Faceless Gods (Second Edition, Vol 1)

 Dear all, presenting the second edition of my novel Faceless Gods (Vol. 1). Kindly use coupon code SPRINGGIFTS to avail 40% discount on the book available at the link

https://notionpress.com/read/faceless-gods-1388339

This story was written around the turn of the century. I was in my twenties and the world almost a mirage viewed through emotional prism. That is primarily the reason for the work’s poetic overtones. Now when I look at it, it seems a long verse written in prose conveying poignant, hard-hitting emotions. But anything not too near, out of compulsion, formalized decency and polished made-up diplomacy is nearer to truth by default. Truth is bitter as they say. But I have tried to mellow down that bitterness by the use of sweet poetic language.

For two-and-half decades since the book was born I have sent it to hundreds of publishers and literary agents. I have written countless mails. Nothing goes waste. It at the least gave me a very nice writing practice.

It’s natural to get bugged with skepticism about your own worth in the face of endless rejections of your creation or when you don’t have a single response kindling some hope. But if you still feel the call of your art, be sure that it’s your real destiny. If your script gets rejected a thousand times—like mine—and if you still feel motivated to write and in fact feel better while pursuing your write-ups then believe me writing is your destiny. Recognition and being famous has absolutely nothing to do with it because you have already crossed the golden threshold to become a nishkam karmayogi, the one who gives her all to a task without getting bothered about the outcome.

First, you have to recognize that this is worth your time and effort. Self-evaluation is the benchmark through which others will evaluate you. And that dear readers keeps me going.

Many people tell me that my language is on the harder side, that I use words that don’t fall in conversational genre, that my sentence structure is complex, which slows down the pace of reading and comprehension. They may have a point but so have I. As far as difficult words are concerned, why do we have them in the first place? Do we keep them in the dictionary only as examples never to followed or used? If we believe it to be so then it sounds an abuse to language and linguistics. In my understanding, it shows our lack of skills rather than the suitability or unsuitability of those words.

We have the words, in the first place, because they have relevance and ought to be used simply because they have been devised to be used. If we come across a difficult word, we should try to know its meaning. Those who overemphasize the importance of smooth reading maybe keep a book just for ‘reading’ instead of ‘studying’. Hell doesn’t break loose if we pause while ‘reading’ and ‘study’ the meaning of a new word. That differentiates ‘reading’ from ‘studying’. The latter makes you a student for life. My books are basically for the ‘students’ who have chosen to be the eternal learners of life, living and language.

I know the publishing industry is dominated by the ‘readers school’. It fetches big numbers and still bigger business. Nothing wrong with that. Thankfully, the self-publishing platforms provide the writers like me plenty of options to continue their writing passion in the hope that out of thousands of readers there are a few students who will take up the message contained in the book. It may not add dollars to a publisher’s account but the contents will surely add something positive to the life of a student in many ways.

The present edition contains some added chapters and changes that I deem it fit to be included as per my present knowledge and understanding of the issues involved in the story.

It is a slowly moving story, meandering like a river in its journey through the plains. It is just an effort to highlight some sober facts like the true meaning of nationalism, religion, politics and humanism. Some people may think that the work has very sharp political connotations. This but is an espousal of the cause of clean politics. It may sound dreamy but the basic contours of humanism are almost utopian in nature. How will the things change if we don’t dream of a perfect state of affairs? A utopian dream is the womb in which even the worst gets transformed into a tolerable reality.

https://notionpress.com/read/faceless-gods-1388339

Fathers and Sons

 

In the past, an old man’s wife found fresh dose of love in her late fifties. She ditched him and eloped with her middle-aged lover, leaving behind a brood of five grown up men and women, two of them already having little children of their own. I happen to overhear a row between the old man, in his eighties now, and his graying son. They are very angry at each other. ‘Your wife ran away with someone. You are fit for nothing,’ the son probes his fingers in the hurtful corner of the old man’s heart. ‘And your mother eloped with a goon,’ the old man countered. Then both of them turned silent under the weight of the family history.

Cheering Sixers for Tau

 

A decade back, I once took a photo of one of the taus in our village. ‘I know why are you taking my photo,’ he said as I clicked the picture. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because you think I’m just about to die and you will be able to see my face later,’ he looked hurt.

He is still around after ten years and most importantly can see reasonably well. I need to take his latest photo so I approach him. He is near the century of years and loves cricketers hitting centuries. He loves those who meet the three-figure mark and hates those who get out in the nineties. He hates them even more than who get out on zero.

He was watching an IPL match. That was the time when luscious cheer-girls danced in skimpy skirts to celebrate the hits to the boundary. I am not sure whether he loves the boundaries more or the dance. I think both of them cheer him up. Once after a hit to the fence they forgot to show the dance. He looked very disturbed and the next boundary took a few more overs in coming. He grew impatient and jittery. ‘Why would they hit boundaries if the girls turn lazy and don’t dance? The girls didn’t dance on the last hit,’ he held a grouse against the girls.

He had another issue about them showing the same dancing reward for both fours and sixes. ‘They should do something better for a sixer, which is far better than a four,’ he reasoned. I was about to say, ‘Do you want the skirts to go up tau to celebrate sixers?’ But I kept the query hidden within me because in that case he would have surely taken a sixer-type swipe at my legs with his well-oiled stick.

Lazy Doves and Smart Buzzards

 

Hope you remember the spotted dove episode? The broken nest is still there. Without any doubt, all doves are very lazy. They seem content in their small, peaceful world and take the trouble to coo sometimes and walk with gentle strides. They show a bit of urgency only when they take off. They flutter their wings pretty loudly to even scare you sometimes. In comparison to their eased living, a tailorbird looks weary and stress-battered.

The nest is just an assemblage of few dry twigs at a height where you can easily touch it with your extended hand and raised heels. A pair of laughing dove now decides to occupy the abandoned house. They aren’t deterred by the painful recent past. They make some flimsy, make-believe adjustments to the arrangement of twigs. You can literally see through the nest when you stand under it and scan it for its safety features.

A honey buzzard lands onto the small curry patta tree bearing the nest and the honeycomb. The birds haven’t laid eggs yet. They fly with a loud beating of wings. The nest is empty but he gets a bonus, the little ball of honeybees. It’s a small hive because flowers are vanishing from the planet and my little garden is sufficient for a tiny hive only. But the eagle gets a little sweet beakful of honey. The dove couple looks adamant and returns after some time. They will surely lay eggs despite cats and the eagle stalking them. They are into it with a single-minded focus. In between, some biggest favor by luck favors them with a successful hatching. However, given their lazy ways, it seems a miracle almost.

