Central India charms

 

I’m visiting Bhopal after two years of Corona mayhem. My sister stays there and the city with its cleaner air and more space usually entices me to extend my stays. Scores of palash (dhak) or ‘flame of the forest’ welcome you with their copious blooms. It’s the flagship of spring in this part. It’s considered to be the sacred agni tree with its vivid, stunning orange flowers. The attractive beacon has a beak-shaped keel petal, two wings by its side and a heart-shaped background petal pointing upwards giving the impression of rising flames.

The welcoming and sprawling campus of Barkatullah university, near my sister’s place, is my evening time escape zone. It’s a peaceful laidback campus, dry leaves rustling like the soft murmur of a poem in a Persian anthology. It’s duly typified by the ancient-looking silent little block of Persian studies on the campus. But then you leapfrog into the future as well when you come across Advanced Research Center for Space and Earth Science under Department of Earth Sciences. I wonder what type of sophisticated tools must be there inside those unassuming old looking blocks. It’s a modern world: remote sensing, geo-informatics, digital image processing of satellite data, mirror and prism stereoscopes, light tables, optical reflecting projector, optical pantograph, image analyzer. And when two buildings, one dealing with a medieval language and the other involving future technologies, stand nearby on the same campus, it’s almost like Persian verses laced with space technology formulas between the lines. A senior research fellow to supervise the modern technical processes; just like a hijab-clad senior professor in the Persian studies department guiding the studying light among the dimly lit corridors of past. The space technology supervisor, her blond hair flashing almost yellow. She walks on the campus as an alien species. Silent, eyes on the ground, not expecting to come across anyone really familiar enough to engage in some talking. She loves walking through the not-so-dense parkland interspersed with scrub forest running along the asphalted path. For safety, she walks keeping the road in sight. The hijab-clad professor zooms past in her car, driving while on a call.

You can feel the changing winds. The Arabic and Persian studies department is a sad pale blue block. To put up a stark contrast, there is a swashbuckling new building, freshly minted, modernly designed. It’s the department of Sanskrit Studies. Arabic and Persian saw their heydays. Before that it was Sanskrit that touched the pinnacle of glory. But by symbolically giving it respect and prestige, you can at least have a feeling of revivalism. The university’s name is Barkatullah but to add to its secular credentials various academic blocks are named Chanakya, Vikramaditya, Shivaji. These signboards are vibrantly painted. There are winds of change for sure. Hindu revivalism, they say. Elsewhere in India the names of roads are getting changed, so are the names of cities. Mughal Garden is no longer Mughal Garden. As of now the word ‘Mughal’ connotes even bigger colonist government than that under the Britishers. The rulers will always have their say, in one form or the other. They will rake-up dirt. They will twist, mold, reshape things as per the suitability of their interests. So we have the modern kings who reshape the past to make it suitable for governance as per their beliefs and ideologies. As I walk musing over the winds of change, I come to realize that Mughals, Sultanate and Gujarat riots have been removed from senior secondary NCERT books. The present is being revamped on the rubble of the past.         

The campus of Barkatullah University is a paradise for evening walkers like me; spacious, almost silent asphalted narrow roads tolerably travelling many hectares of near wilderness with unassuming academic blocks set up almost apologetically among the trees.

As is the case with any neighborhood, there are regular walkers, most of them obese elders trying to stay within the range of the bearing capacity of their frail bones. I remember a few elderly walkers from the last trip. I am glad to know that they are still there and have successfully warded off the corona waves. They seem to be doing fine. The first is a gentleman in his seventies. He comes in well-ironed shirt and trousers. The shirt officially tucked in. He walks slowly but talks a lot more energetically. He is always speaking on the mobile, maybe to a friend from the office days who has gone back to his native place. He takes a long, slow-paced walk and they gently unfold the current affairs going fast around their old legs. The other is a silent elderly woman, fat, bundled in a sari. She heaves herself to health every day. She walks with unassuming purpose by keeping her head tilted sideways. Maybe it helps as a propeller against her weight. To make me happy, both of them look exactly the way I remember from two years back. So walking definitely helps.

The other is an elderly couple. She wears tight three-quarter leggings and a frock to top it. She has broad manly shoulders. She looks bored with late-life household conundrum. He has extremely narrow shoulders and goes broadening below. His waistline quite ample from a plus-sized female barometer. If nature were a bit more lenient and caring, it would have given auntie’s broad shoulders to uncle and fixed his enormous bottom on her, replacing her narrow hips.   

