Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  High fat is good in a treat, bad when it becomes a routine. So is Hinduism inherently a high-fat religion? Good question. After all, India has the largest population of cattle (cows and buffaloes) on earth. But actually, no. We read in the Atharva Veda (I do, anyway) that only cows with low levels of fat in their milk should be kept as family cows. Cows producing richer milk should be donated to the priestly castes, who require a higher percentage of fat when performing yajñas – offering oblations of milk (among other substances) to the sacred fire, to tickle the palates of the gods. They whose digestions can cope with any extreme of lushness.

  Finally the day dawned, as abrupt as all its predecessors, when it was time for me to return to England and my mundane future. It was also time for me to be measured again. Mrs Osborne was visibly excited as she bustled about with her tape measure. She seemed to have forgiven me my limitations as a book-binder. No further jobs were lined up. She didn’t need me to change a fuse or dig a trench.

  Homœopathy was being put to the test. An agnostic was being provided with hard evidence, and trusted to accept the facts however disruptive of previous certainties. I lined myself up against the wall of the house. Mrs Osborne took her pencil and made a mark. She was humming under her breath. Then Rajah Manikkam helped me back to the wheelchair while Mrs O grappled with the tape measure. She made a great fuss about aligning the bottom of the tape properly, asking Rajah Manikkam to check it for her. When she was satisfied that everything was properly arranged she compared the two marks and wrote measurements on the wall.

  ‘John, do you see what has happened? When you came here four weeks ago you measured four feet eight and five-eighths of an inch. Now you are four feet eight and seven-eighths of an inch tall. You have grown a quarter of an inch in a month! And there is nothing to say that your growth will not continue, if you go on taking the pills I have prepared.’ She stopped and looked at me more closely. ‘You are a very unusual young man, John. Of course I don’t know many young men, certainly not young men from the West, but you are certainly a special case. Something you considered fixed is revealed to be alterable, yet you hardly react. I must wonder why.’

  My answer sounded awkward to me even as it came out of my mouth. ‘Mrs Osborne, I didn’t come to India to change on the outside. That was never the idea. That isn’t the important thing.’

  ‘You have changed, but not in the way that you most hoped. Perhaps it is simply shock that paralyses you. You will need time to accept the fact that anything is possible. I understand and will ask no more questions.’

  It wasn’t like that. She was on the wrong track entirely. I had taken the little pills in good faith, and the idea of miraculous growth at the age of twenty had a certain amount of power over me. But I was also cheating.

  The first time I leaned against the wall I had made sure my feet in their built-up shoes were some little distance away from the wall. It wasn’t hard to make out that I had reached the limit of my flexibility. So in the weeks that intervened I had it in my mind that I could either humour Mrs O or show her up, depending on how I felt on the day. It was a strange and no doubt corrupting sensation to have so much power over someone who had so much power over me.

  On the day when the measuring was done, I simply stood a little closer to the wall. I was less steady in my balance, but Rajah Manikkam was there to brace me, and Mrs O was too busy with the tape measure to notice. And as for my motives, obviously they were very far from pure. Once I’d decided to play along, I was going to get my revenge on Mrs Osborne one way or another. Either I was going to show up homœopathy as futile or I was going to humour her, and let her go to her grave believing in something that I’d faked. There was anger in both options, but one option was all anger.

  If I demonstrated that her therapy had failed I was punishing her pure and simple. In the option I settled on there was at least the possibility of a more positive emotion. By assenting to the idea that I’d added something to my height I was going along with my own fond hopes as well as hers. As for why I was angry with Mrs Osborne, part of it had to do with her sudden appearance as Wielder of the Void, using her stick to beat an innocent stray dog who was helping me sleep, but I would have done the same even if that bizarre event had never happened. Fundamentally, it had to do with my coming to India hoping to find a spiritual mother, and finding something else. A Polish-born Hindu repetition of Granny, another avatar of the peremptory. A human vasana, from my point of view, a living rut. A repeated pattern triggering love, submission and resentment, mechanical as a recurring decimal.

