Island (17 page)

“Rehearsal of what?”

“Of the surgery. They ran through the procedure half a dozen times. The last rehearsal was on the morning of the operation. At six, Dr. Andrew came to the Raja’s room and, after a little cheerful talk, began to make the passes. In a few minutes the patient was in deep trance. Stage by stage, Dr. Andrew described what he was going to do. Touching the cheekbone near the Raja’s right eye, he said, ‘I begin by stretching the skin. And now with this scalpel’ (and he drew the tip of a pencil across the cheek) ‘I make an incision. You feel no pain, of course—not even the slightest discomfort. And now the underlying tissues are being cut and you still feel nothing at all. You just lie there, comfortably asleep, while I dissect the cheek back to the nose. Every now and then I stop to tie a blood vessel; then I go on again. And when that part of the work is done, I’m ready to start on the tumor. It has its roots there in the antrum and it has grown upwards, under the cheekbone, into the eye socket, and downwards into the gullet. And as I cut it loose, you lie there as before, feeling nothing, perfectly comfortable, completely relaxed. And now I lift your head.’ Suiting his action to the words, he lifted the Raja’s head and bent it forward on the limp neck. ‘I lift it and bend it so that you can get rid of the blood that’s run down into your mouth and throat. Some of the blood has got into your windpipe, and you cough a little to get rid of it; but it doesn’t wake you.’ The Raja coughed once or twice, then, when Dr. Andrew released his hold, dropped back onto the pillows, still fast asleep. ‘And you don’t choke even when I work on the lower end of the tumor in your gullet.’ Dr. Andrew opened the Raja’s mouth and thrust two fingers down his throat. ‘It’s
just a question of pulling it loose, that’s all. Nothing in that to make you choke. And if you have to cough up the blood, you can do it in your sleep. Yes, in your sleep, in this deep, deep sleep.’

“That was the end of the rehearsal. Ten minutes later, after making some more passes and telling his patient to sleep still more deeply, Dr. Andrew began the operation. He stretched the skin, he made the incision, he dissected the cheek, he cut the tumor away from its roots in the antrum. The Raja lay there perfectly relaxed, his pulse firm and steady at seventy-five, feeling no more pain than he had felt during the make-believe of the rehearsal. Dr. Andrew worked on the throat; there was no choking. The blood flowed into the windpipe; the Raja coughed but did not awake. Four hours after the operation was over, he was still sleeping; then, punctual to the minute, he opened his eyes, smiled at Dr. Andrew between his bandages and asked, in his singsong Cockney, when the operation was to start. After a feeding and a sponging, he was given some more passes and told to sleep for four more hours and to get well quickly. Dr. Andrew kept it up for a full week. Sixteen hours of trance each day, eight of waking. The Raja suffered almost no pain and, in spite of the thoroughly septic conditions under which the operation had been performed and the dressings renewed, the wounds healed without suppuration. Remembering the horrors he had witnessed in the Edinburgh infirmary, the yet more frightful horrors of the surgical wards at Madras, Dr. Andrew could hardly believe his eyes. And now he was given another opportunity to prove to himself what animal magnetism could do. The Raja’s eldest daughter was in the ninth month of her first pregnancy. Impressed by what he had done for her husband, the Rani sent for Dr. Andrew. He found her sitting with a frail frightened girl of sixteen, who knew just enough broken Cockney to be able to tell him she was going to die—she and her baby too. Three black birds had confirmed it by flying on three successive days across
her path. Dr. Andrew did not try to argue with her. Instead, he asked her to lie down, then started to make the passes. Twenty minutes later the girl was in a deep trance. In
his
country, Dr. Andrew now assured her, black birds were lucky—a presage of birth and joy. She would bear her child easily and without pain. Yes, with no more pain than her father had felt during his operation. No pain at all, he promised, no pain whatsoever.

