By Prem Gongaju

I

Around this time of the holiday season the old hankerings for the gold watch start to scrape against the chalkboard of my unrequited heart..

It wasn’t just any gold watch; it was Jim’s pocket watch, an heirloom treasured by three generations of the Young family. And Jim and his wife Della were the protagonists of the love story, ‘The Gift of the Magi’ by O. Henry. Not just any love story, a compelling story of love that brings gods down to earth.

Ah, I smell the fabulous fragrance of frankinscence and myrrh wafting from the golden censer from under the Tower of the Flock.

It could’ve been the attar wafting my way from Jim and Della’s modest apartment in New York, the attar of love between two souls. They could be the pair Martin Buber had in mind when he sang of the union among people in his philosophically profound book, Ich und Du (I and Thou). Love is the tungsten, when it’s lit by the divine spark concealed in the human heart, it transcends the base metal of selfhood, the itness of our humanness, into Thou-and-I, I-and-Thou divineness. For Thou is divine.

In the union of two souls, two I-nesses, Mary and Joseph, Thouness of divine called the womb of Mary a virgin home. Thus conceived from the Thouness of two I-ness, “God came down.”

And the Sage Martin Buber says, “Thou is God.”

And I say to my friends and fellow travellers: Thou art God. Here is my shepherd’s gourd, drink form it; here is my bread baked over the fire of my faith in the brotherhhood and sisterhood of humanity.

II

I think I know why I get the hankering for Jim’s pocket watch around this time. For I, after the fashion and fortitude of Madam Curie, keep burning and burnng the alloy of my soul over the furnace of existence, and ridding a portion of base metal of itness in each successive process of purification of the alloy of my soul. Over the long haul, I would like to earn the credit for having come up with the atom balm for the afflicted of the world. Jim’s pocket watch would surely tell the time of love is now.

And I need to set the hyphen of tungsten on fire in celebration of the love between Jim and Della, and in celebration of the wise Magi of the East.

Also for the hyphen between Raj and I.

-Samapta-