Whose right is it to be a bigger excluvist?

 These are the dark spin-offs of the ultra-nationalist ideology.  You keep parroting "Hindu Rashtra-Hindu Rastra" and it creates ripple effects. It inspires (wrongly of course) others also to do the same. If you talk of an over-swiping Hindutva, coloring the entire country in one color, minorities will feel justifiably threatened. The ultra-nationalist Hindu ideology itself is a reaction, an off-shoot, to the blind religious zealotry of hardline Muslim maulvis who have drilled a dangerous fact in Muslim masses that their first identity is that of a Muslim before any other lesser identity like citizenship, designation, role or responsibility.  So the bully boys of Hinduism feel justified in raising a din in the name of their religion also. Originally, hardliner Islam has wrongly inspired fiery sentiments among other religions. A few of the peace loving sanatan dharmis are now trishul wielding mobsters. Main culprit is the fire of sectranism. It now burns in many Hindu hearts. But fiery Hindu hearts will inspire other religious hearts also. So as the shadows cast by the nationalistic sunrays fall over the Indian diversities, we have resurgence of Khalistan movement.  If you overdo it, so will they. The wrong is far more effective in motovating the mobsters than the right. The policy of systematic discrimination against the Muslims has already sown the seeds of second wave of separatism along communal lines after 1947. And the din raised to the proportions of pralya whenever a Chriatian missionary converts a Tribal in forests will force the Chriatians of north-east to think along separatist lines. India is too diversified to be colored in one ideological color. The shiny nationalistic colorists may gain temporary benefits like forming governments but in the long run it will eat the foundations of India like termites. When Hindu youths go lynching over cows, of course the Sikh youths also get an itching to go on rampage on communal grounds and carry Holy Guru Granth Sahib into the police stations challenging law and order. The far rightist ideology colors the insanity of mobsters in patriotic colors. But then in India we have enough religions to bring down our castle. Let's talk of inclusivity. Let the elections be fought over the issues that concern the common man. Let's put the blinding colors of Rashtravadi revolution on the sidelines and pick up simple tools of nation-making.

Postscript: All excluvist principles draw their sustenance from an atrophied complex, the complex of superiority.  If as a resurgent Hindu nationalist you feel justified in your exclusivistic ideology, don't you think others also feel the same way? Don't you think even a Khalistani will try to justify his/her belief along the same lines? Or do you think that your excluvistic right of  narromindedness is greater than theirs because sanatan dharma is older than Sikhism? From this principle of seniority in years,  the religion of animism followed by Dravadian Tribals deep in the forests of south India has even a bigger claim to hold the copyright over the faith of this particular geographical unit because they were already functioning as a human society with its distinct culture before the Aryans arrived and laid the foundation of what we now recognise as Hindu dharma.

At a Peasant Wedding

 

It’s quite tough to be a non-drinking member of a wedding party in Haryana. Everyone is drunk to be in an enlightened dimension, leaving me the poor earthling struggling with the ground realities. Since truth is decided by the majority, I feel myself clueless and almost an idiot. The marriage DJ starts blaring. The massive woofers and speakers of the music system shake the ground under my steady feet. The liquor-lovers look more sure-footed with their unsteady feet on a shaky ground. The loud blasts of music leave my ribs shaken.

Drunk peasants give a fantastic thrust to their spirits. They challenge all norms of established mindsets, cultural matrix and constitutional niceties. It’s madly adventurous to be among them, I tell you. If you aren’t a fellow seminarist to them, then be prepared for an onslaught by the agents of anarchy.

Hinduism is indeed very liberal. The starting song is a dedication to drunkenness. ‘Bhola takes a bucket of bhang and shakes his bum to ecstatic dance’ is the approximate translation of the rowdy Haryanvi song about Lord Shiva’s fondness for bhang. They are so happy that the Lord Himself loves drinking. Dozens of liquor-lovers turn ecstatic.

