I WAS BORN a Brahmin-that is, devoted to Truth and all that. 'Brahmin is he who knows Brahman,' etc. etc.... But how many of my ancestors since the excellent Yagnyavalkya, my legendary and Upanishadic ancestor, have really known the Truth excepting the Sage Madhava, who founded an Empire or, rather, helped to build an Empire, and wrote some of the most profound of Vedantic texts since Sri Sankara? There were others, so I'm told, who left hearth and riverside fields, and wandered to mountains distant and hermitages 'to see God face to face'. And some of them did see God face to face and built temples. But when they died-for indeed they did 'die'-they too must have been burnt by tank or grove or meeting of two rivers, and they too must have known they did not die. I can feel them in me, and know they knew they did not die. Who is it that tells me they did not die? Who but me.
So my ancestors went one by one and were burnt, and their ashes have gone down the rivers.
Whenever I stand in a river I remember how when young, on the day the monster ate the moon and the day fell into an eclipse, I used with til and kusha grass to offer the manes my filial devo- tion. For withal I was a good Brahmin. I even knew Grammar and the Brahma Sutras, read the Upanishads at the age of four, was given the holy thread at seven-because my mother was dead and I had to perform her funeral ceremonies, year after year my father having married again. So with wet cloth and an empty stomach, with devotion, and sandal paste on my forehead, I fell before the rice-balls of my mother and I sobbed. I was born an orphan, and have remained one. I have wandered the world and have sobbed in hotel rooms and in trains, have looked at the cold mountains and sobbed, for I had no mother. One day, and that was when I was twenty-two, I sat in an hotel-it was in the Pyrenees-and I sobb, for I knew I would never see my mother again.
They say my mother was very beautiful and very holy. Grand- father Kittanna said, 'Her voice, son, was like a vina playing to itself, after evensong is over, when one has left the instrument beside a pillar in the temple. Her voice too was like those musical pillars at the Rameshwaram temple-it resonated from the depths, from some unknown space, and one felt God shone the brighter with this worship. She reminded me of concubine Chandramma. She had the same voice. That was long before your time,' Grandfather concluded, 'it was in Mysore, and I have not been there these fifty years.'
Grandfather Kittanna was a noble type, a heroic figure among us. It-must be from him I have this natural love of the impos- sible-I can think that a building may just decide to fly, or that Stalin may become a saint, or that all the Japanese have become Buddhist monks, or that Mahatma Gandhi is walking with us now. I sometimes feel I can make the railway line stand up, or the Elephant bear its young one in twenty-four days; I can see an aeroplane float over a mountain and sit carefully on a peak, or I could go to Fathe-Pur-Sikri and speak to the Emperor Akbar. It would be difficult for me not to think, when I am in Versailles, that I hear the uncouth voice of Roi Soleil, or in Meaux that Bossuet rubs his snuff in the palm of his hand, as they still do in India, and offers a pinch to me. I can sneeze with it, and hear Bossuet make one more of his funeral orations. For Bossuet believed and so did Roi Soleil-that he never would die. And if they've died, I ask you, where indeed did they go? Grandfather Kittanna was heroic in another manner. He could manage a horse, the fiercest, with a simplicity that made it go where it did not wish to go. I was brought up with the story how Grandfather Kittanna actually pushed his horse into the Chandrapur forest one evening-the horse, Sundar, biting his lips off his face; the tiger that met him in the middle of the jungle; the leap Sundar gave, high above my Lord Sher, and the custard-apples that splashed on his back, so high he soared-and before my grandfather knew where he was, with sash and blue- Maratha saddle, there he stood, Sundar, in the middle of the courtyard. The lamps we being lit, and when stableman Chowdayya heard the neigh he came and led the steed to the tank for a swish of water. Grandfather went into the bathroom, had his evening bath-he loved it to be very hot, and Aunt Seethamma had always to serve him potful after potful-and he rubbed himself till his body shone as the young of a banana tree. He washed and sat in prayer. When Atchakka asked, 'Sundar is all full of scratches...?' then Grandfather spoke of the tiger, and the leap. For him, if the horse had soared into the sky and landed in holy Brindavan he would not have been much surprised. Grandfather Kittanna was like that. He rode Sundar for another three years, and then the horse died-of some form of dysentery, for, you know, horses die too-and we buried him on the top of the Kittur Hill, with fife and filigree. We still make an annual pilgrimage to his tomb, and for Hyderabad reasons we cover it up with a rose-coloured muslin, like the Muslims do. Horses we think came from Arabia, and so they need a Muslim burial. Where is Sundar now? Where?
