To follow the thread of fear

Sometimes Mrs Osborne asked me about my dreams, which I wasn’t in the habit of remembering unless they forced themselves on me. ‘One of Arthur’s first discoveries,’ she said, ‘after he embarked on his Quest was to do with dreams.’ It gave me an English qualm and a Hindu thrill to hear her use the word quest, with its unmistakable capital. Since she had ended up living on a holy mountain whose antiquity made the Himalayas seem like teenagers, I felt she had earned the right to the holiness of the upper case. ‘He realised that whenever he had experienced fear in a dream, his instinct was to make himself wake up. As an adult he decided to override the impulse to escape which had ruled his night thoughts since he was a child. Instead of waking he decided to follow the thread of fear to its end within the dream. Invariably the source of fear when revealed lost its power over him. It was frightening only so long as it was viewed as something to run from. This was an important clue on his Path.’ I wondered if I myself would ever be confident enough to capitalise ‘path’ in conversation.

Mrs Osborne kept a cow in the garden, and that was the milk we would drink, unboiled and unpasteurised, merely chilled in her little fridge. It makes me shiver to think about that now, the blitheness with which we drank untreated milk. One day I was about to pour some over my puffed rice, and decided to taste a bit first. Not nice. It had started to turn and I told her so.

‘Absholute Nonshense!’ she shrilled. ‘There is nothing wrong with my milk. Nothing whatshoever!’ And she looked at me so fiercely that I poured the rest of it onto my cereal and swallowed it down under her unrelenting gaze. Every taste bud in my mouth protested against her doctrinaire clean bill of health. Even so, contradicting Mrs Osborne on any sustained basis was something that called for major resources of willpower. It was necessary to throw all your resources behind your audacious tongue or be annihilated, and at that stage I didn’t feel strong enough.

In the mornings fruit sellers would do the rounds selling their produce – ladies who carried it on their heads in baskets. Guavas, grapes, apples. They came to me on the verandah. At first I was alarmed by this tide of small businesses sweeping across the verandah in their bird-of-paradise colours, smiling and chattering softly to each other, but it wasn’t long before I was looking forward to it. I struggled to master the currency, remembering what Raghu had said about its recent decimalisation. Of course I didn’t have a word of the necessary Tamil, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t haggle. It’s amazing how much economic leverage you can pack into a doubtful frown. I wasn’t in a hurry, and I enjoyed bringing to the transaction some of the grave tempo of chess. One particular woman would call my bluff, shout scornfully, pack up her wares again and walk off across the verandah – and then slow down, shrug and return to the struggle, settling very happily for a sum that differed by a single tiny coin from the amount that she had found so insulting.

One day I heard this fruit seller talking to Mrs O. Afterwards she said that the conversation had been about me. All the time I was in India, I’m ashamed to say, I had at the back of my mind the thought that someone was bound to ask what I had done (in a previous life) to earn the body I was in. But this discussion was all compliments. ‘She loves dealing with you,’ Mrs O was saying, ‘because you always haggle, and you know how it’s done.’ In other words she preferred to spend more time than she might, and to receive less money than she might, just for the tiny drama of the bargain, the human contest finally resolved in smiles.

Later in the morning Mrs Osborne might come out onto the verandah with some sweet-lime juice. She always gave the impression of being very busy – she could only spare me a moment. It’s true that she had taken on co-editorship of the ashram publication The Mountain Path from Arthur after his death, and there were editorial duties to be performed. I remember her opening a letter and saying, ‘I detesht Wei Wu Wei’ – Wei Wu Wei being a contributor to The Mountain Path – ‘I have to rewrite every shingle shentensh.’ I had begun to think that Lucia Osborne enjoyed choosing words with a strong sibilant element – otherwise why not say she hated or loathed this strange being? ‘Wei Wu Wei’ is actually a phrase meaning ‘action without action’, all very Zen. She told me Wei Wu Wei was an Irish aristocrat, born Terence Gray, whose passion was the theatre until he became an eccentric sort of Buddhist. His favourite saying was that ‘everything is a case of mistaken identity’, but Mrs O seemed to have got his number.

Arthur Osborne had left ten editorials prepared, but Lucia was working on one of her own, about Arthur and his shedding of the old coat. She read parts of it to me as she composed them. She called it ‘What is Death if Scrutinised?’ I was moved by it.

Sometimes we talked about spiritual experience. Mrs Osborne told me, as if apropos of nothing, that it was very common for devotees planning to come to Arunachala to have obstacles placed in their way. Sometimes the seeker would find another person actively attempting to prevent the pilgrim from making his journey. At this point I indicated that this was true in my case. I decided to leave it at that, though, and not to go into detail.

Mrs O asked me, ‘Was that person called Mouni Sadhu, by any chance?’, so I saw no point in denying it. I’m sure I got Mouni Sadhu into a lot of hot water spiritually, with Mrs Osborne stoking the fire beneath the cauldron, and I can’t really say I’m sorry. Was I ‘telling tales’, the great crime of my early schooldays? Hardly. I was only answering a question.

When Mrs Osborne sat down and kept me company, she would always let me understand that there were plenty of other things she needed to do. I was slow to detect the element of pathos behind this, that despite her daily dynamism she was a widow struggling to cope. If I was lucky that Arunachala had sent me to her, perhaps there were some fringe benefits for her. She had someone new to cater for and talk to, and isn’t distraction the core of consolation? I provided my fair share of that.

More than once she promised to make me rock cakes, which seemed a baffling ambition. If I was homesick for anything it wasn’t rock cakes. But then it turned out that she wanted to make them for the same reason that riders who have been thrown want to get back on the horse, as a way of defying fate. She told me she was sorry to be weak, but she didn’t feel up to making them just yet. ‘Arthur was so fond of them,’ she said, and her voice shook while a little tear came from her eye. Although I was sorry to see her distress, I was also relieved because it was proof that she wasn’t a real witch. Witches can’t cry – the literature is definite about that. As a child I had loved the witches in stories and had always wanted to meet one, but now I wasn’t sure I wanted to take that last step.

Gross body, causal body, subtle body

One day the weather turned so cool it felt almost English. For once there was no sign of the sun. Rajah Manikkam put a shirt on and Mrs O even wore a jersey. Over breakfast she announced that someone had died – did I want to go to the funeral? I might find it instructive. Rajah Manikkam had got used to pushing the wheelchair, though I hadn’t yet got used to his style of propelling it. He would bump up and down changes of level without slowing down, having no regard for the occupant of the wheelchair, someone who might have received enough jolts in his life already. If he had been employed to push round trolleys of ripe fruit instead, his employers would have insisted on more considerate driving, or the loss of revenue would have been alarming.

Rajah’s pushing became more and more tentative, and he stopped some way short. To my surprise, Ganesh came to meet me and took over. He said I must forgive the superstitiousness of the locals. Rajah’s caste buried their dead, although he and his wife were terrified of corpses, ghosts and spirits, while this was a Brahmin funeral.

When we arrived, the corpse was being put on the pyre. It was all a little undignified, and not just because I could see its shrunken willy. Dried cow-pats were placed over it and then they poured on some kerosene. I say ‘poured’ but that sounds too reverent. Kerosene was simply sloshed over the pyre and the body. The procedure was more than undignified, it was downright unfeeling, but then people are so solemn at Western funerals because nobody actually believes in the effectiveness of the ceremony. It was because the ceremony was trusted, here, that I got the impression of unceremoniousness. There was no emotion surplus to the event. The action was adequate to what it marked.

Ganesh gave me a lesson in last things. While the fire took hold, he explained the different colours of flame which issued from the body as it burned, and what they represented in spiritual terms. Vital airs were streaming from the sutures of the skull. The various sheaths of the physical envelope, the gross body, the causal body, the subtle body, were all returning to their source. All the different elements were rejoining the void. Absence was their destination. It was fascinating to hear his description, in the way that it is fascinating to hear anyone knowledgeable discoursing on a technical subject, even sport or cars.

It was a sort of treat, though an unsettling one, to be invited to look at a corpse in its fiery transition – with roasting smells beginning to break through the stink of kerosene – rather than being told to avert your eyes from the whole subject of death. Then quite abruptly Ganesh summoned Rajah Manikkam, who grasped the handles of the wheelchair and lurched off with me. All Ganesh would say was, ‘You must leave now. The next part is not suitable for you to see.’ We were back in the realm of taboos without explanations. Naturally being told that it wasn’t suitable made me want to see it all the more, on the same principle governing the desirability of X-certificate films back in Britain. No history of disappointment could stop me hankering after the forbidden.

There is no arguing with the pusher of a wheelchair. I tried to feel privileged by what I had seen rather than tantalised by what I had not. As we left the scene a breath of wind brought thick black smoke our way. Ganesh coughed, my eyes streamed and my clothes held the smell of the various shrivelling sheaths for the rest of the day. I felt that these mild inconveniences had a symbolic aspect, though if I was receiving spiritual instruction it was slightly disheartening. Hadn’t we been scrutinising death with exemplary calmness? Yet tears pursued us, even while we strove to rise above their causes.

Installed back on the verandah, I tried to find out from Mrs O about the local funeral rites, and specifically what I had missed by being hustled away from the pyre at a crucial juncture. I got the brush-off, with Mrs O sternly saying that if Ganesh had wanted me to know he would already have told me. She wasn’t going to expose me to unauthorised knowledge herself. Ladies weren’t allowed to attend such events anyway – though I’d like to have seen someone try to stop her if she had put her mind to it.

I tried to generalise my line of questioning. Was it a matter of caste who was buried (like Arthur, as I didn’t quite say) and who was burned, or could people exercise their own discretion?

‘Are you a journalist, John? Is that why you are here, to find out about the ways of the local people, these funny Indians?’

‘No, Mrs Osborne, I’m here as a devotee, to practise self-enquiry.’

‘Then stop asking questions that face outwards and turn your questioning inwards, since that is what it means to be a devotee.’

I had always known I would love Mrs Osborne, but I hadn’t realised how long it would take. If there is no idea more fully grasped by the Indian Mind than ‘scolding’, then people like Mrs Osborne are largely responsible. The scolding must be done with love or it would be easy to reject, but love is not what registers first. The love only reveals itself over time. If it was so with Sister Heel at CRX – and wasn’t she one of the great love-scolders of all time? – then it was true of Mrs Osborne also. Kuppu and Rajah Manikkam were veterans of long campaigns of such scolding, who had come through with their smiles intact.

In fact Mrs Osborne rather enjoyed filling me in about Tamil culture and traditions, as long as she didn’t feel pressurised, as long as it was on her own terms. She told me that Tamil was an ancient and elegant language, with structural similarities to both Latin and Welsh, although modern speakers had rather an inferiority complex about it, feeling that it was a degenerate descendant of Sanskrit.

Tamil had contributed quite a number of words to English, including cheroot, catamaran (literally ‘tied trees’), mango, pariah and mulligatawny, whose literal meaning is ‘pepper water’. Curry was another gift, even if the British had firmly seized the word by the wrong end. Kari means a vegetable dish, not the spicing that made it so remarkable to a sheltered palate. She taught me the proper pronunciations of the original words, curuTTu, kaTTa maram, kari, mang kay, paRaiyaar, miLagu taneer.

A whole room of rain

At night rains would sometimes crash onto the roof – rain so intense that it required the rather Biblical plural form – and drown out all other sound. At night the mewing screams of the peacocks, both eerie and homely, were replaced by the shrieks of owls. No trace of the genteel quizzical Tu-Wit Tu-Woo of the British owl. These ones sounded as if they were being done to death.

