Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I had been determined to memorise my first impressions of the ashram, but alas while Ganesh was offering ambiguous compliments on my mental powers my attention was divided, and those first impressions became lost. There’s a mystical idea that everything that ever happened (and will happen) is stored in a sort of metaphysical store room called the Akasic Records, the astral equivalent of that Harrods Depository where Granny kept ‘nice’ (or even ‘good’) furniture for which she didn’t have space. I suppose my lost impressions must be there, properly docketed, but they slipped away from me immediately.

  It was only in the Old Hall that I began to take in my surroundings. I had approached the holy of holies without the proper preparation. I found myself about six feet from the couch on which Ramana Maharshi had spent so much of his time in the body. Ganesh had delivered me into the heart of a spiritual furnace, where everything can be consumed before the devotee hears so much as a crackle.

  Snide thoughts about upholstery

  A photograph of Ramana Maharshi, half life-size, was reverently propped up on the couch. My view was clear, except for a middle-aged man at the very edge of my vision. He was performing a strange sequence of actions. He would sink to his knees and then struggle upright, only to be brought to his knees again. His face was washed with ecstatic tears. It was as if he was being swept over and buoyed up, continuously, by jostling waves of devotion. Eventually he subsided into a prostrate position, with his arms outstretched and clasped in front of him. It was as if he had been swept off his feet at last by a seventh wave of self-realisation, bigger than the rest. The closeness of those holy tears vividly brought back the weeping of S. P. Munshi at Bombay airport, and the way that its electrolytic dew had seemed to percolate directly into my skin.

  At this point, though, it was hard to say if the osmotic transfusion of spiritual energy from that generous liquor had made any difference. My view of the couch was clear, and yet the couch itself was an obstacle. It was undeniably gaudy, covered as it was with red brocade.

  An outsider could easily think that this was a religion based on the couch – a furniture cult. Couches outnumbered gurus in the Old Hall, after all, two to one. Here was the couch itself, with a photograph of the couch displayed on it. Yes, it had Ramana Maharshi sitting on the couch in the picture, but that might just be some sort of testimonial to the excellence of the springing, as attested on a historical occasion. The guru seemed to make no attempt to match the couch. He was as plain as the furniture was fancy.

  From the corded look of his neck this must be a picture from late life. His facial hair and the stubble on his head are white, but his unpresumptuous smile is ageless and the expression in the eyes quietly expectant. He is leaning against a low wall of white cushions. His right hand rests lightly on his knee, while the arm is placed a little higher up the leg. His legs are crossed, so that the sole of his right foot is presented to the camera.

  The couch has no significance at all. Bhagavan’s choice was to sit on the floor, until he was persuaded that he would make it easier for devotees if he adopted the traditional pose. He was indifferent to such choices on the part of his followers, and the couch was the merest prop.

  Another traditional pose for the guru is sitting on a tiger skin. I had seen photographs of Bhagavan doing just that and found them very jarring. I felt queasy, not liking to be reminded that there was an overlap between spiritual leaders (or their advisers) and big-game hunters. I prefer the symbolic power of the big cats, their aura, to be kept separate from their skin, sliced from the owner – the owner-occupier – at huge karmic cost.

  I did know something of the history of that particular skin, though, the one in the photographs, and how little importance it had for Ramana Maharshi himself.

  One day a devotee appeared to pay his respects to the guru and left with the tiger skin rolled up under his arm. The worthies of the ashram nabbed him and asked him what he thought he was doing. He simply said, ‘Swami gave it to me.’ Obvious nonsense, but for form’s sake they had to check with Bhagavan before turning him over to the worldly authorities. ‘Yes, that’s true,’ he said.

  But why? His answer was classic Maharshi in the gentle chiding it delivered to his followers (not that they noticed, I dare say): ‘Somebody comes in and says sit on the tiger skin. I do so. Somebody else comes in and asks to keep it. I say yes.’

