CORONA MONOLOGUE (5) -By N P Samal

THE SOUL OF SILENCE 

Village is Village. Town is town. None can live in the other. Each lives in its own habitat. Each is being inhabited by its own 'habitants'. The rural habitation of villages and the urban habitation of towns are strikingly different from each other. Each is featured with its own characteristics. While village is purely village, town is purely town. But in this all-pervasive gloom and doom of Corona, there is no village in village, no town in town. The soul of each is dead under the viral onslaught. Lock-down, curfew, social distancing, self-exile, quarantine and isolation have taken a heavy toll on the life and living of each habitat. There is silence. There is solitude. There is abnegation. There is alienation. There is no daintiness of the pastoral graphics of the country life. There is no alacrity of the hostile hustle-bustles of the city life. All the respective activities are under suspended animation. All are hibernating. You are hibernating. In your hibernation, you hear no noise of conflicts, quarrels, abuses, slangs, taboo words, curses...No brawls. No rants. No screams...You are free from painful itchings. Your mind is free from evil thoughts. You do not hear the shouts of your rebellious self with complaints. No threat flaps its violent wings at your ears. No unseen spirit dreads you with eerie laughter... There is complete calm. This calmness teaches you why silence is the soul of spirituality. Now you realize how this spiritual silence turned mundane Ratnakar into heavenly Valmik.

In this Corona-imposed solitude, you find nothing exists in you except the soul of silence. No other soul. There is no soul of a simple villager or soul of a critical urbanite. None feels oneself superior or inferior. None feels oneself a senior or a subordinate. None feels oneself a master or servant... From villages to towns, all the confounded souls have melted into the soul of oneness or nothingness. Here is a new earth - the 'long-conceived' egalitarian earth - in illusion or in vision, however. You find your mind is not crowded in by greeds, worries, anger, hatred, biasness, selfishness, malice... You find the world is not broken into fragments of classes, castes, colors, creeds, strata... There is no nearness or farness. There is no familiarity or strangeness. The world has turned into an integrated whole. You find yourself in this whole of macrocosm, and in you the whole. In an instant, you are traveling the whole universe, then coming back to you. In your introspection, there are pictures and colors of the sky, the sun with radiance, the moon with sereneness, stars with adornments, clouds with levitation, and the earth with mountains, woods, rivers, waterfals, seas, and oceans...You visualize the Creation and its whole activities like Sri Krishna's Viswarup in Hinduism. When you draw a contrast, you realize there are cosmic activities; there is silence. There are no earthly activities; there is muffled resonance of doubts, uncertainty,  faithlessness and fear. And surprisingly, dogs do not bark. Owls do not hoot. Cattle do not bellow. Plants do not chirp. All fauna and flora are nestling in silence... Yet there is the soul - the soul of silence. Can you listen? But the soul speaks loud : There are no animals and birds without humans, and there are no humans without animals and birds.

...And, silenty, the sun rises and sets. Silently, stars come and go. Silently, rivers flow, winds blow, clouds drift, snows fall, and plants bear fruit and flowers with fragrance...

-- N. P. SAMAL, POET, AUTHOR, ACADEMIC