My Journey into an Epic

The Reader's Digest's A - Z dictionary with rich red binding was our prized possession. Not only it looked royal and terribly important adorning our father's beautiful rosewood study table, but for us kids, it was a gratifying reminder that English held a prestigious status in our home. This was oddly ironic since in those days, besides our father none of us was conversant in the lingua franca. 

Sharing the space with this treasure was a rather innocuous looking book, light orange, equally thick and commanding, called 'Savitri' by the great Indian philosopher and poet Sri Aurobindo. For someone like myself, mortally afraid of the English language, and convinced of its utter incongruity, the fact that our father could read and understand this magna opus, made him superhuman in the eyes of my ignorant eight-year-old self. How could anyone read, let alone understand a book of such proportion, was beyond the orbit of my comprehension. Merely lifting it equated to a workout. Yet, everytime I was asked to fetch it, my heart swelled up with pride. To be entrusted with such a hallowed and herculean task, was no mean achievement.

I still remember the deep sonorous voice of our father reading the epic poem aloud, filling the house with its long, unending verses, pausing so often to let them roll gently and settle into the pores of our consciousness. According to him, its mantric value sufficed to bring the Great Change. I would just sit there, listening, not understanding a word; my face aglow with daughterly devotion.

Little did I know that in later years, this is what I would inherit from my father: his love of Savitri. As we traveled around the world, Savitri stayed my constant companion and guiding star. I referred to it whenever I felt lost and whenever I found myself in the din of my own confusion.
Written in iambic pentameter, and consisting of 24,000 lines, Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, based on the legend from the Mahabharata is a symbol of the spiritual journey and transcendence of the human soul.

As an amateur reader of the epic, and a zealous summoner of the Muse, I recently invented an exercise in which while keeping my eyes shut, I randomly open  up a page of Savitri and let my index finger lead me to a word. Whichever word it is, I endeavor to pen down a free-verse with an 'automatic writing' kind of approach. 

1.

Word: Smiting

smiting desires
into minute bits,
stone-carved and
tumultuous,
she walked on
into the world
making an offering
of every step. she
became a shadow
of all her dreams

2.

Word : labours

life labours on
seeking meaning
in the daily chore
of mere existence;
dust settles, weighing
upon the ticking of 
the clock...slowly
suffocating its
sound, drowning its
meaningless zeal,
arresting the cadaverous
mechanicalness of its
hands -- returning life 
to its foetal silences

3.

Word: Impassive

crossing man's troubled
world with heaven's dreams
the impassive sky weaves
itself into Life's nomadic light

4.

Word: questionable

questionable all that was
felt with piercing intensity,
questionable the elation of 
a slow discovery; the gnarled 
misery of unfulfilled
yearnings sweeping across
the being with typhoonic
might and hurtling me 
beyond the vistas of my 
'self'...questionable everything
and yet it flung my soul out
of its ascetic heights
to be trampled upon by
careless feet of  love

5.

Word: turbulent

barred now by a wall of dull logic
the great wave that had inundated
my being with turbulent whirls of
strange and luciferen longings 

6.

Word: pause

while the moment flies, a
dim uncertain pause
latches on to the
leaf that falls and to the shadow
climbing  stealthily up 
towards the light

7.

Word: exultant

serene and exultant
in the inkling of
a distant love
intimate like the
sweet sound of 
koïl on this sweltering
summer day: wrenchingly 
beautiful, and seductively
treacherous...

8.

Word: anguish

all he sees is
anguish and defeat
hanging like Damocles' 
sword above his beautiful
young head; the faint call of
a kite skying up into the
unfathomable heights slips
his sight, as do the 
unwrinkling of the tender
leaves when the morning
sun scatters over them its
column of amber light...
the gentle twirling of spring 
air brushes his cheek as
the butterfly flies past

ideas and their causes sets
his mind abuzz, and he
wakes up wondering why

9. 

Word: smouldering

slow and languorous,  yet
another dawn lingers over
smouldering stones and rocks,
clambers over muted hills, and
skims across brackish oceans
to kiss the world awake and 
fill it with the flutter of
expectation and delight 

10.

flaming mouth

a flaming mouth
sweeping up celestial
verses from the etheric
gold of a hesitant 
dawn, lolling them 
around its cavernous
deep and spurting
them out into the
sputtering fire
of a raging pyre

11.

Word: ungrasped

it is the unseen our

eyes search; the unheard

our ears strive in vain to

listen, and the ungrasped

that the soul seeks 

in its aeonic meanderings

12.

Word: memory

in the haze

of memory

you and i

were made eternal;

our unspoken-ness

finding words

in the ellipsis of

Orion's belt