Two Philosophers #2″
(Finger-drawn on phone mobile app/Radha Gomaty/2023)
O
nce upon a time there was a courtesan…
As most courtesans, she did not become one because she wanted to become one but because like all the rest she too had once dreamt of love , a single –pointed devotion ,a sacramental fulfillment … and had lost…
Once she too had had a love but it was not till later separate from the One Great Love… Of Freedom; or of the instinctive sense of Nature as the Dance of a Great and Divine One…
The one and the One had no distinction.
The placement of capital letters made no difference to either the fieriness of her passionate of spirit or to her capacity for surrender…
The problem began only when with the inscrutable workings of the Great Mystery, the tumultuous unfolding of the divine plan; the one inexplicably disappeared, dethroning himself abruptly from the centre of her little universe…
Where did that leave her but raging and foaming at the mouth, Burnt, and benumbed by the Fire and Ice of a Pure Hell? So, she wept and wept, wrung her hands over-wrought with unanswered questions and endless bitterness …
That one and the One were twain was not acceptable to her.
Unable to bear the betrayal, the reality of the shifting sands that stood in the place of what was once the bedrock of her bliss, she turned into a rebel donning the rebel angel’s scarlet gown… And growing upon her once gentle shoulders, were the insuperable, ghastly wings of flame that people instinctively feared and yet longed to touch …
Thus, she raged, the fire raging insatiably in her innards sometimes leaping without, singeing, sometimes burning into a conflagration those who crossed her path.
…That was how with her dolorous angular beauty, her ready acerbic wit, the gifts of lovely voice and word that was hers from birth, she slowly turned into what some of the angels of flame usually turn into, especially if they are female-The Courtesan …
Wealth came her way. Riches undreamt of… Many were the hearts of the rich and powerful that were flung beneath her well-shod delicate feet upon which she stepped with careless disdainful ease as if so many torn up trembling crimson flowers … Blood flowed in the land for her single glance. Swords were drawn for a letter, a word …
But her mirror clouded in the secrecy of the night. Tears bled from her womb and her eyes. The poor fallen angel could feel her heart turning cold at the edges, her skin turn into a wall of stone, her voice failing, words faltering … Her scented bed felt like a tomb to her and her grand house gradually a marble sepulchre …
The last hold of heaven seemed to drop; the bolts of hell shut tight. Rains of fire broke loose in body and soul … And beneath her, the earth split asunder …
So she moved from courtesan to mistress, from the keeper of hearts to the kept, from the quarters of the rich eventually to the charnel house of the poor not just in worldly wealth but in spirit as well … Thus, she suffered.
During all this a child quickened to life in her and was born…Whose child, she cared not and even in the unrelenting misery of lack, the babe’s breath unclouded a small spot in her mirror and awoke in her the sacred founts of an instinctual holy motherhood…
A Light that belonged to the early days of her own childhood began to reappear as if playing through the wind-danced canopy of the trees, in dim and fleeting rays …
Sometimes it was colored with her hopes and fears and forebodings …
Nevertheless, it was this slim little finger of light that held itself out to her to hold that made the new mother one with the pure little child within her …The little child that we all are in the lap of the One in whom we are all but babes however bent and old by an age given to us by the world that measures itself by the illusion of time …
The ray of light sometimes congealed in her trembling pallid instinctive fighter’s hand to become a new and shining sword. By this light she could see once more in the dim jungle … Become once more the explorer she always was finding her way back to the path through the thick of the undergrowth. And so it went … On through trials and tribulations and temptations till she returned home one night from a dance recital not knowing still that it was to be her last one …
Taking the anklets off her aching feet, not knowing yet she’d never hear them again, a cold curious feeling came upon her …
Suddenly she realized, with her hand on her heart that she, the courtesan, had just died…Was irrevocably completely dead.
Her knees gave way. She clawed the wall, gasping for breath.
