The shrapnel of words was in free fall by now. I had limited
choices. Get buried under them or make a dart. In the nanosecond that seemed like a lifetime, I quickly made two
calculations.
One, that words hold enormous power to scar us - I will be judicial
with selection of words in future if I survive this befalling of
serrated words. But the second one was deliciously exhilarating
and liberating.
That people (relatives, our dearest friends, our boss) hold unduly
emotional powers over us only because we believe WE are all
virtuous and good. That they have the power to hurt us only
because we believe THEY are all virtuous and good.
Both hypotheses are incomplete.
On that momentous eve of Diwali, amidst the heady scent of
marigolds and spicy whiff from the monumental deep-frying, as
we gathered around the ‘parliamentary’ dining table, when I was
a nano second away from getting scarred by her words, a magical
'mithrill' shield insulated me. Of the acceptance of ‘duality in us’
and of the realisation...
…that we remain blind to all personalities being a mean of ‘mean
and nice’, ‘yin and yang’, ‘goodness and evil’, ‘noble and
devil’….that we don’t want to ‘mine’ the truth that we all are alloys
of mettle of 'heroes' and mental of 'villains'….that, we are not
Ram, nor are they, and that they are not from Ravan lineage either.
….that an exquisite duality exists in all of us. ‘Ek myan me do
talwarein kaise rahti hain’ perhaps Gulzar is referring to the
duality in us in this Nazm?
Gaining sight of this instantly widened my private screening of
reality. The B&W reality, where I was constantly in the centre of
the screen as the sole beneficiary of the experience, turned into
an Eastman Color, Dolby surround, 3D reality of a multistarrer.
Where I could be as Gabbar as Thakur (with those garish, spiky
shoes). It’s just a matter of circumstances - the roles swap and
the ‘climax’ changes.
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