With his imago ever since childhood having been more like that of a
Swift-footed jungle boy'sWho rambles through all of nature's grounds,
Rain or shine, if it were, On fleet feet born of great young love,
While his in-born humble nature wooing
Most of the time he as fondly would lay bare,
With steps literallyTouching to the earth, while pressing forward
On the very nerve of good times,
With him and some settler's boy, reared like free colts by the countryside, ever
Mating with creation, jumping jolly
Across all sunny greens & shady forests of the boyhood days,
Gambolling ever playfully on meads and lakesites, nearby and afar,
At hide and seek with cows and calves, sprinting
Around hidden ponds, often only to be
Falling serene over romantic scenes at dusk with
Dragonflies blinking meaningfully
Amidst frogs and birds over waters kissed good-night by the setting Sun, along with
Contests of proclamations of
The Joy of the day's height,
While deeply, for a youngster, thus having experienced
Highly light-winged and very energetic feelings of life's force right there
In the lap of Mother earth,
As butterflies do, that no giant power may ever entrap,
In perfect harmony with the aweful boars, vipers and deer at closest range,
It so happened, that when as a grown man in his mid-forties -
Born a Westerner that he was but
Deep down inside of himself still being the very same jungle boy of old -
Later on in life he once wended his ways,
Clad traditional like any local man from Southern India's culture,
While also then bonding with the hallowed soil of
The Tamils' country where he was going about at the time being
With deepened sensations,
On feet likewise bared up to his down-to-earth attitude of
Being part and parcel of everything and the world naturally,
In a laissez-faire way of soleful gait,
At a time now in these post-modern days, when
Even in India, though rooted in age-old and beautiful traditions of
Cosmically empowered, solitary and congregational, divine merrymaking,
As chiefs of magically potent revelations since times immemorial
Have known to sport all of nature's powers - good or bad - in best possible ways, -
Professing highest souls of seers, in front of
Awe-struck people on silent soles,
Revered for their blessings from aloof -
Witnessing to prove all events to be taken
As distant but near echoings from drama plays on the cosmic stage,
Dramas of most fantastic gods and goddesses of
Translucently realistical, most refined figurings, that,
Most vibrantly alive, are worshipped again and again
So as for them to eventually be reining in regally
On one's happiness in life
By acknowledging a devoutly engaged interactive human players' part in overmind, so
Beautifully elated and enchantingly charged,
With this, or something like it, being the prevalent arena of emotions,
At a time when, thus, even in great free-spirited India's deepest provinces meanwhile
The antennas of the englobalizing television stations had started
To spread out their pictures 'from US' along with
The impending impressions and notions, such as
That boys and girls in other parts of the world,
Outside the fold of their own mother's culture, do
Hold very differently shaped ideals of what makes up for good forms and for true beauty,
And that in Western countries it were regarded
Rather as something cheap
For a poor teenage girl to be pawing and slurring her walks just
Like any cat in the streets does, when off on errands or to school,
Afoot on soles only running hot,
Starched by dust and by grime, -
Foreign notions prone to confound the young head of a
Proud young girl of Hindu feathers and claws,
To whom, well aware of her charms,
It would signal merely an untruth belieing her inner feelings
As what kind of cute birdie she felt she was,
If she were to demand for herself all of a sudden toImitate the trendy and be
Going out anything else from going out as ever before
Simply on earth-bound feet that she so subtly knows to beautify? -,
One such young traditionally dressed local teenage girl,
Who had noticed our Western nature boy and
Friend of the Oriental Indian design, walking in the street; -
His simple outfit being simple as that of the truly meek and great souls, and he was-
On bare feet, as she was, who
Came up to meet him, as he meanwhile had noticed her alike,
Halfways on the town's lane-
On him a plain longgi, a length of
Wide cloth wrapped around his waist
Tucked up to his knees in style,
She in a fashionably designed young girl's floral dress -
And who reached out her hand towards his for an intercultural handshake of two souls
That would leave the two with a feeling
Of having understood each other
By way, only, of the other person's aura and display of style,
With not a single word that would have been required to be spoken, -
And she let the single rupee coin that accidentally happened to have been
Held in the palm of the Westerner's hand at the time, and which
During the handshake, by itself, had slipped over into her palm of the hand, proudly
Drop through her fingers and down to the ground,
With him, so as to reassure the girl's good sense of her own intuition,
Signalling to be sensitive enough himself to mend
Any eventually wrong interpretations of what happened
By immediately picking up the dropped coin, stowing it away into his pocket,
And by offering his hand for a new re-enactment of the handshake that was
Meant to be nothing else but one of a deeply personal intercultural meaning-
Without any money involved that time around -
Exactly as what the young dark beauty obviously had intended it to be,
Letting her thereby know that both of them had indeed grasped the mutual unspeakable point of the matter,
And they seized each other's hand spontaneously for a second time,
Completing their intercultural handshake, not without a certain pride,
Both of them smiling and thereafter getting off again on their own ways.
© Erhard Hans Josef Lang
