Confessions of an Irresolute Ethnic Writer

‘He who is willing to work gives birth to his own father.’

– Kierkegaard

THE ETHNIC WRITER was a somnambulist, also a whiner. He should be writing, but spent many hours thinking about consistent narrative voice and examining every zit on his countenance, or simply gazing at his own visage in the mirror and making faces. The Yellow-Peril Face. The Fu Manchu Face. The Charlie Chan Face. The Fresh-Off-The-Boat Face. The Model-Minority Eager-Beaver Face. Which one was his True Face?

When he couldn’t sleep at night, he padded around his apartment in flip-flops and ate Maltesers. He was garrulous, accustomed to pulling his lower lip in a rant of one kind or another. He was a doodler of Disney characters and Goofy was his best imitation. When he couldn’t write, he blasted Bruce Springsteen very loudly and used his wireless mouse as a microphone in off-pitch karaoke renditions. His invocations for his muse were alliterative jingles: Moose for a goose, how about it? Shitty Chinamen in cities shine your shoes.

Garuda arrived early this morning, swooping down on to the windowsill like a dark angel, the turtle and the elephant in his talons tired of squirming, lying limpid with staring eyes. Garuda, himself a hybrid being—half man, half eagle—had been watching the Ethnic Writer. It was hard to fathom the young man. He didn’t look very chewable or appetising. He ranted about political fiction and the limitations of fictional frameworks, and this made Garuda think he might taste leathery. Although the Ethnic Writer was not bad looking—full head of black hair, nice sloe eyes (the Ethnic Writer was having an internal wrangle over whether to use that description, even if in ironic jest)—Garuda suspected he might be bony and full of cartilage, given his sparrow ribcage and muscley thighs. Was the Ethnic Writer possibly a Brahman? Must not on any account eat one of those.

It felt like yesterday still to Garuda, in a timeless out-of-time kind of way—his encounter with his father, Kasyapa. Wasn’t it just like fathers to be prescriptive without being helpful? Kasyapa had told him to seek out the elephant and turtle quarrelling in the lake and to go eat them on Rauhina, the Tree That Could Speak. Kasyapa hadn’t provided directions or sonar navigational tips—how was he expected to locate Rauhina, this old friend of his father’s? Garuda billowed out his wings and launched himself into the skies. He flew thousands of leagues. It was all very tiresome, because the skies were leaden, filled with sulphurous, dense clouds. Periodically, he flew through ionic patches and got zapped. Then, without warning, he must have flown into the eye of turbulence—he felt weightless, without any sensation of his extremities, and then that drop of vertigo, oh what a rush, like that infamous girl in literature with the pinafore and that rabbit tunnel! Darkness all around, with the occasional twinkle of lights in outer perimeters. Wind tore at him, lashed him and spun him about. He fell out of the sky and his bottom hit a slushy element, something moist and soft. The king of flight, what humiliation! People who own dogs should be more responsible.

Where was he? It was early in the morning. The elephant and turtle had both got bonked on their heads in that crash landing and were swooning. Then Garuda saw this blazing square of yellow light, in some kind of schmaltzy apartment complex, where the inhabitants dumped their garbage in Tesco plastic bags to be later scavenged by errant foxes and mongrel dogs. Here he’d been, until the Ethnic Writer roused from his onanistic reverie.

Upon noticing the outsized shadow grazing his wall, the Ethnic Writer emitted a yelp, then said with great tone control, ‘Em…who or what are you? What are you doing on my windowsill?’

Garuda shook his blue-black wings and folded them. His claws gently pushed elephant and turtle over to one side. ‘Ka,’ he said.

‘Ha?’ the Ethnic Writer sneaked a look at his own face in the mirror, and the wide panic in his eyes made him self-conscious.

‘I’m hungry and looking for something to eat,’ Garuda said.

This seemed to scare the Ethnic Writer out of his wits. ‘Are those an elephant and a turtle you have there?’

Garuda shook his feathers impatiently, which made a horrible rattling sound like swords. He was a God and yet, still he had to suffer an ignoramus of this particular variety.

