Parul, p.12
Parul, page 12
After lunch, they sat in the living room listening to music, some garba and some ghazals; she sat on the floor beside him, with her head in his lap, and he stroked her hair. If there could be a perfect picture of love this was it; if there could be a perfect moment of love here it was; two hearts beating like one, two minds in perfect harmony like the ardhanari, two beings belonging to each other like Radha and Krishna in the twelfth canto of the Gita Govinda, two loves becoming one as if whispering: ‘I am you and you are me,’ uniting two different and separate lives in one undivided love bringing to life a doha by Kabir in Brijbhasha:
prem ki galli iti sankdi jahan do nahi samay
jahan mai hun waha hari nahi, jahan hari hai waha main nahi
Today was the purnima of Sharad; the moon was close to the earth and it looked large; in its romantic light there was a certain silvery softness, in its shadows an invitation to love, in its hushed silence the words of the rasa panchadhyayi of the Bhagavata, in its ambience the rhythms of the maha rasa of Krishna and the gopis. As Parul and Praful sat hand in hand under the canopy of the champa tree, moonlight illuminated their faces. In the stillness of the night, every leaf and every flower of the champa were like gandharvas in the sky blessing the couple underneath. It was as if they were Radha and Krishna at the still centre of the rasa mandala, and celestial beings were raining flowers on them, just as they had celebrated the rasa lila of Krishna and the gopis on that special night in the dashama skanda of the Bhagavata. They sat on the patio till the moon disappeared behind the clouds. Hand in hand they looked up to the champa tree as if to ask for its blessings, and he picked up a champa flower that had fallen on the ground and put it in her hair. It seemed as if a star had descended from the sky to rest on her head, and a beautiful day of being together ended in a beautiful romantic togetherness.
8. Kartik
A potter kneaded some earth
and was making small lamps
and a little girl had money to buy only two
she lit one in the home shrine
and the other on the threshold.
Why on the threshold, someone asked?
So Lakshmi would find her way into our home
and bless our family, she said.
As Kartik comes, monsoon clouds give way to a cloudless sky; the sun is brighter and brings a certain energy to fields and farms; householders prepare for the festive season, walls are painted; rural homes get a fresh coat of cow dung and housewives paint kalashas with rice paste on the walls. Birds gather twigs to build nests, farmers prepare to bring in the harvest and Mehtajis put their ledger books in order, even as tailors ensure that their orders are ready on time. On the full moon of Kartik, devotees gather at the Golden Temple to celebrate Guru Nanak’s birth. Kartik is a month when heaven and earth resonate with a joyous rhythm, when the purnima reminds us of Guru Nanak and the gospel of brotherhood that he preached; it also brings to mind the devout who bathe in the Pushkar Lake. It is on the dvadashi in the month of Kartik when the devout perform the tulsi vivaha and the gods arise from their slumber of four months. Kartik is a month when Parul would have liked Praful to be by her side, creating multi-coloured rangolis, making lanterns, listening to Krishna poetry and singing Nanak bhajans.
She had longed for Praful all month but there was both a certain pleasure and pathos in her longing, particularly as Praful was no longer his distant intellectual self but had become more emotionally responsive and sensually richer. His mind was no longer a fortress denying the veracity of emotion and reality of love but was like a Rajput haveli, ornate, with welcoming arches, evocative niches and with many beautiful jharokhas, where emotion lived and through which she could enter. He was no longer wrapped up in his world-denying philosophy of Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta but instead saw the world in a different light, a world radiant and throbbing with sensual affirmation, a world to be embraced with eyes open and not shut, where the senses were a doorway to jnana and where at the core of one’s being there were madhurdhara, that Krishna had spoken of in the Bhagavata, streams of honey waiting to be activated. Parul had succeeded in removing his dark cloak of sensual denial and replaced it, as it were, with the many colours of her odhnis. She had taught him that to live was to love, and to love was to celebrate the pallu of the beloved. Parul had a special word for it, she called it pallu no prem, a love that is filled with the joys and beauty of the excitement and thrill of amorous pleasures, and which could only unfold under the canopy of a pallu. The pallu for Parul was the heart of romance, a palette where she would mix and create colours, the doorway to many romantic pleasures and the perfect expression of the colours and textures, nuances and meanings, of romantic love. And this is exactly how she was going to welcome Praful today. She gathered some odhnis from her closet and hung them on the parijataka. There was the yellow odhni with the large red bindu; the odhni with the blue bandhej pattern; the white odhni with the yellow motif of the sun and the maroon odhni with the cows of Vrindavana on it. With these odhnis on its branches, the parijataka looked like the kadamba tree of the cheer harana legend, but without Krishna. Her Krishna was to come today and it was appropriate that the parijataka become the kadamba tree; it was under the kadamba in Vrindavana that the gopis would wait and long for Krishna.