  It was certainly true that I had changed, but not in the way that I had most hoped. I was deeply tanned, and according to Mrs Osborne I would now be growing at the rate of three inches a year until I decided to stop taking the pills, with a control over my changing size which Lewis Carroll’s Alice would have envied. I would hit six feet before I hit thirty. I wonder now what preparation it was she gave me – some sort of titration of Sequoia? I still thought of myself as a de votee, but I had failed in my dream of abruptly realising myself for once and for all. I wouldn’t be able to skip my larval stage as a university student. There was no short cut to the shimmering imago, no special ramp up the mountain installed for my convenience.

  The key to the whole problem was Ganesh, the key but not a usable one. Call it a key broken off in the lock. Not Ganesh the man, who had said his goodbyes very warmly. Ganesh the principle, the whole idea of obstacles and their removal. In Bourne End before I set off I had been wise enough to ignore all barriers, discounting the possibility that anything could block my progress, but in India I had been entirely taken up with them, by the verandah, by Peter, by Mrs O and the whole stupid growing-tall project, and by the failure of meditation. I had allowed obstacles to define me and had become bogged down, there where I had counted on being most free, preöoccupied with personalities, which occupy no lofty rung of reality.

  After Kuppu had helped to clean me for the last time, and Rajah Manikkam had lifted me down from the verandah, while I gave him for the last time the stern glare that cuts off giggles at their root, I thought I would have time to myself in the taxi that was taking me to Madras, time to mourn and to start recovering. I planned to wallow a little in my regrets.

  I hadn’t understood how Indian taxis work. For a four-or five-hour trip like that, arranged in advance (and costing me a hundred rupees, more than a fiver), there will always be company. The owner of the taxi, a Muslim wearing a round hat, accompanied the driver. There were women and children, with much kissing and cuddling.

  At the last minute, Mrs Osborne herself got in. She was suffering from toothache, and had decided to make her way to Madras for an extraction. There was a dentist in the city who treated her without charge, not because he was a devotee of Ramana Maharshi but because he was impressed by Mrs Osborne personally, and her steadfast refusal of anæsthesia, both local and general. Toothache didn’t deter her from chatting in Tamil for the whole of the journey, while I closed my eyes and tried to meditate. If I had been a tourist it would have been a waste not to make the most of my last sights of rural India, but I was a devotee, even if I felt further than ever from enlightenment. There was one crowning disappointment in my summer of pilgrimage. I had broken my vow. Chastity had slipped away from me when I wasn’t looking.

  Is this the end for John Wallace Cromer?

  The night before, I had dreamed of the Abominable Snowman. The dream was somehow in the style of a B-movie from the 1950s. I was being hurried to safety through snow by a group of helpers who suddenly scattered and deserted me. The dream wasn’t from my point of view, exactly, but the guiding principle was film cliché rather than astral travel. If I was scared in the dream then perhaps Mrs O’s remarks about the importance of following dream fear to its source remained with me on these lower levels of mental life, so that I over-rode the reflex of waking.

  Now the camera craned up and looked down at me, and I saw that the wheelchair was sitting squarely in th
e middle of an enormous footprint in the snow. Then there was either a commentary or a caption, as if this was an episode of a serial reaching its cliff-hanger ending: IS THIS THE END FOR JOHN WALLACE CROMER, TORN APART BY A MYTHICAL MONSTER IN A PART OF INDIA WHERE HE HAS NEVER EVEN BEEN? In the interior spaces of the dream I was uneasily aware that Tibet was somehow wrong.

  The fact of my being in the wheelchair in the dream already put it into a special category. I walk without difficulty in most of my dreams, I glide along, but this was either wish-fulfilment of a higher sort or something other than wish-fulfilment. Then an enormous shadow fell over the enormous footprint.

  Next thing I knew the Abominable Snowman was cradling me in his arms, which were warm and very soft. I couldn’t see his face, but I was swept up into an ecstasy of mammal safety and release.

