A Meeting by the River

by Christopher Isherwood

  I felt quite proud of this bit of insight and I hoped Olly would be pleased with me for having had it. So, after our visit was over—it ended with some polite small-talk—and we were alone together again, I told him what I thought I’d observed and asked if I was right. He seemed to agree that I was—that’s to say, he nodded and grunted. Our dear Oliver, I must tell you, is a little unwilling to discuss the mysteries of his faith with me, or so it appears. Of course, for all I know, any kind of discussion may be officially frowned on here; perhaps you’re supposed to believe and not talk about it. In any case, please don’t take this as an implied criticism of Olly himself. We must remember that converts are always apt to be more royalist than the King!

  I still see quite a lot of him, though not as much as at the very beginning of my stay. As I mentioned above, he has his duties and I assume that these must include some sort of spiritual preparations—meditation, study and so forth—for the taking of his vows of sannyas. The ceremony is to be at the end of next week. So as not to embarrass him by hanging around and seeming to need to be entertained, I’ve been making excursions into Calcutta. I looked up a man I used to know who’s out here on business, and he has introduced me to a few others.

  One can’t pretend that Calcutta isn’t squalid, though the old English quarter, with the palatial government buildings and the open spaces of park and the monuments, has kept a little of its charm. But even this part of the city looks as if all strong colour had been parched out of it by the sun; it’s faded to a dirty yellow. And the streets are filthy—you have to be careful not to slip on garbage which has been scattered and smeared over the pavement. Even in daytime the atmosphere is full of smoke from the charcoal pots they burn at night. And the crowds! You get the impression that the houses simply will not contain all these people; thousands of them must be living out of doors. Many of the streets are so full that there’s a permanent traffic jam. The traffic ranges from lorries and taxis to bullock carts, rickshaws and funny little closed cabs with louvered shutters. The bullock carts cause most of the obstruction. It’s not just that they are naturally slow, they seem perversely determined to be slower. This morning I noticed one little gnome of a driver seated between the huge wheels of his cart and making absolutely no attempt to prod his bullock into action, despite the frantic honking of horns behind him. He merely pointed his stick at its hindquarters, like a magician, a completely incompetent one, pointing his wand!

  Mother darling, I’m telling you all this because I know you want to hear everything about Oliver’s life and surroundings. If you found out that I’d withheld some detail from you just because it was unpleasant, you’d never trust me again, would you? Everybody who returns from this country is apt to dwell on the horrors of Calcutta, and I’m afraid you may hear descriptions of it which will make you worry about Oliver. What you must realize is that everything is very different out here at the Monastery, where it’s clean and healthy and one has plenty of space and can breathe the fresh river-air.

  I have told Oliver that I’m writing to you and he sends his love. I’m sure his thoughts and prayers are with you constantly. Certainly my prayers are no good to anyone, but my loving thoughts are with you as ever.

  Your devoted son,

  Paddy

  Penelope darling,

  high time for another communiqué!

  I’m afraid you may have found my last letter a trifle hysterical? I admit that it was written in a mood of mild panic, the mood in which you say to yourself, can I possibly stand this? And of course the answer always is, you can if you must. Already I’m in a state of psychological convalescence, sitting up and taking a keen interest in my surroundings. That doesn’t mean that I like them any better!

  I do, however, very much like the monks of this monastery—the few I’ve met, that is. Collectively they are part of the trap into which Olly has fallen, but you can’t blame them for that as individuals, and anyhow they are quite adorable. I suppose I’d expected them to be hypocrites or, at best, mock-humble and mealy-mouthed. But now, having got to know them a little, I’m already prepared to believe that they’re completely on the level—chiefly because they’re so civilized about their beliefs. They seldom refer to them unless you ask a direct question, and there’s never the least hint of their wanting to convert you—hypocrites would be much more aggressive and emphatic! They are soft-voiced and playful and gently teasing, but they’re far from being mealy-mouthed, especially when the conversation gets on to Red China’s ambitions or Pakistan’s claims to Kashmir! They never become mystically grave or tiresomely inscrutable. The plump ones chuckle plumply at my jokes, the skinny ones titter. They all seem to enjoy their food and they belch after it. Now and then, one of them exclaims what at first I thought was ‘Shiver! Shiver!’ but later discovered to be a pious ejaculation, ‘Shiva! Shiva!’ Being with them is delightfully cosy.

