The autumn i had seen before,
were in paintings, posters, movies or in poems .
The lands i came from, basked in the warm glowing tropical sunshine, and large gatherings of monsoon clouds.
where i lived, i never saw a tree totally denuded;
and coming back to life the next season.
However, the contrasts awaited me in another land.
Little did i know of Autumn, who was to be one of my most marvellous teacher, and all the lessons that i was to learn from her.
And so , it is of Autumn - i'm going to speak.
The first time in France , at the end of september; the last traces of summer long gone,
the wind becoming chillier and chillier everyday,
swept across the mountains;
when it was'nt so ,
the fog would be the silent visiter,
hanging in the fields or playing opaque with the wild stretches of space, veiling the face of the morning or the moon at night.
In faint sunlight, October came to its end.
The colours blazed out upon the folliages. As though they were the streak of thoughts rising from the consciousness of the mother Earth.
In the early morning hours of dull visibility by the countryside, i would descend by foot -- the steepy road to the nearby hospital ,that had offered me a job as a student. Very often there was a lots of missing staff , so it was easy for me to fit in.
After work, in the afternoons, i would climb up back to the village where i lived,
Yet , nothing was a routine,
there was something everyday,
something new i had'nt seen before.
It always nourished the poetic side of my life,
both knowingly and unknowingly;
in quietness
or in discret remarks,
or during conversions with very pleasent group of friends at weekends.
Nadine,
i had met her a few times.
During one of such the evenings .
we spoke of Indian medicine, art, culture and philosophy, food , work,
and idle gossipping, like it goes on in every part of the world.
Sometimes, my indian tanned presence, made me more a caricature of indian mysticism, my friends would associate with my way of looking at things, bringing Gandhi into the picture.
i said , i did'nt know much about Gandhi ,
though there was a lot about him that was stuffed into the programmes at secondary school ,
i did read a part of his biography -- but , that was all !!
Apparently ,Gandhi had left deep traces of him everywhere,
but, as far as i'm concerned, i did'nt adhere to most of his ideas, perhaps that being so haughty of me.
Secondly, Gandhi was not a man, but, an idea.
Repeating , the daily national pledge at the morning group routine school asemblies schedules before the national flag..." India is my country , all indians are my brothers and sisters".....
has lead me to look upon an indian girl as my sister. As a result, in spite of her beauty i was brainwashed to sublimate myself, in order to not subjugate incestually.
This is what Gandhi has done to me.
Which helps me to understand my self exiling from India .
And now i've got used to it.
With time ,i realised that i was'nt patriotic at all, a hindu prayer says;
" From the unreal lead me to the real, from the incomplete lead me to completeness".
has help me to abolish the idea of belonging to a community or to a land, or to an ideology.
i'm the world ,
where i'm-- is the world !
and i can change myself ; therefore, the world in which i am !
this laid a certain foundation to my thought.
Once Nadine invited me ,
"Joseph, i'm sure my father would love to meet you, you both have so much to exchange , so please come if you have some freetime.
You know he's an artist, and exposes his painting from time to time.
His great grandfather was married to an Indian muslim princess etc.."
An year so passed, she reminded me again.
I nodded my head, and forgot about it , Another year passed and , it was autumn again.
Monsieur Buffard, retired since a couple of years, spent his time in what he loved to do the most: Painting and sculpting; creating things from nothing....a rare artist .
One evening, i arrived late to join a group of friends, and amidst us was seated ,an elderly man wearing a robe over his pyjamas.
i was intrigued, and it came to an end when someone presented to me,
Monsieur Buffard.
He said to me ,warmly shaking hands, " if you cannot come to the mountains, the mountains has to come to you".
i smiled at the beauty of his metaphor.
i was the last to dinner.
Mr Buffard was tired, and was waiting to get back to his home , he had made the effort to stay because he really want to meet me.
i was very touched, by the high esteem he had of me.
He was much older than my father, yet,
in an instant he adopted me as the son he'd have loved to have.
When he and Nadine left,
i learnt
that he had recently lost his wife from cancer, and, he too was in a terminal phase ; dying.
Explaining of him in such an evening attire.
He was undergoing chemo - therapy,
stubornly keeping to the strict minimum demanded by the palliative proposition of a nearby hospital.
I was overwhelmed by our brief meeting, how i regretted of not having met him before. Which i understood later: our meeting was sufficient enough to impart to each other something very remarkable.
Friendship.
i would go and visit him very often as i could,
In each encounter he wanted to transmit to me the essentials of what he had learnt, i discovered that he was a business man dealing with carpets , and had initially dropout from the " beaux arts '
He had built a fountain in his gardern,
and stone scultped Victor hugo's bust, which he displayed in a delicate bush of fine creepers and roses;
all around sprawled carvings affirming ,who the creator was.
Sometimes, he would authorise himself , to order me around to water his plants protected undercover....though, i love garderns, i'm not the kind to disturb anything.
i realised , how he'd have had loved to do it himself,
and so, he would sit on his swing guiding me with his crutch.
Often, he behaved very rough and angrily with his daughter, but, gently and caring towards me. He sure was'nt someone who ushered you around, but with me , it was different.
When he asked me what was my idea of violence ,
i told him that it goes to the phrase , not Gandhi's ;but, the poet,Francis Thomson's.
" Pluck not a flower from its branch, lest you perturb a constellation in the heaven."
Struck by the intensity of its truth
i have naively followed this thought through out my life ever since .
i understood that everything had a significant place on earth , no matter how insignificant it might seem to our human eye.
A single phrase can change your entire life, and such was the case with mine.
In fact, my life is a little more than such phrases and encounters, craddled by some unknown joy coming from a pathless land known only as a secret to my soul alone.
