Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

‘But aren’t you a Hindu?’

‘I am indeed. As are you. Yet I notice you wear leather footwear.’ He pointed to my shoes, where he had placed them neatly on the bathroom floor.

I blushed. It was true that I had made an uneasy peace with animal sacrifice carried out for my benefit. Useless to say that my very expensive tailor-made shoes — cobbler-made — were supplied free of charge by the National Health, and that I could hardly refuse them. Hadn’t I in fact rejected the synthetic Space Shoes which Ansell had taken so much trouble to commission at CRX? I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I didn’t try to explain, though it was true, that I thought of my shoes as in some way continuing the cow’s experience of life, taking it to places it had never been.

Tingling copper wire

Raghu’s intention was not to chide me. ‘You are a devotee of Bhagavan Sri Ramana, whose teaching is very exalted. My own family are devotees rather of Paramahamsa Yogananda. Many of Ramana Maharshi’s sayings, however, are well known, such as this one: Wanting to reform the world without discovering one’s true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes. ’ In fact this supposedly familiar saying of my Guru was news to me. It provided much food for thought, much spiritual cud to be dwelt on. ‘And now, John, I think I can honestly say that you are as clean as a whistle.’

When I complimented him he merely said, ‘You are not in England any more, John — that savage land where they wipe themselves with sandpaper! Water is always best.’ He teased me sweetly a little longer along the same lines, India the advanced civilisation, Britain a backwater. And of course he had a point. ‘Isn’t your government getting ready for decimalisation just now? But here we have already introduced our naya paisas . You will like your new pence , I dare to predict, once you are used to them.’

Then Raghu insisted on giving me a proper wash, even taking the trouble to delve into my armpits. ‘You will sleep better, John,’ he said, ‘for being cool and clean.’

I was still thinking about his tannery revelations. Since I had taken off into the air above London Airport relatively few hours earlier I seemed to have been shown nothing but irregular behaviour on the part of Bos taurus , of the order Artiodactyla and tribe Bovidi . Cows lolled in slabs on trolleys in the First Class cabin of the Indian national airline, on the streets they languorously licked the mucilage made from their boiled-up relatives, they gave their hides to good Hindus to be made into shoes and jackets. I was being served notice, I felt, that Maya was feverishly at work in these territories, yet I also had the feeling — it was a distinct strand of consciousness within my fatigue, like a tingling copper wire in a skein of dull wool — that everything had changed now that I was sharing a land-mass with my guru, whose ‘death’ had only intensified his local presence.

I had also eaten food of an unaccustomed, revelatory spiciness. Even under temperate conditions chilli, turmeric, garam masala and their allies alter consciousness and tighten the scalp. They pinch and knead the housing of the brain, producing a benign confusion of thought. In a climate of active heat, spicy food brings about a psychological cancellation like the breaking of a fever. By the time I was ready for bed I had taken the new temperature inside myself and was part-way attuned to it.

When Raghu had settled me in a downstairs bedroom with the pee bottle within reach, I should by rights have fallen asleep in seconds. In fact I was kept awake by a pulsing node of thought and feeling — to be frank, an erection. An implacable specimen of its kind.

My celibacy vow had come under pressure from more than one flank already, before my first full day in India. The visiting card from S. P. Munshi at the airport was tucked safely away, but it was so strongly charged with spiritual-erotic impulses that I could feel it pulsating in the darkness. Temptation had opened up a second front at dinner, and I had played eye ping-pong with a charming and not obviously attached young man. Why not give up an enterprise which was obviously doomed and have a good old wank? I managed to persevere, mainly (I’m afraid) by thinking what an impression the household would get of me, and of the wicked West, when Sumati’s servant changed the sheets. ‘Taily’ was the last part of me to go to sleep, and the first to rise in the morning. I ignored it. I would not give in to its sly throbbings. ‘Taily’ seemed the right, childish word for it, this gross part which proved me an adult but wouldn’t let me be one.

I prayed that I would be able to withstand the temptations of spending time in Kashi’s proximity. Obviously I wasn’t going to molest him in any positive way, but it might already count as a betrayal of my vow to have dwelt on his image and to have become excited by it later, in private. In fact, the next morning I didn’t see him at all — he’d left the house early to run errands — which left me rather disappointed. The pressure was off my self-control, and I felt almost cheated. I hadn’t meant to pray quite so hard.

After he had seen to my morning needs as benignly as he had the ones of the night before, Raghu explained that Mrs Osborne’s ‘bung him on the bus’ plan had undergone further modification. Raghu and Sumati would now be bunging me in the car and driving me to Tiruvannamalai. It wasn’t very far, about a hundred miles. It was all decided. I must admit I was relieved not to have to face the bus, though I had been thinking of enquiring about trains. Perhaps going there by train would have been too presumptuous an emulation of my guru, a bit too much like feeling tired all of a sudden and hopping up on a donkey, just when you happen to reach the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Little houses overgrown with creepers

Before we set off Raghu explained one slight complication: I would be showing them the way. I tried to tell myself that he was having trouble with his English, but in my heart of hearts I knew it wasn’t likely. He meant what he said. In some strange way I was to guide the party. I hoped that my adopted religion, which had called to me with its depth and subtlety, wasn’t going to turn out to be full of tests and ordeals after all, like the wearying one I was born into. I didn’t feel that I needed to prove myself in that sort of way.

But why, then, was it my task to show citizens of Madras the way to Tiruvannamalai? Two reasons, really. The first was that Raghu and Sumati could manage conversational Tamil, but couldn’t read it. They were all at sea with the script. This was a little shock. I didn’t quite assume that all Indian people spoke all Indian languages. I knew there were very many, though I didn’t know enough to put them in the hundreds. But I did assume that all Indian people in Tamil Nadu would be at home with the Tamil language. Why else would they live there? In fact the families of Raghu and Sumati came originally from Kerala, and they spoke Marathi at home.

That was one part of the difficulty. The other was that signposts in Tamil Nadu were written exclusively in Tamil. In a recent access of nationalist fervour, the state government had removed the familiar ABC letters from signs. The British had packed their bags and left, but if they changed their minds and came back they would be properly baffled, just like the anticipated Nazi invaders of 1940, who would have found no signposts at all and been all at sea if they had forgotten to bring maps.

The changeover of signposts had only happened a year or two before 1970 — if I’d made my pilgrimage earlier, then the trip to Tiruvannamalai would have been a piece of cake.