Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (54 page)

When the stator arrived from England with a new rear wheel as well, my spirits lifted a little. The cheques were replaced without difficulty. I had another cholera shot and a smallpox scratch to get the necessary certificate. I bought some leather and sewed a new wallet to replace the old one.

The owner of the Choong Thean hotel spoke no English, but was very kind and showed real concern for me and for the safety of my things while I was in the hospital. When I returned he made sure I had the same room, and he often asked me, by gestures, to come and eat with him and his staff in the back.

He was not an old man but his face was battered and impressive. It was difficult for him to express his feelings with it. He walked around all day in pyjama trousers, sometimes with a singlet, sometimes without, and scarcely ever left the hotel. There was much to keep an eye on there. Several Indian prostitutes worked in his front room looking out on the street, comfortable matronly ladies with gold teeth, most of them. They did not have to solicit, for they had regular Hindu gentlemen who called, at all times of day, usually with briefcases under their arms. A room was set aside for them at the back, and they paid a dollar twenty per customer to the house. Then there was the nightly mahjong game in the kitchen below the hotel stairs. This appeared to be hired out on a franchise to a man who also ate with us. He busied himself preparing the table with its thick pad of clean white paper sheets, and was there to tear off the top sheet after each game. It is a noisy game, played very fast and for a high stake. The clatter of the tiles and shouts of Pong and Kong went on into the early hours and I was glad my room was a long way away.

There was an old man working for the owner who spoke English, though he was literally tongue-tied. He told me that he could have been a police inspector if he had had an operation 'to cut the string,' but he was too frightened. When he was not dozing in his chair, he asked me questions about travelling and how much things cost in France. Although he was almost destitute, he began to form the idea that his luck would change and he would be able to travel the world and visit me in France.

'But I would not be able to go as you. When you are going through the jungle and meeting dangerous animals I will not be able to run away, so it will cost me fifty thousand dollars to go around the world.' Not nearly, or about, fifty thousand dollars, but the precise sum, and he would of course put it all straight into 'travelling cheques'.

India received me well. I sat there smiling back at my own good fortune. At best I had hoped to be received by friends of friends, but here I had the friend himself.

Quite by chance I had come during the two weeks that he was visiting his father, and so I had been able to arrive out of the crush and confusion of the Madras Docks to a quiet place among friends.

I sat on a bench in the garden close to the door of the house. There was an area of crazy paving and, rising from the middle of it, a big mature tree with fine leaves called the Neem tree. My friend's father, a retired colonel, told me it was sacred and I did not doubt him. In it lived small squirrels, chocolate brown with light yellow stripes along their backs where, it was said, the fingers of Brahma had caressed them. One of them came down to the paving in front of me to see what else the hand of God might have provided.

Near the tree was a stone pedestal and on it stood a pot with a sacred plant directly facing the door. On the flagstone outside the door was chalked a design which was also sacred. It was renewed every morning by the housekeeper, and there were several patterns she could choose from. They were quite complex and were drawn in a continuous line round rows of dots with swift confidence. Inside the front door was a small reception area and on the wall, looking out to the sacred plant, were portraits of Sai Baba, for the Colonel was a devotee of Sai Baba, the holy man. Between the plant and the pictures the daily
pujas
or services were performed, and these few yards were the axis of the spiritual life of the Colonel's household.

I sat in this shaded pool of faith under the Neem, looking along the path to the garden gate and at two women who were standing there and talking about the arrangements for a wedding. They wore saris of course. I was trying to decide what it was about this garden, this light, these women, that made the sari look so. natural.

The women were the mother and the sister of the bride-to-be. The young woman wore a pink bodice under her sari, but the older woman just draped the loose folds of cotton over her breast. The temperature was such that all clothes were mere decoration.

Nothing changed. Time passed. The squirrel nibbled, ran up the tree, came down again. The women talked, and I heard the rapid syllables of Tamil spurting out, each spurt ending on a tantalizing drawn-out vowel sound. Behind the leaves of the Neem the sun broke into a thousand glittering fragments and moved slowly towards evening.

The Colonel's house was humble. Once the family had lived in a big house and owned a sizeable piece of Madras, but times had changed and anyway the Colonel had found satisfaction in simplicity. The house was a bungalow with a flat roof. At one end was the Colonel's bedroom. At the other end was an office cum spare room where I now slept. Between the two were the little hallway and the kitchen.

The kitchen was mysterious and dark, with little furniture and a stone floor. The housekeeper, a tubby determined woman, sat on the floor to chop food on a board and grind the spices in a mortar. At night she slept on the floor behind the front door. She was a very religious woman and sometimes went into a trance, singing and dancing and twirling rather dangerously, and then it took the strength of several men to restrain her.

There were several smaller buildings around the garden. My friend was housed in one. At the other end of the garden near the gate and beyond the women who were still talking, was another abode attached to a garage. That was where the father of the bride-to-be lived. He was a Brahmin called Rajaram, who had appeared by chance in the Colonel's

life some years before and had stayed to become the resident spiritual adviser.

He was coming towards me now, past the women and the Neem tree, a small thin figure, perfectly erect, with a striking head and prominent features. His eyes were large and luminous, and his mouth was poised always on the brink of mirth, for the world was to him a source of constant amusement.

He wore an open shirt revealing a string of brown beads and the knotted cord of his caste. Round his waist was tied the usual cotton skirt called a
lungi.
His chest was nut brown, hairless, very spare and scarcely wrinkled at all, though he was certainly over seventy years old. There was a little wispy white hair on his head, and rather more in his ears. He was almost deaf, and I got the impression that he was quite glad to be spared from hearing so much nonsense. It certainly saved him from a lot of the fuss to do with the wedding, and he joked about the cost of it and the ceremony attached to it.

