Bab Bab 33 · Chapter XXXIII

. Chapter XXXIII

Some hundreds of miles westward of the Marabar Hills, and two years

later in time, Professor Narayan Godbole stands in the presence of

God. God is not born yet—that will occur at midnight—but He has

also been born centuries ago, nor can He ever be born, because He

is the Lord of the Universe, who transcends human processes. He

is, was not, is not, was. He and Professor Godbole stood at opposite

ends of the same strip of carpet.

“Tukaram, Tukaram,

Thou art my father and mother and everybody.

Tukaram, Tukaram,

Thou art my father and mother and everybody.

Tukaram, Tukaram,

Thou art my father and mother and everybody.

Tukaram, Tukaram,

Thou art my father and mother and everybody.

Tukaram. . . .”

This corridor in the palace at Mau opened through other corridors

into a courtyard. It was of beautiful hard white stucco, but its

pillars and vaulting could scarcely be seen behind coloured rags,

iridescent balls, chandeliers of opaque pink glass, and murky

photographs framed crookedly. At the end was the small but famous

shrine of the dynastic cult, and the God to be born was largely a

silver image the size of a teaspoon. Hindus sat on either side of

the carpet where they could find room, or overflowed into the

adjoining corridors and the courtyard—Hindus, Hindus only,

mild-featured men, mostly villagers, for whom anything outside

their villages passed in a dream. They were the toiling ryot, whom

some call the real India. Mixed with them sat a few tradesmen out

of the little town, officials, courtiers, scions of the ruling

house. Schoolboys kept inefficient order. The assembly was in a

tender, happy state unknown to an English crowd, it seethed like

a beneficent potion. When the villagers broke cordon for a glimpse

of the silver image, a most beautiful and radiant expression came

into their faces, a beauty in which there was nothing personal,

for it caused them all to resemble one another during the moment

of its indwelling, and only when it was withdrawn did they revert

to individual clods. And so with the music. Music there was, but

from so many sources that the sum-total was untrammelled. The

braying banging crooning melted into a single mass which trailed

round the palace before joining the thunder. Rain fell at intervals

throughout the night.

It was the turn of Professor Godbole’s choir. As Minister of

Education, he gained this special honour. When the previous group

of singers dispersed into the crowd, he pressed forward from the

back, already in full voice, that the chain of sacred sounds might

be uninterrupted. He was barefoot and in white, he wore a pale blue

turban; his gold pince-nez had caught in a jasmine garland, and

lay sideways down his nose. He and the six colleagues who supported

him clashed their cymbals, hit small drums, droned upon a portable

harmonium, and sang:

“Tukaram, Tukaram,

Thou art my father and mother and everybody.

Tukaram, Tukaram,

Thou art my father and mother and everybody.

Tukaram, Tukaram. . . .”

They sang not even to the God who confronted them, but to a saint;

they did not one thing which the non-Hindu would feel dramatically

correct; this approaching triumph of India was a muddle (as we call

it), a frustration of reason and form. Where was the God Himself,

in whose honour the congregation had gathered? Indistinguishable

in the jumble of His own altar, huddled out of sight amid images

of inferior descent, smothered under rose-leaves, overhung by

oleographs, outblazed by golden tablets representing the Rajah’s

ancestors, and entirely obscured, when the wind blew, by the

tattered foliage of a banana. Hundreds of electric lights had been

lit in His honour (worked by an engine whose thumps destroyed the

rhythm of the hymn). Yet His face could not be seen. Hundreds of

His silver dishes were piled around Him with the minimum of effect.

The inscriptions which the poets of the State had composed were

hung where they could not be read, or had twitched their drawing-pins

out of the stucco, and one of them (composed in English to indicate

His universality) consisted, by an unfortunate slip of the

draughtsman, of the words, “God si Love.”

God si Love. Is this the first message of India?

“Tukaram, Tukaram . . .,”

continued the choir, reinforced by a squabble behind the purdah

curtain, where two mothers tried to push their children at the same

moment to the front. A little girl’s leg shot out like an eel. In

the courtyard, drenched by the rain, the small Europeanized band

stumbled off into a waltz. “Nights of Gladness” they were playing.

The singers were not perturbed by this rival, they lived beyond

competition. It was long before the tiny fragment of Professor

Godbole that attended to outside things decided that his pince-nez

was in trouble, and that until it was adjusted he could not choose

a new hymn. He laid down one cymbal, with the other he clashed the

air, with his free hand he fumbled at the flowers round his neck.

