WHEN I CAME BACK to Paris I found Catherine, and the baby so pretty, so happy. It seemed as though happiness was near at hand, could be cus from a tree like a jackfruit, like a bel. I took a room near the Boulevard St-Germain, not far from the quay, thus in the evenings I could run down to the river and feel Paris in my nostrils. These October days were very beautiful, with the wind coming from the sea, and not from the north, thus making it seem like a prolongation of the high summer. A single lung seems to make your limbs lighter, your breath deeper and wise. I knew a little, very old restaurant opposite Notre- Dame, Le Coq d'Or, and when I went up, Madame Chimaye always had good petit-pois, salade Niçoise and artichokes for me.
'Pauvre Monsieur,' she said, as though I had to diet because of medical advice-she could not understand vegetarianism on any other grounds. 'Pauvre Monsieur, he must be well fed,' she told the Patronne. 'He already looks so thin. When the north wind comes, he will be blown over the river and get stuck, like some saint, on Notre-Dame, I think she knew, somewhere beyond under- standing, more of me than she put into words. Allez,' she pro- tested, 'you must be gay when you are in Paris, Monsieur. Otherwise why should your father send you so far? I have a son who goes to school. He's iixteen and he's not bad at his studies. I say, "Study, my son. But there's time, too, pour les amusements. If you are not gay when you are young, you may never be gay again." Look at all the wars one has. The Americans want to take us to war again. "And as for the Russians," I tell my son, "leave the happiness of humanity to the fools." There is no hap- piness for humanity, except in work, in washing bottles, peeling potatoes, or in carrying loads at les Halles. And even if the Bon Dieu himself should come down, don't you worry, Monsieur, you would still have to pay income tax.'
She looked after me, did Madame Chimaye, as though I were some lost fraticello. She used to protest against the Patronne charging me too much.
'Poor student that he is, and so far away from his parents, Madame la Patronne, and how he must languish for his country, his people. It must be such sunshine there, and here the winter weeps like some war-widow at the cemetery of Aulnay-sous-Bois. I tell you, Madame la Patronne, we shall have war again this year. Look at the Americans!"
You could not argue with Madame Chimaye. You could not argue with the printed word of a newspaper. There were no duels in France any more: You could say what you liked, print what you wanted. La France Libérée-a paper founded in the Resistance by les braves gens must speak the truth. So many dead spoke through its columns, said Madame Chimaye. Her husband worked at the Renault Motor Works, and there they knew much that even a Minister would not know.
'What does a Minister know,' was Madame Chimaye's sound argument, 'he hardly goes out, except with police motor-cycles on either side and his secretary in front. It is his assistants who bring him the information from the whole of France, from the whole world.'
Madame Chimaye, of course, knew things through her husband and such terrible things, too, she knew. And he knew them direct from his comrades.
"Oh, the world should never have lean men like you,' she repeated, 'nor sick. The world should be gay like the people at the Parc des Princes, play while you play and work while you work. Do you know Monte-Carlo, Monsieur?' she asked. "There you have so much sunshine that you want to loose all the birds from their cages."
Madame Chimaye had one enemy. It was the man who did business with birds opposite. She hated him more than she hated the Americans. This man had larks, parakeets, canaries, herons, birds of paradise; and he sold grain for them, and medi- cines for the birds he sold too. He also made lovely cages-These are the cages of Pekin,' he would show his clients, 'and these are Cages Cambodges, these Cingalaises; and these are Arab ones, and these from the Iles Martiniquaises. You could imprison your birds in lacquer, steel, or oak, it all depended upon your purse and taste.
'Better, Monsieur,' Madame Chimaye went on, 'to be like those booksellers. Look at that friend of mine, Jean there. I have known him for thirty years. He has never grown older, always serving good people like you. And when the young come, foreigners, do you think our. Jean would ever sell those horrible novels about naked women? Never, Monsieur, never. I tell him, "Jean you should have become a curé. You are so virtuous," " "Ah," he laughs, "myvirtue ends with my business. I am a tyrant at home. I have two children and a terrible woman; she is Spanish-Andalusian. I beat her sometimes, you know." Maybe he does beat her; how would I know? My good nean, he would touch me only with a feather. Been married for these thirty-one years, Monsieur. Happy as a bird, I am, and my son is happy too. Better sell books, Monsieur, those learned books, and even drawings and medals if you will, but to sell birds...! Ah, I would dip that fellow there with a hook in his ankle and his mouth in the Seine. Do they catch birds in your country, Monsieur?"
My friend Jean, the bookseller across the road, used to keep me supplied with my needs. I had just to tell him I wanted this text or that, and he would throw his scarf back and wink his eye; he knew exactly the person who would have it. Thus it was I got my Bédier, Lea, Gaston Paris and others. My work progressed.
I was not in a hurry to go back to India: what was there to go back to, after all? Little Mother had gone to live with Saroja in Allahabad, where Subramanya had now been transferred. She was so happy, for she could take her bath every morning at the Ganges. Sukumari and her husband were both in Bombay. Sukumari had joined the Communist Party. Her letters to me became more and more scarce. I was the arch-reactionary for her, and she hated me with the hate brothers and sisters have for one another when they cannot agree. Besides, Sukumari having married Krishnamachari, her politics became an act of faith, a duty she owed to her happiness. She had to love and worship her husband-she was too much of a Hindu not to worship her Lord. Then must she find an adversary, her enemy. Trotsky is an endocrinal need.
Saroja was moody. Her letters were inconsequent. Only in one letter did she say: 'For me life has come to an end. By life I mean hope, work, fulfilment. I expect nothing, Except that I long for you. Brother, come back soon."
Working in the Bibliothèque Nationale I would sometimes open Saroja's letter and read it again and again, thinking there must be someone in the world at some point of space to whom I could go with an open free warmth, and clear, tearful eyes. But for that I must have a home, I must get back home. I would then ask Saroja home, and Little Mother would spend six months with me and six months with her daughters. And one day, I said to myself, I would take Little Mother to Europe. She enjoyed sightseeing; I would show her the lake of Geneva, I would show her les Invalides in Paris, and maybe I would take her to London and show her St Paul's, the Abbey, and the Tower of London. 'Oh, no more sea-aubergines!' I was sure she would say, remembering the fish she had been served at the Calcutta Terminus (Like the wise Brahmins of Bengal, the Cathars too, I now read, could eat these 'vegetables of the sea', as the fishes were not born 'ex impuro coitu'; for when out of water they die!) I could perhaps persuade Little Mother to come. Maybe even Saroja would come. I was day-dreaming. I cleaned my glasses and went back to my bulls of Innocent III. This very wise and good man had to choose between the purity of the heretics, and the continuity of the Roman Church. He belonged not to the Church of Christ but to the Community of the Virgin Mary. The woman must rule the world.
I suddenly remembered Savithri's last words, not to me, but to the nurse at the hospital in London. 'How men suffer!' she had exclaimed to Sister Jean outside, just before the door was closed; I think she wanted to linger, to say something to someone, to anyone. 'How men suffer, Sister Jean! A woman's suffering seems physical: it has a beginning, so it has an end.' 'You are right, Madam,' said Sister Jean. I always prefer women's wards to men's. Women seem to think that once the body is all right, everything is perfect.' 'And men?' asked Savithri. 'Oh, with men, Madam-Oh, I am not speaking of Mr Ramaswamy he is such a good patient, but I mean generally speaking-Man has sorrow in him. Every man is like a Christ on the Cross."
Poor Innocent III was such a Christ on the Cross. He paid his dues to the Virgin and founded the Inquisition.
Yes, indeed, how men suffer. The woman's suffering is, one might say, somewhat biological. It has a beginning, so it has an end. But man's suffering is like one of those trunk roads by the Ganges, that the avenue of trees, ancient and, as it were, bent with time, hide from rain and sun.. But night comes and pene- trates all, night goes through sleeping villages, round Customs houses, travellers' bungalows, and riverside caravanserais. And there is always a pilgrim, a pravrajika moving-men going with baskets and blankets, women crying, the children asleep; the bullocks unable to drag any more, cars driving them mad, so much the cars hoot. But at break of dawn a parrot may sit on a banyan tree, and eat of its red fruit, and sing. That is all man's joy. Man's sorrow is not to belong to this earth. For him to marry is to belong to this earth, like the marrying of Catherine made Georges a Frenchman. He could now say, 'Nous autres français,' and with pride. Man must wed to know this earth. The womb (bhaga) is the great Prakriti (nature), and the Possessor of the womb (Bhagavan) is Shiva."
In the evenings I often went after dinner to Georges and Catherine. I used to go up the Boulevard St Michel and take the 83 at the Gare Montparnasse, which would take me through Avenue Bosquet, and behind les Invalides to Place d'Alma. I would linger a while by the river and then take the 63 straight to La Muette. From there I walked down to the rue Michel Ange. As I went up the staircase what memories came back to me, of Madeliene, of Oncle Charles, and of Tante Zoubie. Letters from Madeleine had become very scarce, and often they would only be to ask some information about a bill I had not paid or about some book I had not returned to the library. She never asked me any more about my health, and of her own news she had nothing to say. I am no more a person, so why speak of it? Of the body's news let the body hear, and of the rest nobody but oneself can tell oneself. So in fact, there is nothing to say. That is why I do not ask anything of you,' she had written to me in London. I knew, however, through Catherine, who had friends visiting Madeleine, that she was constantly ill. She had, while pruning a branch of the pine tree in the garden, cut hertinger, and the infection had lasted for over six weeks. She tried fasting, and when it seemed all but cured she developed a fever. Then she went on to fruit juice, but it did not bring the temperature down Eventually she had to take penicillin injection, and she got much better.
Madeleine had by now decided that she would give up even Villa les Rochers-the garden was too much of a burden. Be- sides, who was there to enjoy it? She took rooms on rue Ste Geneviève, round the corner, not far from the post office. It was a quiet street, and on the top floor she had, she wrote to Catherine, two very spacious rooms (the landlord was a retired customs. officer, and thank God, they had no children!). She had sent some of the unnecessary furniture, including the green chairs, the large spare bed, the two cupboards (ancient eighteenth-century ones, that had come from some English ancestors, they said) to Catherine. 'You have a large family-I mean you will soon have a large family, and what does a single person need all this for?' she had written to Catherine. I think Catherine showed me that letter with a purpose. Often it seemed strange to enter the room and find those green plush chairs; I would look behind me to see if the door would open and Madeleine come in saying, 'Oh these Professeurs, these women! They never have any courage. They will fight with each other, but will not stand and fight for a principle. I'm tired of them! No, Madeleine never had much kindness for women! Oncle Charles sometimes came over from Rouen. He slept in the room next to the kitchen where I had first stayed. And once in a while he would come up to my new rooms, at the Hotel des Parcs, rue de Seine, and try to take me somewhere. anywhere.
'Oh, my daughter, she's like her mother. 'My first wife was not like Zoubie. She was a rat d'Eglise, a smelly fat thing, that went to Mass every dawn, and cooked for her husband and her daughter, dressed the girl up for the Church and the School, and the rest of the time lay on her bed reading the Lives of the Saints. As time goes on Catherine, too, will become like her mother. There is no sap in her; I cannot say, "Come, let us go somewhere", she always chooses to go to the Bazar de l'Hotel-de- Ville to buy children's toys or napkins for her lovely baby. Au diable, little round pieces of pink flesh!' said Oncle Charles,' and took me first to the Place Clichy, and then to Montmartre.
