The Resurrection; Phase 6

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The little boy hid himself where people thought only snakes and scorpions hid. The rotten leaves and itchy tentacles of bushes attacked him on each day of his ‘class’.

After three months, he was happy. The little boy of five did not think he’d mastered the art of Chenda. But he was happy for making the attempt and learning what he thought, was sublime music.

The priest, a person with no gifts of necromancy or supernatural eavesdropping on the unknown, with a slight itch in his eyes, realized that the boy was committing the error of disobedience.

Second chance was not in the priest’s dictionary. He summoned the traitor of the temple. He got the boy down on his knees on a layer of crystal salt on the hard surface of the temple porch. The salt crystals seared through the skin on his knees, but the boy did not cry.

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The Resurrection; Phase 5

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Next, I asked the students if they have done something adventurous in their lives, or an achievement, which came to them after a hazardous struggle.

One of the boys stood up.

He said he loved Chenda, the ancient traditional drum used in temples of Kerala. Once during his childhood, when he was about five, a master came to their village temple and offered to teach the children of the village the art of playing Chenda. The little boy was very excited. He was at the time an assistant to the priest to the temple of Kaali, the pagan goddess of revenge.

Even though he wanted to learn how to play Chenda, the priest of the temple he was assisting did not permit it. His father too succumbed to the distorted argument of the priest that a priest’s assistant should not indulge in another activity. There should be focus, shradha and obeisance, bhakthi towards and only towards the goddess, the priest had explained.   

However, the little boy of five was not familiar with the idea ‘intimidation’ yet.

 

Chenda
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He hid himself outside the small shack where they taught Chenda.

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The Resurrection; Phase 4

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One day, in the previous week, at the college I teach for survival, in a Computer Science class, I inquired if anyone of the students has something creative to share, just to kill time. Someone said a girl wrote poems in Malayalam. When I looked at her, she smiled and sat back shyly. There was an evident inhibition. That was their common problem and as a teacher I could not help them overcome this yet. They were not very confident to express themselves in public.

Then another name came into voice. She writes English poems…someone shouted. In order to overcome the communication gap that is built up between inhibition and thought, this is what they did—they shouted from among other students. They could shout in a crowd.  

This student of mine, however, did not show any inhibition. It was different. She was the topper in the class.

She stood up and read from her paper. Words flowed forth and blessed all the ears it touched and all the minds that drank from the stream of meaningfulness. 

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The Resurrection; Phase 3

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I-poems have always been a hot candy around in my blog ever since I invented them in my own style. In conversations and talks I often compare them with the Haiku poetic form, saying ‘i-poems are haiku style small poems with some philosophic idea condensed into a very few number of lines’, though in truth I never even wanted to write a haiku or thought of calling haikus, i-poems. 

These small poems were always an intriguing mixture of spiritual connection and earthly wisdom. I always felt a Contact with the formless, the Divine Father when I attempted i-poems, not just in this series, but all of them.

There were poems in which I used only one line to tell the idea—one lined poems. I loved that expression of surprise. It is the same excitement I felt each time attempting i-poems.

Then my focus shifted to the book, WALL OF COLOURS and other stories, the first collection of my short stories.

In order to work on this project, I needed my full concentration. Poetry was slowly stashed in the back of my mind. This was the reason for a long break in i-poems in “The Indian Commentator”. The work of the book is in progress.

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The Resurrection; Phase 2

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What made me decide to try the series of i-poems titled “The Geometry of Loneliness:Confessions of a Lonely Traveler” is beyond any surprise. I must have done them anyway. These poems were within me, they had already been written on my soul.

Life, journey, lessons and whatever one leaves behind as part of the journey of life ended up in these words as poems with only one intention—bringing them back to life, in a resurrection.  

The Geometry of Loneliness is about the journey of life. These poems are a journey in themselves. They taught me how to feel intensely about what I, the traveler left behind and how I can look at the losses and temporary distances with a peaceful mind. The mind was anxious and tried, but was learning ways to come to terms with the reality of the journey—that is pain and joy at the same side of the coin.

There was one more reason I tried i-poems, though—I wanted to repeat my success with them. I wanted to see if my hands can still roll in cadence with the music of poetry when mostly I spend time with prose fiction; to see if I still have got the hook?

Not that prose has any music, but the music of prose is not the same as poetry. 

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The Resurrection

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“Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he dies, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” –John 11:25-26

Phase 1                                       

I still remember, when I wrote and published the first series of i-poems in The Indian Commentator one of my best friends had asked me if I could tell her about the story behind the poems, such as what inspired me. So I sent her a detailed mail explaining some of the events that inspired me to write them.

It still did not strike me how wonderful it would be to listen to the stories of creation, the movement of the stream of life, into which merge the words, spaces, signs of pause and half closure, abrupt endings, periods and the distances between thoughts. But only until recently.

On a fine morning, a few days before Easter, I was taking a bus ride to a nearby small town Chakkarakal for buying beef and groceries for Easter celebrations. In the bus was playing an audio.

The interval between the songs was filled by a narration by the music composer.

Ilayaraja, a legendary Tamil musician was humming the tune in his own voice with arbitrary words and fragments of the song in its creative process—a direct record from the day when the song was being composed.

It was great to listen to that moment—the moment of birth, the moment of clearing the mist of inertia and achieving resurrection from death.

This event inspired The Resurrection—the story behind The Geometry of Loneliness.

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The Geometry of Loneliness: An Afterword

The miracle of life unravels in a journey. The end signifies the unknown and the journey, the known. A traveler keeps one foot in the unknown and another in the known. In this journey, the traveler faces stages of exhaustion and loneliness among everything else that he or she encounters.

This journey is yours and mine. This journey has a meaning and a pace. 

The Geometry of Loneliness is about this exhaustion and the resulting loneliness—an attempt to come to terms with both. Writing i-poems is always a rejuvenating process for me.

With the previous poem, the present series, The Geometry of Loneliness has come to a closure.

Thank you all, for reading, commenting, and of course, shying from commenting as well. For those who visited these poems and blessed these words with their attention, a million thanks.

May the Path be merciful towards us all and show us the red shine of the horizon before we tire and give up the good fight.

May all the minds we hurt by leaving them behind in the journey keep us in their memories, until we return with our dreams conquered and our battles won.

Amen.

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