The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969

by Christopher Isherwood

  December 24. Tried to write to Don today, but could say nothing coherent. I feel dazed with “unreality”—which simply means unrelatedness. They have pulled me up by the roots, flown me all these thousands of miles and dumped me down here. I can’t be transplanted. But I may not die if I’m moved back promptly. Am getting fatter at an alarming rate. There’s nothing to do but eat. Fat, lonely, bored.

  This morning, on the river, two truly huge haystacks on rafts— floating mountains of hay.

  We drove into Calcutta, where I made a reservation for Rome on BOAC for January 7. That seems centuries away. Swami changed back into western clothes for the outing; he looked dapper and ridiculously out of place. What crowds and crowds of people! This is what most of the world is really like—overpopulation, near starvation, utter squalor. Old trucks, bullock carts, rickshaws, little closed cabs such as Ramakrishna used to ride in. Holy men smeared all over with ashes. And the skinny wandering bulls.

  Arup is sick, with the shakes. Nikhilananda has nosebleeds due to his high blood pressure; he has been told to stay in bed for a week. Wish he would!

  Prema told me a strange tale about bands of transvestites who roam around the villages. (Though, as a matter of fact, he first saw them in Benares and took them at first glance for raddled old whores, then realized they were men.) The second time he saw them was at Kamarpukur. They are supposed, according to someone who informed him, to be “neuter.” They have ways of knowing when a woman in the neighborhood is going to have a child, and then they come around and “do something” (unspecified) to the husband. They are terribly malicious. You must never cross them, or they’ll revenge themselves on you. They sing and dance to amuse people.

  Came out of my room around 5 p.m., after finishing (and enjoying) Waugh’s Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. The river and the people in their bright colored clothes were just a river and people and clothes. I might as well have been in any foreign town anywhere. Hard to convey the strangeness of this unstrangeness. Let’s put it that I felt as if I might easily have returned to my room, come out again and found myself, this time, in Cuzco. It would have made that little difference.

  This evening, after arati,566 we had a puja for Jesus. They built up an altar on a side aisle of the temple, with shelves of fruit and cakes, all surrounded by a picture of the Virgin and Child. I had been told to read the birth of Jesus from Luke and the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew. Was much disconcerted because they had given me a Roman Catholic bible, with different words, such as “our supersubstantial bread.” So I had to keep transposing and improvising when I couldn’t remember the King James. Then Prema spoke, in his somewhat now-my-dear-friends American way, but quite well. And then Prabhavananda spoke, on the Lord’s Prayer. All the dark faces of the swamis, listening. I knew exactly how I ought to be feeling, so I didn’t feel anything at all. But the ceremony wasn’t in the least revolting. They sang a couple of songs to “Sri Isa”567 in Bengali, which had the merit of taking Jesus right out of the Episcopalian church and putting him back in the middle of Asia, where he belongs. Krishna recorded it all on his new Jap recorder.

  December 25. How nice to wake here, on my refreshingly hard bed, under the mosquito net! Waking up is helped by the rude crows, and a bird which emits liquid tropical whistles; and the factory sirens, and river-boat hooters and the noise of trains crossing the Vivekananda Bridge; and then finally a great smashing clash of buckets and pans as the help starts to get ready for breakfast, which we eat at 7:30 a.m. There is a rather sanctimonious head servant named John. He has been butler to many grand families and has worked in England, I believe. He is a Catholic and attended midnight mass yesterday.

  Last night, in my dreams, my ordinary life suddenly caught up with me—I was surrounded by my playmates, Jack [Larson] and Jim [Bridges], Bill [Brown] and Paul [Wonner], Gavin, Jim Charlton, [Mark Cooper],568 etc. And Don was there too. And that was so much realler than this oriental backdrop. I felt very happy.

  This morning, at breakfast, Prabhavananda tried one of the swamis’ yellow flapcaps on Krishna. He looked very good in it. Probably he will henceforth wear it always.

  Arup is still shaky. Swami is very concerned because, he says, if you aren’t perfectly well, they won’t give you sannyas. One of the hazards of the ceremony is that you have to bathe in the Ganges, and in the middle of the night, too. Telling me this, Swami drops his voice, as though he were describing some obscene rite of sexual initiation, instead of the most ordinary of holy acts.

