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JOURNEY INTO VISHRANTIChandani Lokuge aa Monash University , AustraliaPublished online: 06 Sep 2011.

To cite this article: Chandani Lokuge (2011) JOURNEY INTO VISHRANTI, Interventions: International Journalof Postcolonial Studies, 13:3, 483-494, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2011.597603

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SituationsJ O U R N E Y I N T O V I S H R A N T I

A Cr i t i co -Au tob iog raph i ca l Re f l e c t i on on D ia spo r i c D i s -

be l ong ing

Chandani LokugeMonash University, Australia

................This essay is based on my experiences as a Sri Lankan diasporic in Australia, my

creative writing and academic research. Using the range of mountains named the

Three Sisters and the Buddhist Vihara in Katoomba, New South Wales as a

creative microcosm, the essay weaves into a philosophical meditation on the

diasporic’s journey into true restfulness (vishranti). It is supported by theories of

postcolonial hybridity and globalization.

................Diasporics are frequently marginalized as the ‘other’, categorized as

‘minority’ or ‘multicultural’ in ways that complement or assimilate into a

host national culture, or they are posed in relation to a homeland; their

narratives of loss or yearning present them in a suspended nostalgia. What

are the possibilities for rethinking the role and theorization of the diasporic?

What is at stake in understanding diasporic imaginations not simply as the

voice of the minority-other but as a strong presence revisioning the centre,

the home and/or host culture from a transnational or intersubjective point of

view? How might diasporics challenge sociocultural formation, histories and

......................................................................................interventions Vol. 13(3) 483�494 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)

Copyright # 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2011.597603

Australia

diaspora

hybridity

Sri Lanka

transnational-ism

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regimes of value? What is disturbed or disavowed in their attempts to

configure transnational interactions and transcultural imaginaries?

Mine is a critico-autobiographical reflection on these questions. I must

admit at the outset that I write from a privileged position. I came to Australia

on a Commonwealth Scholarship to read for my doctoral degree, returned to

Sri Lanka and then arrived in Australia as a migrant. I have resided in

Australia for just over twenty years and return to Sri Lanka almost every

year. My voice therefore is not of the refugee, but of the voluntary diasporic

who seeks new professional opportunities in a new country, and also, sheer

adventure. My current research is on the aesthetics and philosophies of the

return journey of South Asian diasporic literature, and my own novels

confront themes of migration. Here, I hope to offer a combination of my

academic, creative and personal experience. I reflect on the search for a

utopia, not of a third space of communication but a fourth utopian

dimension of home that may be possible in the absence of roots, in the

disappearance of the self from space and place.

Preoccupied with these thoughts, I visited the Blue Mountains in New

South Wales in the spring of 2009. Often, still the tourist in Australia, I

arrived at the scenic lookout to the range of mountains named the Three

Sisters. Popular legend offers several variants of what could be an ancient

Aboriginal Dreamtime story; the earliest was recorded by a white Australian

named Mel Ward as late as 1949. Three beautiful Aboriginal women,

Meehni, Weemalah and Gunnedoo, members of the Katoomba tribe, fell in

love with three brothers from a rival tribe. Tribal law forbade marriage

between them. To prevent the marriage and also to protect the three women

from being captured by the rival tribe, the medicine man of the Katoomba

tribe turned them into stone by casting a spell on them. He was killed in the

ensuing battle between the tribes before he could set them free. As no one

else knew the magic word that could reverse the spell, the women remained

petrified.

Martin Thomas, a serious researcher into the Blue Mountains, maintains

that this recorded story could be the ‘dubious legacy’ and creation of a white

man, who ‘intended to bestow upon the landmark some added ‘‘colour’’’.

Thomas implies that if so, the Three Sisters could be seen as the tourist’s ‘one

foray into a long and complex history of Aboriginal occupation’ (2003: 154).

The lookout was milling with tourists. There was a group of Japanese

tourists and a translator was rendering the legend in Japanese. I looked

around � lots of locals, lots of Southeast Asians, a sprinkling of South Asians.

Hardly any visibility of Aboriginal presence. Why would they be there? �they were not tourists. Later, I would find something terrifying � a

photograph of a sculpture of the Three Sisters exoticized, eroticized and

othered for tourist consumption (see Figure 1).

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Caricatured into Hollywood film stars, peddled for tourist gaze, the legend

and the sculptures sent a chill down my spine � would this be the fate of

all but the white Australian population? Would I too end up either

homogenous, swallowed up by white Australia or be turned into an

unrecognizable stone fossil of who I once was? This is not unique to

Australia � dominant cultures all over the world take over minority cultures

if the minority cultures do not assimilate. As Homi Bhabha theorizes: ‘When

the content of a cultural tradition is being overwhelmed, or alienated, in the

act of translation’ (2004: 323), ‘an absorption of the particular [culture] by

the general’ (1992: 48) takes place.

I follow another track � the vision of the Three Sisters imprisoned in stone

like this in the land where they would roam free reminded me of Ariel in

Shakespeare’s The Tempest, locked up in the wood-bark to be released into

slavery by Prospero, and of Caliban’s agonized words, ‘this island’s mine, by

Sycorax my mother’ (1.2.332). I wondered what would happen if someone

discovered the magic word that would free the sisters from their rock

imprisonment. Would they rush across the Divide and drive all intruders out

of their land, which after all had been their home for 40,000 years or more?

Would they engage with debates on Native Titles and European Property

Law legislation? Or would they revile, as Caliban did, the colonizer’s ‘cursed

language’ (1.2.340) by which they have been subjugated? Where would I be

Figure 1 Tourists congregate around the Three Sisters sculpture group

outside the Scenic World entrance in Katoomba, New South Wales. Photo-

graph: Vmenkov (2008).

JOURNEY INTO VISHRANTI 485........................Chandani Lokuge

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positioned in all this? A relatively recent Australian citizen, am I not

seriously removed from this Anglo-Celtic versus Aboriginal history of

conflict? I belong to another category � multicultural Australia. But,

Aboriginal novelists such as Kim Scott would persuade me into the

continuing conflict, seeing it as ‘a significant component’ of the nation’s

psychological infrastructure and ‘a core part of our national identity’ (2005:

19).

Ownership . . . belonging . . . I merged with the tourists, but a sense of

aloneness took hold of me. I query these concepts in my new novel, Softly,

As I Leave You. ‘And who granted Uma Australian citizenship?’ asks Uma’s

father of Chris, her Italian-Australian husband. The conservative Sri Lankan

parent replies to his own question:

The white squatters � what right have they to make anyone a citizen of a country

that does not belong to them? The owners are the Aboriginals � it is their home.

Did anyone ask them how they felt about all this? Don’t you see that you are

as much a squatter there as Uma? How can you fail to see that? You know, I

think you people have given an entirely new dimension to squattalogy. (Lokuge

2010: 56)

It does not have to be so in a country like Australia that is built on migration,

that welcomes migrants. And yet, there are complexities that taint this

welcome, as for example Australian policies of border security and detention

camps developed by successive Australian Governments in recent years.

Once again, I am moved by Kim Scott’s thoughtful reflections. At the height

of Australian border security in 2004, Scott talked about Aboriginal

hospitality, about how Australian Aboriginals welcomed the white settlers

when they first arrived. He censured the Howard government for closing

doors on the refugees:

What a shame that the confidence and generosity with which our earliest white

immigrants were treated, and the accommodating manner in which we welcomed

them into our ways hasn’t persisted as a characteristic of contemporary Australian

identity. (Scott 2005: 20)

It is surely this human spirit of hospitality and inclusiveness that a nation

must celebrate, and for that we must all � indigenous, settler and immigrant �transcend conservative notions of land and culture ownership. However, it

does not come easy, not to any of us diasporics, wherever we roam and

whatever part of the world we cleave to. In her autobiography Out of Africa

(2001), the Danish woman Karen Blixen wonders on the eve of her departure

from Africa where she has homed for twenty years:

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I know a song of Africa . . . Does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the

plain quiver with a colour that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which

my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel on the drive that

was like me? (Blixen 2001: 75�6)

How powerful is our human need to inscribe ourselves on the place that we

think belongs to us, and to which we think we belong. But, then, perhaps

preoccupied with more contemporary issues such as globalization, the 1986

film adaptation of the novel offers another philosophy when Karen’s British

lover, Denys Finch-Hatton, tells her: ‘We’re not owners here, Karen, we’re

just passing through.’

