The inner journey supersedes the outer one. Of course there’s an element of this even in the unsatisfying Western tradition – in the story of the Knight who searches for the Grail all his long life and then, when he’s dying, asks his squire for water. The squire brings it to him in the battered old cup he has used all his life, and he sees that it is the Grail … which couldn’t be found until this moment, although it had never been lost. Because it hadn’t been lost.
That’s a story which communicates directly with my tear ducts, somehow, but these are not the holy tears that signal the presence of God, I don’t think (only one of the eight physical signs, not representing any sort of quorum). Perhaps they’re even a sign of the presence of hogwash, childish feeling that hasn’t been outgrown, like the hymns that stir the blood – ‘Bread of Heaven’, ‘To Be a Pilgrim’ – almost more when the religion that underwrites them has crumbled away. The account has been closed down, but the cheques make us weep even as they bounce.
Our Bourne End neighbour Pheroza Tucker, the one who had brought round the Times of India with the news of Arthur Osborne’s death, paid a social call, though Mum warned us she’d had it up to here with India and could we please talk about something else. While Mum was out of the room I managed to tell her about the funeral pyre on Arunachala. According to Pheroza, the reason I had been hustled away at a certain stage of the proceedings was that after a time the burning body rears up like bacon (she pronounced it ‘beacon’) in a frying pan.
I ran through the Hindu litany, proud of my memory, pattering through the gross body, causal body, subtle body, when she interrupted me with a laugh, saying, ‘Don’t forget the beacon body! It’s all rather primitive to my mind. Rather peasant-y.’ I suppose Parsees parse such things differently. ‘Did you know, John, that the skull is always pierced before the flame is lit, to prevent it from exploding?’ Then Mum came in with the tea tray and we changed the subject to fruit cake.
As a Parsee Pheroza was a worshipper of fire but not someone who would use it to do such dirty work as disposing of a corpse. To her such rituals were rather undignified. In due course her dead body would be exposed on top of a Tower of Silence for the vultures to process in their own way. She would go back to India for the purpose. Bourne End was a nice enough place to live, but she wouldn’t want to die there.
Peter arrived back at Bourne End a week or so after I did, after some scenic detour of his own. It was nothing to him to add a couple of countries onto his world tour. He had with him a photograph of Ramana Maharshi which he had bought at the ashram and now offered shyly to me as a present. He hadn’t been sure whether I would approve of such an object, given that my religion involved discounting the seeming reality of everyday life and aiming to grasp the truth of non-duality behind appearances.
I wasn’t sure whether I approved either, but I was delighted. I had felt a strong impulse to buy just such an object, but had overruled myself on spiritual grounds. Now I was in the happy position of having a wish granted after I had (laboriously, grindingly, like the hoist that lifted me up over the bath in the house at Bourne End) risen above it.
As far as the family went, Peter fell in line right behind me. He supported me in everything I said. He was a staunch ally and a brick beyond praise, but he had his own vulnerabilities. Each of us had spent months in Mum’s karpa-paay, her womb-bag, and she knew how to undermine us from within as well as erode us from the outside. The fraternal fortress of tranquillity was under constant attack.
I reached the point where I really didn’t see how I could hold out much longer. I prayed for help – help sooner rather than later. Sri Bhagavan was the shape divinity took in my mind, but as I was back in England now, worse luck, it seemed a good idea to hedge my bets, so I prayed to my old friend Jesus Christ, and to God the Father as well. I didn’t forget to add a dash of Allah to the cocktail of divine appeal. Desperation is a strongly œcumenical force.
It wasn’t more than a few hours later when the phone rang. Mum answered with genteel poise and warmth (‘Bourne End 21176’) as she always did. The world of tele-communications was expanding convulsively around us, and we in Bourne End now had five-digit numbers.