The Story of a Tiny Beetle

 

Darkling beetle isn’t named after its dark color. It’s a gray ground beetle that loves to stay in the dark. Its Latin name means ‘seeker of dark places and trickster’. But some are active during the day also. They are generalistic omnivores feeding on rotting wood, decaying leaves, dead insects, fresh plant matter, fungi, larvae and much more that we hardly have any clues about.

It’s an unpretentious armored beetle. Under the sunlight, as per the scheme in the beetle world, it would count as travelling by the night. Nights carry risks for us. The same is during the day for these nocturnal insects.

Even while at a run, it seems a leisure walk, something like a jolly, happily portly twaddle of a rotund gentleman. It crossed the garden, walked across the courtyard, walked up to the floored inner yard. As I came nearer, it feigned a perfected death. I moved away and it abandoned its acting and started again.

It looks an adventurous beetle on a long walk. A carpenter ant comes from the opposite direction. They stand face to face, greet each other, shake their antennae to convey bye and move on. An ant—far smaller—hurries past from behind. The ground beetle doesn’t care. It loves it gentle, leisurely pace. Another carpenter ant also goes speeding up as it overtakes and takes a U-turn after going a few yards. What is the use of speed if you aren’t sure of the direction? It’s better to go slowly with a clear sense of direction. The returning ant is in much hurry, so forgets to greet the gentleman like the earlier ant did. 

The ground beetle tries a hop but seems a funny miniature version of a rhino on slow trot. It but realizes its mistake and goes back to its natural pace. There it crosses the inner yard and arrives at a hole in a corner. It’s a nice, cozy, secure hole in the flooring. It seems an ideal spot for a hiatus. It snoozes around the opening. A skink raises objection at the encroachment. The beetle is too big for her mouth and she herself is out of reach for the beetle. So there is no confrontation.

It tries to climb the wall, goes with the slowest of a cautious crawl like an expert mountaineer sticking to a sheer rock face. It realizes that heights aren’t for it and wisely comes down. A very wise decision indeed, a proper estimation of its abilities. It then moves cautiously, slanted over the edge of a stone slab. A journeyman on the move, it goes into the verandah, then into the room. Who am I to stop its march? I can just look at it.

The Lazy Dove

 

An industrious cat will go for a rat. A lazy one will crawl among the trees to steal dove eggs, the easy catch. As we have seen, the lazy cat had an early dinner of dove eggs the other day. The dove cried the next day and to give herself some happiness laid another egg on the following day. By the way, they lay eggs in a little series, separated by a few days gap.

Everything is relative. The dove is still lazier than the cat, so it’s a win-win situation for the idle cat. It again crawled for another early dinner, too early this time. I was in the yard when the tailorbird raised a ruckus like a good neighbor. The honeybees didn’t have any issue like the last time. They leave it for the cat and the dove to sort it out among themselves. So they stayed neutral. I don’t think the honeybees and the cat compete for anything regarding food, otherwise they will also sting, if not speak out like the tailorbird. The cat doesn’t seem to have any appetite for honey. A lesson here. It’s advisable to have some common interests with one’s neighbors so that at least they speak out when you are in a soup. This repetition of crime got me into good neighborly emotions. The egg dropped with a plop followed by the lustily hungry cat. My stick dispensed justice and away went the cat scared out of its wits. It didn’t return the next day but I was sure of its return because it loved its milk bowl, being too lazy to hunt rats. It would maintain some distance for a couple of days and again get into the usual business.

A Dream of Peace and Pause

 

It’s a wish to go slow and continue writing peacefully about small, small things of life till a ripe old age. God, please don’t rock and toss my boat with sudden throws and challenges. I’m more like a dove. I don’t want to go too fast and too far. I just want to move slowly with a smile. The miles covered don’t matter. I just wish to be there like a sagely old tree with crooked, hollow trunk and still waiting for another spring for some more shoots and tender leaves on the hardened, dry branches. A little place of rest and repose for some old birds at least, if not the young ones.

The Neighborhood Liqor-lover

 

Beyond emotional unleashment on the issue, alcohol mints a lot of revenue for the government. With its firm moorings in history, the liquor industry is progressing really well. Now we have as many liquor-lovers roaming around during the day as we had earlier during the nights. The booze business is going great guns as more and more people lose their spirits. One of the liquor-lovers is determined to turn everyone deaf by playing the loudest music for 18 hours non-stop. Then he fell senseless around midnight. The tortured speakers got a well-deserved rest. But our ears carried the echo still drumming in our ears. And when it would come to an end, he would be back with a louder bang.

The Slow-paced Times

 

As per the theory of relativity, time was slower during our growing up years. It left much time at the villagers’ disposal to while it away in chaupal gossips and idle talks over hookah and cards. Grandfather loved mathematics. Since almonds strengthen the brain, from where the sprouts of mathematics originate, he loved almonds as well. So we siblings would break almond shells in the open yard in front of our house. In a bucolic world thirsty for happenings, it presented an interesting episode. The neighbors would creep out and sit around. They counted the number of almond shells broken. Then all of them had interesting bits of information to share about the best way to hit to break the shell cleanly. Just imagine the amount of time at our disposal during those years.

A Coin's Sticking Warmth

 

Those were diminutive, sleepy times in the eighties of our childhood during the last century. Now after almost four decades, little-little memories peek over gentle facades. I must be eight or nine. I was walking by the pot-holed district road on the way to our fields about a kilometer and half from the village. The little tales in schoolbooks with their moral lessons, at least during those times, laid a complex and experiential field to test the lessons.

I was also put into a predicament. I found a fifty-paisa coin. My brisk pacing got slowed down. I had to avoid moral bankruptcy. A fifty-paisa coin carried enough weight till that time. It would fetch ten sugar candies or even fifty little buttons of candies that came one for a paisa. I carried it in my firm, warm, moist, tight fist. Candies would make the day of any child any day in any age. I hope they still carry the same charm.

Still it wasn’t my money. I knew by rote learning that one should be honest and should try to return the lost money to the owner. I saw a group of girls cutting wood by the road and instantly the opportunity to clear my conscience arose. ‘Has anyone of you lost a fifty-paisa coin?’ I asked them. I was expecting a no but one of them said yes. It dumped my spirits. The coin seemed to be glued to my palm. ‘Tell me where did you lose it?’ I raised the level of my enquiry. She was a very intelligent girl. ‘Anywhere between that point and the village school on the road,’ she swiped her little axe along the road to cover two kilometers of stretch. Under the spell of mouth-watering candies, morals can be stretched. I elongated my next query along the lengthened morals. ‘Tell me the year on it,’ I asked. To clear my conscience she had to fail in the test. She hazarded a guess that came to be wrong. So there I carried my coin with a clear conscience and in full honesty.

