AFTER MY mother died, C. sold whatever he could of her possessions, and with the proceeds he and I went to India. At that time one could still travel overland, partly by hitch-hiking, partly on a bus through Turkey and Iran, from Kabul over the Khyber Pass and into Punjab; so by the time we arrived in Delhi, we had already traversed great stretches of country different from anything we had known in England.
The hotel where C. took a room for us on arrival in Delhi was like other such places we had stayed in during our journey. It was in a narrow lane with old and crooked houses, open shops or stalls on the ground floor, stray dogs and cows snuffling among the rotting food stuffs discarded in the gutter, a broken sewer, sweet smoking sticks of incense: the usual bazaar scene except that this one also had a pig rooting up refuse. Neither of us was there for the atmosphere. I was there to be with him, and he had come to seek out a philosopher or guide he had heard about. This was at an early stage of C.’s career, before he had really worked out his own philosophy; and I might as well say at once that I wouldn’t be able, even now, to explain what this was. All I know is that later many people believed in and followed him, as I did at that time.
He had of course charisma—if by that is meant a quality that would make others turn to him for whatever it was they were seeking. It may have helped that he was a very large man who towered over everyone in every room he entered. He had huge shoulders, huge thighs, muscles like those of a construction worker. While in London, to keep himself in funds, he had taken advantage of his great strength to work as a casual laborer on building sites, or as an unlicensed porter. He had very blond hair which stood up in waves like a flame. He also had a fur of blond hair on his chest and along his arms and the back of his hands. Altogether there was something primitive, even barbaric about him: he was like a Goth, or a hunter for food in forests and mountains—not at all one’s idea of a philosopher or spiritual guide.
But the philosopher whom C. had come to meet was just that: he seemed almost entirely spiritualized, non-physical. His name was Shivaji and he was already famous at that time. It was not easy for us, who knew nobody in India and were ourselves nobody, to gain access to him. He lived in a large house, in a tree-lined avenue mostly inhabited by ambassadors and cabinet ministers. The house had been taken for him by one of his followers, the wife of a rich Bombay industrialist. It was of course through this lady that C. had his first audience with Shivaji. I say “of course” because it was always through women that C. got what he needed—not that he particularly wooed them but they were always the first to respond to him. This is what happened in my case and how I came to follow him across deserts, mountains, and sacred rivers to end up with him in a small and cheap hotel room in the middle of a Delhi bazaar.
C. had been my mother Edith’s lodger in the house she bought in a north-west London suburb. This was in the 1940s, during and just after the war. My mother hated being a landlady, but it was the only way she had of making a living for herself and me. We were refugees from Austria and she was lucky to have got enough money out, via Switzerland, to buy this house. She rented rooms to her fellow refugees—all like herself from well-off, cultured families, all having to start out anew in England. C. was the only male lodger and he was a very potent presence among us. He could be heard whistling while he shaved in our only bathroom, and even if he kept us waiting to use it, we easily forgave him when he emerged, still whistling, with freshly shaved cheeks raw and rosy, braces dangling, and hair waving in a blond flame.
I spent many hours sitting on the stairs waiting for him to come home. When he had earned enough money at his various laboring jobs, he studied all day in the British Museum Reading Room, preparing himself for his future career. I didn’t mind waiting for him—I had nothing else to do, I was seventeen and had just failed my school leaving exam—and it was always worth it for me because, when he passed, he ruffled my hair and said something kind. He had the top room—it was an attic really—and I didn’t follow him there because I knew how busy he was reading and studying and covering pages of a school copy book with his writing.
He began to take me on outings with him. We neither of us had any money, so the only entertainment we could afford was to ride on the top of a double-decker bus to the end of the line and back again. We passed miles and miles of small houses and small shops and small businesses; often it rained and everything melted away and we might as well have been under water. We passed one place that was almost like country, with a field and several trees, and once he made us get off there and sit under a tree large enough to shelter us. Here he spread his leather jacket—it was bought secondhand in a street market and had some of its leather rubbed away. He invited me to lie on it; I did everything as best I could, which I know wasn’t very good. He tried not to hurt me, and since I didn’t cry out, he thought he had succeeded. There was quite a lot of bleeding, so I didn’t put my panties back on; instead he dug a hole to bury them, and we made a little ceremony of it. After that we often got out at the same place to lie under the same tree. It sheltered us against any light drizzle, but if it rained more heavily, we were drenched and had to sit on the bus all the way home in our wet clothes. We didn’t mind, and neither of us ever caught cold.
But when we got home, my mother Edith would be waiting for us. Edith had kept the two downstairs rooms for herself, one of them was her bedroom and the other what she called her salon. This she had furnished with what she managed to retrieve from her past life—a low divan, a Matisse rug, an Art Deco lamp, and a little smoking table with an ashtray on it; the ashtray was always full because Edith and all the friends who visited her smoked incessantly. She also brewed Turkish coffee in a tiny brass pot, and the fumes of coffee and cigarettes created a haze in which she could have thoughts and feelings other than her usual worries about money and lost status.
These thoughts and feelings revolved, as mine did, around C. At first they were mixed up with her money concerns—he was always behind with the rent and she often had to ask him for it, which was something she hated doing. When she knew he was settled reading and writing in his attic, she made her way up there. “Oh yes, the rent,” he said, when she had managed to overcome her embarrassment at mentioning it. He wasn’t embarrassed—the subject of money had no importance for him—and he would put his hand in his pocket: if he had managed to earn something that day and had not yet spent it, he handed it over. But she did not go away—she continued to stand looking at him, absorbed as he was in writing in his school book with a stub of pencil that he occasionally licked.
