The Cat and Shakespeare Read online

  Tagore’s classic story of village India, ‘The Postmaster’ (1891), ends on a similar note. The orphan Ratan is abandoned by the postmaster, who finds life in the village of Ulapur intolerable and returns home to Calcutta. The postmaster is more than just an employer to her; he is a father figure, someone she respects and admires. He had provided her a home. For one brief period, his illness brings them together. Ratan rises to the occasion and is transformed from a girl into a young woman. So when Ratan asks him: ‘”Dada, will you take me to your home?” The postmaster laughed. “What an idea!” said he; but he did not think it necessary to explain to the girl wherein lay the absurdity.’20 On leaving the village, the postmaster takes comfort in philosophic reflection: ‘The grief-stricken face of a village girl seemed to represent for him the great unspoken pervading grief of Mother Earth herself.’ (1918:124) Abandoned by their families, the Javnis and Ratans learn to fend for themselves in an inhospitable world. Both stories underscore the resilience of the Indian woman under stress.

  ‘Nimka’ was first published in The Illustrated Weekly of India, Bombay, in 1963. Set in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century, the story reveals the extent of Rao’s immersion in European culture. Himself an exile in France, the narrator, an Indian student at the Sorbonne, is able to sympathize with Nimka’s plight as a White Russian émigré who flees her homeland in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Attracted to Nimka, the narrator goes into raptures over her beauty: ‘Her beauty had certainty, it had a rare equilibrium, and a naughtiness that was feminine and very innocent . . . It was beauty—it always will be, and you cannot take it, and as such you cannot soil yourselves.’ (1978: 99)

  Nimka’s interest in India begins with her interest in the narrator. It expands thereafter to include Tolstoy’s admiration of Gandhi, and stories from the epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, especially the story of Nala and Damayanti from ‘The Book of the Forest’ (the Vanaparvan) of the Mahabharata. Nimka sees in Damayanti, the princess of Vidarbha, a reflection of her own unhappy life. But then she is no Damayanti, and Count Vergilian Kormaloff, her husband, is no Nala, king of Nishadha. One misfortune after another strikes Nala and Damayanti: Nala loses his kingdom to his brother Pushkara in a game of dice, lives in the forest with Damayanti, whom he later abandons; but in the end he wins his kingdom back, and is reunited with Damayanti. Kormaloff loses his entire fortune betting on horses, abandons Nimka, and their son, Boris, and flees to Monte Carlo. When seventeen years old, Boris goes back to Russia and is never heard of again. Nimka’s dream of returning to the Smolny courtyard in St Petersburg never materializes. She is all alone now. ‘She asked nothing of life.’ (1978: 103)

  The identification of the narrator with the swan in the story of Nala and Damayanti is significant. It is the swan that introduces Nala to Damayanti by praising the king’s virtues; Damayanti falls in love with Nala and vows to marry only him.

  Nimka knew the Indian saying that the swan knows how to separate milk from water—the good from the bad, and as I knew her to be good, she recognized me a swan. The swan sailed in and out and India became the land where all that is wrong everywhere goes right there. (1978: 100)

  The swan or bar-headed goose (hamsa, Anser indicus) is, in Indian iconography, a symbol of enlightenment, of those able to discern between the Self and the non-Self. The title paramahamsa (‘supreme soul’; an ascetic of utmost sanctity) is often bestowed upon those who have become fully enlightened, such as Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836-86). Haṃsa is also one of the names of Vishnu. Sankara writes: ‘The Lord is called Haṃsa as He dispels (hanti) the fear of transmigration for those who meditate upon the oneness of “I am He” (aham sah).’21 The statement ‘I am He’ sums up the essential teaching of the Upanishads: the atman and Brahman are one and the same. Again, the bird features prominently in classical Sanskrit poetry. In Kalidasa’s Meghadūta (‘The Cloud Messenger’), the Yaksha, an exile in the Vindhya Mountains, tells the cloud that on its journey to Lake Manasa, carrying his message to his wife in their home in Alaka in the Himalaya, it will be accompanied by a flock of wild geese.

