Cedilla (32 page)

Mouni Sadhu’s book was like my watch after its service, weakly giving back the light it had been given, soon merging with the darkness. Arthur Osborne’s was like the same watch fresh from Canadian Jim’s wrist, charged with every sort of potency. As I read
Ramana
Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge
, the part of me that had been asking
who-am-I?
for so long, since I was first ill – getting no further than the sense of a brown and waxy haze – was bombarded by illumination. Ramana Maharshi as he manifested himself in Arthur Osborne’s book was an active source. His smile was powered by the radium of enlightenment.

It was all so clear, and so easy. Ramana Maharshi didn’t just ‘not demand’ that you changed your way of life, he warned against that temptation. His principle was that if you can discover the meaning of life in the jungle you can do it just as well on a bus. You could do it even in Bourne End.

He himself led a wonderfully inactive life. As a boy in Tiruchuli in southern India, his most obvious talent was for deep sleep. Then one day he went through the experience of death, and got over it. He understood that the death of the body has no relevance to the Self. A little later, still a boy, he set off by train to the settlement of Tiruvannamalai and the holy hill Arunachala. He walked the last miles, shed his privileged status as a Brahmin without premeditation, and never left. For a long time he neglected his body, but not out of a need for mortification (the Hindu word is
tapas
). It was a profound unawareness. He didn’t eat, so people assumed he was fasting. Left to himself he would have starved to death, but if food was placed in his mouth he would chew and swallow unresponsively.

He didn’t speak, and people assumed he had taken a vow of silence. An ashram grew up around him but he fled it more than once. Finally he accepted that he would always be a focus of worship, and simply stipulated that there should be no restriction of access to him, no
charge made. He left no gospel, though he wrote a number of poems and hymns. Sometimes he answered questions and sometimes not. His ego had fallen away. Even in the letter he left to explain his departure for Tiruvannamalai he didn’t use his name. As he explained, there was nothing deliberate or conscious about this. It was simply that the ego didn’t rise up to sign it. Or as he put it another time, ‘After the photographic plate has been exposed to the sun, does it continue to retain images?’

He loved analogies from technology. He would certainly have kept up with developments if his body had been around now, but it didn’t matter. His Grace was already inside my system like a spiritual computer virus, twining its spiderware round every function.

Despite his absence of an ego, I experienced the presence of my guru as something very unlike a blank. There’s another way of referring to the status of the ego after enlightenment, apart from the photographic-plate analogy: it resembles the moon as we see it in the daytime. A minor light operating in its own sphere. Ramana Maharshi had shed his personality yet retained his character, which was a delightful one. Playful, warm and dry.

At some stage in my reading it occurred to me that if this captivatingly earthy mystic made sense to me instinctively, then I myself must be a Hindu, not a Christian nor in any meaningful sense an ex-Christian. The thought didn’t trouble me unduly. Very well, I was a Hindu. There didn’t seem to be any procedure for signing up – it wasn’t like the Rosicrucians, the Brotherhood of the Rosy Dawn, who had so fascinated me when I saw their advertisements in
Predic
tion
magazine promising Cosmic Consciousness. I had only been held back by the necessity of sending my subscription (supposed to be a week’s salary, so it would have been virtually nothing) made out to AMORC, a somehow unappealing acronym – standing for the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosæ Crucis, but still rhyming in the mind with Pork.

I seemed to have become a Hindu simply by the act of thinking so, which was marvellously simple. There’s no equivalent of the Pope in
Hinduism. I don’t mind hierarchies too much, but I do hate paperwork. Hindu Cosmic Consciousness had come to me free of charge and under its own power. No SAE had been required, even.

As I later learned, Hindu converts from Christianity are notoriously stroppy and intractable, so it was handy that I didn’t fit the category. (They pine for their old certainties – they lay down beanbags in a church and then miss the discomfort of the pews.) If I had ever been a Christian, then that was a skin I had shed long ago. My new skin was Hindu.

