A Dream of Horses & Other Stories (2 page)

A DREAM OF HORSES
& OTHER STORIES

Parable of the Archer

Gravity is the root of lightness;
stillness, the ruler of movement
Lao-Tzu

The story was told to me by a friend who was leaving for Lhasa the next day. I hadn’t heard from him in nearly a year, and here we were, taking shelter in a coffeehouse from the sudden rain that was falling in gusts over the empty streets, making the trees shine like chenille and choking the drains and gutters with muddy water. A spell of silence had come over us, a silence in which thought either collects itself or swiftly melts away. He took a sip from his cup, glanced at the mirror on the far side in which was reflected the blow-up of a girl in an alley between yellow walls, and said, haven’t I told you about the parable? It’s an old Tao fable. At any rate, I’ll tell you again. I can never tire of it. And he spoke thus:

In China of ancient times, there lived an archer who was the ablest among the emperor’s great warriors, having won many a battle for the sovereign, annexing one province upon another, and extending the empire to hitherto unknown lands. During a prolonged spell of peace, and for want of a better distraction, he made a formal declaration that any subject of the empire who
could prove himself the more skillful in a direct contest could take his place in the royal court and enjoy all the emperor’s favours that were earlier his. The contest, the archer announced, would remain open for ten days. Now the archer’s fame had travelled far and wide and, as was expected, no match took place. The archer waited in the arena each day only to return at sundown to his palatial quarters and his many wives, filled with a mixed sense of pride and boredom. However, the dawn of the last day brought a visitor who wanted to briefly confer with him. At last a challenger, thought the archer, dressing hurriedly. But what was this, it couldn’t be: this submissive, pale-faced, poor villager – empty-handed too!

The villager bowed with unusual grace. When he looked up, a smile flickered on his lip. This troubled the archer. He asked his guest after the purpose of his visit: surely, he wasn’t here to take the challenge? Oh, no! Certainly not, sire, answered the villager. There is, however, one who can, he continued, one who is beyond contest, and from what I know I will advise you to not confront him as he will not confront you, for you are no match for him, you will be defeated before you lift your bow. The visitor’s words filled the archer with rage, though a curious suspicion was beginning to gnaw at him. Tell me at once who he is, and where will I find him, the archer demanded.

Astride his favourite horse that very morning, the archer headed towards the forest which lay at a two-day trot from the capital. Silence gradually came to fill his hours, and the unending clickety-clack of the horse’s hooves made him soporific. Nights were cold and dark and full of falling stars. He ate frugally and slept huddled close to the small fire he had built with his own hands. For the first time in life, he came to feel the magic of simple things. Yet his resolve remained unshaken.

On the third day his eyes saw the ebony mass of the forest covering the horizon and beyond it rising, distant and elemental, the mist-draped mountains. He gave a tug to the horse’s reins
and dug his heels deeper into its belly, forcing the beast into a gallop. His pride was starting to run in his blood with a renewed vigour and, momentarily, his grip tightened on his bow. Once inside, he forded first a broad and in time a narrow river to find a trail leading to a hut at some distance. The villager had been exact with directions. The archer secured his horse to a tree and continued on foot. Near the hut a man was busy chopping wood. The archer quickly hid behind a tree to observe. Could he be the one? It was inconceivable! Yet there was a certain grace in the axe’s movement that betrayed a skilled hand. The archer decided to take a small test. Still concealed from the woodcutter’s view, he released an arrow with a gentle pull on the bowstring. But just as the arrow was about to graze the woodcutter’s shoulder, it somehow turned back on its course and in the next instant pierced the tree-trunk behind which the archer stood hiding. The woodcutter’s movements had been so swift as to be invisible, indeed he was no match to this man’s skill. Without even being aware of his adversary, he had defeated him. Free of any desire for a contest, the archer emerged into the clearing and begged the woodcutter to take him as a disciple. The other informed him that whatever he knew about archery he had long since forgotten. The archer was persistent, and at last the woodcutter acquiesced.

For many months the archer remained the woodcutter’s pupil, and for many months he did not touch his bow. There were other things he learnt instead: to chop wood free of all effort, aided by the wind, and to catch fish with bare hands, without looking. And little by little awareness of life’s movement grew in him. Then one day the woodcutter bade him near and told him he was free to leave, there was nothing more he could offer as a teacher. The archer was astonished to hear this. He had learnt nothing of the only skill that mattered to him. The woodcutter read his thoughts and said, you learn most when you do not learn at all. An arrow is but an arrow, now if you so wish, time itself will turn back on its course. The archer understood, and in that same
instant he was aware of the movement of every leaf of every tree, of every bird in the sky, of the fish in water, of earth itself. He knelt before the woodcutter and answered, O Master, your wisdom flows to me, and through your blessing I have become the greatest archer of all.

