अधूरी चाहत का कोई चेहरा नहीं होता

अधूरी चाहत का कोई चेहरा नहीं होता, ये कोई रिश्ता निभाया नहीं होता. न इसका कोई बदन होता है न कोई लिबास. न होते हैं पुराने कपड़ों में बोसीदा इसके एहसास. न टूटी चूड़ियों में दबी होती है इसकी खनक, न पाई जा सकती है घर के सामानोअसबाब में लिपटे लम्सों में इसकी रौनक. न होती हैं ज़मीन पे लिखी इसके नक्श-ओ-निशान की रुबाइयां, और न ही बालकनी से सटे सब्ज़ा-ओ-शज़र में होती हैं इसके माज़ी की परछाइयां!

अधूरी चाहत का कोई गवाह नहीं…लोकतक झील के पानी पे तुम्हारी उनींदी उँगलियों से उकेरे गए सोये-जागते ख़्वाबों के हिरन की मानिंद हमारे तुम्हारे प्यारे के हिरन भी वहीं के जंगलों में खो गए हैं. बस, इस खोये प्यार की आँखों की डूबी उम्मीदों की चमक से हमारे तुम्हारे दिल के महल रौशन हैं…बाकी तो सब तारीख़ के खंडहरों की सजाई इमारत.

हमारा अधूरा प्यार ही सही, सलामत रहे…!

@ राज़ नवादवी: मेरी डायरी के पन्ने

भोपाल ०४/०७/२०१४ पूर्वाह्न ११.०७ बजे

लिबास- कपड़ा; बोसीदा: पुराना; लम्स- स्पर्श; रुबाई- कविता की एक शैली; सब्ज़ा-ओ-शज़र- हरियाली और पेड़; माज़ी- अतीत; लोकतक झील- इम्फाल के पास की इक मशहूर झील; मानिंद- तरह; तारीख़- इतिहास

I searched for love all my life: Part II concluding

As luck would have it I got drawn into spirituality too at a very tender age and thus pangs of my unrequited human love found some solace in the faintly understood wisdom of the divine. I read the likes of Maharshi Raman, Bhagwan Rajnish, Dr. Chaturbhuj Sahay, Aurobindo, Swami Sivanand, and many other Indian spiritual classics, Vedanta literature and the theosophical doctrines that were part of my father’s small library at home even when I was only at school. I would meditate or feign meditate and draw some self-acknowledged and half understood satisfaction out of it.  I also once wished to run away to Himalayas and seek God when I was only in class 7 or 8. 

All said and done however, it became more and more clear to me that of the two parallel tendencies running across me and pulling me into two mutually opposed directions- worldly gratification and the divine aspirations- I would need one day to take a conscious side if I wished at all to be at peace with myself. Which side out of the two my quest for love belonged to, I could not however know for sure that time and hence the brook of my life kept running in two separate rivulets.  

It has not been before passing through a long passage of spiritual grace of 17 years from My merciful Master that I realize today that the quest for love, which is so intrinsic to human existence, is only identical with the quest for becoming one with one’s own separated Self, and that no union lesser than the one with God, Master, or one’s own Soul or Spirit can ever satiate this quest. When this realization dawns upon us, the whole creation looks to be dancing in a universal divine love affair enacted through all creatures, big and small.

@Raz Nawadwi: Pages from My Diary

Bhopal 06/08/2014

I searched for love all my life: Part I

“I searched for love all my life; I searched for it in all places, up and down, far and near, and everywhere. I fell in love even at the prospect of the palest beauty of human attraction and the faintest sound of its tenderness. All my childhood, tender age, and adult years I was haunted by a hunt of a love I knew not what it was. All my waking moments and those of dreams were troubled by an insatiable yearning for love which was deeply rooted in the fantasies of the beauty of form, kept alive by the warmth of sprightly  touches, souled with the spirit of the buoyant magic of a lover’s glance, and lived through the whiff of the bodily togetherness.

 But alas, never was I destined to find that ethereal love that I so earnestly sought on earth. I had enamored encounters now and then and had crushes every so often. But none lasted long enough and the joys thereof were proved transient too. I would read love stories of Russian, English, and Hindi writers and imagine myself to be in their plots. I would lose myself into reading something like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and fancy the story to be happening in my life. Such was the agony of the solitude and seclusion of my life as a child and a growing teen and such was its looming shadows on my painful years of existence. 

 My crushes on love took me to try all weird things and cathartics that one does as part of growing up and I even prided in writing pieces of poetry, doing paintings, and composing music of unknown genre- all vicarious elegances of human art and culture that I could do being unaware of the fact though that much as they were secondhand, they were inadequate too in filling the life’s void and vacuity which the spirit within experienced through the bodily prison devoid of any divine connect.”     

@Raz Nawadwi: Pages from My Diary

Bhopal 06/08/2014

Love of a mother in a typically countrified bucolic candy-shop

When I was a junior school child, my mother would oblige me with a five rupee note whenever I so entreated to let me go and eat milk cream crust in a local tuck shop which I was so fond of eating with sugar. I was the youngest of eight children and dearest of my mom. In our place, which was starkly rural and backward, the ethics of the milkmen was not as high as to abstain from adulterating milk with water and selling milk which was sneakily skimmed and underhandedly fat-starved which in turn was unable to render enough cream crust when decocted.  

Going to the local confectionery shop for eating cream was a feast for me for a long time till I grew up and imbibed more fashionable habits. Till date the experience surpasses all my memories of savoring food in life, any dish, any place, any occasion which I may recall. I have never been able to forget the indelible taste of the thickly crusted cream sparkled with sugar grains and served in a china plate with a steel-made spoon.

In fact, when I reflect back I find no other taste as innate to my taste buds as this. It is not about imagining and relishing a goody of a childhood but about getting imbued with the love of a mother permeating in the five rupee note which invariably got passed on to the milk candy I ate in a typically countrified bucolic candy-shop.  

@Raz Nawadwi: Pages from My Diary

Bhopal, India 09.40 pm 29/11/2014