Flying drones is prohibited without authorization in India. And so is celebratory firing. But most of what we do in celebration falls on the other side of law. A young man is flying a drone to make it the best marriage party ever to have visited the village. Another is firing angry vollies of bullets into the body of a helpless sky. I try to add value to their fun. ‘A drone just hovering around is no fun and so is the blind and aimless firing into the sky,’ I call their attention. ‘You try your aiming skills at the drone,’ I propose the scheme to the gun wielder. ‘You prove your expertise in flying by taking it away from the bombardment,’ I suggest to the drone flier. Dozens of voices grab the option and they are egged on to start the game. Even random, close-eyed shots would have a better chance. The boozed man’s careful shot shakes the skies. An electric wire finds the aim. Snap goes the wire with a bang. The scared drone crashes on an attic, making it a perfect drone attack.

There is a spin-off from the same wedding. I come home at night, hugely relieved to come in one piece. But someone bangs fists at the iron gate. He is a most distant relative, so distant that you lose the trail of the relationship if you try to go to the source, who has come attending the same marriage function. He is curtly denied entry into any of the houses he thought had a duty to entertain his stay. Perhaps someone suggested that the writer is a good option under the circumstances. So here he comes to my place. He is unsteady in gait but very steadily holds his feeble right to stay at my place. What will you do, if even after you declaring his totally unwelcome status through your gruff behavior, he pretends to be most at ease as if flowers have just been sprinkled over him, making him the most esteemed guest on earth? You have to be an out and out rascal in bad behavior to help him accept his unwelcome status. The roughest cut-sharp notes are simply songs of welcome to him, so here he is sprawled comfortably on the bed and I take my bedding on a cot in a corner in another room. But before that he prefers to be more welcomed through talks. He is very proud about his vast travels. ‘How many places you have visited in India?’ I am finally forced to ask, getting curious about his far and wide travels. ‘I have travelled far and wide!’ he declares. Then he enlists a thorough sketch of his forced entries into the houses in the neighboring districts within a diameter of 50 km. ‘I have travelled a lot,’ he declares with the world-weary finality of a traveler who has just returned after taking a trip around the earth or maybe even beyond. Thank God, this feeling of world-hopping travel got him sleepy and he dozed off.

But well into the depths of night, another liquor-lover is singing his bawdy songs against humanity. He has drunk away his land and domestic peace. The last installment of the compensation money for his land acquired for a new road project was swiftly drunk away. All that was left was a lakh of rupees. A smart guy cleverly branded his old car at 1.25 lakh rupees. The real price must be around 75000 rupees. He gave a discount of 35000 and sold the car for 90000 rupees. The liquor-lover hits the ceiling in hitting the jackpot.

In return of the favor done to the purchaser, the seller gets a promise to use the vehicle as and when needed till he gets a new car himself. It will be an exception though, he promised to the new owner of the dented old car. In addition, there was another condition. This one made the liquor-lover really happy. He had to promise to take the old owner and his group on two trips to Haridwar. Fun trips, they promised. The two proposed trips to the pilgrimage town saw the rest of the money going out of the pocket. The borrowing of the car turned out to be a generality, not the exception as promised earlier. There is no new car purchased by the previous owner so far. The frequent borrowings result in repeated tiffs between the neighbors. And carrying the momentum from one of the numerous tiffs, he is now tearing apart the shrouds of dark night with his piercing shouts.  

A Few Small Moments

 

Time is creeping ahead block by little block. It keeps on ticking to set up the colossal canvas of happenings. And commodified into its pawns we are also shifted around bundled with all our inflated myths. Among the gigantic plethora of events, there are little tales of agonies and ecstasies. This one here seems a sad tale. Life seems to carry a timeworn and dilapidated myth despite all the hypothetical, slow-dawning effervescence about it. And death, the colossal figure, snatches raw freshness to its age-old, wrinkled self.

A ladybird seems dead in the water bucket. I bring my fingertip near the drowned little colorful flier. Instantly crossing the vast chasm between life and death, it uses its energy held in reserves and crawls to the hand of the species that has destroyed countless fellow earthlings. I look at its beautiful red wings speckled with little dots. It gives gleaming insights into the vast array of natural colors and self-evolving designs.

