She is like a river whose stream flows down from the mountain top. It comes singing beautifully as if teaching this craft of harmony to the celestial flying creatures. The moving prism of the stream is bright like the fairy’s cheek; it falls on the rocks down below in the valley and shatters them into pieces.
Unconcerned, the current turns into delightful pearls like stars in the sky. The spectacle of flowing quick silver gets disjointed and dispersed and an apparition of restless drops appears. But this segregation teaches the drops how to meet. Soon the drops rejoin and coalesce into a spring looking like a silver-net.
The fast rolling stream of life has the One Reality as its fountainhead. It falls from exalted eminence and scatters into a multitude of human beings. We keep separating in the lowland of the cosmos to meet again. But we misunderstand the temporary disunity as everlasting and bemoan. Those who die never perish; actually they never disconnect from the near and dear ones.
The flower-seed remains conscious even under the layers of soil. How anxious it is to unfold, evolve and flourish! The ignition of life latent in the grain is determined to exhibit itself and make a mark in life. Similarly in the quietude of the cemetery also it does not decay. It does not lose its fervour despite having thinned into the elements.
Death binds and networks the perplexed human forces that are otherwise capable of subjugating even the high heavens; it renews the taste of life. Behind a dreamful curtain it gives the message of wakefulness. Such resurrection manifests the human selfhood or ego or khudi and it contributes toward the consummation of life process.
Death is a kind of appraisal of the selfhood's achievements as well as telescoping of self-promises. The human being says, what after I am dead, shall I in the end be brought forth alive? Divine response: Bear in mind, God had made her at first when she was nought!
We take the lesson that emancipation from defined coordinates is not the highest state of nirvana. Life is a shell that encapsulates the soul like a drop of spring showers. The shell is graceless should it not transform the drop into a pearl. If the selfhood is self-generating, self-conscious and self-sustaining then even death cannot stop it from living.
Call her Nirbhaya, Damini or Dosheeza – she persevered for the cause of humanity, achieved martyrdom in the path of godliness and has migrated toward The Friend.
(The author is President, Interfaith Coalition for Peace & Zakat Foundation of India. For this write-up he took inspiration from the poetry of Dr Sir Mohammad Iqbal.)
