And Madeleine looked at the sky and found the world glorious. The bull was saved. He had only a knock on the head, and Madeleine said she had filled the hole with olive-oil that night so that the stone would absorb it and grow black. When I came back from India the hole remained, but like some caste- mark on a basavanna bull it gave him a look auspicious. I must have gazed so many, many times at Nandi in Shiva’s temples and he must have liked to look like his Indian counterpart. And why not, I ask you? Is there a difference between an Indian bull and a Provencal one? Our bull nodded his head like a basavanna bull and said no.
So, news of sorrow or joy came to Madeleine through the good bull’s messages. She read them like a gypsy reads her cards. In some past life Madeleine must have been an Indian woman, no doubt. She believed it firmly, and so believed even more firmly in the truth, the everlastingness of our marriage. Otherwise she could not explain, she said, how a man from Hariharapura, Mysore State, could come and marry a girl from Rouen, St Ouen — orphan of an engineer, niece of a notaire et conseiller municipal de la Ville de Sainte Jeanne. I myself, of course, believed in reincarnation — how could I not? — but it did not always explain everything. Some time, in England, I would be an elm.
I shall be very honest: there is no need to be otherwise. On those early spring days — it was just a year since my father had died — when the birds were coming back and I could almost feel the swell of the earth as it rose to greet the revival of sap and returning great sunshine, I thought once again of the large spaces of atmosphere before me and the journey back to India, and there was a sorrow that filled me and which had no name. The whole sky and jubilant earth were one dominion of sorrow, as though somewhere the earth was seen as a drama, enacted in an isolate, an unuplifted, a non-happening apocalypse. What you loved most, the closest, the nearest, that which spoke its breath to you, that which was the balsam, the burthen-bearer, the hearer, the carrier of your sorrow — was impotent, dead. I pressed Madeleine, on those nights, with the warmth and tenderness of a mother for her child — I would have suckled her if I could, and thought how well I now understood why pregnant wives at home are sent to their mothers. Just as bottled champagne remembers its own spring-time, the grandmother- to-be goes through a new motherhood, and absolves the pain of her own child. She offers her big, round daughter cashew nuts and paprika, Bengal gram paysam and hot tamarind chutney; she makes brinjal curry for the evening, with Maratha- buds, coriander, and cardamom; and once in three days there is onion-curry, smelling from the kitchen to the mat on the floor. The pregnant daughter eats almost where she lies, and when she is taken into the lying-in room, how wonderful to hear the child cry — a long, broken-glass sound, but happy, new, reviving — the limbs become renewed, fresh, whole; the stomach feels vacant, and nostrils are filled with the smell of garlic and betel nut. I wished I were the one who would press Madeleine’s legs — I wished I might have cared for her as I should.
And yet love and sorrow create such an intimacy in one — at a certain level they seem so alike — that if Madeleine had asked, as she often seemed to ask me, with her deep-set eyes, ‘Rama, tell me — tell me, that you love me?’ I should have said to her, ‘Beloved, my beloved, don’t you see, I am near you? That which is within you is mine; I am mine and you, Madeleine, are — a chunk of truth, a reality — as the sun, the moon, and the space of the stars…’ It would have been exact, and I would have betrayed no one.
For, lying by Madeleine, I was overtaken by no remorse, no inhibitions, no eating back my own sorrow on thinking of Savithri. Savithri was there, not in me but as me; not as someone far, unreal, relegated to a country in rounded space, but as light which seemed never to fade, never to know where to go — like that constant sound the texts say which in the silence of things, the first vibration, the primary sound, the pranavam OM propounds itself, and from which all that is World is created. Savithri, as it were, was the meaning of meaning, Sabdharta; and everything read from her, because she was — she is — she will be.
But the texture of our lives, that of Madeleine and me, was woven with such respect for one another, that a false gesture, a sentimental note would have laid us aghast. If I wanted to kill Madeleine I had only to breathe an untruth. We seemed to have entered some magic being, made of thin, sure glass — and breath.
We breathed to each other as though in this respiratory movement we became united as never in flesh we could be. And in breathing with Madeleine I felt sometimes — I was breathing to her the breath of another, a known presence; the tender, compassionate hand of Savithri was perhaps there, and I was the outsider. Gently, and carefully, when I tried to remove my hand and slip back to my own bed, there would be a tender pressure from Savithri, as if to say, ‘Love, my love, do not go.’
One day, I sat and wrote to Catherine: I asked her to come. After all, it would be nice to have her there, I thought, and she would be so happy, I was sure, to see Georges again: in love, days and space pass so painfully, I did not tell Madeleine about the letter, and Catherine seemed to find some difficulty in convincing Oncle Charles about her coming.
‘We are not Indians,’ explained Catherine, when she did arrive a week later, ‘and Oncle Charles said, “You cannot be all the time living in your cousin’s house. Remember you have spent almost a month there. And they’re no millionaires, my daughter”.’
This attitude towards hospitality I understood, but I suffered a great deal from it. As Father said, ‘They who come will eat rice and dhal-water if we can give them nothing better; and sleep on a mat if I cannot spread them a bed in velveteen.’ Catherine was young, and she knew my real feelings; besides, it was natural that she should be back with Georges. They were going to get married in the spring soon after Easter, it was tentatively decided, so that Georges’s old father could come from Munich.
Catherine said, ‘And you, Rama, will not be there, as my godfather and Georges’s only brother.’
‘Oh, Catherine!’ I replied. ‘You know that after Father’s death this, my sister’s marriage, is the first marriage in the household. Besides, I have a vague hope that I may still stop Saroja making a mistake…’ But as I said it I knew that what was was, and Saroja would never go back on a mistake — it would be inauspicious.
Catherine drove all of us to Marignane Airfield, Madeleine sat behind, with her enormous, real and sad presence, and Georges sat beside her, smoking away. Lezo, good Lezo, looked even more like a schoolboy than ever before. ‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, ‘I wish I could go to north India, and learn Bhutanese. There’s very little work done on that language, except for a small grammar by the Reverend Father Templeston, published in 1882.’ Georges seemed truly sad to leave me. Madeleine looked like someone drugged, or a pious woman telling her beads. Buddhism had given her a certain insight into her own nature, a protection from something smelly, foreign, and other — it gave her a step, a conscious foothold in India.
Georges, and all that she meant to Georges, only affirmed my own presence in her. ‘She will be under my care,’ said Georges, at the aerodrome, while we were going through the formalities. ‘N’est-ce pas, chérie?’ he asked Catherine, like an afterthought. ‘Madeleine will just be ready for the good news, as we shall also be thinking of good things,’ whispered Catherine, and kissed Madeleine on her bulging cheek. However holy maternity may be, ‘civilization’ has made it ugly: peasant women do not grow so fat. Little Mother had washed the vessels and was spreading wet, washed saris on the bamboos when the pains started; and in an hour the child was there, Sridhara was there. That is how it should be.