Before actually knowing you, understanding you, I had said - “My gifts are not from a mortal man to that immortal woman; they are from a Sufi fakir who drinks nectar like poison and that too like a solitary star at the migrated evening of this departed country.”

Today as much as my saying this surprises me, it also makes me extremely sad. All my companions are estranged banished from my life; yet I have a sense of thankfulness towards them. Just like the evening ‘raga’, which is bereaved due to the setting of the sun. There is a mysterious cruelty in this - yet without full faith. I cannot believe it. Herein my concept of life with a horse comes into picture. I have a very old relation with the horse. In my creativity, I always find myself riding on a horse. But after the lyrical fit subsides I question myself - was I really riding a horse through this painful process? I am, for a certain period, wholly undecided as to whether this manifestation is a reality, a hallucination or a dream? Has it come from some other time? But I feel it always lay there - half submerged; a water spirit rising or an earth spirit submerging.

But the horse was always there - it was just that I was hiding behind it. Who doesn’t face such questions in one’s lyrical fits? But all these questions are equally truthful.

My meeting with you is a recent thing - a thing that I had never decided to happen with a method. A relation that I was trying to keep at bay - not out of any pledge to celibacy, but just to be sure that the strength of my feeling is reciprocated. But then why is it that I need to meet you so often? Why is it that you should be an integral part of these lyrical attacks of mine; wherein I put pen to paper, at a time I had long forgotten to vent my feelings?

Was it the same old male-female relationship that I was trying to mask under the altruistic feeling of admiration?

You sound very passionate at times. As if to make me aware of the dormant passion in me. But suddenly having said too much, you change your words - “For the physical fixation and for the fixation of the soul” - both things you try simultaneously. You recognise your existence as a thought process, a thought provoking process. I am confused by your sways between materialism and non-materialism. I don’t know whether I should appreciate you materialistic masks or hate you for your restrained, controlled, detached endeavours. A poet had once remarked - “I thought it was the only proper treatment for her” and I, a foolish child am searching for it.

The child in love with prints and gazettes
Finds that the globe his thirst can satisfy
How big the world appears by the lamplight!
How small this world is in our memory.
One morning, we depart, the mind ablaze
The heart weighed down with care and bitterness
Some happily escape their country vile;
Others the horror of their birth.
They drink in burning skies and light and space
The ice bites, the sun which turns them rust.
But the real travellers are those,
Who leave for leaving’s sake, hearts light as air
They never do their Destiny oppose;
Not knowing why, they always say - I dare!

The poem has been titled as “Death” but also sub-titled as “Voyage”. But could it be more aptly titled as “A Voyage of Death”

After almost an eternity, you asked me if I would come with you. I questioned myself, was I the grantor? Was I providing you something or were you providing me something? Were you fulfilling my wish or granting me the freedom to wish? I feel I should tell you - “Dying is painful; not Death. I want your company in this painful process of Death”

And as I sit here, in my favourite chair; I am numb but not unhappy. But neither can I look at everything neutrally; objectively. I am trying to coalesce your anger, intrigue, faith, passion and the plethora of feeling that your eyes duly convey at each waking moment of the day. Yet I am not above the feeling of grantor and grantee. Both ways, it’s my Ego at work. Can it not be that I am a grantee but you suck whatever honey you want out of me? I am assimilating all my self; only to be destroyed by you and hoping that you do it - you who will free me of all my desires and leave me alone at my lyrical fits. There is some divinity at play here, but I am too confused to comprehend it.

It is that my life is to be staked at the hope of waiting for this destruction, untiringly yet knowingly?

But then there is another way of giving and taking. A tree cut; bleeds and if we put our pots at the right place - the heavenly juices before mixing with the earthly soil - just fall into our pots held shrewdly in between.

After all, all sorts of relations have a superiority complex from which stems the feeling –

“Vardhate kshiyate chandraha na tu taraganaha kwachit”

April 6, 2002