IN LONDON I could not say whether I was happy or unhappy. I walked back and forth in my room in Kensington-it was on the third floor of an old building, and looked out on a lovely square beyond which one felt the River-I walked up and down the room, stopping sometimes to put a shilling into the gas-meter or to warm myself. Or I would snatch a book and read a quarter of a page, or jump on my bed and go to sleep for a blank quarter of an hour. And I tried thus to formulate myself to myself. I like these equations about myself or of others, or about ideas: I feed on them.
I could see in myself a vastness, as it were a change of psychic dimension, an awareness of a more ancient me. There was no joy in this knowledge, no, no exaltation. There was just a re- discovery, as though having lost a brother in famine or on pil- grimage I had wandered hundreds of miles, had asked policeman and mistress of household for him, had asked barbers, tradesmen, and sadhus for him; as though walking back through time I had asked men with a more antique form of tuft on their heads, with voices more grave, with lips more lecherous; as though from Muslims as they consolidated their ramparts, sentry-chambers, palaces, 'Brother, have you seen my brother?' I had asked; from Kings, and going beyond, by the Ganges or the Cauvery, from saints and Sages I had asked, backwards in history to the times of the Upanishads, even unto Yagnyavalkya and Maitreyi; and as though at each epoch, with each person, I had left a knowledge of myself, a remembered affirmation of myself; and in this affirmation had been the awareness of the Presence that I am, that I am my brother. Thus it was as I walked about in my Kensington room, feeling the cold of London, the dampness of the river, and my own lung twist a little here and there, as though it also was a recognition, a memory. How much of the time we live in our past: in a Florentine bridge or a kneeling Madonna of Santa Maria Novella; in a breath of thyme and rosemary from the Pyrenees, the face of a child seen at an Easter Service at the Montagne Ste-Geneviève in the name of a book, the look of a Bishop; and far away, in all India, with its little railway stations, with turbaned, beedi- smoking station-masters-Dhumath Khed, Bhumath Khed, Parusram, Alviya, Medhi Mogharpur-all sounding like some names one has known, one has lived, just as one remembers the names of battles at school in a history book. Then you like cucumber and not the bitter gourd, like the honey of the Vind- hyas and not that of the Kuruvai Hills; you like Subramanyam at first sight and you do not bother so much about Subbu, your brother-in-law from Bangalore; you like Little Mother and hate your grandmother; you like Saroja, your sister, not because she is your sister but for something else you marry Madeleine.
Where, I ask you, does history stop, and where do you begin? You can go back through biological constructs and though it be difficult to know yourself you can think yourself a dinosaur, an orang-outang, a bison, heifer or nightingale. You might feel your- self a peacock or a porcupine, then feel the more ancient tall deodhar of the Himalaya. Sitting under the deodhar you may feel memories that have no age, filling you with continuity. You can- not escape time. But you can escape yourself. And in such an escape, in the dim periphery of yourself you meet with fear, with biological fear. But if like a boar or a dog you dig deeper with your muzzle, you will see with wonder the budémakaye break open on the jungle path and you enter, the huge rock lifting like a gate, you enter the Kingdom of the Seven sisters; a Cathar, 'unPur', you enter the Grotte d'Orolac, the Mani, with the Holy Grail in your hand.
There never was time, there never was history, there never was anything but Shivoham-Shivoham: I am Shiva, I am the Absolute. Walking back and forth in my Kensington room that day-it was a Thursday, I clearly remember, the day of Jupiter-I thought of the letter I should write to Pratap. For how could I have gone to Cambridge and seen so much of Savithri without dropping him a line, some concatenation of words (and images) that might give him hope. For hope he certainly could have. Savithri always talked of Pratap as one talks of one's secretary- it must have come from the atmosphere of palaces as an in- evitable support in all contingencies, a certainty in a world of un- certainty. If she talked of him with a touch of condescension it was not because of social differences, it was just because she liked being kind to something, something inevitable, unknown, such as a lame horse in the stable or it might be an old bull, fed in the palace yard till it die; but meanwhile being treated as an elder, a palace bull, given the best of Bengal gram and the choicest of green grass. And when it died, for it would 'die', it would be given a music and flower funeral and have orange trees planted over its grave. And one day some virgin would light a lamp and consecrate it, and every day from that time on the sanctuary would be lit with an oil lamp, as dusk fell over the Palace grove....
