The Lily Hand and Other Stories (3 page)

‘My God, as well as yours?'

‘Of course. Everybody's God. Why not? Yours, mine, everybody's.'

‘If we have the same God,' she said, faintly smiling, ‘why do the priests here refuse to let me into the shrines?'

The white and gleaming smile flared again, disdainful and amused. ‘Oh, priests!' said Subramanya scornfully. ‘But I show you everything here. I hold the light for you, and you see something that is your own as much as mine. That is not strange.'

She was silent a moment, pondering. The boy, untroubled, unable to understand what she should find here to trouble her, waited innocently, watching her.

‘You have so many gods, though,' she said. ‘Some that don't resemble mine at all.'

The eloquent shoulders lifted again serenely. ‘Why not? God is everything.'

He felt no need of further explanation, and perhaps he could have provided none. What he knew he knew, but his dealings were not in words. Ganesh, Hanuman, Kali, Gajalakshmi – what did it matter? Even that many personages had themselves many shapes and many names. Parvati was many, Siva many, Vishnu, this sleeper in the rock, many. Many times incarnated, and still to come again. And every avatar, Varaha, Rama, Lord Krishna, everyone was still Vishnu. And Vishnu and Lakshmi and Siva and Parvati and Hanuman and Ganesh and Subramanya, and all the others: all were God.

‘But creatures seen so differently,' she said, feeling her way towards this subtlety in him which she had so dangerously mistaken for simplicity. ‘So many, and so varied – and all one? Is that possible?'

‘Look,' said Subramanya triumphantly, ‘I show you!'

He held his lantern momentarily over the majestic face, and then caught her by the hand and drew her with him, circling the long couch of stone to the distant corner of the chamber. He lifted the light high. Only a glimmer shone upon the soles of the large, calm stone feet.

‘You see? Is he any less God when we see only his feet? Do you think his face is not still there?'

She was silent a long time, considering that, until Sudha sighed and yawned, and suggested that they had seen enough. She emerged into daylight again still considering it. Subramanya had already put it by and forgotten it; he had no need to remember the logic which lived and breathed in him. He was chattering gaily rather about his parents and his little sister, when he set his lantern down on the stone steps, opened the glass door and turned down the wick. He blew out the flame, and a thin curl of grey smoke spiralled upwards for an instant and was gone. Flame and smoke, light and darkness, lived together inside the cage. Was there any need for a greater diversity than that?

They gave him more money than he expected, and he was pleased.

He walked with them halfway to the settlement, and talked merrily all the way. His father, he said, was one of Cobb Sahib's servants, he kept the garden at the school. But their own house was at the edge of the village; he pointed it out as they went, a low clay shape like all the rest. His little sister was learning to be a dancer. When she was bigger she would go to Madras. If the memsahib was staying here, and if she liked, Shantila would dance for her.

Nothing is rarer than to make a pure human contact; and nothing can happen so simply and naturally when it does happen. By the time he smiled his goodbye to them over his prayerfully-folded hands at the edge of the road, and darted back to his post and his neglected palmyra fruit she knew it was not with her half-rupee that she had won him.

‘I made a friend today,' she said to Andrew that evening over coffee, on the verandah of the bungalow he was visibly seeing now as small and inadequate. His manner towards her was becoming, she thought, at once more relaxed and more proprietary. He had produced her to his nurses at the clinic and his staff at the school with the air of one displaying something not yet possessed, but possession of which he was certainly contemplating.

‘It's a lucky person who can ever say that,' said Andrew cautiously. ‘Who is it?'

‘The light-boy at the temple. He showed us round there this morning.'

‘Ah, Subramanya! He's not a bad boy. Comes of a Christian family, of course.'

She was startled chiefly by the instant and dismaying reaction she felt at hearing this, as though her recollection of him shrank; as though he had somehow been belittled.

‘Really? I shouldn't have guessed that. Not that it arose, actually.' But hadn't it? Was not some kind of answer to that speculation comprehended in the answers he had given to a larger question?

