The bridge was never crossed. Madeleine had a horror of crossing bridges. Born in India she would have known how in Malabar they send off gunfire to frighten the evil spirits, as you cross a bridge. Whether the gunfire went off or not, Krishna could never cross the bridge of life. That is why with some primitive superstition Madeleine changed his name and called him Pierre from the second day of his illness. ‘Pierre tu es, et sur cette pierre…’ she quoted. And she said — for she, a French woman, like an Indian woman was shy, and would not call me easily by my name — she had said, ‘My love, the gods of India will be angry, that you a Brahmin married a non-Brahmin like me; why should they let me have a child called Krishna. So sacred is that name.’ And the little fellow did not quite know what he was to do when he was called Pierre. I called him Pierre and respected her superstition. For all we do is really superstition. Was I really called Ramaswamy, or was Madeleine called Madeleine?
The illness continued. Good doctor Pierre Marmoson, a specialist in child medicine — especially trained in America— gave every care available. But broncho-pneumonia is broncho-pneumonia, particularly after a severe attack of chickenpox. Madeleine, however, believed more in my powers of healing than in the doctors. So that when the child actually lay in my arms and steadied itself and kicked straight and lay quiet, Madeleine could not believe that Pierre was dead. The child had not even cried.
We were given special permission by the Préfet des Bouches-du-Rhone to cremate Pierre among the olive trees behind the Villa Ste-Anne. It was a large villa and one saw on a day of the mistral the beautiful Mont Ste-Victoire, as Cézanne must have seen it day after day, clear as though you could talk to it. The mistral blew and blew so vigorously: one could see one’s body float away, like pantaloon, vest, and scarf, and one’s soul sit and shine on the top of Mont Ste-Victoire. The dead, they say in Aix, live in the cathedral tower, the young and the virgins do — there is even a Provencal song about it — so Madeleine went to her early morning Mass and to vespers. She fasted on Friday, she a heathen, she began to light candles to the Virgin, and she just smothered me up in tenderness. She seemed so far that nearness was farther than any smell or touch. There was no bridge — all bridges now led to Spain.
So when my father had said he was very ill, and wished I could come, she said, ‘Go, and don’t you worry about anything. I will look after myself.’ It seemed wiser for me to go. Madeleine would continue to teach and I would settle my affairs at home. Mother’s property had been badly handled by the estate-agent Sundarrayya, the rents not paid, the papers not in order: and I thought I would go and see the university authorities too, for a job was being kept vacant for me. The Government had so far been very kind — and my scholarship continued. Once my doctorate was over I would take Madeleine home, and she would settle with me — somehow I always thought of a house white, single-storeyed on a hill and by a lake — and I would go day after day to the university and preach to them the magnificence of European civilization. I had taken History, and my special subject was the Albigensian heresy. I was trying to link up the Bogomolites and the Druzes, and thus search back for the Indian background — Jain or maybe Buddhist — of the Cathars. The ‘pure’ were dear to me. Madeleine, too, got involved in them, but for a different reason. Touch, as I have said, was always distasteful to her, so she liked the untouching Cathars, she loved their celibacy. She implored me to practise the ascetic brahmacharya of my ancestors, and I was too proud a Brahmin to feel defeated. The bridge was anyhow there, and could not be crossed. I knew I would never go to Spain. India was wonderful to me. It was like a juice that one is supposed to drink to conquer a kingdom or to reach the deathless — juice of rare jasmine or golden myrobolan, brought from the nether world by a hero or dark mermaid. It gave me sweetness and the délire of immortality. I could not die, I knew; and the world seemed so whole, even death when it was like my father’s. So simple: when it came he said, ‘I go,’ and looked at us, with just one tear at the end of his left eye; then stretched himself out, and died.
The smell of India was sweet. But Madeleine was very far. Little Mother when she saw the photographs of Madeleine and the baby did not say anything, but went inside to the sanctuary to lay flowers on her Ramayana. She never spoke about it at all, but whenever she saw me sad she said, ‘Birth and death are the illusions of the non-Self.’ And as though before my own sorrow her unhappiness seemed petty and untrue, she seemed suddenly to grow happier and happier. She started singing the whole day; she even brought out her vina from the box where it had not been touched for three years, and started singing. My father who was still alive then said, ‘Oh, I suppose you want to show off your great musical learning to the Eldest.’ Even so he laid his book aside, a rare act for him to do, and started to listen to the music.
My grandfather said Father had such a wonderful voice when young — just like a woman’s voice. ‘Later, when that Mathematics got hold of him — for figures are like gnomes, they entice you and lead you away, with backward turned faces, to the world of the unknown—’ he continued, ‘your father never sang a single kirtanam again. Oh, you should have heard him sing Purandaradasa.’ I never heard my father sing, but this I know, he had a grave and slow-moving voice such as musicians possess. His mathematics absorbed him so deeply that you saw him more with a pencil — his glasses stuck to the end of his nose (he had a well-shapen but long and somewhat pointed nose)— than with a vina on his arm. Father was a mathematician, and when he was not able to solve a problem he would turn to Sanskrit grammar. Panini was his hobby all his life, and later he included Bhartrhari among the great grammarians. Father had no use for Philosophy at all — he called it the old hag’s description of the menu in paradise. For him curry of cucumber or of pumpkin made no difference to your intestines. ‘The important fact is that you eat — and you live.’
Father’s greatest sorrow was that I did not take his mathematical studies a little further. He would say, ‘The British will not go till we can shame them with our intelligence. And what is more intellectual than mathematics, son?’ He worshipped Euler, and quoted with admiration his famous saying on the algebraic proof of God. That Father’s work on Roger Ramanujam’s identities or on Waring’s problem were accepted by the world only made him feel happy that it made Indian Freedom so much the nearer. He was happy though that I had taken the Albigensian heresy as a subject for research, for he thought India should be made more real to the European.
He had never been to Europe. First, Grandfather was against the eldest son-in-law going across the seas. Then when Grandfather was reconciled with the changing values of the world there were too many responsibilities at home. And Father, in any case, did not care for travel. Like many persons of his generation I think he could not forget his bath and the Brahmin atmosphere of the house — the ablutions in the morning, with the women singing hymns, the perfume of camphor, and the smell of garlic and incense when the daughter came home for childbirth. He disliked my marriage, I think chiefly because my wife could not sing at an arathi; but before the world he boasted of his intellectual daughter-in-law, and had a picture of me and Madeleine on his table.