Day’s Dark and Night’s Light

 

Rajasthan is the land of desert, valiant Rajputs, marvellous architecture and millions eking out survival from the meagre offerings by nature. The nature itself seems to survive on its famished last crumbs. However, this reticent, unbuckling flora and fauna has its own pertinent, sandy charm.

The Aravali range running north-eastwards from the desert state’s south-central point appears forlorn, denuded, weathered, parched low mountain. After all, it is one of the oldest mountain ranges in India. Its eastern slopes, gradually merging in the Vindhyan highlands, provide a little sip of vegetative solace to the desert state, for here the sands do not shine in their typical hot fury.

The real charm (for the tourist) and horror (for the locals) of the desert sand starts gradually from the western side of the Aravalis. The Aravalis thus stand like a bulwark against the creeping sands from the west. Sadly, as the blatant onslaught of the unchecked human lust plunders the Aravalis of even its famished, stunted mix of subtropical dry deciduous and thorny forests, sparse grasses and shrubs, the low fence is slowly-slowly giving away.

Before the cruel ribbed skeletons of the sand dunes confirm the full hatred of the rain Gods for this deprived land, we come across the western slopes of the mountains covering western Udaipur, eastern Sirohi and eastern Pali. Here we get the stunted forests. Still to the western side, the Luni river fed by its rainy tributaries like Bandi, Sukri, Khari and other lesser streams flashes down in its milder fury during the monsoons, provided the Arabian sea branch of the rain-bearing clouds does not cross over parallel to the low mountains.

When the winds arrive from the north-west and the Aravali puts up some semblance of resistance, the rains reach to the level of 50-75 cm. This is the maximum rainfall and that too when all the climatic factors are beneficent. During that short period of time, the reddish-brown soil, due to its little water-bearing capacity, just abundantly lets the streams on its barren chest in gay abundance. We then have the streams to feed the Luni, which like a life-line amidst the dead soil struggles ahead like a valiant Rajput princess leading her small army against the marauders. The desert river then loses the last vistas of its gurgling presence in the Rann of Kutch.

Starting from the western slopes of the Aravalis, its reddish-brown desert soil slowly turns to dead desert soils. From the base of the old rocky hills, a narrow strip of dwarfish, stunted, wide-spaced growth of trees gives way—almost abruptly—to cacti and stunted acacia. Along the still surviving stream beds, we can spot a bit of semi-desert vegetation of thorny bushes, hardy ferns, acacia, salvadora or peelu trees.

Here lies the district Pali of Rajasthan. During beneficent monsoons—of course a rarity—tiny streams gurgle down the small wooded strip along the western-most slopes of the Aravalis. These little sandy valleys once in a while acquire a rainy river character. However, it is always doubtful whether sufficient rainfall will occur to give enough hydel energy to enable the water from the source to reach the point of merger with river Luni.

Our story starts from a tiny tribal hamlet in the little valley of a rainy stream surrounded by low, weathered crystalline ridges of the Aravali. It was a settlement of the saperas, the snake charmers. There were times when their ancestors provided an almost exclusive form of entertainment to the masses at public squares and to the princes and princesses, Maharajas and later their visiting English guests.

During those happy free times, the Aravalis too boasted of more greenery. However, now the first half of the first decade of the swanky new century gone, times had significantly changed both for the cradle of nature and its child, the human being. Mining for copper, lead, zinc, tungsten, mica, asbestos and unchecked grazing onslaughts by the famished cattle, sheep, goats and buffalos of the sahukars, the mini-landlords, had turned the mountain look far more dreary and desultory than it was just a couple of decades back.

The peasantry on the desert plains struggled with nature to get a sparse field cover of jowar, bajra, maize, barley and cotton. The camels lost the undisputed sobriquet of ‘desert-ship’ as roads came up linking the major cities. However, in the still more famished countryside, they still ruled supreme as the man’s most convenient friend in the hostile sands.

