The Skeptical Romancer (31 page)

The Sufi. He lived in a little house in a poor quarter of Hyderabad. It was almost a slum. There was a veranda, and we waited there to find out from our guide if the holy man would see us. Taking off our shoes before we entered, we were ushered into a smallish room, divided into two, as far as I could see, by mosquito-netting, and I surmised that the part we could not see was his sleeping apartment. The greater part of the space in which we sat was taken up by a sort of dais or platform, about eighteen inches from the ground, covered with cheap rugs, and on these was a rattan mat on which the saint sat. He was very old, very thin, with a ragged white beard; he wore a fez, a white cotton coat and white trousers; and his feet were bare. His eyes looked very large in the extreme thinness of his face in which the cheek-bones stood out above the sunken cheeks. He had long beautiful hands, but fleshless, and his gestures were profuse, graceful and expressive. Though so old and so frail, he seemed full of energy and talked with animation. He was cheerful. The expression of his face was very sweet and kindly. I do not know that he said anything remarkable. I know nothing of Sufism and
so perhaps was more surprised than I should have been to hear him speak of the self and the supreme self in the same strain as the Hindu teachers speak. The impression I carried away was of a very dear, tender, kindly, charitable and tolerant old man.

A Holy Man. Sir Akbar Hydari sent his car to fetch him and at the appointed hour he entered the room. He was richly dressed and wore a great scarlet cloak of fine material. He was a middle-aged man, tall, of a handsome presence, and his manner was courtly. He spoke no English and Sir Akbar acted as interpreter. He talked fluently and well and his voice was sonorous. He said the things I had heard from others twenty times before. That is the worst of the Indian thinkers, they say the same things in the same words, and though you feel that it should not make you restive, for if they possess the truth, as they are convinced they do, and if the truth is one and indivisible, it is natural enough that they should repeat it like parrots, there is no denying the fact that it is irksome to listen interminably to the same statements. You wish at least they could think of other metaphors, similes, illustrations than those of the Upanishads. Your heart sinks when you hear again the one about the snake and the rope. Custom has too much staled it.

I asked him how I could acquire the power of meditation. He told me to go into a darkened room, sit on the floor cross-legged and fix my eyes on the flame of a candle, emptying my mind of every thought so that it was a complete blank. He said that if I would do that for a quarter of an hour a day I should presently have some extraordinary experiences. “Do it for nine months,” he said, “then come back and I will give you another exercise.”

That evening I did as he had directed. I took the time before I began. I remained in that state for so long that I thought I must have by far exceeded the quarter of an hour he had prescribed. I looked at my watch. Three minutes had passed. It had seemed an eternity.

A week or two ago someone related an incident to me with the suggestion that I should write a story on it, and since then I have been thinking it over. I don’t see what to do. The incident is as follows. Two young fellows were working on a tea plantation in the hills and the mail had to be fetched from a good way off so
that they only got it at rather long intervals. One of the young fellows, let us call him A., used to get a lot of letters by every mail, ten or twelve and sometimes more, but the other, B., never got one. He used to watch A. enviously as he took his bundle and started to read, he hankered to have a letter, just one letter, and one day, when they were expecting the mail, he said to A.: “Look here, you always have a packet of letters and I never get any. I’ll give you five pounds if you’ll let me have one of yours.” “Right ho,” said A. and when the mail came in he handed B. his letters and said to him: “Take whichever you like.” B. gave him a five-pound note, looked over the letters, chose one and returned the rest. In the evening, when they were having a whisky and soda after dinner, A. asked casually: “By the way, what was that letter about?” “I’m not going to tell you,” said B. A., somewhat taken aback said: “Well, who was it from?” “That’s my business,” answered B. They had a bit of an argument, but B. stood on his rights and refused to say anything about the letter that he had bought. A. began to fret, and as the weeks went by he did all he could to persuade B. to let him see the letter. B. continued to refuse. At length A., anxious, worried, curious, felt he couldn’t bear it any longer, so he went to B. and said: “Look here, here’s your five pounds, let me have my letter back again.” “Not on your life,” said B. “I bought and paid for it, it’s my letter and I’m not going to give it up.”

