Nachketa 9

Nachiketa was now most often left to his own devices to fathom the answers to the questions that arose in his hours of deep meditation. He often wondered if the old man knew the direction of his thoughts and his quest, and still held back the answers for reasons of his own.  Nachiketa was almost a child when he was brought by providence to the door of the old man, really to die, but perhaps the providence, or perhaps the old man, did not let him die. His childish faith had led him here not really in search of what the world calls ‘death’, but in search of answers which the child in him had believed to be in the trust of the divinity called ‘Yama’. At that time the old man came and gave him life, not death. He wanted to be claimed by death; he was claimed by life. All these years he was cut off from the life of society. He and the old man were the creatures of the forest. The forest knew them and they knew the forest. The forest knew what they needed and gave them in plenty. It was so plentiful that they had forgotten what it is like to be in lack of something.

The old man did not teach him anything, but Nachiketa learnt everything by way of osmosis. He absorbed the old man’s agility of the body and the mind. He absorbed his way of synchronizing decision and action. He absorbed the old man’s virtual invisibility as he reflected on a phenomenon. He understood the marvellous ways in which he disguised his reality when he had to appear differently to the world out there. He had soon realized that the old man was an ace marksman and a good hunter who never missed his target. Living with him, Nachiketa had no memories of his roots.  They lingered in his mind as pictures recalled from a dream. He had lived the years of his childhood in that state of virtual amnesia. But as self-awareness increased, he started thinking about what he had left behind. He remembered that he had dreams of an idyllic world of ideas which he had longed to share with his father and his father’s discordant relationship with the world did not let him in. In his hours of meditation he was often confused as to the nature of his thoughts about his father. As he grew up he developed the practice of concentration and contemplation. But the process of growing up was tied up with a growing realization of his father’s heart and the mind. He was confused about those thoughts because he did not know whether they were distractive and needed to be banished from the focus of meditation or whether they needed to be tamed and understood fully. Often, he felt his father’s hand touch his heart, as if that touch was trying to say something that transcended words. The memory of his father’s strident and commanding, almost terrifying voice would wake up and gradually shade off into an ardent whisper. That whisper seemed to have a voice that desperately called for attention. Nachiketa did not know what to do at such moments. He had no experience of dealing with such feelings. He had no way of establishing a contact with a person who had once ruled over his life and was now relegated to the domain of imagination. He had no way of determining if his perception of that whisper was real or a fragment of imagination.

The old man was neither curious nor perturbed over Nachiketa’s past. As Nachiketa grew up and understood his environment, its perspective and meaning began to grow upon his consciousness. He did not know whether the old man’s apparent apathy was empathy raised to an all-encompassing universal consciousness. Nachiketa as yet had no ability to merge with that dimension where, at this stage of his growth, he felt, God alone could dwell.