by Chandramohan Nair
Chandramohan Nair recollects his brief revelatory conversation with his father over evening tea.
On a still grey afternoon,
I asked my father,
as he sat pensively
sipping his dark-brown tea,
‘What have you made of life, Acchan?’
He looked surprised, perhaps
perplexed why his son,
long past his callow youth,
should vex over such weighty matters.
There was a moment’s silence
before he said,
with his kindly gaze fixed on me,
‘From the soil you come
to the soil you go back,
life is whatever you choose to make of it
during the time in-between.’
It did appear
on the face of it
a somewhat prosaic utterance,
and not the elaboration
dotted with pearls of wisdom
that one might have expected
a long life,
full of simple joys
and great tribulations,
to yield.
Yet to me
it was a moment of epiphany,
that ended years of fruitless wait
for a guru, text or scripture
to reveal
some grand design,
some blinding revelation
that might yet uncover
the mystery of life.
I wonder why I waited so long
to ask him the question,
but maybe, it was my very wait,
watching myths flounder
and seeing lives
being tossed around
in the capricious
waters of life,
that helped me
grasp the insight in
my father’s words,
on that still grey afternoon
in the evening of his life.
Chandramohan Nair lives in Kochi and has taken up writing after a career in the banking and technology sectors.
