Some hundreds of miles westward of the Marabar Hills,
and two years later in time, Professor Narayan Godbole
stands in the presence of God. God is not born yet—that
will occur at midnight—but He has also been born
centuries ago, nor can He ever be born, because He is
the Lord of the Universe, who transcends human processes.
He is, was not, is not, was. He and Professor
Godbole stood at opposite ends of the same strip of
carpet.
This corridor in the palace at Mau opened through other
corridors into a courtyard. It was of beautiful hard
white stucco, but its pillars and vaulting could scarcely
be seen behind coloured rags, iridescent balls, chandeliers
of opaque pink glass, and murky photographs framed
crookedly. At the end was the small but famous shrine
of the dynastic cult, and the God to be born was largely
a silver image the size of a teaspoon. Hindus sat on
either side of the carpet where they could find room, or
overflowed into the adjoining corridors and the courtyard—Hindus,
Hindus only, mild-featured men, mostly
villagers, for whom anything outside their villages passed
in a dream. They were the toiling ryot, whom some
call the real India. Mixed with them sat a few tradesmen
out of the little town, officials, courtiers, scions of
the ruling house. Schoolboys kept inefficient order. The
assembly was in a tender, happy state unknown to an
English crowd, it seethed like a beneficent potion. When
the villagers broke cordon for a glimpse of the silver
image, a most beautiful and radiant expression came into
their faces, a beauty in which there was nothing personal,
for it caused them all to resemble one another during the
moment of its indwelling, and only when it was withdrawn
did they revert to individual clods. And so with
the music. Music there was, but from so many sources
that the sum-total was untrammelled. The braying
banging crooning melted into a single mass which trailed
round the palace before joining the thunder. Rain fell
at intervals throughout the night.
It was the turn of Professor Godbole’s choir. As
Minister of Education, he gained this special honour.
When the previous group of singers dispersed into the
crowd, he pressed forward from the back, already in full
voice, that the chain of sacred sounds might be uninterrupted.
He was barefoot and in white, he wore a pale
blue turban; his gold pince-nez had caught in a jasmine
garland, and lay sideways down his nose. He and the
six colleagues who supported him clashed their cymbals,
hit small drums, droned upon a portable harmonium,
and sang:
They sang not even to the God who confronted them,
but to a saint; they did not one thing which the non-Hindu
would feel dramatically correct; this approaching
triumph of India was a muddle (as we call it), a frustration
of reason and form. Where was the God Himself,
in whose honour the congregation had gathered? Indistinguishable
in the jumble of His own altar, huddled out
of sight amid images of inferior descent, smothered under
rose-leaves, overhung by oleographs, outblazed by golden
tablets representing the Rajah’s ancestors, and entirely
obscured, when the wind blew, by the tattered foliage
of a banana. Hundreds of electric lights had been lit
in His honour (worked by an engine whose thumps
destroyed the rhythm of the hymn). Yet His face could
not be seen. Hundreds of His silver dishes were piled
around Him with the minimum of effect. The inscriptions
which the poets of the State had composed were
hung where they could not be read, or had twitched
their drawing-pins out of the stucco, and one of them
(composed in English to indicate His universality) consisted,
by an unfortunate slip of the draughtsman, of the
words, “God si Love.”
God si Love. Is this the first message of India?
continued the choir, reinforced by a squabble behind the
purdah curtain, where two mothers tried to push their
children at the same moment to the front. A little girl’s
leg shot out like an eel. In the courtyard, drenched by
the rain, the small Europeanized band stumbled off into
a waltz. “Nights of Gladness” they were playing. The
singers were not perturbed by this rival, they lived
beyond competition. It was long before the tiny fragment
of Professor Godbole that attended to outside things
decided that his pince-nez was in trouble, and that
until it was adjusted he could not choose a new hymn.
