Tomichan Matheikal's blog

My blindness will cost you more than the sight of the other guides, said the eyeless man to Ibn Battuta, me. I started this journey as a pilgrimage, the Hajj that ensures the soul the bliss of Paradise. But Paradise is here, on the earth, I learnt as I travelled through Dar al-Islam. Mountains and valleys, rivers and deserts, The birds that fly and the snakes that crawl, The infinite variety of hypnotic women Whose men are grappling with fate In the torrid ruggedness of their life. Sight is a curse, said my blind guide, in the desert where a wind can shift a mountain. The sand dune you see now is a valley after a storm. Trust not your eyes in the land of illusions. Trust not your ears in the land whose air echoes the songs of spirits and calls of phantoms. Trust not your senses in the land of Ostriches that bury their sight in sand. Trust me, I’m the blind man of the desert whose heart beats with insights; I’m the blind man who sees

“I knew you would come to deliver me from my stony existence,” Ahalya said touching Rama’s feet. “I’m just a means,” Rama said with an understanding smile.  “Deliverance is one’s own choice, not given by somebody else.” “But your touch sent grace flowing through my being.  I could feel it.  I felt the stone within me melting away.  The lightness of my being now brings me bliss untold.” Ahalya - a Ravi Varma painting Ahalya was living in a granite cave ever since the intercourse she had had with Indra, the lord of svargaloka.  Gods can transform your life in either way, she realised.  Here is a god who liberated her from the monolith that weighed down her consciousness, a monolith that was put there in her consciousness by another god. She had become a monolith after Indra visited her that day when her husband, Sage Gautama, old man with wrinkled skin and matted hair, had gone to fetch the materials required for his religious oblations.  Indra looked like Gautama