Cedilla (60 page)

The dog was skinny, he was fidgety and his fur was as coarse as a wire brush, but he was an absolute godsend in the night. I could lean on him just enough to change the position of my spine, and get a little relief from the ordeal of the bed. In the mornings he would make himself scarce, though I expect Kuppu had spotted him and was turning a blind eye.

Even with the dog in place my sleep was fitful, and I would take in impressions which fully registered only later. Sleep is a mist subject to intermittent thinning, with occasional patches of clear visibility. So I was dimly aware that in the early hours Mrs Osborne had crept out onto the verandah, carrying a kerosene lamp of some sort, and crept away again. It can’t have been long after three. Time for Lucia’s morning meditation, before the abrupt arrival of dawn stacked the odds against inwardness. Like any good hostess she was quietly making sure that all was well with her guest. Did I have everything I needed?

Then she crept back holding something just out of sight. In my half-sleep I registered that this hunchback was suddenly growing very tall, and then that she had produced a very nasty-looking stick. Without a word she brought it cracking down on the dog, on my innocent bedmate and physiotherapy cushion. Who yelped and ran. I was shocked, frightened and in my bleary-eyed way actually very angry that this vegetarian devotee of a religion of respect for all creation should harbour such a core of rage and cruelty. What sort of person gets up early to meditate and casually brutalises an animal before she starts?

This demonic incarnation of Mrs Osborne gave a nod of satisfaction and returned to the house, so that the conversation which I so badly needed to have with her about how she squared such behaviour with her faith had to wait till morning.

After those few hours’ delay, though, I felt awkward raising the subject, which was dishonourable and absurd. It wasn’t that my feelings had eased, but the good manners in which I had been brought up intervened, and I was very aware of feeling rude and disobliging. I gave less good an account of myself in the argument than I should have. I don’t think I was ever fully rested during the entire five weeks of my stay in India, but that morning broken sleep and emotional upset conspired to make me ineffective.

I pleaded that the dog was helping me sleep, and got the usual reply of
Nonshenshe
, and the familiar boast of how well she slept, despite her age, on a bare floor. I tried to explain one more time that our situations were different, but she obviously concluded that I was a softy. Even after the initial conjuring of the bed by her and Rajah Manikkam I hadn’t been satisfied – the drawback of that kind of bed being that the knots loosen unevenly, so that a few stay taut and dig into you while the others start to lower you to the ground. More than once she and the gardener had made adjustments, winding tapes round the bed to reinforce the slackened ropes and hold them in place.

I had no alternative but to bring up matters of doctrine. ‘Didn’t Bhagavan warn us never to abuse animals round Arunachala, since they might be
siddhas
in animal form?’

‘You forget, John, that I have seen that scabby dog hanging around and scratching itself for months. A siddha might take the form of a dog’ – and here her delivery became positively venomous – ‘but would certainly be immune to
fleas.
On the other hand it might very well be a demon.’ She regarded the matter as closed, and moved away before I could remind her that Bhagavan himself in states of extreme inwardness had been infested with worse things than fleas – his flesh had been eaten by ants.

It points to my oddly intermediate state of mind that summer that I could accept a cow on the mountainside being a goddess, but not a dog on the verandah being a demon.

I didn’t mention that Peter had adopted the dog (or he had adopted
Peter), that we had fed him on
vada
scraps and kept him out of sight. That we had named him in honour of an American cartoon. The scrawny dog with the sidelong grin never came back, and nor did my full fondness for Mrs Osborne. I asked myself what Peter would have made of her cruelty. Could he have hung on to his dependence on Mrs O, his sense that he was safe with her, if he had seen her as I had, as a witch with a stick?

It was a jolting experience, though it also provided a moment of breakthrough in translation from the Tamil. After seeing Mrs Osborne assault a defenceless animal, I had found what Raghu Gaitonde had asked for, a passable English translation of the word
suunyakaari
, ‘she who manipulates nothingness’, so meagrely rendered as ‘witch’. Wielder of the Void. That was her secret identity.

