Asha Iyer Kumar :
To the one above all things born and unborn, I stand today in front of You, tongue-tied, my words drowned in complete disdain for myself. Let my silence today utter my pain, let this unspeakable grief be my refrain. Let these relentless tears wash Your feet, and bring to You my festering heart’s anguish. Hanging my head in shame, I stand in Your presence, lost in my conscience’s murky terrain.
You who listen to the wordless, answer the heedless, shed light on the sightless, lend an ear to my unspoken plea and hasten to rescue my disintegrating spirit. Every passing moment will see me dissolve in the aqua regia of my own hideousness. Soon I will cease to be what You had meant me to be. With every breath I exhale, the venom that runs in my body will spread in the air, the wind will take it to the seas, the seas will run into the land, and the land will reek of rotting flesh. Is this what you had envisaged when you first chiseled me and blew the first breath of life into me?
Of all things you moulded with Your Holy Hands, wasn’t I the most cherished by Your deputies, wasn’t I the most envied of all creatures for being endowed with a sentient mind that You presumed would stand me in good stead? Wasn’t I allowed to evolve by You so that I may romp around the stars and the moon, fly among the clouds and build castles where I pleased? Like a doting parent, You showered me with nameless bounties, and asked for nothing in return except my unflinching love for all things around me. And look what has become of me!
All that You blessed me with – the conscious plains, the moral sense, the aspects of humanness, the dampness in heart, the power of wisdom, the gift of compassion, the blessing of love – all that you copiously filled me with, O Mighty One, I stand bereft of them all. I stand denuded before You, shorn of all that made me superior among the mortal things. Between the moment You devised me and now, what ghastly change came over me? What evil fiend has possessed me that I am not even a shadow of what I was when You sent me down with wings on my soul and prayer in my heart?
Pray tell, O Ruler of the Cosmos, in what ill-fated moment did You abandon me, what made You push me into utter decay so much that I fear to see my face in the mirror today? Of what purpose are my coveted senses, of what use are my human qualities if the sea of love that once soaked my life dries up leaving mounds of biting salt and dreary sand where I crawl in irreversible squalor?
I am filled with pitch darkness today and in Your absence I am a savage, doomed with rage, blind with hate and awash in tainted faith. From being humane, Your absence has reduced me to being merely human, a human with bestial traits.
Release me from my bitter fallacies and take me to Your true Kingdom of Grace. Clear my eyes of falsities, my heart of ruthless craze, and by Your hand raise me to that which will make me shun vice and all its unfounded surmise.
I stand with tears of disgrace pouring from every pore of my skin, mortified at my perverse assumption that with my sin it is You that I am truly serving. Take from me my faculties, all that makes me an abject human entity; make me a worm, make a fish, make a bird or reptile, make me anything that for fancy does not slaughter or destroy that which was born with Your benediction. In absolute abhorrence of myself I crumble in a heap like an incorrigible wretch, waiting for a reprieve and a sacred redemption.
(Asha Iyer Kumar is a freelance writer based in Dubai)
