Advaita Vedanta

175

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

 

PASSAGE TO EUROPE

Life is a prison house in which relativistic rival interests hold the spirit down from flying into its innate freedom in the Absolute. Subtle chains bind all men, whether they are conscious of it or not, and like unhappy birds in cages, all are subject at each moment to the bondage implied in rival claims of relativistic interests of group life.

 

Our movements, thoughts and words are circumscribed, and if one asserts one's absolutism in a relativistic setup, the usual consequences known to all truth-lovers of human history come into evidence. Socrates had to drink hemlock; Mohammed had to fight for forty days to save his disciples and their wives just for insisting that there was only one God; Jesus was crucified. Bruno, in more recent years, was burnt at the stake for holding absolutist theological views, nearer to science than religion. Rousseau and Voltaire suffered banishment and shame. Hypateia, Joan of Arc and Abelard had to pay the price too in their own times and places at the cruel altar of relativistic idolatry, actual or ideological.

 

The latter can be more harmful than the former because the evil is invisible. One is caught finally on one horn or other of the relativistic dilemma, ambiguity or paradox. When thus caught and unable to take a firm decision, absolutism suffers defeat and is, in principle, dead. All possibility of a moral or spiritual life becomes impossible in the asphyxiating atmosphere, social, moral or religious. Thus it is that often the battle for absolutism is lost time and again in individual human life or history. Fleeing relativism again and again is thus the only answer.

 

THE GURU OPENS THE CAGE DOOR

How I was taken for granted and treated as a nonentity among the followers of the Guru, although the Guru himself looked upon me with favour, has been recounted. I seemed to make no impression at all on anybody and felt myself unwanted, although not told so openly.

 

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I could not fit myself into any actual working context as, like one who had missed his proper vocation, I sought to affiliate myself to one group after another in vain. Each leader or group conformed to types or degrees of relativism, representing compromise with first principles that were precious to me but not so important to them. A rarefied set of value-worlds thus presented to me offered no point of affinity or stable contact of any wholehearted kind. Lukewarm affiliations of course could not last long.

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Thus jostled and pushed around by attractions or repulsions in a world of pluralistic values, I was dazed and confused like a fluttering bird caught in the hands of a naughty boy. I had to breathe the free air of absolutism, and the stagnation of the fen in which I found myself gave me no enthusiasm to live a full life in keeping with my age or temperament.

 

The Guru alone could understand me and, as I have stated, had arranged for the money needed for a voyage overseas where I was to go to complete my training in education. I could not stand any more the lifelessly thin air of relativistic interests and, like a half-starved cow released from its tether to which it was uselessly tied all day as an apology for grazing, I took to my wings one day into the larger open world of what is called Western Civilization.

 

THE GURU HANDS ME CASH WITH BLESSINGS

I must have been a problem disciple of the Guru. All others belonged to one camp or other, but here was a lone ranger, a franc-tireur or a freelance who wanted to fight his battles alone. Although it was not normal for a Guru to take interest in the career of an individual, he seems to have understood my one-pointed dedication to the Guru cause and went out of his usual course to help me both with cash and blessings to go abroad.

 

I was then headmaster of the English school started under the auspices of the Guru, which I was to shape as a model educational institution. My plans in this matter did not tally with the local committee and I had to work out my salvation in other larger fields. The Guru's keen eye saw my plight and he opened the cage door for the confined bird.

 

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I was first to go to Colombo and take ship from there. An address was to be presented to me on the eve of my departure from Varkala. The Guru was there, resting in one of the newly-finished rooms of the school building. The function for sending me off was organized by the citizens of Varkala and one sentence stands out as I read the words of the address dated 20th May, 1928, which suffices to show that, mostly taken for granted by the public as I happened to be, there were some silent admirers lurking behind the scenes who were conscious that my life had some deeper significance, though it seemed frustrated at first sight.

 

The English assistant of the school, who evidently enjoyed drafting the address in the name of the public - though merely a matriculate schoolmaster of Edwardian India - showed himself capable of literary ability in a foreign language when he wrote: 'Your career may be likened to that of Cicero who, on consulting the Delphic Oracle as to how he should attain most glory, was answered that he should make his own genius and not the opinion of the people the guide of his life'.

 

How true this oracular verdict has been in my case could be verified by the same person, Mr. Ram, whom I met recently in Singapore, a grand old man with children and grandchildren round him, a peacetime hero who gave the best of his life as an unknown schoolmaster to the cause of child education far from his native land. After a lapse of thirty-five years I pay back now, in January 1964 in these words here, the compliment he meant for me. Let such compliments, in spite of lapse of time or distance, glorify human nature in the name of the Absolute to which all belong, whether as an echo or a light of Eternity.

 

I remember the intimate gathering at the other wing of the school building from that where the Guru rested, a witness to all the fuss that was being made about my departure to the West. After the function I was ushered into the Guru's presence. He was bedridden with his last illness which came to take him away from the world of actuality of touch and hearing. He lives, however, intact in a world as real, where touch, taste, smell or hearing do not count, and has a certain independence in a more subjective zone of the personality, nourished by the reputation it built up when actually alive.

 

I took leave of him as usual and inclined before him, not always touching his feet nor prostrating. I complied only sometimes to this traditional requirement, which is perhaps one of the most touching of the remnants of old India persisting from Kashmir to the Cape to this day. To take the dust off the feet of a Guru is a time-honoured gesture which marks Indian life and behaviour from the rest of the world.

 

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I wish I had been more traditional here than I actually was, although in the name of modernity and revised scientific Vedantic notions, my own inclinations with folded hands could be considered good enough. Kow-towing might be considered not in keeping with the sense of dignity of modern man in a democratic setup - but in a contemplative world of values it should still hold its fully-dignified status in man's relation to man. Man and God can be interchangeable terms enhancing human dignity rather than bringing double degradation to both involved. It is the dialectical way of double assertion that should finally decide the question.

 

PARTING WITH THE GURU

There was a short parting talk which had its own wisdom lesson to teach me, as precious as any other he had richly bestowed on me on many a previous occasion. About one year before this he had given me the signal that his lessons in wisdom to me, spread over the years, were to be terminated.

 

This was at Trichur, where he was resting with his chief disciples, concerned as he was at that time about the continuation of the work he had started after his time. I generally had a time all to myself with him, and it was understood between us when this hour or two of teaching was to be during the four or five days we were to be together. The subject of wisdom followed an inner sequence strictly observed by the Guru as in the case of any professor of a university - only here it was more tacit and implicit. On that occasion, seeing me enter into his presence for the lesson, he sat with closed eyes instead of starting the conversation as usual. This was to tell me that the lessons had ended.

 

On the same sojourn at Trichur, a group photograph was taken of the disciples and, because of some irregularities on the part of the organisers, I was keeping away from the group. The Guru noticed this and himself asked me to sit for the photo which visibly records the event to this day.

 

Such details are many, and the Guru's silent look of approval or disapproval has lighted on me on many an occasion and guided me more eloquently than actual words could have done. The present occasion was to be the last physical contact I was to have with the Guru. He handed me a roll of currency notes which, he was particular to say, belonged to his personal account and not to any legally constituted body at that time, to which he knew I did not wish to belong. He asked me kindly how long I would be away, and when I said 'about eight months', the Guru said, as if thinking aloud, 'four months'. Then he ordered a 'prasadam', a parting gift of fruit, to be given to me, and two attendants brought two fruits, a mango and a pomegranate.

 

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Handing me these, he blessed me fully and said that the two fruits that chance brought meant that I would have double success. Thus the parting took place, which in effect, brought us together more intimately than ever before. I was re-dedicated to the Guru cause more inseparably than ever.

 

ECHOES OF THE PARTING SCENE

Why did the Guru say 'four months' when I had said that I would be away eight months? This was the enigma that put its question persistently again and again within my subconscious mind like the call of a brain-fever bird. As I walked with the boys carrying my luggage up the sloping road to the Varkala railway station another bad omen was noted in the form of an attendant of the Guru who tried to dissuade me at the last moment from going. He must have acted out of jealousy at the favour shown to me by the Guru. My spirit of adventure prevailed on me to go forward, not heeding the language of ill omens. They must have been conspiracies of negative relativism to try my resolve at the last moment. Those who can watch with a keen eye the workings of omens, rumours and conspiracies can discover many strange goings-on in the world of relativism everywhere.

 

As to the difference of four months in the words of the Guru himself, it was readily solved by me by interchanging the subject and the object. As 'I' and 'you' do not matter in the context of wisdom's language, the Guru was telling me indirectly that he would pass away in four months, and that if I came after eight months I would not find him a physical entity like me. Truth was inter-subjective and trans-physical. Echoes, suggestive signs, omens good or bad, flourish in a dull world of relativistic values side-by-side with valid contemplative suggestions or signals; and all we can say about the parting scene is that it was not unlike that of two lovers who talked their own mystical language meant to be understood between the two concerned. All other implications did not count. Men may come and men go but the bubbling brook goes on for ever. Such is the way normal to absolutism.

 

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PREPARATIONS FOR THE VOYAGE

 

 

Colombo in the 1920's.

 

Starting from Varkala, I caught the Mail Boat at Madura next afternoon and reached Colombo after crossing the ferry at dusk in the morning. Finding a lodging with Kerala friends in Dam Street, Colombo, I contacted shipping agents. The steamship called 'Chantilly', named after one of the three musketeers of Dumas' novel, was what was available within a fortnight.

 

More money came to the post office, sent by the Guru as promised. A new black suit and hat were purchased, and so, with an old overcoat, I was a gentleman ready set for sailing. A send-off was given me at a night school of which I was supervisor. On the eve of departure a strange character who looked a typical crook - a miserable and familiar figure found in almost any port anywhere in the world, a by-product of modern collective life - prevailed on me and another young Indian student to stay in his questionable boarding house. He did petty services out of sheer good will as he pretended, but wanted to blackmail both of us, keeping back the passport and tickets which he had helped to collect, as a kind of self-appointed sub-travel agent. I had to do a bit of shouting at him before the ship sailed, as he insisted on abnormal charges at the eleventh hour when the ship's siren had already sounded once.

 

Released thus from the last clutches of relativism, I could see the coast receding fast as the ship's propellers sent the waters boiling behind in a broadening streak, while the bow cut the billows with great strength. The bitter experiences of my failures were only slowly erased as the ship carried my thoughts further and further into the new world of adventure which was opening before me in strange lands among strangers with strange tongues, costumes and ways.

 

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ON BOARD THE 'CHANTILLY'

In those pre-war days the 20,000 ton ship on which I embarked at Colombo was a luxury liner, but it was destined to be a discarded old tub soon after the end of the Second World War, as I saw it again in 1960 on the quayside of the new harbour at Marseilles, with all its glories forgotten and almost in disgrace among more modern boats, berthed apart in lonesome neglect.

 

Air travel was not known then and the first class dining room of the ship with its French garçons and tables richly loaded with red and white wines, was considered chic enough for those days. The bellboys announced dinner soon after embarkation but I had to rush to the purser to see that I had vegetarian food served me. I talked to him in English, but as a true Frenchman is always expected to do, he pretended not to know English.

 

I was seated at table beside a Paris medical student from Delhi, a Bombay jeweller returning to his gem business in Paris, a Bengali going to study perfumery in Geneva and an Italian from California interested in yoga. We soon made friends and found ways and means for life together for spending the three weeks before us. The jeweller was a stuck-up fellow who talked as if he was an authority on correct table manners, himself unconscious of violating some elementary rules. To eat with the fork 'à la fourchette' without the knife or spoon that poor Englishmen used, was more French.

 

I happened to discover that the 'pommes rôties' (roasted potatoes) had a piece of lard in it, although served as fully vegetarian, and that the vegetable 'potages' (soups - not the consommés, which had meat) had a suspicious taste of 'stock' too. Thus I could remain vegetarian in principle only, and began to take eggs, whose animal life-element I considered negligible. I swallowed a fly once while hiking and panting in summer, but still consider myself a good vegetarian in principle. My conscience in such cases was adaptable to necessities when imperative enough. Sabbath was for man and scruples to be respected only within limits of normality.

 

A wine-bibber with side whiskers, coming from Goa on his way to Portugal, was a nuisance at table, as he began collecting the bottles left undrunk by sober passengers like me. He thought himself lucky and unfortunately, in the cabin he had the upper berth to mine. Dead drunk already at Colombo, he had lost all his money at a house of ill-repute and was raving and in distress all the night, spitting and ready to vomit, while alternately praying for the purse he had lost. Thus he made of himself a thorough nuisance, in which light the negative relativism I had left behind had something to be said in its favour. Thus the Western world opened itself out to me with a bang, as it were. More surprises were still to come.

 

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EIGHT DAYS OF ROUGH SEA

Forming coteries on the deck both at sunset and at morning hours; responding to dinner bells; watching deck games; making new friends among men and women; with parties where some drunken sailor performed tap dancing; witnessing clandestine love-affairs during the night where drunken officers were implicated, reports of which came to the cabin - were the normal occupations in which the passengers passed their time.

 

As days passed, however, the Arabian sea became rougher. Foaming crests of waves extended menacingly more and more, and as there was no end to this, whichever way one turned, a negatively mystical fear was induced in some. It took time to gain one's sea-legs. Meanwhile half the passengers were noticed to be absent from breakfast, and their share of butter on the table was grabbed by the more greedy. The billows rose higher still the next day and there seemed to be a ground swell too through which the brave ship had to plough. Pitching and rolling too, with breakers beginning to wash over the deck itself, instilled more concern. An Indian family did not know how to close the portholes and had to be saved from a flooded cabin. The small spirit of man shrank into its own narrower dimensions, and the non-self gained all importance and took up more spiritual space. All might be lost at any moment. The looks of the crew and officers did not instil the former confidence into the passengers either.

 

I was myself feeling fine for the moment, bravely swallowing saliva whenever there was a dip, with a funny feeling at the bottom of the stomach each time the ship seemed to go down under my feet, relieved later by its counter motion when passing the crest of a billow. For days on end all we could see were occasional vessels passing or counter-passing our ship, giving strange signals which the mysterious captain, seated above in his top cabin like a god, could alone understand. Lifeboat exercises made the danger seem still more real. Finally, land was sighted and one felt like a Ulysses or an Ancient Mariner. Djibouti, the French port of African Somaliland, was announced, and it was a consolation for the group of men and women to stroll on the seaside in the hot sun, greeted by the black eyes of Africans and Hindustani-speaking labourers. We were in the land of Islam. The neglected and barren land had almost no attractions to offer the dazed seafarers who, like a motley crowd of Sinbad's men, wandered in gay colours over the grey sands of the beach. Port Said was going to be more interesting, but I had taken ill by that time and was confined to bed and could only hear of reports from cabin mates about the bad reputation of this latter port where all the worst features of mercantilist colonialism were concentrated.

 

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PASSAGE THROUGH THE RED SEA

The Holy Land of Jews and Arabs as well as that of Christian Gentiles lay on either side of the Red Sea as the 'Chantilly' went through the calmer water in the midsummer heat of June 1928.

 

I had to learn my first sentence in French by sheer thirst which made me go to the maitre d'hotel to ask for water. 'Donnez-moi de l'eau, S.V.P.'. (Give me some of the water, please) was the only way I could do so and not call for water straightaway in English. Iced water again and again every half hour made me ill with some kind of influenza. Two other shipmates who died of the same illness found their watery graves soon after when the Captain had their bodies lowered into the sea. The hungry sharks must have benefited. Port Said was announced. The drunken Portuguese young man on the top berth climbed down to mine at night and began to hug and implore me to pray to God that he should get his money back at Marseilles. His exaggerated fervour made me, weak as I was, fight him physically, pushing him away with all my remaining strength. He had guessed that I was the kind of person who might have some favour with God as he understood him to be, not knowing that God might also be with a profligate or a publican too. The favour of an absolutist God is no monopoly of the goody-goody or the merely respectable. An absolutist touch has to be there to deserve the grace of the Most High.

 

THE CALMER WATERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

Soon we passed beyond into the region where orange groves and olives spread their balm into the cooler Mediterranean air. Under the shadow of Stromboli, the lonely sentinel of a barren volcanic isle rising steeply and sheer from the blue-black waters, the passengers were already transported to the mental climate of Europe, although the temperature was only a few degrees lower.

 

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One could live no more in the mental climate of Colombo; while to think of Paris or London became easier, though for no actual reason of distance or time. The transition takes place inside without notice, and one adopts unconsciously the mental idioms and behaviour patterns that go with a new epicentre of a civilization, each of which has to have its personality or soul associated with a city, language or with a name or group of names.

 

It was the Guru Narayana who first pointed this out to me when referring to the inner transition that takes place between Trivandrum and Nagercoil in Kerala, the latter being now properly included in the Tamil-speaking State of Madras. Linguistic geography proves as real to people's minds as the geography marked by rivers or mountains.

 

The approach of Etna in Sicily made all bring their binoculars up on the busy deck. Carpet and curio vendors had already invaded the ship between the Suez Canal ports. Now, passing through the ancient location of the Scylla rock and the whirlpool of Charybdis, we steamed on our way and reached Marseilles in the early hours of the morning two days later.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

 

CHANCE BRINGS ME TO GENEVA

 

Marseille in the 1920's.

 

The 'Paquebot Chantilly' had done its work well and was berthed quite early in the morning at one of the quays not far from the old port of the antique rumble-tumble city of Marseilles, ominously dominated by the St. Barthélémy Hill. The old port known to seafarers of ancient times still existed, and the Place Canebière and the Gare St. Charles where we had to entrain were landmarks known to travellers, then as now, to be counted as rival sights in fame only to St. Mark's Square in Venice and the Eiffel Tower of Paris.

 

The reputations of cities live on, giving depth and meaning to their personalities, some of which are definitely feminine, while others are neutral. Modern towns sometimes fail to have a character at all and leave an insipid taste. Marseilles could not be classed among them. It had its characteristic life, both underworld and above-board, of night and of daytime - so fully French or Provençal that years of contact with the outer world could not erase it in the least.

 

With the clearing of baggage, the health inspection and passport formalities, it took us to nearly ten o'clock to get out of the ship which I was to see again only after two decades as a discarded old tub. With some more shouting to do before everything was settled with bogus baggage agents whose respectable looks and printed cards should not beguile anyone, and who change their rates without notice - as bad as in Colombo or any other port - we found ourselves settled in a small hotel near the steps of the Gare St. Charles.

 

Breakfast-lunch (déjeuner) was soon served in a dining room with large glass windows facing the street from which little hungry gavroches looked in greedily at the diners, pressing their noses flat and pale on the glass panes from the pavement which was their home. Victor Hugo knew them well.

 

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I CHANGE MY MIND

During the last days of the voyage I had changed my mind and, instead of heading towards London, which was what I thought I would do at first, I decided to go to Geneva.

 

To change one's mind is the privilege of every free individual, but to do so too often and too much without proper reasons would make for no virtue, even for a gentleman at large. Something told me that London, with its pounds and shillings to spend and rigid educational rules, was no fit place for an adventurer like me, trying his luck, largely depending on what possibilities could open their doors to me as life unravelled its scroll - full of many possibilities but only a few probabilities.

 

One's discretion has to be used, and it is when there is a fifty-fifty chance involved that we call the discretion intuition, which is only a respectable name for guesswork. The Bengali student whose friendship I had cultivated in the meanwhile, having contacts in Geneva, could be relied on for finding accommodation on reaching there. I was myself armed with a letter of introduction to Dr. P.P. Pillay, then employed in the International Labour Office at Geneva, given by his father in Trivandrum. Although Geneva, with its French, German and Italian and no English, would be a stranger place for me than London, prompted by some whispering little bird within me I cast my lot for the former. The absolutist outlook and the spirit of the gambler go together when both are faithfully or earnestly treated.

 

PICKING CHERRIES

Five or six miles out of Marseilles lived a Frenchman with his wife and child in a country cottage. He was known to the Bengali friend, Mr. Sen, and took us for a ride to see his home and orchard. Cherry blossoms, which gave it a festive garb in spring had, by the end of June, 1928, ripened into fruit, and it was a favourite pastime all over this Mediterranean region - especially for children, but even for grownups - to spend days on little ladders, picking the fruit by way of harvesting - although a portion of the yield was harvested directly into the mouths of the pickers. This was considered quite in order, as it created no further economic problems for experts to solve.

 

The abundance of Nature fed the children's hunger directly, and the world of opulent currency notes was just bypassed in the simple way that God perhaps likes better.

 

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High walls of grey granite, schist or shale enclosed orchards of olives and oranges, besides plums and pears. Vineyards were not unknown either, next to the blue sea water or the cypress-clad hill slopes. Like Naples or Greece, the Alpes Maritimes or the Côte d'Azur lured holidaymakers from the bleak domains of Northern Europe, for whom it was a veritable dream come true after the winter and early spring snows and blizzards. Europe went out of doors into the sunshine then. A festive spirit of holiday prevailed for all and spread both its wings freely and drank of the blue sky and the warm light of the sun. Man was in the embrace of Nature and got full nourishment thereby.

 

FIRST PEEP INTO FRENCH FAMILY LIFE

This little visiting interlude, before we were brought back by our host in his self-driven tin lizzie-like car - violating traffic rules a hundred times, driving right instead of the British left, which was heterodox enough for us as we sat seeking security inside - gave us the first peep into French country home life, which has retained its validity in spite of many later contacts.

 

Our host was a lover of India, and his wife studied books on 'Indian spirituality', whatever that meant. India was a magic name for many other votaries far flung in all corners of the world. She refused to be civilised in the modern sense, and this must have been her secret recommendation to the hearts of simple folk anywhere on the globe.

 

Ugly, ignorant, poor or silly, as one might call her, this is a moral asset stronger than any victory that wars can bring in the future, and worth many diplomatic victories put together. Let modernism never wreck this subtle treasure, by dint of which India has survived many storms and upheavals like the humble grass that bends its head to conquer the violence of gales that can push down many a giant forest tree fated to fall, uprooted with all its pride, before the first storm.

 

Some civilizations survive by the simplicity of their lives. France, like India, has its point of contact through the economy based on land rather than on mercantilism. Saint Simonism, which France has produced, may have economic affinities with what India too wants at present.

 

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Our tickets had been booked early and, with white linen-covered pillows for our heads, we found our places in the continental train, about eleven at night, speeding towards Geneva. Grenoble was passed at night, and it was daylight that revealed the landscape with hedges and waterways, with half a hundred culverts and bridges over which the engine pulled us full steam at about one hundred kilometres an hour. Lovely silver birch trees and rows of poplars with summer daisies, red poppies and cornflowers peeping through tall grass as one farmyard after another went past, with cattle and sheep grazing, made the pastoral South European scene new to me and full of interest.

 

Geneva was reached at about ten in the morning. The friend of Mr. Sen was there in the station to receive us, and we trotted out into the city. After a light lunch at a restaurant, we crossed the famous bridge across Lake Léman, past the monument of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

 

We had already found a lodging in a costly hotel next to the station and, putting our baggage there, went out for sightseeing. The spirit of Rousseau hovered over the city and no wonder, therefore, that this watch-making, milk-canning village grown big became by President Wilson's wish, an international city and the home of the League of Nations. Rousseau was the 'Citoyen de Genève', which, by its very innate veracity, made him in the minds of men a Citizen of the World by implication, which all could feel if sensitive to such values at all.

 

FIRST CONTACT WITH WESTERN CIVILIZATION

 

 

Geneva.

 

My first contact with Western civilization was, by some strange chance, through contemplating the statue of Rousseau on the island in the Lake of Geneva. There he sat on a tall pedestal, with scroll and pen in hand, sculpted or moulded - that lover of truth and of humanity who once shed his tears into that very lake out of sheer love for it and Nature, of which it was the nurseling. This simple thought was overwhelming to his spirit and, although accused of over-sentimentalism by other Europeans of his time, his was a genuine soul that was fully alive to all human values.

 

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As days went on, this contact, which seemed incidental and almost accidental, gained further significance in my life, and gave me the first key to the spirit of the West. White and black swans swim round this little island of poplars, washed by the river Rhone as it passes out of the Lake of Geneva into the sunny southern lands.

 

Although he is recognized as the father of modern education, my full course in India on this subject had left me only superficially acquainted with this great name. Rousseau was too good for the average Englishman who wrote the textbooks for teachers' training courses in India to understand, and so he was bypassed and neglected, while in verity Indian education, more than any other, stood in need of Rousseau to shape its own course along its natural lines.

 

To the educated Englishman like Wells, Rousseau was only a hypochondriac who wrote undignified sob-stuff, his deeper mystical and contemplative traits being wrongly evaluated from a mercantilist background. If the East can meet the West, it must be through the link of Jean-Jacques. Human sentiments weld humanity into one family.

 

BEFORE SETTLING DOWN TO WORK

 

 

Old Geneva.

 

There I was in the strange city, first trying to find a cheap room where I could stay, and then to find the convenience for useful study or work. Fully conscious of my pocketbook which showed that more than three-fourths of the cash I had been given had been already spent on tickets and clothes, my movements had to be quick and cautious. Four hundred Swiss francs which I held in Cook's cheques could not last me more than two months, however I economized.

 

Faced with the danger of being thrown on my meagre resources soon - an utter stranger to the language and still more so to the people and their ways - I relied on a Bengali medical student to find me a room, which happened to be in the Boulevard du Pont d'Arve, a name I could hardly pronounce properly.

 

As I sallied forth into the streets I could not fail to notice how strange a figure I cut with my Colombo-tailored suit and felt hat, both of which were many days in date and degrees in latitude out of mode for Geneva, which was nearer to the epicentre of all European fashions, which was destined to be Paris for ever by a strange conspiracy of the world of tailors, and which had already adopted what Colombo was to know of three months later.

 

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Uniform conformity, even to the point of an imperative cruelty to any sense of individuality left in one, was demanded in the fully-living Western civilization. Fashions changed, and it was a hard task to keep up with its detailed demands. My felt hat had a brim perhaps one centimetre more than what was fully in fashion then, and to add to this, short and round as I was in build, the long hair that I grew, which showed curls from behind the hat-brim, must have been the reason why giggles, sometimes suppressed, sometimes failing to be so, burst from children and even from a group of grown-up ladies, who quickened their paces to get past me on the street, trying their best to conceal the inevitable outburst, as common courtesy would demand. Soon, however, I became a familiar figure, something like the bonhomme seen on Quaker Oats packets and, except for schoolboys who followed me for no reason, they were getting used to me. But young women could not contain their giggling, in spite of their desire to be polite to a stranger. I once saw a mother reprimanding a grownup daughter in a shop to behave better, but she could not help being outrightly impolite. Soon the incidents passed off, at least along my frequented roads and haunts.

 

I found a boarding and lodging place for about two hundred and fifty Swiss francs (almost the same as rupees) a month with a Swiss family in the Boulevard leading to the river Arve on the southern side of the city. The family at table consisted of Madame de Negro with a son and his stepfather, a man with a weather-beaten face and past fifty or so, in love in his belated dotage .

 

The young man took me on a hired bicycle to bathe in the lake and showed me the city which was just lapsing into autumnal cold after the hectic days of late summer. Before the month was out I paid my boarding and lodging promptly and found a humbler room in the Rue de l'Aubépine with an Armenian landlady with a divorced husband, Mr Eltchian. The rooms were smaller, but I could cook my soups in a kitchenette adjoining and have baths free, for less than half the price I paid before. I went out for my buns and rolls morning and evening, and made different soups with packets of Potage Maggi, which had scores of varieties to choose from, and began to feel settled down, although my pocketbook began to show that I was to touch the bottom of my resources soon.

 

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To make my Sunday breakfasts easy to cook, I allowed myself the luxury of selecting small cakes from a nearby boulangerie (bakery); otherwise I practised all the virtues of parsimonious living that I was capable of. I attended different Sunday services, beginning with one at the Cathedral St. Pierre, through Sufi and Baha'i to a Quaker meeting, which last seemed to suit my temperament best.

 

Thus I fully abandoned myself to the hands of chance at Geneva in the late summer of 1928. There was an Institute of the Science of Education, otherwise called the Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where I got myself admitted as a student, and began seriously to do library work and attend courses under well-known educationists like Dr. Edouard Claparède, Dr. Pierre Bovet and others who held higher positions in educational matters. There was also Dr. Adolphe Ferrière who was the Founder of the New Education Fellowship in Europe, with whom I soon came into touch.

 

I proposed to write a thesis on the subject of 'The Personal Factor in the Educative Process' and consulted the authorities of the University of Geneva for the purpose. Meanwhile I got the information that the University of Paris was a freer and more open one, where foreign students could enter without rigid governmental restrictions belonging to states imposed on university education.

 

How I could finish my course, after mastering sufficient French, was vague to me, but there was some faint voice within me which made me believe that I could do it. Languageless, penniless and friendless, I still ventured, depending on the Tao to do the rest.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

 

THE CRIMINAL CONSCIENCE OF AN HONEST MAN

Man is an enigma to himself. One cannot tell oneself 'I am an honest man under all circumstances'. Absolute honesty always hides its own version of criminality.

 

One is false to the state when making one's own counterfeit coins; but a neighbouring state can indulge in such a luxury with impunity. Dry or prohibition areas in the same state can be divided from the wet areas by a bamboo placed across the road; and what is a crime on one side of it may be a virtue for a drunkard citizen on the other side.