Tau Hoshiyar Singh

 

Tau Hoshiyar Singh is in his nineties now and is almost deaf and nearly blind. ‘Tau, can you recognize me?’ I ask him. ‘Yes,’ he says, trying to sound confident, his mind already working on the problem. ‘Then tell, who am I?’ I put up the teaser. ‘Pappu,’ he says. ‘See, you cannot see at all,’ I try to make him confess that he cannot see. ‘Yea, I meant to say Suppi’s brother,’ he hasn’t lost the confidence in the least. Does he mean to say I’m my own brother or he has recognized me as my brother? ‘But you said Pappu,’ I try to make him flinch from his firm perch. ‘Yea, It’s the same,’ he says coolly.  

The Many Versions of My Nickname

 

My Sufism-loving father gave me the nickname of Sufi. But the bucolic tongues twist it to Suppi, Scoopi, Soopi and scores of many other rustic derivates. There are just three or four people in the village who can pronounce my name properly. Tau Surje thought I was Sukhi Ram, so called me Sookhi. Then there were a few old taus who called me Subbi.

The Simple World of an Old Man

 

A small group of Sikh farmers still carries the farmer agitation on the Singhu border. A nihang Sikh comes visiting the market from the protest site. The blue-robed warrior of Sikhism is seen at an Airtel service centre. His old-looking base mobile set isn’t working. He offers it to the elegantly dressed lady on the counter. ‘You keep it and give me a new one. This one might be of some use to you,’ he says. How I wish this world was as simple as this man of religion thinks it to be.

On Festival Eve

 

Diwali falls in the first week of November. The government is trying its level best to curb pollution on the occasion of our grand festival. The firecrackers are banned. But a liquor-lover sets up a huge fire of tyres to meet the shortage of firecrackers. The entire village is wrapped in a thick, black shroud of smoke. All this happens during the day. He has set the nighttime tempo for the firecrackers from the black market.

In the town, sweetmeats are more ubiquitous than grocery items on the festive occasion. Even a puncture shop has sweets piled up on a table in front of it. The puncturewala-turned-sweetmaker even said a firm ‘no’ to my request for an air fill in the tyre of my scooty. ‘There is no air in the tank,’ he told me with an injured pride for not taking him as a full mithaiwala.  ‘Take mithai,’ he offers. I have to move on with my half-deflated tyre.

In the town, almost three-fourth of the road’s width is occupied by the sweet vendors displaying their items. Almost every outlet has throngs of shoppers.

The snake charmers are forbidden from keeping snakes in their baskets these days. In order to collect charity money, they are clad like yogis and play their gourd flutes, been, in front of the stacks of sweets as if a snake would surface from the clods of sugary sweetmeats. By the way, presently sugar seems even more dangerous than snakes to the humans. So they have a nice replacement for the snake hoods.

Despite the ban on firecrackers to save Delhi from pollution, there are more crackers available in the black market than the normal one. There is an illicit fun in cracking dummy bombs and firing toy guns. Pungent smoke covers the sky. Eyes burn and you can feel the smoke going straight into your lungs. How wonderful it would be if we celebrated Diwali in its real spirit instead of just letter-driven lip service.

I put an oil lamp under the Parijat tree. It glowed for fifteen hours. In the morning, it seemed as if the tree has paid it a homage with a drizzle of flowers around it. The post-Diwali morning carried a heavy layer of smog. A cold, shivery, metallic blanket holding the fates of our lungs in its tight grip. Imagine, there are still climate change skeptics. Thankfully, a breeze rolled up and dispelled the post-celebration gloom.

The black-market bombs do one nice thing. As they give a blast, the monkeys think that we have started a war against them. Hence, they are on the back-foot for the time being.

An Ode to Early November

 

Early November is the best part of the year for me. This part of the year is seminally fresh. You can see through the transparent liveliness. The river of time is slowly meandering carrying little buoyant waves. The early winter is so relaxed, playful and carefree in its pre-puberty days.

The roses sway in gentle cool breeze. In salubrious early November, the flowers blossom up fully, open up their self completely, then willingly scatter their petals without pain and suffering. They kiss the ground with as much passion as they blew kisses for the air. Look at them carefully, they greet you and acknowledge your presence with a fragrant smile.

Little pinwheel-shaped Parijat flowers carpet the yard in the morning. The small-sized tree has a distinctive place in Hindu mythology. The holy tree lets loose a fine drizzle of highly fragrant little white flowers as the sun peeks over a dewy, misty morning.

The dew-kissed marigolds are sturdy. They stay for a few days. In garlanded form, they make sporadic forays into mythology.

A skink crawls slipperily on the floor, sneaks under a flowerpot and bumps into a lizard. Both of them then run for their lives in opposite directions.

The loveliest roses are nourished by dewy nights, balmy sunrays and gentle breeze. I have enough flowers to sustain the little ball of honeybees. They have lost their orchards and gone are big honeycombs, so even a small ball of honeycomb is welcome. It’s better than none at all. The little ball of honeybees must be feeling in a paradise with showers of night-blooming jasmine flowers so nearby. They get busy on a very early breakfast. They are whizzing about amid booze and gossip.

The ground gets carpeted with white flowers under the Parijat. I usually collect them and put them in the flowerbed so that they don’t get trampled. I find it a sin to trample a flower. The flowers then become celebratory lunch for scores of little insects.

The spotted doves and the honeybees are very cordial neighbors. The lazy cat now sleeps under the tree. Most probably, he has seen the nest. I hope the bees will teach him a lesson if he troubles their docile neighbor. Sadly, the doves are very lazy in the nest-making art. It’s a poor, fragile, unkempt, clumsy nest. It’s situated at a perfectly reachable height, making it a treat for any winged or even earthly predator. Looking at their careless, almost foolish ways, I sometimes wonder how do they even survive as a species.

The banana flower cone welcomes all from the sweetest ones like butterflies to the stingiest ones like yellow hornets. Nature doesn’t mind it much because they take only as much as they need. The scarlet cone having nutritious sap is placed on the open platter for all to take their share.

There are earthworms in the garden. They are very near to earth, hence named as such. They are just a bit more conscious earth. The earth that crawls a bit. They crawl, die, decay and become perfect earth very soon.   

These are beautiful days. The dusk descends suddenly. A little group of scaled munias is raising a feeble ruckus—they cannot turn noisy even in their worst mood. A hawk is after one of them. Maybe it’s a young hatchling that is yet to learn the entire set of flying maneuvers or perhaps it’s an old one with tired wings. It dives into a clump of trees, followed by the hawk. I can hear a painful screeching sound. Most probably, it’s a successful hunt or a failed escape.

