7 Awakening, 8 Departure

Chapter 7 - Awakening

"Oh, God, that was such a buzz! I'm so glad you persuaded me to come, Amelia. That was great!"

"Yay! Kammy's a convert! Another soldier for the troops – watch out capitalist bastards, here we come! EXTRONN OUT, DAMN THE DAM, EXTRONN OUT, DAMN TH..."

"Oh cut it out, Amelia, for god's sake. Can't we just relax now? If you've still got so much energy come and give me a massage." Jerome flung himself onto his stomach and pulled up his t-shirt. Amelia glared at him and turned to join Kamala and Janey who were picking over the events of the day.

Hyde Park was teeming – scattered around the groups of worn out demonstrators rubbing their blistered feet, were family picnics, snogging couples being sniffed at by dogs whose embarrassed owners looked studiously the other way, gangs of nattering nannies - still hubs of a whirling vortex of screech and run and giggle and hair and scabby little knees, a group of old people going through the achingly slow dance of Tai Chi, sculptured figures changing posture inch by inch...

"Did you see those plain clothes spooks? They were so bloody obvious! Short back and sides and hippy flares." Amelia said.

"Yeah! One of them even had a stage-prop spliff in his hand, the hand that wasn't holding the camera, I never saw him take a single toke, though." laughed Jerome.

"What are you talking about?" Kamala looked wide eyed from one to the other.

"Spies, darling, spies. Your comely form, “Come-á-la”, is engraved forever in their computer archives, you have been marked down as a trouble-maker henceforth and for all eternity. It'll all come out when you're a respectable fifty year-old and your children are grown up accountants and you're applying to become a magistrate!"

"Shut up! You're having me on... spies? Who would want to spy on us? Why?" She'd only come along for a laugh, just got caught up in the moment... it's not like they really meant those things they'd shouted, not really - - except maybe for a few fanatics - and they weren't fanatics, were they? I mean Jerome and Amelia could get a bit intense, but that was just youthful enthusiasm, wasn't it?

"The military of course" said Amelia matter-of-factly. “They always do that at demos. They want to know who to keep an eye on in the future. For all your sensible, grown-upness, you're such an innocent, dear Kammy."

"They weren't all military, though, were they?" said Jerome, thoughtfully, remembering the sharp-suited youths with the huge, black lenses protruding from their faces like futuristic gas-masks. "Who was yanking their leads, I wonder....?" he murmured more to himself than anyone else.

Kamala went quiet. Her mother was a magistrate. What would she say if she knew? She knew exactly what she'd say. "Kamala, I never thought I'd see the day when a daughter of mine would be seen consorting with anarchists and ne'er-do-wells (an expression her mother actually used). There's nothing wrong with fighting the system, but at least do it with decorum, dear. Use your intellect, not your lungs." Yes, thought, Kamala – but Aunty Seema would say I was a good girl... or would she? Wouldn't she be horrified too ...a young girl tramping the streets, sweating and screaming in public, being photographed by strange men?

"Kamala?"

She squinted up at the figure silhouetted between her and the blazing sun.

"Gervaise! What are you doing here?" She struggled up, tipping her lager all over herself. "Oh no!" He laughed, grabbed a discarded jacket and started dabbing at her front.. and then stammered sorry and gave it to her to finish the job.

"I was on the march. I saw you – I didn't know you were into this sort of thing."

"Neither did I til today. I never even thought about this sort of stuff before. All I ever thought about was trees."

"Couldn't see the wood for the trees, eh?"

She smiled. "Couldn't see the people for the trees more like. What are you wearing?!"

"Oh these are my civvys. This is the real me. By day I'm a respectable Professor of tropical agriculture, and by night I'm a free spirit, a love child! Purple, velvet jackets and cheese cloth baggies don't go down well with the Faculty. But that's me, a tie-dyed, die-hard old hippy, with the emphasis on old."

"You're not that old." She said quietly, dropping her eyes in a way that made him ache.

"You're very sweet. And very young." He said, looking at her wistfully. He tried to think of Margaret. Marvellous Margaret who had saved him from the drugs, turned him around, helped him rise from the gutter and hold down a respectable career.

"Not that young." She looked back up at him. Those big brown eyes were drawing him into their vortex again. Gervaise forced himself to picture the Vice Chancellor... the image calmed him momentarily

"How old are you?." he asked.

