A passage from the night Drops onto the page:

My hand reaches for the word And touches a body as firm As basalt, touches light pouring Through a sieve in it that was Woven by wind, a trellis that was Drilled by long absences.

A paradisiacal rose whorls Over the space that lies Between light and shadow Where nippled thorns, Alert like cat’s ears, listen For footfalls of ghosts.

From this one must gather Pebbles, gather rushes for Paper, gather driftwood to Float dreams upon. For this One must pay with sleepless Passages through the dark.

(After a photograph titled Paysage Nocturne)

After a journey by steamship half way around the world, when he arrives at his village, a little distance away from Lahore, he is greeted by the silence of dusk, the smell of new wheat forcing its way out of the alluvial soil, farm families eating their dinner of roti and sabzi under kerosene lamps. How much does he remember of this? He was but a boy at the time of the passage by train and ship out of here. And then he didn’t, or rather couldn’t, return in the interim, even to bury the dead: his mother and his baby sister is quick succession struck dead by some unknown fever, or that was what the village sarpanch had written to him in the letter he received in the new world, eight months after the fact.

He couldn’t sit for a moment to mourn those deaths for time was then was measured by the swing of arms swiveling from a torso hunched over track, driving spikes into hard earth. The only consolation he was offered after he had read that cursed letter was a glass of fire water offered by one of his uncles, the gruff one, who was in fact the softer of the two, even his loud swearing and drinking a mask that failed to hide his sorrow as the death of a sister whom he had doted upon. However now he is back, and now there is enough time for mourning. But how does one conduct a wake eleven years later? How does one prevent the ballast of sorrow from dripping away into the cycle of days?

When the tonga stops at the pepul tree, still standing and still as ancient, where the village wags used to gather after their evening meal to smoke, to gossip, to exchange news before the heaviness of sleep, he finds a small hesitant crowd waiting. Could it be for him? And who are all these people? Faces swimming into view and then as suddenly vanishing into the failing light as if his head were bobbing in and out of a kind of light infused reef. And from out of this group an ancient old man is hobbling forward, a hesitant grin on his face as if he happened to look into a mirror beached by accident after many years on a desert island.

Is this really he, his grandson, dressed like the sahibs? The urchin who used to wash his buffaloes for him at the village pond for a piece of candy, for a piece of sugar cane? Who used to keep the crows at bay during harvest season from threshed wheat with a sling shot for five paise? This young man with strong arms and calloused and work lined hands?

Notes: A story of three families across three generations, from different shores – from colonial Punjab, from Scotland, and from Mexico - one coming down from lumber mill Canadian West, the other crossing a continent from an antebellum American South made redundant by war and the third driven upwards by political violence and change, to a protean world that was California; the frontier that offered the illusion of emptiness waiting to be filled a story of collisions, of miracles, of life, of hopes, of despair, of pain, of love, of leaving home, of finding home, of borders, real and psychic crossed, or those one was forced to cross, in the swift epoch of the last century in whose tail wind I stand hoping to fill in The Blank Slate.