Rojee talks about a silent desert, a shepherd, and a journey of wonder—where questions fade, stars whisper, and meaning lives between footsteps, for Different Truths.
Once, you may have crossed a desert with a shepherd, the only companion, and you know it is not sand that gets you, it is silence.
The silence does not fall all at once on you. It starts with the gentle crunch of every step on the moving dunes, which even in this immense space are so inoffensive that it almost appears to have become the property of infinity. The horizon itself is soon enough a sort of cheat–it never moves, you never get closer to it, no matter how long you go walking. Air feels old, dry and alive as it seems to know every pilgrim who has trodden this path before you.
The shepherd is not a man like one you’ve ever seen, not in a hurry, the sun burns above; not yet weary, the night grows cold. His voice, when he utters it, is not inserted into some pre-existing silence; it forms a part of it, meanders onward in front of you as a filament of smoke before the wind. His speech does not appear to be intended so much to fall on your ears as upon the desert itself, as though now the dunes were hearing.
For one morning, he came to the top of one of those dunes. Plainly, he kneels and grasps a handful of sand. carefully, religiously, he allows it to drop through his fingers. The grains will shine momentarily in the sun only to die down on the seashore once again.
As it was, everything, he mumbles, was once something.
You would like to know what he means, but the question turns to ashes in your throat. He is already looking towards the horizon, which is something like looking at a scripture written in both light and distance.
Much later, when the air is curved into waving mirages by heat, he points upwards. One hawk swoops against the hostile blue sky.
It is not hunting, he adds. It is waiting for the opportune time. To attack early is to have lost. There is not too big a distance between being too late and starving. The hawk is acquainted with the time of survival.”
Weeks drag into weeks, spun of sun and shade, heat and cold. Of the desert, there are no roads; but the shepherd walks as though a path were marked before him by the finger of God, in a cypher which only he can read. The longer you track him, the more you find the burden of your pack lifting-not by virtue of your eating out of it, but by the weight of your doubts falling away. Your questions are no longer shouting answers.
At night, you start thinking of the stars in a new way –not so much as far-off lights, but as hushed companions. When you are next before dawn, you observe the slight variation of the wind, how the dunes hum when the wind passes over them. What had appeared as an emptiness is now full of incognito plenitude. It has its teachers, too, and the most important of these, the teacher of the desert, is the desert itself, and this is its lesson: that nothing will be found sheerly wasted.
And then, when you are amid the journey, and already think that you are lost in the middle of nowhere, there is an oasis on the way that you did not notice an hour ago. Palm trees move in the evening wind. The sky is reflected on the water just as in a perfect mirror. The atmosphere is buzzing with tranquillity that surpasses sleeping, and you know this is the first time you have lived in peace.
The shepherd sits next to you on the side of the water. He reaches into his battered satchel and pulls out a little leather-bound book that is worn a bit by time and travel. He keeps it in his hand for a long time, and it seems like he cannot permit it. Then he quietly repeats with his final gesture, handing it into your hands.
And this, he says as he looks steadily in your eyes, is not the end of your journey. Tell you why you started, yes, but it will tell you why you started.
You unlock the cover. The ink upon the first page sparkles out in the dimming light, like life at last, like a thing written not with pen but with hearsay.
It reads: “Here is a wonder of Paolo the Alchemist, congratulations that you have read it. What you are looking in the desert is not in there, but it is in the steps that you even ventured forth.”
Picture design by Anumita Roy
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