Flying with Broken Wings

 

It’s the last week of September succulent with ripe Dushera-time festivity. Normally it should have been bright and sunny, but then nature flummoxes, as much as we humans also do the same to it. Due to a climatic depression over the North West of India, it has rained almost continuously for the last two days. It cannot be worse for the richly grained paddy, which is sure to fall flat among the slushy fields, bringing the customary losses to the farmers, and in its wake hardly ruffling any feathers because the farmers are more attuned to losses than profits.

After two days of breaking many a farmer’s hearts, it stops drizzling on the third afternoon, and life immediately jumps to chug along the rain-soaked terrain.

Mehar Singh hopefully looks at the streaks of sunlight smiling like a child across the edges of a black cloudy dome. He feels happy about this sunny victory over the cloud. It’s a victory with which he easily identifies many correlates from his mundane life as a common man.

He has already cleaned his green TVS moped that just smells fuel to run smartly, as he proudly puts it, instead of guzzling loads of fuel like bigger vehicles with more speed, noise and the resultant accidents.

‘I don’t need fast speed. I am satisfied with its slow-paced run. And it just purrs softly,’ he never misses an opportunity to proudly sum up the benefits of his little moped.

There is a customized carrier attached at the back on the pillion seat to load the rolls of cot-making ropes and strings. He tightens the hold over the load, and then checks his tool bag having hammer, pincers and knife slung around the moped’s handle. He is full of enthusiasm for a professional outing. Whatever the shortcomings, these may linger on in some other departments but not at least in the domain of his spirits.

His 15-year-old daughter is worried that the weather may turn bad again. He laughs away her concern. Matarani will get me something for you. His daughter is fasting during the navratras. He assumes and wishes, almost blesses her in this regard, that if not for himself but at least for her fasting self the pious goddess will be kind enough to help him get some customers this afternoon, even though it’s too late for a touring cot-maker to set out at this time of the day.

As they say, a day is never enough for all those who don’t have a regular source of income and have to beat hunger, employing all that the sun can offer to light their steps most judiciously, fighting with frenzied ingenuity of effort every time they go out. There are no carry-overs to act advantageously in your favour. It’s a new war every time you set out. 

He is 50-year-old, but just like any other man struggling to survive using more of hands and less of brain, looks aged and beaten beyond his years. He is dark, gray-haired, gaunt, smelling of that typical smell of poverty: soot, grime and sweat topped with a drop of alcohol. He doesn’t drink though, but the hard distillation of life leaves enough alcoholic, painful remnants over people’s lives. It makes them forgetful of better luck and better times, makes it bearable at least, a sort of developing thick skin.

The street is muddy. His daughter looks with concern as he moves to the moped to kick-start it. For what it may, it’s the start of a short trip across the neighbouring villages in the hope of fixing a cot somewhere. For a poor man every chance to earn an extra farthing is as bright as a wealthy man making millions.

Although he is on the older side of age, consequent to his years plus poverty, yet he possesses baby steps. He walks with as much delicacy of caution and genteel spirit shown by a baby while balancing itself during the first tottering steps. He drags his feet, taking one more, then another, then another, each step a milestone, on the shaky stage that life is. It seems like he is walking on stilts, almost on wooden legs that don’t obey the calculations of his brain as the limbs in upper part of his body do. His torso appears relatively bigger on his thin legs.

His daughter seems to run to help him, but then stops herself because that is the point where his fine temperament loses balance to turn to anger. To turn it a matter of more concern, he doesn’t take his support-stick on his outings as a professional, possibly in order to avoid the bigger handicap of managing it in travel as well as while on the work.

Of his weak legs, the left leg is still weaker. Reaching the tiny, heavily laden moped, appears a milestone, and kick-starting another; followed by a string of unending challenges. For a person of disability, life is never in auto mode, like the luckier ones who can afford to be on off-guard assured by a safe, confirmed routine. It’s never-ending manoeuvring. But then that’s the best meaning of life: making every second count; making every step matter. At each step it means avoiding a fall, so at each stride there is a victory to cherish. And he manages it most of the time.

