Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Later in the morning Mrs Osborne might come out onto the verandah with some sweet-lime juice. She always gave the impression of being very busy — she could only spare me a moment. It’s true that she had taken on co-editorship of the ashram publication The Mountain Path from Arthur after his death, and there were editorial duties to be performed. I remember her opening a letter and saying, ‘I detesht Wei Wu Wei’ — Wei Wu Wei being a contributor to The Mountain Path — ‘I have to rewrite every shingle shentensh.’ I had begun to think that Lucia Osborne enjoyed choosing words with a strong sibilant element — otherwise why not say she hated or loathed this strange being? ‘Wei Wu Wei’ is actually a phrase meaning ‘action without action’, all very Zen. She told me Wei Wu Wei was an Irish aristocrat, born Terence Gray, whose passion was the theatre until he became an eccentric sort of Buddhist. His favourite saying was that ‘everything is a case of mistaken identity’, but Mrs O seemed to have got his number.

Arthur Osborne had left ten editorials prepared, but Lucia was working on one of her own, about Arthur and his shedding of the old coat. She read parts of it to me as she composed them. She called it ‘What is Death if Scrutinised?’ I was moved by it.

Sometimes we talked about spiritual experience. Mrs Osborne told me, as if apropos of nothing, that it was very common for devotees planning to come to Arunachala to have obstacles placed in their way. Sometimes the seeker would find another person actively attempting to prevent the pilgrim from making his journey. At this point I indicated that this was true in my case. I decided to leave it at that, though, and not to go into detail.

Mrs O asked me, ‘Was that person called Mouni Sadhu, by any chance?’, so I saw no point in denying it. I’m sure I got Mouni Sadhu into a lot of hot water spiritually, with Mrs Osborne stoking the fire beneath the cauldron, and I can’t really say I’m sorry. Was I ‘telling tales’, the great crime of my early schooldays? Hardly. I was only answering a question.

When Mrs Osborne sat down and kept me company, she would always let me understand that there were plenty of other things she needed to do. I was slow to detect the element of pathos behind this, that despite her daily dynamism she was a widow struggling to cope. If I was lucky that Arunachala had sent me to her, perhaps there were some fringe benefits for her. She had someone new to cater for and talk to, and isn’t distraction the core of consolation? I provided my fair share of that.

More than once she promised to make me rock cakes, which seemed a baffling ambition. If I was homesick for anything it wasn’t rock cakes. But then it turned out that she wanted to make them for the same reason that riders who have been thrown want to get back on the horse, as a way of defying fate. She told me she was sorry to be weak, but she didn’t feel up to making them just yet. ‘Arthur was so fond of them,’ she said, and her voice shook while a little tear came from her eye. Although I was sorry to see her distress, I was also relieved because it was proof that she wasn’t a real witch. Witches can’t cry — the literature is definite about that. As a child I had loved the witches in stories and had always wanted to meet one, but now I wasn’t sure I wanted to take that last step.

Gross body, causal body, subtle body

One day the weather turned so cool it felt almost English. For once there was no sign of the sun. Rajah Manikkam put a shirt on and Mrs O even wore a jersey. Over breakfast she announced that someone had died — did I want to go to the funeral? I might find it instructive. Rajah Manikkam had got used to pushing the wheelchair, though I hadn’t yet got used to his style of propelling it. He would bump up and down changes of level without slowing down, having no regard for the occupant of the wheelchair, someone who might have received enough jolts in his life already. If he had been employed to push round trolleys of ripe fruit instead, his employers would have insisted on more considerate driving, or the loss of revenue would have been alarming.

Rajah’s pushing became more and more tentative, and he stopped some way short. To my surprise, Ganesh came to meet me and took over. He said I must forgive the superstitiousness of the locals. Rajah’s caste buried their dead, although he and his wife were terrified of corpses, ghosts and spirits, while this was a Brahmin funeral.

When we arrived, the corpse was being put on the pyre. It was all a little undignified, and not just because I could see its shrunken willy. Dried cow-pats were placed over it and then they poured on some kerosene. I say ‘poured’ but that sounds too reverent. Kerosene was simply sloshed over the pyre and the body. The procedure was more than undignified, it was downright unfeeling, but then people are so solemn at Western funerals because nobody actually believes in the effectiveness of the ceremony. It was because the ceremony was trusted, here, that I got the impression of unceremoniousness. There was no emotion surplus to the event. The action was adequate to what it marked.

Ganesh gave me a lesson in last things. While the fire took hold, he explained the different colours of flame which issued from the body as it burned, and what they represented in spiritual terms. Vital airs were streaming from the sutures of the skull. The various sheaths of the physical envelope, the gross body, the causal body, the subtle body, were all returning to their source. All the different elements were rejoining the void. Absence was their destination. It was fascinating to hear his description, in the way that it is fascinating to hear anyone knowledgeable discoursing on a technical subject, even sport or cars.

It was a sort of treat, though an unsettling one, to be invited to look at a corpse in its fiery transition — with roasting smells beginning to break through the stink of kerosene — rather than being told to avert your eyes from the whole subject of death. Then quite abruptly Ganesh summoned Rajah Manikkam, who grasped the handles of the wheelchair and lurched off with me. All Ganesh would say was, ‘You must leave now. The next part is not suitable for you to see.’ We were back in the realm of taboos without explanations. Naturally being told that it wasn’t suitable made me want to see it all the more, on the same principle governing the desirability of X-certificate films back in Britain. No history of disappointment could stop me hankering after the forbidden.

There is no arguing with the pusher of a wheelchair. I tried to feel privileged by what I had seen rather than tantalised by what I had not. As we left the scene a breath of wind brought thick black smoke our way. Ganesh coughed, my eyes streamed and my clothes held the smell of the various shrivelling sheaths for the rest of the day. I felt that these mild inconveniences had a symbolic aspect, though if I was receiving spiritual instruction it was slightly disheartening. Hadn’t we been scrutinising death with exemplary calmness? Yet tears pursued us, even while we strove to rise above their causes.

Installed back on the verandah, I tried to find out from Mrs O about the local funeral rites, and specifically what I had missed by being hustled away from the pyre at a crucial juncture. I got the brush-off, with Mrs O sternly saying that if Ganesh had wanted me to know he would already have told me. She wasn’t going to expose me to unauthorised knowledge herself. Ladies weren’t allowed to attend such events anyway — though I’d like to have seen someone try to stop her if she had put her mind to it.

I tried to generalise my line of questioning. Was it a matter of caste who was buried (like Arthur, as I didn’t quite say) and who was burned, or could people exercise their own discretion?