  We breakfast Britishly, on porridge, scrambled eggs, marmalade, strong tea and lots and lots of hard toast.

  Nikhilananda is said to be recovering already.

  This morning was astonishingly cold. (It has warmed up now, around noon.) Borrowed a sweater from Arup, rather than one of Prema’s, because I felt this would make him feel a bit more included. Arup is isolated by his illness, which is really nothing but psychosomatic India-horror. Prema has almost forced him into this role by grabbing the role of India-lover. The greatest possible demonstration of India-love is not to get sick here.

  A weirdly skinny oldish man who is a journalist and also connected with the Ramakrishna-Shivananda Ashrama at Baraset came to see me because he has always treasured my remarks about the guru in “What Vedanta Means to Me.” He really did have the clippings with him and I couldn’t help feeling flattered, although he was as embarrassing as hell about it. He brought me a book he has written, called The Patter of Asude, which is described by the blurb as “the funniest book ever.” Also a Christmas cake, very small and heavy and hard. This he wanted me to eat right away. He offered me a rusty knife to cut it with. But Swami prevented this; promising him, however, that we’ll meet again next week when we visit Brahmananda’s birthplace.

  Walked with Prema down by the ghats beyond the Math property. Old tumbledown dark crimson houses, with French statues in their gardens, and broken walls and vines climbing over everything. Pools full of water flowers, open stinking drains, white cows, lanes that wander to a sudden end, choked with rubble and garbage. Down at the ghats, brown-skinned youths scrubbed their faded paper-thin wearing-cloths and changed them without ever exposing their sex. They dunk their heads in the cloudy brown river water, swill it around in their mouths and spit it out. They have good wide shoulders but wretchedly thin legs. Prema says he is never troubled by lust in this country. We talked about the Franklin scandal. Prema believes he was guilty.

  All over the Math grounds, they are putting up pandals, canvas tent halls with a bamboo framework, for speeches and mass meals on the day of the Vivekananda birthday puja, January 6. Also, in the field in front of the guesthouse, they have dug latrines and shit holes.

  This afternoon, Swami, Krishna, Prema and I went to the opening of the Women’s Congress. A stunning bore. All the speeches are in English and most of them you just cannot listen to; the Bengali accent and the droning delivery keep nudging you over to the brink of sleep. Thousands of people. On the platform, the Maharanee of Gwalior, a plump lady in widow’s white.569 They kept saying, “She has come all the way from Gwalior to attend this meeting,” which was hardly tactful towards us world pilgrims. Also a pra[v]rajika,570 with her shaven head looking like a small brown bespectacled nut. Also a lady named Maria Bürgi from Switzerland, wearing an improbable green toque and suffering from acute enthusiasm. And that dreary old ass, Yatiswarananda, as chairman. The only gleam of joy was in the presence of Swami Aranyananda, who is really one of the handsomest boys I have seen in this part of the world. He comes from [. . .] the southern tip of India. His magnificent, nearly black eyes, very dark skin and fierce white teeth. His smile is fierce, tigerish, and challenging; but his eyes regard you with a languishing intimate sweetness. You can imagine him using phrases of classical oriental endearment like “soul of my soul” without the least embarrassment.

  The front of the platform was lined with pots of pointsettias. On the wall back of the stage were three crude paintings, of Vivekananda, Ramakrishna and Sara
da Devi, all of them decor ated with garlands. Of the three, Vivekananda has been notice ably “favored”; his portrait is larger and more boldly executed than the others. On either side of the portraits were huge objects which looked like the fans used to fan some late Roman emperor. Whenever a speaker began to speak, a technician would promptly appear with a screwdriver and adjust the mike to his or her height, getting between speaker and audience and ruining the effect of the opening lines. I got a delegate’s rosette to wear: orange with blue and purple ribbons enclosing a soulful picture of Swamiji inscribed, “Every soul is potentially divine.”

  In the middle of the street, a dead cow, killed by a car. This is said to be most unusual. As we drove home, Prema wanted to buy Life and Time, to divert poor Arup, whose fever is up again. Swami protested, because it meant delay in our getting home to supper. Why, he said, couldn’t Arup show a little renunciation, one week before taking sannyas? But Prema quietly and firmly bought the magazines anyway.