Camouflaged by the shades of the falling dusk, the lazy cat crawls up the tree very cautiously. The silverbills, tailorbirds and oriental white eyes raise a protest. The dove keeps sitting in its poor nest, believing itself to be invisible. It but flew away at the last moment as the cat easily crept up to the nest. The hungry cat reached the nest and got a crunchy early dinner. The dove kept mum at night but cried through the next day. But it turned silent by the evening. The tragedy was almost scripted beforehand given their lazy and slovenly attempt at nest making. It was destined that the cat would have a breakfast, lunch or dinner any time. Its early foray means that it had a small meal. Had it waited for some days, the food would have been feistier. But then they don’t think like we humans. They live in the present.    

Beyond the mainstream pruning and trimming, it may sound a sidelined, marginalized narrative but it carries its wholesome spiritual trail and healthy cultural pulse. Modern life is stacked from floor to ceiling, pushing us into musty corners of our own creation. The money-spinning fancy footwork, the mad scrambling for supercilious slice barely leaves any shelf space for little innocent smirks, casual banter and childish merry-go-rounds.    

The last journey over laddoos

 

The other day, Balbir ki bahu, a poor woman on the socio-economic hierarchy, died. In patriarchy, you are mostly known as someone’s wife. Very few people know a woman’s real name. She was suffering and prematurely aged beyond her years. But then something rich happened during her last journey. As her arthi passed on the road on the way to the cremation ground, a sweets-laden tempo of a sweet-maker goofed it up. Trays of freshly prepared laddoos went falling in a line along the way. She went floating over the laddoos. Laddoos in place of flowers isn’t a bad bargain. Many dogs felt grateful as they feasted upon the chancy offering.

Before setting her onto the last lag in the journey, i.e., setting fire to the pyre, it was observed that her gold nose-stud was still in her occupation. Her son tried to salvage the last worldly possession but it won’t come off. He pulled very hard but the skin on the old woman’s proud nose stood ground. He had to leave it. Maybe she loved her nose-stud and carried it with her to the other world.

The free-will of the younger generation

 

Dhillu is an agonizingly disciplined man. His life’s show falls under the rubric of ‘what will people say?’ He holds the pole of reputation as he walks on the rope of life. His core ideological moorings keep him safe in the bay beyond controversies and bad name. He is but flabbergasted about the uncaring ways of the current generation. ‘Imagine what the world has come to be. Yesterday I overheard a few boys talking. “You don’t speak! You got slapped for your conduct. It was such a big insult and humiliation. You must be ashamed of it,” said one of them. But the champion replies, “What is insult? This so-called shame, insult or humiliation lasts just two minutes. After that it has no business to be in one’s mind.” Imagine what hard skins for such tender age. With this type of attitude, will anything stop them from crossing any limits?’ He is scandalized and seems very much disturbed. Maybe he realizes that he has led his life in a completely unfit way.

An established mind

 

Rashe fell like a log after drinking too much. He carries a bloody, self-healing scar on his temple. I point it out and he informs me, ‘I have promised myself not to drink anymore.’ ‘When did you make the promise?’ I ask. ‘Yesterday,’ he answers. ‘Should I distribute prasad that Rashe has quit drinking?’ I ask him. ‘Please wait! Even if I quit, others won’t allow me to stand by my decision,’ he says and looks at his friend standing nearby. The promise met its end on the second day and he celebrated the evening in the usual way. ‘But I promise not to fall anymore,’ he said to me the next day.

Rashe is strictly against hoarding anything and would take only as much as it fulfills his requirements at the moment. A meditative present-moment liveliness. Offer him something extra and he says, ‘But there is no need of it.’ Ganja and liquor are an exception though. He would take as much as you offer. I tried to force an extra kitchen stand and a redundant, but in perfect condition, ceiling-high tin tank for wheat storage. Someone in his place would have smartly calculated their resale values and would have happily grabbed the opportunity even if these weren’t needed in his house. But Rashe is beyond such calculations. He rejects the offer because he doesn’t need them. And schemes like taking them and selling aren’t appealing to him. He but carefully inspects two aluminum pots, suspiciously scans them and says his mother will welcome them in her kitchen. The kitchen stand is squarely rejected. I leave it in front of my gate and when I go to check it after fifteen minutes, it’s missing. Someone in need, or even sheer greed, has taken it.

Some moments cocooned in late autumn

 

Like a submissive protagonist in the seasonal play directed by nature, late autumn is handing over the baton to early winter. A rufous treepie, a dweller of the hills and now here for the winter stay, is seen on the gulmohar tree, picking dry ends of the branches to make a nest. Their distinct sound sails over the chirpy songs of the resident species with a palpable dissonance. The migratory couple is exploring a suitable nesting site among a clump of trees in the courtyard of an unoccupied house in the neighborhood. They but see a lot of monkeys in the locality and sensing the dangers born of the simian mischief they abandon the plan. Common sense seems their handmaiden. Ours seems a pale imitation of the unadulterated sense found among the non-human species.

Rockchats are very unassuming and non-pompous birds. A rockchat couple prefers to fly into the verandah to pick ants, spiders and even baby lizards if they are lucky on their menu for the day. They sometimes hop into the room and with an anecdotal perch stare into the dressing table glass with a mysterious clarity and certitude. The couple seems very happy in spending their days hopping and flying in the garden, yard and verandahs. It’s a silent, non-interfering bird. It’s nice to have them around. Both of them somehow add to the silence and solitude around me.

Even early winter has soaring daytime temperature. You can feel the heat. But the putative votaries of superstardom, the lethal shenanigans, the perpetrators of ideological excesses are busy in building hypersonic missiles. China is desperately scavenging for superpower status. They are taking panga with everyone around. It looks a myopic venture. I think they have preponed their jump onto the hot seat by a decade. They could have waited for some more time. Amidst all these bleeding-heart clichés, climate change is too common an issue to grab anyone’s attention. So the planet keeps smoldering.  

But still as an ode to the autumn, dry neem leaves drizzle down carrying the nostalgic nuances of better times when autumns were real autumns, not just in name like now. What is a dry neem leaf by the way? It’s but a bit naughty dust that rustles and rollers over; a kind of bit of earth flying for some fun. While, a flying bird is almost a visible representative of air.

In the curry patta leaves, there is a tiny ball of honeybees and near it a nest of spotted doves. It’s a peaceful and patient couple. They seem to have waited on the sidelines as other bird couples stole the procreative show during the monsoons. They reserved their love for late autumn and now slowly walk onto the stage.

The banana flower cone has oriental white eyes also. It’s a beautiful, tiny, light-green bird with a white ring around their eyes. Beyond the bloodthirsty beats of the human civilization, they are happy taking little sips from the dangling scarlet banana cone. In the mornings, there are beads of dew on the cone and these little birds just love breakfasting upon them.

