Rick Harsch's Blog, page 6

Letter to Uzbekistan: Photos that will Accompany my response to Mr. Karimov, cc to Vladimir Putin

I don’t like being threatened.

 

 

Letters from Uzbekistan: Islam Karimov writes me a personal note

 

Dear Rick,

So far we have been indulgent and patient in regard to your blog’s focus on the lies (my behaviour) and truths (sex is cheap, safe and plentiful here, particularly in Tashkent, and one other town I will not do you the personal favor of revealing unless you visit me in private [consider this an invitation]) regarding the righteous and mighty nation of Uzbekistan of which I am Premier. I like to say ‘Premier’. Yes, Ricky, we have been quite indulgent, but keep up the slander, mention me in relation to my daughter just one more time, and you are likely to find yourself in hot water.

I expect no apologies, for people like you tend to extend such at the instant it has become too late. So here is what I suggest. Merely print THIS on your blog. I did not have anal sex with my daughter. I categorically deny having anal sex with my daughter (which is not to say that anal sex is unavailable in my country, and cheap) and I do not appreciate your adding that libelous passage to the fine letter written by my esteemed Minister of Tourism, Mr. Arslan Levantinovich.

I am sure I need not explain to you that my reach is long and my justice swiftly begun and slow to come to its fit and natural end.

Yours, and perhaps one day in a way you might find unpleasantly, let us say warm,

 

Islam Karimov

Premier (I really like saying ‘Premier’) of the final nation of Uzbekistan

3 Novels from Rick Harsch now available on Amazon. Read Harsch’s Adriatic and Balkan novels–prices quite low, if I may say so…

SKULLS OF ISTRIA

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Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HNAXX62

Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01HNAXX62

KRAMBERGER WITH MONKEY

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Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HMZE6OG

Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01HMZE6OG

ADRIATICA DESERTA

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Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HMZ30XE

Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01HMZ30XE

About these novels:

 

In his USAmerican books, Rick Harsch examined the miasma of the lost souls adrift in empire. In his Indian books, he explored the nature of the foreigner gone deeper into the philosophical chaos of India than any known predecessors. Now in his Balkan/Adriatic books, he finds universals in the thrumming persistence of the harmonics of history, perpetual conflict, and delirious outbreaks of calm.

In Skulls of Istria, a tavern confession novel, a tale told by a brilliant defrocked historian whose first step into the Balkans finds history an active volcano and relates his story in an Adriatic seaside tavern to a man whose only shared language is that of drink, a story that ranges from the Spanish Civil War to seduction and the recent Yugoslav wars.

His recovery he recounts in Requiem for a Suicide, Volume 1, called Noir Slovenia, in which language itself, the Inert, and absurd action suggest a way out for the lost man of the deserts beyond post-modernity – though the second two volumes of the trilogy – works in progress – will perhaps find otherwise, as they will seek to buttress the most extreme notions of their characters, who long for an end to history while forced to search for its very beginnings.

In Kramberger with Monkey, a comedy of assassination, Harsch proves that innovative, experimental fiction can be more entertaining than detective stories, depending largely on the fate of the narrators perhaps, as he probes the surface of humanity’s darkest of jokes only to find the nexus of simian predecessors and exalted artifice.

Adriatica Deserta, an absurdist fable that brings together a mix of eccentric strangers in Zadar, Croatia, is concerned with the more recent politically lurid, occurring during the early days of US war in Afghanistan, an oddity that is perhaps explained by some simulacrum of an eternal fascism, if indeed that is what we are to take from the mysterious tale of the South American fascist Nestor Falco that intrudes on the simpler narrative of a man who has come to take up a position at an office on a street that doesn’t exist.

If there is a palpable thread connecting Harsch’s Balkan/Adriatic books, it is their unpredictability in regard to his delight in the bizarre, his range of expressions of rage, and the tendency throughout for the narration to find purchases on odd excrescences of universals, all of which leave readers space for much laughter and a choice as to degrees of chagrin.

The books can be read in any order, though it is suggested that Skulls of Istria be followed by Requiem for a Suicide Vol. 1. Volumes 2 and 3 of that trilogy are forthcoming, volume one will be out in the Fall.

