Island (10 page)

“Buddhaness, Buddheity, the quality of being enlightened.”

Radha nodded and turned back to Will. “It means that Buddhaness is in the
yoni
.”

“In the
yoni
?” Will remembered those little stone emblems of the Eternal Feminine that he had bought, as presents for the girls at the office, from a hunchbacked vendor of
bondieuseries
at Benares. Eight annas for a black
yoni
; twelve for the still more sacred image of the
yoni-lingam
. “Literally in the
yoni
?” he asked. “Or metaphorically?”

“What a ridiculous question!” said the little nurse, and she laughed her clear unaffected laugh of pure amusement. “Do you think we make love metaphorically?
Buddhatvan yoshidyonisansritan
,” she repeated. “It couldn’t be more completely and absolutely literal.”

“Did you ever hear of the Oneida Community?” Ranga now asked.

Will nodded. He had known an American historian who specialized in nineteenth-century communities. “But why do
you
know about it?” he asked.

“Because it’s mentioned in all our textbooks of applied philosophy. Basically,
maithuna
is the same as what the Oneida peo
ple called Male Continence. And that was the same as what Roman Catholics mean by
coitus reservatus
.”

“
Reservatus
,” the little nurse repeated. “It always makes me want to laugh. ‘Such a
reserved
young man’!” The dimples reappeared and there was a flash of white teeth.

“Don’t be silly,” said Ranga severely. “This is serious.”

She expressed her contrition. “But
reservatus
was really too funny.”

“In a word,” Will concluded, “it’s just birth control without contraceptives.”

“But that’s only the beginning of the story,” said Ranga. “
Maithuna
is also something else. Something even more important.” The undergraduate pedant had reasserted himself. “Remember,” he went on earnestly, “remember the point that Freud was always harping on.”

“Which point? There were so many.”

“The point about the sexuality of children. What we’re born with, what we experience all through infancy and childhood, is a sexuality that isn’t concentrated on the genitals; it’s a sexuality diffused throughout the whole organism. That’s the paradise we inherit. But the paradise gets lost as the child grows up.
Maithuna
is the organized attempt to regain that paradise.” He turned to Radha. “You’ve got a good memory,” he said. “What’s that phrase of Spinoza’s that they quote in the applied philosophy book?”

“‘Make the body capable of doing many things,’” she recited. “‘This will help you to perfect the mind and so to come to the intellectual love of God.’”

“Hence all the yogas,” said Ranga. “Including
maithuna
.”

“And it’s a real yoga,” the girl insisted. “As good as raja yoga, or karma yoga, or bhakti yoga. In fact, a great deal better, so far as most people are concerned.
Maithuna
really gets them there.”

“What’s ‘there’?” Will asked.

“‘There’ is where you know.”

“Know what?”

“Know who in fact you are—and believe it or not,” she added, “
tat tvam asi
—thou art That, and so am I: That is me.” The dimples came to life, the teeth flashed. “And That’s also
him
.” She pointed at Ranga. “Incredible, isn’t it?” She stuck out her tongue at him. “And yet it’s a fact.”

Ranga smiled, reached out and with an extended forefinger touched the tip of her nose. “And not merely a fact,” he said. “A revealed truth.” He gave the nose a little tap. “A revealed truth,” he repeated. “So mind your P’s and Q’s, young woman.”

“What I’m wondering,” said Will, “is why we aren’t all enlightened—I mean, if it’s just a question of making love with a rather special kind of technique. What’s the answer to that?”

“I’ll tell you,” Ranga began.

But the girl cut him short. “Listen,” she said, “listen!”

Will listened. Faint and far off, but still distinct, he heard the strange inhuman voice that had first welcomed him to Pala. “Attention,” it was saying. “Attention, Attention…”

“That bloody bird again!”

“But that’s the secret.”

“Attention? But a moment ago you were saying it was something else. What about that young man who’s so reserved?”

“That’s just to make it easier to pay attention.”

“And it
does
make it easier,” Ranga confirmed. “And that’s the whole point of
maithuna
. It’s not the special technique that turns love-making into yoga; it’s the kind of awareness that the technique makes possible. Awareness of one’s sensations and awareness of the not-sensation in every sensation.”

“What’s a not-sensation?”

“It’s the raw material for sensation that my not-self provides me with.”

“And you can pay attention to your not-self?”

“Of course.”

