Out of India

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Over everything towered the mountains, receding far up into the blue sky to unknown heights of holiness, steppe upon steppe of them, and dissolving from sight at last amid mysterious white veils that may have been mist or snow or, who knew, the emanation of a promised Presence.

  It was all, in short, too good to be true; a dream, though better than anything, Daphne felt, she could have dreamed of. The coolie, naked except for a loincloth, walked in front of her and carried her baggage on his head; he was her guide and protector, who cleared a path for her through the crowd of pilgrims, warded off the beggars, and knew exactly where she wanted to go. It was quite a long walk, but Daphne was too entranced to mind; nor did she for one moment doubt that she was being led along the right way. And sure enough, her messenger, like some angel sent direct, brought her at last into the presence she had desired for many weeks now, and when she was there and saw him again, so great was her relief and her happiness that she burst into tears.

  “Welcome!” he said to her, and did ever eyes and smile swell the word with such meaning? And then he said, to her tears, “Now what is this? What nonsense?”

  “I’m silly,” she said, wiping away at her eyes but unable to check a further gush of tears.

  “Yes, very silly,” he said, and turned to the others around him: “Isn’t she? A silly goose?” and all smiled at her, with him, all of them tender, friendly, saying welcome.

  One or two of them she recognized, the cheerful, bearded, athletic young men in orange robes who were his permanent disciples and who had been with him in London. She did not know any of the others. They included quite a number of non-Indians, and these she guessed to be people like herself who had followed him out here to undergo an intensive course of spiritual regeneration. In addition there were many casual visitors constantly passing in and out of the room, devotees come to have a sight of him who sat for a while and then got up and went away while others took their place. Daphne was used to seeing him thus in the midst of crowds. It had been the same in London, where he had been constantly surrounded—by women mostly, rich women in smart hats who bustled around him and besieged him with requests uttered in shrill voices; and he so patient, unruffled, eating ice cream in someone’s drawing room, and smiling on them all equally.

  Nevertheless it had seemed to Daphne that his smile had in some way been special for her. There was no reason why she should think so, yet she had been convinced of it. When he looked at her, when he spoke to her (though he said nothing that he did not say to others), she felt chosen. She was not by nature a fanciful girl; on the contrary, she had always been known as straightforward and sensible, good at sickbeds, had done history at Oxford, wore tasteful, unobtrusive, English clothes. Yet after she had met Swamiji, she knew without a word being spoken that he meant her to follow him back to India. It was not an easy path. She was fond of traveling in a way, and always spent her summer vacation in France or Italy, and twice she had gone to Greece: but she had never contemplated anything much farther than that. She was quite happy in London—had her few friends, her quite interesting job with a secretarial agency—and though perhaps, if opportunity had knocked that way, she would not have minded a year or two doing some sort of interesting job in America or on the continent, it was not, one would have said, in her nature to go off on a spiritual quest to India.

  Everyone was indeed amazed; she herself was, but she knew it was inevitable. No one tried to stand in her way, although of course her mother—a wonderfully energetic lady of middle years prominent on several welfare committees—pointed out quite a few of the drawbacks to her enterprise. But there was nothing she could say that Daphne had not already said to herself: so that the mother, who was tolerant in the best English way and believed in people being allowed to make their own mistakes, had not spoken any further but instead confined herself to bringing forward several aged relatives who had served in India as administrators during the Raj and were thus suited to give Daphne advice on at least such basic questions as to what clothes to take and what diseases to guard against.

