Pushpam, Proverbial Star

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

--William Blake

Since my college days (now some twenty five years behind me) I've felt an attraction to the work of William Blake and especially to an early work of his called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  It's one of his illuminated books, the words and designs to all of which he etched painstakingly backwards onto copper plates, then bathed in acid to create a negative that could be inked and pressed to paper in order to print a limited number of copies. Then after printing he embellished each page (lovingly, resplendently) with water colors. 

These books--beautiful compelling throwbacks to the medieval illuminated manuscripts--did not sell. But today they are recognized as true masterpieces of composite art. And the Marriage of Heaven and Hell is maybe one of the easiest of the set to enjoy. It's a sort of multimedia broadside against imperialism and dualistic philosophy. Its purpose is to wake folks up, politically, metaphysically, religiously. The secret to understanding and interpreting it? Well that lies in being in on the joke that Blake here has turned traditional Christian cosmology on its head, so that hell is the place we're meant to aspire to and heaven a state of soul most assiduously to be avoided. Heaven is rational metaphysics and allegiance to the imperial state and just in general a state of being in which the creative imagination is limited and controlled by all the powers that be. Whereas hell! Hell on these vibrant pages is life-energy and sociability and political liberty and nakedness and innocence and good hot sex and unity of body and soul and the pure wonder and multi-dimensional strangeness of conscious existence. So down with empire. Down with philosophies that exclude the passions. Up with living it up and getting it on. Up with skylarks. Up with flowers. 

In any case, somewhere about the middle of the tract (and as beautiful and artistically stunning as the book is, that's what at bottom it is--a propaganda piece, a tract) there's a set of proverbs, called "The Proverbs of Hell," which I've come to think just have to be the sweetest set of aphorisms in English imaginable. I certainly haven't come across their like anywhere else; no, for vigor and concision they're pretty much matchless. And I'd like to spend some time with them on and off here in this blog, not just because they are beautiful and meaningful, but because I think they have a great deal to say to any would-be nine volt nomads who want the greener more elemental life, but who are nevertheless afraid to let go of what they currently have in order to have that life. We all have our expectations, some of which are just going to have be unlearned and released, but lucky for us the mind that birthed these proverbs had little use for material wealth or jet-setting or being someone big and famous in the world, and so the proverbs focus on the realest wealth that is (or ought to be) every human being's birthright: friendship, imagination, time itself, the creative intellect at play, the gaining of wisdom by pathways of energetic foolishness: all of which can be embraced as nine-volt nomadic virtues and gifts because in cultivating them, nothing has to be burned or consumed or thrown away. Quite the opposite! Moreover they are key to living the low-energy, high-imagination life in grace and style!

But hey before I go on effusing and declaring without a shred of quotational evidence from the pen and watercolor brush of the master himself, let me just meditate for a short space and a short while on just one of these proverbs, namely of course the one at the head of the post, illuminating it: "He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star." 

First thing that happens as the proverb sinks in, is I think of certain human faces that really do seem to shine, and not just when a smile brightens them but pretty much most of the time. Not movie stars. Not tall beaming politicians with machine-polished shoes. I mean ordinary everyday people whose faces just radiate the generosity and warmth that really is present in their lives as a gift to give away. Being with them is like coming up to a warm fireplace on a dreary day. You feel like a different person in their presence. Or at the very least you feel that in the space around this person there are other possibilities besides continuing on with dreariness, besides just making do or muddling stoically through your troubles. Maybe in the presence of such people you even pretty much forget you have troubles.

Now a question: what happens to such people from OUR perspective, when either they die or just in a practical sense have to exit from our lives for good? Think a minute. What happens?

Why they become stars of course! They become stars by something like the method that the Greeks were getting at in those myths of theirs, those myths in which certain mortals after their deaths were made into stars and constellation and given the honor of placement in the heavens. One of my favorites in this category is the story of the twins Castor and Pollux. The one twin was immortal, the other mortal, and when the mortal one died, the immortal one begged Zeus to confer the gift of immortality on his brother, he missed him so much. And Zeus, moved by the brother's evident love and sorrow, granted the request. Love effected the transformation there by means of the power of a brother's memory. And so it is for us. Whoever the shining faces of our lives are and however they serve us--hiking companion, soul mate, teacher, lover, friend--it's all the same. They become stars of creative recollection, points within us of perpetual light. 

