The peacock screamed again and, through the insect noises that in this tropical night were the equivalent of silence, far off but clear came the sound of gay music, flutes and plucked strings and the steady throbbing of drums.
“Listen,” said Dr. Robert. “Can you hear it? They’re dancing.”
“Dancing,” Lakshmi repeated. “Dancing.”
“Dancing so lightly,” Susila whispered. “As though they had wings.”
The music swelled up again into audibility.
“It’s the Courting Dance,” Susila went on.
“The Courting Dance. Robert, do you remember?”
“Could I ever forget?”
Yes, Will said to himself, could one ever forget? Could one ever forget that other distant music and, nearby, unnaturally quick and shallow, the sound of dying breath in a boy’s ears? In the house across the street somebody was practicing one of those Brahms Waltzes that Aunt Mary had loved to play. One-two and three and One-two and three and O-o-o-ne two three, One- and One and Two-Three and One and…The odious stranger who had once been Aunt Mary stirred out of her artificial stupor and opened her eyes. An expression of the most intense malignity had appeared on the yellow, wasted face. “Go and tell them to stop,” the harsh, unrecognizable voice had almost screamed. And then the lines of malignity had changed into the lines of despair, and the stranger, the pitiable odious stranger started to sob uncontrollably. Those Brahms Waltzes—they were the pieces, out of all her repertory, that Frank had loved best.
Another gust of cool air brought with it a louder strain of the gay, bright music.
“All those young people dancing together,” said Dr. Robert. “All that laughter and desire, all that uncomplicated happiness! It’s all here, like an atmosphere, like a field of force. Their joy and our love—Susila’s love, my love—all working together, all reinforcing one another. Love and joy enveloping you, my darling; love and joy carrying you up into the peace of the Clear Light. Listen to the music. Can you still hear it, Lakshmi?”
“She’s drifted away again,” said Susila. “Try to bring her back.”
Dr. Robert slipped an arm under the emaciated body and lifted it into a sitting posture. The head drooped sideways onto his shoulder.
“My little love,” he kept whispering. “My little love…”
Her eyelids fluttered open for a moment. “Brighter,” came the barely audible whisper, “brighter.” And a smile of happiness intense almost to the point of elation transfigured her face.
Through his tears Dr. Robert smiled back at her. “So now you can let go, my darling.” He stroked her gray hair. “Now you can let go. Let go,” he insisted. “Let go of this poor old body. You don’t need it any more. Let it fall away from you. Leave it lying here like a pile of worn-out clothes.”
In the fleshless face the mouth had fallen carvernously open, and suddenly the breathing became stertorous.
“My love, my little love…” Dr. Robert held her more closely. “Let go now, let go. Leave it here, your old worn-out body, and go on. Go on, my darling, go on into the Light, into the peace, into the living peace of the Clear Light…”
Susila picked up one of the limp hands and kissed it, then turned to little Radha.
“Time to go,” she whispered, touching the girl’s shoulder.
Interrupted in her meditation, Radha opened her eyes, nodded and, scrambling to her feet, tiptoed silently towards the door. Susila beckoned to Will and, together, they followed her. In silence the three of them walked along the corridor. At the swing door Radha took her leave.
“Thank you for letting me be with you,” she whispered.
Susila kissed her. “Thank you for helping to make it easier for Lakshmi.”
Will followed Susila across the lobby and out into the warm odorous darkness. In silence they started to walk downhill towards the marketplace.
“And now,” he said at last, speaking under a strange compulsion to deny his emotion in a display of the cheapest kind of cynicism, “I suppose she’s trotting off to do a little maithuna with her boy friend.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Susila calmly, “she’s on night duty. But if she weren’t, what would be the objection to her going on from the yoga of death to the yoga of love?”
Will did not answer immediately. He was thinking of what had happened between himself and Babs on the evening of Molly’s funeral. The yoga of antilove, the yoga of resented addiction, of lust and the self-loathing that reinforces the self and makes it yet more loathsome.
“I’m sorry I tried to be unpleasant,” he said at last.
“It’s your father’s ghost. We’ll have to see if we can exorcise it.”
They had crossed the marketplace and now, at the end of the short street that led out of the village, they had come to the open space where the jeep was parked. As Susila turned the car onto the highway, the beam of their headlamps swept across a small green car that was turning downhill into the bypass.
