el sham

Strange beings indeed, and Kavi for sure. His sudden disappearances and reappearances made us all scratch our heads and wonder if he really weren't the fabled Narada Muni in disguise. Narada Muni of Puranic Lore – that celestial vagabond par excellence – that Haley's Comet of wandering rishis streaking through the universe in private orbit in a smooth unbroken concatenation of re-corporealizations ad in finitum. And each intervention providing us all with creative devastations essential for growth.

The outpost of phantasy wrecked for good.
Dimming last vestige of patina dark illusion...

Ploy handed Bala the just-faxed printout and spoke in a rare sarcastic tone. "So what has he gone and turned himself into now," she said, "a Coptic Jesus freak?"

Bala examined the communiqué and carefully decided to dispute the sender's identity. "The danger of this format," he said, pointing to the page, "is precisely that of the fraudulent faxer – I mean, this isn't even signed!... Nor could I see your brother embracing the Egyptian Orthodox Church. For all I know of your beloved twin, he hasn't a deferential bone in his body. He wages faith on one thing only – the surety of his own persona non-entity. " – But wait!" Bala blurted. He jumped out of bed. He tied a clean dhoti around his waist and said, "Maybe we've stumbled onto the missing key to Kavi's thwarted resolution."

"What do you mean?" Ploy sat up in bed.

"Let's take a moment to reexamine the metempsychotic history of Kavi. Hasn't it long been his thanatological bent to pass into death in the most mysterious of manners? I allude to the likes of Empedoclese, Padmasambhava, Milarepa and Theos Bernard. Yes, I know, we are supposing many unproven things here. Never mind. Reality will always have its fictive quota."

"Then continue," said Ploy. "I'm taking mental notes."

"It is an esoteric function of dramaturgic form that it embody an inner philosophy of its own. This naturally includes a rule-ensemble, which I trust will yield us everything contained in the Asiatic conception of the mandala. And in this way, the play/act/object of the drama opens on to zones of diaphanous sensibility. Bathed in the springs of creative inspiration, one resigns to the hand of a force far beyond. One dances to a score that is normally unperceived by the standard apparatus of cartilage, flesh and minuscule bone. The question of returns gets thoroughly impeached as does the very notion of departures. All that remains is the bare apparatus reduced to its unadorned simplicity and beauty – this living mythos retrieved from the sun."

"Not bad," she said. "And so the book would be analogous to a mandalic looking glass."

"Correct: a transformation-matrix from whence we stand delivered."

"And the guru is the midwife."

"And tantra my teething ring."

Bala's earliest childhood memory was a tender piercing of the placid trance... The Indian spring had just commenced. He was sitting cross-legged on a blanket on the floor in the sunny front room of their house. His pretty young mother stood watching from the kitchen. He opened his eyes with a sense of knowing buoyed by the warmth of the silence that ensued.

"Where did you go?" she softly asked him.

We are also reminded of the woeful manner in which the woman disappeared that frosty day on the frontier of Nagaland, abandoning the child for reasons no one knew. Or if they did, they never told the child.

Here we get a glimpse of his first twelve years of fermentation on the alchemist's dung heap. Careful. No kiss-talk. Got that? His eventual absconding to the charnel grounds. Later taken in by Professor and Madam Vladimir Balukutsky of the Centre for Russian Studies, South Delhi. Their quiet little dusty two-story house with its enigmatic vantage of Qutab Minar – that tilting cupola of Mogul legacy standing out alone on the rocky horizon.

But when skies were clear he could see it from his bedroom, or better, stepping to the bare veranda. He rose before dawn and walked outside to where inter-campus shuttle-bus parked beside the road. An elderly Hindu man slept in the bus and also sold bunches of green bananas. Bala usually bought a few and climbed the rise toward the rocky ravines, and from there he admired the distant leaning tower. But the vantage was better when a gusty breeze dispersed the typical amber smog-veil. Spring was choice when the breezes were cool as the turning earth met the dawn horizon.

As he viewed the sunrise, he ate the bananas and then fed the peels a wandering cow. Across the ravine were the gopi shanties. He regularly hiked there and talked to the girls who blinked big eyes and smiled on him fondly. He treasured how they made him feel to be among them, classically sitting on the steps of their porches, their mothers putting braids in their long dark hair. He found them valorous, noble and endearing as they willingly gamed for his personal attention, singing

Sham-Bala O Sham-Bala
Sham-Bala O Sham-Bala
Sham-Bala O Sham-Bala
Elope with me to Shangri-La!

From the elite campus enclave known as Poorvanchal, it was a forty-minute bus ride to New Delhi Station. Near to the station were the Main Bazaar and its bustling long lane with cheap hotels. It was also a well-know traveller's quarter. And against all odds Bala regularly went there in search of his vanished mother – But no. He always returned to the Poorvanchal alone.

As he strolled across the campus green, he kept a cautious eye out for the often-maddening Bengali intellectual named Roman, currently in his seventh year at the prestigious post-graduate research institute. Roman had taken Bala under his wing and gave him free tuition in cinema arts. One of Roman's passions was viewing French films at the not-so-far away Alliance Français, and he brought along Bala whenever he could. And before too long Bala also got hooked and anxiously awaited those weekly screenings of classic French films. However, meeting Roman on a daily basis became a palling ordeal for the distant child. What is more, Professor and Madam Vladimir Balukutsky greatly frowned on the vulgar effects that Roman was having on their foster son, and inwardly seethed when they came to find out that the rascal had stayed at the house in their absence.

