Those two coolies were the only Indians I met in Tiruvannamalai who didn’t smile at any time. They hardly even looked at me. From their point of view I suppose I was freight rather than person, and you don’t smile at a parcel. I didn’t mind. I had understood on trains between Bourne End, Burnham and Slough the compensating privileges of being defined as luggage. Freight doesn’t ogle the porter, no one imagines such a thing is possible, and so I was free to let my gaze rove over their sinewy bodies, heated by the sun, cooled by the outflow of sharp sweat. The beauty of one body was visual, it glistened under my eye, while the other was tactile. It glowed with heat and effort as it carried me. And if I was treating them as less than fully human, then I could honestly say that I had pinched the idea from them.
I don’t know exactly what instructions the coolies had had from Mrs Osborne, but eventually they settled me on a suitable rocky ledge. They unfolded the chair and put me in it, without cosseting but with perfect efficiency. They left me pointing towards the peak rather than downhill. The only flourish was that one of them produced a handkerchief, shook it out and then draped it over my head to keep the sun off. This was clearly something that Mrs Osborne had stipulated, and I had time to notice, as the handkerchief was shaken out, the initials A. O. embroidered in red on a corner. Alpha and Omega? Arunachala Om? No, I was being shaded by Arthur Osborne’s handkerchief, an honour that made me feel foolish. Commode and hanky – the late Arthur was giving me the works. The coolies even knotted the corners to keep it in place, a technique which I had always assumed evolved only once in the whole of human history and geography, among English holidaymakers at seaside resorts.
I expected these paid companions to stay while I contemplated the mountain, chatting quietly perhaps, sharing a beedie, idling like taxis between fares. Mrs Osborne’s instructions had been delivered in what sounded like very peppery Tamil, but of course I couldn’t really understand a word of it. I was busy wondering whether her Polish accent was as strong in other languages as it was in English, and if so, how they managed to make head or tail of it.
When I looked round the ‘coolies’ had disappeared. There wasn’t anything supernatural, I don’t think, about their vanishing. Looking round isn’t something I can do in a moment – I have to wriggle round first. If they hadn’t been absorbed directly back into the mountain, according to the etiquette for numinous emanations, then they had clambered down its sides as spryly as they had clambered up.
I was now in direct communion with Arunachala, while the ground dropped away behind me. There was nothing between me and the mountain. In a sense I had been riding on his back for weeks, but this was different. His eye was upon me, and though the experience was very unlike being Frodo Baggins writhing beneath the stare of Sauron it wasn’t exactly comfortable. Arunachala was unhostile, still residually hostly, but not (at this altitude) particularly indulgent. All my excuses went up in smoke under that gaze, like sweet wrappers on a bonfire.
Why was I here?
One answer would be that I had followed a trail from a library book to a crazy old lady with a handy verandah, but that wasn’t what the mountain meant. I tried one more time to concentrate, while the sweat started to trickle down my face. Enlightenment felt like the onset of heatstroke.
I had never to my knowledge dreamed of the mountain or the god (though who’s to say – how do you know when you’re dreaming of white light?), but I had experienced a puzzling dream about the man, about Ramana Maharshi. This was during my time at High Wycombe Technical College, but it was a dream entirely free of the daily grit whose rubbing sets off the nacreous secretion we call dreaming – the quotidian residues. Ramana Maharshi and I were sitting on a patch of sand, whether an area of desert or a specially contrived expanse I couldn’t tell, together with an Arab whom I didn’t recognise. I listened attentively to what Bhagavan was saying, but after a little while the Arab walked off in disgust, kicking sand towards us as he went. At this Ramana Maharshi turned to me and said, ‘I would rather have your love than your anger.’ I woke up with a great sense of injustice, since I had been attending very humbly and hadn’t been the one who had kicked up all the fuss.
It took Mrs Osborne to point out the obvious – that since it was my dream, the Arab was as much me as ‘I’ was. The anger displaced onto him was really mine. At some level I was seething with resentment at my need of a guru. An understandable feeling, of course, since I was so comprehensively dependent in other areas, but hard to take into your heart (the only place where things can be fully owned and finally shed).