 

 

USE SEXISTAN: Letter from Uzbekistan: Democracy and How Islam Karimov Tamed his Daughter

Guess what Rick: That’s not me! Arslan L

Dear Rick,

 

I can write you freely now and am perhaps too anxious, but Rick, though I apologize to you for my disconcertainties and contradictions in the past few mails I am sure you understand. But now this is me, the real me, again, your Arslan Levantinov. Let me quickly explain. You see, the succex you brought me brought me (that does not seem the write words) to the great man himself. Yes, that is right, HIS EXCELLENCY Islam Karimov. Islam Karimov. Islam Karimov. (I’m trying to make it bigger, but I’m lost on my new computer.) No jokes. At that point, when I received the invitation to his presidence, I felt myself in conflict. Elation at my elevated status, for he had already as you know promoted me, but this was together with my fear I have no fear of admitting of being boiled alive. Yesterday, much like flesh soup boiling my affairs came to ahead. Called to an audience with the great man himself. Imagine my trepudiation. I stepped baldly into his office. Imagine this greeting: ‘Arslan, what’s the matter with you? Your letter to the American have turned to shit. You aren’t yourself anymore. It’s as if you’re afraid of being discovered writing subversive letters. Are you, Arslan Levantinovich, aftraid of being accused of writing subversive letters?’ How could I lie? ‘Yes. Yes, Excellency, for I have in fact been writing subversive letters. That is the only reason, I swear.’ He laughed—he actually laughed. ‘But, my son, for you are like a son to me, it is impossible. For you to be subversive there must be something to subvert, am I wrong?’ No Excellency. You are right. Interluckily.’ ‘Then listen to me carefully: Only death can subvert my rule. Are you an assassin, Willard? ‘No…(should I tell him I am not even Willard?)’ ‘Then. You see? You are innocent, my son. Permit me to explain something to you. I have modernized my regime. We are now a democracy very closely allied to the most powerful country in the world.’ Here i made the mistake of interrupting. It was involuntary, a subversive—no, a…well, a belch. ‘A democracy, Sir?’ He slammed his hand onto the desk. I was grateful it was not a fist for in such small details a man does decipher the coded signs that dictate life or death. ‘Yes, a democracy!’ He shouted. We hold elections, don’t we? Precisely on the American model. Two parties: may the one with the most money and best voter suppression techniques win. And judging by the results, either party in the United States could take lessons from me. Imagine what it must be like on election day not actually knowing if you will win or not. I can’t imagine. There are many other direct parallels. Take embarrassing family members, like the Bush boys. They all have them. This last one with a wife who has arms like a Greco-Roman wrestler. Who do you think runs the show? And me with my goddamned daughter, my avaricious beauty who had inherited from me everything but tact, subtlety. Hah! Here is something for your friend, that American exile in the land of Melania: Do you know how I finally tamed her? You notice she has behaved properly for nearly two years now? You want to know my secret? They will. And it will help tourism, too. Or have you heard?’ ‘No, Excellency, nothing.’ ‘No? No word on the street? You know now that you can be frank with me, Arslan Levantinovich.’ ‘But it is true, Sir, I have heard nothing.’ ‘All the better: it shall be a revelation. You have of course read the iranian satirist Obeyd e Zakani from the thriteenth century.’ ‘No Excellency.’ ‘Never mind. He was a Persian satirist.’ ‘From the thirteenth century (I wanted to let him know I was paying attention).’ ‘Yes. And he advised Muslims to have anal intercourse with the daughters of their neighbors that the girls’ hymens remain intact, and they thusly remain good and just Muslims. Satire, Arslan Levy, is the recourse of a troubled state. So I called that little bitch, my daughter, into my office, locked the door, pulled up her gown, tore off her thousand euro panties from France, and fucked her right in her ass. Yes, Arslan Levantinovich, it is true. I gave it to her good and long until she promised to behave properly. I remained a good and proper father. And as I said, she has caused no trouble since. So you write that to your friend, for we prosper as a democracy that is also a cauldron of hot and limitless sex, available to any tourist from anywhere in the world.’ No doubt His Excellency has read and approved this sincere and entirely accurate letter by now. So thank you, Rick, and please forgive my injudasish retreat into smudgery. From now on you can expect nothing but but my frank and warm collaboration as first intended, as your people are want to say, going aheadward.

