A DUNGAN BOOKS PUBLICATION

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by Alex Paikada

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Short Stories:
Gitanjaly Express
The Game of Chess
Knowledge Killeth
Metal Fatal
Umbilical Cord
A Microsecond Is Enough
Our Script Was Different
Kindly Let Me Forgive You
The Rebellion
Jurisprudence
King of the Hills
Poems:
 1. The Mountains Will Remain
 2. The Drug Addict
 3. December
 4. The Misfit
 5. To Be
 6. Eternal Spartacus
 7. Faces, Places, and Events
 8. You
 9. Journey of the Eternal Man
10. Cochin City
11. Death
12. The Rain
13. The Prisoner
14. You and I
15. Christmas Song
16. Metamorphosis
17. Hide and Seek
18. God
19. The Caravan
20. Take on the World
21. Wait
22. Easter
23. This, Our Life
24. Stolid
25. Yeoman and the Nation
26. The Separation
27. The Days Gone By
28. Champaran Highway
29. Just Once
30. An Autobiography
31. The Road to Siberia
32. The Song of the Dejected
33. The Benevolent and the Magnificent

GITANJALY EXPRESS

By the time he forced himself into yielding to the prospect of taking his own life, it was breaking into a regular, run of the mill Indian dawn. Winter had hardly given way to our Indian edition of spring. The mornings are blanketed by an eerie mantle of thick fog in which the people move about like ghosts, translucent and amorphous.

Once a decision is taken the rest is easy. Taking a decision is a tremendous exercise, it puts your ignorance to test in the first place, and then it disturbs the centuries past, present and future. It is an extrapolation from the past follies, your grim and uncompromising teacher.

He plodded into the morning slush, squelched and masticated by thousands of running feet, day in and day out, spread across the centuries. The externality of the long march of civilization is dust and soot, when the dust settles there will remain—muck and soot. The rikshaw pullers groped their way in the thick tuft of fog like mysterious coachmen. Sleek motor vehicles scooted up the hazy road like flitting fire worms. Army trucks whirred past with a haughty impatience.

It was yet another February when Gitanjaly Express defecated him into this sleepy medieval city of the Indian heartland. Now it appeared to him that offering himself to the chugging fury of the same locomotive was the most appropriate thing. He was not particularly miserable, especially at a time when being sad was a marketable fad. He was just tired; he forfeited the appetite, the fever to take on the world. It is a blessing, he reasoned, that one is endowed with the safe option of walking out on life, of shutting out the tomorrows by choice. There will not be a morrow to pitch against our sorrow, he rhymed it with élan. The prospect of having no more tomorrows seemed mysteriously frightening and exciting. Every alpine wolf holed up in the obfuscated subterranean urban bunkers will have to come out into the open for a tryst with destiny; his fiercely guarded solitude will shatter. We owe somebody a death. Like a floating shadow, he veered down the road. The smell of burning coal saturated the air. Ugly street urchins frolicked with the hogs wallowing in the grey water. Women squeaked, washing plates and collecting water from the common tube well. Radios blared Hindi devotional songs from the dingy holes and ramshackle huts. He did not notice anything. Calcutta-Bombay railroad was a few blocks away.

Yet he could not help noticing Somanath Sen’s tailoring shop. On many an occasion he had noticed the old man. An old man who always looked sixty. Despite the passage of years Sen never changes nor does his little room react to the magic hands of time. His shop and he himself remained a curiosity, frozen in time. His customers were old men who refused to change with time. Our creativity is our sexuality, and sexuality emerges from our incompleteness. All through the last fifty years he stitched the same stereotyped outfits and never bothered to introduce the sweeping rages of fashion—somebody who learns nothing new and forgets nothing old. Such people, by and large, are shadowy men held prisoner by the ghost of the past. Sen was always seen lost in his work, furiously chewing his imaginary pan (betel leaf), as if he was masticating the whole world, never looking up, never speaking out, indifferent to pleasures and pressures. But then an Indian life is modeled by chances and accidents alone, and there is an eternity before us in which time doesn’t exist. We argue because we know not; we prove a point because we are not sure of the point. And the point does not cry out from roof tops for its own suicide squads.

Sen was still there, but this time around he was not doing anything, his nimble fingers were idle, and his face straight, vacantly eyeing the wet and filthy road, where the tiny globules of water swirled, eddied, and settled, a road where the myriad show of life pulls on as usual. Individual feels and society heals! We could but be ourselves, and if we strain and strive to be more than what we really are born to be, we would easily achieve what we are supposed to be. But to be is an unnerving burden. If we forget who and what we are, we fuse into the mosaic and then nothing matters, not even Mirza Galib Street.

He smiled at Sen, Sen echoed it and said in his subdued tone, “Come on in, baba, sit near this old man. I need your company today more than ever. Today, after the silence of a lifetime, I want to speak out as moths do in the cool of the evening. One has to flutter and fly out. You must steer clear of the lies of the wise and mark my words distilled from long, long days spent in silent observation.”

He obliged the old man, because he was not in a hurry; there was an eternity before him. Gitanjaly Express was still puffing down east hundreds of miles away. He sat on the shabby couch meant for the customers who were rare and far between. Sen was apparently taking a holiday. It was not like Sen to take a day off. Sen was like time, never taking a holiday, continually taking the length and breadth of customers, and subsequently stitching artless and drab straight jackets for them.

“You know what my child,” Sen said with a paternal warmth, “one longs for company at times. Man cannot survive without something to do, something to hope, and somebody to love, so say the learned people. So young man, may you have all those things that are most essential in life. Remember life can even be an absurd case of somnambulism.” Sen grinned patronizingly and chewed his imaginary pan, tormenting his toothless gums. “To hope, to work, and to love is the recipe for a happy life,” Sen smirked while clumsily grappling with the key words that were attempting to scatter like elusive goblins in the corridors of his mind.

“You have your Devendra Sen to love, your sewing machine to work, and your tomorrows to hope,” he teased out of an innocent bitterness.

“I have neither this nor that. As for the sewing machine I have given it up—Indians never had stitched clothes, you must know that, we had plain clothes without sleeves or legs,” again, Sen chewed with a fury and continued, “didn’t you know that they killed him the other day?”

He sat still for a moment. So that was it, then Devendra Sen was one of the unfortunate victims of the communal riot that had been ravaging the city for the past few days. The city had regular bouts of Hindu-Muslim riots, somewhat like a regular seasonal ritual. Communal rioting is the safety valve which vents our pent up frustrations by pandering to base predatory instincts. If we do not turn against each other, we will turn against the system, against the establishment. Thus, the carnivorous carnival, a gory expression of the killer instinct lying dormant within us. Others have the Olympics; we have communal riots. They play to the gallery while we play to our primordial instincts. They fight it out according to the book, we according to the knack.

The old man watched the reaction being registered on him. Devendra Sen was the only son and relation the old man had, his sole link to the world. He felt sorry for the whole of humanity lost in the business of life and struggling to dig out a meaning for the struggle.

Life is a malady, he thought, and it demands an immediate cure.

“Do you think I am lost?” Sen asked, furtively looking at him. Now his chewing had settled to a gentle tempo.

“I can imagine,” he said softly, with a consoling tone. Who asked the old man's son to step into Mirza Galib Street? No Hindu ventures into a Muslim enclave. It was all Devendra Sen's fault, he demanded it, his time was up.

He thought of Mirza Galib Street, of himself, of his yesterdays left smoldering and fuming. He too had a one man tea shop in the Muslim street, his bread and butter. The religious zealots burnt it down, thereby freeing him of all material possessions.

“But I do not feel miserable and lost,” Sen continued, “have you read Gitanjaly? You should. It is the very best the people of Bengal could offer to the world. Somewhere it says, ‘hast thou not heard his silent steps, he comes, he comes, he ever comes.’ Who is this mysterious he? Anyway, it is not God. It is realization amounting to death. So realization is the cure for life.”

“Look, Sen dada,” he was apparently moved, “why do we suffer? And why is there no socialism in suffering?”

“Must you ask me so, baba?” Sen chewed mysteriously, “I am not against suffering, suffer we must, which alone imparts some meaning and depth to the chemistry of life, because life and all its variegated facets are just chemistry they say. You take it from me, sorrow is the shadow of God. God was sad otherwise this world would not have been created.”

“Ramakrishna celebrated his ailment; he swooned in ecstasy when the powers above racked him. When our will merges and identifies with the eternal will, we will cease to be. Every man in his elements is a masochist. But, sorry, sorrows are also ephemeral. I missed your question, I am old and seventy-four you know. You were asking why we suffer with a difference. My old mind tells me men are not at all equal, their traits and temperaments are different, their interests are different, and their requirements are different.”

For a moment, Sen's guest delved back into his own younger years at Kunnamangalam, in his home state, Kerala. There was a time when he dreamed of a socialist revolution. He had ardently taken part in many an in camera meeting; he had clandestinely listened to Peking Radio. He, too, had fancied an ideal world where all men are equal irrespective of caste, creed, language, region, and religion. The jackboot of the state ruthlessly stamped out the Naxalite movement which had been catching the imagination of the colleges and universities. Many of his friends had vanished or died in false encounters orchestrated by the police. Other friends had melted away as yet another atom in the faceless ocean of humanity in distant cities. But somewhere in his mind remained an ideal world. Revolutionaries are selfless, poetic and sad, and at last they end up mad.

“So, Sen dada, you are against socialism.” He made a statement with an affected indifference.

“There you are, I am against all isms, including Hinduism. All isms are the spiritual props the industry of religion and politics deign to dole out to the masses. Even Marxism has its own pantheon of saints, prophets, rituals, and even a pontiff and a hierarchy of clerics. Every ism is at the mercy of certain concepts and abstractions, which are translated into images and symbols for the benefit of the masses.” [When he said masses, the m was nearly silent]

“Islam needs the accursed infidels and Christianity the pack of fallen angels to survive. Islam will end up in a Diaspora when infidels are at last wiped out. Christianity is packing tent because God lost his beard and Satan lost his tail and horns and both became human beings. The hell within us we find without. Every religious man apes, and that very poorly. They ape Buddha, Gandhi, Christ, Marx, and others and forfeit their originality. Nature does not appreciate imitation. Ultimately your ignorance is your identity and your refuge. The problem with man is that he is not satisfied with eating, mating, and sleeping. Man doesn’t survive on bread alone.” Sen took time to chew away the moments trickling between them. ”Our demented institutions are long ago out of joint,” Sen said with a finality.

He let the words of the old man sink into his being and struggled to make sense. Words reverberated and eddied inside him.

“Having the courage to take your own life is not at all a laudable fete. We risk ourselves to protect certain absurdities because every change takes with it its own quota of rolling heads,” Sen said with shocking brutality. Sen turned pallid despite himself, then made an effort to pull himself together.

“Our world is a passenger bus. You board it and watch the show. You are just a traveler, don’t forget that ever. And you are not the driver. Wait and the driver will take you to the shore of eternal solution. It is foolish of us to pretend to be more than what we are without pretensions. At least you can be you. Being true to oneself is the most difficult and most rewarding compromise.”

“But what am I worth?” he fumed and sank into a reverie. He had left his house in Kerala fifteen years ago. The Gulf oil boom had reached the high water mark. All people languishing in this social no man’s land dreamed of going to the Persian Gulf and striking it rich. Many, on returning from the Arabian countries loaded with petro dollars, bought their way up the social ladder with a vengeance. And many more lost themselves in their struggle to cross the Arabian Sea. He, like many other naive villagers, had been ditched and bamboozled by fake recruiting agents.

He had been the hope of his immediate family consisting of his mother and four sisters. With what he saved overseas he was to have married off his sisters and recovered the small tract of land and the rickety house that they had mortgaged to pay for his voyage. The family was upbeat during those days, they dreamed of good husbands goaded in by the modern god, money, for his sisters and a good and furnished house for him and his mother who had never ever strayed into the sunny side of life. His mother’s words still burn into his system, “We will recover it all and much more through you my dearest.” He was her dearest, her investment for the future, her refuge in her declining years. She suffered for him not to suffer, and projected him as her showpiece, her treasured asset. But that would never be. On reaching Bombay the fast talking recruiting agent had vanished into thin air and with him went his passport, money, certificates, his mortgaged house, and property. He couldn’t think of going back, of facing his mother and sisters who had risked everything for him. They might have long ago been driven out of their house. Do they still have a roof over their heads; have the sisters been married off? Do they get a decent meal, do they still pray for him, for that matter do they still wait for him, waiting for his treasured footsteps in the still moments of the night, when rains fight and lash against the walls?