I try to put it on the night jasmine flowers but it looks full of gratitude and moves up the finger. Getting it off is a very delicate, and tough, job. I am not aware that someone is watching me very closely. A rockchat has witnessed the rescue operation. It’s keenly interested in what I’m doing. Its dull rufous brown color is misleading. It’s not that dumb as it seems. Smartly it picks the ladybird and darts away, giving a triumphant chick-chick note that carries a wry sense of humor. Probably it thinks that I’m offering the little colorful beetle to it.

It’s one of the pair that hops around in the verandah and the yard and the garden ticking out ants, spiders and other little insects. Sometimes they sneak into the room and are very keen to explore the cage of we humans. They survey the room from the ceiling fan and their dark little eyes seem lost in the encyclopedic fog spread by our hopes and desires. I would say it’s a very inquisitive pair of birds and they want to know more about me. Once, one of them, boy or the girl I’m not sure, sat on my writing pad and very comfortably and assuredly eased down a drop on it. Maybe it gave me an autograph.

Sometimes, the rufous brown Indian rockchat is mistaken as female Indian robin, but it lacks the reddish vent and is slightly larger in size than the robin and carries a slightly curved slender beak. It flies like thrushes and redstarts and loves to hop and fly around human habitations. No wonder they have laid claim to the house. They slowly raise their tails as they take little jumps on the ground while picking their feed. They help this lazy countryside writer in keeping a check on the spiders in the verandah. Sometimes they come out even at night when there are moths around the bulb. The pair, quite unlike their unassuming dull color, has a vast repertoire of calls including territorial calls, begging calls, feeding calls, distress calls and roosting calls. But the usual call is a short whistling chee delivered with a rapid bob and stretch. Sometimes, they give company to the tailorbirds with their alarm calls, which is a harsh chek-chek. And when they are very happy after a nice lunch, they sing like thrush in their moderate, few-numbered notes. They are naughty sometimes and try to imitate the sound of other birds.

The honey buzzer got greedy and regularly flew down for three consecutive days. Now the bees aren’t just there to go flying around and gather honey for it. They left the site in irritation. You have to take away only that much as it won’t spoil the game altogether. Sadly, now my little garden looks incomplete without the bees. The flowers will miss them. Hope the tiny winged visitors won’t forget the garden and will come back some fine sunny day to get pollen for their honey and more flowery smiles for the plants.

A little rodent moves quite cluelessly in the flowerbed. Is it a shrew or mole rat? I’m not expert enough to know the difference. To a layman’s eye, there is hardly any difference between the two. I wish it to be a mole rat because they say it brings luck. What is the harm in wishing oneself a bit of luck? These are hard times after all. It’s twilight and a bluejay (Indian roller or neelkanth) suddenly swoops down from the neem branch, where it was sitting stoically for the last half an hour, and takes off a gecko from the compound wall. The gecko will have a nice flight till its carrier lands. Stay indoors you wall lizards if you don’t enjoy flying in the twilight.  

An Elephant Ride

 

I was once walking on my little legs by the side of the famished pot-holed road passing the village. I was coming back from the fields. A road-roller and an elephant were going side by side on the tattered pot-holed road. Three PWD guys on the road-roller, a bulky iron elephant itself, went with a lumbering muse. The real elephant carried four sadhus who maintained the mammoth creature for their mendicant journey. They had exactly the same slow, unmindful pace, none of them willing to overtake the other. Traffic wasn’t much during those days. Now and then a bus, truck or tempo would crawl respectfully from front or behind and carefully maneuvered the crossing by taking its tyres below the road on the opposite side.

I walked behind watching the spectacle unfold. Who would mess with a road-roller and an elephant on the road? So the vehicles maintained their distance. The PWD guys and the elephant-riding sadhus looked very confident on account of their solid occupancy of the road. They even chatted in a friendly way, going slowly side by side.