Passing through. Acknowledging diasporic life as a journey, Paul Gilroy

writes in The Black Atlantic that for the diasporic, home is simultaneously

about ‘roots’ and ‘routes’. And the longer I live in Australia, the more I travel

around the world, I feel I lose more and more of the vertical axis while the

horizontal leads me on and on, ever stretching towards a horizon that

recedes even as I run towards it. I think with a sense of dis-ease of Milan

Kundera’s eloquent title: The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I see a host of

uprooted diasporic personalities, afloat here and there. . . . Bill Ashcroft

defines this as horizonality. And he does not regard this as a negative concept

or illusion because it does not require the abandonment of the local or of the

cultural, but its reconception, its reinscription: ‘Place, like subjectivity, is not

subsumed, but located more clearly in the horizon’ (2003: 32). In that

horizon, every subject is liminal; every subject is global.

On the way back to the car, I listened to a young boy busking to tourists.

His voice was husky and beautiful. A roughly crafted didgeridoo lay unused

beside him on his mat. He looked an inextricable mix in this mellow light �brown gold-dusted skin, deep brown hair and eyes, wide charming smile �vaguely familiar. Is he descended from the earliest Sri Lankans who came to

Australia in the late nineteenth century, to be put to labour in the cane-fields

around Mackay and Bundaberg, or as boatmen in Thursday Island � I mused

whimsically. Research on this history is sparse and limited to a ‘narrative’ by

Stanley Sparkes which is reliant on Magistrates’ Courts records and

contemporary newspapers ‘whose editors displayed values and attitudes

that are untenable today’ (1988: 1). It concludes with Sparkes’ assumption

that ‘Today, many of the descendents of those early migrants are

indistinguishable from the white population, but some who intermarried

with Aboriginals, identify as Aboriginals’ (87).

I drew closer to the busker. He sang in a plaintive elegiac voice:

They couldn’t make out why the drover and the boy

Always camped so far away.

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For the tall white man and the slim black boy

Had never had much to say.

The twist in the song, that the drover’s ‘boy’ was an Aboriginal girl

kidnapped and forced to disguise as a boy to work for and be the lover of a

British drover, hung in the air. If most of us gathered around were more

interested in the singer and his tuneful voice, a few (perhaps locals) seemed

not to know how to react. They dropped a few coins on his mat and moved

uneasily away. The song ended hauntingly, an embarrassing chronicle of the

settler-Aboriginal power politics: ‘Cut her hair, break her in, and call her a

boy, the Drover’s boy’. Lest we forget . . .

R oo t s

I left the scenic lookout and took to the road once again. Ever the hungry

tourist in search of exotic food, I yearned suddenly for a meal cooked and

served by Aboriginal Australia. No such cafe around, of course. I would have

to settle for a glass of chilled Chardonnay, wholesome fish and chips. On the

way, I stumbled into a small Buddhist temple in Cliff Edge. I would soon

discover that it is one of the oldest Sri Lankan Buddhist temples in Australia,

sponsored by a white Australian couple � a magnanimous gesture of

openness to other cultures, or a search for respite in an alternative

philosophy?

A blessed moment, this, for me. The gate was open as if I were expected.

I stepped out of time and place and was wafted back to the Sri Lanka of my

childhood when the temple was so integrally a part of my life. As I stood at

the entrance to the modest building, I was reminded fleetingly of the

ambalama � that traditional resting place in Sri Lanka lying by the edge of

the road for weary wayfarers. In Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje recalls that

‘the wooden ambalama felt like a raft or four-poster bed drifting in the black

clearing’ (2000: 12). A sanctuary, a place of rest, a place for meditation and

self-denial constructed by generous villagers, the pot of crystal-clear drinking

water at the entrance.

Out of long habit, I removed my sandals as I stepped eagerly down the

narrow stone stairs. At the curve of the stairs, a statue of the reclining

Buddha. The eyes looked into mine and away from mine with remembered

remote compassion. It reminded me of what I am, what I have been � in a life

beyond the moment. I felt myself pause. I was home, held in the cocoon of

memory. In Divisadero, Ondaatje reiterates the significance of the past and

our memories on our present:

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It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the

villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at

those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. . . .

