

OMUNKASHYU

Dilshan Boange

Copyright © 2013 by Dilshan Boange

(KUBOA)/SmashWords Edition

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PREFACE

On the 27th of March 2011, I boarded the 7pm bus from Nandyal to Chennai with the kind help of Rachana Prasad Reddy. The courteous and convivial conversationalist that was within her, made her endearingly companionable. The sense of friendship that arose between us as we talked about things that defined us individually as well as culturally made it a meeting which got me thinking it was meant to have some serendipity involved in it.

After we arrived in Chennai with the break of dawn, we took leave of each other and parted ways. She left for her place, to get ready for another Monday at work; and I hopped a bus to Pondicherry. I was hoping to sink into some restful sloth there, and put myself to awaken my creative senses. Hoping dearly to conceive a story that would become my next work of publishable fiction. Thinking of how Yann Martel found his Life of Pi soloing in India, I too harboured secret prayers that I may find my journey to be one where a concept for a story would get kindled in me.

Soon afterwards as I was lazing in Pondicherry's 'French quarter', meditating on my thoughts, the idea for a story began getting sketched in my head. It was just a vague broad concept initially and no more. And of course the grain of it sprang from pondering on the experience of the nightlong bus journey from Nandyal to Chennai. What became central to my introspection was how much we define ourselves through conversation. 'Conversation' is possibly one of the most obvious of our behavioural phenomena needed to define our humanness.

On the 29th of March while in room 206 of the L'Ocean Guest House in Pondicherry, a word unheard sprang up in my head. It was spontaneous. And it seems that all I have noted of 'that moment' in my journal entries made that day was that the movie Constantine was on, on the TV in the room, the moment this word was conceived in my head. And the fascination I had with this word, its 'acoustic form', consequently got worked into my story concept in the subsequent days, and I made cursory, sketchy notes as the ideas developed in my thoughts.

The idea of storytelling and conversation as two oral phenomena that is central to who we are, as creatures who develop what is called a 'culture', took on a big role of this story, which developed significantly as I began drawing up its storyline after getting back to Sri Lanka. This was not going to be a conventional novel. That much I was able to see at the very outset. I hope what the reader finds in Omunkashyu is a narrative which proves to be a worthy read.

This is a work of fiction. There are no biographic motives involved. The themes of conversation and contemplation represented by the characters and the master narrator are not exact reproductions of my own conversations with Rachana. And a great deal of what is made the topics of what the two characters deal with, was developed subsequent to the bus journey from Nandyal. In fairness to all concerned, it must be noted that it is my imagination that drove much of the scenario presented in this story. It is a manifestation of my imagination devising a creative expression kindled from a personal experience.

The writing of Omunkashyu proved to be a greatly inward gazing experience where the power of recollection played a central role. A good memory and the ability to recall the past vividly, is always a means by which a writer's craft gains its spirit and substance. The writing of this book had me reaching into my repositories of memories of various stories. Stories I had heard, that had the intangible form of the spoken word, but due to their fascinating nature got imprinted on my fabric of memory.

The story of Somnath and Kamala Devi was a story once told me by a family friend, Mr. Tilak Ellegedara. The myth of the 'gini mantharaya' was a story that was told by a friend of mine, Waduge Jeewan Chandimal. Sifting out such stories and selecting them for their contextual suitability for the narrative and schema of storytelling in this story, thus had me taking on a bold liberty which I believe a writer is entitled to when crafting fiction,–improvisation.

The historical or factual bases of those stories I heard, and developed to be woven into this work of fiction, were not of any concern to me. Thus each such story cupped out from pools of memories was sculpted to a form of more solidity that would become more compelling, and of course fit into the architecture of this novel. And I hope the reader too will find me vindicated in my role as a fiction writer for the approach I devised for this novel.

Sincere thanks are due to a number of people whose contributions have been significant in this creative endeavour. Many thanks to Deshaka Perera and his wife Rishmila for the invaluable help offered in the manuscript preparation. I am thankful to Piyal Kariyawasam for thoughtfully lending me his copies of Knut Hamsun's Hunger and Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, which were books referred for this work.

Thank you to Nandana Sitinamaluwe whose contribution of critical feedback was very helpful. Thanks to Rishi Walker in Auroville India, for friendlily extending me his willing assistance to visit the 'Mathrimandir', and encounter the 'totality of silence' on the 2nd of April 2011. Grateful thanks are due to the publishers of this book Pablo D'Stair and his wife Sarah in Las Vegas USA, and their team at KUBOA. Their mettle as writers who support unconventional literary fiction is what has allowed this story to 'enter the world' as a book.

And of course, my sincerely profound thanks to Rachana Prasad Reddy. Had it not been for her, and that chanced encounter in Nandyal, it is unlikely, that the word 'Omunkashyu' would have ever had a chance to gain any meaning.

Dilshan Boange

02nd of March 2013

Sri Lanka

***

It is true... Kingdoms have fallen because the beauty of a woman became the universe of a man...

Nandyal. There is something of an eternalness in the way it flows out when spoken; yet as earthly as a word may feel to the lips. As if its solidness is inherent in its succinctness, yet meant to span meanings beyond the earthliness. Nandyal; there is something of a tranquil femininity in the way its sound flows when spoken softly. This word derived from Nandi, the name of the sacred bull, the mount of Shiva. Nandyal; a town in Andhra Pradesh, India; known for being marked by its surrounding belt of nine Shiva temples –the nava nandi. And here our story begins at the central bus station; where it is very unlikely to hear English in the chatter of the Telegu speakers. In India, the sheer volume of faces that throng through the streets of any major town can make one feel faceless. That is if you are the kind given to wonder what your face would mean amongst seeming infinitudes. And yet it is such places, when you pass through, as a wanderer driven by 'searches', that make you develop the need to know what faces may tell you. You learn to read faces.

Seeing how the next bus to Chennai would be over an hour's wait if he wants to travel in the assuredness of a 'reserved seat', Jaliya decided he would try his luck and see if any seats might be available on the bus that had arrived and readying to take in its passengers from the Nandyal bus station. Hanging around for another hour at this bus station, by himself, wasn't much of a pleasant prospect, he decided. There were three young men engrossed in a conversation, and by the look of them they didn't appear as the likely sort who would be able to assist him. After all starting conversations with people randomly may not be the most advisable thing to do when you are a lone backpacker in a foreign land. The next in sight were some very provincial looking women who certainly did not seem to be English conversant. Turning around to walk back, he then caught sight of her. There she was, his heaven sent assistance of the evening.

"Excuse me, miss."

She looked through the rectangular lenses of her specks and smiled at the young man who spoke to her in a well mannered tone of courteousness.

"This is the bus to Chennai isn't it?"

"Yes it is."

Her way of reply told Jaliya he had asked the right person. Yes, she was the helpful kind who restores your faith in the possibilities of the kindness of strangers, which of course is something someone like Jaliya had to rely on.

"I couldn't make a seat reservation. Do you think I could go on this bus? The man at the counter said if there are unreserved seats I could."

"Yes, if all the seats haven't been reserved you can. You will have to ask the conductor."

Her response indicated she found it somewhat curious how this matter was something needing inquiry. But it didn't suggest she was annoyed.

"Thank you." With a nod of appreciativeness he smiled at her and stood there with the unasked question standing at the tip of his tongue

"Er...miss, I'm from Sri Lanka." It was almost like soliciting her to understand the position he was in; and yes, the young lady's face showed the clear sign of being pleasantly surprised. Her half reserved smile now found a more fullness.

"I'm sorry to trouble you but I don't speak Telegu, do you think you could help me, by asking the bus conductor if there are any untaken seats?"

"Yes of course." Her smile was sincere, happy to have the chance of being helpful to a traveller from another country.

"Thank you so much."

"No problem."

Jaliya's face then had a certain look of being relieved and smiled gratefully taking a step back respectfully to allow the lady her space. Seeing the passengers closest to the bus beginning to board, the young lady picked up her single piece of luggage and told Jaliya to come with her. Climbing the first two steps, she spoke to the khaki uniformed conductor and then turned and smiled to Jaliya standing behind her at the bus door.

"He says they have. You can go."

"Thank you." The words exhaled as his face beamed at her.

"You are lucky." She said putting her suitcase under a seat which wasn't on the side of the window and getting settled into it.

"Usually, on Sunday nights, it is impossible to get a seat without a reservation."

"Thanks so much miss." Jaliya set his backpack down at his feet plopping into the seat from across hers.

"I guess the gods are being kind to me." He smiled thankfully at her.

"You are welcome." The light laughter that mixed with her words was the kind that spoke of a convivial nature. The kind who enjoy the company of a good conversationalist, and would not be suspicious of strangers on principle. She too had read his face.

"I'm Jaliya."

"I'm Rachana."

"It's a pleasure to meet you Rachana."

"Same here, it's a pleasure."

They shared a smile that felt as though it meant to fill in the lack of a handshake, as their heads settled on the headrests.

This bus is bound to Chennai, coursing an all night journey, expected to reach its destination at around daybreak. On average the bus ride will take around ten hours, providing of course that no breakdowns or any such unforeseen obstacles were to arise. By daybreak they are meant to arrive at their destination and end their nightlong journey. Yes, that is how this bus ride goes. This bus ride that Rachana is only too familiar with having done it routinely as any average Indian girl from Nandyal would when she travels home for the weekend and then leaves back to her seat of work in one of the big cities in India. But this was admittedly the first time that Rachana had had a Sri Lankan boarding the bus with her after having sought her help, and seeking in a most congenial manner, her companionship, on a journey which was 'foreign' to him. Yes, Rachana will vouch for this claim; it is the first time in fact that she had even met a Sri Lankan.

"Rachana, do you mind if I ask, what your name means? In my own language, Sinhala, it means 'essays'." His words were the convivial sort that makes a distinct impression of being the opening to a conversation, and an eager one at that.

"Very much a similar idea, in a way." Rachana doesn't sound all as much surprised as Jaliya expected her to be. "It means scribe in Telegu."

"Wow, so I guess then it means writer?"

"Ha, ha... yes, but I am not one." Jaliya for the first time sees a spirited laugh from his travel companion sitting across from him, on the other side. Laughter. Laughter, delicate and true; a very feminine expression which he always finds a pleasure to behold. The kind of laughter that makes a man find himself made to feel its mirth seep into him, simply by the mere propinquity shared to the endearing laugher. A lone backpacker in a country that makes him feel the daunting force of facelessness finds very little mirthful moments like sharing laughter true.

"Oh, but I am sure you would be a great one if you tried." It isn't a polite jest to build on the friendliness that is incipient between them. No, in fact Jaliya feels it to be a plausible aspiration. She is an educated young woman, was what he had thought the very moment he saw her.

"Do you mind if I ask what exactly are you going to Chennai for?" Rachana thinks it is very well mannered of him to have asked it in the tone and expression that he did, almost an apology in its delivery lest it becomes too bold a liberty. It elicits a small laugh from her. As though she feels she is duty bound to make this young man feel more at ease and not allow him to keep himself tied to some unspoken inner trepidations that he may think he must carry in him as almost an obligation. Yes, her laughter speaks much to him. He knows that he may find a sense of restfulness listening to the words weaving images between them. She tells him how she travels from Nandyal every Sunday night to arrive with the rays of dawn in Chennai to begin her week. She is a software tester. The bustling city of Chennai is her city of work. And Nandyal her hometown, where the people, she claims, are so homely that a person who may step inside a shop, if had a proper conversation with the shopkeeper, would be remembered instantly by them even ten years after. His eyebrows arch in a gesture of partial disbelief. She maintains her good natured composure visibly stifling the impulse to giggle in amusement. She affirms it to be true. Yes, even after ten years, a person who may have stopped by once would be remembered...

"Nandyal is a very nice place to call home I suppose?" She reads his smile as a sincere one that probably means to convey certain things within him. He is a traveller after all, she thinks.

"Oh yes." He sees how her own smile is a complacent one that says of how perhaps she now feels the growing distance between herself and where she calls home.

"It always feels good to be there." There is something of a nostalgic thread in the way it was said, he feels, as he watches the look on her face which seems to say she is drawing inwards for a mere moment; to some inner sanctum where she may hold in a farewell embrace an elusive love. She looks at him as if out of apology and says with a smile.

"So what is taking you to Chennai?"

"Going to Pondicherry from there actually." He beams at her hoping to put their conversation on a path away from whatever that may cause her any tinges of sadness she may not speak of. "I'm meeting a friend who is working there."

"How nice." When she says these words it carries across that little distance between them, a sincerity bespeaking her well wishes for him. He smiles thankfully. And he sees that her face and that smile accompanying her words somehow had hints of weariness. She is happy for him in the way she would be happy for a dear friend who is about to fly to the arms of a true love. Yet, the unreleased sigh in her had touched her lips to flow over her smile. And Jaliya had sensed it. Is it the weariness of the journey? The one she makes every Sunday night? Perhaps, he thinks; after all it is a lone journey she must make every time.

The bus comes to a provincial station and a stream of passengers noisily clambers inside. The sari clad women of a noticeable provincial exterior seem the rugged kind to Jaliya. He observes how some of them occupied seats in pairs when the seating is meant for one. And such a pair has incurred Rachana's reproach for wanting to take the empty seat next to her.

"Rachana, is there some problem?"

"No, it's ok. These women want to sit together in the next seat, and I said that mine is a reserved seat."

"They want yours??" Jaliya's voice has a tone of concern and censure.

"No; it's that if they both sit it becomes uncomfortable, since one of them will be shifting a bit onto my seat space as well. And I am trying to make them see that I am in a reserved seat and that I don't want to be travelling uncomfortably."

And while this exchange of English happens the Telegu women look on in somewhat puzzlement. Rachana speaks to them in their local tongue and only one woman slides past Rachana to the seat next to her. Jaliya is impressed by the way this young lady handled the situation that sought to compromise her right of comfortable travel. Her firmness had checked the women from asserting a more communally lauded way. Surely her sophistication is the strength one such as she would have in such circumstances, he thinks. And in their talk flowing across the aisle they tell each other of things from their respective cultures. Rachana expresses how she resents the Indian ways of presuming any place is anyone's space when it comes to situations such as the one that had occurred. Jaliya tells her that is would be unheard of in Sri Lanka to be so presumptuous, and how the space of another passenger would not be sought to encroach upon through the guise of communal 'cooperativeness'. She says she wishes people in India could think more considerately as in the ways Jaliya says is prevalent in his country. They tell each other of their family constitutions. Numbers of siblings, parental occupations, their lines of education and also their own 'civil status'.

"So tell me..." says Rachana in a smile mixed of curiosity and tease "...when are you going to get married?"

"Have you been talking with my mother?" A chuckling laugh erupts, making some of the passengers seated within hearing range wonder what the joke was about. Keep in mind that the bus is now only partially lit with a dimness that may suggest a time more appropriate for a nap.

"Don't you have a sweetheart?"

"Had one." His smile is the kind that says he has faced his share of tribulations in love and romance.

Love. Perhaps the most elusive of human states of emotion that defies finality in definition. Love; that which is impossible to know until you're in it. And inexplicable, thereafter. Miles and miles away from all that he knows to be home and the world that acknowledges him as being part of it, Jaliya finds this query about his past on this most bitter sweet of topics to be an opening for him to relive a story more meaningfully. To give his own past a newer rendition.

"She left. It was a couple of year ago. It wasn't anything to do between us but what prevailed in a more forceful way, making her whole family migrate..."

This story has Rachana drawn into a moment that has very effectively closed off the sounds and sensations that the world around her would otherwise touch her senses and encroach her thoughts. The cough of the pan chewing woman next to her wasn't heard. The thrust of a hand on the back of her seat's headrest wasn't really felt. His words were transporting her to a scene that she feels very empathetically for.

"...Politics is an ugly thing Rachana, no doubt you'll agree...Her father after all couldn't do anything so corrupt, and had refused to give in...The threats continued, it became that bad...She herself felt very worried about what could happen, and was even having sleepless nights...Her elder sister was of course married by that time, but her younger sister was still schooling...Her parents felt it was best to leave...They had got sick of living in Sri Lanka with all that harassment... "

"She was willing to leave you?"

"She wanted me to leave with her."

When we speak of an episode from our past that haunts us with some regret, it is possible that we seek some vindication. Some form of self sought penance to punish us so that it may heal the wounds by undoing the sin of some foolishness that always beleaguers the soul of youth in that sweetly oppressive trial called 'first love'. Jaliya was once told by a girl of his own age that she would one day write a book collected of stories from people she knows, about their experience of the most unforgettable love of their lives. It would be 'in homage to love' she had told Jaliya looking deep into his eyes, intently, as they sipped coffee. She said she believed every person has one great love story in their lives etched in their memory's 'eternity' as solidly as their physical existence. And that story, she had said is what every person would treat as being definitive of love, and how love can be illustrated in their experience. She would be a collector of such stories she had said, to give them an enduring form and place in the annals of literature written in Sri Lanka. Her own? When Jaliya asked her, was told 'it is yet to happen', and then a sip of coffee followed through her mischievously smiling lips; her eyes resting on his.

"But then Jaliya, didn't you want to marry her?"

"Yes, but not to migrate. And the thing was that was what she thought we should do..."

Love is about compromise. It is always such greatly willing compromises that one will find one does when in love. And marriage is probably the ultimate test of that path of compromises done in the name of love, for that happiness only love brings. But marriage is a contract to continue compromises, unlike the voluntariness of lovers not bound by the institution of matrimony. Marriage as a 'willing compromise' may ensure a path of togetherness. But a path of 'compelled compromise' forged on impulsions of youthfulness could lead to a very different outcome. And it was such an outcome that Jaliya had feared as a twenty one year old.

"...To leave the world I know and everyone, well...the thing is, I never planned to live my life in another country."

"Wasn't that a compromise you were willing to do for her?"

"...It would probably make me lose her altogether...that's how I felt about it."

"How is that?"

"I believe love does not happen in a vacuum...The world we met in and the one where we built our past holds much of the reasons that kept us together...And what if I had married her and found myself hating the new life in a foreign country? I'd be miserable and at some point I am sure I might begin blaming her for it...I would have by then lost both the world I knew, and the girl I loved."

The prospect of living in a foreign land and building a life in marriage, away from all that you know to be home and the 'world', is a matter that faces Rachana very compellingly.

"So you let yourself lose her for the fear of losing her?"

All Jaliya can offer in response is a smile that says almost apologetically 'perhaps'. And so now Jaliya feels he must tell Rachana how his last sight of her, that moment of goodbye was such that it proved how he lived very deeply in the poetic impulsions propelled by love. He tells Rachana of how he rushed to the airport in the very last minute and took her hands in his and asked one last time to rethink her decision to leave. Rachana listens, enchanted by the moment she is being taken to by his words... He tells her, looking deep into the eyes of the one he loves and loves so truly that he will not risk allowing that love to be sullied someday. The gaze of two very caring parents falls on two young lovers who tenderly hold and kiss each other for the last time. No one disturbs them in that moment of parting which begs to be allowed rebellion against time. The feel of her breath draws away from his face. Her touch slips out of his hands as gently as water. Her eyes growing misty become distant. And the departure happens. He looks on as she walks past the emigration counter. He looks on as her hand wipes away the tears. He looks on as she turns back her head one last time and holds the sight of him as though that moment was meant to be their one eternity...

Rachana looks on at this articulate stranger and the world he had taken her to –his past. She gazes at that emotional moment from his past sketched by his words from a time and space unknown to the two lovers who have now taken abode in her mind...

Is this story true? The moments of beguiling romanticism, its beauty of the tragic? It has Rachana dwelling deeper into a world that takes her far away from the ruggedness around her. She does not ask for its truthfulness. And Jaliya is the keeper and crafter of his own story as any other. It is words narrating moments such as the one told her that makes her fly to a place of contemplation, to secretly reflect on her own life, and the love she let go...

"Rachana?"

"You are so lucky." Her smile is only partly visible. The lighting in the bus isn't at its full capacity.

"How is that?"

"You had that moment to say goodbye to her."

His eyebrows arch to himself and a quiet sigh follows. He smiles to her appreciatively. It is not a response he can do with words. And what about her? Jaliya knows that deep in her own quiet thoughts is some distant love that no longer walks beside her arm in arm. He can read her face.

"This woman sitting next to me asked me where I am travelling with my brother." She grins and at the same time there is a hint of having being irked.

"Your brother?"

"That's who she thought you were."

His eyebrows knot and he squints at the woman next to Rachana in the dim light.

"What did you say to her?"

"I asked 'what brother?' Then she said 'the one sitting on the other side'."

"So who am I exactly?" Jaliya is curious in his tone which has a bit of mischievousness to it as Rachana detects.

