Monthly Story, July 2022

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Image → Claudio Schwarz

Archetype → Magician

Rasa → Kāruṇyam (कारुण्यं): Compassion, mercy. Presiding deity: Yama. Colour: grey, Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow

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Kusum waited patiently for the bus conductor to punch the calculator for her balance; she had already done the mental math. She was used to calculating ahead of everyone in general. The painful hours waiting for the temple committee to figure out that her idea was, in fact, the most efficient… The years lived for her husband to finally comprehend her complex maneuvers to get ahead in life… These had made Kusum grow accustomed to waiting for others to catch up. After the conductor had moved to the next passenger, Kusum opened up her purse and peeked inside out of sheer nerves. Yes, the six-digit cheque was still there, safe.

Money had a strange dimension to it. It freed and weighed you at the same time.

Kusum felt the weight of this money particularly. She had taken it out of temple head monk Gunasāra’s drawer the day his unconscious body was rushed to the hospital. Being the chief donor’s wife, and the temple treasurer, Kusum had borrowed money from the head monk several times. He charged her a minimal interest and she returned the favour by overlooking many discrepancies in the temple accounts. That day too, Kusum had come to ask him for a loan to fund her daughter’s dream to start a hair salon in the city. But, in the calamity of the shaken-up temple rushing Gunasāra to the hospital, Kusum realised that she didn’t have to ask for the money. It was simply there, in Gunasāra's drawer—already stolen, as far as Kusum was concerned.

Throughout the week that followed, Kusum revisited her decision. Each time, she reminded herself how it was for a good reason. After finding her daughter Nimali on the bathroom floor—shaking and crying in hysterics holding chunks of cut-off hair—Kusum found a whole new part of herself awake. It was a part that awoke in every parent, when finding their child kicked in the gut by life, broken, and crownless. Kusum was ready to do anything to help Nimali live her dream—even if it meant finding amounts of money that she couldn’t acquire in the decades spent accounting.

Everything had a good reason. Life always evened out all checks and balances.

As the bus came to a halt, Kusum saw Nimali waiting for her. She asked Kusum a string of questions from what took her so long at the bank, to where they’re heading now. “I got you a place,” Kusum said, while crossing the street at the junction; She thrust her hand out at the careless motorcyclist who almost missed the red light. “A place? For wha...FOR MY SALON?’ Nimali asked, tripping on the sidewalk. Kusum smiled furtively and stopped in front of the crowded city mall. “Where???”, Nimali asked, wide eyes darting around in disbelief. Kusum pointed at the vacant storefront on the city mall’s ground floor. It faced one of the city’s busiest roads. She laughed out loud finding Nimali’s weight swung abruptly around her midriff, as the girl cried uncontrollably. “Come now..,” said Kusum. She tried to tuck what’s left of Nimali’s obliquely cut hair behind an ear, avoiding the stares of passersby. “How did you…?” Nimali asked, looking towards the large space. “Come, we must meet the building manager and put down the lease balance. Did you bring your ID?” asked Kusum, starting to climb up the mall stairs. “But, how?”, Nimali asked, wiping her face. “What are we accountants good for?,” Kusum asked without meeting her daughter’s eyes. “Saving up…?” Nimali asked, half frowning, half smiling.

The hardest part of weaving the bridge between reality and dreams was explaining it.

Kusum didn’t have to answer. Ecstatic, Nimali had flipped around and put her palms against the glass doors, eyes glistening and mouth open. Kusum smiled, seeing her girl crowned again. She basked in it for a moment until that familiar feeling of waiting for the world to catch up started to creep in from the corners. “Come on, let’s lock this lease in,” Kusum said walking inside with Nimali scrambling to keep up behind.

Read the previous 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, July 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 → Kāruṇyam (कारुण्यं): Compassion, mercy. Presiding deity: Yama. Colour: grey, Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow

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Archetype → Magicien

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“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” said Maya Angelou. Emotions are the first language. They are our most natural bridge to connect with another. Our understanding of other people is very much connected to our ability to observe, analyze and mirror others’ emotions—a very natural process for us humans who are inherently social creatures. Reaching consensus, communicating needs and sharing ideas, and experiences through empathy is our natural habitat.

