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”.

Reading about Buddhism the other day has brought me back memories of pottering about the bookstall at the Port Louis market, lifting posters of scantily clad Indian actresses to discover grave volumes of the Veda and the Upanishads. Passing by this stall every day I would look with wonder at a forbidding black hardbound tome on the topmost shelf, with a drawing of a lotus topped by a thunderbolt. I guessed it had to do with tantrism and felt both attraction and revulsion at this book. Still, I bought a slender, more palatable looking book called Man and Microcosm in Tantric Hinduism, by Grace E. Cairns, through which I had an idea of the philosophical aspects of Tantrism, which I had before thought to be only about sexual orgies and human sacrifices. As with all philosophical systems, I have the greatest difficulty in saying now what it was about. I only remember the feeling of having passed through a great system of thought in hushed admiration, the way I would have walked through great silent halls overhung with gloomy portraits, and passed through crowds of whispering courtiers, to enter the appartment of a solemn personage, who would have given me a brief, cryptic overview of an immeasurably old and complex kingdom. One polite question would be allowed, and even, would have to be asked, the answer, brief and heavy with incomprehensible irony, before taking leave, and the quick walk back through the dark halls, to the sunlight. What I understood, vaguely, was that letters existed at three levels of creation. In the innermost level, letters had their seeds ( bij). An elaborate framework tied toegether letters, colours and the chakras. Another, lengthy cord tied up the 36 stages of creation, from Sadasiva ( God as one) to ShivaShakti ( God as Transcendence and Immanence) , to separate aspects of creation such as space and time, down, at the lowest level, to the elements of creation ( fire, earth, etc). Mrs Cairns referred, in revenrential tones, to The Garland of Letters, by Arthur Avalon. Extraordinarily, the book stall had it, lost between a sex manual and an introduction to marketing. It was a frayed old book , its title barely legible. Inside was a photograph of a European man, in dhoti, on the steps of the sun temple in Konarak. Arthur Avalon, whose real name I have forgotten, was a Calcutta High Court judge who researched philosophical tantrism. Unfortunately, his style had the busy, implacable tone of someone who assumes that the reader is already well aware of the subtleties of the matter at hand. The book remained hard, inscrutable, just like a book I also bought in those days ( the things you found in that book stall ) by the current Dalai Lama, a commentary on a tantra treatise by Tsong Kapa. I only remember of it a swarming cosmology of foe destroyers, arhats, and other types of elevated beings.
There is something to be said for bureaucratic boredom: it leads one to nosing about bookstores containing odd tomes. But out of groping among these toughly esoteric works, it did dawn on me that Buddhism is not what some Hindus will have you believe, some kind of export variety of Hinduism. There is no soul in Buddhism, and no “moksha” ( blissful unification with God), because God does not come in the equation. If there is no soul, how does reincarnation work ? Buddhism speaks of “ the light of a candle which is transmitted to another” but that , I thought, could exactly be a metaphor for reincarnation. Later, in a book by Alexandra David Neel, I found the explanation that for a Tibetan Buddhist, a person can be made up of the fragments of personality of various beings ( man, hungry ghost, hell being, demigod, even animal). At his death, these various fragments explode like shrapnel and some get lodged into other beings being born around that time. Or some go their way into the astral. Instead of the neat little blob of light of Hinduism or other religions, Tibetan Buddhism sees you as a sort of nebula from which many voices come out. I found this interesting though hard to focus on, for a long time. The habit of thinking of oneself as one is deeply ingrained. The deepest consolation of religion is that it tells you that you and your beloved ones will survive the grave. But Buddhism specifically tells you that “you” do not exist, coz your conscience is made up of many different , and conflicting, bits of being.
What about God ? In “The Wonder that was India”, it is said that Buddhism is divided in four schools, two from the Greater Vehicle ( Yogacara and Madhyamika), the Lesser Vehicle and the Vehicle of the Thunderbolt. The Yogacara school denies any reality altogether. The world is built by the perceiver’s consciousness, and is only a dream. The only existing phenomena is Tathata ( Suchness) or Dharmadhatu ( the Raw Material of Phenomena). Its chief philosopher was Asanga, who wrote the Lankavatara Sutra, known to be a pretty subtle sutra.

On the other hand, the Lesser Vehicle says that the world is in a state of constant flux and the only stable entity is Nirvana, the state of bliss achieved by the Buddhas, and Arhats ( perfected beings). But if Nirvana is a state, can it really be called an entity. Do the Buddhas and Arhats still exist, given that Nirvana means extinction ? Maybe Nirvana is outside the universe.

The Madhyamika school stands between the realism of the Lesser Vehicle and the total idealism of the Yogacara school. Its greatest exponent was Nagarjuna, who said that the cosmic flux was unreal, as was the consciousness which perceives it, and was itself part of the flux. If the world of flux was unreal, so was also Nirvana, its contrary. If all things were equally unreal, they were therefore ultimately one and the same. This one thing alone had existence and had no predicate. This, Nagarjuna called “Emptiness” or the “Void” ( Sunyata). If Samsara ( the world of flux) and Nirvana ( extinction) are the same, then within Samsara it is possible to immediately attain Nirvana:

“The life of the world is the same as Nirvana (…) and there is really no difference between them at all”.

