I began to feel a little flattered qualm about Ganesh’s obligingness and approachability. He was making time for me in a way which could hardly be standard practice. He was certainly easier company than Mrs Osborne, though of course we only really discussed one subject, and that subject was the reason for my being in India in the first place.
His face too held a fascination, being full of light and kindness. It gave the effect of constant smiling, and yet it was hard to be sure there was a smile there at all. If it was a smile, it was as different from Western smiles as a pearl lightbulb is different from a clear one. It was all glow and no dazzle. Perhaps it was as close as I would get in mere life to Bhagavan’s radiant gaze and piquant serenity, his personality the embodiment of acceptance but also an agent of change.
Then Ganesh quoted a saying of Bhagavan’s to me, which was not only stirring in itself but had some sort of eerily glancing connection with my disordered thought-stream in the Old Halclass="underline" ‘He who is in the jaws of the tiger cannot be rescued; so also a person who has fallen into the grace of a guru cannot escape from it …’
Mrs Osborne too had powerful jaws, though I suppose she was more terrier than tiger. Soon she organised a schedule for me, saying, ‘I thought you might like to go to the Old Hall to meditate for an hour from nine o’clock every morning, and from five in the evening.’ If Mrs Osborne thought you might like something, it was best to start liking it right away.
My second visit to the Old Hall was no more rewarding spiritually than the first. There where I had counted on coming into blossom I experienced a withering. I was forced to face the fact that my pilgrimage was deviating from its planned form. Of course if you issue enlightenment with a timetable you are asking for trouble.
As it turned out, I wasn’t going to leap into self-realisation the first time I entered the sacred spaces associated with my guru. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life there, teaching people how to meditate and realise themselves. That had been my underlying hope, that I wouldn’t have to return to the West at all, to the ordeals of my independence, but could simply be absorbed into the fabric of a less material society. When I had said goodbye to Mum and Dad at the airport, it was with the feeling that I might not see them again. I was conscious during the leave-taking of a finality that I welcomed with at least half my heart. But now it was becoming clear that I would be going back to them. The spiritual pull of Arunachala was still there, it never stopped even when I was at my most frustrated, but somehow the flow was blocked. It refused me, which must mean, mustn’t it, that I refused it without knowing what I was doing.
I was pushed over to the Old Hall to meditate on most days. I almost began to dread those visits, not because there was anything unpleasant about them, but because they reminded me of my failure to make progress. After the initial rush of mystic bliss, meditation had become homework. While everything else in India seemed colourful and immensely interesting, sitting in the Old Hall trying to get some self-enquiry started was distinctly depressing. My mind seemed jumpier than ever, which wasn’t at all the plan.
Of course self-enquiry is a drastic exercise. To make a change in your behaviour is like grafting new fruits and flowers onto a tree, to understand why you have particular desires is to lop off a few branches, but full understanding recognises that the I-tree, stubborn bole, must be pulled up by its root. The ego is a decorative feature that passes itself off as structural. It’s a pillar suspended from the roof it claims to hold up.
It was strange how much at home I came to feel on Mrs Osborne’s verandah. An environment which was announced as fatally hostile turned out to be highly congenial, almost tailor-made. The smell of green breakfast figs cooking, the call of the commode, the lustre of Kuppu’s smile, the tiny mystical pill dissolving on my tongue, all this made up a routine rather sweeter than any I had experienced before.
Every few days Mrs Osborne would have Rajah Manikkam carry out a wind-up gramophone to the verandah. It was like a flashback to CRX, only without the operatic arias, surplus to requirements, so kindly passed on to sick children by the Decca company. Mrs O’s taste was for Bach, which she explained was the Western music which Indians liked best, especially Bach in one of his twiddly moods, where ornamentation seems to stand proud of any melody. I can’t say that the expressions on the faces of Rajah Manikkam and Kuppu backed her up in any definitive way.
To follow the thread of fear
Sometimes Mrs Osborne asked me about my dreams, which I wasn’t in the habit of remembering unless they forced themselves on me. ‘One of Arthur’s first discoveries,’ she said, ‘after he embarked on his Quest was to do with dreams.’ It gave me an English qualm and a Hindu thrill to hear her use the word quest, with its unmistakable capital. Since she had ended up living on a holy mountain whose antiquity made the Himalayas seem like teenagers, I felt she had earned the right to the holiness of the upper case. ‘He realised that whenever he had experienced fear in a dream, his instinct was to make himself wake up. As an adult he decided to override the impulse to escape which had ruled his night thoughts since he was a child. Instead of waking he decided to follow the thread of fear to its end within the dream. Invariably the source of fear when revealed lost its power over him. It was frightening only so long as it was viewed as something to run from. This was an important clue on his Path.’ I wondered if I myself would ever be confident enough to capitalise ‘path’ in conversation.
Mrs Osborne kept a cow in the garden, and that was the milk we would drink, unboiled and unpasteurised, merely chilled in her little fridge. It makes me shiver to think about that now, the blitheness with which we drank untreated milk. One day I was about to pour some over my puffed rice, and decided to taste a bit first. Not nice. It had started to turn and I told her so.
‘Absholute Nonshense!’ she shrilled. ‘There is nothing wrong with my milk. Nothing whatshoever!’ And she looked at me so fiercely that I poured the rest of it onto my cereal and swallowed it down under her unrelenting gaze. Every taste bud in my mouth protested against her doctrinaire clean bill of health. Even so, contradicting Mrs Osborne on any sustained basis was something that called for major resources of willpower. It was necessary to throw all your resources behind your audacious tongue or be annihilated, and at that stage I didn’t feel strong enough.
In the mornings fruit sellers would do the rounds selling their produce — ladies who carried it on their heads in baskets. Guavas, grapes, apples. They came to me on the verandah. At first I was alarmed by this tide of small businesses sweeping across the verandah in their bird-of-paradise colours, smiling and chattering softly to each other, but it wasn’t long before I was looking forward to it. I struggled to master the currency, remembering what Raghu had said about its recent decimalisation. Of course I didn’t have a word of the necessary Tamil, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t haggle. It’s amazing how much economic leverage you can pack into a doubtful frown. I wasn’t in a hurry, and I enjoyed bringing to the transaction some of the grave tempo of chess. One particular woman would call my bluff, shout scornfully, pack up her wares again and walk off across the verandah — and then slow down, shrug and return to the struggle, settling very happily for a sum that differed by a single tiny coin from the amount that she had found so insulting.
One day I heard this fruit seller talking to Mrs O. Afterwards she said that the conversation had been about me. All the time I was in India, I’m ashamed to say, I had at the back of my mind the thought that someone was bound to ask what I had done (in a previous life) to earn the body I was in. But this discussion was all compliments. ‘She loves dealing with you,’ Mrs O was saying, ‘because you always haggle, and you know how it’s done.’ In other words she preferred to spend more time than she might, and to receive less money than she might, just for the tiny drama of the bargain, the human contest finally resolved in smiles.