Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I didn’t mention that Peter had adopted the dog (or he had adopted Peter), that we had fed him on vada scraps and kept him out of sight. That we had named him in honour of an American cartoon. The scrawny dog with the sidelong grin never came back, and nor did my full fondness for Mrs Osborne. I asked myself what Peter would have made of her cruelty. Could he have hung on to his dependence on Mrs O, his sense that he was safe with her, if he had seen her as I had, as a witch with a stick?

It was a jolting experience, though it also provided a moment of breakthrough in translation from the Tamil. After seeing Mrs Osborne assault a defenceless animal, I had found what Raghu Gaitonde had asked for, a passable English translation of the word suunyakaari , ‘she who manipulates nothingness’, so meagrely rendered as ‘witch’. Wielder of the Void. That was her secret identity.

The whole incident with the dog cast a pall over my relationship with Mrs Osborne and made me doubt whether we really shared a faith. If we did, she was no sort of advertisement for it. It was Ramana Maharshi’s practice to feed dogs before people, and though I didn’t want to be the sort of Englishman abroad who makes the treatment of pets his yardstick for everything it was certainly a point of affinity between guru and disciple. I was only a visitor but Ramana Maharshi was much more than a resident, he was the quintessence of this landscape, and between us we outnumbered the Polish suunyakaari.

What I had seen in Lucia Osborne as she brought the stick down on an innocent animal was exactly the sort of pattern which conditions karma , a vasana , a rut of cruelty, a stuck groove in the human record, even if she saw the action as either entirely trivial or else disinterested, as if she was only ridding my bed of a pest. She was deceived. Altruistic deeds release the Self, egotistical ones imprison it.

Later that day she came out onto the verandah with an armful of books, proper Western hardbacks even if they were falling apart and had been eaten by every kind of insect. She dumped them on the table in front of me and said she’d like me to bind them professionally for her. I was utterly dismayed. They were completely unmanageable, the sort of book I would have to wrestle with to show it who’s the boss before I could read a single word. I bleated something about the small size of my arms and the large size of the books, but she said coldly, ‘You told me you were a bookbinder, so I had some jobs lined up for you. Whether you keep your promise is up to you.’ Then she made her exit into the house, leaving the stack of moth-eaten tomes on the table for me to look at, since there was nothing else I could do with them. I had plenty of time to regret the hollow promise I had made in the hope of making myself useful and not being a burden to the household.

Even with Yogi Bear sharing the bed, my sleep had been fitful, but after he had been driven away I had hours of that insomniac awareness that is the opposite of meditation, waiting for sunrise and the relative comfort of the wheelchair. I had plenty of time to grapple with my spiritual impasse. Willpower had brought me to a place where willpower stalled.

Pradakshina had become part of my routine without quite seeming to winch me, as planned, into the centre of my Self. It was something like a sacred constitutional. The beginning of the pradakshina road was remarkably peaceful. The surface of the road was mud, with an almost antique patina and a scattering of sand on top. The accumulated compressive effect of thousands of devoted bare feet on pradakshina had somehow lightened its texture, giving it a sort of upward spiritual thrust that could be felt unmistakably rising up through the wheels of the chair. The ground had a delightful soft feel and released a seductive sifty-tilthy sensation. It transmitted shimmering spiritual tickles.

At this point on every pradakshina I would feel as if I was trembling on the brink of enlightenment, as if light was being born inside my eyelids. Spores of self-realisation drifted around me like flour particles on days when Mum got busy baking. Yet however fiercely I stoked my inward fires, I couldn’t burn off from the unfolding experience a certain gross residue of sight-seeing.

For one thing I had become something of a connoisseur of mantapams , those structures which Ganesh had identified for me on that first night. When I had mentally compared them with bus shelters I wasn’t too far off the mark. A mantapam is no more than a consecrated roof. Ideally a mantapam would simply float above the heads of pilgrims, keeping the rain off. Not practical in structural terms — but that’s the simplicity that mantapams start from.

A roof without a wall would only provide shelter from rain falling in an obliging vertical, and we know how rarely that happens. So a mantapam will have the concession of a back wall, and four pillars to hold the roof up. It’s usually possible to find a dry spot under the roof somewhere. The sacred element in a mantapam is variable, but it’s definitely there. A mantapam is the bud of a temple, which can sprout very vigorously under the right conditions. An unsponsored, unloved mantapam remains dormant in its shelter form. And of course the bud can be blighted. At one point on the pradakshina circuit was a mantapam whose roof was falling in. Grass and weeds were taking over underneath, and an enterprising tree was tapping into the unused vitality of the edifice by growing out of the top of the dilapidated wall. I couldn’t quite see where it was getting its moisture, unless as a sapling it had sent rooting fingers into an unsuspected reservoir of nourishment, some little yolk-sac of grace.

A molten yo-yo looping

Just as a mantapam can blossom into a temple, I suppose a temple which fell on hard times might eventually decline into a mantapam . But there are more possibilities than these in mantapam evolution. A mantapam may grow at an oblique angle into a choultry , which is only a mantapam with a little kitchen attached. The presence of food, whether donated or begged for, changes everything. Once cooking has come into the picture it’s only a matter of time before music gets in on the act, and soon food is being offered to hungry pilgrims at the choultry to the accompaniment of bhajan s, special songs.

I had even made my peace with the tea-shop which I had scorned so bitterly earlier on. There was no resemblance, as it turned out, to a cathedral gift shop or cafeteria, unless those places recruit their staff from the circus. There was a strong element of showmanship involved. The hissing noise I had heard (which reminded me of the auto steam-engine I wasn’t allowed to have as a child because it wasn’t safe) came from something that can only really be called a samovar, despite the distance from Russia. I had seen its domestic equivalent at Mrs Adcock’s in Bourne End, but this one was in constant use. Next to it was another pot, one that apparently had milk in it, simmering over glowing embers of charcoal. Hot water would be dispensed from the samovar and poured through a net bag the size of a man’s sock containing tea dust. Then hot milk was added with a ladle.

It was the next stage of the operation that seemed to call for a drum-roll in the background, and occasional gasps from the crowd. I made sure I had a good view. This was juggling with tea, not with cups of it but the liquid itself. The juggler would pour it from one beaker into another to cool it off to the ideal temperature. Naturally enough, he started to show off, grinning broadly, pouring the tea faster and faster from an increasing distance until it looked, as it flowed from beaker to beaker, like a molten yo-yo looping between expert hands, or a Slinky miraculously promoted from mimicking fluidity with its soft metal coils to partaking of the real thing. At last the beaker was presented to the customer ready to drink, the swirling ribbons of liquid reassembled into one, the colour of caramel and tasting as sweet as it looked.