The Snug: A Blog

A sneak preview from my current novel, Ohiowa Impromptu, in which Dr. Ramsultanajam, Head of Geriatric Medicine at Eisenbahn Memorial Hospital in New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, encounters a Hindu god in the Emergency Ward.

"My God."

The doctor's exclamation was prompted less by the visually certifiable fact of the divine apparition standing in the middle of the room, halfway between Mrs. Hillendale and Mrs. Gong–the elephant-god Ganesha, he of the elephant head, single tusk, and four limbs–than by the powerful stench, whether emanating from the comatose patients or their visitor–or from Haresh, cowering in the corner, Dr. Ramsutlanajam was pleased to note–it was impossible to say.

"Ugh. What an awful stink. Do please use the Lysol."

"Oh my goodness, yes," said the elephant-headed god humbly, seeming to know exactly where it was, and liberally doused the ambient atmosphere from an aerosol can that he held with some delicacy and precision, Dr. Ramsultanajam was intrigued to see, in an unexpectedly elegant and entirely human hand, one of the four. Amazing, how accurate the sculptures at Mysore were, right down to the four arms, not to mention of course the anomalous but divine elephant's head sitting atop that big, burly body, whose forearms were now two, reduced to bidexterity: aha. The way he turned his trunk sharply to his left to sample the aerosol in his lower-left hand was, thought Dr. Ramsultanajam, an admirer of the plastic arts, a particularly definitive archaic feature. But the arms came and went, much as the apparition's shape faded and reformed, much as the apparition itself did....now the elephant god, now a small old brown Brahmin....

"Vighneshvara!"exclaimed Dr. Ramsultanajam, employing the god's traditional sobriquet.  He was less surprised to see the Elephant God avatar of the Supreme Being than he would have been to see, say, his mother, or Pryanka Pal; but then it was the end of a long day, and he was dead tired and fed up with dealing with people, and anyway this wasn't his first hallucination of the day: Hadn't he thought he'd seen Jed Harris, the Astor-winning actor, that morning in the cafeteria, dishing up the biscuits and gravy? And when you came right down to it, what were gods but longed-for celebrities like Jed Harris? He didn't believe in religions anyway, any of them, especially (now that he thought about it) Hinduism: silly nonsense, like a nationwide case of the DTs. At least he hadn't believed until now. And yet surely there was a way to accept the truth without buying into the dogma, the pavement-sweeping, the veganism, the interminable burbling of the vedas, all that nonsense about giant mice? To be a cultural Hindu, in short. A man of the modern world.

So why was he being lumbered with this absurd hallucination?

"Ganesha! Please! Are you real?"

"Ramsultanajam," said Ganesha, softly. "As real as snowflakes on the pines of Kashmir, in the early winter days of Margashirsha."

 "Um kahan se aa rahe ho? Kashmir?" 

"Oh my goodness, yes," said the elephant god. Owing no doubt to his prehensile lower lip and the awkwardness of enunciating with a trunk, his speech was distorted, with frequent brief trumpetings and a heavy lisp that generated a fine spray of saliva. Also, his single tusk gave him an assymetrical, unbalanced look; all in all, clumsy and ill-formed as he was, he inspired pity as much as awe.

He curled his trunk upward, like a question mark, at Dr. Ramsultanajam.

"Mere saath aaeeyé!"

"No, thanks. I have these patients to attend to. Poor old ladies, in need of care."

from The Adorations

Tristan always attracted a crowd, even at the matinee performance, and the conductor, young Bruno Walter, the late great Mahler’s understudy and second-in-command, was himself a powerful attraction, ramrod-straight, lithe and—paradoxically, in a mostly cloudy climate—deeply tanned. In a city given to ranking its artists as another city might categorize sports figures or military heroes, Walter was nearing the top of the list for sheer enigma value, but the Klimt brothers and Oskar Kokoschka had the advantage, for the time being. Indeed, on that Saturday the eminent (or insignificant, depending on the degree of your modernism) Kokoschka was in the Mahler family box—”Look, isn’t that Alma?” whispered Helmuth, and of course it was indeed the Maestro’s widow—and a rumor made its way around the parterre to the effect that a Royal and Imperial personage would be, might be, WAS in attendance...yes! There he was, once again! His Imperial Highness Franz Ferdinand, in full Habsburg splendor, with his dutiful Sophie sitting a suitably morganatic distance behind him. Applause greeted their appearance. He bowed, she inclined her head. Stefanie looked away. She cared less for such personages than she had once.

            “The Archduke,” murmured Helmuth. “Never has he been seen at a performance of a Wagner opera. Why is he here? It’s well known the man has no culture. Did you hear what he said about Kokoschka? ‘I’d like to break every bone in his body.’ Well, here’s his chance, eh? Imagine the headlines!”

            “Oh, forget him,” said Stefanie, impatient at her own past awe, as well as irritated by Helmuth’s moist, darting eyes and overuse of the word culture...then, with a truly fine congruity of sentiment and event, she saw Adolf Hitler, watching her, and at that moment the lights dimmed and Tristan’s musical foreplay began. It was, of course, glorious. In the intervening three years Stefanie had evolved, in her all-or-nothing way, into a devotee of Wagner. Oh, she revered Mozart, as befit a Salzburger; Mahler, too, of the modernists, she adored (oh see! how like a silver ship above his widow sails, on the blue Kokoschka-sea!); and Bruckner, and, yes, stodgy old Brahms, photographs of whom reminded her of her Pappi; but as she said to Cousin Fritzl a while back, a propos of nothing (in her spontaneous, girlish way) “You can have all the other music in the world if I could just keep the Good Friday Music from Parsifal!” Hearty Fritzl obligingly said she was welcome to it, but Fritzl was a philistine, and knew nothing of art. And now she was in the company of another philistine, Helmuth, whose real interest in the opera, as became apparent after his third or fourth cavernous yawn, was primarily social (did she not see, in response to a slight hand gesture, a flirtatious twinkle of opera glasses, from a silk-brocaded feminine blur on the mezzanine?), not that he differed in this from the majority of his fellow Viennese. After all, no city can be as genuinely interested in culture as Vienna pretends to be, but any city can be as interested in dalliance and sex as Vienna really is. Yet there were exceptions: Stefanie, although enraptured by the overture and the stark Cornish blue-and-silver decor of the first act (So frisch der Wind/ Der Heimat zu), stole a glance toward Adolf Hitler, sitting two rows forward to her right. Yes, unlike most of his side-glancing, flirting neighbors, he sat open-mouthed, staring, enraptured, a true and genuine worshipper in the act of worshipping. This decided Stefanie. At the first interval...!