A bit of clean-up drive

 

There is a pre-Diwali clean-up in the house. Thanks to the festival spirit, morose strains of discontent and apathy get dispelled from the soul. Loud-mouthed disorder and clumsy disarray get confronted finally. Festivals bestow you a moonlighted spirit and carry a genial touch of humanity. My cleaning the house, as a Lord Ram worshipping Hindu, to welcome Diwali, leaves enough amusing nuggets for the Muslim trash-picker to make him really happy. He is not-a-boy, not-yet-a-man.

Due to the shake-up drive, the crickets are startled, a conference of frogs gets disturbed under a rusty piece of iron, a lazy lizard scurries away as a plastic case is taken out, and spiders struggle on their arthritic, shaky legs as corners are cleaned. The shoebox tied to a not-in-use ceiling fan, fixed to serve as a nest for the birds that never accepted the tenancy offer, has stinging hornets. Well, not all tenants are submissive. They save their house in the cleaning drive. A fighting attitude helps these days.

These are balmy late October days, the autumn holding the little world in cute enticement. The clear sky hanging with a swanky magnanimity. The stars leave a fluorescent nightglow. Peace and harmony hit a peak when the monkeys aren’t around. But then some liquor-lover comfortably fills up the vacuum. The wives of the liquor-lovers have to daily stretch their patience to accommodate newer domestic troubles.

There are myriads of anecdotal stories in nature’s kitty. A hailstorm strikes to send down the message that not everything is under our control, at least for the time being. It’s a heavy lashing by the skies. There are broken branches and decimated paddy in the fields. Who can help it? There are still confusing contours of myriads of mysteries above.

An old alpha male monkey, fuelled by his vintage sexuality, has a child bride towing him these days. How I wish that he gets at least a dozen strikes with big icy clods from the heavens!

The banana cone is still there. Its layers open with gentle succession. A purple sunbird is busy at it during the day. The bats get its possession at nights. The monkeys have stoically spared it so far. They just pluck away little banana fingers as these unfold above the cone.

The little frog in the kitchen seems distraught that the ever-eating Trummp is gone. It was a good source of food. Little crumbs would fall from the cage and the little frog would dine under the cage. The gluttonous parrot proudly looked at the tiny frog below. Well, that reminds me of Trummp again. I missed to mention that as it finally emerged from its charming spell about eating and emerged from the cage, I shouted, ‘Ja Shimran jee le apni zindagi!’ Let’s hope she is having a nice nuptial inning with her husband. I would prefer to call it Shimran now because there is no need of using cuss words now.

It reminds me of another parrot. My brother’s friend has a pet parrot in Kashmir. It drinks wine with his retired father in the evenings and after that in eased-up spirits whistles at any woman who comes visiting the house. He isn’t bothered about the men entering the house. Maybe the cosmic sense of masculinity itself carries the strains of lecherousness.

Mistri Sat Prakash, a native of Jhansi, informs that the parrots born on an old, grandfatherly neem tree are wise and clever and can be taught to speak. But those born on mahua trees are dimwits and enjoy their foolish tete-tete only.

Sat Prakash is helping me restore a semblance of order in the dilapidated and disarrayed yard. The bricklayer is a small frail man with strong hands. The latter fact is more important for a mason because only strong hands enable you to keep grasping at life, especially if you are poor and have to work daily to survive.

Last night, after he had finished his work for the day in my yard, a smart teacher lured him and others to transfer his provisions to the town. ‘It will take just an hour,’ he told them. But that one hour got completed at three in the morning. So he and his helper are sleepy as they work for me on the next day. They work very lazily and I allow them their semi-sleep. Exploitation there has to be compensated here with some lenience now. It helps people in keeping their faith in humanity.

He is extremely soft spoken and a simple man. You point out the most glaring fault in what he has done, he will listen to you very patiently; he would continue listening though your suggested solution and would finally add, very gently, that this is exactly what he was going to do. His best quality is that he doesn’t trouble his brains with his own plans as a mason. He would do exactly what you tell him to do.

In his sleepy state, taking the afternoon tea, to make up for the inefficiency at work during the day, he gives me new nuggets of information. ‘A prêt has just three of the five primal elements, a sort of spooky concoction of air, sky and ether. So we shouldn’t worry too much about them. They lack solidity and ground to do something physical directly,’ he informs me. Well, that makes the ghosts pretty harmless to me now. It seems a highly scientific explanation.

His helper is big built, very suitable for the physical tasks of digging, lifting load, mixing concrete and the rest of ilk that a mason expertly orders his helper to do. The boy is smeared with soil and cement and grumbles about his slovenliness. ‘Who has ever washed a lion’s face?; who has washed a male buffalo’s behind?’ Sat Prakash eggs him on, making him a lion and a robust buffalo both at the same time.

Despite all the strength of his hands, his handshake carries a feather touch. It feels like you are holding a lifeless hand. It seems he has shaken hands for the first time in the late fifties of his life. Who shakes hands with them? The people usually shake and jolt the littlest semblance of dignity and respect their soul still carry.

And irrespective of the day’s concretely frank and upfront tidings, the nights can be gentle, affable if you have the aesthetic signpost of some slow-paced, gently characterized Iranian movie to guide your way through the night’s oeuvre. The Iranian movie ‘A Cold Day’ is another warm, little story. To like an Iranian movie, you need to be a lover of small-time beauty of nature, hills, flowers, streams; the unhurried pace of life; smiles, soft emotions, simplicity of life and dollops of nature. They beautifully make up for the absence of song and drama.

It’s a little school among small, rolling hills. A teacher saves a little second grader from the fire in the school and gets serious burn injuries. Little Ali is the boy concerned. He is plagued with self-reproach as the teachers blame him for the episode. The teacher has burns on his face and is hesitant to appear before the students. Ali breaks the ice by visiting the teacher who has gone into utter isolation on account of his changed looks. They face each other with frankness, dignity and respect. The smiles return.

A Pilgrimage

 

Through the cut and thrusts of life, as a formal authenticity of my faith, I sometimes go for Govardhan Parikrama. Walking miles on naked feet saves the disillusionment from turning into cynicism. Pilgrimages are significant in their psycho-spiritual dimensions. Bleeding hearts and their taut indictment of the covert and overt shades of fate get a respite. The creeping monotony of life withdraws its steps for some time. The sense of peace felt, despite the hardest of moments, is inherently intriguing.

There is a sadhu in a wheeled tin cabin stationed along the pilgrimage path. He is reading from a scripture. He looks like a well-kept exotic bird. He has shifty eyes and looks at your hand as you approach him. If your hand doesn’t enter your pocket to take the wallet then you are a transgressor into his hymn-citation space. A person not only commits the mistake of not touching his wallet but also performs a double whammy as he tries to click the sadhu’s picture as if he is clicking a rare bird in a big cage. The sadhu loses temper, breaks the sequence of his mantra and retorts, ‘I don’t take a selfie!’