‘His father's my gardener,' said Andrew. ‘I know the family well. My predecessor here converted the grandfather. Yes, he's a nice boy, quick and reliable. As Indians go!'

Why was it, she wondered, watching him steadily in the yellowing twilight, with the sea-wind coming in cool and fresh after the heat of the day, why was it that when he dropped some such phrase as that, quite simply and without malice, she felt herself recoil in such marked revolt? He gave all his energy to his life here, and his life was helping these people. He was right not to be hypocritical about the failings he found in them. He had as much right to his own standards and attitudes as they had to theirs and certainly more control over them. He had adapted more painstakingly to their ways than they did to his. Nor had she any justification for feeling superior.

She had come here gratefully because he was a refuge to her after too much experience too suddenly swallowed. She had come baffled and irritated by the contradictions of wealth and poverty, by the venality of much that she saw, from the buyable people in high places, through the hotel clerks discreetly black-marketeering in sterling, to the malevolent gangs of children pestering for alms, the servile and insolent room-boys, the predatory priests never content even with the most generous of offerings. From all this she had turned eagerly to an English acquaintance with standards like her own, a feeling for time, a sense of responsibility, and words which meant what they said.

And yet he had only to say something like that, and she knew that they stood on different ground. At that tone in his voice, patient and tolerant though it was, she remembered how much more congenial, on board ship, she had found the Indians than her own countrymen, and how the missionaries, in particular, had clung together in a close little clan, and mixed less than anyone aboard with their different fellow-creatures. She remembered to detach herself from her own prejudices, to distrust her own reactions; she reminded herself that she was the creature of her own upbringing and environment, however carefully she tried to stand apart from them. She saw that all that dismayed her here was at least in part her own creation. And she was willing to wait, to continue an alien, to be rejected, to be exploited, if that was the necessary reverse of all that delighted her, the occasional acceptance, the unexpected communication, the momentary belonging.

‘If you want someone to take you about while I'm busy in the clinic, mornings,' said Andrew, placidly unaware of any disquiet in her, ‘you might do a lot worse than Subramanya. He knows everybody in the village, and quite a lot about the dig too.'

She took him at his word; and in the few days of her stay she thought much of the light-boy, and spent a good part of her time in his company. With this child, at least, she had no doubts of her welcome, or of the reason for it. He enjoyed her as she enjoyed him. It might be only the courteous brushing of fingers, but at least they touched.

When he invited her into his home she entered with reverence. A small, bare, clean living room, one shelf with a faded wedding photograph, an asthmatic wireless set, a low mat bed covered with a threadbare rug; and behind a drab curtain, the tiny kitchen hot from brazier fumes, a stained clay oven, and two garish pictures, one on either side. Rachel put off her shoes at the doorway and made her ceremonial ‘Namaste' to a thin, worn woman who was Subramanya's mother. Like the field workers of the south, she wore no blouse under her sari, and the folds kilted almost to her knee. She had nothing to offer but a glass of water. Rachel drank it and thanked her, aware of a special and undeserved happiness.

Not until she was waist-deep in the sea that afternoon, braced against the rough waves, did she realize what she had seen in the kitchen. On one side a cheap, highly-coloured paper print of Christ, soft-faced and appealing; on the other a doe-eyed, tender-mouthed Krishna, blue-tinted and womanish, with his flute at his lips.

And she had seen no discrepancy, no contradiction. They were so profoundly alike that there was no distinguishing between them except by the blueness and the beard and the flute – superficial differences by any measure. The very same too beautiful, effeminate, sentimental art, the flowery beauty that poverty and deprivation and wretchedness need. Necessarily, a distant, hampered and imperfect view, perhaps the buckle of a sandal, a little-toe nail, but still a particle of the god. Of God.

Rolled in the ultramarine shallows, refreshed and languid and at ease, she found no fault with this dual vision. All the pantheon of India had begun to fuse into a unity for her. All the pantheons of the world.