Their eyes locked.

"Old enough."

They held each other's gaze. The blue and the black. The ice and the fire. And the Vice Chancellor vanished with a faint pop.

Sitting up, Jerome frowned when he saw them locked into each others' gaze. He nudged Amelia and gestured with his eyes in their direction. She grinned and shrugged, with much lewd waggling of eyebrows. But Jerome's frown deepened.

"Hey, Kammy. Chuck us a beer would you? Oh, hello Professor Andersen. Didn't see you there."
Kamala blushed and tossed a can over. Jerome wished the old letch wouldn't keep looking at her like that. Despite all his own flirting with her, he thought of Kamala like a younger sister. She was so naive. She seemed to expect everything to be as logical as science – for there to be formula to explain everything. He knew that human life was so much more chaotic than that, so much dirtier. He hated to think of her becoming fodder to the older man's infamous appetites.

He looked at them again, murmuring together like nobody else around them existed.
Was what he saw in Gervaise's expression lust, or could it be genuine affection? What difference did it make? He was old enough to be her bloody father! That was probably why she was looking back at Gervaise with that soupy look her eyes – brought up without a father of her own, she needed a daddy substitute. A sugar daddy. That was a laugh, bloody Gervaise looked like a scarecrow on acid – even when he was togged up for Uni, he looked down at heel. A bloody Brown Sugar daddy, then.

The lager was all gone, Amelia and Janey were carefully collecting up the cans to take home to recycle. The sun was going down. The marchers' feet had long stopped throbbing, throats raw from shouting had been slaked with amber nectar, spirits soaring with protest had mellowed out in the baking sun.

"Coming, Kam?" said Janey.

Kamala looked up at her and then at Gervaise. "Well...."

"Listen, I'm going to a party at a mate of mine's in Camden, why don't you guys come along?"

Janey went back on the coach, saying she needed to get a good night's rest for her rehearsals the next day, but Amelia, Kamala and Jerome tagged along with Gervaise. Amelia and Kamala excited – a party with one of the professors.. so decadent! - but a little nervous, Jerome keeping up an air of slightly superior nonchalance, like he could take it or leave it. When they arrived, it seemed that the party had been going on for a long time. Decades. Stoned and drunken bodies were draped over the furniture and the polished pine stairs, bottles littered the floor and all the surfaces, there was a thick, sweet narcotic fug in every room.

Lava lamps and silk-draped lamps pooled dimly coloured light in the darkness. Although Jerome had thought of Gervaise as an original sixties child, he and his friends were really the second generation of hippies – the true flower power generation were dribbling in nursing homes by now, or had retired to organic farming communes exhausted by running their flourishing vegetarian shoe retails and eco-tourism franchises. These were sixties grandchildren, trying to rekindle the peace and love that the first wave of world violence had been a reaction to. They were in their forties, well off, accessorising psychedelic cell-phone covers with their headbands, smoking refined new GM free designer drugs and drinking organic real ales or homemade potions brewed from elderflowers harvested on Hampstead Heath. They were intellectual, professional peaceniks.

Amelia and Jerome were engrossed in a conversation with a Human Rights lawyer with bright pink spiky hair and her architect 'soulmate'. Kamala and Gervaise had wandered out onto the patio and leant on the balcony between sensuous statuary and giant pots of lavender. In the heat of the night, a huge jasmine bush was suffusing the air with its sweet, cloying fragrance.

"You're beautiful, Kamala."

Kamala just looked back at him – unable to quite believe that the barrier between them was finally melting – no longer student and teacher they were now just man and woman. She had daydreamed something like this so often that the reality seemed almost like a dream too. The sun, the beer, several glasses of elderflower wine and something she had smoked – she wasn't sure what – had melted all her inhibitions and fears. All she wanted was to make passionate love to him. Now.

"I want to make love to you" he said quietly, as though he'd read her mind.

"Yes" she said "Yes."

She put her arms round his neck and started kissing him, her heart thumping so painfully against her ribs she was sure he would be able to feel it. His beard was scratchy, not soft as down as she'd imagined it to be.

"No" he said, gently peeling her arms off his neck, "Let's try something different. You're special. Have you heard of Tantra?"

