Human beings have always been myth-makers; we are meaning-seeking creatures. We fall easily into despair and need to invent stories that give us a sense of the patterns and value of our lives despite chaotic evidence to the contrary. We have the ability to develop ideas, visions and experiences that produces religion and mythology. Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute but the most powerful myths force us to go beyond our experience. Myths are about the unknown. They force us to look into the heart of a great silence.
For more than half my life I’ve lit lamps at the time the devas are supposed to visit Earth. There were years I enjoyed reciting great poems revelling in the rise and fall of the rhythm. Gradually, my recitals grew mechanical. I would say the words but my mind was away.
The only joy I now find in them is the certainty that they are links going back hundreds of years, a part of the intangible heritage that binds me to thousands of people who did the same rituals and prayers: the subtexts of mankind’s need to feel substantially part of some larger plan. When Kerala was overrun by the British some 200 years ago, my ancestors’ thoughts would not have flicked for even a moment to the idea of a descendant, centuries later, saying the same prayers as they did, her mind in English chains. Exactly like when the aazan sweeps across the sky I think to myself: “So it would have sounded on the day Jalaluddin Akbar or Rabindranath Tagore was born”. Or died. Just as we can be sure the Indian sun will pour fire from the sky, we can be sure of the continuity of a few other things.
This life we share with generations of birds and flowers is something that comforts me. I can never enter the ground on which the shrine of the Theruvil Bhagavathy stands without wondering if I’m listening to the descendants of the birds my ancestors heard as they walked the same route. What would they have worried about? Poor harvests? Elderly relatives fading away at home? The chronic skin infection of a child at a time before Western medicine brought swift relief?
Fast-forwarding to the present I smile at the waxy frangipani that now towers lushly onto the terrace. Twenty-one years ago when the tree was just four or five years old, I used to look at its blooms from the first-floor window and wish for a balcony from which I could reach out and pluck the flowers I needed for lighting the evening lamp. Now that I can reach them comfortably, I feel, like Sita did, that only undamaged flowers on the ground need be offered to their ultimate source. Why pluck and pick the descendants of the tree that perfumed the best years of my life? May verses and flowers be the links that lighten the melancholy at dawn and dusk which, by the way, is a quality we share with baboons.