For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout

our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms

and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We

live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

(Ondaatje 2007: 136)

But for people like Willy Chandran in V. S. Naipaul’s novel Magic Seeds, the

past (the homeland India and the adopted land, Britain) is terrifying in its

capacity to quell any idea of peace. Willy begins his journey into his past,

nervously, ‘fearful of encountering his old self’ (Naipaul 2004: 188). He is at

once life’s drifter, its participant and observer. With small epiphanies, Willy

is constantly reborn into some ‘other, new person’ (185) in some other,

hostile place. These thoughts are more than Willy’s � they reflect, I believe,

the truths that most diasporics confront today, as they search desperately for

who they are and where they belong in the globalized world. Between worlds

past and worlds new, in the disunity of his half-lives lived in India, England

and Africa, Willy seeks ‘to get away to the upper air’ (143). But he constantly

feels ‘old stirrings, the beginnings of old grief’ (176), as if he were ‘serving an

endless prison sentence’ (242).

I cast out this bleak philosophy. There was the aroma of sandalwood and

burning wicks. A tall brass lamp stained with burnt oil stood in a glass case

at the entrance to the vihara. And looking over the precipice � a Bo tree

shielded from the wind and rain. I gazed long at it � protected by the

spreading branches of such a tree Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment �nibbana � the liberation of the soul. It was being grafted � silver foil wrapped

on two branches catches the sun and sparked into my eyes. Gradually, other

Bo trees may spread their shade among the Eucalypt, in this foreign land,

eons away from home.

The resident monk came up to me and spoke to me in Sinhala � my first

language. His words and gestures cut inroads into the crevices of my

memory. He invited me to sit upon a reed mat and withdrew into a private

inner chamber. I looked around me � a few people sat crossed legged on the

mat, their gaze held by the verdure framed in the long wide glass pane � they

seemed to have just completed a meditation session with the monk. I sat at

the edge of the mat and tried to compose my mind. I remembered Bhabha’s

vision of a reed mat as a third space � a dialogical site of ‘in-betweenness’ �between the ‘violent and the violated, the accused and the accuser, allegation

and admission’, conducive to ‘discussion, dispute, confession, apology and

negotiation’. To illustrate this idea, Bhabha draws our attention to Conrad’s

Heart of Darkness in which Marlow initiates in the reader a third space

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through his sudden unexpected curiosity to learn about the ‘other’, the

African. Marlow asks: ‘He [the African] had a bit of white worsted round his

neck � Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge � an ornament � a charm � a

propitiatory act?’ (Bhabha 2009: xi�xii).

Redescribing Bhabha’s concept of ‘Third Space’, Robert Young writes:

If anything, it is more like a shifting caravan site, a place where people come

unobserved and where they go without a trace, the place which determines their

lives for the moment they pitch their tent there, a place which is not a space because

it is a site of an event, gone in a moment of time. It is the non-place of the no-fixed

above, the NFA people, migrants, those torn from their homes, cultures, literatures,

a multitude always on the move, shifting sites riven with the lapsed times in

between one pitching and another, the moment from one location to another, the

place where you find yourself momentarily in situ, a literal lieutenant, standing in,

holding the place while something else happens � which is why, therefore, it is in a

sense no more place than space . . . an untimely place of loss, of fading, of

appearance and disappearance. (Young 2009: 81�2)

R ou t e s

There was an Aboriginal woman sitting on the mat, holding a little girl by the

hand. Why was she there? Perhaps for the child who had a lighter mixed-blood

complexion. She turned her face in my direction, acknowledging my presence.

She seemed encased in a strange stillness. She made no eye contact and I did not

know how to react. How ignorant I was of this culture of gesture and silence,

how incurious I have been. Later I would discover that in traditional

Aboriginal culture, direct eye contact was impolite, suggestive of the assertion

of power or reprimand. Researching deeper, I would confront Marcia

Langton’s thesis that Aboriginality ‘only has meaning when understood in

terms of intersubjectivity, when both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal are

subjects, not objects’ (cited in Muecke 1997: 32). As Stephen Muecke

comments in his fictocritical study on travelling in Australia, for what

Langton proposes there is no ‘other’, there is only self and self � ‘I and I’ (32).

