chuba

Sorry it took so long for the next installment. Rehearsals have kept me busy. Here goes India part duex:

As a suddenly as a footstep in a crowd, one persons whole life can change.
I jump down, turn around, and clap my hands to signal my readiness to receive the cooler from the boat, like a sack of Jamaican sugar from my pirate vessel. Then I am held in waiting as I watch the true captain, Hasari, coaxing my parents off the boat by the hand, like Noah convincing the oldest pair of animals to finally leave the ark. Mustnt think of the mundane at this moment. Must keep my mind on sacred thoughts. Power of Now, PowerofNow, powerof-Oh Jesus, mom! Just put your foot on the ground.
I look away, and turn my attentions backward to see the warm, mysteriously open, body of the travel ahead of me. Having been told, on good authority, this is one the most beautiful visiting places in the whole district of Ramanathapurani, I find myself catching in the throat. Nature only allows us to be a part of it. We can never understand the whole rhyme and reason to all her doings.
But this island breathes and sighs in the heat before me. The salt of an unmarried sea, and forgotten mineral shards, shining scars of the ancient wounds of mountains she had left and would return to again, lay glistening at the surface of the sand. To me it seemed like the sweat on an afternoon lover, only perfect because no matter what happens tomorrow no one will ever see it just this way again. The wind pushed its way into the trees and trail ahead of us caterwauling a silence, then being given a voice by there presence like that of girls laughing in secret. Then my own brain betrayed me, asking the kind of question which slips to the front of the tongue with the autonomy of inbred royalty.
There are monkeys on the island right?
Uh, yes miss, lots of monkeys. Its what the island is famous for.
Right, sorry. I knew that, my head was just somewhere else.
We get trips out here everyday. The storm was broken up a great deal by Sri Lanka in this area, so we have had fairly usual business here with visitors.
Yeah, its so beautiful out here I might have to steal one of your boats and come back every day.
Haha, yes.
Hahaha. You dont know how close you came buddy.

My mind in this story must leap forward now. Past beautiful unnamed plant life Ive never seen before, past the way sunshine and air move strangely in a foreign place; past a cliff and tiny waterfall where myth says the beautiful Ramchandi threw herself to eternity after the death of her lover Om, who fell trying to cut a rarely scented flower with the face of a screaming tiger. We hold on this thought for a moment, as I remember the feeling of loss. Not in the sense of death or love mind you, but loss in the sense of our own human smallness. That something so seemingly grand, so outwardly deified is such a simple truth. Their tale only sustained through time because of the beauty and solitude of its location. Had there been a Ramchandi at the window of my hotel, surely no one would speak of her. Nor does one remember the heroics or theatrics of that day, only the symbolic events, only the silent scream of the tiger Nature in defiance of the stumbling fate of humanity. But we try to concentrate on the aspect of love, being more pleasing to the breathlessness of our few days here.
Finally we arrived at the point proposed, my mom and dad adjusting to the heat and sultry air through a mixture of exercise and distraction, the forest and mentionable viewpoints, taking precedence over bra strap and skin-clung cotton.
Honey, hold on a second. Let me get into your backpack, momma needs a Luna bar. You want one? These things are excellent.
No thats okay, dont forget to zip it up.
The momentary crinkling of a savage unwrapping follows.
Wait-ssh!
What is it?
Look, there they are.
Girls, get the camera.
Sssh, dad, hold on.
I hold my breath, giving my eyes a chance to lock onto the eyes already staring at me. This is a moment of discovery. We let our heads open up to the periphery, and notice suddenly a whole family of them. Adorable in all shapes and sizes they sit watching. Some in trees, some small enough they barely rest in saplings, even one daring enough to sit on a large stone at the trails edge facing us.
Oh my God. Would you look at that?
Amazing.
Their fur in separate states of muddled gray and browns, all with an overshadowing of white, their faces surrounded by the fur and yet so clean looking, so human, like funny old men who each spent a hundred years laughing. Their eyes though, were young, a childs exploration in each pair. Blackened and powerful hands that seemed forced to allow the bodies the freedoms they needed to go any and everywhere.
In this moment I have become a pirate, an explorer, a discoverer of new moments. I am doing something no one else has done. Seeing a moment of the world frozen in time and never to be repeated. Maybe Ive been wrong, maybe there is a majesty in the story of two lovers that only the third character Nature can lend. Surely these faces, so innocent and free of our petty thoughts, hold a nobility of the instinctual entirety in the very land around us that humans have forgotten, or let drift away. Surely these eyes as open and ready as an enlightened monk being reborn into a new body hold a secret knowledge.
Then came the scream.
Oh Christ! Oh Jesus! What are you doing?
Hey! Agggghhh! Let go of her, you little bastard!
Why are you screaming!?
Im trying to scare it! Aaaaagggghhh!
I stand momentarily frozen by truth. A middling one had leaped, in one motion, from a tree to my mother. And now clinging to her hips with his legs like a manic toddler, he wrestles her, hand to hand, for the exquisitely pointless gift of her half-eaten Luna bar.
Oh shit.
I am startled alive again by the screaming of my father being followed by the laughing howls of a thinning audience of monkey onlookers.
Mom! Let it go! Just let go of it!
Aaaaagh! Get off of her you little bastard!
I saw the refusal in my mothers eyes. I also saw the truth in the monkeys eyes. What had seemed to me a beautiful awareness now appeared to be a vicious, single-minded, selfish wanting. A very golem in our presence, a lowly thief, and my own mother was sharing that face. They looked for a second like the fearsome fish of the Ying Yang, their only balance being the attainment of this granola of enlightenment. My father stood on their side trying to pry them off of one another with a stick, I thought of Jesus storming the markets outside of the temple.
You will give me that back, right now!
The growl in her voice turns me back into a five year old. For no reason at all, I feel as if Id done something wrong for a moment.
Oh shes right! Just let it go!
Oh no I wont! This is mine, mine!
With a final hurtling shake, the monkey, no larger in truth than an emaciated tot in a Halloween costume, was flung off my mother with a tiny shriek. This followed by a bewildered look, and then a half-hearted flinging of some pebbles and dirt at my parents legs.
Hahah! I got you, you little S. O. B.!
He screeched back shortly, and then disappeared back into the trees as simply as hed arrived.
Oh my God!
What in the hell was that?
What is going on in this place? Do they just let things like that happen all the time?
Its all right. Im all right.
What the hell is going on in this place? Is anything I thought really anything at all? Are we and nature all one thing? Are we all so small? My mother sat down on the stone previously occupied by one of the confederate thieves of this monkey kingdom, and started laughing, to herself at first, and then to the both of us.
I dont know what came over me.
You got him good honey. Here, drink thisthat was something.
My dad handed her water like a proud corner man, cheering his new fighter on to a winning bout.
I had thought we came here as aliens looking for something extravagant to take home. I thought we were going to see something, learn something that would lift us up where nature, and the genius of the world live. Instead Im told we are not outsiders, not really. We are home, and today nature came to us, or rather, came out of my mother to greet her adversary. There wasnt a secret knowledge in this forest, or a hidden truth. There was only truth. And nature. We are all the Screaming Tiger waiting to be cut. The earth shall always decide whether our footing will hold, or if we must go back the way we came.

Let me know what'cha think y'all.