to purify being human.
Learn to serve in the new struggle and the war of our century: the war within.
‘This particular instruction,’ Mia said, ‘interests me. The Rebirth of the Mother Woman.’
‘Well,’ he leant forward. ‘If it was up to me, I would put that right at the top. But the Brothers thought otherwise.’
‘The Rebirth of the Mother Woman? What does that mean exactly?’
‘Exactly what it says.’ His stare was so sharp that she thought his glasses might crack. ‘Fight the female ego! Make the woman return to her natural habitat, her home, and accept her role as mother. Not aspire to become a computer-tapping sexual slave who wears less and less clothes.’ He shrugged, ‘Lots of people are saying it. We are also saying it.’
‘So what’s your solution?’ She scribbled, ‘Purdah? Burqa? Segregation?’
‘You are trying,’ he laughed, ‘to sensationalize it. Give it funny names. Make it sound old-fashioned and silly because you are so convinced of the rightness of your ways. You can accept no challenge, you can tolerate no disagreement because you only want affirmations of what you think you already know. All I said is that the human mother is becoming an object of lust. In fact, she is the object of her own lust, her own vanity. In the guise of freedom and equality, women are being degraded, encouraged to pursue their worse rather than their better selves. A mean selfish woman is apparently an ideal woman in today’s times. To paraphrase Rousseau, woman is born free but everywhere she is in chains.’
Mithu, for example, Mia confirmed to herself, was definitely not capable of the Pure Love of the Mother Woman. In fact, Mithu was an excellent candidate for the Purification Retreat. Perhaps she should be sent off with this sporty brotherhood to their ashram and return, purified, dressed in white, and raging about the Inner War.
She frowned into her notepad. Yet another eccentric whose life made an excellent alliterative tagline. How easily a clever sentence might leapfrog out of the paper. ‘Male Mystic Meets Modern Mom’. ‘Furious Forecaster Fights Feminism’. ‘Demagogue Demands Domestic Duty’. Just another clank of metal in her prison of 20-second summaries of events, her armoury of one-liners and text messages, a deluxe steel prison set back comfortably from the flabby rough heartbeat of the day-to-day business of evolution.
Her father had analysed her predicament on many occasions. He would say:
An excess of instant-knowledge has made you too easily pessimistic. Too many pictures have finished off your capacity to see and too many words have robbed you of the ability to speak. You’ve ceased to grow. Unless you free your mind to the possibility of faith, you’ll never understand the world.
She had protested: But you don’t need to believe in order to grow! You just need to travel and read.
Aha, but what is travel after all but a kind of pilgrimage, basically a journey seeking unknowable truths? One of the world’s greatest travellers, Ibn Battutah, wrote of how a nameless fakir carried him through a parched landscape when he was too exhausted to walk any further…
Nameless fakir, who?
Exactly. Just a stranger who carried Battutah to safety and then disappeared…
You mean it was god?
Maybe. Maybe not. The important thing is he never could find out.
So the tourists on the Costa Del Sol are on a pilgrimage…?
Of course they are! They don’t know it but they too are pilgrims, they’ve gone there to pray for love and happiness in the future. And they’re naked, just like the naked sadhus at the Kumbh, perhaps there’s some unconscious link between the search and nakedness.
Perhaps Karna was searching too, trying to reconstruct a bruised world in the way he could. His words were meaningless. Yet he wasn’t just playing a part. He was struggling to believe his own clichés. He hadn’t said the right things. He hadn’t tried to reassure her by affirming that he was a mere anecdote. Instead his words had come tumbling out, amateur and raw. He had no polite skills. He was only a bespectacled monk from a river bank who had rushed out of his ashram to teach people how to love each other. For his pains, Scotland Yard might drag him away, strapped to a stretcher, and slam him in a cell for daring to be so corny.
Her father’s painting was even more attractive in the flesh. The hare-brained speech and crazy costume made her want to hug him hard and never let go. Anand had deserted her, but she would hold on tight to Karna. She imagined him injured, beaten by the police or stoned by Neo-Nazis, a battered Jesus, a suffering diviner. She felt awakened to fantasy. He would create a new body for her with his hands – a moonlit, newly voluptuous body. His skin would be darkly luminous, and when he threw his hair behind him, she would catch a glimpse of his long throat. In the rain, he would be a bedraggled rock star on stage, wet with sweat and dripping hair.
His formal manner infuriated her, so did his talk of this stupid Purification Journey. She wondered if she should tell him about the painting. Had her father seen him somewhere and captured his exact likeness? Maybe Anand had caught a glimpse of him on one of his many trips to India. She wanted to tell him that she knew him very well. That he was more muscular and tall than she had hoped for. That to see him now was a message from the dead, that her father hadn’t even seen his subject’s best angles. Perhaps most people in the world are waiting to be carried away by strangers on the street, or searching out fervent religious preachers to fall in love with because the software sector was turning out to be far too unromantic and their camouflage of office jokes was wearing thin.
She bent into her notepad, but instead of taking notes, drew a face that was an ideal version of her own, with every feature stretched to perfection. ‘Interesting,’ she said after a pause. ‘Tell me, d’you ever watch TV?’
ALQUERIA, GOA
The road to Alqueria ran along the sea. It was a zigzag of a road. A road with a split personality. A slam of sunlit sea on one side, quiet palm and mango forests on the other. The forests sloped upwards to a red dust hill where the old Portuguese fort stared out across the water. Next to the fort was the church of Santa Ana (presided over by Father Rudy) with its whitewashed walls and blue curlicues.
Tiny seaside Alqueria: one of the world’s forgotten ancestors. Where the spirits were ancient and powerful.
Wayside shrines dotted the zigzag road. There was a white crucifix planted under a cashew bush with a marigold at its base. Next to Sharkey’s Hotel, under the big banyan tree, villagers lit clay lamps every evening. Under the rocky steps that led off the zigzag to the beach were scattered hibiscus petals and stalks of rice. In Alqueria, Father Rudy told his congregation, all kinds of gods pranced in the shadow of humans. When a smiling arc of palm leaf drifted to the ground, you knew it wasn’t just another leaf.
In the evenings, music from the church choir accompanied the fishermen to the taverna. Family homes with pillared patios, red-tiled roofs and icons on their walls came alive with lights and buntings. Bougainvillea, jackfruit trees and abolim flowers grew in the back gardens of the houses that lined the zigzag.
Sloping down from the zigzag was Capuchine Beach and its crescent of sand. On one of the bends of the zigzag was the popular Sharkey’s Hotel. Its whitewashed walls were painted with palm trees and beer bottles. Red paper lamps hung from the ceiling. The rooms on the first floor were comfortable enough though the sheets were faded and the floors were sandy. The best thing about Sharkey’s was its stunning location, with the bay in front and Alqueria stretching behind. Ad executives, chief financial officers and models with bandannas streaming from their hair and cellphones tucked into their sarongs, came to stay during the New Year holiday and arranged all-night parties. There were techno, rock ‘n’ roll and Bollywood remixes on offer and an a la carte of Goan