“Three days later, and after three or four more hours of intensive suggestion, it all came true. When the Raja woke up for his evening meal, he found his wife sitting by his bed. ‘We have a grandson,’ she said, ‘and our daughter is well. Dr. Andrew has said that tomorrow you may be carried to her room, to give them both your blessing.’ At the end of a month the Raja dissolved the Council of Regency and resumed his royal powers. Resumed them, in gratitude to the man who had saved his life and (the Rani was convinced of it) his daughter’s life as well, with Dr. Andrew as his chief adviser.”

“So he didn’t go back to Madras?”

“Not to Madras. Not even to London. He stayed here in Pala.”

“Trying to change the Raja’s accent?”

“And trying, rather more successfully, to change the Raja’s kingdom.”

“Into what?”

“That was a question he couldn’t have answered. In those early days he had no plan—only a set of likes and dislikes. There were things about Pala that he liked, and plenty of others that he didn’t like at all. Things about Europe that he detested, and things he passionately approved of. Things he had seen on his travels that seemed to make good sense, and things that filled him with disgust. People, he was beginning to understand, are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture. It brings them to flower; but it also nips them in the bud or plants a
canker at the heart of the blossom. Might it not be possible, on this forbidden island, to avoid the cankers, minimize the nippings, and make the individual blooms more beautiful? That was the question to which, implicitly at first, then with a growing awareness of what they were really up to, Dr. Andrew and the Raja were trying to find an answer.”

“And
did
they find an answer?”

“Looking back,” said Dr. MacPhail, “one’s amazed by what those two men accomplished. The Scottish doctor and the Palanese king, the Calvinist-turned-atheist and the pious Mahayana Buddhist—what a strangely assorted pair! But a pair, very soon, of firm friends; a pair, moreover, of complementary temperaments and talents, with complementary philosophies and complementary stocks of knowledge, each man supplying the other’s deficiencies, each stimulating and fortifying the other’s native capacities. The Raja’s was an acute and subtle mind; but he knew nothing of the world beyond the confines of his island, nothing of physical science, nothing of European technology, European art, European ways of thinking. No less intelligent, Dr. Andrew knew nothing, of course, about Indian painting and poetry and philosophy. He also knew nothing, as he gradually discovered, about the science of the human mind and the art of living. In the months that followed the operation each became the other’s pupil and the other’s teacher. And of course that was only a beginning. They were not merely private citizens concerned with their private improvement. The Raja had a million subjects and Dr. Andrew was virtually his prime minister. Private improvement was to be the preliminary to public improvement. If the king and the doctor were now teaching one another to make the best of both worlds—the Oriental and the European, the ancient and the modern—it was in order to help the whole nation to do the same. To make the best of both worlds—what am I saying? To make the best of
all
the worlds—
the worlds already realized within the various cultures and, beyond them, the worlds of still unrealized potentialities. It was an enormous ambition, an ambition totally impossible of fulfillment; but at least it had the merit of spurring them on, of making them rush in where angels feared to tread—with results that sometimes proved, to everybody’s astonishment, that they had not been quite such fools as they looked. They never succeeded, of course, in making the best of all the worlds; but by dint of boldly trying they made the best of many more worlds than any merely prudent or sensible person would have dreamed of being able to reconcile and combine.”

“‘If the fool would persist in his folly,’” Will quoted from
The Proverbs of Hell
, “‘he would become wise.’”

“Precisely,” Dr. Robert agreed. “And the most extravagant folly of all is the folly described by Blake, the folly that the Raja and Dr. Andrew were now contemplating—the enormous folly of trying to make a marriage between hell and heaven. But if you persist in that enormous folly, what an enormous reward! Provided, of course, that you persist intelligently. Stupid fools get nowhere; it’s only the knowledgeable and clever ones whose folly can make them wise or produce good results. Fortunately these two fools
were
clever. Clever enough, for example, to embark on their folly in a modest and appealing way. They began with pain relievers. The Palanese were Buddhists. They knew how misery is related to mind. You cling, you crave, you assert yourself—and you live in a homemade hell. You become detached—and you live in peace. ‘I show you sorrow,’ the Buddha had said, ‘and I show you the ending of sorrow.’ Well, here was Dr. Andrew with a special kind of mental detachment which would put an end at least to one kind of sorrow, namely, physical pain. With the Raja himself or, for the women, the Rani and her daughter acting as interpreters, Dr. Andrew gave lessons in his new-found art to groups of midwives and physicians, of teachers, mothers, invalids.
Painless childbirth—and forthwith all the women of Pala were enthusiastically on the side of the innovators. Painless operations for stone and cataract and hemorrhoids—and they had won the approval of all the old and the ailing. At one stroke more than half the adult population became their allies, prejudiced in their favor, friendly in advance, or at least open-minded, toward the next reform.”

