Walk free

Dear Story,

Its hard not to think of you today. It’s today that we met. You and I my beloved story.I don’t know if I walked into you or you walked into me. But it was quite a thing (this meeting) I always knew you were larger and bigger than what I could handle. But I trusted that I could carry you out. How wrong I was.

I remember the first time I looked into your eyes and dared to tell you that I was infact planning to bring you out. I could almost see the angels standing up and showering flowers. Here It was happening in real time. You would live forever, and I through you. The great beginning! Golden and Inevitable. For how could It not have happened? Every little twig, every bloody flower was whispering about us. Propelling us on this journey of coming out in the world to create.

I was so young and earnest that I never believed that any story that began like that could escape immortality. There were one thousand dreams that took of that day about what all would follow once you came. They were like parachutes of rainbow that started circling everywhere I went.

The DND at 90 Kmph. Swooosh! 5parachutes, Brahma studios Swishhhhhhhhh 15parachutes, Ruby Tuesday Fshhhhhhhwwww 500parachutes. Rao Tula Ram Marg Trrrrrrr 350 Parachutes, Krishna Chowk chssshhhhh 80 parachutes, IHC Drrrrrrshhhhh 5000Parachutes. Spice Mall trisshhhhhhhhh 43000parachutes. (They have still not all come back to me! I see them flying much above where I can shoot them down to come back to senses!)

And then I started seeing your cruel will my story . You didn’t want to come with me! Escaping me in big and small ways. You would run to others. You would disappear and appear in a stranger’s gaze. You would keep me waiting for hours and hours for just a few words. From just being my story you started becoming this great catch which ran faster and faster ahead of me!

There appeared no Blue pearls on the white immense paper of my notebook. The days and days and days and nights and nights and nights that I lived with a pen in my hand waiting for you. Struggling for a line that would take us ahead. Me and you. You and me. Me and thoughts of you. Me and me and Thoughts of you. No you! Only the palpable desire of straightening you on a page. I ran so hard. So hard. Got so bruised so bruised.

I didn’t know stories had their wills and ways. Such persistent cunning and morbidity. Even when you danced around my pillow , we slept alone and never met. Oh how hard I dreamed and prayed of bringing you out. The tears I cried when I thought of your cruel will You wily story!

I give up today my story. At the peak of my strength will and love. Go where you must go. Be whatever you must be. I won’t curse you anymore ( I never meant it anyway!) Go dance around like a cottonsilk seed. Drop where you really must grow. Die unplanted if thats what you like.

I have broken my pen today. Walk free of me my story.

Walk Free!

Saving me with a book

Dear Natalie Goldberg,


I will never forget how I met you at that cramped Cyber Cafe in Aligang, near the Gulacheen Temple in that graceful city of Lucknow where I lived when I was 16. There shuttling on the internet between online romances, smart quotes, and Post graduate courses( to find a respectable career) I found that online version of Writing Down the Bones. I lived with it many days before I felt a sense that couldn't live without a Hard Copy of that stuff(It really was like dope!). It became my Bible and you became the woman who walked in front of me telling me just how real women walked.


There were so few ideals then for a girl of my size growing up in a city without any considerable distractions of male attention. I held on to you like nothing else would save me. And nothing else did. Not the degrees I took. Not the heady work I did. Nor the Company of Television Heroes I was so enamored by. Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sankarshan Thakur, Tarun Tejpal. All of them have lost that slickness in life.Why even real people that I fell in love with did nothing to save me. They all crumbled right in front of my eyes.


In the agony of stony places. In the glint of adoring eyes. In the ennui that lasted and costed me a considerable amount of life...You stayed in my bones. Keeping me strong. I always knew something was gonna grow from it. This writing practice that got into my blood stream gave me the ceremony to mourn my losses. The color to paint blazing colors from the sallow tastes on my tongue. The rhythm that played in my ribs when there were no dances I was dying for. 

Katagiri Roshi The teacher who taught you to watch your monkey mind came to me through you Natalie. I know that man, his straight back, his coldness and wisdom and his smile. I met him on a lot of your pages. I am afraid I fell in love with him too. And I realized how he was just supposed to be a teacher and not a alive presence. I never knew his smell though.( And I know why you kept it from me!) I know all the hamburgers you ate and all the houses you lived in. Your father and your Mom. Your sister and your car. Your divorce too. How did you transcend so many blocks of distance/age/country/culture to hold my attention( AND REVERENCE!!!!) for such a long period of time. Surely you too will pass from my life, wont you?


When I read you I feel I have a life that can be made something of too. You had fallen where I had fallen and you got up looking respectable. I too would. There were no children who had made your existence more profound than mine. There was no soul mate you had met and I had missed out on meeting because of my dumbness. There was no  home where people waited for you, there were no friends which you had which were warmer than mine. We are so same same. Teacher Guru. Mad Women Mad women. Mad women making sense of the nonsense!


