Shashank

November 26 is the first anniversary of Shashank Lele, whose "Wanderings in the Twilight Zone"were published on CHOWK as a four part novel in January 2003. Shashank had spent his last months in Auroville, near Pondicherry, India.

[Auroville is an experiment in international community living, founded some 100 years ago by Shri. Aurobindo, a saintly philospher and social thinker of
India.]

Following is one of the letters received upon Shashank's passing away, it is a note from an Englishman named Peter Handley, an author in his own right. It reflects on the life of those who choose to live at Auroville, their way of thinking, their outlook on relationships, life and death. We share it here on request of Shashank's dear ones.



’... thus the individual no more guided by egotistical motives, laws or customs, shall abandon all selfish aims. His rule shall be perfect disinterestedness. To act in view of a personal profit, either in this world or in another beyond, will become an unthinkable impossibility. For each act will be done in complete, simple, joyful obedience to the divine law which inspires it, without any seeking for reward or results, as the supreme reward will be in the very delight of acting under such inspiration, of being identified in consciousness and will within the divine principle within oneself.’ -- The Mother.


The words will not come as I stare at the page. Only a void and a fear at confronting something that is eternal, infinite, an ample spiral of all that has happened before is happening now in the whirling dervish of Nature’s great cycle of events and all that is to come, has been, will be again. This I shared with Shashank and understood the altered states we have come to inadequately call a depression.


A Portrait.
I am told this morning I am chronically fatigued,
Body tired, mind shut down
I do not think that this is so
Though for sure the body has gained in what it lost.
My source tells me that when the brake is depressed
We only accelerate.
I mumble something about travelling further if we stand still;
Having spoken about such things before
may do so again in a dharmic reality
So it takes no energy in the re-telling.
About conversations with the body,
How we learn to speak to ourselves
That we must learn to love, love for love’s sake.
Each has his motor tuned to its own understanding
For sanity’s sake.

Now no words, used up in total for others.
This social therapy calculated as laziness
Though there are those hapless in my absence.
In the tea shop
Along the entrance road next to the barbers’ saloon
vegetable stall bakery and general store, people,
Lacking creed or colour traverse the road
To their nirvana.

I like Kuillapalayam because of its south Indian stillness, because of its nature. Modern life passes through here unnoticing the movements that occur out of the peripheral vision of the busy and the busying. Of people who’ve constituted themselves into the city of experimental human unity. It will always be my home, just outside, the outskirts, India, even as I’m not there. For the good friends, a lover and lazy acquaintance made. Here I first met Shashank in a tea shop, observer, a good friend watching the watchers and the watched. We talked lazy talk knowing it was not.


Mr. Gupta Forgets.

’... when your neck is being trampled under the tyrants’ heal the safest course is to keep on tickling his feet.’ -- Premchand.

Morning begins with the psychology of dogs
And quickly moves to laboratory talk
After discussing the merits of a tin of sardines
Or the disbenefit of toilet paper in extreme heat
We rambled about a famous poet, how he plays with us.
Not exactly in the barrack room
But somewhere near the stores.

The evening is arranged between discussions
About sons who have some imbalance.
Between teas. After breakfast. Before lunch.
Whole conversations in a foreign tongue
I understand from cadence, inflection, tone
And the sound-of-the-world.
I am the king of the castle of concern.
We are our foreign tongues.

In the bookshop, after words, I search for clarity
In totality, having grown lean on Summer fruits.
I see, Mr Gupta takes his raincoat from beyond surrender
And forgets. At the border the weather closes in.

It is true that we travel further if we stand still for a while. Finding the courage of this conviction beyond the fear that keeps our blood pumping, this is a question, a search that keeps pushing us forward into, out of and round and round our own sweet eternities. Often we must travel if only to move that short shift to find a place that beats closest to within ourselves if only for a short time. What infinite progress we can make in ourselves, for others, when we find the courage to stand still. To listen, be aware and share.

My partner e-mails me concerning the tea shop and I am astounded by coincidence coming as it does so close to the news I receive from Shashu’s partner, of his final passing through, this time. The proprietress has taken sick and her husband believes she’s been possessed by a spirit. I think of the ether he’s now inhabiting and the mischief he would enjoy in this new found freedom. If I had described this around a table in the tea shop to him I would hear him laugh. Often I shared laughter, bright, honest laughter only caught in the bosom of friendship sparked by a duality from before, somewhere.


One time, conducting a theatre workshop with Aurovillians I suggested we, as a group, sit and listen to a contemporary opera I thought pertinent to our work. I mentioned the length of the piece and heard with some indignation the voice ’who in Auroville has three hours to spare to listen to an opera?’

My good friend Shashank and I never listened to that opera together but we both had the time to sit and listen to others. It was no luxury and secretly we understood it, the import in the great experimental climate we bordered on. How a story can set the balance of our lives.


