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The Beginning. Chapter from Like Two Rivers

The Beginning

Kheerganga. Parvati Valley. May. 1968.

Lukas is walking barefoot across the steep meadow, away from the log cabin. The first bright spring morning makes the short grass shine. It gleams in his rock crystal prayer beads. Babaji is sitting at a distance, cross-legged and erect on a smooth, flat rock that the sun has dried of night dew. Around him, he has laid out to dry: two dark khaki, woollen shawls and three, white cotton loincloths. He washed them in the holy spring, Kheerganga. When Lukas comes closer, he can see that the sadhu is polishing the copper snake bracelet with ruby eyes. His two strings of gnarly wooden beads are stretched out, dark and damp, on top of the shawls. The air is filled with the scent of wet wool and wood.

This is everything the sadhu owns.

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Seeking Sage

“So…he is a character in your novel?” she asks as we walk up towards his tiny house. A familiar anticipatory silence unfurls itself softly along the mountain path.

“He is the inspiration,” I say quietly and think about the enormous and old Himalayan cedar that shades his slate roof. I often imagine when he is no more, he will exist as this majestic tree and I will continue to visit, to rest my back against the sturdy and immortal trunk, inhale its fragrance and close my eyes. “For more than thirty years I lost contact with him, he was by my side all along, but I only realized it when I found him again,” I attempt to explain.

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Lost in the Mind; A Medieval Madhouse in Aleppo

“Madness is an inability to know dream from reality “-Ibn Sina

Aleppo, Syria, December 1984: “Unexpectedly Nabil stepped out into an octagonal courtyard. In the centre sat a beautiful star shaped sandstone basin. Two overlaid squares turned around a shared centre. Eight-pointed. Around him there were twelve dark door openings. Above them were twelve black portholes. He had never seen anything like it. Everything was built in stone. Again, the reliable and solid aesthetics of the Mamelukes. He could have stumbled into a Sufi monastery, a zawiya. But it did not look like the ones in Cairo and he thought of himself as an expert of everything that caught his interest. Through a circular aperture in the top of the tall dome, he saw above him the distant paleness of the Aleppo sky.

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Walking on the edge of Knowing and Not Knowing

A shiny brass trident carrying the hand drum of Shiva, god of destruction, absolute wisdom and bliss, is trembling impatiently in the windscreen. Above and below the narrow serpentine mountain road, towering Himalayan cedars block the view, as we rumble along the potholed tarmac towards the Jhanna waterfalls. Here and there colourful villages perched on steep terraced slopes, flash between the dark tree trunks. At the tall waterfalls cascading from high meadows and snowclad peaks, we get out and put on our backpacks.

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Language and Reality

The ancient song about the nature of reality, Shivoham Shivoham sung by Jakob Weise , with a video illustrating the world of the novel by V.J. Sam, Like Two Rivers.

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Song as a Symbol of Creation and of Illusion

“The sun had vanished behind the western peaks and darkness had descended on the lake. The dog sat just outside the circle of light. Its eyes gleamed. Gabriel leaned back and patted it. “Good dog” he said lovingly. “Are you my friend?”. As a reply the dog rested its head on his shoulder. It sighed and looked pensively into the fire. Gabriel was listening, and just like the dog, he sat for a long time without moving his gaze from the dance of the flames.

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Locations in Like Two Rivers

Cairo seemed as complex, unpredictable, familiar, and as real as where she had just come from, but in a way, she could not easily decipher. The frustration of sensing that the unfamiliar was nothing but a well-known story written with a different alphabet, halftones, and an incomprehensible grammar, made her feel stupid.

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The Red Thread of Prayer Beads

“Babaji smiled broadly and put his hand on Gabriel’s shoulder.” This world is a constant giving of gifts and singing of songs” he said. Gabriel blinked even more confused. The sadhu sighed and said, “Find a song, sing it, and know that where the words are not, you will find the truth”. Babaji held his gaze with a blank face. Then he took a mala, a string of prayer beads, off his wrist. The string bore one hundred and eight beads of rock crystal.

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Cover Design for Like Two Rivers

“Unexpectedly Nabil stepped out into an octagonal courtyard. In the centre sat a beautiful star shaped basin. Two overlaid squares turned around a common centre. Eight-pointed. Around him there were twelve dark door openings. Above them were twelve dark portholes. Through a circular aperture in the top of the tall dome, he saw above him the distant paleness of Aleppo’s winter sky. He had never seen anything like it.” ( from The Octagonal Room)

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Read chapter 4. Caught

Chapter 4. Caught. In this chapter of Like Two Rivers, Katarina arrives for the first time in Cairo to take care of a unexpected inheritance from the mother she never knew.

4. Caught. 2003. August

Cairo, 2003, August. To step into Cairo was an abrupt and potent confrontation with the acuteness of her own ignorance. It was like walking down familiar steps in the dark and to your astonishment, finding that there was one more step than anticipated. The sudden short drop and the snap, when you slam into reality, shoots like a cold instinctual fear up through your bones. Nobody warned her that the world was far less simple than what she had been told. To her Cairo was as complex, unpredictable, familiar, and as real as where she had just come from, but in a way she could not easily decipher.

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