• Prema Jayakumar

This is the season of the year when days and nights share the hours of the day equally, when the Malayalam astrological chart marks the entry of the Sun into the house of Mesha. It is also the time when the renewal of life is celebrated by the festival of Easter and the renewal of the year by the festival of Vishu. It is this sense of a new beginning that persuaded the poet Vailoppilli to call this month of Mesha, in spite of the searing heat, ‘Velichathin ponmakale… (the daughter of light)’.

Summer is at its peak and it is easy to believe that mankind has gone mad. Sometimes life really seems ‘but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale told by and idiot, full of sound and fury, / signifying nothing’. Life and the world confuse us, because kings turn out to be jesters and jesters turn out to be kings, words change their meanings without our noticing it until we do not know what language is being spoken. Then comes a festival, a celebration, reminding us that the worst of times have an end, lighting up moments on this dark road of life, telling us that there is hope, there is a chance of renewal, of rebirth, of resurrection. After all, we had celebrated this festival last year too, and here we are to celebrate again this year. The world has not ended in the meantime in spite of all the dread we had, in spite of all that heedless human beings had done to bring it to an end.

We now watch the world stage without knowing if what is playing there, whether what we see before our eyes, is tragedy, comedy or the most absurd farce. We sometimes forget the tragedy of tens of thousands of people losing their lives in the darkness, at the whim of people in power, in the spectacles that are being played elsewhere on a better-lit stage. We worry about the rise and fall of stock markets where money is made or lost and tend to forget the more terrible destructions are taking place elsewhere – destruction of cities, communities, lives which can never be regained. We do not remember that when children are killed wantonly it is hope that is being slaughtered, future that is being destroyed. We cannot even say with Yeats as he did in 1916 that ‘a terrible beauty is born’ because those deaths had some meaning, they were for a cause that the dead men understood.

At least one generation that is still alive have lived through various wars, terrible times of death and shortages and sorrow. Even if they have not participated in the world events, they would have read about it, sighed over it. They have told us about it. And yet human beings seem destined to repeat the mistakes of previous generations.

The messier and crazier the world, the more we need the reminders that there is hope, that there is order if we could just get to it. I think this is the biggest gift that time-honoured celebrations give us. When we go through the rituals of those celebrations, when we make the preparations for the sights and tastes of the festivals, we give ourselves over to a continuum that reassures us that life goes on, has gone on in spite of wars, destruction and mayhem. And this gives us hope.

In the yellow flowers and bright lamps and filled vessels of the vishukkani, in the candles and eggs of Easter, in the special food that is prepared to mark the days, in the prayers offered, in the various ways we celebrate the triumph of faith and life over death, we repeat to ourselves that life does get renewed, that death and destruction do end and say confidently in the words of John Donne ‘Death, thou shalt die’.

So, let me wish everyone a very happy Vishu and a wonderful Easter. And end with that heartfelt prayer from the Upanishads, ‘Asato ma sadgamaya, Tamaso ma Jyotirgamaya, Mrityorma amritam gamaya’ (Lead me from untruth to truth, from darkness to light, from death to eternal life). Which after all, is the hope that faith and religion give us.