Savitri and Satyavan

The very first time my Appa told me the story of Savitri and Satyavan, I was hooked. How she wanted to marry Satyavan and no one else; how she went all the way to get him back from the clutches of Yama - it was idealistic in every way and the little girl in me believed wholeheartedly in the story. To top it all, there was even a ritual to celebrate her success, a vrat where women prayed for their husbands. I enjoyed the ritual and the 'adais' we typically make on this day, so much so that it is called "Karadaiyan Nombu", the fast of the karadais.

After I got married, I wondered a lot about this ritual and how all the elders around me told me that women have to observe this fast for the long life of their husbands. Those who know me, would agree that I believe a slight twist to anything adds flavour, adds more meaning to all that we choose to do. So I refused to accept their explanation. I started reading Savitri, by Sri Aurobindo. There I met Savitri and Satyavan for who they were : brave and sensitive souls, who were in LOVE with each other.

Love, that's the principal word here. Savitri did not follow Satyavan into the netherworld out of respect or duty, but out of love. She married him fully aware of his mortality and decided to get him from Yama, going where no woman would have dared to go. A fearless woman, who believed in going after what she wanted. I am sure there were may who dissuaded her from trying to win her husband back, but she refused to listen to them. She listened to her heart and it won her everything, including her man.

Aurobindo's Savitri talks of this flame within her, that grows and ultimately engulfs everything around her; Flame, light, wisdom. Those are the words I associate with Savitri. Not pious or pativrata. She was an illumined soul who brought light into her husband's life too. That is true femininity. Not sindhoor or bangles, but the ache within, to seek, to explore, to love.

For the past few years, therefore, my puja on this day includes the lighting of the lamp and reading the Savitri. Each year, I open it at random and I always find something inspiring. Isn't that what prayer is supposed to do? I do not fall at my husband's feet. I do not recite the prayer asking that my husband never leave me. I think of Savitri and the light that guides us all, everyday.
Let my husband leave me, if he likes.
I have the power to bring him back. Savitri teaches  me that.

P.S: Are you curious to know what inspired me from Aurobindo's Savitri this year? Here it goes :

......pure like the breath of an untainted desire
white jasmines haunted the enamoured air
pale mango-blossoms fed the liquid voice
of the love-maddened coil , and the brown bee
muttered in fragrance mid the honey-buds
the sunlight was a great god's golden smile
All Nature was at Beauty's festival.

[......]

Here in this solitude far from the world 
Her part she began in the world's joy and strife. 
Here were disclosed to her the mystic courts, 
The lurking doors of beauty and surprise, 
The wings that murmur in the golden house, 
The temple of sweetness and the fiery aisle. 
A stranger on the sorrowful roads of Time, 
Immortal under the yoke of death and fate, 
A sacrificant of the bliss and pain of the spheres, 
Love in the wilderness met Savitri. 

I met her too, in those pages, in those words. 
And my Life has never been the same. 

Writers I like..

I do not have a favourite genre of writing but there is a certain kind of writing that I simply adore. It is a style where the writer cites other people or things, for example a band of music or the name of a particular shampoo. I stow away these details somewhere in the recesses of my mind and as soon as I get access to the Internet, I look them up. It is an interesting exercise, with one thing leading to another and at the end of it all, you would have woven a wonderful web of thoughts, ideas, things. It is like a collection, only something more abstract. I have a list of writers who do this and I thoroughly cherish their work. 

One who would top this list is Haruki Murakami. Every book  of his is like the index to a huge encyclopedia. You discover books, music, thoughts, systems : anything and everything basically.

In close pursuit would be Pico Iyer. You have to read him to know the way he spins all those tiny details together. Tiny nuggets of information, little capsules of names and events. 

                                         

I also like C.S.Lakshmi (Ambai) for this very reason. Traditions, names of singers, the moods of  raga, the recipe to a 'thuvayal' (a chutney) - she cites them all. Reading then becomes an activity of connection, of identification , of being caught in a flurry of names. It is bliss. Pradeep Sebastien also writes this way, try his book "The Groaning Shelf" for a sample. Somehow, with writing like this, the book does not end with the story, but rather, it lingers on, someplace else, with someone else.  
                                       

And to me, that is the hallmark of a good book. 

How far away it can take me, far away from the story in hand. 

For one lifetime is never enough to know it all, nay, to know even a bit.

"I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Isaac Newton

P.S : As an aside, I had dinner with a handsome guy at Mainland China this evening. And you know what, he talks the way the writers above write.. with one piece of information leading to another...Like Bugs Bunny leading into Karl Marx. 

And you bet I love it! 

Go ahead, indulge your gossipy nature and look at the pics!

So long, until the next post! Good night, doc!