Bhanwar Singh sapera was forlornly returning home after a couple of month’s absence from his tiny tribal hamlet in the Desuri tehsil of district Pali in south-central Rajasthan. Sukri river—a tributary of Luni—starting from its hungry dry mouth in the western slopes of the Aravali range, lay moaning and pining with its dry bed because it was mid-June. The heat was at its peak and dry desert winds sighed from the western side.

With his meagre savings after entertaining foreign tourists in Jaipur, he thought it safe to save some money by avoiding the eventuality of buying a travel ticket. Since railways provide more possibility of a ticketless journey, using his now customary expertise he reached Ajmer by a train. However, here he was robbed of twenty rupees by the ticket checker. In disgust he decided to make up for the loss by spending another day in the city of pilgrimage. From here onwards, cramped in the third class general compartment of a train (with his gourd pipe and snake basket) with pounding heart, he reached Marwar junction.

Heera, the black snake, hadn’t been defanged. He had caught it in Ajmer as it had sneaked into a house and they had called him for the job. After capturing the intruding reptile, the snake charmer had immediately christened him such. Heera was still fanged because its new owner had the more urgent task of catching the train instead of setting down to the task of breaking snake fangs.

He thanked God for allowing him this part of the journey without any untoward incidence such as a snake bite or the appearance of the ticket checker.

In a very cool and calculated manner, he deliberated over the pros and cons of travelling in the same train up to Rani station, nearest to his settlement. However, discarding the idea of a free ride for too long in the same train, considering it greed that would definitely fetch him trouble, he lingered on without moving in the direction of his hutment. So for two more days, his snakes, including the now defanged Heera, swayed in Marwar to the mysterious vibrations of his blowing pipe, the been, the famed spell-binding, almost magical wand to control the snakes.

On the third day, just as a crowded train was about to leave, he sneaked into the overcrowded bogey all along with his provisions, a not so marvellous feat as the stickiest of bums gave him way for the fear of what he carried.

Even his snakes must have heaved a sigh of relief as the thick soles of his leather papooses hit the coal hot platform gravel at Rani. Before reaching Rani, as the train passed over the dry Sukri river, he had paid his homage to the river by tossing a 50 paisa coin into the sand. From here the journey on the road was less perilous, as moving eastwards it cut through the Aravalis on its onwards march. Pleading in a more pitiable tone, graver even than a beggar, he hitched ride on camel carts; then on a truck. He got down where the road passed over the dry river bed and proceeded on foot up the parched stream bed.

From here onwards, the dusty dry river bed, bound by the scantiest of reddish-brown low banks, went south-eastwards to take its faintest of arid valley into the Aravalis. Getting down he smeared his perspiring brow with the dry sand. It gave him a tremendous feel and smell of home. Heat and drought were at its peak. Around him on the tiny rocky mounds even the cacti seemed gasping for breath and moisture. Low thorny bushes scattered over the denuded hills appeared welcoming. Some thoughts were nagging him.

There in a pit on the river bed, some water must have stayed till late summer. But now in its place there was a little patch of salt marsh and in it a fearsome black cobra pair was lost in copulation; gyrating to the surrendering instinct. They coiled around and rose high in the air in their urgency to beat each other’s fanged passion. At the pinnacle of their ecstasy, they rose so tautly high that from a distance they appeared standing on their tails. Their usual slithery, fanged ferocity was buried under the veneer of gay abundance. His snake charmer’s instincts instantly egged him to catch them; but something held him back. And here cradled in the dusty lap of undulating hillocks adorned with summer-parched, pale, widely spaced, coarse carpet of grasses, shiny thorny acacia and euphorbias, he lay down under a desultory kokko tree by the riverbed and watched the mating snakes.

Balancing the wood on his right shoulder bearing the biscuit-coloured raggish, patched sacks containing the snake wicker baskets he moved ahead. In his left hand he held the chief weapon of a sapera, the been, with the pride and majesty of a soldier holding his sword. The first stars were twinkling in the evening sky over the cooling earth when he left the path by the river, took a side turn and ascended the tiny footpath up a smothered ridge to reach his village in its lee, protected from the hot sighs of the real desert to the west.