  Eager to fly to Lake Manasa, a flock of wild geese, with shoots of lotus stalks to sustain them on the journey, will be your companions in the sky as far as Mount Kailasa.22

  Rich in symbolism, the swan (wild goose) weaves the stories of Nala and Damayanti, and the Yaksha and his wife into the very fabric of ‘Nimka’, deepening its resonance, and making the reader aware of its metaphysical significance. Time and space do not seem to matter as we uncover the many layers of this unforgettable story.

  The reunions of Nala and Damayanti, and of the Yaksha and his wife, make Nimka’s situation all the more poignant. Is India then the ‘land where all that is wrong everywhere goes right there’?

  Though the narrator is involved in the story, he also stands outside it. Perhaps he realizes that Nimka is after all an illusion (maya). As Michel reminds us: ‘The object exists because of its name. Remove the name, and the object is space. Remove the space, and the object is the Reality’ (1978: 101-02). Is Nimka real or unreal? She is a shadowy figure, a fantasy of the narrator’s imagination, someone ethereal who flits in and out of the story. In ‘Nimka’, Rao transcends the limits of the short story to explore states of consciousness that are not usually accessible to language by drawing upon, on the one hand, myths and folklore, and on the other, metaphysics, to try to express the inexpressible. By all accounts ‘Nimka’ is a triumph.

  The author’s note to the reader asks that the eleven stories in On the Ganga Ghat ‘be read as one single novel’. The scene is Kashi, the City of Light, with the ever-flowing Ganga in the background. This is the stage on which the stories are enacted. It seems that the entire world has gathered in Kashi as if for a festival. The Indian imagination is mythopoeic, and so gods and humans mingle with one another as story after story from Kashi’s sthala-purana is woven seamlessly into the narrative. Like the ever-flowing Ganga, there is no end to the stories. It is for this reason that Rao would like us to consider the book as a ‘single novel’.

  Let us look at one of the stories, ‘X’ (the stories do not have titles)—that of Sudha, the only daughter of the jeweller Ranchoddoss Sunderdoss, whose family business was founded way back in 1799 on Girgaum Road in Bombay.

  They say on the day she was born, suddenly, a peacock, wings outstretched and keening, strutted past the courtyard (the mother had gone to Kathiawar, to her own mother, for the childbirth) and everybody said: ‘Well, this girl, she will bring in holy riches.’23

  At fourteen, Sudha resolves not to marry. She would sit for hours in the family sanctuary, chanting ‘Rama, Sri Rama’. She would even fast and observe days of silence. One night she has a vision: ‘a sadhu would come to initiate her, and she would then become a true devotee of the Lord’ (1993: 113). In three days, a handsome south Indian sadhu arrives at the Ranchoddoss’s and asks Sudha’s mother, Ramabehn: ‘Is there anyone living in this house who’s deeply devoted to the Lord?’ (1993: 114). On hearing this, Sudha comes out and falls at the sadhu’s feet. At that moment, she remembers her past life ‘somewhere in Kathiawar’. After three months, the sadhu initiates her into sannyas (‘life as a wandering ascetic’). Sudha puts on a white sari, and a few days later leaves with the sadhu for the Himalaya. Ramabehn is devastated and dies, and Ranchoddoss leaves home in search of his daughter. He finds her in Benares, reading the Vāsiṣṭha Rāmāyaṇa to widows and ascetics. ‘”Father,” she said, looking at the flowing Ganga before her, “Father, I think I have just a chink to the door of Knowledge—to Jnan’’’ (1993: 120). Happy to be reunited with his daughter, Ranchoddoss begins his spiritual exercises in earnest under her guidance. Later, father and daughter visit Badrinath to see her guru’s guru (her own guru, the sadhu, had died). The Guru initiates Ranchoddoss into sannyas. ‘Life flows as you see, like the Ganga herself . . . reminding you that the Truth is but one indivisible flow. What is dream and which reality, then?’ (1993
: 120). Ranchoddoss, the jeweller from Bombay, understands. He has at last come home.

  Sankara praises the river in his ‘Hymn to Ganga’ (‘Gangāstotraṃ’):

  Rather a fish or a turtle in Thy waters,

  A tiny lizard on Thy bank, would I be,

  Or even a shunned and hated outcaste

  Living but a mile from Thy sacred stream,

  Than the proudest emperor afar from Thee.24

  The true protagonist of these stories are not the men and women who throng the ghats of Kashi, but the Ganga herself. Like a thread of gold, the river braids the stories into a seamless whole. On the Ganga Ghat is steeped in the spiritual life of Kashi and is an eloquent reminder of the centrality of the city and the river in the Indian consciousness.

