Island (26 page)

“Look again.”

He looked. “I don’t see anything specially significant.”

“Look harder.”

The seconds passed. Then, with a shock of surprise, he noticed something strange and even disquieting. What he had taken for an oddly ornamented cylindrical pedestal had suddenly revealed itself as a huge coiled snake. And that downward tapering canopy under which the Buddha was sitting was the expanded hood, with the flattened head at the center of its leading edge, of a giant cobra.

“My God!” he said. “I hadn’t noticed. How unobservant can one be?”

“Is this the first time you’ve seen the Buddha in this context?”

“The first time. Is there some legend?”

She nodded. “One of my favorites. You know about the Bodhi Tree, of course?”

“Yes, I know about the Bodhi Tree.”

“Well, that wasn’t the only tree that Gautama sat under at the time of his Enlightenment. After the Bodhi Tree, he sat for seven days under a banyan, called the Tree of the Goatherd. And after that he moved on to the Tree of Muchalinda.”

“Who was Muchalinda?”

“Muchalinda was the King of the Snakes and, being a god, he knew what was happening. So when the Buddha sat down under his tree, the Snake King crawled out of his hole, yards and yards of him, to pay Nature’s homage to Wisdom. Then a great storm blew up from the west. The divine cobra wrapped its coils round the more than divine man’s body, spread its hood over his head
and, for the seven days his contemplation lasted, sheltered the Tathagata from the wind and rain. So there he sits to this day, with cobra beneath him, cobra above him, conscious simultaneously of cobra and the Clear Light and their ultimate identity.”

“How very different,” said Will, “from
our
view of snakes!”

“And your view of snakes is supposed to be God’s view—remember Genesis.”

“‘I will put enmity between thee and the woman,’” he quoted, “‘and between her seed and thy seed.’”

“But Wisdom never puts enmity anywhere. All those senseless pointless cockfights between Man and Nature, between Nature and God, between the Flesh and the Spirit! Wisdom doesn’t make those insane separations.”

“Nor does Science.”

“Wisdom takes Science in its stride and goes a stage further.”

“And what about totemism?” Will went on. “What about the fertility cults?
They
didn’t make any separations. Were
they
Wisdom?”

“Of course they were—primitive Wisdom, Wisdom on the neolithic level. But after a time people begin to get self-conscious and the old Dark Gods come to seem disreputable. So the scene changes. Enter the Gods of Light, enter the Prophets, enter Pythagoras and Zoroaster, enter the Jains and the early Buddhists. Between them they usher in the Age of the Cosmic Cockfight—Ormuzd versus Ahriman, Jehovah versus Satan and the Baalim, Nirvana as opposed to Samsara, appearance over against Plato’s Ideal Reality. And except in the minds of a few Tankriks and Mahayanists and Taoists and heretical Christians, the cockfight went on for the best part of two thousand years.”

“After which?” he questioned.

“After which you get the beginnings of modern biology.”

Will laughed. “‘God said, Let Darwin be,’ and there was Nietzsche, Imperialism and Adolf Hitler.”

“All that,” she agreed. “But also the possibility of a new kind
of Wisdom for everybody. Darwin took the old totemism and raised it to the level of biology. The fertility cults reappeared as genetics and Havelock Ellis. And now it’s up to us to take another half turn up the spiral. Darwinism was the old neolithic Wisdom turned into scientific concepts. The new conscious Wisdom—the kind of Wisdom that was prophetically glimpsed in Zen and Taoism and Tantra—is biological theory realized in living practice, is Darwinism raised to the level of compassion and spiritual insight. So you see,” she concluded, “there isn’t any earthly reason—much less any heavenly reason—why the Buddha, or anyone else for that matter, shouldn’t contemplate the Clear Light as manifested in a snake.”

“Even though the snake might kill him?”

“Even though it might kill him.”

“And even though it’s the oldest and most universal of phallic symbols?”

Shanta laughed. “‘Meditate under the Tree of Muchalinda’—that’s the advice we give to every pair of lovers. And in the intervals between those loving meditations remember what you were taught as children; snakes are your brothers; snakes have a right to your compassion and your respect; snakes, in a word, are good, good, good.”

“Snakes are also poisonous, poisonous, poisonous.”