My own feelingswas-though there was nothing to prove it- that since Tante Zoubie's illness, Oncle Charles had other rea- sons for coming to Paris than to see, his granddaughter. I did not think, from a careless remark he once made, that he went to his daughter each time he came down to Paris. Besides, at dinner he always took some mysterious pills out of the saine round tube, with no label on it.
*I am not young any more,' he explained one evening. 'But then there is no reason why I should have such a big belly. I will never be like you, Rama, but I don't want to look like Monsieur Herriot either. From his face I knew he spoke without con- viction. 'Look, don't you think I have grown much thinner. Oh, I have such a lot of work! When business is bad, people begin to have crooked minds. These bad years mean much more work for a notary. People are so afraid of war. Do you think there will be war, Rama?
'No,' I answered, without much conviction.
After such a conversation I would say, 'I will take a walk now, and go back and work,' and he seemed always sad to see me go. Poor Oncle Charles, he wanted someone to go with him, so that he could laugh and talk and drink, and maybe take a woman to himself; his companion could always have chosen his own brunette or blonde, and, I imagine, he would have paid for it all. Georges once said that a mysterious woman-a frail, young voice telephoned every Thursday evening to know if Oncle Charl was at home.
'From her accent I can see she is a woman from a very special milieu,' said Georges. 'She is so courteous, full of such elegant apologies. Catherine thinks it is an act of precaution. Should anything ever go wrong she could always come to the rue
Michel Ange, and say whatever has to be said.' "They always know whom to approach for the final settlement." added Catherine.
'What is better than a daughter on the rue Michel Ange?' continued Georges. They know the nature of a man or maid from the quartier they live in. Besides, they have their own private detectives. Well, poor Oncle Charles he never had much success with his marriages., One woman was less cultured than him, and the other, the former wife of a futuse ambassador. It makes one feel so sad and he is such a good man.'
But Catherine was worried about the legal consequences. After all she was the daughter of a notary public. *Ah, là là,' Oncle Charles said one day to me, 'I am a crook among crooks, you know, Rama. I am not like your Gandhi, if hit on the right cheek, showing the left. I hit before anyone hits me. All I see every day is how someone wants to protect himself from being cheated by someone else. But when a man calculates that the other will cheat him, it means he would do the same to the other fellow when the time came. There is no love lost, I tell you, in this country. This is the country of Balzac,' he concluded, as if he were quoting scriptures.
Sometimes I went with Georges and Catherine to Rouen- going in the morning and returning that same evening, often as late as twelve o'clock, past Pont de l'Arch, Vernon, and Mantes. I always felt happy to see Tante Zoubie. True, her face was much disfigured with disease, but that did not make her tell less fasci- nating stories. Again and again it would be about the central European diplomat, whose amorous adventures all the chan- celleries knew, but who was nevertheless employed by everybody. Then when the war was over and everybody had the original documents to compare, it transpired that he had played tricks on all the governments, now acting the fool, now a drunkard, now a debauchee.
'Ah, là là!' said Aunt Zoubie, 'his love affairs were written on his face. He wore his women as he wore his cuff-links or his pince-nez, and hid them when he wanted to. Oh, that grand tradition is gone now. Now you need bawds at your service. They say that in Egyptian marriages they employ bawds to abuse the bridegroom's party. Like this the bride will be happy: luck is brought by insult, this is an ancient anthropological law. Oh, Rama, the more you travel in space or in time, the more you see the same phenomenon. Man is such a frail, such a foolish creature. If you respect him too much, he will cheat you. If you treat him with condescension, he will obey and insult you. So you must give him a hot bath at one moment and a cold bath at another, as the doctors have advised me. If you ask me who is paralysed, I or the world, I would say I and the world. My face is turned this way, but their faces are turned backwards like this, like they say the devil's is. It's just silly to live. And as silly, don't you think? to die? Imagine that that silly woman, la Comtesse de Noailles I used to know her well, once, chez la Duchesses d' Uzès could write of her terrible solitude in the tomb: "Moi, qui n'a pas dormi seule, aux jours de la terre!" I ask you, wise man, is one ever but alone. Tell me, Charles, did you marry me because you were alone? Speak. You married me because you wanted a wife, somebody to sew on your buttons, and wipe your mouth when your saliva ran down your face. Oh, là là! marriage is a grand institution. It prepares you handsomely for the grave. You lie by one another, at St Médard, and you are known eter- nally do you hear, eternally-as "Monsieur et Madame Charles Roussellin, Notaire, Rouen (Seine Inférieure)". The Greeks at least wrote elegics. That made death interesting. In life there is a time for everything, love, marriage... and then- nothing at all. But now, notaire, Charles Roussellin.' Tante Zoubie laughed. By now Oncle Charles had left the room; he hated to hear about death. It will come, when it will, as my huissier does. Why ask him to come earlier? Why waste the leather on my chair or the wine in my bottles? I know no dog will bark when they carry my hearse away.' Thus the conversation would go on till Georges looked at Catherine, and Catherine looked at me, and we all slowly rose to go. How lonely poor Oncle Charles felt. He would come to the door of the car, and stand with one foot on the running-board, talking of coughs arfed colds or of clients and municipal rates, till Tante Zoubie would shout and say, 'Don't catch cold! You haven't taken your coat, Papa.' And the car would shake and hum and swing us away-Catherine driving carefully and with authority, while I, seated by her, turned to Georges at the back, and we talked of anything that came to our minds.