With extra effort he lifts his almost lifeless leg to put it on the kick-starter. The machine responds to his push, it purrs to life in one stroke. This success, this surety of the single kick-start, and a liability also because he cannot afford to pound strike after strike in a barrage of strokes on the kick-starter on a lazy machine, comes at an extra cost to his resources.

The engine of his moped has to be extra alert to cover the space left vacant by his disability. The machine thus needs more-than-regular service. He may fail to take medicines while sick, but he doesn’t show any trace of carelessness in getting his moped serviced well before the due date. The moped’s health is more important for this man who has a full disability card issued by the state health department.

The tiny engine purrs with life and away they go. His hard-fought caution and the vehicle’s small wheels working in combo for a little chapter of common success on a mundane day in the life of a poor man.

Now the cot-maker would go into the streets of one of the neighbouring villages shouting charpai banwa lo—get your broken cot renetted and fixed. A cot is still a prominent item of utility in the countryside. While at work, he folds his legs in somewhat half vajrasna posture, the knees supporting the ground, the toes turned to support his bent back because he cannot go down beyond a certain angle.

His hands have gained where his legs lost. These are strong hands. They have to put some extra effort to support him. So his tough hands and still stronger willpower take on the job as he expertly weaves ropes to construe a taught, nicely patterned cot-netting. At other times, he is pummelling down the wooden frame bars with his hammer to crush any asymmetry in the constitution. At still more times, he is expertly repairing the charpoy legs. The enforced habit of moving slowly, and not running after too many things in life, seems to have given an expertise in the art to him.

Engaged in his business, you just cannot make out that it’s a disabled man at work. He is taking life fully head-on like anyone around.

A bad situation disabled a part of his body, but his spirit seems unscathed. It happened 15 years back. He used to sell rolls of woollen thread to earn a living for his family comprising a wife and three children, one girl and two boys. His wife was pregnant with their fourth child at that time.

He had travelled by a state roadways bus. The moment he got down, a bike hit him, plunging him down with full force. His upper back hit a brick. Snap. He heard the sound. Don’t think anyone around heard it, but he heard it louder than any noise in life. It was inside him. Sharp, shrill and sinister. A part of him broke down. The creepy sound which left its everlasting imprint on his each step, every moment, veritably each thought. It still flashes, sending tremors of fear, agitation and hopelessness across his frail body.

The PGI Rohtak, crammed to the gill with overflowing miseries, nonchalantly took this another unfortunate patient. So much was needed to be done at the government medical institution but the resources always fell short and the number of poor patients kept piling up. At state hospitals your agony and disease needs to be lesser than the others to give you any chance of recovery. The relentless tale of the patients’ miseries subdues all efforts to bring sanity and order.

He kept lying there for a couple of months, was shifted from one dirty, overflowing ward to another, and helplessly shared bed and miseries with other patients.

All that an overworked, helpless government doctor can tell a critically injured poor man is: ‘It’s God’s will, pray to God!’

Faith is the best pill they can offer, their efforts and resources always falling short in the face of unending beelines of patients.

He was paralysed neck down. The doctors told his wards to seek miracle from Gods. Medicines they said can be continued till their economy allowed them, which won’t be too long given the fact that they hardly possessed any resources.

After almost rotting in dirty sheets, in pitiful wards, bedsores made hospital a place of greater misery than a station of hope and relief. They brought him back, not exactly looking for a miracle, but expecting to see him through the final leg in his journey, peeing and shitting in bed.

It’s the phase in life when the caretakers, fed up with the stench of death, want actually to be relieved of the onerous task and to clear their conscience they have to say, ‘Only death can relieve him of the pain and suffering.’

Lying he was there, a burden, a shitty stinking creature, closer to death than life. He ranted a lot at his wife, who in the final stages of her pregnancy bore through the soon-to-end, as she helplessly assumed, barrages of foul words brimming over her husband’s lifeless lips. Using his only working faculty, his tongue, he threw abuses at her while she helped a beedi to his mouth. He simply took long draughts to convince himself that he was still alive.

He cursed the cot, the famed Indian charpoy. If you hit the cot, permanently or semi-permanently, it will eat you up, they maintained. To be alive meant you spent the minimum time of your waking hours on the cot. The more of your waking hours spent on the cot, the germs of death crept closer to you. With him lying on it all the time, death was guaranteed, slowly like termites eating the roots.   