There is something oddly comforting about the acoustics of a downpour, as long as wind plays no noticeable part. It seems to confer a privacy. It builds a whole room of rain, but the effect is necessarily spoiled if the body itself becomes wet. When the rain was at its most torrential I would sometimes be splashed a little from the side, which was rather exciting, but the rain never penetrated the roof of the verandah.

On Mrs Osborne’s verandah I was further from being able to summon human help than I had ever been since I became ill. Yet I wasn’t anxious or afraid, even when I was very far from sleep. I was beginning to understand what it meant to be the guest of the mountain. His hospitality was very subtle. Solitude, something of which I had gone short for so many years, was somehow the cornerstone of it. He didn’t overwhelm me with attention.

One night I was woken by something pulling at my finger. It was a macacque, grey-furred and frenetic, of the sort I had seen everywhere in those parts, even in the ashram. While it yanked at my knuckles it looked at me with a pleading intelligence, as if it wanted to enlist me in some public-spirited rescue like the clever dogs in old films.

If so, it had chosen the wrong chap – Lassie, move on.

No help to be had at this address.

Try the next verandah along.

It was chattering at me, not angrily in the style of its species but urgently, with a pulse of meaning, and then it scampered away. It was only after the event (if it even was an event and not a dream) that it occurred to me as strange that its fur had been quite dry despite the downpour. Even so, this could be explained if it nested somehow under the roof of Mrs Osborne’s verandah, sharing with me the hospitality of the mountain.

I asked Mrs O if there were any stories about the local monkeys and their behaviour. Unhesitatingly she said there were. ‘Monkeys are famously fond of tamarind, and humans prize the fruit also, although it must be cooked for their consumption. In fact it is the crucial element in a true curry. Nevertheless the tree is considered unlucky. Consequently they have been nationalised and are government property. Individuals cannot own them, and are thereby spared the attendant bad luck. Instead they pay rent on the trees to the state government. This is ingenious, I feel, and shows Indian bureaucracy in a rare positive light.’ I too was impressed by authorities which accepted the irrationality of their citizens, rather than plastering every wall with posters trying to dispel the superstition. Perhaps we in the U.K. should nationalise black cats and the bits of pavement under ladders.

I had even heard of tamarind, which was an important ingredient of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, Marmite’s acrid sister in the store cupboard. During my bed years, when every other bit of print in the house had been used up, I would get Mum to read me the labels of bottles from the bathroom and pantry. That’s how I know that Dettol disinfectant is one-and-a-half times stronger than pure carbolic acid (Rideal-Walker Test).

‘It happened,’ Mrs O went on, ‘that a Muslim who had rights over one such tree used a catapult to keep the monkeys away. Monkeys value the fruit of the tamarind even more than humans. Meaning only to frighten, he killed one – the monkey king. Did you not know that the monkeys have a king? Each group has its leader. The monkeys took the body to Ramana Maharshi, and asked him to bring their king back to life. Bhagavan always made sure, when feeding his followers, that the monkeys had their share. He spoke their language, as he spoke the language of every animal, but would not undertake resurrection. Instead he comforted them and assuaged their grief.

‘A little later the Muslim became fevered, and rumours of a curse put on him by Bhagavan began to circulate. In fact he treated and cured the fever with an application of vibhuti – the ashes of Shiva. Unfortunately the rumours of a curse did not altogether die away, but nothing could have been further from Bhagavan’s practice.

‘As for the modern behaviour of monkeys, I am afraid that it is less elevated. Rooms at the ashram have to be locked and the windows closed, since otherwise monkeys sneak in and pilfer. It is even possible, since visitors’ rooms are particularly liable to be ransacked, that some of the monkeys are currently human in form. They are perhaps laying the foundations for a future life, in which they will be fully…’ – she looked around for the exact adjective, and for once the Polish sibilants I had learned to filter out couldn’t be ignored – ‘shimian.’ For a moment I thought she had used a Tamil word.

I wasn’t sure what I made of these stories. If I had wanted a guru who talked to the animals I would probably have stuck with Dr Do-little. Still, public figures can’t control how they are perceived, and it made sense that the locals would assimilate Ramana Maharshi into their folk beliefs rather than absorb the full force of his teaching.

Mrs Osborne came in one morning and said that in the night she had seen a light burning on Arthur’s grave. She seemed reassured rather than upset by this manifestation.

I was sceptical about the whole thing, so I asked her to wake me if it happened again. The following night I felt her tugging at me, more roughly than was necessary, and saying ‘Get up!!’ Of course from a bed that low I needed help to rise. She wrestled me into an upright position and pointed me in the right direction, towards Arthur’s grave. Rain was tipping down, but sure enough a steady light was visible even through the monsoon. I felt that I should be frightened, but my nervous system wouldn’t play along. It stayed stubbornly serene.

One afternoon in the third week of my stay, while Kuppu was giving me a wash, tenderly pouring jugs of sun-warmed water over myself in the wheelchair, a strange couple of figures appeared at Mrs Osborne’s house. There was a tall European man leaning on the shoulder of a little middle-aged Indian, being helped to walk. I had never seen the Indian before, but the European was oddly familiar.

His news was only himself

With a shock I recognised my brother Peter. He was very thin and weak, and when he spoke his voice was little more than a croak. ‘I told you I’d see you in India, Jay,’ he said. Kuppu ran off.

It was true that those had been Peter’s last words to me before I set off on my travels – ‘See you in India, Jay’ – but I hadn’t taken him seriously for a moment. He was an experienced traveller and a dab hand at finding cheap tickets. He was surprisingly disciplined about saving the money he earned as a waiter to fund the journeys he enjoyed. On the other hand, he’d never expressed an actual interest in India.

The look on my face gave him a transfusion of energy for just a few moments. He basked in the triumph of having delivered a major surprise, by the brilliantly simple strategy of keeping a promise I had taken for a joke, and then his body gave way and he needed to sit down. The closest thing to a seat was Arthur Osborne’s commode, mercifully closed just then.

It would be going too far to compare Peter with the ancient Athenian who ran all the way from Marathon to break the news of victory. Peter’s pace was crawling, his news was only himself, and his collapse was no more than a return of weakness, a convalescent setback.

It was strange that Mum should insist on having her hair turned white by worrying over me, when Peter was the one who liked to take risks. He was always flying off somewhere, and adding another country to his itinerary probably didn’t strike him as unduly capricious.

He introduced his companion as Dalton, and said that Dalton had saved his life. It was only a slight exaggeration. What had happened was that Peter was at a railway station, feeling very ill, and simply fainted. He had been lucky not to fall onto the tracks, but the wallet containing all his money and also his passport did just that. He would have been in serious difficulties if Dalton had not had the kindness to pick up this stranger and look after him, as well as the presence of mind to climb down onto the track to retrieve the wallet before he took Peter to hospital.

By now Kuppu had re-appeared on the verandah, bringing with her Mrs Osborne and also Rajah Manikkam. Everyone fussed over these two odd visitors. Peter told the whole story of his experiences in an Indian hospital, while Dalton kept saying, in tones of joy, ‘Please don’t mention it. I only did what anyone would have done. It has been a supreme privilege to be of help to a traveller in difficulties.’ Between sentences he frowned and pushed his lips forward, turning the impulse to preen into a solemn grimace.

Up to that moment I hadn’t known that Mrs Osborne spoke German, though in talking about my university future (the one I didn’t believe in) I had obviously told her of my familiarity with the language. Suddenly she was saying in my ear, in German, ‘What’s the quickest way of keeping your brother and getting rid of the other?’ Mrs O could withhold a welcome in any number of languages. I was slightly shocked at the sharply defined limits to this enlightened being’s sociability, but relieved that at least Peter was on the right side of them. It wasn’t as if he had any real claim. I myself was perched on a narrow ledge of hospitality, and wasn’t sure if I could get away with letting him bed down in the lee of the wheelchair.

Peter went on with the story, while Dalton listened with an expression of utter fascination, not because it was unfamiliar but because the part he played in it was so dazzling that he would never get used to it.

Vistas of regurgitated picnic

When Peter woke up in hospital he was violently sick, and then fell deeply asleep again. The next time he woke the light had changed and it was many hours later. His vomit was being cleared away, in the most meticulous manner. There could be no doubt about that. He closed his eyes and counted to a hundred. When he opened them, the clearing-up was still going on but no visible progress had been made.

The process was so slow because it was being carried out by ants. They worked tirelessly to carry away crusted particles from the vistas of regurgitated picnic spread out before them, while Peter watched between dozes. Watching those ants was his only entertainment, and no other creature did any cleaning. No one brought any food to replace what his body had rejected, even many hours after the event.

Every now and then a doctor would come in and administer an injection with great efficiency or at least great force. None of them addressed a word to him. Nurses he never saw, neither by day nor by night. He saw women who might have been nurses, but all they did was stride into the ward, as if to count the number of patients, and promptly walk out again. Indian nursing seemed to be restricted to this striding and counting, without any actual aspect of care.

Poor Peter was learning the hard way about the hospital etiquette of India. The maintenance of patients, their cleaning, feeding and being assisted to perform the bodily functions, was assumed to fall on family rather than professional staff. And Peter had no family. In Indian terms, the absence of any visible family made his whole existence seem tenuous. It was a moot point whether it was even worth the trouble to aid the recovery of so uncorroborated a being.

Peter having no family, Dalton stepped in to fill the vacancy. He acted as an interpreter between Peter and the doctors, he brought home-cooked food, he took upon himself humble tasks that would otherwise have been neglected. The doctors’ attitude towards Peter changed, not because of anything that was said to them but because he was no longer dangling. He became worthy of humane treatment now that he had a context, however improvised and ramshackle. Sometimes Dalton’s wife sat with Peter. Her English was broken at best but there was nothing broken about her smile.

And now Dalton was escorting my brother, recovered from the worst of his illness if not completely better, to join me at Mrs Osborne’s, at Aruna Giri. I had learned by now that the name meant Aruna Hill – I was bivouacking on the foothills of enlightenment. But where would Peter be bivouacking? I started shooting glances of mute appeal at Mrs Osborne. I could almost feel them bouncing off the toughened hide of her psyche, and yet some subatomic particle of pleading may have found a flaw in her shielding.

By now Dalton had so consistently courted and refused our gratitude that I had begun to get just a whiff of an ulterior motive. Nothing material, just a faint spiritual fluffing-up of feathers. By saying so insistently that he had only done what anyone would have done, he gave us to understand nevertheless that his actions had a special status. He was setting an example by following one. His meekness was imitation of Christ.

I don’t think it was an accident that Mrs O thanked him in studiously non-Christian terms, saying that he must have been inspired by the precepts of Bhagavan Sri Ramana. A shadow passed across Dalton’s face, and he swallowed audibly. On features less transfigured by a righteous deed it would have been a scowl. No religion and no sect has any sort of monopoly on virtue, but they all love a squabble. Mrs O pressed home her advantage by offering to take him to the ashram for lunch. No rudeness could have got rid of the Good Samaritan more efficiently than this offer of food served under an alien blessing. Soon he took his leave of us, with a few last flourishes of humility.

Finally Mrs Osborne turned her attention to Peter and his needs. ‘One brother is on my verandah, and the newcomer must also be accommodated. Young man, brother of John, name not yet vouchsafed to me, you are not I hope expecting a commode of your own? I cannot provide the luxury of personal sanitation for all comers.’ Make a commode available in exceptional circumstances, and everyone will feel entitled to one.

