My Nine Lives (25 page)

9

Pilgrimage

A
FTER MY
mother died, C. sold whatever he could of her possessions, and with the proceeds he and I went to India. At that time one could still travel overland, partly by hitch-hiking, partly on a bus through Turkey and Iran, from Kabul over the Khyber Pass and into Punjab; so by the time we arrived in Delhi, we had already traversed great stretches of country different from anything we had known in England.

The hotel where C. took a room for us on arrival in Delhi was like other such places we had stayed in during our journey. It was in a narrow lane with old and crooked houses, open shops or stalls on the ground floor, stray dogs and cows snuffling among the rotting food stuffs discarded in the gutter, a broken sewer, sweet smoking sticks of incense: the usual bazaar scene except that this one also had a pig rooting up refuse. Neither of us was there for the atmosphere. I was there to be with him, and he had come to seek out a philosopher or guide he had heard about. This was at an early stage of C.'s career, before he had really worked out his own philosophy; and I might as well say at once that I wouldn't be able, even now, to explain what this was. All I know is that later many people believed in and followed him, as I did at that time.

He had of course charisma—if by that is meant a quality that would make others turn to him for whatever it was they were seeking. It may have helped that he was a very large man who towered over everyone in every room he entered.
He had huge shoulders, huge thighs, muscles like those of a construction worker. While in London, to keep himself in funds, he had taken advantage of his great strength to work as a casual laborer on building sites, or as an unlicensed porter. He had very blond hair which stood up in waves like a flame. He also had a fur of blond hair on his chest and along his arms and the back of his hands. Altogether there was something primitive, even barbaric about him: he was like a Goth, or a hunter for food in forests and mountains—not at all one's idea of a philosopher or spiritual guide.

But the philosopher whom C. had come to meet was just that: he seemed almost entirely spiritualized, non-physical. His name was Shivaji and he was already famous at that time. It was not easy for us, who knew nobody in India and were ourselves nobody, to gain access to him. He lived in a large house, in a tree-lined avenue mostly inhabited by ambassadors and cabinet ministers. The house had been taken for him by one of his followers, the wife of a rich Bombay industrialist. It was of course through this lady that C. had his first audience with Shivaji. I say “of course” because it was always through women that C. got what he needed—not that he particularly wooed them but they were always the first to respond to him. This is what happened in my case and how I came to follow him across deserts, mountains, and sacred rivers to end up with him in a small and cheap hotel room in the middle of a Delhi bazaar.

C. had been my mother Edith's lodger in the house she bought in a north-west London suburb. This was in the 1940s, during and just after the war. My mother hated being a landlady, but it was the only way she had of making a living for herself and me. We were refugees from Austria and she was lucky to have got enough money out, via Switzerland, to buy this house. She rented rooms to her fellow refugees—all like
herself from well-off, cultured families, all having to start out anew in England. C. was the only male lodger and he was a very potent presence among us. He could be heard whistling while he shaved in our only bathroom, and even if he kept us waiting to use it, we easily forgave him when he emerged, still whistling, with freshly shaved cheeks raw and rosy, braces dangling, and hair waving in a blond flame.

I spent many hours sitting on the stairs waiting for him to come home. When he had earned enough money at his various laboring jobs, he studied all day in the British Museum Reading Room, preparing himself for his future career. I didn't mind waiting for him—I had nothing else to do, I was seventeen and had just failed my school leaving exam—and it was always worth it for me because, when he passed, he ruffled my hair and said something kind. He had the top room—it was an attic really—and I didn't follow him there because I knew how busy he was reading and studying and covering pages of a school copy book with his writing.

He began to take me on outings with him. We neither of us had any money, so the only entertainment we could afford was to ride on the top of a double-decker bus to the end of the line and back again. We passed miles and miles of small houses and small shops and small businesses; often it rained and everything melted away and we might as well have been under water. We passed one place that was almost like country, with a field and several trees, and once he made us get off there and sit under a tree large enough to shelter us. Here he spread his leather jacket—it was bought secondhand in a street market and had some of its leather rubbed away. He invited me to lie on it; I did everything as best I could, which I know wasn't very good. He tried not to hurt me, and since I didn't cry out, he thought he had succeeded. There was quite a lot of bleeding, so I didn't put my panties back on;
instead he dug a hole to bury them, and we made a little ceremony of it. After that we often got out at the same place to lie under the same tree. It sheltered us against any light drizzle, but if it rained more heavily, we were drenched and had to sit on the bus all the way home in our wet clothes. We didn't mind, and neither of us ever caught cold.

But when we got home, my mother Edith would be waiting for us. Edith had kept the two downstairs rooms for herself, one of them was her bedroom and the other what she called her salon. This she had furnished with what she managed to retrieve from her past life—a low divan, a Matisse rug, an Art Deco lamp, and a little smoking table with an ashtray on it; the ashtray was always full because Edith and all the friends who visited her smoked incessantly. She also brewed Turkish coffee in a tiny brass pot, and the fumes of coffee and cigarettes created a haze in which she could have thoughts and feelings other than her usual worries about money and lost status.

These thoughts and feelings revolved, as mine did, around C. At first they were mixed up with her money concerns—he was always behind with the rent and she often had to ask him for it, which was something she hated doing. When she knew he was settled reading and writing in his attic, she made her way up there. “Oh yes, the rent,” he said, when she had managed to overcome her embarrassment at mentioning it.
He
wasn't embarrassed—the subject of money had no importance for him—and he would put his hand in his pocket: if he had managed to earn something that day and had not yet spent it, he handed it over. But she did not go away—she continued to stand looking at him, absorbed as he was in writing in his school book with a stub of pencil that he occasionally licked.

