Yesterday, on that dainty, drizzling equinoctial day, we stood silently, awed by the congealing, silken silence.
Thousands of feet below us, in the vast valleys and rolling, verdant emerald hills, the sun opened occasional oblong patches of gold. Vast swathes of immaculate, puffy mountain mist felt their way through the sleeping, dreaming dells, assuming whimsical shapes and delicate morphological patterns as they drifted. The whole landscape seemed suspended between earth and heaven, between wakefulness and dream.
We stood before a fragile gate, secured by a puny little latch. All around us was a profusion of efflorescence. Beds of gaudy dandelions looked up into the azure heavens, almost like prayers made of colour. Marigolds, roses, bougainvillea and a whole congregation of nameless blooms joined them in their silent liturgy.
A slight, whispering breeze breathed its way through the drenched balsam bushes. Far below, the pruned tea stumps stood sulking in the mist.
And then, like all ruffians who cannot resist a forbidden threshold, we opened the gate and padded in.
Devils rush in where angels fear to tread.
Almost at once, a huge puff of mist devoutly mantled us, enfolding us and drawing us into the universal amalgam of that pregnant silence. There were benches arranged around a rough wooden table, as though waiting for rare words to be shared at some ancient supper—the symbolic supper served two thousand years ago, when bread was broken and silence itself became a language.
We stood there, awed by the profundity of it all, like a pair of wandering pilgrims who had somehow stumbled upon the zenith of Mount Athos.
But this was not Mount Athos.
This was a precarious cliff at Nallathanni, near Kuttikkanam.
Then the door opened.
It did not creak. It did not groan. It did not even yawn. It seemed to understand the meaning of silence.
“The wooden walls are sad, having only us to look at.”
The words of Boris Pasternak floated somewhere in the recesses of my mind.
There he stood: tall, straight, serene, almost austere in his simplicity, unassuming in his ochre, almost tile-red, threadbare homespun attire.
He bowed to us silently, as Indians have bowed to one another for centuries—not merely as a gesture of courtesy, but as an acknowledgement of the elusive spark of divinity with which every human being is endowed.
Perhaps it is that same elusive spark that awakens in us the ancient ache to look upwards, towards the azure mystery of the heavens, and wonder where we came from and where we are going.
With gestures, he let us know that he was observing silence.
Not merely abstaining from speech, but entering into silence.
He seemed to be melting into the universal nothingness, like lumps of salt dissolving in the depths of the Dead Sea, disappearing only to precipitate again, and then dissolve once more.
We were standing before a presence disguised as humility.
It was Rt. Rev. Dr. Joseph Muricken, former Bishop of Palai, a man who had once inhabited the upper reaches of ecclesiastical authority in one of Kerala’s prominent dioceses.
Long ago, he had stepped away from position, power, glory, crowds, commands, hierarchy and the ceaseless clamour that accompanies them. He had walked away from the abundance of the world and chosen instead the austere abundance of silence. There the occasional affable visitors are wild elephants, bears, tigers, and leopards, droppping in to say goodbye.