"I told her you're my friend."

"And?"

"She was a bit shocked I think."

"Why was that?"

"That a girl would be so bold to be talking with a boy on the bus who isn't her brother!" She laughs in a way that says of some inner sense of heroism. And this makes Jaliya chuckle.

"So, do you always talk to a boy travelling on the Sunday night bus to Chennai?" It is a tease well disguised in a neutral tone as a perfectly logical question from a person who is asking for information. For a moment she looks at him bemused. Catching onto the words of this jovial teaser she retorts in good humour.

"Only if they don't speak Telegu. And completely helpless without my assistance."

"Like I said before, the gods have been kind to me."

Will she tell him? Of her own lost love. The one she thinks of every now and then, whenever a moment of solitariness makes her wonder what it would be like to have his companionship again. The barriers of caste had prevented her from going with him on that journey of marriage. Her last meeting with him had not been allowed the tenderness of a parting as in Jaliya's story.

She remembers the look. He had been bitter, and his face taut with a hidden rage. How could he not be, after having been humiliated by her father and uncles at his own doorstep. For the sin of being born lowly. And yet all the apologies she had to profess with the urging of a gushing river were not going to be heard. He had no want for them he had said, and declared that to forgive her for the wrong done to his family's dignity by her kin, would make him truly lowly. Debased beyond all self worth. There are certain things that cannot be forgiven was all he had said, looking at her with an apology of his own that can never be uttered as words but may only be said from his eyes to hers.

"...we met in the evening, after sundown, it was dark..."

Her words have Jaliya going deeper into the beauty of a tenderness of a moment sanctified by the right of young lovers to defy the world. He now sees Rachana in her expression of part worry and fuller relief as her sweetheart calls to her from the darkness of a small lane into which the spray of light off the street lamp does not fall far. She peers into the darkness with a racing heartbeat. His face appears and their hands rush to clasp together, feeling the warmth of the other's touch. A faint beady sweat rising between their palms, fearing the unknown. A union readying to defy all odds. The journey they had vowed to embark on.

"I cried and begged my father...he was with his two brothers, my uncles..."

They catch hold of Rachana and rip asunder the young lovers. The grip, the young hands have on each other, is not strong enough to resist the pulls of paternity. A forceful shove sends the young man tumbling to the cement floor of the bus station. She appeals in tears to her father and uncles. The menace in the very look of the men speaks of the promise of physical harm if he dares come closer. She is in her rightful place. The custody of her father. No lover unapproved may ever touch her again.

"We were only fifteen...Seems like a lifetime ago, like from another life..." Her smile is one suppressing a ruefulness as much as it suggests of how she feels it seems surreal, looking at it from where she relates it now.

"Where were you two going to go?"

"Anywhere at all...We had no real destination. Just the idea of running away. The journey was the only thing we had in mind...So long as it took us away."

"Does he still live in your hometown?"

"About a week later, his parents sent him to live at his uncle's place in Maharashtra."

And no, they did not meet each other again. She tells an empathic Jaliya. There had been no letters from him. Rachana admits she waited in the hope of hearing from him, yet no news ever came. Perhaps any letters sent never got to her she says. Perhaps her parents made sure any such correspondence would never make its way to her. Rachana never got to know where he was. And of course all that had happened in the time before the youth of countries like India and Sri Lanka, immersed their lives in mobile telephony and social media.

Did this story really happen? Is it true? What claims does it have on it from the past lived in reality? But then, like Jaliya, Rachana too is the keeper and crafter of her own story. For each story ever told passionately in this world by a living voice there is someone who truly lives in the enchantment it creates. And it is this truth of feeling that matters to Rachana and Jaliya as they find in the other a sincere listener to the respective stories they live in, and wish to share.

Every person believes they have a story to tell. The first true, real love, the most emotionally benumbing tragedy, a monumental triumph that proves the strengths within, an incomparably courageous feat of selflessness, a sadness untold that begs to be put to rest...But who will listen to these stories? When does one's life take the form of a moment attractive enough to be embraced by another? It is in the retelling of our lives that we shape it to become the poetry that we feel it deserves to be. Something more than the mundane, something more than what the listener can also claim to have lived. For every time we tell the story of our life, we allow that past to regain breath to relive its cyclical motion. Thus, in this cyclical motion we live, and relive; simply to submerge in the growing beauty of those stories. And the worlds they take us to.

In Michael Ondaatje's novel Divisadero the character of Anna, compelled to run away from the world of her childhood, finds a life, a voice, a self, that remoulds her in a newness which is silently haunted by the past. The world that divorced her, and was divorced by her. In her words to us, unfolding who she has become in her new life, she expresses her belief that through the telling and retelling of our own stories we tend to slip into a life fixed to the 'recurrence' of those stories. And perhaps one may say, even a life is thus founded on the satisfactions of storytelling.

"...Do you think about him?"

"Often..."

Yes, there is a need in just about every one of us, sometimes to be a raconteur. And perhaps through the rights of a storyteller we seek at times to escape the cycle we live in. If our listener may allow us to tell our story the way we wish it had happened, regardless of factuality, perhaps then we may hope to alter the permanency of the stories we are fated to retell. If ever we possess the power to remould our personal pasts to our desires, it would in turn be the truest beauty of our present. For the narrating of that past gives us the chance of living a dream. A dream whose sanctity may rest on the spoken word...

The bus noisily rattles to a stop and there is the commotional shuffling of feet and thrust of bodies towards the door. The woman next to Rachana pushes past her legs with some inconvenience in the rush of things. A string of passengers gets in; their eyes hastily scanning for whatever seats available. Rachana sees how two more women appear at her side bearing the inevitable plan of sitting together in the seat that has fallen empty next to her.

"Shall I come over there?"

"I think you should."

Jaliya heaves up his backpack with his right hand and goes over. The two women move to the seat just become vacant without thinking twice. The bus is settling down from the sudden burst of passenger boarding. Jaliya now has a window seat on his right. A companion on his left. And there is a feeling of complacence that has set into him. Possibly the proximity to Rachana has made him become more settled in his composure. She is now only a whisper's breadth away from him.

She settles her head back and smiles as her head turns to him. There is an intentness he feels very strongly in the gesture. The way her head moved gently under the pallid of the dim light.

"I love to travel." She beams at him, making Jaliya respond with a smile that almost seeks some elucidation of those words spoken sincerely. Trying to speak what belies her.

"You mean like this journey to Chennai?"

"In general, I meant. I love to travel Jaliya, especially night time travel." Her voice now comes as though there is some distance she reaches for with those very words. A distance which is somehow very much within her. A place of rest perhaps, but not one that has been freely afforded to her.

He feels there is a sense of great calm that has set on them both as they sit next to each other. This makes Jaliya feel a smile come on him as he turns to her.

"There is something very peaceful about travelling at night." He is now reaching to an inner place of his own. "I rode the bus from Alagada to Nandyal passing those long stretches of fields at dusk, looking into the distances that run to what looked like mountains covered in a misty night at an unreachable distance... And there was something very peaceful in the feeling of that moment...It was the fact that I was travelling that made me feel so at peace, just looking at the scenery passing outside the windows."

Getting off in Nandyal town, travelling from Alagada, he would be back to the backpacker routine of trudging around making inquiries for an affordable room to lodge for the night. Dodging tactfully the advances of touts. Keeping a straight head about him despite the weariness of body and spirit. Jaliya knew all that awaited him as that rickety bus would come to the bus station of Nandyal. It was a respite he had found from the burdens of thinking of such unpalatable inevitabilities, sitting in that rear bus seat between locals who simply knew him to be an outsider and no more. Gazing into a distance of endless expanses of crop fields under a sky coloured by shades of the setting sun, he had found it afforded him a moment of peace. A peacefulness had seeped into him. Painted in the picture of that scenery, passing outside the windows of an old Indian village bus...

The thing is, when you are in motion, away from the grips of the world, travelling if one may call it, there is that peace of escape afforded to the traveller which cannot be found when made to stand in the midst of what constitutes our universe of cares and duties. When you consider that lone ride, when you are made an object of pure motion, disallowing the world to net you into its manifold schedules, perhaps then, for at least a mere moment, we truly do live in a peace that only the wind knows of...

Why does Rachana love to travel? What is it about those words that were just said and its expression that has Jaliya thinking that it was that very line in all its simple wording which perhaps defines the most inner being of his travel companion?

What are you trying to escape Rachana? What belies that beautiful smile you enchant me with? Half hidden in this patched darkness gliding over us... Jaliya's thoughts take him on a silent search of his own. Such a search too can be some form of travel...

"I can be myself, in a way... Not being in a routine of work..."

You don't like entrapment. The kind caused when you are motionless. Made motionless.

"...There is that niceness of the scenery passing too..."

The newness keeps your mind fresh. Fresh and alive. And to know that you are in motion, yes it is a comfort...Because the world passing outside can't trap you...

"...And the world outside, with its worries won't bother you..."

You are merely passing through. Taking nothing but the beauty of the sights that run past you.

Every traveller who ever gazed at the world passing outside the window is a voyeur. Observing a world that is unconscious to your gaze, drinking in the relays of motion; people, places, expressions of faces whose words if ever had been audibly spoken, are muted by the power of the traveller's flight. The traveller. A position that defies being clasped by the chaos of the world. And in each of us there is a strand that thrills at the hope of escape offered by travelling.

But when the journey stops...? What awaits you Rachana?

Will she tell him? Will she tell him of her approaching nuptials? As they move along through this bus journey crossing borders of villages, towns, and states, and meant to finally cross that fluid border of –'night' to 'day'. On the other side of the world is a man to whom Rachana is betrothed. In a few months he will come to India for their wedding and take her on a journey across oceans, to Germany, where he is employed as an accountant at a marine engineering company. The parental choice. The paternally approved.

"...Both my sisters are still studying..."

She now tells him of her role in the family. The trials of being the eldest sister and the endearing burdens she will carry, in being many persons to them in the course of her life– playmate, teacher, confidante, guide, and 'stand in mother' when needed so. She tells him of her maternal grandparents, to whom she professes absolute devotion. A devotion she has declared as surpassing the filial bond.

"... 'Amma–amma' that's how we say grandmother."

"Mother's mother? Is that what it means? Because in Sri Lanka Amma means mother..."

She tells him how Amma–amma who dotes on her, had packed her a couple of roti for her dinner. And as the bus comes to a stop in some small provincial station with its little night bazaar, a considerable number of the passengers disgorge from the bus to get something to eat. Rachana unwraps her small parcel and invites her companion to partake in a typically Indian meal. It is nearly a month since Jaliya last tasted home cooked food. The taste and texture of the simple roti with masala carries in it a sense of the endearing homeliness that one does not find in food cooked for the buyer. He thanks her for this generosity. She has become a strength to his waning spirits in more than one way.

As the bus resumes its motion along the path of its journey the lights inside get switched off. Except for one blue light located just above the board fitted behind the driver's seat. Its dull light spreads a weak glow. The intermittent flashes of light coming through windows when passing by lampposts ends as they exit the little township and get onto a stretch of outland. Now in this darkness, the figures that were once so very livingly pronounced have become tracings of sounds, vague outlines, hazed between certainties and suspicions.

Jaliya tells Rachana how the air-conditioned sleeper coach he took from Hyderabad to Kurnool had a movie shown during the night journey. A Telegu film which had a central hero in his mid twenties who at the opening scene itself singlehandedly fights off more than a dozen villains, executing some of the most physiologically extraordinary acrobatics with an ease as though it was child's play. Amidst the giggling laughs she tells him though however much she adores movies, how she abhors the thought of going to a cinema hall. Jaliya is stunned to say the least. After all, he thinks, who doesn't like to go to the movies? Considering how back in Colombo, the dens of young love in many instances are in fact the 'picture halls'. In such an enclosing, the world is generally made to vanish. The darkness and the magic of the moving image on screen create havens. Escapes.

"...Not even with a group of friends? That is usually quite a lot of fun..."

No. Rachana is not amenable in her disposition when it comes to this matter. She has a very fixed idea about going to the movies. And it is rooted in her world of experience.

"Only once Jaliya, and I hated it..."

He can almost see in full view her face grimace. Yes, his mind is now well attuned to what her expressions are when she speaks. These rhythms of gestures and words of hers have now taken abode in his mind as mental pictures.

"...Absolutely hated it, and I said to my mother I never want to go again!" Jaliya simply has to know what made this wonderful young lady harbour such resentfulness.

"Why? What was so terrible about it? Was it a frightening story?"

No, it was nothing to do with the movie that was screened. In fact Rachana today doesn't even remember what it was about. Not a trace of the plot, nor the silver screen idols can be found if she scanned her memory of that evening, going with her family to the very first movie theatre opened in Nandyal, when she was just six.

"It was not the kind of movie theatre you get nowadays. Not like what you would find in Chennai or Mumbai. Even the ones in Nandyal now aren't like that one, this was some time ago..."

A time when she was a child and the world around her was bursting with new experiences that would invariably, as with most children, leave impressions that shape our perceptions and attitudes towards the world. It is in childhood after all that we believe the revelations of the world may have in them some magic only known to children. Yes, the impressionable age of childhood affords us a freedom of subjective thinking that allows us to judge and label the world as we wish. Unbound in potentials for discoveries even in the most mundane; the world is always such a large place, in childhood...

"...One thing was the seating. There were no chairs. It was like steps. Tiers, and people took mats with them to sit on. The ground was so dirty..." She shirks; he sees it marginally visible, an outline of a living person blanketed by night, seated next to him. "...from that moment itself I didn't like it Jaliya. And the people, the men sitting around us..." There is a pause and Jaliya tries to catch onto the tone of those last words spoken before she withheld herself. What was it?

"Did anyone try to harm you in some way?" He spoke with an intended calmness. Hoping to calm the incipient anxiety in her, betrayed by her voice. Her face not fully readable in the dark.

"No, not like that." She grows relaxed. Her words more of an assurance. "It was... well don't get me wrong. Very...how shall I say, the provincial, kind?...The typical masses types."

In Jaliya's silence, there is a certain manner that tells her his ear is devoted to her words.

"I felt nauseous. They were all chewing pan. And the smell became unbearable...it was horrible. I still feel disturbed when I think about it. When I make myself go back to that moment, that place. In the darkness. Surrounded by those people, and that smell taking over everything my senses could grasp. It almost makes my head spin to even think about it."

"Did you wait till the show ended?"

"No." Her response is immediate, as if though trying to slip out of some oppressiveness. "I began crying actually. And we left even before the intermission."

"What was the movie about?" He senses in this dark that covers her face, a smile has come upon her. This simple question has taken her out of the tenseness her memory had coiled around her.

"I can't remember actually. Not a thing about the movie."

"You were too busy getting annoyed with the smell of the pan." He makes her laugh quietly.

How sad, thinks Jaliya. It is a shame that such an incident had forced her to divorce the movie theatre altogether from her life.

"What about with your sweetheart?..." He hopes he isn't being too brash. But Jaliya simply has to know. "...didn't you want to go to the movies even with him?"

"He thought it was very strange of me. That I was objecting so much about going to see a movie. And when I told him about it, he laughed and said it was very childish of me. But I kept saying I don't want to go inside a movie theatre again. He knew it was useless. I felt sorry in a way for not being able to have a movie date with him. He wanted to take me very much."

In the time before digitalisation took over the world's youth and the realms of telephony and cyber space merged, there were certain rhythms that coursed the paths of young lovers. There was a gentleness, as of flower petals blooming to the sunlit world, that shaped the propinquities between young people who were discovering love, and their own entry into newer maturities. Both Rachana and Jaliya knew of such times. Smiles and shy waves of departure. To hold hands in public would be a bold venture, and that first time would usually find a place in a diary page. This was the age when they as schoolchildren would write love letters during classes. Partly thrilled by the adventure of concealment from the teacher. Yes, Rachana and Jaliya knew of such times in their lives. And in such an era going to a movie, its proposal and confirmation wasn't a simple text message away. Making a movie date, progressing to that stage of comfort, was a sublime development. It was symbolic. A token of propinquity. She has missed out a great part of her young romance, he thinks. And Jaliya feels he would like to share a certain mesmeric moment he had in a cinema hall. A moment that has now slowly flown into his mind. Softly it rekindles that feeling he felt. How he solitarily romanced the beauty of that moment.

"Rachana?"

"Yes, Jaliya?"

"Do you really dislike watching movies that much?"

"I love movies, I buy a lot of DVDs."

"Sorry, I meant going to the cinema."

"Hmm, you seem to be a great fan of the cinema..." It's almost as if she invited him to open to her a part of his world, that he seems to say is bound with a love for the silver screen and the magic of being in that gentle darkness that gives life to the movie.

"It's just that there is a certain experience I'd like to tell you."

"With your sweetheart?"

"No. Much more recently. Not long before I set off to come on this trip here. It wasn't a movie date. I was by myself."

The darkness within the bus is not brushed aside even occasionally from a sweep of light. Outside the windows is uninhabited outland. And most of the passengers, the good fellow travellers of Rachana and Jaliya now seem to have drifted to sleep.

"It was not at a movie theatre..." His words, she senses, are contemplative as if becoming seduced into dreaminess. "...It was the auditorium of the Russian Cultural Centre in Colombo..." Above a whisper yet somehow touched by a lulling serenity "...But of course it functioned very much as a movie theatre with the big screen and the lights all switched off, and the hall itself being rather large..." A serenity that seems to be coming from a distance "...You see Rachana, the Russian Cultural Centre has film screenings free of charge. And it's such a film screening I remembered just now..." A distance from Jaliya's own world, a serenity he wants to regain, and to do so he reaches inwards, his eyes closing, drifting back to that moment sitting by himself watching The Barber of Siberia...

"I was sitting in my favourite seat. Middle area, the last one by the pillar on the right side entering the hall..."

He tells her of the character Tolstoy, the Russian cadet of the imperial army and the antics of his clique while riding the train on which they chance upon Jane, played by Julie Ormond. He tells her how endearing their sense of innocent mischief was. How it reminded something of his own days of the spiritedness of a schoolboy. He describes to her the cinematic beauty of the scenery shown of rural Siberia that mesmerised him...

"...It gave the kind of feeling that makes you settle more comfortably into your seat and be allowed to be swept into the romance of the moment, its sheer beauty..."

...The smile of Julie Ormond with its enchanting allure he found sublimely bewitching...

"...Rachana, the grandness of tsarist Russia with all its splendour, its sweepingly impressive ceremonial pomp and pageantry...the artistry, cultural magnificence was truly a treat for the visual senses..."

...He tells her of the numerous characters, how their paths intersect, coalesce and collide as universes unfold...

"...The pageant of emotions the film presented, unfolding in the melodiousness of cinematic beauty seeped into me Rachana, showing a landscape painted in the colours of the human heart..."

...In front of his eyes those lyrical images move once again, in the soft darkness.

"...Loves, nostalgias, sensual desires, grief... how moments of propinquity as fleeting as the flutter of a bird's wings become blooms of serendipity of the larger flow of destinies...truly enchanting Rachana. It was beguiling..."

The words of Tolstoy the young cadet of the tsar's army come back to him, those words which gripped him, spoken as Julie Ormond prepares to offer herself...

" 'How can I?...You don't love me' Says Tolstoy. His words leaving his lips that turn pale. Dumbfound, his heart has been made to feel numbed by the words of the stupefying prospect, made by Jane...But then, that naïveté Rachana is the beauty of youth, and its young love. Born pristine and true to the heart and not driven by the carnal senses of biology...No, Tolstoy's desire was not to court Jane and profess his love to her so that he may qualify to taste the lushness of her fruit.."

...No Jane, it was not to taste your body's suppleness that Tolstoy toiled as a hapless young lover. It was his innocence that made him magnetised to you. The innocence of a boy bordering manhood, in love. Love. True and sincere.

"...I believe Rachana that Tolstoy's love to Jane was the kind that believes its very being will make it turn immortal, as it transpires in the human heart to pour out beauties that will live long past the mortalities of the lovers themselves..."

Jaliya is unravelling in his words what he believes are the silent sentiments of those arrays of cinematic images going beyond what was spoken. To an audience whose only recourse to that story right now are the words spoken by him. His rendition of the beauty of that work of cinema, which beheld him in its enchantment.

"Love, and the grief of its loss... And the beauty of such silent emotions remaining as secret tenants of the heart, who will never breathe a word, but remain in eternal secrecy, in the sanctities of memories of a past that is unspoken yet yearned for... That is one way feelings can take form, as visions of living pictures. The magic of cinema."

