DESTINY is, I think, nothing but a series of psychic knots that we tie with our own fears. The stars are but efforts made indeterminate. To act, then, is to be proscribed to yourself. Freedom is to leave nothing of yourself outside. The whole of event is the eye of life, and eternity the 'I'. Never can you escape eternity, for never can you escape that 'I'. Even when you say you can, it is the 'I' saying it. Can the 'I' say anything? No, it cannot, no more than eternity can be seen in time. But time seeing itself is eternity, just as wave seeing itself is water. Meanwhile the winds lift and the monsoon blows, and white flakes of wavelets curve and rise, dash and demonstrate, and from crest to crest they caval- cade processioning to the shore. Not wavelet or crest, however breathless with foam is life: water is the meaning of life, or rather the meaning of life is lila, play. Not achievement but self-recognition is pure significance. The extrovert confederates of action must stop, then we leap back to our own safety, our own despiration. The knots are thus undone, and calm as the Mediterranean is the effortless sea. For the going inward is the true birth. He indeed the Brahmin who turns the crest inward; even if you are a pandit great as Jagannatha Bhatta or learned in logic as Kapilä-Charya, the true life, the true Brahminhood commences when you recognize your- self in your eternity. At some moment you must stop life and look into it. Marriage or maternity, pain or the intimacy of success love may dip you into yourself. And as you go on dipping and rising in your inner Ganges murmuring, 'Kashi Kshetram Shariram Tribhuvana jananim vayapim gyana Ganga' 'My body, the holy site, is Benares, Spreading within me as knowledge, the Ganges, Mother of the three worlds." you undo your knots. It is thus Benares is sacred, and Mother Ganga the absolver of sins. Sin is to think that in acting you are the actor: freedom, that you never could be the doer er enjoyer of an act. In the Ganges of such a life destiny dissolves-and you sail down to your own ocean.....
As the ferry-boat chugged and chattered through the English Channel, the blue of sky covering from crest of wave to shore, I 'thought there was the isolate, the holy realm of England, and on the other side, beyond the green water and waves, the wide sea of concussing humanity: France of the Revolution, France of les Droits de l'Homme; the romantic burst against slavery, the con- fusion of caste and confession; France, where 'God sits at the crossroads' warming his hands at the fire.
Je suis fier d'être admis à vos cérémonies O Dieu du peuple élu.
Sitting on the deck, with sea-gulls flying over me and the saline smell of air giving my breath depth, I slowly and deliberately opened my letters one by one. I had not been to Cook's in Berkeley Street, where I used to receive my mail, for at least six days, and had gathered it all just as I was coming to catch the train. Green Park was so beautiful on that morning as my taxi went up Piccadilly, she seemed lost in her own imaginative agree- ment with herself, creating space, streams, palaces; and almost as though there was always a palm-wide stretch of England that was mine my own, named, railed off, consecrated. He who cannot possess a habitation and grove in England has never been admitted to her circle, her ceremony. The Druids have left something of their silent circumambiance in the living trees of England.
The letters were four. I was so free within myself, I felt I could walk down to the sea and leap over the waters, or fly across the curve of sky, or be transparent and sheer as a musical note. Happen what might elsewhere in the world, what triple-heat be it to me! I was confirmed and true in my centripetal being.
The first letter I opened was Suroja's. It was sad and very clear-spoken. She wrote of the frustrations she had had to face, day after day: the refusal by the medical college because at the last moment the University discovered she was a Brahmin; some of the million little indelicacies which life with a mother who is not one's own can bring, to disturb, distort, and ultimately obsess a feminine existence. 'I lie in bed, morning and evening, thinking of the father that is not, and the beloved brother, so far away. I cannot fight life's battle alone, dear brother, and I am not a saint like you are. I have decided to get married. The man I have chosen for myself is not one you would have chosen for me. Such a good man-so generous, sincere, and competent-but he's just not made for me. It's as though if I talked Kanarese he would talk Nepali, or if he played golf I would play chess. But he earns well, he will be loyal and devoted, for he's been wanting to marry me, he says, since I was a girl of five. Brother bless me.'
So that was how I'd functioned after the promises I had made to Little Mother by the sea of Bombay.
The other two letters from India were just business papers needing my signature, concerning my father's insurance money, some property title-deeds I was transferring to Little Mother, the sale of father's car, and the change of house-ownership. I also received, being Sukumari's guardian, the quarterly report on her progress at school. Wish as I might to possess the whole sky that afternoon and feel the freedom of the sea in my nostrils, I was reminded that I was a brother, a son, and the single head of the household.
But Madeleine's the last I opened, for the fear in me had tied such knots-was very sad and free. Something had happened to her too; the elephant always communicated everything to her, she said, when I was away. There was about her a sense of calm desperation: nothing could be as it was. Such a chunk of sorrow entered my throat: O Madeleine, Madeleine.... 'I cannot ask anything of you,' she wrote, 'for as you say, asking is at a level where receiving can never be. Who asks and who receives? La vie est une mélopée du néant. You are, and I know you are there. You are not, and yet I know you are. I lose you--I know I will lose you. And yet where can go but to you?'
Boulogne seemed ugly, with chimneys, unwashed houses, bistros and ungainly rain. In the train I warmed myself with some good coffee, and night covered me up with movement and singleness. Nothing helps sorrow so much as a rythm-a steady prayer-wheel turn, or the sound of an engine. Peace comes with the annihilation of acquired positions. You can slip into sleep and wake to a Paris that is dull, vacant, and elongated with the Eiffel Tower.
My hotel was in the Avenue Mac-Mahon, and its meubles anciens, its boudoirs, panelled cupboards and Louis XV chairs all seemed to come from another world: if I touched them, I thought, I would touch awake death. I undressed, however, and washed; then, being sleepless, I dressed again and wandered down the Champs-Elysées, wishing the book shops were open. But I was in the wrong area for books. Here the holiness of womanhood seemed torn asunder, when you saw bits of elegant flesh, in all its length, roundedness or thinness, and sorrow filled me I wished I could have smiled back at that girl outside Fouquet's, have laid her beside me and told her sweet and enveloping things. My purity was intact, but my sorrow tore holes in it, and gathered me into demands.
Man in his flesh is unutterably weak and the sorrow of a Paris prostitute seems somehow to give meaning to one's own sorrow, to show one's intimacy to oneself, and perhaps even reveal the nature of poetry. For all women have the womb of poetry, and it is we that seek back our integrity of flesh and so lose our free- dom. In the City of Shiva, Benares, concubines powdered the Ganges with yellow turmeric and gold, and dipped into the river and arose, their breasts firm for the taking, their bodies tender as the vinc. They made you leap into yourself, with the feeling that knowledge is of oneself made, that the knowledge of know- ledge is fathomless, unnameable, but with the smell of green camphor on the lip: 'My moon, my jewel, my pride.'
No, these were not the riches, I told myself, of this so different a civilization, where virginity was lost by too much knowledge, and womanhood had lost its rights by forsaking that involved slipping secrecy, that mendicant shyness, with which a woman hides her truth. You should'know'a woman and not understand her-for if you understand her, then you can never be a pilgrim to knowledge. Women, all women, speak poetry: whether they are talking of houses or aluminium vessels, of a sick child's napkin or a reception chez la Duchesse d'Uzès, it is all naming. It is because a woman, even a prostitute, can name things that we seek woman and lay her by our side; perhaps love her for a minute, an intuition, a totalness, a luminiscence when we die unto it, and so to ourselves.
I walked back to my hotel alone. My demands were ancient, primal, inevitable. Yet was I Brahmin. The prostitute of Paris could be a woman gone astray, a bourgeois, like the girl I once met in a café in Clichy. After I had given her drinks and made her feel at home, she told me she was an Italian, the honourable wife of an honourable man, who had gone away with a bad woman and left her stranded. So she had wandered faithfully from one respectable man to another, till age had overtaken her unawares. 'I can keep a house, wash clothes, mend stockings. All I need is an apartment and an ironing machine. You will see how fresh your clothes will be. I am not extravagant-I will look after les économies... I gave her some money, took her address to show how very serious I was-and, of course, never went to see her. I needed the smell of camphor, and the yellow of turmeric on the limbs.
No, all this was vague and silly: wandering thoughts that come to a traveller on a cold night, in the Paris of the Champs-Elysées. I wished I had taken an hotel in the Latin Quarter, where I could have gone to the Deux Magots and spoken to Henri Baudouin, the art-critic. He wrote his books or articles in the Rue Jacob, and came out exactly at midnight to go to the Deux Magots; there the lean waiter called Jean would say, 'Bonsoir, Monsieur Henri, quel temps tout de même, et on est en Février encore, and the small-moustached patron would come and say, 'Bonjour Monsieur Henri; alors, la commande est prise? Eh, oui, c'est le chocolat, avec un peu d'eau chaude et une brioche,' would retort Jean. Of course he knew! Pray, who would, if he did not? Yes, I should have taken my room at the Hotel Atlantide, rue de Seine, and it would have been lovely. I suddenly realized it was beyond midnight and Savithri must have gone to bed; or maybe she had her eyes open, and her collyrium was still flowing down her cheeks-with the tears. 'Let them stay,' she would say, 'for when I see them, I know I have wept for you.' 'I'll tell you something terrible,' she said to me on the telephone, the morning I was leaving, 'could I tell you, Rama, I've not washed my mouth since Sunday, I've refused to gargle or wash, as is my Hindu habit, after eating. I may smell bad, but till you left England I wanted your smell to perfume my mouth. I'm a Hindu woman after all, My Lord."
Yes, it was that very morning she had said this to me. And yet what distances of land and sea and of gathered time had built themselves between us. Even the look of a street-walker in the Champs-Elysées was like the touch of Savithri's presence, her sound, her gait, her gesture, her womanhood. For man, woman is anonymous. Clean or messy, I offered all my thoughts to Savithri, cleaned my mouth and went to bed. I slept very well. For the next few days I kept myself busy between the rue de Richelieu and the Sorbonne, collating my notes, looking up a reference here or there-something about Pierre de Beauville, of Avignonnet (in the fonds Doat at the Bibliothèque Nationale); or some obscure episode in the ghastly burning of the Cathedral of Béziers, for example the woman who begged that she be allowed to escape because she was with child, and the Abbé de Citeaux saying, 'Like this, my dear, there will be one more heretic killed,' and pushing her back down the steep pathway. I also went to the Sorbonne to see my Professor, one of those very shy, very dirty, learned, inexorable, breathless, subtle, universal men. I was always happy with Professor Robin- Bessaignac, if only for the deep sense he possessed of the poetry of history. For him metaphysics was a game of civilization, and the philosophy of history the more wonderful the greater the para- doxes it cultivated. One of his ideas was that the Buddhist Mani (jewel), become Manichaeism, had travelled through Persia gathering strength, and had penetrated Bulgaria to make itself European and establish the sense of the dual-in-history. 'It is a particularity unique to Europe, he averred, 'for Europe is feminine. Nobody goes to fight for a Helen in India; rather does Rama send his devoted wife Sita to exile, to protect his impersonal Kingship from any shadow falling on it. For if the whispero concoction that a washerman had broadcast were true that because Lady Sita had been prisoner of the Demon Ravana there was a shadow on the purity of Ayodhyás Queen, an absurd, an illogical formula, and yet a believable one-then must Rama the Kshatriya send his Queen away into exile. The masculine, the impersonal principle is affirmed,' went on Pro- fessor Robin-Bessaignac, 'and here you must read Michelet's beautiful pages on the Ramayana, in his Bible de l'humanité. What power, what mastery of style, what childishness! But that was the nineteenth century-Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and all that-all so feminine, you see, concepts created and spread by the romanticism of the revolution, with gun and sword in the name of humanity. For, as a clever colleague of mine says: "Tout humanisme est une mutilation." Childish, perfectly silly that human- ity could be bettered by the sword or the lance, any more than Monsieur Benda's intellectual paternoster had brought about a revolution of "clerks", or Monsieur Sartre's jejune lubricity will make us more philosophical. Did Sully Prudhomme make us more poetic?
'Europe, I tell you, is a market-place of ideas,' he continued; 'we sell our wares, not as in India or China where you can trace your artisan ancestor or your Brahmin Guru for two or three or five thousand years-we were still in the Iron Age then, and not long before that our men were drawing those bisons in the Dor- dogne caves we sell our wares, I tell you, because they are newest, because they are of the temps modernes, the freshest, the most original. Europe is made, my friend, of Fath and Dior, of Leib- nitz showing his backside and calling it a monad, and of Renan and Taine calling in the chemistry of the apple to prove their theory of history."
'You are, I fear, to harsh on Europe,' I tried to intercede on behalf of my Europe, but he would not listen to anyone when he made one of those Gangetic escapades into history.
'You, coming from India, were the first person to bring to my notice,' he went on, 'the face that it was not because there was a change in the building material, or because suddenly after a thousand years of Christianity we wanted to have more light in our Cathedrals, that the Romanesque went up and shaped itself into the Gothic ogive that it was Abelard, Peter Abelard, that castrate prince of thought, who like some Yagnyavalkya or Nagarjuna opened the windows of our smelly Oecumenical Councils, established scholastics (maybe-why not?-because of Eloise) and cried for light and for yet more light. You could perhaps go further, and prove anthropologically that the dead and buried illegitimate rejeton of Eloise and Abelard that be- coming a taboo, a crypt in space, made Abelard long for light, for space, for generosity, a hope for truth. 'If you asked me what was the difference between Vézelay and Notre-Dame, I would say one is narrow, earthly, circumscribed, the other is pure gift, the outer adoring the inner, the hiding of the Holy Grail that light may transmigrate into space. "Happy is the people," as you so rightly quote the Nestorian Martyrs' Anthem, "happy is the country where are laid up your bones as treasures. For when the light of the sun sets, the light from your bones will shine forth," Yes, you are right there.
'But our humpty-dumpty historians would prove that on such and such a date some old municipal clerk made an entry in his accounts book, "Sieur Morothor gave two pieces of gold to the Cathedral of Sens, because his father had gone to the crusades and had not returned." And so his grandson Guillaume de Morothor joined the second crusade, and brought back the new style from Constantinople or Syria (only you must add "peut- étre" and probably end with a question mark, or your theory will have no academic distinction). Ha, ha, ha, ha....
'You are right too, mon ami, when you say that that ecclesi- astic of St Denis, hero of the Crusades and enemy of Abelard, St Bernard, condemned the Gothic-its gargoyles, and so on-for he was a realist. Conceptualism in giving essence to objects destroyed the reality of the object, and thus gave lightness to stone and man, and built the apse of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The real heretic, as the Church knew well, and that is why they castrated him, was Abelard, le Socrate de Gaul, as he was called-not some asectic Cathår of Mont Ségur. But just as Cathar- ism spread and has become an actual part of our culture through the troubadours, through St Dominic and the purity of a Simon de Montfort-so did the Gothic idea spread and give light to our lives, so that when Constantinople fell we did not have to sit in smelly, bat-infested Romanesque dens, but in the Cluny there,' said Professor Robin-Bessaignac, pointing in the direction of the Rue des Ecoles. 'Modernism, you might say, started with Abelard, and perhaps Abelard was in no way ignorant of the Manichaeans. We now definitely that he had read a great deal of Nestorian dogmatics. But our poor scholars think that because we have the wireless and the aeroplane not only do we know more of history- but we actually make it. No, we no more make history than the swallow makes the spring. Students and merchants brought ideas from all over the world, and since in the past people were more earnest for wisdom-they did not have the newspaper or the dull specches of Monsieur Vincent Auriol-they understood more quickly and deeply what they heard and not what they read. Did you not say the definition of a teacher in India is he from whom one hears? That is real teaching, that is the real cultivation of intelligence, and not this rushing to the Librairie Gibert to get the latest book of Jaspers. We are poisoned by words, we French,' he concluded, signed my scholarship papers, and started to send me home with a feeling that I had brought light to him and not he to me.
'What do you want?' he added, as he turned towards the Salle Guizot, 'You have the wisdom of ages-you're not bar- barian like us.' He had a class, and he begged me not to come. 'I am going to speak on Henry IV, for soon it will be his fourth centenary and our University thinks every decent Frenchman should know something about him. Well, compare Henry IV, crude, brave, confused, to say, Akbar. Good-bye, mon ami, work well, and lots of greetings to your wife. Good-bye... and remem- ber me and say a prayer for me when the sun shines in Aix!' he laughed; turning round on himself, he was gone.
I felt bewildered with so much generosity. If generosity of thought built Cathedrals, no wonder, I said to myself, Rodin was right when he said: We have no Shakespeare, we have no Dante, perhaps, but we the French have Cathedrals. Nous te bâtissons de nos mains tremblantes nous entassons atome sur atome, mais qui peut t'achever toi, Cathédrale. Au crépuscule seulement nous te laissons seul: et tes contours futurs paraissent comme une aube. Dieu, tu es grand!
Oncle Charles came from Rouen to see me. 'Ah, je suis si content de voir mon neveu,' he said, as though to himself. He always stayed in one of those large and well-established hotels near the Gare Montparnasse, and this time he had come in his car so that we could move about more easily. He looked so happy, so child- ishly happy to be in Paris with me, as though I being the younger would reveal something new and surprising to him. But what did I know of Paris?
'Au Périgourdine pour le diner,' he decided; 'Montmartre pour la nuit-et Les Halles pour le petit matin,' he concluded, and I agreed with him. He chuckled constantly and was enormously amused with everything.
'Coming to Paris with you is like the times we came to the city when we were doing military service; nous venions chercher les filles. Ce n'est pas des choses à dire, Rama, mais la vie était belle avant l'autre guerre. My father gave me a lot of money-my mother was dead-and those were the days when we were very sentimental all over France. An only child had the whole world at his feet- the good parents just gave it to you, saying, "Take it, take it! You will grow old one day and there will be time then for other more serious things." You are too young to know the France of Monsieur Poincaré, of Déroulède and of Maurice Barrès. Life was simple, gay, and rich. There was always a war, but far away somewhere not like the Russians sitting at our doors here Yet a cough or a sneeze from the Kaiser brought all of us back to the barracks.
'We liked barrack life-it made us patriots and comrades. We spoke of our mothers or sisters feelingly, and in nine cases out of ten it was some comrade's sister we married: a fellow went to the country house of a friend, had champagne, and knew so much about the girl opposite that he felt nobody could make him a better wife so he proposed to the father. The father always accepted for no one ever proposed without knowing it would be a "yes" and usually we wore our uniforms; it made us look more distinguished. Then we went about from botte-de-nuit to bolle-de- nuit faisant la noce-for marriage is a very serious affair-and then the wedding came: the smell of new clothes and of perfumes, hats, invitations, the ball, and the honeymoon in Corsica. That's how I married my first wife-Catherine's mother. She was a good woman. I was constantly unfaithful to her, and she knew it, she smelt it as it were, but never said a word. Sad and almost without a word, she died in her second childbirth. In those days people still died in childbirth: it was not as it is today-going to have a baby as though you're going to Biarritz.... But one thing I will tell you, as I always tell Zoubie, the younger generation is more honest, more true, and stand less nonsense. We were the sacrificed.'
He laughed to himself and suddenly looked silent and lost. "This France,' he started, gazing at the moving crowds of the Boulevard St-Michel and the Luxembourg, for we were at La Capoulade, 'this France is a healthier, a much better France. Mais qu'est-ce que vous voulez, one does not become younger by wishing! At best one can cut one's hair or colour it as I do. I hate to look like a grandfather: I hate the thought that Catherine may soon have a child.... By the way, tell me, Rama, what sort of a fellow is your friend, Georges Khuschbertieff?-oh, là, ld, what a difficult name to pronounce! But you know, I'll tell you before you say anything: I like him--I trust him because he is your friend-otherwise I don't trust foreigners,' he said, and laughed again. After all, you're not a foreigner, you're Made- leine's husband; 'Notre Rama, as Zoubie always says. I feel I have always known you always.' 'Georges,' I replietl, 'is a considerate, clever, devoted, and pious man. Outside a monastery you rarely see a man loving the Church or God as he does. Georges is something of a saint,' I said, with no great conviction. But to make up for it I added,
"He will make a wonderful husband for Catherine. To see them together is to believe in happiness.' Oh, that's all your making. You and Madeleine are so happy, it reflects on all around. When we are with you even Zoubie and I are so loving and sensitive to one another. She's a romantic, you know, Zoubie is, and she did not care so much for Made- leine before though she was fonder of her than she ever will be of Catherine. Zoubie has not a particularly loving nature, she's more like a man, fond of ideas, of poetry, of music-more like you in fact well, she just loves and respects you. She says you are either an idiot or quite admirable to treat any woman like you do Madeleine.'
'Oh, nonsense!' I protested. 'Besides, Oncle Charles,' I said, looking at my watch, if you do want to go to Montmartre, and as we have no tickets, don't you think we'd better get in early.'
'Grand, magnifique. It's so nice to think you like going to such places: I thought you were an ascetic. You know we can never be true to each other-we men, I mean when we are with women. Something in the woman is so complicated, so tortuous. I think a woman is just good enough to have babies and nothing else, don't you?'
He was not interested in what I said. As we came down from the first floor of La Périgourdine, he tried to adjust his tie, and rubbed some dust off his black evening hat. Downstairs he looked at all the tables and at the bar, wondering if there was anyone he knew, or who would recognize him. It is nice to meet fellow- countrymen in Paris-it makes you feel younger. Maître Lefort is twenty years younger in Paris than in the Rue St-Dominique at Rouen, and Charles Hublot the advocate's belly looks less ridi- culous in Paris than in the Rouen Palais de Justice.
"The Seine is greener here than in Rouen,' he concluded as we got into the car.
Later that evening, as we came down from Montmartre, he winked at me several times and I did not know whether it was the songs the ribald ones or the cognac, or the champagne, or just the atmosphere of women half or completely naked, but like a tired horse turning to familiar alleys he went round and round the Place Clichy. He looked up one or two addresses and said 'Ah! la vie, la vie!-the houses had changed hands, he said. He seemed tired of living or of driving the car, so he deposited me near the Pont St-Michal and I took a taxi and went to my hotel.
The next morning he rang me up at ten to say he had a bad headache. But we could still meet chez Weber at one o'clock upstairs. 'We can have a light lunch-after the escargots de Bourgogne, and the coq-au-vin of last night, anything would be good, even a simple salad. And at Weber the vegetables are excellent.'
As I usually went to collect my mail from Cooks in the Place de la Madeleine it was very helpful to me to eat near by. There was always the Rue de Richelieu in the morning, dull and warm, with the dust making my breathing somewhat difficult. But it was joy to think of all the great men-Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Baudelaire; Sainte-Beuve, Guizot, Taine, Renan, Rainer Maria Rilke all had worked at those tables. The past, as I said, must always speak to me for the present to become knowledge- able.
The lunch was a dull affair, except that Oncle Charles rang up home from the telephone booth and I talked to Catherine, whose voice was rich and singing, and full of joy. She would soon be married and life would have some meaning. 'You are my godfather of happiness,' she said, 'and you have to be there when the right time comes."
'My sister is getting married too, Catherine, and things at home are not going too well. After all, I'm the eldest son. I may have to go home-fly -for a few months, perhaps.' 'Would you take Mado, then?' she asked. 'For unless one of you at least is there, I will not marry till you return.'
'Well, we won't put off your happiness even by a day,' I promised. I only hope by then Madeleine will still be able to move about.'
'Of course, that's true. I never thought of it. Fancy being a woman and not remembering things like that. You know, Rama, one grows to be such an egoist in love.'
"To whom do you say that?' I replied, as though she would know what I meant.
'I hope my marriage will turn out to be even a little like yours. Tante Zoubie says I have not gone far enough geographically in my choice. I've gone eastward all right, towards Russia, but I haven't gone far enough. She would have liked me to have married an Indian.'
'Who would become a notaire at Rouen?' I laughed, remem- bering the Cimetière St Médard and the Caveau Roussellin.
'No, I suppose not. I shall be happy to be a professeuse, as our maid Jeannine says. Yes, Madame la professeuse, I shall be.'
'Au revoir, Petite Catherine,' I shouted, as Oncle Charles was scratching his thighs distractedly and paying the telephone bill. He joked about something, and how he made the telephone girl laugh.
'Au revoir, Patron,' she smiled. Et à la prochaine."
Oncle Charles left that very afternoon-he embraced me when he was saying good-bye and though my work was over, I wandered about Paris doing nothing, feeling foetid and forlorn. It is at such moments one feels the loss of a father or mother, something steady whose affection is assured, as it were biologi- cally, like the sap to the tree in spring. Walking about aimlessly on the quayside I dipped into this old book and that some history of the Cistercian Order, or the Qualité intellectuelle des Indiens corbeaux, published by some Reverend Father in the hope of con- verting them to good Christianity. It was the time of Chateau- briand and Atala, and the conquest of empires-Les écrivains impériaux, as Thibaudet called the whole group of Chateau- briand, Hugo, Lamartine, and Balzac. The books on naked women revolted me; who on earth, I wondered, could look at such vulgarity, even if it were real. Was the body so important, so consistently in demand, that man forgot Peter Abelard who had preached Conceptualism just on the other side of the river? How often Eloise and Abelard must have wandered together over the bridges, looking like those young couples into the Seine, to see their still faces side by side.
Love is ever so young, so elevating-like the flying buttresses of Notre-Dame, pure, leaping, coloured by the stained-glass win- dows of the apse. I could love, yes, could. I was in love, yes, I loved, I knew love now, I spoke Savithri. Round as the Rose of Notre-Dame was love. Colourful and violet as the rosace was love. There had been days in Cambridge when I felt I could not say "You' to her, only 'I'-but what a strange thing to feel, and how foolish it all seemed. Rilke was right: you discover the nature of love as you grow older. What does one know of love at nineteen? The fresh scent of eau-de-Cologne on the hair of Madeleine, or maybe the shy, as yet unformed curve of her breast. Can one really love lips or limbs?-no, that could never, never be complete, and a sin it would be. Love demands nothing, it says nothing, it knows nothing; it lives for itself, like the Seine. does, for whom the buildings rising on either side and the parks and the Renault factory farther downstream make no difference. Who can take away love, who give it, who receive? I could not even say that I loved Savihri. It is just like saying 'I love myself' or 'Love loves Love'. "Tautology! Absurdity!' I cried, and looked more courageously at the naked women in the books. Finally, as though it would make me reverence Savithri the more, I bought a copy-almost a Montmartre copy-of Baudelaire, with big breasts and twisted limbs about the waist: the dark sensuality which seemed so attractive to Oncle Charles. For I was sure Oncle Charles's headache had other reasons than the champagne and the cognac. Trying to recapture his youth, he must have looked up old addresses. He probably wanted only to be recognized by some former patronne, some girl who would still hold herself bravely-and he must have received a shock. Age is true, very true; especially when one is past fifty. After that age you might choose other, rarer perversi- ties and Paris could supply you with anything you wanted- but this barrack mentality was the bane of Europe. No wonder Monsieur Sartre became famous during the phoney war-the devil becomes interesting when you have no devil to face. In the middle ages, the devils went up high and on to the roofs and became monster gargoyles against whom the virtuous St Bernard fulminated so. And Baudelaire, he could never have become a Conceptualist. He would have been with the good St Bernard, for having gone as far as Italy on the Crusades, he might have bought himself his liberty, and died contrite, a devout monk. Verlaine fulfilled the secret destiny of Baudelaire, like Ronsard's inversely might have been by Villen. Frères humains qui après nous vivez N'ayez les cuers contre nous endurcis Car, se pitié de nous povres avez Dieu en aura plus tost de vous mercis. The train to Aix swung with a rhythm that seemed to give intelligence and feeling back to me. Esclarmonde would of course be born, and how beautiful she would be, with Madeleine's gold in her hair, and perhaps my eyes; I already saw her big and tall, ready for the change into lovely womanhood, and the pang of the first ache for love. She would combine the shyness, the natural intelligence and the deep gravity of, say, Saroja-yes, she could be like Saroja! Why not? And perhaps I would touch her, and feel in my fingers that I was touching something very real, something far and personal: the truth. We seek in our progeny the incarnation of lost hopes. We fornicate on our wives the gifts we would give our loves. We breed bastards, because we lack courage. We lie by each other, clasped in each other's arms, breathing each other, sucking each other, as though truth was in the instant of that conjointhood. We speak tenderly to one another, year after year and life after life we may go on, but the ultimate may be on the bank of a river, a green patch of wide-awake grass, a Norman archway, bicycles, and the bridge of Clare. There is only one Woman, not for one life, but for all lives; indeed, the earth was created-with trees, rivers, seas, boats, buildings, books, towers, aeroplanes--that we might seek her, and remove the tortor act of St Bernard. Poor Charles Baudelaire.
At the station Madeleine looked so beautiful in her big woman- hood, so sad, that I kissed her with warmth, certitude, and devotion. She was the tabernacle of my habitation. I would build a paraclete yet. THE REST OF THE STORY is easily told. In a classical novel it might have ended in palace and palanquin and howdah, or in the high Himalayas, but I am not telling a story here, I am writing the sad and uneven chronicle of a life, my life, with no art or decoration, but with the 'objectivity', the discipline of the 'historical sciences', for by taste and tradition I am only an historian.
