by Anita Desai
Sophie: ‘So you live in a state of ecstasy with the Mother?’
Matteo: ‘Yes!’
Sophie: ‘If that is so, if that is true – you would be burnt up. You would be reduced to ash. The human body and the human heart cannot stand so much ecstasy. They are built to survive only a few seconds of it. We are not made for ecstasy, or immortality.’
Matteo: ‘Sophie, you are a destroyer. You will destroy me. That is what you are trying to do.’
Sophie: ‘I am trying to save you! Take you away and save you.’
Matteo: ‘No, you are trying to destroy me by destroying the only part that has any value. What you want to sustain is the part that has no value. The Mother’s love sustains the valuable part. The Mother’s love sustains!’
Sophie was silent.
Matteo: ‘You see, that is the difference between sacred and profane love!’
Sophie: ‘Maybe I read the wrong books. The books I was given to read told me they are one, the same.’
Matteo: ‘They are one, Sophie, but not the same. The Absolute is nirguna – it has no form. It is acintya – it has no properties. How can our minds and bodies conceive of what is formless and without properties? So superior beings like the Mother are born, they provide the form within which we can see and recognise the Absolute.’
Sophie, covering up her ears and shouting: ‘The Absolute, the Soul, the Supreme. Supra this and supra that. Don’t use those words, I am sick of them. They are non-words.’
Matteo, bitterly: ‘And what words do you like? Don’t tell me, I can guess. Food. Bed. Baby. House. Are those your words?’
Sophie: ‘Yes. Yes! They are good words and I like them. Say them again. I didn’t know you knew them. I thought you had forgotten them.’
Worn by their battles through the night, and by the demanding work of the day, both were gaunt and exhausted. The ashram seemed to watch, in silence, to see who would win: they had witnessed such battles before. Couples had come, settled, had children, and then it had become evident that not both, not all, were equally committed to the ashram and the Mother. Other desires, other ambitions became evident. Sometimes they drew whole families away, at other times families were split and broken. None of it happened suddenly, dramatically. It took time. Years went by. The children grew, playing in the ashram gardens which were the only world they knew. To some it was everything; to others it was not.
Sophie, preoccupied as she was with Giacomo, was nonetheless aware, even if intermittently, of how the longer Matteo stayed the stronger grew his bonds with the Mother and the ashram and the life here. The arguments were turning into silences, and the silences were stretching and deepening. He was disappearing into them. She let him be, bitterly.
But when Diya came to sit with her on the veranda steps one evening and play with Giacomo, and said to her, ‘Why don’t you bring him to my school, Sophie? He is old enough to come to my school now,’ Sophie was shocked. She had not noticed how much time had slipped by. She shook her head, refusing to answer Diya. The next day she began to pack their belongings, telling everyone she was taking Giacomo away to school.
It was at this moment that she learnt that she was once again pregnant.
The day she learnt this was the only time that Matteo saw her bewildered and vulnerable. She had concentrated with such intensity on taking over Giacomo’s life and making it what she wished it to be that she had forgotten to protect herself, she had let an accident happen to her.
Matteo would have chuckled to see her, proud lioness, reduced to such a weak, stricken thing, had he not been so dismayed himself. He could not bring himself to give the news to the Mother when she asked after Sophie and Giacomo. She learnt of it from others, however, and said to him, ‘The monk is becoming a family man, I hear,’ but she spoke in an uncharacteristically flat, faded tone. She had lost much of her archness, her youthfulness. She seemed distracted.
The Mother was not quite herself. At the evening darshan, she spoke less, in a hoarse and difficult voice, and sometimes not at all, leaving Hariharan to sing his most beautiful bhajans in a voice that remained over the years impassioned and profound. She seemed to lose interest in the printing press and left it to Matteo to run. She referred to the time when the Master’s work would all be under the imprint of the ashram ‘and then my work will be complete here’, leaving Matteo to wonder if his duties too would be terminated.
