‘I’ll be back soon, Madeleine,’ I said, making her a long namaskar. I had never learnt to kiss goodbyes in public. Even to take Madeleine’s arm in public seemed a desecration to me. But with Savithri it was different. Why, I wondered, why indeed, as I left the barrier and went towards the waiting plane.
Once the door of the plane had closed behind me, I knew it would never be the same again. Something colossal and complete had happened to Madeleine, to me — to the world. Beautiful was the Mediterranean, green as a silken sari, and the world was covered with noble filigree sunshine.
Man cannot and should not be petty. The magnitude of Marcus Aurelius and his natural wisdom was permanent and universal; the discourses of Socrates everlasting. I thought how Alexandria had taught man medicine, geography, and oriental wisdom, and Eratosthenes, Alexandria’s famous librarian, had written an encyclopedic book on India. Ptolemy Philadelphus himself sent an Ambassador Dionysius to Pataliputra for the fame of Indian wisdom had spread far and deep, and Dionysius was ‘to put truth to the test by personal inspection’. Forget Cleopatra and her rage and think now of Carthage, I said to myself. Baal was cruel and so was Semiramis, but how sacred, how luminous the sky became, beyond the Persian Sea. Darkness had grown, a mountainous, sky-reaching darkness; a hot darkness between India and Greece. But the Mediterranean is an Indian sea, a Brahminic ocean; somewhere the Rhone must know the mysteries of Mother Ganga. India, my land, for me is ever, ever holy. ‘If only to be born in a land with so beautiful a shape, should make you feel proud and wise and ancient,’ Madeleine had once said to me. And I agreed with her.
The continent North of the Ocean
And South of the great snows
Is the holy land of Bharatha.
It’s there they live, the descendants of Bharatha,
Nine yojanas long,
And where all acts have their fruits
For those that seek liberation.
6
I found myself saying the Gayathri mantra as we landed at Santa Cruz. I had said it day after day, almost for twenty years; I must have said it a million million times: ‘OM, O face of Truth with a disk of Gold, remove the mist (of ignorance) that I may see you face to face.’ But this time I said it quietly, tenderly, as one speaks to something near, breathful, intimate. It was India I wanted to see, the India of my inner being. Just as I could now see antara-Kashi, the ‘inner Benares’, India for me became no land — not these trees, this sun, this earth; not those ladle-hands and skeletal legs of bourgeois and coolie; not even the new pride of the uniformed Indian official, who seemed almost to say, ‘Don’t you see, I am Indian now, and I represent the Republic of India’—but something other, more centred, widespread, humble; as though the gods had peopled the land with themselves, as the trees had forested the country, rivers flowed and named themselves, birds winged themselves higher and yet higher, touched the clouds and soared beyond, calling to each other over the valleys by their names. The India of Brahma and Prajapathi; of Varuna, Mithra and Aryaman; of Indra, of Krishna, Shiva, and Parvathi; of Rama, Harishchandra, and Yagnyavalkya; this India was a continuity I felt, not in time but in space; as a cloud that stands over a plain might say, ‘Here I am and I pour—’and goes on pouring. The waters of that rain have fertilized our minds and hearts, and being without time they are ever present. It is perhaps in this sense that India is outside history. A patch of triangular earth, surrounded by the three seas, somehow caught the spirit without time, and established it in such a way that you can see the disk of gold shine miles above the earth. And as the plane cuts through the night of the Persian Gulf, you feel a streak of gold, a benevolent cerulean green, that you want to touch, to taste, to rememorate unto yourself. You feel it belongs to you, be you Indian, Chinese, French, Alaskan, or Honduran. It is something that history has reserved for herself, just as humans reserve an area of their own being, known but hardly used, it exists, as it were, for one’s rarer moments: in the simplicity of dusk, in the breath after poetry; in the silence after death, in the space of love; in the affirmation of deep sleep; an area all known but atemporal, where you see yourself face to face.
That is the India I glimpsed — and lost again, as the customs officials called and the coolies clamoured. The hideousness of Bombay hurt me as only an impersonal falsehood can hurt. But I quickly took a bath at the Taj, and drove back to Santa Cruz, where once again on the green of the airfield I was back in the intuition of India. All the way to Hyderabad I looked down on hills, trains, plains, and villages, on rivers and roads — O those endless white lines, between streaks of yellow, maroon, and green! Soon I would be at Hyderabad.
I remembered how the city was founded. The king of Golconda, so the story goes, was ill and impoverished, despite his celebrated diamonds. His prime minister, a Brahmin, was deeply concerned over the finances of the state. There were enemies abroad — the Moghuls on the one side and the Marathas on the other. But one night, as the prime minister lay in anxiety, restless and concerned over the fate of his sovereign, he saw a great spread of unearthly green and peacock-blue light, and he saw the bejewelled form of Devi, processioning in the sky. ‘Where may’st thou be going, and who may’st thou be, Goddess, Auspicious Lady?’ he asked. ‘I am Lakshmi,’ she said, ‘and I go to the Himalayas, to Brahma my Lord.’ ‘Couldst thou not, Lady, stay a while, just a moment, just a trice, the time a man takes to open his eyes and shut, and I shall call my king my liege, that he behold thy beautiful form.’ ‘Earnest thou art, and thus the prayers be answered,’ she said. So our Brahmin, with turban, cummerbund, and tight trousers, ran up the hill and stood before his king. The night was vast and very luminous. ‘There She stands, over across the river. She awaits us. Come, my liege, my sire.’ Hassan Qutub Shah went in, and soon came out dressed, sword and buckle in hand. He looked from his high, round citadel towards the luminous sky, and across the river. As the Brahmin bent low showing his liege the way, the king cut him in two, that the Goddess of Wealth, Lakshmi, might reside in his kingdom. So he rode down to the goddess on his white charger, and said, ‘My prime minister, Great Lady of the Lotus, will never return. I have killed him that thou mightst remain here forever and ever.’ And Hassan Qutub Shah built her a temple with four spires, as though it were a mosque, and she resides with us, the goddess does, to this very day… She shines on our coins, does Lakshmi, as Bhagyavathi and that is why we call our city Bhagyanagar — city of beautiful wealth, for Hyderabad is but a vulgar homonym.
I hadn’t told Little Mother the day and the hour of my arrival. I wanted so much to surprise them all — I thought it would remove from them the sense of distance, of unfamiliarity, of otherness. It was about the middle of the day when I arrived home. The gate was closed, and when I opened the door, Tiger, the dog, made a lot of angry manifestations against me, till he fell flat before me, helpless, and begged for forgiveness: ‘The Master of the House had come.’ I could see that the water-tap in the garden still needed mending, and as I went up the steps and peeped in, the house was one knit silence. I knocked, and Little Mother said, ‘Who’s there?’ from the sanctum. From her voice I knew she must be at prayer. ‘The son is come home,’ I shouted back. And you could have heard Little Mother’s sobbing voice even from the door.