post-india

Last night in the delirium of sleeplessness I turned to the internet and continued feeding my recently awakened obsession on South Asian literature. This is by no means a new undertaking. I have been searching the world wide web ceaselessly for information, academic and otherwise, for the past six weeks; it was since then that my interest in Indian literature perked again after lying dormant for years. Interviews, reviews, deconstructions, bibliographies, e-journals, reading circles; voyeuring at odd hours of the day and night at forums. Judging by the sudden and rapid acceleration of my interest, I thought, it mightn't have made a difference if I had been looking at porn instead. South Asian literature is so precious precisely because it has come out of a history fraught with violence and turbulence. The weight of such a burden gives rise to truly great works of literature. Of course, at some point, I'd like to read The Illiad and Odyssey and Ulysses, or Arabian Nights and British classics. But I cannot deny my conscience when I am drawn curiously to the call of a country that I've only been to thrice; I neither grew up in India nor registered it in my adolescent mind when my family last went ten years ago, but remarkably I have certainly managed to dig out of the recesses of my mind the memories of a decade ago; I remember it without romanticizing (to be honest, perhaps only a little) its poverty and gray-eyed people; in the village where I stayed with my aunt's family, the boy with dusty brown hair and behind his eyes a brewing storm, who used to stand at his door and stare across the narrow street at me; its crime and cows; religious superstition that becomes, in the minds of millions, an undeniable reality; incessantly impatient traffic and cheeky monkeys. I do not need to mysticize the east like The Beatles, Madonna or the hippies did because I did not live there. The desire my body and my mind has for the country is strong and unflinching, as if it were my motherland and in the peak of life and consciousness, it is calling me back.