Rather than treating me to round after round, the Washbournes thought it was better sport to encourage me to do my party trick with the peanuts, flicking them into my mouth. Then they’d egg someone on to betting that I couldn’t still do it — and stay on the stool — if I had ‘a proper drink’. In this way I got a certain amount of free alcohol and became discreetly merry. When the second packet of peanuts arrived I might eat them out of Malcolm’s hand, funnelling my lips forward in a delicate trumpet, leaving his hand completely dry. Prissie, drinking her Campari, would say to no one in particular, ‘Really it’s just the other way about, you know. It’s Malcolm who eats out of John’s hand. Almost sinister, but what’s a girl to do?’ She sounded supremely unbothered, but then it took a lot to bother her.
She was affectionate to Malcolm but didn’t in the least defer to him. There was sarcasm there, which he accepted and even seemed to enjoy. He was the breadwinner and she didn’t work, though the description ‘housewife’ didn’t remotely suit her. Their twins Joss and Alex were about to start at a fashionably progressive secondary school, and they had long been encouraged to explore other social contexts, or — as Mum would have it — ‘farmed out’ on the slightest pretext. Prissie was like a rich field lying fallow after her single (double) crop, not in the least beholden or unfulfilled, an earth mother who wasn’t unduly addicted to the presence of her children. She certainly didn’t mother Malcolm. I suppose she mainly mothered herself.
Eventually Prissie Washbourne played a walk-on part in the big drama of that summer, the family crisis which was all about me, though I hardly noticed it at first. When I say that she had a walk-on part, I mean a little more than that. She walked up the drive, she knocked on the French windows and she shouted a bit, refusing to go away. But her appearance on the scene, her splendid interference, made everything move up a gear and become more colourful, positively psychedelic in its emotional hues.
Dimly I had noticed that Mum and Dad were having one of their rows, which could simmer on for days. I also registered that every now and then they would seem to address me as much as each other. In some strange way they seemed to take it in turns to badger me. Could this really be happening? It was unlike them to coöperate so smoothly on any enterprise. I wondered vaguely what it was all about. Sometimes, of course, they sent messages to each other through me, bouncing messages off my bonce like schoolboys flicking paper pellets. I let them get on with it.
I had the good sense to absent myself mentally. There’s some debate about whether you should have your eyes open or closed when you’re meditating. It’s a question that often came up among Bhagavan’s adherents and disciples. His answer was that it didn’t matter — should you even know whether your eyes are open or not? That’s just the sort of Western binary opposition that Bhagavan is so good at dissolving.
As if the phone could detect movement
Who is that wants to know? Trace that impostor to his lair. Is it even fair to describe your eyes as ‘open’ when they are absorbing the infinite deceptive variety of Maya, and ‘closed’ when you are perceiving the world in its reality?
Still, it seems very likely that during those days at home a lot of my meditating was done behind open eyes. Even when I wasn’t meditating my attention wasn’t completely attuned to the externals. Whenever I drifted back into my alleged body and took up the reins of mundane vision things looked very much the same. Mum and Dad might have changed places, but they were still taking turns to badger me. The sun might have moved round a fraction, the shadows might fall a little differently, but really that was all.
At one point the pot plant on the table seemed to blossom with a sudden movement, almost a lunge. The great red trumpets of its blooms seemed abruptly larger and more lustrous, which suggested that I had dropped a stitch, or even a whole row, in my knitting together of time and space. The plant itself had featured in earlier disputes between Mum and Dad, with her calling it an amaryllis and him insisting it was technically a Hippeastrum. Mum said he was being ‘predantic’, a mistake which set Dad off on a fresh bout of correction. I’m my father’s son in these matters, which is no doubt why I chose Mum’s womb, wanting to be brought up in a properly pedantic environment, among precise taxonomies and word-use sanctioned by dictionary. I vote for Hippeastrum.
I seemed to have regressed, to the point of needing to be taken to the loo, though it had been second nature for me to manage by myself for years. Mum would escort me and wait in the background while I performed, but there was a sort of truce until she pushed me back into the sitting room. Then it would start all over again — whatever it was.
I knew that there had been a knocking at the door earlier on, and even that it had gone on for some time, while Mum and Dad stopped talking and more or less stayed rigidly in their places. I even knew that the phone had rung a few times, and that Mum and Dad hadn’t answered it. Again they had stopped talking and stayed frozen where they were, as if the phone could detect movement even without being picked up. Then they started right up again the moment it stopped ringing.
I was being asked a lot of questions, or else being asked the same question many times, in slightly different forms. In the course of my engagement with the vichara, the self-enquiry, I’d decided that if you were a non-dualist, resisting the division of reality into This and That, body and soul, real and unreal, then it followed that you couldn’t answer any questions that were put to you, which always rested on assumptions of that kind. I’d read in a book the suggestion that when confronted with a false set of alternatives, you should reply simply ‘Mu’, meaning ‘Your question cannot be meaningfully answered, since it is the product of a misconception. Please examine your premises afresh.’
So when Mum said, ‘Is it your bag or not, John? We need to know,’ I giggled and answered ‘Mu.’
The giggle was there because when anyone of my generation, however estranged from the groovy, asked if something was your bag, it meant ‘Do you like it?’ Is Acid Rock your bag? Is Buddenbrooks your bag? Is the vichara your bag? From my point of view the vichara was the bag in which all other bags could be stored without taking up any room.
The vichara — the only question. Who am I? (Who is it that asks this?) I understood now why I had gone to see The Who in Slough and not some other group. I needed to devote myself to the question of The Who.
And when Dad said, ‘It’s a simple enough question, John. Don’t be mulish. For the last time, is it your bag?’ — the giggle was no longer a temptation but the answer was still Mu. With another annoying giggle because saying Mu got me called Mulish.
At some stage Mum asked me what I wanted for supper, as if this was an ordinary day, which it obviously wasn’t. She put the question in an exasperated voice, admittedly, but that wasn’t such a rare event. And perhaps this time I didn’t answer ‘Mu’, because she said, ‘Better not have eggs again, John, you know how binding they are.’ Om Mane Padme Om. Om Mane Padme Om-pa-pah. I kept losing the thread of my threadlessness, my immersion in blissful absence. I wished Mum and Dad would let me be. I wish they’d let me Be.
‘If it’s your bag, John, then what’s in it is also yours, isn’t it?’ Mu — Mu — Mu. ‘That’s only logical.’ Exactly. Logic based on false premises can only generate nonsense.