Empty Vessel

I was privileged to be born near books, with a priest in the family who awoke at four in the morning and recited Chandi stotra and and other hymns as he tended to his daily ablutions. I was also privileged to have as many women in my family. After a hard day's work in the village, the women gathered around a lamp or two for their only luxury--recounting their hardships and happy endings, gossiping, anticipating and dissecting and building in the air and taking the air out of other enterprises. I listened, often until I fell asleep in a corner, and i must have continued to listen in my sleep as well, because many things come to me which I am sure I never experienced.

Another way in which I was fortunate was the ethnic and cultural diversity in the village, and the social fabric of which my families were a member, one which stretched over the mountains to villages a couple of days walk away. There were certain forbidden territories--the temple of the Old Goddess where the Magars sacrificed their swines, the spring near Mulpaani where the children were forbidden to drink, the washed roots at the mouth of Mulpaani where the source's serpents lived, a bend in Khare Khola where stillborns were buried--and there were specific spirits or decapitated skeletons or wandering witches who roamed their own territories. The landscape was a narrative in its own, made possible only through hundreds or thousands of years of habitation, where it was possible to see in the shadows of a tree a woman who hanged herself there sixty years ago, or a rocking rock on the edge of a precipice from where a laborer fell to his death.

The landscape existed, thusly, as a layered narrative composed of stones and trees or fields and paths shaped by specific events in the village's history that jumped up afresh to the eye, each time transformed by the gown of dusk or the clamor of birds, flapped by vultures alighting and jostling in a litter of carcasses, and as a cast of real, dead spooks and kin, drawn from various generations, colored by very different stories told by the same person, details picking on their own scabs or wearing borrowed jewels from myths and epics similarly heard in the haze of half-sleep. One was outside, the other flowered inside.

As a child, I populated my head with as varied a cast as it was possible for a child's mind. I also had many friends in the cracks on the wall or in the shapes made by leaves against light. I named them, these creation of chance that had acquired permanence, and i spent hours talking to them. Amazingly, invariably, they talked back. As soon as a mind reaches the stage where it can sustain a conversation, it wants more of it, because it recognizes that each of such conversation is a perfect conversation. The most agreeable opponent is within the mind.

[more to follow]