Faded Earth

Subscribe Sometimes you find a book close to your heart, you read that book a few times, hoping to return to it again, only to lose it. No matter how hard you search for it, you cannot find it again. I am sure that things like this happen to all of us. Objects and people are similar after all- they disappear leaving empty smoke behind… When in secondary school, at the age of twelve years, I had the occasion of reading a few books with stories from Upanishads in them, and two particular books struck me as especially interesting. Not having enough knowledge of Sanskrit, I could not read the stories in their original form, nor had I the patience back then to rummage through the entire Upanishads just in order to find a few stories. These two particular books, in all their lucidity of prose and yet not-so-dramatized retelling of the stories drew me to them repeatedly. One even had particular references of the stories being retold, and in this case re-written, so that if one wer...

Subscribe It is difficult to dig up faded stories of the earth or make up a story that both looks faded and smells earthy. My friends have shown great ingenuity in overcoming this impasse. Myself having none, must rely on the recollection of past before it completely fades away. My memory of Gangani goes as far back as my memory of picnics and hazy wintry mornings. A stretch of laterite with patches of cashew trees dips into a gorge with numerous caves and crevices before sloping into the river shilavati. We would cross the river barefoot and my Chhotka would spread his gamcha to catch a fish or two. There was no stair made yet to assist my trembling legs in descend on the yielding soil that glistened like gold in the sun. It was long before we read about soil erosion. For me every crevice was a haunt of stories etched on the soft yellow walls, a maze of figures, human, animal, demonic. Once down I had to stretch my entire neck to look up the ridge at the red rocks sittin...