Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (38 page)

Olcott wrote in his memoirs that he would never forget the intoxication of his first sight of Bombay; Helena did not record her feelings, could not even honestly express them because she had told everyone that she had seen the sights of India many times. Before leaving New York, Henry had asked Chintamon to rent them a modest house in the Hindu quarter and hire the minimum amount of necessary servants “as we did not wish to waste a penny on luxuries.”
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For the second time that day, Chintamon proved his unreliability because they learned that he had not rented a house, but instead was taking them to his own hastily vacated bungalow. The small house on Girgaum Back Road had practically no furniture and of course no such Western conveniences as indoor plumbing, but they assured Chintamon that it was charming. With the perfume of the flowers and the fronds of cocoa palms nodding over the roof, it truly did seem like paradise after their dismal weeks on the
Speke Hall.
That afternoon, several Hindu women, friends of Chintamon’s, called on H.P.B. and Rosa, and later in the day Ross Scott, a fellow passenger on the ship, who was coming out for a civil-service job, also paid a call. Helena had taken a fancy to the coarse-humored Irishman and when Scott begged for proof of her powers, she took from her pocket a handkerchief embroidered with “Heliona” and swiftly changed the name to “Hurrychund.” Violently impressed, as were the dozen Hindus watching, Scott gave her a five-pound contribution for the Arya Samaj.

By the next morning, word of their presence spread through the native community and precipitated a rush of visitors. For two days they floated along blissfully: Chintamon invited three hundred people to a reception at which Helena and Henry were welcomed with garlands, limes and rose water, and Henry felt so touched that he began to cry. They took the six-mile boat ride across the harbor to the Elephanta Caves, inspected the sculptures of Shiva as half-man, half-woman, and enjoyed themselves thoroughly at a picnic luncheon. That evening, their necks wreathed with jasmine garlands, they sat in the box of honor at the Elephinstone Theatre for a special performance of a Hindu drama. During the intermission they listened to complimentary welcoming speeches from the stage. When the play had not yet ended at three in the morning, they excused themselves and departed, eyes barely open. It was, as Olcott called it, “unalloyed happiness.”
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The next morning their bubble exploded when Chintamon presented them with an exorbitant bill for rent, food, repairs to his house and, appallingly enough, even the hire of the three hundred chairs for their reception and the cost of a welcoming telegram he had sent them en route. With a gasp, Henry stared shakily at the itemized bill and thought that at that rate they would soon be penniless. Helena protested furiously that Chintamon had given them the impression they were to be his guests. The session grew stormy and when Helena asked what had become of the six hundred rupees she had forwarded to him for the Arya Samaj, he confessed that he had failed to report its receipt and had, in fact, pocketed the money. Cruelly disillusioned, she and Henry resolved to have no further dealings with Chintamon and decided that the first order of business was to look for a house of their own. Nearby they found a small bungalow at 108 Girgaum Back Road for less than half the rent Chintamon had charged them and bought a few pieces of furniture. Through Moolji Thackersey they acquired a servant, a fifteen-year-old Gujarati boy named Vallah Bulla, which H.P.B. shortened to Babula. There were some who would say, later, that Babula once had been a conjurer’s assistant and had been selected by H.P.B. to function as an accomplice. According to Olcott, he had previously worked for a Frenchman who was a former steward at Bombay’s Byculla Club, and he had a gift for languages, speaking five of them including English and French.

Anglo-India in the 1870s was a country in which European visitors deposited their calling cards at Government House and socialized exclusively with other whites who unthinkingly referred to the natives as “niggers” and complained of their deceit and laziness. That Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott chose to make their residence in a native section of Bombay and fraternized exclusively with Indians was enough to raise eyebrows. Loathing official life, Helena did not go near Government House and she was revolted by the Anglo-Indians’ barbaric and righteous attitudes toward Hindus. If she and Olcott had been anonymous travelers, little note would have been taken of their choice of company, but there was no ignoring Madame. Less than a week after the Theosophists’ arrival, they came under the contemptuous scrutiny of the Bombay
Review.
It quoted Rosa Bates as having said that she was “not a Christian,” and went on to blast the Theosophists for “wanton aggressiveness”
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in insulting the Christians in India. Helena could not resist shooting back a huffy retort calling the paper “a bigoted, sectarian organ of the Christians” and pointing out that among the two-hundred-and-forty million population, Christians “count but as a drop in the ocean.”
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Not content to leave it at that, she recklessly sprayed insults about the Bible, the British government, and the Sepoy Mutiny, which she blamed on the missionaries.

