Nachiketa Installment 5

 

(A page which formed a vital link in the script is missing here, appropriately perhaps. This rupture in the narrative was a coincidence and like certain coincidences it created a vacuum within which one can write everything or nothing. It also made me think over my father’s aversion to my story-telling skills. He did not want that I should understand pain and sorrow. My Guru was perhaps happy that at last I was fit to be a disciple.

In the postmodern techniques of scripting, a rupture in the narrative is also a point of loose ends which let the reader in and write the script. Whatever it may be, a coincidence seized as a moment for introspection, a rupture, or a technique, the narrative has to go on. )

Nachiketa read a sign in the words uttered by his father. His childish mind was not equipped to understand the nuances of the adult language. His world had taken a trauma. Fables and parables are not allegories to a child who has just begun to understand the world and its language. His reality was broken. He had no language to communicate the massive impact of it. He wanted now to meet Yama, the divinity of Death, face to face. If it was Yama who was going to claim him, he belonged to Yama. He felt drawn in love to Yama.

The night was long and restless for Nachiketa. He stayed wide awake and stared into the heart of that night, defenceless and bewildered. He closed his eyes. It made no difference, within and without, all was the same. Is this what they call death? Is this what he loved?

Suddenly he realized that it was not his own death that he feared. How could he die? He breathed his own  name slowly. Each breath filled him with a strength that was beyond hope and time. He realized that at that moment  something had happened to him out of time.

Yes, he was free to choose and he had the strength to choose. And now it did not matter where he lived. In that single night he had come a long way to belong to Death, because he did not belong anywhere. Now he belonged to himself. It was all the same now, here or there, or anywhere; in the woods or in the world of sacrificial rites and strife; Nachiketa would be Nachiketa.

Nachiketa was conquered by Nachiketa. Nachiketa was beautiful; Nachiketa was strong, inexhaustible. No longer would he be banished; no longer would he shy away from the world. His mother, his cow, his father, everything came back to him and he gave them love, infinite love. But not by living here. He must break away from it all.

………………………….

It was a long, long journey, alone to an unknown destination, a journey in search of the meaning of life, and strangely in search of Death. The boy went on and on in search of Death so that great Master would reveal to him the meaning of life. He had left behind the silent rivers, the changing skies, the humming forests to understand the silence beyond it all.

Driven by a lunatic force, he went ahead as if borne on the crest of a deafening tide, inebriate with the desire to know. He was being washed away to the feet of the inevitable. Mornings brought sunrise and with the sun going down he would feel the sea-gulls sweeping across the sky, singing a desperate song to ease the tedium of lonely flights to unknown lands. The boy would gaze at the horizon till the ever-widening blue conquered his vision and sleep too became a sightless plunge into the Blue. His lust or the horizon made him forget that the land never ends and the sky never begins.

Thus Nachiketa travelled for three days and three nights and then dropped down in sheer exhaustion and fatigue.

Myriad forms fleeted past his vision in that moment, his mother’s silent face, the river-bed, the lotus-leaf, the silent, suffering in the eyes of Kapila, and then his father’s volcanic eruption: “Go, I have given thee to Yama, The god of Death.” The next moment Nachiketa could no longer hear silence; he became part of it.