Cedilla (45 page)

As I went into the lavatory he first held the door for me, and then made to come in himself. This was exactly what I had wanted, but it made me nervous. Politely I tried to close the door on him, but it
was necessarily an unequal struggle. He persisted, and so we were both in the cubicle together. I had some slight idea about what this would mean in the West, the taboo charge of lavatory intimacy, but no notion of how it translated here. It felt strange and exciting. I felt a little embarrassment about urinating. With that safely out of the way, I turned to brushing my teeth.

The lavatory smelled foul, but in a pleasingly exotic way. There was unfamiliar spice in the fæcal aroma and I snuffed it up excitedly. Everything was new here, even bad bathroom smells. Of course their source might have been some fresh arrival from Britain overdoing it with the in-flight curry and loosening his bowels the moment he had the chance on
terra firma
, but that didn’t matter. Travel is all about first impressions – it’s very much Maya’s department.

I could see the young man’s face in the mirror, which again was what I had wanted, but the effect was not relaxing. I had to notice that he really was staring at me very hard, and I started to get flustered. Then he started to come over to me, before I had even had time to stow away my toothbrush properly. Then he did two overpowering things at once: he turned me towards him and hugged me, and he burst into barely coherent speech. ‘
I know why you have come!
’ he was crooning. ‘
I know the reason!
’ The crutch slipped from the edge of the basin, but there was no one to shout ‘The ruddy crutch!’ There was only love in an overwhelming surge, like the electromagnetic pulse that accompanies certain types of explosion.

Looking at me with the greatest intensity, my new friend said, ‘Everything must be open and known. You must not conceal your purpose. You should not hide! Why behave as if this was cause for shame?’ I could hardly breathe, not daring to believe we were thinking the same thing.

Sexual feeling and the spiritual urge, those two ways of losing selfhood, are significantly close to each other, deeply similar, vitally different, like the dispensers on a café table which it doesn’t even occur to you anyone could mix up until the first mouthful proves you’ve sugared your tea with salt.

Now I wanted to be very sure. ‘What is it that must be known and not hidden?’

‘Sir, dear sir! Everyone of the airline knows your story already. You are making this journey through the grace of Sri Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi, and should be proud of your purpose. Because, you see …,’ he added with a bewitching shyness, ‘I also am a devotee.’

At this point he burst into tears, squeezed me almost too tightly and began sobbing on my shoulder. Everything exploded in my heart. Part of the detonation was relief that I had been on the right track about this lovely man. That there was nothing carnal in our contact. In India I wanted everything to be pure, and for a long moment I had wondered whether I wasn’t being offered the fulfilment of the dreams I had left behind.

Before leaving Bourne End I had taken a solemn vow of celibacy. In my benighted Western way I thought that celibacy meant abstaining from sexual acts and thoughts. I had a great deal to learn on that subject, as on so many others.

I had read but not taken in what my guru had to say on the subject.
I did not eat, so they said I was fasting. I did not speak, and they said I had
taken a vow of silence.
Perversely I failed to understand, in my deluded hunger for austerity, that suppressing appetites is not the point. By the repression of appetites they are intensified and distorted, when the whole object is to facilitate an evaporation. In the narrowness of my understanding I failed to realise that celibacy is the end point of a whole series of processes and that short cuts are not possible. Willpower not being the weapon, but the target.

I hadn’t yet understood that there was no contradiction between Krishna being decribed as the greatest celibate (the word used is
Brahmachari
) and his having 15,000 concubines.

Meanwhile I felt a piercing guilt that I had mistrusted this marvellous man, not trusting him with the carrier bag that held my treasures, but that emotion didn’t last. It was replaced by a different feeling. In my field of vision there was only whiteness, white with a periphery of brown, white jacket, white trousers with neatly zipped-up fly now pressed more or less against my chest, and warm brown skin showing where the white ended at his collar and cuffs. He caressed me, and I caressed him back, and then he smiled and with his face still streaked
with tears, he held me at a small distance away from himself (as far as the size of the cubicle would allow) and formally wished me joy on my pilgrimage. Despite my vow and my relief I found it hard to disentangle my spiritual feelings from the sensation of touch, and I didn’t ask myself why it seemed so important to try. I just took that for granted and felt awkward that I wasn’t able to match his religious devotion, this tender piety.