The Ethnic Writer shook his head as if to clear it. ‘All I have are Weetabix and Greek yoghurt. If you want, I can rustle up an egg. But the pan is gunked up with charred stuff and I’d rather not have to wash it.’

Garuda frowned. ‘Have you a tree anywhere in the vicinity?’

The Ethnic Writer was used to non-sequiturs, being a writer. ‘I have a ficus that’s dying in the kitchen. Will that do?’

They repaired there, where the Ethnic Writer got out two melamine bowls and cups. ‘Coffee?’

Garuda examined the ficus. It was dry and crackly, and the minute one of his claws touched a branch, it snapped off, which filled Garuda with foreboding. The Ethnic Writer poured milk on his Weetabix, shoved in a mouthful and started grinding his molars. The sounds he produced were so much like the crunching of bones that Garuda looked at him with new respect. Perhaps the Ethnic Writer was very lonely, perhaps he’d been too marginalised, or perhaps he was exercising his imaginative capabilities, because he didn’t think there was anything odd about having a creature of Buddhist and Hindu mythology sitting in his kitchen, clutching an elephant and a turtle that were Lilliputian. Or perhaps he was possessed of great presence of mind by virtue of having to dance on his toes around the perimeters of exclusion/non-exclusion.

As if to demonstrate this particular virtue, the Ethnic Writer asked, conversationally, ‘What brings you to town, or specifically, to my window?’

‘What is this land?’ said Garuda.

‘Em…Fulham.’

‘But you’re not from here. Where are you really from?’

The Ethnic Writer became visibly agitated. ‘Does it matter so much? I’m here now.’

Garuda told the Ethnic Writer about his mission to bring soma to liberate his mother from slavery.

‘What’s soma?’ the Ethnic Writer asked.

Garuda was shocked. ‘You don’t seem to know your mythology. Are you not from the third world?’

The Ethnic Writer blanched. ‘So?’

Garuda nodded sagely. ‘You know Beowulf? Odin? Soma is a drink that marked the passage from nature to culture. You know it as mead.’

‘Of course I know mead,’ the Ethnic Writer said tersely.

Garuda explained the rivalry between his father’s two wives: his beautiful mother, Vinatã, and her sister, Kadru. Kadru asked for one thousand snake sons, while his mother only wanted two. The eggs incubated for five hundred years, but when Kadru’s eggs hatched first, his mother became jealous and impatient, and broke his brother Aruna’s shell before it was time. Aruna had emerged only half-formed and, angry at being called prematurely to existence, he sentenced his mother to be Kadru’s slave for five hundred years. Soma would set his mother free. And where was his father all this time? Off levitating in the forest.

The Ethnic Writer listened avidly, drew a breath and experienced a mini-epiphany. ‘Are you my reflection in mythology? Are you, like, the embodiment of allusion and allegory?’

Garuda was puzzled by the Ethnic Writer’s obsessive mulling of his writerly existence. Nevertheless, Garuda talked about his search for his father and wanting to know more than the circumstances of his birth. As he talked, Garuda felt pain and anguish and desire build within him, reaching such a high-water mark that a wracked caw broke out from his curved beak and rattled the windowpanes. This awed the Ethnic Writer, whose mocha-brown eyes became wide and round with wonder and mystery. ‘I see. Love, honour, pride, pity, compassion, sacrifice.’ He gave a self-deprecating laugh and flicked his boyish hair back. ‘I get it, it’s all about the father of literature.’

Garuda shivered. The Ethnic Writer’s apartment was cold. Again, he wondered if the Ethnic Writer could possibly be a Brahman. He stretched his wings. The dark violet curtain of them rose up like a shroud.

The Ethnic Writer had a lot to say. His father had wanted him to be either lawyer, engineer or doctor. Never on any account one of these ambiguous titles with no discernible boundaries and no upward mobility. He had defied his father’s wishes because he didn’t believe any of those professions, so against his natural inclinations, would help him contribute anything substantial to mankind. Filled with delusions of grandeur and strangely diffident, he too was in search of His voice.

