I booked my seat on the plane, somewhat secretly, for I had become a great coward. The night before I was to leave, I told Lakshmi. She made such a scene I thought the whole building would know.
‘You eunuch,’ she cried. ‘You lecherous coward!’ I thought she would beat me, but she was still very handsome. I took her in my arms and calmed her.
‘Don’t leave me. What will happen to me?’ she sobbed. ‘Come to me again,’ she begged, and as I covered her she seemed lost in her sorrow and firm passion. ‘I’ll thank you always,’ she cried, laying my small head on her swelling bosom, ‘for you at least treated me with respect. I know you will always be there when I want you. And you know, if ever you need me, I will come and look after you. Sham would be happy if I could make you happy. He thinks you are a helpless fellow and a good friend.’
Strange to say, it was this Lakshmi who saw me off at Santa Cruz. My Indian pilgrimage was ended.
7
Madeleine had moved to a new house. ‘I could never again live in Villa Ste-Anne,’ she had written to me. The new one was called Villa Les Rochers, for the sloping garden was strewn with brown and white rocks. It was a little farther away from the town, and the house itself was smaller, but the olive trees that went from step to step, up to the gateway, gave the villa a sense of isolation and of abandon. Far away you saw only the Alpilles and the sun somewhere on the Camargue. Madeleine had decided on the house as though she had decided on her own life. ‘There’s no question now of my going to India,’ she had written, and I never asked her why.
How true the unsaid sounds against the formulated, the uttered. Words should only be used by the perfect, by the gods, and speech indeed be made incantatory. For speech is sound, and sound is vibration, and vibration creation. To create would be to know what the creator is, and to claim creatorhood for ourselves is indeed to commit a noumenal sin. Silence is golden, say the Europeans. No silence is the Truth. Maunavyakya Prakatitha parabrahma Tatvam, said Sri Sankara. ‘The publishing of Truth is the vocable of silence.’
The day I arrived was a sad day. I remember it was the seventeenth of October, and a raz-de-marée had risen in the sea, and had dragged a horse and its rider and two bathers on the beach of Cassis away. Our plane was three hours late — what with the changes in the Mediterranean air currents — and Harry was not there at the aerodrome. Life had changed everywhere. I took the bus to Marseille, and took a taxi from there on to Aix. The afternoon was clear as prayer, with a touch of autumnal gold on the hills. Madeleine was writing a letter when I entered. She seemed calm, fresh, and big; it was true, she had become very large. She carried my bags up the garden steps. It was a nice house she had taken, I thought, as she led me to my new room. My books were all arranged neatly, my large table laid against the window. She had burnt sandal-sticks for I could smell them the moment I came in. My mother’s portrait was hung on the wall above my divan.
‘Have a bath quickly, Rama, and I’ll give you dinner at once.’ Her voice was gentle, deliberate, and strange. This time I undid my trunks quickly, hung my clothes and went into the bathroom. ‘This is a funny geyser; he’s so temperamental,’ she explained, and let the water flow. ‘Just remember to turn off the gas when you get in. Otherwise it escapes, and you’d have to crawl out of the bath, like I did one night. We must get a plumber,’ she added, and went back to the kitchen.
I was too tired to think, so I slipped into the bath. When I got out I felt surprisingly fresh. The evening was cool, and I felt young and whole. My breathing seemed less heavy. I was back home.
There was a dining-room in this house. It was downstairs and opened on to the garden, so that you could hear the crickets in summer, and see the fireflies among the olives. The kitchen was to one side, and I could smell rice and tomato again. It was to be risotto as usual, but with a difference: this time she had added curry powder to it.
‘I thought you would like your wretched spices for some time,’ she said. ‘I never know how to cook for you — I never shall.’
The table was laid and she brought the food. There was the same familiar saucepan with the burnt wooden handle, the same squares-and-triangles kitchen oil-cloth, the same bent fork, with a broken recalcitrant tip. I suddenly realized there was but one plate. I stood up and took another out. Meanwhile Madeleine placed the food on the table saying:
‘Rama, will you forgive me if I do not eat? It’s the eighth moon today, and I’ve taken to fasting. I’m going to be a good Buddhist.’ She spoke quietly, undramatically. ‘Poor child,’ she went on, ‘you must be hungry after such a long journey. Rama, serve yourself, and I’ll just go down to the post office and back. I must catch the last maiclass="underline" it’s for Tante Zoubie.’
She went up to her room, then ran down the staircase and into the garden. It was such a lovely, large evening, with a bunch of stars above me, and the olives shaking with the sea breeze from the south-west. The big cypress at the door stood straight like a redemptor, and the evening was full of birds, sheep, and cries of children. Far away on the other side was the silence of the hills.
I sat at the table and I ate. I concentrated on my food and I was convinced I had to eat. Food is meant for eating; of course it is: ‘OM adama, OM pibama, OM devo varunah Prajapatihi savihannam iharat, anna-pate, annam i hara, ahara, OM iti,’ says the Chandogya Upanishad. But lungs have temperament. My breathing became suddenly difficult. I stopped, however, any exhibition of the extraordinary. I was just the normal Ramaswamy, husband of the Madeleine who taught History at the Lycée de Jeunes Filles, at Aix. There was nothing strange about anything. I had come home from India, and it made no difference to the earth or the air or the olives, or the stars for that matter, that I came from India rather than, say, from Paris or London. True, time exists in clock-hours, in days that you can count, even on the postal calendar in the kitchen — March, April, etc… up to October. The lungs can be very bad, you know, and so you stayed on in India. But Madeleine is Madeleine, the same Madeleine.
‘Ah, I hope you were not so silly as to have forgotten I’d leave the grated cheese in the kitchen. Oh, Rama!’ she exclaimed, like a child. ‘Oh, you are still the same old fool.’ She pushed the entremets towards me, and the nuts. ‘You must get stronger. Now let me have a good look at you. It must be your stay at Kodaikanaclass="underline" you look less dark than when you returned from India last time.’ I spoke of the X-rays and the blood-test. She went up and found my medicines. ‘We won’t go to the elephant today,’ she decided. ‘It’s already a bit cold this year. Let us go up to my room.’
Her room was a smaller one than mine, but opened on to the garden, as mine did. A cypress almost touched her window, and you could, as it were, caress it while counting the stars.
‘This house has no central heating like Villa Ste-Anne, but look what a wonderful fireplace. It is more economical this way, and besides, you will be so much away this year in Paris and London. For me, coming from La Charente, this is enough.’
I looked at the room. The walls were of a yellow-grey and on the table by her bed stood the huge head of a Khmer Buddha.