Washed and brushed, the twins were already in their high chairs. Mary Sarojini hung over them like a proud but anxious mother. At the stove Vijaya was ladling rice and vegetables out of an earthenware pot. Cautiously and with an expression on his face of focused concentration, Tom Krishna carried each bowl, as it was filled, to the table.

“There!” said Vijaya when the last brimming bowl had been sent on its way. He wiped his hands, walked over to the table and took his seat. “Better tell our guest about grace,” he said to Shanta.

Turning to Will, “In Pala,” she explained, “we don’t say grace before meals. We say it with meals. Or rather we don’t say grace; we chew it.”

“Chew it?”

“Grace is the first mouthful of each course—chewed and chewed until there’s nothing left of it. And all the time you’re chewing you pay attention to the flavour of the food, to its consistency and temperature, to the pressures on your teeth and the feel of the muscles in your jaws.”

“And meanwhile, I suppose, you give thanks to the Enlightened One, or Shiva, or whoever it may be?”

Shanta shook her head emphatically. “That would distract your attention, and attention is the whole point. Attention to the experience of something given, something you haven’t invented. Not the memory of a form of words addressed to somebody in your imagination.” She looked round the table. “Shall we begin?”

“Hurrah!” the twins shouted in unison, and picked up their spoons.

For a long minute there was a silence, broken only by the twins who had not yet learned to eat without smacking their lips.

“May we swallow now?” asked one of the little boys at last.

Shanta nodded. Everyone swallowed. There was a clinking of spoons and a burst of talk from full mouths.

“Well,” Shanta enquired, “what did your grace taste like?”

“It tasted,” said Will, “like a long succession of different things. Or rather a succession of variations on the fundamental theme of rice and turmeric and red peppers and zucchini and something leafy that I don’t recognize. It’s interesting how it doesn’t remain the same. I’d never really noticed that before.”

“And while you were paying attention to these things, you were momentarily delivered from daydreams, from memories, from anticipations, from silly notions—from all the symptoms of you .”

“Isn’t tasting me ?”

Shanta looked down the length of the table to her husband. “What would you say, Vijaya?”

“I’d say it was half way between me and not-me. Tasting is not-me doing something for the whole organism. And at the same time tasting is me being conscious of what’s happening. And that’s the point of our chewing-grace—to make the me more conscious of what the not-me is up to.”

“Very nice,” was Will’s comment. “But what’s the point of the point?”

It was Shanta who answered. “The point of the point,” she said, “is that when you’ve learned to pay closer attention to more of the not-you in the environment (that’s the food) and more of the not-you in your own organism (that’s your taste sensations), you may suddenly find yourself paying attention to the not-you on the further side of consciousness, or perhaps it would be better,” Shanta went on, “to put it the other way round. The not-you on the further side of consciousness will find it easier to make itself known to a you that has learned to be more aware of its not-you on the side of physiology.” She was interrupted by a crash, followed by a howl from one of the twins. “After which,” she continued as she wiped up the mess on the floor, “one has to consider the problem of me and not-me in relation to people less than forty-two inches high. A prize of sixty-four thousand crores of rupees will be given to anyone who comes up with a fool-proof solution.” She wiped the child’s eyes, had him blow his nose, then gave him a kiss and went to the stove for another bowl of rice.

“What are your chores for this afternoon?” Vijaya asked when lunch was over.

“We’re on scarecrow duty,” Tom Krishna answered importantly.

“In the field just below the school house,” Mary Sarojini added.

“Then I’ll take you there in the car,” said Vijaya. Turning to Will Farnaby, “Would you like to come along?” he asked.

Will nodded. “And if it’s permissible,” he said, “I’d like to see the school, while I’m about it—sit in, maybe, at some of the classes.”

Shanta waved good-bye to them from the verandah and a few minutes later they came in sight of the parked jeep.

“The school’s on the other side of the village,” explained Vijaya as he started the motor. “We have to take the by-pass. It goes down and then up again.”

Down through terraced fields of rice and maize and sweet potatoes, then on the level, along a contour line, with a muddy little fish pond on the left and an orchard of bread-fruit trees on the right, and finally up again through more fields, some green, some golden—and there was the school house, white and spacious under its towering shade trees.

“And down there,” said Mary Sarojini, “are our scarecrows.”

Will looked in the direction she was pointing. In the nearest of the terraced fields below them the yellow rice was almost ready to harvest. Two small boys in pink loin cloths and a little girl in a blue skirt were taking turns at pulling the strings that set in motion two life-sized marionettes attached to poles at either end of the narrow field. The puppets were of wood, beautifully carved and clothed, not in rags, but in the most splendid draperies. Will looked at them in astonishment.

“Solomon in all his glory,” he exclaimed, “was not arrayed like one of these.”

But then Solomon, he went on to reflect, was only a king; these gorgeous scarecrows were beings of a higher order. One was a Future Buddha, the other a delightfully gay, East Indian version of God the Father as one sees him in the Sistine Chapel, swooping down over the newly created Adam. With each tug of the string the Future Buddha wagged his head, uncrossed his legs from the lotus posture, danced a brief fandango in the air, then crossed them again and sat motionless for a moment until another jerk of the string once more disturbed his meditations. God the Father, meanwhile, waved his outstretched arm, wagged his forefinger in portentous warning, opened and shut his horsehair-fringed mouth and rolled a pair of eyes which, being made of glass, flashed comminatory fire at any bird that dared to approach the rice. And all the time a brisk wind was fluttering his draperies, which were bright yellow, with a bold design—in brown, white and black—of tigers and monkeys, while the Future Buddha’s magnificent robes of red and orange rayon bellied and flapped around him with an Aeolian jingling of dozens of little silver bells.

“Are all your scarecrows like this?” Will asked.

“It was the Old Raja’s idea,” Vijaya answered. “He wanted to make the children understand that all gods are home-made, and that it’s we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.”

“Make them dance,” said Tom Krishna, “make them wiggle.” He laughed delightedly.

Vijaya stretched out an enormous hand and patted the child’s dark curly head. “That’s the spirit!” And turning back to Will, “ Quote ‘gods’ unquote ,” he said in what was evidently an imitation of the Old Raja’s manner, “—their one great merit (apart from scaring birds and quote ‘sinners’ unquote , and occasionally, perhaps, consoling the miserable, consists in this: being raised aloft on poles, they have to be looked up at; and when anyone looks up, even at a god, he can hardly fail to see the sky beyond. And what’s the sky? Air and scattered light; but also a symbol of that boundless and (excuse the metaphor) pregnant emptiness out of which everything, the living and the inanimate, the puppet-makers and their divine marionettes, emerge into the universe we know—or rather that we think we know.”

Mary Sarojini, who had been listening intently, nodded her head. “Father used to say,” she volunteered, “that looking up at birds in the sky was even better. Birds aren’t words, he used to say. Birds are real. Just as real as the sky.” Vijaya brought the car to a standstill. “Have a good time,” he said as the children jumped out. “Make them dance and wiggle.”

Shouting, Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini ran down to join the little group in the field below the road.

“And now for the more solemn aspects of education.” Vijaya turned the jeep into the driveway that led up to the school house. “I’ll leave the car here and walk back to the Station. When you’ve had enough, get someone to drive you home.” He turned off the ignition and handed Will the key.

In the school office Mrs Narayan, the Principal, was talking across her desk to a white-haired man with a long, rather doleful face like the face of a lined and wrinkled bloodhound.

“Mr Chandra Menon,” Vijaya explained when the introductions had been made, “is our Under-Secretary of Education.”

“Who is paying us,” said the Principal, “one of his periodical visits of inspection.”

“And who thoroughly approves of what he sees,” the Under-Secretary added with a courteous bow in Mrs Narayan’s direction.