The truth was that her attention was elsewhere, drawn to a newcomer to the ashram, a beautiful child of fifteen who had been brought by his parents, devotees of many years’ standing, and left in her care. The Mother had taken over the instruction of the boy in all aspects of yoga and meditation, and even in badminton. The other devotees gathered to watch the old woman play with the boy on the badminton court, summoning up reserves of energy and grace so that she seemed to float and drift about the court in her gauzy veils and robes, the boy to provide her with a youthful and robust foil.
Matteo did not watch. He hurried past the courts and in and out of the Abode of Bliss with his files and papers. ‘Like a clerk, Mat-t-eo,’ she teased once when she saw him. ‘First a monk, and then a family man and now – a clerk. You are turning the cycle of life anti-clockwise,’ she indicated how with a long finger.
It was the only cruelty committed by the Mother to which Matteo ever admitted.
Sophie, absorbed in her new process of gestation, said nothing. It was only when the child was born and she saw Matteo’s face as he glanced at the child, expressionlessly, his thoughts elsewhere, that her old rage overcame her. She said to Diya who had come to help as she did with all small babies, ‘Is this what the Mother does to her devotees when she’s finished with them? Leave them with nothing?’
Diya was horrified. Her mouth opened wide in protest but she only said in a frightened whisper, ‘Oh, why do you say such things, Sophie?’ and looked to see if Matteo had heard.
He had, as he was meant to, but he merely turned his face away.
Sophie wished she could leave immediately. But the birth had been a difficult one and although the child seemed strong and determined to thrive, she herself was weakened and dispirited. The baby sucked at her breast day and night, screaming if separated from her, and Sophie felt not only her strength but her resolution draining away from her. She often wept with anger when alone but not when Matteo was there because then she saw herself through his eyes: strident, selfish. Diya came in the evenings to help but by then Sophie was too tired to talk and lay down and slept with the children as soon as they did, needing rest. Diya was worried enough to tell Montu-da, who sent pills which Sophie did not take. She thought of going to Dr Bishop but Dr Bishop seemed more occupied with the church than with the hospital now, leaving it to the younger doctors: she wrote Sophie notes on paper with quotations from the Bible, saying she was ‘preparing to meet her Maker’.
Sophie watched to see if Matteo would notice her altered condition but he said nothing to indicate that he did. He was rarely at home during the hours that the children were awake; usually he returned after they were asleep.
When Isabel showed herself capable of walking and existing independently of Sophie’s arms and lap, Sophie pulled out the boxes and cartons and began to pack. Matteo watched her in silence.
‘Don’t look like that,’ Sophie said. ‘I told you I’m taking them home. You won’t even notice.’
At that moment his face was so agonised that she thought he might say, ‘Stay’ or ‘Take me.’ But what he said was, ‘Sophie, she’s ill. The Mother’s very ill.’
Sophie paused in the folding and packing of baby clothes. ‘Oh? What is wrong?’
‘We don’t know, but she is having tests. It could be cancer. Montu-da said –’ but his voice choked and he slumped against the wall, shading his eyes with his hand.
Giacomo, on the floor, playing, said, ‘He’s crying, Sophie. Why is he crying?’
Then Sophie, marching across to Matteo and grasping him by his hair, tugged at it hard,
hissing, ‘And immortality, Matteo? What about immortality? Or is she only of our world after all?’ Pushing him against the wall and jerking his head by his hair, she cried, ‘Now find out – what is mortal and what is immortal, what is sacred and what is profane. Now find out.’ She shook him and shook him by his hair till Giacomo began to cry for his father.
All day she went back and forth, emptying the house of its belongings – they were hers and the children’s, Matteo owned practically nothing – and putting them away in boxes. When she had finished at night, and put the children to bed, she went out on the veranda where Matteo was sitting in the dark, and leant against the balustrade.
