Journey to Ithaca

by Anita Desai

  Their hair and clothes plastered to their wet bodies, they climbed out of the rickshaw and ran, hand in hand, to the cottage they had been allotted in the family area called Love. Trees tossed on the wind, branches went flying through the air, the dust was sluiced away, rain ran in channels and beat upon the rooftops deafeningly, wide gardens turned into sheets of water where bushes and flowers were waterlogged and marooned. Instantly, the air cooled, became sweet and fresh.

  Sophie, standing on their small veranda and listening to the downpour, saw a world washed and renewed. Grass and leaves glistened, the scent of wet earth was released. She herself, weak and reluctant as she had been to come, felt herself flower in the change of air. She turned to embrace Matteo. This place, paradisaical, had been given them, it would be their home, their child would be born here. She shook under his arm and he asked, ‘Cold?’ with such unaccustomed consideration and tenderness that she nodded and laid her head on his shoulder, allowing him to draw her close. She wondered if now their marriage would truly begin.

  Then the worst stage of summer set in – those last weeks before the monsoon arrived, unbearably close and humid and still. The sun blazed again and beat upon the ashram roofs; under these roofs, the devotees lay, or sat, hardly able to lift themselves to their feet; each small action drained them. They worked slowly, and were exhausted.

  In this heat Matteo started work in the kitchen. He tied his bandana about his head to keep the perspiration from running down his face and set to scrubbing the cauldrons in which the rice and lentils were cooked, washing up mountainous stacks of metal dishes after meals, keeping the fires of the enormous open hearth stoked with coal, scouring the ashes and grits off the floors and tabletops, carrying out buckets of steaming food to the dining halls, staying up at night after all the others were on the patio, listening to the Mother’s discourse, clearing the kitchen for the day by sluicing it with buckets of water fetched from the pump outside.

  He worked in silence, his face gaunt with the effort. The others on kitchen duty had been assigned to this work for much longer; they knew how to deal with it: they sang, and played jokes on each other and clearly knew each other very well. They tried to include him but he did not know how to join them; he worked with his jaw set, in silence, thinking only how the day had passed without seeing her, how he would not even see her on the patio at night.

  Nor did he see much of Sophie. When he returned to the cottage, it was to fall, exhausted, to the floor, and sleep, too tired to bathe or change or climb into bed.

  Sophie, bitterly disappointed at finding out how little she saw of Matteo, began to rail against the Mother. ‘Would you work like this for your father if he asked you to join his business? No, you wouldn’t, you’d refuse outright. So why do you do it for her? What do you get out of it?’

  Matteo had woken and was preparing to return to work. With maddening patience, he said, ‘That is the point. Father would make me work so I could become self-supporting, or so that I could take over the business from him. Father would expect me to want a big salary, a car, all that junk. But the Mother doesn’t make me work for anything. She teaches us to work without desiring the fruit from that work. Isn’t that a higher way of life?’

  ‘Higher, lower – who cares? Work is work and should bear fruit. Or else, what is the point?’ He could not make her see otherwise. ‘If work doesn’t bear fruit, it doesn’t serve its purpose,’ she insisted. ‘Nothing would be done – no house built, no money earned, or spent –’

  ‘You sound like your parents,’ he interrupted, appalled. Then rushed out of the house, hands pressed to his ears, shouting, ‘Money! I don’t wish to hear that word, Sophie!’

  She had overstepped: she should not have mentioned money. It was too strong a reminder that they were still dependent on her parents, who did the working and earning. She had not meant that: she stood with her fingers pressed to her lips, silenced.

  Sophie was left to amuse herself. She had no books to read, and only one tape to listen to on her cassette player, of the Brandenburg Concertos. She would sit on the floor with it beside her, playing it over and over, listening to it with a moody intensity, chin cupped in her hand. When Matteo entered the house, she would be listening to it; when he lay down to sleep, she continued to listen. He said nothing and stubbornly she played it over and over as if she were wrapping herself in it, winding herself into a world separate from his.

