Only For You

The roaring waves silence my shrieks. It is getting darker, and very damp. I have stopped to search here, there and everywhere. The knees wobble making me sink into the sand where I once stood.

I summon enough strength to throw the head back and to look heaven, in the eye.

“You!” I say.

It is you that I talk to. You have gone back on your promise. It was you who had whined about paradise being turned into wasteland by garbage collectors pretending to be gardeners.

I had minded my own business. But you pierced my peace with your plaintive cry. I noticed your concern and made them my own. I asked you what I could do to help to break the chain…to start all over again?

And you gave me him, to nourish into a living example of your idea of a human being, worthy of this world created by you with such love.

I was delighted to share my life with your creature and to care for another, apart from myself. I cradled him night and day in a way that would forever remind him of the virtue of remaining centered, gravitating never unnecessarily to the left or to the right.

He continues to be fed on kindness and is made to rest on cushions of compassion. He has been told about the matriarchal and the patriarchal ways but seems happiest when hopping and skipping on the middle path, often humming your name as fellow traveler.

He was blossoming into a good soul. Together we were trying to make life a superbly, sublime experience, according to your wish.

Then why…?

Of course he loves toys but the exercise was not to have him addicted just to plastic. He was allowed to splash towards the horizon, chasing each rainbow coloured ray of the setting sun till the last one vanished from sight.

Just the other day the home was stormed by a horde of 12 year olds who played hide and seek in the moonlight.

Once we had warmed up to Woody Allen’s Match Point and the children were in and out of the room where the film played on DVD. Over a lush meal of vegetables, bought from the neighbour’s backyard, both elders and children had later talked about the futility, and the tragedy of indulging in lies, lust, greed, cheating, deceiving and betrayal in the name of survival.

He listened when talk led to goodness having been reduced today to banal relativity. Together we tried to imagine the concept of infinite truth contrary to truths patented conveniently by each individual for himself and agreed that the Ten Commandments can never be outdated.

When asked by an aunt what he would like to do in life he had at once lisped, “I would like to be a prince”.

As he grew older he had added that he would also try to avoid being a prince only in public.

“Because it is not right to behave like a pimp in private,” he yelled as he ran away to kick ball on the beach.

In his not very tidy room I caught a slip of paper nearly floating out of the window one day. On it was scribbled:

Paper flowers will not do when I prefer to wait for Spring again.

Someone asked him one day why did he think he was born?

“To find out who I am,” he said.

He was here to watch the soul unfold, behind the veil of his body, he had added, startling an elderly uncle whose hypocritical ways had made him a stranger to straight talk.

He is full of mischief too. I caught him peeing in one corner of the kitchen, behind my back, as I prepared an evening meal.

“Why?” I had glared at him. Because, he said, I had not listened to him and continued to talk and laugh on the telephone. But that was when he was much younger. Once he had hidden a sweetie in the palm of his hand and walked out of the super market without paying for it.

“Why?” I had glared at him again. Because, he said, he did not want to give money to the lady at the cashier who he felt was rude and unkind.

But with time he was learning to peel the ego, petal at a time, and to radiate love for everyone like the sun does. He expected the ocean to teach him generosity and the earth, gratitude. He was beginning to understand that to look for you is all that matters in life but to find you he had to be first aware of each one of us.

Don’t you want him to know you here, and to watch him experience the ecstasy of having found himself as well?

Is this not what you most regret?

That the first principle of a world, conceived so rationally by you and its inner working so easy to discover through the simple combination of love and logic, seems most difficult for most to grasp, let alone, practice? That constitutions, continue to be penned, one more poetic than the other, even as the sacred Law of Nature is forgotten? That the space of animals, vegetations and minerals is marched over by man in pursuit of some very preposterous pleasures?

You are saddened that few bother to make the stride today from an obviously physical existence to the equally essential, spiritual one?

My boy was trying to do all that. Just the other day he told me how he imagines an endless pool, somewhere, of everything, and himself a drop, as if, escaped for a moment into a cloud, or waiting in a cup to quench the thirst of a parched throat.

He had made some very enlightened choices lately, with care, so that this pool of everything, remains unsoiled, at least by him.

I have watched him toy with many a kind thought that have led to some very special deeds and eventually all this would have become his character. Perhaps he was even on the way to being the human you dream of?

Then why, oh why…?
I spring back on my feet. I shout.
Wind, stop your whistling, will you?
And tides your tale.
Then I hear a familiar call. I stop to shout. I sing.
Sand you may smile again.
But before I turn around I want to be sure that what I have just heard is really, “Ma?”