‘Don’t you know I’m in the pay of America,’ I laughed. ‘Except that the Americans are anti-George the Third, so they’re confirmed anti-royalists, and they’d have nothing but laughter for my kingless royalism or for my Vedanta. I should have been born in the seventeenth century, should have called myself Rama Bhatta and written complicated panegyrics on some obscure prince, like the great Jagannatha Bhatta did.’
‘Not on a princess?’ she asked.
‘No, a Brahmin in those days could never have married a princess.’
‘But Jagannatha Bhatta did.’
‘Well, so they say…’
‘He married Shah Jehan’s own daughter,’ she continued, half in fun and half seriously. ‘Or rather he took her to Benares, and the whole populace rose in anger that a Muslim, even a Mogul princess, should enter the great temple of Kalabhairava Himself. So the poet led her through lanes and by gutters to the ghats of the Ganges, and said, “Mother Ganga, great Mother Ganga, I bring thee my bride, my princess…”
‘The River Ganga rose, she rose wave after wave upwards, and washed the feet, did Mother Ganga, of the holy bride…’
‘And Jagannatha Bhatta thereupon composed those celebrated verses of the Gangalahari:
Nidhānam dharmanām kimapi cha vidhānam
Navasudām tirhanām amala paridhānam trijiagatah
Abode of all dharma,
Sole giver of pleasure to the young;
Centre of holy waters,
Bright garland of the three worlds.
‘He might at least have praised her too?’ she added.
‘Well, I shall myself. And may I then write a Sanskrit verse, in Cardulā vikridïta1 about you?’ I asked. ‘Will you permit me?’
‘Since my eighteenth-century ancestor perhaps no one has had a panegyric addressed to him in Sanskrit, so why not! My more recent ancestors employed Mogul poets to write of Alexander the Great or of Suhrab and Rustam, and at best some bulbul might drink teardrops from a princess’s marble hand. If you went further you were tied to a pillar, and your skin peeled off your back. I didn’t tell you the end of the story. My father wept the whole night with the father of the boy, and gave the young Muslim a scholarship and sent him to study in Aligarh. The verse wasn’t bad; I can still remember it:
The dew waking asked the Sun, O thou all — seeing,
Give me the eye that sees, the red lamp that illumines
So that before the bulbul has begun to sing her lamentations
I will have looked on the curve of her eyebrows.’
‘True,’ I said, ‘your eyebrows are the most beautiful part of your face.’
‘A nasty thing to say, but go on.’
‘Your skin is perhaps even more wondrous. Five hundred years of being shut away in the zenana.’
‘Seven hundred, please, for it was Altamash that conquered us first.’
‘Well then, seven hundred years of zenana life has given your skin the texture of self-luminescence.’
‘And so?’
‘And so when you fall into your silence, it’s as though you contemplate a crystal from inside.’
‘And what a roundsome bowl too!’ she added, hilarious.
‘Roundsome, true, but a jaltarang2 on which a musician could play.’ Suddenly the hilarity stopped, the eyelashes fell on themselves, and any professor’s pug, mesmerized into the orbit of Savithri’s knowledge, might have sat as some dogs do, in the tapestries of Bayeux, their ears stretched back, their tail out, their hind quarters from which rises a conviction, a strength that illumines their eyes.
When Savithri went into this state I fell into myself, and forgot all but the feel that existence is I. I am, therefore the world is. I am, therefore Savithri is. How I would have loved to have taken Savithri into my arms; how natural, how true it would have been! But we were not one silence, we were two solitudes. What stood between Savithri and me was not Pratap, but Savithri herself. Meanwhile she had her gods and her holy land, and she was happy with the comrades, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Mao was still unfamiliar, and too near the Indian frontiers: she had given him no official recognition in herself yet.
