A few weeks ago, after morning Zazen, the below quote popped up in my InsightTimer meditation app. A famous quote attributed to Rumi, it said “Tie two birds together. They will not be able to fly, even though they now have four wings. ”

Gether, is a dialectical variant of the word gather.

Oxford dictionary says, last recorded usage of that word, “Gether”, dates back to 1500s. Now it is absolutely obsolete. At least as a standalone free bird word. It often tries valiantly to stick its neck out from its , buried alive / incarcerated state, among other words, when we play a game of Scrabble.

I had quite forgotten about it altogether. At least Consciously. But only when i started getting similar insights from everywhere, i realised it got etched in my brain. That is the way ,our minds work. We don’t see the word as it is. Rather we see the world as we are. IT Cortex , a brain part decides what we got to see. That is why u notice all the grey Suzuki Swifts on the road, if you had recently bought a new Suzuki Swifts car . Grey coloured. Again i ended up reading Gibran’s The Prophet. The Nth time…

I had read it first , before i got married. And i used a pale take off from a passage from that book to sweep Thara off the feet, when i went to see her first time in Mysore. “You can have as much freedom as i have in my own life. I can give only what i have. And if you want more freedom than that, you got take it yourself.” When i finished , by that 100 W bright shine and effervescent smile in her eyes, i knew it is a YES. 🙂 . And that was the only time i was a successful salesman. I should hasten to add , at that point i was not aware that , though she was born with a silver spoon and brought up in a well to do business family, her life was like that of a parrot in a gilded cage. Her father, though a loving, generous to a fault, over-caring and well-meaning person, was as conservative as a conservative can be, in body, mind and soul. After our marriage, on our way to Kumarakom, we landed at Kottayam railway station a bit late in the morning. As i was thinking about, where to have breakfast, Thara noticed a salon just across the Kottayam railway station and got cut her hair short then and there, while our cab driver to the Kumarakom resort waited. and Me too waited with an hungry and growling stomach.

That was her way of reclaiming her freedom, her life and herself .

,After that i would have shared the passage on Marriage from that book at least with 50 people as a wedding gift wish. Just a few weeks back, i shared that passage to my Wipro colleague Hema’s Daughter as a wedding gift. I think , i remember the last para of that page as vividly as Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra. It sings like this,

” Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.    For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts . And stand together yet not too near together, For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow. “

But even then,those scattered sprinkler thoughts never penned itself into a blog. Blogs gets written not by ink or pixels, but blood from the wounds of one’s heart. And this got written in my mindscape, as i drove to Bangalore from Ramapura, a small village near.Kollelgal, while my mother narrated her life story for some 4 hours, last Saturday 30 June 2024. Ramapura was the place where she was born and brought up until she got married to my father and moved to Kerala. She chose to return to Ramapura and live there , alone all by herself, after my father had passed away, all of a sudden in 2006.

Again, that was her way of reclaiming her freedom, her life and herself .

Have heard those stories, in bits and pieces , many a times from many people who are dear and near to Amma. By any yardstick, she did have a tough life.She might have carried more crosses than even Jesus Christ.

My late father too had many crosses to carry in his eventful life. May be slightly less in number than that of Amma and Jesus. He grew up quite poor and had to start working at the age of 15 to take care of his siblings. He was honest, very generous and caring to all. And very courageous too. He fought many a battles for the people around him regardless of who is on the other side. Whether it was a local liquor baron or a cabinet minister.

One of my vivid memory about him was when we were staying in a village named Thenkara which was around 6- 7 km away from the small town and high school. There were just 2 -3 private transport buses passing through our village in the morning school time and there were many a students who was commuting to the town school for their education. The buses wont stop for us. And many a times, my father used to stand in the middle of the road , get the bus stopped and ensure all the children are taken care. I remember when once someone asking him, “Sankara, are you not scared ??”. And he was not. He did earn a good name for himself and the crowd which came home when he had passed away was a testimony to the kind of life he led.

But Amma had a different perspective about it now. She was telling me that when some one tries to be too good for others, some people around the dogooder got to sacrifice a lot and suffer. And She suffered in that.

And the clarity with which she conveyed that me, just pierced into my heart.

Though Amma does not read my blogs, she know from my sister about my penchant for being a scribe of life stories that’s come my way. So when i had shared with her that i am writing a blog , she had put her foot down and said clearly and sternly that i am not allowed to write the stories she shared with me.

Again, that was Amma exercising her new found freedom…

I left this blog incomplete, till a conversation i had with a friend last week triggered it again. When i shared my plans of moving to Zendo, he asked me , whether Thara too is joining me. I tried to explain, Thara is not into Zen and she makes her own choices in her life.

23 years later after we “tied the knot”, we are still in love and deeply care for each other. Like two circles (enso ?!) in a Venn diagram, though there are many things in common in our likes and dislikes, we also have many things not so common. We respect that space of each other and strive to ensure that space does not shrink in anyway. Marriage is a clever institution foisted upon the fairer sex by a patriarchal society. And often it ends up a gilded cage for a woman.

Even the word “tying the knot” signifies it. As Rumi had asked, if we tie two birds together, they will not able to fly, even though they have four wings.

I dont know how successful i was on the promise i gave to Thara, “You can have as much freedom as i have in my own life. I can give only what i have. And if you want more freedom than that, you got take it yourself.” As in any other life, we too had our lows and highs, ebbs and flows.

May be she will share and write her side of the story, like my mother did !