Georges's research in Chinese had led him to further very interesting theories about the relation between Nestorianifm and Buddhism; he was still working on the Fou'kien stehe, and on the connection between the lotus and the cross. His mind, whereso- ever it went, took Christianity with it, as mine conspired with history to prove Vedanta. In fact it would seem, speaking objectively, that almost any theory will fit in with most facts, just as almost any system makes it possible to play chess efficiently. The only difference is, in how many cases can you say you really are convinced yourself? It is easy to convince others: you cannot fool yourself. And this, finally, is the only touchstone of good research.
Catherine was happy driving the car, and pointing to some corner of Mantes where she had come with Grandfather, or where she had fallen from a horse at the fair of St Ouen. For her, life was a series of remembered facts. And a good life was one where there was such a series of remembered facts. Death itself when it came would be a remembered fact. Passing in the night by the Seine, that quiet, self-assured river, which had given kings their strength and the French language its precision, how I fell back on myself, and remem- bered myself as the other. I would wonder, too, coming back home on those Sunday nights, whether Madeleine would one day let me speak to her again, or whether Savithri had reached India yet-would she be happy, truly happy?-whether the radar had indeed contacted the plane. I wondered what it would be like for Savithri to go back to the Surajpur Palace, with the Nine Musics of the day, the gunfire for the birthday of the Maharaja he had a right to five rounds-and the parties at night, where the new crude Congressmen and the old vulgar aristocracy mingled for the building of a magnificent India. But it would never be my India, it could never be Savithri's India. It would in fact be nobody's India, till someone sat and remembered what India was.
India is not a country like France is, or like England; India is an idea, a metaphysic. Why go there anyhow, I thought; I was born an exile, and I could continue to be one. My India I carried wheresoever I went. But not to see the Ganges, not to dip into her again and again... No, the Ganges was an inner truth to me, an assurance, the origin and end of my Brahminic tradition. I would go back to India, for the Ganges and for the deodhars of the Himalayas, and for the deer in the forests, for the keen call of the elephant in the grave ocellate silence of the forests. I would go back to india, for that India was my breath, my only sweetness, gentle and wise; she was my mother. I felt I could still love something: a river, a mountain, the name of a woman....
I wished I could be a river, a tree, an aptitude of incumbent silence.
My work was making a patient, and sometimes even a rapid progress. I had just finished my ninth chapter, on the Holy Grail, its historical significance and destiny, and had only two more chapters to finish. When I came, however, to the tenth chapter it was on Paradise-I had to go very cautiously, for the old professors at the Sorbonne were not only clever men but often conservative and doctrinaire; you had to be sure that every per- spective had been foreseen, or you could get into a mesh of futile and often exasperating discussion. I had been at too many soutenances des thèses not to know how often the self-evident seemed the least obvious to scholarly minds, especially if they have sat for too long in the same seat, and at the Sorbonne. For them there is nothing more to achieve, except it be the Collège de France-and that does not come everyone's way either. For the rest you go on punctuating your Racine according to his- torical rules and point out mistakes in the spelling of some text of Pascal, or an Agrippa d'Aubigné, that a former colleague, now dead, hadaken some ten or twenty years to edit. For these old scholars, said Dr Robin-Bessaignac, who was no typical Pro- fessor of the Sorborfhe, every hypothesis had a way of opening somebody's else's grave. The autopay always proved intriguing. For that matter all bodies do behave differently, whatever their commonplace,diseases-which again Dr Robin-Bessaignac pointed out, indicated the great significance of individuality; even in death you are different, whether you die of cancer or of heart trouble. But the dead scholar was the particular passion of the Sorbonnards: he smelt bad. All graves smell bad,' said Dr Robin-Bessaignac, 'and they enjoy this delicious humectus of fermenting toxins. It replaces their Dubonnet,' said Dr Robin- Bessaignac, and he was done with the subject.
My tenth chapter was especially difficult because it was going to deal with the metaphysical symbolism of Paradise. According to the Hindu concept there is not only satya and asatya, Truth and untruth, but also mitya, illusion-like the horns on the head of a rabbit, or the son of a barren woman. Paradise, I argued, was the inversion of Truth. To see frankly is not necessarily to see fairly-you can look at a thing upside down. After all the deer went to drink water at the mirage. The Impossible becomes the beautiful. Love becomes divided against itself, just as Avignon is split into Petit Avignon and Avignon des Papes. In between is the Rhône and the broken bridge of St Benezet. You can go far into the river, but you cannot go across. Petit Avignon will always be Paradise. It is like Avignon seen in the River: you see the re- flection and you enjoy it; you can see it like a child and enjoy it; but put your hand into the water and try to catch it, to palp it, and you have only water in your hand. So does the deer drink water of the mirage or the barren woman have her son.
Heresy, I continued, was the near-Truth seen as Truth. Heresy is romantic, as Petit Avignon is romantic, heresy is the promise of Paradise. Heresy is the masculine turned feminine for protection, for fear of the real-like the solid golden England under Queen Victoria. Paradise is a feminine continuity in a cul- de-sac, it is the deification of death, the immortality of mortality; Paradise, therefore, is full of angels. Eternity is a masculine concept. To accpt eternity is to dare annihilation. To be dissolved is not to be reborn. But Paradise is to continue as one is as a ghost is supposed to be-only not in darkness but in light. Not to dare annihilation but to continue is to affirm the tangibility of the object. In a Paradise created outside of time, isolate and blue, as in some of the medieval manuscripts-with queens, gardens and palaces, and turrets; white horses, story telling pygmies, the unicorn, and angels trumpeting; with the river of paradise flowing as milk-you create the isolation of love. You keep your body pure for Paradise, come la carna gloriosa e santa. You jump into fire and become pure, because you will go to Paradise. So Paradise becomes the fulfilment of love.
