God is very much in the literary news these days as Arundhati Roy rakes in her millions and the Booker with her The God of Small Things. Earlier Amy Tan proclaimed that God wasn't averse to being worshipped in the avatar of The Kitchen God's Wife.God is everywhere but it suddenly occurred to me that sometimes we ourselves assume god-head as I found myself playing a Lesser God in my rose garden one morning.
It was my routine to sit in the garden, sipping tea and reading the newspapers or sometimes to walk about the garden cutting flowers or just to stand and stare.
The peace and quiet that was palpable in my little haven was in sharp contrast to the turbulence of the political situation conveyed by the newspapers: the dowry deaths, the rapes, the murders and the trauma of mass deaths of pilgrims in Mina or Amarnath -- God knows no caste or creed when his devotees have to be decimated en masse -- and the scourge of Aids and cancer.
That gives me to reflect. He wields His wrath like a sharp scythe,indiscriminately cutting through cross-sections of humanity, His idea no doubt being to make random examples of unsuspecting innocents of the punishment earned by humans for their tamperings with Nature and the Environment.
Sometimes I'd abandon the world in the newspapers to its own upheavals and violence and take a walk in the garden instead. But suddenly I start seeing pictures and images from Life superimposed on my rose garden.
I snip the dead flowers and leaves. Try as I may I can't avoid chopping off a bud here, a full-blown flower there.
The rose bushes will thrive best if they are pruned and trimmed at the right time. I remember the way they looked last year, bereft of all their colour and beauty, their gnarled stems exposed with only a few branches and leaves to exude the hope that they will bloom again.
Is this what God does every now and then: get rid of the deadwood so that the rest can thrive? The Positive Check which Malthus explained was my Grand Trim.
Everything fell into placesuddenly -- famines floods, earthquakes, dead pilgrims, wars. You notice that God never annihilates the entire human race at any given time, however ruthless He may seem.
I see an analogy in every bloom in the rose garden. The bud I had ruthlessly cut off along with the withered flower was the three-year-old toddler of a friend, inexplicably felled by encephalitis.
That beautiful, perfect half-blown golden yellow there was the youth snuffed out in a car accident. That gorgeous crimson full blown, with many more days to its credit but shorn of half its petals by my unheeding secateur, is the 45-year-old woman afflicted by cancer when she has a lifetime of living left to do.
While amputating some of the young, the healthy, the perfectly formed, in the foliage I often overlook the wasted, asthenic flower, long past its prime but drawing sustenance still.
And I am reminded of the many aged and infirm among humans clinging to existence with a privilege denied their younger counterparts.
My secateurs arerazor-sharp sometimes and the cut is neat. But at other times they are blunt and I tug impatiently at the stems, maiming a few blooms in the process.
But I am God in my rose garden and all that goes on here is part of the Grand Design.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