No one could have guessed the bleakness of Mum’s underlying mood from the way she crooned into the receiver. ‘Oh, hello, Malcolm … how lovely to hear your voice … Yes … yes … yes he’s back and well settled in … yes … yes … brown as a nut. Oh, he had a wonderful time. He’s very full of his experiences … No it doesn’t do much for me I’m afraid, but that’s really not the point, is it? My only concern is for his happiness … Yes, Downing College. After that, who knows? I don’t think there are many vacancies these days for people to get paid for sitting around on their bottoms doing nothing, but if anyone can make a living from that I dare say John can …’
Mum’s theory of conversation seemed to be that you could say any number of disobliging things about people as long as the last thing you said was more or less positive, so I wasn’t surprised to hear her start to sign off with ‘Perhaps we should all take a leaf from his book … wouldn’t life be lovely if it all worked like that?’
Then the conversation took a new turn. Mum’s voice became if anything even sweeter, but her hand tightened on the receiver and she stuck her chin out. ‘What’s that? … Oh yes, Malcolm, of course you can … You know John, he’d love it … But promise you’ll say if you get bored? There’s no kindness in humouring him. Shall we say about three? … Perfect! … bye-eee …’
Her obliging manner was a pale shadow of itself by the time the phone was back in its cradle. ‘That was Malcolm Washbourne,’ she said sourly. ‘He says he’s dying to hear all about your experiences in India, and he’s coming over to see you at about three o’clock. How lovely for you.’
The last door-slam
She seemed enormously put off herself. ‘Now, what do you want for lunch? If you can think of a way of getting a meal to cook by itself while you sit on your bottom, please pass it on. I’d be glad to put my feet up myself.’ She went into the kitchen, slamming the door behind her, so that I ached to be back with Mrs Osborne, with her wild-fig dishes and her big dog-battering stick and the scoldings that seemed loving by comparison.
I couldn’t understand why I was being reproached for needing food, while Peter was catered for as a matter of course. He could easily have managed for himself in the kitchen, and would have left enough mess to keep Mum grumbling contentedly for days. I didn’t argue the toss. In theory I could always get the last word, but Mum would always have the last door-slam. Conversational manœuvres, however crushing, will always come second to repartee of that physical sort. The doors in that house must have been sturdy indeed, to survive the years of melodramatic slamming.
Still, I had resources of my own. Mrs Osborne had scared me half to death about the use of aluminium pans in cookery. We were destroying ourselves at every mealtime, as surely as the Roman patricians did with their lead plates and cutlery, poisoning their brains while the plebs ate off wooden plates with their hands. There was a book on the subject: Aluminium: A Menace to Health by Mark Clement.
When I got home, I got hold of a copy (it was published by Thorsons). I must have driven Mum mad by waving it under her nose, and refusing to eat anything ever again that came out of one of those sinister health-destroying pans. As if I wasn’t fussy enough about food, without becoming obsessed about its preparation and accusing her of killing us all under cover of nurture. If she had beaten me about the head with an aluminium pan, screaming, ‘How’s your brain working now? Rotting, is it? Is it?’, any decent lawyer would have got her off with probation, maybe words of praise from the judge.
Peter joined the conspiracy by looking for scratches in the pans Mum used. ‘That shows the bits which came off when she slashes the potatoes with her knife,’ he told me. ‘And we’re all eating them!’ We made her buy a stainless-steel one, though on the Granny principle of balancing the books, albeit with lopsided contributions,
I gave a little something towards it – ten shillings. I’ve stuck to my guns, though, and avoided aluminium ever since. If my brain goes bad I won’t hold the kitchen cupboard responsible.
Mum hated it when we ganged up on her. Unfortunately she had a talent for uniting the opposition, and had inherited none of Granny’s flair for playing people off against each other.
After that miraculous phone call I felt a deep thrill of hope within me. I had prayed to God to send reinforcements, and now Malcolm was coming to visit. He was the only one of our neighbours who seemed to enjoy spending time with me, and Mum had never really understood that. I didn’t exactly understand it myself – we weren’t on a wave-length, exactly, we were like two notes at opposite ends of a keyboard, so that you can’t really decide whether they harmonise or clash. But Mum couldn’t believe his interest in me was real, that two such different people could agree on anything. Malcolm worked in advertising, which made his spiritual interests no more than playacting to her way of thinking.
