There are numbers of siddhas and sages on Arunachala even now, similarly perambulating in invisibility. It’s correct to walk on the left side of the road so as not to obstruct them, thereby gathering additional blessings.
Pradakshina is beneficial even in the absence of faith. There’s a lovely image used for the process: just as a cow, wandering aimlessly round the post to which it is tethered, finds that the rope inexorably shortens, so by each circuit the sadhaka will be drawn nearer to the Heart-Self centre. The captivated cow is not required to understand the principle of the winch.
In my case, though, it wasn’t easy to disentangle theory and practice. What constituted pradakshina for me? I couldn’t expect to reap the spiritual benefit if someone was pushing me – going barefoot was no hardship when your feet didn’t touch the ground. But if I did it myself, surely the ritual had to be scaled down in some way, and doing it without shoes wasn’t an option. The last time I had done any walking without shoes had been at the bidding of a sadistic physiotherapist. My guru would not make similar demands.
In religion I seemed to be re-experiencing what I had encountered in terms of my education. It stung me with a sense of unfairness. Once again it required special measures for me to participate on equal terms, schoolboy among schoolboys, devotee among devotees. My guru had walking difficulties, as I did, though admittedly his rheumatism required the help of a stick and not a wheelchair. And still I didn’t fit in here. Ramana Maharshi didn’t need to walk round the mountain because, for all practical purposes, he was the mountain. There was no call for him to walk round himself, he would reap no benefit thereby, and pradakshina as a sacred practice had nothing to teach him. If I, on the other hand, couldn’t walk round the mountain, that would knock the stuffing out of my pilgrimage and my vain discipleship. All Air India’s generosity, for which Dad had done such stalwart wheedling, would be a waste of grace.
When I opened my eyes again, Mrs Osborne was sitting there in front of me, with her elbows on the table, resting her austerity of a face in her hands. She looked oddly beautiful, as if her head was a flower resting in a vase designed for the purpose.
‘John,’ she said, ‘when I think of the difficulties your body has put in your path, I think that simply making your way to Tiruvannamalai must count for half a pradakshina.’
This was the kindest thing Mrs Osborne had said to date, even if the sentence began more promisingly than it ended. She seemed to be able to look into my heart more easily when my eyes were closed (and my mouth also). I wondered if I had really been meditating, or only sneaking in all innocence a restorative nap.
‘I have sent Rajah Manikkam to the ashram with a note. If all goes well, a brahmin from the ashram will escort you on pradakshina later in the day. The brahmin will explain the spiritual significance of the mountain’s features as you pass them.’
This was a good start, or so I thought while I waited for the brahmin to arrive from the ashram. In England ashram was a highly unusual word, like ankylosed and epiphysis, needing to be explained and apologised for. Here it was an entirely everyday word and thing, like ‘school’ or ‘library’. I loved that.
The brahmin was a bright-eyed fellow, whose greeting was merely to fold his hands in silence. This should hardly have amounted to a greeting, yet its meaning seemed clear. There was a semaphore twinkle in his eye which transmitted the message ‘I bid you welcome, pilgrim.’ ‘Pilgrim’ was the word I was anxious to supply, since it turned my restlessness into a virtue.
This wordless welcome made a pleasant change from Mrs O’s original ‘Imposhible, imposhible!’ But after that things didn’t quite go according to plan.
It was already late in the day. The evening insects had begun their thrumming song. Before the brahmin had finally turned up I had a conversation with Mrs Osborne about them, asking whether they were actually cicadas or some other variety of insect. She said, ‘Strangely enough, that was a question I once put to Arthur. My husband’s general knowledge was very wide. It was his opinion that they were not “strictly” cicadas, so we always just called them Hoppy Things.’
It had not been explained to me that my first pradakshina was to take place in dying light, in what (given the blink-and-you’ve-missed-it quality of the Indian dusk) was pretty much darkness. When I protested to the brahmin about the timing of so important an event, he simply said that vision was an unimportant factor in the doing of pradakshina. I needn’t worry about being able to see the mountain – the mountain would be able to see me without difficulty.
