May Musings

The perch-pole’s length has been increasing as the temperature rose in May. It’s a very high, lofty platform for the white pigeons to enjoy the lower world from a higher platform. These are docile, domesticated pigeons with clipped wings. They fly with a lot of flutter, out of habit, the birdie habit to fly, and land on their little perch point after a few sorties in the sky. The struggling flight carrying faint rebelling undertones as the languidly looming horizons cajole with the prospects of free flights. But the attitude of gratitude for the owner is strong enough to quell the spirit of freedom. They land on their little open cage. Domestication piles up habits, loads of habits in fact. The roots blended with a sense of uprootedness; the sweetened taste of petty vagaries. It gives a sadistic penchant for taming punctualities. Out of sheer habit the pigeons sit on their high open platform in the merciless noontime heat, even though there are shady trees around. The boy should fix a shelter box on the open, flat board which the pigeons consider their home. Otherwise the sun may roast the pigeons and the eagle will arrive to enjoy roasted meat. Why persist with the habits that give you sunstroke or even roast you alive, I wonder.

Not much bothered about the white pigeons getting roasted alive under merciless noontime sun, the parijat shows new leaf shoots. As if apprehending burning fires and the last drop of water getting vaporized at the peak of the hot season, it went into a panic mode and in mad frenzy to dodge the death’s dragnet shed its leaves that dropped almost endlessly. The garden bore a sad autumnal look. So many hardy big dry leaves as would make a little mound. From its luxuriant buxom look it turned into a skeletal sadhu doing penance in the Himalayas; a lean and fragile monk with swordfish spirit. I would term it as stoic detachment to green foliage. If it gets too attached to the luxuriant canopy, it will lose so much water to even die and unable to hold its seeds. Nature is unsparing. It demands sacrifices. Each thing, plant, tree, grass blade, stone piece, everything in fact has to bow down to the laws to retain its shape. As a concerned and caring parental entity, the bare skeletal tree carried its dry pods of seeds, so many of them that even though each gust of wind scatters hundreds every minute, still many will be left to keep its lineage alive.

It’s the young lad of a tree carrying its palpable adolescence. And with the new shoots coming up you can enjoy reading newspaper under it in the morning. New shoots carry a unique, fresh aura. After its tapasya, the young tree seems in excitement of love and procreation. Its dark brown button-shaped seed pods fall in a drizzle—an orgasmic surrender; a sort of foreplay among the hot sighing winds. Then the monsoon will arrive like a bride with its large-hearted surrendering overreach and conceive its offsprings. A mother with springing affections. A fresh enthusiast of new life. A carrier of entrepreneurial dynamism. The seeds will come to life. Some seeds fall on my head also. Misplaced enthusiasm, at the most. Maybe the tree wants to take roots in our minds from where mother nature’s concern has been severally uprooted. Or maybe the tree is playing some mischief by hitting me on the head.

Then the plumber-cum-labor man arrives to fix a broken tap. Regular work with shovels, spades, pick-axes and pipe-wrenches bestows muscular arms and strong hands. There is an imposing crocodile tattoo on his hand. I complement him for it, telling him that the great crocodile looks suitable for his work-hardened limbs. He is slightly embarrassed and tells me, ‘Well, I asked the tattoo maker at the fair to draw Shiva but he was high on afeem and Shiva came out like this!’ I stare deeply and try to find out any semblance of the great God’s supreme stature in a godly niche in the skin graphic. There is hardly any trace of Him here. But with the mind’s intensely intellectual excretions one can spot, or even innovate in imagination, eccentrically methodical designs and patterns conveying meanings of other dimensions, just like abstract art, to justify whose strangest lines and shapes one has to have a huge mind to spin out new meanings or even blindly babbling speculations. So it looks a masterpiece of abstract painting. I get inclined to view it as the modern art form but my reverie is broken by the bearer’s gentle tone. ‘It was sinful on his part, so I gave him a hard beating. But he was very professional at least in digging deep. The ink is so thick and deep that it won’t go away however hard I rub,’ he clarifies the entire story behind the tattoo. Indeed the high-on-substance tattoo maker has left a well-rooted heritage on this man’s skin. His free-flowing hands drawing a plenteously aesthetic design as per the diktats of a free spirit, carrying soft blends of awareness and unawareness.