We had no news of Sachish for two years. I don’t wish to say anything critical about Sachish but I couldn’t help thinking then that at the shock of bereavement the note to which he had been tuned had slid down the scale.
‘Just as a moneychanger rings a coin to test if it is counterfeit,’ Uncle had once remarked on seeing a sannyasi ‘the world tests the quality of man by making him experience loss, bereavement and the lure of salvation. Coins that ring false are discarded as counterfeit; these sannyasis are like those fake coins, useless in life’s transactions. Yet they go around saying that they have renounced the world. If one is of any use there’s no way one can slip out of the world of samsara. Dry leaves fall from the boughs because the tree shakes them off—they are trash after all.’
Among so many was it going to be Sachish’s lot to end up as trash? Had it been inscribed on the dark touchstone of grief that Sachish was worthless in life’s marketplace?
Then we heard that Sachish was somewhere in Chittagong. Our Sachish was with Swami Lilananda, dancing ecstatically, singing kirtans, playing cymbals, and rousing whole neighbourhoods into a state of excitement.
Once I couldn’t imagine how someone like Sachish could be an atheist; now I couldn’t understand how Swami Lilananda made Sachish dance to his tune.
Meanwhile how could we not lose face? Our enemies would laugh at us. And they were far from few.
Members of our group turned violently against Sachish. Many claimed to have known all along that there was no real substance to Sachish; he was all empty theory.
I realized now how much I loved Sachish. He had aimed a fatal missile at our group, yet I couldn’t bring myself to feel any anger towards him.
I set out in search of Swami Lilananda. I had to cross many rivers, cut across many fields, spend nights in grocers’ stalls, before finally catching up with Sachish in a village. It was about two in the afternoon.
I wanted to see him alone, but there was no hope of that. The courtyard of the disciple’s house in which the Swami had halted was thick with people. There had been kirtan singing all morning. Arrangements were afoot to provide a meal to those who had come from afar.
As soon as he saw me Sachish rushed forward and hugged me. I was astonished. Sachish had always been restrained in manner; with him, silence evinced depth of feeling. Today it seemed as if he was high on drugs.
The Swami was resting in a room. The door was slightly ajar.
He caught sight of me and called out in a deep voice, ‘Who is it?’
‘My friend Sribilash,’ said Sachish.
My name had begun to get around. A certain Englishman of intellectual repute had observed on hearing me lecture in English, ‘The fellow’s quite . . .’ but let me not make more enemies by going into all that. I had become well known among students and their parents as a formidable atheist who could drive the four-horse carriage of English conversation at twenty or twenty-five miles an hour with amazing finesse.
I believe the Swami was pleased to hear of my arrival. He wished to see me. I entered his room and greeted him with a namaskar. It was a namaskar in which my joined palms rose perpendicularly to my forehead; my head didn’t bow at all. We were Uncle’s disciples, our namaskar was like an unstrung bow: dispensing with the nama, it stood ramrod straight.
Noticing this, the Swami said, ‘Get the hookah ready for me, Sachish.’
Sachish sat down to prepare the hookah. As the tikka lit up I too began to burn. I couldn’t decide where to sit. The only furniture was the cot on which the Swami had made his bed. I didn’t consider it improper to sit down on one side of it, but I didn’t do so I don’t know why—I kept standing by the door.
I discovered that the Swamiji knew I had won the Premchand-Raychand scholarship. ‘Baba,’ he said, ‘the diver has to go down to the seabed to look for pearls, but it’s fatal to get stuck there, so he comes gasping to the surface to save his life. If you want salvation you must leave the floor of the ocean of knowledge and come to the shore. You have won the Premchand Raychand scholarship, now look to the Premchand-Raychand renunciationship!’
When the hookah was ready Sachish handed it to him and sat on the floor at his feet. The Swami at once stretched out his legs towards Sachish, who began slowly massaging them.
The sight was so distressing to me that I couldn’t remain any longer in the room. I realized it was in order to provoke me that Sachish had been made to prepare the Swami’s hookah and massage his legs.
