Monthly Story, December 2022

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Image → Angela Roma

Archetype → Caregiver

Rasa → Śāntam: Peace or tranquility. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: perpetual white.

Śṛṅgāraḥ (शृङ्गारः): Romance, Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: light green,

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As Jamila stepped onto the cobblestone floors, a reassuring composure welcomed her. It was her favourite villa at the old Dutch fort. Although a sunny April sat outside, it felt as if she had just weathered a storm. Feeling her phone vibrating again, Jamila held down the power button without looking at the screen. Her former fiancé, his family, and her family drove her crazy—collectively and individually. She just had to shut them out.

Jamila drank in the space hungrily while being checked in. It was a spectacular seventeenth-century hospice building turned into a villa. Although she had covetously dined at its restaurant, and religiously liked every single picture that they posted, Jamila had never stayed here before. In fact, she had never stayed anywhere alone before. Her right leg shuddered, twitching unstoppably under the reception desk. The old hospice walls reassured her that everything will be alright. Surrounded by its wizened beauty—holding the centuries within limestone pores, bearing countless stories of broken minds and bones that healed between these walls—Jamila couldn’t help but trust this place.

As soon as left alone in the room, she turned the bathtub tap on and started to undress. Jamila watched her own body emerge from the clothes. She took herself in the mirror; reflection of the familiar, yet unfamiliar woman in the mirror. She pressed her hand on the arm just to make sure. Yesterday, she was soon to be wedded to someone everyone else thought was good for her. Today, she was someone who sold her engagement ring and rented a room alone at her favourite villa. She pressed her bare feet against the old cobblestone bathroom floor. The high window snuck in a streak of southern sun that fell on her hair making it shine black-bronze. 'You're worth it', a gentle thought permeated from the tranquility of the old place.

Then, with an incredible release, Jamila wept.

As the pain receded, Jamila felt comforted by the old walls surrounding her with their limestone warmth. The water fell into the tub in a gentle dialogue of liquid and metal, as if to reassure her.

Finally emptied, Jamila wiped her face and turned the tap off. She lowered herself into the bathtub and felt the warm water surround her with liquid grace. Jamila realized that her insides had been brewing a storm since the arranged marriage was confirmed last year. And, when it finally broke out in lashing rains and thunder yesterday, she called off the engagement and didn’t return home to her parents after work. She came to the villa instead. Coming dangerously close to getting locked into a default life that wasn’t hers, Jamila understood that without making room for what she really wants, there will never be space for happiness. But, now what? Jamila had no answers.

Everything will be alright, all in due time; the old limestone walls assured her.

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Go to Reading List for this story.

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The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Monthly Story, November 2022

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Image → Inna Rabotyagina

Archetype → Utopian

Rasa → Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: Yellow. Śṛṅgāraḥ (शृङ्गारः): Romance, Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: light green,

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The crisp brush of his white cotton shirt on my skin.

The smell of the sea on his skin.

That immortal place where everything is at rest, and even the coconut palms leaned comfortably into the call of gravity.

I’ve always known that inside every person, there is a place. Inside my father, there was a place thick with wild lagoon fear and intermittent bays of total abandonment—a lot like the village that he grew up in. In my mother, there’s a clear, cold, calculating lake. In my grandfather, there were rocky mountains with grey peaks; unchanging, silent, intense, and watchful. Inside me, is an abandoned old city, with worn walls bathed in a warm night that would never birth a dawn. Each place was different from the other as we were from one another; but, they were also similar in how all our places shared some form of torment.

But, inside Sunil, there was a place that I dared to call paradise. It was a sunlit ocean shore shaded with tall palms waving in the breeze. You could perhaps even see a little house between the faraway palm groves where the beach curved in the distance—well beyond earshot. Ahead, it blazed hot gold along the stretch of sand. But, under his palms, it was always cool, and the air was free of the sun’s noon frenzy. When my eyes adjusted to the shade, I could see that the sea was no longer made of glimmering diamonds, but a clear blue. I’ve never seen a place quite like Sunil’s shore. It had no shadow of hunger, hurt or fear that I felt in everyone else. On Sunil's shore, I would always sit down and forget to leave. He was where I liked to fall asleep.

I remember the way he thought about it carefully when I asked what his name meant. ‘Sunil? Hm. Clear, cool, water. Something blue...’, he said after much thought.

I’ve now given up trying to forget the way he talked about the sea; how he said he loved to go fishing and swimming in the mornings because the sea nurses a sense of danger that is natural, gentle and latent—something he liked to be reminded of every day. It was such an honest and subtle flirtation with death that it wasn't morbid in any sense. “Everything began in the sea, and everything will end in it,” he’d say in his placid blue voice. When I asked him how he learnt these things, he looked puzzled for a second. “You just watch and you see, isn’t it?”

I haven’t visited the seaside south for four months now; half out of being unable to bear the pain of remaining just a guest and not part of that dream; half out of the fear of looking Sunil in the eye after the things I’ve imagined through the nights in my apartment. But, the voice in my head telling me to resign from the firm and move to the south never rests now.

Today I went to the beach near my city; just to smell the salt air again. Although it was small, dirty, and full of people, I still found traces of Sunil in the smell, sound and sight of the sea. The salinity cleansed me of greyness—and I could long for him again without breaking.

I remember his weight on me. A clear, clean, blue airborne sensation entered at the tips of my hairs and swam all the way through me, making cool sea moisture on my skin. His memory came to rest in me, as apparent, as distant, and as real as the horizon.