To speak the truth, I hated this attitude of Savithri's. I felt she was so truly indifferent, so completely resigned to her fate-like all Hindu women-that for her, life was like a bullock-cart wheel: it was round, and so it had to move on night after night, and day after day, smelling chilli or tamarind, rice or coco-nut, over rut and through monsoon waters purring at the sides to the fairs in the plains; or to the mountains, high up there, on a known pilgrimage. What did it matter, she would ask, whether the sun scorched or the rain poured, or you carried tamarind or saffron? Life's wheel is its own internal law. Nobody could marry Savithri, nobody could marry a soul, so why not marry anyone? And why should not that anyone be stump Pratap? It certainly could not be Hussain Hamdain; and thank heavens his vanity and self-interest took him to Pakistan and a good job-and Pratap was, anyway, so very clean, so gentle, so sincere. If one should have a husband at all said Savithri, Pratap was the very best. "What do you think?' she had asked me one evening, a day or two before my departure from Cambridge. We were not by the river, which was reserved for us, for our conjoint intuitions of poetry and history of a song of Mira's, and again maybe of some historical character from Avignon, Nimes, Carcassonne, Albi, or Montpellier. But when we come out into the open street- light we could talk of anything, of Nehru's Government, of Father's despair at having three elephants instead of eight, a tradition which had come down from Rajendra Simha III, in the sixteenth century. Finally, in the heart of this extrovert world one can always dig a hollow, make oneself comfortable in a bus- shelter, an A.B.C., or with hot coffee at the Copper Kettle one can sit and talk of Pratap.
"There's such goodness in him. I have never seen anyone so good in life. Not even you,' she had said, in mock severity.
'I never said I was good."
'Of course not,' she teased, 'but you want to be called a saint."
'You say so,' I laughed, and that is your responsibility.' I could hear the bells ring the hour on Trinity Tower, so gathering her notes we had jumped into a taxi at the Market Square and rushed off to deposit her safely at the gate of Girton.
'It's me,' she said, with that enchanting voice, and even the gate-keeper did not seem to mind very much. 'Am I very late?' He had looked at the clock first, and then at me. 'Well, Miss Rathor, the world does not always function by the clock, does it?' he said, with a wink. She laid the red rose I had bought her on his table, saying, "This is for Catherine,' and turning to me she had added, 'She's such a nice girl, seven years old; we're great friends. Good-night, Ramaswamy, Good-night Mr Scott. Good-night."
Back in the taxi I said to myself, 'Catherine or Pratap, for Savithri it makes no difference. Both are lear because both are familiar, innocent, and inevitable in her daily existence.'
Thinking over all this, my letter to Pratap never got written. It was a damp day and I did not go to the British Museum for my work, but as it was already long past three, I took a stroll by the river. What an imperial river the Thames is-her colour may be dark gr brown, but she flows with a majesty, with a maturity of her own knowledge of herself, as though she grew the tall towers beside her, and buildings rose in her image, that men walked by her and spoke inconsequent things as two horses do on a cold day while the wine merchant delivers his goods at some pub, whispering and frothing to one another-for the Londoner is eminently good. He is so warm, he is indeed the first citizen of the world. The mist on the Thames is pearly, as if Queen Elizabeth the First had squandered her riches and femininity on ships of gold, and Oberon had played on his pipe, so worlds, gardens, fairies, and grottoes were created, Empires were built and lost, men shouted heroic things to one another and died, but somewhere one woman, golden, round, imperial, always lay by her young man, his hand over her left breast, his lip touching hers in rich recompense. There's holiness in happiness, and Shake- speare was holy because Elizabeth was happy. Would England not see an old holiness again?
For me, as I have said already, the past was necessary to understand the present. Standing on a bridge near Chelsea, and seeing the pink and yellow lights of the evening, the barges floating down to some light, the city feeling her girth in herself, how I felt England in my bones and breath; how I reverenced her. The buses going high and lit; the taxis that rolled about, green and gentlemanly; the men and women who seemed re- sponsible, not for this Island alone, but for whole areas of humanity all over the globe; strollers-some workman, who had stolen a moment on his way to a job, some father who was showing London to his little daughter, two lovers arm hooked to arm- how with the trees behind and the water flowing they seemed to make history stop and look back at itself.
