In India, if one is lucky, one comes across the odd diviner or any one of the several categories of people who can look into the seeds of time and tell you what is to happen in life. For instance in1978 someone gave to me in writing that I’d be a writer of historical significance, something that seemed fake and impossible then, or at least till thirty years later when I started writing fiction and published my books in the UK, in India and in the US. Then I met another astrologer who wrote on a piece of paper that I would be able to buy a house between August 17 and 21 of a certain year, exactly two years before that actually happened. I bought it on Aug 20, even when I had thought only a few days earlier that I would not have the means to afford it.
In India there are also those who will tell you where a stolen item can be recovered from and it often is recovered from there. There are people who will walk on a plot of land and tell you if water is available very deep down below or close to the surface. That turns out to be true . A number of people living in the remoter regions depend on such extra rational sources of knowledge. After one has studied science and developed faith in it one finds it very difficult to reconcile the two worlds of the rational and intuitive perception of things. But with advancing age one can begin to take these more and more seriously, if for no other reason than this that one wants the impossible to become possible. The human mind wants to encounter that which it finds difficult to explain.
Having taught Shakespeare for decades, and trying to write a book on him for some years, I saw how much this author drifted towards extra rational experience. Very often he treated the extra rational as more than rational. Till very recently I wondered why Shakespeare, living so far away from the mystiques of the East, needed to believe in the supernatural just as some orientalist soothsayers did. But of course, I corrected myself, the West has as much of a right to be intuitive as the East and the West also has its share of diviners.
Till that time all seemed reasonably well. But then came a very disturbing morning. I met a man who was scarcely exposed to Western thought. He had heard Shakespeare’s name perhaps but it was no more than a word for him. He was one who knew how to go back into the past lives of people. He read me like a book and astonished me with his abilities to look into the past to predict the future. His predictions were made on the basis of what he saw in the past. He said to me that in one of my births I was a man called William Shakespeare. I told him that that was impossible and too good to be true . He then continued, ‘Shakespeare was probably a writer’. Of course he was, and I could tell him that without being an astrologer. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘for a few births you have struggled to return to writing but failed. Now you have crossed that time when you could not write. You will begin to write and be known for your writing,’ he said and left as he was in a hurry. I wondered if what he said could be true . I was the Shakespeare teacher of a university department. How could I be teaching my own plays? All this was too much of a dream. I have been making an effort to forget about this chance meeting. I have been very wary of telling my friends about this man for I have a feeling that whoever I tell this to will begin to dislike me or laugh at me at least.