Yet even in history Catherine de Branganza marries Charles the Second, and so Bombay comes into being; or Marie de Médicis marries Henri IV, becomes a widow, and, stupid and resolute, fights against Cardinal Richelieu, dies in exile and in Cologne; or India de Travalcen marries someone, is taken prisoner by the Turks and becomes first the wife of Noureddin and then of Suldan. Or look at the marriages and widowhood of Eleanor of Aquitaine, but for whom there would never have been the troubadours, nor, perhaps, modern love ('L'amour?' said the famous French historian Charles Seignobos, une invention du XIIe siècle"), which means I might never have met Madeleine or married her like a good Brahmin of the older generation I would have sat in meditation morning and evening and changed annually my sacred thread, for even in Aix-en-provence, though you cannot make pipal-fire, you can always make an olive- wood fire, draw the swastika on the wall, decorate the sanctuary with mandalas, light the Sacrificial hearth and walk round Agni. You can get Ganges water by air every week for aspersions and mouth ablutions. And going back home, I would have gone seven times round fire again, and safely married some Ven- katalakshamma or Subbamma, who would have borne me my heir and my funeral fire-lighter; and at the end I would cer tainly have held the tail of some bull or cow that my son had bequeathed for my further journey, and thus my story would have ended. Madeleine might have married some doctor from Rouen or naval cadet from Toulon, would have borne him two children and possibly even a third-it did not depend as in India on the stars, but on arithmetical figures at the Bank and the Caisse d'Epargne, and certainly this Roger Marbillon or Claude Caril- lon, would have accepted a safe and historical place at St Médard but Madeleine married me, and this is the sad part of the story. For life is sad, whether you look at it from the bottom or from a backward-turning look, or from any side, in fact; and we roll our lives with events, and cover ourselves with history and position, till the last moment arrives. For whether you drive a carriage and four-or like that famous lakpathi of Lahore, who came to visit Guru Arjun with nine pinions to his carriage, because he owned nine lakhs in silver; and who was mischievously given by the saint the needle he was stitching with, and asked that this instrument of sewing be brought over to the next life or whether we wear ribbons, medals, sacred threads, or tufts on the head, or like the Yorubas mark our faces with lines each time our heroism has shone by cutting off the head of another; or whether we get the Stalin Peace Prize and have a photograph printed in all the Soviet papers-for they all print the same things, simultaneously, say I the historian, and in every language of the eighteen or more Republics, including Tamlouk, Uzbec, or High Azerbaijan-be it any of these, but when you have to catch the bull's tail you all catch it the same way, whether your heir has left one for you in Benares or not. Marriages are because death must be: the end implies a beginning.
The fear of extinction is the source of copulation: you make love that the heir be born-the son who will light your funeral pyre. Even Stalin has a son, and he will do his job, don't you worry, when the bell tolls.... For the bell will toll even for Stalin, say I the historian.
So marriages are and marriages must be. For otherwise what would happen to the wife and children (or mistress and children) of Pierre Boissier or Jean Carrefour, grejer at the Mairie of the VIIIth Arrondissement, in charge of improving the national demography? To him you go and say: 'Monsieur, here are my papers here my papiers de coutume given by the Embassy, here my birth certificate (however bogus, for in India we do not yet have this municipal proof of having come to be), and here my bride's; and here, may I permit myself to offer you most humbly, most courteously, three thousand francs, Boissier or Jean Carrefour prepares a book of heirs, the three thousand francs having warmed his gullet and his bed. But what would become of him if all became Cathars, and talked of the corruption of the body, the sin of fornication, and the horror of birth? There would be no funeral fees to pay either, if everyone went to another Pure, took con- solamentum and fasted in some caverne d'Orolac till sweet death, dove-like, benign messenger of the happy world came and took them away. For in that other world you do not need any bulls or cows: it is full of the loveliest fire-birds, pigeons, nightingales.... No you should not starve Pierre Boissier or Jean Carrefour.
Nor must any poor Brahmin of Benares be allowed to take his own child to the Ganges banks for there he would pay nothing, not even the hire of four shoulders, being just a child, his own arms would do. Because whatever happens, the Ganges is al- ways pure, and he has no money to buy firewood from all those clamouring scoundrels on the pathways to the ghats. 'Oh, Panditji, I've received such fresh, dry consignments from the tarai and I'll sell it to you for two annas a maund less than that rascal, that robber, across the road.' 'Oh, Panditji, you know me, and your father knows me,' says the other, 'and did I ever sell you bad firewood? No, never. Whereas-ask the street-cleaner Panha-yesterday the body would not burn with that fellow's firewood, so they came running to me. And look at this deodhar, heavy as gold....' But he needs neither, for he can afford neither; so he takes the child, wraps him in the white of his shoulder-cloth, and muttering some mantra goes into the water, and lets the little one float down. 'Float down, float down, little circles like flowers, and there is not even a tear in his eye, for who can weep? Why weep and for so many dead-what little circles like some flowers, and there is not even a tear in his eye, for who can weep? Why weep and for so many dead-what would happen to this poor Brahma Bhatta or Virupaksha Bhatta if our fathers did not die, and we did not have to take their ashes to Benares? Death and birth are meteorological happen- ings: we reap and we sow, we plant and we put manure; e smile when the sky shows rain, we suffer when it rains Aail-and all ends in our stomach. There must be a way out, Lord; a way out of this circle of life: rain, sunshine, autumn, snow, heat and the rain once more, in gentle flower-like ripples on the Ganges....
Little Mother wrote to me that Saroja had made up her mind to marry Subramanya Sastri. 'He's a very nice man, Rama, and one can have nothing but esteem for his purity, gravity, and deferential ways, but he's not made for Saroja-so lovely, so sensitive, so sad.... What can a woman do, Rama? You alone could have done something, were you here. Now it's foolish to say anything to do anything. Already the other-people treat her as one of their own. What invitations, gold, chains, diamond ear-rings, evening drives.... But it gives me such pain in the heart, I know not why. Saroja somehow thinks, and it is a natural thing to think for a girl of her age, a girl and a stepdaughter, that I am her enemy. Rama, I have tried my best to treat everyone alike after all, are you my own son? Yet what confidence I have in you. Rama, I wish Saroja would marry someone like our Rama... Come soon, we need you. And blessing to you, and to my daughter-in-law."
What sweetness flowed from Little Mother to me. She it seemed was my inmost centre, the mirror of my life. With no word, or sometimes with just a word, she understood the curva- tures of my silences and thoughts. She seemed to have borne me without bearing me, and somewhere, I knew, she suffered for me, felt the sorrow that filled my nights with such breathlessness.