  I had conjured up a place of altitude and hardship which was no doubt partly a plaintive self-portrait of the modern pilgrim and his travails. It was also a fantasy of relief from the heat I had been in so constantly for a month now, a dream of snow. Yet into that imaginary cold I had smuggled warmth and comfort. The strong arms of the Abominable Snowman, densely covered with black fur, squeezed me in a surging rhythm like a global heartbeat. My bones made no protest as I was hugged to that mighty chest. My bones were glad, were only glad. I was enclosed in something like the mechanism of a cat’s purr, only a million times larger. Then little by little the vision receded and I became awake. It was a little after dawn, on the last morning I would spend on Mrs Osborne’s verandah, as a guest of the oldest mountain on earth.

  It was an undignified ending to my Indian adventure. I had set off with hopes of celibacy and self-realisation, but all I had achieved was disappointment and distraction. Now my unconscious mind had even broken my presumptuous vow. I had wanted to pitch all my thinking at an elevated level, to soar above my limitations – but then I had to go and crash-land my own quest by having a wet-dream about the Yeti.

  4

  Dark Ages

  I felt very low on the plane home, suffering a sense of spiritual failure that was like a hangover. This Maharajah had no desire to be served champagne in the sky as he headed wearily for home. I was on the wagon, and all the fizz had gone out of me.

  Even so, my depression didn’t last for the whole flight. The more distance I put between India and myself, the rosier my vision of the visit became. The grotty bits tactfully disappeared, while the good moments rooted themselves firmly in my memory and sent up tender shoots. Mrs Osborne herself started to shine like a saint in my mind, which was never an illusion that I had entertained when she was sitting opposite me, hissing her savage sibilants and grieving over rock cakes when she wasn’t beating stray dogs.

  I had expected too much from the huge endeavour of displacing myself to India. I had banked on apotheosis and received only a holiday, something I had no use for. I had hoped to realise my Self, but I was still trapped in the lower case, confined by the daily self which so obviously offers too little but also too much. The self of every day is like some hectoring street hawker, touting bangles and sweetmeats, guides to the museum, sexual use of his family in exhaustive combinations, trayfuls of watches but never the right time. I must still engage daily with Maya, who by pulling some sort of typographical strings has managed to become capitalised on the sly herself.

  Still, I knew from Dad’s horticultural lectures that if you take an established plant and transfer it to another climate it never really settles down. I needed a more realistic plan, and this is what I came up with: I would graft onto my English life all the things I had learned in India.

  I felt I had understood the essence of what I should do, being deceived only about details of location. I had thought I would melt into the mountain like butter into holy toast, which was greatly presumptuous. Parvati in penitent devotion had indeed vanished into Arunachala, leaving that single bosom behind, but that was different. It had been absurd for me to imagine I could do the same, leaving later generations of devotees to trace the shape of my McKee pins in the mystically absorptive rock.

  I had set my sights too high. My job was to be more like a gardener’s, taking a cutting and starting new growth in another bed, and my mission would be in Britain.

  I took comfort from an old episode in the history of Arunachala. Four hundred years previously a guru had ordered his prime disciple to go away, to what is now Bangalore. It was there that he must carry the inner torch. The explanation was that two mighty trees can never thrive next to each other. This wasn’t banishment but husbandry. The seeds spread and scatter, and the strength is in the distance, not the closeness. And after all, Bangalore (or whatever it was called back then) is on the Deccan plateau, well elevated and much cooler. Having to go back to England was no more than the modern equivalent of being sent to Bangalore.

  In my mind I had staked everything on the transformation India was going to work on me, and I had given no thought to coming home. In my mind I had staked everything on the transformation India was going to work on me, and I had given no thought to coming home. My previous concerns had been trumped by spiritual awareness. Making progress in the world was no longer a tempting illusion. I was too old to go through the motions. Cleverness and willpower had been my bath toys, and I had played with them very happily, until the day I looked out of the window and saw the sea.

