Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I would have liked to tell her that her case wasn’t so bad. Ramana Maharshi’s own mother had a lot more on her plate. After her boy had run away from home she had no news of him. When she learned he was living on the holy mountain Arunachala she sent his brother to bring him home. When that didn’t work, she went herself. Seeing he was immovable, she stayed herself. She put herself in charge of feeding him, not a very satisfying position given his indifference to food. He would refuse titbits or extra portions, saying that he ate through a thousand mouths and needed no special treatment. Mum wouldn’t have enjoyed running a kitchen on that basis.

The penis which pays visits

One of the great advantages of my spiritual orientation was that I didn’t have to read the newspapers. I could ignore the urgent daily shrieks which die down into the moan we call history. I made sure everyone knew that I was uninterested in politics of any stripe or spot. Dad made the point that a lot of people had gone to a lot of trouble (fighting and dying, activities along those lines) to make sure that I had the right to vote.

I refused to be manipulated by such pieties. I dare say that I confirmed the impression he had already formed, that despite my departures from statistical norms I was a typical member of my spoiled and clueless generation. He wasn’t completely wrong, of course. He couldn’t be expected to notice the difference between the prevailing attitude (make love not war, don’t trust anyone over thirty) and mine: Love and war, age and youth, are no more than the tricks Maya plays. Dualistic thinking is a trap, whose bait and jaws are made of the same ‘substance’ .

I had never had any interest in the War as a child. Men in uniform were (and are) an entirely separate subject, objects of a feeling that was religious in its own way. War was boring. You choose the womb — the Tibetan Book of the Dead is clear about this — at a pinch you choose the penis which pays visits there, but you don’t have to take an interest in the stories which are attached to the organ.

Indifference is the supreme goal of any sensible religion, but it certainly gets on people’s nerves along the way! Dad would grit his teeth and say, ‘I’ll have you know that if the bulk of the population had been similarly minded, we’d now have Herr Hitler in charge, or someone even worse.’ It might have given me pause to be told that Herr Hitler routinely destroyed the physically defective, but Dad didn’t pass that on.

People had given their lives for me and what thanks did they get? None. If people die deluded about the way the world works they have to start all over from the beginning. Do not pass Go, though perhaps I mean Stop. Do not collect (be dissolved in) Nirvana.

The general election called for June 1970 gave Dad’s grumbles a new sharpness of focus. Voting age had been lowered to eighteen as of January of that year, which meant he had not one but two sons who were entitled to enter the electoral fray for the first time. Never mind that I had indicated I was above such illusory convulsions.

‘My godfathers!’ I heard him saying to Mum. ‘The little twit is planning to throw away his vote. But not if I can help it. The proper way to throw away your vote, m’dear, is to spoil your ballot paper in the voting booth. Nothing else shows the proper respect for the democratic process. And if he’s really hell-bent on being difficult, that’s what he’s damn-well going to have to do.’ It isn’t hard to say things like that out of my earshot if that’s what you want. Obviously I was meant to hear him, and to know what I was up against.

Mum gave a little sigh of exasperation at her son’s intransigence or (giving her the benefit of the doubt) the intransigence her husband and her first-born seemed to share. Mum had never got round to reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead , or she would have realised that the resemblance was purely coincidental.

To my face Dad was more politic. ‘Look here, Chicken,’ he said, ‘Mum and I both admire you for standing up for what you believe in. We’re only asking you both to vote, to show you’re adult by exercising this privilege. We would never try to tell you how you should vote. That’s not the point. It’s the voting that counts. How you vote is entirely your affair and nothing to do with either of us.

‘Naturally, if you wished to show a little solidarity with your parents and the cause of common sense in the face of the current countrywide opportunity to make a stand, by voting for the Conservatives, we would feel gratified. It would also not go amiss with Muriel’s sewing class. There are rumours that you’re going to the bad, what with your vegetarian crusades — giving teachers at your college an earful about bull-fights and what-not — and Mum could do with something positive to report. Anyway, as I said, it’s the voting that counts. Where you make your mark is entirely a matter for your conscience.’

On the day itself Dad gave me a ten-bob note, telling me that Peter could push me to the polling station, and we could stop off at Thorne’s Stores in the village. I could buy a strawberry Mivvi and Peter could have some ham, freshly sliced. ‘Tell him he can eat it just as it is, with no bread, no roll, nothing like that. I know he loves to eat it that way. I’d be grateful, though, if he didn’t actually cram it into his mouth straight from the slicer, though I know he would given half a chance. At least let the shopkeeper put it in a bag! Otherwise it’s Liberty Hall … just don’t tell your mother.’

It was strange that Dad gave the instructions to me rather than Peter, who was so much more likely to follow them. Dad must have thought, after the procurement of a first-class return ticket to Madras, that his secular authority was beyond question, but I couldn’t let even gratitude sell me down the river. I had a duty to thwart him.

The taste of corruption

Don’t tell your mother . This warning didn’t apply to Dad’s undermining of democratic process, which was blatant and undisguised, but to his giving permission for Peter to eat ham publicly in a vulgar style, news of which might also get back to Mum’s sewing circle, the way everything else in the proximate cosmos seemed to.

The Cromer brothers arrived at the polling station with the taste of corruption on their lips, animal-salty in Peter’s case, dairy-sweet in mine. After we had established our identities Peter tried to push me over to the polling booth, but we were intercepted. It wouldn’t be right for Peter, under cover of giving help, to see how his brother cast his vote. Inwardly I chuckled — the authorities being so concerned with the little proprieties, while substantial wrongdoing was taking place beneath their very noses! I was pushed to the booth by an official who helped me stand, so that I could reach the voting surface, where I would make my crucial mark with a stubby pencil on a string, and then turned his back theatrically, as if we were playing a children’s game of some kind — Elector’s Footsteps, perhaps. Pin the Tail on the Candidate.

When we got home there was no formal debriefing, though Dad certainly wanted to know how the virgin voters had ‘got on’. I assured him that the day’s Mivvi had been particularly delicious, and Peter loudly sang the praises of fresh-sliced ham. Thanks, Dad!

More information was required. Though Dad had announced it was none of his concern how we would vote, it was a different matter when we had actually expressed our preference in the matter of national politics. The moment the deed was done any privacy was forfeit.

‘Do you want to tell me how you voted, boys? Not that it’s any of my business.’

‘Conservative, Dad!’ sang out Peter.