One day Mrs Osborne announced that there was a famous Tamil singer giving a concert in the Temple that night. We should all go (though ‘all’ did not include Rajah Manikkam and Kuppu). The Temple was an extraordinary setting, and the concert should have something to offer both pilgrims and tourists. She looked at Peter and me when she said this, and for a moment I wondered if she was really registering a distinction in our status as travellers.
Mrs Osborne assumed that Peter would push me, once the new Rajah Manikkam (no longer hysterical) had lifted me off the verandah, but it turned out not to be quite so simple. Peter could manage the wheelchair perfectly well on the flat. But when we got to the Inner Temple, where the performance was to take place, we were confronted with some astoundingly imposing sacred architecture, an impossibly steep set of steps. ‘Let’s not bother,’ I whispered to Peter, knowing he was incapable of any lifting – but then I remembered Burnham Grammar School and the lesson it taught. That access transcends questions of architecture.
Lightning strikes twice – of course it does! – and then twice more. Lightning strikes in a logarithmic progression of 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 until there is nothing but the strobe-lightning that illuminates Shiva’s dance. And where would Shiva more naturally put on a show than here, where the mountain, the god and the man step in and out of time in an ecstasy of mutual personification?
Very tentatively we approached those sheer steps, and then hands simply appeared from the crowd, each one grabbing a different part of the chair, collectively imparting a strong upward impulse. The wheelchair glided up the stairs as though it was on an escalator. The movement was eerily smooth. Often in the wheelchair I’m semi-consciously anxious that the person pushing will bump me up the kerb, clip my feet when executing a turn and so on, but on this occasion I felt utterly safe. Was it Elijah in the Bible who was carried up to Heaven in a chariot? I have to say I felt pretty blessed myself during that wheelchair ascension glide. I was on my own personal hovercraft, bobbing on jets of divine enablement, puffs of holy help.
For two years at Burnham School I had been lifted upstairs and downstairs by my fellows, and every time it felt like an act of faith, my life in their rowdy hands. Now a crowd of unknown Indians, none of whom individually could have pushed the wheelchair on level ground without mishap, was collectively wafting me upwards. I think I can say with confidence that this has been a life without short cuts – and yet there was this one short cut, this human thermal which uplifted me and me alone.
I wish similar miracles had happened on a regular basis since, with the result that I positively look forward to seeing a flight of steps in front of me. But once was enough. Then, after I had been magicked up all those stairs, Peter came and sat next to Mrs O. He knew her and felt safe near her. Next minute the entire audience, all seated of course on the floor, started undulating with turbulent movement like an ominous sea. I was puzzled and couldn’t see why. Some of the faces in the audience wore expressions of polite distaste, others of actual horror.
Peter had gone to sit in the ladies’ section. That was all it was. There was a rope down the middle of the audience, and men had to sit strictly on one side, ladies on the other. Eventually Mrs O worked out what the trouble was and had a word with Peter. She pointed him over to the other side of the rope. At first she was as baffled by the uproar as I was – then she suddenly remembered the Indian convention against which none of us had meant to offend. Perhaps it was quite a time since she had attended this sort of event, or she had got used to being a living breach of the rules, and thought she could spread her cloak of exemption over Peter’s shoulders also.
All this time I was sitting in the ladies’ section myself, on the other side of Mrs O, and not a single eyebrow was raised. No questions were asked, no orders to relocate issued. The Temple’s (surely?) very first wheelchair seemed to slip through the covenants of tradition and gender. I had a cloak of my own.
Worldly veins throbbed in smugness
What with the various palavers, the communal levitation of the wheelchair followed by the transgression against seating taboos, the performance itself made relatively little impression. The singer was plump and he sang with his eyes closed most of the time. If I hadn’t known the songs were spiritual I wouldn’t have guessed. At the time I wasn’t attuned to Indian vocal style. I just didn’t get it. The singer approached the note like a bee hovering in front of a flower, instead of fixing it cleanly as singers do in the Western tradition, pinning it like a butterfly onto a cork board.