To this side of the slope adjoining a dry stream bed and almost reaching its margins, a few reddish-brown, semi-arid plots of land had been prepared but these were seedless waiting for the rains. In fact, everything animate and inanimate seemed chanting ‘rain...rain’. Iron oxides present in the weathered old crystalline rocks of the Aravalis gave its reddish, sandy, loamy character to pass off as the natural colour of the place in place of the usual green we associate with the countryside. However, the more everything yearned for rain, the lesser was their capacity to hold water.

Here in this lowland, the soil wasn’t totally barren and yielded coarse grains when it rained.

His family, spread out in the open enclosure surrounded by mud walls around the hutment, met him without any emotion, as if his safe return was almost granted and he had just returned in the evening after setting out in the morning for routine work.

****

The wrinkled brow of his father seemed more worn-out as if some big worry had been pasted on the family patriarch’s broad slanting forehead vanishing under the thick folds of a heavy turban (it is really big and cumbersome in this part of the world to protect against the sun).

It seemed the old man was simply waiting for a fresh ear to vent out his woes.  

‘People from the forest department have made our lives hell since you left. We have been lucky to stay here for I fell at their feet on behalf of the whole clan. But we hear that people in Bali tehsil have been thrown out of their lands. Who cares for the tribals like us? For hundreds of years, we have been living in peace with nature with our starved forests for many generations. Now they say that the land belongs to the mine-owning sahukars and the government!’ he lamented in a piteously drooling tone.

For decades, the fragile eco-system of the Aravalis had been plundered unsustainably, and when the first symptoms of the blatant rape of nature arrived, an overzealous government, silkily following the new-age mantra of the new century, in cahoots with numerous environmental groups, went on to impose many face-lift measures. So under their overarching drive, the tribals were found to be the encroachers who plundered nature. In its spree of zealously declaring areas after areas as protected zones, sanctuaries and national parks, the government dilly dallied with the issues of tribal land rights, while the systematic plunder of the already famished Aravalis by the forest mafia (involving rangers, industrialists, poachers and politicians) continued as before, for they knew how to dodge the law because it was a puppet in their hands.

Sometimes the tribal department officials arrived on the scene. With thumping hearts, the poor inhabitants of this still poorer forest awaited with bated breaths that they might get some semblance of legitimacy in the register of land records. Nonetheless, the forest acts are/were too harsh for the tribals. The mystifying ecological provisions, like a hard task-master, suspiciously look at the areas where these poor people have been living since the time immemorial.

Before the last assembly elections, the election manifestoes of almost all the political parties had cackled:

‘Regularisation of all land records; inalienable forest rights; inheritable rights over the traditionally occupied lands; merciful issuing of lease deeds, etc., etc.’

However, once the new seat of power had been established, all the flimsy ink in the declarations vanished in thin air only to be again raked up at the time of the next elections in future.

****

Roop Singh, his elder brother, had not returned home for the last five days.                       

With six-seven fellow tribals, he was deeper into the Aravalis, seeking fiercest most snakes in those rocky ridges and semi-arid slopes covered with tropical dry thorny bushes, wide-spaced stunted trees of mahua, khair and occasional sheesham. Here surviving on occasional game of hare, birds, jackals—while their goat and sheep herd nibbled at the faded little grass and shrubs to give them some milk—they looked for jahar mora, a black shiny button that allegedly soaked venom when put at the snake bite. It was, they claimed, obtained from a big, dangerous mountain frog. Apart from this, they wandered far and wide into this tropical thorn forest consisting of ber bushes, babool and khardhai for herbs and medicinal plants with miraculous healing properties which they later tried to sell to an almost disbelieving crowd during their snake circus in the streets of the more civilized world.

