Everybody has an allergy

Farmer Ranbeer drops in the morning. ‘Haven’t met you since many weeks, so came to see you,’ he greets me in my yard. He seems apologetic because he can easily read my mind that is full of thoughts whose summary is that the host doesn’t approve of the guest’s visit and considers it a waste of time. But farmers have thick skins. They don’t get bruised by such subtle hostilities. Theirs is a tough world where something has to be loudly visible and concrete solid to be taken seriously. So my feelings and thoughts are irrelevant and his arrival is supposed to be born of my invitation and his acceptance of the same.

Secluded in the yard corner, far away from the maddening crowd, basking in the soothing gaiety and enormous serenity, I’m reading newspaper. To me he seems a loafer tramping around on a mission to slay all traces of peace from the remotest corners. My face wears gravity even though he carries an affable personage. He is slightly stalled—just a trace of it—by my quirky countenance, and quickly grasps the affectionate strings ever-available in his goodwill for me. He considers it to be a very friendly visit and drags the chair very near, as would do justice to a joyous smalltime prattling between two idle-most people in the world.

His left eye is watery and blood red. Lost in my covert conjectures, I surmised ‘Eye flu!’ It strikes me hard with cold disdain. Eye flu, the harrowing word, boldly italicized upon my once editor’s psyche on the page of my insecurities. Knowledge, apart from being the solution provider to many challenges, is also the cause of many of our problems in the modern-day life. The farmer isn’t bothered much about my unease. Maybe the idlers and loafers suffer the least weight on their brains. The world of knowledge keeps us on the edge. I give him malicious looks. ‘You should take rest and not loaf around,’ I testily tell him, almost rebuke him in fact, my knowledge of the eye flu’s contagiousness giving me anxiety attack.

‘It’s nothing,’ he laughs. It was nothing to his wife as well. Ranbeer had gone to the village chemist for eye-drops for some mild irritation in his eye. He got the drops, came home and settled on a charpoy to receive the eye-drops in his eye from the work-hardened hands of his farmer wife. She like all farming women was thrashed like a hefty heifer during her husband’s prime but now pulls all levers, including ears sometimes, as the hubby grows old and she still retains immense powers. In the Jat community the availability of power in the limbs is the main deciding factor in the game of life. You rule like an egomaniacal king when you have power and strength in your bones. You fall down to slavish level with the passage of strength from your body.

She has retained at least double of his, so she is a formidable and petrifying force now. Haughty, stern and austere, no wonder, she rules the kingdom now. From an earlier avatar of a tyrannical king, he has now fallen to the level of a grizzled old social democrat and she a ruling-by-fist communist autocrat. He has to hope that she soon acquires a weak memory of the past. Or if not, at least listens to the conscientious commotions of her female heart, forgetting all the poignant recalls from the past when the hubby was the king.

On his part, he cannot afford to fall into any misdemeanor born of habit. He has groomed a nice new trait in him: in response to her ravings he gives supplicating, meek looks of a puppy. He is ageing wisely, a kind of melting of the grand discordance (at least on his part) between a husband and a wife, a peeling away of chauvinistic sentimentalism, an ability to keep things normal despite the better half’s chastisements.  

She stares at the brand new medicine vial. She is illiterate but has pictographic memory. Everyone needs such skills to stay alive in this memory-crazy world. Her face turns very serious as if she is busy in solving the most puzzling equation in the mathematical world. She doesn’t open the medicine and carrying a doctor’s mien goes into the store room crammed with agriculture tools, barn equipment and discarded electric gazettes. She returns after five minutes from the dusty-musty place, some cobwebs jewelling her hair.

She is quite perturbed over Ranbeer’s spendthrift ways. She remembers his hard-fisted financial tyranny when he used to be the king. It resulted in her entire life being spent clad in a select few rumpled, worn out salvaar kameej and chunris. ‘It’s the same medicine. See, just same-same! Why waste a new one. There is a bit left in the old one. Use it!’ she commands. She isn’t, even with her pictographic memory, much concerned about the expiry date printed on the medicine. ‘The old medicine was at least five years older than the expiry date. But she has to spend the old one first otherwise our house will break down due to the wasting habit of mine. So in order to finish the old bottle, she drops the medicine throughout the day,’ he laments.

No wonder, his eye is blood red now. But worrying about such matters is not for them. He laughs away the petty talk as if nothing has happened. So it stands proven that worrying is basically a disease of the well-informed or rather too much informed. The farmer with a deep-red eye takes leave, jocosely looking forward to a restful day, leaving me still wondering and apprehensive about the transfer of the possible eye flu in his eyes.