Garuda thought the Ethnic Writer was one very lost boy. For someone with no voice, he sure talked a lot. The muscle ticked in the Ethnic Writer’s cheek, beating like an avaricious pulse. Garuda wondered if the Ethnic Writer, with his power over words and syllables, could help him steal the soma to free his mother. There was so much Garuda wanted to know. Why couldn’t he eat a Brahman, his mother’s edict? Why was his father so distant? But even the few times that he’d located his father deep in a mediaeval forest, Garuda had felt tongue-tied, unable to make his mouth form the words that contained the meanings of what he sought. What deep irony from he who was himself composed of syllables, the metaphor for rhythm, sound and metre.

‘The power of words is in sound.’ The Ethnic Writer’s eyes had turned defiant. ‘I used to know this.’

‘I don’t mean to be rude and interrupt you,’ Garuda said, thinking, perhaps I won’t eat you after all, ‘but I really must get on. Perhaps you might like to come along? I promise I won’t eat you if you help me find soma.’

The Ethnic Writer rushed to put on his Birkenstocks and retrieve his satchel with Dictaphone and notebook. How often he’d wanted to travel beyond himself, to escape the confines of his own skin. Now was his chance. He clambered up on top of Garuda’s shoulders, and really, he’d never imagined that the triangular scapulas riding each side of Garuda would feel so much like camel humps.

‘I might die doing this,’ he screamed against the gales of wind as they coasted up and up on pockets of air currents. ‘We are on an odyssey, aren’t we?’

Garuda enjoyed listening to this tortured soul produce a stream of words that reflected an inner perverse logic. The Ethnic Writer was introspective in a way that Garuda felt himself to be when he was in flight.

They flew beyond the perimeters of city blocks and electrical power lines. The roads snaked and crossed in cloverleaf patterns. At some point, the landscape changed: patches of floret-like greenery were interspersed with wide, open fields and rolled hay and blue hills.

The Ethnic Writer waved his hand about as if he was riding a bronco. ‘Yeeha! We’re the new global nomads!’

They were now flying over golden wheat fields, dotted with farm machinery crawling slowly like individual black ants against counterpanes of yellow. On the top of a brown, low-slung hill stood a lone, tubular tree, spreading its shade along the ground with its leafy branches.

Garuda’s stomach growled. ‘Mind if I make a pit stop?’ He swooped down low. The dip quite took the Ethnic Writer’s breath away.

They landed in a field where bales of hay rolled up here and there looked like giant curlers on blond hair. A red-roofed barn tilted in the far distance. The Ethnic Writer dismounted. Garuda flew up and alighted on a branch. He was famished. The elephant and turtle cast their surrendering eyes at him, and he opened his beak, revealing a great maw of darkness, fathoms deep. But despite their sacrificial expressions, Garuda felt an instinct bubbling within him—that it was wrong to eat them now. There was a time and place. With a rumbling hiss that seemed to emanate from the acids in his stomach, Garuda sucked the air, and the worms, squirrels, bugs, beetles and other creepy-crawly inhabitants in the trunk of the tree were vacuumed up into this black cavity and extinguished.

The Ethnic Writer said, ‘Holy shmoly, how’d he do that?’

Garuda was still hungry. He looked around for something else to eat. The leaves of this particular tree—an oak or something—looked dusty and twiggy, and he remembered the thousand coiling black snakes around Kadru, his mother’s sister. Those coiling black snakes were his half-brothers, but damn, they looked plenty savoury. He looked down at the Ethnic Writer and was tempted. The Ethnic Writer started babbling.

Put-putting up a dusty road-track fenced on both sides with stiles was a farmer in his tractor. Garuda immediately inclined his head that way. He eyed the farmer. He eyed the tractor. The Ethnic Writer took a comb out of his satchel and began to toy with his hair like a 1970s movie star in extreme nervousness.

