He never thought he would die, so he never thought of the funeral ceremonies. Grandfather must have thought of it, for when I went to ask his advice as to where and what should be done Grandfather had all the answers ready: the ceremony had to be in Benares, and it had to be in my brother’s name. ‘Not that I do not love you, Rama. How can I not love my daughter’s own eldest born? But that is what the elders have laid down; and it has come from father to son, generation after generation. Why change it today? Why give importance to unimportant things? God is not hidden in a formula, nor is affection confined to funeral ceremonies. Be what you are. I like the way you go about thinking on the more serious things of Vedanta. Leave religion to smelly old fogies like me,’ he concluded, and I almost touched his feet. He was so noble and humble, Grandfather was.
It was not the same thing with my uncles, but that is a different story.
Thus Benares was predestined, and as I went down the river with Little Mother, Sridhara on her lap, I could so clearly picture Madeleine. She would be seated at the left window of the Villa Ste-Anne, patching some shirt of mine, and thinking that as the sun sets and the sun rises, she would soon have the winter out. Then the house had to be got ready, and before the house was ready I would be there, back in Aix. Not that it gave her any happiness — but it had to be, so it would be. I was part of the rotation of a system — just as July 14 would come, and she would spend the two weeks till the thirtieth getting the house in order before we went to the mountain for a month. After that we would go to see her uncle for three days on a family visit, take a week off in Paris, and then come down to Aix before the third week of September. On October I term begins and on waking up she would see my face.
Affection is just a spot in the geography of the mind.
For Madeleine geography was very real, almost solid. She smelt the things of the earth, as though sound, form, touch, taste, smell were such realities that you could not go beyond them— even if you tried. Her Savoyan ancestry must have mingled with a lot of Piedmontese, so that this girl from Charente still had the thyme and the lavender almost at the roots of her hair. She said that when she was young she loved to read of bullfights, and the first picture she had ever stuck against the wall of her room was of Don Castillero y Abavez, who had won at the young age of nineteen every distinction of a great torrero. She hated killing animals, however, and I did not have to persuade her much to become a vegetarian. But sometimes her warm Southern blood would boil as never my thin Brahmin blood could, and when she was indignant — and always for some just cause — whether about the injustice done to teachers at the Lycée de Moulin, or the pitiful intrigue in some provincial miners’ union at Lens or St Etienne, she would first grow warm and then cold with anger, and burst into tears, and weep a whole hour. This also explains how during the occupation she was closer to the Communists than to the Catholics or Socialists, though she hated tyranny of all sorts. What I think Madeleine really cared for was a disinterested devotion to any cause, and she loved me partly because she felt India had been wronged by the British, and because she would, in marrying me, know and identify herself with a great people. She regretted whenever she read a Greek text not having been born at the time of the Athenian Republic; which also explained her great enthusiasm for Paul Valéry. I, on the other hand, had been brought up in the gnya-gnyaneries of Romain Rolland, and having read his books on Vivekananda and Ramakrishna, I almost called him a rishi and a saint. Valéry seemed to be too disdainful, too European. For me, the Albigensian humility seemed sweeter, and more naturally Indian.
Loving Valéry, Madeleine, who taught History at the college, loved more the whole of ancient Greece. And when I introduced her to Indian History her joy was so great that she started researching on the idea of the Holy Grail. There is an old theory that the Holy Grail was a Buddhist conception — that the cup of Christ was a Buddhist relic which the Nestorians took over and brought to Persia; there the legend mingled with Manichaeism, and became towards the end of the Middle Ages the strange story of the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail also gave Madeleine’s sense of geography a natural movement. She loved countries and epochs not our own.
Whereas I was born to India, where the past and the present are for ever knit into one whole experience — going down the Ganges who could not imagine the Compassionate One Himself coming down the footpath, by the Saraju, to wash the mendicant-bowl? — and so for me time and space had very relative importance. I remember how in 1946, when I first came to Europe — I landed in Naples — Europe did not seem so far nor so alien. Nor when later I put my face into Madeleine’s golden hair and smelt its rich acridity with the olfactory organs of a horse — for I am a Sagittarian by birth — did I feel it any the less familiar. I was too much of a Brahmin to be unfamiliar with anything, such is the pride of caste and race, and lying by Madeleine it was she who remarked, ‘Look at this pale skin beside your golden one. Oh, to be born in a country where tradition is so alive,’ she once said, ‘that even the skin of her men is like some royal satin, softened and given a new shine through the rubbing of ages.’ I, however, being so different, never really noted any difference. To me difference was inborn— like my being the eldest son of my father, or like my grandfather being the eight-pillared house Ramakrishnayya, and you had just to mention his name anywhere in Mysore State, even to the Maharaja, and you were offered a seat, a wash, and a meal, and a coconut-and-shawl adieu. To me difference was self-created, and so I accepted that Madeleine was different. That is why I loved her so. In fact, even Little Mother, who sat in front of me — how could I not love her, though she was so different from my own mother? In difference there is the acceptance of one’s self as a reality — and the perspective gives the space for love.
In some ways — I thought that day, as the boat, now that evening was soon going to fall, was moving upstream, with a fine, clear wind sailing against us — in some ways how like Madeleine was Little Mother. They both had the same shy presence, both rather silent and remembering everything; they loved, too, more than is customary. Both knew by birth that life was no song but a brave suffering, and that at best there are moments of bridal joy with occasionally a drive over a bridge — and then the return to the earth and maybe to widowhood.
I remember very well that day, just three days before our marriage. We had been to Rouen, just because we had nothing better to do, and Madeleine seemed so, so sad. She said, ‘I have a fear, a deep fear somewhere here; I have a fear I will kill you, that something in me will kill you, and I shall be a widow. Oh, beloved,’ she begged, ‘do not marry me. Let us part. There is still time.’ She was twenty-six then, and I twenty- one. I did not care for death and I said to her, as one does with deep certitude at such moments, ‘I will never die till you give me permission, Madeleine.’ She stopped and looked at me as though she were looking at a god, and turning laughed, for we were by the statue of Henriette de Bruges, who for the birth of her son Charles, later to become the Dark Hero of the Spanish Wars, had a statue erected to herself. The child Charles, with the crown of Burgundy already on his small plump head, was lying on her lap. The statue was stupid, but it seemed somehow an answer. And when we got back to Paris and were married at the Mairie of the VIIth Arrondissement — for I then lived in the rue St Dominique — we bought ourselves a book on Bruges that is still with me. It is one of the few things I could save for myself when the catastrophe came.
Bruges must be beautiful though. I have never been to that city of canals and waterfronts, but the ugly, fat face of Henriette de Bruges will always remain a patron saint of some mysterious and unperformed marriage.