Pebbles

Truth and Dare is a curated monthly column in our Features section. In this experimental series, we present a prompt to writers and invite them to respond with a short piece of fiction or non-fiction. There are no restrictions on genre or form, only the challenge of engaging with the prompt in whatever way it leads them. 

We are curious to see how this prompt evolves as it passes through different writers. Perhaps every writer encounters invisible prompts — those quiet provocations that become the spark for a creative journey.

We look forward to discovering what writers make of this prompt and the surprises they bring back for our readers. In the end, the truth lies in their responses; the prompt is simply the dare.

The prompt for this piece is: Small Comforts

I dreamed of big things when I was a little boy. In trying to reach them, I grew up. When I felt myself to be sufficiently big, I learned that it was in the little things that I could truly be.

I was born in a tiny village near Nagarcoil. From my earliest days, I knew that the village was small. That it wasn’t enough for me. That all great things existed outside my home; outside my village; somewhere beyond everything I knew. That they were calling out to me.

In that tiny village the world came to me as the sky comes down into a prison cell, like silver coins through tiny holes in its roof. Two magazines, in particular, brought the world to my village: “Soviet Land” and “SPAN”. In those days, only these two magazines carried colour prints — photographs of cities and landscapes from the West. My friends and I have travelled many kilometres on bicycle for the pleasure of viewing these copies.

Once,  a photograph of the Grand Canyon  was published on the cover of  “SPAN”. We cycled ten kilometres to a friend’s house, waited there for an hour, and when he finally brought the copy out, we looked at the picture for twenty minutes without so much as touching the glossy copy and returned home. Later, when I watched “Mackenna’s Gold” in Nagarcoil, the visual of the Grand Canyon in the film pulled me in like a dream. How vast! How magnificent! That was the word that kept running through my head then. Magnificence.

Magnificence was an eternal call, like a strange dream. A massive mountain-peak, moving imperceptibly in the dark, arriving at my door. I open the door, and there it is, standing in front of me. Sometimes it would be Karadimalai, Bear’s Hill, a stone’s throw from my house. Sometimes, the Imayamalai - the Himalaya - which was somewhere far away, with its snow-covered peaks and magnificent solitude.  

From as far back as I can remember, I have been running away from home. A journey that began in the final year of my college and lasted over two years. I fancied myself a mendicant and travelled all over India in the guise of one. I stayed with lepers and beggars. I have written about those experiences in my memoir-novel “Purappadu” (Wandering); my novel “The Abyss” also builds on some of those experiences.

 I kept traveling in search of great experiences. I have come face to face with death. Witnessed murders. Survived religious riots. Gone without food for twelve days. Once I was tortured by the police in a lock-up in Andhra Pradesh. For a long time, I thought these intense experiences made me a writer.

 My unyielding desire for magnificent things made me write novels on an epic scale. The rush and elevation I feel inside me when I consider grand archetypes and metaphors is the fountainhead of my writing. It was that force of feeling that brought me all the way to “Venmurasu” (The White Drum). The Mahabharata is the greatest among the great works of Indian creative literature; “Venmurasu” is conceived on an even grander scale.

One day when I was just finishing up “Venmurasu”, suddenly, I had a feeling. I realized I was no longer a young man. My time was coming to an end. This was during the pandemic –- I could die, I thought. Death could be waiting in the wings, impossibly near. This feeling, of impending mortality, gave me a new insight into myself. Magnificent experiences hadn’t made my life; the little ones had.

It was only after this realisation that I turned around and started thinking about my childhood and youth. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, I wrote a short story a day; a hundred and thirty six stories in all. What emerged in those stories were the simple, lustrous moments of life. Almost all the stories were endowed with a smile; they expressed life’s hope, its dream.

For the first time in my life, I was looking back. My youth emerged from it again. My father. My mother. My family. A monkey that had once been our guest and stayed on with us. A dog that accompanied my father wherever he went. The clock that was wound  up by father every morning with the solemnity of a man turning the wheels of the universe. The pocket watch that he would place next to his ear, keenly listening to its inner whirring as if it were his own heart. Everything had become precious.

I realised that even in my large-scale creative works, what I had really discovered were the subtlest, littlest of things. One day, on a Himalayan slope, I saw a single, lone footprint in the snow. There was nothing behind it, nothing in front of it. I looked at it for a very long time. Somebody flying high in the skies must have touched one foot to the ground for an instant and immediately taken off, I thought. Today, all of the Himalaya is that lone footprint to me.

Once, hungry, weary and alone, I was slowly walking through the dusty streets of some town in North India. A door opened; a girl came out, and with a smile, placed two rotis in my hand.  In retrospect, those two rotis have come to mean all of this land to me.

The dream I nursed as a young boy in the village made me a restless, itinerant traveler. In all these years, I have never stayed in one place for more than fifteen days. Today, I travel all around the world. I am writing this essay from a hamlet in Austria’s mountains. But it is through little moments, little things, that I have come to know the world.

I have now stood many times at the rim of the Grand Canyon that I yearned for in my childhood. But among the many hundred faces I saw there, only the littlest drops of life still stay with me. A toddler who, without anybody noticing, removed the pacifier from his mouth, carefully tucked a pebble into it, popped the pacifier back, then looked at me and smiled. Today, he would be twelve years old. 

Suddenly I have become someone who collects little things, like pebbles. I have also become passionate about crystals. When I sat on the Glass Beach at Mendocino, CA, picking out blue, violet and red-coloured bits of sea glass from the beach, I felt a deep sense of meditative calm.

These days, when I go for a walk, I linger on tiny flowers that nobody else pays attention to. I stop, and I look at them  for a while. I follow the footprints of dogs in the mud. I admire the various patterns and waves made by the winds on the sand. Over the past year, I have written over seventy short pieces, each one about such a little thing.

When my guru Nitya Chaitanya Yati went on his daily walks, he brought back pebbles, small feathers, seeds and other little things that had caught his eye on the way, and placed them in small glass jars. If someone visited him, he would make them a present of one of those objects with a smile and a good word. I have noticed his visitors being taken aback by the gift. Many of them came a long way to pay their respects to the guru; they may have expected to hear some profound words in return. They may even have nurtured secret dreams that the guru would present them with some infinitely rare, precious, divine object.

Some of them may have discovered how magnificent the things he gave them were after many years, like I did.