The Sufis say that one travels for many reasons, to meet the masters, to achieve anonymity, for self -discipline, to learn. In the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the great heroes are sent into a long exile in the forests, a space that is the very opposite of what they have inhabited all their lives. There is travelling in almost all the writings in this issue.
The Bengali poet Joy Goswami, who grew up in a small town in Bengal says, “The genesis of the poems in The Ashen Sun was really my terrible depression. Also, I was thinking of all sorts of things. About Andrew Wiles who was speechless when asked how it felt to have finally solved Fermat's Last Theorem - he had no words to describe the 'unbelievable beauty'. I was also wondering what Niels Bohr would have thought after the discovery of atomic structure. I was thinking of the enormous burst of energy from the dropped asteroids that wiped out the dinosaurs from the face of the planet, of pterodactyls taking to the air in the split-second before their annihilation. I was thinking of myths, of Hiranyakashipu and Vishnu in his Matsya Avatar, I was also thinking of Lord Ganesha writing the entire Mahabharata without any breaks or interruptions. The whole notion of poetry being 'received' rather than 'written'. In this book, there is the image of this 'headless painter' painting his shlokas on the back of the universe - as if the universe were a giant canvas.”