A Writer's Notebook (78 page)

The occultist. He was a little man with a round face and bespectacled round eyes, very fluent in conversation. He had been in the war and emerged with the rank of major. He had travelled a great deal. He was a Christian and a student of Paracelsus and of Eliphas Devi. He distinguished between white magic and black. He had a contempt for miracles, but
claimed to be able to levitate. His contention was that any demonstration made merely to satisfy curiosity lessened the agent's powers. His were purely spiritual. He asserted that he could heal the sick, but said that his wife (who came to my house with him) had much greater powers than he. She was an Indian in a sari, not quite young, silent and watchful. When they left she told me that I would sometimes see her and that when she appeared to people it was always in a dark blue sari.

It may be that it is the I in us which is the cause of all our wickedness, but it is the cause too of our music, our painting, our poetry. And so what?

Ahmed Ali, Sir Akbar's secretary, told me the following story. He said that a woman who had been bitten by a scorpion was brought to him and he was told that if he wrote the number 16 on the ground and rubbed it with a shoe she would be healed. Not believing in it, he did so and nothing happened. She went away and then someone pointed out that he had written not 16, but 13. Since then he had written 16 and had cured several people.

A Yogi wanted to cross a river and had not the penny to pay the ferryman, so he walked across the river on his feet. Another Yogi hearing of this said the miracle was only worth the penny it would have cost to cross by ferry.

A Yogi wanted to go somewhere by train, but having no money, asked the station-master if he could go for nothing; the station-master refused, so the Yogi sat down on the platform. When it was time for the train to go it would not start.
It was supposed that something was wrong with the engine, so mechanics were sent for and they did all they knew, but still the train could not go. At last the station-master told the officials of the Yogi. He was asked to get in the train and it immediately started.

The occultist and Ahmed Ali both agreed that there was a station-master on the line who could heal snake bites, and they said that if anyone was bitten he had the right to telegraph free of charge to the station-master, who telegraphed back and cured the patient.

I gave a small dinner party. Six people. They were philosophers, pundits and scholars. The conversation turning on the power a Yogi can obtain by discipline and mortification, they told me of one who had let himself be buried at the bottom of a dry well and had told people to open it in six months. If the top of the head was warm they would know he was alive and should revive him, if it was cold they would know he was dead and could burn him. They did this and found he was alive. He soon revived and is now living hale and hearty sixteen years later. They had all either seen him or known people who had. They accepted the incident as certain.

The peacock. We were driving through the jungle. It was not thick and presently we caught sight of a peacock among the trees with its beautiful tail outspread. It walked, a proud, magnificent object, treading the ground with a peculiar delicacy, with a sort of deliberation, and its walk was so elegant, so wonderfully graceful that it recalled to my memory Nijinsky stepping on to the stage at Covent Garden and walking with just such a delicacy, grace and elegance. I have seldom seen a sight more thrilling than that peacock threading its solitary
way through the jungle. My companion told the driver to stop and seized his gun.

“I'm going to have a shot at it.”

My heart stopped still. He fired, and I hoped he'd miss, but he didn't. The driver jumped out of the car and brought back the dead bird which a moment before had been so exultantly alive. It was a cruel sight.

We ate the breast for dinner that night. The flesh was white, tender and succulent; it was a welcome change from the scraggy chickens which are brought to the table evening after evening in India.

Benares. Nothing can be more impressive than to saunter down the Ganges by boat in the evening just before the sun sets. It is thrilling to look at the city with the two minarets of the mosque standing up against the pale sky. A wonderful sense of peace descends upon you. There is a great silence.

Then in the morning before the sun rises you drive through the city, the shops still closed and men under rugs lying asleep on the pavement; a scattering of people are going down to the river, with brass bowls in their hands, for their prescribed bath in the sacred water. You get on to a houseboat, manned by three men, and slowly row down by the ghats. It is chilly in the early morning. The ghats are unevenly peopled. One, I don't know why, is crowded. It is an extraordinary spectacle, the throng on the steps and at the water's edge. The bathers take the ritual bath in different ways. For some of the boys it is a lark and they dive into the water, come out and dive in again. For some it is a ceremony that must be gone through as quickly as possible, and you see them make the motions of devotion mechanically and gabble through their prayers. Others take it solemnly. They bow to the rising sun and, their arms outstretched above their heads, utter their prayers with unction. Then, the bath over, some chat with their friends and you guess that the daily obligation offers an opportunity
to exchange news and gossip. Others sit cross-legged in meditation. The stillness with which some of them sit is strangely impressive: it is as though in that throng they sat in a temple of solitude. I saw one old man whose face was decorated with great rings of white ash around his eyes, a broad oblong patch on his forehead and square patches on his cheeks, so that he looked as if he were wearing a mask. Many of the bathers, having taken their bath, carefully scrubbed and polished the brass bowl in which they were going to carry back to their houses the lustral water.