Can it be? inquired the woodcutter, when the old man of the mountains is still alive. Compared to him my wisdom is but a lark in the sky. These words altered the archer’s course. Instead of returning to the capital, he slipped deeper into the forest and having walked for a week reached the mountains. Another day’s climb brought him to a tarn where he refreshed himself and rested for the night. Continuing his ascent into the mountains next morning, he presently saw a frail old man, something of a hunchback, slowly descending towards him with an urn balanced on one shoulder. The archer asked him for directions and was shown the way to the cave near the summit. The archer thanked him and resumed his journey.

By noon he had found the cave, which was empty. He decided to wait. It was nearly evening when he saw the old man coming towards him. The archer realized his mistake and made as if to bow. The old man responded with barely a nod, and removed the urn full of water to the ground. Then he looked at the archer’s bow and arrows and inquired after their use. The archer was half expecting this. He raised his bow and, taking aim at a bird in flight, shot the arrow. In the next instant it lay quivering at the old man’s feet. Oh, this! The old man gave a low grunt. I now recall I too had played like this in my youth. You call this play? asked the archer with some irritation. Wearing a pout on his lip, the old man motioned him to follow. The slate-rock walls of the cave converged behind it and extended beyond the cliff over the ravine which fell thousands of feet below into a white nothingness. The archer followed the old man a few steps, but a cold fierce wind attacked him and he fell to his knees trembling. Just when he was attempting to rise, the elevation produced in
him a most terrible vertigo which swiftly brought him back to the ground. The old man, on the other hand, had advanced to the very edge of the rock, and presently he turned to look at the archer. He was poised on his toes, his heels suspended over the ravine. Unmoving like the rock itself, his white silken beard flowing in the wind, he called out to the archer to stand by his side. Frozen with fear, the archer did not reply. Looking up from his low position, he now saw a rare blue rose in the old man’s hand. The flower baffled him, and his throat finally felt the warmth of his voice again. O Master, what has a rose to do with archery? The old man was oblivious to the archer’s words. Overhead, a flock of swallows was hurrying away in the evening sky. At a glance from the old man, the birds lay twitching on the rock.

Unaware of the tears clouding his vision, the archer saw stretching before him a narrow path at whose end was the rose.

The Passage
(A Scenario)

You gods! My baffled steps are lost in you!
Paul Valéry

The sounds have long fallen into a rhythm. They emerge – from his nostrils, from his hurried step crunching the dry leaves, faintly, from the metal of the rifle slung over his shoulder as it rubs across his khaki shorts, and there is even a jingle from the few bullets in his pocket – cut each other, and lose themselves like flashes in the wide spaces between the trees that are stark and echoless. The heat fails to touch him, for he shivers and his teeth chatter, but his lips are sealed, allowing neither the saline fluids to enter and sting his tongue nor the sobs to escape. Surely this is all a dream, but how to explain the pain that persists in his shoulder and spreads across his back, obliging him to slow down every now and then. Yet he must keep up his pace; from what he knows of these parts, the brook is at least two miles away.

Barely a year ago, he was still in the village, playing, running errands, and going to the new school. Although not quite taken in by school, he was the last to leave each day, for he had early on made the discovery of some books in the common room where it was always cool and shady. These were strange things,
alive to the touch, and he stayed alone, reading and weaving fantasies until light began to leave the sky. He was just beginning to make sense of the words, but the pictures spoke to him openly – of distant lands and times, fishlike maidens and fire-spitting dragons, magic cloaks and tunnels you took to slip into the earth’s belly. Only if he had not been hurriedly despatched to live with his uncle in town. More than once, his family had received feelers from the guerrillas that he was now old enough to handle a gun.

In town he could not go to school immediately: that he had to wait for the term to end was one in many reasons. With each day he grew ever more listless and six months later succumb to the offer of becoming a soldier in a new ‘civil resistance’ movement fostered by the authorities. The allowance was handsome and at last the bookstore lay within easy reach. But without a warning he was removed to the camps on the edge of the forest along the main road to guard the town and resist the advance of the guerrillas. Here all you saw were khaki clothes, guns and bullets, and some food, but never books. Here, too, was a boy of his age who by the third month had become his friend.

Last evening he had found his friend fingering – he could not believe it – a book, hardly outside his grasp, waiting. He moved towards it, but just then there was a shuffle of steps outside the tent and, as if a trance had been broken, he ran away in confusion, though not before hurriedly imploring his friend to bring the book along in the morning to their secret place. Night was spent counting stars, awaiting the light that would wipe them away. At dawn he was already at the meeting point in the forest, though nearly three hours passed before his friend showed up – he could not comprehend it – empty-handed. Uncontrollable rage welled up in him, making him dizzy, and he came to himself only when he heard the shot.