Later, when he and I had begun to go on our outings together, she would be waiting for us in her salon. She sent me upstairs and invited him in for cigarettes and coffee and to talk to him about me: how young I was, how unformed, how incapable of dealing with my emotions. She talked about love in general, and about herself and her past and her affairs and her unhappy marriage to my father and her longings and so on. It was always very late when he came upstairs, and if I had fallen asleep, he woke me up. By this time I had got into the habit of spending most of the night in his attic room, and we could hear her roaming up and down the stairs outside.
Before this, Edith and I were used to being only with each other. She and my father had separated shortly after I was born, and he emigrated to Argentina about the same time that Edith managed to get a visa for herself and me to go to England. She was a cultured person and hoped I too would grow up to love literature and music. And though her hopes were mostly centered on me, she never showed disappointment when I didn’t live up to her expectations. After I failed my exam, I heard her tell her friends that I was too imaginative to fit into the groove of education meant for ordinary girls.
But sometimes, when I came home from school, I would find her alone in her salon, her cheek propped on her hand. I put down my satchel—“What’s happened, what’s wrong?” She covered her face with her hands and said, “There’s nothing left, only to die.” Each time I was terrified. I didn’t know the cause of her despair; I think it was often financial, there were days when she didn’t know how we were going to get through the next week. Or it was emotional, something to do with a love affair, for she had one or two in those years, mostly with fellow refugees as cultured and as newly poor as she. These never worked out well, maybe because she was no longer young and also so full of anxieties; and she may have been too frantically eager—which could be seen in the way she smoked, deeply inhaling and smearing the cigarette with lipstick almost half its length as if she had been trying to swallow it. When she talked about killing herself, I became so desperate, I clung to her and made her promise, promise never to leave me. And she did and seemed comforted and lit another cigarette. Then later, when I started being with C, she several times said that there was nothing left for her, that she would kill herself. But by that time I had heard it so often, I no longer paid much attention and anyway I was too immersed in my own emotions to have room for hers; also I was no longer so terrified of being alone if she left me.
Edith loved to speak of the grand life-style—probably exaggerated in her mind—that had been hers in her family’s house in Vienna. Of course it had all gone long ago and was familiar to me only from her nostalgic descriptions and her own small attempts at recreating it in her salon. But then, after long dusty traveling in buses and trucks, I found it all again in India: the carpets, the crystal, the silver Edith had described. It was the ambience created for Shivaji by his patroness Renuka, the industrialist’s wife. She herself was born to such things and took it for granted that she had to provide them for him. He was the center of the house Renuka had taken for him: literally its center, for one had to pass through various ante-rooms before a final silk curtain was parted and there he was, crosslegged in the lotus pose on a Persian rug on a marble floor. The room was tall and had only ventilators set high up into the walls, so it was always dark: and on first entering, one’s eyes were drawn at once to Shivaji in his starched white muslin, gleaming like a lamp perpetually lit to illumine the room, the house. I have never seen anyone embody holiness the way Shivaji did. He was a high-class brahmin with a light skin that was paper-thin; very graceful, delicate. His lips were narrow, his nostrils somewhat pinched, giving him the serious expression to be expected from one with such a serious message to deliver. But when he laughed—and he laughed often—this was entirely dispelled.
Renuka had a daughter called Priya, who hated her mother’s guru. She said he was everything that was demeaning to women like her mother; that he took advantage of their higher striving and the unhappiness of their marriages (Renuka and Priya’s father had been separated for years, with him making money in Bombay and she spending it on Shivaji). In her view, his message was a fraud and designed only for his personal gain. Priya had strong ideas—she was a strong person; I had never met anyone like her, though I had gone to school with clever girls who went on to college and became professional women. Priya too had gone to college, in America; she had recently graduated from Bryn Mawr, majoring in (I think) psychology. Now she had come home to India to see what she could do for her own country. She was the first modern Indian girl I had met. I was astounded by her brains and her beauty, but she took them as much for granted as the money that was always at her disposal. The one thing she and her mother had in common—about everything else they fought continuously—was their taste for fine saris and jewelry. Every day shopkeepers came to spread their wares in one of the verandahs that encircled the house, and mother and daughter sat side by side, each buying lavishly. There was another taste they shared, and this was one for great men. But the particular great man that each chose was as different as their preference in saris and jewels.
Nothing could be more distinct from Shivaji’s delicacy than C.’s rough-hewn personality. My mother used to sneer and call him the village blacksmith. But I know that was only to turn me against him and that secretly, deep inside herself, she too was attracted by this particular quality in him. And so was Priya, for all her refinement: “He’s so real,” she would say. Certainly, compared with Shivaji who seemed almost to float above the earth, C., with his big feet in big sandals, was firmly planted on it. In the beginning, Priya would ask me to tell her about C.—she had absolutely no conception of the background of a person like him.
Since the time he moved into our house as a lodger, I used to hear Edith and her friends speculate about him. They discovered that he had given several different versions of himself. Sometimes he said that he had run away from a Hungarian orphanage; then that he had been found in a forest in the Bukovina being suckled by wolves; another time these wolves were humans who hunted him down, so that in the process he himself turned into a wild beast hiding in caves. Yet everyone agreed that, far from being hunted, it was he himself who looked like the hunter. Here, over their cigarettes and Turkish coffee, they really let themselves go: they imagined him tearing meat from the sides of animals he had killed and eating it either raw or roasted over a fire he had lit by rubbing stones together. But at this point they burst out laughing and said that it was all a lot of rubbish. Most likely he came from some very modest home—his father a shoemaker, his mother cooking vast pots of kasha—in some country with fluctuating borders and several languages. I’ve heard him speak German, Hungarian, and Rumanian, all of them I’ve been told without an accent: unlike his English, which always remained heavily Teutonic.
