by Sharon Maas
'So what's the practical matter you wanted to talk about, Saroj?'
'Oh, nothing in particular. Just that I wish you'd change the subject. This is all too abstract for me.'
'Well, I have a practical subject I want to discuss. Why don't Ganesh and his wife come and see me?'
They stared at him. Then Nat looked at Saroj with triumph in his eyes and a wide grin across his face, and when Saroj could only stammer in reply to Baba's question Nat said, 'Pitaji, Ganesh and his wife will be here this time tomorrow. I guarantee it.'
'Baba, we thought, we thought...' Saroj grasped for words.
'You thought I'm a very stupid, hard-headed old man incapable of admitting his errors. Well, as Nat has just so lucidly explained, there are absolutely no distinctions between the various physical forms, so why get het up? And even a poor ignorant non-dualist like myself must remember Krishna's words on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, that the wise man remains in equanimity no matter what befalls him. So let them come and stop treating me like a senile old fool. Let them come!'
65
Chapter Sixty-five
Saroj
London, 1970
The papers, bundled together and tied with twine, almost fell apart in Saroj's fingers. She had found them in a suitcase under Deodat's bed, the suitcase containing his private correspondence and other personal papers. She had gone through the papers one by one, and made two piles, one to throw away, and one consisting of official papers, to keep and to deal with; Baba, having lost interest in worldly matters, had given her authority to dispose of everything. ‘Everything?’ she had asked, and ‘Everything,’ he had firmly replied. ‘I am only waiting to untie the strings that bind me to this earth.’
Most of these papers would almost certainly belong on the throw-away heap, but Saroj, sighing, untied the bundle the way she had untied every other bundle.
Deodat's correspondence with India had been sparse, yet constant. But till now everything had been unreadable, all written in Bengali, except the envelopes, which were addressed in English. Of course, they could just as well throw out everything wholesale. Gan had suggested that. But Saroj had refused; her meticulous, methodical nature did not permit such slipshod disposal of material, and so it was up to her to go through it all, to sift through the chaff for, perhaps, a few grains of wheat.
What she now held in her hand was promising: four Indian red-and-blue-edged air-letter forms with return addresses in English. She turned them over, and on three of them read a return address from various Roys in Calcutta. The fourth letter was different. The spidery hand was hard to read, but, squinting in the dusky light of Deodat's abandoned flat, Saroj made out the capitalised word Madras. She started. Ma was from Madras, not Baba. But all Ma's personal correspondence had perished with her. Back in Guyana, Baba had conducted his private affairs from his office; home, he had always claimed, was too chaotic, with children running in and out all day. And it was in his office that he kept the rickety old typewriter with which he wrote his letters, both business and private, which was why these papers had survived.
Saroj unfolded the air-letter form, so thin and flimsy it threatened to fall apart in her hands. Feeling like a trespasser on forbidden territory, she read it.
It was difficult, and took some time, for the words were scrawled more than written, faded with age and almost illegible. And when she had read it she read it again, and then copied the words down into a half-empty exercise book she had found among the papers, the other half-filled with lists of numbers of some arcane meaning.
Dear Sir,
My family was very interested to read your advertisement in The Hindu as enclosed herewith. I am hurrying to dispatch for your immediate notice a photograph of my younger sister who is a beautiful young Brahmin unfortunately widowed at a tender age, without issue, although she is proven capable of producing live healthy offspring. Unfortunately however the fine son she produced is now deceased as is her late husband. I am seeking remarriage for my sister and distance is no hindrance. Although this is not a recent photograph, having been taken before her marriage, I am sure you will deduce that my sister is a highly suitable match for your esteemed personal self. She is also beautiful and extremely homely. Her English is as you require excellent. She is also highly skilled in cooking and in all housewifely duties. Should this humble application arrest your interest, please reply to above address.
Yours truly
The signature was illegible, but at the top of the letter was printed the name: G. P. Iyer, followed by a Madras address. Gopal Uncle.
The eternal busybody and matchmaker. This, then, was the letter that had joined Ma to Baba, the letter received in answer to the little ad pasted in Balwant Uncle's family archives, the letter that had accompanied that first photo of a young and hopeful Ma.
Saroj copied everything into the exercise book. Her thoughts were in confusion: excitement, regret, curiosity, hope, all jumbled together, but most of all the overwhelming desire to share all this with her nearest, with Ganesh and Trixie, but most of all with Nat.
She longed, as always when they were apart, for him. But now these words from the past conjured back a certain anguish, a deep abyss of unknowing. Ma was an unhealed wound within her, a wound that still throbbed with pain, behind the joy and the beauty of the present moment. She longed to share with Nat the pain of losing Ma. She wished she had a photo she could show him, but all photos of Ma except Balwant Uncle's — an ironic twist of fate, Saroj thought — had been destroyed in the fire. Nat must know this part of her life. Must know Ma. Touch the pain.
Saroj offered her wounds to Nat. He offered her the wounds of others. 'Their wounds are deeper than yours, Saroj. Come with me, to India. Come and share my work. You'll see: there's no greater satisfaction.'
