"Ready and champing at the bit," he said as he stepped out onto the veranda.
"Then let's go." Vijaya took his arm. "Careful of these steps," he recommended.
Dressed all in pink and with corals round her neck and in her ears, a plump, round-faced woman in her middle forties was standing beside the jeep.
"This is Leela Rao," said Vijaya. "Our librarian, secretary, treasurer, and general keeper-in-order. Without her we'd be lost."
She looked, Will thought as he shook hands with her, like a browner version of one of those gentle but inexhaustibly energetic English ladies who, when their children are grown, go in for good works or organized culture. Not too intelligent, poor dears; but how selfless, how devoted, how genuinely good-and, alas, how boring!
"I was hearing of you," Mrs. Rao volunteered as they rattled along past the lotus pond and out onto the highway, "from my young friends, Radha and Ranga."
"I hope," said Will, "that they approved of me as heartily as I approved of them."
Mrs. Rao's face brightened with pleasure. "I'm so glad you like them!"
"Ranga's exceptionally bright," Vijaya put in. And so delicately balanced, Mrs. Rao elaborated, between introversion and the outside world. Always tempted-and how strongly!-to escape into the Arhat's Nirvana or the scientists' beautifully tidy little paradise of pure abstraction. Always tempted, but often resisting temptation; for Ranga, the Arhat-scientist, was also another kind of Ranga, a Ranga capable of compassion, ready, if one knew how to make the right kind of appeal, to lay himself open to the concrete realities of life, to be aware, concerned and actively helpful. How fortunate for him and for everyone else that he had found a girl like little Radha, a girl so intelligently simple, so humorous and tender, so richly endowed for love and happiness! Radha and Ranga, Mrs. Rao confided, had been among her favorite pupils.
Pupils, Will patronizingly assumed, in some kind of Buddhist Sunday school. But in fact, as he was now flabbergasted to learn, it was in the yoga of love that this devoted settlement worker had been, for the past six years and in the intervals of librarian-ship, instructing the young. By the kinds of methods, Will supposed, that Murugan had shrunk from and the Rani, in her all but incestuous possessiveness, had found so outrageous. He opened his mouth to question her. But his reflexes had been conditioned in higher latitude and by settlement workers of another species. The questions simply refused to pass his lips. And now it was too late to ask them. Mrs. Rao had begun to talk about her other avocation.
"If you knew," she was saying, "what trouble we have with books in this climate! The paper rots, the glue liquefies, the bindings disintegrate, the insects devour. Literature and the tropics are really incompatible."
"And if one's to believe your Old Raja," said Will, "literature is incompatible with a lot of other local features besides your climate-incompatible with human integrity, incompatible with philosophical truth, incompatible with individual sanity and a decent social system, incompatible with everything except dualism, criminal lunacy, impossible aspiration, and unnecessary guilt. But never mind." He grinned ferociously. "Colonel Dipa will put everything right. After Pala has been invaded and made safe for war and oil and heavy industry, you'll undoubtedly have a Golden Age of literature and theology."
"I'd like to laugh," said Vijaya. "The only trouble is that you're probably right. I have an uncomfortable feeling that my children will grow up to see your prophecy come true."
They left their jeep, parked between an oxcart and a brand-new Japanese lorry, at the entrance to the village, and proceeded on foot. Between thatched houses, set in gardens shaded by palms and papayas and breadfruit trees, the narrow street led to a central marketplace. Will halted and, leaning on his bamboo staff, looked around him. On one side of the square stood a charming piece of Oriental rococo with a pink stucco facade and gazebos at the four corners-evidently the town hall. Facing it, on the opposite side of the square, rose a small temple of reddish stone, with a central tower on which, tier after tier, a host of sculptured figures recounted the legends of the Buddha's progress from spoiled child to Tathagata. Between these two monuments, more than half of the open space was covered by a huge banyan tree. Along its winding and shadowy aisles were ranged the stalls of a score of merchants and market women. Slanting down through chinks in the green vaulting overhead, the long probes of sunlight picked out here a row of black-and-yellow water jars, there a silver bracelet, a painted wooden toy, a bolt of cotton print; here a pile of fruits, and a girl's gaily flowered bodice, there the flash of laughing teeth and eyes, the ruddy gold of a naked torso.
"Everybody looks so healthy," Will commented, as they made their way between the stalls under the great tree.
"They look healthy because they are healthy," said Mrs. Rao. "And happy-for a change." He was thinking of the faces he had seen in Calcutta, in Manila, in Rendang-Lobo-the faces, for that matter, one saw every day in Fleet Street and the Strand. "Even the women," he noted, glancing from face to face, "even the women look happy."
"They don't have ten children," Mrs. Rao explained. "They don't have ten children where I come from," said Will. "In spite of which . . . 'Marks of weakness marks of woe.' " He halted for a moment to watch a middle-aged market woman weighing out slices of sun-dried breadfruit for a very young mother with a baby in a carrying bag on her back. "There's a kind of radiance," he concluded.
"Thanks to maithuna," said Mrs. Rao triumphantly. "Thanks to the yoga of love." Her face shone with a mixture of religious fervor and professional pride.
They walked out from under the shade of the banyan, across a stretch of fierce sunlight, up a flight of worn steps, and into the gloom of the temple. A golden Bodhisattva loomed, gigantic, out of the darkness. There was a smell of incense and fading flowers, and from somewhere behind the statue the voice of an unseen worshiper was muttering an endless litany. Noiselessly, on bare feet, a little girl came hurrying in from a side door. Paying no attention to the grown-ups she climbed with the agility of a cat onto the altar and laid a spray of white orchids on the statue's upturned palm. Then, looking up into the huge golden face, she murmured a few words, shut her eyes for a moment, murmured again, then turned, scrambled down and, softly singing to herself, went out by the door through which she had entered.
"Charming," said Will, as he watched her go. "Couldn't be prettier. But precisely what does a child like that think she's doing? What kind of religion is she supposed to be practicing?"
"She's practicing," Vijaya explained, "the local brand of Mahayana Buddhism, with a bit of Shivaism, probably, on the side."
"And do you highbrows encourage this kind of thing?"
"We neither encourage nor discourage. We accept it. Accept it as we accept that spider web up there on the cornice. Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making flytraps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for-to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there's a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that's religion. Good religion or bad religion-it depends on the blending of the cocktail. For example, in the kind of Calvinism that Dr. Andrew was brought up in, you're given only the tiniest jigger of realism to a whole jugful of malignant fancy. In other cases the mixture is more wholesome. Fifty-fifty, or even sixty-forty, even seventy-thirty in favor of truth and decency. Our local Old-Fashioned contains a remarkably small admixture of poison."