  Everyone, whatever their private thoughts, had been too tactful outright to warn Daphne of disaster. But if they had done, how triumphantly she could, after some weeks’ stay, have contradicted them! She was supremely happy in the ashram. It was not a very grand place—Swamiji had rented it for a few months for himself and his followers, and it consisted merely of three rows of rooms grouped around a courtyard. The courtyard was triangular in shape, and the apex was formed by Swamiji’s room, which was of course much bigger than all the others and led to a veranda with a view out over the river. The other rooms were all small and ugly, inadequately lit by skylights set so high up on the walls that no one could ever get at them to clean them; the only pieces of furniture were cheap string cots, some of which had the string rotting away. The meals were horrible—unclean, badly cooked, and irregular—and the cooks kept running away and had to be replaced at short notice. There were many flies, which were especially noticeable at mealtimes when they settled in droves on the food and on the lips of people eating it. Daphne rose, with ease, above all this; and she lived only in the beautiful moments engendered by the love they all bore to Swamiji, by the hours of meditation to which he exhorted them, the harmonious rhythm of their selfless days, and the surrounding atmosphere of this place holy for centuries and where God was presumed to be always near.

  The door to Swamiji’s room was kept open day and night, and people came and went. He was always the same: cheerful and serene. He sat on the floor, on a mattress covered with a cream-colored silk cloth, and the robe he wore loosely wrapped around himself was of the same silk, and both of them were immaculate. His beard and shoulder-length hair shone in well-oiled waves, and at his feet there lay a heap of flowers among which his fingers often toyed, picking up petals and smelling them and then rubbing them to and fro. He was not a handsome man—he was short and not well built, his features were blunt, his eyes rather small—yet there was an aura of beauty about him that may have been partly due to the flowers and the spotless, creamy, costly silk, but mostly of course to the radiance of his personality.

  He was often laughing. The world seemed a gay place to him, and his enthusiasm for it infected those around him so that they also often laughed. They were very jolly together. They had many private jokes and teased each other about their little weaknesses (one person’s inability to get out of bed in the mornings, another’s exploits as a fly-swatter, Swamiji’s fondness for sweets). Often they sat together and just gossiped, like any group of friends, Swamiji himself taking a lively lead; any more serious talk they had was interspersed among the gossip, casually almost, and in the same tone. They were always relaxed about their quest, never overintense: taking their cue from Swamiji himself, they spoke of things spiritual in the most matter-of-fact way—and why not: weren’t they matter-of-fact? the most matter-of-fact things of all?—and hid their basic seriousness under a light, almost flippant manner.

  Daphne felt completely at ease with everyone. In England, she had been rather a shy girl, had tended to be awkward with strangers and, at parties or any other such gathering, had always had difficulty in joining in. But not here. It was as if an extra layer of skin, which hitherto had kept her apart from others, had dropped from off her heart, and she felt close and affectionate toward everyone. They were a varied assortment of people, of many different nationalities: a thin boy from Sweden called Klas, two dumpy little Scottish schoolteachers, from Germany a large blond beauty in her thirties called Helga. Helga was the one Daphne shared a room with. Those dark, poky little rooms made proximity very close, and though under different circumstances Daphne might have had difficulty in adjusting to Helga, here she found it easy to be friendly with her.

  Helga was, in any case, too unreserved a person herself to allow reserve to anyone else; especially not to anyone she was sharing a room with. She was loud and explicit about everything she did, expressing the most fleeting of her thoughts in words and allow
ing no action, however trivial, to pass without comment. Every morning on waking she would report on the quality of the sleep she had enjoyed, and thence carry on a continuous stream of commentary as she went about her tasks (“I think I need a new toothbrush.” “These flies—I shall go mad!”). In the morning it was—not a rule, the ashram had no rules, but it was an understanding that everyone should do a stretch of meditation. Somehow Helga quite often missed it, either because she got up too late, or took too long to dress, or something prevented her; and then, as soon as she went into Swamiji’s room, she would make a loud confession of her omission. “Swamiji, I have been a naughty girl again today!” she would announce in her Wagnerian voice. Swamiji smiled, enjoying her misdemeanor as much as she did, and teased her, so that she would throw her hands before her face and squeal in delight, “Swamiji, you’re not to, please, please, you are not to be horrid to me!”

