Books

A Well For The Moon

Sealy doesn’t just build a scaled-down 8th century Chinese pagoda in Doon. His almanack is a fragile ecosystem itself.

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A Well For The Moon
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A bicycle ride round the top of the Xian city wall, a recipe for soup from nothing and stray snatches of conversation bet­w­een an imaginary student and a forest dweller. Irwin Allan Sealy’s The Small Wild Goose Pagoda lives up to its ‘almanacity’. At its heart, the book is a mix of memoir and building manual set mostly in the author’s home in Dehradun. After a visit to Xian, Sealy was inspired to build himself a smaller version of Hiuen Tsang’s Wild Goose Pagoda, sky well and all.

Almond blossoms on the cover set the tone for Orientalism and the seasons, the call of the birds and the budding of flowers. At one level, the book is a close to nature, minutely observed experience. At another, The Small Wild Goose Pagoda has a vast canvas—it flits to China, hops across the seas to America, the UK and New Zealand in the noma­dic footprints of the author, though the China trip is the most extensive.

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Oddly enough, there is not that much about Hiuen Tsang, the great Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar and traveller, though Sealy spends a lot of time sketching in China and looking for a small town to remind him of the one he lives in while wistfully thinking of a Hiuen Tsang returning from his wanderings after 17 years, then wondering how to leave his cloistered existence again for the winds blowing down the Silk Route. In this is an echo of Sealy’s wistfulness at turning 60.

The act of building has something archetypal about it, mainly because of all the detailing involved—the acquiring of materials, the gathering of teams, the distractions, even the proportions and planning. Sealy talks about hunting for lintels and the old Indian woods that last for centuries—sal and deodar. In turning the ground he turns up old histories, caste battles and stories of changing religions, not to mention his own Anglo-Indian family which struggled to fit into a post-Independence India, made an unsuccessful attempt at migration and then settled down to build a life in Uttarakhand, foraging for goodies like sour dough bases from relatives and friends living abroad.  Presumably, this is also why he uses the old spelling for almanac with a ‘k, the way magic used to be spelled with a ‘k’ for extra emphasis, and why he digs into the origins of words going back to Persian and Hebrew roots.

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Hiuen Tsang designed his Wild Goose Pagoda and actually took part in building it—something which Sealy follows to the letter, though, quirkily, he prefers the smaller version of the pagoda in Xian to the one that Hiuen Tsang actually built. When the tower is finally completed in time for the summer solstice, Sealy inaugurates it with a ritual involving three uses of ice and sins written on pages of the proofs of his novel Red and ceremonially burnt on a day in one of the hottest of Indian summers.

But a pagoda-building story the book is not. Sealy refers to it as a ‘sociological history’ of the region, which includes the story of Dhani the gardener, Habilis the builder-contractor and Victor, who works at bricklaying when it is building season and waits on tables when there are weddings. In a sense, it harks back to The Everest Hotel and life in a small town in the shadow of the mountains—in fact, coincidentally, the title page of The Everest Hotel manuscript pops out of the diggings at one point, as indestructible as the values that the novel stood for. Habilis’s relationship with Beauty, Dhani’s family back in some long-forgotten ‘des’. People lost and found as artefacts are lost and found, along with trees and birds. There is a thief who mysteriously breaks in and vanishes in a tumble of things.

Sealy is in search of his identity both through the tower and through contemplation of his new coming of age. His house has a Sanskrit name to confuse potential rioters if they do materialise and a double entrance with a twist. At the edge of his world is a kind of unspoken threat, which is why instead of directions he refers to the corners of his home by borderlines—Pakistan, Tibet, Bangla....

One would, however, have welcomed more Everest Hotel rhythm to sweep the reader through the book on the wings of poetry and nostalgia as only Sealy can do.

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