The Enlightenment

                                        

23^rd February 1976. 2.00 AM at room no. 35, East Hostel, Ravenshaw College, Cuttack. All these details have earned much more eminence than my birth day and are thus ever green in my mind. It was the last day for submission of entries for the college short story competition and the dead line was to expire at 5.00 PM. The college notice board had set my mind ablaze with a crazy desire to compete for the contest. I gave up evening walks and gossip sessions. The steaming aroma of dosa and upma in the college square South Indian Café no more held any attraction. The call of Herman Hess’ ‘Siddharth’ running houseful weeks at the nearby Grand Talkie was turned down. Every day, every evening, I sat alone at the window in my hostel room, eyes quietly grazing the distant skyline, mind upset in frenzied search for some idea. Fifteen days thus passed in sheer torture. Yet nothing came my way.

And then, when I had almost abandoned in dire despair, it came rolling like a dream. At the strike of two on my table clock, as I was gazing in grim expectation at the vast emptiness outside my window, when the twinkling little stars across the moonless sky seemed to whisper some mystic communication intensifying the eerie silence of the cold wintry night, when the entire hostel was hushed in quiet darkness and all my room-mates were fast asleep, dispelling the thickening gloom, the agonising frustration came the ‘enlightening’. It came as my eyes suddenly fell on a roadside fire off the college gate. Braving the whipping chilly wind gushing through the giant canopy of a centenarian banyan tree by the hostel boundary, some dim, dark phantom figures had gathered round the fire. Out of this soaring flame, from the midst of these shadowy figures emerged the long eluding Idea Godot, the soul of my maiden creation.

Under my table lamp the clock was ticking away. Only four hours to day- break. My look went up the front wall. A gallantly galloping Napoleon from the huge oil paint poster seemed to goad me along ‘To Destiny’. And lo, the Idea unfolded itself with all its myriad effects. In a superb slow motion cinematic spell, it blossomed into a beautiful plot where its characters mysteriously appeared on their own and played their parts as in a pre-decided style and sequence. I gazed and gazed and little thought as the scenes of my fancied story screened past me. In a few hours my pen captured all that crossed my mind’s eye—word by word, scene after scene. And about 4.00 PM, just before the deadline for submission of articles expired, I had in my hand a wonderful story of exquisite beauty—Nihsanga Neelima.

The last one hour between 4.00 PM to 5.00 PM saw the real deadliest race of my life. As the English Department had closed for the day, I had no other go but to deliver the article at Prof. Frederick’s residence. Riding a borrowed cycle, squeezing through evening city traffic, I hurtled down to Tulsipur at the other end of the city. At five minutes to five, as I knocked at his door and the forty year old, blue eyed Anglo-Indian Professor, who had just returned from college, greeted me with a broad grin, I forgot for a moment all the trials and tribulations, all those tireless struggles in solitude that had befallen me for the past fortnight. Out of within came a conviction that the best was sure to come. And fifteen days later, to my sheer delight, the college notice board just confirmed that.

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