The poem opens partway through a long drive into the mountains.

The bus is
crammed full of passengers, a mix of travelers and local people going from
village to village, town to town. In such a remote place, public transport services
aren’t frequent, and no doubt local inhabitants are keen to take advantage of a
bus that might only pass by once a day, if that. Jackson is travelling with a
companion who’s sitting separately three rows from the back. Seemingly
unbothered by the uncomfortable conditions inside the bus, he or she is
absorbed in a book called The Jataka Tales, a collection of Buddhist
storieschronicling Buddha’s past lives and his road to enlightenment. The act of
reading these stories symbolizes the speaker’s traveling companion’s curiosity
for and immersion in the journey and, through allusion (if you recognise the title
of the book, you will know the themes of the stories inside) suggests
‘enlightenment’ or self-discovery is a possible reason to go traveling in the first
place.
While her travelling companion is immersed in his book, Jackson’s speaker
appears bothered by the journey – and irritated by another passenger who
encroaches on her space.

While her companion is engrossed, the same cannot be said of Jackson’s

speaker who’s finding the journey a bit of a chore. Dictionbetrays her negative
mindset; the word crammed tells us the bus is unpleasantly full, and the way a fat
man rubbed against my legis bothering her. She describes this intrusion into her
personal space through the simile like a damp cat, making the unwanted
physical contact seem clammy and persistent, in the way a cat will keep nuzzling
you to be petted (although I’m sure it’s unintended on the part of her seatmate).
Stumbled, grinding and tripping suggest exhaustion as wheels and hours spin by
endlessly, taking them higher and higher into the mountain range. Although there
must be much pleasure in traveling through such an incredible place (images of
the Spiti mountains that rose up around us imply an epic journey into a majestic
landscape under a grand open sky) right now it’s just too challenging to fully
enjoy and either she’s tired by the journey or tired of the journey.

The bus functions as a capsule insulating her from the full impact of the outside
world; airless and stifling, she’s on the verge of nodding off. Outside, the
landscape has a stark, lunar beauty – but there’s only so many sheep, cows and
gompas (small temples, more like shrines really) that she can look at and still feel
any frisson of amazement. In fact, the way she traced the rockline on the window
with my finger betrays a little boredom, as if the scene is more like the
background for her own daydreaming than something she’s really looking at (by
contrast, her travelling companion is immersed in the exotic stories of this
region, a comparison that draws out her lack of engagement nicely). When she
resorts to counting cows for some kind of distraction, it reminds me of the way a
person might count sheep to help them fall asleep. Finally, she admits her
lethargy and says she felt my eyes glaze over. Her exhaustion is somewhat
mirrored in the environment that’s grindingpast outside the bus windows.
Through pathetic fallacy, a type of metaphorwhereby human emotions are
transposed onto the natural world, the sky is described as propped open by its
peaks, as if the eyelids of the world are drooping with fatigue (although,
conversely, strong P alliteration in this line conveys something of the grandeur
of her epic surroundings, if only she can focus her attention a little better).
Despite the wheels and hours grinding away, the feeling persists that they are
stuck going nowhere; when Spiti finally rose up around usthe active verb is
attached to the mountains themselves, so from her tired perspective it feels like
it’s the landscape that’s moving around her stationary viewpoint. Over the first
few lines and verses, there’s a niggling feeling – faint, but persistent – that she’s
somehow reluctant or unable to fully open herself to the possibilities of her
adventure.

All the while Jackson’s poetry conveys something of the grandeur of the
surroundings that she experiences through the half-fug of sleep, almost as if
she’s in a dream. She writes in an unusual stanzaic form of two-line stanzas and
more often than not she uses enjambment so one line continues into the next,
like the bus cruising on without even the briefest of toilet-breaks. She even
enjambs between verses, so each couplet becomes a snapshot of a longer
experience, with the same mountains spiralling up around her each time her eyes
droop closed and open again. She writes in long, long sentences extended by
conjunctions (and, while, and again, and as spin out the first sentence) and an
innocuous semi-colon (and we all stumbled on; wheels and hours grinding)
stretches the sentence even further, like it’s taking the bus an eternity to get to
any kind of destination. Her internal struggle is evoked through alliteration and
consonance, techniques that repeat letters at the beginning of and inside words
respectively. Scattered around the first half of the poem like boulders on the
sparse hillsides are frequent hard consonantsounds that suggest the going is
not entirely smooth. At one point, alliteration seems to measure each second
dragging interminably as time slows to a crawl (counting cows and gompas…). In
several lines, plosive sounds (made with the letters B and P) dentals (D and T)
and gutturals (made with G, hard C and K) suggest hardship and difficulty – yet
also contain the rugged quality of rock formations, crags and jagged, flinty peaks.
As the jouney is hard, the spectacular landscape is too hard and unforgiving.
When these sounds are combined in lines such as The bus was crammed…
rubbed against my leg like a fatcat, and Spiti rose up… sky propped open, the
auditory effects, both positive and negative, are multiplied.

