After There's a Carnival Today, Long Night of Storm by Prawin Adhikari is a good book to take a closer look at Sri Indrabahadur Rai's genius for readers who are comfortable reading in the English language. The collection consists of many well-known stories such as Pahar ra Khola, Kheer, Jaar, Ek din ko Samanyata etc. Out of these, the story called the Journey of an Ideal has left a lasting impression on me.
In the Journey of an Ideal, a Father narrates an anecdote from his childhood as he gets his daughter ready for school.
His trail of thoughts meanders through his childhood memories where he pauses to tell us the story of the Jogi or the Pheriwala, the Eastern Himalayan mystic.
*Jogis are significant to the Eastern Himalayan spiritual practices. They are elusive beings who wander into the night, chanting prayers and singing honors to the Lord Gorakhnath, as they blow into a wind instrument that resonates into the night.
Rumors say that this instrument is a dead human's Tibia bone. According to belief, the resounding echo of the Jogi's prayer wards off all evil spirits from the neighborhood.
Like many of us who grew up meekly peeking out of windows at night hoping to catch a glance of the Jogi, only to jump back into our beds at the faintest sound of his instrument, the father too grew up in the fascination of the Pheriwala.
Until one day, at Simana, a border hamlet between India and Nepal, the narrator’s mysterious image of the mighty mystic came crashing down.
There, he discovered that the Jogi is not just one mysterious being, but there are scores of them, and they sleep and breathe and eat just like an ordinary human.
After that moment of discovery, his preconceived notions of life gradually started peeling off and somewhere through the process of it he “grew up”.
Much like in other short stories by Sir IB Rai, in this one too, he uses the narrator's experiences to draw subtle conclusions on the meaning of life or the meaninglessness of it.
As children, we are easily fascinated by life’s new experiences. On traveling through the journey of life, we collect many ideals and ideas about “the perfect life”. We grow up and mould ourselves into these ideas. Soon our decisions start to be based not on instinctive curiosity but rationality and skepticism.
Just like the narrator, many of us have shed our childlike wonders and built our life around many ideologies about what’s right and wrong, what’s real, what’s illusory, and what life should really be like. Today these ideological differences cause chasms among communities and even at the cost of innocent lives. But, shed these ideas and ideologies, and beneath it, all life is just life. Yet so fragile is the nature of the human psyche that the shattering of an idea can have a massive impact on one’s purpose of life itself.
In his lifetime, the Father may achieve no great feat, the purpose of his life may be getting his daughter ready for school. Beyond ideologies and ideas, there exists a foundation of the human psyche and (humanity) which makes every life worth living.
The author concludes with a thought that edges towards nihilism yet calmly reassures “All work is merely working, they never let you live you just the unadulterated …, we were not born into life to spend it kowtowing before ideologies..”
(* The original Nepali story is available in the short story and essay collection called" Kathastha". The story goes by the name " Ewta vicharko yatrapath". The collection engages in discussing the meaning of life through ordinary happenings')
Note: Want to read more about the Pheriwala or Jogi? Here are some links that helped me:
This blog post explains the ethnic identity of the Pheriwalas.
Here is an interesting book about the Nepali Shamanic Path
Note 2: My idea of perfectionism and fear of failure has kept me away from this blog for almost a year. This blog post is a subtle reminder to myself on shedding all preconceived ideas about life and just getting the work done.
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