“I can’t see anything outside the window.”
“Nothing?”
“Just darkness. A completely lightless night.”
“How fast are we moving?”
“Can’t say. I can’t see anything passing us outside to get an idea.”
Speed is always relative isn’t it? It is when we are able to measure the intensity of the movement of the object undergoing transmission from one place to another, in relation to what is stationary besides the object in motion, can we envision speed. Speed is always relative and depends on the externality of materials either in motion or static to indicate that speed has come real.
“Shouldn’t we be passing some villages? Some little pockets of farming settlements? I saw a lot of patches like that before. India is full of sights like that along travelling routes.”
There is a tinge of worry, some sense of anxiety incipient in Jaliyas’s voice. Rachana too feels perturbed by the lack of any sounds inside the bus apart from the bus engine’s mechanical snore.
“If there was some little light outside, from some little house or something, we could know how fast we are going.”
It is important to Rachana to know how fast they are travelling. Why is that? Because she has to go to work in the morning, once they arrive in Chennai. But what does speed mean to Jaliya? It may not mean nearly as anything urgent as to Rachana, but he too is conscious of the relevancies of speed and the port of arrival it brings the traveller to. Yes, Jaliya is very conscious of this all too indisputable truth. But if we may ask for a moment in connection with the Kunderian theorem of speed and its ‘secret bond’ with the human ability to recall and forget, endearingly brought out in Slowness, what of it applies to these two passengers travelling to Chennai? Has the speed of their travels, their gradual undergoing of transmission from one place to another, had any bearings on what either of them could be trying to recall, or forget? If travel can be achieved through storytelling, and storytelling is a form of escape, then surely to travel is to achieve a form of escape isn’t it? The illustration in Kundera’s Slowness indicates it too. The increased pace in the walk of the one who wants to put distance between him and the unpleasant experience, to cause forgetting more effectively, puts into effect a more intensified effort into travelling, which is to undergo a transmission from one place to another with directionality, which may or may not, be pre-planned.
Has the world outside disappeared?? This isn’t how it should be! Rachana? No. No point in alarming her anymore than she may already be. But then, where is the scenery that passes by?!
Is he asleep? I hope the daylight doesn’t come too soon. Sigh. It feels good to be on the move. Travelling. Seems I do so much of it. But on the same old route. Same old routine. Who can change it anyway?
What kind of escape could these two travellers be hoping for through this journey? They are firm in their knowledge, yes, let’s say knowledge rather than ‘belief’, of travelling on a bus bound for Chennai which runs a nightlong journey. A nightlong undergoing of a transmission from one place to another. From Nandyal to Chennai. It’s rather simple after all. Yes, a journey with a definite destination, defined route and expected time of arrival isn’t a complicated undertaking. She does it ever so regularly. But then it seems she also hopes somehow this routine could be altered in some way.
Mmmm...Sleepy. And there still isn’t a sign of any landscape outside. Nothing. Nothing passing us by.
He seems asleep. I wish I could slip into sleep, and escape to a dream. A dream, to take me away. Away, away from the dawn. ...Sigh.
In many ways sleep can be a form of escape. It does very effectively shut out the world from our senses. Ungoverned by logic and sciences the world of dreams is very much made of an architecture of our interiority. And when we shut out the world, we do very effectively shut out our self as perceived and projected back to our senses by the world. Our self as seen by the world around us gets sifted dramatically when we dream. And it is a welcome respite, a welcome escape for Rachana. Sleepiness hangs over Jaliya’s eyelids gently cooing him to a soothing semiconscious state where he floats between sleep and being fully awake. A most blissful state of being, though Jaliya has no intention of drifting off to sleep completely. He would rather stave off the sleepiness, the drowsiness, and alight himself to converse with Rachana. But sleep is gripping him more eagerly, it has almost usurped the joy of conversation with Rachana. How insidiously it pervades over him, he isn’t conscious enough to stave it off. But then, completely unexpectedly, he felt the warmth, the realness of her touch on his hand. Instantly he is brought back to his surroundings.
“I’m sorry did I wake you?”
“Hmm? No, no I wasn’t really asleep as such.”
“Just wanted to get my bottle of water.”
“Oh! Sorry. Didn’t realise I had my hand on it.”