'But I've only just started my studies,' objected Saroj. 'How can I?'
'There are good universities in Madras and in Bangalore. And when you're finished you'll have your hands full at Prasad Nagar. There's so much to be done. I'm thinking, Saroj, I'm thinking of the women. You'd be a godsend! Dad and I do our best but, you know, they're shy with men. We can't reach them in the way you could. We can't talk to them about things like birth control and menstruation and they don't like us attending their births. You could change all that.'
'You're talking about a vocation, Nat. I don't know if I'm made of that stuff.'
'You've always aimed for the best, for the highest. This is the highest. Believe me.'
Nat's enthusiasm was contagious. Prasad Nagar, Saroj understood, must surely be heaven on earth. Nat made it sound as if just setting foot on the soil of Prasad Nagar was the greatest good that could befall a human being; that working for the poor, for free, in primitive mud huts or under the glaring sun, with the most rudimentary of equipment, with random medicines begged from and donated by the pharmaceutical giants, was the highest honour and privilege God could ever bestow. He almost had her convinced.
'India just seems so far away, so foreign,' she now confessed.
'It's where your roots are. And it's… Saroj, look, if you love me you'll love India. Either you love India or you hate it, and all I am, all you know of me, is what it is because of India. The real India, the India behind the chaos and the dirt and the madness and the ugliness, the India of the spirit. You'll feel it. I know it. And you'll love it. You'll fall under the spell, just as I have.'
'There's a part of me, the old part from my childhood, that rejects India completely. But there's another element, it's sort of fuzzy right now but I feel it nevertheless. A fascination. A mystery, to be unfolded. And this letter, this Gopal Uncle, holds the key. I'd like to see him again, Nat. I'd like to find out more. I need to know what and who Ma really was, what her life was before she crossed the ocean and started from scratch. As if, discovering Ma, I'll discover myself.'
'You will. I guarantee it.'
And that is how Nat and Saroj found themselves on a plane to Colombo a few weeks later. Baba had been saf
ely and temporarily settled in a small nursing home until such time as they had made arrangements for him in Prasad Nagar; then Saroj would fly back to London and accompany him over on the long sea voyage.
Flying is hovering in stillness, Saroj thought. An endless space between past and future. All that has been has come to a standstill, doors have been closed, and new ones will open; and yet, the doors that open to my future will also open to my past, not my own personal past but centuries of ancestors, generations of men and women meeting and marrying and making children, and I am at the very peak of this process, born halfway across the globe, and now I am returning. Home!
The very vastness of it stunned her. Her ignorance of her roots shamed her. With all her being she strained forward, eager to absorb and to understand and to know who she was, where she came from. It seemed that a great wealth was waiting for her, just beyond her grasp; that she had ever been a chalice, but turned upside down, ignoring that wealth, and all that was required now was to reverse that chalice, hold it up, open herself, and let all that wealth flow into her.
Saroj and Nat checked into a hotel a half-hour's drive from Colombo's airport. They had a room with a balcony overlooking the beach, the sea at their doorstep, and two weeks for themselves. They arrived at night, exhausted from the journey, too tired to do more than collapse into the double bed in the middle of the room, she wrapped in his arms, their first night spent together.
Dawn called them with the sweet lapping of water on sand and the tentative chirp of a bird on the balcony railing. They woke into the sweetness of a love that was as wide and encompassing as the ocean, a love so secure and so deep they knew it had been there long before them, only waiting for their recognition, a love that welcomed them as the ocean closes around an early morning worshipper. They melted into each other as a salt doll melts in the ocean. They found each other in stillness which was movement, and movement which was stillness. Love was oneness; to lose one's identity in love was not to lose oneself, but to find oneself in the other, for the unity of two was greater and vaster than the sum of two separate parts. Two flames melted into one.
Later they swam. The water was soft and warm, their skin golden and glistening, their eyes clear and laughing. Days melted into nights and nights into days, and there was neither day nor night but only undulating time, measured only by that love which grew and bloomed and drew them constantly closer into itself, ticked away by the ring of their laughter and their footsteps on the sand.
'Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could preserve time — hide it away in a capsule where no-one ever goes, except us? And whenever we feel like it, we could enter that capsule, return to this time, and everything is just the way it is now, and nothing has changed?'
Saroj spoke almost in a whisper. She and Nat sat at the water's edge, barely out of reach of the frothing sheets of water that slid up towards them, trying in vain to nip at their toes. It was dusk; just a minute ago the last sliver of glowing sun had slipped behind the horizon. They were alone. The beach was empty of life, and except for the blinking lights of an aeroplane circling to land at Colombo the sky was vast, cloudless, and devoid of all movement.
Nat squeezed her closer to him.
'You're cold,' he said, and then, 'are you thinking of tomorrow? Are you afraid?'
'Yes, Nat. I wish tomorrow would never come. I wish this would never end. I don't want to go to Madras or see anyone else ever again, but only be here now, with you.'
'You'll always be here now, with me,' said Nat. 'Because wherever you are, I'll be there too. Every moment of every day and every night. Even if you can't see me, hear me, feel me, I'm there. I am you, Saroj. Don't you feel it, don't you know? Always and everywhere.'
