by Anita Desai
‘Tell me how to see.’
‘Through faith,’ Theo roared, shaking his mane like a lion. ‘Through faith. “With faith,”’ he quoted, ‘ “the blind man pierced the pearl, the fingerless put a thread through it, and the tongueless praised it.” You need to learn, man, and meditate. Do you think you can acquire faith without working for it?’
Then, feeling himself alone in his lack of faith, Matteo began to keep to himself. He felt disabled, without the skills the others possessed, a kind of leper amongst them. So he rented a room for himself where he might be alone and meditate and concentrate upon his need for the extra faculty that he desired and required if he was to survive. He had begun to feel that if he could not have a vision of spiritual truth then he could not continue to live – not here, not as he had done.
It was then that Sophie came stumbling in, weeping, her feet bare and dirty and her hair dishevelled. Sighing, Matteo gave up the room to her, fetched her water to wash in, left her sleeping on his mat, and went out, blinded by the sun, to be by himself. At night, he still did not feel he could go back into her company – or anyone else’s – and spent the night out on the beach, in a boat a fisherman had pulled up under the coconut palms.
It became impossible to return to the room, to the company of anyone. He wandered away to be alone and to be further away from everyone. He walked inland where the others did not go, and the landscape changed to one of mudflats and then tilled fields, sparser vegetation, everything flattened by the immense sky and the punishing sun. He remembered hearing some talk of a temple in this region; he could not remember which deity was worshipped there but he had been told a darshan of it was considered specially blessed. He would go and find it: in this country one was never far from a temple. In fact it surprised him when, scanning the horizon where a line of trees was scribbled across the sky, there was no temple spire or mosque’s dome to be seen. He set himself to find one, if only to prove himself right in his belief in Indian religiosity. It led him on a longer walk than he had anticipated. Most of it was across flat fields, drying in the sun; the stubble cut his feet painfully, and he would have been glad of a cloud or the shade of a tree.
Eventually he came to a grove of banyan, mango and jackfruit trees. He wondered if the temple might be there: there was often one in the vicinity of a banyan. Besides, he could rest in its shade. Wiping his face on his bandana, he went towards it but could see no structure, however elementary, that could be taken for a temple. Long aerial roots trailed from the branches and parrots sat at the top, eating the small red fruit. He wished there were water, that he might have a drink. There was nothing. A koel, high up and invisible amongst the leaves, mocked his disappointment with its high-pitched, repetitive call. As he stood there, dejected and fatigued, he saw lodged in a crack of the great grey tree trunk, a stone, and wondered if it were carved into the shape of a deity, an idol. But it was simply a smooth, round stone that had found a niche in the tree; there was no red or yellow powder, no flowers or lamps to suggest it might be an object of worship. No, this was no temple – only a stone, and an abode for a stone.
He was about to turn and leave in search of a drink of water when the bamboos at the other end of the grove parted to reveal a path he had not noticed earlier, and on it an old man appeared, wearing a bit of cloth tied around his waist, his matted grey hair tied in a topknot above his head, holding a brass pot in his hand. His face was so crossed with wrinkles as to appear scarred and his eyes were small and seemed half closed.
The old man gave him scarcely a glance through those small lost eyes. He walked past Matteo to pluck some flowers from a bush nearby, then returned to the banyan tree. Matteo watched as he bent towards the stone lodged in the tree trunk, dribbled water from his brass pot over it, sprinkled it with flowers, murmuring what Matteo took to be prayers. Having done that, he hobbled away, sighing ‘Aum, Aum,’ to himself, and disappeared behind the bamboos from where he had come.
Now Matteo studied the stone again – was it carved after all, but so smoothed by time and touch as not to have appeared an idol to him? He stared and stared but it still seemed nothing but a smooth, round stone even if it was now consecrated with drops of holy water and some flower petals. Then, as he continued to gaze at it, he saw that what was perfectly balanced there in a cleft in the tree was not a stone at all but a circle, and it contained within it another circle, and another; that there was no beginning and no end to them; they were infinite; they were infinity. That circle was the universe itself, containing world within world, ring upon ring, sphere within sphere, and to his dazzled eyes they revolved within each other and yet remained perfectly static, maintaining a total balance and harmony that could only be divine. The stone glowed now, became brilliant in Matteo’s eyes, refulgent with what was, he felt certain, divine light.
