A Smile in the Mind's Eye Read Online Free PDF Page B

with me always; and later on, when my father decreed that I must go to England for my education, I felt that he was delivering me into the hands of these sadists and cannibals, men who could worship this brutal and savage effigy on the Christian cross. Naturally I could not put all this into words for many a year, but at that precise moment I knew that henceforward I would never bring myself to trust anyone who called himself a Christian and so invoke this doom-laden symbol of unhappiness! How right I was! So far nothing has ever come my way which might persuade me to modify this somewhat decisive though perhaps absurd view. 3 The main road which passed the school in Darjiling ran along the side of the playing-fields; the sight of Tibetan lamas setting off on their long pilgrimages to the distant plains of India was a familiar one. Smiling, as if sauntering through the pages of Kim , they whirled their small prayer-wheels. I have had them on my mind ever since and can still hear the noise of the little brass wheels as they whirred out their prayers. But I had to make a wide detour to rediscover them, the lamas! A lion, I was thrown to the Christians!
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    So page by page, the text opened itself to our study, while the arguments and explanations spread out sideways from it, like crabs. Chang was delighted to hear that even old Rabelais had devoted thought to the matter of longevity, wondering if one could not ‘try how long an ingenious and agreeable man might last, if taken good care of’. Presumably the same sort of formula would apply – breathing, diet, husbanding of sexuality. Chang’s Taoist answers must have seemed on the face of it somewhat extravagant; yet here in the book were texts and pronouncements by the old masters of this love-craft which suggested quite the contrary. I was cutting up leeks as these ideas came under scrutiny and inadvertently threw out large sections of the outer leaves as I prepared them. Horrified, Chang gave a sort of little chirp – a Chinese sob – and dived down to the dustbin to recover them crying angrily: ‘You are wasting again; and you know how firm my Taoist principles are!’ There was heartbreak in his voice and I felt chastened and sorry. He took the discarded leaves and smoothed them delicately out with his fingers – as if they might have had a precious message graven on them. He washed them. ‘They are too coarse and old, Jolan,’ I remonstrated, but he shook his head and pursed his lips. He rolled them as one would a big tobacco leaf and taking the sharpest of the knives he cut them as finely as possible. He repeated for the hundredth time, ‘Anything is eatable if cut up small enough!’ I was proud of one thing however: to have reconverted him to ginger – it was a long time since he had used any in his cooking; also curry, I had some fresh curry from Madras – fresh from the armpits of Krishna, so to speak. He was less charitable to the wines in the house, and would not touch coffee. But he watched me indulgently as I drank, and toasting him I said, ‘I am suffering from a case of repressed longevity.’ But he only smiled and shook his head sadly, saying: ‘You are drinking too much; it makes you reason falsely and disturbs your yoga balance – not to mention making you fat …’ He was right, of course, but then the Good God gave us reason to make fools of ourselves with, and I did not want to be left behind. In a certain subterranean way this talk of the Tao – of the prelapsarian déclic which would enable one to turn the key of immortality in the lock – chimed in my mind with some old ideas I had had once about the nature of the poetic act. I felt that it was as if one were making the orgasm more and more conscious with each poem, exhausting, so to speak, the simple amnesia provoked by the ejaculation per se. Perhaps, without knowing it, I had been very close to