The Swami continued with his rest, the visitors finished their meal of khichuri. At five, kirtan singing resumed and went on till ten at night.
Catching Sachish alone at night I said, ‘Sachish, from the moment you were born you have lived in a liberated atmosphere. What strange bondage have you got yourself into now? Can Uncle’s death be such a devastating event?’
Partly as an affectionate joke, partly because of my appearance, Sachish used to transpose the first two syllables of my name, Sribilash, and call me Bisri, which means ugly. ‘Bisri,’ he said, ‘when Uncle was alive he gave me freedom in the sphere of life’s activities, and this was like the freedom a child enjoys in the playpen. With his death he has set me free in the ocean of ecstasy which offers the freedom a child finds at its mother’s breast. Having enjoyed the freedom of daylight, why should I now forgo the freedom of the night world? You may rest assured Uncle has had a hand in both.’
‘Whatever you say,’ I retorted, ‘Uncle’s weaknesses didn’t extend to making others massage his legs and prepare his hookah. This doesn’t look like liberation.’
‘Uncle trained my limbs for work and gave me the freedom of the shore,’ said Sachish. ‘Now I am in the ocean of ecstasy, where a boat’s moorings are its guarantee of liberty. That is why the guru has bound me like this to a life of service; by massaging his legs I am making my way across the ocean.’
‘The words don’t sound unattractive on your lips, I said, ‘but the person who stretches out his legs towards you like that is surely . . .’
‘He can do that because he doesn’t really need anyone’s service. If he did he would feel embarrassed; the need is mine alone.’
I realized that Sachish was in a realm I had never entered. The ‘me’ whom Sachish had embraced when we met wasn’t ‘me, Sribilash’, it was the Universal Soul that inheres in all beings, it was an Idea.
Such an Idea is like wine; whoever is drunk with it will clasp anyone to his breast and shed tears; it makes no difference whether that one is me or another. But I couldn’t share the inebriate’s joy; I didn’t want to lose my power of discrimination and be a mere ripple in a flood of Sameness—after all, ‘I’ am ‘me’.
I knew it wasn’t a question that could be settled through argument. But it was beyond me to abandon Sachish; drawn into the Swami’s group because of him, I too drifted from village to village. Gradually the intoxication came to possess me as well; I too embraced everyone, shed unrestrained tears, massaged the guru’s legs; and one day in a sudden, ineffable rapture I saw Sachish assume an other-worldly form that could only be that of a god.
3
HAVING ROPED TWO FORMIDABLE ENGLISH-EDUCATED ATHEISTS INTO HIS fold, Swami Lilananda’s fame spread far and wide. His disciples in Calcutta implored him to make his base in the city. So he went.
The Swami once had an extremely devoted disciple named Shibtosh, with whom he would stay whenever he was in Calcutta. The pride and joy of Shibtosh’s life was to serve the Swami and his retinue.
Before his death Shibtosh made out a will granting life-rent for his house and other property in Calcutta to his young and childless wife, and ultimate ownership to his guru; it was his wish that in time the house would become the chief place of pilgrimage for his guru’s followers. This was where we billeted.
During my delirious wanderings from village to village, I had been in one frame of mind. After coming to Calcutta I found it difficult to sustain my drunkenness. All these days I had been in the realm of ecstasy, where the cosm
ic Female and the consciousness-pervading Male made love endlessly; the music of that cosmic romance filled the village pastures, the peepul-shade at the river-crossing, leisurely afternoons, and the evenings pulsating with the chirp of crickets. It was like a dream in which I floated without hindrance in the open sky; coming to the tough city my head suffered a knock, I was jostled by crowds—the spell broke. Once in lodgings in this very Calcutta I had devoted myself day and night to study; had met with friends by the Goldighi lake to ponder the nation’s future; played the volunteer at political conferences; nearly landed in jail in protesting against police brutality. Responding to Uncle’s call, I had vowed to oppose the brigandage of society with my last breath and to liberate the minds of my countrymen from all forms of bondage. From early youth till now I had moved through the city throngs like a sailboat travelling proudly upstream with chest puffed out, derided by stranger and kinsman alike. Now in the same Calcutta, I tried desperately to sustain the trance of lachrymose ecstasy amidst crowds tossed about by hunger and thirst, pleasure and pain, and the baffling problems of good and evil. At times I felt I was too weak, I was straying, my devotions lacked concentration. But turning to Sachish I saw in his face no recognition of the fact that Calcutta had a position in geographical space; to him it was all shadow.
