The gate of ages and ageing

M: Here a woman might meet her mother as a woman younger than her, and watch her walk past, living her life.

There are ages to live through and parenthood is merely one piece of our parents.. parenthood is not their only sky, as we, their children imagine it to be: maybe we cannot look otherwise, except with some bitterness. Similarly there are parents, like Dhundiraj, who too often forget that that is what children necessarily think.. that parents will be the sky to them. Prabhakar, as an old man, with dark glasses, frail, in bed, remembering Japanese phrases, might look at his father's face and still see a large space where birds might take wing.

( M sitting and writing in his hotel room in the night. The hotel is an older haveli converted, with plaster walls and a new piece of painting up)

M: Writing itself has ages, and you look back at earlier pages and hear a young voice.

The Darwinian drawing is an image imprinted in the minds of our times. The idea of progress, that as the ferris wheel of age goes up, you progress, over spring into the fullness of summer and the wet rains and somewhere, hidden in the turn when the wheel tries to turn again, old age, whenever that might be. If it is a fractal of wheels within wheels, we age all the time, and make so many saawans and shraavans. So to a eight year old, the faculties of the child of two are lost..and to the two year old? persists the stain of a loss, the beginnings of memory.

We meet an Urvashi here, the one who controls the heart. A fine funny young fellow, who would not comply with such subject positions being cast on her. Avid science student, going to college now, with glasses, wants to be work with computers, not sure quite how she wants to do it. I tried to play with her my name game- Ur- vashi. I told her the Puranic story. She smiled in a simple open way- a little shyly, accepting the wish of her parents for their child.

PHALKE STORIES Kamal ( Hindi / English)

BOOK 1- 1919 Hansa

vadodara