The impossible, for Grandfather, was always possible. He never-he, a Brahmin-never for once was afraid of gun or sword, and yet what depth he had in his prayers. When he came out, Aunt Seethamma used to say, 'He has the shine of a Dharma Raja.'
But I, I've the fright of gun and sword, and the smallest trick of violence can make me run a hundred leagues. But once having gone a hundred leagues I shall come back a thousand, for I do not really have the fear of fear. I only have fear. I love rivers and lakes, and make my home easily by any waterside hamlet. I love palaces for their echoes, their sense of never having seen anything but the gloomy. Palaces remind me of old and venerable women, who never die. They look after others so much I mean, orphans of the family always have great-aunts, who go on changing from orphan to orphan-that they remain ever young. One such was Aunt Lakshamma. She was married to a minister once, and he died when she was seven or eight. And since them my uncles and their daughters, my mother's cousins and their grandchildren, have always had Lakshamma to look after them, for an orphan in a real household is never an orphan. She preserved, did Lakshamma, all the clothes of the young in her eighteenth-century steel and sheesham trunk, in the central hall, and except when there was a death in the house these clothes never saw the light of the sun. Some of them were fifty years old, they said. The other day-that is, some seven or eight years ago when we were told that Aunt Lakshamma, elder to my grandfather by many years, had actually died, I did not believe it. I thought she would live three hundred years. She never would complain or sigh. She never wept. We never wept when she died. For I cannot understand what death means.
My father, of course, loved me. He never let me stray into the hands of Lakshamma. He said: 'Auntie smells bad, my son. I want you to be a hero and a prince.' Some time before my mother died, it seems she had a strange vision. She saw three of my past lives, and in each one of them I was a son, and of course I was always her eldest born, tall, slim, deep-voiced, deferential and beautiful. In one I was a prince. That is why I had always to be adorned with diamonds-diamonds on my forehead, chest and ears. She died, they say, having sent someone to the goldsmith, asking if my hair-flower were ready. When she died they covered her with white flowers-jasmines from Coimbatore and champaks from Chamundi-and with a lot of kunkum on her they took her away to the burning-ghat. They shaved me completely, and when they returned they gave me bengal-gram, and some sweets. I could not understand what had happened. Nor do I understand now. I know my mother, my Mother Gauri, is not dead, and yet I am an orphan. Am I always going to be an orphan?
That my father married for a third time-my stepmother having died leaving three children, Saroja, Sukumari, and the eldest, Kapila-is another story. My new stepmother loved me very dearly, and I could not think of a home without her bright smile and the song that shone like the copper vessels in the house. When she smiled her mouth touched her ears and she gave me everything I wanted. I used to weep, though, thinking of my own mother. But then my father died. He died on the third of the second Moon-month when the small rains had just started. I have little to tell you of my father's death, except that I did not love him; but that after he died I knew him and loved him when his body was such pure white spread ash. Even now I have dreams of him saying to me: 'Son, why did you not love me, you, my Eldest Son?' I cannot repent, as I do not know what re- pentance is. For I must first believe there is death. And that is the central fact-I do not believe that death is. So, for whom shall I repent?
Of course, I love my father now. Who could not love one that was protection and kindness itself, though he never understood that my mother wanted me to be a prince? And since I could not be a prince--I was born a Brahmin, and so how could I be king? I wandered my life away, and became a holy vagabond. If Grandfather simply jumped over tigers in the jungles, how many tigers of the human jungle, how many accidents to plane and car have I passed by? And what misunderstandings and chasms of hatred have lain between me and those who first loved, and then hated, me? Left to myself, I became alone and full of love. When one is alone one always loves. In fact, it is because one loves, and one is alone, one does not die.
