TWENTY FOUR
The picture that Maya had of a cozy home and family was shattered. Kartik on the other hand, was getting increasingly frustrated with her complaints and emotional demands. His calculations were going wrong and Maya was turning out to be a bad debt for him. He could not sense that Maya was turning away from him gradually. She was drifting further and further towards loneliness.
Loneliness is often, our biggest shadow. It seems to be at a touching distance all along. Everyone faces loneliness at least once in life. How long it lasts is another question. The inner demons keep haunting us. We would go out to parties, walk over the grinning faces, drink, smile, and lean on physical pleasures and in the end come home scared. Maya was also trying hard not to get sucked into the black hole.
She knew the pain that fills you when life destroys your closely knit dreams and in that pain she felt a connection. A bond she shared with every other woman and also with her step mother. She wondered why she could not see life from this angle earlier. She realised suffering makes one less judgemental automatically. She closed her eyes as if she was in lot of physical pain and she lay on her back. She felt difficulty breathing. Tears trickled down the corners of her eyes. She wanted to scream and cry, but she could not. However hard she tried she could just gasp, nothing came out of it. It's strange that as we turn into adults, we lose our ability to cry like kids. She felt as if she would choke. She removed all her clothes and lay naked on the bed. She felt trapped, as if her hands were tied.
As she put her hand on her waist, she felt a sudden sensation, of pleasure, a frisson of excitement. She started touching herself more and more. She wanted to touch the woman inside her; the shocked woman who is terrified of this world. The naked Maya, with blisters in her heart.
Her hand was making a subtle move towards the woman in her, fingers guiding her thoughts, and her body responded to every touch. She seemed to be moving into a tunnel of pure pleasure. The entangled and bleeding mess in her soul felt at ease. A strange calm was also descending as her mind was wandering. An intense mix of pain and pleasure was making her feel anxious.
Her whole body was responding to her own touch down there, sending shivers transforming her mind and soul. She felt an unnatural bliss. Strangely her body echoed an orgasm and her eyes responded with screaming loud tears a sobbing orgasm. How about that? She felt tears gushing out of her. She felt as if something that was trapped was let loose on her. She gasped for a second and burst into loud cry. She kept crying for a long time screaming her heart out.
An hour later, bewildered by her discovery, she reached for the phone and called Vikram. Only he could possibly understand.
“What's it?” his voice was soothing.
“You can't imagine what I went through,” she said.
“I'm all ears.”
“I … I ...” she hesitated.
“Relax!”
“I masturbated,” she said finally, not without a hint of shame in her voice.
“So?”
“Well… then I cried. I cried my guts out. I should have felt pleasure!” she sounded confused.
There was a pause. She is evolving, he thought.
“Hello?” she reminded him of her presence.
“What's making you so sad?”
“Nothing,leave that. Tell me why I would cry after an orgasm.” He took a deep sigh.
“Most people think that when people have sex or crave for better sex it's only physical. More often than not, it's the craving for a deeper state of peace and bliss. The deeper connect. You cried because when orgasm leads you into a state where the mind ceases to exist. The emotions are raw, so you express what surfaced inside you. In your case, it turned into crying. Your pain found a way of release through your pleasure. It's exactly how life finds a release through death. The unrest is gone forever and peace restored to soul.” He paused.
“Alright, look at it this way,” he continued, “When you are in an orgasmic state you are free from all other thoughts. It's what you call spiritual sex which is as good as meditation. It leaves you thoughtless for a few moments. In those moments you have no Ego, no mind, there is no I, you just become part of this huge universe. If there was nothing that would distract you back you would have been able to stay in that bliss forever. This is what meditation also does to you. The sad part is there are enough distractions that pull us back in this life. In your case you cleansed yourself with your tears.” She was listening to him silently awestruck as ever. She realised that listening to him always seem to charge her energy levels. “What is spiritual sex,” she was curious.
“Maya, it's the transcendent sex. Strangely, it's even better when people are not living together.It's about experiencing emotions that help us discover altered states and higher realms. Ecstasy in the Greek origin means 'to stand outside'. It's loosing oneself into divinity, the larger cosmic space.”
“I don't get that.”
“Will you ever be patient?” He smiled. “Spiritual sex is complete surrender to your own desire, your own centre. If we learn to live charged up and with a similar integrity in every moment all of them would become raw. Nothing would need to surface, simply because nothing would be hidden. The sexual energy is not contained till sex. It is the energy of the being. The energy at our centre, the life force. Some people also call it kundalini. Imagine if it is always charged and you are always on a high. The mind becomes incapable of influencing you and controlling you. Your mind doesn't let you discover that kind of intensity because it does not want to lose control over yourself.”
“You mean I cried because the pain surfaced in the form of pleasure,” she said.
“Yes. Pain and pleasure are connected. There is no balance. It's like a rope. One end is pleasure and the other is pain. It's the same rope.”
“No wonder there are times when at my deepest connect with someone I can feel an equally intense release of pleasure as well as pain.”
“Yeah, because all intense emotions produce asimilar kind of feelings , in our hearts. We should always listen to them. Their voice is the voice of our soul and the larger cosmic space. Through them the Almighty guides us. ”
“What would I feel if I am at the centre?” she asked.
“Salvation!” He must be smiling, she thought.
“How?” she was curious.
He liked this aspect of her, her thirst to know more.
“A living person emotes. He would feel happy and he would feel sad. If we are afraid of feeling sad we would have to do away with our want to be happy either. If we want to achieve a balance, then we would have to leave both the ends of the rope. That can only happen if we stop living. We need to understand that life cannot exist without death. Days cannot be without nights. Pleasure would not exist unless it is polarised with pain. So we need to enjoy both the ends. Sadness and pain have their own beauty. They also teach us, they feed our soul. Pleasure and pain can be of the same intensity, the same bliss to a point of having no difference. What you experienced was that point. What matters is just the result. Not the journey. You can achieve the same state both through pleasure and pain.”
“Hmmm…” she drifted into her own mode of introspection.
“Sleep!” he said.
And she did doze off thinking over it. She opened her eyes to realise that she had slept for a while.
She felt surprised at herself. The other Maya in her became more firm on her decision to search for meaning. Some part of her was dead. Another Maya, the more vulnerable one, took over completely. A more impulsive Maya, the wanderer, and the one in search of something she knew not.