Vijaya excused himself. “I have to get back to my work,” he said and moved towards the door.

“Are you specially interested in education?” Mr Menon enquired.

“Specially ignorant would be more like it,” Will answered. “I was merely brought up, never educated. That’s why I’d like to have a look at the genuine article.”

“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” the Under-Secretary assured him. “New Rothamsted is one of our best schools.”

“What’s your criterion of a good school?” Will asked.

“Success.”

“In what. Winning scholarships? Getting ready for jobs? Obeying the local categorical imperatives?”

“All that, of course,” said Mr Menon. “But the fundamental question remains. What are boys and girls for?”

Will shrugged his shoulders. “The answer depends on where you happen to be domiciled. For example, what are boys and girls for in America? Answer: for mass consumption. And the corollaries of mass consumption are mass communications, mass advertising, mass opiates in the form of television, meprobamate, positive thinking and cigarettes. And now that Europe has made the breakthrough into mass production, what will its boys and girls be for? For mass consumption and all the rest—just like the boys and girls in America. Whereas in Russia there’s a different answer. Boys and girls are for strengthening the national state. Hence all those engineers and science teachers, not to mention fifty divisions ready for instant combat and equipped with everything from tanks to H-bombs and long-range rockets. And in China it’s the same, but a good deal more so. What are boys and girls for there? For cannon fodder, industry fodder, agriculture fodder, road-building fodder. So East is East and West is West—for the moment. But the twain may meet in one or other of two ways. West may get so frightened of East that it will give up thinking that boys and girls are for mass consumption and decide instead that they’re for cannon fodder and strengthening the state. Alternatively East may find itself under such pressure from the appliance-hungry masses who long to go Western, that it will have to change its mind and say that boys and girls are really for mass consumption. But that’s for the future. As of now, the current answers to your question are mutually exclusive.”

“And both of the answers,” said Mr Menon, “are different from ours. What are Palanese boys and girls for? Neither for mass consumption, nor for strengthening the state. The state has to exist, of course. And there has to be enough for everybody. That goes without saying. It’s only on those conditions that boys and girls can discover what in fact they are for—only on those conditions that we can do anything about it.”

“And what in fact are they for?”

“For actualization, for being turned into full-blown human beings.”

Will nodded. “ Notes on What’s What ,” he commented. “Become what you really are.”

“The Old Raja,” said Mr Menon, “was mainly concerned with what people really are on the level that’s beyond individuality. And of course we’re just as much interested in that as he was. But our first business is elementary education, and elementary education has to deal with individuals in all their diversity of shape, size, temperament, gifts and deficiencies. Individuals in their transcendent unity are the affair of higher education. That begins in adolescence and is given concurrently with advanced elementary education.”

“Begins, I take it,” said Will, “with the first experience of the moksha -medicine.”

“So you’ve heard about the moksha -medicine?”

“I’ve even seen it in action.”

“Dr Robert,” the Principal explained, “took him yesterday to see an initiation.”

“By which,” added Will, “I was profoundly impressed. When I think of my religious training . . .” He left the sentence eloquently unfinished.

“Well, as I was saying,” Mr Menon continued, “adolescents get both kinds of education concurrently. They’re helped to experience their transcendental unity with all other sentient beings and at the same time they’re learning, in their psychology and physiology classes, that each one of us has his own constitutional uniqueness, everybody’s different from everybody else.”

“When I was at school,” said Will, “the pedagogues did their best to iron out those differences, or at least to plaster them over with the same Late Victorian ideal—the ideal of the scholarly but Anglican football-playing gentleman. But now tell me what you do about the fact that everybody’s different from everybody else.”

“We begin,” said Mr Menon, “by assessing the differences. Precisely who or what, anatomically, biochemically and psychologically, is this child? In the organic hierarchy, which takes precedence—his gut, his muscles, or his nervous system? How near does he stand to the three polar extremes? How harmonious or how disharmonious is the mixture of his component elements, physical and mental? How great is his inborn wish to dominate, or to be sociable, or to retreat into his inner world? And how does he do his thinking and perceiving and remembering? Is he a visualizer or a non-visualizer? Does his mind work with images or with words, with both at once, or with neither? How close to the surface is his story-telling faculty? Does he see the world as Wordsworth and Traherne saw it when they were children? And, if so, what can be done to prevent the glory and the freshness from fading into the light of common day? Or, in more general terms, how can we educate children on the conceptual level without killing their capacity for intense non-verbal experience? How can we reconcile analysis with vision? And there are dozens of other questions that must be asked and answered. For example, does this child absorb all the vitamins in his food, or is he subject to some chronic deficiency that, if it isn’t recognized and treated, will lower his vitality, darken his mood, make him see ugliness, feel boredom and think foolishness or malice? And what about his blood sugar? What about his breathing? What about his posture and the way he uses his organism when he’s working, playing, studying? And there are all the questions that have to do with special gifts. Does he show signs of having a talent for music, for mathematics, for handling words, for observing accurately and for thinking logically and imaginatively about what he has observed? And finally how suggestible is he going to be when he grows up? All children are good hypnotic subjects—so good that four out of five of them can be talked into somnambulism. In adults the proportion is reversed. Four out of five of them can never be talked into somnambulism. Out of any hundred children, which are the twenty who will grow up to be suggestible to the pitch of somnambulism?”

“Can you spot them in advance?” Will asked. “And if so, what’s the point of spotting them?”

“We can spot them,” Mr Menon answered. “And it’s very important that they should be spotted. Particularly important in your part of the world. Politically speaking, the twenty per cent that can be hypnotized easily and to the limit is the most dangerous element in your societies.”

“Dangerous?”

“Because these people are the propagandist’s predestine victims. In an old-fashioned, pre-scientific democracy, any spellbinder with a good organization behind him can turn that twenty per cent of potential somnambulists into an army of regimented fanatics dedicated to the greater glory and power of their hypnotist. And under a dictatorship these same potential somnambulists can be talked into implicit faith and mobilized as the hard core of the omnipotent party. So you see it’s very important for any society that values liberty to be able to spot the future somnambulists when they’re young. Once they’ve been spotted, they can be hypnotized and systematically trained not to be hypnotizable by the enemies of liberty. And at the same time, of course, you’d be well advised to re-organize your social arrangements so as to make it difficult or impossible for the enemies of liberty to arise or have any influence.”

“Which is the state of things, I gather, in Pala?”

“Precisely,” said Mr Menon. “And that’s why our potential somnambulists don’t constitute a danger.”

“Then why do you go to the trouble of spotting them in advance?”

“Because, if it’s properly used, their gift is so valuable.”

“For destiny control?” Will questioned, remembering those therapeutic swans and all the things that Susila had said about pressing one’s own buttons.

The Under-Secretary shook his head. “Destiny Control doesn’t call for anything more than a light trance. Practically everybody’s capable of that. The potential somnambulists are the twenty per cent who can go into very deep trance. And it’s in very deep trance—and only in very deep trance—that a person can be taught how to distort time.”

“Can you distort time?” Will enquired.

Mr Menon shook his head. “Unfortunately I could never go deep enough. Everything I know had to be learned the long, slow way. Mrs Narayan was more fortunate. Being one of the privileged twenty per cent, she could take all kinds of educational short cuts that were completely closed to the rest of us.”

“What sort of short cuts?” Will asked, turning to the Principal.

“Short cuts to memorizing,” she answered, “short cuts to calculating and thinking and problem-solving. One starts by learning how to experience twenty seconds as ten minutes, a minute as half an hour. In deep trance it’s really very easy. You listen to the teacher’s suggestions and you sit there quietly for a long, long time. Two full hours—you’d be ready to take your oath on it. When you’ve been brought back, you look at your watch. Your experience of two hours was telescoped into exactly four minutes of clock time.”

“How?”

