Three Continents (27 page)

Crishi on the other hand was always ready to explain at great length, to talk as long as I wanted him to, but unlike Michael he wasn't ready to tell me whatever I asked. But when he saw that I had found out something for myself—as with the military exercises—he pretended he thought I had known all along. He did it this time too: “I thought you knew, Harriet,” he said—the same words as Michael's but in his case untrue. He went on to reproach me for my ignorance; he said it was dumb of me not to know everyone had to learn self-defense.

“But what about me? Why can't I learn?”

“You!” He was first amused, then shocked—both reactions so exaggerated that he didn't even pretend they were real. He started in on one of his stories about how I would be sent
to a safe place in any situation of danger—“What danger?” I asked, unheard, anyway unanswered. “Not like in the bad old days,” he went on, making one of his favorite poker faces. “What they did was light a big fire and threw all their wives in so they wouldn't be raped by the enemy. Aren't you glad we're a modern movement? Or would you rather be raped? You'd enjoy it, bet you anything. I can prove it to you,” he said, ending the conversation in the usual way between us.

Anna's article had opened so many questions for me—had revealed so much new or contradictory information—that I felt I had to follow it up. I wrote her a note at the magazine, but instead of getting an answer from her, I was told by Crishi, “Anna says you want to see her.” He seemed to think this was perfectly natural and wrote down her address for me with instructions how to get there; in return he expected me to accept it as perfectly natural that he and she were seeing each other. She had given him a time when it was convenient for her to receive me. She lived in an unexpected place—in a salubrious suburb and in a large comfortable family house with several children of school age. Some of these were at home, entertaining their friends, and one was practicing the flute. Anna made it clear that she resented being there: It was a friend's house, and she had had no alternative but to move in, her own place having been snatched from her by a rapacious landlord whom she was taking to court. She went on and on about this—she was the sort of person for whom her own concerns loomed so large that they swallowed up everything else. At one point a woman opened the door without knocking and glared at both of us before banging it shut again, giving me the impression that Anna was not only an unhappy guest in the house but an unwelcome one.

“They're such philistines, you have no idea,” said Anna in real despair. “They have no respect for my work at all—for any kind of creative work. All they know is stockbroking and housecleaning. And whenever any of my friends, Crishi or anyone, comes to see me, they carry on as if I'm running some sort of massage parlor in here. That's why she came in, to check up you weren't him. Well of course he comes to see me,” she answered in wide-eyed surprise to a question I
hadn't asked. “He knows I can be useful to him, with publicity and so on—though unfortunately not with money. He's very keen on money,” she said, giving me a keen look. I didn't react, and there was a pause before she went on, “When will you be twenty-one?”

“Next June.”

“Oh well, that's not so long to wait. . . . I hate living in this house, I hate living in this suburb, and that's the way he hated where he grew up too.”

“You wrote he grew up in London.”

“Isn't that what he told you? He does have several versions; I wonder which is the one he gave you. But I know mine is correct because I checked up on it, as he knew I would. I called his mother—in Hong Kong, that's where she is now, conveniently far away. What did he tell you she was—an English model or a Burmese princess? He tried both versions out on me before giving me the correct one: She's partly Assamese, partly English—grew up in Calcutta and still has such a sweet Calcutta accent. There's no love lost between those two, I can tell you. All she did was warn me about him.”

“About her own son?”

“She said he was a hopeless case; a criminal; a disgrace to her whole family, who had always been very respectable, working on the railways. I asked her about his father's family, but it's rather a dark area. He himself has several fathers to offer—one's an Indonesian jeweler, another an Italian naval officer—which one did he give you? The fact is, I think she's not sure who the father was. There must have been a lot of men. My guess is, she was very attractive—I mean, look at him. . . . She's living with someone now, a younger man, a Chinese wrestler. Well I don't know why you've come to me for information: After all, they're your family, not mine.” She gave me a strange look, and then said, seriously puzzled, “Why? That's what I don't understand: why you and that brother of yours had to get mixed up in it. What is it that you want that you haven't already got? It's different for the rest of us—look at me,” she said, with a pained expression at the domestic noises surging up to her door. “Not even a decent place of my own but having to put up with people who have absolutely no conception of the peace and privacy I need for my work.”

She didn't put up with them much longer, for a few days afterward she moved in with us. Crishi came up one morning to Michael and my flat with a follower whom he instructed to get the third bedroom ready. “For Anna,” he said to me; and to the follower: “Get some flowers in. . . . Poor thing,” he told me, “we have to be very nice to her to make up for those boring people she's had to stay with.” He wasn't in when Anna's luggage began to arrive—all those pieces I had seen at Propinquity, and Anna fussing at the followers who were carrying them. She looked around the flat—well, apparently it would do, if not ideal. She asked me to take away the flowers, since that particular kind gave her an allergy. As soon as she was settled and resting on her bed with pads on her eyes—“You won't make a noise, will you, Harriet? No TV or anything?”—I went in to Michael to see how he felt about our new roomate. As I might have known, he didn't feel anything; he was not disturbed by her. Michael might be alone on a mountain top, or crammed into a temple hostel with hundreds of noisy, reeking, snoring strangers; he was perfectly private everywhere. Anna couldn't impinge on him in the least. I tried to emulate him, but it was not so easy for me.

Anna took over the flat with all her habits and hang-ups, familiar from Propinquity. That didn't bother me too much—but what did was the way she sat at night waiting for Crishi. She even made out that he was coming to see her and not me; as soon as he entered, she called to him from the living room, where she was doing her nails, with a drink and watching television, and asked him where had he been, why was he late. When he left her and came with me, she called after us how selfish we were—we knew perfectly well she suffered from insomnia and how did we think she was going to amuse herself all night? It was true about the insomnia—whenever we woke up we could hear her fiddling with her TV or radio to get different stations or banging around getting more ice or soda for her drink. I would whisper to Crishi, “Why does she have to be here?” and he would say “Oh poor Anna, where else would she go—everyone else threw her out ages ago.” There was plenty I could have said in reply but I hardly wanted to waste these hours when he was with me arguing over Anna.

