Notes Before Filnttnaking afternoon. He feels shame, he feels defiled by the power of the City and Nature which with such ruthless indifference exposes the extent of his finiteness to himself. But, simultaneously, also limits his experience of the extremity of exile. Shame means the acceptance of his finiteness/ but so close to grace he will attain it even if it means — Oedipus' choice — self-mutilation. He wills, therefore, with the deliberate humourlessness of a sixteen-year-old, he wills himself to believe that he can 22 cultivate excess in his desire. That he can cultivate madness the way other people cultivate love, to live. What he has to do is quite simple, he thinks, because he has to do it in his head. He has to transform his finitude to destiny: from exile to insanity, which, he believes, is the final stretch of exile, the only silence which can fnatch the indifference of Nature and the City. Years later, while involved in work with a filmmaker with whom, for the first time, he feels a sense of home, he realizes that if he had followed the path mapped in the loneliness of Bombay then, today he would have been irredeemably lost. He would be as beyond life as the Bombay cinema. However, what saves him then, paradoxically, is just these Hindi films. Gripped in their auto-erotic flow, he feels himself impregnated by the mystery which is the secret force of these films. He feels that these films have already succeeded in the transformation at whose edge he stands. They have transformed life into artifice and have thus become free of life. It is life that is banished now. They have transformed nature into an immutable Mechanism anU Man (in films, for instance, the Star) into its Master. This is a vindication, a pathetic revenge against the City and Nature's indifference. The boy does not realize that it is a turning against the self the weapons of one's own violator. A reflexive violence, which murders the Mother within, transforming the erotic to necrophilia, and desire to masturbation: the final silence of Man become God. But he is Destiny now, he is the ineluctable Flow. He is the Narrative, he is the Force that forges identity and dissolution, meaning and madness, silence and fury, finitude and recurrence. He is. His flow leads him to the FTII, in Pune. Entering it, he feels he is entering a womb. The womb of Purusha, though, his first teacher there tells him, mocking. A male womb, like any other artifice of our civilization, be it city or garden. But it does still allow more births than deaths. The teacher, Rabat Yusufi, has caught him momentarily vulnerable within the moist shadow of the wisdom tree. The boy does not answer, cannot. The ironic thrust of Rahafs remark does not fail to set trembling the still fragile sense of destiny the new student is carrying. He had thought his thought unknowable, his silence implacable. But Rabat seems almost to augur the future of this silence; a certain sacrifice that it would demand. The new student had sought to escape just such questioning of his belief in the isolation of his hostel room. The few words he had allowed to escape him under the Journal of Arts <& Ideas