For me the experience of air travel was one of a marvellous levelling. Up there in the air, as I realised, we’re all the same. The plane is a big box full of people who can do nothing for themselves. It’s not just me. We passengers displayed our caste marks less legibly than usual. If I needed more help than my fellows to go to the toilet, then it wasn’t much. I was calm even when the plane lurched in turbulence and my fellow-travellers murmured anxiously. I was at an advantage. I’d had plenty of practice at sitting still.
The only disadvantage was visual. My eyes work reasonably well, but I’m partially sighted all the same. I’m partially sighted on planes because I don’t have a view even if I have a window seat. At best, with my flexibility at its maximum, I can look out but not down, and down (when you’re many thousands of Maya-feet up in the air) is where the view is.
The food came in small portions at short intervals, which is just what this body likes. Eventually the hiccups stopped and I dozed off. When I woke I was in a panic. I was convinced that the plane had landed at Bombay, and somehow I had slept through the whole thing, so that the plane had taken off again and I was now on my way somewhere else. I called the stewardess for reassurance. She managed the same beautifully measured smile as she had when she had poured my champagne. She told me there were still three hours to go.
What in a semi-conscious state I had interpreted as my missing my stop, as if this was that other exotic mode of travel, a bus, must have been our Boeing 707 landing in Bah. rain, a detail of its itinerary which I had somehow forgotten. I was sorry to have missed the ‘reality’ of Bah. rain since I liked the name so much with its diacritical fleck, the dot under the h like a stowaway clinging to the undercarriage of the word.
Now, suddenly, I found I had run out of patience. Those three hours were harder to live through than the years I had spent in bed forbidden to move. I thought that I would go mad, now that I was definitely moving, and still not getting where I wanted to go. I didn’t enjoy the way my life seemed to offer an endless cumulative proof of Zeno’s paradox, that the arrow will never reach the target, since it must cover half the distance, and then half that, then half that … Patience is only tenderness in its chronological expression. At this point I had no time-tenderness left.
In my mind I tried to knock off the o-apostrophe-s to turn what was blocking my path into a more congenial Zen paradox, the one about the Zen master who always hits the target although (because!) he doesn’t bother to look and is wholly indifferent to the result. Then all I had to do was become indifferent, all of a sudden, to everything I’d struggled for all my life.
I didn’t see my gormandising co-Maharajah again after Beirut. Perhaps that was as far as he was travelling, or perhaps he was sleeping it off. Or else vomiting it out.
Before we landed at Bombay I was told the drill. I should remain in my seat while the other passengers ‘deplaned’. After I had myself deplaned, of course, I would re-emplane for Madras. I was transplaning.
On hand for the deplanement was an attractive young man in white trousers and jacket, an Air India official of some sort who was helpfully holding on to a child whose mother was struggling to organise herself. He offered to take my carrier bag for me when everything was arranged for this little family and he had a hand free.
Dad had warned me to be careful in India, in fact anywhere outside England. In England there were rules, but anywhere else it was mayhem and anarchy. You could trust no one. At Bombay airport, in my first conversation with an unknown Indian, I was unwilling to part with the bag – which was of course open to the world and contained my passport and traveller’s cheques, not to mention my wash bag, flannel and perspex bum-wiper. My doubts must have shown on my face, because the white-clothed official said sweetly that he was only trying to help. That was his job! He wasn’t going to run off with my bag, and he certainly didn’t want to make me uneasy. I should hold on to my bag if that made me happier. But when he was finished with his current task was there something else he could do for me?
Ramana Maharshi compared anxious seekers after self-realisation to people on a train insisting on carrying their luggage. Put everything down! It’s all coming with you! I wasn’t sure that a similar analogy applied to my situation, now that the plane had landed and I needed to take charge of my belongings again.
Meanwhile, what did I want this young man to do? I wanted to go on looking into his eyes, which meant I wanted him to carry me slung in his arms in the appropriate position. Not very practical. I certainly didn’t want him to push me in my wheelchair – that way I wouldn’t be able to see him. It would be better if he pushed someone else in a wheelchair, ahead of me, while someone else (someone less rewarding to look at) was pushing me.
My mouth tasted sour, of old champagne and bad sleep, and I realised it was high time I brushed my teeth. It was thinking about my wash bag, and whether to trust it to a stranger, which reminded me. I decided I should greet the Indian Nation with gleaming teeth and fresh minty breath, and this suddenly became a worry, that I might greet the Nation with an unworthy smile. The beautiful brown man in his white clothing had handed the toddler back to its mother, and was now turning his entire attention to helping me. I told him that I wanted to visit the lavatory and also to brush my teeth. He said ‘That is very fine.’ He pushed me in the wheelchair as far as the Gents, then helped me out of it.
As I went into the lavatory he first held the door for me, and then made to come in himself. This was exactly what I had wanted, but it made me nervous. Politely I tried to close the door on him, but it was necessarily an unequal struggle. He persisted, and so we were both in the cubicle together. I had some slight idea about what this would mean in the West, the taboo charge of lavatory intimacy, but no notion of how it translated here. It felt strange and exciting. I felt a little embarrassment about urinating. With that safely out of the way, I turned to brushing my teeth.
