The Long Night of the Bhikshu

THE EVENING HAD MOVED IN ON him almost unsuspectedly, grey cloud leading to grey drizzle. It was only when the bullfrogs started croaking that he realised it was dark.

- Keki N Daruwalla

They were never really vocal while it was light. The pond was a remnant of what was once a jheel, a sort of watering hole for wild elephants. Those days were long past. The jheel had now shrivelled with age, drying slowly at the edges, each sliver of caked mud being grabbed by frantic peasants as they went about adding to their holdings. The village would soon be arriving at the pond, he thought.

He had always known that a day would come when his window would open out on nothing. Simply nothing. It bothered him. Nothingness was perhaps something you could put into a void. But you couldn’t. The void would not be a void if you could place something in it. And one had to distinguish nothingness from somethingness. If nothing was nothing, you really couldn’t get hold of it and plonk it some place, certainly not in a nonexistent bowl which went by the name “void”. He was clutching at the straws of his logic and wouldn’t let go.

The Bhikshu started mumbling. It didn’t strike him that his speech was a bit slurred and his listener was not attentive. You could not accuse him of lip reading, for the fellow he was speaking to had his back to the Bhikshu. And the Bhikshu was on one of his trips to the past. In his younger days, he was saying, he had wondered about things like whether existence had a hold, however tenuous, on permanence. After all, you lived, you ate, drank, loved, died. All this could not be maya or mithya. He had left all that behind. Now all he wanted was tranquillity, the night around him, the chirr of the cicada and the croak of the bullfrog.