Although all this was fascinating to Priya, what fascinated her most was his ideas. C.’s ideas: unlike myself, Priya understood completely what they were about—or rather, as she put it, what C. himself was all about. She knew, she felt it in her guts (she had these expressions) that C. was the real thing; whereas Shivaji was (again her expression) all bunk. Not the type to repress anything, she never disguised her feelings about Shivaji; but he was just as nice with her as he was with the rest of us. He had very gentle—one could almost say “gentlemanly”—manners, a sort of physical and moral delicacy typical of high-class Hindus. When Renuka took him to England—and this was one of the many things Priya held against him—he liked to outfit himself in Savile Row suits and in shoes that had to be handmade because of his slender brahmin feet. In India he wore only Indian clothes, of the most exquisite muslin with Lucknow embroidery at the shoulders and sleeves. And whereas in Europe he enjoyed lamb and wine, in India he was a pure vegetarian, eating out of silver bowls on a silver tray which Renuka herself carried in to him.
Usually he ate alone, but once a week we had what he called a feast, with all of us gathered around him. Nothing serious was ever said at these feasts; he made them playful occasions for everyone to enjoy, with laughter and teasing. He loved to tease and he didn’t spare C. Shivaji himself always ate with his fingers, very skillfully and without spilling a drop; but when C. tried it, he got into a terrible mess, as Shivaji pointed out for everyone’s amusement. C. also had difficulty sitting crosslegged on the floor—he was too large, his legs were like pillars, impossible to tuck under him, and about this too Shivaji teased him and made everyone laugh, C. the loudest. Only Priya scowled and said she saw no particular virtue in squatting on the floor, and though she spoke quite rudely, Shivaji made out that it was all in the same spirit of friendly fun.
For Priya, Shivaji was already “past it,” as she put it: his ideas were too naive, too simplistic to appeal to the educated of her own generation. But her mother was Shivaji’s ardent devotee, and also in complete charge of his practical and financial arrangements. She had given herself and her whole life over to him. She hardly spent any time in Bombay with her husband—“Of course Daddy is glad to be rid of her,” Priya assured us. Later, when she got to know us better—when she got to know us very well—she also shared her grudge against her father with us and told us of his scandalous affair with a Bombay film actress who made as free with his money for her young lovers as Renuka did for Shivaji.
Priya didn’t suggest that her mother and Shivaji were lovers. The word “suggest” is not right in regard to Priya, whose language was always direct, not to say blunt. I had never known anyone so uninhibited. At first this was strange to me, a contrast to the traditional modesty of the sari she so elegantly draped around herself, or the grace of her Indian gestures enhanced by the soft clinking of the gold bangles and ankle-chain she wore. But then, within this feminine exterior, she had a sharp, emancipated mind. She was voluble on every subject, including sex. She spoke frankly about her mother and Shivaji, explaining that yes of course she would have liked to have sex with him but he wouldn’t, or maybe couldn’t. Priya speculated about his sexual potency or orientation or both with such freedom that it was as if she intended to violate the purity under his spotless white muslin.
She was equally frank about her feelings for C. Of course he was at that time young, whereas Shivaji may even have been old. It was difficult to tell with him: sometimes his fine pale ivory skin seemed smooth and young, but sometimes it looked as if it had been stretched over his facial bones like parchment that was about to split. Also, whereas Shivaji sat enveloped in a hush of reverence within his palatial mansion, C. moved about the city, robustly enjoying everything around him. All our time in Delhi we lived in the same tiny rectangular room, with big patches of damp seeping through the walls on which many bugs had been squashed. The rooms in the hotel were always full, probably because they were so cheap. It was noisy with a whole lot of men in one room, drinking, laughing, and fighting. On hot nights they sat out in the street, in front of the hotel, where C. often joined them. I watched them from our window above and I could see what a good time they were all having together. Although he didn’t as yet speak much of any local language—he learned a little more every day, he was a true polyglot—he managed to communicate with everyone, largely through humor and back-slapping. They were all large men, as large as he was, and with the same rough quality. He told me that most of them were Afghans, here on business—the business was clandestine, probably in opium, always a flourishing trade on this route. Some also had connections with the brothels located in the network of alleys around the hotel and were responsible for supplying them with new girls. Theirs were dangerous and highly competitive occupations, so it was no wonder that there were frequent fights, both in the hotel and in the street, including some stabbing incidents, for everyone carried a knife or dagger hidden under their long loose shirts.
To cater to the taste of these Afghan traders, several eating stalls had sprung up with open fire pits in which highly seasoned chickens and lumps of meat were roasted on spits. C. loved this food, and when I saw him surrounded by his new friends, all of them tearing their food with their hands—so different from Shivaji’s refined table manners—it was impossible not to remember his stories of hunting and being hunted across forests and mountains. And although he was blond and they dark, dark-bearded, they were somehow of the same type: hunters, predators. They also introduced him to another of their great pleasures: Bombay films, for which we would queue up to get into the cheap seats. It was an experience to be down there in the stalls with our new friends, who knew and sang along with all the lyrics and cheered the hero and booed the villain and expired in ecstasy over the huge-bosomed heroine or with pity over her sufferings that made tears roll down her cheeks, plump as plums.