I didn’t have the experience of a conversion in the conventional sense, nor even the decisive moment which Quakers call ‘convincement’. I treasure that word, perhaps more out of a love of technical terms in general, and a soft spot for the Quakers, who (apart from anything else) provided such a nurturing school for my brother, than because it describes anything that I felt. The rosy pervasion I was undergoing was perhaps closer to a chemical process, transformation on a molecular level like the action of yeast in dough or beer-making.

The great thing about this internal change was that there was nothing for anybody to notice. A carnivore turning Hindu would have to change his habits, but my vegetarianism was already in place.

Conversion doesn’t always get a good press. Gandhi was opposed to the practice on principle. He felt that you should stay with the faith-structure of your upbringing, and try to fill it with your own ideals. My idea is just the reverse – every incarnation is like a treasure-hunt, and where would be the fun if the answer lay right next to the question? Going far afield for the beliefs that feel like home isn’t a perverse extravagance, like buying your knickers on the Moon. The element of spiritual shopping-around is crucial, just so long as you know when to stop when you’ve found your bargain.

Those who content themselves with the faith of their parents aren’t really playing the game. And I’m sure that the faith I inhaled, those hymns and that yawning, the earnest irrelevancies of the pulpit, would be an answer to prayer for someone brought up in another faith, even if I can’t quite see how.

The letters from Keele and Cambridge arrived the same day. Mum hurried off to fetch Dad’s letter-opener, samurai sword of the stationery drawer. I didn’t know why it wasn’t in my possession anyway. I
was the only one in the house who actually needed a weapon to tackle his scanty postbag. Dad had a lovely long finger fit for the purpose. Mum had once explained that Dad’s letter-knife was an heirloom, and I managed not to say, ‘Yes, and I’m the heir apparent!’

Mum slid the opener across to me. She was as nervous as I was. ‘Which are you going to open first?’

The one I cared about, obviously. The one from Keele.

It was a rejection, and I took it hard. I’d set my forks on the redbrick campus, the grown-up Toytown. ‘Set my forks on’ – that was a phrase from a television quiz show of the time –
Take Your Pick
, compèred by Michael Miles. When a new contestant came on Michael Miles would tend to ask, ‘Any prize you have forks on tonight?’ Reluctantly I withdrew my forks from Keele.

Perhaps Dad had been right – they already had a disabled person and weren’t in any hurry to acquire another. Disabled students were like hermits on country estates in the eighteenth century, very fashionable but one is enough. In fact to have two rather than one would spoil the whole effect.

I held out no hope for Cambridge’s letter. I thought I knew what it said. The atmosphere at Keele had been much more welcoming, and if Cambridge hadn’t bothered to ask me any proper questions it was because they’d already decided my fate before they laid eyes on me. No one had any obligation to accept me, after all. And that was me dished, educationally. I had the car and the driving skills, but nowhere to drive away to in the Mini.

I told myself that at least Cambridge University wasn’t being hypocritical. There was no pretence that I was being rejected for academic reasons. It was a nice straightforward slap in the face. My thinking hadn’t been tested – I had failed in the practical, by not walking well enough to a snack bar. My intelligence wasn’t being denied, just my right to develop it.

Despite my alleged cleverness, I had failed to notice a crucial detail. The Keele envelope was skinny, and the other one was not. The envelope from Cambridge was positively fat. It bulged.

That’s because when they say No, that’s all they need to say. Big fat no – it doesn’t take up much space. If they say Yes, they have to explain the fine print, as I found out when I picked up my borrowed
blade and prised open the flap. The one big Yes was hedged about with a thousand niggling Thou Shalt Nots.

The bye-laws and regulations went on for page after page. They had said Yes. Yes, but … Yes, as long as … Yes, unless …

But still Yes, though it was slow to sink in. The Yes was so greatly outnumbered by the Nos, it hardly seemed to have a chance. The level of detail was astonishing.
Undergraduates are permitted to boil eggs on
hobs and in their kitchens. More adventurous culinary efforts, especially those
involving frying, are strictly prohibited.
It was easy to lose sight of the favourable verdict in the haze of caveats and prohibitions.

It took me quite a while to get it into my head that I’d been accepted – and even then Mum wasn’t convinced. I had told her about not really being interviewed, just made to walk to a coffee bar. They’d only stopped short of putting me in the stocks, why would they be giving me the key to the city? She couldn’t believe I was really being offered a place at Cambridge – the very thing that Hitler had stolen from Dad – just like that, with no questions asked, or no relevant questions at least.

