How true, I thought, as still I walked backwards and forwards on the path — thinking of history was thinking of Savithri — how true that ascetic Protestantism, the Puritan spirit, was combatting feminine Communism. Communism, I concluded, would be defeated not because of the atomic bomb or the heroes of the Korean War, but because the civilization of America was changing over from its puritan background to the magnificence of women’s clubs. The American man accepted woman more deeply than did the European. To worship woman is to redeem the world.
She would come to me then, perhaps, like she had the other day, under the bare trees and the yellow lamplight, with a gesture of sari and books, her voice lilting up with excuses, with implorations of forgiveness. ‘Did I make you wait very long?’ she had asked, putting a warm hand through my overcoat arm, as when the sluices are lifted and the canal waters run back, gurgling and rolling, splashing their joy back to all the recurrent past, with a feeling of intimacy, a fervent churning prayer, saying man has no empty kingdom in himself, but all is true and reverential.
Yes, Savithri had such a sense of reverence for things— were she picking up a spoon, or holding your pen in hand to write an address (for she always forgot her pen and her glasses anywhere, in classes or digs or in a restaurant, and one of the most lovable things I could do for her, was to go back to Lyons or to Witfolds, and ask the management for Savithri’s glasses. ‘This Indian lady, forgot them in the afternoon,’ I would plead, and more often than not, they were found). Sometimes, too, sitting by her on a bench behind Trinity we would be talking away at some abstruse metaphysical subject, and there would come some elegant young Indian or Englishman (‘Your paramours’ I called them, mostly out of fun, but not without a touch of other feelings) whom she had sent searching for her glasses, lost at Heffer’s maybe, buying her Michael Drayton (for she was specializing in the early seventeenth century) or at the Copper Kettle (opposite King’s) where girls gathered together in the afternoon to talk shop. Sometimes these girls themselves, whether it were Betsy (whom I had met by now) or Lakshmi or Sharifa, two Indians, one a Brahmin from Trichinopoly, and the other a Lucknow Muslim, both of them seeking her warmth and intelligence, but each of them detesting her for their own feminine reasons — well, some boy or girl therefore would bring Savithri’s glasses or pen, or even her notebook, and say ‘Sorry to disturb you, Savithri’, or sometimes even ‘Sorry to disturb you, Princess, but we thought you might again get lost, and not find the doorway of Girton. You don’t want that to happen again, do you?’ ‘Oh, no, ‘Savithri would smile, ‘Oh, no, and thank you ever so much.’
My looks would not encourage any disturbance, thus our conversations on the Bogomol dualism or of the good Revolution of ‘48 would go on. She was not in fact, very much of a Communist, but she once said: ‘You know, Ramaswamy, if you’d seen the misery I’ve seen in north India, say, amongst the Pasies, a tribe where a man would murder another for five rupees, or if you had ever visited, as I often did in stealth, some village or home, when my father was away shooting a tiger, or having a huge assembly of notables coming to pay homage to him with sword and ashrafee; or, worse still, if you had been with me on that atrocious day when my father tied a miserable son of a clerk, a munshi’s son, to the middle post of the palace hall and took a whip to him just because he’d dared, like a true Muslim youth, write poetry in my honour and sing it below my window — and in all innocence; if you’d seen such things, and the way when the floods came, Mother Goomtie’s kindness brought such waters that in the middle of the monsoon, with blanket, cradle, and pot on their heads, man, woman and child had to mount up trees and live full fifteen days, as it were from moon to moon — for the river entered the huts and homes, and carried away cattle, boundary-stones and children; if you’d seen all that, you would know whence comes my Communism. My Communism is made of Mother India’s tears.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I answered, ‘but that is because you cannot weep yourself.’
‘You are right there.’ She was always willing to agree. I was her schoolmaster, and she liked to learn from me.
‘The fact is, for you, love is an abstraction.’
‘How right you are,’ she said, her eyes fervent as with a sudden illumination. ‘Lakshmi often says,’ she continued, ‘that Savithri can never love. All is given to her, money and adoration — those are her own words — so Savithri can never love.’
‘No,’ I protested, somewhat in selfish defence perhaps. ‘You can love. Or rather you can be love.’
‘Now, now, what’s that?’
‘For you love is not a system — a canalization of emotion, an idea. For you love is a fact, an immediate experience, like an intuition,’ I said.
‘Wonderful, wonderful. Go on.’
‘I’ve seen you look at a flower or stand at the weir and hear the Cam purr till you are absorbed in yourself. You come out after a long, long silence and say, “Have I made you wait too long?” And with what a melting voice!’
‘Tell me then, wise man, what happens when I hear the Cam purr?’
‘The wise man says: When the Cam purrs for a long time Savithri becomes Savithri. First Savithri listens to the river, then she listens to her own heart, then she listens to her own silence — and then she is lost.’
‘Where, sir?’
‘Nowhere, young lady. You are lost to everything — and not to yourself. “Ambo yatha salilam seva tu tat samagram”—that is, “it’s always and forever but water”.’
‘I think I understand. Go on.’
‘I obey. As Proust says, after all we can only know ourselves.’
‘Does it mean, then, that one cannot love another?’ She was in haste, as she wanted to hear it proven that Pratap could love her, but that she might not love him and yet marry him. Pratap was always on her mind.
‘No, you can love another. But love can never be a movement, a feeling, an act. All that acts can only be of the body, or the mind, or the ego. Only the selfish can love.’
‘And the loveless?’
‘They become love.’
‘Meanwhile?’ she asked eagerly, apologetically, like a peasant asking an astrologer when the rains will fall.
‘Meanwhile you sing the song of the Soviet land,’ I said, and we laughed so much that some kind professor’s spouse, taking her pug for its walk, found that the Britannic canine sensibility had been hurt in this, the kingdom of England, by such outrageous behaviour. The halls of Trinity must have heard our laughter and the dog, relentlessly, continued to bark.
‘Pugs, Madame,’ I said to Savithri, ‘are a bourgeois conception, and would not therefore be allowed in the fatherland of Socialism. You can say “psh — psh — psh” (like our peasants call back dogs in India) to most people in the Soviet land — anyway they carry labels, chains, and municipal hygiene certificates, allow their tails to be cut or have muzzles put on their beakers — so dogs are not allowed.’
‘That’s sheer American propaganda!’ she protested.