Cedilla (47 page)

For one heart-stopping moment I thought the choice was going to fall on Kashi. My heart would stop because we would be alone in an enclosed space, and I would be able to smell the traces of
sambhar
on his elegant fingertips. On the other hand he would be able to smell the after-odour of my bowels, perfumed by spices which my body had no history of processing.

Raghu’s brow cleared and he said with great good humour, ‘The right person seems to be me. It is I.’ Once we were in the bathroom, he lit a joss-stick, wetting it first. When I asked why, he explained this enhanced the fragrance, made it more aromatic. The sweet smoke gave the hygienic proceedings an overtone of luxury and ritual. It had the added benefit of combining two of the smells of Dad’s garden, for which I felt an unexpected pang: roses and bonfires. Then Raghu asked me what to do, and managed remarkably well. I can’t think
there was any area of his life in which similar chores were expected of him. I very much doubt if he had ever performed the same offices for Chu-cha.

Of course the novelty was symmetrical. I myself was used to being tended to by women. Dad didn’t greatly involve himself in this aspect of my life, bodily maintenance from day to day.

Raghu washed me very tenderly. I told him I had brought a flannel, but he said very decisively, ‘There is nothing filthier in the whole world than a flannel. Take my word for it. Direct washing is the only way.’

At first I was embarrassed and made small talk, very much for my benefit rather than his. At any moment I felt I was going to come out with the hoariest Queen-of-England question of all – ‘And what do
you
do?’ As if the Queen had ever really tried to answer that question herself.

I complimented Ragu on the excellence of his English. ‘I too have travelled, you know, John, and even to England. In fact I was “pulling pints” in a pub in the North of England when you must have been a small boy. If you put a bottle of White Shield in my hand this moment, I would still know how to angle the neck in order to keep the sediment back from the glass. Some things you don’t forget.’ It was splendid that he knew what he was talking about, even if I didn’t. ‘The locals couldn’t get their tongues round Raghu, so I was “Reg” for the duration. Then my father had a stroke and that was that.’ He didn’t go into details, and I didn’t know whether to ask any further.

Did I have a defective social picture of India? Truer to admit that I had no social picture at all. For me the subcontinent held equal numbers of Maharajahs and untouchables, clustered round that single point of light which was my guru – the double star made by the guru and the mountain as they pooled their cosmic fire. Raghu and his family didn’t seem to fit in with this scheme. They seemed to be prosperous merchants of some sort. I managed to cast my question in marginally more refined terms than the Queen’s. ‘What is the family business, if you don’t mind me asking?’ I was balancing against the basin at the time, while he washed me.

Raghu didn’t look up. ‘Naturally I don’t mind. Gaitonde and Company are well-established as manufacturers of leather goods.’

It was good that Raghu was taken up with his chosen task, or he
would have seen a look of utter bafflement on my face. The Indian leather manufacturer seemed the stuff of jokes, the equivalent of the contraceptive machine in the Vatican basement.

‘But aren’t you a Hindu?’

‘I am indeed. As are you. Yet I notice you wear leather footwear.’ He pointed to my shoes, where he had placed them neatly on the bathroom floor.

I blushed. It was true that I had made an uneasy peace with animal sacrifice carried out for my benefit. Useless to say that my very expensive tailor-made shoes – cobbler-made – were supplied free of charge by the National Health, and that I could hardly refuse them. Hadn’t I in fact rejected the synthetic Space Shoes which Ansell had taken so much trouble to commission at CRX? I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I didn’t try to explain, though it was true, that I thought of my shoes as in some way continuing the cow’s experience of life, taking it to places it had never been.

Raghu’s intention was not to chide me. ‘You are a devotee of Bhagavan Sri Ramana, whose teaching is very exalted. My own family are devotees rather of Paramahamsa Yogananda. Many of Ramana Maharshi’s sayings, however, are well known, such as this one:
Want
ing to reform the world without discovering one’s true self is like trying to cover
the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It
is much simpler to wear shoes.
’ In fact this supposedly familiar saying of my Guru was news to me. It provided much food for thought, much spiritual cud to be dwelt on. ‘And now, John, I think I can honestly say that you are as clean as a whistle.’