He falls into the stream with open arms and drinks greedily, never noticing the shadows that are thickening over the hill.

The Light Ascending

All will grow dark again
.
Samuel Beckett

Somewhere behind the tall water tank is the trail that leads into the forest. The iron mesh has an opening there, like a wound that hasn’t been allowed to heal, and you can slip past it to the other side without any discomfort. Locals who work at the institute prefer this shorter course to return home every evening. Part of the way they leave the trail to cleave the wilds, descending into the bowl of the valley through routes that remain hidden to the untrained eye, routes as many as rivulets in the rain, routes like hieroglyphs that can only be traced if one learns to read the symbols, to touch and to look closely: the impress on a patch of grass, the carelessly crushed cigarette butt, the broken twig, the startled call of a bird in flight.

At nine thousand feet above the sea, this is pine country. Leaving the stinking dump that Simla has become – a dump through which remnants of the Raj rise like smoke here and there, not just vertically through space, but horizontally, too, along the axis of time, moving from a subdued and painful past towards a cataclysmic future – and travelling for an hour on the road that spirals higher and higher, you come into these hills that
have not yet been laid waste by progress. Here, deep in the pines and deodars, tall and dark and indistinguishable at a distance from each other, magic survives and magical events have a chance to occur.

From the guest quarters of the institute, it is barely a fifty-step walk up the incline to the water tank which stands on a high wrought-iron structure. Around it there is some flat space to move about and enjoy the vista that opens up between the trees. At dawn, before the smoke and haze has obliterated the view, one can see the snowy peaks, blue, pink, and orange at once, that girdle the world’s edges.

Yet by noon there is little solitude here, so one ventures past the iron mesh in search of it and the mud path mercifully takes him where he belongs. First it ascends, then curves, and later begins to descend, only to flatten and meander under the canopy of branches. To either side the forest slopes downwards and, intermittently, one can glimpse the road that clasps the hill like a snake, hundreds of feet below. In time the trail splits, one part dropping slightly, skirts along the hill and at half a mile’s walk ends at the spa resort, the other rises to the hill’s crest where an old water pumping station awaits the solitude-seeker.

On coming to know of the
strawberry trail
, I decided to explore it and thought of going to the resort at least once before my money, whatever little I had of it, ran out. So I set forth one morning soon after my arrival. In barely a half hour I could see the cone-like slate-blue roofs of the building rising over the trees. Suddenly the road bent sharply to the left and the view was lost behind the hill. Now the road was entirely under its shadow and the pines acquired a blackish hue, but above the sky was high and clear and dazzling, all of it making a very pretty picture.

Unlike in life, mountains always propel me to choose the course that moves upwards. Thus I instinctively selected the narrow path rising past young twisted pines and shrubs whose names I did not know, when it was apparent that the
wider, flatter, oft-trodden road I had left behind was the correct way. But as in life so in the hills there is compensation for the drifter.

The pumping station was in a state of disrepair, and yet there was something striking about it. I went around in circles, unable to pinpoint it. On one side was a line of ancient trees, interspersed with a few young poplars. Here I sat down and was suddenly tired, not just by the slight trek, but with the burden of my choices that lay heavy on me and were now turning into an almost physical sensation of pain. Every story demands some insight into the life of its characters, and one could not have asked for a quieter setting than in which I found myself to recall past events.

Floating in and out of the courts, I had reached the point from where I could simply stare at myself, ten, twenty, thirty years into the future: a Dantean vision that unsettled me each time. At twenty-six, with much difficulty and late-night hardships, I had written a novel whose publication I had part financed upon it being turned down by several publishers. Aside from winning a small prize and some readers, it went unnoticed. As was also apparent, it made me little money. And yet there was a singular result: I started corresponding with JC, the best of them all, the writer
par excellence
, decorated everywhere, yet miraculously aloof, private, and dignified. Less a writer than a monk. The legend of how fiercely he guarded his privacy refused to die; indeed the talk resurfaced each time he failed to appear to collect a prominent international prize. Obviously I did not know his whereabouts, so I sent a copy of my novel to his agent in London. To my surprise, I received a brief remark about the book inside of a month from some obscure town in Australia. I was elated. I wrote again and in response received a personally autographed copy of one of his novels with a short letter in longhand in which he told me that I would write many books and that I should never worry about criticism. Kind of him to have written that,
but criticism was the least of my worries then and counts for nothing now that I am amid this solitary beauty.

Two years later, I departed from the city. I had not left much behind, whatever few relationships I had cherished were already on a downward spiral.

