Cedilla (59 page)

Where was the cowherd boy now? Shouldn’t he be rushing up to drive his charge back towards its fellows, using a stick that would make me wince in sympathy but also thank him in my heart? I couldn’t see him. With a neck properly equipped with rotational
and stretching powers, I might have had a better chance of getting a glimpse, but there it was. All told I miss quite a bit from the lack of play in my neck.

On the other hand, if I had been in possession of a working neck I wouldn’t have been in India in the first place, I’d have taken so different a path that the two Johns, the supple and the stiff, would long since have been invisible to each other.

The cow came nearer and nearer. I became increasingly conscious of the largeness of the cow and the smallness of me. It wasn’t a sleek prize-winning English cow, but it wasn’t the scrawny animal I was half-expecting as the norm in India. Nor did this animal resemble the cow in Mrs Osborne’s garden, which gave us milk that could never go off.

This cow was pure white except for a streak of shit on its flank. It was strongly built, with something that was almost a hump behind its shoulder. As it came close it seemed to be bigger than any normal cow could possibly be, but then I’m not used to the looming of cattle. I had an almost intoxicating sense of my own littleness, a thrill of insignificance.

At the same time I was highly aware of the precariousness of my position. As the cow came closer I started to talk to it, saying, ‘Nice cow’ or some such absurdity, hoping madly that it wasn’t going to butt the chair or interfere with me in any way. I tried to remember whether the brakes were on, though I knew how little difference it would make if the huge animal once made physical contact. I would either be nudged off the chair or nudged off the mountain.

The cow slowed down as it approached me but didn’t actually stop. She came nearer and nearer, her eyes both empty and searching, bending her head down low in a way that didn’t look particularly submissive. In an obscene reflex I could smell the meatiness of her. I suppose we all harbour some such atavistic instinct, even when as individuals we have learned to find animals’ lives delicious, and not their deaths.

The cow came so near that I couldn’t see both her eyes at once. There was just enough play in my neck for me to turn the angle necessary to focus on one and then the other. Her massive jaw moved to the side chewingly, and she unrolled her breath in front of me like a
carpet of grasses. She nudged even further forward, so that her breath rolled over me in a cuddy plume. Eventually I was touching her nose, and speaking to her as evenly as I could. If I say I was touching her nose, it must be understood that the action was hers not mine – she presented her nose to my hand.

My terror was that she was going to reach out to me with her tongue. As long as she kept it in her mouth I could contemplate her with a sort of equanimity, under my fear. Having refused my share of a thousand Sunday roasts, I was in physical danger but not shamed. If she showed her tongue I would be morally annihilated, having eaten tongue, processed and jellied, in ignorant enjoyment as a bedridden boy. How was I supposed to live with myself after that, if she reached out that wet muscle and licked me with it? My whole pilgrimage was being dominated by the bodily not the spiritual, and by cows’ bodies at that, cows and their tongues, cows in the city and cows on the mountain.

I found myself crooning, ‘Avatar of the cow goddess’ – in my panic I’d forgotten precisely which Hindu deity took bovine form – ‘Emanation of Arunachala …’ over and over again. I was also murmuring ‘Pax, pax,’ as if this was a playground dispute that could be resolved by surrender. In confrontations with cattle Pax is not an effective spell, whether you’re a matador impaled in his suit of lights, repenting his cruelty with sobs of blood, or a neophyte devotee whose bluff has been called, discovering that the mountain he has adored from afar is numinous beyond all reckoning.

I was slow to realise that this was a supernatural encounter. The mountain had given up on the project of addressing me directly and had lowered himself to incarnation, and a sort of ruminant ventriloquism. Contact on a level I could understand. My abilities had been scrutinised and revised downwards, though I think without disapproval. I have observed a similar procedure in a Chinese restaurant, when the management has smilingly brought knife and fork, without being asked, to rescue a patron defeated by chopsticks.

After that the divine cow started showing signs of what I can only
call affection, rubbing and pushing lightly against me. They were slight movements for a cow, but I was rocked alarmingly by them. I had as much to fear from a friendly cow as from a mad bull, not from a charge but the delicate movement that would crush me. If all this had happened down in the plain, with the cowherd nearby, watching with an indulgent smile, I would have been in
svarga –
in heaven – or at least in the Indian equivalent of Whipsnade (remembering the time a snake had handled me there), but here I was in real danger and a real state.

