“What’s ‘there’?” Will asked.
“‘There’ is where you know.”
“Know what?”
“Know who in fact you are—and believe it or not,” she added, “tat tvam asi—thou art That, and so am I: That is me.” The dimples came to life, the teeth flashed. “And That’s also him.” She pointed at Ranga. “Incredible, isn’t it?” She stuck out her tongue at him. “And yet it’s a fact.”
Ranga smiled, reached out and with an extended forefinger touched the tip of her nose. “And not merely a fact,” he said. “A revealed truth.” He gave the nose a little tap. “A revealed truth,” he repeated. “So mind your P’s and Q’s, young woman.”
“What I’m wondering,” said Will, “is why we aren’t all enlightened—I mean, if it’s just a question of making love with a rather special kind of technique. What’s the answer to that?”
“I’ll tell you,” Ranga began.
But the girl cut him short. “Listen,” she said, “listen!”
Will listened. Faint and far off, but still distinct, he heard the strange inhuman voice that had first welcomed him to Pala. “Attention,” it was saying. “Attention, Attention…”
“That bloody bird again!”
“But that’s the secret.”
“Attention? But a moment ago you were saying it was something else. What about that young man who’s so reserved?”
“That’s just to make it easier to pay attention.”
“And it does make it easier,” Ranga confirmed. “And that’s the whole point of maithuna. It’s not the special technique that turns love-making into yoga; it’s the kind of awareness that the technique makes possible. Awareness of one’s sensations and awareness of the not-sensation in every sensation.”
“What’s a not-sensation?”
“It’s the raw material for sensation that my not-self provides me with.”
“And you can pay attention to your not-self?”
“Of course.”
Will turned to the little nurse. “You too?”
“To myself,” she answered, “and at the same time to my not-self. And to Ranga’s not-self, and to Ranga’s self, and to Ranga’s body, and to my body and everything it’s feeling. And to all the love and the friendship. And to the mystery of the other person—the perfect stranger, who’s the other half of your own self, and the same as your not-self. And all the while one’s paying attention to all the things that, if one were sentimental, or worse, if one were spiritual like the poor old Rani, one would find so unromantic and gross and sordid even. But they aren’t sordid, because one’s also paying attention to the fact that, when one’s fully aware of them, those things are just as beautiful as all the rest, just as wonderful.”
“Maithuna is dhyana,” Ranga concluded. A new word, he evidently felt, would explain everything.
“But what is dhyana?” Will asked.
“Dhyana is contemplation.”
“Contemplation.”
Will thought of that strawberry-pink alcove above the Charing Cross Road. Contemplation was hardly the word he would have chosen. And yet even there, on second thoughts, even there he had found a kind of deliverance. Those alienations in the changing light of Porter’s Gin were alienations from his odious daytime self. They were also, unfortunately, alienations from all the rest of his being—alienations from love, from intelligence, from common decency, from all consciousness but that of an excruciating frenzy by corpse-light or in the rosy glow of the cheapest, vulgarest illusion. He looked again at Radha’s shining face.
What happiness! What a manifest conviction, not of the sin that Mr. Bahu was so determined to make the world safe for, but of its serene and blissful opposite! It was profoundly touching. But he refused to be touched. Noli me tangere—it was a categorical imperative. Shifting the focus of his mind, he managed to see the whole thing as reassuringly ludicrous. What shall we do to be saved? The answer is in four letters.
Smiling at his own little joke, “Were you taught maithuna at school?” he asked ironically.
“At school,” Radha answered with a simple matter-of-factness that took all the Rabelaisian wind out of his sails.
“Everybody’s taught it,” Ranga added.
“And when does the teaching begin?”
“About the same time as trigonometry and advanced biology. That’s between fifteen and fifteen and a half.”
“And after they’ve learned maithuna, after they’ve gone out into the world and got married—that is, if you ever do get married?”
“Oh, we do, we do,” Radha assured him.
“Do they still practice it?”
“Not all of them, of course. But a good many do.”
“All the time?”
“Except when they want to have a baby.”
“And those who don’t want to have babies, but who might like to have a little change from maithuna—what do they do?”
“Contraceptives,” said Ranga laconically.
“And are the contraceptives available?”
“Available! They’re distributed by the government. Free, gratis, and for nothing—except of course that they have to be paid for out of taxes.”
