Kumbh Mela
I often wondered about those Aghoris who draped the Ganges around themselves at Haridwar. Tied the Godavari in their matted hair. Drank from the Shirpa at Ujjain. Shared their ineligible musings with Prayag. Now, why would I think of them on certain dark nights, on certain busy mornings, on austere afternoons as abundant as time that is not inclusive of this alternate world? I am a woman who mingles freely with Gods and fads. I am a woman who can savour Apple toddy and earthly trappings. I am a woman who drapes, ties, drinks, muses and acquires trappings, amassing - like contiguous lives lived one after the other of all the women who lied their way through seasons. I have often wondered if in some life I was an Aghori when the habitual discontentment of life overwhelms me. I think of trees and birds. I think of an ascetic and the sailor of a commissioned ship. I reason better with things I hold and I covet. Rivers long to overflow into a sea that presumes at the end of the journey it meets the sky. Standing amidst the confluence of roles I play of a wife, mother, daughter - I think of them, standing amidst the Ganga, Jamuna and Sarasvati. And their lust that drives them in hordes leaving behind the intoxication of isolation to dip in the elixir for purity, for auspiciousness, for moksha through rivers and time that turn or turns into elixir. That well guarded secret known to men, of desires and detachment. Aghoris and an Aquarian woman meet. One assumed supreme bliss through dips into the silvery flow. The other has reduced herself into a pitcher, a pond, a river, a sea that can hold a million Aghoris aspiring for salvation. The woman who reasoned triumphs! I have often wondered about those.