That’s all. I suppose if I belonged to the modern school of story writers, I should write it just as it is and leave it. It goes against the grain with me. I want a story to have form, and I don’t see how you can give it that unless you can bring it to a conclusion that leaves no legitimate room for questioning. But even if you could bring yourself to leave the reader up in the air you don’t want to leave yourself up in the air with him.

I went to lunch with the heir apparent and his wife, the Prince and Princess of Berar. During luncheon the prince talked to me of my journey. “I suppose you’ve been to Bombay?” he asked. “Yes,” I answered, “I landed there.” “And were you put up for the Yacht Club?” “Yes,” I said. “And are you going to Calcutta?” “Yes.” “I suppose you’ll be put up at the Bengal Club?” “I hope so,” I replied. “Do you know the difference between them?” the prince asked. “No,” said I innocently. “In the Bengal Club at
Calcutta they don’t allow dogs or Indians, but in the Yacht Club at Bombay they don’t mind dogs; it’s only Indians they don’t allow.” I couldn’t for the life of me think of an answer to that then, and I haven’t thought of one since.

BENARES. NOTHING CAN
be more impressive than to saunter down the Ganges by boat in the evening just before the sun sets. It is thrilling to look at the city with the two minarets of the mosque standing up against the pale sky. A wonderful sense of peace descends upon you. There is a great silence.

Then in the morning before the sun rises you drive through the city, the shops still closed and men under rugs lying asleep on the pavement; a scattering of people are going down to the river, with brass bowls in their hands, for their prescribed bath in the sacred water. You get on to a houseboat, manned by three men, and slowly row down by the ghats. It is chilly in the early morning. The ghats are unevenly peopled. One, I don’t know why, is crowded. It is an extraordinary spectacle, the throng on the steps and at the water’s edge. The bathers take the ritual bath in different ways. For some of the boys it is a lark and they dive into the water, come out and dive in again. For some it is a ceremony that must be gone through as quickly as possible, and you see them make the motions of devotion mechanically and gabble through their prayers. Others take it solemnly. They bow to the rising sun and, their arms outstretched above their heads, utter their prayers with unction. Then, the bath over, some chat with their friends and you guess that the daily obligation offers an opportunity to exchange news and gossip. Others sit cross-legged in meditation. The stillness with which some of them sit is strangely impressive: it is as though in that throng they sat in a temple of solitude. I saw one old man whose face was decorated with great rings of white ash around his eyes, a broad oblong patch on his forehead and square patches on his cheeks, so that he looked as if he were wearing a mask. Many of the bathers, having taken their bath, carefully scrubbed and polished the brass bowl in which they were going to carry back to their houses the lustral water.

It is a moving, a wonderfully thrilling spectacle; the bustle, the noise, the coming and going give a sense of a seething vitality; and those still figures of the men in contemplation by contrast seem more silent, more still, more aloof from human intercourse.

The sun rises higher in the heaven and the grey light which had bathed the scene grows golden, and colour clothes it with a motley radiance.

TAJ MAHAL
. Notwithstanding my expectations and all the pictures I had seen of it, when I got my first and proper view of it, the view from the terrace of the gateway, I was overcome by its beauty. I recognized that this was the authentic thrill of art and tried to examine it in myself while it was still vivid. I can understand that when people say something takes their breath away it is not an idle metaphor. I really did feel shortness of breath. I had a queer, delightful feeling in my heart, as though it were dilated. I felt surprise and joy and, I think, a sense of liberation; but I had just been reading the Samkhya philosophy in which art is regarded as a temporary liberation of the same sort as that absolute liberation in which all Indian religion ends, so it may be that this was no more than a reminiscence that I transferred to my actual feeling.

I cannot enjoy the same ecstasy over a beautiful thing twice over, and next day when I went to the Taj again, at the same hour, it was only with my mind that I enjoyed the same sight. On the other hand I got something else. As the sun was setting I wandered into the Mosque. I was quite alone. As I looked from one end along the chambers into which it is divided I had an eerie, mysterious sense of its emptiness and silence. I was a trifle scared. I can only put what I felt into words that make no sense: I seemed to hear the noiseless footfall of the infinite.

MADURA. THE TEMPLE
at night. There is always a noise in India. People talk all day long at the top of their voices, but in the
temple they talk more loudly than ever. The row is terrific. People pray and recite litanies, they call to one another, vociferously discuss, quarrel or greet one another. There is nothing that suggests reverence and yet there is a vehement overwhelming sense of the divine that sends cold shivers down your spine. In some strange way the gods there seem to be near and living.

