The Story of Nachiketa Second Coming: Installmrnt 2

But today as he hurried toward their cottage he thought more of his father than of her; but not in the way he thought of her, however. He never had to think of her, just as he never had to think of himself, or of the river, or of the sky, the nights and the mornings. They were simply there. They made no demands and were unending like his mother, and yet were there within the grasp of his embrace.

For the past one month his father had been busy calculating something with the almanacs spread before him. He was also busy taking measurements in the courtyard for a place to build the ritual fire. Nachiketa had been running around doing errands for him. Men who looked like solid mountains had come to help him prepare for the ceremony.

Nachiketa had once sat by his father watching them discuss something which he did not understand. He tried to copy their gestures as faithfully as he could and got so engrossed in the game that he failed to understand why one of them felt offended when he caught Nachiketa in his act of mimicry and why his father had turned to him in anger upon that.

Nachiketa knew that his father wanted many things. He saw him toiling day and night. At times he wanted some miracle to happen so that his father would forget the heavy books and the learned discussions and join him in his lonely excursions in the woods. Nachiketa’s heart would go out to meet and seek his father out. But there was no place for him to occupy in his father’s domain. He felt like an alien who had strayed into a territory the laws of which could not be fathomed and which yet asked him to comply. And very often Nachiketa violated those laws without being able to understand the severity of the punishment. He felt like a criminal who silently suffered, and suffered all the more intensely because he did not understand what his crime was.

Forests and streams and the changing skies became his companions. They spoke to him in their silence. They healed his wounds and gave him a strange strength: a strength that came from an all-abiding love. At night, upon waking up in the middle of it, he would stare in amazement at his father’s countenance. Those lines of deep trouble and frustrations would take on the shape of an undecipherable sorrow. At such moments Nachiketa would almost see the likeness of the tempestuous trees in the forest when they were stilled into silence. He would remember the ceaseless toil of that sleeping heart during the day. Nachiketa’s pure heart and tender soul would stoop in compassion over that agonized, anguished human who was his father. The two souls would be suspended in a closeness, one awake, the other asleep. In one there were no desires, and the other lacerated by unfulfilled dreams. Nachiketa would stare long at  the dimly lit features through the intervening shadows cast by the trees outside the cottage-window.

In the morning the room would be bright and noisy. The vision of the night would be replaced by the sight of his father moving about the house in immaculately clean white clothes. His strident voice would belie all that he spoke to Nachiketa in the space of the night.