by Anita Desai
Then, when the silence and its components had gathered into a pressure they would not be able to bear any longer, the grey-haired woman in front of them lifted her arms and held them out. Since it was the first movement she had made, they were transfixed and watched her slowly bring her hands together and rub her palms against each other as if she were washing them, or crushing something invisible.
‘Ahh,’ cried the people in the front row, and ‘Ahh,’ the cry was taken up by others so that their ‘Ahhs’ rippled through the room and lapped against Sophie and Matteo, who strained to see the reason for their wonder. They could see nothing that had not been there before but gradually became aware that instead of the conflicting, noisy and obstreperous odours that had earlier filled the room, there was now a sweet scent of flowers – tuberoses, spider lilies, jasmine and roses – swirling almost visibly through the brightly lit pink room. Sophie craned to see what was the source of the perfume, and what was it that made people exclaim in wonder and shake their heads in amazement. Pierre Eduard cried, ‘Miraculous! Miraculous!’ and his friend wagged his head and smiled as if to say, ‘See, did I not tell you?’ Matteo said nothing.
So they had come to see a performance of magic tricks, Sophie thought, sinking back on her heels in disappointment. She watched as the elderly woman lowered her hands almost to her knees, then changed the movement and waved them over a brass tray, heaped with fruit and small brass ritual objects, that stood on the floor in front of her. As she did so, the brass objects revealed themselves to be lamps: small flames flickered up from them.
The people called out louder still in wonder. The woman rose, slowly, lifting the tray in her hands, and walked away into the room beyond. Through the open door they could see her carrying it across to what seemed to be an altar in a niche in the wall for it contained a brass idol, an oleograph of a goddess, some incense and a book bound in red cloth. With her back to the people in the pink room, she began to revolve the tray slowly around these several objects and as she did so some people who had been seated in the darkness of the unlit room struck up on the drums they held on their laps and loudly clanged their cymbals. With this introduction of music into the ceremony, everyone’s feelings of praise seemed released and, throwing back their heads and clapping their hands, they sang:
‘Glory to Shiva,
Glory to the Mother.
The light of Shiva
Shines from the Mother.
Glory, Glory, Glory!’
Pierre Eduard would not go to sleep. He sat at the table in the restaurant and kept shaking his head in wonder at what he had witnessed.
‘But Pierre Eduard,’ Sophie protested, ‘I have seen tricks like that at parties and magic shows. When I was a child, my parents would engage magicians to entertain us. What is so –’ she was going to say ‘magical’ but stopped to search for a more critical word.
Pierre Eduard’s face became contorted with anger. ‘But did she do it for money? As entertainment? Didn’t you see why she did it? For the glory of God! As a form of worship!’
Sophie shrugged and lit a cigarette. ‘So what’s the difference?’
Pierre Eduard began to tear his hair at her cynicism but Matteo, who had been silent so far, said suddenly, ‘The difference is what Pierre Eduard said – not of how she did it, but why she did it.’
Sophie took the cigarette out of her mouth and regarded him with surprise. She said, ‘All right then, she did it for-the-glory-of-God. Can’t she find a better way of worshipping him than with party tricks?’
Pierre Eduard flung himself forward and beat at the table with his fists. The waiter, wiping glasses at the counter, stared. Sophie blew streams of smoke through her nostrils and smiled.
‘Can there not be many ways, more than one way – the Christian way – to glorify God?’ he raged. ‘Hers is to create belief in people, through her powers. Is that wrong?’
Sophie looked at him in the throes of his ardent belief and wonder. She smoked her cigarette down to a stub and then crushed it in a saucer. ‘Depends on what she gets them to believe,’ she said. ‘What if all it is is that God can do party tricks?’ She got up. ‘I’m going to bed. That train ride nearly killed me. I won’t go again.’
Pierre Eduard let out a groan. Matteo scratched at his flea bites reflectively.
That was what Sophie suspected most – Matteo’s reflectiveness. She kept a sharp and suspicious eye on him, especially when Mr Pandey came to visit them.
