Choose Not Part 4 8July14

As I am sitting here and writing                                          8July14

And watching out of the window

Listening to the insistent calls of a squirrel—

Unseen but somewhere out there, I see a young girl peeping out of her apartment-window,

Throwing something out to the birds perhaps,

Unmindful of what she was doing.

Suddenly the urge overpowers me—

The urge to break out of my apartment-world—

The urge to break out of this body of mine

To be with that being wherever might be.

But I know, he has disappeared

Even from this virtual world of a while,

Nowhere to be found, nowhere heard.

His act of disappearing was as mysterious as was his existence in this world.

He came like a gust of wind

And went away like the heart of a stone.

I saw in an image

Two women with their heads covered with the dark red end of their sari,

Bending over a prayer-lamp they were going to float

In the dark and a purple river.

It was the river he had mentioned once,

The river Bagmati-

And the place was Nepal-

Pashupatinath, Lord Shiva-

The creator, destroyer and the controller of all,

Was going to answer their prayer.

From here with my mind’s eye wide open in a moonless sky,

I join them in their prayer, whatever that prayer may be.

I saw only a half of the moon;

The other half was always dark.

My prayer is for the dark half

And my wishes are for the bright part

That was ever a witness to my soul.

Contd

Choose Not Part 3 To be contd

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

Choose Not Part2 to be contd.

I remember my surprise when I heard it first

In this world-wide web of virtual, elusive reality.

Undoubtedly, that voice existed

Like the wind whose origin was out of my range;

And yet it held out a fragrance to me, all its own.

Soon I was at the receiving end, listening and storing it deep in me.

I was that boy whom I watched from my apartment-window, unseen and unknown to him,as he toiled on,

Fruitlessly engaged in a trivial task,

Drowned too deep for a breath of life.

I was a distance of a few yards away from him

And yet my voice did not reach him to change his world

And this voice which I heard was a full ocean away,

But it found me and reached me across the sky.

The voice I heard was a mythical being with no face

But his presence pervaded all

And though he was a mystery unmatched,

He spoke with a clarity that could see through all.

His insight had the Germanic precision;

His vision had the Russian ambiance;

And his ability to balance all scales

Had the Swedish resilience.

He could straddle across the two cultures with ease-

The culture of the materialist West

And the ascetic quest of the East.

I heard him with rapt attention.

For the first time some being made me feel

The density of language and utterance

And the ethereal feel of their poetry.                                  

To be contd

Choose Not

Choose Not

You have lived life

With all the possibilities defined

Of dooms and the fall.

You have seen and felt them and lived them all.

All the mirages are now dissolved

The Distance and the horizon stand not apart;

They are merging in a single stratum of time .

But be it known to you that they will ever be away from you

So long as you stand apart from them,

Because you saw them with the human eye.

Now all the choices sound hollow.

The destination near, the pilgrimage over,

It’s time now to give yourself over to the river.

But something is still pulling me back

And telling me to hold on still:

Hold on and watch the flow

And be with it till the end,

Till the hope leads on

And the gorge of the ocean

Is still a distant dirge.

Here I have seen a world of another dimension—

So close to my heart

But unknown still and out of reach.

At this very moment here and now,

I am watching from my apartment-window

A school-boy sitting by the opposite window

Of another apartment in front of me.

He is busy collecting his books and tools.

A stout woman, probably his mother,

Suddenly emerges on the scene

Giving shrill commands that carry no significance for him

But as I watch him closely, I realize,

She is no mother and he no son.

He is just a servant of the household, docile infirm,

But sincerely devoted to the task in hand,

Throwing a furtive, fearful glance

In the direction of the woman who has vanished from the scene.

The boy does not know that someone is watching him from another window,

So immersed in the small details

And vainly in love with the task is he!

And I in love with his foolishness,

Am sending a wave of a blessing unknown to him.

My world is a world of another dimension.

It is the same world as the one I found

In this worldwide web

Of what is called the virtual reality,

Very much resembling this apartment window of mine.

It was a   virtual  window I opened on the world

Out there beyond my real reach.

But once it was opened it ceased to be unreal;

The dream turned into real moments of magic.

It was a dense forest at first.

At least, it is less scary when you look at it thus

Than be a soul floating on its wide ocean-tides

I told myself, “YES, this is a forest

And there has to be a way out of its depth.

Wild animals and vampires are lurking there in the dark.

Watch out; be wary.

These are vengeful beings,

Out to pour their wrath

And quench their thirst for some real human blood.

It was then that I heard a different voice-

A voice from yet another dimension-

From far beyond the forest I was in-

A voice distinct and clear-

And though it was hard like a crystal,

Soft like a white swan’s feather to me.

As I watch this boy from my apartment’s window

The memory of that voice comes back.

The streams gush forth and wash me away

And that voice comes riding on the wave.

To be contd.

(c) Sushama Karnik