Finished reading David Malouf’s autobiography 12 Edmondstone Street. It’s not an autography that covers the whole different stages of one’s life; it consists of three parts and a coda, all very understated, with moments of revelation throughout. The title piece is the longest and it tells about his childhood house in Brisbane. The sequence about the child’s magical thinking is especially impressive. But more interesting to me is the writer’s account of “foreign” cultures; Tuscany, India.
My note is then centered on the piece on India, “A Foot in the Stream.” The stream, le grand fleuve, of course, is India itself.
“The fear of India. It comes in many forms. Fear of dirt, fear of illness, fear of people; fear of the unavoidable presence of misery; fear of a phenomenon so dense and plural that it might, in its teeming inclusiveness, swamp the soul and destroy our certainty that the world is there to be read but is also readable.” (105)
India has always been portrayed as chaos beyond description, an immense civilization, a multitudinous universe in itself, disorder materialized. To Malouf also, India was extravagantly otherworldly.
“This promiscuousness of India, its teeming plenitude, far from being oppressive, seems invigorating. It humbles but lifts the spirit. It seems immemorial, endless, indestructible. Things have been like this forever, and will go on like this, in defiance of every catastrophe, into a future too remote to contemplate. We will survive here, we humans, one species among many----that is what India promises.” (110)
Take humanity for example. The whole gamut of life styles, styles of economic and material existence, is so outrageously wide that it breaks easily the notions we have of humanity and the social equity. But then the picture of humanity we have acquired in our short life is only a very small part of the vastness and eternity-like sense of time that India may represent.
I remember a friend of mine from college said, a quarter of a century ago, after his return from Brazil, that Brazil was like India. He had been to India the previous year. I went to Brazil next year and learned vaguely what he had meant when he said that. But to this day I haven’t been to India, and even if I encounter innumerable people of Indian origin everywhere----in Montreal, Fiji, Tokyo, or Sydney, living prrofs that INDIA EXISTS----India still seems like a fictional terra incognita too vast and too far to be imagined. I have enough representations of India at hand. But the immediate experience of my senses lacking, I keep on fearing, probably more than necessarily, this cosmic elephant of a country. Will I go there one day?
