Whenever I read Amitav Ghosh I cannot just stop at that. When I was reading The Shadow Lines it took me 15 years back in time to the time when I was a little child. I remembered having a recurring dream. We stayed in Chandigarh the capital of Punjab and Haryana, 5 hours from New Delhi. My cousins and grandparents lived in Delhi and the best part of my summers was to visit my cousins in Delhi. I always looked forward to going to Delhi. This was before we had a car so we would go by train. In my dream I would see me with my family boarding the train. The train looked morose for some reason and I wouldn't feel too excited which were curious aberrations. And then it would happen , every time, every night and I would wake up startled staring out at the dark sky visible from the balcony. As we would be sitting in the train someone would place a packet under my seat and immediately leave. The dream ended there or maybe it didn't. But what woke me up was not what followed but the fear of what would follow. These were the late 1980s and the Sikh movement in Punjab was pretty much alive. Chandigarh was more or less the safest place in the whole Punjab. A city of the educated and the retired had little part to play in the revolution. From where I became a victim of the dream was initially hard to trace but it came back slowly. My paternal grandparents live in this place called Gurdaspur which lies in the heart of Punjab. We would hardly go there. We feared what might happen to us on the way or that is what I thought was the reason. That may have materialized in the form of the dream. The dream lasted for a week. It is ironical how I finally got rid of the dream. My mom told me how nothing could hurt us, how we would remain unscathed because God would protect us and somehow her words instilled such faith in me that I never had that dream again. The irony is that how the faith that had made me feel protected against my worst fears had translated into something that had been the cause of those fears in the first place.
The journey I decided to embark upon after reading "An Egyptian in Baghdad" from the collection of prose pieces titled "The Imam and the Indian" was of a slightly different nature . I was on virtual trip to Egypt and the middle east. My fascination with the upside-down house continues. I want to see the other side of the world . As a child I was fascinated by Lonely Planet and wanted to tread the unknown and the mysterious. Do I expect things to be upside-down there? I don't know. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Amman, Israel, Iraq, Iran and Kuwait. Their destinies entangled more by geography than history. I remember a very candid remark made by Atal Behari Vajpayee, he said "We can change history but we cannot change geography." I remember how, I, as a student had received the Arab-Israel conflict. It was befuddling as it would be to a dreamy 14 year old because I couldn't understand why all the fuss for a piece of land. But even more surprising was how we read that part of history like chapters from a story book. The six days war and Yasser Arafat were like events and characters from an epic. Too far too medieval.
Let me first start with what the prose says about Egypt, Iraq, Saudi, Jordon, Kuwait and Iran.
An epitaph (After the Requiem for the dream?)
This article died in it's cradle after the author checked a mail that doomed her to stay away from the mysterious for perhaps another six years and maybe for life. Let's just hope Maupassant was wrong. Let's just hope the cynic within me doesn't have the last laugh. Let's just hope life ain't all that singular and some loop somewhere will bring me back to this article.
The journey I decided to embark upon after reading "An Egyptian in Baghdad" from the collection of prose pieces titled "The Imam and the Indian" was of a slightly different nature . I was on virtual trip to Egypt and the middle east. My fascination with the upside-down house continues. I want to see the other side of the world . As a child I was fascinated by Lonely Planet and wanted to tread the unknown and the mysterious. Do I expect things to be upside-down there? I don't know. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Amman, Israel, Iraq, Iran and Kuwait. Their destinies entangled more by geography than history. I remember a very candid remark made by Atal Behari Vajpayee, he said "We can change history but we cannot change geography." I remember how, I, as a student had received the Arab-Israel conflict. It was befuddling as it would be to a dreamy 14 year old because I couldn't understand why all the fuss for a piece of land. But even more surprising was how we read that part of history like chapters from a story book. The six days war and Yasser Arafat were like events and characters from an epic. Too far too medieval.
Let me first start with what the prose says about Egypt, Iraq, Saudi, Jordon, Kuwait and Iran.
An epitaph (After the Requiem for the dream?)
This article died in it's cradle after the author checked a mail that doomed her to stay away from the mysterious for perhaps another six years and maybe for life. Let's just hope Maupassant was wrong. Let's just hope the cynic within me doesn't have the last laugh. Let's just hope life ain't all that singular and some loop somewhere will bring me back to this article.
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