“Don’t I recognize the royal Baby Austin?”
“You do,” said Susila, and wondered where the Rani and Murugan could be going at this time of night.
“They’re up to no good,” Will guessed. And on a sudden impulse he told Susila of his roving commission from Joe Aldehyde, his dealings with the Queen Mother and Mr. Bahu.
“You’d be justified in deporting me tomorrow,” he concluded.
“Not now that you’ve changed your mind,” she assured him. “And anyhow nothing you did could have affected the real issue. Our enemy is oil in general. Whether we’re exploited by Southeast Asia Petroleum or Standard of California makes no difference.”
“Did you know that Murugan and the Rani were conspiring against you?”
“They make no secret of it.”
“Then why don’t you get rid of them?”
“Because they would be brought back immediately by Colonel Dipa. The Rani is a princess of Rendang. If we expelled her, it would be a casus belli.”
“So what can you do?”
“Try to keep them in order, try to change their minds, hope for a happy outcome, and be prepared for the worst.”
“And what will you do if the worst happens?”
“Try to make the best of it, I suppose. Even in the worst society an individual retains a little freedom. One perceives in private, one remembers and imagines in private, one loves in private, and one dies in private—even under Colonel Dipa.” Then after a silence, “Did Dr. Robert say you could have the moksha-medicine?” she asked. And when Will nodded, “Would you like to try it?”
“Now?”
“Now. That is, if you don’t mind being up all night with it.”
“I’d like nothing better.”
“You may find that you never liked anything worse,” Susila warned him. “The moksha-medicine can take you to heaven; but it can also take you to hell. Or else to both, together or alternately. Or else (if you’re lucky, or if you’ve made yourself ready) beyond either of them. And then beyond the beyond, back to where you started from—back to here, back to New Rothamsted, back to business as usual. Only now, of course, business as usual is completely different.”
15
ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR…THE CLOCK IN THE KITCHEN STRUCK twelve. How irrelevantly, seeing that time had ceased to exist! The absurd, importunate bell had sounded at the heart of a timelessly present Event, of a Now that changed incessantly in a dimension, not of seconds and minutes, but of beauty, of significance, of intensity, of deepening mystery.
“Luminous bliss.” From the shallows of his mind the words rose like bubbles, came to the surface, and vanished into the infinite spaces of living light that now pulsed and breathed behind his closed eyelids. “Luminous bliss.” That was as near as one could come to it.
But it—this timeless and yet ever-changing Event—was something that words could only caricature and diminish, never convey. It was not only bliss, it was also understanding. Understanding of everything, but without knowledge of anything. Knowledge involved a knower and all the infinite diversity of known and knowable things. But here, behind his closed lids, there was neither spectacle nor spectator. There was only this experienced fact of being blissfully one with Oneness.
In a succession of revelations, the light grew brighter, the understanding deepened, the bliss became more impossibly, more unbearably intense. “Dear God!” he said to himself. “Oh, my dear God.” Then, out of another world, he heard the sound of Susila’s voice.
“Do you feel like telling me what’s happening?”
It was a long time before Will answered her. Speaking was difficult. Not because there was any physical impediment. It was just that speech seemed so fatuous, so totally pointless. “Light,” he whispered at last.
“And you’re there, looking at the light?”
“Not looking at it,” he answered, after a long reflective pause. “Being it. Being it,” he repeated emphatically.
Its presence was his absence. William Asquith Farnaby—ultimately and essentially there was no such person. Ultimately and essentially there was only a luminous bliss, only a knowledgeless understanding, only union with unity in a limitless, undifferentiated awareness. This, self-evidently, was the mind’s natural state. But no less certainly there had also been that professional execution watcher, that self-loathing Babs addict; there were also three thousand millions of insulated consciousnesses, each at the center of a nightmare world, in which it was impossible for anyone with eyes in his head or a grain of honesty to take yes for an answer. By what sinister miracle had the mind’s natural state been transformed into all these Devil’s Islands of wretchedness and delinquency?
In the firmament of bliss and understanding, like bats against the sunset, there was a wild crisscrossing of remembered notions and the hangovers of past feelings. Bat-thoughts of Plotinus and
