Log Chapter Three

          Monday early afternoon. Images from dreaming. It’s all the same world I live in, the dreaming world and the waking world, and all that is remembered is simply carried forward, into another day, into another night. I’m standing at a streetlight corner in Albuquerque, Alameda and Rio Grande Blvd. to be specific, with a little girl at my side, eight or ten years old. The changing lights tell us to walk. Her pace moves ahead of mine, but not excessively so, but the walk light timing is short and we must both walk briskly to get to the other side before cross traffic is given the go ahead. We go to a bus stop at the curb next to a field, where a few lime green polar bears are walking slowly through the grass. Seems so very non-sensical. The bus comes to pick us up, and when I get on, I am told by the conductor there are two fares, thirty-five cents for students with IDs, and fifty cents otherwise. The little girl disappears into the not-so-crowded bus, while I fish around for my ID, which I cannot find in my wallet. The conductor says Ok for this time, but you must have it for next time. I find a seat near a window. The little girl has vanished. This is a Madison, Wisconsin bus line. I drove these bus lines for four years between 1978 and 1982, and they are deeply embedded in memory. We’re on East Washington approaching the Capitol Square through late afternoon snowfall. As we pull up to one of the stops on the square, I see the face of a woman I knew but did not know from way back then, thirty-five years ago, half of my lifetime ago. Madison for me in those years between the central part of the city, the Capitol Square, and the university campus, was a sea of familiar faces. As bus driver and all-purpose walk-around guy, I felt there was hardly a face I didn’t recognize from somewhere in this part of town. This tall, lovely, graceful woman was about my own age, and there was a strange chemistry that connected our occasional by-the-way glances, but I never got to know her, and always wondered what our conversation would sound like. As those years went by, her visage receded, and eventually disappeared, as my waking life was absorbed by all of the others in my conversational life.

     Now in this dream, I sit as a passenger in this bus on the square. She stands at the bus stop in the gently falling snow, and we are both as old as we are now, thirty-five years later, and her eyes light into mine like the brightest two stars in the night, with a penetrating affirmation that we have arrived at a mature understanding of who we are and what we are about. Shortly thereafter, I step off the bus, not to approach this woman or meet her, for we have met, and she has disappeared, but to simply walk the sidewalks of the Madison Capitol Square through evening snowfall, as I had done so many times during those years, with a sense of peace and connection with everything around.

     Late morning walk through the front gate to east on the noisy, busy Poonamallee High Road where every motorbike and car with a horn electrifies the air with its warning. Blue skies break through while hot sunlight and humidity saturate the ambiance. Turn left at the light and dodge my way along sidewalk and street to the Airtel hole-in-the-wall shop to inquire about an internet stick. Bit of a language barrier here as the shopkeeper wants to know if I have a Chennai ID. . . . huh? . . Walk back to the guest house, and meet with Ray who fills me in on some basics. First of all, the guest house normally has WiFi, but normal is not an operational word these days. Connectivity is down in many sectors throughout the city . . . for cell phones, for internet, for ATMs, for credit card transactions, and has been especially so since the big downpour last Tuesday. Second, there are two primary connectivity sectors in India, one for the four southern states where we are, which is why I need a Chennai ID, which is something on the order of an address verification, and one for the north, which centers in Delhi. My southern ID would not work in the north and vice versa.

The YWCA can provide the guest house address as my Chennai ID for the time

I spend in the south. How many other quirks there are to getting this function set up and running I don’t know, so I think it best to not be in too big of a hurry and be sure I know what I’m getting when I start handing out rupees for equipment and services.

     In today’s newspaper, I learn that “of the (Chennai) Corporation’s area, the 172 sq. km. of the old city (where I am) have storm water drains while the remaining 254 sq. km. have no storm water drains but only drains constructed by the local bodies that are not connected to the rivers.” In another article, “huge tracts of densely populated areas became completely inaccessible floating islands. As power was switched off to avoid large-scale electrocution, mobile towers, basic telephony networks and internet cables too went kaput, making all forms of communication impossible. So, inaccessible and incommunicado are two words that best described the plight in most people in the state over those scary three or four days (last week).” Today is a short reprieve. More rain is forecast for the next three or four days, and Pondicherry and hard hit Cuddalore are also on the target, so it looks like Ray’s suggestion that I could go to Pondy if I wanted is a bit premature, and wisdom would dictate that staying right here is my only sensible option.