4
MY FRIEND AND I CONTINUED TO LIVE WITH OUR GURU IN SHIBTOSH’S house. We were his chief disciples and he wanted us to be constantly with him.
Day and night we discoursed with our guru and fellow disciples on the theory of rasa, the essence of ecstasy. Amidst the obscure profundities loud feminine laughter would suddenly reach us from the zenana. Sometimes we would hear a loud summons to the maid, ‘Bami!’ Seen from the rare heights of abstraction in which our minds were absorbed these were trivialities; but it would suddenly seem as if a shower had pattered down in the middle of a drought. Whenever such small signs of life in the hidden world on the other side of the wall touched us like falling petals, I would be struck by the realization that the desired partner in ecstasy was there—where the rattling bunch of household keys was tied to a corner of Bami’s sari, where the smell of cooking rose from the kitchen, where I could hear the sound of sweeping, where all was trivial yet true, where the sweet and the bitter, the crude and the subtle, were inextricably intertwined—there lay the paradise of ecstasy.
The widow’s name was Damini. At first we would catch only fleeting glimpses of her, but Sachish and I were so close to the guru that she couldn’t keep herself hidden from us for long.
Damini means lightning and Damini was like the lightning in thunderous monsoon clouds. Her outward form brimmed with youthful vitality; and in her soul danced a restless flame.
At one point in his diary Sachish noted:
‘In Nonibala I saw one form of the Universal Feminine—the woman who takes upon herself the stigma of sin, who sacrifices her life for a sinner’s sake, who in dying adds to the contents of life’s cup of ambrosia. In Damini the Universal Feminine assumes another form. She has no truck with death, she is a celebrant of the vital force. Like a spring garden she is always brimming with waves of lovely fragrance. She doesn’t want to renounce anything in life; she is unwilling to play host to the sannyasi; she has sworn not to pay a paisa in homage to the cold north wind.’
Let me say a few words about Damini’s background. Damini’s marriage took place at a time when her father Annadaprasad’s coffers overflowed with a sudden flood of profit from the jute trade. Till then Shibtosh had only a good pedigree; now fortune smiled on him. Annadaprasad presented his son-in-law with a house in Calcutta and arranged for him an income sufficient to ensure a comfortable life. The dowry also included a large quantity of ornaments.
He tried to train up Shibtosh in his office. But it wasn’t in Shibtosh’s nature to take an interest in worldly matters. An astrologer once told him that the influence of Jupiter during a certain conjunction would liberate him from earthly attachments. Henceforth, in anticipation of his salvation, he decided to forgo the desire for gold and other precious substances. He had by then become a disciple of Swami Lilananda.
Meanwhile a crosswind in business had overturned the full-sailed pinnace of Annadaprasad’s fortune. He had to sell off everything, even his house, and was hard put to provide his family with regular meals.
One evening Shibtosh entered the zenana and told his wife, ‘Swamiji is here—he has asked to see you to give some advice.’
‘I can’t go now. I don’t have any time,’ Damini said.
No time! Shibtosh drew closer and saw that in the darkened room Damini had taken her jewellery out of its boxes.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘I am sorting out my jewellery,’ Damini replied.
Was that why she had no time? Really! The next day Damini opened the steel chest and found her jewellery gone.
‘Where’s my jewellery?’ she demanded of her husband.
‘You have presented it to your guru,’ her husband said. ‘That was why he had summoned you at that moment, for he is omniscient. He has liberated you now from desire for gold.’
Damini flared up. ‘Give me back my jewellery!’
‘Why, what for?’ her husband asked.
‘It was my father’s gift,’ Damini replied. ‘I’ll return it to him.’
