Judith (25 page)

I once heard Shastri addressing a political meeting at the side of the road. He stood on a handcart that had one wheel missing: his group of boys in white shirts and black trousers were propping it up. He was saying the sort of things that people always say at political meetings – other people have privilege, privilege is wrong, we demand that we have privilege.

When I talked to Shastri he said – What is your God planning? to say he has died, and to come alive? taking with him everyone's money?

One day one of the shanties made of sacking and old driftwood in the sand-dunes caught fire; a child was burned; her mother was said to have been on acid. The next day the police came and walked around the scene. Their helmets were like the shells of crabs. They seemed to be waiting for baby turtles.

Throughout my time in the Garden I never went (perhaps I went just once in order to see) to any of the encounter groups or what used to be called ‘human potential' groups in which people were supposed to be helped to get rid of bottled-up feelings of rage – against parents, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, society. Strangers would face each other on the floor of a large room and shout the abuse that they had not been able to shout at whom it concerned; there was an outpouring of hatred that was meant to disappear down some drain. But the reserves of hatred, from such a well, seemed endless. I thought – Surely there is enough to do in the way of fighting in the world outside?

Once or twice I went down to the grand hotel to see – what? the bodies stretched out by the swimming-pool? the landscape in which I had for a moment been happy, in which I might be happy again? I thought – If you have to fight anyway, perhaps it is in seeing yourself as an agent in occupied territory that you might feel at home.

One evening I was lying on my bunk in the hut and Ingrid and Gopi were combing each other's hair like one person looking in a mirror and Samantha had got into a yoga position like the one in which you are supposed to be able to squirt water in and out of your arse; and there was a sort of pattering, a small screaming, on the pathways outside: it seemed to be to do with rats; we went to the doorway and looked out. It was the police running down to the shanty town by the sand-dunes; they carried long sticks like the wings of seagulls or the claws of crabs. I thought – It is they, and not the baby turtles, who now run towards the sea; and will the baby turtles get them? I followed them and saw them hitting with their sticks at the makeshift huts: the denizens came out and the police
kicked and knocked the huts over: there did not seem to be much purpose in what they were doing; people would wait for a time, standing around in the half-dark, and then start putting their huts up again. I thought – It is like that painting in the National Gallery of the battle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs: people enjoy bashing and being bashed about; it is what they are used to; it is not so easy simply to get out?

The house in the village in which Shastri lived, and which was owned by his uncle, was a sort of boarding-house on two floors with rooms on four sides facing inwards round a courtyard. Bedrooms were on the upper floor with doors on to an inner veranda; on the ground floor there was an eating-room and a kitchen and a laundry and rooms where people could hold meetings. Men in striped pyjamas used to stand on the veranda and lean on the balustrade and look down as if they were political prisoners.

I did go to one of Shastri's meetings: I sat at the back of a room of men and girls in white shirts and black trousers while Shastri faced us from behind a table. He spoke mostly in their local language: when he spoke in English, he seemed to be speaking to me.

‘My father was once a schoolteacher and had high hopes of this man who is now called God. He thought he might lead the country to a new beginning! Then there was a strike of schoolteachers and my father lost his job – Who was this man who would do nothing to support him?

‘My father went to jail. These people in the Garden, who will support them in the day of retribution?

‘When last there was violence it was not ourselves who suffered: it was the rich! the privileged! Let no one imagine it is a privilege now to say you will come alive when you have been dead!'

I thought – A political meeting is like some box, perhaps, which you listen to through a keyhole and the bits and pieces of sound that come out seem to make sense; then you lift the lid off and it is all nonsense, there are no connections.

Afterwards I went up with Shastri to his room. I lay on the bed with my hands behind my head while noises came in like flies from the road outside. I said –

‘My father had the idea that human beings became different from apes when they walked upright; then they could have bigger brains, there were thus no limits to their interest in sexuality. This resulted in language: they couldn't have sex all the time, so they had to think, to talk about it – to plan, to attack, to cajole, to defend. They did not need to spend so much time hunting for food. Of course, when we know this, we can just stop talking: but we carry this enormous brain round in our heads. We don't use it yet wholly; we can cut off bits and pieces of it. But we don't use our ability to take the lid offand look inside. This would be the whole – to talk, and talk about what you are talking about at the same time.'