Priya deplored C.’s taste for these films, which she characterized as vulgar and childish. He went on enjoying them; he had even begun to learn the lyrics and to sing them with his friends. Although she so despised the films and their audience, Priya always came with us, for by this time she came with us everywhere. She sat around in our room for hours, though it was such a different atmosphere from anything she was used to. She never seemed to notice or to care about that. It didn’t bother her even when a fight broke out in one of the rooms, or there was screeching and cursing on the stairs every time a hotel guest was evicted. She made no secret of the fact that she had attached herself to C. and wanted to be where he was. It was very unusual for a girl like her to be seen in these bazaar streets, but she walked in them as proudly as she did everywhere, just lifting the edge of her sari a little to prevent it from trailing in anything trodden into the ground. There was something so royal about her confidence that no one dared to call after or molest her in any way. I myself had had more trouble when I first came here—the only women seen in these streets were poor shabby housewives or prostitutes dressed to kill—but by now I was generally accepted as C.’s companion. In any case, I had nothing very remarkable about me to invite sexual interest. That may have been why my presence never inhibited Priya or affected her interest in C. If he was out when she came to the hotel, she simply stayed to wait for him. I sat on the floor while she lay on the bed; no other furniture was provided except for an earthenware jar to store drinking water. When Priya ran out of conversation with me, she picked up one of C.’s books and was soon immersed in reading it.
Although Priya’s interest in C. was personal—and how could it not be?—that was only part of his appeal to her. Like everyone else, she felt the force of a great future in him, but in her case this went beyond a vague response to his personality. His ideas were in process of unfolding; and I think what interested her most was that they were so different from anything that Shivaji taught. As far as I understood this difference—and that was not very far—both wanted people to be more knowledgeable about themselves; but whereas Shivaji’s self-knowledge was aimed at transcending this world, C.’s was aimed toward a better adjustment in it. If Priya were to read this last sentence—but she won’t, she has long since moved away, physically and intellectually—she would be very impatient with me for my crude interpretation. For it was she who had tried to explain C.’s ideas to me in a way that he himself never did. He never spoke to me about these things; his relationship with me was on another level of his existence—one that was completely and utterly satisfying to me and, I like to think, in some way for him too. For me, there has never been anything like the sweetness of our sessions under the tree; and perhaps some small drop of it has also lingered with him, through all his subsequent career and his professional and personal relationships with many, many others.
When our money ran out—and I never figured how he had made it last so long—Priya became our patroness. She had a large allowance from her father and could always ask him for more, so it was not difficult for her to supply our needs. Nor was it difficult for us to accept. By this time I had adopted C.’s attitude toward money, and anyway it was fun to go shopping with Priya for new clothes, which we badly needed since ours were falling to pieces. She dressed us up in Indian outfits—the choice was hers, she knew best of course and was bossy by nature. C. now wore the same kind of loose shirt and baggy pajama trousers as his Afghan friends, so that he took on even more of their warrior appearance. Priya was also ready to move us out of our hotel room—she had already chosen a rooftop flat for us in a much better part of the city—but C. wanted to stay where we had made friends and become used to the streets and stalls that supplied us with cooked food in little earthenware pots covered with leaves. The only inconvenience was that we had only one small room with a single bed in it, and while this had been fine for only C. and me, it was no longer so when Priya began to spend most of her time with us. She often found it difficult to leave because of the discussion of ideas she was having with C. Here I might mention that it was no part of his method to confine himself to abstract discussion. Far from holding aloof, he threw himself in, made himself—his expression—part of the equation. And with Priya, as probably with his later students, this took a physical turn: and since it was part of their work together, there was no embarrassment for anyone except me, who left them alone at such times though they always said it was all right for me to stay.
In this time I got to know the city of Delhi well, wandering around on my own in its streets and parks and tombs and temples and mosques. But as the season advanced and the heat became intense, I drifted more and more to the other house, where Shivaji was. Here it was cool and tranquil, and I was given almond sherbet to drink out of a silver vessel. I sat with Renuka, Priya’s mother, on a brocade sofa while she spoke to me of her difficulties. Chief of these was her daughter Priya—she knew that daughters often rebelled against their mothers, but she could not understand why Priya’s hostility extended to Shivaji, who was such a great and realized soul. How was it that instead Priya should attach herself to someone like C.—and here she had the same sort of questions as my mother Edith used to ask me: who is he, where does he come from? “And why is she with him so much?” Renuka also asked me. This question I could answer more easily: “They’re discussing his ideas. Priya’s the only person really able to understand them.” Priya’s mother said nothing, but bit her lips like one who could say a lot if she wanted to.
While Renuka kept her opinions to herself, Priya couldn’t pronounce hers loud enough. “It’s really quite sordid,” she said of her mother and Shivaji. “It’s all about money. She’s afraid that if she doesn’t come up with it, he’ll just drop her and take up with someone else. He would too; he’s the greediest person alive.”
I didn’t believe her. Along with his other visitors, I spent a lot of time in his presence, and I always tried to be there when he was singing. He had a light, melodious voice, and although I couldn’t understand the words, I realized that they expressed feelings of love and devotion. Listening to him, all of us sat very still with only an occasional deep sigh of contentment. The one who sighed deepest was Renuka, and I think she would have liked to do more—to cry out maybe, to dance, to roll on the ground—but Shivaji was opposed to any form of ostentatious behavior. She was an imposing, regal woman, with an imperious manner, but I noticed that, when she approached him, this manner changed entirely: she became like a humble handmaiden whose one desire was to serve him. But I also saw that this deference was extremely irritating to him—he would frown and be curt with her and send her briskly about her business (which of course was his, she had no other thought or occupation). Then she would come out of his room with tears in her eyes, and complain to me afterwards about how difficult it was to serve a saint. However, whenever he had been impatient with her, he made up for it later by singling her out for praise before everyone for her selfless work, so that she glowed with pride and was able to preen herself a little.