Here's a fact to chew on: evidently we all possess madly specific neurons in our brains that fire every time we see a photograph say of Obama. And by that I mean any photograph. In other words you might be shown hundreds of different photographs of Obama one after the next, taken from all angles and on any number of occasions, and every time that neuron will recognize Obama and fire. 

I like to think about this fact when I picture within me the faces of people whom I really truly love. I like to think that every time I see my wife or my son or say my gentle and artistic grandmother Brooten, somewhere within my brain a certain very specific point bursts out in recognition, a neuron whose task it is to recognize and remember and fire away in salutation and celebration, an inner neural star. You see they really exist. Some of them I suppose are baleful ones. But of course right now, to quote another poet, we're thinking of the ones that shine on us "graciously, with fair aspect."

One such remembered face (luminous with affection) was part of my life in my early childhood. It belonged to a woman who happened to have had her nose pierced, so that she wore a piece of jewelry there on one side of her nose that even reminded me of a star. Her name was Pushpam and she worked in our home during my family's nine years in Southern India. Again, this was back when my age could still be measured in the single digits, yet my memory of her is anything but dim.

Most of what Pushpam did was cook for us: a labor that in that place and time was no easy one, there being no reliable electricity to keep a refrigerator, and no packaged foods available, and no automobiles in the driveways to just conveniently hop into every time you needed to go to pick up some coriander or curds. No, all the ingredients had to be bought from the open air town bazaar almost daily, and our stove was fueled with wood, and our water, to be made potable, had to be relentlessly boiled. Nor were there any of those labor saving gadgets, no blenders or digital scales, no food processors. Certainly no dishwasher. All of which meant that the principle ingredient to any prepared meal was in fact not rice or spice or meat or vegetables or fruit but honestly time.  

So Pushpam was to be found mostly in the kitchen; I would go there and sit on a yellow bench near a kitchen island (or really peninsula) painted yellow to match my bench. And I would talk to her. Well sometimes maybe I would do some little task to help her: maybe pick stones out of the rice and the lentils or maybe sort through the tangled underworld of the utensil drawer like a private eye for the coconut grater. But for the most part I just sat around and talked and asked to sit closer to the stove. These days I like to think that my own pretty easy-going attitude about the amount of time most tasks around the house are just going to take has its source in enjoying that time with Pushpam, who was friendly and kind without ever coming anywhere near spoiling me. I like to think that she enjoyed talking to me. I like to think that I entertained her as least half as much as she entertained me. She taught me the Tamil names for the animals. I told her about what I learned at school. I asked her lots of questions about her family. She was a widow. Her husband who in life had been a perpetual ne'er do well had died just a few years after she started working for us, so she was the primary provider for her several young children. In any case she liked to talk about her kids. 

Now I'm sure I will have much more to say about Pushpam as time goes on, but for now what I want to say is how amazed I am at how often even to this day she returns to my field of inner vision in all her sturdy kindness. It has been more than thirty-five years since I last saw her and yet I am sure that not a week goes by in which I am not gladdened by a happy recollection of her face. So her face is like a star to me. And those regular glances into memory in which I see her--they're like looking up at night to see some bright and easily recognized constellation like the Big Dipper or Orion. 

"He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star."

But here's the simple proverbial point: would I remember Pushpam at all so happily, so pleasurably, if during the time in which I was actually with her in those days she had shown me neither attention nor kindness nor love? Of course not! Her face had to shine outwardly day after day, hour after attentive hour for it to shine inwardly for me here and now. And so it is for you and all of yours and for me and all of mine: love-in-the-present is the key to ever gracing anyone's memory. After all the only time in which we can cause anything to happen is the present time, the past being all too solidly over and done with, and the future nothing but a cloud or a mountain fog! 

Take heed. Love now. Shine far. 

 HB, WB

The Schindler's List Dream

There's a dream that comes back to me occasionally. It's not a pleasant one.  I wish it were pleasant, but it's not. I wish I could feel like a hero in it, but I don't. There's a door in front of me, and behind the door, a room. And inside the room (though not visible)--a crowd of people, God knows how many, but what I do know is that everyone in there is suffering, and everyone wants out, out of the room. Mind you from outside there are no apparent signs of their grief and suffering. No beating on the wall from the other side, no wailing from within. The existence of the grief within the room is just the given of the dream--one of those things that the person having the dream knows without any outward evidence to go on. In dreams for the most part the realest knowledge is subjective. But it often is no less absolute than the information that your waking senses give you, that the sky is blue and that rain is wet.