Shastri, with his hands at the buckle of his belt like a gunfighter in a western film, said ‘What are you saying? I don't understand what you are talking about.'

There was a day when I was told I had been chosen to be one of the disciples to whom God was to give his special blessing that evening in his inner garden. I did not know why I had been chosen; it might have been arranged by one of the people in my hut, or by my friend who was like Lilith. I did not see her so often now: we had never spoken to each other much. (Do you think I was growing up? Or do you think that with Shastri I was having just another dose of childhood?)

Twenty or thirty people lined up outside the entrance to God's inner garden: we were all clean and bright: I had not been into this part of God's own territory before. We were taken round the side of his house into the part of the garden at the back where there was the loggia; this was where I had seen, from the outside, the picture being painted by the girl who might have been Anita Kroll. I wondered where Anita Kroll was now; were we not both, perhaps, being trained to be agents in occupied territory? The boundary hedge of God's inner garden had been patched up with matting: rugs had been
placed on the ground; we sat facing the loggia, within which there had been placed one of God's empty chairs. Beyond, in the outer garden, we could hear the music of the nightly celebration starting up: what was to happen here, in the nucleus, was to be echoed in the larger cell. There was even a small band of drummers here at one end of the loggia: the style of the blessing, the transmission of grace, seemed, as usual, to be about to contain some self-mockery: we were both to experience blessing, and to look down on it as if it were some stage show. I thought – God may suddenly pop his head through curtains like a clown.

In fact when God did appear from the back of the loggia he was smiling and gliding as usual; he turned this way and that in greeting to the lines of people in front of him; it was as if he were a toy; as if he were saying – Gods are after all, are they not, some sort of clockwork toys! He sat in his chair and arranged his robes and looked amongst us with his sad, enormous eyes as if to say – You know which is the joke? which the sadness? which the reality? The drumming began. God's chosen acolytes were to be led up to him one by one. I did not at first see my friend who was like Lilith. Then I thought I caught a glimpse of her through the plate-glass window. I could not see the girl who might have been Anita Kroll.

As each acolyte was led forwards to God's throne the drumming intensified: she or he knelt and bowed down: God moved to the edge of his chair as if he had indigestion: he spoke to the acolyte softly, so that no one else could hear what he said. I thought – Well, God does say different things to different people, doesn't he? Then God seemed to move forwards almost beyond the edge of his chair; he put his hand round the back of the head of the acolyte as if he were getting a hold of (yes!) a musical instrument: he put the thumb of his other hand on the centre of the acolyte's forehead and seemed to play it (you have met this image before?) as if he were producing music: he waggled his thumb and fingers this way and that – why do the thumb and fingers have to waggle, do you know? is it because this technique is necessary to produce
the single note of pure music? After a time the acolyte in front of God seemed to wilt: it was as if she or he were dissolving into music: were being remoulded; perhaps would emerge again as something indeed emptied, or like a bird from an egg. So then she or he could go out, and fly around, and appear as her – or himself again – as nothing? – or at the bottom of that staircase? I thought – Of course, God's finger comes down from above that doorway; the loggia is the courtyard containing the angel and Mary. So then, being played, are we not being taken beyond the framework of the picture? After a time one or two of the acolytes began to howl: it was as if the instrument being played were less a cello, more a saw: I thought – Who was that satyr, Marsyas, who was tortured for playing music? The images, as so often, became piled up. I thought – It is not so much that I fear I am being carried away: it is that I know I will have to watch, with cunning, if I am to emerge from this upheaval of bodies as if in a telephone-box.

