Puzzle Horse

India, 1983

Walking through the Ajanta Cave emples in Aurangabad, India, I had a revelation. In one of the ancient wall murals—still vivid and clear, despite being at least 1,500 years old—I saw a scene I recognized. It wasn’t that I remembered it from a guidebook, folktale, or art lecture. I remembered being there: actually being one of the characters in the scene. I saw myself in the mural, painted by an unknown hand in the distant past.

At that instant a storm of memories, complete with impossibly vivid details, flooded my mind. I recalled the names of the people around me that long-ago day; the reason for our gathering; my role in the scene; even the temperature of the air that cool afternoon, many centuries ago.

During the next several years I set to work writing about my life and experiences during that long-lost lifetime. I felt I had been touched by a force larger than myself. Honoring those memories was a calling: the most important project ever bequeathed to me.

I worked on the book first in Kathmandu, then in Santa Cruz, and continued wrestling with it when I moved to the Bay Area. The first few chapters came effortlessly. But the most intriguing part of the story—what became of “me” (or whatever you want to call that spark of consciousness) between the distant past and now—was a complete mystery. I had no memories at all of the in-between centuries; only of that life, and this one. There was a vast gap, and no bridge across it. My story needed that binding agent.

My single visit to the Ajanta Caves occurred when I was 29. Since then I’ve published scores of stories, and seven books. A few of them please me very much. But none of them is the one I once felt destined, even chosen, to write.

Over the years, I’ve come to accept that I may never write that book. Letting go of that inspiration haunts me. Yet try as I might, I can’t seem to find my way through the labyrinth. It’s as if I’d been solving a marvelous puzzle, only to discover that the most critical piece—the ones that would make it all fit together—are missing.

I don’t blame myself. But sometimes I do feel I was given a profound gift, and wasn’t smart enough, or persistent enough, to unwrap it.