Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

I told Little Mother how Tulsidas had written the Ramayana just there, next to the Rewa Palace, and Kabir had been hit on the head by Saint Ramanand. The saint had stumbled on the head of the Muslim weaver and had cried Ram-Ram, so Kabir stood up and said, ‘Now, my Lord, You be my guru and I Thy disciple.’ That is how the weaver became so great a devotee and poet. Farther down, the Buddha himself had walked and had washed his alms-bowl — he had gone up the steps and had set the wheel of Law a-turning. The aggregates, said the Buddha, make for desire and aversion, pleasure and ill, and one must seek that from which there is no returning. Little Mother listened to all this and seemed so convinced. She played with the petal-like fingers of my brother and when she saw a parrot in the sky, ‘Look, look, little one,’ she said, ‘that is the parrot of Rama.’ And she began to sing:

O parrot, my parrot of Rama

and my little brother went to profoundest sleep.

My father was really dead. But Little Mother smiled. In Benares one knows death is as illusory as the mist in the morning. The Ganges is always there — and when the sun shines, oh, how hot it can still be…

I wrote postcards to friends in Europe. I told them I had come to Benares because Father had died, and I said the sacred capital was really a surrealist city. You never know where reality starts and where illusion ends; whether the Brahmins of Benares are like the crows asking for funereal rice-balls, saying ‘Caw- Caw’; or like the sadhus, by their fires, lost in such beautiful magnanimity, as though love were not something one gave to another, but one gave to oneself. His trident in front of him, his holy books open, some saffron cloth drying anywhere — on bare bush or on broken wall, sometimes with an umbrella stuck above, and a dull fire eyeing him, as though the fire in Benares looked after the saints, not the cruel people of the sacred city — each sadhu sat, a Shiva. And yet when you looked up you saw the lovely smile of some concubine, just floating down her rounded bust and nimble limbs, for a prayer and a client. The concubines of Benares are the most beautiful of any in the world, they say; and some say, too, that they worship the wife of Shiva, Parvathi herself, that they may have the juice of youth in their limbs. That is why Damodhara Gupta so exaltedly started his book on bawds with Benares. ‘O Holy Ganga, Mother Ganga, thou art purity itself, coming down from Shiva’s hair.’ When you see so many limbs go purring and bursting on the ghats by the Ganges, how can limbs have any meaning? Death makes passion beautiful. Death makes the concubine inevitable. I remembered again Grandfather saying, ‘Your mother had such a beautiful voice. She had a voice like concubine Chandramma. And that was in Mysore, and fifty years ago.’

I could not forget Madeleine — how could I? Madeleine was away and in Aix-en-Provence. Madeline had never recovered— in fact she never did recover — from the death of Pierre. She had called him Krishna till he was seven months old. Then when he began to have those coughs Madeleine knew: mothers always know what is dangerous for their children. And on that Saturday morning, returning from her college Madeleine knew, she knew that in four weeks, in three and in two and in one, the dread disease would take him away. That was why from the moment he was born — we had him take birth in a little, lovely maternity home near Bandol — she spoke of all the hopes she had in him. He must be tall and twenty-three; he must go to an Engineering Institute and build bridges for India when he grew up. Like all melancholic people, Madeleine loved bridges. She felt Truth was always on the other side, and so sometimes I told her that next time she must be born on the Hudson. I bought her books on Provence or on Sardinia, which had such beautiful ivy-covered bridges built by the Romans. One day she said, ‘Let’s go and see this bridge at St Jean-Pied-de- Port,’ that she had found in a book on the Pays Basque. We drove through abrupt, arched Ardeche, and passing through Cahors I showed her the Pont de Valentré. She did not care for it. It was like Reinhardt’s scenario at Salzburg, she said. When we went on to the Roman Bridge of St Jean-Pied-de-Port she said, ‘Rama, it makes me shiver.’ She had been a young girl at the time of the Spanish Civil War, so we never could go over to Spain. Then it was we went up to some beautiful mountain town — perhaps it was Pau, for I can still see the huge chateau, the one built by Henry IV — and maybe it was on that night, in trying to comfort Madeleine, that Krishna was conceived. She would love to have a child of mine, she said — and we had been married seven months.

At that time Madeleine was twenty-six, and I was twenty- one. We had first met at the University of Caen. Madeleine had an uncle — her parents had died leaving her an estate, so it was being looked after by Oncle Charles. He was from Normandy, and you know what that means.

Madeleine was so lovely, with golden hair — on her mother’s side she came from Savoy — and her limbs had such pure unreality. Madeleine was altogether unreal. That is why, I think, she never married anyone — in fact she had never touched anyone. She said that during the Nazi occupation, towards the end of 1943, a German officer had tried to touch her hair; it looked so magical, and it looked the perfect Nordic hair. She said he had brought his hands near her face, and she had only to smile and he could not do anything. He bowed and went away.

It was the Brahmin in me, she said, the sense that touch and untouch are so important, which she sensed; and she would let me touch her. Her hair was gold, and her skin for an Indian was like the unearthed marble with which we built our winter palaces. Cool, with the lake about one, and the peacock strutting in the garden below. The seventh-hour of music would come, and all the palace would see itself lit. Seeing oneself is what we always seek; the world, as the Great Sage Sankara said, is like a city seen in a mirror. Madeleine was like the Palace of Amber seen in moonlight. There is such a luminous mystery— the deeper you go, the more you know yourself. So Krishna was born.

The bridge was never crossed. Madeleine had a horror of crossing bridges. Born in India she would have known how in Malabar they send off gunfire to frighten the evil spirits, as you cross a bridge. Whether the gunfire went off or not, Krishna could never cross the bridge of life. That is why with some primitive superstition Madeleine changed his name and called him Pierre from the second day of his illness. ‘Pierre tu es, et sur cette pierre …’ she quoted. And she said — for she, a French woman, like an Indian woman was shy, and would not call me easily by my name — she had said, ‘My love, the gods of India will be angry, that you a Brahmin married a non-Brahmin like me; why should they let me have a child called Krishna. So sacred is that name.’ And the little fellow did not quite know what he was to do when he was called Pierre. I called him Pierre and respected her superstition. For all we do is really superstition. Was I really called Ramaswamy, or was Madeleine called Madeleine?

The illness continued. Good doctor Pierre Marmoson, a specialist in child medicine — especially trained in America— gave every care available. But broncho-pneumonia is broncho-pneumonia, particularly after a severe attack of chickenpox. Madeleine, however, believed more in my powers of healing than in the doctors. So that when the child actually lay in my arms and steadied itself and kicked straight and lay quiet, Madeleine could not believe that Pierre was dead. The child had not even cried.

We were given special permission by the Préfet des Bouches-du-Rhone to cremate Pierre among the olive trees behind the Villa Ste-Anne. It was a large villa and one saw on a day of the mistral the beautiful Mont Ste-Victoire, as Cézanne must have seen it day after day, clear as though you could talk to it. The mistral blew and blew so vigorously: one could see one’s body float away, like pantaloon, vest, and scarf, and one’s soul sit and shine on the top of Mont Ste-Victoire. The dead, they say in Aix, live in the cathedral tower, the young and the virgins do — there is even a Provencal song about it — so Madeleine went to her early morning Mass and to vespers. She fasted on Friday, she a heathen, she began to light candles to the Virgin, and she just smothered me up in tenderness. She seemed so far that nearness was farther than any smell or touch. There was no bridge — all bridges now led to Spain.