(Suggested pre-read Wanderer)
I have been wandering ever since. The encounter with the ageless wanderer had left me muzzled up. All I could do all these while was howl and scream and run the last words the he left me with in my heart.
“My love train stops at no station, no passengers abode, just the driver and the guard… set perennially apart by the manifest, by the jest, by the infirm test, by the world and the rest…”
I kept going back to the same café in search of the legendary wanderer but to no avail. With each failed attempt my angst and frustration grew louder. Today was supposed to be the last visit to the café. The moment I entered, I saw a familiar silhouette; of a man sitting at the exact same table, where I met the wanderer earlier. My heart was overjoyed. I rushed to grab a seat next to the gentlemen. I sat down and greeted him.
He looked up. To my dismay it was not the wanderer I had met before. It was someone else. I felt disappointed and at the same time also embarrassed that I had barged into someone’s personal space. I said sorry.
The man, almost sixty, replied back –
“Boy, you must be Balaji and must be looking for the wanderer. He told me all about you and how you helped him pen his story. He told me you come here every day and wait for him and go home disappointed. He feels sorry for you. But he can’t make it to this place for quite a while now. Instead he asked me to meet you and here I am.”
I felt strange, really strange. I asked him who he was.
He responded, “Well, I am an old friend of his. He wanted me to thank you for taking his story to the world and he knows it is in safe hands. But he also knows that the encounter with him had left you with many questions. You can ask me the questions boy; I will give you the answers that he would have given you. Word by word!”
My first question, Is it really love? Really? For so many women?
He responded, “Poor you! must be traumatized. Well young man, let me put in a way it really is and then you decide whether you want to call it love or not.
Technically speaking, right at the time when god was toying with the idea of Genesis, he realized that he needs to have a one-on-one connection with all his creation all the time. He knew he needed a platform that afforded no outages, no noise. He also felt the need for peer to peer connection between his creation so that he could relay signals. After much mulling over this, he knew what was required. He embedded invisible traces of himself in each of his creation. Ardent grains of god blended into each soul. Each grain having a certain, specific and unique pairing code for relay signaling and a universal architecture for seamless summation at the cosmic cash counter. This was full proof, tiny seeds of gods embedded into each vessel.
Well don’t get overwhelmed young man, this was the only technical part, rest all is emotional as you would like to call it.
The flavor of god within our Wanderer had started to churn. When the churning gathers momentum, it releases a sweet, heavy, pull somewhere between his lungs. An ecstatic central thump in his chest, a dish-dash, which suddenly makes you see the seams of the universe. A feeling of glorious foolishness, a kick, a swirl, a tilt, a sway, a connection stronger than the one when we pray. The onset of god’s direct, overbearing, tangible presence in us. It’s flame, a spark, a mark, that would talk. It talks, he listens. It commands, he obeys. It directs, he delivers. Now his heart is fully radioactive – like an active radio it transmits and receives, without modulation, the link to the absolute signal.
He continues to wander… for he searches and searches for years, decades, centuries, millenniums, within the shores of eternity. He searches for the vessel, which not only emits, but has become the true emblem of that cut piece signal. He searches for his completion, the one that resides in the hallway of time… a consummation of his soul with the stark water paradise. A cosmic union, at a time and place when and where he himself will attain his pinnacle and his love will wander carelessly to a woman who would be ready to relay the signal home. The magnetic match whose value will be precise to the value of Pi to the last decimal. A day and place when he will cease to wander. A day and place when he will unfold the hammock by the tree and laze around in company of his love and slowly disappear into the sky.
Until then, this wandering is his calling. To find the vessel, to find vessels, to understand her, to understand them, to understand his true calling, understand the mechanics of love’s true nature, to understand why his radio hooks up to this frequency, to understand where this channel will lead him, to understand this sub-relay (relay within the larger relay), to understand his own self, his true currant, the blackest currant.
And through this journey, many worlds would swim across him, bringing him hope and despair, love and hate, free will and fate, timelessness and date, empty bottles and crates. Then the spark will be fanned by his true pursuit and it will engulf the forest of his life, blow out of proportion, like a million supernova exploding at the same time, it will be the brightest light on the every darkest night. It will be his absolution. His answers without the questions. Like an electromagnetic wave it will dissolve all else, and love would shine the brightest.
And through this journey, he will touch upon the vessels of his calling, the women in whose being his god finds a match, he will seek, until there is nothing left to seek in that vessel, and through this he will learn the baby steps of god, of tactical deficiency of life and attainment, and en route rub off his magic to these women, and unassumingly guide them towards their own destiny, prod them to their wondrous acme, and one of these very women would without fail quench his eternal thirst and making him flow into god, eventually.
That’s it young man. That’s the all I wanted to tell you when you asked me the question.”
Whoaaaaaaaaa… I had no clue what to do now, what else to ask him next.
But cutting through this seamlessly endless ocean of knowledge, the gentleman asked me a question.
“Tell me young man, what should the wanderer do? If I told you that the women he pursues now holds only promise of knowledge and would not be his grace. Should he hold back the wave of his heart? What should my friend do?”
I looked into the old man’s eyes and replied –
“So if from rank to rank she darts her ardent eyes,
let she find only love, and if love be thy true calling,
let it find its own path!
Keep the flame burning bright, Foreknowledge is alright,
You take only what was yours, in your unending flight.”
I was amazed at what I had heard, at what I had said, at how all this was beginning to shape up. I felt an irresistible urge to dart back home, write this down, word by word… the way it happened.
I asked for the old man’s leave. Said I will be back tomorrow to meet him again. He only smiled back. Put his hand through his coat pocket and pulled out an old world silver business card holder. Carefully, like all old men, he took out one card and handed it over to me. Without looking at it I put it in my kurta pocket.
I still do not have the guts to see what the card reads!
At this juncture, I would like to quote myself – “A day will come when you will see, I will turn into the answers I once asked of thee”