Renée quarreled with Crishi about her—it was the first fight between them I had so far witnessed, and it showed Renée in a different light. It wasn't really a fight, because that takes two, and Crishi was not responding to her. By the time I came in on them, she was not exactly crying, but she had her handkerchief to her mouth and her eyes above them were wide open, as though she were willing them not to shed tears. Her voice, usually so low and lazy, had risen high: “Isn't it enough—don't I have enough to put up with? And now you bring that journalist, or whatever she is.”

I wanted to go away, but instead Crishi said he had to be somewhere in a hurry and left her and me alone together. She didn't seem to mind that I saw her in this state. She still didn't allow the tears to fill her eyes, but she laid her head back against the sofa and gave a deep, deep sigh. She said nothing to me, made no confidences.

Anna spent several hours a day with the Rawul, and at night I could hear her transcribing her tapes. I'm not sure what the plan was—whether she was writing a book about him or helping him to write his own. While everything I have described was going on—our involved family and other relationships—he was never for a moment diverted from thinking about and developing his theories. It was at this time that he changed the name of the movement to that by which it has since become known: Transcendental Internationalism. The use of the word
transcendental
was surprising because he had always insisted on being secular and operating entirely within the limits of this world. Now he explained that the boundaries to be transcended were not spiritual but national ones, and all political forms: It was these he wished to pull down and build up anew, just as other movements had aimed at doing within the mind and/or spirit of man. Anna was useful to him, for she drew him out and guided him beyond his founding vision to some sort of statement of practical principles. Practical! Well, it might still have sounded weird to an outsider, but as was pointed out to us over and over, every revolutionary movement started off with the vision of one man who was regarded as a crank by all except a tiny nucleus of believers. I guess we were those believers.

T
HE RAWUL may have been influenced at this time by his contact with another, earlier movement. Some years ago this had been a worldwide movement, and its leader, Babaji, had been famous—one of the really famous Indian gurus—and had attracted so many followers, and so much money, that he had been able to establish centers in India, England, the U.S., Germany, France, Holland; everywhere. That had been in his heyday. But now he was an old man, and I guess most of his followers were old too, or middle-aged, since he didn't attract younger people anymore. One by one the centers had had to be closed, the movement had shrunk till only this one house in England remained, where he lived with two faithful followers. He was old and sick and eager to return to die in India. The one remaining house was for sale, and Crishi wanted to buy it.

I hadn't realized that he had been negotiating for this property, and only got to know about it when I had a letter from Mr. Pritchett. The mailman threw letters through a slot in the front door downstairs, and they lay there on the mat till someone came to pick them up. There were other tenants in the building, on the floors above us, but Crishi was usually the first one down; he was always expecting, and getting, a lot of mail, and anyway was too impatient to wait for someone to bring it up. But one morning I happened to be the first down. I was on my way out for a walk to get away from Anna, who had a migraine and was making demands for coffee and
head massage. I found the day's letters scattered over the doormat and was about to step over them—I never expected any letters; my contacts with home were on the phone—when one of them caught my eye because it had my name on it. The envelope had the title of Mr. Pritchett's firm printed on it and I wasn't terribly interested in the contents, which I knew would be some sort of legal business. Still, I opened and skimmed over it and had just read how Mr. Pritchett was surprised at my lack of response to his previous letters when Crishi came running down the stairs to get the rest of the mail. He said “What have you got there?”

“Crishi, did Mr. Pritchett send me any letters?”

“Oh he's always sending you letters.” He was down on the mat, scooping up his mail, and then he stood and flicked through it. “Usually warning you not to sign anything—he's such a tight-assed old fool, I'm just counting the days till you're twenty-one and we can get rid of him. Where were you going? For a walk—in the rain?”

“I'd rather be in the rain than upstairs with Anna.”

Crishi laughed—he often said that Anna was there to teach me patience and forbearance—and opened the front door to look out. It was raining, but it was fresh and cool and much more pleasant than inside the tall dark hallway with the black-and-white marble tiles and big gilt mirror that had black spots on it from age and damp. Crishi came out with me, and we sat side by side on the top step, where we were partially sheltered by the doorway. He said “You don't mind, do you, that I've been opening your letters? They were all from that old fool.”

I thought for a while—I guess I'm like Michael, and unlike Crishi, that I can't ever respond very quickly; then I said “No I don't mind. But why do you keep wanting to get money from him?”

“But of course I want to get money from him; what do you think—from anyone, from anywhere I can get it.” He ground his teeth a bit—a habit of his when charged up about anything; he had these very magnificent teeth, and the effect was always striking.

“Is that why you keep going off to Holland and places? And sending Michael?”

He gave me a sideways look; his teeth were still on edge but he forced himself to smile: “Have you been brooding about that?”

“Yes,” I said, quite quickly this time. “I've been scared.”

“She's been scared.” He took a strand of my hair and tucked it behind my ear. “Well you know you can't live without cash, not if you're in the world-movement business. And someone has to get that cash. Someone has to take risks. . . . Are you getting wet?”

“No.” I was—and so was he—but it was that soft English rain, very sweet and cooling. The trees in the square were wrapped in a wet mist, and so were the passersby on this typical English morning—businessmen in business suits under black umbrellas, an Arab with his white robe trailing over the wet pavement and several shrouded women behind him, the milkman in a striped apron clattering in his little van. A policewoman in a trim uniform was going around writing down the license numbers of cars illegally parked around the square.