It was a busy morning for Parul as usual. Today she wanted to make her home more festive. She applied some finishing touches to the rangoli that she had made just outside the front door; on its four corners, she put four bowls of water with flower petals. Today was a day for diyas and not candles, so she arranged a row of earthen diyas all over the house and even on the patio. And if the parijataka was decorated with odhnis for his coming, the champa could not be left behind. She had prepared a lantern with coloured paper; she climbed on a stool and hung it on one of its branches. The parijataka and the champa were temples of her love; they were shrines where romantic moments were spent, and like a yakshi, she would very often hold their branches so that it seemed that she and the tree were in resonance with each other, for these trees knew what she felt.
She had picked a yellow ikat sari from Orissa, and had made a new blouse especially for it with a sparkling glass motif on the back. If the pallu was her banner of love, the choli was its insignia and expressed her romantic moods. To go with this she wore her kundan jewellery, a couple of gold rings, red lac bangles, a bajubandh on her left arm and dangling earrings and placed a multi-coloured hair ornament. As she was making a final check and looked in the mirror she was startled by what she saw. Praful was silently standing behind her; for a moment she did not know whether she was dreaming or awake. How often she had wished that when she was getting ready she would see Praful in the mirror! She did not know what to say; she got up and began to cry – at that point Praful held her tight in his embrace. Emotional moments for Parul were to be handled with touch and not words, with tender feelings that were beyond language, with gestures that would transcend speech.
‘I wanted to surprise you by coming early.’
Parul was speechless, because she was elated at seeing him and also because her wish of seeing Praful in the mirror had come true.
‘It looks as if Krishna has already been here,’ he said looking at the parijataka as they sat hand in hand on the patio under the champa.
‘Krishna comes to my home only once a month. The gopis of Vrindavana were luckier for they had Krishna with them all the time.’ Parul brought her pallu forward as she poured coffee for him.
Soon they settled down to catching up with the happenings of the last month, sipping coffee and munching on spicy cashews that she had made.
‘Let us go and gather all those odhnis and join them together and make a patchwork quilt,’ Praful said getting up and walking toward the parijataka.
‘Since when have you become interested in quilts?’ Parul spoke with a touch of sarcasm in her voice.
‘Ever since I met you,’ he said, pulling the many odhnis off the parijataka. ‘Buddha’s robe was made up of many fragments of old cloth stitched together.’
‘And women of Bengal and Bihar make kantha from sewing pieces of old saris, and these become treasured household items or are part of the trousseau of the daughter,’ she said, quick to uphold and highlight the role women have played in the various crafts.
‘Yes, that is true. If there is a certain sacredness in the unstitched fabric for the Hindu, there is equally a message and meaning in a patchwork robe or quilt for the Buddhist,’ he said.
‘And what would that message be?’ she asked, arranging her pallu and making sure that the border of the sari went across the chest without hiding the highlights.
‘Buddha’s robe sends a message of anitya or impermanence; in that message, there is an assertion that there is nothing permanent or everlasting in this world, that one thought arises and dies and this is followed by another. The Buddha taught the doctrine of anatman, whereby he meant that the past is unconnected to the present; and the present is detached from the future, that there is no permanent ground of being that connects everything, not even an atman. The Buddha believed that we can forge a continuity by joining pieces of fabrics together, but that like the patchwork quilt or his own robe, any sense of continuity in it is false,’ Praful always looked professorial when he held forth on matters philosophical.