In any case they all want out, and I, the only one outside--I want to rescue them, and as many as I can. And I AM able to help. I can open the door and reach into the room and pull folks out by the arm or the shoulder. The trouble is that my rescues can only happen at a painfully slow pace. And here the doorknob is the obstacle--this awful round doorknob, which is brass and hot to the touch.  For the most part it's locked, and only at certain random intervals does it unlock itself and allow itself to be turned. Then too, whenever I can turn the knob and open the door, as soon as I finally pull someone out the door slams shut and again I have to wait for the knob to unlock itself before my next rescue can take place.

Sometimes I wake out of this dream in a literal sweat. Why do I have it? What does it mean? I do not pretend to know for certain, but I think it has its roots in all the thinking and reading and considering I've given over the last few years on the theme of limits. Limits of perception, limits of knowledge, limits to prediction, limits to the limits of knowing our limits: all of which by the way are tied up in the grand predicament of not knowing our limits when it comes to nature.  Incidentally I call this dream my Schindler's List dream, after the industrialist in Spielberg's movie who saved several hundred Jews from the Nazi murder machine, but who in spite of his work and the risks he ran in the end was in despair at the thought that he might have done more. "I could have done more. I could have done more" he yells out in some of the final moments of the film. And in my dream the essential problem is the same. What any individual has on offer as a force of rescue or repair is just completely outmatched by the scope and violence of the general predicament. 

What is our responsibility in a time like this when the problems in the world are so overwhelming? When the forests are falling and the reefs are dying and the fisheries collapsing and the sea levels rising? How much trouble should we take to change our lives to undo or at least limit our contribution to the damage? At first it would seem as though a great deal of sacrifice would be in order, but then when the scope of the problem becomes clear and we pit the hugeness of the task against the actual good the individual can do, why, it's natural to ask if it even makes sense to try. Take that half ton or so of carbon I save every year by doing my laundry by hand. A half ton sounds like a lot at first, but when compared with the dozen gigatons or so released annually into the atmosphere by civilization at large, it's not even a drop in the bucket; it's truly a statistical nothing. Aren't there other things I can be doing with my time than plunging a plunger up and down in soapy water? Of course I still choose to plunge, but have to admit, sometimes I feel doubtful about doing so.

It's the aspect of doubt that that I want to speak to here today, this aspect of doubt that often masquerades as the voice of reason, even though it's not really moral reason but usually something more like utilitarian reason and usually a purely personally-focused one at that. But in any case the reasoning goes like this: 

1. Here I am making all these adjustments and changes to my life to keep from harming the planet. 
2. No one else I know is doing this. Or hardly anyone to speak of.
3. The net effect of all my sacrifices, practically speaking, is zero.
4. Why should I bother? Who am I fooling? I'm wasting my time. I'm wasting my life. Think of the fun I could be having. Think of the fun everyone else is having. Spending the carbon. Trying not to think about it.
5. That's it. I'm buying a ticket to Cancun. Once I get there, I'm going to rent a Hummer for a week. 

It's an extraordinary moment really, if you think of it. Here, in age of limits (and this is an age of limits!) we feel ourselves limited in our response to civilization's insistence that there need not be limits! And the source of that feeling is really let's face it social conformity, and the relief that it would give us just to be acting like everyone else. We know in our hearts that there are limits. We sense real destruction and grief on the other side of the wall. And we want to help. But the truth is, that what we want even more than the power to help is just to wake up and find that the predicament itself was all a bad dream, so that we can just get down to living the way that everyone else is living and leave behind all this worry, this burden of the knowledge of our collective slow suicide by consumption. It's a powerful thing, the power of suggestion, the power of our social nature to make us conform even to lifestyles that we know to be destructive. Other people really do exert pressure. Let me give you an example.

My son is entering college at the end of this month--at a school that happens to be some twelve hours away by car. Months ago we decided that in order to save on carbon and fulfill a pledge not to drive more than three thousand miles a year (and fewer the next) we would not take him to school by car. Instead he could make the trip himself on the train. Which of course does not zero out the emissions, but again, helps. And I promise this decision was never something we advertised or trumpeted or evangelized about; nevertheless news gets around and it has caused something of a flurry of commentary. 