Peter looked baffled, and sent me a glance that wondered about Mrs O’s mental capacity. I did my best to reassure him with a shake of my head, and he politely answered No. He wasn’t expecting to be greeted with a commode, though he would appreciate the chance to lie down. And he was called Peter.

‘In that case I will offer you the hoshpitality of my roof,’ said Mrs O. Her roof was reached by a flight of stairs built on the outside of the house, and Peter, who had stood for too long and was trembling with fatigue even sitting down, set himself to climb them. He waved away Rajah Manikkam’s offers of help, but he had overestimated his strength. He had to sit down part-way up to recover himself. For his weakness I felt an acute pity which was entirely new and only half welcome. How far we had both had to travel for me to see my younger brother helpless in the body!

Just as Mrs O had boasted about the excellence of her verandah, so now she sang the praises of her roof as a place of habitation. She said there was a ‘Goh-taa’ up there, which she explained as a kind of hut made of bamboos and palm-fronds. It sounded like a habitable parasol. Peter’s eyes were drooping even before she had finished waxing lyrical about the shelter on top of her house. Peter may not have slept for the whole of that day, but he didn’t come down again to my level. Kuppu carried up dainties to him. Mrs Osborne delivered some sweet-lime juice in person, a great gesture of concern, well masked by gruffness, from someone to whom stairs did not come easily.

The roof seemed to breathe out

I had time on the verandah that night to consider the impurity of my emotions. I felt a certain amount of annoyance at seeing Peter in this setting. Travelling to India had been my project, and truly a vast project it was. To achieve my spiritual objective I had been forced to mount something like a military campaign. Now Peter seemed to be casually horning in on my territory. What was a pilgrimage for me wasn’t much more than a lark for him. In the night I examined these feelings and repented of them. Peter’s constitution was perhaps not as strong as I assumed. He had always suffered from sore throats, and had been prescribed many courses of antibiotics over the years by Flanny.

The next day Peter was already amazingly better. He had slept well. The resilience of youth had done the rest. He did say, though, that the roof seemed to breathe out during the night all the heat it had absorbed by day.

Peter still didn’t have the strength to lift me down the three steps from the verandah, and that remained Rajah Manikkam’s job. Once I was installed in the wheelchair Peter could manage me on the level. In fact he grasped the handles as if it had only been a minute since he had last let them go, and he powered me away from Aruna Giri. There was a definite feeling of nostalgia about being pushed by Peter again, even if he couldn’t keep up that initial burst of energy. It was as if we were off exploring round Bourne End again, irresistibly drawn to the woods we thought were haunted.

I was torn between shyness about my spiritual false starts and eagerness to share my experiences, not sure whether to suggest a visit to the ashram or to keep that at least for myself. Peter had his own ideas anyway.

With a tourist’s hands on the handles rather than a devotee’s, the wheelchair began to find its way to more secular places. I had hardly noticed that a mundane town even shared the sacred geography.

Not that Peter would have cared to be labelled a tourist, nor even a traveller. He thought of himself as an explorer, and I had my own mild claim on that title. It was a significant expedition for me to go into Bourne End to buy a clandestine tube of depilatory cream from a chemist’s, and here I was sleeping on a verandah, serenaded by the anguished voices of Indian owls.

The exploring we did after Peter arrived was of a particular kind. I swear that boy had a sixth sense for snacks. He could detect the smell of garlic frying from a mile away, and track it down infallibly, although Tamil Nadu was a mass of smoke and promiscuously pungent aromas, both secular and sacred. He was a teenager, after all, voracious and splendidly undiscriminating. He liked food that was meant to be eaten with the fingers – in that respect India suited him very well.

This prejudice against knife and fork may have had something to do with his work as a waiter. A day spent reverently cradling between a pair of spoons (the absurd rigmarole of ‘silver service’ which boosts waiters’ earnings) the very potato croquette he had seen dropped by chef, picked up and dusted off, was reason enough for preferring food that wasn’t turned into a fetish. He liked food snatched on the hoof, eaten without ceremony.

We discovered a stall selling little fried dumplings, crisp on the outside but soft inside, and took some home with us. Mrs Osborne told us they were called vadas – she pronounced the word to rhyme with ‘larders’ – and that we shouldn’t eat too many of them. They were made from pounded lentils, onion, and curry leaves with a bit of cumin. And garlic of course. The scolding she gave us for buying them was a gentle one by her standards, no more than Force 2 on the Osborne Scale of reproach-rockets, a very mild flare.

I don’t even know whether Mrs O’s warnings had to do with the Hindu dietary laws which classify onion as a darkness food, or with common-sense ideas about the unhealthiness of frying. Whichever it was, we disregarded her. Whether she was speaking as a Hindu or as a moderate adult, she was wasting her breath. There weren’t many areas of life where I could compete on equal terms with Peter, and eating snacks was one of them. I wasn’t going to give it up.

On one of our early expeditions I felt the urgent need for a pee. Peter pulled the wheelchair onto some waste ground and helped me to stand sufficiently upright to accomplish my purpose. I became aware of voices behind me, and then of a boy standing in front of me, staring. He wasn’t looking at my face but at the humble piece of plumbing currently in use. Soon he was joined by others, all equally mesmerised and calling to their fellows to see the show. Peter helped to zip me up as quickly as possible and we moved on, rather shaken by the extreme response to what we had imagined to be a very minor transgression.

The excrement forest

Hadn’t I seen plenty of people peeing in the street in the previous weeks, without embarrassment or much in the way of discretion? But perhaps Europeans were barred from such casual customs. ‘What was that all about, Jay?’ Peter asked, bewildered, but I was as much in the dark as he was. The strange thing was that the crowd didn’t seem angry or disapproving, just gripped by a strange fascination.

When we had arrived back at the verandah, there was no alternative but to ask Mrs Osborne. It was either that or cling to our ignorance. I decided on a cautious approach. ‘Mrs Osborne, is it taboo in these parts to urinate in the open air?’

‘Not at all. Males do this freely, though it is polite to step away from the road. What makes you say so?’

‘Well, I had to go by the side of the road, and for some reason we gathered quite a crowd. They were all very excited, in fact they were talking at the tops of their voices.’

Mrs Osborne’s flinty face took on a look of sly amusement. ‘I think I can solve the mystery. It is certainly not that they are shocked by your use of the outdoors. In fact it is indoor excretion which is a puzzling novelty in Tamil culture. Even evacuation is performed out of doors, in designated places to which Tamil gives the charming name pii kaadu. Meaning excrement forest. No, these spectators who so unsettled you were taking the opportunity to satisfy a natural curiosity about your parts.’

This was worse than anything I could have imagined. ‘What about my parts?’

‘They are under the impression that Europeans are only furnished with white skin on the parts that show – hands and face. This would certainly explain the white man’s unwillingness to bare his skin to the sun. If he did so – what is the phrase? – the jig would be up. By producing your private parts you have provided an exshellent opportunity for them to test this theory and perhaps even to settle some longstanding bets about the pigmentation of Western anatomy.’ And she produced a decidedly dirty-sounding laugh. If she gave vent to merriment on any other occasion that summer I don’t remember it.

As for whether her humiliating account of what we had experienced was truthful or not I really couldn’t say, since for the rest of my visit I made myself ignore the demands of the bladder until I was safely in reach of that providential piece of sanitary furnishing, the late Arthur Osborne’s commode, come all the way from Bangalore.

Peter’s presence transformed my relationship with Kuppu. Before he arrived she and I had enjoyed a warm friendship, as free and easy as any relationship can be that is based on one person’s perpetual need to be cleared up. Often she would speak to me in Tamil, starting every speech with ‘Amma, Ammaaa!’ Eventually I realised from her gestures that she meant Mrs Osborne by this, but I couldn’t follow the rest of what she was whispering so urgently.

I didn’t think she was telling me that pale children kept arriving at Aruna Giri in pairs, hand in hand, the boys in shorts, the girls in pigtails, while nothing ever came out of the house except the smell of roast meat. But it was worth bearing in mind.

Soon after he arrived, Peter exercised his able-bodied privileges and went through my little suitcase. He came upon the tin of Cadbury’s Roses, the chocolates deformed by the heat but still viable, and started doling them out to Kuppu – one every time she freshened me up, another every time she freshened the commode. This miniature bounty was enough to transform her attitude from obligingness to stark devotion. The tin was a little pharmacopœia, full of medicinal powers individually wrapped in cellophane and foil. I had to contemplate the possibility, not quite that Mum had been right all along when it came to my packing priorities, but that her hand had been guided by the guru she so resented when she had sneaked the tin back into my luggage.

Then one day we bought a dozen bangles from a stall in the town. They were ridiculously cheap – a rupee for the dozen, at a time when there were seventeen or eighteen rupees to the pound. That evening I gave them to Kuppu, thinking she should be compensated by something more lasting than chocolate for her willingness to cross caste lines and keep me clean. Her expression was unreadable as she grabbed the bangles. She simply disappeared, as if she was running for her life. She sprinted from the verandah, and we didn’t see her for the rest of the day. I tried not to be put out by the absence of a show of thanks. ‘It’s probably not the custom here,’ I told Peter uncertainly. ‘She can’t be offended, can she?’

‘At least she didn’t leave the bangles behind, unless … do you think it’s unlucky to give jewellery here? Perhaps that’s why they were so cheap.’

It was certainly a possibility, but there were others. ‘Perhaps in this culture,’ I wondered aloud, ‘I just proposed to her?’

‘A dozen bangles – that’s twelve proposals! She must think you’re head over heels.’

‘I don’t think we’re ever going to understand how things work over here.’

‘How are you going to explain her to Mum? Rather you than me. But at least she’s pretty.’

‘She’s married to the gardener already, idiot.’

The next morning, early, there was an outburst of screeching from the gardener’s hut, the one which Kuppu shared with Rajah Manikkam. Peter and I were quite alarmed, until Mrs Osborne came out of her house, rolling her eyes in exasperation, as she so often did when dealing with the locals.

‘Are they frightened of something again, Mrs Osborne?’

‘No, John, it’s not that. Kuppu has invited all her friends round to show them her new treasures. I hope you haven’t spoiled her for good with your lavishness.’

Spending one rupee on someone who made a hygienic life possible didn’t seem like lavishness, exactly. But at least we had our explanation for her rapid exit when I handed over the bangles. Kuppu had legged it before I had a chance to change my mind.

The behaviour of dogs after death

Peter didn’t react at all to Mrs Osborne as I would have expected. He hero-worshipped her more or less from the start. He said that wherever he was in the world, he would never be afraid of anything as long as Mrs Osborne was there. This from the fearless world traveller, who collapsed on Indian railway stations just to see what would happen! He wanted to ask her advice about things that were close to his heart, things (in fact) that we had never discussed with anyone.

First on the list was what happened in our room after Gipsy died. How was it that Gipsy had breathed by my bed as usual on the night after I took my Spanish oral in 1968, though she had been lethalised earlier in the day? It was as if she had forgotten she was dead. She even gave those sighs that dogs make in their sleep, aware even in unconsciousness of a job well done, the pack protected. The same thing happened every night for a week, and then the ghost breathing had simply stopped. Now it was time to take the mystery to Mrs Osborne.

She started nodding vigorously. Almost before we had finished explaining she said, ‘It was burned into her jiva that she must look after you. That was her purpose in life. When her body died, she had to be sure you were all right without her. I have no doubt that she will be as devoted in the next life as she was in this. May her rebirths be few!’

