By Jasmine Singh

Every journey has a purpose, which gives a perspective to life. Also, the journey that we embark never ends, even after we are gone from the face of earth. The soul remains, and takes on a yet another journey. Writer Kamla Kapur (born Kamaljit Kaur Kapur) is also on a pilgrimage to discover the deeper meaning of life. She tries to get there with Pilgrimage To Paradise, Sufi Tales from Rumi, released at a function organised by Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi on Saturday.

On a spiritual journey of submission, surrendering herself, falling in love with ‘Rumi’ was natural for Kamla. “I heard Rumi’s name while I was growing up,” says the winner of two national awards in 1977. “The moment came, when I moved into my husband, Payson Steven’s house shortly before our marriage. There, I saw three volumes of the Mathnawi in his library.

I was hooked on to from the first line I read. And so I began another journey, ‘the way’ as the Sufis call.” Adds the writer, “Rumi was a total human being who expressed humaneness through love, pain and submission. We must understand that each one of us are the central characters of our journey, and there is more to what meets the eye.”

In Pilgrimage to Paradise, Kamla reworks Rumi’s writings into 30 tales of wit, wisdom and faith. “I can’t write without making the story mine. Writing is an experience of an incident that rings a bell and brings in that ‘aha’ moment, wherein you want readers to experience what you have,” puts in this author of Ganesha Goes To Lunch. “Indian myths have a deeper spiritual meaning,” she smiles, “and I don’t want anyone to follow them without challenging and experiencing them on their own. This helps to discover truth for one’s own self as well. In the end, I feel experience is more important than any philosophy or religion.”

Back to the fountainhead of existence, ‘love’. “Believes Kamla, who divides her time living in India and California where she is on the faculty of the Grossmont College in San Diego, “Sufism has a big audience in India as it sends out the universal message of love that resonates in all human beings irrespective of caste, colour and creed. Besides, Sufi music has also helped in the popularity of Sufism.”

No wonder, you have youngsters picking Brian Weiss, Paulo Coelho, Richard Bach from the shelves. ” Fame, money, name, family, career, everything is important to us, but we also need to find out the deeper meaning connected to our soul. This meaning connects to us to different souls in the universe.”

jasmine@tribunemail.com

Appeared on Tribune

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OCT 5 ‘09

It’s still October 3, 2009, actually, but I have gotten ahead of myself, having written three blog entries while flying from India to here, and I have a hunger, if not a desperation, to connect with the Man in the Black Hat to whom I am going to add three more people, in my mind, at least, to come up with an audience of four: Neelam, Judy Bernstein, Jori Owens, and of course, the Man in the Black Hat, who I am going to name, Mabha. For now. The reason why he will stay as my primary audience is because he is always there, and he will stay throughout, till my last blog, no, Blag. Remember, it is the word I have given for my blabs here. I can always count on him, and he is ever present and ready to listen. Such, my dears, is the power of the Imagination to solve and resolve our life, and not only that, but sweeten it.

And I am in need of sweetening. Desperately. My landings in the West (I spend six months in Del Mar, California, and six in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, in the Kullu Valley, land of the gods, India), are always very rough. I will describe in detail later (or perhaps never; my urge to communicate here is such that I have little patience for details, and often even the rules of grammar. The devil is in them, as they say, perhaps because they require so much labor), but in brief: jet lag; being wrenched away from all my connections in India, from a jostling, bustling life with dogs and domestic help, mother, siblings (often frustrating and chafing), and friends, specially two very new and sweet ones, Muzaffar Ali (check him out on the net) and Mike Pandey (check him out in the latest Time Magazine, of Oct 3, I think, the issue on the environment); a sense of isolation and exile in the USA – believe me, Payson and I had a box full of snail mail waiting for us, with not one fucking personal thing. It was all about money: bills, takes, CDs, receipts, bank statements, catalogs asking you to buy, buy, buy; returning to a house and garden neglected for six months, even though we have had help working on them; bone tiredness; too much to do; too much in a hurry to do it all (not letting myself rest), and do it at once so I can get down to the real business and passion of my life, writing.

I always fall into a funk on my return. And after a brief nap in which I dreamt about thugs stealing all my diamonds (though they were nice thugs and the possibility of retrieving them was strong), I prepared a bath for myself, poured a few drops of apricot oil I had got from Kullu in the water (almost wept sentimentality at this connection), and a cap full of lavender oil, I lit two candles, played a bit of Gurmeet Singh Shant’s kirtan – Phai Rai, Ram Kaho chit laye – returned to my center, and thought of you. Yes, you, my sweet audience, I thought of you, and I was filled with purpose, motivation and love. After my bath I would write here, tell you my all, connect, send and receive love and all would be well.

So here I am, drumming away at the keyboard, chewing the succulent fat of words, and in my exile and isolation, connecting with my web of friends, imaginary and real, feeling nourished and at peace.

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As we sat sipping our sweet lime (mausami) juice, I told Neelam, with whom I can speak my heart, “I was at the very edge of sanity yesterday. I had a Prozac and a quarter of a valium and some usually wonderful, all natural, organic herbs. I was so off. I couldn’t cope. Nothing helped. Not prayer, not deep breathing, nothing, so I figured chemicals would do it, but I had a drug reaction. I was edgy, disturbed, and felt a straw would break me.”

Neelam was surprised. She had always thought of me as very together. She also felt it wasn’t right for someone like me, or anyone else, to pop pills. I forget her exact words, but it was something like ‘while you’re writing about all this spiritual stuff in your blog . . .” You know what I mean. It is an old, old feeling that we cannot trust anyone who falls of the tightrope, and that certainly we cannot respect them. Look at what happened to Osho, and Muktananda, the former rumored to have drugs problems and to have committed suicide, the latter fallen for pretty blonde things. How can you trust what they say when they are so plainly human, not some super god men who always stay on? This, and the other argument of great artists who were bigots, racists and misogynists , like Wagner, Ezra Pound, etc — is an old one that nobody has resolved, and I am not about to even attempt it here, though I have my opinions. I just want to clarify my own position here, to myself and to you.

I am first of all a human being. This is at the center of my being from which everything else I am interested in radiate out like spokes in a wheel: spirituality, scatology, psychology, physiology, criminology, philosophy, etc, etc. I know and admit I fall off; I don’t even endeavor to be the perfect tight-rope artist who will never again do so. Who knows what lies in store? Sanity and insanity, as far as I know, are a hair breath apart.

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