All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (15 page)

I said that I would certainly try to.

‘Each year,’ he continued, ‘there is a pilgrimage to this town. From all across our India, people travel in their thousands to walk round a holy mountain, Arunachala. I will tell you sincerely, that if you want to understand something of what makes India tick, you should see this. On the final night, a great beacon of fire burns out so brightly it can be seen for many miles.’

‘When is this festival?’ I said.

Mr Rajkowa’s eyes twinkled once more. ‘It is beginning in two weeks,’ he said. ‘And although I am not knowing your commitments, I am heartily suggesting that you cancel them.’

A week later, I was on the train heading south. Plans had been rearranged, meetings postponed, tickets transferred via innumerable sheets of waxy blue triplicate. Although I’ve never been much of a person for signs and portents, I couldn’t help but feel that what had happened was fate. A chance meeting had spun my compass through ninety degrees, and placed in my hands the account of a journey which seemed, with every passing page, to mirror my own.

On the top bunk of my berth, by torchlight, I marvelled at the book. Brunton, a journalist who had served in the First World War, was a curious man by all accounts, intensely private, and claiming certain occult abilities since his youth. He went East, like so many before him, in search of mystical knowledge. What set him apart from most Englishmen of his era was his attitude towards both the Indians and their religious traditions. There are two types of traveller to India, he wrote: ‘The white tourist who “does” the chief cities and historical sites and then steams away with disgust at the backward civilisation of India . . .’ Or alternatively, a ‘wiser kind of tourist . . . who will seek out, not the crumbling ruins of useless temples, nor the marbled palaces of dissipated kings long dead, but the living sages who can reveal a wisdom untaught by our universities.’

Brunton himself fell very convincingly into the second category. During his travels around India he found yogis who could stop the beating of their own hearts, who claimed the powers of telepathy, who could drink the most deadly poisons without suffering the effects. A natural sceptic, he remained unaffected by almost everything that he saw, until one day he arrived at the small hill town in South India called Tiruvanammalai. It was here that he would meet Ramana Maharshi, one of the most revered Indian saints of the twentieth century, who would change Brunton’s life for ever. Brunton’s writings, in turn, would inspire thousands of Westerners to make their way East, and his account of his meeting with the sage remains a classic account of spiritual revelation:

There is something in this man which holds my attention as steel filings are held by a magnet. I cannot turn my gaze away from him . . . But it is not until the second hour of the uncommon scene that I become aware of a silent,
resistless change taking place within my mind. One by one, the questions which I have prepared with such meticulous accuracy on the train drop away. For it does not now seem to matter whether they hitherto troubled me. I only know that a steady river of quietness seems to be flowing near me, that a great peace is penetrating the inner reaches of my being, and that my thought-tortured brain is beginning to arrive at some rest.

The expression ‘thought-tortured’ seemed to me to be especially significant. As a symptom of Western life – addled by data smog, overstressed and anxious – it seemed one of the most likely causes for our modern turn East. Certainly, on my unhappiest days I felt that my brain was a machine with overloaded circuit boards, and that if only I could hush it I might find peace.

This ‘inner silence’, then, was part of what I was here to find. To practise meditation is to begin to still the endless chatter that most of us live with in our heads. It’s to come fully into the present, to achieve what the Zen Buddhists call a ‘one-pointed’ mind. For Hindus this silence is even a divine state, a state of
samadhi
, and it is said – as Brunton discovered – that certain realised masters have the capacity to allow those who sit with them to share in it, a state of complete absorption in the present moment. Those moments of my life when I’d felt most struck by the numinous had also, I realised, occurred when ‘thought’ was entirely absent.

‘One more thing before you go,’ Mr Rajkowa had added to me, as we bade farewell at Delhi railway station. ‘If you make it to Arunachala, please visit the cave on the hillside there. Although Sri Ramana Maharshi is no longer in his body, the cave has a stillness that is very rare in this world. I sat there myself in early 1984, by chance at the very period Indira Gandhi was shot. And though I feared greatly for what might happen to India, I emerged from that cave in a state of unique tranquillity. Perhaps I have never achieved it since?’

