விஸ்வரூபம் – சார்வாகன்

Visvarupam by Saarvaagan

Who is he? What is his name?

Ram? Mugrugan? Muniyan?

Maadan? Muthan? Markandan? Mahadevan?

I see him daily.

I see him, whenever I search for the neem stick, on waking up while packing my sleep with sleeping mat. He used to be drinking porridge under the neem tree. On that day also he was doing the same. The mud pot from which he was drinking porridge was black, covered with dirt resembled a deity that is equally black and dirt covered that has not been worshiped. Soft cheeked kids with dried tears with dirt marks and with shrunken eyes were sleeping beside him.

Job.

Has he a job to go for? Is he in search of a job?

Why should he be going for a job, if it does not fetch him a good meal?

Who is he? What is his name?

I have a thousand names, Sahasranaamam. 

I am nameless, Anamadhayam.

I am a person. A common man. A numbered prisoner. A Policeman. A porter. A laborer.

A former.

A carpenter. A mason. A basket weaver. A driver. A worker.

You are I. You become I.

Who are you? What’s your name? Where are you?

I am everywhere. I am omnipresent. There is no place without me.

Are you Narayanan? Do you exist in this pillar?

I am Narayanan in human form. I am in this pillar. I am there in the dried stick in your hand. My tissues, my muscles, my sweat, my blood are intermixed in this pillar. This pillar, the house, the roof, the belongings of you that it bears, all of them are I. They all are my creations. I am in the pillar, I am the pillar. I am everything.

Who are you? What is your name? Where are you? What do you do? Where do you go? I….I….I am everywhere. I do everything. I go everywhere. I go East, West, North and South. Only when I am present anything, anywhere, for anyone will become possible. Without me, no atom would move. I walk. I crawl. I float. I fly. I walk with your legs; I walk with a kid’s toddle. I move forward, backward, up, down. There is no beginning and no ending for my journey.

 Who are you? What can be any gain of you? You are a Kabandhan. Headless. Only with a stomach. No legs. Only with hands. You are no god. You are a demon. You are an intruder. You and I can’t coexist. You are a wriggling worm trying to walk the path of the sun. You are a disease. You are ignorance. You are loathsome. You are sluggish. You are ignorance. You are slumber. You are death.

Lightning strikes. Blinding red light on the sky and around.

It thunders, deafening sound that rips the ear drums.

Is that the sky blasted? Do the universe shattered into dust!

What did you say? You ridiculous! Look at me.

Blinding gigantic manifestation. Million hands. Million legs. Million heads.

Black, red, yellow, blue and many more colors.

Feels like the head blown off.

Sky thunders. Lightning again.

Where am I? Not even there exists dust of ash.

A loud deafening laughter rips off the ears.

I am not. But, the laughing is audible. The omnipresent, gigantic manifestation is visible. I am not. But I am seeing.

A whirlwind throws me off and I am reduced to dust.

Oh swami, you seem to have lost holding the stick!

He was laughing.

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(Tamil version – Thamarai, 1964)
[This happens to be the first work authored by Saarvaagan.
First published work as well]

My Musings:

"VISVAROOPAM’: the metaphysical inquiry about ‘the self’, could have been influenced by the collection of books of his maternal grandfather, who happened to be an ardent devotee of Saiva Sidhantham.

Q: Greetings. Being a renowned doctor (medicine) … and the entry into literary world…. Saarvaagan: It’s a matter of coincidence, my maternal grandfather Sri. Krishna Iyer was engrossingly rejoiced in ‘Saiva Sidhantham’. By then itself there were more than 10,000 books in our home. Hence, reading beyond the textbooks was a natural consequence. Even when I was young I was encouraged to read Tamil rather than Sanskrit…. Having placed it in writing a core idea that was lingering at a corner of my mind for long, I had sent it to ‘Thamarai’ in the year1964. To my surprise, it got published immediately. That was the story ‘VISVAROOPAM’. Other stories and short novels followed regularly.

– Excerpts from the interview by Siddharthan Sundaram, THALAM, Jan – March 2016.