‘That makes sense, whichever way you look at it, doesn’t it, Mum?’ I said. She didn’t quite get the joke at first, so I wrote ‘9/6’ on a piece of paper and then turned it upside down to show her that it still said ‘9/6’. She was impressed and congratulated me on my cleverness. I didn’t have the honesty to confess that the idea wasn’t mine. I’d pinched it from an old advertisement for Castella cigars. I was baffled by the variability of Mum’s intelligence: she could sometimes be very sharp, while other times she was like a sort of super-parrot repeating things she’d read or heard. On my side, though, there was a relentless need to impress her with my brain and the constancy of its whirring. All this knotting-up of family emotion, of dependency and resentment, was something I hoped would simply fall away when I was in India and could look at the world through other eyes, eyes freed of their Bourne End blinkers, able to see beyond the sun.
Mum said if I really wanted to travel light why didn’t I send the Marmite as the company recommended instead of taking it myself? 9/6 wasn’t a great deal of money, and the jar was heavy. I pointed out that I’d already bought the jar, but Mum said she would pay me back and take it off my hands. So huge a quantity of yeast extract would give depth of flavour to her soups and stews for years to come. I held firm, and finally she had to give in.
This was typical of our arbitrary wrangles at that time. If I had learned about the Marmite despatch service before Mum did, I would have been on fire to take advantage of it, while she would have poured all her energy into making the case against. No stick was too small for us to lunge at, determined to get hold of it by the wrong end. These were the sticks of disputation, which have no right end.
It bothers some people that Marmite is saline mulch thrown off in the process of beer-making, defined historically as a waste product until people could be persuaded to buy it. I think that’s typical of Maya’s work, which is really only advertising. I don’t think there’s such a thing as original sin, but I do think there’s such a thing as believing your own publicity.
At this point in the drama of packing the battle of wills shifted ground. The next conflict was over confectionery. Mum had finally been gracious on the Marmite question, but she took a harder line on the issue of Cadbury’s Roses. Suddenly travelling light was less of a priority. She was very insistent that I should take a tin with me to India. In fact she unilaterally packed one in my suitcase, ignoring my protests, saying, ‘You never know when a box of chocolates will come in handy – you know, to say thank you to your hostess. That sort of thing.’
I managed not to point out that I was going on a pilgrimage, not a house party – you don’t struggle half-way across the world hot on the heels of self-realisation only to bleat out, ‘Thank you for having me.’ Still, I couldn’t shut up altogether. The need to have the last word in argument was as strong as ever, and serenity was well beyond the horizon. I said, ‘I’ll be staying at the ashram, or else with a fellow devotee, and the only person I will want to thank will be my guru, whose body died in 1950, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, leaving him impervious to chocolate.’
‘Don’t snap at me, please, John.’ With a sigh she took the offending Cadbury’s Roses out of my little bag. ‘I’m trying to help you as best I can. I just wish I knew where exactly you’ll be staying – will there be running water and proper conveniences at this guest-house?’
‘An ashram is a sort of monastery, not a guest-house.’
‘Well, will they be giving you a proper breakfast? Who will look after you when you get ill – you will get ill, won’t you? It stands to reason. So far from home, eating strange food.’
‘I trust my guru that my pilgrimage is pleasing and is meant to happen. Plumbing and cooking are not interesting subjects to the evolved mind. And it’s meat-eaters such as yourself who get into trouble in foreign parts, not vegeteerians. As you like to call us.’
Onions a great obstacle to deliverance
Ramana Maharshi had also had a sticky relationship with his mother. After she had despaired of persuading him to come home and had moved to Tiruvannamalai herself, she pestered him with her attentions. First she prepared a vegetable dish, than a little soup, and soon she was wandering all over the hill gathering provisions, murmuring, ‘He likes this vegetable, he likes this fruit,’ entirely ignoring his remonstrations. She took silence for assent, and his indifferent eating, absolved of appetite, as Thanks Mum, What Would I Do Without You?
