While in Dehradun during the Durga Puja far away from the pomp and grandeur of the festivities in Bengal, I wonder why an experience I had on a Kali Puja night some years ago in the forests of the Dooars of north Bengal is haunting me. I all the more wonder because Kali Puja and Durga Puja are different in celebratory ambience. While Durga Puja means unfettered joy and light and exuberance Kali Puja on the other hand stands for darkness, reflection, looking within, churning within.
At least I feel so. But now, queerly enough, when the people across the country are in a celebratory mood, observing the Namarari or the Durga Puja in devotion-drenched joy, I keep reminiscently reflecting on the darkness I felt or rather enjoyed while at a tiny, sleepy place known as Lataguri, surrounded by Gorumara forest of north Bengal, on the moonless, Amavasya night-the night of Kali Puja.
On that night, nothing seemed to me real, except the darkness-the primordial darkness, the darkness preceding the cosmic creation. Darkness was hanging thick and deep outside and I felt that there was no light left within me strong enough to resist the darkness. Powerless to resist, I decided to embrace it. I felt that darkness was a subject of study and it could not be known by flooding it with light.
The impenetrable gloom reigning all around reminded me of the dark beginning of all created things, a time before the gods awoke. It made me to imagine the State when the Supreme Force-lying immobile in an apparent slumber on the rim of inscrutable silence under impassive, pitch-dark skies- was awaiting the time to churn and stir things out of its creatively dark bosom.
I felt the darkness inside me, around me, above me, engulfing me in a mighty swipe. Everything belonging to the sensory world, so overpoweringly real in light for flesh and blood, seemed lost in the pregnant, serene darkness pervading the horizons from end to end. I mused over whether the darkness was that the Goddess Kali represents? She, the Adi Shakti, is supposed to have conjured up the worlds from her darkness for her delight of creation and she at the same time goads the created into the void of nothingness for her delight of destruction to new-create things.
The darkness reminded me of T S Eliot who deifies darkness as something coming from the divine, asking the soul of man to be still and allow the encroaching darkness to descend in full so that the darkness becomes the transmuting light and the stillness becomes the dance of the divine. What Swami Vivekananda wrote in his poem on the Mother Kali swept into my mind- “The stars are blotted out, the clouds are covering clouds, it is darkness vibrant, sonant. In the roaring, whirling wind are the souls of a million lunatics just loose from the prison-house wrenching trees by the roots.
The sea has joined the fray and swirls up mountain-waves to reach the pitchy sky.
The flash of lurid light reveals on every side a thousand, thousand shades of death begrimed and black, scattering plagues and sorrows, dancing mad with joy. Come, Mother, come! For Terror is Thy name, Death is in Thy breath and every shaking step destroys a world for ever. Thou ‘Time’, the All-Destroyer! Come, O Mother, come! Who dares misery love and hug the form of Death, dance in Destruction’s dance, to him the Mother comes.”
Is this the darkness that we must crave for? Must we wake up to this darkness which is the light to light the beauty within? For the darkness without can drive out the darkness within. Should we allow it to sweep its way into us, in spite of ourselves, despite the gravitational resistance, despite our unquenchable hunger for light to see, enjoy, wallow and fall? Should we allow the darkness to swallow up all that is dear to us, rending the veil asunder that covers our depths to lead us to a new light through the passage-the tunnel through darkness?
And is this the transition that the Goddess Kali presides over, a prescient presence lurking everywhere, enveloping us in darkness, drowning us into darkness, driving us into a kind of eyeless musing at a certain juncture, to awaken us to a new dawn, to a new life that springs up from within the womb of darkness and takes us into an effulgence that never fades?
I do not know why the joyous illumination of Durga Puja longs to merge in the reflective darkness of Kali Puja this time. While a certain part of my mind is still craving for the light of the festivities another one is yearning for the darkness proper to the moonless Amavasya night when Kali Puja is held.
Two goddesses are merging in one, light merging in darkness, joy of living loving to lose itself in the void of a non-existence whence must emerge a new existence, unknown, yet palpable. I must say that it is a strange feeling. But it is real nonetheless.