  How do they feel about me, I wonder? When I try to put myself in their position, I realize that they must regard Oliver as a tremendous catch. This isn’t something I’m imagining—I’ve seen them looking at him with beaming proprietary pride! And is that so surprising? I don’t, of course, know what kind of followers Olly’s Swami had found for himself in Munich before Olly came along, but they must have been a pretty stodgy lot of middle-aged transcendentalist krauts. No doubt the Swami’s brothers here had already regretfully written off his mission to the barbarians as a flop. And then, at long last, he captures and posthumously presents them with this unique marvellous creature, this his one and only genuine disciple, who has cooked for him, looked after him, abased himself before him in utter devotion, and is an Englishman into the bargain! What a typically Indian victory, a victory without violence! The child of the conquerors is brought, literally and willingly, to his knees! Not only does he embrace the religion of the conquered, he’s ready to accept a position of authority, publicly, as one of its ministers—this must actually be, from their point of view, the greatest triumph of all. (However, what I don’t think the swamis can possibly understand is that Olly would never, under any circumstances, have become a Christian priest or minister. Most of his fellow-workers on these social projects must have been Christians. Where would have been the thrill for him in going over to them? It would have been such a tame sort of conversion. Besides, the Christians believe in action, and that’s what he was evidently yearning to give up!)

  Now, if the people here think Olly’s conversion is such a coup, then they must naturally expect that it’ll be headline news in London, read by the English with dismay. (The cream of the joke is that they might not be absolutely wrong, as far as the headlines are concerned. Today, while I was in Calcutta, I ran into an Irish journalist I know slightly; he has been roaming around eastern Asia looking for suitable stories to peddle to the London press. He had heard some exaggerated rumours about Olly and had the cheek to ask me of all people if I’d help him get an interview with The White Swami, illustrated no doubt with photos of Olly enrobed and perhaps even communing with a cobra! My first impulse was to kick his backside, but prudence intervened and I tried instead to talk him out of the idea by being very blasé and disowning poor Olly as a boring unnewsworthy crank!)

  Anyhow, my point is that the swamis of this Monastery may well have been expecting some sort of counter-attack. I don’t mean by the English nation—would Victoria have sent a battleship to bring Olly back?—but perhaps by his family. And what, in fact, does happen? I appear—your official representative, the Elder Brother, that formidable figure whose authority, according to oriental thinking, is equal to that of the Father himself! Are they really at all worried by my visit? I very much doubt it. But who can tell? I have no way of guessing what they think me capable of doing, or how well they understand Olly. Not very well, I suspect. Still, this is a confrontation of a sort. There is some kind of opposition, deep down, between them and me, even if it’s no more serious than a game of chess. All right—I’m quite willing to play chess with them, and puzzle them a
bit if I can, and see what happens. It should be fun!

  How does Oliver take my being here? That’s a terribly difficult question to answer. I sense a mixture of hostility—yes, there’s that, certainly—and genuine affection. Also I get the impression that he wants desperately to talk to me—I mean, talk really frankly about this whole situation—but that he can’t bring himself to, at least not yet. Also, now and then, I’m aware that he’s avoiding me. He excuses himself, says he has things to do, but it just isn’t convincing. When I ask him about his life here, he takes one of two attitudes—either he’s cagey and changes the subject, or else he answers at considerable length, but in a bored clockwork tone of voice, like a guide showing you round a cathedral.

