On the Edge A Novel (13 page)

A lecture on
darshan
manners, delivered on the edge of the dark and foggy car park by a skeletal and lamp-eyed man with a monkish haircut who looked as if he’d been interrupted illuminating a twelfth-century manuscript, advised Crystal not to look at the other devotees but to turn her attention inwards and meditate during the three hours she would sit in Mother Meera’s presence.

While she stood there waiting to leave, Crystal overheard a snatch of conversation between two American men.

‘What did you say this guy’s name was?’

‘Poonjaji. He can really shift your perspective,’ said a man in a blue bonnet.

Crystal felt a burst of affection for Poonjaji. She remembered her private interviews with him and the way he always went straight to the point.

‘Are you and I the same?’ he would ask in the warbling Indian accent she loved to imitate. ‘Is there any difference between you and my guru?’

Nothing about the content of these questions could in itself explain why she had felt all the walls come down at once, and the undulation of a universal rhythm flow through her unresisted, not with the loud bliss of psychedelics but with perfect naturalness. The trouble with Poonjaji’s teaching was that there was no supporting practice, and it only took a long plane flight, a bout of flu and an unreliable man to turn this openness into a sense of agoraphobic naivety, quickly followed by closure. Having thought she was beyond meditation, she resumed with grim discipline. She couldn’t fly to Lucknow every morning for half an hour but she could sit on a cushion.

What would be the Mother Meera effect? What would it show her, if anything?

When the group of newcomers finally set off, the man who had spoken about Poonjaji was at the front of the pack.

Someone came abreast of him. ‘First night, huh?’ he asked sarcastically.

‘Oh, yeah, well, like I figured I deserved a place in the big room,’ said the man in the blue bonnet.

He’s lying, thought Crystal. He’s on his way to see someone who he thinks is either God or a fully realized human being and he’s lying in order to get a better seat. What’s the deal here? Hasn’t it occurred to him he might be blowing it?

And here she was on her way to see the same person and getting annoyed by the behaviour of a stranger.

The group advanced swiftly and quietly through the streets, approaching a house with a large room on the ground floor and a dimly lit window upstairs. Ah, thought Crystal, uplifting her thoughts, that’s her home, that’s where we gather downstairs, and from her bedroom Mother Meera engages in her lonely work, sending the Paramatman light into the world.

It was not the house. They moved on to a stubbornly ordinary village house and stood in line, having their names checked by a man with a clipboard and a mustard-coloured tie.

Inside, Crystal sat down in a room crowded with rows of white plastic chairs; its wallpaper was silky and white, the floor tiles white marble, and against the wall stood a large armchair draped in pale floral silk. On the ceiling the light bulbs were contained by opaque glass lotuses, not with a thousand petals but with six, each petal patterned with sinuous tendrils of clear glass.

Crystal sat down and closed her eyes.

She was astonished by the speed and directness with which she was javelined into concentration. It was a ferocious state of mind, piercing her with a sense of urgency. Why was she holding back from the final generosity, the final embrace of life? How could she bear to run along the gleaming tracks of a determined and yet fugitive experience?

All the touching deathbed scenes she had ever imagined flashed over her at once. Smiling serenely at her inconsolable friends, she would be wise and kind, a reconciliation in one hand and a legacy in the other, courageous in the face of pain, witty at the end.

Why wait? Why wait until she had a hospice for an address? Why wait until she was twiddling the dial on a morphine drip?

Why not do it now? If not now, when?

She opened her eyes and looked around her, ostensibly to check whether she was participating in a mass psychosis, but also wanting to steady herself with the reassuring metallic flavour of irritation with which Germany and Boris had provided her so conscientiously over the last twenty-four hours. Who were these devotees she had fallen among? What context did they provide for her prickling sense of urgency?

Not surprisingly, visiting someone called ‘The Mother’, there were various connoisseurs of the maternal: earth mothers, lost boys with pursed lips, thin unsuckled daughters. She looked around, relieved by the triumphant return of her critical mind.