Garuda lifted his wings. To see him launch himself airborne was a magnificent sight—the giant brush and collaring of his wings, his arms and legs curled up underneath, the swift descent, the sudden darkening, the farmer’s turned-up face frozen in fright, the fraction-of-a-second disappearance of farmer and tractor, scooped up like a ball of ice cream.

 

Now that Garuda was sated, they took off again, passing fields, stiles, hay bales, sheep and cows, brown-roofed barns and houses. The edges of a forest, like a child’s irregular pencil markings. It could be a fairy tale. It was a long while before the Ethnic Writer could speak. He craned his head and looked down. The elephant and turtle had dozed off, as stiff as carcasses.

They crested a hill—its summit fashioned with a craggy outcrop of rock. A sun haze around it created a perturbation of the air, which they did not perceive until they’d flown straight into its maelstrom. It was like flying into the glow of a fire, one moment cold, the next piping hot. A detectable shift in the wind. Garuda’s giant wings flapped once, twice, and then hovered—he’d felt a gentle sucking resistance, as if he were being palpated by a mouth and then spat out. With determination, he beat his wings, and the air-rush underneath propelled them up twisting, twisting, piercing this imperceptible membrane, and all at once, they felt that everything was different, although the scenery hadn’t changed at all. Yet, the gradations of colour were more vivid somehow, the river glinting beneath the dappled leaves more scintillating, the blades of grass all various hues of green. Was this what it was like when you entered an alternate reality? the Ethnic Writer thought, life became more compelling, more digestible with every in-drawn rasp? The temperature had distinctly risen.

Far below, sitting on the riverbank, was a balding man in a dhoti. He looked like a mendicant, as perhaps he was. Garuda made a beeline for this quarry.

‘Please don’t eat him,’ the Ethnic Writer begged. ‘Are you going to eat him?’

‘Why would I eat him? He’s a sage, we’re here to consult him.’

‘Oh, good, my shivery unconscious can’t handle another wanton killing.’

The mendicant looked up as they approached. His glasses and bald pate glinted in the sunlight. His cheeks were round and doughy as dumplings. The mendicant reminded Garuda of his father, and this filled him with a pang of longing. Guilt. Foreboding.

‘It’s a curse that such a great one as yourself should be yoked with someone so puny,’ the mendicant shouted to Garuda. His voice was phlegmy, his eyes rheumy and vacant as if he were doped up.

The Ethnic Writer rolled his eyes.

‘My son, I have a message for you. You have deviated from your one true path.’ His milky gaze roved over both of them.

‘Are you referring to me?’ the Ethnic Writer shouted, but even so, his words were borne away willy-nilly by the moderately violent wind.

‘All you have are words. You have not carried out one jot of your mission. You have shown neither passion nor compassion.’ The mendicant picked up a branch from the ground. He swished it about, producing a whap, whap! as if against the hide of an imaginary buffalo. Garuda hung his head, ashamed. The Ethnic Writer felt his cheeks reddening with defensiveness.

‘Waste no more time. You are to go north. Find ice. Find snow-capped mountains pockmarked with caves. That’s where you can finally dispose of the elephant and turtle.’

‘I need to explain to Father,’ Garuda said.

The mendicant pursed his lips. ‘And what good will that do?’

There was no answer for this. None that would satisfy. Garuda knew this.

‘If you want to have hope of penance, read the Vedas,’ the mendicant advised.

‘What about me?’ the Ethnic Writer said.

‘What about you?’

‘What’s to be my fate?’

‘How should I know?’ The mendicant turned his head towards the wind. Tufts of hair around his ears ruffled in the breeze. His dhoti curled around his legs, sinuous.

A voice spoke up, ‘Were you not born in a third-world developing country?’ The voice was coming from the tree, and its hollow echo sounded as though it was issuing from deep within its trunk.

‘Not that, again,’ the Ethnic Writer said.

The mendicant smiled into the wind. ‘Child, is the diaspora not within you? Do you not contain multitudes? Trust in the ineffable, the invisible. The voice will find you.’