  A couple of days ago, I met Olly unexpectedly as he was coming out of the Temple after the evening service. He seemed disconcerted and asked me, quite sharply, what I was doing there. I explained meekly that I’d been standing outside listening to the singing—which, incidentally, I find curiously exciting—no doubt it has its own brand of religious sentimentality, but as a foreigner one mercifully isn’t aware of this. While I was speaking, I noticed that Olly was holding something in his hand. He saw I saw it, and made a quick furtive move to slip it into the breast pocket of his shirt. I asked, ‘Is that your rosary?’ I honestly didn’t intend to embarrass him—his nervousness made me nervous too, and I felt I had to say something. He looked surly, and said, ‘Yes it is, actually.’ So then what could I do but ask to see it? He hesitated visibly, for several seconds, before he opened his fist—the rosary was twisted around it. But, as I moved slightly closer to look, he jerked his hand and his whole body backwards, shying away from me, exactly like an animal. I suppose he thought I was going to touch it, which of course I wouldn’t have dreamt of doing. Perhaps if I had touched it with my impure worldly hand he’d have had to throw it away! Anyhow, we were both almost equally startled by his reaction, it was so violent and so instinctive. We stared at each other, unable to speak. Then he mumbled that he had to be off somewhere, and he left me abruptly.

  This incident didn’t discourage me, however, because at least I’d provoked Olly into doing something spontaneous. So I decided to stop being so tactful and prod him a bit harder. (I’m well aware that I’m making myself sound bitchy, not to say malicious, but seriously, Penny, don’t you agree that if Oliver is ever to realize what this mess is that he’s in, he must be made to drag his new beliefs up out of the murky gooey soup of the subconscious and take a long look at them, consciously and objectively? He must hear how they sound when he has to define them to a nonbeliever. Perhaps it simply isn’t possible to induce him to do this, but that’s no reason not to try and go on trying!)

  Yesterday I began cross-examining him about his own Swami and his teachings. Olly obviously didn’t want to discuss this, but he couldn’t very well refuse to, because he’d already told me enough in one of his letters to give me ammunition for my questions. So we went into all this thing about the Red Cross and the Quakers and how the Swami had made him see that the Western concept of social service is fundamentally unsound, because it’s based on judgement by results and a belief that social conditions can be permanently improved—which is idiotic, Olly said. This view I find merely asinine. Of course conditions can be changed permanently, for better or for worse—by blowing up the world, for example! But in all fairness I must admit I realize that that’s not exactly what Olly means, and I do glimpse some sort of truth glimmering behind his deplorably sloppy phraseology. It’s just that this languid supercilious oriental negativism makes me want to puke!

  However, I certainly wasn’t going to get myself involved in an argument about semantics, so I just asked Olly mildly what he thought the proper approach to social service was. At this, he began to mumble and stumble, muttering that it was very difficult to explain. Again to do Olly justice, we both know that he’s no tongue-tied moron, he can be as articulate as the best of us—what he actually meant was that it was difficult, i.e., embarrassing, for him to explain this sort of thing to me. However, he finally managed to come out with the statement that the Hindus believe that all one’s work should be done symbolically, as though it was some kind of a religious ritual which has no practical usefulness, only intrinsic spiritual significance as an offering to the Supreme Being or whatnot—in other words, what’s important is one’s attitude to the performance of the action itself, not to its results—success and failure are regarded as equally irrelevant. (Forgive this clumsy exposition of what’s probably kindergarten stuff to you; I only include it because it’s part of the story.) It was naughty of me, I know, but I couldn’t resist such a beautiful opening. I said, in a dreamy faraway murmur, ‘To work alone thou hast the right, but never to the fruits thereof’—which startled Olly considerably. ‘But that’s from the Gita,’ he exclaimed, quite indignantly. ‘Funny,’ I said, all innocence, ‘it just popped into my head—you know my unfortunate talent for storing up useless information, I must have heard it quoted by someone, Penny probably.’ He didn’t like this, I could tell—I suppose because it seemed like poaching on his preserves. ‘But, frankly Olly,’ I went on, ‘I really couldn’t care less what somebody wrote thousands of years ago, all that interests me is what you think, now.’ I was honestly trying to pacify him, but my tone must have been wrong, because this only displeased him more. ‘You keep saying you’re interested,’ he said, looking at me very hard. ‘I dare say you are, up to a point. You’d better not get too interested, though. It might be risky.’ ‘Risky?’ I said. ‘Why on earth should it be risky?’ ‘If you really cared what I thought,’ he said, ‘you’d be forced to ask yourself, sooner or later, if there wasn’t some truth in it. And suppose you decided there was, then the question would arise, what you were going to do about it. And that might mean altering your attitude to a whole lot of things. Wouldn’t that be a bit inconvenient for you?’ He said this with the most aggressive kind of sarcasm, it quite startled me. I felt the situation was getting altogether too serious and tense and that I’d better stop poking him, for the time being. So I laughed and said, ‘But surely, Olly, you should be the last person to worry about that. I mean, let’s suppose that by some miracle I did change my attitude—whatever you think that is—shouldn’t I be, from your point of view, saved?’

