Patagonia calling

I've just begun to re-read a novel I last read 10 years ago, Red Earth and Pouring Rain by the Indian / American writer Vikram Chandra, which opens in spectacular form when a disaffected young man returns to India and shoots a white-faced monkey that has carried off his jeans. The family bring the monkey inside, fearing a riot by followers of Hanuman, the monkey-god, and while being nursed, the monkey comes to self-consciousness as a reincarnation of Sanjay, a man who'd died a century previously. He begins to communicate with the family through a typewriter when Yama, the god of death, comes to capture him with a silken noose.


with the last of my strength, I rolled out of the bed and onto the floor and quickly dragged myself into the dark recesses underneath it. I lay there panting, watching Yama's gigantic gold-sandalled feet move closer to the bed to stand firm and immovable as pillars beside it; then, then a slim silver noose--so toy-like, you would think, so harmless--appeared to arc and weave like a living thing, nosing around under the bed, darting, snapping from side to side, seeking me, drawing closer, closer. . . . The noose is silver and soft, seductive in its silkiness, it comes to you gentle and pleasing like a lover . . .

Shortly after beginning this epic novel, I ran across an interview in Harper's for April with the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges [that's Hor-gay Loo-ees Bor-hays] which also touches on the topic of transmigration of souls.

For me death is a hope, the irrational certitude of being abolished, erased, and forgotten. When I'm sad, I think, What does it matter what happens to a twentieth-century South American writer? What do I have to do with all of this? . . . I hope to be totally forgotten. I believe that this is death. Yet perhaps I'm wrong, and what follows is another life on another plane, no less interesting than this one, and I will accept that life too, just as I have accepted this one. But being younger, I would prefer not to remember this one in the other.

Images of death are so common in literature and in life, and yet we spend so much of our energy repressing our knowledge that some day it will be our turn. But I've sometimes thought of it as being elsewhere. Say, Patagonia. So far as I know or intend, I will never travel there--not that I have anything in particular against the extreme southern part of South America. There's just nothing to connect me with it or anyone who is there. Someone dies, and they are just incommunicado, off to Patagonia, and they won't call home though perhaps we live in the hope that they might.