Such perfume ! Yasunari Kawabata’s " The Dancer of Izu" and other stories ( I have just read it in French) spread a heady scent into the soul which stays on for days. It is sad to think of the poignant loneliness of the teenage narrator, a boy who had lost all his family, one member after the other, in his childhood ( this is not mentioned in the story, but one can safely assume that this is an autobiographical story). In another story ( " La lune dans l’eau’), a sick man watches the world from his bed using a mirror. His wife discovers that the world, as reflected in a mirror, has a beautiful sparkle to it: the sky has a shimmering blue, clouds are rimmed with shining white.
I have also been struck by this, recently. I was driving near the coast and the landscape seemed particularly beautiful, as seen from the rear mirror. And less so, to the naked eye. I was bringing some foreign friends along. On the evening of that day, they showed me the photos taken from their digital camera, which they had downloaded in the computer. As seen on the flat liquid crystal screen, the colours were gorgeous. The burnt red earth of the sugar cane fields, on which the spotted brown old stone walls arose, was like a thick red sauce in a witch’s cauldron. At the same time, they were seeing back what they had filmed on their camcorder. It was incredibly boring. These long shots of someone’s feet, followed by a groping and shaking blurred view of what had been a magnificent landscape. A waterfall, caught in a photo, is a drama of spray and frozen movement. On a camcorder, it is just a white line there against the cliff and you are catching all kinds of tourist comments as background noise.
Ok, so what pearl of wisdom can we obtain from the above ? I guess taking a photo gives you more leeway for on- the-spot dramatic embellishment – you can focus, and play a bit with light, and tell people to come closer. Of course, you can do the same with a camcorder, you can edit scenes, and redo the light but it’s more complicated. Like everybody else, I bought a camcorder when my boy was born, but I have been using more and more the digital camera.
To come back to Kawabata – I hope I can get hold of "Snow country" and "The Go Master" one day. The japaneseness of these titles ! " A Thousand Cranes ", "The rumbling of the mountain", "The Old Capital".

Since my boy was born, I have been asking my parents in law and my own parents about genealogical information, so that I can tell him about his ancestors later on. This morning my mother gave me a copy book in which an aunt of mine had once noted down some family lore told to her by my father’s maternal grandmother. Interesting catch. I notably learned that the sister of the mother of my father’s maternal grandmother had left the family because of quarrels with her sister in law and eventually became the mistress of a white man. She had three children, two daughters and a son. One of the girls became a catholic nun in a convent near Port Louis and she recently died ( I’ve been trying this afternnon to figure out which convent this could be).

A catholic nun ! I eagerly placed her image in my imaginary family photo album next to:

(i) the hindu mystic ( a cousin of my great grand father) who started the annual pilgrimage to Grand Bassin, for Maha Shivratree, having declared Grand Bassin to be linked to Ganga.

(ii) the kung fu master ( a brother of my wife’s paternal grand father) who fled the family home in Beijing, and after some time roaming in China, took up the study of kung fu, and eventually wrote a popular treatise on one of its styles. He used to tell my father in law to drop school and become his student. I heard a Chinese television station has made a documentary on him in recent years.

Another interesting peace of information I gathered is that my paternal grand father, who took up the profession of tailor at the age of 14, became attached, at one point, to a natak group, whose clothes he stitched and mended. What is interesting about this is that my father in law’s grandfather’s grandfather ran an embroidery shop specialised in costumes for Qing dynasty officials and Beijing opera actors. That was way back in 19th century Beijing. Two tailors – for – comedians in the family, O Cosmic Convergence.

( from a letter I sent to a friend, a few years back) You ask me about how I imagine God to be like. No joke, but I think of a pretty black hooker with an afro hairdo, in a dark alley, wearing a snakeskin miniskirt and fluffy pink blouse, with a big yellow pin on it saying : “Free Angela Davis”. She is smartly holding a cigarette and humming something with a husky voice. I think that image comes from a graffiti I once saw, saying: “God is black ! ” to which somebody else had added: “Yes, She is !”. Influenced by this image, I once depicted Shiva, in a story I never finished, as a smart black man, Marvin Gaye style, wearing an Armani suit, with neat dreadlocks, and a silver ring with a skull on it. He was the owner of an amusement park. He was soft spoken, moved with feline grace and a casual sort of authority among fire breathers, snake charmers and lion tamers. Parvati was a luscious blonde in a clinging red dress, à la Rita Hayworth, with long cigarette holder and gloves reaching her elbows.

