Have you seen the trees that stood on the road taking you to bliss?
There are moments when we have eyes and moments when we are blind.
There are things we pass everyday on our way to school or work but we
don’t notice. There are books that stare us in the face from bookshelf
and yesterday but we don’t notice their names. There are people who walk
in and out of our lives whose names we do not know, and people through
whose lives, hearts, minds and blood streams we travel without ever
asking where they live, who they are or even if they mind.
It is random. All so very random. There is someone who saw me 19
years ago and remembered my face. I didn’t see her. I didn’t know that
she had seen me so many years ago or that she had remembered face and
moment when I saw her about four years ago. On that occasion, she did
not see me. And then a year ago, a flash, a moment, a click and an
intersection. All random, All so very random. We say, though,
‘inevitable’. I am not sure it is, although it is romantic to think that
way, but that doesn’t matter at all.
Flip it a bit and the reverse of the embroidery is as fascinating. We
pass loveliness all the time and we don’t see flaw, partly because we
like to indulge the notion of perfection or are terrified to think
acknowledge blemish. But like how auspicious intersections of time,
space, thought and human social intercourse reveals to us magic that we
passed by day in and day out through moment and century without
noticing, so too these flaws break out and raise their hands, announcing
presence: ‘I am here, now what?’
Life can never be the same again once this happens. Until the next
flaw rises to the occasion, the next perfection, the magical something
that we missed everyday until that one day when we got one minute late
or arrived one minute early or was at the wrong place and the wrong
time. It is not just about human relationships, encounters,
intersections, convergences, fractures etc, it can be about anything. A
neglected garden. A tree that you didn’t see until it shed all its
leaves or when the first leaves pop out in the most tender green after
the long drought ends. A school wall that got a new coat of paint.
It can take the form of absence too. The tree you didn’t notice until
it was cut so that space could be obtained to put up a hoarding (outside
the Dutch Burgher Union, for example). The smile of a person who is not
longer here to smile. The tear that didn’t move you in the eye that is
forever closed. The child whose request you ignored but you cannot
attend to now because she is no longer child. Such things appear from
nowhere. At the strangest places and at the most unexpected of times.
The night before the last, that’s the night of July 7, 2010, I was on
the land-side of Galle Road, between the Savoy and the Wellawatte
Junction, waiting for my friend Jayanath Bodahandi, who had run across
to the bank to withdraw some money. Two things happened. First, I
remembered being sent to banks to cash cheques written by my mother and
sometimes by my father. Tokens. Waiting. Two hour chores that take just
a few minutes now. We forget the inconveniences that conveniences
replace. Like the long queues of the ration-days of the 70s. Like the
every-moment anxieties before the LTTE was defeated.
We forget, I realized, waiting for Bodhi, the trees we cut so that we
can build a road that gets us from here to there and to nowhere and
everywhere faster so that we can do something or everything, anything or
nothing. We don’t see the trees that stood on the roads we walk. We
don’t see the teachers who gave us words and thoughts and skills and
ways of engaging. We don’t see our parents when we look at ourselves in
the mirror and we don’t see ourselves in our children or vice versa. We
have seen moments that are myopic and ‘blindnesses’ that illuminate.
I was waiting for Bodhi for a long time. I noticed a man seated on
the pavement, his back against a wall. ‘Mendicant’ I read. I saw
immediately all the beggars who’ve been mysteriously murdered over the
past few months. I saw this middle-aged, emaciated man, scratching his
matted hair, one leg raised and shaking uncontrollably. I remembered
amputees and how they are said to suffer terribly from the itch from the
limb-part that’ gone forever. I remembered that I have two feet.
I remembered a line from Simon Navagaththegama’s Sansaara Aaranyaye
Dadayakkaraya (The Hunter in the Wilderness of Sansara). Simon was
describing place. The Mullegama Gal Kanda and the jungle that surrounded
it. It was jungle, he wrote. Then the jungle was ‘covered’, he said, by
civilization. Then, yet again, civilization was re-covered by the
forest. Time passes. Things immortal get obliterated. We all pass on
although we are all convinced that passing-on moment is not going to
arrive today.
What is the name of the book that helped shape notions of good and
bad and distinguishing lines? No, not religious books. Storybook. I
remembered Lassana Vasilissa (Vasilissa the Beautiful). I remembered the
chess game that I was winning but lost and all the lessons I’ve learnt
from things that didn’t arrive, couldn’t arrive and were pushed aside in
my ignorance and arrogance.
I asked if I should look more carefully at what’s around me. I
realized this is silly. Things have a logic of their own and sometimes
will not visit just because we send invitation. We have ‘eyes’ at
particular times, not a moment before and not a moment after. We could,
theoretically obtain something on account of striving, but there will
always be something else that we will forego as a result.
Right now I am drinking a cup of tea. I am seeing tea leaf and bead
of sweat. I am seeing a forest that existed and is not gone and the
forest that will someday recover its traditional homeland or else the
desert that will arrive to punish us for our greed and arrogance.
Moments. Interesting things. They make us see things. Even when our
eyes are closed.
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