Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

There were advantages to sleeplessness in my new surroundings. I saw my first Indian dawn, which wasn’t at all as I expected it. I’d begun to think that India was a country where the categories that were supposed to be separate bled into each other like bright colours in a washing-machine. Everything was true and not true at the same time, thoroughly mixed and indefinite. Airline employees threw themselvers into passionate embraces with strangers, cows were vegetarian cannibals, mountains could project themselves across space. But the Indian dawn wasn’t like that — it was brusque, peremptory. It took hardly a moment. The English dawn was like a whole orchestra tuning up, but here it was like a single vast gong struck with a stick. The heat which the gong released was already so intense that I doubted my body’s ability to adjust.

Despite the change of scene from Madras, my half-sleep was punctuated with erections, and with burnished images of S. P. Munshi and Kashi Gaitonde flickering behind my eyes. I did nothing about them, hoping that my excitement would subside before anyone could notice. I was determined to beg a sheet for the following night, since desire seemed to be mounting a permanent ambush.

Being awake so early was also a suitable expression of eagerness for my long-awaited rendezvous with Arunachala. When Mrs Osborne appeared, I could hardly wait to pester her on the subject of the mountain, but first there were formalities to be observed as between host and guest. ‘I hope you were comfortable in the night, John?’

I felt that lying would be a greater breach of manners than telling the truth. ‘I’m afraid not, Mrs Osborne,’ I said, aiming for chirpiness. ‘Please don’t think I’m spoiled, but I could hardly get a wink. Still, I’m not here for my beauty sleep.’

Mrs O looked baffled. ‘I myself sleep on the floor and find it very comfortable.’ From her expression you would have thought I was the princess kept awake by a pea through forty mattresses, rather than someone with fixed and swollen joints who had spent the night on a bed of planks for the first time. She hobbled off the verandah as if aggrieved by my ingratitude. The word ‘impossible’ hovered in my mind, given a particular pronunciation. Mrs Osborne was imposhible .

Her own sound sleep seemed to be a badge of virtue, and my broken night a sort of self-indulgence. It was disheartening to find the same attitude I had found so suffocating in the West repeated here virtually unchanged — that with a little thought, a little consideration even, I could be able-bodied like the majority.

Of course if the body is no more than an old coat, there’s no point in complaining about the unflattering cut or the rips in the lining. I tried to think of a Bhagavan-esque way of reproving her, although reproval was not really Ramana Maharshi’s style. The way he rebuked his sometimes small-minded followers was by following their rules, showing them to be ridiculous by his very deference to absurdity.

The only saying that came to my mind was his disclaimer of austerity in his early years. ‘ I did not eat, so they said I was fasting. ’ Perhaps that could be turned around without impiety. ‘They said I was keeping vigil, but I was just bloody uncomfortable.’ I’ve found it a useful skill to formulate rude remarks in full, savour them on the tongue and then cleanly suppress them. I have more to lose by rudeness than most.

In earlier life I was less restrained — but then pertness, if well judged, with the right audience, can be a successful way of getting on in institutions like hospitals and schools (I can’t speak for prisons and asylums). Out in the open, where people have no obligation to meet your needs, emollience is what pays off.

Raghu and Sumati took their leave early, perhaps making a quick getaway before Mrs Osborne changed her mind about the poshibility of the verandah as a place for me to stay.

My nostrils began registering a delicious aroma, quite unlike anything I had smelled before. I had given no thought to the question of what Indians ate for breakfast, but from the smell it could only be a kind of curry. Then Mrs Osborne came back with a pan containing a marvellous-smelling dish, a poriyal of wild green figs. If she hadn’t told me what it was I would have guessed at fried mushrooms. From the finished dish you’d never guess that the main ingredient was unripe fruit.

She helped me to sit upright on the bed and then to move the wheelchair, but the effort was almost too much for her and she warned me that I would have to show Kuppu the gardener’s wife how to help me in future. She noticed the bites on my toes and asked about them. She herself, she said, had never been troubled by mosquitoes. Perhaps she had a spell to keep them away.

I think I could have stuck to my vow of austerity and my fast if I had been offered Western fare, but the novelty of wild fig poriyal sidestepped my willpower. It was delicious. I asked Mrs Osborne who had cooked them. ‘Why, I myself, of course!’ she said. ‘Do you think I have a cook? I have a gardener because I am not so flexible, and he has a wife who would be more use if she wasn’t so nervous. Whenever she sees a stranger she is sure she has had the evil eye put on her. I spend many of my days calming her down.

‘The ashram sends food every day in a tiffin carrier. As you may know, Arthur made over all his earnings from books to the ashram, which shows gratitude in this and other ways. But I am not so fond of their food. It is a little flavourless — they try not to alarm the Western palate, while I am now accustomed to spicy food.’

She mentioned without false pride that an English millionaire had once fallen in love with her poriyal , and wanted to have supplies of wild figs flown over to England.

‘Indian puddings I do not care for,’ she added, ‘but I am skilled at the making of rock cakes, which are I think an English favourite.’

It seemed a good idea, now that the Gaitondes had gone, to ask about things that had puzzled me. When I asked if Sumati’s hanging back rather than greeting a guest was typical, she answered that it was, except in very Westernised households. ‘But don’t be too quick to condemn these old styles of behaviour. In this culture there are four female virtues, to wit shyness, simplicity, timidity and delicacy. In Tamil naanam, madam, assam, payirrpu. However there are spiritual meanings involved. Those are the qualities with which the male devotee also will approach manifestations of the divine. There is something of this in the Bible, of course, when the soul arrays herself to greet Christ the bridegroom.’

I was almost more interested to ask about the Gaitondes’ family business. Mrs Osborne said, ‘You must try to understand the Indian Mind. Very little is forbidden absolutely — absolutes are instead the West’s idea. In India it’sh a matter of matching the person to the act. It’sh to do with caste.’ I was beginning to think that Mrs Osborne’s peculiarites of diction were to do with imperfect dentures as well as perfect Polishness. ‘For a Brahmin to touch the shkin of a dead animal in the process of tanning would be the greatest impurity, but an untouchable can do so with no loss of status. Obviously. I know that in Calcutta there is a population of Chinamen who, not being Indian or Hindu, can provide the labour for a substantial industry of leather-dressing and tanning.’

Celebrated prompters of evacuation

I recoiled from the idea of the Indian Mind, but I had to admit the force of what she was saying, even with my infinitesimal experience of India. When it was a matter of attending to my needs in the bathroom, Raghu had tried to think of the person whose function was to deal with such things — as if there might be a glass case in the hall with a servant inside — before he made the breakthrough of deciding that, as my host, he was in fact the person to deal with me, or at least to deputise.