A Short History of Richard Kline (17 page)

Guru. How could I bear to use that word? It smacked of the seventies, and the Beatles, and John Lennon in bed with Yoko Ono holding a press conference between the sheets of some five-star hotel and drivelling on about love. I despised this stuff, had despised it even when I was young, never mind now. Yet here I was, caught in the net. Was I now a de facto member of a cult? The very idea was ludicrous. Nevertheless, something told me I needed to be careful. I had no intention of confessing this, to anyone.

But as time went on there was a strain in remaining silent. It meant that nowhere I went could I be myself. It felt unnatural.

What of those others who had been there? There were so many people in the hall that weekend, the predictable sprinkling of ageing hippies and young ferals come down from the hills, but the majority had looked more or less like me. Perhaps they met regularly. It would be a relief to talk to someone about my experience. Not that I doubted the experience: if it had been some kind of mania, of freaking out, it wouldn't have felt so good.

‘It's all in your mind,' my mind told me. ‘She is an ordinary person, albeit a benign one, from another culture, and the exotic joy of it has got to you; the eastern mystique; the charm of it; the chanting, the drumming, the cymbals.' Chanting is well known for its effect on biochemistry, like any sustained and harmonious vibration.

‘Leave it,' my meditation told me, ‘don't worry about it. Whatever “it” is will take its own course. Forget about it for now. You must learn to trust yourself.' Yet who was this
self
I was supposed to trust?

But for a while, trust is what I did, because that was the easiest path to follow. And life was the same, exactly the same as before. No, it wasn't
exactly
the same. On the surface, yes – but in a way I couldn't define (and by now I knew better than to attempt it) some profound change had occurred, some vibration had entered my body. I had heard about other people's experiences but I didn't have ‘experiences', no visions, no flashing lights; what I experienced was a subtle but ongoing change in my relationship to the world. I could say no more than that.

And then one day when I was cleaning up at home, I picked up the pamphlet I had brought home to show Zoe. On the back I noticed something. In small print was a name, Rebecca Wilson, and a local phone number. Ah, Rebecca, I remembered her. We had met at the Roseville program, and had sat together for a while. She had invited me to join a monthly chanting group but I had made excuses. With her long, cascading tresses she looked like a hippie, and I had no desire to hang out with people who hung tattered Tibetan prayer flags across their verandah, or stuck statues of lumpen elephant gods on their mantelpiece.

But maybe it wasn't like that; maybe I was jumping to unwarranted conclusions.

The next day, at work, I rang her number.

The apartment was in Edgecliff, one of a group of eight built in the forties on the side of a steep hill and looking out over a mass of terracotta rooflines. The apartment block itself was almost completely obscured by trees and vines. A line of cypresses ran along the boundary facing the road, and a steep drive ended in a tangle of trellis vines, of jasmine and climbing rose.

Outside the door of Apartment 5 there was a cluster of shoes and I unlaced my own. The door was ajar but I knocked anyway. When no-one came I pushed it open and walked into the cedar-lined hallway. At that moment Rebecca appeared. Her long, brown hair was pulled back in a tortoiseshell clasp. She looked lovely; she was aglow.

‘Rick,' I said.

‘I know,' she said, with a certain gaiety. ‘We're in the living room.' She indicated a doorway and waited for me to go through.

Once inside, I was dismayed. Against the far wall, set on a shelf at chest height, was a huge Indian altar, garish in the extreme. It was made out of some kind of gold-coloured tin and built like a tabernacle, with doors that opened from the centre to reveal three chambers, each with gaudy images of contorted forms painted on all sides. A man with a peacock head-dress and dark blue skin playing a flute, a woman seated on a swan and playing a stringed instrument, an elephant head on a man's body, dancing a jig. It was grotesque, and tacky beyond belief. There were candles lit all along the front, and incense sticks in brass holders. There were flowers on either side, and a large bowl of fruit sat in front of the tabernacle. And everything sat on a red and green silk cloth, intricately patterned in the Indian way. The overall effect was of gilt and tinsel, outlandish and in the worst possible taste.