Now, a few of the older folks who have gotten wind of our decision, have gotten a little misty-eyed recollecting that they themselves went to college by train. That's been fun to see. But a good share of the responses have featured surprise and even consternation. In fact just this last week someone who had heard (by the grapevine) of our arrangement said: "What? you're not taking him? I'll drive him up!" Clearly it has become a cultural expectation in America that parents settle their children into their dorm rooms if they possibly can! 

What's going on here? Well what's going on here is we're re-discovering the age old truth that conformity matters. That if you choose for whatever reason to transgress social norms, those choices will be commented upon and questioned, and attempts will be made to adjust your behavior. This was true about adultery in Hawthorne's America, and it is true today with questions of diet or politics or opinions about evolution and yes even about how you get around. Ask any bicyclist or walker who has been hooted at by folks in automobiles. Or heck ask the Amish farmer in Pennsylvania whose farm was recently the object of an armed federal raid because he was suspected of selling his milk raw-naked from the cow to customers who wanted their milk that way. I of course am not claiming victim status here. I only want to point out the very real alarm with which many people view contrarians, as well as the energy of concern behind some of their responses, though of course most of the time the disagreement, discomfort, and alarm will remain more attractively packaged in a wisecrack or a whisper of side talk. 

"But why should anyone care about how I live?" you might ask. "I'm not living this way to be self-righteous. I'm just trying to do the right thing by my conscience." Ah conscience you say, but you see that's just it. The truth is that when you choose to take a train instead of a car, or choose the farmer's market for raw vegetables instead of driving an SUV to Walmart for cans and packages, others know why you're doing it and are going to interpret it as a judgement on their own way of living; which of course in a way it is! You may not be saying out loud "you're wrong" and you may not even feel that you are making judgments against them, but the action speaks for itself. It says "I do not wish to live in the same way that you are living." Well, why wouldn't some folks feel defensive about that? It's a natural social reaction. 

Is there anything we can do about all this? Not really. Should it make us change our minds about how we decide to live? Probably not. In the first place because those who cannot respect your decisions about how to live probably do not deserve the time or the effort of your friendship, and in the second place, because in the end if we in the new simplicity movement are right about the way history is headed--deeply into an age of limits, it's only a matter of time before everyone is living more like us. And in the meantime, your real friends as well as you know that such lifestyle differences need not after all be the end of the world! All sorts of people meet and enjoy one another across all kinds of mental and cultural divides, and we either get used to being different from one another or we convert to the other point of view. 

I want to say more about our boy going by train to his first year of college. There's a rich vein there to probe and to mine. The theme of social expectations. The theme of owning more stuff than you could ever carry onto a train. The theme of what blessings can accrue to the project of what, in my last post, I called "dying into simplicity." I'll leave all this for a different post though--maybe one for after the boy had boarded and the cord is cut. Which happens to be next week Friday. 

Though now that I think about it, I may have to put off writing about any of that for a week or two and fit something else between now and then. The boy's departure is probably too big an event. Too much to think about. Too many emotions to feel. Some words are best left on the trees of Feeling and Intellect to ripen and fall naturally without being force-picked! In any case, for now dear readers, until my next post early next week, best wishes and sweet dreams of non-conformity. 