“Nobody knows how,” said Mr Menon. “But all those anecdotes about drowning men seeing the whole of their life unfolding before them in a few seconds are substantially true. The mind and the nervous system—or rather some minds and some nervous systems—happen to be capable of this curious feat; that’s all that anybody knows. We discovered the fact about sixty years ago, and ever since we’ve been exploiting it. Exploiting it, among other things, for educational purposes.”

“For example,” Mrs Narayan resumed, “here’s a mathematical problem. In your normal state it might take you the best part of half an hour to solve. But now you distort time to the point where one minute is subjectively the equivalent of thirty minutes. Then you set to work on your problem. Thirty subjective minutes later it’s solved. But thirty subjective minutes are one clock minute. Without the least sense of rush or strain you’ve been working as fast as one of those extraordinary calculating boys, who turn up from time to time. Future geniuses like Ampere and Gauss, or future idiots like Dase—but all of them, by some built-in trick of time distortion, capable of getting through an hour’s hard work in a couple of minutes—sometimes in a matter of seconds. I’m only an average student; but I could go into deep trance, which meant that I could be taught how to telescope my time into a thirtieth of its normal span. Result: I was able to cover far more intellectual ground than I could possibly have covered if I’d had to do all my learning in the ordinary way. You can imagine what happens when somebody with a genius IQ, is also capable of time distortion. The results are fantastic!”

“Unfortunately,” said Mr Menon, “they’re not very common. In the last two generations we’ve had precisely two time-distorters of real genius, and only five or six runners-up. But what Pala owes to those few is incalculable. So it’s no wonder that we keep a sharp look out for potential somnambulists!”

“Well, you certainly ask plenty of searching questions about your little pupils,” Will concluded after a brief silence. “What do you do when you’ve found the answers?”

“We start educating accordingly,” said Mr Menon. “For example, we ask questions about every child’s physique and temperament. When we have the answers, we sort out all the shyest, tensest, most over-responsive and introverted children, and assemble them in a single group. Then, little by little, the group is enlarged. First a few children with tendencies towards indiscriminate sociability are introduced. Then one or two little muscle-men and muscle-women—children with tendencies towards aggressiveness and love of power. It’s the best method, we’ve found, for getting little boys and girls at the three polar extremes to understand and tolerate one another. After a few months of carefully controlled mixing, they’re ready to admit that people with a different kind of hereditary make-up have just as good a right to exist as they have.”

“And the principle,” said Mrs Narayan, “is explicitly taught as well as progressively applied. In the lower forms we do the teaching in terms of analogies with familiar animals. Cats like to be by themselves. Sheep like being together. Martens are fierce and can’t be tamed. Guinea-pigs are gentle and friendly. Are you a cat person or a sheep person, a guinea-pig person or a marten person? Talk about it in animal parables, and even very small children can understand the fact of human diversity and the need for mutual forbearance, mutual forgiveness.”

“And later on,” said Mr Menon, “when they come to read the Gita , we tell them about the link between constitution and religion. Sheep-people and guinea-pig-people love ritual and public ceremonies and revivalistic emotion; their temperamental preferences can be directed into the Way of Devotion. Cat-people like to be alone, and their private broodings can become the Way of Self-Knowledge. Marten-people want to do things, and the problem is how to transform their driving aggressiveness into the Way of Disinterested Action.”

“And the way to the Way of Disinterested Action is what I was looking at yesterday,” said Will. “The way that leads through wood-chopping and rock-climbing—is that it?”

“Wood-chopping and rock-climbing,” said Mr Menon, “are special cases. Let’s generalize and say that the way to all the Ways leads through the re-direction of power.”

“What’s that?”

“The principle is very simple. You take the power generated by fear or envy or too much noradrenalin, or else by some built-in urge that happens, at the moment, to be out of place—you take it and, instead of using it to do something unpleasant to someone else, instead of repressing it and so doing something unpleasant to yourself, you consciously direct it along a channel where it can do something useful, or, if not useful, at least harmless.”

“Here’s a simple case,” said the Principal. “An angry or frustrated child has worked up enough power for a burst of crying, or bad language, or a fight. If the power generated is sufficient for any of those things, it’s sufficient for running, or dancing, more than sufficient for five deep breaths. I’ll show you some dancing later on. For the moment, let’s confine ourselves to breathing. Any irritated person who takes five deep breaths releases a lot of tension and so makes it easier for himself to behave rationally. So we teach our children all kinds of breathing games, to be played whenever they’re angry or upset. Some of the games are competitive. Which of two antagonists can inhale most deeply and say ‘OM’ on the outgoing breath for the longest time? It’s a duel that ends, almost without fail, in reconciliation. But of course there are many occasions when competitive breathing is out of place. So here’s a little game that an exasperated child can play on his own, a game that’s based on the local folklore. Every Palanese child has been brought up on Buddhist legends, and in most of these pious fairy stories somebody has a vision of a celestial being. A Bodhisattva, say, in an explosion of lights, jewels and rainbows. And along with the glorious vision there’s always an equally glorious olfaction; the fireworks are accompanied by an unutterably delicious perfume. Well, we take these traditional phantasies—which are all based, needless to say, on actual visionary experiences of the kind induced by fasting, sensory deprivation or mushrooms—and we set them to work. Violent feelings, we tell the children, are like earthquakes. They shake us so hard that cracks appear in the wall that separates our private selves from the shared, universal Buddha Nature. You get cross, something inside of you cracks and, through the crack, out comes a whiff of the heavenly smell of enlightenment. Like champak, like ylang-ylang, like gardenias—only infinitely more wonderful. So don’t miss this heavenliness that you’ve accidentally released. It’s there every time you get cross. Inhale it, breathe it in, fill your lungs with it. Again and again.”

“And they actually do it?”

“After a few weeks of teaching, most of them do it as a matter of course. And, what’s more, a lot of them really smell that perfume. The old repressive ‘Thou shalt not’ has been translated into a new expressive and rewarding ‘Thou shalt.’ Potentially harmful power has been redirected into channels where it’s not merely harmless, but may actually do some good. And meanwhile, of course, we’ve been giving the children systematic and carefully graduated training in perception and the proper use of language. They’re taught to pay attention to what they see and hear, and at the same time they’re asked to notice how their feelings and desires affect what they experience of the outer world, and how their language habits affect not only their feelings and desires but even their sensations. What my ears and my eyes record is one thing; what the words I use and the mood I’m in and the purposes I’m pursuing allow me to perceive, make sense of and act upon is something quite different. So you see it’s all brought together into a single educational process. What we give the children is simultaneously a training in perceiving and imagining, a training in applied physiology and psychology, a training in practical ethics and practical religion, a training in the proper use of language, and a training in self-knowledge. In a word, a training of the whole mind-body in all its aspects.”

“What’s the relevance,” Will asked, “of all this elaborate training of the mind-body to formal education? Does it help a child to do sums, or write grammatically, or understand elementary physics?”

“It helps a lot,” said Mr Menon. “A trained mind-body learns more quickly and more thoroughly than an untrained one. It’s also more capable of relating facts to ideas, and both of them to its own ongoing life.” Suddenly and surprisingly—for that long melancholy face gave one the impression of being incompatible with any expression of mirth more emphatic than a rather weary smile—he broke into a loud long peal of laughter.

“What’s the joke?”

“I was thinking of two people I met last time I was in England. At Cambridge. One of them was an atomic physicist, the other was a philosopher. Both extremely eminent. But one had a mental age, outside the laboratory, of about eleven and the other was a compulsive eater with a weight problem that he refused to face. Two extreme examples of what happens when you take a clever boy, give him fifteen years of the most intensive formal education and totally neglect to do anything for the mind-body which has to do the learning and the living.”

“And your system, I take it, doesn’t produce that kind of academic monster?”