He laid down one cymbal, with the other he clashed the
air, with his free hand he fumbled at the flowers round
his neck. A colleague assisted him. Singing into one
another’s grey moustaches, they disentangled the chain
from the tinsel into which it had sunk. Godbole consulted
the music-book, said a word to the drummer, who broke
rhythm, made a thick little blur of sound, and produced
a new rhythm. This was more exciting, the inner images
it evoked more definite, and the singers’ expressions
became fatuous and languid. They loved all men, the
whole universe, and scraps of their past, tiny splinters
of detail, emerged for a moment to melt into the universal
warmth. Thus Godbole, though she was not important
to him, remembered an old woman he had met in Chandrapore
days. Chance brought her into his mind while it
was in this heated state, he did not select her, she happened
to occur among the throng of soliciting images, a
tiny splinter, and he impelled her by his spiritual force
to that place where completeness can be found. Completeness,
not reconstruction. His senses grew thinner,
he remembered a wasp seen he forgot where, perhaps on
a stone. He loved the wasp equally, he impelled it likewise,
he was imitating God. And the stone where the
wasp clung—could he . . . no, he could not, he had been
wrong to attempt the stone, logic and conscious effort
had seduced, he came back to the strip of red carpet
and discovered that he was dancing upon it. Up and
down, a third of the way to the altar and back again,
clashing his cymbals, his little legs twinkling, his companions
dancing with him and each other. Noise, noise,
the Europeanized band louder, incense on the altar,
sweat, the blaze of lights, wind in the bananas, noise,
thunder, eleven-fifty by his wrist-watch, seen as he
threw up his hands and detached the tiny reverberation
that was his soul. Louder shouts in the crowd. He
danced on. The boys and men who were squatting
in the aisles were lifted forcibly and dropped without
changing their shapes into the laps of their neighbours.
Down the path thus cleared advanced a litter.
It was the aged ruler of the state, brought against the
advice of his physicians to witness the Birth ceremony.
No one greeted the Rajah, nor did he wish it; this
was no moment for human glory. Nor could the litter
be set down, lest it defiled the temple by becoming a
throne. He was lifted out of it while its feet remained
in air, and deposited on the carpet close to the altar,
his immense beard was straightened, his legs tucked
under him, a paper containing red powder was placed
in his hand. There he sat, leaning against a pillar, exhausted
with illness, his eyes magnified by many unshed
tears.
He had not to wait long. In a land where all else
was unpunctual, the hour of the Birth was chronometrically
observed. Three minutes before it was due, a
Brahman brought forth a model of the village of Gokul
(the Bethlehem in that nebulous story) and placed it in
front of the altar. The model was on a wooden tray
about a yard square; it was of clay, and was gaily blue
and white with streamers and paint. Here, upon a chair
too small for him and with a head too large, sat King
Kansa, who is Herod, directing the murder of some
Innocents, and in a corner, similarly proportioned, stood
the father and mother of the Lord, warned to depart in
a dream. The model was not holy, but more than a
decoration, for it diverted men from the actual image
of the God, and increased their sacred bewilderment.
Some of the villagers thought the Birth had occurred,
saying with truth that the Lord must have been born,
or they could not see Him. But the clock struck midnight,
and simultaneously the rending note of the conch
broke forth, followed by the trumpeting of elephants; all
who had packets of powder threw them at the altar,
and in the rosy dust and incense, and clanging and shouts,
Infinite Love took upon itself the form of Shri Krishna,
and saved the world. All sorrow was annihilated, not
only for Indians, but for foreigners, birds, caves, railways,
and the stars; all became joy, all laughter; there had
never been disease nor doubt, misunderstanding, cruelty,
fear. Some jumped in the air, others flung themselves
prone and embraced the bare feet of the universal lover;
the women behind the purdah slapped and shrieked; the
little girl slipped out and danced by herself, her black
pigtails flying. Not an orgy of the body; the tradition
of that shrine forbade it. But the human spirit had tried
by a desperate contortion to ravish the unknown, flinging
down science and history in the struggle, yes, beauty
herself. Did it succeed? Books written afterwards say
“Yes.” But how, if there is such an event, can it be
remembered afterwards? How can it be expressed in
anything but itself? Not only from the unbeliever are
mysteries hid, but the adept himself cannot retain them.
He may think, if he chooses, that he has been with God,
but as soon as he thinks it, it becomes history, and falls
under the rules of time.
A cobra of papier-mâché now appeared on the carpet,
also a wooden cradle swinging from a frame. Professor
Godbole approached the latter with a red silk napkin in
his arms. The napkin was God, not that it was, and
the image remained in the blur of the altar. It was just
a napkin, folded into a shape which indicated a baby’s.