Basically a non-political person, Helena’s pugnaciousness made her seem political, and the suspicious government immediately pricked up its ears, less because of her anti-Christian remarks than because she was Russian. For seventy years, England had been at odds with Russia over Afghanistan and in 1873 it obtained promises that the country would remain outside the sphere of Russian influence. However, a few months before Helena’s arrival, Amir Sher Ali Khan had ostentatiously received a Russian delegation at Kabul while refusing a British delegation permission to cross his frontier. A few weeks after Helena’s arrival in Bombay, the British would invade Afghanistan. British officials were consequently in no mood to take lightly any Russian visitor, especially so obvious a troublemaker. Concluding that Madame Blavatsky must be a spy, they placed her under police surveillance; fortunately, having followed Olcott’s advice, she had been carrying an American passport, otherwise, sterner measures would probably have been taken.

All this publicity would reap undeniable benefits, for it enabled H.P.B. and Olcott to proselytize among Bombay’s intellectual Hindus, many of whom seemed eager to join the Theosophical Society. Even more encouraging, Helena received an unusually warm note from Alfred P. Sinnett, editor of the
Pioneer,
a powerful, ultra conservative English daily that was virtually the mouthpiece of the British government. To her surprise, Sinnett hoped very much to meet her if she ever visited Allahabad and, moreover, would be interested in publishing an article about the Theosophical Society.

Helena was too happy to be unduly annoyed by either espionage charges or hostile newspaper articles, which insisted upon calling her a countess. Life on palm-shaded Girgaum Back Road had almost a dreamlike quality. Awaking at dawn to the cawing of crows, she dressed in light clothing and spent her days entertaining visitors on the veranda while Babula fanned her with a painted punkah. The balmy air was so fragrant with flowers that it made one forget the icy March winds sweeping through the streets of New York or Odessa. H.P.B. was so relaxed that she did not even feel much like writing letters, and in the end it was Henry who dutifully wrote William Judge, advising him to “keep the Society alive and active.”
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On April 2, a disappointed Judge responded with a complaint about the meagerness of Henry’s letter. How in heaven’s name was he to keep the Society alive when “we are entirely without money?”
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And a week later he wrote again to wonder why H.P.B. had not written to him herself. Obviously he felt neglected and deprived: “Oh! how I wish I was with you at 108 Girgaum Back Road in your Bungalows. Have you been to any place where there are elephants in the grounds and a tame tiger?”
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He could not understand Olcott’s purposely vague condemnations of Chintamon, since Madame had assured him that Chintamon’s leader, Swami Dayananda, was an adept. Had the Masters made a mistake? “What the deuce does it mean?”
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he demanded.

Henry silently pondered the same question. Writing continually cheerful letters to Judge, his sister, and his sons, he mentioned that all of them were in good health and described how they had been feted by the Hindus, but he said nothing about his own abysmal depression. Not only had Chintamon’s perfidy and the police surveillance thoroughly demoralized him, but he was also desperately worried about money. The trade arrangements he had made in the U.S. did not seem to be working out, and even though he made repeated visits to Bombay firms, he had little success peddling his alarm clocks. And in addition to this stressful pursuit, he was straining to establish the Theosophical Society as being of serious purpose. Hindus had begun to join the Society, but some of them were frightened by the surveillance rumors and at least one eminent physician hastily resigned. On March 23, Henry delivered a sober lecture at Framji Cowasji Institute on “The Theosophical Society and Its Aims,” and a week later he wrote an article along similar lines for the Bombay
Gazette.

Still, his low spirits began to chill Helena, who felt impelled to take steps to snap him out of it. She herself had begun to grow uneasy over the inauspicious start they had made in India; indeed, there must have been moments when she was more frightened than Henry. In New York, she had used her powerful evocative ability to persuade Olcott of the Brothers’ reality and had promised these mighty sages would protect and look after them in their new home. It had been one thing to sit in her living room at the Lamasery spinning gorgeous hallucinations, but entirely another actually to arrive in her dreamland only to discover that holy men such as Chintamon were really liars and thieves.