  What is remarkable about these three stories is Rao’s understanding of women. Javni, Nimka and Sudha come across as real people whom we may have known. They are not characters in fiction. Sudha’s story is especially poignant. Born into a wealthy family, she gives up a life of ease and privilege. A spiritual aspirant, she leaves home and goes forth into homelessness in search of, as her name implies, the nectar of Knowledge.

  It was Rao, who, more than any other writer of his generation—which included Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) and R.K. Narayan (1906-2001)—established the status of Indian literature in English during India’s struggle for independence from British rule. Neither Anand nor Narayan had come anywhere close to Rao’s innovative approach to fiction. Rao’s fiction is a philosophical quest in search of the word as mantra that would lead to liberation. Rao never considered himself to be solely an Indian writer. He had spent his formative years in France and not in England. Though his novels are rooted in the Indian philosophical tradition, they are universal in scope. Rao was conscious of the fact that English is an Indo-European language and therefore distantly related to Sanskrit. In his fiction, English, French and Sanskrit rub shoulders with one another in a linguistic family reunion of sorts. What is explored is the nature of language itself in an attempt to know the Truth.

  The English language does not have sufficiently deep roots in India. It is therefore important for the writer to find his own individual style through which to express his world view. The reader, on his part, if he is not to misread the text, must get to know the writer’s epistemological viewpoint, or the sum total of beliefs, preconceptions and values which the writer shares with others within a sociocultural context.

  R. Parathasarathy

  Saratoga Springs, New York

  15 January 2014

  1

  I have a small white house here, with a courtyard. From the back I look over coconut trees, and huts, and somewhere there’s the sound of the sea.

  I was appointed divisional clerk, Trivandrum, some two years ago. I left my wife and two children at Pattanur. My eldest was five years of age, my youngest three. It’s not so easy to change schools, you know; and then it was monsoon time. When I thought of the bad new road (which leads to Kamla Bhavan, the noble name my fat landlord inflicted on this blue and ochre-banded building), I suffered to think of Usha coming back from school in this mess. Usha has sensitive hands, and her schoolmistress Tangamma was always telling her: Child, you have the fingers to make a nice braid. You will be a dutiful wife. My wife Saroja said: ‘Nice thing for teachers to be talking of wives already.’ But that is the way with my wife. She cannot help all the time talking of the wife. I am a quiet man, and to speak the truth, I don’t yet know what it is to mean husband.

  Yes, at last I had a house. It was new and it was white. It had ochre bands on it—almost as on a temple—and I could hear the sea.

  Now that the monsoon was as its fiercest, there was a problem even about going to the office. I ate every day at the Home Friends; the food was bad, but the freedom was so good. When I did not eat at the Home Friends, I could always go to the Trivandrum Brahmins’ Hotel. There the food smells less bad but the place looks more untidy. Life is always this choice—to choose an old house nearer the office or the new one sitting amidst coconut gardens. My wife saw this and said: ‘Oh, it’s just like home, coconut trees, huts, and the sound of the sea.’ For she is from Alwaye. And she never tired of saying how her old grandfather spoke of the way the Dutch landed some two hundred years ago, and thank heavens the Kartikuras’ house was two miles inland—but you could hear the sea—and the Dutch took away all the able-bodied men to fight (or to become Christians), and Kartikura House, being two miles inland, was left in peace. So the two miles and the coconut trees saved the Kartikura people, and thus emerged my wife, and from her and me, Usha and Vithal, my last born, a boy so round and fresh, with a tilak on his brow, and he leaps when he sees a car, and says, ‘Take me on a pom-pom,’ but I make him ride on my knee. But here, in Trivandrum, I sit alone and ride my own knee, as it were. I like being alone. I like eating dose and drinking coffee at Jyothibhavan. ‘Hey, take this away, this is such bad coffee,’ you can always say to the Brahmin boy, but you cannot say that to Saroja. She will talk of the Dutch and Christianity—and the sea.

