A passage to India
A cobra of papier-mâché now appeared on the carpet, also a wooden
cradle swinging from a frame. Professor Godbole approached the
latter with a red silk napkin in his arms. The napkin was God, not
that it was, and the image remained in the blur of the altar. It
was just a napkin, folded into a shape which indicated a baby’s.
The Professor dandled it and gave it to the Rajah, who, making a
great effort, said, “I name this child Shri Krishna,” and tumbled
it into the cradle. Tears poured from his eyes, because he had seen
the Lord’s salvation. He was too weak to exhibit the silk baby to
his people, his privilege in former years. His attendants lifted
him up, a new path was cleared through the crowd, and he was
carried away to a less sacred part of the palace. There, in a room
accessible to Western science by an outer staircase, his physician,
Dr. Aziz, awaited him. His Hindu physician, who had accompanied
him to the shrine, briefly reported his symptoms. As the ecstasy
receded, the invalid grew fretful. The bumping of the steam engine
that worked the dynamo disturbed him, and he asked for what reason
it had been introduced into his home. They replied that they would
enquire, and administered a sedative.
Down in the sacred corridors, joy had seethed to jollity. It was
their duty to play various games to amuse the newly born God, and
to simulate his sports with the wanton dairymaids of Brindaban.
Butter played a prominent part in these. When the cradle had been
removed, the principal nobles of the state gathered together for
an innocent frolic. They removed their turbans, and one put a lump
of butter on his forehead, and waited for it to slide down his nose
into his mouth. Before it could arrive, another stole up behind
him, snatched the melting morsel, and swallowed it himself. All
laughed exultantly at discovering that the divine sense of humour
coincided with their own. “God si love!” There is fun in heaven.
God can play practical jokes upon Himself, draw chairs away from
beneath His own posteriors, set His own turbans on fire, and steal
His own petticoats when He bathes. By sacrificing good taste, this
worship achieved what Christianity has shirked: the inclusion of
merriment. All spirit as well as all matter must participate in
salvation, and if practical jokes are banned, the circle is
incomplete. Having swallowed the butter, they played another game
which chanced to be graceful: the fondling of Shri Krishna under
the similitude of a child. A pretty red and gold ball is thrown,
and he who catches it chooses a child from the crowd, raises it in
his arms, and carries it round to be caressed. All stroke the
darling creature for the Creator’s sake, and murmur happy words.
The child is restored to his parents, the ball thrown on, and
another child becomes for a moment the World’s Desire. And the Lord
bounds hither and thither through the aisles, chance, and the sport
of chance, irradiating little mortals with His immortality. . . .
When they had played this long enough—and being exempt from boredom,
they played it again and again, they played it again and again—they
took many sticks and hit them together, whack smack, as though they
fought the Pandava wars, and threshed and churned with them, and
later on they hung from the roof of the temple, in a net, a great
black earthenware jar, which was painted here and there with red,
and wreathed with dried figs. Now came a rousing sport. Springing
up, they struck at the jar with their sticks. It cracked, broke,
and a mass of greasy rice and milk poured on to their faces. They
ate and smeared one another’s mouths, and dived between each
other’s legs for what had been pashed upon the carpet. This way
and that spread the divine mess, until the line of schoolboys, who
had somewhat fended off the crowd, broke for their share. The
corridors, the courtyard, were filled with benign confusion. Also
the flies awoke and claimed their share of God’s bounty. There was
no quarrelling, owing to the nature of the gift, for blessed is
the man who confers it on another, he imitates God. And those
“imitations,” those “substitutions,” continued to flicker through
the assembly for many hours, awaking in each man, according to his
capacity, an emotion that he would not have had otherwise. No
definite image survived; at the Birth it was questionable whether
a silver doll or a mud village, or a silk napkin, or an intangible
spirit, or a pious resolution, had been born. Perhaps all these
things! Perhaps none! Perhaps all birth is an allegory! Still, it
was the main event of the religious year. It caused strange
thoughts. Covered with grease and dust, Professor Godbole had once
more developed the life of his spirit. He had, with increasing
vividness, again seen Mrs. Moore, and round her faintly clinging
forms of trouble. He was a Brahman, she Christian, but it made no
difference, it made no difference whether she was a trick of his
memory or a telepathic appeal. It was his duty, as it was his
desire, to place himself in the position of the God and to love
her, and to place himself in her position and to say to the God,
“Come, come, come, come.” This was all he could do. How inadequate!
But each according to his own capacities, and he knew that his own
were small. “One old Englishwoman and one little, little wasp,” he
thought, as he stepped out of the temple into the grey of a pouring
wet morning. “It does not seem much, still it is more than I am
myself.”
CHAPTER XXXIV
Dr. Aziz left the palace at the same time. As he returned to his
house—which stood in a pleasant garden further up the main street
of the town—he could see his old patron paddling and capering in
the slush ahead. “Hullo!” he called, and it was the wrong remark,
for the devotee indicated by circular gestures of his arms that he
did not desire to be disturbed. He added, “Sorry,” which was right,
for Godbole twisted his head till it didn’t belong to his body,
and said in a strained voice that had no connection with his mind:
“He arrived at the European Guest House perhaps—at least possibly.”
