They gathered in the temple of the republic

only to hurl you
from the mountain's brow.

Yet before their hands
could complete the geometry of exile,
you entrusted yourself
to the abyss.

You leapt.

Dharmendra—

Dharma does not abandon
those who descend into fire.
It waits beneath them,
its invisible palms
older than gravity.

The seeds of learning
you buried beneath the Indian earth
have already awakened.

Now Saraswati's veena
has become a river of sound.

No lid can imprison it.
No earthen vessel
can cork an awakening
whose echo has entered the sky.

Among the countless seeds you scattered,
one has become
a forest of inward light,

where forgotten disciplines
grow like rain-fed banyans
through the masonry of time.

Tomorrow,

even these counterfeit pilgrims
who rehearse their revolutions
with painted voices

shall wander beneath
the merciless noon of existence,

searching, without admitting it,

for the cool shadow
cast by the very tree
they sought to uproot.

Dharmendra—

because of you,

the Saraswati of this ancient soil,

the mothers of wisdom,

the feminine constellations
that inhabit our civilisation,

were not stripped naked

to amuse the marketplace
of ridicule.

The royal epics of this land,

its civilisational fossils,

its invisible grammar of spirit,

you dared to place
once more

into the hands of children.

That they could not forgive.

The ghosts of Babur,Akbar,Aurangzeb,

Robert Clive,Caldwell,Pope—

their long shadows

can no longer occupy

the entire classroom of memory.

That is what unsettles them.

For a child

who remembers his own inheritance

cannot be rewritten as easily

as an erased manuscript.

Thus they fashioned

their limping pretexts,

their theatrical uprisings,

their paper tempests,

hoping to disguise a deeper hunger.

But no—

the defeated one is not you.

Dice may briefly

devour the dwelling-place of Dharma;

yet Dharma

possesses the patience of mountains.

It returns. Always.

Dharmendra—

they did not cast you down.

You chose the leap.

And the valley was never

your destination.

Between one summit and Everest,

every traveller must surrender

a little height before ascending

into impossible air.

The champion of the high jump

always bends,

always make a first small  jump

for the briefest instant,

before the body

sail over the tallest task

its true altitude.

So too this descent

is merely

the hidden syntax

of another ascent.

No height shall remain

beyond your reach.

Jai Hind.

Vande Mataram.

Bharat Mata Ki Jai.

— Ragavapriyan