  The Dutch of course are an able-bodied people who have white ships. I have seen them because I have been to Bombay. During the war I tried to get into the navy and have better emoluments. At the interview they made me sit and leap so much, I cried, ‘Ay ya yo yo,’ and said: ‘No more silver than this hand can earn driving a nib.’ A man is meant to work for his wife, to feed her, and for the children to go to school (I so much liked Usha coming back along the railway embankment from school—three miles are three good miles from Pattanur to Alwaye, but then there’s the signal, the red and green lights, and all the other children, and father at home. Vithal was, of course, always in his mother’s arms).

  I was thirty-three, and I had ever wondered that one is alive. I wanted to become a rich man, for then my wife would be so happy that I could do what I liked. If my plans went well—and in the new India plans are never so difficult, the new is made with plans—I would build a big house, like contractor Srinivasa Pai. He is some distant cousin of mine, and I no more like his house than I like his face. But people usually introduce me in the office saying, ‘This is Mr Ramakrishna Pai, cousin of Srinivasa Pai of Chalai Bazaar,’ as if I belonged to some royal lineage. My lineage smells of chilli and cardamom and tamarind as my wife’s does of coconuts. But then my wife’s people had two or three boats that plied the canals, and banditry and pilfering can make a lot of difference with prices. One can build a Kartikura House on thuggery. My wife was the second child; the first daughter was amply given away to a merchant in Ernakulam. Sundari (my wife’s sister) must tell Ramu, her husband, about the Dutch and the sea. Ernakulam must have many ruins and the Dutch must have left a few guns there. In Kartikura House they still show you Dutch cannon balls. When you plough for the tapioca sowings, the cannon balls come out just like the tapioca. Usha used to say, ‘The cannon is hard tapioca but this tapioca is man’s.’ Thus the cannon became the gods’. Strange how we transform all things into ours. Our houses must look like us, just as our ancestors built temples in the shape of man. In Chidamabaram Temple, Shankar Iyer says, the image of Shiva occupies the place of the heart. Then what is the place Parwathi1 occupies? I sometimes wonder whether I have a heart as I wonder in summer whether the rains will ever come. In heat I strike. I struck my wife only twice and have left marks on her face.

  I don’t know if you’ve heard of a bilva tree—it has three leaves and a crust of thick thorns. It’s a scraggy tree but dear to Shiva, for one night a hunter trying to shoot at his game—was it a deer or a porcupine?—went up this obnoxious stump, and in his hours of waiting, sent down leaf after leaf, so they say, and a Shiva image being beneath, Shiva himself came in a vision and said: ‘Here I am.’ For it’s not the way you worship that is important but what you adore. Even an accidental fall of leaves on Shiva’s head got the wicked hunter his vision. And thus the stump of tree became sacred—and its trefoil sacred, for all that is sacred to God.

  So w
hen I look from my window eastwards, just by the garden wall, I see this stump of bilva tree, thorns visible in the morning sun. And I wonder if God will ever bless me, just like that.

  Vithal would have to go to school next year, I was saying to myself one vacant morning. Usha would have to be brought to Trivandrum and sent to the convent. The sisters there, you know, are Belgian, they say, and very good. They teach excellent English—and never forget they also teach Malayalam. But then for a Saraswath Brahmin2 like me, Malayalam or English is all the same. The Revenue Board has no preference, or if preferences there be, they lie in the direction of English. But soon it will be Hindi, and my Konkani will be of help. God helps one in everything. Will I build a big house? That is what I asked looking at the tree.

  Just at that moment Govindan Nair looks up from between the leaves and says: ‘Hey there, be you at home?’ That is his style, if one may say so, of talking. It’s a mixture of The Vicar of Wakefield and Shakespeare. The words are choice, the choice of the situation clumsy. He never says come and go. He will always say: ‘Gentleman, may I invite myself there? Will I be permitted into your presence?’ That’s ever the way with him, in English or in Malayalam. He must twist a thing into its essence and spread it out. So that milk becomes cow’s precious liquid or water the aqua of Ganges. His heart is so big, it builds a wall lest it runs away with everything. He always wants to run away with everything. In fact he himself is . . . running.