Skip to main content

Eclipse




From Times of India
Sporadic monsoon clouds smudge the night sky as I look out for the moon which struggles to shine through the haze.  There’s going to be partial lunar eclipse tonight, the newspapers say.  I’m interested in eclipses.  I am an eclipse myself.

The most memorable eclipse was when I was in Shillong.  It was in the last decade of the millennium.  I was sitting with a friend in his room when the air outside resounded with sounds of tin drums.  We came out to see what was happening.  Everybody was celebrating something.  Our landlady rushed to us with two tin drums and asked us to join.  It took us a while to grasp what was going on.  There was a solar eclipse.  The people believed that a dragon was swallowing the sun and the tin drums were meant to scare the dragon away.  Since the landlady insisted that we join in liberating the sun from the dragon, we did lest we be accused of gross neglect.  How criminal it would be to let the sun be swallowed by a dragon?  Moreover, it gave us much thrill to think that our tin drums were going to make themselves heard 150,000,000 km away.  It gratified our egos, to say the least.  My friend and I contributed our bit to the cacophony. 

I don’t know how many people in that whole horde of drum beaters actually believed that they were delivering the sun from the dragon.  The passion with which most of them beat the drums indicated that they were indeed serious about their mission.  Aren’t quite many of our rituals similar ego-gratifications?  How great we must feel to perceive ourselves as warriors against the powerful devils out there in the vast space around us!

If the heavens permit me, if the clouds clear, I shall stand outside tonight, beneath the diaphanous sky, in the penetrating quietness of the bucolic darkness except for the vibrating tymbals of cicadas in the leaves, I shall stand gazing at the moon being eclipsed slowly, partially, slowly…

Comments

  1. Rajeev MoothedathAugust 7, 2017 at 8:40 PM

    Nice...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Murthy K v v sAugust 7, 2017 at 10:17 PM

    Sometimes we have to do things like that, tin drums.. however a new and novel concept.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 7, 2017 at 10:28 PM

      But the clouds have become darker, the moon has vanished... Tin drums would land me in a mad house here in this small village in Kerala! 😀

      Delete
  3. EngramsAugust 8, 2017 at 8:32 AM

    Well the tradition of making noise to scare away the dragon from swallowing the sun is across the cultures in various parts of the world. I got to know about the mythology and practices only yesterday while browsing about blind beliefs that goes with an eclipse . Nice to have experienced it in person .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 8, 2017 at 10:26 PM

      True, many people have that belief and practice. It's also fun for many, I guess.

      Delete
  4. Purba chakrabortyAugust 8, 2017 at 3:32 PM

    Thank you for sharing this wonderful and amusing memory. I missed watching the eclipse last night :\

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 8, 2017 at 10:27 PM

      I couldn't catch it either Purba because of the clouds.

      Delete
  5. sunaina sharmaAugust 9, 2017 at 6:32 AM

    Loved the poetry in this prose. Traditions are practiced followed blindly from generation to generation. The strong that you have narrated would be a good theme for a children's book. I have read somewhat similar one where the moon is being swallowed by a dragon and the animals come together to chase it away - the message there is quite different than the thing that was happening in Shilling however.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Pranju chakrapaniAugust 9, 2017 at 2:30 PM

    For tonight, Tomichan, the cicadas would suffice. But for tonight.

    The sun awaits us on the other shore with shrieking cacophony of tin drums. But for tonight let's be happy with the cicadas.

    ReplyDelete
  7. ManiparnaAugust 10, 2017 at 4:28 AM

    I did venture out and managed to click some pictures of this amazing celestial phenomenon.... :-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...
9 comments
Read more