I guess that this explains why the Chan Buddhists insisted on immediate realization, without using the books, and using shock tactics. I do not know about the lines of affiliation between Chan ( originally Dhyana) Buddhism and the Madhyamika school.

The other day I was telling my mother that I considered Fidou as a pretty typical Mauritian nickname for a Mauritian little girl. She said that the counterpart for a Mauritian little boy would be Garcon. The name Fidou conjures to me the image of a little girl in pink dress and a ponytail, sitting on a low stone wall, eating a pixidou ( also, touchingly, part of my wife's childhood 15 000 kms away) or a merveille, while up the street there runs Garcon, pushing up a wheel with a stick, or riding a big black Phoenix bicycle "en bas cadre", a feat I was never up to. In our Mauritian mind, childhood is a blessed world wonderfully removed from the soiled fingers of politicians and socio cultural lobbyists - they cannot stick their yellow star identity badges on Fidou and Garcon. Hence do Vovo and Ameena , in the beautiful "Le Paille en Queue" by Mr Bigaignon, though pinched by hunger and lice, thoroughly beaten up by arrogant uncles and teachers, yet roam unblemished in their tattered paradise, until the advent of youth - which spells the expulsion from the garden.
We Mauritians would love to go back to the Garcons and Fidous we once were - sometimes they come back , these memories- of running in a narrow lane between hovels, to suddenly stop, at the arresting sight : from a window, three toothless hags beckon at us, crooked fingers straightening a stray wisp of grey dirty hair, then resuming their gesture of calling us. we run away laughing. Another time - the sharp flash of light reflecting on water - and a recollection of a jump into a pond. The smell of incense, and the play of colours, when a neighbour was building up a cavadee. the climb up the crumbling cemetery, covered with brede mouroung, to see a coffin being lowered in a county cemetery, and the cowing in the bed, at night, after hearing stories of dain and chourel, the peering into narrow crevices to look for freshwater shrimp, and the gaze far up to follow the course of one's kite.

Insomnia is so addictive. You want to believe that the next minute you will stumble upon a great thought , an equivalent to the daring z stroke of Zorro. I see a busy crossroads, on the other side of the street is a big neon lit cinema. It is in a big city in the US in the thirties, men wearing hats, boys selling newspapers. the cinema - or is it a music hall- beckons. It's just a sort of vision, more like a feeling of urgent life moving in all directions, the men picking up the newspapers, rushing home to listen to the match on the radio, the sleek black cars passing by. Gosh how i love the thirties, maybe because people still had this naive thrill for modernity, or because the way modernity presented itself in those days still had a rustic feel to it. Any boy with some simple notion of science could open up and repair a car, a radio, a telephone. I would have liked to be that kind of boy. Actually the only time I've ever repaired something was my car and that was a VW Beetle - so it is 1930's technology.

But more than that I love to imagine how people travelled in those days - still mostly by boat. Suppose you're crossing the Suez canal, and you know- you can feel - you've left the West behind you. Then there's the stop at Aden. Then there's Bombay. Then after a long time it's Singapore and people are now yellow. Then the arrival in Hong Kong.

Man's that's what I call travelling, this slow unfurling of port after port, each with the suggestion of its mysterious hinterland, and yourself sitting on the deck, rereading the same newspaper which you bought when you embarked in Southampton, the growing obsolence of the news like a ray of light crossing space from a long dead star.

And in those days, harbours and cities in general did not feel that deplorable urge as nowadays , to adorn themselves with modernish giant cubes of glass and steel , however dirt poor the country may be. Nowadays when you arrive in a city somewhere, it means you step out of the plane into some gigantic concrete toad in which the duty free boutiques are selling exactly the same whiskeys and handbags as the one where you boarded the plane.

But oh for those days ! when Alexandra David Neel could alight with a light step from her steamer in Bombay, after a most horrible storm which left both crew and passengers crawling and retching, except for this woman of steel, who went on Benares to resume her Sanskrit studies, and from thence to three years of meditation and initiations in a cave in Sikkhim ( " I must say that swallowing a burning candle, as part of the ritual at this stage, left me with a most unpleasant feeling"), and from thence to seven years of roaming in Tibet, disguised as a mendicant old lady, in what still a forbidden country.

A forbidden country ! A white spot on the map, the source of the Brahmaputra still uncertain, and what did Lhassa look like - one could only guess from the tales of merchants. At one point , in further travels in North China, she is fleeing from the sacred mountain of Wutaishan, for the Japanese army is advancing, and arrives at the train station in Taiyuan, amidst a panicking crowd trying to get aboard the last train. she falls down, is stampeded by the crowd and left half dead in a ditch ( but eventually recovers and spends the next nine years basically crossing China and Tibet by foot, Himalayas included, to appear in front of a bemused English official somewhere near Jammu in 1946). I have stayed in Wutaishan too, muttering praise to Amitabh, the buddha of infinite light, and my wife was born somewhere near Taiyuan. I have walked in the forests at the foot of Wutaishan, like her, though I did not see the strange rays of light which sometimes emanate from its summit.

These thin details of similarity, to me, only throw in starker relief the almost cosmic immensity of the gulf which separates her life from mine, a bit like a cloud passing in front of the moon makes you think of how far, in fact, the moon is from the wisps which seem to veil her.