The honey-blond crew who discussed the enneagram over coffee in their lovely homes. Gold jewellery. Very long fingernails. They hold the saucer under their chins as they sip from the cup. They brush the crumbs from the corner of their mouths with pinched napkins. No minds to speak of, but a kind of gooey generalized lurv. Easter bunnies melting next to a fake log fire.

And the hippies who’d done India and done acid and done communal living. Hair still long, but grey now. Experts on altered states who thought that Mother Meera might give them a hit that would take them back beyond the detoxifying diets, beyond the ashrams, back to the
early
trips.

And old people who would hardly be able to get on their knees to rest their heads in Mother Meera’s consoling hands. They wanted to be less scared of death, of all the things they’d done and hadn’t done. Who could blame them? Who could blame any of them?

‘The Mother’ came into the room and they all rose, eagerly, coolly, arthritically. She’s a small Indian woman with a moustache and a fancy sari, thought Crystal, but she felt a visceral recognition during the avatar’s swishing passage through the room, and sensed a masterpiece of concentration housed in that fragile body.

Crystal closed her eyes again and shifted instantly into an intense reverie. She saw an image of pale-yellow roses beaded with rain, and felt that this vivid picture was somehow accompanied by an elaborate anecdotal atmosphere.

She was seeing these roses in the early morning, after talking all night in a curtained room with someone who was not yet her lover but would be soon. And then she’d gone outside. Wet grass, almost as laborious as sand to walk through, and the melancholy excitement of a new day without sleep, the smell of rained-on earth and, round the corner of the house, the roses, against a stone wall, their heads stooped with water, but also stooped from having to mean so much, like a newborn child who inherits a famous name, not just wet flowers but old roses.

Behind her closed eyes she closed her eyes again, and the smell hit her in the middle of the brow like a picture nail. The inner sensation of beauty disarmed her predatory mind which, a few moments earlier, had been watching for something to condemn, like a cat beside a mousehole. Now, she had merged with an imaginary rose and was nodding carelessly on the edge of a symbolic realm, pregnant with the atmosphere of amorous adventure.

Far out.

If only I could sustain this awareness for ever, thought Crystal, immediately losing it, recognizing the inevitability of the loss, and finding a new centre. The operation was over in a second. Some things were lost, some remained. The thing was to see what was there, instead of moping about what was lost and hoping it might return. The enigma of how things became available to consciousness was some consolation for their apparent loss, as well as a promise of further loss. She had spent so much of her life chasing after half-concealed thoughts, like a diver hurrying towards a glint in the seaweed, only to find when she got there at last the lid of a tin rocking limply in the current.

The roses were gone but she had cut through their loss with a bracing sense of present reality.

This Mother Meera was quite something; or the collective expectation that she was quite something was quite something. What did it matter? In her presence Crystal was able to hover on the thermals of impermanence without needing to beat a wing. And if those warm currents, caused by appreciating the insubstantiality of her own thoughts, were removed, and she hovered in pure emptiness, beyond even acknowledging the emptiness, would she have to flap a wing?

She experimented, relaxing completely into the knowledge of her own death, taking groundlessness as her ground, and free fall as her playing field. Instead of spiralling downwards, she found a still more essential poise. Her eyelids parted slowly, her lips parted slowly, and her slowly exhaling breath seemed to last from the beginning of time to the present moment, so solid was her sense of connection between those two non-events, passing like a rod through the centre of her body.

Quite something, the little Indian woman was quite something.

Curious to watch the process of
darshan
more closely, Crystal beamed in on the devotee who was kneeling in front of Mother Meera, his head in her hands. After a few moments he gazed up into Mother Meera’s eyes. Crystal was trying to discern the exact quality of the transmission when she was distracted by the sound of muffled crying.

