Island (9 page)

“Thank goodness,” said the little nurse when he had gone.

“What was his offense?” Will enquired. “The usual thing?”

“Offering money to someone you want to go to bed with—but she doesn’t like you. So you offer more. Is that usual where he comes from?”

“Profoundly usual,” Will assured her.

“Well, I didn’t like it.”

“So I could see. And here’s another question. What about Murugan?”

“What makes you ask?”

“Curiosity. I noticed that you’d met before. Was that when he was here two years ago without his mother?”

“How did you know about that?”

“A little bird told me—or rather an extremely massive bird.”

“The Rani! She must have made it sound like Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“But unfortunately I was spared the lurid details. Dark hints—that was all she gave me. Hints, for example, about veteran Messalinas giving lessons in love to innocent young boys.”

“And did he need those lessons!”

“Hints, too, about a precocious and promiscuous girl of his own age.”

Nurse Appu burst out laughing.

“Did you know her?”

“The precocious and promiscuous girl was me.”

“You? Does the Rani know it?”

“Murugan only gave her the facts, not the names. For which I’m very grateful. You see, I’d behaved pretty badly. Losing my head about someone I didn’t really love and hurting someone I did. Why is one so stupid?”

“The heart has its reasons,” said Will, “and the endocrines have theirs.”

There was a long silence. He finished the last of his cold boiled fish and vegetables. Nurse Appu handed him a plate of fruit salad.

“You’ve never seen Murugan in white satin pajamas,” she said.

“Have I missed something?”

“You’ve no idea how beautiful he looks in white satin pajamas. Nobody has any right to be so beautiful. It’s indecent. It’s taking an unfair advantage.”

It was the sight of him in those white satin pajamas from Sulka that had finally made her lose her head. Lose it so completely that for two months she had been someone else—an idiot who had gone chasing after a person who couldn’t bear her and had turned her back on the person who had always loved her, the person she herself had always loved.

“Did you get anywhere with the pajama boy?” Will asked.

“As far as a bed,” she answered. “But when I started to kiss him, he jumped out from between the sheets and locked himself in the bathroom. He wouldn’t come out until I’d passed his pajamas through the transom and given him my word of honor that he wouldn’t be molested. I can laugh about it now; but at the time, I tell you, at the time…” She shook her head. “Pure tragedy. They must have guessed, from the way I carried on, what had happened. Precocious and promiscuous girls, it was obvious, were no good. What he needed was regular lessons.”

“And the rest of the story I know,” said Will. “Boy writes to Mother, Mother flies home and whisks him off to Switzerland.”

“And they didn’t come back until about six months ago. And for at least half of that time they were in Rendang, staying with Murugan’s aunt.”

Will was on the point of mentioning Colonel Dipa, then remembered that he had promised Murugan to be discreet and said nothing.

From the garden came the sound of a whistle.

“Excuse me,” said the little nurse and went to the window. Smiling happily at what she saw, she waved her hand. “It’s Ranga.”

“Who’s Ranga?”

“That friend of mine I was talking about. He wants to ask you some questions. May he come in for a minute?”

“Of course.”

She turned back to the window and made a beckoning gesture.

“This means, I take it, that the white satin pajamas are completely out of the picture.”

She nodded. “It was only a one-act tragedy. I found my head almost as quickly as I’d lost it. And when I’d found it, there was Ranga, the same as ever, waiting for me.” The door swung open and a lanky young man in gym shoes and khaki shorts came into the room.

“Ranga Karakuran,” he announced as he shook Will’s hand.

“If you’d come five minutes earlier,” said Radha, “you’d have had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Bahu.”

“Was
he
here?” Ranga made a grimace of disgust.

“Is he as bad as all that?” Will asked.

Ranga listed the indictments. “A: He hates us. B: He’s Colonel Dipa’s tame jackal. C: He’s the unofficial ambassador of all the oil companies. D: The old pig made passes at Radha. And E: He goes about giving lectures about the need for a religious revival. He’s even published a book about it. Complete with preface by someone at the Harvard Divinity School. It’s all part
of the campaign against Palanese independence. God is Dipa’s alibi. Why can’t criminals be frank about what they’re up to? All this disgusting idealistic hogwash—it makes one vomit.”

