Awesome Agra

 

Taj Mahal Nature Walk street facing the eastern gate. We have to go to Agra Fort. The autowallahas are asking 150 rupees. It’s seven or eight kilometers they say. I see an elderly Muslim rickshaw puller going at a decent pace down the lane towards the Taj. It’s a slight descent and his rickshaw rolls with a song. I hark, ‘O rickshaw!’ He puts breaks. He says 40 rupees to the destination for the two of us. The autowallah is hovering nearby. He grunts and snorts accusatively as if the rickshaw puller has stolen his clients.

Autos are not allowed beyond the barricade about 200 meters from where we board the rickshaw. So they have to take a detour through the congested city to reach the fort. The rickshaw puller takes a chance. If he is allowed to cross the barricade and move along the Taj’s outer boundaries, he will need to pedal for just two and half kilometers.

He is going at a nice pace along the gentle slope. ‘O miyanji, turn back! As if you don’t know that rickshaws aren’t allowed beyond this point!’ one of the policemen manning the barricade hollers. The rickshaw puller gives a broad smile and takes an instant sharp U-turn. In fact he answers just through a broad smile to most of your words. He seems to take everything impersonally—nothing personal. He turns back with ease as he would turn around when faced with a wall.

So his shortcut has been belied—for which he asked just 40 rupees—and the only route left is the long-cut which the autos have to take. It means, as per the changed equation, he will have to heave the rickshaw for almost eight kilometers for just 40 rupees. For a person who takes things personally this calculation would immediately suck out fuel from his pedaling legs. But not this man. His smile doesn’t go. It was his offer. The route choice isn’t in his hands now. But he won’t back out from his word. So without any hint of disappointment or complain or any inclination to redraw the deal due to the changed route he focuses on pulling the load up the slope.

It’s a heavy pull. The rickshaw is crawling slowly. You can argue with someone who grumbles, frets about the loss-making deed. He isn’t affected in mind due to the changed situation. We feel his physical exertion. We have no doubt that he will continue pulling for all these eight kilometers without complaining or asking extra money. Such honesty and integrity to one’s word makes you sensitive to the situation. More than him, we feel the weight of his almost unrewarding assignment. His legs would possibly bear the weight to take us all the way for just 40 rupees. But our conscience won’t allow it. We feel the extent of his loss-making assignment.

He is all focused on pulling the rickshaw. ‘Shouldn’t we take an auto because it’s quite far from this side,’ we start discussing, expecting him to agree and propose it himself. But he doesn’t say anything. Just silently pulls. Then we ask him, ‘Shouldn’t we take an auto?’ ‘That also is ok,’ he says casually with a smile. His smile is unaffected by all considerations of the amount of fare, distance plied, weight, etc. He halts. We give him 20 rupees. He accepts it with another beaming smile. The very same smile. He is simply at ease with himself. With that ease of being, the outer flutter of leaves hardly disturbs the inner lamp.

Our spirits uplifted by this gentle brush with a tender and honest soul, giving us a lovely starter for the aesthetic senses, here we are at the Agra fort welcoming us with a marvelous dining prospects of medieval architecture. It’s a vast palace complex involving spacious courts with mansions around; designed brackets supporting the chhajas and lintels; large assembly halls with flat ceilings; glazed tiling and stucco along with ornamental stone carving; harem complex once guarded by chaste women and trustworthy officers. The past pulls you with musty but welcoming force.

Humayun was coronated at Agra fort overlooking river Yamuna. It has double ramparts with massive circular bastions; a broad deep moat, bearing drawbridges, in a semi-circle; four gates in different directions. You feel special while standing in Diwan-i-Am (hall of public audience) with its pillared halls with cusped engrailed arches on the façade and grand columns in triple-aisle deep complexes plastered with white shell lime (over red sand stone). The imperial jharokha (throne) chamber still has enough luxuriance, even after the dusty layers of centuries covering it, to give you an idea of aristocratic opulence. There is a private marble mosque for the harem ladies, enclosed for purdah. You can’t help but appreciate the water tank with cascade and the shahi hamam with its impressive water supply system—closed complex of octagonal halls, interconnected by corridors with jali openings on the river side. Then there is the chain of justice, the regal bell tied to a chain which could be pulled by the commonest of the common to seek justice by directly appealing to the emperor. How I hope that justice was as easily and directly available to the modern citizens; that we had some direct means of being saved from injustice instead of spending our entire lives in the unsurpassable judicial corridors. There are so many things I want to shout. I feel like pulling the chain but it’s not accessible to the visitors; just there for viewing.

