8 Quotes by O V Vijayan

Beyond the mountain lay untrodden tracks. Great unseen rains fell on those timeless springheads and the waters avalanched down muddy and turbulent, leaving the silt of age on the enfeebled pilgrim.

No, not on this journey of many lives, this journey of incredible burdens. Let me reach my inn, the village called Khasak

On either side of the footpath, tree and shrub and crag seemed alive in the thinning mist, like breathing embryos ...

Then would he share his sorrow with her, the placental sorrow, generation after generation; as he thought this, the sorrow spilled over to become the sorrow of karma, it was the scar of the sinner, the orphan’s pining, the despair of the one who thirsted for knowledge.

Meanwhile Appu-Kili had caught a dragonfly and with nimble fingers slipped a lasso round its tail. Abida looked at the dragonfly, into its eyes of a thousand crystals. The eyes shone dully with the chronicles of the dead. If dragonflies were memories of the dead, as they believed in Khasak, whose then was this memory? Perhaps it was her mother’s pining images of sin and regret and drowning. The crystal eyes fell on her.

She began to sob. Ravi received her sorrow like a desert does the rain.‘What are you running away from Ravi?’ asked the despairing voice.I wish to escape nothing, Ravi answered from within his silence, I want to be the sand of the desert, each grain of sand; I want to be the lake, each minute droplet. I want to be the laya, the dissolution.

Ravi listened to the ballad of Khasak in her, its heroic periods, its torrential winds and its banyan breezes. There was no death but only silver anklets and her eyes sparkling through the surma. Ravi looked deep into those eyes; the story would have no dying, only the slow and mysterious transit. He began in the style of the ancient fabulist.‘Once upon a time ...

ഇതു കര്‍മ്മപരന്പരയുടെ സ്നേഹരഹിതമായ കഥയാണ്. ഇതില്‍ അകല്‍ച്ചയും ദുഃഖവും മാത്രമേയുള്ളൂ.