Finally, though, the bus reaches somewhere meaningful; namely Gramphoo, a

mountain waystation for travelers to replenish themselves. The speaker mentions
dhabas, which are roadside cooking stalls, complete with charcoal stoves and
various ingredients that can be quickly whipped up into delicious curries for
hungry passengers. While Jackson is sorely in need of replenishment – perhaps
of a more spiritual or attitudinal kind – our bus doesn’t stop and whizzes past the
lines of cooks, hawkers, and their hangers-on. The change in scenery does
provide a distraction though, and something catches her eye: a little local boy
who pops out from between two rocky crags as if by magic. His appearance
transforms her journey, and the brief-but-powerful interaction between them has
a significant impact on her alertness. Before she was nonchalantly tracing the
outline of mountain scenery on the window, daydreaming, and letting her eyes
glaze over; by contrast, this encounter is vividly burned into her memory. The
boy’s playful and spontaneous interaction with her (he shot me with a toy gun)
forms a momentary connection that strikes the speaker physically – he ‘shoots’
her awake with a start – and also with the force of epiphany, a sudden
realisation where the essence of something is revealed. The action of ‘shooting’
is therefore both literal and figurative: the violent connotations of shotremind us
that the road to ‘enlightenment’ can be long and difficult, and may involve
hardship and even pain. I saw a thin boy and I almost missed him suggests
Jackson knows that, on the verge of being overpowered by tiredness, the
moment could easily have passed her by. There’s also a nice little rebuke to her
companion here; head buried in The Jataka Tales, he would have missed this
opportunity for connection with another human being. Perhaps Jackson’s
suggesting enlightenment won’t be found in the dry pages of a book but through
real-life experience and being prepared to open one’s eyes to one’s
surroundings.
While it might be a stretch to say the poem is all about Jackson’s search for
‘enlightenment’, there’s definitely a sense that she was looking for direction,
some kind of course-correction in her prevailing outlook, perhaps. For here,
where the road divided, is the turning point of the poem; a ‘fork in the road’ that
presents a symbolicchoice. Tired of the journey, one road will take her back
down the mountain, returning her to a recognisable and comfortable world. The
other will climb higher, leading to new discoveries – but she’ll need to find a way
to open herself to the possibility of adventure, or sharpen her perceptive
faculties, things she’s found hard to achieve before now. This moment is
signposted (some might liken this to foreshadowing in prose) throughout the
poem by the significance of the number ‘two’: the divided road splits in two; two
crags; two dhabas; each verse is composed of exactly two lines – all
symbolically mirroring the moment when a piece of me stopped, and the
traveler metaphorically divides in two as well. At this instant, her ‘past’ self is left
behind as if it fell by the roadside, and her ‘new’ self emerges, reinvigorated and
ready to embrace her adventure more fully. I think the title of the poem, The
Instant of My Death, is revealed to be a clever piece of misdirection; ironically,
she seems to become more alive after he shoots her.

In truth, the poem’s ambiguity makes it hard to put our fingers on precisely what
changes after a piece of me stopped. While I’m reluctant to blindly guess why, I’m
hazarding that she was a bit lonely and felt isolated way up in the mountains.
After all, her friend was off in his own imaginary world so perhaps she was feeling
ignored or upset at having to share a seat with a stranger. With nothing else to
do, she lets the repetitive scenery slide across her gaze, and finds herself on the
verge of nodding off. Like a shot of adrenaline to the heart, the boy’s spontaneity
sparks her awake. The details she provides (thin, red flannel, gap-toothed, small,
the way he squats by the cook-stands) are more vividly drawn than the hazily
traced rocklines of the Spiti mountain range and he certainly stands out
memorably. While the colour contrast is not explicitly made, his bright red flannel
shirt exposes him against the drabness of the background scenery, signalling
some kind of symbolic importance. The metaphor black-eyed bean, intensified
by alliteration, gives him a dark and mysterious allure as well as emphasises
how small he is; it’s interesting that the massive mountains had less impact on
her than this single soul. More alliteration dramatizes the moment of connection
between them, turned, gap-toothed, shot and toy gun feature strong G and T
sounds that follow a period of relative quiet; listen to how slipped in… he was so
small that I almost missed him uses sibilance and nasal M, N to lull us into a
hazy, dreamlike state… before the staccato sounds of the toy gun crack in your
ear like a shot! If you’ve ever dozed in the back of a car only to be suddenly
jolted awake, you’ll be able to relate to the abruptness of this feeling. However
you want to describe his transformative role, the boy is significant in energising
and fortifying her for the journey ahead.

Therefore, while the final lines of the poem seem to take us back to the beginning
(this is called loop composition) as the bus moved onand we are reacquainted
with the fat manwho still takes up more than his fair share of the seat, actually we
get the impression that things have changed. For starters, she doesn’t complain
about his pressing against her anymore. Instead, she describes the way he
cracked an apple open with his thumb, the word open being an example of how
diction– as well as her outlook – has altered. In another positive change,
cracked has replaced crammed, the vivid onomatopoeiaconveying something of
how her perceptions have sharpened and her senses become more acute (an
impression supported by whip-sharp sounds such as hard CK and plosive P in
apple open). The opening of the apple, splitting it into two, certainly associates
with the opening of the speaker’s perceptive abilities, and the way she feels a
part of her has been left behind at the site of her epiphany. While literary and
cultural associations of the apple are myriad, several symbolic meanings carry
connotations of ‘rebirth’ that fit with this reading of the poem. To mention a few
examples, in China apples symbolise Spring, youth and new beginnings; in
Greece they are symbolically associated with new beginnings through fertility; in
Judaism apples are eaten at New Year, again symbolising a new beginning; and
in Christianity, while many believe the forbidden fruit devoured by Adam and Eve
was an apple, it is not explicitly stated so in the Bible. Instead, upon his
resurrection Jesus Christ is often depicted holding an apple in his hand, and in
these cases it carries symbolic associations of rebirth, redemption and
renewal.