The Under-Secretary shook his head. “Until I went to Europe, I’d never seen anything of the kind. They’re grotesquely funny,” he added. “But, goodness, how pathetic! And, poor things, how curiously repulsive!”

“Being pathetically and curiously repulsive—that’s the price we pay for specialization.”

“For specialization,” Mr Menon agreed, “but not in the sense you people ordinarily use the word. Specialization in that sense is necessary and inevitable. No specialization, no civilization. And if one educates the whole mind-body along with the symbol-using intellect, that kind of necessary specialization won’t do much harm. But you people don’t educate the mind-body. Your cure for too much scientific specialization is a few more courses in the humanities. Excellent! Every education ought to include courses in the humanities. But don’t let’s be fooled by the name. By themselves, the humanities don’t humanize. They’re simply another form of specialization on the symbolic level. Reading Plato or listening to a lecture on T. S. Eliot doesn’t educate the whole human being; like courses in physics or chemistry, it merely educates the symbol-manipulator and leaves the rest of the living mind-body in its pristine state of ignorance and ineptitude. Hence all those pathetic and repulsive creatures that so astonished me on my first trip abroad.”

“What about formal education?” Will now asked. “What about indispensable information and the necessary intellectual skills? Do you teach the way we do?”

“We teach the way you’re probably going to teach in another ten or fifteen years. Take mathematics, for example. Historically mathematics began with the elaboration of useful tricks, soared up into metaphysics and finally explained itself in terms of structure and logical transformations. In our schools we reverse the historical process. We begin with structure and logic; then, skipping the metaphysics, we go on from general principles to particular applications.”

“And the children understand?”

“Far better than they understand when one starts with utilitarian tricks. From about five onwards practically any intelligent child can learn practically anything, provided always that you present it to him in the right way. Logic and structure in the form of games and puzzles. The children play and, incredibly quickly, they catch the point. After which you can go on to practical applications. Taught in this way, most children can learn at least three times as much, four times as thoroughly, in half the time. Or consider another field where one can use games to implant an understanding of basic principles. All scientific thinking is in terms of probability. The old eternal verities are merely a high degree of likeliness; the immutable laws of nature are just statistical averages. How does one get these profoundly un-obvious notions into children’s heads. By playing roulette with them, by spinning coins and drawing lots. By teaching them all kinds of games with cards and boards and dice.”

“Evolutionary Snakes and Ladders—that’s the most popular game with the little ones,” said Mrs Narayan. “Another great favourite is Mendelian Happy Families.”

“And a little later,” Mr Menon added, “we introduce them to a rather complicated game played by four people with a pack of sixty specially designed cards divided into three suits. Psychological bridge, we call it. Chance deals you your hand, but the way you play it is a matter of skill, bluff and co-operation with your partner.”

“Psychology, Mendelism, Evolution—your education seems to be heavily biological,” said Will.

“It is ,” Mr Menon agreed. “Our primary emphasis isn’t on physics and chemistry; it’s on the sciences of life.”

“Is that a matter of principle?”

“Not entirely. It’s also a matter of convenience and economic necessity. We don’t have the money for large-scale research in physics and chemistry, and we don’t really have any practical need for that kind of research—no heavy industries to be made more competitive, no armaments to be made more diabolical, not the faintest desire to land on the backside of the moon. Only the modest ambition to live as fully human beings in harmony with the rest of life on this island at this latitude on this planet. We can take the results of your researches in physics and chemistry and apply them, if we want to or can afford it, to our own purposes. Meanwhile we’ll concentrate on the research which promises to do us the greatest good—in the sciences of life and mind. If the politicians in the newly independent countries had any sense,” he added, “they’d do the same. But they want to throw their weight around; they want to have armies, they want to catch up with the motorized television-addicts of America and Europe. You people have no choice,” he went on. “You’re irretrievably committed to applied physics and chemistry, with all their dismal consequences, military, political and social. But the underdeveloped countries aren’t committed. They don’t have to follow your example. They’re still free to take the road we’ve taken—the road of applied biology, the road of fertility control and the limited production and selective industrialization which fertility control make possible, the road that leads towards happiness from the inside out, through health, through awareness, through a change in one’s attitude towards the world; not towards the mirage of happiness from the outside in, through toys and pills and non-stop distractions. They could still choose our way; but they don’t want to, they want to be exactly like you, God help them. And as they can’t possibly do what you’ve done—at any rate within the time they’ve set themselves—they’re foredoomed to frustration and disappointment, predestined to the misery of social breakdown and anarchy, and then to the misery of enslavement by tyrants. It’s a completely foreseeable tragedy, and they’re walking into it with their eyes open.”

“And we can’t do anything about it,” the Principal added.

“Can’t do anything,” said Mr Menon, “except go on doing what we’re doing now and hoping against hope that the example of a nation that has found a way of being happily human may be imitated. There’s very little chance of it; but it just might happen.”

“Unless Greater Rendang happens first.”

“Unless Greater Rendang happens first,” Mr Menon gravely agreed. “Meanwhile we have to get on with our job, which is education. Is there anything more that you’d like to hear about, Mr Farnaby?”

“Lots more,” said Will. “For example, how early do you start your science teaching?”

“We start it at the same time as we start multiplication and division. First lessons in ecology.”

“Ecology? Isn’t that a bit complicated?”

“That’s precisely the reason why we begin with it. Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very first that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and the country around it. Rub it in.”

“And let me add,” said the Principal, “that we always teach the science of relationship in conjunction with the ethics of relationship. Balance, give and take, no excesses—it’s the rule in nature and, translated out of fact into morality, it ought to be the rule among people. As I said before, children find it very easy to understand an idea when it’s presented to them in a parable about animals. We give them an up-to-date version of Aesop’s Fables. Not the old anthropomorphic fictions, but true ecological fables with built-in, cosmic morals. And another wonderful parable for children is the story of erosion. We don’t have any good examples of erosion here; so we show them photographs of what has happened in Rendang, in India and China, in Greece and the Levant, in Africa and America—all the places where greedy, stupid people have tried to take without giving, to exploit without love or understanding. Treat Nature well, and Nature will treat you well. Hurt or destroy Nature, and Nature will soon destroy you. In a Dust Bowl, ‘Do as you would be done by’ is self-evident—much easier for a child to recognize and understand than in an eroded family or village. Psychological wounds don’t show—and anyhow children know so little about their elders. And, having no standards of comparison, they tend to take even the worst situation for granted, as though it were part of the nature of things. Whereas the difference between ten acres of meadow and ten acres of gullies and blowing sand is obvious. Sand and gullies are parables. Confronted by them, it’s easy for the child to see the need for conservation and then to go on from conservation to morality—easy for him to go on from the Golden Rule in relation to plants and animals and the earth that supports them to the Golden Rule in relation to human beings. And here’s another important point. The morality to which a child goes on from the facts of ecology and the parables of erosion is a universal ethic. There are no Chosen People in nature, no Holy Lands, no Unique Historical Revelations. Conservation-morality gives nobody an excuse for feeling superior, or claiming special privileges. ‘Do as you would be done by’ applies to our dealings with all kinds of life in every part of the world. We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence. Elementary ecology leads straight to elementary Buddhism.”

“A few weeks ago,” said Will after a moment of silence, “I was looking at Thorwald’s book about what happened in Eastern Germany between January and May of 1945. Have either of you read it?”

They shook their heads.

“Then don’t,” Will advised. “I was in Dresden five months after the February bombing. Fifty or sixty thousand civilians—mostly refugees running away from the Russians—burned alive in a single night. And all because little Adolf had never learned ecology,” he smiled his flayed ferocious smile, “never been taught the first principles of conservation.” One made a joke of it because it was too horrible to be talked about seriously.

Mr Menon rose and picked up his briefcase.

