Island, Page 29

  290

  Island

  down, the soul began to lose its virtue, its very identity. The heroism went out of her, the love and the goodness evaporated. For the last months of her life she was no more the Aunt Mary I had loved and admired; she was somebody else, somebody (and this was the ironist's final and most exquisite touch) almost indistinguishable from the worst and weakest of the old people she had once befriended and been a tower of strength to. She had to be humiliated and degraded; and when the degradation was complete, she was slowly, and with a great deal of pain, put to death in solitude. In solitude," he insisted. "For of course nobody can help, nobody can ever be present. People may stand by while you're suffering and dying; but they're standing by in another world. In your world you're absolutely alone. Alone in your suffering and your dying, just as you're alone in love, alone even in the most completely shared pleasure."

  The essences of Babs and of Tiger, and when the cancer had gnawed a hole in the liver and her wasted body was impregnated with that strange, aromatic smell of contaminated blood, the essence of Aunt Mary dying. And in the midst of those essences, sickeningly or intoxicatedly aware of them, was an isolated consciousness, a child's, a boy's, a man's, forever isolated, irremediably alone. "And on top of everything else," he went on, "this woman was only forty-two. She didn't want to die. She refused to accept what was being done to her. The Essential Horror had to drag her down by main force. I was there; I saw it happening."

  "And that's why you're the man who won't take yes for an answer?"

  "How can anyone take yes for an answer?" he countered. "Yes is just pretending, just positive thinking. The facts, the basic and ultimate facts, are always no. Spirit? No! Love? No! Sense, meaning, achievement? No!"

  Tiger exuberantly alive and joyful and full of God. And then Tiger transformed by the Essential Horror into a packet of garbage, which the vet had to come and be paid for removing.

  •#• 291

  And after Tiger, Aunt Mary. Maimed and tortured, dragged in the mud, degraded and finally, like Tiger, transformed into a packet of garbage—only this time it was the undertaker who had removed it, and a clergyman was hired to make believe that it was all, in some sublime and Pickwickian sense, perfectly O.K. Twenty years later another clergyman had been hired to repeat the same strange rigmarole over Molly's coffin. "If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advan-tageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die."

  Will uttered another of his hyena laughs. "What impeccable logic, what sensibility, what ethical refinement!"

  "But you're the man who won't take yes for an answer. So why raise any objections?"

  "I oughtn't to," he agreed. "But one remains an aesthete, one likes to have the no said with style. 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.' " He screwed up his face in an expression of disgust.

  "And yet," said Susila, "in a certain sense the advice is excellent. Eating, drinking, dying—three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if ever they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies—but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference."

  "And rises again from the dead?" he asked sarcastically. "That's one of the questions the Buddha always refused to discuss. Believing in eternal life never helped anybody to live in eternity. Nor, of course, did disbelieving. So stop all your pro-ing and con-ing (that's the Buddha's advice) and get on with the job."

  "Which job?"

  292 Island

  293

  "Everybody's job—enlightenment. Which means, here and now, the preliminary job of practicing all the yogas of increased awareness."

  "But I don't want to be more aware," said Will. "I want to be less aware. Less aware of horrors like Aunt Mary's death and the slums of Rendang-Lobo. Less aware of hideous sights and loathsome smells—even of some delicious smells," he added as he caught, through the remembered essences of dog and cancer of the liver, a civetlike whiff of the pink alcove. "Less aware of my fat income and other people's subhuman poverty. Less aware of my own excellent health in an ocean of malaria and hookworm, of my own safely sterilized sex fun in the ocean of starving babies, 'Forgive them, for they know not what they do.' What a blessed state of affairs! But unfortunately I do know what I'm doing. Only too well. And here you go, asking me to be even more aware than I am already."

  "I'm not asking anything," she said. "I'm merely passing on the advice of a succession of shrewd old birds, beginning with Gautama and ending with the Old Raja. Start by being fully aware of what you think you are. It'll help you to become aware of what you are in fact."

  He shrugged his shoulders. "One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one's merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy."

  "And that precisely is the first half of the Buddha's message. Transience, no permanent soul, inevitable sorrow. But he didn't stop there, the message had a second half. This temporary slowdown of entropy is also pure undiluted Suchness. This absence of a permanent soul is also the Buddha Nature."

  "Absence of a soul—that's easy to cope with. But what about the presence of cancer, the presence of slow degradation? What about hunger and overbreeding and Colonel Dipa? Are they pure Suchness?"

  "Of course. But, needless to say, it's desperately difficult for

  the people who are deeply involved in any of those evils to discover their Buddha Nature. Public health and social reform are the indispensable preconditions of any kind of general enlightenment."

  "But in spite of public health and social reform, people still die. Even in Pala," he added ironically.

  "Which is why the corollary of welfare has to be dhyana—all the yogas of living and dying, so that you can be aware, even in the final agony, of who in fact, and in spite of everything, you really are."

