by Anita Desai
‘What –’ he began weakly, whereupon she raised her voice and began to scream. ‘If we don’t leave this place – if you don’t leave today – I’ll – I’ll go to the police.’ She was shaking her hair about her face, as if possessed. Others were staring. ‘I’ll tell the police what we heard. The police had better hear about this. I’ll tell them if you won’t –’
He had to bend and grasp her arms and shake her. ‘We’ll leave, we’ll leave. Just be quiet. Stop screaming, Sophie.’ When she showed no sign of calming down, he drew out the piece of paper Richard had given him and showed it to her, like a promise. ‘We’ll leave today. It’s in the hills, Sophie, the hills.’
Sophie took it from him and stared at it, then flung it away, saying bitterly ‘Another ashram!’
CHAPTER TWO
MATTEO WAS LYING in bed again. When Sophie had gone to have a bath he had rolled up his belongings and slipped down to get a rickshaw to take him back to the ashram – or had tried to but had then collapsed and had to be carried back.
The doctor had to be fetched, nurses came scurrying. The day went by in the tense routine of a hospital crisis. Now he lay on his side, quite spent, with his knees drawn up and his hand under his chin.
Sophie, exhausted, sat on the upright chair beside the bed, drawing on her cigarette, and knew that he was awake. She did not mean to agitate him yet could not restrain herself from saying, ‘It all comes of reading Hesse, that damned The Journey to the East, doesn’t it? If it weren’t for that book, you would not have thought of coming to India or of following this guru of yours to your death.’
He gave a small sigh. ‘It was the book that opened my eyes,’ he protested. ‘Why do you say it leads me to my death when it is to my awakening I go?’
‘Don’t speak so, Matteo!’ she cried, flinging away her cigarette. ‘It will kill you if I don’t get you away from here, I see that I must.’
For a while he did not say anything but when he spoke again it was in an even and reasonable voice. ‘What is death?’ he said. ‘Do you remember that scene in The Journey to the East when the narrator sees the two figures by candlelight, one pouring himself into another?’
‘And is that why you pour everything into her? What does that leave for me? For the children? Or for yourself? It has finished you –’
‘What does the body matter? Or earthly life? What matters is – is the search. She takes me with her on her search.’
Sophie sat brooding, her hair hanging about her face. Then, sweeping it aside, she said defiantly, ‘And what is it the two of you expect to find?’ When she had no response from him, she went on, ‘I read Hesse too, I can quote him also. Do you remember that scene in Siddhartha when Govinda says, “I will never cease seeking. That seems to be my destiny,” and Siddhartha says to him, “Perhaps you seek too much . . . as a result of your seeking you cannot find.”’ She saw Matteo go tense: he was listening, so she continued, slowly, trying to remember the words with accuracy. ‘“When someone is seeking, it happens quite easily that he only sees what he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means to have a goal, but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.”’
Then she saw his face contorted with pain and became overcome with remorse. Touching his face with her fingertips she asked as gently as she could, ‘What do you hope to find, Matteo?’
‘I have found it, I have: what I never had before, what my life had been empty of – and now is not.’
‘You believe that because you want to believe it,’ Sophie snapped in spite of her better intentions. ‘And what is this thing, this miracle, this unique being you believe in? Not what you imagine she is. You delude yourself, you know. Look again, Matteo, look again!’
*
Matteo entered the ashram alone. Sophie became so violently ill on the long train journey across the country from Bihar to the north, in the great heat of summer, that on their arrival she had to be lifted out and placed on a stretcher and taken directly to the city hospital. Matteo, hurrying to keep up with the stretcher so that he could hold her hand, found it cold. Her head lolled upon her shoulders and her eyes rolled in the dark sockets; she was no longer conscious.
When she did regain consciousness and begin to take in her surroundings – the white walls, the stained ceiling, an iron bed rail – the fierce stench of antiseptics told her where she was but it did not explain the chalky white face lowered over her, the pale blue eyes and the fine grey hair and the English voice saying, ‘Feeling better, my dear?’ She became confused; the sights and smells, the very air, limp and heavy with heat, were familiar enough, but the foreign voice and foreign face did not fit into the context. She reached out to touch whatever was real, and grasped a square, cool, clean hand. For some reason this made her cry, wordlessly, and the doctor – clearly she was that – patted her, saying, ‘There, there, no need to cry, dear. You’re going to be well soon, we’ll see to that.’