Will turned to the little nurse. “You too?”

“To myself,” she answered, “and at the same time to my not-self. And to Ranga’s not-self, and to Ranga’s self, and to Ranga’s body, and to my body and everything it’s feeling. And to all the love and the friendship. And to the mystery of the other person—the perfect stranger, who’s the other half of your own self, and the same as your not-self. And all the while one’s paying attention to all the things that, if one were sentimental, or worse, if one were spiritual like the poor old Rani, one would find so unromantic and gross and sordid even. But they aren’t sordid, because one’s also paying attention to the fact that, when one’s fully aware of them, those things are just as beautiful as all the rest, just as wonderful.”

“
Maithuna
is dhyana,” Ranga concluded. A new word, he evidently felt, would explain everything.

“But what is dhyana?” Will asked.

“Dhyana is contemplation.”

“Contemplation.”

Will thought of that strawberry-pink alcove above the Charing Cross Road. Contemplation was hardly the word he would have chosen. And yet even there, on second thoughts, even there he had found a kind of deliverance. Those alienations in the changing light of Porter’s Gin were alienations from his odious daytime self. They were also, unfortunately, alienations from all the rest of his being—alienations from love, from intelligence, from common decency, from all consciousness but that of an excruciating frenzy by corpse-light or in the rosy glow of the cheapest, vulgarest illusion. He looked again at Radha’s shining face. What happiness! What a manifest conviction, not of the sin that Mr. Bahu was so determined to make the world safe for, but of its serene and blissful opposite! It was profoundly touching. But he refused to be touched.
Noli me tangere
—it was a categorical imperative. Shifting the focus of his mind, he managed to see the whole thing as reassuringly ludicrous. What shall we do to be saved? The answer is in four letters.

Smiling at his own little joke, “Were you taught
maithuna
at school?” he asked ironically.

“At school,” Radha answered with a simple matter-of-factness that took all the Rabelaisian wind out of his sails.

“Everybody’s taught it,” Ranga added.

“And when does the teaching begin?”

“About the same time as trigonometry and advanced biology. That’s between fifteen and fifteen and a half.”

“And after they’ve learned
maithuna
, after they’ve gone out into the world and got married—that is, if you ever do get married?”

“Oh, we do, we do,” Radha assured him.

“Do they still practice it?”

“Not all of them, of course. But a good many do.”

“All the time?”

“Except when they want to have a baby.”

“And those who don’t want to have babies, but who might like to have a little change from
maithuna
—what do
they
do?”

“Contraceptives,” said Ranga laconically.

“And are the contraceptives available?”

“Available! They’re distributed by the government. Free, gratis, and for nothing—except of course that they have to be paid for out of taxes.”

“The postman,” Radha added, “delivers a thirty-night supply at the beginning of each month.”

“And the babies don’t arrive?”

“Only those we want. Nobody has more than three, and most people stop at two.”

“With the result,” said Ranga, reverting, with the statistics, to his pedantic manner, “that our population is increasing at less than a third of one percent per annum. Whereas Rendang’s increase is as big as Ceylon’s—almost three percent. And China’s is two percent, and India’s about one point seven.”

“I was in China only a month ago,” said Will. “Terrifying!
And last year I spent four weeks in India. And before India in Central America, which is outbreeding even Rendang and Ceylon. Has either of you been in Rendang-Lobo?”

Ranga nodded affirmatively.

“Three days in Rendang,” he explained. “If you get into the Upper Sixth, it’s part of the advanced sociology course. They let you see for yourself what the Outside is like.”

“And what did you think of the Outside?” Will enquired.

Ranga answered with another question. “When you were in Rendang-Lobo, did they show you the slums?”

“On the contrary, they did their best to prevent me from seeing the slums. But I gave them the slip.”

Gave them the slip, he was vividly remembering, on his way back to the hotel from that grisly cocktail party at the Rendang Foreign Office. Everybody who was anybody was there. All the local dignitaries and their wives—uniforms and medals, Dior and emeralds. All the important foreigners—diplomats galore, British and American oilmen, six members of the Japanese trade mission, a lady pharmacologist from Leningrad, two Polish engineers, a German tourist who just happened to be a cousin of Krupp von Bohlen, an enigmatic Armenian representing a very important financial consortium in Tangier, and, beaming with triumph, the fourteen Czech technicians who had come with last month’s shipment of tanks and cannon and machine guns from Skoda. “And these are the people,” he had said to himself as he walked down the marble steps of the Foreign Office into Liberty Square, “these are the people who rule the world. Twenty-nine hundred millions of us at the mercy of a few scores of politicians, a few thousands of tycoons and generals and moneylenders. Ye are the cyanide of the earth—and the cyanide will never, never lose its savor.”

