Blind Faith. Sagarika Ghose

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      Blind Faith

      Sagarika Ghose

      CONTENTS

      DEDICATION

      1

      2

      3

      4

      5

      6

      7

      8

      9

      10

      11

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      2002

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      COPYRIGHT

      ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

      DEDICATION

      For IS and TS

      And all those willing to make a leap of faith

      1

      January 2001

      ALQUERIA, GOA

      When the plane from Delhi to Goa exploded in mid-air and plummeted into the Arabian Sea, the sky wavered momentarily like a computer screen ribbed by static.

      Below the falling airliner, the sea curved into a bay. Smooth ocean’s forehead against a springy hairline of palm. The waters of the bay were calm, ploughed occasionally by barges carrying manganese ore to big ships parked on the horizon. When the plane plunged in, the bay became a painting in which the colours had dissolved.

      At this very time, a fire raged on the seashore. In the seaside village of Alqueria, Sharkey’s Hotel burnt as strongly as the aircraft had before it hit the water. Fire engines along the beach sent blue flashes into the coconut trees. A lone figure sat upright on the beach, tense with accomplishment. Villagers gathered at the seafront, staring at the sky, at Sharkey’s, at the shards of plane sticking out from the water.

      We are constantly reminded, noted Father Rudy, priest of the Church of Santa Ana, that even after centuries of evolution, the human remains as wild as any animal.

      Alqueria. Tiny fishing village in north Goa. That night Alqueria was surrounded by fire. In the water, a burning plane. On land, a beach hotel in flames. The papers carried the news next morning:

       South Wind Airways flight SW 448 from Delhi to Goa, crashed into the Alqueria bay in north Goa last night. There are no reported survivors and navy divers are continuing their search for bodies. The black box has been found. Eyewitnesses say they heard a thunderclap and an explosion that looked like a fireworks display.

      The international conspirators who claimed responsibility for the bomb were the outer splinter of a cell gearing up to collaborate with more complicated international organizers elsewhere in the world. This explosion was only a small local rehearsal. A case study. A test of patterns of airport and aircraft infiltration.

      The year was 2001 and it was January.

      Eight months later, other aircrafts would cut through tall buildings on the opposite side of the world to herald a new century.

      But in Goa the bombers had unknowingly interfered in another plan.

      A plan that went unreported in the newspapers.

      2

      January 2000

      LONDON

      Mia saw him for the first time in London and at once realized the truth of the phrase, ‘not being able to believe one’s eyes’. He reminded her eerily of her father’s painting. He was a replica. A colour facsimile. A 3D projection of the man from the painting. A painting that had hung in her room for as long as she could remember. She frowned and looked again. Yes, unmistakably him. The man from the painting had leapt out of the canvas and walked into her life and the impossible had occurred as easily and as ordinarily as taking a train to work.

      She stared around and upwards. Boundless city, once on the frontlines of the Luftwaffe, now swarming with nations, religions, sexualities. And miracles. Yet for her the city had become remote. She felt excluded from it, as if the drunks sleeping in hotel doorways along the Strand were trying to trip her up as she passed. Bankers, lunchtime joggers, newly arrived Serbs, blues guitarists and students from the Czech Republic shouldered past. She felt far removed, sitting alone on a high wall from which she couldn’t climb down. She was at once over-excited and bored, liable to burst into tears even at advertising jingles, sometimes wanting to fade out from the world, other times wanting to courageously lead it.

      ‘A rapidly alternating state of sorrow and elation is often believed to be one of the first symptoms of hyperactive psychosis.’ The Drama of Depression by T. Rosenthal and M.O. Silver, M.D., a book she had been reading on the advice of a colleague.

      She had recently moved back into her parents’ nineteenth century, white, stucco-fronted flat in Belsize Park from her own apartment in Putney. She worked for a satellite television channel called SkyVision where the purple and pink studio sofas reminded her how unhappy reunited families could be.

      She tried to find the sun but it was only a vague outline through the clouds. Every evening she watched the faces on the Northern Line and wondered why everyone wasn’ t protesting aloud that the sun should be more responsive to consumer demand; that by not providing adequate amounts of sunshine it was artificially driving up its own price.

      Her parents’ apartment looked out onto a cherry tree and it was only a five-minute walk to the Eagle And Flag. After her father’s recent suicide, damp faces had begun to grimace through the wallpaper. His ghost lived on in the odour of oil-paint-and-turpentine that hung about the rooms.

      But now, as if to compensate for his death, her father’s painting had come alive in front of her eyes.

      The painting had appeared in Hyde Park. Clothed in white, mystic, wonderful. Ebony skin rose out of his white clothes like granite crags in a landscape of snow. Under a thick beard and bushy, shoulder-length hair she sensed a careless slant of cheekbone and a thin line of jaw. He wore small round glasses. Windswept. Windblown. Someone who looked as if had recently touched down on earth. Perhaps he wasn’t real and she was hallucinating. Her brain had registered something other than the physical reality – the way she had recently mistaken a stranger for a neighbour who, she had known, was long dead.

      Yet, there he was, standing in a crowd of people in Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, holding a demonstration of some kind, which she had been sent to cover for SkyVision. A group of men, in white shirts and trousers and no warm clothing despite the cold, held up banners. ‘Purification Journey’, the banners read. ‘Join the Movement to Purify Humanity’. ‘Your Water Is Pure, But Is Your Love?’

      A red-haired man was making a speech: ‘This is the time for the Inner War! A war between the positive and the negative self! Don’t turn your back on this war! Look around you! We have returned to a world of lust and obscenity. What is our solution? Come and find out in the Purification Journey. Learn breathing exercises, the joy of being human, the Pure Love of the Mother Woman. Learn about the Inner War.’

      He stood a little apart from the group. The odd man out. She noticed that strapped to his back was a childish toy: a wooden bow and arrow. A hilarious, fancy-dress party accessory. His eyes were intense and watchful, a novitiate, recently inducted into a monastery, looking around and thinking: Ah-so-this-is-my-life-now, this-is-my-life.

      Except for the bow and arrow, he was frighteningly, incredibly, similar to her man from the painting.

      She