You would think I am making fun of God, but I am not. I am attracted to the idea of God as an outsider, which is why I find the figure of Jesus appealing. But he talks too much, and gets very serious towards the end. I am not that much in tune either with Salman Rushdie’s depiction of God in one of his novels ( “ Exhausted, he fell on the bed. But at that moment, God appeared at the foot of the bed. He was in the form of a middle aged accountant, with a balding pate and a small pot belly. “What is happening, Lord ?” “Lots of problems yaar”) though it is engaging to imagine God as looking somehow like Woody Allen.

I imagine God – among - us as maybe the leader of a group of bums, jumping into cattle trains and eternally criss crossing the United States, from coast to coast. A medicine man in a small town in Congo, served by an old rusting steamer – interesting. A travelling vacuum cleaner salesman in Eastern Europe – not so much, too insecure and obsequious. God- with- us would be poor but pretty self confident. An eccentric circus manager in Siberia, whose performers would be tattooed ex cons, juggling with chainsaws, clowns twisting balloons into obscene shapes, alcoholic elephants ( they easily get addicted to booze) – we are getting there.

Vishnu has a cycle of incarnations, the boar, the tortoise, etc. The characters I am imagining would be for a cycle of incarnations of Shiva. Mahadev is the quintessencial outsider. He lives half naked in the Himalayas, and threads a necklace of human heads for his sharp fanged wife, At midnight, sitting on a burning funeral pyre, he drinks wine using the skull of his enemies as a cup, and smokes marijuana, in the company of ghosts and demons. At noon, he plays with children in the dust of the road. Shiv Shankar Bhagwan, the hoboe king, the African snake oil merchant, the Siberian circus manager with a Russian war song tatooed on his back. Or the disco king in a dingy night club, in a small town near the border with Mexico. He wears an Elvis outfit, complete with rhinestones and huge belt buckle, and sports a glistening hairdo. Parvati is the dance floor queen, a hard drinking middle aged latin dance teacher.

Vaishavism imagines God as transcendence. Vishnu coming down on earth would therefore bring with him something “from above” – a message, teachings, a model of behaviour. Hence the seriousness of Rama, and of Krishna, in his later years, when he teaches the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna. Saivism is an immanent religion. Shiva and Shakti pervade the world. In the puranas, when Parvati tells Shiva she wants a baby, he is reluctant: “Shiva is in every man, Shakti in every woman” he says, “why do we need a child ?”. Shiva’s avatars would therefore be like more incadescent bits of melting rock, in a flow of lava, or like the foam on the crest of a great wave, or sparks flying from two clashing swords – they belong to the world, but are overflowing , in a splendid manner , with the divine energy of creation which pervades everything. We have all met people like this, who “ate” life, who radiated sex, or beauty, who gave the impression that reality, around them, bends like a light wave does when passing near a massive star. We meet them more in high school than in college, because most can’t bear the treadmill and drop out. Hence the odd professions.

But some avatars would make it to college. One would be a former Indian Institute of Technology physics professor, who continuously comes up with theories on matter which could blow up the universe ( Bhava Bhayankar). He lives in a tent with his wife, a sublimely beautiful gypsy sorceress, and her tribe, which keeps moving to and fro in desert areas between India and Pakistan. The generals of both countries keep trying to lay hands on him, sending their best commando units in hot pursuit. But Parvati keeps a watchful eye and they come back wild eyed, and shaking, telling tales of having pursued over the dunes an ever receding gypsy camp, trembling in the hot air, in which a huge headed, pot bellied boy flew a kite – sometimes hovering just above their grasp – made of paper on which were scribbled equations – and at night an extraordinarily beautiful woman would dance by the fire, and even atop of it- her feet would send burning logs rolling over the sand, as she kicked and heaved, like a living tongue of fire, sometimes joined by her husband, a sort of hopping – bumping Einstein with a booming laugh. Attempts to interrogate the professor’s other son, a renowned piercing artist in Chennai, have proved unsuccessful – he seems immune to all forms of torture.

There would probably also be animal avatars- a wild mustang in Arizona – the Chinese imagine the Ying principle as “ a wild mare running all over the earth, uncatchable”, and the yang as “ a dragon rising over the horizon”.