The sadhus had opium chillums in their hands and the PWD guys got desirous of some free spirits. They requested and it was accepted by the sadhus already in free spirits. Two sadhus got down with a chillum and got onto the road-roller and the driver enjoyed the smoky bonhomie. The road-roller rolled almost of its free will. The other two PWD guys stood in front of the elephant as it put its trunk under their bums to hoist them on its back and there they enjoyed the inhalations of freedom with the couple of sadhus on the elephant. And there I walked behind looking at their merry ways. It was a far gentler world then.

Chand the Great

 

Chand is in his early fifties now. He is unmarried and works as a truck driver. He is a simple, unassuming guy. You hardly notice any airs around him. But he has a specialty. Presently, the current generation has lots of social-media ventilated issues to talk about. But if we go two decades back, Chand was a solid topic to be discussed about, especially among the endowment-size crazy youngsters. Without any competition, Chand was, and most probably still is, the best-hung guy in the village. Literally, every male would lose confidence in himself at a mere look at Chand walking dourly.

Chand was childlike in this regard. He never wet his shorts while taking bath, sitting innocently on the tube-well’s water tank wall and giving himself a nice scrubbing bath while dozens of eyes stared in awe. And the legend spread. He was almost a poor man but people far higher in social standing gave him respect due to his USP. People joked that the reason he is still unmarried is because no father would put his daughter in trouble.

There was a story of mythical proportions that even nautch girls on the GB road in Delhi refused him service. One tormented woman, who had taken the risk and accepted money, bit him and escaped while it wasn’t yet over for him, saying, ‘Who wants to be hospitalized for his bloody 100 rupees!’ She slapped him very hard and threw his 100-rupee note on his face. After that he was spurned by one and all in the area.

There was a famous gupt rog vishesagya, the sexologist, in the town. Dr. Lubhash Chugh’s name was scribbled on all walls in the region ranging from temples to schools to private houses. Wherever there was space, he got it painted with his offer of turning docile sheepish males into rampaging horses. That was the only form of advertizing we saw while growing up because he didn’t leave an inch of wall space for any other product or service. Apart from this, secondarily though, he claimed to treat venereal diseases also.

He had grown sagely old after decades of groping his fingers among people’s groins, gleefully looking for the weak spots. The people joked that he had taken nayan sukh, solace for his eyes, of ogling at one million guptangs, secret organs. But the old man was at the shock of his life in his eighties. He still loved the art of checking guptangs. As fate would have it, Chand got a painful boil on his special thing. It forced him to visit the venerable doctor. The old doctor gasped, gasped for life in fact, as he stared at the thing. His mathematics of male anatomy gone haywire, he gasped for words. ‘O my God!’ is all he could manage to mutter as he struggled with words. He was lost in thoughts as if his life’s philosophy had crashed. Then he suddenly flared up, ‘Take him away….go and make it sit down…how dare you insult a doctor by coming with an awakened thing!’ the proportions obviously made him think that it was wide awake. ‘It’s perfectly asleep sir!’ Chand said meekly. Then the old sexologist had a careful second look and slumped into his chair as if he had been finally defeated. ‘Did anyone ever allow you to even touch herself?’ the doctor asked at long last. He had forgotten about the patient’s boil. ‘That’s why I’m almost virgin,’ Chand answered stoically. I think the old doctor would have been more than happy to retire after hitting this milestone in his career.

The Esteemed Milkmen of Yesteryears

 

Those were very simple but careful days. People had their names etched on brass, steel and aluminum utensils. The neighbors usually borrowed kitchenware from each other during weddings. So the post-ceremony retrieval of the items required a strong, unquestionable identification mark. They would also get a tattoo of one’s name and village on the arms to give a clue to their identity if someone got lost at a fair. I remember a little boy who got lost at Haridwar fair. His misspelled village name got him transported to a far off village in some other state. He was lucky to be delivered finally after the failed attempt to deliver him at the wrong address.