London was esoteric and preparing for the crowning of another Queen; and Englishmen felt it would be a momentous insight of man into himself. The white man, I felt, did not bear his burden, but the Englishman did. For, after all, it was the English who founded the New World, yet now it was America that naïvely, boastfully, was proclaiming what every Englishman and woman really felt-that the dominion of man, the regulation of habeas corpus or the right delivery of some jute bales on Guadalcanal Island, in the Pacific, was the business of these noble towers, clocks, balances, stock-books, churring ships, and aeroplanes above, and that there would be good government on earth, and decency and a certain nobility of human behaviour, and all because England was. That I, an Indian who disliked British rule, should feel this only revealed how England was re- covering her spiritual destiny, how in anointing her Queen slie would anoint herself.
It was nearing six by now and knowing that about this hour Julietta would be at the Stag, I dropped in, took an orangeade, and sat waiting for her. Julietta was a great friend of Savithri's. She had left Girton the year before, and though I had met her only once I felt I could talk to her about anything.
Julietta and the whole generation of young English people who had either fought in the war or matured during it-Julietta was eighteen in 1945-were fascinating to me. That is why for an out- sider pub life seemed so valuable-he saw the new England, even when the English men and women he met were not particularly young. But England herself had become young-and sovran. Young Englishmen looked so open, so intellectually keen, and the girls seemed so feminine, so uninhibited. It was all so far from the world of Jane Austen or Thackeray, or even from the world of Virginia Woolf. Boys and girls met and mated and helped each other through life with, as one girl remarked to Savithri, the facility of eating an apple. In fact I was eating an apple,' said Marguerite Hoffner, 'when he did it to me. What is there in it, anyway, to talk about so much?' Indeed it was ex- plained to me that the coupling of male and female had gone on more and more normally, and that a modern Lady Chatterley would not have to go so far as a gamekeeper, but would find her man beside her in a theatre, on Chelsea Bridge, or in a pub. I only knew the foul smelling bistros in France, and almost never went to any could you imagine Madeleine, at the Café des Marroniers or in the Rencontre des Pêcheurs?-but the pub, the Stag, was so civilized.
Julietta came in, accompanied by Stephen, a Logical Positivist with a curve of sparse golden hair, a high forehead and lilting green eyes. In his opinion Aristotle had proved that the world was very real: he could not understand how one could doubt one's self.
And who doubts the doubter?' I asked.
"The doubter?'
'Who sees the doubter?'
"My mind," he answered.
'Can my mind see itself?' I pressed.
'Of course. Why not?'
*Can you have two thoughts at a time?' I continued.
'Come, come,' he said, waving his glass and feeling very happy, 'you don't want me to grow mystical do you?'
'No,' I said, 'I am talking to Aristotle."
'Well, Aristotle has decided on the nature of syllogisms.
'Why, have you never heard of the Nyaya system of Indian
logic?'
'Nyaya fiddlesticks,' said Stephen good-humouredly.
'Come, come,' said Julietta, with womanly tenderness, pushing back Stephen's golden hair. Her hands, I noticed, were not as elegant as the sensitivity on her face.
'Can light see itself?' I asked.
'Obviously not,' said Stephen. "Then how can the mind see itself?'
'I told you,' shouted Stephen, 'not to talk mysticism to me!'
'He's talking sense and you, non-sense,' said Julietta, chivalrously.
'And you, my love,' he said, kissing her richly before everyone, 'you own the castle of intelligence, and I am the Lord,' He was obviously getting drunk. I stopped, bought them each a drink and sat down. There was by now a gay crowd of artists in patched elbows, old stockbrokers with indecipherable females, landlords with their dogs, writers who talked, their nose in the air, as though publishers belonged to the tanners or the drum- mers caste-writers, of course, being Brahmins-and there were silent, somnolent painters carrying the tools of their trade, with canvases hidden under some cover, chatting with the bar-tender.
'Half of bitter, please,' came the refrain, gentle and gruff, elegant and cockney, and the whole place filled with smoke, silence and talk. The smell of perfumes mingled with other smells of females and men, making one feel that the natural man is indeed a goods man-lo naturale è sempre senza errore-that logic had nothing to do with life. Life was but lovely, and loveliness had golden hair and feminine intimacy, while the Thames flowed.
'One last question,' I said bringing more beer to Julietta and Stephen. 'The brain is made of matter...
"That is so, my inquisitor,' said Stephen, laughing.
...so the brain is made of the same stuff as the earth?'
"That is so, my Indian Philosopher.'
"Then how can the earth be objective to the earth-under- stand, the earth?"