I went to Benares, once. It was in the month of March, and there was still a pinch of cold in the air. My father had just died and I took Vishalakshi, my second stepmother, and my young stepbrother Sridhara-he was only eleven months old and I went to Benares. I was twenty-two then, and I had been to Europe; I came back when Father became ill. Little Mother was very proud of me-she said: 'He's the bearing of a young pipal tree, tall and sacred, and the serpent-stones around it. We must go round him to become sacred. But the sacred Brahmins of Benares would hear none of this. They knew my grandfather and his grandfather and his great-grandfather again, and thus for seven generations-Ramakrishnayya and Ranganna, Madhava- swamy and Somasundarayya, Manjappa and Gangadharayya- and for each of them they knew the sons and grandsons-(the daughters, of course, they did not quite know)--and so, they stood on their rights. 'Your son,' they said to Little Mother, 'has been to Europe, and has wed a Eropean and he has no sacred thread. Pray, Mother, how could the manes be pleased.' So Little Mother yielded and just fifty silver rupees made every- thing holy. Some carcass-bearing Brahmins-'We're the men of the four shoulders,' they boast-named my young brother Son of Ceremony in their tempestuous high and low of hymns-the quicker the better, for in Benares there be many dead, and all the dead of all the ages, the successive generations of manes after manes, have accumulated in the sky. And you could almost see them layer on layer, on the night of a moon-eclipse, fair and pale and tall and decrepit, fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, nephews; friends, kings, yogins, maternal uncles-all, all they accumulate in the Benares air and you can see them. They have a distanced, dull-eyed look-and they ask-they beg for this and that, and your round white rice- balls and sesame seed give the peace they ask for. The sacred Brahmin too is pleased. He has his fifty rupees. Only my young brother, eleven months old, does not understand. When his mother is weeping for death takes a long time to be recognized- my brother pulls and pulls at the sari-fringe. I look at the plain, large river that is ever so young, so holy-like my Mother. The temple bells ring and the crows are all about the white rice-balls. The manes have come, look!' say the Brahmins. My brother crawls up to them saying 'Caw-Caw', and it's when he sees the monkeys that he jumps for Little Mother's lap. He's so tender and fine-limbed, is my brother. Little Mother takes him into her lap, opens her choli and gives him the breast. The Brahmins are still muttering something. Two or three of them have already washed their feet in the river and are coming up, looking at their navels or their fine gold rings. They must be wondering what silver we would offer. We come from far-and from grandfather to grandfather, they knew what every one in the family had paid, in Moghul Gold or in Rupees of the East India Company, to the more recent times with the British Queen buxom and small-faced on the round, large silver. I would rather have thrown the rupees to the begging monkeys than to the Brahmins. But Little Mother was there. I took my brother in my arms, and I gave the money, silver by silver, to him. And gravely, as though he knew what he was doing, he gave the rupees to the seated Brahmins. He now knew too that Father was dead. Then suddenly he gave such a shriek as though he saw Father near us not as he was but as he had become, blue, trans- corporeal. Little Mother always believes the young see the dead more clearly than we the corrupt do. And Little Mother must be right. Anyway, it stopped her tears, and now that the clouds had come, we went down the steps of the Harischchandra Ghat, took a boat, and floated down the river..
I told Little Mother how Tulsidas had written the Ramayana just there, next to the Rewa Palace, and Kabir had been hit on the head by Saint Ramanand. The saint had stumbled on the head of the Muslim weaver and had cried Ram-Ram, so Kabir stood up and said, 'Now, My Lord, you be my Guru and I Thy disciple.' That is how the weaver became so great a devotee and poet. Farther down, the Buddha himself had walked and had washed his alms-bowl-he had gone up the steps and had set the wheel of Law a-turning. The aggregates, said the Buddha, make for desire and aversion, pleasure and ill, and one must seek that from which there is no returning. Little Mother listened to all this and seemed so convinced. She played with the petal-like fingers of my brother and when she saw a parrot in the sky, 'Look, look, little one,' she said, 'that is the Parrot of Rama.' And she began to sing:
O parrot, my parrot of Rama and my little brother went to profoundest sleep.
My father was really dead. But Little Mother smiled. In Benares one knows death is as illusory as the mist in the morning. The Ganges is always there-and when the sun shines, oh, how hot it can still be....
I wrote postcards to friends in Europe. I told them I had come to Benares because Father had died, and I said the sacred capital was really a surrealist city. You never know where reality starts and where illusion ends; whether the Brahmins of Benares are like the crows asking for funereal rice-balls, saying 'Caw-Caw'; or like the Saddhus by their fires, lost in such beautiful magnanimity, as though love were not something one gave to another, but one gave to oneself. His trident in front of him, his holy books open, some saffron cloth drying anywhere- on bare bush or on broken wall, sometimes with an umbrella stuck above, and a dull fire eyeing him, as though the fire in Benares looked after the saints, not the cruel people of the sacred city each Saddhu sat, a Shiva. And yet when you looked up you saw the lovely smile of some concubine, just floating down her rounded bust and nimble limbs, for a prayer and a client. The concubines of Benares are the most beautiful of any in the world, they say; and some say, too, that they worship the wife of Shiva, Parvathi herself, that they may have the juice of youth in their limbs. That is why Damodhara Gupta so exaltedly started his book on bawds with Benares. O Holy Ganga, Mother Ganga, thou art purity itself, coming down from Shiva's hair. When you see so many limbs go purring and bursting on the ghats by the Ganges, how can limbs have any meaning? Death makes passion beautiful. Death makes the concubine in- evitable. I remembered again Grandfather saying, 'Your mother had such a beautiful voice. She had a voice like Concubine Chandramma. And that was in Mysore, and fifty years ago."