There were one or two of God's regular disciples ready to prop up the bodies of the enrapt, collapsing acolytes: I thought – Dear God, they are like those two Thai boys who used to lift me at the house in North London: indeed, what is and what is not a joke? The place on the forehead against which God was pressing his thumb was the place where there was, or might be, the third eye of Shiva: this is the eye that sees inwards: I thought – Perhaps when you see with this, the bits and pieces in your brain become connected like light.

After a time the acolyte had to be helped up, or even carried out, like a knocked-out boxer. And there was the drumming and wailing going on all the time, the people on either side of me swaying about, the whole scene reverberating with the banging away in the outer garden. I thought – So what is this music you are trying to put into or draw out of people? you want them to be carried as passed-out bodies to Valhalla? Don't you want them to fly? Does not a bird have to find land on its own? Does it not then come back to you?

When it came to my turn to be led up to God's throne I was thinking – no, not thinking: we had been told by God, had we
not, that we should not think: but had I not also been told by God why on earth should I obey him? so what I was doing both was and was not thinking (this is, yes, an easy way of putting it) – What would have been the point if God or the angel or whoever it was had put his finger on Mary's forehead and Mary had passed out moaning and yelling? God would be looking for someone who could bear his burden, would he not: who could look him in the eye; or at least look down at some place where the bird might be; in front of her stomach, in fact; up from that empty nest of stones. In fact God would long, would he not, for someone who could both love him (could it be me?) and yet get away from him. When it came to my turn to go up to God's throne I saw that my friend who looked like Lilith had appeared and was standing beside him. She smiled at me. I thought – And you, Anita Kroll, are you beyond that window? Then – All right, God, here I am. But the child is looking, is he not, somewhere beyond the picture. There was all this drumming: people in the audience were swaying and moaning. I knelt: I thought I might arrange my pink and gold robes behind me: well, if I were not Mary, might I not be the angel? In such circumstances people do see visions, don't they? God put his head down close to mine. There was no smell. Perhaps you notice this only when there is no smell. There was something soft and luminous in him like the canvas of a picture seen close up. I thought – Things are in a different focus here. God said my name in his soft whisper: then ‘You are thinking of leaving us?' I nodded. God had these extraordinary transparent eyes that you seemed to see through into a new landscape. He put his hand round the back of my head and the other hand in front of my forehead: then he paused, and then put this other hand against my throat. I had not seen him do this to anyone before. He said ‘You will speak?' I said ‘Yes.' He did not put his thumb on my forehead and wobble it.

You remember that story of Marsyas and Apollo who challenged each other to a duel about who could make the best music: Apollo played the lyre and Marsyas played the flute: Apollo was judged to have won, because Marsyas looked so
ridiculous when he blew his cheeks out. So Marsyas, as a punishment for the presumption of his challenge, was sentenced to be flayed alive while Apollo watched – has not this always made Apollo seem worse than ridiculous? God leaned forward again and whispered ‘You will come and see us?' He still did not wobble: I did not blow my cheeks out or yell or moan. I thought – There has been made this hole through the canvas: what is here is to do with vibrations, not music.

The disciples on either side put their hands under my arms as if to support me. I thought I might say – Oh for goodness sake, I don't need this, don't be ridiculous! God's huge face smiled down at me. I thought – It is like the sun that comes up in the morning: there it is, the grid; the riddle.

It seemed that there was an enormous event going on elsewhere: that something quite different was with some difficulty being born. I had no further image of this: there was just that empty space on the ground; the bird flown from its nest; the child looking out of the picture; God's huge face at the back of the finger looking down. Just before I got up to leave – when I did, I did not go back to my place on the rugs in front of the loggia but went straight round the side of the house and out of God's inner garden – just before I got up to leave – how composed I was! how immaculate, as it were! – God took hold of my head between his two hands and I had the impression that he was going to kiss me on my forehead. I did not want him to do this: I did not know why: I would not put my head down, so if he kissed me he would have to kiss my mouth. So he smiled, and took his hands away. He sat back. He seemed pleased. I thought – Well who was it who did or did not kiss someone in a garden? Then – Well, there will be that baby on the edge of the bed: here is the earth, its mother. I wondered if I should wave and say – Coo-ee!