The monstrous machinery of the city churned and twisted him, then spurned and ejected him. Dignity is an unseen barrier actuated by social conditioning, a built in barrier that the character brutes are entirely innocent of. Dignity becomes a casuality in the struggle to keep the soul and body together. Gitanjaly Express had gobbled up and defecated him in a central Indian city where Keralites were seldom seen. Better his mother dwell on the vacuous hope that he would one day turn up to right all the wrongs perpetrated by time. For their image of him to be intact he should cease to be. The realization came as a flash to him: the driver of the bus is absconding.

“These religious extremists should read about Gora,” Sen continued, being done with a vigorous bout of chewing away the absurdities of the world, “a Muslim has the right to be a Muslim and the duty to let an infidel be an infidel. None can right the wrongs because nothing is right and nothing is wrong. No religion is the absolute custodian of truth and every man is his own messiah. Look at the way I am straying, my mind is wandering, I guess. Gora, I was telling you about, the hero of the great poet who penned Gitanjali. Let me tell you now dear fellow, my Devendra Sen was a later day edition of Gora.”

He cocked up his head, whipping up some curiosity for the sake of the old man.

“Twenty years ago,” Sen continued, “our street had a few Muslims and Mirza Galib Street had a few Hindu families. One day in a paroxysm of religious hysteria they exterminated all the Hindus on Mirza Galib Street and Hindus reacted in the same coin. Then a certain Muslim mother came running to me and deposited her child in my lap. You take it from me all mothers are of the same religion. She chose me because I had nobody and I was no party to any sect. I took the child because her eyes could have melted even an unfeeling stone. She was omnipotent in the capacity of a mother. Later they raped her, tortured her, and torched her in the name of religion and civilization, our civilization very much part of our increasing entropy, our civilization denatured by cultural eutrophication. [Civilization moves from one equilibrium to another until it collapses from inside.] That child was my Devendra Sen, the foolhardy youth who happened to be in Mirza Galib Street when communal tensions once again reached a flash point. With but and if we link our life. Mirza Galib Street is an endemic question, a delirious dimension to an epileptic existence.”

“I am sorry for you, dada.”

“I don’t feel sorry for anything. I am old but bold because tomorrows do not haunt me and yesterdays do not hunt me. The driver is very much there, I know. I relax and watch the show.”

He left Sen to another spree of gum chewing, as if he was chewing the ideologies spewing fire. All the Hindus in Sen’s street had a soft spot for him. Sen had come to India in 1947 as a refugee from Naokhali, Bangladesh. His parents, brothers, and relatives had been massacred by Muslim League activists on Direct Action Day. His sisters were killed by his father before the marauders could get to them. The venerable and mysterious Sen dada whose age seemed stalled at sixty.

“You know my boy,” Sen began, “there was only one true Indian, amongst our phalanx of leaders, all the rest were imposters and charlatans. Only one could identify with the soul of India, an old man who became what he believed. It was Gandhi who walked all the way into Naokhali on bare foot and his lips mumbled, 'go it alone.' We walk alone with a pair of bloodied feet thinking of a collective salvation. It is true that it is true that we can wake up somebody asleep but not somebody pretending to be asleep. Take this also my wretched Madrasi, when we stop raving, we know we are dying.”

He slumped into a shallow slumber after many days of disorientation and wandering. Sen watched him benevolently. When he came to his senses in the afternoon, the fog had cleared out and the sun was mildly laying rotund shadows on the floor. Sen was perched on his ancient wooden chair, serene, peaceful, and dead.

THE GAME OF CHESS

Adi Reddy moved the pawns against himself on the chessboard, folding himself up in a creaking, faltering, and protesting chair. He is perched at the balcony of the first floor of a century old bungalow fast crumbling and darkened by the ravages of time. Time hasn't been kind to the mansion. The mossy, musty walls and the dusty floor exude the odor of death. The ceiling, done in expensive rosewood, with its exotic mural carvings and exquisite workmanship had long ago lost its finish and sheen from layers of cobwebs, dust, and soot. Hornets made themselves at home in the dandy cornices. The gargoyles were gagged by the filth of the decades that had gone past the building. The structure stood out defiantly at the nerve center of the provincial Andhra town like an intimidating monstrous being.

Adi Reddy sat there, quite oblivious of the capsule of silence that he was shut into. His dry and insipid fingers crawled on the chessboard like crabs on the sprawl, reluctantly and tremblingly. The day was dying on the horizon; the cool December night marched in from the east and filled into the depressions of the landscape. A towering palm tree softly dragged its lengthening and fading shadow in the compound of the bungalow. People hurried back home in the eerie gloam of dusk on the dusty roads, after haggling their purchases. Shortly, the roads will be deserted and the inky night will devour the sleepy town where medievalism lingers with a fury....

Then, something unexpected happened. Women turned their faces and screamed in protest. There is a sad sorority amidst them. The street urchins hollered. The hurrying pedestrians stood back petrified. The people forgot their hurries and existential worries. Adi Reddy lifted his wrinkled haggard face and strained his failing eyes to see down on the road. He strained to discern something in the dying light of a December dusk. Somehow, he recognized the actors in the macabre drama being staged down on the street.

Two men were parading a woman in her early thirties, naked and brutalized. This atrocity had in fact provoked the sorority and impotent protest of the passing womenfolk. Her dry silken hair was flying about and her hands were tied from behind with pricking coir rope. A bushy, well built man was dragging her along the road and another man was driving her from behind, flashing his whip and cracking it at times on her bruised back. The eyes of the woman were dry and vacant. On her fair and exposed bosom, belly and navel, bloody furious rashes and welts crisscrossed. Blood slowly creeping down from her forehead disappeared in the blue, fluffy pubic hair.

Adi Reddy bent his aged head in disgust and silent protest. Battle raged on the chessboard. The black knight galloped and the white bishop fell. Adi Reddy was anxious to checkmate his foe, who was none other than himself. The pale face of the naked woman filled the canvass of his mind. She was his maid servant Muthamma. She was born and brought up in that bungalow, being the daughter of his former servant Kanakamma, who had died giving birth to her.

The sole link he had with the living world was Muthamma. She smuggled in food for him regularly. He was very familiar with her frightened face and gentle footsteps. Like Braille script, he used to experience her presence even without the faculty of vision. She had an oval face, fair complexion, and Aryan features, totally unlike her mother, as if by accident. Adi Reddy moved the pieces on the chess board. He looked down again, still, at a distance, he could figure out his son dragging her and his son-in law brandishing the carnivorous whip. They are ambitious; nobody survives his ambitions. And, believe it or not, individuality is an institution of pride.

He turned his face again. If anything was relevant, it was the game of chess alone; as long as the game continues, the world and its methods will drag on. Everything else is impertinent and base. Many years had come to pass since his son had banished him to the obfuscated top floor. He had ever since been pulling on his vegetable life in the cocoon of time. He is not angry with anybody, nor is he nostalgic or proud of his tremendous yesteryears. The past is a phantasmagoria, the bristling pride and the voracious greed and lustful thirst for the world were reason enough for him to laugh away his time. He laughed at the bubble of the universe, even laughed at himself. He knows that in this game his will be the last laugh. He who knows he knows knows not, and he who knows not he knows knows. Consciousness is one of the five holy wounds of life. But that also doesn’t matter much, the world is an absurdity spread on the plane of time and space. Women decorate the openings in their body, betraying their desire to fill in the spiritual vacuum with life; men smudge this vacuum with strife and death. We suffer from us and from none else. The musk deer seeks the source of musk everywhere but on himself. A vengeful mind is an asset, the vengeful cannot die. Forgiveness blunts the edge of life. There is no true love other than self love. Either you love you or you love none, you cannot make love to a concept. Adi Reddy excogitated on truths vandalized and prostituted. The difference between USA and USAma [Editor's Note: Usama bin-Laden] is simple, one sets truth free and dissects it in different ways and the other highjacks it and tethers it, and truth cares for none. Christ was wise indeed, he mused, Christ answered a tremendous question: he was asked what is truth and in the most eloquent way he answered it. His answer was silence. When time is ripe, truth will speak out through the wrong openings if we shut out its regular avenues. Reason is a treason; where reason dies poesy springs.

He moved on the chessboard. On the road the way of the cross progressed undaunted. The people recovered from the initial shock and disorientation. The Good Friday was perfected by a Veronica in the form of Somayya. He had seen Muthamma at the market on many days. Her frightened and apologetic face remained etched in his being. He had known that she belonged to his caste, the caste of shepherds. But she was fair and delicate in contrast to his blunt, black Dravidian features. When he recovered from the initial confusion, Somayya darted forth, pushing away the thronging crowds, peeling his long and soiled shirt. But the Roman centurion frightened him away by cracking the whip. Fear was infused into his fawning being, the residual survival mechanism in the wilderness of humanity. One has to be a seer to fear fear. Fear sets the pace of our life. Somayya by nature was a soft-hearted fellow. He was moved easily by the misery of others. His monthly visits to the town for purchases of essential goods, were punctuated by regular deeds of goodwill. For example, a few years ago he had been deeply moved by the sad plight of a vociferous Christian preacher, who was preaching at the main thoroughfare to an unsympathetic and pooh-pooing audience. He felt sorry for the preacher and offered himself to be converted. But his conversion was skin deep; he had no other religion than being kind to others and being at home with himself. Once the preacher caught him in town and forced some pamphlets on him which he could not read because he was innocent of letters.

"Life is not as simple as proclaiming that your master is a Jewish carpenter, you really have to be one," the preacher chastised him.

Adi Reddy had a glorious past. The town had developed around his castle, and all the denizens of the town were at a certain point of time his obsequious tenants. He had his regular durbars, and lively discussions on poetry, art, and religion. He had his education in Europe and had assimilated the English way of life. India, in all its diversities and contradictions, was a beautiful country to him, but alas! It was peopled by Indians. Now the world has come a long way away. His children are grown up. Superiority is a misunderstanding; we feed on the same absurdities. He thought of the Mogul Emperor Shah Jahan. Shah Jahan grabbed power and glowed in imperial glory. Then, one fine day he was arrested and put in solitary confinement by his son. In his miserable years of confinement Shah Jahan could watch Taj Mahal across the Yamuna, the mausoleum built for his wife at the cost of thousands of lives. The Taj Mahal stood before him, as Tagore put it, like a drop of tear on the cheek of time. That is the way of life, Adi Reddy reasoned. Cyrus the Great discovered it too late. The eloquent epitaph of the Persian emperor reverberated in his mind. The world is created by us, each one creates this world, without us there is no world. Life belongs to the quixotic carpetbaggers and history is created by neurotics who are not at home with themselves. They trouble trouble and sparks of history come flashing down.

Ere long, the ups and downs of the landscape were inundated in darkness. Adi Reddy’s blank oval face turned to the darkness, and he had visions of the past and present. The game of chess continued. They left her alone at the end of the street where the road dived into the unfathomed depths of gloom. The voltage starved street light at the extremity of the street was failing in its miserable fight against the waves of darkness. Her tormenters left her with a parting kick, "show your ass again in town and we will chop you to pieces; do you get it bloody bitch?" Consummatum est!

Muthamma did not hurry to cover up her bloodied and tortured body. Her dignity had been violated. Her body reeked and had been burned here and there. Her mind was blank. She took stock of her state of affaires in the refuge of groping darkness. She had not been able to think anything during the course of the ordeal; she was just a detached spectator. In the beginning, she had tried in vain to cover her private parts; in the beginning, she had railed and ranted at them; she had even begged for mercy from her tormenters. By and by, she became silent and blank. She became oblivious of the whip and the cruelties wreaked upon her body. The penetrating eyes of the bawdy onlookers did not anymore make her uneasy. Her mind wandered at a plateau far and away. And now in the inky solitude she tried in vain to put together the broken links of reason.