So as to satisfy Mum, and to quiet my own unworthy doubts, I rang up the Admissions Board for confirmation. I said quite clearly, ‘We just had a walk and a cup of coffee. He didn’t test me at all. There must be more to it than that!’ The secretary went away for a few minutes, and when she came back she said, ‘Yes, he did. He did test you, and he passed you, and we’ve accepted you.’ Apparently A. T. Grove had a portable X-ray machine with him all along, and had peered inside my mind when I wasn’t looking.

It’s funny that it should have been so hard, after all the to-ing and fro-ing, to take Yes for an answer. I’d won, and I demanded a recount. The doors had opened, and somehow I kept banging on them with my stick and my puny fists.

Of course there was a catch. To satisfy Cambridge I only had to get two Es in my A-levels, English and German, but if I was going to read Modern Languages (which was the whole idea), then I had to take another modern language at A-level. It couldn’t be a subject that
was already part of my course of study. In other words, it couldn’t be French.

This was actually something of a relief, since I’d always disliked the language, or at least the chasm between what was written and what was said. Every ending in French seemed to sound like
eh
, but the spellings proliferated wildly. That had always been one of German’s trump cards, the precision of its notation.

My extra language would have to be Spanish, which I’d barely started to learn. The strategy of early application had been a success, though, and I had time in hand, if I could only muster the patience. Eckstein had already got me started. I was well on my way with
Nos
ponemos en camino
.
We put ourselves on the path
. We were picking up speed. There were three books in the series, and I sailed through the first two. Admittedly the third gave me a bit of trouble.

I would skip the O-level and study for my Spanish A-level at High Wycombe Technical College, brushing up my German at the same time, and I would arrive in Cambridge at last in September 1970.

First, though, there was some more tinkering to be done on this body. It was as if I had got used to a perverse sort of pattern – leave a school, treat yourself to some surgery. This time it was a matter of sorting out my right leg, which pointed forward so alarmingly at the knee. The procedure wasn’t medically necessary, but the leg was certainly unsightly as things stood.

Mr Arden would operate, as before. ‘I don’t need to explain everything to you, John,’ he said, ‘after what you’ve been through already. You know the drill.’ Indeed I knew the drill. The circular saw I also knew. ‘But how straight do you want it?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to make it
too
straight, after all.’ He did a little sketch of what he proposed, to be sure of getting my approval.

The proposed operation was paradoxical. I was like a Zen koan written in surgical steel:
shortening the leg we make it longer
. Mr Arden would be shortening my leg, in the sense that a wedge of bone would be removed, but lengthening it for practical purposes. My foot would meet the ground, once he had done his work, and the finished limb would be longer because more straight. The effect, if he overdid it, would be to make the other leg, the left, shorter in relative terms. My ability to reach the pedals with both feet might be impaired. He
wanted me to know what would be involved, even after I had given the go-ahead on the basis of his nifty little drawing. ‘You do know, don’t you,’ he said, ‘that you’ll have to learn to drive all over again when your leg has healed? Not from scratch, exactly, but near enough. It’ll take you a good while to adjust.’ I told myself that it couldn’t be as bad as the rehabilitation from hips.

I was promised clear benefits from the operation, in terms of my posture and physical ability to manage, but really this was cosmetic surgery. If Patrick Savage had never referred to the unearthly angle of my knee and his need for a protractor to measure it, I wouldn’t have tampered with it. I had wanted to be his dear love, I hadn’t wanted to be his geometry homework. But of course by this time he and I hadn’t spoken for months. We were no longer even at the same institution. It was too late to make any difference, and I couldn’t mend the past.

Perhaps I was hoping to get off on the right foot with a future, more available Patrick Savage. To make the best of my prospects, with someone who had lacked company in the womb and might elect to become my twin. Any streamlining that could be done on this uncoöperative body was a good idea – that’s the sort of thinking that passes for rational. But yes, perhaps there was an element of scape-goating, singling out my knee for punishment when it was the whole organism which had failed to find favour.