The lavatory smelled foul, but in a pleasingly exotic way. There was unfamiliar spice in the fæcal aroma and I snuffed it up excitedly. Everything was new here, even bad bathroom smells. Of course their source might have been some fresh arrival from Britain overdoing it with the in-flight curry and loosening his bowels the moment he had the chance on terra firma, but that didn’t matter. Travel is all about first impressions – it’s very much Maya’s department.
Love the electromagnetic pulse
I could see the young man’s face in the mirror, which again was what I had wanted, but the effect was not relaxing. I had to notice that he really was staring at me very hard, and I started to get flustered. Then he started to come over to me, before I had even had time to stow away my toothbrush properly. Then he did two overpowering things at once: he turned me towards him and hugged me, and he burst into barely coherent speech. ‘I know why you have come!’ he was crooning. ‘I know the reason!’ The crutch slipped from the edge of the basin, but there was no one to shout ‘The ruddy crutch!’ There was only love in an overwhelming surge, like the electromagnetic pulse that accompanies certain types of explosion.
Looking at me with the greatest intensity, my new friend said, ‘Everything must be open and known. You must not conceal your purpose. You should not hide! Why behave as if this was cause for shame?’ I could hardly breathe, not daring to believe we were thinking the same thing.
Sexual feeling and the spiritual urge, those two ways of losing selfhood, are significantly close to each other, deeply similar, vitally different, like the dispensers on a café table which it doesn’t even occur to you anyone could mix up until the first mouthful proves you’ve sugared your tea with salt.
Now I wanted to be very sure. ‘What is it that must be known and not hidden?’
‘Sir, dear sir! Everyone of the airline knows your story already. You are making this journey through the grace of Sri Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi, and should be proud of your purpose. Because, you see …,’ he added with a bewitching shyness, ‘I also am a devotee.’
At this point h
e burst into tears, squeezed me almost too tightly and began sobbing on my shoulder. Everything exploded in my heart. Part of the detonation was relief that I had been on the right track about this lovely man. That there was nothing carnal in our contact. In India I wanted everything to be pure, and for a long moment I had wondered whether I wasn’t being offered the fulfilment of the dreams I had left behind.
Before leaving Bourne End I had taken a solemn vow of celibacy. In my benighted Western way I thought that celibacy meant abstaining from sexual acts and thoughts. I had a great deal to learn on that subject, as on so many others.
I had read but not taken in what my guru had to say on the subject. I did not eat, so they said I was fasting. I did not speak, and they said I had taken a vow of silence. Perversely I failed to understand, in my deluded hunger for austerity, that suppressing appetites is not the point. By the repression of appetites they are intensified and distorted, when the whole object is to facilitate an evaporation. In the narrowness of my understanding I failed to realise that celibacy is the end point of a whole series of processes and that short cuts are not possible. Willpower not being the weapon, but the target.
I hadn’t yet understood that there was no contradiction between Krishna being decribed as the greatest celibate (the word used is Brahmachari) and his having 15,000 concubines.
Meanwhile I felt a piercing guilt that I had mistrusted this marvellous man, not trusting him with the carrier bag that held my treasures, but that emotion didn’t last. It was replaced by a different feeling. In my field of vision there was only whiteness, white with a periphery of brown, white jacket, white trousers with neatly zipped-up fly now pressed more or less against my chest, and warm brown skin showing where the white ended at his collar and cuffs. He caressed me, and I caressed him back, and then he smiled and with his face still streaked with tears, he held me at a small distance away from himself (as far as the size of the cubicle would allow) and formally wished me joy on my pilgrimage. Despite my vow and my relief I found it hard to disentangle my spiritual feelings from the sensation of touch, and I didn’t ask myself why it seemed so important to try. I just took that for granted and felt awkward that I wasn’t able to match his religious devotion, this tender piety.
Hugs work so well on paper, and in films. People flow together, step into each other’s arms, become one. That’s not my experience. A standard-sized person either picks me up in his arms and embraces me in mid-air, which isn’t as much fun as it sounds, or presses my head and shoulders against his middle, with more or less of the courtesy of a stoop. The other option is to kneel in front of me and start from there, but that’s pretty stilted in its own right, though it gives me the pleasure (usually) of feeling breath on my face. The hoist, the squeeze with semi-stoop, the kneel – none of them quite hits the spot.
Faces and groins never match up at the same time, whichever is the chosen pose, and one or other of them always has its nose put out of joint. It’s never fifty-fifty – and I imagine it was the fifty-fifty idea which made hugging catch on in the first place.
Woeful tears are viscous
The lovely man in Bombay airport explored two methods. An episode of semi-stooping (and the semi-stoop can claim to be the best of a bad bunch), then some intense moments of kneeling before me, not humbly kneeling but proudly kneeling, and shedding the tears of strength.