The Professor dandled it and gave it to the Rajah, who,
making a great effort, said, “I name this child Shri
Krishna,” and tumbled it into the cradle. Tears poured
from his eyes, because he had seen the Lord’s salvation.
He was too weak to exhibit the silk baby to his people,
his privilege in former years. His attendants lifted him
up, a new path was cleared through the crowd, and he
was carried away to a less sacred part of the palace.
There, in a room accessible to Western science by an
outer staircase, his physician, Dr. Aziz, awaited him. His
Hindu physician, who had accompanied him to the shrine,
briefly reported his symptoms. As the ecstasy receded,
the invalid grew fretful. The bumping of the steam
engine that worked the dynamo disturbed him, and he
asked for what reason it had been introduced into his
home. They replied that they would enquire, and
administered a sedative.
Down in the sacred corridors, joy had seethed to
jollity. It was their duty to play various games to amuse
the newly born God, and to simulate his sports with the
wanton dairymaids of Brindaban. Butter played a prominent
part in these. When the cradle had been removed,
the principal nobles of the state gathered together for an
innocent frolic. They removed their turbans, and one
put a lump of butter on his forehead, and waited for
it to slide down his nose into his mouth. Before it could
arrive, another stole up behind him, snatched the melting
morsel, and swallowed it himself. All laughed exultantly
at discovering that the divine sense of humour coincided
with their own. “God si love!” There is fun in heaven.
God can play practical jokes upon Himself, draw chairs
away from beneath His own posteriors, set His own
turbans on fire, and steal His own petticoats when He
bathes. By sacrificing good taste, this worship achieved
what Christianity has shirked: the inclusion of merriment.
All spirit as well as all matter must participate
in salvation, and if practical jokes are banned, the circle
is incomplete. Having swallowed the butter, they played
another game which chanced to be graceful: the fondling
of Shri Krishna under the similitude of a child. A pretty
red and gold ball is thrown, and he who catches it chooses
a child from the crowd, raises it in his arms, and carries
it round to be caressed. All stroke the darling creature
for the Creator’s sake, and murmur happy words. The
child is restored to his parents, the ball thrown on, and
another child becomes for a moment the World’s Desire.
And the Lord bounds hither and thither through the
aisles, chance, and the sport of chance, irradiating little
mortals with His immortality. . . . When they had
played this long enough—and being exempt from boredom,
they played it again and again, they played it again and
again—they took many sticks and hit them together,
whack smack, as though they fought the Pandava wars,
and threshed and churned with them, and later on they
hung from the roof of the temple, in a net, a great black
earthenware jar, which was painted here and there with
red, and wreathed with dried figs. Now came a rousing
sport. Springing up, they struck at the jar with their
sticks. It cracked, broke, and a mass of greasy rice and
milk poured on to their faces. They ate and smeared one
another’s mouths, and dived between each other’s legs
for what had been pashed upon the carpet. This way
and that spread the divine mess, until the line of schoolboys,
who had somewhat fended off the crowd, broke for
their share. The corridors, the courtyard, were filled
with benign confusion. Also the flies awoke and claimed
their share of God’s bounty. There was no quarrelling,
owing to the nature of the gift, for blessed is the man
who confers it on another, he imitates God. And those
“imitations,” those “substitutions,” continued to flicker
through the assembly for many hours, awaking in each
man, according to his capacity, an emotion that he would
not have had otherwise. No definite image survived; at
the Birth it was questionable whether a silver doll or a
mud village, or a silk napkin, or an intangible spirit, or a
pious resolution, had been born. Perhaps all these things!
Perhaps none! Perhaps all birth is an allegory! Still,
it was the main event of the religious year. It caused
strange thoughts. Covered with grease and dust, Professor
Godbole had once more developed the life of his
spirit. He had, with increasing vividness, again seen
Mrs. Moore, and round her faintly clinging forms of
trouble. He was a Brahman, she Christian, but it made
no difference, it made no difference whether she was a
trick of his memory or a telepathic appeal. It was his
duty, as it was his desire, to place himself in the position
of the God and to love her, and to place himself in her
position and to say to the God, “Come, come, come,
come.” This was all he could do. How inadequate!
But each according to his own capacities, and he knew
that his own were small. “One old Englishwoman and
one little, little wasp,” he thought, as he stepped out of
the temple into the grey of a pouring wet morning. “It
does not seem much, still it is more than I am myself.”