I felt like one of those people in Greek mythology who are granted their greatest wish, with a hidden flaw that turns it into punishment – becoming immortal, say, without having remembered to ask for eternal youth. Or like a bride on her wedding night, forbidden to set eyes on her beloved. Was it for this that I had travelled so far, a mystery tour in the dark with some parables thrown in at no extra charge? Of course I couldn’t make any real protest – my bluff had been called by the brahmin’s greeting. To hang on to my status as pilgrim I had to go along with the idea that vision was an incidental part of this body’s operation, of no spiritual significance. If I set too much store by actually seeing things I was pretty much begging to be reclassified as a tourist. With any luck at least we wouldn’t be bivouacking on the mountain.
Once we had set off, I had to admit that the brahmin was very sure-footed. He knew exactly what he was doing. It’s extraordinary how hands on the wheelchair can transmit along the handles the competence or ineptness of the pusher. I felt that I was as safe with this man as Hillary was with Sherpa Tensing, on his own rather hum-drum mountain quest. The air was certainly cooler than it would have been by day. Even when my eyes had adapted to the dark, though, I couldn’t make out more than the vaguest shapes.
The voice behind me murmured, in a very educated English, ‘Arunachala is the oldest mountain on earth, older by far than the Himalayas …’ I managed to keep my mouth closed and not to murmur in my turn, ‘Oh I know that,’ in a voice that would have been to all intents and purposes Granny’s. Then I wondered a little uneasily if he had picked up my thoughts about Hillary and Everest, as directly as I had picked up a confidence in his wheelchair-handling. Wheelchair handles can be very good conductors.
‘In spiritual terms Arunachala is the South Pole of India, Mount Kailas being the northern one. There are three main peaks to the mountain,’ he went on. ‘They correspond to Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.’ That was something I didn’t know, so I made attentive-schoolboy clucks. If people can’t read your expression they tend to repeat what they’ve said until they get an acknowledgement. Dealing with the disabled makes people’s IQ fairly plunge. ‘There is another tradition which numbers the peaks as five. Opinions vary. There is much to be said on this issue. There may be three peaks or else five – but not four. Definitely not four.’ Mentally I plumped for five, not wanting to have travelled half-way across the world only to bump into the Trinity in native costume.
At one point I noticed a mysterious shape looming by the road. It looked like a bus shelter – at least that’s what it would have been by a suburban road in England. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘Mantapam,’ said the brahmin, and I didn’t want to advertise my lack of ability to concentrate on the mountain by asking anything else. Similar shapes loomed up at intervals, and I was fairly sure that they were mantapams too, whatever a mantapam was.
Finally there was a light, and also a strange hissing-puffing noise, like something a tiny steam-engine might make. ‘Perhaps you would like a cup of tea?’ asked the brahmin politely. No I would not! I was scandalised that there was a tea-shop brewing up in the middle of the night on the holy mountain. I felt as if I was being nudged if not positively funnelled towards the cathedral gift kiosk, in a way that slighted my piety. Did I want to look at some postcards, perhaps a calendar? Not on your nelly. Full steam ahead, please, brahmin driver. Step on the gas.
The warm glow died away behind me. It was frustrating not to b
e able to see the object of my pilgrimage, when I might actually be passing right beneath the rock where Bhagavan would sit in the morning, cleaning his teeth with a twig from the toothbrush tree, as he did even in bad weather, with an arthritic lady down below drinking up the darshan as it splashed down the slope.
Anecdotes of that sort were rather more real to me than my closeness to the mountain which had inspired them. Perhaps that was the lesson intended behind taking me on pradakshina in the dark, to show me that there was still plenty of baggage to be shed, trunk after trunk of it. The mountain was blazing with realised Selfhood, and my little mind clung to its cone of dark. The dunce’s cap of unenlightenment.
The brahmin told me about Parvati and her penance on Arunachala. I didn’t catch exactly what she was atoning for – if I was truly attuned to sin and atonement I’d have stayed at home. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘when Parvati went on pradakshina, her devotion was so strong that she simply melted into the mountain, but her shape – her bosom, in fact – can still be traced at this very point on the slope.’ Not by me it couldn’t. I hadn’t flown above the clouds with the hiccups to end up playing I Spy with divine body parts and the local rocks.
