Skip to main content

Being with the beloved


Nothing ennobles human beings more than the company of their beloved ones in an environment suffused with the splendour of nature.  My latest such experience occurred last summer when Maggie and I visited Shimla.  The verdurous hillsides that rise majestically all around cling to your soul with an unearthly tenacity.  They bewitch you so much that you feel oppressed and liberated simultaneously.  You become the questing knight of  Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci.  You are drowned in transcendental beauty.  You are intoxicated with it.

Having spent the day visiting various places of tourist interest, we were dropped back by our driver at the Old Bus Stand from where we wished to walk up the fairly steep ascent to the Mall Road.  The narrow lane is lined on both sides with goods of all sorts ranging from exotic trinkets to day-to-day grocery items.  The mundane and the sublime coexist in an edifying spirit of camaraderie in the markets of hill stations. 

A view from the Mall Road
Photo by Maggie

A colossal statue of Hanuman that overlooks the entire town welcomed Maggie and me as we stepped on to the Mall Road.  We sauntered along the road constructed by the British and now crowded with tourists from various parts of the country as well as outside.  Standing at a relatively deserted part of the road, we watched the saffron Hanuman towering above the trees and even the mountains.  The thick foliage that surrounded him crept into my imagination and began to metamorphose into a story.  Instead of Keats’s knight questing for his mysterious Dame, my fantasy drew up a female protagonist robed in the saffron colour of the Indian ascetic and was on a spiritual quest.  While Maggie sat on one of the pews in Christ Church seeking spiritual union with her God, I sat beside her conjuring up the dimensions of the ascetic who had invaded my imagination.  Maya was finding her dimensions in my imagination.

As the sun disappeared behind the foliage that marked the horizon, Maggie and I walked into an elegant restaurant for our dinner.  Shimla’s apple wine failed to surpass the intoxication of its mountains.

Even when Maggie and I, perched precariously on our ponies, were climbing up the rugged trail leading to Kufri’s adventure land the next morning the fictitious woman in the woods surrounding the Hanuman temple kept haunting my imagination.  Maggie screamed as her pony slipped on a pebble.  “Hold on tightly,”  instructed the guide who was walking between our ponies.  He kept instructing us when to bend forward or backward so that the pony is not overburdened by our ignorance of riding rules.  I watched Maggie on her pony making a fine balance between fear and ecstasy. 

Balance and harmony.  Merging of contradictions.  Evaporation of polarities.  Was Maggie merging into Maya or vice-versa?  How is a story born? 

Being with your beloved unfolds stories.  Naturally.  Like the blossoming of the tree when the season arrives.


PS. Inspired by the theme  ‘Together’  sponsored by  Housing  [https://housing.com/]




Comments

  1. I still remember how liked that story 'Maya', so nice to know about its origin today :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The origin of many stories may be stories by themselves.

      Delete
  2. I was walking down the memory lane reading this post. Beautiful post, Maya is a lovely name for fiction. It has that vibe.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sir, we have nominated you for awards http://www.auraofthoughts.com/2015/03/thank-you-for-versatile-blogger-award.html

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks a lot. I've been very busy. Will visit your blog soon.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let