Little Mother, having recovered her peace, started reciting as at home Sankara’s Nirvana — Astakam. I have loved it since the time Grandfather Kittanna returned from Benares and taught it to me. I would start on ‘Mano — budhi Ahankara…’ with a deep and learned voice, for after all I had been to a Sanskrit school. Little Mother followed me, and verse after verse: ‘Shivoham, Shivoham, I am Shiva, I am Shiva,’ she chanted with me. All the lights in Benares were by now lit, and even the funeral pyres on the Ghats seemed like some natural illumination. The monkeys must have gone to the tree tops, and the sadhus must be at their meals. Evening drums were beating from every temple, and one heard in the midst of it a train rumble over the Dalhousie Bridge. It was the long Calcutta Mail, going down to Moghul Sarai.
On the other side lay Ramnagarh — a real city for Rama. Every year people still came down to see the festival of Rama, and men and women and the Royal family with horses, fife and elephants enacted the story of Rama. Little Mother felt unhappy we were too late for it this year. I told her I would soon come back to India and take her on a long pilgrimage. I promised her Badrinath and even Kailas. I knew there would be no Himalayas for me. Sridhara woke and as Little Mother started suckling the child again, I chanted to her the Kashikapuradinatha Kalabhairavam bhaje:
‘I worship Kalabhairava, Lord of the city of Kashi,
Blazing like a million suns;
Our great saviour in our voyage across the world,
The blue-throated, the three-eyed grantor of all desires;
The lotus-eyed who is the death of death,
The imperishable one,
Holding the rosary of the human bone and the trident
Kashikapuradinatha Kalabhairavam bhaje.’
Benares is eternal. There the dead do not die nor the living live. The dead come down to play on the banks of the Ganges, and the living who move about, and even offer rice-balls to the manes, live in the illusion of a vast night and a bright city. Once again at the request of Little Mother I sang out a hymn of Sri Sankara’s, and this time it was Sri Dakshinamurthy Stotram. Maybe it was the evening, or something deeper than me that in me unawares was touched. I had a few tears rolling down my cheeks. Holiness is happiness. Happiness is holiness. That is why a Brahmin should be happy, I said to myself, and laughed. How different from Pascal’s ‘Le silence éternel des ces espaces infinis m’effraie’.
The road to the infinite is luminous if you see it as a city lit in a mirror. If you want to live in it you break the glass. The unreal is possible because the real is. But if you want to go from the unreal to the real, it would be like a man trying to walk into a road that he sees in a hall of mirrors. Dushasana1 is none other than the homme moyen sensuel.
For the bourgeois the world, and the Bank, and the notary are real; and the wedding ring as well. We spent, Madeleine and I, the last few thousand francs we had, to buy ourselves two thin gold wedding rings the day before our marriage. I still remember how they cost us 3700 francs apiece, and as we had a little over 9000 francs we went up the Boulevard St Michel to eat at the Indo-Chinese restaurant, rue Monsieur. We had rice for dinner and Madeleine felt happy. It was her recognition of India.
The next day at eleven we went up to the Mairie with two witnesses. One was Count R., an old and dear friend of Father’s who had worked with de Broglie; unable to go back to Hungary because of the Communist revolution there, he had settled in Paris. The other, from Madeleine’s side, was her cousin Roland, who was an officer in the French Marine. Having seen a great deal of the world, an Indian was for him no stranger — he even knew Trichinopoly and Manamadurai — and he came to the marriage in his brilliant uniform.
Madeleine’s uncle, of course, disapproved of all this outlandish matrimony. Oncle Charles was settled as a notaire at Rouen and he would not admit of any disturbance in his peaceful provincial existence. It was said of him that when he married his second wife — she was a divorcee — he married her without telling his old mother. It would have upset old Madame Roussellin too much — she lived in Arras. His second marriage was a most unhappy one, but he was proud of his brilliant wife; she made his position secure, and he loved her. Madeleine was her favourite, but lest the child should see too much of his married life the uncle very studiously avoided sending for her.
Madeleine was brought up by an unmarried aunt at Saintonge, in the Charente, but she saw her cousins from time to time, and they were gay with her. They teased her and said she would end up in a convent. Roland even discovered some mysterious tribe in the Australasian isles — they were called the Kuru-buri, I think — and said that on one of his expeditions he would land her on that blessed isle. ‘Your virtue will be appreciated there, Mado,’ he would say, ‘and imagine adding twenty thousand more to Christendom, before some Gauguin goes discovering the beauty of their virgins and peoples the island with many blue-eyed children.’ Such things were never said in front of me, but one day Madeleine, finding what a prude I was, told me the story with generous detail. ‘Imagine me a Catholic Sister,’ she said; ‘I who love the Greeks. Tell me, Rama, am I not a pagan?’
I was the pagan, in fact, going down the Ganges, feeling such worship for this grave and knowing river. Flowers floated downstream, and now and again we hit against a fish or log of wood. Sometimes too a burnt piece of fuel from some funeral pyre would hit against the oars of the boat. People say there are crocodiles in the Ganges, and some add that bits of dead bodies, only half-burnt, are often washed down by the river. But I have never seen these myself. Night, a rare and immediate night, was covering the vast expanse of the Benares sky. Somewhere on these very banks the Upanishadic sages, perhaps four, five, or six thousand years ago, had discussed the roots of human understanding. And Yagnyavalkya had said to Maiteryi. ‘For whose sake, verily, does a husband love his wife. Not for the sake of his wife, but verily for the sake of the Self in her.’ Did Little Mother love the Self in my father? Did I love the Self in Madeleine? I knew I did not. I knew I could not love: that I did not even love Pierre. I took a handful of Ganges water in my hand, and poured it back to the river. It was for Pierre.
~
I cannot remember anything more about Benares. We spent a further two or three days there, and while Little Mother went to hear parayanams in a private temple I wandered, like a sacred cow, among the lanes and temples of the holy city.
What I loved most were the shops, with their magnificent copper-work, inlaid with lacquer and ivory; the many bunches of false hair hanging from the roof; the multicoloured bangles; and the rich, fervid smell of bhang, as it was given mixed with buttermilk and spice. The Benares silk shops too were splendid, with saris of such intricate designs as to make one marvel that people still prepared such wonders and sold them for money. One day I went out alone and bought a rose-coloured sari, with pistachio-green mango-leaf pallo for Madeleine — the pistachio would be so splendid against her gold. For Saroja I bought a simple white knitted sari from Lucknow. I wanted to buy bangles, too, but I was afraid they would break, and thought besides that when Little Mother had had to break them but the other day, to carry them would have been improper.