BEING AND NOTHINGNESS

Mumbai is a city I hate as also love. This where I awakened 35 years ago. I have explored the city – it’s structures, it’s pulse, its depravity, its grandeur, it’s discipline,
it’s indifference and above all it’s soul. As Hermann Hesse says in the “The Glass Bead Game” – “ My awakening has a similar kind of intensified reality for me. That is why I have given it this name; at such times I really feel as if I had lain asleep or half asleep for a long time, but am now awake and clear headed and receptive in a way I never am ordinarily.”

It was sometime in the middle of February 1974 that a strange thing happened to me. Strange, because I never did understand at that moment what it was. It would be more accurate to say that something happened within me. It was perhaps the first glimpse of what I will term as my awakening, a partial awakening perhaps.

More than Sartre it was Mumbai that taught me my first lessons on ‘Being and Nothingness’. This was back in 1974 -
“There is a street lamp at the end of this road. Its neon light casts a ghostly glow around. There existed below it, once, an old woman. Now she is no more. She could have been a stone, it would have made no difference. Her disappearance from the spot has in no way affected the working of this world. But it had a curious effect on me. I have passed that way so many times before, without the slightest awareness as to what was it that existed below the neon lamp. Then one day she disappeared. There is nothing there now, only space.

That night I dreamt of the old woman:

Old woman what ails you?
I can’t see your face,
I can’t feel your pain.
You stay crouched,
Bent with age, your face down;
Your limbs don’t seem move:
But I know you too live.
I see yoy in the distance,
I move, but you stay;
I pass, but you still stay.
For a minute I feel you live,
Then I pass.
You remain, a stone.

Though she did not lift her head, I knew it was she who spoke,

“ I do wonder,
What ails him, that passes me so?
I can’t see his face
Nor can I feel his pain,
But I know he is there,
I hear him.
He comes from somewhere,
To somewhere does he go;
For a minute I know he feels ,
For his footsteps falter.
He lives.
Then he is gone, no more.”

Then she disappeared. An empty space stood there staring back at me. An eerie feeling crept into me as I reflected:

Old woman,
You have gone away.
Though a stone you were there yesterday.
I saw from distance,
There was only space.
My footsteps did’nt falter,
As I passed the place,
Where you had lived, lain,
Now Nothingness.

I still remember how as I stood looking at that emptiness below the lamp the full force of nothingness gripped me.