I could not forget Madeleine-how could I? Madeleine was away and in Aix-en-Provence. Madeline had never recovered - in fact she never did recover-from the death of Pierre. She had called him Krishna till he was seven months old. Then when he began to have those coughs Madeleine knew: mothers always know what is dangerous for their children. And on that Saturday morning, returning from her Collège Madeleine knew, she knew that in four weeks, in three and in two and in one, the dread disease would take him away. That was why from the moment he was born-we had him take birth in a little, lovely maternity home near Bandol-she spoke of all the hopes she had in him. He must be tall and twenty-three; he must go to an Engineering Institute and build bridges for India when he grew up. Like all melancholic people, Madeleine loved bridges. She felt Truth was always on the other side, and so sometimes I told her that next time she must be born on the Hudson. I bought her books. on Provence or on Sardinis which had such beautiful ivy covered bridges built by the Romans. One day she said, 'Let's go and see this bridge at St-Jean-Pied-de-Port,' that she had found in a book on the Pays Basque. We drove through abrupt, arched Ardèche, and passing through Cahors I showed her the Pont de Valentré. She did not care for it. It was like Rein- hardt's scenario at Salzburg, she said. When we went on to the Roman Bridge of St-Jean-Pied-de-Port she said, 'Rama, it makes me shiver.' She had been a young girl at the time of the Spanish Civil War, so we never could go over to Spain. Then it was we went up to some beautiful mountain town-perhaps it was Pau, for I can still see the huge château, the one built by Henry IV- and maybe it was on that night, in trying to comfort Madeleine, that Krishna was conceived. She would love to have a child of mine, she said-and we had been married seven months.
At that time Madeleine was twenty-six, and I was twenty-one. We had first met at the University of Caen. Madeleine had an uncle her parents had died leaving her an estate, so it was being looked after by Oncle Charles. He was from Normandy, and you know what that means.
Madeleine was so lovely, with golden hair on her mother's side she came from Savoy-and her limbs had such pure un- reality. Madeleine was altogether unreal. That is why, I think, she never married anyone-in fact she had never touched any- one. She said that during the Nazi occupation, towards the end of 1943, a German officer had tried to touch her hair; it looked so magical, and it looked the perfect Nordic hair. She said he had brought his hands near her face, and she had only to smile and he could not do anything. He bowed and went away.
It was the Brahmin in me, she said, the sense that touch and untouch are so important, which she sensed; and she would let me touch her. Her hair was gold, and her skin for an Indian was like the unearthed marble with which we built our winter palaces. Cool, with the lake about one, and the peacock strutting in the garden below. The seventh-hour of music would come, and all the palace would see itself lit. Seeing oneself is what we always seek; the world, as the great Sage Sankara said, is like a city seen in a mirror. Madeleine was like the Palace of Amber seen in moonlight. There is such a luminous mystery-the deeper you go, the more you know yourself. So Krishna was born. The bridge was never crossed. Madeleine had a horror of crossing bridges. Born in India she would have known how in Malabar they send off gunfire to frighten the evil spirits, as you cross a bridge. Whether the gunfire went off or not, Krishna could never cross the bridge of life. That is why with some primitive superstition Madeleine changed his name and called him Pierre, from the second day of his illness. Pierre tu es, et sur celle pierre...she quoted. And she said-for she, a French woman, like an Indian woman was shy, and would not call me easily by my name she had said, 'My love, the gods of India will be angry, that you a Brahmin married a non-Brahmin like me; why should they let me have a child called Krishna. So sacred is that name.' And the little fellow did not quite know what he was to do when he was called Pierre. I called him Pierre and respected her superstition. For all we do is really superstition. Was I really called Ramaswamy, or was Madeleine called Madeleine? The illness continued. Good doctor Pierre Marmoson, a specialist in child medicine-especially trained in America- gave every care available. But broncho-pneumonia is broncho- pneumonia, particularly after a severe attack of chicken-pox. Madeleine, however, believed more in my powers of healing than in the doctors. So that when the child actually lay in my arms and steadied itself and kicked straight and lay quiet, Madeleine could not believe that Pierre was dead. The child had not even cried.