Her next step was to turn her head. One huge horn came down and to the side, so that it went through the wheelchair arm-piece on the left, with a smooth grinding noise as solid bone slid on hollow metal. Another small movement and she had manœuvred her left horn under the right arm-piece, so that her head ended up in the centre of the chair’s rotational axis. Precisely where a cow would position itself if it wanted to use its mighty neck muscles, and the superbly articulated bones they powered, to give my wheelchair an apocalyptic flick. The cow’s friendliness continued, but I was filled with terror and awe. In a perfectly friendly way, she could have lifted her head straight up, in creaturely greeting, and the chair would either have been lifted up bodily, taking me with it, or tipped backwards off the mountain.

This wasn’t a cosy creature out of A. A. Milne making butter for the royal slice of bread, this was a Hindu divinity. It was terrifying. This wasn’t Daisy, this was – it came to me – Lakshmi. I was locking horns with Lakshmi. Her cud-breath engulfed me. There was a long string of saliva hanging from her mouth, a glutinous rope, but I could easily believe it would hang there for a thousand years without falling.

My body entered a state of sacred shock. I was almost weeping, and when I tried to speak to this presence, no sound came out. In fact they were all here, or at least seven out of the eight: horripilation, trembling, tears, faltering of the voice, perspiration, inability to move, holy devastation. All the physical signs of the presence of God, everything that makes up what Hindus call
nirvikalpa samadhi
. I can’t vouch for the changing of my body colour in any real way, but it seems hardly likely that I would stay the same colour when every other aspect and sensation was turned upside down.

Of course any one of the signs, and even whole groups of them,
could be explained by my situation. At the mercy of an immense and capricious ruminant. On a mountain that I claimed as my spiritual home, but was thousands of miles from home by every other definition. But there was no doubt in my mind, as I gazed at her, that I was in the presence of Lakshmi. She turned her head a little, so that only one eye remained in my field of vision. That eye was a glazed bulge in which all contradictions were collapsed, a radiant absence and a probing vacuum.

This turning of the head, though smoothly executed, brought a huge force to bear on the wheelchair. If it hadn’t been exactly in line with the axle the chair would have been tipped over, and even so the framework juddered and one wheel lifted from the ground.

Mechanistic Western thinking was all at sea in this terrain, but still it went on offering the incantation which calls itself analysis of events. What it told me was that horn and arm-piece had meshed as a result of a series of moves on the divine cow’s part. The only way the knot could be undone without capsizing me was if the same sequence was performed in reverse, lateral actions with no component of movement either forward or backwards, passes as precise as the ones required to knit together the kinked silver loops of Patrick Savage’s fidelity ring in the library of Burnham Grammar School. Time would have to go backwards, the film be shown in reverse. Otherwise I would shortly be united with the mountain in a crash of silence.

If I could just have banished the final particle of fear, the ego might have melted for good, dissolving into Arunachala just as Parvati did, in the story told to me on my first walk round the mountain. I wouldn’t necessarily have died, although that isn’t out of the question. But the ego would certainly have burned away in its current form, persisting only as a wraith, the fabled moon in the daytime. A purely executive residue with no agenda of its own, directing my life without getting in its way, a policeman on point duty with no powers of arrest.

For a long moment, the Cow on the Mountain stayed poised in entanglement with the wheelchair. Then she gently disengaged her horns, as if she knew exactly what she was doing. The film was run backwards frame by frame, and the raised wheel renewed its contact with the ground. At this point there was a subtle molecular change in the cow’s gaze. After a few moments it became clear that she was
baffled by her surroundings. It wasn’t hard to see her as an audience member suddenly finding herself on stage at a hypnotism show, with no memory of what has been said or done while under the influence, unreassured by the welling of applause. She was definitely a cow at this point, not a deity, and as a cow she wandered off out of my line of sight.

