A philosopher’s childlike dream

Sarabjeet Garcha’s translation of Marathi playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar’s genre-dissolving triptych ‘Tribandha’ as ‘The Necropolis Trilogy’ sparkles and flows like wine. It is a memoir, an essay in three parts, a reverie, a fable, a desire, and a melancholic erotic fulfilment. It is also a philosopher’s childlike dream and an ageing magus’ ‘Alice in Wonderland’ whispered to himself night after night. If Kafka had lived in Kashi and not in Prague, he would have spun such a yarn — profound, brooding, luminous and veined with humour that is now Rabelaisian, now Hamletian.

What if death were a never-ending dream? The narrator would, in that case, like to be dead. What if life is a dream? What if life and death are one dream? What then is reality? And what is truth? In prose that rings and ripples like poetry, the writer muses on these enigmas in a sensuously-crafted book of just 144 pages. Departures, separations, deaths and the homecoming, in which the narrator returns home alone, his people watching him not come but go home. It is an uncanny homecoming, a paradoxical departure from childhood.

The three parts mingle through motifs and characters. They move in surging duets of spectacle and dream, dream and reality, reality and truth. The first essay walks you through a vast graveyard. ‘Do these graves look ochre because something erupted inside?’ Your frozen reality begins to thaw. This will go on until you begin to see reality differently and glimpse its truth. When familiar reality meets unfamiliar truth, you do not know if what you are seeing truly is or merely appears. The dead return, or seem to. And what seems in this book is not delusion but a window on truth. It bursts with insights.

The architecture of a tomb resembles ‘the music of Amir Khan Saheb’. The quest for forbidden notes has been planted in the narrative’s courtyard and will unfold like music. The emotional symphony has begun to play. The stage has been set, and it is the mind. The narrator’s schoolmate, the cross-eyed and confident Mandakini, sits on a couch like Cleopatra, with Achilles and Duryodhana seated beside. ‘The woman you see is not the Mandakini in your mind. She is the woman I have in mind. Tell me how she looks,’ she asks him. Can he tell? Can he enter her mind? Her squint, she says, was an asset. It gave her a point of view none possessed. WH Auden remembers the Greek poet Cavafy contemplating the world “at an angle”.

In the second part, a child’s fantasy, inspired by the experience of cinema, shapes his reality. This complicates his self-awareness. He flits between the spectacle and the spectator. The cinema becomes a rehearsal for an encounter with reality as a projection of consciousness. Sublime moments light up the wandering narrative, such as: ‘Above the roofless mazaar, the sky bursting with moonlight, the taans emanating from their (the qawwals’) guts yearning to reach there.’ Waking to such raptures, the child is initiated into the fractured reality he must inhabit.

The third part checks into evanescence and contingency. Darkened by sombre reflections on dying and radiant with a hunger for light, the cinematic spectacle segues into reality as a dream seen by truth, like the poet-philosophers Abhinavagupta’s “city in the mirror”. You hear subdued echoes of the inner worlds of Rilke and Rothko.

If reality is a dream, imagination might be truth. On the seashore, in Melbourne, the narrator meets Meursault, Camus’ anti-hero, who wants to meet his author if only once — just to tell him that writers are selfish, that they don’t know that the characters continue to grow forever while they stop growing. The narrator’s own creation, Chandu Kaka, had met him once and asked why he had cast him into such degradation. ‘Only after it burns to ashes does the inside light up’ was the answer. But the reader cannot clearly tell if these were the writer’s words or the character’s. The two have become inseparable, a glimpse of the double sacrifice that writing inflicts.

Others whom the narrator meets include the Yakshi of Didarganj, the narrator’s long gone music teacher Jadhav, the destitute and lonely Rukmani Kaku, whose lacerated feet recount countless women’s untold stories, and Emily Dickinson.

Dickinson has murmured to Meursault the infinite burden of pain. But the secret of light that makes pain bearable isn’t disclosed. It is Chandu Kaka whose words will light up Meursault’s way out of his hell. In a mind-bending reversal of roles, he becomes also his creator’s leader and guide, a Virgil to his Dante.

The book ends with the narrator telling Meursault to trust Chandu Kaka’s words and begin his journey to the other shore of “the Black Sea” of blind suffering. And he himself starts walking towards the water. Like Chandu Kaka, Camus’ Meursault, too, has dissolved into the narrator. The dream has yet again spoken its intimate truth.