He let out a cry and heard the koel flutter out of the tree and sweep upwards into the sky.
Down the village road, with a great din of drums and trumpets that made the stray dogs get up out of the dust and howl and the villagers come to their doors to look out, a procession passed by, waving streamers and balloons in party colours of pink and purple and yellow. In its midst, six men in black suits carried upon their shoulders a small bier which they held tilted so all could see that it contained a small, wax doll-like girl child in a lace dress and a lace veil, her head upon a pink lace pillow and her hands folded over a velvet-bound prayer book laid upon her chest. She was surrounded by flowers. The women in the procession held flowers too, and prayer books, and shuffled slowly through the dust.
From the other direction came Matteo, stumbling along the road, blinking as if amazed by the sight he saw. Before anyone could stop him, he leapt in front of the procession and there began to dance, jumping and whirling, twisting and whirling, till Nanette and Francis seized him and dragged him out of the way of the mourners, some of whom were threatening to give him the beating of his life.
‘The goddess!’ he howled, thrashing around on his knees, ‘the goddess is going to be married. Let me go – let me go to her wedding,’ he screamed, but they dragged him through the dust, up the stairs and across the veranda to his room and locked him in, telling Sophie, ‘Don’t let him out till the funeral is over, or he’ll get beaten up, d’you hear?’
Sophie watched him beat against the door and then lie sobbing on the mat. Pity stirred inside her. ‘It was a doll, Matteo,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t you see it was a doll?’
‘A doll for you. To me, a goddess,’ he responded with passion.
A few days after that, when she was sitting on the beach, they came and pulled her to her feet and hurried her to the tavern where Matteo was lying prostrate on the floor, heaving himself to his knees and falling again amongst the feet of the drinking customers.
‘He thinks it’s a temple,’ Francis told her in disgust. ‘What’s gone wrong with him? You’d better do something, Sophie.’
Sophie walked up to him where he grovelled in the centre of the curious onlookers. Now she felt no pity for him. She merely found him ridiculous, an insect that had become disoriented and lost its bearings. Putting out her foot, she gave him a kick in the side. ‘He’s a fool,’ she said.
Everyone fell silent, their expressions turning grave and disapproving. Francis dragged her out.
Then he nearly drowned himself in the sea where he had gone bathing at high tide, insisting it was the holy Ganga and that he had to bathe while the sun was in eclipse. They saw him disappear again and again under the high crested waves that leapt up to the sun, now at its noontime height and blazing, and finally a fisherman went in to catch him by his hair and drag him out onto the sand where he lay spewing sea-water in gasps.
Sophie was shaken when she saw him: he lay so limply on the wet sand, his head twisted to one side and the water gushing from him. She remembered him now as he had been, went down on her knees and wept, ‘Matteo!’
The doctor in the small village dispensary to which they took him said
to her, as she sat beside the narrow bed on which Matteo had been laid, ‘Do you want him to die? Don’t you think it is time to leave for your own country?’ Although he had worked hard at pumping the water out of Matteo’s lungs and reviving him so that he was now breathing evenly and recovering, the doctor’s face was tense with dislike.
Sophie was ashamed and muttered something about tickets and travel. The doctor turned back to the counter where he had been dividing a bottle of powder into small paper spills that he dispensed through a hole in the wall to his patients queuing on the veranda outside. Francis, who had sat beside Sophie through Matteo’s ordeal, muttered, ‘Matteo doesn’t need a doctor, he needs a guru.’
Although he had kept his voice low, the doctor heard him and looked over his shoulder at them with disgust. Francis tried to explain: ‘He has it bad; all that searching and meditating can drive you crazy if you haven’t a guru to guide you.’
The doctor said nothing, simply went on folding his paper spills, but after Sophie and Francis left, he went back to check on Matteo’s pulse. Matteo was awake, and the doctor said to him, ‘So I hear you are searching for divine light.’
Matteo was too weak to deny, or to assent to his words. He lay motionless, his face pinched and pale.