“Where did they go from pain?” Will asked.

“To agriculture and language. To bread and communication. They got a man out from England to establish Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics, and they set to work to give the Palanese a second language. Pala was to remain a forbidden island; for Dr. Andrew wholeheartedly agreed with the Raja that missionaries, planters and traders were far too dangerous to be tolerated. But, while the foreign subversives must not be allowed to come in, the natives must somehow be helped to get out—if not physically, at least with their minds. But their language and their archaic version of the Brahmi alphabet were a prison without windows. There could be no escape for them, no glimpse of the outside world until they had learned English and could read the Latin script. Among the courtiers, the Raja’s linguistic accomplishments had already set a fashion. Ladies and gentlemen larded their conversation with scraps of Cockney, and some of them had even sent to Ceylon for English-speaking tutors. What had been a mode was now transformed into a policy. English schools were set up and a staff of Bengali printers, with their presses and their fonts of Caslon and Bodoni, were imported from Calcutta. The first English book to be published at Shivapuram was a selection from
The Arabian Nights
, the second, a translation of
The Diamond Sutra
, hitherto available only in Sanskrit and in manuscript. For those who wished to read about Sindbad and Marouf, and for those who were interested in the Wisdom of the Other Shore, there were now two cogent reasons for learning English.
That was the beginning of the long educational process that turned us at last into a bilingual people. We speak Palanese when we’re cooking, when we’re telling funny stories, when we’re talking about love or making it. (Incidentally, we have the richest erotic and sentimental vocabulary in Southeast Asia.) But when it comes to business, or science, or speculative philosophy, we generally speak English. And most of us prefer to write in English. Every writer needs a literature as his frame of reference; a set of models to conform to or depart from. Pala had good painting and sculpture, splendid architecture, wonderful dancing, subtle and expressive music—but no real literature, no national poets or dramatists or storytellers. Just bards reciting Buddhist and Hindu myths; just a lot of monks preaching sermons and splitting metaphysical hairs. Adopting English as our stepmother tongue, we gave ourselves a literature with one of the longest pasts and certainly the widest of presents. We gave ourselves a background, a spiritual yardstick, a repertory of styles and techniques, an inexhaustible source of inspiration. In a word, we gave ourselves the possibility of being creative in a field where we had never been creative before. Thanks to the Raja and my great-grandfather, there’s an Anglo-Palanese literature—of which, I may add, Susila here is a contemporary light.”

“On the dim side,” she protested.

Dr. MacPhail shut his eyes, and, smiling to himself, began to recite:

He opened his eyes again. “And not only this poetry of silence,” he said. “This science, this philosophy, this theology of silence. And now it’s high time you went to sleep.” He rose and moved towards the door. “I’ll go and get you a glass of fruit juice.”

“‘P
ATRIOTISM IS NOT ENOUGH
.’ B
UT NEITHER IS ANYTHING ELSE
. Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.”

“Attention!” shouted a faraway bird.

Will looked at his watch. Five to twelve. He closed his
Notes on What’s What
and picking up the bamboo alpenstock which had once belonged to Dugald MacPhail, he set out to keep his appointment with Vijaya and Dr. Robert. By the short cut the main building of the Experimental Station was less than a quarter of a mile from Dr. Robert’s bungalow. But the day was oppressively hot, and there were two flights of steps to be negotiated. For a convalescent with his right leg in a splint, it was a considerable journey.

