Leaning against the door at the edge of the footboard I watched the sky interspersed with silken clouds, and reveled in the leela as they enacted a celestial drama and played the game of divine hide-and-seek. The sun, trying to steal itself away sneaked into embrace of the soft woolly balls of mischievous cotton, and la there for a moment until wind, unable to overcome its jealousy, blew its consort away.
A screenplay was beginning to form in the mind. Taking elements from the Hindi films—fluttering birds, swaying …show more content…
With their plumage spread to entice the female, dancing to seduce her, impregnate her to ensure that the spectacle continues long after they have become one with the earth, nourishing its soils, sustaining life including the whirring electrons of those which don’t live, and, in the process, becoming life once again.
The Cloud Messenger–Pining & Longing
While I am engaged in the nifty details ‘up above in the world so high’ and as far as the distance the horizon lay, the clouds like moody nubile nymphets continued with their childish, childlike zest, teasing the winds and the lights as they tried to entrap them in their rarefied atmosphere.
I find my mind in the AD fourth century. To the times of celebrated Indian bard and a playwright, Kalidasa, the author amongst others of Meghaduta (The Cloud Messenger) in which the Yaksha banished to earth for one year by the Gods pines for his wife. Staying, quite coincidentally, in Central India, in the city of Ujjain, the Yaksha pours out his heart to the clouds and requests one of them to carry his longings to his beloved who is back home, living in the city of Alaka in the distant …show more content…
Unmindful of the city the panorama of the day before bewitched me once again in its charm. Painted blue, donning the colour of the sky, the still water of this mammoth lake had forsaken its ‘I.’
Standing at its centre the grand statue of Avalokiteshwara appeared like a tiny fleck while overhead the clouds, and the sky, the lights and the wind continued their flirtations.
Could they be stratospheric clouds? The mind as it enters the realm of reasoning starts thinking.
From ‘Meghaduta’ to ‘The Next One Hundred Years’—it turns out to be a paradigm change.
“Situated 12 to 13 kilometers above the earth’s surface, the clouds in the stratosphere,” I had read, “are amongst the most beautiful sights of nature.” The relationship between the two begins to blur. “The most luminous parts of these clouds,” an observer had written, “shine like mother-of-pearl. Common only in Antarctic and at that height where ozone is normally thickest, these could do incredible damage.”
The time had come for me to confront the malevolent aspect.
The Cloud Messenger–The Reality