‘We obey,’ said Saroja, looking at me shyly.
That evening everyone vied with the others to make Little Mother’s bed, and then mine. The whole house seemed to have banished sorrow from the world. Here someone sang, there others had their faces in their books. Sridhara already lay on his mother’s bed, as if he, too, felt the world was a safe and good place, and that when he grew up Little Mother would have nothing to bend and break, nor a thing to carry. Milk would flow in the house and the cattle would fill the courtyard with holiness.
Till late in the night lying on the veranda — for it was so hot already — Little Mother told of all her experiences in the north. I nearly feel asleep, but she woke me up and said, ‘Do you remember, Rama, that meal in Calcutta? You know what they did Saroja? We bought meal tickets at the station Hindu restaurant. “Brahmin or non-Brahmin?” they asked. “Brahmin,” we answered. And when I went to the Brahmin section the whole place looked funny. It was not that I had not been to restaurants before — I have even eaten in Brahmin hotels at Bangalore — but there it was different. They started serving. I put my hand into the curry. It seemed very soft to touch, but yielded with such difficulty. “Brinjal it must be,” I said, and looked at Rama. Rama, who’s been all over the world, he also proceeded with care. Saroja, thank God I did not put it into my mouth. You know what it was — it was fish. “Ayyappa!” I said, and rose hastily. I would have thrown the whole of my stomach out. They laughed at us and explained that in Bengal Brahmins do eat fish; they call it “the vegetable of the sea”. Ayyayyo,’ said Little Mother, ‘I could have put my hand into fire, as we do impure vessels, to get the touch of it out of my skin. Thoo!’ spat Little Mother, and how Saroja laughed. ‘Say what you will, Saroja, the northerners haven’t the sensibility of living such as we have. You can see married women without kunkum on their faces, or men spitting on the floor. And as for dirt, well, the less said the better. It is something, Saroja, to be born a Brahmin,’ she said, and became silent.
Sleep carne with the fresh breeze that blew from the crackling palm trees, and now and again the smell of jasmine wafted above us. I knew I was home.
It was Saroja in fact who made me feel I was back home and in India. When I first came back after Father’s illness I was too busy with doctors and visitors to think of being back home. I took Little Mother to the North not to see India myself, but to show India to her and make her ‘inauspiciousness’ familiar to herself. Now here I was, back again on the veranda of Vishnu Bhavan, quiet, on my own, with the sound of the toddy palms at the back, and the smell of jasmine coming with the midnight breezes. The tap in the street still purred, despite changes of government and municipal constitution, and the blind Tiger, my father’s favourite dog, still hunted the fleas on his back, even at night.
‘How does a blind thing know night from day?’ Little Mother asked.
Tiger always had fleas, so one day some four or five years before I had bought a bottle of phenol and given him such a scrub that some of the liquid entered his eyes. He could hardly see anything afterwards, and he transferred his loyalties. He went to my father, he treated me as secondary in the scale of human importance. For Tiger I still existed, but just as a member of the household, albeit the eldest. One fact, however, must be said in his favour. For three days before my father’s death he never touched any food. On the day of Father’s death he howled at the moon a great deal. And the next day he let Sridhara pull his tail as much as the child liked. But Tiger never got reconciled to me. He always looked at the gate, as though the doors would open and Father would come in again.
Saroja had grown so lovely. At seventeen, Lord, how beautiful the world could be! She was tall and was fair in a family where most of us are fair. And her silence had a quality that made living cervine. Saroja would never say anything important to anyone, and yet by some abrupt inconsequentiality she would say something you had been waiting to name. She had a deep and a noble wisdom. And she could talk so much, tell such stories, read your hand or invent a tale about her class- companions; but always it was to hide something of her own.
Sukumari was different; she was afraid of something, so she always quarrelled. What was red to Saroja was always pink and white to Sukumari, and the discussion usually ended in a longdrawn sobbing. ‘What an inauspicious thing to be doing, and of an evening, when the lights are being lit,’ Little Mother would say, and Saroja would go into the kitchen to help her with frying the mustard for the rasam.
Each evening before the meal the younger children would recite hymns, and once the camphor was lit Saroja would sing an arathi song and I would begin ‘Rājhādhi-Rājāya…’ After the circumambulations we would eat quickly and rush back to the veranda, and the talk of what happened with the Venktaramans in Allahabad or with the Vikrams in Delhi would begin again. There had been one miserable little child of Vikram’s — Vikram had married for the fourth time at fifty-five and she eighteen— who was so ugly, such a bunch of carrots and coriander leaves, that nobody seemed to care for it. Sridhara looked a prince beside that Vithal, and at the mention of Vithal everybody laughed. Later Little Mother wrote to me that Vithal had died, of cholera.
Saroja was a strange sensation for me. Here was a mystery which I had never observed before: the girl becoming woman, and the thousand ways it shows itself, in shyness, in language, in prime presence. I had left India too young to know the sensibilities of a Brahmin girl. Saroja was thirteen when I left, and Sukumari but nine years old. Saroja’s presence now obsessed me sometimes, like one of those nights with the perfume of magnolia. Rich and green seemed the sap as it rose, and it had a night of its own and a day. That Saroja was my sister made the knowledge of her womanhood natural to me— natural to see, to observe and even to breathe. I would myself pluck flowers for her hair and take her out on long walks and speak to her of Europe and of Madeleine. She too wanted to come and study in Europe; she would be a doctor, and later she would get Little Mother to live with us, she said. I was intoxicated with Saroja’s presence, like a deer could be before a waterfall, or an elephant before a mountain peak; something primordial was awakening in a creature, and I felt that maturity in a girl was like new moon or the change of equinox, it had polar affinities. There was something of the smell of musk, of the oyster when the pearl is still within, of the deep silent sea before the monsoon breaks. There was, too, a feeling of a temple sanctuary, and I could now understand why primitive peoples took the first blood of menstruation for the better harvesting of their fields. And why the Indians gave such beautiful names to their women, and told us how Malavika when she poured water made the Asoka flower, or Shakunthala the Karnikar blossom. What a deep and reverential mystery womanhood is. I could bow before Saroja and call her queen.
She gave me one of her own saris for Madeleine as I left. I prayed for Saroja, and knew in the eye of my eye, somewhere in the interstices of my being, I had named something I had not known yet — it was the absence that had become presence again; it was not Saroja I felt and I smelt, but something of the Ganges and the Jumna that rose into my very being. Benares was indeed nowhere but inside oneself: ‘Kashi kshetram, shararam tribhuvana jananam.’ And I knew: all brides be Benares born.
2
The trip back to Aix started somewhat inauspiciously. My plane, after being five hours in flight and almost halfway to Cairo, returned to Bombay airport with engine trouble. Here they tinkered away on the tarmac, but somewhere in the middle of the night they put us into a new plane, and off we were again. We did not land at Cairo till midday, and at Rome I missed my connection for Nice. I sent a cable to Madeleine immediately — I had begged her anyway not to come to the airport, for I wanted to see her first against the Vénitienne in her own room, in her beige-green suit, with her hair falling on her shoulders and the back of it seen in the mirror. I took a plane straight to Geneva, and finding nothing there to take me to Marseille went on to Paris. Here, there would be a plane, only not until the morning, so leaving my baggage I wandered from midnight till five of dawn aimlessly by the Seine, absorbing Paris into my being.