Radha stretched out her hand and gave his ear three sharp tweaks.

“You little…” he began angrily; then broke off and laughed. “You’re quite right,” he said. “All the same, you didn’t have to pull quite so hard.”

“Is that what you always do when he gets worked up?” Will enquired of Radha.

“Whenever he gets worked up at the wrong moment, or over things he can’t do anything about.”

Will turned to the boy. “And do you ever have to tweak
her
ear?”

Ranga laughed. “I find it more satisfactory,” he said, “to smack her bottom. Unfortunately, she rarely needs it.”

“Does that mean she’s better balanced than you are?”

“Better balanced? I tell you, she’s abnormally sane.”

“Whereas you’re merely normal?”

“Maybe a little left of center.” He shook his head. “I get horribly depressed sometimes—feel I’m no good for anything.”

“Whereas in fact,” said Radha, “he’s so good that they’ve given him a scholarship to study biochemistry at the University of Manchester.”

“What do you do with him when he plays these despairing, miserable-sinner tricks on you? Pull his ears?”

“That,” she said, “and…well, other things.” She looked at Ranga and Ranga looked at her. Then they both burst out laughing.

“Quite,” said Will. “Quite. And these other things being what they are,” he went on, “is Ranga looking forward to the prospect of leaving Pala for a couple of years?”

“Not much,” Ranga admitted.

“But he has to go,” said Radha firmly.

“And when he gets there,” Will wondered, “is he going to be happy?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” said Ranga.

“Well, you won’t like the climate, you won’t like the food, you won’t like the noises or the smells or the architecture. But you’ll almost certainly like the work and you’ll probably find that you can like quite a lot of the people.”

“What about the girls?” Radha enquired.

“How do you want me to answer
that
question?” he asked. “Consolingly or truthfully?”

“Truthfully.”

“Well, my dear, the truth is that Ranga will be a wild success. Dozens of girls are going to find him irresistible. And some of those girls will be charming. How will you feel if
he
can’t resist?”

“I’ll be glad for his sake.”

Will turned to Ranga. “And will you be glad if she consoles herself, while you’re away, with another boy?”

“I’d like to be,” he said. “But whether I actually shall be glad—that’s another question.”

“Will you make her promise to be faithful?”

“I won’t make her promise anything.”

“Even though she’s your girl?”

“She’s her own girl.”

“And Ranga’s his own boy,” said the little nurse. “He’s free to do what he likes.”

Will thought of Babs’s strawberry-pink alcove and laughed ferociously. “And free above all,” he said, “to do what he doesn’t like.” He looked from one young face to the other and saw that he was being eyed with a certain astonishment. In another tone and with a different kind of smile, “But I’d forgotten,” he added. “One of you is abnormally sane and the other is only a little left of center. So how can you be expected to understand what this mental case from the outside is talking about?” And without leaving them time to answer his question, “Tell me,” he
asked, “how long is it—” He broke off. “But perhaps I’m being indiscreet. If so, just tell me to mind my own business. But I
would
like to know, just as a matter of anthropological interest, how long you two have been friends.”

“Do you mean ‘friends’?” asked the little nurse. “Or do you mean ‘lovers’?”

“Why not both, while we’re about it?”

“Well, Ranga and I have been friends since we were babies. And we’ve been lovers—except for that miserable white pajama episode—since I was fifteen and a half and he was seventeen—just about two and a half years.”

“And nobody objected?”

“Why should they?”

“Why, indeed,” Will echoed. “But the fact remains that, in my part of the world, practically everybody would have objected.”

“What about other boys?” Ranga asked.

“In theory they are even more out of bounds than girls. In practice…Well, you can guess what happens when five or six hundred male adolescents are cooped up together in a boarding school. Does that sort of thing ever go on here?”

“Of course.”

“I’m surprised.”

“Surprised? Why?”