Her mind refused to delve into the ground realities and wandered in the rarified heights. Her mind was like a bird soaring high and away. All of the crude and taunting facts melted away into absolute emptiness. The real world vanished, leaving nary a trace behind. A new world opened out around her, fresh, bright, and beautiful, as if she was slipping into another birth, into another existence. She moved along the track lost in darkness like a shadow. The world waited in bated breath.

By mustering all the strength of his hands to move his heavy legs, Adi Reddy tried to make himself comfortable. But his legs remained inert and stationary, weighed down by elephantiasis. Again, his fingers snaked on the chessboard. The stench of the past filled the air. He toyed with the prospect of death. Death liberates many things including a name; life binds many things including a sign. Life is green in color and death is blue. And life can certainly be much more than a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing. This world with the triple co-ordinates of space, mass, and time will sink to a point and the dream of life will fade out; the fragrance cannot outlive the flower. Life ought to be much more than living, much more than breathing. The coconut speaks a mysterious language. The two eyes of the nut come to naught; when the third eye opens, life sprouts.

The canals from Nagarjunsagar Dam radiated away into infinity. A dam that copiously blessed the people with filariasis and fluorosis. Muthamma moved falteringly by the side of the rippling babble of the waters. The night was starlit. The chill of the night excreted fine droplets of dew. The stars watched benevolently over the earth comfortably sleeping. Muthamma patiently stepped into the water and moved down into the depths as if she was going home. We are bold when we have no place to flee. Death can even be a remembrance. Life is an immensely simple question which is always hovered over by a mysterious answer—death. But when we are in the fitful rage of life, we beautifully and in a sense, dutifully, forget the question as well as the answer. Silence settled again, the ripples and disturbance in the water also died down.

The world did not end there. Muthamma opened her eyes; she was in the lap of Somayya.

“Did I not die yet?” she asked, her sadness and despondency condensing.

“No you did not.”

“Why did you do it?’’ she wailed in excruciating anguish.

“It was not I, it was somebody else high and above.”

Adi Reddy moved again on the chessboard. In his hazy consciousness it occurred to him that he was the fundamental cause, the primordial drive of this phenomenal world and everything associated with it. And the reason fights against itself. The nonsense perpetrated in the evening was part and parcel to that psychological macrocosm residing inside him.

“Leave me alone strange man, whoever you be. I am done with this world, I have no business here,” Muthamma sobbed and stammered. She was in fact irritated by his stupid intervention.

“This life of ours is neither mean nor melancholy, Muthamma.”

“I am fed up. Please leave me alone.”

"Dear Muthamma, the world is not the same everywhere, every time. The world changes and so do the actors. I invite you to the distant hills; there we will walk way into the evening of life hand in hand. When the sheep move about in the lonely pastures, I will play a tune or two on my poor flute in the shadow of an evergreen tree. The flowers will tell us from everywhere that April has come. At night nightingales will come out with their lullaby. In the morning the gentle breeze will dance with the gaudy boughs. Summer will come with gray skies and nocturnal rains. There will still be music in the hills. In Autumn we will watch the crescent moon laying its gossamer in the sleeping valley. Winter will come again with floating yellow leaves and permeating silence. Our days and nights will come and go this way and that way, part of a larger harmony. April will always be there beckoning to us.”

Then he broke into a song, a song he had perfected during his solemn moments in the pastures, by giving and taking, polishing and honing up.

Come away, you come away
Come away, mon agnus dei
Dancing breeze and dreaming trees
Running streams and winning dreams
Come away, you come away
Come away, mon agnus dei
Rolling hills, where sunshine dies
Falling rains and nights and days
Come away, you come away
Come away, mon agnus dei
Hills and dells and winsome hollows
Dance and sleep in fulsome shadows
Come away, you come away
Come away mon agnus dei
Flush your sorrows, flush your morrows
Never one lends and never one borrows
Come away, you come away
Come away, mon agnus dei
Play I shall there on my flute
Watch you shall, it thrilled and mute
Come away, you come away
Come away, mon agnus dei.

Muthamma slipped into a placid slumber and watched the dream he was directing for her. Live your dreams and soon you will crash against the wall, leave your dreams and soon life turns into lead. The dream is an alchemist of sorts.

KNOWLEDGE KILLETH

My legendary uncle visited us recently, only to transform my life once and for all. It was a time when I had concluded that the best thing to do was not to do anything. I had tried many jobs; nothing lasted, nothing worked, and I grew depressed.... Then, popped up the dreaded question, a question that accosts anybody who emerges alive from a shattering event: what to do with what remains of my life?

My father had left me and went God knows where. He was a curious character in our sleepy little village. You know, the world is not meant for the sane; he was copiously endowed with the faculty of eccentricity and made a patent celebration of it. He was a medicine freak; he protested to suffer from an enormous number of curious imaginary diseases. Let me add though, that he was long ago a caring father and a gifted mason (we belong to the caste of masons, you know). One day, he switched from the obsession of parenting and masonry to medicine mania. A certain woman, who is at present raving mad, is said to have tried black magic on him. He was the easy quarry to the mendicant quacks, monte blancs, and other conmen. He tried traditional herbal medicines, Unani, Allopathy, Homoeopathy, yoga, and faith healing and pestered all the doctors in our region. When the doctors tired of him, he began to prescribe medicines for himself and the obliging pharmacies always accommodated him. He haunted all of the free medical clinics organized by charitable organizations. With his staple diet of tablets, capsules, and tonics, my father grew thinner day by day. He sought a panacea as if life itself was a malady that demanded an immediate remedy. And one day he disappeared from his regular orbit linking a string of government hospitals and faith healing centers. Some of his close cohorts told me that he had hinted of going to Benares, on the Ganges. Anyway, he was gone and I was left to my own devices. This development reiterated my decision not to do anything for a living. Replenishing my small stomach was not a difficult task, and when food was not handy I slept my day away. Then my uncle showed up. I was meeting him for the first time. Some twenty years ago, he is said to have visited us, and had taken me in his arms and blessed me. But it was long ago, when my mother was with us. My uncle is like a comet that cares to visit the earth irregularly.

One fine afternoon, he unceremoniously pulled me out of my facultative siesta, breaking into peals of fulminating laughter. The stifling heat of April was ruthlessly smothering us. The furious heavens frowned down upon us. The heat of the day and my troubled slumber made me think the queer apparition in front of me was a ghost, because our ancient village is frequented by ghosts of various denominations. With his paroxysms of laughter rocking his lean body, overflowing pepper and salt beard, and cemented wands of hair, my uncle introduced himself, and then I was interested.

"So my nephew has proved himself to be a good for nothing loafer," he declared gleefully. "But don’t worry," he continued, "I was like you; all Indians in their true colors are like you. So yours is not an endangered species and may your tribe prosper." He guffawed again. His celebration of being himself appealed to me.

"Now shake yourself up my flip-flop nephew, I am going to be your Tao," he said with finality. His unwavering energy was smoothly energizing me. I cocked up my antennae against the tantalizing stimuli.

"I’ll show you the right path, but I am not the path. Every path is the right path but there is only one righter path for the righter person." I guessed that he was going to take me under his wings, a prospect which seemed altogether enticing because I was averse to taking responsibilities.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

"You should take to the road," he said and gauged the reaction reflected in my face.

"Do you want me to leave my hut?"

"Yes, you have to. Your soul is there where your wealth is. When you have nothing, the whole world is yours, and you belong to the whole world. You can be anywhere, everywhere, anytime, every time."

"Who is going to feed us, who is going to clad us, who is going to give us money?"

"Look at me, you lousy chap."

I surveyed his saffron clothes, vermilion smeared on his forehead, and his soiled cloth bag.

"This uniform is a possibility, a passport to travel anywhere in the country. Our British raj stitched the country together with their railroads. Now it is yours, the country and the railroads. You board a train dressed as a monk, a true Hindu will never inspect your rail ticket, and, if he is modernized and spoiled, he will get you arrested and imprisoned. But worry not, you are not in a hurry, you are at home everywhere, they will feed you and will offer a roof above your head. When they are tired of being your host, they will let you free, you board the very next train until the next prison takes you in as a guest. Knowledge kills and ignorance keeps you. Drink and seek not the chemistry of the teat, eat and seek not the recipe of the dish that is prepared for you. To know is to know that you know not to know," he philosophized. My uncle looked at me with a mischievous glow in his merry eyes.

Negation of knowledge fascinated me; I am a dropout from primary school, you know.

"How do we find acceptability, being innocent of knowledge?" I inquired.

"Again, I say knowledge killeth your dreams and faith giveth life. Have you not heard the story of the quack of Calicut? Here it is. Long, long ago there lived an idiot close to a miracle doctor who cured snake bites by sprinkling water and reciting mantras. One day our fool is sent to the doctor by his mother to learn the mantra. He goes to the doctor with an ash gourd as a reward for sharing the mantra. On seeing the fool the doctor bitterly scowls: 'wherefore is this ash gourd, you idiot?' The fool places the vegetable at his feet and runs home pleased and happy because he thought that the miraculous mantra was: wherefore is this ash gourd, you idiot? He recited the mantra a hundred thousand times the number of letters in the mantric sentence. Then, he treated one patient when the true doctor was not home. It worked. Then, patients came trickling in; he chanted his treasured mantra and sprinkled water on the sinking patient; he lured them all to the world of the living. One day, the princess of the kingdom was stung by a deadly serpent. She was immediately taken to the true doctor. He failed to coax her back to life. Then, the idiot tried his mantra and sprinkled water and, lo, she woke up from her coma. His name spread far and wide and the true doctor eclipsed into oblivion. One day, the idiot was being taken to the palace in a palanquin, and he saw the true doctor on the road, weak and miserable. The idiot ordered his bearers to stop and alighted; he fell at the feet of the doctor and said: 'great master I am ever grateful to the mantra you taught.'"

"What mantra?" asked the flabbergasted doctor.

"'Wherefore is this ash gourd, you idiot?' the fool muttered in awestricken respect without batting an eyelid. So knowledge kills faith and there survival begins."

"But how does one eke out a living, in and out of trains?"

"You travel across this vast country, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Always seek the villages, for India is long dead in the cities. And you sell your wares, abstract wares. You sell shadows."

"What do you sell for a living?"

"I sell nothing for a living. I sell for the fun of selling. And I sell dreams. I sell dreams—streams of dreams. I am the merchant of dreams. I offer beautiful dreams and sound sleep to the insomniacs. And my offer has enough takers. They will offer you money. Don’t take it; they are inadvertently poisoning you. They will give you anything in this delirious world in exchange for a pleasant dream."

I stood enthralled and starry-eyed. "Then, Madhavan uncle, what is to become of our life?" I asked.

"Survival begins when we begin to live. Stop living, forget that you are alive. Life is understood in the heart and not in the brain. Strain not your brain, train yourself to meet sun and rain and you forget pain and gain, then you become heavenly strain." He stood erect congratulating himself.

He dramatically half sat on my icky, rickety cot, pulled out his shoulder bag, and searched in its infinite number of pouches. The bag was loaded with many curious articles like safety pins, musk, dry flowers, desiccated balsam leaves and much more. He pinched out a pinch of holy ash and applied it on my forehead. I was thus initiated into his nomadic fold. He got to his feet from my soiled bed, and on a second thought turned to me again and said, "If you are destined to become an enlightened vagabond, never harm anybody, never steal anything, never tell lies, never put on airs, never hurry, never leave behind a tale of tears, and never swim against the flux. Never go for anything, everything will come to you if the flux flexes its primordial will. And, most important, never hope for anything. We become what we believe and not what we know. Have benevolent and pleasant thoughts because thought precedes action."

