Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

By this time I had weaned myself off taking sugar in tea (coffee was more of a challenge), but it would have been missing the point to have clung to my preferences now. The tea flowed across my tongue differently from any Western preparation. It positively sauntered down the digestive pathway, and of course there’s a reason for this. The local cows (species Bos Indicus , breed most likely Kangayam ) produce a sleeker milk. There’s an inverse relationship between milk yield and fat content, so Daisy (species Bos taurus , breed perhaps Jersey) outproduces Lakshmi in volume but can’t compete in richness.

High fat is good in a treat, bad when it becomes a routine. So is Hinduism inherently a high-fat religion? Good question. After all, India has the largest population of cattle (cows and buffaloes) on earth. But actually, no. We read in the Atharva Veda (I do, anyway) that only cows with low levels of fat in their milk should be kept as family cows. Cows producing richer milk should be donated to the priestly castes, who require a higher percentage of fat when performing yajñas — offering oblations of milk (among other substances) to the sacred fire, to tickle the palates of the gods. They whose digestions can cope with any extreme of lushness.

Finally the day dawned, as abrupt as all its predecessors, when it was time for me to return to England and my mundane future. It was also time for me to be measured again. Mrs Osborne was visibly excited as she bustled about with her tape measure. She seemed to have forgiven me my limitations as a book-binder. No further jobs were lined up. She didn’t need me to change a fuse or dig a trench.

Homœopathy was being put to the test. An agnostic was being provided with hard evidence, and trusted to accept the facts however disruptive of previous certainties. I lined myself up against the wall of the house. Mrs Osborne took her pencil and made a mark. She was humming under her breath. Then Rajah Manikkam helped me back to the wheelchair while Mrs O grappled with the tape measure. She made a great fuss about aligning the bottom of the tape properly, asking Rajah Manikkam to check it for her. When she was satisfied that everything was properly arranged she compared the two marks and wrote measurements on the wall.

‘John, do you see what has happened? When you came here four weeks ago you measured four feet eight and five-eighths of an inch. Now you are four feet eight and seven-eighths of an inch tall. You have grown a quarter of an inch in a month! And there is nothing to say that your growth will not continue, if you go on taking the pills I have prepared.’ She stopped and looked at me more closely. ‘You are a very unusual young man, John. Of course I don’t know many young men, certainly not young men from the West, but you are certainly a special case. Something you considered fixed is revealed to be alterable, yet you hardly react. I must wonder why.’

My answer sounded awkward to me even as it came out of my mouth. ‘Mrs Osborne, I didn’t come to India to change on the outside. That was never the idea. That isn’t the important thing.’

‘You have changed, but not in the way that you most hoped. Perhaps it is simply shock that paralyses you. You will need time to accept the fact that anything is possible. I understand and will ask no more questions.’

It wasn’t like that. She was on the wrong track entirely. I had taken the little pills in good faith, and the idea of miraculous growth at the age of twenty had a certain amount of power over me. But I was also cheating.

The first time I leaned against the wall I had made sure my feet in their built-up shoes were some little distance away from the wall. It wasn’t hard to make out that I had reached the limit of my flexibility. So in the weeks that intervened I had it in my mind that I could either humour Mrs O or show her up, depending on how I felt on the day. It was a strange and no doubt corrupting sensation to have so much power over someone who had so much power over me.

On the day when the measuring was done, I simply stood a little closer to the wall. I was less steady in my balance, but Rajah Manikkam was there to brace me, and Mrs O was too busy with the tape measure to notice. And as for my motives, obviously they were very far from pure. Once I’d decided to play along, I was going to get my revenge on Mrs Osborne one way or another. Either I was going to show up homœopathy as futile or I was going to humour her, and let her go to her grave believing in something that I’d faked. There was anger in both options, but one option was all anger.

If I demonstrated that her therapy had failed I was punishing her pure and simple. In the option I settled on there was at least the possibility of a more positive emotion. By assenting to the idea that I’d added something to my height I was going along with my own fond hopes as well as hers. As for why I was angry with Mrs Osborne, part of it had to do with her sudden appearance as Wielder of the Void, using her stick to beat an innocent stray dog who was helping me sleep, but I would have done the same even if that bizarre event had never happened. Fundamentally, it had to do with my coming to India hoping to find a spiritual mother, and finding something else. A Polish-born Hindu repetition of Granny, another avatar of the peremptory. A human vasana , from my point of view, a living rut. A repeated pattern triggering love, submission and resentment, mechanical as a recurring decimal.

It was certainly true that I had changed, but not in the way that I had most hoped. I was deeply tanned, and according to Mrs Osborne I would now be growing at the rate of three inches a year until I decided to stop taking the pills, with a control over my changing size which Lewis Carroll’s Alice would have envied. I would hit six feet before I hit thirty. I wonder now what preparation it was she gave me — some sort of titration of Sequoia ? I still thought of myself as a de votee, but I had failed in my dream of abruptly realising myself for once and for all. I wouldn’t be able to skip my larval stage as a university student. There was no short cut to the shimmering imago, no special ramp up the mountain installed for my convenience.

The key to the whole problem was Ganesh, the key but not a usable one. Call it a key broken off in the lock. Not Ganesh the man, who had said his goodbyes very warmly. Ganesh the principle, the whole idea of obstacles and their removal. In Bourne End before I set off I had been wise enough to ignore all barriers, discounting the possibility that anything could block my progress, but in India I had been entirely taken up with them, by the verandah, by Peter, by Mrs O and the whole stupid growing-tall project, and by the failure of meditation. I had allowed obstacles to define me and had become bogged down, there where I had counted on being most free, preöoccupied with personalities, which occupy no lofty rung of reality.

After Kuppu had helped to clean me for the last time, and Rajah Manikkam had lifted me down from the verandah, while I gave him for the last time the stern glare that cuts off giggles at their root, I thought I would have time to myself in the taxi that was taking me to Madras, time to mourn and to start recovering. I planned to wallow a little in my regrets.

I hadn’t understood how Indian taxis work. For a four-or five-hour trip like that, arranged in advance (and costing me a hundred rupees, more than a fiver), there will always be company. The owner of the taxi, a Muslim wearing a round hat, accompanied the driver. There were women and children, with much kissing and cuddling.

At the last minute, Mrs Osborne herself got in. She was suffering from toothache, and had decided to make her way to Madras for an extraction. There was a dentist in the city who treated her without charge, not because he was a devotee of Ramana Maharshi but because he was impressed by Mrs Osborne personally, and her steadfast refusal of anæsthesia, both local and general. Toothache didn’t deter her from chatting in Tamil for the whole of the journey, while I closed my eyes and tried to meditate. If I had been a tourist it would have been a waste not to make the most of my last sights of rural India, but I was a devotee, even if I felt further than ever from enlightenment. There was one crowning disappointment in my summer of pilgrimage. I had broken my vow. Chastity had slipped away from me when I wasn’t looking.