And from that moment he lived of his past, he opens his eyes to a darkness that engulfs his sights into blindness. The gentle fabric of darkness inside the auditorium drizzled with light coming off the screen, evaporates. But through this thick blanket covering him now, comes the voice of Rachana.

"Jaliya, that was beautiful."

He has arrived at his present. The feeling of that moment from the past lingers, having dwelt into the repository of memories within him to evoke that moment to life again. Whenever we allow such moments to relive through our words, we renew the past with life into the present. And when such life is breathed into the past through the words spoken in the present, the past walks amongst us. What Jaliya did was to gaze back at that moment, at himself sitting quietly in a tranquil moment of serene joy, solitarily, and entered that world of emotions birthing within him. A moment not spoken of with anyone, until now. As much as the past sometimes is full of emotional turbulences, at times the past sits in an unspoken joy of the heart, in a tranquil quiet, in a supple darkness of a film show, marginally visible under the glow that falls off the screen, watching peacefully, absorbed in an endearing solitariness, a film that marks an experience of beauty. And as Jaliya reflects on that moment from his past, it kindles in the gentleness of a firefly's glow 'a moment of poetry'.

"It was almost like listening to poetry." Rachana speaks softly as if careful not to rupture the tranquillity she feels in the air between them. And she senses Jaliya's smile, it is understood in the way he says "Thank you. A lovely compliment."

But Jaliya didn't tell her what had been playing in his mind that evening at the Russian Cultural Centre in Colombo as he immersed himself in the charm of the movie. He didn't tell her of how he thought up of how the story being played on the big screen could have had a different turn. In a way, a different story, altogether. In his mind, he thought of Tolstoy and his band of friends as being bound as tightly as brothers, sharing a common past of childhood. After Tolstoy becomes enamoured with Jane, they embark on missions of their own to help him win her heart. But alas, as possibilities develop for Tolstoy and Jane, the young cadets become embroiled in the chaos of an approaching Marxist insurgency as per events in history brought on in those times. They would be despatched to various posts in St. Petersburg. The imminent collapse of the tsar's government forces non-nationals to leave Russia. Jane finds herself in difficulty to make it to a boat leaving with foreign nationals. Her only exit out of a Russia engulfed in flames. The carnage wracking the city is too hostile for a woman of her delicateness. Tolstoy comes to her aid, abandoning his assignment. He begs his friends to let him go to her aid and to wait for him before leaving for their next post. He takes her safely to the dock and they walk up the gangplank. She steps inside. Her hand tightly holding his. She turns to him, and their eyes hold each other. There is a moment of confusion. She assumed he would come with her. Tolstoy is stilled of all expressions. He can only hold the sight of her face as though they were in their moment of eternity. As the horn blows signalling departure, Tolstoy's hand leaves Jane's. He steps down the gangplank, her voice wails his name. For one last glimpse of her, he turns around. He sees her being drifted away to a distance of safety. Unable to tear his eyes from her, he gazes out his farewell. He finally turns away, slowly, to leave. He is felled lifeless by an insurgent's gunshot.

Can such a story really happen? Well, it certainly happened in the private narrative Jaliya made for himself as he was sublimely swept away by that cinematic moment. Yet, why didn't he tell her that storyline? Why not tell her that 'alternative' he had sketched in his thoughts? Jaliya's purpose we may assume was to give expression to a moment that he had been taken into by the magic of cinema, and make Rachana feel drawn to the experience he had become part of. Whereas his alternative was a 'private rendition' which is not as fully lived. It was after all in his own mind. And not beyond. What credence could it have unless told as a story of his own? These we may assume lie in the subconscious of Jaliya. If for a moment we are to think of giving a visual dimension in our minds to the final moment in Jaliya's private version of how Tolstoy's and Jane's story ends, it may develop a moment that is in complete contrast to the final moment actually shown in the film, of Tolstoy's eyes beholding the sight of Jane. She gallops the horses of her carriage to charge faster and faster along the road through a forested terrain in Siberia. He watches her. From a distance in the woods, hidden, unknown to her. He is invisible to her, beholding her departing sight destined for the distances beyond him. And in this final moment, Tolstoy, a criminal in exile, lights a cigarette and keeps watching Jane almost as if fulfilling a secret vow.

Rachana hears the sound of his breath. She realises that it is the first time she hears it consciously. The pause of his words has made his breathing audible to her ears.

"Jaliya..." She turns to him in the darkness "...tell me a story."

She wants to be taken away into a stream of scenery unfolding from his voice. She wants to move out of the darkness through his words.

He has been called upon to be a raconteur. To take her into a landscape which he is at liberty to create at his will. And what story then will he tell her? Of his own life? Of the lives of so many countless ones such as he and her? Or perhaps of people and events that could only have the chance of being true in a story narrative...

"Close your eyes Rachana..."

...He wants her to take in his words and give them life as her own visions...

"...Think of this story as like a movie..."

...Rachana is free to give the heroes and heroines and their antagonists the faces and demeanours that will make them best suited to her visual tastes...

"...Think that a story of images will flow just for you..."

...And thus begins his story for Rachana.

"...In a time before known time, there was an island. Mystically shrouded in mists, of both heaven and earth..."

An island, he tells her, believed to have formed when a slice of the golden face of Mount Kailas had fallen to the ocean after the trident of Shiva struck against it. This island, he says to her, with all its enchantments had become the abode to four tribes of peoples, whose feats were miraculous and awe inspiring to even some of the gods, who began to envy them and the abundances of wealth they enjoyed that sprang from the heavenly properties possessed by the land...

"...They were called the Helas. Four nations that became a single state, and were called the 'Siu Hela', Siu meaning 'four'..."

...They had been people capable of great mysticism and superhuman feats, yet lived in absolute harmony, with each of the four nations having its own system of laws and norms that applied to every one of its nationals regardless of where they inhabited the island. Jaliya tells Rachana that it was not a system based on principles of territory that made a person subjected to a particular law of that island; it was their kinship to their respective nationhood...

"...The worshippers of the ocean and spirits of the waters, they were the nation of Naga; a people of a complexion of soothing light blue...The sky worshippers, who had their dwellings mostly in mountain regions, who harnessed the energy of starlight and prayed to the wind and the cosmos were the Deva...Those whose deities manifested in the mightiness of great stone boulders and worshipped the durableness of iron were the nation of Raksha ...And the nation that worshipped the earth as the mother of all beings and believed fire as the ultimate enigma holding all secrets of power and life, was the Yaksha..."

Rachan envisions these fantastic people who had inhabited a land in an age unclasped by time. It is beyond myth she thinks. It is whatever Jaliya will allow his words to create in her mind. For her to behold and be witness to.

"...In the middle of their island was a magnificent lake where water lilies of five colours bloomed in the morning and folded their petals to sleep at sunset, and five nocturnal lotuses of different hues would open to the moonlight... and this vast lake which was almost an ocean, had at its middle an islet on which no one of the four nations had ever set foot..."

The shades of the water blossoms, the ones that open to the tender rays of sunlight and the kinds that open to caresses of moonbeams take shape in Rachana's mind. She tries to drift into such settings of morn and night which blend into each other as reflections on rippling water. It is not the time of these happenings that matter to her but the beauty that beholds her as she lets Jaliya's words become images...

"...One night, this distant islet came alight as a spark of fire from the heavens fell on it..."

...She pictures this moment as a beautiful mystery violating nature's norms of night and morn. Imagining the light of heaven coursing a fleeting dawn of crimson...

"...It was learnt by the wise seers of the four nations of the state of Siu Hela that what had descended was a gemstone of unimaginable power and indescribable beauty..."

...He tells her of how the heads of the four nations arriving in regal pageantry to a grand assembly decided that it had been a gift from the gods to the nation that proves to be the most ingenious, and thus worthiest to become its exalted possessor...

"...From then on it was a race between the Nagas, Rakshas, Devas and Yakshas to reach the islet and claim the prize that lay waiting for its destined owner..."

...Each of the nations had begun to build a bridge to reach the little landmass in the middle of the great lake. And as their tensions and enmities grew towards each other, devious acts were perpetrated, for each wanted to have an advantage over the other in the race...

"...As the clashes became more fierce, they decided they would all unite to build just one bridge. A single bridge built in amity to claim the gemstone as a common prize."

...What will this story be called? Rachana now wants to know this very basic of details...

"Jaliya, what's the name of this story?"

...The four nations had begun building their bridge. From this point onwards they will not turn back regardless of what the outcomes may be. Whether they will reign together in unity, or fall into dissent allowing treachery and avarice to reign over them.

"It's called, 'The bridge to Omunkashyu.' "

Omunkashyu...The word pervades in Rachana's thoughts. It offers itself to her. It offers her its form of sound and takes shape as an image. Thus it begins to gain meaning. It becomes a word she can appropriate.

"The bridge to Omunkashyu." She says it in a whisper to complement the way Jaliya uttered it to her.

How did this word come into being? This acoustic property? A word coined by Jaliya at Rachana's behest? Is it a word? Is it a word yet? And are we to believe that such an arbitrary act has now given a new verbal sign for Jaliya and Rachana to communicate with?

"Yes, Omunkashyu. The gemstone they were fated to war over."

Where does this word come from? Did Jaliya pluck it out of the darkness over his face? Can this arbitrary coinage be justified? Does Jaliya even think of any of these matters? No. He is too preoccupied with narrating the developments of the story to Rachana. Yes, it's understandable. He has in her a completely faithful audience. But what is interesting at this point to note, now, in the aftermath of Jaliya's liberty taken in coning a word, is how in this act we may see a certain attribute of modernist fiction. The modern novel was birthed by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun whose novel Sult, which was translated to English as Hunger, presents the wild discursive of a first person narrative that was later dubbed as the narrative technique 'stream of consciousness'. What is relevant from Hamsun's novel is that the unnamed narrator lying awake in the absolute pitch darkness of a police station cell, in a 'deep darkness', which he says does not even allow him sight of his hand held in front of his eyes, creates a word –Kuboaa. The conditions described by the protagonist prior to this coinage take the reader into the disturbing darkness that encapsulates him. A darkness which he says is a blackness unlike what he had ever seen before. A darkness which he terms as a blackness become an 'extreme element', he says 'no one ever before had noticed'. What can we learn of this when we think of Jaliya and Rachana? Yes, the darkness around them does blanket them into a solitude of sorts. But we may be assured it is unlike what the protagonist of Hamsun's Hunger experienced in that police station cell. No; in the darkness they sit, there is some sweetness that keeps them wanting it. It is their cover. In a way, it keeps their story real. Because intrusions of light right now can rupture the fabric they are weaving to drape them together. But let's return to the word of Kuboaa and all the modernism it presented in that dark room as the nameless narrator of Hamsun's novel lay in his cot, terrified of the darkness that he battled against. Kuboaa. Whatever could it mean? Kuboaa, does the sound of it give any indication? This is precisely what battered the mind of the word's creator as he sat in that darkness which was a blackness as an 'extreme element'. Hamsun's protagonist dismisses that it need not mean something as 'god' to be a word that carries a meaning worthy of some sense of exaltation. What could be higher than 'god' after all? Yet he dismisses very vehemently that Kuboaa does not have to mean 'cattle show' either. Oh yes, this defence he upholds very firmly. Possible meanings of 'emigration' and 'tobacco factory' are also dismissed. And we must keep in mind that all these possibilities spring up and get rejected in the consciousness of a single man who is in an internal debate within him. 'Yarn' as a possible meaning to the word when it comes up spontaneously is rebuffed with a tone of aggression almost, as the narrator claims he has a 'special aversion' to its meaning. The narrator of Hunger tells us that the most important thing was his 'discovery' or what we may even say was his creation; the word Kuboaa. What it will mean is a secondary matter, and asserts it purely as his prerogative. To define in good time, at his discretion being the rightful creator of the word. What then is Kuboaa suppose to mean? One may never know, for it is left undefined of its signifie or 'signified'. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, hailed as the father of modern linguistics, claimed through his teachings that a word is made up of two main components or 'sides'. It has firstly an 'acoustic image', or the sound element forming a pattern that has auditory distinction, which is known as the 'signal' or the more usually used term –'signifier'. And then there is what is called the 'signified' or the 'concept' represented by the 'signifier'. It is this 'concept' that has not been assigned to the 'discovery' by Hunger's narrator. After all, there need not be a 'signified' be born simultaneously to Kuboaa, since according to de Saussure, the connection between the two are arbitrary and have no inherent link existent from the point of conception. Therefore it is but convention that governs the meanings of these words.

The words of Jaliya now tell Rachana of how the mystical allure of Omunkashyu began to enflame the hearts of the leaders of the four Hela nations, to break their accord. He tells her how the lustful cravings for possession of power and beauty began the fiery war. As streams of water arose in the form of serpents answering the prayers of the Nagas, mountainous stone boulders became living giants to aid their devotees the Rakshas, and the supplications of the Devas evoked the winds to become arms of death delivering force, while the element of fire moved as wanton waves and walls of destruction to the calls of the Yakshas.

"They became desperate, and resorted to crafts of magic that plagued their whole land with devastation...When stone was brought to life, taking the form of giants moving to come near the precious stone, to claim it, walls of fire rising as high as mountains would wrap them, and under the intense heat the might of stone would shatter... And it seemed the Yaksha nation had been able to lay a final fortification around Omunkashyu, depriving anyone from coming close enough to possess it...Yes Rachana, the winds of the Devas though they blew the fires asunder could not douse them for good... The claimant of the gemstone seemed to be the leader of the Yakshas who was learning the mystical craft of a certain mantra that would make him immune to fire, so that he can walk through it unharmed and claim the prize...The elements themselves seemed to be at war Rachana, and in a final desperate attempt to stop the Yakshas from winning, Virupakkha lord of the Naga nation conjured a great body of water to force through the firewall with his daughter riding inside, having taken the form of a female cobra... This regal creature was to swallow the gemstone and no sooner then was to exit the inferno with the tide sweeping out..."

Jaliya narrates to Rachana how the Naga princess after being bathed in the pulp of blue lotus petals and white sandalwood took the form of a sapphire skinned serpent. She bowed in obeisance to the mighty Virupakkha, her father, and followed him out of his palace that looked out from atop a cliff to the emerald sea.

"...A mountain like column of water rose from the ocean..."

The eyes of the Naga princess, he says, gleamed as though she was witnessing an epiphany, a calling to her own self. The ocean in its boundless vastness was answering to their supplications. And as the incantations of Virupakkha flowed intensely, she realised that the ocean too would have to be paid its dues.

"...She took flight on that river of water moving through the air..."

The saviour, as her father saw her, who would deliver Omunkashyu to him and his nation, moved fearlessly through the flames and claimed the gemstone into her, and rode out with the emerald waters rising skywards to return to whence they came. And as that river, moving serpent like through the air, moved past the terrace of Virupakkha's palace, he raised his hands in homage to the great waters and bade his beautiful daughter alight to his arms. The royal serpent turned once more to her human form with the gemstone, in all its dazzling glory, held in her hands, for her father's sight.

"...Her eyes were misty and sorrowful Rachana, they didn't sparkle as before..."

Omunkashyu had brought great suffering to the Siu Hela. And the princess knew from the moment she saw the ocean deploy a great river to her father's bidding, it was meant to end the mindless warring.

"...She bade her father farewell with her silent gaze, and rode with the water into the ocean."

It had been the only way to end the destruction that engulfed their land and its peoples. To her it had been an act of setting balance to the order of things. Of realising the course of destiny. It was a sacrifice, and not a betrayal.

"It ended the suffering in her land."

"Yes. It was her destiny."

"And then what became of Omunkashyu?"

"No one knows Rachana. It remains a mystery."

The word mystery moves out of his lips like a whisper with the likeness of a wisp of hair that moves across the face when touched by a gentle wind. Mystery; Rachana feels the sound of that word hang before her dissipating gently into that comforting darkness. The warmth of his hand just a hair's breadth away from hers. And she sighs to the silence that now rests around them.

She thinks it is wonderful and strange how sleep has not claimed either of them although the hour should be quite late by now. It has to be the charm of storytelling she thinks, a smile lurking within her. Jaliya now wants to hear her voice come to him past that thin veil of blackness. The warmth of her arm, resting beside his, wafts to him. This sensibility causes him to want more of her being to manifest against the blackness that deprives them proper sight.

"Rachana."

"Yes Jaliya?" He loves how she speaks those two words together. It affirms his presence as much as hers. It affirms their togetherness in this innocuous fulsome dark of the night.

"Have you ever thought of becoming a writer? Like your name means?" It isn't a question in jest, she knows. But more like a probable invitation. To allow her a voice, bespeaking who she is beyond the details of what is seen of her. The world after all may judge of what it sees of us and what we allow it to see of us. What then can we reveal in the darkness of what we are, but cannot be seen as?

"I have never thought of it." Rachana's words are pensive and her tone of voice says the weight of Jaliya's question is something that is beginning to grip her. Perhaps her own storytelling could allow her a space to become someone else, and leave her life and its designated junctures. The impending wedding. The departure overseas, to another life. The morning, and its duties awaiting her on arrival at Chennai.

"What about you?" There is a certain elevated spirit in her voice. "Have you ever wanted to become one?"

The response from him is silence. A silence of meaning, she supposes. Her question has brought on that silence in him. Speaking in its form of wordlessness of what lies in his inner being.

"There will be a young man, who has entered university. He is in his freshman year. He needs some means of income to meet his expenses..."

Rachana is glad the quiet has been broken. His voice now kindles her to imagine this young man. This young man whom she grows curious of as Jaliya's words create a shape of him to reside in her vision, under closed eyes. A young man like him? She has that question in her, now, as he speaks...

"He has a manner of quietness. Unless he finds suitable company. He believes in conversations of a purpose. Talk that can enrich in some way his understanding of the world..."

Perhaps this is you? I can see this young man. A quiet person whose thoughts run deep. Searching for some greater meaning in things that form his world. From where are you conjuring this young man?

These thoughts interlace in Rachana's mind with the image she is building to the spoken words of Jaliya. Yes, she too has questions she may not give voice too. In this gentle darkness that tries to almost coo her to sleep while his words drape her...

"...He is the kind who would find solace in solitude..."

...Will she drift into sleep? And dream this story Jaliya is developing? No. The world of sleep has not been able to claim her just yet though the darkness may want to seduce her to it. She wants to be awake to his words. It is not the image of the story alone that matters to her. It is also the presence of a voice –his.

"One of his neighbours offers him a job, of sorts. The neighbour has an elderly uncle recently widowed. He has one child. A matured son in his mid forties. He is unmarried, lives with the father who is now in his eighties. Every Tuesday to Friday the son returns very late at night. It's because of the work he does. Only a manservant is in the house. The old gent needs a companion to bear those evenings till late at night. The loneliness is too much for him, he is an educated man who had held high positions in public administration....And so..."

And so, this is the start of a turning point it this young man's life. For a somewhat modest amount, sufficient to meet his requirements, he becomes the paid visitor. Every Tuesday to Friday from five to ten. He proves to be a worthy conversationalist to the old gentleman who sees a new world through the eyes of this young man as they enter into dialogues that enrich their evenings by reaching across generations.

"This is a story I would someday like to write Rachana."

And will it be a story of your own life Jaliya? She cannot help but think it sharply. Is it so? But Jaliya has not given any indication of it to her.

"Will it be a novel?"

"Maybe. Or a novella. A short novel."

What makes a person want to be a writer? Do we address our minds to that question when we assume the position of the reader? Or for that matter should we ask, what makes a person become a storyteller? And what makes a person listen to the narratives of a raconteur? On one hand one may say these are truths best know to these personae whenever they are in those respective roles. But perhaps Jaliya and Rachana may reveal such truths as they sit in their splendid isolation. Bothered by no one on this bus which now drifts into a placid slumber of its own. Though the engine runs and the driver steers it on, there is a certain curtain of quietness fallen over the rest of everything. Muting a busload of passengers from being a living body of human burden to Jaliya and Rachana. Let us assume it is the hour that has claimed them, taking them to sleep, while Jaliya and Rachana continue in their refusal to accept the existence of time's conditionings.

"What is the plot of this story Jaliya? How does it end?"

"Its plot is in the stories they tell, the knowledge they exchange. The worlds they each find opening to them through the words they speak. The meeting of two generations, one that is slipping into the quietening dusk, and the other feeling the morning rays, hoping to shine forth someday... There is nothing of the conventional novel in this story. Not like the Victorian flow of plot and all that. No Rachana, it will be a fiction that tries to journey into the souls of these two. This venerable old gentleman who has seen a world and its many changes and lived its times and now wants to pass on what he has learnt of life, to a patient and caring soul of the generation that will shape the world to what it will be. A world that is sometimes so very incomprehensible to him..."