Once he teased her while she was cooking, saying, ‘Beware of those onions, Mother. They are a great obstacle to deliverance!’ Onions in the Hindu classification being tamasic, darkness foods, though not strictly forbidden like other substances in their category (such as meat).
I was lucky that Mum’s phobias would prevent her from following me to the holy mountain under any circumstances. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her sneaking the Cadbury’s Roses back into my case. I made a mental note to ask Peter, when he got home from work, to remove them and hide them somewhere safe. Inside his digestive system if need be.
I was beginning to understand the spiritual value of the family as an institution, which is nil. The family stands for everything that religion (properly understood) opposes – in a word, attachment. Christ showed he grasped this when he rejected his blood family in favour of something more real: ¶Know you not I must be about my father’s business? Slyly he used the rhetoric of family while slipping out of its clutches.
Mum said that worrying over me was turning her hair white. There was no sign of that, but I did try to be sympathetic about her little obsessions. At her urging I even went to see Flanny the GP, complicit in Mum’s sneering at vegeteerians, for something to take with me in case of diarrhœa. Her response was typically forthright, typically unhelpful: ‘Of course you’ll get diarrhœa,’ she said, as if this was the real underlying purpose of the trip. ‘But I’m not allowed to prescribe for things you haven’t got yet.’
I always found Flanny difficult to deal with, which may only mean that she found me difficult. Doctors like to make a difference. They don’t like the patients who keep turning up when there’s nothing wrong with them, and they don’t enjoy the long-term cases whose lives aren’t susceptible to transformation. Hypochondriacs and chronics alike undermine the self-respect of professionals. The fact that I stubbornly turned up from time to time with a new demand must have seemed like malingering of a perverse sort, as if I was playing for sympathy from the far shores of ill health. In fact I don’t want sympathy from a doctor (sympathetic in medicine being strictly a description of one branch of the nervous system). I’d rather have a snappy diagnosis or a script made out with no questions asked.
In the end I had to fork out for some Lomotil on a private prescription, which rather rankled. 10/6 it cost me, making a considerable hole in my budget. You could send a large jar of Marmite anywhere in the world for a sum like that, and still have a shilling left over for emergencies.
Mum refused to look at Tamil Nadu on a map, though Dad took an interest in that aspect of the expedition, and insisted on referring to my whole summer of pilgrimage as ‘John’s trip to Timbuktu’ – despite his having spent some time in those parts himself.
There was very little that reassured Mum about my five weeks of proposed self-discovery, but at least there was the late Arthur Osborne’s social status. He was a graduate of Oxford University, which counted for a lot in her eyes, and he had even written a book, which I had on long loan (thanks to Mrs Pavey’s good offices) from Bourne End Library. Mum would have the book to hang on to while I was away.
She was comforted, too, that I would be cared for by Mrs Osborne. Wives and mothers were the same the world over, weren’t they? ‘Mrs Osborne’ was a name with an uncommonly reassuring cadence, suggesting Queen Victoria (wasn’t Osborne the name of her house on the Isle of Wight?). Nothing would go wrong, surely, while I was in the charge of a Mrs Osborne. I don’t know exactly what Mum’s mental picture of Mrs Osborne amounted to, but in my eyes
Mrs Osborne was a sort of anti-Mum, blonde where she was dark, perhaps a little plump, serene and indulgent, like a Roman goddess of the crops depicted in a sentimental painting – like the lady on the jar of Ovaltine, in fact, clutching to her boozzie a bountiful cereal sheaf which promised restful nourishment. Realising that the late Arthur Osborne had been in his sixties, so that his wife, even if she had been (as I vaguely remembered) a student of his at one stage, couldn’t be so very young, I sowed silver hairs among the imaginary gold, and adorned her face with glasses whose frames curved jauntily up at the sides.