  Swamiji had a very simple and beautiful message to the world. It was only this: meditate; look into yourself and so, by looking, cleanse yourself; harmony and happiness will inevitably follow. This philosophy, simple as its end-product appeared to be, he had forged after many, many solitary years of thought and penance in some icy Himalayan retreat. Now he had come down into the world of men to deliver his message, planning to return to his mountain solitude as soon as his task here was achieved. It might, however, take longer than he had reckoned on, for men were stubborn and tended to be blind to Truth. But he would wait, patiently, and toil till his work was done. Certainly, it was evident that the world urgently needed his message, especially the Western world where both inner and outer harmony were in a state of complete disruption. Hence his frequent travels abroad, to England and other countries, and next he was planning a big trip to America, to California, where a group of would-be disciples eagerly awaited him. His method was to go to these places, make contacts, give lectures and informal talks, and then return with a number of disciples whom he had selected for more intensive training. He had, of course, his little nucleus of permanent disciples—those silent, bearded young men in orange robes who accompanied him everywhere and looked after his simple needs—but the people he brought with him from abroad, such as Daphne and Helga and the others, were expected to stay with him for only a limited time. During that time he trained them in methods of meditation and generally untangled their tangled souls, so that they could return home, made healthy and whole, and disseminate his teaching among their respective countrymen. In this way, the Word would spread to all corners of the earth, and to accelerate the process, he was also writing a book, called Vital Principle of Living, to be published in the first place in English and then to be translated into all the languages of the world.

  Daphne was fortunate enough to be chosen as his secretary in this undertaking. Hitherto, she had observed, his method of writing had been very strange, not to say wonderful: he would sit there on his silken couch, surrounded by people, talk with them, laugh with them, and at the same time he would be covering, effortlessly and in a large flowing hand, sheets of paper with his writing. When he chose her as his secretary, he presented these sheets to her and told her to rewrite them in any way she wanted. “My English is very poor, I know,” he said, which made Helga exclaim, “Swamiji! Your English! Poor? Oh if I could only speak one tiniest bit as well, how conceited I would become!” And it was true, he did speak well: very fluently in his soft voice and with a lilting Indian accent; it was a pleasure to hear him. Daphne sometimes wondered where he could have learned to speak so well. Surely not in his mountain cave? She did not know, no one knew, where he had been or what he had done before that.

  Strangely enough, when she got down to looking through his papers, she found that he had not been unduly modest. He did not write English well. When he spoke, he was clear and precise, but when he wrote, his sentences were turgid, often naive, grammatically incorrect. And his spelling was decidedly shaky. In spite of herself, Daphne’s Oxford-trained mind rose at once, as she read, in judgment; and her feelings, in face of this judgment, were ones of embarrassment, even shame for Swamiji. Yet a moment later, as she raised her burning cheeks from his incriminating manuscript, she realized that it was not for him she need be ashamed but for herself. How narrow was her mind, how tight and snug it sat in the strait-jacket her education had provided for it! Her sole, pitiful criterion was conventional form, whereas what she was coming into contact with here was something so infinitely above conventional form that it could never be contained in it. And that was precisely why he had chosen her: so that she could express him (whose glory it was to be inexpressible) in words accessible to minds that lived in the same narrow confines as her own. Her limitation, she realized in all humility, had been her only recommendation.

  She worked hard, and he was pleased with her and made her work harder. All day she sat by his side and took down the words that he dictated to her in between talking to his disciples and to his other numerous visitors; at night she would sit by the dim bulb in the little room she shared with Helga to write up these notes and put them into shape. Helga would be fast asleep, but if she opened her eyes for a moment, she would grumble about the light disturbing her. “Just one minute,” Daphne would plead, but by that time Helga had tossed her big body to its other side and, if she was still grumbling, it was only in her sleep. Very often Daphne herself did not get to sleep before three or four in the morning, and then she would be too tired to get up early enough for her meditation.

