The Perfect Date....

Nothing had been planned. It just happened. I hadn't asked for it nor expected anything like it. It was just a very ordinary warm day. All I did, was to just follow something as complex as a desire.

The perfect music..

The evening was relatively cooler. It had been one and a half years since I had sung to my heart's content in the way music was supposed to be practiced. It was quite difficult to launch a full-fledged Carnatic music recitation in Holland with a busy life oneself and even busier students for neighbors. Every day I sang a piece or two and hummed along while getting some chores done. I hadn't listened deeply to the timber of the tamboora in so long. That evening I just had to. It was destined that I unfolded my voice to the fullest and got every note perfect to the last of breath I could hold. I just had to get all the gamakas right and I desperately needed to confirm the life of music in me. Every single stroke of the strings from my tamboora (even though electronic) resonated somewhere deep within me on the very silent evening. I took a while to just listen to it. I then began.. It was a deep sense of pleasure, a sense of realization of purpose, of existence. Something I was searching for, for a long time. It was like an epiphany. The same kind I experienced when I had walked the entire length of a wind tunnel two years ago. I knew what the word “happiness” truly meant. Few hours where even after trying, I couldn't remember a single thing that could possibly make me worry. Everything in the world seemed glorious. A place where there was a solution to everything. A drugged effect you may say, but you would also acknowledge that music is one of the best drugs, especially when you feel its spirit glow inside you. I started with a varna, a simple mohana raaga varna.. I never imagined it would give me answers to so many doubts of the recent past. As I went through other raagas, an intense feeling of bliss settled over me.

A long time or short, I dunno, but it had grown really dark outside. I stepped out in the most perfect of light winds which carried the scent of a certain sweetness that I just couldn't ignore like other sweet aromas. It rang a few bells in the depths of my childish memory. It smelt like fresh grass, like soil, like a garden that knew was going to be regaled.

The smell had overpowered what little control I had over myself. A moment of almost impossibility where my head was crystal clear and I wasn't thinking of anything! Absolutely nothing running in my head! I literally was in the moment. Never did that happen before. I stood by the porch leaning against the gate and staring at nothing in particular.

The perfect rain....

And then something distracted me from my thoughtless reverie. The softest touch...The first touch in a long time that restored my soul to what it truly is! It didn't stop. First my hand, then my shoulder, to my cheeks and my forehead. Cool droplets came down slowly at first and then picked up pace unremittingly. Accustomed to clenching tight when Holland rained over me, I cowered a little but then my mind wrenched free as the innocuous droplets began to unthaw my shell. I could literally see the overheated earth below my feet melt away when the rain gods decided to grace me with the early monsoon showers. The sweet smell had been justified now. Soft yet quick, ambient rain drops.. I blankly walked out and stood on a street so deserted that a blind man could presume it was a graveyard. Outstretching my arms in the middle of the night, I soaked in every single molecule that came my way. The stress that had rigged my soul for the last two years and especially of the last few weeks had been wiped clean. The flavor in the air intensified and I gave up. I had become a slave to the ways of nature and I let it be. It seemed like an eternity that I stood there.

And yet when mom yelled out asking me to fetch the dried-a-lil'-while-ago-but-now-wet-clothes from the terrace, I thought I had stood there just for a few seconds.. I went up. The clothes were all dripping gleefully without the slightest hint of the annoyance it would cause mom. No point rushing now I thought. I sat down in the middle of the terrace half illuminated by the street lamp post. …. for quite some time...

Somewhere along I must have laid on my back. As the incredible early monsoons stopped, I could see the cloudless skies dazzle with its stars coiffured neatly.

Holland's skies had been always oppressed with clouds. I never for once saw a constellation up there. But to the delight of the high school girl in me, Orion, the hunter, my man, had come along with his brightest belt and the shiniest knee. A little away from Betelgeuse was Sirius and it looked like he had the widest grin for me. Sirius was still the most-fairest of all and evidently the

The perfect Orion..

the star of the stars! I still couldn't figure out which star completed the Big dog's tail (there are many around) as Sirius twinkled mischievously, comprehending my confusion, as always.

It was like the ground and the sky had become one. Sirius had hypnotized me. I was lying in space, passing the stars as I floated along. The enormity of this universe seems surprising every time I see the skies. Just unimaginably big and beautiful. Highly astonishing that men fight for few square feet of land when every man could own the universe in his own way. As of that moment, it belonged to me. Everything belonged to me. The oceans, the trees, the stars, the planets and comets, the space rocks and even vacuum. I was being sucked into the black hole of a grandeur fueled by the gifts from beyond. I was a creation that knew the existence of every other thing. I did not possess many things I longed for. But it was just going to be a matter of searching and finding them...just a matter of time.......

It was a very long time before I returned back to my terrace that night- rather the next morning.

As I climbed down the stairs, I realized what a perfect evening it was. I could never come up with an answer before, when people asked about my idea of a perfect date, but today I just had one. With myself. The one I needed so desperately to keep my sinking relationship afloat.... The one that was due for a long, long time.... The best one I ever had and probably will ever do. That was my perfect date..........

aeroyogi

24/2/2011