I winced. Idolatry, I thought. Worse, it reminded me of my Catholic childhood. Here we were and it was just the same, worshipping idols and crude images.

Well, then, I would turn my back on it, and I did, finding a spot on the floor where I could sit at an angle such that I was looking towards the other end of the room. As I settled into position I noted that there were around thirty others present, and they looked more or less normal – not a dreadlock in sight. That, at least, was reassuring.

But what a schizophrenic room it was. Built in the art deco style it was, in effect, two rooms separated by wide double doors that had been removed to create the effect of one long salon. The first room was the very model of a European music room. It had a green velvet chaise longue pushed back against the wall and two handsome Victorian armchairs in black leather standing on a thick Persian rug. A piano stood against the end wall, flanked by bookshelves. These were stacked not only with books but with piles of sheet music and two busts – one of Beethoven and the other I didn't recognise, though I could read the inscription:
Liszt.
Some of the books had titles in a script I guessed might be Hebrew, given the presence of the menorah that stood on top of a dark wood chiffonier near the door. The whole room might have been a Viennese parlour from the 1920s. And yet, here at this end of the salon, the other half of the owner's split self stood in flamboyant and embarrassing relief.

I never did like any of that Indian iconography in the tacky bedrooms of girls I had known in my student days, and I cared even less for it now. The one thing I could relate to was a large photograph of
her
, but even that was way too big, quite unnecessarily enlarged, and so uncomfortable did I feel that I could scarcely bear to look at it. Meanwhile, the smell of incense wafted up into my nostrils and I felt a headache coming on.

By this time Rebecca had seated herself cross-legged on the floor at a small box harmonium. When she began to sing, a devotional song in Sanskrit, I felt my heart lurch in my chest with sudden elation, and for a moment, and only a moment, my eyes blurred with tears.
Where does this come from?
I asked myself. I'm not even in a good mood, I don't like the room, I'm wary of these people, and yet I crack open like a nut the minute this woman begins to sing. Rebecca's voice was remarkably affecting. It was not the voice of the church choir, sweet and plaintive. Instead, it had a hard, ecstatic edge to it, a ruthless eros that made me shiver and brought the hairs up on the back of my neck. She played the harmonium expertly, with a kind of fluid yearning, though entirely without affectation, and the songs she sang bore no resemblance to hymns. On the contrary, they had an unnerving undertow of the wild, as if at any moment they were about to break the bounds of their notation. It was a sound I might once have called primitive, though I was wary now of that word because I realised I didn't understand it.

But the true revelation of the evening was the Sanskrit. I hadn't the least idea what these words meant, so why were they familiar to me? Familiar and enlivening, as if the bellows of my lungs were powered by their distinctive sounds, as if I drew my very breath from their long vowels, like an explosive sigh. Not that I sang along or even hummed – I was too self-conscious and it felt ridiculous even to try. Perhaps it's just the music, I thought, but then when they sang in English the effect wasn't the same: still lovely, but diminished. No, it was the Sanskrit. I had heard a little of it before, at her programs, but then it had washed over me. Now, tonight, I felt at home with it, like it was
my
language, my native tongue, lying quietly in wait for me to recognise it. As if I had emigrated alone from some other country as a child, had forgotten my mother tongue and was hearing it again for the first time. This, truly, was the most bizarre and inexplicable part of the evening.

Over supper I sought out Rebecca. She was a fey woman, delicate and with a tendency to dither, in every way unlike the authoritative presence at the harmonium that had led the call-and-response chanting. She introduced me to some of the others, and their names wafted around me in the general chit-chat of the moment. It was pleasant enough, but still I could not bear the big tinsel altar, the red and gold beast that seemed to take up more than its own space so that I felt invaded by its presence. It was too strong, too alien. How could she live with it, day in, day out?