I disagreed. The products Malcolm was called on to sell were dreams in the first place, and the slogans and campaigns he came up with were dreams about dreams. They were Maya squared, Maya rampant and in spades. Dreams were his medium and his currency, so it followed that reality must be his consolation. He must find the square root of Maya in meditation, where objects, symbols, words and ideas dissolve impartially, leaving a light that has no source and casts no shadow.
I was benefiting from the resumption of my meditation practice, now that I was no longer trying to light my little match in the up-draught of a huge conflagration.
Malcolm and I would talk for hours, on subjects literary and metaphysical. Malcolm always said we were ‘crackajolking away like a hearse on fire’, a splendid phrase he had picked up from Finnegans Wake. Like most people (not just advertising men, those great experts at making a little go a long way) he had probably read only one page, but he’d found himself a good one. I hadn’t so much as looked at the book, and when I did I was disappointed to find nothing that fell under my eyes matching up to the sample.
Malcolm enjoyed banter and teasing. In fact I think he positively enjoyed being told what a hopeless case of materialism he was. I dare say the actual cultivation of his spirituality came second, though he had read almost as many of the relevant books – or book-jackets – as I had and kept up pretty well.
It was high time for some spiritual work. The hearse might be on fire, but I had a firm grip on the appropriate extinguisher. Truly our astral tongues were hanging out for water to quench the hearse-fire of the Samsara, the action-reaction Ocean of births and deaths. Now that I was fully tanked up with Indian juice, I could provide him with the first cooling drink for months. I would lead us out of the maze of misery and set us on the road to freedom.
Mum bustled about Malcolm when he arrived, exactly as if he was her guest rather than mine, plying him with tea and cakes. Malcolm asked me about what I ate in India, a subject that made Mum roll her eyes, out of his line of sight but well within mine. Shouldn’t it have been the other way round, making him complicit with her exasperation? Mum could never quite get the hang of conspiracies.
I suggested that we go to my room (mine and Peter’s) and try to meditate. Malcolm was a dab-hand at sitting with his legs crossed, in a sort of informal lotus position, although conditions on the floor weren’t ideal (Mum had insisted on lino rather than carpet for fear of what the wheelchair would track in). I could just about manage a symbolic crossing of the ankles in the wheelchair. After a minute or so even this token position became painful, but I knew from the Maharshi’s example that a dispensation from orthodox posture was spiritually unimportant.
From the perspective of the wheelchair I could see the zone of thinning in Malcolm’s hair, where the scalp showed dimly pink. It was a joy in itself to be looking down rather than up. I felt a rush of privileged piety.
‘I really don’t think I need a mantra,’ Malcolm said. ‘After a week at work my mind goes blank of its own accord.’
The mind stops twitching
‘The mantra is nothing in itself,’ I cooed. ‘But the mind, like the tip of an elephant’s trunk, must always be grasping something. So the mahout gives the elephant a chain to hold and it loses its restlessness. Similarly when provided with a mantra the mind stops twitching.’ I didn’t actually claim to have seen elephants and their keepers in India, but I let it be understood. In fact I had seen elephants only at Whipsnade. In India I had seen nothing larger than water buffalo. Large enough, particularly from my low angle of vision. In worldly terms they were larger than the cow on the mountain. Her immensity was of a different kind.
Peter came to join us, slipping into the room and joining our meditation like someone sliding into still, deep water. The atmosphere was blissful, a dynamo of silence in a house too often agitated by unadmitted discord and dissension.
After a period that we could only have guessed at in our timeless state, but was certainly less than ten minutes, Mum eased the door open. She couldn’t bear not knowing what we were up to. She moved like an actress tiptoeing ostentatiously on stage to do something illicit. After peering round, she retreated in the same way, closing the door with a careful quietness that was existentially much more definite than a bang.
