the dark, still potent, waiting for an occasion to be used.
He drops it on the back of my hand and I bring it to my mouth. He has another drop for himself. Now it’s done there’s no going back.
I’ve made my excuses with Aunty: I’m staying over at a friend’s house. It’s quiet in the colony. In the darkness outside good people have retreated to their beds, but we won’t sleep. He says I’ll see things tonight, the world will open up to me. I’ll see it for the illusion it really is.
We leave the flat and go down to the car. He says we’ll drive into the night out in the desert towards Jaipur.
Driving through the city, nothing happens for a long time. I say, Maybe it’s not working, maybe we should take some more? And he laughs and says, Trust me, it’s coming, you just have to wait.
It begins on the Gurgaon road. Yawning, each one sucking in a lungful of air, but it’s not tiredness, it’s something else, as if bubbles are rising and the atoms of the body are breaking loose. The buildings at the side tingle and shudder. The tail-lights of cars leave tracers of red in their wake. And in the belly, there’s this feeling of butterflies, the compulsion to bring it all up, the impossibility of it, and the knowledge that if you could, it would be nothing less than the universe, a projectile stream of galaxies from the mouth.
But this is only a whisper, a small wave, it comes, it goes. Relax, he says. Relax, and his voice comes to me from far away. I close my eyes and focus on the dark throbbing music he plays, the low hum of the engine. We’re on the highway in the desert.
I open my eyes to a carnivalesque world. Unhinged, the trucks come roaring at us with their painted faces and vicious mouths, the cheap flashing statues of neon gods that adorn their dashboards leading the charge, dancing into the void. Real objects slide on the surface of things. Solid spaces bend. What I once knew to be true is only acanvas to be painted on and torn apart. I turn to look at him and he’s a black beast with a grinning maw. I can’t help laughing out loud. I laugh at him for what seems like hours. There’s a panic somewhere there.
On the stereo the sheer terror of Vivaldi.
Haunting corridors and cloisters, bales of straw across fields, sweat cooling on the skin.
She loses speech, hearing.
Her sense of self, always so certain, so fearful, begins to fall away. Her personality, so fixed and inevitable, reveals itself to be entirely open to change.
Here it peaks.
And then it breaks.
Like passing from a raging torrent into a vast and eerie lake.
He pulls the car over at a dhaba. The engine dies, the music stops. She can hear it ticking as it cools. The silenceis unnerving. His face is watching hers; his eyes drift like coracles tied to the dock of his nose. He insists they go in.
She says she won’t go in. He goes in. It’s 3 a.m.
There’s nothing left but the tremor of the tyres, the horns going off like ships leaving port, horns like the charges of matadors. In the trees the tube lights hang at odd angles, the broken limbs of angels. The insects of India swarm, drawn to the brightness that is a gas fogging the eyes.
He returns without a word and we are driving again. We might never have stopped. We drive for ever and turn around and drive back again.
We end in the birthing fields of Gurgaon, among those infinite constructions that have become ruined cities to me, the emptiness of history reflected in the stars above. I don’t know how we got here, how much time has gone and what has been lost.
Ahead there is one building site framed by bamboo drenched in an artificial light with workers crawling across the concrete and steel.
They look like ants devouring an elephant’s corpse. Only the corpse will devour the ants in the end, devour them and grow up tall.
We fall down before it, are silent in awe of it. He makes love to me on the desert floor. I see other faces in him; he changes before my eyes into an
He drops it on the back of my hand and I bring it to my mouth. He has another drop for himself. Now it’s done there’s no going back.
I’ve made my excuses with Aunty: I’m staying over at a friend’s house. It’s quiet in the colony. In the darkness outside good people have retreated to their beds, but we won’t sleep. He says I’ll see things tonight, the world will open up to me. I’ll see it for the illusion it really is.
We leave the flat and go down to the car. He says we’ll drive into the night out in the desert towards Jaipur.
Driving through the city, nothing happens for a long time. I say, Maybe it’s not working, maybe we should take some more? And he laughs and says, Trust me, it’s coming, you just have to wait.
It begins on the Gurgaon road. Yawning, each one sucking in a lungful of air, but it’s not tiredness, it’s something else, as if bubbles are rising and the atoms of the body are breaking loose. The buildings at the side tingle and shudder. The tail-lights of cars leave tracers of red in their wake. And in the belly, there’s this feeling of butterflies, the compulsion to bring it all up, the impossibility of it, and the knowledge that if you could, it would be nothing less than the universe, a projectile stream of galaxies from the mouth.
But this is only a whisper, a small wave, it comes, it goes. Relax, he says. Relax, and his voice comes to me from far away. I close my eyes and focus on the dark throbbing music he plays, the low hum of the engine. We’re on the highway in the desert.
I open my eyes to a carnivalesque world. Unhinged, the trucks come roaring at us with their painted faces and vicious mouths, the cheap flashing statues of neon gods that adorn their dashboards leading the charge, dancing into the void. Real objects slide on the surface of things. Solid spaces bend. What I once knew to be true is only acanvas to be painted on and torn apart. I turn to look at him and he’s a black beast with a grinning maw. I can’t help laughing out loud. I laugh at him for what seems like hours. There’s a panic somewhere there.
On the stereo the sheer terror of Vivaldi.
Haunting corridors and cloisters, bales of straw across fields, sweat cooling on the skin.
She loses speech, hearing.
Her sense of self, always so certain, so fearful, begins to fall away. Her personality, so fixed and inevitable, reveals itself to be entirely open to change.
Here it peaks.
And then it breaks.
Like passing from a raging torrent into a vast and eerie lake.
He pulls the car over at a dhaba. The engine dies, the music stops. She can hear it ticking as it cools. The silenceis unnerving. His face is watching hers; his eyes drift like coracles tied to the dock of his nose. He insists they go in.
She says she won’t go in. He goes in. It’s 3 a.m.
There’s nothing left but the tremor of the tyres, the horns going off like ships leaving port, horns like the charges of matadors. In the trees the tube lights hang at odd angles, the broken limbs of angels. The insects of India swarm, drawn to the brightness that is a gas fogging the eyes.
He returns without a word and we are driving again. We might never have stopped. We drive for ever and turn around and drive back again.
We end in the birthing fields of Gurgaon, among those infinite constructions that have become ruined cities to me, the emptiness of history reflected in the stars above. I don’t know how we got here, how much time has gone and what has been lost.
Ahead there is one building site framed by bamboo drenched in an artificial light with workers crawling across the concrete and steel.
They look like ants devouring an elephant’s corpse. Only the corpse will devour the ants in the end, devour them and grow up tall.
We fall down before it, are silent in awe of it. He makes love to me on the desert floor. I see other faces in him; he changes before my eyes into an
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