This wasn’t the wisdom I had come to India to find, but it was a pretty good explanation all the same, of something on the borderline – the melting film – between the ‘real’ and the Real.

Peter wanted to ask Mrs O about Mum’s increasingly erratic behaviour. She would go very barmy over the smallest thing. A dropped piece of cheese could easily lead to a major row, with no end of screaming. Sometimes Mum would be shaking with rage. Peter and I dreaded the evenings when we ate fish, because that always seemed to trigger a mighty fight afterwards. The best we could do was anticipate trouble and shelter as best we could.

I very much didn’t want to consult the Osborne oracle about the mundane miseries of the Cromers. She might have special insight into the behaviour of dogs after death, but she was not the guru I had come to India for. I had come to bask in the presence of Presence, not to have my questions answered. I wanted something that was equally far from a question and an answer.

I persuaded Peter that as a good Hindu Mrs Osborne would treat family itself as a source of distraction and entanglement. She really wasn’t cut out for the rôle of agony aunt – of the sort that Mum so addictively sneered at in the Daily Mirror. At the hairdresser’s in Bourne End village she would ‘tidy up’ the cluttered magazine table, and somehow the problem page would always fall open in front of her eyes.

Peter was slow to recover full strength after his illness. Much as he would have loved to, he still wasn’t able to lift me up or down those three steps onto Mrs O’s verandah. Rajah Manikkam continued to take care of that bit. Peter’s stamina was poor, and he needed a lot of sleep, some of it in the day, so we rarely stayed out late. When we did, we went to the hut that Rajah Manikkam shared with Kuppu so that he could load me into the wheelchair, now that his giggling fits had been more or less exorcised.

One day Mrs Osborne announced that there was a famous Tamil singer giving a concert in the Temple that night. We should all go (though ‘all’ did not include Rajah Manikkam and Kuppu). The Temple was an extraordinary setting, and the concert should have something to offer both pilgrims and tourists. She looked at Peter and me when she said this, and for a moment I wondered if she was really registering a distinction in our status as travellers.

Mrs Osborne assumed that Peter would push me, once the new Rajah Manikkam (no longer hysterical) had lifted me off the verandah, but it turned out not to be quite so simple. Peter could manage the wheelchair perfectly well on the flat. But when we got to the Inner Temple, where the performance was to take place, we were confronted with some astoundingly imposing sacred architecture, an impossibly steep set of steps. ‘Let’s not bother,’ I whispered to Peter, knowing he was incapable of any lifting – but then I remembered Burnham Grammar School and the lesson it taught. That access transcends questions of architecture.

Lightning strikes twice – of course it does! – and then twice more. Lightning strikes in a logarithmic progression of 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 until there is nothing but the strobe-lightning that illuminates Shiva’s dance. And where would Shiva more naturally put on a show than here, where the mountain, the god and the man step in and out of time in an ecstasy of mutual personification?

Very tentatively we approached those sheer steps, and then hands simply appeared from the crowd, each one grabbing a different part of the chair, collectively imparting a strong upward impulse. The wheelchair glided up the stairs as though it was on an escalator. The movement was eerily smooth. Often in the wheelchair I’m semi-consciously anxious that the person pushing will bump me up the kerb, clip my feet when executing a turn and so on, but on this occasion I felt utterly safe. Was it Elijah in the Bible who was carried up to Heaven in a chariot? I have to say I felt pretty blessed myself during that wheelchair ascension glide. I was on my own personal hovercraft, bobbing on jets of divine enablement, puffs of holy help.

For two years at Burnham School I had been lifted upstairs and downstairs by my fellows, and every time it felt like an act of faith, my life in their rowdy hands. Now a crowd of unknown Indians, none of whom individually could have pushed the wheelchair on level ground without mishap, was collectively wafting me upwards. I think I can say with confidence that this has been a life without short cuts – and yet there was this one short cut, this human thermal which uplifted me and me alone.

I wish similar miracles had happened on a regular basis since, with the result that I positively look forward to seeing a flight of steps in front of me. But once was enough. Then, after I had been magicked up all those stairs, Peter came and sat next to Mrs O. He knew her and felt safe near her. Next minute the entire audience, all seated of course on the floor, started undulating with turbulent movement like an ominous sea. I was puzzled and couldn’t see why. Some of the faces in the audience wore expressions of polite distaste, others of actual horror.

Peter had gone to sit in the ladies’ section. That was all it was. There was a rope down the middle of the audience, and men had to sit strictly on one side, ladies on the other. Eventually Mrs O worked out what the trouble was and had a word with Peter. She pointed him over to the other side of the rope. At first she was as baffled by the uproar as I was – then she suddenly remembered the Indian convention against which none of us had meant to offend. Perhaps it was quite a time since she had attended this sort of event, or she had got used to being a living breach of the rules, and thought she could spread her cloak of exemption over Peter’s shoulders also.

All this time I was sitting in the ladies’ section myself, on the other side of Mrs O, and not a single eyebrow was raised. No questions were asked, no orders to relocate issued. The Temple’s (surely?) very first wheelchair seemed to slip through the covenants of tradition and gender. I had a cloak of my own.

Worldly veins throbbed in smugness

What with the various palavers, the communal levitation of the wheelchair followed by the transgression against seating taboos, the performance itself made relatively little impression. The singer was plump and he sang with his eyes closed most of the time. If I hadn’t known the songs were spiritual I wouldn’t have guessed. At the time I wasn’t attuned to Indian vocal style. I just didn’t get it. The singer approached the note like a bee hovering in front of a flower, instead of fixing it cleanly as singers do in the Western tradition, pinning it like a butterfly onto a cork board.

I hadn’t exactly lost my pang of resentment at Peter’s arrival, my sense that a spiritual quest for one Cromer had turned into an adventure for two, but it had certainly gone underground. It was fun being able to explore more easily, even if it wasn’t the sort of exploration I was here for. I hadn’t been able to meditate since he came, not even for a second.

Then one morning Peter announced that he was leaving. When? After breakfast. One last bumper helping of wild fig poriyal, and he would be off. My face must have fallen. He said, ‘I thought it was best just to go without making a fuss about it. Drawn-out partings are horrible – isn’t that what Granny always says?’ Well, yes it was, as a way of making a brusque turning on the heel seem like the height of consideration. ‘And I’ll see you at home, Jay, won’t I?’

Well, of course he would, but it was still a shock. Perhaps subconsciously I had been anticipating having his help with the hundred hurdles of intercontinental travel on the way home.

Peter went up the stairs to the roof and came back with his case two minutes later. Either he had already packed or he was innocently showing off the impulsive efficiency of the able-bodied.

He had withdrawn emotionally by the time we came to say our goodbyes proper. This had been his habit since he was quite a little boy. When he was about ten or eleven Mum noticed a difference in the ritual of bedtime. She came to our beds as usual to give us a hug and a goodnight kiss. He would put his arms round her as usual and he said all the usual things, but he had gone to some other place inside himself, for protection. Peter coped with his great need to belong by choosing to be alone, even in company, and so when it came time to say goodbye he made sure that to all intents and purposes he had already left.

After Peter had gone, the wheelchair resumed its sacred ruts and the vada stall dwindled into the distance, until it was only a memory reeking of spice, carbohydrate and deep fat. I felt Peter’s absence keenly. There’s nothing people miss so much as a good excuse. As long as he was there, he could take the blame for my spiritual stalemate. I could forget that I hadn’t been able to meditate before his arrival either, not for a second.

The weeks had flown by, and my time of pilgrimage was nearly over. What had been accomplished? I had spent many hours in the Old Hall but had made no progress in taming my mind. What if I had moved heaven and earth to make the journey, only to find that I wasn’t mature enough to benefit from it? Sleepless nights were pretty much the rule for me in Tamil Nadu, what with the unravelling bed and the shrieking owls, but I had a few around that time that were distinctly bleak in terms of the thoughts that came to me and the lack of answers I had for them.

Finally I got around to reading the passage that Mrs Osborne had marked for me in The Razor’s Edge. It filled me with an unholy rage that seedy, hateful Somerset Maugham (about whom admittedly I didn’t know a great deal) had come to Tamil Nadu to do a little light research, and had approached Ramana Maharshi bearing a basket of fruit very much as he would have sent flowers to a London hostess. Having fallen into a highly convenient faint, he had been rewarded with Bhagavan’s transforming hands – darshan upon unparalleled darshan – on his unworthy forehead, where worldly veins throbbed in smugness and lassitude. Concentrated Grace had been poured out over this … this storyteller! This storyteller with the ugly, turned-down lips. And all for the sake of some local colour, a whiff of the timeless East.

I on the other hand had made a pilgrimage to Tiruvannamalai in a body that would have been taxed by a visit to Canterbury, for no other purpose than to pay my respects to my guru, and been rewarded with an unquiet mind and a craving for lentil dumplings.

Then Mrs Osborne came out with another book of Maugham’s. In her way she was quite a persistent director of studies. I had done the basic reading, and was to be rewarded with an advanced text. This second book was a collection of essays called Points of View, actually Maugham’s last book, dating from the 1950s. What she wanted to show me was the piece called ‘The Saint’, which was a portrait of Ramana Maharshi written long after the meeting which had fed the silly fantasies of The Razor’s Edge. Maugham had remembered Bhagavan over all those years, and considered him a great spiritual figure. His understanding of Hinduism seemed pretty erratic to me, and a guru is not a saint, but I had to admit that he hadn’t entirely missed the point. That seemed to be my privilege.

I knew that I was supposed to become a Cambridge undergraduate that September, but apart from the kick of outdoing Dad (ignoble triumph, since his chance of university was scuppered by a world convulsion) it meant nothing to me. My life as I wanted it to be went only so far as this visit to Tamil Nadu, then it became incomprehensible. I hadn’t foreseen having to come home. I had planned a sort of Indian rope trick all of my own. I would climb up into union with the guru and pull the rope ladder up after me. No one I knew could follow. I would simply disappear, leaving behind the return portion of my Air India ticket and a half-smile like the Cheshire Cat’s, half-way up a tamarind tree.

Now I felt I was seeking self-realisation against the clock, and finding the necessary states of mind even harder to achieve. Of course ‘achieve’ gives the wrong impression. There can be no question of making something happen. That’s what makes it so hard for the Western mind, and my mind was Western to its fingertips. I had built myself a carapace of brittle willpower, laboriously secreting the chitin from which an exoskeleton is constructed, and now I wanted it cracked open, pierced and raked by the loving beak of enlightenment.

Flakes of powdered glory

One afternoon I was in the Old Hall trying to meditate, and becoming aware as usual that my attention was skittering off in all directions. Then I noticed an old man brushing Bhagavan’s couch. This must have been a particular privilege, since there was a small wooden fence round the couch. Clearly he had permission to pass inside. His eyes were milky with cataracts, and he worked from very close to the fabric, using a brush that was more like a fly whisk than a serious instrument of housework. Nevertheless he kept at it, drawing the little brush down the fabric in reverent strokes, turning the chore into a ritual of sustained attention. I found myself following his movements, fascinated. It took him the best part of an hour to brush the whole upper part of the couch, and then he started on the back, with the same slow meticulous pace. Then it was the turn of the underside, though he had to lie down at odd angles to reach every square inch. Then he turned his attention to the legs of the couch.

The little brush he held was only a step up from the imaginary one which Granny had told me to use as a child to beguile insomnia, patiently cleaning the cells of a beehive which was no less imaginary.

