Travel: How this Sri Lankan spectacle became a wellspring of hope and courage in dark times

February 2020, Sri Lanka — I wanted to leave. It was 5am on a mountain on an island. We had made it an hour early to the peak. It was chilly and I was not wearing enough layers. Standing idle only made it worse. Bleak thoughts of waiting for one long, dark hour to see the sunrise engulfed me in negativity. “Poof, I’ve seen many sunrises, on mountains tall and oceans wide,” I thought. My companion suggested we wait for another ten minutes, then another and then another. He really wanted to stay, trying everything to make me feel comfortable. This further agitated me.

I was on holiday and Janaka had been driving me between towns. He is Buddhist and this was his first pilgrimage to Sri Pada (the sacred foot in Sanskrit), or Adam’s Peak. I paid my respects to the ancestral giant-sized footprint after queuing for nearly 30 minutes. I rung the bell at the ascent as pilgrims are meant to do each time they summit the peak. This was a special moment in my life, but impatience and an anxiety-induced prolepsis of the situation was getting the best of me. I knew the dread that was about to arrive.

My best friend always leaves a few minutes before a concert officially ends to conveniently avoid the ensuing crowd. This is what I felt after summiting Adam’s Peak, realising that the number of people waiting to see the sunrise was in the thousands. Once the sun was out, hordes of people would head back on an unusually steep set of stairs downwards. I did convince Janaka to leave but got stuck in the crowd. There was no way out but to watch the sunrise first. There was also talk of a virus originating in China and spreading rapidly across the globe. I had been advised to be careful and avoid contact with people. Well, there I was on Sri Pada right in the middle of the pilgrimage season.

First, there was a glint of red at the horizon. An indication of the sun’s coming. In what seemed like every five minutes, the horizon would change a shade — until the red became a beaming line of ruby against a midnight-blue sky. We kept watching and just as the sun showed signs of emerging, a drummer and reed flutist began to enchant us with what I now call ‘the morning song’. A rhythm for the stirring of dawn. A beat for the emergence of the sun. We were like children following the pied piper’s tune but stunned and stationary. Here was the sun, a distant fiery ball, a graceful orange and yellow, and oh, how it appeared as if it was being emancipated, wild yet elegant in all its glory! I wondered whether, if the sun spoke it would sound like my high-school Urdu teacher with her post-cancer thick white hair, ancient and wise but bursting with child-like energy.

The emancipation of the old woman and child in the image of the sun occurs daily. One does not appreciate in everyday life, what has been handed to them before birth. You begin to consider such things as rightfully yours. But can you claim, “I was here first, it’s mine?” Can you claim this for anything unless you made it with your own hands? Even then, can you claim your child belongs to you? At best, you can appreciate your child and make an effort to show them life in the most realistic and grateful manner. I often notice the sun on the way to work or on an early weekend run. Yes, I take notice, yet more often only see it. But to feel it, emanating from the dark matter of nothingness; the nothingness is what we cannot imagine space to be. It is everything we know about it and everything we don’t.

The sun emerged out of nothingness, and thousands of us stood in silence, waiting patiently in unison. All of us had climbed 5,500 uneven, painstaking steps to witness the echo of an event that supposedly happened thousands of years ago. For many, the beginning of time on earth for humankind. All of us climbed up, no questions, only smiles at each other. All of us stood together, no questions, only making space for each other; accommodating and most importantly, being kind and respectful to each other’s bodies in this space. All of us stood still, waiting together for the sun and when the sun appeared slowly but surely, like time’s arms stretching by a second on a clock, like time itself trickling over the vast expanse of the earth, we watched it bloom. We felt it. We felt the sun give us everything.

Was it the communal act of watching the sun rise that brought such tranquillity to our hearts? That everyone of us had one cause for this moment — rich or poor, healthy or ill, race or religion. I found myself lost as I basked quietly in the blessed golden moment. This new day, brought by the sun, for us sleepless ones — many old men and women, using sticks and taking long pauses to aid their climb. Many were children held by their devoted parents. Many barefooted. The holy sun was at its best, making a golden toast out of all of us, as we stood above mist and clouds among which the smaller peaks continued to entrance.

The sun went to sleep that evening eventually. The believers made their pilgrimage, said their prayers, received their blessings. The hikers made their summit. People came and went. They took what they intended to from this journey, leaving space for others. We left in kindness and consideration, all of us truly becoming pilgrims of whatever reasoning we believed in. We were liberated by a simple sunrise as we retraced the footprints of our ancestor.

Less than a month later, my workplace at that time was the first one to go to into quarantine mode. Being in isolation for the coming months had been a testing time, as we all know too well. It was perhaps the blessed sunrise on Sri Pada that continued to offer rays of hope and courage to me as we came to the realisation that life is unpredictable, humans are vulnerable and so is this Earth. Perhaps, a reminder for us to take intentional decisions and make conscious commitments as we move through this age of constant connectivity. Perhaps, a reminder for us to leave footprints like the sun does, footprints with life-restoring energy.

wknd@khaleejtimes.com

• Lifestyle