His father said, ‘Poor Roopa left happily saying that this time he will catch some animals to look like a mini-circus and then showcase these at Connaught Place in Delhi, where angrez log just shower hundred rupee notes like these are mere one rupee coins. The poor boy doesn’t know that the person who told him such Delhi stories has returned like a beggar this time. Poor Ratna...!’

‘What happened to him?’ Bhanwar Singh got worried.

‘He came back lamenting that the big, educated people in Delhi now think that we torture animals. He was beaten up by the police. His snakes, the monkey pair and the pet bear were snatched away like he had stolen these from somebody. It’s a great feat that despite robbed of all his property, he managed to reach here!’

Here as well, like most of the laws that flaunt their muscles only against the weak and the dispossessed, the Wildlife Protection Act, 1970 banning cruelty to animals got suddenly rejuvenated thanks to a fretting, fuming animal activist from Delhi. So the circus industry right from the street-side snake charmers to the big organised circuses with their entertaining trails of animals and artists got almost a fatal blow.

Meanwhile, the real culprits, who plundered Mother Nature at the institutional level, cutting thousands of acres of land on a daily basis, polluting the skies with millions of tons of toxic fumes, smothering life out of the seas with nefarious pollutants, all these and more went with their business as usual with a clean hand and legal documentation.  

****

In front of their tiny hutment, a dusty square was marked by a stunted pair of neem and peepal. The curbing around this pair contained little alcoves where they worshipped the snake Gods and their ancestors. Then there were chambers to put snakes in them. Water was the costliest item for oblations here. Faith can stretch out the last ounce of materialism, so whatever might have been the condition of the drought, these people still offered water and crumbs to the deities, expecting them to make their life better. On these morsels survived ants; on water the neem-peepal pair; and on the living offerings of frogs, lizards and insects the snakes thrived.

‘Kala has stopped dancing to the been tunes,’ Bhanwar said after performing his thanksgiving homage at the holy place.

The morning was changing into noon. The sun was baking hot. His old father put his big bundle of intricately twisted head-cloth on his head and picked up his old, blackened big gourd pipe made of dried vessel of gourd. Its neck was ornately carved and painted. The central bulge or the belly as they called it had little round mirror pieces and coins sticking with gum and tar. From this central bulge emerged two pipes, one longer than the other. The wooden shorter one had modulating air holes and the metallic longer one took those deep bass rumblings and mysterious rhythms to the protruded snake hood.

Drawing his tattered dhoti to hide his private parts while sitting on his haunches, the old man said, ‘Those educated fools say that a snake doesn’t dance to the been’s tunes! I hope Kala hasn’t paid too much heed to their nonsense in the city.’

He grunted and put the lid off the round wicker basket. It was a huge snake. Its coils almost filled up the entire basket. However, it didn’t show any interest in the sudden burst of light. It kept lying as before. Its closed hood was hidden somewhere among the coils; only the tail showed above. With caution the old man tickled the tail.

‘You were out for a long period of time, I hope the nag hasn’t regained its fangs in the meantime! And you are lazy enough not to be bothered about such issues,’ he turned to his son with a stern glare.

Kala didn’t respond. Taking up the snake’s lethargy as a challenge to his art, the mastery of the snake charmer started in full flow and wisdom, its vibrations after hovering over the basket wispily serpented across the coils. It needs a tremendous throw by the blower’s throat to play this instrument. The cheeks and the throat get puffed up almost to their last restraint. The eyes pop out wide, almost on the verge of coming out of their sockets. The throat muscles twist in such a manner that the veins protrude as if the neck has been put in a strangulating noose. The lips have to be pressed so hard against the pipe that they bear permanent marks of puffy craftsmanship.

The old man drew out every ounce of his art and craft to get the snake respond to his tunes. His face was perspiring but he won’t give up. It seemed the old man would faint any moment. Then the cobra rose in its full majesty.

