Listening to his passionate discourse, she became strangely sombre and was quiet long after he had finished. He was beginning to feel he had spoken something to offend her. "You haven't'" she assured him. She was only worried that truth and love to her son had come to mean items and data. Truth and love were making nothing happen to him. And yet, he was obsessed with proving something about them with his brilliant arguments. And this she thought took him farther and farther away from understanding and experiencing truth.
A silence walked between the mother and her son but it was not a silence that spoke nothing. Already, he was feeling the impact of something reaching out to him from the depths of her being. Her silence had words though it had never needed any.
He moved closer to her but his eyes were still not meeting hers. She saw him twiddling his thumbs. Slowly, gently, her hand moved towards his, and she held it with gentle firmness. Slowly, she pulled him closer till once again, he lay in her lap, eyes closed, his mind still restless with thoughts he did not understand. He was sure she will lead him out of this strange disturbing certainty -- a certainty which felt more turbulent than his occasional doubts. He felt invisible tendrils of compassion and love reaching out to him from distant worlds. But he knew it was his mother, sitting so close to him and yet seeming so large her presence stretched from horizon to horizon.
Suddenly, a half forgotten memory of a dream he had dreamt the previous night began to crawl over him. The dream had followed him in different shapes since his adolescence. He had a vague memory that the previous night, he had seen a charioteer standing in the middle of ignorant armies, a smile across his lips - a smile that on anyone else would have looked so out of place in the midst of loud sounds of clashing swords and conches and bugles and war cries and yet, with this charioteer, the smile looked to be the only natural response to the scene in front of and around him. He looked so blissful.
Soon, the dream melted away, and he saw his mother's face re-emerge out of a dim relief. She seemed silent but he heard, as he had often heard , the forest speak to him. The forest spoke in his mother's voice but its words were its own
"Truth is an experience, " he heard the forest say, " as is love too." And then, after a pause, he was not sure who was speakin to him , his mother or the forest. " Truth and love are pure and absolute. They wouldn't exist in zones of doubts and uncertainties. It is impossible to think of uncertain love or doubtful truth. They are relative in that , though absolute, they would be experienced differently by different people. No two prophets have the same vision of reality but all prophets are moved the same way by their different visions. Each would invent his own symbolisms but all would have the same mystical experience."
'Mamma' he thought for while. But it was not his mother's voice only though it was saying what she would also say. But no, she never speaks like this. She is simple, clear like a rivulet, child-like in her profound wisdom.
He looked at her, their eyes met for a second, and then he hid his face in her lap. " What is right for me, Mamma." She did not reply but kept moving her fingers through her son's handsome hair.
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