True stories - The man who saw the peacock smile.
The worlds first democratic Communist government got elected in Kerala in 1953. Since then governments have come and gone but the communist in the Malayali remained (to the extent that we now have hoardings of Che Guevara wearing the lungi and shirt!!!). That sense of equality and brotherhood made us logical and compassionate in all issues including that of religion and God. But in the lives of everybody comes these incidences where you just know, that all this beauty that you see around us, can't just be some unmonitored evolution process....The beauty shakes us so violently that u realise that it can only be a person behind it all. You understand that this very small beautiful world around us and its evolution is just a Big Great Design.
He had only seen them from a distance. In the zoos, in the New doctors hostel, occasionally with the feathers spread, once even dancing in the soothing rain which came as a relief to the scorching heat of Chandigarh. But when he was on his way down to the boat jetty in Pawana lake he never expected to see a peacock on his way. But that's exactly what he saw, perched on the hand railing of a small bamboo bridge, feathers neatly tucked in. He had to cross the bridge to go ahead. The bridge was just one man wide and so his fiancée decided to take the long way around the bridge. He, somehow, wanted to see the peacock more close and continued onto the bridge.
He noticed it was a very young peacock, colours glinting from an early morning drizzle. He also noticed (pointed out by his fiancée) that it had a sharp curved beak. If he were to pass the peacock perched in this position, he would have to get agonisingly close. So close that, all the peacock had to do was just bend and he would get bitten /stung. He slowly tread forward. By then the peacock had turned its neck, seen him and was following every move of his. Their eyes met. The peacock had deep black eyes bordered by greenish brown rim. He inched forward with no sudden movements, till he reached the middle of the bridge at level with the peacock, eyes still glued to each other. He was both excited and scared and somehow had this feeling that he was about to experience something divine. He wondered whether the peacock would spread his feathers and almost wished for it to happen when he realised how wonderful it would look at this proximity. Just after that thought, he somehow knew that the peacock understood what he was thinking, because exactly the next moment the peacock smiled.
Nobody else would see it and nobody would ever believe it, but he saw. He saw the muscles at the edge of the peacocks beak twitch. It straightened and in less than two seconds spread of its feathers. The spreading made a sound which reminded him of his dog shake drying itself after getting wet. He even felt a few drops of the morning drizzle from the feathers falling onto his face. The spread feathers were much much larger than he expected. In such close proximity it occupied his whole visual field that he couldn't see anything else. The sheer beauty of the sight made him numb, speechless, wide eyed and open mouthed. The extreme symmetry of the arrangement of the feathers, how each feather was exactly similar to the next one, the exact demarcations between green, gold and dark blue, shining from the effects of the morning drizzle. Time froze for eternity (30 seconds according to his fiancée) and then after what seemed like an open mouthed lifetime the peacock jumped back into its adjoining shallow enclosure, still maintaining eye contact, feathers spread.
The eye contact broke after another 30s and the peacock started swinging from side to side as if showing off his feathers. He still couldn't move. His fiancée came up to the bridge thinking he was hurt or something, pulled him away, all the while asking him what had happened. He was not hearing anything that she said. Finally mortal worldly sense started returning and he was literally pulled down from his eternal divine trance. She was repeatedly asking him, "What happened to you, say something" and all he could blurt out was,
"I think I just saw God......"
No comments:
Post a Comment