They speak of travels. The old gentleman describes to the young man his numerous overseas visits. Opportunities that he was privileged to have had as a government official. The young man hears of the awe inspiring sights of the murals of the Sistine chapel. The grandeur of Buckingham palace and the elegance of the tomb of Napoleon. He learns of the palace of Versailles; a creation in homage to luxuriance, which despite its great ostentation had not a single toilet. Jaliya tells her how one dusky evening the old gent asks the young man if he has read The Old Man and the Sea. The young man answers that he read it as part of his prescribed readings for studies. With a placid smile half shadowed, the gentleman expounds to the young student of literature, why Hemingway devised the most simple of language to narrate the story of Santiago the fisherman. The great writer it seems had begun to distrust 'erudite' language.

"...Touched lightly by the last rays of the setting sun, a light that seeps through the shady trees outside the veranda they sit at, the gentleman says how he finds the story of Santiago endearing itself to him in ways that sometime make him feel slightly disturbed...Getting up from his seat he asks the young man to follow him to his library. They enter a space that is revealed from the shadows as a light switch clicks. Surrounding them is an awesomeness of knowledge to the young man who sweeps his sights over the spines of books cased in mahogany shelves reaching an impressive height. A space he believes is in homage to the beauty of reading and the sanctity of knowledge. The wrinkled old hand moves gently. The fingers slowly grasp the top edge of a slim, leather bound, spine of a book. The volume is placed in the young hands of his young companion. He is told it was bought years ago in Washington D.C. The young man holds a first edition of The Old Man and the Sea. To his speechless joy he is told, it is now his to keep..."

Jaliya sees these two figures in the elegance of that library. The emotional depths of that moment, as treasures are bequeathed, and a man's legacy finds a way to survive for another generation. Beneath the closed eyelids, he feels their presence becoming closer. He sees the tenderness in their faces as they find in each other kindred souls.

"...They converse about history. The great narratives that charted the courses of civilisations...their words take them to the great land of Bharath and of the battles that shaped the course of the subcontinent..."

And what wonderful stories of this ancient land will they talk of Jaliya? What in your story will you write about this country, bringing it through conversations between that dear gentleman and the young student? Perhaps I could guide them...

"...The temple of Somnath, said to have been built by the moon god Soma, the eternal shrine, becomes a great fascination to the gentleman who tells the young student of its grand history..."

What has attracted you to Somnath? What mysteries do you believe this temple holds for your story Jaliya? Rachana's quiet wonderings take her to a beach overlooked by an ancient temple, where once as a child she gazed at the sublime sight of the 'protector of the moon god' –Somnath. As the waves washing over the grey sand lapped at her feet that peaceful evening, she was told by her Amma–amma the story of how the moon god was cursed to wane for the sin of loving one of his wives more than the others. Thus she knew the birth of Somnath 'the eternal shrine' to have been in a time before the era of 'common man'. Somnath, a creation bound to the repentances caused through love, when denied in its rightful share. It is also a story of how love can redeem the wrong doer, she was told, that gentle evening as the waning crescent moon hung over them in the darkening sky. Pointing to the waxing moon, Amma–amma tells her granddaughter sitting on her lap that it was Rohini's love which saved her husband Soma to not wither and die as cursed by her father Daksha, but instead to be reborn anew and become renewed of life. A story of how life was restored to a dying man through the love of a favourite wife.

"...Somnath, had been the object of attack and destruction by the Arabs and Moguls time and time again, and the young man is told of these battles history had witnessed in the land of Gujarat...Wars fought for religion, riches of gold and silver, and jewels..."

There were battles fought for rewards of other kinds as well Jaliya. Jewels, yes, perhaps that's how those who fought over them would say. Jewels that aren't the kind that may be worn on a ring. But possessed into ownership, in every way.

"...And also the 'prize' of certain damsels. Wars have been fought so often through history between nations over the right to possess women. The beauty of Helen sealed the doom of Troy, and Somnath was sacked in the wave of destruction that swept across Gujarat for a woman's beauty. Incomparable, and indescribable by even the craft of the most gifted of poets. Unbelievable, until seen with living eyes. Yes Rachana, it was the beauty of a woman that was the prize that brought the sea of mogul swords. The young student is told this by the learned old gentleman. Fabled as the living jewel of all jewels, they came for her, Kamala Devi..."

The warriors whose last stand was at the temple of Somnath believed so long as the white flag atop the temple remained in its place honouring the four winds, they would be undefeatable. This sublime truth kept them inexhaustible. The 'eternal shrine' would not fall. And their treasures within would be untouched by the invaders.

"...Knowing the unfading courage of the warriors came from their belief in the sacred white flag's immovability, the invaders began to devise means to scale the eternal shrine. And one single mogul warrior finally succeeded. Though an arrow found its way to lodge in his side, the strength of his resolve drove his hands to make that last lurch forward and pluck the white flag."

With his triumphant cry in praise to his god, the courageous warrior had fallen under a rain of arrows cast upon him. The blood from his hundred wounds desecrating the immaculate flag of Soma. The strength in the hearts of the faithful defenders had fallen at the sight of what they believed was the impossible. The temple is overrun by the invader with an unstoppable wave of warring might. Conflagrations erupt in the house of homage built to Shiva by the moon god. Bounty is everything and anything deemed worthy of possession by the victors. Resistance of any kind is crushed. None may even hope that there is a possibility of resurrection... They watch, drained of all will to fight, as hapless captives, the blood of a cow flow from its slit throat pool on the central shrine's floor. Men felled in their beliefs may never rise once more. Only the victorious may pronounce of what is possible in this world.

Yes, Rachana hears from Jaliya that it all happened for a certain woman. Kamala Devi, the virgin princess whose possession would be a prize, a pleasure, beyond all value of gems and gold.

"The power of a woman's beauty" He tells her. His voice becoming subdued, as though benumbed by the sight of a form of beauty that commands a sanctifying silence by any who behold it.

Kamala Devi.

What could she have looked like he wonders, imagining he is the student who longs to ask this from the elderly raconteur before him, calm in his composure of a sage unstirred by the chaos of the world.

Kamala Devi...

But, Jaliya, don't you know?...

"Kamala Devi. The beauty of a woman moved those armies to wreak horrific devastation."

"Jaliya, they invaded for Omunkashyu..."

Another story begins. Jaliya is intrigued and turns his face to Rachana.

"...It was the one treasure that could not be valued by gems or gold. The gemstone that gave its keeper eternal beauty and youth...It was Omunkashyu that they waged war for. The jewel whose keeper was Kamala Devi. She was a beauty who was fabled throughout the land of Bharath for her magical youth. A youth that never withered. She kept Omunkashyu on her at all times Jaliya. It was kept in her body..."

She tells him that Kamala Devi's life was bound to Omunkashyu and its mystical properties. And she became the 'chamber' that would house it. Her body was made the shrine inside which rested the gemstone that had descended from the heavens. Her vulva, the doors to this glorious treasure.

"...Eternal youth, beauty, who wouldn't put nations on fire for such power Jaliya? Since the dawn of time, since man realised his body was meant to wither and die, his one unrelenting quest through history was for immortality..."

A listener behind the veil of darkness draping them, Jaliya has found a raconteur in Rachana. She now inscribes on the fabric of darkness in front of her a history that had been hidden to him. Her words conjoin his narrative to give continuance to the story.

"...Kamala Devi saw her soon to be captors as they broke through to her chamber. Brandishing swords stained with the blood of their victims, snorting like wild beasts hungry for their prey they meant but one thing to her..."

It had been the end for Kamala Devi. Rachana's words sound as if they come from a great distance. A distance setting them apart in their places in time. In this darkness she has crept away to that tragic moment of Kamala Devi's emollition of herself. She had uttered the incantation that beseeched Agni, the god of fire, acceptor of sacrifices, to consume her in his sacred flames. Her piety and purity beyond all questioning, she was taken by Agni the two headed messenger to the gods. Nothing had been left of her but a white ash gleaming with a million fragments of a shattered jewel. Only divine fire, she says, was able to finally claim Omunkashyu.

"...Only divine fire, Jaliya, was able to finally claim Omunkashyu." Her voice becoming whispery as the last word exhales itself gently from her lips. This exhale that moves past Jaliya, as though bidding him catch it, if he can. He rests in the silence that holds them, as does she. There is nothing so much more sensible to them right now as their being awake to each other's presence. An unseen presence that speaks of propinquities that takes various forms in this gentle darkness of a night undisturbed.

"Omunkashyu, has caused the destruction of many civilisations Rachana..." She feels how in him a spark has awoken. Their story will take on a new face, she assumes, settling into her seat. Jaliya finds a newer shape for this word gaining more meaning to its form. In this new form is another story, she senses.

And then what of the young man, the undergraduate who travelled with the stories of the learned old gentleman? Where have they been left? What is to become of them? In his mind, in sketchy images drawn of soft hazy shades, Jaliya sees them sitting complacently in the closing moments of a quiet dusky evening as the student speaks of his plans to one day become a writer. The old gent lauds it; a smile of dearness speaks of his inner happiness. Live your life, he advises the young man, and live to tell the story. In telling your tale one day your past finds life renewed. The final gem of wisdom imparted to the young man as he rises to take his leave of him–Remember, a raconteur is nothing without an audience.

"...Other than the great Hela nations that tried to build bridges to Omunkashyu there was also a god incarnate who crossed the sea over a pathway built of stones and trees to reach Omunkashyu...still, today that 'bridge' exists, silently, under a shallow covering of sea water."

"Ram sethu."

"Yes, 'the bridge of Rama' was a pathway to Omunkashyu. Through its mesmerising beauty it held great power over any whose sights beheld it, and caused the destruction of nations. And taking the form of knowledge it was coveted and prized for the power it would give its possessor..."

"Lord Ram crossed the sea to Lanka for his wife Sita. Did she carry Omunkashyu in her, like Kamala Devi?"

"No Rachana, Sita was the one who was to acquire it..."

To acquire it? From whom? What do you mean 'acquire'??

Logical responses, valid questions, one may propound very comfortably. Yet Rachana does not put forward such queries verbally. No, she isn't that child sitting on her Amma–amma's lap asking questions to dwell deeper and deeper into the world that stories opened for her... But does she want to? Would she like to? Yes, very much so. Because in each of us there is that child who yearns to sit on the lap of parental or grandparental safety once again, and be enchanted by stories of times and places that only children may know of; for it is only the child whose world is wide enough to allow them in.

"...When Emperor Ravana carried her off to his golden city of Lankapura the citadel perched in the central hills of his empire's capital Lanka, Prince Rama's plan had worked exactly as anticipated."

Lord Ram wanted Ravan to abduct his wife Sita?! The most pious and virtuous of all women!

The acceptability of such a twist in the tale is what pricks Rachana right now. But what we may hope she will soon realise is that the story Jaliya will unfold with his words is his, and not the text of a 'history' before 'recorded history' that survived the ages through oral narratives of sages and bards.

"Their battle Rachana was after all one that marked how two civilisations clash when each vies for mastery over the world. The very first in fact in the existence of human kind. Though born of the same root, the people of these empires did not see the world big enough to share. Isn't that how it is after all with all great powers, whether they are divided by waters or not? Though blood is thicker than water, power hunger, that insatiable craving, overrides all bonds of kinship."

"Kinship? But Jaliya, the battle of Lord Ram with Ravan, is, well, it is more of a final war between two races. You could say it was between Devas and Rakshas, gods and demons, or between people of the North and South, Aryans and Dravidians."

"A popular misconception held by people on both sides of the Palk Strait. Chronology is the keeper of clarity. And then there are truths that become shrouded in obscurity because of their sheer antiquity. Such truths can be found preserved in the stories of people who pass it down from one generation to the next. After all it is only the victor who can write history, Rachana. The defeated may only speak of their pasts, and at times they may only say it as murmurs and whispers. The story of the Devas and Asura's is such a story. A story of two peoples of one root, whose branching out over the course of millennia estranged them."

The word Asura was born of the word 'Azura' he tells her. And the word 'Azura' traces its origins to the name of the God of the Persians–Ahura-Mazda, the divinity that incarnated on earth in the form of fire. The most sacred of truths to the Zoroastrians. It is fire that is the giver of all life to the world.

"The Asura's were the golden haired ones Rachana. The Irano-Aryans who competed with their brothers the Indo-Aryans for supremacy over the known world. The very names of kings who preceded Emperor Ravana of the Yaksha dynasty speak of this truth. Hiranyaksha and his brother Hiranyakashipu, the first name meaning 'golden eyed' and the other 'golden haired'. But of course with the final vanquishing of the Yaksha rule over Lanka, after the victory of Prince Rama, history took over, in the words of the victors. Masters of the earth and sky the Asuras were said to be demons, the unholy, the impious. Their very appearance was taken from them by the words of the victors. Their beauty was distorted to be the image of horror and contempt."

"Was Omunkashyu their treasure? Was it a jewel they had, that Lord Ram wanted?"

"It was not a jewel in the way the nations of the Siu Hela saw it, and craved for. No Rachana, the Asuras were the descendants of those whose worship of fire gave them mastery over it. It was their boon, to command its power and be unscathed by its wrath whenever it manifested the furies of the divine on the mortal earth."

Jaliya tells her how the abduction of Sita was the ruse that Prince Rama had wanted to capitalise for his plans to eventually posses Omunkashyu from the mighty emperor. Prince Rama knew of the justness of his rival and how he wouldn't subject his captive to any torment. Whatever that would happen, would be with consent. There would be no violation of a woman and of her right to chose who may access her body. Jaliya tells Rachana, Prince Rama was aware of the great masculine beauty of his rival. He knew of the frailties of a woman's resolve, and how the lust of mortals acted.

"He knew that his mighty opponent was aware of the ways demanded by the practices of the Hindus. Sita would be subjected to the 'fire test' to prove her purity after having been the captive of the emperor... And this would be the way he would acquire Omunkashyu. From her, Sita, who would be taught the way to escape the harms of fire by the mighty Ravana who would have by then developed a love for her and would have offered her his hand to his royal bed."

"Omunkashyu was with Ravan?" There is, he senses, some disdain in her voice. Some sense of objection to this direction of the story.

"Omunkashyu. The only thing that would save her life when stepping into the flames. The only weapon, the defence, Sita would have to become immune to the all consuming flame. Omunkashyu, which was in fact the zealously guarded Gini Mantharaya."

"Gini Mantha-ra-ya?" She speaks the unfamiliar words that had passed her fleetingly in the form of Jaliya's voice cutting through the darkness. Words she had grasped momentarily as it dissipated back to the blackness it came from.

The word Gini in the Sinhala language means fire, and Mantharaya means spell or incantation. Omunkashyu was a mystical craft that relied on the power of the utterance, to cause fire to be tamed, and controlled. Still to this day, says Jaliya, when Hindu fire walkers in their acts of piety and devotion performed in homage to certain deities make invocations in the form of supplications, there is in those words an acoustic spark of the Gini Mantharaya. The oral transmissions of knowledge through generations somehow find some strands of endurance, becoming encrypted in the vernacular itself. Such truths, says Jaliya to Rachana serve the speaker with benefits that he may not be fully aware of. Such truths, he tells her, as those carried by the power of the spoken word can hold in them the power of life and death.

"The power of the spoken word must never be underestimated Rachana. It was the value placed on the power of the spoken word that made the Gini Mantharaya, called Omunkashyu that caused the land of Lanka to be devastated by the forces of Prince Rama. It caused ultimately the fall of a dynasty, and the end of an empire."

There is something that withholds the words in Rachana's head from being spoken. The silence that holds her words have draped them both into a moment of quiet contemplation. A sleepiness hangs over their eyelids now. And the growing silence makes them wonder if they are in fact asleep already. But no, it cannot be so, they each think. A dream cannot be this real they reckon in their silent thoughts.

But, Sita? She couldn't have been a thief Jaliya. Surely you are mistaken. She is a divine incarnation. A symbol of virtue.

I hope you will see the ways of people Rachana. People are capable of deception, bearing the most innocent and noble appearances.

Would Ravan be so foolish to give her Omunkashyu? Why would he simply just give it to her? After having been with him, what good would it be to let her save herself in the fire test if she is simply to become once more the possession of her husband? Ravan was a demon Jaliya.

Love... If only a woman could fully know how her beauty can claim the world of a man without unsheathing a single sabre. And once he becomes hers, 'her survival' is all that matters to him. Yes Rachana, Sita's beauty beguiled Ravana. She claimed his world. It is true...kingdoms have fallen because the beauty of a woman became the universe of a man.

And Lord Ram used such trickery? Such callous trickery using his wife? How can the divine who protect Dharma commit such unjustness? No Jaliya, Lord Ram could not have resorted to unrighteous scheming as that.

If you think Prince Rama was unrighteous, you forget his form Rachana, it was 'human'. How else could he have defeated Ravana who was granted by the boons of Brahma invulnerability from gods, demons, serpents and wild beasts? It was only through a rival in the form of the fallible 'human being' could Ravana be felled. The divine, if ever they assume the form of the human, acquire all our fallibilities as well. It is only 'human', after all, Rachana.

Sigh... But there is something romantic in that story. The way Ravan truly loved Sita and the way he treated her. Coming in his sky chariot he took her away. He fought Garuda's nephew Jatayu in the air and killed him when he tried to stop Ravan from taking Sita. She must have admired his great strength and power. The courage he had to uphold his own honour. Perhaps it was Ravan's acts that really proclaimed the value of Sita. She lives in history today because of him, Ravan, the demon King from Lanka.

There is something very unusual to Rachana in this condition of things. The silence that pervades and prevails seems almost stilled. As if somehow the quiet has demarcated their space to be separate from the rest of the busload of passengers. And what about the passengers? What indications are there that they are still onboard? Neither Jaliya nor Rachana have heard any stirrings from fellow travellers of this all night journey. They cannot all be sleeping like the dead? Could they? It certainly isn't how Rachana knows this journey to be. The journey she generally makes every Sunday evening from Nandyal.

"Jaliya, have you any idea what the time could be?"

"The time?"

"Yes."

The face of his wristwatch not visible to him, Jaliya gets out his cell phone. No light comes off its screen. The battery is dead. His thumb presses the 'power' button but the mechanism simply refuses to respond.

"That's strange. I thought there was still some life in it before I'd have to recharge it."

"It doesn't get switched on at all?"

"No. How about yours?"

She reaches down to her trouser pocket and discovers her cell phone's battery too has run out of life. It won't respond to be switched on for even a second to offer them at least some specks of illumination.

"Very strange."

"Yours doesn't switch on either?"

"I know the battery was fully charged when I left for the bus station."

"How strange." A contemplative tone couched those words. Somehow there was a subtle sense of relief in it, like when you are compelled to a moment of inactivity that becomes a respite; one that is secretly welcome.

"Are we alone Jaliya?"

"Alone?" An almost stupefying question he thinks. How does a person respond to that?

"Yes, that's what I am wondering. Are we?"

"We are inside a bus loaded with passengers Rachana. I don't understand."

"But are we?"

"What do you mean?"

"Are we actually in a bus full with passengers?"

How can Jaliya respond to that? Her question has him almost meditating on the words that he must interact with and produce his own corresponding thoughts to in a verbal response.

"How could we not be? We got into one in Nandyal, I don't understand Rachana." Yes, truly Jaliya is perplexed by Rachana's ontological questions.

"This isn't how this ride goes Jaliya. By now we should have passed several small towns. They are usual short stops along this route..." There is some staidness in the way she said it, he cannot help feel unsettling.

"...And the passengers who go on this journey don't all fall asleep in a total silence. There isn't any sign of their presence. Not a sound."

"As if everyone else just switched themselves off."

"It's so strange."

Yet it is true. There isn't the vaguest sound coming from a being other than the two of them. These are Indians after all, thinks Jaliya. Their presence is so undeniable at times. There is a certain jarring way about most of them.

"Do cinema halls ever become like this?" Her voice is a tease. He is jostled out of the daunting feeling that sought to overcome him.

"Cinema?" She senses his face grow a smile, by the sound of how he says– "Cinemawa pilliyak!"

"Cinema-wa... pilli-...pilli-"

"Pilliyak!" His soft laughter in the darkness is a welcome sound to her.

"Pilliyak?" Her giggle complements the moment.

How exactly do they sound to Rachana? What could they mean to her? These Sinhala words that Jaliya poured out into the darkness? To her they are but sounds that may hint of some possible guessable meaning. The 'signifiers' may have found some landing on her lips, but they are not yet demystified to her. Words from a land that she has only yet encountered through the young man she sits next to.