I have to say that at the end of this old man’s prodigious grooming the couch looked exactly the same as it had at the beginning. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to sit on it anyway. It was no more than a stand for a portrait, and a prop from a long-ago photo session. If anyone had asked to take the couch away Ramana Maharshi would very likely have said yes, just as he had with the tiger skin. Nevertheless I was very struck by the devotion of the man with the little brush. From the eerily patient way that he coaxed notional dust from that couch, you would think that it was covered in the most fragile living tissue, like the flakes of powdered glory that make up a butterfly’s wing.

It was only afterwards that I realised how far I had fallen from my own hopes of pilgrimage. The point of pressurising Dad into getting the airline ticket, the whole idea of coming all this way, was to take possession of my spiritual life, not to be impressed by someone else’s. I was estranged from my own devotion. I had failed to establish a primary connection with either of the complementary entities which fed the hunger of so many, the mountain and the ashram. I was turning into a sort of spiritual parasite. I had less of a real relationship with Ramana Maharshi now that I was spending time in rooms that his body had occupied, and spending every day with people who had met him, than when I had been stuck at home in Bourne End, with no stronger inspiration than a book borrowed from the local library.

Ganesh no longer did me the honour of pushing the wheelchair from Aruna Giri to the ashram. Rajah Manikkam delivered me to the gate, and then I would be ferried to the appropriate room by an American devotee who had a sonorous, almost mantra-worthy name: Caylor Truman Wadlington. Of course Ganesh had a lot to do in terms of ashram admin, and he never saw me without giving me his full smile and bidding me once again welcome. But I was rather nostalgic for the good old days earlier in my visit to India, before we had begun to be friendly. Then the obstacles to spiritual progress seemed reassuringly external. Now the resistance was pretty clearly coming from inside me. In an analogy which Ramana Maharshi took from the movies (a particularly rich source of teaching for him), if while you are watching a film a gigantic flickering hair obscures the heroine’s profile, it is futile to attempt to dislodge the monster fibre from the back wall of the cinema. It is of normal size and inside the projector. Inside you, who project so unrelentingly.

In the last week of my stay, Mrs Osborne came up with an inventive solution to one aspect of my impasse, relating specifically to pradakshina. Since it wasn’t possible to go round the mountain under my own steam in the prescribed manner, I should be assisted to climb it. She said, ‘You may not be able to climb Arunachala yourself, but that is no reason for you not to be as high up as we can possibly get you. Not as high as Brahma, I dare say, but high enough to take a small visitor’s breath away.’

The story goes that Vishnu and Brahma were once quarrelling over which was the greater, until Shiva was brought in to settle the question. He appeared as an infinite column of fire, a tejolingam, and challenged the rival gods to find its upper or lower extremity. Vishnu became a boar and burrowed down in search of the base, while Brahma became a swan and soared up in search of the summit. Brahma tried to cheat (he caught a falling flower and claimed to have picked it on the summit) and consequently Vishnu won. The column of fire was too bright to be looked at, so in consideration of the limitations of human vision, Shiva manifested himself instead as Arunachala, on the same spot. It’s the sort of lively story that monotheism rules out of bounds. I do like a large cast of characters, even if they’re only there on the stage, all singing, all dancing, to tell me that existence is one and indivisible.

There may have been some religious symbolism in Mrs O’s suggestion. Why are there many faiths, when there is only one truth? The mountain analogy again, with many routes to the summit, over different types of terrain. Ramana Maharshi’s way has always been considered as a sort of direct ascent of a precipice, as simple as it is difficult. This accounts for the idea (mistaken, I’m sure) that the task is easier with lesser gurus – hence for instance, Raghu’s family’s adherence to Paramahamsa Yogananda. The vichara path being too ‘high’, too ‘exalted’, a ‘lower path’ is chosen until the disciple is ready. I’m truly sorry, but bollocks! It isn’t presumption that chooses the direct approach, it’s faith.

There’s an English climber called George Mallory who disappeared on Everest in 1924. His body has never been found, and it isn’t clear whether he got to the top or not. His is the famous remark about wanting to climb Everest ‘because it’s “there”.’ He did a celebrated bit of climbing in Wales once, nipping down a sheer rock face by the most direct route to retrieve his pipe, which he’d forgotten. And for exactly the same reason: because it was ‘there’, and he was desperate for a soothing puff of Mayan tobacco.

The climb is written up in all the books as Mallory’s Pipe, the descent of a sheer face undertaken in fading light in front of witnesses, with a note which adds, ‘This is impossible.’

Come to that, it’s impossible for an Indian boy mentally to live through his own death and to understand that it is nothing, but it had happened, which was why I was here. And it was also ‘impossible’ for a severely disabled twenty-year-old from Buckinghamshire to be spending a month as a guest of the holy mountain, but here I was. Once you enter the realm of the impossible, every possibility is equally likely.

The only thing which really did seem to be impossible was for me to find the concentration necessary to meditate – or I suppose the disconcentration. Willpower must step back from the event. I couldn’t make that direct descent into the Self, lacking the aplomb of a tweeded mountaineering genius, able to nip down and grab his favourite briar without giving it a thought.

The privileges of luggage

Mrs Osborne arranged for two men to take me up Arunachala. She called them ‘coolies’. I suppose she must have paid them for their labour, though I didn’t think of that at the time. One of them knelt down and carried me in a sort of fireman’s lift. As he clambered up the mountain I had an excellent view of his bobbing rippling muscly back as I looked down, and if I managed to raise my sights a little I could see not where I was going, which was a total mystery, but where I had been. Maybe it was just as well, since the rocky ground dropped away so rapidly it took my breath with it. I could also glimpse the second coolie lithely ascending, carrying the folded wheelchair on his head with no apparent effort.

Those two coolies were the only Indians I met in Tiruvannamalai who didn’t smile at any time. They hardly even looked at me. From their point of view I suppose I was freight rather than person, and you don’t smile at a parcel. I didn’t mind. I had understood on trains between Bourne End, Burnham and Slough the compensating privileges of being defined as luggage. Freight doesn’t ogle the porter, no one imagines such a thing is possible, and so I was free to let my gaze rove over their sinewy bodies, heated by the sun, cooled by the outflow of sharp sweat. The beauty of one body was visual, it glistened under my eye, while the other was tactile. It glowed with heat and effort as it carried me. And if I was treating them as less than fully human, then I could honestly say that I had pinched the idea from them.

I don’t know exactly what instructions the coolies had had from Mrs Osborne, but eventually they settled me on a suitable rocky ledge. They unfolded the chair and put me in it, without cosseting but with perfect efficiency. They left me pointing towards the peak rather than downhill. The only flourish was that one of them produced a handkerchief, shook it out and then draped it over my head to keep the sun off. This was clearly something that Mrs Osborne had stipulated, and I had time to notice, as the handkerchief was shaken out, the initials A. O. embroidered in red on a corner. Alpha and Omega? Arunachala Om? No, I was being shaded by Arthur Osborne’s handkerchief, an honour that made me feel foolish. Commode and hanky – the late Arthur was giving me the works. The coolies even knotted the corners to keep it in place, a technique which I had always assumed evolved only once in the whole of human history and geography, among English holidaymakers at seaside resorts.

I expected these paid companions to stay while I contemplated the mountain, chatting quietly perhaps, sharing a beedie, idling like taxis between fares. Mrs Osborne’s instructions had been delivered in what sounded like very peppery Tamil, but of course I couldn’t really understand a word of it. I was busy wondering whether her Polish accent was as strong in other languages as it was in English, and if so, how they managed to make head or tail of it.

When I looked round the ‘coolies’ had disappeared. There wasn’t anything supernatural, I don’t think, about their vanishing. Looking round isn’t something I can do in a moment – I have to wriggle round first. If they hadn’t been absorbed directly back into the mountain, according to the etiquette for numinous emanations, then they had clambered down its sides as spryly as they had clambered up.

I was now in direct communion with Arunachala, while the ground dropped away behind me. There was nothing between me and the mountain. In a sense I had been riding on his back for weeks, but this was different. His eye was upon me, and though the experience was very unlike being Frodo Baggins writhing beneath the stare of Sauron it wasn’t exactly comfortable. Arunachala was unhostile, still residually hostly, but not (at this altitude) particularly indulgent. All my excuses went up in smoke under that gaze, like sweet wrappers on a bonfire.

Why was I here?

One answer would be that I had followed a trail from a library book to a crazy old lady with a handy verandah, but that wasn’t what the mountain meant. I tried one more time to concentrate, while the sweat started to trickle down my face. Enlightenment felt like the onset of heatstroke.

I had never to my knowledge dreamed of the mountain or the god (though who’s to say – how do you know when you’re dreaming of white light?), but I had experienced a puzzling dream about the man, about Ramana Maharshi. This was during my time at High Wycombe Technical College, but it was a dream entirely free of the daily grit whose rubbing sets off the nacreous secretion we call dreaming – the quotidian residues. Ramana Maharshi and I were sitting on a patch of sand, whether an area of desert or a specially contrived expanse I couldn’t tell, together with an Arab whom I didn’t recognise. I listened attentively to what Bhagavan was saying, but after a little while the Arab walked off in disgust, kicking sand towards us as he went. At this Ramana Maharshi turned to me and said, ‘I would rather have your love than your anger.’ I woke up with a great sense of injustice, since I had been attending very humbly and hadn’t been the one who had kicked up all the fuss.

It took Mrs Osborne to point out the obvious – that since it was my dream, the Arab was as much me as ‘I’ was. The anger displaced onto him was really mine. At some level I was seething with resentment at my need of a guru. An understandable feeling, of course, since I was so comprehensively dependent in other areas, but hard to take into your heart (the only place where things can be fully owned and finally shed).

Gruffly Mrs O consoled me, pummelling antiseptic creams into the bruise which her unwelcome insight had made. ‘Progress is an illusion, my dear John. As is the absence of progress.’ By this time I was so used to her way with sibilants that I would only have noticed if the hissing stopped. These strange noises were like the multifarious knocks and rattles of an old car, and oddly reassuring. Only sudden silent running would announce the imminence of collapse.

‘It is disheartening for you, I know. You have brought your little radio to a new place,’ she would say, ‘where there is a terribly powerful transmitter. The strong signal overwhelms your little apparatus, that is all.’

My little apparatus overwhelmed

Ramana Maharshi was very fond of taking parables from the wireless as well as that other high technology of his day, the cinema. He used the example of the radio (which a devotee had turned on, rather too loud) to show that there is no time and no space – here after all is a little box that says, perfectly truthfully, ‘Hello, this is Hyderabad’ one minute and ‘Hello, Bangalore here’ the next. Yet it never moves an inch.

I can’t say I was much consoled by this explanation. If my little apparatus was overwhelmed, what was I supposed to do about it?

‘Perhaps your little radio will tune itself to the new signal. You must learn patience from the mountain.’

I wondered if the problem was with my mantra, my regulation-issue beginner’s-level Om-Mane-Padme-Om, so I asked her what she used to help her meditate. She seemed rather shocked by so personal a question. It was as if I had asked for the loan of some underwear. ‘If you need a new mantra one will be given to you in time, but you cannot simply borrow one from someone else on the Path.’ Then she relented a little. ‘You might try Arunachala Siva or simply Om. Perhaps one of those will help.’ In practice I didn’t get anywhere with either, and fell back on my old standby. It seemed silly to think that a mantra would need converting to cope with the vagaries of a foreign current, like an electric shaver.