'It's just like asking-I beg pardon, Julietta-if I copulate with Julietta, as I often and joyfully do-and the nicer, the better when there's a drink-then how do I understand Julietta? The fact is I don't understand Julietta. I never will understand Julietta. I don't know that I love her-even when I tell her sweet and lovely things. I'm happy and that's all that matters. I'm a solipsist,' he concluded laughing.
Julietta was pursuing her own thoughts, seemingly undisturbed by his statements. 'I'm reviewing a book on the subject,' she broke in, 'which says God is because evil is. Is that what you mean?'
'I don't know what you mean by God. But it needs a pair of opposites to make a world. Only two things of different texture and substance can be objective to one another. Otherwise it's like two drops of mercury in your hand, or like linking the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea-they are both water and the same. I ask you, how can the mind, made of the same stuff as the earth, be positive about the earth? Water is not positive to water-water is positive to nothing. Water is. So something is. And since isness is the very stuff of that something, all you can say is, "Is is"
'I knew Indians were mad, that Gandhi was mad. And now, now I have the proof,' said Stephen. 'I'm an old anarchist. I believe that matter is true, that Julietta is true, that I am true, and you also my friend, who stands me drinks, and spends nine-pence each time on sae and ninepence on Julietta. Now, go and get me another. This time I don't want a half. I want the whole damn' thing, and Long live Pandit Nehru.'
People from the counter turned to look and lifted their glasses to India, to me. How wonderful to be in an English pub, I thought. Such humanity you would get in France only amongst the working classes, never among the dark-faced, heaving, fingering bourgeois. The sensuality of the bourgeois is studied, it is a vice, because he was defeated before he went to it: Baude- laire was already defeated by his stepfather and his smelly mother before he went to his negress. You see the dark because you want to prove yourself the light; dialectic is on the lip of the rake. But in this young England, which I knew so little, I felt man was more primary and innocent, more inexhaustible. He did not have a 'judas' on his door-he did not cultivate the con- cierge yet. Flowers grew in his gardens, red fluorescent lights lit the top of the buildings, and beneath them, the Thames flowed. White cliffs of chalk begirt the isle at the estuary, and you could see sea-gulls rising with the ferry lights and returning to the night. Soon I'd have to be back in France, and I shivered to the bottom of my spinc. Lord, would that I could make the moment stay, and make the world England. Walking beside Savithri the next day, towards the evening we were on the Embankment I told her of my premonition of England, of this new island, knowing she was going to have a Queen: the King was already a little not there, he was so ill, and the leaves and the water in Hyde Park, the very sparrows and doves and dogs seemed to feel that there was something new hap- pening to England, that the Regency was going soon to end. 'What Regency?' asked Savithri, with the air of a pupil to her teacher.
'Why, don't you see, ever since the death of King George the Fifth. Ever since the abdication of Edward the Eighth-that new King Hal who would have created his own Falstaff, and which a fat and foolish bank-clerk civilization drove into exile- this country, which chose hemown church because her King pre- ferred to choose his own wives-having become big, with an Empire and all that involves; and she became so afraid of the Stock Exchange, and of what Mrs Petworth would say in Perth or Mr Kennedy would say in Edmonton, Alberta-for regember it's all a question of wool-shares or the London-Electric-this mercantile country drove away what might have been her best King, or at least the best loved since Henry the Fifth. Do you remember those broken French sentences addressed to his Kate: "Donc vostre est France, et vous estes miennes?" And England put in his place a noble Bharatha who apologized every time he spoke, saying, "You think I am your king, but I am only Brother to the King; I tremble, I hesitate, I wish my brother were here." And he ruled the land with the devotion of a Bharatha, worshipping the sandal of his loved brother placed on the throne. Kingship is an impersonal principle; it is like life and death, it knows no limitations. It is history made carnate, just as this Thames is the principle of water made real. And when a king apologizes for being a king he is no king; he establishes a duality in himself, so he can have no authority. "The King can do no wrong," comes from the idea that the Principle can do no wrong, just as communists say, "the Party can do no wrong." Talking of the communists the other day in Cambridge, I forgot to say that communism must succeed; happily for us, to be followed by Kingship. Look at the difference between Hitler and Stalin. Stalin, the man of iron, the mystery behind the Kremlin, the impersonal being; to whom torture, growth