     Besides, Ray has become a shining gem of Light for me here. After clarifying connectivity issues and updating the weather forecast, Ray asks me who is this little girl he sees standing around me all the time. . . .huh? . . He holds his hand out palm downward a couple or three feet above the floor where we’re sitting in the lobby, and tells me there is a little blond, blue-eyed girl who is always near me, and he wonders who she is. Thinking through my friends and acquaintances around the world, I can’t identify who she might be. Some people see things that others do not, he assures me, and of course I know this is true, though I am generally not so forthcoming as Ray with my observations around my friends and family where I come from. Many of them are generally not used to such ideas, and there is little point in bringing these kinds of things up unless I feel that person is attuned to listening. It is simply an insight I can keep in mind as my friends and I continue our everyday conversations about who we are to each other. Ray sees the little girl around me, and I am touched to the quick of my heart. Ray steers the conversation to the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry and the philosopher, mystic and writer, Aurobindo Ghose, who illuminated the spiritual path that led to the beginnings of the ashram named after him. When I lived for two years in Cuddalore near Pondy, when I was in my mid-twenties, Aurobindo’s writings informed my first encounters with Indian spirituality. I knew the place and some of its residents those forty-five years ago. Ray tells me that his grandmother, when she was carrying his mother, met Aurobindo. Ray and I are not analyzing cause and effect relationship, simply stating the things we see and know, and there is no one to say these things are true or not-true. They simply are, for those who can see, and know how to listen, and sometimes the sharing is right. Ray has given me a Ray of Light. He has a poem he wishes to share, and goes over to the front desk to stand and write it out.

     An Ode to New Beginnings

Amidst busy operations of my day

John Ashbaugh walked my way.

It was an absolute pleasure to see him

Living in love, light and harmony.

Interacting with him

Swept my heart away

Bringing meaning to my mundane day.

When it’s time to go his own way

I will continue to hope and pray

That this love, light and joy he shares

Grows deeper and sharper

With every ‘curve’ life throws his way.

*  - * - * - * - *

Dear John,

In a world of excess it renews my faith

To know that God and Mother Nature

Still take time off to create

Selfless souls like you.

With much respect, love, light and living

Only to serve another day.

Kiran  “Ray”  Amarnath

07 – 12 – 15

Chennai YWCA International Guest House

* - * - * - * - *

     Wednesday evening, December ninth. The city waits now for the aftermath, and hopes that the worst of the deluge has passed. After Monday’s blue skies reprieve, more showers have been expected, and skies over the guest house have been completely overcast, but no water is fallen. The toll so far listed in Tuesday’s newspaper is 427 for the state, including 134 in Chennai, and more is expected as the effects of sickness and disease set in. Unthinkable amounts of garbage and refuse, as well as the rot from animal carcasses – goats, cats, dogs and cows – will add to the festering air, and persons trapped in submerged homes have already been found. Fishing boats and helicopters are deployed to aid in rescue efforts and convoys of trucks try to deliver food packets and aid. Medical staff is overwhelmed, and the effects of PTSD are sure to set in for those who lost, quite literally everything, when their homes were washed away. Here at the guest house, we bear the inconvenience of no internet connection, and watch television images of all that is going on around us.

     Cuddalore district has been slammed, vast tracts are still underwater, and over a hundred persons have already died there. I think of that part of town where my Peace Corps supermarket is. I think of my home at Fort St. David out by the beach. I think especially of Bhanumati’s humble home just a few blocks from the supermarket, and wonder what is become of her and her family. I wonder what will be there when I return to visit, and how long it will be until I can visit, and who will be there to visit, when all I can do now is sit here and wait.

     I have my room with ceiling fan and open window, and the guest house lobby one floor below where visitors come and go, and Aruna and Daphne and other desk clerks answer questions and register and discharge guests. I visit the dining room every morning for breakfast and coffee and sign up for lunch or dinner, but usually not both. I can walk the expansive courtyard and visit the pond and the chapel. I can walk to the light at the corner, turn right and walk another block to the Nilgiris supermarket to buy sundry items, going as much for the walk as anything else. I read in the paper that the sector where the school is still has water and drainage issues. I wonder if Ambi and Shantha are still trapped in their house and how the school is doing. Again there are no classes for a week, and I suppose it’s safe to say that this semester has in a sense, been blown out of the water.