On this particular afternoon, however, she suddenly appeared, unusually late, her high heels making her look more unsettled on her feet than ever. As she came running up, with her two companions following almost behind her, and stood before me, I must have looked so lonely and angry that she just laid her hand on mine as it lay on the wall of the bridge. Nothing was said, nothing needed to be said: her sorrow just gurgled out of her, as she breathed a long and heavy sigh. Her companions stood on the opposite side of the bridge, looking down into the waters. She knew damp was no cure for my lungs and said suddenly, like a nanny might to a child, ‘I’ve not heard you cough for a long time, for such a long, long time. It’s true, isn’t it?’ It was true indeed, and she knew it was she that made my breath regular and rested.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as we all walked through Senate House Passage towards the Adelphi. ‘Come, Ramaswamy, let’s have dinner together — all of us — and then you can go back to work. I’d completely forgotten I’d told Jack I would keep this Wednesday evening free for a dance. He’d bought the tickets, and I was starting out here when he suddenly appeared.’
‘Ah,’ said Jack Hollington as though apologetically coming towards us, ‘if I’d been a minute late I couldn’t have known where Savithri was unless I’d gone round with a loudspeaker van.’ How heavy British humour looked after the niceties of French wit. ‘Yes,’ he continued, as though speaking of a rugby match, ‘and we’d hardly gone ten yards when Michael Swanston appeared at the gates of Girton, saying ‘Hullo, Miss Rathor! I’ve a date with you. Don’t you remember we promised to go to that Kingsley Martin lecture?’ But Swanston hadn’t bought his tickets yet, and as he’s a comrade he hadn’t dressed, as I had.’ And Hollington looked himself up and down.
‘And then,’ intruded Savithri, ‘what with dressing for the dance and meeting Michael I forgot whether we’d arranged to meet here or at the library, so we went there first — and I with these terrible stilts, and we did everything to be on time. You know watches are always against me,’ she apologized, as she removed her coat.
We had come to the Adelphi, and the terrace was all that is gracious and sprightly in Cambridge, pink dresses, frills, magnolias, bow-ties, whispers, laughter. Swanston and I were the only two who looked like boors: Swanston had abandoned his lecture — Savithri had a way of begging people to excuse her which made everyone follow wheresoever she went. As we all sat for dinner I saw for the first time that Savithri could be beautiful. She had put on some ancient Agra jewellery— her ear pendants were very lovely — and she had blacked her eyebrows with collyrium; the smell of Lucknow attar made me feel I should like to be back in India. For Hollington, doing radio-engineering at Pembroke, Savithri was just another undergraduate. Her father and his father had shot tigers together, or some such thing, and so the old Raja Sahib had written to Sir Edmond who in his turn wrote to Jack and asked him to take care of her. This was the first time they were going out together.
Swanston they both knew from hearing him plead the Communist cause at the Union. He was clever, a scholar, and ever so willing to be of service. You found him often at the library or outside the Copper Kettle, talking of Molotov or Haldane. It was the time of the Soviet accusations against the United States about germ-warfare in Korea, and Swanston had the names, qualifications and findings of everyone on the international committee of inquiry, from Joliot-Curie to some obscure professor in Australia. What continually surprised me was the obscurity of the great defenders of the Soviet land — if Lysenko were to be proved right you quoted a Melbourne newspaper; if Stalin was to be virtuous, you invariably quoted a Tokyo or Toronto source. Again, the negro of America, whether he were called Jim, Harry, or Peter Black, was always a great leader, and knew everything about the great peoples’ democracies. This amused me a great deal, for it reminded me of Georges with his obscure authorities for the defence of the dogma: it only needed some patristic Father or a bishop of Nevers in the thirteenth century to prove to Georges that his theory was correct. It was incontrovertible when he said, ‘L’Archevêque Henri d’Auxerre a dit...’ and I had to be silent. Haldane was the same for Swanston. It would have amused Henri d’Auxerre, Archevéque, to face history with Haldane. This eighteenth-century prelate being more trained in diplomacy and unction than the British biologist, the Archevéque would no doubt have opened some Burgundy — the best is grown near Auxerre — and then after a meal of rognons à la brochette, une caisse de foie gras aux truffes, et enfin la fondue a pinch of strong snuff from the Levant would be passed on to Haldane; which would have proved that bishops and comrades, whatever their origin, never go wrong.