 

All the best,

Your friend,

 

Arslan

I Have a Dream Speech, a fragment of the lost final draft

 

 

 

Let us take heed of the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

Facing the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all white men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to celebrate together a collegiate football championship.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of elite sport and television sitcoms.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, perhaps it will be Uruguay.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be grown and join hands with grown white boys and white girls as jailed and jailors.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; »and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together,« whites who own it and blacks who work it for minimum wage.2

This is our best hope, and this is all I can go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a pebble of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a collection of Coltrane and Monk LPs as our only solace. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing at the last we will remain imprisoned together.

And this will be the day — this will be the day when all of God’s white children will be able to sing with sardonic meaning:

My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

 

And if America is to be a great nation, much must remain true:

And so let freedom ring from the white communities of New Hampshire.

Let free verse songs ring from the black jail cells of New York.

Leave the freaks alone in the blighted Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let free tuition remain for whites only in the universities of Colorado.

Let clubs rain down freely in the hands of the racist cops of California.

 

But not only that:

Let free whites range unbotherd by black folk up that mountain in Georgia.

Let free whites gaze at neoliberal separate ain’t equal in Tennessee.

Let free blacks search every hill and molehill of Mississippi looking for work.

From every mountainside I see the same shit in different caption.

 

And since this is what happens, and when we allow change for the worse, when we imbue every village and every hamlet with yet deeper hatred, in every city’s every black ghetto, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s black children, men and women, young and old, will be able to join hands and if we escape this dystopian and doomed nation—because you know the whites ain’t leavin–we may finally sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

                Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!3

Letters from Uzbekistan: a Retraction my Ass: Trump or Putin or A Pot of Boiling Lies

The Mysterious Miss Uzbekistan, 2013.

Donald Trump, the man whom my source previously named as her father (with Melania)

An Imperial Arrangement?

Gulnara Karimova.

The New Tale

My heretofore reliable source has gone off the rails. I received an emergency note from Arslan Levantinovich (as he has recently re-named himself) begging me to delete the article I wrote on his word (he claimed to have evidence he would have to deliver in person, and up to that point he had been perfectly upright and accurate in all our dealings) as to the Paternity of the mysterious Miss Uzbekistan of 2013, to wit: Trump and Melania. He would fill me in later. So what the hell, I wrote it. Now, Mr. Levantinovich, or rather–his transparent anagrammatical code name, by which he signed this note warning me of the possible ill luck descending toward my friend Arslan, Valentin Lasarnovich–begs me to believe that this could turn embarrassing at any point in the future after the imperial marriage of none other than V Putin and the daughter of Islam herself, Gulnara Karimova, at the wedding of which they will announce the identity of their daughter, Miss Uzbekistan, 2013.

 

Believe what you want. Maybe this is a retraction.

Letters From Uzbekistan: Tashkent Nights

 

 

Dear Rick,

Thank you so very much for all you have done for me and my agency and the nation that owns it. Since your efforts to promote our country we have received evidence of increased interest (and actual investment) in visiting our country, particularly Tashkent. A total of 19 European nations have shown interest/booked flights and hotels, including one secret one that goes by the moniker »E. U.« Isn’t that strange. (Here’s another odd one: We had a group from Puerto Rico fly in and they were listed separately in the computer from the United States yet carried United States passports. I guess you can imagine how long they were clearing customs…) 18 Asian/Middle Eastern nations showed increased interest and actual investment as well, even within Uzbekistan. We had five caravans from Karakalpakstan alone in April and the first half of May! None going the other way, but I attribute that to the season. Australian visits are up nearly 50% over last year, and we received our first governmental delegation of ‘Kiwis’, I hope it i sall right to call them. In a big city, of course, there will be some problems and perhaps over time we will be sufficiently savvy in tourist matters that we will never put the Kiwis with the Indonesians again. I know Geography about as well as the next person on a flight were I on a flight, but I never realized they shared an island with Indonesia! And apparently unhappily. Wait—oh, my assistant, L., points out that the Puerto Ricans actually never did clear customs and were sent on the first flight back. I have so many questions for you, Rick, and let that be one of them, if you could shed light on that. But primarily I write to thank you, tell you how well the work is going, how happy my superiors are with me, and finally to ask you to allow me to withdraw my permission to be in your novel or any novel you may write. And please do not ‘fictionalize’ me. I ask this as your friend, knowing I could never stop you no matter how many favors our Montenegrin guests come to owe me (astonishing how much like Russians these people are, and I mean that they share the finest qualitites!).