Swinging his leg energetically up and down under the table in the restaurant, Mr Pandey enthused. ‘She is great, the Perfume Saint, no?’ Up and down, up and down swung his leg. ‘I can show you others, many others like her – saints, great souls, siddhis. Our country is full of such people who have found enlightenment. I will take you to see others if you like.’
Matteo too, as if hypnotised, swung his leg – up, down, up, down – although more slowly, in wide pyjamas. He had given up wearing Western dress – he was dressed now in wide pyjamas and a cotton vest bought from a pavement stall, already tattered and faded from the original red to a mottled salmon pink. Cautiously, he asked, ‘Are they here, nearby?’
‘Here only,’ Mr Pandey assured him, sweeping his arm to include the sooty, sulphurous air inside the stifling restaurant. ‘Here, everywhere. Come, I will show you.’
Sophie protested, ‘We were going to the beach today.’
‘Chowpatty beach? Very good, very good,’ Mr Pandey pounded his leg furiously in the air. ‘At Chowpatty beach itself there are saints.’
While Sophie walked determinedly in the surf that crept over the sand to wash over her feet, and tried to derive vicarious pleasure from watching a family of Bombay women and children walking into the waves with their saris and frocks tucked up at their waists, screaming when a wave lifted to dash itself at them and leave them drenched, she saw from the corner of her eye Matteo following Mr Pandey from one live sideshow to another: a begger with no limbs who sat on a wooden cart and held out a can for alms between his teeth; a man who was painting a picture of his favoured saint on the sand in powdered chalk – bright yellows and pinks and violets; a woman who wore a string of wooden beads around her neck and held another in her hand, and lectured to a reverential crowd.
Coming out of the waves, her skirt, wet with sand, dragging at her ankles, she caught up with them and told Matteo, ‘You look like a woman in an Italian market, shopping for vegetables.’
‘Very good,’ laughed Mr Pandey who had overheard, ‘but it is fish he is buying, madam, fish.’
Another time she did have Matteo to herself by the sea. They walked along the Worli seaface, bending over as the wind struck at them, laughing when the waves climbed so high over the seawall that they towered, briefly, glittering over their heads, and then washed over the street to the delighted shrieks of the other walkers.
‘Monsoon is coming!’ they heard children scream. ‘Monsoon is coming!’
‘When?’ Sophie asked, screwing up her eyes at the livid sky, the heavy leaden light of afternoon. ‘I don’t see it, do you?’
‘Sophie, Sophie,’ Matteo said, putting an arm over her shoulders and shaking her, ‘will you believe only what you see?’
The monsoon did come, that very night, and they climbed up onto the flat roof to feel it pouring down while the city went collectively mad. Cars were stalled in the streets, horns honking; urchins splashed through the floods and bargained with the drivers over the price of pushing them out; drains clogged and overflowed, shoes floated away in the gutters, and people waded across the streets holding onto useless umbrellas that had been battered into shreds. Thunder boomed and ricocheted off the walls and lightning flashed out at sea, over and over. Sophie and Matteo were not alone on the roof – all the other inhabitants of Hotel Monaco were celebrating by leaping up and down, hugging each other, throwing their arms up and letting the rain wash over them. No matter how filthy it might all have been, that night the water seemed a blessing coming after the heat of th
e long summer days, cleansing and refreshing.
In their room, after stripping off their soaked clothes, Sophie and Matteo made love for the first time since they had come to the hotel. Laying his hand on her shoulder and curling her damp hair about his finger, Matteo said, ‘It’s like being children again, isn’t it?’
‘I thought you hated your childhood,’ Sophie said. The dampness of the hard cement floor was beginning to penetrate her, bleakly. ‘Or have you come here to have another?’ she asked suddenly.
Matteo lifted himself onto an elbow and lowered his face right into hers. ‘The past is over, Sophie,’ he said, ‘over, over, over – not to be repeated. Don’t repeat it.’ He pressed his finger on her lip, hard.
