There the sky was knowledge.
I was aware of the sky from the earliest hours of the morning. Without an
alarm clock I always woke when there was a change in the texture of the
darkness…as if the night had thrown a voluminous cloak around a shining
body….The dawn was incredibly swift.
By eleven the sky was burning
white beating light. I can’t remember looking up into it. Girls walked
quickly over the burning road in their bare feet, their sari ends pulled
down over their heads to shade their eyes.
Under the banyan tree at noon
there were strong cool winds but I don’t know how they came there from the
burning plains.
While the sun went down we
walked out toward the villages. Because of the flatness of the land the sky
was immensely wide and high. When the sun was golden our shadows were long
on the road. It struck the paddy fields horizontally a brilliant green.
Tribal men and women walking single file toward their villages were black
against the sky. Then the sun grew orange and the color growing darker
covered half the sky, a fierce red. The other half of the sky was then in
darkness. On those roads at sunset we drank, we breathed a freedom that was
like pure water to a man parched with thirst.