“But if you remember that they’re just as good as they’re poisonous, and act accordingly, they won’t use their poison.”

“Who says so?”

“It’s an observable fact. People who aren’t frightened of snakes, people who don’t approach them with the fixed belief that the only good snake is a dead snake, hardly ever get bitten. Next week I’m borrowing our neighbor’s pet python. For a few days I’ll be giving Rama his lunch and dinner in the coils of the Old Serpent.”

From outside the house came the sound of high-pitched laughter, then a confusion of children’s voices interrupting one
another in English and Palanese. A moment later, looking very tall and maternal by comparison with her charges, Mary Sarojini walked into the room flanked by a pair of identical four-year-olds and followed by the sturdy cherub who had been with her when Will first opened his eyes on Pala.

“We picked up Tara and Arjuna at the kindergarten,” Mary Sarojini explained as the twins hurled themselves upon their mother.

With the baby in one arm and the other round the two little boys, Shanta smiled her thanks. “That was very kind of you.”

It was Tom Krishna who said, “You’re welcome.” He stepped forward and, after a moment of hesitation, “I was wondering…” he began, then broke off and looked appealingly at his sister. Mary Sarojini shook her head.

“What were you wondering?” Shanta enquired.

“Well, as a matter of fact, we were both wondering…I mean, could we come and have dinner with you?”

“Oh, I see.” Shanta looked from Tom Krishna’s face to Mary Sarojini’s and back again. “Well, you’d better go and ask Vijaya if there’s enough to eat. He’s doing the cooking today.”

“Okay,” said Tom Krishna without enthusiasm. With slow reluctant steps he crossed the room and went out through the door into the kitchen. Shanta turned to Mary Sarojini. “What happened?”

“Well, Mother’s told him at least fifty times that she doesn’t like his bringing lizards into the house. But this morning he did it again. So she got very cross with him.”

“And you decided you’d better come and have dinner here?”

“If it isn’t convenient, Shanta, we could try the Raos or the Rajajinnadasas.”

“I’m quite sure it will be convenient,” Shanta assured her. “I only thought it would be good for Tom Krishna to have a little talk with Vijaya.”

“You’re perfectly right,” said Mary Sarojini gravely. Then,
very businesslike, “Tara, Arjuna,” she called. “Come with me to the bathroom and we’ll get washed up. They’re pretty grubby,” she said to Shanta as she led them away.

Will waited until they were out of earshot, then turned to Shanta. “I take it that I’ve just been seeing a Mutual Adoption Club in action.”

“Fortunately,” said Shanta, “in very mild action. Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini get on remarkably well with their mother. There’s no personal problem there—only the problem of destiny, the enormous and terrible problem of Dugald’s being dead.”

“Will Susila marry again?” he asked.

“I hope so. For everybody’s sake. Meanwhile, it’s good for the children to spend a certain amount of time with one or other of their deputy fathers. Specially good for Tom Krishna. Tom Krishna’s just reaching the age when little boys discover their maleness. He still cries like a baby; but the next moment he’s bragging and showing off and bringing lizards into the house—just to prove he’s two hundred percent a he-man. That’s why I sent him to Vijaya. Vijaya’s everything Tom Krishna likes to imagine he is. Three yards high, two yards wide, terrifically strong, immensely competent. When he tells Tom Krishna how he ought to behave, Tom Krishna listens—listens as he would never listen to me or his mother saying the same things. And Vijaya
does
say the same things as we would say. Because, on top of being two hundred percent male, he’s almost fifty percent sensitive-feminine. So, you see, Tom Krishna is really getting the works. And now,” she concluded, looking down at the sleeping child in her arms, “I must put this young man to bed and get ready for lunch.”

W
ASHED AND BRUSHED, THE TWINS WERE ALREADY IN THEIR HIGH
chairs. Mary Sarojini hung over them like a proud but anxious mother. At the stove Vijaya was ladling rice and vegetables out of an earthenware pot. Cautiously and with an expression on his face of focused concentration, Tom Krishna carried each bowl, as it was filled, to the table.

“There!” said Vijaya when the last brimming bowl had been sent on its way. He wiped his hands, walked over to the table and took his seat. “Better tell our guest about grace,” he said to Shanta.

