"Well, shall we go on?" he said to Mary Sarojini.
They entered the lobby of the hospital. The nurse at the desk had a message for them from Susila. Mary Sarojini was to go directly to Mrs. Rao's, where she and Tom Krishna would spend the night. Mr. Farnaby was to be asked to come at once to Room 34.
"This way," said the nurse, and held open a swing door.
Will stepped forward. The conditioned reflex of politeness clicked automatically into action. "Thank you," he said, and smiled. But it was with a dull, sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that he went hobbling towards the apprehended future.
"The last door on the left," said the nurse. But now she had to get back to her desk in the lobby. "So I'll leave you to go on alone," she added as the door closed behind her.
Alone, he repeated to himself, alone-and the apprehended future was identical with the haunting past, the Essential Horror was timeless and ubiquitous. This long corridor with its green-painted walls was the very same corridor along which, a year ago, he had walked to the little room where Molly lay dying. The nightmare was recurrent. Foredoomed and conscious, he moved on towards its horrible consummation. Death, yet another vision of death.
Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four . . . He knocked and waited, listening to the beating of his heart. The door opened and he found himself face to face with little Radha.
"Susila was expecting you," she whispered.
Will followed her into the room. Rounding a screen, he caught a glimpse of Susila's profile silhouetted against a lamp, of a high bed, of a dark emaciated face on the pillow, of arms that were no more than parchment-covered bones, of clawlike hands. Once again the Essential Horror. With a shudder he turned away. Radha motioned him to a chair near the open window. He sat down and closed his eyes-closed them physically against the present, but, by that very act, opened them inwardly upon that hateful past of which the present had reminded him. He was there in that other room, with Aunt Mary. Or rather with the person who had once been Aunt Mary, but was now this hardly recognizable somebody else-somebody who had never so much as heard of the charity and courage which had been the very essence of Aunt Mary's being; somebody who was filled with an indiscriminate hatred for all who came near her, loathing them, whoever they might be, simply because they didn't have cancer, because they weren't in pain, had not been sentenced to die before their time. And along with this malignant envy of other people's health and happiness had gone a bitterly queru lous self-pity, an abject despair.
"Why to me? Why should this thing have happened to me?"
He could hear the shrill complaining voice, could see that tearstained and distorted face. The only person he had ever really loved or wholeheartedly admired. And yet, in her degrada tion, he had caught himself despising her-despising, positively hating. To escape from the past, he reopened his eyes. Radha, he saw, was sitting on the floor, cross-legged and upright, in the posture of meditation. In her chair beside the bed Susila seemed to beholding the same kind of focused stillness. He looked at the face on the pillow. That too was still, still with a serenity that might almost have been the frozen calm of death. Outside, in the leafy darkness, a peacock suddenly screamed. Deepened by contrast, the ensuing silence seemed to grow pregnant with mysterious and appalling meanings.
"Lakshmi." Susila laid a hand on the old woman's wasted arm. "Lakshmi," she said again more loudly. The death-calm face remained impassive. "You mustn't go to sleep."
Not go to sleep? But for Aunt Mary, sleep-the artificial sleep that followed the injections-had been the only respite from the self-lacerations of self-pity and brooding fear.
"Lakshmi!"
The face came to life.
"I wasn't really asleep," the old woman whispered. "It's just my being so weak. I seem to float away."
"But you've got to be here," said Susila. "You've got to know you're here. All the time." She slipped an additional pillow under the sick woman's shoulders and reached for a bottle of smelling salts that stood on the bed table.
Lakshmi sniffed, opened her eyes, and looked up into Susila's face. "I'd forgotten how beautiful you were," she said. "But then Dugald always did have good taste." The ghost of a mischievous smile appeared for a moment on the fleshless face. "What do you think, Susila?" she added after a moment and in another tone. "Shall we see him again? I mean, over there?"
In silence Susila stroked the old woman's hand. Then, suddenly smiling, "How would the Old Raja have asked that question?" she said. "Do you think 'we' (quote, unquote) shall see 'him' (quote, unquote) 'over there' (quote, unquote) ?"
"But what do you think?"
"I think we've all come out of the same light, and we're all going back into the same light."
Words, Will was thinking, words, words, words. With an effort, Lakshmi lifted a hand and pointed accusingly at the lamp on the bed table.
"It glares in my eyes," she whispered.
Susila untied the red silk handkerchief knotted around her throat and draped it over the lamp's parchment shade. From white and mercilessly revealing, the light became as dimly, warmly rosy as the flush, Will found himself thinking, on Babs's rumpled bed, whenever Porter's Gin proclaimed itself in crimson.
"That's much better," said Lakshmi. She shut her eyes. Then, after a long silence, "The light," she broke out, "the light. It's here again." Then after another pause, "Oh, how wonderful," she whispered at last, "how wonderful!" Suddenly she winced and bit her lip.
Susila took the old woman's hand in both of hers. "Is the pain bad?" she asked.
"It would be bad," Lakshmi explained, "if it were really my pain. But somehow it isn't. The pain's here; but I'm somewhere else. It's like what you discover with the moksha-medicine. Nothing really belongs to you. Not even your pain."
"Is the light still there?"
Lakshmi shook her head. "And looking back, I can tell you exactly when it went away. It went away when I started talking about the pain not being really mine."
"And yet what you were saying was good."
"I know-but I was saying it." The ghost of an old habit of irreverent mischief flitted once again across Lakshmi's face.
"What are you thinking of?" Susila asked.
"Socrates."
"Socrates?"
"Gibber, gibber, gibber-even when he'd actually swallowed the stuff. Don't let me talk, Susila. Help me to get out of my own light."
"Do you remember that time last year," Susila began after a silence, "when we all went up to the old Shiva temple above the High Altitude Station? You and Robert and Dugald and me and the two children-do you remember?"
Lakshmi smiled with pleasure at the recollection.
"I'm thinking specially of that view from the west side of the temple-the view out over the sea. Blue, green, purple-and the shadows of the clouds were like ink. And the clouds themselves-snow, lead, charcoal, satin. And while we were looking, you asked a question. Do you remember, Lakshmi?"
"You mean, about the Clear Light?"
"About the Clear Light," Susila confirmed. "Why do people speak of Mind in terms of Light? Is it because they've seen the sunshine and found it so beautiful that it seems only natural to identify the Buddha Nature with the clearest of all possible Clear Lights? Or do they find the sunshine beautiful because, consciously or unconsciously, they've been having revelations of Mind in the form of Light ever since they were born? I was the first to answer," said Susila, smiling to herself. "And as I'd just been reading something by some American behaviorist, I didn't stop to think-I just gave you the (quote, unquote) 'scientific point of view.' People equate Mind (whatever that may be) with hallucinations of light, because they've looked at a lot of sunsets and found them very impressive. But Robert and Dugald would have none of it. The Clear Light, they insisted, comes first. You go mad about sunsets because sunsets remind you of what's always been going on, whether you knew it or not, inside your skull and outside space and time. You agreed with them, Lakshmi-do you remember? You said, 'I'd like to be on your side, Susila, if only because it isn't good for these men of ours to be right all the time. But in this case-surely it's pretty obvious-in this case they are right.' Of course they were right, and of course I was hopelessly wrong. And, needless to say, you had known the right answer before you asked the question."