The Lamps

This is a story about a house and a girl who lived in that house. She was young and she was pretty. She loved her parents and she loved spending time with her grandmother. Her grandmother was some five and eighty years of age and she was as wise as she was kind.

The girl, whose name was I do not know once told me a story her grandmother had told her and about how it was not just a story, but fact. She started hesitantly and then she warmed to her theme and her eyes sparkled as she told me the tale.

Be warned that this is a story about love and it is a story about the past. It speaks at length of memories and of nostalgia. It is a story about fire and a story about the night and the stars.

This is the story the girl told me, when she was herself five and eighty and she told me it was a story as old as her name.

One day, the girl woke up to find that her grandmother was not in the chair she usually sat in. The girl was confused and she asked her father where her grandmother was. Her father looked devastated. He told her that she was gone. The girl may have been little but she was mature. She realised her life had just changed forever.

After her grandmother’s funeral rituals, which involved a priest and a prayer and some assorted fruit, the girl returned to the house. The house seemed emptier without her grandmother there and the girl felt sadness engulf her in a wave. She cried. But, she was also a sensible girl and she soon managed to check her emotions and she remembered all the great things her grandmother had done. The potato salad that only she could make, the stories about her college days and the teachers she had had, and of course tales about her father when he was her age. This last thing was her favourite because she could tease her father afterwards with these stories.

That evening, her father went to the porch and he lit a small earthen lamp, shaped like a teardrop. The girl thought nothing of it at the time, but she noticed that such lamps had been put all around the house. She had fallen asleep and her father must have put these lamps everywhere while she was sleeping.

She asked her father what the lamps were for.

Her father told her that her grandmother had abandoned her physical form, but the soul which resided in that form was beginning a long journey. He told her the lamps were lit for the soul, to light its way along the path it was treading.

The girl wondered where the soul was going. Would the soul need food and water? Who would care for the soul?

Her father told her that souls do not need food. They however leave a little bit of themselves behind in the place their physical form resided. Those pieces are called memories. Her father told her that memories needed to be nurtured for sometimes memories could give power.

The girl said that when it was time for her father’s soul to make a similar journey, that she would light the same lamps for him, so that he would also be able to make the journey along a well lit path.

Her father smiled and gave her a hug and together they looked up at the sky which was filled with stars.

The Bilge Master