Another Life: Thirteen Stories and a Play

By Mohan Rakesh

Mohan Rakesh was a towering figure in Hindi fiction and drama. More than a decade in the making, and put together in collaboration with the author, this volume makes a broad range of his work available to English readers. The stories here range from humorous, satirical studies of human foibles, to profound, painful commentaries on the complexities of the human condition. A translation of Adhe Adhure, the play that thrust Indian drama into modernity and one of the finest ever written in Hindi, is included as well. Rounding out the book, as part of the 'P.S. Section', are a self-portrait and interview - rare, first-person statements by the author, and among the most important critical sources for his work.This is an essential volume for anyone interested in the changing landscape of post-Independence Hindi literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harper Perennial India
• Release date: Mar 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9789352776047

Mohan Rakesh

Mohan Rakesh (1925-1972) was one of the pioneers of the Nai Kahani literary movement of Hindi literature in the 1950s. He wrote the first modern Hindi play, Ashadh Ka Ek Din (1958), and made significant contribution to the forms of the novel, short story, travelogue, criticism, memoirs and drama. Carlo Coppola was the Editor Emeritus, Journal of South Asian Literature, 1963-2002. He has taught South Asian and Middle Eastern studies, literature and linguistics for decades.

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AN INTRODUCTION

Here is Rakesh available to those of us who cannot read him in the original but are interested enough to settle for the second best under the circumstances. Rakesh was not widely translated in his lifetime. Now and then a story would appear in The Illustrated Weekly or in an issue on Indian literature brought out by an enterprising foreigner. An American student, Sarah K. Enslay, who came to India to learn Hindi, did a fine translation of his first full-length play, Ashadh ka ek din. It lay unpropitiously with the author for a couple of years. A chance discussion with Rakesh brought up the topic of publishing Indian plays translated into English in Enact. I complained of the non-availability of translators, if not of the plays, and the ubiquitous unavailability of funds to deal with known authors in a little-known magazine. Rakesh had the reputation, as he forthrightly puts it in his interview in this anthology, of a tough guy with editors and publishers. As it is, I was scared of doing commerce with authors. To deal with a ‘reputed’ one like Rakesh was out or the question for tiny Enact. Rakesh sensed the problem. Without a word more, he pulled out the script and handed it to me and asked me to schedule it at my convenience. We published the play in August–September 1969, Enact’s first full-length modern Indian play. From that month, Enact gained a certain dignity, and importance. It could no more be dismissed as a mere gadfly. Rakesh not only didn’t ask for a penny but he angrily tore up the honorarium cheque that I ‘generously’ carried to him. From that moment our relationship became less formal and more friendly. That was his way of dealing with people. He didn’t do commerce with everyone. He did it with people who were making money by publishing authors like him. Later Enact published his other plays, and we developed a friendship in which we fondly sought each other’s company, We would meet two to three times a week, if not oftener, and discuss almost everything under the sun – from Apollo 11 to Upendranath Ashk, from Brecht to Bachchan, from Marx to Max Müller Bhavan. This intimacy scared me to death, which we often discussed, and I wondered if his friendship with me wouldn’t end like his other ones with Rajendra Yadav or Basu Bhattacharya. He would qualify this one and reassure me he wasn’t such a bad reader of men as I alleged.

I started depending intellectually, emotionally and for every conceivable ‘advice’ on his friendship. The friendship and the dependence also grew though Rakesh (who had mastered the art of intense friendship without reading Carnegie, otherwise it wouldn’t have been so bloody warm) made it sound and seem mutually dependable. He even asked for ‘advice’ and emotionally elevated this relationship by discussing both personal and professional matters.

I valued his intellect and his views on life. Taking advantage of his love for me, I asked him if we could do a series of intimate recordings for a possible book. He said he didn’t mind denuding himself, though the idea of a book would make these interviews formal. He wanted to have ‘Conversations’ rather than ‘Interviews’ and wanted them to be as relaxed and desultory as possible. We got down to the first one and, as it turned out, the last one, because Rakesh died within a few weeks of its recording. But he kept his promise, and talked of his childhood, his literary background, his family life, his broken homes, and his life with Anita with a candidness that comes to people after a lot of conscious skin-peeling.