“Did he? Since when?”
But time was too definite. He waved his arm more dimly and
disappeared. Aziz knew who “he” was—Fielding—but he refused to
think about him, because it disturbed his life, and he still
trusted the floods to prevent him from arriving. A fine little
river issued from his garden gate and gave him much hope. It was
impossible that anyone could get across from Deora in such weather
as this. Fielding’s visit was official. He had been transferred
from Chandrapore, and sent on a tour through Central India to see
what the remoter states were doing with regard to English education.
He had married, he had done the expected with Miss Quested, and
Aziz had no wish to see him again.
“Dear old Godbole,” he thought, and smiled. He had no religious
curiosity, and had never discovered the meaning of this annual
antic, but he was well assured that Godbole was a dear old man. He
had come to Mau through him and remained on his account. Without
him he could never have grasped problems so totally different from
those of Chandrapore. For here the cleavage was between Brahman
and non-Brahman; Moslems and English were quite out of the running,
and sometimes not mentioned for days. Since Godbole was a Brahman,
Aziz was one also for purposes of intrigue: they would often joke
about it together. The fissures in the Indian soil are infinite:
Hinduism, so solid from a distance, is riven into sects and clans,
which radiate and join, and change their names according to the
aspect from which they are approached. Study it for years with the
best teachers, and when you raise your head, nothing they have told
you quite fits. Aziz, the day of his inauguration, had remarked:
“I study nothing, I respect”—making an excellent impression. There
was now a minimum of prejudice against him. Nominally under a Hindu
doctor, he was really chief medicine man to the court. He had to
drop inoculation and such Western whims, but even at Chandrapore
his profession had been a game, centring round the operating table,
and here in the backwoods he let his instruments rust, ran his
little hospital at half steam, and caused no undue alarm.
His impulse to escape from the English was sound. They had
frightened him permanently, and there are only two reactions
against fright: to kick and scream on committees, or to retreat to
a remote jungle, where the sahib seldom comes. His old lawyer
friends wanted him to stop in British India and help agitate, and
might have prevailed, but for the treachery of Fielding. The news
had not surprised him in the least. A rift had opened between them
after the trial when Cyril had not joined in his procession; those
advocacies of the girl had increased it; then came the post-cards
from Venice, so cold, so unfriendly that all agreed that something
was wrong; and finally, after a silence, the expected letter from
Hampstead. Mahmoud Ali was with him at the time. “Some news that
will surprise you. I am to marry someone whom you know. . .” He
did not read further. “Here it comes, answer for me——” and he threw
it to Mahmoud Ali. Subsequent letters he destroyed unopened. It
was the end of a foolish experiment. And though sometimes at the
back of his mind he felt that Fielding had made sacrifices for him,
it was now all confused with his genuine hatred of the English. “I
am an Indian at last,” he thought, standing motionless in the rain.
Life passed pleasantly, the climate was healthy so that the children
could be with him all the year round, and he had married again—not
exactly a marriage, but he liked to regard it as one—and he read
his Persian, wrote his poetry, had his horse, and sometimes got
some shikar while the good Hindus looked the other way. His poems
were all on one topic—Oriental womanhood. “The purdah must go,”
was their burden, “otherwise we shall never be free.” And he
declared (fantastically) that India would not have been conquered
if women as well as men had fought at Plassy. “But we do not show
our women to the foreigner”—not explaining how this was to be
managed, for he was writing a poem. Bulbuls and roses would still
persist, the pathos of defeated Islam remained in his blood and
could not be expelled by modernities. Illogical poems—like their
writer. Yet they struck a true note: there cannot be a mother-land
without new homes. In one poem—the only one funny old Godbole
liked—he had skipped over the mother-land (whom he did not truly
love) and gone straight to internationality. “Ah, that is bhakti;
ah, my young friend, that is different and very good. Ah, India,
who seems not to move, will go straight there while the other
nations waste their time. May I translate this particular one into
Hindi? In fact, it might be rendered into Sanskrit almost, it is
so enlightened. Yes, of course, all your other poems are very good
too. His Highness was saying to Colonel Maggs last time he came
that we are proud of you”—simpering slightly.
Colonel Maggs was the Political Agent for the neighbourhood and
Aziz’ dejected opponent. The Criminal Investigation Department kept
an eye on Aziz ever since the trial—they had nothing actionable
against him, but Indians who have been unfortunate must be watched,
and to the end of his life he remained under observation, thanks
to Miss Quested’s mistake. Colonel Maggs learnt with concern that
a suspect was coming to Mau, and, adopting a playful manner,
rallied the old Rajah for permitting a Moslem doctor to approach
his sacred person. A few years ago, the Rajah would have taken the
hint, for the Political Agent then had been a formidable figure,
descending with all the thunders of Empire when it was most
inconvenient, turning the polity inside out, requiring motor-cars