Enlightened Fog (by alex martin)

October 10, 2009 at 4:45 pm · Filed under short fiction

A promising voice of Contemporary Oriental Literature, Alex Martin, historian and writer, describes India’s people with a frankness of prose and the concentration of an eye-witness. Having been to India several times, the author knows exactly what he is writing about.

Drawing on both a Hemingwayesque mode of writing and meticulous observations of daily (Indian) life, the Londoner succeeds in combining classic techniques of writing with touching perceptions of “the alienated foreigner”. At times, Martin’s convincing poetic and magical mode of writing is almost reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”.

I strongly recommend you to read “Enlightened Fog”, a short story that is as captivating, compulsive and contemporary as you could wish for.

Enlightened Fog

by Alex Martin

We embarked from the small bus stop to be greeted by little more than a row of tuk-tuk drivers sleeping in their cars. The town showed no signs of activity and we got into a tuk-tuk and drove into the surrounding green of the hills. The journey seemed eerily timeless as we drove past decayed walls and bridges. We drove by dusty schoolchildren playing on the roadside ambling towards their morning classes.

The scene was so foreign and alien to what we had seen before and it seemed so static. This same picture would no doubt have been seen two hundred years before and showed little signs of any challenge to it coming from the near future.  The day was rising from a heavy rainfall the day before and the horizon was a deep and lush green.  After twisting and turning along a minor road until the dim city presence was submerged into a light fog, the vehicle slowed to a stand-still. The road finished here and we were to walk the rest of the distance.

As we crunched our way up the pebbly road a grand yet decayed miniature palace emerged. It was a place so beautiful and recallable to my future imagination but a place of little significance to anyone else. It rose over a shimmering lake reflecting the hills of the distance. The place had five or six plastic tables on the veranda and casually served food and drinks. I ordered and waited with excitement, not for the meal but in lieu of my surroundings. The place seemed so placid. Monkeys would jump from the roof occasionally to grab food from a left table only to be beaten back by a waiter’s broom. I couldn’t help feeling deeply pensive about everything so far in the day.

A few days before and I had been back in England unchallenged by the unfamiliar, even the arrival in Delhi offered similarities – the cars, huge apartment buildings being erected, the international advertising billboards. India was a place that was on the up. I remember walking down a road of shopping malls which, but for its vastness, offered no difference to home but for the sand instead of tarmac. We stayed here for around an hour but I was not aware of time passing as one normally is. What struck me was the quiet and archaic beauty of the place. It was unaware of it. It was here in the Eastern Rajasthani hills that I was confronted with my inevitable Indian ‘culture shock’. It all seemed so perfect- still and tranquil and to my inquisitive eyes remarkably unaware of any novelty. To them the shooing of monkeys every so often was a necessary burden on their time – there was no doubt that they were pests. Yet it seemed to me so strange. Of course it was not strange to them; it was my un-acclimatized eyes that saw it this way.

I enjoyed everything about my time in India but my fondest memories are those of an awareness of difference. By the time I came home much that would have fascinated me on arrival was overlooked by my increasingly adjusted self. I wrote in my diary the evening I arrived at the school of the poverty and desperation of the nearby villages. I remarked on the tarpaulin covered roofs on the sides of the streets and wrote about their poverty and assumed suffering. When driving back towards Delhi passing those same villages for the final time I had realised that these were not unusual or even signs of poverty but commonplace. The villages were not poor just away from the influences of a modernizing and Western style India.

I remember a feeling of being enlightened to something new and different. We went into the forests below and found an ornate temple hidden to the world behind the canopies of overhanging trees.  I understood nothing of what was being said but left with a clay-red “tilak” on my forehead and a string bracelet on my wrist. I think one of the main things that made me think was the difference between this reality and my assumptions about India. I expected oppressive heat yet basked in the cool of the late winter. I was prepared for thriving commotion but sat in an openness challenged only by the light fog.

copyright alex martin, 2009.

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