Moksha moment

It was at the farmhouse. My sister had graduated from running after fat ants to tumbling down the stacks of hay. I pulled her into a silly catch-me-if-you-can game. A sprint, a jump and I found myself in the bio-gas plant tank, which I had mistaken for solid ground. I yelled, but there was nobody there who could have saved my life.

I desperately clung on to the grass that lined the edge of the tank for dear life. Yes, it really sustained the nearly drowning 17 kilos of me. I felt myself slipping and kept up the howling and screaming. Sister dear joined the chorus. Thankfully, at that point, grandma descended like an angel on the terrace of the house, just in time to spot her favourite grandchild on the point of drowning. My parents rushed to rescue me. Soon I was standing before them with dung dripping from all over me.

In the family, they still call it my ‘re-birth’. Suddenly everybody understood why the calves and pups around house constantly kept getting lost. Grandfather believed that it was the holy grass, and not grandmother’s alarm, that had saved me. Later I learned that the grass was known as ‘doobra’, in local parlance.

As for the dip, it certainly was a spiritual experience. Some moksha moments in pure cow-dung!