Priya conceived the idea that C. too had to be set up, like Shivaji, as a leader with a following of his own. He could not be wasted just on me and on herself in a broken-down bazaar hotel. She wanted to take him away—not just out of the hotel or the city of Delhi but right out into a bigger world. Shivaji already had a following in Europe, but for C. Priya wanted a new world, the New World, America itself. The first step was to get him there: to make his travel arrangements and set him up on a suitable scale. Of course everything had to be first-class, as it was with Shivaji. Money had never presented a problem for Priya, any more than it had for C: in his case, because he had never had any, in hers because she had always had enough. But now her father said he couldn’t support two world movements, his daughter’s and his wife’s. He was perfectly willing to part with a certain fixed sum, the way another husband and father might have allotted pin money; and if Priya’s scheme was to be financed, then she and her mother would have to share the available amount between them. Busy with his own affairs, he left them to fight the matter out between themselves.
Renuka became very worried about not having enough money for Shivaji. It was the one thing she had to offer him, and without it she felt unworthy. There was a humility in her of which Priya had no trace. Priya felt that her contribution to C. was not money but understanding, intelligence, strength of mind, resolution, ability. She was no one’s handmaiden but a muse, a partner, a spouse. That was why it was so easy for her, I think, to disregard and displace me: because she knew I couldn’t be any of those things to him. I didn’t even have money to sponsor him. She quite liked me—indeed, I became her principal confidante: she told me how they were going to go to America and set up there and start their work. There may even have been some suggestion that I might go with them, she didn’t say in what capacity, nor did she promise anything.
It was her mother who questioned me as to what I saw as my role in their future plans. What could I tell her, since I knew nothing myself? All I had ever wanted was to be with him, but I had realized from the beginning—when my mother Edith too had questioned me about what I saw as my future with C.—that he could not be confined to only one person. He belonged to the world in all its manifestations, including all its physical pleasures that he relished so much—eating, and having sex with women he liked. It may sound strange that he enjoyed it equally with Priya and myself, and even more strange that this was acceptable to both of us. For her, it was anyway secondary and, I believe, always remained so. She stayed with him for many years in America and was largely responsible for building up the practical side of his movement. There were always many women around him, and I have heard that Priya encouraged their physical involvement with him as part of their treatment.
As for me in those early years, I began to learn to do without him. It was not that I felt differently about him—not at all, any more than he did about me. It didn’t seem to make that much difference to either of us that he now spent more time with Priya than with me. We both recognized that a new phase had started for him, one from which he could no more draw back than I could or would hold him back. “What belonged to us was that earlier time in London, our times under the tree. That was sealed, sealed off in all its sweetness, for the rest of my life anyway. Later I heard and read about him in newspapers and magazines, and saw photographs of him. He grew immensely fat, mountainous. I studied the pictures closely, trying to make out the features that I had known so well. Probably it was my imagination but I liked to think that I could find the original C. in that mass of flesh and fame: that what he had given me—all that youth and love—was still there within him and that the memory of our tree remained inviolate in him, as it did in me.
But now came the years of change, or change-over; for the more time Priya spent with him, the more time I spent in the house with her mother. Renuka wanted me there, since I was the only person she could talk to, and question about C., and about Priya, and their project together. Driven by Priya’s energy and her organizing ability, both stupendous, this was now really taking shape. Whenever she showed up at the house, she was like a whirlwind, making her arrangements over the long-distance telephone and assigning tasks and commissions to her mother’s staff. She was impatient and high-handed—doubtless like Renuka when she had first begun to organize Shivaji’s movement. But now Renuka had to stand by and watch her daughter setting up her rival organization. She also had to watch her bank account being drained of its usual allowance, for Priya had instructed her father’s employees to divert these sums to the account she had set up for her and C.’s needs. When Renuka tried to dispute or even discuss this new arrangement, Priya would brush past her without a word, her arms full of important files.
Renuka was desperate. She needed money for the house she had bought for Shivaji and its large staff, for entertaining the crowds of visitors who came to see him; at the same time there were halls to be hired for his public appearances, and the brochures and pamphlets to be printed. All this she confided to me—whom else could she talk to? Priya wouldn’t listen, and as for Shivaji himself, she would not have dared to bring these matters to his attention. Not that he wouldn’t have listened, and probably very carefully, but this was her domain, the work he had assigned to her. There was nothing else he would accept from her. And here she extended her confidence to me and spoke of that other matter she could tell no one else: her relation to Shivaji, her need for him, his coldness to her that prevented her ever showing her feelings for him, not even her reverence, for when she tried to touch his feet, the way a disciple does to a master, he drew them back and clicked his tongue in annoyance.
She chose me for her confidante, I think, because of the way I tried to listen to her: with all my attention, all my understanding. These were qualities I had not shown my mother when she needed them. At that time I was too immersed in my own happiness to pay any attention to her. And if I had listened, all I would have heard were complaints—mostly about me, how I was too young, and about C., and how no one knew where he came from. Even when she spoke more generally, as she liked to do, about the experience of love and loving, I wasn’t prepared to listen because I was in the middle of living that very experience and had no need of her theories about it.
As for C., he was himself young in those London years and concerned more with formulating his ideas than with their practical application. Later I believe he did help people in trouble with their psychological problems, although even then, in America, he got into difficulties when some of his patients did not react well to his methods. Or to him—for those who came to him for guidance (or whatever) had first to deal with him, with that personality of his which played such an enormous part in his work. For some, he must have been too strong, but he was probably unaware of that, the way the waves of the ocean are not conscious of sweeping you away.