Sophie found her voice: she let out a wail. ‘Please, please, I want to go home,’ she wept like a little girl. The more the doctor patted her and comforted her, the louder she wailed, ‘Please, please, send me home –’ till the doctor said, ‘There, you sound better already! That’s a good, strong cry if ever I heard one,’ and she seemed so pleased that Sophie stopped abruptly. ‘Good girl, now just let me fix this oxygen mask on and give you a whiff – we’ve got to take care of the baby, too, you know,’ the doctor clucked on, and Sophie gave herself up in helplessness. ‘No need to look so frightened,’ she was saying to Matteo now, ‘she will be all right, and so will the baby.’
Matteo was gone when Sophie next looked about her but Dr Bishop came every few hours and whenever Sophie saw her come in, unvaryingly clean and cheerful and white, she broke into sobs and clutched at her hand abjectly and shamelessly, pleading again and again, ‘Send me home.’ As she grew stronger, her grip on the doctor’s hand became fiercer but Dr Bishop would somehow extricate it and stroke Sophie’s hair, saying soothingly, ‘Yes, yes, get your strength back first and then we shall see about going home.’
Matteo would come to visit her, slouching into the ward with his eyes lowered – Sophie had been put into the maternity ward and everywhere women were lying half-clothed, some in the throes of childbirth, screaming, ‘I am dying, I am dying!’ and others sitting up and nursing their small, wizened babies at breasts that swelled out of their hospital shifts like great moons. He would seat himself gingerly on the metal stool beside her bed, still not looking up. Sophie found this irritating beyond endurance and grew impatient for him to leave, to be alone with her legitimate and sanctioned weakness and helplessness.
She clung to her weakness, using it to draw sympathy and gentleness from the nurses and, above all, from Dr Bishop. In her crumpled white coat and with her grey hair combed into a bun and her swollen feet bulging out of boat-shaped white shoes with neatly tied laces, the doctor seemed to her a saviour. When Dr Bishop placed her freckled hands on the edge of the bed and bent over her so that her stethoscope swung into Sophie’s face, it was all Sophie could do not to let out a sob and snatch at her hand in the same abject manner as on the day she had arrived. She deliberately assumed a helpless air and made her voice smaller and weaker in order to have more of such nourishing attention, but Dr Bishop would place her fingers on Sophie’s pulse which gave away the truth and say brightly, ‘Getting stronger, I can see. All that’s needed is plenty of rest and –’ lifting up her finger and wagging it at Sophie as at a little girl, ‘no smoking.’ Sophie knew without being told that she referred to the smoking of marijuana; she had forbidden it strictly and Sophie, with her memories of the train journey on which she had nearly died, and the consciousness of the living creature inside her, set her jaw and nodded in total agreement. ‘Good girl!’ the doctor would exclaim and Sophie glowed. She began to devise ways of keeping the doc
tor by her for a few minutes longer. Since she could no longer feign illness, she would try to ask questions and establish a more personal relationship.
‘And when will you go home, doctor?’ she asked once with what she thought cunning. Dr Bishop misunderstood her and thought Sophie meant the mission house on the other side of the wall from the hospital, and said yes, breakfast would be waiting for her there, but Sophie insisted, ‘No, no, your home, I mean your real home.’ Dr Bishop continued to look puzzled but said, ‘Oh, I see, you mean where I come from? Why, it’s just the tiniest little village in Cornwall and I haven’t been there in years. Not since my mother died and my brother moved into her house. Oh dear, I can’t say when I’ll go again. It’s a tiny house and he has a wife and four children. They send me a big box at Christmas, every year, with enough old clothes for all the servants at the Mission house,’ and it was that home that she began to talk of again.
Sophie interrupted. ‘When did you come to India? When did you leave home?’