  A guinea-pig in a wheelchair

  Now I had little interest in reading Modern Languages at world-famous Cambridge University, and none whatever in being a guinea-pig in a wheelchair, as Downing College’s first disabled student. I had lost heart for another round of the obstacle race, but really, what was the alternative?

  At Cambridge there would be people responsible for my welfare, and Mum and Dad – however little I wanted to depend on them – would be no more than a telephone call away, yet it was a far more daunting prospect than the voyage I had made to India alone, when there was a real possibility of my having to sleep by a roadside infested by brigands. I had much less to fear from going to Cambridge, but incomparably slighter grounds for hope.

  Nevertheless I managed to convince myself that there was a spiritual mission involved, quite distinct from the next scheduled phase of my mundane education. My job was to plant the seeds of Self-Enquiry and Ramana Maharshi, first in the heart of Buckinghamshire, and then in Cambridge University itself. Why else would a place be waiting for me there? It came to me suddenly. I was to be a teacher disguised as a student, providing a wisdom that bubbled up from underneath, not mere knowledge filtering down from above.

  Cambridge was still some weeks off in the future. What mattered during that interval was the Here and the Now: Trees, Abbotsbrook, Bourne End, Bucks. The Abbotsbrook Estate would be the nursery garden for my centre. Young shoots would be watered and protected from too much sun. Morning and evening meditation would be the order of the day. Unless Mum had anything to do with it, of course.

  Her first words were ‘Welcome home, JJ! My, you’re brown. Have you turned into a little Indian yourself?’ After that, her reaction to my project for the propagation of peace and love seemed to be anger in a hundred forms. She took my five weeks away as a rejection of her love. What stung her was that I hadn’t returned chastened to her bosom. I had managed perfectly well. She listened stonily to my account of Kuppu’s willingness to clean commodes and its significance in caste terms. Buttering her up a bit, I emphasised that without the Cadbury’s Roses she had insisted I take there would have been no easy way to reward such exceptional helpfulness, but I needn’t have bothered. She was not to be won over.

  I had returned after my experiment in self-sufficiency, but while I was living in the house I was still dependent on her. She could make me pay for needing her now.

  Dad, of course, was impossible to pin down, lending a hand now and then very much on his own terms, not to be counted on. At one point he mentioned that colleagues of his at work were very interested in my trip to India. They had suggested that it would ma
ke a good feature for the Today programme. Why not have me interviewed by Jack de Manio?

  Dad had told them that I was attuned to higher priorities and wouldn’t be interested in anything like that. He was a big fan of the ego-diminishment project as long as the ego in question was mine, and from the spiritual perspective which I had espoused for so long I could hardly complain about being kept out of the limelight, now could I? Dad had beaten me at my own game.

  Mum had things pretty much her own way. Every helpful gesture had an overtone of reproach and injured pride, as if she was always muttering under her breath OH, YOU NEED ME NOW, DO YOU?

  I had failed to follow Ramana Maharshi’s example, by leaving home once and for all, making a clean break. What’s the worst thing that can happen if you do? That she will follow you wherever you go, as his mother did, with her cooking-pot and her tears.

  Mum kept nobbling my peace of mind. She had quite a talent for spiritual disruption. I felt dented and bruised by her angry subservience. Serenity had seemed so close, but it had slipped through my fingers, fingers with remarkably little talent for gripping.

  I had been led astray by my old romantic notion of the Quest – when hadn’t Ramana Maharshi always made it clear that outer trials and journeys were supremely irrelevant? Changing your life without changing your life, that was the challenge he set, and I seemed to have fallen at the first fence. Life in Bourne End, far from being transfigured, was the same only worse.

  Perhaps by going to India I had committed the spiritual equivalent of the ultimate English sin, namely queue-jumping. After all, the whole universe was Bhagavan’s ashram. Anyone who lived in that universe was part of it. I could claim no special preference by virtue of having travelled to Arunachala, and would have lost nothing by staying away.