It was high time for some spiritual work. The hearse might be on fire, but I had a firm grip on the appropriate extinguisher. Truly our astral tongues were hanging out for water to quench the hearse-fire of the Samsara, the action-reaction Ocean of births and deaths. Now that I was fully tanked up with Indian juice, I could provide him with the first cooling drink for months. I would lead us out of the maze of misery and set us on the road to freedom.
Mum bustled about Malcolm when he arrived, exactly as if he was her guest rather than mine, plying him with tea and cakes. Malcolm asked me about what I ate in India, a subject that made Mum roll her eyes, out of his line of sight but well within mine. Shouldn’t it have been the other way round, making him complicit with her exasperation? Mum could never quite get the hang of conspiracies.
I suggested that we go to my room (mine and Peter’s) and try to meditate. Malcolm was a dab-hand at sitting with his legs crossed, in a sort of informal lotus position, although conditions on the floor weren’t ideal (Mum had insisted on lino rather than carpet for fear of what the wheelchair would track in). I could just about manage a symbolic crossing of the ankles in the wheelchair. After a minute or so even this token position became painful, but I knew from the Maharshi’s example that a dispensation from orthodox posture was spiritually unimportant.
From the perspective of the wheelchair I could see the zone of thinning in Malcolm’s hair, where the scalp showed dimly pink. It was a joy in itself to be looking down rather than up. I felt a rush of privileged piety.
‘I really don’t think I need a mantra,’ Malcolm said. ‘After a week at work my mind goes blank of its own accord.’
The mind stops twitching
‘The mantra is nothing in itself,’ I cooed. ‘But the mind, like the tip of an elephant’s trunk, must always be grasping something. So the mahout gives the elephant a chain to hold and it loses its restlessness. Similarly when provided with a mantra the mind stops twitching.’ I didn’t actually claim to have seen elephants and their keepers in India, but I let it be understood. In fact I had seen elephants only at Whipsnade. In India I had seen nothing larger than water buffalo. Large enough, particularly from my low angle of vision. In worldly terms they were larger than the cow on the mountain. Her immensity was of a different kind.
Peter came to join us, slipping into the room and joining our meditation like someone sliding into still, deep water. The atmosphere was blissful, a dynamo of silence in a house too often agitated by unadmitted discord and dissension.
After a period that we could only have guessed at in our timeless state, but was certainly less than ten minutes, Mum eased the door open. She couldn’t bear not knowing what we were up to. She moved like an actress tiptoeing ostentatiously on stage to do something illicit. After peering round, she retreated in the same way, closing the door with a careful quietness that was existentially much more definite than a bang.
Malcolm’s eyes flew open, and mine must have been open already, to notice it happening. He frowned. ‘I’m afraid my psychic capacitors aren’t up to the job of absorbing Laura’s surplus energies. And what a shame — meditation would do her no end of good.’ He hoped she would come round to the idea of such soul-refreshment in time. I tried to imagine it.
‘The world is too much with us,’ I said thoughtfully, and Peter said, ‘Mum is too much with us.’ We tried to be faithful to our task, but then Audrey and her friend Lorraine crept in, shushing each other, and took up enviably supple lotus positions, their bones flowing round corners, on a spare patch of floor. They started to murmur something just below the level of distinctness, so that ears which were straining to tune out had no choice but to tune back in. As the murmuring became louder, their mantra revealed itself in a storm of giggles as ‘Mrs Brown went to town, With her knickers hanging down, Mrs Green saw the scene, Put it in a magazine.’
That broke the mood for good. Malcolm stretched and stood up, and Peter chased the girls out of the room, which was exactly what they wanted.
Later that evening I heard Mum complain about it to Dad. ‘He’s trying to turn this house into a bloody ashram,’ she said, ‘or whatever we’re supposed to call it.’ Dad’s reply was him all over, changing sides to keep her guessing: ‘And would it be such a bad thing if he succeeded? You’ve got your sewing circle, after all. Let him have his prayer meeting, and try to look on the bright side — at least they don’t sing.’ Dad seemed to have the knack of tossing a coin inside himself at times like these, letting Heads or Tails decide which way he would jump in an argument, so that agreement and dissent were equally disorienting for Mum.
She wasn’t someone with any talent for looking on the bright side, but on this occasion Dad wanted her at least to try. At other times when Malcolm came over to meditate, she made a better job of keeping her distance. She went to the other end of the house and emitted her sighs from there, though I’m sure she knew they could find me through the walls.
I felt that a campaign of holiness had been well begun. I was quite able to overlook the hypocrisy of the whole thing. Underneath my Indian tan I was a whited sepulchre, far whiter than the Taj Mahal. I was really enjoying ruling the roost. We are always fighting back our tears at the cremation of the ego, only to find it has been throwing dust in our eyes, not ashes, all along.
I had a nerve leading a group in meditation, when I had only been able to achieve that mind-free state of mind since my return from India. I was teaching lessons that I barely knew myself. In Dad’s vocabulary I was shamming and no mistake. My disciples deserved better, even if they were only an advertising man with a bad conscience and a trainee chef with an unkillable respect for his older brother. Audrey and Lorraine had pretty much the right idea.
It would have served me right to be found out, except that there were others involved. I would have betrayed my guru by allowing Malcolm and Peter to have a low opinion of him through my own bad behaviour.
Similia Similibus
I went to India a Hindu, and I returned to Bourne End a Hindu and a homœopath. Soon I had Mrs Pavey hard at work tracking down copies of Magic of the Minimum Dose and its indefatigable sequels, and helping me to read widely in the subject.
Finally I summoned up the courage to ask Flanny for a referral to the Royal Homœopathic Hospital, on Great Ormond Street, the institution which had achieved marvellous results in a long-ago cholera epidemic, and so given a dissident tradition a foothold in national life. Flanny snorted a bit down her horse’s face, but she had learned by this time to let me go my own way.
The pretext for this visit to what I regarded as the mother church of the whole fascinating cult was to find a remedy for the dandruff that had plagued me for years. More than a pretext, really — I’d have been happy to see the back of those flakes which Mum and Dad refused to refer to except as scurf. I don’t know why scurf is U and dandruff is a suburban condition. Like any euphemism it soon takes on a taint of the word that’s being avoided. Call it what you like, call it seborrhœa if you must — just stop it happening to my scalp.
The hospital looked like any other, both inside and out, but I was heartened to realise the hospital smell was faint, barely detectable. The doctor asked me a whole range of wide-ranging questions. Not just the usual ones, but impressionistic ones — what did I dream about, habitually? What was my favourite, what was my least favourite type of weather? He was being unusually thorough, I thought, but perhaps some of these were trick questions.
Of course it was no more than good homœopathic practice. No symptom should be regarded as insignificant, or artificially separated from the person. There’s an enormous amount of cross-referencing required for diagnosing even minor ailments — though the minor/major distinction doesn’t really apply in homœopathy. Hierarchies don’t really come into it, when the smallest leaf and twig can be as instructive as the trunk or roots. A headache in a redhead who has nightmares about rain and feels tired in the early afternoons may lead to a quite specific remedy, which would have no healing effect on a blonde headache with insomnia.