Of course, things may change,

And until then, or before then even, I will remain

Yours,

Arslan Levantinovich

P.S. If you post this on your blog, please consider ‘Tashkent Nights’ and if you could use the attached photo we would much appreciate the gesture.

Barack Don’t Surf: A Knifely Welcome to a Killer

Barack Obama is a USAmerican who won the US presidency, promptly went to speak to the ‘Middle East’, won a Nobel Peace prize, fomented a counter-revolution in Egypt, kept troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, committed war crimes as commander in chief of the US armed forces within days of assuming office, as bombs killed dozens of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He continued his drone atrocities from his first days in office until now, targeting, vaguely, ‘enemies’, killing families, peaceful tribal elders, women, children, young men and women, men without combatant status, and doing so in countries the US was not at war with. He refunded the criminal bankers whose greed was astonishing even to the old-fashioned moneygrubbers in the US, and gave safe haven to every high echelon war criminal from the US who preceded him in office. He kept Guantanamo open, despite his promises not to do so. He failed to halt torture as a CIA and special forces tool.

Barack Obama is a charming man, an intelligent man, a sensitive man; yet he has hounded Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers, done nothing about gun violence and income maldistribution in the US, has softened the edges of US imperialism’s surface while cranking up the murderous engines of vengeance beneath the surface.

Barack Obama is not welcome in my house, not even as a face on a card. My children know of his crimes, and revel in the blade-toss that is pictured here.

Wherein my son renders Vasco da Gama and I describe his bloody deeds in India

A little about what the psychotic Vasco da Gama did in India

Vasco da Gama as depicted by Arjun Hektor Perumal Harsch

Vasco goes to India

Currently throughout the world it has become a commonplace observation that the United States is the successor of the British empire; yet the simplicity of the notion blandly obscures (especially in the implied natural progression of historical blocks of time and ravage) the lasting devastation wrought by the Brits, who essentially, beginning as little more than pirates and con men, transmogrified India from the wealthiest region in the world into a perpetually desolate lesser chunk of land, committing what ought to be considered if the word is to be used at all an economic form of genocide. Strangely, at least to me, the, for lack of a better term, racism that allowed the swindling and subsequent conquering of India is widely considered an anachronism, as if self-serving behavior at the deathly expense of others was once in moral cahoots with enlightenment. Interestingly the only defense of attenuate British terror is multiple offense, though I would defend the word racist by conjuring offense against the Scots and the Irish, peoples it was easy enough to watch keel over but far more difficult to outright murder. The phenomenon was, of course, visited upon India first by the Portuguese, and none so gruesomely, with such bloody arrogance, as history’s esteemed Vasco da Gama, whose less examined second visit to India degenerated into a paroxysm of revenge. At the time, the Hindu kingdom of Vijanagar was a center for trade that dealt primarily with Muslim traders, who rightly viewed the sudden appearance of da Gama as a threat to a centuries old system. On his first visit, some of them seized and held captive several of his crew. Da Gama held the Hindu ruler of the coast, the zamorin, and the matter was worked out without bloodshed. But on his return voyage Vasco da Gama was responsible for the one innovation Europeans introduced into the Indian Ocean trading system: the use of force to extract favorable terms of trade — for the first time in the history of the Indian Ocean, merchants arrived supported by navies. Much is made of the strange absence of great navies among the successive empires of south Asia, but the simple fact seems to be that as trade was established and generally followed international rules from China to Africa and even into the Mediterranean, the hinterland empires had no motive for opening their treasuries to build warships.

