Cedilla (49 page)

On the way out of Sen-Jee the wall persisted across the road itself, so that we drove through a gate. It did my heart good to know that we had broken the back of the journey, and I started to scan the horizon for the shape I had seen in so many dreams. Soon I felt a jump in my heart. I sang out, ‘Oh look! Arunachala … There it is!’

Raghu chuckled indulgently at my beginner’s mistake. ‘No John, that is not Arunachala. We are too far away. It is very similar, though, as a lot of these mountains are. You do not need to be on the edge of your seat just yet!’

It was a mortifying moment. I hated to be playing the part of the Credulous Tourist, who on first seeing the White Cliffs of Dover exclaims that he can make out the spires of Harrods twinkling in the distance.

Sumati said something from the back which Raghu didn’t translate but which I heard as the equivalent of ‘Have a heart, Arthur! Don’t throw cold water on the poor boy’s faith!’

I accepted in my social self that what I saw was not Arunachala, although its contour fitted my dreams so well. I believed Raghu because he was Indian and this was his country, not mine, but in spite of his authoritative Indianity, I had some irrepressible instinct of recognition.

The feeling grew as we continued our journey, and the supposed not-Arunachala grew bigger and bigger, and again I piped up: ‘But it must be Arunachala! You said it wasn’t, Raghu, but I’ve kept my eye on the outline all the time, and it got bigger and bigger and
look
!’

I had by now grown used to the strange curls which spelt out ‘Tiruvannamalai’. Three times we had gone astray to follow the will-o’-the-wisp of ‘Tiru…’, but now the ‘…vannamalai’ with its rearing serpent had fully lodged itself into my brain. In front of us another signpost loomed, with the swaying cobra rising up at the end of the word, looking as if it was about to swoop down at us and spit.

When Sumati spoke again from the back of the car I felt certain that I could follow the gist of what she had been saying. I knew no Marathi but I could tune into her heart. It was something along the lines of, ‘There, didn’t he tell you so? True faith sees further than the eyes can …’

The town was indeed Tiruvannamalai, and we had arrived at Arunachala, but I don’t mean to say that Raghu was wrong. Our perspectives are perfectly compatible. Nothing could be easier for Arunachala than to project himself a little further on that day, for the benefit of a pilgrim who was beginning to despair of his welcome and, as it turned out, would still find some obstacles put in his way. The mountain can be a perfect gentleman.

Sermons in my schooldays had never satisfactorily explained the Trinity, except by way of a solar analogy (the Sun, the Sun’s light, the Sun’s heat, triple and indivisible). Yet I didn’t have the slightest difficulty in understanding the guru, the God and the mountain, Ramana Maharshi, Shiva and Arunachala, as emanations of each other. What was true of one was true of all, and I knew that Ramana Maharshi would sometimes take great pains to offer a devotee
darshan
, the word which denotes a formal manifestation of presence, spiritual grace as it is offered to the eye.

There was one occasion, for instance, when it was noticed that Ramana Maharshi had changed his morning routine. He no longer brushed his teeth in the same place, but moved, while he agitated the appropriate twig in his mouth, a little distance away.

It was a minor mystery, with the disciples wondering why he had changed the pattern of his days. (‘Disciple’ seems to outrank ‘devotee’, but their relative status is unclear. The greater susceptibility to ego
tends to mark the disciple down.) Only much later did it become known there was a devotee who had sought her guru’s presence on a daily basis but was no longer able, by reason of age and bodily stiffness, to climb the mountain to where a view might easily be had. It certainly seemed to her that Ramana Maharshi took those few steps to supply the
darshan
she so much desired. He himself, as befits a mountain, made no comment.

So if Arunachala graciously bowed in my direction, it had nothing to do with merit on my part. It was the apotheosis of good manners, a welcome mat the size of the sky.

Somehow we found our way to Mrs Osborne’s house, which Raghu said was called ‘Aruna Giri’. There was a strange pale-skinned figure on the verandah, leaning over something with a tool in her hand. She didn’t look round at the sound of the car, or even when we pulled up by the house. She seemed to be in a trance. Then a young woman ran up from the garden and pulled at her sari, and she looked round rather abstractedly.

