Jab kahi pe kuchi nahi bhi nahi tha
Wahi tha wahi tha
Wahi tha wahi tha.
(When there was nothing,
He was the one,
the only one.)
– Kun Faya Kun (2011)
Time is a great equalizer, maybe the only one?
How do you measure sadness, how much is too much? Do you need to be so sad that you find no joy in life, or is it when you somehow cannot force yourself to smile?
Who has seen the most sorrow? Can a child’s sad story be considered sad enough? Or do you have to be broken after you’ve built that adult threshold for grief?
By the time you’re 25, everyone has had that experience, from life or from people. Everyone has lain on their beds numb one night having cried their eyes out, thinking of how alone they are, of how right those were that left everything and everyone, of how they were brave, of how helpless we are by ourselves. Sat on the floor and bawled at this cruel world of those that hurt us.
Defenceless, alone, but above all, innocent.
That’s the sad, but also the beautiful way we’re all equals at 25. How time is an equalizer, maybe the only one.
This isn’t about being 25 though.
Nobody is more sympathetic to our younger selves than us, I think.
Last month I was sitting on a bench outside DO class when two students approached me, said they’re from the Theology department doing a survey, and asked if I believe in God or a higher power. (My better guess is they were two friends in conversation looking for a random person’s perspective, but yea).
I do, I say.
They ask me their theological question which isn’t relevant in this story, but they took me back to this phase I had almost forgotten I had.
I don’t have an adjective to describe it though, it’s just a vulnerable 19 year old me and an overflowing heart. There’s people, there’s college, there’s lots more people. But they’re somehow neatly tucked away like we belonged in parallel stories, in separate worlds.
Amma and I visited Padmanabha Swamy temple every month back then on my asking. It was the one place where I took peace in return for surrendering all that that plagued me, where I didn’t have to fight and was finally at ease. And I never wanted to leave.
Everything the temple housed was alive to me – oil that dripped to floors from large hanging lamps, flowers from prasadam that were gently squeezed to the back of aunties’ hair, the constant humming breeze to which untrimmed bushes swayed. Alive and sacred. They were glimpses, or rather a beckoning at a life sans desperation, a life that was elusive yet very much existed, that I was allowed to be a part of for the short while that I was there.
I saw beauty in every person, I could see only kind faces that reflected back at me the serene in passing, as if they all knew why I was there, as if they all said a prayer for me.
I saw old ladies seated on a mandapam reciting chants and that’s when I knew I could sit with them and cry my heart out if only I had learnt those songs that Amma knew. I wondered how they did not break into fits of weeping every time they sang them. I envied what devotion (and in all likelihood old-age) gifted them. They were already at peace and singing a prayer for me and others like me, just like the solitary cobweb floating on a high corner I chanced upon seemed to be.
Every time after going around the whole temple, Amma and I sat on the parapet facing the sands on my asking, watching the towering gopuram in the orange lights.
It was almost always 7pm by then, and I wondered how there were no pictures of that one angle of it bathed in shadows and light against the dark sky, one you can see only from the inside. How whoever constructed it back then saw the quiet splendor that I was looking at, or probably much more.
Of how somebody had known humans would house worries bigger than themselves to look for comfort in things larger than life.
I wondered if there were others who visited the place to absolve of all that taxed them, who marveled at its massiveness and felt the same empty light heartedness I felt then.
I watched a classical recital in the temple once, and I watched others who sat listening – silent, smiling, dissolving. I could only see pointlessness in my suffering then, how what I bore was boundless to my trivial self yet how the world was much bigger than any of it. And yet I knew I’d soon walk past the doors of the temple out into the world only to be overwhelmed by my own reality.
It makes sense that I never wanted to leave.
I remember thinking Gopika was lucky for getting to visit so often, for staying so close by. I wondered what one did if you had no troubles to hand over, if you had no turbulent mind to begin with, and I couldn’t imagine much more. Looking back, what’s funny is I was either not in my elements while I was there, or it was the only place where I was. The lines are blurred and there’s no way I can tell now.
Jab kahi pe kuchi nahi bhi nahi tha,
Wahi tha wahi tha,
Wahi tha wahi tha.
(When there was nothing,
He was the one,
the only one.)
There is a story of how when we were kids my brothers and I played in the sand inside the temple for hours, and I have listened to it being retold as many times as I’ve been there. I once asked Amma about why the place felt so positive, and she mentioned something unappealingly scientific about energy flow, unobstructed pathways and open spaces.
Every time I have gone back, I have still seen magnificence but in the “open spaces, positive energy” way.
I’ve smiled at how I once looked to its huge corridors* and pillars to be a part of me, how I felt lighter with every step I took around the temple, how even the cheli of wet footprints had brought me peace. How I held on to this one place because I found nobody and nothing else to turn to.
I’ve wondered at how young I was, how innocent I was, how I didn’t deserve any of it. Like we all do, I guess.
Yet I’ve not felt the same submission nor seen the surreal there since. I see beautiful faces, sure, but also the regular lives that go on behind them and the chanting. I see pottis and that solitary cobweb on the high corner, but they’re no longer conferring a hurried blessing upon the mortal me. And yet I had seen all of it there, the same way we seek comfort in music or art, but cannot go back once we’ve made it through.
Like the Room of Requirement lending itself only to those that need (ask and you shall receive?).
Faith to me was hope. I needed mine to be larger than life, larger than anything I knew.
It was, and it’s how I survived.
(You’re right, this article may be summarized as Paalam kadakkuvolam narayana).
* I meant pradakshina paatha but I’ve only ever called it chuttunna vazhi and hence.
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