Scientists now know that this capacity for empathy requires an exquisite interplay of neural networks enabling us to perceive the emotions of others, resonate with them emotionally and cognitively, to take in their perspectives, and to distinguish it with our own. In the eastern artistic theory of Rasa, compassion (karunā rasa) is an emotional state that often leads to creating empathy. Wrongs that right injustice, worldly sorrows weighing down a young person, longing for life’s dreams are compassion evoking themes that we used in this monthly story to induce empathy towards a morally compromising act. The main character of this story, Kusum, was built using the shadow side of the character archetype magician—the manipulator.

In this reading list, you’ll find stories, books, films, and research that connects to compassion, finding emotional empathy in moments that conflict with the cognitive and the magician archetype from Jungian psychology.

• 1994, I.A. Richards and Indian Theory of Rasa, Gupteshwar Prasad. Sarup & Sons, New Delhi, India. Page 24: This book details the rasa theory with parallels to other theories connecting to the arts and their enjoyment. Gupteshwar notes how being affected by others’ emotions is the primary condition of aesthetic enjoyment. He points to this impersonal identification of emotions as an extension of the ‘karuna rasa’, which is called ‘samvēdhana’ in the original rasa theory, and says it’s the same as what’s knowns as ‘empathy’ in English and ‘einfuhlung’ in German.

• 2016, Mind and creativity: Insights from rasa theory with special focus on sahrdaya (the appreciative critic). Louise Sundararajan, Maharaj K. Raina. The Sage Pub: Rasa theory suggests that there are three aspects or stages to art: the first is the creative process of the artist; the second is the artwork; and the third is the viewer’s response—when the artist’s experience is recreated through empathy. It further details Tādātmya—a state of the reader or spectator who loses for a while his or her personal self-consciousness and identifies him or herself with some character in the story or scene.

• Saradiel is a man who lived in Mawanella, Sri Lanka in the 19th century and was executed for theft and murder. Saradiel’s image is conflicting. Bandit, vigilante, people’s champion, lawbreaker, murderer, hero of the poor….it’s not easy to fit him into one box. Saradiel’s targets were mostly the rich aristocracy and colonial officials; he robbed, killed, and intimidated many. At the same time, he selflessly shared his loot with the poor and fought against injustices that they suffered at the hands of the rich and the powerful. He is sometimes listed among national heroes. But, he is also marked as a dangerous criminal. Despite the sticky image, people still visit his last jail cell, and his tales have been made into many books, films and tele dramas. Saradiel certainly occupies that difficult space between hero and outlaw. In Saradiel’s stories, we see how a criminal by law is capable of evoking empathy even in usually law-abiding people.

• When Carl Jung first identified the ‘Magician’ archetype, he called it the Philemon. In his Liber Secundus we are introduced to Philemon, the ‘magician’. On the nature of magic Jung derived from Philemon he has written, “there is nothing to understand…Magic happens to be everything that eludes comprehension.” The difficulty with magic is precisely the difficulty of existing without reason. The foundation responsible for bringing Carl Jung’s works to the world is called the Philemon Foundation after this archetype that deeply influenced Jung.

• The antihero is a character type that blurs the line between good and evil, and achieves a justified cause in their own way, often questioning morality. They are morally ambiguous and lack conventional heroic attributes. Unlike the ‘hero’—who is an idealized, flawless personality—the ‘anti-hero’ is more human and relatable to the average person, evoking their compassion and empathy.

The antihero

The Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil

Patrick Bateman

The Narrator (Fight Club)

Lestat de Lioncourt (The Vampire Chronicles)

Man with no name (The Dollars trilogy)

Nancy Botwin (Weeds)

• 2009, Royal, Warrior, Magician, Lover—Archetypal reflectivity and the construction of professional knowledge. Darrell Dobson, Teacher Education Quarterly (Pages 154-157): Dobson identifies the magician archetype as one that actively seeks to put that content and methodological knowledge in service to the fullest possible individual and social development every day, and recognizes that such a practice derives from and will provide encounters with the numinous, whether in mathematics, science or art. He identifies the active shadow magician is the manipulator—who has either not mastered his technologies or himself, or both.