or death are essentials of an abstract arithmetic. As the Catholics looked for omens in the Bible, Stalin looked to impersonal history for guidance. Stalin lives and dies, in history as history, not outside history. Hitler, on the other hand, lived in his dramatic Nuremberg rallies, visible, concrete, his voice the most real of real; his plans personal, demoniac, his whims astrological, his history Hitlerian-Germanic, if you will-dying a hero, a Superman: Zarathustra. Duality must lead to herbism, to personality- development, to glory. The dualist must become saintly, must cultivate humility, because he knows he could be big, great, heroic and personal, an emperor with a statue and a pediment.' Here, silently Savithri led me on to Chelsea Bridge, and looking down at the river, I continued: 'But the impersonal is neither humble nor proud-who could say whether Stalin was humble or proud? But one can say so easily and so eminently of another Cathar, another purist, Trotsky-that noble revolutionary of perfect integrity-that he was vain. He would gladly have jumped into the fire, down the campo di crémars, smiling and singing, "I am incorruptible, I am pure, I am the flame." Stalin would have the Kremlin guarded with a thousand sentrics, a few thousand spies, killing each one when he knew too much, first a Yagoda, then a Yezhov. For him History killed them, just as an Inca chief believed his god, not himself, wanted a sacrifice. Stalin bore no personal enmity to Trotsky, for this was real history. Even if Stalin the man was jealous of Trotsky "the flame of pure Revolution" (and Stalin might have admitted this), Stalin who is history, had to kill Trotsky the anti-history. The pure, the human, the vain- glorious leader's personal magic was an unholy impediment to the movement of history. In the same way Marshal Toukhachesv- sky had to die-the impersonal cannot allow that any man be a hero. Stalin was no hero: he was a king, a god.'
'How well you hold forth,' teased Savithri, tugging my arm. She wanted me to look at the barges as they floated down, or at the clear moon that played between the clouds and delighted Savithri as it might have a child.
'Moon, moon, Uncle Moon,' I chanted a Kanarese nurs- ery rhyme, 'Mama, Chanda-mama,' and then we went back to history.
"The Superman is our enemy. Look what happened in India. Sri Aurobindo wanted, if you please, to improve on the Advaita of Sri Sankara-which was just like trying to improve on the numerical status of zero. Zero makes all numbers, so zero begins everything. All numbers are possible when they are in and of zero. Similarly all philosophies are possible in and around Vedanta. But you can no more improve on Vedanta than im- prove on zero. The zero, you see, the sunya is impersonal; whereas one, two, three and so on are all dualistic. One always implies many. But zero implies nothing. I am not one, I am not two, I am neither one, nor two: elham hirvikalpi niräkara rüpih.' I am the "I". So, to come back to Sri Aurobindo, he shut himself in Pondicherry and started building a new world. If you can build a house of three stories, you can build one of five, eight, ten, or twelve stories and go as high as the Empire State Building or any other structure, higher and yet higher. And just as aero- planes at first went fifty miles an hour, then eighty, then a hun- dred, two hundred, three, and now go far beyond the speed of sound, similarly you can build any number of worlds, can make the mind, the psyche so athletic that you can build world after world, but you cannot go beyond your self, your impersonal principle. And just as the materialism of Stalin and not his im- personal sense of history, but his material interpretation of history made him end up like the Egyptians in being embalmed and made immortal as history, Sri Aurobindo tried to make this perishable, this chemical, this historical body, this body of eighteen aggregates as Nagarjuna called it, permanent. Moralism and materialism must go together. The undying is a moral concept for death is a biological phenomenon, an anti-life phenomenon, against the nature of the species. Not to die, to drink the elixir of life, is moral-it is to transcend the phenomenal as celibacy is the transcending of nature. The moral must end in mummification and the pyramid.' 'I am breathless,' said Savithri; 'you take me too far and too quickly.'
'Just a moment,' I begged, 'I'll soon finish. The Superman is the enemy of man-whether you call him Zarathustra, Sri Aurobindo, Stalin, or Father Zossima.'
"That's a new gentleman in history,' laughed Savithri.
'Oh,' I remarked, a little irritated by her disturbance, 'it's a saintly character in Dostoievsky: he smells-he decomposes when he dies, and thus disturbs the odour of sanctity his miracles had brought to him. When Sri Aurobindo died his disciples must have felt the same: the deathless master, who wanted to conse- crate his body, consign it to immortality, died like any other. His breath must have stopped, his eyes must have become fixed in their sockets, but being a yogin he may have been sitting in a lotus posture, and that would have given him beauty and great dignity.'