A week later, I found myself outside Ramana Maharshi’s ashram. It was late November, and the sun was a glowing halo in the sky. Unsteady on my feet after three days of dysentery, I walked gingerly along the road, barely able to focus on the men and women who passed me. Along the lane I saw a vendor of tender coconuts and stopped to buy one. The vendor, a minuscule woman of about sixty, pushed herself to her feet and picked up her machete. She had the most deeply calloused hands I’ve ever seen: a lattice of brown ridges across each palm. Laying the coconut down on an old stump, she swung the machete with a practised air and sent a disc of green spinning into the ditch. Three more chops, then she used the knife’s tip to prise open the milky crown. Inside, the precious liquid seemed startlingly clear and pure amongst all the filth, and as I drank it down the first inklings of strength flooded back into my body. Nonetheless it was curious to be back on my feet, and a wave of dizziness passed through me. She noticed and offered me her own stool.

‘Problem?’ she enquired, pointing to my stomach.

‘Yes. Big problem.’

‘
Acha
.’ She tilted her head and held her palms up acquiescently. ‘One day, two days only,’ she added brightly. ‘Only cleansing!’

I smiled at her. In a few sentences, the entire Indian world-view was evident, and I found it intensely heart-warming. For the price of seven rupees (ten pence), she had given a stranger her chair and a maternal kindliness. It was what made me love the country from the first.

I wandered further along the road, taking in the sights of the town. Decrepit structures roofed with corrugated tin. Sellers of snack foods: crispy
dosas
and soft white
idlis
topped with filigrees of coriander leaf. Buffaloes, their horns painted sky blue. Bamboo lean-to’s, concrete painted in garish hues, an internet café boasting one primeval machine.

As I walked on, the nature of the town as a pilgrimage site was instantly apparent. Rickety stalls offered garlands of flowers, fruits and sweets.
Naivedya
, an important element of
puja
rituals, are gifts given to deities or saints, and one of five required daily offerings amongst orthodox Hindus. Different vendors – an old crone, a portly man swathed in a billowing orange shirt – entreated the passers-by not to forget their spiritual dues. Between all this, buses painted with deities roared past honking their horns, dust devils cavorting in their wake.

Presently, already sweating from the heat, I came to the archway that signalled the entrance to the ashram. At least five beggars were in position outside, vying for alms. Scarecrow figures, emaciated from a life in the open, they held out their bowls, offering toothless grins. It was hard to look at them unmoved. Behind the ashram, the mysterious cone of Arunachala, a wild uncultivated hill, rose up under the flaming sun.

Inside the ashram gates, I passed quickly through the streams of devotees, and followed the signs for the path towards the summit. Behind the meditation hall, and past the placid buffaloes which provide fresh milk and ghee for the ashram kitchen, a narrow trail led up towards Arunachala. Even before Ramana Maharshi made his way to the hill a century before, there were tales of saints secluded in the caves there, and I was anxious to see for myself just what about this hill was so remarkable. Added to this, my landlady in Tiruvanammalai, Mrs Vasikari, had told me that there was, even now, a great sage who dwelled upon the summit.

For the worshippers of Shiva, perhaps nowhere in India is so revered as Arunachala hill. That, in fact, was why so many pilgrims were at this very moment swarming into the town in their thousands, camping out under makeshift tent structures, snoozing in doorways and on dusty verges. As one version of the legend tells it, the hill was formed after a dispute arose between Brahma, the Creator, and Vishnu, the Preserver. While both of them argued over who was superior, Shiva manifested himself as a vast column of light, thus asserting his dominance. When the people prayed to Shiva to reveal himself in a more comprehensible form, he revealed himself as Arunachala hill. The yearly Karthigai Deepam festival is thus a recreation of this event, and the giant fire lit on the hill’s summit is supposed to represent Shiva’s divine pillar of light.