A colleague assisted him. Singing into one another’s grey

moustaches, they disentangled the chain from the tinsel into which

it had sunk. Godbole consulted the music-book, said a word to the

drummer, who broke rhythm, made a thick little blur of sound, and

produced a new rhythm. This was more exciting, the inner images it

evoked more definite, and the singers’ expressions became fatuous

and languid. They loved all men, the whole universe, and scraps of

their past, tiny splinters of detail, emerged for a moment to melt

into the universal warmth. Thus Godbole, though she was not

important to him, remembered an old woman he had met in Chandrapore

days. Chance brought her into his mind while it was in this heated

state, he did not select her, she happened to occur among the

throng of soliciting images, a tiny splinter, and he impelled her

by his spiritual force to that place where completeness can be

found. Completeness, not reconstruction. His senses grew thinner,

he remembered a wasp seen he forgot where, perhaps on a stone. He

loved the wasp equally, he impelled it likewise, he was imitating

God. And the stone where the wasp clung—could he . . . no, he could

not, he had been wrong to attempt the stone, logic and conscious

effort had seduced, he came back to the strip of red carpet and

discovered that he was dancing upon it. Up and down, a third of

the way to the altar and back again, clashing his cymbals, his

little legs twinkling, his companions dancing with him and each

other. Noise, noise, the Europeanized band louder, incense on the

altar, sweat, the blaze of lights, wind in the bananas, noise,

thunder, eleven-fifty by his wrist-watch, seen as he threw up his

hands and detached the tiny reverberation that was his soul. Louder

shouts in the crowd. He danced on. The boys and men who were

squatting in the aisles were lifted forcibly and dropped without

changing their shapes into the laps of their neighbours. Down the

path thus cleared advanced a litter. It was the aged ruler of the

state, brought against the advice of his physicians to witness the

Birth ceremony.

No one greeted the Rajah, nor did he wish it; this was no moment

for human glory. Nor could the litter be set down, lest it defiled

the temple by becoming a throne. He was lifted out of it while its

feet remained in air, and deposited on the carpet close to the

altar, his immense beard was straightened, his legs tucked under

him, a paper containing red powder was placed in his hand. There

he sat, leaning against a pillar, exhausted with illness, his eyes

magnified by many unshed tears.

He had not to wait long. In a land where all else was unpunctual,

the hour of the Birth was chronometrically observed. Three minutes

before it was due, a Brahman brought forth a model of the village

of Gokul (the Bethlehem in that nebulous story) and placed it in

front of the altar. The model was on a wooden tray about a yard

square; it was of clay, and was gaily blue and white with streamers

and paint. Here, upon a chair too small for him and with a head

too large, sat King Kansa, who is Herod, directing the murder of

some Innocents, and in a corner, similarly proportioned, stood the

father and mother of the Lord, warned to depart in a dream. The

model was not holy, but more than a decoration, for it diverted

men from the actual image of the God, and increased their sacred

bewilderment. Some of the villagers thought the Birth had occurred,

saying with truth that the Lord must have been born, or they could

not see Him. But the clock struck midnight, and simultaneously the

rending note of the conch broke forth, followed by the trumpeting

of elephants; all who had packets of powder threw them at the

altar, and in the rosy dust and incense, and clanging and shouts,

Infinite Love took upon itself the form of Shri Krishna, and saved

the world. All sorrow was annihilated, not only for Indians, but

for foreigners, birds, caves, railways, and the stars; all became

joy, all laughter; there had never been disease nor doubt,

misunderstanding, cruelty, fear. Some jumped in the air, others

flung themselves prone and embraced the bare feet of the universal

lover; the women behind the purdah slapped and shrieked; the little

girl slipped out and danced by herself, her black pigtails flying.

Not an orgy of the body; the tradition of that shrine forbade it.

But the human spirit had tried by a desperate contortion to ravish

the unknown, flinging down science and history in the struggle,

yes, beauty herself. Did it succeed? Books written afterwards say

“Yes.” But how, if there is such an event, can it be remembered

afterwards? How can it be expressed in anything but itself? Not

only from the unbeliever are mysteries hid, but the adept himself

cannot retain them. He may think, if he chooses, that he has been

with God, but as soon as he thinks it, it becomes history, and

falls under the rules of time.

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.”