I walk with the setting sunrays and then branch off into the more natural parts to the distant corners of the campus. A foot trail branches off from the asphalt road and sneaks over the dark soil bearing winter-beaten grass. It’s not leveled up like a well-planned park. It still retains mother earth’s very own open plan, a very fine undulation. The black soil bears a very short-cropped grassy grey hair and little sparse weeds. Lots of sheesham trees have been planted in the unkempt, free park. Planted in the same season, most of them look similar in age and built—adolescent tree-boys having faint strains of mustachioed canopy.

One can walk in any direction even wearing bathroom slippers. But we are the children of beaten paths. We feel secure in following a trail of passage. There are feeble traceries of foot tracks across the grassy terrain deciding the little-little destinations and milestones. Maybe we have killed our spirit to just move around without looking for endpoints. Even on a perfectly walkable unpaved landscape, our feet feel a drag, an inhibition, an ambivalence, creating a discomfort that finally draws our steps to the beaten path. It’s for this reason that walking on solitary trails brings a sense of freedom to the footloose revelers.

The setting is perfect for me. The scattered clouds present a shifting panorama of shapes and colors. Look into the shapes evolving and colors changing. At a cursory glance, it may appear meaningless. But look deeply and the mind will identify shapes. It will give ideas. In a way, it just is, but our mind will conjure up colorful things like elephants, gods, ships. Things on the ground are no different. They just are; mere shifting shapes. Our mind is what creates the newer and newer meanings, spinning spools of complexities.

A cluster of wild jasmine bush is my milestone to take to this solitary trail from the tar road. Wild jasmine flowers suffuse the evening with a heady aroma, egging one to seek more solitude to be in company with one’s real self. The parkland bearing faded grass has a few stunted palms as well as tall date palms and tall thickets of bamboo bushes. A drongo is having a late evening feast on palash flowers as I pass by the tree. I usually walk to the clumps of bulrush, the waterside sedge, around a mossy waterhole on this black-soiled, faded grass-topped, palash-flamed panorama.

The sun is setting behind a cluster of palms, bamboos, sheesham and palash. A pale orange flame in the dark green bowl of the joint canopy—a lamp of sadness. What remains of the day bygone? What remains of the love lost? A distant whisper, a nearby murmur, a nostalgic tingling, some pain, a soft smile, a bruise, a hurt, some guilt, some blame. But above all, the dying pale rays sowing the seeds of a new bright day after the night.

Sweet-sour sadness to be topped with some wild berries. It’s a clump of wild karanda (carissa spinarum), a thorny, dense, multi-stemmed shrub with forked branches and ovate leathery green leaves. Its tiny flowers with five white narrow petals beckon me for sour-sweet solace. It’s also called conkerberry or bush plum. It offers its ripe purple conkerberries and says these are edible. I usually accept its offerings in this solitude. But this time I have to be careful—watchful that beauty comes with its risks. Its milky sap and unripe fruits are harmful. I roll my tongue over the biter-sweet tart taste and absorb in the sweet-scented flowers. It’s a heady smell, just like the smell of beauty usually is.

The trail leaves the faded beaten grass to enter a zone of wetland grass. A story says that little Moses was found in a bulrush boat. Its long, narrow eight or nine feet tall leaf stems provide sanctuary to a colony of black-breasted weaverbirds. It’s the roosting time and they raise a high frequency din at the sundown as if discussing the day’s events. You can hear this jingling music from a distance. There is basa (ipomoea carnea) or pink morning glory. It is also called besharam. I would prefer the last one for the fact of its shameless thuds and thwacks on our bums at the village school. It has a hardy, juicy stem that has enough hardness to burn the skin but sufficient suppleness to avoid serious bone injuries. Our teachers preferred it as their striking weapon. The favorite pipe-cane wielders of our school zoom in my memory as I appreciate the lovely heart-shaped purple blooms.

My brother-in-law has a vintage type Maruti 800. Its flashy red color can bring the best of cars to submissive blush. And when he obliges me and drives me to lovely places like Sanchi, Bhimbhetaka caves, Narmada ghats and massive uncompleted Bhojraja temple, I make it a point to encourage him: ‘Instead of sitting as a passenger in someone’s Lamborghini, drive your own Nano with pride.’ He seems slightly disturbed. ‘It’s not a Nano. That is half of it,’ he corrects me. As a big SUV sizzles past I really marvel at his capacity to look for little things to compare with his favorite car.