 

A line can divide two conflicting consciences. What is duty at one time might become an offence at another. An absolutist conscience can neither be wholly right nor wholly wrong. It can only say 'amen' to both or either of rival claims and remain neutral, lest our conscience should make cowards of us all. Neutrality is the best form of bravery.

 

In my early Geneva days, when utter indigence and I seemed to walk hand in hand, a stranger in a strange land, I had occasion to bring my own conscience under, as it were, a sort of X-ray scrutiny.

 

In Gobbo's language conscience is something 'hanging at the neck of one's heart', but he would not have been right if he had considered it as having a fixed voice. In fact, it often has a sliding adjustment, and what it does not permit in the policeman's presence is in order when he is gone. Society is often the custodian of the conscience of certain people, while others look up to God to regulate it.

 

A conveniently adjustable conscience is what most people have - sometimes obeying society and at other times the voice of 'duty' as they call it, as 'the stern daughter of the voice of God'. Treachery, tyranny and sheer homicidal glories may be conveniently covered by the name of 'duty' to crown, country or God - without ever being recognized in their true colours. Even rank fanaticism can pass muster in the name of religious zeal or duty. Any conscience at the behest of relativistic interests must, however, be considered suspect. A relativistic conscience would be far worse than having none at all.

 

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FALSE LUCK COMES MY WAY

Returning from an evening walk on one of the last days of my stay in Geneva, finding what luck had in store for me, conscious of the end of the resources that should make my life possible without being reduced to utter penury in a civilization that looked askance at beggars, my conscience if any had a very unstable position within me.

 

When I neared the Parc des Eaux-Vives on the lakeside road coming to Geneva, in full view of the evening glow of Mont Blanc, a piece of folded paper lying on the sidewalk caught my attention. I picked it up with alacrity and, as I already suspected, it was a currency note for a thousand German marks. For a moment I thought that luck had favoured me just at the time I was in dire need. I looked at it a second time to see if it was a genuine one with all the required inscriptions. It was so. I could change it for Swiss money in any bank and that would keep me going for a month or two. I put it into my pocket but looked round to see if anyone was watching me. My conscience came into play just then and I began to have a moral sense of some strange guilt. I should, as a man of integrity, surrender the money to the police to return to the person who might have lost it.

 

With these thoughts I went to a garden seat in the nearby park. As I sat and thought about the thousand Reichsmarks in my pocket, I could definitely feel that my conscience said one thing at a given moment and just the opposite at another. Instead of hanging at the neck of my heart as Gobbo felt it, saying 'budge' or 'budge not,' it seemed to sway upward or downward, touching the plus and minus poles of its full amplitude, making me alternately a criminal or a respectable citizen. It could not be stabilized, at least for some time.

 

At last I prevailed on myself to equalise my intentions and said I would keep still till some right answer came by itself. One or two days thus passed and the thousand marks lay in my pocket without affecting my heart one way or the other. Neither the thought of luck nor ill luck was to cross my mind. I had swallowed up the thoughts, as it were, and kept them motiveless within myself. My wobbly conscience was thus stilled for the time.

 

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But the curiosity about the luck that seemed to come my way remained active still. At last I brought the question to a friend, an Indian domiciled in Geneva, to find out the value of the note. He examined it and said that it still could be cashed in a bank, although it belonged to the pre-war regime of Germany - but the exchange value would be about a thousandth of the face value.

 

This was a veritable anticlimax to the whole episode, but I was glad that my poor conscience was no more to be disquieted by this piece of paper. False luck, that thus came to tempt me, at least made me confirm the truth of the proverb that an open door will tempt a saint. I could at best expect to be an honest man with a criminal conscience. One or the other had to prevail at a given moment and make me the same fundamentally as any other fellow man. We can at best live a stable or unstable life at the core of a conscience belonging to all men in an absolute sense, which is neither a criminal nor an honest one. No conscience can be permanently stabilized in any other sense.

 

THE DOORS OF CHANCE OPEN AGAIN UNSOUGHT

In spite of such false scents that lured me off my track, the main doors of chance were not shut against me, as experience soon revealed.

 

It was at one of those Sunday-morning meetings of the Quakers at the centre of the old city of Geneva that chance conspired to open a secret door for me. I was sitting for the second or third time in the silent Quaker Sunday service. There was no priest nor preaching, but all sat silent for a while, and when half an hour had elapsed, could speak when 'moved by the will of God' or the spirit or whatever moved or quaked man from his own inside consciousness. The voices often came gently, without passion, as if from the other side of life if there was any such. Instead of a priest as a representative of holiness or God, they had only a man or a woman who functioned as 'clerk' to the meeting. Votes were not counted even at the business meetings of the Quaker 'Society of Friends' as they called themselves, but the consensus of opinion at the meeting was recorded honestly by the clerk, who could exercise his discretion to some extent to keep the votes from becoming too brutishly quantitative.

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The ways of such a Christian group became interesting to me, especially as they respected all religions within limits, and did not descend into vulgar methods of proselytism in the name of winning souls to the Church and in the innocent name of Jesus, as most missionary groups do, almost with unholy haste. Often we see an over-zealous missionary of Christ beginning to have rather a nuisance value by his excesses and exaggerations, reviling other believers in the same God. The Quaker meetings could not be charged with any such vulgarity, and therefore their ways appealed to me as coming nearest to that of the attitude of the tolerant and 'mild' Hindu within me.

 

Miss Emma Thomas happened at the time to be the 'Clerk' for this Geneva Quaker meeting. I sat silent mostly at the meetings, and was treated as a 'friend of the Friends.' On this occasion, prompted by some strange urge which I cannot analyse, I went up to Miss Thomas, the Clerk of the meeting, when the service was over and, having understood that she was the head of an international school on the banks of the Lake of Geneva about twenty kilometres outside the city, where new educational methods were being applied under her direction, asked her if she would permit me to stay somewhere near and frequent the school so as to observe at first hand the new teaching methods employed.

 

The lady looked rather confused at my request and seemed for a minute not to understand exactly what I wanted. One of the young English teachers at her school had recently left and the room in which he lived, and his work, had to be filled before the winter term began, which was to be in one or two weeks. She could not believe that I was asking her for no more favour than to frequent the school as a mere observing student, which I was at that time. Moreover the police office where I had to report myself not long before, had told me in so many words, that I was 'interdit de prendre emploi' (prohibited to take employment) in the Canton de Genève, and a seal to this effect was stuck on to my visa by a grim-looking fat Swiss gendarme in unmistakable terms.

 

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A TEACHER IN IDEAL SURROUNDINGS

 

 

The Lake of Geneva seen from Gland.

 

The Tao, however, could not permit gaps or a vacuum to exist, whether in the world of words or of actualities. The lady took it for granted that I was indirectly asking to be employed and appointed to the vacancy which she suspected I was aware of, in spite of my complete ignorance of any such. The myth-making instinct supplied the rest and, strangely enough, she said something to the effect that I was welcome as a teacher in the school and that the only formality in the way was putting the application before the staff meeting to take place in a few days. She promised to write me the result.

 

Fortunately too, as I found out, I would not be breaking the law by accepting the job because Gland, the little lakeside village where the school was located, was just two or three kilometres outside the limits of the Canton of Geneva. The promised letter did not fail to follow soon, and I was to be a teacher of science, all found and paid an allowance too of a hundred Swiss Francs per month, which was an amount received equally by the Directress herself as well as by the cook and the gardener, on a principle of equality and Quaker fellowship. The amount was not much by other standards, but was sufficient for my simple needs.

 

Thus it was that the myth-making tendency, which always fills up gaps where they exist in nature, and the Tao, a vague principle in the Absolute, working hand in hand with subtle possibilities-probabilities to throw up chances which we mortals call luck or good fortune, saved me from the brink of dire penury and want, after having tested my conscience and its stability under the experimental circumstances related.

 

Necessity and Providence which, when conceived in very crude or brute terms of given facts or events, is also called Fate, is made of sterner tragic stuff. Kali, the cruel goddess, can thus be also the favourable mother of wisdom, Sarasvati, when viewed in the less harsh context of a general chance situation. The language and science of mysticism or contemplation recognize these factors less empirically. Believing in such matters is not to be treated as an article of faith in any hide-bound religious sense, but as a free recognition of subtler factors that make up the stuff called life in which human values are woven or strung or built in. The Tao thus conspired to help me go on with my studies and follow up my ambitions for five years, unhindered by any necessities of ordinary life.

 

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I could go swimming in the lake, and rich vegetarian food in plenty, with baskets of fruits and nuts, not to mention milk and butter, were provided by the same hand as sports and pastimes. Forty boys and girls and a dozen teachers of all ages drawn from different parts of Europe and outside, Chinese and Negro, French and German, with an overdose of American and English, basked in the free international atmosphere on the borders of Lac Léman dear to Rousseau, and with their animation and frolics brought some semblance of rare values to prevail on this green planet of ours. Geneva was a specially favoured spot in this respect - a holiday home for fellow mortals here.

 

QUAKER PACIFISM AND VEGETARIANISM

The 'Ecole Les Rayons', as the school was called in which I was to spend the next five years of my life - teaching while preparing for a doctorate in education - combined many happy features which made my good fortune all the more so.

 

It was an international school where national frontiers did not count and, as for race and sex too, these were not much respected either in the matter of keeping humans from getting together in a normal way. Many languages were spoken, though for the time being this was limited mostly to the European ones by geographical limitations. Quakerism implied the principle of pacifism and that of non-killing, of which vegetarianism was a corollary. Thus it was easy for me to conform to the principle of non-killing or ahimsa, which was one of the articles of my behaviour-pattern that, next to absolutist doctrines, took its place as the very first item of my ideas of what made up a spiritual life.

 

Between extreme vegetarianism that made all animal produce taboo, as with some sects in India, and gross carnivorous habits, I was willing to include milk and unfertilised eggs into my menu when diet otherwise called for their inclusion in cold countries, especially outside the limits of India, where vegetarianism was enforced sometimes as a religious scruple and sometimes on the basis of the principle of ahimsa. One had to draw a line between taboo and scruple on the one hand and the requirements of a scientifically-understood adherence to vegetarianism. In one sense even eating green leaves would be wrong, as it does hurt life, and, at another extreme, we can think of cannibals who would justify the eating of their own kith and kin.

 

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Here again, between the maximum and minimum of quality or quantity in the possible applications of this principle of non-hurting of fellow creatures, each one had to make up his mind about where to draw the line. I willingly therefore conformed with the ovo-lacto-vegetarianism that prevailed in the Fellowship School of the Quakers where I found myself. In Rome one had to be a Roman, when no fundamental principles were violated.

 

Extremes of exaggeration have to be avoided in the name of Absolutism when neutrally and normally conceived. The Gita recommends such a middle way called samatva, which implies harmony between extreme possible positions. Moreover, in actual practice one finds that it is often difficult to break away from conforming to prevailing standards in such matters unless one insists on being an out-and-out individualist in behaviour. Strict standards often become disturbed by outer circumstances calling for adaptability to existing environments. A man living in utter retirement can manage matters even more easily  without any compromise. Drupes and berries which leave the life-elements intact when the fruit has been eaten enable an easy practice of non-hurting. A farmer with his cattle who found a tiger lifting one of them each day can hardly be asked to forego them all in the name of this principle. Between the necessities and contingencies of the situation one strikes a middle course, which is the yogic way recommended by the Gita.

 

Thus it was that I found myself quite at home in my new surroundings as a pacifist, vegetarian and a cosmopolitan with flexible, open and dynamic notions of religious, moral or spiritual values.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY

 

I SETTLE IN A SWISS LAKESIDE SCHOOL

I arrived at Gland railway station, bag and baggage, one pleasant forenoon after the summer months were over, from my habitation in the Rue de l'Aubépine in one of the less rich districts of Geneva where I had settled for some time. The electric train in which I came had a stop at a small station previous to Gland, and I was about to alight there by mistake because of its not being a fast train but one of the ordinary ones. I quickly discovered my mistake and put my heavy trunk and belongings back and got to Gland.

 

By a strange chance an English couple who were on the staff of the Fellowship School where I was to teach, lodge and board, were present to meet some other arrival by the same train, and they offered to put my luggage in the 'char' (small four-wheeled cart) that they had brought with them from the School, which was a mile off on the borders of the blue Lake Léman. Except for some ugly remarks made by a lady who knew India and thought that I was an upstart coolie pretending to be the equal of Europeans, who want to look down on black colonials as inferior when they go east of Port Said, my welcome to the Fellowship School was fully cordial.

 

All turned out on my arrival at the School to have a look at the newcomer. As the School was divided into family units for dining-table facilities, with a male senior member, a woman senior member, two senior students, male and female, and children of different ages to make up seven or eight round a table, the senior boys and girls vied with one another to book me for their family as an interesting asset.

 

That I came from distant India was a special recommendation. The male teachers, they soon explained, were known as 'Pitar' because the Head of the School, Miss Emma Thomas, had discovered this Sanskrit name more suitable than the word 'Father', which had become somewhat hackneyed by long use in Catholic Schools.

 

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Deus-Pitar as the derivation of the name Jupiter, the Most High God, also helped in this choice, as the 'Pitar' of Jupiter  was traced by philologists to the same root as 'Pita' in Sanskrit. The corresponding feminine was 'Mata', which when Miss Thomas spelled it happened to be 'Moto' so that she was called the Moto of the School as a whole, and each woman teacher had Moto prefixed to her Christian name, while men had Pitar similarly used.

 

Thus it was that I was called Pitar Natarajan, or more endearingly, Pitar Natty for short, especially by the younger teenagers, both boys and girls, with whom I became very popular and even a favourite before hardly a month had passed.

 

BETWEEN A BOGEY MAN AND BONHOMME

I have a strange weakness for children which, as a personal trait, like a constant in mathematics, has always haunted me through my life wherever I have gone. In the strangest of countries, children discovered in me, as often as a dog or cat did, a familiar friend. They took it for granted that I was going to be good. Sometimes even the smallest of them took liberties with me on the road in the strangest of places, whether in the countryside of India itself or abroad.

 

In the village of Gland, where simple peasant boys were sometimes quietly grazing cattle and I had to pass them on the road, I could notice how they feared me as a kind of bogey-man, as children often called figures which were suppositious only and not real to them yet. A strange short figure, black or brown, was enough of a puzzle and reminded them, perhaps, of some Negro doll they might have seen. As I approached, I could see the boy in great difficulties trying to hide his fear and praying for me to get past him somehow without any fearful problems for him to solve. As the distance shortened between us, the confusion and fear mounted in inverse proportion of the square of the distance between us.

 

At the critical moment he would just manage to say 'Bonjour Monsieur', and when I went past without harming him he would gain his breath again, after being dumbfounded and almost tongue-tied. To hear me talk in response to his laboured greeting made the confusion more confounded, as in certain cases with younger children, especially after I had added, in later years, a beard to my enigmatic face, which once scared two tiny tots who were about to cry on seeing me approach, but could not help bursting into loud screams when they found that the bogey man could not only walk but even speak like others who were not bogies at all.

 

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School-children have followed me everywhere and, although I treated them as pets, I was obliged to look upon them as pests or nuisances when I could not get rid of them. When there was no elder person to scare them away with a grumpy voice, I found myself often mobbed and, as it were, marooned, surrounded by ragged urchins who took no end of liberties with me, treating me as a harmless 'bonhomme', no more harmful than the weakest among them.

 

How they were able to guess my helplessness so readily has remained a puzzle to me. I can remember a girl in rags, hardly six, who went far in making faces at me and treating me like a strange monkey or other animal, while I only smiled benignly and looked on. She continued her efforts to disturb my equanimity for several hours at a time and for several days on end, so that I began to wonder how much wickedness could remain stored in little imps of her small size.

 

As a schoolmaster I had to be a disciplinarian and the demands of this side and the extreme latitude that children took with me often created annoying problems, especially in a school which was fully committed to pacifist Quaker ways. All physical punishments were taboo too, and both the parents and teachers adhered to rule as best they could. I had to be an exception in this matter and often fell back on hitting myself when no other honest way could be found. Children understood and excused me. I made up quickly and we were all friends again.

 

NEW SCHOOL FOR OLD

'New Education', whatever the term was expected to mean, was the rage in the school world of Europe at the time I became one of the staff of the Fellowship School in Gland. From the Negative Education of Rousseau to the Free-Play method of Froebel and Pestalozzi, one heard such expressions as 'the Child-Centred School' and the 'Ecole Active', where education, instead of being given or driven into the pupils, as thought correct till then, was rather drawn out with a programme or syllabus based on the natural interest of the pupil, paedocentrically, as against a programme of subject-matter where books to read took the central position.

 

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Such schools were sometimes called 'experimental schools', either because they were based on experimental psychology or because the schools themselves were looked upon as experiments in educational research. The children were not only to be left alone, unpunished or uncoerced, but enjoyed what was called 'freedom', which often verged on license, and chaos sometimes reigned in classrooms.

 

In most cases the individual rather than a group was catered to. Sometimes the children were grouped according to age groups or subject groups, with projects to accomplish, whether within laboratories or in the open air. 'Learning through free play' was another doctrine in vogue, and the teacher was mostly an onlooker or a companion only, rather than the all-knowing village schoolmaster whom Goldsmith had portrayed. One talked in terms of 'a garden of children' where the horrid school bell and the grammar-school atmosphere through which a David Copperfield or an Oliver Twist had to be ground or licked into shape by the free use of the birch by the Murdstones or stepfatherly educators of the old school; or where the boy had to make good at any cost along the lines that the state or the county council demanded; or be banished into the army or the navy as a good-for-nothing - was no more the case.

 

On the contrary, sheer impishness and the terrible features of the spoiled child often came to evidence. Gloating over the two cross clauses of the full declaration of freedom of the child, which were 'I can if I want to' do such and such, and 'I don't have to', completed the condition which often made chaos prevail where all had been dead discipline and silence before.

 

Calligraphy and the three R's naturally suffered in such a setup and there was not much difference between a school working day and holiday. Such was the educational paradise into which I entered. As the teachers too, naturally, took their vocation as lightly as the pupils did, my life at the Fellowship School was no drudgery at all. Nestling among the mountains on the border of the lake, it was for me five years of freedom with everything found.

 

FROM STOIC TO EPICUREAN

Thus study and ease together mixed with the games and recreations in a Swiss village in full view of the Alps and their twilight glories reflected in the lake where swans glided and icicles melted as the seasons passed, not far from Nyon where Rousseau was born as the son of a watchmaker. Life was for me a pastoral paradise in earthly surroundings, which could not be any better.

 

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The table too, at the school, lacked no nourishing food. Plenty of butter, fruit, and milk, with all imaginable luxuries belonging to a rural gastronomy were provided in plenty. Natural honey and nuts and seasonal fruit and vegetables, with a cuisine that catered to all European tastes, French, Italian, or that of the New World; with a company of men and women in full healthy holiday mood - was just the opposite phase for me of the immediately preceding austere years that I had left behind in India. I feared that God was being too kind to me and tried hard to bring a touch of old austerity into the merry-making world in which my lot happened to be cast.

 

Dinner was on a cafeteria basis and all helped themselves at a large kitchen. Ad lib was the rule as we passed in single file round the various items of the full three-course meal, beginning with vegetable soup and ending with dessert. In the beginning I was so repulsed by the gourmandising atmosphere that one day I decided to be satisfied by the first course alone. I could not continue this severity on myself without being discovered by my young friends who became so touched by it that they stood round me one day, protesting and asking me to eat for their sakes and not be such a killjoy. It was not fair to all the rest, they argued, and I had to give in finally - which was not difficult as it was austerity which was unnatural. I was obliged to conform and soon began to grow fat on rich ovo-lactarian food, with other open-air activities.

 

When autumnal evenings began to be colder, indoor games and assemblies were organized and it was fun and frolic round the clock, except when one was in the nursing arms of sleep. The grape-gathering season was over, during which the vendangeurs and vendangeuses, young and old, had their time of gay orgies of kissing and being kissed while they plucked the grapes - which was quite normal then as between young and old of both sexes. This was a Swiss custom which had its origin from Rousseau's time and excites the people each year like the Holi of India.

 

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I AM DEEPLY TOUCHED BY 'EMILE'

 

Jean-Jaques Rousseau.

 

One day when it was my turn to be on duty in the kitchen of the school, making toast for supper for the whole community of fifty or sixty as the autumnal days set in with that strange touch of inner sadness that creeps into one at the time of the falling leaves before full winter, I remember that I sat near the fire and, while watching inside the large iron oven to see that the toast did not burn, I pored over the pages of Rousseau's 'Emile'.

 

My knowledge of French was still poor. By reading signboards and newspaper headlines and more particularly by scanning a textbook in which one page was the translation into English of the facing French text, I made headway inch by inch, always annoyed by the complications that the conjugation of irregular verbs presented and by the bugbear of gender that made syntax a hurdle for foreigners to the language.

 

Still I plodded on, burning the midnight lights. I made full use of the only full phrase I knew at the beginning which was the English title of one of Keats' poems, 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' and naughtily repeated it to some of the girls to make them mock my aptitude in learning French. Instead of taking easy books with no interest to me, I adopted the contrary way of following as best as I could the thoughts in difficult books such as those of Bergson and Rousseau.

 

I distinctly remember when I read in Emile the following, 'It is to thee that I speak, gentle and foreseeing mother' etc. in the introduction where, continuing, Rousseau says that it is the mother alone who can put a fence round the growing child in the initial stages of its education so as to protect it from those who might tamper and distort the growth of the tender plant when it needs full protection. 'C'est à toi que je parle, douce et prévoyante mère' ran the actual words which enthralled me for the first time as I read Emile to find its affinity with Indian concepts of education. I could see the kinship between 'negative education' and the idea of brahmacharya as understood in the context of Indian education. This was an eye-opener for me in my researches on the 'Personal Factor in the Educative Process' which was to be my chosen subject for a thesis I was to write for Paris.

 

I was also deeply moved by another sentence there which ran as follows: 'Reader, remember always that he who speaks to you is neither a philosopher nor a savant, but a simple man, a lover of truth (un ami de la vérité)'. How often since then have I repeated these words, each time with an increasing emotion, till sometimes I have been so deeply touched as to have tears filling my eyes.

 

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Rousseau became thus for me a key to Western civilization more and more; and a sure contact was thus established between me of the East with the West by my understanding of the dear spirit of Rousseau who combined the 'Solitary Promeneur', the 'Lover of Heloïse' and the 'Teacher of Emile'. He was a Citizen of Geneva and at the same time a Citizen of the World. I have not been able to forget him for the rest of my life. 0 Kindred Spirit! I now greet thee again from this distance of time and space, after two hundred years have passed since you lived with vivacious emotions, the same as when I read your precious words!

 

Autumnal evenings merged and blended with colder winter days and, after an initial cold and attack of fever by which my system seemed to adjust itself to the challenge of real winter in a European climate; with a sense of fear of what was going to be, and with deep-seated emotions being revived within, both intellectually and instinctively, with new sets of relations with people around - I felt a strange sense of the numinous not unmixed with a touch of agony, anxiety and even exaltation at the strangeness of the situation as a whole. Admiration for Rousseau became more and more justified as I read more of him and allied literature in preparation for my work at the University.

 

FOREWARNED OF A SECOND LOVE AFFAIR

Before the last embers of my first affair with a woman had died out, I had early forebodings of another that was going to erupt, as it were, from underground. A pretty French teacher at the school was in question this time. As each family table had to have a father and mother and enough children of both sexes, I found that by some strange chance this particular person was at my table.

 

I had already been looking to her for help in learning French. Something forewarned me that I should change my family table and not be bracketed with this pretty mistress. I did so. In the long run, however, this deliberate avoidance did not avail. A strange intimacy began to grow between us, which seemed to have the approval of all nature. She was the teacher willing to teach me, and I had to be closeted with her in the newspaper room of which I was in charge and where I had my own books for my work and gave lessons in science for the junior boys and girls three or four times a week.

 

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It was the warmest and cosiest corner too for me to remain most of the late autumnal days. I spent many hours alone there, sometimes half-drowsily listening to a girl at her piano practice in the adjoining school hall. Some of the haunting notes of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata sank into my own subconscious and became part and parcel of my own nature while it seemed also to interpret the colourful autumnal scene which I watched through the windows.

 

While sweet memories brought also memories bright or dark around me, it was at this period that a strange letter was received from the woman in a far-off land whose story I have already told and by which the last embers of my love affair with her were to be soon extinguished. At the time she was still treating the matter seriously. The long letter described how she had made the acquaintance of another man who was keen on having her as a life companion. She wished that I should permit her to enter into alliance with him and absolve her of any understanding with me. I gave her this assurance readily and thus a chapter was properly closed, though the ashes continued to be warm till death on her part extinguished them finally about three or four years later. The new love affair was ready to leap its surprise on me already - and however much I tried to avoid it, all my efforts only made it more difficult for me to completely call a halt to further developments.

 

On a certain evening I was going to catch the night train to Paris for the first time to see the professor who was to interview me about the thesis that I was to submit in another two years or so. The kind lady accompanied me at dusk as far as the railway station, and on the way put me a strange question which I did not understand at first, which was clothed in the simplest of words: 'Pitar Natty,' she said, 'What do you think of me?' I could not answer her so simply and straightforwardly as she was able to put this momentous question. She was bringing out into the open something she could not express. In the world of love affairs, however, it was an event as important as the eruption of a latent volcano.

 

Next school year after winter, however, the illness of her parents kept her away from the school, and I had for the time being no problem to solve. I continued my life playing mixed football matches or tennis; indulging in swimming whenever the weather permitted; and taking language lessons in French and German, while I gave my lessons, in class or to individuals, in English and in science subjects, for seniors as well as juniors.

 

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A STRANGE CHANCE EVENT

In India one hears of psychic powers or siddhis, which ought really to refer to spiritual attainments or perfections of some kind, but are often imagined to be supernatural or extra-sensorial aptitudes or abilities such as divination, telepathy, clairvoyance or the power to produce some desired results at will. Materialisations and hallucinations too get mixed up with these, but the officially-recognised siddhis or powers of a yogi in Sanskritic lore, which are eight in number, are said to belong to the series: anima, mahima, laghima, garima, prakamya, isitva, vasitva, prapti - with many others sometimes added - and comprise powers of being or becoming small, big, light, heavy; of mastery, divinity, control and attainment.

 

Sleight of hand is responsible for some so-called powers, but others are more psychic or occult. A mixture of elements, apparent or real, can produce puzzling effects. To see light between the eyebrows when meditating, and to hear sounds or have visions of holy lights with singing of heavenly choirs are other familiar forms of siddhis, besides levitation and flying into thin air.

 

I have been strangely innocent of any of these during the course of my spiritual practices. I tended normally to discredit them and only hoped one day to discover their scientific basis, while generally preferring to be sceptical about them. I cannot say, however, that I never had an experience of an order that could be suspected to be supernatural or abnormal.

 

This, as it so happened in my case, has been connected with books. When I wanted a book badly, by some strange chance I came up against it, almost as a rule. The need had to be real and the desire fully genuine. It may be possible that there is a subjective element involved, so that when a certain expected event happens, you tend to match a desire for it as its cause without any intrinsic cause-effect relation between them - it might have been a mere sequence and you have read more into it than there is actual justification for in the case itself when treated without fuss. All such views are possible, but one cannot fail to note a coincidence, especially when it is of great significance to one's life.

 

Miss Thomas had decided to give me a room near and overlooking the lake with only the fishing boats and the pebbled beach intervening. A fisherman was living next door, with two or three motor-propelled boats with which he went fishing with his wife.

 

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The broad lake, with the French Savoy opposite, was rich in finny population of various kinds. In this room was where the chance event took place which I tell without any distortion of circumstances at all.

 

A TREASURE TROVE OF BOOKS

It was a longish room, with doors and windows opening towards the lake only, and my bed and table were at the end where there was enough light. I was to begin my work seriously on my thesis, and was preparing to make the first skeleton outlines and explore for preliminary books which would give me ample data.

 

I had to take a decision to start the work on the thesis in right earnest and had drawn two tables together and got ready the writing materials. I sat down, determined to make a beginning - but I thought of the preliminary books I had to read. I was not acquainted enough with the new school of analytical psychology. Freud and Jung were the rage at the time, and Adler too was much talked about. How could I prepare a thesis without knowing about them? And there were experimental aspects of psychology which I had not mastered and without which my thesis would be feeble in its documentation and cross-references.

 

I raised my pen several times to start writing the first paragraph of the introduction. The pen gave me some trouble too. I felt disgusted with myself on not being able to muster the first sentences which, when well begun would have made my task half done, as the adage puts it. A first, second and a third time I made my attempt, but I felt no confidence in what I wanted to say, which had to be one hundred per cent honest and original. I was not going to get a doctorate with made-up theories or on findings of a second-hand order.

 

When I found that my confidence utterly failed me a third time, I put my pen down in disgust, rose from my seat and began to pace up and down the longish room. How was I to reach the books on psychoanalysis and have a better grounding in experimental aspects of psychology? I had already ransacked the school library and asked the other members for any books in their respective collections. The only alternative was to go to the nearest library in Geneva, which meant a day's journey each time.

 

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As I paced up and down, I clearly remember noticing, for the first time, a curtain hiding a door at the hindmost end of my room. I removed the curtain, pushed open the door and entered a lumber room where old things were stowed away. There, on a broken piece of furniture, I found a pile of big volumes. I looked at their titles and what was my surprise when I found that they all referred to abnormal and analytical psychology which I wanted to consult very badly indeed just at that moment. Miss Thomas had wanted these books to be put away from adolescent readers because they contained sex anecdotes. And there they were, together worth a couple of hundred Swiss francs, and all waiting for me to make use of them.