Mrs Osborne must have realised that my distress was real. She unbent a bit. ‘It is sometimes easier for children to give full attention than adults. My daughter Catherine – Katya – was the first of any of us to enter Bhagavan’s presence, carrying the customary basket of fruit. He indicated the low table on which such things were put, but she misunderstood and hopped up there herself, cradling the basket.

‘The disciples nudged each other and said that she was making an offering of herself to Bhagavan. Certainly she had no difficulty communicating with him. You yourself are no longer a child, but you are younger than I was when I came here, younger also than Arthur.

‘When he came here at the end of the war, he experienced similar difficulties to yours. He said that the presence of Bhagavan was less real to him than the photograph which had given him such strength and serenity during the years of his internment.’

I perked up no end at this precedent. ‘So it’s a sort of test?’

‘It is no sort of test. There are no tests. What is it that would be tested? It is a stage merely.’ I must have looked crushed all over again, and her consoling instincts gained ascendancy. ‘A schoolfriend of Ramana Maharshi, visiting him here, once said, “If you stay with the Jñani he gives you your cloth ready woven” – meaning that you don’t have to find the thread and weave it yourself, as you do with other gurus. But that is not necessarily the case for everyone. Each has his path, but the mountain is the same goal for all.’

Drowsing beneath my folkloric hanky, I began to think that the mountain had taken his eye off me. The strangest aspect of my pilgrimage was that Arunachala, in Britain so absolutely steady a signal source, became when I was in such close proximity oddly inconstant.

Arunachala didn’t altogether compel my reverence as I had assumed in advance. Ramana Maharshi wrote in an evocation of the mountain that was himself, ‘Though in fact fiery, my lack-lustre appearance as a hill on this spot is an effect of grace and loving solicitude for the maintenance of the world.’

There were times when Arunachala really did look lack-lustre to me, just one more mountain, fit subject for a holiday postcard, to be sent to those people who are owed holiday postcards. Sometimes Arunachala could have been any hill that had seized my imagination when I read about it – the Wrekin, say, in the poems of A Shropshire Lad.

At this point it would be hard to say that I was even trying to meditate. I was engaged in a rêverie which was the exact opposite of meditation, perversely imagining the Wrekin in mid-Shropshire instead of Arunachala in mid-Tamil Nadu. Behind closed eyes I was trying to subtract from my surroundings the Indian smells, baked earth, flower perfume, and spice, not to mention the Indian heat, and to replace them with genteel transient fragrances and parochial birdsong. Insipid scents and tweetings.

I tried to imagine church bells in a peal, the jangling overlapping changes which somehow spell out the opposite – changelessness. The acoustical shimmering which is the closest our ears can come to hearing eternity. It’s even possible that I was feeling homesick, though I was conjuring up a synthetic landscape rather than anything I actually knew.

It seemed to me that I could really hear bells, but not church bells – cowbells. I opened my eyes and saw, some distance away, a cowherd boy with some cattle. One of the cows wasn’t tethered and seemed to be free to wander where it pleased. It also seemed to see me, and as if acting from a sociable impulse it ambled my way. The bell round its neck was massive and made of some dully shining metal. It didn’t seem scared or suspicious of the wheelchair, as most livestock is (many pets have the same mistrust).

Where was the cowherd boy now? Shouldn’t he be rushing up to drive his charge back towards its fellows, using a stick that would make me wince in sympathy but also thank him in my heart? I couldn’t see him. With a neck properly equipped with rotational and stretching powers, I might have had a better chance of getting a glimpse, but there it was. All told I miss quite a bit from the lack of play in my neck.

On the other hand, if I had been in possession of a working neck I wouldn’t have been in India in the first place, I’d have taken so different a path that the two Johns, the supple and the stiff, would long since have been invisible to each other.

The cow came nearer and nearer. I became increasingly conscious of the largeness of the cow and the smallness of me. It wasn’t a sleek prize-winning English cow, but it wasn’t the scrawny animal I was half-expecting as the norm in India. Nor did this animal resemble the cow in Mrs Osborne’s garden, which gave us milk that could never go off.

This cow was pure white except for a streak of shit on its flank. It was strongly built, with something that was almost a hump behind its shoulder. As it came close it seemed to be bigger than any normal cow could possibly be, but then I’m not used to the looming of cattle. I had an almost intoxicating sense of my own littleness, a thrill of insignificance.

At the same time I was highly aware of the precariousness of my position. As the cow came closer I started to talk to it, saying, ‘Nice cow’ or some such absurdity, hoping madly that it wasn’t going to butt the chair or interfere with me in any way. I tried to remember whether the brakes were on, though I knew how little difference it would make if the huge animal once made physical contact. I would either be nudged off the chair or nudged off the mountain.

The cow slowed down as it approached me but didn’t actually stop. She came nearer and nearer, her eyes both empty and searching, bending her head down low in a way that didn’t look particularly submissive. In an obscene reflex I could smell the meatiness of her. I suppose we all harbour some such atavistic instinct, even when as individuals we have learned to find animals’ lives delicious, and not their deaths.

The cow came so near that I couldn’t see both her eyes at once. There was just enough play in my neck for me to turn the angle necessary to focus on one and then the other. Her massive jaw moved to the side chewingly, and she unrolled her breath in front of me like a carpet of grasses. She nudged even further forward, so that her breath rolled over me in a cuddy plume. Eventually I was touching her nose, and speaking to her as evenly as I could. If I say I was touching her nose, it must be understood that the action was hers not mine – she presented her nose to my hand.

My terror was that she was going to reach out to me with her tongue. As long as she kept it in her mouth I could contemplate her with a sort of equanimity, under my fear. Having refused my share of a thousand Sunday roasts, I was in physical danger but not shamed. If she showed her tongue I would be morally annihilated, having eaten tongue, processed and jellied, in ignorant enjoyment as a bedridden boy. How was I supposed to live with myself after that, if she reached out that wet muscle and licked me with it? My whole pilgrimage was being dominated by the bodily not the spiritual, and by cows’ bodies at that, cows and their tongues, cows in the city and cows on the mountain.

I found myself crooning, ‘Avatar of the cow goddess’ – in my panic I’d forgotten precisely which Hindu deity took bovine form – ‘Emanation of Arunachala …’ over and over again. I was also murmuring ‘Pax, pax,’ as if this was a playground dispute that could be resolved by surrender. In confrontations with cattle Pax is not an effective spell, whether you’re a matador impaled in his suit of lights, repenting his cruelty with sobs of blood, or a neophyte devotee whose bluff has been called, discovering that the mountain he has adored from afar is numinous beyond all reckoning.

Locking horns with Lakshmi

I was slow to realise that this was a supernatural encounter. The mountain had given up on the project of addressing me directly and had lowered himself to incarnation, and a sort of ruminant ventriloquism. Contact on a level I could understand. My abilities had been scrutinised and revised downwards, though I think without disapproval. I have observed a similar procedure in a Chinese restaurant, when the management has smilingly brought knife and fork, without being asked, to rescue a patron defeated by chopsticks.

After that the divine cow started showing signs of what I can only call affection, rubbing and pushing lightly against me. They were slight movements for a cow, but I was rocked alarmingly by them. I had as much to fear from a friendly cow as from a mad bull, not from a charge but the delicate movement that would crush me. If all this had happened down in the plain, with the cowherd nearby, watching with an indulgent smile, I would have been in svarga – in heaven – or at least in the Indian equivalent of Whipsnade (remembering the time a snake had handled me there), but here I was in real danger and a real state.

Her next step was to turn her head. One huge horn came down and to the side, so that it went through the wheelchair arm-piece on the left, with a smooth grinding noise as solid bone slid on hollow metal. Another small movement and she had manœuvred her left horn under the right arm-piece, so that her head ended up in the centre of the chair’s rotational axis. Precisely where a cow would position itself if it wanted to use its mighty neck muscles, and the superbly articulated bones they powered, to give my wheelchair an apocalyptic flick. The cow’s friendliness continued, but I was filled with terror and awe. In a perfectly friendly way, she could have lifted her head straight up, in creaturely greeting, and the chair would either have been lifted up bodily, taking me with it, or tipped backwards off the mountain.

This wasn’t a cosy creature out of A. A. Milne making butter for the royal slice of bread, this was a Hindu divinity. It was terrifying. This wasn’t Daisy, this was – it came to me – Lakshmi. I was locking horns with Lakshmi. Her cud-breath engulfed me. There was a long string of saliva hanging from her mouth, a glutinous rope, but I could easily believe it would hang there for a thousand years without falling.

My body entered a state of sacred shock. I was almost weeping, and when I tried to speak to this presence, no sound came out. In fact they were all here, or at least seven out of the eight: horripilation, trembling, tears, faltering of the voice, perspiration, inability to move, holy devastation. All the physical signs of the presence of God, everything that makes up what Hindus call nirvikalpa samadhi. I can’t vouch for the changing of my body colour in any real way, but it seems hardly likely that I would stay the same colour when every other aspect and sensation was turned upside down.

Of course any one of the signs, and even whole groups of them, could be explained by my situation. At the mercy of an immense and capricious ruminant. On a mountain that I claimed as my spiritual home, but was thousands of miles from home by every other definition. But there was no doubt in my mind, as I gazed at her, that I was in the presence of Lakshmi. She turned her head a little, so that only one eye remained in my field of vision. That eye was a glazed bulge in which all contradictions were collapsed, a radiant absence and a probing vacuum.

This turning of the head, though smoothly executed, brought a huge force to bear on the wheelchair. If it hadn’t been exactly in line with the axle the chair would have been tipped over, and even so the framework juddered and one wheel lifted from the ground.

Mechanistic Western thinking was all at sea in this terrain, but still it went on offering the incantation which calls itself analysis of events. What it told me was that horn and arm-piece had meshed as a result of a series of moves on the divine cow’s part. The only way the knot could be undone without capsizing me was if the same sequence was performed in reverse, lateral actions with no component of movement either forward or backwards, passes as precise as the ones required to knit together the kinked silver loops of Patrick Savage’s fidelity ring in the library of Burnham Grammar School. Time would have to go backwards, the film be shown in reverse. Otherwise I would shortly be united with the mountain in a crash of silence.

If I could just have banished the final particle of fear, the ego might have melted for good, dissolving into Arunachala just as Parvati did, in the story told to me on my first walk round the mountain. I wouldn’t necessarily have died, although that isn’t out of the question. But the ego would certainly have burned away in its current form, persisting only as a wraith, the fabled moon in the daytime. A purely executive residue with no agenda of its own, directing my life without getting in its way, a policeman on point duty with no powers of arrest.

For a long moment, the Cow on the Mountain stayed poised in entanglement with the wheelchair. Then she gently disengaged her horns, as if she knew exactly what she was doing. The film was run backwards frame by frame, and the raised wheel renewed its contact with the ground. At this point there was a subtle molecular change in the cow’s gaze. After a few moments it became clear that she was baffled by her surroundings. It wasn’t hard to see her as an audience member suddenly finding herself on stage at a hypnotism show, with no memory of what has been said or done while under the influence, unreassured by the welling of applause. She was definitely a cow at this point, not a deity, and as a cow she wandered off out of my line of sight.

I was in a state somewhere between revelation and shell-shock. I remember nothing about the descent from the mountain. I assume the coolies rematerialised and carried me and the wheelchair down as briskly as they carried us up, but there is nothing in my memory to vouch for that. If I had floated down under my own power or been lowered smoothly by thousands of hands appearing out of nowhere, I hope I would remember, but I can’t be certain even so.

