An epiphany

For the first time, I had a flash of understanding of how maya or illusion conceals the real, writes Kamala Balachandran

Divya was on the phone. “Did you hear about it aunty?” she asked. The reference, I knew, was to the untimely death of a common friend. “Series of bad news,” I said.

“You must watch the Mahabharat aunty,” Divya said with sincerity. “Over the last two episodes, Krishna answers Arjuna’s questions on life and death. Krishna compares death and rebirth to the discarding of old clothes and donning a new one. The explanations are so calming.” The conversation left me thinking. I had probably got acquainted with the Bhagavad Gita way back in childhood when my father narrated the stories from the epic. Yet, I have not been able to internalise the lessons or bring in any significant change in my thought process. In the lockdown period, I experienced a spark of that elusive understanding.

The early days of the lockdown were dry and windy. Every morning, when I opened the front door, I was greeted by a liberal sprinkling of fallen leaves, waiting to be swept. Day one, as I went about the job of sweeping, my sleepy eyes spotted the odd one out. It was a flat white bit, no bigger than my little finger, with a slightly padded centre square. Though I had never seen one that small, I identified it as a used Band-Aid. I carefully binned it.

Over the next few days, as I regularly spotted one or two of them, alarm bells started to ring. Could it be that someone was taking a syringe shot and discarding the little swab inside? I recalled, with horror, that some months back a very dirty looking man, who looked mentally ill, was sleeping all day in the shade of the tree outside. Now it occurred to me that he was perhaps coming in every night to take his shot and sleep. I felt fear and revulsion.

Another day, when taking a walk on the terrace, I spotted it again. But how could it have reached the terrace? There was no way anyone could have dropped one on the roof. I bent down to take a fresh look at the thing. With the edges slightly spread, this matured one looked like a bird in flight. At the centre, was the flat seed, on a flight, in search of a germinating spot. I stood transfixed. The well-known theosophical metaphor of seeing the rope as snake came to mind. It was a moment of revelation. For the first time, I had a flash of understanding of how maya or illusion conceals the real.