 

If the coincidence did not tally with the very moment I was in anguish for them, I could have dismissed it as a mere accident - but put together with my inner agony for lack of them just at that very moment, I could not treat the event merely mechanistically. There were more than merely brute mechanistic factors involved, whatever name I might give to the chance element which was a blend of probabilities and possibilities of a fifty-fifty world of subtle occasionalism. As I claimed to be both a sceptic and a believer at once, as one dedicated to absolutism, I left this as an open question and I do so even now. It could be treated just as a mere coincidence if I thought like Bertrand Russell; but in the light of the principle of pre-established harmony in the universe of a Leibniz I can look upon the same event as a wonder and a mystery. I like to accept both of these and fit them into a common scheme of the Absolute, as a fact as well as a mystery at once.

 

While I am on this subject I must also say here that a fortnight after this event I found another book I wanted in the same mysterious way. It was the book on experimental psychology that interested me then, which I wanted to revise from end to end before starting on my thesis. I had asked all the teachers, especially the English couple, Mr. and Mrs. Best, who had a fine collection of books in their flat upstairs, also overlooking the lake, just above my room.

 

It was Easter of 1928 and the whole school had gone to Arles in the South of France for an excursion and historical study round the Greek remains there. The couple had entrusted their flat to my care and I could use their library when they were away, as also their crockery and all the jams and conserves they had left behind. I did not let the chance slip and helped myself freely to the provisions.

 

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I looked once again all over for the wanted book, although I had already asked the owners if they had it and they had denied it. At a moment of keen need felt inside, I bent over the bookshelf again, and a smallish book with peculiar Sanskritized lettering on the back, belonging to the 'Temple Series' as it was called, seemed to beckon to me to come closer and take a look at the title. When I bent more closely, I read, to my surprise, the very words 'Experimental Psychology, by William Mac Dougall'. No better book could have come to my hands just then, and I grabbed it with prayerful avidity and a thankful drop of tears in my eyes - confirmed sceptic and unbeliever that I otherwise ordinarily claimed to be in other moments of my life. Life consists both of facts as well as mysteries.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

 

WALKING THE CORRIDORS OF THE UNIVERSITY

 

Paris in the 1920's.

 

Paris, Paris! This name has endeared itself to modern man in many ways. Its charms have attracted many a globetrotter, and to repeat the name brings to mind a cluster of associations that cling together almost into a persona.

 

Paris has a female personality which one never fails to sense on entering through its walls. Besides the Cathedral so called, some fashionable 'Notre Dame' occupies mentally the core of Paris, trotting the pavements in a quick high-heeled pace. It is the woman and not the man who is respected in Paris, and if anywhere in the world the word 'Madame' gains meaning in modernism, it is at Paris that its high-water mark gets recorded every time you utter the word. The aristocrat or bourgeois here takes off his gloves to shake hands with a mere servant-woman, which one does not do elsewhere in civilised cities.

 

To love Paris is to respect Woman, irrespective of her faults which might be more glaringly revealed in the night-life of Montmartre than anywhere else in the respectable world. Thus it is that the 'amour' of Paris is 'pour toujours' (forever). Like the thing of beauty which is 'a joy forever' as Keats would say, 'Paris toujours' is the slogan natural in the mouth of the young dandy or old flirt.

 

Much intellectual life has also to be associated with Paris, with its life dating back to the fall of Rome after which soldiers, priests, sailors and philosophers jostled and rubbed shoulders in what is called 'la vie de Paris', lasting for centuries. Even the concierges and charwomen were respected like vestal virgins here. Such was the Paris that in the autumn of 1928 I walked into, unconscious yet of her charms and claims to be worshipped on the part of a votary from a far-off shore, suckled by other strange 'pagan' and 'barbarous' cults and customs.

 

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LIFE IN THE LATIN QUARTER

'See Naples and die', goes the saying, but the smells and sights

of actual Naples might be repulsive. After alighting at the Gare de Lyon I was conducted through the streets of Paris by an Indian friend who later become famous as a physicist. It was still early in the morning and the autumnal sun was hardly visible in the dull air. The shops and boutiques were opening, and the trams and Métro only beginning to wake up the lazy giant city from its prolonged slumbers after a busy previous night. Most of Europe is dead drunk still at eight in the morning, and the carpet-beating of some wilful man on a fifth-floor balcony only makes the sleeper turn onto the other side to get his lost forty winks again. The polite policeman of Paris breathes mist like a fiery horse, and the wayside vendor begins to arrange his flowers or stockings with a yawn. The waitresses too shake off their slumbers as best they can before the revels begin again with glasses clinking and pavement cafes begin to work in full swing through the day into the recesses of the night.

 

'Le Quartier Latin' is where all Parisian life converges to reveal its most unconventional liberties. Past the University area where blonde girl students can be seen walking arm in arm with their jet-black counterparts from the interior of the Dark Continent, or sipping café noir sitting on high seats in restaurants, one reaches the Porte d'Orléans, where fish and rabbits hanging upside down are displayed alongside chic shops with flower- or newspaper-vendors, with roasted nuts too. All this makes for the busy life of the more common Parisian. The latest Paris cries can be heard here as in the days of old.

 

I finally went off the Boulevard to a smaller side-street where I was to live at No.5, Rue Marie Davy, 14th district, where my kind hostess Madame Morin was expecting me. This lady was a friend of Indians, many of whom enjoyed her hospitality over many years. Finally her love of India brought her to Delhi, where she still lives, broadcasting in French for All-India Radio. To have become such a mouthpiece must have been in her karma in this or a prior life. Such thoughts do not sound strange to an Indian mind, although they might rub a Papist the wrong way.

 

I had a room to myself which belonged to the son of Madame Morin, Jean-Jacques, then about twelve, who was then in a boarding-school. There, sitting up many times on autumnal mornings carrying the foretaste of winter to come, I formulated the contents of the thesis I was going to write for the Sorbonne University. Many tentative skeletons were made and torn up before something satisfactory emerged.

 

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The agony of finding shelter, learning a language, paying for my lodging and board, finding guides or friends, were still uphill points for me to climb and reach if possible. Faith alone was on my side then. I felt much helplessness and ignorance, keenest at this time of my life; and to Madame Morin goes the credit of giving me some attention which is still appreciated by this man who is 'ever yours truly', no other than a 'satya-dharman' - a lover of truth trying to walk in its path.

 

THE SUBJECT THAT HAS REMAINED DEAR TO ME

'The Personal Factor in the Educative Process' was the title of the thesis I was going to submit to the University. Even before going to Paris I had made up my mind in this matter, as I have always been of the opinion that the core of education consists of proper rapport between teacher and taught. This principle has been understood through all time in India, as even a peasant woman to this day would strongly vouch for in asking her child to touch the feet of a passing saddhu or itinerant teacher. From the learning of the first alphabet to wisdom, this Guru-sisya (master-pupil) relation counts; and this belief, tacitly accepted by millions for ages, needed to be restated in a revised form for moderns to understand. The subject had enough research features involving psychology, pedagogy and philosophy.

 

The whole theory and practice of Indian education had to be revalued and restated, and this topic that touched the core would, I thought, command a basic interest that would not pass away quickly. Modern education under the New Education Movement started by Dr. Adolphe Ferrière, Dr. Edouard Claparède and Dr. Pierre Bovet, whose personal acquaintance I had already made at Geneva while at the Institute Jean-Jacques Rousseau where I had completed short courses already, had given me enough modern ideas in education to give flesh and blood to my study of the role of the Guru.

 

Taking the dust off the feet of a Guru walking the dusty roads of India has been a gesture dear to the Indian mind, even before the great Buddha's days when it was fully recognised; and the unique character and personality India possesses to this day is owing to this respect for Guruhood. To analyse this regard and give it, if possible, a new lease of life was to be my contribution through my thesis.

 

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I am sure the idea is dear to India still and perhaps will remain so whatever else changes and passes. At least that is a hope, even if all else should be lost. Whether in early 'negative' education, in later adolescent 'natural', or mid-life 'pragmatic', or in 'idealistic' education before death, the bipolarity as between teacher and taught holds good as a law in education.

 

Nature's pages could substitute for the Guru in a sense, and a living guide represent the Guru-ideal - but these are partial aspects of the total situation in which a full osmosis could take place between the two poles of the situation. Both gain equal transparency in the end when the Absolute vision is complete. Such were some of the implications of the subject I had chosen.

 

I MEET MY 'RAPPORTEUR'

The nights began earlier and lasted longer, and this gave me a strange sense to which I was unused and which I cannot describe in words. It had an element of self-realization which made it interesting to me as I sat one evening in a Métro that had emerged from underground, where it properly belonged, to above the houses and roads in the area of Paris where the Eiffel Tower raised its head and was visible like a ghost from far off, through the misty atmosphere lit up with blurred lights. The Trocadéro and the triumphal arch passed by and I was being conducted to the study of Professor Wallon by my good hostess Madame Morin.

 

Wallon was the name of a young professor of the Faculty of Letters of the Sorbonne who was to be my 'rapporteur'. Madame was my interpreter in French and I readily handed in the abstract in French that I had got ready. He scanned the items and turned the pages silently for some time and seemed satisfied, but soon added that Indians were generally 'sentimental', and the thesis had to be  'objective' and 'critical'. I knew already that these words were dear to the modern Western mind. 'Demonstrable', 'operational', 'pragmatic', 'scientific' and 'realist' are other modern words which are dear to the West - and anything that even smells of the a priori is at once suspect and thus repugnant. The modern man forgets that all speculation is immersed in truths taken for granted as a priori, whether as axioms, postulates, theorems, riders, corollaries or lemmas which all depend on the principle of the a priori.

 

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I took up the challenge of the professor from that day, and have tried to fulfil the requirements of the critical approach in all my speculative writings. A science must have its due proportion of both speculation and criticism, which together bring up the total knowledge-situation in the progress or procession of thought, speculative or scientific. It was thus that I struck another bargain in my life-long research of the Absolute.

 

ICE-BOUND WINTER COMES WITH SANTA CLAUS

By the time I returned to Switzerland the trees had shed their leaves and winter sleet and slush were announced, with the Mistral or the Bise that needed double shutters to keep out the cold. There are many kinds of killing winds in the world 'nor good for man nor beast', rising from land or sea. Of these the Bise with its league-long wings was special to the lakeside Canton of Vaud in Switzerland, as the Mistral is to the South of France. It brought blizzards which alternated with hoarfrost and unhealthy mists decking the pine trees in various fantastic costumes from day to day or week to week, revealing or hiding Alpine scenery both near and far.

 

Icicles and frozen lakes were common, favourable to iceskating and other winter sports. Migrating water birds of many kinds, and robins who ate crusts off the windowsill, lent the winter air a mystical content of joy. Indoor cosiness and comfort had its counterpart in the bleak skies outside, so that one reflected the projection of the other with a subtle one-one correspondence between the inner and outer spaces.

 

Winter too had its glad tidings and greetings of the season, presided over by the pagan Santa Claus figure of the pine-clad Nordic clime with a sled drawn by reindeer. Christmastide, with its carol singing when the first snows are evident, brings the pagan world of witches, Pucks and Jack-O'Lanterns into full view, as reflected in Goethe or Shakespeare. Christianity can never hide its pagan background in spite of its Passion Plays belonging to the Greek context.

 

Warming myself in bed and keeping fires going all round were responsibilities I shared with all others. Shutting doors after one and not letting the heat warm the garden outside were precautions to be taken, and thus winter days passed memorably for me as we enjoyed its close embrace.

 

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STUNG BY A WASP BEFORE BAD NEWS REACHES ME

Coming events cast their shadows before. Strangely, an instance of this kind came into my experience when winter days were beginning and we were planning to go to the Dôle, the highest peak of the Jura Mountains, a formation of a different geological origin from the Alps, to the north of Lake Geneva.

 

In September I had celebrated the birthday of the Guru Narayana at a place in Geneva, the 'Salle Quo Vadis', which a kind Theosophically-inclined lady, a follower of Abdul Baha, had lent me for the day. It had a small auditorium with separate places for cooking and eating. I sent out invitations, asking people to bring an offering of fruits or flowers to the Guru, whose picture was placed on a pedestal and decorated with flowers and adored in right Indian style, not omitting incense and the waving of the camphor flame.

 

A dinner of rice and vegetable curry was also cooked by me. About fifty Europeans responded and participated in these quaint formalities with open-minded willingness, and a very fine atmosphere prevailed during the day. The Rev. C.F. Andrews, passing through Geneva, sent a note too, with a few rose-flower offerings, saying that he was on his way to Marburg University that day, after visiting Romain Rolland that morning, to meet Dr. Rudolf Otto, whose book 'The Idea of the Holy' ('Das Heilige'), was just then a sensation of the season.

 

This event was on September 14th, and on September 28th the Guru Narayana attained samadhi (final peace) in life. I was still ignorant of this event in the school at Gland, on that winter day when I was preparing with two others to climb the peak of the Dôle. On that morning, a wasp, angry that summer days were over but who continued to survive in the colder days, had stung me, and this mishap, though negligible in itself, had induced a strange state of anxiety in my mind, sensitive as I have been always to adverse red lights wherever they flickered as signals or omens against me. One always waits for what adverse event might follow. I was aware that all this was nonsense but could not help noticing the coincidence for whatever it was worth. Coming events do cast their shadows, however faint, before - though not as a mechanical rule, but in the subtle language of chance or omens. It is the voice of the Tao, for those who are sensitive to its whisperings.

 

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The wasp-stung mood of anxiety had scarcely passed away when I got the news that the Guru Narayana had passed away in India. What heightened its significance to me was the fact that the date was roughly four months after I had taken leave of him, as recounted already, and his words 'four months' when I said I would be away for eight months, were still ringing in my ears. There are still, small voices that one can listen to within oneself if one is sensitive and can properly tune in to them.

 

MY VISIT TO ROMAIN ROLAND

 

Romain Rolland.

 

The great pacifist writer of France, the author of 'Jean-Christophe', a novel in several volumes, was living in retirement or self-imposed banishment at a small lakeside retreat in Switzerland at the other end of the same lake on whose borders I too lived.

 

Soon after the birthday celebrations of the Guru Narayana at the 'Salle Quo Vadis' in Geneva, I had a letter from the author of international fame whose books were no sooner issued then they were read in several languages in far-flung corners of the Western world. He had heard about the Guru Narayana from the Rev. C.F. Andrews, and wanted to meet me as the Guru's disciple. A date and time were fixed which I tried to adhere to as best as I could. At Lausanne station, however, where I had to change trains for Villeneuve, I made the mistake of being exact to the minute to try to get into the train, and when two minutes still remained, started from the first platform to the second, but in spite of my carefulness, by over-punctuality rather than neglect, I missed the train by one minute, as the railway clocks were automatic and my watch worked second by second instead of the minute-hand jumping once a minute rather than progressing by seconds. When I said there were still several seconds for the last minute, the railway clock had changed position twice. A sort of Zeno paradox involving Achilles and the tortoise - the former never being able to overtake the latter - was involved here. I learnt to respect Zeno from that day, but as I had to take the next train I arrived at Romain Roland's residence nearly an hour late. Otherwise the interview went well.

 

I was received in the drawing room of a villa bordering the high ranges of the Jura as they closed on the Alps from the southern side of the eye-shaped lake. I forgot to make any apology for being late, as the great writer, then a bachelor past sixty, and his sister Madeleine greeted me.

 

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Soon the conversation touched the subject of the Guru. I happened to mention that the Guru mistrusted excesses like killing to please God in the name of religion. Not having visited India, the sharp grey eyes of the moustached visage of the lean and pale-looking Frenchman seemed to peer into mine questioningly. Between Bengal and Kerala a racial difference of temperament was soon read into the story, although actually there are no two ethnic groups in India that could be bracketed together as alike as the Bengali and the Malayali. He then scanned me with cat-like eyes, and with his natural penetration took me to be a representative man of Kerala, which in many respects I do not think I am.

 

In one of his posthumously-published diaries he has a small note about meeting me and pays me the compliment of being ugly. Although I do not consider myself very good-looking by Western standards, from my own inner standards I have never had any misgiving about my good looks. My mirror has always praised me, whatever others might have thought of me as fat, round or bald, as I actually was. One sees Helen's beauty in an eye of Egypt, as Shakespeare would put it about a lover's imagination. On my part, the slanting moustache, grey eyes and pale look of Romain Roland himself did not make any particular impression on me either, and thus we can be quits on this subject, I suppose, at least at this late hour.

 

A short footnote in 'The Life of Ramakrishna' which Rolland was at that time writing, shows how he made use of the interview in getting all information he could. We sat and sipped tea together and, on hearing a cough and a voice from the next room, Rolland remarked to me that it was his father who was nearing a century in age. 'He talks to himself sometimes', he added. Rolland's ability to read into the general climate and implications of Indian spirituality without ever visiting the country, it must be said, does much credit to him.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

 

IN EUROPE BETWEEN THE WARS

Three more years of holidaymaking on the continent of Europe still remained for me to enjoy. From 1930 to April 1933, many unexpected trapdoors of chance opened for me to give me peeps into the history and civilization of Europe. I had only to let go and not make my own plans, to be taken free of cost to all the best scenes, art-galleries and museums, cities, and hubs of what together make up Western civilization.

 

But we cannot afford in these backward glances to linger too long over each item. A peep through each door left ajar for me to get a passing view is all we can attempt here. Let memory bring its 'sweet light of other days' again. Regrets, if any, could have been bitter when mixed with memories, which can never attain to the full savour of sweetness; but in my case, regrets are not strong enough to mar in any way the sweetness of those unforgettable days.

 

I shall tell here the story of a stranger from the Deep South of India as he found his way in post-Georgian Europe after the First World War. The heart of Europe was still beating strong at that time, with not yet any signs of the decadence which only became evident a little later. From the fall of the Roman Empire through the French and Russian Revolutions to the League of Nations, reborn as the United Nations, the events are too many - but the pulsations of the heart of Europe were sturdy and sound still and held out a promise of world-wide repercussions which were to be far-flung and significant to impress the age the world over with its characteristic contributions - whether good or bad remains to be judged by posterity.

 

I FIRST TURN MY EYES TO ENGLAND

I had early located the heart or epicentre of European thought in the 'Citizen of Geneva', the solitary 'Promeneur' and lover of Truth, who was none other than the much-misunderstood and persecuted Rousseau.

 

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Without him at its core, European civilization would be an empty shell of opulent glamour hiding poverty in the form of economic scarcity, with no true value-content within, as Voltaire correctly indicated in his 'Candide'.

 

With all his faults, it was Rousseau who proved that Europe still had a pulsating heart. True, his own is considered to this day as over-sentimental by some of Europe's best sons; but to the view of an outsider like me, Rousseau's sentiments alone acted as an eye-opener to civilization as applied to Europe which otherwise would have remained a closed book to all men sensitive to the human values.

 

Both Rousseau and Voltaire were hounded round different parts of Europe for the opinions they expressed, and the game of ushering in the Age of Enlightenment in Europe can be said to have been played with a ball that was passed from one side that was sentimental to the other that was over-rational - as represented by Rousseau and Voltaire respectively. Both found The Hague of those days an open-minded city where they could take refuge from the closed and static loyalties of the old regime.

 

England too, nobly played the role of protector of the freedom of thought with its sceptical Protestant and empirical outlook, and gave hospitality to these men off and on. The credit and glory that this brought to Great Britain, as both belonging to Europe and outside its mental climate, linger on in the reputation for stern common sense that the British people still enjoy in the eyes of the rest of the world. It was thus right that I should turn my eyes to England to know modern Europe.

 

CROSSING THE CHANNEL IN A CHOPPY SEA

Known as Pitar Natty in the little international lakeside community in Switzerland where I had spent my first two years in Europe, I soon became a favourite among the boys and girls who clung round me constantly with familial familiarity. One day, even before the limit of the two years was over, an elderly lady from Wales belonging to an old Quaker family, Miss Edith Roberts of Nelson, Glamorgan, who had watched me with the children of the school, and who was dressed in a broad-brimmed straw hat and plain untrimmed robes, accosted me and with deep seriousness in her face and offered me a blank cheque which I could fill with any amount I wished, to enable me to visit England and Wales.

 

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The reason she gave was a touching one, and I could not disrespect her sentiments, even if I did not want to take the chance. 'My father built railways in India', she said, 'and I have always wished to return part of the gains to an Indian'. I was myself broke, with my bank balance dwindling and at that precise time altogether inadequate for a trip to England and back. Besides the blank cheque, she had procured a return ticket for me in a comfortable second-class to London, via Paris, Dieppe and Folkestone.

 

Starting sufficiently early the previous day, Paris was passed at night and the Dieppe-Folkestone crossing was announced during the early hours of the next morning. It was a long schooner or cutter that waited to ferry us over the chafing channel, on whose deck we soon found ourselves huddled with our belongings. The crossing was not long, but the chilly winds and choppy weather were all unfavourable for any tender sentiments, least of all lovemaking, as I could not omit noticing with some couples or pairs of them around me. No doves can coo in adverse weather. Love calls for a calm atmosphere - it is vertical and bad weather is horizontal. They cannot go together.

 

At long last the daylight announced itself and the ferry was within sight of the English coast. A fellow-passenger who was an English student in London stood beside me on the deck and pointed at the first English roof that caught our eye in that dear old country. He taught me to recognize the pub which is always to be associated with Merry England. Soon on English soil my friend helped me to find my way to London. A taxi soon took me to Gower Street Indian Hostel, where, after a few hours waiting, I got a bed-and-breakfast lodging in famous London Town.

 

CHANGING LONDON AND CHANGEFUL WEATHER

 

 

 

London in the 1930's.

 

John Gilpin's London Town with its turnpikes and towers must have changed after the Great Fire and the Plague recorded in old Pepys' Diary. Dickens too portrayed a London in his 'Pickwick Papers' and 'David Copperfield'. Sir Roger de Coverley saw a London that was pre-Victorian as revealed in the Spectator essays of Addison. My familiarity with London was supplemented by what was heard and seen in pictures and from the Illustrated London News. The Thames Embankment, Tower Bridge, and the Houses of Parliament had figured on the top of biscuit boxes or as wallpaper designs. Stereoscopes had made me familiar with the fabulous policeman of London and the newsboy, representing London types in life already known.

 

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Ever-changing London presented to me three different pictures on my three visits and sojourns there; the first in 1930, the second in 1951 and the third in 1969. Each time it was almost a different London that I visited, although at its very core London retained its personality. The London of winter was quite different from the hot London of summer with its unexpected thunderstorms and showers. It was in such an uncertain London that I found myself on my very first visit in 1930. It was a cold, sleety, misty and bleak London that I visited in 1951. I remember walking under Big Ben on Christmas Eve of 1951 with my overcoat, hands kept warm in my pockets. The short days were closing in even at five and, in the boarding-house in Tavistock Square where I stayed, I had to keep warm by putting pennies in slots for the gas fire to burn as in the good old days. Changeless London still lingered on as a state of mind in spite of change all round. Hyde Park Corner and Picadilly Circus retain still some of their fine old aspects. Greater London with its suburban life is where change was seen greatest during my 1969 visit. The familiar Londoner was being displaced by people from all the far-flung corners both of palm and of pine - dark, fair or mixed, to make of modern Greater London a mosaic pattern of different complexions and mentalities.

 

AT PILGRIM PLACE, NELSON, GLAM.

The countryside of England gives a better picture of English life. I had already an invitation to spend a few days at a typical old Quaker house in the Welsh town of Nelson, near Cardiff, removed from urbanism and hiding within typical country surroundings. I took a train at Euston for Glamorganshire. The Great Western Railway engine soon gathered full speed as its big wheels covered the countryside like a dart. The waiter soon after announced lunch and, while bridges and fields went by as I watched through the dining saloon window that shook characteristically because of the luxury springs beneath the bogeys, an Englishman sitting facing me at table put me a question which was queer to me though natural enough from his standpoint. 'Is Gandhi still giving trouble in India?' he asked.

 

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'Sure', I nodded assentingly, swallowing my patriotism, if any, to accommodate the conversation that naturally followed afterwards. Yes, the Mahatma was a troublemaker, only he made such trouble that one group liked and another disliked. There were racial and geographical boundaries involved, however generously interpreted. If there was absolutism in the trouble, it was not at least evident on the surface.

 

The Bristol Channel was crossed under the estuary rather than by an overhead bridge. It was a new experience for me to be told that we had passed from England to Wales at an estuary in daylight without seeing the water that we had crossed. Changing to a smaller-gauge railway line at Cardiff, I continued through winding hilly country scenery, not unlike that of the Indian Nilgiris, into Wales proper past Welsh towns whose names I could hardly pronounce. Beyond Pontypridd I found my way to the little village of Nelson in Glamorganshire to the house of my hostess, whose sister received me with the charming hospitality of old Wales, now unknown in urbanised parts of Great Britain: mixing with the people of the place; attending an educational conference; cooking a much-relished Indian dinner for the inmates of Pilgrim Place, as the centre I lived in was called; and airing all my views openly and freely without reserve.

 

After spending five days, I returned part of the way to Cardiff in a cart with an ex-member of Parliament in charge of doling out help to unemployed Welsh workers in social centres scattered over South Wales. The troubles of the labouring section became fully evident to me as I was taken in a spin to more than a dozen places. I was dropped at a wayside station in the afternoon from where I reached Cardiff sufficiently early to attend a lecture by Mrs. Annie Besant in the biggest half of the town, with Mr. Shiva Rao on the platform with her, speaking on Indian Home Rule. An Irish lady speaking on Indians in Wales gave me fresh perspectives in politics. Cardiff, I discovered, had some colour prejudice because of Negro sailors, who were not welcome in some inns and restaurants. I bought some clothes in a main-street shop before returning to the baggage I had left in the station, and took the train late at night back to London. Arriving too early, before daybreak, I waited till it was daylight to find my room again in the Gower Street Hostel.

 

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Sight-seeing for its own sake was against my principles in life, and, for the reason of insisting on sights coming to me instead of my seeking out sights, I spent a whole afternoon sitting on one of the benches opposite the British Museum. Rare exhibits of interest, especially as I was a naturalist and indologist, must have been missed, but curiosity must have a break and what we learn must come by natural interest contacts of time and place. I would not go out of my way to seek new satisfactions. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof. More sights have come to me by this negative attitude than to many others equal to me in other respects who have cultivated interests more haphazardly. The world of interest outside and our own curiosity must be correctly linked so that an osmotic interchange of essences involved between them can naturally take place.

 

The Nelson monument, Covent Garden, the place where Johnson lived in the Haymarket, what was said to be the Old Curiosity Shop pictured by Dickens, Hyde Park Corner - not to speak of Kingsway, the East End where Quakers worked in slum areas, and High Holborn - none went out of my view. Sight after sight came before me.

 

Once entering Hyde Park, summer as it was, the lawns were filled with holidaymakers basking in sunlight. Spring fever was still lingering on and, unlike in India, love-excited men and women with flushed faces were having a good time. I sauntered along with my broad-brimmed hat and long hair showing its curls behind. As I entered the park, I created a sensation as I must have appeared a queer figure like the man figured on Quaker Oats packets. I could not explain the uproar that went on around me wherever I walked that day, till I had proved experimentally that it was the curly hair beneath the broad-brimmed hat that had gone slightly out of fashion that acted as a cynosure, by returning to the same spot without creating any excitement after I had a haircut, everything else remaining the same as before,

I visited my Bahai friend, Lady Bloomfield, and was taken in her brother's car to have a spin round the sights of London. Another day I took tea in Parliament House overlooking the Thames with the famous Labour member, Fenner Brockway. I dined another noon in the suburban residence of two other senior parliamentarians after attending a Quaker meeting at Euston.

 

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I missed my way many times, walking the streets and shop-window gazing, catching wrong buses to add to the confusion. I used the underground 'tube' and climbed by revolving staircases at Tottenham Court Road. I did not omit Woolworth's, also once attending a Church service at St. Martins in the Fields. The blank cheque was filled in by me with 'pounds ten' which I cashed at the Trafalgar Square branch of Lloyds Bank, and I had time too, to get a London tailor make a coat and plus-fours - in fashion then in London - made of heavy woollen worsted.

 

After a full fare of London's attractions, major and minor too, like eating at the Lyons' Corner House restaurant or witnessing a Punch and Judy marionette show, I returned to Geneva the way I went, this time the train rounding the outskirts of Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon, to avoid breaking my journey there. A special midnight train brought me to Gland, although I happened to be the only passenger in the bogey that could take fifty.

 

The London I again saw in 1951 had many familiar spots blown out of existence. Some were being rebuilt, but others seemed to take a laborious time to recover, contrasting in this respect with Germany where recovery seemed comparatively vital and fast.

 

THE RECRUDESCENCE OF LOVE

As I have related, my first love affair in India was at a time when I was ill-fed and steeped in poverty. In Europe it was the opposite condition that prevailed. Butter, cream, nuts and the equivalent of two or three eggs a day, with fruits and three-course dinners regularly, was normal, and I could not baulk out of it although I made a trial at first. The second love affair that came up, as I have related previously, came with a bang of surprise and interest when I was better fed. As the Gita says, food has a direct bearing on appetites such as sex and only a full vision of the Absolute can effectively cure man of this basic biological disposition. (Gita, 11.59).

