The book of Shadows - Excerpt - Fiction

New Internationalist, Oct, 2001 by Namita Gokhale

One night, as I was brushing my hair in the dressing room, I had a curious experience. I was overtaken by the sensation that my feet were not where I expected them to be. The ground below me had lost its authority, it no longer exercise the inevitable pull of gravity. The jute matting beneath me had abandoned faith and logic and assumed a life and form of its own. I felt weirdly disembodied; I was flailing, and my senses were overshooting themselves. It was as if I were receiving no information from my peripheries, as though my centre had been displaced. The fundamental and organic mooring of personality had completely abandoned me - I was as floppy as a ragdoll, but in the hands of what monstrous child I could not say.

My core felt different - it was as though I had been breached, as though someone or something had infiltrated me. I can remember quite clearly that my arms and legs began to go numb, and that there was a deep ringing sound in my ears. My voice when I spoke my own name out loud was hollow and suspect.

I remember awakening that night to find an iridescence suffusing the room. It was a circlet of light, like a gas balloon, or like ectoplasm, as I would imagine it to be from what I have read about seances and things like that. It wasn't fuzzy at the edges, but quite well defined, with a double-edged outline of orange and pink shaping its billowing luminescence. It hovered over the old desk that stood in the corner, it looked gentle and utterly harmless. I reached out under the bed for Lady's warm brown fur, and fell asleep again.

I dreamt of a woman standing in a garden, a bunch of summer blooms in her hand. I dreamt of a man in a cassock climbing uphill. When he turned to face me I confronted the deep empty sockets of his skeletal face. Yet I could sense that his eyes were sad, and that the grim contortions of his smile, of calcium and bared cartilage, were a travesty of his deepest emotions. I dreamt of deep night and a procession of fireflies. When I emerged from my night-consciousness I recalled these images with clarity and precision. I found they did not leave me or erode in my memory as the day progressed.

The Book of Shadows by Namita Gokhale is published by Abacus, 2001, (ISBN 0 349 11 231).www.littlebrown.co.uk

Namita Gokhale was born in the Kumaon Himalayas in 1956 and now lives in Delhi. She has had three previous ovels published in India; Gods, Graves and Grandmothers; Mountain Echoes and Paro, Dreams of Passion. The latter caused a stir when it was published in the 1980, pioneering a sexually frank genre in Indian writing. During this time she almost died of cancer and lost her young husband from cirrhosis of the liver. In recent years death, love and lust have been her most common themes and she gives advice on bereavement in a regular newspaper column. She has said, in a personal note on The Book of Shadows; 'I too have lived in the house I have written about. This is a novel which has it core in truth. It has been written itself, under circumstances which would appear strange to most people. It has been a vehicle to resolve my personal pain, but there is more to it than that.'