  Eventually the tape wore out; one day, snarled in the whirring interior of the cassette player, it was ripped to shreds. The music splintered and foundered in the dying whirr.

  If Matteo felt like gloating, he bit his lip and said nothing to express his relief. Instead, he brought her a handful of tapes a devotee had left behind on departing. She looked through them with contempt. It was all music she despised – rock, pop – Matteo should have known that. The only piece of classical music in the collection was Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’. ‘The Moonlight Sonata – of course, naturally!’

  The small house sank into a silent well of her disappointment.

  Broodily, she sat on the veranda steps, listening to the great hum that seemed to emerge from a combination of sun and earth and leaf and sky. The Mother sent no summons for her; she was given no tasks, no diversion. Matteo had vanished into the heart of a world that remained shut to her. She had not thought she wished to enter it or explore it but Matteo’s disappearance was so profound that her uneasiness grew. Yet she could not give up her conviction that she could draw him away and back to her, or the conviction that she must.

  Eventually she got to her feet and ventured out of the cottage, walking along the hedged paths with her hands behind her back and her head bowed. When she saw the painted signs – Love is Truth and Work is Joy – her lips curled in contempt. Pink-robed figures flitting past her, barefoot or in lightly flapping slippers, smiled and greeted her; the smile she returned was a sour one, determined not to be taken in by all this sunniness. The ashram as an earthly paradise, presided over by a benign deity – she knew better than to believe that. For her the Mother was a monster spider who had spun this web to catch these silly flies.

  Unknown to Matteo, she did secretly go out one evening to observe the evening darshan at the end of a long, empty day out of which the desire to see the fabled Mother rose irrepressibly. But, in spite of the theatrical setting – the sky streaked pink and violet and saffron with sunset light, the great dark tree and the rustling birds with the devotees in attitudes of intense attentiveness like forest hermits in the presence of their guru – Sophie found herself disappointed to learn that the Mother was only a small shrunken creature with a throaty voice who made dramatic gestures and used those big abstract words that held no interest for her. Yawning unashamedly, she left before it was over.

  At night, she told Matteo, ‘She may be your Mother but I have one who is quite enough for me, I don’t need this one.’ She feigned a yawn and Matteo asked incredulously, ‘You were bored?’

  She did, however, have another encounter with the Mother, one she did not confess to having. She had grown tired of the ashram grounds, her walks along its neat paths through neat parks and gardens, and had scrambled out onto the hillside at the back of the ashram very early one morning before the sun began to beat upon the rocks and the sand in the river bed to give off its blinding glare. That brief hour of comparative coolness was quickly over; the sun was a white eye in the yellow sky, watching her as she made her way along a maze of goat tracks between the rocks. The dust that crept down her neck and between her toes proved defeating; and she turned back to the ashram. She found she had lost her way and, after stumbling about stones and bushes for a while, emerged on a slope directly above the Abode of Bliss where she knew the Mother lived. She could see its distinctive tiled roof in the shade of the gigantic banyan tree with its heart-shaped leaves and forest of aerial roots, and beyond it the intensely green grove in which the Master’s samadhi made a single white mark.

  Sophie, c
oming to a standstill with her hands upon her hips, found she could look right over the boundary wall into the backyard of the Abode of Bliss. To her astonishment and consternation, the Mother was seated there on a small cane stool in the shade of a tree with feathery leaves and large, livid red flowers. Under it, she looked very small and slight, not in the voluminous robes she usually wore but in a cotton shift, a rather faded and discoloured one. Nor had she her turban on: her hair grew in thin wisps, showing pink expanses of scalp. She was holding her hands on her knees in the classic yoga posture and she was very still, as if in meditation. But she was not: her eyes were narrowed in intense observation, and she was watching, or enticing, a flock of peacocks that were scrambling down the rocky hillside, fluttering over the wall and invading her garden. They were parading on the strip of gravel where she sat, up and down, the males spreading out their tails into enormous, weighty fans that thrummed like harps and that were made up of a thousand individual fans of brilliant bronze-like greens, blues and golds. They balanced on their toes and dipped and turned before the Mother, displaying their glories with a preening expression of vanity. The smaller, drab peahens, brown and plain, with pathetically undeveloped and unsightly tails, scurried around awkwardly. The males paid them no attention: their eyes, so startlingly rimmed with white, and the hundreds of eyes upon their feathers, all seemed trained upon the Mother. They maintained this display that was their tribute to her for long minutes, surreal to Sophie in this landscape of silence and solitude.