The roof of the Hotel Monaco had soon taken as much rain as it could hold. Saturated, it could not shelter them from the monsoon much longer. Everywhere in their room damp patches were creeping across the walls, the ceiling and the floor, and turning green with mildew. Sophie set out mugs and basins and tumblers to catch the worst drips, but they overflowed quickly. The clothes she washed hung about limply on the line in the humid air.
Pierre Eduard had fever and lay in bed: his body ached till he groaned, and Sophie had to bite her tongue in order to be patient and gentle and bring him flasks of tea from the restaurant downstairs. Mr Pandey came to see them and said, ‘Very damp, very bad here – how much are you paying?’ When they unwillingly revealed to him how much, in their innocence, they paid, he told them, ‘I can get you rooms in an ashram. Nice ashram, nice rooms, very cheap.’ Sophie glared: she had begun to think him a sinister deus ex machina in their lives. Of course Matteo and Pierre Eduard took him as a divine sign.
‘Who is he?’ she cried angrily, throwing damp clothes into her rucksack. ‘Why does he keep coming here? What does he want?’ She swept her toilet articles off shelves and ledges, making them fall to the floor.
Matteo, who was on his feet again, picked them up for her. ‘He is helping us,’ he said.
‘You call it help?’ Sophie could already visualise the ashram in which they were to be trapped: a place just like the Hotel Monaco only filled not by tourists with guide books but tourists with holy scriptures – the ones Mr Pandey and Pierre Eduard called ‘devotees’. This whole country, she reflected, was populated with devotees; the gods could not have enough: now they recruited them from abroad as well.
She was very nearly right, although not entirely. They made their way through the city, tense with expectation – sometimes on a bus, sometimes on the train, then in a rickshaw and finally on foot, arriving at the ashram tired and silent. It consisted of three or four floors of small rooms in straight rows off long verandas in a rainstreaked building that stood in a yard filled with overflowing drains and floating debris behind an unfinished temple building of unpainted grey concrete, fitted up with a loudspeaker system and iron-barred doors behind which the deities lived in dim lamplight. On the veranda balustrade all the crows in Bombay seemed to have gathered to huddle, shaking their bedraggled feathers and letting out caws of complaint at the season and their fate.
Matteo followed Sophie up a steep flight of stairs to one of the small rooms off the veranda. ‘Cheer up,’ he said, remembering one of Fabian’s phrases. ‘It will be better tomorrow.’
She lifted the rucksack off her back and hurled it to the floor.
It did not stop raining all of July and all of August. Sophie had been trying to keep a diary and plan articles she might write for a German magazine, but now found herself doing little else but hanging their wet clothes and belongings on a string across the room to dry and running out onto the veranda to drive away the crows that maddened her with their cries from before sunrise to after sunset. The others who lived along the veranda – and Sophie had been wrong about them, none were foreign tourists, they were all Indian families and Indian pilgrims – laughed to see her dart out screaming and waving her arms. The crows hopped off the ledge, flapped about in the rain like clowns miming for an audience, then drifted back and settled down on the ledge again, shaking their feathers and giving extra loud caws of indignation and outrage.
For meals they all went down to the dining hall on the ground floor, a long, bare room spread with mats on which steel trays were arranged in rows. Everyone settled down in front of the trays and the devotees who were on kitchen duty came out with pails of rice and dal and vegetable curries and ladled out large, soupy helpings. Sophie found it a ridiculous arrangement to sit and eat at one level. She found herself bending over double and hanging over her tray in order to get the food to her mouth with her fingers, and the others who sat beside her and opposite her watched and giggled and laughed outright to see the food slip from her fingers and spatter across her knees. One small boy who sat between his parents, large and rotund and dressed in crisp fresh clothes and shining gold jewellery, said in careful English he must have learnt in school, ‘See, she is eating like-a-crow.’ Sophie’s face reddened.