The whole incident with the dog cast a pall over my relationship with Mrs Osborne and made me doubt whether we really shared a faith. If we did, she was no sort of advertisement for it. It was Ramana Maharshi’s practice to feed dogs before people, and though I didn’t want to be the sort of Englishman abroad who makes the treatment of pets his yardstick for everything it was certainly a point of affinity between guru and disciple. I was only a visitor but Ramana Maharshi was much more than a resident, he was the quintessence of this landscape, and between us we outnumbered the Polish
suunyakaari.

What I had seen in Lucia Osborne as she brought the stick down on an innocent animal was exactly the sort of pattern which conditions
karma
, a
vasana
, a rut of cruelty, a stuck groove in the human record, even if she saw the action as either entirely trivial or else disinterested, as if she was only ridding my bed of a pest. She was deceived. Altruistic deeds release the Self, egotistical ones imprison it.

Later that day she came out onto the verandah with an armful of books, proper Western hardbacks even if they were falling apart and had been eaten by every kind of insect. She dumped them on the table in front of me and said she’d like me to bind them professionally for her. I was utterly dismayed. They were completely unmanageable, the sort of book I would have to wrestle with to show it who’s the boss before I could read a single word. I bleated something about the small size of my arms and the large size of the books, but she said coldly, ‘You told me you were a bookbinder, so I had some jobs lined up for
you. Whether you keep your promise is up to you.’ Then she made her exit into the house, leaving the stack of moth-eaten tomes on the table for me to look at, since there was nothing else I could do with them. I had plenty of time to regret the hollow promise I had made in the hope of making myself useful and not being a burden to the household.

Even with Yogi Bear sharing the bed, my sleep had been fitful, but after he had been driven away I had hours of that insomniac awareness that is the opposite of meditation, waiting for sunrise and the relative comfort of the wheelchair. I had plenty of time to grapple with my spiritual impasse. Willpower had brought me to a place where willpower stalled.

Pradakshina
had become part of my routine without quite seeming to winch me, as planned, into the centre of my Self. It was something like a sacred constitutional. The beginning of the
pradakshina
road was remarkably peaceful. The surface of the road was mud, with an almost antique patina and a scattering of sand on top. The accumulated compressive effect of thousands of devoted bare feet on
pradak
shina
had somehow lightened its texture, giving it a sort of upward spiritual thrust that could be felt unmistakably rising up through the wheels of the chair. The ground had a delightful soft feel and released a seductive sifty-tilthy sensation. It transmitted shimmering spiritual tickles.

At this point on every
pradakshina
I would feel as if I was trembling on the brink of enlightenment, as if light was being born inside my eyelids. Spores of self-realisation drifted around me like flour particles on days when Mum got busy baking. Yet however fiercely I stoked my inward fires, I couldn’t burn off from the unfolding experience a certain gross residue of sight-seeing.

For one thing I had become something of a connoisseur of
man
tapams
, those structures which Ganesh had identified for me on that first night. When I had mentally compared them with bus shelters I wasn’t too far off the mark. A
mantapam
is no more than a consecrated roof. Ideally a
mantapam
would simply float above the heads of pilgrims, keeping the rain off. Not practical in structural terms – but that’s the simplicity that
mantapams
start from.

A roof without a wall would only provide shelter from rain falling
in an obliging vertical, and we know how rarely that happens. So a
mantapam
will have the concession of a back wall, and four pillars to hold the roof up. It’s usually possible to find a dry spot under the roof somewhere. The sacred element in a
mantapam
is variable, but it’s definitely there. A
mantapam
is the bud of a temple, which can sprout very vigorously under the right conditions. An unsponsored, unloved
mantapam
remains dormant in its shelter form. And of course the bud can be blighted. At one point on the
pradakshina
circuit was a
mantapam
whose roof was falling in. Grass and weeds were taking over underneath, and an enterprising tree was tapping into the unused vitality of the edifice by growing out of the top of the dilapidated wall. I couldn’t quite see where it was getting its moisture, unless as a sapling it had sent rooting fingers into an unsuspected reservoir of nourishment, some little yolk-sac of grace.

