Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Despite the change of scene from Madras, my half-sleep was punctuated with erections, and with burnished images of S. P. Munshi and Kashi Gaitonde flickering behind my eyes. I did nothing about them, hoping that my excitement would subside before anyone could notice. I was determined to beg a sheet for the following night, since desire seemed to be mounting a permanent ambush.

  Being awake so early was also a suitable expression of eagerness for my long-awaited rendezvous with Arunachala. When Mrs Osborne appeared, I could hardly wait to pester her on the subject of the mountain, but first there were formalities to be observed as between host and guest. ‘I hope you were comfortable in the night, John?’

  I felt that lying would be a greater breach of manners than telling the truth. ‘I’m afraid not, Mrs Osborne,’ I said, aiming for chirpiness. ‘Please don’t think I’m spoiled, but I could hardly get a wink. Still, I’m not here for my beauty sleep.’

  Mrs O looked baffled. ‘I myself sleep on the floor and find it very comfortable.’ From her expression you would have thought I was the princess kept awake by a pea through forty mattresses, rather than someone with fixed and swollen joints who had spent the night on a bed of planks for the first time. She hobbled off the verandah as if aggrieved by my ingratitude. The word ‘impossible’ hovered in my mind, given a particular pronunciation. Mrs Osborne was imposhible.

  Her own sound sleep seemed to be a badge of virtue, and my broken night a sort of self-indulgence. It was disheartening to find the same attitude I had found so suffocating in the West repeated here virtually unchanged – that with a little thought, a little consideration even, I could be able-bodied like the majority.

  Of course if the body is no more than an old coat, there’s no point in complaining about the unflattering cut or the rips in the lining. I tried to think of a Bhagavan-esque way of reproving her, although reproval was not really Ramana Maharshi’s style. The way he rebuked his sometimes small-minded followers was by following their rules, showing them to be ridiculous by his very deference to absurdity.

  The only saying that came to my mind was his disclaimer of austerity in his early years. ‘I did not eat, so they said I was fasting.’ Perhaps that could be turned around without impiety. ‘They said I was keeping vigil, but I was just bloody uncomfortable.’ I’ve found it a useful skill to formulate rude remarks in full, savour them on the tongue and then cleanly suppress them. I have more to lose by rudeness than most.

  In earlier life I was less restrained – but then pertness, if well judged, with the right audience, can be a successful way of getting on in institutions like hospitals and schools (I can’t speak for prisons and asylums). Out in the open, where people have no obligation to meet your needs, emollience is what pays off.

  Raghu and Sumati took their leave early, perhaps making a quick getaway before Mrs Osborne changed her mind about the poshibility of the verandah as a place for me to stay.

  My nostrils began registering a delicious aroma, quite unlike anything I had smelled before. I had given no thought to the question of what Indians ate for breakfast, but from the smell it could only be a kind of curry. Then Mrs Osborne came back with a pan containing a marvellous-smelling dish, a poriyal of wild green figs. If she hadn’t told me what it was I would have guessed at fried mushrooms. From the finished dish you’d never guess that the main ingredient was unripe fruit.

  She helped me to sit upright on the bed and then to move the wheelchair, but the effort was almost too much for her and she warned me that I would have to show Kuppu the gardener’s wife how to help me in future. She noticed the bites on my toes and asked about them. She herself, she said, had never been troubled by mosquitoes. Perhaps she had a spell to keep them away.

  I think I could have stuck to my vow of austerity and my fast if I had been offered Western fare, but the novelty of wild fig poriyal sidestepped my willpower. It was delicious. I asked Mrs Osborne who had cooked them. ‘Why, I myself, of course!’ she said. ‘Do you think I have a cook? I have a gardener because I am not so flexible, and he has a wife who would be more use if she wasn’t so nervous. Whenever she sees a stranger she is sure she has had the evil eye put on her. I spend many of my days calming her down.

