20 Meta-Mobilis: The Case for Polymorphous Existence in K.S. Maniam’s Between Lives BERNARD WILSON And this—as I see it—is also the role of the author within his ancestral background: he is the complex ghost of his own landscape of history or work. To put it another way, his poem or novel is subsistence of memory (Wilson Harris 2000). 1 It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters in the end (Ursula K. Le Guin 1987). INTRODUCTION T he Indian-Malaysian novelist, playwright and academic, K.S. Maniam has been his country’s most highly regarded English lan- guage writer over the last quarter of a century. The thematic concerns of Maniam’s oeuvre have increasingly reflected the dilemma, not just for Malaysia’s diasporic Indian population, but for all of its principal ethnic groups: the angst which so often accompanies transformation, and the hope for an often intangible but nevertheless crucial sense of unity—the transformation of cultures and, in many instances, the socio-political repression of languages—but also the forfeiture of the opportunity for soul-sharing and a style of existence sans frontières which has its roots in past mythologies and, equally as importantly, the landscape itself. It is through simultaneously negotiating the present, past and future, through journeying back to lost myths and narratives while creating new ones, Maniam suggests, that one may regain a lost