  Later in his life Bhagavan sat in the New Hall instead. When he was sick, and Mrs Osborne and others were treating him, a sign went up: no one to enter between twelve o’clock and two. The usual well-meaning acolyte meddling. The idea was to give Bhagavan time to recover. He himself voiced no objection to the rule. In fact he took it so much to heart that he vacated the premises between those hours, so as to be freely available outside.

  The couch in front of me was something that someone’s tasteless auntie would sit on, something that might turn up at a flea market. I had travelled here to find out who I really was, not to think snide thoughts about upholstery, but it wasn’t easy. Even at these high spiritual temperatures the asbestos of habit fought against combustion. My reflex of triviality was a stubborn vasana, a deep rut from a previous life needing to be raked smoothly over in the sand of the new one.

  I sat in the wheelchair looking at the two couches and the single guru, but my mind was straying to other rooms, other images and times. It was almost worse to be sitting in the Old Hall thinking of the New Hall than it would have been to be thinking of Bourne End. I seemed to be more attuned to anecdotes and the past than to the numinous room in the present. My attention wandered, and my reverence had no focal depth.

  If anything preöccupied me, it was some of the words Ganesh had used while we were approaching the ashram. Strength of devotion. Determination. My determination was really only passive resistance, though some people (such as Dawn Drummond) had run a finger along its militant edge and left a little trace of blood there.

  Those qualities had brought me to this place, but now they were blocking my path. Passive resistance was the parachute which had allowed me to descend safely into these new surroundings, but now it was entangled in a tree and had become a threat. I must free myself. If only there was a quick-release mechanism on the harness of the ego, one which would let me drop into freedom with a single decisive click! I had the sense that I would be dangling there for some time in the breeze, while the leaves yellowed, fell and renewed themselves, without their meaning any reproach by it.

  Executive moonlight

  Of course Ganesh had referred to Mrs Osborne’s determination as well as my own. She was calm as well as determined, certainly calm rather than frantic, but it was a sort of steel calm, lacking flexibility. I couldn’t honestly say that I thought her ego functioned as it does (by all accounts) in a realised person, persisting merely as the moon does in the daytime – the ego emeritus, performing little administrative tasks, pottering in its contented retirement.

  Far from it. Her ego seemed robust, even fierce. Sometimes it positively spoiled for a fight. It was strategic even in its retreats, as when Mrs O had given way on the pradakshina question so as to get her own way about my meeting Ganesh. If Mrs O’s ego was mere executive moonlight, then why was it so hard to look at directly? Still, the state of her ego was really none of my business. I must mind my own.

  When Ganesh came back to find me, it was actually a relief to be interrupted. He had left me alone for a good stretch of time. I wasn’t getting anywhere with meditation, with stilling my thoughts and holding my mind alert in quest of itself. Altogether self-enquiry seemed to have reached a dead end. The whole idea seemed impossible, like using the light of a candle to make out the silversmith’s mark on the base of the candlestick. Meditation solves the problem by detaching the flame from the wick, letting its light float free, but currently I seemed to have lost that knack.

  Ganesh was too tactful to ask if I had profited from my first encounter with the ashram, but I said something about finding the presence of other devotees distrac
ting. Instead of pointing out that I was a hopeless case if I couldn’t ignore such irrelevancies he offered to have me brought back at a time of day when it would be quieter.

  I began to feel a little flattered qualm about Ganesh’s obligingness and approachability. He was making time for me in a way which could hardly be standard practice. He was certainly easier company than Mrs Osborne, though of course we only really discussed one subject, and that subject was the reason for my being in India in the first place.

  His face too held a fascination, being full of light and kindness. It gave the effect of constant smiling, and yet it was hard to be sure there was a smile there at all. If it was a smile, it was as different from Western smiles as a pearl lightbulb is different from a clear one. It was all glow and no dazzle. Perhaps it was as close as I would get in mere life to Bhagavan’s radiant gaze and piquant serenity, his personality the embodiment of acceptance but also an agent of change.