Those were also the days when the milkmen served as paramours to lots of work-beaten and bored peasant women. In the privacy of the barn, the milkmen had the luck to stare at them as they milked the cows or buffalos. Romance bloomed usually, followed by boredom-killing intimacies. In the drudgery of a hard life, it was a handy diversion. In the pre-dawn darkness, inside the barn, there was a good chance that the milkman provided some succor to the work-beaten peasant woman. No wonder, the milkmen tried their best to collect milk from all barns before the day broke. As most of the villagers, the males at least, slept peacefully and the peasant women already in the yoke of domestic chores in the brahma muhurat, the milkmen loitered around with a mischievous glee on their faces.

One was Khome Dudhiya. Reddish, thin, his mongoose face always clean shaven, he moved with lots of business in his role of paramour to a few peasant women. His cream-colored shirt and pants were always ironed to notify his hard-edged intent. He bestowed a few allowances to his special friends of the opposite sex. Firstly, he deliberately allowed them to mix water in the milk. He just took long, joyful draughts at beedis and pretended not to look as water turned milk. Now this bumper offer was too big to be ignored by the peasant women. It gave them, and still does, an orgasmic sense of relief to mix water to milk. Next, he gave them maybe a rupee extra for per kg milk. And when he was really happy, he would gift them pieces of cotton clothes for sewing salwar kameez sets. In this simple way, he kept on ferrying milk in his iron drums on his bicycle. It was a very successful life. It is proven by the fact that he was never thrashed by any of the irate husbands on account of his romantic inclinations.

The younger crop of milkmen, who now supply milk to households in the nearby town, also have their share of fun. While the earlier generation had fun basically with the sellers, the stylish young milkmen of the present times have goody-goody times with the purchasers in the town. Many urban housewives also lead a suffocating life within the confines of four walls. The rotund young milkman, whom they consider to be carrying a bagful of libido because of his milk diet, comes handy to beat the boredom. These young Romeo milkmen, as they ride their bikes carrying milk drums, carry a boyfriendly look as if they are going on a date instead of selling their milk. In comparison to the milkmen of earlier generation, these flunky milk carriers have to follow the reversed equation in one more regard: as a special favor to their love interests, they supply waterless milk at subsidized rates.

A thin ribbon of wilderness

 

There is a monitor lizard in the neighborhood. There are little clumps of trees, grass and bushy plants to allow the reptiles maintain a foothold in the rapidly urbanizing landscape. The monitor lizard hatchlings resemble ghavera, vishphoda, a poisonous reptile in the lizard family, so people run to kill them. Card-playing idlers are at the forefront of this assault. It gives them a break from the mind-sapping focus in the card game.

Sometimes, a group of four or five ducks goes sullenly over the village. They already look like an extinct species because there aren’t any waterbodies to sustain their winter sojourn here in the plains. During good old days, the village pond rippled with their fluttering feathers and boisterous quacks. There was even a group of geese in the village pond. They appeared very peaceful and confident but at a spur of some tricky moment, they let loose a round of bassy quacking and seemed very angry. The dogs had their scary tales to share how angry these Donald ducks could become. The sturdy big ducks taught the dogs many lessons in good behavior. By the way, I remember clearly, they slept on one leg and turned their neck backwards to put it on the back for a soft feathery pillow.

The surrounding countryside is under intense agriculture, leaving hardly anything for the migratory winter birds from the Himalayas. To keep the hopes alive for the winged visitors, three white-necked storks still visit the countryside around the village. They have been visiting for the last many years, spending their time with hesitant little flights, measuring the vanishing wilderness with their long strides. They are always together. All three of them cannot be females because they would have gossiped to animosity by this time. They cannot be males also because they would have fought over females and fallen apart. It’s either a female with two males (polyandrous stork system) or a male with two females (polygamy, which seems more likely given the scourge of male chauvinism across species).

