I looked down the green grass and through the mist to the naked orphrey trees. Beyond the road there, and beyond the park beyond, was Buckingham Palace. Somehow I felt grateful, grateful, walking towards it. I walked in the light of a new England.
My research, I fear, did not make very great progress during the next few months. Perhaps the trouble was not with the English climate, as some thought, or with my vegetarian diet, but with some more immediate and occult anxiety. I knew I was losing something and would not find anything again.
And I felt lost in this new, this flowering England, with a feeling of desperation in my lungs. Just as a hunter knows—’My father often knows that a tiger is there,’ Savithri had said, ‘with the hairs on his toes, as it were, before his eyes or his ears have information’ so did my body know of some annihilation before my being knew; the haemoglobules were more intelligent than my mind — or my famous intuition. I felt I was sinking, though the X-ray showed no ‘shadows’ of increased activity. Oxford and the damp certainly did not agree with me. I felt I could not go to Cambridge again, so I tried Brighton — and returned to London soon, and even more ill, this time to a hospital. It was somewhere near Euston and specialized in tropical diseases. Being from India I managed to get in, with the help of our High Commissioner.
They were going to try prolonged bed-rest, and if that was no use, there was always thoracoplasty. The whole thing was a question of breathing well, and they sat me down in the appropriate position and taught me this and that, and how to lie on the right side of my chest.
‘Good man,’ said Dr Burnham, ‘if you don’t get well soon, I’ll give you nice chicken-soup,’ he laughed, ‘and veal for your dinner.’ The nurses were very kind and they winked at me. Dr Burnham, after he’d examined me and my temperature chart, went on, ‘You must get better Mr Ramaswamy. You will.’
He was against pneumothorax, and spoke of it with marked contempt. He called it the Indian mango — trick. ‘You can see the mango but cannot eat it.’
‘Thoracoplasty,’ he concluded, ‘is like the Bank of England. But if you don’t obey I’ll write to Uncle Seetharamu. Goodbye, Achchājëe, Namasthé,’ and he went away.
Lord, I must have mentioned Uncle Seetharamu but once, and he had remembered it. What nobility there must be in the hearts of those who bear the pain of others.
Lakshmi (from Cambridge) whom I had accidentally met at India House when I was working in the excellent library there, came often to see me. She was convinced I was a victim of some sort of malediction.
‘God knows,’ she said, protectively and femininely, ‘Indian palaces are not homes of prayer and virtue.’
I was not so dull of understanding, hence I discouraged her visits. But how virtuous she seemed, did Lakshmi Iyengar with her big kunkum mark, and deep-set melodious voice. Madeleine was right: Indian women do not look innocent. They look wise — and virtuous!
Lakshmi never talked to me of Madeleine. For her there were no European women. I think she disliked them, feeling that they were libidinous, always trying to please men.
‘You can’t press a man to your body, as they do at their dances, and talk of virtue. Oh, I am longing to be back in India.’
Lakshmi was doing child-psychology and would be going back to the Ministry of Education, in New Delhi. She would look after children’s textbooks. Virtue certainly would flood India then.
I hated this moral India. True, Indian morality was based on an ultimate metaphysic. Harishchandra told the truth; and lost his kingdom and his wife, but he found the Truth. I wanted to tell these virtuous ladies of India, the story of Satyavrata:
The deer comes — so the story goes in the Mahabharata— leaping, with froth and foam, and whistling with the breath of fear, and takes shelter in the low hut of the ascetic. The hunter, pursuing, comes after, making strange noises and imprecations, but seeing the ascetic falls low before him, and asks Satyavrata, ‘Learned Lord, have you seen a deer?’ Was he going to tell the truth, he Satyavrata.1 ‘I have five children at home, puling, hungry creatures, and a wife, enormous and distraught; and they be without fire and flesh these six days of the moon. Lord, clear-seeing, compassionate ascetic, I have to save them from starvation and death. The drought has driven all the vulnerable beasts away, and we must lie and starve.’ Was Satyavrata going to give up the innocent deer to the hunter? No. So he went unto himself and uttered that profound Vedantic truth. ‘He who sees cannot say, and he who says has not seen.’
Truth is the only substance India can offer and that Truth is metaphysical and not moral. Lakshmi was not India. Lakshmi was the India that accepted invaders, come Muslim, come British, with sighs and salutations. Lakshmi would not read the Mahabharata the whole night, cut her finger, and anointing her Lord with her young blood burn herself alive.
‘Page Boy tell me, ere I go, how bore himself, my Lord?’ ‘As a reaper of the harvest of battle. I followed his steps as a humble gleaner of his sword. On the bed of honour he spread a carpet of the slain, whereon, a barbarian his pillow, he sleeps ringed by his foes.’
‘Yet once again, O boy, tell me how my Lord bore himself?’ ‘O Mother, who can tell his deeds? He left no foe to dread or admire him.’
She smiled farewell to the boy, adding, ‘My lord will chide my delay,’ and like an Esclarmonde sprang into the flames.
N’ Esclarmunda, vostre noms signifia
Que vos donatz clartat al mond per ver
Et etz monda, que no fes mon dever:
Aitals etz plan com al ric nom tamhia.
So wrote Guillaume de Montanhagol. The Cathar heroine leapt forward to Paradise, the Rajput princess withdrew into herself and became white as ash. Paradise is the inversion of Truth, and is feminine. It is the elongation of man to his celibate singleness: ‘Vidi... credo ch’io vidi’. The Holy Grail is the residue of delight.
Virtue is virile. Behind every ‘virtuous’ Indian woman I felt the widow. But we needed real wives, wives in life — as in death. I had too much surquedry to be but Brahmin. The Brahmins sold India through the back door — remember Devagiri — and the Muslims came in through the front. Purnayya sold the secrets of Tippu Sultan and the British entered through the main gateway of Seringapatam. Truth that is without courage can only be the virtue of slave or widow. Non-violence, said Gandhiji, is active, heroic. We must always conquer some land, some country. Ignorance, pusillanimity, ostrich-virtue is the land we shall liberate. That is true Swaraj. The means is satyagraha. Come.