Lightning struck…
2003 Harley-Davidson V-Rod, 100th Anniversary Edition
Yes, that sort of lightning. A brain surge. Inspiration.
I’d been searching for quite a while for the subject matter of my next book. Nothing stood out, in the melee and circus of life in the you-knighted states, that was compelling (not even my new toy in the picture)…and true love, that I’d promised to write about in HnH, seemed trite in this age of extreme self-love.
Until yesterday. When walking out of a local Indian store with my son and daughter, into the hot and sultry air outside, someone at the door thrust a pamphlet toward my son. Never one to refuse anything given to him, he grabbed it – and opened it immediately. An ad for professional Black Magic elimination, for cures of all Evil, Evil Eyes, Ill Omens…the common con art in India. There was that omnipresent hand symbol – for Palmistry – on its face.
“Throw it in the trash bin, son!”
“I will, Dad, let me look through it.” I shook my head.
“Today, in this day, and they spread this superstition here! Don’t bring it into the car!”
“I WILL throw it away, Dad!” He squished the pamphlet into his pocket as we got in to drive back home.
But that got me thinking. This unshakable belief in superstition, in the supernatural – where does that spring from?
After we dropped my daughter at her mother’s, my son and I watched the first Jurassic Park – it’d become available on Netflix. As is my intolerable habit, I criticized every failing in the making of that movie.
A night’s troubled sleep after that, and it wouldn’t leave me: I must write. About the ‘Witches of Benganur,’ that a kind plantation owner, who fed a hungry teenage student on his lone Chakrayatra many decades ago, had requested of me.
He died a few months after that curious journey I’d undertaken. But his exhortation to me remained a part of my soul.
That aspiration will live again.
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