Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Mrs O asked me, ‘Was that person called Mouni Sadhu, by any chance?’, so I saw no point in denying it. I’m sure I got Mouni Sadhu into a lot of hot water spiritually, with Mrs Osborne stoking the fire beneath the cauldron, and I can’t really say I’m sorry. Was I ‘telling tales’, the great crime of my early schooldays? Hardly. I was only answering a question.

  When Mrs Osborne sat down and kept me company, she would always let me understand that there were plenty of other things she needed to do. I was slow to detect the element of pathos behind this, that despite her daily dynamism she was a widow struggling to cope. If I was lucky that Arunachala had sent me to her, perhaps there were some fringe benefits for her. She had someone new to cater for and talk to, and isn’t distraction the core of consolation? I provided my fair share of that.

  More than once she promised to make me rock cakes, which seemed a baffling ambition. If I was homesick for anything it wasn’t rock cakes. But then it turned out that she wanted to make them for the same reason that riders who have been thrown want to get back on the horse, as a way of defying fate. She told me she was sorry to be weak, but she didn’t feel up to making them just yet. ‘Arthur was so fond of them,’ she said, and her voice shook while a little tear came from her eye. Although I was sorry to see her distress, I was also relieved because it was proof that she wasn’t a real witch. Witches can’t cry – the literature is definite about that. As a child I had loved the witches in stories and had always wanted to meet one, but now I wasn’t sure I wanted to take that last step.

  Gross body, causal body, subtle body

  One day the weather turned so cool it felt almost English. For once there was no sign of the sun. Rajah Manikkam put a shirt on and Mrs O even wore a jersey. Over breakfast she announced that someone had died – did I want to go to the funeral? I might find it instructive. Rajah Manikkam had got used to pushing the wheelchair, though I hadn’t yet got used to his style of propelling it. He would bump up and down changes of level without slowing down, having no regard for the occupant of the wheelchair, someone who might have received enough jolts in his life already. If he had been employed to push round trolleys of ripe fruit instead, his employers would have insisted on more considerate driving, or the loss of revenue would have been alarming.

  Rajah’s pushing became more and more tentative, and he stopped some way short. To my surprise, Ganesh came to meet me and took over. He said I must forgive the superstitiousness of the locals. Rajah’s caste buried their dead, although he and his wife were terrified of corpses, ghosts and spirits, while this was a Brahmin funeral.

  When we arrived, the corpse was being put on the pyre. It was all a little undignified, and not just because I could see its shrunken willy. Dried cow-pats were placed over it and then they poured on some kerosene. I say ‘poured’ but that sounds too reverent. Kerosene was simply sloshed over the pyre and the body. The procedure was more than undignified, it was downright unfeeling, but then people are so solemn at Western funerals because nobody actually believes in the effectiveness of the ceremony. It was because the ceremony was trusted, here, that I got the impression of unceremoniousness. There was no emotion surplus to the event. The action was adequate to what it marked.

  Ganesh gave me a lesson in last things. While the fire took hold, he explained the different colours of flame which issued from the body as it burned, and what they represented in spiritual terms. Vital airs were streaming from the sutures of the skull. The various sheaths of the physical envelope, the gross body, the causal body, the subtle body, were all returning to their source. All the different elements were rejoining the void. Absence was their destination. It was fascinating to hear his description, in the way that it is fascinating to hear anyone knowledgeable discoursing on a technical subject, even sport or cars.

  It was a sort of treat, though an unsettling one, to be invited to look at a corpse in its fiery transition – with roasting smells beginning to break through the stink of kerosene – rather than being told to avert your eyes from the whole subject of death. Then quite abruptly Ganesh summoned Rajah Manikkam, who grasped the handles of the wheelchair and lurched off with me. All Ganesh would say was, ‘You must leave now. The next part is not suitable for you to see.’ We were back in the realm of taboos without explanations. Naturally being told that it wasn’t suitable made me want to see it all the more, on the same principle governing the desirability of X-certificate films back in Britain. No history of disappointment could stop me hankering after the forbidden.

