A guinea-pig in a wheelchair
Now I had little interest in reading Modern Languages at world-famous Cambridge University, and none whatever in being a guinea-pig in a wheelchair, as Downing College’s first disabled student. I had lost heart for another round of the obstacle race, but really, what was the alternative?
At Cambridge there would be people responsible for my welfare, and Mum and Dad — however little I wanted to depend on them — would be no more than a telephone call away, yet it was a far more daunting prospect than the voyage I had made to India alone, when there was a real possibility of my having to sleep by a roadside infested by brigands. I had much less to fear from going to Cambridge, but incomparably slighter grounds for hope.
Nevertheless I managed to convince myself that there was a spiritual mission involved, quite distinct from the next scheduled phase of my mundane education. My job was to plant the seeds of Self-Enquiry and Ramana Maharshi, first in the heart of Buckinghamshire, and then in Cambridge University itself. Why else would a place be waiting for me there? It came to me suddenly. I was to be a teacher disguised as a student, providing a wisdom that bubbled up from underneath, not mere knowledge filtering down from above.
Cambridge was still some weeks off in the future. What mattered during that interval was the Here and the Now: Trees, Abbotsbrook, Bourne End, Bucks. The Abbotsbrook Estate would be the nursery garden for my centre. Young shoots would be watered and protected from too much sun. Morning and evening meditation would be the order of the day. Unless Mum had anything to do with it, of course.
Her first words were ‘Welcome home, JJ! My, you’re brown. Have you turned into a little Indian yourself?’ After that, her reaction to my project for the propagation of peace and love seemed to be anger in a hundred forms. She took my five weeks away as a rejection of her love. What stung her was that I hadn’t returned chastened to her bosom. I had managed perfectly well. She listened stonily to my account of Kuppu’s willingness to clean commodes and its significance in caste terms. Buttering her up a bit, I emphasised that without the Cadbury’s Roses she had insisted I take there would have been no easy way to reward such exceptional helpfulness, but I needn’t have bothered. She was not to be won over.
I had returned after my experiment in self-sufficiency, but while I was living in the house I was still dependent on her. She could make me pay for needing her now.
Dad, of course, was impossible to pin down, lending a hand now and then very much on his own terms, not to be counted on. At one point he mentioned that colleagues of his at work were very interested in my trip to India. They had suggested that it would make a good feature for the Today programme. Why not have me interviewed by Jack de Manio?
Dad had told them that I was attuned to higher priorities and wouldn’t be interested in anything like that. He was a big fan of the ego-diminishment project as long as the ego in question was mine, and from the spiritual perspective which I had espoused for so long I could hardly complain about being kept out of the limelight, now could I? Dad had beaten me at my own game.
Mum had things pretty much her own way. Every helpful gesture had an overtone of reproach and injured pride, as if she was always muttering under her breath OH, YOU NEED ME NOW, DO YOU?
I had failed to follow Ramana Maharshi’s example, by leaving home once and for all, making a clean break. What’s the worst thing that can happen if you do? That she will follow you wherever you go, as his mother did, with her cooking-pot and her tears.
Mum kept nobbling my peace of mind. She had quite a talent for spiritual disruption. I felt dented and bruised by her angry subservience. Serenity had seemed so close, but it had slipped through my fingers, fingers with remarkably little talent for gripping.
I had been led astray by my old romantic notion of the Quest — when hadn’t Ramana Maharshi always made it clear that outer trials and journeys were supremely irrelevant? Changing your life without changing your life, that was the challenge he set, and I seemed to have fallen at the first fence. Life in Bourne End, far from being transfigured, was the same only worse.
Perhaps by going to India I had committed the spiritual equivalent of the ultimate English sin, namely queue-jumping. After all, the whole universe was Bhagavan’s ashram. Anyone who lived in that universe was part of it. I could claim no special preference by virtue of having travelled to Arunachala, and would have lost nothing by staying away.
The inner journey supersedes the outer one. Of course there’s an element of this even in the unsatisfying Western tradition — in the story of the Knight who searches for the Grail all his long life and then, when he’s dying, asks his squire for water. The squire brings it to him in the battered old cup he has used all his life, and he sees that it is the Grail … which couldn’t be found until this moment, although it had never been lost. Because it hadn’t been lost.
That’s a story which communicates directly with my tear ducts, somehow, but these are not the holy tears that signal the presence of God, I don’t think (only one of the eight physical signs, not representing any sort of quorum). Perhaps they’re even a sign of the presence of hogwash, childish feeling that hasn’t been outgrown, like the hymns that stir the blood — ‘Bread of Heaven’, ‘To Be a Pilgrim’ — almost more when the religion that underwrites them has crumbled away. The account has been closed down, but the cheques make us weep even as they bounce.
Our Bourne End neighbour Pheroza Tucker, the one who had brought round the Times of India with the news of Arthur Osborne’s death, paid a social call, though Mum warned us she’d had it up to here with India and could we please talk about something else. While Mum was out of the room I managed to tell her about the funeral pyre on Arunachala. According to Pheroza, the reason I had been hustled away at a certain stage of the proceedings was that after a time the burning body rears up like bacon (she pronounced it ‘beacon’) in a frying pan.
I ran through the Hindu litany, proud of my memory, pattering through the gross body, causal body, subtle body, when she interrupted me with a laugh, saying, ‘Don’t forget the beacon body! It’s all rather primitive to my mind. Rather peasant-y.’ I suppose Parsees parse such things differently. ‘Did you know, John, that the skull is always pierced before the flame is lit, to prevent it from exploding?’ Then Mum came in with the tea tray and we changed the subject to fruit cake.
As a Parsee Pheroza was a worshipper of fire but not someone who would use it to do such dirty work as disposing of a corpse. To her such rituals were rather undignified. In due course her dead body would be exposed on top of a Tower of Silence for the vultures to process in their own way. She would go back to India for the purpose. Bourne End was a nice enough place to live, but she wouldn’t want to die there.
Peter arrived back at Bourne End a week or so after I did, after some scenic detour of his own. It was nothing to him to add a couple of countries onto his world tour. He had with him a photograph of Ramana Maharshi which he had bought at the ashram and now offered shyly to me as a present. He hadn’t been sure whether I would approve of such an object, given that my religion involved discounting the seeming reality of everyday life and aiming to grasp the truth of non-duality behind appearances.
I wasn’t sure whether I approved either, but I was delighted. I had felt a strong impulse to buy just such an object, but had overruled myself on spiritual grounds. Now I was in the happy position of having a wish granted after I had (laboriously, grindingly, like the hoist that lifted me up over the bath in the house at Bourne End) risen above it.