When she came towards us it gave me a real shock. Could this really be Mrs Osborne? Surely this twisted old lady, this hunchback, must indeed be a witch rather than a beacon for spiritual travellers. She seemed better suited to manhandling lost children into ovens than helping pilgrims to their destination. She was wearing a white sari rather than a black cloak, but that seemed a minor detail, the witch’s summer plumage. The servant girl ran into the house.

When the old lady spoke she made it worse. She came awkwardly down the steps of her house and peered into the car. I suppressed my fear, made myself perk up and stretched out what I could of my hand with a well-brought-up ‘How do you
do
?’ I was trying to mimic Granny’s technique of imposing herself by manners.

She completely ignored my gesture, and then exclaimed, almost with disgust, ‘But Raghu, you have brought ush a
child
! Look at him! How can I poshibly cope with a shituation like thish?’ Mrs Osborne had seemed completely English on the page, in the letters she wrote to me, but when she opened her mouth she had one of the thickest accents I had ever heard. Thanks to my experience talking to Barbara Broier’s gruff dad in Cookham, who pronounced
r
as
g
, I was able to work out that she was Polish, but her accent was thicker even than
Barbara’s dad’s. These were not by any interpretation the sounds of welcome. All those hostile sibilants, those
eshesh
, made me forget how much I actually liked snakes.

We were behaving with symmetrical shallowness, equal disgraces to our faith and the arrangements we had made. Neither of us corresponded to the other’s cosy image, built up over months of letter-writing, and we reacted with horror.

Gloomily I remembered that I had written to Ganesh at the ashram that he could prevent me from coming to the ashram, but not from coming to Tiruvannamalai. If necessary I would sleep at the side of the road. Unless Mrs Osborne took me in, I would have to make good on that threat.

Feeling that Arunachala might be testing my reactions and my sincerity, I started looking at the hedges around the little house. They had prickly pear cactus mixed in. Hedges with spikes were not something I’d reckoned on. It began to look as if I should have asked Mrs Pavey at Bourne End library to find me a copy of
Hedges of India
.

Mrs Osborne motioned Raghu to climb the three steps on to the verandah, and then disappeared with him into the house. She took herself off but then raised her voice so much that she might have dispensed with the fiction of withdrawal. From my seat in the car, I could hear her shrieking to Raghu: ‘Imposhible, quite imPOSHible for him to manage here!’

Behind me in the car Sumati was singing to herself in a way that I did my best to find comforting. I hadn’t forgotten what Sumati had said, though, about the eight-legged and no-legged inhabitants of the region. If I slept under a hedge then scorpions also and serpents would be my portion. I would have ample opportunity to test my understanding of a classic Hindu parable:
At dusk a man sees a snake
at the side of the road and is frightened. By daylight he sees that it was only
a coil of rope.
The snake standing in for ‘reality’, dusk for perception without enlightenment.

The moment I read this parable I realised how right I was to be transfixed by Mum’s description of the Indian Rope Trick while I was bedbound. Of course the business of the fakir climbing up the rope and disappearing is a fable or a misunderstanding. But properly understood, everything we see around us is an Indian Rope Trick.

Then Raghu and Mrs Osborne came out of the house, and he spoke, though it was at her dictation. He was like a politician reading a prepared statement with stiff composure, saying that war had been declared or that his wife was standing by him. ‘I’m sorry, John, but it really is impossible for you to stay here. I know your ways and your needs a little by now. Even if you could manage to get through to the bathroom somehow, I don’t see how you could manage there on your own. And as you can see Mrs Osborne is not hale enough to help you.’

Indeed she was not, and I felt a little betrayed by her physical state. It’s true that I had delayed any revelation of my disability until I had been accepted in principle, but that was to keep the two things separate, the general possibility and the particular difficulties. Mrs Osborne hadn’t said a word! She was pretty much helpless, but she had kept it to herself. She couldn’t have pushed the wheelchair a yard, even on the flat. How and when had she managed to do
pradakshina
with Sumati? Even with a snoring break in the middle of the eight-mile trek, the task looked to be beyond her.

Now I broke down and wept, but only on the inside, having come all these miles and braved so many hardships only to be met by this. Yet something held this vehicle of skin and blood and bone together. The body twitched its little arms in a helpless jerky gesture, while its face put on the most appealing and childlike expression it could muster.