Read the previous story

Go to Reading List for this story.

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The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Reading List, November 2022

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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.

We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.

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Rasa → Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow. Śṛṅgāraḥ (शृङ्गारः): Romance, Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: light green

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Archetype → Utopian

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“I know, I know a place in the sun by the fountain of time,

where the air is kind.

I know, I know, because I hold it in my secret pocket—

a dream taken from between sleep and wake, never to be forgotten.”

There’s something acutely human about the idea of paradise. Other beings like animals and plants don’t seem preoccupied as we humans are with this idea of a place of never-ending peace and happiness. Perhaps, in the sense that they don’t question or compare the perfection of their reality, they never left promised land. Even children unacquainted with life’s harder facets or long-range worries remain in this blissfully innocent dream.

But, not all adult humans lose sight of utopia. Some of us hold on to the dream through the grind and still find ways to return to paradise through textures, tastes, sights, smells, stories, places, or people. These natives of promised land are known as the ‘innocent’ or ‘child’ archetype in Jungian psychology. When we use this archetype in storytelling to construct characters, we find it more appropriate to deem it ‘utopian’ to avoid biases. The utopians’ strength is their inextinguishable optimism. Their charm is their innocence. The core desire driving this archetype is returning to paradise—whether it’s something they held and lost, or have only dreamt of. This is the archetype that we used to construct Tanya’s character in this monthly story.

Complementing Tanya’s character, we chose the moods of wonder and beauty for this story. Moods like wonder (adbūtha rasa) and beauty (sringāra rasa) are storytelling tools that we’ve adopted from the eastern performance theory of Rasa, which describes nine elemental moods for all works of art.

This reading list will take you through the ideas, incidents, people, films, music and research that inspired us through the making of this story.

November 2022

• 1944, Gamperaliya. Martin Wickremasinghe: One of the most iconic stories that communicate the timeless narrative of losing paradise in South Asian literature is Gamperaliya. It captures the story of changing times through a southern village going through a cultural and class system upheaval.

• Translating between garden and paradise: Gardens have been used as models of paradise for as long as human civilization goes. After the beginning of agriculture, humans seem to have bridged their sense of separation from nature with fantasies of paradise that translated to gardening over time.

• 1955, Orson Welles interview excerpt. Persistence of Cinema: Welles talks about how his innocence of the film craft and naive optimism about what a camera could capture in cinema led to one of his greatest successes as a new director.

• 2009, Panpsychism in history, an overview. David Skrbina: Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness doesn’t stop at living things, that it did not develop to meet survival needs, nor that it emerged when animal brains evolved to be complex enough. Instead, consciousness is inherent to matter—all matter. Stones and stars, electrons and photons, and even quarks have consciousness.

• 2021, The Conscious Universe. Joe Zadeh. Noema Magazine: The radical idea that everything has elements of consciousness is reemerging and breathing new life into a cold and mechanical cosmos.

• Love and erotic expression are perhaps the most widely explored emotions and experiences in all types of art forms throughout the world. Sringāra rasa ( the aesthetic mood described as romance, love, and beauty) is sometimes known as the mother of all rasas and has remained one of the most popular rasas of all time. It has two base points—union and separation.

• The 43 Group led by Lionel Wendt was at the forefront of Sri Lanka’s modernist movement, depicting Ceylonese life at the time, and bearing witness to the culture of this country with great artistic truthfulness. Their work, depicting people, moments, fantasies, landscapes and everyday life played an important role in refreshing Sri Lanka’s reputation as an island paradise.

• 2022, Picturing Paradise, the hereafter in art and religion panel discussion with Pujan Gandhi, Amy Landau, Ben Quash, and Melissa Raphael: Our cultural and devotional imagination is enriched by the ongoing attempts artists make to visualize the invisible, and in this symposium, historians and curators specializing in Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Christian and Islamic art will account for the diversity of these beliefs about paradise through the lens of art both historic and contemporary. Scroll down to watch the video recording (documentation) of this online event.

• 1993. Expressionist utopias: paradise, metropolis, architectural fantasy. Benson, Timothy, O. Frisby, David. Calif, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• 2011, Alison Carroll: Gauguin And The Idea Of An Asian Paradise: Paul Gauguin not only offered the world a fresh view of itself but also suggested that there may well be places where paradises existed. That place was the South Seas. Much inspired by Gauguin’s example, many artists sought out Southeast Asia as their paradise.

• 2021, Within the Known: Wonder That Comes from Understanding. Amanda Vick: Is understanding contradictory to wonder? There are two sub-moods of the Adbhuta Rasa (the mood of wonder) in the eastern Rasa theory. The first includes wonder that occurs when there is a lack of understanding of an experience that could be understood. The second sub-mood comes from not understanding experiences that cannot be understood. What is the possibility of understanding leading to or supporting experiences of wonder? To explore the concept of wonder, thirty interviews were conducted in this study.

• Paradise is reflected in Islamic art and culture in distinctive ways with remarkable ideological continuity in the Muslim world. The concept of paradise, a part of the Islamic cosmos, is put forth in the Quran through ayat or "signs for men possessed of mind". The term used to describe Paradise often is Jannat or gardens. The Islamic garden mirrors this idea of paradise.

• 1808, William Blake. Illustrations for Paradise Lost: As a poet and artist, William Blake had a highly personal response to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). He produced books inspired by the poet, designs for Milton’s Comus (1801), as well as pencil sketches, paintings and three sets of illustrations of Paradise Lost. These are archived in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Huntington Library and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

>> Read the previous reading list