‘I hated going to St Maximin, though. I could not visit the church without you; I almost felt you by my side and often turned back to see if by chance you had not suddenly come back, and missing me in Aix had followed me by that terrible intuition of yours. These days with aeroplanes everything is possible. And how sad, Rama, is a lonely woman. Without a man she can see nothing great or holy. There the Hindus are right. Man must lead woman to the altar of God.
‘I love you, Rama, with a strange, distant, impenitent love— as though in loving you I say I do not in fact love you. I wish I had an assurance of love, that I did not love you for your purity, your inner strength — the wall, the stone wall that will never yield, “celui qui ne décevra jamais,” as the astrologer in the Boulevard St Germain told me. I wondered whether I could really love you — whether anyone could love a thing so abstract as you. Sometimes you seem almost here, and I have such delight that I think I will go down to teach at the college, almost singing, when you have given me my morning coffee. You the most choice, the most noble, the most unhuman husband. I wonder if Indians can love.
‘I can. And therefore I await you, you my young love.
Mad.
‘P. S. How Indian sometimes I have become — I see and I wonder. India is infectious, mysterious and infectious.’
Even the Indian trains seem to chant mantras: ‘Namasthethu Gangé twadangé bhujangé; Hari-Hari-Ram-Hari-Ram, Ram-Haré’; and going uphill, ‘Shiva-Shiva, Hara-Hara, Shiva-Shiva-Hara’; and so to the morning. The night was quickly over; the child woke up only once or twice, and Little Mother said something incomprehensible in sleep. ‘Saroja,’ she seemed to say, ‘bring me a glass of white water.’ Then came the silence, the long empty silences of the stations, the cry of hawkers, the sound of pilgrims, and then up again, and towards the mountains. The compartment was getting cold. I rose up to cover Little Mother’s uncovered feet. She was awake, and said, ‘Oh, I cannot bear to hear you cough like that.’ Was I coughing?
The morning mists were already against the windowpane when the restaurant-car boy came to wake us up. The coffee was warm but very bad. The birches and the deodars of the Himalayas spread before us. Isolated forest bungalows came, and now and again a whole tribe of deer jumped away across the pools of the forest, so frightened were they of the train. The parrots had slender and very lovely yellow rings round their throats, and the Himalayas shone above them, simple, aware, vibrant with sound. The Ganges, a small stream, flowed gently against us, but her freshness was so mature. Whether young or older in years the Ganges is ever so knowing, so wise. If wisdom became water the Ganges would be that water, flowing down to the seven seas.
Somewhere between the interstices of those trees, somewhere in the movement of the hinds, in the mountain stillness of Hardwar did I feel a new knowledge. I felt absence.
The mountains must know, I thought, and so I looked up towards the bridge and mountain path that, winding through the pines, led to Rishikesh and Badrinath. There beyond the folds of the snow was Gangotri, where the holy mother took her birth; and the barbarian began where she started. Tibet lay beyond, where Sister Brahmaputra cuts herself gorges in the Himalaya to feed the barbarian; then mingling with the Ganga and become holy she enters the sea conjointly. Duality is antiIndian; the non-dual affirms the truth.
I dipped in the Ganges and felt so pure that I wondered anyone could die or go to war, that people could weep, or that Hindus and Muslims had cut each other’s throats and genitals. Indeed the refugees in Hardwar, innocent creatures, had seen the barbarities of an alien religion. One could expiate for the kidnapped and the forsaken, dipping and dipping in the Ganges by the Himalaya. One could expiate also in the Ganges for the dead. Pierre was never dead: I could feel him in my loins.
There is no absence if you have the feel of your own presence. The mountain echoed an absence that seemed primordial, a syllable, a name.
We went to Dehra Dun in the evening. Next morning I took Little Mother to Mussoorie, and showed her the snows from the Hamilton Point. White and beautiful in their simplicity were they, peaks, bare glaciers, and the sounding emptiness of sky. Sridhara clung to his mother as if he saw something too big to understand, and Little Mother simply muttered away some prayers. When she was moved she always understood herself reciting a hymn. Ultimately the far and the awesome is Divine, it destroys the barriers of body and mind, no, rather of mind and body, and reveals the background of our unborn, immaculate being. That is why Shiva lives in the Himalaya.
What happened afterwards is still very hazy in my mind. Little Mother and I left the mountains and the Ganges with immeasurable pain, as though we had been visiting some venerable relations and had to leave them, with a broad kunkum on our faces and their hands on our heads, the perfume of their feet in our nostrils. Mother Ganga had her feet all yellowed with turmeric, and she carried the flowers of our evenings in her hair. The Himalaya was like Lord Shiva himself, distant, inscrutable, and yet very intimate there where you do not exist. He was like space made articulate, not before you but behind you, behind what is behind that which is behind one; it led you back through abrupt silences to the recesses of your own familiar but unrecognized self. The Himalaya made the peasant and the Brahmin feel big, not with any earthly ambition, but with the bigness, the stature of the impersonal, the stature of one who knows the nature of his deepest sleep. For in the deepest sleep, as every pilgrim knows, one is wide awake, awake to oneself. And the Himalaya was that sleep made knowledge.
Coming down the ravines by the silent rivulets that ran with us one had the sense of innocence great mountains never give. One felt indeed that neither tiger nor scratching bear, neither python nor porcupine could ever do the smallest hurt; as the epics say, here in this auspicious refuge the deer and the lion drink of the same waters, and the jackal and the elephant are friends. However, one could not forget, for newspapers never let you forget, that not far from Dehra Dun, in the Tarai, the maneaters still roamed, and villagers were just caught in their fields and taken away with the ease that boys catch wagtails in spring. You shoot the tigers, so the Government said, and get five hundred rupees. And yet how tame and wise-eyed the deer under the trees looked, and when the peacocks danced the world seemed touched by the music of the flute.
Oh where shall I go, Oh where, thou source of virtue,
Kanhayya;
Oh where when the flute plays, and the cattle come to thee?
Mira the poetess is so northern. She a Rajput princess could treat God, could treat Sri Krishna, her Kanhayya as she, would Rathor. She could count the jewels of his howdah, admire the rings on his fingers, whisper that the cavalry move quicker and the drums beat as Royalty advances. And by pool and archway would the women await, with kunkum water and coconut and flower in hand, to welcome this great God, this Principle, this Presence amidst them. The pools suddenly grew lotuses, the parrots suddenly sang, ‘Hari is come. Sister, Hari is come,’ and the peacocks would pull their tails and offer that he wear a crown of their feathers. The black deer, hearing the sound of music, came to him as in the Rajput paintings, their heads lifted and their ears laid back, listening to the music that came from the flute.
Muraré, I have brought thee the butter of my heart,
And when the pyre is ready, Lord, light it thyself;
Let my ashes serve as tilak on thy brow.