  ‘The ashram sends food every day in a tiffin carrier. As you may know, Arthur made over all his earnings from books to the ashram, which shows gratitude in this and other ways. But I am not so fond of their food. It is a little flavourless – they try not to alarm the Western palate, while I am now accustomed to spicy food.’

  She mentioned without false pride that an English millionaire had once fallen in love with her poriyal, and wanted to have supplies of wild figs flown over to England.

  ‘Indian puddings I do not care for,’ she added, ‘but I am skilled at the making of rock cakes, which are I think an English favourite.’

  It seemed a good idea, now that the Gaitondes had gone, to ask about things that had puzzled me. When I asked if Sumati’s hanging back rather than greeting a guest was typical, she answered that it was, except in very Westernised households. ‘But don’t be too quick to condemn these old styles of behaviour. In this culture there are four female virtues, to wit shyness, simplicity, timidity and delicacy. In Tamil naanam, madam, assam, payirrpu. However there are spiritual meanings involved. Those are the qualities with which the male devotee also will approach manifestations of the divine. There is something of this in the Bible, of course, when the soul arrays herself to greet Christ the bridegroom.’

  I was almost more interested to ask about the Gaitondes’ family business. Mrs Osborne said, ‘You must try to understand the Indian Mind. Very little is forbidden absolutely – absolutes are instead the West’s idea. In India it’sh a matter of matching the person to the act. It’sh to do with caste.’ I was beginning to think that Mrs Osborne’s peculiarites of diction were to do with imperfect dentures as well as perfect Polishness. ‘For a Brahmin to touch the shkin of a dead animal in the process of tanning would be the greatest impurity, but an untouchable can do so with no loss of status. Obviously. I know that in Calcutta there is a population of Chinamen who, not being Indian or Hindu, can provide the labour for a substantial industry of leather-dressing and tanning.’

  Celebrated prompters of evacuation

  I recoiled from the idea of the Indian Mind, but I had to admit the force of what she was saying, even with my infinitesimal experience of India. When it was a matter of attending to my needs in the bathroom, Raghu had tried to think of the person whose function was to deal with such things – as if there might be a glass case in the hall with a servant inside – before he made the breakthrough of deciding that, as my host, he was in fact the person to deal with me, or at least to deputise.

  My normal time for a tuppenny was before breakfast, but my system was less full than usual thanks to my having skipped food since lunch the day before. Now the time would have been upon me, even without my indulgence in figs, those celebrated prompters of evacuation. Mrs Osborne summoned Kuppu and tactfully withdrew to the house.

  By the time she emerged again, a number of things had happened. I had undertaken my maiden voyage on her late husband’s commode, and Kuppu, who seemed to understand me with the minimum of effort, had not only emptied the pee bottle but had removed the bowl from the commode and cleaned it. Kuppu had learned very quickly to help me up by bending down and putting her arms round me. And now the bowl of the commode was sparkling and fresh, ready for the next use, and I myself had been deftly cleaned up. Kuppu had lost her fear of me, and now her smile seemed as much a part of her as her nose-ring.

  Mrs Osborne was astonished. Her face softened. I exaggerate: it was a face that clung to its hardness, but there were nuances to be read there all the same, granite nuances. ‘Never would I have believed this poshible,’ she said. ‘Truly Arunachala blesses your presence here!’ Which I devoutly hoped was true. I thought of throwing back at her the observation that absolutes are a fad of the West, but decided against it. Kuppu deserved
all possible credit for quietly slipping across the boundaries of caste for my benefit.

  My next question to Mrs Osborne was obvious. ‘When can we go to Arunachala? Can we go soon?’ Her answer was not what I expected. ‘My dear child, you are already there! Did you really not know? We are at the foot of the holy mountain, and the ashram is no more than a few steps from here.’ With ‘ashram’ she had at last found a word to whose esh-sound she could really do justice. ‘It is merely that we are so near that we do not see the profile of Arunachala, just as a fly that has landed on your neck cannot see your eyes.’

