Roja: The Sudden Festival

 Life takes its own accidental turns without even caring to let us know. We are merely the audience in the theatre. The actors and actresses, director and producer, background musicians- all are abstract senses that lead us to our destiny- to the Roja. In my case, the honeybee, reading whom I suddenly found myself in a divine garden that day, was a Tamil girl. 

How, when, and where I met her for the first time are all too earthly matters to talk about. Let us just say that when I met her, I had a lost but free soul; I had the soul of a discoverer. The hitchhiker did not realize when, with the irony of time, he came across what he was searching for all these days. He just felt that this stone was something that may be interesting in terms of its own properties, however unknown it maybe to the outer world. So he picked that stone inquisitively and kept it in his pocket. 

When he returned to his home after a long adventure, unloaded his backpack, and stretched his limbs on his very own bed, something tingled into his pocket. It is that special stone. With sleepy and cozy eyes, he looked deep into its texture. His expertise in geography told him that this stone is from a place very near to the source of a river, up above the hills,  into the snow. The boy was immediately teleported to another world where he could only see white snow spreading a sense of peace and maturity in nature. However, the temperature was warm and soothing. On the snow grow tiny wildflowers, and there is divine music accompanied by a harp coming from behind the clouds. Approaching higher hills in search of the musician, the boy gradually started to make sense of the lyrics of the song- "Ankhon mein tu hain, asuo mein tu hain, aankhein bandh kar lo, to mann mein bhi tu hain, khwaabon mein tu, saanson mein tu, Roja!" 

Now, the discoverer is traveling into the unknowns, even when he is at his own home, sleeping in peace. He is constantly exploring a world above this one we see all around us. He plans to go to every corner of this new world, touch every bit of it, know every flare of it, hear every sound of it, and smell all the odors it contains. He has headed already all alone.