“Where are we going, Ama?” Jyothi asked. “Kashi!” insisted Jiwan. “My good, brave boys,” Bindra smiled, “I don’t know where we’re going . . .” “We’re going to Kashi!” Jiwan announced again with untiring confidence. “But, son, I don’t know where Kashi is,” she protested. “We speak of it in our tradition - but I don’t know where to find it. Do we walk towards the rising sun, or towards its setting? Is it one day’s travel, or one year’s? You see? I don’t even know where to begin.” Bindra knew the name of Kashi, the City of the Light of Liberation. She knew it from the tales of Skanda, the Spurt of Semen, divine patron of learning and hidden wisdom. She knew it as the place where Syambhuva and Shatarupa, the first named humans of this cycle of mankind, were said to have paid homage to the forces of their creation. She had described it to her children as the place at which an immeasurable laser beam, a lingam of light, once broke through the Earth’s crust and illuminated the cosmos to reveal the underlying consciousness of which the entire universe is an expression.