You live so far away in Santa Fe in New Mexico. I dont even know where it is! How much does it cost to reach there? How much to just deliver a parcel? Would you mind if I land up outside your door one day? I'll get purple flowers. Just to mark my gratitude. And when those flowers sit on your writing desk..Will you know what you have given to me?

Love and Gratitude
Pearl

PS- I am so proud of myself I haven't married the fly! :)

Dancing with Men

I grew up on the romance of Himalayas with Ruskin Bond. He took me to the Graveyards of the Raj and taught me to smell the marigolds and the sweet peas in my garden. Over endless cups of tea we discussed the love of a writing life. I couldn’t have thought of becoming anything else but a writer, I loved this man so much. Even now when it rains and I smell the mud I take out the leaves from those old love books. The Room on the roof will always be the first room of a boy that I entered. Rusty was the first one who put flowers in my hair and smiled at what a tomboy I was.
Then I grew mad stubborn and wily and Rusty slowly faded away.

I was sandwiched in a crowd of sweaty men in a local bus to Badarpur border when I first met Saint German Exupery. I couldnt have known then that this little man of his book would make me fall head over heels over him. This French pilot lived centuries before me and yet he broke my heart with his most enamouring heartbreaking tale 'The Little Prince'. I sat and wept in the bus. Oh of the misery growing up and parting with loved ones. Of loving little roses with thorns around them, of leaving behind the pretty face of one's rosebush! Only a real man made in the same earth as mine could have understood the cruelty of having the little kid inside us hurt. He showed me how his inner landscape looked after he had cried too much and I remebered the times when I had grown numb from too much crying too.I saw the little loving parts within him withering away as he struggled in the hostile sands where no flowers grew. His love was simple with no unnecessary complications here. I could have lived forever with you Saint German Exupery if only you had disappeared to another planet leaving me with just two of your books.

Then one day I saw Thich Nhat Hanh walking in a red robe and I liked his colour so much that I started walking along..He smiled at me and told me the heart sutra and I became loose as the wind started flying, hugging the trees in this madness of discovering the most valuable power of dissolving and embracing all life. My ears became my hands and my hands turned into my nose and my grandfathers hands and my father’s hands all wrapped my heart with warmth . He sat me down and I felt the earth that held me and the sun that would never fade away no matter what. We ate Tangerines together, slowly mindfully in the present moment. All the pain vanished. All because I smiled at him and he smiled back till all eternity lasted.

Photo Courtesy- Abbas Shamael Rizvi

eyes of light

She twinkles in the moonlite like today's...
Sleeping in an alien city now..wonder if she has had dinner or has she dozed off on the bed alongside the books.She likes tea before sleeping( yellow label with very little sugar).Nights with her are like a balm...There is absolutely nothing that cant be paired down to perspective(except the temperature of the air conditioner..she likes to sleep freezing)

Everything has a proper place.You like me wouldnt know it until you know better from her!The big decisions and the small decisions are all in her EDL. Just press the button and you would know Just the right thing for you!You're a big fish or a small fish or a medium sized fish..she has a recipe for every disaster that you have tasted in life so far!(Really i am telling you!)

Lying beside her on nights like these,I have felt gawky and bumbling..like one feels while holding a little baby in one's big scratched hands. My smoothness has all gone where her shines bright! My courage is waning away while she still protects her dreams in a small wicked space...I bump into walls and reach her to ask why didnt I see them?

On dark nights when the greys of the world leaave me blind with their details, I miss those eyes of light!

The answers come...

Kindred reply a friend wrote...

'Heck who can answer for the Buddha. He was really wise and he would have answered all the questions that have been asked. In fact the Tripitaka has 84,000 sutras by him and my guess is that he has answered all of them and several more questions there.

Now I put this forward humbly, as a person who has tried to understand his teachings and has tried to follow the way of life he recommended, I am just putting a few thoughts here.

It must be damn cool to be enlightened and all that no?

Oh yeah from what I have heard it's damn cool and more. Forget about the fantastic abilities of being able to fly and walk on water and many such freebies which the enlightened one cautioned were of little consequence. The fact that one can live freed from the long term or even short term effects of one's past actions, in the present moment in peace seems so attractive.

Tell me how does it feel to wear red all the time? Does the red of your robe not add to the restlessness of being alive?
Well the Buddha wore saffron robes.They signified the holy life, the life of renunciation. Not what they have come to represent in our unhappy times. And as for the restlessness of being alive, the Buddha simply discovered the restfulness of being alive.

