RO ON RUPTURED SPACE - 2

THE AWAKENING

She’d burst into the room; wake me up with a hullabaloo. She’d say, “Get up, my sweet”, her voice cheerful, like birdsong. Then she’d go across to the window, and tear the curtains open to allow the golden sunshine to drench the room.

Then, she’d leave my bedroom door ajar and go back into the kitchen. I’d hear the din of domesticity, the clang and clamor of steel vessels, the chitchat with the kitchen help, her poignant stotras to the Gods. Strains of the “Vishnu Sahasranama” – a mantra that evokes Vishnu, the Preserver, with a thousand names – would stream in. She had a voice like a nightingale, she did, my mother.

But what a delicious wake-up! How fortunate is one to wake to a mother – and her love – every morning!

Strangely, not so for me.

For an extremely sensory and sensitive type of personality, this would be an ice-cold shock every morning. It would rip me out of slumberous stupor; yank me from the inmost layers of consciousness; drag me out of deep, drowsy dormancy. Basically, ruin the start to my day.

This went on for years; my mother’s love, care and concern showering me… in ways other than just being woken up.

Then, one day I moved away to a magic faraway land called “Singapore”, where I was answerable only to myself. At first, I was uncomfortable with the quietude, but began to understand who I was, what I wanted, even how I needed to wake up.

Consciousness is so much like Nature. It needs to dawn tentatively like the sky – from dark to opaque, translucent to transparent, shade to tint. It needs to stretch languorously like the long, lazy, limbs of a pale-gold sun. It needs to unfurl slowly like petals on a dewy early-morning flower.

Sometimes, during such times of luxurious leisure, thoughts flutter in.

Thoughts of the empty nest I perhaps left ruptured when I took flight.