'And now?' begged Savithri. The damp of the river was rising. 'I am a biological phenomenon, and food and warmth are necessary. Besides,' she added, pulling her sari over her breast as though it was she who would suffer, 'besides, I am terrified of your lungs." So I obeyed and we slowly strolled along the Embankment.
"You know,' I said, 'Julietta is probably at the Stag."
'Ah,' she burst out laughing, 'so you remember geography and biography do you? Come let us go."
'Oh, never, never!' I shouted. 'You, Savithri, in a pub?' 'Pub or no pub, take me anywhere, my love,' she said, so gently, so dedicatedly and with such a pressure of her fingers on my arm that the whole world rose up into my awareness renewed; 'take me anywhere, and keep me warm.' Was it I, the foolish schoolteacher, this miserable five foot eleven of Brahmin feeble- ness, this ungainly, myopic over-bent creature, to whom she had said those two tender, commonplace, but perfect words? It was the first time she ever said them to me, and perhaps she had never said them to anyone else. History and my mind vanished somewhere, and I put my arms round that little creature she hardly came to my shoulder and led her along alleyways and parkways, past bus-stop, bridge, and mews-to a taxi.
'Let's go to Soho,' I said, and as I held her in my arms, how true it seemed we were to carh other, a lit space between us, a presence-God. 'Dieu est logé dans l'intervalle entre les hommes,' I recited Henri Frank to her.
'Yes, it is God,' she whispered, and we fell into the silence of busy streets. After a long moment, she whispered again, "Take me with you, my love."
'Will you come, Savithri?"
"Take me with you, my love, anywhere.'
'Come,' I said; this minute, now....
'No, I cannot. I must go back. I must go back to Pratap.'
I pressed her against me ever more tenderly. 'Come, I'll take you,' I persisted.
"To God,' she said and fell into my lap. I touched her lips as though they were made witle light, with honey, with the space between words of poetry, of song. London was no longer a city for me, it was myself: the world was no longer space for me, it was a moment of time, it was now.
At Barbirolli's I ordered a Chianti, and said, as though it had some meaning, 'And now you must learn Italian.' 'Io ritornai dalla santissima onda rifatto si come piante novelle renovellate di novella fronda Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle."
I recited. 'You must learn Italian, for God has texture in that language. God is rich and Tuscan, and the Arno has a bridge made for marriage processions."
'So has Allahabad,' she added, somewhat sadly. 'And ap- propriately it is called the Hunter Bridge.'
'May I go on with my Superman?' I begged.
'The biological sense of warmth having come back to me-and how nice this Chianti is she raised her glass, 'I can now follow any intricacy of thought. I like to play chess with you history.' in 'The Minister is the Superman,' I started.
'And the King?"
'The Sage. The Vedantin, himself beyond duality, is in him- self, through duality and non-duality.'
"That's too difficult with Chianti. I wish, Rama-shall I call you that from now?-I wish you could sing me a song, and I would lie on your lap, far away where there is no land or road, no river or people, no father, fiancé, filligree, palace, or elephants- perhaps just a mother-and on some mountain...'
'In Kailas...' I said.
*You would sit in meditation.'
'And you?'
Pray, that you might awaken, and not burn the world with that third eye that eye which plays with history, 'she laughed.
And parrots would sing, and the mango leaf be tender, be like copper with morning sunshine.' 'And I would go round you three times, once, twice, thrice, and fall at your ash-coloured feet, begging that the Lord might absorb pe unto himself.... I am a woman,' she added hesi- tantly, 'a Hindu woman.
Mérého Giridhara Gopala... Mine the mountain-bearing Krishna, My lord none else than He.' History, Stalin, and the Superman had vanished. Trying to solve the puzzle of history, like some hero in a fable, I had won a bride. A princess had come out of the budumékaye, but the moment I had entered the world of the seven sisters the Prime Minister's son had led a revolution in the palace, had imprisoned the other six, and put us two under arrest. King Mark of Tintagel awaited his Isolde. I would have to give her to him, but having drunk the Potion of Granval I would meet her by brooks and forests; I would be torn by dragons, but some day we would lie in the forest, the sword between us. Some day love would be strong enough to shatter the rock to fragments, and we should be free to wandler where we would, build an empire if we cared.
'And we shall have a bambino,' she said, and laughed as though she had caught my thought.