On a green emerald It carried, the desire of Paradise: It was the object called the Holy Grail.
Turrets, blue skies, and the music of angels are promised. So you isolate your love and put her into a turret, into a palace. You can go as far as the end of the broken bridge, and look at Petit Avignon. And standing on this side you can sing ditties. Being un-deflowered the virgins in Paradise will be exalted. Their bosoms will be full, their limbs straight and lovely, and on their heads will be crowns. There is no pain and there is love. Mean- while you go, on horse and foot, to fight the Turk. The Holy Land shall be free. There be many lovely women there. You might marry them, give children to them, and return heroes with booty, with your limbs stilled of passion. Then lay your sword before your Lady, and offer her your worship. She smells it, and you sing to her.
Sans coeur suis et sans coeur demeure Je n'ai membre, ni pied, ni main. Sans amour en amour demeure, Vivant, faut-il donc que je meure.
That is the perfect picture of Paradise. To be orthodox, to be a smartha, I said to myself, is to accept the real. Stalin is orthodox; he is crude and smelly like some Jesuit father, he the product of a seminary. But Trotsky promised us beauty, promised us paradise. There is a saying that when Trotsky was talking of the beautiful world revolution, Stalin was making statistics of the bovine riches of Soviet Russia. He wanted to know whether the peasants had enough to eat and drink, and their children had enough milk.
Again, Bonaparte turned the French Revolution and made it. realistic. He built roads and bridges, started a military academy, established jurisprudence, innovated the system of education and turned Robespierre's Republic into a total human ex- perience. ('Robespierre himself,' said Péguy, 'that royalist) But Bonaparte went wrong when, after changing his world, he estab- lished himself as the cause of the change; from the Consul Bonaparte he made himself the Emperor of the French. From an impersonal revolutionary he made himself in a hero; as a per- son, an ego, he entered history. This he knew to be improper, which explains his desperate desire to be crowned by the Pope, to be sanctified, to recover the impersonal-the thief of the Absolute, to become identical with the Absolute. And thus on to the Emperor N.N.N.N..... Otherwise Napoleon would have ended, almost as Hitler did, on the bunk of a dug-out.
The Cathar, the pure Hitler, who ate only green vegetables, lived in some Montségur (remember Tristan and Parsifal) and ended in the crudity of his own myth. He married Eva Braun: that had to be his death. Paradise ended on that bunk.
Beatrice, O Beatrice is beautiful in Paradise. But what an impossible tyrant she becomes. It is she who wants to show the Truth to Dante.
Apri gli occhi e riguarda qual son io; tu hai veduto cose, che possente sei fatto a sostener lo riso mio.
She who should see light through him, now wants to show the light to him. It is the inversion of Truth. Where the world can- not annihilate itself, whether it be in Buddhism or in Chris- tianity, it has to make the world feminine. Just as progeny is through woman, child after child, generation after generation, you may have as many paradises as you care to have. Buddhism went to Tibet, and gave itself many paradises. Tantra entered Hinduism, and worshipping the women, made the world real. Man became thus the everlasting, the superman, the slave of him- lf, and all such supermen must end in stink and on the bunk of at dugout. Eva Braun showed the world was real. The ogre, the superman Hitler, inventor of the gas-chambers and the concentration camps, died a simple man. Almost an anonymous person. Ravana was defeated by his ten heads. The miracle must for ever end in emptiness.
But the smartha-some Innocent III-knows this world is in- tangible, and all worlds therefore are intangible, and turns his vision inwards. Paradise vanishes where you are the interior intimo meo of St Augustine. And the world continues as it is. The two are not distint experiences, but it is experience seen as the totality of Experience. Whether you see the world or you do not see the world you are.
Writing this I am reminded of a very moving story of Radha and Krishna:
'One day Radha had a very possessive thought of Krishna. "My Krishna," she said to herself, as though one could possess Krishna as one could possess a calf, a jewel. Krishna, the Absolute Itself, immediately knew her thought. And when the Absolute knows, the knowing itself as it were, is the action of the act, things do not happen according to his wish, but his wish itself is his own creation of his wish, as the action is the creation of his own action.
'So, Durvasa the great Sage was announced.
"He is on the other side of the River, Lord," spake the mes- sengers, "and he sends his deep respects."
"Then Krishna went into the inner chambers and said to Radha, "Radha, Durvasa the great Sage is come, my dear. We must feed him."
"Oh, then I will cook the food myself," said Radha, and Krishna was very happy at this thought. So he went back to the Hall of Audience, and not long after, Radha came in with all the cooked food. "Yes, the meal is ready, My Lord. And I will take it myself to Sage Durvasa."
Wonderful, wonderful!" exclaimed Sri Krishna, pleased with the devotion of his wife to the Sages.
"I'll go and come," said Radha, and hardly had she gone! the palace door, than she remembered the Jumna was in flood. No ferryman would go across. She came back to Krishna and begged, "My Lord, how can I take the food? The river is in flood."
"Tell the river," answered Krishna, "Krishna the brahma- chari¹ wishes that the way be made for you to pass through
'And Radha went light of heart, but suddenly bethought herself it was a lie. Who better than she to know whether Krishna be brahmachari or not? "Ah, the noble lie, the noble lie," she said to herself, and when she came to the river, she said, "Krishna, the Lord, the brahmachari, wishes that the way be made for me to pass through."
'And of course the river rose high and stood still, but suddenly opened out a blue lane, small as a village footpath, through which Radha walked to the other side. And coming to the opposite shore, she thanked the river, and saluting the great Sage Du vasa, in many a manner of courtesies and words of welcome, spread the leaf, and laid him the food.