"It's that new make of car isn't it?" she said, puzzled.

"No" he laughed. "It's a very, very old art form"

"Oh, that's more Jerome's area"

"No, you silly girl. Not that kind of art. Don't you know anything about your culture?"

"Yes, actually" she said, a little irritated "I know all about English culture, thank you... I'm a fully paid up member of the National Trust. I just don't know about this Tantra business – why don't you just tell me about it since you know so much?"

"Why don't I just teach you?"

"Why don't you, Professor?" she smiled, softened by the gentle passion in his voice.

"Not here" he said, and leaped up, grabbing her hand. He pulled her, laughing, down the garden path to the shed at the end of the garden.

"In here?!" She squealed incredulously.

"Yes" he breathed, pulling the bolt across the inside of the door (Why'd anyone have a bolt on the inside of their shed door? wondered Kamala a little uneasily), "We need privacy and absolute quiet". The throbbing music from the party was almost as loud here as in the house, but she didn't dare mention it, he seemed so excited and serious. She was excited too, but a little nervous. What on earth was he up to?

They cleared a space amongst the spades, rakes, Flymos, bits of chopped wood and piles of old gardening magazines, and sat down cross legged facing each other on the floor which smelt of damp and mouse droppings.

He looked into her eyes, and started talking in a low, insistent voice... "Kamala! I am a Tantric master. I will now teach you how to reach the peak of human ecstasy with me, higher and greater than the peak of Everest..."

Kamala started giggling. Gervaise frowned, "Come on, you've got to take this seriously or it won't work... now, we have to take off all our clothes. Come on, sweet heart, don't be shy, I'll start if it makes you feel better." In moments his hemp baggies and kurta were in a pile on the dusty floor. His rather incongruous, tight fitting red Sloggis joined them – the crumpled cherry on the cake. He was very thin. A silver ring was pierced through his left nipple, Kamala noticed, wincing slightly.

"Now you, darling." He helped her out of her clothes, sighing and murmuring how beautiful her body was, running his finger tips over her shoulders. When they were both naked - he sat down cross legged again on the dank floor – she hesitated, then grabbed one of the gardening magazines and flung it on the floor, before sitting gingerly on it. She tried not to look at the way his milky white genitals hung down into the murky floor, or to think about how exposed and vulnerable she felt in that position – but luckily he was closing his eyes.

"For the first stage, it is important that we don't touch. This will make the communion even more intense when we get to the second stage." It wasn't easy to stop their knees touching in the cramped little space they'd managed to clear, but she did her best – though it meant having the prongs of a rake digging into her back. At her throat the golden serpents on the silver chain gleamed in a shaft of streetlight struggling through the grimy window.

Gervaise stared intently into her eyes "Ommmmmm manipadmiommm, Ommmmmm manipadmiommm, Ommmmm manipadmiommm!"

This is bloody ridiculous, the voice of reason cut through her fuddled mind. I'm sitting on a filthy shed floor with this weird old guy chanting at me... not exactly what I'd imagined...

"You're supposed to chant too, Ommmmmmmm..." Fighting down another surge of giggling, she did her best to mimic the chant, thinking I've got to get away from here.

But the sound of her voice repeating the mantra begins to drown out the sounds of the party. Gervaise's voice fades away, but hers grows stronger and stronger. Her hands on her bare knees begin to tremble, beads of sweat break out on her forehead, she is trembling all over (Gervaise has stopped chanting and is looking at her rather frightened...). She feels something coming loose at the base of her spine, a warm, tingling movement which uncurls and snakes up her spine, winding round vertebrae after vertebrae, each swirl a hot, sweet surge of life, until it reaches the base of her neck – and a light bursts open in her head, like the full blaze of the midday sun bursting through cloud. It streams out around her face, blinding Gervaise, pouring through the windows of the shed, throwing violent, violet shadows through the startled garden.
(Gervaise had had a few weird trips in his time, but this time he wasn't sure which of them was tripping. Was it even possible to experience someone else's trip? He couldn't remember...)

