There may have been some religious symbolism in Mrs O’s suggestion. Why are there many faiths, when there is only one truth? The mountain analogy again, with many routes to the summit, over different types of terrain. Ramana Maharshi’s way has always been considered as a sort of direct ascent of a precipice, as simple as it is difficult. This accounts for the idea (mistaken, I’m sure) that the task is easier with lesser gurus — hence for instance, Raghu’s family’s adherence to Paramahamsa Yogananda. The vichara path being too ‘high’, too ‘exalted’, a ‘lower path’ is chosen until the disciple is ready. I’m truly sorry, but bollocks! It isn’t presumption that chooses the direct approach, it’s faith.
There’s an English climber called George Mallory who disappeared on Everest in 1924. His body has never been found, and it isn’t clear whether he got to the top or not. His is the famous remark about wanting to climb Everest ‘because it’s “there”.’ He did a celebrated bit of climbing in Wales once, nipping down a sheer rock face by the most direct route to retrieve his pipe, which he’d forgotten. And for exactly the same reason: because it was ‘there’, and he was desperate for a soothing puff of Mayan tobacco.
The climb is written up in all the books as Mallory’s Pipe, the descent of a sheer face undertaken in fading light in front of witnesses, with a note which adds, ‘This is impossible.’
Come to that, it’s impossible for an Indian boy mentally to live through his own death and to understand that it is nothing, but it had happened, which was why I was here. And it was also ‘impossible’ for a severely disabled twenty-year-old from Buckinghamshire to be spending a month as a guest of the holy mountain, but here I was. Once you enter the realm of the impossible, every possibility is equally likely.
The only thing which really did seem to be impossible was for me to find the concentration necessary to meditate — or I suppose the disconcentration. Willpower must step back from the event. I couldn’t make that direct descent into the Self, lacking the aplomb of a tweeded mountaineering genius, able to nip down and grab his favourite briar without giving it a thought.
The privileges of luggage
Mrs Osborne arranged for two men to take me up Arunachala. She called them ‘coolies’. I suppose she must have paid them for their labour, though I didn’t think of that at the time. One of them knelt down and carried me in a sort of fireman’s lift. As he clambered up the mountain I had an excellent view of his bobbing rippling muscly back as I looked down, and if I managed to raise my sights a little I could see not where I was going, which was a total mystery, but where I had been. Maybe it was just as well, since the rocky ground dropped away so rapidly it took my breath with it. I could also glimpse the second coolie lithely ascending, carrying the folded wheelchair on his head with no apparent effort.
Those two coolies were the only Indians I met in Tiruvannamalai who didn’t smile at any time. They hardly even looked at me. From their point of view I suppose I was freight rather than person, and you don’t smile at a parcel. I didn’t mind. I had understood on trains between Bourne End, Burnham and Slough the compensating privileges of being defined as luggage. Freight doesn’t ogle the porter, no one imagines such a thing is possible, and so I was free to let my gaze rove over their sinewy bodies, heated by the sun, cooled by the outflow of sharp sweat. The beauty of one body was visual, it glistened under my eye, while the other was tactile. It glowed with heat and effort as it carried me. And if I was treating them as less than fully human, then I could honestly say that I had pinched the idea from them.
I don’t know exactly what instructions the coolies had had from Mrs Osborne, but eventually they settled me on a suitable rocky ledge. They unfolded the chair and put me in it, without cosseting but with perfect efficiency. They left me pointing towards the peak rather than downhill. The only flourish was that one of them produced a handkerchief, shook it out and then draped it over my head to keep the sun off. This was clearly something that Mrs Osborne had stipulated, and I had time to notice, as the handkerchief was shaken out, the initials A. O. embroidered in red on a corner. Alpha and Omega? Arunachala Om? No, I was being shaded by Arthur Osborne’s handkerchief, an honour that made me feel foolish. Commode and hanky — the late Arthur was giving me the works. The coolies even knotted the corners to keep it in place, a technique which I had always assumed evolved only once in the whole of human history and geography, among English holidaymakers at seaside resorts.
I expected these paid companions to stay while I contemplated the mountain, chatting quietly perhaps, sharing a beedie, idling like taxis between fares. Mrs Osborne’s instructions had been delivered in what sounded like very peppery Tamil, but of course I couldn’t really understand a word of it. I was busy wondering whether her Polish accent was as strong in other languages as it was in English, and if so, how they managed to make head or tail of it.
When I looked round the ‘coolies’ had disappeared. There wasn’t anything supernatural, I don’t think, about their vanishing. Looking round isn’t something I can do in a moment — I have to wriggle round first. If they hadn’t been absorbed directly back into the mountain, according to the etiquette for numinous emanations, then they had clambered down its sides as spryly as they had clambered up.
I was now in direct communion with Arunachala, while the ground dropped away behind me. There was nothing between me and the mountain. In a sense I had been riding on his back for weeks, but this was different. His eye was upon me, and though the experience was very unlike being Frodo Baggins writhing beneath the stare of Sauron it wasn’t exactly comfortable. Arunachala was unhostile, still residually hostly, but not (at this altitude) particularly indulgent. All my excuses went up in smoke under that gaze, like sweet wrappers on a bonfire.
Why was I here?
One answer would be that I had followed a trail from a library book to a crazy old lady with a handy verandah, but that wasn’t what the mountain meant. I tried one more time to concentrate, while the sweat started to trickle down my face. Enlightenment felt like the onset of heatstroke.
I had never to my knowledge dreamed of the mountain or the god (though who’s to say — how do you know when you’re dreaming of white light?), but I had experienced a puzzling dream about the man, about Ramana Maharshi. This was during my time at High Wycombe Technical College, but it was a dream entirely free of the daily grit whose rubbing sets off the nacreous secretion we call dreaming — the quotidian residues. Ramana Maharshi and I were sitting on a patch of sand, whether an area of desert or a specially contrived expanse I couldn’t tell, together with an Arab whom I didn’t recognise. I listened attentively to what Bhagavan was saying, but after a little while the Arab walked off in disgust, kicking sand towards us as he went. At this Ramana Maharshi turned to me and said, ‘I would rather have your love than your anger.’ I woke up with a great sense of injustice, since I had been attending very humbly and hadn’t been the one who had kicked up all the fuss.
It took Mrs Osborne to point out the obvious — that since it was my dream, the Arab was as much me as ‘I’ was. The anger displaced onto him was really mine. At some level I was seething with resentment at my need of a guru. An understandable feeling, of course, since I was so comprehensively dependent in other areas, but hard to take into your heart (the only place where things can be fully owned and finally shed).