‘Divine light can kill,’ the doctor went on. ‘The gods are destructive in this country.’
It was not fair: Matteo could not protest, he was far too weak. Tears liquefied his eyes out of weakness and self-pity.
The doctor saw them and sat down on the chair by his bed, and lit himself a cigarette. He seemed to have contempt for Matteo and yet could not leave him alone. For a while he stared out of the open door at the veranda which was empty now, the last of the patients having left. The light on the road outside was dim, it was nearly evening. Suddenly the emptiness of the scene filled with a flock of crows that arrived out of the sky to hover over something in the ditch that had caught their alert eyes. They cawed in excitement.
‘Why not try books instead?’ the doctor asked. ‘Study?’ He continued to look enquiringly out into the road in the evening light as if he were addressing the crows there.
Matteo stirred on the thin mattress, wanting to reply.
The doctor glanced at him. ‘You come to India and you do not even bother to learn about it. You think you can understand it without any study, that divine light is like a flash of lightning.’ He drew upon his cigarette and then exhaled slowly. ‘It is not a bad idea to acquire knowledge first. In books you can find a way – or a flash of light – that will show you how to deal with – with this –’ he gestured with a long graceful hand at the scene outside the door. What was struggling along in the ditch, he saw, was a dog, either maimed or sick, and the crows were bent upon its extinction. He flung his cigarette out of the door at them and got up abruptly. ‘Now I am going to leave you here for the night to rest. Please don’t try to get up before morning.’
He went across to his work table and began to collect his belongings, then went towards the door. Before he left, he said, ‘If I had not studied, I would be like that dog in the road. But I went to medical school; my parents saved all their money and sent me to medical school. It was very hard. I had no food sometimes, no money for clothes or books. The college was not good, too crowded. Somehow I passed the exams. I became a doctor.’ His face was in the shadows and the room was nearly dark now but Matteo, staring at him, could see that it was for himself that he had contempt, and for his own life. ‘I would have died to go to the West for studies,’ he ended, before shutting the door.
Francis and Theo came to the railway station with Sophie and Matteo to put them on the train. On the way, Matteo fell upon his knees before a young girl carrying a basket of eggs to market, a broom for sale in a wayside shop, a lamppost outside the police station; when they hauled him to his feet and dragged him away, he pleaded, ‘Don’t you see? Are you all blind? The divine manifests itself in everything, everybody –’
‘Yes, yes,’ they agreed, and handed a slip of paper with an address to Sophie. ‘Here it is, keep it safe – Matteo will only lose it. It is the address of the ashram that will take him in. The swami we met said it was the best place for anyone who really wants to learn.’
Matteo stood on the platform meekly, his hands folded before him. But suddenly he darted aside and rushed over to a magazine and book stall; he had seen something there that he wanted, amongst all the garish paperback books with their lurid titles of war and lust. It was the life of a saint, cheaply printed by an ashram press, and bore on its cover a photograph of her face, blurred beneath a white turban. The Mother was its title and Matteo clutched it so fiercely that the vendor became agitated, shouting, ‘Hey, pay up.’ Theo came to pay him and led Matteo away by his arm.
‘My God, Sophie, you better watch him,’ he said, and then helped them into the third-class compartment of the train to Bihar. Francis bought them packets of biscuits, paper bags of guavas and bananas, clay pots of tea, then stood with Theo waving to them from the platform.
As he felt the great iron wheels start up under him and begin to roll, Matteo got to his feet in alarm. His eyes looked wild with fear and his hands sought a way out through the crowds. Sophie caught and tugged the ends of his shirt violently to bring him back to the seat beside her.
