I gave priest Ranganatha three hundred rupees for the repairs of the Kenchamma temple. ‘And here’s a sari for the goddess,’ said Little Mother, producing a small worship-sari from her box. I was happy to see the cattle when they came home; Gauri was still alive, and so strong for her age — she was eleven years old. ‘She gave this calf but a year ago,’ protested Nanja, ‘and she still gives us three measures.’ Lali and Sethu had died of foot-and- mouth disease the year before.
When dusk fell the village elders came to invite us for the evening worship. How very splendid the Goddess looked, round, with her green eyes, and the serpent-belt that Grandfather, so they said, had given her after my birth. And when we went home after the circumambulations Mango-tope Siddanna came to discuss some boundary questions: the corner-house people had encroached on our elephant-fruit field, and they were not people to listen to kind words. ‘For just a question they’ll throw you into the Himavathy, but we know how to deal with their grandfathers,’ said Siddanna. Little Mother knew all the details about the lands, though she had been here but once; Uncle Seetharamu had given her detailed instructions.
Everybody asked about Saroja’s marriage. ‘What a wonderful family — a son in London, and a daughter in Delhi,’ said Bailiff Subbayya. ‘Now that the youngest has drunk of Mother Himavathy’s green waters, this child, too, will come back to us, for initiation and marriage,’ proclaimed Pattadur Patel Siddalingayya. In the night, as I lay thinking on my lands— this long stretch of Himavathy valley that had given us rice and sugarcane year after year, and the hills beyond that had fed us on coffee and jackfruit, cardamom, and honey, for decades, for hundreds of years — it seemed to me that they were a presence, a more continuous, inexorable presence than Little Mother, Sukumari, Sridhara or me.
We went back to Bangalore happy and refreshed after Hariharapura.
Saroja came to join us the week after. Her husband had been sent on a mission to London, and she was going to spend a few months with us. Never in my life have I been happier than during those six weeks in Bangalore. We took walks in the Lal Bagh, we went to hear music at the City Hall, we visited relations — Little Mother knew every one of them, and like Father she loved visiting all of them, morning, noonday, afternoon and dusk-fall — and we played country-chess at home and laughed all the time. Saroja came to understand Little Mother better, and often as I entered they changed their talk, as if they did not wish to worry me. ‘Brother, you get better first — and the rest is my affair,’ Saroja pleaded. Sukumari was happy too, for here she could go about with boys without people talking scandal.
‘In Bangalore,’ remarked Little Mother, ‘it is not as in Muslim Hyderabad. Here girls can go about with boys and nobody thinks anything of it. After all it’s Brahmin-land,’ declared Little Mother, forgetting that the benign Congress régime had abolished caste distinctions.
The air in the evening of Bangalore is cool, and in Basavangudi how enchanting the dusk hours, with the bells of the Bull Temple ringing, rich and long. We often walked up there when my breathing was not too hard — and let the evening fall on us across the rocks and the momentous hollows of the hills. Lights would suddenly shine out everywhere, and while the bats settled on the trees Little Mother and Saroja would go into the temple and bring back prasadam. Then with the smell of camphor mingling with the smell of champaks, we would go home, our nostrils rich, and our breath sacred. ‘Sambho-Sankara, Sambho-Sankara,’ repeated Little Mother, as though we were in Benares again.
Saroja had brought her cook from Delhi, for our own cook was no good at all. Appoo Nair made wonderful sambar and idlies. I was happy.
The doctors began to be more optimistic. They said it was my vegetarian habits that must have caused all this trouble.
‘In Rome do as Romans do, is a good adage,’ said Dr Bhimsen Rao to me. ‘It’s because Grandfather wouldn’t allow your father to die like the great Ramanujan3 that your own father was never allowed to go to Cambridge. But times have changed and you have gone to Europe. You must eat meat and drink wine,’ he advised. ‘If not why marry a European wife?’
What was there for me to say? I laughed and said, ‘I am a European Brahmin,’ and he seemed satisfied with my answer. Since that day he always introduced me to the nurses and X-ray assistants as ‘this European Brahmin, this French Vedantin.’ It made everybody laugh. In India we always laugh, at everything, auspicious or indifferent. It must do our lungs a lot of good.
Noble is the game of life and pentathlic the works of civilization. Birth and death, sowing and reaping, the communication of joys and sufferings; the subtleties of statistics, the names of loves; diplomatic determinations, subterfuges, losses, conquests; the crowning of queens (death of kings), the killing of dictators or of their fist-faced henchmen; all these follow one another, as if the magnificent line of ants at my feet in the Lal Bagh had any knowledge of other things than that the sun shines in between two gusts of monsoon winds, and have no premonition of the trees that wave their tops in jubilant youth, that aeroplanes hover above the earth, bearing people back and forth, and from all the lands and from round the roundsome globe, or that the telegraph wires which pass by me, have carried the destiny of men for decades: ‘Shamoo died?; ‘Subbu, succeeded exams’; ‘Lakshmana transferred to Dehra Dun, Military Depot,’ and they will carry it for several decades more, unless more simple means dispense with wires and conglomerate absurdities, so that important news does not reach us on a bicycle, with a blue coat and khaki trousers, and brick-coloured envelopes do not contain the amalgam of destiny.
Through the kindness of the authorities telegrams from abroad were marked, ‘Cable Indian Overseas Services,’ so a cable generally meant a cable to me from Madeleine. The cable I received that morning after returning home, of which I had perhaps a premonition, from having sat looking at the telegraph wires so long, came therefore as no real surprise, especially as Little Mother had just said on seeing me, ‘How well you look, Rama! What clarity and blood has come to your eyes.’ It was just then, when Little Mother had hardly gone in, that the telegraph peon handed the cable to me. I sat on the stone bench near the pomegranate bush and opened it, letting my cane fall beside me. The cable was from Tante Zoubie. It said that Madeleine had had to be taken to hospital suddenly for a caesarean to be performed. The boy died soon after. ‘Madeleine well’ it went on to say. ‘Don’t worry we will look after your wife. Get better soon. Chariot sends love…’ I could hear Saroja count the clothes inside the veranda — the washerman was there — three jubbas, four saris, ten handkerchiefs, four towels and I put the telegram into my pocket: it was addressed to the ants.
In the bathroom, later, when I stepped on the wash-slab I laughed. I was neither in pain, nor was I relieved; I felt above both, like a child looking at a kite in the sky; I thought of Georges, and laughed at Leibnitz and the monad and all that. I saw the yellow and white of the kite and the snake-like tail that the wind swept curling, whirling on itself and leaping up back against the sun. The winds blew cool and fresh. I laughed as a child laughs, playing with the subtleties of the breeze. I was happy. The world is a happy place for anyone to live in: look at the ants in the Lal Bagh. Vassita found peace with the Lord.
I laughed hilariously the whole afternoon, playing country- chess, first with Little Mother, and then with Saroja when she woke from her siesta. In the evening I took them all to the cinema.
News from Savithri was scarce. When letters came they were brief and full of humility: ‘This fat and foolish thing’—’I am unworthy — so uneducated a creature as I,’ and so on. It was just fear, I concluded, turned to nobler purposes.