Just as a
mantapam
can blossom into a temple, I suppose a temple which fell on hard times might eventually decline into a
mantapam
. But there are more possibilities than these in
mantapam
evolution. A
mantapam
may grow at an oblique angle into a
choultry
, which is only a
mantapam
with a little kitchen attached. The presence of food, whether donated or begged for, changes everything. Once cooking has come into the picture it’s only a matter of time before music gets in on the act, and soon food is being offered to hungry pilgrims at the
choultry
to the accompaniment of
bhajan
s, special songs.

I had even made my peace with the tea-shop which I had scorned so bitterly earlier on. There was no resemblance, as it turned out, to a cathedral gift shop or cafeteria, unless those places recruit their staff from the circus. There was a strong element of showmanship involved. The hissing noise I had heard (which reminded me of the auto steam-engine I wasn’t allowed to have as a child because it wasn’t safe) came from something that can only really be called a samovar, despite the distance from Russia. I had seen its domestic equivalent at Mrs Adcock’s in Bourne End, but this one was in constant use. Next to it was another pot, one that apparently had milk in it, simmering over glowing embers of charcoal. Hot water would be dispensed from
the samovar and poured through a net bag the size of a man’s sock containing tea dust. Then hot milk was added with a ladle.

It was the next stage of the operation that seemed to call for a drum-roll in the background, and occasional gasps from the crowd. I made sure I had a good view. This was juggling with tea, not with cups of it but the liquid itself. The juggler would pour it from one beaker into another to cool it off to the ideal temperature. Naturally enough, he started to show off, grinning broadly, pouring the tea faster and faster from an increasing distance until it looked, as it flowed from beaker to beaker, like a molten yo-yo looping between expert hands, or a Slinky miraculously promoted from mimicking fluidity with its soft metal coils to partaking of the real thing. At last the beaker was presented to the customer ready to drink, the swirling ribbons of liquid reassembled into one, the colour of caramel and tasting as sweet as it looked.

By this time I had weaned myself off taking sugar in tea (coffee was more of a challenge), but it would have been missing the point to have clung to my preferences now. The tea flowed across my tongue differently from any Western preparation. It positively sauntered down the digestive pathway, and of course there’s a reason for this. The local cows (species
Bos Indicus
, breed most likely
Kangayam
) produce a sleeker milk. There’s an inverse relationship between milk yield and fat content, so Daisy (species
Bos taurus
, breed perhaps Jersey) outproduces Lakshmi in volume but can’t compete in richness.

High fat is good in a treat, bad when it becomes a routine. So is Hinduism inherently a high-fat religion? Good question. After all, India has the largest population of cattle (cows and buffaloes) on earth. But actually, no. We read in the
Atharva Veda
(I do, anyway) that only cows with low levels of fat in their milk should be kept as family cows. Cows producing richer milk should be donated to the priestly castes, who require a higher percentage of fat when performing
yajñas
– offering oblations of milk (among other substances) to the sacred fire, to tickle the palates of the gods. They whose digestions can cope with any extreme of lushness.

Finally the day dawned, as abrupt as all its predecessors, when it was time for me to return to England and my mundane future. It was also time for me to be measured again. Mrs Osborne was visibly excited
as she bustled about with her tape measure. She seemed to have forgiven me my limitations as a book-binder. No further jobs were lined up. She didn’t need me to change a fuse or dig a trench.

Homœopathy was being put to the test. An agnostic was being provided with hard evidence, and trusted to accept the facts however disruptive of previous certainties. I lined myself up against the wall of the house. Mrs Osborne took her pencil and made a mark. She was humming under her breath. Then Rajah Manikkam helped me back to the wheelchair while Mrs O grappled with the tape measure. She made a great fuss about aligning the bottom of the tape properly, asking Rajah Manikkam to check it for her. When she was satisfied that everything was properly arranged she compared the two marks and wrote measurements on the wall.