Turning to Will, “In Pala,” she explained, “we don’t say grace
before
meals. We say it
with
meals. Or rather we don’t
say
grace; we chew it.”

“Chew it?”

“Grace is the first mouthful of each course—chewed and chewed until there’s nothing left of it. And all the time you’re chewing you pay attention to the flavor of the food, to its consistency and temperature, to the pressures on your teeth and the feel of the muscles in your jaws.”

“And meanwhile, I suppose, you give thanks to the Enlightened One, or Shiva, or whoever it may be?”

Shanta shook her head emphatically. “That would distract your attention, and attention is the whole point. Attention to the experience of something given, something you haven’t invented. Not the memory of a form of words addressed to somebody in your imagination.” She looked round the table. “Shall we begin?”

“Hurrah!” the twins shouted in unison, and picked up their spoons.

For a long minute there was a silence, broken only by the twins who had not yet learned to eat without smacking their lips.

“May we swallow now?” asked one of the little boys at last.

Shanta nodded. Everyone swallowed. There was a clinking of spoons and a burst of talk from full mouths.

“Well,” Shanta enquired, “what did your grace taste like?”

“It tasted,” said Will, “like a long succession of different things. Or rather a succession of variations on the fundamental theme of rice and turmeric and red peppers and zucchini and something leafy that I don’t recognize. It’s interesting how it doesn’t remain the same. I’d never really noticed that before.”

“And while you were paying attention to these things, you were momentarily delivered from daydreams, from memories, from anticipations, from silly notions—from all the symptoms of
you
.”

“Isn’t tasting
me
?”

Shanta looked down the length of the table to her husband. “What would you say, Vijaya?”

“I’d say it was halfway between me and not-me. Tasting is not-me doing something for the whole organism. And at the same time tasting is me being conscious of what’s happening. And that’s the point of our chewing-grace—to make the me more conscious of what the not-me is up to.”

“Very nice,” was Will’s comment. “But what’s the point of the point?”

It was Shanta who answered. “The point of the point,” she said, “is that when you’ve learned to pay closer attention to more of the not-you in the environment (that’s the food) and more of the not-you in your own organism (that’s your taste sensations), you may suddenly find yourself paying attention to the not-you on the further side of consciousness, or perhaps it would be better,” Shanta went on, “to put it the other way round. The not-you on the further side of consciousness will find it easier to make itself known to a you that has learned to be more aware of its not-you on the side of physiology.” She was interrupted by a crash, followed by a howl from one of the twins. “After which,” she continued as she wiped up the mess on the floor, “one has to consider the problem of me and not-me in relation to people less than forty-two inches high. A prize of sixty-four thousand crores of rupees will be given to anyone who comes up with a foolproof solution.” She wiped the child’s eyes, had him blow his nose, then gave him a kiss and went to the stove for another bowl of rice.

“What are your chores for this afternoon?” Vijaya asked when lunch was over.

“We’re on scarecrow duty,” Tom Krishna answered importantly.

“In the field just below the schoolhouse,” Mary Sarojini added.

“Then I’ll take you there in the car,” said Vijaya. Turning to Will Farnaby, “Would you like to come along?” he asked.

Will nodded. “And if it’s permissible,” he said, “I’d like to see the school, while I’m about it—sit in, maybe, at some of the classes.”

Shanta waved good-bye to them from the veranda and a few minutes later they came in sight of the parked jeep.

“The school’s on the other side of the village,” explained
Vijaya as he started the motor. “We have to take the bypass. It goes down and then up again.”

Down through terraced fields of rice and maize and sweet potatoes, then on the level, along a contour line, with a muddy little fishpond on the left and an orchard of breadfruit trees on the right, and finally up again through more fields, some green, some golden—and there was the schoolhouse, white and spacious under its towering shade trees.

“And down there,” said Mary Sarojini, “are our scarecrows.”

Will looked in the direction she was pointing. In the nearest of the terraced fields below them the yellow rice was almost ready to harvest. Two small boys in pink loincloths and a little girl in a blue skirt were taking turns at pulling the strings that set in motion two life-sized marionettes attached to poles at either end of the narrow field. The puppets were of wood, beautifully carved and clothed, not in rags, but in the most splendid draperies. Will looked at them in astonishment.

“Solomon in all his glory,” he exclaimed, “was not arrayed like one of these.”

