[8] He carries the past like a moneybag stitched around his waist, quite like a kangaroo’s pocket, and coins jingle deep in his sleep. He desires to become something else, faceless, colorless, odorless, perhaps even that giant cockroach of Kafka crawling across an infinite sheet of white paper.

Who is he and what are the stories he carries somewhere in his body five or so feet long? India appears like a daydream. “What do I know of it anymore?” he thinks, even as he directs his tongue to speak of it to the others, the curious looking for him to explain all those curious, and no doubt savage, customs they find “charming”? Is this paradise or a monstrous anthropological museum? But don’t all paradises come fully equipped with their own versions of the inferno - the inferno at the center of paradise, singeing the hair of everyone tumbling into those ballrooms? One has to give it to the Man upstairs – he definitely has a sense of humor.

No soap can wash this stench of burning away. His skin has stories written all over it, his fingers read stray sentences written in Braille when they surface under the shower on some mornings. He remembers those other bodies from childhood, the first awareness of other scents – hers’, his mortal adversary in the obstacle course of elementary school exam grades, who smelt of sour milk and almonds, whose skin was many shades whiter than his brown, alluring like the sheen of some exotic silk. That Gondwaland boy and Aryan girl wrestled each other to death in pop quizzes. Perhaps they still do.

He studied maps in his geography textbooks with a hunger, running names over his tongue like bubble gum – Tashkent, Majorca, Tripoli, Bangkok, Honolulu, Buenos Aires, Nova Scotia, Xian, Leh, Cairo, Budapest, Kinshasa and so on. The mind is where journeys happen first. The sack of flesh and bones, that dead weight, can follow, but it is not necessary. However in exile the tables are turned. The body goes to this other paradise and the mind screams, dragging its feet. This scene is quite similar to those places where they drag corpses of the murdered from jeeps, in chains.

Years pass, books pile on one half his bed, and bottles underneath. Holding a glass of yellow fire in one hand and a sheet of black fire in the other, trapped under the boulder of time, he burns himself up, so as to escape for this paradise, as swirling billowing smoke.