Sri, Dewa and Anna will go away, back to their home, back to their island, the starting point of each new journey. What they have brought with them, to share with these exiles, is the knowledge that looking back on the familiar past carries with it the regret of nostalgia. But for the exile familiarity is to be reclaimed through the chance encounter. It is here then that he or she must remain until this strangeness too grows with the passage of time into familiarity. The paradoxes will always remain, and therein the poignancy of thought and feeling caught up in that conflict.

There is this last glimpse into life, ordinary everyday life on the street of Madurai before they go back to their hotel—a little girl sits crosslegged inside a room on the street, writing in her exercise book as the father sits at the threshold of their house and sells towels to the passersby.

People drift in and out of their lives. Are they to be remembered, these people who become part of the sights and smells that accompany them in this reincarnatory journey through the continents of their individual selves. Addresses are taken down, with promises to write, but in what ways can transience give any kind of permanency through encounters so brief that they leave only fleeting impressions of faces, bodies, voices?

They had met Mr Thandampani, an official from the State Bank of India, at the Tiruchi airport when they had first arrived in India. Dewa had begun it all because she had started discussing philosophic concepts with him while changing currency. It was something she would never have done on that other journey at Heathrow or Gatwick. Everything had been cut and dried there with only a polite interchange between herself and the official who stamped her visa giving her entrance into another of her reincarnatory journeys. When she was coming back home, another official had asked her, ‘Will you return?’ ‘Only if I am invited back,’ she had said. There was time only for such cryptic utterances there, unlike in this little room where she could start her journey by attempting to explain to someone, who she hoped would understand why she had come here, her need to explore the myths and legends that she felt existed as pointers and landmarks in her journey of discovery. The others with her had their own explorations. There was Anna’s longing for discovery of this mythological continent where part of her life would always remain. She would think back on that childhood illness where in fever and delirium she had felt that she would never see again and Sri who had suffered so much for her had made this vow to Ambal. For Sri this was a pilgrimage.