From the corner of his bulging eyes, he saw Bhanwar getting up and touching the feet of the eldest surviving clan member—a sort of patriarch to the snake charming tribals of the area. The old man had witnessed the spectacle. However, more than the feeling of pleasure over this win of the sapera’s dexterity over the snake’s venomous timidity, the clan chief expected the player to come and greet him respectfully. But the player’s success had come at too big a price. So he would rather incur the chieftain’s wrath than lose his pleasure.

Its hood drawn taut, the snake hissed menacingly at the flute end. The deeply rumbling tones seemed to hypnotise it and made it harmlessly sway its hood. The reptile seemed lost, dazed and spellbound as its intoxicated hood gyrated slowly, ponderously in the air, following the gentle sway of the instrument in front of it.

Drawing big sips of success, the old player suddenly clutched at his side in pain. Holding at his stomach with one hand below the ribs, he greeted the old clan leader.

The still elder sapera chided him:

‘It’s not the time to waste your energy like that in a show of arrogance with that snake. Where’ll you play with a snake if the lands are snatched away from us? Our complacency will find us bundled out from our lands, which they say doesn’t belong to us because we don’t possess the chit of paper proving our rights to it. Not only that, they are now forcing us to abandon our traditional occupation. Talks are circulating that in the cities, they now beat the saperas, take away the snakes and set them free in the forest. Damn with the forest and animal laws of theirs! Both our occupation and settlements have become illegal now. Water is just about to cross over the heads. Either we take action or perish. We have decided to sit on a dharna in front of the assembly building in Jaipur, demanding our rights. If they don’t pay heed, we’ll obey their laws. We’ll set our snakes free; but not in the jungles—we will leave the poor reptiles in the very houses of its new friends. We’ll throw them into the assembly building and perish of hunger!’

Writing with pain and clutching the side of his stomach, Bhanwar’s father reasoned, ‘But the police will beat us and put us in jail!’

‘The cowardice of this sort will ring the dooms bell of the adivasi samaj! Be ready with all your snakes, you will get to know the day of the protest march in the meantime!’ the clan leader left the place in a hurry to spread his message across the others hutments in the area.

****

Roop Singh hadn’t returned, nor was there any information about the group that had gone hunting deep in the Aravalis. With the more energetic enforcement of the forest laws, such time-worn and old forays were increasingly coming into the fold of illegal activities now. Systematic plunder by the larger players had of course enforced the legislature to formulate protective legislations, but those bigger players knew it very well how to dodge the executive and the judiciary.

As cosmetic measures to prevent the laws from dying, minor facelift measures like arresting the tribals in violations of the forest laws kept on occurring now and then. Thus, even without his family having any inkling to it, poor Roop Sigh and his friends had been arrested. Crime? They had killed a chinkara antelope. But what about the bigger killers who slaughter entire forests, thus killing not only the antelopes but every species dwelling in the forest? They are not the offenders. They are the lawful parts of the system that decides what is wrong and what is right.

His father was definitely ill. After that excruciating bout of pain that started in his right flank and with tremendous pungency spread to his whole body, he was now crouching almost decimated. Poking his fingers into his ribs, the unregistered medical practitioner in the nearest settlement of the civilised people had declared kidney stone, a big one as if he could see it. Now this stone had become a drag on the old man whose soul once flowed freely, but now the freely sailing ship of yore had been anchored to the stony thing in his physical self.

Rolling the hard-wood frame of a kanjira type frame-drum in his hands, the old man said with a sigh, ‘I don’t know what has taken Roopa so long over there. I’ve polished the frame. All it needs is a lizard’s skin!’

Hunting wild monitor lizards was one of the many other purposes of the visit.

The old man was wearing a home-spun, open-fronted vest of coarse cotton. His dark hairy arms and muscular chest vouchsafed a tough life lived in those trying circumstances. Letting the frame roll in the direction of one of his grandchildren, he got up from the cot and walked with bent back to the hut entrance. He emerged with an old frame-drum with blackened dark-brown skin drawn for some folklore tunes. Its rhythm and deep bass sound had so many times provided company to his dexterous been music while showcasing his snakes.