I hadn’t exactly lost my pang of resentment at Peter’s arrival, my sense that a spiritual quest for one Cromer had turned into an adventure for two, but it had certainly gone underground. It was fun being able to explore more easily, even if it wasn’t the sort of exploration I was here for. I hadn’t been able to meditate since he came, not even for a second.
Then one morning Peter announced that he was leaving. When? After breakfast. One last bumper helping of wild fig poriyal, and he would be off. My face must have fallen. He said, ‘I thought it was best just to go without making a fuss about it. Drawn-out partings are horrible – isn’t that what Granny always says?’ Well, yes it was, as a way of making a brusque turning on the heel seem like the height of consideration. ‘And I’ll see you at home, Jay, won’t I?’
Well, of course he would, but it was still a shock. Perhaps subconsciously I had been anticipating having his help with the hundred hurdles of intercontinental travel on the way home.
Peter went up the stairs to the roof and came back with his case two minutes later. Either he had already packed or he was innocently showing off the impulsive efficiency of the able-bodied.
He had withdrawn emotionally by the time we came to say our goodbyes proper. This had been his habit since he was quite a little boy. When he was about ten or eleven Mum noticed a difference in the ritual of bedtime. She came to our beds as usual to give us a hug and a goodnight kiss. He would put his arms round her as usual and he said all the usual things, but he had gone to some other place inside himself, for protection. Peter coped with his great need to belong by choosing to be alone, even in company, and so when it came time to say goodbye he made sure that to all intents and purposes he had already left.
After Peter had gone, the wheelchair resumed its sacred ruts and the vada stall dwindled into the distance, until it was only a memory reeking of spice, carbohydrate and deep fat. I felt Peter’s absence keenly. There’s nothing people miss so much as a good excuse. As long as he was there, he could take the blame for my spiritual stalemate. I could forget that I hadn’t been able to meditate before his arrival either, not for a second.
The weeks had flown by, and my time of pilgrimage was nearly over. What had been accomplished? I had spent many hours in the Old Hall but had made no progress in taming my mind. What if I had moved heaven and earth to make the journey, only to find that I wasn’t mature enough to benefit from it? Sleepless nights were pretty much the rule for me in Tamil Nadu, what with the unravelling bed and the shrieking owls, but I had a few around that time that were distinctly bleak in terms of the thoughts that came to me and the lack of answers I had for them.
Finally I got around to reading the passage that Mrs Osborne had marked for me in The Razor’s Edge. It filled me with an unholy rage that seedy, hateful Somerset Maugham (about whom admittedly I didn’t know a great deal) had come to Tamil Nadu to do a little light research, and had approached Ramana Maharshi bearing a basket of fruit very much as he would have sent flowers to a London hostess. Having fallen into a highly convenient faint, he had been rewarded with Bhagavan’s transforming hands – darshan upon unparalleled darshan – on his unworthy forehead, where worldly veins throbbed in smugness and lassitude. Concentrated Grace had been poured out over this … this storyteller! This storyteller with the ugly, turned-down lips. And all for the sake of some local colour, a whiff of the timeless East.
I on the other hand had made a pilgrimage to Tiruvann
amalai in a body that would have been taxed by a visit to Canterbury, for no other purpose than to pay my respects to my guru, and been rewarded with an unquiet mind and a craving for lentil dumplings.
Then Mrs Osborne came out with another book of Maugham’s. In her way she was quite a persistent director of studies. I had done the basic reading, and was to be rewarded with an advanced text. This second book was a collection of essays called Points of View, actually Maugham’s last book, dating from the 1950s. What she wanted to show me was the piece called ‘The Saint’, which was a portrait of Ramana Maharshi written long after the meeting which had fed the silly fantasies of The Razor’s Edge. Maugham had remembered Bhagavan over all those years, and considered him a great spiritual figure. His understanding of Hinduism seemed pretty erratic to me, and a guru is not a saint, but I had to admit that he hadn’t entirely missed the point. That seemed to be my privilege.