After the glare of the cocktail party, after the laughter and the luscious smells of canapés and Chanel-sprayed women, those alleys behind the brand-new Palace of Justice had seemed doubly
dark and noisome. Those poor wretches camping out under the palm trees of Independence Avenue more totally abandoned by God and man than even the homeless, hopeless thousands he had seen sleeping like corpses in the streets of Calcutta. And now he thought of that little boy, that tiny potbellied skeleton, whom he had picked up, bruised and shaken by a fall from the back of the little girl, scarcely larger than himself, who was carrying him—had picked up and, led by the other child, had carried back, carried down, to the windowless cellar that, for nine of them (he had counted the dark ringwormy heads), was home.

“Keeping babies alive,” he said, “healing the sick, preventing the sewage from getting into the water supply—one starts with doing things that are obviously and intrinsically good. And how does one end? One ends by increasing the sum of human misery and jeopardizing civilization. It’s the kind of cosmic practical joke that God seems really to enjoy.”

He gave the young people one of his flayed, ferocious grins.

“God has nothing to do with it,” Ranga retorted, “and the joke isn’t cosmic, it’s strictly man-made. These things aren’t like gravity or the second law of thermodynámics; they don’t
have
to happen. They happen only if people are stupid enough to allow them to happen. Here in Pala we haven’t allowed them to happen, so the joke hasn’t been played on us. We’ve had good sanitation for the best part of a century—and still we’re not overcrowded, we’re not miserable, we’re not under a dictatorship. And the reason is very simple: we chose to behave in a sensible and realistic way.”

“How on earth were you able to choose?” Will asked.

“The right people were intelligent at the right moment,” said Ranga. “But it must be admitted—they were also very lucky. In fact Pala as a whole has been extraordinarily lucky. It’s had the luck, first of all, never to have been anyone’s colony. Rendang has a magnificent harbor. That brought them an Arab invasion in the Middle Ages. We have no harbor, so the Arabs left us alone
and we’re still Buddhists or Shivaites—that is, when we’re not Tantrik agnostics.”

“Is that what
you
are?” Will enquired. “A Tantrik agnostic?”

“With Mahayana trimmings,” Ranga qualified. “Well, to return to Rendang. After the Arabs it got the Portuguese. We didn’t. No harbor, no Portuguese. Therefore no Catholic minority, no blasphemous nonsense about its being God’s will that people should breed themselves into subhuman misery, no organized resistance to birth control. And that isn’t our only blessing: After a hundred and twenty years of the Portuguese, Ceylon and Rendang got the Dutch. And after the Dutch came the English. We escaped both those infestations. No Dutch, no English, and therefore no planters, no coolie labor, no cash crops for export, no systematic exhaustion of our soil. Also no whisky, no Calvinism, no syphilis, no foreign administrators. We were left to go our own way and take responsibility for our own affairs.”

“You certainly
were
lucky.”

“And on top of that amazing good luck,” Ranga went on, “there was the amazing good management of Murugan the Reformer and Andrew MacPhail. Has Dr. Robert talked to you about his great-grandfather?”

“Just a few words, that’s all.”

“Did he tell you about the founding of the Experimental Station?”

Will shook his head.

“The Experimental Station,” said Ranga, “had a lot to do with our population policy. It all began with a famine. Before he came to Pala, Dr. Andrew spent a few years in Madras. The second year he was there, the monsoon failed. The crops were burnt up, the tanks and even the wells went dry. Except for the English and the rich, there was no food. People died like flies. There’s a famous passage in Dr. Andrew’s memoirs about the famine. A description and then a comment. He’d had to listen to
a lot of sermons when he was a boy, and there was one he kept remembering now, as he worked among the starving Indians. ‘Man cannot live by bread alone’—that was the text, and the preacher had been so eloquent that several people were converted. ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’ But without bread, he now saw, there is no mind, no spirit, no inner light, no Father in Heaven. There is only hunger, there is only despair and then apathy and finally death.”