Here follow the first couple of pages of my first novel, The Moment, Before Sleep. It’s set up like a symphony–that’s why there’s a “Program” and “Prelude”.
Program
Ah, to look, for God in a book!
A blind writer in a library far away—or perhaps no further than the breadth of ones breath—opened the door to his writing-room. He placed his sheaf of invisible sheets upon a table, perplexed. He’d been writing of an Indian emperor, the 16th century Mughal Akbar, who’d once called off a tiger hunt. Akbar had been as dazzled by tigers as he’d been. And one day, in a sudden fit of revulsion at the idea of killing such a noble creature, Akbar had called off the hunt. But something strange had started to happen—
A Zoroastrian holy man, a fire-worshipper, had made his appearance. Akbar claimed the fire-worshipper had visited him decades ago. Nothing was strange about this: the blind writer knew that the Mughal Emperor had often had holy men of different faiths pulled up to his room on a platform that hung right outside his bedroom window in the palace. Akbar loved discussing the mysteries of all faiths with the learned.
But what confused the blind writer was that the fire-worshipper seemed to be the same one in The Circular Ruins, a story he himself had written so many ages ago, it seemed another life. He’d had absolutely no intention to write of the fire-worshipper now. Could it be possible, that one of his characters was now writing his story? He recalled the last line of that story—written so long ago that he felt it was someone else’s words—
“With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.”
But it couldn’t be—he, the blind man, was writing this story right now.
Wasn’t he?
He sighed, walking to an armchair. He was stuck in this story anyway. Perhaps sleep would bring inspiration. He lay back his head, and dreamed…
…we are all connected, each one of us a single syllable in a musical composition unbearably beautiful, horrific, wondrous. A symphony of spirits created, perhaps, by a dreaming deity? For whom the whole of time is the holiest of mysteries. And the only entry into that dreaming world is through the moment, before sleep…
PRELUDE
1. all the while, in blessing
Ashwini wasn’t dreaming.
Was she?
As she watched the dancer offer his vibrant grace-lit spirit to the audience gathered on the coast of the Arabian Sea, she found her mind moving in several different melodic directions.
All steeped within the world of dance.
From Nataraja, the great cosmic dancer who danced life into death and back again, all the while holding his right palm outward in blessing, to the Emperor Akbar, who created a sanctuary for music, philosophy, and the arts in his fortress-city whose streets she knew by heart, to a newspaper article she’d read that morning of the genocide in Rwanda. How could such impossibly beautiful dance and impossible-to-believe death spirals exist within miles of each other upon the same planet? Only a mere leap across an ocean away….
She remembered a line in a film song she’d loved, about a woman so enraptured with the wonder of the world she wanted to wrap the earth in a sari. Ashwini smiled to herself. To wrap the whole world in a sari, a sari as light as starlight whose colors were as varied as the smiles of a thousand sunrises, as the sighs of hundreds of sunsets. Really, she dreamed too much.
But she wasn’t dreaming, she was gloriously awake, still watching the dancer. What would a sari-wrapped earth be but a mere bauble for Nataraja to toss in the air as he danced and danced?
One right hand holding the drum of creation.
One left hand holding the fire of destruction.
Another left hand pointing to the demon of vicious selfishness Nataraja stood upon.
All within a ring of fire, the circle of universal energetic connection.
But Nataraja didn’t simply kill the demon.
He danced upon it with abandon, lithely with vivid life, his other right hand steady, palm facing outward,
held all the while, in blessing.