The necessity for water. A human necessity. Arguably one of the direst needs of any person. And it was thirst that had impelled their first acquaintance of touch with each other. She had thought and thought over again whether it would be proper to move his hand and gently take from under it the plastic bottle his hand rested on. The bottle of mineral water lying horizontally in the little space between their seats. She had wondered if it would wake him, if it would seem proper to let her ‘touch’ go onto him. But she would do it very subtly she had told herself. Hoping he would not wake up, hoping he would not really be sensible of the bold venture she had been compelled to do.
To Jaliya this meant a new level of perceiving her. He now knows what her hand feels like. The dearness of the warmth it holds. All this time she had been a visual and auditory persona, a being whose speech he took in through his faculties. But now, he knows of her touch. And who can deny the fact that a person whom we perceive through our sense faculties becomes a person rendered of a newer meaning to us each time we advance in our knowledge about them from a different aspect of their being. A woman who is only known in sight becomes something more upon that first moment a man hears a ‘voice’ come from that visual persona. One may say that such a woman who was only a visually perceived image becomes added of another ‘dimension’ when she speaks and reveals the nature of her vocal element. Yet it is the touch that finally tells us the ‘dimension of flesh’ has been revealed to us, our senses. And thereafter that person would be a being formed of a ‘tri dimensionality’ in our perceptions, as well as our interpretations of that person. Sight, sound and touch. Unknowingly through that innocent act of taking her bottle of water from under his hand Rachana and Jaliya have been revealed to the other of their ‘tri dimensionality’. Our memory and what we carry of an experience depends much on what we have perceived of phenomena through the respective sense faculties. If we heard the screams of a person subjected to unimaginable torture that sound will haunt us, while if it was seen the impact of it would be more. And to a person who would be made to have some physical bodily aspect of such an act affect him, the prime example being the victim himself, the experience would have a ‘tri dimensionality’ which drills in the intensity of the realness in force. The more our sense faculties are exposed to the different aspects of a certain phenomenon, the more firmly it embeds itself in our river of memories... And what of this experience, of their journey together, will each carry once this ride comes to an end? Now that they have, even though by chance of circumstances, come to know the feel of the other as a touch. A touch, that was a most subtle and fleeting physical meeting, hardly an ‘interaction’ yet somehow in its serendipitous nature it bore that beguiling potency to cause the spark that ignites an endearing curiosity. The curiosity to know more.
“Rachana...” His head slightly rolls to the side as if seeking some propinquity to her “...I’d like to share with you my theory of the shareera yatharthaya.”
When a person edifies certain memories, which have been most precious to him, it takes on the figure of history. It is history that survives the liv
ing. It is history that overruns the past once the holders of the memories that speak as the past, are no more. History directs us to believe what we are, is a projection of the events that narrated time’s passage that led us to the moment we breathe in –the present. And nearly every moment we breathe in as the present we harbour a subconscious yearning, a hope that some exhale of ours will turn to marble, become an edifice sculpted into eternity in defiance of time’s ravaging, so that some part of us may enter the folds of history...
“The word shareeraya, in Sinhala means body...”
...to become a historian through words or constructions means to find one’s self moonlighting with what is beyond the mortal, beyond the mundanely diminishable. A form of endurance and existence surpassing the ‘breath dependency’ inherent to both man and beast. Yes, it is for the glory of a life beyond the mortal frame that poets monumentalise the ones they love in verses that live on long after their physical beings are no more...
“...shareera means bodies, the plural form, and it could also mean to say bodily...”
...With each passing generation, when the world of breathing ‘forms’ succumbs to death, the world of words and moments with its architectural myriads shall immortalise the ones who attracted the ardour of historians. It is for this sanctuary of history, and the endlessness it provides, becoming part of the continuum of human consciousness, in the form of words that Alexander Pushkin sought to eternalise in verse his love for Ekaterina Karamzina, the wife of the historian Nikolai Karamzina. From the age of seventeen to his last moment of breath at the age of thirty seven Pushkin kept in secrecy the identity of his ‘nameless love’. For twenty years the love for Ekaterina Karamzina was sculpted through beauteous words taking the form of poetry. And gave her a life beyond the dimensionalities the physical frame could afford, beyond time and the places they would have walked through...
“...And Yatharthaya, means reality.”
