The Truth Beckons

I came back with the wrenched heart with so many philosophical questions. When I first read about Gautam Buddha’s tryst with philosophy on witnessing the travails of old age, the understanding could not permeate me. As they say examples are better than precept and I add they are bitter than precept, especially when you see it in real life.

I took a train to Kashi to meet him. He was my first encounter in life to strength, power and authority. Everybody was scared of him. He stood like a banyan tree giving shades to all of us. There had been complaints that he could never see anyone above him but I reject them as small weeds in his shade. I love to have pillars around me. I love holding them dance around them, the way I did as a kid. You grow up and you are suddenly thrown in this sea where you keep swimming. Those pillars become hindsight. The heart is relieved to let the fleeting memories get washed away with time but the scar which entrenches in the personality constantly reminds of the aches. His seventy five years old frame of 71 inches lying on the dilapidated bed, the orangish yellow eye opened as I touched his feet. He smiled and to me that moment meant the world. I could not control the sudden rush of salty liquid from my eyes. Yet I managed to hide it somehow. I wanted to hug him and cry my heart out. It was my pillar falling infront of my eyes and I was helpless. The first encounter of strength in my life is my latest rendezvous with the fragility and weakness. I could not see the coin reversing. He tried being as normal as he could but I felt his pain in my heart, soul and mind and my eyes were refusing to obey my brain. He kept smiling and slept.

His frame is still so formidable. In this frailty, he commands that respect which none other in that room can ever; the way he did in his youth, when he would jump from the boat in the mid of Ganges just because his instinct would ask him to swim the other half of the river. Now also, he was ordering everybody about how he should be fed and how his pillow is supposed to be kept. The love for his empire could not take a back seat even now. He had been sorting out all the matters related to money in that one stroke of pen and whisper.

I know what Buddha must have felt that moment when he questioned the beauty of life while seeing the senescence. It’s Karna’s lines from Mahabharata which reverberates inside my head, I see it now, this world is swiftly passing.

P.S. This post is dedicated to my grandfather who passed away thirteen days after I wrote this post. Incidentally it was my birthday that day and it ceases to be happy ever.