Often I would lie with the moonlight entering my window- my bed was at the farther end of the room, almost by the window, and that of Madeleine against the wall, for light disturbed her and feel the wakefulness of the olives, the figs ripening on their branches, the nests waiting for the blue swallows to come; I could see the long, white highway to Marseille, on which yellow- lit cars must still be moving, and beyond St-Charles and the Vieux-Port, you duld almost go step by step to the top of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, turn round the Cathedral and look at the stretch of the Mediterranean-'la mer, la mer, toujours recommence. After a lapse of long silence, I would look towards Madeleine. The secret of inner formulations and growth had widened her cheeks, given poise and sadness and a certain pride to her lonesome face. I could have knelt by her and taken her hand and pressed my lips against it, and whispered many irrelevant, untrue things.
Sometimes, on an afternoon, breaking her clear quiet she would say, 'Rama, talk to me, say something to me,' and she would look at herself as though she carried some holy sin, some loved impurity, and I would remove my heavy glasses and tell her, 'Oh, Madeleine, I'm sure Little Mother would be so happy to see you,' or 'She will be so lovely, Esclarmonde, just like Saroja.' She would say, stopping her knitting (for knitting, like nest- making, is an instinct, a biological function), 'Rama, say some- thing about yourself.' And I, speechless, for one cannot tell an untruth before a child-bearing mother, she is holy, a symbol of some certitude: like breath, like a mountain, or the silence of a river. I would take her head in my arms, play in the gold of her hair, and kiss her on the crown of her head. She was not mine, maternity had given her an otherness-she seemed secretive, whole, incommunicable. Words had no great meaning for her; she spoke, it seemed, always to herself, and alone. I wished I could have bought her a garland of thousand-petal jasmines, and tied them round her hair. And all the night I could smell them. But Madeleine, unlike other women, never seemed to have pregnancy-desires, no sudden intolerable wish for malagoa- mango or for red grapefruit-not even for good strong eau-de- Cologne. Her passion had turned elsewhere. She read and read a great deal, though doctors told her to be very careful; she con- tinued her Pali lessons, and studied every book she could find on Buddhism. She went to the library and brought back Renan, Senart, and Alexandra David Neel. She ordered books from England, from the Sacred Books of the East series. She loved the Psalms of the Sisters so much she started translating them her- self. One story particularly upset her for, coming home that evening from one of my long walks alone, I found her bathed in tears. I could not understand what had upset her-I always thought the chief, the single origin of all sorrow could only be me. I wondered what I had done. Then she slowly put her head on my lap, and told me the story of Vassita and the Lord."
'Go, mother, go, bereft mother, go and find a household where they have mustard seed, and bring it to me quickly. I shall awaken thy Child, Varsita. So shall he be the Buddha- become. Only this, Vassita, must thou remember, ask whilst thou crossest the threshold, sister, "Brother, has there been any- one dead in this house ever?" And if they say. "None, none, sister Vassita," then bring thou a seed of mustard to me.. Vassita, whose child had lain dead on her arm, said at each door, "Has there been anyone dead in this house ever!' And they all said, 'Yes, yes, sister, yes, mother.' Then did she come back to the Lord and say, 'Lord, be this not the name and nature of Motherhood, that that which we bare must always perish, as we ourselves shall, of eighteen aggregates compounded.' And to her then, with the child, the dead child before her, did the Buddha, the Lord of Compassion speak and say, 'Thou speakest the Truth indeed, little Mother, for all that has birth must perforce have death. The complex must dissolve, the be- coming end in being. Then she said, did Vassita, 'Lord, take me unto thy fold.'
'Lord,' muttered Madeleine to me, 'Lord, take me unto thy fold.'
The sorrow of woman be indeed the barrenness of man.
Every evening Georges came as usual to the house. He be- came freer and more simple and jolly, making puns, laughing, and making us laugh; and thanks to his new certitude and hap- piness for he really was beginning to be happy-he brought release from the sorrow of our householdt Sometimes he carried his papers to correct; I gave him a little table in my room, and as I worked on my history he would correct his papers, and from time to time make humorous remarks.
'Look, look, what humanity is coming to!' he said one day. 'A sixth-form student, when I asked what duty was, said: "Duty is what one does the soonest"-and forgets all about afterwards, I suppose! And another bright young lad puts it: "If duty be anything universal, then it seems strange that in Tibet, they say, the same woman has five husbands, and in Islam four wives at least are de règle (for example, the Sultan of Morocco). August Comte was probably right in saying that duty is the law of the Great Being, who is nothing but growing humanity itself. Your duty is to the narrow world around you the serf of the Middle Ages has his duty to his lord, the bourgeois to his city-council, and in Soviet Russia duty is to the Party. Duty could be defined as that system of personal behaviour which gives man the maximum of happiness and incurs the least pain to other... How well defined,' continued Georges, 'and to think this bright lad is a Communist. C'est triste.' And he went on to his next paper.
Meanwhile three times a week, on Thursdays, Saturdays, and Tuesdays, Madeleine continued her lessons with Lezo. There was such a change in Lezo since I had seen him in Pau. Either because he realized the sorrow of Madeleine, for I think he did care for her a great deal, or because Georges had given him a nice talking-to, or possibly just because he had learnt more of life he had changed considerably!
Later I was to know that one day while I was still in London Georges did not come-he had one of his usual 'malarial' fevers that shook him all over and made him take to his bed, an after- math of some infection caught during his Resistance days-well, Georges had not come, and Madeleine was taking her Pali lessons. As usual, after the work was over Madeleine went into the kitchen to make some fresh, good coffee for Lezo 'Poor man, he's so lonely-think what it must be like to have so little money and live in a pension'-and when she came back, with a cup in each hand, and entered the drawing-room, she saw no Lezo. Before she could know what had happened he had come from the back, having hidden behind the door like a schoolboy, put his hands over her eyes, and tried to bring his hands farther down, when Madeleine, with her Charentaise ire, dashed the cups against his face, and slapped him angrily and kicked him in the belly. 'I was a fury-a wild fury,' she explained. 'He fell on the floor, and begged me, begged me humbly and simply to forgive him. "Je ne suis qu'une bête sauvage," he pleaded; "my ancestors were probably Berbers. Forgive me".