 

Seasickness, love-sickness and homesickness are like all other ailments, which are essentially fleshly in origin. Their origin is not deep-seated in the human system, but belongs to the peripheral epiphenomenon aspect, full of the changing glamour of interests. Some take them seriously as belonging to the soul of life. The true love of Shakespeare's Sonnets has its reality in anthologies of lyric poetry where it is treated seriously.

 

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Lyrics become more serious in Romantic literature, culminating in such works as Victor Hugo's 'Hernani', where the play ends and the curtain drops over two lovers who at the end of five or more acts full of tragedy-verging romance drink poison from each other's hands and lie dead on the stage at midnight. Love stories in Hamlet and Othello become instilled with sterner stuff till they attain to white heat again in Greek tragedy in the hands of master artists like Euripides and Sophocles. When love thus transcends death and rises to an absolute status in the scale of human values it deserves to be respected, otherwise it is no more than a stomach ache, nostalgia or mal de mer.

 

The affair that was in evidence in my life when I was in the better-fed atmosphere of the Swiss lakeside boarding-school was perhaps one of those billows that begin with early adolescence, gently at first as a sort of ground swell, but which are succeeded, as one approached middle-age maturity, by surging waves that sometimes dash against the beach as breakers. Tidal waves thus come and go, leaving behind the rock they swept over when true love emerges and survives all stages of life.

 

These truths were known to me, but my affair with the pretty French schoolmistress was not yet closed. I had a telephone call in a lady's voice one day after winter's ice had thawed and spring flowers like cowslips and buttercups were still hiding under the grass waiting to announce the glorious spring that all poets of Europe have ever lauded. The call was a familiar one and, interspersed with sighs and deep breaths, it announced the death of her father. A further link was established thus with the same young lady who is the subject or object of this love affair or romance, the second wave that passed over me after attending a Quaker meeting at Euston - a taller billow than before by its lack of deeper content. How I lived through this second upsurge and tided over my emotional crisis I shall tell later.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

 

HOLIDAYS ON THE CONTINENT

England to me was not a strange land. It was known through books and some aspects of England forgotten or taken for granted by the Englishman himself were known to me more intimately. Not so with the continent; it held its close secrets even for an educated Englishman whose course of culture could not be considered complete without being finished by a continental tour.

 

A smattering of French often added to the stature of an English snob, and to have had a French nurse in infancy gave a continental touch to enhance aristocratic superiority. In most cases this kind of little knowledge did not go well with the bowler-hatted conservative and suave Londoner who could never make a good Parisian dandy brought up in the free and easy atmosphere of the continent.

 

The continent had a liberalising effect, although through the Dark Ages to the time of Voltaire there lurked at its heart many vulnerable spots which were the subjects of the vitriolic indictments contained in 'Candide'. A whole generation was later to be disillusioned by Voltaire about the value of the mercantile civilization of Nordic Europe. The Latins retained some culture in spite of these forces of opulence and gold rush.

 

Hitler and Mussolini were still alive when I had the chance to spend several holidays in rare parts of Europe still holding out cultural treasures for the edification of moderns. A pilgrim from the East had many new matters to absorb from art galleries, museums and music halls and even from the range of wines that required the cultivation of 'good taste', the last distinguishing mark of one whose education was not neglected.

 

ANNUAL CULTURAL PILGRIMAGES

 

Arles.

 

The chronological order of my several holidays in Europe eludes me at this distance of time, but each such period comes within the purview of my retrospective glance like a separate island rising above the water level of consciousness.

 

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Each year, invariably at Easter, the Fellowship School programmed a visit which was called a 'pilgrimage' to the warmer climes of southern Europe. I had purposely missed the very first of them, which took the school to the Greek ruins in and around Arles in the south of France. I found time for all such tours the rest of the five years. Each teacher as well as student had months of preparation before the pilgrimage began in which courses were given and library references made in respect of the sites and scenes to be visited. This preparatory course was compulsory for both pupils and staff.

 

The history of art and architecture was explored so as to throw sidelights and give proportion and perspective to history as gained from mere textbooks - much of which book-work often evaporated without leaving any impression on the pupils once the white heat or boiling point of the public exams were over. The brains then remained clean slates again with no living interest fixing the facts and figures into memory. Personal visits helped to make the programme of interest supplement the programme of mere study. As in the 'look and say' method, one appealed to the visual and the other to the auditory, till both fused into one 'apperception mass' as educational psychologists call such, after Herbart. Some neglected aspects of my own education were thus to be compulsorily and free of cost made available to me, even though rather late in my career.

 

IN AND AROUND VENICE

 

Venice.

 

It is Shakespeare's 'Merchant of Venice' that introduces this city to the undergraduates of English universities. Padua, Verona, Vicenza and other smaller and less-reputed towns have also their stories to tell about classical times, both Roman and Greek. The Jew like Shylock entered the scene only after the fall of Constantinople, bringing in his trail the Renaissance, with Christianity spreading from the time of one pope to another. European civilization had its cradle here. Master sculptors and painters found patrons through the centuries: now under the Church; now under the rulers who ousted each other in turn in domains big and small.

 

Venice has retained its character through all these vicissitudes. The favourite landmarks in terms of which the modern tourist thinks of his itinerary remain here, such as the Bridge of Sighs; the Lido; the Rialto on which Shylock shouted for his daughter, offering ducats; St. Mark's Church and Square; the Clock; the Doge's Palace and the Church of Santa Lucia of whom the gondoliers sing as of old their long-drawn songs of praise - give Venice its time-honoured personality.

 

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Balconies and loggias speak of ancient love-smitten couples who must have been serenaded from road or canal under conditions in which Shylock's daughter herself eloped at night by torchlight reflected on the dark waters. The glass-blowers too must have been there because Venetian glass has a reputation dating back quite far into history.

 

It was at a station before reaching Venezia Santa Lucia that we were unexpectedly told to alight with bag and baggage from the long compartment in which forty boys and girls of all nationalities, together with the staff and some guests who were allowed to join the holidaymakers, had travelled from Switzerland. We detrained in a hurry and each took care of his own and other people's things in promiscuous mutual aid. As a result, when we reached the Italian boarding school for adults where we were to lodge I found to my distress that my suitcase, which contained my typescripts for my thesis, was not among the boxes that had arrived. It was too precious to me to be lost and, after telephoning from the same station, the next day the lost article was traced at the terminal station, Venezia Santa Lucia, whose very name became thus associated in my mind with something dear to me. The song in praise of Santa Lucia still rings in my ears although I can hardly repeat the beautiful cadence reflecting the leisure with which I have heard the gondoliers themselves sing it in praise of the Holy Mother of Light.

 

Vicenza itself was not without its important places of cultural interest. Each day of our stay large tourist buses took us in different directions, including the ancient City of the Dead where remnants of past civilizations lie buried. I could learn about elements of architecture; distinguishing the Gothic from the Greek style or from the Byzantine or the Renaissance over which the genius of Palladio, a native of Vicenza, had exercised his architectural imagination that is said even to have influenced Sir Christopher Wren of St. Paul's of London fame.

 

Among sculptors the name of Canova stands out for the purity of his work on marble; and for paintings in the various galleries too numerous to mention, the ultramarine used by Tintoretto in his painting of the Virgin or of the Immaculate Conception stands out. The little I knew then has mostly evaporated by lapse of time and other interests.

 

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Even if I could recall some more details here they would only show how superficial and meagre my knowledge was in proportion to the richness of material that was presented to me. Madonnas can be graded by the austere touch in their faces or by their jocund smiles into a series representing the stages of the revaluation of the ancient art of the old regime to that of the days after Leonardo. I could recognize Rubens and Michelangelo in broad terms. The composition that counted in paintings relied sometimes on natural tones, some more realistic; while others, of a miniature style, had their own sense of proportion. Grand creations on canvas alternated with ones that loved details of birds, flowers, fish or festoons of babies hanging from on high; and delicate and robust ones could be distinguished, as could those that used chromatic colours profusely and those that used them sparsely. The good taste that remained for me after all these sights and criticisms has at least enabled me to be sensitive to the architectural monstrosities and clashing colour schemes that have contributed to the large-scale vandalism that prevails in India at present, where laws of line, light and colour are all violated by authorities, from municipalities low down up to those sitting in the Viceregal lodges of old on high, who murder art in many ways and bury taste everywhere at present in public squares or parks all over the country. No one protests, which is a pity.

 

I GO TO ROME

 

Rome in the 1930's.

 

Another Easter pilgrimage took me to Rome. Even before reaching there I kept repeating to myself on the train those lines from Shelley's 'Adonis':

 

'Go thou to Rome - at once the Paradise,

The grave, the City, and the wilderness;

And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise

And flowering weeds and fragrant copses dress

The bones of desolation's nakedness

Follow when all is fled - Rome's azure sky,

Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words are weak

The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.'

 

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I shall not be tempted here to describe in better words what Shelley said so well, but simply add my own signature or confirmation to the words after staying on two different occasions in this city. The Rome of Mussolini's time presented, however, some features which Shelley could not foresee. Multi-storied apartment houses raised their architecture inspired by le Corbusier rather than by a Palladio or a Wren. Side by side with sepulchres and ruins infested with families of cats which bred in the very centre of the city, modern constructions in reinforced concrete in plain, futuristic, or cubical styles went sheer up to break into the sombre monotony of the antique background whose limit was masked by the Renaissance. Between the old Rome and the new that raised its head, one could visually measure the span of the history of the city of the suckling wolf and the gargoyles to the age of skyscrapers, whose time-range was marked also by the names of Caesar, Garibaldi or Mussolini.

 

THE VATICAN

Even to do bare justice to the treasures that Rome offered to a pilgrim in search of cultural secrets would take volumes, and I shall not venture any further here. The Vatican as an institution interested me personally, and I frequented St. Peter's many times and was present on a certain Easter Sunday at a service in which the chief of the cardinals of the Pope went past in the service conducted there. It was too much for me to aspire to have a personal interview with the Pontiff himself, but the sight of the cardinal was itself one which a constant crowd waited patiently to gain a glimpse of.

 

Although a Pagan I respected Christianity as much as I could without considering myself as belonging to any closed group. One could not only tolerate other religions, which some might feel is sufficient, but one could even go into the spirit of another religion so well as to be as good a papist as the Pope himself by inner sympathy. One becomes as royalist as the king without violating the openness and truthfulness that all absolutist views imply as corollaries.

 

I was therefore as much a Catholic or a Roman in Rome as any other in the world without inner contradiction; though, horizontally viewed, I remained an Oriental Pagan while all others around were Occidental believers in a True God.

 

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As all spirituality depends on an inner vertical view, to speak of Jew or Gentile, Kafir or unbeliever, unless mutually recognized by both parties as such, makes contradictions for purposes of war or clash by rival worldly interests.

 

I cannot linger on this subject of Rome longer and must omit my visits to the several churches and memorials to bygone popes and emperors. I did however snatch a special occasion to visit the graveyard of both Keats and Shelley, and also a museum where the originals of Keats, who died a young poet, were preserved. I could actually read in Keats' own hand the first lines of his 'Endymion' which read, 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever, its loveliness increases, it will never pass into nothingness' etc. The art galleries in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican would take pages to cover. I shall therefore pass on to my next pilgrimage, penetrating deeper still into European history, religion and art in deeper southern latitudes.

 

A MONTH'S HOLIDAY IN SICILY

 

Catania.

 

The tyrant Dionysius ruled in Syracuse, the port and capital of Sicily, in the days of Plato, who is said to have been his tutor or political adviser. Starting from Switzerland on another Easter pilgrimage we passed through the Simplon tunnel, crossing the Alps into sunny Italy. After staying at Milan to see the famous cathedral and the church in which the original painting of the 'Last Supper' by Leonardo da Vinci still attracted many tourists, we travelled along the coastal route past Genoa, again to Rome and on to Naples, breaking journey in each place for long or short periods. Passing through tunnels that alternatingly contrasted with open vistas into the sea as we passed at express speed, it was a memorable joy-ride that took us to the toe of Italy where we crossed the straits, the whole train-load carried into the ferry-boat, to continue on the other side of the Straits of Messina, passing the rocks from Scylla to Charybdis instead of through them.

 

We soon went past Catania, overlooked by Etna whose eruption was an ever-present sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of the citizens of Catania and its neighbourhood, as Vesuvius was to Pompeii. Arriving at Syracuse in the afternoon we found our home for more than a month's séjour in an orange grove of several hundred acres. There were cargo ships of smaller size loading and unloading in the quay and, unlike the opulent exterior of northern Europe, the countryside presented an air of poverty.

 

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Tonsured priests of a Capuchin order were to be seen here and there, and bullock-carts were also in evidence with decorations on their wheels, much like what one finds in India.

 

THE CATACOMBS AND THE LAND OF THE PAPYRUS

Of all the sights of importance in and around Syracuse, by far the most important we visited was the Catacombs. These have reference to the earliest chapters of Christianity in Europe and were supposed to be the Christians' hiding and burial places where they sought refuge from persecution at the hands of the Greek-Roman Gentiles as well as Jews. Some marks like the swastika and the fish were to be seen near some of the niches of burial in the underground caverns where we had to go with candlelight. These have prehistoric kinships in common with larger civilizations that prevailed before Christianity, as in the case of Mohenjo-Daro in India (presently in Pakistan).

 

The land of the papyrus, which lies on smaller islands off Sicily that we also visited in smaller boats, took us to the days when there were commercial links between the Dark Continent and Europe through the Mediterranean; thus taking us back to a stratum in history that could be called almost prehistoric. Papyrus was the source of the earliest-made paper known to man.

 

I APPEAR ON THE STAGE IN A GREEK AMPHITHEATRE

 

The amphitheatre in Syracuse.

 

With the special permission of Mussolini, the Director of the school staged a dance recital in one of the largest amphitheatres remaining from Greek times near Palermo, the famous tourist centre. I was also to appear, dressed in an ochre turban and flowing robes, with two damsels who were supposed to do an Indian dance with me, and music set to a Marathi tune that was harmonised and orchestrally adapted to a special orchestra arranged for the occasion.

 

More than twenty thousand tourists watched me standing on the stage perhaps two thousand years old, as people did perhaps in the days of Archimedes, who died in 212 BC and still has a road named after him in honour of his birth in Syracuse.

 

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The big fiddle of the orchestra struck up the Marathi tune and myself in Indian yellow robes had to play the fool, as it were, in public, as Rousseau is reputed to have done. The 'Corriere Della Sera' reported the dance in two columns as a great success as an international event of the season, and all ended well for the time.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

 

EUROPEAN WINTER TOURS

 

Gland in winter.

 

The first European winter, for one bred in the year-round warm ocean breezes of the extreme south of India, was an experience in itself. Although the essence of winter could be tasted in India itself in the high altitudes of the Himalayas or in the Nilgiri or Palini hills of South India, winter will only whisper its inmost secrets in Nordic climes where snow and sleet, fog and hoarfrost, with mists, icicles or frozen rivers and lakes, and blizzards now and then, are familiar features.

 

Then the winking eye of daytime blinks no summer sky, and flowers, birds and butterflies are all steeped in dire distress. Playgrounds remain neglected. The fireside and flannel wrappings are favoured. Dull grey overcomes the gay rainbow colours of warmer lands. Indoor life encroaches into the night, reflecting an incubating inwardness of feeling which has its dark yet splendid linings. Palm and pine are contrasting presences, each with its own proper world to bring for man's love of alternating bitter joys. Ugly winter breezes, often cruel to man and beast, still hide within their wide wings the whisperings of a strange, outlandish, inner fullness.

 

As I have already related, the first forebodings of a European winter came upon me at the Dôle in the Jura in the late autumn of 1928. Since that first acquaintance, my friendship with winter grew and went through months of holidaymaking and sports each year successively for a full five seasons. Robins eating crumbs at the windowsill while you are in over-heated apartments is an artificial falsification of winter. Young and old, dressed up like Eskimos, go out to face the snows in a full spirit of sport and adventure. The complexion of winter dark changes into the burning brightness as from within a cave. I remember seeing snowflakes floating down the open courtyard sky and, as I caught and examined one's feather-like structure, there was a joy then that was but the negative counterpart of the leaping heart of Wordsworth when he saw a rainbow in the sky. There is a one-one correspondence implied  between summer joy and winter closeness which actual experience can alone reveal.

 

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SPORTS AND HOLIDAYS AT LES RASSES

 

The peaks of the Dents du Midi.

 

The Hotel les Rasses, from the top-storey balcony room of which I was the occupant during the winter in 1930 or so, opened its front windows to a full view of the range of the Alps. On sunny days one could see far-off all the famous peaks, some of which had personified names known to the Swiss peasants. Human faces and forms were imaginable in their outlines, and the 'Teeth' of Provençal France as the peak, 'Dents du Midi', was called, stood out in its pointed specificity beside the massif of Mont Blanc which looked more like an enthroned emperor shining in all tints from light violet to pink. A sceptre and a crown, with vassals sitting or standing round, were not hard to put into the glory of the scene by an eidetically-predisposed onlooker.

 

The spot overlooked Yverdon, known as the home town of Pestalozzi, the schoolmaster who brought kindness to children into the classroom. Its other importance as a modern township consisted in a factory for making musical machines. One looked over a sea of mist, called 'la mer de brouillard', when one woke on certain mornings to look at the sunrise through the window curtains, and it would then be easy to imagine oneself sailing on open seas. These were attractions to the less-active holidaymakers, like me disposed contemplatively.

 

The majority of Europeans loved active life and were fully at home with skis and sleds, and armed with flannels up to their teeth against the cold. The pine-clad hillsides round the spot presented a world that belonged to Aladin or Santa Claus. Snow-bedecked pine trees stood in rows with gleams of sunlight showing here and there, reflected from the sun that could be unbelievably hot at times. Radiated heat from the snowy ground gave to winter-sporters that tan in their faces which made them resemble darker peoples of other climes - and they loved the change too, with a certain secret, paradoxical pride.

 

I tried skiing, putting on the things needed, but gave up after some attempts. Skating was more repugnant to me as being more incompatible with the contemplative that I claimed to be. I preferred watching ice-skaters performing their graceful figures, and took strolls into the woods with my galoshes sinking as much as two feet deep sometimes. I often returned to the hotel vestibule strewn over with flakes of snow, and shook them off my overcoat and changed into indoor shoes each time.

 

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My sport had little to do with the space outside, but I enjoyed it by inward sympathy as much as anyone else of the company, which consisted of the whole Fellowship School of Gland.

 

The comfort of my room favoured my thesis-writing work which I kept at with persistence, progressing para by para and page by page, with effort at each step. I can remember too the return bus journey from Les Rasses to Gland, with bus tyres bound in chains to keep then from skidding, and the whole road frozen over so that, if the authorities had not posted guiding poles all through to help the driver distinguish the limits of the road, he could easily have driven us all unwittingly into some precipice or valley. Bad visibility, deep snow and just cold, made travel full of hazard. But we reached the Fellowship School safely, although again I had forgotten my precious manuscript in the drawer of the table of the hotel where we stayed, and had to put in a long-distance call to get it back.

 

ZERMATT, GORNERGRAT AND MONTE ROSA.

 

Mont Blanc.

 

A snow-capped peak or even a massif such as that of Mont Blanc or the several famous peaks of the Himalaya, viewed in winter or summer, when sunlight glows on them in its glory, is almost a divine event. The word 'celestial' gains a meaning from such views on earth. I have elsewhere told the story of my vision of the Himalayan scene from Simla and Mussoorie. My impressions dated from my later or earlier wandering among the alpine scenes, both from the Jura side of the Lake of Geneva as from closer quarters in Chamonix. Only a grand musical symphony can have the same transporting effect on the human spirit. Heaven is not a myth but a reality to one who has had this normal human experience.

 

Although it was in summer, one of our Easter outings from the Fellowship School was in the area of Zermatt where the needle-shaped peak called the Matterhorn, a challenge to adventurous mountaineers, raised its head in steep and sheer snow-clad glory above all lesser mountain-tops. The Monte Rosa that was on the boundary between France and Italy was also favoured by mountaineers because of the glacier there, where we had to go with nailed boots and steel-pointed alpenstocks to save us from falling into the sea-green gaping crevasses. We climbed over the glacier and looked on the Italian side from a point of vantage.

 

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In the little village of Zermatt we bought the souvenir of an alpine stick decorated with plaques naming our mountaineering conquests in the Alps.

 

I remember keeping away from a nightly visit to a national dance of the villagers to be able to produce a sonnet the next morning at breakfast because, in a spirit of bravado, I had blusteringly wagered to a fellow holidaymaker to produce one next morning, although we returned late and tired in the evening after walking about twenty miles to and from the foot of the Matterhorn. I sat up late at night by sheer wilfulness to make good my wager, and was satisfied fully with what I wrote. This was my special way of being wilfully impossible with myself, which I recognise now as a slight touch of a tragic trait in my character.

 

Age has sobered me a bit, I do confess, but not altogether, even at sixty-nine when I pen these lines. Five or six sonnets had previously come from my pen. This was a special hobby I cultivated even from my high-school days in my teens. Previously the Adam's Peak of Ceylon inspired one such. I can remember too that I wrote one on myself on attaining the age of twenty. Another had the praise of a young lady for its theme; while I devoted another to the fame of Vivekananda, the hero of my young days at school. The pleasures of rhyme-making and phrase-weaving interested me always; and playing with words and their happy combinations still pleases me even now much more than hair-splitting or logic-chopping.

 

THE RHINE FALLS, LAKE CONSTANCE AND HITLER'S LAND

 

The Rhine Falls.

 

Singen was a little township in Germany where the school holidays took us another Easter time. Streamers decorated the street in honour of the now forgotten absolutist of homicidal glory whose name was a byword of the time everywhere. I need not spell the letters H-i-t-l-e-r here for anyone of the present or one more future generation at least.

 

I could have seen him if I had waited on the street side another hour, but I preferred to climb up a hill where holidaymakers crowded into a pub for drinking beer, the national habit dear to all Germans. Instead, I sipped a glass of lemonade, watching the Sunday crowd of young and old with plenty of cooing couples, hand in hand, seen on all sides, while summer skies warmed up their heartbeats in sympathetic pulsations of love, natural to gods and men alike.

 

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Bacchus is there in Europe in spite of all Christian respectability; and Pagan Europe, in and through all outside Sunday sacredness, still persists to the present day with its obtruding profanity. Near the Rhine Falls and the forests around, there is a turreted old castle into whose large courtyard many horsemen could enter or exit galloping in numbers. The castle, sometimes fired from the West by the setting sun as one watched it from a distance, revealed a typical German scene. Schaffhausen was a large town in Germany whose acquaintance I made, where Germans were said to be of a shorter stature and finer features than their compatriots further north, where Latin features gave room to Anglo-Saxon ones.

 

Once we sailed on Lake Constance in a steam launch. This was another of the unforgettable interludes in my travels which I can refer to here in passing. Gone, gone forever are those days, but I shall never regret them, as looking forward is the rule of normal life.

 

AN ORIENTAL POET IN EUROPE

The Orient visualized mentally from Europe presents a view such as great historians like Michelet have described. The open skies and warm expanses where ships can go sailing on and on in endless adventure, past Suez or rounding the Cape of Good Hope, opened a vista of possibilities for any ancient mariner. The Orient was a state of mind in which human life could thrive and multiply.

 

Europeans were generally well informed about the Near East, but when they were asked to think of the Extreme Orient or the Middle East, they often became overpowered, and a fabulous glamour filled their admiring minds. Actual visits to these places disillusioned some, but in most cases they remained staunch admirers of all that the East represented. The three wise men came from the East, as also the star of hope. 'Ex Oriente Lux' is still a recognized saying. An Eastern sage represented all these factors together in the mind of the young men or women seeking fresh fields for their energies of maturer years. Thus it was that Tagore was welcomed in Europe with enthusiasm, exultation and even ecstasy, especially by young men and women, when he visited some time in the thirties.

 

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My friend Miss Josephine De Storey was an unmarried rich heiress of England who had made Geneva her home. She lived in good style in the classy quarter of the clean international lakeside city, then the seat of the League of Nations. She maintained a free reading-room and library of special spiritual literature for the benefit of university students, where they could come and feel at ease. She published luxury editions of the writings of the Oriental sages Abdul Baha and Baha-Ullah of the Near East. She was one of the ever-increasing number of European seekers of new wisdom outside the Sunday churchgoing world, and had visited India and Tagore in Shantiniketan itself.

 

She came back and reported to me that she was rather disappointed by the dust, untidiness and lack of order generally in India, including Shantiniketan. She had invited Tagore with his camp-followers to spend some days in Geneva as her guest. A spacious house with a garden was made available, and the hostess invited me to stay there too to enjoy the poet's company. I availed myself of the invitation. A dozen well-known Indians, ladies and gentlemen, forming the poet's entourage or just admirers, were accommodated in the big house, with some in tents in the garden, as it was summertime. Some Bengali ladies from London cooked special dishes to please the poet who spent his days apart upstairs, while the entourage talked and mixed on the ground floor, basking in the poet's fame in reflected pride or glory.

 

I had a chance to have more than one intimate talk with the poet, who complained of his visit to Travancore for collecting funds for his Shantiniketan and the poor purse given to him by the royalty there. He also mentioned how some Kali-worshippers in Calcutta still had the practice of smearing sacrificed goat's blood to sanctify their foreheads - which was repugnant to him as a man of civilised ways. I remember too how H.G. Wells came to the house to pay respects to the poet, as also Romain Rolland, another Nobel Prize laureate, who came walking with his sister, alighting from a tram without any of the pomp or fuss that surrounded the Oriental poet. The pompous world of the good old Haroun al-Rashid was present still round the poet, while the modern plainness of a man among men was the context to which Romain Rolland belonged. The contrast could not be missed. In this respect Gandhi, who also visited Europe when I was there at roughly the same period, thought more like Burns who said that 'a man's a man for all that'. Oriental pomp has no place any more in the plain world of the modern man.

 

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GANDHI'S VISIT TO EUROPE

 

Gandhi and Romain Rolland.

 

Gandhi erred, if at all, in the opposite sense - he dared to face all the modern respectability of Western civilization in a bare loincloth. He was not a nabob but rather a fakir as known to European literature. Both, however, had their value as curiosities for the European of Hitler's day.

 

This time it was Romain Rolland himself who took interest in writing to me to arrange a meeting between me, as an Indian he knew as a disciple of the Guru Narayana, and the Mahatma. We were to meet at the home of Rolland at Villeneuve, but the engagement did not transpire for some vague reason or other. Instead, I had occasion to sit at the Quaker Centre in Lausanne one cold evening in early winter. Dr. Pierre Cérèsole, the great Swiss pacifist and founder of the 'Service Civil Volontaire', the group of peace-lovers who went in groups to render service in other lands each year as a mark of international amity, was to speak to a select gathering at three in the afternoon. He had his own brand of pacifism and conscientious objection. Military love of dress, decoration and ceremony were to be pressed into the service of peace to attract the common man from the side of competition and rivalry to that of active collaboration and partnership, and thus strengthen the bonds of humanity and fellowship between man and man. Such was his formula.

 

It was a sight to see the Mahatma squatting on the floor, working away at his spinning wheel in the presence of a group of Quaker Friends and sympathisers that memorable afternoon. Good Quaker ladies watched the hungry-looking brown man with emaciated limbs and austere face sitting silent as in some picture belonging to another world.

 

The situation was too strange and august for anyone present to dare to break the tense silence. After waiting a moment, I mustered enough courage to break through the barrier of silence and presented myself to Gandhiji, saying I was a disciple of Guru Narayana of Kerala, to which he gave a smile of recognition, but continued his silent spinning. I turned to Devadas Gandhi, who was also of the entourage. I introduced myself to him as one of the very first batch of Hindi students taught by him in the house of Mr. C. Rajagopalachari at Madras in about the year 1920.

 

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Mr. Rajagopalachari and his daughter were with me in the same batch, and out of the lessons taught by young Devadas to the young lady, there must have been lurking too the silent language of love between them, as their later union in wedlock amply proved. Devadas asked me if I could speak Hindi, which I said I could not with full freedom. Gandhiji had come to Europe to be present at the Round Table Conference in London, called together by Ramsay Macdonald, the then Prime Minister, so as to prepare the ground before granting Commonwealth status to India as an autonomous country, from being a subject empire. Gandhi's simplicity and austere earnestness, and the type of politics he represented, were all new to the world of Western politics. He was an enigma to many. Some journalist in Italy, I remember, could not explain this extreme personal simplicity when he noted, side by side with it, that the baggage unloaded from the ship from which Gandhi disembarked at some Italian port, had to be transported by a lorry fully loaded with trunks and suitcases, all belonging to the Gandhian entourage.

 

Later, at Lausanne Cathedral, Gandhiji addressed a more public meeting, and I sat in one of the pews listening to him hold out bravely in praise of Indian womanhood, who could tell them all, he said, when questioned about the secrets of pacifism. At the earlier gathering itself I heard him answer a question put by Dr. Pierre Cérèsole himself about what he would do if, after getting freedom, India had to have militia to protect its borders. His categoric answer was that he would then quit India himself and step into the ocean.

 

 

 

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TWENTY FIVE

 

THE CLOSE OF MY FIRST CHAPTER IN EUROPE

All reminiscences are tinged with some bitterness. Regret and retrospection taste the same as a drop of tears. One passes one's old schoolhouse after many decades, where perhaps one remembers playful days of old on the lawns amidst sunshine or among flowers. The same scene might be present visually decades after, except that an element of an unsought tear of regret dims the view, as it were, from within.