Rakesh was increasingly getting intolerant of masks, both in his writings and in his personal life. He was in search of words which were devoid of their inherent crust and cliched associations. He was chiselling them anew and removing the frills. He had grown tired of swathing the absurdity of this world in mind-teasing phrases and plots. He thought life was more absurd if presented starkly. And for that he realized he didn’t have a readymade language. He was thus in search of simple words. This led him inevitably to the Nehru Fellowship Project of ‘The Dramatic Word’. Unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to complete the work, though he had prepared a complete outline. Even in its present form it’s rich source material.

When I came to know Rakesh, he was predominantly a playwright. He had cooled off after his famous Nai Kahani controversies. He felt settled in life. He was devoting most of his time to writing plays. (It’s another matter he didn’t produce much.) I often accused him of turning to theatre after he had run dry in the field of the short story and the novel. He said he was often unjustly accused of this by his contemporaries. He had a fascination for the stage even when he was an undergraduate and some of his earliest literary efforts were radio plays. Anyway, he was the only worthwhile playwright in Hindi of his time. Bharati wrote only one full-length play two decades ago and the others were either too erratic or too casual.

Rakesh was an intense writer. He would shut himself off in his study when he was at the typewriter. No one was allowed to disturb him. Friends knew of his working hours so they desisted from phoning him during that time. Whether he struggled like a sculptor with the stony language of Hindi to sharpen its edges or just leafed through a magazine or read a budding playwright, he applied all his concentration to it. He did several drafts of his plays. If interrupted midway, he would do the whole thing ab initio. On many occasions, when he had to absent himself from work, he couldn’t just pick up the threads and proceed further. He had to do it all over again. As if interrupted with a beloved in middle years. The passions had to be worked up again. He produced in white heat.

He was also a very intense person. Little things would upset him. Somebody else’s personal problems would become the sole occupant of his thoughts. He showed much concern in giving his studied advice and he would sacrifice anything to accommodate his friends. This egregiousness took away much of his time. And being very sentimental, he found justification for a lot of time he thus frittered away. He could never develop the art of being indifferent to many things as he should have. He realized he didn’t have much time. I don’t mean he imagined he was going to die so soon, but the pending work that he wanted to get finished worried him. After his mother died, he had become more upset. I don’t think he fully recovered from that shock before his death. Lately, he had begun to think in terms of his little children and the fear of leaving them out in the cold.

Outwardly, he laughed a lot. With friends, his laughter had the highest voltage. But he was on edge all the time, like a brilliant student who reaches the examination hall halfway through. I later met a doctor in Bombay who had met Rakesh with some other theatre people a few months before his death. We discussed cardiac falls. He said he wasn’t surprised. After all, Rakesh was an ideal case. He chain-smoked, he was thinking all the time, was hypersensitive, and obese. And he did nothing to relieve himself of his tensions.

Though Rakesh was in love with the language he chose to express himself in and purified it a lot, he was very fond of English. He used it quite correctly and effectively. He was very keen on reaching an audience and readership which couldn’t read him in the original. He could, like all writers, recognize a good translation from a bad one. He was very interested in ‘the Carlo Coppola project’. Unfortunately, he didn’t see much of it, otherwise this excellent anthology would have been further improved in its translation. Quite a few faux pas would have been avoided. But, if these stories and interviews are published in book form after minor corrections, they could well be the definitive ones.

RAJINDER PAUL

Editor, Enact

2 December 1974

EDITOR’S NOTE

Plans for this issue of the Journal of South Asian Literature (JSAL) devoted to the writings of the late Mohan Rakesh were begun in 1968 in collaboration with the author. He selected a basic core of stories for the issue; the self-portrait was chosen so that he could avoid answering an innocuous interview question about his youth and early writings; the interview was made two evenings before my departure from India, in the room where Rakesh did all the writing. An old air conditioner offered a drone continuo to the conversation taken down on tape. A number of letters were exchanged over the next several years to plan this number: what to include, what to delete, what progress was made on the translation of Adhe Adhure, the interview to the updated, whom to approach for which critical piece, etc. The resultant issue would have numbered some four hundred pages: everything contained herein, an additional half-dozen stories, four critical articles, an updated interview, a bibliography of all writings in Hindi and a similar bibliography of translations in English, etc. However, the demise of the author seriously curtailed many of the plans for this issue. If such a loss were not monumental enough, another one in the form of diminution of funds for JSAL also hit us. Hence, this issue – approximately half the dream of the writer and the editors.

Making a choice of what should be published from among all the material available was a very difficult matter. Several criteria were used, some reasonable, others not: first, all the pieces Rakesh originally suggested for the issue have been included; second, stories which have appeared elsewhere in translation have not been printed here; third, less important pieces were deleted in favour of more important ones; and finally, no critical articles were used.

