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‘Standing alone in the face of infinity, it’s not your beliefs but what you have rejected that bothers you.’
Divine Nangas, or the Divine Nakeds as the Oxford Dictionary later translated it.
The bachelors may keep the world spinning, but it’s the married ones that keep it grounded.
When someone comes too close, they bite out of fear.
Humans: once bitten, twice shy. Centipedes: shy once, biting twice.
Chanda Devi, trained in the straightforward ways of Sanskrit literature, is oblivious to the English obsession with wit as a higher form of intellect.
In all theological discourses, man can only speculate, never judge. Only the subject of the study—the formless, genderless almighty—bears that privilege.’
The struggle of an equal couple isn’t just the subject of ethnography. It is multi-disciplinary. Intimacy and distance operate like the tide—high during the day, peaking at mealtimes. The moon is a cup of tea, it pulls them to the zenith of their interaction. The nights are parched. Unconquered land separates their beds.
Since he doesn’t make demands, she has learnt to read his desires by his actions. When he looks at the horizon with vacant eyes, he yearns for tea. If he is famished, his belly emits cub-like growls. If his forehead is wrinkled and he has a mild frown on his face, he is deep in thought. His head droops when he is tired. It tilts to one side when he is sleepy. If he sits or stands upright, his attention is on his surroundings, observing perhaps the call of a bird, a shift in the winds, or an increased smell of chlorophyll. A scientist studying the environment looks very much like an animal on
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Though she sits in the same room, Girija Prasad often suspects she is constellations apart. In that different time and universe, he wonders if she finds herself alone. But he is hopeful. One day, he too will travel across time to reach the end of Chanda Devi’s gaze.
English language’s crisis of inarticulacy. His mother tongue, he suspected, was incapable of expressing the complexities that lay dormant in a single word. It could not, for instance, describe snow the way the Eskimos did with their dozen synonyms. It did not see the diversity that fell with each flake. Nor had the English language experienced rains in the way the people in the straits of Malacca had. Their word for heaven meant sublime rain, and hell was rain that drowned. All life was an oscillation between the two. No word—certainly not the innocuous ‘love’—could be used to describe the
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He wants to pray, but he doesn’t have faith.
Here, hens fly as high as crows do on the mainland. They build their nests on mango tree branches. Some even compete with eagles in their flight, clucking in desperation to fly higher, faster. Easily flustered, they lay eggs mid-flight or perched on branches. Hens here are birds of ambition, not mere poultry.
‘Without god, there is no purpose to loss. She needs faith to start again.’
‘But faith is not the birthright of the pious. A virus does not need Jesus Christ
to understand the value of adaptation ...
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TWENTY-THREE MONTHS AND ten days into their marriage, the Varmas have been together long enough to experience one of the most sacred interactions between a man and a woman. She is now a nagging wife, and he a clueless husband.
For too long, he had been toying with atheism, rejecting religion on scientific principle. In this moment, his reasons are clear. Only when one experiences a moment in its entirety—as a world in its own right, with a unique shape and axis, a sun and moon, laws and philosophies—only when one encounters all the moment’s possibilities with contentment, only then is one left with no reason to pray.
‘Ghosts do not live where they died. They return to the place where they felt the most alive. They have struggled, lived and enjoyed their time there so much, they cannot let go.
Disbelief, it turns out, is belief of its own kind. It is a river that flows against the overbearing currents of time and
truth to make the opposite journey. It gathers all the mysteries of the ocean and returns them to their frozen origins. In the form of a glacier, it holds its head high up to look at god hiding behind the mists of heaven. What is the purpose of belief if even god can’t put the world back the way you worshipped it?
Girija Prasad and Devi feel the deepest form of gratitude and love towards her—they take her for granted.
‘When your friend uses the word crazy,’ he says, ‘what does she mean exactly? Is she referring to a form of neurosis, like anxiety or hypochondria? Or a psychosis, like schizophrenia? Or is it a degenerative disorder, like Alzheimer’s? A scientific mind is always specific. It doesn’t use terms and concepts loosely. It seeks the truth, at all costs.’
‘We have been soulmates for several births now. But in each birth, our search for love and struggle for purpose is new. It is why I made my bed on the floor for all those nights. You had to earn a place in my heart.’
‘This is why I prefer physics to metaphysics,’ he sighed. ‘No one talks in riddles, only equations.’
‘All of us are burdened by the twin destinies of saying goodbye to our loved ones and departing from our loved ones ourselves,’ he writes in a letter accompanying the gift. ‘Let this not obliterate the greater destiny we all share—the fleeting moments we have together.’
To him, they are the contemporary shorthand for expressing an emotion that old people like him had invested a lifetime of silence in.
He’s alert to the existence of beauty all around him. But he lacks the courage.
He was a child then, conjuring up other worlds to explain this one.
Orphans, he realized, needed human bonds, ordinary distractions and excuses to hang on to. Not the metaphysical emptiness propounded by a prince who had everything—kingdom, palace, parents, wife, children—only to give it all up.
One can only delay it or bring it closer. Idealists call this liberty.
The general took more interest in poultry and cattle than in the welfare of students drunk on foreign ideologies.
This is what death is, he thinks. A moment isolated from everything and everyone else. A moment magnified and distorted beyond comprehension. A moment devoid of all possibility. An ossified moment. Like a shell
discarded by a mollusc, the moment resonates with reverberations and echoes. Not life.
But Plato doesn’t stand up. He can’t leave his corner just yet. He has only killed thirty-eight mosquitoes since he awoke. By his calculations, he must kill at least eighty each day to restrict their rate of multiplication. Even four mosquitoes flying in Plato’s cell are a protest. Ten, a riot. Hundred, a rebellion. They must be silenced. Each and every one of them.
‘What is it your friend Marx says? That philosophers can talk about the world in many ways, but no one can change it?’ ‘No. He says that philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways, the point is to change it.’
wars are fought for the right to die with dignity,’
A long time ago, when the hours weren’t divided into day and night, the sun and moon lived a contented life together. But the bats were blinded by the sun and the trees needed to rest in darkness. So they urged the two to spend time apart. Over time, discontent seeped into their marriage. One day, the moon stood between the sun and the earth. She reminded him of the love they had shared before a planet came in their way. The sun, angered by the moon’s audacity, began to beat her. Even now, he hits the moon and hacks her into pieces.
No tragedy, emotion or assault is big enough to let go of the washing.
He is the only man he knows who talks like this. Somewhere in his gibberish lies the possibility of redemption.
But he has spent the most promising part of his life in prison. It has taught him to read, hear and embrace the silence that follows half-uttered sentences.
‘If a grain of sand is the heart,’ he says, a little before dawn, ‘is an earthquake the heart’s torment?’
It strikes him that reality is the worst story ever written.
Emotions, he believed, were only cosmetic. They held no value in the face of the commercial transaction most people called life.
‘If there was one thing I could have smuggled into solitary confinement,’ he said, ‘it would have been a watch. Nothing is more frightening than an undivided stretch of time.’
The departing seldom say goodbye. It is better left that way.
