When friends meet after ages, one question which they ask each other is this: where have you been all these years? Whatever be, there cannot be a satisfactory answer to this question from anyone. All the answers may only sound as nothing more than a matter of fact! Now, let me turn this question to myself. More than a month since I visited the blogger, and a few friends of mine enquired some days ago, what had happened to the blog! Had I forsaken it altogether? I knew that any answer to these volley of questions was not going to really address the question. In fact, I have come to understand the different levels of questions and answers. Not all questions require answer; literature calls them rhetoric questions. I may smartly pass off some of the vital questions as truly rhetoric questions, while frantically trying to run away from addressing real questions.
Questions are generally asked in order to elicit an answer; but there are other kinds of questions, which carry a cart-load of pre-suppositions and pre-judgements. Anyone is wary of these kinds of annoying questions, which may sometimes cross the boundaries of decency and decorum. One of the best and most difficult answers to such questions, I have learned from life is silence. Are there more questions, then the better way to face them is through more and prolonged silence. And there can be no better way to retaliate to the questioner's mean and narrowmindedness than by keeping mum!
But am I going to exercise that way of answering the question, where I had disappeared for more than a month, since I last visited the blogger! Nope! There are answers which are implied in the questions, and even when one does not speak out the answer, the questioner is sure to get the answer by looking at the face, or the body language. But lucky that I am hiding myself behind the screen of this laptop, and those who would toss questions to me are not here to observe my face to get a clue to the answer. But the fact is that feastive moments are not the kind of time that should be spent behind the lifeless screens of the laptop or the desktop. There has been so much of life around me, and it would have been a sad sight were I to sit down in my room to "imagine" what was happening outside.
The feastive season is not yet over, and the air is still mingled with magical fragrance; the tiny flowers of the bokul on the road have spread a carpet, and their fragrance have added to the drunken state of the early winter. The fragrance was lively, and it appeared to me that she was frantically looking for her lost lover in the alleys and bylanes of the city. The early morning wearing a chill weather, forcing the lazy babes sleeping long to pull the sheets over their bodies! There was life outside, and there it is still. How can one leave behind life to go after the lifeless notions!
I wish I was able to take home a handful of the fragrant bokul flowers, and fill my room with its fragrance; but when the fragrance of the bokul flowers mingled with the morning air, was nothing less than bloodymary! I was out all these days searching, finding and treasuring life - life in a thousand forms and shapes, and it was a joyful experience to life spreading her wings and fly in the limitless blue sky, all in a wonderful array! When one is guided by the spirits of life, then one becomes out of control, and everything then becomes a journey in faith! That is where one can find the true self of one's being, whose other name is but God!