What we offer here though is by no means a halt-measure. The self-portrait and interview are rare, first-person statements by the author. The stories contained in this issue range from humorous, satirical studies of human foibles, to profound, painful commentaries on the complexities of the human condition. We are especially pleased to publish this second translation of Adhe Adhure, a project in which Rakesh himself was most keenly interested, but which, unfortunately, he was never to see.

It is our sincere hope that Rakesh’s confidence in us to bring out this issue has been somewhat justified and that it brings to him and his work more of the attention and recognition in the West he so richly deserved but, unfortunately, did not fully enjoy during his lifetime.

CARLO COPPOLA

1 October 1973

MOHAN RAKESH: A SELF-PORTRAIT

Translated by Deborah Torch

One night: a night of two worlds. Both worlds are mine – my own private ones. And the night linking them is so much a part of me that even today it is not over.

That night I could not sleep a wink. At first, I sat on the stairs in the darkness beating my head against the wall. I lay down for a while on the living room sofa. Then, standing by the window, I let my imagination travel through the inky sky. The unknown deepness of the sky and that of the dawning day.

My father had just died, his body had been laid out. I had to stay with him until morning, or maybe even later. Hearing a harsh voice in the darkness, everyone suddenly stopped wailing.

It was the voice of the landlord’s eldest son. Standing in the market and beating his chest, he howled, ‘I won’t pick up that carcass! Until the rent is paid, I won’t let anyone touch the body!’ For several years we had owed a few months’ rent on the house, and with father’s illness, an additional six or seven months.

After the landlord’s son left, silence hung upon the darkness for a long time. No one dared to say a thing to anyone else or to cry. All the people who were gathered sneaked away one by one.

But in the morning, they returned. There could be no disturbance in the funeral procession. By then, mother’s bangles had been sold to pay the rent.

As I looked out of the window that night, I saw an infinity in the deepness of the sky – all that had passed, that which was passing, and which was about to pass even now. The shadows of yesterday’s experiences had gathered together at the juncture of yesterday and today. And I could see, beyond the electric wires and branches of trees, the approaching tomorrow which sometimes brightened like a firefly and sometimes twinkled like stars. Once in a while the coming day would get lost in the thick darkness and shades still present from the day before slowly became bigger.

It was a winter night. Even so, my shivering hands held on strongly to the window ledge.

Jandiwali Lane, on the roof of the house in which I was born. From the roof, you can see the courtyard of a house at the back. People put baskets or something on their heads and dance there, both the men and women. Grandmother does not allow me to watch them. She says, ‘They’re Kanjurs.’ What’s wrong with Kanjurs? I myself would like to dance the way they do, but when grandmother glares at me every desire to be a Kanjur and to dance vanishes. I hide my head in her lap.

In grandmother’s house, there is a special type of smell which comes from the home-washed dhoti – of perspiration, spices, flowers, and puja for the Thakur. In the shelter of that smell, I was not afraid of bats, ghosts, witches – anything. Evil spirits themselves are terrified of grandmother. Nobody could stand before the fires of her abuses. Except for our house, ghosts, goblins, Kanjurs, lizards, magicians, bats and sorcerers lurk in every home in the area. All of grandmother’s maidservants cast spells. Often they make somebody sick. If I have an earache or my eye hurts, there is only one reason – the widow Guradei or the husband-eating mother of Dhugga had put down chillies in front of the door. At night, when a dog begins howling in the street, we shut the doors and windows of the house. Grandmother says that the widow Phulkor is waking the dead. Phulkor and Balkor are grandmother’s best friends, but when they quarrel among themselves, that very night they scare waking the dead. They mix poison even in food and flowers, and put filthy insects in the prasad for Thakur.

I was not allowed to play in the street. Contamination from the sight of the magician Bhanshah and the leper Kuljug Prasad is more dangerous than the germs of their diseases. Even if we stay locked inside the house, their contamination takes hold by coming through the windows and skylights. Inside the house, auntie’s germs are dangerous and contagious. Grandmother’s opinion is bad even about mother, and she wants to save father from the sight of my mother.

Our house is always damp. A bad smell comes from the drains. The stairs are dark. Mother lives in the bedroom right behind the entrance.

On the first storey, there are three small rooms in front. The windows are sealed with bags instead of with doors. Grandmother lives in the back in a dark room in which we keep a very old trunk.

