GURU DAKSHINA

In the past four decades I have attended hundreds of wedding ceremonies of my students. In our twenties, my colleagues and I attended these functions as if we were on a picnic. As years passed by, this feeling changed. In my forties I started praying for them. Once I fell onto the wrong side of fifty, students apart from inviting to their wedding, started requesting me to receive ‘Dakshina’ from them. This often posed logistic difficulties as the Dakshina had to be received in the morning at the bride(groom)’s house and the wedding happened at a later time at a different place. But I always obliged.

What a ‘Dakshina”

Ten years ago, this girl named after her birth star invited me to her wedding at the famous Mahadeva Temple in Vaikom. Since her home was too far away she didn’t request me to receive the Dakshina in the morning. After the wedding ceremony we moved to the reception hall and waited for the newly married. The sun was merciless at the highest altitude and I took refuge under a tree with leaves in such abundance that no sunlight or heat could percolate down. But I was a little uncomfortable wearing a branded ready-made shirt for the first time in my life. With a large number of buttons almost all over, I thought I looked like a clown. I told myself not to worry as I was a total stranger there. Even as I was trying to settle down to the comfort of the thick shadow, the cavalcade carrying the young couple arrived. The bride stepped out of the car in typical slow motion as per instructions from the photographers. Upon seeing me, she ran a full twenty meters towards me to the astonishment of everyone including the groom. The photographers ran after her not missing a single frame of the galloping bride. Never before in their professional lives might they have clicked such bizarre images. Reaching me she knelt to touch my feet. I felt sorry for her as it was very difficult to kneel in her pompous Kancheepuram saree and with all those glittering gold ornaments. So far so good. The satisfied photographers rushed back to take positions in front of the stage inside the hall. Even before I could realise what had happened I heard the senior photographer still beside me shriek, “come back”. The girl while rising in a hurry after touching my feet had her hair and some thin gold chains on her head tangled with the buttons on my shirt! In her anxiety she started shaking her head violently and the photographers ran around the hapless guru and shishya clicking with a vengeance as if there was no tomorrow. Suddenly there was a lightning from above and I told the bride: “It’s God showering those choicest blessings from the heaven”. The bride without losing her characteristic sense of humour even in her predicament, answered; “Might be Sir. God is everywhere: sometimes He hangs from a tree like a bat”. I looked up and saw the youngest of the lens brigade, beating his older colleagues, taking aerial shots with the camera in his left hand and hanging from a fairly high branch of the tree using his right hand. I advised the girl to stop shaking her head and I started setting her free from those innumerable buttons one by one. In a minute or so the girl was free and I could hear many a sigh of relief. A short while ago I was a total stranger in the crowd and now I am the centre of attraction. I tried to put up a brave face and feigned as if nothing happened. But clearly I was failing at it.