Slowly, painfully, Will made his way along the winding path and up the steps. At the top of the second flight he halted to take breath and mop his forehead; then keeping close to the wall, where there was still a narrow strip of shade, he moved on towards a signboard marked
LABORATORY
.

The door beneath the board was ajar; he pushed it open and found himself on the threshold of a long, high-ceilinged room. There were the usual sinks and worktables, the usual glass-fronted cabinets full of bottles and equipment, the usual smells of chemicals and caged mice. For the first moment Will was under the impression that the room was untenanted, but no—almost hidden from view by a bookcase that projected at right angles from the wall, young Murugan was seated at a table, intently reading. As quietly as he could—for it was always amusing to take people by surprise—Will advanced into the room. The whirring of an electric fan covered the sound of his approach, and it was not until he was within a few feet of the bookcase that Murugan became aware of his presence. The boy started guiltily, shoved his book with panic haste into a leather briefcase and, reaching for another, smaller volume that lay open on the table beside the briefcase, drew it within reading range. Only then did he turn to face the intruder.

Will gave him a reassuring smile. “It’s only me.”

The look of angry defiance gave place, on the boy’s face, to one of relief.

“I thought it was…” He broke off, leaving the sentence unfinished.

“You thought it was someone who would bawl you out for not doing what you’re supposed to do—is that it?”

Murugan grinned and nodded his curly head.

“Where’s everyone else?” Will asked.

“They’re out in the fields—pruning or pollinating or something.” His tone was contemptuous.

“And so, the cats being away, the mouse duly played. What were you studying so passionately?”

With innocent disingenuousness, Murugan held up the book he was now pretending to read. “It’s called
Elementary Ecology
,” he said.

“So I see,” said Will. “But what I asked you was what
were
you reading?”

“Oh, that,” Murugan shrugged his shoulders. “You wouldn’t be interested.”

“I’m interested in everything that anyone tries to hide,” Will assured him. “Was it pornography?”

Murugan dropped his playacting and looked genuinely offended. “Who do you take me for?”

Will was on the point of saying that he took him for an average boy, but checked himself. To Colonel Dipa’s pretty young friend, “average boy” might sound like an insult or an innuendo. Instead he bowed with mock politeness. “I beg Your Majesty’s pardon,” he said. “But I’m still curious,” he added in another tone. “May I?” He laid a hand on the bulging briefcase.

Murugan hesitated for a moment, then forced a laugh. “Go ahead.”

“What a tome!” Will pulled the ponderous volume out of the bag and laid it on the table. “Sears, Roebuck and Co.,” he read aloud, “Spring and Summer Catalog.”

“It’s last year’s,” said Murugan apologetically. “But I don’t suppose there’s been much change since then.”

“There,” Will assured him, “you’re mistaken. If the styles weren’t completely changed every year, there’d be no reason for buying new things before the old ones are worn out. You don’t understand the first principles of modern consumerism.” He opened at random. “‘Soft Platform Wedgies in Wide Widths.’” Opened at another place and found the description and image of a Whisper-Pink Bra in Dacron and Pima cotton. Turned the page and here,
memento mori
, was what the bra-buyer would be wearing twenty years later—A Strap-Controlled Front, Cupped to Support Pendulous Abdomen.

“It doesn’t get really interesting,” said Murugan, “until near the end of the book. It has thirteen hundred and fifty-eight
pages,” he added parenthetically. “Imagine! Thirteen hundred and fifty-eight!”

Will skipped the next seven hundred and fifty pages.

“Ah, this is more like it,” he said. “‘Our Famous .22 Revolvers and Automatics.’” And here, a little further on, were the Fibre Glass Boats, here were the High Thrust Inboard Engines, here was a 12-hp Outboard for only $234.95—and the Fuel Tank was included. “That’s extraordinarily generous!”