I knew that I was supposed to become a Cambridge undergraduate that September, but apart from the kick of outdoing Dad (ignoble triumph, since his chance of university was scuppered by a world convulsion) it meant nothing to me. My life as I wanted it to be went only so far as this visit to Tamil Nadu, then it became incomprehensible. I hadn’t foreseen having to come home. I had planned a sort of Indian rope trick all of my own. I would climb up into union with the guru and pull the rope ladder up after me. No one I knew could follow. I would simply disappear, leaving behind the return portion of my Air India ticket and a half-smile like the Cheshire Cat’s, half-way up a tamarind tree.
Now I felt I was seeking self-realisation against the clock, and finding the necessary states of mind even harder to achieve. Of course ‘achieve’ gives the wrong impression. There can be no question of making something happen. That’s what makes it so hard for the Western mind, and my mind was Western to its fingertips. I had built myself a carapace of brittle willpower, laboriously secreting the chitin from which an exoskeleton is constructed, and now I wanted it cracked open, pierced and raked by the loving beak of enlightenment.
Flakes of powdered glory
One afternoon I was in the Old Hall trying to meditate, and becoming aware as usual that my attention was skittering off in all directions. Then I noticed an old man brushing Bhagavan’s couch. This must have been a particular privilege, since there was a small wooden fence round the couch. Clearly he had permission to pass inside. His eyes were milky with cataracts, and he worked from very close to the fabric, using a brush that was more like a fly whisk than a serious instrument of housework. Nevertheless he kept at it, drawing the little brush down the fabric in reverent strokes, turning the chore into a ritual of sustained attention. I found myself following his movements, fascinated. It took him the best part of an hour to brush the whole upper part of the couch, and then he started on the back, with the same slow meticulous pace. Then it was the turn of the underside, though he had to lie down at odd angles to reach every square inch. Then he turned his attention to the legs of the couch.
The little brush he held was only a step up from the imaginary one which Granny had told me to use as a child to beguile insomnia, patiently cleaning the cells of a beehive which was no less imaginary.
I have to say that at the end of this old man’s prodigious grooming the couch looked exactly the same as it had at the beginning. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to sit on it anyway. It was no more than a stand for a portrait, and a prop from a long-ago photo session. If anyone had asked to take the couch away Ramana Maharshi would very likely have said yes, just as he had with the tiger skin. Nevertheless I was very struck by the devotion of the man with the little brush. From the eerily patient way that he coaxed notional dust from that couch, you would think that it was covered in the most fragile living tissue, like the flakes of powdered glory that make up a butterfly’s wing.
It was only afterwards that I realised how far I had fallen from my own hopes of pilgrimage. The point of pressurising Dad into getting the airline ticket, the whole idea of coming all this way, was to take possession of my spiritual life, not to be impressed by someone else’s. I was estranged from my own devotion. I had failed to establish a primary connection with either of the complementary entities which fed the hunger of so many, the mountain and the ashram. I was turning into a sort of spiritual parasite. I had less of a real relationship with Ramana Maharshi now that I was spending time in rooms that his body had occupied, and spending every day with people who had met him, than when I had been stuck at home in Bourne End, with no stronger inspiration than a book borrowed from the local library.
Ganesh no longer did me the honour of pushing the wheelchair from Aruna Giri to the ashram. Rajah Manikkam delivered me to the gate, and then I would be ferried to the appropriate room by an American devotee who had a sonorous, almost mantra-worthy name: Caylor Truman Wadlington. Of course Ganesh had a lot to do in terms of ashram admin, and he never saw me without giving me his full smile and bidding me once again welcome. But I was rather nostalgic for the good old days earlier in my visit to India, before we had begun to be friendly. Then the obstacles to spiritual progress seemed reassuringly external. Now the resistance was pretty clearly coming from inside me. In an analogy which Ramana Maharshi took from the movies (a particularly rich source of teaching for him), if while you are watching a film a gigantic flickering hair obscures the heroine’s profile, it is futile to attempt to dislodge the monster fibre from the back wall of the cinema. It is of normal size and inside the projector. Inside you, who project so unrelentingly.