What a lot of rot, the Ethnic Writer thought. So much for Hollywood’s idea of the magical, brown guru. And the guy had cribbed from Whitman.

‘But whatever you do, do it also to locate compassion, heal the heartsick, provide dignity to the living. Our collective mission is to rise together. But you can’t do that if you don’t first—’ the mendicant coughed ‘—love yourself.’

‘Is that from a pop song?’ The last word ended on a falsetto, as if the Ethnic Writer were revisiting puberty. He was beginning to feel like the faithless, ever suspicious of all forms of knowledge.

The elephant and turtle had woken up. One trumpeted meekly and the other waddled its legs. The Ethnic Writer felt sorry that they would die an ignominious death.

‘Get lost.’ The mendicant coughed again. ‘I mean, get lost more often.’

In the north, a diffuse light was growing, and a smell of turpentine wafted from somewhere. Garuda felt the plangent call of his mother. Garuda. He flexed his muscles, fluffed his feathers, stiffened his spine, sniffed the air.

‘What’s happening?’ the Ethnic Writer stood up.

‘It’s time to go.’ Garuda bowed to the mendicant. ‘No time to lose.’

The Ethnic Writer wriggled his eyebrows. He was feeling lots of abstractions at the moment. Illusion and fantasy. Image and Significance. Art and life fusing together. In Search Of.

‘Coming with?’ Garuda lifted an eyebrow.

The Ethnic Writer took one last look at the world he knew as he climbed on to Garuda’s broad back, and wondered, life being circular and all that, if the end of something could also mean the beginning of something else, and what that could be.

For eight days and eight nights they flew north. The air progressively became colder and felt like knives. The sky turned a bruised purple. The elephant and the turtle rode on Garuda’s back, and at night, the Ethnic Writer snuggled in with them for body heat. His heart surged with tremulous hope. He’d never seen anything so beautiful as the sun rising over the horizon of water and sky. The half-light cast a bluish tinge over the sea they travelled above. The sun was a bright orange fireball. The winds combed his hair and clothes back in powerful gusts. The more he looked out at the vast expanse of rippling blue, the more he couldn’t fathom where the ocean ended and the sky began. Perhaps this was what the inside of an eggshell looked like, vast and limiting. Beyond it the universe was unrecognisable, unknowable. He tried to make out the inner lining of the horizon. It was a thin, concave, blue line. The sky looked peaceful, a carapace for the ravaged sea. He experienced a series of small epiphanies, like body-tremors, and ideas began to form in his head. He started scribbling, stopping occasionally to eat or to shiver when the air became so cold that the muscles in his hand seized up. And then he employed his Dictaphone, speaking far into the night in a low murmur. To Garuda, it felt like a kind of meditative chant; it almost put him to sleep. Sometimes, the Ethnic Writer would shout with joy, ‘Too de loo de la. Too de loo de la!’ The cold was absolutely numbing. The Ethnic Writer wrapped a few of Garuda’s giant feathers, thick as fur rugs, around himself and felt as if he were being shuttled back to a time and place primordial.

On the seventh day, they sighted snow-covered mountains and glaciers. Majestic, desolate, vast landscapes, jagged peaks alternating with plains of snow, like melting curd cheese, the sound and fury, the loom of a gigantic wall of ice and then so lonely, a sole crumbling fortress in front of this sheer backdrop of ice-blue snow. The gods are worshipped here, the Ethnic Writer thought, and he struggled to find his breath. It made him remember all sorts of things: his mother feeding him cubes of ice made with mango-scented water, his father boasting about a hybrid of mango (crossed genetically with coconut) he’d created that was the size of a bowling ball, his grandmother’s coffin and how frightening she looked with cotton-swabbed eyes and sewn-shut lips, his first dragon dance, his first kung-fu film, the first time he kissed a girl—her name was Sumathy, with a thick braid of hair swaying down her back and lips that tasted of nutmeg. His memories bore the shape of people he’d loved tinged with twilight, and although they were things that had happened, they felt mythological.