The golden serpents at her throat are blazing. In the still-dark corners of the shed, spiders spin like tiny Catherine wheels on the ends of taut laserbright filaments of web. The chanting stops abruptly, snapped off like water in a choked hose... its rhythm goes on pulsing through her body. Kamala takes a sharp breath inwards, throws her head back. The walls of the shed burst open with a loud crack – as though it just can't hold all the light inside it any more. She is flying through a dark void, an angelic voice sings – filling her body, her mind, the Universe, while the chant continues soundlessly - like a heartbeat. She is floating in the darkness of space, skating on a stream of charged electrons, her hair sweeping about her bare shoulders, she is glowing, she opens her eyes and they are shining with ecstasy... I am the fulcrum of the rotating universe, I am the logic of an infinity of patterns, I am the heart of the thousand petall'd lotus, the epicentre of endless mandalas, the core of countless concentric shapes, I am the serpent that traces the spiralling lines across never-ending time and space. There is a shadowy figure in the distance, she reaches her arms out towards it... but it's moving away from her, like the memory of a dream she can't hold onto as wakefulness gains a hold on her, even the music is fading. Or rather is growing louder, and grosser, instead of soaring with sublime sweetness it's throbbing earthily... and suddenly, she lands, with a bump, back on the shed floor.

She looks around her in surprise. The dirty floor of the shed, the grimy window, the walls are all firmly in place. Gervaise is staring at her boggle-eyed. "Are you alright, sweet-heart? You looked like you were having some kind of fit, there."

"I'm fine" Kamala mumbled, "Probably just a touch of claustrophobia". She hurriedly started gathering her clothes.

"What are you doing? said Gervaise, "I think we're ready for the next stage, now, the touching stage," he grinned... But Kamala had already fled, running up the garden path to the house, pulling on her clothes as she went. She didn't notice the stunned earth worms still splayed in a halo around the shed like iron filings around a magnet. She didn't see the hedgehogs and snails only now starting to uncurl, hear the lapdogs barking in chic apartments up and down the street, see the hair standing up on the cats' backs. She just wanted to find Jerome and Amelia and get out of here. She just wanted Mother... normality, sanity.

Gervaise sat thoughtfully for a while alone, then shook his head and got up, dressing slowly – these young girls... so easily spooked - were they really worth the hassle? He paused with his hand half-way to the bolt still fastened shut on the inside of the shed door – the hairs on the back of his neck prickled...

Uch! It sickened me to have to do it that way, to use such a crude implement to unlock you. But what else could I do, frozen between these dark walls? It’s as much as I can do to keep watch over you, over all of you, I had to use whatever was nearest at hand… sometimes the patterns, the flashes of recognition, the circuitous, serpentine routes of serendipity are too dense even for me to decipher… all I knew was that he had somehow got hold of the key.
Well not The Key, but a version of it. A tiny, tinny replica of the real thing - but enough to do the job. Enough to release what had been waiting inside you, struggling to get out, seeping through your eyelids at night, crackling in the static of your hair, ever since you were born. It wasn’t an ideal release by any means - it was half cocked (no pun intended). Now there’ll be a hiatus, you’ll have to cope with the fall-out for a little while without even knowing why. Without knowing how. Until you find me and I can show you, show you. And as for you, ‘Gervaise’, you’ve done your bit. Now run along... We don’t need you anymore.



Chapter 8 - Departure

My sky blue Ford Sedan wound its way at a stately pace past the now dilapidated carved balconies, through the back streets of the town which had now stretched its hut-encrusted fingers out to touch the very edges of the gardens that surrounded the House. By now it was my House. The old Mother was long gone, her ashes had fed the waters beside a flourishing grove of mango trees, and several generations of her successors were gone too. The descendents of my maids then served me now, and they, like their grandmothers and great grandmothers wondered sometimes about where I had come from, and when. Different rumours circulated about me now, but I had become well established in the town by this time, respected, so the rumours were gentle, respectful ones, mist-like, disappearing with a wave of the hand or when the sun's rays grew strong.

The door was opened by the toothless, watchman and I stepped out onto the marble steps. The house was surrounded by fruit trees and flowering shrubs. From its white verandas, I could look back at the cloak of saal trees swathing the distant hills and sense the cool breezes that must be blowing up there. Those hills were where the river started as a silent seeping from a rock face, then grew into a stream, toddling between the great red shins of saal, then a rivulet carving its own path, and, by the time it barged its way through the thinning edges of the forest - a proper, grown-up river. Having passed through a number of fields and villages which on alternately years it shrank perversely from and flayed with its floods, it reached the edge of my garden, where it slid silkenly through a sleeve of bowing greenery - my garden dropped jasmine flowers onto the its glittering cheek and the river gave of its nurturing body to my garden… and my garden was the only part of its banks that had never been flooded by it, though they were not particularly high there...

