The gallows!
The rareness of life—it can neither be reproduced by any of the forces in this world, our progress, our science, nor by any of the tools and techniques developed by our civilization—and yet a simple heartlessness is all it takes to snuff out that same life, to ensure its destruction—the gallows!
But why the gallows? To punish a criminal. But will this rehabilitate him? Will this erase the effects of his crimes? The indelible line which has been drawn by his hands—will that be erased when he is gone? The gallows: a lesson to teach others. But what kind of education is this supposed to be which orchestrates a display of cruel, heartless contempt towards life in order to teach respect for it? And has this ever taught anyone anything? The idea of the gallows has always gripped me strangely—it has something of the power of a cobra’s eyes: bone chilling and yet unfalteringly hypnotic . . . A hypnotizing summons that turns even this machinery of vengeance into something poetic, as the unfortunate—or should I say most fortunate!—person who is sacrificed on its altar is rewarded with one of life’s realizations, so his untimely end is simultaneously a kind of completion of his life . . .
The gallows!
The high tide of youth in a dried-up ocean. The tresses of darkness cascading, thick with shadows, over the dawn. A monstrous, dark raincloud athwart the beauty of the autumnal sky. Its realization is precisely in this opposition, in this sudden juxtaposition and in the implied, unprecedented poetry of terror that it produces . . .
What kind of realization—to what end? What will my death realize—and what realization did my life produce?
The curtain rises and falls. The scenes drop and are raised. But with the curtain’s every fall, and every transformation of the scene, transfixed even in death, another drop falls into the stream of the play; another drop which is nothing in itself but without which the stream lacks movement—without which it doesn’t even exist.
I am performing my life’s retrospective, I am living the life I have already lived a second time. I, who had always looked ahead, have come to the final stretch of my life’s journey and am now looking back to see where I came from and how I drifted, and the curious experiences that have brought me here. Which is why it seems to me that there had been a plan in my drifting, containing the germ of my ultimate objective. My psychological idiosyncrasies contained a unique hedonism that was turning into my guiding principle. And the mountains, valleys, rivers and streams, trees and forests, storms and rains that came across the path of my life all possessed for me and me alone a unity, whose purpose was to give the particular shape of my life completion at a specific time, in specific circumstances in a specific place, after specific preparations and means, in which it would find its own realization, its own fruition and its own coherence . . . as of now I am unfinished but I am not lacking; I am incomplete, but there are no more places to affix things that could complete me.
Except for this retrospective. Perhaps it is the provision for the final stretch of my life’s journey, because this, and only this, brings me contentment.
*
Before everyone else, I turn to you, Shashi.
Not because you came into my life first or because you are the freshest memory. But because the core of my being depends on you—exactly like the blade of a sword depends on the whetstone’s dream. You are the whetstone that has sharpened my life’s blade again and again, that has scraped and ground me and turned me into something that is not ashamed to stand exposed before the world—that knows no reason to feel ashamed.
You aren’t alive any more. You were broken along the way as I created Shekhar, perhaps you were even broken by Shekhar’s own hands. And I’ve been repeating it over and over in my mind—‘Shashi is gone, Shashi is dead, Shashi is gone’—but I still can’t fathom what has happened exactly. No one can accurately assess the damages he has caused, or feel it fully.
Why? Why . . . how does a sharp sword know that the whetstone is broken as long as the sword isn’t dull or doesn’t break? And I’m still alive. I’m still burning, still ‘am’.
But then why do I say that you don’t exist any more? The whetstone that sharpens a sword doesn’t break until the sword breaks. I have to die, swinging from the gallows, but for now I’m still alive.
Give me permission to remember you. To speak of you and use the word ‘memory’ is to desecrate a prayer, but I’ll still ask it of you. Give me this right. You’ve died, you’ve become the essential ‘nothing’. Let me explain this to myself, but in order to do that, I have to bring forth a thing which is ‘something’ for me—your shadows, which I used to believe were real . . .
No, it’s not the one where I was scared and so I asked you, ‘What happens, Shashi?’ And you replied hoarsely, drifting off into unconsciousness, ‘Happiness, Shekhar. Happiness . . .’ I don’t have the strength to bear that moment for anything more than an instant.
I can remember how we used to meet and talk effortlessly. We felt affection; we felt attraction; but not the kind of affection that flows by holding on to hardship, not the kind of attraction that builds its home only on a foundation of pain . . .
This realization hit me hard when I got out of jail and saw you for the first time. That’s why I said, ‘I’ve lost so much now that I’m out. While I was in jail I thought you and I were one, but now it seems that I have to learn who you are all over again.’ You cried . . .
Suddenly, you said, ‘Won’t you come and see my home?’ Because you were married now, you had a home . . .
I saw your home and the man who was the reason that the house was now your home. And it seemed to me that you were content and your life had now been set firmly on its tracks and there was no one else anywhere near those tracks. So I became even more afraid that I had to learn who you were all over again—because you weren’t familiar any more . . .
I said, ‘Shashi, sing something for me.’
‘I don’t do that sort of thing any more.’
‘Why, are you too old now?’
You laughed. And as a result of the sound of your laughter I had a vision, the kind that only seldom occurs. I saw unwaveringly and with perfect clarity, the cloud-capped sky, the dimmed twilight, the settled winds, the invisible lightning and a solitary bird falling helplessly as its wings suddenly broke in mid-flight, which while it was falling tried to find its flight, find its place by writhing in pain, writhing in pain . . .
Then I suddenly knew who you were . . . and I couldn’t bear to be there any longer. I asked for your leave and left.
You came to the door to see me off.
‘Got a good look at my house?’
‘Yes, I saw. I saw quite a bit,’ I said and left hurriedly, and you stood there encircled by the perimeter of your home.
The ruins of the buildings that were built at the time of Banda Veer1 and others built around that time, and some more recent than those, but still very old buildings. Shekhar sits in one such building. He’s sitting in his ‘room’, but in reality it’s just the sill of an old-fashioned window on one side of the granary. Wide and misshapen, blackened with antiquity, but functional. He’s sitting on that sill, his arms hanging to his side and his head is bent to his right, leaning out.
There are several bullet holes on the walls of the room and on the window. There are a few emplacements in the walls that were designed for returning fire from the inside. The bullet holes and the emplacements comprised a chapter in the history of that house that no one reads any more. He’s sitting there, in the window, and also not noticing them, nor can he see anything beyond the scene that is before his eyes.