Garuda was tired. He felt it now—the mission felt like pressure on his bladder and it was mounting the closer he flew to soma. His back was heavy with its burdens, his heart pounding with his exertions, but there was no turning back. He glided, soared, flapped, dipped, swerved, emptied his bladder. The air currents buoyed him. In the distance, a pair of black-necked cranes climbed the skies. They were the only other creatures close enough to observe them.

Then, in front of them, the pyramidal shadow of a mountain that rose into the heavens, wreathed in fog and clouds. Without a word, Garuda flew straight towards it. Soma. The Ethnic Writer witnessed but had no words.

They heard it before they saw it, the zinging and whistling of a hail of arrows flying past their heads followed by fireballs that left jet-trails of vapour and gas in their wake. Garuda’s beak opened. They turned their heads back to look. It would have been better if they hadn’t. What they saw coming at them now at great velocities was an avalanche of hurtling, dizzying meteors, fireballs, a celestial rain of cosmic debris radiating from somewhere to the east of them.

They were in the thick of it, and darkness fell even as the mass and density of objects were backlit by crimson, silhouettes moving, swirling, spinning. All around them was falling ash. It had suddenly become very hot. Garuda let out shrill cries. The Ethnic Writer hunkered down in terror. The air was thick with the smells of gas and heat and dust. Dante’s inferno, and the Ethnic Writer was experiencing it in the prickling of his skin and the pressing down of sulphurous heat. Elephant trumpeted and the strength of his blows spiralled some of these meteors from their parabolic trajectories. Turtle’s head disappeared entirely.

Without warning, Garuda started to fly in haphazard directions, and sometimes he tilted so dangerously to one side that the Ethnic Writer, the elephant and the turtle swung by their knuckles in hair-raising ways.

‘A present from the gods!’ Garuda screeched. ‘This is the work of Indra. He’s trying to stop us. We must be very near the soma.’

‘You failed to mention that we would risk getting incinerated,’ the Ethnic Writer whined.

A juddering shook Garuda’s body and rattled the teeth of the Ethnic Writer.

‘I’ve been hit!’ Garuda said.

The air around them suddenly lit up as if a thousand klieg lights in a stadium had been turned on—and the Ethnic Writer saw tiny figures sitting on top of some of the shooting asteroids, cheering, raising their fists and shaking them.

‘Indra’s thunder bolt!’ Garuda veered swiftly to the right. A hail of arrows followed their flight.

‘Those the bad guys, I take it?’ the Ethnic Writer pointed at the tiny figures.

‘They are the guardians of soma.’

‘Aha.’

Garuda plunged and rose, dipped and listed, trying to outdistance the rain of arrows. Where the arrows hit him, feathers were loosened in tufts, floating like dirigibles in the dense air. Of Indra, the Ethnic Writer saw only his shadow looming in the far horizon—his triangular headdress, the lean youthful body, the loincloth and thin legs, mounted on top of an elephant.

They were approaching the Mistral Mountain. Garuda began to flap his wings energetically, rapidly, and the air around them moved in concentric circles. The Ethnic Writer had never seen anything like it. Invisible molecules of air began to resemble translucent rings of waves, cresting outward, spreading, lace-like eddies of air and dust beginning to spin and project, turning, twisting like water going down a sinkhole. Garuda had created a mighty whirlwind of dust, and the air around them was writhing and spiralling, and they were buffeted and churned along with it. Every creature and thing was caught up in this mighty tornado, hurled with centrifugal force, whirling round and round, faster and faster.

The Ethnic Writer felt them dropping. His stomach rose into his throat, the feeling of rappelling down as his body lifted out of its frame. Garuda swayed and canted. They dropped out of the tornado, hurtling towards a giant cantilevered wheel with metal spokes joined in the centre. The metal spokes elongated and retracted. The ends of the spokes were sharp spears. Through the moving spokes, the Ethnic Writer glimpsed two golden cups, top up-ended on bottom, and the rims were jagged. The cups too were shifting up and down, the teeth of the top fitting into the cog-like rim of the bottom with exact precision.

