Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

One day Mrs Osborne announced that there was a famous Tamil singer giving a concert in the Temple that night. We should all go (though ‘all’ did not include Rajah Manikkam and Kuppu). The Temple was an extraordinary setting, and the concert should have something to offer both pilgrims and tourists. She looked at Peter and me when she said this, and for a moment I wondered if she was really registering a distinction in our status as travellers.

Mrs Osborne assumed that Peter would push me, once the new Rajah Manikkam (no longer hysterical) had lifted me off the verandah, but it turned out not to be quite so simple. Peter could manage the wheelchair perfectly well on the flat. But when we got to the Inner Temple, where the performance was to take place, we were confronted with some astoundingly imposing sacred architecture, an impossibly steep set of steps. ‘Let’s not bother,’ I whispered to Peter, knowing he was incapable of any lifting — but then I remembered Burnham Grammar School and the lesson it taught. That access transcends questions of architecture.

Lightning strikes twice — of course it does! — and then twice more. Lightning strikes in a logarithmic progression of 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 until there is nothing but the strobe-lightning that illuminates Shiva’s dance. And where would Shiva more naturally put on a show than here, where the mountain, the god and the man step in and out of time in an ecstasy of mutual personification?

Very tentatively we approached those sheer steps, and then hands simply appeared from the crowd, each one grabbing a different part of the chair, collectively imparting a strong upward impulse. The wheelchair glided up the stairs as though it was on an escalator. The movement was eerily smooth. Often in the wheelchair I’m semi-consciously anxious that the person pushing will bump me up the kerb, clip my feet when executing a turn and so on, but on this occasion I felt utterly safe. Was it Elijah in the Bible who was carried up to Heaven in a chariot? I have to say I felt pretty blessed myself during that wheelchair ascension glide. I was on my own personal hovercraft, bobbing on jets of divine enablement, puffs of holy help.

For two years at Burnham School I had been lifted upstairs and downstairs by my fellows, and every time it felt like an act of faith, my life in their rowdy hands. Now a crowd of unknown Indians, none of whom individually could have pushed the wheelchair on level ground without mishap, was collectively wafting me upwards. I think I can say with confidence that this has been a life without short cuts — and yet there was this one short cut, this human thermal which uplifted me and me alone.

I wish similar miracles had happened on a regular basis since, with the result that I positively look forward to seeing a flight of steps in front of me. But once was enough. Then, after I had been magicked up all those stairs, Peter came and sat next to Mrs O. He knew her and felt safe near her. Next minute the entire audience, all seated of course on the floor, started undulating with turbulent movement like an ominous sea. I was puzzled and couldn’t see why. Some of the faces in the audience wore expressions of polite distaste, others of actual horror.

Peter had gone to sit in the ladies’ section. That was all it was. There was a rope down the middle of the audience, and men had to sit strictly on one side, ladies on the other. Eventually Mrs O worked out what the trouble was and had a word with Peter. She pointed him over to the other side of the rope. At first she was as baffled by the uproar as I was — then she suddenly remembered the Indian convention against which none of us had meant to offend. Perhaps it was quite a time since she had attended this sort of event, or she had got used to being a living breach of the rules, and thought she could spread her cloak of exemption over Peter’s shoulders also.

All this time I was sitting in the ladies’ section myself, on the other side of Mrs O, and not a single eyebrow was raised. No questions were asked, no orders to relocate issued. The Temple’s (surely?) very first wheelchair seemed to slip through the covenants of tradition and gender. I had a cloak of my own.

Worldly veins throbbed in smugness

What with the various palavers, the communal levitation of the wheelchair followed by the transgression against seating taboos, the performance itself made relatively little impression. The singer was plump and he sang with his eyes closed most of the time. If I hadn’t known the songs were spiritual I wouldn’t have guessed. At the time I wasn’t attuned to Indian vocal style. I just didn’t get it. The singer approached the note like a bee hovering in front of a flower, instead of fixing it cleanly as singers do in the Western tradition, pinning it like a butterfly onto a cork board.

I hadn’t exactly lost my pang of resentment at Peter’s arrival, my sense that a spiritual quest for one Cromer had turned into an adventure for two, but it had certainly gone underground. It was fun being able to explore more easily, even if it wasn’t the sort of exploration I was here for. I hadn’t been able to meditate since he came, not even for a second.

Then one morning Peter announced that he was leaving. When? After breakfast. One last bumper helping of wild fig poriyal , and he would be off. My face must have fallen. He said, ‘I thought it was best just to go without making a fuss about it. Drawn-out partings are horrible — isn’t that what Granny always says?’ Well, yes it was, as a way of making a brusque turning on the heel seem like the height of consideration. ‘And I’ll see you at home, Jay, won’t I?’

Well, of course he would, but it was still a shock. Perhaps subconsciously I had been anticipating having his help with the hundred hurdles of intercontinental travel on the way home.

Peter went up the stairs to the roof and came back with his case two minutes later. Either he had already packed or he was innocently showing off the impulsive efficiency of the able-bodied.

He had withdrawn emotionally by the time we came to say our goodbyes proper. This had been his habit since he was quite a little boy. When he was about ten or eleven Mum noticed a difference in the ritual of bedtime. She came to our beds as usual to give us a hug and a goodnight kiss. He would put his arms round her as usual and he said all the usual things, but he had gone to some other place inside himself, for protection. Peter coped with his great need to belong by choosing to be alone, even in company, and so when it came time to say goodbye he made sure that to all intents and purposes he had already left.

After Peter had gone, the wheelchair resumed its sacred ruts and the vada stall dwindled into the distance, until it was only a memory reeking of spice, carbohydrate and deep fat. I felt Peter’s absence keenly. There’s nothing people miss so much as a good excuse. As long as he was there, he could take the blame for my spiritual stalemate. I could forget that I hadn’t been able to meditate before his arrival either, not for a second.

The weeks had flown by, and my time of pilgrimage was nearly over. What had been accomplished? I had spent many hours in the Old Hall but had made no progress in taming my mind. What if I had moved heaven and earth to make the journey, only to find that I wasn’t mature enough to benefit from it? Sleepless nights were pretty much the rule for me in Tamil Nadu, what with the unravelling bed and the shrieking owls, but I had a few around that time that were distinctly bleak in terms of the thoughts that came to me and the lack of answers I had for them.

Finally I got around to reading the passage that Mrs Osborne had marked for me in The Razor’s Edge . It filled me with an unholy rage that seedy, hateful Somerset Maugham (about whom admittedly I didn’t know a great deal) had come to Tamil Nadu to do a little light research, and had approached Ramana Maharshi bearing a basket of fruit very much as he would have sent flowers to a London hostess. Having fallen into a highly convenient faint, he had been rewarded with Bhagavan’s transforming hands — darshan upon unparalleled darshan — on his unworthy forehead, where worldly veins throbbed in smugness and lassitude. Concentrated Grace had been poured out over this … this storyteller! This storyteller with the ugly, turned-down lips. And all for the sake of some local colour, a whiff of the timeless East.