Dusk arrival at the top of this mountain. Night descends after wending slow, roaming lonely kilometres of scars – barely healed – bloodless paths of trucks long gone, stubborn pines arising, unspoken witness. A whole plateau, freshly headless and accusatory. Nightstealers linger, patient sleepers in the amethyst-brush. Somehow we’ve made ourselves known to entire empires …
A couple of years ago, I came across the ideas and writings of archaeologist and former professor emeritus of archaeology at UCLA Marija Gimbutas in a heavy tome that I chanced upon in one of my used bookstore haunts (The Language of the Goddess). Filled with diagrams of artifacts and patterns found in Neolithic sites all …
Braving the notoriously dangerous traffic, this short essay that I wrote back in 2007 is about a spontaneous, (almost) death-defying, 80 kilometer day trip by scooter to Chidambaram, a holy site in southern India. Sun-baked and fleeting, the humid South Indian landscape falls beneath the thrumming wheels of our old scooter. In a roaring blur, …