Vomiting serenely in the bushes
In the car Mum was tense, tense even for her. When we were some way from the airport Dad pulled the car over, but it must have been a signal from Mum which made him stop. From my position in the front seat, required by the inflexibility of my legs, I dare say I missed a lot of byplay over the years. Then Mum had another go at asserting herself. When she spoke, she leaned over between the seats so that her rapid breaths sounded in my ear and buffeted against my face. In that posture she wasn’t properly in my line of vision – for a true confrontation she would have had to get out of the car and face me down through the windscreen, but that would hardly fit as the setting for this little tableau, A Mother’s Final Appeal, though it might have fitted with her general sense that the world was bearing down on her.
Mum’s sense of drama was still rudimentary – she didn’t yet feel entitled to make any sort of scene. Granny had drummed into her the idea that anyone who raised his or her voice in an argument was wrong by definition. If ever Granny broke that rule and raised her voice herself, without stopping being right, other people were normally too alarmed to find the inconsistency.
From her position in the back seat, head thrust forward and turned round, she may even have felt that I was being stubborn in not meeting her gaze – being stiff-necked, as people say. She said, ‘Listen, JJ. It’s not too late to call this whole trip off. There’s no shame in admitting you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. We can just turn round and go home. No one will think the less of you. Your father and I will never mention it again. Dad can get you a ticket for somewhere nearer and just as nice.’
‘It’s not a trip, it’s a pilgrimage. I’m not going there because it’s nice!’ Perhaps this wasn’t the most tactful line to take, but I was beginning to feel genuinely claustrophobic about Mum’s need to control me. How threatened she was by hints of independence on my part! And I suppose, seeing it from her point of view, she had her reasons: what was the meaning of her life, unless it was to make mine possible? She had forged an identity for herself by chaining us together.
I wonder what would have happened if I had given in to the pressure, the parental front united for once. I can imagine Mum breaking out the tin of Roses from my case right away (I’d forgotten to charge Peter with their removal), passing them round in hysterical relief and stuffing her own cheeks with sweets, tears running down her face in her gratitude for the reprieve she’d won herself, by staving off my maturity. After that, she might have signalled Dad to pull over again, and vomited serenely in the bushes. Beyond that, I can’t guess. I wonder if I would even have taken up my place at Cambridge, if I’d lost the battle for India.
Before I said yes to their offer of a lift, I had made Mum and Dad promise they wouldn’t wait until my plane took off. Otherwise, I told them, I would take the Mini and let it take its chances for five weeks in the car park. They hung around rather helplessly after they’d helped me check my case in until I reminded Dad of his promise, and of how much he hated goodbyes and all that emotional claptrap. After that he led Mum away, though he did explore the furthest tender reaches of his vocabulary by calling me ‘Chicken’ when he patted me goodbye.
In 1970 Air India advertised itself as The Airline that Treats You Like a Maharajah, and I can’t argue with that on the basis of its performance that year. Of course I can’t vouch for anything but First Class. Ladies in saris started serving me dainties almost immediately. Caviar, smoked salmon, pâté de foie gras, all these got the thumbs-down from me, but they did a nice line in spicy nuts, and there was pink champagne, served in proper fluty glasses, which suit my hands better than any other shape.
Pinkness was a definite theme, so that the first-class cabin had almost the feel of a boudoir. There were pretty pink tablecloths and proper napkins. Luxury seemed to be a female preoccupation, though in all those hours I only glimpsed one or two Maharanis in First Class.
Cold international air strips scruples away
The ladies in saris seemed a little disappointed that I wasn’t going to order a nice juicy steak, which was what Maharajas with my skin tone normally plumped for. That must have been a major part of their training, to offer taboo fare without showing disgust, up above the clouds where the cold international air strips scruples away.
My nearest Maharajah (as pale-complected as me) was a little distance away, thanks to the luxurious width of the seats, but I could see that he was making more work for the staff than I was. They couldn’t do enough for him. He had loosened his tie, a procedure I’ve never managed to understand. Obviously I’m not the person to ask about the finer points of formal dressing, but doesn’t that produce the worst of both worlds, encumbrance without the faintest possibility of elegance?
