The Gharbar - Crossing the Rubicon

I had come in from the cold with Alf by my side. Inside, the hall was bedecked with saris, slung over beams that reached from one wall to another, surreptitiously tacked to the walls, wound in pleats and then gathered to drape over the shoulders of the assembled women. To the rear of the hall they were clearing away what was left of the food. Coke, water and orange juice were still being served. The chairs, and those still seated, had retreated, leaving the front half of the hall for the gharbar. I stood to the side and looked on, detached, from across a gap borne of that all too human cleaving of the conscious from the primal. The lights were bright and the music was live, and many of the wedding guests, mostly the younger ones, were lined up facing each other, approaching and then retreating, approaching and retreating with their arms tracing spirals amidst the tidal glitter of gold and colour and smiles crowning wave after wave. The dance was designed for life, bringing people together so that their connections were true, so that they might court with a smile, a movement, a look held fast, unbroken and untainted by self-consciousness. As I looked on, a tangible sense of what I was witnessing - the growing swell of collective exaltation - broke upon me, overwhelming my thoughts. I submitted. I was entranced. I wanted to cry. Tears were forming. Humanity, at its most edifying, in its most glorious guise. The music and the dancing gathered pace. A small group of women had broken away and were spinning as they circled, their feet stepping in time to the music's ever quickening tempo - Neesha's grace was that of a soul dancing. How now can I articulate what I felt ? I cannot. I can only indicate. My whole being was riven by the apprehension of the coming together, of the unity of individuals indivisible.

The music reached a crescendo and then stopped. The dancers broke away from their neat lines to gather up the dhandia - short wooden sticks, a pair to a person - and then returned to line up facing each other, brandishing the dhandia as they rehearsed the strokes. The band struck up again and the guests began to move to its rhythm, knocking their own dhandia together, and then with one step moving towards their partner, dhandia raised and then sweeping in an arc to clash with their partner's, crossing in the air, back and forth, once, twice, thrice. Each then retreated, again bringing their own dhandia together as they spun full circle while moving laterally in opposite directions, so as to emerge face to face with dancers to the left. And so it began again. The solitary clash of dhandia, then raised, each arm extended beyond itself to strike in kinship, wood on wood, self on self, me, you, we, all of us, the world revealed through the fog of thought, laughter, step back, a flirtatious twirl, a teasing thrust mocking swords smelted in the furnace of atman, again a clash, a spin, a missed move, a sideways glance and a sideways step, two streams flowing side by side, in opposite directions, bridged in the air by the coupling dhandia.

I watched, absorbed, and the mist cleared for a moment, affording me a glimpse of sky and earth reunited, the one born of the other, reflecting the other in its yearning to return, to bridge the divide that they may once again coincide in their entangled coupling. I jumped, with the sky on my back, and lay down to soak in the giving ground. I danced, laughed, spun and staggered; a novice again. When we faced each other it was Kunal who leapt. Reena struck hardest when our dhandia met. The swaggering of souls embroidering their steps. The heat and sweat, and the panting of breath. The music stopped. Shailan and I grabbed and held a dhandia together, leaning back and facing each other, holding tight to the dhandia. And then we began to circle around its flucrum. We spun, faster and faster, in staggering circles. Faster and faster, until Shailan was now the fixed point, and it was the backdrop of the world arround us that was spinning. We stopped, finally, giddy and out of breath. I leant against the wall for support. I was laughing. The world was a carousel that I was now riding. I had crossed the rubicon.

The Ivory Towers

Today was distinguished by the discovery of a greek myth that may have escaped the scrutiny of classical scholars.