Gruffly Mrs O consoled me, pummelling antiseptic creams into the bruise which her unwelcome insight had made. ‘Progress is an illusion, my dear John. As is the absence of progress.’ By this time I was so used to her way with sibilants that I would only have noticed if the hissing stopped. These strange noises were like the multifarious knocks and rattles of an old car, and oddly reassuring. Only sudden silent running would announce the imminence of collapse.
‘It is disheartening for you, I know. You have brought your little radio to a new place,’ she would say, ‘where there is a terribly powerful transmitter. The strong signal overwhelms your little apparatus, that is all.’
My little apparatus overwhelmed
Ramana Maharshi was very fond of taking parables from the wireless as well as that other high technology of his day, the cinema. He used the example of the radio (which a devotee had turned on, rather too loud) to show that there is no time and no space – here after all is a little box that says, perfectly truthfully, ‘Hello, this is Hyderabad’ one minute and ‘Hello, Bangalore here’ the next. Yet it never moves an inch.
I can’t say I was much consoled by this explanation. If my little apparatus was overwhelmed, what was I supposed to do about it?
‘Perhaps your little radio will tune itself to the new signal. You must learn patience from the mountain.’
I wondered if the problem was with my mantra, my regulation-issue beginner’s-level Om-Mane-Padme-Om, so I asked her what she used to help her meditate. She seemed rather shocked by so personal a question. It was as if I had asked for the loan of some underwear. ‘If you need a new mantra one will be given to you in time, but you cannot simply borrow one from someone else on the Path.’ Then she relented a little. ‘You might try Arunachala Siva or simply Om. Perhaps one of those will help.’ In practice I didn’t get anywhere with either, and fell back on my old standby. It seemed silly to think that a mantra would need converting to cope with the vagaries of a foreign current, like an electric shaver.
Mrs Osborne must have realised that my distress was real. She unbent a bit. ‘It is sometimes easier for children to give full attention than adults. My daughter Catherine – Katya – was the first of any of us to enter Bhagavan’s presence, carrying the customary basket of fruit. He indicated the low table on which such things were put, but she misunderstood and hopped up there herself, cradling the basket.
‘The disciples nudged each other and said that she was making an offering of herself to Bhagavan. Certainly she had no difficulty communicating with him. You yourself are no longer a child, but you are younger than I was when I came here, younger also than Arthur.
‘When he came here at the end of the war, he experienced similar difficulties to yours. He said that the presence of Bhagavan was less real to him than the photograph which had given him such strength and serenity during the years of his internment.’
I perked up no end at this precedent. ‘So it’s a sort of test?’
‘It is no sort of test. There are no tests. What is it that would be tested? It is a stage merely.’ I must have looked crushed all over again, and her consoling instincts gained ascendancy. ‘A schoolfriend of Ramana Maharshi, visiting him here, once said, “If you stay with the Jñani he gives you your cloth ready woven” – meaning that you don’t have to find the thread and weave it yourself, as you do with other gurus. But that is not necessarily the case for everyone. Each has his path, but t
he mountain is the same goal for all.’
Drowsing beneath my folkloric hanky, I began to think that the mountain had taken his eye off me. The strangest aspect of my pilgrimage was that Arunachala, in Britain so absolutely steady a signal source, became when I was in such close proximity oddly inconstant.
Arunachala didn’t altogether compel my reverence as I had assumed in advance. Ramana Maharshi wrote in an evocation of the mountain that was himself, ‘Though in fact fiery, my lack-lustre appearance as a hill on this spot is an effect of grace and loving solicitude for the maintenance of the world.’
There were times when Arunachala really did look lack-lustre to me, just one more mountain, fit subject for a holiday postcard, to be sent to those people who are owed holiday postcards. Sometimes Arunachala could have been any hill that had seized my imagination when I read about it – the Wrekin, say, in the poems of A Shropshire Lad.
