Gems

Coming home after that rough everyday struggle for your livelihood, literally. Looking forward to good food and a warm bed. Trying to drain the poison off my mind, recollect all the things I enjoyed doing. Trying to remember if there was ever a thing that could consume my mind, my passion, me. That I believed in, wanted to live for.

It was the evening before the Ayodhya verdict was to come out. And my rickshaw driver, decked in the traditional taqiyah, asked me not to step out of my house the next day without reading the newspaper. It was not very safe for me, though Mumbai has offered him lots of freedom, enough to visit his beloved mosque in the middle of the night and unload his mind in prayer. Why fight over such an old issue, he claimed. Why not build a hospital. After all, what could be a higher act of benevolence?

There are men of wonder who spend their lives in mosques, in prayer and healing, he said. Those maulanas, both revered and feared by different kinds of people, they can perform magic. Tantras they know, of great power and use, and these they bestow on the sick and poor. No money or food they take in return, but a blessing and a hope that man would not harm, kill or sin. Hundreds of superstitions they know of and preach. He followed many, several were given to me in advice.

Simplicity, yet comprehension led his life. Ignorance of several scientific marvels, perhaps. Yet, how much did it really matter what he believed, as long as he was happy and did not hurt a single soul in the world. And I remembered and felt what it had been like to have such conversations, such times of knowing, of trying to understand, of sharing thoughts and love. Like a passion waiting to fill itself in something.

Life may be full of crap, but it is a few moments of pure happiness as these which make it worth living. It made me smile, more than once.