“Seeing that girls aren’t out of bounds.”

“But one kind of love doesn’t exclude the other.”

“And both are legitimate?”

“Naturally.”

“So that nobody would have minded if Murugan had been interested in another pajama boy?”

“Not if it was a good sort of relationship.”

“But unfortunately,” said Radha, “the Rani had done such a thorough job that he couldn’t be interested in anyone but her—and, of course, himself.”

“No boys?”

“Maybe now. I don’t know. All I know is that in my day there was nobody in his universe. No boys and, still more emphatically, no girls. Only Mother and masturbation and the Ascended Masters. Only jazz records and sports cars and Hitlerian ideas about being a Great Leader and turning Pala into what he calls a Modern State.”

“Three weeks ago,” said Ranga, “he and the Rani were at the palace, in Shivapuram. They invited a group of us from the university to come and listen to Murugan’s ideas—on oil, on industrialization, on television, on armaments, on the Crusade of the Spirit.”

“Did he make any converts?”

Ranga shook his head. “Why would anyone want to exchange something rich and good and endlessly interesting for something bad and thin and boring? We don’t feel any need for your speedboats or your television, your wars and revolutions, your revivals, your political slogans, your metaphysical nonsense from Rome and Moscow. Did you ever hear of
maithuna
?” he asked.

“
Maithuna
? What’s that?”

“Let’s start with the historical background,” Ranga answered; and with the engaging pedantry of an undergraduate delivering a lecture about matters which he himself has only lately heard of, he launched forth. “Buddhism came to Pala about twelve hundred years ago, and it came not from Ceylon, which is what one would have expected, but from Bengal, and through Bengal, later on, from Tibet. Result: we’re Mahayanists, and our Buddhism is shot through and through with Tantra. Do you know what Tantra is?”

Will had to admit that he had only the haziest notion.

“And to tell you the truth,” said Ranga, with a laugh that broke irrepressibly through the crust of his pedantry, “I don’t really know much more than you do. Tantra’s an enormous sub
ject and most of it, I guess, is just silliness and superstition—not worth bothering about. But there’s a hard core of sense. If you’re a Tantrik, you don’t renounce the world or deny its value; you don’t try to escape into a Nirvana apart from life, as the monks of the Southern School do. No, you accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself.”

“Good talk,” said Will in a tone of polite skepticism.

“And something more besides,” Ranga insisted. “That’s the difference,” he added—and youthful pedantry modulated into the eagerness of youthful proselytism—“that’s the difference between your philosophy and ours. Western philosophers, even the best of them—they’re nothing more than good talkers. Eastern philosophers are often rather bad talkers, but that doesn’t matter. Talk isn’t the point. Their philosophy is pragmatic and operational. Like the philosophy of modern physics—except that the operations in question are psychological and the results transcendental. Your metaphysicians make statements about the nature of man and the universe; but they don’t offer the reader any way of testing the truth of those statements. When
we
make statements, we follow them up with a list of operations that can be used for testing the validity of what we’ve been saying. For example,
tat tvam asi
, ‘thou are That’—the heart of all our philosophy.
Tat tvam asi
,” he repeated. “It looks like a proposition in metaphysics; but what it actually refers to is a psychological experience, and the operations by means of which the experience can be lived through are described by our philosophers, so that anyone who’s willing to perform the necessary operations can test the validity of
tat tvam asi
for himself. The operations are called yoga, or dhyana, or Zen—or, in certain special circumstances,
maithuna
.”

“Which brings us back to my original question. What
is maithuna
?”

“Maybe you’d better ask Radha.”

Will turned to the little nurse. “What is it?”

“
Maithuna
,” she answered gravely, “is the yoga of love.”

“Sacred or profane?”

“There’s no difference.”

“That’s the whole point,” Ranga put in. “When you do
maithuna
, profane love
is
sacred love.”

“
Buddhatvan yoshidyonisansritan
,” the girl quoted.

“None of your Sanskirt! What does it mean?”

“How would you translate
Buddhatvan
, Ranga?”