Posted:
In an empty weekend, bereft of Rudra Paro and Rangrasiya, I laze around and wonder. Two weeks, only, and yet almost everything has been written about Rudra, Paro, their characters, their psyches, their phobias, fears, their travails, and their need to be healed and made whole.
But one thing has been gnawing at the back of my mind but has till now lost the jostle for mind and forum space to other more important issues, facets and questions. But ths weekend the thought just wont go away. I wonder if it has occurred to any of you brilliant minds yet? I havent read any post abou it, but if this has been said then my apologies , yet my happiness that we think alike
Rudra was born in this Chandangarh, within a 60 km radius of Birpur, presumably in Birpur District. He faced the biggest trauma of his life here, which left his childhood and his psyche tortured and scarred forever. He tells his boss that he has spent a lifetime to forget his place of origin, its incidents, and his place in his life. And yet it wont go! But that makes me stop and think. A boy, a man who has spent most of his life trying to erase his bad memories, his childhood pains, in running away from his past, builds up his life entirely to deal with that one incident, what does he do? He goes and joins the Bharat Seva Dal- a border security agency. What does the BSD do? It protects the border. So where does it keep Rudra inextricably tied to? To the border of course, including the very same area from which he had fled in childhood, and which he wants to forget at all costs. Is it not a strange choice? Contradictory, confusing and self-defeating?
Or is it a subconscious, emotional, unspoken, unadmitted desire to somehow remain linked? To a mother who was lost there. To a childhood which is still looking for answers. Perhaps nurturing a secret hope that some day the unanswered confusions of his tormented soul will be solved in the same place where it all began. If his torturous life's descent into despair began there, then perhaps the key to his salvation lies somewhere in those sands. For somewhere in those villages, perhaps, is a woman who left him without word and without explanation .Somewhere buried in those sands, is hidden the happiness of his childhood, perhaps waiting only to be found and dug out.
Rudra has only hatred , but no answers to the tangles of his life. He hopes somehow that the desert, the place of his birth will some day take him in its fold and unravel his life's jumbles for him. Will take away his painful hatred and replace it with peace. Will bring him salvation and solace. Will bring him his lost Mother. Or atleast an explanation. Will bring closure. Perhaps.
A postscript added:
If I may add another point here which I had expressed in another post earlier is the fact of Rudra's intense patriotism. All PH interviews before the start of the show underline his intense patriotism as the underlying and defining characteristic of Rudra's character-the only important thing in his life. I have always felt that his patriotism is an outlet for the unexpressed love and affection in his life which he had no one to bestow upon, and showered upon his motherland, as he feared no treachery, no heartbreak there. That is the only unquestioned and unquestionable love in his love, perhaps the love that he had for his mother and could not give her, and hence redirected towards the motherland as an apt substitute. This patriotism and the connect with the stage where his early childhood played out are both outcomes of the events that tore his life apart. Perhaps they both came together to make BSD the ideal, nay , the only choice for Rudra.
Anupamaa
