A Passage to India: Chapters 33–37

Mixed with them sat a few tradesmen out of the little town, officials, courtiers, scions of the ruling house.

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personal, for it caused them all to resemble one another during the moment of its indwelling, and only when it was withdrawn did they revert to individual clods.

Music there was, but from so many sources that the sum-total was untrammelled.

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.

This was more exciting, the inner images it evoked more definite, and the singers’ expressions became fatuous and languid.

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.

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.

All laughed exultantly at discovering that the divine sense of humour coincided with their own.

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.

Nominally under a Hindu doctor, he was really chief medicine man to the court.

“...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.

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 and tiger-hunts, trees cut down that impeded the view from the Guest House, cows milked in his presence, and generally arrogating the control of internal affairs.

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 and tiger-hunts, trees cut down that impeded the view from the Guest House, cows milked in his presence, and generally arrogating the control of internal affairs.

He had had enough of showing Miss Quested native life. Treacherous hideous harridan!

“There is no God but God”; that symmetrical injunction melts in the mild airs of Mau; it belongs to pilgrimages and universities, not to feudalism and agriculture.

He didn’t want them to grow up superstitious, so he rebuked them, and they answered yes father, for they were well brought up, but, like himself, they were impervious to argument, and after a polite pause they continued saying what their natures compelled them to say.

Ahmed, apprized by Mohammed Latif of the character of the bee, said, “They will not hurt us, whose lives are chaste,” and pushed boldly in; his sister was more cautious.

Ahmed, apprized by Mohammed Latif of the character of the bee, said, “They will not hurt us, whose lives are chaste,” and pushed boldly in; his sister was more cautious.

From the shrine they went to a mosque, which, in size and design, resembled a fire-screen; the arcades of Chandrapore had shrunk to a flat piece of ornamental stucco, with protuberances at either end to suggest minarets.

As He did so, troubling the waters of our civilization, one prisoner would be released, and then He would proceed to the great Mau tank that stretched as far as the Guest House garden, where something else would happen, some final or subsidiary apotheosis, after which He would submit to the experience of sleep.

Smiling, with downcast eyes, the prisoners discussed with the gentry their chances of salvation.

“However did you make such a mistake?” said Fielding, more friendly than before, but scathing and scornful.

Seated at his ease, he could witness the Three Steps by which the Saviour ascended the universe to the discomfiture of Indra, also the death of the dragon, the mountain that turned into an umbrella, and the saddhu who (with comic results) invoked the God before dining.

Nothing of the sort could occur to-day, because death interrupts. It interrupted less here than in Europe, its pathos was less poignant, its irony less cruel.

He had nothing to do all day, except to send the embrocation over to the Guest House, and towards sunset he remembered it, and looked round his house for a local palliative, for the dispensary was shut. He found a tin of ointment belonging to Mohammed Latif...

A large crowd watched the loading of the State palanquin, the prow of which protruded in the form of a silver dragon’s head through the lofty half-opened door.

He took the path by the sombre promontory that contained the royal tombs.

The signs of the contented Indian evening multiplied; frogs on all sides, cow-dung burning eternally; a flock of belated hornbills overhead, looking like winged skeletons as they flapped across the gloaming.

There was death in the air, but not sadness; a compromise had been made between destiny and desire, and even the heart of man acquiesced.

“Radhakrishna Radhakrishna Radhakrishna Radhakrishna Krishnaradha,” went the chant, then suddenly changed, and in the interstice he heard, almost certainly, the syllables of salvation that had sounded during his trial at Chandrapore.

She was praising God without attributes—thus did she apprehend Him.

Others praised Him without attributes, seeing Him in this or that organ of the body or manifestation of the sky.

He entered the dark waters, pushing the village before him, until the clay dolls slipped off their chairs and began to gutter in the rain, and King Kansa was confounded with the father and mother of the Lord.

Whatever had happened had happened, and while the intruders picked themselves up, the crowds of Hindus began a desultory move back into the town.

The floods had abated and the Rajah was officially dead, so the Guest House party were departing next morning, as decorum required.

My wife’s after something. You and I and Miss Quested are, roughly speaking, not after anything. We jog on as decently as we can, you a little in front—a laudable little party.

After a silence—myriads of kisses around them as the earth drew the water in—he continued: “Do you know anything about this Krishna business?”

They cantered past a temple to Hanuman—God so loved the world that he took monkey’s flesh upon him—and past a Saivite temple, which invited to lust, but under the semblance of eternity, its obscenities bearing no relation to those of our flesh and blood.

They cantered past a temple to Hanuman—God so loved the world that he took monkey’s flesh upon him—and past a Saivite temple, which invited to lust, but under the semblance of eternity, its obscenities bearing no relation to those of our flesh and blood.

But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.”