Alberto Manguel concludes his Afterword to Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey with the words of the pavement artist or in Manguel's words the "wall artist". Manguel wants us to finish our reading at a place that is universal: "[...] does it matter where?" It does. These are not the very last gestures or words of the novel. In any case there is some imprecision in the way Manguel reports the protagonist's question to the artist. Manguel paraphrases the scene by having Noble ask where the pavement artist is next going. It is Gustad, not Noble (the case could be made for the different tones that are produced on the various appellations assigned to the protagonist throughout the narration; a similar case revolves around whether a reader chooses to dwell on the moment of the artist against the wall or that of the artist bent over pavement), who responds to the assertion of the time to go on on the part of the pavement artist with nothing that focuses upon a series of successive steps. Gustad is in the moment: "Go? But where? Have you made a plan?" As tempting as it would be to read the three part question as a figure of the first image the pavement artist drew and coloured on the black wall: Trimurti, it is on the exchange of objects I wish to dwell -- seven sticks broken off the neem tree, the oil and brushes left behind, the crayons, the recovered prayer cap.

Just as Manguel calls Gustad, Noble, he refers to the pavement artist as the wall artist. Pity. The details are telling. This is a novel that portrays, over and over again, that where one comes from, a place made up out of the memories one has chosen to preserve, the habits one has chosen to create and those memories and habits one has striven to destroy, that is the coming from which accompanies one no matter what the detours, no matter how long the journey. My own journey does not stop at the end of Manguel's afterward. It goes back to the end of Rohinton Mistry's novel. The very specificity of light and dark and noise. And air. Crunching gravel -- heard only on two prior occasions, both at the Tower of Silence. The paper pulled from the ventilators (not just the windows are covered) -- an appeal to smell in a novel that exudes odor. A live creature is stirred --- a frightened moth flies out and circles the room. Sohrab, the eldest son now reconciled with his father was an amateur entomologist who left off the killing of specimens. Dilnavaz, the wife, long endured the black out paper erected in a time of war. It is such specificity that marks this passage to peace.

The novel's final image is not "the lifespan of a moth". It is circling. Where is the hint of larvae here? Manguel is only partially correct. The artist (wall and pavement like temple and latrine matter little by novel's end -- in this Manguel is correct -- but the difference mattered and did not matter in the beginning), the man with the crayons, is simply by the end referred to as the artist, not the wall artist. Manguel invokes life spans and yet misses what nourishes. He points to the epigraph from T.S. Eliot, he fails to note that it is sandwiched between quotations from Tagore and from Firdausi. A careful reader cannot be impervious to context. A reader sensitive to the specificity of the citations would find three voices, three times, three attitudes. Our journey (Eliot) is between their heroic labour (Firdausi) and a new country to be revealed (Tagore). The pronouns are indicative. The past belongs to them, the historical present to us and the undetermined future, neither they nor we know to whom.

Perhaps, the future belongs to those who will reread Manguel's afterword and pose beside his assertion that the Iliad we read is done so in knowing all life as a battle, a knowledge of life as negotiation (and the added knowledge that negotiation and battle are similar but different), and beside his insistence that the Odyssey is read through the experiecne of life as a voyage, lay the experience of waiting, and to his strong suggestion that Mistry's novel moves in widening Dantesque circles, observe a different geometry, less dispairing and conversely less full of an anticipation of salvation, loose the old tracks in a way of observing, reading and knowing that looks at the event of a frightened moth that "flew out and circled the room" in its narrative and fictional specificity without anticipating a concentric trajectory to the circling of that very particular room, without projecting an inexact symbolism, being able to negotiate a "looking on" through the waiting of a "looking at".