  There is no arguing with the pusher of a wheelchair. I tried to feel privileged by what I had seen rather than tantalised by what I had not. As we left the scene a breath of wind brought thick black smoke our way. Ganesh coughed, my eyes streamed and my clothes held the smell of the various shrivelling sheaths for the rest of the day. I felt that these mild inconveniences had a symbolic aspect, though if I was receiving spiritual instruction it was slightly disheartening. Hadn’t we been scrutinising death with exemplary calmness? Yet tears pursued us, even while we strove to rise above their causes.

  Installed back on the verandah, I tried to find out from Mrs O about the local funeral rites, and specifically what I had missed by being hustled away from the pyre at a crucial juncture. I got the brush-off, with Mrs O sternly saying that if Ganesh had wanted me to know he would already have told me. She wasn’t going to expose me to unauthorised knowledge herself. Ladies weren’t allowed to attend such events anyway – though I’d like to have seen someone try to stop her if she had put her mind to it.

  I tried to generalise my line of questioning. Was it a matter of caste who was buried (like Arthur, as I didn’t quite say) and who was burned, or could people exercise their own discretion?

  ‘Are you a journalist, John? Is that why you are here, to find out about the ways of the local people, these funny Indians?’

  ‘No, Mrs Osborne, I’m here as a devotee, to practise self-enquiry.’

  ‘Then stop asking questions that face outwards and turn your questioning inwards, since that is what it means to be a devotee.’

  I had always known I would love Mrs Osborne, but I hadn’t realised how long it would take. If there is no idea more fully grasped by the Indian Mind than ‘scolding’, then people like Mrs Osborne are largely responsible. The scolding must be done with love or it would be easy to reject, but love is not what registers first. The love only reveals itself over time. If it was so with Sister Heel at CRX – and wasn’t she one of the great love-scolders of all time? – then it was true of Mrs Osborne also. Kuppu and Rajah Manikkam were veterans of long campaigns of such scolding, who had come through with their smiles intact.

  In fact Mrs Osborne rather enjoyed filling me in about Tamil culture and traditions, as long as she didn’t feel pressurised, as long as it was on her own terms. She told me that Tamil was an ancient and elegant language, with structural similarities to both Latin and Welsh, although modern speakers had rather an inferiority complex about it, feeling that it was a degenerate descendant of Sanskrit.

  Tamil had contributed quite a number of words to English, including cheroot, catamaran (literally ‘tied trees’), mango, pariah and mulligatawny, whose literal meaning is ‘pepper water’. Curry was another gift, even if the British had firmly seized the word by the wrong end. Kari means a vegetable dish, not the spicing that made it so remarkable to a sheltered palate. She taught me the proper pronunciations of the original words, curuTTu, kaTTa maram, kari, mang kay, paRaiyaar, miLagu taneer.

  A whole room of rain

  At night rains would sometimes crash onto the roof – rain so intense that it required the rather Biblical plural form – and drown out all other sound. At night the mewing screams of the peacocks, both eerie and homely, were replaced by the shrieks of owls. No trace of the genteel quizzical Tu-Wit Tu-Woo of the British owl. These ones sounded as if they were being done to death.

  There is something oddly comforting about the acoustics of a downpour, as long as wind
plays no noticeable part. It seems to confer a privacy. It builds a whole room of rain, but the effect is necessarily spoiled if the body itself becomes wet. When the rain was at its most torrential I would sometimes be splashed a little from the side, which was rather exciting, but the rain never penetrated the roof of the verandah.

  On Mrs Osborne’s verandah I was further from being able to summon human help than I had ever been since I became ill. Yet I wasn’t anxious or afraid, even when I was very far from sleep. I was beginning to understand what it meant to be the guest of the mountain. His hospitality was very subtle. Solitude, something of which I had gone short for so many years, was somehow the cornerstone of it. He didn’t overwhelm me with attention.

