“The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.”
—Rabindranath Tagore
I am a seed.
I transplanted myself to the city.
I have to say, I am a mature seed. I was fully mature before the age of twelve. And I tell you what, I come from somewhere. I have a lot of teachers; every blade of grass in my homeland was my teacher . . . Long before I was twelve, I had already read three thousand faces, and eaten every type of plant that grows in the fields, and knew every kind of birth and death. After this, every day of life is all part of the process. The process cannot be transcended. I carry on my back a thousand acres of earth (without the foundations of a home), almost six thousand eyes (and a handful are blind, or half - blind, but they are still looking at me), and almost three thousand mouths that can’t control themselves (sometimes, they will say a dead person is alive, or a living one dead) — their flying spit can drown people.
The reason I am putting myself on display is to make you understand that on this Earth, people are different from each other. Each person comes from somewhere. A person’s childhood, or their background if you like, can influence their entire life. For example, in my subconscious: the ring of a telephone is as abrupt as a dog’s bite. But things are different now. The dogs have come into the city too.
Do you want to know what I feared the most in my first ten years in the city? I’ll tell you, the ring of a telephone.
Every time a phone rang, my heart jumped out of my body!
(Chapter One)