A POND IN THE SAND

Dr. Boya Subramanyam Reddy, a physician who hails from Thondavada, a small village near Tirupati and who had settled down in Mineral wells, a village of around 80 miles from Dallas, USA requested me to translate a book entitled Meditation written by Eknath Eswaran an Indian born spiritual teacher who established the Blue Mountain  Centre of Meditation in California, USA. Then he published it ( Dhyanam) under the banner of Subhashini Prachranalu in 1998.

I had the acquaintance with Dr. Subramanyam Reddy through my father. When my father visited USA on the invitation of TANA conference  held at Chicago in 1995 Dr. Subramanyam Reddy contacted him and invited him to Mineral Wells. He introduced himself as an ardent fan of my father’s stories and my father, in one of the introductions he  wrote to a short story collection, related the interesting way he travelled to Mineral Wells from Chicago by a domestic flight and how Ms. Subhashini, the wife of Dr. Subramanyam Reddy received him in Dallas. Dr. Subramanyam Reddy told him that one of the stories he was very much fond of was Chalichelama(A Pond in the sand). It is a story about a person called AJ Devabandhu whose original name was Anjaneyulu before the conversion. When the daughter of his aunty got married to some other person and he was denied of her hand due to his poverty, he fled to Chennai, converted to Christianity, got educated by the help of the missionaries, went to London, marries a Christian woman and thus flourished well. But he couldn’t escape from the nostalgic memories of his childhood. After many decades he meets the son of his childhood friend on the road accidentally, takes him to his house and makes elaborate enquiries about many people and things of the past. He points out that he has a terrible desire to go to the rivulet of the village, make a pond in the sand and drink the waters of it till his thirst is quenched. The young man who narrates the story relates that the ground water in his village had gone deep and so water wouldn’t ooze in the pond of sand there.

The reasons for Dr. Subramanyam Reddy’s fondness for that story are quite obvious.  Searching for greener pastures, he left his motherland for USA many decades back, settled there and he and his family are now legitimate citizens of it. But he still has his roots deeply fixed in his village.  But the interesting thing is that my father wrote that story in 1967 after visiting Chennai and I accompanied him on that occasion. We went there to attend the obsequies of a relative and it was then that my father took me to the museum, zoo and a movie and we spent lot of time in the Central railway station. I know that he used every one of his trips to any place as a setting of  a new story. It is a common practice of all writers but the greatness of a writer depends on the way that he spins a plausible story on it.

It so happened that I went to Allahabad and saw how the funeral rites of the people were conducted at the Thriveni Sangam, the confluence of three sacred rivers, Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswathi.  The unforgettable experience I had there became the theme for a story entitled Asthithwaaniki Atoo Itoo. It is about two friends who were caught in a storm as  a result of which the atheist of them transforms into a theist and the other vice versa. Dr. Subramanyam Reddy read it and was very happy to find the philosophical overtones in it. While discussing the same thing I told him that there are many great philosophical stories in Telugu literature. He immediately requested me to compile a book of Telugu Philosophical Short Stories.

The psychologists observe that the man is happy during the day time as he can live with his imaginary world and the same man gets frightened during the night as his imaginary world gets punctured and so he has to live with his own self. Why the man should get afraid of himself? What are the questions that he encounters during the night?  Why should he get agitated to think about himself and his life? What exactly is the meaning of life? Man has been tackling these questions ever since the beginning and there are diversified and multitudinous answers to them though all of them once again are questionable. Not only the philosophers but also the writers of all the ages took part in the same discussion. And the same quest for answers is going on now and will go on in the future.  If the final and ultimate answers are revealed and if there would be no need of having further interpretation and inquisition, the life may lose its vitality, mystique and freshness.

As there is a need of reinterpreting and re-enquiring of the life which becomes more complex with the passage of time, many writers and philosophers are emerging ceaselessly. The Vedas and Upanishads had done the same in the ancient India and the efforts of Mahaveera and Buddha can be considered a continuation of the same. All the scriptures of all religions belong to the same category. Man is always been the centre of literature and so literature took up the same responsibility in its own inimitable way since the beginning. There are many questions which the science cannot answer and literature by means of its artistic tools like symbolism, allegory and imagery can answer them.  Literature asserts that questions are permanent, answers belong to heaven, there are many alternative answers to a single questions and an awareness of it makes the man matured. The Telugu Short Story which has celebrated its centenary recently has proved itself as a suitable vehicle for many oriental and western philosophical discourses.  The Telugu writer posed questions about the things on the other side of darkness.  They analyzed the human predicaments, intellectual perceptions, mystical realizations and introspective assays. They can be considered modern Upanishads and can also be called Kathopanishads.

I could gather 29 of such stories which included, Chalam’s O Puvvu Poosindi, Rachakonda Viswanatha sasthry’s Sristilo, Padmaraju’s Gaalivaana, Sathyam Sankaramanchi’s O roju vellipoyindi, R S Sudarsanam’s Madhura Meenaakshi, R Vasundaradevi’s Penjeekati kaavala, Thripura’s Bhagavantham Kosam  and Swami’s Chamkidanda. A collection of stories like this can never be comprehensive but it proves the vitality and vibrancy of Telugu Short Story. It was titled as Thathvika Kathalu and the same Subhashini Prachranalu published it in 2002. It was released in the ATA conference held at Dallas in 2002 and the curious coincidence was that I was invited to attend it as the editor of that book. Then I had the opportunity of going to Mineral Wells as a guest to Dr. Boya Subramanyam Reddy’s house exactly 7 years after my father visited it.

Mineral Wells is a small village and Dr. Boya Subramanyam Reddy’s house is on the cliff of a mountain.  It has a huge backyard from which the serene meadows and green fields of the valley appear clearly.  When we were sitting there Dr. Reddy showed me a group of cattle grazing in the far away fields and said that he would be always waiting to watch them like that as it always reminded him of his village in India. He became an USA citizen but he doesn’t break his umbilical relationship with India. He is fond of the Vedantic books written by Eknath Eswaran. He constructed a school in his village and started an orphanage in Kadapa. Of late he is seriously thinking of bringing out a revised edition of Thathvika Kathalu. Fortunately he is not a Deenabandhu as waters never stopped oozing in the sand of the river Swarnamukhi, near Thondavada.

                                                 ---                MADHURANTHAKAM NARENDRA

            (The writer is a bilingual short story writer, novelist and poet, who writes in Telugu and English)