It reminds me of my own episode of red eye and the people running away in office. I worked in the editorial department of a publisher during those days. It was an oral homoeopathic medicine that I was taking at the time. Editorial being a very taxing job for one’s eyes, I usually used some general eye-drops to relieve the eyes of the strain. One day, after a bad day at office and having lost my focus, by mistake I dropped the eye-drops on my tongue. My taste buds complained a bit, a small hint at change of taste, but not much. It was followed by dropping the oral drops in my eye. But the eye singed with pain. I had a blood red eye like Ranbeer. Next day my manager—always strongly explicit with disdain, disgust and aversion—ran away from me, grimacing with repugnance, as if I carried plague. ‘Eye flu, eye flu!’ I could hear him muttering. With my contagion strain I turned infallible and the manager a mere harmless slanderer. My teammates maintained a distance. ‘You should have taken an off. It’s clear-cut eye flu!’ my manager rued. I told them the reason but they laughed and took it as a joke. Keeping their sensitivities in mind I took three days leave. The ever-fighting manager, forever reaching higher and higher to the capricious cusp of his deranged self, temporarily forgetting his inveterate hate, morphed into a kind gentleman, in fact seemed very relieved about avoiding the eye flu pandemic in the office.

Ranbeer leaves but it seems a visitors’ day today. Very soon, Master Randhir, a retired teacher from a neighboring village, arrives and confidently occupies the just-relieved chair. His nose, turned bold purple due to the ceaseless rub of the hanky, is working to the fullest watering capacity. His hanky already sloshed due to his effort to stop the endless stream of water. It’s the nastiest cold, as worse as it can be. This is an apocalypse of pandemics, I shiver. To the hell with Corona-type symptoms! Socializing is very important. Go and live your life, embrace people in bear hugs, especially if you have a running nose. It shows how much you love your fellow humans.

The retired teacher is in his early seventies and hard on hearing. Doing me favors, he draws the chair even nearer. His major activity is wiping his nose all along. Nicely cornered, I resign to my fate, kill my irritation, slaughter my frowns and set out to entertain my guest.

Masterji is a considerate man, understands my feelings regarding pandemics—Corona isn’t too far in memory—and tries to assuage my apprehension. ‘It isn’t bad cold that others will catch. No virus and bacteria. It’s allergy. Nazla-nazla,’ he clarifies. Masterji is a long sufferer of this allergy, the triggering unknown substance lets loose his bronchial and respiratory system now and them, torturing him so much as to turn him on the path of spirituality. I bow down to the godliness in him for he thinks that I’m a great saint in making, despite my eye-rolling denials and even open declarations of my worldly shades, and wants me to cure his tragic allergy.

‘I can fill buckets of water with this tube-well on!’ he ruminates. ‘Santji there must be some cure. I know you can search and get me rid of this evil allergy,’ he looks expectantly. I feel sad for him. I feel sorry that I can hardly help him in this regard. But I can see that it has weighed very heavily on his mind.

‘Masterji, you feel sorry and bitter thinking that you the odd one has been chosen to suffer with this horrible nazla and that makes you feel sorry for yourself. But everyone has got a nazla. Some have the nazla of power, some of wealth, some of lust, of jealousy, of hate. See-see, everyone has got a type of nazla. Sab saale nazla se pareshaan hain. I can’t see even a single person who isn’t suffering from a nazla of his own kind. Go out in the street and spread your arms and shout ‘sabko nazla hai’,’ I spread my arms. Masterji cackles with laughter. He is consoled. He realizes that all of us have our own nazla, our own sufferings of mind, emotions and body. ‘Sabko nazla hai!’ he repeats and laughs as I see him off at the gate.

Just nearby a leery young dog, his tongue hanging out with paroxysm of obscenity, is locked onto an old hag of a bitch. The clumsy fellow seems to be repenting in the grip now and being dragged around—an aftermath of its inexpert endeavor, looking for a way out, its suppliant tongue out in submission. And she, the old, wise, clever and capricious one, has all the time to drag and publicly shame him for his impulsive storm. Aaah the hideous deformity of time—its seconds, minutes, hours (and weeks, months and years in case of humans)—after the love-ravage! The bitter fruits of basic instincts, gratuitously bequeathed by the still higher forces drawing the strings somewhere in the unseen mysteries.

Masterji is piqued for a moment but then regains his jeering spirits. ‘Inn saalo ko bhi nazla hai,’ he roars with laughter.