The true mystical temperament is a well fed from springs beneath, indifferent to drought or flooding. My own state at this point was rather different – a bath so overfilled that even dropping the soap would make it slop over. The moment I had recovered my presence of mind I had to blab to somebody about the cow on the mountain. I couldn’t keep the miraculous to myself. I had to parade it. And even though I was always a little afraid of her, it was Lucia Osborne I was going to tell. The witch in the white sari had a knack of drawing the strangest confessions into her gnarled and Polish ears.

She asked for a clear description of the cow, and nodded as I passed on everything that I could remember. I hesitated to mention the streak of shit on her flank, but this rather lowly detail didn’t make her stop nodding. ‘This is certainly a photism, a visual manifestation of Lakshmi the goddess, in fact of course – though the correspondence is not exact – of Lakshmi the disciple, an extraordinary cow who achieved enlightenment on June 18th, 1948.’ I didn’t quite see how Mrs Osborne could be so definite, but this was a lady pickled in certainties who could go for years without saying ‘perhaps’. I would have liked to quarrel with that rather gossamer word photism, since the massive presence of the cow, the overwhelming likelihood that it would send me flying, were not things registered by the eye alone.

‘We have no choice but to call her a disciple of Bhagavan. Even as a calf she would come and place her head at his feet. That was before I came here, of course, but I was there on the day that Sri Bhagavan held her head in his hands when she was in the throes of her death. He watched over her almost as he had done with his own mother when she shed her body. Her samadhi is at the ashram.’

Samadhi meaning resting-place. By etymology a putting together, joining, completion, and so either the state of bliss or a place of rest. The actual cow festival is on January 15th, but I didn’t think Lakshmi should be made to wait. Taking a cue from Lewis Carroll, I would celebrate her unbirthday. Mrs Osborne helped me prepare a puja for Lakshmi. Puja is I suppose the elementary form of worship in Hinduism. Chanting is more abstract, and meditation still more so. That’s the order in which they are ranked for the benefit of those who think in terms of progression. But physical puja has its place, there’s no doubt about that.

Mrs Osborne gave me guidance about the offering I should make: a miniature meal for the god, laid out on a banana-leaf. A few grains of rice, a little pile of vegetables, a dab of sambhar. Mountain banana was particularly pleasing to the Lakshmi she knew, she said, the historical one. This foreshortened feast appealed to many deep memories – it was a snack of savoury reminiscence in itself. I remembered Mum’s doctrine that every forkful I put in my mouth should ideally contain each element of what was on the plate, the meal in microcosm.

We discussed whether the offering should be taken to the shrine in the ashram. Eventually we decided that it should be fed to an actual cow. Mrs O brought out an image of Lakshmi onto the verandah for my benefit. An image wasn’t strictly necessary, since the real shrine is in your heart. We waved joss-sticks around – always a pleasure in its own right. Then we entrusted the little meal to Rajah Manikkam, who took it away and fed it to the cow of his choice, a white cow if he could find one, shit-streak not required.

Bloated with a pilgrim’s blood

At night I pondered the difficulty of my quest and prayed for softness in that awful bed. My compassion for the mosquitoes biting my toes had lasted all of a day. I had given them a good night’s feed, with a willing heart, but enough was enough. There’s such a thing as taking liberties. After that, I was all in favour of squashing them and bother the karma. I even wondered if we could get hold of some poison somehow. Wouldn’t the mosquitoes be likely to be reborn in better lives, rewarded for dying while bloated with a pilgrim’s blood?

Then when Peter came, I acquired a secret weapon in the fight for a good night’s sleep. A dog followed us home from the market. We fed it on vada scraps and anything else that came to hand. It wasn’t a house dog but a street dog, wily and craven. Peter had named him Yogi Bear, after the cartoon character, a sweetly clueless creature to whom he bore no resemblance whatever. I’m sure Peter really chose the name out of fond mockery of my religion, but it stuck even after he had gone.

The dog was skinny, he was fidgety and his fur was as coarse as a wire brush, but he was an absolute godsend in the night. I could lean on him just enough to change the position of my spine, and get a little relief from the ordeal of the bed. In the mornings he would make himself scarce, though I expect Kuppu had spotted him and was turning a blind eye.

Even with the dog in place my sleep was fitful, and I would take in impressions which fully registered only later. Sleep is a mist subject to intermittent thinning, with occasional patches of clear visibility. So I was dimly aware that in the early hours Mrs Osborne had crept out onto the verandah, carrying a kerosene lamp of some sort, and crept away again. It can’t have been long after three. Time for Lucia’s morning meditation, before the abrupt arrival of dawn stacked the odds against inwardness. Like any good hostess she was quietly making sure that all was well with her guest. Did I have everything I needed?

Then she crept back holding something just out of sight. In my half-sleep I registered that this hunchback was suddenly growing very tall, and then that she had produced a very nasty-looking stick. Without a word she brought it cracking down on the dog, on my innocent bedmate and physiotherapy cushion. Who yelped and ran. I was shocked, frightened and in my bleary-eyed way actually very angry that this vegetarian devotee of a religion of respect for all creation should harbour such a core of rage and cruelty. What sort of person gets up early to meditate and casually brutalises an animal before she starts?

This demonic incarnation of Mrs Osborne gave a nod of satisfaction and returned to the house, so that the conversation which I so badly needed to have with her about how she squared such behaviour with her faith had to wait till morning.

After those few hours’ delay, though, I felt awkward raising the subject, which was dishonourable and absurd. It wasn’t that my feelings had eased, but the good manners in which I had been brought up intervened, and I was very aware of feeling rude and disobliging. I gave less good an account of myself in the argument than I should have. I don’t think I was ever fully rested during the entire five weeks of my stay in India, but that morning broken sleep and emotional upset conspired to make me ineffective.

I pleaded that the dog was helping me sleep, and got the usual reply of Nonshenshe, and the familiar boast of how well she slept, despite her age, on a bare floor. I tried to explain one more time that our situations were different, but she obviously concluded that I was a softy. Even after the initial conjuring of the bed by her and Rajah Manikkam I hadn’t been satisfied – the drawback of that kind of bed being that the knots loosen unevenly, so that a few stay taut and dig into you while the others start to lower you to the ground. More than once she and the gardener had made adjustments, winding tapes round the bed to reinforce the slackened ropes and hold them in place.

I had no alternative but to bring up matters of doctrine. ‘Didn’t Bhagavan warn us never to abuse animals round Arunachala, since they might be siddhas in animal form?’

‘You forget, John, that I have seen that scabby dog hanging around and scratching itself for months. A siddha might take the form of a dog’ – and here her delivery became positively venomous – ‘but would certainly be immune to fleas. On the other hand it might very well be a demon.’ She regarded the matter as closed, and moved away before I could remind her that Bhagavan himself in states of extreme inwardness had been infested with worse things than fleas – his flesh had been eaten by ants.

It points to my oddly intermediate state of mind that summer that I could accept a cow on the mountainside being a goddess, but not a dog on the verandah being a demon.

I didn’t mention that Peter had adopted the dog (or he had adopted Peter), that we had fed him on vada scraps and kept him out of sight. That we had named him in honour of an American cartoon. The scrawny dog with the sidelong grin never came back, and nor did my full fondness for Mrs Osborne. I asked myself what Peter would have made of her cruelty. Could he have hung on to his dependence on Mrs O, his sense that he was safe with her, if he had seen her as I had, as a witch with a stick?

It was a jolting experience, though it also provided a moment of breakthrough in translation from the Tamil. After seeing Mrs Osborne assault a defenceless animal, I had found what Raghu Gaitonde had asked for, a passable English translation of the word suunyakaari, ‘she who manipulates nothingness’, so meagrely rendered as ‘witch’. Wielder of the Void. That was her secret identity.

The whole incident with the dog cast a pall over my relationship with Mrs Osborne and made me doubt whether we really shared a faith. If we did, she was no sort of advertisement for it. It was Ramana Maharshi’s practice to feed dogs before people, and though I didn’t want to be the sort of Englishman abroad who makes the treatment of pets his yardstick for everything it was certainly a point of affinity between guru and disciple. I was only a visitor but Ramana Maharshi was much more than a resident, he was the quintessence of this landscape, and between us we outnumbered the Polish suunyakaari.

What I had seen in Lucia Osborne as she brought the stick down on an innocent animal was exactly the sort of pattern which conditions karma, a vasana, a rut of cruelty, a stuck groove in the human record, even if she saw the action as either entirely trivial or else disinterested, as if she was only ridding my bed of a pest. She was deceived. Altruistic deeds release the Self, egotistical ones imprison it.

Later that day she came out onto the verandah with an armful of books, proper Western hardbacks even if they were falling apart and had been eaten by every kind of insect. She dumped them on the table in front of me and said she’d like me to bind them professionally for her. I was utterly dismayed. They were completely unmanageable, the sort of book I would have to wrestle with to show it who’s the boss before I could read a single word. I bleated something about the small size of my arms and the large size of the books, but she said coldly, ‘You told me you were a bookbinder, so I had some jobs lined up for you. Whether you keep your promise is up to you.’ Then she made her exit into the house, leaving the stack of moth-eaten tomes on the table for me to look at, since there was nothing else I could do with them. I had plenty of time to regret the hollow promise I had made in the hope of making myself useful and not being a burden to the household.

Even with Yogi Bear sharing the bed, my sleep had been fitful, but after he had been driven away I had hours of that insomniac awareness that is the opposite of meditation, waiting for sunrise and the relative comfort of the wheelchair. I had plenty of time to grapple with my spiritual impasse. Willpower had brought me to a place where willpower stalled.

Pradakshina had become part of my routine without quite seeming to winch me, as planned, into the centre of my Self. It was something like a sacred constitutional. The beginning of the pradakshina road was remarkably peaceful. The surface of the road was mud, with an almost antique patina and a scattering of sand on top. The accumulated compressive effect of thousands of devoted bare feet on pradakshina had somehow lightened its texture, giving it a sort of upward spiritual thrust that could be felt unmistakably rising up through the wheels of the chair. The ground had a delightful soft feel and released a seductive sifty-tilthy sensation. It transmitted shimmering spiritual tickles.

At this point on every pradakshina I would feel as if I was trembling on the brink of enlightenment, as if light was being born inside my eyelids. Spores of self-realisation drifted around me like flour particles on days when Mum got busy baking. Yet however fiercely I stoked my inward fires, I couldn’t burn off from the unfolding experience a certain gross residue of sight-seeing.

For one thing I had become something of a connoisseur of mantapams, those structures which Ganesh had identified for me on that first night. When I had mentally compared them with bus shelters I wasn’t too far off the mark. A mantapam is no more than a consecrated roof. Ideally a mantapam would simply float above the heads of pilgrims, keeping the rain off. Not practical in structural terms – but that’s the simplicity that mantapams start from.

A roof without a wall would only provide shelter from rain falling in an obliging vertical, and we know how rarely that happens. So a mantapam will have the concession of a back wall, and four pillars to hold the roof up. It’s usually possible to find a dry spot under the roof somewhere. The sacred element in a mantapam is variable, but it’s definitely there. A mantapam is the bud of a temple, which can sprout very vigorously under the right conditions. An unsponsored, unloved mantapam remains dormant in its shelter form. And of course the bud can be blighted. At one point on the pradakshina circuit was a mantapam whose roof was falling in. Grass and weeds were taking over underneath, and an enterprising tree was tapping into the unused vitality of the edifice by growing out of the top of the dilapidated wall. I couldn’t quite see where it was getting its moisture, unless as a sapling it had sent rooting fingers into an unsuspected reservoir of nourishment, some little yolk-sac of grace.

