Kanchipuram

Visiting Kanchipuram was an intensely emotional experience. 

It holds one of my most vulnerable and scariest of experiences, and a visit there reopened it all...... and proved way more cathartic than what I had been prepared for. And to add, on a hot day, we were caught in a sudden cloud burst.....thunder and lightening and pouring rain......and it just seemed to be symbolic of the turmoil within.
                              

                               

                               

                               
These pics are courtesy Google

The incident is from a long long way back, seventeen years back to be precise. We were on a family visit to kanchi.....and while in one of the temples, for a brief while, we lost Diksha. She was three. It was almost an entire half hour before we even discovered that she wasn't with us. It was crazily crowded, and we'd gotten separated in the queues ....and I thought she was with Ravi and he thought she was with me, and in that mess, we found she was with neither. The toughest was to hold panic at bay. Even the recall can turn me cold.

After some frenetic searching.... and when the fear was peaking out, as we'd searched almost everywhere.........we found her near the inner exit of the temple....... standing against a pillar, a good distance from where we had last seen her. And her standing there, pressed against the pillar to not get pushed on by the crowd....it has an intense and (surreal) story. 

I had her in my arms and as we were heading out to the main gate, she turned back over my shoulder and started to speak, in first person....vivid and clear......I turned to look but there was no one there. At first I didn't think much of it, but the conversation continued.... and my ears caught a name. She was talking in first person and she was talking to her thatha (ravi's father) who had been dead for two years. That's when I froze..... goose bumps all over, and I asked her who she was talking to. She pointed out....and continued to talk....and I could also tell it was a dialogue, like ongoing question answer kind, and she was oblivious to the fact that I could see no one. And when she realized that person wasn't coming along with us, she started to cry and didn't want to go....and I started to cry because it was more than I could handle. It was too eerie and real at the same time.

I stopped and put her down, I had to respect her experience. We sat....and then I asked her to describe who she was talking to, and she told me like she was still seeing him. She said his full name, her grandfathers name which she didn't even know (she was just three), and at that point all doubt left, and I knew there was something unreal happening right there. She described him as an old man, white robes, friendly...who had taken her by hand, made her stand against the pillar and told her not to move....and that's why she had just waited there (and that's why we found her).

Even writing about it now is bringing tears to the eye. And the amazing thing was that, while we didn't know which temple this had happened in, when we walked into the temple yesterday (the second one we visited, as we were on the search) Diksha just knew it was the one. She could recall it all instance by instance, like it had just happened, even two girls asking her where her parents were and after a short chat just walking off.....and even recognizing the pillar she had stood by. It was very intense for both of us.

We spent a long time at the temple, found an isolated vantage point.......and then we sat together, in the pouring rain, quiet.....each in our own deep space, yet bonded by an indelible and mysterious experience........ and watched, even as it rained, the sun come out from behind the clouds.