The night that Edith killed herself she had come bursting into the attic where I was sleeping with C. Perhaps she just couldn’t stand it any more, creeping around on the stairs and maybe listening at the door. This time she pounded on it and then pushed it open. And she saw us in the light of a streetlamp outside—both of us naked and asleep in one another’s arms. It was only when she began to tug at me that we started up out of our deep sleep. “Give me back my daughter!” she shouted. C. leaped out of bed, and as he stood stark naked before her, she began to drum her fists on his chest as she had done on the door. But he was more solid than any door, and besides he had this blond fur of hair softening her blows. “Who is he anyway?” she was shouting at me. “Where does he come from? What’s he doing in our house?” C. laughed in that easy hearty way he always had, and said, “But I’m your lodger.” She began to plead with me: “Let him go, darling, everything will be as it was when he’s gone. He’s just a coarse, common person!” That made him laugh again, so that she tried to hit him again. This time he stepped aside—more to save her than himself, I think—and she caught hold of me. She held me so tightly that, when I remember that night, I can still feel myself pressed against her heart and hear its beat. But then I was concerned only with getting free, shaking her off, and when I couldn’t, I cried out against her, “Leave me alone!” Instead she held me closer, and I cried, “Go away and leave us alone! Go,” I cried, “go!” and with each word I struggled more fiercely to release her arms from my neck. And when I succeeded, it was I—I, not C.—who pushed her out of the door and shut that door behind her, so that I could lie down and go to sleep again with C.
Books have been written about the number of suicides that have occurred from around the beginning of the twentieth century among middle-class Jewish women. One theory has it that the cause may have been a sense—a fore-sense—of the fate in store for them in the following years. But another reason may also have been their own psyche and the tremendous importance they had learned to attach to it. The constant analysis of their own feelings and their attempt, on the one hand, to control themselves and, on the other, not to suppress but fully to release their impulses—all this involved them in a maze of conflict from which they couldn’t find an exit. And when something bad happened to them, such as a failed exam or an unhappy love affair, then the only exit was suicide and that was the route often taken. Some of them even kept the means for it close by—Edith, ever since she was a young woman in Vienna in the 1920s, had carried a phial of cyanide in her handbag.
So now it was Priya’s mother I listened to with the attention I had not shown my own mother. Priya only came to the house to quarrel with her mother. Besides money, she now also demanded her share of the family jewelry. This was to have come to her only on her wedding day, but she wanted it at once to take with her to America. Renuka tried to resist, but each time she was left wounded and panting with all her pulses beating (I believe she was at that time in her menopause years) and in a despair that frightened me, remembering as I did my mother’s own state and the way she had ended it.
C. no longer came to the house. Perhaps it was a sort of tact that kept him away, not wanting to interfere in a quarrel of which he was the cause. Shivaji also held aloof from it—perhaps this is how men of destiny reach their goal, by letting others manage matters for them. C. now spent his time in the hotel room, reading and writing. His Afghan friends had departed—some back to Afghanistan, others to buy arms in other countries, while some were in jail for pimping or drug-dealing. C. too seemed ready to move on, and I heard him ask Priya several times how much longer she was taking with her preparations. There was a hint of impatience in his tone, though normally he was so goodnatured and relaxed. Even now, he wasn’t exactly tense but more like an athlete straining toward the next race.
Then one day Priya said, “I’ll settle it right now, once and for all.” Looking grim, she left us to fight it out with her mother. The moment she had gone, we sank almost in relief on to the bed together. We kissed the way we used to under our tree. He was as he had always been with me, and that is the way I shall always remember him, though the later image I have of him is of a very different person. It was said that, in the process of establishing his work, he became dictatorial, even cruel toward opponents, especially toward former followers who dared to leave him. Many lawsuits were filed against him—by the relatives of young people he was said to have seduced away, or of those who had made over their properties and monies to him. He also had to fight an extradition order from Holland, where he was accused of forging a will in his own favor. But all this was in a future that I did not share with him.
Priya returned in triumph, bringing a casket that held not only her own wedding jewelry but some of her mother’s too. She spilled it on to our crumpled, sagging bed—a shimmering cornucopia of gold and precious stones that made me hold my breath at so much beauty. But for Priya there was only the satisfaction of her victory, while C.’s appreciation was almost ironic—such private wealth did not impress but amuse him, and he had no interest in its value except as a contribution to his work. That very afternoon Priya bought three tickets to New York; one-way, since there was no thought of return. For the two of them their future lay elsewhere. It was only I who felt regret: as if, unlike them, I had not yet quite finished here.
When I went to say goodbye in the other house, I found a terrible commotion. Servants and visitors ran around, some sobbing, some silent in disbelief. All the doors were wide open, right into Shivaji’s sanctuary. It was empty—and for a moment this was what astonished me most, his absence, and the way it reduced the room to a dark shaft, a vacuum at the heart of the house. I was told that Shivaji was with Renuka in the hospital. She was in intensive care, having suffered a stroke after her last fight with Priya. When I arrived at the hospital, I found her with tubes and other machinery attached to her in an attempt to pump her back to life. She was unrecognizable; there was no Renuka at all, just this immobile mound. Probably that was what made Priya, after her visit, decide there was nothing she could do, so she and C. might as well depart, as planned. Since I decided to stay, she sold my ticket at the airport to a stand-by passenger.
After several weeks, Renuka recovered, at least partially, and it was a pleasure to help her slowly regain some of her faculties. She learned to move and talk again—never perfectly, her walk remained halting, her speech slurred. It was hard work but we persevered and made progress. This took all our effort so that neither of us had any thought to spare for what might be happening outside the hospital and its therapy center.