The kitchen is in the front on the second storey. The room where we eat and also keep our dishes is in back, and smells of ghee, grain, and green vegetables cooking. Sometimes we hold our puja there, where it smells of incense, sandalwood and camphor. We play there.

There is an open roof and balcony on the top storey, and two rooms in the back. Auntie keeps her puja things in one room where the arti ceremony takes place. Flowers and red powder are strewn around, and the Thakur is covered by lotus flowers with big stems. A breeze blows in the neighbouring room where auntie lives.

There are often fights in our house. In the dark stairway, the voices of auntie and grandmother carry all through the house. If there is a fight, we are not allowed to go up on the roof.

In the house, our energy is suppressed. Often I escape to the street. After they grab me, I run away. Sometimes they find me in the temple courtyard, sometimes I go to the trees in the grove below the outer street. When I am kept inside, I cry for a while and make myself sick. Besides the world of the house and street, I have my own private world. Sometimes I travel with the rows of big black ants through holes in the door. Sometimes I make the tiny atoms fight with each other in the sun. I try to look for different faces from the broken plaster of the walls up to the running water of the tank. To change the plaster faces, I adjust the corner of my eye; I change the faces of the water by moving my hand. If the flow disrupts the faces which I have made, I give them new forms. I stare at the faces for a long time. Suddenly, a hand grasps me from behind. I am scolded for playing with the water. ‘The way this boy stares at one thing; he’s going to be a robber when he grows up!’ I find some connection between a robber and knife so that I want to scare everyone with the vegetable knife which I take from the kitchen. ‘Thief! Thief! Thief!’ If Uncle Shyam comes running in front of me holding a rat by the tail, I drop the knife and run away.

Not that house anymore; another house now. After leaving uncle and auntie and their children, the rest of the people came here. This place is not the mysterious world of the lane, but is very isolated, with Desi Sabun’s factory on one side, a school on the other, and a turmeric granary across the street. There are neighbours – Sabun’s mechanic, the turmeric-carriers, labourers and the boys who study at the school.

The house is in a bazaar. I am not allowed to play with the bazaar boys, so I play with books. The closets in father’s study are filled with countless books. I play hide-and-seek with them, or make them into forts. If some heavy book falls on my leg, I get mad and shove it to the back of the closet. The book which I dislike the most I put away in the closet where we keep old things. When I get a chance, I look in and tease the book: ‘Yi, yi, yi!’ If my hostility increases, I even beat the book with a stick and tear the pages: ‘Yi, yi, yi!’

Enmity goes deeper than books. In the beginning there are two enemies – Pundit Loknath and Sardar Nihal Singh, who have come to my house to collect debts.

When Pundit Loknath comes up the stairs supporting himself on his cane, I go to hide in one of the inner rooms. Mother searches for me and drags me out, and I have to go to tell him that father is not at home. Hearing this, Loknath does not go, but sits down in the drawing room to wait. Finally, he mutters something. As he is leaving, he says, ‘When Babu comes, tell him that Loknath came, and I’ll come again tomorrow.’ The second he reaches the stairs, I take my revenge behind his back: ‘Yi, yi, yi!’

We owe a large sum to Nihal Singh, and as a result, he is a big enemy.

Whenever someone great comes to our house, we are forbidden to eat or dress up in front of them, on account of Nihal Singh. What if he should see? What if he should hear? The good clothes are kept in a trunk. At the mere sound of his step, the harmonium, sitar and violin are shoved under the charpoys. The possibility of living a free life hangs on that day when we will be clear of our debt to him.

Father has brought a new gramophone. We have to tell people that it is not our own. If there is time at night, father lies down after eating and listens to his records of classical music. Suddenly coming from the doorway, I say in a thin voice, ‘Nihal Singh.’ Father sits up in surprise. Mother stuffs some towels over the sound box. When Nihal Singh’s voice is audible, the moving gramophone is covered with a quilt.

But Nihal Singh has not even reached the doorway when I make his shape in the plaster on the wall. I take aim at him: ‘Yi, yi, yi!’

There are a lot of collectors. If Loknath and Nihal Singh do not show up, an agent from the law book company comes. Although he comes to demand money, he leaves behind some fat law books. If he does not come, some cloth merchant or goldsmith comes to call on grandmother. Father is very irritated at grandmother’s callers, and grandmother at father’s, but both respect their own.

