35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

224
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
legal thing – Elizabeth I insisted all plays have five acts, violators
subject to execution by big axe. Subramanian R. found this an
eminently reasonable answer. They were so well behaved, these
students, so polite, that they began to irritate me. This exemplary
behaviour, I came to see, made up for their salient and prodigious
laziness. The first essay I sat down to mark consisted of one single
sentence: ‘The Mabeth is play by english genius SHEIKH SPIRO
he was knowing king and some bad peoples they are not wanting
this man to be their king so forest is walking to kill him.’
Maybe teaching wasn’t my forte?
It was at the university that I met the Rajkumar of Venkatagiri, a
prince who had some kind of financial relationship with education
and religion in South India. His father had been one of Sathya Sai
Baba’s earliest devotees, although the rajkumar did not seem to be
particularly favoured at Brindavan. This prince was a thin, hunched
man in his fifties, with bulging eyes, a nose like a boomerang, and
an air of always being cold; something no one ever is in that part of
the world. He also kept inviting me to stay at his palace: ‘You must
come as guest at my palace,’ he’d say. ‘My family have been rajas
there for more than one thousand years, you see.’ The two
statements seemed related.
The idea of staying in a ‘palace’ was more than usually attractive
to me at this point. My time around Baba, once more, seemed to be
suddenly over. And King Lear was next on the academic agenda. I
couldn’t face attempting the plot synopsis.
The crumbling colonial bungalow I’d inhabited now for some
months was also beginning to oppress me. With its rotting rattan,
its brimming septic tank, its eight dilapidated servants who barely
managed the workload of one part-time man between them, it was
a place I dreaded returning to at night. The electricity supply was so
erratic that I often had to prepare lectures by candlelight; and when
it did work, the plugs and switches frequently provided shuddering
240-volt shocks, unless you operated them with a twig or other
such nonconductor. Food was kept in contraptions like bird cages
suspended from the rafters, to prevent rats getting at it. Giant ants
constructed extraordinary adobe skyscrapers up the walls overnight.
And once, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something moving up