‘Holy Mother of God, is that where we’re going?’ He could see a distant magical glow through the open cracks of the rims as the cups moved apart, which only became stronger the closer they were.

Garuda breathed in deep and lengthened the span of his wings. It was now or never. He had a split second to insert his beak between the metal spokes and the cracks of the cups and steal the glow within. If the spokes or the cups closed over his beak as he was doing so, he and his companions would all be disintegrated into a million smithereens. Sayonara, immortality!

The Ethnic Writer clapped both hands over his eyes, peering through his fingers. At that instant, the elephant and turtle catapulted forward and were swallowed up in Garuda’s huge maw, vanishing as if they’d never been. This was Death—you often didn’t see it coming. The Ethnic Writer’s heart jolted in shock. They had meant something to each other, all of them. He swallowed, wondering what his fate would be.

Garuda’s wings were perfectly still. They hovered so close that the Ethnic Writer could see that the walls of the cups were uneven, caulked like plaster. A split second later, and the teeth were upon them, and Garuda’s head disappeared from view. The Ethnic Writer looked up—he was dangling right in the centre of this metallic jaw—above, he saw fangs gleaming like blades of a guillotine swinging down, and he felt his heart leap out of its metaphoric cage. Oh, indelible image seared into my brain. Oh death, here it comes. And then, the Ethnic Writer felt their retreat. He opened his eyes. Garuda had done it—his beak was entirely haloed in a luminous glow, as yellow as egg yolk, as phosphorescent as moon jellyfish.

‘Yahoo!’ the Ethnic Writer couldn’t resist. He shrieked with pent-up testosterone and emotion. They were already gliding swiftly away. He turned back towards the wheel and the cups for one last look, and there, arrayed in front of the wheel, were dozens of little figures with ornate headdresses and bracelets around their arms and legs, clad only in loincloths. The gods of soma were watching them depart with their stolen booty, solemn and still. It had been written that this day would come to pass. Many things had been pre-ordained, but some weren’t. The Ethnic Writer suddenly understood equivalences.

They flew night and day, over lands, mountains, sea, heading for Garuda’s mother. These were mythical lands, ancestral places, and the Ethnic Writer thought he saw similarities with the earth he knew—the taiga, the tundra and the steppes. They evoked feelings of longing and homesickness and nostalgia (even though he’d never seen these places on earth with his own eyes).

They heard music, a lone flute. Playful then sad, haunting then not, lilting then erratic. A ballad of antonyms calling Garuda by his essence. Garuda lifted his beak. His eyes closed for a second. He too remembered his mother telling stories, stroking his hair, grooming his feathers. Stories about her evil twin Kadru. Stories about mortals.

A large cloud drifting by cast a sullen shadow over them. They both glanced up. It was Indra with his thunderbolt, hovering in the airspace on the back of an elephant, looking contrite and accommodating.

‘Well, hello. Fancy catching up with you like this.’

Garuda frowned. With the soma transferred to his beak, he really wasn’t equipped to speak. Looking at the Ethnic Writer, he gestured towards Indra with his beak.

‘Me?’ the Ethnic Writer stammered. ‘Ehm…what do you…’ He cleared his throat for a more authoritative voice. ‘What do you want?’

Indra flashed them a toothy grin. ‘There’s really no point in us being enemies. You have soma. Which is fine. Really. I thought I should tell you, though, that you mustn’t let the snakes have it.’

The Ethnic Writer looked at Garuda. Garuda flapped one wing, thinking quickly. He gestured at the Ethnic Writer’s notepad and wrote down: Tell him it’s to ransom my mother.

‘It’s to ransom his mother.’ The Ethnic Writer snuck one hand under his armpit for comfort.

‘I understand that,’ Indra said, with some impatience. ‘All he has to do is deliver the soma to the snakes. They don’t have to possess it, know what I mean?’

They didn’t really know what that meant. Garuda felt a trick in the offing. He felt the shifting of fates. Indra was king of the gods after all. Kings often knew what they were talking about. Or did they?