When I complimented him he merely said, ‘You are not in England any more, John – that savage land where they wipe themselves with sandpaper! Water is always best.’ He teased me sweetly a little longer along the same lines, India the advanced civilisation, Britain a backwater. And of course he had a point. ‘Isn’t your government getting ready for decimalisation just now? But here we have already introduced our
naya paisas
. You will like your
new pence
, I dare to predict, once you are used to them.’

Then Raghu insisted on giving me a proper wash, even taking the trouble to delve into my armpits. ‘You will sleep better, John,’ he said, ‘for being cool and clean.’

I was still thinking about his tannery revelations. Since I had taken off into the air above London Airport relatively few hours earlier I seemed to have been shown nothing but irregular behaviour on the part of
Bos taurus
, of the order
Artiodactyla
and tribe
Bovidi
. Cows lolled in slabs on trolleys in the First Class cabin of the Indian national airline, on the streets they languorously licked the mucilage made from their boiled-up relatives, they gave their hides to good Hindus to be made into shoes and jackets. I was being served notice, I felt, that Maya was feverishly at work in these territories, yet I also had the feeling – it was a distinct strand of consciousness within my fatigue, like a tingling copper wire in a skein of dull wool – that everything had changed now that I was sharing a land-mass with my guru, whose ‘death’ had only intensified his local presence.

I had also eaten food of an unaccustomed, revelatory spiciness. Even under temperate conditions chilli, turmeric, garam masala and their allies alter consciousness and tighten the scalp. They pinch and knead the housing of the brain, producing a benign confusion of thought. In a climate of active heat, spicy food brings about a psychological cancellation like the breaking of a fever. By the time I was ready for bed I had taken the new temperature inside myself and was part-way attuned to it.

When Raghu had settled me in a downstairs bedroom with the pee bottle within reach, I should by rights have fallen asleep in seconds. In fact I was kept awake by a pulsing node of thought and feeling – to be frank, an erection. An implacable specimen of its kind.

My celibacy vow had come under pressure from more than one flank already, before my first full day in India. The visiting card from S. P. Munshi at the airport was tucked safely away, but it was so strongly charged with spiritual-erotic impulses that I could feel it pulsating in the darkness. Temptation had opened up a second front at dinner, and I had played eye ping-pong with a charming and not obviously attached young man. Why not give up an enterprise which was obviously doomed and have a good old wank? I managed to persevere, mainly (I’m afraid) by thinking what an impression the
household would get of me, and of the wicked West, when Sumati’s servant changed the sheets. ‘Taily’ was the last part of me to go to sleep, and the first to rise in the morning. I ignored it. I would not give in to its sly throbbings. ‘Taily’ seemed the right, childish word for it, this gross part which proved me an adult but wouldn’t let me be one.

I prayed that I would be able to withstand the temptations of spending time in Kashi’s proximity. Obviously I wasn’t going to molest him in any positive way, but it might already count as a betrayal of my vow to have dwelt on his image and to have become excited by it later, in private. In fact, the next morning I didn’t see him at all – he’d left the house early to run errands – which left me rather disappointed. The pressure was off my self-control, and I felt almost cheated. I hadn’t meant to pray quite so hard.

After he had seen to my morning needs as benignly as he had the ones of the night before, Raghu explained that Mrs Osborne’s ‘bung him on the bus’ plan had undergone further modification. Raghu and Sumati would now be bunging me in the car and driving me to Tiruvannamalai. It wasn’t very far, about a hundred miles. It was all decided. I must admit I was relieved not to have to face the bus, though I had been thinking of enquiring about trains. Perhaps going there by train would have been too presumptuous an emulation of my guru, a bit too much like feeling tired all of a sudden and hopping up on a donkey, just when you happen to reach the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Before we set off Raghu explained one slight complication: I would be showing them the way. I tried to tell myself that he was having trouble with his English, but in my heart of hearts I knew it wasn’t likely. He meant what he said. In some strange way I was to guide the party. I hoped that my adopted religion, which had called to me with its depth and subtlety, wasn’t going to turn out to be full of tests and ordeals after all, like the wearying one I was born into. I didn’t feel that I needed to prove myself in that sort of way.