...Wishing his name be spoken with hers and not even be parted by death, Mikhail Lermontov dedicated thirty poems to a woman who enamoured his heart from days of youth. She would remain by the identity of three initials during his life time; N.F.I. Thus, like so many other women who were cupped onto the palms of history by the writings of poets, she, Natalya Fyodorovna Ivanova, was edified to last beyond what her mortal frame would grant her. Yes, truly there is a part of us that becomes a historian of sorts when we meet those we fall in love with. And to make our own world be somehow woven to theirs, even at least in some form of non-physical threading, we undertake labours that become sweetly painful. A pain whose sweetness feeds the soul.
“The body, the shareeraya, Rachana, is the primary tool with which the mind may access the material world. The shareeraya is a physical entity; it’s a composite of sense faculties. Our consciousness comes into contact with the world and becomes conscious of the world of materiality around us through the body. The senses it is composed of. The physical elements reveal themselves to our mind through the contact made with the body... The body is like an axis between the consciousness and the world of matter and materiality that is around us. This doesn’t mean however that the world is entirely what the body perceives through its senses as the external world. It isn’t so at all, as I see it... If you think of the way the mind, the consciousness, holds the world of fantasy within the realm of the imagination, it too is a part of the world we are conscious of. Because it is we who hold it in our consciousness. But it is by no means a part of the shareera yatharthaya, it is in fact quite the opposite. The world of fantasy we conjure in the sanctum of our inner being, our thoughts, does not have a material aspect to it. It is within, internal, totally and completely. The fantasising we do is of our interiority. The body does not come into play when it comes to devising and validating the fantasy. But that isn’t the case when it comes to matter and material elements around us. When we perceive them with our senses of the body only then do they come real to our consciousness. It is only when we perceive does it exist in our world of experience. And that experience is a case of how matter is made to have a physical aspect to it when it comes into contact with the body and its sense aggregates... Why do I say a ‘physical aspect’? Because Rachana, the physical means to be linked, interpretively, to the physique, the body. And to be, in some sense, ‘physical’ means it has been interpreted through the physique, the body. And when that happens of course, the matter that was untouched by the physique until that moment takes on another ‘form’. Yes Rachana, it is a touch by the human body on the inanimate, nonliving matter, which makes it have a physical form to it. It is when touch occurs, when touched, the object becomes ‘physio-material’... How is it ‘physio’? What does that prefix mean? It denotes that it is definitional of the physique or the ‘bodily’ being at work in giving meaning to that material which was perceived by coming into contact with the body as a touch. Coming into physical contact, bodily contact... An object, a material object, complete in its visual dimensions, its form and colour, remains an object yet to be fully in the fold of the shareera yatharthaya until, until, yes, until it is touched. Then it gains ‘flesh’ Rachana. Then it has colour, form and flesh, because it is then within the ‘realm of touch’, the most sensual of senses. The most real of any sensation. That is what tells us that we are in fact physically awake to the world around us. An object that comes into physical contact with the body transpires in its form of materiality, its state of being, ‘matter’, becoming the physio-material...”
Touch. The significance of touch can be manifold. It has an invasiveness in one way, because to each person their body can be a temple. A premise that may be physically known by another, ideally, only with a certain form of consent coming into effect. Touch. It carries in it at times the most endearing affirmation. The assurance by another that we exist, physically, in the world of another...
“...If, deep in a forest, a tree falls and no one sees or hears it, did it really happen? It’s a way to illustrate, I suppose, how a material phenomenon comes into being when there is someone who has witnessed it in some way. When it has occurred within that someone’s ‘radius of perceptibility’. And this radius Rachana will certainly differ from person to person, depending on the potency of their sense faculties. And it is also subject to interpretation. With any of the senses it is possible that each phenomenon or object is given a different level of interpretation. Take the example of a seat inside a bus, like we are in. Different people who sit in these seats may have different opinions about its softness or hardness, subjectively decided, because of how their respective bodies, their touch took place on that surface of inanimate material. And surely in their subconscious they may arrive at these opinions, these decisions, with references to previous experiences. Experiences the body has had, coming to contact with material surfaces meant for seating. And this Rachana, is an instance of the physio-material coming into being. The value judgment on a material surface, a tangible object. And being judged as desirable or not causes the material to be imbued with a physio-materiality...”
We need at times, to be in the grip of someone’s touch to know that our existence is really and fully true in physical terms. It is fascinating how much power we may attribute to another to affirm to us that truth, of being real. To be looked at, to be spoken to... And to be touched. Sometimes it is to simply know that we are touchable. Touch. Sometimes, we just want to be touched. To be told in a truth firmer than ‘words’ of our realness, in this world.