The Little-little Remains of a Day

 

Maybe after flying for many a fruitless mile, the honey buzzer has spotted the little honeycomb in our garden. In a world of vanishing flowers and rapidly decreasing honeycombs, it has a right to take a little bite of the thing that gives it a name. The attempt turns out to be very clumsy. The majestic honey-loving hawk is too big for the delicate branches of the small curry-leaf tree. The hunter has to grab its morsel while almost in flight. A bigger piece falls on the ground than what it takes away. But they don’t get sullen over such drops and misses. They are happy to take whatever falls in their kitty. The notion of getting more or something going waste doesn’t turn their head heavy. The honeybees struggle over the fallen piece. Instead of complaining over the loss, they use their energy to retrieve the grounded granules of honey. After a labor of one hour, they settle for almost the same shape as before. It’s so easy to move on with life if one doesn’t carry the extra load of grudges, guilt and anger.

The purple cone of banana flower hangs with silent, pinpointing precision. It’s heavy enough to tilt the stem and hangs down like a mason’s iron-cone used to check the vertical component of the wall under construction. It’s ideally, from our economical point of view, supposed to be taken off once the gap between the last row of the banana fingers and the flower cone is 15 cm because it sucks a lot of nutrition from the tree. But I keep it to enjoy the sheer joy of a dewdrop hanging from its tip in the mornings. Moreover, I have no business to temper with it when even the monkeys have spared it so far. They just pluck away the unripe little banana fingers unfolding on the upper part.

The purple pendulum of the banana blossom looks a nutritious heart-shaped tree chandelier. Dew drips down during the misty nights. The green little fingers above get into a sturdy claw. Many varieties of sucklers have a nice party during the day including mosquitoes, fruit flies, stinging wasps and the purple sunbird couple that is almost a full-term resident of the little garden. At dusks, a flying fox comes toed by smaller bats at night.

The night falls across a smoggy dusk. The evening twilight and a half moon doing justice to both the night and the day. It seems there is blood on the moon’s pale face, a kind of portrait of the bleeding nature. The reddish moon casts glum shadows across the smog. The smog is a regular affair now even in the villages during early winters.

But the worlds, big and small, have to lumber on. A caterpillar has lost its grater, the last bulbous part. It goes like a funny little tractor whose backside mudguards have been taken off. It walks pretty briskly, just that it topples over repeatedly after losing its anatomical symmetry. Accidents abound at this level of existence. But I think it’s better than getting crushed altogether. It has had a long day on the floor, doing all these antics, toppling over, lying calmly like a corpse for some time, an ant or two coming to check about the chance of a meal, and there it hops up again to keep claiming its right to life.  

A butterfly going for the last sips of nectar before calling for the day. A slumberous darkling beetle and an agile ant bump into each other. The day going for rest and the night getting up for its shadowy tasks. And above all the fears and insecurities, mother nature still trying to assuage the restless, aggrieved child:

‘Let me provide warmth for your frozen hands. Let me smile to soak your tears. Let me hold a flower for you to smell and smile. Let me hold light for your eyes even in the dark.’

Kori's Chronicles

 

We called him Kori but his real name was Vinod. His mother was from our village and he came visiting his maternal granny’s house during school vacations.

Those were slow-paced times. We got our lessons in animal care and kindness through simple norms and traditions. When stray female dogs in the streets gave birth to puppies, we would prepare nice little kennels for them using paddy haylofts. As the canine lady in labor rested, in the evenings we set out on a sort of alms-asking sortie on behalf of her. The group of children would hold an earthen pot, bowl or basin, little fingers holding the rim from all sides and there we went yelling in front of closed doors, raising a ruckus. People would offer chapattis, subzi, curd, buttermilk, millet khichdi and other rustic attempts at cooking a supper. All of it would be dumped in the same container to make it a heady cocktail of a canine supper. It would acquire a unique flavor as layers of different items entered the recipe.

Kori was involved in one such sortie. He loved bajra khichdi and buttermilk to along with it. It was a winter night. Those were the days when the streets were dark after the sunset and electricity arrived just in name, so most of the houses had candles and kerosene lamps. Kori must have felt very hungry. On top of that, his favorite dish was in the pot. He was draped in a shawl and in the dark helped himself with plenty of handfuls of buttermilk laced bajra khichdi. In fact, he chucked it out clean. So this part of the collective food went missing.