“The postman,” Radha added, “delivers a thirty-night supply at the beginning of each month.”
“And the babies don’t arrive?”
“Only those we want. Nobody has more than three, and most people stop at two.”
“With the result,” said Ranga, reverting, with the statistics, to his pedantic manner, “that our population is increasing at less than a third of one percent per annum. Whereas Rendang’s increase is as big as Ceylon’s—almost three percent. And China’s is two percent, and India’s about one point seven.”
“I was in China only a month ago,” said Will. “Terrifying! And last year I spent four weeks in India. And before India in Central America, which is outbreeding even Rendang and Ceylon. Has either of you been in Rendang-Lobo?”
Ranga nodded affirmatively.
“Three days in Rendang,” he explained. “If you get into the Upper Sixth, it’s part of the advanced sociology course. They let you see for yourself what the Outside is like.”
“And what did you think of the Outside?” Will enquired.
Ranga answered with another question. “When you were in Rendang-Lobo, did they show you the slums?”
“On the contrary, they did their best to prevent me from seeing the slums. But I gave them the slip.”
Gave them the slip, he was vividly remembering, on his way back to the hotel from that grisly cocktail party at the Rendang Foreign Office. Everybody who was anybody was there. All the local dignitaries and their wives—uniforms and medals, Dior and emeralds. All the important foreigners—diplomats galore, British and American oilmen, six members of the Japanese trade mission, a lady pharmacologist from Leningrad, two Polish engineers, a German tourist who just happened to be a cousin of Krupp von Bohlen, an enigmatic Armenian representing a very important financial consortium in Tangier, and, beaming with triumph, the fourteen Czech technicians who had come with last month’s shipment of tanks and cannon and machine guns from Skoda.
“And these are the people,” he had said to himself as he walked down the marble steps of the Foreign Office into Liberty Square, “these are the people who rule the world. Twenty-nine hundred millions of us at the mercy of a few scores of politicians, a few thousands of tycoons and generals and moneylenders. Ye are the cyanide of the earth—and the cyanide will never, never lose its savor.”
After the glare of the cocktail party, after the laughter and the luscious smells of canapés and Chanel-sprayed women, those alleys behind the brand-new Palace of Justice had seemed doubly dark and noisome. Those poor wretches camping out under the palm trees of Independence Avenue more totally abandoned by God and man than even the homeless, hopeless thousands he had seen sleeping like corpses in the streets of Calcutta. And now he thought of that little boy, that tiny potbellied skeleton, whom he had picked up, bruised and shaken by a fall from the back of the little girl, scarcely larger than himself, who was carrying him—had picked up and, led by the other child, had carried back, carried down, to the windowless cellar that, for nine of them (he had counted the dark ringwormy heads), was home.
“Keeping babies alive,” he said, “healing the sick, preventing the sewage from getting into the water supply—one starts with doing things that are obviously and intrinsically good. And how does one end? One ends by increasing the sum of human misery and jeopardizing civilization. It’s the kind of cosmic practical joke that God seems really to enjoy.”
He gave the young people one of his flayed, ferocious grins.
“God has nothing to do with it,” Ranga retorted, “and the joke isn’t cosmic, it’s strictly man-made. These things aren’t like gravity or the second law of thermodynámics; they don’t have to happen. They happen only if people are stupid enough to allow them to happen. Here in Pala we haven’t allowed them to happen, so the joke hasn’t been played on us. We’ve had good sanitation for the best part of a century—and still we’re not overcrowded, we’re not miserable, we’re not under a dictatorship. And the reason is very simple: we chose to behave in a sensible and realistic way.”
“How on earth were you able to choose?” Will asked.
“The right people were intelligent at the right moment,” said Ranga. “But it must be admitted—they were also very lucky. In fact Pala as a whole has been extraordinarily lucky. It’s had the luck, first of all, never to have been anyone’s colony. Rendang has a magnificent harbor. That brought them an Arab invasion in the Middle Ages. We have no harbor, so the Arabs left us alone and we’re still Buddhists or Shivaites—that is, when we’re not Tantrik agnostics.”
“Is that what you are?” Will enquired. “A Tantrik agnostic?”
“With Mahayana trimmings,” Ranga qualified. “Well, to return to Rendang. After the Arabs it got the Portuguese. We didn’t. No harbor, no