"A friend of mine once said it Rachana. He is a writer, back home, in Sri Lanka. I noted it down in my memory, made a mental note of it. I thought there was something very profound in that line, though he just cackled it out towards the end of a night of drinking. His senses becoming doused by the arrack, yet keeping focus on the topic a group of us discussed with a lot of interest, cinema."

The word 'Cinemawa' is explained to Rachana as an 'acquisition' of the English noun to the contemporary Sinhala dialect with the suffixation of the 'wa' sound, which serves more or less in the functioning of the 'the' article. And what of the 'pilliyak'? She is curious beyond the tones her voice suggests. The word itself has an amusing sound, she thinks jovially. Amusing, yes surely, amusing.

"Pilliyak. It's the singular form of the word 'pilli'. Pilli in the Sinhala language, Rachana, relates to a form of witchcraft, voodoo. An evil spirit would be summoned by a kattandiya, a voodoo practitioner, and this spirit would then take an earthly form, it could be of a man, a woman, a dog, or even some deadly venomous arachnid like a scorpion. This conjured creature or 'form' is a 'pilliyak'. A creature neither naturally of our world, nor of the intangible spirit form. But it will do the bidding of whoever summoned it, unquestioningly. And there is only but one order made to such a creature. To find and kill a given victim."

"How horrible!" Somehow the darkness that was innocuous, throughout this journey so far, seemed to slide over her a coldness. It made her shudder. And somehow the earlier phonologically amusing 'pilliyak' that plopped onto her ears and popped out of her lips seems abhorrent.

"That is the sole purpose of a 'pilliyak'. It takes form in the world of men only to end a life of some unfortunate person who will suffer an unimaginably violent death within mere hours of coming into contact with it. Becoming uncontrollably feverish the victim will erupt finally into a maniacal seizure and howl out shrieks gripped in a state of horrific insanity, ending his misery as his mouth spews blood and the body falling lifeless."

She feels the coldness of this night air move on her. It's as if it wants to settle on her like a second skin that will subtly claim her, cocooning her into a state of vulnerability. No, she will not let it claim her. And be spirited away to sleep.

"Once, many years ago, when I was a schoolboy, I was told about this form of witchcraft for the first time by the grandfather of one of my friends. We were sitting in the veranda of his grandparents' place in their old village, a place nestled in a cool hilly region..." Rachana senses Jaliya's nostalgia rising quietly in him. His words have now broken the skin of coldness the darkness slid over her.

"...There were three of us sitting around him with cups of hot ginger tea. It was a quiet evening Rachana, outside the veranda the night enclosed the geography, making the mountains in the distance to appear as silhouettes. The flavourful tea we relished with every sip. The steam rising from our cups gently curled in the coolness of the air. He then told us, our friend's grandfather, of how he had heard as a boy the story of how four traders had once been the victim of a 'pilliyak' in their very village. A story that made the cool of the night air turn into a coldness on my skin, making a slight shiver run in me... It had happened when the village was just beginning to get set up, he told us. People had moved in from different directions to find better prospects for both trade, and crop cultivation. There had been only four shops in the whole village, owned by four cousins who had pioneered the founding of the village. The story goes that one morning a rodiya had come to the shop of the eldest of the four traders. A rodiya is a member of the very lowest caste. They are the outcastes, the ostracised. Their ancestry being founded on the ignominy of having slaughtered and eaten the flesh of a cow during the olden days of Sinhala kings. It was such a heinous barbarity in the eyes of the people at the time, the perpetrators of the sacrilegious act, their families, and their progeny were condemned as the ostracised, the 'Rodee'. They would visit villages for paltry trade and labour hoping to earn some sustenance, but would not be allowed to reside within the borders of any village. They would have their own encampments, settlements in outlands closer to the wilderness. And so, that rodiya, a young man who had no money on him had asked for a half pound of salt, urging the tradesman to accept a cured python skin as payment. The rodiya had been scoffed at and told sneeringly that if he has no money on him, to ask his mother to come by nightfall in lieu of payment. The humiliated young man pained by the hooting laughs of the villagers who were at the shop had walked with his head downcast. But, he had turned back and asked the trader if he would in fact give the half pound of salt if his mother were to visit him at nightfall. The merchant had boisterously laughed and said that if she stays with him till dawn he will give her not half but a whole pound of salt! The men had roared in laughter as the young rodiya simply looked at his antagonist dejectedly and said with a hapless sigh, that he will tell her to come see him. That evening, at dusk, a middle age woman had come to each of the four shops and spoken to each of the tradesmen. Asking which of them had wanted her to call on him on the matter of the half pound of salt her son had told her of. The story goes that none of the traders had been able to even respond to her query; they had been seized with fright at the sight of her face. Her eyes had been simply two empty black holes. By daybreak the following morning all four shopkeepers were dead. Throughout the night they had been gripped in a demonic fever and howled and screamed like wild animals until the sun came up. And blood had flowed out of their mouths, before collapsing lifelessly... Rachana, the rodee people to this day are feared for their deadly witchcraft."

"What a frightful story! The pilliyak is an awful thing Jaliya! Why would your friend ever think of comparing the cinema to that?"

Rachana sounds genuinely perturbed over what she feels is an affront made upon the art of the moving image. An assault on the most appealing form of storytelling bequeathed to the modern world.

Truly a legitimate question. Why? What was behind that remark? After all the romanticism he has spoken of to her about the mesmerising ways of cinema, after telling her of that rapturous experience of watching The Barber of Siberia, why did he say such a thing?

"I suppose at that moment I was also wondering what he really meant by it. After one too many glasses of arrack and soda, he wasn't really in a sense to explain his discourse behind it. But Rachana, there is some truth that we can really unravel from those two words. The concepts behind those words can tell us what relevance they may have when brought together. I was thinking of it that very night."

Ah! So it seems Jaliya is going to explore the 'signified' of those words, the two 'signifiers', and bridge together a meaning for the phrase? Yes, he is exploring means for interpretations. Perhaps he sees a metaphoric sense in those two words though Rachana feels it is an opprobrious incongruity!

"...The 'pilli', their form, is neither fully of this world, nor of the original spirit world. It's a 'nether worldly' sort of form. Perhaps cinema is something like that. We don't touch it Rachana, yet it's so very truly visible. It's like a living entity with its images, shapes and sounds. The effect it has on us is very strong. From love, to laughter, to tears and rages. We can feel pain, sadness, and blood chilling horror, and fright... We can be made to feel all of these simply by its presence to our senses. Yet we can't touch it! ...Its power is such it can drive our senses to its decrees. Decrees that we never hear as explicit orders, but decrees that permeate our skin and lodge in our pulses, and drive us through emotions. Cinema can have that power over us Rachana. Simply because it begins by becoming alive to our sight... And I forgot to tell you another thing. A 'pilliyak' cannot affect the blind. It must always be seen by the victim to cast its effect."

Only if seen does cinema have a form and its effect proper. Yes, Jaliya has a valid hypothesis doesn't he? And its form is visible yet beyond touch. In a way like the words that pass between these two conversationalists, wouldn't you say? Though none of these two may hold the other's words in their finger tips, they grasp them in auditory form, and create images in their minds. But what of these can they touch?

"But a film, a movie, doesn't kill anyone Jaliya, not literally. Unlike a 'pilliyak'." Her contention is steadfast.

Jaliya contemplates on Rachana's argument. It is true isn't it? The cinema doesn't kill anyone.

"But, what if it makes one feel as if his whole identity has been possessed by it and made to feel killed of his identity?"

But what is this? Jaliya can't surely mean that a person's 'identity', which may be interpreted in different ways, can be the same as the death of the physical person?

"What do you mean?"

"Once I saw in an interview of the Swedish film maker Ingmar Bergman. Bergman says there are very beautiful cathedrals in Europe, the baroque cathedrals, I believe were the ones he was referring to. So, he said that although the cathedrals are so beautiful and have lasted through the ages to be marvelled at, no one knows who built them. Not a single name would ever be found of the people who laid the stones, who carved those intricate details that embellish the ornate structures. He, Bergman, says in that interview, he wished he could have been like those cathedral builders. That he wished he could have remained in anonymity and let his creations endure the ages and successive generations. And to be spared of his identity becoming fixed on his creations and his creations alone. Perhaps he felt his whole world had been presumed through his work, through the 'cinema of Bergman'. He must have felt he had become a prisoner of his own creations. Generally it is the creation that must be subservient to the creator. But the cinema he created captivated so many millions across countries and generations that he was owned by them, owned through the presumption that Bergman was theirs, theirs through the cinema he created. But in reality he could have been, and possibly like every other artist, much more than what comes through his work alone. The world presumes too much of the artist by acquiring his creations. Such presumptions may make him feel robbed."

"Robbed?"

"Yes Rachana, robbed of his identity, which may then be interpreted and declared to the world by those who have passionately taken possession of his work. It is a labour of love and devotion perhaps on the part of the world. But then, did they ever ask him? But the anonymous cathedral builder, he, is spared of all that Rachana. While he may take great silent pleasure in the beauty he has helped birth to the world, he is not robbed of his identity as a reward for having bequeathed to the world a monument of beauty. His silence, his facelessness has spared him from it. His labour's results will continue to marvel the world. And with the countless multitudes he too may gaze upon the beauty of his creations, undisturbed. Perhaps the cinema may take away the identity of people who birth it. It may be another form of killing...Killing the person within, underneath the skin, beneath the laughter and the smiles."

"But then what is the purpose of cinema?"

She who found it unbearable to even think of going to the cinema hall, to the pictures, even with her childhood sweetheart now believes this noble art of cinema must be better defended. Who cares of what Ingmar Bergman may have said about his craft and his creations having robbed him of his identity? Why should it, she thinks, matter to the world? If the world has been offered it then it is for the receiver to decide what to do with it. Whatever laments the artist may have in retrospect is irrelevant. He should then decide before he bequeaths it to the world that hungers for art, for beauty. Rachana feels cinema, the great art of storytelling, has been done wrong in this discourse between her and Jaliya where he has called it a form of death. The death of the 'filmmaker' who may forever be viewed by the world through the pictures he put to motion after looking at the world through a lens.

"Escape..." It is a solemn whisper that leaves his lips to her ears. A wisp of air. An acoustical wisp of air, becoming a 'signifier' with a 'signified' that opens a new vista.

"..Escape could be the very soul of cinema. It could be the very purpose that it exists for, in our world of mortality."

"Escape?"

"Yes Rachana, just think of it. Cinema is a form of storytelling, don't you agree?"

"Of course, and on that you are suggesting that storytelling too is a type of escape?"

"It is. Storytelling has been one of the first forms of escape we developed. Escapism is at the root of storytelling Rachana. In the cinema hall we are taken away into the magic of the light that comes in the form of pictures. It's a collective ritual of escape where each is a lone escapee. Yet storytelling is the first collective escape humans came up with. For both the listeners and the raconteur. And every time we think back to such a moment, like from our childhood when we sat at the feet of our grandparents being taken away to different times, and places, and people, by their words, we find recourse to that escape once more."

To remember, to reminisce, is to escape? Rachana wonders if this young man sitting next to her suggests that the past is a land we try to escape to. But then, maybe not. He was referring to storytelling, she reminds herself. Not wishing the past, the past with all its hallowed memories of the joys had in her life, to be transfigured into the likeness of a 'story', another mere 'story'. She assures herself that the past is something more profound and deeply rooted with purpose than a 'story'. It was not that the treasured moments she has had are now merely for the purpose of being some easy means to shut out the present world temporarily. But then, what is a person's 'story' she wonders. What form does one's life have when looked back on, in retrospect, when it is given the shape of spoken words? Is that a 'story', she wonders.

"Storytelling is a means of escape in more than one way."

"To forget the world, you mean."

"But also sometimes just the opposite Rachana."

"What do you mean?"

"The raconteur can sometimes extend life. That is after all not in want to leave the world, but in the desire to embrace it. Through storytelling, to ward off death."

"Ward off death? But how is that? What do you mean?"

"Through stories, for generations, people have passed down their knowledge to the generation that will succeed them. It's one form of extending the life of your knowledge. Stop it from dying out completely. For a person who believes, that in the knowledge deposited in the minds of the living that some sense of him too will live symbolically. That's like a way of extending your lease of life, in a different way. To live on as a memory."

"But then that's metaphorical Jaliya. It doesn't prevent you from dying."

"But what if storytelling can prevent death?"

"How?"

"It was storytelling that saved Scheherazade from the executioner each morning."

"Scheherazade."

Ah, Scheherazade! Who could forget her? The immortality she has achieved through generations and generations passing civilisations across barren deserts, unconquered mountain terrains and limitless oceans is testimony to how the art of storytelling has been treasured by man. Scheherazade, the daughter of the chief vizier of the King Shahryār, who artfully narrated stories for a thousand and one nights keeping her king in raptures thirsting for more. And of course he would grant her the blessing of life each dawn, delaying her fate. And yes, as Jaliya said, warding off death.

"But Jaliya, to her it was also a means to find a solution to a problem. Her escape at the same time was also a solution."

The power of storytelling. Has it ever been understood as for one single purpose? But does it even have to, for that matter? Throughout the narrative of human inhabitation of this earth, the 'story' has always had its place to interpret the world as man saw it. Through cave paintings to canvases, from oral narratives to ritualistic performances, to stone inscriptions to the 'printed word' and finally the art and technology of the moving image, all of these means of 'communication' find deep in their threading at least some semblance of that human phenomenon –The story.

"Yes, your right. It was a solution to her. The story itself was always the answer to her. To her problem, it was the existence of the story that assured her another day of life. But over the course of history Rachana, stories have been ways to pass on knowledge and wisdom that offer solutions to problems to people. The panchatantra for example, just think of all those tales that preach a moral teaching. Yet to whomever that kept telling stories like Scheherazade, it was always a form of escape. That I think is what meant the most. To her the very reason for storytelling was for existence. To escape death."

"And it had two sides to that escape didn't it?"

"Two sides to it?"

"Yes, Shahryār found his escape, through those stories didn't he? He could have just gone to sleep that first night when Scheherazade began telling that first story to her sister Dinazade. Although he allowed her that last wish to tell a story he didn't have to listen to it."

"What made him listen to that young virgin?"

"His conscience wanted respite, to escape all the burdens it carried. The blood of all those virgins he had put to death one after the other, each having but just one conjugal night...And deeper within him was that inconsolability. The grief of a sincere lover betrayed by his one true love. Yes, Shahryār wanted escape from his cycle of grief and sin. He could not bear to see the world as he saw it. Infidelity was all he saw... But, when Scheherazade began her story..."

When Scheherazade began that first story her king truly did find a solace that he had never found since coming to know of the infidelity committed by his wife. That sin which near doomed Shahryār to a life of misogynistic bloody revenge upon all woman kind within his realm. It was a soothing comfort he found in the words of Scheherazade as she took him to lands and times past, and yet to be. To the adventures of men who defied the laws of science by flying on carpets and commanding at will genies trapped in lamps. Yes, it was that comfort of listening to stories that healed his wounded heart, by shutting out the world. By offering him escape, in certain ways, from himself. For every time we immerse ourselves in the magic of a story and imagine ourselves as one of those larger than life characters, we do in fact find respite from ourselves. Yes, our dear selves.

"...Shahryār found he was being unburdened from the world that waited for him in the morning. He found his escape in her stories Jaliya. The guilt of the deaths of all those virgins whose lives were fated to a conjugality of a single night in the royal bed chamber was on him. Thinking he was Sinbad, he was Aladdin or Ali Baba, Shahryār found in those stories a haven. A refuge from his conscience."

"And those stories were vessels for him. They transported Shahryār. The words of Scheherazade wove that flying carpet Rachana, and her storytelling gave him his escape, becoming a form of travel."

Storytelling as a means of 'travel'. Rachana finds that a very interesting notion. And then, if so, can travel constitute a story? Why yes, of course, she reminds herself of having heard how much travelling influences writers. And how writers nowadays speak of being inspired by their travels. Surely then there is that bond between storytelling and the idea of being transported to another place and time becoming some 'form of travel' to the listener? And while she thinks of these things in the privacy of her thoughts, Jaliya is reminded of a four word line that was impressed on him. They were words of Rachana herself –'I love to travel'.

She loves to travel. And then she wanted me to tell her a story. 'Jaliya, tell me a story'. And what purposes did you have Rachana? You who said you 'love to travel', especially at night.

What 'purposes' did she have? Could any of the purposes these two passengers have expounded so far, be sufficient purposes for each of them to indulge in storytelling? Becoming the raconteur then turning listener, and switching roles again? ...Travel and storytelling. The links between these two phenomena as a metaphorical overlapping of one another; is that what Jaliya and Rachana are discoursing? If that is so let's look at the concept of 'travel'. As a phenomenon of human doing how does one perceive and interpret travelling? If one looks to dictionary definitions, different volumes by different publishers would not likely word the definition in exactly the same way. But there are some key essentials that would come out as being definitive of the 'concept' of 'travel' when looking for an understanding of the concept behind the word. The 'signified' behind the 'signifier'. The 10th edition of the Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary elaborates the word 'travel', very explicitly defining it within the domain or context of its physical dimensions and aspects concerned. The idea of movement in a given direction, and undergoing a 'transmission' from one place to another. With these ideas in mind one may deduce that travel always has a 'destination', going by the more scientific, lexical classifications. So, a destination, which one may interpret as being the culmination point of the 'directional' aspect, would be essential to define the act of travelling. And then if we think of the idea of 'movement', within this same context of defining the definitive elements of the word 'travel', it would mean the transmission between two places or points of some object. Now, this object, must surely be a form with an identifiable materiality with materially identifiable dimensions. But yet these materially identifiable parts constituting the formal nature of the object do not have to be static. They may not necessarily be definite in terms of fixedness. No, in the course of the 'transmission', change may occur. Yes, travel can cause change, in dramatic and remarkable ways. But then, with all the grounding it has in the aspect of materiality how does storytelling become a form of travel? If we all sit around a campfire engrossed in the narrative of the storyteller, what form of motion do our bodies take? It doesn't really fit into that classification does it? Seems unlikely to. But what then is affected to undergo some form of 'motion', some directional movement? Perhaps though not strictly literal, in a more metaphysical and metaphoric way, the minds that are involved, the minds of the listeners' as well as the raconteur's, do move along with the images that conjure in their heads when the words take form from being the 'signifiers' to the 'signified'. Something like cinema in a way isn't it, if you really think about it? Our minds become the screen while the words of the raconteur are like the light beams projected onto the screen. And of course the story unfolds as the images move on that screen, though they may not transform into a form of materiality of tangibility to travel as Jaliya and Rachana who are sitting next to each other. But then, this manner of travel in the form of storytelling does not involve constriction to the dimensions of materiality. It is not a physical transportation but a mental one. A 'transmission' not of a material object between two points identified for its physical dimensionality, but beyond the realms and notions of the material. But then, if one might ask in this context, what about speed? Travel does involve speed after all doesn't it? But even when there is no material objects involved? Ah, but wait! Who can say this phenomenon of storytelling and the consequent travel that occurs is completely and absolutely devoid of all forms of materiality? There is speed involved when we think of the words that string together the narrative. How fast does the narrator speak? What is the time taken for the words to reach from his lips to the ears of the listeners? And how fast can the listener conjure up the image, the 'signified' on that screen called the mind? Undoubtedly, in any form of travel, be it within the context of walking, or dreaming, there is that element of speed involved, though a dictionary definition may perhaps not necessarily include it directly with the word. Speed. Yes, without the element of speed, motion would not be possible. Motion must always be defined with the presence of speed. Because to not have any speed of any kind whatsoever would mean being stationary. So, in this context of our story one may ask what is the level of speed that applies to the travel Rachana and Jaliya are engaged in? Where has their bus journey taken them to? Where? As in where along the route are they now? The 'route' which is another word for the 'direction' the bus moves, or undergoes 'transmission', one could say. Well, we may be assured that the relevancies of the route have eluded both Jaliya and Rachana and they would be the last two on earth who would be able to answer that question. Because for one thing, in order to measure where they may be right now, neither knows of the speed that is in force, in terms of the motion of the bus they are in. There is an interesting theorem about speed or the intensity of movement, and how it is linked to 'memory' in a novel named Slowness by the Czech born writer Milan Kundera. He believes there is a 'secret bond' as he so calls it, between slowness and the power of recollection or memory as he calls it, and in the opposite end of this spectrum is 'forgetting' which is bonded to speed, which must be understood in opposition to slowness. To illustrate and substantiate his argument Kundera offers us in Slowness a very mundane incident which is so endearingly true to life in our world of experience. The example he provides is of a man walking along the road whose pace lowers when he attempts to recall something yet finds it eluding him. And the slowing down which happens not so much as a result of conscious effort helps the process of recollection, and finally the man may fully recall to memory what he tried to grasp and afterwards resume his previous pace. Kundera contrasts this with the opposite scenario of a person who hurries his pace, increases his speed, when he has had an unpleasant experience and finds that to increase the level of speed puts the experience more and more into the past, and distances it from him and his present, as the speed increases. It is a form of forgetting or putting the experience which still resides in his recollection vividly into the process of forgetting. Rather true isn't it? To move further and faster away from a particular place or person which has caused us an unpleasant experience offers some relief, some semblance at least of comfort. Isn't this movement, the undergoing of a transmission with a directionality, travelling? It most certainly is. And then 'speed' here plays a very crucial role. To reduce speed would be to help recollection and to increase it would be to aid forgetting.

