Wow I'm Eighty Today !

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

I woke up this Sunday to the chants of Happy Birthday from my loved ones ethereally whispered and sonorously communicated, disorienting me and my alignments with reality. What! I am eighty today! What is eighty ? A number or something beyond my comprehension in the schema of time? Well, one day I was born -that's for sure. If my birth was on a dated , numbered calendar date I was not responsible for it. But my parents must have been  delighted otherwise they wouldn't have given me an upbringing and education to face the time revealed challenges to make a man of me. I have lived a constrained yet free, pursuing my evocations with my inborn impulsiveness and impatience.

Should I now give a balance sheet? To whom and what for ? When you come to the world you have to live choicelessly. What you make of your life depends on your own circumstances and opportunities;  you know not where you came from and what for. Also you know not whither you would  go.  All you have is time measured by seconds, minutes, hours , days and years. Between your coming and going you have some conscious time which you must utilise to make yourself, if at all, a Being, Of what stuff or essence   you yourself ought to decide and work hard towards it through your education- formal, informal, intuitive. If you do nothing that is allow yourself to be played upon by nature and society and float like an atom in a magnetic field, that is your choice. But if you think you have to find out your own salvation and  create your own heaven  and hell, You may have to take the  available time span of your life as a race to glory, whatever be its contours.

From the beginning of my wingy days  I wanted to be a teacher: not that I had great things to teach but to learn. Learn how to go beyond the focal area of my eyes to see the unseen like chasing shadows in darkness. Hence my life is less sleep and more dreams. And dreams of the ecstatic in the humdrum made my life what I have made of it , if I ignore fate, destiny and the cosmic curve which apparently bends every moment.

I loved all  beautiful things of nature: sky and its luminosities, earth and her sea, forest, storms and all manifested mood shifts. I admired beauty in all its forms; flowers, women , words, rhythms, bubbles and craggy paths like belly folds (not tyres of fat) in an aged belly dancer. Death never disturbed me as I knew it was a given. Yes pain I hated. Any kind of physical pain. Tension was my middle  name for a man superimposing a phantom reality on his encountered reality will accept tension as a natural concomitant of his transcendental fantasies. I was never heartbroken by any betrayal, failure or frustration. I always made detours to find alternative  paths to my extraterrestrial energies to lift me up above the socio- political, governmental pressures denying me my due. Yes I have never entertained the idea of revenge to get even with my secret enemies. I have always ignored the hidden snakes, jumping over them to my self made paths. I was my own  master. I respected the wise, knowledgeable and the just. Respected institutions.  Although my faith in religion, rituals, God and the other world are shaky  I was never an iconoclast.

I have raised a family thereby fulfilling societal obligations. My wife and children are all good and noble souls. But I am not a confined family man. My world is vast and various with multitudes of imaginative structures. I love the human being; I don't love animals; without hating them I tolerate their presence and respect their Darwinian rights to life. I can never  kill even to save myself. I can never hate even if I am hurt beyond measure. I love the rivers, lakes and seas. Anything that is vast, deep and mysterious invites my soul. I am repelled by superficialities and all  artificial  constructs for tinsel glory.

I have discovered love as the only perennial value that can sustain the soul in its salvational quest. And I have loved with single minded devotion without expecting anything carnal or mundane. I have lived with sprightly convivial wordlessness.

What else could I have done? A good job, a good family, some praise, fame, respect and love and a house to live in, good food to eat, good things to wear and a salt-pepper fullness. If I feel empty that is my  stylish fullness of being. My dreams have not stopped  haunting me. My songs have not stopped throbbing my heart. My love has not ceased in my eighty year old heart. Well I have lived, yes lived in style and flourish. I am proud of my fourscore  and look forward to more songs of love, poetry and truth.