Purple Prose (20 page)

My four siblings and I ran around barefoot on our farm in Narrogin. We scoffed at city cousins who winced at the hard gravel and red dirt, the ants and dry gumnut scrubble. Under the shed lived a menagerie of carpet snakes, blue-tongue lizards, drop-tail geckos, spiders and rats. Possums scrambled up trees and mated loudly on the roof. Magpies warbled greetings at dawn. We meditated and chanted sanskrit mantras on a thrice-daily regime, where family meals were vegetarian, egg-free, rennet-free,
gelatinfree. We met the concept of indulgence, of material gluttony, with an austere shudder. We were nothing like Krishna. Krishna was perpetually flirtatious, bacchanalian in his appetites and as urgently boyish as Peter Pan; he broke into houses, gorged on curd pots and hid the clothing of
gopis
as they bathed. At a touch of his hand the rotting fruit became jewels, the hunchback woman straightened, the six dead children rose again, the magical flute played on and hypnotised all the listeners into a daze.

By the time I turned ten, I felt like a traitor for switching my affections from Krishna to Sai Baba. Sai Baba was the man of miracles from a small village in South India. It was said that he plucked all kinds of fruit from a wish-fulfilling tree, fruit out-of-season and grown in regions far away. I heard accounts of his materialisations, statues rising up from his palm, jewels and rings and pendants, of stone turning into candy, of how he appeared in two different places at once, rescuing followers from car accidents and train crashes and suicidal follies – how he suddenly turned up at the door of a professor in Osaka and hugged him, how he tore up visa applications and granted them for another in New Zealand – he was omnipresent and omniscient, he could travel at the speed of light, he knew everything.

The route from the Bangalore airport to the ashram in South India was well travelled by taxis and buses, wending through rural villages and outposts and boys hurrying cattle along with switches, the shrines built by the roadside adorned with desiccated petals and metal gods. Chalk mandalas dotted the ground. We waited in gender-segregated lines for
darshan
. He floated about the ashram grounds in a robe of saffron orange, a slight figure crowned in a dense black afro which seemed to wax with the moon, waving his hands in a circular motion and distributing ash to followers who daubed it between the eyes and swallowed clots of it as a reminder that all things are reduced to ash, all things are transient. His eyes were piercing yet gentle, his nose broad but somehow cute against his heavy cheeks.

The ashram was a global village of followers, a swelling ocean of people sprawled across the grounds and living in the pastel pink and white buildings which resembled, from a distance, thickly iced cakes. Garlands wrapped pillars. Volunteers swept the pathways and ushered tourists along
.
The washermen returned the laundry washed, dried and folded neatly in tone-matched piles. We attended a regimen of prayers, lectures and devotional singing. Sai Baba's lectures were translated and compiled into multiple anthologies. He insisted that the epics of the
Mahabharata
and the
Ramayana
had actually occurred; that Krishna once walked the earth; that fantastical giants and talking animals populated forests and cities; and at the utterance of a
mantra
, chariots would fly across the sky. My palms were inscribed in henna by an Indian woman who refused payment: ‘It is a blessing for you, keep you safe.' I began wearing bangles and anklets, clapped harder during the
bhajans
in order to hear the instrumentals resonating from my wrist. In our spartan room in the residential towers, we crawled along to the spectre of diarrhoea and vomiting – sipping red cordial and ingesting charcoal tablets. The ceiling fan vibrated with the rhythm of
Vedic mantras
.

O
ṃ
bhūr bhuva
ḥ
sva
ḥ

tát savitúr váre
ṇ
ya
ṃ

bhárgo devás yadhī mahi

We meditate upon that most meditation-worthy

the most knowable and hence

the most relishable self-luminous radiance

In one of my dreams Krishna morphed into Sai Baba. Sai Baba's afro-haloed face hovered on Krishna's body as he played the flute and danced. ‘You can call me Krishna Baba!'

I woke in euphoria – they were one and the same. Like nesting Russian babushka dolls, Krishna's lineage could be linked to Sai
Baba as
avatars
of the super god, Vishnu, he who floated through each of the ages of the earth and descended in embodied human form whenever righteousness and virtue were in decline – a kind of superman reincarnating himself over and over in different bodies.