The guest list had grown to over a hundred and everyone had to be fed, with many dishes served on banana leaves.

'There are four thousand people coming,' he said, spluttering with laughter. 'Each one is getting a tamarind leaf with one grain of rice.'

His wife scolded him for not taking it seriously, but fortunately he could not hear her. He came up to me now and greeted me gravely. Then pointing to the motorcycle standing near his room, he held his hands out in front of him as though grasping the controls and pretended to roar off into the sky, grinning like a child.

'You are flying through the world,' he said. 'You must be going at two hundred miles an hour.'

I laughed to see his enchantment. It was wonderful that this tiny old man could imagine himself rushing through the stratosphere, bow-legged and beads flying, astride a great machine. The bike was so familiar to me, in its capacities and limitations, that I was surprised when others saw it as a symbol of great speed and power.

The Colonel came out of the house carrying a silver platter. During the day he wore English clothes. When going to town he put on his polished brown shoes and his solar topee and carried a cane. Now he was wearing
alungi
also, and the Indian shirt. He came to me and showed me the grey powder on the plate.

'This is
vibuti,'
he said. 'It is holy ash. It is the custom to put this on our foreheads when we worship God.' He put his finger in the ash and drew a line over my nose, like an exclamation mark. I shuddered slightly to the touch, and then felt calmed by it. There is great power in such deliberate touching of another human being, and I had been experimenting with it, trying to recognize the force that lay in my hands.

Rajaram went through the ritual of the
puja
in front of me with the Colonel standing solemnly by. The plant and the tree were part of it, and then, still chanting, the Brahmin walked to the pictures in the house and chanted in front of them too, 'Hare, Hare, Krishna, Krishna,' and so on, the Colonel following and standing by. It was businesslike but not at all perfunctory, as so much Christian ritual seems, and as the Chinese had seemed in their temples. My friend stood by, rather detached with his arms folded, looking as English here in India, as he had looked Indian in England.

With no religion of my own, I had always been embarrassed when others tried to draw me into their religious exercises, saying 'grace' for example at Lusaka, even making a circle of hands at the ranch, the least of statements. Yet here, I already felt that I was living as much in a temple as in a house; merely by being here I was engaged in some kind of worship, and it did not offend me at all. What I objected to, what had always seemed awkward and artificial, was the separation of God from the world. 'And now, a brief word to our Sponsor . . .', that kind of thing. If there was a god at all, then wherever he was would have to be in everything all the time, especially in me. After only twenty-four hours in India I could already feel that presence, in the tree, the plant, the animals, in Rajaram. It was the living belief of others that conjured up this feeling in me. I was excited and curious to see how it would affect me in the long run. As faith, or superstition?

'Sai Baba is quite a remarkable man,' said the Colonel. I could see his problem. How do you talk about such things to an Englishman? The word 'remarkable' has a nice understated honesty about it. Might do the trick? He looked at me through his dark brown eyes, trying to gauge whether it was worth going on. The Colonel was a very straightforward man, without guile. I tried to be encouraging.

'He does certain things which can only be described as miracles. For instance this holy asfh now, you see,
this vibuti.
He can produce it from his hand. He will walk among his devotees and distribute the
vibuti.
In considerable quantities. I myself have seen it literally pouring out.'

This is the turning point, I thought. He has committed himself now, by the evidence of his own eyes. I nodded enthusiastically.

'That is the sort of thing I have been looking for all along,' I said. 'In Brazil I heard about something similar . . .' I stopped. The Colonel was listening politely, but I could see that he did not want to hear about Brazil.

'Of course, many holy men can produce
vibuti
’
he said. 'That is nothing special. Now Sai Baba does other things much more remarkable. He can produce objects such as jewellery, and precious stones. There are recorded instances of him taking a broken watch from a devotee and

returning it in perfect order after holding it in his hand. I will give you a book to read. There are many examples.

'Sai Baba has encouraged me to do my own work here. I had the idea of building a small temple devoted to him, and a hall where people may come to hear about different religions. You see, there is only one God. Christ, Buddha, Brahma, Mohammad, it is all the same.

T asked Sai Baba, and he gave me his blessing. Every year he produces
alingam
from his mouth. It is an important event at Whitelands, where he has his headquarters. It is quite extraordinary. The
lingam
is very big. It is impossible to see how it can pass through his throat.

'There is always a great throng of devotees and Sai Baba passes among us, talking to some, stepping over bodies to get past. At one point he stepped on my back to pass across and you know, a quite remarkable thing, he was weightless. He had his foot on my back but there was absolutely no weight at all.'

We walked through the gate and along the pavement, and then turned back behind the garden wall to where the temple was, a simple square building with a wooden floor, and at the back a shrine with two portraits of Sai Baba. In one he was garlanded and smiling, and the picture was rather faded with brown marks at the bottom edge. In the other he was standing at the top of a flight of stone steps in a vivid crimson robe. He was a small dark-skinned man with a round face appearing at the centre of a mass of fuzzy black hair. The portraits were in silver frames. Beneath one was a silver bowl and beneath the other was a tray.

'Now I have brought you here to see this,' said the Colonel, 'because it is proof. From this portrait, you see, ash falls into the tray. The
vibuti
you have on your forehead came out of this picture. Every morning there is more ash on the tray. And from the other picture honey runs into the bowl. It is quite amazing.'

There was ash in the tray, but the bowl was empty.

'During the last few days, the honey has stopped,
I
think
it is a sign that something is not right. There are certain problems. I am planning to ask Sai Baba's advice.'