Then he dramatically walked out on me. I ran to the door to see where he was going. He had vanished; he had chosen not to take the narrow path crawling downhill to the dusty road across the brook. He might have gone uphill. Now, it little mattered whither he went; I was initiated into an order without order. To the order of remitting my will at the sanctum sanctorum of the universal will, into the rarified circle of enlightened vagabonds I was recruited. An electric thrill proliferated in my cells and I experienced it sweeping my gawky being. Every man is reborn every second, I discovered. I imagined myself adrift like a soft breath of breeze willy-nilly blowing, like a feathery whiff of wind willy-nilly flowing, all set for a sedentary life in which infinite possibilities of permutations and combinations are there.

Many days thence, I landed up at Ernakulam Junction, the main railway station in Cochin. Trivandrum-Guwahati Express was due at 17 hours. At the station, sooty, smoke-belching diesel engines had been replaced by sleek electric engines for northbound transit. Trains to Trivandrum, Mangalore, Bangalore, and Hyderabad were available but I chose Guwahati because it was the first train leaving the station and its flood of humanity. I entered the general compartment without a ticket and without money; I was trying out a theory. As destiny would have it a seat was found vacant and I engaged it immediately. Passengers poured in, wave upon wave, dragging their fussy bags and luggage. It is convenient to have no luggage at all, and it procured me the first vacant seat. Thousands had gathered to see off the departing souls, as if we were off to another world. Shortly, the compartment was full and each one made himself at home familiarizing with the few square inches of area he happened to be sitting on or standing on. Each has his own mechanism to guard his territory; the most common method in general compartments being to pretend to be a ruthless brute.

Close to me was seated a suave and well bred gentleman with his timid wife and excited child. He seemed very irritated and impatient. Certainly, people of his ilk are not expected in general compartments; general compartments are meant for wretches who move about in the shadows of life, leaving life entirely to chances and accidents. He was irritated because the foul smelling rabble poured in without a method or decorum, the rural scum floating down to urban mire. His journey up to Cochin had been peaceful as passengers were few.

The train pulled out, the people inside and outside waved to each other, some touched each other, tears rolled, some even sobbed. High voltage moments of sentimentalism began to ease out when the train rolled out of the enormous station, and we began to relax. Still there were tears in many eyes. Then the gentleman turned to his wife and muttered in English, apparently tired of all this third class melodrama, "I expected this; it is all your fault. I cannot travel in an unreserved compartment. Your stupid mother chose to die so unexpectedly." She looked at him with a pleading helplessness. His little son said something to her.

"You filthy muck of an idiot," he jeered at the child and slapped him across the face. "I have told you time and again not to speak this bloody local language. Speak English or shut your box for good."

"Jose Achaya, please do not create a scene," his wife looked at him like a beggar.

"You shut up, bloody bitch. You spoiled this bloody bootless brat and shattered my peace of mind," he said in English and looked at her venomously. It had a dramatic effect. She and the child fell silent, their silence spread into the cabin, and it turned glum and sepulchral, as if a frowning schoolmaster was watching over us. He looked formidable with his domineering authority, English, spic and span outfit, and above all with the perfume in which he had drowned his natural body odor. It appeared that he might smite us as well for smothering him with our crude and artless presence. I surveyed other travelers in the cabin. There was a young mother with her baby in the corner close to the window, accompanied by her young and beaming husband. Others were youths in their early twenties, like me. We sat there beneath the stiff bitterness of a towering sphinx, afraid to move. The train floated past across Kerala landscape parched in summer fury. At night the train pulled into Palakkad Junction, the last station in Kerala. The gentleman hurried out and came in a few minutes later to collect his things.

"Berth has been arranged for us in the sleeper coach, come away," he commanded.

More wretches poured in and filled into available spaces, longingly looking at the occupied seats. We sighed a sigh of relief, as if a weight had been lifted, as if the tyrant of a school master had left the children to their own devices.

"Thank God, now I can freely fart out all my pending farts," one declared aloud.

"If you fart, fart artfully," another advised.

"His English is as bad as ours," a youth consoled us, breaking the spell. We broke into a hearty laughter of solidarity.

"That dastardly bastard will whack his wife because she represents the impossible world, the true humanity that he is inclined to be but afraid to be. He is battering his tormented alter ego," diagnosed somebody sitting close to me.

"He is one of the bourgeoisies sucking our nation dry," another accused. The youths were on their way to Tiruppur to work in textile mills.

"The nation is a beast, a beast feasting on other’s meat," said another youth, "with its basic instincts of property, libido, and survival of the fittest."

"If the nation is a beast, then society is a bitch," said the youth who judged the gentleman’s English, "frowning on the fawning and servile to the system that prevails."

"That bastard is most probably on the payroll of the CIA," another youth decided aloud.

"Pax Britannica is replaced by Pax Americana; in any case we have our pax. So much the better," said another.

"America is ubiquitous; it has penetrated our dreams. We dream American dreams; they have stolen our dreams. So much so that the material world has a subtle American taste to it," said the gentleman’s judge.

"The difference between India and America is little. They have their tomorrows and we have our yesterdays and both converge at the cantankerous arena of today."

"India is funky, fussy, and mussy, a quarrelsome hussy. She needs a man of high thinking and lofty vision to be tamed and trained. Hitler made love to the thronging masses, the mass is feminine, and a charismatic leader is masculine."

"But man is troubled by a bubble, the bubble of being."

"Woman is an ecstatic woe to man, a distraction that leaves him open to the perils of the world."

"Man is a spark and woman is a heap of gunpowder."

"There will come a certain man with a vision and a mission to extirpate our mediocrity."

"Our problem is that we did not ever kick start afresh with the momentum of a revolution. We are the lotus eaters with a congenital residual faith, a faith that miraculously became our raison d’etre. India will remain with a cold and timid glow no mater how many Somnadhs become the stepping stone to the mosque of Samarkhand."

"The problem is that we are too many, it is time to jettison the country."

"You are farting through the wrong hole, do not come out with sentences too big for your tiny orifice," someone chided the chirping young man.

"Now, where are you to?" another one turned to me and asked, armed with an amicable disarming smile.

I had to concoct a story, a real cock and bull story. I said I was to Calcutta, where a relative of mine had arranged a clerical job for me. One wanted to know the name of that relative. I said it was a Sreedharankutty. Another youth said he had a friend in Calcutta by that name, who was with Alkali and Chemical Corporation. I said my Sreedharankutty was in the Railways. Fortunately that was the end of it.

The train pulled out with a jerk. We were leaving Kerala; we were leaving the roaring industry of politics, the sanctimonious political theorists, and perfunctory lethargic bureaucracy. The passengers en masse peeped out into the looming darkness, to get a final view of Kerala. They imagined red flags etched with sickle, hammer, and star, red and cream KSRTC buses whirring past, raising a cloud of dust. A mist of nostalgia spread across the whole length of the train. For decades, Keralites have been going out of the state into alien languages, cultures, and environments, and all of them, in the bottom of their bags, no matter whether they be a soldier or a businessman, kept a copy of Remanan or a novel by Muttath Varkey or M.T.Vasudevan Nair. They took a piece of Kerala with them. The train crossed Palakkad Gap and plunged into the dry, sweltering night of Tamilnad, and, suddenly, all lights in the sleeper coaches died, the passengers went to bed with a heavy mind etching the last treasured view of Kerala. They were taking a piece of Kerala with them whatever they happen to be and wherever they happen to go.

"I must drink some water now, even from the pipe," one complained.

"Don’t do that, the penniless cannot afford to be sick. The doctor will feel your purse and write you off."

"Better to die thirsting than to die with a leaking bottom," another reasoned.

The heat was unbearable. The young mother with the baby pulled out a bottle of water boiled with cumin and offered it to us all with a motherly generosity. It tasted good. Then, we became aware that a woman was amidst us. But she was a mother; motherhood saves women from many a trouble. For example, sex starved neurotics will not ogle nor will they have imaginary sex with her, feasting on her anatomy. A mother is respected and even treated with deference.

Then, she shared with us all in the cabin a delicacy made of jackfruit and flour wrapped in spicy leaves. In fact, I was terribly hungry. It was real manna. When the child got used to the new world, he made himself busy by engaging all of us. I do not get along well with children, you know. Yet I found him amusing. The passengers took turns to keep him in good spirits. The mother glowed with pride and satiation as if she was the crowned paragon of womanhood. Her husband, Kurup, was taking her from Mavelikkara to West Sikkim, where he was employed as a clerk. She had waited for two years to join him after their marriage. During her pregnancy and post natal care she had been dreaming of joining her husband in the Himalayas, and has her own plans of making a home. Kurup also betrayed true masculine pride in that he was taking his wedded woman to his exotic world. I found it all mysteriously fascinating. To be frank, I envied the child for being mothered over by such a graceful woman. She was not particularly beautiful, but in the capacity of a mother she was radiant and divine. Motherhood is one of the miracles of the world, I decided.

We tried to steal some sleep. The prospect of being apprehended for ticketless travel did not bother me anymore, and the ticket examiners found it loathsome to squeeze into the jam-packed and foul-smelling compartment. The trouble of dealing with a culprit was too much for them. Some tried to sleep sitting, some standing. The train surged ahead through the plains of Tamilnad. At midnight, the young men alighted at Tiruppur. Some others barged in to occupy the vacant seats. In the morning the train pulled into Madras Central station, a station which was booming with activity. Many more Tamilians poured into the compartment. Kurup's family and I were the only Keralites left in the cabin. Very few Keralites choose general compartment for long distance journey. The young mother fished out some pancakes and she shared them with me. The Coromandal coast sprawled ahead like an enormous frying pan. The child became restless in the heat wave. We thought aloud that it must be raining in Kerala. I privately thought of the merry, wanton streams bordering our property, and the fish catch during the first flood of the year.

By midday, we reached the enormous railway junction at Vjayawada. My ankles were swollen from sitting non-stop. It became a difficult task to keep the little monster of a child in good humor. He pulled out pens and tickets from the pockets and the little tyrant bawled the non cooperating passengers into submission. The mother melted as a lump of love unto him. The train blasted ahead in full fury across the river basins of Godavary and at night reached Waltaire. The cornucopia of the mother’s bag kept me from being terribly hungry. She came out with a good variety of delicacies which motherly concerns had made her prepare. In her capacity as a dame, she will feed five thousand with five pieces of bread. Another sleepless night passed, and in the morning we were fleeting past the plains of Orissa. The child again woke up and began his pranks.

The child, having no other curiosities to amuse him, pulled out his mother’s wallet from the bag. On finding its texture to feel wonderful, he reasoned that the next best thing was to eat it. You know, our primary instinct is to assimilate anything wonderful. We usually satiate that feeling with greedy smacking kisses and sniffing. Mother, with a loving force, tried to dissuade him from that unwelcome exercise. The child in his little wisdom reasoned that if it was not good for eating, it was not good for keeping and in a flash flung it out through the window. For an instant, everybody was thunderstruck. The parents looked at each other, letting the reality sink into them. The train was flying at its maximum speed. Somebody had the resourcefulness to pull the chain. The train seemed least inclined to entertain the caprices of puny little men. It surged ahead impatiently. Within a few minutes, the train got the message and it dragged to a reluctant halt sounding questioning and protesting horns that it was not supposed to come to a grinding halt at that time. But, in the meantime, we had passed a good many kilometers. On consultation it was decided that Kurup was to alight there and run back to track down the wallet and the mother and child would proceed to Calcutta so that they could wait for him at Howrah Station, where he was to join them by the very next train. Together, they could proceed to Siliguri by another Guwahati bound train. The problem was that all her gold and silver, their train tickets, and all their money were kept in the wallet for safety.

Kurup jumped into the gray Orissa morning, and his wife wailed with concern and anxiety, "Oh dear, God help us. Do not tarry. You are more precious to me than the wallet. You must positively reach Howrah by the very next train." He did not hear her wail; he was running like the first Marathoner. The train moved. In the morning daze I wanted to tell him that the electric post at the point where the tragedy occurred had a number with the last digits 8356, and that there was a pond and a neem tree at the site. But he was already gone.

For the next three months, I wandered throughout the towns and cities of Bengal. I had completely forgotten Madhavan uncle. I didn’t even look for my imaginary cousin Sreedharankutty.

