Memories of Siddhartha

... He wanted to follow Siddhartha, the beloved, the splendid. And in days to come, when Siddhartha would become a god, when he would join the glorious, then Govinda wanted to follow him as his friend, his companion, his servant, his spear-carrier, his shadow...


I had my back to the wall when I first met him. He had his back to the wall too. He grinned at me when I trudged out of my place, crestfallen, to join him beside the blackboard and stand in attention in punishmnent. With my back to the wall. "Hi, I am Siddhartha, the Great!" he cheerily extended out his hand. And thus we extended our hands to a friendship that was born out of a fourth-standard classroom adversity. "Face the wall and kneel down for the rest of the hour", my Maths teacher's voice boomed, resonating through the walls of the classroom, cutting short a newly formed two-membered cabal planning a coup in their rendezvous beside the blackboard. "You stand on this side of the board, and you on the other side." she thundered in the vernacular, "And if the two of you talk again after all the mischief you have done, I shall have you caned and excoriated." My head hung down in shock and ignominous humiliation. The rest of the class was staring at us. I turned and knelt down, facing the wall. And I did not dare look at him for another ten minutes while I quietly suffered in humiliation. It struck me that I had wanted to ask him where he lived, and whether he would come to my house this evening to play cricket on the streets. I had played well enough the previous evening to feel confident enough about an exhibition of my skills with my willow to a newfound friend. I looked at him. There he was kneeling down, arms folded behind the trunk. And grinning at me. He gesticulated me to come closer to him with a shrug of one shoulder. We inched towards each other even as our knees hurt, even as he intently gazed at me with a sense of purpose... "Shall we lick the blackboard clean? It looks very dirty with all the chalk dust. If we make it spotlessly black, Miss will be very happy with us. And then she will never scold us!"...

"What the hell is this?!", the Maths teacher screamed in shock, absolutely furious. "So this is what you both do when you are punished. Call your parents tomorrow, you rogues. The two of you will henceforth stand out of my class for the next one month." ...


... He loved Siddhartha's eye and sweet voice, he loved his walk and the perfect decency of his movements, he loved everything Siddhartha did and said and what he loved most was his spirit, his transcendent, fiery thoughts, his ardent will, his high calling...


The time, I notice, is 4:39 PM...

... "Hey, what is the time?"

"Siddhartha, will you believe it! It is 12:39! This is the fourth day in a row when you have asked me the time and I have told you the exact four digits!"

That was the day when two Sixth standard boys who met up for lunch pledged their solidarity to the number 39, and resolved with a lump in their throats that they would think of each other whenever their watches showed the four digits of time for sixty seconds of moments that had been hallowed in the sands of the Vidya Mandir auditorium. The allegiance to the numbers and each other was made in fields of childish fancy. A solemn pledge; a pledge that lay buried in those very sands two days later when the childish minds leapt on to other fields. Forgotten...

...My timepiece's alarm still reads 12:39 PM.


... "If you only," spoke Govinda, "wouldn't speak such terrible words, Siddhartha!" ... Govinda stopped on the path, rose his hands, and spoke: "If you, Siddhartha, only would not bother your friend with this kind of talk! Truly, your words stir up fear in my heart..."


"I have noticed these days that you grab every opportunity to belittle me with your jokes. If I may seek to find out the cause of this behaviour."

"Siddhartha, It is merely a retaliation of the condescension that you subject me to. I think it is merely my reaction to the insinuation that you subject me to. I feel genuinely hurt because you are so good at it that you manage to pull it off everytime. And I keep shrinking in my own estimate."

"Oh! So you feel that I really mean all that I say when I rile you? I think you need to be able to take sportively the jokes that are cracked at you."

"Siddhartha, it does not behoove you to say something like that. I know that you do do not wish me anything bad. And you know too that I have always wished you well. You also know that, many a time, I have been the first person to laugh at myself. But there is a threshold that one needs remain within. I think you have begun to cross the threshold beyond which I cannot take, hard as I may try. I only react when I am instigated to a point beyond which I cannot take."