Malcolm’s eyes flew open, and mine must have been open already, to notice it happening. He frowned. ‘I’m afraid my psychic capacitors aren’t up to the job of absorbing Laura’s surplus energies. And what a shame – meditation would do her no end of good.’ He hoped she would come round to the idea of such soul-refreshment in time. I tried to imagine it.
‘The world is too much with us,’ I said thoughtfully, and Peter said, ‘Mum is too much with us.’ We tried to be faithful to our task, but then Audrey and her friend Lorraine crept in, shushing each other, and took up enviably supple lotus positions, their bones flowing round corners, on a spare patch of floor. They started to murmur something just below the level of distinctness, so that ears which were straining to tune out had no choice but to tune back in. As the murmuring became louder, their mantra revealed itself in a storm of giggles as ‘Mrs Brown went to town, With her knickers hanging down, Mrs Green saw the scene, Put it in a magazine.’
That broke the mood for good. Malcolm stretched and stood up, and Peter chased the girls out of the room, which was exactly what they wanted.
Later that evening I heard Mum complain about it to Dad. ‘He’s trying to turn this house into a bloody ashram,’ she said, ‘or whatever we’re supposed to call it.’ Dad’s reply was him all over, changing sides to keep her guessing: ‘And would it be such a bad thing if he succeeded? You’ve got your sewing circle, after all. Let him have his prayer meeting, and try to look on the bright side – at least they don’t sing.’ Dad seemed to have the knack of tossing a coin inside himself at times like these, letting Heads or Tails decide which way he would jump in an argument, so that agreement and dissent were equally disorienting for Mum.
She wasn’t someone with any talent for looking on the bright side, but on this occasion Dad wanted her at least to try. At other times when Malcolm came over to meditate, she made a better job of keeping her distance. She went to the other end of the house and emitted her sighs from there, though I’m sure she knew they could find me through the walls.
I felt that a campaign of holiness had been well begun. I was quite able to overlook the hypocrisy of the whole thing. Underneath my Indian tan I was a whited sepulchre, far whiter than the Taj Mahal. I was really enjoying ruling the roost. We are always fighting back our tears at the cremation of the ego, only to find it has been throwing dust in our eyes, not ashes, all along.
I had a nerve leading a group in meditation, when I had only been able to achieve that mind-free state of mind since my return from India. I was teaching lessons that I barely knew myself. In Dad’s vocabulary I was shamming and no mistake. My disciples deserved better, even if they were only an advertising man with a bad conscience and a tra
inee chef with an unkillable respect for his older brother. Audrey and Lorraine had pretty much the right idea.
It would have served me right to be found out, except that there were others involved. I would have betrayed my guru by allowing Malcolm and Peter to have a low opinion of him through my own bad behaviour.
Similia Similibus
I went to India a Hindu, and I returned to Bourne End a Hindu and a homœopath. Soon I had Mrs Pavey hard at work tracking down copies of Magic of the Minimum Dose and its indefatigable sequels, and helping me to read widely in the subject.
Finally I summoned up the courage to ask Flanny for a referral to the Royal Homœopathic Hospital, on Great Ormond Street, the institution which had achieved marvellous results in a long-ago cholera epidemic, and so given a dissident tradition a foothold in national life. Flanny snorted a bit down her horse’s face, but she had learned by this time to let me go my own way.
The pretext for this visit to what I regarded as the mother church of the whole fascinating cult was to find a remedy for the dandruff that had plagued me for years. More than a pretext, really – I’d have been happy to see the back of those flakes which Mum and Dad refused to refer to except as scurf. I don’t know why scurf is U and dandruff is a suburban condition. Like any euphemism it soon takes on a taint of the word that’s being avoided. Call it what you like, call it seborrhœa if you must – just stop it happening to my scalp.
The hospital looked like any other, both inside and out, but I was heartened to realise the hospital smell was faint, barely detectable. The doctor asked me a whole range of wide-ranging questions. Not just the usual ones, but impressionistic ones – what did I dream about, habitually? What was my favourite, what was my least favourite type of weather? He was being unusually thorough, I thought, but perhaps some of these were trick questions.
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