But why, then, was it my task to show citizens of Madras the way
to Tiruvannamalai? Two reasons, really. The first was that Raghu and Sumati could manage conversational Tamil, but couldn’t read it. They were all at sea with the script. This was a little shock. I didn’t quite assume that all Indian people spoke all Indian languages. I knew there were very many, though I didn’t know enough to put them in the hundreds. But I did assume that all Indian people in Tamil Nadu would be at home with the Tamil language. Why else would they live there? In fact the families of Raghu and Sumati came originally from Kerala, and they spoke Marathi at home.

That was one part of the difficulty. The other was that signposts in Tamil Nadu were written exclusively in Tamil. In a recent access of nationalist fervour, the state government had removed the familiar ABC letters from signs. The British had packed their bags and left, but if they changed their minds and came back they would be properly baffled, just like the anticipated Nazi invaders of 1940, who would have found no signposts at all and been all at sea if they had forgotten to bring maps.

The changeover of signposts had only happened a year or two before 1970 – if I’d made my pilgrimage earlier, then the trip to Tiruvannamalai would have been a piece of cake.

The state authorities hadn’t anticipated that others beside the few remaining Britishers would have trouble with the signs. Indians from other states who worked in Tamil Nadu relied on English to help them find their way, so they were running around confused as well. There were already indications that the authorities would think again – trade was beginning to suffer, and pressure was mounting to let the English alphabet return from exile. So if my pilgrimage had taken place in a later year, the last stage of the journey might well have been a simple matter again. It was only around 1970 that a devotee had an extra set of obstacles to overcome – but that was the year I had chosen for my visit. It was as if my whimsical guru had overheard me thinking about the spiritual life as a sort of treasure hunt, and was dropping in a few more puzzles for my benefit, to draw out the game and sweeten the victory, like an announcer who leaves an endless pause after the words, ‘And the winner is …’

Raghu had asked a neighbour, a native speaker of Tamil, to write down the magic word ‘Tiruvannamalai’ on a piece of paper – in fact
a sturdy piece of card, of the same weight and texture as the pieces of card which protected Dad’s shirts (to some tiny extent) from crushing when they returned from the laundry. Tamil script is made up of lovely flowing characters, loops, swirls and emphatic dots, which had an immediate appeal, making me wonder why I had ever bothered with shorthand, whose practical utility had been more or less irrelevant to me, if not actually a drawback in my eyes.

Tamil characters display a beguiling combination of architecture and flow, grid and embroidery. A line of printed Tamil looks to Western eyes like a row of irregular little houses overgrown with rather stylised creepers. When it’s written by hand, the curvaceous element predominates.

For some reason the stiffness of the card made me feel much more confident about the enterprise. Surely our plan was similarly crush-proof. Raghu and Sumati could remember the first part of the journey. They could negotiate our departure from the city. It was only out in the country that they would falter. That was where I would take over, comparing the curious loops and curlicues of Tamil script with what I saw written on signposts, and directing us safely to our destination. I said with as much confidence as I could muster, ‘Whenever I see a signpost, I’ll try to match it with what I’ve got written down here. Easy!’ What could go wrong?

Not quite everything, as it turned out. Raghu kindly put me in the front seat of the car, with a canvas of some sort behind me. Sumati was in the back with my things. She said something to Raghu in (I suppose) Marathi after we had set off, and I asked Raghu to translate. He seemed a bit embarrassed, but I told him it was impossible for me to be offended by hosts who were going to so much trouble to help me. Then he told me, ‘Sumati said, “How can such a small person have so much luggage?” She says it’s all right for us up here in the front, but she’s getting squashed by your things.’ I laughed and asked Raghu to translate back to Sumati, ‘Please help this small person to compress his luggage by accepting the small cheese which is at the top of his case.’ It was a Germanic interpretation of Edam – I’d chosen smoked so it would travel better. She ferreted out the sausage of cheese in its tight plastic skin and soon started tucking into her snack.