  December 26. This morning had a strange bright unhealthy chill; the sun burned one side of your body while the other shivered as if in a tomb. Arup is dreadfully hungry and worried about his health. He is confined to his room. Prema is primly healthy and pleased with himself.

  Prema has taken hundreds of photographs for the Ramakrishna book. We spent the morning looking through them, sitting in front of the Leggett House on the marble bench by the entrance stairs. The benches are backed by sort of stone bolsters. White stone dust comes off on your pants. The charm of the little garden plot along the river embankment. A fountain full of green scum, supported by three swans below and above by two cupids, one of them headless. The gardeners are working on the chrysanthemums, dahlias and roses. At the foot of the embankment, discarded leaf plates and broken earthenware cups are agitated by the lapping river waves. A young swami who has just taken his bath wrings out his wet gerua cloth and hangs it up to dry in the breeze.

  Prema, with his usual crushing frankness, remarked that he has been reading through the Ramakrishna book and doesn’t think it’s really “great.” I agree with him, of course. But I added that I could probably draw a much better portrait of Ramakrishna to a sympathetic stranger one evening when I had had a few drinks. There is that in me which will never write its best to order. Deep down, something has always been resenting the censorship of the Math and Madhavananda’s comments.

  Meanwhile, thank God for the genius of Willa Cather. I am relishing every single page of The Song of the Lark.

  This afternoon, I wanted to get into the Math grounds before the gates were opened. But I couldn’t climb over the side gate because there were so many people standing there. And the main gate was much worse: a crowd of maybe a hundred, including two cows. So I had to wait my turn. A tiny child begged cross-legged on an outspread mat. An adult beggar exhibited his deformed hand. Merchants squatted behind white cupie-dollish figures of Ramakrishna and framed photos of Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore. Quite well-dressed middle-aged men crouched to piss in the ditch alongside the lane, exposing ugly naked shanks. The dhoti looks so proper from in front; then, from behind, you glimpse the bare legs; and the effect is indecent because it seems unintentional.

  White cranes perch on the backs of the cows, apparently searching them for lice. Anyhow, the cows seem to like it.

  Tension at supper this evening. We asked Mr. Carlson and Al Winslow to get us a birthday cake for Swami. But it was a great mistake, because we embarrassed him in the presence of Nikhilananda, who smiled in a superior manner, to remind us that sannyasins are not supposed to recognize birth and death. Nikhilananda told corny Jew stories. Prabhavananda looked small and sad, at the other end of the table. And the cake was hard as rock.

  December 27. A tedious interview with an ass of a journalist named D.P. Tarafdar, of the Amrita Bazar Patrika. He wrote down everything very slowly in longhand. Then Prema and I dashed into town to pick up some film for taking pictures of the Parliament of Religions delegates. Prema rejoiced that he will soon be retiring from all these concerns into the seclusion of preparation for sannyas. It was hot and loud in Calcutta, with a hint of the weary heat of the coming months and the smell of sewers and septic dust. How easily one can lose one’s vitality here!

  This afternoon, I talked at the Ramakrishna Mission College. They had fixed up the gymnasium for the occasion; the stage was part shrine, part oriental parlor. On the back wall was a thing like a monster valentine, enclosing Vivekananda’s portrait. Below this were a number of basketwork lotuses. Incense was burning before them. Downstage were a draped couch and a draped table, with a stick of incense burning on it, right under the noses of us speakers, as we sat on the couch, garlanded by the students, like gods. (Luckily we were allowed to take the garlands off again; they were terribly hot.)

  I was fairly good, I guess. Not that I said anything much, but it came through without hesitation, and good and loud. Many of the students had their arms round each other as they listened. They were thin, pliant-waisted youths with dark mocking eyes and smiling teeth and, quite often, moustaches. Then Swami was asked to come up on to [the] platform and answer questions. He was all silver and gold—silver hair and gold skin with a silvery light on it, and the blending yellow of his robe—and again his greatness was revealed. He told the boys that their college would be a success only when it produced at least a dozen monks a year. He was adorable—so amused and teasing and yet quite quite serious. By an awful effort of piggy peg-toothed Gokulananda, Nikhilananda was not asked to speak. He sulked a bit about this, but I will admit that he had the grace not to sulk afterwards at supper.