‘Does that also apply to love?’ Parul was distinctly saddened by this pronouncement of the Buddhist concept of impermanence. ‘Does it mean that when you go home, you forget me? Buddha may have been a great man but I have no use for his ideas. I do not believe that true love can be transitory or fleeting. I am glad I do not keep any images of the Buddha in my home. I do not know about Buddha’s clothes, but this much I know; that the clothes a person wears not only reflect the person’s personality but also contain the spirit and memory of the person. That is why a new-born child is received on a blanket of old clothes. Clothes are my companions; they speak to me, they bring back memories, they give expression to my unspoken feelings and they protect my emotions.’ Parul with her love of fabrics and garments could dismiss the greatness of rishis in an instant when it came to matters of love.
‘No, we are both Hindus and are committed to the permanence of the atman – for us, there is a message of permanence or continuity in the unstitched fabric, like your sari,’ Praful clearly did not want to ruffle any feathers at the start of a beautiful day.
Parul was no intellectual and was never impressed by words, but she felt supremely happy when simple things like fabrics, ornaments, leaves and flowers, replaced erudite words and became messengers of philosophy. Fabrics and everything connected with them was important to her; threads and sutras, spinning and weaving, saris and odhnis, quilts and chaddars. These were her art objects, and her means of connecting to the world around her.
The day was languid, the sky was clear – under the sunlit sky, Parul and Praful spent the day in the simple joys of being together, looking at pairs of birds that had perched on the branch of the champa, admiring bees that would flit around from flower to flower, seeing the chequered pattern of light and shade on the earth and watching the leaves of the parijataka flutter in the soft breeze.
Praful looked up and spoke in a whisper, ‘rupam rupam pratirupam babhuva.’ Parul, who loved the sound of Sanskrit but did not totally understand it, kept on knitting.
‘Tell me what it means. It sounds very scholarly.’
‘It means that every form is a replica of a primal form,’ Praful said, standing up, stretching himself and coming closer to Parul. ‘Nothing is new but is a mere recreation of something ancient, primeval. Whether it is an image that we make or a story that we write or a raga that we play, it is not a new creation but a discovery of something that exists. Even knowledge is ancient, ever present, but forgotten and we rediscover it during our life.’ Praful was, as usual, his professorial self as he was enunciating this important idea from the Vedas.
Parul put her knitting down and looked up and asked, ‘What about love?’
‘I was expecting that question,’ Praful said, as he sat down next to Parul and held her hand. ‘Love is also very ancient and so is romance and so is our relationship. I have been thinking a lot about romantic couples who have come before us, Laila Majnu,
Sohni Mahiwal, Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, Dushyanta and Shakuntala, Madhavanala and Kamakandala and of course Radha and Krishna and so many others.’
Parul flashed her gorgeous smile and Praful held her close and read her a poem that he had scribbled on an old greeting card. He would never throw away greeting cards that he received in the mail. He would cut out the first page and write something that he had read, or a line that he thought of, on the back of the card, and then he would use these cards as markers in a book. He pulled out this card and read aloud, and as he did Parul went behind him and placed her arms around him.
It was a clear midnight blue sky of Kartik and it was as if distant stars hung as lanterns in the sky, and as the stars blinked and twinkled, it seemed as if the stars were whispering as romantically as mortal lovers do. In the stillness of that night sky, images of eternal lovers like Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, Jayadeva and Padmavati, Mahiwal and Sohni, Savant Singh and Bani Thani, Chandidas and Rami, Ghanananda and Sujan, Madhavanala and Kamadandala, Dushyanta and Shakuntala were seen. Praful held Parul’s hand as they both looked at the sky and he whispered a poem that he had scribbled just that day:
A nayaka asks the nayika
Who will inherit our love, a love that is so pure?