I might as well not have been on the mountain at all. Our promenade, though sacred and circular, was unleashing no inner change. Even before I finished my first pradakshina I began to pin my hopes for breakthrough on the ashram rather than on the mountain. Despite the antiquity and power of the mountain, after all, it was in the ashram that the transcendent powers of Bhagavan would be at their strongest. In the Old Hall above all, which must have absorbed the purest energy from his presence, darshan in a concentration approaching critical mass, radiant core of spiritual fission-fusion. To that fizzing sherbet fountain of anti-matter I transferred my hopes.
When we returned to Mrs Osborne’s house it was well after midnight and I was exhausted, but she still seemed to have plenty of energy. I didn’t make the mistake of thinking she was waiting up for me, even worrying about me. I was in the hands of the mountain. Sleeping on the bare earth certainly seemed to suit Mrs O. Being so much less firm than her formidable personality, it must have felt actively soft beneath her.
She told me that she had left a book out for my inspection, and that she would bring me out a fruit juice to refresh me. ‘The local juice is good,’ she said, ‘though not of course as refreshing as the sour cherry juice they make in Poland.’
Thick even in dilution
These were significant concessions, the book and the juice both delivered to me on the verandah, and I felt that my sincerity as a pilgrim was really beginning to wear down Mrs Osborne’s resistance. It was with faint dismay that I noted that the book was by Somerset Maugham, in 1970 definitively out of literary fashion. It was The Razor’s Edge. I certainly didn’t expect to have anything to learn from this shallow stylist – this storyteller. I was going up to Cambridge in a few months, after all. I was up-to-date. I had discussed Lorca’s passion for another man with a Catalonian-British housewife, in a Bourne End kitchen wreathed in the smoke of our Ducados. I was far too grown-up for Maugham. Perhaps Mrs Osborne had brought the wrong book out to the verandah? A widow for only a matter of weeks, she couldn’t be quite as composed as she seemed.
But no, I was the one who was confused. When Mrs Osborne came out with the mango juice, which was thick even in dilution and extremely delicious, she set me straight about that. ‘A famous English writer came here to do research on a guru, a spiritual teacher who might give the hero of his next novel a smattering of an Eastern perspective. Mr Maugham came to do some research. He was neither tourist nor pilgrim, but he found something a little more real than he anticipated. He knew enough to bring a basket of fruit as an offering, but the meeting with Ramana Maharshi did not go as he had planned.
‘Mr Somerset Maugham came here expecting to find a charlatan. But he fainted before he even entered the presence of Bhagavan Sri Ramana. Major Chadwick, who was his host, sent for Bhagavan rather than a doctor, and Bhagavan stroked Somerset Maugham’s forehead until he came to himself. Then Bhagavan said, “It is finished. Heart talk is all talk. True talk ends in silence.” Mr Maugham did not say one word, but when he wrote his book he did not describe a charlatan. I have marked the passage for your interest.’
Then Mrs Osborne asked me casually about my tour of the mountain in the dark. ‘Some people find their first pradakshina disappointing. Perhaps this is true of you?’ I could have said that I had received more in the way of enlightenment from the Ghost Train at the funfair, and that was without benefit of riding the damn thing, just from watching people’s faces as the cars clattered out into daylight. I managed to say that I was too humble to expect an instant impact even from a profound experience.
‘That is a healthy state of mind. Pradakshina is not like a lightning-bolt, but like a single mighty turn of the spiritual generator that charges one’s batteries. I trust your companion was informative?’ I made gracious noises. Then she sprang her trap. ‘Ganesh is a fine teacher, if someone is willing to learn.’
‘Ganesh?’ I gurgled. I felt utterly mortified and outmanoeuvred. Bamboozled, even. I had known that at some stage I would be in the same room as Ganesh, since he was a luminary of the ashram, after all. Even before I left Britain I had decided on the attitude I would assume when I met the man who had tried to discourage me from making my visit. I would be friendly but distant. We were united, after all, by more things than divided us. Fellow devotees – that would be my line. I was as much a follower of Ramana Maharshi in my own way as he was in his. But now Ganesh had sneaked in under my radar by presenting himself in the guise of helper, and escorting me on my first pradakshina, as if he was offering a belated blessing on my presence. And all of this insidious conciliation had sneaked up on me without my knowledge.