Mrs Osborne looked exasperatedly at Raghu, as though the whole situation was somehow his fault, and Raghu looked at me. I kept up the look of supplication in the direction of Mrs Osborne, inwardly wondering whether Mum wasn’t right all along, about the entire idea being crazy from start to finish. My mother thought I was mad, and so did a nameless elder in provincial Tamil Nadu. Nobody much was standing up for my sanity.

We seemed to have reached an impasse. I could feel my supplicating look beginning to run out of steam. I had never played so nakedly on my helplessness and I was becoming horrible to myself. Was this really what the mountain required?

Raghu broke the deadlock. ‘What we should do next, I think, Mrs Osborne,’ he said, and I blessed him for it, ‘if you agree, is to get John out of the car. His joints are playing him up. We could at least give him a good breath of Arunachala, possibly on the verandah. Would there be a possibility of rustling up a cup of tea from somewhere?’

It was wonderful to hear an Indian gentleman coming out with those magic words, ‘rustle up a cup of tea’. If Raghu could be so providentially English, then there was chance of a bit of it rubbing off on Mrs Osborne. Perhaps she would pick up on the national spirit of muddling through somehow, even though I had doubts about her permeability. She’d been married to an Englishman, after all, since before the war, and she still seemed to be stubbornly Polish.

Even when she spoke Tamil she sounded Polish to my ears, and I could only imagine the impression she made on her Indian hearers. ‘
Avvarai jaakiradai tuukkanum!
’ she said, in what was the voice of command in any language, and a dark-skinned, smiling man I hadn’t seen before came towards me. He had a charmingly squashed nose. ‘This is Rajah Manikkam, my gardener,’ she explained. ‘He will lift you on to the verandah.’

Somehow or other I was lifted up those three big steps, and found myself in the wheelchair, on Mrs Osborne’s verandah in Tiruvannamalai. There was a table near me at a convenient level – just over two feet high. On it was placed the welcome cuppa, which I was determined to handle competently without help. Even if there was nobody watching, I needed to demonstrate that I was something more than a helpless, hapless pilgrim, a mere drain on hospitality, not even posh but merely imposhible.

On the table was the tool Mrs Osborne had been using when we arrived, and the tablet of stone on which she had been labouring. It seemed to be a memorial tablet for her husband. A grave marker for Arthur Osborne.

It was good to be at this elevated level, and soon I began to feel almost at home, until I looked towards the dark hole which must have been the entrance to Mrs Osborne’s witch-house. Then my heart sank again. All the ingenuity in the world wouldn’t help me to get inside. It was cramped and poky for an able-bodied person, and anything less Johnable could hardly be imagined.

When I had finished the tea and Raghu and Mrs Osborne appeared again, they were still shaking their heads and Mrs Osborne was murmuring, ‘Imposhible – absolutely imposhible.’

After the interlude of teatime I was back on pleading duty, like a puppy in a pet-shop window after a lull in the pedestrian traffic on the street. The look I was making myself wear was beginning to hurt, but I concentrated every scrap of prayerful energy I had on Mrs Osborne. At that moment her stern strict face softened and became really rather beautiful.

‘John!’ she said. It was the first time she had addressed me by name. ‘It’s quite imposhible for me to have you in my house. I built it myself, you know. I mean to say, I had no plans and no architect. I just told the masons what to do. Arthur said it was half-way between a palace and a dolls’ house. If I build another house I will try to consider your needs, but this house for you is quite imposhible. That is perfectly clear and beyond argument. We shall discuss it no further. But let me ask you one question. Where are you now?’

I didn’t quite know what she was getting at. Was this a sort of Hindu catechism? ‘Well, on the mundane level I’m sitting at your table on your verandah at the moment.’

‘And izh there anything
wrong
with my verandah?’ she asked. ‘Izh there any way in which you poshibly don’t
like
my verandah?’

In fact my only knowledge of verandahs and the torrid goings-on associated with them came from watching
The Rains of Ranchipur
, starring Richard Burton and Lana Turner (
Theirs was the great sin that
even the great rains could not wash away!
), but I kept that to myself. ‘No,’ I said, trying to sound as if I was assessing the verandah by a thousand discriminating criteria, ‘I like it … quite a lot. As verandahs go I would say that the one you’ve got here is … distinguished. Altogether a high-class verandah.’