“I must be going.” He shook hands with Will. It had been a pleasure, and he hoped that Mr Farnaby would enjoy his stay in Pala. Meanwhile, if he wanted to know more about Palanese education, he had only to ask Mrs Narayan. Nobody was better qualified to act as a guide and instructor.

“Would you like to visit some of the classrooms?” Mrs Narayan asked, when the Under-Secretary had left.

Will rose and followed her out of the room and along a corridor.

“Mathematics,” said the Principal as she opened a door. “And this is the Upper Fifth. Under Mrs Anand.”

Will bowed as he was introduced. The white-haired teacher gave a welcoming smile and whispered, “We’re deep, as you see, in a problem.”

He looked about him. At their desks a score of boys and girls were frowning, in a concentrated, pencil-biting silence, over their note-books. The bent heads were sleek and dark. Above the white or khaki shorts, above the long gaily coloured skirts, the golden bodies glistened in the heat. Boys’ bodies that showed the cage of the ribs beneath the skin, girls’ bodies, fuller, smoother, with the swell of small breasts, firm, high-set, elegant as the inventions of a rococo sculptor of nymphs. And everyone took them completely for granted. What a comfort, Will reflected, to be in a place where the Fall was an exploded doctrine!

Meanwhile Mrs Anand was explaining— sotto voce so as not to distract the problem-solvers from their task—that she always divided her classes into two groups. The group of the visualizers, who thought in geometrical terms, like the ancient Greeks, and the group of the non-visualizers who preferred algebra and imageless abstractions. Somewhat reluctantly Will withdrew his attention from the beautiful unfallen world of young bodies and resigned himself to taking an intelligent interest in human diversity and the teaching of mathematics.

They took their leave at last. Next door, in a pale blue classroom decorated with paintings of tropical animals, Bodhisattvas and their bosomy Shaktis, the Lower Fifth were having their bi-weekly lesson in Elementary Applied Philosophy. Breasts here were smaller, arms thinner and less muscular. These were only a year away from childhood.

“Symbols are public,” the young man at the blackboard was saying as Will and Mrs Narayan entered the room. He drew a row of little circles, numbered them 1, 2, 3, 4, n . “These are people,” he explained. Then from each of the little circles he drew a line that connected it with a square at the left of the board. S he wrote in the centre of the square. “S is the system of symbols that the people use when they want to talk to one another. They all speak the same language—English, Palanese, Eskimo, it depends where they happen to live. Words are public; they belong to all the speakers of a given language: they’re listed in dictionaries. And now let’s look at the things that happen out there.” He pointed through the open window. Gaudy against a white cloud, half a dozen parrots came sailing into view, passed behind a tree and were gone. The teacher drew a second square at the opposite side of the board, labelled it E for ‘events’ and connected it by lines to the circles. “What happens out there is public—or at least fairly public,” he qualified. “And what happens when somebody speaks or writes words—that’s also public. But the things that go on inside these little circles are private. Private.” He laid a hand on his chest. “Private.” He rubbed his forehead. “Private.” He touched his eyelids and the tip of his nose with a brown forefinger. “Now let’s make a simple experiment. Say the word ‘pinch.’ ”

“Pinch,” said the class in ragged unison. “Pinch . . .”

“P-I-N-C-H—pinch. That’s public, that’s something you can look up in the dictionary. But now pinch yourselves. Hard! Harder!”

To an accompaniment of giggles, of aies and ows , the children did as they were told.

“Can anybody feel what the person sitting next to him is feeling?”

There was a chorus of No’s.

“So it looks,” said the young man, “as though there were—let’s see, how many are we?” He ran his eyes over the desks before him. “It looks as though there were twenty-three distinct and separate pains. Twenty-three in this one room. Nearly three thousand million of them in the whole world. Plus the pains of all the animals. And each of these pains is strictly private. There’s no way of passing the experience from one centre of pain to another centre of pain. No communication except indirectly through S.” He pointed to the square at the left of the board, then to the circles at the centre. “Private pains here in 1, 2, 3, 4, and n . News about private pains out here at S, where you can say ‘pinch’, which is a public word listed in a dictionary. And notice this: there’s only one public word, ‘pain’, for three thousand million private experiences, each of which is probably about as different from all the others as my nose is different from your noses and your noses are different from one another. A word only stands for the ways in which things or happenings of the same general kind are like one another. That’s why the word is public. And, being public, it can’t possibly stand for the ways in which happenings of the same general kind are unlike one another.”

There was a silence. Then the teacher looked up and asked a question.

“Does anyone here know about Mahakasyapa?”

Several hands were raised. He pointed his finger at a little girl in a blue skirt and a necklace of shells sitting in the front row.

“You tell us, Amiya.”

Breathlessly and with a lisp, Amiya began.

“Mahakathyapa,” she said, “Wath the only one of the dithciples that underthtood what the Buddha wath talking about.”

“And what was he talking about?”

“He wathn’t talking. That’th why they didn’t underthand.”

“But Mahakasyapa understood what he was talking about even though he wasn’t talking—is that it?”

The little girl nodded. That was it exactly. “They thought he wath going to preach a thermon,” she said, “But he didn’t. He jutht picked a flower and held it up for everybody to look at.”

“And that was the sermon,” shouted a small boy in a yellow loincloth, who had been wriggling in his seat, hardly able to contain his desire to impart what he knew.

“But nobody could underthtand that kind of a thermon. Nobody but Mahakathyapa.”

“So what did Mahakasyapa say when the Buddha held up that flower?”

“Nothing!” the yellow loincloth shouted triumphantly.

“He jutht thmiled,” Amiya elaborated. “And that thowed the Buddha that he underthtood what it wath all about. Tho he thmiled back, and they jutht that there, thmiling and thmiling.”

“Very good,” said the teacher. “And now,” he turned to the yellow loincloth, “let’s hear what you think it was that Mahakasyapa understood.”

There was a silence. Then, crestfallen, the child shook his head. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

“Does anyone else know?”

There were several conjectures. Perhaps he’d understood that people get bored with sermons—even the Buddha’s sermons. Perhaps he liked flowers as much as the Compassionate One did. Perhaps it was a white flower, and that made him think of the Clear Light. Or perhaps it was blue, and that was Shiva’s colour.

“Good answers,” said the teacher. “Especially the first one. Sermons are pretty boring—especially for the preacher. But here’s a question. If any of your answers had been what Mahakasyapa understood when Buddha held up the flower, why didn’t he come out with it in so many words?”

“Perhapth he wathn’t a good thpeaker.”

“He was an excellent speaker.”

“Maybe he had a sore throat.”

“If he’d had a sore throat, he wouldn’t have smiled so happily.”

“ You tell us,” called a shrill voice from the back of the room.

“Yes, you tell us,” a dozen other voices chimed in.

The teacher shook his head. “If Mahakasyapa and the Compassionate One couldn’t put it into words, how can I? Meanwhile let’s take another look at these diagrams on the blackboard. Public words, more or less public events and then people, completely private centres of pain and pleasure. Completely private?” he questioned. “But perhaps that isn’t quite true. Perhaps, after all, there is some kind of communication between the circles—not in the way I’m communicating with you now, through words, but directly. And maybe that was what the Buddha was talking about when his wordless flower-sermon was over. ‘I have the treasure of the unmistakable teachings,’ he said to his disciples, ‘the wonderful Mind of Nirvana, the true form without form, beyond all words, the teaching to be given and received outside of all doctrines. This I have now handed to Mahakasyapa.’ ” Picking up the chalk again, he traced a rough ellipse that enclosed within its boundaries all the other diagrams on the board—the little circles representing human beings, the square that stood for events and the other square that stood for words and symbols. “All separate,” he said, “and yet all one. People, events, words—they’re all manifestations of Mind, of Suchness, of the Void. What Buddha was implying and what Mahakasyapa understood was that one can’t speak these teachings, one can only be them. Which is something you’ll all discover when the moment comes for your initiation.”

