His questions
appeared self-reflexive at first.
They would come out
of the blue—surcharged,
But reach me like a
target hit in the dark.
“Where is your
journey leading to?”
He had asked me once.
I said, “I do not
know. The path is not fully in view.”
And though he was
quiet upon this
He seemed to know
where the path was leading to.
After a while his
response came, apparently vague,
But it carried an
oracular certainty.
“What you are seeking
is seeking you!”
At that moment I
neither knew what I was seeking
Nor did I know
What it was that was
seeking me and why.
A solitary traveler just
walks ahead,
Heedless of who is
walking beside.
But his voice and his
presence
Were destined to
live alongside me
for a destined length
of time
and a destined length
of the route of the path.
“The light that had
shone
Shines no longer on
my path”,
I had said to him.
“The ripeness is all
that stays behind”
I had added for the
sake of clarity’
From his answer I
realized that I was seeking the light
That had gone out of
my world and plunged my path in the dark.
“It’s a way of life
known to you
A full life-time ago.
It’s a forgotten path
which was known to you”,
He had said.
And I knew; I had a
vague remembrance
Of everything he was
saying to me: about the path, and about the forgetting of it all…
And thereafter all
that he said
Was about
remembrance.
Somehow, I felt my
presence in all that he was saying.
All that I knew
perhaps a life-time ago as it were,
He was saying it all,
once again, it seemed.
His songs were those
of a solitary singer,
As if for whoever
heard them and was ready to play them back to him.
But I had heard them
all before.
The images he
recalled were those of a life-time lived and left behind,
But I was in them
all.
He was a creature of
the European sky
And I was rooted in
my Indian soil.
His Europe had gifted
him with infinite freedom to soar as high as he wished.
My Indian shackles
tied me down to the antiquity and the fixity of my soil.
I saw no way to reach
out;
I was stifled for
want of air,
And Time weighed me
down.
The afternoon call
for the mass-prayer
Coming from the
nearby mosque
Gave me a feeling of
the hopeless expanse
Of the poignant desert-winds,
and the echoes in the dunes of sands.
My inhibitions—ingrown
and killing—
Anguished me beyond
the sense of pain.
It was a measureless
length of time which had brought me to these pathless woods
Echoing with the
sound of what was known to me all along
And stubbornly
muffled and brushed away.
He was real and so
was I.
It was neither a
dream nor a virtual reality any longer.
It was oppressively
real.
The call became
persistent and time rode over it all
Like an imperceptible
river that was rolling outward
Towards the ocean
like a scroll.
To be contd
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