Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

My normal time for a tuppenny was before breakfast, but my system was less full than usual thanks to my having skipped food since lunch the day before. Now the time would have been upon me, even without my indulgence in figs, those celebrated prompters of evacuation. Mrs Osborne summoned Kuppu and tactfully withdrew to the house.

By the time she emerged again, a number of things had happened. I had undertaken my maiden voyage on her late husband’s commode, and Kuppu, who seemed to understand me with the minimum of effort, had not only emptied the pee bottle but had removed the bowl from the commode and cleaned it. Kuppu had learned very quickly to help me up by bending down and putting her arms round me. And now the bowl of the commode was sparkling and fresh, ready for the next use, and I myself had been deftly cleaned up. Kuppu had lost her fear of me, and now her smile seemed as much a part of her as her nose-ring.

Mrs Osborne was astonished. Her face softened. I exaggerate: it was a face that clung to its hardness, but there were nuances to be read there all the same, granite nuances. ‘Never would I have believed this poshible,’ she said. ‘Truly Arunachala blesses your presence here!’ Which I devoutly hoped was true. I thought of throwing back at her the observation that absolutes are a fad of the West, but decided against it. Kuppu deserved all possible credit for quietly slipping across the boundaries of caste for my benefit.

My next question to Mrs Osborne was obvious. ‘When can we go to Arunachala? Can we go soon?’ Her answer was not what I expected. ‘My dear child, you are already there! Did you really not know? We are at the foot of the holy mountain, and the ashram is no more than a few steps from here.’ With ‘ashram’ she had at last found a word to whose esh -sound she could really do justice. ‘It is merely that we are so near that we do not see the profile of Arunachala, just as a fly that has landed on your neck cannot see your eyes.’

I was already where I wanted to be. This was a great discovery and a great lesson. The mountain had stretched itself towards me the day before, so that I saw it long before Raghu thought such a thing possible, and then it had hidden in plain sight. Arunachala was playing hide and seek with me, showing me how freely He could intersect with time and space. I could even feel that my residence on the verandah was somehow significant, with no walls to block spiritual access, that it pleased Arunachala to have me near and in the open air. Perhaps I could even count him, rather than Mrs Osborne, as my host in Tamil Nadu.

I was also reminded of something that Ben Nevin, the teacher I hero-worshipped, had said at Vulcan about different religions, and how it was possible that they might all be true. He asked us to imagine a mountain, which many people are climbing. Some of them climb up in a straight line, some of them look for the less forbidding slopes, others take a spiral path. It all depends on their abilities and their maps. I had thought this was a wonderful notion even before the mountain Himself started showing me the truth of it.

‘Now,’ said Mrs Osborne, ‘perhaps Arunachala will also smile on the bed problem.’ It turned out that she wasn’t leaving it up to the mountain altogether. She summoned Rajah Manikkam and gave him some instructions. When he came back with some rope I expect my face fell. I had been hoping for something fluffy, cushioned, perhaps even inflatable. But then the two of them got to work. From Mrs Osborne’s disapproval of my soft, bed-loving ways, I had no reason to think that what they were doing was a routine procedure, but they behaved as a team, with a degree of coöperation which seemed downright eerie.

What they were doing, in broad terms, was wrapping the rope round the bedframe in a diagonal weave. Rajah Manikkam’s job was to pull the rope tight, while Mrs O put knots in it. The knots must have been the cunning sort which tighten when pulled on. Then their working became more ambitious. Rajah Manikkam started to stand on the rope bed and to trample on it in some methodical way while Mrs Osborne refined her knot-tightening. Despite her poor posture, her fingers were deft and strong. The whole process had some mysterious logic. Rajah Manikkam’s trampling started at the loose bit of the rope web and moved up towards the neck of the bed. It’s hard to offer accurate descriptions of actions that you can’t perform yourself — the best I can do is to describe Rajah Manikkam’s actions as a sort of regulated trammelling, a spontaneous blend of weaving and hopscotch. Handiwork of any kind often seems miraculous. I don’t easily distinguish between degrees of accomplishment. All I can say is that it looked pretty clever to me.

From my vantage point I could see that sometimes the rope passed between Rajah Manikkam’s toes, while Mrs O exerted pressure. I’m no expert on toes, but the friction on those tissues looked alarming. Those tender pegs were surely never meant to do duty as pulleys, as tiny capstans — but when Rajah Manikkam met my eyes he gave a huge grin. Only when their methodical trampling and knotting had produced results did Mrs Osborne allow herself a sharp smile of satisfaction. In the space of a quarter of an hour they had created between them a very serviceable bed, in the form of a cat’s-cradle.

They had performed the Indian Rope Trick right there on the verandah, for my benefit exclusively, only they had done something much more useful than making a man vanish, by making a bed appear from nothing.

While the white witch and her gardener had been working away for my benefit, and while I basked in the satisfaction of having opened my bowels without trauma, I had been reviewing my experiences of India so far, cannibal cows and all. The only episode that seemed wholly fantastical in retrospect was Mrs Osborne telling me that she would give me pills to make me grow. It was straight out of Alice in Wonderland . Had I fallen asleep, tired as I was, for a few moments at least, and dreamed this unlikely piece of wish-fulfilment?

But then Mrs O reappeared with a little container of pills, one of which she insisted on popping directly onto my tongue. As she tipped it from the lid of the container she told me that homœopathic preparations should never be touched. I have to admit that this was something which appealed, the sense of medicines as sacred. I let the tiny pill unleash its sugared potency on my tongue as I was told, without chewing. Perhaps it was Mrs Osborne’s aspect as a homœopathic practitioner which had made Raghu compare her to a witchy ‘handler of nothingness’. Homœopaths in their spells handle somethings that are almost smaller than nothings.

Change eyes with a basilisk

Under Mrs Osborne’s direction, Rajah Manikkam practised the drill for getting me on and off the verandah. She was well used to correcting (without expense of tact) the shortcomings of the locals, and her analytical eye had seen that there was no point lifting me anywhere if I didn’t have my shoes on. Without them I could hardly stand at all. She gave him the order to hug me and lift me up or down the three steps, and showed him which uprights were strong enough to let me lean against them while he fetched the wheelchair, and which would let me down.

Perhaps Rajah Manikkam was nervous about being entrusted with these intricate tasks. The procedure, which had gone smoothly during its first execution, became problematic the moment we started practising it. At the point when his arms were wrapped round me, he would be overwhelmed by a laughing attack. Suddenly it struck him as the funniest thing in the entire world that he should be lifting John up and down the steps to the verandah. His movements became less controlled, the functional hug developed tremors and spasms. He began to sway as if he was drunk, and there was a real possibility of him falling over or else simply dropping me.