  Then the Mother unclasped her hands, opened them to show they contained grain. It was the little peahens that noticed at once and darted forwards to peck at it, alert and greedy and cautious. The males seemed too proud to fold their fans and abandon their posturing, but they quivered, hesitated on their toes, feathers thrumming. With a laugh, the Mother flung grain towards them, calling to them with little vowel sounds deep in her throat: ‘Aa-aa-aa-aa. Piyari mor, aa-aa-aa.’ When the peacocks too folded up their gorgeous tails, dipped their heads and stretched their necks for the meal, she threw back her head to laugh a low, chuckling laugh.

  As she did so, she saw Sophie standing on the rock, watching. The two women stared at each other, then simultaneously turned their heads aside, Sophie to scan the rocks for a path down, and the Mother to call to someone in the house. The flock of peacocks dissolved into the wilds, uttering their piercing, questing calls. One remained: it flew onto the roof with a violent beating of its wings and sat there, shrieking. It was the largest one, with a dazzling featherfall of blue and gold.

  This encounter appeared to have two results. One was that Matteo was abruptly taken off kitchen duty and brought back to work in the Mother’s office at the Abode of Bliss, for him a joyful prospect. He could not help thinking that there was a plan, a carefully considered plan in the way the Mother assigned duties and moved her devotees from one to another, and he felt that she had put him on trial in giving him the most menial of all work and was now rewarding him.

  What he discovered was that she had decided to set up the printing press she had so often talked of, and wanted Matteo to involve himself in the publication of the Master’s books, having taken them away from the publisher in the city through a long and complicated court case that had led to much publicised acrimony and rancour between the ashram and the townspeople who had hoped to turn the ashram to profit and now discovered the ashram intended to keep all its profits to itself.

  After the initial joy at his appointment, Matteo became overwhelmed with self-doubt at undertaking a responsibility for which he had no training and no aptitude. It seemed to him that the Mother had chosen to place upon him the gravest responsibility of all: to present to the world the Master’s teaching. The enormity of her expectations so overwhelmed him that they left him shaken and unsure.

  There was a small reward for this monumental labour, a very precious one, however: at night, before the work was put away, Matteo was sent to fetch a tumbler of warm milk from the kitchen for the Mother before she retired. When he watched her drink it slowly, sip by sip, sighing with weariness and sleep as she did so, he resolved to tell her that he could not continue: the intimacy of the moment presented such an opportunity. Then, seeing her bend her head, reveal the frail back of her neck with its transparent skin and the knobs of her small bones, he felt that if he were driven too far, stretched to breaking point, then she shouldered burdens a hundred times greater than his, through no strength but that of her will and her great love. He felt that the role given to him was that of her protector, almost of parent, and she the child who caused such trouble, demanded so much, and yet was all that mattered to the parent, a cause and a reward in one. Instead of resigning his duties, he resolved to commit himself to more of them, to greater ones. He took the empty tumbler from her, bowing low before her, almost to the ground.

  On Sophie that improbable, dream-like encounter with the Mother had an effect she was hardly able to articulate even to herself. There had been revealed to her both the mythical figure who could summon peacocks out of the wilds as she did devotees from the world over, and the aged, solitary woman with sparse hair and a faded nightdress. Against all her own expectations and intentions, the paradoxical, contradictory image stayed in her mind. She saw that the apparition was not one she could explain, let alone dismiss as she had so consistently done in her arguments with Matteo. She would not admit, even to herself, that she had had a glimpse of the spell such a being could cast on Matteo and the others, but she did tell herself that it was one that she needed to explore if she was ever going to arrive at the heart of it.

