Today is indeed an unusual day. It is the twenty-first day in the twenty-first week of the twenty-first year of the twenty-first century. Rather a marginalia in this new millenium that has already seen so many muddles that we could wail with W.B.Yeats, "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world".
When such, such are the times, some succour seems inevitable. Many numerologial mutations of names and surnames ( the Corona mutants cannot metamorphose that fast!) arise hence surreptitiously. In Aai-Papa's generation, it often used to be the religious practices. At the time of the Ganapati festival, for instace, every durva dal had to be a triune. The Lord loved twenty-one modaks as the offering. The bilwa dal reflected the trinity of satya-shiva-sunder. Why, Bramha Deva and Dattatreya had three heads. Most all gods had four hands. Nothing seemed amiss in such representations.
Personally I feel it was a celebration of abundance. Surely it was not merely rigid ritualism. Life was more relaxed then. People were closer to Mother Nature. The intoxicating rush that life, despite Covid, today is was yet to invade personal spheres. Hence the festive feel of fecundity, I suppose.
Number, number, was the name of the game, to tangentially quote the famous James Bond one-liner. No wonder, for Aai-Papa, merely just the two of them was never company, we three were the core of their togetherness. Often they sacrificed their inseparableness for our sake. Why, not just us, even the larger family was never a crowd for them. They had a largesse of heart so rare, and lost, absent in today's wor(l)d of `I, me, my, mine'. They found, and revelled in, the magicalness of the many. Let me hence conclude this vignette today with
ek dunni do, do dunni char
choti, choti baton me bat gaya sansar
nahi bata tha, nahi batega
Aai- Papa ka pyar!
Pratima@strength in numbers
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