When luciole & jugnu became one

She was a flicker of light in the dark night. We met 50 years ago in our student days in Paris. On the birth of our first child, a daughter — Sandrine — she wrote a poem, Lucioles (Jugnu), that flicker in the dark nights of sawan. Our frequent visits to Leh sort of converted her to Buddhism. She translated Japji and Jap Sahib into French, also a number of other classical texts of Punjabi language and culture. Some of them were published along with my writings. Others are preserved in a manuscript, Echos du pays des cinq rivieres (Echos of the country of five rivers). Sandrine became chief of a section in the Archaeological Survey of France. The other two children, Eric and Anila, continued with their academic careers.

There are so many myths about the lucioles. In the days of yore, in the now forgotten and almost lost past, there were no electric lamps, not even earthen ones. So, it appears, the artists and writers used to have these jugnus in transparent vases. It is in the paisible sight of these beautiful creatures and their soothing light that some of the masterpieces of the ancient world were composed.

When the evening dawned, when the scorching heat and the burning light of the sun faded away, the scribes and philosophers sat down under the flickering light of these marvellous creatures, and far from the madding crowd, meditated and reflected upon the affairs of this world — the world that was not always very sympathetic and gentle — and discerned and articulated the wisdom of the cosmic universe. Even our grandmothers and great-grandmothers sought their light to wind up the small chores of the day.

After a few years in India, in Patiala, she wrote a doctoral thesis on the phrase structure of Punjabi for the University of Sorbonne, Paris, and continued to teach there. The family was physically separated, between Paris and JNU, but like the flickers of the jugnus, there were frequent reunions with travels throughout the length and breadth of Bharat. The night was always dark, but there were flickers of light with new adventurous ideas and thoughts in our intellectual pursuits.

So, it continued for 50 long years in this mundane world of strife and struggle, of jealousies and friendships, of faiths and betrayals. And on the evening of April 23, the luciole, Daielle Gill, had her last flicker at her home in Paris, a home which was once visited by a number of highly distinguished academicians of France.