At this point it would be hard to say that I was even trying to meditate. I was engaged in a rêverie which was the exact opposite of meditation, perversely imagining the Wrekin in mid-Shropshire instead of Arunachala in mid-Tamil Nadu. Behind closed eyes I was trying to subtract from my surroundings the Indian smells, baked earth, flower perfume, and spice, not to mention the Indian heat, and to replace them with genteel transient fragrances and parochial birdsong. Insipid scents and tweetings.
I tried to imagine church bells in a peal, the jangling overlapping changes which somehow spell out the opposite – changelessness. The acoustical shimmering which is the closest our ears can come to hearing eternity. It’s even possible that I was feeling homesick, though I was conjuring up a synthetic landscape rather than anything I actually knew.
It seemed to me that I could really hear bells, but not church bells – cowbells. I opened my eyes and saw, some distance away, a cowherd boy with some cattle. One of the cows wasn’t tethered and seemed to be free to wander where it pleased. It also seemed to see me, and as if acting from a sociable impulse it ambled my way. The bell round its neck was massive and made of some dully shining metal. It didn’t seem scared or suspicious of the wheelchair, as most livestock is (many pets have the same mistrust).
Where was the cowherd boy now? Shouldn’t he be rushing up to drive his charge back towards its fellows, using a stick that would make me wince in sympathy but also thank him in my heart? I couldn’t see him. With a neck properly equipped with rotational and stretching powers, I might have had a better chance of getting a glimpse, but there it was. All told I miss quite a bit from the lack of play in my neck.
On the other hand, if I had been in possession of a working neck I wouldn’t have been in India in the first place, I’d have taken so different a path that the two Johns, the supple and the stiff, would long since have been invisible to each other.
The cow came nearer and nearer. I became increasingly conscious of the largeness of the cow and the smallness of me. It wasn’t a sleek prize-winning English cow, but it wasn’t the scrawny animal I was half-expecting as the norm in India. Nor did this animal resemble the cow in Mrs Osborne’s garden, which gave us milk that could never go off.
This cow was pure white except for a streak of shit on its flank. It was strongly built, with something that was almost a hump behind its shoulder. As it came close it seemed to be bigger than any normal cow could possibly be, but then I’m not used to the looming of cattle. I had an almost intoxicating sense of my own littleness, a thrill of insignificance.
At the same time I was highly aware of the precariousness of my position. As the cow came closer I started to talk to it, saying, ‘Nice cow’ or some such absurdity, hoping madly that it wasn’t going to butt the chair or interfere with me in any way. I tried to remember whether the brakes were on, though I knew how little difference it would make if the huge animal once made physical contact. I would either be nudged off the chair or nudged off the mountain.
The cow slowed down as it approached me but didn’t actually stop. She came nearer and nearer, her eyes both empty and searching, bending her head down low in a way that didn’t look particularly submissive. In an obscene reflex I could smell the meatiness of her. I suppose we all harbour some such atavistic instinct, even when as individuals we have learned to find animals’ lives delicious, and not their deaths.
The cow came so near that I couldn’t see both her eyes at once. There was just enough play in my neck for me to turn the angle necessary to focus on one and then the other. Her massive jaw moved to the side chewingly, and she unrolled her breath in front of me like a carpet of grasses. She nudged even further forward, so that her breath rolled over me in a cuddy plume. Eventually I was touching her nose, and speaking to her as evenly as I could. If I say I was touching her nose, it must be understood that the action was hers not mine – she presented her nose to my hand.
My terror was that she was going to reach out to me with her tongue. As long as she kept it in her mouth I could contemplate her with a sort of equanimity, under my fear. Having refused my share of a thousand Sunday roasts, I was in physical danger but not shamed. If she showed her tongue I would be morally annihilated, having eaten tongue, processed and jellied, in ignorant enjoyment as a bedridden boy. How was I supposed to live with myself after that, if she reached out that wet muscle and licked me with it? My whole pilgrimage was being dominated by the bodily not the spiritual, and by cows’ bodies at that, cows and their tongues, cows in the city and cows on the mountain.