     Ray continues to shine his Light in the lobby and the dining room. He is an ambassador of goodwill to all visitors and guests and has learned a range of simple greetings and phrases in many languages from places he will never go.

We sit sometimes in adjoining chairs at a small round coffee table in the lobby and he tells me some of his stories. He has a Native American name, Thunder Moon, given to him by a Native American visitor some years ago. Along with a long eagle feather. The name is given based on the month of Ray’s birth. Which tribe? The name-giver told Ray that he was of the tribe that told the most stories. Giving names according to the time of birth is akin to the Hindu tradition, and the name Kiran was chosen for this man in that way. As Ray and I sit sharing stories, various guest house personnel are frequently walking over to him in search of a signature of approval. He doesn’t seem to spend very much time in his office, as the world of guest house employees and visitors whirls around him and he weaves the magic of his Light, keeping abreast of everyone’s needs and desires and stories, with quiet, thoughtful, soft-spoken sincerity.

     Thursday, as morning light illumines the room. Begin this morning’s dream with driving the dark two-lane highway towards home from the monthly second Wednesday gathering of poets at the Bernalillo Range Café. As I approach the roundabout intersection with Tramway and the bridge across the river, the road narrows and becomes mucky. I exit my car and proceed on foot, searching through the sloppy water-logged ground for a path to the bridge. Various large highway construction vehicles sit around in idle waiting and various pathways

I venture prove blocked or impassable. A couple of other poets from the Range Café gathering are also here and none of us are having success in our search for a viable path. Until finally another poet, one of the younger women, appears on the scene and leads the way over a small embankment to a clear open path we can follow to the bridge.

     From here I go to my grandmother’s house in the small Illinois town where my parents came from. This is my mother’s mother’s home that as children my brothers and sisters and I visited so many times, a center of extended family community where we enjoyed the company of grandparents, uncles and aunts, and some of the other elders. Everyone is now here socializing in a congenial way. Everyone is of their age when I knew them at their best, while I am pretty much as old as I now am. Someone goes out to check for mail and comes back and says there is nothing for me. On the pretext of taking a walk, I go out to check for myself. I must walk down the quiet street at dusk to where the big metal box sits on a concrete pillar. When I open the latch to look in, I see piles of muck and old rotted leaves, and a few waterlogged pieces of mail that look like they could be addressed to me, but are essentially addressed in gibberish. I reach in to pull all of this yuck out and throw it into the shallow drainage ditch at the foot of the mailbox post. The cavernous mailbox, now free of rotting debris, is clear and serviceable, and I enjoy my walk back along the old street of that once familiar neighborhood as dusk settles into the soothing darkness of nighttime’s first starlight.

     Thursday mid-morning, with my ever-changing plan for the months ahead.

Christmas tree goes up in the lobby this morning and the skies are completely overcast. Newspapers are full of stories of displaced persons trying to recover, trying to survive. Stories of squalor, and sickness and filth. Stories of tragic deaths and morgues filling with unclaimed bodies. Stories of inadequate relief and relocation facilities, and oceans of helplessness and desolation that surround this enclave of normality where I have my choices between corn flakes with milk and sugar, and fried eggs and buttered toast, and puris with coffee or tea or both. And streams of traffic go by outside and I wonder where everyone is going and why.

     Spin the roulette wheel of idle itinerary planning. With each passing day,

I become more settled into the life of the guest house with no sense of hurry to go anywhere, knowing full well that wherever I go, I’ll be looking for what I have here, a comfortable room with amiable company around and time every day to make up my mind about what to do next. From one such place to another I will wander, and I wonder which ones will follow one another and why. I could stay here for the next three weeks till the first week of January, waiting for the flooding up and down the coast to subside and begin to dry out and for the shockwaves of devastation to fade before taking the bus or train to Pondy for a month long visit to that town and neighboring Cuddalore. I could then return to Chennai and catch a plane to the Andaman Islands far out in the ocean west of here, spoken of in the Lonely Planet as a tropical paradise. That would be for February and into early March. Then fly from there to Calcutta and change planes for Kathmandu and spend a month in the valley there. Then take the road across southern Nepal to Rishikesh in Utterakand for a couple of weeks. Then on to Dharamshala for a month. Then on to Srinigar before heading over to Leh in July where I would stay till September. I would have to leave the country again by then, and could return to Nepal for a visit to Pokhara  or the Kathmandu valley again until I decide that it might be time to revisit the USA , or who knows what kind of plan I might be up for by that time. The overland traveling will always be the hardest part of this itinerary, and I hope I can figure out ways to make it as easy on myself as possible. In the end, it always comes down to finding this quiet room somewhere, with a few kindred souls with whom I can share stories, and with whom I can create new stories to carry along to wherever my path goes next. All the while filling my notebook with thoughts and dreams along the way. There can be no hurry to go anywhere.