He felt creepy, crawly creatures swarming his brain, emerging from the cot-netting, crawling over the bar and coming onto his face. He hated his cot more than anything else in the world. In fact, he hated all and everything in the world. After all, you cannot die as a loving person, liking everyone and everything around. All was well with the world while he was dying. He hated everything even more for this.

While he was withering, as they surely expected him to, his wife gave birth to a pair of twins, a boy and a girl, slightly bigger than the rats in the house, each weighing less than a kilo. The doctor declared them to be critical like their cot-ridden crippled father.

While they were taking them to another doctor, Mehar Singh, a bit in control of his mind and emotions, put up an effort to say, ‘Ask the doctor to save at least the girl’s life. Otherwise the people will say that to breastfeed the boy we allowed the poor girl to die.’

They looked at him in surprise. After a long time he seemed in tune with his usual upright self.

All of us have our own share of miracles, so even this poor family had theirs. The twins survived. The doctors told this fact very clearly to them.

Now the girl, the lakshmi of the house, is considered lucky by her father for more than one reason. She keeps navratras and counting on whose luck he sets out on a rain-stormed afternoon, hoping her prayers will get him something during what little remained of the day.

Well, going back to his post-injury times. Even the most optimistic souls hardly expected a miracle in this case. All accepted the countdown to his demise. But then fate stumps us. It plays its offbeat cards sometimes, so that we continue holding onto the myth of miracles. For the concept of miracles to survive we need to have them now and then.

A poor, paralysed man needs miracles more than anyone in the world. And luck sometimes favours the poor as well. 

Mehar Singh’s sister was married in some village in a neighbouring district. A man in his thirties was shouting in her street, ‘Khatmal maarne ki dawa lo!’

It was a cot-bug killing potion seller.

Now definitely there was a link: the cot, bugs, death and the poison. Miracles have their own magical potion.

The bug-killing medicine vendor had a bagful of unknowable potions made of his secret formula as he boasted. A group of women was haggling around him in gossip. The topic of paralysis somehow cropped up given the womenfolk’s flippancies hurtling in all directions on a range of issues when they gather at a place. Paralysis, the ill-famed lakwa. Some word, in some phrase, caught it and brought the topic to the centre-stage. The word crept up in the discussion like it was a bedbug to be annihilated under his thumbnail.

She told him about her brother’s plight.

‘Everyone says now he will only shit in the bed till he dies,’ sisters always have sobbing emotions for their brothers.

He made five pudiyas of a henna-like greenish powder.

‘Don’t blame me if his death comes speedier. In any case, he will die as you say. But with this, he may have a shot at life,’ he absolved himself of any unseemly consequences.

They deliberated a lot over the powder before finally taking a chance. A chance at life, in the face of sure rotting death, came out to be a better bargain.

Fifteen years later, Mehar Singh can claim that nothing can taste more bitter and horrible than the paste he was force-fed, either to die swiftly, or to live at least a non-shitty life.

He still remembers, over all the tastes of life, the taste of that green powder, like he does, and will do so throughout life, the crack-snap sound which overhauled his life in a moment.

After administering the paste, thus taking doctoring in their own hands, once the real doctors had failed, or call it this way that his poverty took him only to a point in the healthcare system where the doctors just declared it a will of God the moment you needed critical care, they waited in anticipation.

He felt like throwing up. His innards retched. But nothing would come out except saliva and white froth bubbling over the lips. His pupils dilated. Death’s churning they suspected and looked at each other, blaming and pardoning each other at the same time. ‘It was the will of God,’ they had accepted it long ago.

He felt like throwing out all of his innards but nothing except white foam came out. A strange revulsion was cascading through his wooded body. Late in the night they kept a watch over him, holding a glass of Ganga jal, the holy water, to give him a sip at the final breath that would absolve him of all worldly sins.

However, instead of fading away, deep down somewhere in the mysterious corridors of life and death, where the agents of living and fatality are busy in an endless combat, he was clawing his way back. This again he will remember throughout life. The touch of his fingers on the rope-netting of the cot. The touch of life.