It was his noble weeping that affected me so profoundly. His cheeks brushed past mine and left traces. The excited particles of those tears passed rapidly into my skin, dancing through the pores. The divine pervasion took only a moment. It stands to reason that happy, holy tears are governed by a different principle and have a greater penetrating power than woeful ones, which as we know are highly viscous. There must be a subtler globulation involved. I experienced those tears passing directly into me, by an osmosis of essence which science has neglected to study.
When he had reinstalled me into the wheelchair and taken me to the check-in for Madras, this angel of the magnificent aura and the percolating tears gave me a white card with his name and rank on it. I have forgotten the rank, but his name is written on my mind in italic caps. S. P. MUNSHI.
In the little whirlwind of sensation and revelation that was my sojourn in Bombay airport shame played a part, but it was only a walk-on. It’s true that I had experienced sexual attraction to S. P. Munshi as well as spiritual common ground. S. P. Munshi vibrated to both frequencies. But if I wasn’t ashamed I was certainly a little embarrassed. Life would certainly be easier if everything kept to its category, without overlap. My murky vow of purity and self-denial (as if the Self could be denied!) had rather been shown up by the brilliant white of S. P. Munshi’s uniform, as echoed by the brilliant white of his business card, still in my possession, tucked reverently into the carrier bag, jostling among the traveller’s cheques and the perspex bum-snorkel.
On the plane to Madras I had much to think about, though I had hardly set foot on Indian soil. I knew that I would be met by someone at Madras Airport – Mrs Osborne had promised me that much – but she hadn’t told me who. In my feebly fantasising mind it was even money whether it would be some swami or some street urchin. Brahmin or pariah.
As we descended towards Madras I could see a certain amount out of the windows of First Class if I worked myself around to face them. Even after my hip operations I don’t have a lot of flexibility in my mid-section – I’d need a spine replacement for that. But I was able to manage a methodical wriggle.
Everything I could see was green. I could see cows. We seemed to be about to land in a field. I couldn’t understand how the cows were going to keep away from the plane, or the plane keep away from the cows, and then the plane banked and the fields disappeared.
In those days, British citizens had no need of a visa to visit India and customs procedures were rudimentary. All that happened was that a rather sweet young customs man approached me and asked if I would please fill in a required form. After a glance at the situation he offered to fill it in for me himself. He was extremely friendly and polite, but the questions just went on and on. Why was I here? Where was I staying? Would I be going anywhere else?
There were very few of these questions to which I could supply a satisfactory answer. The customs man had no objection to writing ‘Not Applicable’ on his forms, in a handwriting that was certainly far superior to my best efforts, but there seemed no end to his forms. Question begat question.
Eventually I groaned and said, ‘Why do there have to be all these questions? All this paperwork?’ The customs man turned and gave me his brightest smile yet, saying, ‘We learnt it all from you, sir!’
It was Mr Raghu Gaitonde who met me after I had cleared customs, neither swami nor urchin but to judge by his dress and demeanour a successful businessman in his forties. While I was summing him up he was doing the same with me. I was pleased with what I saw, pleased and also disappointed, since I had my heart set on the exotic. He was less satisfied with the results of his visual survey. In fact he was fairly evidently reeling. More or less his first words were, ‘Mrs Osborne sent me along with the instructions “Collect him from the airport, and bung him on a bus for Tiruvannamalai.”’ He made a helpless gesture with his hands. ‘I don’t lightly disregard Mrs Osborne’s instructions, but I think in this case the proposed course of action will not do. Bunging of any sort would not be responsible. Buses are not to be thought of. Other modes must be devised. She would undoubtedly scold. I myself live in Madras. You must come to my home and meet my family.’
I felt rather seasick in Raghu’s large old-fashioned car, an Ambassador. Luckily there was an absorbent canvas cover on top of the leather, or else I would have been slithering queasily across the seats. From what I could see he was the most cautious driver in those seething streets. Even so, when we turned corners I felt a little insecure, at the mercy of the superannuated suspension.
I had braced myself for the hubbub of traffic, and had more or less visualised the handcarts and st
reet traders hawking their goods. It had never occurred to me that cows would be wandering along the streets of a major city without visible attendants. Naturally enough they had the right of way – even Michael Aspel, demon driver of Bourne End, taker of mad risks, would have thought twice before locking horns with them.
Chewing the cud of images
Those cows gave me my first indelible (and briefly traumatic) impression of India, an odd sort of spiritual scorching. Whenever we stopped at traffic lights, or were brought to a halt by any other wayward blockage of the traffic flow, I would close my eyes for a few moments, perhaps longer. Once, when I opened them again, I could see a pair of cows leaning against the walls of a building and giving them a good old lick, showing every sign of enjoying themselves. The walls they chose were ones where cinema posters had been stuck, gaudy in their green and orange and red. They must have found that when the posters had aged a bit and started to peel away from the wall, or else were so fresh that they were still wet, they could by dint of extra licking peel a whole strip from the wall with their lips. Hadn’t I given way to the same temptation with the yellow-roses wallpaper of my room in Bathford? It must be a profound animal craving.
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