And among all this grandeur, the sadness of the historical fact that Shah Jahan spent eight years at Agra fort as a prisoner looking at his soulful salutation to love, Taj Mahal, on the other side of Yamuna.

Memoirs from the Agra trip

 

The petha sellers of Agra think they carry a reputatious virtue, which makes them so bold and aggressive in soliciting your attention to their sweet shop that it literally makes them look like marauders ready to kidnap you and forcibly make you buy their mithai. Your courteous denials finally bid you bye and you start saying ‘NO’ in sour notes.

For a few hundred meters facing Taj Mahal’s eastern gate there is a lovely tiled walkway, flanked by trees, shops and restaurants. The lights are screened behind tall square columns of slab-stones. A subtle, subdued light emerges from the patterned holes in the screens. It builds a healthy prelude to your next day’s early morning visit to the monument of love. You might be lost in myriad tunes of history emanating from veena’s soulful notes of the past. But the shopkeepers will keep crying an encore, keep throwing their verbal bouquets, which finally begin assaulting you like bricks. It keeps pulling you down from the paramount constellation of emotions about the embodiment of living soul in white marble.

The present’s popular caricature boosted by consumerism is too noisy for poetic sentiments about Taj Mahal in the markets surrounding it like a tight noose. A sort of irreverent drabness sizzling through the grand monument’s mythical dimensions. I have been trying to keep focused on the crystallized voracity of romance etched in stones while being bombarded with almost kidnapping calls of autowallahas and sweet-makers. They look ready to force you into accepting their services.

Me and my brother have been walking on the Taj Nature Walk boulevard. At every step we have to say ‘no’ to an autowallah, petha seller or some hawker. Saying ‘no’ hundreds of times makes us hungry and finally we give into the insistence of a short but smart looking young man. They are all on the younger side in this dining establishment. We hardly expect the dinner to be anything but ordinary. I’m still baffled with my decision to agree to enter this restaurant. We sit and wait for our order to be served.

The establishment is garishly decorated. Not much footfall, we being the only customers at the moment. We can’t expect the food to be delicious. We just pray that please god let it be fresh at least, however bland it might turn out to be. Then the young man arrives with our order. The salad pieces are nicely arranged in circles. The mix-veg is no random assemblage of parts taken from other recipes. It’s prepared individually. The makka roti is lovingly laced with butter. The hubbub and helter-skelter of doubt vanishes.

We thoroughly enjoy the dinner. ‘It’s delicious food!’ we compliment and share our feedback. He isn’t used to hearing words of appreciation. The customers basically cringe and complain when they don’t like something. Criticism sits on their tongue-tips. But they turn misers and dumb while praising someone’s goods or services. As our feedback pours out abundantly and positively, he stands absorbing this unique experience. It stirs emotions in him. Tears are on the verge of toppling down from his eyelashes. Looking at his eyes, our eyes also get their share of moisture.

It’s a beautiful feeling. This human touch. I can feel these words of appreciation mean so much to him. There is usually an inundation of critical stuff from family, friends, peers, customers. The words of appreciation can bring new light and life in someone’s eyes.

Who knows what problems in career and family this young man has been facing. But our words of appreciation give him some hope and pride in his profession. Shivam Pandit is his name. We leave him more in love with his work.