“Time to move on,” the Principal whispered. And when the door had closed behind them, and they were standing again in the corridor, “We use this same kind of approach,” she said to Will, “in our science teaching, beginning with botany.”

“Why with botany?”

“Because it can be related so easily to what was being talked about just now—the Mahakasyapa story.”

“Is that your starting point?”

“No, we start prosaically with the textbook. The children are given all the obvious, elementary facts, tidily arranged in the standard pigeon-holes. Undiluted botany—that’s the first stage. Six or seven weeks of it. After which they get a whole morning of what we call bridge-building. Two and a half hours during which we try to make them relate everything they’ve learned in the previous lessons to art, language, religion, self-knowledge.”

“Botany and self-knowledge—how do you build that bridge?”

“It’s really quite simple,” Mrs Narayan assured him. “Each of the children is given a common flower—a hibiscus for example, or better still (because the hibiscus has no scent), a gardenia. Scientifically speaking, what is a gardenia? What does it consist of? Petals, stamens, pistil, ovary and all the rest of it. The children are asked to write a full analytical description of the flower, illustrated by an accurate drawing. When that’s done there’s a short rest period, at the close of which the Mahakasyapa story is read to them and they’re asked to think about it. Was Buddha giving a lesson in botany? Or was he teaching his disciples something else? And, if so, what?”

“What indeed?”

“And of course, as the story makes clear, there’s no answer that can be put into words. So we tell the boys and girls to stop thinking and just look. ‘But don’t look analytically,’ we tell them, ‘Don’t look as scientists, even as gardeners. Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you. Look at it as though you’d never seen anything of the kind before, as though it had no name and belonged to no recognizable class. Look at it alertly but passively, receptively, without labelling or judging or comparing. And as you look at it, inhale its mystery, breathe in the spirit of sense, the smell of the wisdom of the other shore.’ ”

“All this,” Will commented, “sounds very like what Dr Robert was saying at the initiation ceremony.”

“Of course it does,” said Mrs Narayan. “Learning to take the Mahakasyapa’s-eye view of things is the best preparation for the moksha -medicine experience. Every child who comes to initiation comes to it after a long education in the art of being receptive. First the gardenia as a botanical specimen. Then the same gardenia in its uniqueness, the gardenia as the artist sees it, the even more miraculous gardenia seen by the Buddha and Mahakasyapa. And it goes without saying,” she added, “that we don’t confine ourselves to flowers. Every course the children take is punctuated by periodical bridge-building sessions. Everything from dissected frogs to the spiral nebulae, it all gets looked at receptively as well as conceptually, as a fact of aesthetic or spiritual experience as well as in terms of science or history or economics. Training in receptivity is the complement and antidote to training in analysis and symbol-manipulation. Both kinds of training are absolutely indispensable. If you neglect either of them you’ll never grow into a fully human being.”

There was a silence. “How should one look at other people?” Will asked at last. “Should one take the Freud’s-eye view or the Cézanne’s-eye view? The Proust’s-eye view or the Buddha’s-eye view?”

Mrs Narayan laughed. “Which view are you taking of me?” she asked.

“Primarily, I suppose, the sociologist’s-eye view,” he answered. “I’m looking at you as the representative of an unfamiliar culture. But I’m also being aware of you receptively. Thinking, if you don’t mind my saying so, that you seem to have aged remarkably well. Well aesthetically, well intellectually and psychologically, and well spiritually, whatever that word means—and if I make myself receptive it means something important. Whereas, if I choose to project instead of taking in, I can conceptualize it into pure nonsense.” He uttered a mildly hyena-like laugh.

“If one chooses to,” said Mrs Narayan, “one can always substitute a bad ready-made notion for the best insights of receptivity. The question is, why should one want to make that kind of choice? Why shouldn’t one choose to listen to both parties and harmonize their views? The analysing tradition-bound concept-maker and the alertly passive insight-receiver—neither is infallible; but both together can do a reasonably good job.”

“Just how effective is your training in the art of being receptive?” Will now enquired.

“There are degrees of receptivity,” she answered. “Very little of it in a science lesson, for example. Science starts with observation; but the observation is always selective. You have to look at the world through a lattice of projected concepts. Then you take the moksha -medicine, and suddenly there are hardly any concepts. You don’t select and immediately classify what you experience; you just take it in. It’s like that poem of Wordsworth’s. ‘Bring with you a heart that watches and receives’. In these bridge-building sessions I’ve been describing there’s still quite a lot of busy selecting and projecting, but not nearly so much as in the preceding science lessons. The children don’t suddenly turn into little Tathagatas; they don’t achieve the pure receptivity that comes with the moksha -medicine. Far from it. All one can say is that they learn to go easy on names and notions. For a little while they’re taking in a lot more than they give out.”

“What do you make them do with what they’ve taken in?”

“We merely ask them,” Mrs Narayan answered with a smile, “to attempt the impossible. The children are told to translate their experience into words. As a piece of pure, unconceptualized givenness, what is this flower, this dissected frog, this planet at the other end of the telescope? What does it mean? What does it make you think, feel, imagine, remember? Try to put it down on paper. You won’t succeed, of course; but try all the same. It’ll help you to understand the difference between words and events, between knowing about things and being acquainted with them. ‘And when you’ve finished writing’, we tell them, ‘Look at the flower again and, after you’ve looked, shut your eyes for a minute or two. Then draw what came to you when your eyes were closed. Draw whatever it may have been—something vague or vivid, something like the flower itself or something entirely different. Draw what you saw or even what you didn’t see, draw it and colour it with your paints or crayons. Then take another rest and, after that, compare your first drawing with the second; compare the scientific description of the flower with what you wrote about it when you weren’t analysing what you saw, when you behaved as though you didn’t know anything about the flower and just permitted the mystery of its existence to come to you, like that, out of the blue. Then compare your drawings and writings with the drawings and writings of the other boys and girls in the class. You’ll notice that the analytical descriptions and illustrations are very similar, whereas the drawings and writings of the other kind are very different one from another. How is all this connected with what you have learned in school, at home, in the jungle, in the temple?’ Dozens of questions, and all of them insistent. The bridges have to be built in all directions. One starts with botany—or any other subject in the school curriculum—and one finds oneself, at the end of a bridge-building session, thinking about the nature of language, about different kinds of experience, about metaphysics and the conduct of life, about analytical knowledge and the wisdom of the Other Shore.”

“How on earth,” Will asked, “did you ever manage to teach the teachers who now teach the children to build these bridges?”

“We began teaching teachers a hundred and seven years ago,” said Mrs Narayan. “Classes of young men and women who had been educated in the traditional Palanese way. You know—good manners, good agriculture, good arts and crafts, tempered by folk medicine, old wives’ physics and biology and a belief in the power of magic and the truth of fairy tales. No science, no history, no knowledge of anything going on in the outside world. But these future teachers were pious Buddhists; most of them practised meditation and all of them had read or listened to quite a lot of Mahayana philosophy. That meant that in the fields of applied metaphysics and psychology, they’d been educated far more thoroughly and far more realistically than any group of future teachers in your part of the world. Dr Andrew was a scientifically trained, anti-dogmatic humanist, who had discovered the value of pure and applied Mahayana. His friend, the Raja, was a Tantrik Buddhist who had discovered the value of pure and applied science. Both, consequently, saw very clearly that, to be capable of teaching children to become fully human in a society fit for fully human beings to live in, a teacher would first have to be taught how to make the best of both worlds.”

“And how did those early teachers feel about it? Didn’t they resist the process?”

