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The night the stars put up an exclusive dance
Spice of Life: They came together forming a massive ball of light that pirouetted vehemently and seemed to impishly challenge the luminosity of the full moon
I’m not an astronomer, but my affinity with stars dates back to childhood when I used to spend hours under the canopy of the night sky strewn with thousands of them while sleeping out in our lawn with my mother and grandparents during the summer vacation.
My mother would sing to me about the man in the moon and angels in the stars, who kept a vigil to ensure that each child slept well at night. I used to gaze ardently at these heavenly bodies, expecting to see something unusual and interesting in the sky before falling asleep.
Some stars seemed to smile, while others winked at me. They even played peek-a-boo with me on cloudy nights. I would often skip the family TV time for a prolonged tête-à-tête with the stars. I would whisper my disappointments and failures and shout out my achievements to them and they always seemed eager to listen to me.
Sometimes I would sing and dance and they would respond by twinkling merrily. It seemed as if they wanted to commune with me, but were only looking for an opportune moment, that came years after my son’s birth. My boy, who is a teenager now, too feels the pull of the stars and rushes out to gaze at them as soon as night sets in. Even the chilly winters of the North cannot deter us from a chat with our nocturnal friends.
On a winter night when we were returning home on a rickshaw after meeting one of my friends, we saw some unusually bright stars adjacent to the full moon that shone in all its glory. They seemed to beckon us to stop and look at them. I asked the rickshaw-puller to pull up and as soon as we stopped, those stars started twirling in gracefully synchronised movements that resembled a neatly choreographed ballet in the sky.
They came together forming a massive ball of light that pirouetted vehemently and seemed to impishly challenge the luminosity of the full moon. The brilliant dance continued with the dancing stars suddenly seeming to draw closer to the Earth, apparently bowing to their audience before vanishing into the night sky.
The show lasted several minutes, leaving us spellbound. We waited for a few more minutes for the stars to return, anticipating an encore, but it seemed they had called it a day. We too decided to return home discussing our experience animatedly all the way.
The next morning, we checked the TV news and the newspapers for an explanation of the phenomenon, but there was none. How could such a phenomenal celestial event go unnoticed by space researchers?
The answer was quite clear. The heavenly dance show was an exclusive event intended for a very special audience, comprising my son and me. We were indeed honoured and blessed to have been a part of it. shaheen.parshad@gmail.com
The writer is an Amritsar-based freelance contributor