Nearby a mammoth alpha male is having the fun of his life. He is lying sprawled on the sand, his belly up and all fours spread out. His queens are giving him a nice massage by rummaging their nimble fingers through his fur to pick lice. Another one is busy fulfilling the basic instincts on his queen consort, the primal religiosity of all living beings.

At a path-side temple, the priest proudly informs me that around five crore pilgrims daily visit the temple. The mathematics leaves my head spinning. I try my level best to show that I believe him. I succeed and he pats a nice blessing on my back. It props out something from my wallet. But he doesn’t seem too happy about the effect of his blessing pat.

An exclusive signboard says: Chunmun Bandariya ke liye 1000 jamun ke ped, meaning one thousand jamun trees for Chunmun baby monkey. It’s a nice little grove of fruit trees. Blessed be the Babaji who asked his disciples to set up this little grove of fruit trees. In fact, many monkeys show that it’s fulfilling its intended purpose as they romp around among the fruit trees.

As I get tired while walking, I try to take inspiration from those who cover the entire distance by prostrating, stretching their bodies on the ground all along the way and cover the whole length by measuring it with their bodies. Such flawless faith makes you a God or Goddess without doubt.   

The Story of a Aaam Family

 

This is October end. There is a ceremonial frenzy of the season through falling leaves, almost a rain of dew at nights, fleecy mist at dawn, dew-drenched flowers at sunrise, paling sunrays, cool breeze, lots of festivals and much welcomed freshness in social mood. The air carries some floating salubrious emotions. Rashe and his younger brother Karne are sitting under a tree. It’s day off from work. Well, their case needs a mention here. They have a smalltime, ambling past, a little history of their household.

Rashe’s brother Karne went missing at the age of ten. He was spotted last time at the nearest railway station at Sonipat. Everyone accepted that he boarded a train but whether he went north or south nobody had any clue. Well, his parents had three sons and a daughter, so he wasn’t missed much in the one-room house of a poor landless family lying almost at the base of the socio-economic hierarchy. The most popular version about him was that his organs had been harnessed by the medical mafia and he had completed his purpose on earth.

His father had one leg afflicted with polio. So they christened him Langda, the lame one. Langda was very hardworking and would give a tough challenge to any two-legged human around in completing tough labor tasks. He loved drinking after the day’s hard work. And once he was fully sloshed, he would give a test to his lungs by shouting so loudly as to be heard even in a neighboring village on clear, silent nights. He didn’t say too offensive things. He just targeted an ex village head who had denied his request for a below poverty line card that would have made him eligible for free ration and some help for repairing his one-room house. Langda wasn’t in the sarpanch’s good books, so his name didn’t enter the beneficiaries, while people far richer than him got their cards that entitled them to receive government subsidies. So Langda would shout ‘Dalbir sarpanch mar gaya!’ throughout the night. It meant the sarpanch is dead. The ex village head stayed at the farthest end of the village but he would regularly hear the declaration of his death because Langda shouted better than a big loudspeaker. Finally, they had to give him a few slaps. Langda simply brought down the volume a bit but continued with his declaration nonetheless.

One night a fully drunk Langda was hit by a high-speed car while crossing the road outside the village. The family received ten lakh rupees in compensation from the party in their out of court settlement. That helped them in making a better house. His widow would acknowledge God’s help as she saw their better home. ‘Thank God their father’s bones sold well!’ she would say.

Then Karne returned after ten years. He had grown tall like a giraffe. He had actually boarded a train heading north to reach Punjab. There a good-natured Sikh farmer kept him as a helper on his farm. As a goodwill gesture, I gifted them a big speaker lying sullenly in the store. Karne and his brother, Rashe, the gentle giant, loved music. They must have really liked the gift because they played songs at a riotous volume throughout nights. The soul of their father must have felt propitiated, hearing his legacy being carried forward in a nice manner. Rashe and Karne would work on the farms and construction sites and would enjoy ganja whenever possible.

Well, ganja has been quite a popular choice in this part to forget the hardships of life. During the good old days, people would smoke ganja sitting on the last seat of the last bus and its fumes would take everyone in the grip along the aisle. The driver would baulk that his head is spinning and he would crash-land the bus into the roadside ditch. ‘Please do it, you will also die with us!’ they would encourage him to keep his words.

During those grand old days of theatres, when people danced in front of the screen on popular songs, there would be some ganja-lovers inside the cinema hall who would leave a big plume of ganja smoke leaving dozens coughing and sneezing. Ask them to stop it and they would threaten to help the troubled person by beating him to pass out and hence turn impassive to the offensive smoke. Those were the days when women won’t dare to step into a theatre because the crudest words were hurled in the darkness infested with grossly atrophied masculinity. Well, coming back along the ganja strains to the little tale of Rashe’s house.   

Their brother, named Munna, is a bit higher placed on the scale of cleverness and sophistication in thinking. He works at a needle factory in the nearby town. A few years back he took an overdose of ganja. People said it entered his brain and he shouted all through the nights for almost two years and kept the family tradition of night shouts alive. Well, on a dull drab overcast autumn morning, the song of the birds holds the hope of a bright sun sometime. The fate of the only witty son in the family also got its sunshine. He got his mind back and stopped shouting. In fact, he seems a silent sage now and speaks only the least words required to sustain his job.

Rashe is my favorite of the three. ‘How are you Rashe?’ I ask. ‘Even happier after meeting you,’ he replies. He did some work for me and after paying him I asked, ‘Is it enough?’ ‘There cannot be any shortage in your reign,’ he replied. He prefers payment in liquor. Handing over the favorite beverage after the completion of another task, I ask him, ‘Hope this is sufficient.’ He points his fingers to the sky and declares, ‘God will definitely give more.’ So I have to give him more to fulfill God’s wish. He has a cutely slurred speech thanks to the immobility of his lower jaw that went out of action after their horse hit him on jaw when he was an infant.

Their mother is a much-at-ease woman. She is a big lady and moves slowly with ease and comfort. Any type of restlessness is farthest from her persona. She is incapable of holding any ill will against anyone or anything. The villagers take these uncompetitive traits as signs of her foolishness and say that she is weak in mind. Being competitive, restless and quarrelsome are taken as signs of mental health. She is thus beyond any malice. There is an exception though. She has a mission against the monkeys and that makes my head almost bow in reverence before her. The roots of this animosity go back to her childhood. She cannot forget that a monkey snatched away the sweetest mango she has ever tasted in life. Unpardonable. The simians got the duel further when an irritated monkey sank its teeth in her calf muscles. She took hold of its fur and bit even harder. The monkey carried the bite mark to its grave just like she carries hers on her leg.