Standing in front of a door from where the incharge boy tilted the basin to check whether the collection was sufficient. To his puzzlement, the khichdi part of the canine supper was missing. It was pretty spooky and left us wondering about some ghost taking it away. We had a scary discussion about ghosts stealing bajra khichdi. Kori played a lead role in spreading the spooky tales about certain djins and prets who loved this food as his grandfather had told him.  

A few days later, having nicely digested the khichdi, but unable to digest the secret, Kori told me, on promise of keeping it a secret of course, that he had availed himself with that part because he liked it and we were late for dinner that day. Commendably, he had managed it very smartly, even though it was dark, from a basin that was held by many fingers.

Once, during some other summertime school break, he arrived at his granny’s place. Driven by his curiosity about his anatomy, he had an injured hung. So he couldn’t use his pants. He wore a lungi. Moreover, his rubber slippers went sailing down the village canal during one of the fun-bathing episodes, leaving him the option of wearing his maternal uncle’s leather boots that were double his size. In a lungi and double-sized black boots, he looked the kingpin of local goons. This, and his injured hung, gave him the walk of a teasing swag, a kind of flirtatious swaying gait. An old woman next door took it to her heart. He turned an eyesore to her and she cracked jibes at him. ‘He hardly has any legs in his bum but look at his attitude,’ she would say loudly whenever Kori passed her house.

With an injured pride, and injured hung, Kori resolved to take a revenge. He started relieving himself—in both solid and fluvial sense—on their own roof. When his granny found the roof turned into an open toilet, Kori pointed out the enemy old woman, saying he had seen her scaling the low parapet dividing their roofs and performing the relieving rites. But his granny cackled with laughter. Much concerned, Kori asked, ‘Why, you don’t believe me? Then whom do you suspect?’ ‘I don’t just suspect but I have full knowledge that it’s you. It’s a boy’s poop of your age beta,’ she spoke wisely. So the attempt at taking revenge failed.

A Monkey's Revenge against Humans

 

If your being isn’t bugged with ambition to a specific extent, the institutions, people, society, even your own family will find you weak and inefficient for their scheme. Satti Bhai, my cousin brother, is a clear example of this. He held a governmental job but had no hunger to rise in the ranks. During his youth, he loved mountaineering but the Himalayas lost their charm as drinking became his primary love in the evenings. He is a thorough gentleman in the art of drinking. Even after the alcohol’s chauvinistic liberality running in his veins, he is always at peace with one and all. As the bottle hits the bottom, he is a replica of some inclusionist, flexible, eclectic and absorptive God.

But then something happened that spoilt the equilibrium. I saw him losing his temper for the first time. It wasn’t after drinking. It was in broad daylight when his body was free of liquor. We were standing in a narrow, crowded old Delhi bazaar lane. Electric cables above, just a few feet above one’s head, crisscrossed the narrow space like thick creepers to give the sense of a false ceiling. Satti Bhai stood with a sense of aloofness and majestic muse about the futility of all this scurrying about, probably already looking up to the evening when his already slow world would become almost stand-still in the beautiful fog created by the bottle.

Then the leisurely strolling moments were checkmated. A monkey was kingly sitting on the electric cables, its legs dangling above Satti Bhai’s head. With an unbelievable ease, it peed on his head. As the warm fluid trickled down his crown, Satti Bhai couldn’t believe the attack on his sagely dignity. He yelled revengefully, baulked a terrible cuss word and jumped to hold the monkey’s tale to swing it and thrash it around. The offending rascal easily escaped leaving Satti Bhai out of words and fuming with rage.

Later, he took bath and shampooed his hair but, as he said, the bad smell won’t go. He got a terrible headache as well, which he said was due to the horrible chemicals in the simian pee. That evening, the bottle failed to sober him down for the first time. He was snappy, moody and argumentative. That was his initiation into after-drinking usual kind of revelry. He is capable of punching his co-drinkers these days. So primarily what happens to us can mould us into countless variants.

