Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

‘I promise,’ I replied. I must have looked such a fool.

Sometimes she saw miracles as well. The flowers began to speak to her, the marguerites, the daisies, and the horsetails. One day, coming down the hill from one of her expeditions to the ‘Black Madonna’, she begged, oh, ever so tenderly, that a little pansy she had found lying crushed on the road would not suffer.

‘Some brute,’ she muttered; ‘there are such ignoramuses all over the world. They are so cruel that they pluck innocent creatures like these,’ she said, caressing the flower under the moonlight, ‘and then throw them down and walk away, as if the world were made solely for man. What if someone did the same with their children, the young ones? And this is the Europe,’ she continued, sitting on the garden bench, ‘that has known the horrors of two wars, and Hitler’s incineration camps. Lord, Lord’ With tears she dug a small hole, and laid the stem and the two leaves and the blue, open-eyed pansy on the earth. ‘Rama,’ she begged, ‘bring me some water.’ I brought a jugful of water from the kitchen. ‘Rama, touch this, please. You have holy hands.’

‘Holy indeed!’ I burst out laughing. ‘Holy with Brahminic cruelty.’

‘But it is Brahminic. I know you have power.’

‘Power or no power, Little Madeleine, give it to me then,’ I said, and touched the plant, and gave it back to her dispiritedly.

She planted it with many Hum-Hums, Om-Hrims, and Manipadme-Hums. She laid it first on her frock, and straightened the stem and leaf; then, closing her eyes, she pushed the little broken stalk gently and carefully into the earth. ‘Today is the ninth day of the moon of Sravan,’ she said, ‘and it is an auspicious day.’

I gave water to the pansy. We called it the Buddha’s plant, and the last thought of Madeleine before going to bed was to go into the garden and see if the Buddha’s plant still flowered under the moon. The pansy looked happy. Indeed, who would not be happy under the Mediterranean moon; and with such loving care about one. In the morning Madeleine woke, and there he was, the Buddha’s plant, his face smiling under the magnificence of the sun.

‘Oh, be good!’ prayed Madeleine, like a child, and gave him water again. We made a small canal round him, and as often as possible we gave him water. Madeleine then went into her room, and brought the sacral water of the Buddha. ‘This is the best Ganges water,’ she proclaimed. The pansy was bright, and we were happy with it. Even I grew attached to the pansy. You get attached to anything you create. You create the world, and so you get attached to the world.

‘Madeleine,’ I said, ‘Look, it stays on!’

‘Of course it does. And why not? If men recover from wounds in a hospital, why not a plant, a tree?’

‘You’ve heard of Jagdish Chandra Bose and his experiments on weeping trees, have you?’ I asked.

‘Of course. But you don’t need an electromagnetic instrument to know plants suffer. Even so, it needed an Indian to prove that plants do suffer.’

‘And a Bengali,’ I said.

‘What’s that now?’

‘The Bengalis are a sweet, musical, poetical, large-hearted, sunshine, moonshine people.’

‘All that sounds very nice,’ she said.

‘And for them the world is all Brindaban — miraculous with peacocks, rivers, lotuses, and dancing men and women with garlands, and the lilting finery of weeping trees.’

‘And so?’

‘And so Santinektan and Tagore and all that gnya-gnyanerie. The world has to be made beautiful. They’re like the Italians: the world has to be made paradisiac.’

‘And you, the southerners?’

‘Our home is in Shiva’s crematorium grounds. We dance away our momentary deaths — and there is no time for Paradise. Besides, Paradise,’ I added, ‘needs space and time.’

‘In space and time the pansy blooms,’ she said, and closed the subject.

We gave water to the plant. It flourished with a vigour which made us admire life itself. The leaves stood up, and shot up more leaves. Madeleine’s altar table had now a special vessel: a silver tumbler I had had since my upanayanam ceremony, which I brought to Europe for remembrance and for reverence of Grandfather Ramanna. Eventually I gave the tumbler as a family present from Hariharapura to Madeleine. This Grandfather Ramanna’s silver tumbler gave water to the pansy — and the pansy seemed almost to remember the Himavathy and the Mysore mountains; and the pansy put forth more and more flowers, flowers large as nenuphars. We called in the gardener from Villa Belmont, and he exclaimed, ‘Ah, c’est bien étrange, Madame, et encore une pensée!’ And Madeleine said, ‘Rama, if you stand here in the middle of the night, you will hear a bell, I promise you— just a tingle-tingle bell.’ And believe me, I felt things turn round me, shapes, eyes, presences; sometimes I would turn round and try to see them, but they always seemed to be where I could not see them. They were there; I have no doubt about it whatsoever.

Then Madeleine started looking for wounded caterpillars. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘how the motor-cars crush these slow centipedes. They must go from tree to tree — it is in the very nature of creatures centipedic that they crawl like this. They must go from pine to pine. If man has built a road and cut furiously through the hills, and has invented fast-moving vehicles of battery and combustion, that’s no reason why these poor animals should suffer. Poor, poor creatures!’ she would say, and lift these hairy, itching things on her lap and arm, and take them across the road and leave them on a pine tree. In fact, some days when she had no class, she would go up the Luberon highway and sit by one of the bedraggled pines, which seemed to specialize in caterpillars.

‘The caterpillars eat the tree, so you must kill the caterpillars,’ I teased Madeleine.

‘Oh, no, we should save both.’ And so she put a large stone under one of the trees and would sit for hours in the Dorje- posture saying her mantras, or would take a book — some Pali book, preferably — and read. She made friends thus with the schoolchildren, who went up there every Thursday; but once when they climbed a tree to see a nest of starlings, how she howled, did Madeleine, and told the curé to look after all the children of God, not merely those of man. She convinced the children with Saint Francis of Assisi.

There is no doubt Madeleine developed powers— extraordinary powers. She had by now procured through Lezo, somehow, a Tibetan thighbone Kangling, and she tied bells to it, little bells that also came from Tibet no doubt; she started waving it and sounding it and muttering prayers to herself, chanting ‘Hum-Hum-Phat’. She started looking fixedly at the sun, and began meditations on the infinity of space. ‘Do not think of the past. Do not think of the future,’ she would repeat Nagarjuna’s dictum, ‘and keep your mind in its cool state.’

She meditated too, on a red ball, one of those balls you can buy at any big store for children to play with — and then suddenly she would meditate on a stick: the texts said so. So she broke a stick from the holy pine — the one with caterpillars— and she polished it and washed it and gave it an ochre colour, and placing it in the south-west corner of her room she started saying her japas. It gave a green and liquid fixity to her look; she smiled with gentleness and her anger seemed to grow less and less. Then, when she had fasted for new moon or eclipse, she would go and throw her sanctified water — always in Grandfather Ramanna’s silver tumbler — to the holy pine tree. And the pine tree put forth new green eager needles.