by Anita Desai
At that moment, a peacock’s call rang out, raucous and irreverent, and the old woman, throwing back her head to laugh, said, ‘Listen, my piyari mor is telling me: be quiet, and let me sing.’
Everyone laughed. Then singing broke out. Someone started the hymn:
‘Awake, O man, from thy deep sleep.
Awake . . .’
and soon everyone was singing, some seated and swaying back and forth as they clapped to its rhythm, and others on their feet dancing with their eyes closed and their bodies swaying with ecstasy. The small old woman remained seated, crosslegged, her hands folded on her knees, watching with an enigmatic smile.
Afterwards everyone prostrated themselves before her, full length on the patio, touching their foreheads to the stone in total obeisance.
*
When Matteo rose and left, hazily aware that he must find his way back to his room in the house Welcome, he walked without knowing where he walked, and saw not the dark hedges or the paths or the other figures strolling back through the groves, but only the huge silhouette of the ficus tree with its silenced birds and the night sky over it and the small and wonderful being seated beneath it, her eyes that shone from even such a distance and the hands with the long tapering fingers which seemed to reach up and bring the immensity of the night sky down to them.
When he was in his room, he flung himself full length upon the floor, clenching his fists and shutting his eyes, trying only to retain those impressions, keep them from disappearing.
He felt that the only thing in his life that mattered was to retain those impressions.
His days seemed to pass motionlessly. They formed a great, sun-struck emptiness. He hovered in that vacuum, hardly breathing, hardly existing, waiting only for that hour when he could make his way to the patio again, seat himself and wait for the presence to manifest itself before him.
Only that moment mattered when she made her appearance. It always happened without him seeing it happen. Although he strained his eyes to catch the moment, it eluded him. Suddenly she was there, seated against cushions and bolsters, quiet, commanding, in complete authority, filled with the calm of her authority.
He became convinced that she was always there, only he did not see. He wept into his hands with frustration at his dullness, his blindness, and even cried out, ‘Mother, where are you?’
Then, in the evening, the miracle occurred: she was there, he in the presence.
Of course Sophie had to be visited. Tearing himself away from the ashram, he made his way to the hospital in town as if it were a penance, and sat by her bed with a face of suffering while she lay – calmly, willingly, even contentedly – at the centre of the hospital world of beds, babies, food, bodies and their smells. To see her so was to have a vision of what the world was for the ordinary, the unblessed: a nightmare world of physicality.
It brought him a strong reminder of what his life had been before he had seen the Mother. He realised now why even the paradisaical surroundings of his home on the lakes had been for him empty and desperate, because no one had been there to show him that they were an expression of an eternal and essential truth. He remembered how as a boy he had torn through the landscape as if through a shining fabric, crying, ‘Dove sei? Where are you?’ When he thought of how the question had been answered at last, he covered his face for emotion.
Sophie meanwhile was telling him, with a certain smugness, how Dr Bishop feared she might have a miscarriage if she were moved from the hospital and continued to live an itinerant life, and how important it was to stay here and rest – ‘But you’re not interested, you’re not even listening.’
‘I am, how can you say I’m not?’ he replied hurriedly.
‘Oh, I know that look, that face, I know it.’
When the doctor came in to examine Sophie and inform Matteo that they would have to keep Sophie at the hospital for observation a bit longer, he was afraid his face would reveal his relief and gratitude for the situation; he had only to glance at Sophie to see that it did.
When Sophie seemed stronger, and was sitting up in bed, knitting – one of the nurses had shown her how and Dr Bishop had approved of it as an excellent occupation and suggested she knit small blankets for the children of the poor in the non-paying patients’ ward – Matteo tried to explain to her how the ashram he now lived in was run by a woman they called the Mother. He soon gave up, acutely aware of the inadequacy of words and his lack of skill with them. Yet he must have given away his passion for she said drily, ‘And what is she, this Mother – a hypnotist, a magician? It sounds as if she gets up on a stage and hypnotises you all like some magician.’
