“Fucking delicious.”
38
HE DOES NOT know where he is, nor when he departed this life. He is dead. He cannot hear the breeze rustling the branches of the trees, nor the breath of the sea next to him; he cannot feel the fishermen as they walk past his grave, leaving imprints of bare feet on the sand and the faint whiff of tobacco in the air. The time that existed before birth has become one with the eternity that followed death to become a single entity with no beginning and no end, no before and no after. He does not know who owns his lands now. How he came to love it! Did he exist? Does the path still exist? He does not know; the strange flower that was his mind has withered and now, for him, there is no memory. He is lost forever in the vast totality that is now and always has been, this living thing that is at once remote and utterly present, this thing that is but water, though it blossoms as love, terror, wisdom and desire; water that blooms as beauty, blood and passion though always and ever it is water.
And as his cheeks decay, his ears disintegrate, his heart is delivered up to other beings, the sun, this sun which is also fleeting, has not ceased to shine on other lives. On the monkeys leaping from bough to bough. On the cattle ceaselessly chewing their own weight in cud. On the white glare of gulls as they rend the air. On men sitting under trees and eating mangoes.
But he no longer knows these things. He cannot hear the whisper of the sands shifted by burrowing crabs that trickle into his grave like some frantic sandglass. He cannot hear the frantic roar of the waters as the tide swells and the sea retreats, taking with it the sand he is becoming. In the beginning was the sea. All was in darkness. There was neither sun nor moon; no people, no animals, no plants. The sea was everywhere and everything. The sea was Mother. The Mother was not a woman, nor a thing, nor nothingness. She was the spirit of that which was to come and she was thought and memory.