Then Matteo began to speak to her, and he told her of his visit to the shrine a long time ago, and how he had seen a stone there. ‘That was when I understood what had brought me to India, Sophie. It was only in India that a stone could have shown me the Infinite. Nowhere else, Sophie, nowhere else could a stone contain a glimpse of infinity. It was such – such perfection.’
‘Perfection, in a stone?’
‘No, no, not the stone at all – but the cosmic whole contained within the stone! Yes, that is why I stay here, Sophie, in this country where one sees the divine enclosed within the earthly.’
‘Oh, the Mother. Once again, the Mother. Not the stone, not the shrine, Matteo, it is a woman who keeps you here. Call her what you like – the Cosmic, the Absolute – but she’s a woman. Don’t you see?’ Sophie’s breath was coming short and hard. She turned and went back into the darkened room. There was nothing left to say.
Apart from brief visits to the bazaar for milk powder or gripe water, Sophie had not left the ashram for so long that she was disconcerted to find she had lost the knack of manoeuvring her way about in the outer world. Paying off the rickshaw driver, purchasing tickets, standing guard over the luggage – all these exercises she had once performed competently now required prodigious concentration and effort. She frowned fiercely as she pushed her way through the crowds and found the railway carriage in which she had been allotted a berth. Settling onto it with the babies and the luggage, she became aware of the other passengers already in it, staring at her so acutely that she felt their eyes slithering across her body. She realised she had not been with strangers, with anyone other than the inmates of the ashram, in years. Then she had longed to be amongst ‘normal’ people again, by which she meant people outside the ashram; now, trying to hold them off by angry looks, she found herself hating their ‘normality’ if that was what it was. Then, she had thought the outer world contained the freedom she had lost; now, penned up with other travellers – a middle-aged man who changed from trousers into a dhoti before her eyes and lay back on his berth, waggling one foot over the other knee, a woman who was unpacking half a dozen containers of food from a basket and smacking her lips over some pungent pickles, a young man whose adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a frog in a snake’s throat as he stared at her fascinatedly – she felt herself caged in a zoo, or prison, forced into surrendering her freedom and privacy.
And she had thought it was the ashram that was the gaol from which she had to escape.
All through the journey she had to rouse herself to take care of such commonplace matters as ordering meals from the curry-stained waiter who went down the corridor collecting orders, reaching out through the window to buy tumblers of tea, bananas and packets of peanuts from urchins peddling them at wayside stations, and presenting her tickets for inspection. The sober, orderly routine of the ashram, the meals prepared and served them on shady verandas, all that she had thought of as so restricting now seemed to have provided a freedom in which she had lived without giving such matters a thought.
The outer world she had told herself was the ‘real’ one thrust itself at her like blows from its fists: people casually leaning out of the windows to spit, beggar children with the protruding bellies and strawy hair of the starving clamouring at the wayside stations where they briefly halted, animals that belonged to no one – wretched pai dogs and sad monkeys – scavenging for food, then a rotund merchant and his wife climbing into the carriage with great boxes and bags of luggage carried on the backs of coolies – all sights to which Sophie had developed an immunity on her earlier travels in India, now struck her as being more brutal than she could bear.
Huddling on her berth with the sleeping children, she wondered if she would find the courage to make this escape from the ashram back into the world.
At the hotel in New Delhi where they stayed while Sophie arranged for airline tickets through a travel agent, she bathed and put the children to bed before having a shower and changing her clothes. Giacomo was awake, looking through a book she had bought him, and said she could go out, he would take care of Isabel. Earlier she had looked out of the window at the kidney-shaped swimming pool with its chemically blue water blazing in the sun and thought of going down to lie on one of the canvas chairs under a palm tree. She had also noted a pastry shop in the lobby with the kind of confections she had pined for at the ashram. Now that all this was available, she found herself drawing the curtain against the sight and walking past the enticing aromas on her way to the dining room where she told herself she would eat a Western meal of meat in order to mark her release from the ashram.
