In silence Susila stroked the old woman’s hand. Then, suddenly smiling, “How would the Old Raja have asked that question?” she said. “Do you think ‘we’ (quote, unquote) shall see ‘him’ (quote, unquote) ‘over there’ (quote, unquote)?”
“But what do you think?”
“I think we’ve all come out of the same light, and we’re all going back into the same light.”
Words, Will was thinking, words, words, words. With an effort, Lakshmi lifted a hand and pointed accusingly at the lamp on the bed table.
“It glares in my eyes,” she whispered.
Susila untied the red silk handkerchief knotted around her throat and draped it over the lamp’s parchment shade. From white and mercilessly revealing, the light became as dimly, warmly rosy as the flush, Will found himself thinking, on Babs’s rumpled bed, whenever Porter’s Gin proclaimed itself in crimson.
“That’s much better,” said Lakshmi. She shut her eyes. Then, after a long silence, “The light,” she broke out, “the light. It’s here again.” Then after another pause, “Oh, how wonderful,” she whispered at last, “how wonderful!” Suddenly she winced and bit her lip.
Susila took the old woman’s hand in both of hers. “Is the pain bad?” she asked.
“It would be bad,” Lakshmi explained, “if it were really my pain. But somehow it isn’t. The pain’s here; but I’m somewhere else. It’s like what you discover with the moksha-medicine. Nothing really belongs to you. Not even your pain.”
“Is the light still there?”
Lakshmi shook her head. “And looking back, I can tell you exactly when it went away. It went away when I started talking about the pain not being really mine.”
“And yet what you were saying was good.”
“I know—but I was saying it.” The ghost of an old habit of irreverent mischief flitted once again across Lakshmi’s face.
“What are you thinking of?” Susila asked.
“Socrates.”
“Socrates?”
“Gibber, gibber, gibber—even when he’d actually swallowed the stuff. Don’t let me talk, Susila. Help me to get out of my own light.”
“Do you remember that time last year,” Susila began after a silence, “when we all went up to the old Shiva temple above the High Altitude Station? You and Robert and Dugald and me and the two children—do you remember?”
Lakshmi smiled with pleasure at the recollection.
“I’m thinking specially of that view from the west side of the temple—the view out over the sea. Blue, green, purple—and the shadows of the clouds were like ink. And the clouds themselves—snow, lead, charcoal, satin. And while we were looking, you asked a question. Do you remember, Lakshmi?”
“You mean, about the Clear Light?”
“About the Clear Light,” Susila confirmed. “Why do people speak of Mind in terms of Light? Is it because they’ve seen the sunshine and found it so beautiful that it seems only natural to identify the Buddha Nature with the clearest of all possible Clear Lights? Or do they find the sunshine beautiful because, consciously or unconsciously, they’ve been having revelations of Mind in the form of Light ever since they were born? I was the first to answer,” said Susila, smiling to herself. “And as I’d just been reading something by some American behaviorist, I didn’t stop to think—I just gave you the (quote, unquote) ‘scientific point of view.’ People equate Mind (whatever that may be) with hallucinations of light, because they’ve looked at a lot of sunsets and found them very impressive.
But Robert and Dugald would have none of it. The Clear Light, they insisted, comes first. You go mad about sunsets because sunsets remind you of what’s always been going on, whether you knew it or not, inside your skull and outside space and time. You agreed with them, Lakshmi—do you remember? You said, ‘I’d like to be on your side, Susila, if only because it isn’t good for these men of ours to be right all the time. But in this case—surely it’s pretty obvious—in this case they are right.’ Of course they were right, and of course I was hopelessly wrong. And, needless to say, you had known the right answer before you asked the question.”
“I never knew anything,” Lakshmi whispered. “I could only see.”
“I remember your telling me about seeing the Clear Light,” said Susila. “Would you like me to remind you of it?”
The sick woman nodded her head.
“When you were eight years old,” said Susila. “That was the first time. An orange butterfly on a leaf, opening and shutting its wings in the sunshine—and suddenly there was the Clear Light of pure Suchness blazing through it, like another sun.”
“Much brighter than the sun,” Lakshmi whispered.
“But much gentler. You can look into the Clear Light and not be blinded. And now remember it. A butterfly on a green leaf, opening and shutting its wings—and it’s the Buddha Nature totally present, it’s the Clear Light outshining the sun. And you were only eight years old.”
“What had I done to deserve it?”
Will found himself remembering that evening, a week or so before her death, when Aunt Mary had talked about the wonderful times they had had together in her little Regency house near Arundel where he had spent the better part of all his holidays. Smoking out the wasps’ nests with fire and brimstone, having picnics on the downs or under the beeches. And then the sausage rolls at Bognor, the gypsy fortuneteller who had prophesied that he would end up as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the black-robed, red-nosed verger who had chased them out of Chichester Cathedral because they had laughed too much. “Laughed too much,” Aunt Mary had repeated bitterly. “Laughed too much…”
“And now,” Susila was saying, “think of that view from the Shiva temple. Think of those lights and shadows on the sea, those blue spaces between the clouds. Think of them, and then let go of your thinking. Let go of it, so that the not-Thought can come through. Things into Emptiness. Emptiness into Suchness. Suchness into things again, into your own mind. Remember what it says in the Sutra. ‘Your own consciousness shining, void, inseparable from the great Body of Radiance, is subject neither to birth nor death, but is the same as the immutable Light, Buddha Amitabha.’”
“The same as the light,” Lakshmi repeated. “And yet it’s all dark again.”
“It’s dark because you’re trying too hard,” said Susila. “Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. ‘Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.’ I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly—it was the best advice ever given me.
Well, now I’m going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi…Lightly, my darling, lightly. Even when it comes to dying. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self-conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Goethe or Little Nell. And, of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the Clear Light. So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling. On tiptoes; and no luggage, not even a sponge bag. Completely unencumbered.”
Completely unencumbered…Will thought of poor Aunt Mary sinking deeper and deeper with every step into the quicksands. Deeper and deeper until, struggling and protesting to the last, she had gone down, completely and forever, into the Essential Horror. He looked again at the fleshless face on the pillow and saw that it was smiling.
“The Light,” came the hoarse whisper, “the Clear Light. It’s here—along with the pain, in spite of the pain.”
“And where are you?” Susila asked.
“Over there, in the corner.” Lakshmi tried to point, but the raised hand faltered and fell back, inert, on the coverlet. “I can see myself there. And she can see my body on the bed.”
“Can she see the Light?”
“No. The Light’s here, where my body is.”
The door of the sickroom was quietly opened. Will turned his head and was in time to see Dr. Robert’s small spare figure emerging from behind the screen into the rosy twilight.
Susila rose and motioned him to her place beside the bed. Dr. Robert sat down and, leaning forward, took his wife’s hand in one of his and laid the other on her forehead.
“It’s me,” he whispered.
“At last…”
A tree, he explained, had fallen across the telephone line. No communication with the High Altitude Station except by road. They had sent a messenger in a car, and the car had broken down. More than two hours had been lost. “But thank goodness,” Dr. Robert concluded, “here I finally am.”
The dying woman sighed profoundly, opened her eyes for a moment and looked up at him with a smile, then closed them again. “I knew you’d come.”
“Lakshmi,” he said very softly. “Lakshmi.” He drew the tips of his fingers across the wrinkled forehead, again and again. “My little love.” There were tears on his cheeks; but his voice was firm and he spoke with the tenderness not of weakness, but of power.
“I’m not over there any more,” Lakshmi whispered.
“She was over there in the corner,” Susila explained to her father-in-law. “Looking at her body here on the bed.”
“But now I’ve come