Allegories on the banks of the Ganga.

Dining out on English
Delving into words
Talking turkey once or twice
About Kashmiris or the Kurds.
I add a little colloquial
A swear word or some slang
And wait for other languages to concur
That a bang is just a bang.

I never called him grandfather, as others did in my bemusement, simply because to my knowledge he never was. Few grandfathers’ wore jogging shoes and ankle socks as Shashank did so comically. Besides which it was an affront to his libido to be called such.

I describe the picture of an anorexic Sumo wrestler a little distressed after an unmatched fight. Would you laugh. I hear him laughing now. I’d similarly described the arch feminist Germaine Greer as a person sitting somewhere between a grimace and a leer. He liked that, enjoyed it, asked me if it was mine and could I be quoted later. Embracing his feminist side.

Often we would sit in the barracks, sometimes the stores, but we were most happy in the officers’ mess, not because we were, but simply because we could have been, had we wanted, should we have shown the capacity to bow before the system to play that game. He’d his own game and me mine, they coalesced at points knowing the rules of each, a little battle worn and weary but our child always returns us to our game. Perhaps that is why Nikolai took to calling him grandfather in jest, a ribbing, seeing something of the child we lose in our growing to return. That cheeky child status pretending not to understand to draw us a little closer to our understanding. This is why we crossed our own paths the same and walked together a while as we were both slightly out of kilter with ourselves in others’ eyes yet at peace with our own demons within, knowing it was they, is them, that take us to that place of description candour and revelation, in essence, in the analysis, for others, using the difficulty.

He’d not seek for recognition, only to be allowed what he was in his essence; a reflector of what he saw and experienced for others. Society culture and the ages have had names for these people and have far too simply been abandoned to the realms of ill-health and waistrelty.


Time on the Scaffolding.

I have begun telling the watch laden time
plucked righteous from air as hard as nails
Some overbearing excess gives grieving hours
more minutes to this psychics realm.

And well before the hands that turn
False humour into seconds caught
we gaily pass the future on
wishing our own sweet content some way.


It is impossible to eulogise in memoriam from here at the beginning of December in the damp and foggy dark chill of midlands England. Nothing has been lost accepting the possibility of physically sharing time in grandfathers company. I’d hoped to again you see, another cup of sweet milk tea on that road. This I tell myself to barter with a dormant grief I know, we knew, is energy better used elsewhere. He’d agree and so I’ll try, knowing the reprimand if I did not. He confronted demons for me and socialised them, sending them back to look me in the eye and pose the same question again. A little like Ping-Pong yet more robust, never an adequate parallel for his erudition in that game.


Serve Yourself and Save.

On the eve of a small but powerful linguistic conflict
We sit and discuss the merits of spiritual massage
And words to delete from dictionaries.
We are cultured, cultivated, refined and artificially prepared.

It’s only a game, we say, we play with ourselves
But even so the list of all that could be
By political coercion is never complete
Until the being within us is abated.

Shock waves and rumblings and the immediate requirement
Someone I quote, is to create conditions precluding
The use of such weapons.’ That is to say
Not going to war is the first post-dictionary condition.’

Hate, crisis, culture, emotion, fear, harsh, solution, logic
Are what we began with,
Servant, problem, slavery, brother, no, law, hunger, good
Is how we go on.

My brother comes wracked by dull light more than it sounds. He is a painter and I’m reminded very much of Shashank on seeing him. Sitting in the tea shop I would see glimpses of blood-kin in Lele staring further off into the middle distance trying to catch a thought. He lays out his afternoons’ work on my mothers’ living room carpet. Here are angels, drawings of angels in their absolute. A siren call from the dead of winter to live a little dormant until the new season and spring. An interruption of Angels on the hearth-rug and my brother tells me that sometimes he feels that God has forsaken him. I reflect knowing that true courage is being able to lay out our angels on the hearth-rug for all the world to see, in front of the fire, our fire. For the world, if only to make it a little less wearing, a touch easier. From here the angels sing the song of ages. The song we sing from all sides, if there is such. Hear it now? The Angel. Singing from all sides in the naked courage it has taken to describe our heart for us all, illumined by light.

Mister Lele is my brother. Not defined by nation, blood, skin, tone, voice or apparent identity and as we walked and talked and drank and laughed we unravelled lifetimes of knowledge just for kicks, because it was possible, because we knew how to tap the latent and mix it with words which covered our nakedness. Without fear, secure.


Waste Paper.