A molten yo-yo looping

Just as a mantapam can blossom into a temple, I suppose a temple which fell on hard times might eventually decline into a mantapam. But there are more possibilities than these in mantapam evolution. A mantapam may grow at an oblique angle into a choultry, which is only a mantapam with a little kitchen attached. The presence of food, whether donated or begged for, changes everything. Once cooking has come into the picture it’s only a matter of time before music gets in on the act, and soon food is being offered to hungry pilgrims at the choultry to the accompaniment of bhajans, special songs.

I had even made my peace with the tea-shop which I had scorned so bitterly earlier on. There was no resemblance, as it turned out, to a cathedral gift shop or cafeteria, unless those places recruit their staff from the circus. There was a strong element of showmanship involved. The hissing noise I had heard (which reminded me of the auto steam-engine I wasn’t allowed to have as a child because it wasn’t safe) came from something that can only really be called a samovar, despite the distance from Russia. I had seen its domestic equivalent at Mrs Adcock’s in Bourne End, but this one was in constant use. Next to it was another pot, one that apparently had milk in it, simmering over glowing embers of charcoal. Hot water would be dispensed from the samovar and poured through a net bag the size of a man’s sock containing tea dust. Then hot milk was added with a ladle.

It was the next stage of the operation that seemed to call for a drum-roll in the background, and occasional gasps from the crowd. I made sure I had a good view. This was juggling with tea, not with cups of it but the liquid itself. The juggler would pour it from one beaker into another to cool it off to the ideal temperature. Naturally enough, he started to show off, grinning broadly, pouring the tea faster and faster from an increasing distance until it looked, as it flowed from beaker to beaker, like a molten yo-yo looping between expert hands, or a Slinky miraculously promoted from mimicking fluidity with its soft metal coils to partaking of the real thing. At last the beaker was presented to the customer ready to drink, the swirling ribbons of liquid reassembled into one, the colour of caramel and tasting as sweet as it looked.

By this time I had weaned myself off taking sugar in tea (coffee was more of a challenge), but it would have been missing the point to have clung to my preferences now. The tea flowed across my tongue differently from any Western preparation. It positively sauntered down the digestive pathway, and of course there’s a reason for this. The local cows (species Bos Indicus, breed most likely Kangayam) produce a sleeker milk. There’s an inverse relationship between milk yield and fat content, so Daisy (species Bos taurus, breed perhaps Jersey) outproduces Lakshmi in volume but can’t compete in richness.

High fat is good in a treat, bad when it becomes a routine. So is Hinduism inherently a high-fat religion? Good question. After all, India has the largest population of cattle (cows and buffaloes) on earth. But actually, no. We read in the Atharva Veda (I do, anyway) that only cows with low levels of fat in their milk should be kept as family cows. Cows producing richer milk should be donated to the priestly castes, who require a higher percentage of fat when performing yajñas – offering oblations of milk (among other substances) to the sacred fire, to tickle the palates of the gods. They whose digestions can cope with any extreme of lushness.

Finally the day dawned, as abrupt as all its predecessors, when it was time for me to return to England and my mundane future. It was also time for me to be measured again. Mrs Osborne was visibly excited as she bustled about with her tape measure. She seemed to have forgiven me my limitations as a book-binder. No further jobs were lined up. She didn’t need me to change a fuse or dig a trench.

Homœopathy was being put to the test. An agnostic was being provided with hard evidence, and trusted to accept the facts however disruptive of previous certainties. I lined myself up against the wall of the house. Mrs Osborne took her pencil and made a mark. She was humming under her breath. Then Rajah Manikkam helped me back to the wheelchair while Mrs O grappled with the tape measure. She made a great fuss about aligning the bottom of the tape properly, asking Rajah Manikkam to check it for her. When she was satisfied that everything was properly arranged she compared the two marks and wrote measurements on the wall.

‘John, do you see what has happened? When you came here four weeks ago you measured four feet eight and five-eighths of an inch. Now you are four feet eight and seven-eighths of an inch tall. You have grown a quarter of an inch in a month! And there is nothing to say that your growth will not continue, if you go on taking the pills I have prepared.’ She stopped and looked at me more closely. ‘You are a very unusual young man, John. Of course I don’t know many young men, certainly not young men from the West, but you are certainly a special case. Something you considered fixed is revealed to be alterable, yet you hardly react. I must wonder why.’

My answer sounded awkward to me even as it came out of my mouth. ‘Mrs Osborne, I didn’t come to India to change on the outside. That was never the idea. That isn’t the important thing.’

‘You have changed, but not in the way that you most hoped. Perhaps it is simply shock that paralyses you. You will need time to accept the fact that anything is possible. I understand and will ask no more questions.’

It wasn’t like that. She was on the wrong track entirely. I had taken the little pills in good faith, and the idea of miraculous growth at the age of twenty had a certain amount of power over me. But I was also cheating.

The first time I leaned against the wall I had made sure my feet in their built-up shoes were some little distance away from the wall. It wasn’t hard to make out that I had reached the limit of my flexibility. So in the weeks that intervened I had it in my mind that I could either humour Mrs O or show her up, depending on how I felt on the day. It was a strange and no doubt corrupting sensation to have so much power over someone who had so much power over me.

On the day when the measuring was done, I simply stood a little closer to the wall. I was less steady in my balance, but Rajah Manikkam was there to brace me, and Mrs O was too busy with the tape measure to notice. And as for my motives, obviously they were very far from pure. Once I’d decided to play along, I was going to get my revenge on Mrs Osborne one way or another. Either I was going to show up homœopathy as futile or I was going to humour her, and let her go to her grave believing in something that I’d faked. There was anger in both options, but one option was all anger.

If I demonstrated that her therapy had failed I was punishing her pure and simple. In the option I settled on there was at least the possibility of a more positive emotion. By assenting to the idea that I’d added something to my height I was going along with my own fond hopes as well as hers. As for why I was angry with Mrs Osborne, part of it had to do with her sudden appearance as Wielder of the Void, using her stick to beat an innocent stray dog who was helping me sleep, but I would have done the same even if that bizarre event had never happened. Fundamentally, it had to do with my coming to India hoping to find a spiritual mother, and finding something else. A Polish-born Hindu repetition of Granny, another avatar of the peremptory. A human vasana, from my point of view, a living rut. A repeated pattern triggering love, submission and resentment, mechanical as a recurring decimal.

It was certainly true that I had changed, but not in the way that I had most hoped. I was deeply tanned, and according to Mrs Osborne I would now be growing at the rate of three inches a year until I decided to stop taking the pills, with a control over my changing size which Lewis Carroll’s Alice would have envied. I would hit six feet before I hit thirty. I wonder now what preparation it was she gave me – some sort of titration of Sequoia? I still thought of myself as a de votee, but I had failed in my dream of abruptly realising myself for once and for all. I wouldn’t be able to skip my larval stage as a university student. There was no short cut to the shimmering imago, no special ramp up the mountain installed for my convenience.

The key to the whole problem was Ganesh, the key but not a usable one. Call it a key broken off in the lock. Not Ganesh the man, who had said his goodbyes very warmly. Ganesh the principle, the whole idea of obstacles and their removal. In Bourne End before I set off I had been wise enough to ignore all barriers, discounting the possibility that anything could block my progress, but in India I had been entirely taken up with them, by the verandah, by Peter, by Mrs O and the whole stupid growing-tall project, and by the failure of meditation. I had allowed obstacles to define me and had become bogged down, there where I had counted on being most free, preöoccupied with personalities, which occupy no lofty rung of reality.

After Kuppu had helped to clean me for the last time, and Rajah Manikkam had lifted me down from the verandah, while I gave him for the last time the stern glare that cuts off giggles at their root, I thought I would have time to myself in the taxi that was taking me to Madras, time to mourn and to start recovering. I planned to wallow a little in my regrets.

I hadn’t understood how Indian taxis work. For a four-or five-hour trip like that, arranged in advance (and costing me a hundred rupees, more than a fiver), there will always be company. The owner of the taxi, a Muslim wearing a round hat, accompanied the driver. There were women and children, with much kissing and cuddling.

At the last minute, Mrs Osborne herself got in. She was suffering from toothache, and had decided to make her way to Madras for an extraction. There was a dentist in the city who treated her without charge, not because he was a devotee of Ramana Maharshi but because he was impressed by Mrs Osborne personally, and her steadfast refusal of anæsthesia, both local and general. Toothache didn’t deter her from chatting in Tamil for the whole of the journey, while I closed my eyes and tried to meditate. If I had been a tourist it would have been a waste not to make the most of my last sights of rural India, but I was a devotee, even if I felt further than ever from enlightenment. There was one crowning disappointment in my summer of pilgrimage. I had broken my vow. Chastity had slipped away from me when I wasn’t looking.

Is this the end for John Wallace Cromer?

The night before, I had dreamed of the Abominable Snowman. The dream was somehow in the style of a B-movie from the 1950s. I was being hurried to safety through snow by a group of helpers who suddenly scattered and deserted me. The dream wasn’t from my point of view, exactly, but the guiding principle was film cliché rather than astral travel. If I was scared in the dream then perhaps Mrs O’s remarks about the importance of following dream fear to its source remained with me on these lower levels of mental life, so that I over-rode the reflex of waking.

Now the camera craned up and looked down at me, and I saw that the wheelchair was sitting squarely in the middle of an enormous footprint in the snow. Then there was either a commentary or a caption, as if this was an episode of a serial reaching its cliff-hanger ending: IS THIS THE END FOR JOHN WALLACE CROMER, TORN APART BY A MYTHICAL MONSTER IN A PART OF INDIA WHERE HE HAS NEVER EVEN BEEN? In the interior spaces of the dream I was uneasily aware that Tibet was somehow wrong.

The fact of my being in the wheelchair in the dream already put it into a special category. I walk without difficulty in most of my dreams, I glide along, but this was either wish-fulfilment of a higher sort or something other than wish-fulfilment. Then an enormous shadow fell over the enormous footprint.

Next thing I knew the Abominable Snowman was cradling me in his arms, which were warm and very soft. I couldn’t see his face, but I was swept up into an ecstasy of mammal safety and release.

I had conjured up a place of altitude and hardship which was no doubt partly a plaintive self-portrait of the modern pilgrim and his travails. It was also a fantasy of relief from the heat I had been in so constantly for a month now, a dream of snow. Yet into that imaginary cold I had smuggled warmth and comfort. The strong arms of the Abominable Snowman, densely covered with black fur, squeezed me in a surging rhythm like a global heartbeat. My bones made no protest as I was hugged to that mighty chest. My bones were glad, were only glad. I was enclosed in something like the mechanism of a cat’s purr, only a million times larger. Then little by little the vision receded and I became awake. It was a little after dawn, on the last morning I would spend on Mrs Osborne’s verandah, as a guest of the oldest mountain on earth.

It was an undignified ending to my Indian adventure. I had set off with hopes of celibacy and self-realisation, but all I had achieved was disappointment and distraction. Now my unconscious mind had even broken my presumptuous vow. I had wanted to pitch all my thinking at an elevated level, to soar above my limitations – but then I had to go and crash-land my own quest by having a wet-dream about the Yeti.