But Murugan, it was evident, was no sailor. Taking the book, he leafed impatiently through a score of additional pages.

“Look at this Italian Style Motor Scooter!” And while Will looked, Murugan read aloud. “‘This sleek Speedster gives up to 110 Miles per Gallon of Fuel.’ Just imagine!” His normally sulky face was glowing with enthusiasm. “And you can get up to sixty miles per gallon even on this 14.5-hp Motorcycle. And it’s guaranteed to do seventy-five miles an hour—
guaranteed!
”

“Remarkable!” said Will. Then, curiously, “Did somebody in America send you this glorious book?” he asked.

Murugan shook his head. “Colonel Dipa gave it to me.”

“Colonel Dipa?” What an odd kind of present from Hadrian to Antinoüs! He looked again at the picture of the motorbike, then back at Murugan’s glowing face. Light dawned; the Colonel’s purpose revealed itself.
The serpent tempted me, and I did eat
. The tree in the midst of the garden was called the Tree of Consumer Goods, and to the inhabitants of every underdeveloped Eden the tiniest taste of its fruit, and even the sight of its thirteen hundred and fifty-eight leaves, had power to bring the shameful knowledge that, industrially speaking, they were stark-naked. The future Raja of Pala was being made to realize that he was no more than the untrousered ruler of a tribe of savages.

“You ought,” Will said aloud, “to import a million of these catalogues and distribute them—gratis, of course, like contraceptives—to all your subjects.”

“What for?”

“To whet their appetite for possessions. Then they’ll start clamoring for Progress—oil wells, armaments, Joe Aldehyde, Soviet technicians.”

Murugan frowned and shook his head. “It wouldn’t work.”

“You mean, they wouldn’t be tempted? Not even by Sleek Speedsters and Whisper-Pink Bras? But that’s incredible!”

“It may be incredible,” said Murugan bitterly, “but it’s a fact. They’re just not interested.”

“Not even the young ones?”

“I’d say especially the young ones.”

Will Farnaby pricked up his ears. This lack of interest was profoundly interesting. “Can you guess why?” he asked.

“I don’t guess,” the boy answered. “I know.” And as though he had suddenly decided to stage a parody of his mother, he began to speak in a tone of righteous indignation that was absurdly out of keeping with his age and appearance. “To begin with, they’re much too busy with…” He hesitated, then the abhorred word was hissed out with a disgustful emphasis. “With
sex
.”

“But everybody’s busy with sex. Which doesn’t keep them from whoring after sleek speedsters.”

“Sex is different here,” Murugan insisted.

“Because of the yoga of love?” Will asked, remembering the little nurse’s rapturous face.

The boy nodded. “They’ve got something that makes them think they’re perfectly happy, and they don’t want anything else.”

“What a blessed state!”

“There’s nothing blessed about it,” Murugan snapped. “It’s just stupid and disgusting. No progress, only sex, sex, sex. And of course that beastly dope they’re all given.”

“Dope?” Will repeated in some astonishment. Dope in a
place where Susila had said there were no addicts? “What kind of dope?”

“It’s made out of toadstools.
Toadstools!
” He spoke in a comical caricature of the Rani’s vibrant tone of outraged spirituality.

“Those lovely red toadstools that gnomes used to sit on?”

“No, these are yellow. People used to go out and collect them in the mountains. Nowadays the things are grown in special fungus beds at the High Altitude Experimental Station. Scientifically cultivated dope. Pretty, isn’t it?”

A door slammed and there was a sound of voices, of footsteps approaching along a corridor. Abruptly, the indignant spirit of the Rani took flight, and Murugan was once again the conscience-stricken schoolboy furtively trying to cover up his delinquencies. In a trice
Elementary Ecology
had taken the place of Sears, Roebuck, and the suspiciously bulging briefcase was under the table. A moment later, stripped to the waist and shining like oiled bronze with the sweat of labor in the noonday sun, Vijaya came striding into the room. Behind him came Dr. Robert. With the air of a model student, interrupted in the midst of his reading by trespassers from the frivolous outside world, Murugan looked up from his book. Amused, Will threw himself at once wholeheartedly into the part that had been assigned to him.