‘Let’s strike a deal,’ Indra said. ‘What say I give you something as consideration? What do you want?’

Garuda was always hungry. He was also dead nervous about accidentally eating a Brahman. He thought for a bit and selected his next words carefully: Ask him if I may eat all the snakes.

The Ethnic Writer smiled. ‘May he please eat all the snakes?’

‘Sure,’ Indra was equally expansive. ‘Why not? All-you-caneat buffet.’

I would also like to study the Vedas, Garuda wrote.

The Ethnic Writer parroted.

Indra’s grin widened. ‘Done! Now, throw it upon that dharba grass over there!’

They could see the snakes down in the mosh pit below, coil upon coil of writhing black slinkiness, constantly moving. The Ethnic Writer shuddered.

They both saw Indra fly off with this last instruction. Garuda cast out the soma from his beak. It dribbled like a basketball across the valley on to a thatch of grass. Immediately, when the soma came to rest on it, the grass turned a golden yellow. Each blade opened up to reveal a scurrying and bustling of thousands of movements—little people everywhere, Brahmans, gods, celestial beings, baubles of spirit, all inhabiting a briefly transparent realm. The Ethnic Writer blinked in incredulity.

The snakes began to writhe towards the soma as a body. The flow of black lava, cresting with different heads.

‘Before you touch the soma, you have to have a purification bath!’ Garuda screeched. The snakes halted. Nothing moved. There could be heard only the rustle of the wind. Distantly, the flute or its echo, could still be heard. Just as miraculously, it worked. The course of this black wave changed. It headed towards the river. Garuda led the way, ensuring no snake slid away from the pack.

The soma was left alone on the grass. The Ethnic Writer couldn’t explain why he did what he did next. It was impulse. It was courage, absorbed from Garuda. With a horrific yell, he leapt from Garuda’s back. ‘Keep going! I’ll see you later. Enjoy your snakes!’

He saw the soma. Still resplendent. Still glowing. Then. The Giant Hand coming down from above. Swiftly descending.

‘Nooooooo!’ The Ethnic Writer had nothing with him to stop Indra stealing back the soma. His heart knocked crazily, his knees buckled, his eyes misted, but his hands threw up all those pages of his notepad, those pages filled with his chicken-scrawly writing, filled with ideas and nubs of ideas and line upon literal line of nonsensical sentences he’d written during their journey north. He’d thought they were finer than anything he’d ever written, and also the least meaningful of anything he’d ever written.

The Hand swept these pages aside. It curled into a Fist and came down and hammered the Ethnic Writer in one mighty blow. His breath left him and he lay there with his eyes open. He imagined he saw Garuda circling back towards him, wings extended, having consumed all the snakes. But the sky was empty, as blank and white as a baby’s blanket. He hadn’t done enough to warn Garuda.

He watched Indra lift the soma in his hand and ride away, triumphant.

Knowledge came to him of failure and inability. In defeat one finds atman, a higher deeper consciousness. The Ethnic Writer took in a deep breath and it was painful; the sun was directly in his eyes, and his vision dimmed, trailing a dusky halo. He tried to hold his breath in, but that hurt too. Words came to him. Datta, dayadhvam, damyata.

Puny mortals metamorphose into pentameters. There is rhythm, and there is sound. But where is meaning? Ha ha.

Verse fragments floated past his consciousness. The Indians believe your father dies and becomes thunder. The Russians believe he takes your childhood with him. The French believe you take his place and become your own father. What father can take the place of Faulkner?

For one moment, as his lungs wheezed, he thought he was dying. But no, he’d merely been thoroughly flattened. Lost to himself, lost to the world. His eyes focused on the white sheets of paper sailing in the sky, fluttering, pages of confetti. Was someone getting married? Was there a plane in the sky? But no, it wasn’t paper confetti.

Nothing mattered any more. There’d been only one word that he’d scrawled floating back in front of his dim eyes.

Light.

But did it mean the absence of darkness, or did it mean the absence of weight?