The cuckoo sings beautiful. Really beautiful. For the first time in my life of 46 years, I paid attention to the notes of the cuckoo. My listening began in the evening last Friday when I was meditating. I had been told earlier by a spiritual master trained in yoga that I should
listen to the sounds arriving in my ears with my eyes closed. I had done that earlier. But I had not struck gold while listening the way I did last week. I realised how enchanting nature can be. The cuckoo was there outside my window on the fourth floor of my apartment in Patna all the time. She was singing all the time. Only I was not tuned to it.
It is like radio or TV broadcast. The radio and TV waves are there all the time. But you need a device that can catch the waves and you need to turn it on and tune it to them. And lo, you can hear lata Mangeshkar singing or watch Sachin Tendulkar batting. Mangeshkar might have sung ages ago. Tendulkar might have batted in 1990. But if a station is playing a recording of their work and the broadcast is available where you are, the sounds and pictures will be there around you. And you can choose to turn on the radio or TV and see and hear them.
A person not aware of this technology may not believe if you tell him that Mangeshkar is singing right here and now if a broadcast of her song is available but the radio is not tuned to it. If he has heard her before he will think she is inside the radio if you turn it on and tune to the station playing her song. She sang in a time and place different from the time and place you hear her right now if the radio station plays her recorded song.
What if the cuckoo is like a radioIJ What if the cuckoo is just a device receiving the song of some entity singing in a different time and placeIJ In spirituality, it is said that there are different lokas, or worlds. The time and space of these worlds are different. That’s why it is said that more than three trillion years of a human being equal one year of Bramha, a Hindu deity. That’s because the loka of Bramha is different from the loka of a human. It is said that the Vamanavatar of Hindu deity Vishnu in three strides covered three lokas — the world of suras or benevolent deities, the human world and the world of asuras or malevolent deities. That’s because space and time in the worlds of deities like Bramha and Vishnu are different from the space and time of our world.
Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity gives a glimpse of how this is possible. As per Einstein’s theory, which has been proved correct experimentally, if a man stays on earth and his twin brother takes off into space and travels at speeds close to the speed of light, the space traveller would age less than his earth-bound twin brother. So when the space traveller returns to earth his age would be less than his twin brother’s. This is known as time dilation. Space too is a variable like time in the relativity theory.
So there might be worlds in which different kinds of bodies exist having different time and space zones. The past might be present somewhere and the future might be past elsewhere. We could be living in a space and time soup in which different entities are at different time and space coordinates all connected to and interacting with each other.
The thought running through my head right now might be the broadcast of an entity from a station, loka or world whose space-time are very different from common human space-time. The thought might be a recorded broadcast, coming from the past. Or it might be an inspired thought, a broadcast from the future. So I might be thinking right now and here what someone thought a long time ago in a totally different world. Or I might be thinking what someone is thinking many years ahead in the future, again in a totally different world of time-space. We do find that some people are stuck in the past and some people can look ahead and visualise the future in moments of inspiration. In the middle of all this are the cuckoo and I, the cuckoo singing and I listening. In the
middle of all this is beauty, beauty so uplifting it goes beyond the sense and reaches the soul. The cuckoo sings straight from her soul. At four in the morning last Saturday, she sang in the dark before dawn like it was her last song. I counted the notes and judged them on the scale of the sargam of sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni. These seven notes make one saptak. The cuckoo sang two straight saptaks in perfect order.
I wonder who taught her music. The notes were even placed and each stirred me so much it became unbearable to hear her after some time. This was heavenly beauty. I have not seen or heard God. I don’t know what God is like. But just as Australian cricketer Matthew Hayden very famously said, “God bats at No. 4 for India after watching Tendulkar play,” I can say God sings on the mango tree outside my window at four in the morning after hearing the cuckoo sing.
God can be unbearably sweet and melodious. A corrupted little mortal like me can take only so much of God at a time. But let’s suppose it was actually God singing through the cuckoo. Well, then, God has to be something present at all times at all places. That’s where the space-time thing ties up. If God is at all places at all times in the past, present and future, and if He was singing through the cuckoo at dawn outside my window, I was hearing something truly timeless and universal, something totally out of this world, something otherworldly.
With that thought, time stands still for me right now. Yes, the notes of the cuckoo have not changed. It sang saptaks 500 years ago outside the window of the palace of Emperor Jahangir. It sang 1,500 years ago outside the window of poet Kalidas’ house and 2,500 years ago outside the window of the palace of prince Siddhartha who would be Buddha one day. It sings outside my window today. It will sing at dawn 500, 1,500, 2,500 years from now.
The cuckoo catches and relays the primordial sound of the Big Bang, the Word of the Bible, the Om of the Hindu, the Anhad of the yogi. If Mangeshkar is kanth kokila, or the one with the voice of the cuckoo, and sur samragyi, the empress of sur or musical notes, I can understand why. If the cuckoo can receive the notes of heaven, why can’t Mangeshkar, or any man or woman, in fact, any being.
And then I thought about the notes of the cricket singing in the grass. Yes, it’s unmistakable. Sweet, soft, soothing. It can lull you to sleep. This world is magic. Miracles everywhere, in the grass of the cricket, on the mango tree of the cuckoo, in the blade of Tendulkar, in the voice of Mangeshkar, in the broadcast of the radio, in the experiences coming from our head and heart. And from the soul too. The soul is out of fashion. But a cuckoo just gave my soul back to me.
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