"But I wonder why, of late, your insinuations have become too frequent and too piquant for comfort."

"Oh! You think so?! I also wonder why! Siddhartha, the answer to that lies in your question."

(After a pause)

"See, I really think the problem lies with you. I have thought long and hard about it. I even reckoned initially that there may have been mistakes on my part."

"To hell with you and your supremacist bigoted mind."

Thus ended one of the biggest spat that occurred in a grove in Yercaad, leaving a bitter taste in both our tongues; at least in my tongue. The tongue that felt bitten by the very canines so near. The bite stung more than usual. And three rivulets of blood trickled down the side of my tongue even as I spoke those last words. Yes, the bite stung more than ever because it was Siddhartha who cajoled me into making the trip. A trip that four of us friends had undertaken. As a celebration of twelve long years of camaraderie and genuine goodwill. The strange thing was, even though the feud had been very dramatic and intense (to me, at least), both of us knew all along that neither would bear each other any kind of resentment or ill-will. Only the actions needed retrospection, not the intentions. Anyway, the heated exchange had drawn too much out of me. My temples were splitting in pain after the nervous exertion. I got myself a mango drink and slunk under a tree tired, tense and unhappy. In the context of friendships, the spat is a very minor one. And it was. This was merely a brush of momentary rushes of bloods; merely words that were strung up in a heated argument. And this did not leave the scar on the left side of my chest that I you see today. The scars were created a few moments later. When I drearily staggered back to join the other three. When the words pierced the tympanum of my ears. When I realised that intents were piercing my ear and not words. When one of the two spectators to the onslaught of words said, "Siddhartha, forget it. We know his ego only too well. you can never change certain things." When the left side of my chest ripped open. When history streamed out of my heart as blood. When I ejected out of my heart the history of two conniving people with finesse in my life. When I deleted their annals chronicled in my life in such great detail. The scars were created.

In retrospect, I should not have made the trip at all. Or probably, it happened for good. I obtained an unequivocal measure of two of my friends. Siddhartha has remained as hallowed in my life as ever. Both of us know till date that there was no ill-will. The others have faded out; blurred into the obscurity of the background vision of a possibly myopic eye. And the scars remain. Fresh...


... when he heard these words and read the decision in the motionless face of his friend, unstoppable like the arrow shot from the bow. Soon and with the first glance, Govinda realized: Now it is beginning, now Siddhartha is taking his own way, now his fate is beginning to sprout, and with his, my own...


We met up on Saturday evening in the beach and spent an hour during which both of us spoke little. A silent Shraddhanjali to the fourteen years that lie buried in our backyards. Ghosts of which have remained to haunt me at night. And day. Though the thought itself is very Victorian and fulfilling, realism and objectivity would probably attribute the silence to something else. Lack of a common ground. It dawned on me then that we were slowly drifting apart. He is too perceptive an individual to not realise it. But he has maintained a dignified silence. It is his greatness. He seems to have measured out his life in immaculate coffee spoons, a la Prufrock. Ergo he knows this is an obligation slated out for him by his childhood. And he complies by allowing himself to languish in my mediocrity for sometime. Yes, coming back to what I was saying, we are drifting apart. It seems inexorably inevitable. A cul-de-sac, so to speak. And the finality with which the situation looms is frightening. It has left me shaken. And deeply perturbed. I was nothing but an abject parasite, thiriving on his knowledge and vision. If the host and the parasite are separated, what does the host lose but the parasite?! And the parasite moves on, gasping for stale air, to embark on a quest for a new host; he knows it is ultimately a pointless odyssey - the next sojourn is bound to end the same way...


(TO BE CONTD.)

NOTE: All the italicized passages are from Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

- posted by Dileepan @ 3:12:00 am

Lampoons:
Post a Comment