     I have been telling myself that I came over here to meet somebody. The person I came here to meet is actually myself. Three weeks have gone by and today is day one of week four. There are no poetry readings to attend. There are no art show openings. There are no movies I need to see, and my Netflix account is defunct. I’ll not be attending any shootouts at the pool hall, and I will miss all of the NFL playoffs. I am missing all of the news desk updates for the latest archaeological discoveries of remnants of ancient civilizations, and do not know whether Atlantis has been convincingly discovered or not, or what ancient Egyptian mysteries have been revealed. I do not know who is shooting who in the United States, or anywhere else for that matter. All of the usual suspects, I’m sure! I do not know how many people are outraged, or what they are all outraged about. I do not know what the banking cartels are planning for the next economic catastrophe. I do not know why brother is pitted against brother and sister against sister, in this world where getting along is so much more fulfilling. I do not know who is going to bomb the fuck out of whom next, but I do know that it will happen and that the ravages of war will continue unabated until the last asshole standing thinks he is king of the hill. Pockets if Intelligence will survive in remote corners of the globe, and they may or may not find each other, and it really doesn’t matter if they do or if they don’t. All that will matter will be whether or not two or more people can find love in their hearts for one another. If you are already there, the rest is smoke to the wind, and there is no need to know anything else.

     Friday morning. Begin this little dream standing amidst the flotsam and debris of my past life, this life I have led this time around. Piles of accumulation in no particular order and I feel the strong sense that something is incomplete. I’ve been putting something off that needs to be done. Like I need to take one more college course to complete my degree, and I am somewhere in the middle of this course and need to take some exam but have been negligent and am woefully unprepared. I owe some work to my art school professor, and am so far behind that if I don’t turn something in soon, my eligibility for graduation will expire. I look for some clothes and all that I find is dirty and grungy. I’m watching a group of college students, amongst them some beautiful young sorority types, laughing and playing a game of tug-of-war amongst themselves, but I cannot go to join them for I must be on my way to take my test and complete my degree. I drive my car over to somewhere near a campus, park on a side street and begin walking in search of the building where I must go to prepare for and schedule and take my test. This sprawling campus is an amalgamation crossover between the West Texas A&M and the University of Wisconsin – Madison campuses that I spent so many years at, and it seems the further I walk, the larger it gets, classroom buildings multiply in every direction no matter which way I go and I am feeling hopelessly lost. Classes let out and mobs of young students fill the walkways and I seek a direction away from them, and am continually unsure about which way to go. Evening light begins and I come to an outdoor assembly of ROTC students all dressed in their uniforms seated in a huge amphitheatre like the curving end of a football stadium. They are all paying attention to what is going on at the foot of the amphitheatre, band music and fireworks and speechmaking. I see that I can climb the steps on one side of the amphitheatre, no one will pay any attention to me and I can arrive at a high point overview of this sprawling, confusing campus terrain and get an idea for where I am at, get my bearings for where to go.

     When I get to the top tier of this amphitheatre, there is a doorway into a very tall tower, which I enter, and begin to climb a spiraling staircase that eventually leads to a metal runged ladder that becomes narrower and more precarious the higher I go, but I continue to the topmost rung where I can look through a hole-in-the-wall window to an airplane height view of the capitol square and isthmus and university area of Madison, and I can follow with my eyes that network of streets I walked through for so many years of my life. That landscape-cityscape then blends on one side into the West Texas A&M campus in Canyon, extensive and grassy and less urbanized. This is truly an awesome overview of this combined Madison, Wisconsin and Canyon, Texas terrain, and now I begin climbing down, rung by rung, this precarious ladder, and must be very careful not to lose my grip from this wavering height or I will surely fall tragically to the bottom of this tower I am trying to slowly descend, and I awaken in awestruck wonder of the overview I’ve just had, and in trepidation of the height I so precariously hold onto.