“It was I who got here too early,” he said in response to Vijaya’s apologies for their being so late. “With the result that our young friend here hasn’t been able to get on with his lessons. We’ve been talking our heads off.”

“What about?” Dr. Robert asked.

“Everything. Cabbages, kings, motor scooters, pendulous abdomens. And when you came in, we’d just embarked on toadstools. Murugan was telling me about the fungi that are used here as a source of dope.”

“What’s in a name?” said Dr. Robert, with a laugh. “Answer,
practically everything. Having had the misfortune to be brought up in Europe, Murugan calls it dope and feels about it all the disapproval that, by conditioned reflex, the dirty word evokes. We, on the contrary, give the stuff good names—the
moksha
-medicine, the reality revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved. Whereas our young friend here has no firsthand knowledge of the stuff and can’t be persuaded even to give it a try. For him, it’s dope and dope is something that, by definition, no decent person ever indulges in.”

“What does His Highness say to that?” Will asked.

Murugan shook his head. “All it gives you is a lot of illusions,” he muttered. “Why should I go out of my way to be made a fool of?”

“Why indeed?” said Vijaya with good-humored irony. “Seeing that, in your normal condition, you alone of the human race are never made a fool of and never have illusions about anything!”

“I never said that,” Murugan protested. “All I mean is that I don’t want any of your false
samadhi
.”

“How do you know it’s false?” Dr. Robert enquired.

“Because the real thing only comes to people after years and years of meditation and
tapas
and…well, you know—not going with women.”

“Murugan,” Vijaya explained to Will, “is one of the Puritans. He’s outraged by the fact that, with four hundred milligrams of
moksha
-medicine in their bloodstreams, even beginners—yes, and even boys and girls who make love together—can catch a glimpse of the world as it looks to someone who has been liberated from his bondage to the ego.”

“But it isn’t real,” Murugan insisted.

“Not real!” Dr. Robert repeated. “You might as well say that the experience of feeling well isn’t real.”

“You’re begging the question,” Will objected. “An experi
ence can be real in relation to something going on inside your skull but completely irrelevant to anything outside.”

“Of course,” Dr. Robert agreed.

“
Do
you know what goes on inside your skull, when you’ve taken a dose of the mushroom?”

“We know a little.”

“And we’re trying all the time to find out more,” Vijaya added.

“For example,” said Dr. Robert, “we’ve found that the people whose EEG doesn’t show any alpha-wave activity when they’re relaxed aren’t likely to respond significantly to the
moksha
-medicine. That means that, for about fifteen percent of the population, we have to find other approaches to liberation.”

“Another thing we’re just beginning to understand,” said Vijaya, “is the neurological correlate of these experiences. What’s happening in the brain when you’re having a vision? And what’s happening when you pass from a premystical to a genuinely mystical state of mind?”

“Do you know?” Will asked.

“‘Know’ is a big word. Let’s say we’re in a position to make some plausible guesses. Angels and New Jerusalems and Madonnas and Future Buddhas—they’re all related to some kind of unusual stimulation of the brain areas of primary projection—the visual cortex, for example. Just how the
moksha
-medicine produces those unusual stimuli we haven’t yet found out. The important fact is that, somehow or other, it does produce them. And somehow or other, it also does something unusual to the silent areas of the brain, the areas not specifically concerned with perceiving, or moving, or feeling.”

“And how do the silent areas respond?” Will enquired.

“Let’s start with what they
don’t
respond with. They don’t respond with visions or auditions, they don’t respond with telepathy or clairvoyance or any other kind of parapsychological
performance. None of that amusing premystical stuff. Their response is the full-blown mystical experience. You know—One in all and All in one. The basic experience with its corollaries—boundless compassion, fathomless mystery and meaning.”

“Not to mention joy,” said Dr. Robert, “inexpressible joy.”