  One night I was woken by something pulling at my finger. It was a macacque, grey-furred and frenetic, of the sort I had seen everywhere in those parts, even in the ashram. While it yanked at my knuckles it looked at me with a pleading intelligence, as if it wanted to enlist me in some public-spirited rescue like the clever dogs in old films.

  If so, it had chosen the wrong chap – Lassie, move on.

  No help to be had at this address.

  Try the next verandah along.

  It was chattering at me, not angrily in the style of its species but urgently, with a pulse of meaning, and then it scampered away. It was only after the event (if it even was an event and not a dream) that it occurred to me as strange that its fur had been quite dry despite the downpour. Even so, this could be explained if it nested somehow under the roof of Mrs Osborne’s verandah, sharing with me the hospitality of the mountain.

  I asked Mrs O if there were any stories about the local monkeys and their behaviour. Unhesitatingly she said there were. ‘Monkeys are famously fond of tamarind, and humans prize the fruit also, although it must be cooked for their consumption. In fact it is the crucial element in a true curry. Nevertheless the tree is considered unlucky. Consequently they have been nationalised and are government property. Individuals cannot own them, and are thereby spared the attendant bad luck. Instead they pay rent on the trees to the state government. This is ingenious, I feel, and shows Indian bureaucracy in a rare positive light.’ I too was impressed by authorities which accepted the irrationality of their citizens, rather than plastering every wall with posters trying to dispel the superstition. Perhaps we in the U.K. should nationalise black cats and the bits of pavement under ladders.

  I had even heard of tamarind, which was an important ingredient of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, Marmite’s acrid sister in the store cupboard. During my bed years, when every other bit of print in the house had been used up, I would get Mum to read me the labels of bottles from the bathroom and pantry. That’s how I know that Dettol disinfectant is one-and-a-half times stronger than pure carbolic acid (Rideal-Walker Test).

  ‘It happened,’ Mrs O went on, ‘that a Muslim who had rights over one such tree used a catapult to keep the monkeys away. Monkeys value the fruit of the tamarind even more than humans. Meaning only to frighten, he killed one – the monkey king. Did you not know that the monkeys have a king? Each group has its leader. The monkeys took the body to Ramana Maharshi, and asked him to bring their king back to life. Bhagavan always made sure, when feeding his followers, that the monkeys had their share. He spoke their language, as he spoke the language of every animal, but would not undertake resurrection. Instead he comforted them and assuaged their grief.

  ‘A little later the Muslim became fevered, and rumours of a curse put on him by Bhagavan began to circulate. In fact he treated and cured the fever with an application of vibhuti – the ashes of Shiva. Unfortunately the rumours of a curse did not altogether die away, but nothing could have been further from Bhagavan’s practice.

  ‘As for the modern behaviour of monkeys, I am afraid that it is less elevated. Rooms at the ashram have to be locked and the windows closed, since otherwise monkeys sneak in and pilfer. It is even possible, since visitors’ rooms are particularly liable to be ransacked, that some of the monkeys are currently human in form. They are perhaps laying the foundations for a future life, in which they will be fully…’ – she looked around for the exact adjective, and for once the Polish sibilants I had learned to filter out couldn’t be ignored – ‘shimian.’ For a moment I thought she had used a Tamil word.

  I wasn’t sure what I made of these stories. If I had wanted a guru who talked to the animals I would probably have stuck with Dr Do-little. Still, public figures can’t control how they are perceived, and it made sense that the locals would assimilate Ramana Maharshi into their folk beliefs rather than absorb the full force of his teaching.

  Mrs Osborne came in one morning and said that in the night she had seen a light burning on Arthur’s grave. She seemed reassured rather than upset by this manifestation.

  I was sceptical about the whole thing, so I asked her to wake me if it happened again. The following night I felt her tugging at me, more roughly than was necessary, and saying ‘Get up!!’ Of course from a bed that low I needed help to rise. She wrestled me into an upright position and pointed me in the right direction, towards Arthur’s grave. Rain was tipping down, but sure enough a steady light was visible even through the monsoon. I felt that I should be frightened, but my nervous system wouldn’t play along. It stayed stubbornly serene.

