Ignorance, Kundera

I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals, but also because they don't hold the same importance for each other.

Slowness

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.

Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himeself from a thing still too close to him in time.

The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

Milan Kundera. Slowness.

Dark Man III

‘Dada, come here…’, Amir heard his younger brother Ari shout to him.

‘What is it?’, replied Amir, sitting under the mango tree, reading a book.

‘Come na!’, Ari shrieked again. This time, Amir could detect a tremor in his voice, a tension. He walked over to where Ari was.

Ari was standing in front of a neighbouring house, leaning with both hands rested on the wooden door. He was as tall as a six year old boy is and could see the scene unfolding in the backyard behind the door only between the planks of wood.

In the backyard, there was a dark man squatting on the ground. He was clad only in a white dhoti, everything else about him being black. In his left hand was a chicken, fluttering desperately. In his right was a long knife. The man was trying to control the chicken with his one hand, but the chicken seemed to be in no mood to give it all up so easily.

Ari watched the chicken. Amir watched Ari.

The dark man, finally fed up trying to stifle the chicken, pressed all its feet with his right leg, and in one quick action of his knife, separated the creature’s head from its body. The head flew in the air and fell a couple of feet away. The dark man recoiled sharply from the spectacle, as if in deep disgust.

Ari watched the chicken head. Amir watched Ari.

The rest of the chicken’s body still fluttered for a few moments, Ari constantly staring at it, waiting for it to finally stop.

It eventually did. Amir tried to pull his brother away from the scene, but Ari wouldn’t budge. Amir finally decided to leave, unsure of what had disturbed him more – the incident or the look in Ari’s eyes.

The above is a shot-to-shot description of a scene from the movie Pratidwandi by Satyajit Ray. Liberty has only been taken with the names of the characters.

Unclaimed

To make love to a stranger is the best.

There is no riddle and there is no test -

To lie and love, not aching to make sense

Of this night in the mesh of reference.

To touch, unclaimed by fear of imminent day,

And understand, as only strangers may.

To feel the beat of foreign heart to heart

Preferring neither to prolong nor part.

To rest within the unknown arms and know

That this is all there is; that this is so.

Not mine. Vikram Seth's. Exquisite.

Surface Extract

A piece of text from Siddhartha Deb’s Surface:

A long time ago, when the world was a far better place than it is now, there was a divine couple, a god and a goddess deeply in love with each other. Their love was so perfect that a quarrel broke out between the two about who loved the other more. Even the court of the gods couldn’t settle the dispute, so the two agreed to put their love to the test by being born in human form. The challenge was to see who recognized the other first. They would have no knowledge of their heavenly past, being in possession of nothing more than average human memories of their human lives.

They are born in different corners of the kingdom of Manipur, she as a princess, he as a commoner. The years of their childhood pass in ignorance of each other, without a single encounter. Then the commoner comes to the court from the village one day, and they meet accidentally in the palace, and they recognize each other in the same instant. Their love is still without imperfection, still equal, but just then a battle breaks out between factions in the court and both are killed in the fighting. The dispute is unresolved.

So they take birth as human beings again, and again, and again, and each time the same thing happens. They meet as adults, recognize each other instantaneously, the kingdom is pitched into a war, and they die in the ensuing battle. People in Manipur believe that when things are very bad in our human world, when it is a time of war, it means that the two are around in human form, slowly drifting towards each other. Each is looking at the other without really knowing it, attracted towards the partner by the force of their divine love, and the terrible battle of our times will coincide with their mutual discovery.

……Their coming together in the human world with death following immediately is a sign of the perfection of their love and how it can’t be contained within the imperfection of our world. But there will be a time when they meet and admit that it is a draw, that they love each other equally, and that there is no more or less for either of them. They will see, they will recognize their love for each other, and they will not die. When that happens and their contest is over, our world will end in the final apocalypse.