Earlier in the day, I had given compliment to a woman in similar circumstances. Her husband managed the front end of the shop, selling tea, coffee and snacks. She ran the small kitchen at the back with a few tables and chairs in between. A Muslim woman used to work in the shadows, she prepared the omelet with ease and care. The taste was good. But the way it was served was unique—cut in little pieces, just big enough so that you can take it with a fork in one bite. Served with care. ‘Your omelet is really good!’ I said as we got up to leave. She was sitting in a corner chair looking at us eating, her eyes trying to gauze the standard of her cooking from our manner of eating and talking.

The people won’t praise when it’s good. But they will say a lot when they don’t like it. She was visibly surprised at the compliment. Maybe it was the first time a customer expressed his good words. It was a new experience to her and she didn’t know how to handle it. She just nodded with a little hesitant, shy smile. But I’m sure she will have enough time to digest this new encouraging pill. Won’t she find her work meaningful and feel proud of it? She will. Kind words of appreciation give people hope. Who knows what testing situations they are facing. And a few positive words can brighten someone’s gloomy day. She will find her cooking more meaningful. Just like Shivam would be happier the next day while manning his establishment.

You need not shower people with wealth, benefits or favors to make them happier. That’s asking too much from yourself. Making others happy comes without any cost at your end. Just give them the credit that they deserve on account of their product or service. Just this much. When someone’s karma is appreciated with contentment and joy, it dispels darkness and doubts from that person. It opens a little ray of hope. And even if you are a pessimist and don’t think it’s too substantial change maker in someone’s life, even then you have to accept that at least that moment is freshly lit when you deliver that feedback. Even that’s sufficient. Because NOW is all that matters.

Goodness buried under the weight of daily-dusting humanity

 

Me and my brother decide to take a shared Eco van from Agra to Fatehpur Sikri. It’s a well-worn, thoroughly used vehicle. The owner driver is named Lehri Singh Faujdar, a dark man with pan-gutka-painted red teeth. He flashes them with great effect with a smile. ‘I usually take 14 passengers,’ he forestalls any logical protest as me and my brother find ourselves bundled in the front sheet. ‘There are no more passengers today, otherwise I would have put one by your side,’ he informs me. The gear shaft between my thighs, tightly squeezed between him and my brother, I watch in dismay as he pulls the gear, pushing and prodding almost in my groins.

I start praying that let there be no more passengers on the way. My prayers are heard. He sees an old woman waiting by the road. Obviously she can’t be stuffed by our side in the front seat. She protests that there is no space in the vehicle and she will take some other convenience. Her protests fall on deaf ears. He has to have one more passenger to make up for having one less on the main middle seat. I thank god for sending this old woman as a passenger. The six passengers on the two side seats at the back moan with agony. He puts her heavy sack on the roof. The load lands with a thump and the roof bulges down a bit in the middle. He secures the load using tight ropes with expert hands. Then the six passengers at the back are pushed and shoved and the old woman is dumped among them. The back door is forced shut. It’s for them to adjust the old woman in any cubic meter of space available. They won’t fall. With jolts their bodies will acquire the most feasible shape to fill the space, settling down more comfortably.

The main middle seat is not cumbered much with human weight. A patient is lying here, his legs folded, nose taped and a nasal pipe still in it. He probably got discharged from hospital. He is seriously ill. The patient is accompanied by a man and a lady in burqa. Sitting at both ends of the long middle seat, they are holding the patient between them.

I take the van owner to be any other passenger-hunting transporter. He cracks his point—beyond which you can’t say much—flashes his red teeth with a challenging smile. ‘How many times you ply between Agra and Sikri in a day?’ I ask. I think that he is so passenger hungry that he must be relentlessly plying on the route till night. ‘I do just two rounds in a day,’ he says. Then he naughtily slaps his palm on the battered dashboard and says, ‘Irrespective of how many rounds I make up in a day, she will give survival crumbs only. More rounds won’t mean a big mansion. So just two for me. Two, four, six or eight will give just enough to see through the month. So why torture oneself?’ he again flashes his red teeth and gums.

By the turn outside Sikri he stops by another rental shared van, opens the sliding middle door and helps the sick man to be transferred to the other vehicle for the onward journey. I can see that it’s not just about fare. The fare would mean just stopping there, leaving the sick man’s wards to take care of the transfer.