By the sunrise next day, his hands miraculously stretched out. He could move them back over the head like you raise hands when asked to surrender with the only difference being that here it wasn’t surrender. It was subtle triumph. It was like a creaking, wooden scarecrow holding out hands to scare away the birds. Instead of the birds, his wards got scared. They took it to be the death rattle, as if his soul was escaping through the raised hands.

There was hardly any hope. The people from neighbourhood gathered to arrange the cremation. The relatives were summoned. Mehar Singh but flummoxed them all with a smile and a desire to have the worst-tasting paste again, not that he liked it, but because it seemed a ladder out of the well of death.

For the next four days, they served him the paste made of one pudiya each day. And miracles do happen, because they simply do. He could hold a beedi in his half-alive fingers. He felt like a King holding the baton of supreme authority.

For the time being, the mysterious concoction seemed to kill the bugs of mortality and tilt the scale in favour of dear life. They ran to sought out the bug-killing medicine seller. He of course, as can be expected, increased the price manifold and gave them 15 more pudiyas.

Each time it tasted worse than before, but he wanted more of it. One per day, at any cost because he was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, even though it found him sweating like a pig with the effort to swallow the impossible-to-eat thing.

They ran to get more of the pudiyas. His upper body got some faint traces of creepy sensations, a pre-sign of some jerky mobility. Waste up he could feel the faint trace of being alive. Another month down the line, his semi-wooden legs saw him taking much-laboured short, shaky movements with the help of a stick.

Now he wanted those pudiyas more than he needed the air.

‘Just one more month and even my legs would have cured fully,’ he says with a shadowy grudge which casts a cloud of gloom over his fighting spirit.

Well, the chance winds of luck rarely see us perfectly through to the shore. There is always something more that could have been done.

Mehar Singh ran out of his sip of luck after a couple of months of miraculous unspooling of the knot of fortune. It got stuck again. The bug-killing medicine vendor vanished from his rented room. Many said he was under debt and ran into anonymity to avoid debt trap and start a fresh innings somewhere else. Mehar Singh felt like a batsman getting out in nineties. So near, yet so far.

For a poor man the stroke of luck is never sufficient.

He was back in the stream of life, though with stiff legs that moved slowly with careful deliberation, one little cautious step at a time. Still it means a lot to be in the rut of life, if not speedily, even slow movement will do. Speed is the choice when we can easily move. And any movement should be taken with gratitude when faced with the stony immobility of death. The tiny distance covered at a low rate means a wealth because it connotes life. He didn’t want to run. He could do a bit more than mere crawling. He could stand and take baby steps. But then here, in this busy street of life, you just cannot afford to be around without paying the costs. You have to pay to be there in the thoroughfare.

The moment you grab a fraction of life, you are forced to work to keep holding it. As a slowly walking person now, he was, inevitably, unavoidably, faced with the question of bread and butter. He wanted to live, not like a beggar, using his disability as a candle light to melt hearts to fetch little charities. He wanted to live like someone who did something to earn some crumbs of dignity apart from some bare minimum money to feed his troupe.

Luck has hardly any place in a poor man’s house. No sooner the euphoria of getting a non-shitty life was over than the bigger question of survival took the centre stage. Hunger is beyond life and death. It’s unsparing. It creeps more eagerly into poor huts to come ruling the air inside; and stands at a respectable distance in the corners of the palaces, meekly obeying the masters. His youngest children wailing, he looked at the wretched cot which nearly became his death bed.

He won’t forget the sight of this cot either. Giving it a challenging look he moved out. Waste-up he felt confident of taking life head on. But the legs play no less part in running the show of life. How he wished he could have that goddamned thing for one more month.

Starting the show of life on weak infirm legs again appeared a daunting task. Everyone out there looked so healthy and almost running to a glorious destination. It was so difficult to come to terms to the creepy crawling speed which required utmost focus of body and energy of mind. He felt like collapsing on the very same cot.

I’m going to weave the best of these goddamned cots. The thought came of its own. He could not have claimed any ownership on it.