Mrs Narayan shook her head. “They didn’t resist, for the good reason that nothing precious had been attacked. Their Buddhism was respected. All they were asked to give up was the old wives’ science and the fairy tales. And in exchange for those they got all kinds of much more interesting facts and much more useful theories. And these exciting things from your Western world of knowledge and power and progress were now to be combined with, and in a sense subordinated to, the theories of Buddhism and the psychological facts of applied metaphysics. There was really nothing in that best-of-both-worlds programme to offend the susceptibilities of even the touchiest and most ardent of religious patriots.”

“I’m wondering about our future teachers,” said Will after a silence. “At this late stage, would they be teachable? Could they possibly learn to make the best of both worlds?”

“Why not? They wouldn’t have to give up any of the things that are really important to them. The non-Christian could go on thinking about man and the Christians could go on worshipping God. No change, except that God would have to be thought of as immanent and man would have to be thought of as potentially self-transcendent.”

“And you think they’d make those changes without any fuss?” Will laughed. “You’re an optimist.”

“An optimist,” said Mrs Narayan, “for the simple reason that, if one tackles a problem intelligently and realistically, the results are apt to be fairly good. This island justifies a certain optimism. And now let’s go and have a look at the dancing class.”

They crossed a tree-shaded courtyard and, pushing through a swing door, passed out of silence into the rhythmic beat of a drum and the screech of fifes repeating over and over again a short pentatonic tune that to Will’s ears sounded vaguely Scotch.

“Live music or canned?” he asked.

“Japanese tape,” Mrs Narayan answered laconically. She opened a second door that gave access to a large gymnasium where two bearded young men and an amazingly agile little old lady in black satin slacks were teaching some twenty or thirty little boys and girls the steps of a lively dance.

“What’s this?” Will asked. “Fun or education?”

“Both,” said the Principal. “And it’s also applied ethics. Like those breathing exercises we were talking about just now—only more effective because so much more violent.”

“So stamp it out,” the children were chanting in unison. And they stamped their small sandalled feet with all their might. “So stamp it out!” A final furious stamp and they were off again, jigging and turning, into another movement of the dance.

“This is called the Rakshasi Hornpipe,” said Mrs Narayan.

“Rakshasi?” Will questioned. “What’s that?”

“A Rakshasi is a species of demon. Very large, and exceedingly unpleasant. All the ugliest passions personified. The Rakshasi Hornpipe is a device for letting off those dangerous heads of steam raised by anger and frustration.”

“So stamp it out!” The music had come round again to the choral refrain. “So stamp it out!”

“Stamp again,” cried the little old lady setting a furious example. “Harder! Harder!”

“Which did more,” Will speculated, “for morality and rational behaviour—the Bacchic orgies or the Republic ? the Nicomachean Ethics or corybantic dancing?”

“The Greeks,” said Mrs Narayan, “were much too sensible to think in terms of either-or. For them, it was always not-only-but-also. Not only Plato and Aristotle, but also the maenads. Without those tension-reducing hornpipes, the moral philosophy would have been impotent, and without the moral philosophy the horn-pipers wouldn’t have known where to go next. All we’ve done is to take a leaf out of the old Greek book.”

“Very good!” said Will approvingly. Then remembering (as sooner or later, however keen his pleasure and however genuine his enthusiasm, he always did remember) that he was the man who wouldn’t take yes for an answer, he suddenly broke into laughter. “Not that it makes any difference in the long run,” he said, “Corybantism couldn’t stop the Greeks from cutting one another’s throats. And when Colonel Dipa decides to move, what will your Rakshasi Hornpipes do for you? Help you to reconcile yourselves to your fate, perhaps—that’s all.”

“Yes, that’s all,” said Mrs Narayan. “But being reconciled to one’s fate—that’s already a great achievement.”

“You seem to take it all very calmly.”

“What would be the point of taking it hysterically? It wouldn’t make our political situation any better; it would merely make our personal situation a good deal worse.”

“So stamp it out,” the children shouted again in unison, and the boards trembled under their pounding feet. “So stamp it out.”

“Don’t imagine,” Mrs Narayan resumed, “that this is the only kind of dancing we teach. Redirecting the power generated by bad feelings is important. But equally important is directing good feelings and right knowledge into expression. Expressive movements, in this case, expressive gesture. If you had come yesterday, when our visiting master was here, I could have shown you how we teach that kind of dancing. Not today unfortunately. He won’t be here again before Tuesday.”

“What sort of dancing does he teach?”

Mrs Narayan tried to describe it. No leaps, no high kicks, no running. The feet always firmly on the ground. Just bendings and sideways motions of the knees and hips. All expression confined to the arms, wrists and hands, to the neck and head, the face and, above all the eyes. Movement from the shoulders upwards and outwards—movement intrinsically beautiful and at the same time charged with symbolic meaning. Thought taking shape in ritual and stylized gesture. The whole body transformed into a hieroglyph, a succession of hieroglyphs, of attitudes modulating from significance to significance like a poem or a piece of music. Movements of the muscles representing movements of Consciousness, the passage of Suchness into the many, of the many into the immanent and ever-present One.

“It’s meditation in action,” she concluded. “It’s the metaphysics of the Mahayana expressed, not in words, but through symbolic movements and gestures.”

They left the gymnasium by a different door from that through which they had entered and turned left along a short corridor.

“What’s the next item?” Will asked.

“The Lower Fourth,” Mrs Narayan answered, “and they’re working on Elementary Practical Psychology.”

She opened a green door.

“Well, now you know,” Will heard a familiar voice saying. “Nobody has to feel pain. You told yourselves that the pin wouldn’t hurt—and it didn’t hurt.”

They stepped into the room and there, very tall in the midst of a score of plump or skinny little brown bodies, was Susila MacPhail. She smiled at them, pointed to a couple of chairs in a corner of the room and turned back to the children. “Nobody has to feel pain,” she repeated. “But never forget: pain always means that something is wrong. You’ve learned to shut pain off, but don’t do it thoughtlessly, don’t do it without asking yourselves the question: What’s the reason for this pain? And if it’s bad, or if there’s no obvious reason for it, tell your mother about it, or your teacher, or any grown-up in your Mutual Adoption Club. Then shut off the pain. Shut it off knowing that, if anything needs to be done, it will be done. Do you understand? And now,” she went on, after all the questions had been asked and answered. “Now let’s play some pretending games. Shut your eyes and pretend you’re looking at that poor old mynah bird with one leg that comes to school every day to be fed. Can you see him?”

Of course they could see him. The one-legged mynah was evidently an old friend.

“See him just as clearly as you saw him today at lunch time. And don’t stare at him, don’t make any effort. Just see what comes to you, and let your eyes shift—from his beak to his tail, from his bright little round eye to his one orange leg.”

“I can hear him too,” a little girl volunteered. “He’s saying ‘ Karuna, Karma !’ ”

“That’s not true,” another child said indignantly. “He’s saying ‘Attention!’ ”

“He’s saying both those things,” Susila assured them. “And probably a lot of other words besides. But now we’re going to do some real pretending. Pretend that there are two one-legged mynah birds. Three one-legged mynah birds. Four one-legged mynah birds. Can you see all four of them?”

They could.

“Four one-legged mynah birds at the four corners of a square, and a fifth one in the middle. And now let’s make them change their colour. They’re white now. Five white mynah birds with yellow heads and one orange leg. And now the heads are blue. Bright blue—and the rest of the bird is pink. Five pink birds with blue heads. And they keep changing. They’re purple now. Five purple birds with white heads and each of them has one pale green leg. Goodness, what’s happening! There aren’t five of them; there are ten. No, twenty, fifty, a hundred. Hundreds and hundreds. Can you see them?” Some of them could—without the slightest difficulty; and for those who couldn’t go the whole hog, Susila proposed more modest goals.

