Author's Note

This tale is comprised of a vast number of elements that have been bouncing around in my mind for quite a long time. I first started thinking about this idea months ago when I saw the sickbed visions in Tony Kushner's play 'Angels in America'. After that, I took an English scholarship exam wherein I had to study two poems by Alfred Tennyson and Christina Rosetti, where themes of life and death were presented in an interesting way. Then there are the songs that have been stuck in my head for ages – 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', 'Islands in the Stream' and 'The Great Beyond' by REM.

Last week, these ideas all came together in my head when I was at a 'Doctor Faustus' lecture. The professor was talking about the Morality play fixture 'Everyman', the character on a journey to the afterlife. Then I remembered the references in Hamlet to death as 'the undiscovered country', and the imagery of life and death as a journey became prominent in an originally very different story. Stories like 'The Journey to the Dead' by John Updike and various tales from 'The Elephant Vanishes' by Haruki Murakami were also sources of inspiration.

The mythological aspects sort of introduced themselves without my knowledge – Durga made her presence known very early on, almost as soon as I started writing about travelling in Asia.

There's not really much else to say about this story, except that I really hope you enjoyed it.

Oh, and for anyone who is interested (which you're probably not)... I got the English scholarship!