But for now, the bustle of the town was behind me. It was still barely eight a.m. and the tapered path heading upwards through dense scrub appeared empty. I walked briskly, breathing the clean air, taking in the broad plain encircled by groups of hills about me. Above me was Arunachala, the highest hill for miles around. It is said that years ago this whole area was studded with great trees, but the growing demand of the nearby townspeople for firewood has wreaked havoc. Now there was largely a stony soil, interspersed with scrub, lemongrass and the occasional basking lizard.

Off in the distance, I heard the shrieking of wild monkeys and the trilling of a peacock. Then silence. Only the crunch of my feet on the stones, and the sound of my breath coming faster now that the path grew steeper. It was pleasant to be alone in nature, a surprisingly difficult feat in much of India. In the brush I noticed wild neem growing, often used by Indians as a medicine. Vast boulders, which looked as if they had been tossed here by a giant, appeared at random on either side of the path, and I felt a surge of great happiness to be walking in this sacred place.

Round the next corner, I stopped suddenly. An old man was sitting cross-legged on a boulder. He was dressed in pure white, his hair shorn to the scalp, and there was a broad smear of ash across his forehead. I raised my hands in
namaste
and drew closer.

‘Do you speak English?’ I asked.

There was a pause. Then the old man gestured to the flat boulder beside him. He may as well have been waiting for me. ‘Please be seated,’ he said, in well-articulated English.

I did as he suggested and we observed each other for a time. He was quite elderly, with fair skin for an Indian and an impressively hooked nose. His eyebrows, as well as the faint tufts which protruded from his nostrils, were chalk-white. His robes were immaculate; by his side was a faded brown bag of the type doctors carry in old black-and-white films.

‘You are a pilgrim?’ he asked.

‘I suppose I am.’

‘And you are going to Bhagwan’s cave?’

I nodded.

‘Then you are blessed. That is one very special place. Many auspicious births will have been necessary to bring you here.’

‘May I ask who you are?’

He paused for some time. No feature of his face moved. ‘They call me the Wandering Swami,’ he said at last. ‘And that is a name I do not dislike.’

‘Are you the swami from the top of the hill?’ I asked. ‘I think I’ve heard of you.’

‘No, no. That is a different man. He was there a long time. Had you come here even
one
day ago you would have found him at the summit. But yesterday, I myself witnessed him being carried down and taken to hospital. Stomach problems, I believe.’

‘I heard he hadn’t eaten for fifteen years,’ I said, trying not to sound too facetious. ‘I suspect he might have major stomach problems.’

The swami smiled faintly. ‘Cup of milk he was taking every morning. That is all. Some yogis, it is true, need not take any food at all. Air is enough. But that man, he had one cup of buffalo milk in the morning.’

‘And he
never
spoke?’

‘Correct.’

‘I had hoped to see him,’ I confessed. ‘I heard he had a great spiritual presence.’

The swami nodded reflectively, smoothing his cheeks with one of his hands. ‘Energy was there, yes. But for the one who is attuned, Bhagwan’s cave may also show the way. Whole hill, in actual fact, has great spiritual power. And there are many other yogis here.’

‘There are?’

He shook his head. ‘You cannot meet them, friend. They are invisible. Perhaps if they wanted you to see them. But why should they? They are
siddhas
, tantric yogis. They are ethereal beings who have moved beyond this world.’

I looked across the hillside. ‘Have you seen them?’

‘No. But, over time – and I have been here for a long time – one comes to know when they are close. Human being is very special,’ he added. ‘And of humans,
siddhas
most of all. They have the power of
kundalini
– the divine energy of the feminine creative power. They are alchemists who have understood the way to immortality. Not even the squirrels and the birds can do this.’