Star Gazing
The summer sky is simple yet pithy and intriguing. During the day, it is an immense azure canopy with the few brave white puffs brushed roughly aside to the fringes. In the evening, it glows gold, amber and pink like an unfinished canvas as weary herons and egrets fly back that extra mile from the last few remaining water-holes. At night, with late moonrises, the glazed quietude of the starlit firmament is disturbed only by occasional lightning streaks as rare summer-storms promise welcome relief on yonder horizon. Amid the busy rustle of numerous trees and the almost imperceptible rumble of distant thunder, stars silently await the April moon's arrival like tribal trappers awaiting their quarry. Thus unfolds the celestial tableau which I have so come to love over the years, complete with the daily transcontinental jets and perchance shooting-stars.One of my first books was a bright and colorful one about the universe - a typical Russian children's book with magnificent illustrations and an intoxicating smell of fresh-print that Dad got me in one of those then. The book opened my eyes to the magic of the night-sky. It introduced me to the world of The Big Dipper, The Orion, The Scorpio and others. It thought me how to spot planets and how a line drawn between the first two stars of the Great Bear led to the Pole Star. I remember picking favorite stars and naming them with a cousin..I used to spend hours and hours lying supine in my terrace with my hands folded behind my head, staring at the stars. Summer then was two months with the clichéd "little to do and all day to do it in". Even if you did device interesting activities, the sapping heat soon left you drained. At night, the heat stuck on to you in palpable molten sheets of sweat and stickiness. The hot air that the fans dutifully spewed offered little respite.Oh, how I valued those hours I had for myself in the terrace! Starlight, unlike the gaudy showiness of the sun and moon, is refined - mysterious and ancient. On a clear night, a billion twinkles seem to whisper primordial secrets into discerning ears. There is a certain aloneness about star-gazing that is fascinating - a thrill in lying in communion with life or lifelessness billions of light-years away even as the hustle and bustle of mundane livelihoods right below recedes to a dull din. Under the stars, there are only two entities - you and the universe. There is nothing that is "yours" - the universe in its might encompasses and embodies everything else in one single unfathomable space-time continuum. You realize how small and immaterial you are in the scheme of things. Yet you feel part of something so immense and expansive that there is a certain pride in being even the transient diminutive speck that you are in inter-galactic shifts. And you lie transfixed as the stars continue their timeless march... Yesterday, I went outside after the rest of the family were long asleep, and lay down to let the astral vision fill my senses... As one half of the sky lay bedecked in stars and the other rumbled ominously with lightning streaks like some wild drum-beat at the altar of pagan deities, , distant traffic and the cackle of conversation from other terraces into the background... With nobody to share the moment with, with no fear pain or worry weighing my mind down, with the irritating glow of city lights wiped off my consciousness,I found a part of me that I thought I had lost forever... And I then remembered the most fascinating fact I'd read in that old Russian book - that we see some stars the way they were years back because starlight takes years to reach the earth. As I began to slip into the depths of sleep, I wondered how the stars today will see a different Atticus- an Atticus from a happier time who believed that one could strip down life's complications at will, shed all the ties and binds of civilizations, stop chasing shadows and just be alone in the starlight...
posted by Madiha Nasir @ 2:59 AM
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