     Twenty-six years between when I was thirty and arrived in Madison to when I was fifty-six and moved from the West Texas town of Canyon to Albuquerque. Two campuses, lots of time going to school, innumerable hours reading through countless books in the library stacks, three art degrees and all kinds of hours in English linguistics, . . . that whole middle chunk of my Life. What was that all about? Open my eyes and stare in awe at the three-winged ceiling fan slowly turning. How many words do I have for that story? And for whom is the story to be told? And what exactly is it that I need to understand?

     Violette is native to Chennai and lives and works as a paralegal in New York City. Diminutive in size and nearing sixty, she visits her family here from time to time and takes special interest in her nieces and nephews. She is interested in my poetry book and says she is working on a book of her own poetry and hopes to get it published. She introduces me to her forty-two year old nephew Dominic yesterday after lunch. We three sit around a small coffee table in the lobby. Dominic is a handsome young man but somewhat disheveled and has a horrendous wound to his left shin, broken in a motorcycle accident. It is all scabbed over and there are some bandages but no cast and he walks with the help of a four-footed cane. The story that comes from Violette is that Dominic needs to seriously get his act together. He’s got a drug problem with ganja and hashish and has been hooked up with a woman for the last fifteen years whom Violette feels is a bad influence on Dominic, siphoning off whatever money he comes into and doesn’t spend on drugs. They’ve got a fourteen year old son together. Violette wants Dominic to leave this woman, get off his addiction, get a real job and straighten out his life and I sit here and listen to her get on his case, which she says she’s been doing for years to no avail. Dominic is a quiet and courteous young man and listens compliantly and attentively, but given the circumstances and history Violette describes, I can’t help but wonder if anything will change. For one thing, he needs to keep off of his leg and give it the months of restful healing it looks like it deserves. Violette feels like all of her prayers and admonishments and attempts to help have been fruitless, wasted efforts, and she asks me to give a few words of advice and wisdom to this young man, and he listens respectfully while I tell him that his aunt and family love him and want earnestly for him to lead a fulfilling life, and that if he doesn’t take very special care of this wounded leg, it looks like it could be lopped off at the knee. How much can anyone say to someone about making smart choices, knowing full well that those choices are ultimately up to that person alone? For as long as the next few days that Violette will be here, she’ll be trying to steer Dominic into a sensible direction, despite her near sense of futility and despair, and all I can do is lend my ear and encouragement to her plight.

     Saturday morning, December twelfth. The floodgates of dreaming are lifted as one vignette follows another and as unresolved relationship issues find new understandings. I’m an apprentice to a team of professional car mechanics, and am faced with the task of lying on my back under a car trying to loosen some intractable nut from its frozen condition. Without damaging anything in the process of course, and if I succeed I will be accepted into the brotherhood of mechanics. Through trial and error and effort, I finally succeed, and when I roll out from beneath this car, I look across the bays of this garage and see my own white ’93 Ford Escort LX, my companion on the road for the last sixteen years, lifted up on the rack with all four wheels off, undergoing inspection and necessary maintenance for future driving capabilities. When updates are complete and she’s brought down road ready, my newfound maintenance companions and I head out for a test drive east on Alameda avenue as this surly, good-natured crew and I keep our eyes out for a place to buy beer for a celebration. I’m driving, and riding shotgun is a version of Daffy Duck, I kid you not.

     Switch to the mostly empty rooms of my Corrales Road hacienda, where I’m crash-padding amidst the left behind disarray. No one knows I’m here, until there appears seated on the floor, leaning against the wall, a mature younger woman whom I’ve never met, in a very sexually suggestive and receptive position, but not urgently so. She is crash-padding in one of the other rooms, and is here to help me tidy the place up, and the idea for developing intimacy is certainly here.

     Wander over to one of the other rooms which morphs into the central bedroom of the Rose family house, the home of my childhood friend Jim, and his three sisters Grace, Pat and Donna, all of whom were my boon companions of our childhood neighborhood. I’m still in the cleaning up and sorting out mode, and come to some small boxes of trinkets amongst which are some gems I select for safekeeping.

