A special prayer

Since the beginning of the rainy season he has been offering prayers to God.

Dilesh, wife’s younger brother, is good company. He is a special child. Special children demand special attention. They are special in quite some ways.

It's not a simple task to say negative their demand. They are highly territorial. Chores you and I find boring and monotonous, they engage themselves doing it uncomplainingly. Living with him for over a decade has been instructional.

For instance, after years of adult life, it has dawned on me that most of us so-called normal are also handicapped, only the degree is variable. He struggles to express his inner most feelings. Am I always able to express my own feelings? Does my vocabulary match the intensity of my feelings? Do circumstances always facilitate free expression? And, how many of us act our mental age at all times that I should be inferring that his mental age is only a third his physical age?

Three years ago, when his mother died, he insisted on visiting the crematorium and we obliged. He showed a rare maturity in not grieving over the dead. One day, he startled us when he said he wanted it to rain heavily as the showers would bring his mother down with them. It was a piece of beautiful imagination, though, to him it must have been absolutely within the realm of probability. It was only more recently that I heard from a spiritual master that the indestructible soul travels up upon being divorced by the body only to be brought down by the rain and enter a new body through food. How interesting!

Now, this season, Dilesh wants no rain. He does not want rain, especially day-time rain, to upset his routine. He is so much habituated to operating the washing machine and putting up the clothes to dry. Luckily for him, the rain has been erratic, almost non-existent. Scarce rainfall has been generally to his delight. In fact, since the beginning of the rainy season he has been offering special prayers to God. He stands in the balcony, bows before the sun and prays that there be bright sunlight so the clothes can dry on time.

On occasions, I have even tried to counter his worship with my own. (Aren’t you reminded of the Kurukshetra scene where missiles and counter-missiles are fired, not before sufficiently infusing them with propitiatory chants.

I gleefully found on youtube renditions of some of the mantras I had long forgotten and began to chant along. At the end of every stanza I would quickly add my wish 'Let there be rain'. Dilesh stood by me, thoroughly bemused. However, he did not delay adding to the intensity of his bed-time prayers. So the battlelines were drawn. The conch began to boom on either side. It was his abracadabra - special children are not blessed with a clear speech - versus the reserve of years of my training in childhood in Sanskrit.

The result of this battle is for all of us to witness. God obliges those with a pure heart. Vast tracts of Karnataka are still going dry. I fervently wish that the special poojas — both state-sponsored and otherwise — would soon subdue my brother-in-law’s prayers and that the country, especially the southern regions, will soon have a canopy of rain-bearing clouds.