'What does one do to such a fool but forgive,' said Madeleine. 'And after that, he's become obedient as a dog. Sometimes I tell him: "Don't behave like a rat," and he smiles. Now, Rama, there's no fear. You could go to Quimper-Corentin, and Lezo would behave like a faithful dog."
'What can you expect,' said Georges one day, 'he lives with that seamstress."
'Does he?' I asked.
'Yes, I never told you. But one day he was boasting of his bucolic adventures, bucolic I tell you, like some schoolboy's; "You are a born puritan! and as they said about somebody: You were born middle-aged and will never grow younger. You, Georges, are made for the Inquisitor and hell-fire," he said. "1, I am, I, of the warm country of Spain; not one of those Bogoro- ditza, Bogoroditza crying Slavs, weeping over the sleeves of the Virgin. You should see me with Rose. She's a seamstress all right, but she's warm and round and wonderful to mellre dessous"-I quote his words. Humiliation,' continued Georges, 'is a terrible thing. When you've been a Professor of a University, and you have drawn a decent salary, and you are forced to emigrate for some brave speech you made, defending your language, your mother tongue, be it Catalan or Serbe or Mal- gache, and you have to live on giving lessons, far away from father and mother, sisters and brothers-and far away from your Church ...' said Georges. He became silent for a moment, then continued... what else could happen to you? But Madeleine is having a very good influence on him. Perhaps even Buddhism is good for one!' he declared, and laughed. I enjoyed Georges's new, open laughter. No, Catherine was not going to be just an appendage, she was going to bring some strain of happiness into the sad soul of this Slav. Alyosha Kara- mazoff would still be happy....
So Madeleine continued her Pali and her own gravity in- creased, partly because of her maternity, I think-for a woman feels very serious and responsible and even ponderous when she bears a baby inside her and partly because of her natural sad- ness. Our lives were now grown more intimate, it seemed, for we spoke less in words and gestures than with silences. She knew something, she knew not what herself. Maybe the elephant had told her, or the bull. He often did tell something, with a peculiar telluric vibration, some sort of telegraph code, which seemed to hum on all the time inside; and the moment you touched him,' caressed him and left your hand long enough to feel itself, the cthonic message came through and you knew. The bull gave Madeleine these messages too, as to when my letter would come for I wrote so seldom-or when her Inspector General would visit her Collège. And sometimes the bull gave her happy news: for example, that she would have a son-and that was about Pierre -or a daughter and that was Esclarmonde. And it gave sadder news too, sometimes. It seemed more communicative and friendly, this Nandi, to Madeleine than it ever was to me. But, after all, Nandi was Parvathi's companion and only Shiva's vehicle.
I remember, as though it was told me but yesterday, how the landowner of the plot opposite, who wanted to get rich and so let the plot lie there till the crise économique was over-the Korean War had brought the price of land down-one day decided to make some money. He was a retired Italian fruit merchant, without children, and he thought it better to do things while he still could, so probaly Monsieur Scarlatti said to himself, 'Let me hew some of this stone, and maybe I could sell it to that Englishwoman who's just bought the Villa Malherbe opposite.' Madeleine described how when he put his chisel against the stone and started hammering, two birds, two sparrows 'with stripes as big and dark as your fingers on them' came twittering and clamouring to the window, and would not leave till she rose, and when she went to the window there he was, one could see, Monsieur Scarlatti, and he hammering away. 'My heart bled,' said Madeleine, 'as though something terrible was going to happen. And without a moment's thought she ran down to Monsieur Scarlatti and said, 'You know, we like this huge, bulging stone at our door. Couldn't you let it stay? Look what a kind shape it has.' 'Madame Ramaswamy,' he replied. 'I am a man without work; so I thought, why not make some money selling stone to that Anglaise? But I'll leave it, since you ask, en bon voisinage. I'm too old, in any case, to hew such stone. Look, look at what I have performed after half an hour of sweat! And please look at these hands-ah ia la!'
*Your husband is back home, Madame Ramaswamy?' he had asked after that.
'No, not yet,' Madeleine said. 'You know his father died?' "Yes, that is what the postman told me. And such a nice husband you have. Always saying "Bonjour, bonjour," to all the neighbours. You never hear him make a sound in the house.' 'Ah,' Madeleine protested, 'you haven't heard him singing! When he sings in his bath, it's as though the roof would fly to his own country.'
'He has every reason to be happy. My wife says, "That couple there, they're nice people-and so learned. They have such interesting looking visitors too." And, being Italian, she likes to hear a foreign language. It makes her feel at home when you pass our windows speaking in English.'
"Thank you, Monsieur Scarlatti.'
"Thank you, thank you, Madame. And if ever Madame has something to dig or carry, a bulb to be planted, the jasmines to be trimmed, "There he is," you should say to yourself, "there's neighbour Scarlatti". By the way, Madame Ramaswamy, I was telling Madame Jeanne you should cut that jasmine a little now, that it may grow big by spring and make you a nice bower by summer. Anyway, it's good to have spoken to you, Madame, and say bonjour on our behalf to Monsieur your husband when you write to him....
Madame Scarlatti, seeing them from the window, had shouted. *Bonjour Madame; comme il fait beau! Les hirondelles sont déjà la... 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 Provençal 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 gipsy 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 Quen -orphan of an engineer, niece of a notaire et Conseiller Munici- pal 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 brinjol 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 cats 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 be- trayed 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 nie, 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 move- ment 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, thy 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 con- vincing 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 George's old father could come from Munich. Catherine said, 'And you, Rama, will not be there, as my god- father and George'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 house- hold. 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 ex- claimed, '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, Shridhar was there. That is how it should be.
'I'll be back soon, Madeleine,' I said, making her a long namaskar. I had never learnt to kiss good-byes 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 com- plete had happened to Madeleine, to me--to the world. Beauti- ful 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 mediche, geography, and oriental wisdom, and Eretagthenes, Alexandria's famous Librarian, had written an encyclopedic book on India. Ptolemy Philadelphus himself sent an Ambassodor 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 my- self. 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 dark- ness between India and Greece. But the Mediterranean is an Indian sea, a Brahminic ocean; somewhere the Rhône must know the mysteries of Mother Ganga. India, my land, for me ist 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.