But then Solomon, he went on to reflect, was only a king; these gorgeous scarecrows were beings of a higher order. One was a Future Buddha, the other a delightfully gay, East Indian version of God the Father as one sees him in the Sistine Chapel, swooping down over the newly created Adam. With each tug of the string the Future Buddha wagged his head, uncrossed his legs from the lotus posture, danced a brief fandango in the air, then crossed them again and sat motionless for a moment until another jerk of the string once more disturbed his meditations. God the Father, meanwhile, waved his outstretched arm, wagged his forefinger in portentous warning, opened and shut his horsehair-fringed mouth and rolled a pair of eyes which, being made of glass, flashed comminatory fire at any bird that dared to approach the rice. And all the time a brisk wind was fluttering his draperies, which were bright yellow, with a bold
design—in brown, white and black—of tigers and monkeys, while the Future Buddha’s magnificent robes of red and orange rayon bellied and flapped around him with an Aeolian jingling of dozens of little silver bells.

“Are all your scarecrows like this?” Will asked.

“It was the Old Raja’s idea,” Vijaya answered. “He wanted to make the children understand that all gods are homemade, and that it’s we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.”

“Make them dance,” said Tom Krishna, “make them wiggle.” He laughed delightedly.

Vijaya stretched out an enormous hand and patted the child’s dark curly head. “That’s the spirit!” And turning back to Will, “
Quote
‘gods’
unquote
,” he said in what was evidently an imitation of the Old Raja’s manner, “—their one great merit apart from scaring birds and
quote
‘sinners’
unquote
, and occasionally, perhaps, consoling the miserable, consists in this: being raised aloft on poles, they have to be looked up at; and when anyone looks up, even at a god, he can hardly fail to see the sky beyond. And what’s the sky? Air and scattered light; but also a symbol of that boundless and (excuse the metaphor)
pregnant
emptiness out of which everything, the living and the inanimate, the puppet makers and their divine marionettes, emerge into the universe we know—or rather that we think we know.”

Mary Sarojini, who had been listening intently, nodded her head. “Father used to say,” she volunteered, “that looking up at birds in the sky was even better. Birds aren’t words, he used to say. Birds are real. Just as real as the sky.” Vijaya brought the car to a standstill. “Have a good time,” he said as the children jumped out. “Make them dance and wiggle.”

Shouting, Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini ran down to join the little group in the field below the road.

“And now for the more solemn aspects of education.” Vijaya turned the jeep into the driveway that led up to the schoolhouse.
“I’ll leave the car here and walk back to the station. When you’ve had enough, get someone to drive you home.” He turned off the ignition and handed Will the key.

In the school office Mrs. Narayan, the Principal, was talking across her desk to a white-haired man with a long, rather doleful face like the face of a lined and wrinkled bloodhound.

“Mr. Chandra Menon,” Vijaya explained when the introductions had been made, “is our Under-Secretary of Education.”

“Who is paying us,” said the Principal, “one of his periodical visits of inspection.”

“And who thoroughly approves of what he sees,” the Under-Secretary added with a courteous bow in Mrs. Narayan’s direction.

Vijaya excused himself. “I have to get back to my work,” he said and moved towards the door.

“Are you specially interested in education?” Mr. Menon enquired.

“Specially ignorant would be more like it,” Will answered. “I was merely brought up, never educated. That’s why I’d like to have a look at the genuine article.”

“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” the Under-Secretary assured him. “New Rothamsted is one of our best schools.”

“What’s your criterion of a good school?” Will asked.

“Success.”

“In what? Winning scholarships? Getting ready for jobs? Obeying the local categorical imperatives?”

“All that, of course,” said Mr. Menon. “But the fundamental question remains. What are boys and girls for?”