She was no more adept at bathing which also had to be done in public, communally. Standing at one of the taps, she found herself amongst a row of women, none of whom had undressed. All bathed under the taps in their saris, then somehow managed to remove the wet clothes from under the dry ones, with no flash of nudity in between. Sophie watched and observed but could never see how it was done, and decided it could not be if the clothes were jeans or a dress. She tried baring only one portion of her torso at a time but found everyone staring and heard a mocking voice say, ‘See, she does not know how-to-take-a-bath.’ Sophie would gladly have emptied a bucket of water over the speaker’s head but saw there was little point since the speaker was already drenched.
The ashram rules had to be observed by all inmates but Sophie refused to rise at dawn with Matteo and go down to the temple for the morning hymns: the loudspeakers blared them out for everyone for miles around to hear them anyway, she said. She did follow him downstairs in the evenings out of desperation at having been indoors all day. The head swami, who was Mr Pandey’s guru, was not present – he was abroad, lecturing – and it was a bevy of junior swamis who ran the place and officiated at prayers and held discourses. They were energetic, active young men who flapped around in faded pink robes and worn rubber slippers, and the atmosphere was rather like a boarding school where the monitors had taken over in the absence of the teachers. The discipline was haphazard and erratic, but could be severe.
The evening sessions were always crowded because not only the ashram dwellers attended but visitors from the neighbourhood. Some of the families who came brought along sick relatives, others physically or mentally handicapped ones and those considered ‘possessed’, who seemed to Sophie to be in the throes of epileptic fits; she stared at them with unconcealed horror. ‘Why don’t they take them to hospitals for treatment? All they get here are prayers and hymns,’ she said. ‘That is the treatment,’ Mr Pandey explained to her serenely. ‘It has very soothing influence.’
Every place in the meeting hall was taken up and the air thick with the odours of perspiring humanity in an atmosphere already heavy with incense, marigold garlands and lamp oil. Drums banged, cymbals clanged, voices rose and rose till they reached shrieking point, then broke into pieces and scattered like glass shards.
Sophie held her hands to her ears. ‘Can’t we go there at some other time when it is quiet?’ she complained to Matteo. ‘I thought you said you wanted to meditate.’
‘One must learn to meditate anywhere, at any time, Sophie. What is important at these assemblies is the satsang itself – the company of the truthful – being with others who have the same thoughts, the same belief.’
‘Oh, is that what it is? I thought it was body odour.’
He gave her a hurt look. ‘You make no effort, Sophie.’
‘To like the smell of truth? No,’ she agreed. ‘I’d like to smell something really sinful – a beefsteak, a Martini, perhaps. Or at least chocolates, strawberries.’
Pierre Eduard had been sitting very q
uietly in the crosslegged position he had learnt to assume. Now he let out such a groan of desire, both Sophie and Matteo had to laugh.
That evening they went to a hotel in Juhu for a meal. They did not get Martinis or beefsteaks but they sat under a coconut tree by a swimming pool and ate fried fish and chips, omelettes and chips and chicken sandwiches and chips. They drank feni out of coconut shells and watched Indian boys and girls in limp wool swimming suits chase each other in and out of the pool and throw themselves into the water with loud thwacks. They went to the cinema and watched Kabir Bedi in Sandokan and laughed so loudly that some in the audience turned to stare and reprimand them. Linking arms, they sang as they walked back to the ashram down roads already dark and deserted where film posters loomed into the dirty city sky so that doe-eyed heroines with pink breasts showing through gossamer clothing and moustachioed villains with guns at their hips and wine glasses in their hands were illuminated in the smoky dark and saints with golden haloes floated upon lavender clouds above them. It made it possible to ignore the garbage and mud through which they made their uncertain way.
Yet when Matteo came to her in the night, she fought him off fiercely. ‘I can’t – I can’t here, in this zoo. I want to go away. I want us to be by ourselves.’
‘By ourselves.’ Matteo withdrew in distress. ‘By ourselves we’ll never come to know India.’