The Cauliflower (13 page)

3.

July 1865 (or sometime thereabouts): Sri Ramakrishna is taken to a private house, seated comfortably on a mat, and then, following an intense period of prayer and meditation, the aforementioned mysterious orange-robed woman leads a naked couple into the room. They lie down together on a bed and proceed to make love. Sri Ramakrishna watches them writhe and groan and cavort with complete equanimity.

Mysterious Woman (
mildly interested
):
“Pray, what do you see here before you, my child?”

Sri Ramakrishna (
smiling
):
“All is beautiful! All is holy! I see nothing before me,
nothing
, but the blissful sport of the Divine Mother!”

The mysterious orange-clad woman nods, satisfied, as Sri Ramakrishna enters a state of deep ecstasy.

4.

August 1865 (or sometime thereabouts): the mysterious orange-robed woman offers a quaking Sri Ramakrishna a small chunk of rotting human flesh which has just been offered in
tarpana
(i.e., to the Deity), and asks him to touch it with his tongue.

Sri Ramakrishna (
wincing
,
aghast
):
“Can it be done?”

Mysterious woman (
matter-of-factly
):
“Of course, my child. Look…”

She puts the rotting human flesh into her own mouth, pauses, then calmly withdraws it again.

Mysterious Woman:
“How else, pray tell, are we to conquer our weak and pathetic human aversions?”

Sri Ramakrishna closes his eyes, visualizes Ma Kali in her terrible form, and then, chanting—“Mother! Mother! Mother! Mother!”—he enters a light trance and opens his mouth, and the flesh is placed onto his tongue with no trace of aversion.

5.

11th September 1865 (or sometime thereabouts)
: Sri Ramakrishna enters into a state of uncontrollable ecstasy at the sight of inebriated revelers outside an overcrowded tavern.

P.S. This is not—officially speaking—a part of the
Tantric
sadhana
.

6.

12th September 1865 (or sometime thereabouts)
: Sri Ramakrishna enters into a state of uncontrollable ecstasy at the sexual union of two stray dogs.

P.S. Nor is this.

7.

15th September 1865 (or sometime thereabouts)
: Sri Ramakrishna enters into a state of uncontrollable ecstasy at the sight of a poor prostitute plying her trade on Calcutta's filthy streets.

P.S. This neither.

8.

21st September 1865 (or sometime thereabouts)
:

Certain quite random words—because of their sub- or
un
conscious connection with the divine—will henceforth act as linguistic trip wires and cause Sri Ramakrishna to fall into an immediate and uncontrollable state of ecstasy at any—and every—given moment.

Ooops!
There he goes! He's just fallen into another trance. You take his head, will you? And I'll grab his …

Circa 1882, Sri Ramakrishna offers some practical advice to his householder devotees:

“Live like the mudfish—

Even though it dwells in filth

Its skin stays spotless.”

1847. The Rani's dream(s)

Of course (as with most things in life), it's simply a question of finding the right angle.… And yet no matter which angle we attempt to film it from, the actress playing the Rani still seems to find the scene of her “assault” deeply troublesome. She has been slapped so many times now (albeit simply in pretense. This is all sleight of hand.…
Well
, there may've been the occasional slip—the actor who plays Ramakrishna being a trenchant realist/naturalist/drama queen/bitch—and who'd have it any other way?) that we no longer need to apply blusher to her precious cheek, but are obliged to cover over the marks—obscure them!—with copious quantities of heavy makeup.

The actress is losing heart. We try to remind her of her subject's lofty morals and profound spirituality. But still she harbors resentment. She's been hired to play the Rani, hasn't she? A queen? So how can she be expected to simply submit to such appalling treatment without struggling to bring a twinkle of feminist fire—nay,
ire
—into it?

Oh dear. She's such a modern creature. Between takes she's been poring over Rudyard Kipling's “The City of Dreadful Night” (for Calcuttan background, for atmosphere—it's her first film and she's annoyingly keen) and as a consequence she's now livid with Kipling, too (which is doing precious little to improve the quality of her,
ahem
, “performance”). She is righteously indignant. She was hoping for another
Jungle Book
, where all the rough edges (man's and nature's) are neatly and sweetly tidied up. But this no-frills Kipling's a bust!

