Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Mum said if I really wanted to travel light why didn’t I send the Marmite as the company recommended instead of taking it myself? 9/6 wasn’t a great deal of money, and the jar was heavy. I pointed out that I’d already bought the jar, but Mum said she would pay me back and take it off my hands. So huge a quantity of yeast extract would give depth of flavour to her soups and stews for years to come. I held firm, and finally she had to give in.

This was typical of our arbitrary wrangles at that time. If I had learned about the Marmite despatch service before Mum did, I would have been on fire to take advantage of it, while she would have poured all her energy into making the case against. No stick was too small for us to lunge at, determined to get hold of it by the wrong end. These were the sticks of disputation, which have no right end.

It bothers some people that Marmite is saline mulch thrown off in the process of beer-making, defined historically as a waste product until people could be persuaded to buy it. I think that’s typical of Maya’s work, which is really only advertising. I don’t think there’s such a thing as original sin, but I do think there’s such a thing as believing your own publicity.

At this point in the drama of packing the battle of wills shifted ground. The next conflict was over confectionery. Mum had finally been gracious on the Marmite question, but she took a harder line on the issue of Cadbury’s Roses. Suddenly travelling light was less of a priority. She was very insistent that I should take a tin with me to India. In fact she unilaterally packed one in my suitcase, ignoring my protests, saying, ‘You never know when a box of chocolates will come in handy — you know, to say thank you to your hostess. That sort of thing.’

I managed not to point out that I was going on a pilgrimage, not a house party — you don’t struggle half-way across the world hot on the heels of self-realisation only to bleat out, ‘Thank you for having me.’ Still, I couldn’t shut up altogether. The need to have the last word in argument was as strong as ever, and serenity was well beyond the horizon. I said, ‘I’ll be staying at the ashram, or else with a fellow devotee, and the only person I will want to thank will be my guru, whose body died in 1950, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, leaving him impervious to chocolate.’

‘Don’t snap at me, please, John.’ With a sigh she took the offending Cadbury’s Roses out of my little bag. ‘I’m trying to help you as best I can. I just wish I knew where exactly you’ll be staying — will there be running water and proper conveniences at this guest-house?’

‘An ashram is a sort of monastery, not a guest-house.’

‘Well, will they be giving you a proper breakfast? Who will look after you when you get ill — you will get ill, won’t you? It stands to reason. So far from home, eating strange food.’

‘I trust my guru that my pilgrimage is pleasing and is meant to happen. Plumbing and cooking are not interesting subjects to the evolved mind. And it’s meat-eaters such as yourself who get into trouble in foreign parts, not vegeteerians. As you like to call us.’

Onions a great obstacle to deliverance

Ramana Maharshi had also had a sticky relationship with his mother. After she had despaired of persuading him to come home and had moved to Tiruvannamalai herself, she pestered him with her attentions. First she prepared a vegetable dish, than a little soup, and soon she was wandering all over the hill gathering provisions, murmuring, ‘He likes this vegetable, he likes this fruit,’ entirely ignoring his remonstrations. She took silence for assent, and his indifferent eating, absolved of appetite, as Thanks Mum, What Would I Do Without You?

Once he teased her while she was cooking, saying, ‘Beware of those onions, Mother. They are a great obstacle to deliverance!’ Onions in the Hindu classification being tamasic , darkness foods, though not strictly forbidden like other substances in their category (such as meat).

I was lucky that Mum’s phobias would prevent her from following me to the holy mountain under any circumstances. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her sneaking the Cadbury’s Roses back into my case. I made a mental note to ask Peter, when he got home from work, to remove them and hide them somewhere safe. Inside his digestive system if need be.

I was beginning to understand the spiritual value of the family as an institution, which is nil. The family stands for everything that religion (properly understood) opposes — in a word, attachment. Christ showed he grasped this when he rejected his blood family in favour of something more real: ¶Know you not I must be about my father’s business? Slyly he used the rhetoric of family while slipping out of its clutches.

Mum said that worrying over me was turning her hair white. There was no sign of that, but I did try to be sympathetic about her little obsessions. At her urging I even went to see Flanny the GP, complicit in Mum’s sneering at vegeteerians, for something to take with me in case of diarrhœa. Her response was typically forthright, typically unhelpful: ‘ Of course you’ll get diarrhœa,’ she said, as if this was the real underlying purpose of the trip. ‘But I’m not allowed to prescribe for things you haven’t got yet.’

I always found Flanny difficult to deal with, which may only mean that she found me difficult. Doctors like to make a difference. They don’t like the patients who keep turning up when there’s nothing wrong with them, and they don’t enjoy the long-term cases whose lives aren’t susceptible to transformation. Hypochondriacs and chronics alike undermine the self-respect of professionals. The fact that I stubbornly turned up from time to time with a new demand must have seemed like malingering of a perverse sort, as if I was playing for sympathy from the far shores of ill health. In fact I don’t want sympathy from a doctor ( sympathetic in medicine being strictly a description of one branch of the nervous system). I’d rather have a snappy diagnosis or a script made out with no questions asked.

In the end I had to fork out for some Lomotil on a private prescription, which rather rankled. 10/6 it cost me, making a considerable hole in my budget. You could send a large jar of Marmite anywhere in the world for a sum like that, and still have a shilling left over for emergencies.

Mum refused to look at Tamil Nadu on a map, though Dad took an interest in that aspect of the expedition, and insisted on referring to my whole summer of pilgrimage as ‘John’s trip to Timbuktu’ — despite his having spent some time in those parts himself.

There was very little that reassured Mum about my five weeks of proposed self-discovery, but at least there was the late Arthur Osborne’s social status. He was a graduate of Oxford University, which counted for a lot in her eyes, and he had even written a book, which I had on long loan (thanks to Mrs Pavey’s good offices) from Bourne End Library. Mum would have the book to hang on to while I was away.

She was comforted, too, that I would be cared for by Mrs Osborne. Wives and mothers were the same the world over, weren’t they? ‘Mrs Osborne’ was a name with an uncommonly reassuring cadence, suggesting Queen Victoria (wasn’t Osborne the name of her house on the Isle of Wight?). Nothing would go wrong, surely, while I was in the charge of a Mrs Osborne. I don’t know exactly what Mum’s mental picture of Mrs Osborne amounted to, but in my eyes Mrs Osborne was a sort of anti-Mum, blonde where she was dark, perhaps a little plump, serene and indulgent, like a Roman goddess of the crops depicted in a sentimental painting — like the lady on the jar of Ovaltine, in fact, clutching to her boozzie a bountiful cereal sheaf which promised restful nourishment. Realising that the late Arthur Osborne had been in his sixties, so that his wife, even if she had been (as I vaguely remembered) a student of his at one stage, couldn’t be so very young, I sowed silver hairs among the imaginary gold, and adorned her face with glasses whose frames curved jauntily up at the sides.