“In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.”
-Eckhart Tolle
In the course of our lives we come across circumstances that alter our perceptions. Some of them jolt the very foundations of what we know, leading to unexpected realizations. Such instances become memorable for ever.
Her name was Saba Khan. She was my classmate and the prettiest little thing I had seen in the seven years of my existence. We were in the third or fourth standard perhaps, I don’t remember exactly.
What I do remember till date is my fondness for her. She was very pretty but more than her prettiness, it was perhaps the serenity about her that attracted me most. There was something in her eyes. She had lovely brown eyes, like those of a fawn, innocent and full of wonder; the kind that could perhaps inspire poetry. They evoked feelings of happiness, the sort that you get when you see a beautiful wallpaper depicting falling autumn leaves. Like the placid surface of a lake, her calm eyes seemed to hold numerous untold secrets underneath.
I was a shy kid back then. I had my own gang of pranksters with whom I was comfortable. In the class of forty, I did not speak to everyone. I did not speak to her as well, not often anyways. It did not help that she was not the outgoing kind. Quiet and reserved, she was nothing like me. While she carried herself with poise, I was like a little bull in a china shop. She could sustain her spotless uniform without an extra crease throughout the week while I was always the one with ink spots on my shirt or a hole somewhere on my trousers.
That I did not speak to her much, did not prevent me from observing her with admiration all the time. The memory of her pretty little face with the black scarf on her head is still fresh in my mind. Her soft fair cheeks dimpled every time she smiled. In the classroom I would sit just across the aisle and look at her in awe every time she spoke or stood up to answer.
Then came the day it all happened. It was the moral science period and the topic was something new, about different religions and places of worship. At the end of the lesson the teacher gave us an exercise. Each of us was supposed to tell her, what religion we belonged to and what place of worship we visited. One by one the students answered and all the while I waited as usual for the question to reach Saba.
She stood up and said, “I am a Muslim and I go to pray in a mosque.”
I would have kept on looking at her had it not been for the question that jumped the aisle and came straight for me.
“Abhigyan, what about you? Tell us what your religion is and where you go to pray.” The teacher asked me.
I could not have answered the question had it not been for Saba. It was the first time I had heard about something called religion. It was like people were of different kinds. At that moment I had not even realized that I did not know the answer to that question.
I had replied confidently, “Mam, I am a Muslim and I pray in a mosque.” If Saba Khan was Muslim I could not be different.
My friends had giggled and a couple of them had tried to prompt an answer to me. The teacher had inquired, “Are you sure you are a Muslim ? I think you are a Hindu.”
I had stolen a glance at Saba Khan who had been looking at me with a doe eyed expression on her face.
Having found no reason to reconsider my answer, I had emphasized, “Yes Mam, I am a Muslim.”
With a kind smile on her face the teacher had said, “It is all right my child, why don’t you speak to your parents and then let us know tomorrow.”
It was only after I had asked my parents had they explained how people followed different Gods and how they are classified into religions and each religion into sects. It was the first time I learnt that there are differences among people. They are divided into religions and sects and castes and other strange groupings.
I had come to realize that I was Hindu and more importantly, that I was different from Saba Khan. The immensity of this dismal realization had felt heavy. All of a sudden I had become sad about the fact that I was not a Muslim.
