The Lost Desert

Rajasthan, it’s beautiful. Well any place with a couple of trees and a grassland stretching for anything more than a yard or two looks beautiful in monsoon but still there is a thing about deserts and the rains and the way they both blend together in an inexplicable way to make even the most protean of sights breathtakingly gorgeous. And yes I did felt cheated when the ever stretching lush greens met my expectant sights that have waited for almost an eternity to feast on those arid and dry wasteland that have become synonymous with this part of my country. And there wasn’t a stretch left untouched, it was all green. Fields, mountains, flats, lake side and for crying out loud there were trees growing atop a palace. Like someone with his water canon went on and spray painted this country side in an ever variegated ever stretching shade of green. And it looked beautiful, beyond word, so gorgeous that even a philistine would have stopped in his steps to admire, so spell binding that even a heart as broken as mine felt newer buds of hope, love and happiness surfacing through these thousand layers of deceit, betrayal and dereliction. I stood there staring at those  mountains that looked not so formidable under that green onslaught, so unlike their arid or snow capped counterparts, and I wondered as to what ails this human heart, as to what wounds do we carry inside of us, as to how irrevocably are we actually broken inside and when a desert wasteland could so easily transform itself, can’t we give up on the all the hurt inside and accept this suffering to be of our very own making and let our tears glue this world back together. And yes I thought of all this and more in an instant and this brings me from my self-absorbed excursions back to the beautiful Rajasthan.

Once upon a time there was a prince and that prince ordered to be built from the state funds, two of the most exquisite palaces. One with a thousand windows, euphemistically named The Palace of Air, with each window covered with multi hued multi colored glasses, so much so that the filtering sunlight and more importantly the moon light, rendered everything so ephemerally, so colorfully, in the shades of, red, green, blue and orange. And in the second palace was erected a room of thousand mirrors, each cut in so many different shapes, and all put together to form so many shapes and of so many sizes.

Now each generation interprets history in its own way, so what follows next may not have a semblance of truth to it but this is exactly what I would have done had I been the prince and yes, I would make for a lousy monarch for people like are for too busy thinking about things that have nothing to do with this world or the next.

So our prince had two of the most exquisite palaces and what exactly our prince did with them? Well what exactly would you do, if not make lie down with your beloved somewhere along those thousand windows,  in the filtering variegated moon light, turning a shade different from the other, making love in that colorful, ever-changing moonlight. Or would you rather watch your reflection as you lie down underneath a canopy of thousand murals, watch your reflection as it breaks down into a thousand pieces and becomes a part of all those peacocks and elephants that form an almost infinite mural. Imagine waking up each morning to the sight of the majestic Aravalli’s as they perforate through those clouds. Could a sight be more spectacular than this, I wonder.

There was something which I learnt standing at the windows where our apocryphal prince would have once stood and that was the realization that how every trivial experience in our life stretches along into making what we are. If for just a moment we could stop ourselves from labeling whatever is that we are experiencing, then maybe we could someday become a trifle of what we actually are capable of becoming. The best thing about this life is the fact that you are alive, rest all will fall into place once you start living your experiences out.