"I can't see anything outside the window."

"Nothing?"

"Just darkness. A completely lightless night."

"How fast are we moving?"

"Can't say. I can't see anything passing us outside to get an idea."

Speed is always relative isn't it? It is when we are able to measure the intensity of the movement of the object undergoing transmission from one place to another, in relation to what is stationary besides the object in motion, can we envision speed. Speed is always relative and depends on the externality of materials either in motion or static to indicate that speed has come real.

"Shouldn't we be passing some villages? Some little pockets of farming settlements? I saw a lot of patches like that before. India is full of sights like that along travelling routes."

There is a tinge of worry, some sense of anxiety incipient in Jaliyas's voice. Rachana too feels perturbed by the lack of any sounds inside the bus apart from the bus engine's mechanical snore.

"If there was some little light outside, from some little house or something, we could know how fast we are going."

It is important to Rachana to know how fast they are travelling. Why is that? Because she has to go to work in the morning, once they arrive in Chennai. But what does speed mean to Jaliya? It may not mean nearly as anything urgent as to Rachana, but he too is conscious of the relevancies of speed and the port of arrival it brings the traveller to. Yes, Jaliya is very conscious of this all too indisputable truth. But if we may ask for a moment in connection with the Kunderian theorem of speed and its 'secret bond' with the human ability to recall and forget, endearingly brought out in Slowness, what of it applies to these two passengers travelling to Chennai? Has the speed of their travels, their gradual undergoing of transmission from one place to another, had any bearings on what either of them could be trying to recall, or forget? If travel can be achieved through storytelling, and storytelling is a form of escape, then surely to travel is to achieve a form of escape isn't it? The illustration in Kundera's Slowness indicates it too. The increased pace in the walk of the one who wants to put distance between him and the unpleasant experience, to cause forgetting more effectively, puts into effect a more intensified effort into travelling, which is to undergo a transmission from one place to another with directionality, which may or may not, be pre-planned.

Has the world outside disappeared?? This isn't how it should be! Rachana? No. No point in alarming her anymore than she may already be. But then, where is the scenery that passes by?!

Is he asleep? I hope the daylight doesn't come too soon. Sigh. It feels good to be on the move. Travelling. Seems I do so much of it. But on the same old route. Same old routine. Who can change it anyway?

What kind of escape could these two travellers be hoping for through this journey? They are firm in their knowledge, yes, let's say knowledge rather than 'belief', of travelling on a bus bound for Chennai which runs a nightlong journey. A nightlong undergoing of a transmission from one place to another. From Nandyal to Chennai. It's rather simple after all. Yes, a journey with a definite destination, defined route and expected time of arrival isn't a complicated undertaking. She does it ever so regularly. But then it seems she also hopes somehow this routine could be altered in some way.

Mmmm...Sleepy. And there still isn't a sign of any landscape outside. Nothing. Nothing passing us by.

He seems asleep. I wish I could slip into sleep, and escape to a dream. A dream, to take me away. Away, away from the dawn. ...Sigh.

In many ways sleep can be a form of escape. It does very effectively shut out the world from our senses. Ungoverned by logic and sciences the world of dreams is very much made of an architecture of our interiority. And when we shut out the world, we do very effectively shut out our self as perceived and projected back to our senses by the world. Our self as seen by the world around us gets sifted dramatically when we dream. And it is a welcome respite, a welcome escape for Rachana. Sleepiness hangs over Jaliya's eyelids gently cooing him to a soothing semiconscious state where he floats between sleep and being fully awake. A most blissful state of being, though Jaliya has no intention of drifting off to sleep completely. He would rather stave off the sleepiness, the drowsiness, and alight himself to converse with Rachana. But sleep is gripping him more eagerly, it has almost usurped the joy of conversation with Rachana. How insidiously it pervades over him, he isn't conscious enough to stave it off. But then, completely unexpectedly, he felt the warmth, the realness of her touch on his hand. Instantly he is brought back to his surroundings.

"I'm sorry did I wake you?"

"Hmm? No, no I wasn't really asleep as such."

"Just wanted to get my bottle of water."

"Oh! Sorry. Didn't realise I had my hand on it."

The necessity for water. A human necessity. Arguably one of the direst needs of any person. And it was thirst that had impelled their first acquaintance of touch with each other. She had thought and thought over again whether it would be proper to move his hand and gently take from under it the plastic bottle his hand rested on. The bottle of mineral water lying horizontally in the little space between their seats. She had wondered if it would wake him, if it would seem proper to let her 'touch' go onto him. But she would do it very subtly she had told herself. Hoping he would not wake up, hoping he would not really be sensible of the bold venture she had been compelled to do.

To Jaliya this meant a new level of perceiving her. He now knows what her hand feels like. The dearness of the warmth it holds. All this time she had been a visual and auditory persona, a being whose speech he took in through his faculties. But now, he knows of her touch. And who can deny the fact that a person whom we perceive through our sense faculties becomes a person rendered of a newer meaning to us each time we advance in our knowledge about them from a different aspect of their being. A woman who is only known in sight becomes something more upon that first moment a man hears a 'voice' come from that visual persona. One may say that such a woman who was only a visually perceived image becomes added of another 'dimension' when she speaks and reveals the nature of her vocal element. Yet it is the touch that finally tells us the 'dimension of flesh' has been revealed to us, our senses. And thereafter that person would be a being formed of a 'tri dimensionality' in our perceptions, as well as our interpretations of that person. Sight, sound and touch. Unknowingly through that innocent act of taking her bottle of water from under his hand Rachana and Jaliya have been revealed to the other of their 'tri dimensionality'. Our memory and what we carry of an experience depends much on what we have perceived of phenomena through the respective sense faculties. If we heard the screams of a person subjected to unimaginable torture that sound will haunt us, while if it was seen the impact of it would be more. And to a person who would be made to have some physical bodily aspect of such an act affect him, the prime example being the victim himself, the experience would have a 'tri dimensionality' which drills in the intensity of the realness in force. The more our sense faculties are exposed to the different aspects of a certain phenomenon, the more firmly it embeds itself in our river of memories... And what of this experience, of their journey together, will each carry once this ride comes to an end? Now that they have, even though by chance of circumstances, come to know the feel of the other as a touch. A touch, that was a most subtle and fleeting physical meeting, hardly an 'interaction' yet somehow in its serendipitous nature it bore that beguiling potency to cause the spark that ignites an endearing curiosity. The curiosity to know more.

"Rachana..." His head slightly rolls to the side as if seeking some propinquity to her "...I'd like to share with you my theory of the shareera yatharthaya."

When a person edifies certain memories, which have been most precious to him, it takes on the figure of history. It is history that survives the living. It is history that overruns the past once the holders of the memories that speak as the past, are no more. History directs us to believe what we are, is a projection of the events that narrated time's passage that led us to the moment we breathe in –the present. And nearly every moment we breathe in as the present we harbour a subconscious yearning, a hope that some exhale of ours will turn to marble, become an edifice sculpted into eternity in defiance of time's ravaging, so that some part of us may enter the folds of history...

"The word shareeraya, in Sinhala means body..."

...to become a historian through words or constructions means to find one's self moonlighting with what is beyond the mortal, beyond the mundanely diminishable. A form of endurance and existence surpassing the 'breath dependency' inherent to both man and beast. Yes, it is for the glory of a life beyond the mortal frame that poets monumentalise the ones they love in verses that live on long after their physical beings are no more...

"...shareera means bodies, the plural form, and it could also mean to say bodily..."

...With each passing generation, when the world of breathing 'forms' succumbs to death, the world of words and moments with its architectural myriads shall immortalise the ones who attracted the ardour of historians. It is for this sanctuary of history, and the endlessness it provides, becoming part of the continuum of human consciousness, in the form of words that Alexander Pushkin sought to eternalise in verse his love for Ekaterina Karamzina, the wife of the historian Nikolai Karamzina. From the age of seventeen to his last moment of breath at the age of thirty seven Pushkin kept in secrecy the identity of his 'nameless love'. For twenty years the love for Ekaterina Karamzina was sculpted through beauteous words taking the form of poetry. And gave her a life beyond the dimensionalities the physical frame could afford, beyond time and the places they would have walked through...

"...And Yatharthaya, means reality."

...Wishing his name be spoken with hers and not even be parted by death, Mikhail Lermontov dedicated thirty poems to a woman who enamoured his heart from days of youth. She would remain by the identity of three initials during his life time; N.F.I. Thus, like so many other women who were cupped onto the palms of history by the writings of poets, she, Natalya Fyodorovna Ivanova, was edified to last beyond what her mortal frame would grant her. Yes, truly there is a part of us that becomes a historian of sorts when we meet those we fall in love with. And to make our own world be somehow woven to theirs, even at least in some form of non-physical threading, we undertake labours that become sweetly painful. A pain whose sweetness feeds the soul.

"The body, the shareeraya, Rachana, is the primary tool with which the mind may access the material world. The shareeraya is a physical entity; it's a composite of sense faculties. Our consciousness comes into contact with the world and becomes conscious of the world of materiality around us through the body. The senses it is composed of. The physical elements reveal themselves to our mind through the contact made with the body... The body is like an axis between the consciousness and the world of matter and materiality that is around us. This doesn't mean however that the world is entirely what the body perceives through its senses as the external world. It isn't so at all, as I see it... If you think of the way the mind, the consciousness, holds the world of fantasy within the realm of the imagination, it too is a part of the world we are conscious of. Because it is we who hold it in our consciousness. But it is by no means a part of the shareera yatharthaya, it is in fact quite the opposite. The world of fantasy we conjure in the sanctum of our inner being, our thoughts, does not have a material aspect to it. It is within, internal, totally and completely. The fantasising we do is of our interiority. The body does not come into play when it comes to devising and validating the fantasy. But that isn't the case when it comes to matter and material elements around us. When we perceive them with our senses of the body only then do they come real to our consciousness. It is only when we perceive does it exist in our world of experience. And that experience is a case of how matter is made to have a physical aspect to it when it comes into contact with the body and its sense aggregates... Why do I say a 'physical aspect'? Because Rachana, the physical means to be linked, interpretively, to the physique, the body. And to be, in some sense, 'physical' means it has been interpreted through the physique, the body. And when that happens of course, the matter that was untouched by the physique until that moment takes on another 'form'. Yes Rachana, it is a touch by the human body on the inanimate, nonliving matter, which makes it have a physical form to it. It is when touch occurs, when touched, the object becomes 'physio-material'... How is it 'physio'? What does that prefix mean? It denotes that it is definitional of the physique or the 'bodily' being at work in giving meaning to that material which was perceived by coming into contact with the body as a touch. Coming into physical contact, bodily contact... An object, a material object, complete in its visual dimensions, its form and colour, remains an object yet to be fully in the fold of the shareera yatharthaya until, until, yes, until it is touched. Then it gains 'flesh' Rachana. Then it has colour, form and flesh, because it is then within the 'realm of touch', the most sensual of senses. The most real of any sensation. That is what tells us that we are in fact physically awake to the world around us. An object that comes into physical contact with the body transpires in its form of materiality, its state of being, 'matter', becoming the physio-material..."

Touch. The significance of touch can be manifold. It has an invasiveness in one way, because to each person their body can be a temple. A premise that may be physically known by another, ideally, only with a certain form of consent coming into effect. Touch. It carries in it at times the most endearing affirmation. The assurance by another that we exist, physically, in the world of another...

"...If, deep in a forest, a tree falls and no one sees or hears it, did it really happen? It's a way to illustrate, I suppose, how a material phenomenon comes into being when there is someone who has witnessed it in some way. When it has occurred within that someone's 'radius of perceptibility'. And this radius Rachana will certainly differ from person to person, depending on the potency of their sense faculties. And it is also subject to interpretation. With any of the senses it is possible that each phenomenon or object is given a different level of interpretation. Take the example of a seat inside a bus, like we are in. Different people who sit in these seats may have different opinions about its softness or hardness, subjectively decided, because of how their respective bodies, their touch took place on that surface of inanimate material. And surely in their subconscious they may arrive at these opinions, these decisions, with references to previous experiences. Experiences the body has had, coming to contact with material surfaces meant for seating. And this Rachana, is an instance of the physio-material coming into being. The value judgment on a material surface, a tangible object. And being judged as desirable or not causes the material to be imbued with a physio-materiality..."

We need at times, to be in the grip of someone's touch to know that our existence is really and fully true in physical terms. It is fascinating how much power we may attribute to another to affirm to us that truth, of being real. To be looked at, to be spoken to... And to be touched. Sometimes it is to simply know that we are touchable. Touch. Sometimes, we just want to be touched. To be told in a truth firmer than 'words' of our realness, in this world.

"...Whatever we perceive through touch Rachana is an ultimate truth. It affirms beyond all doubt to our consciousness that the object that we have perceived through touch is real in terms of shareera yatharthaya. Until through touch a material object has revealed its fullness to our senses, anything could be an illusion."

Touch; what of it have Jaliya and Rachana shared so far? Sitting beside the other how have each of them, in terms of the ideas expounded by Jaliya, revealed themselves to each other on this journey? Yes, in sight and sound they have projected to the other, dimensions of their selves. But, in terms of the shareera yatharthaya, in terms of perceiving through their sense faculties, how much dimensionality has each gained of the other? It was only through that simple contact of hands that was caused by the need for a drink of water had they shared a sense of the other's touch. The only occurrence of touch which had 'revealed' a bodily existence of the other. Yes, these two may rest assured, that neither of them is an illusion.

"But every illusion Rachana, to the person who sees it, becomes a part of the realness their consciousness holds. It's just that the illusion doesn't have the potential to enter the deeper folds of the shareera yatharthaya... Like the mist for example. In its beauty of visual form, its graceful motion flowing past the tops of mountains we behold it in our visual senses. Yet it cannot be touched. In its very nature of intangibility it has distanced itself from the potential of becoming 'physio-material'. Though seen, and of a form that seems tangible, none may touch it. In that ambiguity, Rachana, you find its very poeticness... It's sort of like the cinema in a way, if you think about it. With all that colour, form and motion, yet, who can touch it? Who can make what they see on the screen to become part of their shareera yatharthaya? Goes to show, I guess, we cannot necessarily own all what we may see." He smiles under the cover of darkness, in a way, to himself.

True, all that we may see may not become ours to own. But we may wonder whether it has occurred to either of them that what can be touched has the potential be owned.

"That is one of the fascinating things about faceless correspondence."

"What do you mean?"

Like how I am talking to a voice in this darkness? The way I think of your face as the way I saw it back in Nandyal? Although you are covered out of my eyesight right now? Is that what you mean Jaliya? Somehow I know. Yes, I know you are smiling sweetly, at me.

"Just think of how many people we may communicate with everyday, without seeing them. Leave aside the people we know, the ones whom we know by sight. Think of what the cyber realm has offered the world now. We have the space to be virtually anything, in a virtual world."

I know from the way that soft laugh comes your mouth spreads in a certain way, making a dimple. It's on your left cheek. Yes Jaliya, I know. The sound of your voice says it.

"Take 'digital discourse', that's what linguists now academically label the correspondence we do through email, chatting online, texting and stuff. Unless it's some webcam thing, it's mostly faceless, right? So we interact with some words that come on a screen. Words made of characters, signs. And then we use emoticons to express our moods. More signs, to our correspondence that doesn't have an actual human face. Yet through these words, signs, we imply what we may look like. It's the mind that draws pictures in our head based on those signs. 'Mental pictures' of what the person at the other end must appear like at that moment."

Mental pictures... Sigh... Mental pictures. How sweetly they struggle to stay alive, from fading.

"And faceless correspondence Rachana, is another form of escape, in a way."

"How? How is it an escape?"

"Knowing that the person at the other end does not come into our shareera yatharthaya gives our subconscious the feeling, a subtle, secretively dwelling notion within us that says we are locked into some surreal state of relations. No, it's more of a semi-surreal state, I suppose. Because while we are assured of our own bodily existence, the words we interact with have no body, no face, no voice. It's just a set of signs. Words, in a visually perceivable form. And we can let our mind then take on the role of giving an architecture to the body, the face, the being we assume is at the other end. Unseen, unheard, yet communicating with us. There is that burden of the identity that may disappear for a mere moment at least, when we are in a mode of interaction like that... Because at some hidden layer of our subconscious Rachana, is that knowledge, of how we too have transformed our being into words of a visually perceivable form to the person at the other end... We become faceless and bodiless... But we travel to the consciousness of another, through the words we use to communicate, devoid of the verbal and auditory form. And in that secretly lingering feeling we are motivated to unburden ourselves, believing that we have transpired into some surreal form where the 'politics' of our identity, our visage, our body have been taken away from us. And we remain faceless for a reason. So that we may be unburdened of our selves. It is a way to escape the self."

"I see what you mean..."

But you don't see 'me', do you Rachana? Not in the literal sense of the word. Not at this moment. You hear my words. Taking shape in your senses as auditory signs, words that communicate my ideas to you. And in that you see some form of me. This darkness covers your face. But I know you are smiling. The sound of your words says so.

"...Yes, true, we do become faceless in correspondence that depends on words in some written or digitalised form. I have felt that I suppose..."

You are smiling now dear Rachana. There is in that tone, its textures, an emoticon with the words. The emoticon of a smiley.

"...Like in the letters we write. Well, I haven't written a letter in a while. But when I write, there is, I have felt, some part of me becoming the words that take shape on the paper. It's like there isn't anyone to judge what I say, or may say... Sometimes I have felt it's much easier to say things in written words than to actually say it..."

Faceless correspondence my dear. How wonderful it can be. But it's also an entrapment in a way my dear Rachana. You lose track of the realness that does exist on the other side of the dialogue, the correspondent who keeps your words. Words that sometimes may otherwise not be spoken or only spoken with much caution can be made to slip, spill out, more easily...

"...And when you text. Yes, there is that relaxedness isn't it? It isn't strained like it happens sometimes when talking in person."

...Yes Rachana it can make you susceptible to divulge things that you may guard when you are in a conversation with faces actually in front of you. In digital discourse we become disembodied. Some unknowingly, swayed by the comforting it provides, may be made vulnerable. And allow too much access. Giving chances for some to turn into 'marauders'.

She giggles; it has a certain charm, a girlishness to it. And to Jaliya this endearing sound creates in his head a vivid picture of her in this unrelenting darkness. Though he may not see her. He has in his mind a mental picture.

"Thought of something amusing?" His own face now has a smile, she knows. That dimple has appeared again.

"SMS."

"What about it?"

"Ok, you have texted with girls you liked? I mean late night text chats?"

A gentle laugh, makes his head lapse onto the seat's headrest. He smiles to himself placidly. A sigh almost at his lips.

"Yes." He replies, a shyness in him revealing itself from that single word. She sees his face in her thoughts. Remembering there is an emoticon for this particular expression. A tinge of blush on the round yellowish face.

"How many of those texts do you delete afterwards?" Her tone has an impishness, a tease he finds endearing.

"You wait for that,..." He smiles, his words betraying his coyness. "...you wait till your inbox is full and you can't receive anymore unless you've deleted some."

"Then it's the same way with all of us I guess. You look at how many SMS from that person you add up with each passing day. What the best ones are. Read and reread the ones that make you smile to yourself. It becomes a secret little history we carry around with us."

Yes, it is a history Rachana. Being in that digitally written form to which you may have recourse to time and time again, it does qualify as a history, doesn't it? It's not just memories. Its memories that have been given some form of edification. A secret, private edification one may say. An inbox full of text messages. And in it lies its being as something more 'formal' than the mistiness of human memory which eventually falls at the mercy of 'time' and its bodily manifestation called 'ageing'. As the silence sets into the space between Jaliya and Rachana they each wonder in silence what will the other keep of this journey, this meeting, in their storehouses of memories? What, if ever at all, out of what they have shared, will transpire into history? How will they each remember the other once this bus journey eventually reaches its destination?

So nice. Very nice. The warmth in her hand. Real. It was real. No, I didn't dream it. Yes, it was real. Like the soft laughter, from her, playing in my ear...