 

It is not altogether impossible to brush the feeling aside and switch on a prospective attitude visualizing fields of adventure. Retrospection counters the spirit of adventure, and to this extent it can be a tribulation and an impediment to spiritual progress. Adjusted correctly between the two tendencies, however, no harm results, and the neutral clarified vision that refuses to take either side reveals the blissful light of the Absolute, free from any bitter taste. Such bliss is situated between life's tears and smiles - which are both false.

 

REVERIES IN VIEW OF THE EIFFEL TOWER

One afternoon in late summer, if I remember rightly, I was sitting in the park near the Trocadéro in Paris after I had a 'séance' with my professor who was my 'rapporteur' in respect of my thesis on 'The Personal Factor in the Educative Process', which had already taken me four years of patient labour to complete and submit.

 

I heaved a deep sigh of regret, thinking of the unfavourable way in which my 'séance' with Professor Wallon had terminated. He made many small corrections in my thesis, which was then less than one hundred typewritten pages. Marginal instructions read 'Expliquez-vous!' (explain yourself), or asked me to elaborate further some subtle point that I had made. In and through the criticisms he seemed to indicate more than once while talking to me that I should make the thesis a little more lengthy.

 

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The volume was not thick enough to make a conventionally respectable thesis. How long, how long must I remain a forlorn student in a far-off land? Like Ulysses who found the wind god driving him away from home, when the coast of Ithaca was already in sight, because of some inadvertence of his crew, I felt for the time depressed, losing hope of ever satisfying the cruel and exacting professor.

 

The crisis soon blew over when my host, Mr. Best, reassured me that, since the professor referred to the size of the thesis more than once, that was the main drawback which he wished me to amend. My soul was not dead to the love of India, my labours were not to be lost altogether, and I could still persevere in hope of terminating them satisfactorily. Relapses of homesickness sometimes mildly or forcefully affect the lives of all of us, however brave otherwise. Such were my reveries while I sat on the bench in the park of Trocadéro in full view of the Eiffel Tower.

 

SMALLER SEJOURS IN FRANCE

 

Nice in the 1930's.

 

Christmas 1931 was spent by me at Nice. Provence was a part of France which retained something of the oldest strata of European civilization. Remnants of Caesar's rule and those of the Gauls were in evidence here and there, and old castles and manor houses are retained to the present day, reminiscent of the regime that has given place to the new order. The Provençal dialect and mentality is a joke still for the Parisian; and his tendency to exaggerate is a charge that one still hears made, although to me the folk of the South of France and round Nice were simple peasants who had their own singsong way of speaking, and resembled peasants anywhere round the Mediterranean region, whether in France, Spain or Italy.

 

I lived in a villa up the hill from Nice, called 'Les Mimosas', whose tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Best, my hosts, had gone to England, leaving only my friend Walter Smith in charge of the orchard of orange trees and olives, with some beds of seedlings covered with paper or glass panes to keep them from the bite of frost. Winter round this region resembled our own Nilgiris climate or as I hear it is round northern California. The Riviera spells joy to the holidaymaker of Europe forever, and its affinities with the Dark Continent beyond give it a touch of mystery all its own as the coast where Phoenicians came and went, linking the white with the dark peoples alternatingly through history.

 

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Big colourful oranges could be still picked from off trees while I was there, and the blue skies and vistas of the countryside have not been forgotten.

 

My stay came to an end after I was treated to a Christmas dinner where I sat at table unable to eat or drink any of the numerous courses except for some lettuce, cabbage and potatoes because of being a teetotaller and vegetarian to boot. Neither the rows of wine glasses nor the varieties of venison and turkey roast, carved by the hostess with great pains, meant anything to me, which circumstance surprised the company present, the embarrassment of which reached its climax when I refused to peel an orange, saying it looked more beautiful held in the hand than when eaten.

 

Krishnamurti, 'the Messiah in a smoking-jacket', as some called him, was there too at that time and, although I tried once to contact him, I did not succeed. It was perhaps better that way because there was hardly any point of contact between me as a plain blunt man and one whose reputation was built - even though it happened to be on his refusal to be the messiah that he was meant to be - by Mrs. Besant, his godmother. I could breathe neither the thin air of Messiah-hood nor even its vehement denial. Both left me gasping for fresh air.

 

AT THE 'UNIVERSITE POPULAIRE DE FONTETTE'

'Liefra' was the name of a socio-economic-educational experiment conducted by Prof. Paul Passey of the University of Paris, where I was invited to participate at an International Conference of Phonetics under the auspices of the Université Populaire de Fontette. It was a land of rolling acres cultivated by peasants on a basis of 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity', and from the initial letters of each of these words this novel experiment derived its name. Away in the interior of the South-West of Old France was the chosen venue of the experiment. The phonetic conference had attracted hundreds of delegates from England too. Taking an out-of-the-way route from Lyon, I wended my way to a place beyond which there was no railway at all.

 

It was getting towards dusk and I had the choice of walking while there was sunlight, cutting across the side of a triangle to reach Fontette, covering about ten kilometres; or reaching the apex of the triangle later at night, to return by dogcart to the same point.

 

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I preferred to cover the unknown country by foot, and it was an unforgettable experience to go past the undulating French country of the deep interior, where peasant hamlets nestled up the river and over the lea, with the same kind of dogs barking at pedestrians as in any countryside of the world.

 

My friend, Captain Pétavel, had taken a horse and carriage to the end of the funiculaire and returned disappointed after midnight, and slept on the other side of a village where I had been given a bed by Miss Passey earlier in the night. We discovered each other, as I remember, in bright sunlight after the soundest sleep I had experienced in years, and each told his story whose poignancy was already lost by the result of our happy meeting at daybreak.

 

I gave a series of talks before the International Phonetic Conference and returned to Geneva after seeing one of the boldest economic, sociological and educative experiments of modern times. I came to know of dreamers beside me who dreamt of Utopias or Eldorados of their own imagination. The world is too bad for such dreams to come true, I suppose. Too many such dreamers have dreamed, some more urgently than others, only to be buried or forgotten in the lapse of time, alas!

 

THE YOUNG CLAPAREDE ALSO ENTERS MY LIFE

 

Claparède.

 

At the very time that a pretty French schoolmistress had crossed my life's path, there was another beautiful person, a young man this time, for whom I cultivated a deep and lasting friendship. Born of a Russian aristocratic mother, whose father was the philosopher African Spir, who had settled in Geneva about the time of the 1917 revolution, and was a full professor of Geneva and author of the standard book on Child Psychology, Dr. Edouard Claparède, this young man of about twenty-two, combined in himself some of the best features of Western Civilization. He lived among the trees of the paternal manor-house at the very heart of Geneva. His features were those of a Greek Apollo. Before the friendship could come to its full maturity, death, as with Keats, took him away when still young, because of God's love. A perfectly behaved gentleman, a scholar fully alive to the highest point of thought of his own age, represented by the writings of Bergson, Romain Rolland or Einstein, he himself began the role of professor after his famous father.

 

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It was a sight to see the old professor carry his books for him on the son's maiden lesson at the Institute of the Science of Education which Dr. Claparède had founded with Dr. Pierre Bovet and Dr. Adolphe Ferrière - three luminaries of the New Education Movement on the continent. He had plans too of coming to India after I had returned, and listened to what I said at the discussion groups that I had organized at his house with full affiliation, resembling that between a guru and sisya in the familiar Indian scene. The contact held out much promise for both of us, but it was perhaps too good to come true.

 

THE 77TH BIRTHDAY ANNIVERSARY OF THE GURU NARAYANA

During each of the five years of my sojourn in Europe, I made it a point to gather a group of men, women and children, sometimes reaching a hundred in number, to spend a day together in memory of the Guru Narayana, whose way of life was becoming dearer and dearer to me each year. An Indian dinner which I cooked myself used to be served, with floral decorations and burning of incense also, out of a desire to cater to curiosity rather than in the name of any Hindu ritualism. The Guru was as much a Hindu as a member of any religion that implied absolutist attitudes and values.

 

After the first celebration of the kind at the Salle Quo Vadis in Geneva in 1928, two were held at Gland, another in a vegetarian restaurant in Geneva City, and the fifth in the house of Dr. Claparède. My intimacy with young Claparède had grown so strong on one side; and his position as the only son of the highly cultivated and aristocratic family was so secure on the other side; that he took the liberty to ask his father and mother to vacate the big house, kitchen and all, for a whole day for the use of the celebration.

 

The guests who came included Dr. and Mrs. Cousins of Ireland, Dr. Privat of Switzerland and many Indian and Genevese friends of the League of Nations. A memorable day was again spent, the last of the kind I was going to organise myself, as I then thought, but as it transpired actually, there was another after an interval of nearly thirty years.

 

The exotic spicy dishes, the atmosphere of worship and the reverence of a particular kind for the Guru, gave an outlandishly quaint touch, neither Pagan nor Christian, to the atmosphere which none missed recognizing. They were transported to some strange world of Old India.

 

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The novelty was too much for certain temperaments, but when they did sympathise they could go further than expected into the spirit of the situation. The father and mother Claparède kept out of the house almost the whole day according to the desire of the son, and came in only for the lunch and the conversation at teatime. Without reserve all praised the special atmosphere.

 

THE FORTNIGHTLY GROUP MEETING

Besides the annual celebrations in which I spread the message of the Guru, I had also made it a rule to gather together friends under the name of the 'Groupe de l'Ashram.' The object was eventually to establish a spiritual retreat in Europe.

 

An interested group of cultured people responded, and we talked over tea and refreshments each fortnight in one or other of the houses of the group, alternately. Mademoiselle Marie-Anne Ferrière, grand-daughter of the founder of the Red Cross and sister of one of the founders of the New Education Fellowship, took much interest in the group discussions, and her chalet on the fashionable Route de Florissant in Geneva was where our company met. Lessons on the Gita and on the Guru were given by me. New members were drawn into the familial formation. Instead of putting the Guru's message as a saving gospel blatantly as Christian missionaries often do, I tended in my work to keep the Guru in the background lest the message should become static and closed into a cult for any local fixed group.

 

Open dynamism to universal fluid values, which alone would be called truly spiritual, was more important to me than the mere fidelity of adherents forming a well-knit group with strict articles of faith or rigid patterns of behaviour. Like a jealous lover who kept the picture of his or her loved one secretly away from the gaze of all and sundry, the intimacy of personal regard with which I looked on the Guru made me err on the negative side of missionary zeal in this respect. I often thought such zeal violated the requirements of common decency as seen practised by over-zealous men and women of Christ who fished for souls to save, often in the troubled waters of questionable politics or tribal rivalries.

 

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The fortnightly group could not be called propagandist at all in such a sense. The vulgar extremes to which such a spirit could go is seen often in the United States where I have once watched a van for collecting old clothes making the appeal in the name of the Son of God Himself by a blazoned slogan to the effect in large letters on the body of the van. Zeal often buries good taste very deeply in such matters.

 

THE FLAME OF LOVE KEEPS BURNING STILL

In and through these activities, the intimacy that had developed between me and the French schoolmistress was far from being extinguished. The death of the mother of that poor lady followed her father's expiry by one year or so. In the group that formed round me she was an inevitable common factor. The boys and girls of the school had taken note of this intimacy, which on my part, I had tried to avoid developing as best as I humanly could, at the beginning stage at least, as I have already related.

 

It was clearly understood between us from the very start that the friendship was not one that could ever culminate in the usual marital union; but to make decisions overtly is one thing and for fate to see it observed in actuality is another, and matters took the usual course that nature's ever-flowing currents dictated. We were linked together by young people as inseparables, jokingly most often, but seriously at least once. I know that when an adolescent Russian boy of fifteen was asked to write a composition on ideal friendship he was known to have cited our intimacy as an example.

 

Little girls and boys joined in improvised songs made in our honour and all nature seemed to conspire against my efforts to steer clear of the affair as understood in the more usual sense. Who was there to believe in an affair fully pure, even if it should have been there? How much less should I expect, therefore, the usual readers of these lines to refrain from raising their eyebrows as I say that I claim to have remained innocent? A childish trait in me has always protected me in this respect and I can say that I never dared to treat any woman as belonging to the context of man and wife in relation to me in the ordinary sense.

 

Although I cannot claim therefore full freedom from all earthy touch, I can at least claim that a flame, though smoky still, burnt within me, keeping me on the side of purity rather than of taint. As a human born on earth, the red streak of earthiness in the flame was there in evidence too, side-by-side with the brighter tongues of flame called 'all-tasting' in the Upanishads.

 

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My own conscience can always be quieted by the thought that my tendency to be earthy was at least equally balanced by its opposite all the time, though I remain open fully and freely to the judgement of fellow humans of posterity. I wish to be judged as one of those who has loved and lost so as to gain entry into a larger world of values in which both are the same.

 

MY THESIS GETS ACCEPTED AND MY THOUGHTS TURN HOMEWARDS

'Vu: le 14 Octobre 1932, Le Doyen de la Faculté des Lettres de l'Université de Paris, H. Delacroix. Vu et permis d'imprimer, Le Recteur de l'Académie de Paris, S. Charlety' - such were the two inscriptions with which the copy of my thesis on 'Le Facteur Personnel dans le Processus Educatif' came back to me late in October 1931, not long after the celebration of the birthday anniversary of the Guru related above. The silken streamer of my life-interests began to be wafted homeward after this event and, although intellectually I had gained dominance over homing instincts, gentle breezes still played to sway the silken sails in the homeward direction, though nothing to be proud of.

 

The august event of the 'soutenance' still remained, and many loose ends of strings had to be tied together to make my séjour and return fully consequent, among which the intimacy with the girl in question was by no means an unimportant one. This presented to me a delicate and difficult problem. I wanted her to fall seriously in ordinary love with someone else, and save me from possible blame of irresponsibility, lack of faith or untruthfulness. The unkindness involved would cut across my soul like the keen bite of the winter wind that kills life as it prevails.

 

To do well in sustaining my thesis before the Senate of the University; and also to be absolved morally before the Judge of Judges of all errors and evil possible in human life hereunder - both were subjects that worried me at superficial or deeper levels of my life-stream at that time. How I managed to live through the ebb and flow of such considerations is the story I have still to tell before being actually homeward bound by April 1933.

 

As I look back now at the age of sixty-nine when I pen these lines, I can clearly see that I have had one trait that has kept me apart from treating actualities of any situation as seriously as I see others around me do.

 

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This tendency has held good all through, and even in this affair where a serious relationship could have been normally expected to result, like the wind that passes through a tunnel, I seemed to survive unaffected by the more vitalistic pulsations of life.

 

It was not a difference of kind but only of degree. Life is like a pencil drawing for some, one-dimensional rather than real in all perspectives. The possible colorations or overtones of sin and good, the profane and the holy, belief and scepticism, alternate between opposite poles more mildly than with any brusque change of gear. My love for women was there, it is true, with all its implications, good or bad, as with all mortals. The stresses and strains - the accentuations of highlights of the situation as between enjoyer and the thing enjoyed - had a different timbre, though the scale remained the same. The kind of love that the young woman could give me did not therefore tally with my own inner inclinations, and this incompatibility was the cause of my concern at this time.

 

THE SILENT ELOQUENCE OF EYE TO EYE

The Kural, the most saintly of books, puts the situation of love as dialectically understood when it asks: 'What is the use of words when eye speaks to eye?' The spark of true love is never one-sided but kindles in both hearts at once. Earthly love rarely fulfils this condition nor satisfies such a subtle equation. The usual love that ends in wedlock and progeny is often a one-sided affair, and incompatibility creeps in sooner or later, making marriage a martyrdom for one or the other which in effect necessarily affects both. The course of love never runs smooth when viewed in its earthy setting of relativism.

 

I had developed enough theories on these lines already and also learned to distinguish Platonic love from companionate marriage with all the possible sub-varieties, but this did not save me from getting involved in a complex relationship brought about by forces of nature. I had never thought of my relation with the young lady as conforming to the usual pattern as between man and woman, but nature, in spite of all my wariness, had conspired against me, and little by little I found myself in a position from which I could not easily back out.

 

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As a way out I thought that I should try and arrange a normal alliance for her, and took some initiative in putting her in contact

consciously and expressly with others with whom she could get united normally. A new professor who came into the school was, I thought, suitable at first; but although their eyes met, the spark was not natural. Nature itself had to set to work in such matters. It was a situation not unlike the one in the Midsummer Night's Dream.

 

NATURE'S CONSPIRACIES PROVE STRONGER THAN MY MANOEUVRES

Young Claparède, whose intimacy with me became very strong at this very moment when I was thinking of returning home, was present at one of our fortnightly discussion gatherings at Nyon in the house of the very young lady in question. After tea and table talk we decided to take a rowing boat from the lakeshore and take a short trip on the blue waters where Rousseau himself two hundred years ago went rowing behind the boat of a lady whose love he had lost.

 

The evening was a pleasant one and my impending departure to India was known to all the company. Although I avoided sitting beside my lady friend, young Claparède took the initiative to place me beside her on the boat. On the other hand, I was nurturing the idea that some sort of intimacy would crop up between them. Claparède was a more suitable match for her in every respect; she having herself descended from the stock to which Rousseau's watchmaker father himself belonged.

 

I did not keep this thought a secret either, and if nature had not actively conspired against my wishes, it should have reasonably transpired by all possible calculations. The mother of young Claparède was a consenting party too, as I understood, and all, I thought, would work out well when I was not on the scene any more to divert attention.

 

The boat trip terminated pleasantly that memorable day when I actively manoeuvred to change places in favour of a rival suitor for one I liked and even loved, though from a rather theoretical position. Young Claparède however, was taken mentally ill soon after, frustrated in love as his mother complained to me, and sent word to see me from a nursing home where he was admitted - which I did. I also arranged for the young lady to visit him in the hospital.

 

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All my campaigning, however, was in vain, as later events two months after my return to India proved. In anticipation of telling the rest of this story in more leisurely manner, let me only indicate here that the sad news of the death of Jean-Louis Claparède came to me in India two months later. What transpired with the young lady in the meanwhile, and how one chapter at least was partially closed soon after by her getting married to a third person, and how it closed more firmly and finally for me twenty years after, has yet to be told in its proper place.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

 

HOMECOMING AND AFTER

A story is as long as one makes it, but the best is the shortest. Trivialities and events of import get twisted together like the fibres in a thread. To be effective, story-telling has sometimes to travel backward to catch up afresh with the loose ends left out and to continue the thin line made up of flowing interests long or short in duration. It was on the note of love that I finished the last chapter of my life-story of thin and ever-thinner interests. It is the gleaming streak of thin continuity running through life which is the most interesting aspect of an autobiography.

 

It might interest the reader, however, to know of several events which, by exigencies of narration, I have inadvertently skipped. The 'soutenance' of my thesis at the amphitheatre in the Sorbonne where, from the time of Descartes, many philosophers, theologians, statesmen and psychologists before me had faced the ordeal before exacting professors who seemingly enjoy playing with aspirants for the doctorate like cats with half-dead mice - where many innocent post-graduates have broken down - passed off well for me on March 10th, 1933.

 

I had previously been wrongly conditioned by kind spinsters and ex-students too, some of them with forebodings of sure failure, which they ominously supported with index fingers pointed at me, or even shaken against me. How I smiled and lived through the trial before the jury consisting of senior members of the Senate of the Sorbonne; and how the tables turned in my favour in the middle of my defence by which the judges seemed more afraid of the poor accused in the box; and how finally Professors Wallon, Block and Fauconnet consulted between themselves in the anteroom and conferred a 'très honorable' distinction - I seem to remember covering once already in these pages.

 

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MY PASSAGE HOME IS BOOKED

It was Mr. Ronald and Mrs. Ethelwyn Best, who lived in a big apartment house in Meudon Val Fleury in the north-western suburbs of Paris, who offered me hospitality during the days of these academic trials. Mrs. Best was particularly interested in my career and the mother-instinct in a good woman can alone explain the type of kindness she showed me.

 

By the time I had paid the University for my doctorate and printed three or four hundred copies of my thesis, about half of which number had to be given free for the University to exchange with other results of research in universities in France or outside, I was all but totally broke financially. With the famous old booksellers, J. Vrin, next to the Sorbonne, I deposited about one hundred copies of my thesis and they paid me an advance of some percentage, which helped me to keep floating still. Indigence again haunted my life, but inside I felt rich with the intellectual training I had gained, and among my baggage I carried two bundles of books which were precious to me because they had been produced by my own humble labours. Although in terms of cash-value they meant nothing at that time, they kept me morally supported from within, keeping me from actually touching the bottom of my resourcefulness.

 

I could still have continued in the Swiss school to replenish my resources, but something told me that my days there were to be ended. Mrs. Best, whose confidence I enjoyed, discouraged me too, and even offered to pay for a passage which I could return after reaching home. She treated me to two typical Paris entertainments also: one at the Grand Opéra, where I saw Salomé shouting and singing hysterically at her male counterpart, raving in megalomaniac frenzy as the curtains fell and then rose again and again till past midnight, while I watched from a box seat beside my hostess. A contemporary farce from a French writer at another well-known Paris theatre was added by her, by way of finishing my education before I left Gai Paris, for some unknown period.

 

Thus overwhelmed and encumbered somewhat by the motherly generosity so natural to an open-minded English lady, to which I have always remained comparatively cold and unresponsive in my own non-expressive South Indian way, where even thanking or excusing oneself seemed to obtrude, left still a slight sense of guilt within me.

 

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I accepted the lending of a passage to India which Mrs. Best had arranged for me on the Italian luxury liner Conte Rosso, bound for Bombay by the end of April 1933. It was, however, the cheapest deck passenger ticket that was bought for me, as the coat had to be cut according to the cloth available.

 

LAST DAYS AT GENEVA

Two educational conferences organized on a world basis: one international conference held with particular reference to the Indian freedom struggle from British rule; and a delegate status and representation in the Central Committee of the World Conference for Peace through Religion - all held at Geneva - widened my contact with world figures like F. Nansen, the Polar Explorer, and Sir Francis Younghusband, who climbed the Himalayas, besides priests, prelates, soldiers and scholars - all conspired to give me some rough idea of the intellectual or spiritual attainments of fellow-humans with similar ideals from far-flung parts of the world. Dr. Henry A. Atkinson, Secretary of the Carnegie Foundation for Peace, and Dean Shailer Mathews, the President, became my special friends, through whom, nearly twenty years later, I participated as an official delegate from India in a Conference held in New York City in 1948.

 

I spoke at these conferences and participated in committees of different kinds, rubbing shoulders with intellectuals of almost every nation. I had already cultivated an international outlook through being in touch with notables connected with the now-defunct League of Nations. Among my autograph-book conquests I can include ex-viceroys of India, ex-Vice Presidents of the US, Madame Curie, Sir J. C. Bose, ex-Presidents of the Indian National Congress and several VIPs of the Old and New Worlds. Each such contact added, as it were, a feather to my cap, and propped up my ego in a subtle way, only to be thrown, later in my life, into a waste-paper basket when I could properly revise my life-values.

 

TOUCHING SCENES BEFORE ADIEUX

'Au revoir' (till we meet again) and 'adieu' (unto God, farewell) have a qualitative difference between them, not measurable in terms of actual time. The second is more absolutist in content. It was this quality that the children of the Fellowship School at Gland, with many of whom at least, in spite of the floating population, I had spent five of the happiest years of my life, seemed instinctively to recognise in their own way, in bidding goodbye to me before the summer holidays came in 1933.

 

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Secret parties were given for me in special rooms where favourites met over a cup of tea. Money was secretly collected too among the youngest of the children to hand me enough pocket money for chocolates, as they said, during my deck passage to India. Mlle. Ferrière had bought tubes of condensed milk which I could use to whiten the black coffee served on a crude table before a bench where I would be seated on the deck, as I had to sip my mug for breakfast, while all others dined in luxuriously-laden tables in the saloons of the ship.

 

Dr. and Mrs. Privat had invited me to spend the early night on the day of my departure at Montreux in their lakeside villa, and had taken care to include the lady I was intimate with in the invitation. The electric train moved off from Gland as the boys and girls young and old waved 'adieu' to their favourite Pitar Natty. After dinner at the Privats' in Montreux, the Grand Orient Express, with giant engine wheels and a bogey marked 'Venezia Santa Lucia', stopped for less than two minutes and my luggage, which I thought would be left behind, appeared only one minute before time by lift from below, to be promptly put into the van of the train with automatic precision.

 

There was a hurried last-moment goodbye, and Dr. and Mrs. Privat retired from the scene abruptly and perhaps before the last minute - evidently to allow me the last chance to say 'a proper goodbye' to my 'lady love'. This did not, however, take place in any of the sentimental styles usually expected in Europe. The poor lady just looked on somewhat dazed as the train moved off while I watched the parting scene grim and motionless in cold blood. That was too much for anybody, and then to make the chance afforded fully vain and useless was inexcusable perhaps - but it had to be so because of my peculiar introverted temperament. It was perhaps a pity that I was not a good lover in the usual sense so well understood in France. Voluptuousness and absolutism cannot go together.

 

Soon Europe was to be reduced into a memory on a par with memories of many, many past years ago, as I sighed my last sigh of regret over the scene at Montreux the next morning, and the conductor announced the station Venezia Santa Lucia in the country of Mussolini, as my sleepy eyes opened on the signboard, although it was as late as 10 AM.

 

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DECK PASSENGER ON AN ITALIAN LUXURY LINER

 

Bombay docks in the 30's.

 

The usual luggage handlers soon appeared on the scene and, after passing through the by-lanes of Venice where the artist's version of Venice could differ most from actuality, where one had to tolerate much squalor and bad smells with ugliness, I crossed the calm waters in a gondola to where the dignified white ship lay in all her heavy majesty, sending out a long flowing streak of smoke resembling the tresses of a high-born Egyptian beauty as she aired them in the morning sun, ready to take me to the further shore of safety and homeliness, beyond the raging main.

 

Soon the luggage was on the aft deck and I paid up an exorbitant charge with the lira, without complaining as I had done many a time before. Fortunately, I found a compatriot too, who travelled in the same class of the ship, returning after specialising to teach French in Bombay. We talked and walked, or sat in nooks and corners of the ship, and spent nearly a fortnight together, thinking that we had made a lifelong friendship - but now the illusion has passed away for me, having never met him since landing in Bombay. Travel friendships are often too short-lived.

 

I took precaution, as Bombay was announced, to throw overboard certain papers concerning the disappearance in Germany of an Indian known to have had a seditious attitude to the British rulers of those days, lest the intelligence men of Bombay, mostly half-educated men, should treat me as a political suspect. My compatriot had greater difficulty than me, because of a typescript in his possession in which they could see the name of Tilak appear more than once. It was whisked away by a retired sergeant who was almost unlettered. The lean-legged policemen of the wharves of Bombay who seemed to open and shut gates religiously, unlike their alert counterparts in Western ports, struck me as a peculiarly Indian feature. A Victoria horse-carriage soon took me across the slums of Bombay where ill-clad, ill-kempt and undernourished pavement-dwellers declared the failure of India's peasantry to adjust itself to the cruel demands of modernism with all its mercantilist implications. The honest Indian peasant is poles apart from life based on such gross values.

 

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The irony here is that those who are most responsible for it look down on India with the greatest contempt. The sight of rags hanging to dry from chawls near Byculla repeated the same sad tale as I approached the house of a kinsman employed in Bombay, where I stayed till I took a train to the South, to arrive in the cool Nilgiris about a fortnight after.

 

I AM EXPOSED TO UNCERTAINTY

 Ootacamund in the 30's.

 

Normally a man of my age, then thirty-eight, fully qualified to fit into a professional career and lead a family life, must have strong motives not to follow such a line. On my return from Europe in April 1933 I found that I fitted into none of the contexts open to a man of my training or temperament. In the first instance I discovered that after the passing away of the Guru in September 1928, the disciples who had claimed the properties left by him through a registered organization hastily improvised at the last moment of the Guru's life, and not in full conformity with his own will and testament, were fighting a long battle in the law-courts to retain their claims. As a monastic order loosely knit together, through divided loyalties between relativist and absolutist interests clashing within the situation that necessarily prevailed in the absence of the Guru's noble leadership, this state was but natural.

 

Clashing interests between groups with rival bones of contention made it impossible for me to find a place within any group of the existing set-up. True to the loyalty to the Guru's cause, I broke my journey at Arkonam Junction, near Madras, to get my first contact with the Guru's disciples, who had a good centre of medical service at Conjeevaram. I reached this place late at night in moonlight to make my first contact with fellow-disciples. Two of the Guru's leaders had already been taken away by the hand of death - Bodhananda had left his mantle to Govindananda who survived him only for a couple of years before he himself passed away, with Achuthananda at the helm. Long litigation had riddled the Guru-interests with holes, and mutual mistrust prevailed in the movement. Strangers outside the proper vertical hierarchical line of succession had queue-jumped to occupy positions of power. Suspicion instead of trust strained the cementing factors, disrupting unity and growth. As I spread my bed on the veranda of the ashram that night, I heard one of the new sannyasins actually saying that I had come to spy into the affairs of the institution.