'Durvasa was mighty hungry and he ate the food as though the palm of his hand went down his gullet. "Ah, Ah," he said and belched and made himself happy, with curds and rice and many meats, perfumed and spiced with saffron, and when there was nothing left in leaf or vessel, he rose, went to the river and washed his hands. Radha took the vessels to the waters, too, to wash, threw the leaf into the Jumna, and stood there to leave. Then it was she suddenly remembered, the river was in flood. Sri Krifana had told her what to say while going and not what to utter while coming back.
'Durvasa understood her question before she asked for the Sages have this power too-and he said: "Tell the river, Dur- vasa the eternal upanasi, says to the river, 'Open and let Radha pass through to the other shore.""
'Radha obeyed but she was sore sorrowful. "I have seen him eat till his palm entered his gullet, and he has belched and passed his hand over his belly with satisfaction. It is a lie, a big lie," she said, but she went to the river thoughtful, very thought- ful."River," she said, "Durvasa who is ever 'm upavasa says open and let me pass."
The celibate, or he who has taken the vow of celibacy.
He who fasts. *And the river opened a lane just as wide as a village pathway, and the waves held themselves over her head, and would not move. She came to the other shore and returned to the palace in heavy distress. "Yes, nature is a lie, nature believes and obeys lies. Lord, what a world," she said to herself, and going into the Hall of Sorrowing, shut herself in and began to sob. "Lord, what a lie the world is, what a lie."
'Sri Krishna knew the cause and cadence of this all, and gently entered the Hall of Sorrowing: "Beloved, why might you be in sorrow?" he said.
"My Lord," she answered, "the river believes you are a brahmachari, and after all who should deny it better than me, your wife. And then I go to Durvasa and he eats with his palm going down his gullet, and he says, 'Tell the river, Durvasa who's ever in upavasa asks you to open and let Radha pass.' And the river opens herself, makes a way large as a village pathway and I pass over to this side. The world is a fib, a misnomer, a lie." ""The world, my dear, is not a lie, it is an illusion. Besides, tell me, is my body your husband, Radha?"
"No, My Lord."
"Is my mind your husband, Radha?"
*"No, my Lord."
*"*Then what is it you mean when you say to yourself, 'Krishna,
my husband"." Assuredly something beyond the body and beyond the mind the Principle."
"And tell me, my love, can you possess that, can you possess it?"
"No, my Lord, how can I possess the Absolute? The" is the Absolute." And she fell at the Lord's feet and understood, and lived ever after in the light of the Truth."
To be free is to know one is free, beyond the body and beyond the mind; to love isto know one is love, to be pure is to know one is purity. Impurity is in action and reaction: what is born must die, what has form must vanish and stink. La Charogne of Baudelaire was a fact; La Charogne was a fact to accept, so that Cézanne could paint the mauve and violent sky of Mont Ste- Victoire. You need not take consolamentum and jump into the fire to be a Cathar, for what are you but a Cathar? Everyone, beyond his body and beyond his mind, is a Cathar. The Ganges dissolves all sin. Even the ashes of the dead that the fire has burnt must dissolve in the Ganges and have absolution.
Sakala kalusha bhangé suarga sopana sange Taralata Gangé Devi Gange prasida Dissolver of blemishes Companion of the Waters Dancing and sparkling Ganges I worship.
Benares is everywhere where you are, says an old Vedantic text, and all waters are the Ganges. To realize this is to be a true Cathar. The rest is heresy.
But I had such a tender heart for the Cathars, as I had for the Buddhists, that I felt I must go down south, and see in the light of the Languedoc the truth of this truth, so to say. Yet the Church too had its truth-you must remember what a kind and gentle Christian even Innocent III was. On the other hand, how could one condemn those who, with such beauty in their eyes and their faces lit with a divine conviction, jumped down the precipice at Montségur, or shut themselves up in the caves of Orolac, the Holy Grail in their hands. Death itself to them was life. The Cathar, the Saint, wants to transform the world in his image-he the supreme anarchist. The Sage knows the world is but perception; he is King, he, Krishna the King of Kings. The one cannot be many, but the many can be one, and the one thus transcended to its non-dual source, the ekam advayam, the one not-two is Truth. (In between is the moralist, the Republican of Ferney, with one foot in royalist France, the other in Zwingli's Switzerland, in the contemplation of the lake, memoryful.) Brother, my brother, the world is not beautiful-you are beauty. Be beauty and see not the beautiful, my Parsifal,
I went down to Montpellier again, to that very lovely arched town of Henri IV, took a room on Boulevard Ledru-Rollin, just off the recurrent aqueduct of Le Peroux. Wandering backwards and forwards through that light and clear air, wandering to Béziers to see the Black Church again, going to Sète to see the Cemetery, taking a train and going to Carcassonne, feeling the earth, and looking at the faces of the men and women of Lan- guedoc, I understood much that no history could say. There, was great kindness in the sunshine, a keen perceptivity about the cypresses, the oaks of the garigue; some love had passed by there, that had no name as yet, and had hallowed the land. The minstrelsy of Languedoc had made modern man, as Denis de Rougement explained, and the troubadour was the forerunner of Paul Valéry. The Lady had to be, for the Cemetery of Sète to have meaning. The Mediterranean had to be, for happiness to be. In that sunshine, in the touch of that volcanic earth, man could believe in his own realistic eternity. Greece made life real. Montségur made death real. To believe in death is to commit suicide the Cathar Bernard Bort refused consolamentum because he thought he could not die: quia non putabat mori. Life that pro- longs itself beyond death, beyond all deaths, is orthodox, is the real law. 'Never at any time am I subject to Death,' says the Rigveda. The only real illusion, mrityu, mara, is Death. Man seeks for ever the death of death.
