While going through Kulwant Singh Gill's poetry, a sense of spiritual awakening grips us, a quest haunts the passionate pilgrim who goes about counting the scattered beads of meditation. In Flower Children, he talks of the Western people on their way to find peace in India which is but in non-attachment and the realization of the self, Tat-tvam-asi, Sat-Chit-Ananda. The poet feels enigma when being drawn by the sweet scent of the lass passing, the wisp and whiff breaking his sadhna of meditation. This is what he says in Enigma.

Now say you, what should he do? Should he continue with his sadhna or not? The girl too is ravishingly beautiful. Sweet scent and spray of perfume are mesmerizing him and he feels drawn towards her inwardly.

When she glides him past, a waft of perfumes does it the rounds and he feels moved by the scent coming from, stirring the senses, shaking his soul.

This is as if his sadhna were broken, disturbed. Suppose you a Buddha is sitting before in meditation and a beauty passing through with the tinkle of the anklets and sounding bangles. Now how to pass the test of sadhna? How to debar sensuality disturbing the inner self of austerity and ascetic conformity?

His sadhna seems to be nowhere, disturbed by her strange presence and the citadel defence levelled. Is she God-sent to disturb? Beauty, love and lust, these in reality break the concentration of the mind ever rising in spiritual quest, expansion and culmination. How to describe it the joy of finding her? How to describe it the pain? Now what will it happen to my years of tapasya if I could not keep myself in restraint? The poet’s tapasya the apasaras, nymphs and fairies disturb it to be broken and gone in waste.

What is all this which he does not understand it? Is her beauty which is so ravishingly beautiful? Or, it is his love and lust, infatuation with, passion for loving which draws him closer to her? Can a flower be averted from seeing? Beauty is for to see. Passion is for to restrict us sometimes, but do we remain successful in restricting us? We succumb to all that.

As you glided past me
the waft of perfume
stirred my senses
and shook my soul.

You limpid, lustrous, love-lorn eyes
battered the citadel
of my ascetic defence
and vouchsafed a vision
of joyous-pain immense.

Was it your beauty
or my ego  inflate
that made you a fairy
in the book of my fate?

The poem ‘Enigma’ has been included in Scattered Beads published by Writers Workshop, Calcutta in 1989.