The throng is dense, men, women and children. The men are stripped to the waist, and their foreheads, and often their arms and chests, are thickly smeared with the white ash of burnt cow dung. Many of them in the daytime, while going about their ordinary affairs, wear European clothes, but here they have discarded Western dress, Western civilization and Western ways of thought. Here in the temple is the native India that knows nothing of the West. You see them making obeisance at one shrine or another and sometimes lying full length on the ground, face downwards in the ritual attitude of prostration.

You pass through long halls, the roof supported by sculptured columns, and at the foot of each column is seated a religious mendicant. Some are old and bearded, some terribly emaciated, some are young, brawny and hirsute. Each has in front of him a bowl for offerings or a small mat on which the faithful now and again throw a copper coin. Some are clad in red, some are almost naked. Some look at you vacantly as you pass, some are reading, silently or aloud, and take no notice of the streaming throng. Sitting on the floor, outside the adytum, is a group of priests, the fore part of their skulls shaven, the hair at the back tied in a knot, rather stout, their hairless brown chests and their fleshy arms streaked with white ash. One, a scholar and a noted holy man, in a red turban, with bracelets on his arms, and a coloured dhoty, with a grey beard and an authoritative manner, comes followed by two or three pupils, utters a prayer at a shrine, and then, with the dignity of a man who is respected, the way cleared for him by his pupils, strides into the holy of holies.

The temple is lit by naked electric bulbs that hang from the ceiling and throw a harsh light on the sculpture, but where they do not penetrate render the darkness more mysterious. The impression you take away with you, notwithstanding that vast, noisy throng, or maybe because of it, is of something secret and terrible.

When I was leaving India people asked me which of all the sights I had seen had most impressed me. I answered as they expected me to answer. But it wasn’t the Taj Mahal, the ghats of Benares, the temple at Madura or the mountains of Travancore that had most moved me; it was the peasant, terribly emaciated, with nothing to cover his nakedness but a rag round his middle the colour of the sun-baked earth he tilled, the peasant shivering in the cold of dawn, sweating in the heat of noon, working still as the sun set red over the parched fields, the starveling peasant toiling without cease in the north, in the south, in the east, in the west, toiling all over the vastness of India, toiling as he had toiled from father to son back, back for three thousand years when the Aryans had first descended upon the country, toiling for a scant subsistence, his only hope to keep body and soul together. That was the sight that had given me the most poignant emotion in India.

WE WERE SPENDING
the night at a small town in Texas. It was a convenient stopping-place for people driving across the continent, and the hotel was full. Everyone went to bed early. At ten o’clock a woman in one of the rooms put in a call to Washington, and in the frame house you could hear plainly every word she said. She wanted a Major Tompkins, but she didn’t know his number; she told the operator that he was in the War Department. Presently she got on to Washington, and when the operator told her that she couldn’t trace him, flew into a temper and said that everyone in Washington knew Major Tompkins. It was very important, she said, and she had to speak to him. She was cut off and in a few minutes tried again. She tried every quarter of an hour. She abused the local operator, what sort of a one-horse dump is this? She abused the Washington operator. She made more and more noise. Nobody could sleep. Indignant guests rang down to the office, and the night manager came up and tried to get her to be quiet. We listened to her angry replies to his mild expostulation and when, defeated, he left her she started once more to ring the exchange. She rang and rang. She shouted. Furious men in their dressing-gowns, dishevelled
women in wrappers, went into the passage and banged on her door telling her to stop making so much noise so that they could sleep. She told them to go to hell with such variety of language as to excite the outraged indignation of the ladies. The manager was again appealed to and at his wits’ end sent for the sheriff. The sheriff came, but he was no match for her and not knowing what else to do sent for a doctor. Meanwhile she rang and rang, screaming obscenities at the operator. The doctor came, saw her, shrugged his shoulders and said he could do nothing. The sheriff wanted him to take her to the hospital, but for some reason I couldn’t understand, something to do with her being a transient from another state, and if she was crazy, as all these frantic people insisted, she might become a charge on the county, the doctor refused to act. She went on telephoning. She screamed that she must get Major Tompkins; it was a matter of life and death. At last she got him. It was four in the morning and no one in the hotel had shut an eye.