You can live in life and think on death. Can you be in death and think on life? La Charogne proved the soul. Valéry ful- filled Bertrand de Born:
Lumière!... ou toi, la mort!
Instead of life being turned into death, death had to be inte- grated into life. The cemetery proved the Mediterranean, with its serrated cypresses going upward into the light of the hill, the silly tower of the church, and its empty bell, showed the wide, blue, free Mediterranean was the norm, the reality. The Mediter- ranean is inclusive of Sète. 'La mer, la mer toujours recommencée."
The acrid, crusted Languedoc, did not have the rolling, self- assured sweetness of Provence. The Rhône divided them, blue green, mother Rhône. And where the Rhône met the Mediter ranean rose the stub, collected Church of Ste Marie-de-la-Mer,
where Marie-Madeleine had landed, and where the Gipsies still come to crown their King. Farther away, where the Mediter- ranean turns inwards, withdraws with an intimate tenderness into the land, and curves again to make the castellated hilltops of Liguria, is Italy; there man believed himself to be whole, and so invented the Paradise where the acorn grows. I hard shut myself in, and tried to isolate myself in the present of separated exist- ence. Mother Rhône, sister to Ganga, flowed on the other side. Madeleine's kingdom was' not my world, ber trees, virgins, Buddhist pigeons were not of my understanding. I lived among the unicorns, I wrote letters to Madeleine and I had no reply.
The days were filled with many splendid things. As the sun- shine had given me an instinct to see, to discover, I went into libraries, families, monasteries and found manuscripts and stories of the Cathars, for Catharism is a very living tradition in the Languedoc; and I marvelled at the sheer magnanimity of their faith. I did not hear from Savithri for a very long time. Then came just a line, sent on by Cooks from Paris: 'The radar, Rama, has landed the plane where it should. Forgive me. S.' The Ligurian coast seemed to shine with a greener brilliance than I had ever known before. Paradise, I thought, does, does exist....
One very cold winter evening early in January, when the snow had fallen, and the whole world seemed re-created, I went back to Aix. It was moving to hear the long lamentations of the Marseille streetcars, to smell the rich, soap-like air of the city, and slowly, desperately seek back the hills, the mountains, from which so much sweetness, so much purity once had flowed. The Buddha might have passed there, so cool and tender the land- scape looked, and it was as if the stones were but elephants that had knelt, as the Compassionate One passed by, offering their homage, kneeling with their trunks between their legs. The Buddha had touched them, and such was their love of the Lord that 'Let his touch remain', they said, and so became stone. And in between the legs of the elephants, where they laid their trunks, little altars were built by the Goths, and then by the Romans and the French, first in adoration of the sun and moon, Apollo, Zeus, and Diana; and then time turned them int chapels of the Virgin, the Mother of God. I could have knelt as the bus swung upwards. Holiness is wheresoever love is.
I entered the Cathedral of St Sauveur and wandered into my- self. How such a structure seems to mirror one's own mystery, the memory of one's self, the picture of one's being. The dead-live in the towers, they say, and the dead, speak in compassion to us. Father, mother, brother, husband, or son: speak, that we bear kindness to one another, that we revere one another, for in death there is no reverence. Death is a shadow, a despair of light.
I knelt, I do not know for what, and hid my eyes from myself. I did not weep, I did not sing, I did not know. I knelt that hap- piness might be. That the dead might pardon us for our mistakes, for we are poor fools, thinking that the Rhône divides mankind. Love was born on those garigues of Provence, and love lights us when we pray.
Love shines as the instinct in the step, where we move. The snow has fallen again. We leave our footsteps behind telling love we have loved. The post office may be there and may not take letters for someone, they think, has cut the bridge on the Rhône but where chevaliers have walked, and have con- quered kingdoms for their ladies, why could not a Brahmin, a simple foolish soul, go up the steps and see the light on the second floor of Villa Ste Cécile? I go up the steps, I the husband of Madeleine.
There were irises on both sides of the pathway. The snow had bent them, the snow overflowing the orange trees. I rang, where my name still was, 'K. R. Ramaswamy,' and Madeleine came down the staircase. She was light of foot, though she was still round; her fat had not diminished. Like the moon in a theatre, there was a crescent somewhere in the sky, and an abundant purity about the stars. Madeleine opened the gate.
'It is I,' I said. 'C'est moi, Madeleine.' She did not seem sur- prised. She did not look happy: she did not look hesitant. 'May I come in?' I said, as she walked back up the garden. I closed the gate behind me. She held the door wide ajar, for me to come in.
It was a strange house, it was someone else's house. There were wheel-barrows on the landing, and bottles and two bicycles. I went up the stairway. The rooms were bare. Almost all the furniture was gone, it seemed. There was the same low bed, covered with a yellow bed-cover. There were many chakras and mandalas on them, like one sees on Tibetan makas. The table was richer with a few more sajras, a few fnore demons, and a very beautiful big Avalokiteshwara. There were red hibiscus in the water, and at the foot of the Avalokiteshwara. I sat in the only chair in the room, still one of the plush chairs that had come from her mother. She sat on the floor, squat like a Hindu, and took the rosary from the table. The room smelt of something familiar-it smelt of sandalwood.
'Why did you come?'
"To see you.'
'You cannot see anything but the eighteen aggregates.'
'But eighteen aggregates can see eighteen aggregates,' I said, laughing.
