Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Page A

made a promising first step in shaving his head and throwing away his clothes. For this they seem ready to give him the benefit of many doubts. I’ve seen them do the same with Indian holy men who often pass through the town with their ochre robes and beads and begging bowls. On the whole they look a sturdy set of rascals to me – some of them heavily drugged, othersrandy as can be, all it seems to me with shrewd and greedy faces. But as they pass through the streets, some half naked, some fully so, rapping their pilgrim staffs and shouting out the name of God as peddlers shout their wares, people come running out of their houses to lay offerings into the ready begging bowls. Chid also has a begging bowl and often people put something in it – a banana or a guava – which he eats by himself in a corner of my room, afterwards leaving the peel on the floor. When I tell him to pick it up, he does so quite meekly.
    Inder Lal is much impressed with Chid. As soon as he comes home from the office, he climbs up to my room and sits there for hours listening to Chid. Chid tells him about the centres of energy within the body and the methods to be employed in order to release them. He points now to his skull and now contorts himself so as to dig himself in the base of his spine; and then he weaves his hands about in the air as if drawing down spiritual forces to be found there. I get very bored with all this. It seems to me that Chid has picked up scraps of spiritual and religious lore here and there, and as he is neither an intelligent nor very educated boy, it has all sort of fermented inside him and makes him sound a bit mad at times. Perhaps he is a bit mad.
    I still don’t know anything about him. Sometimes he gives me accounts of himself, but they are always different and it is impossible to reconcile one with another. Anyway, as they deal mostly with the development of his spiritual life, they are abstract rather than personal. Inder Lal tells me this is quite all right because Chid has no personal past. When someone becomes a Hindu ascetic, all his former life – indeed, his former lives – everything he has ever thought or done or been is burned up: literally burned up, for a funeralpyre is lit and the aspirant’s clothes and shaved hair consumed in it in a symbolic cremation. Chid has undergone this ceremony, so that now, according to Inder Lal, he is nothing but the Hindu sadhu we see before us. However, he has retained his flat Midlands accent which makes everything he says even more weird.
    He is always hungry, and not only for food. He also needs sex very badly and seems to take it for granted that I will give it to him the same way I give him my food. I have never had such a feeling of being used. In fact, he admits that this is what he is doing – using me to reach a higher plane of consciousness through the powers of sex that we are engendering between us. I don’t really know why I let him go ahead. I’m much bigger and stronger than he is and could easily keep him off. But it seems as if there really is something, some emanation, that does not come from him but from some powers outside himself. Because he himself is quite sexless: his cheeks are smooth except for some scattered tufts of blonde hair, and he is terribly skinny like a boy who has just got up from a sickbed. But he has constant erections and goes to a tremendous size, so that I am reminded of the Lord Shiva whose huge member is worshipped by devout Hindu women. At such times it seems to me that his sex is engendered by his spiritual practices, by all that chanting of mantras he does sitting beads in hand on the floor of my room.
    15 April.     Typical of the way things get mixed up in India is the story of Baba Firdaus’ shrine. As the Nawab had explained to Olivia, this had originally been built by his ancestor Amanullah Khan in thanksgiving to a Muslim fakirwho had given him shelter. It is now