Life rolled in the gutters, I lived on country liquor and cheap flesh. But during rare sane moments the sad memories of Kurup and his wife came floating to me, and I drowned them in more booze. I shuddered at the thought of Kurup racing against time in his blind foray, and at the possibility of being run over by a furious train. Then, I fancied the possibility of her waiting for him at Howrah ad infinitum, at a place where the language and culture are absolutely alien to her. I couldn’t help pitying them. They were nice, straight, and benevolent.

After three months, once again I landed up at Howrah station, to watch the huge concourse of humanity. Then, I found her there, still waiting. Her bag gone; child gone; charms gone. Her hair was haywire and her sari soiled and stained. I watched her from a distance. Her face was vacant, she was just sitting there, looking blankly into infinity, looking through and through the eddies of humanity.

I moved closer to her. She looked through me. There was no recognition. I called her by her name; there was no response. She was telling something to an imaginary person in an imaginary language, it was definitely not Malayalam, our mother tongue, nor was it any other language known in the world. Language did not fail her, she was solemnly telling something to the space in front of her. Then I did a curious thing. I rummaged through my bag and pulled out her wallet and flashed it in front of her eyes. It did not mean anything to her. I opened the wallet and produced a photograph of her sitting with her child at home in Kerala. This extreme gesture also did not provoke her. I abhorred myself and felt utterly miserable. I had squandered all their wealth; now, only the empty wallet was left.

I walked out of the bustling station and went to Howrah Bridge. I stood there for hours leaning on the railing, watching the inexorable flow of the mighty river of time.

METAL FATAL

Time died in the morning; to be precise it happened at 6:42 AM. I was at the site of the epochal event lying languidly on the floor. She had long ago left taking her morning sickness with her. I watched the hands of the clock quivering, slipping back, and trying to climb again. After a few attempts the clock gave up and died. That sleek and crisp electronic clock had been presiding over our jerky, faltering life as man and wife ever since she entered my drab existence. Somebody dear to her had given her the clock as a wedding gift. I didn’t bother to ask her who it was. To be frank, it was the single luxury in our drab life together. I had often dreamt of purchasing a transistor radio, but somehow it never happened; the money evaporated away to meet other immediate and important needs. Ours was a simple Spartan existence bereft of colors and red letter days.

It was raining throughout the night. The storm was lashing across the lea day in and day out. Our delicate land perched between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats [Editor’s Note: Ghats is the Indian word for hills] is rudely and maliciously flushed with the evaporates abducted from the antipodes all through June and July. Prudent and realistic families store enough food and firewood to tide over the difficult months, however, we couldn’t, for us today mattered much more than tomorrow, because there is no tomorrow without a today. Having nothing else to do, I would silently watch the storm unleashing its fury across the valley. Whenever the rains slacken to mobilize for the next salvo, the moody trees will whimper and weep, trying to remember something sad and distant. Tears will trickle down from the drooping branches until the trees are drowned in the next violent rainstorm. I had been hibernating at home for many days now, there was no food and because of the inclement weather there was no work. Once the rains are over, I could go out for rubber tapping or lumbering. She knows where to find work as she is closer to life. She would go out to carry wood or to work in the paddy fields. But we couldn’t save enough for a rainy day.

We have certain seasoned mechanisms to tolerate each other. When she raves, laments, and curses me and everything connected to me, I just switch off my ears. When she is in the right mood, she silently suffers my negligence, drunken madness, and irresponsibility. Ours was a working arrangement necessitated by the pressures of life. She darted in from the haze of the raving rain with a bundle of dripping firewood. I sniffed trouble, she had been asking time and again for me to collect and store some more firewood. Setting fire in the damp hearth is a daunting task; she would blow and curse me, her eyes would be wet and her face smoky. She has the nose to dig out some edible roots and tubers to fill our stomach, probably half ripe tapioca. But to boil it is next to impossible. As I expected, she began to blow off like a shrew. I moved to the damp little verandah, rain danced in the little pools, and the wind twisted and twirled the trees across the river. Then, in a wanton bout of recklessness, I shouted at her, "Cut it out, woman. I don’t need your bloody rotten food. Take it and shove it."

I put a towel on my head and plodded into the rain, impudently squelching and splashing the water trapped in small puddles. The rain was sad; it was crying sonorously. I walked down to the river at the foot of the hill. The river is a resort where I can sigh my life away or take an elaborate bath. The violent river of blue-green water laughed into white metallic streaks of froth and crashed against the tremulous willows. I stood silently in a clump of weeping trees watching the torrent of the mountain river and brooded on our poverty. Penury is more a state of mind than anything else, I decided. There is no escape from its clutches. Wretchedness is reflected in every word and deed of the congenital wretch. The dog licks from a river in spate and an elephant slurps in gallons. The month of June kept weeping down from the gray heavens and the wind shuffling the trees. The rubber estate where I work on sunny days stood sadly lost in wordless meditation.

The Periyar River negotiates an enormous bend in our parts. The interior of the crescent is by far calm and sequestered, even when the river is at the highest water mark of her regal glory; here the waters are not troubled by vortices and upwelling. Putting on the towel, I stepped into the pinching cold water. Only the first dip is difficult, thence you are not cold anymore. It is just like life: if you wait and tarry, you wait infinitely, and if you take the plunge you forget everything. Before I could take the first dip, a suffocating stench enveloped me. I looked around to locate the source of the foul smell; it was not to be sought far away. It was floating down towards me with measured confidence and a cold determination, as if it slithered away from the violent shear force of the core of the river with the single mission of having business with me. The floating corpse was three days old; I immediately recognized the body. Three days ago, a first class judicial magistrate and his friends had gone to Bhoothathanketu Dam picnicking and in their drunken bout the boat had capsized drowning them all. All of the local newspapers had printed the photograph of the missing judge.

His body had swollen to explosive dimensions, the white of the eyes bulged out, and there was a floating halo of debris around the body. The skin had peeled off at certain parts revealing white filamentous tissues. My attention was hooked on the forty gram gold chain around his swollen neck. I reasoned that the honorable judge, dead and decaying, was not in dire need of that precious metal, whereas I was. I waded to my benevolent visitor to receive his parting gift which he seemed to be very inclined to give me. Though I was not an admirer of unfeeling high profile bureaucrats, I felt sorry for him, being the beneficiary of his post mortem charity. That treasured chain of gold was more important to me than to anybody else, it could potentially buffer me against the hard times I was in the thick of, a temporary bail from my ogling financial problems, a rarest of the rare opportunity to take on life with confidence, a chance to finish off my half built house.

But it was not that easy to free the judge from the chain. The metal had eaten into the flesh. The running nose and the frothy mouth offered more resistance. Now, on looking back, I gather that the awareness of my sad state alone forced me to be adamant. Once the mission was accomplished, I pushed the body back to the mainstream with a floating pole of reed that came by. He floated away reluctantly, with his eyes eagerly fixed on the coveted metal. Then, I struggled my way back out of the water. I vomited into the slushy mud while holding the stinking booty; from my empty stomach bitter yellow bile came forth. I vigorously washed the chain in the flow of the river, but the smell still lingered. I washed myself thoroughly, but the smell pounced on me from all sides. I wrapped the booty in colocasia leaf and trudged my furtive way home. I was rocked by violent palpitation, a dark shadow weighed on me. Then, I understood the significance of the death of time. The death of time is a relative experience and the end of the world is also a relative experience. I looked for a place to hide the booty and at last placed it in her trunk under her threadbare saris. Afterwards, I sat closer to the fire in the hearth to singe away the lingering stench.

A contrite wife taking pity on my drenched miserable state offered me boiled tapioca. Poor girl, she will never know how base and mean I have become. It was sheer treason to have disgraced a corpse. My civic sense protested that I should have contacted his relatives who were searching for him all along the course of the river. The sliced and boiled tapioca looked exactly like the floating filaments of the judge’s tissues. Stench smothered me again. I vomited violently; my convulsive belching frightened her. She massaged my back and asked me time and again what was wrong with me.

"Don’t you feel the stench?"

"What stench?" she said flaring her nostrils and sniffing like a cat.

"Nothing," I buried my head in my hands like an ostrich stricken with panic.

"What happened to you, my man, your face has gone pale."

"It is nothing," I tried to smile at her.

"It is not stench, it is the pinch of hunger," she declared.

Again, I walked out into the rain. Rain rained monotonously. The domesticated fowls huddled up under the thatch eaves jerking away the sinking water drops and dreaming of better climes. My half built house made a sorry sight behind me, swaying in the wind, leaking, and walls missing in many parts. In front of me, the rubber estate lay helpless in the gloomy general haze. I longed to take an immediate hegira to someplace sunny and warm where life opened out in myriad colors. It was my practice to idle time away at the local tea shop some two kilometers away, reading newspapers and discussing politics. Reading between the lines was a merry sport. But with no money at hand, the tea shop did not lure me. I was purposely shying away from the shop because debts had accumulated there beyond a tolerable limit. I strolled along the deserted mountain path like a mad dog. The plumage of the dejected thickets looked pallid for want of the sun. Starvation as such didn’t matter, dignity didn’t matter, but this shadowy existence did. We suffer from us and from none else because we differ with ourselves. We fail to be at home with us. The cold and sullen landscape echoed the human condition of those burrowed deep in the woods down in the valley. Most wretches are walking stomachs, alimentary canals on the move. But a few are haunted by the encumbrance of being. I happen to be one among that hapless lot. The cycle of life is analogous to the hydrologic cycle, we coalesce and fall pure and transparent, we gather dirt and filth soluble and insoluble, we degenerate and flow down and down until there is no more down. When we cannot drift down anymore, we merge with eternity. As long as we have a smeared and smudged separate entity, we are burdened by the state of being.

I emerged from my inky, distracting thoughts late in the evening and returned home. Back at home, I was once again accosted by the nasty smell. I shuddered like a possessed fellow. The villainous judge afloat in the ocean of darkness stared at me with his laser sharp eyes. As sleep evaded me, I tried to focus my mind on something invigorating and hilarious. She slept serenely in my warmth, on the screw pine mat which had turned soggy in the long wet spell. I touched her calloused hands which had long ago lost their feminine tenderness. I thought of our working together to complete the construction of our house, of our working with a fury to pool up enough money to build a pleasant home. I hankered on such thoughts to ward of diabolical images. I thought of her mother who cried silently when we came to her for the first time as man and wife. On many an occasion I had wondered what made her sad in our union. Certainly, I was not a desirable son-in-law, with little education, undesirable habits, and no permanent income. Still, I could not stomach the idea that I disappointed them all. Now, I found it expedient to remember it all and the reaction I got when I asked her mother why she had cried on the day of our marriage. Then, she deigned to tell me a story which made me all the more miserable because of the wet, fresh, and innocent tenderness the story exuded. My wife had an elder brother. When he was three years old, he picked up a seed of a jackfruit that tasted of honey, and, looking at the intimidating heavens that were rumbling to break into the first thunder showers of the year, he is said to have proclaimed, "for my sister and mother to eat and grow, I am planting this seed." The seed sprouted and grew up swaying its black-green leaves. But the child did not survive the next rainy season. He perished in starvation and waterborne disease. In the years that came, the tree spread its bushy branches and offered its cool protective canopy to the courtyard of the house. When the tree came of age, it offered sweet fruits in scores and the tree became an integral part of the family, feeding them and offering fodder to the livestock. Then, my wife filled out into a wench of consequence and it became a pressing duty of the parents to marry her away. But the dowry stood in the way; a poor girl cannot dream of a comfortable marriage because she will inevitably be married away into inconsistencies, hard work, and despair. They sold the tree for twenty-five thousand rupees [Editor’s Note: $542 in US currency] to finance her dowry, and that amount has gone into our half built house. All gestures of the trembling tenderness of love make us sadly happy. Either we are sad or we are mad, there is no option in between.

