Siṃhī’s World
“Far above her, at the top of the world, in the high branches of the undying tree.” A small bird of Amarāvatī goes down into the world to watch, and what she sees is heavier than she is. “No bird flies here. Least of all a bird of Amarāvatī, whose whole nature is the high air and the open sky and the light that does not end.”
“Far beneath the tall grass of the north, beneath the roots of the roots, there is a fire that should not burn, and does.” A snake keeps it, and not for himself. It is not beyond the map — it lies under the top of it, and the cub sleeps far to the south of it: “Above them, far to the south, the cub turned in her sleep against her father’s side.” How far down it goes belongs to Pakṣikā’s Fall, where a small bird falls the whole way and is told, “there is more cave than the room you fell into… there are doors below the deep one.”
THE CLIFF
“The top of the world.” Bhīma is “already there when she arrived,” and below it an ocean she had not known was there, with a bridge across it that is not built but “was becoming — not āsīt, little one. It was not there. It was arriving.”
THE OVERLOOK
Above a river, a man sitting very still, looking south. Kūrma walks the whole road and then stops at the bottom of it: “I did not climb with her. Some places a body has to reach alone.”
THE BARE STONE
Sāvitrī is simply present — “not arrived” — the way the light is. This is the one high place any book gives a direction, “in the west,” and it gives it only while saying which way she walked home: “she came down the western slope.”
The Valley of the Sun
Where the cub’s mother was born, and where she died. Siṃhī’s father tells her it is a different grass from the one under their tree, and that she does not yet have a word for it: “Grass that tall had a nature of its own, wherever it grew.” The pride that raised Gāyatrī “ranged the whole of this grass, south to the cold hills.” The storm that takes everything comes down out of it.
“North of the valley, in a dense forest, there is a cave — an opening in the ground that looks like any other opening.” Sarpa keeps what is down there. A storm drives a cub inside, and the snake — knowing she is sad and afraid — begins to tell her a story. What is under it goes further down than the cub ever sees.
“A modest valley, held between a western ridge where forest climbed the slope and a gentler eastern rise, a river running its whole length north to south, a dry streambed marking the valley’s western edge like an old scar healed pale.” Vajra’s Fire calls the eastern side a rise; every other book calls it the ridge, and the ridge is where the light comes up. The water hole lies east — “the water hole on the eastern side, where the pride came to drink” — and at the centre the ancient tree, older than everything around it by an age, with the high rise beside it where Gāyatrī sang. The acacia is the valley’s margin: “at the southern end where the shade is deepest,” and again as the line she passes going up and west toward the bare stone. It is not a destination in these books. It is what she walks through on the way out. The only forest is the one climbing the western ridge; when the fire comes it goes east, and what it leaves is bare ground — “where it had burned the ground was black and bare and open.” This is the grass the cub has a word for, and it comes to her shoulders. The other one came to her mother’s.
A broad brown ease yesterday; a churning width today. Sahasā — the change that arrives already finished, that you meet at its end because it never let you see its beginning. There is an old tortoise who has watched this river do it before.
“South — farther south than the pride’s territory, into the tall grass valleys where the light came down in long columns through the trees and the deer moved in the early morning before the heat rose.” Tall grass grows here too; the same kind, a different place. This valley has an acacia of its own — “the same acacia at the eastern edge, the same flat stone at the valley’s southern end” — and walking home you cross the open ground, pass through the acacia, and go up over the ridge, with the home valley north beyond it. On that flat stone a great bird sets down his wings. It is the valley she goes to alone, farther than the pride ranges, once she is old enough to want something of her own — to build a thing she cannot name yet.
“It begins in the red-grass country, in the far south of the world, in the season of the wrong wind.” Vajra was born here, in a world that had not yet burned. When the drought came and stayed, “the red grass went gold, then white, then a color that had no name — the color of things waiting.” And after the fire had taken it: “the ash was not a grave. It was a seedbed. He saw green come up through the black in a wave.” Beyond it lie the rock country, the ash country, the plain with the tree the fire waited in — “a road south through ash. A tree that waited” — and, further still, “the deep country past the edge of every map his mother’s stories had drawn.”