I feel big respect for this man. We talk to him and then as promised he takes us nearest to the fort’s gate, gives us instructions regarding the return journey, warns us to stay cautious about tout guides who act as middlemen for the chador and flower sellers and cajole people into buying high-priced items to get their commission later. We have talked to him like friends and he reciprocates as a well-wisher. It has been a good experience with him. A good man, soiled under the dust of daily survival. You have to give a friendly swipe at the dust to see goodness in someone.

We have reached Fatehpur Sikri through a very decent mode—a good man under rough outer bearing due to the tough battle for survival on a daily basis. Before entering its grand courts, complexes and step wells another piece of kind welcome awaits us—the omelet served by the Muslim woman. The court complex is primarily in red sandstone—trabeated construction; designs evincing composite culture under the Mughals. It’s an open and airy luxury involving many arched facades (multiple-arch deep) and bulbous domes crowned by lotus petals and kalash finials. The imposing masonry walls, huge pillared halls, coquettish archways, sensuously carved pillars with inlaid designs, arched prayer chambers, the king’s tower (jhorakha darshan), sturdy battlements, geometric symmetry and aesthetic frame take you to ancient times. It’s redolent with multiple layers of history.

It’s advisable to visit the monuments of past—belonging to any dynasty, be it Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian or Buddhist—with an open mind and restful heart. It helps us to learn, to grow, to understand things better. I just look around, when I’m at such places, with a sense of wonder carried by a little student.     

A night journey

 In a passenger train starting around midnight from New Delhi. Just a couple of passengers per coach on average. Chilly air gushing into the almost open carriages. An eerie emptiness in the absence of jostling crowds. An empty passenger train, which is usually crammed to the ceiling, seems weird as it battles past the dark countryside. A sadhu settles on the floor by the wide open doors. He feels comfortable to sit cross-legged even though there are empty seats around. An educated person is holding discussion with him about God, ethics, religion and spirituality.

You need safety in an empty train at night. A burqa-clad woman comes scanning for a safe spot. She sees three of us in the coach and sits on a corner seat. The gentleman disembarks at the next station. The sadhu prepares to call it a day. He isn’t interested in occupying any of the empty seats. He spreads his cloth on the floor near the wide door-less entries on both sides. At the next station, a group of about a dozen adolescent boys comes rushing. They create a lot of turbulence. Crack lewd jokes, fake loud orgasms, imitate sadistic moans, dangle from the hand-support handles and shout with vulgar merriment.

The burqa-clad woman leaves in a hurry to find some other harmless corner in some other compartment where she can smell some harmless, protective human presence. The sadhu gets up and sits with eyes closed, trying to bear the disrespectful remarks, not hurled at him directly, but offensive generally just with their existence in his ascetic presence.

‘Shakeel… Ahmad… Waseem…’ The words acquire identity in the chilly night air. Now I get their religious identity. Razor sharp knife of polarization comes cutting the chilly dark air with silvery sparks of glee. Communal polarization. The Hindus feel victims due to the misdeeds committed during the Islamic rule in the medieval period of Indian history. The Muslims feel marginalized and pushed into a corner in the present nationalistic, hyperbole-ridden air. The future looks dangerous. I can feel that the Muslims as a community perceive themselves to be on the back-foot presently.

These boys must have heard lots of discussions about partiality against their community at home. The empty train gives them a space to pour out all the scorn. They do it with a rancid sense of taking revenge against the system. We keep mum. They seem primed for crime. The slightest reaction might flare up vagrant passions. It might start a chain reaction leading to a big communal fire. Only the common people burn in a communal churn. It’s wise not to jump into the fire; the fire that fattens the big and the mighty.  

In a state roadways bus

 

The state roadways bus is lurching with archetypical languor. There is someone who catches one’s eye with conjecturing vivacity. A wrinkled, flabby old man is gawking at the person with open-mouthed, gap-toothed leer. His pinched, shriveled wife watching with repugnance. A skinny, bony adolescent boy is caught in a motley of hormonal storms. He seems curious and seeking answers to the questions that will plague him during this build-up of youth regarding sexuality, gender and more in the domain.