'Two,' I added. 'One is Ganesha and the other Kumara.' 'And we shall throw colours on each other at Holi under the mountain moon. Our Indian Eros shoots with a flower, so why burn him?'
'Why not?' I asked. 'The third eye opens when the attraction has ended. I hope you are not attracted by me?'
'Oh, no,' she said. 'If I were attracted by attraction, there would be no one like Hussain. He looks like someone from a Moghul painting, lovely with a long curve of eyebrow, a thin waist, very long gentle hands-and inside here,' she pointed to her head, 'all empty. His heart is filled with popped rice, curly and white and isolated. Muslims know how to please a woman,' she finished, rather sadly.
'And a Hindu?'
'A Hindu woman knows how to worship her Krishna, her lord. When the moon shines over the Jumna, and lights are lit in the households, and the cows are milked, then it is Janaki's son plays on the banks of the Yamuna in Brindavan. The cattle tear their ropes away, the deer leave the forests and come leaping to the groves, and with the peacocks seated on the branches of the asoka, Krishna dances on the red earth. What Gopi, my Lord, would not go to this festival of love? Women lose their shame and men lose their anger, for in Brindavan Krishna the Lord dances. We women are bidden to that feast. Come,' she said, as though it was too much emotion to bear.
As we wandered down the streets, Piccadilly with its many- coloured lights, the Tube entrances and the bus queues gave us a sense of reality. Finally I took her to some woman's hostel off Gower Street-where she always had rooms reserved for her and where she was looked after by her friend Gauri from Hyderabad, round as Savithri herself, but loquacious, big and protective. I was always so afraid of Savithri getting lost. It was not only a matter of bringing back her glasses or pen, but one always felt one had to bring Savithri back to Savithri. 'Ah, I am very real,' she protested. 'And tomorrow you will see how clever I am at taking buses. I'll jump into a 14 at Tottenham Court Road and be in Kensington at ten precise,' she promised as I left her. I knew that at ten she would still be talking away to Gauri about some blouse-pattern or somebody's marriage in Delhi. I knew I would have to telephone and ask her if she knew the time. I promise you, you need not telephone. Tomorrow I will be punctual as Big Ben.' With Savithri the profound and the banal lived so easily side by side.
I touched her hand at the door, to know I could touch her, and carried the feel of it home. It was like touching a thought, not just a thought of jug or water, or a pillow or a horse, but a thought as it leaps, as it were, in that instant where the thought lights it- self, as the meteor its own tail. I felt it was of the substance of milk, of truth, of joy seen as myself.
Next day, when I was washed and dressed and had meditated and rested-I was in a muslin dhoti and kudtha-there was still no sign of Savithri at ten or at ten past ten. Not long after, she entered in a South Indian sari of a colour we in Mysore call 'folour of the sky', with a peacock-gold choli, and a large kun- kum on her forehead. She looked awed with herself, and full of reverence. As I went to touch her I refrained-something in her walk was strange.
'I have been praying.'
"To whom?'
"To Shiva,' she whispered. Then she opened her bag and took out a sandal stick. Her movements were made of erudite silences.
'Please light this for me,' she begged.
By the time I had lit the sandal stick in the bathroom and come out she had spread her articles of worship about her. There was a small silver censer, with the camphor. There was a silver kun- kum-box. She had a few roses, too, fresh and dripping with water.
'Bring me some Ganges-water in this.'
I put some plain water in her silver plate. She put some kunkum into the water.
"Will you permit me?' she asked, 'Permit this, a woman's business?'
'Oh, no!' I protested.
'But it was you who told me at home a man obeys a woman, that it's Hindu dharma."
'I obey,' I said.
Then she knelt before me, removed one by one my slippers and my stockings, and put them aside gently-distantly. She took flower and kunkum, and mumbling some song to herself, anointed my feet with them. Now she lit a camphor and placing the censer in the middle of the kunkum-water she waved the flame before my face, once, twice, and three times in arathi. After this she touched my feet with the water, and made aspersions of it over her head. Kneeling again and placing her head on my feet, she stayed there long, very long, with her breath breaking into gentle sobs. Then she gently held herself up. Taking the kunkum from the box I placed it on her bow, af the parting of her hair, and there where her bosom heaved, the abode of love. I could not touch her any more, nor could she touch me, and we stood for an isolate while. Then suddenly I remembered my mother's top- rings.
'Stop where you are for a moment,' I begged.
