Gone with Colours and a Smile

 On Holi the colours go riotous. It comes with spring, rejuvenation, resurrection and blossoming. The rigidities melt and stiffened souls flow to embrace a bit of fun, a bit of sunshine. Everybody takes a sip from the weather’s cool cocktail. And the effects go cutting across ages. Childhood dawns.

Colours fly, water is raining around, although there is no rain. Even mud finds a way, especially when playfulness mixes with the speedy horses of angry mischief. The drunkards dance as women beat them. The drinkers have a heyday. Bhang flows unchecked. There are cries: playful, challenging, querulous, sneering, sniping, chiding, mocking, and above all flirting. As the floodgates of festivity get opened, inhibitions and taboos take a backseat and people enter the zone of a rare freedom, a chance let-looseness: flirting, teasing bonhomie.

We celebrate the festivals for life, love, hope, light and keeping the dreams alive. And when there is a death in the near neighbourhood, within a fortnight or so of the festival of colours, the spirit gets damp. The colours get a black cast in the mould, some extra mixing, a discoloration.

The old lady was on her deathbed for the last three months. An averagely good woman, but more importantly very unfortunate, was the summary of her life when people discussed her plight and even prayed to God for a hasty, smooth and painless end. For that would be a relief to the good old lady, a painless death.

Such suffering puts up a speed-bump even on the life-road of those around. All of us fear the same fate; so like a horrible nightmare, wish a prompt end to the tale of agony that reminds us of the inevitable chapter in everyone’s life. But then Holi was approaching. If she had died within weeks before Holi, the colours would have been lost. But as it happens, such last sufferings get prolonged—extended to break the last sinews of attachment still clinging to the body, to free the soul. Surviving on water just by tea spoons, the old woman kept hanging there between life and death.

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She was deaf due to old age and missed most of the words shouted almost into her ears. But then sometimes unwanted comments and jibes sneaked into her ears like a distant golf-shot incidentally falling straight into the hole. And then it would create a ruckus. 

It was on Holi that her life went colourless. Not once but twice, one exceeding the other in the measurement of pain and loss. A few decades back, it appears like ages now, she then a young wife disposing household chorus like a nimble-footed sprinter, one-year-old boy suckling her full breasts, singing lullaby and mollycoddling, was preparing to participate in the festival of colours.

In the black and white of a tough peasant life, Holi stood out as a colourful intervention, when all their life’s rough and gruff melted in the coloured waters, gulaal, street mud, beatings, drunken sprees, and quarrels that arose like water bubbles and went down unnoticed.

Her husband was known among the rural hamlets as the master crafter of wheat-chaff domes. Massive, almost three storey high domes of wheat-chaff bore a testimony to his craft. These were storage structures, storing hundreds of quintals of the dry fodder meant for the off season usage. The circular base, made of the hard stalks of dried arhar, was dug into the ground. Over that bajra stalks and paddy hay was built into circular layers in conjunction with the wheat chaff filling inside inch by inch, hard pressed by stomping feet. The ropes made of reed and hemp took it upwards to end into a well proportioned and perfectly symmetrical dome, ready to save the storage mound against the worst of weathers. Of course it required special expertise, matching that of a weaverbird’s effort in notching out the marvel of a nest in terms of safety and symmetry.

Two days before the festival of colours, a rainstorm had lashed the farming hamlet. Lightning struck and blew away the crown of the chaff mound. If further rain fell, water would seep from the top to spoil the entire dry fodder. So on this day of Holi, before surrendering to the fun and funstery of it, her husband, after being repeatedly requested by the neighbour to repair the open-skied chaff store, got onto the top and started with his expert hands. It was a sight to watch him working so diligently almost three storey high in the sky. All was going well. But then accident takes the fraction of a second’s goof-up, just like normal routine needs miles of straight moments. He slipped, fell headlong , broke his neck and died.

The death and tragedy overwrote the festival with its swiping black colour. The festivity was gone. Colours were banished from her life and she got a permanent white as her identity. And life moved on.

In the black and whites of a widow’s life, she still had some colours hidden deep in her dreams for her son whom she brought up single-handedly, sweating out on the plot of arable land. Irrigated with the moisture of her sweat and blood, manured by the maternity of her motherly self, the flower blossomed. He turned out to be a handsome young man and was readily taken by the army.

Post training, his first posting was in Kashmir, the state that was on boil in 1989. Post a horrid winter, while the ice was thawing, and spring was beckoning all humans to calm down and listen to its open-armed charms, the turmoil touched a new peak as casualties touched a new high on both sides in the spring of 1990. There was another young soldier from the same village in the company.  Their patrol was ambushed by the militants. Amidst fierce gun battle, the widow’s son fell to bullets. It was found that he had died while attempting to save the life of his fellow villager.

