When The Murti Blinks: A Memoir Of Darshan

The stiff, frozen marble eyes—warm in their sweet and loving glance—were blinking in a slow, deliberate rhythmic cadence as they stared out at me, not ten feet away. With my mouth wide, face contorted, I thought, “what is happening here?” I took off my glasses and wiped my eyes in the ever-widening tears of confusion within a strange feeling of knowingness, which was bursting inside me, somewhere—everywhere! But a knowingness of what? Within the ten or perhaps fifteen minutes of utter dismay, bewilderment—which was more likely an exaggerated few moments, I cycled between taking my glasses off, wiping my eyes then replacing my glasses, only to continue to see something which was not supposed to be happening. Certainly not to me anyway. Stone sculptures don’t move! And they positively do not blink their eyes! “Am I really seeing this?” I wiped my eyes more fiercely, frantically determined to remove any visual splatter, any dust particles which must be clouding my vision. My shoulders now covered in my tear-soaked tee-shirt could not absorb another drop of moisture. Saturated however, I desperately felt around for any part of my shirt which might have escaped the free-flowing tears of great disagreement between my experience and my knowledge of physics. “This cannot be happening!” I mused.All the while, I’m becoming more lost in my tears, misplaced in the transcendence. Those who are with me, leading the prayers, are casually observing this westerner, this stranger reacting to a happening which is widely accepted in this country of India. They witness without interfering. They simply carry on with a manner of duty, of passionate obligation, and loving devotion. However, at the moment I hit the tiled floor, my dear new friend Arvind, smiled broadly with full comprehension, and kneeling beside me says, in a cool matter of fact tone “Baba ji has given darshan”. It sounded like a question, but in actuality, it was an earned wisdom from his experience of having been with the great saint while he was still alive, and of this physical space. I could say nothing accept for “Maharaj ji is blinking his eyes at me”. And continued to weep uncontrollably.