They gathered in the temple of the republic
only to hurl you
from the mountain's brow.
Yet before their hands
could complete the geometry of exile,
you entrusted yourself
to the abyss.
You leapt.
Dharmendra—
Dharma does not abandon
those who descend into fire.
It waits beneath them,
its invisible palms
older than gravity.
The seeds of learning
you buried beneath the Indian earth
have already awakened.
Now Saraswati's veena
has become a river of sound.
No lid can imprison it.
No earthen vessel
can cork an awakening
whose echo has entered the sky.
Among the countless seeds you scattered,
one has become
a forest of inward light,
where forgotten disciplines
grow like rain-fed banyans
through the masonry of time.
Tomorrow,
even these counterfeit pilgrims
who rehearse their revolutions
with painted voices
shall wander beneath
the merciless noon of existence,
searching, without admitting it,
for the cool shadow
cast by the very tree
they sought to uproot.
Dharmendra—
because of you,
the Saraswati of this ancient soil,
the mothers of wisdom,
the feminine constellations
that inhabit our civilisation,
were not stripped naked
to amuse the marketplace
of ridicule.
The royal epics of this land,
its civilisational fossils,
its invisible grammar of spirit,
you dared to place
once more
into the hands of children.
That they could not forgive.
The ghosts of Babur,Akbar,Aurangzeb,
Robert Clive,Caldwell,Pope—
their long shadows
can no longer occupy
the entire classroom of memory.
That is what unsettles them.
For a child
who remembers his own inheritance
cannot be rewritten as easily
as an erased manuscript.
Thus they fashioned
their limping pretexts,
their theatrical uprisings,
their paper tempests,
hoping to disguise a deeper hunger.
But no—
the defeated one is not you.
Dice may briefly
devour the dwelling-place of Dharma;
yet Dharma
possesses the patience of mountains.
It returns. Always.
Dharmendra—
they did not cast you down.
You chose the leap.
And the valley was never
your destination.
Between one summit and Everest,
every traveller must surrender
a little height before ascending
into impossible air.
The champion of the high jump
always bends,
always make a first small jump
for the briefest instant,
before the body
sail over the tallest task
its true altitude.
So too this descent
is merely
the hidden syntax
of another ascent.
No height shall remain
beyond your reach.
Jai Hind.
Vande Mataram.
Bharat Mata Ki Jai.
— Ragavapriyan