Hugs work so well on paper, and in films. People flow together, step into each other’s arms, become one. That’s not my experience. A standard-sized person either picks me up in his arms and embraces me in mid-air, which isn’t as much fun as it sounds, or presses my head and shoulders against his middle, with more or less of the courtesy of a stoop. The other option is to kneel in front of me and start from there, but that’s pretty stilted in its own right, though it gives me the pleasure (usually) of feeling breath on my face. The hoist, the squeeze with semi-stoop, the kneel – none of them quite hits the spot.

Faces and groins never match up at the same time, whichever is the chosen pose, and one or other of them always has its nose put out of joint. It’s never fifty-fifty – and I imagine it was the fifty-fifty idea which made hugging catch on in the first place.

The lovely man in Bombay airport explored two methods. An episode of semi-stooping (and the semi-stoop can claim to be the best of a bad bunch), then some intense moments of kneeling before me, not humbly kneeling but proudly kneeling, and shedding the tears of strength.

It was his noble weeping that affected me so profoundly. His cheeks brushed past mine and left traces. The excited particles of those tears passed rapidly into my skin, dancing through the pores. The divine pervasion took only a moment. It stands to reason that happy, holy tears are governed by a different principle and have a greater penetrating power than woeful ones, which as we know are highly viscous. There must be a subtler globulation involved. I experienced those tears passing directly into me, by an osmosis of essence which science has neglected to study.

When he had reinstalled me into the wheelchair and taken me to the check-in for Madras, this angel of the magnificent aura and the percolating tears gave me a white card with his name and rank on it. I have forgotten the rank, but his name is written on my mind in italic caps.
S. P. MUNSHI.

In the little whirlwind of sensation and revelation that was my sojourn in Bombay airport shame played a part, but it was only a walk-on. It’s true that I had experienced sexual attraction to S. P. Munshi as well as spiritual common ground. S. P. Munshi vibrated to both frequencies. But if I wasn’t ashamed I was certainly a little embarrassed. Life would certainly be easier if everything kept to its category, without overlap. My murky vow of purity and self-denial (as if the Self could be denied!) had rather been shown up by the brilliant white of S. P. Munshi’s uniform, as echoed by the brilliant white of his business card, still in my possession, tucked reverently into the carrier bag, jostling among the traveller’s cheques and the perspex bum-snorkel.

On the plane to Madras I had much to think about, though I had hardly set foot on Indian soil. I knew that I would be met by someone at Madras Airport – Mrs Osborne had promised me that much – but she hadn’t told me who. In my feebly fantasising mind it was even money whether it would be some swami or some street urchin. Brahmin or pariah.

As we descended towards Madras I could see a certain amount out of the windows of First Class if I worked myself around to face them. Even after my hip operations I don’t have a lot of flexibility in my mid-section – I’d need a spine replacement for that. But I was able to manage a methodical wriggle.

Everything I could see was green. I could see cows. We seemed to be about to land in a field. I couldn’t understand how the cows were going to keep away from the plane, or the plane keep away from the cows, and then the plane banked and the fields disappeared.

In those days, British citizens had no need of a visa to visit India and customs procedures were rudimentary. All that happened was that a rather sweet young customs man approached me and asked if I would please fill in a required form. After a glance at the situation he offered to fill it in for me himself. He was extremely friendly and
polite, but the questions just went on and on. Why was I here? Where was I staying? Would I be going anywhere else?

There were very few of these questions to which I could supply a satisfactory answer. The customs man had no objection to writing ‘Not Applicable’ on his forms, in a handwriting that was certainly far superior to my best efforts, but there seemed no end to his forms. Question begat question.