She is currently pondering the chapter in which RK (while on his tour of Calcutta's more terrifying districts with the local police force—all jolly chaps) encounters a white prostitute (of Eurasian stock), mother of nine and widow of an English soldier. This woman is called Mrs. D, and she stands in her cheap doorway on her filthy street with her shameless eyes boring into Kipling's lily-white (Union Jack–enrobed) heart. Her grimy hovel—which is littered (Kipling haughtily imagines) with cheap paintings of the saints and badly engineered statuettes of the Virgin Mary—rings with the echo of her saucy tongue and her lilting and curiously affecting laugh (this laugh—no whorish cackle, even Kipling admits—has markers of true gentility in it). Mrs. D is certainly to be judged and found wanting by the colonial Rudyard (as all things Calcuttan surely must be).

The actress longs to inhabit Mrs. D and wrest back her humanity from Kipling's sneering gaze.

“Oh, he sees how hard I am, all right,” Mrs. D (aka the actress) improvises, adopting a fetching southern Irish accent. “A slut, a potential murderess”—(“They said I'd poisoned my husband by putting something into his drinking water,” page 75)—“but even so far as I am from God,” she persists, hands clasped, cheeks streaking with righteous tears, “I feel that I am suddenly held close, gripped tight—by the contempt in his eyes—to the black heart of the Goddess. I am
here
. I am
hers
. So completely fallen and yet so warmly embraced within this strange world of reeking filth and death and darkness…” (
Bravo! Rousing rounds of applause!
)

But this is not our scene! we tell her, panicked. The light outside is swiftly fading. We must get our take. The actor playing Ramakrishna (our star! our Great Hope!) is already in a fearful bait. His slapping hand is suffering from twinges of repetitive strain injury. We dare not offend him any further. He's been dieting for months now to get down to the requisite size (featherweight!) and is already up in arms about playing his nude scenes after an especially vicious bout of food poisoning (his local chip shop must take the blame; a tepid saveloy of questionable origin—we're filming all interiors, for financial reasons, in an adapted mansion in London's leafy Kensal Green).

Perhaps if we screen what we have accumulated thus far—everything in the can—backward, we may lessen the impact of what is yet to come. Perhaps the actors will be mollified if they can see where they've been, where they've traveled from.

Watch the film rewinding. Look! The Rani is unslapped and then deep in prayer, and then leaving the temple and then talking with her lawyers. The tape rewinds faster and faster until—Ah! Stop!
Stop!
Play it! We're in 1847, and we see the Rani asleep in bed. Her rest is fitful, as all rest in her great city must be (because of the heat, the humidity, the bugs). She has been planning a six-month pilgrimage to Varanasi, the City of Light. But there is no train. And the roads are treacherous. So she is sailing there by boat … along the child Hooghly and the mother Ganga, following these great and holy rivers in the strong conviction that every pitch and bob of her valiant craft will resound in her head, her heart, like a prayer.

It's the night before she leaves and there are twenty-five boats in her convoy—three for her daughters, one for her doctor, one for the washerman.… One contains four cows, and another is stuffed full of their fodder. Imagine the preparation! Well, you don't have to imagine it—we can rewind the tape farther and you will see.… But how expedient! There's the fleet of boats (the
grab
, the
brig
, the
pansi
, the
katra
, the
fealchara
, the
hola
, the
sloop
, all painstakingly re-created in our Thames-side studios based on the watery etchings of François Balthazar Solvyns) being gradually
un
loaded. Because during her sleep on the night prior to her departure the Rani is visited by Ma Kali (in some accounts the Rani is already onboard and adrift; it's her first night on the water and she is passing the
very spot
—Dakshineswar—where her Kali Temple will be built) who tells her that there is no need for her to head off on this pilgrimage. Instead she is to use the money put aside for her trip to build Ma a temple on the banks of the Ganga. The Goddess will graciously accept her devotions there.

