VALENTINE´S AT MADRAS

From the very first day on, I felt being home, although I hadn´t have any before. It was a familiar sensation, never formerly experienced at any town in which I had lived. Some cities have bewitched me just on arriving, others seemed to me, and continue seeming, delightful places for setting on a plenty live; I remember some with great joy for everlasting passions, even for once, I started missing a village prior to arrival.

It is different here. There are ravens instead of storchs that I see during the morning taichi, and they are my home crows. It is greatness corrupted into misery what I feel everywhere, and it is my home misery. Throughout the deafening traffic noise, the electrical transformers, and the poluted air; the soft essence of jasmine reaches me, and it is my home jasmine. I look right and I find myself dining at Le Meridien, I look left and I found myself atonished at the sight of the cat with a brilliant green neck pidgeon catched in the mouth. I ride to the work site and at each instant I expect to see the tiger coming out of the undergrowth, and it is my home tiger carrying the story of life written on its skin.

Surrounded by a heat that soon will be unbearable, today it rained for the first time in Madras. Now the sun sets beyond mountains that I am told to stand west. Southwards lies Kerala, where the summer monsoon enters India. Eastwards, the Bengala Gulf remembers me that here too the light splendour is that of Dyonisio rather than Apollon.

And my eyes are looking north, where thousand miles away the most sacred places on earth are sited. I do not know to which I will be assigned, the nerve that moves my compass still oscillates looking for a course; I know I will meet it home, here where I am beginning to recognize the eternal food for hope.