The Re-turn

 In our family, the tradition is that the Ganesh immersion takes place along with the Gauri Visarjan. The convention is that Devi Gauri comes to our home as the daughter of the family. She comes to her parents' place, so to say. She stays at 'her own' place for three days. She is treated the best possible way, and leaves with her son, Lord Ganesh.

After the visarjan, I have always found it difficult to look at the somehow empty 'devhara'. I know it is senti, but I have always kept on looking at the idol as long as I could as it flows away with the current of the river. I know that in a way it is the return of the tiny with the whole, and yet it is a very emotional moment, like realising that the long lost dear  departed now would never return. The only happy feel with the Lord is that he would be there yet again next year.

This 'punragamanay', that is, 'pun: agamnay', the forever return feel, is a little hurtful now that my brother's family insists on the visarjan at home in a bucket. I know that it is comparatively more environment friendly. Yet, somehow for me, it is difficult even to imagine the much beloved idol disintegrating there in a bucket in the balcony. True, I have anyways found it difficult to look for months on end at the partially broken, tattered, destroyed idols lining up the Hussein Sagar where Hyderbad immerses the huge idols. 

Just imagine the much beloved idol as mere mud the next day. Tough! Yet I console myself in two ways. To begin with, I tell myself that in a way, it is a re-turn from the element, of the element to the element. The other way to look at is that the Lord was never really in the idol merely. He was in our mind, our consciousness, in our eternal remembrance of him. In that sense, it is the real re-turn, the forever 'punaragman', the 'pun: agaman', the forever return.

Pratima@So it is with the forever loss of the much beloved. Sure we cannot see, touch, hear them physically. They are, however, always with us, ever present in our best memories.