In my garden all kinds of birds gathered, showering the air with their colours and song. Bird fanciers – earnest young college students - were often to be seen hanging around at the edge of the river, whispering excitedly to each other that they had spotted a rare crested hoopoe, or a migrating heron from a distant, cold land, or a speckled nightingale that no-one had seen for centuries (last described in some ancient poet's ghazal). I did not encourage them to enter the grounds – but if the weather was particularly hot, I sent servants out with trays of iced lime, mint and coriander sherbert.

They were also put off entering the grounds by the reputation of the beautiful garden as a haven for serpents. Rumour had it that the ground writhed with them – that snakes of every size and colour swirled in the undergrowth beneath the scented, flowering shrubs, in the marble fountain, in the branches of the apricot trees... They said that neither the lady of the house nor any of her servants or invited guests were ever bitten by them – but heaven help those who came uninvited. We didn’t discourage the rumour, of course, it had its uses... we were never, ever burgled.

Some said that one or two snakes even lived in the house, in the lady's bedroom it was whispered... but no-one dared take this particular insinuation any further. I smiled to hear them, their murmured voices and whispering thoughts, the whispering workings of the minds of all the world, like the million-layered shuffling of chiffon, which filtered endlessly down to me through the streets, the walls, across the spaces to where I sat in my shady room, which always smelled so sweetly of nutmeg and of sandalwood oil. Mostly I could tune it out, but sometimes I liked to sit quietly and focus and find out what was going on in people’s hearts and minds. Mostly people, though others spoke to me too, of course.

I bathed again. My shower at The Palace had been a practical one – this one was ritual. The royalty I entertained now were movie moghuls, industrial emperors, political princes... the real maharajas could no longer afford me. The Palace Hotel boasted a folly, a luxurious but unfinished annexe to the original palace, reputed to have been built by a maharaja for his favourite courtesan. The story goes that she spurned his offer of marriage and went off to become a hermit in the forest at which he died of a broken heart. They say he bid his servants carry his deathbed out to the veranda so that the unfinished palace would be the last thing that filled his eyes in this life and he could take the sight with him to his next life. They say that on certain nights of the year you can still hear his footsteps echoing through its crumbling corridors and hear his heartbroken sobs on the wind... what nonsense you creatures do come up with sometimes!

The hotel chain prided itself on preserving the traditions of each stately building it took over - so I still had my embroidered screen, my musicians and my silken sheets. They never explicitly advertised my services of course - but some things don't need to be shouted about, whispers are just as effective - more. People love thinking they are part of a secret.

My musicians now were the descendants of those who played for me and the Maharaja. The boy who played the tanpura for me now had the same flustered, puppy eyes of his great grandfather... sweet boy. Good heart. Sometimes I almost forgot which segment of time I was in... but it was ok, my new clients rather liked being mistaken for a maharaja and being addressed as 'my lord'.

My maids poured pure Ganga water from silver pitchers (gifts from the old maharajah, bless him) over my body as I prayed, palms pressed together in front of my closed eyes - while the local holy man chanted on the balcony outside, screened behind shutters so finely pierced with carvings that they acted like a net, letting the light in but hiding the room and its occupants from view.

My maids noticed that something was troubling their mistress (and I noticed that they noticed, but was too preoccupied to try to hide my feelings better… too focused on the growing sense of imminence inside me...). They sensed that their mistress' eyes had a more far away look than usual. That though my body was here, with rivulets of crystal water streaming down it, my heart had gone somewhere else. They had known me all their lives, their mothers had bathed my ‘mother‘, their grandmothers, my ‘grandmother‘.

They knew every inflection, every glance, every flutter of mood. Those who did not know me so well would have called the maids fanciful. Kamala-ji does not have moods. She is supremely in control, they would have said. And so it seemed to the outside world. And so it was, up to a point – but even I had some weaknesses. Even I sometimes succumbed to slight irritation if my lassi was too salty or my favourite comb was lost. Or if someone called my art ‘prostitution‘. It just took a very experienced eye to notice it.

