Cold misty mornings giving way to mellow sunlight topped with flowers in riotous dazzling colours cocking a snook at the grey smog. It is Delhi walking the ramp displaying her winter fashions! Days are shorter, night falls faster, fog smothers everything. We wake up to chilly dawns with the rain clattering on the roof tops. Don’t you, then, long for those hot May afternoons?
Of course you do! Because light and heat are wellsprings of Life. Light represents knowledge, joy, honesty, a spiritual state while darkness offers images of fear, the unknown, sadness, loss. All over the world we tend to have a compelling need to light up the dark with headlights, streetlights, houselights, floodlights, decorative lights, diyas and many other kinds of lights rather than enter and cherish the unique gifts of darkness.
Actually very few of us experience true darkness .One hot summer night while travelling by road from one city to another somewhere in Gujarat, our vehicle broke down. Though we were in the middle of nowhere, we couldn’t bear the heat inside the van and all of us stepped out. As the driver and his assistant tinkered with the engine, we walked a little up the deserted road. So far from any human habitation, it was eerily quiet. We could hear some clicking and whirring sounds in the grass and a soft scurrying. It was very dark and as our eyes got adjusted we could see the individual trees and bushes. Suddenly the stillness was shattered by one of our group saying, “Look!” Everyone looked up to where he was pointing. Tilting our heads back we saw a luminous, glowing white band. It was the unfamiliar but easily recognisable Milky Way. We trembled not in fear but in ecstasy. I felt I was incredibly blessed to be far enough from human-made lighting so that this divine ‘river in the sky’ was visible to me. Just as it had awed me, it must have awed my ancestors all through the ages. The timelessness of this ethereal sight brought to me the realisation of my own insignificance in the gigantic ocean of Time. Darkness woke me to a Truth, dormant when Light surrounded me.
Poets seem more sensitive to this truth. David Whyte says in Sweet Darkness:
The night will give you a horizon
Further than you can see.
I leave you in solitude to let these thoughts meander through your mind.
Copyright@Sutapa Basu. All rights reserved.