  Then Ganesh quoted a saying of Bhagavan’s to me, which was not only stirring in itself but had some sort of eerily glancing connection with my disordered thought-stream in the Old Hall: ‘He who is in the jaws of the tiger cannot be rescued; so also a person who has fallen into the grace of a guru cannot escape from it …’

  Mrs Osborne too had powerful jaws, though I suppose she was more terrier than tiger. Soon she organised a schedule for me, saying, ‘I thought you might like to go to the Old Hall to meditate for an hour from nine o’clock every morning, and from five in the evening.’ If Mrs Osborne thought you might like something, it was best to start liking it right away.

  My second visit to the Old Hall was no more rewarding spiritually than the first. There where I had counted on coming into blossom I experienced a withering. I was forced to face the fact that my pilgrimage was deviating from its planned form. Of course if you issue enlightenment with a timetable you are asking for trouble.

  As it turned out, I wasn’t going to leap into self-realisation the first time I entered the sacred spaces associated with my guru. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life there, teaching people how to meditate and realise themselves. That had been my underlying hope, that I wouldn’t have to return to the West at all, to the ordeals of my independence, but could simply be absorbed into the fabric of a less material society. When I had said goodbye to Mum and Dad at the airport, it was with the feeling that I might not see them again. I was conscious during the leave-taking of a finality that I welcomed with at least half my heart. But now it was becoming clear that I would be going back to them. The spiritual pull of Arunachala was still there, it never stopped even when I was at my most frustrated, but somehow the flow was blocked. It refused me, which must mean, mustn’t it, that I refused it without knowing what I was doing.

  I was pushed over to the Old Hall to meditate on most days. I almost began to dread those visits, not because there was anything unpleasant about them, but because they reminded me of my failure to make progress. After the initial rush of mystic bliss, meditation had become homework. While everything else in India seemed colourful and immensely interesting, sitting in the Old Hall trying to get some self-enquiry started was distinctly depressing. My mind seemed jumpier than ever, which wasn’t at all the plan.

  Of course self-enquiry is a drastic exercise. To make a change in your behaviour is like grafting new fruits and flowers onto a tree, to understand why you have particular desires is to lop off a few branches, but full understanding recognises that the I-tree, stubborn bole, must be pulled up by its root. The ego is a decorative feature that passes itself off as structural. It’s a pillar suspended from the roof it claims to hold up.

  It was strange how much at home I came to feel on Mrs Osborne’s verandah. An environment which was announced as fatally hostile turned out to be highly congenial, almost tailor-made. The smell of green breakfast figs cooking, the call of the commode, the lustre of Kuppu’s smile, the tiny mystical pill dissolving on my tongue, all this made up a routine rather sweeter than any I had experienced before.

  Every few days Mrs Osborne would have Rajah Manikkam carry out a wind-up gramophone to the verandah. It was like a flashback to CRX, only without the operatic arias, surplus to requirements, so kindly passed on to sick children by the Decca company. Mrs O’s taste was for Bach, which she explained was the Western music which Indians liked best, especially Bach in one of his twiddly moods, where ornamentation seems to stand proud of any melody. I can’t say that the expressions on the faces of Rajah Manikkam and Kuppu backed her up in any definitive way.

  To follow the thread of fear

  Sometimes Mrs Osborne asked me about my dreams, which I wasn’t in the habit of remembering unless they forced themselves on me. ‘One of Arthur’s first discoveries,’ she said, ‘after he embarked on his Quest was to do with dreams.’ It gave me an English qualm and a Hindu thrill to hear her use the word quest, with its unmistakable capital. Since she had ended up living on a holy mountain whose antiquity made the Himalayas seem like teenagers, I felt she had earned the right to the holiness of the upper case. ‘He realised that whenever he had experienced fear in a dream, his instinct was to make himself wake up. As an adult he decided to override the impulse to escape which had ruled his night thoughts since he was a child. Instead of waking he decided to follow the thread of fear to its end within the dream. Invariably the source of fear when revealed lost its power over him. It was frightening only so long as it was viewed as something to run from. This was an important clue on his Path.’ I wondered if I myself would ever be confident enough to capitalise ‘path’ in conversation.

