"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 back. Me and the pain, me and the Light, me and you--all together."
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 fleshle
ss 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 the Gnostics, of the One and its emanations, down, down into thickening horror. And then bat-feelings of anger and disgust as the thickening horrors became specific memories of what the essentially nonexistent William Asquith Farnaby had seen and done, inflicted and suffered.
But behind and around and somehow even within those flickering memories was the firmament of bliss and peace and understanding. There might be a few bats in the sunset sky; but the fact remained that the dreadful miracle of creation had been reversed. From a preternaturally wretched and delinquent self he had been unmade into pure mind, mind in its natural state, limitless, undifferentiated, luminously blissful, knowledgelessly understanding.
Light here, light now. And because it was infinitely here and timelessly now, there was nobody outside the light to look at the light. The fact was the awareness, the awareness the fact.
From that other world, somewhere out there to the right, came the sound once more of Susila's voice.
"Are you feeling happy?" she asked.
A surge of brighter radiance swept away all those flickering thoughts and memories. There was nothing now except a crystalline transparency of bliss.
Without speaking, withou
t opening his eyes, he smiled and nodded.
"Eckhart called it God," she went on. "'Felicity so ravishing, so inconceivably intense that no one can describe it. And in the midst of it God glows and flames without ceasing.'"
God glows and flames... It was so startlingly, so comically right that Will found himself laughing aloud. "God like a house on fire," he gasped. "God-the-Fourteenth-of-July." And he exploded once more into cosmic laughter.
Behind his closed eyelids an ocean of luminous bliss poured upwards like an inverted cataract. Poured upwards from union into completer union, from impersonality into a yet more absolute transcendence of selfhood.
"God-the-Fourteenth-of-July," he repeated and, from the heart of the cataract, gave vent to a final chuckle of recognition and understanding.
"What about the fifteenth of July?" Susila questioned. "What about the morning after?"
"There isn't any morning after."
She shook her head. "It sounds suspiciously like Nirvana."
"What's wrong with that?"
"Pure Spirit, one hundred percent proof--that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work."