  There was a sound of footsteps on the planking of the veranda, and a childish voice called, "Mother!" "Here I am, darling," Susila called back. The front door was flung open and Mary Sarojini came hur-rying into the room.

  "Mother," she said breathlessly, "they want you to come at once. It's Granny Lakshmi. She's . . ." Catching sight for the first time of the figure in the hammock, she started and broke off. "Oh! I didn't know you were here."

  Will waved his hand to her without speaking. She gave him a perfunctory smile, then turned back to her mother. "Granny Lakshmi suddenly got much worse," she said, "and Grandpa Robert is still up at the High Altitude Station, and they can't get through to him on the telephone." "Did you run all the way?" "Except where it's really too steep."

  Susila put her arm round the child and kissed her, then very brisk and businesslike, rose to her feet. "It's Dugald's mother," she said.

  "Is she . . . ?" He glanced at Mary Sarojini, then back at Susila. Was death taboo? Could one mention it before children? "You mean, is she dying?" He nodded. "We've been expecting it, of course," Susila went on. "But

  294 Island

  not today. Today she seemed a little better." She shook her head. "Well, I have to go and stand by—even if it is another world. And actually," she added, "it isn't quite so completely other as you think. I'm sorry we had to leave our business unfinished; but there'll be other opportunities. Meanwhile what do you want to do? You can stay here. Or I'll drop you at Dr. Robert's. Or you can come with me and Mary Sarojini."

  "As a professional execution watcher?"

  "Not as a professional execution watcher," she answered emphatically. "As a human being, as someone who needs to know how to live and then how to die. Needs it as urgently as we all do."

  "Needs it," he said, "a lot more urgently than most. But shan't I be in the way?"

  "If you can get out of your own way, you
won't be in anyone else's."

  She took his hand and helped him out of the hammock. Two minutes later they were driving past the lotus pool and the huge Buddha meditating under the cobra's hood, past the white bull, out through the main gate of the compound. The rain was over, in a green sky enormous clouds glowed like archangels. Low in the west the sun was shining with a brightness that seemed almost supernatural.

  Soles occidere et redire possunt; nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. Da mi basin mille.

  Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses; kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.

  "What do you say to people who are dying?" he asked. "Do

  295

  you tell them not to bother their heads about immortality and get on with the job?"

  "If you like to put it that way—yes, that's precisely what we do. Going on being aware—it's the whole art of dying."

  "And you teach the art?"

  "I'd put it another way. We help them to go on practicing the art of living even while they're dying. Knowing who in fact one is, being conscious of the universal and impersonal life that lives itself through each of us—that's the art of living, and that's what one can help the dying to go on practicing. To the very end. Maybe beyond the end."

  "Beyond?" he questioned. "But you said that was something that the dying aren't supposed to think about."

  "They're not being asked to think about it. They're being helped, if there is such a thing, to experience it. If there is such a thing," she repeated, "if the universal life goes on, when the separate me-life is over."

  "Do you personally think it does go on?"

  Susila smiled. "What I personally think is beside the point. All that matters is what I may impersonally experience while I'm living, when I'm dying, maybe when I'm dead."

  She swung the car into a parking space and turned off the engine. On foot they entered the village. Work was over for the day and the main street was so densely thronged that it was hard for them to pass.

  "I'm going ahead by myself," Susila announced. Then to Mary Sarojini, "Be at the hospital in about an hour," she said. "Not before." She turned and, threading her way between the slowly promenading groups, was soon lost to view.

  "You're in charge now," said Will, smiling down at the child by his side.

  Mary Sarojini nodded gravely and took his hand. "Let's go and see what's happening in the square," she said.

  296 Island

  "How old is your Granny Lakshmi?" Will asked as they started to make their way along the crowded street.

  "I don't really know," Mary Sarojini answered. "She looksterribly old. But maybe that's because she's got cancer."

  "Do you know what cancer is?" he asked.

  Mary Sarojini knew perfectly well. "It's what happens when part of you forgets all about the rest of you and carries on the way people do when they're crazy—just goes on blowing itself up and blowing itself up as if there was nobody else in the whole world. Sometimes you can do something about it. But generally it just goes on blowing itself up until the person dies."

  "And that's what has happened, I gather, to your Granny Lakshmi."

  "And now she needs someone to help her die."

  "Does your mother often help people die?"

  The child nodded. "She's awfully good at it."

  "Have you ever seen anyone die?"

  "Of course," Mary Sarojini answered, evidently surprised that such a question should be asked. "Let me see." She made a mental calculation. "I've seen five people die. Six, if you count babies."

  "I hadn't seen anyone die when I was your age."

  "You hadn't?"

  "Only a dog."

  "Dogs die easier than people. They don't talk about it beforehand."

  "How do you feel about. . . about people dying?"

  "Well, it isn't nearly so bad as having babies. That's awful. Or at least it looks awful. But then you remind yourself that it doesn't hurt at all. They've turned off the pain."

  "Believe it or not," said Will, "I've never seen a baby being born."

  "Never?" Mary Sarojini was astonished. "Not even when you were at school?"