  I was already where I wanted to be. This was a great discovery and a great lesson. The mountain had stretched itself towards me the day before, so that I saw it long before Raghu thought such a thing possible, and then it had hidden in plain sight. Arunachala was playing hide and seek with me, showing me how freely He could intersect with time and space. I could even feel that my residence on the verandah was somehow significant, with no walls to block spiritual access, that it pleased Arunachala to have me near and in the open air. Perhaps I could even count him, rather than Mrs Osborne, as my host in Tamil Nadu.

  I was also reminded of something that Ben Nevin, the teacher I hero-worshipped, had said at Vulcan about different religions, and how it was possible that they might all be true. He asked us to imagine a mountain, which many people are climbing. Some of them climb up in a straight line, some of them look for the less forbidding slopes, others take a spiral path. It all depends on their abilities and their maps. I had thought this was a wonderful notion even before the mountain Himself started showing me the truth of it.

  ‘Now,’ said Mrs Osborne, ‘perhaps Arunachala will also smile on the bed problem.’ It turned out that she wasn’t leaving it up to the mountain altogether. She summoned Rajah Manikkam and gave him some instructions. When he came back with some rope I expect my face fell. I had been hoping for something fluffy, cushioned, perhaps even inflatable. But then the two of them got to work. From Mrs Osborne’s disapproval of my soft, bed-loving ways, I had no reason to think that what they were doing was a routine procedure, but they behaved as a team, with a degree of coöperation which seemed downright eerie.

  What they were doing, in broad terms, was wrapping the rope round the bedframe in a diagonal weave. Rajah Manikkam’s job was to pull the rope tight, while Mrs O put knots in it. The knots must have been the cunning sort which tighten when pulled on. Then their working became more ambitious. Rajah Manikkam started to stand on the rope bed and to trample on it in some methodical way while Mrs Osborne refined her knot-tightening. Despite her poor posture, her fingers were deft and strong. The whole process had some mysterious logic. Rajah Manikkam’s trampling started at the loose bit of the rope web and moved up towards the neck of the bed. It’s hard to offer accurate descriptions of actions that you can’t perform yourself – the best I can do is to describe Rajah Manikkam’s actions as a sort of regulated trammelling, a spontaneous blend of weaving and hopscotch. Handiwork of any kind often seems miraculous. I don’t easily distinguish between degrees of accomplishment. All I can say is that it looked pretty clever to me.

  From my vantage point I could see that sometimes the rope passed between Rajah Manikkam’s toes, while Mrs O exerted pressure. I’m no expert on toes, but the friction on those tissues looked alarming. Those tender pegs were surely never meant to do duty as pulleys, as tiny capstans – but when Rajah Manikkam met my eyes he gave a huge grin. Only when their methodical trampling and knotting had produced results did Mrs Osborne allow herself a sharp smile of satisfaction. In the space of a quarter of an hour they had created between them a very serviceable bed, in the form of a cat’s-cradle.

  They had performed the Indian Rope Trick right there on the verandah, for my benefit exclusively, only they had done something much more useful than making a man vanish, by making a bed appear from nothing.

  While the white witch and her gardener had been working away for my benefit, and while I basked in the satisfaction of having opened my bowels without trauma, I had been reviewing my experiences of India so far, cannibal cows and all. The only episode that seemed wholly fantastical in retrospect was Mrs Osborne telling me that she would give me pills to make me grow. It was straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Had I fallen asleep, tired as I was, for a few moments at least, and dreamed this unlikely piece of wish-fulfilment?

  But then Mrs O reappeared with a little container of pills, one of which she insisted on popping directly onto my tongue. As she tipped it from the lid of the container she told me that homœopathic preparations should never be touched. I have to admit that this was something which appealed, the sense of medicines as sacred. I let the tiny pill unleash its sugared potency on my tongue as I was told, without chewing. Perhaps it was Mrs Osborne’s aspect as a homœopathic practitioner which had made Raghu compare her to a witchy ‘handler of nothingness’. Homœopaths in their spells handle somethings that are almost smaller than nothings.