Blood spread with a sprawling sanguineness on the melting snow. It was a Holi of agony and pain. Elsewhere in the plains, including their village, people were busy in obviating the miseries of a hard life in the coloured frenzy. Barely recognisable, panting with riotous play, surrendered to the spirit of the festival to deface their mundane existence, they stood stunned, as the news reached them in the evening. Again the black shades had been splashed suddenly by destiny.

This time Holi had robbed her of the colours of her dreams. Her plaintive wails killed the last trace of festivity hiding in some part of the village. Holi had restamped its authority to drive away all colours from her life.

There was another common thread which separated the tragedies by two decades. The soldier, whose life the widow’s son had saved, was the grandson of the chaff mound owner, repairing which the dead soldier’s father had fallen down. This fact rose over the merciless paradox of Holi repeatedly robbing someone’s colours, first from the real life and then from the dreams also.

She cursed Holi as much as she cursed the family which unfortunately, accidently, came to be linked to the tale of her irreparable loss. After that they couldn’t so much as raise their eyes if they happened to face her. It was a meek acceptance of their incidental link to the tragedies in her life. Not that the rest of her year was better, but come Holi and her soul would burn in the boiling cauldron of limitless agony.

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Since the last week before Holi, anybody could have said she may die any moment. However, the feeble flicker kept on burning, as if it didn’t want to become the reason for postponing the colourful fair by one year. And then there was the Holi dawn. She was taking last laboured breaths. The festival started with its customary worship at the shrine of the village God. Then gulal-smeared children ran amuck through the streets, men-folk got to drinking in order to benumb the senses against beatings, ladies prepared hunters of twisted cords of headgears, which otherwise keep them chained into docility and obedience in the patriarchal society. But today the roles were reversed. For 364 days of submissions and even thrashings, they donned the role of beaters on this special day.

It was then the same thing: children shouting and clapping, men mimicking bravery, while the women pounded then like they were letting out all the pent-up fury born of their subservient position in the male-dominated society.

The festivity was on its downslope—with ladies all drenched and smeared in every possibly way, and the men with dead tired bodies still holding ground to keep their sense of victory even today.

Around four in the afternoon the news spread. It might be the end. People gathered around her cot. She was dragging her breath with a guttural sound. Her mouth was open and dull grey eyes, sunk deep in her skull, had a look of overawe and fear like you are face-to-face with the fearsome unknown. She already looked like a corpse.

A little boy from that family, which destiny had put up as a sorrowful factor in her tragic life, all smeared in colours, was also standing near the cot. From nowhere her eyes rested on him. With one last effort in her life, she raised her hand in his direction. They pushed him forward. The scared little boy bent over her. God knows from where did she manage even that much of life. She moved her finger to take off a bit of gulal from his cheeks and put in on her forehead. Her eyes closed, as if she was wishing herself happy Holi, a smile surfaced on her shrunk lips. The smile remained, and the eyes closed forever.

She was gone with a bit of colour and a faint smile. She had crossed a milestone to start again. 

A night with a corpse is too long and unbearable in a Hindu house. Funeral was to be arranged before the sundown. If they missed the deadline then the ordeal of nightlong sitting around the dead body, placed on the ground, awaited them. Of course anybody alive, and wanting some rest after heavy drinking and Holi lynching, would prefer rest in bed instead of guarding a corpse.

With sobered senses, beaten bodies and unrecognisably smeared in colours, the erstwhile revellers, like sleepwalkers, got busy with the funeral procession, most of them drunk dead, trying their best to force sobriety and sense, to hold ground, to walk straight, and talk without a slip of tongue. The dead have their right to respect. They knew this. The setting sun seemed to make up for mourning through its pale rays. It was a queer funeral procession. Their glide down from the high plane of festivity had been suddenly checked, and the happening like a strict and unsparing teachress put them in a line to behave themselves.

In intoxication, a man isn’t completely in control of the reins over his emotions, so tears which would never have seen the tired sunrays flew freely in many eyes, the eyes that hardly had seen the old woman on the deathbed of late. Many were freely philosophical about the questions of life and death. The procession walked silently. The drunk mass minding its steps pretty well. The biggest onus was on those shouldering the arthi. They had to walk without the slightest falter in steps. It was such a task at hand. Some steps still staggered.

When the pyre burnt much to their collective relief, many a battered limb felt the soothing warmth. Their conscience then repulsed all such feelings of ease and comfort at the pyre-side.