My Ph.D. Thesis : Two Summaries

Most newspapers have two types of crosswords, one called direct and the other cryptic. As I work on the final draft of my Ph.D. thesis, perhaps I should give my readers two summaries, one direct and the other cryptic, of what 'it is about'.

Direct Summary :

My thesis is about the nature of our temporal experiences, the fact that we are temporal beings who are influenced as much by the (rewritable) past as by the (projected) future. This might sound counter-intuitive, especially if you happen to follow rigorously the dictum, 'Live for today, and don't think about your past or about your future'. As a matter of fact, however, the past is never past, it is still flowing past us, our past actions, experiences, inclinations, and dispositions live with us even if in a subterranean manner; and our present expectations of the future cast a long backward-shadow on what we are doing right now. We human beings, therefore, live at the unstable and shifting point of intersection between the effects of the disappeared past and the anticipations of the incoming future.

Cryptic Summary :

In the year 2030, the Ironist will go back to a remote village in the upper regions of Assam, India, where his family had been landowners for countless generations during the time of the British Empire. The last time he was there was in 1990 when his old grandfather had died, and as he walks down the dusty red road in 2030, he will suddenly remember all the sights, the sounds, and the smells that he has lived with since then. He will recall how the huge black house was overcrowded with grieving men and women; how the crisp air in the golden paddy fields glistening in the autumn sun was alive with the screams of his cousins playing hide-and-seek all over the sprawling estate; how the elders rebuked them for their utter lack of taste; and how the starving villagers came to pay their last respects to their honourable landowner, who seemed larger in death than in life.

And then he will relive how every morning he used to walk down the narrow misty road to the river with some of his cousins and would stare intensely at the cold swirling waters. He will also reminisce how a young cousin, barely six years old, had asked him where her grandfather had gone to, and how he had, at the age of sweet sixteen, assured her that God was lovingly holding grandfather in His right hand, and how that guarantee had brought a stream of tears from her beautiful little brown eyes.

But in 2030, none of them would be there. He will not have been in touch with his cousins for almost half a century, many of his uncles and aunts would either be dead or waiting for a merciful death, and nobody in the village would recognise him. He will walk round and round the ancestral mansion in the ghostly moonlight, and think of all the people there who had vanished dreaming of the distant skies. He will hear vacant echoes of the songs that some wandering minstrels had sung in 1990 at his grandfather's funeral, will see wraiths of his ancestors floating around the rooftop, and will smell again the burning wood of his grandfather's pyre.

He will walk down the river as he used to do long ago, and will meet an old white-haired woman at the bank, who will tell him that the river has changed course five times since 1990, and that he must now walk further upstream to find it. He will ask her if she will walk that distance with him, but she will remind him that she belongs to his unredeemed past and is forbidden by time to undertake the journey with him.

So he will walk along and arrive at a fork in the red road, and when he will want to take the road he has never taken earlier, he will see an old man sitting under a brown banyan tree who will tell him that the road is forever closed to him. So he shall turn back and start walking to the house when he will meet his beaming grand-niece who will come up to him with a brown book of his forgotten poems. She will turn the brittle yellow pages, apparently at random, until she will reach this one :

I too had once tasted the fervent sky

And let her pallid wealth

Sink into my tired bones

And now that with me

You too have grown an eternity old

I wish to go back to our past

And paint the anguished face

Of your unblemished youth.

His grand-niece will ask him, 'Is this you someone you had known once?', and he will lie to her, 'No, my dear, it is not anybody I knew. In fact, this poem is just for you.'

And she will go away, with a gentle smile on her young rose-red lips, and will fade away into the morning mists. He will trudge back to the river, knowing that the time has come for him to disappear too, to disappear into the cold night to meet his ancestors who have always been waiting to reconcile him to his past.