The next day I felt better. There was little sun in the morning, but it filled our vacuum. The honorable ghost seemed to have left me alone because I was more or less happy again. The unnerving stench also seemed to have thinned away. I ventured down into the river in the rejuvenating sun. The huge trees that mutely watched the passage of the centuries spread their wide canopy above the chilling swirls of the river. The river heaved and swayed lasciviously. I can stay under water for a full three minutes without coming up for air, listening to the sounds in the translucent aquatic world. Water caressed me and went its way. When I came up for air, the monstrous stench smothered me full blast. I was drowning in the stench; it asphyxiated me. On red alert, I stood up on my legs. On my shoulders there was an arm, the stinking, withering arm of the malicious judge. Screaming despite myself, I ran to solid ground. A sight it was. He was staring at me. One eye was gone; the flesh of the lips was no more. I stood still for an instant. The flow was circular in the inner pool of the meandering river. Raving and ranting, I pulled out a long pole and turned to the judge who was visiting me directly from hell.

"Enough is enough. Dare no more to put me on trial and sit in judgment, go you must to the world of the dead, your honor; you belong to the silent necropolis." I strived to push him into the mainstream once again. "Good boy, hurry away and worry not about the yellow metal. It is in safe custody as my keepsake. Don’t hang around with your shady, diabolic mission. Remember always that you are dead and no more."

This time around, the judge seemed to have got the message and headed for the rapids. Still, I kept on ranting. For the next few days, I was confined to the bed, raving and feverish. I was completely out of my senses. One morning, when the rains had subsided for a much needed interregnum, my wife came to me and guessed that my madness had subsided to a tolerable level, enough that she could reason with me.

"You have gone mad, really mad, that is it," she accused. I did not venture to rectify her. I fixed my eyes on the leaking roof and slipped into another slumber.

There was a tense armistice for the next few days. I was limping back to my former self; the stench was far gone. The ceasefire ended quite unceremoniously one night. It was after midnight, the part of the night when you sleep unconsciously. Then, it occurred to me that I was sleeping with the judge, embracing his rank yielding flesh. His stench filled me. In the softness of the flesh, his gold chain pricked me. I opened my eyes and recoiled. Cold sweat broke out. It was he, on my mat, and the chain was on his neck. I shrieked and jumped up. My hair stood on ends. Immediately, the judge was also on his heels. But it was my own wife in a white nightgown and the accursed chain was around her neck.

My neurosis was contagious. "What man, what happened?" she asked equally nervous.

With an impotent horror I stared at the chain. There was a blood red precious stone at the junction of the cross on the chain.

"Oh, you are worried about this chain?" she fondly ran her fingers on the metal.

"How could you, why did you take it?"

"What a man you are; why did you hide it from me? The other day I found it in my trunk. Now it is ours, and that makes it half mine. I won’t part with it even at the pain of death."

"No, it is not ours."

‘You are a slow coach, poor fellow. You got it from the river, now it is ours. I will put it on for a day or two. Then, we will hoard it for important occasions. We will sell it when I have had enough of its charm."

I have heard that there exists a chemical affinity between women and gold. To understand is to forgive. Shall I deny her the little pleasures that come her way?

I rushed out of the room. There was a faint gray in the east, day was nigh. There was no arguing with her. Had we ever been happy? She shares my poverty because she was born to poor parents. She had no dreams when she joined me. Everything begins in the mind and ends in the mind. But she could not expect anything because she was marrying a real pit. In our struggle for existence, I could not offer her anything. Was I man enough to be a man to a woman? Her life did not change much with marriage. Just like her father, I also gambled, boozed, and squandered my days. We could not inch ahead in life. Fairs and holy days went past us. I have watched her; her eyes are dull; they have no dreams. I have heard about the infinitely eloquent blue eyes of winsome girls, reflecting the condensed sadness of the whole world. She lost her feminine charms somewhere down the road, perhaps even before she joined me. The comforts of life and the treasured luxuries such as electricity and electrical appliances are more than what they are. We collect things and pretend that it fills our spiritual emptiness. Everybody tries beyond his means to be held prisoner by his luxuries and comforts. Then, we pretend to be sinners and we force ourselves to believe that comfort is a sin. For every comfort, we hoodwink us by our skin deep lamentations: culpa mia, culpa mia, mia magna culpa! It is strange that we cannot outgrow us. We cannot even fill into our true frame.

Sometimes, after the regular hassles, I would sit in the open listening to the shrill sounds of the night. We quarrel because we are caught between different pulls. She is solidly and stolidly rooted in the soil, I am part of the avifauna, I float in the air and feed on air, I dissolve my absurdities in cheap illicit liquor. Given a chance, every Indian will make a bee line for the Himalayas. The brave new world does not impress us. The Indian rustic is just like Kilimanjaro, the flagpole of Africa, which told the first aviator that dared to fly above its cold lethal grin:  "stay away man, I am not impressed." My wife finds expression to her fecundity by planting this or that in our tiny tract of land. Our inner disorder or order we find outside. Strange bedmates we are indeed. Sometimes a nameless bird would cry out in the woods, heralding the change of season. The silken stillness of the dragging night would permeate me. When our inner pandemonium dies down, we almost hear the ethereal music of transparent silence. At that point, imperious distances and separations become irrelevant. She is too busy in the business of life to be distracted by somber thoughts; blessed be her lot. Certain people, on the other hand, ramble along like homesick exiles, sharing the glories of an impossible Jerusalem. Years heaped up between us. Now the confounded chain has obliterated everything.

In the morning, I put on my shirt and curtly walked out. I thought I would walk my misery away.

"Where are you going?" she called out from behind.

"I don’t know." It was the truth.

"Well, must you leave behind a pregnant woman like this, especially when she has put on a precious gold chain?"

"To hell with your gold chain."

I walked and traveled all day. At night I slept on a rock on the seashore. The sea growled and seethed. It crashed against the shores and swooned. I heard the roar of humanity, and the endless inky sadness. The ocean makes one sad, sad for no reason. Behind me, an ancient European fort was crumbling under the weight of the centuries. I fancied the struggle of generations. From the very first man we repeat the same mistakes. We embrace the follies of the generations that went before. Where is salvation? Where is emancipation? I am my nemesis and my salvation. When all is said and done, we sadly realize that it is all the same. It little matters where you are and what you are. We dance to a tune set by somebody else. Salvation and condemnation are gifted hoaxes employed to jilt us. The chimera of death is a tremendous possibility; it sobers us and at times moderates our voracious greed. Truth is a tragedy and ignorance is the breath of life, I concluded.

My journey back in the morning was troubled by stray thoughts. Something was wrong at home. The fowls holed up in their coop protested aloud. I opened the coop and let them out. They celebrated their freedom by flapping their wings. The house was silent. I entered the house to find her in front of me, dead and disfigured. The back of her skull was broken and her eyes stared into the distance. In her clenched fist, the cross of the chain was still intact. In the throes of death, she managed to save the cross, however, the housebreaker got away with the chain.

UMBILICAL CORD

Dry Chestnuts and walnuts were raining down the trees to settle on the thick mat of litter. The precipices and wet valleys were streaked by a riotous profusion of dahlias and dandelions, and the orchards flashed their wares of mellow luscious apples, oranges, and pomegranates. The early days of winter were arranging blue-white floral festoons on the leafless trees. We, I and Lendup Dorjee, the dearest disciple of Guru Rempoche Dava’la, boarded the state bus, at the monastery bathed in morning dew, starting from the top of the mountain at the crack of dawn.

I was leaving the ancient monastery, overlooking Kanchendzonga, the third highest peak in the world, the ruling deity of that Himalayan kingdom, the abode of secret treasures. The peak had been a part of my existence for many years. I turned and stole one last fleeting glimpse of the venerated mountain.

"I have entrusted everything to Lendup. He will handle everything properly," Guru consoled me. Suddenly, it seemed funny to me that somebody from somewhere else has to barge in to forcefully make a twist in our destiny. The existence of a someone at a somewhere makes our existence a reality, and that someone basks in the secret pleasure that he is, at least for a while, at the helm of another person’s destiny.

There is a shady benefit when you board a Sikkim National Transport Bus. Donate one or two rupees to the conductor and alight anywhere you want, provided you do not insist upon a bus ticket. Across the melting darkness, we crossed clumps of pines and terraced orchards pensively perched on the stooping slopes of the mountain. We whirred down seven thousand feet to the notch of a furious mountain river, crossed it, and ascended another seven thousand feet and alighted at Rabongla, a small mountain hamlet. The senile sun was out caressing the humanscape into life. We procured a long jute rope, a knife, and biscuits and started off east along the mule track winding straight into the woods. I tried hard to shake away the vertigo lingering after the tortuous bus journey.

Far, far down the Rimbicola River smiled mysteriously like an anklet at the foot of the towering mountain. Snow clad peaks jutted out in the horizon brooding and troubled by the gentle sun. Lendup flitted across the rolling boulders and I struggled to follow his heels. Within hours, we landed in a sad and silent pine forest. My guide turned back at times and encouraged me to hurry up with an eloquent smile. I could not comprehend his obscene hurry. I preferred to take my sweet time, feeling the shining flakes of graphite on the exposed rocks, greeting every coniferous tree that came our way, drinking the trickling water from every secret nook and cold recess, letting my mind loose into the expanse of imagination. Never shall I hurry. We are at our destination wherever we are, I decided. We hurry as if the world was a burning ship and willingly prostitute whatever little values we are endowed with, virtually for nothing.

Down in the valley, diluted by the persistent mist, the shining roof of Tamling monastery could be discerned bathed in the November sun. By the time I surveyed it, Lendup had darted a long way off. I let the majestic grandeur of the mountains sink into me and catching up with the impatient guide became a non-issue. The words of Guru Rempoche came reverberating, "we are one—the peaks and the people, we look up into the heavens, grow into the heavens. No Muslim adventurer and no European could colonize us, and we slither away from their complex economics." When Lendup melted away into a puny speck on the dusty road, I relaxed even more. I collected and cracked walnuts, plucked wood apple and relished their proteins and acid. There my life transcended into an infinity because time swooned and ceased to be. The fulsome time that fulminates, the tiresome time that terminates, the variegated time that demotes, promotes, and again demotes, the delusive time that devises to navigate us around the contours of a zero, a circle. When we forget time, we remember infinity; when we merge into infinity we become one. Across the silence of the woods, I stumbled on Lendup, he was sitting in padmasana, eyes closed, lost in meditation. The evening sun painted his shaved head and yellow face shining gold. His chinky eyes, high cheek bones, and flimsy beard imparted an exotic appeal. His thin and stiff lips held back the Mongolian secretiveness. His face registered my physical presence and broke into a cold smile, understanding and obliging.

"From this point we have to go straight down to the valley," he told me. I craned my head and looked down; it was a pool of darkness. We tumbled down the fragile farmlands held in place by savage bunds. The shadow of the western peak had inched its snaking way across the narrow valley and was struggling uphill. I followed him faltering and falling.

"I had warned you that we should make it fast," he said thoughtfully. Again we entered the dark wilderness, dense and pathless. We were threshing and stamping cardamom plants in our tumbling way down. This tortuous trial groping our way down the precipice came to an abrupt end when we crashed into a rude hut, the walls of which were made of clay plastered on a frame of split bamboo. I collapsed on the grassy yard relieved that it was over. An old and dejected dog, too lazy to bother me, accepted my intrusion into that Elysian solitude of little wants and no hurry, with a piteous impotence. It was the humble abode of Lendup’s elder brother. I lay in the grass watching the swaying fleece of the towering trees; the sky was overcast and it might break into a rain.

"Lobenla," I turned my head languidly and saw a little girl of seven looking down at the curious wreck of a wretch.

"Have tea," she said with genuine concern and respect. I took the salted tea she offered in a bamboo cup. She was in a long and old gown too big and too awkward for a girl as small as her; it was obvious it belonged to somebody else much older. Her little head had the sweat, soot, dust, and tears of toiling in the dioxin rich, oxygen starved kitchen all through the day. She was playing the vicarious little mother to her younger ones.

Then, she distributed the biscuits to her little brothers, never bothering to take one herself. They grabbed and gobbled it with shameless greed and unsheathed envy for each other. The remaining one biscuit she crunched and pressed into the tender lips of the baby in her arms and he felt the taste of the strange substance and looked at her curiously. Then she went into the house with the baby to make food for us.