  Her pursuit of it took her into all corners of the ashram and made her search out and establish links with the inmates that she had earlier shunned. She began to stop at the verandas of other cottages in the family quarters to talk to the women and the children there, or greet and converse with those she met on the paths, going about their work. Matteo was pleased to see her begin her own relationship with the ashram, and smiled in approval till she began to bring back bits of gossip or information to which she gave a twist of her own, and then he was disturbed.

  ‘What is she anyway?’ Sophie queried, putting on her brassiest tone to aggravate him. ‘Looks Indian, sounds Indian, but not Indian. Well, what is she then?’

  ‘You should never ask questions about a sadhu’s past. They bury their past and are reborn when they take initiation.’

  ‘Ah, so – she was born, or re-born, the Mother of the ashram, and that’s all there is to it, is it?’ Sophie mocked. ‘But what if I told you what I’ve heard? What if I tell you she was once a dancer, that she first came to India with a dance troupe. The dance tour went to pieces – I suppose the manager ran off with the money instead of booking halls or printing posters, isn’t that what they always do? So then there she was, on the lonesome, looking for a rich somebody to pick her up –’

  ‘Sophie, don’t!’

  ‘Oh, don’t look so shocked – you’re not quite a monk, you must know something about the world.’

  ‘I don’t want to listen to you. I don’t believe anyone in the ashram will have said such things about the Mother.’

  Sophie laughed and reached out to ruffle his hair. ‘You’re right, no one did. They’d have been driven out, or lynched, if they did. No, what they said was that the Mother was a beautiful dancer who danced the role of Radha, pining for her lover Krishna. And behold, there was a blaze of light and there was Krishna. And they danced together – the divine lovers –’

  In agitation, Matteo stammered, ‘The Mother may have been a dancer when she was young – I know that myself – but no one, no one has ever said the Master was one. I know because I am printing all the literature about him. I’ve read every word written about him and by him. He was a sadhu. He was taken as a child by his parents to a great guru and he lived in a hermitage as a monk. Later he travelled to a cave in the Himalayas where he meditated –’

  ‘Oh, Matteo, no need to take this so seriously!’
r />   ‘I am absolutely serious about this, Sophie. I will bring you books to read. You need to learn –’

  He did bring her the books he was printing at the press, and Sophie gave them a cursory glance and made sarcastic comments about the garish covers, the pictures of pink lotuses and blue gods, but when Matteo was not there to see, she opened and read them. The clumsy language, the lurching from fact to fantasy, from the prosaic to the abstract frustrated her but it gave her further material to place before Matteo.

  ‘Matteo! She was born in Egypt, did you know that?’

  ‘Of course, Sophie. I published that book.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I told you, the past is of no importance to a sadhu.’

  ‘What rubbish, of course it is! To know that she is from Egypt makes one think of the Sphinx, and Cleopatra –’

  ‘Enough nonsense, Sophie.’

  ‘Is that nonsense, or a fact? Why isn’t one allowed to discuss facts here?’

  ‘We talk of nothing but the truth, all the time.’

  ‘No, you don’t. You talk of Truth with a capital T, not of the truth as in facts. Doesn’t it interest any of you? Look, it says here that she studied in Paris. Very elite. But where, in the Sorbonne? And what? Not a word. Another uninteresting detail, I suppose. Then that she “studied dance in Venice”. Now, that is not what you would expect to find in the biography of a sage! Are you not interested?’

  ‘No, not in these unimportant details.’ Then he said, tiredly, ‘If you want to know about the Mother’s past, you should talk to Montu-da, the ashram doctor. He is the oldest of her devotees, he has been with her longest.’

  In the small white cell where he sat dividing his tiny homeopathic pills and powders into vials and spills, Montu-da looked at her through his gold-rimmed spectacles. ‘You say you don’t want pills, you want to talk about the Mother. My dear lady, that is the best pill – it is better than all my pills!’ His broad face with its heavy, dark folds gleamed with pleasure. ‘Please sit down, please let us talk. I too will share that sweetest pill with you, if I may.’