Vasco da Gama may not have known that he was lucky to escape India alive, but he should have. Surely he was to a degree a learned man, quite aware — this is of the utmost import — that a journey to India by sea around Africa had the potential to devastate the markets of the land route and Red Sea route he knew to be ancient. In fact, that was why he was sent. He would have known that he was sailing into a web of trade that was centuries old, offering insultingly trifling gifts to a locally venerated and wealthy ruler; how could he not have known that the established traders would take umbrage at his arrogant foray to the Malabar coast? Though da Gama knew that most of the traders were Muslim — this was, after all, an attack on the Ottoman rear — he made no religious distinction in the inner maelstrom of his insane wrath. He was after Calicut, site of his considerably petty ordeal the first time over, and its zamorin. But his revenge could not wait — he attacked the first merchant ship he saw near the Indian coast. Though it was indeed a cargo ship, it was also transporting pilgrims returning from Mecca. One might consider pilgrims pious innocents (no popery intended), but not if one were a deranged Portuguese captain, who could only consider them inhuman infidels — or, at best, in the way. Da Gama captured the ship effortlessly and stole all the cargo, but this was just the first act in a bloodthirsty play of vengeance and he was not about to let the matter rest there, with a simple act of piracy: The vessel was filled with gunpowder and set on fire; those who leapt into the sea were pursued by da Gama’s men and slaughtered, about 700 of them — the only people spared were about 20 children who would be forcibly converted. The zamorin thus had certain news of the return of Vasco da Gama, and sent emissaries to try to persuade him to approach in peace (as if it were not too late). However, once da Gama actually arrived off Calicut, a Hindu ambassador sent to the ship with generous offers intended to calm da Gama was arrested and the Portuguese bombarded the city for three days. Meanwhile, 20 trading vessels off the town were seized, their goods stolen, and about 800 commercial sailors captured. Da Gama ordered his men to take these prisoners ashore and amputate their hands, ears, and noses, which ex-excrescences were subsequently piled in a boat. The rest of the bleeding victims then had their feet bound together, and since they obviously could not untie themselves with their hands, that left their teeth to be stove in (the Portuguese were quite thorough in mid-atrocity — who else would have thought it necessary to prevent these noseless, earless, handless wretches biting through the ropes that bound them?), as they duly were before they were tossed in yet a separate boat that was set alight. The only survivor amongst these particular innocents was the ambassador, whose boat was sent not afire off to where he has become a ghostly phantom of history. The order of all these events is rather difficult to sort out, but suffice the mention that the original fire ship reappeared, drifted ashore, and there were, amazingly, a few survivors, apparently aside from the stolen children — and a number of grieving relatives clamoring toward shore to search for their men in what must have been a terribly wrenching scene to any sane observer. Da Gama was immune to wrench; he had his men keep the relatives at a distance, and then, upon finding that there were indeed some survivors, had them strung up on masts (I don’t know of which ships, but he had about 19 extra at his disposal) and used for target practice by his already expert crossbowmen. Strangely, after all this, another ambassador was sent by the zamorin — who knows how he fell into disfavor, to get such a task — and this one, quoting Richard Hall from Empires of the Monsoon, “had his lips cut off, his ears cut off, the ears of a dog were sewn on instead, and the Brahmin was sent back to the zamorin in that state. He had brought with him three young boys,” sons and a nephew, who were hung and afterwards sent ashore, dead of course. This account leaves out a total of the dead, for no tally from the bombardment is given, nor details of further massacres that occurred before da Gama’s holds were filled and he had turned for home; but there is plenty of evidence that his example was an inspiration to his crew, and fellow captains and their crews, who perpetrated a variety of tortures on a variety of captives before setting off home.

Should anyone out there read this bescumbered page of maritime history, I urge you to treat it as a message in a bottle, for da Gama remains a figure of merit in history books (which is already rather risible, given that the cape had already been rounded by 1498 and his trip across the Arabian Sea required, simply, the pilotage of a Gujarati seaman picked off the east coast of Africa), but was in reality a figure to match the most monstrous malefactors of even the 20th century. At any rate, Arjun will be immune.

