Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I felt like one of those people in Greek mythology who are granted their greatest wish, with a hidden flaw that turns it into punishment — becoming immortal, say, without having remembered to ask for eternal youth. Or like a bride on her wedding night, forbidden to set eyes on her beloved. Was it for this that I had travelled so far, a mystery tour in the dark with some parables thrown in at no extra charge? Of course I couldn’t make any real protest — my bluff had been called by the brahmin’s greeting. To hang on to my status as pilgrim I had to go along with the idea that vision was an incidental part of this body’s operation, of no spiritual significance. If I set too much store by actually seeing things I was pretty much begging to be reclassified as a tourist. With any luck at least we wouldn’t be bivouacking on the mountain.

Once we had set off, I had to admit that the brahmin was very sure-footed. He knew exactly what he was doing. It’s extraordinary how hands on the wheelchair can transmit along the handles the competence or ineptness of the pusher. I felt that I was as safe with this man as Hillary was with Sherpa Tensing, on his own rather hum-drum mountain quest. The air was certainly cooler than it would have been by day. Even when my eyes had adapted to the dark, though, I couldn’t make out more than the vaguest shapes.

The voice behind me murmured, in a very educated English, ‘Arunachala is the oldest mountain on earth, older by far than the Himalayas …’ I managed to keep my mouth closed and not to murmur in my turn, ‘Oh I know that ,’ in a voice that would have been to all intents and purposes Granny’s. Then I wondered a little uneasily if he had picked up my thoughts about Hillary and Everest, as directly as I had picked up a confidence in his wheelchair-handling. Wheelchair handles can be very good conductors.

‘In spiritual terms Arunachala is the South Pole of India, Mount Kailas being the northern one. There are three main peaks to the mountain,’ he went on. ‘They correspond to Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.’ That was something I didn’t know, so I made attentive-schoolboy clucks. If people can’t read your expression they tend to repeat what they’ve said until they get an acknowledgement. Dealing with the disabled makes people’s IQ fairly plunge. ‘There is another tradition which numbers the peaks as five. Opinions vary. There is much to be said on this issue. There may be three peaks or else five — but not four. Definitely not four.’ Mentally I plumped for five, not wanting to have travelled half-way across the world only to bump into the Trinity in native costume.

At one point I noticed a mysterious shape looming by the road. It looked like a bus shelter — at least that’s what it would have been by a suburban road in England. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘ Mantapam ,’ said the brahmin, and I didn’t want to advertise my lack of ability to concentrate on the mountain by asking anything else. Similar shapes loomed up at intervals, and I was fairly sure that they were mantapams too, whatever a mantapam was.

Finally there was a light, and also a strange hissing-puffing noise, like something a tiny steam-engine might make. ‘Perhaps you would like a cup of tea?’ asked the brahmin politely. No I would not! I was scandalised that there was a tea-shop brewing up in the middle of the night on the holy mountain. I felt as if I was being nudged if not positively funnelled towards the cathedral gift kiosk, in a way that slighted my piety. Did I want to look at some postcards, perhaps a calendar? Not on your nelly. Full steam ahead, please, brahmin driver. Step on the gas.

The warm glow died away behind me. It was frustrating not to be able to see the object of my pilgrimage, when I might actually be passing right beneath the rock where Bhagavan would sit in the morning, cleaning his teeth with a twig from the toothbrush tree, as he did even in bad weather, with an arthritic lady down below drinking up the darshan as it splashed down the slope.

Anecdotes of that sort were rather more real to me than my closeness to the mountain which had inspired them. Perhaps that was the lesson intended behind taking me on pradakshina in the dark, to show me that there was still plenty of baggage to be shed, trunk after trunk of it. The mountain was blazing with realised Selfhood, and my little mind clung to its cone of dark. The dunce’s cap of unenlightenment.

The brahmin told me about Parvati and her penance on Arunachala. I didn’t catch exactly what she was atoning for — if I was truly attuned to sin and atonement I’d have stayed at home. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘when Parvati went on pradakshina , her devotion was so strong that she simply melted into the mountain, but her shape — her bosom, in fact — can still be traced at this very point on the slope.’ Not by me it couldn’t. I hadn’t flown above the clouds with the hiccups to end up playing I Spy with divine body parts and the local rocks.

I might as well not have been on the mountain at all. Our promenade, though sacred and circular, was unleashing no inner change. Even before I finished my first pradakshina I began to pin my hopes for breakthrough on the ashram rather than on the mountain. Despite the antiquity and power of the mountain, after all, it was in the ashram that the transcendent powers of Bhagavan would be at their strongest. In the Old Hall above all, which must have absorbed the purest energy from his presence, darshan in a concentration approaching critical mass, radiant core of spiritual fission-fusion. To that fizzing sherbet fountain of anti-matter I transferred my hopes.

When we returned to Mrs Osborne’s house it was well after midnight and I was exhausted, but she still seemed to have plenty of energy. I didn’t make the mistake of thinking she was waiting up for me, even worrying about me. I was in the hands of the mountain. Sleeping on the bare earth certainly seemed to suit Mrs O. Being so much less firm than her formidable personality, it must have felt actively soft beneath her.

She told me that she had left a book out for my inspection, and that she would bring me out a fruit juice to refresh me. ‘The local juice is good,’ she said, ‘though not of course as refreshing as the sour cherry juice they make in Poland.’

Thick even in dilution

These were significant concessions, the book and the juice both delivered to me on the verandah, and I felt that my sincerity as a pilgrim was really beginning to wear down Mrs Osborne’s resistance. It was with faint dismay that I noted that the book was by Somerset Maugham, in 1970 definitively out of literary fashion. It was The Razor’s Edge . I certainly didn’t expect to have anything to learn from this shallow stylist — this storyteller . I was going up to Cambridge in a few months, after all. I was up-to-date. I had discussed Lorca’s passion for another man with a Catalonian-British housewife, in a Bourne End kitchen wreathed in the smoke of our Ducados. I was far too grown-up for Maugham. Perhaps Mrs Osborne had brought the wrong book out to the verandah? A widow for only a matter of weeks, she couldn’t be quite as composed as she seemed.

But no, I was the one who was confused. When Mrs Osborne came out with the mango juice, which was thick even in dilution and extremely delicious, she set me straight about that. ‘A famous English writer came here to do research on a guru, a spiritual teacher who might give the hero of his next novel a smattering of an Eastern perspective. Mr Maugham came to do some research. He was neither tourist nor pilgrim, but he found something a little more real than he anticipated. He knew enough to bring a basket of fruit as an offering, but the meeting with Ramana Maharshi did not go as he had planned.