WORSHIP FOR THE SOUL
RAJANNYA LAHIRI



I for all times have been at home in the city, amidst the human zoo of
roofs, walls, and barred windows: because I always had the agility to
climb up to the unrailed roof of my building and gaze at the sky in
all colours and tempers. I am brought up with the feeling of being
free under this body of ether. I know that I ultimately belong to that
space and nothing so earthly has the power to impede me in my
security. The most distinct and the most distant thing I recall from
my childhood is the sky in which I visualized everything running
through my mind...
Those plenty moments of reflection I spend on top of my windy roof
actually keep me moist with a fearless emotional quotient when I am
down to earth, lend me such vapour as which defines my very being. I
am in quest for this vapour in every aspect of my surroundings: I seek
just the potential difference between myself and people. This is
sensitivity. And was this sensitivity revealed boundless times more
than it does in the city, at the famed "Gangar ghat" from Sutanuti
Police Phari in Kumartuli the recent evening I had been there? I
cannot tell, for then had I been too flooded to conclude a deeper
sensitivity.

It was simple and usual to the typical. The sky was a billowing skirt
of inky black - like the colour I so love to watch in the well of my
fountain-pen - with a characteristic hemline which was trimmed with
dotted lights, but richly punctuated with portions of lightlessness.
It was the swirling waters which caught the tamelessness, swiftness,
and pride of my mind and absorbed me down to an inward tumult against
my bosom. Of the infinite images, one inside another, which the waves
conspired to throw up to me, I could see the violence of my mind, the
intransient passions of my hungering self, the virgin duality of my
spirit. My eyes met the graceful details of the Divine Mother's face
and figure: and somewhere in the halo of Her sublime form's
interpretation, I experienced the wholeness and the agitated love of
my Guru.
These are the moments when numberless letters, verses, and reflections
are conceived in a state of divine essence, or being; the tangible
birth (in black and white) of which is an affair of complex
interpretations, suffering, and disturbance. Had I sat down till where
the lights from the other end danced over the waters, to pen down a
letter, a verse, or a reflection, I could have lost consciousness and
been one with the waters - such was the potency of my feeling and the
might of my compassion. Instead, I stood leaning over the railings and
ravenously drank in the dance of the waves; I viewed its tiara of
alternating lights and lightlessness in rapture; I experienced bliss
as I had rarely chanced to know before...
Then the minutes slipped by and I was suddenly aware that the people
who I had come with would beckon me away in another handful. I gazed
down the pregnant motion of the waves and felt my self roll along in
ecstasy. The knowledge of the temporary end was dawning on my psyche,
as the waters steadily became one with the skies. Finally, the call to
retreat caused tears to prick against my eyes.


As said, I am intimate with the skies, live and breathe the skies.
Last year too had been a wonderful experience at the "Gangar ghat" (I
make it a point to be attended to visit Kumartuli every year), but
this time it was a sixteen-year-old's heart which responded to it and
that too, unlike last turn, against the backdrop of nighttime for
which I have a deep-rooted magnetism. Now the dryness of the concrete
zoo around glares more loudly out as the memory of those few minutes
continue to haunt me. Shall not solace have mercy on my battling
disposition? Shall pristine experiences such as this continue to mock
in its many ways a hungering beggar?
But my vision has stretched farther and my interpretations have grown
leagues. I shall continue to mature as the images of the night keep
haunting me.