Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I liked this no-authority principle. It extended to exactly the sort of thing a religious leader might be expected to value. It’s true that there is no equivalent of the Pope in Hinduism, but there is a sort of scattered college of cardinals, people who claim the authority to decide who has authority. The word in this context is diksha , ‘protocol’ perhaps. You can’t just say ‘I bagsy Enlightenment’. There’s a proper procedure to be followed, a formal initiation, and Ramana Maharshi didn’t seem to have followed it.

A swami came by one morning to check his spiritual paperwork. It wasn’t enough for Ramana Maharshi to get the right answer, he had to show his workings. He was living in the Virupaksha Cave on Arunachala at the time. This swami (actually a Sastri, but never mind) wanted to add him officially to the line of gurus, and requested him to submit to sannyasa , the ancient ritual of renunciation. He wasn’t asking on his own account merely, but had been deputed. The swami said that he would return at three that afternoon with everything that was needed for the ceremony. It wouldn’t be necessary for Ramana Maharshi to wear the full ochre-coloured robes. A loincloth of that colour would be sufficient. He went away.

Then an elderly brahmin came along, with a bundle of books. His face looked familiar. Four or five books would be enough in this context to establish a high level of learning. Ramakrishna, for instance, was relatively ignorant in linguistic terms. Sanskrit was more or less a closed book to him, though it was a closed book he loved to carry around. There was one particular book which he carries in a number of photographs. Eventually it was pointed out to him that this was a volume of erotica. He didn’t seem in the least put out, saying simply, and irrefutably, ‘It is made up of the same sacred letters.’

While the brahmin went to bathe in the local water tank, Ramana Maharshi picked up one of his books. It was a Sanskrit book in Nagari characters, with the title Arunachala Mahatmyam . He hadn’t known that this book existed in Sanskrit also. He was surprised, and opened the book on a passage saluting the greatness of the place in the words:

Those who live within the radius of three yojanas { 30 miles } of this place, i.e. this Arunachala Hill, will get My Sayujyam, i.e. absorption into Me, freed from all bonds, even if they do not take any diksha. This is my order.

Living on Arunachala superseded initiation. Ramana Maharshi copied out the passage and the scriptural reference, replaced the book in the bundle and tied it up again. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again there was no sign of the bundle, and the brahmin never reappeared either. The swami returned but went away again once he had read the citation, the vital authentication which had drifted towards Ramana Maharshi like a blown wisp of wool landing on a twig.

Part of the appeal of this story was that the book in it behaved exactly as I would want it to, materialising with the crucial information and then resolving back into the void, lending the weight of its authority without the burden of its physical presence, the volume so heavy to lift, the pages so awkward to turn.

I wasn’t living on the holy mountain of Shiva but in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, and I would have loved a bit of initiation, a spiritual diploma to go with my driving licence. I longed for recognition, and if it wasn’t going to take the form of worldly success then it would have to be an esoteric form of belonging. I hadn’t altogether left behind the scheming child whose campaign to raise funds for the PDSA was really a bid for a mention in the Busy Bee News . I was still the unappeased teenager who would have joined the Rosicrucians by post if their acronym had been less ugly. Ramana Maharshi showed me that every time I sought endorsement, acknowledgement, a pat on the back from a hand in the sky, I gave away what I was hoping to be given. If you need to be admired for your independence, you’re going to have to find a different name for it.

A crack in the core of that nuclear brain

Dad came to visit me in hospital a couple of times on his way to work. He would say, ‘I can give you ten minutes, Chicken.’ He was horrified, though, when he saw the book about Mary Baker Eddy. ‘So those lot have got their claws into you, have they?’

‘No, Dad,’ I said, perfectly truthfully. ‘Don’t worry. I’m perfectly safe. I’m a Hindu.’ Which only made him pull another face.

Then he said something surprising. ‘Your mother went shopping yesterday. Ran into that radio man … Aspel. Seems they had quite a chinwag.’ This was a remarkable breakthrough. Michael Aspel, teddy-bear uncle turned demon driver, wouldn’t be my first choice of celebrity for her to deal with, but at least he wasn’t intimidatingly clever.

Then Dad said something so surprising there had to be another word for it, a word to be kept behind glass and used only in emergencies. ‘It’s good to have her back.’ It was like hearing a tree speak.

I hope at least he didn’t say anything similar to Mum herself. There’s nothing so disruptive of a fragile equilibrium than a fleeting taste of what you want.

It had been touch and go for quite a time. We weren’t even sure if Mum should be going to Muriel’s for the sewing circle — it was her only social outing, involving only a short exposure to harmful brainwaves. But it was at Muriel’s that she was most likely to hear news of the radiant thinking machine which was stopping her from sleeping.

She kept going. Dad wouldn’t escort her, but he did give her the cue to set off (‘Quick march!’). And then it was at Muriel’s that she had the first inkling of deliverance. The bush telegraph of Bourne End was all of a twitter. Jose Stoppard had started to behave strangely after the birth of another son. She had made rather a scene at the chemist’s, shouting that it was she who had written the plays which had made her husband famous.

Mum wasn’t the sort to take pleasure in another woman’s troubles, and marital breakdown was still a troubling rarity in her circle. Even so she had a sense of consolation, of reprieve. It was tragic that a crack in the core of that nuclear brain, some defect in its shielding, had exposed an innocent party to toxic overdose, but at least it meant, surely, that the danger to the public would be taken seriously. Then she wouldn’t be alone with her thoughts any more. This wasn’t a case of estrangement but of contamination, radiation sickness in its marital form.

Later bulletins confirmed the fact of breakdown. Late in 1969 Tom Stoppard moved out, taking his sons with him, and Thatch End was put on the market. Mum began to breathe more easily. Her world returned to something like normal. She still had the rituals she needed to perform before leaving the house, rapping softly with her knuckles on either side of the hall mirror in patterns of five and eleven. But after that she could do her chores, and even get some joy out of going shopping. After a while we all relaxed, until we didn’t feel we needed to hide the local paper in a panic just because it reviewed an amateur production of The Real Inspector Hound .

Towards the end of rehabilitation I went to a convalescent home in Bognor Regis — the local authority paid for it. I can’t imagine that a great deal of creativity goes into assigning rehabilitation patient to convalescent home in the normal run of things, but perhaps on this occasion someone gave it a little extra thought, reasoning that a non-standard patient might suit a non-standard home.

It was certainly an eccentric set-up, run by a Scot called Mr Johnson. This was an establishment with a guiding principle. The guiding principle was ‘næ wummen’. He wouldn’t employ women because, he said, they were too bossy. If you had women around then it turned into a hospital ward in no time, and that wasn’t the point, was it? So the staff were all male, all young and mostly nice to look at.