Cambridge was a large town compared to Bourne End. The streets were often crowded and so were the pavements. Bicycles were everywhere. Bicycles were the elementary particles of the Cambridge universe, but I had last reacted with one on an experimental basis in hospital at Taplow, and I couldn’t get excited about them now.
I could park the Mini more or less anywhere, though I tried not to obstruct the passage of traffic. The wheelchair had its own tendency to produce clots, little embolisms in the pedestrian circulation. A surprising number of able-bodied walkers — I’d put it as high as one in a hundred — seemed bewitched by the chair, unable to step aside from its progress. This seemed to happen as often when I was being pushed as when I was punting myself along in the intervals between porters.
It seemed to be some malfunction of the decision-making apparatus, with the option of going left being cancelled out by the option of going right. There was nothing to choose between them, and the alternatives produced paralysis. The wheelchair didn’t have headlights, of course, and these pedestrians weren’t rabbits, but the situations were parallel. At least once a day I would find myself confronted by someone, almost invariably male, blushing and mumbling, stalled in front of my vehicle, wishing the ground would open up and swallow him. Sometimes I wished for that to happen too, though I’d smile and say, ‘After you.’
Hypnosis is hard work, it drains the system, and charm is hypnosis without the handy short cut of a trance. People can’t be made to do things against their will, but they can be led into a state where they don’t think in terms of what they want. But now I also came to see that charm is like a muscle or a gland. It took effort to clench someone’s attention in mine, or to secrete the social juices that made people play along, and at the end of a day my face would simply ache from the effort of geniality.
Is it possible to sprain your smile? If so, then I did it sometime in the second week of that first term.
I still had my photograph of Ramana Maharshi on my desk, but I could hardly bring myself to look at it. I seemed to deal with the world through a deviously grinning mask, the opposite of his smile in its piercing openness.
Of course there were brighter moments, and there were even people who would come up and ask if they could help. I had my regulars, people I came to know almost as friends, just because they had helped me out a few times. One very big and broad woman seemed to enjoy the labour of assisting me. I suppose she was in her late twenties or early thirties. She wore denim skirts of an intermediate length which seemed to limit her range of movement. At all events, when she was preparing to lift me she would plant her legs far apart and then hitch up her skirts with a great grin. She seemed to be modelling her stance on a Japanese wrestler’s. Her body gave off a warm friendly smell, spiced like cloves or cinnamon. Her only conventionally feminine touch was the wearing of elaborate earrings, which must have looked discreetly decorative when she put them on, head at rest, but became downright alarming when she was out in public, thanks to the abruptness of her movements.
Then one day she happened to pass when I had already accepted assistance from someone else. Her face became fixed and she went rigid with disapproval. I hadn’t seen her in time to give her priority, and it was impossible to dismiss a willing volunteer just because a more experienced porter had happened along after the fact. But after that, although I saw her passing by on a regular basis, she never offered assistance again, and this is something I have never understood, the process by which the helpful impulse shades into a sense of ownership.
This person and I had never so much as exchanged names. She had held me in her arms, yes, but she was no more than an acquaintance. Sometimes it seems that I’m in a minority all over again, for feeling that physical intimacy shouldn’t go to people’s heads. Offering a service shouldn’t establish a right.
The blooms from traffic islands
Still, beggars can’t be choosers, eh? The status of begging was much on my mind at the time, because of a remark of Ramana Maharshi’s.
Of course my begging wasn’t Indian begging, stumps-and-sores begging, but it felt real enough. In Cambridge at that time there seemed to be only two real beggars, both of them shaky alcoholics. One of them made a show of selling flowers on Market Hill, but everyone knew they were stolen, or at any rate pilfered. He slept in a hostel on the outskirts of town, and would uproot the blooms from traffic islands and park plantings as he neared the centre.
What Ramana Maharshi said about begging was that it made him feel like a king and more than a king. To depend on strangers for the food he needed to live gave him the exhilaration others find in the exercise of power. I found this very hard to understand. I even put it down to his having been born a Brahmin, though he had shed his caste. As if he had kept a sense of entitlement even when the entitlement ran out.
It was almost a form of slumming, wasn’t it? To treat begging as a sort of royal sport. Then I reminded myself that he was so indifferent to food, in his early days in Tiruvannamalai, that others had to place it in his mouth. Eating was optional and hunger an irrelevance.
And if he had been able to see through the game of Brahminism, why should he not do the same with begging? Yet he didn’t say begging was a matter of indifference to him, he said it made him feel like a king (and more than a king). I couldn’t help seeing him in a constant downpour of food and flowers, which seemed less like begging than being crowned Queen of the May. It was all a long way from my world of Supplementary Benefit and Education Authority grants, and asking people to drag me from car to wheelchair so that I could attend lectures from which my absence would not be noticed.
I was a poor student of Bhagavan, not to remember that his enthusiastic description of begging referred specifically to the beginning of his reliance on others for food. Whether he experienced the royal feeling over time isn’t clear.
I was still seeing the world through Christian eyes. Admittedly Christ made a splendid remark about taking no thought for the morrow, but his teaching turns the beggar into a figure of reproach to those who have more than they need. When the privileged deal with the deprived, they are face to face with Christ’s representatives and their own judges — but there’s not much suggestion that the lot of the judges is a happy one. I didn’t want to be a reproach to anyone. I just wanted to get to lectures.
So I tried to conform my thoughts to Ramana Maharshi’s, and to feel that I was partaking in something he regarded as a privilege, and still begging did not make me feel like a king. It made me feel like a beggar.
Beggars get scraps. Begging my way to lectures was the only way I might find enough scraps fallen from the academic table to fill my mental belly.
In Christianity, of course, there’s ‘blessed are the meek’, but even before I discovered Ramana Maharshi I had a strong feeling that by a great mercy meekness was not required of me. I don’t quite know what it would mean in my case, since meekness is voluntary powerlessness and I had no power to disown in the approved manner.
I started to discard the clothes I had arrived in, like many another fresher, since they seemed dated and formal. Of course, thanks to Mum’s skill with her sewing-machine — ‘the Bernina’ — they were also made to measure, and I had to abandon fit along with formality. Wearing a gown had traditionally been a university requirement, but recent friction between town and gown had led to its suspension. The only benefit I might have got from a gown (supposing one was tailored to my size) would have been an extra layer of protection from the chilly winds for which the city is known, the icy gusts from the Urals losing little of their cutting power on the way to slice into East Anglia. One item I did hang on to was a sort of cape she had made for me, which I could drape round myself with the minimum of difficulty to keep the wind off.