     Finally, in some manner or another, I come to a room in another venue where I meet a woman I’ve known, clothed in a simple but elegant dress, wearing a pair of glasses, and I’ve never seen her wearing glasses. The better for each of us to see each other with, I hope, my dear, for our brief but promising encounter just three years ago, crashed in a series of misunderstandings, and I’ve wished ever since that we could get back on an even footing, and know in my heart that we can. She manifests elegance in artistic and musical refinement, and in this dream, I see so clearly her sensitive reaching out. So now I must wait, until we can sit at her table again and share another bottle of her rare wine. Patience, Kiran observes, is the art of knowing that there is an unknown path towards the realization of a desired outcome, and of waiting for that path to make itself known.

     Who is this journal for? And how much of what I write here will I wish to share? While in my heart, I feel it is so necessary to write these things down!

As close to the heart of my feelings as I can get.

     Saturday afternoon, going back to yesterday afternoon when I spend three hours from two-thirty to five-thirty with Ray in his office. On the one hand, watching him interact with the various employees from the various sectors under his purview, who come to him with pieces of paper to sign, seeking directives and advising him about difficulties they face that need resolution. The glassed-in room has a full view of the reception desk and lobby, and the sense of a captain at the helm of his ship prevails.

     Ray is thirty-five with significant experience in this role. He’s only been here a couple of months and has ideas for upgrading this guesthouse into a more competitive position in the Chennai guest house market, but feels he is faced with a committee of conservative overseers unable to see how the establishment can and should evolve. He will soon be coming up for evaluation for contract renewal which is not the shoo-in I can see that it should be. He’s concerned for the outcome but not excessively so for he knows he can find a role in a more progressive institution. And he really does want a place somewhere where his ideas are appreciated. Meanwhile, requests keep coming in and decisions are always in order, and if there is anyone who can turn this place into an efficient operation, here he is.

     A man of unpretentious wisdom, Ray is clearly one of the people I came to India to meet. He tells a story of meeting with the Dalai Lama five years ago. He was with a group over in the Bangalore area, where there is a Tibetan monastery, relocation center and settlement, and he was not at that time even exactly sure who the Dalai Lama was. He was sitting in the back of the room nodding off when His Holiness gestured to single him out and beckon him to come forward. Dalai Lama asked Ray to ask any question, and Ray asked, how can you know if you have a loving relationship? Dalai Lama asked Ray if he was sure he wanted to ask that question of a monk who had nothing to do with women in that way. Ray answered yes, and after bowing his head in contemplation with a smile, Dalai Lama raised his head and spoke and told Ray, when the relationship is based on loving for one another, and not needing one another. Dalai Lama looked down again for a moment, then looked up and said, your grandfather has already told you this. And upon reflection, Ray recalled that indeed his grandfather had told him something like this when he was a little boy.

     Here in the YWCA guest house in Chennai, I meet a man who received this wisdom teaching directly from His Holiness, and feel very connected to the network and web of wisdom that touches the lives of all who seek for the truth of the underlying reality in the Heart we share. And signatures are sought after, and requests for a day off must be approved, and at one point an elderly couple comes down all in a rage about their internet connectivity problems, and their shouting and insults directed at Shri, the IT man whose office is next to Ray’s, are an awesome display of fire and brimstone and disrespect one would not expect from mature educated people. Yet here they are, unconscionably unreasonable and one can only wonder about what in their lives has brought them to this level. They leave in the rage they came down with, not having looked for a solution in the first place, but only a venue on which to vent the sadness in their hearts. Such is part of the world the manager and his trusted and competent assistant must deal with.

     Forgiveness . . . is the scent that a violet sends to the boot that has crushed it.

And it is only humans who tell their young Not to do things. Animals do not tell their young Not to do things. They only show them what to Do. By the time a child is five years old, its parents will have told it what Not to do a hundred and seventy-eight thousand times. What do you think the child will want to do?

     Monday morning, December fourteenth. In the top floor apartment of a very tall building, the interconnected rooms are residential and sparsely furnished, with a bit of the sense of storage room facility about them. The floor plan between the rooms reminds me of the word layout of an evolving scrabble board game. All the rooms have large open windows and breezes blow through rustling leaves of notebook paper and newspapers on the tables. No single room has any specific function, much like a series of interconnected guest house rooms similar to where I am now staying. I walk from one room to another, closing windows to shut out the disturbing, disruptive breezes, wondering how many rooms there are, and eventually come to a room with a table where a packet of Nepali rope incense twists are lightly smoldering. I feel that left unattended, they might start a fire, so I gingerly extinguish them, and return to my exploration of these mysterious empty rooms. A man appears in a doorway, a landlord or owner, and tells me he will let me stay longer for a reduced rate if I will look after the place. I tell him I’m not sure and will think it over since I do in fact feel somewhat confined here and feel the need for a measure of freedom to explore the outside surroundings at will.