A small courtyard enclosed by falling walls. In one corner, a small jujube tree casting a shadow over a dilapidated, dried-up well. A pile of old-fashioned bricks next to the well, and some yellowed, wind-scattered, peepul leaves on the right side of the courtyard. Outside the walls, a peepul tree and a cow that is tied to it, the vaulted rooftop of a tiny little temple nearby and the drooping pods of a tamarind tree complete the tableau. And all of this in the tranquil quiet of the afternoon.
That’s what he’s looking at as he sits. Shashi’s father lies ill with a heart condition, and so the whole family is anxiously expecting a calamity. A dark shadow hovers over the house, and it seems as if the silences of the rooms in the house are whispering to each other in muffled voices.
It’s to escape from that strange, pulsating silence that he comes to sit here, and tries to forget the smell of the air in that house by watching this scene instead. Because he loves each member of that family but can’t bear that taunting muteness.
Shashi is the queen of that household, and his sister. It’s on account of Shashi that he abandons the vital and unfettered atmosphere of college and comes here, finding consolation even in these shadows.
She’s not really his sister. But in that context, even if he feels a difference, it’s not of distance, but of deep closeness, of an unobstructed friendship. A feeling like the early morning sun in autumn that not only lays to rest the shadows of that house but dissolves the shades of his differences, too.
She’s not a relative. That’s why Shekhar doesn’t ‘remember’ her, doesn’t ‘look in’ on her. He hasn’t earned the right. He’s only been allowed to worship. He sits there and dreams, dreams in which Shashi does not appear like a portrait but like the light which illuminates the portrait—a feeling remains rather than a thought.
That feeling arises sometimes in a terrible shudder. Shashi sings. Her voice lacks sophistication, she lacks the nuance of a trained artist and the attraction that radiates, but it has a stormy brilliance, the sweet warmth of fire in autumn. Her voice has the richness of a violin, the taut pain of a lute playing on some distant mountain at sunrise, the precise urgency of a flute heard in a pitch-black night of the monsoon, and on top of all of that, the marvellous daring of a voice, with the depth of youth, which pushes itself to the limits of breaking but doesn’t break.
And she sings—what? A song that Shekhar has heard several times, from many different voices, several times from thousands of individuals singing collectively, but whose meaning, whose rising flame he has never felt.
What was it that awoke within me when I heard that song? Love, or anguish, or aggression, or all three? Whatever it was it came over me like a trance and showed me wild dreams of heroism and battlefields, where I could clearly hear myself telling the story of my own strength, my own sacrifices, my own fire-smelted soul—a story whose premise, whose internal force was Shashi. And it would awaken in me the awareness of a very sacred object, for which I was ready to go on jihad, and it would overpower me, this enigmatic feeling.
This call of Shashi’s personality, this ‘appeal’,2 was for the part of my mind that spills over from the ferment of life’s activities, the part that is a rebel. But there was another part of my mind that could only reflect the beauty of creation, which really is my brain’s heart, and therefore is a poet, and that part would wake at the sound of Shashi’s laughter. There was something in that laughter that thrilled, but would steal the power of speech from you. It was a laugh beyond poetry; you would have to fall silent when you heard it. My imagination could show me visions of rivers, of waterfalls, of moonrises, of oceans, the Milky Way, but then quietly it would return to recall the sound of that laughter.
The cloud-capped sky, the lightless evening, the settled winds, the invisible lightning, and today there is no solitary bird falling helplessly as its wings suddenly break in mid-flight, who while it was falling tried to find its flight, find its place by at least writhing in pain, at least writhing in pain . . .
In this tiny hell, the voice of an ascetic points me to a sacred hermitage and reduces my vast delusion by an iota, forgetting that it in no way was appropriate in this situation, and with a godly sympathy, says, ‘O Sheldrake bride, bid your mate farewell. The night is come!’3
Oh night!
I can no longer recall from which faraway land we departed and arrived here! Our houseboat has only taken us a mile away from Srinagar yet, but it seems as if it has taken ages, as if it has been going for countless years and will go on for countless more, as if the travellers have been stricken with Narad’s curse and can never stop anywhere.4
The houseboat has passed through the Jhelum canal and is now entering Manasbal Lake. It has already crossed the filthy waters of the Jhelum, and it has long since passed the dense shade of the chinar trees. Now the lake’s limpid waters reflect the sky’s cloudlessness, and the long grasses that undulate in the lake, reflecting the brilliance of the sun, sparkling and prismatic—sometimes golden, red, sometimes taking on a dazzling green. And sometimes a ray of light will cut through their tangles and make glisten a rock lying at the bottom.
The houseboat isn’t moving quickly. It’s drifting. The current is so weak that it’s as if the power which set it in motion gave it a push and then exhausted itself, and the boat is pulling along in the stupor of that single push it hasn’t been able to stop yet. Its other bow—it’s as if it has just awoken from a nap, seen the lattice of light dancing before it and is extending its still-drowsy arm to catch it.
Two people sit on its stern. The boy is wearing knickers, but the rest of his body is naked, his hair scattered and tousled, and he holds a long staff that he’s turned into a fishing pole by attaching a hook to one end. He plucks white lotus blossoms from the lake and drops them into a pile in front him, but he’s not satisfied. He’s only plucking the half-opened blossoms; for some reason, the fully opened ones don’t interest him.
A girl sits nearby. But mentally, she is hundreds of thousands of miles away. She has several landscape paintings of Kashmir made by an English painter, and in her lap, she has a book—Kalidasa’s Raghuvansha. But she isn’t looking at the paintings, nor is she reading the book. She’s looking at the boy blankly, humming something to herself. Who knows what she’s thinking.
The boy is about eight years old, the girl about thirteen. The boy is me and the girl is my sister.
There are other people on the houseboat. But in the world of this afternoon there are no others deriving pleasure from the sun of this affection. They are separate, lost. And the houseboat is advancing patiently, chasing their dreams.
The boy exhausts himself plucking flowers and now there are no more bunches of flowers; and now it’s only after a long stretch that he finds the occasional flower. And now they’re reaching the deep parts of the lake. The boy tears the long stems of the flowers into pieces and makes a garland out of them. The stems are torn in half to make a link, and at the bottom of each chain dangles a flowery pendant. He goes on making garlands and each time he finishes one he sneaks over to his sister and gently puts it around her neck. She sits unfazed. Each time she smiles a dreamy smile at him and then drifts away. Her brother has piled her up with flowers, but he’s not satisfied, and she doesn’t stop him either.
The flowers are almost gone—the few that remain have broken petals. The boy thinks that these might not be suitable for garlands. But at the same time, he realizes that there aren’t enough garlands—there is still room for many more . . . but then, perplexed, he goes to his sister and says guiltily, ‘The rest weren’t any good.’
His sister sees his disappointment and laughs. She says, ‘There are plenty. Do you want to crush me?’