Beating his fingers on it he started his tale of sorrows, ‘Though vaidya promises to draw the stone through his potions and concoctions, but I doubt his ability. For a month I’m living on practically nothing but his liquids. With the passage of each day the pain is increasing. If you have saved something from the trip then we can visit a doctor in the town.’

‘Why waste their money on your never-dying wish to live forever old man!’ his wife cackled.

‘Shut up you venomous old snake!’ the old man threw the drum at her.

Drawing every single penny from the pockets of all the family members and after borrowing something from the neighbours, they mustered up their cash resources to the tune of 300 rupees. Bhanwar Singh put on his unwashed black long shirt and a similar coloured loin cloth tied in a knot around his waist and tucked the money in the safety of its folds. They set out for the dusty township in the lap of Aravalis.

The X-ray, some medicines and the travelling expanses found them plundered to their last penny. All this had happened while the treatment hadn’t even started. The doctor said he needed an operation and its cost was beyond even the wildest of their dreams. Looking at their famished position, the doctor suggested they could knock at the doors of the civil hospital at Pali. But they will have to buy medicines even there.

Dejected they returned home. Tormented by the pain, the old man ogled at the X-ray film and his bleary eyes stared deep at the place purported to be the stone. Then he poked his finger into his side to arrive at the similar point in his body.

After adjusting his fingers here and there for a while, he sighed with satisfaction, ‘The devil lies here. It’s almost for nothing they want to rob us of plenty of money!’

The emerging bout of pain was making him desperate, leaving him prone to any type of helpless, illogical step.

‘I can cut out the devil myself! Then I’ll put boiled oil with nettles and some other grasses that they say will heal a wound even extending along a completely torn apart body!’

Writhing in pain, he went out and borrowed somebody’s shaving razor in the hamlet. However, the vision of upcoming pain and blood left him cold-footed and he threw away the razor swearing at himself for showing this excitement.

The local herbsman suggested another concoction—the meat of a black buck boiled with some stones, roots and herbs.

‘The killing of a black buck will be like committing a robbery!’ the old man sighed resignedly.

Under the Wildlife Protection Act, it had been declared a protected species.

With tears in his eyes, Bhanwar Singh vowed to hunt a black buck. However, the old man showing surprising calm held him back:

‘Son, it’s better to die than to see the days when you are condemned a criminal for following the occupation of your forefathers; when the very means to save your life and earn your livelihood become the occupation of a thief in the eyes of the government. It’s then better to die of a stone instead of being humiliated and made to die thousand deaths in the form of restricting our movement through our lands like one tries to restrict the passage of free air through the skies. What hope lies when our small time killings of animals and their capture becomes the greatest sin on earth? All this while, they kill far bigger, they kill rivers, forests and this entire earth. Our means to livelihood are crimes and their massacres are mere development. But I can assure you son that these, I mean our innocent takeaways from Mother Nature, are no sins, for if these had been so, the collective sins of our forefathers would’ve sent all of us to hell. It’s no sin to survive like taking honey sips as the bees do without eating the flower itself. The sinners are these outsiders, the big people, who come and break the whole plant; not just the flower...and we become the culprits!’

Exhausted with pain, the old man dozed off.

It was the day of their protest demonstration in front of the state assembly house in Jaipur. The tribals in big numbers had marched to raise a voice for their rights. However, Bhanwar Singh could not join them on account of his father’s ill health. Yet he had donated his snakes for the cause.

‘In case they don’t listen to you, forcing you to let your snakes into the big house, my Kalu will take full revenge from our side!’ he said with moisture in his eyes.

With forlorn steps he ascended the ridge. Reaching its crest dotted with thorny bushes, he put his hand over his eyes to look for any sign of his brother whom he hadn’t seen for many weeks. Mercilessly the hot wind blowing from the thar desert hit his back with a wild dusty fury.