It was early and the waiters were setting tables. There was only one other customer there, a middle-aged and heavily built man who sat across from her and stared with unconcealed lust; under the table his legs were spread wide and he worked his knees rhythmically in and out. She tried to ignore him and cut up her meat and eat it but found it impossible to swallow when she was being watched so avidly. Finally, she admitted the taste of meat was sickening and, leaving the cutlet on the plate, she wiped her mouth on a napkin and asked for the bill.
The man rose and walked across to her table, holding his napkin in front of him. ‘I’m in room forty-two,’ he said in a slurred voice. ‘Come up and I’ll give you whisky.’
She sat as if she had been slapped. Her cheeks stung and turned red. She gripped the edge of the table, wondering: should she throw it over, at him? Should she scream for the waiter, the manager, the police?
‘Foreign whisky,’ he said, twitching a finger with a gold ring.
‘Get out – I’ll –’ what should she threaten him with that would be sufficient response to his vileness?
He protested ‘You are alone. You want a man. All foreign women do.’
She leapt up and strode out of the room, then hurried up the corridor to the elevator, trying not to sob or scream. When she got to her room, she rolled onto the bed beside the sleeping children, gripping a pillow. Clutching it, she cried, ‘Matteo! What about this, Matteo? What are you going to do?’
The phone rang and she picked it up hastily because the baby was beginning to whimper. She fumbled it to her ear and heard the man’s voice say, ‘Have you changed into your nightie? Is it see-through? Do you wear knickers –’
‘I hate you,’ she hissed at him. ‘You filthy animal, I hate you,’ and left the phone off the hook and lay back stiffly, prepared to hear him come and scratch at the door or even turn a key in the lock and enter. No one did, and she was alone with the children who sometimes slept and sometimes woke, needing to be patted and reassured, and gradually the voices talking loudly at the end of the corridor, the rattling of doors and the burble of television sets died away and there was a tattered, precarious silence, but still Sophie could not sleep for hate. If she had hated the ashram, the Mother, Matteo and their lives there, it was nothing, she now felt, compared to the hate she felt for the world outside. Matteo had spoilt it for her. Bitterly she thought how the standards he had set, of silence and intensity and purpose, had become the standards by which she would find herself judging all that followed in her life.
By the next night, when she had finally made her way through the queues and crowds and tumult of the airport, whey-faced at three o’clock in the morning, a sleeping child on each arm and a torn and bursting rucksack
on her back, the sense of escape to freedom had entirely dissipated to be replaced by this bitter sense of loss and betrayal. Having laid the children side by side across two seats to sleep, she hunched over with her head in her hands, overwhelmed by despair.
An air hostess in the guise of a butterfly came fluttering up the aisle to ask solicitously, ‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’ She had to lift her face up to the little painted creature and dutifully nod – it was one of the duties one had in the world outside – and say ‘Yes, okay.’
To begin with, she took the children to her parents’ home in Frankfurt. Her mother had, after all, been a most concerned and conscientious grandmother ever since the children were born, and Sophie looked forward to sharing them with her now and having her help in rearing them. To have their help and support would surely transform the nightmare into the daylight of comfort and security, she felt. But she soon found she could not stand the sharing, or the being together with them in their home.
Her father held himself in the background, stepping forward only to bring the children chocolates, then stepping back again hastily before they started smearing the chocolates all over the white carpets and white furnishings of the elegant apartment, and it was his reticence Sophie resented. She noticed him wincing every time he came downstairs in the morning and saw the state of the breakfast table, and bending over his armchair to remove crumbs before he sat down on it. In her mother, it was the lack of reticence she found intolerable. At breakfast she would already be discussing what they would buy at the supermarket, what they would cook, what would be good for the babies. ‘Oh, Mama, what does it matter? We will just pick up whatever there is!’ Sophie cried in exasperation as the shopping list grew longer. When the mother insisted on taking them shopping for new clothes and went from one boutique to another in search of a party dress, a jacket, shoes, Sophie protested, ‘Look, these children are used to just running around naked. You needn’t overdo it, you know.’