Home To India by Jacquelin Singh Page B

heard what the lady said.”
    â€œYou don’t really …”
    â€œBelieve that?” he asked.
    â€œYes,” I said. “You don’t really think they’re here.” I strained to see him in the dark, but his features were in shadow.
    â€œHe’s the god of destruction and she’s his consort and between them they’re supposed to be able to dance up a storm. This is, after all, their legendary home.”
    â€œAre you serious?” I asked.
    â€œThe next valley is named after her. Not for nothing.”
    â€œCome on. What does that prove?” I said. “It’s just folklore.”
    â€œNo,” Tej insisted. “It’s what the sound tells me. I hear it now. What you heard.”
    â€œI don’t believe it,” I said. “You’re making it all up.”
    He laughed and lay down again.
    â€œIf you want it to be Shiva and Parvati, why not?” I said, wanting to have the last word. “We haven’t even seen the Babaji yet, but you insist he exists. Do you think we’ll see him?”
    â€œI suppose so,” he mumbled, turning over.
    â€œMaybe we’ll see him in the morning?” I suggested.
    â€œWe’re leaving in the morning,” he said, barely audible now.
    â€œThere’ll be time to meet him before we leave, won’t there? After all, he’s the reason we’ve come up here.”
    It was getting harder to make sense of all this, with my eyelids refusing to stay open and my breathing slowing down. “Tej,” I said, “isn’t it odd? I can see myself lying down here; I can see the two of us, your sitar and our gear and everything. And at the same time I can see us trudging through the rain up that slippery path, and earlier, all of us bumping up and down over that dirt road, squeezed into the bus all morning. Did we really do all that? Or am I dreaming?”
    â€œWe did,” Tej reassured me.
    â€œYou know,” I said, staring into the darkness of the room, “sometimes I wonder if life is going to be just a series of disconnected comings and goings. At the end, will I look back and see a meaningless hodgepodge of pictures that are unrelated? That have no development?”
    â€œDo you suppose,” I went on, not caring now whether he was listening or not, “that we experience life in the same way as we look at a motion picture? With that defect in the human eye they call persistence of vision? I once read that because of some peculiarity, our eyes hold onto the image of a subject for a bare instant after the thing we’re looking at has moved. Moving pictures are just a series of still pictures, but our eyes don’t perceive the gaps in between; we are fooled into thinking that everything is moving. Isn’t that odd?” He didn’t answer.
    â€œIn our lives, are we really moving along? Or does it just seem that way? Do we suffer a kind of psychological persistence of vision too, that makes us think we’re going somewhere when we’re not? It could be that our lives, like the motion picture, are just some stills that we connect together so that they will make sense.”
    There was a moment like a blacked-out motion picture screen before the M.G.M. lion roars or the 20th Century Fox klieg lights scan the sky. Then the stills flashed by in my mind like rushes from a hastily filmed sequence. They needed editing, but there they were: scenes of Tej and me in Berkeley.
    Actually, Carol and me at International House, to begin with. By the time we were graduate students we moved in, I the better to find out about India and, more to the point, to meet Indians living there.
    One Saturday night Carol and I took the F Train to San Francisco, along with a couple of Hungarians from the International House. They had recently arrived from Shanghai where they had got bogged down while awaiting their U.S. visas. For eight years. I had a photographic assignment to