Walking back from a lunch with the Bengali and her daughter
She off to the proposed epicentre of a conflagration after describing
By default, her disdain of the britishers, through that not said,
In the road, amongst the rubbish of modern-village living
that cannot be recycled-sold or burnt, a page from a school book,
words laying wasted on the red earth of sun bleached land –
- numbered one to fifteen in no order, red and blue ink
- writing getting to grips with the written form
it goes something like this

11. No isn’t a bell statement
13. Is it a book. Yes it is a book
12. Are we boys. Yes we are boys
15. Are you mans. Yes you are mans
14. Are they pencil. No they aren’t a pencil
1. Are they Poleic. Yes I am Poleic
2. Is he a doctor. Yes he is a doctor.
3. Is she a fox. No isn’t she a fox.
4. Is it a flow. Yes it is a flow
5. Are we pens. Yes we are pens
6. Are you homes. Yes you are homes.
7. Are they trees. Yes they trees
8. Am I banana. No am not bananas.

I read this. Then I re-read this. Then I read again,
In the quiet of the wind that blows through my hut
As seven sister birds argue with a snake in the grass
about territory and belonging .

I would like the next instalment, the next lesson
To come fallen in the wasteland to teach me more.
Nothing will come, there is no more.
I must be satisfied with these abstractions.
Are we pens. Yes we are pens.
Is it a flow. Yes it is a flow.


He knew that words were so inadequate in the working of them but used them just the same. Pain must be shared best by a route into laughter, which is what we found I believe, both outside the experimental world of human unity being created nearby. Chiselling away at that block of truth.


Mute.

No more words please, last orders at the bah, bah bah
Language has literally arrested faith between faiths
our lifetimes of forgetting, to move forward
between the position that makes hungry dogs bark
or the lame seek solace on the crutchless stop of beggardom.

Where are the archers and infantry, buccaneers, captains of tomorrow
Seers, prophets, idiots and idealists, fools to kinsmen and kings.
A small fight for the final great lost cause, please.
Have we coca-collared on yet to the Priests of the Golden-Bull?

One more word, after we climbed the hill, remember, on the descent
distributing dog-ends like Darshan to a smiling socialite sadhu
encamped on the slope, entertaining guests around a small fire
He has seen silence, I can see, in his eyes, beyond,
not for nothing he wants for nothing, nowhere, somewhere still.

Further down amidst the creating meow of peacocks,
mayuried into indifference, cavorting with softer cadences
sought by the wise or the wilting, not one drops its’ proud plumage
until, somewhere in the Gujrat a knife is twisted in the skin of innocence.

The last word, I notice, written on the Pillars of Hercules in blistered heat
that big fish in little ponds are less active than the smaller ones
and rise for air, that other world, more often than the rest –
well water is deep, fish say unaffected by the tides
sweeping through his and her story to put hope an egoless horizon.

Later, I see, the moon casts no shadow on all things less than we are
the laughter of silver white fractals shooting through the finite again
shining light on the cock-crow-of-crackling fires, burning,
upon the hill-top of our concern, sometime, soon, without words.


I do not need to close my eyes to feel him pulling me on to do what we were both a little lazy in doing. A little more inadequate writing. I enjoyed his company not solely because his professing as a writer stimulated my own but also because he sanctioned my own facility to sit and do nothing, knowing it was never for nothing, always for something more, later. I know he would be pulling me up, as I write, for more clarity and accuracy. We could sit for hours and debate around it all, certain of both conditions, knowing nothing is rarely wrong.


Either With Us or Against Us.

It’s true, I have been here before, redefining the circle
And editing again, the past, events, reflections inside history
Like a square could never be such without rounded sides.
But listen, listen as you first tried to speak:

Equal is as equal does and unity is something together no?
none of us hastened towards the dawn that has not broken yet
so fast. Did they? Yet we know it comes
as sure as the lark-the new poisoned bird
we hear sing on the wing above chemical stained trees
on the wing of melancholy of late but true to itself
sharing with us great secrets of times tide in three notes.

Even listen to the whisper that is gathering ground
in the grass, beneath the soil, in the very white unsunned root
that’s never had nor will ’til then see the light that is our day.
It comes, we know it comes, so swift, so fast
we cannot recollect the speed of our own time passing
as if the minutes were hours and the days far off
like an aeon in an hour glass we are trying to parade truth.


To be someone’s Avatar, he enjoyed that. He had written “to me what is important is that someone worked hard, fatigueless to put down in fairly lucid diction all that he experienced…and all this for what?…he became the ambience…the framework, the canvass…whatever. From the hell of his descent into night, Ashwapati now finds hell on earth…but we are informed here that this hellish torment is the shortest cut to heaven”

A few years back, visiting my less than ebullient brother in his Garrett in the south of England I wrote “as I said, I put my story down here so that someone may take it up another day. That at the end we begin to reflect back a perfect beginning risen in the moment when the flame goes out. Blown by a wind-rush or an echo of a moment that has not sunk from the collective pattern of things, but is continually, remorselessly re-tuning itself somewhere in our wilderness.”

And in that we found a common ground. In that I hope and know we shall do so again. Two agent provocateurs found each other for a while, drank, laughed, joked, played, taunted a game with words and then moved on. Blessings.



Peter Handley.
December 2002