‘The year I joined the Mission,’ Dr Bishop told her. ‘I heard the Lord call me to India and I came to serve Him and have never stopped being grateful for this chance to serve.’
‘Here, in this hospital?’
‘No, no, no,’ Dr Bishop laughed and, growing expansive, began to tell Sophie about the Mission, its other centres, the schools and hospitals it ran, and the ones where she had ‘served’. Sophie lay against the flat pillow and the limp mattress and listened to Dr Bishop rattle off the names of South Indian villages, Bengali cities and Oriya towns and felt as if she herself were setting off on another journey through them. She became dizzy and nausea overtook her. Dr Bishop seemed not to notice and went on and on till a nurse came running to call her and then said, ‘I’ll bring you a little book about the Mission, you can read it all for yourself,’ and hurried away.
Sophie sighed and folded her hands over her stomach, she closed her eyes and felt herself being swallowed up by her state of pregnancy.
That night she dreamt she was squatting on a dark hillside and suddenly the baby came slithering out of her in a stream of blood. She picked it up and spread out her skirt and placed the infant upon it. It lay there in coils, its head buried within. As she touched it and tried to unwrap it, she found it was a snake, cold and limp, and drew back her hand in horror.
Leaving Sophie in the hospital in Dr Bishop’s care, Matteo had gone out into the street and climbed into one of the brightly painted bicycle rickshaws lined up at the gate for custom. Setting his rucksack between his feet and mopping his face with the bandana he kept tied around his head, Matteo directed the driver to take him to the ashram.
The driver seemed to know the address and complained, ‘Very far, sir,’ and argued over the fare for a while, then mounted the bicycle for the long ride.
They pedalled through the city without Matteo’s noticing much about it: it was Sophie’s bloodless face and limp hand that remained in the foreground for him, and the city was, after all, exactly like all other cities: improbably pink and violet cinema posters looming into the gritty sky over the flat rooftops and their paraphernalia of washing lines and pigeon roosts, small shops for grain and soda water and printed cotton lined along the open drains, above them the dilapidated living quarters of the shopkeepers and their families, wet clothes hanging out of the windows, women standing in the cluttered balconies and combing out each other’s hair while rickshaws, bicycles, trucks and bullock carts rolled past endlessly. Loudspeakers blared cinema music, a local politician passed by on a float, holding a megaphone to his mouth and haranguing the public while his supporters threw coloured leaflets that fluttered up and then fell to be trodden under in the mud and debris. Two trucks locked in combat hooted their horns while the drivers shouted abuse and refused to unblock the traffic; the rickshaw driver manoeuvred his vehicle around them and past them wearily.
Gradually the bazaar petered out into a string of petrol pumps, small cheap hotels garishly painted pink and blue, and signboards, schools and dispensaries standing haphazardly in barren fields. There were dusty lantana bushes growing beside the ditches and spindly eucalyptus trees along the road. Now they passed flat-roofed villas sunk deep in disorderly gardens of guava and citrus trees, potted marigolds and vegetable vines. Behind them open fields of ploughed earth stretched as far as the low scrubby foothills. Beyond them, in the thick haze of summer dust, the merest outline of the distant mountains could barely be discerned. They seemed illusory, possibly a mirage. Yet, going towards them, even if at this tortuous pace through the deeply rutted and dusty road, Matteo felt something inside him that was not so different from hope, or at least curiosity. He had now been in India long enough and travelled its plains for sufficient distances to regard the sight of a mountain as an event, both physically and metaphorically significant.
Now the cycle rickshaw was ploughing through dust so thick and deep that the wheels threatened to become embedded. They had gone off the main road and were making their way between deep hedges of pink and yellow lantana, over stones and rocks and through scrub, all thrumming in the heat of noon and rasping with the fiddling and scraping of cicadas. The driver no longer sat on his bicycle seat but stood up to pedal with loud grunts that made Matteo look at him with concern, and hold onto the sides of the rickshaw as it swayed and jolted.