I was in a state somewhere between revelation and shell-shock. I remember nothing about the descent from the mountain. I assume the coolies rematerialised and carried me and the wheelchair down as briskly as they carried us up, but there is nothing in my memory to vouch for that. If I had floated down under my own power or been lowered smoothly by thousands of hands appearing out of nowhere, I hope I would remember, but I can’t be certain even so.

The true mystical temperament is a well fed from springs beneath, indifferent to drought or flooding. My own state at this point was rather different – a bath so overfilled that even dropping the soap would make it slop over. The moment I had recovered my presence of mind I had to blab to somebody about the cow on the mountain. I couldn’t keep the miraculous to myself. I had to parade it. And even though I was always a little afraid of her, it was Lucia Osborne I was going to tell. The witch in the white sari had a knack of drawing the strangest confessions into her gnarled and Polish ears.

She asked for a clear description of the cow, and nodded as I passed on everything that I could remember. I hesitated to mention the streak of shit on her flank, but this rather lowly detail didn’t make her stop nodding. ‘This is certainly a photism, a visual manifestation of Lakshmi the goddess, in fact of course – though the correspondence is not exact – of Lakshmi the disciple, an extraordinary cow who achieved enlightenment on June 18th, 1948.’ I didn’t quite see how Mrs Osborne could be so definite, but this was a lady pickled in certainties who could go for years without saying ‘perhaps’. I would have liked to quarrel with that rather gossamer word
photism
, since the massive presence of the cow, the overwhelming likelihood that it would send me flying, were not things registered by the eye alone.

‘We have no choice but to call her a disciple of Bhagavan. Even as a calf she would come and place her head at his feet. That was before I came here, of course, but I was there on the day that Sri Bhagavan
held her head in his hands when she was in the throes of her death. He watched over her almost as he had done with his own mother when she shed her body. Her
samadhi
is at the ashram.’

Samadhi
meaning resting-place. By etymology a putting together, joining, completion, and so either the state of bliss or a place of rest. The actual cow festival is on January 15th, but I didn’t think Lakshmi should be made to wait. Taking a cue from Lewis Carroll, I would celebrate her unbirthday. Mrs Osborne helped me prepare a
puja
for Lakshmi.
Puja
is I suppose the elementary form of worship in Hinduism. Chanting is more abstract, and meditation still more so. That’s the order in which they are ranked for the benefit of those who think in terms of progression. But physical
puja
has its place, there’s no doubt about that.

Mrs Osborne gave me guidance about the offering I should make: a miniature meal for the god, laid out on a banana-leaf. A few grains of rice, a little pile of vegetables, a dab of
sambhar
. Mountain banana was particularly pleasing to the Lakshmi she knew, she said, the historical one. This foreshortened feast appealed to many deep memories – it was a snack of savoury reminiscence in itself. I remembered Mum’s doctrine that every forkful I put in my mouth should ideally contain each element of what was on the plate, the meal in microcosm.

We discussed whether the offering should be taken to the shrine in the ashram. Eventually we decided that it should be fed to an actual cow. Mrs O brought out an image of Lakshmi onto the verandah for my benefit. An image wasn’t strictly necessary, since the real shrine is in your heart. We waved joss-sticks around – always a pleasure in its own right. Then we entrusted the little meal to Rajah Manikkam, who took it away and fed it to the cow of his choice, a white cow if he could find one, shit-streak not required.

At night I pondered the difficulty of my quest and prayed for softness in that awful bed. My compassion for the mosquitoes biting my toes had lasted all of a day. I had given them a good night’s feed, with a willing heart, but enough was enough. There’s such a thing as taking liberties. After that, I was all in favour of squashing them and
bother the karma. I even wondered if we could get hold of some poison somehow. Wouldn’t the mosquitoes be likely to be reborn in better lives, rewarded for dying while bloated with a pilgrim’s blood?

Then when Peter came, I acquired a secret weapon in the fight for a good night’s sleep. A dog followed us home from the market. We fed it on
vada
scraps and anything else that came to hand. It wasn’t a house dog but a street dog, wily and craven. Peter had named him Yogi Bear, after the cartoon character, a sweetly clueless creature to whom he bore no resemblance whatever. I’m sure Peter really chose the name out of fond mockery of my religion, but it stuck even after he had gone.