  After Prabhavananda, there was Justice P. B. Mukherjee, who spoke for nearly an hour, flipping through the pages of a manuscript which could probably have lasted [two to three] hours if read in its entirety. When it was over, Swami Gokulananda, without the faintest trace of irony, said, “All’s well that ends well.” We were then served grey sweetened milk tea and oranges and cookies. There were also glasses of water. Swami, who is determined that I shan’t be poisoned on this visit, said quite loudly, “Don’t drink it, Chris.”

  December 28. This morning, the Amrita Bazar Patrika carries a piece on me by Tarafdar without one word in it of what I actually dictated to him. It begins, “Why did distinguished writer Christopher Isherwood become such a strong admirer of Swami Vivekananda (to the extent of banging his fist on the table in raptures, as he did in Calcutta on Friday)?”

  Then Gokulananda arrived, to announce that my talk had not been taped. Could he have a copy of it? Told him with sadistic relish that there was no copy; I never write my speeches. But he then produced a short version of the speech taken down in longhand by one of the students—quite inaccurate, but earning a big B for emotional blackmail. Now I’m obliged to go back to the college and redictate the whole thing to a tape recorder. Fuck them.

  Today, I finished The Song of the Lark. It’s certainly one of her greatest.

  Why do I feel such an intense eagerness to leave this place, and this country? I count the days. It is an experience, being here. I am getting something out of it, I know. And yet I strain like a leashed animal to escape.

  Today, Prema, Swami, Krishna and I ate lunch with the swamis, in the monastery dining room, sitting on the floor. You eat with your right hand; mustn’t use your left. I finally had to sit on mine, because it kept flying up to my mouth to help the other. At intervals, one or other of the swamis would start a chant. Often these chants sound lively and aggressive, like political slogans. I noticed particularly one sturdy old monk, who walks around with a pilgrim’s staff; he chanted with such an air of game toughness and sturdy enthusiasm. You saw him as a young boy and now as an old man. He hadn’t changed. He had taken his vows and he would go through with this thing to the end with unquestioning loyalty and faith. Such a comical old man, his chin nearly meeting his nose. All he has done—all—is to take what Ramakrishna said quite literally; and so has no problems, and no money and no fame, and is maybe a sa
int. One out of dozens.

  But I hate floor eating. It is messy and unsnug. Couldn’t get my plate clean of the dull runny tepid food.

  Along with the interview in the newspaper was a photo Prema just took of me, making me look lean faced, sly and shifty eyed, rather like Oppenheimer.571

  To the college, where I taped my talk—it turned into something entirely different. The students sat around bright eyed, but they didn’t really understand; when it was Swami’s turn they asked him to speak Bengali. Later, Prema gave his lecture on the Vedanta Society of Southern California, illustrated with slides. The slides gave an extraordinarily strong impression of luxury, cleanliness and lack of clutter. In contrast to here, even the freeway looked tidy, and the shrines seemed so sleek with polish and well carpeted, they were like comfortable hotel rooms, and the flowers and trees were so luxuriant. The audience was more or less the same as yesterday’s, except for some small kids who lay bundled up, two to a wrapper, on the floor under the screen. Prema spoke excellently, but they didn’t really understand either him or the pictures. (The scenes from Disneyland might as well have been visions obtained through mescalin.) But then there was a Bengali film showing the procession which inaugurated the Vivekananda celebrations, last winter—an endless straggling confusion of cars, banners, military cadets, cows, musicians, trucks, political speakers—and this they truly understood. It was their Vivekananda—he appeared again and again, as a photograph, as a cardboard cutout, as a plaster statue— imposing his presence through sheer campy absurdity—made into a god in order not to be taken seriously. (How he would have raged against the editors of the Delhi centenary volume; it is a jungle of misprints!572)

  Just before supper, the lights in the guesthouse failed and stayed failed. Bed in the dark.

  December 29. Swami, Krishna and I have just moved into Calcutta. During the Parliament of Religions, we are to stay at the International House of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, because it will be easier for us to get to the meetings. It is very grand and well planned, but the floors are grimy with fallen dirt, as in New York. However, we have air conditioners.