The first thing I noticed was that something had changed in the quality of space. The spires looming over the Sophia Mosque were expanding and contracting as I breathed. The sunlight was golden through the dust in the streets and I imagined that if I closed my eyes for long the blazing orb in the sky would burn a whole right through me. I felt vulnerable. The letter I had hoped to receive from my brother in India where I had last seen him hadn't arrived. Maybe it never would. Last I saw him he was being treated in a hospital in Kashmir for hepatitis. I had overstayed my visa by a year and was threatened with jail if I didn't leave India. I left but my heart remained.

   Returning from the post office in a state of disappointment I saw an old man twirling his prayer beads fingering them so reverently. He had a green aura around his head. I had been seeing that phenomena for days. The gulls above the smoking barges screeched their sounds that vibrated sharply in my inner ear, turning their cries into the music of Bach. I was elated, imbued with a sense of ecstasy. Yes I was elated and vulnerable. Most of all I was feeling loneliness.

   I was aware of certain distortions. Some of these could be attributed to that strange drug someone offered me some days ago at the Gulhani Hotel. It was a potent cough syrup that caused hallucinations and for days afterwards space seemed altered, zooming in and out with the rhythm of my breathing. That really only enhanced my general state in which I awoke everyday afloat on an irregular movement that divided and unified space randomly. It was happening frequently in those days in Istanbul. I didn't know exactly where that city was but only that it was a geographical crossroads and was once called Constantinople.

   My travels taught me the grace of always moving on. Going forward in my travels meant reaching towards an absolute in which to rest. One was always nearer it, I believed, by not keeping still. One day crossing the Golden Horn Bridge over the Bosphorus I had the strange sensation that the asphalt under my feet was trembling, taking on a deep throbbing like an enormous dynamo. At the same time there was a fluctuation of light, a brilliant pulsing, coming from the horizon of minarets on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. The distortions were becoming more frequent and growing stronger. Again the world was inflating for a moment and then shrinking. The city had varying moods, deep contrasts that reflected internal states of mind and heart. At one moment while walking the streets of Istanbul I would be swallowed up in the fullness of sounds. There was the noise of trade and the selling of merchandise, an abundance of sound. That loud frantic liveliness I came to associate with the time of sun. Later in the day came the silence born of shadow.

   In the afternoons in the shade of trees there would be the fluttering of movement but not the sound. The merchants would be pouring their pitchers of mint tea and coffee, but I didn't hear the ice crackling or the tinkling of the cups. In the streets around the markets, in the myriad shops, outside the cafes bustling with business there was a silence. Even the ubiquitous flies behind the hollow reed curtains made no buzzing noise. Elsewhere at this time of day along the cobbled streets and in Kasbah cafes, it was the men's bodies and spirit which went silent, which could not move on, away from the sluggishness of tea and siesta, to rediscover the vitality of their life's pounding pulse. The forms of those somber men outside the smoky, acrid cafes would suddenly turn into the bodies of my friends, motionless and seated on hospital chairs struggling with hepatitis in Srinagar. There was the dreariness of the depths of this city in their silence. These men appeared to lack the energy to move on. None of them, I believed, would even attempt crossing the bridge that divided Europe from Asia. I saw the faces of parents and old friends and those people who had always witnessed my life, dissolving into an immense stillness. I was so alone in the middle of the world. Very little money and adrift from the roots I had laid down in India , nothing in this silent space of melancholy moved, nothing lived, not a hopeful thought, not a belief in a future, not a beckoning voice in my imagination. In this breathless pause my existence was being carried out, so far from human eyes, with only the smoky sky with its minarets and gulls as spectators and judges.

   Just as suddenly as this isolation converged upon me, my vision expanded. Light began to shudder and I would open my eyes to see things and thoughts growing brighter and brighter. The contrasting expansion always followed my melancholy. I could see gatherings on the beaches, in the parks of Delhi and Bombay and Calcutta, in temples with the Himalayas behind. I could see Markandeya and my brother and Mario and Eddie and Bruno, all of them smiling and laughing behind shrouds of hashish smoke. Desiree and Gina and Julie were welcoming me home with embraces.

   One day I was sitting on a bench near the Sophia Mosque and a bird walked on its tiny legs very close to me and twisted its head from one side to the other and chirped a few notes. I felt certain the creature wanted to talk to me, to tell me something important. At once a flock of them sprang into the air, calling shrilly their strong and hopeful sounds; and suddenly, behind me the green hedges broke into song, and I could hear the colored-fanned peacock that roamed the garden, calling out to me in that strange sound that resembled words. I closed my eyes and listened intently to its utterance, which I swore were words meant for me. "Go, go, go, back, back, back, India, Ind-e-e-e-e-ah-ah." Suddenly the revelation or the hallucination rose in me: it was beautiful and at the same time absurd. I thought that I had received the essential message: return to where I once belonged. I would go east, crossing the Bosphorus Bridge and the desserts of Iran and the mountains beyond the Caspian Sea crossing the Khyber Pass down into the Punjab of India. Home again! Whatever hardship it cost, no matter what subterfuge necessary at borders, whether facing hunger or any other deprivation, I would return.

