‘SHE’ – A Misinterpretation (Part - II)

     

     Do you know about our national poet? His journey of love lasted as long as she lived. Our poet D.R.Bendre did not say any less about her. He wrote SakheeGeeta. K.S.N became old trying to find her, the daughter of a Shanubhoga, (a Brahmin who does the work of a village accountant) in leat, banana and lemon orchards. We don’t know if he gave her Mysore Jasmine. Harivamsharaya Bachchan, who worshipped her in his Madhubala, MadhuShala and Madhupyala, was clammed mad about her. Vincent Vinci who cut his beautiful ears, wrapped them in a piece of canvas and gave her asking her what gift he should give, the English poet W.B.Yeats who whispered into her ears “tread softly, my love, because you are walking on my dreams”, all these artists, I think, have gone in search of her but they have not seen her. Who is ‘she’ that slips away like that?

       What a pain that I suffered that evening! My mother told me ‘she died of blood cancer’ ‘who?’ I asked. She told me “That female child who played on my plam, who warmed your limbs, caused the blood to flow to your cheeks, is now no more.” She continues to talk about her. I looked deep into my mother’s eyes. In her eyes ‘her’ fire was burning. But she was not burning. Our tomorrows will be a shade less excruciating if she were to die once for all, won’t they? I think that Death becomes meaningless if it were to attack her. How can she be liquidated by Death when she is after the deathless, formless and harmless man standing on the burning bed of straw on the water? Language becomes utter pointless whenever I think of her. Women of different kinds-of physical structure, of language, of beauty have entered into my life. I address all of them as ‘she’. ‘She’ becomes totally essential to language but not to emotions. In language ‘she’ is treated as ‘she’ but ‘she’ is a child in the form of a seed in the womb. ‘She’ is still very young in my mind as waiting for her customers by the shade of a chimney in front of my school as evening approaches. But ‘she’, holding wine glasses of different colors, arousing you sexually in the bedrooms of your veins, dancing, has not been affected by time.

          

     The blind woman Shankaravva who carried me to various place during my childhood and showed me a different world with her unending stories, poor lady teacher who fed me, Talawar Dundavva, who could take my father to task who believed in the theory of controlling his children by punishing them, Shivamma who smeared our empty forehead with vibhooti and lifted our small feet to touch her forehead, Tulajabai who cleaned our urine, Ratnavva who protected me from the burning sun by covering the head with the end of her sari, Mangalavva who cursed me, the lady teacher who promised me English which I could not learn, the lady friends who attended and who will attend my programmes, functions, marriage, one day my cremation, with love or with hatred, are all different incarnations of ‘she’, aren’t they? My whole life is love, trouble, torment, humiliation, hospitality and sweet pain that ‘she’ has given. Truth is dependent on those complete deaths. If my existence itself is impossible without ‘her’, why don’t I understand ‘her’? Who is ‘she’ who cannot be understood?

    Who is ‘she’, who played all possible roles in my life, who is present at every step in the journey of my life but who remained as a buried treasure without being available to the quest called research?

   The more I ask this question, the more complicated ‘she’ becomes. ‘She’ can even get her sex changed. You may not believe if I say that ‘she’ was present in the food that was served by my grandfather, in the made love of my brother, in the pure love of fans, in the happiness of students, in the affection of a teacher who used to come from a distant place and in the innocent smile of my brother’s new born child. I can say with certainly that ‘she’ is present in the jasmine flower, in the books that I pick up with love, in the pillow on which I lie, in the ruined sinking stone pillars of Hampi. I can talk to ‘her’. I can tune in to ‘her’ voice’; I can plant myself in ‘her’ womb. But, still who is ‘she’? I just cannot say. ‘She’ is not just kumkum, not a nose-ring or ring worn on the toes, not a saari, nor a Sanyasini in the mundane world.

      Let us relate the story of a young man of our family who went to see God. He quarreled, left the house, abandoned my sister whom he had married in accordance with the scriptures, left the town, and grew a beard, wandered from forest to forest for a decade. Punishing his body he tried to prove that he was beyond ‘her’. When he returned home, one day, all of a sudden, he went mad. He was born again and again around the fragrance of ‘her’ heart like a moth that dies trying to catch fire. He might have found life meaningless without ‘her’. Or he might have misunderstood ‘her’, thought of ‘her’ as an obstacle in realizing the aim of his life.

     He had 12 children from ‘her’. He often met other women after he had abandoned my sister. He is still meeting them. My argument is that he did not get ‘her’. ‘She was neither an obstacle in his way in the beginning of his life, nor was ‘she’ the woman who satisfied his growing desire for sex in his later years. ‘She’ was merely the scapegoat of his limited vision that is all.

    I now feel that because of the limitation of my emotion and intelligence, I tried to catch ‘her’ with my language and conceptual imagination. The more I try to express ‘her’ in language, the more significant forms ‘she’ talks on.

    How can I say that ‘she’ will not be misunderstood when we describe ‘her’ as merely ‘she’ just as we misunderstand when we say earth as merely earth and light as merely light? We understand according to the twist of meaning because we have always viewed everything within the parameters of meaning. But, we must know, that the misinterpretation and twist of ‘her’ is the first step towards getting a vision of the truth about ‘her’.