Will shrugged his shoulders. “The answer depends on where you happen to be domiciled. For example, what are boys and girls for in America? Answer: for mass consumption. And the corollaries of mass consumption are mass communications, mass advertising, mass opiates in the form of television, meprobamate, positive thinking and cigarettes. And now that Europe has made
the breakthrough into mass production, what will its boys and girls be for? For mass consumption and all the rest—just like the boys and girls in America. Whereas in Russia there’s a different answer. Boys and girls are for strengthening the national state. Hence all those engineers and science teachers, not to mention fifty divisions ready for instant combat and equipped with everything from tanks to H-bombs and long-range rockets. And in China it’s the same, but a good deal more so. What are boys and girls for there? For cannon fodder, industry fodder, agriculture fodder, road-building fodder. So East is East and West is West—for the moment. But the twain may meet in one or other of two ways. West may get so frightened of East they it will give up thinking that boys and girls are for mass consumption and decide instead that they’re for cannon fodder and strengthening the state. Alternatively East may find itself under such pressure from the appliance-hungry masses who long to go Western, that it will have to change its mind and say that boys and girls are really for mass consumption. But that’s for the future. As of now, the current answers to your question are mutually exclusive.”

“And both of the answers,” said Mr. Menon, “are different from ours. What are Palanese boys and girls for? Neither for mass consumption, nor for strengthening the state. The state has to exist, of course. And there has to be enough for everybody. That goes without saying. It’s only on those conditions that boys and girls can discover what in fact they are for—only on those conditions that we can do anything about it.”

“And what in fact
are
they for?”

“For actualization, for being turned into full-blown human beings.”

Will nodded. “
Notes on What’s What
,” he commented. “Become what you really are.”

“The Old Raja,” said Mr. Menon, “was mainly concerned with what people really are on the level that’s beyond individuality. And of course we’re just as much interested in that as he was.
But our first business is elementary education, and elementary education has to deal with individuals in all their diversity of shape, size, temperament, gifts and deficiencies. Individuals in their transcendent unity are the affair of higher education. That begins in adolescence and is given concurrently with advanced elementary education.”

“Begins, I take it,” said Will, “with the first experience of the
moksha
-medicine.”

“So you’ve heard about the
moksha
-medicine?”

“I’ve even seen it in action.”

“Dr. Robert,” the Principal explained, “took him yesterday to see an initiation.”

“By which,” added Will, “I was profoundly impressed. When I think of
my
religious training…” He left the sentence eloquently unfinished.

“Well, as I was saying,” Mr. Menon continued, “adolescents get both kinds of education concurrently. They’re helped to experience their transcendental unity with all other sentient beings and at the same time they’re learning, in their psychology and physiology classes, that each one of us has his own constitutional uniqueness, everybody’s different from everybody else.”

“When I was at school,” said Will, “the pedagogues did their best to iron out those differences, or at least to plaster them over with the same Late Victorian ideal—the ideal of the scholarly but Anglican football-playing gentleman. But now tell me what
you
do about the fact that everybody’s different from everybody else.”

“We begin,” said Mr. Menon, “by assessing the differences. Precisely who or what, anatomically, biochemically and psychologically, is this child? In the organic hierarchy, which takes precedence—his gut, his muscles, or his nervous system? How near does he stand to the three polar extremes? How harmonious or how disharmonious is the mixture of his component elements, physical and mental? How great is his inborn wish to
dominate, or to be sociable, or to retreat into his inner world? And how does he do his thinking and perceiving and remembering? Is he a visualizer or a nonvisualizer? Does his mind work with images or with words, with both at once, or with neither? How close to the surface is his storytelling faculty? Does he see the world as Wordsworth and Traherne saw it when they were children? And, if so, what can be done to prevent the glory and the freshness from fading into the light of common day? Or, in more general terms, how can we educate children on the conceptual level without killing their capacity for intense nonverbal experience? How can we reconcile analysis with vision? And there are dozens of other questions that must be asked and answered. For example, does this child absorb all the vitamins in his food or is he subject to some chronic deficiency that, if it isn’t recognized and treated, will lower his vitality, darken his mood, make him see ugliness, feel boredom and think foolishness or malice? And what about his blood sugar? What about his breathing? What about his posture and the way he uses his organism when he’s working, playing, studying? And there are all the questions that have to do with special gifts. Does he show signs of having a talent for music, for mathematics, for handling words, for observing accurately and for thinking logically and imaginatively about what he has observed? And finally how suggestible is he going to be when he grows up? All children are good hypnotic subjects—so good that four out of five of them can be talked into somnambulism. In adults the proportion is reversed. Four out of five of them can never be talked into somnambulism. Out of any hundred children, which are the twenty who will grow up to be suggestible to the pitch of somnambulism?”