Kunalwrites

Micchami Dukkadam What a 72-hour fast during Paryushan is teaching me before I have even begun I can remember many of the people who have hurt me. Some moments remain surprisingly clear: the words that were used, the place where they were spoken, and sometimes even the expression on the other person's face. Hurt has an impressive memory. What is less clear is the effect I may have had on others. Not because those moments did not matter, but because we rarely experience ourselves as the person at fault in someone else's story. We live inside our own explanations, pressures and good intentions, and that makes it remarkably easy to misunderstand the harm we may have caused. Starting tomorrow, I am attempting a 72-hour fast during Paryushan. Even before it has begun, it has forced me to confront an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps the things I most need to give up are not on my plate. Perhaps they are the stories I tell myself about who was right, who was wrong, and why my own be...

There is a place in western Tibet where two lakes sit three kilometres apart, drink from the same sky, sit at nearly the same altitude, and could not be more different if they tried. One is round. Sun-shaped, the old texts say. Its water is sweet enough to drink, cold enough to numb you in seconds, and clear enough that pilgrims have walked eighty-eight kilometres around its edge for two thousand years just to touch it. Bar-headed geese nest on its banks. Fish move through it. It is called Mansarovar , the Lake of the Mind, and it is considered one of the holiest waters on earth. The other is a crescent. Moon-shaped, dark, saline. Nothing swims in it. Almost nothing lives on its shore. Local guides will tell you, half-joking and half not, to be gone before sunset. It is called Rakshastal , the Lake of Demons, and legend ties it to Ravana himself, meditating on its banks, offering his own heads to Shiva for power. Same sky. Same mountain. Same rain. One clean, one cursed. The Stories Pe...