Three Continents (37 page)

The Bari Rani was finding tenants for the flats falling vacant when we left for India—that is, her own flat as well as the downstairs and upstairs ones in our house. She didn't believe in going through agents and paying them what she called some ridiculous percentage, but she personally took people around. She came upstairs several times and barged in and out of our bedrooms and bathrooms and opened closets to show them to prospective tenants. These were mostly foreign businessmen and their wives, and they trailed behind her and appeared intimidated, as well they might be, for the Bari Rani was regal and at the same time a sharp businesswoman; if the client, or usually his wife, plucked up courage to object to some feature of the accommodation, she overruled them at once and moved firmly to the next room. She didn't care who was inside—once Michael was squatting in the tub holding the sprayer over his head and she didn't even apologize. When she opened Anna's door without knocking, she just said “Oh are you still here”; Anna could be seen crouching inside as in a lair and she stared out at the intruders with very bright eyes, so that even Bari Rani thought it best to close that door again right away.

In the past, Anna's presence had made me uneasy because she was waiting for Crishi in the same way I was. She was still waiting for him, but in a different way. Crishi didn't seem to give her a thought and acted as if she weren't there, while we could hear her playing TV or her tapes in the next room. When he was tired, he turned around and went to sleep. I kept on listening to the mechanical sounds from her room. Behind them, I felt I could hear her sharp thoughts clicking, her hard heart beating, and I leaned over Crishi as if I had to protect him. He looked very young sleeping, though I knew by this time he wasn't. He slept naked, which made him seem particularly vulnerable. One night I crept to the
door to lock it so no one would be able to get in. I did it very softly, for I knew how lightly he slept, alert to every sound or movement. But when I returned to the bed, he was lying there with his eyes wide open and watching. He looked ready to spring, or any other action that might be necessary. He asked “Why did you do that?” I wouldn't tell him at first, knowing he would laugh at me, and when he got it out of me, of course he did. “Oh you're scared she's going to use her little pearl-handled pistol on me? . . . You don't by any chance think she hasn't got one? Someone like Anna? Are you kidding? She wouldn't be seen dead without it.”

It was one more thing to deal with in my mind. I looked back at myself as I used to be—at Propinquity, or in Grandfather's embassies—Michael and I both. We used to think we had to deal with such a lot: our parents, Lindsay and Manton, and going from country to country and being in international schools and not belonging anywhere, not wanting to settle anywhere, not wanting to go to any more schools, and not knowing what to do next; and the way we would discuss it and try to think out our values in absolute truth and purity. But now all that seemed so childish and unreal, blank somehow; as though we were blank pages no one had ever written on. That was not the right image—I had heard it used but it was not the right one for what I felt was happening to me. It was more like having my consciousness made deeper as more and more things—of which Anna's little pearl-handled pistol was one—were dropped into it. Things I didn't know about, which people did or had; the way other people were or lived. Now I was not only learning about all that but participating in it.

I began to wait for Anna to go out, so that I could get in her room and search for her gun. It is strange to go secretly into someone's room—this was my first experience of it—for they seem to be as much in it as when they are actually there; or even more so, maybe because you are thinking of them so intensely, and afraid they might come back and catch you. This inhibited me from searching very thoroughly; besides, I didn't know where to search, where people might hide guns. I opened her closet and chest of drawers, stuffed with clothes; she had an immensely large wardrobe, so many
little dresses and shoes to match them, and silk shirts and cashmere sweaters. Otherwise there was nothing—no photographs, no letters she had kept, or any object or memento: just clothes, and her dressing table full of cosmetics. I must have gone in there two or three times, in fact every time she went out, which wasn't very often. I never stayed long, always thinking I heard her coming back. But the thought of that gun had got wedged in my mind, and I imagined every sort of situation, especially at night when Crishi was sleeping.