In the last week of my stay, Mrs Osborne came up with an inventive solution to one aspect of my impasse, relating specifically to pradakshina. Since it wasn’t possible to go round the mountain under my own steam in the prescribed manner, I should be assisted to climb it. She said, ‘You may not be able to climb Arunachala yourself, but that is no reason for you not to be as high up as we can possibly get you. Not as high as Brahma, I dare say, but high enough to take a small visitor’s breath away.’
The story goes that Vishnu and Brahma were once quarrelling over which was the greater, until Shiva was brought in to settle the question. He appeared as an infinite column of fire, a tejolingam, and challenged the rival gods to find its upper or lower extremity. Vishnu became a boar and burrowed down in search of the base, while Brahma became a swan and soared up in search of the summit. Brahma tried to cheat (he caught a falling flower and claimed to have picked it on the summit) and consequently Vishnu won. The column of fire was too bright to be looked at, so in consideration of the limitations of human vision, Shiva manifested himself instead as Arunachala, on the same spot. It’s the sort of lively story that monotheism rules out of bounds. I do like a large cast of characters, even if they’re only there on the stage, all singing, all dancing, to tell me that existence is one and indivisible.
There may have been some religious symbolism in Mrs O’s suggestion. Why are there many faiths, when there is only one truth? The mountain analogy again, with many routes to the summit, over different types of terrain. Ramana Maharshi’s way has always been considered as a sort of direct ascent of a precipice, as simple as it is difficult. This accounts for the idea (mistaken, I’m sure) that the task is easier with lesser gurus – hence for instance, Raghu’s family’s adherence to Paramahamsa Yogananda. The vichara path being too ‘high’, too ‘exalted’, a ‘lower path’ is chosen until the disciple is ready. I’m truly sorry, but bollocks! It isn’t presumption that chooses the direct approach, it’s faith.
There’s an English climber called George Mallory who disappeared on Everest in 1924. His body has never been found, and it isn’t clear whether he got to the top or not. His is the famous remark about wanting to climb Everest ‘because it’s “there”.’ He did a celebrated bit of climbing in Wales once, nipping down a sheer rock face by the most direct route to retrieve his pipe, which he’d forgotten. And for exactly the same reason: because it was ‘there’, and he was desperate for a soothing puff of Mayan tobacco.
&nbs
p; The climb is written up in all the books as Mallory’s Pipe, the descent of a sheer face undertaken in fading light in front of witnesses, with a note which adds, ‘This is impossible.’
Come to that, it’s impossible for an Indian boy mentally to live through his own death and to understand that it is nothing, but it had happened, which was why I was here. And it was also ‘impossible’ for a severely disabled twenty-year-old from Buckinghamshire to be spending a month as a guest of the holy mountain, but here I was. Once you enter the realm of the impossible, every possibility is equally likely.
The only thing which really did seem to be impossible was for me to find the concentration necessary to meditate – or I suppose the disconcentration. Willpower must step back from the event. I couldn’t make that direct descent into the Self, lacking the aplomb of a tweeded mountaineering genius, able to nip down and grab his favourite briar without giving it a thought.
The privileges of luggage
Mrs Osborne arranged for two men to take me up Arunachala. She called them ‘coolies’. I suppose she must have paid them for their labour, though I didn’t think of that at the time. One of them knelt down and carried me in a sort of fireman’s lift. As he clambered up the mountain I had an excellent view of his bobbing rippling muscly back as I looked down, and if I managed to raise my sights a little I could see not where I was going, which was a total mystery, but where I had been. Maybe it was just as well, since the rocky ground dropped away so rapidly it took my breath with it. I could also glimpse the second coolie lithely ascending, carrying the folded wheelchair on his head with no apparent effort.
Cedilla Page 46