A Romancer of Loads

 

This one again dates back to the eighties of the last century. They gave him the name deplume of Bhunda Nai. Bhunda derived from his features, which stood as pompous adversaries to any sense of symmetry. There was a gross inaccuracy in their alignment with a sense of normalcy. They shouldn’t have named him Bhunda, ugly. To me he looked pretty interesting with his strange features. Nai was derived from his caste, barber.

Bhunde Nai ka bharota, Bhunda Nai’s fodder bundle, was part of local fables. He had spun a dynamic legend about it. Apart from his customary job of cutting hair, shaving beards and filling hookahs during weddings, he worked as an agricultural laborer. During those times, in the harvesting season, a laborer would be paid in fixed maunds of wheat and fixed number of fodder bales. He couldn’t do anything about the wheat because it would be measured. But the equation was open in terms of the number of fodder bales. A bundle could be as big as per the carrying capacity of the bearer. He made it the largest in the area.

He was a small man but very strong in bones. He had sewn himself a huge piece of sackcloth in order to accommodate maximum amount of fodder chaff in a bundle. The people comfortably agreed that his huge piece of cloth could easily accommodate a quintal and half of wheat chaff. Then he would walk like an ant carrying a huge grain of sugar. He was technically entitled to it. As per the norms, the farmer couldn’t say no to his load as long as Bhunda could carry it.

Then one day he fell while carrying his load from the farm to his house. They measured the load. It was dangerously near to two quintals. The village headman, a wise old man, had to intervene. ‘We have to fix the amount in measurable terms for fodder also, otherwise he would break his neck some day,’ he said. So the rule was changed and fodder chaff also came to be fixed in weight so that Bhunda won’t put his life at risk by carrying the heaviest load as per the old rule that allowed specified number of bales irrespective of their weight.

Bhunda was disgruntled. ‘You higher caste people make rules as per your advantage. What business is it yours if I break my neck while carrying my load,’ he cribbed while shaving the beard of a very old farmer. ‘We have all the business in doing so and save your life. Don’t we take care of our strong bulls who plough the maximum furrows for us?’ the old farmer asked in a gentle tone. Bhunda Nai had to agree to the logic. Strong laborers were as much indispensable as the strong bulls in agriculture during those days.

Why is the real poetry a thing of youth only?

 

Most of the real poems are written during the turbulent twenties of a poet's life. In the early twenties, one is pursued by the glorious uncertainties of life. It’s a slippery, exciting and critically opinionated path. Don’t worry, it’s just a surge of extra energy, nothing else. The stage is shaky and realities are yet to get a foothold. You trample a lot of turf like a young colt spraying legs in all directions and galloping just for the sheer causeless fun of it. Of course, there are consequences but they hold their miserable importance in the eyes of the elders only. To the youngsters they are just irritable speed-breakers on the thrilling path.

One’s hormonally buzzing self floats in a hazy mist of unripe, raw, juicy, sweet-sour tart of dreams and imaginations striking the moron mass of established norms. The hormonal-storms-fuelled beliefs, views, opinions and dreams create sparks and sometimes thunderstorms. Nothing wrong with that! That’s all part of our making. It’s a pretty noisy and shaky groundwork born of your ‘making’ that provides a bit of stability later in life. Ask anyone, most of us are very lenient and forgiving towards our youthful gallops even if these have given us many bruises after the hard falls. We wear them with pride like the symbols of our reaching the peak of the mountain.

Tossed by immaturity and the raw power of youth and age, one hits the extreme ends of emotional scale. It’s a massive range of most painful pangs of heart to the ecstatic most reverberations of spirit. It’s a churning of our existence pulled by totally different strings. The product is quite fatty and butter-laced. No wonder, poetry is the handmaiden of the youth. The sediments, the cuts, the corrosion, the erosion, the torrents all unleash a gushing stream of emotions and adventures that swirl past the hard-established conventions and taboos to create a niche for the self.

There is an entire emotional terrain from the bleakest to the brightest as a youthful soul tries to manage the precarious walk on the shaky rope of young age. The same was the case with yours truly. It was a far simpler world in the nineties of the last century and it seems a long time since then. But it’s never easy for the youth, be it any age or century. They have their own challenges, agonies, follies and ecstasies.

The sheer shakiness of life in youth propels a multitude of streamlets in one’s heart. There is a teasing pull between the head and the heart, wherein the latter most often wins the lots in its favour. The elders may disagree but young people have an entire parallel world, a world that challenges the mundane and boring and firmly etched norms and conventions. We may compromise later in life and settle for a far more contained and restrained life but all of us carry pining nostalgia for our youth because that is when we really challenged the chains that curtail our free flight.

Our follies, which we committed during our youth, still stand better than all the rights of our later years. This is in celebration of youth and its tendency to throw us literally to hit against the ceiling. And the bumps, bruises and little scars that we get along the way never fail to bring a smile on our lips even in the grey years of our old age.      

The Last Bus of the Day

 

This goes back to the last decade of the last century. Those were the times of very limited means of transport. The last bus would start at half past nine in the night from the district centre for the neighboring district city. Our village fell at a distance of 10 km from the starting point. If the rumble-tumble of circumstances found you stranded at the town at night, you had to muster up every ounce of your flint-hard willpower to get a foothold on the last means of conveyance. If you missed it, pleading a lift with the truck drivers was the last resort. This was lethally inept choice because even if some trucker gave you a lift with a conspicuous condescension, you would lay at the most open disposal of fate as they would be drunk and ply their jangling vehicles with untamed energy.

It was against this background that the last bus acquired a big status. Those were easier times and at half past nine, the town would look deserted like it was midnight. The exotica, the erotica would arrive shaking its tin body with the epitome of teasing virility. It carried an air of romantic freshness as it arrived at long last. The big group of stranded passengers—at that time one would feel like stranded—would welcome it with whistles and catcalls. There would be a stampede to grab the seats. Tempers would ride tautened strings.

There would be dozens of indifferent village drunks among the passengers. Lawlessness went on increasing down the aisle. It reached its peak on the last seat. The conductor looked helpless in doing his ticketing duties. He appeared singlehandedly pitched against millions. He would squeeze through the pandemonium of brawls, lewd songs, guffaws of laughter, cuss words and dirtiest jokes. Free spirit unleashed its lecherous mechanism in full veracity with the evil. Everyone felt so free and independent to go to any extent without the censorial holds of society and traffic laws. Most of the passengers would flatly say ‘no’ to the bus conductor’s request for a ticket. There was no danger of getting caught by the ticket-checking flying squad at night.