But there was no need of us—from the moment of Renuka’s stroke, Shivaji had taken complete charge. He dealt with everything himself: the bank, the accountants, with the staff, most of whom had to be let go. At least once a day he came bustling into the hospital, full of good cheer and with the air of an easy-mannered, smiling, forceful little businessman. He wore rimless spectacles and a linen suit—one of those made for him abroad that, with his handmade shoes, had so upset Priya. In this outfit he was rattled from side to side in the motorcycle rickshaw he hired, having had to sell all the cars; it didn’t seem to make any difference to him, he sat there with unruffled dignity. When Renuka regained the use of one hand, he made her sign a power of attorney to him; and with this he managed her affairs, so that by the time she emerged from therapy, he had settled everything. We never even had to go back to the house, which he had meanwhile sold with all its furniture and fittings. He used the proceeds to buy land and a house in the foothills of the Himalayas, and he brought us straight there from the hospital on an overnight train.
There is something wholesome about the climate in these foothills—the sharp mountain breezes with their hint of snow, the deodar trees rising so tall into the sparkling sky that they seem to be drawing a constant supply of fresh sap from it. Shivaji put us on a diet of vegetables grown on our land and cooked in a simple and delicious way he devised himself. A small colony of houses grew up around us, built by the people who had followed Shivaji to be close to him. He established a crafts center as part of our community and persuaded the lepers who used to beg on the bridge to learn to spin and weave the rugs that were then sold for good prices. It became a thriving business and Shivaji retained something of the brisk commercial air I have mentioned. Studying accounts through his rimless spectacles, he was quick and shrewd, and when buyers came from abroad, he would make us take out and press one of his linen suits. But mostly he remained the Shivaji I first knew, shimmering in white muslin as though filled with light from within. While the colony proliferated with more and more houses, he remained the center around which everything revolved. Just as we had done in Delhi, in the evenings we gathered in the central room of his house while he talked to us and sang, encouraging us to join in. The lepers from the workshop were also part of our community, and although during the day there were a lot of disputes among them, in Shivaji’s room these were mostly forgotten. This hour we spent with him had the same effect on us as did their ritual bath for the pilgrims washing away their impurities in the holy river below.
Unlike C. and Priya and their movement, we never became very famous. Even so, some magazine articles were written about our work and a documentary film was made for German TV, and these brought inquiries from people wanting to help. Shivaji dictated answers to all these letters, and he was very specific about what was required: some were asked to send money, others to come to the crafts center and help with the work there. The TV crew had given him a VCR, and he often asked for tapes to be sent to him. He was particularly fond of American films—especially Westerns, and comedies of the 1930s and ’40s which always made him laugh. He had me wheel in Renuka to watch these films with him, and she also laughed when he did. Although no longer walking or talking, she seemed calm and happy. We lived there for many, many years, and she must have reached the age of ninety or more. The climate had a preserving quality, assisted in her case no doubt by the constant presence of Shivaji from whom she appeared to draw light and air, like the tall trees from the sky.
One year Priya came to visit us. She had read some article about us and was curious to see what we were up to. Renuka did not recognize her; for the last many years she had assumed that I was her daughter, and she knew that she had never had more than one. Priya had retained some features of the young Priya we had known: her elegance—she was still in the finest silk saris—her intelligence, her educated accent; she was skinny now rather than slender, and wore large black-framed spectacles that took up most of her face. She summed up our activities with one glance and made her opinion of them clear. And she was right; in comparison with her worldwide operation, we were negligible. Priya had always emanated a sort of contemptuous pride—as was perhaps her right, since she was so much more clever and efficient than most other people. But now, mixed with that, there was some other expression. It was almost as if her pride and contempt had turned inward, as if she herself, her own life hadn’t come up to her expectations. And this was strange, since she had been so spectacularly successful in what she had undertaken.
She had not revised her opinion of Shivaji. She was still certain that she could see through him, though I’m not sure what it was that she saw: she could hardly accuse him now of misappropriating her mother’s wealth when she herself had stripped her of it. Once she said, “What’s worse than being a fraud?” and laughed, with a hard bitter sound that she had when she laughed at all, which wasn’t often. “To be an unsuccessful fraud,” she answered herself, and then went on, “At least that one’s successful . . .” She meant C., and it was the first time she had mentioned him. Now that she had started, she couldn’t stop and it came out in a rush, all the bitterness I had felt in her, not only against herself but against C. too and what he had become, and what she had helped him to become.
“You wouldn’t even recognize him if you saw him,” she told me. This was one night when she and I were alone outside one of the houses perched on the slope of the mountain. Shivaji and Renuka were inside the main house, watching an American Western—the sound of it came drifting out, a strange contrast to the silver silence of the stars overhead and of the river below. But Priya’s thoughts were as violent as the galloping horses and the double-barreled guns of the Western. They were all about C.—how his voracious bulk had to be continually stoked with food and vulgar luxuries, and how an endless supply of money was needed to satisfy his coarse cravings. He had a fleet of twenty-seven Rolls-Royces, though he was too fat to move, so that everything had to be brought to him: including of course an endless supply of women, who became younger and younger, more and more stupid—as stupid as animals, Priya said, to please his animal appetites.
