Lights, Colors and Darkness

It’s that time of the year again. The sun is bright yet mellow, the breeze is gentle and cool and the mind is peeling off its myriad layers of consciousness. After all its autumn in the northern hemisphere and mankind is celebrating many of its festivals- fall festival, Diwali and Halloween to name a few. In the western world you spring clean after a long tough winter, in India we autumn clean (pre-Diwali) after a tough hot summer and a wet sludgy monsoon! We look forward to the coolness of winter; the dryness of it kills all the germs of monsoon and for once during the year we look forward to basking in the sun (time to harvest all the vitamin D for free!).

 All cupboards to be emptied, their tops dusted, cobwebs to get rid of, old clothes to be thrown (new ones to be bought!) silver to be polished, glass panes to be cleaned…… the list is never ending! We are all getting ready for Diwali. The good has won over the evil during Dusshera, now is the time to celebrate the coming home of Rama after fourteen years of exile and the triumph of Krishna over Narkaasura. Whatever the reason, it is a time of joy and celebration. It’s a time for new beginnings; it is the time to harvest the fruits of our labour and rest; it is also the time to look back and savour our success and forget our failures.

Baskets of fresh green vegetables, rows of lovely red pomegranates, orange papayas, green apples, purple grapes, dappled custard apples and bristly kiwis… Such a lovely picture! Walking on the pit hole filled cobbled roads of Mumbai, this picture actually rejuvenates your mind. For a moment you forget the struggling rag pickers and the begging children and the vicious circle of problems and solutions that we face each day and the mind wallows lazily in this Utopia of colours and dreams of the tantalizing smell and flavours of these offerings!

I see two young rag pickers hauling a heavy bag filled with plastics laughing and playing with each other as they sludge their way through the overflowing garbage pits. I walk up to them and in my mellow mood I offer them ten rupees each. Instantly the expression of happiness is replaced with wariness – they look at me suspiciously and say “Kya Chahiye?” (What do you want?) Never for a moment have they put their hand forward to take the money. I realize that I was going to commit a crime. I was trying to give them something which they had not earned and I would have made them handicapped forever. Happiness is relative. For a moment I thought I would buy myself some righteous happiness by bribing them and they rightly rejected my gesture. They had never got anything for free and naturally they were suspicious.

I keep telling all the people I know that nothing in this world is free (the ‘buy one get one free’ is a myth meant to addle the brains of most homemakers in a net of greed!) These two rag pickers were not greedy; they wanted to give something to get something in return. In my moment of weakness I thought that I could give them happiness (indirectly giving myself some!) through this method. Well! We grow and learn!

The sweeper has a harassed look on his face as he sweeps the fallen leaves of autumn into piles and carefully uses two cardboard pieces to pick them up and put them in the bin. Lovely leaves- yellow, red, orange and golden – lovely for me; irritating for the sweeper. I wish I could go and explain to him that because the leaves are falling, he has a job of picking them up and he feeds his family using this job. How smug and self-righteous I sound! There have been many moments in my life when I have whined and cried at my state and condition without counting my blessings. How often I have blamed God and others for my frustrations.

I do have a few questions for the world- why do we have to grow old to grow wise? Why do we have to fall before we can walk forward? Why do we have to experience pain to appreciate pleasure? I wish we are born with pre- fed knowledge so that life would be a bed of roses… but then, would it?

The lamp shines the brightest in the darkest of night, hope this Diwali makes all our senses receptive to the brightness of awareness, for at this time of my life I realize that there is no perfect good or ideal bad; no white right or black bad there are only the different shades of colour. Whether they are faded or bright is up to us.