I dragged myself into the small verandah and spread my length and breadth on the floor washed by cow dung. It smelled fresh, like nature. Hunger was telling on me, true infernal greed for food flared. And pity welled up somewhere inside me for the child playing mother, sweating and steaming for us.

At night, her parents came back home after the exacting toils of the day in a distant farmland. And, suddenly, the hut became noisy with complaints, hugs, laughter, and tears. The children were vying with each other to relate the sagas of the day and to appropriate treasured kisses. They make the better of their lives though innocent of the boon of a silver spoon. Home is a tremendous institution, I thought, spreading into the past and future. Then I thought of myself, coming from somewhere far and away, floating in like a timid gust of wind to melt away like a sedentary formless cloud, I stand alone, here outside the shell of linguistic and consanguineous intimacy. Still, I felt very safe and sequestered. The riotous greenery and the dank sympathy of nature made me believe that no force could perpetrate a standing harm upon me.

It was time for food. I ventured out into the open. Numbing cold water came gushing forth from a rubber hose connected to a mountain stream uphill. The water imparted a new lease of vitality to my sagging ambition. In the soft mat of grass, pearls of water drops quivered, watching the heavens in their nascent innocence. They treated me with boiled rice, beans, stinging nettle, fern shoots, bamboo shoot, and soup served in wooden bowls. Lendup seemed neither hungry nor exhausted, he was mountain smart. He ate very little and was very reticent and often relapsed into long spells of reverie. After eating they continued excited discussions. Lendup was telling them about monastery life, Guru Rempoche, and the new developments of the world without. But do they know that every news creates a new wound, that every news is a prospective noose?

I was making myself at home on the open verandah insulated from the excitement inside. Hours later, he shook me awake to let me know that we were not to spend the night there. I expressed my gratitude to the family in my broken Tibetan. I was in fact too weak to suffer another ordeal of a journey downhill. While feeling our strenuous way down, I thought about the little girl and wondered whether her fresh innocence and altruism would stay intact in the long and nerve racking process we call life. Somewhere deep in the timeless night, we reached the banks of a moon blanched river. The sky had cleared after a soft drizzle which happened while I was sleeping my exhaustion away. The still leaves smiled silver in the moon. The sands of the river lay in an ethereal glow amidst huge boulders and erect columns of rocks. Logs and dry wattle were found precariously perched on rocks, the fingerprint of a recent flood. Lendup was familiar with the river and its personality. Even at night, one can see the steam spiraling up from behind the mammoth rocks. Across the river, a huge granite mountain stood up against the sky like an intimidating fortress, beckoning at time and the forces of nature.

"The thing that you seek is to be scraped out from the bosom of that towering rock," Lendup pointed to the black citadel of nature across the river.

The exotic aphrodisiac silajith is excreted from the lethal flank of the rock. I had braved all the way to this valley with an unholy and avaricious mission to harvest the forbidden fruit.

We moved to the steaming hot spring. The boiling sulfurous water and the chilling waters of the Himalayan river violently mingled there, provoking conspicuous ribbons of steam. We slid into the comfortable warmth of the aquatic world stark naked. Laying our heads on the bed of sand and feeling the tender ministrations of the ripples, we slept. Later, we went to dry ground and slept in the shelter of each other's warmth. It protected us from the chill of the night. Again, it drizzled sometime in the morning. I opened my eyes and received the silken needles of the drizzle until it drenched me fully awake. Lendup Dorjee slept beautifully and serenely. He is at peace with himself; hence, he is at peace with the world. He is an empty flute in the hands of God. Though there are only the two of us, we can become a snarling and nervous crowd amidst the cacophony of incompatibilities.

When he becomes a full fledged monk and flies away to European cities to market his mysteries and religion, marketing the Buddha and Guru Padma Sambhava, perhaps in his still and solemn moments he may remember these towering pinnacles of nature, this dark green deluge of vegetation, and this wild and self-willed mountain river. Will he remember the drizzle raining down on us like a gesture of goodwill by pristine nature, these hallowed moments, and me coming from a hot and bustling corner of the earth? He may remember, he may not remember, but one day in the evening of my life, I shall relive these moments, I thought.

Morning beams focused their searchlight on the summit of the rocky cliff. I watched the awe-inspiring cliff secreting silajith in the broad daylight. The intimidating terror of the black turret of magma was offset by the placid beauty of serene nature. The river washed the feet of the mountain with her frothy flux of silver and meandered into the mysteries beyond, making one surmise that there does exist an exotic Shangri La behind those towering peaks. In between the columns of mountains, the clear heavens beckoned us with ultraviolet exuberance. We once again washed ourselves in the hot spring.

We waded across the river, often jumping from boulder to boulder jutting out from the water table. The flat river basin was bursting at the seams with orange orchards. We had them to our hearts content. I tried to collect some luscious fruits in my bag. Lendup stopped me. "Eat as much as you want, but you cannot hoard it or cart it away."

Shortly, the laborious ascent began, along the treacherous slope of the granite hill. With stout and solid steps Lendup moved up. Whenever I lost balance and fell with the rolling stones, he swished back and scooped me up. We had to climb a thousand feet. By the time we landed on the tableland the sun had emerged over the eastern peak and bathed us in its freshness. We reclined on the rocky surface.

"Rest as much as you want," Lendup smiled with an obvious empathy.

"Let us move, it is getting late," I exclaimed as I pulled myself together and stood up. We had to trudge another half kilometer across the tableland. It was getting to be noon and once again the sky was overcast as if it would break into a drizzle again.

The next step was to tie the jute rope to a tree or peg and climb down the precipice. I had a fond presentiment that Lendup would do it for me because I was his guest and he was my benefactor. We love others because we love us, we fear God and death because we fear anything that defies our imagination and comprehension. But Lendup diligently tied one end of the rope to the trunk of a chestnut and double-tied it for safety. Then, to my momentary bewilderment and confusion he handed the other end to me. Then only it dawned on me that I was in real trouble. It was too late to back off. A mortal tremor swept past me and cold sweat broke out. If I had a premonition that I was to go over the precipice alone, I would not have embarked upon this venture at all. At least he should have told me about it at the river basin; that could have saved us a great deal of hardship. I was ashamed to spill out my inner turmoil and thought it was foolish of me to have hoped that Lendup would do it for me. Only to save my face, I tied the rope to my waist and veered my way along the slope wildly holding onto the rope. Then, the rock slanted down like a vertical wall. Being confused, disoriented, and inexperienced, I lost my poise and tumbled head over heels down the sheer face of the cliff. I found myself dangling upside down. The wild mountain river roared and broke into peals of laughter, thirsting for my blood, taunting me. The gaping rocks looked up at me with an obscene greed. At a distance, I could see the steam wafting high from the hot spring.

Yesterday, I was more or less free while bathing in the hot spring, and then I could not have fancied me in this fix. A second is enough for us to slip into another world, into another shell. Every moment takes with it the space connected with it also. Being subjected to these weird thoughts, I surveyed the whole valley. It was a queer experience to see the world upside down, dangling in the air like bait hung to trap an imaginary world. This is the temple of solemn serenity, and I? I fit perfectly well into the shoes of a vandal out to plunder. If I take this booty to the distant sunbathed and dusty cities, it may bail me out from starvation for a few days. Then it will be all the same again. I turned my head and looked at the rock wall close by. The coveted musky secretion of the rock was just in front of me, tantalizing with an uncanny appeal. It is mine if I take my knife and slice it out. But I could not make myself do it. I could not defile that sacred atmosphere with my lusty and lewd mind. I know that philosophy is the last resort of congenital bunglers. It is the creed whence follies breed, vollies of follies laced with incorrigible and impossible ignorance, the green room to lick and brood. Even after the last man has signed off after having sung his last song, perhaps this river, this valley, these snow-clad peaks, and these seasons will be here intact. We are a breed known for its foolhardy greed.

Who am I? Only a thin rope holds me to the world of the living. Where will be my silajith and greed if the rope gives out? But it does not have to break; Lendup can easily finish the business by cutting the rope. I strained my head and looked up. What I imagined was true; Lendup was ready with his traditional Tibetan knife, whetted and shining, which he had smuggled in, keeping it inside his yellow blouse or pink frock. He was closely watching me, our eyes locked. What was the language of his eyes? He looked like a priest, performing a solemn religious ceremony. I closed my eyes and waited for the last. I didn’t feel like begging Lendup to prolong my life. All my ambitions fled from me in an instant. A day before, I had been sleeping close to Lendup in the lap of the river, now we stand in two worlds and look at each other helplessly. He has to be himself; it is a covenant. Nothing more had happened when I opened my eyes. Lendup was still there and he had not withdrawn his ceremonial knife.

Spartacus was happy in the throes of his suffering because his suffering was divine, whereas I suffer from myself and for nothing.

I struggled and twisted to get hold of the rope and dragged myself up, brutally stamping on the rock and grappling with the rope. I cannot give him the luxury of curing my amnesia, of curing my mortal grossness, of dutifully catapulting me across the vortices of time and space. Blood oozed from palms and toes. When I got to the plateau, Lendup had withdrawn the knife and was ready to go. Panting and gasping for breath, I ran after him and asked, "Was it Guru’s directive?"

"Yes," he kept on walking in his steady undaunted pace, he was cool and kept his poise and did not bother to turn back.

"Then why did you not do it?"

"Guru asked me to do it the moment you touched the secretion with your knife." He walked away, not willing to entertain any more of my questions. Somebody pulled me back from behind. I fell headlong onto the granite. I was still tied to the tree. It had held me back at the end of the rope.

I remained on the granite. The wetness of a drizzle enveloped me. I watched Lendup sinking behind the tableland. From the point where he disappeared, thick fog came burgeoning in. Soon, the valley and I were buried in it. Then, the mountains ceased to be, the river and valley ceased to be, the secretion of the rock ceased to be, and I ceased to be. The world had faded into nothingness. All that remained was the rope linking me to nature like an umbilical cord.

A MICROSECOND IS ENOUGH

The month of November, and winter mobilizes all its powers to smother the world. Anne settled the accounts of fees collection for the day, removed the thick window curtain, and peered into the imaginary figures across the frosted windowpane. Then, by an impulse, she opened the glass door and stepped into the verandah which was hazy from the lingering mist pumped in by the persistent wind. That was how she saw him for the first time, a towering person, tall and black. A savage, reading the articles on the notice board, casually observing the pictures in the showcase. She moved near to him, and turned her head up to his bemused face and asked, "what can I do for you?"

Very languidly, he tilted his face down to the little young woman washed in his imposing black corona, and whispered softly, "I am coming from Trichur with this, the appointment letter you had sent me."

"Oh, you are from Kerala, we were waiting for you."

Disappointment welled up somewhere inside her. Who fancied that the applicant was such a crude monster? He did not seem to be in the habit of taking a bath, or washing his clothes. His Karl Marx beard shrouded him like a halo, his eyes were fierce and penetrating like laser guns, his forehead was wrinkled with an indelible stamp of penury, and the tussled and dusty hair was growing thin. Anne squinted at him furtively, struggling to make sense of the absurd scene.

"Where did you do your M.A.?" she asked only to break the spell.

"At St.Thomas, many years ago." The answer was crisp and offhanded.

"Do come in," she ushered him to the principal’s chamber, opening a series of creaking doors. "The new appointment from Kerala," she reminded the head.

The principal in spick and span western outfit whirled in his chair and with a dramatic effect which he had a penchant for, turned to the stranger. Like most principals of public schools in the hill stations, he was prospering on showbiz, with an affected western twang and a proclivity to judge anything Indian wrong. His is not an endangered species—more English than the English, stiff and upright, punctual and reticent, a slave of the chronometer. Being unable to come away from his self-styled high pedestal, the true colors of life are denied to him.

He eyed the stranger from top to toe and stole a fleeting glance at Anne as if it was her fault. He had told her that male candidates are not to be considered. Women can be controlled and prevailed upon. They are docile with their secrets and coveted sorrows. But Anne was adamant that he was the right choice. In going through his scanty and informal application, she had thought he was the best. In a state where there are four million unemployed, choosing the right person from a flood of applications is an art. She opted for him because he was what she was not, careless and irreverent.