‘Where did you get the altar?' I asked her.

‘In Rajasthan,' she said. ‘Amazing, isn't it? When I first saw it I thought it was over the top, but then it grew on me. Of course I don't leave it up all the time – there isn't room in this small apartment. I set it up before we meet.'

Thank God for that, I thought, because I liked her, and I wanted her not to be a loony. But, I resolved, I would not be coming back.

When I arrived home, Zoe was still up. An early riser, on most nights she went early to bed but I could tell that she was curious, and possibly even anxious about this outing.

‘How was the prayer meeting?' she asked.

‘Not my scene,' I told her. But I had struck up one conversation over supper, had met one person I could relate to. This was Stephen Chang, a pathologist with an ironic sense of humour, someone with whom I felt I could share the self-mockery I employed to keep myself at what I thought of as a safe distance – not from
her
, but from the bizarreness of the outer trappings. Stephen and I had exchanged business cards and agreed to have a drink one night after work.

‘Invite him home for dinner,' Zoe said.

‘Maybe.'

Had I come down to earth? Not in the least. In the months that followed I experienced what I can only describe as a series of epiphanies, times when I felt infused by an absurd, secret pleasure. I would be posting a letter and suddenly feel a rush, a heightened sense of awareness. The postal system was a marvel: I put something in a steel box and within hours someone would be reading my words. I would cross a road and be struck by the extraordinary fact that the traffic lights worked; all over the city red and green lights were signalling in perfect order, and this was a miracle.

In these moments I took nothing for granted,
nothing
, and was heady from an uprush of euphoria. I was a new creature and the world no longer seemed mundane; it did not have a mundane atom in it. It fizzed and sparked with the current of an unnameable essence – and that essence had always been there, it was just that I hadn't been alive to it. I had been an instrument un-tuned.

One Saturday afternoon around five, the busiest time in our seedy local bottleshop, I stood in the queue behind an old woman, shabbily dressed. When her turn came, she shuffled up to the counter and asked the young man behind it, Tony, for a single bottle of draught beer. At least, I deduced that this was what she wanted, for she had a speech defect and seemed to choke on her words. But Tony was unfazed. ‘Same as usual, Barb?' he asked. She grunted, and he walked from behind the counter to the wall of refrigerated cabinets, where he extracted a single bottle from a tightly wrapped six-pack.

By the time he had returned to the counter, Barb had decided that no, she didn't want draught; she wanted premium lager. ‘No worries,' said Tony. The man in the queue ahead of me sighed deeply as Tony once again stepped out from behind the counter. This time he put his arm around Barb's shoulder and proceeded to shepherd her gently towards the big fridge. ‘Which lager?' he asked, and waited while she took an age to choose, as if her brain were stuck in a groove and couldn't compute. Finally she muttered something and he extracted another bottle, this time from a cardboard pack.

Then he took her arm and escorted her back to the head of the queue, all the while keeping up a flow of amiable small-talk. Had she had a bet today? Did she fancy anything in the Derby? Just when it seemed the transaction had been brought to a conclusion, Barb opened her scuffed little purse and began painstakingly to count out the price of her bottle in small change. ‘Jesus,' muttered the man ahead of me.

But Tony ignored him. He leaned on the counter, in an attitude of relaxed patience as if whiling away the time with an old friend, and studied the pile of coins on the counter. ‘Been raiding the money box, Barb?' he said. He could not have been more than twenty and yet he had the ease of a young prince. He treated this abject figure with such respect that instead of appearing pathetic, she began to shine in the glow of his courtesy. As I looked on at her muddle of five, ten and twenty cent coins, silently I began to count along with her –
fifteen … twenty … twenty-five
– and in that counting something happened: the spaces of the bottleshop began to shimmer in a milky white light, the coins, the beer, the fridge, the faded lino tiles, the black brand-name t-shirts hanging from cardboard display stands, the manic figures on the TV screen above the door, all were transparent in the light.