Sai Baba never spoke to me in person. Yet I felt as if I owned him, I formed an intimacy, a projection mythologised by his followers. We exchanged stories of his divinity, how he had read our minds, hearts, directed our lives in such small and significant ways, passed around totems he had materialised, rings and necklaces, brooches and pictures. His grace was a vaccine, it was some kind of giant and invisible dome within which we were inoculated against the tribulations of the world. I tried my best to be worthy of his grace and resist the pull of pop culture and other things extraneous to the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment, but upon returning to Narrogin and entering high school I listened to Kyle and Jackie O on the radio – watched
Passions
and
The Bold and the Beautiful
when my parents were out – and browsed old copies of
Women's Weekly
and
Cleo
stashed in my wardrobe. For a Wheatbelt town over two hours drive from the nearest beach we were rather obsessed with surfing fashion. We wore Roxy boardshorts, Quiksilver thongs and appliquéd Billabong logos in purple glitter on our bags. Form class was an excuse to recap on
Home & Away
and
Neighbours
. The wooden desks were gouged by generations of students: affirmations of love, obscenities, clumps of dried gum, stickers from mandarins and Granny Smith apples. In the school canteen I gazed upon the crumbed and deep fried cornjack in awe. The farm kids stayed at the hostel or came in by the busload with the hardened skin of those used to rising at dawn and herding sheep and shooting them in times of drought, of downing beer before they reached fifteen and brushing their teeth in soda. Their pet lambs ended up in the fridge, heads crowning the kitchen bench in pools of coagulated blood. My classmates took orders for burgers, fries and milkshakes to the nearest Hungry Jacks on the outskirts of Perth, a four-hour return drive.

I nursed seasonal crushes on unattainable boys although our interactions did not progress much further than questions such as, ‘Why did you end up in Narrogin – why did you move here?' A jolt ran through me when I confronted my Asiatic reflection in the mirror. I longed to be less apparent. During my first year of high school I plunged into a state of anxiety. I spent recess locked in a toilet stall or in the library corralled with books. The classes were bewildering and filled with teenagers engaged in quick and provocative conversations I could not follow. My tongue felt slow and my mind foggy. My thoughts turned with greater frequency towards Sai Baba. I wore his face in a small pendant around my neck and told onlookers he was my boyfriend. I scribbled requests onto notes and folded them inside the shrine enclosing his framed photo; prayers to vanish my acne and obtain my driver's licence, to pass my exams with marks above ninety. I gave him a pet name.

My meditations were adventures on a nightly trajectory, where I could sense the verge of the universe, the impression of limitless power, the globe circling beneath my fingertips, as if the secrets of life itself were about to be revealed. Purple was the colour of revelation – the moment just before the lotus opens in a light-filled meditation where we move the spore of light through every limb of the body and then expand it outwards until the universe is encompassed in light with such intensity that sweat ran down my face. In my last dream of Sai Baba I was sitting an exam with questions on my spiritual grade:
What are the attributes of god? What does god mean to you?
I flung down my pencil. I had passed the exam and yet there was no need to pass. Sai Baba walked past slowly in his orange robe and smiled at me. When the tertiary entrance exams were over I celebrated with my classmates. We slurped ice-cream spiders and shopped along Narrogin's main street – lavender-scented soaps, homewares, Target Country clothes. Our next destination was Perth, the city of traffic lights and palm trees, an adult city packed with unknown and dangerous
things. I was terrified and excited. The horizons of my small, intricately constructed ashram were shifting.

More than a decade later and this all seems innocuous; these teenage attempts to pass various examinations of the spirit, to graduate from ignorant acolyte to illumined being, the continual self-progression and inquiry. These episodes of devotion and obsession appear dreamlike; it is as if I emerged from a haze. Yet I miss that utter immersion, that dome of invisible protection, and still the scent of turmeric and spice brings it back, as do glimpses of afro-haired pedestrians, Hare Krishna dancers in the street, the intricate stringed
veena
and the ululating sounds of devotional
bhajans
, the insignia of the OM curling in on itself in graffiti and tattoos – a hybridised India of Western appropriation and esotericism, a spiritual fusion, a global mishmash. The two loves are inseparable – Krishna fading into Sai Baba, Sai Baba's smile merging into Krishna's mysterious one, Krishna's inscrutable gaze matching Sai Baba's distant one, my longing for certainty.