She did not realize how strong a tide was carrying her, she went with it and was content. She watched Shantila dance, and listened to Subramanya's monotonously-sung accompaniment, and learned to distinguish
abhinaya
, the mimed interpretation of ballads and songs, from the stylized movements of pure dance. Classical Indian music as yet only confused and excited her, but the popular music of weddings and folksongs she found astonishingly approachable. And how quickly, how very quickly, someone else's fairies and gods become one's own, familiar and dear. She had only to watch Shantila cross her ankles and poise her lifted fingers on the invisible flute, and Lord Krishna was there before her, in all his youth and beauty and antique innocence.

She was changing after her bathe, on the fifth afternoon of her stay, when she heard Andrew come trampling heavily up the steps to the verandah, half an hour ahead of his usual time. Sudha was still snoring delicately under her mosquito-net, for to Sudha the afternoons were made for sleeping rather than swimming. If Andrew called out, he would wake her. Rachel opened the door an inch or two and said softly: ‘I'll be out in a moment. There's a fresh lime soda in that covered jug in the cooler. Get one for me, too, will you?'

He was stretched out in one of the cane chairs when she came out to him a few minutes later, still towelling her wet hair. He looked up at her with a brief, preoccupied smile that faded quickly into a grimace of discouragement; and yet she had a strange impression that somewhere at the heart of his unexplained mood there was an odd little glow of satisfaction.

‘What's the matter? Has something happened?'

‘Oh, nothing I shouldn't have been prepared for, I suppose. It's only too ordinary. I finished early,' he said, ‘and thought I'd get the car out and run you over to the south beach or somewhere. I looked in at the village, thinking I might find you there. I didn't, but I found something else.' He was groping deep into his bush-jacket pocket. ‘You won't believe it,' he said, sour enjoyment unmistakable in his voice now.

After more than a month in India there was not much she would have had difficulty in believing. She said so, but the serenity in her tone did not seem to be what he expected of her.

‘I thought Subramanya's people might know where you'd be, so I called in there. This will show you what these people are really like – unreliable, two-faced, born without sincerity. You think you've got them, and it's like holding water in your hands. You'll understand now what I'm up against. For three generations these people have been professing Christians. And look what they had pinned up on the kitchen wall! Right beside a picture of Christ!'

He whipped it out on to the table and unfolded it before her eyes with a gesture of bitter triumph. She let the towel fall into her lap, and sat for a long moment with her eyes fixed upon the garishly-coloured flamboyantly-printed page, its glossy surface seamed now with sharp white folds like scars. Lord Krishna's flute was bent, his round, girlish arm broken. The delicate, effeminate, blue-tinted countenance with its fawn's eyes was deformed by a slashed cross.

She sat looking at it, and her face was thoughtful, mild and still. She said nothing at all.

‘I'm sorry!' said Andrew, stretching and relaxing with a sigh. ‘I don't know why I had to take it out on you, it isn't your fault. But you see how devious they are. You can't trust them an inch.'

No, from his point of view perhaps not, and certainly one could argue, she thought reasonably, that knowing what they know, they ought not to profess conversion from one creed to another. What isn't worth keeping, isn't worth giving up, and why change one illusion, one voluntary mutilation, for another? But probably the grandfather had never really understood that his own universality was coming into a head-on clash with something smaller, less enlightened, and as exclusive as it was militant. One more aspect of divinity came graciously enough to him; how could he possibly realize that he was expected to make it, from then on, the only one? Like sealing up against the sun all the windows of your house but for one small casement. Like voluntarily walling yourself into a dark tower with one narrow loophole, when you could be outside lying in the grass.

‘You made them take it down?' she asked, smoothing the edge of the spoiled picture with one finger, her voice quiet.

‘Well, of course!' he said, astonished, and stared at her blankly.

‘Why “of course”?' She looked up. ‘They have the right to believe and worship as they please.'

‘Certainly,' agreed Andrew, stiffly. ‘As they please, and whichever they please. But not
both
!'

Almost pleasurably, as in a half-dream, she heard her own voice saying: ‘Why not?'