‘Listen, Matteo,’ she hissed, ‘you sit down now, and I will get you to your guru, hear?’ It seemed to her that she must hand him over, hand over responsibility for him, and if this guru and the ashram in Bihar were willing to accept Matteo, then she must get him there. For this purpose she was willing to travel a thousand miles in the company of peasants who smelt powerfully of unwashed clothes, stale food, wood smoke and dust, merchants and their families who travelled with large baskets of food and pickles, beggars who could not afford to buy tickets and cowered under the benches or made themselves invisible in the latrines when the sweating and harassed conductors came to check. Resolutely she held on to her place on the bench and made sure that Matteo was not edged off his. Heads in their hands, they dozed through the sweltering day, and at night were wakeful and watched the powerful lights of wayside stations go by, lighting up scenes of coolies bowed under bales and crates of goods, shrouded figures stretched out to sleep, others patiently filling jars and pots at water pumps, and dogs scurrying amidst the debris, that might have been scenes from a nightmare, or pictures of hell. As they travelled relentlessly through the great dark plain that seemed to have no end, Sophie heard Matteo muttering to himself in horror. ‘The light’s gone – I can’t see – I’m blind –’
‘Fool,’ Sophie said to him shortly. ‘It is night and we are out on the land where there are no lights to see.’
Yet, when they arrived in the city, he rather than Sophie summoned up the resolve to make their way through the choked streets and bazaars to the ashram and face the disappointment of finding it was no secluded grove upon a river bank but a mass of concrete structures behind a high iron gate and walls topped with barbed wire in the heart of the city. He had the surly guard open the gates to them and led her into the courtyard that lay between the dark, drab buildings that made up the ashram. When they were taken down a long veranda littered with debris to a room with streaked and faded walls, dust-coated windows, shadeless light bulbs and an electric fan that did not work, Sophie sighed before lowering her rucksack to the ground and sinking onto it.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I knew it would be like this.’
He made her come with him to the swami whose permission was required for their stay. The swami was sitting at a desk on an upholstered chair, his well-groomed appearance in striking contrast to the squalor outside his room. After Matteo had introduced himself, he said disapprovingly, ‘Look at yourself. Look how you have come to hear the holy words spoken. Don’t you know you should be clean and bathed and well clothed and in good health to receive them?’ Matteo hung his head in apology and heard a titter from the younger swami who had brought him here and stood at the door, liste
ning.
Sophie had not understood the words – she found the English spoken by Indians as incomprehensible as the native languages – but she heard the hostility in them and glared.
Later Matteo stormed at her, ‘When did you last wash your clothes? Do you even have a piece of soap with you? Have you given up washing your hair?’ She spat back ‘Wash, what for? To go and sit with those beggars?’ She refused to leave the room again but Matteo went out of the ashram gates to find a barber in the bazaar. He sat in a wooden kiosk hung with a single small mirror amongst many pictures of gods and goddesses all decorated with tinsel, had a sheet tied around his neck and then a shave and haircut from a small bald barber who whistled through his gold teeth as he flashed his knives and scissors and worked. Urchins gathered to watch and giggle and followed him back to the ashram gates. He bathed under an outdoor tap, trying to rid himself of the small bristling hairs that had fallen into his clothes, and remove the clinging stench of perfumed hair oil the barber had rubbed onto his head.
He was still damp and gleaming when he asked to be taken back to the swami. The younger man who was to lead him there asked, ‘Don’t you know, you must go to your guru with an offering?’ Matteo returned to the bazaar and from a fruit barrow bought a bag of oranges, bananas, custard apples and cheekoos. Feeling dusty and hot again, he returned to the ashram and presented them to the swami. There was a drawer pulled half open in the desk and the swami made the briefest gesture in its direction. Matteo saw it was filled with Wills Goldflake cigarettes, fountain pens, a gold-plated lighter, and even currency in several different denominations. Matteo’s offering was clearly despicable in comparison.
Nevertheless he was aware he had been accepted when he was given instructions regarding the rules and regulations of the ashram to which he would have to adhere. Everyone had to wake at four o’clock in the morning and come down for an hour of meditation in the long, colonnaded hall on the ground floor of the main building. They were given some time in which to bathe and dress, before returning to a public room for their breakfast of black tea and bowls of sprouted lentils. Then the lessons began for Matteo and he spent the day going from one teacher to another. He took a class in Sanskrit with a swami who had been a schoolteacher and was now too aged for work but still had a professionally fierce expression and held a wooden ruler in his hand as though it were an indispensable adjunct to the teacher’s role. In the evening there were prayers around a shrine in the central courtyard and after that the head swami gave a discourse that was relayed over loudspeakers to every part of the ashram, interspersed with hymns that rang late into the night.