110-A

'..and now it is as though my heart had moved miles away.'
--Rilke.

Who lives there now?

"They're taking better care of the flowers than us," said the swami as we drove past the open gate of what was formerly our home.

It is hard to imagine that we used to live there. So much time has passed that there's a dreamlike, ephemeral quality to your life right now, as if we were wandering through a landscape in which the mist was up to our knees and our steps tentative, our whole stance to the world questionable; we are unsure of our footing, our bearings all awry. There is no order in this hour, just minutes passing. 

A few of the old ones are left; most have left or are dead or struggling with cancer. Some sit in their rooms and think of children who have long left the nest for a more glamorous life, a life freer of thought and memories. 

We return and are like ghosts. Some people "vaguely" remember us or remember someone talking about us. A young teenage girl clutches a clipboard to her chest and thinks to herself: how old and strange are these people. She probably thanks God that her own mother, plumpish and decked out, still has a lot of anger in her voice, is still in the ascendancy. "God, not yet".

The swami still speaks in the old way, when words were kind, when time was gentler. It's as if we're living on the frontier now. We meet A, in her eighties, as tough as an ox, headstrong and fiercely independent, though now hobbling on crutches. She lives in dark rooms with a maid who has become her eyes and hands. Lots of dark wood furniture, a call to prayer (that goes unheard). There are some people who are so strong that they outlive their own deaths... 

What mechanisms of the mind, what inner resources are available, to detect the workings of time, measureless time, implicit in our gestures?

'And what's new within? Like the fine-hair thread of a galvanometer' that registers your bewilderment with fine precision, the skilled amplification of your estrangement. Time; so that everything doesn't happen at once. In the fullness of time there will be more space to be ourselves and everyone will be granted a glimpse of what they nearly were, but not yet, not now. 

I give a note written in a beautiful and clear script to the vegetable seller. Shuffle around amidst all this accumulated dust. "I'm looking to sell..". For a moment I think about paying the man 200 RS to deliver the message to the property dealer but think better of it. Not to close the deal but to open it, to first find the parcel of land and clear the accounts, get the documents in order, tie them up in a a bundle with a single piece of string, undo the mistakes and years of neglect. 

On the way back, past the green-tiled old shrine, you stop off at old Affers' place to visit his restaurant. We discuss meat for twenty minutes, gulp down hot milky tea and talk about the failing marriages of other friends. Disease and divorce being the staple items of our conversations nowadays. 

Drive back through the din of a city that you no longer recognize. Keep to familiar roads and drown it all out with John Luther Adams. The music seems to have no beginning or end. No, that's not quite right. The beginning and the end sound the same. 

My heart is not the same. And now it is as though it had moved miles away. Who lives there now?

{lines by Holub}