What has brought you here? Escape? Travelling in India, the storytelling. Are you looking for escape? So polite, courteous. His hand felt so still. Asleep. While in my grip...

...You must have felt nervous. I think you did. You must have thought I was asleep. You did. If not you wouldn't have. So respectable. Traditionally brought up young lady. Light blue shawl. Yes, her shawl is light blue...

....Maybe he thought I would refuse. Maybe that's how he thought. Traditional Indian girl. Conservative girl. Yes, has to be. Otherwise surely he would have given his hand. Introducing his name, we would have shaken hands...

...Who is waiting for you? When you get off at Chennai. When we get off. Two different directions afterwards... Sigh... Who is waiting for you Rachana? But then, you 'love to travel'. You like night time travel. This night is like a blanket from the world...

...Sleep is an escape. Underneath closed eyelids we dream. We escape the world. But when did you last sleep well?

...When you do this routine journey. This nightly journey. What do you dream of, while sleeping? Do you escape into your dreams, while the bus carries you off to your morning?

Neither of them can seep under the covers of sleep. They each feel there is that need to stay awake, almost dutifully. But then there is something else that has been affecting their subconscious all this while to keep them in this play of verbal interaction dispelling the advances of sleep. What is that? It is the intensifying quietness. The unearthly silence that has set in all around them. No there isn't the slightest indication of any other living human being onboard with them. Not a cough, a stirring sound by any of the passengers. And the automotive sound of the bus in motion has been so monotonous, and turning lighter with passing time there is something of a growing 'distancing' of that sound from their perception with the progression of their dialogues with each other. Though they did not speak of this concern more consciously, about the lack of any visibility of whatever landscape may be passing them. Which could have been seen, with the aid of some light from a little town they ought to pass. Though it was spoken about, the unusualness of it all, in mere cursory remarks, this matter has been weighing steadily onto their subconscious. And the weightiness of all of this had strapped onto it another concern. A question –Where are we headed?

This silence...like its covering us altogether. In the womb of silence. Ah yes, I remember.

In the gentleness of a whisper he speaks her name, lest it becomes intrusive to her possible sleep, or solitary thoughts.

"Rachana?"

"Yes Jaliya?"

A reply suggesting anticipation. She wants his voice to drive away the silence invading her ears.

"You weren't sleeping I hope. Did I wake you?"

"No, no. Don't worry. Not sleepy at all. It's strange in a way."

"Yes, I was thinking that myself. The silence."

"It's, it's not suppose to be like this. I can't imagine why."

She speaks in the darkness, her lips moving unseen. Yet heard by the young man, whom she knows carves in his head the picture of her. Strangely, now, the sound of each other's words is the most they can see of each other. Tones tell them how the other's visage is like.

"I was just thinking of the experience I had two weeks ago. In Auroville, in Tamil Nadu. Have you been there Rachana?"

"I have heard of it of course, but no, haven't gone there. What did you think of it? Did you like the visit?"

"A very unique place. I'll say that. But what I found most fascinating was the Mathrimandir."

"Ah, the Mathrimandir! I've seen pictures of it. It looks like something from a science fiction movie." There is intrigue blended with something else. What is it? Jaliya asks himself trying to decipher the tone.

You're sceptical. There is a sense of scepticism in you about that place.

"Very much. Looks like it's a thing in a sci-fi movie. And the inside of it! Rachana I am telling you it is surreal. Seriously, it's like you step inside a scene of a science fiction film. One without aliens zapping you with lasers of course."

Their laughter suddenly moves them to feel more livelier. As though the silence around them with its oppressive feeling is staved off by their laughter's liveliness. But does anyone onboard show any signs of responding to such audible laugher? No, there is none, because from a point of perceiving the world through their senses, both Jaliya and Rachana have locked onto the sound of the words, sighs and laughs of each other. Even if some slumbering passengers onboard were to show some sign of being perceptive to their sound of laughter, these two travellers would not be awake to the sounds of stirrings of those others.

"To me the experience was something out of this world..."

She likes his voice that comes in a tone of hushed deepness. It is enthused with what he is reawakening in him, dwelling deeper into his own experience. There is some charm of mysticism wrapped in it.

"...Inside the meditation chamber, seeing that single ray of sunlight coming into the crystal ball in my direct view, I was folded within a world of soundlessness. Rachana, I was in the womb of silence."

"The womb of silence." She says it softly. Partly a question seeking explications. Partly an utterance to gain more familiarity, expecting a revelation of details. Something more than the mere acoustics of the words as parts of a spoken dialogue.

"It was as if silence, the very 'element of silence' is born to the world from that place. It is the repository of the world's silence. Being there, with my legs crossed in the lotus position in the central chamber, I was seated in the womb of silence. The loudness of my own thoughts is all I could hear. It engulfs you, that repository of silence, and bids you become one with it, the silence. That is why to me it was the womb of silence... Because if you let your mind become one with it, then you may feel you are on a path to rebirth. To be reborn into the silence. To become silence. But what stood in my way, what stood between that silence, that all encompassing silence Rachana, which in itself was like a stilled force, and me, my being, was the loudness of my own chaotic mind..."

You were facing, you were made to face, the chaos your mind carries? The chaos within you? An overwhelming thought. Locked out of everything else. No escapes...No escapes.

"...The awesomeness of the Mathrimandir experience was something I contemplated on very deeply. Imagine the impact of it, when you are left to simply face your own thoughts and nothing else! No external stimuli. Nothing but the presence of your own consciousness. Undisturbed and unavoidable. Inescapable..."

It must have been almost unreal. The world shuts out... And it's just you. You in the form of your thoughts. Your unbroken flow of consciousness. If it's the silence that causes it, then Jaliya is your consciousness the 'weight of silence'?

"...You stare at yourself, in a way. Your thoughts stare at you in all its volume. Your self is all there is. The self, made to appear through the unconquerable silence, Rachana, I truly felt the weightiness of my own consciousness, the jarring spirals, the storminess inside. I was asking myself later, when compelled so intensely, can you really look away? No you can't. And then, you have to answer that question. How much of it can you bear? How much can you really bear? How much can you ultimately bear, of yourself?"

"Did you find the answer Jaliya?" She says this, wanting to be of comfort to him. She knows, his voice says he has within a weariness that seeks to be put to rest.

"Did that question find its answer?"

He sighs deeply in response. He puts his head against the headrest. He looks overhead. As though he would probably do if out alone on a starry night, looking to the heavens for some answer. She imagines him in such a narrative of actions.

"I don't know. But I know there is that urge. Maybe in all of us, to find that silence of true peace."

"A silence of true peace. Yes, it would be beautiful. And tell me. This experience of silence, in the Mathrimandir, your womb of silence. What would you call it? The image of that experience, being in there, the image of that experience within you?"

Suddenly he felt himself recalling that feeling. That incomparable feeling never known before under any circumstances. He knew what it meant and how its significance could be conjured into an image conveyable by words.

"The totality of silence. That is what it was Rachana. The totality of silence." He inhales audibly and exhales in the likeness of a breathing exercise. Perhaps, she thinks, it had proven too much for him. The magnitude of that silence.

"I kept asking myself. How could I explain that moment? What could I say to someone as an illustration to give an idea of it, 'the totality of silence'."

"So have you thought of it?"

"I did. It came to me rather. Revealed itself, more than my making it. It's, a moment of, 'you minus you'. Does that make sense? I was thinking about it later, strolling in the gardens surrounding the Mathrimandir. What does it mean? You minus you. And then it became clear. The womb of silence is meant to make you feel the awesomeness of the totality of silence. And then you realise that to become one with it means to erase all the loudness and chaos inside. So it means 'you minus you'. Nothingness. Nothingness, as in 'no self'."

"Or maybe, Jaliya, it means you plus you. Do you think that is possible?"

There is that sensibly paused moment in their conversation. She has stilled him in a way. His convictions of how he understood and interpreted his experience in the Mathrimandir has been confronted with a diametrically opposed view. The change of that single word, minus to plus has created a 'questioning', a query which he cannot negate.

"What do you mean Rachana? You must explain it to me."

"Just think, what if the totality of silence means to become united, you plus you. Rather than withdraw from the self. What if it meant you are to find your union with the silence of restfulness. The divine. For you to become one with the force of the universe that holds in it all creation. And then, it would be a path towards where your self, unites with the greater self. The divine cosmic energy, of which we are all a part, I believe. I believe that is what we all seek in a way. In the cycle of birth and reincarnation. We seek rest... To escape this cycle, where we keep living some story, and then be reborn to live a story that perhaps was lived in some life before."

A stark contrast of views caused by the simple supplanting of one word in a single line. Which is it? Minus or plus? They sit next to each other not knowing how much of their beliefs the other has been able to relate to. Their conceptions aren't after all purely of their own individual thinking and philosophising after all. No, how could it be? The world they have inhabited before getting on this bus is far more complex than that. Far more complicated than the experience of an overwhelming silence are these ideas they each expressed relating to the essence behind Jaliya's Mathrimandir experience. What Rachana expressed as an alternative way of perceiving it and interpreting it, has a subtle, unpronounced foundation of religiosity. Yes, they each carry an identity in terms of the religious convictions they bear. From the world outside they entered this night bus journey, carrying those religions. The beliefs they have been exposed to in their respective worlds of experience. And that is why Jaliya believes his conceptions of interpreting the totality of silence in terms of subtracting the self from the self and arriving at a symbolic zero or nothingness has the truth of Buddhism, as he understands it. The Buddhist conception of ending 'samsara', the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, is the attainment of nibbana or nirvana. The former of the two words being the term from the Pali language in which the Buddha preached, while the latter is its form in Sanskrit. Nibbana or nirvana has been described in terms of imagery by the Buddha himself, in the Rathna suthra. When the oil in the lamp dries out, the flame on the wick burns no more. The extinguishing of all desire. In every conceivable way, it manifests to Jaliya as a nothingness, arrived at from the equation he articulated. Yet, however much it seems like an indisputable truth to Jaliya, and however much he may couch it in descriptions and imagery meant to capture the listener, projecting that epiphanous moment to the listener by reaching inside for words, to give form to that sensitive experience, it meets a barrier. Rachana's own repository of religiosity and perceiving the world through such vantages does not find complete harmony with what Jaliya propounds. The word, the signifier that shades her approach to this discourse is moksha. The Hindu belief of reunification with the supreme divinity, Brahma, and thus ending the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, stands contrary to what Jaliya expounded. Rachana believes it is by achieving the state of oneness of the mortal soul with its divine origin, that the cosmic fount of life can restore the 'silence of true peace'. A lasting restfulness into man. And thus, she will believe in the 'you plus you' theorem. It is these two conceptions, moksha and nibbana, that have brought in the minus versus plus divide between them in trying to decrypt and interpret what silence in its absoluteness could mean. But, the question now is whether they will debate on it, verbally, with each other? That is what is most crucial in deciding perhaps the fate of the sweet harmony built up between them. While they each hold their respective silence pondering how they must proceed in their verbal interactivity after hitting this contentious incompatibility governed by religiosity, it is the sound of their breathing that speaks of their respective presence to the other in this darkness, affirming that neither has dissolved into the blackness... Breathing; the most fundamental function of the body, essential to sustain life. And how beautiful it must be to these two to hear the rise and fall of their breath, which may now even seem like some secret form of speech, devised between them to convey the simple truth of affirming physical presence next to the other... The sound of breathing? But is that all they now have to say to each other? After all the stories they shared? Did the discourse of words bring them to such a perplexity about the other that they can't get their conversation back on track? In a way, it seems the world of words, reliance on words, and words alone to communicate, may have done them something of a disservice. What holds them now, is the silence. The silence they feel around them and a silence within, binds them together in a moment devoid of words. And this sudden silence thudding in between them, imposing a divorce from the vernacular that too had much pre-eminence to affirm their existence, must be dispelled, they both think. Yes, they think it is a must to break the spell of the darkness manifesting its being in the form of this persisting silence, because the unrealism it brings is just too much for them. Unrealism? Yes, that is exactly how they both feel right now about their present context, being severed from the world of sight by means of the absolute darkness yet to be broken by even some scant light, and the gradual sensible severance from the world of sound with only the dimming monotonous hum of a bus engine almost surreptitiously coalescing with the silence. And rest assured it is not a comforting feeling to either of them to be in this state. The feeling of being in this state is becoming daunting to them.

"Rachana?" He almost spurts her name. It is the silence that did it. Making him feel as though his words will somehow have to spear the thick veil.

"Yes Jaliya?" There is no mistaking it. He can sense the hidden tenseness in her. Somehow they have both been clasped by the oppressiveness of the silent darkness around them.

"No, I was just, er...just checking."

Checking what Jaliya? What exactly did you mean to check of Rachana by saying her name like it was a projectile released on half a decision?

"I was wondering if you had fallen asleep."

"No, somehow, it seems I can't become sleepy." And what is that weariness in her voice? The lively spirited convivial Rachana whose companionableness is deeply endearing to him, sounds numbed like.

"Strange. Neither can I."

What is the purpose of dialogue? Has anyone from the millions of interlocutors on the face of this earth engaged at this very moment in dialogic discourses exchanging ideas and information through the oral medium of speech ever thought of that simple question? What is the purpose of dialogue?... Generally speaking, one may propound that the result, the outcome of the two way interaction between two talkers, proves the purpose of a dialogue; why the conversation took place, and why such verbal interaction is necessary. The outcome? Yes, the outcome, which may or may not always have a measurable degree of materiality to it. For example, when people converse to do business transactions, the economic goal involved is materially measureable. But then people talk for pleasure, like lovers who may utter 'sweet nothings', but that too reaps outcomes that are materially measurable when the lovers manifest their love for each other with bodily interactions. People may gain relief, mental respite, through conversation, which of course may not always be materially manifest of its outcome. The purposes underlying 'acts of communication' are needless to say innumerably multifarious. But then what is discussed here is the concept of dialogue isn't it? Yes, when taking dialogue as one means of communication between persons, 'dialogue' can simply be seen as a 'verbal exchange of words'... But what if the facts were to be inaccurate and the data value was to be lost in a certain dialogue? It doesn't matter one may suppose, unless it's meant for that explicit purpose, with the sole intention, of exchanging 'data', 'facts'. And if that isn't the sole basis of a certain dialogue, then the conversation may meander in all sorts of directions. So then, what do Jaliya and Rachana hope to make the outcome of the verbal exchange they just made a little while ago, which didn't have the thrust of developing into a conversation like before?

She is. She is here. Yes...

He sounded startled. Jolted. Why?...

Say, something. Something to get talking again...

Doesn't he want to talk? He was so good at it before.

They both want to talk. Yet it seems, to initiate a dialogue isn't as easy right now, for some reason. But then why do they want to talk if it seems to be a tedium? Perhaps they want to exchange the facts about their state of mind right now? A factualness is to be the sole basis, is it?... But then how factual have all the stories they have developed so far, been? But still, there can be dialogues, conversations that are completely devoid of facts and show no 'fact value'. Then of what worth is such talk? Ah, but then, there is another reason between them. Talking is the only way they can assure themselves the other exists in this abysmal darkness. And to be affirmed of another being conscious of your own presence is an affirmation to your own existence. The sound of the other's voice has come to mean this very thing to them. Their subconscious needs that.

"Jaliya."

"Yes Rachana?"

"Tell me about Omunkashyu."

Once again, yes once again the subtle frostiness in the silence melts with the warmth of words spoken between Rachana and Jaliya. To them the smoothness of their conversations builds and solidifies a bridge between them. Bridging two persons who aren't bound by the realness of a continual touch.

"Into the sweetly idyllic villages nestled in the Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria, a detachment of soldiers were deployed from Istanbul on the word of the Grand Vizier to the 'Padishah' the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. It was in the year 1668....The power of the ottomans had swept across from the south to the east of Europe to propagate the word of the prophet. In their heart of hearts they believed they were uniting the world in a providential vision of oneness, under the holy banner of the prophet....To the Ottoman Empire, Rachana, the Rhodope Mountains was strategically important. Its geography made it a natural fort that marked the might of an empire which had spread its reach to the Balkans and now looked westward to march onto claim mastery over the world....To the theocratic mullahs in Istanbul, who dominated affairs of state, the little pockets of 'non-believers' scattered in this region seemed to hold symbolic importance... The embracement of the one true faith had to be expedited to set an example to other 'non-believers' in conquered lands. It would be done and done with all means necessary....And so, the conversion of a remote little village in the Rhodope mountain range, called Elindenya, was marked to be moulded into a model example testimony to the power of persuasion, or coercion, of the mighty ottomans. That was how the relentless time of violence erupted, in those scenic Bulgarian mountains, as a fiercely armed contingent came on horseback under the command of the most fearsome janissary of that time, Karaibrahim."

"Janissary? Was it a special kind of soldier of the ottomans?"

"The most fearsome warriors of the Ottoman Empire. They swore loyalty to the Sultan and acted in fanatic devotion to him. Their loyalty could never be usurped and their very lives were dedicated unquestioningly to their master. Janissaries, Rachana, were moulded out of Christian boys taken from their villages. Boys between the ages from six to ten. They were called the 'blood tax'.

"How terrible." There is a gasp with those words, he detects.

"The story begins with a rear view of Karaibrahim saddling his horse. It's daytime. A bust size camera frame, so his whole body is not visible to us. Only the top, from mid torso up. He wears a black turban with thin white stripes set well apart. His hands move slowly, pensively. The camera is still. The scene changes to show a man dressed in an elegant Turkish garb. Regal looking, his white turban is very elegantly ornate with gold. But, no words are spoken. It is night time. The camera cuts back to Karaibrahim. Still he has his back to us... His hands move slowly securing the straps of the riding saddle. Once gain it is night as the camera takes us to the exquisitely dressed Turkish man. His movement indicates he is a commander of some sort. He is reviewing troops. And once again we see daytime, that same sight of Karaibrahim. Perhaps Rachana, this is a recollection. A flashback. A thought process in pictures..."

So again you have taken me to the cinema. Here in this darkness.

"...Now the man in the white turban speaks to his men, whose backs of heads are all we may see, but only partly. The camera tracks, moves, as the Turkish commander says how he fears not that there are enemies of the Padishah who walk the earth, still. For they will eventually be annihilated, he assures... But, he says in slow controlled words pregnant with intent, he fears that there are still many subjects of the Padishah who worship the cross... And so, he declares that unless a single faith binds them, and the holy banner of the prophet flutters over all, the world will not become theirs..."

So this is how the film story begins in words. Softly spoken words of violence.

"...The camera returns to Karaibrahim who slowly turns around to reveal his face to us. Strong, impassive, redoubtable, his eyes speak of his iron will. The camera cuts back to the night time memory to show the Turkish official walking away from his troops. The camera returns to Karaibrahim who mounts his horse and raises his right hand making the signal to move forward. The camera cuts to a long wide angle shot. Dominating the scope of the frame is the mighty Rhodope Mountains, under a gloomy sky. In the foreground we see a light brownish, barley coloured plane. A column of horses moves slowly, carrying men in turbans. The camera cuts to a high angle wide shot of the cavalry trotting slowly in a row of pairs... Cutting to a low angle shot we see the column of riders ascending a mountain ridge, we see them more closely now... The mist of the mountains drifts across them. They cross a stream and come to a path to ascend the mountain again. Though they move innocuously, somehow you know they are in disharmony with the surroundings. The stillness of the mountain finds them alien..."

The sleeping mountains know what is to come. They feel the violence that is in the blood of the men on horses... Yes Jaliya, nature can feel deeply what is in the hearts of men. Nature after all carries the spirit of a mother.

"...And now as we see the camera cut to a tilt down angle, we see Karaibrahim in the foreground moving forward on his mount. Again it is a 'bust size' frame. The camera tracks backwards as Karaibrahim advances impassively. His face masked in a silence created by the depth of his thoughts. The intenseness within, as he rides through a cavern like passage sided by walls of living rock. His soldiers are behind him. In this narrow passage as they advance, suddenly, the peace is broken as clumps of rock fall ahead of their path from above! The horses are startled and the janissary's eyes dart suspiciously at what is overhead. They continue... The camera passes the riders and the faces of the soldiers become detailed visages. And then a full frontal close-up shot of Karaibrahim's face. His moustache is like of a Turkish vizier. Spreading sideways pointedly. There is nothing but stoniness in his visage. He is, after all, Rachana, a man now made to be a belief, an unshaken belief, and nothing more... Suddenly, we see the camera cut to the visual of a small waterwheel, the kind used in little streams in villages to power a mill. The water splashing on it glistens in the sunlight. It is but only too brief, and the emotionless face of Karaibrahim returns to confront us wordlessly. Again we see another picture. A low angle shot shows us a tree on whose branches are large bells. A soft music enters the picture..."