Once I was an evangelist, a shy and secretive one holding the god inside a cheap locket, a necklace, a Post-It note prayer, a blu-tacked ring, and it seemed that the whole world would become unlocked and apparent to me in an instant of illumination, and the town where I lived would no longer be a mystery to me. I looked covertly for potential converts. The Golden Age of illumination could be a long time coming, but it would still come. Now I relish this new freedom. There is a vacancy of meaning. It is the mystery of the moment which keeps revealing itself without any reason or explanation, where karma holds no sway.

avatar.
Deliberate descent or incarnation of a holy deity on earth.

bhajan.
Hindu devotional song.

darshan.
In Sanskrit, auspicious sight or the beholding of a divine being.

gopi.
In Sanskrit, a cow-girl.

halva.
A sweet Indian dessert often made out of semolina.

Mahabharata
and
Ramayana.
Two major and ancient epics from India, tracing the conflicts and dynasties of royalty and interactions with
avatars.

mantra.
Sacred utterance, numinous sound, or a group of syllables or words believed to have psychological and spiritual resonance.

Vedic.
The language of the
Vedas,
being ancient and holy scriptures and verses composed in Sanskrit.

veena.
Plucked stringed instrument with a bulbous end, originating in ancient India.

There was no blinding moment or first love with Impressionist art. Not that I recall, anyway. More a gentle osmosis: the Degas prints from childhood ballet days, the nude towelling her neck in my teenage bedroom, and the Renoir painting I now know as
Bal du Moulin de la Galette
. Its dappled warmth presided over every meal at the Rabauds', the couple I like to think of as my adopted French parents. Through a haze of wine at the weekend, our faces resonant with those of the Renoir, I could reimagine the flea-ridden gloom of my student flat in Bordeaux. Whenever I see that painting, conflated now in my mind with the Rabauds' hospitality, I bask in those effulgent blues and pastels, a twenty-year-old again.

The epiphany with Impressionism comes decades later, and it is through the colour purple in Melbourne. The sign on the wall reads:
AUSTRALIAN IMPRESSIONISTS IN FRANCE
, Ian Potter Centre, NGV: 15 June – 6 October 2013. Beneath it stands a woman about my own age, dapper in a black skirt and chartreuse blouse; nametag, Natasha. I saunter across, absorbing the quiet murmur of the anticipatory crowd. Then she gestures to us and we are led beyond the grey screen into a universe of colour.

The fierce tones of a Van Gogh assail us on the way in, with its crushed paper mountains and ectoplasm cloud. But Natasha sweeps on towards one of the main protagonists,
In the Morning, Alpes Maritimes from Antibes
(1890) by Australian Impressionist John Russell. We cluster around it, the rocky foreground and bleached coastal scrub suggesting an Australian scene, except
for the pointillist lime in the foreground and the snow-capped mountains dreaming beyond a cool, green sea.

‘Wow!' says the girl with the pink-tipped hair. ‘All those lemony … limey tones …' the words slow to mirror our collective shift as we muse on the painting, ‘… and
purples
!'

Our mobiles are switched off, there are no clocks, no rush, no time; just this leisurely pace to match the heartbeat of the artist who captured this scene over a century ago. In a letter to Tom Roberts before beginning on the painting, Russell described the scene exactly as he saw it, in terms of colour: ‘Sea a mighty blaze of blues, greens, purple, opalescent lights, distant snow covered Alps, tender green and rose sky. Over all a blaze of sunlight.'
¹

‘Purple was much favoured by the Impressionists,' says Natasha, ‘and for good reason.' And she tells us about the accidental discovery of this first synthetic dye by William Henry Perkin in 1856. The young chemist happened upon this brilliant hue, it appears, while trying to synthesise quinine for the treatment of malaria, and later commercialised it under the name ‘Mauveine'. It was cheap to produce, colourfast and an instant hit, leading to the ‘Mauve Decade' of the 1890s.