   I leapt up into the air, shouting and yelling wild, joyful noises. Then I began to run, not carefully, as I had before, but madly, like a delirious thing. I was out of my mind, yelling mad with the joy of resolution that broke through the fevers of hopelessness and confusion. I rushed down into the marketplace under a tumult of lively noises, while all the shouts of the hucksters, I imagined, sang my praises. I ran in great leaping strides, and shouted, " I'm coming home."

   The faces of a meat merchant and his wife watching me turned into the faces of my parents who looked startled, stretching out their expectant arms. I was saddened to see the grave disappointment in their faces. Ah yes, I thought, any decision to go one direction rather than another would have varying consequences. My parents probably thought that going home meant returning to their lives in Philadelphia. There it was again. My decision would not please everyone. In the hush of afternoon that held my future and past, I heard the sound of pain, just a step behind joy. There was disappointment in the world. It sounded in the echoing halls of the market like a shortened cry, someone or something that had no breath. Elation and despair took turns inside me still, two directions to go on the staircase of emotion.

   Then, between two arches, against a background of glistening spires of mosque, was a figure from a dream, a strange beast that was horned and its hoofed legs were pointed in opposite directions. It was like something I had never imagined, a unique creation that had sprung from my own personal mythology. Its ragged legs had black tufts of hair; each pair positioned differently, the front legs could advance forward while the hind legs could only move backwards. I had met with this figure before. Somewhere in the memory of my dreamscape I had wrestled this beast. Its symbolic presence was clear to me. It was the beast of ambivalence that threatened to tear my soul in half.

   The head of the beast became my own head sprouting horns of duality: desire and fear, east or west, will and inertia, go or stay, separation or reunion. My mind seemed to move inward and outward, everywhere and nowhere at once. It paid no attention to the laws of space. Geography was mental hopscotch; I could jump from place to place, from mosque to market and always back towards India. Converging in and diverging out, my psyche was an accordion upon which time and ambivalent will played its discordant song. The main trouble was that I was becoming familiar with this perplexing irregularity, even comfortable with hallucination and its companion, delirium. Sometimes I awoke from a wild daydream that was not mine. I often shook myself awake, startled. I began to feel the danger of my mind leaping so far that it would lose its direction and the world would forget where to find it. Some control was essential; any measure might serve. Or else! Or else? That was the thought and the question never really approached. It was the fear of going too far out or falling too far down that had always dislodged the dream from myself. I always awoke before I hit the ground or drifted beyond all restraints. When I heard the birds talking, something in me snapped. When I saw the beast of ambivalence rise up inside, something in me again snapped. Now again once more I felt on the threshold of snapping. It could no longer be avoided. The breaking from immediate reality had happened so often it was now so easy and tempting to let it happen. After all, it momentarily helped me escape ambivalence; the hallucinations had a life of their own.

   So now it happened again, this time even more wild than before. This time the images were rushed, the fall between the cliffs of elation and despair deeper and more dangerous. I heard the call of the Imam from the minaret. The voice was caustic and angry, as it drove south the frightened gulls from the domes of mosques to the skies over the barges and hauls docked along the wharves. A rush of waves curled over me rolling out a sound plaintive and low, and I was a rower of some fabulous barge enslaved on a strange sea, bending and swinging under blows of the lash, and singing all the while a doleful song. And it felt so soft the sands of the beaches of West India with the warm air that clothes by night the tropical nakedness of the Malabar Coast and I came again to some seamless place between time and obsession, a deep pool where the tangled weeds grew, and there plunged downward and downward into the sweet but perilous pool, until I felt the sudden alarm of choice, to surrender to the dear dark water or to break the drift and the lure of drowning and come up for air. There out of the lovely chill that is the heart of awakening, I arose from the delirium and rejoiced with the will to dance upon the image of the stars.

   Instead of flying high into promising skies, I found myself rolling and flailing on the ground. Turkish men stood all around me, their harsh voices coming at me from all angles.

   " He has gone crazy, the poor foreigner!" one man said.

   " He must be taken to the hospital," Another in a red fez said.

   " They can give him something to calm him. Very confused."

   " He is mad. Should be tied down, given a shot to make him sleep."

   " Yes, he must go to that place where they treat his kind."

   Suddenly I leapt out of my trance to my feet. I pulled away from the curious crowd. Gathering my mind out of its frenzy, I shook myself into a clarity quickly putting fear and indecision behind me. " Mad?" I said to myself. " A place where they treat his kind?" I sensed serious trouble and so I pointed my body ahead and walked determinedly forward. For now suddenly I felt no ambivalence. I had somewhere to go. Away from there! I would not hesitate to walk faster and faster far away from that place, far away into whatever circumstances time had imagined for me.