"Then it is no business of mine,' she said, and started counting her beads. I sat there, in the smell of sandalwood. In the inner picture, of Indra and Prajapathi, of the Buddha that was, and the Buddha to be, I saw mountains, rivers, and snows, animals and mankind walking backward through history, as in a film, as in some ancient story. I could see Madeleine kneeling before an ascetic and saying, 'My Lord, are you a man or a divinity." And the yellow-robed one answered, 'May I know what I am, lady? I am but a wanderer, a ministrel, a mendicant.' And she gave him, she in the infinitude of her compassion, a home and a bowl, hot water to wash in and cold, cool water to drink. She rubbed him, did the lady, with many sweet-smelling unguents, and bathed him in the love of her tears; her hair grew long and curled and black, for her love was so simple in devotion, and she rose and she sat, as though love was a gesture, a genuflexion, and she parodied herself out of existence, remembering the love she bore the ascetic. And she lived a long and intent life, in world after world, bathed herself and combed her hair, washed herself and prepared herself, as though fer a wedding; but when the earth came and the light of trees and rivers, the intelli- gence of Plato, the directness of Descartes, she gave herself a name and a station, and prepared herself for a festival. Festival is only the commemoration of what is not; you worship the non-existent to prove that you exist. You worship your. self in your birthdays, saying time is eternal. You worship your son knowing you will die. You worship your husband the Lord, knowing he is a fool, a thief, a non-existent Brahmin, 'made of the eighteen aggregates of Nagarjuna.' True, the snow is pure and white in the garden outside, true that the sun must shine some day on the footsteps that have been left behind; true, too, that the Buddha has passed this way, and that elephants have knelt; and that the black virgin of St Ouçn still cures dread diseases three circumambulations with a stick of oak, and four 'OMJRIMS', and a draught of the juice of red dandelion with honey, and eight narrow nights on the white carpet asleep-and the next morning, what you give cures, what you say heals. But love, my love, cannot be healed, cannot be said. It must go as it came. It must not linger, it must not name, it must die; for it was made of the eighteen aggregates. Love that is love remains, like those hibiscus in the crystal; the water reflects them, as my eye reflects God. Look, look into it, my Brahmin, and see me. 'Apri gliocchi e riguarda qual son io.' There was no word spoken, and all was said. You just see the counting of beads. Then you ride and say to God, even unto the Buddha Himself, many, many angry things. 'Lord Buddha, my Lord, O you abode of Compassion, O you who talked even unto the courtesan Ambapalli and partook of the meal of Chunda, the untouchable, do you hear me? May love be as fat-bosomed as the olives in Aix be ancient. (Ah, cela vient du temps des Romains," said Scarlatti, as though, being Italian, he still was a Roman, and as though he had conquered France.) Lord Buddha, did you make the cypress grow grey, and the skin so pale? Must one shine only because one is desperate, that man and husband had to take the steps out of the garden, counting the marks he'd made, on the pure winter snow? Must the bead be the ladder of intel- ligence? Must truth grow fat with fasting? It smells bad, Lord Buddha, it smells very bad, that the Kingdon of earth be shut in with a garden gate.
India, my Lord, is a vast and lost land; a beloved land of many mountains and cliffs, of cedars and deodhars, of elephants and tigers, of pigeons that sing and owls that hoot. We grow mangoes in India, Lord Buddha, and the women of my country worship trees. Buddha, Lord Buddha, quit the sanctum, come through vision and dream; come like that statue of you, brought to Lon- don in some British Governor's box, which came night after night with tears in its eyes, and body grown fat with fasting, saying, 'Send me back, send me back, send me back to my own Land'; till one day the lady sent the Buddha away and all was peace and brilliance in the air of Brighton. Buddha, Lord Buddha, do not traffic with the Black Virgin;, do not sing those Tibetan mantras; do not fast, do not preach, do not count beads; open the door and walk out to the India that is everywhere about, marking the foot- steps on the snows.
The river Rhône flows like the Ganges, she flows does Mother Rhône into the seven seas, and she built herself a chapel, that the gay gipsies might come and sing and worship Sarah in her sanctuary. Ships go, rushing ships go now to India, to far India, to quick India. Go there Mother Earth, go there Mother Rhône! Do not devastate your being with fast, tear, and prayer. India is the Kingdom of God, and it is within you. India is wheresoever you see, hear, touch, taste, smell. India is where you dip into yourself, and the eighteen aggregates are dissolved. Even Bertrand de Born I take with me. I would take even Péguy to my India. Come... Mother, Mother Rhône...!
Lemust have gone round and round the post office six or seven times, then I went down to the Place de la République and jumped into a taxi. I said 'Tarascon and what a night of love it was, with the moon and the snow, and then the Rhône.
I went back to work. I now understood why the boat of Iseult which carried the white sail first and then the black, was seen by the people of Loonois as though the black came first. Iseult with the lovely hands had to remain a widow. The potion of love was made of the eighteen aggregates. The limb and the lip spoke to one another. King Mark was not fooled, he was wise and he knew, knew that being a King, a Principle, he could not admit sin. Where sin is admitted death is true, Tristan took Iseult of the white hands as bride, but he did not take her maidenhead. Between adultery and virginity is the river Rhône. The gipsies who marry and dance at Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer know there is no sin. When you have a Gipsy King, and the long road, you play with life distributing destiny cards to yourself. King or Queen, Diamond or Heart, they are so many dimensions of one's living. But when you live in dimension itself, the world is yours. You reap and you enjoy, you breed children and you grow fat, you live in a palace or you give away Prizes at a Football Match ('Savithri Prize at the Allahabad Football Finals,' I had read in some Indian newspaper, and seen Savithri giving away a prize to some sturdy fool), but love is continuous with dimension, love is the light of space. Objects are articulated in space, so go right, go left, go north, go east, you cannot go beyond yourself. Love, my love, is the self. Love is the loving of love.
Harmonieuse Moi....
The train came from Sète, and took me away through the night and by the Rhône, to the severe clarity, the austere benignity of Paris.
