The Prayer of a Broken Drum

Forgive me, Lord, this broken drum speaks
In a unworthy voice -- now true, now untrue.
Sift truth from the lies if truth there is,
Else spill me in the dust.

My quest is the quest of a one-eyed man
Whose vision oft deceives him;
He depends on his poor eye not because he trusts it,
But because others who would lead and show him the way
Did not earn his trust.

Dimly-remembered voices from a past
So distant that it is doubtful
Whether it existed at all
Echo in my skull
Half-voices, half-noises...
Disturbances in a cave of unknown depth.

With the tips of my mind I seek out the cracks
Between wakefulness and sleep
Where I hear these voices loudest,
And glimpse faces that I recognize –
Faces not of those living
Nor of the dead I know.
Fleetingly with forceful gestures they speak.
Seeking to grasp their words, I awaken
Only to find my awakening empty
Bereft of the meaning of what I saw and heard.

Something I knew and trusted was lost
And so I grope at the cracks in the walls of my life, furtively
Hoping by happy chance to find it.
But my groping is subdued by the need to preserve
That civilized veneer that keeps my life from coming unwound
And keeps me from becoming entirely mad
Or – who knows –
Entirely sane.

If my prayer were true, Lord, methinks I could force your hand.
I struggle to remember a forgotten prayer
That would make two halves of me clap whole again.

Remember me, my Lord. Look at me:

I am the monk who was sent out
And did not return.

I am the doubting monk
Who questioned everything and took nothing on faith.

I am the one who cried that the monastery had nothing of value
That the rest of the world did not have.

I am the monk who wanted the love of woman and child
And the care of a parent, and the worries of a man in the world.

I am the monk who lusted,
The monk who dishonored the sacred cloth
Who blasphemed and asked with arrogance
To be cast out… and yet was not.

Alone, unloved, despised was I and
The Truth that I clung to
Was a lonely Truth
That seemed like blasphemy.

They loved the Truth, they said.
Well, the Truth they loved was
Not my Truth
And I was sworn to embrace and cleave to my Truth, not theirs.
Forgive me, Lord, my arrogance
And if I am untrue, spill me.

Pitambardas… Gokulnandandas…
Names that I awoke with one morning long, long ago,
Knowing that they belonged to me...
Why did I ask then to be addressed with these names?

And why does something rise from within,
Seeking to wrap a cloth over my shoulders
Seeking to seduce me to become… a monk?
Is that part of me calling? Or is there something else?

No, surely the way of the bhikshu is not my path.
My lust, passion, temper, vehemence, love…
They forbid monkhood.
No, I cannot be whole if I make myself half-man again.
And yet…

No, my Lord, but maybe there is something that I swore
Something I forgot in the midst of the varied seasons of life
Something without which, no matter how good it all gets
All of it is of doubtful worth.

Desire & Fulfillment

My name is Desire.
Come fulfill me.
Seek my nooks and crevices, my many nuances.
Fill me with sensitive flesh and intuitive spirit.

Like the sun you seek to give?
Like the needy earth I shall absorb
Your every ray of light and warmth.

Like the breeze you seek to blow?
I shall gratefully inhale your every fragrance.

Like rain you seek to fall?
I shall lie below, arms outspread,
Face upturned, mouth open
And soak you with my thirsty flesh and spirit.

Come flow as the blood in my veins.
Come extinguish the fire that is I
For my name is Desire.

My name is Fulfillment.
Come desire me.
Seek my fingers and tongue,
And so many nuances of flesh and spirit
That wish to reach you within,
Satisfy your longing body, your craving soul.

I am your sun.
Allow me to gently warm and illumine you.

I am your forest breeze,
Bringing distant memories of the dreams you forgot to dream.
Inhale deep, know me
And you shall find yourself within.

I am the stormy lashing rain.
Do not shelter from my force.
Receive me gladly on your face, your body and soul.
Do not turn from me in fear and aversion.
Take all that I have to give.

