Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Everything I could see was green. I could see cows. We seemed to be about to land in a field. I couldn’t understand how the cows were going to keep away from the plane, or the plane keep away from the cows, and then the plane banked and the fields disappeared.

In those days, British citizens had no need of a visa to visit India and customs procedures were rudimentary. All that happened was that a rather sweet young customs man approached me and asked if I would please fill in a required form. After a glance at the situation he offered to fill it in for me himself. He was extremely friendly and polite, but the questions just went on and on. Why was I here? Where was I staying? Would I be going anywhere else?

There were very few of these questions to which I could supply a satisfactory answer. The customs man had no objection to writing ‘Not Applicable’ on his forms, in a handwriting that was certainly far superior to my best efforts, but there seemed no end to his forms. Question begat question.

Eventually I groaned and said, ‘Why do there have to be all these questions? All this paperwork?’ The customs man turned and gave me his brightest smile yet, saying, ‘ We learnt it all from you, sir! ’

It was Mr Raghu Gaitonde who met me after I had cleared customs, neither swami nor urchin but to judge by his dress and demeanour a successful businessman in his forties. While I was summing him up he was doing the same with me. I was pleased with what I saw, pleased and also disappointed, since I had my heart set on the exotic. He was less satisfied with the results of his visual survey. In fact he was fairly evidently reeling. More or less his first words were, ‘Mrs Osborne sent me along with the instructions “Collect him from the airport, and bung him on a bus for Tiruvannamalai.”’ He made a helpless gesture with his hands. ‘I don’t lightly disregard Mrs Osborne’s instructions, but I think in this case the proposed course of action will not do. Bunging of any sort would not be responsible. Buses are not to be thought of. Other modes must be devised. She would undoubtedly scold. I myself live in Madras. You must come to my home and meet my family.’

I felt rather seasick in Raghu’s large old-fashioned car, an Ambassador. Luckily there was an absorbent canvas cover on top of the leather, or else I would have been slithering queasily across the seats. From what I could see he was the most cautious driver in those seething streets. Even so, when we turned corners I felt a little insecure, at the mercy of the superannuated suspension.

I had braced myself for the hubbub of traffic, and had more or less visualised the handcarts and street traders hawking their goods. It had never occurred to me that cows would be wandering along the streets of a major city without visible attendants. Naturally enough they had the right of way — even Michael Aspel, demon driver of Bourne End, taker of mad risks, would have thought twice before locking horns with them.

Chewing the cud of images

Those cows gave me my first indelible (and briefly traumatic) impression of India, an odd sort of spiritual scorching. Whenever we stopped at traffic lights, or were brought to a halt by any other wayward blockage of the traffic flow, I would close my eyes for a few moments, perhaps longer. Once, when I opened them again, I could see a pair of cows leaning against the walls of a building and giving them a good old lick, showing every sign of enjoying themselves. The walls they chose were ones where cinema posters had been stuck, gaudy in their green and orange and red. They must have found that when the posters had aged a bit and started to peel away from the wall, or else were so fresh that they were still wet, they could by dint of extra licking peel a whole strip from the wall with their lips. Hadn’t I given way to the same temptation with the yellow-roses wallpaper of my room in Bathford? It must be a profound animal craving.

At first the sight was no more than a bit of exotic drollery, cattle at ease in a city, imperturbably chewing the cud of advertising images. I’d heard that Indians were cinema-mad, and the craze even affected the ruminants. I could see that some of the cows were sitting down, munching whole strips of poster in a gloriously unhurried way, wide ribbons of clashing colour. Then I realised with a flash of horror that what they were really interested in eating wasn’t the paper but the glue that stuck it to the wall. And what was glue made of, if it wasn’t the boiled-down bones and hooves of its own kind? Gelatine. There was a heinous meeting in those mouths, as viscous saliva softened a paste made of melted kine. The sacred animal of India was contentedly masticating a gruel made of its own kind on the streets of Madras. This baleful vision of the long-lashed vegetarian turned cannibal followed me all the way to Raghu’s house.

There’s something sinister about the tongue itself as a body part. It flexes and drools, helpless but implacable, a chunk of meat that we can’t choke down. Without it we can’t speak, though if we become too conscious of it in our mouths speech becomes impossibly paradoxical. No other muscle is tethered only at one end — perhaps that’s part of its uncanniness.

In my own history it spells guilt, since as an innocent and ailing child I ate it with relish, not allowing myself to know that this silky vegetable was something quite different. The bovine tongue brings on a mood of superstitious horror, not helped by my witnessing what it got up to on the streets of Madras. This is the tissue of moral dread, flesh flap that licks and whispers — or it would be, if I didn’t have non-dualist thought handy to dissolve it.

When we had reached his house Raghu left me in the car while he went inside. By now I was overheating — I can keep cool for quite a time, not by any virtue except that I move about so little, but then suddenly I’m awash with sweat. In the short time that Raghu was away, the windscreen filled up with mischievous inquisitive children’s faces, more thickly plastered against the glass than leaves in an autumn gale. I beamed at them and hoped that Raghu had locked the door.

He was back remarkably quickly. In fact he had hardly spent more than thirty seconds inside the house. If I had been less preöccupied with cattle atrocities seen beside the road I would have registered that this was something altogether remarkable. I was in a very different sort of society from the one I was used to. A man enters a house and tells his wife that they are having a surprise guest, not only for dinner but overnight. He emerges half a minute later, smiling and composed. It was a sequence of actions as mysterious in its way as the riddles I had enjoyed leaving unsolved at Burnham — Antony and Cleopatra, the man who asks for a glass of water and has a gun pointed at him by the barman instead. It was completely impossible in British terms without the creation of domestic turmoil, protests and mutterings, without mollification by bribery or vows of retaliation, but here it was perfectly routine. No broken glass, not even a hiccup.

I wasn’t sure that I was up to socialising of any high order, but perhaps that wouldn’t be expected of me. I was exhausted, and grateful to be cared for by anyone who was willing to take me on. The house was spacious and airy, well equipped with large ceiling fans. It was furnished to allow entertaining in both the Western and Indian styles, with sofas and chairs, and also mats for those who gravitated more naturally towards the floor.

I began to sit up and take notice when I was introduced to Raghu’s younger brother Kashi, a fine young man with a boyish grin who seemed to dance along the ground rather than walk on it. He looked no more than thirty — in fact he was nearer to forty. He was marvellously sleek, like a matinée idol of the sort that is out of date in the West. If his features had been blown up to vast dimensions on a poster, staring into heroic distance, it would be hard to blame any sentient creature for being mesmerised by them. I would have liked to give him a good long lick myself.