Dakshineswar

T

his week while cleaning the junk accumulated on my laptop, I came across a video I had taken one evening from the Dakshineswar Ghat back in 2010. At the time I had just arrived in the city and was preparing for the upcoming PG Exams. It was a tough time for me with no job, no alternative plan for future and an upcoming exam regarding whose net outcome I was not sure myself!

But then one good evening as I lay tired from reading all day long the boring and tiring medical books for cracking the MD entrance exams, my good friend Nilanjan called me up. As we went through with the conversation I mentioned that I was bored and tired of studying all day and needed a break, and that’s when as a part of his helping me explore the city, he suggested me a visit to the Dakshineswar Temple. The evening was nice and I decided to leave aside my laziness and soon after taking a refreshing shower, I was out waiting for Nilanjan and his wife at the Dumdum railway station with my best buddy Sayak who was staying with me at the time and preparing for the PG exams as well.

Apart from my own laziness which however was not the culprit in this case, on that particular evening Nilanjan arrived 10 mins after the train (Dankuni Local) had already left and smartly put the blame on his wife’s taking a lot of time to get ready which got them behind the schedule. But the explanation was strongly opposed by his good wife (Piyu as we call her) who stressed that the thing was actually the other way around!

Well, whatever be the fact we ultimately missed the train and the next train was not coming any sooner going by the frequency of Dankuni Local on the route. So, instead we traversed the path to the temple on a taxi- that yellow coloured rugged vehicle seen roaming everywhere in Kolkata with equally rugged and mostly rough (but rarely polite) taxi pilots!

Ultimately we reached the temple, and although this was not the 1^st time that I was visiting the temple, but still it made me feel fresh and joyful. Soon after the Devi darshan and Puja we were down on the Ghat wetting our feet in the muddy waters of Ganga. The water was cool and felt nice. With the gentle evening breeze slowly caressing our hair and flowing past touching our bodies with a cooling feel, it felt unspeakably relaxing and nice. I was feeling a new energy inside me as if the Goddess had injected me with new vigor and courage to move on and strive towards my target.

This is the beautiful thing about Dakshineswar—whenever I go there, as soon as I enter the premises I feel a gentle calm slowly percolating into me. Most of my confusions seem to fade into oblivion and the more logical outcomes automatically make themselves evident. It is as if the goddess grants me a divine vision to see though the chaos and confusion. I feel calm inside whenever I visit there.

It was on this evening standing on the lower steps of the Ghat wetting my feet in the waters of the Ganga that I saw a boat travelling over the river currents and out of spontaneity to capture anything that catches my interest I took my mobile and shot the clip. And today as I was cleaning my drive, I stumbled over the video and in a moment I was transported two years back into those troubled times when I was unsure about nearly everything that I was doing…

The Goddess blessed me not just once but every time I visited her temple. The place (Dakshineswar) in itself feels divine, especially the river Ghat on a serene evening with a gentle breeze. Feels as if how good it should be had the time stopped right there!

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Last winter, one fine day as I was in OT attending to my routine duty posting in David Hare Block-OT, I received a call from my brother. The call was unexpected in that, he would never call me up during my duty hours unless it was really that important or urgent. And as the mobile flashed his name, I felt a creep shudder inside me. I picked up the call to be informed that my mother was having abdominal pain and she was being shifted to the hospital. In a moment the world stood still before me. I knew my mom had incisional hernia and there was a risk of it getting strangulated and she was waiting for a planned elective surgery for the hernia repair. It was also evident that the Pain that my brother told me about must the excruciating and severe enough to make my mom allow herself to be taken to the hospital. She had been the strongest pillar in the family entwining whom we had all grown up to be whatever we were…

That one call made me see it as vividly as if the whole thing was being enacted right there in front of my very own eyes. My mother was critical and something was terribly wrong.

As I stood in the corridor of the OT complex brooding over the things, another call flashed and my brother told me that she was being taken to the Operation Theatre.

I didn’t realize that I had spent nearly half an hour brooding over the things when my mom was being shifted from her house to the hospital and from there directly into the OT. I felt bewildered. Unsure what to do, I took leave from my duty and as I walked out of the operation theatre, a place where my mother was now a thousand kilometers away  fighting for her life, my legs felt weak and the stepping unsure.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Unsure as I walked into College Street, an auto going towards the Sealdah railway station stopped near me and uttered, “Sealdah, Sealdah”. I got into the auto. There seemed nothing inside my mind. Everything had gone vacant. I didn’t even realize whence I reached the station. Getting down from the auto I entered the station and walked into the platform and there was the Dankuni Local ready to depart. I got on and soon within a minute or two the train started. Never realized that I needed a ticked to board the train! Being a doctor, the profession gets us conditioned to seeing people in trouble and even dying all the time but then, things seem so messed up when a near one is in trouble or danger!

I think it is the intricate complexity of the human relationships that does to us what nothing else can do—it teaches us to see the unseen which is but always evident.

Here I was doing my duty, explaining to the patient’s party what grave consequences lay ahead in store of their critical/moribund patient with the utmost ease and smoothness, and on the other hand there I was, a helpless patient’s son finding it difficult to come to terms with the thing his mother was passing (rather) fighting though. My mother could have died that day. I didn’t know what lay on the other side of the day when the doctors would come out of the OT. What would they tell about my mother. Oh GOD!

As the thoughts bubbled up in my mind from the fermentation of confusion and fear, the train stopped and I got down and walked straight down the flight of stairs from the platform to the road that led to Dakshinewsar temple. Yes I was at Dakshineswar!

I was surprised myself to find me there and amid all the chaotic thoughts, I entered, bought a Puja dala, removed my footwear at that dala stall and walked straight into the Mandir and asked the Mother just one thing—return me my mother. Please don’t take her to be with you. Make her well.

And I don’t know what happened, but the palpitations that where thumping against my chest until now as I urged the Mother to give me my Mother, slowly over time gently ceased to feel. I breathed in the air wetted by the moisture from the river and went over and sat on the Ghat waiting for further news from my brother. Once or twice I felt like to give him a call, but I knew was must be passing through with him and so abstained myself from doing so.

Actually I was feeling a feeling of calm come down over me. Right at the moment I prayed to the Mother, I felt inside an assurance that everything would be alright. I knew it was the Mother herself…

The twilight had just passed into night when I received a call from my brother, “The doctor said the operation was successful…”