'I can go nowhere,' she answered, 'I belong to you.' Gently, as if lost in the aisles of a large temple, I walked about my room, opened my trunk and slowly removed the newspaper cover, then the coco-nut, the betel-nuts, the kunkum that Little Mother had destined for her daughter-in-law. 'I, too, had come prepared for this morning,' I said.
'Really?' she smiled, for in me nothing astonished her.
'Yes, but it was a preparation made a very long time ago-a long, long time, Savithri. Not a life, not ten lives, but life upon life..."
'Yes,' she said; 'This Cambridge undergraduate, who smokes like a chimney and dances to barbarian jazz, she says unto you, I've known my Lord for a thousand lives, from Janam to Janam have I known my Krishna..
'And the Lord knows himself because Radha is, else he would have gone into penance and sat on Himalay. The Jumna flows and peacock feathers are on his diadem, because Radha's smiles enchant the creepers and the birds. Radha is the music of dusk, the red earth, the meaning of night. And this, my love, my spouse,' I whispered, 'is from my home. This is coco-nut, this is Letel-nut, this is kunkum and these the toe-rings my Mother bare, and left for my bridal.' Slowly I anointed her with kun- kum from my home, offered her the coco-nut and the betel-nuts there were eight, round and auspicious ones. 'And now I shall place the toe-rings on your feet.'
'Never,' she said angrily. 'You may be a Brahmin for all I know. But do you know of a Hindu woman who'd let her Lord touch her feet?'
'What a foolish woman you are!' I said, laughing. 'And just by this you show why a Brahmin is necessary to educate you all, kings, queens, peasants, and merchants. Don't you know that in marriage both the spouse and the espoused become anointed unto godhead? That explains why in hindu marriages the married couple can only fall at the feet of the Guru and the Guru alone for the Guru is higher than any god. Thus, I can now place them on your feet.'
So much theology disturbed, and convinced her, and she let me push the toe-rings on to her second toes, one on the left and the other on the right. The little bells on them whisked and sang: I was happy to have touched Savithri's feet. The toe-rings were the precise size for her. Little Mother was right: for Madeleine they would have been too big.
Savithri sat on my bed, and the sun who had made himself such an auspicious presence fell upon her clear Rajput face as she sang Mira.
Sadhu matha já... Sadhu matha jā... O cenobite, O cenobite do not go. Make a pyre for me, and when I burn, Put the ashes on your brow, O cenobite, do not go...
We were at Victoria by nine o'clock. We were so happy and so sad altogether, as though no one could take us away from each other and nobody marry us again. We were not married that morning, we discovered, we had ever been married-else how understand that silent, whole knowledge of one another.
'My love, my love, my love,' she repeated, as though it were a mantra, 'my love, and my Lord."
And when will Italy be, and the Bridge on the Arno, and the Bambino?' I asked.
She put her head out of the window of the train, and for the first time I noticed the collyrium that tears had spread over her cheeks and face.
'I promise you one thing,' she said.
And what, Princess, may that be?' I replied, laughing.
'Parvathi says she will come to Shiva, when Shiva is so lost in meditation that were he to open his eyes the three worlds would burn."
'Meaning?' I was so frightened that my voice went awry and hollow.
'I'll come when you don't need me, when you can live without me, O cenobite.' I knew the absolute meaning of it, the exacti- tude, for Savithri could never whisper, never utter but the whole of truth, even in a joke. But it was always like a sacred text, a cryptogram, with different meanings at different hierarchies of awareness.
'I understand and accept,' I answered, with a clear and definite navel-deep voice. I can hear myself saying that to this 'day.
'Italy is,' she continued, relentless, 'when Shivoham, Shivo- ham is true.'
'Meanwhile?'
'Meanwhile I go back to Allahabad and become Mrs Pratap Singh.'
'And run the household of the new Governor,' I added, to hide my knowledgement and pain. For by now Pratap had become Personal Secretary to His Excellency the Governor of some Indian Province. 'Palace or Government House, they're equal and opposite,' I laughed.
'And what will the learned historian do?' she asked.
*Finish the history of the Cathars, and well-wed and twice-wed, become Professor of Medieval European History at some Indian University. India is large and very diverse,' I pleaded.
'I shall always be a good pupil,' she joked. The train whistled, and took her away.
I took a taxi, went back to the Stag or the Bunch of Grapes, for I do not remember exactly-and stood a drink to some bearded painter who talked abstract art and had a beautiful face. Holy is a pub when one is holy oneself.