I found myself crooning, ‘Avatar of the cow goddess’ – in my panic I’d forgotten precisely which Hindu deity took bovine form – ‘Emanation of Arunachala …’ over and over again. I was also murmuring ‘Pax, pax,’ as if this was a playground dispute that could be resolved by surrender. In confrontations with cattle Pax is not an effective spell, whether you’re a matador impaled in his suit of lights, repenting his cruelty with sobs of blood, or a neophyte devotee whose bluff has been called, discovering that the mountain he has adored from afar is numinous beyond all reckoning.
Locking horns with Lakshmi
I was slow to realise that this was a supernatural encounter. The mountain had given up on the project of addressing me directly and had lowered himself to incarnation, and a sort of ruminant ventriloquism. Contact on a level I could understand. My abilities had been scrutinised and revised downwards, though I think without disapproval. I have observed a similar procedure in a Chinese restaurant, when the management has smilingly brought knife and fork, without being asked, to rescue a patron defeated by chopsticks.
After that the divine cow started showing signs of what I can only call affection, rubbing and pushing lightly against me. They were slight movements for a cow, but I was rocked alarmingly by them. I had as much to fear from a friendly cow as from a mad bull, not from a charge but the delicate movement that would crush me. If all this had happened down in the plain, with the cowherd nearby, watching with an indulgent smile, I would have been in svarga – in heaven – or at least in the Indian equivalent of Whipsnade (remembering the time a snake had handled me there), but here I was in real danger and a real state.
Her next step was to turn her head. One huge horn came down and to the side, so that it went through the wheelchair arm-piece on the left, with a smooth grinding noise as solid bone slid on hollow metal. Another small movement and she had manœuvred her left horn under the right arm-piece, so that her head ended up in the centre of the chair’s rotational axis. Precisely where a cow would position itself if it wanted to use its mighty neck muscles, and the superbly articulated bones they powered, to give my wheelchair an apocalyptic flick. The cow’s friendliness continued, but I was filled with terror and awe. In a perfectly friendly way, she could have lifted her head straight up, in creaturely greeting, and the chair would either have been lifted up bodily, taking me with it, or tipped backwards off the mountain.
This wasn’t a cosy creature out of A. A. Milne making butter for the royal slice of bread, this was a Hindu divinity. It was terrifying. This wasn
’t Daisy, this was – it came to me – Lakshmi. I was locking horns with Lakshmi. Her cud-breath engulfed me. There was a long string of saliva hanging from her mouth, a glutinous rope, but I could easily believe it would hang there for a thousand years without falling.
My body entered a state of sacred shock. I was almost weeping, and when I tried to speak to this presence, no sound came out. In fact they were all here, or at least seven out of the eight: horripilation, trembling, tears, faltering of the voice, perspiration, inability to move, holy devastation. All the physical signs of the presence of God, everything that makes up what Hindus call nirvikalpa samadhi. I can’t vouch for the changing of my body colour in any real way, but it seems hardly likely that I would stay the same colour when every other aspect and sensation was turned upside down.
Of course any one of the signs, and even whole groups of them, could be explained by my situation. At the mercy of an immense and capricious ruminant. On a mountain that I claimed as my spiritual home, but was thousands of miles from home by every other definition. But there was no doubt in my mind, as I gazed at her, that I was in the presence of Lakshmi. She turned her head a little, so that only one eye remained in my field of vision. That eye was a glazed bulge in which all contradictions were collapsed, a radiant absence and a probing vacuum.
This turning of the head, though smoothly executed, brought a huge force to bear on the wheelchair. If it hadn’t been exactly in line with the axle the chair would have been tipped over, and even so the framework juddered and one wheel lifted from the ground.
Mechanistic Western thinking was all at sea in this terrain, but still it went on offering the incantation which calls itself analysis of events. What it told me was that horn and arm-piece had meshed as a result of a series of moves on the divine cow’s part. The only way the knot could be undone without capsizing me was if the same sequence was performed in reverse, lateral actions with no component of movement either forward or backwards, passes as precise as the ones required to knit together the kinked silver loops of Patrick Savage’s fidelity ring in the library of Burnham Grammar School. Time would have to go backwards, the film be shown in reverse. Otherwise I would shortly be united with the mountain in a crash of silence.
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