The myth relates to the fate of two spurned lovers, their unrequited entreaties having been rebuffed by the one and the same; that most tragic of heroes, Narcissus. You may recall the story of Echo, that lively tounged companion of the goddess Hera, who had used her eloquence to distract Hera's attention from her husband Zeus's embrace with a young nymph. Hera, having discovered Echo's deception cursed her tounge decreeing that she would never again be able to initiate speech, only to repeat the last words uttered by another voice. The story of Thenides is less well known. He too was the victim of the gods' malign meddlings. Punished for his indisciplined approach to the liturgies of the day, he was blighted by a malady of malapropisms. Thus, every sentence he uttered was rendered meaningless. Both Echo and Thenides were both, at separate times, subject to the spell of Narcissus's beauty (who can blame them? Even the gods circling above on their starlit thrones would part the clouds to stare in wonder). Alas, both were summarily rejected by Narcissus, his beauty tainted by the impossibility of love, of giving love. Echo and Thenides bemoaned the impotency of their powers of seduction, unaware that the object of their infatuation was plagued by such misfortune.

True and sustained realisation of the self is nurtured by our meaningful interactions with others. And so both Echo and Thenides despaired, their human conditions wilting, deprived as they were of the nurturing so imperative to their flowering. Their paths crossed and they grieved together. Unable to share words that conveyed their thoughts, they supped from the same cup of tears. And then both retreated from the world, each to a tower poles apart, each tower borne aloft from from the same beginnings:

The story of the two towers - In the age of the Golden race, before that minister of time Cronus was usurped by his son Zeus, the Silver race had begun to establish a presence on earth, and hence delusions of grandeur. Envious of their superiors, the silver skinned demi-gods contrived a plan to plunder some of the lustre that so distinguished their golden ancestors. They cast aside all internecine differences in one grand collaborative effort to build two towers to scale the skies, each tower antipodal to the other, each aiming at the treasure troves that orbited the outer reaches of the heavens. But no sooner did the parapets of those towers straddle the stratosphere, then the golden gods inflicted many tounges on the Silver usurpers, rendering them incapable of communication, and thus any further collaboration was doomed; the towers would reach no further.

And so it was that both Echo and Thenides removed themselves to these very same towers, where, unaware of their shared fate, they wiled away the days pining for loves lost and never to be. Unbeknownst to them, the demi-gods, those greek heroes who bore responsibility for the pitiful states of the exiles, had discovered the irony that so supremely crowned these towers. For although the upward path of the Babel-ian towers had been curtailed by the plague of
many tounges that afflicted their silver-plated builders, their horizontal paths extended far beyond their outer dentin walls. Indeed, these paths circled the globe, tracing in their arced passage communicative conduits via which messages inscribed on tablets might be sent and received by the demi-gods. Thus did the two towers become way-stations, imbuing with vitality the tablets that were borne aloft their per-orbital extensions. Demeter need only leave an imprint of her mind in the hot wax of an enameled tablet, and dispatch it on its way to one and then the other tower (each time the tablets delivered from inside those opaque walls would be charged with such energy as to out-pace even Hermes) eventually reaching the awaiting eyes of the eager Persephone, still ensnared in the fiery clutch of Hades.

Echo and Thenides soon discovered the tablets that passed through the portholes punctuating the upper reaches of their towers. Although their tounges were blunted, their wits were still sharp. For here they had discovered a way by which they might bypass their barren tounges and communicate to each other. Relishing the vengeance that they wrought, they would intercept the tablets sent by the demi-gods and purloin one thought burnt by words into the wax of one tablet, another thought inscribed into the wax of another, and compose from the sentences plucked from the tablets, their own thoughts that they would then send to each other. The intercepted tablets were then either discarded, or sent, garbled and incomprehensible, on their way to the destined demi-god. And indeed the demi-gods wrung their hands in despair, for much confusion and misunderstanding ensued as a result of epistles sent but not received, epsitles sent but so corrupted by the plundering of our two heroes, that they were rendered meaningless upon reaching their recipients. And both Echo and Thenides amused themselves as they read of the ensuing mayhem so earnestly chronicled in the subsequent epistles that they intercepted. And both Echo and Thenides composed ever more elaborate locutions for each other from the words contained in those missing and corrupted mails. And both Echo and Thenides flowered once again in the late and lonely autumns of their lives.