AND if you are at rest all the time? Does it not make you feel dead?
Being at rest as far as I know it, is being intensely alive. Sitting still, have you ever closed your eyes and taken your attention to your breath passing through your nostrils, to your sensations throughout your body, to your thoughts - you feel anything but dead. Of course, enlightenment, Arahantship and Buddhahood is aid to be a stage beyond this sensory realm that we know. Of course I know nothing about it. But according to Buddha's teaching, death is not the opposite of life. Death is life continuing in a state beyond the perception of normal humans. A person dying moves to another form of being. This is described in startling detail in the TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD - this is more psychology than anything else. Of course psychology of an advanced order described by people - we may call them sages - who have done extraordinary inner research. Actually the Buddha was a scientist if you really consider it.

Do alive women not strum at your heartstrings with their energy? Are you menopausal?
Oh yes, alive women did strum at the Buddha's heartstrings but in a manner of great compassion. Kissa Gotami, Mahaprajapati his foster mother, his outstanding female disciples like Samadevi, Vishaka all entered states of full enlightenment. He opened the doors of religious life for women by initiating the community of Bhikkhunis - at a time in ancient India when women lived lives of subservience. He declared women capable of full enlightenment and did not consider them in any way inferior to men.

As far as having erotic inclinations, would such desires be possible for anyone who has seen the emptiness of the sensory world? One who has clearly seen the impermanence of all forms. And even we, if we are to observe the human form closely and penetratingly are we not confronted by the less than desirable contents of the body?

Do you never rue the fact that your dad was a small King and died one day?
King Suddhodhana was not a small king. Much of ancient history of that region remains unknown. Yes Buddha did know of Suddhodhana's passing. And Suddhodhana having fathered the Buddha had sown unmatched karmic seeds and his passing was as I have mentioned earlier, the continuation of his life in another form. For Buddha whose perception was developed enough to penetrate states of existence beyond our limited human realm, Suddhodhana was always alive to him. Ok ok I know I'm sounding fantastic now. But let me just say this, the Buddha clearly saw planes of existence beyond the plane in which we humans dwell. Like colours of the spectrum invisible to the human eye, but visible to dogs and animals let's say and those visible to instruments that we have created like x rays and so on. Similarly, the Buddha had trained his mind to penetrate different planes of existence. This sounds plausible to me and best of all, the Buddha actually gave clear instructions on how anyone could do the same. If we walk the path, we can have the answers. Not speculation, not arguments, not hearsay but direct experiental knowledge.

Did you father a son? Would you have been a happy man without that?
And yes he did father Rahula. And Suddhodhana told Rahula to ask his father for his inheritance and of course, Rahula's father the Buddha had renounced everything and could only give him the teaching - the path away from all suffering and sorrow. What could be a greater gift?

What does a hot jalebi taste like on a hot afternoon?
I love hot jalebis and during meditation retreats I am visited by thoughts of jalebis and ice cream and so many fantastic things. Do you know how monks eat? They have a single bowl and you pour in a spoon of Khichdi then when you are about to pour in a spoon of kheer, you stand confused, there's no separate compartment for the kheer so where does that go? The monk merely stands there holding out the bowl and you reluctantly and also maybe with some dismay or disgust, you pour the sweet kheer right on top of the steaming khichdi. After that the monk takes his bowl away and mindfully eats without disgust and without relish. This is how followers of the Buddha train to see the world, without compartments, without relish, without disgust. It's something worth experiencing. I am sharing my humble baby steps hoping to shed some light. Your questions are so beautiful and childlike. And yes the practise opens our senses, makes us kind and loving. The wet mud does smell very sweet as the sorrow of our fellow beings feels very bitter.

Its so wonderful that you think so much of Buddha. Who knows what happens after parinibbana? Can the Buddha die, into which realm has he gone, these questions can only be answered after you have yourself attained enlightenment. I don't know where Buddha is but I feel his kindness and his love. Thank you for this beautiful post. I hope my sharing has been useful.'

RG

Of being

When you are an elephant, born an elephant,There is nothing that you can do about it!(except be an elephant!)
You can only fall in love with elephants
You cant run away from your elephant hunger.
You cant squeeze yourself to resemble a porcupine( although it has much better defence mechanisms!)
You cant lie to yourself like smaller animals.
You cant run away fast from danger and threat.
You cant help your memory(even if you remember useless details which have long ceased to be a reality or the truth)
Your truth is the elephants truth. It weights you down and you carry it gracefully.
Someday you will scramble the whole bloody world if doesnt stand up to your elephant reality( and youre more than capable of it, let no one live in any illusions!)
You are hungary on life..and you shall have your elephants share!

Radhe Radhe

I'll make a film.
About Radha of Vrindavan...I dont know when..I dont know with whom..but someday!
It will be a good film..Its been brewing in my blood for sometime.It would go out in the world and speaks to everyone.It will be a film I would want to see.