Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

pāpaḥ Pancavatīṃ vilokayatu vā gacchatv asambhāvya vā.’

And now Madeleine understood. Even the dead and buried legionaries of Marius, those severe civilized men who fought against the Teutons and conquered Gaul, whose bones must be lying somewhere all about us, they too must have keyed their ears to this grave speech and understood.

‘Sapin and sap, come from the Sanskrit word Sapa,’ I said, as though it were the definition of Truth. The dictionary is often the bible of the inarticulate. Etymology and grammar, I thought, help in the mechanisms of matrimony.

These are the Sankrit verses Kama chanted to Madeleine on that February afternoon.

This, then, is the forest — I see it now…

Both as hermits and householders here have we lived

For a long, long while, performing our sacred acts

And knowing the juices of the joys of existence.

This, then, the mountain where the peacocks cry

And here the valleys with antelope wooded;

There, with bamboos softly murmuring

In dark blue tufts, the banks of rivers.

There, where soars Mount Prasravana

Like a garland of cloud, flows the river Godavari…

Like the burning spread of a rooted poison—

Like splinters raked by a force unknown—

Like a healed wound’s touch on a tender heart—

Intense, my pain enfeebles me,

As if it sprang but yesterday.

Pañcavati, where with her I have spent so long

As if it were my own true home;

Pañcavati, the immediate, object of our constant talk.

But now alone is Rama, and faded his dearest things,

Heartless would it be not to linger long looking,

Or leave without deep salutation

To Pañcavati.

~

Those winter days in Aix seem to have avowed such simple and deep understanding between Madeleine and myself that I can only think of them as having had a lot of warm and powdery sunshine, which bathed the olives to the spread roots and gave the cypresses a sense of singleness, as though they represented a direction, a formula, a principle.

Life outside was full of charm. Monsieur Béguin brought his goats up the path, and he left them to graze while he lay under the olives reading the Petit Provencal. Two goats looked up at me now and again with a feeling of kinship and knowingness, and big bellies became flat and the young ones came to play, tottering under the intoxication of being born. I had heard in India that goat’s milk was good for weak lungs, so every afternoon I walked out into the fields, and M. Béguin would produce a bottle of the strong-smelling viscous liquid; sometimes he milked the goat called ‘Gazella’ in front of me. How kind and maternal the milk was! Whether it did me good or not I cannot say, but my health never gave me much cause for anxiety.

Dr Séraphin at the hospital laughed and confirmed me as the perfect specimen of a good patient. ‘If I asked him to drink three spoonfuls of cod-liver oil, you could be sure he would run down to ask me if I meant the big English coffee-spoon or our small coffee-spoon; in fact he would produce the spoons from his pocket to make sure my instructions were strictly followed. In his country it must be so easy to be a doctor. It must all come from their age-old civilization. Not like the cattle we have to deal with here…’

Whether I was a good patient or not, I took my illness very seriously. I did not want to be a problem to Madeleine. We were already enough of a problem to one another.

Madeleine’s own illnesses were, if one may say so, somewhat more picturesque. She came back one day with a thorn in her heel, and bandaged the whole thing up so savagely that after a few days it began to smell. ‘Let the wretched thing suffer,’ she said; but even so she moaned, quietly, rhythmically, as if she were repeating a mantra. Then I knocked at her door, went down to the kitchen for some hot water and cleaned her wound with boric-acid. She had become so shy of exposing any part of her body, that even getting her to stretch out her leg was difficult. She covered the whole of her leg and let me just touch her foot. And when she had a stomach ache — for she ate so little that her stomach began to give her trouble — she would not let me massage her either. She grew more and more like a young girl and covered up her chest, as though it were a sin to show any part of her body but her two hands and her big, kind face.

‘Poor child,’ she said to me one day, ‘I make you live the life of an ascetic. You must one day find the right Hindu wife.’ I did not seem so eager for a wife.

‘Madeleine, you have a swollen throat. You must allow me to put some hot towels on it.’

‘Oh, it’s nothing. You know I have had a bad throat since I was a child of three. They say that Mother thought I would have goitre some day. But nothing so serious will ever happen to me. I am not even good enough for disease.’

Her food was now measured with the palm of her hand in Indian style. ‘Three times a day and three handfuls a day,’ so the Buddhist text said. And whether it was this starvation or the working of her inner spirit, she looked so transparent, elevated.

‘When you were in India,’ she said one day, ‘I was afraid I would die of those complications. I was frightened they would bury me at the Cimetière St Médard. So on coming here I made a will, and I want you to know — as Catherine knows too — that I’d like to be cremated. You know how complicated French law is on the subject. I wish it would happen, though, when you are still here. Rama, you need not apply to the Préfet des Bouches du Rhone any more.’

‘Oh, don’t say such inauspicious things, Madeleine. You know I am more ill than you are.’

‘That is why I say it. I have prayed night after night, like you said Emperor Babar prayed for his son Humayun, that I be taken away in your place. You are young, you are a man, you have yet to live. When I knew you first you were such a sprightly, vivacious being. It is I who brought all this on you. I am only a log of flesh, and anyone can take my place. But you, you are the head of the family.’

‘Madeleine! Must you torture me like this?’

‘Well then, I shall be silent.’ She was tucked under her ochre-coloured sheets, and her brown rosary just showed against her pale green-eyed face. The moment had come, I felt, to ask the question that had been lying between us. I made bold and wanted to ask. But she divined my question, I think, and said:

‘What is it separated us, Rama?’

‘India.’

‘India. But I am a Buddhist.’

‘That is why Buddhism left India. India is impitoyable.’

‘But one can become a Buddhist?’

‘Yes, and a Christian and a Muslim as well.’

‘Then?’

‘One can never be converted to Hinduism.’

‘You mean one can only be born a Brahmin?’

‘That is — an Indian,’ I added, as an explanation of India.

‘Your India, then, Rama, is in time and space?’

‘No. It is contiguous with time and space, but is anywhere, everywhere.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It stands, as it were, vertical to space and time, and is present at all points.’

‘This is too mystical even for me.’

‘Would you understand if I were to say, “Love is not a feeling, it is, you might say, a stateless state, the whole condition of oneself?’

‘I don’t. But suppose I did?’

‘Can you understand that all things merge, all thoughts and perceptions, in knowledge. It is in knowledge that you know a thing, not in seeing or hearing.’

‘Yes.’

‘That is India. Jnanam is India.’

‘But that is the place of the guru — of Buddha?’

‘Well, for me India is the guru of the world, or She is not India. The sages have no history, no biography — who knows anything about a Yagnyavalkya or a Bharadavja? Nobody. But some petty king of Bundelkhand has a panegyric addressed to him, and even this is somewhat impersonal. We know more of King Harsha than we do of Sankara. India has, I always repeat, no history. To integrate India into history — is like trying to marry Madeleine. It may be sincere, but it is not history. History, if anything, is the acceptance of human sincerity. But Truth transcends sincerity; Truth is in sincerity and in insincerity — beyond both. And that again is India.’