Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Finally Mrs Osborne turned her attention to Peter and his needs. ‘One brother is on my verandah, and the newcomer must also be accommodated. Young man, brother of John, name not yet vouchsafed to me, you are not I hope expecting a commode of your own? I cannot provide the luxury of personal sanitation for all comers.’ Make a commode available in exceptional circumstances, and everyone will feel entitled to one.

Peter looked baffled, and sent me a glance that wondered about Mrs O’s mental capacity. I did my best to reassure him with a shake of my head, and he politely answered No. He wasn’t expecting to be greeted with a commode, though he would appreciate the chance to lie down. And he was called Peter.

‘In that case I will offer you the hoshpitality of my roof,’ said Mrs O. Her roof was reached by a flight of stairs built on the outside of the house, and Peter, who had stood for too long and was trembling with fatigue even sitting down, set himself to climb them. He waved away Rajah Manikkam’s offers of help, but he had overestimated his strength. He had to sit down part-way up to recover himself. For his weakness I felt an acute pity which was entirely new and only half welcome. How far we had both had to travel for me to see my younger brother helpless in the body!

Just as Mrs O had boasted about the excellence of her verandah, so now she sang the praises of her roof as a place of habitation. She said there was a ‘Goh-taa’ up there, which she explained as a kind of hut made of bamboos and palm-fronds. It sounded like a habitable parasol. Peter’s eyes were drooping even before she had finished waxing lyrical about the shelter on top of her house. Peter may not have slept for the whole of that day, but he didn’t come down again to my level. Kuppu carried up dainties to him. Mrs Osborne delivered some sweet-lime juice in person, a great gesture of concern, well masked by gruffness, from someone to whom stairs did not come easily.

The roof seemed to breathe out

I had time on the verandah that night to consider the impurity of my emotions. I felt a certain amount of annoyance at seeing Peter in this setting. Travelling to India had been my project, and truly a vast project it was. To achieve my spiritual objective I had been forced to mount something like a military campaign. Now Peter seemed to be casually horning in on my territory. What was a pilgrimage for me wasn’t much more than a lark for him. In the night I examined these feelings and repented of them. Peter’s constitution was perhaps not as strong as I assumed. He had always suffered from sore throats, and had been prescribed many courses of antibiotics over the years by Flanny.

The next day Peter was already amazingly better. He had slept well. The resilience of youth had done the rest. He did say, though, that the roof seemed to breathe out during the night all the heat it had absorbed by day.

Peter still didn’t have the strength to lift me down the three steps from the verandah, and that remained Rajah Manikkam’s job. Once I was installed in the wheelchair Peter could manage me on the level. In fact he grasped the handles as if it had only been a minute since he had last let them go, and he powered me away from Aruna Giri. There was a definite feeling of nostalgia about being pushed by Peter again, even if he couldn’t keep up that initial burst of energy. It was as if we were off exploring round Bourne End again, irresistibly drawn to the woods we thought were haunted.

I was torn between shyness about my spiritual false starts and eagerness to share my experiences, not sure whether to suggest a visit to the ashram or to keep that at least for myself. Peter had his own ideas anyway.

With a tourist’s hands on the handles rather than a devotee’s, the wheelchair began to find its way to more secular places. I had hardly noticed that a mundane town even shared the sacred geography.

Not that Peter would have cared to be labelled a tourist, nor even a traveller. He thought of himself as an explorer, and I had my own mild claim on that title. It was a significant expedition for me to go into Bourne End to buy a clandestine tube of depilatory cream from a chemist’s, and here I was sleeping on a verandah, serenaded by the anguished voices of Indian owls.

The exploring we did after Peter arrived was of a particular kind. I swear that boy had a sixth sense for snacks. He could detect the smell of garlic frying from a mile away, and track it down infallibly, although Tamil Nadu was a mass of smoke and promiscuously pungent aromas, both secular and sacred. He was a teenager, after all, voracious and splendidly undiscriminating. He liked food that was meant to be eaten with the fingers — in that respect India suited him very well.

This prejudice against knife and fork may have had something to do with his work as a waiter. A day spent reverently cradling between a pair of spoons (the absurd rigmarole of ‘silver service’ which boosts waiters’ earnings) the very potato croquette he had seen dropped by chef, picked up and dusted off, was reason enough for preferring food that wasn’t turned into a fetish. He liked food snatched on the hoof, eaten without ceremony.

We discovered a stall selling little fried dumplings, crisp on the outside but soft inside, and took some home with us. Mrs Osborne told us they were called vadas — she pronounced the word to rhyme with ‘larders’ — and that we shouldn’t eat too many of them. They were made from pounded lentils, onion, and curry leaves with a bit of cumin. And garlic of course. The scolding she gave us for buying them was a gentle one by her standards, no more than Force 2 on the Osborne Scale of reproach-rockets, a very mild flare.

I don’t even know whether Mrs O’s warnings had to do with the Hindu dietary laws which classify onion as a darkness food , or with common-sense ideas about the unhealthiness of frying. Whichever it was, we disregarded her. Whether she was speaking as a Hindu or as a moderate adult, she was wasting her breath. There weren’t many areas of life where I could compete on equal terms with Peter, and eating snacks was one of them. I wasn’t going to give it up.

On one of our early expeditions I felt the urgent need for a pee. Peter pulled the wheelchair onto some waste ground and helped me to stand sufficiently upright to accomplish my purpose. I became aware of voices behind me, and then of a boy standing in front of me, staring. He wasn’t looking at my face but at the humble piece of plumbing currently in use. Soon he was joined by others, all equally mesmerised and calling to their fellows to see the show. Peter helped to zip me up as quickly as possible and we moved on, rather shaken by the extreme response to what we had imagined to be a very minor transgression.

The excrement forest

Hadn’t I seen plenty of people peeing in the street in the previous weeks, without embarrassment or much in the way of discretion? But perhaps Europeans were barred from such casual customs. ‘What was that all about, Jay?’ Peter asked, bewildered, but I was as much in the dark as he was. The strange thing was that the crowd didn’t seem angry or disapproving, just gripped by a strange fascination.

When we had arrived back at the verandah, there was no alternative but to ask Mrs Osborne. It was either that or cling to our ignorance. I decided on a cautious approach. ‘Mrs Osborne, is it taboo in these parts to urinate in the open air?’

‘Not at all. Males do this freely, though it is polite to step away from the road. What makes you say so?’

‘Well, I had to go by the side of the road, and for some reason we gathered quite a crowd. They were all very excited, in fact they were talking at the tops of their voices.’

Mrs Osborne’s flinty face took on a look of sly amusement. ‘I think I can solve the mystery. It is certainly not that they are shocked by your use of the outdoors. In fact it is indoor excretion which is a puzzling novelty in Tamil culture. Even evacuation is performed out of doors, in designated places to which Tamil gives the charming name pii kaadu . Meaning excrement forest . No, these spectators who so unsettled you were taking the opportunity to satisfy a natural curiosity about your parts.’