‘It has fallen into better hands,’ said Shibtosh. ‘Instead of going to feed those with earthly attachments it has been dedicated to the service of religious devotees.’
Thus began the brigandage in the name of spiritual devotion. In order to rid Damini of the spirits of all earthly desires, the exorcist’s raids continued apace. While Damini’s father and young brothers starved, she cooked daily, with her own hands, for sixty to seventy devotees. She would wilfully put no salt in the curry, she would let the milk go off: such was her brand of asceticism.
Just then her husband died after imposing on her a penalty for her lack of devotion. Together with all his property he placed his wife under the guardianship of the guru.
Throughout the house the tide of devotion rose tirelessly. People thronged from far away to seek the guru’s blessing. Yet Damini, who could come close to him without trying, kept this precious opportunity at bay with continuous taunts and insults.
Whenever the guru asked to see her to impart some special advice she would say, ‘I have a headache.’ If he questioned her about a slip-up in the dinner arrangements she would say, ‘I was out at the theatre.’ It wasn’t true, but it was barbed. The guru’s women devotees saw how she behaved and raised their eyebrows in disbelief. To begin with, Damini didn’t dress like a widow; then, she would pointedly ignore the guru’s instructions; and finally she showed no hint of the radiance of ascetic purity that lights up body and soul through being close to such a great man. Everybody voiced the same opinion: ‘Some creature indeed! We have seen a lot, but such a woman—never!’
The Swamiji would laugh and say, ‘The Lord loves to wrestle with a strong opponent. When she eventually concedes defeat, she will be struck dumb for ever.’
He began showing excessive forgiveness towards her. This was even more intolerable to Damini, for it was merely a disguised form of punishment. One day when Damini was with a female friend he overheard her mimicking, amidst merry laughter, the exceedingly lenient manner he adopted with her.
He said nonetheless, ‘God is using Damini as an agent for bringing about the unexpected. She isn’t to blame.’
So far we had seen one side of Damini; now the unexpected did indeed begin.
I don’t feel like writing any more; it’s also hard to put these things into words. In life the web of suffering that is spun by invisible hands working behind the scene has a pattern that is neither dictated by scripture nor made to anybody’s order; that’s why inner and outer awkwardness forces us to suffer so many knocks, why life explodes with such sobs.
The brittle armour of rebellion silently shattered and fell off in the light of an unforeseen dawn, and the
blossom of self-sacrifice raised its dew-laden head. Damini’s service now became so effortlessly splendid that it seemed to spread a rare boon of sweetness over the devotion of the disciples.
When Damini’s thunder and lightning had thus mellowed into a steady glow, Sachish began to notice her loveliness. But in my opinion Sachish saw only Damini’s beauty, he didn’t see Damini herself.
In Sachish’s sitting room a photograph of Swami Lilananda in meditation had been placed on a slab of china. One day he found it in splinters on the floor. Sachish thought it was his pet cat’s doing. From time to time many such accidents occurred that would be beyond the strength of a wild cat to bring about.
The atmosphere around us became charged with restless energy. Invisible lightning flickered in hidden recesses. I don’t know about the others, but my soul throbbed with pain. At times I thought I wouldn’t be able to bear the ceaseless play of the waves of ecstasy any longer; I felt like escaping it at a gallop. Those bygone discussions with tanners’ children on Bengali conjunct letters, so utterly devoid of ecstasy as they were, seemed preferable.
One winter afternoon, the disciples were tired and the guru was resting in his room. Sachish, who needed to go there for something or the other, stopped short in the doorway. He saw Damini prostrate, with hair let down, repeatedly banging her forehead on the floor and muttering, ‘O stone, stone, have mercy, have mercy on me, strike me dead!’
Sachish shivered all over with fright; he withdrew as fast as he could.
5
ONCE A YEAR, IN THE WINTER MONTH OF MAGH, GURUJI WENT AWAY TO some remote, solitary place. The time had come round again.
‘I’ll go with you,’ Sachish said.
‘Me too,’ I said. The pursuit of ecstasy had left me with frayed nerves. I badly needed a spell of fatiguing travel and solitary living.