  One afternoon in the third week of my stay, while Kuppu was giving me a wash, tenderly pouring jugs of sun-warmed water over myself in the wheelchair, a strange couple of figures appeared at Mrs Osborne’s house. There was a tall European man leaning on the shoulder of a little middle-aged Indian, being helped to walk. I had never seen the Indian before, but the European was oddly familiar.

  His news was only himself

  With a shock I recognised my brother Peter. He was very thin and weak, and when he spoke his voice was little more than a croak. ‘I told you I’d see you in India, Jay,’ he said. Kuppu ran off.

  It was true that those had been Peter’s last words to me before I set off on my travels – ‘See you in India, Jay’ – but I hadn’t taken him seriously for a moment. He was an experienced traveller and a dab hand at finding cheap tickets. He was surprisingly disciplined about saving the money he earned as a waiter to fund the journeys he enjoyed. On the other hand, he’d never expressed an actual interest in India.

  The look on my face gave him a transfusion of energy for just a few moments. He basked in the triumph of having delivered a major surprise, by the brilliantly simple strategy of keeping a promise I had taken for a joke, and then his body gave way and he needed to sit down. The closest thing to a seat was Arthur Osborne’s commode, mercifully closed just then.

  It would be going too far to compare Peter with the ancient Athenian who ran all the way from Marathon to break the news of victory. Peter’s pace was crawling, his news was only himself, and his collapse was no more than a return of weakness, a convalescent setback.

  It was strange that Mum should insist on having her hair turned white by worrying over me, when Peter was the one who liked to take risks. He was always flying off somewhere, and adding another country to his itinerary probably didn’t strike him as unduly capricious.

  He introduced his companion as Dalton, and said that Dalton had saved his life. It was only a slight exaggeration. What had happened was that Peter was at a railway station, feeling very ill, and simply fainted. He had been lucky not to fall onto the tracks, but the wallet containing all his money and also his passport did just that. He would have been in serious difficulties if Dalton had not had the kindness to pick up this stranger and look after him, as well as the presence of mind to climb down onto the track to retrieve the wallet before he took Peter to hospital.

  By now Kuppu had re-appeared on the verandah, bringing with her Mrs Osborne and also Rajah Manikkam. Everyone fussed over these two odd visitors. Peter told the whole story of his experiences in an Indian hospital, while Dalton kept saying, in tones of joy, ‘Please don’t mention it. I only did what anyone would have done. It h
as been a supreme privilege to be of help to a traveller in difficulties.’ Between sentences he frowned and pushed his lips forward, turning the impulse to preen into a solemn grimace.

  Up to that moment I hadn’t known that Mrs Osborne spoke German, though in talking about my university future (the one I didn’t believe in) I had obviously told her of my familiarity with the language. Suddenly she was saying in my ear, in German, ‘What’s the quickest way of keeping your brother and getting rid of the other?’ Mrs O could withhold a welcome in any number of languages. I was slightly shocked at the sharply defined limits to this enlightened being’s sociability, but relieved that at least Peter was on the right side of them. It wasn’t as if he had any real claim. I myself was perched on a narrow ledge of hospitality, and wasn’t sure if I could get away with letting him bed down in the lee of the wheelchair.

  Peter went on with the story, while Dalton listened with an expression of utter fascination, not because it was unfamiliar but because the part he played in it was so dazzling that he would never get used to it.

  Vistas of regurgitated picnic

  When Peter woke up in hospital he was violently sick, and then fell deeply asleep again. The next time he woke the light had changed and it was many hours later. His vomit was being cleared away, in the most meticulous manner. There could be no doubt about that. He closed his eyes and counted to a hundred. When he opened them, the clearing-up was still going on but no visible progress had been made.

  The process was so slow because it was being carried out by ants. They worked tirelessly to carry away crusted particles from the vistas of regurgitated picnic spread out before them, while Peter watched between dozes. Watching those ants was his only entertainment, and no other creature did any cleaning. No one brought any food to replace what his body had rejected, even many hours after the event.