And then she drifts away again. The boy sits next to her and listens to her humming like a devotee, almost as if a goddess were giving him a blessing.
I still haven’t forgotten those words. In those days, I didn’t know what they meant, but I do now. But I haven’t been able to decipher the dreams that I saw in those days, and the feelings they evoked—they’re beyond meaning . . .
If this garland can rob one of life, why did it not kill me when it fell on my heart?5
Listening to his sister sing, a sudden, unknown feeling rises in the boy’s mind. It wasn’t produced all at once, it’s been germinating slowly for several days in his heart, but its rich fullness is new, and it has surfaced on his mental horizon for the first time today while putting the garlands around her neck and listening to her sing. Very gently he brushes his sister’s cheek and says, ‘You look so good.’
His dictionary doesn’t have entries for beauty and ugliness, good and evil, truth and falsity. He’s an innocent child but he fully appreciates the fact that ‘truth is eternal and good’.6 And so to express the unknown feeling in his heart, he says, ‘You look so beautiful.’
And the sister understands him. She laughs again, and the slightest blush comes over her and makes her look even more beautiful and she turns away to stare at the water.
To find her imperceptible reflection? I don’t know, and she only maybe knows herself. And now she is undergoing a secret transformation. I still tell her all of my secrets, but she’s beginning to understand that she has claim to an independent reserve of mysteries—her own heart?
*
The order of my memories has come undone, like when a necklace of pearls falls apart and the spilt pearls are rethreaded haphazardly. I see another scene at the same time that I see this one. It has the same characters, the setting is the same, but its essential theme is completely different. This scene has the same point of view as the other, but in the course of my life it seems as if this scene bears no relation to the other, and if there is a connection then it is that the two scenes are symbols of the simultaneous development of very different feelings . . .
The same lake, the same houseboat, the same day. Evening has fallen, everyone has gone inside. I am alone on the roof of the houseboat. The light from the turbid and complex colours of the sky is reflected on the lake and has turned it into something like the guileless eye of nature, still drowsy from sleep, and like eyelashes around it, the long grasses are cutting into the horizon wildly. Despite being entranced I’m watching the inky shadow-images that the grass makes. It’s black, itself devoid of beauty, but still encircling such beauty!
But even more than that, I’m sitting here waiting for something. Towards the east, the grassy eyelashes look even darker, because a clean white light falls on them from the sky. I’m trying to imagine it, the kinds of changes that will be produced in the various elements when the moon rises, the kinds of patterns that will develop. I had not realized that reality can outstrip my imagination . . .
Below, inside the houseboat, someone is singing. I am trying hard to listen. Two voices are singing together—one of them belongs to my sister and the other to our aunt. I don’t remember the words to that song, but both voices still ring in my ears . . .
I imagine that the voices are two powerful swimmers riding the invisible waves on the lake and vanishing into the horizon, into the moonrise, to meet the rays of moonlight, because the rays of moonlight are their sisters, and they will adorn them with garlands of lotuses . . .
Ah! Those rays of moonlight draw nearer—the black eyelashes of the lake have now turned into lines of mascara in the eyelids of the horizon, and above them the moon has risen like an enormous, petrified eye . . .
A strange thought wells up in my mind. The moon is a virgin, and the dark beauty of the earth is its cloak. But the moon is so beautiful that the cloak has no right to cover it and so the moon has shed and discarded it and, naked, it now walks the horizon. Its radiating beauty makes even the abandoned covering beautiful.
I can’t definitely say that these thoughts actually arose in my heart at that moment in this very form. But in the images that appear in my memory, that child is filled with these thoughts as he stands there. If these thoughts were not in his head in precisely this form, then their germ definitely was. It was definitely true that he had acquired an indirect knowledge of the fact that beauty was completely naked and that nakedness was completely beautiful . . .
A voice enters, tearing through the child’s dream. ‘Shekhar, come down now!’ This, too, is his sister’s voice. Ever since then, whenever I forget myself in a metaphysical frenzy while looking at an extremely beautiful scene, a sharp voice calls to me and says, ‘Shekhar, come down now!’
Dead, long dead;
Long dead!
And my heart is a handful of dust,
And the wheels go over my head,
And my bones are shaken with pain,
For into a shallow grave they are thrust,
Only a yard beneath the street.
And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat,7
Under the cover of a grove of eucalyptus trees stands a half-hidden bungalow called ‘Eagle’s Nest’. This was the bungalow where she was living on the day Shekhar had buried her under flowers and abandoned her, filled with an irrepressible spirit, unable to bear the shadow that Sharda cast over him. Today, after so many days, Shekhar was running towards that very same grove, and memories of the past were racing through his mind . . . and the first wave of adolescence was crashing inside him.
The hoofs of the horses beat . . .8
The same Sharda who used to make him laugh. Sharda, who played music on the veena that he could lose himself in, who had teased him so much that she had become his friend. Who had become everything for him, who didn’t have her own home, who filled him with an urge today . . . which he also could not bear.
He came right up to the grove and stopped. Did he hope that he would find Sharda waiting for him at her doorstep and that she would start when she saw him? Because that didn’t happen. She wasn’t at the door. The door was closed. And even the smoke wasn’t there today, the smoke that used to rise from the chimney of ‘Eagle’s Nest’, the smoke he used to spend his days watching from a distance . . .
Timidly, Shekhar went to the door of the house. There was a lock on the door. He looked in through the window—the house was completely empty.
For a while he couldn’t make sense of what was directly in front of him. And then slowly it dawned on him, and
The hoofs of the horses beat, beat,
The hoofs of the horses beat . . .
He stumbled and sat down on the steps.
When he got up and left, his mind was completely blank. After that he just never had occasion to be hurt by this wound or even try to understand it.
*
Just as a creature that lives inside its shell will only go outside it when it is hungry or when it is seeking a mate, and once it is satisfied it will return to the safety of its shell, similarly unsatisfied and discontented, Shekhar, too, emerged. Wretched and wounded, even if he had wanted to go back, the hunger inside him wouldn’t let him return. He was vulnerable to injury, armourless, and life was leading him farther and farther away from the safety of his home . . .
He was quietly eating his roti. And, at the same time, he was thinking. Mother was sitting next to him in the kitchen; Father was talking to her. A letter had just arrived carrying news about his brother who had dropped out of college. It said that he was in Calcutta trying to find work as a policeman. That’s what Father was explaining to Mother, and Shekhar was eavesdropping absent-mindedly.
His brother had told people in Calcutta the name of the college he had attended but had lied about the names of his parents. When the college was asked to verify his identity they sent a telegram to Father.
Father was hurt most by the fact that his son had lied about his parents. That’s the sort of thing he was saying.
Mother said, ‘I always used to say, how in the world could anyone trust such a son?’
Father said, ‘Humph.’
Then Mother said, ‘And if you ask me in all honesty’—and then her voice suddenly got softer—‘ask me in all honesty, I’ll say that I don’t trust this one either.’
This one?
Shekhar didn’t see anything, but sitting there it didn’t take him long to imagine the whole scene, that agitated, stony visage and that thumb pointing towards Shekhar—‘This one!’
He sat like that, stonily, until night fell. He didn’t eat or drink anything. Mother came and scolded him, then she cursed her own fate, cried and left. Father came, yelled at him and left. Night fell, everyone was asleep, and it was perfectly quiet. Shekhar went into his room, closed the door and bolted it, blew out the candle and sat down on his charpoy and smouldered . . .
Much of the night had passed before he picked up his diary and tried to relieve his turmoil . . .
‘It would have been better if I had been a dog, or a mouse, or some stinking insect or worm—better than being the kind of man whom no one can trust.’
He got up. He stared at the wall, agitatedly, and said in English, ‘I hate her, I hate her!’9 Then he got dressed, jumped out of the window and started walking.
As he neared a park some miles away he vowed that he wouldn’t listen to his mother, he wouldn’t communicate with her, he would never do the kind of thing that would compel his mother to put even an ounce of trust in him . . .
He didn’t make this promise out loud, he wrote it down on a piece of paper. But immediately something inside him changed again. He tore the paper to shreds, threw the pieces on the wet ground and began grinding them with his feet—until they were invisible, covered with mud and buried.
‘I am trustworthy, will stay trustworthy. Why should it be my defeat that she doesn’t know how to trust?’
He came home just as dawn was breaking.
I see a disconnected scene. It’s very vibrant; I can often see it perfectly clearly, but I don’t always get the order right. I use the image that I have seen of myself in the scene to estimate my age, but my memory doesn’t help me be any surer of that estimate.
I am bringing back Father’s monthly wages after cashing his cheque at the bank. Father is at the office, and I am taking the money out of my pocket to give to Mother. There are several denominations and a lot of banknotes, and several silver rupees, and that’s why, when I see Mother’s extended hands, I say, ‘Mother, take them in your anchal, there’s too much.’
Mother slowly spreads her anchal, but laughs as she says, ‘I’ll spread my anchal only when you bring home your own earnings; why bother for this?’
I am about to hand over the money but I stop. I look at Mother with a strange look in my eyes, which she doesn’t seem to understand—perhaps I don’t understand it either. Then ignoring her outspread anchal, I pull out the side table and deposit the money there—‘Count it.’ And I leave the room.
*
When I think about how this is possibly among the reasons that I am here—as a reaction to this distrust—I don’t know why I refuse to give Mother credit for this immense change, for this incredible influence. I don’t know why my heart wants to deny her even this much gratitude, to be indebted to her for this undesired but good impact.
Ever since that day, no other image has haunted me—while sleeping or awake, conscious or unconscious, in fight or flight—as often as the image of the terrible, unexpected knowledge of her distrust. I remember, after I was arrested, when my thoughts first turned to home, I thought that when Mother heard the news of what happened, her first reaction would have been one of victory, something like ‘I knew it. I never trusted him!’ Then she would be sad, might even cry, or get angry, but her first thought, no matter how fleeting, and even if she immediately regretted it, her first thought would be that she should have seen this coming . . . and I don’t know why, but this thought gave me much consolation, made me perfectly calm and made me completely indifferent to the police’s excesses.
Forgiveness is the soul’s religion, but I am unable to do it. It’s not the case that I’ve become angry because of the things that have happened to me here. At least it isn’t any more.
I know that even if this hadn’t happened, I’d still have evolved into this state, become the person that I am today. There was some force inside me ever since I was born, or the germ of a force, which had been propelling me here undeterred, and still would be, even if Mother never spoke to me or said a word about me. This knowledge, on the one hand, prevents me from getting angry, but on the other hand, it also keeps me from being grateful . . .
I believe that revolutionaries aren’t made; they’re born. A revolutionary disposition isn’t fashioned from the power of struggle against material conditions, from the activities of life, from the action–reaction response to circumstances. It’s not something external that attaches to the spirit; it’s an innate part of it. I don’t believe in God because if we suffer from helplessness or powerlessness, these are not external factors, but internal ones. If they were external, they would be characteristics of another, and then we could call that ‘God’, but it’s inside us, it’s our own, even if it takes an external influence to make it solid. We could call it a ‘personal destiny’.10
It’s not my argument that Karl Marx was simply born or that Shelley didn’t learn anything from the world or that Trotsky wasn’t as affected by his world as much as he affected the world. What’s unique about a revolutionary’s spirit is that it remains revolutionary even when it embraces the modern ideas that are flying around as part of its development since it is more advanced than the most advanced sections of its times. That’s why Einstein is a revolutionary despite being born in reactionary Germany, and despite being cradled in the womb of the world’s greatest, fieriest, most intense world-historic event of the Russian Revolution, Stalin never became a revolutionary. He simply remained to pick up the scraps . . .
If this is the case, is it pointless to propagate revolutionary ideas? No, but if the ideas are being disseminated in the hope that they will produce new revolutionaries or that they will give rise to revolutionary possibilities, then they will prove fruitless. But if the objective is to recruit existing revolutionary forces, collect the existing will to revolution, to give it a line of march, then this objective will come to fruition.
After all, the revolutionary is a natural leader. Why should all of his followers be revolutionaries? If I am a carpenter, if I make things with adzes and planes, why do the adzes and planes need to be self-motivated and self-directed? Why is this necessary?
I’ve seen countless such individuals who say, and think, that a particular mental reaction to something made them revolutionaries, like Tilak’s funeral,11 the images of martial law or Jatin Das’s hunger strike.12 They lie! Or perhaps they lack the self-awareness that would allow them to see their own revolutionary instincts lurking behind these external causes, or then maybe they don’t have the instinct, and they aren’t revolutionaries.
Those are elements of a revolution, external manifestations of a rebel’s plan and reflective abilities, but not the necessary, fiery, inner drive that gives them substance and endurance. Under duress, they fall naked, their internal vacuousness, their bankruptcy, becomes transparent; these people, who trumpet the power and influence of eminence, hide a secret in their depths which escapes and bleats its presence.
These days our leaders repeatedly proclaim that ours is only an economic revolt. We have no bread in our homes, we aren’t paid our wages, we’re hungry, and that’s why we’re rebels. I think that this is ignoble, an immense insult to the self.
There was a time when ‘religion’ was the dominant force. Then, our hypocritical leaders tried to demean the idea of revolution by saying, the people’s revolt is not religious, but social, so we should have the right to reform our society. When ‘society’ began to become more important, those same hypocrites became nervous when they confronted it, and then they argued that they wanted full political control, and when ‘politics’ became important, they then claimed, we aren’t interested in challenging politics, we are rebelling against financial mismanagement. Vile, vile, vile! I say, O revolutionaries, come, first rid yourself of this vanity! Learn, understand, declare that we are not against misadministration, but we are rebels against homogeneity, against conformity; we want to change everything; ours is a revolution driven by our opposition to religion, to politics, to economics, and in the end even against our personalities.
Idols can be built from the earth, but the earth cannot be built. An even better idol can be made from the same clay or even clay of a lesser quality, but if there isn’t any clay, no amount of propaganda, no amount of education, no amount of burning sacrifice can create an idol.
A revolutionary heart needs a revolutionary-maker, in the same way that the touch of an artist can transform the clay. To complete a revolutionary, to create a quintessential man, one needs mental power, immense control, unceasing toil, just like one needs when making a work of art from clay.
But even after being fully trained, acquiring all the necessary abilities artificially, a person without that inner force can only become a revolutionary up to a point just like a picture with all the ornamentation and decoration but lacking inspiration can only be a work of art up to a point . . .
That’s why I say, I believe that just as a thousand years’ worth of effort is insufficient to create a Leonardo da Vinci or a Rabindranath Tagore, similarly, the generation of a complete and model revolutionary is a precondition for successfully bringing about a new century, a new culture.
The most important thing for an artist, after mastering a working knowledge of art’s internal force, is to have a pure reverence for art itself. Similarly, the most important thing for a revolutionary is to have a devotional attachment to revolution. That’s the only way he acquires the ability to lose himself in his work, to devote his entire subjectivity to it, and still have the power to judge it objectively. It’s the only means by which his drifting is intentional drifting—if he dies it’s because he wants to sacrifice his soul, if he loses himself in the world, it’s because he has understood his personality . . .
It’s on account of this, and exclusively on account of this, that he can perform any number of ‘immoral’ acts, but they won’t taint him; he can ‘sin’ and still remain pure.
Amongst these pure sins, one very important sin worth committing for a revolutionary is hate.
The capacity for an immense, comprehensive love is certainly within the repertoire of the revolutionary, but another element is also necessary, essential, alongside it—the ability to hate. An enduring, burning, terrible affliction, but despite being all of these things an objective, pure hatred, by which I mean the kind of hate you can experience with an attentive mind, not the kind that completely destroys us or drives us crazy and enslaves us.
This is something that the Nihilists understood. Hatred played a central role in their all-consuming, fiery passion, and they drank it like strong liquor and lost their personalities in it and used it as a model. This was the mistake they made, it came from the flood of their passion, carried in on a wave, a flood which initially rises high on a shore and slowly, hiding itself in a spray of foam, returns to its natural boundary. But still, they had taken this fierce, intellectual hatred to have significance, and made full use of its driving force, took full advantage of it.
The world still doesn’t understand this; the everyday ethical order of ordinary society considers this quite despicable. That’s why they think hatred is an unnatural tendency which destroys humanity, which prevents everything else. They don’t understand the power of this feeling, this epoch-changing power, if it can be used properly and rationally!
I fantasize about the day when our nation’s—our world’s—people who call themselves revolutionaries will be filled with a fierce but calm, rational hatred and they won’t be afraid of it, and will accept its inspiration and place their stamp on the world, and then plant yet another seed for an epoch-altering revolution . . .
Because revolutions are endless, permanent, because amongst their mechanisms, the most productive tool after love is this rational hatred.
Except for suffering—terrible suffering. Because suffering is also a high quality and very pure weapon.
But why write about suffering?
To describe a house and the specific landscape13 around it one has to survey it. Not by simply standing outside close at hand, but from quite a distance . . . so where can I go to talk about suffering, from what vantage should I weigh and measure it, determine its worth and significance?
*
Since then, I’ve felt as if my mind has been cleft into two parts. Sometimes it feels like more than two, but there are at least two parts. And as far as I can tell, the cause of this unbreachable rift is that imaginary image which my mind saw as it penetrated the walls of that kitchen, at the moment when Mother said—‘I don’t trust this one, either.’
This rift could have a reason, a cause, but only a psychologist could really know. At a minimum, though, I know that it exists. Because sometimes I myself have felt those two parts of my mind at war with each other, fighting for control over my conscience. And sometimes one has more influence than the other, sometimes the other, and the result is that there is a contradiction in my work, an incoherence that manifests itself, which people who only know me from the outside fail to understand, but which has entered into my personality and become one with it, dissolved in it like a solution. Sometimes it happens that neither side has priority, at which point they lay claim to the various centres of my brain, and so if one controls my hands, the other controls my mouth, or one will have the reins of my consciousness and the bodily apparatus will be run by the other. At such moments I must appear like a machine whose wires have got crossed but which is still in motion.
I’m not crazy! But sometimes I think that the line which keeps me on this side of insanity, the line which prevents crossing over, is extremely thin!
Perhaps it is just as thin as the line separating love from hate, cruelty from suffering, affection from renunciation.
Because these cannot be separated, everywhere that love is strong, hate is just as sharp. Suffering is not merely the result of cruelty, it is a manifestation of it, and the lover not only loses himself in love, but also loses the object of affection.
Love is such a slippery and sweeping emotion that individual personality ceases to exist. The lover never ‘remembers’ the object of his affection because he never forgets her. He becomes so accustomed to the idea of her that he never thinks ‘I should see her’, that I should make a separate, special effort to see her. When we look at a very well-lit scene we won’t notice the light, but when looking at a dark scene, we will involuntarily ask, ‘What part of this is supposed to be lit?’
*
Someone has sent me flowers.
If sunlight and shade complete one another, then shouldn’t a feeling well up when I look at these flowers? In this cell five paces long and three paces wide, in this piece of darkness enclosed by iron bars, why don’t I feel the glory of realization when I look at these flowers? Why do I feel entirely incomplete, totally empty, when I look at their scattered white beauty and their wide yellow eyes? Is there an overly zealous rebel, a destructive desire arising in me?
Break break break the prison,
strike upon strike.
Hey, what song have the birds sung today,
The rays of the sun have arrived.14
What must the person who sent me these flowers be thinking about these things she has sent me—what is it that scorches me for which I am nevertheless grateful?
She was a student of mine, but I wasn’t her teacher. I simply used to teach her, but she never thought of me as her teacher. I was like an older brother to her—but the kind of brother that could be loved, who could be leaned on, on whose support dreams could be woven . . .
And who could wreck them with indifference!
I need to teach her, work hard at teaching her. But she was never able to learn a thing! I used to ask her, ‘Do you remember the last lesson?’ That’s when she’d hang her head, meaninglessly smile and grow silent.
At that point, I would question her over and over, and then reprimand her, ‘You won’t learn anything this way.’ Then I’d sit her down to recite the last lesson again.
And she would completely refuse to read. She’d place the book in front of her and stare at it intently. Her eyes would fill with large tears and she couldn’t see anything.
Then I would say lovingly (but with only the slightest amount of love), ‘All right, I’ll do today’s lesson with you. Tomorrow, make sure you’ve learned both lessons!’ And then she’d read. And the next day, it was the same problem all over again.
Once I got really angry. When I looked at her tearful eyes I got irritated and said, ‘You don’t read or write anything, and then when I say something you start crying! I give up. I’m not coming back any more.’
I got up to go. Then she said, pathetically, ‘Where am I supposed to find the time? Mother works me to the bone every day.’
How could a teacher tolerate this? Her mother came out. I asked her, ‘How much time does she get to study?’
‘She spends the whole day with her nose in that book. I never say anything to her for fear that it will disturb her studies. Why, is she not studying properly?’
I should have told her the truth, but I said, ‘No, she studies, but if she got a little more time, then perhaps . . .’
She left. So I asked her again, ‘So?’ What could she say? There should be a limit to how long one can daydream while staring at a book!
I said in a sterner voice, ‘So now?’
‘I’ll study harder from now on.’ I started teaching her again.
Then one day I didn’t go to teach her. Missed the next day and the next. On the fourth day I wrote a letter to her father saying I couldn’t teach her any more. He sent me a cheque with my name on it the next day.
The story was finished. But the next day their servant, a young boy, came to me and said, ‘The mistress wants to know whether you’ll come and teach her.’
I barked back, ‘What mistress?’
‘The young mistress. She called for you.’
I asked again, ‘Sheela?’
‘Yes.’
She probably didn’t know that her lessons had been cancelled. I said, ‘Tell her I can’t come. Her father has cancelled her lessons.’
He left. I didn’t think for a second about what kind of a coward I had been for lying. I just kept thinking that I had won.
That victory was in fact my defeat. Had I told her the truth about my refusing to come, perhaps she would have considered herself the victim of injustice and found some consolation in that notion—I didn’t even leave her that possibility. Ever since then, her accusing spectre has been following me, crying, saying, ‘Liar! Liar!’
I run away, avoiding her. I’ve been running ever since. And now looking at these flowers I think, where will I run from these wilting blossoms?
But why should I run?
Sheela, I didn’t lie to you. I have, for sure, been lying to myself all these years. The lie that I told you didn’t mislead you; it misled me. But I understand my mistake now. Today, I, the brother who caused you pain, who gratefully acknowledges your devotion, who forgets his embarrassment and says that I didn’t lie to hide myself from you, ended up hiding from myself. This is the settling of that account whose payment you haven’t received yet, which perhaps you will never receive, but which has been settled and redeemed.
*
As long as the flowers were fresh, it never seemed as if they were bound. I had tied them to the iron bars of my cell, but the piece of cord that I used to bind them can’t be seen. Soft, white flowers tied to rods of black iron, a pleasant way to remember a very unpleasant truth . . .
Today, the rods remain. The dried flowers remain in their unceasing grip, leaving their own memorial, and hanging there helplessly. They are trying to make me remember something—who knows what! They say lust is fleeting, it wilts and then the fibres of love provide constancy in life . . . or perhaps it’s the other way around! They’re saying that when love dies, then lust carries its corpse around, hoping to hide itself in deception . . . they say, and they’re reminding me of something, they’re hinting at something . . .
On one of ‘the charming banks of the Ravi’—but whatever it is it isn’t charming—is a dense forest of small shrubs and stumps of trees. Like a long, drawn-out sigh, the warm, dead night. Above, a few stars, tangled in the dried branches of the trees, below, the vapours of the dried moans of dead and disintegrating leaves. And in front . . .
The scattered remains of a corpse. Both of its arms have been cut off. One of its feet has been cut off. The belly has been sliced open and the entrails are spilling out. Eyes wide open, piercing into the web of branches above, they’re looking, at some star. The mouth is smiling a warped, agonized smile.
He’s been dead for some time. There were a few witnesses present at the precise moment when that specimen of humanity fell like a broken column from a terrible explosion, but when he died, there was no one to help him disentangle the knotty turmoil of his life. They went to get help—leaving him behind. But it was getting dark, and the waiting one could bear it no longer . . . so he began searching for the last night watchman.
And when he returned with him, when everyone regrouped to pick him up and carry him away, had they lost him? He had gone away, leaving his distorted smile, a symbol of his pain and suffering, his hopes and works.
Those four or five men are standing over that body. They aren’t crying, they aren’t shedding tears. They are shedding their long-held ambitions because their goal had dissipated like the smoke after an explosion. He escaped, slowly finding his way through the tangled web of the branches of the dense jungle, writhing but quietly, leaving a full smile behind in that impervious solitude, and when the last night watchman left him behind, his own internal anguish had turned into a solitary watchman and was aimlessly watching over the dead lump of isolated hopelessness.
If we could ever uncover what the blindness of his wide eyes made out in that wilderness . . .
Those four or five men are standing over him. Standing in a line, at attention, heads bowed. With a feeling of respect, they all raise their hands in salutation and stand like that for quite some time.
They are all silent, the morning raag (Bhairavi) that would complete the scene is echoing in a mute voice from some place inside them . . .
These are the last rites of this soldier with a poet’s heart; the last shudder of that revolutionary’s revolution.
The scene fades out. The only thing left behind in that boundless white sky is that body left in a pool of clotting blood . . .
On either side of him are two figures—a woman and a man. They are looking at each other. Their eyes do not look down to see the corpse, their hearts do not feel as if they are desecrating the grave of some beautiful sacredness. They meet, wrap each other in their arms and copulate out of some bestial hunger, all right next to that corpse. And then . . .
Illusions! I am looking at the bouquets of narcissus flowers hanging on the iron bars and the pieces of cord that are binding them together.
For humans, lying, fraud and deception come extremely naturally because God made them in his image and according to our wisdom God is the biggest liar, fraud and con artist . . .
Otherwise, what other explanation could there be for the image that I see? Can humans sink this low—and so low right in front of such glorious self-abandon?
When I recall the circumstances in which that explosion and that death occurred and when I think about how at that moment that person was desperately blowing at the dying embers of his life to try and keep his nearly dead dreams alive a little longer, and how there were conspiracies plotted around him, and how wildly nakedness was dancing while taking cover in the lowest weaknesses of the human heart, then suddenly I no longer have faith in myself or the things that I’ve done . . . was this the stream of inspiration feeding everything?
I think that although conventional wisdom seems ready to accept the idea that every human impulse stems from a material need, I believe instead that humans have a metaphysical force within them, some kind of natural, genuine inspiration. Our biggest problem is to resolve these two mutually opposed principles. After this is resolved a thousand other questions. But this question is so big, obscure and sweeping that you can find examples of it at each step, and so we could spend our entire lives trying to resolve it, but the problem remains just as it was before.
*
Alas for all the loves that youth lets fall
Like the beads of a told rosary15
But why don’t I feel any sadness in recalling all of these scattered loves?16 Why don’t I feel feelings of failure or deceptiveness welling up? An angry rebellion wells up in me not because I’ve lost something or because I’ve borne so many burdens, but because I’ve inflicted so much suffering, so cruelly wounded so many innocent hearts . . .
What is my life’s realization? What is its purpose? All lies—nothing, nothing, nothing! Actually, less than nothing, a negative debt that I mistook for a treasure.
But what am I doing? Am I not making their affliction worse by offering up such base excuses for such immense wounds? Because there is really only one salve for the deepest cuts and that is the indifference of the cutter; mercy scrapes at the wound and reopens it . . .
What am I? What sense do I have of myself? What is the truth of a life on which so much energy has been spent, so much effort expended, in order to destroy it? A line drawn across dust flying through the wind, was that it?
It can’t be! All of my dreams cannot be worthless even if my life was worthless. I may be nothing, my works nothing, my life nothing, but how can my revolutionary impulse vanish? I have brought about a record of deep transformation, the ideal of a radical revolution in every object in the world—or at least as far as my reach went in the world—tirelessly. Will they be choked to death by the gallows? I may not survive, and no sign of me may remain, but will this force also be wiped out? Will the thrill of its illumination also be lost?
Science tells us that nothing happens, nothing will happen. Whatever has happened will remain until the end of the future and what is yet to happen was there at the onset of the past because the past and the future are nothing, because time is nothing, like height, width and length. It’s just a vector of motion, a form of it. And so even when I die I will be alive, but even as I live I am already dead . . .
I shouldn’t be so attached to life. But how am I being attached to life? Attachment happens when life has a realization. And I’ve been thinking that death is its realization!
But what? Science also says that you only get one life, that there is no part of human existence that is eternal. It is completely destroyed in death, nothing remains to be reincarnated . . .
And energy? Can energy also be destroyed? No, energy cannot be destroyed. It merely changes form. But energy is impersonal, and energy and matter are not separate—they are two aspects of the same thing. What today is my revolutionary energy will turn into a chain of irons to bind someone else tomorrow—some revolutionary who, like me, wanted to change the future, and who will be chained for the rest of his future.17
Alas, the small minds of men and, alas! The immense truths of existence!
But isn’t there some solace in this thought? Doesn’t it contain the essence, truth and success of all our activity and our evolution? In this utter destructibility are infinite reincarnations, limitless transformation—under the principle that no two moments can ever be the same and that in the tiniest fraction of time he can die and in the immediate next fraction of time is the possibility of his birth . . . I die because my life is merely an introduction to my death, in which reside thousands and millions of future lives.
I am the concentrated essence of my innumerable past lives. Beginning with the dead comet that produced life on this planet, and created a multitude of basic life forms, and from those developed countless different species of vegetation, reptiles, insects and mammals, I bear the imprint of this legacy on me. I am also in the many characterizations of the best paragon of a humanity that has ceaselessly evolved for tens of millions of years. From this perspective, whatever I am, I am not my own, nor am I anything new. I am a new edition of an incredibly old volume, an expanded and corrected and annotated edition whose original author is unknown.
And I am new, and rare. Not a single moment of my life has happened before. I am a new thing, a new promise that the future will keep, a lesson that will remain for posterity.
Permanence belongs to moments, but moments are desperately fragile. I, too, am, and whatever novelty exists in me, I want to finish speaking of it in a moment because it belongs to the future. I can’t stop without speaking it and there is no time to think—what is the life of a moment?
Let me speak my inner story, let me shed my inner anguish, let me scatter my inner light, let me allow my private experiences to be looted, let me give away my long-collected lessons of inner strength, the ecstasy of my inner being.
So that I may go. I am exhausted, so that I may sleep. But first, let me reveal my one secret, which is the race of man’s legacy to me and my legacy to the race of man—the story of my will to revolution . . .
What sorts of memories occur to me in my silence.
You are made anxious today, O Poet!
By the jangling of earth’s ornaments
The aimless, unceasing movements of unseen feet
Pulsating, throbbing the sound of your wandering footsteps
From your heart arises a clamour.
Who knows why your blood
Dances like the waves of the ocean
Today the impatient forest quivers
I am reminded of that tale
Proceeding through ages
Drunkenly, unsteadily
Silently, quietly
From form to form
From soul to soul
In the morning, at night
Whatever I have acquired
I have merely passed on
From song to song.18
I’ll speak.
As I consider the story of my life, as I consider its importance in the life of a revolutionary by evaluating and weighing and measuring each individual argument, I begin to hold it in higher esteem. There is something in this life. An energy, a celestial glow, which if it isn’t the will to revolution, it is definitely the capacity to worship the will to revolution.
I just remembered something from a long time ago, some ten or eleven years back. I was about fourteen years old then, maybe fifteen. This revolutionary sentiment was smouldering within me and I had wandered to many places before coming back home. I had tried very hard to lead a revolt against my own home and each time I would end up grinding my teeth in helplessness and insignificance.
One day, I don’t know why, I left home. I don’t remember how I came to this decision, or what compelled me, but I still remember today the feeling I had when I left. It is still boiling within me as if it will break through the external pressure and explode. I’m thinking with a wounded pride that there is no place for me in this enormous world, and I keep looking back towards my home as if to destroy it.
Beaming with pride and full of hope, I left my home. What were my worldly possessions? In addition to a small package of biscuits, one loaf of bread and the clothes on my back, an old overcoat into whose pockets I put both of these things.
I have left home to wander, and I’m standing on a hill thinking, where should I go? ‘Where to go’ doesn’t yet produce a clear feeling in me because it hasn’t occurred to me that sometimes you have no place to go. I didn’t feel compelled to go to any particular place; I am voluntarily choosing between many attractive directions . . .