     So here I sit in my guest house room and another day goes by, and another day of wondering when I will leave, where I am going, and why! Clearly, Pondy is next, perhaps the day after Christmas, which is still twelve days down the road. Plenty of nice, quiet streets for walking there, with comfortable coffee shops, restaurants and book stores and such, all with the ocean’s horizon nearby. In the right guest house to stay, I can visit for a couple of months, and my erstwhile urge to visit the Andaman Islands now seems like a needlessly expensive lark. From Pondy, I can return to Chennai in March, and take a flight directly to Kathmandu and hope they don’t have another earthquake there.

     Meanwhile, my stay at the guest house here is becoming an ashram-like existence, which is really all well and good. All that went by during my last four years in Albuquerque since I retired from teaching at ITT is brought into reflective focus. All of those people I met whose lives I became a part of, and they a part of mine, are set into a mobile, interactive diorama, along with all those other worlds I passed through during my last fifty years on the stage. I can call it something and say it had a purpose and a reason, and I can reminisce about all of those people who gave me cause to feel, and there are a lot of them, and every day they pass by, one after another, in my memory, from many years ago, or from one year ago, all memories have equal footing, and then I wonder anew, about who I will talk with today, and tomorrow, and for the next twelve days here, and for my time in Pondy, and for wherever I go after that. An endless river of conversations, going where, and why, I can hardly imagine. And imagine I surely do, knowing full well that all of these imaginings are like the clouds floating above in their continually changing formations.

     Tuesday morning, December fifteenth. Return to that multi-roomed apartment from yesterday only this time it is a dark and murky basement with rotten support beams and gaping holes in the wooden floor boards. As I explore this next best thing to a sewer for a home with my high school friends Frank and Bill, scanning rooms and hallways with dim flashlights, I come to a place where I can exit into the daylight above and advise my friends that I am going in search of some kind of help. After some wandering about, I meet one of my high school teachers, a member of an order of Catholic brothers who were not only scholars, but rational disciplinarians, emphatic without severity in their advice and guidance to our emerging teenage minds. He wants to know what me and my friends have been up to with the implication that it had better have been something worthwhile or else we are in trouble. I’ve no choice but to lead him back to the underground hovel not exactly sure that he will be satisfied. We must enter from ground level through a hole in the roof. He leads the way and we come to a room where my friend Frank has been industriously and productively making bricks. There are scores, nay hundreds of freshly made silver colored bricks lying about in various stages of drying, and Frank is putting the finishing touches on a barbeque pit he has made from some of these bricks. In addition, a large swathe of the floor has been laid out in preparation for a concrete pouring, and we are simply waiting for the mix to be prepared. Clearly, my right hand man has come through with flying colors.

     Now we go to a long, drawn out scene at a pond where a big fat toad sits mostly submerged with only his eyes and nostrils, the top part of his face, protruding from the surface of the still waters. On a rock on the shore nearby, a predator of the toad toys with and teases its prey and the toad stays its place and watches. The predator gets brave and more careless in its approach and gets right up under the toad’s chin. Slowly, the toad’s fat, sticky tongue emerges, and wraps around the clueless interloper. The toad opens its jaws wide and lifts this fresh meal into its cavernous mouth, where this still clueless creature, now recognizably a box turtle, cooperatively turns and walks right on into the throat of the toad, disappearing into the darkness within. An eye-opening image this morning for how patience and waiting can reap its reward. Through the act of doing seemingly nothing, the prey has consumed its predator.

     Another day at the guest house opens before me, and there is seemingly very little to do. Walked over to the supermarket last night, something on the order of a large American convenience store, and bought a box of twenty-four colored pencils. Lots of colors to play with now.

     Mother India. Eyes patiently watch across the still waters while I dance my dance, and query and question, and tease and surmise, and suppose and propose, and gesture and suggest, until, as I rest beneath her unwavering gaze,

She enfolds me in her embrace and takes me gently and entirely into the innermost sanctum of her comfort and understanding.