I started reading this. So far I just finished the parts about the story teller’s role in rural India and the Lavana story. I was enchanted by the Lavana story. I don’t think that I could do it justice by trying to retell it, but I should jot down a few notes to help my memory later.

Ok, so there is this king called Lavana. This magician comes to his court to visit and says that he can do all kinds of tricks. Lavana tells him that he better do something awesome because he is tired of seeing all kinds of stupid tricks. So, the magician tells Lavana to look into his eyes. Lavana finds himself living another’s life, going through the motions and feeling himself stuck in that life for decades. Lavana even forgets about his old life, when he was king. When he is about to pass away in his hard life of backbreaking labor, he wakes up to find himself back in his royal court. He asks his court attendants how long he has been asleep, and they say that he has been asleep just for a couple of minutes. And the magician is gone.

This story is supposed to illustrate something about the nature of time. At the beginning of the retelling, the pandit tells the author of the book: “I took a little time to read the account of the man who has been flung into the regions of the upper air and has circled the earth—strange experiments people of the Western world attempt….So between two dawns he does not pass through twenty-four hours as we do, but through a half-day or two days, who can say which? All this makes one think again and again of the nature of time. What is a day? What are two days? What is a lifetime? I am going to tell you the story of Lavana to illustrate this.”