I did not eat that night, but went to bed early, sending my maids away – I said I needed to be alone tonight. Downstairs in the kitchens they gathered, with the other servants wide eyed and sombre. "What does it mean?" "Is she ill?" "What will happen to us?" But nobody had any answers.

At midnight there was a loud knocking at the back gate. The watchman, roused from his musings, opened it to see a tall, imposing figure framed in the gateway. A black mane swept over his bare shoulders and muscular chest, down to his waist, around which was a dirty cloth which had once been white. He held a huge, wooden staff in one hand and a metal bowl in the other. On either side of the rust red streak on his forehead, his eyes blazed with a brightness that somehow couldn't quite be explained by the reflections of the watchman's flaming torch.

The watchman cowered, he knew he should prevent this inconsiderate caller from disturbing the household at this hour, but he didn't have the courage to stand up to him (he who had seen off a gang of fierce bandits – who were from out of town and hadn't heard about the snakes - and even, once, a prowling panther...). And anyway, you couldn't turn away a sadhu, could you? Even if they did come in the middle of the night. A night which was already unsettled by the strange rumours which had reached him from the house, via the departing cook's assistant. He wondered whether this guest was somehow connected, whether he was... expected. The sadhu swept past him without a word and strode towards the kitchen veranda, where he stood, silently waiting.

The servant, curled up under a sheet on the kitchen veranda, woke with a start... wondering what had broken his sleep, and his heart almost stopped at the sight of the sadhu. The moonlight slashed harsh shadows and swathes of light across the face and body towering over him, and the blazing eyes which gleamed down at him seemed not to get their lustre from the moon alone. He got up hurriedly, and bowed. Strange time to be collecting alms, he thought, but you can't question the ways of these holy men. The greater they are, the stranger their behaviour...
Rubbing his still sleepy eyes, he hurried into the store-room and, opening the wooden grain chest as quietly as he could, scooped out a cup of rice. He poured it into the sadhu's outstretched bowl and then bowed again, waiting for his blessing. But instead he saw the rice showering down in front of him into the dirt at the sadhu's feet. He looked up, astonished, and quickly looked away again before the blazing eyes could blind him. Rushing back into the store-room he clattered around seeking out the most refined ghee, almonds from Kashmir, halva made by the master sweet maker of the town and brought these to the sadhu. These too were flung into the dirt.

"Your honour, forgive me if I have offended you, I didn't know... I didn't intend... Please tell me what it is you want? I am just a simple servant, please spare me your anger."

"Do you always greet your guests with gifts of low value?" replied the sadhu in a voice that seemed to emerge from the depths of the earth. A terrible voice, streaked with sulphur, but also shot through with an almost unbearable sweetness, like the bellow of a rutting lion, like the deepest note of the shenai heard across a river at the first light of dawn...

"But, honoured sir" trembled the servant, "I have offered you the finest sweets and ghee in the house, please accept them and go. My mistress will be wakened."

"What use are sweets and ghee to me? The mithai-wallah can give me sweets, the rice merchant can give me rice... It is not my body that needs to be fed. I am a holy man, as you can see. It is my soul that needs nourishment."

Tears stung the servant's eyes. "Your soul, sir? Please, don't be angry! I am only a servant, I don't understand... how is it possible to feed the soul? Whatever food you name I will get for you, just tell me – I am just a simple man, I cannot understand your riddles."

"Is the soul of a holy man something of value?"

"Yes, yes, sir, of course! The greatest value! Nothing has greater value than this!"

"Then you agree that the nourishment it requires should be that which has greatest value in this house?"

"Yes, sir, without doubt!" wept the servant, bowed almost double before him. "But what is it? What is it? Please, just tell me and I will fetch it for you."

Behind him a voice said quietly. "I know what it is." The servant spun round and saw Bimla, the chief of my maids, her hair loose, her body draped in a long white shawl. "Come, Lord" she said.

The sadhu followed her up the curving marble stairs to my chamber. She knocked quietly at my door and opened it without waiting for an answer. I was waiting for him, standing by my window. Bimla's lantern threw his face into deep shadows - and out of the darkness his deep, dark voice echoed the mantra in my head... "Shakti-ma, it's time."