I am confused and I feel bad. I wish that I could do something to pay off the debts. In spite of all my fighting with the books in my father’s closet, their number increases every day. I guess customers do not come for the books, and that’s why we cannot pay our debt. If I spread out more books in the bazaar, they would sell better. In order to help my father in this task, one day in his absence I take many thick, fat books from the almirah. Holding them carefully in my arms, I go downstairs intending to sell them. The other members of the house learn of my plan when I reach the bottom after toppling all the way down the cement stairs.

A lot of things bother me about the people in the house, others keep certain things which I would like to have for myself.

Some of the things are in mother’s closet – a white necklace and a yellow deer. Although she never plays with them, she will not let me have them. When I hold the necklace in my hand, the stones beg to be let free. The helpless deer is unable to move from its place, and its lowered head looks at me timidly. Whenever my eyes meet its eyes, my hand starts to itch.

The sitar and violin hang on the wall like a hunted crocodile and fox. Father has the privilege of making them scream by pulling their ears. I cannot even stand on a chair and loosen one of the strings a little bit, or take out even one tooth from its open jaws. If I did, someone would pull my ears until I screamed. I am threatened that I will be hung on the wall just like the sitar and violin.

The statues sitting on the thrones of the shelf are grandmother’s. Only she is able to perform the duties of bathing and dressing them. She even ignores my suggestion not to bathe them with cold water in the winter. After their faces and hands are washed, they should be left alone. They should be dressed in woolen clothes. I know more than grandmother does about the hearts of statues, but she thinks herself the expert on statue psychology.

Aunt Pashi keeps many beautiful small boxes and delicate small bottles in her trunk. She does not auction them, and she will not let me. If I call her a witch because of that, I put the whole house in an uproar. But then we tell her that all witches are beautiful, and she is no less so than any other witch.

Camera, binoculars and folding steel cane – the possessions of Uncle Shyam. But I do not have any complaints about him – he takes pictures of me with the camera; he shows me the roofs of the neighbours’ houses through the binoculars; he lets me chase away the dogs with the steel cane. He is the one person in the house whom I enjoy. Even after getting old, he does not indulge in illegal activities like old men.

‘Bhaji, what is death?’ It is raining. I am lying down with Uncle Shyam on his small bed. When it rains hard, Uncle Shyam often makes a canopy by putting one charpoy on top of the other and throwing a waterproof cloth on top. He likes to lie down inside and read a book.

I come right away, hearing that Devidayal Mama has died. Uncle Shyam is lying down inside the canopy with his head in his arms. He is not reading. One hand slowly strokes my wet body. Getting no answer the first time, I ask again, ‘Bhaji, what is death?’

Taking his arm away from his face, Uncle Shyam turns towards me. He starts to explain what sort of thing life is, where children come from. I interrupt him to ask my question again.

His hand rests on my shoulder. He draws me very close to him. In a torrent of words, he explains that death is the end of life, that a dead man lives on through his children. Thinking for a while, l am shocked that maybe father too will leave his soul to me.

‘What happens after death?’

‘After death nothing happens. With death, a man is finished – that’s it.’

A man is finished – that’s it! I come so close to Uncle Shyam that I can smell the hairs on his chest. I cannot believe that man really ends.

Uncle Shyam has often made jokes to tease me. I want to guess from his breathing that somehow this too is nothing more than a joke. I wait for him to start smiling at me and to stroke my head and say, ‘Hey, you donkey, can’t you take a joke? How can a man be finished?’ But his eyes remain serious and his lips are strangely tight.

Raindrops fall on the waterproof cloth. Falling on the floor, the drops swim as bubbles until new drops from above break them. After a while, the bubbles slip around on the floor; then suddenly, noiselessly, they disappear. Sometimes the net of drizzle is thin, sometimes dense. A pigeon hidden in its nest is scared of the rain and flaps its wings. I hear footsteps on the stairway, but no one comes out to the roof. I am terrified. It seems that if I want to take my leg out from the canopy and put it on the ground, I will not be able to touch the ground. No matter how far I stretch my leg, the ground is always too far away.

Sitting on a school bench, climbing stairs or playing jacks – suddenly I think about death. I forget the lesson; my foot turns to stone; my hands feel cold.

Can it really be…

I look all around me. Is it really true that one day…

I want to ask someone else. Maybe Uncle Shyam really was joking, or he really did not know. Maybe someone lied to him. But just in case what he told me was the truth, I do not want to ask anyone.