One day when Anna had gone out, Michael was home—this was rare too—I could hear him showering, and I went in the bathroom and sat waiting for him to finish. It was a long time since I had seen him without his clothes. We didn't avoid it but it didn't happen, probably because we were no longer together as much as we had been. I had forgotten how very white he was—peeled—or maybe it hadn't struck me so much before I got used to Crishi's color. When he turned off the shower, I told him about Anna's gun, and he wrapped a towel around himself and went straight in her room with me. He searched much more thoroughly than I, more skillfully too; and he wasn't a bit nervous that she might come back. There was something nice about being there with him on this secret search—not the actual search but the two of us doing something together after such a long time. He didn't find a gun but he did find a folder with her passport—or rather, passports. She had three—he showed them to me—one British, one French, one Iraqi.

Something else that was happening at this time was that Babaji's health was really going down. He still spoke of returning to India, and the two Devis told him they would take him there, but I could see they were not as hopeful about him as they pretended. He remained cheerful—he kept trying to sing and some very high, cracked notes came out, driving Crishi crazy when he was there so he would tell me to go and shut the old man's door; but I wouldn't do it because I knew he liked to have it open to see everyone passing. Whenever he saw me, he would call me in—it got so that when I was busy I crouched down to get past without his seeing me. Once when I went in, he said to me, “Do you know where I'm going?” I said “Yes, to India.” “Right,” he said and beckoned
me closer, closer, closer; he had always done that, so he could pat my cheek or whatever, but now it was so I could put my ear near his mouth because his voice had become very weak.

“I'm going home,” he said. “Do you know where that is? It's by a river and I shall swim in it; bathe and sing sing, pray pray, all day long. When the sun goes down, all the birds fly home and they sit in a tree and make a lot of noise and then they're asleep. I'm asleep too, in my little hut. Yes, I have a little hut by the river, and when I get up at night to relieve myself, the moon is shining on the river and also on the water I'm making, and my water is a clear pure shining silver stream. . . . This is what I cook and eat: a handful of rice, a turnip and an onion, and one piece of pickle—do you like pickle? It burns but it tastes good, hm hm, hot. I wish I had it right now—just now—call the Devis—tell them Babaji wants his pickle. Run! Quick!” But when I ran to Nina Diva, she said “Oh no he mustn't. Poor Babaji.” She returned with me, but he was talking about something else then: “They gave me a watch—a big big watch, I never took it off, I could tell the time and the day and the month; and then they gave me a radio and the radio was as small as the watch was big—tiny tiny tiny—and then they said you have to have an airplane. I said all right. They all came with me in the plane, all singing, and we landed on the mountain and they built a big beautiful place with air-conditioned Meditation Hall. They came from everywhere to be with me—Germany—all the countries. I taught them everything. I had to, because they didn't know anything—nothing at all—only eat, sleep, fuck, that's all. I taught them. I taught you,” he told Nina Devi. “You didn't know anything.”

“Nothing,” she confirmed. She grasped his hands—“Dear Babaji, everything has come from you”—but he pulled them away and said “Don't touch me! You're old. I want her—let her do it to me.” I knew he meant me, though I wasn't sure what he wanted me to do to him. When I looked inquiringly at Nina Devi, she said “Babaji has to rest now. For the journey. You want to be nice and fresh for the journey, don't you Babaji?” “What journey? I'm not going anywhere.” “Why Babaji—we're going home to India.” He waved her away—“You don't know anything about that place.” He turned his
face away from us and didn't try to stop us when we left.