After that, what we heard later came as no surprise. Priya broke away from the movement—broke it from within by joining his enemies and providing them with crucial evidence for the many cases brought against him. At first it seemed that he was to be extradited to Holland, but in the meantime a court in Texas built up a sufficient case (something to do with a fraudulent conversion of title deeds) to bring him to trial there. He was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. So it was in Texas I imagined him—a place I only knew from Shivaji’s VCR tapes. How to fit C. into that landscape, among those big men in big hats? Of course he himself had always been big; but his bulk was charged with brain, alive with thought that had soared right up to the dome of the British Museum Reading Room. How could so much thinking, such high ideas become gross the way Priya had described? It was impossible—just as it was impossible to think of this large and happy person as a convict in a cell.
I became restless. My thoughts took me far from this peaceful place sealed off in its capsule of pure air. Too disturbed now to join the evening sessions of song and prayer, I remained outside under the tent of mountain stars without looking up at them, waiting for the joyful sounds to finish. It was only when Shivaji put on one of his Westerns that I joined him and Renuka inside. I wanted to see all I could of that far-off place, which I assumed to be Texas. Apart from taking in the scenery, I paid no attention to what was happening on the screen; and it was only when loud gun shots woke up Renuka and made her cry out in shock that I noticed all the fighting and screaming going on. None of it disturbed me—until the day that I saw the hero taken off to jail by an evil sheriff. I sat up and watched this same hero as part of a chain gang breaking rocks under the eyes of a foul-mouthed guard armed with guns and a whip. Then I cried out louder than Renuka had done.
Shivaji turned off the tape in surprise. He asked me to wheel out Renuka and put her to bed. As she did every night, she embraced me like a child, with her arms around my neck. I waited for her to fall asleep, and then I returned to Shivaji. I asked him to give me the plane fare to America; he said he would think about it. By next day he had made his calculations: he said he could afford a ticket to New York and from New York to Texas. He had also worked out what I would need to reach my destination and to keep me there for a month. After that, he said regretfully, I would be on my own; but that if I wanted to return, he would somehow manage to send me the fare. I agreed and thanked him. Neither of us mentioned my imminent departure to Renuka—anyway, she might not have understood. I could hardly wait to leave, and on my last night when I put her to bed, I was so impatient that I didn’t wait for her to fall asleep but loosened her arms from my neck, the way I had released myself from my mother on her last night.
After some misadventures—I was no longer used to traveling, and America was a new continent to me—I reached the prison in Texas. It was like entering a fortress; it was a fortress with armed guards at each corner watching from high towers. A succession of metal gates slid mechanically behind me, and at each gate there were more guards telephoning up to the towers before I was allowed to pass on to the next one. The passages were lit by a light so blinding and unnatural that it was a kind of darkness. But I thought only of the person I was walking toward and went cheerfully through steel and stone.
At last I was face to face with him. True, it was through a glass partition, he on one side of it and I on the other, communicating with each other by telephone; but I could see at once that he had not changed. He wore a kind of overall in a bright orange color that suited him. There was nothing at all of the person Priya had described, the mass of flesh insatiable for luxuries and young women. He was muscular and fit, like someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. I asked him about the chain gangs—it was almost my first question, and my voice must have trembled over the telephone so that he quickly assured me that these had been discontinued. Having been sentenced to hard labor, he did do a lot of road work, breaking rocks and so on, which he said gave him a healthy appetite. His cheeks were pink; for many years, he said, he had had a beard, and when this was shaved off by the prison barber, the skin underneath turned out to be soft and smooth. His hair too had been cut, but the stubble left was a grey as light as the original blond flame I remembered. Yes, many years, a lifetime, had passed, but really he was the same. His voice too was the same, and the fact that it came transmitted through a receiver made it seem as if he were whispering right into my ear, the way he used to. And he was smiling at me through the glass while the voice in my ear told me that I too had not changed. I smiled back at him, aware as I did so that I was showing the gaps left by my missing teeth; but that didn’t matter to either of us, any more than that the person he was seeing through the glass had become a scrawny old woman.
However, it did matter when I tried to get a job. I had been used to doing domestic work in Shivaji’s commune, serving visitors and looking after Renuka, so I thought it would be easy to find work. Wherever I saw a notice for waitresses wanted, I went in to apply but everyone laughed at me. I realized that the waitresses there were all young and pert and wore pink skirts that reached only to the tops of their thighs. But I needed to earn money very badly, having come to the end of the month Shivaji had provided for. C. was allowed visitors every fortnight, so it was necessary for me to stay in the neighborhood. I had come to an arrangement with another woman visiting her husband in prison; he was serving a life sentence, so she let me sleep in his half of their king-size bed in return for babysitting her children while she was at work. But this did not cover the rest of my expenses, and I persevered in my search for a job until at last a short-order cook hired me to clean up after him, sweeping the peelings and scrubbing the pots, that sort of work, all very easy.
With my first earnings, I bought a new frock in which to visit C. It was quite ordinary—it had been hanging on a rack with dozens exactly like it, all marked down—but he complimented me on it, not only once but each time I went to visit him. Although we were never alone, since on his side of the glass partition was a row of prisoners communicating with visitors on my side, we felt perfectly private, our voices trickling intimately into each other’s ears. He told me about his busy schedule: this included, besides his outdoor work, teaching other prisoners chess and holding seminars for them on different subjects. I would be surprised at their wide range of interests, he said. He had also learned to play basketball, and in spite of his age, was good at it, probably because of his height. So his days were full and so were mine, with my long hours of kitchen work and looking forward all day and night to these visits. But we often spoke of an even happier future and what we would do, where we would go, when his time was up. The whole world was open to us, and we considered every possibility. At the end of his sentence, even with time off for good behavior, he would be in his eighties and I in my seventies; but neither of us ever felt that our future had shrunk from the time when we had made love under our tree, or in my mother’s attic room for which he was always behind with the rent.