HB

Notes on the 9-Volt Nomadic Life

1. We begin and end our days embedded within the cosmic economy. Death is a part of the arrangement here. Without death there is no life, as the garden soil continually reminds us; for the soil is the sum of all that has gone before us and died, that we may live.
2. To die then, is to be in the position to give life to others. 
3. Now there are many ways to die, most of which do not involve physical death. To forgive a person is to die a little death. To put the needs of another person before your own is to die a little death. To say something like this--"the life of the earth demands that I give over thoughts of human convenience and speed, as well as power and my ambitions to control my surroundings"--this is also to die a death.
4. For the sake of the life of the earth as well as for the sake of reclaiming an honest straightforward human life tied to the life of the earth, it is time for us to die a certain difficult death. This death will require us to give up circumstances and machines that put us physically at ease. It will require us to share our wealth with others. It will require us to accept our dependence on the earth, as well as the consequences for poor decisions made in the past, many of them not by us.
5. There is no way to buy ourselves out of humanity's past errors. Additional consumption (enabled by the printing of money and the accumulation of debt) cannot lead to less consumption. More machines manufactured at the cost of more pollution cannot buy fewer machines and less pollution.
6. Our work must be more personal. It must treat the damage directly. It must substitute physical labor for financial fictions. It must replace fantasies of industrial control with a painstaking intelligent program to harmonize the human being with the landscape as well as with the indispensable life of the ocean. It must transform our wish to be the absolute rulers of nature into a desire to be its faithful servants and live according to its dictates.
7. The pleasures of consumption can no longer be our society's goal. We must not ask "what new thing should I buy?" but instead "what can I do without, or make myself, or repair?" Not "how much of my wealth should I give back to the world?" but instead "how much is it right for me, in the first place, to take?" 
8. From here on out, we should strive to acquire only what will unequivocally equip us to die this death into greater simplicity. Say a packet of seeds. A scythe. A pressure canner and glass jars. A book, the words of which are self-evidently magical and will entertain us with only the light of the sun to help us to read them.
9. It is true that none of us can die this death today, all at once. This is because the death in question amounts to a complicated universal labor and involves the regaining of many lost skills and competencies.
10. At the same time we do not say "one small step at a time," but instead "one big step at a time." Otherwise this dying will never happen; we will only play at it.
11. A few minutes of your time to sort your refuse into the proper bins is not the same as dying this death.
12. Turning off a light switch when you leave the room is not the same as dying this death. 
13. The purchase of gizmos that purport to save a bit of energy is not the same as dying this death.
14. However, "This year I will learn to cook." "This year I will plant and tend a garden." "This year I will walk everywhere I can." "This year we will give up the car..." Eventually these things add up to a respectable death, which is to say, one that truly, powerfully, imparts life. 
15. The household is the smallest meaningful human unit of the cosmic economy. Responsibility for the human portion of life of the cosmic economy begins there, in the nucleus of the household. This is where our dying must begin. 
16. Do not look to others elsewhere to do your dying for you. This is an abdication of responsibility and a culpable sleight of hand. 
17. Do not look to technology or science to obviate the need for this death. Technology and science have had their own obvious part in creating this all-too human mess of our home planet. At best they will help us discern between prospective methods of labor that tend toward reconstruction and renewal, for instance in the creation of nutritious perennial grains, or in guiding the renewal of marine ecosytems depleted by over-fishing and pollution. 
18. Do not look to government to solve the problem. The resources of governments the world over are materially and politically  in serious decline and in any case there can be no large scale solution to the problems we face without the involvement and commitment of individuals. We must all do our part. 
19. This death we must die will not be without its pain. All dying involves pain. We are not dying until we are feeling a certain amount of pain. 
20. Beyond the pain though, lie blessings implicit in this death--blessings that will unfold in surprising ways, as a new life for us takes shape from the fertile ruin of the old. Pleasure, for instance, in this new life will be simpler and quicker to come by, as well as far more certain for its being more elemental and basic and near at hand: the morning light, the sweet fuzzy heft of a peach in the hand, the joy of muscles and nerves that know precisely how to do a task... 
21. Remember our ambition is not control but to widen the circle of community and love and to find (in the earth beneath us) our common sustenance. 
22. Remember the future is slow. The future is perennial. The future is elemental. The future is hard work. 
23. This death I speak of is slow. This death I speak of is perennial. This death I speak of is elemental. This death I speak of is hard work.
24. Consumption is the emptiest goal.
25. "More, more, more," is the cry of a soul in error. Even "more with less!" is a mistake, if the "more" we speak of still involves the ambition to control and consume. How much better it would be simply to do nothing much at all with very little! To do a little fishing and catch no fish! To sail lazily around a lake in a sailboat with no other end or goal in mind than to enjoy the lap of the waves and the rippling of the sail and the warmth of the sun!
26. Once there was a boy with the initials HB who believed he could power a go-cart on a standard 9-volt battery, purchased with an advance on his weekly allowance from the corner store down the hill. 
27. Did he, in the material sense, fail to create such a go-cart, or even to procure adequate capital for the purchase of said battery? 
28. Yes. Alas.
29. But in a visionary sense did he fail? 
30. No not at all! 
31. How could this be?
32. Because to this day HB (sitting in his sun room in a wooden chair) by use of his imagination rides over the entire universe in a go-cart that is powered by a 9-volt, and there is no end to his adventures because of course the go-cart's battery is continually recharged by the twenty-three watt generator of his now middle-aged brain, which is fertile with the ruins of his youth. 
33. So far as he (HB) knows, he is the first world's first 9-volt nomad. But you too can be a 9-volt nomad if you wish to be and HB is certainly desirous of your joining him perhaps in a 9-volt go-cart race to Alpha Centauri. You will find him (as soon as he has completed this post) most likely in the vegetable garden saying vroom vroom.
34. In any case, seize the day! Seize it as a time to die, which is to say as a time to live joyfully, vividly, imaginatively, sympathetically, elementally. 
35. Who else can do either your living or your dying for you?