 

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I left next morning for Ootacamund, picking up my luggage left at Arkonam Junction and reaching the cool hills in summer, and spent a fortnight or so in a rented house near to the land where the young Maharaja of Travancore had laid the foundation stone of the Gurukula five years earlier. I found that valuable trees had been cut and sold; the foundation stone stolen; the water pipeline I had fitted before leaving had been removed without authorisation of the Municipal authorities by some interested office-bearer of that time; the books, vessels and furniture had been reduced to trash remnants with a musical instrument, a cycle and other valuables gone - although a village woman had been supposed to be left in charge of them all.

 

I had the task of beginning to build all over again. The straw hut that I had managed to put up had been set on fire and a wooden bench within burnt. Nearly broke to the last cent, I was saved by payment of some money due from the sale of trees in my absence, which was only a fraction of what should have come to my hands. All these minor disasters did not disturb me and I took the train to Varkala to see if I could at least find a place from where I could start all over again as a disciple of Guru to whom I was still correctly dedicated. I also visited Trivandrum where my parents, sisters and brothers still lived. They too welcomed me, but I could not fit into the family context either, although the debt I had incurred for my return journey from Europe was promptly returned to Mrs. Best at the instance of fatherly generosity that still lingered on. I remained however, a sort of rebel, a misfit of a devil's disciple within the family circle, feeling like a fish out of water, though strangely back within its own original pond. I was a prodigal son in an inverse sense.

 

I SERVE IN THE MIDDLE SCHOOL AGAIN

I had expected an enthusiastic welcome for me in the Guru-fold, but facts proved otherwise. Although I had returned a fully qualified educationist according to the desire of the Guru who had intended me to direct all his educational institutions, I found other masters in the places meant for me, wilfully clinging to positions where the least power or pelf was involved. There was not even a crevice left into which I could strike my roots and thrive.

 

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At last, a very small opening seemed to come to me. The headmaster of the Higher Elementary or Middle School, where I had served before going to Europe, had to go for his legal studies, and I could fill his place for the time being on about fifty rupees salary a month. I agreed to do so as I was eager to insert myself into the context of the Guru-cause somewhere; but later events revealed that the manager of the school did not want me to continue even in this occupation so totally incompatible with my capabilities and qualifications. After submitting to the misfit discipline for three months, I again bid for a life of free adventure and chance, but within India this time.

 

INSULT ADDED TO INJURY MEANWHILE

The monastic disciples of the Guru, from whom I expected better treatment, let me down coldly. I was treated as a fly in the ointment or a frog in a chamber. The opposition became more and more unmistakable. Lip-sympathy however, continued to be shown as long as I did not try to enter preserves of interests or power. The tone and complexion changed if by any mistake I approached too near. A bat cannot belong to the camp of birds or animals. Such was my case even with the camp rival to the monastic disciples.

 

The organization called the S.N.D.P.Y., which was meant to propagate the way of the Guru, had become a closed, static and tribalistic organization, instead of the open, dynamic and free one that the Guru had meant it to be, giving it the boldest of watch-words befitting the Indian context in the words 'One Caste, One Religion, One God for Man'. Closing of barriers served vested interests better.

 

That was the story when, shortly stated, one morning the general secretary of this organization met me at the Middle School where I was teaching. He asked me to preside at the Annual General Meeting of the S.N.D.P.Y. to be held at Alleppey that year. A date was fixed. I awaited further word from him about my transport arrangements. No such word reached me, which was itself a bad omen.

 

True to my word I took a first-class ticket to Alleppey in a steam launch from Quilon, which I first reached by train. I took an attendant with me so that the dignity of a president could be kept up to standard. On arrival at the place, however, I found to my surprise that the meeting attended by thousands had a president already seated with lace turban and coat in proper form who had been proposed to take the chair instead of me.

 

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I met the secretary for the year 1933 General Body Meeting. He neither excused nor apologised, but said that a very respectable lawyer and leader of the tribe or community had taken my place without even a hint to me by him or any others. My un-tribalistic way was perhaps known to the organisers. The forty-odd pages of a Presidential Address which had meant days of desk work and research for me was in my hand, which an ex-secretary who was now in a rival group, grabbed from me to read, being himself then the Editor of a daily in Quilon from where he published one column of translation as a sample, to support the news of my disappointment and quick return by the next available boat. To this day no explanation has been given to me.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

 

ADVENTURES IN JOB-HUNTING

The glamour of cushy well-paid jobs, especially in government service, is a craze with Indian youth. The transition from an economy based on land and produce from farms to one of paid jobs was full of false lures which trapped the imagination of the peasant population, used to plain living and high thinking. The position became reversed, and to gain a government job became the ambition of youth and has become increasingly so with the lapse of years.

 

My reaction against it was quite strong, even when I left college, but after a lapse of over ten years after leaving the University of Madras with two degrees with distinction, and having returned in 1933 to India with a first class Doctorate of Education from Paris, I thought that I must conform to the craze of job-hunting as all others did, more because of not wanting to have cause for regret later than with any full zest for jobs as such.

 

Cold-shouldered by fellow disciples; the Guru's love for me not being there any more; let down by organisations which should normally have supported me; I was lastly disillusioned by the fact that even in the job I was filling as headmaster of an English Middle School started by the Guru on a pittance of a salary of 40 rupees per month I was not to be incumbent in office on any permanent basis.

 

A short note from the manager of the school indicated that I had to vacate for another who had gone for legal studies and returned. This acted as the last straw to make me decide in favour of fortune-hunting, which would allow chance to open some other door when I found the last of the naturally-expected doors slammed against me. It would also afford me a chance of seeing India, the lack of acquaintance with my mother country still being a disqualification against me.

 

The four acres of land that I had got for a Gurukula Educational Institute had suffered neglect from adverse circumstances and, as I have already related, I had reached the end of my tether in respect of that undertaking. I had already burnt my fingers once and was now twice shy about going back to the same task.

 

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Half as a fortune-hunter and half as an adventurer in job-hunting, I decided to give chance its full scope by fleeing from Varkala into the wide world of unknown chances. To live without a vocation would have been asphyxiating. Ground rent had to be paid by me for the land in the hills and I had myself to keep my pot boiling. There were other necessities seen from the workaday angle that assumed a capital N at certain moments, though most of the time they were spelled with a small n, by the grace of the same absolute principle involved. Sinking and rising above the level of Necessity alternately is the lot of all who are born with a body on this earthy planet of green hills and deep waters.

 

I LET GO MY HOLD ON RESPECTABILITY

A man who is not able to fit into his normal occupation and thus becomes a misfit in society, having lost his hold on practical realities, tends to become abnormal. Judged in this way, although I had gained high academic honours, I was to be considered nothing short of a madman by conventional standards of 'respectable' or 'sensible' people.

 

A vague idealist dreamer pretending to be a renouncer of the world is just one who has missed his vocation, as they say, and could be a lion under sheep's clothing in Aesop's old idiom, making a virtue of necessity. To die in one's proper vocation is better than to pretend to fit into a way of life not fully one's own. Such misfitting is fraught with danger, as the Gita puts it quite bluntly. The danger is to one's contemplative life, and a misfit in society can run amok in extreme cases, or at least have a nuisance-value in milder cases of incompatibility. Chance or luck, which are only milder terms for false kismet or karma, must be given opportunities to regulate one's life and make inner urges compatible with outer occupations.

 

These two factors were at loggerheads in my case just at that time. A life of free adventure was the only answer open to me so that Fate could decide what calm calculation could not accomplish. Thus it was that I wandered the length and the breadth of this motherland as an adventurer who carried with him his solitude and orphanage in God to let destiny have its way with his petty life. Job-hunting was not to be ruled out for me in the attitude of resignation that I was forced to adopt. One cannot live in vacuity.

 

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EVEN MADNESS MUST HAVE A METHOD

The Guru had intended me to return from Europe with fresh ideas on education, and my part of the task was fully accomplished when I came back with a Doctorate in Education from the University of Paris and admission into the Royal Society of Teachers in London, giving me full professional status. I had taken shorter courses and attended many conferences. The school which the Guru had in mind in Varkala was one that would combine the best features of a Western Public School and the basic features of ancient Gurukulas of India. The theoretical bearings of such a combined pedagogics were worked out patiently by me and incorporated in my researches at the University after five long years of labour. When the prize was about to be won, however, on return to my chosen scene of action, strangers, like Penelope's lovers, were in the seats meant for me by the Guru. He was gone, and the usual country gentlemen - who had themselves no ideas or programme on education that would suit the times; and in spite of my having presented the proposal at the inaugural meeting in the presence of the Guru before I went abroad - had illegally usurped all places, including mine, and I had to try my luck from scratch elsewhere wherever a door might have been left open for me.

 

Even though such frustration could have driven one mad, I followed a method even here and started on my adventures in job or fortune-hunting or both, fully conscious of what I was doing. Without claiming any rights of my own or striving for power, I shall tell the story as best as I can. Like the methodic doubting of Descartes, I had to have some kind of system in my adventures.

 

I BEGIN AT TRIVANDRUM AND END UP AT NEW DELHI

 

Trivandrum.

 

I heard from my father of respected memory that his own father, having passed a Pleader's examination in Travancore State, was refused a government job about the year 1860 on the basis of a 'traditional State policy' which did not permit such entertainment for certain sections of the subjects of the ruler. In other words, a form of theocratic orthodoxy which prevailed stood against him in fulfilling his career normally like any other subject of the State. About twenty years later, in the last century, my father had become a medical graduate.

 

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He sought government employment but became excluded from state service for the same reasons of a 'traditional State policy' as the endorsement of the Dewan said in so many words. In 1933, two generations after, it was my turn again to approach the Adviser to the Ruler of Travancore, as an MA, LT (Madras), Doctor of Letters of Paris, and as a member of the Royal Society of Teachers.

 

I was given a patient hearing by the administrative advisers of the theocratic State, and I was asked to bring my father to support my written application. This I could not do, as I had broken away from all family loyalties, having already become a full-time disciple of the Guru Narayana ten years earlier. The motive behind this condition thus imposed on me was not clear to me, but I guessed then that it was not anything above board, whatever its nature. Such was my first failure in job-hunting which I began methodically and systematically at the very southernmost toe of Mother India, as was natural and legitimate.

 

A victim thus hereditarily to theocratic forces involving cruel tribal exclusiveness too complicated to describe, I set my face against the land of my parentage, though not of my birth, destined to hunt for fortune in other lands. Thus was spelled out in large letters the story of my first failure in systematic job-hunting. It was better this way than to have resigned myself to my fate prematurely, with no failures, and to the success that was to be mine by the will of the Tao. One of the definitions of God that I formulated much later in life is relevant here, as it said: 'God is what is right when you are wrong'. Years have now proved to me that what I considered my ill-luck then has been more compatible with Chance with a capital letter that has a hand always in shaping the affairs of men.

 

I GROPE TO FIND MY PROPER VOCATION

My education was on Western lines with a strong loyalty and devotion to the Guru Narayana on the other side. To become a sannyasi in the conventional sense filled me with mistrust. To fit into the family setup, as one among brothers and sisters, did not agree with my inner absolutist inclinations. On my return from Europe I tried to stay in a hotel at Trivandrum first to steer clear of the relativistic atmosphere of the family with father and mother still living.

 

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The sannyasins of the Shivagiri Ashrama on their part were lukewarm in the welcome they gave me, as I did not conform fully with all the conventional requirements which included many articles of faith and patterns of behaviour not natural or acceptable as such to me. Disadopting natural blood-relationships on one side and unable to fit into the context of an outmoded pattern of a holy or religious life, I had to strike a line of life all my own, and thus plough, as it were, a lonely furrow. Cold-shouldered or blackballed by one or the other side, I had to deny myself the easy way of being fully adopted by either. My personal problem too, existed - I had heavy taxes to pay for the land then vacant that was in my name in the Nilgiri Hills; and it was a question of making a living too without being false to myself in any way.

 

Finding my chances at the school where I worked had reached the breaking-point, I decided to remove myself from the whole context in Kerala, as already related. I found from the newspapers that an English teacher was wanted in a tutorial college in Madras, and I remember sitting in a train to Madras late in the summer of 1933, again absconding from shackles, real or imaginary, which I wished to shake off like a wet horse or dog would when coming out of water. I bid for my freedom again for the second or third time. One has to liberate oneself again and again in the life of an absolutist, and the more often one is able to do this the better is the quality of his absolutism. Narayana Guru was a perfect model here, for he often changed his abode, almost between any two of his meals. He represented in himself thus the principle of uncertainty, which belonged to the phenomenal aspect of Absolute Truth.

 

UNSETTLED LIFE IN OLD MADRAS AGAIN

Although sticky and incubator-warm at times, with its smelly stagnant waters and dustbins from which stray cattle on the roads could sometimes be seen to eat of the garbage, one falls in love with lazy Madras with its half-naked sun-tanned population in a strange way, as Gauguin would with Tahiti. The cries of old Madras that street hawkers raise persisted still with their outlandish strangeness during the heavy-laden hours of the afternoon siesta.

 

Madras life has a way of getting under one's skin, and with all its ordure one begins to like it. Those creaking tramways at Broadway and Harris Bridge are no more, perhaps, but the breezes of the Marine blow now, I am sure, as ever they did. I have sung these praises of Madras already.

 

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It is enough to repeat the dear name of Madras to feel the joy of the embraces of this lazy, sea-washed city, roughly on the same latitude as Mexico City in the New World. It can be said confidently, however, that Madras laziness does not rob one at least of intellectual alertness. One compensates for the other.

 

I took up lodging first in a hotel in Broadway, and taught for a month or so in a tutorial college, coaching students privately for the intermediate or matriculation examinations of Madras University. My many-lettered degree titles helped the manager of the institution to gain publicity, but actually he was unable to pay me even the one hundred rupees he had agreed upon.

 

Then I took up lodging in Mambalam Extension near Saidapet in a little cottage which I intended to be a meeting-place for students of philosophy, but the locality was inaccessible, with muddy dirt roads. I finally ended up by staying with Swami Vidyananda who had a free dispensary at Old Mambalam where I was received with some degree of welcome, at least greater than the warmth of the welcome in other centres where the Guru's disciples lived. When I found that the manager could not pay me anything, being himself an adventurer like me in financial distress, I got an offer to go to Bombay as a kind of baby-sitter in my sister's house in Bandra, a suburb of Bombay. I grabbed at the opportunity which would enable my adventures in job-hunting and wandering in India to continue.

 

Meanwhile, I had also tried to see the Director of Public Instruction at Madras because of my past service for two years as demonstrator in Zoology at the Presidency College, Madras - but technical objections of break of service and over-age for fresh recruitment were raised against me, although once before it was ruled by the same department that, having received a stipend in the Teacher's college in 1922, it was binding on me to seek service in Madras State.

 

Rules and by-laws can be quoted against you as easily as for you, depending upon whether you had some uncle to do the wire-pulling from behind, which was exactly what I lacked. No mere paper application for a job, specially for one involving more than five hundred rupees a month, could lead to a positive result if not supported by somebody's personal interest. Often the competition for any such chance would be so keen as to make sparks of deadly rivalry fly from the looks of fellow-applicants for the same job.

 

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I had to learn this verity the hard way, as I shall tell presently and, if I had been wise enough to know in advance, I should not have wasted my time. On the whole, I do not regret having gone through the experience without turning back. The discipline involved and the preparation that went on while I waited for one chance after another did me the good of widening my wisdom, both worldly and bookish. Even when the chance was lost, I had improved my understanding about ever-fresh educational aspects. In this sense no experience is a waste but a training that rounds out one's education.

 

BARODA

 

Baroda palace.

 

It was in this way that a teacher's college opening made me read the latest books on educational methods. A chance in a public school in Dehra Dun made me look up all about that; and a research job in experimental psychology kept me active similarly for several weeks. I nearly got an appointment order as principal of a Parsi seminary for young priests, but this was cancelled at the last moment before the actual offer made to me could be confirmed.

 

Many were the chances that came my way and slipped away from me before my lips could touch the cups. I spared none of my chances and applied for all and sundry, leaving no stone unturned in order to prove to myself that if I did not succeed it was not due to my negligence of details. Such details are too many to remember or recount here. All I can say is that the over-all impression was that I could not deceive fate whose thin Ariadne's thread on my path always seemed to regulate my chances.

 

I met the Registrar of the University of Bombay and even obtained a letter from the Dewan (Minister) of the State of Baroda himself, recommending me for the job of Director of Education there. The letter was obtained before the minister was about to sail for Europe on leave, and was addressed to his assistant. I thought myself likely to get the job through his son, who happened to have been my hostel-mate in the Madras Victoria Hostel. Chances seemed to conspire for me sometimes. It was almost equal to having two birds in one's hand, possessing the letter from the minister himself to the appointing officer - but even the surety of one bird in hand was not present in the letter, in spite of my having obtained it with much tact and trouble, as results soon proved.

 

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I need not say that I took the train for Baroda and, staying in a posh hotel near the railway station, took a horse carriage to go to the Secretariat in good form. I was dressed in a new tussore silk suit with a white stiff collar, as decent standards of the time required of a would-be Director of Education under a maharaja.

 

Alighting from the carriage, saluted all along by liveried peons, I presented my precious credentials to the officer. An Englishman was then involved as adviser to the administration, and his voice counted higher than that of the Dewan himself in actual affairs. Whether there were other snags unsuspected by me, I know not. Hopes thus fizzled out at the last moment and I returned to Bombay to begin my job-hunting all over again.

 

ANOTHER ROYAL FAVOUR IS FOILED

 

Indore Palace.

 

It was the Maharaja of Indore himself who interviewed me in his palace situated in a large garden where I arrived in 'bonne tenue' (good form) another month of the year 1934, if I remember rightly. From the waiting room I was ushered into a well-furnished drawing room where I was received by the young Maharaja himself. He questioned me minutely about my plans and ideas. I handed him a copy of my thesis for the University of Paris, and another elaborate plan for revising secondary education in India, to make it more work-biased than bookish. He scanned the typewritten sheets and seemed to approve of my appointment from all I could guess. He retained the book, which was my printed thesis for Paris University, saying he would duly return it. There was, however, a bad omen right in the beginning of the interview. The chair on which I had to sit while being interviewed was a fancy one, standing on three legs and, what was worse still, I had been warned by whispers in my ears from the secretary who ushered me into the princely presence that I should take care not to upset the chair, but I did the very thing I was warned against. For one who believed in omens this was a bad augury in itself. Being, however, more hard-boiled than to be disturbed by omens, I optimistically expected that I would be selected for Indore State.

 

That night I happened to be staying at Dewas State not far from Indore, as a guest of one of the Council of Ministers of that much smaller State, also ruled by a maharaja.

 

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He was my schoolmate who, by uniform favour shown him by a British official well-wisher in the political department, had come to occupy an important place in Central India's administration, which was dominated by diplomatic moves in which the voice of the ruling class, naturally enough, rang higher than all others.

 

Within the palaces too, various varieties of intrigue, favouritism and nepotism flourished side by side with conspiracies and personal rivalries in which the many wives or paramours in the harem of the princely families freely had their say to make the confusion all the more confounded. Often, when all was settled according to correct official procedures or rules of selection, a last-minute telephone call from some lady with a higher political status foiled all and superseded with a shrill voice all the red-tape work that had been done before by lesser officials - each with his own secret axe to grind - while all the time putting on a big artificial front of impartiality. The façade deceived none but innocents seeking jobs, like me. Often a job-hunter travelled thousands of miles in response to a 'wanted' announcement in one of the newspapers of his own corner of India. He had to look presentable and be provided with the proper paraphernalia and have at least a second-class ticket, often for a four days' journey across the peninsula. The crease of his pants counted, and the way he brushed his hair. He must have a proper professional look in keeping with the nature of the position he was after. A panel of interviewers often put him embarrassing questions; and stock techniques and catchy surprise methods might be employed to make the poor interviewed applicant blurt out, in his confusion, something that would disqualify him. Over-preparation for the interview could be considered a disqualification. Often a young officer from the ruling or royal family, representing more circumscribed interests, would himself outdo the milder questions put by the other members of the interviewing panel.

 

When all was done, that inevitable telephone call from a lady with a shrill voice from the palace or vice-regal lodge came, and all the game was over and to be closed. The victim of the interview wended his way back to the corner where he belonged, often a couple of thousand miles away. There were, of course, others who lay in wait in Delhi itself as habitual job-hunters ready to pounce at another opportunity as soon as it presented itself; and if they could fulfil both celestial and mundane requirements which could make varied demands on them, they at last got the much-coveted job.

 

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Murderous looks had to be exchanged before any such event really happened, after one had the lack of decency to queue-jump or rudely elbow through a crowd of fellow job-hunters who had to be treated as rivals.

 

Such were some of the bizarre aspects of the situation normal to job-hunting in India at that time. I was fully informed of such necessities and contingencies, but it was different this time. The palace of the prince was invaded late at night by his royal relations, mostly female who, it was reported, had broken down in tears before him, pleading for a young lady of the family who had the minimum qualifications for the job.

 

This last-minute feminine onslaught on the young prince turned out to be too much for him to resist. It needed much bravery to face the tears of womenfolk of the inner family circle. The ill omen of having upset a tripod chair should have told me in advance what would happen if I had the sensitivity to understand the language of omens. All was lost again, I soon understood, as reliable first-hand news reached me before dawn from those present at the nocturnal palace scene. The reply was sent to me officially and the papers which were to be returned were forgotten.

 

All the happenings above did not take place at Dewas State - the last minute telephone call refers to a later event at Delhi which was the scene of my adventures in job-hunting not much later. I was not the victim there, but several others who gave up after much waste of time and energy. It can be laid down as a general rule that job-hunting without a godfather to support you at every step or without being a nephew of some sort of VIP is foredoomed to failure in the normal course. Blood is thicker than water and money can make many things, otherwise wrong, quite right. Often the conditions advertised were fixed for a particular nephew with whose qualifications it tallied. Sometimes chance worked retrospectively, adopting eliminatively instead of selectively. The rest was often a farce or a formality that just had to be gone through. I know it is not quite a respectable lesson to learn, but I have to record it, with apology, for the guidance of young job-hunters who might come after me, lest they should think that any cushy job will come to them just because their application shows the required qualifications. If you want a job, you have to want it badly enough to be prepared to stoop low enough to get it.

 

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JUNAGADH, SIMLA, GWALIOR AND DELHI FAIL ME

 

Simla.

 

Besides a chance of being appointed head of a training ship for the Navy, I remember one for a high office in the Education Department at Junagadh in the Kathiawar peninsula. It had for chief administrator an Englishman named Caddell whom I interviewed with early in the Bombay Club where he stayed. He was fully satisfied that I had the qualifications, but lisped something about the last incumbent in office having been resented as a South Indian.

 

In Simla I met a member of the Viceroy's Executive Council who was in charge of the Doon Public School newly started by the late S.R. Das, with whom I was in correspondence even before my visit to Europe. His death had taken the edge out of the hopes he held out for me in 1928. Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, the celebrated poet of India, gave me a letter to her friend recommending me strongly to a post in Gwalior where he was a high official. I met the appointing authority but the strong recommendation letter remains with me, more as a souvenir of Mrs. Naidu who later became the Governor of a state in Independent India and a heroine in Indian political life. Official change was responsible for my failure in this particular instance.

 

Finally Delhi, too, where I took lodging in the YMCA for over a couple of months, failed me - and that was enough to turn me back forever after from the onerous task of job-hunting in India, whose aftertaste could not be said to be pleasant at all in my mouth.

 

This time it was no less a figure than Pandit Madan Malaviya, the founder of Benares Hindu University, who received my cleanly typewritten application, which I presented to him personally, taking an opportunity that presented itself during his sojourn at Birla House in Delhi. A Principal was wanted for the Teachers' Training College at Benares. Sitting on a white linen-covered mattress on a divan (raised seat), propped up with plenty of sausage-shaped pillows, he scanned my application carefully, took off his spectacles, and turned his white-turbaned head to regard my person for a minute. He actually expressed his surprise at the unique qualifications detailed in my application, congratulating me.

 

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But one small question cropped up at the last moment which brought into the picture, as I watched him, that fatal element of anti-climax. Was I a married man or a bachelor? That was the deciding factor. I was a bachelor and all hope was lost, as I could see him put away the papers with the usual promise to look into the matter. That was all.

 

Let me not linger too long on this subject of job-hunting, but life is not strewn with flowers all the way. Thorns and roses have to be treated together. One question remains unanswered. That is, how did I find money to have all these adventures? My baby-sitting income was fifteen rupees a month, with free board and lodging with relatives in Bombay, mostly near that notorious back club area of Byculla Central Station where free fights between Hindus and Muslims could be witnessed from the windows every day. I supplemented this income by giving private tuition in school lessons to two girls of the Agha Khan clan at the Napier Road Girls' School in the Fort Area, where the sister of Mrs. Sarojini Naidu was Principal and kept an open salon like the intellectual French ladies of the time of Rousseau in France, where select men and women met and discussed art, philosophy and literature. Many notables of the day, artists and intellectuals, called at her well-appointed apartment and enjoyed her open hospitality. I took an interest in the dance performances of Mrs. Sunalini Devi, the sister of Mrinalini, the elder Cambridge tripos lady. Subhashini too, the younger sister, who was leftist in her inclinations, brought her friends; and the three sisters differed between them like the three madonnas created in De Quincey's opium reveries. At Delhi too, I made many similar contacts.

 

For paying my taxes in the Nilgiris, I took on the job of canvassing advertisements for the Medical College Magazine, going up and down the lifts in the Fort Area to gain enough commission. I was also engaged in selling special books at a Meddows Street bookshop to oblige a friend. I also took the sister-in-law of Mrs. Naidu to her home in Calcutta, staying some time in Ballygunge, the residential suburb of that city.

 

After the failure of the interview with Pandit Malaviya while at the Delhi YMCA., I decided to close down the chapter of job-hunting. The four acres of land in the Nilgiri Hills had not lost their charm in my imagination and, like a vagrant who knocked at many wrong doors before realizing that his first love was good enough for him, I returned to Fernhill after just two years of adventure, in the summer of 1935.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

 

CHEQUERED PATTERNS OF INDIFFERENT FORTUNE

Life is a glimmering chequered pattern consisting of patches of light and shade. This characteristic of the whole of any man's life was particularly applicable to the years between 1935 and 1945 in the middlemost decade of my life-span, calculated on a basis of an expectation of a hundred years given to man in principle, though not in actual quantitative terms of statistical averages.

 

Kaleidoscopic life patterns, viewed from inside, correspond to their own outer counterparts of pure consciousness, subtly oscillating between plus and minus poles in colourful or sombre schematic outline patterns. When fully active, the alternation is so fast that there is a white apperceptive light absorbing both name and form aspects, algebraic or geometric, as the case may be.

 

Eventfully reviewed, the colour content of each phase of changing life glows dim or bright when different scales or colours, as with sound, cover the gamut of possible interests within life's amplitude of change and becoming. A flux, in which phenomenological components make for unitive epoches representing the soul and the universe at once, makes up the stuff of life, with time and space as warp and woof of its fabric.

 

It is in this sense that I refer to this period as a passing show or a flowing mirage - expressions dear to the mystics of India. Viewed in this perspective of a subjectivism of the right degree, contemplation treats life neither seriously nor lightly, but with the characteristic indifference of the absolutist.

 

I START ALL OVER AGAIN

 

The view from Narayana Gurukula, Fernhill, Oootacamund.

 

It was a relief to find myself again in the Nilgiri Hills after an absence of hectic job-hunting of two years, as recounted already.

 

'Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air

In his own ground'.

 

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This was the refrain of a schoolboy recitation piece (Pope's 'Ode on Solitude') which haunted my memory at this period, although the acres were not 'paternal' in my case. They were the hangovers of my first love to whom I ruefully returned after the setback in fanciful fortune-hunting adventures. I took a room at the foot of the hill slope of the land acquired for the Gurukula nearly a decade earlier. It was a coolie line in which I could find the nearest room from which as base I could apply my shoulder to the Gurukula cart to make an effort all over again to get the Gurukula of my dreams going.

 

A friend in Bombay, Mr. A. Bose, had paid me eighty rupees for putting up a small zinc sheet shed in the eucalyptus grove on the slope of the hill next to the topmost point. I got some round posts of eucalyptus trees and stuck them in the ground with a frame for the roof to make a bunk, eight by ten feet, with two small glass windows and a panel door. Although the money with me could, at first, only buy three sheets short for finishing even such a hut, it made me as happy as if I had built a pleasure dome.

 

I papered the walls inside to insulate the room from the extremes of heat and cold to which the Ooty climate exposed it. Such was my home for the time being. A boy to help to cook my meals at the coolie room below, and later on a cow that was given to me nominally as a gift, but really against about thirty-five rupees which a man in Coonoor had borrowed from me, were other living beings who happened to share life with me in the second starting of the Gurukula plan which was as dear to me then as now at the end of my life.

 

When the first tin cabin was habitable enough, I began fencing and the cultivation of potatoes round it. A dolichos creeper, a few tree tomato plants, Brussels sprouts, cape artichokes and small french breakfast radishes were the first vegetables which I proudly harvested after the rains of 1936. Gourds too grew in plenty, to which a friend from French Algeria, a magistrate at Pondicherry, helped himself freely. He loved the very tender ones, and it was not without a pang that I occasionally allowed him to pick them in my absence from the little garden.

 

Tending cows who slowly grew in number from one to four, both by multiplication and by purchase, kept me busy. Two grown-up cows 'went and died on me' as Americans say, making me unhappy in that particular way which only animal keepers can understand.

