Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I had been a busy correspondent. There was a third letter which I also didn’t show to Mum and Dad, though this time I had a better excuse. I had destroyed it, with Peter’s help. We were systematic about it — tearing it into small strips, which we carefully burned before flushing the ashes away. Peter didn’t ask who the letter was from or what it contained. He could see at a glance that it had thrown me into confusion, the very state which my Indian expedition was meant to dissipate.

The letter was from Mouni Sadhu. I had written to him in care of his publishers, George Allen & Unwin — Ruskin House, Museum Street — thanking him for his books. Incantation of the Tarot had allowed me to ventilate pain without losing dignity (let’s hope), while In Days of Great Peace , although its direct effect on me had been oddly muted, had led me to Arthur Osborne’s book and Ramana Maharshi himself. I mentioned my visit to Tiruvannamalai and I suppose I was asking for his blessing on it. Blessing was not what came.

The air letter came from Australia, where (as it turned out) Mouni Sadhu made his home. He said there was no point in my going to Tiruvannamalai with the Maharshi gone. The spiritual effect had vanished, as he was in a position to know. If I went there all I’d find was greedy people after my money. Piccadilly Circus offered a better prospect of enlightenment.

Even with this terrible letter ceremonially annihilated, there was a risk that Mum (or even Dad) would notice something wrong in my demeanour. I wasn’t confident that I could fend off questions without revealing my dismay. I got through the day somehow, and gave myself a talking-to once I was safely in bed.

I had saved almost fifty pounds out of the Supplementary Benefit (a little over three pounds weekly) awarded me by a tender-hearted government. I had offered to put this little income towards my keep at Trees, but Dad had said he was sure I could find better uses for it. I had been expecting to have to stump up a certain amount for the ticket to India, but now that obligation had vanished. I wasn’t rich, but I was quite rich enough to be fleeced by the money-grubbers of southern India without having cause for complaint. Even if Mouni Sadhu was right, I would cope. Hadn’t I survived financial shipwreck before, when the Guardian Bank betrayed my trust, sinking without trace in a haven advertised to be safer than houses? After this internal pep talk sleep came sweetly.

A week later I had to play another charade in front of Mum and Dad, but this time in a different key of feeling. A letter arrived from the ashram to say that Mr and Mrs Osborne had been kind enough to say that I could stay with them, although Arthur was unwell and I shouldn’t expect too much. Now it was relief and exhilaration that I had to mask. My bluff had been successful and my desperate gamble had come up trumps. It was Arthur Osborne who had introduced me to Ramana Maharshi in the first place (with Mouni Sadhu it was a case of mistaken identity — I had walked straight past him). Now I would be able to thank my benefactor in person. Mouni Sadhu must be wrong about the departure of spiritual aura from Tiruvannamalai if Arthur Osborne lived there still.

I didn’t want to be a charity case while I was in India, and racked my brain to think of what service I could offer. I settled on cutting vegetables and binding books, since it resonated with what Arthur had written. Those were activities favoured by Ramana Maharshi during his days in the ashram which formed around him. These were not books in the Western sense but little notebooks, a few pages roughly sewn together, and I thought I could probably manage.

A great tree must attract squirrels

It would be quite wrong to say that Ramana Maharshi formed an ashram — he merely stayed where he was, and an ashram grew around him. He couldn’t help sustaining a rich spiritual eco-system, any more than a great tree can avoid attracting squirrels, birds and insects. In the early days his participation was less than minimal. How could it be otherwise? He was silent, cross-legged, absorbed in the bliss of Brahman.

Of course nothing could be more alien to someone in my circumstances of life, or more inspiring, than this voluntary movelessness — if you can call something voluntary which is the product of a transcendent amnesia. He didn’t even notice!

His first devotee had originally been worshipping a stone god in the town, getting money by begging so as to buy camphor, sandal paste and milk, adoring the statue with tears of love in his eyes, until someone said, ‘Why do you keep worshipping this stone god? In a cave on the hill there is a live Swami. He never speaks, and there isn’t anyone to look after him. Why not make your worship to him?’

At first the new love-object’s similarity to the old, although it was warmed from within, must have outweighed the differences. Still, food must be offered to this human statue in more than a symbolical fashion — nourishment was required to enter the mouth. The sites of excretion must be kept in order.

The ritual attentions carried over. The devotee poured a little buttermilk over this living statue’s head. Meeting no objection, he followed this up with anointings of milk and then ghee. Encouraged, if only by immobility and silence, he daubed this undissenting body with sandal paste and kumkum . He offered fire-oblations and chanted mantras, as priests do to the statues in temples.

Indian religious practice is a sort of calligraphy whose logic is to cover every surface with intricate patterns, and then to fill the spaces between. There would be no end to this loving and meticulous scribbling.

Then one morning when the devotee came into the cave he found a change. The Swami was in the same position as when he had been left, but there was writing on the wall. It said (I paraphrase) that the service rendered was quite enough.

Amazement in the cave. For one thing, it was news that the Swami could read and write. Literacy in God-men was not a given. It was also (briefly) baffling how the writing had been done. There was no stationery cabinet in the cave. The Swami had virtually nothing in the way of possessions, if you can even use the word ‘possessions’ of someone whose non-spiritual activities are in abeyance. He ‘owned’ a loin-cloth, though that had only recently been put on him, and a cup made of half a coconut shell.

He had made marks on the wall with a half-burnt stick from the fire. Possibly there is a subtle reference here to the part played by the ego in its own dissolution. In the process of self-enquiry, the ego is like the stick that stirs the funeral pyre to make sure that everything is consumed, and burns to nothingness in its turn.

After that, people started to ask questions, and to get them answered, either by means of a burnt stick again, or by his writing in the sand. This style of teaching ( upadesa ) was superseded when the questioners started to bring their own pieces of paper and writing instruments for him to use. Then they would take the pieces of paper away with them to make fair copies of their own.

Sometimes Ramana Maharshi composed verses, and when others gathered them together he made no objection — though the term ‘necklace’ used of one such collection could apply to all such, the beads being strung together by another hand than the maker’s. I imagined helping the Osbornes by mending little books of this type, restringing the beads and giving them a quick buff-up in passing. I had my limits, but I was quite handy with Sellotape.

I told Mum about the new arrangement as if it was no more than an administrative detail, that I would be staying in a private house not an ashram. I thought there might be some crumb of comfort in that. By this time I wouldn’t have blamed Mum for developing a hatred for Mrs Pavey, the seeming friend who had slipped into her bicycle basket a book that from her point of view might just as well have been called How To Disown and Desert Your Loving Mother as Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge .