whispered lineage

Jalgaon, 25.XI.08

Grit that seems to come from under the door. As if self-willed, stolen in by night. In the morning, before I turn on the TV, there is a small ritual of gathering this fine sand, come in from the street, from different travellers’ shoes, from the largely arid wastes of the plains beyond the small town. A minor ordering against general encroachments.

In the mid-morning, the TV doesn’t work. The general power is disconnected, though this is only meant to last for three hours: a struggle with a minor addiction to the World Movies channel. There is a disturbance, outside, down the corridor, a brief verbal skirmish between a Spanish woman and one of the Indian workers: she is impatient and he is repeatedly apologetic, both it seems in a familiar mode, a small scene of disorder they have played out many times before this one. The woman wins the minor contest – even in India. ( In bed reading early Bellow by torchlight, this room immured from light, the adventures of the prose exploit this one, a youth again, in hiding, picaresque fugitive between walls. I never know what will come next.)

Later, with the power returned, there’s more sense in going out to eat. The Mumbai ticket needs confirming, down at the local station, an obscure, stray satellite of one of Dante’s purgatorial suburbs. And always far more people than the existing system seems able to accommodate. A thousand men materializing always at the head of the queue. If I were not a self with a self-project to enact in the world I could stay there indefinitely, eternally, relegated to the end of the line a martyr a saint of patience and waiting except that I have by this time gone beyond suffering it seems, suffering is what real people do and I am a cipher a circle a zero or orobouros not merely chasing its own tail because this tail and all its imaginary outgrowths have been digested, self-fellated so many aeons before there is no more of that fictional shambolic passage to show for it has been told a million times what more another Cervantes Sterne Rushdie or Foster Wallace to repeat the tale of misbegotten quests? Please, steal this cheap plastic pen, the cheap imitation watch from this same wrist that itself imitates how many yesteryears of DNA? In this queue in this queue in this queue I am nobody nada to wait to be waited upon by others to wait for the enaction the event the happening I believe it has become a truism to suggest that the à venir never arrives or does it or does it or does it.

I leave, I can’t wait, I abandon the confirmation side of the process, the ticket is in my hand, this is enough, this will be my way out of here, I will leave, I will be delivered in Mumbai, three hours away, tomorrow, my birthday, of all days.

Five more hours of powerlessness. It is good, it is better, to read, cut toenails, wash a dusty shirt, prepare cups of electric black tea and biscuits in my small escape-hatch, Bellow to hand. The town itself bellows, aches and roars dimly, beyond the single, barred window. The Spanish infanta departed. The Indian peon (archaic word, strangely permissible) – chastened. He eats his unlit lunches on the cool floor right in the corridor. In the early evening the TV appears to work. I seek ‘the world news’: but there is no English broadcasting. Hindi, Marathi, some Tamil, apparently. Perhaps Gujerati, even Malayalam. (Listed here only for phonetic pleasure.) But only brief skirmishes into English, occasional morses of escaped worlds: bandits, world summit, cholera, one-day test. Field day for a collagiste. (Be my guest, while I am yours.) Soon the transmission buzzes out, exhausted in the swinging temperatures. I sleep early, Bellow patient, near-silent (there are still echoes) by my ear. And it slips into the decision-making apparatus that I’ll go to the caves enter the grotto Buddha place, what wombs still there simple sublime, but here here but what I know but sublime but this desiccated wasteland outskirts of town, dried heart, small pitted dried fruit they sell like shrunken yellow dried pussy in the streets on a cart, to the caves on a cart thus have I heard Lord Buddha once saw lying beyond the palace gates a cripple an old man a corpse on a cart on a cart on a cart a corpse on a cart a corpse

          and saw a robed giver-upper in the muddy street and did the same did the same did the same did the did he did he did did di di di didididididi…

*

There’s no entry for the real-life journal, unlike this simulacrum. Strange European companion for the day, I never knew her name. Children, impeccably poor. Touts, scammers and shysters. Big thick horde-groups of French and German burghers. (Where’s my bacon, where’s my beef?) Not charitable, on my birthday, can’t afford to be, when so much is lost. Already gone. Gate gate parasamgate. Many of the finest wall-paintings ruined by vandals. But the echoing vaults there still. Buddhist sutta bled clean and transparent into the walls. Schist and basalt. Centuries of industry. Centuries passed now, only these marks here, nameless workers, unknown bhikkhus, bhikkhunis, carving into the empty vast of earth: full weight of elephant ear, chariot, flank of deva girl, so many breasts limpid fruit hung from the boughs of mango trees, how many sweat monsoons slipped away but for these austere dripping fruits of time. Before the body became an item, commodified by an unreal market value, gave supply a demand. Gave need, a craving. Tanha, or the Noble Truth, re-told by Cervantes and Co.

I pay the guide vastly inflated sums merely to regain my solitude. The beggars demand spiritual succour in the form not of mangoes but of Euros. Even the children disdain the bunches of bananas I offer them. While I am there I’m accosted by three local children, near-violent in their demands. I teach them to teach themselves how to make an offering – a Marathi folk song for paid lunch, a Bollywood shimmy for the schoolbooks they say they need. They are nervous at first, outside the regular routine, tentative as young horses drinking at strange water. Then satiric, parodic of themselves without ever knowing of punk or post-New Wave or postmodernism. They understand the disguises of irony, its self-protection, not yet ten years old, never gone to school. After their debut concert, shambolic but brave, leave them most of my last rupees. By then their song has been sung true. They can join the greats.

End of day dusk, before the bus is leaving, a poor farmer with splintering crystals gathered from his fields. Another I had had was stolen, weeks before. So I buy, just one, to replace it, the lucky charm from the Womb of wombs, the Door of all doors, the Cave of all possible recesses, refuges, and places of eternal safety. I buy, and will buy again, to pay penance, to placate the demons, to make feeble mark on my slate of credit out in the unreachable sky, I pay, I pay because in this world here below it is the only way we now know the only sacrifice we now make the only intermediary between the gods and ourselves we still trust in. So we will pay. And pay, and pay again. On the bus ride back I’m the only one standing, no-one offers me a seat. The ticket for Mumbai somehow between my fingers, November 26 ill-printed, foregone now, let slip through the window into the darkening night. The sunset is supernal. An ache of surrender.

Next morning the TV doesn’t work. I go for late breakfast, a year to add to those that have gone before. Back at the hotel the Jain proprietor offers me the front-page Times of India, shakes his head, little more. Then the TV is working, as if self-willed, I can’t follow the Hindi, but we watch, we watch, craning old survivors’ necks, lizards in the largely arid zones. Still alive, yes. Hell three hours down the line, the line that divides. But we know we have paid, as they have.

As they have but not as they have.

*

 April, 2009 Paris

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