The Coconut Story

Say something, why don’t you speak to me, look at me

Just speak to me please…

(Lyrics from the song “MoraPiya” from Rajneeti)

Dejection, Desperation, Discomfort...

In this world of illusion and fakeness, where there is a bunch of affairs that seek our attention and devotion, what should you give yourself to and what should you stay away from? Well, the answer lies in your desperation. It’s in your pain -physical or emotional - that you are most fervent and vulnerable. It’s when you’ve been ripped apart that you either completely abandon yourself, stop believing in the positivity of the universe; or you gather courage and strive to rise from your own ashes. It’s in these moments that either an atheist or a believer is born.

It’s when life has bluffed you terribly that you are forced to settle down at your newly discovered awareness that – “No one and nothing comes with a tag: I will not disappoint you!” Then is there something which you can really hold on to forever without getting broken? Is there some ONE thing which you can put above rest everything else, without the fear of being let down or being left out in a lonely void? Ummm! Did someone just conceive the thought of God? But does (S)HE really exist? A question which has intrigued many curious souls. So were these souls ever illuminated?

Illuminated or not, I will continue to live with my belief that there are some phenomena which are and will remain alien to the encompassments of science and reason. If someone tells you that you can break a stone, without letting any visible force even touch it, and still make no sound, will you believe it? Well, provided he is not a magician and instills no tricks into you. Our lazy - or just pathetically busy and lost - mind would not even care to testify the authenticity of such crap. Right? But if one says same thing to a child, he might just go ahead, try this, he may or may not get the desired results though. But the point here is that, at the least he will get curious, and maybe for an instance he will believe it too, and this ‘belief’ does miracles!

During my early teens, my trust in Sai Baba was, at best, fallible. Some devotee of Baba, I happened to come across by sheer luck, shared an unusual experience and even asked me to practice the same. This involved getting a coconut to break into two, in silence, with no intervention from any visible force, but just with pure concentration and devotion for Baba. Unbelievable, right?! That’s what I thought when I heard it. But there was some grace, some aura about the lady narrating this to me which made me not un-believe this for a moment.  And thus began the haunt, of temptation and curiosity, of partial belief, of partial hope to not to be ridiculed even though if it meant self-ridiculousness. I waited for an opportunity when I was alone at home. I got one, and I conducted my experiment. My attempt went on for several minutes, until I felt like a complete failure and hence picked up the (as I thought ‘fruitless’) coconut to put it where it belonged, i.e. the kitchen…

A year later, I had the most severe jaundice. It lingered on to my body for 3 months. I still remember around 150 syringes, and some hundred bottles of glucose which I was injected to. My weight had flaked off to 30 Kgs or less. And my distant relatives started dropping off in the hospital suspecting meeting me for the last time. But then, on my not-so-obvious recovery, the doctor who took through my case, said, “This girl is unusual for her age. In 3 months, I didn’t see a single sign of thorniness on her face” Well, the secret was my strength, my faith, my awareness which banked more upon ‘something else’ than on my sickness. My grandma was daily narrating me stories of Baba in the hospital, which kept me amused and wondering all the time. So while Jaundice was busy playing havoc with my body, my mind was busy moulding into a healthier mechanism, healthier than ever. But this all was back then, when I was a kid, and believed in miracles and a happy world.

And today even a minor tooth problem holds the capability to scare the hell out of me. That’s because my ‘grown up’ deceased mind now wants to control the entire universe around me, and when things go unexpected, non-acceptance creeps in. Somewhere in the journey, I seem to have outgrown the fact that few things are better, if left uncontrolled. Try your best to correct, but there’s always a cap to the extent you can control.

And as I am writing this, I am reminded of the things which I should not have left behind in my journey. My talks with Baba. Even though he has never stopped being with me, it’s me who’s clouded herself in illusions and falsehood, and hence can’t see, hear or feel the obvious.

…Oh! By the way – when I lifted that coconut, only the upper half of it came to my hand! For it was silently broken! Geometrically neatly broken! Into two equal halves. And my fallible faith turned infallible, blind. I wonder if it was this strength which helped me endure the phase of near-fatal disease. As if all Baba wanted for me was to have a life-time proof to help me in years when I would have so-called grown up and started taking life head-on. Will the coconut break for me even today? I don’t know.

But I still want to say this to myself:
Probe your mind, traverse it through the sea of doubts, go experimental, and you might be amazed at your discoveries!

-Raise your hands, sing, dance and surrender yourself into the tunes of The Power : The Sufi style, The Iskcon style; or

-Worship an Idol; or

-Follow someone whom you think is Illuminated; or

-Read; or

-Enchant; or

-Surrender yourself to the elements of nature – fire; or

-Meditate, Go silent! Feel the shape of silence, its texture, and get in love with it; or

-Just go blind – the Meera way!

Get your strings attached. Get conversing whichever way it satisfies you. There’s no wrong way! Remember, one way to live life is to believe that everything is a miracle, and the other way is to believe as if nothing is.