'Nat, oh yes, Nat, of course. But still. This is just so… so perfect. I wish it would never end. And it will end. Tomorrow. The minute we step off that plane in Madras the outside world will catch up with us, will grab us and claim us.'
'And that's what you're afraid of.'
'Not afraid, really. I just don't want it to happen. It's all so far away. All that matters is this. And this time tomorrow it'll be all over. Past tense.'
'No, it won't be over. Because wherever we are it's still here. Here, Saroj, here, inside us! That's what's real, and not all the things that are waiting over there.'
He waved out over the ocean, westwards, towards India. India, which had seemed like a magnet drawing Saroj, now threatened her. It was like a hulking beast that would devour her, suck her in, absorb her into itself and destroy this deep perfection she now shared with Nat. She shuddered and huddled into him. She had no name for her fear. Perhaps it was simply the awareness that such happiness, such perfection, could never be for ever, that something so precious was also so very fragile…
I don't deserve this, she found herself thinking, almost against her will. It is so precious, so priceless. So very perishable. She reached out to grasp it to herself, but in grasping it all she found was fear. It cannot last, said that fear. Something terrible will happen. It will be shattered. It is not for me. I am too imperfect; how can I hold such perfection?
66
Chapter Sixty-six
Savitri
An Ashram in Madras State; Madras, 1944
Savitri arrived at the Asramam in the searing heat of midday. There was no sign of life, except for a peacock perched on the roof of the nearest hut. Under a peepal tree a dog stretched out in sleep, its tail twitching away the flies. Savitri walked between the few whitewashed, thatched-roofed huts scattered around the open grounds, stepping gingerly on red sand so hot it tore at the soles of her bare feet.
A man in the orange cloth of a sannyasin sat fanning himself with a fan of peacock's feathers on the porch of one of the huts. He gestured for her to approach, and when she came near, said, 'Have you just come? Have you taken meals yet?'
'No,' said Savitri.
'Would you prefer to take meals, or shall I take you to the Maharshi?'
'Take me to him,' whispered Savitri.
The sannyasin rose, retied his lungi, placed his upper cloth over his head and left the shade of the porch to show her the way.
'In here,' the sannyasin said in a voice hushed with awe. 'He is always alone at this time but he likes visitors to come at all times. Come in, come in.'
At first, Savitri thought the room was empty. It was dark, after the glare of outdoors. The hut had a low thatched roof, the shutters to the windows were closed, and the black flagstones were cool as she stepped inside and her eyes adjusted to the darkness.
Somewhere a clock ticked; the only sound in a silence so palpable she felt she could reach out and touch it, which seemed to fill every atom of her being.
In the left-hand corner of the room was a couch, the only piece of furniture in the room. On it a man reclined. Before the couch another man, probably an attendant, sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the wall, dozing. On a small wooden stool burned a tiny oil-lamp, next to which three sticks of incense burned, white, curling tendrils of scent rising up, intermingling, dissolving into thin air. Rose petals lay drying in a brass dish, along with an untidy heap of vibhuti and kum-kum. The mingled aroma of those fragrances, of rose and burning ghee, incense and vibhuti, seemed to seep all through her tortured thoughts, calming and cooling.
The man on the couch wore nothing but a loincloth. His hair was white; he was aging, perhaps in his seventies, perhaps older, perhaps younger. It was hard to tell. He was smiling slightly, and his eyes rested on her. She felt it. They were cool as the full moon. They saw through her. She felt transparent under that gaze, as if her whole life and all her agony lay spread out as a crumpled sheet between them, open for him to see. She herself could see little, for tears were brimming up in her eyes, clouding her vision. She slowly walked up to the man, raised her hands in Namaste. He returned the Namaste. Her legs trembled as she bowed; she had lost control of her body. She fell to the floor and the sobs came; they heaved through her body from an inner depth s
o secret, so hidden, from a remote recess within her protected from view by layers and stratums and crusts of sorrow, all of which collapsed and dissolved and melted into her tears. Her body heaved, bent double in pain as she sobbed alone on the cool black flagstones. She made great gulping, spluttering noises yet felt no shame and no inclination to shame. The tears would never dry, they flowed and flowed and would flow for all eternity, she would cry an ocean of tears, for ever and ever and still her misery would not end, it was everlasting; it was too great, too endless ever to be measured or ever to cease.
It seemed she had been sobbing for an eternity when, of their own accord, the tears stopped. Their stopping took her by surprise.
After a while she sat up, dried her eyes on a corner of her sari, opened them. Her eyes met his. He was smiling, and his gaze still rested on her like a great warm glow. She could not remove her eyes. No words came. There was no need of words. She simply looked, and let him look, and her soul was naked and he saw every corner of it and it was good.
Savitri, she who had healed so many, felt now the healing hand on herself. But not a hand; something more subtle than a hand. A healing light. So powerful, it drew the ghostly darkness of pain into itself and left her light as ether, unburdened, and free. She felt, rather than heard, the door to the hut opening and someone enter. Gradually, the room filled with people, who entered in silence and sat in silence. The midday break was over.