She was witness and priest, mourner and corpse all at once … And she knew what it was like to be present at her own death …
Was it simply Fear that she felt? At the falling away of the familiar, which however miserable, invoked such dread as she had never felt hitting her with such singular power throughout the entire length and breadth of the miserable existence, she had lived from the shattering of the One up to this final moment …
Yes, it was Death.
The shock wore away.
Finger by finger, with a quiet and singular deliberation, she loosened the grip from upon what was left of the familiar.
She undid one by one the threads that were once the inseparable warp and weft of her Life. The old silk was swiftly confined to the flames. From the brocade, only the gold was allowed to remain as so many tangled skeins of shimmering thread …
It was all very sudden.
…Yet she knew deep within that this leap was the culmination of a long and complicated series of steps… And she also sensed that this plunge was not the end but was just the beginning, the test toe-dip, so to say, into the waters of unknown hue, power of flow and depth that she knew was readying behind the heavy opaqueness of time to claim her …
The knocks gradually stopped at her door. The faces changed from that of hypocritical merchants and greedy misers in pursuit of easy pleasures to earnest aspiring students, monks and mendicants briefly stepping in for shelter …
Sometimes moved by the simplicity of her piety, the innocence of her devotion, the monks and mendicants tarried a little longer and carried forth discourses amongst themselves at her steps attracting common folk on their way to and from the market.
She listened to them as her little one played fretting with the ochre hems of the mendicants’ robes or toying with the rough roundness of their prayer beads …
Listening, strange seeds were sown in her heart … Her spirit received them as the earth does. In the deep furrows of her inner tumult and torment, strange plants sprouted in silence and flowered as she scoured the pots and pans, lit the lamps, washed the clothes, drew water from the nearby river and cooked pots of simple food for the asking …
The years passed … The babe was now a little lad going to school …The signs of age held back from the dense black cloud of her hair but for an occasional hesitant strand of white lightning …. Her spine was pure steel, lithe and supple and an unsullied girlhood lit up the soft clear lamps of her childlike eyes …
A new peace was rising in her heart when they arrived … From two directions from whence the moon and sun rise… Two personages … Each staking in her claims that seemed different yet were somewhere one and the same …
The one and the One …
The memory jolted though it no longer pained to remember as it seemed to her the last beckoning of what seemed an unattainable vision …. She started a little.
From the West, the serious-eyed youth with his long mane and rare but gentle smile. Although he looked a little more than a boy, his energetic gait betrayed a passionate dynamic man, and he was forthright.
He talked feelingly of the sorrows and the sadness of common people…The need for compassion to her obviously spiked by a drive to change work into acts of love imbued with the spirit of selfless service and sacrifice …
He spoke earnestly to her of the helpless mothers he knew who were compelled to sell their bodies to feed their hungry children … And when he did, his tears that wet her step, she understood, came from a sacred wound in his heart with which she empathized as one string of a sitar to another …
His whole being struck her as an egg stuck with straw smeared with ashes in which restlessly stirred a fledgling wisdom ….
Then one day placing his small work -toughened palm upon the head of her sleeping child, still talking upon bended knee, he beseeched her in soft tones to grace his homestead. With earnest eyes, in a passionate voice, he implored her to let him join her in building a new life ….
He spoke of making a home with her full of music and love… where shared readily with the poor and the truly needy, the humblest of meals would become the choicest banquets of the gods… Touching her callused Mother’s hands reverently with his own trembling ones he went on to pray for the tinkling laughter of children they would have together… Gently, brushing back the tired lock of hair from her forehead, he touched her hands once again reverently, this time with his lips and left her. As he reached her gate he turned around once more and begged her with his eyes to consider what he had said, that soon he would come back for her answer …
The moon rose high up above the trees…A wind from nowhere came crashing down like a giant sigh through the leaves … She sank down upon the ground at last with trembling legs. She did not know what to do or how to think …
Little children danced around her without touching the ground, hands enjoined, her first born, the tallest and the oldest of the lot, also taking his merry steps in the enchanted ring …
In a trice they vanished …
She felt the weight of child within her; the unborn daughters rolling in her abdomen …
The feeling vanished …
She saw the Kind One exchanging words with her she could not hear but from his face and his eyes she could see, though mundane homely things, they were sacraments …
They vanished …
And dreams growing within dreams, fell scattered about her in heaps like the petals of the lightening hours …
She had stopped weeping by then and sat quietly in silence ….