I think this tells us one way to go now, today, in the globalized world

where so many cultures swirl around us. We achieve home in intersubjectiv-

ity, and it begins with individuals being curious about each other � making

bridges rather than walls. Home for the global citizen, then, is in

transcending traditional notions and opening up to inclusiveness � which

John Ralstan Saul (2006) defines as the pathway to positive nationalism. In

People Like Us: How Arrogance is Dividing Islam and the West, Waleed

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Aly, a Muslim born and raised in Australia, explores what he calls ‘a world

of radical misunderstandings’. He explains the title of his book as follows:

The phrase embodies both problem and solution. Our stubborn egocentricities lead

us to believe that that world must be run according to our own templates; that all

would be well with the world if only it were populated with people like us. Only

when we come to understand each other’s complexities can comprehension begin.

Only when we apprehend each other as human, with the contradictions, beauty

and frailty that implies . . . only once we internalize that those we do not

immediately understand are nevertheless people like us � will the world begin to

make sense. (Aly 2008: 27)

My consciousness returned to the mat in the temple. The woman had turned

back into the landscape. The child looked down. A missed moment.

Voices suddenly drew close. A group of devotees walked down the stairs

carrying alms for the monk. He invited everyone gathered to share the meal.

I embraced the mood � the remembered hospitality of the temple. After-

wards, I lingered in the courtyard with a young woman who had sat across

from me during the meal. We conversed in our mother tongue, inducing an

immediate bonding that transcended polite, impersonal exchanges between

strangers. She had come to reside in Australia two years before, when she

had married a Sri Lankan Australian. I looked around for him.

‘He’s not here . . . he runs a cleaning business back in Paramatta, he’s very

busy’, she said. ‘He was an engineer back in Sri Lanka, but he could not get a

job here because he had no Australian experience. Language is also a

problem, Madam.’ With the honorific, she relegated herself to a lower social

stratum. Drawing closer, I tried to close the gap, and hoping to cheer her up,

asked whether she would be visiting Sri Lanka any time soon.

‘Maybe in a year or two’, she said. Tears seemed very close. We sat down

on the low courtyard ledge and looked over the precipice. Through the dense

foliage, a little distance away, I spotted a small lotus lake, and at its edge a

homely shrine of the kind that villagers in Sri Lanka used to construct in their

gardens. Surely, the custom became obsolete a long time ago. We looked at it

together. ‘I am an only child and it is so sad to be away from my parents who

have done everything for me. Now when they need me most . . .’

I sighed. Migrant guilt, so familiar, along with homesickness and nostalgia �sentimental for some, a gash for others. And her husband? ‘He’s been in

Australia for much longer � 12 years. It was an arranged marriage, he said he

was an engineer, and my parents wanted me to escape the war in Sri Lanka.’ It

was a familiar story related in a shamed voice, filled with the pain of betrayal

and loneliness. Would it have worked out better for her in Sri Lanka? She had

indeed escaped the war when it was at its worst. Would she return home now

that the war was ended? ‘I like to, very much. But my husband likes it here. He

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says he’s been in Australia for too long to make another life all over again in

Sri Lanka. But’, she said brightening, ‘we are better off than those boat people.

They’ll be in detention camps for years. Worse than going to prison, isn’t it?’

It saddened me that she measured her situation against her compatriots

who were in worse turmoil. Those ‘boat people’ swindled by people

smugglers. Among them victims of the war, opportunistic post-terrorists

and poverty stricken ordinary people. Those ‘Sri Lankan and Afghani boat

people seeking asylum’ (Barkham 2001), unwanted baggage uncomfortably

and indiscriminately dumped in detention centres (BBC News 2010). Among

them, children screaming in nightmares (Stephen 2002), stitching up their

lips to gain government attention (Tenenbaum 2002).

These are harrowing narratives that shadow my own.

