That bright red spot

She walked in the class, a distracted lot looked on, whiling away their time, like chicken do when they are stuffed inside that rusted wire cage before being slaughtered, expressionless, not knowing what fate awaits them.

I looked up, waking up from my reverie, everything seemed hazy without my glasses, a woman strode in…draped impeccably in a sari. I’ve always maintained that a woman is closest to being naked when she’s well dressed…. our business journalism teacher someone hissed, as if I cared.

Clarity descended as soon as I put my glasses back on….all blurred edges assumed a definite shape, all the black ink on the board shrank meekly into boundaries, into recognisable text and so did her face……..

40-something, age stealing the thunder off her persona, leaving behind luxuriant pale skin, glowing with brilliance, slightly plump, mesmerising…..

Her eyebrows stretched; yawning into arches…perfect black lines they appeared, drawn with utmost care… with heavenly poise. And between those arches was a bindi, perfectly round and red, red as my blood.

I could have juxtaposed a graph paper on her face to find out the coordinates of that bindi; to confirm the symmetry and its linearity to those arches…..nothing seemed out of place. She spoke; I heard….never listening, my mind veered off to a parallel world all because of that damn bindi.

That bright red spot that I’d seen after so long on somebody not familiar traumatised me …flooding me…reminding me of the clay face of Maa Durga that we have in our drawing room…with big scary eyes, burning upon us. I was in a daze, if not a trance and that bright red spot continued to hog the attention.

Red stood for blood, for integrity, for life, for procreation…..its real meaning unknown…cloaked under mysteries. Through thousands of generations …immigrants, invaders, plunderers, colonisers have added their bit to it and it has flowed retaining its character, its meaning, undiluted, unrestricted.

And that circle? What did that signify? What else but that the earth is round and so is time. That time follows a damn pattern and it all starts where it ended, and that history blissfully repeats it self. Happiness and sorrow, victory and failure, everything’s a mere illusion. All lessons learnt are trifling; they all are in vain in the long run as the cyclical nature takes charge…..

What with the positioning….between the eyebrows, above the eyes, on the line of symmetry of the face…is that a coincidence too? I have often meditated with a yellow circle of incandescent light exactly on that spot as per the rules ….the yellow light relenting at first….. spreads over the rest of the body….is certainly divine. No wonder it is the divya chakshu of lord Shiva.
Mythology and commonsense seemed to converge making the picture a bit clearer and a hell lot complex. She rambled on about some boring details….oblivious of her fascinating bindi…and I gaped at her with child-like curiosity.