  297

  Will had a vision of his headmaster in full canonicals conducting three hundred black-coated boys on a tour of the Lying-in Hospital. "Not even at school," he said aloud.

  "You never saw anybody dying, and you never saw anybody having a baby. How did you get to know things?"

  "In the school I went to," he said, "we never got to know things, we only got to know words."

  The child looked up at him, shook her head and, lifting a small brown hand, significantly tapped her forehead. "Crazy," she said. "Or were your teachers just stupid?"

  Will laughed. "They were high-minded educators dedicated to mens sana in corpore sano and the maintenance of our sublime Western Tradition. But meanwhile tell me something. Weren't you ever frightened?"

  "By people having babies?"

  "No, by people dying. Didn't that scare you?"

  "Well, yes—it did," she said after a moment of silence.

  "So what did you do about it?"

  "I did what they teach you to do—tried to find out which of me was frightened and why she was frightened."

  "And which of you was it?"

  "This one." Mary Sarojini pointed a forefinger into her open mouth. "The one that does all the talking. Little Miss Gibber— that's what Vijaya calls her. She's always talking about all the nasty things I remember, all the huge, wonderful, impossible things I imagine I can do. She's the one that gets frightened."

  "Why is she so frightened?"

  "I suppose it's because she gets talking about all the awful things that might happen to her. Talking out loud or talking to herself. But there's another one who doesn't get frightened."

  "Which one is that?"

  "The one that doesn't talk—just looks and listens and feels what's going on inside. And sometimes," Mary Sarojini added, "sometimes she suddenly sees how beautiful everything is. No,

  298 Island

  that's wrong. She sees it all the time, but / don't—not unless she-makes me notice it. That's when it suddenly happens. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! Even dog's messes." She pointed at a formidable specimen almost at their feet.

  From the narrow street they had emerged into the marketplace. The last of the sunlight still touched the sculptured spire of the temple, the little pink gazebos on the roof of the town hall; but here in the square there was premonition of twilight and under the great banyan tree it was already night. On the stalls between its pillars and hanging ropes the market women had turned on their lights. In the leafy darkness there were islands of form and color, and from hardly visible nonentity brown-skinned figures stepped for a moment into brilliant exis tence, then back again into nothingness. The spaces between the tall buildings echoed with a confusion of English and Palanese, of talk and laughter, of street cries and whistled tunes, of dogs barking, parrots screaming. Perched on one of the pink gazebos, a pair of mynah birds called indefatigably for attention and compassion. From an open-air kitchen at the center of the square rose the appetizing smell of food on the fire. Onions, peppers, turmeric, fish frying, cakes baking, rice on the boil—and through these good gross odors, like a reminder from the Other Shore, drifted the perfume, thin and sweet and ethereally pure, of the many-colored garlands on sale beside the fountain.

  Twilight deepened and suddenly, from high overhead, the arc lamps were turned on. Bright and burnished against the rosy copper of oiled skin, the women's necklaces and rings and bracelets came alive with glittering reflections. Seen in the downward striking light, every contour became more dramatic, every form seemed to be more substantial, more solidly there. In eye sockets, under nose and chin the shadows deepened. Modeled by light and darkness young breasts grew fuller and the faces of the old were more emphatically lined and hollowed.

  Hand in hand they made
their way through the crowd.

  299

  A middle-aged woman greeted Mary Sarojini, then turned to Will. "Are you that man from the Outside?" she asked.

  "Almost infinitely from the outside," he assured her.

  She looked at him for a moment in silence, then smiled encouragingly and patted his cheek.

  "We're all very sorry for you," she said.

  They moved on, and now they were standing on the fringes of a group assembled at the foot of the temple steps to listen to a young man who was playing a long-necked, lute-like instrument and singing in Palanese. Rapid declamation alternated with long-drawn, almost birdlike melismata on a single vowel sound, and then a cheerful and strongly accented tune that ended in a shout. A roar of laugher went up from the crowd. A few more bars, another line or two of recitative, and the singer struck his final chord. There was applause and more laughter and a chorus of incomprehensible commentary.

  "What's it all about?" Will asked.

  "It's about girls and boys sleeping together," Mary Sarojini answered.

  "Oh—I see." He felt a pang of guilty embarrassment; but, looking down into the child's untroubled face, he could see that his concern was uncalled for. It was evident that boys and girls sleeping together were as completely to be taken for granted as going to school or eating three meals a day—or dying.

  "And the part that made them laugh," Mary Sarojini went on, "was where he said the Future Buddha won't have to leave home and sit under the Bodhi Tree. He'll have his Enlightenment while he's in bed with the princess."

  "Do you think that's a good idea?" Will asked.

  She nodded emphatically. "It would mean that the princess would be enlightened too."

  "You're perfectly right," said Will. "Being a man, I hadn't thought of the princess."

  The lute player plucked a queer unfamiliar progression of

  300

  Island

  chords, followed them with a ripple of arpeggios and began to sing, this time in English.