Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

It was in the nature of our position that he should be looking me almost directly in the face, but of course I knew not a single word of Tamil, except possibly the name of a spicy appetiser served in Madras. I never saw him with a beedie in his hand or between his lips, but at this range his was unmistakably a smoker’s breath, nutty and corrupt. All I could do to steady him was to change Eyes with a basilisk (as described in The Duchess of Malfi , which I had read at Burnham), hoping to freeze the laughter at its root. Of course sometimes, although this doesn’t usually happen in The Duchess of Malfi , the change-Eyes-with-a-basilisk routine just makes things even funnier.

Much of the day was spent in a battle of wills between me and Mrs Osborne about whether I would go to the ashram first or around the mountain. She said that Rajah Manikkam was at my disposal as wheelchair-pusher, whenever I wished to go to the ashram. To which I replied, why not then put him at my disposal to take me round the mountain? Mrs Osborne, though, was not to be got round in that way. ‘He is unsuitable for that purpose, since he is no devotee and can neither identify the mountain’s features nor explain their significance.’ Even if he possessed such knowledge he lacked any English in which it might be embodied. As if it was the dutiful parroting of a guide for which I had travelled, and not direct contact with the mountain, the divine presence expressed in geology.

To show willing (or to protect my stubbornness from a flanking attack, which is what ‘showing willing’ normally means) I had let Rajah Manikkam give me a test ride for a few yards. Even then I wasn’t convinced that he was up to the job. His technique was very jerky and approximate — gardeners in Tamil Nadu don’t have wheelbarrows to practise on. When we came to rough terrain I would be asking for trouble.

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I will wait for a suitable pushing-person to become available.’

‘Such people gather at the ashram. Lunch is also served. Why not make enquiries there?’

‘After that delicious breakfast I am in no hurry to eat again. I will try to match my patience to the mountain, as you advise.’ That was telling her, all right. I closed my eyes.

Any time I closed my eyes at home, or kept them open but withdrew into the practice of meditation, I would be accused of ‘woolgathering’. It would have been handy to be able to dramatise my need for privacy by locking a door behind me, or hanging up a sign saying, SPIRITUAL EXERCISE IN PROGRESS — KEEP OUT — THIS MEANS YOU, MUM, but that wasn’t a possibility. ‘You were miles away,’ Mum would say when I had picked up the threads of mundane life, as if holding the mind stilled in quest of itself was only a form of absent-mindedness, a failure of concentration, and I would say, ‘More than miles, Mum … light years’.

The rope inexorably shortens

Doing pradakshina was of course my ambition. In Rome you are photographed standing next to the Colosseum, in Paris you climb the Eiffel Tower and in Tiruvannamalai you walk clockwise round the mountain. It’s not a sacrament but a ritual stroll. The limbs move but the mind is silenced.

There are numbers of siddhas and sages on Arunachala even now, similarly perambulating in invisibility. It’s correct to walk on the left side of the road so as not to obstruct them, thereby gathering additional blessings.

Pradakshina is beneficial even in the absence of faith. There’s a lovely image used for the process: just as a cow, wandering aimlessly round the post to which it is tethered, finds that the rope inexorably shortens, so by each circuit the sadhaka will be drawn nearer to the Heart-Self centre. The captivated cow is not required to understand the principle of the winch.

In my case, though, it wasn’t easy to disentangle theory and practice. What constituted pradakshina for me? I couldn’t expect to reap the spiritual benefit if someone was pushing me — going barefoot was no hardship when your feet didn’t touch the ground. But if I did it myself, surely the ritual had to be scaled down in some way, and doing it without shoes wasn’t an option. The last time I had done any walking without shoes had been at the bidding of a sadistic physiotherapist. My guru would not make similar demands.

In religion I seemed to be re-experiencing what I had encountered in terms of my education. It stung me with a sense of unfairness. Once again it required special measures for me to participate on equal terms, schoolboy among schoolboys, devotee among devotees. My guru had walking difficulties, as I did, though admittedly his rheumatism required the help of a stick and not a wheelchair. And still I didn’t fit in here. Ramana Maharshi didn’t need to walk round the mountain because, for all practical purposes, he was the mountain. There was no call for him to walk round himself, he would reap no benefit thereby, and pradakshina as a sacred practice had nothing to teach him. If I, on the other hand, couldn’t walk round the mountain, that would knock the stuffing out of my pilgrimage and my vain discipleship. All Air India’s generosity, for which Dad had done such stalwart wheedling, would be a waste of grace.

When I opened my eyes again, Mrs Osborne was sitting there in front of me, with her elbows on the table, resting her austerity of a face in her hands. She looked oddly beautiful, as if her head was a flower resting in a vase designed for the purpose.

‘John,’ she said, ‘when I think of the difficulties your body has put in your path, I think that simply making your way to Tiruvannamalai must count for half a pradakshina. ’

This was the kindest thing Mrs Osborne had said to date, even if the sentence began more promisingly than it ended. She seemed to be able to look into my heart more easily when my eyes were closed (and my mouth also). I wondered if I had really been meditating, or only sneaking in all innocence a restorative nap.

‘I have sent Rajah Manikkam to the ashram with a note. If all goes well, a brahmin from the ashram will escort you on pradakshina later in the day. The brahmin will explain the spiritual significance of the mountain’s features as you pass them.’

This was a good start, or so I thought while I waited for the brahmin to arrive from the ashram. In England ashram was a highly unusual word, like ankylosed and epiphysis , needing to be explained and apologised for. Here it was an entirely everyday word and thing, like ‘school’ or ‘library’. I loved that.

The brahmin was a bright-eyed fellow, whose greeting was merely to fold his hands in silence. This should hardly have amounted to a greeting, yet its meaning seemed clear. There was a semaphore twinkle in his eye which transmitted the message ‘I bid you welcome, pilgrim.’ ‘Pilgrim’ was the word I was anxious to supply, since it turned my restlessness into a virtue.

This wordless welcome made a pleasant change from Mrs O’s original ‘Imposhible, imposhible!’ But after that things didn’t quite go according to plan.

It was already late in the day. The evening insects had begun their thrumming song. Before the brahmin had finally turned up I had a conversation with Mrs Osborne about them, asking whether they were actually cicadas or some other variety of insect. She said, ‘Strangely enough, that was a question I once put to Arthur. My husband’s general knowledge was very wide. It was his opinion that they were not “strictly” cicadas, so we always just called them Hoppy Things.’

It had not been explained to me that my first pradakshina was to take place in dying light, in what (given the blink-and-you’ve-missed-it quality of the Indian dusk) was pretty much darkness. When I protested to the brahmin about the timing of so important an event, he simply said that vision was an unimportant factor in the doing of pradakshina . I needn’t worry about being able to see the mountain — the mountain would be able to see me without difficulty.