It begins in the house of orange and black gates in Madras. I am locked in the bathroom where my sister and I used to soap our bottoms and go bumskating on the floors. I must be seven, eight? I am in the bathroom alone. My sister and mother are outside, telling me to turn the key this way and that. I struggle with the lock, but there is no satisfying click sound to set me free. The air grows thin at the top of my throat. Unbearable. I think I will faint. I cannot remember how I got out, only the terror of not being able to get past the door.
Another door. This time I am twenty. My friends and I have just baked a tray of brownies with unconventional ingredients. Our first time. I feel as though I’ve been dropped into an Agatha Christie novel. My mission is to figure out how to get beyond this front door and save my friend’s dogs who are outside and must surely have discovered the brownies by now. I spend half an hour, maybe more, before giving up to go lie on a couch. In years to come I will be brought back to this feeling of incompetence with doors again and again – which key, which bolt, which “open sesame” words to use before I can pass through.
As I’ve grown older, this phobia of doors has been nourished and maintained at a low-key simmer. I avoid elevators when I can, hover over public bathrooms with one arm barricading the door instead of locking it, for fear of the air thinning at the top of my throat again. All because of that incident in childhood.
A few summers ago, with my family all in a room together, I asked, “Remember that time I got locked in the bathroom, how old was I then?” My mother and sister looked at me surprised. “It wasn’t you who got locked in. It was Ajay.” They say it almost with one voice, and the minute they say it, I know it to be true. It had never been me in that bathroom, but some early transference, some desire to slide under the door and help Ajay, my baby brother with Down Syndrome, who had somehow managed to lock himself in.
Does it matter now that I know this memory isn’t true? Does it take away my distrust of doors even though I’ve readjusted that memory in my head so I can see it’s not my body in that bathroom but my brother’s? Not really. Fear is fed by all kinds of imaginary forces. What’s real isn’t what matters so much as the emotion that fuels it. Rationality can only take you so far.
The truth is that no person has ever woken up to find that they have turned into a giant insect. But quite a few of us have gone to bed and woken up discombobulated in strange surroundings or emerged from a sleep so deep that for a moment we forget who and where we are. The kind of alienation that Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis experiences is not so far from us. To wake to an altered reality. To news of terrible illness, war, partner abandoning you, hurricane on the horizon.
We can keep the biography of Kafka close at hand when we read him. We can find evidence of his self-loathing and daddy issues in his diaries and letters. He lays it out quite clearly in Letter to My Father (which he never has the guts to send), “My writing dealt with you, I lamented there only what I could not lament on your breast.” By turning Gregor Samsa into a bug in a story, Kafka gets to do more than just lament. He gets to shift reality, to arrive at something more truthful. An unmasking. What in the parlance of today might be described as dropping “truth bombs.”
In fiction, there is a groping toward that which cannot be known immediately. So, a man has to wake up as an insect in order to understand the reality around him. To find his once-beloved sister calling him vermin, telling their parents they must get rid of him. The Metamorphosis is filled with doors as barriers, filters, separators, before arriving at what needs to be arrived at. A door slammed shut. Gregor’s sister, waiting for him to scuttle into his room on his tired insect legs before quickly locking him in. Poor Gregor, in his final moments, head sinking to the floor as the first light of morning infiltrates the windows, still thinks of his family with tenderness as the last flickers of breath leave his nostrils.
In The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Kafka writes: Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognise itself; anyone who wants to recognise it has to be a lie.” Listening to fiction writers talk about truth is a bit like reading treatises on the Vedas – all that searching and seeking for brahman – that which is vast and ultimately real. Legions of writers speak of truth as a game of subterfuge. Poking at lies in order to find the truth, telling lies in order to reveal the truth. The process that fiction goes through, plucking from the real and transforming, to get to the thing that sits above the regular thing, which may be a lie but is somehow truer than the truth. The truthness of truth. And like all big ideas – God, the self, quantum gravity – truth too, might best be framed in the negative. That which is not this.
I remember the first time I heard the etymological meaning of the word guru (told to me by my guru). The Sanskrit root of gu and ru: One who removes darkness. Not one who takes you toward the light. Not let me lead you into, but let me move this aside. Here, let’s push this thing out of the way. And this. Now, what do you see?
For the ancient Greeks, truth was not mere correctness, but Aletheia (the unhidden). Heidegger reminds us of the importance of this negative framing: that which is without hiddenness, as opposed to an assertion of correctness. Remember Heraclitus, he says, who told us that it is in the nature of beings to conceal themselves. Not just that we like to hide ourselves from time to time, but that it is in our innermost drive to remain hidden, and if brought out of hiddenness, to return to it.
Is it any wonder then, that across the world an early form of entertaining babies is the game of peekaboo. That as children we play the somewhat terrifying game of hide and seek. That even when we are fully grown, walking down a street in some faraway city, we may catch sight of our reflection in a passing store window and suddenly shirk back, startled by our own self. Is it any wonder then, that so many religions forbid us to make images of God? And even those that allow the representation of what is ultimately transcendent, will ask you to mediate this vision: to stand at a distance, in a doorway, deflect the brightness, not stare for too long, as though this image were the sun in the sky that could blind us. Emily Dickinson, that secretive poet, in whose poems, shadows hold their breath, wrote of telling truth aslant: “The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.”
Truth – rarely smelled or tasted, sometimes spoken and heard, but frequently framed through the sense of the eye. Revelation, awakening, insight, epiphany, recognition. And above all light.
There is a reason why philosophers, while talking about truth, have loved the allegory of the cave. Plato made his cave-dwellers believe that shadows were their reality, and he led them out to the true form of things that lay outside the cave in the light. In Indic thought the direction of enlightenment is reversed. Mystics, Tantrics, Sadhus, went in to caves in order to meditate, to shed their attachments and understand the true nature of reality. One journey to truth is a travelling outward into light, another is a travelling in to the dark.
