Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Raghu looked almost dismayed at my appreciation, and rattled off some Marathi words at Sumati. It turned out, when he translated her reply, that he was asking if she had at least put some salt and pepper on them. (She had, of course.) Even properly seasoned they tasted of little enough, he thought, but without salt and pepper it was like chewing mouthfuls of air.

‘Aren’t you going to try one?’ I asked, and they rather despondently agreed, chewing politely and clearly despairing of understanding the insipid passions of the Raj.

Dancing on the edge of pain

It turned out that Sumati had also brought along a few samosas and poriyal and chapattis, in a much smaller bag. I felt almost ashamed that she had put my needs first, and also overestimated my appetite, so that the sandwich supply greatly outweighed what she had brought for her husband and herself. Politeness, though, demanded that I try a samosa when it was offered me, even though I was a sandwich millionaire and they had little of their own food to spare.

That samosa was a rite of passage in its own right. Nothing I had ever put in my mouth could have prepared me for the experience. It became painfully clear that Sumati had gone easy on me with her spices the previous evening. Now like some tribal teenager in an initiation ceremony my tongue had to run over hot coals without being blistered. My taste buds hopped and winced, dancing on the edge of pain. Even more than the night before I had the sensation of a hallucinated clarity, as my senses narrowed to a point and simultaneously opened up with an unprecedented freshness.

Yet even with the spices burning off my old habits of mind I could hardly register the landscape around us, let alone describe it. My mental vocabulary was so limited, and this country was neither lush nor bare, or else was both at once. It was green, but a green that was mostly blue and brown.

While we were eating our food, the fiery and the bland, a group of people had come up to see what we were doing. In great contrast to Mum on any comparable occasion, Raghu and Sumati seemed unperturbed by the uninvited company. The most inquisitive of the bunch was an old man with a lovely character etched into his features — his looked like a face from a documentary film. Perhaps the old superstition is true, and the camera steals the soul, just not all at once, but in tiny incremental larcenies. Certainly it’s the faces that have never been photographed which have the strongest identities.

I offered him a sandwich, but he seemed afraid of it and reared back suspiciously. He started addressing words to Raghu, whose spoken Tamil was reasonably fluent. He could hardly have been able to run a business in Madras without being able to get by in conversation.

Raghu retailed the conversation to me. Apparently the old man had asked where we were from. ‘He’d love to know where we’re going, too, but he dare not ask that. These country people are very superstitious. It’s considered very unlucky to ask anyone making a journey where they are going — if he’d done that, then according to their rules of life we would have to go back to our starting-point, drink a glass of water, and set off again! Not very up-to-date, these people. Widows also can blight a travelling party by crossing its path.’

The old man was apparently wondering if I was real. ‘Why don’t you tell him,’ I said, ‘that he is welcome to touch me, if that will help him make up his mind.’ Small talk in these parts seemed to be on a satisfyingly intense philosophical level. No beating about the bush here! Heirs to a long tradition of enquiry, the locals came straight out with, ‘Are you a part of Reality?’

The old man came close and put out his finger very carefully, as if prepared to jerk it back at a moment’s notice. He touched my arm. I was of course very hot, but this rural Indian’s flesh felt cool. I noticed the fine tanned skin on his arm, faintly reptilian in its visual texture, and I touched it in return. He pulled back for an instant, but then consented to this reciprocation of contact. A few other people in his party came forward and had a touch of me as well. I was quite the craze for a little while. It wasn’t clear, though, that touching me had settled their doubts about my existence. The looks they exchanged were still puzzled.

The oldest member of the group started talking to Raghu again, and I noticed that he was now pointing up to the sky. Raghu passed on what was said without my having to ask. He seemed to be getting into the swing of this new job of translating. Raghu explained that the elder was talking about the stars which come out at night after the sun had gone down. ‘He wanted to know, which of those stars was your home, and why had you decided to leave it?’ At my prompting, Raghu told him that I wasn’t doing interstellar travel — ‘at least not at the moment,’ I said, but I don’t expect he passed on that silly flourish — and that I was from this very planet itself. From England in fact.

The look of puzzlement on the elder’s face only deepened, and then he shrugged his shoulders decisively, and his whole little party sloped off. I waited till they were out of earshot before I pestered Raghu for translation — what had he said? What was the verdict? Raghu gave a broad smile. ‘He said, “If that’s what he thinks, he is mad — mad beyond prayer. Mad beyond the hope of cure.”’ To such a connoisseur of Maya it was more likely that I’d flown in from the Crab Nebula than from London Airport.

I’d been rather enjoying the conversation with this elder, relishing my ownership of an unfamiliar kind of strangeness, until the turn it had taken at the very end. Then it knocked me off my perch surprisingly much — being dismissed as insane. Perhaps I can blame the effects on morale of jet lag, which is only a special case of the need for sleep, brought on by the additional effort of maintaining more than one ‘reality’ in the course of a day.

In my history I have noticed that on the threshold of a new stage of life there is often a figure of two-faced welcome, half ushering me in, half keeping me at bay. On the way to CRX it wasn’t a person but the train itself, specifically its lavatory, which first terrified and then thrilled me. On the way to Vulcan it was a yokel who was unable to give my party directions until he realised we were looking for the place for ‘them plastics’ (spastics).

Of course there were more formal welcoming committees at those institutions, the three fateful girls with Still’s come to assess me at CRX, the Grey Lady with her terrifying rhyme come to test me at Vulcan. But the outriders were just as significant. Perhaps the old countryman who thought I was from the stars was serving the same function as the train lavatory and the sardonic yokel. The place where the encounter took place was in its own way almost excessively symbolic, under a signpost that gave too much information or too little, with samosas pointing east and sandwiches pointing west.

I hope the mountain doesn’t take my shoes

My trip to India was purely volitional, unlike my moves to CRX and Vulcan (CRX for treatment, Vulcan for something approaching education), and I very much wanted good auspices and a successful outcome. Still, I don’t want to make too much of the incident. I’m necessarily a sort of lightning rod for little discharges of eccentricity, even a lot closer to home.

On the other hand, the holy mountain Arunachala, towards which we were driving, has his own reputation for a certain amount of caprice. He can be downright curmudgeonly. There’s a legend of a wedding party on its way to pay respects to the mountain, bearing lavish gifts, who were waylaid and robbed before they reached their destination. Even the shoes of the party were taken. The groom was a child saint, Sambandhar, who was being conveyed to his nuptials in a little chariot, adorned with bells to announce his arrival. Eventually it turned out that the thieves weren’t actually human. They were emanations of the mountain, sent to teach an important lesson. Pilgrims should approach Arunachala in simplicity, and barefoot. Ideally, skyclad — stark naked.