Of course the two Devis were tremendously sad to see him sinking but, like him, they remained happy and cheerful. And they too kept harking back to the past—they couldn't tell me enough about it, how nice it had been. The Devis were always dressed in white cotton saris with Jesus sandals on their bare feet, and they wore their hair Indian-style and that red mark on the forehead; but they looked and spoke and were as English as you could be. Nina Devi was short, sturdy, and apple-cheeked; a wonderful manager, a wonderful gardener, full of common sense, calm, pleasant, affectionate. Before joining Babaji's movement, she had taught English and geography in a girls' school, and she was the sort of person you would want to be your teacher. Maya Devi had also been a teacher, but only for a very short time because she said she found it too consuming. I could imagine how she would get very involved with some of the girls and have these very strong favorites and care nothing for the rest of the class at all except for disliking some of them. She was herself like some English girls I had gone to school with; she had the same gawky figure and columnar legs and big hands and feet she didn't know where to put. She was always starting up with pleasure or anger, but having been so long with Babaji, she had learned to curb herself more—at least she tried to; you could see her doing it, rearing up and then making herself get down again as if she were both horse and rider; and if she didn't manage it herself, there was Nina Devi to gently warn “Maya Maya,” whereupon Maya Devi would strike herself about the face with her fist and say “I know I know I
know
,” in an absolute passion with herself.

They had both been among Babaji's earliest followers and remained part of his most inner circle right through his high tide of public success when he had had many rich followers and a few famous ones. It was never those years the Devis dwelled on, but the beginning, when there had been just a handful of them living in old army huts on vegetables and goat milk. It did sound very beautiful—the river Babaji had spoken of, where they had bathed and prayed, and the sunrise and sunset reflected in it, and the trees, birds, and hymn singing—everything was pure and bright and so were they when they spoke of it. They were middle-aged, old even, but
their eyes shone and their voices skipped a bit and they tripped each other up with laughter when they told how it had been.

Unfortunately, at this time the house was very noisy. Led by Michael, the followers had their usual arms drill and other martial exercises; they ran and marched around Nina Devi's flower beds, and they pinned a board for air-pistol target practice on the shower curtain in one of the bathrooms. In addition, there were the preparations for Founder's Day, involving a lot of hammering and moving of furniture, so Babaji certainly couldn't get the silence and rest required for a sick man. Nina Devi decided she would have to appeal to the Rawul, and one day she came to call on him in the downstairs flat. I was surprised to see her and the way she was dressed—not in her usual sari but in a baggy brown skirt and jacket, which must have dated back to when she was teaching school. She sat on the black-and-gold sofa in the drawing room with her flat-heeled shoes dangling over the Persian carpet, very patient and determined as she waited to be admitted to the Rawul's presence. There was always something of being “admitted to a presence” with the Rawul, but Nina Devi was one of the people who met him with an equal dignity. She was small and shabby, had come to him as a supplicant, yet with the air of an ambassador representing a power as important as the Rawul himself. The Rawul was silent for a long time after she had made her plea to postpone the celebration. His eyes were downcast, looking at the floor, and when he raised them again, they were full of sorrow to have to refuse her. He explained how utterly it lay beyond his, beyond any person's power to change a date that lay within the rotation of the movement's calendar. I felt that it wasn't up to me to point out that it
had
in fact been changed—that when it was thought better to leave the country because of the police inquiries, the date of both his birthday and Founder's Day had been moved forward. Nina Devi listened as patiently as he explained; and when he had finished, he got up and moved in his stately way to the door, which he opened for her. He bent down toward her and took her small hand in his and kept it there, while assuring her of his concern for Babaji and sending heartfelt wishes for a full and speedy recovery.

But Babaji died before Founder's Day. Michael was in the
house at the time, together with other followers, working very hard to get the downstairs rooms ready for the celebrations. The Devis had to come down several times to ask them to make less noise, but it was impossible to be quiet in the process of such a major job. Anyway, Babaji died in the middle of it all, and when Michael came home at dawn he either forget to mention the fact, or was too tired from working. I didn't get to know till one of the Devis called to tell me. Even then, it was some time before I could take her news in, for she told me in a bright happy voice that Babaji had attained
samadhi
. At first I thought she was telling me he was better, and it was only when she gave me the time and place of the cremation that I understood. Of course I said I would go. I dressed up for it—I didn't actually have anything black, but I did have a sort of suit Lindsay had once got for me. I had assumed we were all going, only it turned out everyone else was much too busy with preparations for Founder's Day.