Come absorb me.
Let me remain only as
The wetness of your flesh
The blood in your veins.
Let me become your every breath,
Every pleasure every pain.
Let me become you.

Shrink not from me, from your deeper self.
With a knife that is
Beyond kindness or cruelty, right or wrong,
Your bonds I shall sever,
Set you free to fly.

Look into my eyes,
Gaze deep, deeper
Until you see yourself within.
Enter and meet yourself,
Embrace yourself.
In a blaze of light,
Engulf and extinguish me
For my name is Fulfillment.

I call I endlessly seek
And so do you
But, ah… we know the truth:
Two faces of the one spinning coin called Existence,
We pursue each other but can never meet
For our names are Desire and Fulfillment!

Nigel, the three-legged cat

This is Nigel, the three-legged cat. He died yesterday, after being in and out of animal hospital for two months. The day before he died, I took this photo with my son Gattu in our compound.

To me, Nigel is a question-mark about the way I view life. Let me tell you why... but before that, I must explain a bit about this kitten who may have been about five months old.

"Leave him to die"...

Two months ago while playing basketball, Gattu and I found Nigel in the bushes at 11 pm. As we stroked him, we realized that he was horribly injured -- his paw hanging in bloody shreds. The stench of gangrene pervaded the air.

We must have caused the little fellow a lot of pain by carrying him to a nearby bench to examine his paw under a light, but he was amazingly cooperative and trusting.

We gave him some milk in a saucer and he eagerly lapped it up. My daughter Bloo and I thought it wasn't worth trying to save him because a three-legged cat wouldn't have much to live for. Better leave him alone; he would die before morning, we reasoned.

And so we put him back in the moist rain-washed bushes where we had found him.

Kittens die all the time, I explained to Gattu. Each female cat gives birth to about 10 kittens per year, and nine of them die of disease, injury or starvation before they reach adulthood; otherwise, the cat population would skyrocket. So this kitten's death is in the natural order of things, I reasoned.

But Gattu was of another opinion. Shouldn't we at least take him to a vet? No use, I said. But he gently persisted until I gave in. "Alright, I'll take him to the vet in the morning if he lives through the night. Now leave him," I said.

Gattu wasn't satisfied. "Maybe he will die... but shouldn't we at least make him comfortable? Why not take him home and keep him in the balcony for the night?"

Fair enough, I thought. And so I made a soft bed from a discarded bedsheet, and took the cat home on it, oozing paw, stench and all.

The next morning, I drove the kitten to a private vet in a plastic basket lined with newspapers, which Gattu carried on his lap. On the way, I explained that the vet may 'put him to sleep' with a death injection.

Hospitalizing him...

Well, it turned out that this vet was reluctant to even touch the cat for love or for money. He suggested that we should take him to the municipal veterinary hospital at Malad New Link Road. They specialized in amputations and could give much-needed post-operative care, he pointed out.

And so, after sending Gattu to school, my Mom and I admitted the cat to the municipal hospital which is run by a trust called Ahimsa Foundation. The doctor deftly cut away the rotting bits of flesh and bone, flushed out the maggots, bandaged the stump and injected a large syringe of vitamins, antibiotics and saline water into his thigh.

Then the kitten was put in a little cage in a hall that held about 50 dogs (and a few cats). How the hall rang with their collective barking and howling!

My kids and I visited the cat every weekend for three weeks. We also became friendly with two three-legged cats, a one-eyed cat, a blind dog, and the hospital staff, and we watched a number of hopeless, maggoty cases as they were brought into their emergency ward by good samaritans.

While we were sitting with the kitten in an outdoor enclosure on one such visit, Bloo and Gattu christened him Nigel.

Nearly a month later, there was still a small wound at the end of his stump, and that wasn't going to heal in a hurry. As advised by the doctors, we decided to take Nigel home and release him in the compound. After all, being a wire cage in a room full of a bunch of barking and howling dogs wasn't a good life for a cat.