An almost unbearable cawing filled the air. I awoke to find a raven, its black plumage glossy in the noon light, perched on the tap which jutted out from a wall of the pumping station, watching me. Every once in a while, there was the sound of a lorry passing on the road below or maybe it was just the wind swaying the pines. Later, seated above the evergreen forest, the chain of snow peaks obscured by distance and yet transmitting their solid presence, I ate an expensive meal in the open, returning light in the pocket but feeling all the better for it.

It’s three weeks since my arrival. I have made several trips to the pumping station, and two even to the resort. For hours I read or lie under the trees gazing at the sky where at times I can detect a few old faces – always happy faces – in the shapes of clouds. The forest has its own music, clear, simple, and fluid; it glides over you like a stream in which you have fallen with joyous abandon. Choices, however, remain. And time.

*

The sky is a riot of stars. I sip my drink and let it trickle down my throat, absorbing its warmth. The wind is sharp and chilly and makes me yearn for the fiery sky. It flows over the hillside and the giant trees tremble in it, a roar erupts that drowns every other sound. Yet before the wind has risen again, I can hear very faintly the notes of a flute.

The notes grow prominent and I realize with a slight jolt that I am already in the forest, lured by the melody. At first the notes are spaced out like droplets, but soon they merge and rise into a river of hope and longing. Unbeknown to me, I have made the
choice. Now all that remains is to walk the path to its end. Fortunately, the moonshine filters through the overhanging branches, and I have followed this path many times in the day. Still I cannot make out at once when I hit the fork. The music is coming not from above, but from the side of the hill, from the direction of the resort.

The trail stretches endlessly ahead. Even after half an hour, I am no closer to my destination. Either time has slowed down or I have somehow lost my way. I am deep in the forest; here the moonshine does not reach me, but countless tiny eyes follow my steps in the dark. The music has stopped too, it occurs to me. Then the moon tears away from a cloud and I see at last the familiar green gate. Beyond it, however, I see nothing. This is when I realize I am in a dream, mine or another’s, I can’t tell.

A glade. Pale clouds of mist roll across it in files, while above sparks of an exploding universe emphasize the dense silhouettes of trees that make its circumference – how calm they appear from a distance. A vague smell of burnt wood rests on the air and I walk in its direction. Then I see a cottage in the distance, streaks of smoke are coming off its chimney. A few old cedars close the view from one end. Suddenly I am standing at its door, on each side a paper lantern producing a velvety glow, about to knock. Hairs rise on my arms and the back of my neck, and I know I am going to meet a ghost from the past.

I knock twice and wait. After a time, I knock again. I hear a lumbering, approaching step. The door creaks, and what I see – or cannot see at first – is a curious blue light in which I do not instantly recognize his face. He says nothing, only stands aside for me to enter. Most of the room is in shadow, but gradually my eyes adjust to the light coming from the window and from the embers in the grate. Under the window, there is a round table with two chairs. In the funnel of light, I see a chessboard on which only five pieces remain. Clearly this is not a game in
progress, for both the kings are missing from the board. The board itself is placed diagonally such that a corner points at the player. At its centre stands a white queen, bishops and knights surrounding her in a rhombus-like formation. For some strange reason, I silently start burdening them with names: ‘the black bishop – Borges; the white knight – Joyce; the black knight – Faulkner; the white bishop…’

‘Beckett,’ his voice down to a whisper reaches me. By the time I turn, he has settled in one of the chairs.

‘Beckett,’ I repeat, hearing my voice for the first time and taking the empty chair. His face, silhouetted against the blue light, appears to be young and timeless. ‘And the queen?’ I ask.

‘…isn’t the queen, of course. Just like this isn’t chess.’

‘Who’s she, then? The Muse? And this, the chequered world of art, of joy and despair chasing each other?’

‘Chess is a proof that we live in a world of symbols, a world which we both pinch and populate.’

‘What are books then,’ I inquire.

‘What they’ve always been, rivers, stars, galaxies.’ He has moved deeper into his chair and his lean frame is completely in the dark. He is his voice alone, though I can’t tell if this voice belongs to him, for I haven’t heard it before. ‘What do you think music is?’

‘A bridge,’ I say instinctively. ‘From one void to the next.’ I have a vague feeling that he is smiling. I am enjoying the game now, and I go on: ‘What is poverty a symbol of?’

‘The avarice of the rich,’ the voice answers. With horror I understand that I am losing my way in a labyrinth of symbols, where everything is a symbol for everything else, a web that may hold me prisoner forever. Suddenly, on an inspiration, I ask: ‘What does the calm ironic smile of a child symbolize?’

My voice echoes around me. The chair opposite me is empty. But I know the answer. I say the word softly to myself.

The word weighs me down, gives me vertigo. Light begins to
fade from the room and return to the sky, and the room begins to spin, and it feels like I am fast falling into a bottomless pit of darkness.