Padma keeps sending me photos of sunrises taken from the high-rise apartment in Surabaya where she is staying with her sister and her sister's husband and their son. All sunrises are beautiful, even those tarnished by pollution and the noise of a big city, because they are the promise of a new chapter in your life waiting to be written.
The sun rising anew each morning symbolises the cyclical nature of life, death, and regeneration. In many literary works, the sunrise is a moment of hope, a reminder that even after the darkest of nights, a new dawn brings the promise of a fresh start.
There was a time when I used to stay up to watch the sun rise; these days I get up for it: often as early as four, or five, but never later than six o'clock. I am addicted to sunrise, that mysterious still time before reality is revealed, before shapes emerge, when everything floats nebulously in that queer light that makes you think of the beginning of time.
Long before the huge garbage truck comes hissing down the lane on a Friday morning, long before the efficiency of the plumbing in the house is put noisily to the test, I sit on the verandah with a big mug of tea and watch the world reveal itself to be pretty much what it was yesterday.
I am lucky to have watched the sun rise from atop the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon and across the burning desert in Arabia, from tropical islands in the South Seas and from bobbing fishing boats in the Aegean Sea, and I shall never forget watching the sun rise from the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion. Each one was a moment of hope.
I don't know whether it is true that dawn is the time when the majority of people choose to enter the world or to leave it, but it does seem to be a suitable hour. I should count myself lucky to push the Publish button on my last blog as I watch the rising sun turn the Clyde River into a river of gold.
Until that happens, I shall continue to be a dawn watcher. It's why I'm so hopeless in the afternoon.