"Well, gentleman, please take your seat. How many years of teaching experience do you have?" he asked the stranger coldly.

"Many years at many schools. And I have lost count of the years. Who counts it all?" he smiled.

"Alright, alright. That is interesting. But where were you working before joining us?" He didn’t want to leave behind a person as an unsettled enigma. Once you understand a person he falls beneath you.

"I was at a temple, carving out gods and goddesses from stones. Every stone is everything if we chip off everything but the everything," he teased again.

"So my young man from revolutionary Kerala, you do not have a standing job," he was anxious to wind up the farce.

"No, I don’t have. I have lived my days across the country as a sculptor, journalist, ascetic, revolutionary, and even as a vagabond."

The principal was instantly satisfied, he could understand him. An idiot and a brute, who squanders away the measured out days given down to him. Somebody who vengefully refuses to leave behind his footprints on the sands of time. Now he can go home without a heavy mind.

"In case you join us, how long will you be here?" he asked with obvious impatience.

"Not more than two months."

"Two months?" despite himself he jerked his polished head.

The stranger remained silent as if there was nothing unusual in it.

"Look, gentleman, actually we do not need teachers from outside. And all other teachers are women. Anne alone is from Kerala. We cannot, as a matter of policy, appoint teachers who cannot stay with us at least for one academic year. So sorry, man." That was the end of it.

“It is alright, let me hurry back, the day is dying."

Both Anne and the principal were astounded by his disarming indifference. When he stalked out of the snug chamber, for once he looked at Anne, a piercing but innocuous look. When he became a disturbing vacuum amidst them, Anne darted out of the door as if an unseen hook had pulled her. He was slowly measuring his way in the drenched turf of green, green grass.

"Just a moment," she called from behind. He halted, then slowly, very slowly, turned towards her (like a mortar being zeroed to the target, she thought later).

"Then, as a matter of fact, that is if you don’t mind," she faltered, "do you have bus fare to go home?"

"I didn’t have money even when I started from Kerala," he smiled like a moon after the rains. The pines buried themselves in the fur coat of thick fog. His naked feet got wet.

"Please wait a few minutes," she exclaimed and ran inside.

“Sir, he will be here until Christmas vacation. We can appoint another hand in the meantime. The students will not feel the pinch if a new teacher comes after the holidays. How can we turn him out after having invited him?" she said vehemently.

"Look, Anne, do you think this mysterious boor would get along with the kids? The guardians will come out with a volley of complaints. This is a matter of survival, we should remember that."

"But sir, he is experienced, let us try him."

"He is from your state, I can understand. I do not like the idea. But then, okay, we will try him."

When she walked to the hostel with him, night was descending upon the landscape. Tiny globules of mist settled on his shock of a beard. Streetlights created timid and pallid circles in the mist.

"Is it very cold for you, especially since you come from the plains?"

"No."

"Very well, you must be hungry."

"No."

“When did you have your last meal?"

"Yesterday."

"Still, are you not hungry?"

He stopped and turned to her, "long ago I decided not to hunger any more and never more I hunger."

"That is interesting," they moved again. Somewhere a church bell chimed. She crossed herself. He kept moving indifferent to the world around him. "Look, sir, this is not a big school," she enlightened him. "After my joining here, there is slight improvement. Hostel also is a small one. Fifteen students, a maid servant, a cook, and me. I shall arrange a room for you though it isn‘t much. Then, what news from Kerala?"

"The same sun rises and sets there," he said with a mischievous smile.

Deep at night, while going to bed, Anne prognosticated that it was a wise move from her side to have retained him. As if a new confidence came to stay with her, as if he brought with him the warmth and musk of a distant, colorful world into the frigid and rolling meadows of the hill station.

In the morning she asked him, "Can’t you shed that beard?"

"Of course I can, but it will grow again." Clean-shaven and without putting on the sweater Anne had from somewhere procured for him, he presented himself at the school office.

"I’ll teach only those who can be taught," he told her at the office. "I cannot train parrots to babble 'ba ba black sheep.' Learning is not a skin deep process; it is a process of assimilation and becoming. The teacher just sheds the light; it is up to you to discern what is what and what is not and choose your path."

He was asked to engage students of tenth class. There were only eight girls in the class—the three boys in the class would turn up only to remit fees. Instead of teaching he acted out the scenes from history. The students were amused and engrossed. Anne, watching the show from a distance, was thrilled and impressed.

"How do you teach without a text?" she wondered aloud with a mysterious smile that did not fail her.

"History walks with you, history sleeps with you," he declared.

"You act well," she complimented.

"I was with a theatrical group, also," he explained. Within a few days, he filled into the campus, engrossing the students in many creative activities.

On a Sunday evening, while strolling on Kocker’s Walk, she asked, "Are you a poet?"

"No, never, but I make a poetry out of my life."

"Do you enjoy poems?"

"Yes, I do very much."

In a sudden impulse, she opened her bag and pulled out a book, and read out-"Why hast thou bloomed in my silence?/Why hast thou showered me in thy radiance?/Didst thou not see/ In the petals of my treasured day/Trembling drops reflecting you?/Coalescing drops that come to stay."

"This is the feminine mind," he said aloud, smiling his own patent smile, "woman seeks a god in man; woman seeks a raging fire in man. Man becomes the walking inferno which thirsts for what is not, a black hole in the midst of a universal whole."

"But what is the true masculine mind?" she asked out of pique.

"The masculine mind is a tree straining to touch the heavens. A lonely tree, thirsting for thunderbolts and tempests on touching the stars. A tree scary of and weary of the climbers with their tendrils and their tentacles."

"Tree of a man also needs his share of flowers and bees. Was it not a male poet who wrote: I want to do to you/What April does to a dreaming tree."

"The feminine mind is the music of the earth, the everlasting ooze of life. There are many with a feminine mind. Let us leave it at that. Teacher should have become a poetess."

"Had I been one!" she looked at him.

"Then you would have written about darkness—the mystery which melts all beings into one. You would have written about long and ascending falls through the shafts of darkness. About the pensive peaks, about the tumbling drops from the plumes of the brooding pines. And if you were a painter, you would have painted mysterious snakes snaking into holes, or a spider meditating at the intersection of the radii of a world wide web, or even a horse surging into infinity."

"Believe me, I had dreams like that."

"There you are. Don’t worry. You are entitled to be you. Then you will be exposed full blast against the gorgons of truth."

"I am not afraid."

"Truth will leave you alone and you will speak a new language. But worry not. Everyman as a debutant is an Athanasius contra mundam."

"Slowly, but silently, I am discovering myself."

"In that case make it fast and get it over with before I leave this place."

"I’ll try to."

"But let me tell you. It is stupid of you to discover you. You cannot discover something that is not lost. There are certain things we see but see not, suffer through but experience not. We can just realize us. In certain cases this happens at the last second. A microsecond is enough, a tremendous microsecond, and it will outweigh a whole protracted lifetime. Salvation is a subtle microsecond away, a microsecond that we let slip across our palsied and unsure mental fingers."

"I have never had room for realization. My life flows eventless and devoid of ripples, to the tune of the church bells, never questioning never doubting. The primary school at Palai, rubber plantations, fairs at the parish church, and little streams; all these and much more punctuate my monotonous life. At Alfonsa College, I by-hearted my way across the university examinations. At St. Thomas, I gobbled up Harold Lasky, Ricardo, Keynes, Malthus, and Adam Smith and regurgitated them onto the answer sheets. Then, the life in this igloo, and I send monthly money to my parents and sisters, like many other monthly discharges."

"I steer clear of all your economists. My economics is simple, simple as a thimble. I spend what I have and spend not what I have not. But, of course, I am for your Adam Smith."

"It is very kind of you. But why him?"

"Because he used to walk long, long distances, lost in thought, in his crumpled underclothes. He lived in an astral world and refused to growl and grunt at the curs all around. Society prevails upon the individual to commit a necessary harikari in the social amalgam. At last even nations and civilizations, too, commit suicide when they have nothing else to do. Every civilization is a flower at its time, and when it wilts and decays, it smothers the garden with its stench."

“You are an alien in our civilization."

"India is a crumbled glass of civilizations. Civilization is a collective memory, made up of language, trust, and symbols, and thus, fragile. Every civilization, like a puffed up and conceited frog, stands up against the world—and its flimsy facade will come tumbling down when its symbols become obsolete."

“Is this what history taught you?"

He laughed. "You know what? History teaches us that history teaches us nothing."

The lawn of the deserted American Church was wet. They entered the church and settled on adjacent pews. Fading daylight filtered in through the colored Venetian glass. Therapeutic silence enveloped them. The aquamarine infinity of the mind opened out to float and flee beyond the veil of human speech.

When they emerged out of the church, he said, "Anne is a poetess. Every pious person is a poet."

"Why can’t you turn to God?"

"But I have never ever turned away from God."

The boats in the lake were one by one landing. A day was signing off. The venders selling baked maize and roasted groundnuts were packing up and going home. On the way to the hostel he said, "Anne will give birth to a child."

"But I know not the man."

"The child will be conceived by the holy spirit. And from you will emerge another Anne. Like a day giving birth to another day."

"You are demented and brazen. I knew it long ago. But you have read the gospel."

"Yes I have. I have a nose for poetry."

* * *

"What are your suggestions to improve the image of our school?" the principal asked him.

The answer was at the tip of his tongue, "You should wind up this school. All schools of this genus must be shut down. Who needs stereotyped, toilet trained robots in uniforms? One day I am going to open a school somewhere in the lap of nature. My students will grow living in the sun, earning their bread toiling in the soil, learning from the rhythms of nature. They will learn long enough to discern the echo of the music in each one of them in a certain chord of nature. That is the end of education—to find out where we fit in to be us. Nobody is a good for nothing. Each one has a role to play in the world. Education helps us find out our own world."

"Does such a world exist?" Anne asked later.

"We will make one," he consoled.

"Would you let me work in this ideal school of yours?"

"I’ll embark upon that project only after burning out all of my excess energy. There is a time for everything."

"I also dream of such ideal worlds. But I have to support my parents and younger sisters. They are all on my head. Now I am twenty-nine. As you mentioned, one of these days, I will give birth to another Anne," Anne said almost like a soliloquy.

"Only the idiots are carried away by the notion that one lives for somebody else. For that matter what are we? We are a dream that somebody dreams somewhere else."

In the morning, Anne’s feet were swollen. "Do you know what this signifies?" He looked at her quizzically. "This portents evil days for me. I am a life running out fast. I need an injection every six months. Once in a while I will black out. I have a problem in the heart. Doctors say that I am too frail to suffer and survive a surgery. Yet it cannot wait beyond next year. Before they take my consciousness, the doctors will ask, do you have to meet anybody in particular, and I will say yes, there is one, somebody who comes in like a puff of wind and melts away like a puff of mind. Whence he came and wither he went, nobody knows. Somebody who has nobody, somebody who castes the spell of pleasant sadness. Will you come?" she looked at him with a violent expectation.

He surveyed her frail delicate body clothed in sari and sweater. "Yes," he said like a mantra.

Another day, they were at the Pillar Rock, a tourist hot spot of the hill station. After a long spell of silence, sitting in the soft mat of grass, watching the towering columns of granite penetrating the dizzy haze of mist, oblivious of the hollering tourists around them, she said, "In the next birth I prefer to become a column of rock."

He looked at her with a newly fanged curiosity.

"A petrified being that braves the furies of nature stoically. Never melting in the rain, never breaking in the sun, never shivering in the winter nights. Eternally meditating on the side of the flux of time, Anne, an igneous turret," she mused, beautifully lost in fantasy.

"Just like this," he showed her a paper in which he had drawn her petrified form. In the picture she was not wearing glasses. Her silken hair was flowing down, as if in a storm. Her face was subtly and exquisitely half hidden. "I read your mind when you were looking at the rock with a curious greed."

Crossing the thick clumps of trees, they moved to the Golf Club, whose mortal attraction is Suicide Point, which they reached by ascending the granite steps bordered by peaches. And a day was burning out in the western crematorium. She stood by the steel railing at Suicide Point. Periyakulam town and Vaigai Dam are visible far way, and fear below. She stared into in