  Change eyes with a basilisk

  Under Mrs Osborne’s direction, Rajah Manikkam practised the drill for getting me on and off the verandah. She was well used to correcting (without expense of tact) the shortcomings of the locals, and her analytical eye had seen that there was no point lifting me anywhere if I didn’t have my shoes on. Without them I could hardly stand at all. She gave him the order to hug me and lift me up or down the three steps, and showed him which uprights were strong enough to let me lean against them while he fetched the wheelchair, and which would let me down.

  Perhaps Rajah Manikkam was nervous about being entrusted with these intricate tasks. The procedure, which had gone smoothly during its first execution, became problematic the moment we started practising it. At the point when his arms were wrapped round me, he would be overwhelmed by a laughing attack. Suddenly it struck him as the funniest thing in the entire world that he should be lifting John up and down the steps to the verandah. His movements became less controlled, the functional hug developed tremors and spasms. He began to sway as if he was drunk, and there was a real possibility of him falling over or else simply dropping me.

  It was in the nature of our position that he should be looking me almost directly in the face, but of course I knew not a single word of Tamil, except possibly the name of a spicy appetiser served in Madras. I never saw him with a beedie in his hand or between his lips, but at this range his was unmistakably a smoker’s breath, nutty and corrupt. All I could do to steady him was to change Eyes with a basilisk (as described in The Duchess of Malfi, which I had read at Burnham), hoping to freeze the laughter at its root. Of course sometimes, although this doesn’t usually happen in The Duchess of Malfi, the change-Eyes-with-a-basilisk routine just makes things even funnier.

  Much of the day was spent in a battle of wills between me and Mrs Osborne about whether I would go to the ashram first or around the mountain. She said that Rajah Manikkam was at my disposal as wheelchair-pusher, whenever I wished to go to the ashram. To which I replied, why not then put him at my disposal to take me round the mountain? Mrs Osborne, though, was not to be got round in that way. ‘He is unsuitable for that purpose, since he is no devotee and can neither identify the mountain’s features nor explain their significance.’ Even if he possessed such knowledge he lacked any English in which it might be embodied. As if it was the dutiful parroting of a guide for which I had travelled, and not direct contact with the mountain, the divine presence expressed in geology.

  To show willing (or to protect my stubbornness from a flanking attack, which is what ‘showing willing’ normally means) I had let Rajah Manikkam give me a test ride for a few yards. Even then I wasn’t convinced that he was up to the job. His technique was very jerky and approximate – gardeners in Tamil Nadu don’t have wheelbarrows to practise on. When we came to rough terrain I would be asking for trouble.

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I will wait for a suitable pushing-person to become available.’

  ‘Such people gather
at the ashram. Lunch is also served. Why not make enquiries there?’

  ‘After that delicious breakfast I am in no hurry to eat again. I will try to match my patience to the mountain, as you advise.’ That was telling her, all right. I closed my eyes.

  Any time I closed my eyes at home, or kept them open but withdrew into the practice of meditation, I would be accused of ‘woolgathering’. It would have been handy to be able to dramatise my need for privacy by locking a door behind me, or hanging up a sign saying, SPIRITUAL EXERCISE IN PROGRESS – KEEP OUT – THIS MEANS YOU, MUM, but that wasn’t a possibility. ‘You were miles away,’ Mum would say when I had picked up the threads of mundane life, as if holding the mind stilled in quest of itself was only a form of absent-mindedness, a failure of concentration, and I would say, ‘More than miles, Mum … light years’.

  The rope inexorably shortens

  Doing pradakshina was of course my ambition. In Rome you are photographed standing next to the Colosseum, in Paris you climb the Eiffel Tower and in Tiruvannamalai you walk clockwise round the mountain. It’s not a sacrament but a ritual stroll. The limbs move but the mind is silenced.