Bombay Ice [antikvár]

FLASHBACK: Bengal Light Bengal light: black sulphide used as a shipwreck signal, or to illuminate the night. The Sailor's Hornbook for the Law of Storms* I HAVE SOMÉ knowledge of poisons. My mother was a gilder, by inclination as well as profession: she turnéd base metál into gold with the help of potassium cyanide. At an early age I was taught the precise identification of toxins and their antidotes. Identity is important, if you want to find out which toxin is responsible, and who to blame. Mum was not the only poisoner in our household. Our old gardener on the Malabar Coast used to collect seeds from a plánt the Jesuits called St Ignatius's bean. The active principle of it and its close relatíve, Strychnos nux vomica, is the poison strychnine, whose seeds are eaten by many people in Malabar as a prophylactic for snakebite, especially during the monsoon, when cobras are driven from their holes by the rains that revive the earth. If a history of these monsoon rains could be plotted as a series of fixed points on a map, would they form a pattern, the way planetary orbits do? A whole nest of cobras, perhaps, like the sinuous interplay of radio frequencies when different rhythms come together, or the strobing, flickering patterns of my monsoon summer, a cycle of events that comes back to me as dreams connecting impossible images. I can see the jerky four-frame shots in my head now, the clockwork cartoons of cheap animation.