Duality

This story attempts to illustrate how our dormant identities shape our worldview, and how transient these identities truly are. The corollary is that although our worldviews may differ, essentially it is the same world we argue about. It is only human fallibility that makes us view the world from a single perspective and deny all others. Man’s worst enemy is his dogma.

Many years ago I was visiting my sister who lived in Malakkallu (Kerala), at the southern end of the 1000-mile-long mountain range that bisects the Indian Peninsula. I had acquired a new camera and intended to capture the sights of Kerala for my friends back in London.

When I looked around, however, I saw only mundane, everyday sights: cashew fruits in bright yellows and reds, translucent orange mangoes falling in the wind, oversized and abundant jackfruits with their succulent flesh hidden by the spiked outer skin, hibiscus flowers spilling over the fences, and the occasional goat lazily nibbling at them, coconut and betel nut trees competing to canopy the clear blue skies, precarious bamboo bridges swaying in the wind, the shy touch-me-not leaves closing in on themselves on contact, and a myriad other sights. Nothing novel to photograph.

It was my sister’s 60th birthday. A priest conducted ancient Vedic rites in her honour, chanting Sanskrit verses and gesticulating with timeless gestures. The ritual fire, fed with the occasional spoon of ghee, leaped and raged. A mother hen chaperoned her chicks, feeding them grains scattered across the hard, earthen courtyard. The mountain stream flowed nearby, and a cement tank interspersed in its path sparkled with clear fresh water, forever overflowing back into the stream. The delighted cries of little children splashing about mingled with the mantras invoked by the priest.

I sat there mesmerised by the flames of the sacred fire, the air intense with the smell of burning ghee and camphor. There I was: born here, grew up here, part of the scene in every sense. I slipped into a semi-trance, induced by the evocative smells and sounds. I had moved beyond the present as I floated on the magic carpet of happy childhood memories. The spirits of my departed parents smiled upon me.

Suddenly and without warning, I thought of London. I was trudging across London Bridge on my daily march to work. I thought of my home in England: the breathtaking beauty of magnolias in April, the daffodils and cherry blossoms of spring, the robins, the swallows, and the blackbird. I was suddenly homesick! I missed my family and friends back in London. I longed for my Guardian newspaper there and then.

I was sitting in one part of the world and missing another. I was curiously happy and thankful for this dichotomy. The existential concepts of the West—free will, choice, and personal responsibility—sat comfortably with my Eastern Karma and its very diminution of the self. Sarvam Maya—“All you behold is an illusion”—seemed more palatable in that fleeting moment. I observed the dualities of my mind with an objectivity that comes to one at rare moments. I felt thankful for everything: for my past and my present, for my mental reconciliation of divergent philosophies, and above all for my feeling of comfort with them. 

Almost without thinking, I started seeing the sights I had grown up with as if for the first time. I photographed everything—the jackfruits, the cashew, the untranslatable vegetables, and the misty mountains. Even the stark, unforgiving laterite soil where I had grazed my knees as a child.

I was a complete man of dual identities—both transient, both illusory.