At a friends house in Amritsar, I was sitting in front of the computer, it was the last day to write and send my regular page for ‘Universal Colours’.
I was struggling to find the hook to hang may thoughts together; Roopa walks in with a big smile and pair of bright eyes, eyes those exude the delight of being alive.
I had met Roopa and her husband, couple of years earlier in a conference in UK, the only couple in the whole crowd that you would like to meet again and again. The love between the two gave me the feeling that if they had just fallen in love with each other. At the end of the year when I visited them in Amritsar, discovered to my surprise that they had been married for eighteen years and they had a son almost sixteen.
I asked Roopa to tell me a story. She hesitated a little and then narrated me a story that she had read years earler.
“There was a couple; both loved each other that anyone could have given life for the other. The husband was suffering from an un-curable disease and was dying slowly. In spite of deep love for the man, the woman couldn’t see him suffering; so she decided to end his suffering sooner than later. She started to mix a small amount of poison in his daily medicine.
The man loved the woman with equal intensity and wanted to die as quickly as possible. To reduce the suffering of his wife; he decided not take the medicine to accelerate his death, without knowing that the medicine could rather have fulfill his wish.”
Roopa, stopped at this point in the story. I asked her, why did she like this particular story? Did she saw herself in the role of the woman in the story?
My question sent Roopa into her deep thoughts. Many different expressions came and went over her face. I could almost see many different scenes of a documentary being played behind her dark eyelashes.
She tried to say something, but she seemed rather shaken, my question had forced her to think something that she did not want to. Like most people she did not want even to imagine herself in such a situation. I could see from her face, she had to think the unthinkable, especially when she herself is perpetually in love with her husband.
After few moments, her eyes brightened and she opened her red lips to say something, and she stopped for moment. I could almost intuit the thoughts being formed in her head and taking shape into words, “I know that if I happen to be in the situation where this woman in the story was, I would feel trapped in a dark alley, ‘something’ in me will come out to show me the way forward.”
I question Roopa further, if this ‘something’ would come from her own being or from the aura of love that they both have created around them? I was trying to force her to analyze her very source, from where her poetry comes?
She answerd in her poetic language, and said, “I believe there was a chushma/spring of creativity within me, my husband came into my life and lifted the stone that was blocking the flow of water/creativity. Only then I discovered how much life had given me, which has been flowing abundantly through my poetry since. That is the source I get all the answers, even the most difficult ones.
While I was talking to Roopa, an old friend of mine Manu called.
Manu is another story; in this story, Manu was born into a well off loving family; she was gifted with everything one could dream off. Manu grew into a tall beautiful woman with talent for art and music; had the university education up to Masters in Literature and Philosophy. All the tools a modern woman of her generation could ask for to start a happy creative fulfilling life.
But this very generosity of life, and the feeling that she had everything she needed, which could have been endless source for her creative life, but became her prison. During the last three decades I had known her, she has been continuously digging herself deeper and deeper in to a hole, and where she now left with nothing else, but weeping and self pity.
The woman in her story had continuously building a wall around her higher and higher everyday, where she could only see herself, but nothing else.
Manu, has called me several times while I was in India, asking me when I shall be in her city? When I asked her, what she would like to do when I shall be with her. Her answer was the same that she had given me for the last thirty years, “Nothing, I have nothing to share, I am only waiting for the end of my life.” Then she told me about a poem, an obituary that she had already written for herself.
Roopa was still sitting in front of me, her eyes still shining, waiting to tell me, she had so much to share, that she could continuously write her poetry non-stop for years to come.
When I visualized the large gap between Roopa and Manu, I felt falling into a dark space. At the bottom of my fall, I felt the liquid darkness around me. Something came out of me like a light; I got up, or rather woke up from a dream, and wrote the above lines to share with you. I feel I have two unlimited sources of different energies that would take me years to examine and write and share with you.
Avtarjeet Dhanjal
March 5, 2009