ONE OF THE reasons I didn’t want to be born became clear to me after I had come into the world. I was still very young when in a daze I saw Dad swallowed up by a hole in the road. Another time I saw Mum dangling from the branches of a blue tree. I was seven years old when I dreamt that my hands were covered with the yellow blood of a stranger. I had no idea whether these images belonged to this life, or to a previous one, or to one that was yet to come, or even if they were merely the host of images that invades the minds of all children.

When I was very young I had a clear memory of my life stretching to other lives. There were no distinctions. Sometimes I seemed to be living several lives at once. One lifetime flowed into the others and all of them flowed into my childhood.

As a child I felt I weighed my mother down. In turn I felt weighed down by the inscrutability of life. Being born was a shock from which I never recovered. Often, by night or day, voices spoke to me. I came to realise that they were the voices of my spirit companions.

‘What areyou doinghere?’ oneof themwould ask.

‘Living,’ I would reply. ‘Livingfor what?’ ‘I don’t know.’

‘Why don’t you know? Haven’t you seen what lies ahead of you?’

‘No.’

Then they showed me images which I couldn’t understand. They showed me a prison, awoman covered with golden boils, alongroad, pitiless sunlight, aflood, an earthquake, death.

‘Come back to us,’ they said. ‘We miss you by the river. You have deserted us. If you don’t come back we will make your life unbearable.’