And so his emotions now take on another level to express his thoughts... Is the music soothing, calming, as he moves with so much emotional burdens?

"...The image of the waterwheel returns. Then we see two small boys playfully toss white flour at each other from two sacks placed in front of them... The camera cuts to a high angle shot. We see the bank of a stream, a rocky ground, and there is a single woman drying in metal pans what looks like wheat flour, in the bright sunlight... The camera in its high angle slowly zooms out to a long wide angle to reveal that the two boys are on a wood made terrace running along a cottage like structure overlooking the stream from across which on the other side is the woman... A man comes over to the two boys and ends their playful mischief, chasing them away..."

Tranquillity. The peacefulness of childhood. You cannot forget it.

"...The camera cuts back to the face of Karaibrahim..."

The face of violence.

"...Behind him Rachana we see the faces of his men in the backdrop, in the distance are the mountains. But now, we see, shading his face, a barely detectable sign of emotion. The camera takes us back to the two small boys. They are swimming in the stream, in the glistening sunlight..."

How can anyone erase the times of childhood?... Nostalgia. Nostalgia has come in, carrying underneath it, the sadness. The sadness of its end. The tragedy of childhood, Jaliya, is its unbreakable bond to the eventuality called adulthood.

"...In the water are lily pads, or some water flora resembling lily pads... The two boys are naked. Swimming joyfully, they are utterly carefree. The camera cuts back to the face of Karaibrahim..."

He is recalling his childhood Jaliya. It is a terrible pain for him to bear and still be the man he is required to be.

"...His eyes have gone to a distance, inwards, within him..."

"Jaliya?"

"Yes Rachana?"

"How do they make those small boys, those children, into cruel warriors? How can they be made to do violence to their own people?"

"The method of creating janissaries has been a science developed over centuries... The people in the Rhodope Mountains say that no janissary was ever born into the world, but were moulded out of their children, turning the supple flesh to a hateful iron. It happens like this Rachana. You see, when those small boys in their innocent childhood are taken into the hands of the ottomans, they are blindfolded. They remain deprived of sight of the daytime, being taken on horseback on that seemingly unending journey to the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Only at night during the journey, as the soldiers camp, would the blindfolds be undone, and that too inside the tent. And only for a new minutes would they be allowed this respite from the fearful darkness bound on them. Only the dim flicker of a fire outside do they see. And then darkness takes over again... In this way they live for days, until they enter the capital. Deprived of sight and assailed by a plethora of sounds that scare them to no end. Children from sleepy mountain villages thrust into the 'centre of the world'. And it is here finally, after days and days of harsh travel on horseback blindfolded into an unmoving darkness, they finally see the daylight once again....And the sight that greets them is the grandeur of the Sultan, the Padishah himself... His gaze falls on them kindly with an embracing visage of affection. The kind of powerful impression a father may cast on his son who assures that no harm will ever be allowed upon him, by anyone, hereafter. It is this very moment that marks their total capture Rachana. Because now their hearts have run to this powerful figure pulsating with an abundant paternal love. And from this benign father figure they receive their first delectable meal. The Sultan himself serving the famished boys who yearn for a sense of comfort, assures them that he will from then on be their father in their new home. He will lovingly feed each boy a mouthful by his own regal hand, and kiss the forehead... Smiling with unbound love he looks into their eyes, assuring he will dispel whatever fears haunt them. And this is the point where the innocence of their supple flesh is met with the deceptive irons of the ottoman methods. The means to craft steely men who will unquestioningly brandish swords for their Padishah and dedicate their very breath to be at his bidding....And so these children are taught the arts of soldiery from that day on. They are trained as men and not spared of cruel punishment for the missteps of children. Both their bodies and their minds being shaped in the mould of a loyal servant who embraces the greatness of the ottoman civilisation unquestioningly...The children have no respite from the harshness they are subjected to. The only comfort they would look forward to is the meal they will have once a week with their newly professed father, the Sultan. His warmth and benevolence is the only drink of water their hearts receive in the harsh burning trek they make in desolate loneliness. His sight becomes the form of love that fills the void in their hearts...So, this benign captor becomes the paternal figure who is their only dear one. The one they will never want to displease. The one they become devoted to in a gratitude for healing them of the fear they were tormented by...And as they mature, Rachana, the janissaries are bound to their father, their master, in a devotion that is fanatical. A devotion that is crafted through deceptions, yet is a realness they feel. To them all that matters is they uphold this sanctified feeling. Because it is a filial piety. And this filial piety Rachana, they called it..."

"Omunkashyu."

"Yes." The acoustic form of his reply dissipates to a solemnity of quiet between them.

"What happens to him Jaliya? Karaibrahim."

There is a quiet contemplation as Jaliya holds his words. She knows this about him. The story, in a way, must become him. Only then will she feel she can live it through his words. A story must always feel as though it will make the listener live it. Those are the stories that survive the generations as time rolls on unceasingly. Time, which is a respecter of no persons.

"He wonders what waits for him in Elindenya. That is why his gaze doesn't flow to the distance beyond, but dwells inwards. Within him are questions... You see Rachana, there is a certain science when it comes to the janissaries. The system that governed them dictated a janissary never be sent to his village of childhood, his first home. It was feared that to send a janissary to the place of his childhood would mean a possibility of creating a rift between his worlds. The life he has been moulded into and the life he knew, which secretly lurks in his subconscious. Made to sleep silently over the course of years and years of harsh training. The rigidified janissary must not be made to hear the whimpers of the child subdued, nor echoes of his laughter from days that may only drift across him like a soft wind in his dreams. They, the masters of the janissaries feared Omunkashyu, the code of filial piety observed by the janissaries, would be broken if overpowering emotions from the land of their childhood were to take hold of them, which would happen only if the sights and sounds of the forgotten past were to meet them once again... There is nothing more powerful Rachana, than the power to cause remembrance..."

And what will you remember of me Jaliya, when morning comes...

"...We see there is a speckle at the corner of his eye. He remembers the land that slowly takes shape in front of him as he comes out of the narrow rock passage. His horse takes steps along a gravel path and a mountain road opens to them. He knows this path Rachana, in his eyes there is a silence that says his whole being has been caught in a moment of involuntary solemnity... The wind feels familiar to him. The camera cuts to a close-up shot of his face. The emotionless face is secretly affected. In front of him is the road to the village. Elindenya. A land of memories. Yes, he is caught in a moment of remembrance..."

...Perhaps you will keep some of the words... Maybe the sound of the laughter, we shared.

"...He wonders what awaits him... What faces could emerge from like a shadow seen in a dream?... Something vague will touch him. But too vague to be anything relatable to the world he was possessed by."

"But Jaliya, why is Karaibrahim being sent to Elindenya? It goes against their system doesn't it?"

"Karaibrahim was the favourite of the janissaries' commander. The mission to Elindenya was of significant importance to many in Istanbul. It would be a matter of pride and in another sense a bid made in desperation."

"Who was desperate?"

"The clerical bastions in Istanbul wanted this symbolic conquest desperately to further their own influence. And the most effective of the janissaries was Karaibrahim."

"Was he asked?"

"Yes. And when the commander of the janissaries spoke of it to his most trusted protégé, Karaibrahim had begged to be given the honour of proving his steadfast resolve in serving the destiny of the Sultan. The king of kings, the Padishah."

"And they disregarded the principle that was meant to protect Omunkashyu?"

"They challenged it. The strength in the character, the redoubtable resolve of Karaibrahim beseeched for the trust of the janissaries' commander. He was desperate to prove his bond to Omunkashyu. To show how nothing could tear it from his heart."

"What is his destiny? This man driven by his conviction in Omunkashyu?"

"He has no idea of what lies ahead as his mount steps onto the gravel path to Elindenya. He doesn't know yet Rachana that in his village there is an ailing woman who has had a dream of his arrival... She hasn't much time. She is dying and wants to see with her own eyes the man whom she knows will change Elindenya forever."

Dare she ask, she thinks. But she will, because she is as much part of driving this narrative ahead as Jaliya. The raconteur may find in his listener a partner whose questions become a strength that propels the imagination, with something as so subtle and unsuspecting as the feeling carried in the tone of the questions spoken.

"Who is she Jaliya?"

He knows now who she is. The touch of Rachana's tone on his ear made it clear to him. And how will he tell her, answer her simple question? Will he say it in just a word, or go deeper into the woman's being and the advancing figure of violence?

"She is submerged in a fever that is claiming her into the growing darkness... The fever had turned terminal ever since she saw the dream. The face that remained unmoved against her pleas. The stony determination on that face to commit violence had spoken to her in an expression that had needed no words... And then she knew. Her time was coming... She is bound to that face by the truth of blood. Blood. It holds the definition of life, Rachana... And Karaibrahim is yet to know how strong the ties of blood are. Because it was the blood in this woman lying febrile in a cot covered by a sheepskin that created him."

She takes in a sharp breath. Consternation stifled. And Jaliya knows how she feels by the subtle sound of her reaction.

She is still there! Waiting for his return!... But then, he is not who he was. After all those years and after all he has been through....He is not who he was. Is he?

"Though maybe all too well known, there is a saying, 'a man cannot escape his past'."

Can any of us Jaliya? Can any one of us really escape our past? We live in it with every turn our life makes we think is 'new'. It is the story we are meant to find again and again in different forms. However much we step towards the future. However much the dawn brings a new day.... But then, Karaibrahim doesn't know that yet.

"Where does his horse take him? Is he in Elindenya?"

"The wind speaks to him of what he may have to face. There are gentle whisperings in the wind he finds familiar. As a boy, bathing in the river under a clear sky, he would listen to the wind and imagine the wind was whispering poems only he was meant to understand..."

Sigh... Those poems will not mean anything to him Jaliya. There is no dearness in his heart. He is a man whose poetry has been taken out of his soul.

From whose soul has the sense to feel poetry been taken out? Who is this emotionless being Rachana thinks of as Jaliya speaks? Are her thoughts still referring to Karaibrahim, the janissary in the story Jaliya narrates?... Ah!, but then, the thought of a hardhearted man isn't a thought that can only find a stem of truth in the character of Karaibrahim she hears of from Jaliya. To Rachana it has a whole other dimension of truth. Ever since she began to see the innerness of the man who waits to claim her on a day set in the not too distant future... There is no poetry in his soul? How sad. But why does she think that? Was it because he chided her girlishness and the want of romance from him? Were her wants too great? A quiet walk in a park, under cool foliage, holding hands. Perhaps to sit together watching a sunset, gazing at the boundlessness of the ocean. Talk softly in wonder of what the future may hold in store... Simple gestures, like stealing a lick from her ice cream. Looking into her eyes, and smiling. To feel his lips touch her forehead. Picking a white flower adorning her hair, as a keepsake, before leaving for the airport. Things that make the moments they spend together matter only to them. Things that say she is dear to him.

She now has a dire urge to feel a human touch on her hand. To feel there is a world of humanness abundant in tender emotions. And this makes her sigh deep within. For she cannot make herself fulfil this need. To put her hand upon his.

"...There are memories still lurking in him Rachana. Memories held in silence. Bearing silently the sweetness of childhood, he knew to be true. But the grip this wind has on him is frail. It can't yet grip him as tightly as Omunkashyu..."

How tightly did Ravan grip Sita that day, when he took her on his flying chariot? He fought Jatayu, refusing to give her up. Defended her, treated her honourably. Maybe her husband's grip on her wasn't strong enough. Maybe that is why Ravan was able to enchant her. To take her away to his island paradise.

"...But with the steps his steed makes, slowly on the cool dry gravel, there is a change in the road of destiny that he does not know of Rachana..."

He may not really care Jaliya. Whatever turn of fate that waits ahead is not the doings of an unseen providence... Destiny happens when people make decisions that give definitions over their actions, their lives.

"...The janissary's world will be thrown into turmoil... He will contest inside him how much of Omunkashyu can bind him to who he is. The sight of his mother, now just a vague outline of what he can recall only in his dreams, the sound of her beseeching voice will finally cause him to search within, what Omunkashyu means to him..."

And what does it mean to you? Omunkashyu... Touch me. Touch me Jaliya. Can you become my Ravan...

"...She is visibly silent, but her mouth moves in the hope of producing speech. The frame is a tight close-up of her. The old face is wrinkled and beleaguered. The years of grief and the fever plaguing her have claimed the spirit of her vitality. The camera cuts to a close-up of Karaibrahim. The intensity in his eyes speaks of a possible duality. He may even commit the unthinkable... Slowly his lips move as the camera cuts quickly to capture in a full frame the ultimatum pronounced. A wide angle frame. The villagers have formed a periphery. The anxiety and despondency written on their faces become clearly visible as the camera pans in a track shot... The camera cuts to a close-up frame of a Turkish sword, a yatağan, encased in its silver scabbard. A hand clutches the handle. And the camera cuts to a profile shot of the fierce janissary who draws his sabre. The camera cuts to a frontal close-up shot of Karaibrahim. There is a battle he faces on two fronts. The one assigned to him. And what he has inherited..."

With whom does his loyalty lie? Who has the privilege of claiming his true bond?

Is this how it really happens? The story of Karaibrahim the janissary as he sets upon the village of his childhood Elindenya, in the Rhodope Mountains? Is this the story narrated in the historical novel Vreme Razdelno written by the Bulgarian writer Anton Donchev, which was translated to English with the title Time of Parting? On which the movie Vreme Na Nasilie was made, directed by Ludmil Staikov, carrying its English title as Time of Violence? Is this that very exact story we are told by Jaliya? But then, the fact of the matter right now is that it does not really matter to Rachana. And Jaliya has taken the full extent of liberty that a raconteur may deem as his prerogative. But, has he really, truly, and fully got an audience digesting every word he narrates and lives in the moment created by his words? Because right now Rachana is made to think of a state of reality that can only be spoken of in terms of Jaliya's shareera yatharthaya theorem. She must feel the reality of a human touch on her to feel that all that she has felt within her isn't merely her imagination at work and that she has not drifted into a dream, blanketed by this impenetrable darkness. So then why doesn't Jaliya comfort her with the simple act of making his hand come into physical contact with hers? Perhaps he doesn't know she needs a human touch right now? Yes, true enough, he doesn't know that because he isn't a mind reader after all. But, perhaps, there is something else when it comes to the significance of a touch that Jaliya may be dealing with subconsciously... Sometimes, a touch, human skin making its presence upon another, can create bonds stronger than iron.

"Jaliya!"

"What is it Rachana?!"

Her breathing is intense. It cuts the silence sharply. The anxiety in her made his name burst out. She trembles. Her hand is slightly shaky as it grips Jaliya's....This hand she holds, the touch they share is an anchorage of comfort.

"What's wrong?"

"It's this darkness..." the voice quivers slightly, "...Jaliya this darkness. I can't bear it. It's, it's...it's like, it's suffocating me!"

"It's alright."

His hand holds hers. He couches her hand in his touch of comfort. "It won't harm us."

His fingers slip between hers and keep her entwined in a grip of a promise. This closeness comforts her; keeps the oppressiveness of the dark silence around them at bay. "What's troubling you?" He makes his words fall gently on her ear.

"Jaliya there isn't a speck of light in here now. Outside the window there isn't a thing we can see!"

"But this bus is still travelling Rachana. We are en route to our destination."

She senses the smile of reassurance is on his face. The face her eyes cannot behold, but is only a breath's distance away. The sound of his breath is audible. It is calm, and seeks to calm the shakiness in her.

"How much time do you think has gone by? Since we left Nandyal?"

"I have no idea."

"We should have made several stops by now Jaliya. And I know we should be nearing Chennai by now. We should have some sign of morning coming to our sight through the window!"

"Hmm...Yes, you have a point. But I can't for the life of me see my watch in this darkness."

And so they both reach for their mobile phones again and check if they can switch them on again somehow to have some idea of what the time, could be. But neither of them can get their phones to switch on. Somehow it's as if time has deserted them. Abandoned them to the unrealism of the dimensionalities governing their state of being aboard this bus, travelling on its course of a night that does not seem to let up.

"But don't worry, morning will come, eventually. And we will be in Chennai."

Somehow, these words do not elicit from Rachana an indication of being comforted. Does she not trust Jaliya's words? Or is it something else?

He makes his grip on her hand more felt upon her skin. A gesture that is probably a promise of more than words. And her fingers, entwined between his, fold closer, to reciprocate his gesture.

"Morning will come Rachana."

What awaits them in the morning? The morning that is yet to give them any indication of its arrival? The morning that may even possibly seem to have decided to elude them? But then, what does actually await these two in the morning once the bus slowly draws into the Koyembedu bus station in Chennai? Well, Rachana certainly knows what routine she will step into. A cousin of her fiancé's will come on a motorcycle to pick her up and drop her where she lives in Chennai, the comfortable little rented house she shares with three other female colleagues. And by 8.30am she will sit at her table and begin her day... Yes, that is what awaits her at the end of the night journey she does to the big city from Nandyal. And then, there is also her unuttered anxiety that becomes more pronounced with the arrival of the dawn, every day, every morning, as of some time now. Yes, she has her doubts about it. It draws closer with each passing day. And the uncertainness in her grows. It all awaits her, with the morning. The dawn.

"Jaliya?"

"Yes Rachana?"

"What will the morning look like?"

And what awaits Jaliya when morning comes? This young man who has thirsted for travel and keeps believing to be in perpetual motion means to craft one's own fate, one's destination. What awaits him? There will be another bus waiting for him, he imagines. And it will take him away along an open road.

"The first rays of sunlight. A rose like tender light red touches the dimming darkness. The sky gains its face again, slowly, as if waking up to the gentle whispers of a lover. The dawn arrives, gracefully, over a paddy field. The light green paddy saplings are grazed by a soft wind... And far in the distance Rachana, the mountains that slept under the cover of the night now appear, as the mist that wrapped them tenderly fades under the sunlight...The scenery passes us quietly, outside the window a world awakens gently...There are two elderly men, simple village folk, smoking, sitting together, on wood crates, at a wayside chai shop. The steam from the boiler drifts out passing the bunch of ripe yellow plantains hung at the front of this quaint little boutique...And as we roll on, along the gravel road of this tranquil locale, a bullock cart goes past outside our window. Sleepiness in the oxen falls off, like stalks from the hay load being carted. Dropping to the jerky jolts as the hooves move on the pebbly road...We see a small river approaching our sight. It runs through the green paddy field. We go over it, along a little iron bridge....On this body of water is a young boy on a plank ferry, his barge pole moves lightly, unrushed, taking him away from us...The river runs like a hazy road undefined in its tangibility, stretching out to the distance to meet the mountains, the sunlight now glistens bouncing off the water's shaky surface... Our morning has arrived Rachana."

"It's so beautiful Jaliya. But, that isn't the morning that comes in Chennai, when day breaks... Streams and streams of chaotic rushing around is what you see. The morning arrives to show a concrete jungle. That is what waits for us."

"It doesn't have to be... There is nothing visible outside Rachana. It's like an empty canvas. We can let our minds paint whatever we want on it. Don't be daunted by the darkness."

"Is this real Jaliya? Have you wondered if this is real?"

"Do you feel my hand holding yours? The touch of my hand? ...Is it real to you?"

"Yes...Yes it is."

"I feel the same."

Has the silence around them undone itself? Has the darkness outside begun to fade against a ray of dawn? Well, actually no, not really. The darkness still persists outside the window Jaliya sits at, and not a speck of light inhabits inside the bus either.

But then, Jaliya and Rachana are no longer daunted by the darkness. And more importantly they are no longer daunted by the burden of 'arrival' at a given destination. Because, you see, they have decided, both in his and her silence of unspoken thoughts and emotions that they will remain thus. However unrealistic it may seem, they have chosen to remain in this unrealism. And it seems the burdens of the world are no longer fettered to them, for ports of arrival have ceased to be.

"Jaliya, it occurred to me...maybe, this bus

isn't going to Chennai?"

Her head moves, to rest on his shoulder.

"Then tell me Rachana, where is this bus heading to?"

His lips, through the darkness, touch her forehead.

"Omunkashyu."

***

Dlshan Boange is a writer from Sri Lanka who has authored three previous books –Consciousness: the Writer's Primary pen (2010), Textual Tapestry (2011) and Hola El Che! (2011). His academic credentials include a BA in English (Hons) from the University of Colombo, a Higher Diploma in International Relations from the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies. He has worked as a broadcaster for Sri Lankan national TV for over three years, and is a features writer for two national newspapers in his home country. Currently he is reading Law at the Sri Lanka Law College. Omunkashyu is his first published novel.

