STAR STRUCK

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Memory tag: The picture my window framed.

Erratic best describes the frequency of Green Cardamoms in the last few months. Do put it down to my nomad –settling in phase, and certainly not a case of out of sight – out of mind. Last evening, as I stood out on the small verandah that opens out from my living space, I was spell bound by what I saw. Framed between the tall silk cotton trees, shone the solitaire, Venus the evening star, in all its glory! It was the perfect tableau, of a proverb I’d heard translated from Japanese a long ago, ‘Every window must frame a picture.” And what a picture did my patch of heaven frame! Simple, breathtakingly beautiful, elemental, reassuring and above all, inspiring! To me, it marked and approved the spot on which this nomad should set up house.

Did it, in times long past guide ancient nomads to their places of rest after a long day or journey? In their wanderings without defined boundaries were they comforted or guided by stars of wonder, stars of light, stars that became in their due course stars of royal beauty bright? In the perceived evolution of man, a line of thought that has always stood out is, man became mankind when he looked up at the stars and wondered. Initially perhaps, this was the author’s personal perception but in time the theme it underscored was universal in acceptance. This star struck wonder would slowly become the most humanizing of all factors. Is that the lineage of this unnamed joy that touched me that evening after traveling across time and space? Did this cascade into a quantum leap of road signs that would lead the telescope toting, Hubble Space Telescope crafting astronomers to the Big Bang? A phenomenon that some seers have apparently learnt without apparatus or modern scientific paraphernalia?

Many a time when the terrestrial markers of a journey changed, the nomads in their uncertainty looked to the star studded heavens for guidance. Individual bright or interwoven into a constellation, they lent their guiding lights on dark nights when the sun did not shine .So it became customary to look to the heavens above for help and then to clothe them with human connections. Thus the evening star was the son of dawn in ancient Greek mythology and the brother of the morning star. It took the advanced wizardry of the Babylonian astronomers to say they were the same planet. Its undeniable beauty probably lead the Babylonians to name the planet Ishtar being personification of womanhood, and goddess of love. Arwen, an elf-maiden in J.R.R. Tolkien's writings is also referred to as "Undomiel", elvish for "Evenstar". In the book Lord of the Rings Arwen gives a jeweled pendant called the Evenstar to Frodo before he leaves Minas Tirith. It powers the forces of good, as the One Ring powers the forces of evil. Is this why Evenstar is so frequently used as a name in Meghalaya? 

Sometimes star shows coincide with terrestrial ones. The great annual flooding of the Nile follows the sighting of the Sirius, the Dog Star. Comets, supernova explosions all got woven into the human fabric of history and thought. They also perhaps lifted man to a higher universal commune. Is that why higher is more exalted than lower? Is the inexplicable, yet out of reach star show the reason why all our Gods are found @ heaven .com? Yet , it was this mortal , upturned face that first saw the star filled firmament and became a astronomer-poet! Is that why he stopped lumbering on limbs so that the fingers of his forelimbs were free to trace the patterns that the stars wove?