Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

My little apparatus overwhelmed

Ramana Maharshi was very fond of taking parables from the wireless as well as that other high technology of his day, the cinema. He used the example of the radio (which a devotee had turned on, rather too loud) to show that there is no time and no space — here after all is a little box that says, perfectly truthfully, ‘Hello, this is Hyderabad’ one minute and ‘Hello, Bangalore here’ the next. Yet it never moves an inch.

I can’t say I was much consoled by this explanation. If my little apparatus was overwhelmed, what was I supposed to do about it?

‘Perhaps your little radio will tune itself to the new signal. You must learn patience from the mountain.’

I wondered if the problem was with my mantra, my regulation-issue beginner’s-level Om-Mane-Padme-Om , so I asked her what she used to help her meditate. She seemed rather shocked by so personal a question. It was as if I had asked for the loan of some underwear. ‘If you need a new mantra one will be given to you in time, but you cannot simply borrow one from someone else on the Path.’ Then she relented a little. ‘You might try Arunachala Siva or simply Om . Perhaps one of those will help.’ In practice I didn’t get anywhere with either, and fell back on my old standby. It seemed silly to think that a mantra would need converting to cope with the vagaries of a foreign current, like an electric shaver.

Mrs Osborne must have realised that my distress was real. She unbent a bit. ‘It is sometimes easier for children to give full attention than adults. My daughter Catherine — Katya — was the first of any of us to enter Bhagavan’s presence, carrying the customary basket of fruit. He indicated the low table on which such things were put, but she misunderstood and hopped up there herself, cradling the basket.

‘The disciples nudged each other and said that she was making an offering of herself to Bhagavan. Certainly she had no difficulty communicating with him. You yourself are no longer a child, but you are younger than I was when I came here, younger also than Arthur.

‘When he came here at the end of the war, he experienced similar difficulties to yours. He said that the presence of Bhagavan was less real to him than the photograph which had given him such strength and serenity during the years of his internment.’

I perked up no end at this precedent. ‘So it’s a sort of test?’

‘It is no sort of test. There are no tests. What is it that would be tested? It is a stage merely.’ I must have looked crushed all over again, and her consoling instincts gained ascendancy. ‘A schoolfriend of Ramana Maharshi, visiting him here, once said, “If you stay with the Jñani he gives you your cloth ready woven” — meaning that you don’t have to find the thread and weave it yourself, as you do with other gurus. But that is not necessarily the case for everyone. Each has his path, but the mountain is the same goal for all.’

Drowsing beneath my folkloric hanky, I began to think that the mountain had taken his eye off me. The strangest aspect of my pilgrimage was that Arunachala, in Britain so absolutely steady a signal source, became when I was in such close proximity oddly inconstant.

Arunachala didn’t altogether compel my reverence as I had assumed in advance. Ramana Maharshi wrote in an evocation of the mountain that was himself, ‘Though in fact fiery, my lack-lustre appearance as a hill on this spot is an effect of grace and loving solicitude for the maintenance of the world.’

There were times when Arunachala really did look lack-lustre to me, just one more mountain, fit subject for a holiday postcard, to be sent to those people who are owed holiday postcards. Sometimes Arunachala could have been any hill that had seized my imagination when I read about it — the Wrekin, say, in the poems of A Shropshire Lad .

At this point it would be hard to say that I was even trying to meditate. I was engaged in a rêverie which was the exact opposite of meditation, perversely imagining the Wrekin in mid-Shropshire instead of Arunachala in mid-Tamil Nadu. Behind closed eyes I was trying to subtract from my surroundings the Indian smells, baked earth, flower perfume, and spice, not to mention the Indian heat, and to replace them with genteel transient fragrances and parochial birdsong. Insipid scents and tweetings.

I tried to imagine church bells in a peal, the jangling overlapping changes which somehow spell out the opposite — changelessness. The acoustical shimmering which is the closest our ears can come to hearing eternity. It’s even possible that I was feeling homesick, though I was conjuring up a synthetic landscape rather than anything I actually knew.

It seemed to me that I could really hear bells, but not church bells — cowbells. I opened my eyes and saw, some distance away, a cowherd boy with some cattle. One of the cows wasn’t tethered and seemed to be free to wander where it pleased. It also seemed to see me, and as if acting from a sociable impulse it ambled my way. The bell round its neck was massive and made of some dully shining metal. It didn’t seem scared or suspicious of the wheelchair, as most livestock is (many pets have the same mistrust).

Where was the cowherd boy now? Shouldn’t he be rushing up to drive his charge back towards its fellows, using a stick that would make me wince in sympathy but also thank him in my heart? I couldn’t see him. With a neck properly equipped with rotational and stretching powers, I might have had a better chance of getting a glimpse, but there it was. All told I miss quite a bit from the lack of play in my neck.

On the other hand, if I had been in possession of a working neck I wouldn’t have been in India in the first place, I’d have taken so different a path that the two Johns, the supple and the stiff, would long since have been invisible to each other.

The cow came nearer and nearer. I became increasingly conscious of the largeness of the cow and the smallness of me. It wasn’t a sleek prize-winning English cow, but it wasn’t the scrawny animal I was half-expecting as the norm in India. Nor did this animal resemble the cow in Mrs Osborne’s garden, which gave us milk that could never go off.

This cow was pure white except for a streak of shit on its flank. It was strongly built, with something that was almost a hump behind its shoulder. As it came close it seemed to be bigger than any normal cow could possibly be, but then I’m not used to the looming of cattle. I had an almost intoxicating sense of my own littleness, a thrill of insignificance.

At the same time I was highly aware of the precariousness of my position. As the cow came closer I started to talk to it, saying, ‘Nice cow’ or some such absurdity, hoping madly that it wasn’t going to butt the chair or interfere with me in any way. I tried to remember whether the brakes were on, though I knew how little difference it would make if the huge animal once made physical contact. I would either be nudged off the chair or nudged off the mountain.

The cow slowed down as it approached me but didn’t actually stop. She came nearer and nearer, her eyes both empty and searching, bending her head down low in a way that didn’t look particularly submissive. In an obscene reflex I could smell the meatiness of her. I suppose we all harbour some such atavistic instinct, even when as individuals we have learned to find animals’ lives delicious, and not their deaths.

The cow came so near that I couldn’t see both her eyes at once. There was just enough play in my neck for me to turn the angle necessary to focus on one and then the other. Her massive jaw moved to the side chewingly, and she unrolled her breath in front of me like a carpet of grasses. She nudged even further forward, so that her breath rolled over me in a cuddy plume. Eventually I was touching her nose, and speaking to her as evenly as I could. If I say I was touching her nose, it must be understood that the action was hers not mine — she presented her nose to my hand.