The small boat looked as if it was
drifting in the indolent current of the river. The sound of the splash of water was serene, divine actually. The shrill and sharp squawking of birds, in
search of their morning feed, filled the moist morning air.
The boatman was easily handling the long
pole to navigate the boat to the other bank of the river. He made the strenuous
work look very easy. He was lightly humming under his breath some local folksong.
Unlike the boatman stereotyped by our movies, he was clad in a pair of frayed light
blue jeans, a green-and-white striped tee shirt, and a pair of worn out white canvas
shoes.
However, it was a completely different
story with his face. The week-old stubble, the sunken dark brown eyes, the thin
pale lips, in fact the entire countenance exuded an aura of deep suffering, understanding,
and serenity. There was a kind of radiance emanating from his presence,
radiance associated with untold privation, profound knowledge, and experience
of matters concerning life and living.
Seated on a rafter in the middle of the
boat, I broached the conversation by means of timeworn topics of weather,
rising prices, and politics.
***
On way here, I stopped at the shanty
that goes for a tea stall; the tea was sweet but good, though,” I made a
beginning.
“Yes, Ramu kaka makes good tea, not the fancy one you city guys drink in
restaurants, though. It is sufficient for us down here.” There was an impish
smile on the boatman’s face, no malice.
“In fact I heard a lot about you when I
travelled in this area during last year’s elections to the state assembly. I work
for a news paper.”
The boatman just nodded silently.
“I asked for your whereabouts; nobody
could tell, just that you would be available here with your boat from dawn to
dusk. Nobody knew where you lived, who you are, or what your name was. They
said you just appeared on the scene a few years ago in tatters, physically
injured, mentally shattered, hungry, and thirsty. Care to say something about
it?” I paused and looked at him seriously and curiously.
Continuing to pole-row the boat, he took
a deep breath and spoke.
***
"Where do you want me to start?” He
asked.
“You can begin with your name,” I
replied.
“What did the villagers tell? How did
you address me when you came here?”
“They said they addressed you as ‘boatman’.”
He smiled and said, “So, it is boatman, then.”
“What is your religion? Are you a Hindu,
a Muslim, a Christian, or something else? What is your caste? Please tell me
something about you.”
“I am a human being. Isn’t that enough?
What difference does it make if I was a Hindu, or a Muslim, or a Christian?
When will we evolve from the level of always dumping humans in one slot or the
other?”
“You are very secretive, aren’t you?”
“Not secretive but a private person,
that’s all, and what’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name
would smell as sweet, wouldn’t it?” The impish smile will not go away.
“Okay, have it your way. Go ahead,
please,” I conceded.
“Actually, there isn’t much to tell
about me. I am an ordinary person; spending my life as a boatman here. The
villagers feed me and clothe me. I live in a small abandoned temple couple of
kilometres away. The villagers know that but I requested them not to reveal it
to any outsiders.”
“Why is that?”
“I like my privacy.”
“Explain in detail.”
“Oh, we are turning combative, aren’t
we?” He smiled.
“Sorry, hazards of being a journalist.
Please explain.”
“For a journalist, you are very curious
about a non-entity like me! I am not newsworthy; I cannot help your newspaper
with high TRPs. What is your reason? What have you heard about me? The truth,
please.”
“All right, the truth. I know only that
the villagers think and speak of you very highly. They think that you are
highly educated, knowledgeable, and philosophical with deep understanding of
life and living…”
“Like Mr. Sri Sri Ravishankar?” The boatman interrupted.
“Yes.”
“I am not even a patch on him, but go on.”
“You help the villagers and advise them
in their problems, small and big. However, you don’t seek publicity of any kind
and you are very strict about it. You don’t make any demands on them. You give
away the earnings from the boat to the village chief. In turn, they feed you
and clothe you. You help their children with their studies. You regularly
conduct classes for education of their womenfolk and also help them conduct
their micro-businesses from their homes like making papads, pickles, weaving, etc.; lot of activity for a batman who
wants to be a non-entity, a recluse, an invisible man!”
“Wow, you did unearth lot of information about me. You must be very good at your
job.”
“Come on, boatman don’t divert the
discussion…they that you did some miracles, too.”
“Now, that is a myth if I ever heard of one.”
“So, you say that you did not cure that
little girl from an unknown, untreated disease?”
“She was very sick. Her parents couldn’t
even take her to a hospital. They asked if I could help. I just spoke to the
girl, that’s all.”
“You touched her. You placed your palm on
her chest…and she was up and about.”
The boatman fell silent.
“Her parents, no, the entire village
treats you as God; you are their god-man.”
“Lo and behold, ignorance speaks. I am
an ordinary homo sapien that God
created me, just as He created you and everyone else.”
“Homo
sapien? Shakespeare’s rose? Uncommon expressions for an uneducated
boatman!”
The boatman remained silent.
“Okay, boatman I promise. I won’t record
our conversation. I won’t take any notes even. I won’t publish anything about
our conversation without your permission. Just talk to me. Tell me who and what
you are. I want to understand it all. Please.”