Later, when he and I had begun to go on our outings
together, she would be waiting for us in her salon. She sent me upstairs and invited him in for cigarettes and coffee and to talk to him about me: how young I was, how unformed, how incapable of dealing with my emotions. She talked about love in general, and about herself and her past and her affairs and her unhappy marriage to my father and her longings and so on. It was always very late when he came upstairs, and if I had fallen asleep, he woke me up. By this time I had got into the habit of spending most of the night in his attic room, and we could hear her roaming up and down the stairs outside.

Before this, Edith and I were used to being only with each other. She and my father had separated shortly after I was born, and he emigrated to Argentina about the same time that Edith managed to get a visa for herself and me to go to England. She was a cultured person and hoped I too would grow up to love literature and music. And though her hopes were mostly centered on me, she never showed disappointment when I didn't live up to her expectations. After I failed my exam, I heard her tell her friends that I was too imaginative to fit into the groove of education meant for ordinary girls.

But sometimes, when I came home from school, I would find her alone in her salon, her cheek propped on her hand. I put down my satchel—“What's happened, what's wrong?” She covered her face with her hands and said, “There's nothing left, only to die.” Each time I was terrified. I didn't know the cause of her despair; I think it was often financial, there were days when she didn't know how we were going to get through the next week. Or it was emotional, something to do with a love affair, for she had one or two in those years, mostly with fellow refugees as cultured and as newly poor as she. These never worked out well, maybe because she was no longer
young and also so full of anxieties; and she may have been too frantically eager—which could be seen in the way she smoked, deeply inhaling and smearing the cigarette with lipstick almost half its length as if she had been trying to swallow it. When she talked about killing herself, I became so desperate, I clung to her and made her promise, promise never to leave me. And she did and seemed comforted and lit another cigarette. Then later, when I started being with C, she several times said that there was nothing left for her, that she would kill herself. But by that time I had heard it so often, I no longer paid much attention and anyway I was too immersed in my own emotions to have room for hers; also I was no longer so terrified of being alone if she left me.

Edith loved to speak of the grand life-style—probably exaggerated in her mind—that had been hers in her family's house in Vienna. Of course it had all gone long ago and was familiar to me only from her nostalgic descriptions and her own small attempts at recreating it in her salon. But then, after long dusty traveling in buses and trucks, I found it all again in India: the carpets, the crystal, the silver Edith had described. It was the ambience created for Shivaji by his patroness Renuka, the industrialist's wife. She herself was born to such things and took it for granted that she had to provide them for him. He was the center of the house Renuka had taken for him: literally its center, for one had to pass through various ante-rooms before a final silk curtain was parted and there he was, crosslegged in the lotus pose on a Persian rug on a marble floor. The room was tall and had only ventilators set high up into the walls, so it was always dark: and on first entering, one's eyes were drawn at once to Shivaji in his starched white muslin, gleaming like a lamp perpetually lit
to illumine the room, the house. I have never seen anyone embody holiness the way Shivaji did. He was a high-class brahmin with a light skin that was paper-thin; very graceful, delicate. His lips were narrow, his nostrils somewhat pinched, giving him the serious expression to be expected from one with such a serious message to deliver. But when he laughed—and he laughed often—this was entirely dispelled.

Renuka had a daughter called Priya, who hated her mother's guru. She said he was everything that was demeaning to women like her mother; that he took advantage of their higher striving and the unhappiness of their marriages (Renuka and Priya's father had been separated for years, with him making money in Bombay and she spending it on Shivaji). In her view, his message was a fraud and designed only for his personal gain. Priya had strong ideas—she was a strong person; I had never met anyone like her, though I had gone to school with clever girls who went on to college and became professional women. Priya too had gone to college, in America; she had recently graduated from Bryn Mawr, majoring in (I think) psychology. Now she had come home to India to see what she could do for her own country. She was the first modern Indian girl I had met. I was astounded by her brains and her beauty, but she took them as much for granted as the money that was always at her disposal. The one thing she and her mother had in common—about everything else they fought continuously—was their taste for fine saris and jewelry. Every day shopkeepers came to spread their wares in one of the verandahs that encircled the house, and mother and daughter sat side by side, each buying lavishly. There was another taste they shared, and this was one for great men. But the particular great man that each chose was as different as their preference in saris and jewels.

Nothing could be more distinct from Shivaji's delicacy than
C.'s rough-hewn personality. My mother used to sneer and call him the village blacksmith. But I know that was only to turn me against him and that secretly, deep inside herself, she too was attracted by this particular quality in him. And so was Priya, for all her refinement: “He's so real,” she would say. Certainly, compared with Shivaji who seemed almost to float above the earth, C., with his big feet in big sandals, was firmly planted on it. In the beginning, Priya would ask me to tell her about C.—she had absolutely no conception of the background of a person like him.

Since the time he moved into our house as a lodger, I used to hear Edith and her friends speculate about him. They discovered that he had given several different versions of himself. Sometimes he said that he had run away from a Hungarian orphanage; then that he had been found in a forest in the Bukovina being suckled by wolves; another time these wolves were humans who hunted him down, so that in the process he himself turned into a wild beast hiding in caves. Yet everyone agreed that, far from being hunted, it was he himself who looked like the hunter. Here, over their cigarettes and Turkish coffee, they really let themselves go: they imagined him tearing meat from the sides of animals he had killed and eating it either raw or roasted over a fire he had lit by rubbing stones together. But at this point they burst out laughing and said that it was all a lot of rubbish. Most likely he came from some very modest home—his father a shoemaker, his mother cooking vast pots of kasha—in some country with fluctuating borders and several languages. I've heard him speak German, Hungarian, and Rumanian, all of them I've been told without an accent: unlike his English, which always remained heavily Teutonic.