Experiences

I wandered as lonely as a cloud… The other day. Yesterday. Many moons ago. Everyday. Weightless, fluffy—yet, anchored down by gravity. In my meditation, I use a brilliant visualization technique for grounding—I imagine myself tethered to the earth with light cords. I always end up visualizing myself as floating in space on my chair, bobbing like another Little Prince, linked to a small earth. I wonder whether I see the earth below my feet as small. Barely enough to stand on. Do all of us come with some earth apportioned to us? A little piece of land to put roots into? Or are our connections as imperceptible as light cords? I wander a lot. Aimless and restless, over hills, valleys, forests and city-scapes. Or purposeful and sure footed—getting somewhere, doing something—carrying life, rainbows and messages for banished Yakshas. I meet other clouds and I slide by them, rubbing shoulders sometimes, rumbling and thundering, or quietly, forming hares and dog...

The little neighborhood on the banks of a green river where I spent all my childhood was like a ghost town when I visited it a few years ago. The alleys were much narrower than I had remembered them, closing in, claustrophobic. The houses used to be much bigger in my childhood. Now they all seemed to have shrunk, aged. And I couldn’t find my friends. Not a single one. I sometimes wonder whether I had imagined it all. The big gang, hide-and-seek games in a cocoa grove, radio performances, ramparts of the ancient temple ruins, and lily ponds around school. “School? Oh I hated school—don’t have any pleasant memories,” said one gang member when I met her in Chennai briefly, 10 years ago. The Orkut community on my neighborhood has no familiar faces. Maybe I never existed there. Or maybe I was always a visitor, an amusing outsider. “Gosh, your Malayalam has such a strong Tamil accent! You’ll never get it right!” Being an outsider—oh, I do it well. “Do us a favor—don’t even att...