Only a few seats away from the avatar’s armchair sat the source of the noise. Her face was crumpled, halfway between the tear pump of a devouring Picasso hysteric and the glycerine leakage of the sickliest devotional postcard. Tears streamed down her cheeks with such hydraulic prowess, it was hard to believe that she was not connected to the mains water supply. As one fluid ounce followed another into a chain of soggy handkerchiefs, Crystal started to imagine the slates of a mountain lodge glittering in the spring thaw; Venetian floods submerging the chequered piazzas, and eventually, in pure awe, Noah’s ark bobbing under a dehydrated sky.

The reason she couldn’t find her way to compassion was the repulsiveness of the display. It seemed to be divorced from direct suffering and to spring on the one hand from a simple rage that Mother Meera was getting so much attention, and on the other from a veil of piety suggesting that only she, Wasserworks, understood the exact nature of the sacrifice the Divine Mother had made by descending into the charnel house of human incarnation.

Crystal tried to persuade herself that this was the core of suffering, the suffering of self-centredness, and that it too required compassion, but she only grew more exasperated. Wasserworks’s strategy of draining attention towards herself was bad enough, but the dissonance of her calamitous expression as she looked at
darshan
was like going to a concert with someone who stoutly whistles another tune during the performance. Crystal tried all the usual self-accusations to discover why she was so annoyed by this woman, but finally had to give up and be annoyed by somebody else.

Immediately behind Wasserworks, and in comic contrast, was Mrs Ecstasy, who had her hands folded over her heart and her head cocked to one side and a grin from ear to ear. She looked like a clown on a circus poster.

Crystal tried to stop but she simply had to accept that she was doomed to shuttle between passages of exquisite insight and blasts of annoyance and disrespect.

Ah, there was the liar, without his blue bonnet, looking shifty as hell. The Macbeth of
darshan
, whose victorious proximity to Mother Meera was utterly compromised by his means of winning it, was sweating on his throne. Whatever self-righteous pleasure Crystal might have taken in his punishment collapsed at the thought that she must soon present herself to Mother Meera. Who was she to condemn Blue Bonnet, or anyone else? What was so pure, after all, about her own state of mind?

She realized she was asking these questions in order to be able to look without malice into the eyes of what might be God, whoever she was, or an agent of the Paramatman light, whatever that was. The calculated nature of this correction made her feel even more phoney. She realized that any pretence would give way like so much sodden paper, and that this too was an effect of the context she was in. She exhaled and let it happen, finally coming to rest in the knowledge that she had come to Thalheim, however misguidedly, because somehow she wanted to be a force for good in the world. That was true. She could rest there.

She started wishing that they had been given numbers so that the timing of her own
darshan
could have been taken out of her hands. Instead, she found herself waiting apprehensively, half relieved and half frustrated by the constantly renewed line of kneeling devotees waiting in the aisle. Eventually deciding to treat the queue as a reassuring interval in which she could reverse her decision, she knelt in the aisle herself.

What could she bring to Mother Meera? The outcry of a lost child? The humble devotion of a pilgrim? The highest notes of her own consciousness? What were those anyway? In a blur of panic and indecision she staggered up to the waiting chair and watched the last
darshan
before her own.

Kneeling in front of Mother Meera, almost fainting with nervousness, she bowed her head until it was parallel with the avatar’s knees. Mother Meera pressed her thumbs gently on either side of the central line of her skull and Crystal felt, or imagined she felt, two rods of light being slotted into her head. They would dissolve over time, she decided, keeping her bathed in a state of illumination.

These thoughts gave way to a sense of flotation in infinite space, without images, and without speculation about the state itself. Mother Meera removed her thumbs and Crystal looked up, no longer wondering which gaze to use. Her awareness had briefly flipped from a point in space to being space, the pure category without the limitation of a viewer. She offered this transformation, not without scholarly enthusiasm, to Mother Meera, who instantaneously met her at that level, but met her with eyes that hinted, without reproach, that she could take it further.

Crystal left
darshan
with an unprecedented sense of devotional simplicity. It did not last.

Boris had picked up a pink-cheeked Englishman whom he was also driving back to Dornburg.

‘God,’ said Robin, ‘did you see that man who went up twice? He snuck up at the end and had a second bite … Can you believe that?’