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The longing would be taking the lovers home, a place of peace and union, free of earthly paraphernalia. Her upbringing tied her to what she believed to be right for all.
Kadambari was tossing and turning in bed. It was an every night story of insomnia for her. When the doors to the outer world closed, the forbidden one quietly opened in the darkness of the night.
Unable to sleep, she heaved herself out of bed. The town of Mukteshwar in Uttarakhand, India, was comfortably nestled in the arms of a lullaby. She picked up her pashmina shawl, wrapped it around her slender and delicate form, and quietly tiptoed out of the room.
Unfastening the door, she stepped out into the garden.
The smell of the freshly mowed grass lingered in the breeze. She heard a rustle near the antiquated fountain, whose basin flowed with ribbons of purity and gold.
A figure clad in white was standing there. Kadambari was accustomed to her presence and often perceived her in the embrace of the night. The sky was sombre, and the hills were covered in a misty haze.
The silhouette of deodar trees dotting the horizon stood like sentinels of the sacred truth in her. Breaching the solitary reign of the night, an owl hooted. Her earthly life was breached eternally by the light in the eyes of a stranger.
She wandered along with a drifting cloud over the magnificent Himalayan ranges to a distant land.
Will he also be peering into the emptiness and thinking of me? Do I ever visit his thoughts or else I am not even a part of a treasure trove of his memories as he is not the kind of guy who looks back with regret? Do I visit his soul when he hears my name uttered somewhere?
But then, she had an inner knowing of an eternal belonging to each other. She soaks in the freedom of bonds tied together by an invisible chord. They don’t need societal obligations to be complete; they are complete in themselves.
They exist; no name, no attachment, just a knowing. The freedom with which they come ties certain credibility and chasteness to them. They are felt, and words cannot do justice to the existence of the higher dimensions of love. They are beyond the understanding of ordinary mortals.
After all, pure reverence cannot be put into words. The ‘unsaid’ holds the secret in its all-knowing consciousness. The cosmos exists in silence, yet holds the creative potential of love in its united womb.
Kadambari had experienced this love in a physical form. It had ripped her soul into two and instilled a longing that nothing could ever subside. She had taken a sip of a holy river and was now eternally thirsty in her never-ending quest for that river. She did not even know what she was in search of.
It was a never-ending search for the elusive. The longing would be taking the lovers home, a place of peace and union, free of earthly paraphernalia. Her upbringing tied her to what she believed to be right for all. And she had to balance the two worlds, the earthly and the spiritual. For, in essence, we are spiritual beings inhabiting physical bodies.
The light of the autumnal morning when love had graced her soul unawares was more intensely burning in her than it did a decade ago. Gradually, his love had overtaken every atom of her form, filling her with itself. She was standing in his energy, and that energy filled her. Like the divine energy seeps the entire cosmos and every creation embody its energy.
The Persian poet, Rumi’s words, echoed within.
‘I am in You and I am You. No one can understand this until he has lost his mind.’
She could not speak of this love to anyone. No one in a sane state would have trusted what she was living with. This love was to be experienced to know it, for it is beyond the understanding of ordinary mortals. No scientific evidence existed to prove its existence.
The ecstasy of this love often filled her eyes with tears of bliss. He existed in everything. Be it the fragrance of the flower, be it the stars in the sky, be it in the blue sky or even her earthly home where he accompanied along.
He was in every word she penned down and in every stroke of colour on the canvas of her life. She was perfectly sane, for a field of quantum entanglement connected the two lovers in oneness. There was no way she could have separated herself from him. He had become closer to her in separation.
If physically, the two were together, the connection would not have been so intense. The energetic connect is more intimate and powerful than a physical union can be. She burned at the altar of divine love every second of her life.
She always lit two diyas and two aggarbattis. Likewise, she always prayed for his family and hers.
After all, she was contented and happy in her married life but missed his physical presence.
He lived as energy without being physically there; the fragrance of a flower cannot be separated from the flower, the song of a dancing brook cannot be silenced, the breeze cannot be separated from its feel, a river longs to merge into the sea and is pulled towards her home, the waves of an ocean were in an eternal longing to touch the shores and then dissolve into the ocean again.
What they desired from the shore, they did not know. The waves longed to expand outwardly, ebbing and flow to the pull and push of energy. Like the ever-evolving cosmos, our soul is in a constant process of expansion and growth. It continues to evolve to experience the cosmos and become one with it in the process.
Kadambari looks at the sentinels of love and sets her wish free in the cosmos. ‘May all the soul lovers be united in the physical someday, and the desire of their longing soul be satiated.’ She sighed deeply, asking the sentinels of love for the courage to honour her marriage and the sanctity of this love.
As the chiming of bells of 350-year-old Shiva temple reverberated in the air, she wiped the tears of the parting mist off her cheek. The earthly doors were about to open soon, and she headed back to her home to get some sleep.
The figure in white was sitting on the edge of the fountain, and as Kadambari left the garden, it turned wispy but did not disappear altogether.
In the morning, Kadambari dropped a veil over her soul and donned a mask to live another day of her earthly truth.
First published here.
Image source: Via Getty Images, free and edited on CanvaPro
Alka loves to write poetry and dabbles in colours. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in several journals and anthologies. She loves nature and is an autoimmune warrior. read more...
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Neena was the sole caregiver of Amma and though one would think that Amma was dependent on her, Neena felt otherwise.
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Neena grew up in a home where both her parents worked together in tandem to keep the house up and running. She had a blissful childhood in her modest two-room house. The house was small but every nook and cranny gave her memories of a lifetime. Neena’s young heart imagined that her life would follow the same cheerful course. But how wrong she was!
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Being a writer, Nivedita Louis recognises the struggles of a first-time woman writer and helps many articulate their voice with development, content edits as a publisher.
“I usually write during night”, says author Nivedita Louis during our conversation. Chuckling she continues,” It’s easier then to focus solely on writing. Nivedita Louis is a writer, with varied interests and one of the founders of Her Stories, a feminist publishing house, based in Chennai.
In a candid conversation she shared her journey from small-town Tamil Nadu to becoming a history buff, an award-winning author and now a publisher.
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