• 2012, “Rasa Yatra” — Using film to teach cross-cultural empathy, Martin Haigh, Planet, 26:1, 51-58: Empathy is a key skill for intercultural understanding. This paper evaluates the results of a pilot study for an exercise designed to introduce undergraduate geographers to the problems of interpreting emotional messages from an unfamiliar culture and worldview. Learners are set the task of interpreting the emotional content of this film and of trying to share the feelings of another.

>> Read the previous reading list

Monthly Story, June 2022

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Image → A.Savin

Archetype → Creator

Rasa → Raudram (रौद्रं): Fury. Presiding deity: Shiva. Colour: red, Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow

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Nicole watched the homeless man by the Colombo rail from under her long bangs and lowered eyelids. This man’s hair seemed to have somehow been dried, blown and sprayed to perfection from nothing but the Colombo heat, salinity of June air and the monsoon winds. Thinking about how she failed to create the same beach waves at her hairstyling course exam that morning, Nicole felt something searing painfully in her gut; It shaped a toxic orange feeling.

When the world hands out what you’ve bled for, to someone who doesn’t even care, what the hell does that even mean?

A familiar voice inside Nicole’s head started a monologue of everyday injustices, stinging against her threshold. It was a chili-red coloured voice that always triggered the memory of sour mangoes in her taste nerves.

Seeing the homeless man’s beach waves had also scratched Nicole’s faith in the world. Things like the heatwave that passed through the city this morning (altering the very dynamics between keratin and water particles) and the model’s hair appearing surely vitamin-deficient no longer seemed like coincidences, but pitfalls set up by a conniving world. A few hours later, by the time it was her stop, something in Nicole was screeching in unison with the train coming to a halt.

Nicole hated coming back to her parents’ village where everyone knew her as ‘Nimali’—the given-name that she no longer identified with. Head lowered, but eyes scrutinizing from behind her long fringe, Nicole found offence in how the villagers on the street had the same hair—oiled and tied back or combed to a side.

Can a homogenous bubble be called life? Isn’t sameness a state of death than of being alive?

Nicole's chili-red voice muttered all the way home, prickling the sides of her tongue with a pleasurable sting. Her mother was standing by the gate, waiting. She showered Nicole with questions about lunch, breakfast, the house keys, laundry, reducing the length of the fringe, the exact temperature in Colombo... Nicole answered everything and nothing with ohs, hms, nuhs, and mh-huhs.

Is it still home if your instinct is to escape it?

Nicole walked in with her mother following two steps behind questioning what she’d like to eat. Sitting on a kitchen chair with hands quietly clasped on the table, zoning out from her mother’s string of questions, Nicole seemed almost composed. But, she had a scream welling up inside. Nicole knew this scream; It always came in a voice of deep burgundy and brought on a metallic taste on her tongue.

When her mother started asking about the hairstyling course exams, Nicole could no longer take it. She covered her mouth and ran into the bathroom. The trail of her surprised mother’s voice shouting in the background—about getting a bladder infection from holding it in for so long—came to an abrupt end when Nicole locked the door behind herself.

Between aspirations and expectations was a hellish place.

Hands clasped tightly over the mouth, Nicole watched her reflection in the bathroom mirror as the silent scream unraveled inside. It felt as if the burgundy-coloured loathing was being spewed all over her interiors. From the burgundy-bathed inside, came another voice—a new one Nicole had never heard before. It was an ugly shade between purple and wine red and induced a tinge of bitterness at the back of her tongue. The new voice spoke heavy and monotonous. It dropped words like a shaman’s drum beats inducing an altered state of consciousness; Words that Nicole couldn’t bear to hear; Mediocre. Dull. Forgettable...

In a moment of noxious revulsion, Nicole grabbed the little trimming scissor inside the jar with tweezers, combs and clippers. With shaking hands and short scissor blades inadequate for the task, she cut off her long, thick fringe in careless, irregular strokes. Nicole felt the weight of the entire year that she spent devotedly growing and shaping her fringe dissipate into air as the cut hairs fell at her feet.

Maybe it’s best to get nothing free from the world, and owe nothing free in return.

Nicole swallowed the last of the bitterness as the wine-purple receded, and a jagged hairline hung like a torn curtain above her face.

Read the previous 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.