  She could not take this failure as lightly as Helga took her own. When Helga boasted to Swamiji, “Today I’ve been naughty again,” Daphne would hang her head and keep silent, unable to confess. Once, though, Helga told on her—not in malice, but rather in an excess of good humor. Having just owned up to her own fault and been playfully scolded for it by Swamiji, she was brimming with fun and her eyes danced as she looked around for further amusement; they came to rest on Daphne, and suddenly she shot out her finger to point: “There’s another one just as bad!” and when she saw Daphne blush and turn away, rallied her gaily, “No pretending, I saw you lie snug in bed, old lazybones!”

  Daphne felt awkward and embarrassed and wondered what Swamiji would say: whatever it was, she dreaded it, for unlike Helga she took no pride in her shortcomings nor did she have a taste for being teased. And, of course, Swamiji knew it. Without even glancing at Daphne, he went on talking to Helga: “If you manage to do your morning meditation three days running,” he told her, “I shall give you a good conduct prize.” “Swamiji! A prize! Oh lucky lucky girl I am!”

  But the next time they were alone together—not really alone, of course, only comparatively so: there were just a few visitors and they sat at a respectful distance and were content with looking at and being near him—as Daphne sat cross-legged on the floor, taking dictation from him, her notebook perched on her knee, he interrupted his fluent flow of wisdom to say to her in a lower voice: “You know that private meditation is the—how shall I say?—the foundation, the cornerstone of our whole system?”

  After a short pause, she brought out, “It was only that I was—” she had been about to say “tired,” but checked herself in time: feeling how ridiculous it would be for her to bring forward her tiredness, the fact that she had sat up working till the early hours of the morning, to him who was busy from earliest morning till latest night, talking to people and helping them and writing his book and a hundred and one things, without ever showing any sign of fatigue but always fresh and bright as a bridegroom. So she checked herself and said, “I was lazy, that’s all,” and waited, pencil poised, hoping for a resumed dictation.

  “Look at me,” he said instead.

  She was too surprised to do so at first, so he repeated it in a soft voice of command, and she turned her head, blushing scarlet, and lifted her eyes—and found herself looking into his. Her heart beat up high and she was full of sensations. She would have liked to look away again, but he compelled her not to.

  “What’s the matter?”
he said softly. He took a petal from the pile of flowers lying at his feet and held it up to his nose. “Why are you like that?” he asked. She remained silent, looking into his face. Now he was crushing the petal between his fingers, and the smell of it, pungent, oversweet, rose into the air. “You must relax. You must trust and love. Give,” he said and he smiled at her and his eyes brimmed with love. “Give yourself. Be generous.” He held her for a moment longer, and then allowed her at last to look away from him; and at once he continued his dictation which she endeavored to take down, though her hands were trembling.

  After that she was no longer sure of herself. She was an honest girl and had no desire to cheat herself, any more than she would have desired to cheat anyone else. She felt now that she was here under false pretenses, and that her state of elation was due not, as she had thought, to a mystic communion with some great force outside herself, but rather to her proximity to Swamiji, for whom her feelings were very much more personal than she had hitherto allowed herself to suspect. Yet even after she admitted this, the elation persisted. There was no getting away from the fact that she was happy to be there, to be near him, working with him, constantly with him: that in itself was satisfaction so entire that it filled and rounded and illumined her days. She felt herself to be like a fruit hanging on a bough, ripening in his sunshine and rich with juices from within. And so it was, not only with her, but with everyone else there too. All had come seeking something outside of themselves and their daily preoccupations, and all had found it in or through him. Daphne noticed how their faces lit up the moment they came into his presence—she noticed it with Klas, a very fair, rather unattractive boy with thin lips and thin hair and pink-rimmed eyes; and the two Scottish schoolteachers, dumpy, dowdy little women who, before meeting Swamiji, had long since given up any expectations they might ever have had—all of them bloomed under his smile, his caressing gaze, his constant good humor. “Life,” he once dictated to Daphne, “is a fountain of joy from which the lips must learn to drink with relish as is also taught by our sages from the olden times.” (She rewrote this later.) He was the fountain of joy from which they all drank with relish.