Neera

सई किवा से सुंदर रूप 

चाहिते चाहिते पाशि गेल चित्ते 

बडई  रसेर कूप । 

Sakhi when I saw you I forgot what I was witnessing and slowly it entered into me like my heart is going into the well never to return back. - Avanindranath Tagore.

Some things are way beyond any written philosophy or beliefs. The experience of them itself is the proof of ultimate. Beauty is one of those things which surpasses any written word that has been created to codify or contain her. 

I have always carried this question inside me like water carries the light. Bending and blending it beautifully. Why is a man drawn toward beauty ? Why do we seek cinema, photographs, paintings, sculptures? Why do we fall in love not only with the beauty but also the reflection of beauty ?

There is an old story of Narcissus, who knelt beside a pond and fell irretrievably in love with his own face shimmering in the water. This series is a tribute to that reflection; the one that compels beauty to turn inward and recognise itself. It is not vanity. It is something older and truer than vanity. It is the moment when the self becomes both the seer ( द्रष्टा ) and the seen ( दृश्य ), and finds no separation between the two.

As human beings, we long to witness another’s aliveness to be near them, to sense their warmth, to feel in that proximity something we cannot name but recognise as completion. Yet the system has declared this longing taboo, and from that declaration begins the oldest conflict: between what we feel and what we are permitted to express. Even love directed toward oneself is considered excess  condemned within our own homes before the world beyond the door has had its turn. We are taught to be strangers to our own fullness. 

To become a lesser version of ourselves just to please the society. Have you ever thought a flower blossomed halfway just because other flowers could blossom like it ? Or a peacock is not dancing because his female counterparts do not have colourful feathers 

And yet  PLAY लीला  and LOVE  प्रेम remain the ultimate acts of freedom. This world is nothing but the Leela of Maya, the great mother playing with herself across infinite forms. The form we understand most instinctively, the one that lives closest to that primal source, is the feminine  she who gives birth, nurtures, makes love, and in the end gently dissolves everything back into herself. We mistake her movements for our own doing. But every wave of emotion simply rises to its crest, trembles there for a moment, and returns. Nothing was ever truly ours to hold.

When it comes to the natural world it does not judge. It just behaves as per it’s rhythm and nature.  The water receives everyone without judgment. It does not ask whether she is permitted to be here, whether her body is appropriate, whether her joy is earned or she is coming to drown her tears into the pool. It simply holds her  the way earth holds a root, the way infinite night holds a star. She floats on its surface and the surface becomes a mirror  not of vanity, but of divinity quietly recognising itself. The pond has always known what civilisation forgot: that a body at ease is not a provocation. It is a prayer.

As a human, artist, lover when I see her something stirs inside me. What is the exact thing that draws me toward her ? Is it weakness, love, lust or some unnamed compulsion, what precisely is it ? On the other hand she is engrossed entirely in her own play. She loves what she is doing. And I feel something open in me watching her some long-held tightness releasing without announcement. Does her joy give me something in return? 

Should I even be asking that question? Perhaps the truer question is this: why not simply be glad that she exists in her own paradise? That there is something in this world like a flower that blooms and releases its fragrance without requiring an audience, without negotiating with anyone’s permission.

The Nayika who does not wait to be seen, who does not perform for a gaze, but who inhabits her own beauty the way a forest inhabits its own silence. She is not merely unclothed. She is unguarded. There is a difference that centuries of conditioning have worked hard to collapse, and she, in this moment, restores it with the ease of someone who has simply forgotten to be afraid.

I think of the apsaras carved into the temple walls at Khajuraho and Halebidu  bare-breasted, full-hipped, caught mid-gesture in stone that has outlasted every empire. No shame encoded into their posture. No apology in the arc of their raised arm. 

The sculptors understood what the moralists forgot ; that the body in its fullness is not an invitation to transgression but a threshold into the sacred. She in the pond is their living descendant uncarved, unbounded, moving through water instead of stone, and utterly, completely her own.

The urge to possess beauty is a barbaric impulse masquerading as love. Nature is complete within itself and asks for nothing from us. Life unfolds, and so does death. Every being plays her part with full conviction, whether or not we are watching. I may not bloom or express freely under the accumulated weight of social pressure but she is dancing, playing, creating, living entirely inside her joy. 

And knowing that such a thing is possible, that a natural beauty in feminine form can exist without shame, without guilt, without the crude dictionary of moral or immoral that itself feels like rescue. What nature has given her, she wears without apology. She is sinking into it completely, the way the afternoon sinks into itself.

Just witnessing her gives me something far more valuable than anything I could ask of her the way witnessing a sunrise gives, the way a vast open valley or a towering mountain gives, the way the peacock’s sudden dance in a clearing gives. Something so simple and yet so vast it cannot be measured. Beyond the reach of any system that needs to tag and contain and approve. Her act touches the deepest part of me and stirs a rasa that no book has fully named and no rule has ever had the jurisdiction to govern.

She will step out of the water eventually. The afternoon light will release her. The pond will settle back into its own stillness and carry no memory of her and yet be forever changed by having held her. That is how beauty moves through the world: not leaving a mark, but leaving an altered quality of light.

I set down my camera. Some moments are not to be captured. They are only to be received. And I have received this one like a blessing I did not ask for, did not deserve, and will spend the rest of my life being grateful for.

Muse : K Raginee Yogesh

Words & Images : Yogesh Kardile

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