 

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Qualitatively, the pangs of human bereavement can be as keen with any animal pet. In spite of all my Vedantic wisdom which treated the visible world as a myth, I was no exception to the rule here and became very depressed when in two years I lost four head of cattle, the last being a case which affected me to the core for several weeks.

 

MY BEST COW 'DIES ON ME'

It was the death of a pride of an Australian cow which had been presented to me as a full-blooded thoroughbred heifer two years before, and which I had grazed and given tubs-ful of rich drinks to for over two years, and to which some of the neighbouring women used to send their contributions of rice-gruel water to help me fatten it - an animal that was reputed as the best bred and tended cow of the countryside - that made me so unhappy.

 

There were only two or three days more for it to calve for the very first time. The udder got more and more filled out with lymphatic milk content and unfolded its rich undulations each day. It was to be a bank for financing and keeping alive the Gurukula I had restarted after running after opulent power and pelf. I sometimes proudly took visitors to see the cow and explained how it was a symbol of abundancist economy, while they belonged to the opposite camp as clerks or salaried government servants.

 

But the worst part of the story was the tragic end of the cow when hardly a day remained for the golden calf to be born. I had bought a new rope bridle for it, and tethered it as usual among the bushes of acacia undergrowth within the Gurukula land. At midday I was having my usual siesta officially consisting of forty winks. But, as fate would have it, on this particular day my siesta was five minutes longer and I was awakened by the groaning cry of the cow. The neighbours announced that the cow had fallen down, and raised an alarm.

 

My laziness delayed me by half a minute as I rubbed my eyes and stretched myself before becoming fully alive to the situation. The new rope strangled the heavy fully pregnant animal as it fell forward and could not stand up again. I was too late by half a minute, but that half a minute was filled with fatality. The eyes of the cow were turned awrily upward and breathing was all but stopped. I tried artificial respiration with the help of the kind neighbours.

 

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Three of them could hardly shake the fallen animal, she was so heavy with good feeding. I watched it die helplessly with the same eyes with which I had seen it grow and graze with joy for years.

 

The blow was too tragic but I decided to brave it out. Although I thought of bringing the vet to see if any help could bring the calf out alive, and even ran three miles hastily to meet him, the scientific verdict he gave of simultaneous asphyxiation of the foetus and the mother animal turned me back to the Gurukula after a run to the animal hospital in Ooty. The news was too much for the other inmates, and the neighbourhood was shocked as rarely before. I was, however, the first again in the confusion to take the digging spade and start making a pit large enough to bury the dear animal's remains.

 

DEATH AS A TOUCHSTONE

This incident was perhaps meant by Providence to wean me out of the context of trying to make a living by the usual means. I felt it as a stern reprimand in the voice of God. The lesson went home with all the force of a bolt from the blue. I felt impoverished and weak, both economically and in spirit, like Job in the Bible. I seemed to touch again the zero point at the bottom of my resources and efforts to survive as a wilful Absolutist who had no place in this cruel world.

 

With much gnashing of teeth and clenching of fists, drinking of gall and eating of wormwood, and with a fully contrite heart, I stood, mentally at least, before the Most High counterpart of myself, the Absolute. Human bereavements have not succeeded in moving me more deeply than the case of this pet animal. I had brazened myself through Vedantic wisdom against the passing away of father, mother, a sister and a brother soon after, and treated these calamities lightly and as if assumed and anticipated. My own death too, I expect to take for granted when it comes near to me. This will prove the quality of my absolutism as a final test of my love of Truth. Prayana-kala (the time of going forth) is treated by the Gita itself (VIII. 10) as a touchstone for absolutism.

 

God himself seemed to me, during the test, to be on the wrong side of the situation, while I was on the right. But absolutism knows no inequality or asymmetry or imbalance between the Self and the Most High.

 

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Both cancel out into one unitive neutrality, which was the attitude proper for me to cultivate consciously. Instead of two wrongs one would then have one doubly right; and life's calamities could thus be transcended.

 

It was the horizontalism implied in the bereavement of a pet animal that made its pang keener than that of my own passing away. Beware therefore of cultivating horizontal values. Let favouritism be always banished in favour of an attitude in which love or preference sheds its light uniformly over the whole scene like moonlight over the white-walled town or the seashore seen on a deep and silent night.

 

PLOUGHING STILL MY LONELY FURROW

At the furthest end of the Gurukula land I discovered some laterite which could be used for the foundation of a new cottage that I was planning to construct. With a boy to help me when not engaged in other work, I broke up the laterite into blocks and carried them on my head or shoulders to a place where there was a charcoal-burning pit where the foundations for the proposed cottage were dug.

 

It was lonely work, snail-slow and uphill, but it was a pleasure to do it for its own sake. Many a sunset hour found me digging Mother Earth with deep sighs of a loneliness which was both sad and enjoyable at once. The absolutist content and purpose gave it a special flavour and taste. Sweet are the joys of that loneliness, ineffable and unutterable, of an absolutist - sufficient company unto himself wherever he may be and whatever his occupation.

 

The boy who had been helping became an uncertain factor and took eight days' leave; but went forever to get married and settle down in his native village near Varkala. I had to rely on occasional helpers from among the village boys, and cooked, washed, went to market, carried water, split wood, grazed cows and kept watch over the trees that villagers pilfered for firewood. Study and some writing work went on apace too. I invented new soups and dishes, and drank hot spiced molasses water from a plate instead of a cup, like a cow, being short of cash to buy any proper crockery.

 

Tea-drinking came into my regime only because of two visitors from Bombay who came with Sunalini Devi, sister of Sarojini Devi, both of much fame - one as a danseuse and the other as a political leader.

 

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A pot of tea with proper cups became a regular institution in the Gurukula, and the ceremony once started has stuck on tenaciously to this day when, as with Englishmen, the cup of tea has its inevitable place in the daily routine.

 

A goat that I had bought from a neighbouring farmer for seven and a half rupees was resold to the same man, as 'the poor man's cow' as Gandhi called it, became more of a nuisance than a milk-giving animal, with its constant depredations among my favourite plants; its vomit-sounding bleatings that were often sickening to hear; and its tendency to entangle its tether when left to itself for more than half an hour. This was the earliest period of my return to the Gurukula, before the gifted cow took the place of the noisy and trouble-making goat. From the poor man's cow of Gandhi to a normal herd of four or five cows was a natural promotion.

 

Cows too belonged to an abundancist context in economics which has its grassroots in nature. The roots of the economy of opulence are established in the sky, in scarcity. The world of abundance grows from below in geometric progression, while opulence as capital descends from above as a competitive factor to crush man in rags. I preferred abundance of farm produce to a bank account, and progressed slowly but surely to establish more and more Gurukulas of the same kind in different parts of the world as the years passed. This long story has to be told in bits.

 

PATTERNS OF INNER AND OUTER EVENTS

From one boy to help occasionally; one room to live in; one goat or one cow to tend; one-course dinners; only being able to afford a postcard correspondence; newspaperless; washing myself under the wayside tap; and conducting the necessary activities under a roof which gave way when rains came - my life was a veritable chequerboard of necessary and contingent events. I had to keep hold of every cent I could lay my hands on. A kind fellow-sannyasin offered half a pint of milk free from his ashram opposite, where I went to read the newspaper each evening - but this gift was soon stopped for fear of audit objection from above. I had to keep smiling still as a brave boy scout was expected to do.

 

A sense of humour is as good a saving factor in life as a knowledge of the transient nature of the world as taught by pessimistic religion. The smile is possible only when the rigid objective reality is reduced in harshness by an introspective and self-criticising subjectivity called contemplation. Life becomes bearable when its overtones and undertones are thus balanced by knowledge or a faith in the neutrality of the Absolute. Life becomes bearable when its overtones and undertones are thus balanced by knowledge or a faith in the neutrality of the Absolute.

 

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Thus years passed on while I lived steeped within the chequered stream of passing values of everyday interests and events. The Self, seated deep below the surface happenings, watchfully kept its peace and was uniformly happy throughout.

 

FEASTS AND PARTIES IN THE GURUKULA

Social events too were interwoven into the pattern, including a religious feast which was an annual fixture. I invited the élite of the hill station to the occasion, usually before the end of May, at which all came to know of the plans and progress of the Gurukula informally.

 

Once a year there was also the feast, at which there was a general feeding of all the villagers, called Guru-puja. Then rich and poor, young and old, men and women of all strata of society, races and religions broke bread together so as to open dynamically the walls of the Gurukula to all and sundry in the wide world. We went all out to be good and generous that day in the name of a noble soul who had dedicated his life to such a high, noble, absolutist way of life. Such an event has been observed by me wherever I have been in September or October each year, as also in most of the Gurukula centres I have started, whether in Europe, America or the Far East, for fifty years or more now without a break. Mass contacts have thus been made. The social parties which I have also held over cups of tea or conversazioni have helped to bring me in touch with intellectuals or the select élite of all the countries I have visited and in the Gurukula at home also.

 

I LOVED TO PLAY THE FOOL IN PUBLIC

 

Todas in the Nilgiris.

 

The hut on the hilltop where I lived commanded a view on the east of the formation of the Nilgiri Hills dominated by the highest massif of the plateau called Doddabetta, which was over eight thousand feet (2500 metres) above sea level. My habitation was but a speck to be located among the greenery of the hills when clouds or mists left the scene clear to view.

 

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The toy mountain railway that carried people up and down to the plains exposed this humble habitat of a recluse between cultivated land and wild areas far away from other dwellings.

 

Not unlike the Todas - the oldest of the hill tribes of India, still surviving in the Nilgiris - I was something of a cave man or a pagan abundancist unbeliever, outside every respectable fold in India or abroad. I was a kind of nomad or gypsy or orphan in God at heart, not fully aware of my affiliation to any group as such, but loyal vaguely to my kind, called humanity. A gentleman-at-large, a globetrotter or a world-citizen, were roles which fitted me as different caps; and I put on whichever I liked - always loving, as I did, to play the fool in public.

 

Rousseau, who put on an Armenian cap, would alone have understood me easily. A free-lance, a franc-tireur, almost a hobo who was at times conventional to boot, were traits I could also see in myself. My own image sometimes frightened me with its tragic possibilities, but mostly it was the comic side that prevailed and saved me many times from the fate of a Macbeth or Othello. At least there ought to have been some hidden trait that gave significance to my life, however faintly expressed through my personality.

 

FAIRY GODMOTHERS COME FROM AFAR

I guess now that this faint but distinct trait must have been what attracted to me two elderly ladies, one English and one Scottish, living in London. Mrs. Travis was past middle age, perhaps even nearing her seventies. Her companion, Mrs. Johnstone, was perhaps younger by ten years. I had met the former only once in Geneva where she came to visit me when I was at the Fellowship School. This was enough to start a spark of regard for me, which had no ulterior interest or motive as far as I could see, except a deep-seated maternal instinct to help an interesting dreamer like me.

 

She had taken pains to travel six or seven thousand miles out of a liking to meet the man for whom she had developed a kind sympathy, nay, love. They were messengers or angels from the West come to bless a wise man of the East - if we are to fit the plain event into the stained-glass context of the Bible. Whatever it actually was, there they were at Ootacamund, having taken residence at the YWCA situated near the public gardens. They sent word and I went to meet them.

 

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ANGELIC BENEFACTORS

Boadicea bled from Roman rods, and English slave-girls were sold in far-off markets before the time of William the Conqueror. These are landmarks in English history not less important than the Spanish Armada which attempted to violate English soil. After England became a mercantile colonial power, it became a sinner in this respect rather than being sinned against by invaders. The fair-complexioned, blue-eyed slave girls were called angels, we are told, side-by-side with similar commodities of swarthy skin exposed for sale in the same market-place.

 

It is in this sense that I here call the two God-sent benefactors angelic at this stage of my life. They were like angels from the bleak domain of snowbound Nordic latitudes. Sunburnt angels of Egypt are a contradiction in terms, although black girls can be beautiful in the context of the Song of Solomon. In more recent times, 'paleface' has becomes a nickname for whites in North America, as given by Red Indians. Standards may differ widely here, but the human heart, which is more than skin-deep, remains universally constant, free from time and clime.

 

These two British angels were dear to me and had crossed the raging main and taken the train for more than a fortnight to reach me just in time to save my life from being an utter failure a second time. My own countrymen responded but little to what I represented. I was perhaps too much above or below their heads or the time - my first chapter in the Gurukula being sufficient proof of my need for this divine help.

 

FAIRY GODMOTHERS WITH CHEQUE BOOKS

To be a guardian angel, a patron saint or just a respectable godfather - like being best man to a bridegroom - are all good, but to make such really good practically, they must be provided with a chequebook which gives their status the last finishing touch of effectiveness in this wicked world.

 

Mrs. Travis happened to be a rich widow with plenty of extra cash to throw about. I helped her to settle down in a good residence in the classiest part of Ooty town. Wrexhurst, as the big house was named, catered to the taste of the English colonial world in great detail. The garage, the servants' quarters, the sun-parlour and bay-windows,

though built in rumble-tumble flimsiness, could be painted or upholstered tastefully to make a well-ordered home, as Mrs. Travis soon did. With a table maintained with a full complement of domestics, such as a butler, cook and cook's mate, water man or errand boy and chauffeur, life was fully respectable at Wrexhurst.

 

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Finger-bowls were still in vogue at table in post-Victorian Ooty, when they had gone out of fashion altogether in the mother country. Mrs. Travis fitted well into this classy world, and servants lined up to say goodnight to her each night, as in every respectable English home. Pilfering and other troubles were constant with the servants, and I was useful in settling some of these problems, intervening between the memsahib (lady of the house) and the domestics. Pet Pekinese or King Charles' Spaniels with a Borzoi and Siamese cats added to the cosiness of domestic life, and all seemed to go well. A cheque for one hundred pounds was properly made out in my favour by the kind lady. How we got on later, and how I built a whole house for the Gurukula with this amount - hardly one-fifth of what was normally required - are interesting details to be told hereafter.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

 

OCCUPATIONAL VACUITY GETS FILLED

Usually a man of forty five spends his life fully absorbed in social and familial responsibilities, and perhaps has a profession to give him an outlet for the best part of his aptitudes and energies. My case was different. What an old man retired from active living did, was what it was given to me to do when my energies were at their peak of the possibility of their best performance. It is true that I did all incidental work that came my way with all the ingenuity, zeal and attention that was natural to me. I craved for something harder for my teeth to get into by way of more real or serious work.

 

With all the midday hours free, while the world of students went to school and all adults toiled to win bread in one way or the other, I was at best a gentleman farmer or a cowherd, interested in keeping the front of the newly-built bungalow clean. I did some flower gardening too, specialising first in a box of carnations - the double variety - whose seedlings I had brought from the Jodhpur Palace. Gladioli, dahlias, violets and pansies were all tried one after another. I had sometimes to water them at night because of the daytime scarcity of water. Cabbages and cauliflowers too were in the vegetable garden and needed watering. Pottering in the garden thus, together with study and ease mixed with sweet meditation, were all gentle occupations, but amounted only to hobbies treated seriously. It was gooey, like bread, milk and jam given to children, but too sloppy to suit the taste of the middle-aged man that I was becoming or had already become.

 

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT

I have to go back chronologically one or two years to relate what was promised at the end of the last part of this story - how I built a house, like Jack of the nursery piece well known to all English children, where the use of the relative pronoun 'that' is used with a vengeance. In the first place, as soon as I got the cheque from the kind lady, my fairy godmother of that time, I set to work with paper and pencil to be able to cut the coat according to the cloth, as I was told I was to expect no more cheques.

 

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I had to muster all my kausala in karma (ingenuity in action) to make what God had sent me of maximum benefit to the ideals to which I had dedicated myself. The lie of the land; the materials most easily available; the labour that could be cheaply commanded without offering fancy attractions to an architect-contractor or other form of middleman - each of whom, in a series, usually came into an enterprise of the kind, usually asking for a slice each - had all to be considered.

 

The design of the building also counted, because if you thought in terms of burnt bricks or cement blocks, or even mud walls, the cubic feet that went into the work had to be balanced by the useful empty spaces, like windows or unpartitioned rooms inside, because the emptiness of a house is the most useful or valuable part of it. A room cluttered up with too many things is no room, and a house made of thick walls cuts the wrong way in good house planning.

 

A dialectical balance had to be struck between filling the chosen space and keeping it empty to the best advantage of the inhabitants. False gingerbread flourishes or decorations had to be avoided, and space-saving built-in devices, to avoid duplication of cupboard or other spaces that go to waste precious interior utility at so many rupees per cubic foot, had to be economically conceived. Tall or thick walls took more bricks, and small windows did not effect as much saving as would seem, because brickwork, when plastered and painted, sometimes cost more than the windows. Where a sun-parlour or an annexe has to be put should take advantage of the tall part of the wall somewhere. Glass had to be used profusely for light and to keep out the cold winds of the Nilgiris. The eucalyptus trees that grew tall on the Gurukula land had to be used as far as possible, with proper unwarping wood - more costly - coming in only where fully inevitable. The entrepreneur's sagacity came in thus as a surplus-value factor of great significance; and thus it was in short that, with a fifth of the money normally needed, Jack built his house in the present instance.

 

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Necessity is the mother of invention, and plenty of evidence for this is found in the comfortable cottage in which I have lived now for three decades, where three bedrooms with bath fittings for each, a large bay-window, a vestibule, an office room, a stage where meditation and worship could be arranged, with a fireplace mantelpiece serving for altar, and a space like a hall-cum-drawing room to serve as library and meeting-place too, which on occasion could take in two hundred young and old - these were all thrown into a single bargain. Wall-to-wall coir matting and curtains for the windows now add to the cosiness of this home, where the most precious of books have come almost by themselves, unsought or unbought.

 

Cheap and classy items of furniture have strewn themselves in the interior as chance itself has arranged. Such is the home that the Tao has made available for me - more out of the errors and omissions of those who were connected with me than purposefully wished for as willing contributions collected through active canvassing. Even pieces of junk that thus accumulated, by omissions rather than by commissions, have found their proper places to beautify this home which I look upon as much as a caravanserai or pilgrim-place as a home to which I am sentimentally attached.

 

A mere house becomes a home after a lot of living in it. This was true of mine, if I could say so, for between just the house that was made from the cheque that the lady gave, chance winds had to waft in more and more small items through the course of the years before it became fully liveable.

 

The fairy godmother too was not always a guardian angel to me, for I found that - as with every woman's relations with man - for no reason I could think of, she had to have tense moments of strained conversation. The workings of the mysterious Maya-factor in such relations was evident even in such a case of thin or theoretical relationship between man and woman. How much more must it be so where flesh and blood give full actuality to it!

 

PROFITLESS AND THANKLESS ASSIGNMENTS

Sinecure jobs ran away from my grasp; but onerous thankless ones seemed to seek me out. Two of them stand out in my memory, although I cannot remember which came first. When fitting the doors and windows to the house that was getting finished, I had a call from Varkala by Swami Achyuthananda, who was then the third in succession to the pontifical chair left vacant by Bodhananda and Govindananda, after the samadhi (passing into peace) of the original Guru Narayana.

 

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One of the legalist-minded disciples of the group that was managing the Guru's institutions and properties was becoming a menace to the others who were simpler folk whose lack of modern education made them less vocal or articulate in matters of administrative importance. It is the cleverer ones everywhere who get the upper hand, and Achyuthananda and Ramananda suggested that I should go to Varkala as an adviser to the sannyasins to save the situation.

 

In the beginning, when the danger of their being dominated was at its maximum point, I was treated with the full status of a persona grata. Confident of full support by all, I set out to make bold plans. My objective was to set the whole of the Guru movement on its feet again in working order after it had gone into effete disuse after the Guru's days. I conceived a bold idea of infusing enthusiasm into the situation by planning an exhibition on the extensive acres of the Headquarters of the Guru, with a Convention to take place also in which all sections of the Guru's followers could be given an opportunity to come together. I stayed at the Shivagiri Mutt and strained every nerve to make the plan a success.

 

As accredited adviser of the body of sannyasins then in management, I respected the head of the group in possession and had a prospectus printed in English and many bulletins in Malayalam setting forth the plans in detail. Things were shaping themselves to my satisfaction, although I had to be on the move from centre to centre on the West Coast and had to keep a secretary and an office running in full swing for months.

 

Adverse forces, however, were lurking within the movement itself which spelt failure for me. My position as adviser, with freedom to plan and direct, was questioned by one who was my rival - equal or superior to me perhaps in organisational or legal matters. Although he did not openly defy me in the beginning, his lukewarm cold-war attitude was evident and grew from day to day till it ended as a litigation in which the whole movement became involved, in which I had to appear before the district court in Trivandrum charged with trying to disturb the peace and contemplative life of the sannyasins.

 

In spite of statements made by the head of the group supporting my claims and position unequivocally, the litigation was effective in putting cold water into the growing warmth of the situation. Not satisfied with a civic plea to restrain me, I was also cleverly implicated in a criminal complaint of which I was informed directly by the then Sub-Inspector of Police of Varkala who got down from his bicycle one day as I was returning from a trip to Trivandrum.

 

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He himself was returning from an inquiry in the Mutt, and told me of a complaint that had been made that I had broken open a door to a room in which some records of the rival swami were kept, and had destroyed them. The inspector's prompt and on-the-spot investigation had made it clear to him that the complaint was falsely fabricated, taking advantage of my absence in Trivandrum. Good intentions alone do not always guarantee smooth sailing in life. Several sinuous ways were also later employed to obstruct me through political insinuations, with tribalistic motives attributed to me and alibi devices to make my position difficult; but I stuck to my post as best I could, and had to fight many a skirmish and even pitched battles. I tried to meet the calumny, insinuation, invective or half-truth employed against me with plain truth or fact based on weapons sharpened in the absolutist and simple armoury all my own. The single-handed defence was a trial of which the complications and resolutions are so many that I cannot repeat them all here. It is ungenerous, even to one's worst enemy, to remember all his evils. Such stories are undignified, nor are such unfamiliar to people in politics.

 

BEATING A RETREAT

In the face of other complications that set in too, I had to beat my retreat. The plan of the exhibition had to be given up at the last moment, even when the contractor, who had to construct the palm-leaf sheds required, had started work. The whole atmosphere of the State was heading towards turmoil and political arrests and shootings were taking place less than twenty miles from the venue of the exhibition. I had to take a decision quickly before matters went out of hand and landed me in discredit, loss, shame and all. Brave as I was and fully an absolutist still, I had to recognize the force of absolute factors of Necessity (with the capital letter N) when it raised its head, and use discretion, which is said to be the better part of valour.

 

Soon after that, when the danger that the swamis feared had passed, I found my own position as adviser began to lose its force, and signs were noticed of their disadoption of me. Soon I became unwanted and my presence more and more resented till even words of open rivalry or antagonism became evident.

 

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English kings had to be beheaded or banished before they could be made to submit to parliamentary control, and in France the struggle between monarchy and democracy or Pope and State expressed itself with unforgettable force. No wonder therefore, that I was thrown out of my orbit tangentially and returned to my favourite hill-retreat at Fernhill to tend cows as before. Meanwhile my English benefactress Mrs. Travis and her companion Mrs. Johnstone had died - the one in Ootacamund and the other in Coonoor - and their affairs were settled with the help of Mr. Ernest Wood who took a friendly interest in the two ladies. I found myself left alone as before. Thus ended the first thankless assignment which came my way unsought.

 

I BECOME ADVISER TO COCHIN STATE

 

Old Cochin.

 

The other profitless assignment that came my way unsought, roughly at the same period, was an invitation to tour Cochin State as Adviser in Rural Reconstruction. Sir R.K. Shanmukham Chetty was then the Dewan (Minister) of the State, and my interest in rural economy and original ideas about it had reached his ears through a common friend. Dr. J.M. Kumarappa who, with his brother Dr. J.C. Kumarappa, a Gandhi follower of Wardha, stayed with me for some time during the summer season. Gandhian economic theories were in the air at that time and economic experiments of different kinds were being tried in India, both by the British and some American experts too, interested in lifting India out of her poverty.

 

Having received the invitation to tour the rural areas of Cochin State as Adviser till I could submit a report for the guidance of the government, I thought myself favoured by luck, and with some small amount of cash that I got together to reach Ernakulam, the capital of the State, I entrained and got there one fine forenoon in a first-class compartment with my baggage and dress as near as I could make it correspond to that of any other VIP of the time.

 

The dailies of Madras announced my arrival and I was noted in the Cochin Gazette as an officially recognized Adviser to the State Ministry. A car was waiting for me on arrival and as I alighted I could see another VIP, Sir Alladi Krishnaswami Iyer, a leading lawyer of Madras, alight too from the same train. He was being briefed for a well-known Church dispute to take place in Cochin State Court at this time.

 

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We exchanged looks and I felt quite as important a man for the time being, puffed with that variety of egotism, enemy to all contemplation, that government jobs can best confer on an otherwise normal man.

 

I was soon driven to the State Guest House behind the posh ministerial residence, bordering on and commanding a full view of the backwaters and the harbour that was to be. Settled down thus for the time being in princely pomp, though of a short-lived order, I had to fit into the new rule correctly. As the Tamil saying goes, 'if one dons the role of a dog, one has perforce to bark'. Although my inside remained as ever that of a simple mendicant, I could act any part when the occasion demanded it.

 

I had the State Car at my disposal all day and even long into the night if I wanted. To keep it idle would not be fair to the machine or to the driver who waited for orders. I therefore had to improvise some visits which were not utterly necessary. I visited the rural experiment at Alwaye and went round the harbour area where dredging was going on. Meanwhile, I studied the reports of rural experiments and innovations undertaken in the state and brought my own understanding of the situation up to date by reading about some of the latest experiments in the Punjab and elsewhere. Much of the reading and hard work that was done then has not been a mere waste, for my understanding of economic problems got its real breadth and depth of perspective by this assignment. I am going to tell how otherwise this assignment proved profitless to me and even cost me a few rupees from my own breaking-point pocket. At each guest-house that we left there was an inevitable line-up of 'menials' so-called, who stretched out their hands for baksheesh, and even such amounts easily totalled up to fifty rupees.

 

RURAL UPLIFT FROM ABOVE VS. GRASS-ROOTS

Dr. Spencer Hatch was an American YMCA missionary, whose book, 'Up from Poverty', which was meant to teach Indian administrations the intelligent modern approach to the problem of poverty in India, had gone into more than one edition, and proved a bestseller at that time in India. Gandhian economics had its own solution, based on self-sufficiency and an anti-machine or homespun approach of its own. There were other economic prophets on the horizon who spoke in terms of a 'Co-operative Commonwealth' - the best instance of which was said to be in the Sundarbans, near the mouth of the Ganges, near Calcutta.

 

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An Indian Civil Service officer of England had his own ideas based on consolidation of land holdings into profitable units instead of the evil of fragmentation, which made tilling unprofitable.

 

How the State could help the lot of the farmer was a problem that eluded all experts; and in most cases where remedies for poverty were suggested, it was the man who formulated the plan who rose up most effectively from his own previous economic condition to a higher level. The plans mostly left the peasants themselves untouched. They had to pay heavier and heavier taxes to finance the experts. There was thus an element of irony here that none seemed to locate. The best help that a farmer could receive was not one dropped down from above from the side of opulence or government for him to pick up, but one that would nourish his own grass-roots.

 

Although at that time I had not clearly formulated my later theory of an abundancist economy, even then I could feel that what was wrong in the whole situation was its top-heavy handling from above, vitiated by red-tape and other heavy bureaucratic procedures which stifled the growth of that genuine economy which thrives best when left alone or nourished at its roots, as underground springs or gentle rains do best in a natural way. Opulence and abundance are poles apart and cannot be promiscuously mixed without spoiling both.

 

I took one month to prepare an eighty-page report, after being taken first to the Trichur area where the Minister for Health accompanied me. From there I was taken to various centres in the interior countryside. From visits to areas where tribal groups made baskets and mats far away from civilization as understood by others, to places where screws and nails were made to teach village blacksmiths to become mechanics on a small scale - I covered all grades in my rounds.

 

Health units, co-operative colonies, sales depots, selling and consumer agencies to stimulate the economic cycle of prosperity and whatever was understandable from textbooks, were all being tried. Methods that succeeded in countries like Norway and Sweden were transplanted to Indian village conditions, forgetting the contrasting context of conditions of opulence or scarcity of the civilised West and the abundance of raw material and human labour available, almost as weeds instead of garden produce, here in the East.

 

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Economic theories developed on the basis of Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' - the basic textbook of the London School of Economics - are still applied to Indian conditions by so-called experts who advise the government here. Those who want to protest are mostly inarticulate at present in this country, although they sometimes raise vague slogans such as 'sarvodaya' (the common good) without being able to add one more intelligible word to their theory. Opulent economy has to be based necessarily on scarcity with its corollary of competition; while abundancist economy allows full scope for the co-operative spirit. That these cannot be mixed without spoiling both is the secret I have elsewhere tried to explain with all the arguments I can muster. All plans in India have so far failed - the proof of which is that the poorest woman living in the village opposite to where I write these lines told me yesterday that she does not get enough rice or wheat per week for love or money at the age of eighty. Such is the tangible result of all the top-heavy planning that has gone on in this country after independence. It is rice and not explanations in which we happen to be poor at present.