Eventually I groaned and said, ‘Why do there have to be all these questions? All this paperwork?’ The customs man turned and gave me his brightest smile yet, saying, ‘
We learnt it all from you, sir!
’

It was Mr Raghu Gaitonde who met me after I had cleared customs, neither swami nor urchin but to judge by his dress and demeanour a successful businessman in his forties. While I was summing him up he was doing the same with me. I was pleased with what I saw, pleased and also disappointed, since I had my heart set on the exotic. He was less satisfied with the results of his visual survey. In fact he was fairly evidently reeling. More or less his first words were, ‘Mrs Osborne sent me along with the instructions “Collect him from the airport, and bung him on a bus for Tiruvannamalai.”’ He made a helpless gesture with his hands. ‘I don’t lightly disregard Mrs Osborne’s instructions, but I think in this case the proposed course of action will not do. Bunging of any sort would not be responsible. Buses are not to be thought of. Other modes must be devised. She would undoubtedly scold. I myself live in Madras. You must come to my home and meet my family.’

I felt rather seasick in Raghu’s large old-fashioned car, an Ambassador. Luckily there was an absorbent canvas cover on top of the leather, or else I would have been slithering queasily across the seats. From what I could see he was the most cautious driver in those seething streets. Even so, when we turned corners I felt a little insecure, at the mercy of the superannuated suspension.

I had braced myself for the hubbub of traffic, and had more or less visualised the handcarts and street traders hawking their goods. It had never occurred to me that cows would be wandering along the streets of a major city without visible attendants. Naturally enough they had the right of way – even Michael Aspel, demon driver of Bourne End, taker of mad risks, would have thought twice before locking horns with them.

Those cows gave me my first indelible (and briefly traumatic) impression of India, an odd sort of spiritual scorching. Whenever we stopped at traffic lights, or were brought to a halt by any other wayward blockage of the traffic flow, I would close my eyes for a few moments, perhaps longer. Once, when I opened them again, I could see a pair of cows leaning against the walls of a building and giving them a good old lick, showing every sign of enjoying themselves. The walls they chose were ones where cinema posters had been stuck, gaudy in their green and orange and red. They must have found that when the posters had aged a bit and started to peel away from the wall, or else were so fresh that they were still wet, they could by dint of extra licking peel a whole strip from the wall with their lips. Hadn’t I given way to the same temptation with the yellow-roses wallpaper of my room in Bathford? It must be a profound animal craving.

At first the sight was no more than a bit of exotic drollery, cattle at ease in a city, imperturbably chewing the cud of advertising images. I’d heard that Indians were cinema-mad, and the craze even affected the ruminants. I could see that some of the cows were sitting down, munching whole strips of poster in a gloriously unhurried way, wide ribbons of clashing colour. Then I realised with a flash of horror that what they were really interested in eating wasn’t the paper but the glue that stuck it to the wall. And what was glue made of, if it wasn’t the boiled-down bones and hooves of its own kind? Gelatine. There was a heinous meeting in those mouths, as viscous saliva softened a paste made of melted kine. The sacred animal of India was contentedly masticating a gruel made of its own kind on the streets of Madras. This baleful vision of the long-lashed vegetarian turned cannibal followed me all the way to Raghu’s house.

There’s something sinister about the tongue itself as a body part. It flexes and drools, helpless but implacable, a chunk of meat that we can’t choke down. Without it we can’t speak, though if we become too conscious of it in our mouths speech becomes impossibly paradoxical. No other muscle is tethered only at one end – perhaps that’s part of its uncanniness.

In my own history it spells guilt, since as an innocent and ailing
child I ate it with relish, not allowing myself to know that this silky vegetable was something quite different. The bovine tongue brings on a mood of superstitious horror, not helped by my witnessing what it got up to on the streets of Madras. This is the tissue of moral dread, flesh flap that licks and whispers – or it would be, if I didn’t have non-dualist thought handy to dissolve it.

When we had reached his house Raghu left me in the car while he went inside. By now I was overheating – I can keep cool for quite a time, not by any virtue except that I move about so little, but then suddenly I’m awash with sweat. In the short time that Raghu was away, the windscreen filled up with mischievous inquisitive children’s faces, more thickly plastered against the glass than leaves in an autumn gale. I beamed at them and hoped that Raghu had locked the door.