***
The boatman spoke softly and slowly.
“I believe you. Actually, it doesn’t
matter. I have nothing to hide. I am much older than what I look. I was born in
a very poor family and I have no siblings. My father was a farm worker and my
mother a homemaker. We lived in a small hamlet in Telangana. We lost our home
and every material possession in a cyclonic storm in my childhood and never
recovered from that. My father wasted his and our lives by drinking himself to
death. My mother followed him two years later leaving me an orphan.”
“I did odd jobs on the farms in our
village and gave myself primary education in a street school. Later, the kindly
chief of our village sponsored me to higher education in a nearby town and then
to college. Struggle became my byword for achieving anything in my life, even
the simplest of things. I got sponsorship, scholarship, and part-time jobs and
completed my post-graduation; I am a double post-graduate, in English and psychology.
I even taught English in a college in a town near my village.
“I married a colleague of mine, who was
a widow and had one daughter. We were a happy family until tragedy struck a
cruel blow and snatched them from me; they died in a bus accident while
travelling to their village. My whole life was shattered. I could not come to
terms with that catastrophe. I quit my job, sold our small house, and left. I
didn’t have a destination or a purpose. I threw a few clothes in a bag and
boarded a train that took me towards an unknown destination. Since then I was
travelling non-stop in search of truth, meaning of life and death; searched for
answers to why my wife and daughter died. I visited numerous shrines, ashrams of various religions. I read
indiscriminately. I debated and discussed matters that troubled me in every
religion. Having found no answers to my questions, I completely lost faith in
God and religion. I turned a nomad, rescinded all earthly “luxuries”, which are
not available to the poor. I restricted my requirement to the bare minimum of
food and clothing, just for surviving. My nomadic life took me across our
country, through an incredible experience of a wide range of cultures,
languages, and religions, mainly people. That helped me understand the
insignificance of my tragedy in comparison to the tragedies I saw others
suffer. It was a revelation, which turned my thinking on its head. I found
myself changing! I started to look at my life and life, in general, from a
different perspective.
“Around that time, when I was going
through a paradigm transformation in my life, I reached this village. While I
was having tea, I heard villagers talking about the ill health of the child you
mentioned earlier. I asked for details and went to her house. Her parents were
wailing and grief-stricken. I entered the little hut and sat beside the girl. I
don’t know what happened but I felt a surge of energy through every cell of my
body. Nothing but the little girl was visible to me. I didn’t know if she was
already dead; I couldn’t say. The din of some mysterious raw energy, if there
could be one, was reverberating in my ears. I was overcome by extreme emotion
and placed my palm on her emaciated chest. At first, I didn’t hear anything; I
couldn’t hear anything. After a few seconds, I could hear her heartbeat, a
faint and irregular lub dub, lub dub.
A couple of minutes later her heartbeat was normal and regular.”
The boatman paused. I could not assimilate
the profoundness of either the narrated incident or the following silence. It
was nothing short of a miracle. I broke the silence.
“How do you explain it, account for it,
boatman? It is incredible!”
“Isn’t it?” He said simply.
“Please continue,” I beseeched.
“That incident, that experience was
ethereal. It shook the core of my existence, really. Somehow, it made me think,
nay, realise that my nomadic lifestyle had reached its destination and I had
reached my destiny. It dawned on me that the truth, which I was unsuccessfully
searching for all those years, was staring at me. I just had to reach for it.”
“The truth liberated me from myself and
my narrow-minded thinking. My search ended then and there. The parents and the
villagers were ecstatic and begged me to stay there. I agreed. I never looked
back.”
“What do you perceive as the truth?”
“Is there one truth; could there be?
What do you think?”
“How so?”
“What we see as truth is often our
perception of things. A simple thing like a glass half filled with water itself
gives rise to multiple truths, half-full and half-empty. When you see a man and
woman from a distance talking to each other, you immediately assume that they
are boyfriend and girlfriend. You may not say so loudly but never does it occur
to you that they could be brother and sister, for example, or just friends or
colleagues, so much for the truth.
You must be experiencing this phenomenon in your own profession, on a daily
basis.”
Chastised, I asked, “So, what next,
boatman?”
“For me or for you?” He smiled.
“Both.”
“For me, I just told you that I arrived
at my destination; I found my destiny. I help people reach their destination,
the opposite bank.”
“This…this village, this work is your
destiny?” I was surprised.
“Why not? Not everyone could think of
becoming the Prime Minister or a super star or Sri Sri Ravi Shankar; everyone
has one’s own destiny and destination. One must pursue it and find it. For you,
I suggest embark upon your own journey, while you are busy with your profession.”
“How will I know if I have arrived?”
“You will know and when know, it will
dawn on you that you have arrived at your destination, your destiny, your
truth.”
“And then?”
“It is up to you.”
I stared at his smiling countenance.
“We have reached your destination,” he
said.
I thanked him, got into the water, and
walked away towards my own destination, while he stored away the pole, jumped
into the water, and moored the boat to a mooring post.
After walking a short distance, I turned
around to see the boatman.
He was nowhere to be seen.
***