F ou r t h S pa ce

I am led into another truth � Stephen Muecke writes:

What would it be if I wasn’t here? The post tourist may ask, or ‘How can I lose

myself in this place by following a track of disappearance instead of imagining

myself ‘‘at one’’ with a place, a plodding spirituality, might I not just imagine that

I’m already gone � that much will be certain and in this lightness, lift ever so

slightly from the ground’. (Muecke 1997: 135)

It seems that Muecke is looking forward; his words suggest to me a fourth

space beyond the third space of transitional intersubjectivity � a momentary

home between self and other. Losing oneself, the disappearance of self,

suggests a detachment from the sensory experience of identification with a

physical place or a relationship, even from our own bodies that deter us from

the liberation of the spirit. Perhaps I could describe it as vishranti � that state

of true restfulness that can be achieved through thoughtful reflection of the

sensory experience. Harsha Dehejia, in accordance with Kashmir Shaivism,

defines vishranti as follows:

The all important concept of vishranti . . . is a rich and full epistemic rest, it is the

rest that comes at the culmination of a joyful activity, it is the pleasurable stillness

. . . the silence that follows speech and yet contains within it all sounds, it is the

glow of restful knowledge that seeks knowledge no more, it is the serenity of self-

awareness that need not look outward anymore, but only inward to enjoy that

awareness, it is the stillness of self-reflection, it is the freedom of consciousness

turning in on itself, it is the beauty of cosmic vision, it is the glory and majesty of

vishvarupa. (Dehejia 1977: 83)

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So, I too may pick truth from any and all philosophies that I encounter on

my journeys back and forth and make them my own. I returned home on this

thought. As I opened the door of my car, my little grandson Rohan came

running out to greet me, a beautiful child with his black hair, pale golden

skin and amber eyes � the hybrid product of a Sri Lankan mother and

Scottish-Australian father, so naturally himself, unfettered as yet by this

culture or that, enriched by all our differences. As my arms closed around

him, my mind tracked back to the last time I visited the temple in Sri Lanka

before migrating to Australia. As I tied the blessed thread of protection

around my wrist, the monk said to me:

My child, you are going on a long journey into a foreign land from which you may

never return. Emulate the legendary swan of medieval Sinhala literature � extract

the pure milk out of an impure mix of milk and water. Extract the essence of each

culture that you visit and you’ll drink a rich brew.

I have made Australia my home. But how may I claim it? This island is not

Caliban’s, it does not belong to the three sisters in the Blue Mountains, nor

to white Australia. It is not mine. I am a traveller on a long journey. I would

end this reflection with a kind of blessing � a poignant truth � the sacred song

offering that my father used to read to me so long ago, from Rabindranath

Tagore’s Gitanjali:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depths of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of

dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action;

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. (Tagore 1959:

27�8)

In conclusion, I’d say that for me, home in this restless world seems more

ethereal than rooted, the vertical axis no longer moving deep downwards but

spiralling upwards into another kind of home that transcends the spatial. I

would travel lightly on the horizontal route, in and out of places, cultures,

religions and philosophies. Home may lie here and there on this journey if I

draw sustenance from those I pass without surrendering to the obsession of

possessing them � belonging at once � to nothing and everything. But, I

cannot cling even to this theory with any permanence. Where am I, if not in

transit?

JOURNEY INTO VISHRANTI 493........................Chandani Lokuge

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Ashcroft, Bill (2003) ‘Post-colonial transformationand global culture’, in Silvia Albertazzi and Dona-tella Possamai (eds) Postmodernism and Postcolo-nialism, Bologna: Il Poligrapho, pp. 17�32.

Barkham, Patrick (2001) ‘Paradise Lost awaits asylumseekers’, online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/11/immigration.uk.

BBC News (9 April 2010) ‘Australia halts Sri Lankanand Afghan asylum claims’; online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8610679.stm.

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Lokuge, Chandani (2010) ‘Softly, As I Leave You’,unpublished.

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Tagore, Rabindranath (1959) [1912] Gitanjali, Lon-don: Macmillan.

Thomas, Martin (2003) The Artificial Horizon: Ima-gining the Blue Mountains, Carlton, Vic:Melbourne University Press.

Young, Robert J. C. (2009) ‘The void of misgiving’, inKarin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner (eds) Communi-cating in the Third Space, New York: Routledge,pp. 81�95.

interventions � 13:3 494.........................

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