The infinite is apparent, but not in
this sleep. AWAKEN! To see it, unfortunately, might be more a question of
steering alongside death. It might be the place where the One becomes the
Other: it happened to me.
Mahaballipuram is a small resort town
on the Tamil Nadu coast, south of Madras
It's still quiet now, expanding, more
of a tourist trap (the shopkeepers are getting desperate: in that respect it's
not too far from Agra
The shore temples have been barricaded
against nature, and this doesn't help much; they're not the same at all.
Thousands of years on the beach didn't seem to do them much harm; now they're
"protected" there are more visitors, more footsteps; the wear and
tear is grinding the old place into the ground.
I got a room in the Five Rathas
village, just south of the town, in a row of thatched mud and brick huts next
to the home of Mrs. Rajalaxmi and her family. There was one window, but all I
could see from it was a wall. Despite it being October, the heat was stifling,
the mosquitoes fierce. They say a dying man has more desire to procreate than
he ever did before, as a kind of preservation instinct. The species must grow,
must continue. Well, the mosquitoes were like that. Winter, of sorts,
approaching, they wanted blood, and they wanted it now.
There was a bed. More of a charpoy,
let's say an amalgamation of the two. With a net, a small table in the corner,
and a door. The pillow was thuggish.
Everywhere in Mahaballipuram the sound
is one of chipping: hundreds of stone carvers are busy chiselling at blocks of
stone night and day, they never let up. The streets are lined with stalls
groaning under the weight of Ganeshas. There are bronze Shivas too, made with
the age old lost-wax process. Nothing changes here, when you get down to it.
The third day there I got ill, and I
think I might have died were it not for... well, I don't know what. This is
what happened:
It was getting hotter, the monsoon had
been dragging on, loathe to finish. I awoke in the night, my dreams getting
more disturbing. Lying on my back, something wet was running down my neck. In a
semi-sleep state I must have wiped whatever it was away with the back of my
hand. But it continued. A slow trickle of liquid down my neck. Like thick warm
oil. And the dreams got worse, until I got confused about what was real, and
what was sleep. To this day, I'm still troubled by this problem. I never know
if I'm awake, or in bed, at night, dreaming. Always it turns out that I'm
awake, but I'd like more proof sometimes.
In the morning, despite there being
brilliant sunshine outside, the hut was in darkness. The only things
discernible were corners, some more obvious shapes. Only when I opened the door
and let light flood in with a tidal belch did I discover the meaning of the
night's occurrence. The pillow, formerly a whitish grey cotton, was now a
crimson swab lying at the head of the bed, looking like it had been done over
by a hit squad of angry Sicilians. It was soaked through with blood, a delta
like a big flat poppy imprinted on its cloth, and the left side of my neck was
red also.
From there I don't remember shutting
the door, or indeed recollect anything of the rest of that day. I simply
remember it being night, and the dreams that went with it were raging.
A steady trickle of blood leaked from
my ear until morning. And only when I awoke did I remember the dream, though
when I tried to come to terms with it, to write it down if not on paper then at
least on a page my mind had set aside for it, I found that I could not.
What had happened to me though, in the
night, was a vision of another dimension: one where the senses, that is, those things which make us alive, make us what we
are, were all described, all existed to me as geometry. Yes, it's impossible to describe to you (if it was
possible to do so, then surely the experience could not have been
supra-dimensional?), but try and imagine, if you can.
I was hearing, smelling, tasting,
touching, in geometry. It was a language alone, every part of my being,
restricted as it was by lying prostrate, fevered, in a bed, in darkness,
everything I was, had been and ever should be, ever could be, ever would be,
transliterated into a language of geometrical shapes and calculations.
I remember reaching out and striking
the wooden frame of the bed: the nervous process of instructing the muscle to
move, the reaching out, the sensate touching of the wood, all of this was geometry. Such a wonderful thing!
And in the night, after the fever had
subsided a little, when I'd regained my usual hold on the world, there was a
disturbance outside the window. I could only hear the commotion: wailing,
screaming, great distress in the next hut just across the way. I presumably
fell asleep again, unaware of the blooding taking place.
When I awoke I knew I was physically
ill: blood was still trickling from one ear, my temperature must have been over
100°, and as soon as Mr. Rajalaxmi set eyes on me he commanded his son to run
me to the doctor in town on the back of his bicycle. I walked to the bike
lopsidedly as my balance was affected, and stuck out from the machine at a
forty five degree angle, like the broken indicator of a Morris Minor. We rode
through the main street with Indians waving and laughing at us, the spokes of
the wheels nipping at my toes, which were poking out like whelks from the blue
shell of my flip-flops.
The doctor let me jump the queue (I
think it was obstetrics day), had a
quick look at my ears and my throat, listened to my chest briefly then sold me
some tablets for 200 rupees.
Later, Mr. Rajalaxmi told me that in
the night the man living in the next house had been out drinking with his
friends, and coming home, drunk, they'd spotted a young cobra at the side of
the road. The man had gone over to it and tried to catch hold of the thing,
like it was a kitten or a chicken, and the cobra had, understandably, struck,
biting him on the hand. His friends had panicked: instead of getting someone to
drive him straight to Madras for medical
treatment (all hospitals in India
With a cobra bite, there is a forty
minute window to get treatment; after that you die. The man's clock ticked,
ticked, ticked, and he died.
Later still that day, after Mr.
Rajalaxmi had made me inhale a potion of eucalyptus and other herbs put into
boiling water, and had made an offering of flowers and some food to the shrine
in the garden (a large Ganesha, washed and mollycoddled twice daily with Tender
Loving Care), I managed to walk out to the street running alongside Five Rathas
village, chasing the thrill of a silly corpse.
On a table at the side of the road the
dead man was lying, white and dry. He was opposite a tree, from whose low
branches a snake was hanging by the neck. Villagers were filing past the body
of the man, then passing by the tree in single file. Stopping briefly, they
were each of them slapping the snake and shouting at it, throwing a torrent of
Tamil abuse at the serpent. Then they were going on their way, having paid
their respects to the corpse and having vented their anger on the murderer.
The next day, feeling better, still a
bit lopsided though, I caught a bus to Chingleput. Half an hour out of
Mahaballipuram the monsoon reappeared; the shutters of the bus were lowered,
but they were inadequate. Rain forced its way into the bus, and although I was
sitting away from the window, warm water was pouring over me continually like
some blind gardener with a watering can and its brass rose decided I should
grow. Then it rushed along the floor of the bus, as if desperate at all costs
to get to ground.
* *
*
This story was first published in the magazine The Third Alternative, Summer 1994.
It is available as part of my short story collection The Bee and Other Stories, available as a Kindle download.