Bala continued his stroll across the lawn to the place where the intra-campus shuttle-bus stopped. He peered out the window as it sped past the paan stalls and the chockablock bike-racks that ran along the women's dorm—the red brick bulk of the Science Building. As it screeched around turns of sun-softened asphalt, the boy cast his gaze to the parched terrain of poachers and peacocks over gaitered claws aflit.

Bala stepped slowly in a Bhikkhuesque pavane along the leafless tree-lined and half frozen moat of the town. The ponderous events of previous days had left him feeling like an over-taxed producer of a sixty-second ad-spot. Those hair-split increments of reeling film-bytes surgically lanced with excruciating accuracy—grafted to a catalogue of sympathetic strings and a thousand tones of feigned appeal by dint of the credulous subscribers' urge to be tricked into almost anything if marketed correctly.

There was also the issue of the unforeseen cameo appearances of certain divine-order beings—itinerant thespians of another world, costumed undetectably in foreign robes of flesh. Then a big red dog unleashed by its owner bound past Bala who was nearly standing still. This was followed by a warbling whistle and a shout as the warmth of the sun emerged from a cloud... Such vernal suffusions of incipience and light lent golden pleasures to his mortal frame, engorging his subtle nexus of nerves with co-axial streams of transfixing linkage to the vast Akasic archives above. Hello, Hello?... Paging Buddha Absconditus. Relics to decipher at the bottom of the crucible.

Now Van Holden was taking huge pleasure in himself. "Yes," he said, "these pages do remind oneself of surgical stitches—some weeks after removal. Accessible only to a psychic tea leaf reader!"

"Now as explicitly told from the outset," Kavi submitted, "Everything will have to have its own natural frequency—its own vibe."

"As does your impenetrable writing style! With its confounded messing with idiom and syntax, and general abandonment of conventional organization. And mind you me," he added, "as suspicious as I am of your genre twaddle, it still remains the only valid explanation of why dialect ceases to pertain to English—the world's undisputed lingua-franca."

"Don't be daft," Kavi intervened. "As knowledge in the subtle art of 'metempsychotic relaxation' deepens, you become less intent on always insisting that facts never disappoint rules."

"Yes, I will watch for that," Van Holden assured him. "Yet stemming from indifference to your own good advise against the hyper-formulation of wild-eyed theories, you have repeatedly insisted on sprinkling your path with forbidding inlays of baroque beguilement—all of which appear to be dedicated solely to denying your readers familiar signposts."

"Careful, Van Holden. You may be lending too much weight to emotional zeal. Remember your blood pressure."

"Then what the fucks your point! That we all be drawn into a sportive volley of vile recriminations? Or is it merely to secure another wrenched viewpoint?... You shake your head no?"

"Just think of it as wobble between two variant waves that seek to obtain congenial hum. When two sequestered heart-cells are brought together they immediately beat as one."

"Anything you say." He returned to his news rag.

"It's true!" he demanded, as if talking to himself. "Requisite patience will never be widespread. The only thing I know is that suffering is diminishable: there's a practical way! As long as I'm here it's up to you. After I'm gone, it's still up to you."

This should not be misconstrued as a "minimalism," really, which is rather just a Baroque excess – a trick!

• Time should not be given to the demonstration of concealing the executive means of structure, but to lend oneself fully to the immediacy of substantive wealth.
• Remember: with each new enrichment, one has to pay.
• Thus, we attempt to bridge the yawning gorge that lies between the emergence of any specific thought-complex and its effectual echo of post-natal severance.
• My basic thought-texture is that of a disciplined monastic sensuosity. Notice that I always keep my staircases hidden, insisting on narrow, solitary flights. Rooms are always left empty and bare – stone freshly cut, just begging to be weathered and worn.
• I find the whole notion of patterns despicable. The venous appeal of polished marble is totally incompatible to my urgent need of tactility.
  Here the already-restrained use of device is consigned to the office of prop-marginalization to assist the presentation of a new generation of environmental psychologies.
• Then comes the actual dimensioning of the film: its theorematic movement of thrown filtered light with recumbent, clear-cut, virgin-like transparencies, where the forms themselves suffuse to admit us to the depths of muteness and aesthetic experience.
• Similarly, I should add, the screenplay version will have to be written in the present tense.
• Remember: scenes without the main character are only used to support the story; yet every scene still needs to have its own protagonist.

[From Kavi's Directorial Notes]

Now the gist of the bargain revolved around the question as to whom among our prominent character-role-functions would ascend to the throne of chief protagonist?

"Tell us, Van Holden, what are your thoughts?"

"This ain't Robert's Rules," he grimly remarked. He cleared his throat and lit another fag. "But while our precious little payload is out doing the groceries, let us try to galvanize her seat a bit. I mean, after all, she's right: there can only be one real protagonist, one chief character, one sole hero. The Hollywood insistence on a co-starring heroine is hogwash – my words are backed by the Father of the Peripatetics himself. And indeed," he continued, "a protagonist can be everywhere, and in many things – I would like to remind my erudite jury!

His remarks held a cool sort of classy irony.

"But there is more I need to tell you. All lesser principals, friend or foe, are bound to the function of leading the hero to his super-objective. What do I mean? Take Ploy for example: Has she not aroused us all to numerous awakenings?"

"Hardly difficult," Bala cut in. "Man produces three thousand sperms per second. That makes his balls are more astute than his brains.""Point well taken," the fat guy replied. "But let us now turn to your de facto brother-in-law. Has the little rascal not ployed well-long enough to maintain those subterfuge stresses and pulls to which our high-jacked emotions have become so addicted? I charge you with diversionary tactics, purely!"