Architecturally, caves are interesting to me because they lack doors. Even though they can still entrap us, the cave is a liminal space. Its threshold is vulnerable, yes, a strange crossroads between the inside and outside, but the cave is ultimately a womb, place of beginnings. A shelter. Site of our earliest expressions. Our ancestors marked the walls of caves with their handprints, fashioned caravans of moving animals with charcoal, chalk and red oxide. Some say these were shamanistic visions. Others, that this was a collective dreaming, a utilitarian hunting magic, a hope for the abundance of prey. What can we say about these paintings that have survived so long? That they collapse time between the distant past and the present? That the geology of caves with all their striations orchestrate vision?
John Berger, who was an early visitor to the paintings in Chauvet, described the world of these early humans as such: “They had been born, not on to a planet, but into animal life. They were not animal keepers: animals were the keepers of the world and of the universe around them, which never stopped. Beyond every horizon were more animals.”
In the central Indian caves of Bhimbetka, I too witnessed this dream life of our ancestors. Never-ending processions of long-tusked elephants, monkeys, deer. The predominance of animal life and how inextricably our lives are tangled up in theirs. Men sitting atop horses wielding spears. Women gathering plants. Men and women, we say of these hunter-gatherers, although all the people on those walls have the same bodies: tiny circular heads, triangular bodies, stick-like arms and stick-like legs.
“Inside the cave,” Berger writes, “Everything is present and nameless. Inside the cave there is fear, but the fear is in perfect balance with a sense of protection... For both hunters and hunted hiding well is the precondition for survival. Life depends upon finding cover. Everything hides.”
There it is again, that game of hide and seek. Heraclitus. This weird nature of our being, to want to conceal ourselves.
In the earliest hymns of the Rig Veda, Indra, God of Thunder, vanquishes a demon Vala, who has stolen a herd of cows and Ushas (the dawn light), and trapped them in a cave. Of course, the cows and the dawn light are set free by Indra, who cracks open the cave with his thunderbolt. But only after he imbibes a magical potion of soma and utters a special chant.
Two things interest me in this story, and both of them have to do with language. Vala, the name of the demon, means to cover, to enclose. There we go again: peekaboo! The Rig Veda, so big on symbolism, brings in Indra with his thunderbolt (hello light, hello epiphany, hello the way a poem or the truth arrives like a flash). But it is not Indra’s physical prowess alone that vanquishes. The Rig Veda is also big on utterance, on kavya, which is poetic truth, which is the power of a word when uttered aloud to change reality. Words as magic, in other words. Indra wins because of his thunderbolt, but also, because of his soma-inspired chant.
Was that me, so young at 20, trying to cleanse the doors of my perception by putting one, two, three of those brownies down my throat – pop pop pop, a paltry imitation of soma? Didn’t the world appear infinite, as William Blake said it would? Once my doors of perception had been cleansed, wasn’t I able to break free from the “narrow chinks” of my cavern? Didn’t I lie on a bed with my five closest friends having a silent conversation for hours and hours without any of us saying a word? Wasn’t it miraculous? Can’t I still feel those silvery lines that joined and enclosed our bodies? Didn’t the world seem suffused – an orb of light – that we were somehow holding up through our connected limbs. Weren’t we planets, really, before everything suddenly turned spiky and horribly sharp? Didn’t I struggle with a real door even though I’d cleansed my perception doors, and didn’t I fail to save the dogs from eating those brownies? (Reader: relax, they survived). Didn’t all my friends and I stay away from intoxicants for a very long time because something of our true selves emerged in that paranoia that we didn’t want to see?
If truth, as we have established, cannot be some kind of sitting duck, hanging out in the open for all to see. If it has to be sought, unveiled, arrived at. And if that requires some journeying in or out, some knowledge of self, a quest for beauty or freedom, then how do we, the makers of fire, who have brought our own form of illumination to the world, contend with this crazy mirror world we find ourselves in? To have emerged from a global pandemic into this season of horrific wars and an ever-fearful climate scenario? What is this heartbreak that we must hold? What names will we give to it, and how will we tell about it?
A word isn’t simply a sound with meaning. A word written in a newspaper can be as cunning as a word coming from a politician’s mouth. A word uttered at a press conference in the bastion of democracy can be more malnourished than a word uttered at a press conference on the ruins of a hospital organised by children pleading for their lives.
If you say a word long enough or loud enough you can coopt that word and steal its meaning. Truth, truthful, truther, truthness. Who is dying who is murdered who is hungry who is doing the hungering who is funding who is condemning who is evil who is burned to death who is burned alive who is clearing the way who is exterminating who is crossing who is blocking who is terrorist who is freedom fighter who is innocent who is child who is baby who is nameless who is numbered, who and how and why.
It feels as though I’ve gone around in circles trying to catch hold of truth. And truth, in its true nature, is hiding from me, resisting any kind of definition. All this talk of doors and caves and shadows. What good is it to say, “Speak truth to power” when words and images can be manipulated into meaninglessness? When mass surveillance and artificial intelligence keep blurring the boundaries of reality, and conspiracy theories thicken the air, leaving us with a sense of disorientation so complete, we have become the kind of people Hannah Arendt warned of: people who have lost their bearing to reality. Not because lie has replaced truth, but because nobody believes anything any longer. We are unmoored. There are no silver strings connecting us to one another. If there is a space to be reached, perhaps it is the imagination. To reimagine the imagination. To begin to know our bodies again, the inner possibility of things, the here, the now, the what can we envision ourselves to be, the grasping, the hands, the freedom, the moving towards like a caravan of animals, somewhere between the light and the dark, our true selves, our murky shadows, to make again from the beginning.