“Alms” It was said but not spoken …
She started awake. Golden sunshine was pouring all over her dishevelment.
A cock crowed. Was it the sun or the deep eyes of the Luminous One calmly heading the small cluster of Bhikkus who stood at her doorstep?
She rushed like a madwoman to light the fire, to scour the pots, to draw water, to clean the courtyard in brisk semi-circular strokes with controlled dance-like steps in His honour…
Her heart leapt wildly as the Bhikkus settled a few paces within the edge of her garden to rest after their long journeying … There were women too, this time. One young like herself, the other old, who beckoned to her newly risen young one to sit with them.
They sat gratefully in silence breaking the humble bread she had hurriedly made them and sipping the sweetened water she poured out boiled with soothing herbs …
The Bhikkus emanated the fragrance of an indescribable peace in her entire garden, the slanting sunlight falling on ochre robes soiled with much journeying, upon poor starved bodies caked with dust but filled to the brim with rich and full spirits …
Every leaf on the plants, every sound of the empty earthen cups softly striking the ground … All formed a discourse on the sheer Beauty and the indescribable richness of Life without words …
A horde of dragonflies descended like a sign hovering prayerfully above the garden … It was then that the Luminous One lifted His eyes and smiled at her, getting up, slightly bowing as a sign of His impending departure …
“…Until next time,” He said in a low clear voice mingled with what she felt to be an all-knowing teasing playfulness.
Blessing the young one He bowed once more and seemed suddenly to her eyes not to walk but rather glide out of her little garden… Her gaze followed the group of monks till they had but vanished over the line of the horizon. For some reason she blushed. Then crouching behind the door, she crumpled her upper cloth into a ball which she drove between her teeth and uncontrollably wept …
The hours slipped down the slopes like so many tears …
Her heart gradually lightened.
Peace filled the house as the shadows lengthened into evening and slowly spreading, turned the violet sky to night …
There once more, within earshot, approaching her from the door at the West the sound of firm familiar resolute footsteps …
“Ma? Ma… “Someone was shaking her shoulder “Why do you cry?”
Siddhaarth, Anahata and Vishuddhi stood around her massaging her thin feet and stroking her sweat-drenched head …
Poor Mother!
He sat beside her. Gently … Their fingers gnarled with age, barely touching …
“Vibhuthi?” He whispered …
Something inside smiled.
For, it was a call so familiar, so deep, so much in command of itself and the lives in its charge that it needed no answer …
Within that call the eyes of the Luminous One shone once more …
“Master …” She uttered once without voice before falling still …
“Vibhuthi …” He affirmed softly, letting go of her cold hand as he rose, to no one in particular.
*****
Author bio
Radha Gomaty had her initial training at
Kerala Kala Peetom with Artist T Kaladharan.
After attending the Foundation Programme for school leavers at NID, Ahmedabad, she opted to do her BA in Fine Arts (Painting) at MSU, Baroda, followed by a PG in History of Art from Viswabharathi University, Santhiniketan.
From scriptwriting for documentaries, curating art shows (including a section in KMB’s recent edition) involving in various outreach activities, aesthetic & ecological, Radha’s engagement with multiple concerns is principally poetic.
She is in fact a poet with her first collection Through Moonless Nights published by Kendra Sahitya Akademi under the Navodaya scheme in 2008 and her second Immortal Story (2013) published by Aether Books with colour plates of her sculptures based on her poems.
Today she is a noted upcoming actor in Malayalam Cinema.
Address:
Radha Gomaty
Edathodam, ALRA 75
South Eroor PO
Ernakulam 682306
Kerala
Ph 8281185859
******
“Vibhuthi?” He whispered …
Something inside smiled.
Oh dear….
Touching
“Vibhuthi?” He whispered …
Something inside smiled.
Oh dear….
Touching