HB

The Last Steam Trains of India

When I was a boy, there were still steam trains in India, steam trains pulled by huge black locomotives, juggernauts of steel vitality. Everything is alive to the child, but these locomotives, multiplied into herds at the station, seemed more alive than anything I knew. The locomotive was horse, the locomotive was cow, the locomotive was elephant, the locomotive was tiger. And it pulled whole zoos of us people too: beggars, brahmins, holy men with dung in their hair, hippies on hash, street dentists, legume salesmen, factory workers, housewives, potters, snake charmers, cremationists, typists, accountants, little white boys (dirty cheeks) of missionary extraction. Even blue Krishna himself, I liked to think, would have enjoyed riding the train. Some passengers even spilled up onto the roof to ride in the open breeze and sun although if you did that better look out for bridges and tunnels and electrical lines and such and when you saw them coming better flatten yourself to the riveted metal like a fly to a windshield else risk decapitation or some other gory inglorious end!

And the smoke! We trailed smoke like banners of the apocalypse; we rode under all that was left of a mass incineration of coal, coal that had at one time been (my mother told me) living animals and plants that had died and that after millions of years under the earth were changed by weight and pressure into exactly the coal that now propelled us along. So the pressure of the earth that had forged the coal was now the pressure of steam hurtling us along toward, well...toward wherever we were headed now. Toward the cities of the plains: Bangalore. Madras. Tirichuripalli. Or Trivandrum by the sea. Or if back home, then toward Kodaikanal Road station. 

Shrouded in steam and concentrating on the fire in their bellies, the locomotives made no distinction between one carriage and another; they played no favorites with the allotment of their horsepower but simply pulled every car in the train equally and every car together. For us humans traveling the rails though, the view tended to be different. From our human perspective the train was divided into classes: first class, second, and third. My family always traveled second class. Had we traveled third, few would have credited us with being reasonable. Why after all would anyone without an absolute need to economize put up with all the crowding, all the standing room only, all the dirt and the bodily smells, and also (if you were a woman) all the groping that third class entailed? No, third class was no place for a family with means, even missionary means. But what about first class? I asked my mother. Would we ever be rich enough for that?

"We could afford it, at least sometimes."

"Then why don't we? We could have our own cushioned seats, and our own private compartments."

"Because there are more more important things."

Such as? I asked, and my mother answered without hesitation: "Well, just being with people, for instance. If we rode in a private compartment, your father and I wouldn't get to hear as much Tamil. And you and your brother wouldn't get to see as many interesting things happen."

"My seat is hard," I might say to my father.

"Do you want a blanket to sit on? We brought a blanket."

"I don't want a blanket."

"Then make do."

"With what?"

"With your inner resources."

"Which ones?"

"Try your patience. Try sitting on your patience."

It was good advice always on a train to keep your patience with you, especially your patience with people, because no matter the class or the carriage the train was going to give you an immersion in the human experience. It was a sort of city-in-a-line, an extract of India, a democratic container of life vibrantly spiced with elbow bumps. You couldn't escape or avoid, no it insisted on offering glimpse after glimpse into the lives of others, and therein lay its equalizing power as well as the power of every ride to enrage you or put you in despair, because of course not every human interaction is one that we want to repeat and there certainly are times when we're going to agree with Sartre that hell is other people. 

In general though my family looked on the bright side of the opportunity and the experience. We ate and drank and conversed with fellow passengers and looked out the window and stood up and walked around and eavesdropped. Even in the more idle periods of a trip while the tock tock of the rails lulled me and caused me to float on the waters of consciousness sweetly without direction--even then always there was the hum of humanity in my ears: of mothers humming to their children and the music of conversations in languages familiar and unfamiliar all mixing in a kind of lullaby glossolalia. I like to think that I carry all that conversation with me still, the way a seashell far from the shore is said to carry with it the sound of the waves of the sea.