We were given special permission by the Préfet des Bouches- du-Rhône to cremate Pierre among the olive trees behind the Villa Ste-Anne. It was a large villa and one saw on a day of the mistral the beautiful Mont Ste-Victoire, as Cézanne must have seen it day after day, clear as though you could talk to it. The mistral blew and blew so vigorously: one could see one's body float away, like pantaloon, vest, and scarf, and one's soul sit and shine on the top of Mont Ste-Victoire. The dead, they say in Aix, live in the cathedral tower, the young and the virgins do- there is even a Provençal song about it so Madeleine went to her early morning Mass and to vespers. She fasted on Friday, she a heathen, she began to light candles to the Virgin, and she just smothered me up in tenderness. She seemed so far that near ness was farther than any smell or touch. There was no bridge-- all bridges now led to Spain.
So when my father had said he was very ill, and wished I could come, she said, 'Go, and don't you worry about anything. I will look after myself.' It seemed wiser for me to go. Madeleine would continue to teach and I would settle my affairs at home. Mother's property had been badly handled by the estate-agent Sundarrayya, the rents not paid, the papers not in order: and I thought I would go and see the University authorities too, for a job was being kept vacant for me. The Government had so far been very kind and my scholarship continued. Once my doctorate was over I would take Madeleine home, and she would settle with me-somehow I always thought of a house white, single-storied on a hill and by a lake and I would go day after day to the University and preach to them the magnificence of European civilization. I had taken History, and my special subject was the Albigensian heresy. I was trying to link up the Bogomolites and the Druzes, and thus search back for the Indian background Jain or maybe Buddhist-of the Cathars. The 'pure' were dear to me. Madeleine, too, got involved in them, but for a different reason. Touch, as I have said, was always distasteful to her, so she liked the untouching Cathars, she loved their celibacy. She implored me to practice the ascetic brah- macharya of my ancestors, and I was too proud a Brahmin to feel defeated. The bridge was anyhow there, and could not be crossed. I knew I would never go to Spain.
India was wonderful to me. It was like a juice that one is sup- posed to drink to conquer a kingdom or to reach the deathless- juice of rare jasmine or golden myrobolan, brought from the nether world by a hero or dark mermaid. It gave me sweetness and the délire of immortality. I could not die, I knew; and the world seemed so whole, even death when it was like my father's. So simple: when it came he said, 'I go,' and looked at us, with just one tear at the end of his left eye; then stretched himself out, and died.
The smell of India was sweet. But Madeleine was very far. Little Mother when she saw the photographs of Madeleine and the baby did not say anything, but went inside to the sanctuary to lay flowers on her Ramayana. She never spoke about it at all, but whenever she saw me sad she said, 'Birth and death are the illusions of the non-Self.' And as though before my own sorrow her unhappiness seemed petty and untrue, she seemed suddenly to grow happier and happier. She started singing the whole day; she even brought out her vina from the box where it had not been touched for three years, and started singing. My father who was still alive then said, 'Oh, I suppose you want to show off your great musical learning to the Eldest. Even so he laid his book aside, a rare act for him to do, and started to listen to the music.
My grandfather said Father had such a wonderful voice when young-just like a woman's voice. Later, when that Mathe- matics got hold of him-for figures are like gnomes, they entice you and lead you away, with backward turned faces, to the world of the unknown" he continued, 'your father never sang a single kirtanam again. Oh, you should have heard him. sing Purandaradasa.' I never heard my father sing, but this I know, he had a grave and slow-moving voice such as musicians possess. His mathematics absorbed him so deeply that you saw him more with a pencil-his glasses stuck to the end of his nose (he had a well-shapen, but long and somewhat pointed nose) than with a ring on his arm. Father was a mathematician, and when he was not able to solve a problem he would turn to Sans- crit Grammar. Panini was his hobby all his life, and later he included Bhrathrihari among the great Grammarians. Father had no use for Philosophy at all-he called it the old hag's description of the menu in paradise. For him curry of cucumber or of pumpkin made no difference to your intestines. 'The important fact is that you eat-and you live.'
