Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

My first draft had no spiritual underpinning. To boil it down: I’m sorry for your loss. My second attempted to go a little deeper beneath the surfaces of things. Baldly: ‘Seeming-I is as-it-were sorry for seeming-you’s apparent loss.’ I read over it and gave it the lowest possible marks, then went back to the first version. Again Peter escorted me to the postbox. There were some messages I didn’t altogether trust Mum to transmit — at least without scrawling Please if you have any pity in you discourage my deluded boy on the back of the envelope. Then all I could do was wait and hope for deliverance. The time of my flight was coming near, and I didn’t want to be left to the mercies of the road, which refuses no one and by the same logic welcomes no one either.

Meanwhile a window was mysteriously left open by Audrey, and that was the last we knew of the bird with no name. I suppose Audrey may have been jealous of Mum’s bird, at some level, but it’s also true that the namelessness didn’t help. Of course we’re none of us real, and names are no less unreal, but having a name does seem to keep us going, doesn’t it?

With Sultan Audrey tried a charm offensive. Her philosophy was that you could make any creature love you if you set your mind to it, by grabbing and smothering if need be. Mum would sometimes give Sultan orders to stay on Audrey’s bed till she fell asleep. Sultan would do it, but you could feel every feline fibre straining to be gone. Every pet we ever had was wary of Audrey, perhaps knowing things we didn’t.

Two days before the date of my flight, when Mum had cried all the tears she had in her and Dad had taken to leaving travel brochures for Paris around, remarking (as if casually) that the lifts on the Eiffel Tower went right the way to the top, a letter came from Mrs Osborne. I hadn’t managed to strike the right note when I tried to write a Hindu letter of condolence to Mrs Osborne, but her reply had perfect pitch. She said that she would have learned nothing from Ramana Maharshi if she let the shedding of an old coat get in the way of welcoming a fellow devotee.

The arrangements could stand. There was a place made ready for me thousands of miles from home, and I was expected by strangers I loved already. Of course if life and death don’t qualify as real, then family has quite a nerve to make such claims on us, It’s only common sense that the family you choose outranks the one you were given.

I was taking a leap in the dark, the enlightening dark, in a body ill suited to any sort of run-up. A solo trip to India was a fairly adventurous thing for anyone to do in 1970, but my case was almost insanely bold. Over the years I had moved from a hospital to a special school and then to a normal one. With each successive change of address I had whittled away at the elaborateness of the infrastructure that was needed to support me. In India I would have absolutely nothing familiar to rely on. I would be travelling on a wing (two wings, thanks to Air India, and First Class wings at that) and a prayer. At Burnham Grammar School my falls had been cushioned by willing helpers, and India was even more richly supplied with personnel — but it seemed foolish to expect the entire population to act as ramshackle shock-absorbers protecting me from the impact of so much difference.

I had decided on five weeks as the right period for my pilgrimage. It was a length of time which would allow me a full month of devotion in Tamil Nadu, the Indian state where Ramana Maharshi had lived and died, with half a week at each end of that to recover from arriving, and to prepare myself for departure.

I’m good at packing. Packing for me is something that takes place on a piece of paper, where I list objects and actions as precisely as possible. The satisfaction only begins to leak out of the process when I have to pass the list over to someone else — to Mum, in this period, for the executive stage of packing, the actual gathering and encasing of possessions.

At that point you might think my involvement in packing was over, but not so. That’s when I have to maintain the greatest vigilance. Otherwise when the case is opened at the other end of a journey there are extensive omissions, bonuses and maddening bits of improvisation. When my outrage is reported back to the executive I never get a more satisfactory response than I couldn’t see what you wanted with X or You can’t have too many Ys . I have to anticipate the perverse algebra of the proxy packer, complicated in this case by the fanciful travel priorities of a virtual agoraphobic.

There was a certain amount of worldly advice current about what to take with you to India, things which were scarce there, and consequently better than hard currency — bottles of whisky and razor blades. I wasn’t going to be able to be my own porter, but even so, travelling light was part of my agenda. Travelling light was an admirable goal in itself, even if Dad, the family’s supreme exponent of the art, sometimes came close to showing off. He had arrived in Tanganyika once with all his possessions (toothbrush, flannel, razor) rolled in a towel under his arm.

The bottles disqualified themselves immediately, but I dare say I could have managed some razor blades — except that a pilgrim doesn’t bring contraband or even legitimate wares. A pilgrim brings only his submission to the sacred, and I refused to be canny or self-serving on this devotional journey.

Mrs Osborne had given the travelling-light agenda a wonderful boost by saying that I should bring a single change of clothes and no more. That was all I would need. There wasn’t much Mum could do to overrule such a definitive pronouncement. I took with me a suitcase to go in the hold of the aeroplane, and a carrier bag which would hang on the crutch when I walked. The carrier bag held crucial objects like my flannel, tooth-cleaning equipment, bum-wiper, passport and traveller’s cheques. By now I had developed considerable expertise with the bum-snorkel, to the point where I could do a better job using remote-control toilet paper origami than any nurse who had looked after me at CRX, or any helper at Hephaistos. Have snorkel, will travel. I would have hated to have to put my bum in the hands of strangers during my pilgrimage. The strangers themselves would have been less than thrilled, brahmins aghast and even pariahs not best pleased.

Marmite and Roses

Mrs Osborne had specifically asked me to bring some Marmite, as that strange substance (which I remember calling ‘salty jam’ as a child) wasn’t available in India. Mum insisted that she’d read somewhere that the manufacturers of Marmite were so keen on their product that they would send it anywhere in the world for a modest sum of money. When I expressed doubt about this, she did one of her rare Granny impersonations, smiling sweetly and saying, ‘Let’s write to Marmite and find out, shall we?’ She didn’t veto the purchase of a large jar of Marmite for my Indian expedition, but all the same she wanted to be vindicated before I left if at all possible. Marmite replied by return of post. Mum was in the right. The company would send a large jar of Marmite anywhere on the globe for the sum of 9/6 (including postage).

‘That makes sense, whichever way you look at it, doesn’t it, Mum?’ I said. She didn’t quite get the joke at first, so I wrote ‘9/6’ on a piece of paper and then turned it upside down to show her that it still said ‘9/6’. She was impressed and congratulated me on my cleverness. I didn’t have the honesty to confess that the idea wasn’t mine. I’d pinched it from an old advertisement for Castella cigars. I was baffled by the variability of Mum’s intelligence: she could sometimes be very sharp, while other times she was like a sort of super-parrot repeating things she’d read or heard. On my side, though, there was a relentless need to impress her with my brain and the constancy of its whirring. All this knotting-up of family emotion, of dependency and resentment, was something I hoped would simply fall away when I was in India and could look at the world through other eyes, eyes freed of their Bourne End blinkers, able to see beyond the sun.