Another force of democracy on the train was the WC. This was located generally next to the vestibule that connected one carriage to the next, and you opened the door to the WC and there (often right in the middle of the floor) as you entered the space was the toilet. And the toilet's design was minimalist perhaps to a fault. Simplicity itself.  Specifically it was just a hole in the floor, framed in metal, through which you could look directly down onto the tracks below. Come close and look down into it and there they were: the gravel and the ties down below repeating themselves: the gravel and the ties, the gravel and the ties. Depending on the speed, they might simply be a blur or they might resolve themselves into wooden timbers and individual stones. 

Sometimes, as I recall, the hole featured footprints off to the side (imprinted into the metal of the frame), and these were of course a guide for placing the feet encouraging toilet-goers to squat directly over the hole for best results. And I would say the diameter of the hole was on average large enough to drop say a good-sized cabbage through. Or a cannon ball. Or a genius brain. But then again, this is only recollection and everything seems bigger to a young boy than it probably really is. I can imagine that the size of holes is especially tempting for a boyhood memory to exaggerate. A boy wants to stuff through a hole whatever might possibly fit. And if that item won't fit in reality, then his imagination will generally accomplish the feat, and memory record it for a fact of experience.

Also in every car, without regard I think to class, was a safety feature fascinating to children. You looked for this toward the middle of each car, and up near the ceiling. Yes there it was:  a set of red letters proclaiming “EMERGENCY”, and above that hung a cord with a wooden handle. I inquired with my mother as to the uses of the cord. 

"When you pull on it," she said, "I think it activates the brakes of the car you're in, and then the engineer gets a jolt and knows to brake the whole locomotive."

"So you stop the train with it?"

"Yes. But listen to me. You don't just pull it willy-nilly, or at least no one had better do that. Stopping a train suddenly is always a dangerous business. The carriages can jackknife. People get hurt." 

"But so if there's a fire, or an explosion, or there's a cobra on the loose, someone can pull the emergency cord?"

"Yes. That's the purpose."

"What about jewels? What if someone stole some jewels?"

"Jewels might not be an adequate reason. I think there needs to be danger to human life, if you're going to pull the cord." 

"Anyway, I can't reach it."

"No you can't."

"You seem glad."

"I am."

And yet the unattainable nature of the cord as an object of physical manipulation also made it an object of desire. Dangling high up there like the star in the sonnet "whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken," it served as a goad to story making. In particular I pictured all sorts of occasions when under the pressure of a true emergency--an assassination attempt on the engineer by the caboose man, a tiger attack at Jollarpettai station, a rogue elephant on the loose in the carriage behind--I would discover some extraordinary ability that I had not until that time known existed in me, or had perhaps known it to exist, but been forced to keep a deep unflinching secret.

But you see in that moment, I would be transformed into the very hero I was destined to be! I would leap ten feet through the air, to pull an emergency cord. Or I would grow an extra limb long enough to reach the emergency cord. Or I would grasp the EMERGENCY cord simply by the power of my mind, and activate it by spelling out (with my eyes closed) the word EMERGENCY. Goodness, what superpowers! my fellow passengers would say, after they had been saved by me. We never knew! my parents would whisper. And all this time I thought he was just an ordinary brother! my older brother would say before falling on his knees in awe, and begging forgiveness for how often he had until that point treated me: namely as though I were just any old ordinary younger brother, whom he could banish anytime from looking at his stamp collection and keep from playing with his toy submarine!

Now as it happened, there WAS a story that featured an emergency cord, as well as a toilet, as well as a train that encompassed the two together, all in one mobile setting: a deeply satisfying package. The story was told to me by my good friend Deepak,  a classmate of mine at the boarding school in Kodaikanal, where both my mother and father worked as teachers.

"A certain woman," said Deepak, "boarded a train to Tirichurippali." 

"Steam train or diesel?"

"I do not know. But I suspect steam. However, the essential fact is that during the ride, this mother was feeling the natural need."

"For?"

"For the WC."

"So why didn't she just go?"

"She does go. She does. But she brings along her newborn infant baby (very small) as well. In her arms. I believe the baby was asleep."

"How old was it?"