Father's greatest sorrow was that I did not take his mathe- matical studies a little further. He would say, "The British will not go till we can shame them with our intelligence. And what is more intellectual than mathematics, son?' He worshipped Euler, and quoted with admiration his famous saying on the algebraic proof of God. That Father's work on Roger Ramanujam's identities or on Waring's problem were accepted by the world only made him feel happy that it made Indian Freedom so much the nearer. He was happy though that I had taken the Albigensian heresy as a subject for research, for he thought India should be made more real to the European. He had never been to Europe. First, Grandfather was against the eldest son-in-law going across the seas. Then when Grand- father was reconciled with the changing values of the world there were too many responsibilities at home. And Father, in any case, did not care for travel. Like many persons of his generation I think he could not forget his bath and the Brahmin atmosphere of the house the ablutions in the morning, with the women singing hymns, the perfume of camphor, and the smell of garlic and incense when the daughter came home for childbirth. He disliked my marriage, I think chiefly because my wife could not sing at an Arathi; but before the world he boasted of his intellectual daughter-in-law, and had a picture of me and Madeleine on his table.
He never thought he would die, so he never thought of the funeral ceremonies. Grandfather must have thought of it, for when I went to ask his advice as to where and what should be done Grandfather had all the answers ready: the ceremony had to be in Benares, and it had to be in my brother's name. 'Not that I do not love you, Rama. How can I not love my daughter's own eldest born? But that is what the elders have laid down; and it has come from father to son, generation after generation. Why change it today? Why give importance to unimportant things? God is not hidden in a formula, nor is affection confined to funeral ceremonies. Be what you are. I like the way you go about thinking on the more serious things of Vedanta. Leave religion to smelly old fogies like me,' he concluded, and I almost touched his feet. He was so noble and humble, Grandfather was.
It was not the same thing with my uncles, but that is a different story.
Thus Benares was predestined, and as I went down the river with Little Mother, Sridhaca on her lap, I could so clearly picture Madeleine. She would be seated at the left window of the Villa Ste-Anne, patching some shirt of mine, and thinking that as the sun sets and the sun rises, she would soon have the winter out. Then the house had to be got ready, and before the house was ready I would be there, back in Aix. Not that it gave her any happiness--but it had to be, so it would be. I was part of the rotation of a system-just as July 14 would come, and she would spend the two weeks till the thirtieth getting the house in order before we went to the mountain for a month. After that we would go to see her uncle for three days on a family visit, take a week off in Paris, and then come down to Aix before the third week of September. On October 1 term begins and on waking up she would see my face. Affection is just a spot in the geography of the mind. For Madeleine geography was very real, almost solid. She smelt the things of the earth, as though sound, form, touch, taste, smell were such realities that you could not go beyond them even if you tried. Her Savoyan ancestry must have mingled with a lot of Piedmontese, so that this girl from Charente still had the thyme and the lavender almost at the roots of her hair. She said that when she was young she loved to read of bull- fights, and the first picture she had ever stuck against the wall of her room was of Don Castillero y Abavez, who had won at the young age of nineteen every distinction of a great torrero. She hated killing animals, however, and I did not have to persuade her much to become a vegetarian. But sometimes her warm Southern blood would boil as never my thin Brahmin blood could, and when she was indignant-and always for some just cause-whether about the injustice done to teachers at the Lycée de Moulin, or the pitiful intrigue in some provincial miners' union at Lens or St Etienne, she would first grow warm and then cold with anger, and burst into tears, and weep a whole hour. This also explains how during the occupation she was closer to the Communists than to the Catholics or Socialists, though she hated tyranny of all sorts. What I think Madelein really cared for was a disinterested devotion to any cause, and she loved me partly because she felt India had been wronged by the British, and because she would, in marrying me, know and identify herself with a great people. She regretted whenever she read a Greek text not having been born at the time of the Athenian Republic; which also explained her great enthusiasm for Paul Valéry. I, on the other hand, had been brought up in the gnya-gnyaneries of Romain Rolland, and having read his books on Vivekananda and Ramakrishna, I almost called him a Rishi and a Saint. Valéry seemed to be too disdainful, too European. For me, the Albigensian humility seemed sweeter, and, more naturally Indian.
Loving Valéry, Madeleine, who taught History at the Collège, loved more the whole of ancient Greece. And when I introduced her to Indian History her joy was so great that she started re- searching on the idea of the Holy Grail. There is an old theory that the Holy Grail was a Buddhist conception-that the cup of Christ was a Buddhist relic which the Nestorians took over and brought to Persia; there the legend mingled with Manichaeism, and became towards the end of the Middle Ages the strange story of the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail also gave Madeleine's sense of geography a natural movement. She loved countries and epochs not our own.