  Mrs Osborne kept a cow in the garden, and that was the milk we would drink, unboiled and unpasteurised, merely chilled in her little fridge. It makes me shiver to think about that now, the blitheness with which we drank untreated milk. One day I was about to pour some over my puffed rice, and decided to taste a bit first. Not nice. It had started to turn and I told her so.

  ‘Absholute Nonshense!’ she shrilled. ‘There is nothing wrong with my milk. Nothing whatshoever!’ And she looked at me so fiercely that I poured the rest of it onto my cereal and swallowed it down under her unrelenting gaze. Every taste bud in my mouth protested against her doctrinaire clean bill of health. Even so, contradicting Mrs Osborne on any sustained basis was something that called for major resources of willpower. It was necessary to throw all your resources behind your audacious tongue or be annihilated, and at that stage I didn’t feel strong enough.

  In the mornings fruit sellers would do the rounds selling their produce – ladies who carried it on their heads in baskets. Guavas, grapes, apples. They came to me on the verandah. At first I was alarmed by this tide of small businesses sweeping across the verandah in their bird-of-paradise colours, smiling and chattering softly to each other, but it wasn’t long before I was looking forward to it. I struggled to master the currency, remembering what Raghu had said about its recent decimalisation. Of course I didn’t have a word of the necessary Tamil, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t haggle. It’s amazing how much economic leverage you can pack into a doubtful frown. I wasn’t in a hurry, and I enjoyed bringing to the transaction some of the grave tempo of chess. One particular woman would call my bluff, shout scornfully, pack up her wares again and walk off across the verandah – and then slow down, shrug and return to the struggle, settling very happily for a sum that differed by a single tiny coin from the amount that she had found so insulting.

  One day I heard this fruit seller talking to Mrs O. Afterwards she said that the conversation had been about me. All the time I was in India, I’m ashamed to say, I had at the back of my mind the thought that someone was bound to ask what I had done (in a previous life) to earn the body I was in. But this discussion was all compliments. ‘She loves dealing with you,’ Mrs O was saying, ‘because you always haggle, and you know how it’s done.’ In other words she preferred to spend more time than she might, and to receive less money than she might, just for the tiny drama of the bargain, the human
contest finally resolved in smiles.

  Later in the morning Mrs Osborne might come out onto the verandah with some sweet-lime juice. She always gave the impression of being very busy – she could only spare me a moment. It’s true that she had taken on co-editorship of the ashram publication The Mountain Path from Arthur after his death, and there were editorial duties to be performed. I remember her opening a letter and saying, ‘I detesht Wei Wu Wei’ – Wei Wu Wei being a contributor to The Mountain Path – ‘I have to rewrite every shingle shentensh.’ I had begun to think that Lucia Osborne enjoyed choosing words with a strong sibilant element – otherwise why not say she hated or loathed this strange being? ‘Wei Wu Wei’ is actually a phrase meaning ‘action without action’, all very Zen. She told me Wei Wu Wei was an Irish aristocrat, born Terence Gray, whose passion was the theatre until he became an eccentric sort of Buddhist. His favourite saying was that ‘everything is a case of mistaken identity’, but Mrs O seemed to have got his number.

  Arthur Osborne had left ten editorials prepared, but Lucia was working on one of her own, about Arthur and his shedding of the old coat. She read parts of it to me as she composed them. She called it ‘What is Death if Scrutinised?’ I was moved by it.

  Sometimes we talked about spiritual experience. Mrs Osborne told me, as if apropos of nothing, that it was very common for devotees planning to come to Arunachala to have obstacles placed in their way. Sometimes the seeker would find another person actively attempting to prevent the pilgrim from making his journey. At this point I indicated that this was true in my case. I decided to leave it at that, though, and not to go into detail.