“Just make twelve of them,” she said. “Or if twelve is too many, make ten, make eight. That’s still an awful lot of mynahs. And now,” she went on, when all the children had conjured up all the purple birds that each was capable of creating, “now they’re gone.” She clapped her hands. “Gone! Every single one of them. There’s nothing there. And now you’re not going to see mynahs, you’re going to see me . One me in yellow. Two mes in green. Three mes in blue with pink spots. Four mes in the brightest red you ever saw.” She clapped her hands again. “All gone. And this time it’s Mrs Narayan and that funny-looking man with a stiff leg who came in with her. Four of each of them. Standing in a big circle in the gymnasium. And now they’re dancing the Rakshasi Hornpipe. ‘So stamp it out, so stamp it out.’ ”

There was a general giggle. The dancing Wills and Principals must have looked richly comical.

Susila snapped her fingers.

“Away with them! Vanish! And now each of you sees three of your mothers and three of your fathers running round the playground. Faster, faster, faster! And suddenly they’re not there any more. And then they are there. But next moment they aren’t. They are there, they aren’t. They are, they aren’t . . .”

The giggles swelled into squeals of laughter and at the height of the laughter a bell rang. The lesson in Elementary Practical Psychology was over.

“What’s the point of it all?” Will asked when the children had run off to play and Mrs Narayan had returned to her office.

“The point,” Susila answered, “is to get people to understand that we’re not completely at the mercy of our memory and our phantasies. If we’re disturbed by what’s going on inside our heads, we can do something about it. It’s all a question of being shown what to do and then practising—the way one learns to write or play the flute. What those children you saw here were being taught is a very simple technique—a technique that we’ll develop later on into a method of liberation. Not complete liberation, of course. But half a loaf is a great deal better than no bread. This technique won’t lead you to the discovery of your Buddha Nature: but it may help you to prepare for that discovery—help you by liberating you from the hauntings of your own painful memories, your remorses, your causeless anxieties about the future.”

“ ‘Hauntings’,” Will agreed, “is the word.”

“But one doesn’t have to be haunted. Some of the ghosts can be laid quite easily. Whenever one of them appears, just give it the imagination treatment. Deal with it as we dealt with those mynahs, as we dealt with you and Mrs Narayan. Change its clothes, give it another nose, multiply it, tell it to go away, call it back again and make it do something ridiculous. Then abolish it. Just think what you could have done about your father, if someone had taught you a few of these simple little tricks when you were a child! You thought of him as a terrifying ogre. But that wasn’t necessary. In your fancy you could have turned the ogre into a grotesque. Into a whole chorus of grotesques. Twenty of them doing a tap dance and singing, ‘I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.’ A short course in Elementary Practical Psychology, and your whole life might have been different.”

How would he have dealt with Molly’s death, Will wondered as they walked out towards the parked jeep? What rites of imaginative exorcism could he have practised on that white, musk-scented succubus who was the incarnation of his frantic and abhorred desires?

But here was the jeep. Will handed Susila the keys and laboriously hoisted himself into his seat. Very noisily, as though it were under some neurotic compulsion to overcompensate for its diminutive stature, a small and aged car approached from the direction of the village, turned into the driveway and, still clattering and shuddering, came to a halt beside the jeep.

They turned. There, leaning out of the window of the royal Baby Austin was Murugan and beyond him, vast in white muslin and billowy like a cumulus cloud, sat the Rani. Will bowed in her direction and evoked the most gracious of smiles, which was switched off as soon as she turned to Susila, whose greeting was acknowledged only with the most distant of nods.

“Going for a drive?” Will asked politely.

“Only as far as Shivapuram,” said the Rani.

“If this wretched little crate will hold together that long,” Murugan added bitterly. He turned the ignition key. The motor gave a last obscene hiccup and died.

“There are some people we have to see,” the Rani went on. “Or rather One Person,” she added in a tone charged with conspiratorial significance. She smiled at Will and very nearly winked.

Pretending not to understand that she was talking about Bahu, Will uttered a non-committal, “Quite”, and commiserated with her on all the work and worry that the preparations for next week’s coming-of-age party must entail.

Murugan interrupted him. “What are you doing out here?” he asked.

“I’ve spent the afternoon taking an intelligent interest in Palanese education.”

“Palanese education,” the Rani echoed. And again, sorrowfully, “Palanese” (pause) “Education.” She shook her head.

“Personally,” said Will, “I liked everything I saw and heard of it—from Mr Menon and the Principal to Elementary Practical Psychology, as taught,” he added, trying to bring Susila into the conversation, “by Mrs MacPhail here.”

Still studiedly ignoring Susila, the Rani pointed a thick accusing finger at the scarecrows in the field below.

“Have you seen those , Mr Farnaby?”

He had indeed. “And where but in Pala,” he asked, “can one find scarecrows which are simultaneously beautiful, efficient and metaphysically significant?”

“And which,” said the Rani in a voice that was vibrant with a kind of sepulchral indignation, “not only scare the birds away from the rice; they also scare little children away from the very idea of God and His Avatars.” She raised her hand, “Listen!”

Trom Krishna and Mary Sarojini had been joined by five or six small companions and were making a game of tugging at the strings that worked the supernatural marionettes. From the group came a sound of shrill voices piping in unison. At their second repetition, Will made out the words of the chantey.

Pully, hauly, tug with a will; The gods wiggle-waggle, but the sky stands still.

“Bravo!” he said, and laughed.

“I’m afraid I can’t be amused,” said the Rani severely. “It isn’t funny. It’s Tragic, Tragic .”

Will stuck to his guns. “I understand,” he said, “that these charmings scarecrows were an invention of Murugan’s great grandfather.”

“Murugan’s great grandfather,” said the Rani, “was a very remarkable man. Remarkably intelligent, but no less remarkably perverse. Great gifts—but, alas, how maleficently used! And what made it all so much worse, he was full of False Spirituality.”

“False Spirituality?” Will eyed the enormous specimen of True Spirituality and, through the reek of hot petroleum products, inhaled the incense-like, other-worldly smell of sandalwood. “False Spirituality?” And suddenly he found himself wondering—wondering and then, with a shudder, imagining—what the Rani would look like if suddenly divested of her mystic’s uniform and exposed, exuberantly and steatopygously naked, to the light. And now multiply her into a trinity of undressed obesities, into two trinities, ten trinities. Applied Practical Psychology—with a vengeance!

“Yes, False Spirituality,” the Rani was repeating, “Talking about Liberation; but always, because of his obstinate refusal to follow the True Path, always working for greater Bondage. Acting the part of humility. But in his heart, he was so full of pride, Mr Farnaby, that he refused to recognize any Spiritual Authority Higher than his own. The Masters, the Avatare, the Great Tradition—they meant nothing to him. Nothing at all. Hence those dreadful scarecrows. Hence that blasphemous rhyme that the children have been taught to sing. When I think of those Poor Innocent Little Ones being deliberately perverted, I find it hard to contain myself, Mr Farnaby, I find it . . .”

“Listen, mother,” said Murugan who had been glancing impatiently and ever more openly at his wrist watch, “if we want to be back by dinner time, we’d better get going.” His tone was rudely authoritative. Being at the wheel of a car—even of this senile Baby Austin—made him feel, it was evident, considerably larger than life. Without waiting for the Rani’s answer he started the motor, shifted into low and with a wave of the hand, drove off.

“Good riddance,” said Susila.

“Don’t you love your dear Queen?”

“She makes my blood boil.”

“So stamp it out,” Will chanted teasingly.

“You’re quite right,” she agreed with a laugh. “But unfortunately this was an occasion when it just wasn’t feasible to do a Rakshasi Hornpipe.” Her face brightened with a sudden flash of mischief, and without warning she punched him, surprisingly hard, in the ribs. “There!” she said, “Now I feel much better.”