Sometimes I sneak into the little neighborhood market. A small world having little stores, medics, groceries, fruit and vegetable sellers, sweet makers and a confectioner. A pan wallah at one corner and a chai wallah at the other. A photocopier and stationer. Vineet Hair Dresser and Ananda Tailors at the end of the little passage at the back of the block. Have tea, chew a pan, smoke a cigarette on your cheat day, get glued to your phone sitting on a cushioned bench outside the hairdresser, look at the pretty ladies coming to the tailor to get their clothes fixed. The tailor’s establishment is at the end, with its workshop area open to the passage. It’s a little world in itself. You have young people waiting patiently for their hairdo turn. Smartphone is the new tool of meditation, of being in the moment. You have the cosmos on your fingertips. You are like a god having the power of witnessing what and how things are at the moment just by touching a few points on the screen. The elderly meanwhile seem itchy and restless while waiting for their turn. Time is a big element in their life as it moves towards the zero hour.

There is an old woman in my sister’s neighborhood. I think she has stubbornly decided to hit the century mark. She is still around and looks same since I visited two years back. She still has enough motherhood to take care of her middle-aged son and attend to her toiletries. What else you need? She was diagnosed with blood cancer more than a decade ago. She but is an illiterate village woman whose son works here and she has joined him to share urban life for the last few years. Ignorance is bliss. She hasn’t allowed someone’s conceptual terminology of an imbalance in her energetic system as cancer to hijack her spirit. Lack of knowledge is blissful in such cases. It avoids the paranoia about a fatal diagnosis. Most often, the word ‘cancer’ kills more than the disease itself. An almost normal system suddenly surrenders the instinct of survival and one dies of shock basically. But the word has no big meaning for her. So here she is hopefully looking at the three-digit mark with good spirits.

Time flies. Three weeks fly in a jiffy. The spring is gone and we have early summer. In Bhopal summers are special, and very sweet. The streets in residential quarters have many mango trees. They fructify really well. In late March, the trees are laden with tiny clusters of flowers. Some already have little green unripe mangoes. A tree may reward you with a succulent drop, hopefully not on your head, as you walk in the street. But that will be during the peak of summers. As of now, I have to inhale and be content with the smell of mango flowers and little unripe green baby mangoes. I have to go back and rely on my sister’s tales of ripe mangoes and their fruit feast.

It’s early morning. Rani Kamla Pati railway station can rival with the capital airports of many developing countries. Sleek, semi-high-speed Vande Bharat train has been launched a couple of days back on April Fool’s day by the honorable prime minister. It feels like you are going to board a plane while standing on the platform. This is the world of social updates. Most of the waiting passengers are taking proud selfies with the gently roaring engine.

Hordes of people line up at poor hamlets along the tracks to capture the fleeting glimpse of a vibrant, shiny India whizzing past their static, frozen poor fates. In the train many educated people audibly speak in English to do justice to the swanky new train. It’s a high-end transport facility. In the first week, there is a feedback that it runs on time. Automatic sliding doors, airplane type seats, long and high glass windows, the staff moving with purpose. But then the toilets get bombarded with enthusiastic, misdirected squirts. An announcement has to be forced on the speakers requesting the passengers to aim well and flush the toilet after use—sorry misuse. We have a long way to go in the field of maintaining toilet decorum. Within a couple of hours of travel, the toilets are completely unusable for the women and children.

I have a curiosity and keen interest in watching the historical Chambal badlands from the train window. Pan Sing Tomar is my favorite movie. It’s a complex topography around Chambal river. There are critically dissected ravines and undulating gullies. It’s a maze of eroded clay-rich soils. The eroded landforms and scarce vegetation has spun many legends of rebels. All this topographic whirlpool is churned by perpetual vertical erosion by rivers and streams. It’s particularly critical between Bhind and Morena. In these tiny sand hills, steep ridges, trenches and incised meanders many dacoits and rebels set up their own system to fight against what they deemed to be injustice. Those who wanted to fight on their own terms escaped into these badlands of fluvial erosion. The outlaws had their heydays in the messy tri-junction in Chambal valley among MP, UP and Rajasthan borders. The elements of social erosion flew along the puzzling ravines to set up their own fiefs primarily with a gun. There were plenty of bagis who considered themselves to be revolutionaries.

It’s a quick travel and at noontime the train is safe home in Delhi. They have tried their level best to organize things at the New Delhi railway station. But no facelift is enough for the ever-increasing passenger footfall. They trample all facelifts within hours. And there you have it—the very same, stuffed, stomped, smelly railway station of old.