 

 

The Appearance of Death to a Hindu Woman (excerpt)

All dogs long since asleep, I sleep until the dogs are small like rats and when I wake it’s a rat I remember. He had climbed up the drainpipe into the second floor bathroom, where I sat one dysenteric night. When I saw the rat I stood slowly, my lungi collapsed limply at my feet. He was cornered near the door; I was between him and the drainpipe. We approached each other warily, intending no harm, each choosing the wrong direction in a brief, panicked dance of evasion, leaping at the same instant, meeting in the air, fangs withdrawn, violence far gone into fear. He fled down the drainpipe, but we could still feel each other, where our bodies met, and I was surprised how quiet it had been. And I sit in this bloodred chair in which Sushila loved to sleep, her legs drawn up, her chin resting on her knees, a cup of heavily sweetened coffee on the arm. Sometimes her brother Gautam would be playing his guitar. I sit and look at Kali and try to feel Sushila’s warmth beneath me, but it is the rat I feel, and then I refuse not to imagine myself as I once did, a plague rat carrying the disease I desperately fled, unaware that it as well arrived before me to those shores radiating from a Madras throbbing in the heat. Perhaps the series of fevers and dysenteries left this wretched self-image, rendered me incapable of sequential reason, clarity of memory—still, I look back and I do not see much of a man.

The rats flee with a rat’s health, leaving fever. I left here in deliberate pursuit of fever, that Sushila might find me accustomed to her land. I would then wait for Sushila, who could have come here only for me; Sushila, who had left her mother—and her mother, who was not looking for an orphan, an exile, a son; her mother, who unfolded herself like Maya, opening before me a universe of delirium, which Sushila had tried to prepare me for by chanting a mantra of coconut groves, by burning away in her passion the remaining accretions of my own civilization. Now I beseech Mother Kali to take me back, to return Sushila to me. I had had a taste of fever and it was like drinking of desire, like jewels located in a dream held in the palm under the last light of the moon before coming fully awake, the dream gone, the mind still in its sway. Perhaps I left Sushila for Madras certain that in a land where the malady is fever one wakes from the dream without having returned its gifts. Alas, fever is not so generous to strangers. My fevers began almost immediately, increasing in their intensity until the profusion of images that pleased me were flattened into a shifting, hallucinatory dimension, until in the fumbling hands of a more capricious time and space all my nights became a day, a hot day in which past and future were compressed and then stretched to rising horizons enveloping the sky; a drenched, tumid day of temperamental gravity, of faltering geometry, that would burst out of itself like flowers of madness; Sushila’s cool lips covering my burning eyes, shh, she said, like Mother, her susurrations expanding like an approaching train into a roar trapped against the walls of my skull, and she was gone, and the walls of my room mocked me, held themselves at impossible angles, leaning, laughing, in league against me, Sushila again 10,000 miles away; and as I concentrated, endeavoring to focus in vain attempt to take the first immeasurably short step toward comprehension, another day or two passed, a letter arrived from America in response to the one I had sent with the maid that morning, the maid returned, set the letter by the window, then stood before me, her vermilion sari a garment of blood, remaining in flames when she left the room. How may times in those days of fever her face loomed before me, my head oppressed by the weight of the sea, how many times I longed for Sushila’s face, my mind lightened by the attenuation of the desert.

I don’t know how many days were burned up by the sun inside me before the proximity of the sea prevailed, before the sea lifted and a distant, profound will put the smell of salt into the miasmic air of my room, luring me like a sleepwalker from the resignation of fever’s hot equilibrium. The burning was so well attuned to the sultry days and nights, it may never have occurred to me to rise again had it not been for the nearby Bay of Bengal. The waves playing against the coast exerted upon me the influence of a second world, or third, one in which a man could drown or be devoured rather than wither dishonorably in a bed of his own effluvia. I lay in bed, far from Sushila, and the sea was telling me that the death I was ready for was not ready for me.