Mrs O had a certain malicious twinkle in her eyes when she said, ‘Perhaps you were not looking forward to meeting Ganesh, John. It is a mistake to waste time on such feelings. Certainly you should know that the letter Ganesh sent you in England was written in consultation with me. He did not know quite what to do, and we agreed on a course of action. Why not ask him about our discussion tomorrow? He will be coming to take you to the ashram. And now I am tired, and you must be in a similar state – except that you have a bed which tonight, I trust, will meet your exacting standards.’ There were times when it would have been a relief to know, by peeping into her bedroom in a way that I never could, that she was a hypocrite about her austerity and actually rolled herself up for the night in bedding so luxurious it made my Margaret Erskine Dream-Cloud seem like wire wool.
Ganesh turned up again shortly after breakfast the next day, lively and smiling. I had wanted to approach the precincts of the ashram with an attention washed entirely clean of worldly concerns, but that really wasn’t on the cards after what Mrs O had told me the previous night.
This time Rajah Manikkam did the pushing, which made me wonder why he hadn’t been used on the previous occasion. I knew that Westerners were technically unclean to many Hindus, and one of the advantages of the hand-folding namaskaaram gesture is that it offers a polite abstention from touch. Selfishly I approved, since people who are keen to shake my hand are usually in pain socially, and likely to inflict some of their own. Now I wondered if touching the wheelchair wasn’t itself under a taboo for a brahmin like Ganesh, which would mean that on our first pradakshina, when he told me about Parvati’s penance on Arunachala, he had taken on some trifling mortification of his own.
I felt it was up to me to take the initiative, and I started the conversation formally. ‘My name is John Cromer, I am a devotee from England, and you I think are Ganesh, head of the ashram.’ Ideally I would have wanted to have a proper face-to-face confrontation, to thrash things out in bold British style, but that wasn’t possible with him walking alongside me. I would have liked to fix him hypnotically with my gaze, a weapon that can be powerful on occasion but is all too easy to dodge. The ray-gun has rusted o
nto its tripod.
‘Indeed I am Ganesh, but I am by no means “head” of the ashram. What need of a head as long as there are hearts? After Bhagavan’s mahasamadhi his younger brother Chinnaswami was there to oversee the ashram. Then my father T. N. Venkataraman succeeded him. I am editor of The Mountain Path with Mrs Osborne, which is privilege and labour enough.’ Much of the labour, I imagined, had to do with keeping his collaborator sweet. ‘But let there be a new beginning between us. You are here, you are welcome, you are doing pradakshina, perhaps it has started to take effect. You may remember that I wrote you a letter that did not encourage you to continue with your visit, and perhaps you wonder why.’
‘Mrs Osborne said she had something to do with it.’
‘Indeed so. Yours was an unusual case, John Cromer, both in the strength of your devotion and in the obstacles in your path. Obstacles which, as perhaps you remember, were only belatedly revealed to us. I proposed that I remind you of what Bhagavan said about internal and external change: that if you could realise yourself in the jungle, you could do so anywhere. An outward journey was not necessary, and could simply be a distraction. Mrs Osborne is – can we agree? – capable of great determination. She said instead that we should not preach, but simply be as discouraging as possible on the mundane level. Her thinking (and for this also there is much precedent) was that if your visit was meant to happen then no such strictures would have the slightest effect.’
I could hear him smile at this point. A smile is a perfectly audible aspect of conversation. It colours not only speech but silence. ‘It seems that determination is not exclusively Mrs Osborne’s province. I hope you understand our … stratagem, and the fact that we are very happy for its failure.’
‘I promise I will try.’ By this time we had reached the ashram, and Ganesh said, ‘I shall take you to the Old Hall and then perhaps leave you to meditate. If you need me just mention my name to anyone you see. Ganesh, the god after whom I am named, is the god who removes obstacles, and I would be happy to live up to my name, despite your past doubts.’
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