Womb Is Not Tomb

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty 

The petals of nameless flowers are falling off. The leaves dry and green float zigzag in the winnowing wind. The TV blares from some distant houses its daily dose of rapes, drugs, sleep-in dharanas, IPL scores and Covid statistics. The digital media posts hatelines while the Ladakh border melts the early snow by snow boots and fake propaganda. Yet I read poetry of dead poets about dying men. The LED lamp on my table never blinks at anything. The phone rings -my Samudi is dead, my son’s father in law. I sat glum a moment and passed on the news which they already knew. The phone is a great communicator of bad news. The dead man riseth: Ha, he is no Christ, no second coming. I console myself, he is relieved of mortality, his paralytic nerves are now redeemed. Death will take me when He is ready. I am always ready. Ripeness is all – I remember. I resume reading Till Day You Do Part, Peter Handke’s monologue by ‘She’ in Samuel Becket’s Krapp’s Last Tape where she is alive again to proclaim undying love. I got your point Handke, love is a monologue in the grave, after the lights are out and you wait for the sun to do another round. Even birth for you is death: “didn’t your own mother go around telling everyone that even the cry you gave when being born was not at all the cry of a newborn babe but echoed as if it came from inside a sepulcher?” We all have heard this cry Mr Handke but in our ears the cry fell like dewy flowers of hope, joy and possibilities. Why do you make even the beginning a gravestone?

 

The poet has nothing to offer the dying; he sings of the dead. His spring is in eternal winter. His nightingale is strangled by snakes curling around her dainty neck. Life has become a story of the night in which the gravedigger prepares his own burial. No ceremony for death, no threnody for life. The poet is without beginning or end: Just a middle, a headless legless piece writhing in agony. The womb is not the tomb, damn it!

 

Since the birth of the species, man has been complaining of everything. The aches of the belly, the itches of the body, the throbs of the heart and the nightmares, the horror show of his own imagination. He laments his youth and age and mocks at his childish pranks. He has never called another man a hero unless he has vicarious heroism consoling his own cowardice. No reputation in the world remains unscathed, untarnished. The Buddha statues are broken, the Gandhi head is chopped off, the Gita- Bible are burnt and fellow humans are killed. Man never likes wholesomeness in anything. He has no farewell song for the receding clouds for he never welcomed the rains. What he writes about the clouds is dark in splenetic humour. When children sing paeans for the rains on the open spaces mothers drag them in and when lovers sing sad songs others call them mad: See see!  How this fellow has wasted his life for a woman! A woman who eloped with her ex after…  All these things happen when one is alive. Man bribes for a job, a promotion; hires an assassin to kill his rival; steals another’s thesis for what you know. The kings hired poets, historians to write adulatory biographies for posterity to dote on. All this is true because man does not know how to live life; how to utilize the moments by creating happy memories.

 

I have often said life is not a monologue of pain, nor is a duologue of mutual recriminations. Life is a theatre of multitudes. If you think that you are a true human being you are wrong; you become a human being by your deeds and there are no constitutional provisions for living. The first thing to do is to distinguish yourself from your name given by your parents or priest. The christened name is for all registers – school, bank, civil list, service book etc. the identity which your name gives is for the world, for others including your family. You are a nameless being. What the named person ought to be according to all kinds of rule books. There if you defy rules, transgress norms the nameless being will suffer the consequences. Hence your first responsibility is to see that you don’t make your nameless being an outlaw. The name can also earn accolades if you achieve excellence in your areas of operation. You can discover, invent, create, build and practise all things without flouting the rules and you will earn fame and money. But the other self, the nameless being is meant for higher things.

The self is the essential human soul which needs first of all, love, peace: and then a direct encounter or communion with the world, seen and unseen. The priorities of the self are respected by the soul within the logical – legal frame of the society. The soul or the authentic self is governed by a moral - aesthetic unwritten code which the unnamed human pursues to love and be loved by another authentic self. Once this love enriches the person he can connect himself with everything. Death will cease to frighten; calamity will fail to deter you and you will face the world with confidence. If you feel the love and breathe it in your soul you will love all the blooms and bruises of life. Nothing will be beyond you. Life will enclose the tomb as a transit point…