But Father had died now, and Mother was dead long ago. ‘You must remember his mother,’ said Little Mother to Lakshamma when they were praising me for things I did not possess: dignity, deference towards elders, and a deep seriousness towards life. ‘Only such a mother could have borne such a son,’ added Little Mother again, and Sridhara looked at me as though he recognized my own mother in myself.
I laughed and recited, ‘Kupathu jayathā, kachadapé kumāta nachavathu: A bad son may sometimes be born, but a bad mother never.’
On the morning of our departure for Hardwar I received via Cooks in Delhi a letter from Madeleine. I did not open it. I knew: one can know in the moment of any event the whole nature of that event, if only we let our minds dwell upon it— meaning, in fact, is meaningful to meaning. I put the envelope into my right pocket, where I kept all her letters.
When we had said goodbye to the Venktaramans — the father and Kaumudi had come to see us off at the station — and Little Mother had wiped her tears, Sridhara began to look out and see the girders of the Ganges Bridge; he looked back at his mother to ask what it meant. Suddenly, without reason, Little Mother shook with sobs. She shook and shook with such violent sobs that I sat there, hands on my knees, with no understanding. Long after the bridge had passed it was that I guessed: perhaps for the first time she realized, Little Mother realized, that Father was really dead. Something in the big look of the child perhaps, or perhaps it was the Ganges, with her sweet motherliness that one was unhappy to quit who said it, for she it was, from age to age, who had borne the sorrows of our sorrowful land. Like one of our own mothers, Ganga, Mother Ganga has sat by the ghats, her bundle beside her. What impurity, Lord, have we made her bear.
I sang the Gangāstakam again. Little Mother was very sensitive to Sanskrit hymns, being herself brought up the granddaughter of a learned Bhatta.
‘Kāshi kshétram, sharîram tribhuvana jananîm…’
And nigh the riverbank Thy water is strewn
With kusha grass and flowers,
There thrown by sages at morn and even.
May the waters of the Ganges protect us,
I chanted. Then it was I understood: Little Mother must have remembered the ashes and bones of Father that we let down into the Ganges at Benares. The Ganges knew our secret, held our patrimony. In leaving the Ganges she felt Sridhara was an orphan.
After the next station she looked towards me reassuringly. I was there, heir and protector and companion. By now a common pain had knit us together, and in the daily pressure of the unexpected, in which two humans thrown together have to live side by side, Sridhara became our means of understanding. We both of us played with him — what a lovely child he was! — and in that common language we communicated with each other. Little Mother was a shy and silent person. I used to say she spoke as though she were talking to the wall or to a bird on a tree. She always spoke to herself as it were. She spoke to me sometimes, with long silences, in simple sentences that she could not formulate, for her education was meagre. But her voice was infinite in accent and tone, as though it were some primitive musical instrument, that made some noise, which having been used from age to age had learnt the meaning of sound. And sound is born of silence.
So rich and natural was Little Mother’s silence that she often lay with her eyes closed, almost motionless. She now stretched herself out on the berth, for we were alone in the whole compartment, and with Sridhara against her breast she lay almost asleep. Only when the child moved you could see her hand cover its head with the fringe of the sari. Little Mother must later have fallen sleep, for I heard her snore once, and then she did not wake for many hours.
Meanwhile Manduadih, Balapur, Hardatpur, Rajatalab, Nigatpur passed by; little hamlets with green all around and clusters of ancient trees by pond or on mound, that seemed to guard the tradition of the race. One remembered that it was here that the Aryans, when they first entered the country, camped under the ancestors of these trees, and the Ganges flowing by brought them the richness of green wheat stalks, the yellow of sesame and the gold of sugarcane. It was somewhere here, too, that Gargi and Yagnyavalkya must have walked, and out of their discussions by wood-fire and by river-steps was our philosophy born, and that noble, imperial heritage of ours, Sanskrit, the pure, the complete, the unique. He who possesses Sanskrit can possess himself.
A signal, a flag, and the clang of the train carried us towards the holy, thrice holy Himalayas. It was thither, when the work in the plains was over, or when one needed the integrity of selfness, that my Ayran ancestors went up the Ganges to seek the solitude of the snows and the identity of Truth. Somewhere over against the sky should Kailas stand, and Shiva and Parvathi besport themselves therein, for the joy of mankind. Nandi, the vehicle and disciple of Shiva, that bull without blemish, would wander round the world, hearing the sorrows of this vast countryside, hearing of painful birth and death, of litigation, quarrel, and paupery. Parvathi would know of it, for Nandi would never dare tell his master in speech, and Parvathi would plead with Shiva that orphan, beggar, and widow should have the splendour of life given unto them. You never knew when the door would open, and the sack of gold be found at your threshold.
The whole of the Gangetic plane is one song of saintly sorrow, as though Truth began where sorrow was accepted, and India began where Truth was acknowledged. So sorrow is our river, sorrow our earth, but the green of our trees and the white of our mountains is the affirmation that Truth is possible; that when the cycle of birth and death are over, we can proclaim ourselves the Truth. Truth is the Himalaya, and Ganges humanity. That is why we throw the ashes of the dead to her. She delivers them to the sea, and the sun heats the waters so that, becoming clouds, they return to the Himalaya. The cycle of death and birth go on eternally like the snows and the rivers. That explains why holy Badrinath is in the Himalaya: it proclaims the Truth.
Sri Sankara again came to my mind.
Shines forth does the Devi, born in the snowy mountains;
Her beautiful hands are like a red leaf.
It is She with whom Shiva seeks shelter,
Who stoops from the weight of her breasts,
Whose words are sweet;
Tender creeper of intelligence and bliss.
Reciting the hymn I slipped into one of those curious moods that fill us in the vastness of India; we feel large and infinite, compassion touching our sorrow as eyelashes touch the skin. Someone behind and beyond all living things gave us the touch, the tear, the elevation that makes our natural living so tender. If there were no barbarian beyond our borders the Hindu would have melted into his nature, grown white as some women in the zenana, and his eyes have seen the splendour of himself everywhere. He might have grown emasculated, but he would have played in the garden of the Ganga.
My thoughts were, as you see, very Indian, and I thought it right, now that the evening was slowly stretching itself down, that in this atmosphere I should read the letter from Madeleine.
‘M’ami, my friend,’ she wrote. The letter was dated the 29th of March, 1951.
‘M’ami, my friend. Will I give you pain if I told you I went down last weekend to Bandol? Somehow I had to visit it. You could never understand what Pierrot’s birth was to me. You in your masculine isolation — I could almost say your Indian aloneness — can never understand what it is for a mother, and a French mother, to bear a child. It is the birth of the god in a chalice, the Holy Grail; you know, Christian or not, one feels the birth, and even one who is not a Christian would almost look around and see the stable and the Rois mages bringing offerings to the Lord.