He groaned, ‘Must you have a scientific explanation? You remind me of the child who pulls a butterfly to bits so it can see what makes it fly.’
The extreme bitterness of his voice roused her. Tapping with her long needle – how he hated the knitting needles, the sight of her mindless activity – she said, ‘Must we believe everything without any questioning? Are you afraid my questions will expose her?’
‘Your questions do not expose her, they expose you – your, your pathetic –’ he stammered.
‘Stupidity?’
‘Oh, call it what you like – it is your refusal to see and experience –’
What?’
‘What I see and experience!’
They stared at each other in hostility and incomprehension.
Then Matteo pleaded, ‘If you allow yourself, Sophie, just to see her and be in her presence, she will make you well again, and the baby well, I am convinced.’
Sophie pursed her mouth and resumed her knitting. ‘There is one thing that will make me well,’ she said, ‘and that’s not having to see another damned ashram or mad guru.’
Any time spent away from the Mother, without her, was wasted time, empty time, dead time: he could not account for it, it did not pass, it stood like a block or an emptiness around him. That he could not do away with it filled him with such despair that he would lie helplessly on the bare floor of his room, or sit upon the veranda steps, dully, in a state of non-being.
Only during the darshan, in the Mother’s presence, he and everything else came alive. Then darshan would be over and he would return to his room for the waiting to begin again. Was he to spend all his allotted time in an ante-room, waiting to be summoned?
No summons came, but one afternoon he rose from the floor and stood looking out of the single window at the wild rocky scrubland that lay behind the ashram when he saw, silhouetted against the sky, a band of devotees making their way over the rocks. The older ones walked in a cluster at the head, stately and slow, most of them in white, and the younger ones, in pink, bounded and leapt behind, cavorting like young goats over the stones and the dark sand. Seen against the yellow afternoon sky, they were like figures in an etching, or a tapestry. Matteo clutched at the windowsill, staring, somewhat surprised that a scene that did not contain her should have such vitality.
Then there was a slight halt, the devotees at the head stood aside to let one pass and lead the way up a narrow path between two rocks, and Matteo saw it was the Mother who led them. Again, she had manifested herself suddenly and wonderfully: she had been there all along, at the very centre.
Giving a shout of excitement – although perhaps it was someone on the hill who actually shouted – Matteo pulled on his sandals and ran out of the room, around the house to the back and then set off after them. He had never ventured out on the hills before and found them criss-crossed by an intricate network of paths between the scattered rocks. He was misled by them again and again, and although he could hear their voices in the distance, laughing, he was clumsy and agitated and lost his sense of direction many times, sometimes finding himself headed for a gully full of thorn bushes and at others faced by rocks too jagged to climb.
Eventually the slope of the hillside flattened out and from the level top he saw that on the other side of it there stretched an immense sandy riverbed with a narrow cha
nnel of water running through the centre of it, and beyond it bank upon bank of silvery plumes of pampas grass from which birds rose singing into the vast air.
The group was seated at the edge of the level hilltop under a twisted flame of the forest tree on which thin curved petals of brilliant orange spurted out of sooty pods. In its sparse shade the Mother sat upon a rock, a purple robe falling in folds about her and the air yellow gold around her, as always drawing it into her so that she was a figure of light and flame amongst the others. They were seated around her in the dust or on low flat rocks. As he stealthily came closer, not knowing how they would receive him, he saw that she was not giving a discourse; the devotees were holding out to her, by turns, some object they had picked up along the way – pebbles, berries, flowers – and she was holding each object in turn, fondling it and stroking it and building up a small parable around each.
‘Ah, a feather! Look, a feather – white along the quill, then grey, then brown, and at the edge the grey and the brown merging to become black. But look how it is made – all these fine, fine filaments coming together, holding together with some in-vis-i-ble power to form a perfect feather that provides the bird with flight. Do you think we have in our own bodies something like that, something that is so purr-fect-ly made? Hard to tell, is it not? We are all covered with this ugly bag of skin –’ she plucked at the backs of her hands with comical distaste. ‘But my friends, I assure you, if you and I were anatomists and if we were to observe a dissection, we should see the parts of our body as perfectly constructed as this feather, and if we were only aware of that perfection, don’t you think we would move, and behave differently in order to achieve what the birds achieve?’
