WITH A MARGIN FOR ERROR

The luminous white flowers of the tree jasmine hang inverted, south-side-up, from the crown of unusually tall, lean trees. It is hard not to look up, be struck with wonder at the gleaming flowers that grow upside down and get swayed by their vinous scent.
As a wave of them carelessly float downward with limber grace, I bend to gather them.
On a clear March morning in my leafy garden in New Delhi’s Chattarpur, this simple act of filling the hollows of my palms with milky white tree jasmines infuses me with a sense of airy freedom, a sharp sense of self-awareness and soul-joy. On a scale and intensity I have never felt before.
In the pervasive fragrance around me, I intuit the high notes of yogic liberation. I surrender to this experience, to the world beyond. In complete abandonment. This in my early twenties where life is so piquantly immediate.
Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life. The lines of Omar Khayyam flash through my mind.
Almost immediately, another unsolicited thought follows. What happens when this moment is gone?
Will the unrestrained exuberance and freedom extend past mid-morning? Into the late afternoon? Stretch through the golden dusk and invade the star-brimmed night? Will it flow into days, months and years? Or will my inner sunshine be sun spotted before I can savour it fully?
These questions beg resolution for in this second I have understood what it means to be in a moment and beyond it at the same time.
My ponderings is broken as Tia rushes in. With uncharacteristic briskness, clothes flapping, she hurtles past the multitude of trees where the suspended jasmines wait to detach and make their long descent to the ground like snowflakes. Unseeing of their beauty and unmindful of their heady scent.
I notice instantly that my best friend’s odd mix of features, a square face, wide forehead, high cheekbones and a hawk nose, that make her unusually beautiful, are in a severe state of churn. There is a twitch in her nose. Her eyes dart wildly. Her usually tidy hair is in disarray.
I have my answer in her wrecked composure and the words that tumble out from her mouth, one upon another.
“Rachna has been in an accident. It’s serious. Her car was hit by a truck from behind. Doctors are unsure how she will fare. We need to rush.”
Rachna our feisty friend is a live wire and a huge presence in our lives. A year older to Tia and me, she ring leads many of our dare devilries. A void already begins to form within me.
Personal grief has odd effects. The commotion in our lives in the next hour is hard to describe. We sit coiled together in grief at the hospital. Our tears blur the tubes attached to Rachna and we see only her pale face. We are irate with the injustice of it all, as the mishap is in no way her fault and fight futilely against the situation, the scary finality it holds.
In this quandary, the irony of our situation descends on me. Today is March 20. The international happiness day.
Should we all be in pursuit of happiness, and the sense of freedom that accompanies it, if these virtues escape us before we begin to count on them? If the idea of everything changing, moving, revolving and flying away is true, isn’t the attempt to root them an unwise enterprise?
The violation of a child, end of a friendship, rift with a sibling or a lover’s tiff – any and all adverse circumstances – can after all make off with our sense of the self. And rock our worlds in an instant.
I am deeply disoriented.
Next day, while we keep vigil over Rachna at the hospital, I bring up the happiness day issue with Tia. What does she make of the happiness index as a measure of joyfulness? Can we retain joy and freedom when there are so many misfortunes around the bend? Is there another way of seeing?
Tia muddies my hopes. She brings up fresh concerns. “Should we dare to universalise these emotions when happiness and freedom mean different things to different people?” she asks.
“Some seek solace in ordered lives and lean towards the proclivities of right side of their brain. They use logic, commonsense and analytical reasoning to channel their lives into paths of measured certainties. Others live off-centered lives, veering perilously away from the beaten track, filling their lives with passions and yearnings of all manner, poetry and music. Yet others live lives based on their own truths,” she explains.
So my point is this, she says. “The left and right sides of the brain will be in perpetual quarrel. And if one point of view is the accepted norm at any given point in time, should the other reality suffer for simply for being the other. Is there anything like the absolute truth?”
Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud throws another damper. “What we call happiness comes from the satisfaction of needs that have been dammed up.” Is he right about the chase being nothing but self-absorption? Is the search for happiness and freedom as prosaic as this?
If the definition of happiness and freedom is a problem, is it any wonder that the answers on how and where to find them are evasive, eccentric and even inglorious? Will the World Happiness Report 2017 report be resolute in its answers?  I attempt to know.
It shows a tightly packed bunch of countries – Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland – to top the happiness index. Factors supporting their happiness are caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance.
To me it reads: if you are white, good, law abiding and eat salmon daily you net happiness and several good-nesses. Measuring happiness and freedom with such weights and measures is facetious as what we call happiness and freedom surely and squarely evades precision. I am disappointed.
Bhutan believes that happiness and freedom comes from being left alone. “Limited exposure to foreign culture” and “local community vitality” kept Bhutan high on the happiness list for years. But what happens when you are a multi-cultural society? Will one community’s vitality cause another to feel sidelined?
Understandably, India is nowhere in the list. Perhaps because our countless philosophers and spiritualists, blessed with an inner vision – that capsules centuries of seeing and knowing – have insisted happiness and freedom to be a state of mind…of a limitless kind that expands far beyond the present into a sort of everlastingness.
A state within oneself really. Where what we refer to as happiness and freedom remain unmoved and invincible by daily occurrences and emotions, good, bad or indifferent. The land, the societies we live in, in this case is not the territory for the quest. You could be in a prison yet happy and free.
Should not this secret of inner equipoise, of not allowing joy and freedom a shape, size, feeling, place or timeline, be the answer I am looking for?
It is not. The tree jasmines have allowed me a glimpse of eternity, yet one that was ephemeral. By this logic, cannot say goodbye to the only self I know. One mired in the business of daily consequences. I need answers from the febrile, roiling mess that is my everyday life. The idea of seeking joy and freedom in the calm and infinite spaces of the mind is too far removed from my worldview for now. Its aesthetics mysterious and alien. Rachna’s brush with fatality is a reminder of this. I cannot bring myself to accept the idea of the continuum of life and death as yet. I see only the finish line.
I guess Tia grapples with the same muddle: making a choice between immediacy and infinitum.
She and I have purposefully started a new ritual. We frequent a coffee house that doubles up as a bar, serving warm latte art in the morning and frosted beers in the evenings. It is peculiar but fulfills our unusual needs. The need to assuage our grief, search for answers and keep hydrated in body and mind.
We use this watering hole as our daily base to make regular hospital trips to visit Rachna and keep a close watch on her, hoping she will call out us to us. To life. We meet here daily as much as to understand where to point our happiness-freedom search compass.
We hope to one day truly understand whether the pursuit of happiness and freedom is individual and fleeting, enduring and universal, be found in isolation or within societies, lives within the mind or in a special way of life or whether the quest is metaphorical, sociological, psychological and political or all of all of it.
Or whether there is something called happiness or freedom? Are they just trap words, ones that aim to convey states of existence that are griefless?
We hope to leave margin for error as we search.
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