Island - Aldous Huxley [36]
“Do you mean ‘friends’?” asked the little nurse. “Or do you mean ‘lovers’?”
“Why not both, while we’re about it?”
“Well, Ranga and I have been friends since we were babies. And we’ve been lovers—except for that miserable white pajama episode—since I was fifteen and a half and he was seventeen—just about two and a half years.”
“And nobody objected?”
“Why should they?”
“Why, indeed,” Will echoed. “But the fact remains that, in my part of the world, practically everybody would have objected.”
“What about other boys?” Ranga asked.
“In theory they are even more out of bounds than girls. In practice…Well, you can guess what happens when five or six hundred male adolescents are cooped up together in a boarding school. Does that sort of thing ever go on here?”
“Of course.”
“I’m surprised.”
“Surprised? Why?”
“Seeing that girls aren’t out of bounds.”
“But one kind of love doesn’t exclude the other.”
“And both are legitimate?”
“Naturally.”
“So that nobody would have minded if Murugan had been interested in another pajama boy?”
“Not if it was a good sort of relationship.”
“But unfortunately,” said Radha, “the Rani had done such a thorough job that he couldn’t be interested in anyone but her—and, of course, himself.”
“No boys?”
“Maybe now. I don’t know. All I know is that in my day there was nobody in his universe. No boys and, still more emphatically, no girls. Only Mother and masturbation and the Ascended Masters. Only jazz records and sports cars and Hitlerian ideas about being a Great Leader and turning Pala into what he calls a Modern State.”
“Three weeks ago,” said Ranga, “he and the Rani were at the palace, in Shivapuram. They invited a group of us from the university to come and listen to Murugan’s ideas—on oil, on industrialization, on television, on armaments, on the Crusade of the Spirit.”
“Did he make any converts?”
Ranga shook his head. “Why would anyone want to exchange something rich and good and endlessly interesting for something bad and thin and boring? We don’t feel any need for your speedboats or your television, your wars and revolutions, your revivals, your political slogans, your metaphysical nonsense from Rome and Moscow. Did you ever hear of maithuna?” he asked.
“Maithuna? What’s that?”
“Let’s start with the historical background,” Ranga answered; and with the engaging pedantry of an undergraduate delivering a lecture about matters which he himself has only lately heard of, he launched forth. “Buddhism came to Pala about twelve hundred years ago, and it came not from Ceylon, which is what one would have expected, but from Bengal, and through Bengal, later on, from Tibet. Result: we’re Mahayanists, and our Buddhism is shot through and through with Tantra. Do you know what Tantra is?”
Will had to admit that he had only the haziest notion.
“And to tell you the truth,” said Ranga, with a laugh that broke irrepressibly through the crust of his pedantry, “I don’t really know much more than you do. Tantra’s an enormous subject and most of it, I guess, is just silliness and superstition—not worth bothering about. But there’s a hard core of sense. If you’re a Tantrik, you don’t renounce the world or deny its value; you don’t try to escape into a Nirvana apart from life, as the monks of the Southern School do. No, you accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself.”
“Good talk,” said Will in a tone of polite skepticism.
“And something more besides,” Ranga insisted. “That’s the difference,” he added—and youthful pedantry modulated into the eagerness of youthful proselytism—“that’s the difference between your philosophy and ours. Western philosophers, even the