Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

‘Are you a journalist, John? Is that why you are here, to find out about the ways of the local people, these funny Indians?’

‘No, Mrs Osborne, I’m here as a devotee, to practise self-enquiry.’

‘Then stop asking questions that face outwards and turn your questioning inwards, since that is what it means to be a devotee.’

I had always known I would love Mrs Osborne, but I hadn’t realised how long it would take. If there is no idea more fully grasped by the Indian Mind than ‘scolding’, then people like Mrs Osborne are largely responsible. The scolding must be done with love or it would be easy to reject, but love is not what registers first. The love only reveals itself over time. If it was so with Sister Heel at CRX — and wasn’t she one of the great love-scolders of all time? — then it was true of Mrs Osborne also. Kuppu and Rajah Manikkam were veterans of long campaigns of such scolding, who had come through with their smiles intact.

In fact Mrs Osborne rather enjoyed filling me in about Tamil culture and traditions, as long as she didn’t feel pressurised, as long as it was on her own terms. She told me that Tamil was an ancient and elegant language, with structural similarities to both Latin and Welsh, although modern speakers had rather an inferiority complex about it, feeling that it was a degenerate descendant of Sanskrit.

Tamil had contributed quite a number of words to English, including cheroot, catamaran (literally ‘tied trees’), mango, pariah and mulligatawny, whose literal meaning is ‘pepper water’. Curry was another gift, even if the British had firmly seized the word by the wrong end. Kari means a vegetable dish, not the spicing that made it so remarkable to a sheltered palate. She taught me the proper pronunciations of the original words, curuTTu, kaTTa maram, kari, mang kay, paRaiyaar, miLagu taneer .

A whole room of rain

At night rains would sometimes crash onto the roof — rain so intense that it required the rather Biblical plural form — and drown out all other sound. At night the mewing screams of the peacocks, both eerie and homely, were replaced by the shrieks of owls. No trace of the genteel quizzical Tu-Wit Tu-Woo of the British owl. These ones sounded as if they were being done to death.

There is something oddly comforting about the acoustics of a downpour, as long as wind plays no noticeable part. It seems to confer a privacy. It builds a whole room of rain, but the effect is necessarily spoiled if the body itself becomes wet. When the rain was at its most torrential I would sometimes be splashed a little from the side, which was rather exciting, but the rain never penetrated the roof of the verandah.

On Mrs Osborne’s verandah I was further from being able to summon human help than I had ever been since I became ill. Yet I wasn’t anxious or afraid, even when I was very far from sleep. I was beginning to understand what it meant to be the guest of the mountain. His hospitality was very subtle. Solitude, something of which I had gone short for so many years, was somehow the cornerstone of it. He didn’t overwhelm me with attention.

One night I was woken by something pulling at my finger. It was a macacque, grey-furred and frenetic, of the sort I had seen everywhere in those parts, even in the ashram. While it yanked at my knuckles it looked at me with a pleading intelligence, as if it wanted to enlist me in some public-spirited rescue like the clever dogs in old films.

If so, it had chosen the wrong chap — Lassie, move on.

No help to be had at this address.

Try the next verandah along.

It was chattering at me, not angrily in the style of its species but urgently, with a pulse of meaning, and then it scampered away. It was only after the event (if it even was an event and not a dream) that it occurred to me as strange that its fur had been quite dry despite the downpour. Even so, this could be explained if it nested somehow under the roof of Mrs Osborne’s verandah, sharing with me the hospitality of the mountain.

I asked Mrs O if there were any stories about the local monkeys and their behaviour. Unhesitatingly she said there were. ‘Monkeys are famously fond of tamarind, and humans prize the fruit also, although it must be cooked for their consumption. In fact it is the crucial element in a true curry. Nevertheless the tree is considered unlucky. Consequently they have been nationalised and are government property. Individuals cannot own them, and are thereby spared the attendant bad luck. Instead they pay rent on the trees to the state government. This is ingenious, I feel, and shows Indian bureaucracy in a rare positive light.’ I too was impressed by authorities which accepted the irrationality of their citizens, rather than plastering every wall with posters trying to dispel the superstition. Perhaps we in the U.K. should nationalise black cats and the bits of pavement under ladders.

I had even heard of tamarind, which was an important ingredient of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, Marmite’s acrid sister in the store cupboard. During my bed years, when every other bit of print in the house had been used up, I would get Mum to read me the labels of bottles from the bathroom and pantry. That’s how I know that Dettol disinfectant is one-and-a-half times stronger than pure carbolic acid (Rideal-Walker Test).

‘It happened,’ Mrs O went on, ‘that a Muslim who had rights over one such tree used a catapult to keep the monkeys away. Monkeys value the fruit of the tamarind even more than humans. Meaning only to frighten, he killed one — the monkey king. Did you not know that the monkeys have a king? Each group has its leader. The monkeys took the body to Ramana Maharshi, and asked him to bring their king back to life. Bhagavan always made sure, when feeding his followers, that the monkeys had their share. He spoke their language, as he spoke the language of every animal, but would not undertake resurrection. Instead he comforted them and assuaged their grief.

‘A little later the Muslim became fevered, and rumours of a curse put on him by Bhagavan began to circulate. In fact he treated and cured the fever with an application of vibhuti — the ashes of Shiva. Unfortunately the rumours of a curse did not altogether die away, but nothing could have been further from Bhagavan’s practice.

‘As for the modern behaviour of monkeys, I am afraid that it is less elevated. Rooms at the ashram have to be locked and the windows closed, since otherwise monkeys sneak in and pilfer. It is even possible, since visitors’ rooms are particularly liable to be ransacked, that some of the monkeys are currently human in form. They are perhaps laying the foundations for a future life, in which they will be fully…’ — she looked around for the exact adjective, and for once the Polish sibilants I had learned to filter out couldn’t be ignored — ‘ shimian .’ For a moment I thought she had used a Tamil word.

I wasn’t sure what I made of these stories. If I had wanted a guru who talked to the animals I would probably have stuck with Dr Do-little. Still, public figures can’t control how they are perceived, and it made sense that the locals would assimilate Ramana Maharshi into their folk beliefs rather than absorb the full force of his teaching.

Mrs Osborne came in one morning and said that in the night she had seen a light burning on Arthur’s grave. She seemed reassured rather than upset by this manifestation.

I was sceptical about the whole thing, so I asked her to wake me if it happened again. The following night I felt her tugging at me, more roughly than was necessary, and saying ‘ Get up!! ’ Of course from a bed that low I needed help to rise. She wrestled me into an upright position and pointed me in the right direction, towards Arthur’s grave. Rain was tipping down, but sure enough a steady light was visible even through the monsoon. I felt that I should be frightened, but my nervous system wouldn’t play along. It stayed stubbornly serene.