Uncle Shyam himself proved the truth of what he said. He had to have a hernia operation. After the operation, he seemed worse, so within a night, we brought him from Mayo Hospital in Lahore to Amritsar.

The veranda is closed off. Ten or twenty people sit in a circle around the cot. Frightened, I go to be near him. His eyes have no brightness or shine. He takes my hand and puts it on his lap. He says, ‘Oh, my dear Mohan.’

His hand feels very cold to me, and so does the floor beneath my feet. I myself feel very cold. I go to another room and lie with a pillow under my stomach. In a little while, the news comes that Uncle Shyam…

A fever climbs in my brain. It seems that Uncle Shyam and I are lying under the canopy. I stretch my leg, but it does not reach the ground. Uncle Shyam himself finally gets up and helps me get down, but there is still no ground beneath my feet. Taking hold of my finger, he takes me with him. There is a fog in front of us. The pigeon flaps its wings. The further we go, the thicker the fog becomes. The pigeon flaps harder. There are beads of perspiration on the back of Uncle Shyam’s neck. The fog seems red, as though it were on fire. The flapping wings become silent. I cannot see a thing. No voice comes out of my throat. Then somebody comes and puts a hand on my shoulder. Uncle Shyam lets go of me. A hand leads me out of the fog and flapping wings. Coming out, I see that the hand which led me is that of no one other than Uncle Shyam’s.

I am afraid of the dark. During the day I have dreams – at home, in school, anywhere, at any time. My head leans to one side; my eyes are heavy; my forehead wrinkles up; I doodle lines on my slate. The person in front of me seems to become double. The talk of audible voices fade out. Right in the middle of the teacher’s lecture, I slip into a trance.

On the marble floor, scattered yellow gorocun paste and bells of arti … the swift currents of the Ganga and on it, the tiny swimming lamps … young girls bathing at the ghat … fair, nice-looking bodies and wet transparent saris … smoke of ritual fire and chanting of mantras … open doors and decorated statues … lines of smoke oozing out of the incense stick … shapes colliding in the crowd of the celebration … the path full of rainwater and in it naked children dancing … an old woman Paro cursing the children…

‘Hey, Paro, you want some sugar cane?’ Making me stick pleasantly close to her, a girl ten years older kisses me … pages torn to shreds … a song swimming in the night breeze … the wax of a melting candle … shivering shadows … the fragrance of bread and the sound of Banarsi on the twisting staircase … carving letters in the door with a knife … sun and sugar cane peels spread on the roof … the hand raised to catch kites. Oh, I caught that! … the dirt path … tired feet and eyes drooping from sleep … the crowd yelling slogans of revolution … the sound of a violin in the wet darkness … shaking hand, dry lips, and in the body the first pangs of desire…

The reality of yesterday becomes today’s dream; tomorrow’s dream is drawn from today’s reality. Not one minute of our lives is isolated and free from moments of the past and future. Whatever happens, the mind dwells on what has passed and on the future. Every day of life seems to arrive germinated in the previous day – we are anxious to make the approaching tomorrow rise of itself.

This anxiety, this instability becomes habit. A moment doesn’t last in its desire to become the next one. Wherever you are, get up and go somewhere else. Leave whatever you are doing and start something else. If you are sitting and reading, turn the page every two minutes to see where your chapter ends. If you sit down to eat, gulp everything down in four minutes and then go to wash your hands. If you drop the glass, realize even before it hits the ground that it is broken.

Extremism comes from instability. If you drink tea, it is so hot that it burns your tongue. If you drink water, it is so cold that your throat starts to hurt. If you laugh, you laugh so much that you feel sad. If you are quiet, people start to worry about you. Your desires should be free like a waterfall rolling down a hill. If you see even a little bit of sadness in others, withdraw like a snail. If you sense even a little bit of intimacy in someone, tell everything about yourself. As soon as I feel bored, I withdraw miles away. Live in such a way that you always seem to be standing at the top of a peak; but be ready to fall before the gusts come.

Often I have a fever. My face is yellow for a few days and then becomes flushed. I do not want to go to school. Every day I hope that the school building has burned down. But every day, I am disappointed. I never see the fire brigade outside the school. Again and again when I have a fever, there is one good thing – a vacation from school.

I have to stay by myself when I have a fever. Father also becomes sick often and mother has to spend more time looking after him. He does more work for literary and cultural organizations than for his law practice. Therefore, unless he’s sick, as