  This made him grin, in spite of himself, and created a noticeable détente, of which I took advantage by asking to see his room. Of course, this was being personal too, in a different way—I’d asked him once before and he’d put me off with some excuse—but now he raised no objection, in fact he seemed positively eager to show it to me. (Looking back on the incident, I suspect he’d decided that the time was ripe to teach me a little lesson. More about that in a moment.)

  So he took me over to a building I’d scarcely noticed before, it’s behind the Monastery kitchen, right at the back of the grounds, a long way from the river. When we got there, he led me up an outside staircase to a doorway at the top. He didn’t invite me to enter, he simply stepped aside to let me look in—and, I must say, I got one of the biggest shocks of my life! (Mother would have rushed straightway to the Mahanta, boiling with indignation, to demand proper accommodation for her boy. She might even have wired our Ambassador in New Delhi! So, in case you talk to her on the phone and she happens to bring this subject up, for Heaven’s sake be discreet! Either say I haven’t mentioned it in my letters, or, if you’re not afraid of having a white lie on your conscience, assure her that Olly has a charming little cell all to himself with a breezy outlook on the river. Which is what I shall have to tell her, anyway, sooner or later.)

  What I did actually see was a very large ill-ventilated room which was as bare and stark as a public urinal—the best you could say for it was that it looked adequately clean. It was empty just then, but the entire floor was covered with sleeping-pads and bundles of clothes, and it was crisscrossed by clotheslines hung with mosquito-nets. I imagined myself waking up there at night and wanting to relieve nature an
d trying desperately to get out of the place in the dark without stepping on someone’s face or catching my neck on one of those lines! I fairly gasped with horror! And that pleased Olly, I could tell—it’s reassuring to know that he hasn’t yet risen above liking to show off a little!

  I was so distressed that I found myself cross-examining him exactly as Mother would have. He told me that he has been living in this dungeon ever since he arrived at the Monastery. Yes, they had offered him a room to himself, but he’d refused to take it—‘For obvious reasons’ was his comment, and I’m afraid I in my wicked way couldn’t help being reminded of Colonel Lawrence’s determination to prove to his Arabs that he was just as tough as they were, and a bit extra! However, Olly did admit that this room was ordinarily less crowded—two weeks ago it was filled up by the arrival of a lot of junior monks from other monasteries of the Order in different parts of India, who have come to take this final vow of sannyas. Olly does have a few more possessions than the others, his European clothes for instance, and these he keeps in a suitcase, somewhere else. But just think of it—no privacy whatever, nowhere to sit down properly in a chair or at a table, nowhere to be even relatively alone except out of doors! (I remembered how I’d once come upon him sitting cross-legged under a tree in the grounds, writing something in a copybook open on his lap—at the time I didn’t realize that he had nowhere else to do it!)

  Of course, Oliver is used to roughing it, and he has always been unnecessarily strict with himself, but he can’t ever have experienced anything as bad as this, before. The way he lived while he was in Africa was luxury by comparison. There were moments in the Army when one felt pretty sorry for oneself, but one always had the consolation of knowing one wasn’t stuck there for ever, and at least one was among one’s own kind. I must admit, liberal and one-worldly as one tries to be, that I absolutely shudder in my deepest bowels at the thought of spending even a single week shut up all alone with these, well, what else can you call them, aliens. No amount of shared belief, religious or otherwise, could make it any better, surely? As a matter of fact, I’m willing to bet that Olly’s brother monks shrink back from him, in their innermost feelings. That’s instinct, and how can you change it?