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SPRING, HEAT, RAINS

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Preface.......................................................ixAcknowledgments...............................................xvSpring........................................................1Heat..........................................................67Rains.........................................................115Appendix: Nala and the Naishadhiya-carita.....................213Selected Dramatis Personae....................................217Notes.........................................................219Glossary......................................................223Bibliography..................................................233

Chapter One

February 5, 2006: East Coast Express

Rocks. Goats. Dry shrubs. Buffaloes. Thorns. A fallen tamarind tree. Tents. Red bricks in heaps. White graves, flashes in a brown-yellow universe. A motorbike on an earthen path. An auto rickshaw, yellow and black. Palm trees. Bicycles. Orange saris. A white flower in her hair. Eyes.

Mahbubabad. The morning ride across Telangana, the high plateau east of Hyderabad, seems synchronized with my need for a slow reentry. "Time" again presents itself as a question: does it exist, all of it, all past-future, as a dusty, viscous elastic casing for the mind, twisted into the mind? Each of us gets to see a small segment buried in one of the twists. For example, I have been offered the second half of the so-called twentieth century-an arbitrary boundary, after all-and on for some ways into the twenty-first. One could also run the segment backward. There is even knowledge, however uncertain, of the part that supposedly lies ahead. In fact, one can see it from the train window. Yellow and brown, flashes of white, a grave.

Nampalli station in central Hyderabad was chaotic, and no one could tell me what platform to look for. I fought my way with heavy bags, and the inevitable clumsy bottle of mineral water, up the steps and over the bridge through a vast crowd of disembarking passengers. On the coach, miraculously, pasted beside the window: David Dean Sul, age 57, berth 38.

It is early February, I am back in India. As always, being free, utterly free, feels oppressive, even sad. I can barely speak. Language is stuck in some recess of my mind, mostly inaccessible, a congealed form of forgetting, or of resistance. There is the huge effort ahead.

Slowly the landscape changes. Winter rice. Green shoots. More black rocks. The endless sky. Herons wade gingerly in a shallow pond. White over gray-blue. Lotus pads. Thorns. Boulders. Threshers. Winnowers. Brown haystacks. A river, clinging to existence. A bridge. A ridge. Two women sit, sifting grain in the sun, on the parallel track. A huge yellow sign reads Papatapalli. A boy, naked but for his shirt. The wind in the grass. Five more buffaloes. Thatched, round huts in the field. A serrated line of distant hills, orange-red as they come closer. The subtle taste of happiness. To celebrate, I take out the Naishadhiya, to make a beginning. I will be living for these months with, or maybe in, this book, Sriharsha's Sanskrit masterpiece on the life of Nala, an Indian Everyman (nara). Nala is chosen by the beautiful Damayanti, only to abandon her as he wanders, transformed into an alien self. Like Nala, I am, perhaps, disguised, or lost; but I am heading, maybe backward, to some known home.

Rajahmundry, Anand Regency Hotel

8:45 PM

The first sight of the town, as we cross the vast bridge into East Godavari district, is only partly astonishing: a jumble of uneven houses, fading pastels, grime-laced facades, alleys, spilling up from the riverbank. It is the magic hour when the light turns molten. Dust and gold. Of course it is the river itself that takes away one's breath; probably the river, this wide sluggish sweep of brown and green, is the real Rajahmundry, the buildings and streets no more than an appendage. Arrival is the usual flurry, the usual question-why am I here, of all possible "heres"? The rickshaw drivers outside the station, well aware of their advantage, extort the ridiculous fee of fifty rupees to the hotel. I clamber in, suddenly exhausted, quizzical, a little raw. I remember these streets from the last time, in 2000, when I came to the Gautami Library, one of the major collections in Andhra Pradesh, in search of a rare Telugu book. I was lucky that time: hidden in the Gautami's dusty shelves amid other rare, nineteenth-century editions was the arcane text I needed. And a few weeks before, there was a weekend here with Eileen and Edan at the Mahalakshmi Hotel, on the riverbank, smothered in the stench of the Andhra Pradesh Paper Mills upstream.

I check in to the Anand Regency. Six years ago it was polished, slick, and new; proud to be "the only star hotel" in Rajahmundry. The new millennium had brought this self-conscious fragment of the outside world to the city of Nannayya, the first Telugu poet. A turbaned doorman in white and green still stands at the entrance. But six years have taken their toll, or perhaps it is only the clammy air of the delta; in any case, the polish is largely gone, though the pretense is still in place. I unpack and peer out the window at the white roofs of Danavayipeta as the sun sets, a pale red halo traced through the dust. The roof closest to me has a vast carpet of red chilies that have been set out to dry.

Before dark there is time for my first walk. But why here? It is hard to shake the strange sense of an arbitrary fate, or was it merely a romantic choice that came out of a fantasy of poets and scholars on the bank of the Godavari? The dense stacked alleys remind me of Bashir Bagh, where I lived (happily) in Hyderabad in 1998-99. It is hot and sticky and I am deeply alone, even alone to myself, lost, murky, unstuck.

Dinner at the hotel brings some new friends. A tall, contemplative waiter named Sharif says he reads philosophy every afternoon in the Gautami Library. What is my philosophy? I tell him it is too early to say. I am fifty-seven years old, struggling with simple Telugu sentences. Give me some time, I say, I will come back and we will discuss the great questions. Bitter-gourd curry, kakara-kaya, my favorite, picks up my spirits; or perhaps it is the subtle, only partly conscious sense of coming to rest. I have been telling my friends in Israel, who ask me what I am planning on doing in Rajahmundry for seven months, that I need to reinvent myself. Last week Yair reminded me that when, some years ago, before my last long trip, he asked me what I was planning to do in India, I answered that one should never go to India with a plan.

February 6

Is it possible that I came to India only five days ago? Opening this page, I record the date and suddenly cannot remember the year. Each hour has its specific gravity, its physical intensity. My eyes, my hands, my ears, my memory: all are furiously at work. I try to think it through: by now, it seems to me, it must be at least 2008. Some shred of the Mediterranean world surfaces; no, it is, at least in theory, somewhere, elsewhere, still 2006.

First things first. I want to see the town, the Godavari River, the revus or ghats on the riverbank leading down to the...