Cynics may pooh-pooh the dream. Cynics may think that there were other reasons—an attack of toothache, a legal problem, the prospect of a big business deal—for this last-minute cancellation, but we believe in the dream. If we explore the Rani's dream (the Rani dreams in black and white! How curious!) we can see the Goddess and hear her speak. The Goddess is huge and seems to be operated by stop-motion model animation (the Rani is so ahead of her time—even as she sleeps!). Look beyond the light and you can almost see the shadowy figures of Don Chaffey and Ray Harryhausen in conference. This is a remake—no, a premake—of 1963's
Jason and the Argonauts
.… Listen … there's even a rousing theme tune written by Bernard Herrmann!

Oh dear. But the Rani's daughters are all packed up and ready to go and really,
really
looking forward to their trip.… And the doctor … even the cows! I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. But the Rani has had a dream (*kindly insert communal, Munch-style silent scream here*). In fact, she has had
two
dreams, thus far: the first to go on a great pilgrimage (this is a waking dream, a yen), the second telling her not to go and to use the money to buy some land instead and build a temple there.

We have inspected all minor details of the actual dream (our experts are compiling a lengthy and highly informative dossier) and we are still unable to confirm (at this early stage) that the Goddess actually mentions the serving of
cooked
food at her new temple. Cynics (ah, you're back again!) may think that this was all simply a matter of social status, not spiritual necessity/divine intervention, and hence contrary, in principle, to Hinduism's adherence to the rules of caste, and, worse still, the spirit of resignation/renunciation/destruction of the
ego
/et cetera, which jointly underpin its most essential tenets. But we choose to see this as simply another dream of the Rani's—another waking dream. A deep desire (or “earnest desire,” as the Ramakrishna Movement would have it). An inexplicable urge. And therefore an expression of her profound spiritual devotion, her modest need to serve as best she can—not an undermining of it.

It's also important to bear in mind that if the Rani
hadn't
had this dream (the cooked food aspiration) then she could've hired any number of priests to serve in her temple. But she
did
have it, which meant casting around for the one specialist, the one expert, the one (quite frankly pretty minor) pandit who would feel inclined to find some kind of working compromise to fulfill it. This was Sri Ramakrishna's brother, who had engaged with this tricky problem before, remember? (Gadai's sacred thread ceremony?) Hmmm.

When you play it backward it suddenly all seems … well, so bizarre and incidental as to be divinely inspired. But the cynics (hello, y'all!) see something else. They see a group of individuals who have been naturally inclined, obliged, even forced, to compromise (sidestepping the restrictive rules of sex, gender, race, and caste). They see brash modernity posing as (but signally undermining) the vital traditions of sincere devotion. How could these special someones—these social and spiritual and (yup)
political
trailblazers—
not
be drawn together? Is this destiny, or rather just plain (even bare-faced) necessity? Did the Bengali Renaissance start here, or … or were these just the early markers of a movement—an expanding, experimental social psychology—already well under way? Who can say?

One thing worth considering is how the Rani, Sri Ramakrishna, the
Brahmo Samaj
, and the Bengali Renaissance all have in common a sense of moving forward while still looking keenly back. A kind of easy modernity which passionately celebrates its conservative—even (wince) “primitive”—past. It is intrinsically Kali-esque in nature. It somehow magically transcends the pair of opposites. It is at once of now and of then. A synthesis. A counter-/pro-imperialist, counter-/pro-capitalist farina pudding of yes and no. A milky (distinctly nontransparent) anti-/pro-nationalistic faith-fueled blancmange.

Let's get back to the dreams. Because there's still another dream (a second/fourth!). But before we home in on that, let's imagine the Rani hunting for her piece of land. Or the Rani's agent (in all likelihood). He sails up the great Hooghly (well, it's actually the Thames—some swampland down near Canvey Island in which we've raised a couple of mock palms. Although his
grab—brig—katra
—I forget which—is a 100 percent faithful copy, et cetera, et cetera…) searching diligently for the perfect spot. And he finds several.