A Book Post but can that be?

I haven’t written anything that can fill a blog-post and I haven’t written anything that I think can fill a blog-post without considerably alarming me some days or hours later and so I am scribbling usefully elsewhere. Yet I found the below, which I think can fill in as a blog-post. I have no recollection of writing it but didn’t mind re-reading it. From the time-line seems it was written sometime in January 2009 or maybe very late November 2008 maybe, although I can bet on neither. It seems it was written in February 2009 actually. Also, it seems I had an “exciting” time while writing a paper….so maybe such things are possible for some selves.

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I think it's time for another whimsical post. I haven't written anything over here in ages – partly because I haven't been able to concentrate on one single theme and carry it along till it's done. The previous post ended up being a little too self-centred than I had intended. There was another post that I had started writing and it was called “Many Hours Later”. I saved it as a draft, and there seemed to be precious little point going back to it for the “Many hours later” slowly became many, many hours and then days and it hardly makes any sense to put it up anymore. Although if truth be told that post, which never got put up and some other bits and pieces fit together to form a last minute paper in the previous semester, which I had an exciting time writing within the space of an eve’, so much so that I promised myself that I would polish it and send it off to some journal – but I haven't done anything of that sort.

So I must write now. Why I must is a road that is best not traveled along for now....

I'd been reading a book awhile ago that Guha had picked out from our public library some weeks ago. Neither one of us had heard of the author or the title, but Guha being so fascinated with fantasy picked it out of the fantasy section while I had been sitting cross-legged in the spirituality section (I never learn), first gaping at the books and wondering which one to pull out from the rack (thankfully enough all the books on Buddhism are on the lowest rack), and was then flicking through one of Dalai Lama's books when Guha came over and said “Look at what I found.” So saying he showed me the book, and said “It's either going to be a really good read or a terribly bad one.” I nodded. For reading the blurb, it seemed that the book had to do with an imagined history of the world, where the western world is wiped out pretty much completely by the plague while the civilizations in India and China flourish, as do the religions of Buddhism and Islam. The book seemed to cover an impressive period of time and it seemed that most of the book was based either in China or in India or both….

Once we came home with our goodies, Guha very kindly offered to let me read the book first because I was eying it wistfully. I immediately liked the author's style of narrating his tale, and he had a tale to tell, and it indeed was historical fiction, where he pretty much introduces the primary characters right at the onset (Temur makes an appearance and dies within the first ten pages or so). I bonded with the characters from the get-go, and they were very well-formed, and I could identify with them. There was a sense of grandeur and godforsaken loneliness as I traveled alongwith the primary character for pages when he was all by himself and when he didn't know whether he was alive or dead because he is within a landscape where all human beings have been wiped out by the plague...but then the author thankfully enough didn't just keep us hanging on near the borders of the twilight zone. Pretty soon yet another one of the primary characters enters the scene...the route of travel is rather vague in my head (that's not just because of my memory but it's also because the map he shows is all skewed)...but they do indeed travel a fair bit through Europe, and across the seas; the two primary characters are sold twice over as slaves, and finally after a particular gruesome incident they end up in China, where one of the primary characters – the younger of the two, has as his single mission to kill off the Chinese emperor. By this time of course I was absolutely hooked onto the book. I knew that my little sense of history was going to be forever warped, and had been ruing over the fact that I remembered so little of world history anyway (although I had loved it in school and in high-school, and one of the subjects along with geography…and weird, physics actually, I think, that I never flunked in), and even though I didn't recognize many of the names (some historical figures keep appearing and then disappearing through the course of the book) – none of that mattered. I was gripped by the tension and the sheer madness of this young black boy (who was the one who was put through something utterly gruesome) who was going to kill off the Chinese Emperor, and it seemed vitally important (!) that he do so, and I couldn't help siding with him and the other primary character who no matter what his inhibitions, had given his absolute trust to the boy, and therefore knew of the mad boy's plans, and was therefore an accessory. So there I was thinking “Oh, my God he's going to pull it off...! He’s going to murder the Emperor! How on earth…!” “…but what's going to happen after this...where are they going to go? What are they going to do? How are they going to get out afterwards?” When galuph! Both of the primary characters die all of a sudden even before I could figure out what was going on...they just die.

Of course I was taken aback. In fact to say I was taken aback doesn’t even begin to describe my emotional state. Sometimes while reading I have to stop. I need to pause. This was not a pause that came about. It was not a moment to let the events unfurl or to let the ideas seep or to let the thoughts collect through my slow mind. No. This was just a rude shock to the system. What was the writer doing? Why was he being so inconsiderate? The book has hardly begun and the two characters are now dead. And I, the reader, had gotten attached to them – need I remind him?...If these two characters were no more then was I supposed to still keep reading?...Anyhow, feeling quite frazzled and grumbling somewhat I got on with the reading…

And this is where the book got mightily interesting, even more interesting than I thought possible. It turns out that these two end up in the bardo. Now I remember reading The Tibetan book of Living and Dying (which is another story for some other day but I can tell you that it got me worried) some four years ago or so (which is another story)....but I don't remember too much about it. I remembered the bit about the bardos, and the stages that one goes through – so I knew what the author was talking about but I didn't quite expect what he threw out at me. Well there they were, the two characters. The older the more patient and quieter and the more balanced one explains to the younger boy how they are a part and have always been a part of the same jati. He scolds the boy and says that the reason that they keep losing him over and over again is because this boy simply refuses to remember or recognize his jati members when he sees them on earth. But the older man is gentle too, and he tells the young boy that he will take him through the different levels of the bardo, and that eventually both of them alongwith the other jati members will pop out into the real world. The boy is willing, unwilling, willing, unwilling, dithering and dallying although he is an exceptionally remarkable character, and at the final moment when they are being thrown out into the real world again – the boy runs away from his jati members because he finds a safe and secure spot (or so he thinks!) within the bardo. Bang. Boom. He's reborn as a tiger prowling – that’s his first memory. That’s his first impression. That’s his first remembrance – that’s where we pick him up...the other primary character does of course meet him...but that's another story.

I won't go through the whole book of course. Telling everyone what happens in every stage. Narrating the whole story from top to bottom. But I will go on with this post.

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Unfortunately (or fortunately?) enough, that’s where the post ended. It didn’t go on. I didn’t go on with the post. What I was planning to write about for “the rest of the post” I have not the faintest inkling (it may have been to do with the bardos and the meeting and connecting with one's kinsmen). I chanced upon this bit by accident while searching for some soft-copy of an old document transferred from an old, hand-me-down and rather sturdy if somewhat whimsical computer, which croaked its last some years ago. I’d thought the document was something else when I saw the title, which simply said “The years”. I wish I’d had the patience to have written a bit more of the book. Bits of the book sail or fly by every now and again but I remember not much of it and it wasn’t actually the sort of book that one reads through twice….I can’t exactly pin-point the reasons. But yes, the tale does trail over into India…It really is a book worth a read, I think (although I'd have to read it again to figure out whether it should have a place on one's book-shelf). If people can locate it, I think they’d have an interesting time, maybe? It’s called, yes. The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. I have rustled through some of his other books while sauntering through the local library space but none of his other books seem or sound half as captivating.