There would be a joyful tension and exciting tumult among the law-breaking passengers, and the conductor carried his moist and embittered soul among the enemies. The roadways department chose muscular and brawny types of conductors for this last, tough trip of the day. Amidst the brash and benumbing noise, he tried to salvage some coins in his green leather bag and save the ignominy of not being able to hand out even a single ticket among the crowd. The moment he heard a sorrowful, somber and low-timbred voice, he would swoop down upon the opportunity to sell at least a ticket. More duty-bound types would enter into a verbal spat and even a fistfight with the vagrants. So, all in all, it was a charity round by the roadways. Dozens of passengers on the roof were the freest souls. They were above any rule of society and traffic department. Dark vaults of the sky were the farthest limits for their fun-ride.

Fauji Thekedar, a smalltime construction works contractor, once found him in this pandemonium. He was no Fauji, soldier, but his conduct was so orderly and disciplined that they accepted him as a soldier, more real than the real soldiers in the Indian army, and gave him the honorary title of Fauji. He also justified this title much demonstratively and crossed the paths and bypaths of personal and professional life with an impressive moral grandstanding.

He felt a mortal strain to his sense of uprightness. Sitting on the last seat amidst the vilest revelers, he decided to teach them a lesson. As the bus stopped at a non-descript station in the countryside, he raised a terrible alarm ‘Bomb-Bomb’ and made way for the exit as if flying away from definite doom. He fell on the steps with his face down and his back offered a nice ramp for the fellow passengers to escape into the dark outside. The bus was empty within a minute and Fauji was the sole passenger lying painfully facedown on the steps. From a distance, they waited eagerly for Fauji to be blown away with the bus. There was no blast for five minutes and they slowly came nearer. They got him up and enquired about the bomb. A lot many of them looked eager to start the second installment of punishment. But then a sane voice intervened. ‘His back has enough horses galloping on it for the day. Leave him!’ He was given a safe corner. Later on, Fauji seemed to lose his sense of discipline. He turned cranky and at loggerheads with any sense of order.

A Visit to the Town

 

These are the times of big things and big issues. If you ride a little vehicle like scooty then you have to accept your humble position and agree to whatever inches of the road by the edges that may be granted to you by the bigger, faster vehicles. A car parked by the side will suddenly take a turn and deprive you of even the thin line of your travel along the road’s margin. A window may suddenly pop open giving you the scare of life.

I am going to the town and a liquor lover is asking for a lift. He is standing right in the middle of the road. When he found that I am crossing him without paying heed to his orders, he takes a swipe at my helmeted head. I duck and give myself credit for being alert enough to avoid going dusting at his feet. Further on, you have a non-confident dog looking to cross the road. It almost did what the drunkard had failed to do. Well, there are confident dogs as well, who just step back wisely as you press the horn. By the way, the very same are the categories of the humans crossing the road.

A woman is getting down from the bus with her face backwards and the helpless conductor shouting, ‘Look saamne, saamne!’ She tumbles down as the bus is still in a snaily motion. Luckily, there is no harm done and she gives a sheepish, embarrassed grin. A few people gather around and give her a nice lecture about how to properly get down from a slowly moving bus.

The most challenging task is to avoid a little school boy from scoring a goal. Bored with school after two years of Covid-forced holidays, and not in the habit of attending classes anymore and hence in a terrible mood, he tries to beat his boredom by kicking a coconut shell. He is all for playing football with an empty coconut. My vehicle is surely the goal. I turn sharply at the last moment and he misses it. Misses a goal and kicks dust with a dejected face.

Then I have to overtake a tractor discotheque. The tractor itself makes so much of noise and coupled with huge woofers and speakers it unleashes a tornado. The main beneficiaries of the music, if at all, are those at least a mile off. I cross it with much trepidation. It’s almost like getting across a fighter jet.

Randhir, the farmer, is coming back from the town. He feels best while plying his tractor, so in good mood he waves at me. His BP has been recorded to fluctuate between 40 and 240 and he passes off almost every fortnight. But he feels safe while driving his tractor. ‘The bumps and jerks keep the body shaking and I am at my best!’ he explains the reason for loving tractor riding. So he doesn’t miss an opportunity to go plying his tractor.

In the town, the banjaras have pitched tents along the road. They have a nice way out to handle the civic body officials. They too want to settle down now after those centuries of wanderings. They have national flags flying from their huts and tents. A few have cows also tethered in front. It stops the civic authorities from treating them merely as stateless ruffians. Nationalism sells well these days and they have as much a right to affirm their credentials as any other internet patriot.

A policeman has parked his car on the road and there is a traffic jam. Many people mutter their grumbling dissent under their breath only. You have to respect police even if they park their private vehicles right in the middle of the road. Small vehicles carry advantages also and I somehow squeeze through.

In the grain market, a merchant shares his philosophy. His servant is busy in cleaning his master’s brand new car. The business is slack and there is no work for the servant so the Lala has got him to the task of cleaning his already shining car. ‘Never leave a servant free!’ he tells me the mantra of his success. I get a few moments for a talk with the car-cleaning servant. ‘Haan ji ki naukri, Na ji ka ghar!’ he shares his philosophy. Well, both credos seem complementary to each other in the world of business.

If you are lazy to go visiting your town regularly and instead club your multiple tasks in a single visit, you will return at twilight only. There are shrieks and screeching of the noisy spotted owlets as I open the gate. They love jumping out while it’s still some minutes left for the fading light of the day and scare the people with their hideous shrieks and squeaks. It sounds like they are condemning my returning in one piece on a little vehicle, riding on a road that has been hijacked by the bigger ones.

Never commit the mistake of being absent for the entire day, especially if there are monkeys around. The garden is vandalized. The banana frond is decimated. It seems an intentional ravage. They are showing the best population growth rate at the moment. There are monkeys-monkeys everywhere. Does nature have a counter? Younger lithe males are trying to break into the established harems of the old rascals. Short on love, a young rascal settled for a very old, shrunk, tailless monkey lady. He was earlier thoroughly bashed up by the huge alpha male so the beaten Romeo settled for a harem discard. If they are off the scene even for an hour, you come to understand what peace really means.

A bat hovers around. The twilight is preponed slightly as it’s overcast. It loves to suck juice from the big dark scarlet cone of the banana flower. It seems to love doing shirashana as it hangs upside down from the pointed end of the cone. It’s miraculous that the cone is still dangling intact after the monkey’s free play in the garden.

The kittens are waiting for their milk. They are both males by the way. They now have a cheeky girlfriend. She is very clever. They love her company and their priorities seem to have shifted quite a bit. They have given her an unrestricted access to their milk bowl. They no longer sleep together curled up in a brotherly ball. There is a girl in the equation now. Maybe they are jealous of each other and are looking for some private space.