She let the feather drop into her lap and now someone was offering a pebble to her. She rolled it about in the palm of her hand, lifted it to her cheek, saying, ‘Mmm, mm’ as if considering something she saw inside it, and she did not notice Matteo join the group and drop onto his heels beside the others so as to merge with them and not be noticed while he feasted his eyes on her and his ears on her voice. The scene was utterly extraordinary to him – she seated in purple robes beneath the orange-flowering tree, the air and sky saffron about her, and beyond her the vast riverbed, shimmering in the afternoon light, edged with the silver of the blowing pampas grass, and beyond it the watery grey-blue line of the horizon. It might have been called unreal, but why? Why not reality heightened and raised to a pitch he had not experienced before but was now revealed as what it might be and could be?
The magical hour went by so swiftly it might have been water flowing through the riverbed. The group was rising to its feet, dusting off its clothes, preparing to return to the ashram, and Matteo rose too. As they wound their way along the dusty path through the rocks, one of the older devotees at the front came back to Matteo and said, ‘The Mother wishes to speak to you.’ Everyone seemed to hear, everyone stared and there were expressions of surprise and curiosity. Matteo edged past them on the narrow path to the Mother’s side. She continued to shuffle forwards in little, gliding steps, but when he came to her side, she gave him a sidelong smile with her large, mobile mouth and glanced at him in a way that made him feel totally exposed to her attention. The elderly devotee who had brought him forward murmured something in her ear.
‘Ah, Mat-t-eo from It-a-ly,’ she pronounced it as if trying out the names, just as she had turned over the pebble in her hands, regarding it from every side, scrutinising it. ‘I once lived in Italy,’ she murmured. ‘So beautiful, so beautiful, but so sad, sad,’ she went on. ‘On the outside, rich and beautiful, but on the inside – death and the grave, death and the grave.’ She seemed pensive. Then, putting out her hand and resting it lightly on his arm, she asked, ‘Will you stay?’
Matteo stammered a reply; he wanted to give it with his entire being, his total assurance, and there were no words to convey so complete a commitment as he wished to make. She continued to shuffle forwards, her head hunched between her shoulders, keeping her hand on his arm for support in a graceful, girlish way. Matteo hardly knew how to live up to it; it seemed to belong to the age of knights and maidens and chivalry.
‘And how,’ she continued in a rather low and hoarse voice – entirely different from the voice that rang out with such thrilling clarity at the evening darshan – ‘how did you come to us?’
Matteo found himself blurting out, ‘I read The Journey to the East, Hesse’s book.’ It sounded insufficient, he ought to add something to that, he knew, but he could hardly unfold before her the saga of his travels with Sophie. Already they were receding into the distance and disappearing into the greenish-blue haze that was coming up the riverbed and rustling through the pampas grass and climbing uphill towards them. Already the sights and scenes of those journeys, Sophie’s illness, the train, the baby – all were being swallowed up by the evening shadows. When a lapwing ran across the silvery sands below, crying its agitated query, ‘Did-did-did you do it?’ Matteo felt he was being addressed; he wanted to reply, ‘No, no, I did not – I did nothing – nothing till now, here, here and now –’
Yet the words about the book had been spoken and there was a somewhat cynical twist to the Mother’s voice, as if expressing her opinion of such work. ‘I will tell you a story,’ she said. ‘It is about the Sufi Inayat Khan,’ and the others hurried to catch up and be at her side to listen. ‘He asked his follower, “Have you studied the book?” “Yes, murshid,” the follower replied. The Sufi said, “It is not in the book.”’ She chuckled with delight and the others chuckled too, appreciatively.
Patting Matteo’s arm and then releasing it, she said, ‘Come, I will show you something,’ and threw the entire band of followers into consternation by turning away from the ashram wall and taking a new direction. Stumbling and bumping into each other like ants halted on a trail, they too turned and followed.
