Almanacs OVER A CUP OF EVENING TEA: MY TRYST WITH REVATHI - Star of Mysore |
| OVER A CUP OF EVENING TEA: MY TRYST WITH REVATHI - Star of Mysore Posted: 02 Apr 2010 12:49 AM PDT
OVER A CUP OF EVENING TEA: MY TRYST WITH REVATHI
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By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD Quite unexpectedly, two days ago, I met her after one long year and she literally stepped out of the blue. Strangely, unlike me, over the long years she does not seem to have aged one bit. My love affair with Revathi has been both a very deep and long standing one. And, this fascination seems to be a very enduring one too as it shows no signs of waning as the years go by and as I grow older. It is therefore perhaps true that all love affairs, including our most futile and failed ones, like vintage wine, only become stronger and dearer with the passage of time. The familiar saying about 'time wounding all heels and also healing all wounds' therefore does not seem to be very true in the case of love affairs. Although it is not wrong if I call it my very first serious love affair, my wife who came into my life much later, however says that it is only one of my many infatuations and that is why perhaps she does not mind this transgression of mine if I may call it so. As I have always done over the years of my life, with the coming of the month of March, I invariably begin to pine for Revathi. Although she never fails to meet me year after year, she very often plays truant and fails to keep her tryst with me at the expected time sending my soul into a strange kind of restlessness. And of late this elusive playfulness is becoming rather too frequent for my comfort. Although I first met her very long ago, not by accident but by an act of fate, in the forests of Malnad, perched majestically over the Western Ghats, Revathi is no sylvan lass. Revathi is the name of the first major rain that brings the glad tidings that the south-west monsoon, the annual and unfailing nourisher of life in the Indian sub-continent, is on its way. Incidentally, if you look at it, all the rains of the Indian monsoon bear very romantic feminine names like Revathi, Ashwini, Bharani, Krittika, Swathi, and Anuradha. I have often wondered why it is so. It is perhaps because the sages of the past who painstakingly compiled all the rainfall data that was so vital for the agrarian activities of their time wanted the unlettered peasants to remember and recall this vital information painlessly without the need to look into charts and almanacs. Whatever information, useful or useless, advancing age may erase from a mans mind, I am sure the names of all the pretty damsels he has met will be the last to go! This has been true in the past and is therefore bound to be true for the future too. Eons before the advent of the modern computer our peasants have been using the traditional knowledge handed down by their ancestors, entwined in folklore and mythology and therefore safely protected against corruption and loss, like a modern day TIFF file that we use today to store our most vital data! My paternal grand mother, who like me had lived all her life watching the summer skies and reading the clouds, knew the names and schedules of all the major and minor rains like how a modern day Mumbaikar knows the arrivals and departures of his or her local trains. Although she had never gone to any formal school beyond the lap of her own mother who had taught her the ropes of life and the elements of faith, she used to accurately tell me what to expect from the weather by simply looking up at the skies or by sniffing the air. On a bright and sunny summer day with a crystal clear sky, she would suddenly clear her throat and announce that it was time to gather the coffee crop drying in our yard and transport it to the safety of the store-room, making us all wonder why she was in such a strange haste. But since she was the one who used to call the shots, the workers would simply obey her orders, although with strange looks on their faces and do her bidding. In no time the clear sky would then slowly begin to change face, perhaps to match these looks and in no time start growling, heralding the arrival of the first summer rain! The summer rains about the joy of which I have written in the past, are the ones that slake the thirst of a parched land and bring tears of joy to the weather-beaten and wrinkled faces of the land holders. They are the ones that transform the complexion of their fields from a lifeless brown to a living green. They are the harbingers of hope and happiness and the first major one among them is good old Revathi. She is the one we would always wait for eagerly to bring on the coffee blossom that was the beginning of joy and hope for us every year. That is why she means so much to someone like me who has grown up playing with her. Although she comes every year making me happy, this year she made me happier as she came all the way to meet me here in Mysore a full day before she was expected ! e-mail: kjnmysore@gmail.com Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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