Unexpectedly, a high iron gate painted a vivid sky blue reared up out of the scrub under a rank of tall, ramrod-straight ashoka trees that were the first sign of human habitation. The driver grunted to a halt, slipped off his bicycle and sank onto his heels in exhaustion. Matteo, paying him with a roll of notes from his shirt pocket, heaved the rucksack onto his back and unlatched the gate – a curved circle of ironwork above it gave the name of the ashram – and entered.
‘Wait for you, sir?’ the driver called, and Matteo half turned to wave him away, then continued on his way.
It seemed deserted even if everywhere there were signs of habitation and cultivation as though a magic spell had fallen upon the place and removed the inhabitants and cultivators themselves. In every direction a narrow path lined with bricks that were freshly whitewashed led into groves of oleander and hibiscus bushes in flower and citrus and guava orchards bearing fragrant fruit; bougainvillaea gushed up out of the sandy earth in fountains of papery flowers – pink, orange, yellow, crimson and lilac. Birds called to each other from the dense shade of mango and lichee trees in ringing voices as if they watched over the garden and were there to interrogate intruders like Matteo.
He heard water being pumped out and splashing onto stone, lavishly. He heard laughter but still saw no people. Matteo felt the hairs on the back of his neck begin to bristle and he recognised the sensation as one he had had as a child when he had wandered through the embroidered landscapes of old tapestries and lost himself in their magic wilderness.
He walked slowly and cautiously past signs that lined the paths and dotted the gardens, carefully lettered and painted with flowers, bearing such legends as Well Beginning is Half Done, Character is Spirituality and Respect the Elders. He read them as he walked past, increasingly bewildered.
Eventually, having passed hedges of flowering jasmine, he came upon a settlement of low houses, some in the shade of immense trees and others blazing white in the glare of the sun. These severe barrack-like structures were somewhat softened in effect by verandas that ran along them and the flowers planted in beds around them. As he moved closer to them – still slowly, still cautiously – human beings at last revealed themselves to him, but in the postures and attitudes of forest creatures: a pretty young woman with a head of golden hair and dressed in a salmon pink sarong carried a pail of water down a path, smiling as she did so with mysterious complicity; several young people, similarly dressed, sat on the veranda steps and seemed to be reading aloud to each other but looked up and smiled in greeting; behind the house, small children were running about in a game, their voices raised in excitement. Matteo found himself as amazed by it all as he had be
en on encountering embroidered figures in the old tapestries. What was more, he found he was no longer accustomed to friendliness: he found it difficult to believe in their smiles, and smile back.
Was this a place for serious study and meditation? Had Richard misled him, for Sophie’s sake? The atmosphere was so sunlit, so calm, so lit with smiles that he could not believe it was true, and searching for hidden clues gave his face a wary look.
More prosaic signs appeared at the sides of the paths now and directed him to an office. It did not exactly look like one, its veranda filled with birds, its door surrounded by bougainvillaea and canna lilies, but when he entered it he saw he was not misled: immediately in front of him, high on the wall, hung enormous tinted photographs of Swami Prem Krishna and the Mother, both garlanded with tinsel and paper roses. Moreover, the Mother’s was the same he had once found on a book cover in a railway station; he had it in his rucksack and could have taken it out to verify it but did not need to: this ashram was clearly the one they had founded. They were nothing less than royal in their stateliness and dignity. Underneath were glass bookcases in which their books were displayed with their names repeated on every cover and spine.
The secretary at the desk, a small grey woman with a tiny precise mouth, produced forms for Matteo to fill in, looked at his documents and then allotted him a room in a house called Welcome; it was where guests stayed for short periods, she said. Matteo felt a pang of uneasiness – Welcome, not Truth or Knowledge? But as he hesitated, a passing devotee, barefoot and humming, offered to show him the way.
Welcome was another long low building with a row of doors opening onto a veranda – a common arrangement in hostels of the type, Matteo knew, but distinguished by its fresh paint, its extreme neatness and cleanliness. Similarly, the room he was shown was as bare as he knew he should expect, but its floor was polished till it gleamed and its single window looked not upon any city squalor but onto hillside – rocky, reddish, scrubby and stretching out as far as the huge and radiant sky. The cicadas’ song rose, at that moment, to its crescendo and at the same time the sun reached its dazzling zenith.