My feet set off in one direction—I kept moving in the direction they propelled me. For the first seven or eight miles I had no idea where I was going; I never even thought about it as my mind was still fixed on vexing thoughts of home. But after about ten miles, my home became too remote for my thoughts. Then I looked at the road, and the part of the road that went off into the distance made me aware that they were taking me towards a waterfall that I had seen many times on a map and in my dreams.
I had decided to leave home for the rest of my life when I set out, but I hadn’t considered how I would survive for the rest of my life on a package of biscuits and a loaf of bread. And the sun was beating down hard, and I was very hungry . . .
I took my clothes off on the banks of the first stream that I came to and lay down. When my body had cooled off a bit I turned over on my stomach and dipped the biscuits in the water and started eating, and that’s how I polished off half of my life savings. Afterwards, I started to dream about a time when no one would have to suffer humiliation, whether in the home or in the world.
I got out of the water and put my clothes on and lay down with my loaf as a pillow so I could rest for a while.
When I woke up it was dark; the stars were shining. I looked around. I was walking through a coffee plantation, but there was no sign of the waterfall that I was walking towards . . .
I walked another mile. I was still in the plantation. When I came to a small brook, I decided to stop there for the night and at the same time remembered that I had a loaf of bread.
All of my savings were gone. I spread my overcoat on the ground and tried to sleep, using the protruding root of a coffee tree as a pillow, listening to the din of the cicadas.
I don’t know if the din ended first or if I fell asleep before it did. But I awoke in the middle of the night. I was shivering. I picked up the coat and wrapped myself in it, and tried to go back to sleep. The cicadas were silent. I listened. From a distance came a deep, oceanic sound. It was the sound of a waterfall.
Wrapping myself up in the coat made me feel even colder. So I put half of it on the ground and wrapped myself up in the rest and, in my endless attempts to keep this arrangement balanced, it somehow turned into morning.
When I could see the waterfall from afar, I sat down on the road and watched it for a long while. I thought that life should be like this, resplendent, limpid, filled with music, free, always alert and endlessly progressive, free from the chains of households and always rebellious . . . I got up slowly and walked towards it.
I don’t know how much of the waterfall’s frothy water I drank that day because water doesn’t alleviate hunger, and whenever I got hungry, I drank.
I passed the night under that waterfall. I found a clean and flat ledge that had been baking all day in the sun to sleep on, and at night when the ledge deceived me and turned cold, I fought with that geezer of an overcoat, trying to make it longer until night turned to daylight. Even after daybreak I didn’t wake up. I remained curled up until the sun came and spread its loving warmth across my cramped form.
My anger had subsided by then; the prior tumult inside me had calmed. I was sitting thoughtfully and observing the waterfall, noticing emptiness in its life . . . I thought that I could feel a stubborn monotony in its volatility, a subservience in its unrestricted freedom, a hunger . . . and I was drinking the water over and over again in order to hide from myself!
By the afternoon, that thoughtfulness had abandoned me. I was depressed and irritated. The feeling that I had was not unlike the feeling I had when I was leaving home. But now it was leading me back home.
It was a feeling of frustration and defeat and I couldn’t keep it from myself—my hunger wouldn’t let me ignore it. I got up and turned back! I passed the night on the road, and by morning I was back home. I had even forgotten my frustration and defeat and had a new respect for life, one that had become hardened and recast through pain and experience.
There had been a wide search conducted for me—but no one had thought to go near that waterfall. Father didn’t say anything to me, nor did he ask me where I went.
He quietly accepted my return. He possessed a generosity which allowed him to endure not only his own but the defeat of others—it took me a long time to recognize this in him . . .
I will tell my story with the newly acquired respect I discovered that day. That feeling of respect, which contains the equanimity of experience, the purity of pain and, perhaps, a little bit of the rage of defeat . . . because although my life has found a kind of realization, it is not quite complete. It’s almost like the feeling when someone has eaten and extinguished his hunger but hasn’t had anything to drink and is still thirsty. It is this story of the agony of completion and incompleteness that I will tell.
Oh light, oh flames! Endow that feeling of respect, that purity and that rage with durability so that I can centre my energies completely on that message which I have retrieved from the dark past of evolution, which I will leave behind for the bright future . . .
Sometimes I think, what can I leave aside from that terrible curse—because my life has been a curse.
Cursed be the social wants that sin against
The strengths of youth!
Cursed be the social lies that warp us
From the living truth!19
*
How should I write it?
Shall I compose my story by pouring all of the will power of my personality in it, using all of the analytical powers of subjectivity, and shout out a challenge full of pain and fire, or
Shall I step outside of my ego and examine my actions and the drives that inspired them from an external, objective vantage point, and speak a calm, dispassionate and intellectual message, or
Shall I think of it as a loan from some natural force, and then like a debtor paying off his entire debt when he returns it, make redress for some wrong committed and offer up a detailed, contrite confession?
Shall I think of my personality as ‘me’, ‘he’ or ‘you’?
I’ve come from a feeling of duty; there is a responsibility on my shoulders. So it is only right that I am like a criminal standing before a judge taking responsibility for his actions, one who hears the unbiased evaluation of his weighed and measured character in the form of a charge sheet from the judge’s mouth, and that’s why I think it’s best if I put myself in the form of ‘you’ and conduct an evaluation of it. Or in order to leave behind a memorial of myself, to leave behind the stamp of my personality and my prowess, I will call myself ‘me’ and express myself.
But I don’t want to do either of these things. I have accepted my responsibility, and so if I am ‘you’ then only for myself. Besides I have no selfhood, and the stamp that I want to leave—I am merely the art of the flow of life which will be reabsorbed in the flow—I am myself a stamp!
I have brought a message, which is not my own, but which I have received from the evolution of my race, which I say under pressure from an external compulsion. All of my actions are the result of a compulsion which is external to me, separate from me. I want to gesture to the future of that compulsion—consider it a force separate from my personality, something supernatural.
Therefore the story in which the message inheres will belong to ‘him’. His name is Shekhar. He is currently awaiting death. In this waiting he is revealing his selfhood to himself, and after reading the truth of his life, drawing out its essence and transcribing it, I will also be leaving.
I am leaving. Where? The same place he is going—where we are both strangers. Because we are indivisible, ultimately one. And our unity is awaiting its death . . .
*
I will say everything with an excited, all-consuming faith. I will say it all. Even if his life is destroyed in the process of making his brilliance manifest, even if it runs into nothingness and is lost, even if he reaches no one.
Destructibility!
When the thorns will be ravished by cruel storms of wind
Who will hear the words of the blossoms, trapped therein
When my selfhood will be mute in its final repose
The silence within me how will anyone disclose
Who, destructibility!