"Perhaps a week. Maybe two. Maybe three. But very small. Very small still." Deepak held out his hands somewhat like a fisherman demonstrating the length of a fish, only in his case, the point seemed to be to de-emphasize rather than exaggerate its length. He went on: 

"Now in the WC, this mother proceeds to make use of the toilet. However the kingpin is this. The baby, I am saying, falls unmistakeably into the toilet hole. And then all the way through."

"Was it a boy or a girl?."

"I do not know. It is unimportant to the final moral of the tale."

"Did it fall feet or head first?"

"On this point as well, I am uninformed. However, I would consider it most likely to have been a feet first fall, considering the extraordinary outcome of the experience as reported to me. Now as the baby falls, certainly the train is still very much in motion. Quite fast. But the baby falls onto the tracks, you must understand. Onto the ties."

"Did it scream when it fell? Did the baby scream? What about the mother? Sid she pull the emergency cord?" 

"Accounts on this matter vary. Yes however the emergency cord was pulled, but as to who accomplished the pulling it is not known. It may have been the mother. Or perhaps a passenger who was able to hear the mother's painful hullabaloo. But in any case, yes the emergency cord was pulled. And the train comes to a full stop, period, and search parties are eminently dispatched to recover this baby. And this baby is found! Very much alive. Still on the tracks you see, but two miles behind the train. Two miles because you see a great deal of time is required in order to bring a train to a halt. But the baby is alive. The baby is alive!"

It was on the train that I learned to tell time. My mother taught me. We used a handmade clock cobbled together out of a sheet of cardboard (the back of a legal pad maybe) with hands of construction paper held in place by a brass brad poked in through the center of the clock, and the numbers inked on in marker. It was hard work telling the time, there being in the first place so many different ways to express this or that hour of the day. Quarter past seven could also be expressed seven-fifteen. Half past eight was also eight-thirty. Furthermore it could be nine o'clock in the morning or nine o'clock in the evening, which was odd though also not necessarily surprising. A great deal of life was complicated and unpredictable and not very amenable to immediate comprehension, and that was just the truth. You could complain, and of course you did complain but sadly this usually did not change the facts. No, you still had to live with the facts. Well I have learned a great number of facts since that time. Since those boyhood days. Since those last boyhood days of the glory of steam. Among them these:

1. That time runs on and does not stop for anyone. 
2. That death comes for everyone, even mothers. 
3. That landscapes are wounded and betrayed by those who say they own them, and the results are called progress.
4. That far too many people on this earth are liars.
5. That given these truths and under such circumstances sometimes the only thing you have left to lean on is a place called home. 
6. Home is where eventually you hope to get to. It's where people know you. Where they say yes you belong. It's a place you have a hand in making. A place where if you had a baby, you would bring it there to be.
7. Home is a place yes, but it doesn't have to be rooted like a tree. It is any space made magical by love. 

It always made me so wistful to be faced with that necessity of getting off at the station. It was bad enough seeing other passengers detrain at stations prior to our own end-of-the-line. But when it was my OWN family getting off, how much worse THAT was! First far ahead of our arrival my mother would take a census of our belongings to make sure that nothing had gone missing during the ride or was in danger of being left behind. Sometimes too if I was sleepy she would rub my shoulders between the shoulder blades as if to polish me there. Then depending on the time of day and the importance of the station the conductor might come through and announce the name of the stop. And finally the process of deceleration would begin and the train's shrill whistle would blow as a warning to anyone or any creature on the tracks ahead to move off.

When we pulled alongside the platform sometimes I would start to cry. 

"You want to go places," my mother said to me with a certain impatience, "but you don't want to get off the train!" As if rational metaphysics could wipe away my tears! 

And yet in retrospect I suppose I can thank her for identifying so precisely the source of my sorrow. It was the essence of my predicament as a child, and perhaps of my life, truly to be interested in new projects, travels, and in meeting people as yet un-introduced to me, and yet at the same time to wish to hold onto the full sum of my past. I wanted to be curious as well as loyal. Furthermore I wanted my sense of loyalty to be returned, reflected back to me, in this case by the train itself. But here the train was intent on betraying me; it was pushing me off, insisting I go. Was this how my love was rewarded? All my faithful service on board, to the tasks of perception and observation? What a cold uncaring creature this train really was, abandoning us here at the station like a snake leaving her eggs behind, to hatch on their own!

HB