The face of Narayan

The doorbell rang incessantly. I sleepily squinted at the alarm clock. It was 5 am the lazy Sunday morning, in the freezing month of December. “For god’s sake, who the hell is at the door at this ungodly hour?,” I murmured angrily even as I reluctantly ditched my fuzzy, warm quilt. A draught of icy cold waft hit me as I opened the inner wooden panel of the door. “Please help me, call the police, they will kill me,” a husky, broken male voice pierced the pitch darkness outside. The silhouette of a shaggy, middle-aged man appeared across the iron grill gate.

“Don’t open the door,” my husband’s voice reverberated from behind me. He had, by then, sensed that something was not normal and had rushed after me. “Who are you? What are you doing here at this hour?” he charged a volley of queries at the stranger. I dialled the police. “They are after me, are waiting for me downstairs, can I have some water?” his parched voice pleaded. My husband stopped me again from opening the door to give him water. “He may be armed and may mortally harm us,” he reasoned. I froze. The cops came and whisked him away.

“You never know how Narayan (the Lord) would show up,” Bhakti saint, Tulsidas had remarked when asked why he was nice to everyone. What if that was the Lord Himself who had appeared before us? But I was suspicious, burdened by the baggage of memories, past experiences and preconceived notions about people and situations. Gautam Buddha was not when he encountered the highway robber who famously wore a garland of the chopped fingers of his victims, Angulimal. And it transformed the criminal. However, the villagers, his past victims, could not discard the baggage and lynched him to death. Angulimal’s past sins, eventually, caught up with him. There, perhaps lies our folly…our inability to let go of our ego and completely surrender to His will. “We will partake whatever you earn through unscrupulous means but we won’t be party to your sins,” Ratnakar, another robber’s family told him. Jolted out of his abysmal existence by the unsavoury answer, he evolved into Valmiki, the ‘Adikavi’ who scripted the epic, Ramayan.