Our compound seemed fairly safe. The stray dogs in the neighbourhood -- all on cuddling-licking-feeding terms with us -- left Nigel alone after sniffing at him, and he was now moving quickly enough on his three legs to avoid being run over by the vehicles that came in now and then.

Afterwards, for two weeks, things were fine. Nigel got plenty of hugs and cuddles three times a day. Besides milk, Nigel was kept fed on fish and boneless chicken which Bloo or I got despite our being vegetarians.

Hospitalizing him again...

And then one morning, on my way to a meeting, I noticed that the stump was red and swollen like a tomato. I phoned my Dad and Mom to please take Nigel to the hospital.

The vet told Dad that the stump could never completely heal unless the bone was amputated and the skin was stitched over it. But amputation was ruled out for Nigel; he was not strong enough to withstand this amputation, and would die on the operation table, the doctor opined.

And so Nigel spent another 10 days in hospital. On our second weekly visit, last monday, we took him home again. This time, on the vet's advice, we clean the stump everyday with Savlon and applied Nebasulf powder.

Sudden death...

The day before yesterday, I slept fitfully in the morning. I awoke gasping for air several times before drifting off to sleep again. I didn't have a cold or anything, but no matter what position I slept in, I kept choking on my tonsils.

After I got up, I awakened Gattu and told him to go give Nigel some milk. He went down but came back wailing, "Dost, come quick! Nigel is DEAD!"

We examined the limp body lying on soft green leaves. Seeing a half-inch tear in the skin near his hip, I wondered if a stray dog had attacked him, but as the tear was bloodless, I doubted this theory. Maybe the tear had happened somehow after he died. There were no other signs of violence -- no ragged fur, teeth-marks etc.

Nigel's eyes were still moist and clear, not glazed or milky; his body had just begun to stiffen up. So he may have died in the last hour or so (while I was struggling in my sleep with unexplainable sensations of suffocation -- was there some sort of astral connection? I wonder.)

We buried Nigel in a shallow grave. Gattu hugged me and wept, and then tearfully drank up the half-glass of milk that he had taken for Nigel that morning. He drank it to give peace to Nigel's soul, he said.

A whole bunch of question-marks and maybes...

As we often do after the death of a pet, Gattu and I had a discussion. "Maybe you were right, dost. Maybe we should have let him die that night," thought Gattu aloud.

I disagreed. "Thanks to your kindness, Nigel lived two months more than he would have otherwise," I said. "Maybe it wasn't a very happy life, but he did enjoy your love and care. For a stray cat with a life expectancy of about three years, two months is like several years of a human lifetime; that's not bad at all!"

But I myself wonder whether it would have been kinder to leave Nigel to die, or indeed, to have killed him myself. (I'm no stranger to euthenasia; I once throttled a terminally-ill pet rat with my hands, and coldly watched the eyes bulge out of its head before it ceased to struggle.)

On the other hand, as the economist Keynes remarked, 'In the long run, we are all dead.' Maybe the best we can do as friends of creatures is to help them see another sunrise, and draw a few more breaths of fresh air on this good earth.

If we choose to let animals live only when they are cute, cuddly and healthy, maybe we are nothing more than fair-weather friends. For all my stated love of animals, I may have decayed into a cynical fair-weather friend over the years. Through his gentle persuasiveness, my son helped me to become more tender-hearted and less cynical.

Yes, we went out of our way for what seems to have been a lost cause. But I am beginning to think that maybe God lives in all the lost causes that we avoid.

Maybe Nigel was what Gandhiji termed as Daridra-Narayan. Maybe Nigel helped me rediscover a kind of love that I had forgotten or never knew: love that doesn't even expect the survival of the beloved, love that bows in humility to ugliness, disease and death.

Gattu wants to visit the animal hospital again tomorrow evening, to adopt another creature to care for in our compound -- maybe a black one-eyed cat that had befriended us. He wants us to continue to serve animals, not because they are cute and cuddly, but simply because they are fellow beings.