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is trying to say that it is impossible to choose the known once the unknown approaches closer and closer. And the moment he saw the people of his own land... now the unknown starts becoming known. Now it is not such a risk -- he knows those people, he has recognized them. Now it is not a question of choosing. By the time he has reached the foot of the hill, he knows in his heart that the time to go has come. Now nothing can prevent him. The only thing that could have prevented him was the unknowability, the strangeness of the ship. But it is no longer strange.
Those people represent experiences, experiences that he recognizes now as his true source of life -- not this world in which he was an outsider, a stranger, somehow deceiving himself that "I am not an outsider. I am a Hindu. I am a Mohammedan. I am a Christian." These are deceptions that we have created, false identities, so that we don't feel that we are in a strange place where we don't belong.
No one is a Hindu and no one is a Mohammedan, no one is a Christian. No one is a German, no one is a Japanese, no one is an American. These are false identities, props -- somehow we go on believing in them; otherwise we will feel so alone.
No one is a husband, no one is a wife. Just by sitting beside a fire and a priest repeating mantras in Sanskrit -- which neither he understands nor you understand -- and just a few minutes before, you were strangers....
In India -- and the same is true in other countries in different ways -- the basic thing is some ritual. The priest creates the ritual. The husband and wife take seven rounds around the fire and two strangers have become as if they are born for each other.
I was a professor in my university. One professor was really going through difficult times with his wife. She actually beat him. Finally, he came to me. He was not known to me but somebody suggested to him that "The man has strange ideas, maybe he can figure out something."
He said, "I will not hide anything." He showed me his back, because that very morning the wife had beaten him with a stick. There was blood.
He said, "What to do?"
I said, "You are an idiot!
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