She led them onto a path that veered back towards the river but then brought them to a standstill in a grove above it. Here, under the trees where the birds were already quarrelling shrilly over their roosts for the night, there was a small shrine of the kind one might come across at the wayside anywhere – a small altar of bricks splashed with whitewash, a rounded stone daubed with red powder, some faded marigolds scattered around. Beside it, let into the earth, was a curious opening, as into a tunnel, covered with iron grating. There was nothing to explain it except an orange pennant fluttering on a stick nearby, showing it to be the abode of a yogi.
Matteo stared at the scene, feeling uneasily as if he had visited such a shrine before but not able to recall when or where. Then he heard the Mother chuckle, ‘Baba-ji lives here. He has lived here for – how long?’ she turned to ask her devotees, and one cried, ‘Twenty years!’ She laughed, ‘How do you know? Baba-ji was here before we came. All the time I have been at the ashram, he has lived here above the river, in his cell. It may be for fifty years, or a hundred.’
‘And does he never come out?’ Matteo asked.
‘Once a day, for half an hour. He fetches water from the river, and he goes into the bushes to do his business,’ she giggled, ‘and then he goes back. The cell is – oh, perhaps three feet by three feet? He has lived there all these years, in meditation.’
Matteo might have left without knowing if the old sage was actually there or merely a story told by the Mother, a fantasy, but just then the grating rattled slightly and moved aside as the aged yogi, who had perhaps heard their voices, came crawling out. The Mother called out a greeting and the old man, bent double, first blinked at her and then smiled a smile that spread slowly over his deeply wrinkled face, like a baby’s when it sees its mother bend over its cot. He hobbled forward to touch her feet but she would not let him, she stooped to catch him by his bent shoulders, and stooping together, they both smiled and smiled. Then, as if he were a forest creature, uneasy amongst people, he hobbled away with his brass pot and the Mother said to her followers, ‘Let us go away and leave him to do his business, eh?’
&nbs
p; Matteo, before he turned away, glanced down the tunnel but could see nothing but darkness, feel nothing but darkness there, the close confined air of the cave coming out like an exhalation. He backed away in horror at a life lived within it: was that what it would mean to live a life of meditation and devotion? He did not think he could bear it – certainly not the darkness and the solitude and the being away from the Mother’s radiant, golden presence. Was she showing him what it might be to live apart from her, locked away from her? Or was she telling him that devotion to her could mean closing himself into a state so grimly hermetic and ascetic? Was she showing him the rigours of a life of devotion to see if he was afraid? Yes, he was afraid.
The morning dispelled the fear. Matteo received a summons from the Mother to visit her in the house called the Abode of Bliss, where she lived.
This had once been the garden house, or retreat, of a devout and wealthy disciple of the Master’s, and donated to the Mother so that it could form the nucleus of the ashram. Gradually the land around it had been bought, acre by acre, mostly wasteland, rock and scrub that was over the years transformed into the flowering estate now spread over them. The house was clearly the oldest one on the property, built in a more substantial style – that of a spacious bungalow, with a slightly sloping tiled roof under a gigantic banyan tree, deep verandas with pilasters of white stucco at regular intervals, wide steps lined with ranks of flower pots, and tall doors and narrow windows fitted with framed screens to keep out insects.
To approach it one had to pass through a grove of frangipani trees and bougainvillaea amidst which lay the samadhi of the Master, a plain block of stone painted white and decorated each morning with fresh flowers. These were heaped on it now: large livid hibiscus and canna flowers, handfuls of white jasmine, limp pink roses and garlands of marigold. For all the brilliant colours, the grove had a peaceful air: devotees came and went through gaps in the hedge, barefoot and silent, and there were always a few who sat crosslegged beside it, still as statues and eyes closed in deep meditation. Only a koel, hidden in the foliage of the banyan tree, dared to call out loud, ‘Ku-hu? Ku-hu?’