Touching the earth, the nayika said
It is the earth, which will inherit our love
From it will rise a kalpavriksha
on which will sit birds who will sing a song of our love
and when the wind blows through it
it will whisper softly of our romance
and when lovers sit underneath it
they will speak in hushed voices of our love
and when rain falls on the tree
it will gently bring with it our blessings
that all love should be as pure and everlasting as ours .
Just then, the two birds that were perched on the branch of the champa came closer together and as their wings touched each other, Praful and Parul looked longingly at those birds and entrusted their love to them, for birds were twice-born and therefore Brahmans and were custodians of matters sacred, and they sat together until they could no longer see the moon or talk to the stars – like the two birds on the champa tree, they stayed together till the chirping of the birds woke them in the morning.
9. Margashirsh
It was the month of Margashirsh
and a single parrot perched on Minakshimadurai
was reminding devotees that even though Minakshi
was different from the northern Parvati
the tradition would be unbroken and unaltered
for a parrot could only repeat
and not create words
of the shastra
and Parvati would ever be
the consort of Shiva.
Margashirsh is a wintry month, when people huddle in their blankets and sip ginger tea; grandmothers apply oil to their bodies, housewives make sesame sweets, Bengali women gather in chowks to make kanthas and the new bride-to-be in Bihar stitches the sujuni. The gulmohar is dormant but roses bloom; birds from the distant northern Arctic migrate to warmer spots; devotees of Datta gather at temples to celebrate the trinity and the goswamis of Nathadwara adorn Shrinathji with a quilted jama. Margashirsh is when Parul would have liked Praful to sit by her as she quilted and embroidered, rather than be away from her.
If Parul’s body responded to the moon, her heart resonated with the seasons. In Chaitra, when nature was erotically frenzied, with buzzing bees and singing kokilas, blossoming flowers and perfumed winds, Parul’s shringara matched the world around her. As the seasons changed, so did the texture and expression of her love; from a warm and effusive romance to a more subdued and spiritual love; a progression from the outer to the inner, from expressive to the more serene experience of love, from material evocation to spiritual realization. The growth and development of her love did not differ from that of a tree that goes from a riot of colours in the spring to a more subdued foliage in the summer and then sheds its leaves in the fall. For Parul, the world of nature, with its blossoms and creepers, trees and birds, colours and sounds, movements and rhythms were not only beautiful but a source of knowledge for her. She learnt from nature; she responded to it in many different ways and let it chasten her body and mind; it was for her an open book of knowledge, a veritable shastra. And thus it was that even her love for Praful changed, from the Chaitra when she first met him to Margashirsh, when her love had matured. It was like the love of Krishna for the gopis in the Bhagavata, which moved the amorous kridas to the spiritual rasa lila.
Fabrics were important to Parul – she put away the quilting she was working on till late in the evening, to prepare for Praful’s arrival; she thought of the many quilts her mother would make and give away to young mothers. Her mother would often tell her that a new baby should be received on an old and used fabric and never on a new or unused fabric. She had learnt in childhood that used fabrics carry memories, even as they are wrapped around the body and as they protect the person wearing them and are rubbed off by the many experiences and events from the person’s life; they are touched by impressions and they contain aromas of the person who wore that fabric and these in turn are transferred to the person who receives the fabric. For Parul, fabrics are repositories of feelings. Parul’s relationship with fabrics was like that of a painter with her brush or a writer with her pen; for Parul was not only expressing herself through her needle and thread, but this was her way of reaching out to Praful. When she was designing her choli, it was an invitation for Praful’s eyes; when she stitched a border on her sari, it was to frame her body like a picture for Praful to admire; when she embroidered a leaf or flower on her sari, it was like an offering from her puja platter to worship him; when she fashioned a small case of fabric, it was for him to put his glasses when he took them off at night and when she knitted, she would make a scarf for him, making sure to weave his initials in it. Fabrics for her were like canvas, thread like colours, and a needle her kalam. Parul wrapped the scarf that she had made for his birthday, which was this month, in a piece of her old sari and tied it with nadachadi, a red and yellow ritual thread, and kept it on a table on the patio.