A self-proclaimed non-believer in miracles, she had nonetheless counted on the presence of her supermen, never pausing to consider more realistic alternatives. Whatever else one might say about her delusions, she sincerely trusted in the wise men’s existence. Since coming to Bombay, she believed it all the more firmly, for the Indians to whom she spoke affirmed the existence of those wise men they called mahatmas, the Great Souls. Helena continued to expect a mahatma to surface eventually. He would seek her out, and would make valid her visions. In the meantime, however, she was forced to improvise.

Her first target was Moolji Thackersey and, indirectly, Henry. On March 29, she asked Thackersey to lend her a buggy, which she needed for an errand. Mysteriously refusing to reveal the destination, she directed the driver up one street and down another, seemingly in circles. Eventually they arrived in Parel, a seaside suburb some ten miles from Girgaum Back Road, and pulled up at the gate of a magnificent private estate. Instructing Thackersey to remain in the carriage, H.P.B. walked up to the door, which was opened by a tall Hindu, then disappeared inside. Not long afterward, she reappeared carrying a bouquet of roses and climbed back into the buggy. To Thackersey’s questions, she replied that she had been transacting a piece of business with an occultist; the roses were a gift for Henry.

Once they returned to the city Thackersey began to doubt what he had seen. For one thing, he was familiar with Parel because his mother had been cremated there, but he had never noticed this particular estate; secondly, the house, a rather spectacular structure, had not looked like any dwelling that might be found in India. When he announced his intention of going back for another look, to satisfy his curiosity if nothing else, Helena coolly bet him he would not be able to locate the house.

She was right. Even though Thackersey and Olcott prowled around Parel for more than an hour, they found nothing but sand and pine trees and returned home thoroughly mystified.
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Pressed for explanations, Helena finally said that the estate was maintained by the Brotherhood as a resthouse for traveling gurus and chelas and “was always protected from the intrusion of strangers by a circle of illusion.”
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Naturally it would not be visible to curious passersby.

A day or so later, she asked Thackersey to engage a servant for her, making sure he was an intelligent Hindu of the better class and not a house menial. He found her a man named Baburao who must have passed inspection because after talking to him privately for a while and giving certain instructions, she sent him away. She warned Thackersey to say nothing about Baburao to Colonel Olcott, then announced to Henry that an adept of her acquaintance had invited them on a trip to the Karli Caves. When Henry cried poverty, as she knew he would, she assured him that most of their expenses would be taken care of by the Brotherhood.

H.P.B., Henry and Moolji, along with Babula, left Bombay by train on April 4. It was late in the day when they reached Narel station, but H.P.B.’s Hindu was waiting for them. With a snappy salute, Baburao rattled off a message in Marathi that Moolji, interpreting, said were the compliments of his master. Naturally Olcott assumed that Baburao’s master must be one of
the
Masters. Would they prefer ponies or palanquins for their assent up the hill to the town of Matheran, Baburao inquired? Both were ready. Henry and Helena chose the litters, each with twelve bearers; Thackersey and Babula decided on using ponies. To Henry, the night trip up the mountain was “a poetical journey.”
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He would never forget the sky ablaze with stars, the rustling of the jungle leaves, the great bats sailing silently overhead. Ravenous by the time they reached the Alexandra Hotel, they ate a hearty supper at eleven and fell into bed.

The next morning Helena began to unfold a piece of absurdist theater conducted mainly with the help of hypnosis, and to a lesser degree, of Baburao and perhaps Thackersey. Before breakfast, Baburao announced that his masters wished to donate to the party a rent-free bungalow for as long as they desired it. Helena had not counted apparently on Olcott’s accepting. When he did, she suddenly declared herself nauseated with “the aura of Anglo-Indian civilization” at Matheran and insisted they must depart immediately for Khandalla. Back down the hill to Narel they proceeded in heat that Henry likened to “that of the stoke-room on a steamer,”
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and got a train to Khandalla. There they were greeted once again by the mercurial Baburao and escorted to one of the cheap wayside hostels the government maintained for travelers. Now miracles began to occur at a dizzying pace: unknown men appeared with messages, only to disappear as if by magic; letters were dispatched into thin air and answers received just as mysteriously; a bouquet of roses and a small lacquer box, both presumably gifts from the adept acting as their host, were ceremoniously delivered to Olcott.