Whereas I was born to India, where the past and the present are for ever knit into one whole experience-going down the Ganges who could not imagine the Compassionate One Himself coming down the footpath, by the Saraju, to wash the mendicant- bowl? and so for me time and space had very relative import- ance. I remember how in 1946, when I first came to Europe-I landed in Naples-Europe did not seem so far nor so alien. Nor when later I put my face into Madeleine's golden hair and smelt its rich acridity with the olfactory organs of a horse for I am a Sagittarian by birth-did I feel it any the less familiar. I was too much of a Brahmin to be unfamiliar with anything, such is the pride of caste and race, and lying by Madeleine it was she who remarked, 'Look at this pale skin beside your golden one. Oh, to be born in a country where tradition is so alive,' she once said, 'that even the skin of her men is like some royal satin, softened and given a new shine through the rubbing of ages.' I, however, being so different, never really noted any difference. To me difference was inbon-like my being the eldest son of my father, or like my grandfather being the Eight-Pillared House Ramakrishnayya, and you had just to mention his name any- where in Mysore State, even to the Maharaja, and you were offered a seat, a wash, and a meal, and a coconut-and-shawl adieu. To me difference was self-created, and so I accepted that Madeleine was different. That is why I loved her so. In fact, even Little Mother, who sat in front of me how could I not love her, though she was so different from my own mother? In difference there is the acceptance of one's self as a reality-and the perspective gives the space for love.
In some ways-I thought that day, as the boat, now that evening was soon going to fall, was moving upstream, with a fine, clear wind sailing against us in some ways how like Made- leine was Little Mother. They both had the same shy presence, both rather silent and remembering everything; they loved, too, more than is customary. Both knew by birth that life was no song but a brave suffering, and that at best there are moments of bridal joy with occasionally a drive over a bridge-and then the return to the earth and maybe to widowhood. I remember very well that day, just three days before our marriage. We had been to Rouen, just because we had nothing better to do, and Madeleine seemed so, so sad. She said, 'I have a fear, a deep fear somewhere here; I have a fear I will kill you, that something in me will kill you, and I shall be a widow. Oh, beloved,' she begged, 'do not marry me. Let us part. There is still time. She was twenty-six then, and I twenty-one. I did not care for death and I said to her, as one does with deep certitude at such moments, 'I will never die till you give me per- mission, Madeleine.' She stopped and looked at me as though she were looking at a god, and turning laughed, for we were by the statue of Henriette de Bruges, who for the birth of her son Charles, later to become the Dark Hero of the Spanish Wars, had a statue erected to herself. The child Charles, with the rown of Burgundy already on his small plump head, was lying on her lap. The statue was stupid, but it seemed somehow an answer. And when we got back to Paris and were married at the Mairie of the VIIth Arrondissement-for I then lived in the rue St-Dominique-we bought ourselves a book on Bruges that is still with me. It is one of the few things I could save for myself when the catastrophe came.
Bruges must be beautiful though. I have never been to that city of canals and waterfronts, but the ugly, fat face of Hen- riette de Bruges will always remain a patron saint of some mys- terious and unperformed marriage.
Little Mother, having recovered her peace, started reciting as at home Sankara's Nirvana-Astakam. I have loved it since the time Grandfather Kittanna returned from Benares and taught it to me. I would start on 'Mano-budhi Ahankara... with a deep and learned voice for after all I had been to a Sanscrit school. Little Mother followed me, and verse after verse: 'Shivohom, Shivoham, I am Shiva, I am Shiva,' she chanted with me. All the lights in Benares were by now lit, and even, the funeral pyres on the Ghats seemed like some natural illumination. The mon- keys must have gone to the tree tops, and the Saddhus must be at their meals. Evening drums were beating from every temple, and one heard in the midst of it a train rumble over the Dal- housie Bridge. It was the long Calcutta Mail, going down to Moghul Sarai.
On the other side lay Ramnagarh-a real city for Rama. Every year people still came down to see the festival of Rama, and men and women and the Royal family with horses, fife and elephants enacted the story of Rama. Little Mother felt unhappy we were too late for it this year. I told her I would soon come back to India and take her on a long pilgrimage. I promised her Badrinath and even Kailas. I knew there would be no Hima- layas for me. Shridara woke and as Little Mother started suck- ling the child again, I chanted to her the Kashikapurädinatha Kalabhairavam bhaje:
I worship Kalabhairava, Lord of the city of Kashi, Blazing like a million suns; Our great saviour in our voyage across the world, The blue-throated, the threeyed grantor of all desires; The lotus-eyed who is the death of death, The imperishable one, Holding the rosary of the human bone and the trident Kashikapurädinátha Kalábhairavam bhajë.