An Ode to Early November

 

There is nostalgia and romance in the air in early November. A festive spirit is daintily festooned to most of the faces. There is love in the air. A butterfly couple flies in looping, free patterns of companionship, love, lust and procreation. It represents the air’s gallant, love-drenched, unhurried, effortless, soaring spirits.

The rose petals are velvety, soft, scented and scatter to playful winds after their short dazzle on the stage of existence. They are like a pampered princess. Marigolds, on the other hand, are hardy ones. Their lack of flashy colors and intoxicating smell is compensated by hardiness and durability. They are like hardworking, working class people. No wonder, the Gods prefer them as garlands around their necks.

A peepal that I planted has grown too long. Its thin stem looks too eager to kiss the skies. But too soaring ambitions see us plummeting down to kiss the ground as well. The lanky plant falls under the weight of its own tall aspirations. It now needs the support of a stick to regain its vertical. Helping a bent down plant to hold its head high is a nice thing to do. I only advise the plant to go up at a moderate, manageable pace.   

The Power of Faith

 

Many decades back, it was a scrub forest in the countryside surrounding my village. The distances were still measured by creaking cartwheels even though rolling tyres had made their presence felt. A sanyasi meditated in a little cave dug into an earthen mound overlooking a little pool of water in the scrub forest. As he meditated, a wolf and a cobra stayed nearby. He achieved enlightenment. Now we have the holy pond surrounded by a tiny grove of banyan, peepal and neem trees.

The place carries its mystique and solitariness, where one can still feel the aromatic wafts of the holy man’s spirituality. There is an elemental sound of faith reverberating through the gusts of breeze playing with the leaves. Silence and peace is unperturbed as the moments pass in tuneful glides with harmony. Birds have a melodious regaling among the trees. A family of green pigeons safely coos in the banyan canopy. There is a group of fourteen geese that own the pond waters and they assert their rights pretty noisily now and then.

The holy man used to bathe in the tiny pond. Faith is feisty, disarming and daring. Our own self is its mighty nurturer. The waters in the little pond heal skin allergies. Many people have been cured and the myth stays with the little mossy pool.

In the little shrine commemorating the holy man, a priest draws healing powers from the holy man’s legacy. He acts as a faith healer and his simple process of chanting mantras and blessings—drawing sustenance from the holy man’s spiritual energies—cures people of typhoid. Many people authenticate the efficacy of this faith-healing treatment. Long lasting are the effects of meditations.

The place has all that it takes for the seekers of silence and peace. The offerings at the little temple sustain birds and a few dogs on the premises. The seeds of penance leave behind a crop that serves humanity, and some animals and birds also, for a long time.

The New Bride

 

She is a new bride, pretty looking, slender and curvaceous with a biting pout on her lips. Whatever energy is left after the night revelries driven by the youthful passion, she spends it on her mother-in-law. The old woman has a loafy, gruffy, rumbling tone that booms in a dull way. It’s highly inept for fighting. The young woman, on the other hand, is incisive like a knife. Her high-pitched, sharp notes cut through the buttery, loafy resistance of her mother-in-law. Who wins is a foregone conclusion. She easily tames the old woman during the day. For the nights, her pretty face and slender figure is more than sufficient to tame the already exhausted husband who works in a needle factory in a nearby town. He is well aware of the dangers presented by small, sharp, incisive things. And thus starts another little story of lengthening another pedigree.

The Matrimonial Bamboo

 

A guy married very late, at the age of forty in fact. In the conservative village society, it’s almost like getting married while you are peeping into your grave. They would love child marriages any day. His classmate in the village school meets him after a few years. ‘I hardly meant to marry but this society, peer pressure, and family and relatives nagging my soul day and night forced me into marriage at last. I couldn’t handle it anymore. It was like they had put the end of a stick into my bum and held it to maneuver around,’ he lamented. ‘And now by agreeing to get married, you have allowed the stick to be entirely thrust inside you, so carry it smartly now,’ the friend quipped matter of factly.