Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘Ah, I hope you were not so silly as to have forgotten I’d leave the grated cheese in the kitchen. Oh, Rama!’ she exclaimed, like a child. ‘Oh, you are still the same old fool.’ She pushed the entremets towards me, and the nuts. ‘You must get stronger. Now let me have a good look at you. It must be your stay at Kodaikanal: you look less dark than when you returned from India last time.’ I spoke of the X-rays and the blood-test. She went up and found my medicines. ‘We won’t go to the elephant today,’ she decided. ‘It’s already a bit cold this year. Let us go up to my room.’

Her room was a smaller one than mine, but opened on to the garden, as mine did. A cypress almost touched her window, and you could, as it were, caress it while counting the stars.

‘This house has no central heating like Villa Ste-Anne, but look what a wonderful fireplace. It is more economical this way, and besides, you will be so much away this year in Paris and London. For me, coming from La Charente, this is enough.’

I looked at the room. The walls were of a yellow-grey and on the table by her bed stood the huge head of a Khmer Buddha.

‘I had this sent from the Musée Guimet. Isn’t it beautiful?’ She had other, more lovely Buddhas on the walls, especially the one from the Hadda, the Greco-Buddhist one. She had a tanaka too, with ferocious heads, monsters with arms of lions and feet of buffaloes, dhyana-Buddhas and nimbus lotuses, with a serene Bodhisattva seated in the blue middle.

‘Oncle Charles bought it for me in Paris,’ she explained; ‘now I meditate and sleep here. You won’t mind your room, will you? Besides, you can work so much better.’

We talked of Saroja’s marriage, of Hyderabad and my job.

‘This cold country of ours is no good. I am glad the job there awaits you. You must finish your thesis this year. I’ll help you, now that the house is small and we are far away from anyone.’

I asked news of Catherine.

‘She’s splendid as a rose, and to see her is to know that happiness is possible. Georges just adores her, and you cannot imagine how like a schoolboy he has become. They’ve got a nice apartment near the Bois, Rue Michel-Ange, ‘deux pieces, cuisine, salle-de-bain’. It’s some distance for poor Georges to get to Louis- le-Grand, but Oncle Charles has bought them a small Morris— he got it through a client who has business in England — and it’s Catherine who takes her husband to the lycée. I’m glad we don’t have the car any more. It’s not good for your lung, and I am too exhausted to drive a car. Anyway, where’s the need? So much income tax the less.’

‘You look tired. I’ll bring you a hot-water bottle—”la sainte bouillote”,’ she laughed, ‘and you had better go to bed now. There’s an electric heater in your room, and I’ve put it on the whole afternoon. Go, get undressed, Rama,’ she begged.

I went to my room. Looking at my mother’s picture I was filled with such pain that I was on the point of sobbing my heart hollow. But I rubbed my eyes carefully, undressed, and like a schoolboy I went to bed. Madeleine brought me my hot-water bottle, drew the light nearer me so that I could read, laid all the recent Revues d’histoire des religions on the table — she had even marked the articles useful for my work — and then sat at my feet playing with the tassels of the bedspread.

‘I’m learning Chinese now, and Tibetan, from Lezo. Tibetan is only a form of Sanskrit, but Chinese is really difficult. I want to get to know more of Chinese Buddhism. Besides, some of the best Buddhist texts, as you know, no longer exist in Pali — destroyed by the Muslims when they burnt Nalanda and Vikramasila. The intellectual brilliance of Buddhism has no equal in the world: it’s the religion of the modern age. Some Buddhist texts read like a novel by Aldous Huxley — so curiously intellectual, almost perverse. For the European, Truth can only be attractive when it is perverse. Your Dr Robin-Bessaignac is right; since we could not accept God, we had to invent a Mother of God, make her into a Virgin, and then accept her Son and find out how he was born. How simple and beautiful is the birth of the Buddha, in comparison. Maya Devi has been pregnant for nine months. She is going to her mother’s house. She has birth-pains, and she stops, holds to the branch of a mango tree in blossom, and the great Buddha is born, like any other, in the normal physiological way. To be normal is to be whole,’ she said, and stopped.

I, too, was playing, with the paper cutter — an ivory one I had had for many years — and my Revue d’histoire des religions.

‘You probably want to look at your magazines,’ she said, rising. ‘Tomorrow there’s a slight change in the programme. Nowadays I rise like a good Buddhist at dawn, wash and say my mantras. My Buddhas are kind: the early morning meditations are wonderful. I shall speak of it all to you tomorrow.’

She came near me, and as she tried to tuck in my bed, I slipped my hands over the smoothness of her hair. It was still golden and true, and mine own. But it did not smell of eau- de-Cologne. And there was no powder on her face, I observed for the first time, and not even the slightest tinge of rouge. I felt helpless — and moved my legs to the other side, towards the hot-water bottle.

‘Goodnight, Rama,’ she said at the door, ‘and sleep well. “Worry is of the mind,” says the Buddhist text. Do not worry, mon ami.’

I fiddled with my paper cutter, went to the window and breathed a little fresh air, and went back to my bed. All night I dreamt of Little Mother and a puppy-dog, playing with her in our Bangalore courtyard. I smelt the monsoon and they put me to bed and gave me some brandy. The doctor came a little later, a fat and angry man, and gave me an injection. The X-ray had something written on it, maybe in Chinese. Georges stood on the table, explaining Prospero to his class. All the students laughed. They were all Indians and they wore black or coloured glasses. They smelt bad and they all seemed sons of princes.

With the wake of dawn I heard such a grave and long-drawn mantra ‘OM DHIH-OM GIH-OM JRIH’, that I thought I was in Hardwar, and the Ganges flowing by me. It is beautiful to live, beautiful and sacred to live and be an Indian in India.

The next few months were spent in peace and hard work. We worked together, Madeleine and I, on a task which ultimately, I thought, would destroy her theogony: the anthropocentric civilization, whether it be the Purist (or Protestant) the Buddhist (or Jain) must be self-destructive. The abhuman civilizations — the Greece of Socrates, the India of the Upanishads and of Sankara, Catholicism (and not Christianity), Stalinism (and not Leninism, Trotskyism or Anarcho — Syndicalism) had permanence, because they were concurrent with the Law, Man is isolate — and in his singleness is the unanimity of the whole: ‘when you take away the whole from the whole —purnam —what remains is the whole.’ The job is to build bridges — not of stone or of girders, for that would prove the permanence of the objective, but like the rope- bridges in the Himalayas, you build temporary suspensions over green and gurgling space. You must feel the mountain in your nostrils, and know ultimately you are alone with silence. Death is our friend in that sense — life after life it faces us with the meaning of the ultimate. To be is to recognize integrity. The moral universe insists — whether it be according to Newton or Pascal — on the reality of the external world. That dhira (hero) of whom the Upanishads speak, enters into himself and knows he has never gone anywhere. There is nowhere to go, where there is no whereness. Alas, that is the beautiful Truth and man must learn it — beautiful it is, because you see yourself true.