Benares is eternal. There the dead do not die nor the living live. The dead come down to play on the banks of the Ganges, and the living who move about, and even offer rice-balls to the manes, live in the illusion of a vast night and a bright city. Once again at the request of Little Mother I sang out a hymn of Sri Sankara's, and this time it was Sri Dakshinamurti Stotram. Maybe it was the evening, or something deeper than me that in me unawares was touched. I had a few tears rolling down my cheeks. Holiness is happiness. Happiness is holiness. That is why a Brahmin should be happy, I said to myself, and laughed. How different from Pascal's, 'Le silence éternal des grands espaces infinis m'effraie.'
The road to the infinite is luminous if you see it as a city lit in a mirror. If you want to live in it you break the glass. The unreal is possible because the real is. But if you want to go from the unreal to the real, it would be like a man trying to walk into a road that he sees in a hall of mirrors. Dushasana¹ is none other than the homme moyen sensuel.
For the bourgeois the world, and the Bank, and the notary are real; and the wedding-ring as well. We spent, Madeleine and I, the last few thousand francs we had, to buy ourselves two thin gold wedding-rings the day before our marriage. I still remember how they cost us 3,700 francs apiece, and as we had a little over 9,000 francs we went up the Boulevard St-Michel to eat at the Indo-Chinese Restaurant, rue Monsieur. We had rice for dinner and Madeleine felt happy. It was her recognition of India. The next day at eleven we went up to the Mairie with two witnesses. One was Count R., an old and dear friend of Father's who had worked with de Broglie; unable to go back to Hungary because of the Communist revolution there, he had settled in Paris. The other, from Madeleine's side, was her cousin Roland, who was an officer in the French Marine. Having seen a great deal of the world, an Indian was for him no stranger-he even 1 A character in the Mahabharatha, brated because he had walked into a mirror thinking it was a path in the park. knew Trichinopoly and Manamadurai-and he came to the marriage in his brilliant uniform.
Madeleine's uncle, of course, disapproved of all this outlandish matrimony. Oncle Charles was settled as a notaire at Rouen and he would not admit of any disturbance in his peaceful provincial existence. It was said of him that when he married his second wife she was a divorcée-he married her without telling his old mother. It would have upset old Madame Roussellin too much-- she lived in Arras. His second marriage was a most unhappy one, but he was proud of his brilliant wife; she made his position secure, and he loved her. Madeleine was her favourite, but lest the child should see too much of his married life the uncle very studiously avoided sending for her.
Madeleine was brought up by an unmarried aunt at Saintonge, in the Charente, but she saw her cousins from time to time, and they were gay with her. They teased her and said she would end up in a convent. Roland even discovered some mysterious tribe in the Australasian isles-they were called the Kuru-buri, I think and said that on one of his expeditions he would land her on that blessed isle. 'Your virtue will be appreciated there, Mado,' he would say, 'and imagine adding twenty thousand more to Christendom, before some Gauguin goes discovering the beauty of their virgins and peoples the island with many blue-eyed children.' Such things were never said in front of me, but one day Madeleine, finding what a prude I was, told me the story with generous detail. 'Imagine me a Catholic Sister,' she said; 'I who love the Greeks. Tell me, Rama, am I not a pagan?'
I was the pagan, in fact, going down the Ganges, feeling such worship for this grave and knowing river. Flowers floated down- stream, and now and again we hit against a fish or log of wood. Sometimes too a burnt piece of fuel from some funeral pyre would hit against the oars of the boat. People say there are crocodiles in the Ganges, and some add that bits of dead bodies, only half-burnt, are often washed down by the river. But I have never seen these myself. Night, a rare and immediate night, was covering the vast expanse of the Benares sky. Somewhere on these very banks the Upanishatlic Sages, perhaps four, five, or six thousand years ago, hau discussed the roots of human understanding. And Yagnyavalkya had said to Maiteryi. 'For whose sake, verily, does a husband love his wife. Not for the sake of his wife, but verily for the sake of the Self in her.' Did Little Mother love the Self in my father? Did I love the Self in Made- leine? I knew I did not. I knew I could not love: that I did not even love Pierre. I took a handful of Ganges water in my hand, and poured it back to the river. It was for Pierre.