 

Thus ended my second 'profitless assignment.' My pocket was depleted to the tune of two hundred rupees and all I gained was plenty of salutes from so-called menials or subordinates.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER THIRTY

 

THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND AFTER

I have now passed my seventieth year. In this narration of my life story, factual details and points of time have been roughly respected as the clarity of my memory varied between period and period. Such actual aspects touch that horizontal side of life's process of being and becoming in a matter-of-fact manner. The younger you are, facts and sense-impressions gain in eidetic content; while maturer years tend to take away such a colourful content, and one begins to live in a more plain and less glamorous world. If the former is rich in hierophantic values, the hypostatic values which are more theoretical than actual fill later life.

 

Having now brought up my own life story to the point where I am about to celebrate my fiftieth birthday, let me now change the key of my song to suit the more mellowed, sobered and much disillusioned outlook of a septuagenarian. It strangely happens, however, that my later years around fifty were more filled with just such events that usually attract the public attention of newspaper headlines. But writing about my travels in Europe and visits to the United States or speeches before world conferences, do not interest me as much now, with the drab spectacles natural to less-youthful years.

 

A strange law of inverse proportion seems to hold good here. To use the example of Guru Narayana: the false doll to an infant is the reverse of what meaning it makes to a grown-up man, as the world is to a wise man who treats it as equal in status to the eidetic presentation of a forest in the sky. The reader should excuse therefore my intention hereafter to be less realistic and more dream-like in the rest of the story I have to tell about the remainder of my life. Some admirer or disciple can take up the strain or strike up a fresh note from where I might leave off or where he feels my story lacks the realistic touch, lapsing too much into the reveries and reflections natural to maturer years.

 

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BETWEEN LEAVING KERALA AND MY 50TH BIRTHDAY

The Second World War was nearly coming to a close when I left the job of headmaster in the High School in Kerala and went to Bangalore where my brother proposed to start a craft-based school in a rural area outside the city.

 

This kind of creative work appealed to me more than the routine red-tape conformity to bureaucratic standards in the High School where I served. I helped to find a bit of land six miles outside the city where such a craft school could be located; and there were about twenty craftsmen already engaged in various crafts like blacksmithing, ceramics etc., who were in two rented buildings in Bangalore and who were to be moved to the new place.

 

Soon, however, some relativistic factors intervened and there arose subtle and characteristic clashes, mostly of a cold or implicit order, which made me feel like a fly in the ointment or a frog in a chamber, living in the family and wanting to behave as an absolutist. I had news also just then that the boy who was looking after the cows at Fernhill Gurukula had absconded, while other rivalries and duplications of office developed from underground - enough to foil all the good plans. Finding that there was another man already engaged to look to the routine office work, I soon became a supernumerary in the job I tried to do with my brother and his Japanese wife. Perhaps I did not look upon my job with the sense of responsibility and subordination that was to be expected. Between 'either-or' alternatives, it was mostly 'neither-nor' that more often prevailed instead of both rival interests which could work together only in very happy instances, rarely to be seen in actual life. Charity and business can never attain a stable equilibrium.

 

Relativistic and absolutist setups have to be given primacy of one or the other in accentuation if they have to co-exist. Often, when both are given equal importance, one aspect suffers at the expense of the other. The golden mean is rarely struck.

 

I TRY TO START A BUREAU OF EDUCATION

I still lacked a true vocation that fitted my training and temperament. I conceived of another bold plan of starting an 'Institute and Bureau of Education' which was to be a clearing-house for information in respect of progressive educational reform in India.

 

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The Wardha Plan of self-sufficient, craft-based, basic education was just then being promoted by Mahatma Gandhi, and educationists had to be guided through information and discussions. I cycled from one distant city or cantonment school to another canvassing support and organisational help for this new venture. With the Mythic Society Hall available for fortnightly gatherings, I managed to bring together a fairly big crowd of interested educationists and intellectuals, both men and women. The work had developed over several months and was gathering momentum when my need to be back in the Gurukula at Fernhill became more imperative. Appointing a new secretary, I left for the hills again.

 

While speaking of my work in my proper field of education, I should not omit to mention that at this period I had prepared an elaborate scheme for a rural high school which was to be craft-based and planned to incorporate the requirements of the basic Wardha Plan of Mahatma Gandhi side-by-side with the best features of the Dewey Project Method, the Dalton Laboratory and Gary Plans, as well as features of the 'Ecole Active' of Adolphe Ferrière, President of the Progressive Education Movement of Europe. A Rousseau touch was to make it resemble the ancient forest Gurukulas of India; and some Danish Folk High School and English Public School features were to be added on also. A long typescript with actual plans and estimates was prepared by me after many hours of research and library work, which I submitted to Sir Mirza Ismail, the then Dewan (Chief Minister) of Mysore, at a personal interview. He showed some interest in the plan and put me on to Mr. Sultan Mohideen, then Director of Public Instruction in the State. The plan was all but approved and Madhugiri was to be the place where the first new type rural folk high school was to be established. Official changes, politics, upheavals and post-war adjustments, however, conspired together to make these good plans fall through again, and my own duty took me to my original post in the Nilgiri Hills, where I continued as ever to graze cows and live in my own pastoral paradise.

 

A SEMI-ROMANTIC INTERLUDE

Running after some woman is seen to be a 'depravity', if we may call it so, even of old age, to be noticed in many noble minds. Even when I was nearing fifty this tendency asserted itself in a strange form in me once again.

 

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My spirit was not unlike that of Rousseau with whom I often used to compare myself. Although an ageing man like me should have been, in one sense at least, fully ashamed of running after any woman, especially one with plenty of good looks in her favour besides much intelligence - even when actively encouraged by her to do so. Above all, in spite of the humorous side to the situation which none will miss, I must confess here to a semi-romantic episode of this kind at this period, for which my only excuse or consolation was that I was in good company with some great names who have erred with me in a similar manner in this same fully human fashion. The last of the labours of Hercules was for imprisoning Iole, the young damsel of 'great name and great beauty', and Pythagoras, the austere saint, took for wife Theano, much younger than him and his pupil.

 

Some blue blood too, ran in the veins of the lady in whom were found too, ancient traditions of the Maharashtra land, round the city of Ujjain where the greatest Sanskrit poet, Kalidasa, was reputed to have lived. She was a blended Moghul, Rajput and Dekkanese, the heredity of each adding a certain finish to her natural good taste, ways and culture. An Artemis rather than an Aphrodite in type, she had the vivid brightness of a Portia and some womanly traits that brought to mind a Joan of Arc, a Hypateia or a Heloïse. Dante's Beatrice, Goethe's Margaret and Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloïse were other women who had some at least of those traits listed by Vyasa in the Gita - such as fame, prosperity, gift of wordy clarity of memory, will-power, intrepidity and meek patience - that go to give an absolute finish to the personality of womanhood anywhere. Although a brighter lamp can always have a deeper shadow below, it was the positive aspect alone that commanded my admiration in this case. With Rousseau's Madame de Warrens and Madame d'Epinay, admiration for this chosen lady attained almost to the point of adoration.

 

As Rousseau himself records in his Confessions, he often got up before daybreak from his bed, often in an outhouse meant for servants, and waited, drinking glasses of cold water and strolling up and down looking at flowers, before he could get a glimpse of the rich patron heiress who treated him as a queer scholar to be allowed only sometimes to dine at the table of his mistress when she wanted him to carry on sufficiently tolerable conversation, as she thought, when any élite guest visited her.

 

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Victor Hugo is reputed to have hidden a last love affair in his old age. Old men's love is thus not unknown to literature and exists even now in the world of sugar daddies in America.

 

I was no utter exception to this weakness, if it should be so adjudged. Idealising womanhood need not necessarily have any immoral implications, and since the derivation of ethics can originate in a closed static society or in an open dynamic world of spiritual values, there is as much to be proud of in this trait as perhaps what one should shun in the name of mere conventional respectability. My own attitude was sufficiently reflected in a sonnet that I composed in her honour. I have now lost track of it, but if it is ever found, it would correctly reflect my feelings.

 

I remember visiting her at Tiruvannamalai where Ramana Maharshi lived. Once, sitting together near and in front of the saint in the first row at breakfast, which consisted of idlies (steamed cakes of rice and gram flour) - a favourite with South Indians - with chutney and a cup of strong coffee, there seemed to be, at least to my eyes, an understanding gleam in the Maharishi's eyes as he seemed to scan us both in his usual silence.

 

I later took the brother of this lady on a tour as a guide or tutor, and pronounced benediction at the marriage of one of her sisters at Bombay, representing the bride's mother and grandmother, who could not be present. Many were the meetings at which she spoke in Hindi or English, with great fluency and interest, attracting the admiration of crowds as she recited extensively from the Upanishads or the Gita, and I joined her on the platforms as a speaker or presided.

 

Such events associated us on platforms in Tiruvannamalai town and to a limited public in Varkala too. I had hoped vaguely to collaborate with her in furthering the cause of Indian wisdom, but the woman in her at last proved stronger than any urge for being a spiritual speaker in public. She made up her mind to marry a young man of Kerala soon after and a chapter naturally closed for me in the matter of further adventures with any woman. Love without any room for jealousy can be compared to coffee without any caffeine, containing no element to shun or desire. I have as much regard for her now as at any time during this episode.

 

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THREE WEEKS OF 'ISOLATION'

Except for finding my name included as a member of an educational committee of the then Travancore State, which was duly deleted when they found out I was back in the Nilgiris, which involved their paying travelling expenses from Ooty to Trivandrum, no career opened its doors to me any more in the usual sense. I was again in the Nilgiris, grazing the cows myself and eking out a livelihood with what chance brought to me.

 

There was then a character, a down-and-out 'misérable', who used to frequent me, and who had a son who was a cowherd boy too, and thus a fellow professionalist with me. As was usual with me when expressing my sympathy with children in rags, I happened to hold this boy in affectionate embrace once, little knowing that he had just been discharged from the Isolation Hospital for smallpox. Eruptions appeared on my face four or five days later, with a high fever preceding. I was taken to the Ooty Isolation Hospital at the far end of the town, where I lay on a bed that commanded a view of a bend of the lakeside road leading to Kandal. For fully three weeks I was confined to the same view to the same bed, and I took full advantage of the quiet that the time gave me to retire within myself in introverted meditation. It was a bit of rare good luck, every moment of which I enjoyed fully.

 

VISIONS AT THE ONSET OF SMALLPOX

Some chemical changes in my blood at the onset of fever before the smallpox attack must have been responsible for some visions that I had at this period just before I was in hospital and still lay in the tin bunk which was my room from the beginning of my life at the Gurukula. From my window I could see a cluster of young blue-gum trees and, as my fevered brain's sight lighted on them, they became, as I watched more and more intently, a vision the like of which I had never experienced before. In childhood delirium once I imagined two bodies, one bright and one shadowy, trying to fight or swallow each other. This present vision, however, was different and - whether known to medical science or not - was a fully representative one whose eidetic force was great.

 

As I watched the cluster of trees intently, I could see emerging from the space where the blue-green leaves spread in the evening sunlight, a celestial group of gods and demigods posing, as it were, for a group photograph. Each had gloriously colourful raiment and their familiar weapons, such as bows, carried by each according to his specific grade or class of divinity.

 

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I have heard of such visions from others, especially couples of lovers in the voluptuous joy of communion. Comparing notes with such and similar reports, I have formed a theory that the composition of the blood on special occasions of exaltation or depression can project visions which become elaborated by the myth-making tendency found in each one of us. This is called 'viksepa sakti' (the eidetic power of projecting or superimposing on empty space representations that belong to instinctive levels, where apperception masses remain dormant till they get a chance to find expression through special emotional states not unconnected with changes in the blood plasma).

 

Life itself can be considered as a long-drawn-out dream representation of the same order, having its origin in a kind of jewel box within consciousness where apperception masses originate and put corresponding diamond-like stars in the blue or dark firmament. Such eidetic possibilities, thought of together and phenomenologically viewed, would explain the theory of Maya, which has been the subject of much speculation on the part of philosophers both for and against it.

 

I returned from the Isolation Hospital after having had many chances for such reveries and reflections. On the day I was discharged I had no proper clothes on my back. Carrying a bundle of disinfected things, I returned from hospital clinging to my walking stick on my shoulder and sneakingly took a back-door way to the Fernhill Gurukula. Broke again and at a blind alley as far as any fresh career; disappointed and totally rejected the N-th time in love; emaciated and unshorn, and in a bad state of deshabillé; I felt as miserable as a criminal like Jean Valjean searching for a roof over his head. I even looked furtively at respectable citizens passing me in cars, and imagined that they were looking at me as a contemptible man outside their respectable world. I seemed to be touching some sort of negative zero point of absolutism again.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

 

GENEVA ONCE MORE

The humdrum events of life sometimes attain tragic heights while at other times they fall flat into the world of commonplace banalities. From being a superman and falling low into the world of sensuous slavery there is a vertical amplitude within which life oscillates.

 

I CELEBRATE MY 50TH BIRTHDAY

With the sun rising on one side, while the full moon was setting in the West, I stood half-naked after a bath at four in the morning in a foaming stream near a cascade. From the top of the hill where I stood at this still small hour, I could see the silver-grey outlines of the cascade beginning to be lit up by the pink fingers of dawn. The mountaintops still lay partly in shade, like giant gods on a watery expanse that the morning mists lent semblance to. I had a favourite disciple who was with me that day, and I hardly suspected then that he would later make an attempt on my very life. I had slept in a hut with him preparing to celebrate my fiftieth birthday in a place ten or twelve miles away from the Gurukula.

 

We had walked there the previous afternoon while wild water buffaloes watched us as we wended through thickets of medicinal herbs on barren undulating ground. Gentians grew here in spring, which was not fully come, and the red clusters of rhododendrons contrasted with the deep green leaves on their antique stems as we observed in passing. I remember clearly all these details of the day previous to my birthday, on which I decided to make a new beginning in my life, though rather late, after touching the zero-point already indicated.

 

Life has many beginnings of higher ambitions and resolves in never-ending series. I might have been a Failure so far, with a capital letter, but such an absolute failure as a careerist had the potency of success with compound interest as, hoping against hope, I have always believed. The last shall be the first.

 

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The chain reaction of the splitting of the atom in the bomb explosion involves a geometric progression which, though in principle only a process, ends in a sudden event of negative significance to humanity. Contemplation leads up to a similar verticalized culmination, and every failure of this kind is to be counted a double negation that spells a success that fully succeeds, in itself, for itself and by itself. Efforts cancel out in its pure dynamic becoming. The 'unmoved mover' and the 'pure act', conspire here in the neutrality of the Absolute that is non-dual. As Narayana Guru says (Darsana Mala, VI. 6):

 

'Fire burns, the wind blows,

Rain showers, the earth supports,

Rivers flow, and ever the One

Remains alone and still.'

 

On my fiftieth birthday I was still a man of subdued and subjective interests. None of the various vocational caps that I had tried on fit me, and I left them and stood, as I have narrated already, on a hilltop to celebrate this half-century in my own original way, exposing my skin to those luminaries which represent the overt and the innate eyes of cosmic consciousness. Agony was being sublimated into a sense of utter abandon then. I made certain resolutions at that moment which may be said to mark the turning of the top half of a figure of eight that my life's unfoldment represented just at that moment. More ambitious programmes were coming ahead. The contemplative spirit, however, lives through these alternating phases in the balanced way indicated above.

 

FIVE BIRTHDAY RESOLUTIONS

To write a book about the Guru; to found a centre in the West for the teaching of Brahma Vidya; to lecture in the States on One Religion; to complete still further my education, both Eastern and Western; and to study the programmes of the United Nations and UNESCO so as to be able to form ideas about world unity - these were the main items of the five-point birthday resolution that I made for myself on my fiftieth birthday.

 

As an overall decision I re-dedicated myself to follow a more thoroughly absolutist way of life, renouncing more emphatically all relativistic affiliations. Although I had hitherto wilfully put a stop to careering in the usual sense, careers had seemed to come to me still, but from that day they finally fell off without clinging to me anymore.

 

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I DECIDE TO GO TO THE USA

At the time I made my birthday resolutions, I hardly knew how they were to come true. Steeped in poverty even to the point of not knowing how to live without starving for the next week, it was an impossible dream to think of going to the United States. But the Tao has its own way of turning impossibilities into possibilities. The switch for such happenings is on what is often referred to as the 'other side', the 'Para' (transcendental beyond). All that I could gather together if I wanted was about five hundred rupees from the sale of a bit of land that had come to me through partition of my mother's properties.

 

Meanwhile I was in touch with Dr. Henry A. Atkinson, of the Church Peace Union, New York, which was about to hold a World Conference of Religions in New York in 1948. I had made his friendship in Geneva in the year 1932 or so, when I participated as a Delegate and Member of the Central Committee of the World Conference for Peace through Religion under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation. This valuable contact had persisted and I was invited to attend the World Conference at New York, as an indian delegate representing the universal teaching of brotherhood, the Guru Narayana's movement.

 

The letter from the World Conference for Peace through Religion reached me after I had taken the decision to go, and before I had found the money for the costly trip. The date of the Conference was coming close and I had difficulty in obtaining shipping accommodation to reach New York in time for the event. At the last moment I had to decide on an air passage, at least as far as Geneva, in order to be able to catch the boat called SS Washington, if I remember rightly, sailing from Cherbourg to New York. More than a couple of thousand rupees had to come to me, which I did not actually have when I wrote to the shipping agents in Bombay, Thomas Cook and Sons, to fix a passage quickly by air or surface route, whichever was most easily available.

 

A FAIRY GOD-MOTHER COMES INTO THE PICTURE AGAIN

If the fairy godmother previously referred to was from an unknown clime and a far-off shore, it was a lady who could claim blood relationship with me who came into the highly improbable situation in which I found myself in early 1948.

 

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The travel agents had asked for a deposit in advance to negotiate my passage, which was difficult to arrange still in those post-war conditions. I did not really know where the two thousand rupees were to come from. But, strange to say, just at that time the wife of the poet Kumaran Asan happened to visit the Ooty Gurukula, and readily promised to advance the amount needed without any difficulty. Years later she even waived her claims and what was meant to be a loan was made into an outright gift.

 

The motives for such generosity cannot be easily analysed, especially because this lady was related, on my father's side, to me. Other blood-relations, even the most near, had disadopted me for my abrupt and absolutist ways, but there was some absolutist factor which the Tao itself seems mysteriously to employ in my favour. My intimacy with the late poet who, like Shelley, suffered the nemesis of a watery grave somewhat prematurely in the most promising period of his life as a poet, must have also had at least something to do with the throw of chance in my favour. All thus went well and I remitted my passage to Bombay in time without any hitch.

 

When I think of how naturally all this happened without my having to press any button anywhere, and especially as I was not in touch with any relations for many years, I cannot, even as a confirmed sceptic, but feel that there are many happenings hereunder not spoken of in the work-a-day philosophies of individuals, but which still do happen by the invisible hand of chance rather than by cut-and-dried causes and effects in the more evident and usual manner. The world is a mixture of vertical and horizontal elements.

 

A FRIEND AND DISCIPLE FROM BOSWELL'S LAND

 

Nataraja Guru with John Spiers and Nitya.

 

John Spiers, who had by this time lost the mother who had adopted him and finished with his odd offices which he had held during or after the war, arrived at the Gurukula at Fernhill soon after. I still lived in the original tin bunk with papered walls which was put up in the eucalyptus grove in 1934. Now it was nearing 1948. John and his adopted Indian boy, Sandy, about fourteen years old, and two others of his age, were put in the new building and in the cottage that was the second to come up on the Gurukula's grounds as years went by.

 

305

A cook with his wife and child who had worked with John came too and fitted into the life of the Gurukula for some time, sharing the partitioned kitchen of the time.

 

Intimates thus increased, and with Soman, Shivan, Balan, Vijayan and Raman coming in too, soon after, bread-winning for the increased family became more and more difficult. John was always known for his open generosity, a natural corollary of absolutism, and had known enough hardships and changes in his own life that adaptability to even the worst of circumstances was nothing to him.

 

Begging and borrowing which touched the lowest level; even stealing by the half-starved boys in dire need; became a boast or a joke sometimes overlooked, condoned or reprimanded. Necessity, which knows no law, was the mother of invention or resourcefulness, and all morality was capable of some accommodation and adjustment within the limits of permissible error. Honesty seemed a luxury meant for the respectable high-class 'haves' for whom such morality was advantageous rather than for the down and out 'have-nots' to whom it was often a high luxury. Moral standards sometimes have to be thrown into the crucible to melt and be made into new models. Absolute morality thus remains ever an ideal only to be approximately attained hereunder. Respectability tended to be thrown to the winds as morality alternated between its relative and absolute limits. Cowardly consciences tend to be unstable; while even with most honest men some gentle alternations exist.

 

How we again faced the situation is not clearly to be recollected at this distance of time; but that we did survive, with pawning or selling of some precious or semi-precious presents or heirlooms, for which we explored the bottoms of trunks each week to pay the grocer's bill, is a story I cannot tell in detail. We can promise only that we did not commit highway robbery, but within certain tolerable moral limits, we survived against some of the hardest days. Stewed vegetables and potatoes substituted for regular rice and curry, and some time after I even heard that the boys subsisted for a week on some pounds of dates alone which someone had gifted to John. This was when I was away in the States. But an important episode took place before I went.

 

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THE SISTER MARGARET EPISODE

It was during these low-grade conditions of life that an episode developed in which a lady, past seventy, who had been a nurse on ships, called Miss C, living a retired life at the border of the lake at the end of the town all by herself, was reported to have fallen unconscious one day as she returned after marketing. This lady was a friend of John and had expressed her desire to spend her last days as an inmate of the Gurukula, calling herself Sister Margaret. The idea of letting her live as an inmate of the Gurukula was in the air and when I thought over the matter I saw no harm. Instead of spinsters and widows having to suffer loneliness, as I have seen in Europe, confined to garrets in big towns from which they emerge only very occasionally on special invitation to mingle with other fellow beings, I thought the ennui of such neglected people could be countered by collective life in colonies meant for common welfare.

 

THE KIBBUTZ OF PALESTINE AFFORDED A MODEL.

As reveries such plans were tantalising, but when put in terms of actual living together there were snags, pitfalls and hidden traps into which one can unconsciously fall or get caught in spite of all good intentions. Soon after Sister Margaret had sold her cottage at the edge of the lake and come with her belongings to the Gurukula, she began to show signs of abnormality and complained that her food was being poisoned. This tendency, lurking behind a decent outside conversation and behaviour, became more and more pronounced till she created a scene in which John was criminally implicated in ill-treating her. Although a police van came to help the lady, through conspiracy with the villagers, John stood absolved from blame. Frustrated attention must have been the psychological cause on the part of a spinster who lacked the intimacy of friendship all her life. When I was preparing to go to America she was still a misfit in the Gurukula, and after I went the plot was hatched. Happily, however, the clumsy episode closed by her quitting the Gurukula of her own will with all her belongings for a Home for Friends in Need started by Lady Wellingdon in the British days.

 

The episode meant much irritation for John, who wanted to be her generous friend. Instead the annoyance that resulted was not tolerable. The problem thus solved itself and I again burnt my fingers trying to be kind at the wrong time, to wrong persons, in wrong circumstances. This chapter is now all but forgotten, and except for the lesson it taught me, it is better so. I have never again thought of admitting any woman into the Gurukula without being twice shy in the matter.

 

307

I TAKE OFF FOR EUROPE EN ROUTE TO THE STATES

Such humdrum details of life deserve to be forgotten quickly. Life however has other moments which are more interesting and worthy of being treasured in memory. My first flight, from Bombay to Geneva in a TWA Constellation was an experience in itself. Starting at ten in the morning, we flew alternately over the sea and desert lands with sparse vegetation when we came to the tropical belt of the earth. Flying below the clouds most of the time there was more to see on the way than in more modernised international flights in jet planes that get lost above the clouds. At best you can enjoy the lunches served and the pretty air hostesses who sometimes smile with gilded angelic smiles while they flit up and down corridors or gangways.

 

After several hours of flight over thickets of undergrowth and desert sands bordering on oceans whose billows, tier on tier, looked like ripples in a tea cup, we landed at dusk at an airport near some oil wells in Saudi Arabia. Black and turbaned Arabian cooks served a meal of baked beans in tomato sauce, which was perhaps the standard meal approved by the TWA company, and notables rubbed shoulders in the canteen for about half an hour before the plane took off again after the usual bells and signals, which drill all went through religiously in the interests of their own safety.

 

Asaf Ali was returning from New York just then, alighting from a plane bound in the opposite direction, and was seen at the same dining room. A young Parsi lady going to see her relations in the Geneva Embassy and a Tamil woman alighting at the Saudi Arabian port to join her missionary husband were the persons I talked to. The former young lady seemed to be somewhat in distress, travelling alone and feeling anxious about finding her friends when she reached Geneva. I had to be chivalrous and allay her anxieties, which was not an altogether unnatural role for me to fulfil as a sort of gallant, though remaining a tyagi (renouncer). I remember other pretty ladies in distress to whom I have felt parental concern or have been a knight-errant. These are natural dialectical counterparts which can belong together happily even as birds of passage as fellow passengers in a plane. That friendships thus made are often of the least lasting nature only adds to the free and easy content of human fellowship.

 

308

THE LIGHTS OF CAIRO ARE SEEN LATE AT NIGHT

 

Cairo.

 

Near midnight the denizens of terra firma must have been disturbed in their slumbers when our plane circled over Cairo, following light and sound signals from the ground to correctly guide its eagle wings onto the runway. A logarithmic spiral with a golden number implicit in its proportion, supported by the notion of a time-space continuum of a summation of differential and integral elements, must have been respected by the mathematically-minded soul of the pilot, whose sense of a graceful landing without bumps must have been wedded to the delight of correct mathematical calculations of split-second precision in the instruments that he controlled or responded to alternately from ground or sky.

 

The magic city lay as an illuminated carpet below with blinking lights of different colours here and there. Cairo was a state of mind as well as a starlit world of Aladdin's lamps. Sitting cosily within the plane without disembarking, and obeying the red and green lights or their flashed signals, even this magic city was soon left behind and we were heading drowsily for Rome. The passports were collected and handed back at each place that we touched or passed through, with queer marks seen on some pages which were not unlike the hieroglyphics of the world of mummies and sphinxes. Taking some aristocratic Italian Signora with her bambino on board at Cairo, the dawn took us to Rome. Lack of lira currency and exchange facilities kept me from taking a café-au-lait at the airport.

 

Rome's azure sky and ruins with memories of a thousand years passed through my mind, wherein wars were waged for the expansion of the Empire now fallen into the disrepute of more prosaic days. Tiberius Graccus and his son stood out with Caesar and Brutus in my reveries as they went as far as the cradles of Christianity in Crete and about Syracuse. The night flight was full of rich dream-content and when the day had dawned we were passing over the countryside of Naples and Florence, and I peeped through the porthole to locate Capri and Anacapri.

 

At about nine we were nearing Switzerland and could see the characteristic greenery that contrasted with the dry and dusty Egyptian areas. Steeper-gabled, red-roofed dwelling places and farmyards brought into the picture the touch of Europe. The summer blue in the sky was like a sigh of relief for the European who had survived many days of winter.

 

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The housewives beating their carpets or shaking their sheets from balcony windows gazed with joy at the bright sky while more sunbaked lands praised instead the shade of trees. Like gnomes and angels or like the Kinnaras and Gandharvas of Indian lore, the human spirit is happy at different levels of light or darkness, above or below the clouds, and hastens from one level to another to seek favourable environments. These quasi-celestial personifications only represent the cravings of the human soul for differing degrees of happiness available to man, released mentally from earthy bounds. Robin Hood's fellows and fairies exist in this sense, and fit into the value worlds proper to each, whether called hobgoblins or gnomes.

 

LANDING IN GENEVA AGAIN FROM THE AIR

The chalets and villas, with farm houses interspersed, bordering on blue lakes and vineyards, when the light greenery that covered the spring buds was turning darker with all thickets and bushes overladen with flowers galore, turning to fruit or seed in the glut of the summer season with its own riot of colour, with red poppies and blue cornflowers showing through tall grass yet to be mowed, from where straw-hatted girls in summer clothes fondly gathered and bundled them up - such was the scene through which the luxury bus, with glass top and sides, took us to the centre of the city on landing from the airport several kilometres away.

 

It felt like a second homecoming to me on reaching this city associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the seat of internationalism through decades and centuries. The placid blue lake and the high jet of water near the principal bridge joining the two parts of the town nestling amidst the Jura Alps were filled with some strange consoling associations in my mind.

 

The colourful spectacles with which I had looked at the same scenes twenty years before in 1928 were changed into more mellow, almost achromatic tones when I viewed the same scene again in 1948. The eidetic content of values change from one pole to the other within the phenomenological frame of reference within which even empirical life, not yet fully contemplative, has to move. Mellowed by maturer years, Geneva was still interesting to me as a place where I could surprise old friends with an unexpected visit, which in itself was a joy like that of hide-and-seek of which children cannot ever miss the joke.

 

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An element of this play lingers on even in more advanced years. To mention only one instance, I met by chance a young woman in her late teens who told me that her mother was Russian and that she was going to college in Geneva, while her father was a Doctor in Calcutta. Memory linked me up with a Bengali medical student by the name of Sircar whom I used to see taking walks in Geneva with a Russian girl in 1928, and the rest of the story of the girl student needed no explanation on her part. Nature had not missed to do her work and that was all. It was just a matter of putting two and two together to know almost all about the young lady.