The ladies in saris kept popping juicy things into the beak of this burly cuckoo. I suppose pâté de foie gras is juicy – I have no plans to find out. His fantasy of luxury was clear, that he should be catered to as intensively as possible, to get the maximum value out of every costly minute (costly to his employers, I imagined, rather than to him personally), even if the unnaturally accelerated intake of food and drink made him go very red and sweaty in the face.
My notion of luxury was very different, and I was living it out very fully. Mostly I waved the attentions of the ladies in saris away, I gave little shakes of the head. I would graciously accept snacks from time to time, perhaps a small bowl of pilaff, and a little light topping-up of my elegant glass, but I declined the immoderacy of a full meal.
The theatrical show the cabin staff put on for my neighbour began to seem actively oppressive to me. I had seen similar rituals performed at the Compleat Angler, but everything looked very different at twenty-five thousand feet and six hundred miles an hour. A steward in a tunic came pushing a trolley before him, then reverently removed its polished metal cover to reveal a slab of roasted flesh, which he then carved with the gravest ceremony on to my neighbour’s plate. He made great play of tossing salad high in the air, virtually juggling it with adroit tongs, so that the dressed leaves in their tumbling came within inches of colliding with the ceiling panels (necessarily low), where they would have left faint imprints flavoured with garlic and mustard.
This should have seemed merely droll, but for me it had a nightmarish aspect. The flushed businessman being fed so relentlessly seemed to be on the receiving end of a torture rather than a treat. It was as if I was being given a vision of his karma, a terrible locked pattern like a recurring equation, in which he was alternately a goose being force-fed grain until its liver slowly exploded inside it, and a man being force-fed that liver.
My own experience of force-feeding was modest, extending only to the time at Vulcan when the demonic matron Judy Brisby had stuffed congealing pilchards into my mouth and held my nose, but it had left its mark. I felt the sort of shiver which Mum always interpreted as a goose walking over her grave – in this case a goose that wanted the return of its liver, rudely confiscated, pressed in jelly, and sold on.
All this restaurant pantomime was no more than a game of status, disconnected from any matter of appetite. The stewards might just as well have spared my neighbour the labour of greed by placing in front of him a gorgeously illuminated calligraphic parchment reading: Mere feet behind you, screened by curtains and the impalpable screens of caste, tourists, families and lesser businessmen are wrestling with sachets of salad cream and trying to unpeel slimy layers
of cold meat from the bottom of a plastic tray, or else peering with distaste at bowls of sloppy curry … and you, perhaps, honoured sir, would care for a cheese and pickle sandwich (freshly made of course)? We have tomatoes!
As it was, the staff were presumably struggling in a tiny galley just out of sight, trying not to bump into each other, the steward plying a blow-torch to give the surface of the roast the appropriate savoury blisters, one of the ladies in saris pulling the leaves off a dishevelled lettuce, rinsing them over a miniature sink with water poured carefully from a bottle.
Lively molecular traffic
My fantasy, of course, was that in the middle of all this finicky drudgery one attendant would say to the other, ‘If only they were all like the little chap! He’s no trouble at all …’ Only in these supremely artificial circumstances could I bask in the luxury of being ‘no trouble’. Normally it isn’t an option for me to be no trouble. I can only hope to be worth the trouble I cause.
I resolved to remember the name of the champagne, so that I could ask Granny if it was a good make. Moët et Chandon. It seemed nice. I’d have to ask her without any men around, otherwise she would defer to their judgement, pretend not to know the names of brands, and refer to the drink itself, so lively in its molecular traffic, simply as ‘fizz’. Somebody behind me, another lucky soul reincarnated for a few hours as a Maharajah, got the hiccups. Shortly afterwards so did I, whether because of champagne, altitude, suggestibility or some combination of the three. It struck me that since the state airline was part of the government of India, the country itself had paid my travelling expenses. Not only that, India had given me the First Class treatment. I was much more than a tourist, and in a special category even as a pilgrim. I was a national guest, as I lolled above the clouds in a cloud of hiccups, nicely flustered by fizz.
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