With lurching, tottering steps, holding his walking stick dearer than life, he reached the little town nearby, and used all of their money, to the last paisa, in buying cot-making hemp ropes and strings. In fact, he surprised himself by his guts to dive headlong into an enterprise in which he held little experience, excepting long time back when he helped his father in weaving cots and mending the broken cot-nets. However, a task when attempted at the professional scale acquires completely new dimensions.

His purchase of string rolls hanging from his shoulders, he entered the streets of the first village he came across on the way back. He surprised himself in shouting the offer of his services. It was encouraging indeed. He had taken the leap of faith. But then sometimes the leap of faith, its first step, proves more important than the entire journey. Sometimes what matters is the will to do. If you have it in you, irrespective of your skills and abilities, the inertia pushes you into the ring of existence, bringing you unexpected chance shots at life. Well, that’s what makes the game of life so interesting.  

An old farmer beckoned him from his barn. He had three cot-frames to be re-netted. Having fixed the price for all three, Mehar Singh sat down on his weak knees to start the innings. Having the will power is one thing, but to carry out the task skills are also needed. He seemed to have forgotten where to start from. The robust old farmer, wizened and tempered by the time’s rasp, laughed, had a pun at him, called him a little plume-less peacock, and shouted tea for both of them.

Mehar Singh’s hands were shaking out of nervousness. He appeared clueless as to what to do. He forgot even the little things he knew about cot-making. His mind went blank. If not a straightway beating, as a cripple he expected at least a discounted reprimand by the old farmer.

‘You have hardly any legs left. But instead of begging you decide to earn a living. That is enough job for the day, son. Now relax and have tea first,’ the old farmer patted the novice cot-maker on his shoulder.

‘At least you hands are strong enough to pull the strings and hammer down the sides and legs of the cot-frame. One doesn’t need legs to run while mending cots. On top of that you can see like an owl. Even blind people weave chairs,’ as the old patron’s words got soaked into his sullen spirits, the pall of glumness was lifted from Mehar Singh’s soul.

The old farmer then initiated him into cot-making at the professional level. His instructions were so simple and methodical that the process appeared a fun game. He helped him hand-to-hand in the first two cots, and watched him netting the third one as a lenient judge.

‘Not bad. You will not die of hunger with this skill, son,’ the happy mentor declared.

Furthermore, his guru paid him the full amount for all three charpoys.

Sometime just mustering up courage to start against all odds is sufficient to be victorious.

Mehar Singh felt like flying on his weak legs. Sometimes a drop of water is sufficient for the desert, just by being there, because it keeps the hope of the rains alive.

With his rickety steps, he found himself hoisted onto the rails to move swiftly in spirit if not in letter.

He always felt proud as the father of five children, and prouder still to feed them through work.

Whenever life became tough, he felt that bitter taste in his mouth and that crack-snap sound buzzing though his brain. But he had got back this portion of life through the chronic bitterness of that mysterious concoction, so he had no reason to hate the sourness of life and circumstances. At least he was living and walking limpingly on a pair of legs which appeared still thinner below his gaunt torso.

The children in poor households grow physically slower, but mentally they pre-pone their arrival on the bread-earning stage. His eldest daughter and son are married. At their marriage, even the caterers would accept just a nominal charge, thus helping a man who tried to help himself. Long before the others take up your load, you have to be seen to be lugging ahead at the best of your capacity. Even charity seeks some reasoning in going into somebody’s kitty.

He is a proud grandfather now. His married son is a hawker of cheap clothing and roams the countryside to sell his wares to poor households primarily. Another son is a motorbike repairman. He was once stabbed 25 times. Mehar Singh has reasons to forget and forgive:

‘It was all in the legs and arms. At least they were merciful enough to spare the stomach, chest and heart.’

His youngest twin children are in tenth grade now in the government high school in the village.

And there he goes on his moped, repairing, mending and re-weaving charpoy-nets. His slow steps forcing people to slow down their pace, listen to his stories, and pay him some extra bucks for being a diligent survivor. However bad the times might be, the people still appreciate genuine efforts.

The life stops the moment we feel to be out of options. It starts the moment we take onto a choice. It may not run fast, but it moves, and that’s what is more important.