The bus conductor up-heaves his effort; he denounces the melodramatic passenger’s denial to pay the bus fare. ‘We’re entitled to travel free!’ the adamant passenger rebuffs in a bristling, vagrant tone. The tone has effulgence to drown the conductor’s stern professional pitch. ‘No! You have to take ticket and pay!’ the conductor is sticking to his point.

The passenger has the artifice and classical eloquence to catapult the arrows of maidenhood from behind subtle masculine ramparts. The passenger is a handsome-pretty eunuch clad in a yellow and orange shimmering shrara. The uncouth notes in the conductor’s voice don’t appear to be considerate enough to give her a free ride. She strikes her palms accompanied with a little bit of oratorical violence. The gestural escalade fails to perturb and slim down the conductor’s  rotund demand. He is a Muslim man. She greets him with ‘salaam aalekum’ to make some friendly bridge over the torrid flow of his duty. He is unfazed. She again gets into a rebuking tempest. ‘I will take off my clothes and turn naked here in the bus!’ she threatens. The kinnars view this act as the hammer of revolt against all social prejudices against them. ‘Do it if you want,’ he isn’t repulsed by the threat.

Despite all the male-female interpolations and undulations in her persona, there is an imperturbable streak of friendliness in her. She is young, her face an exquisite mix of handsomeness and prettiness. She has hennaed hands; bangles on masculine wrists; lovely, gentle, big eyes under boyish eyebrows; the jaw-line is manly but lips are lovely like a young girl; the hair having feminine elements of style on masculine girth. She turns coquettishly cheeky and cuddles him on the cheek. All this while she looks at other passengers and involves us for a sort of free entertainment. I am sitting across the aisle from her seat. She winks at me after making a mischievous comment.

She is no abashed wretch. She is joyful. Such setbacks—like the conductor insisting on taking the bus fare—are easily taken in a playful stride. After all, one has to trample such tiny heartburns to survive in a world structured on male-female binary; where all possibilities of love, profession, education and social standing are customized in the routine gender duality. It’s a calamitous contingency to have an off-beat gender. The mainstream society takes them to be foredoomed from the beginning. They have to claw their way into the main thoroughfare to survive.

She won’t allow him the entire way. ‘I’ll give only hundred rupees,’ she relents, calculating the conductor’s defensive portals. The fare is 120 rupees. ‘Twenty rupees on you raja,’ she teases him. She gives him 100 rupees. While he is making her ticket, she looks back at the passengers, makes a face and says, ‘I’m his wife. See, how unkind he is to me.’ The passengers laugh. She feels the malignant notes in the old woman, the wife of the oldie who has been leering at her with drool in his mouth. ‘Radhe-radhe mataji!’ she greets her. The old woman can barely shake her head in greeting back.

She has already won many hearts with her banter and friendliness. ‘O raja, I’ll reimburse the loss within no time,’ she defiantly says to the bus conductor and sets out on making up for the loss. I give her ten rupees and she affectionately pats my cheek because I have been nodding and laughing in support of her. She collects 80 rupees within two minutes from the moving bus. ‘Lost just 20 rupees,’ she says almost triumphantly. She goes to the conductor and asks his share of donation. He angrily shakes his head in a firm no. She pats his cheek. The passengers laugh.

She has two smartphones. Her Instagram account is full of her luscious photos and vibrant musical videos. She plays them for the young man by her side to watch. Then turns back to show them to me. ‘You look like a heroine,’ I compliment. ‘I was in Bombay for three years,’ she says with nostalgia. Photos and videos in sunshades, strappy bras, revealing tops, sexy leggings. She opens the keypad of her phone and moves it to me, asking me to dial my number. She has mistaken my support for her cause as my interest in off-beat sexuality. I look at her with a straight face and then smile and gently say no with respect. She understands that my interest in her is born of respect, curiosity and sympathy and not sexuality. And then she smiles a normal smile.

Digital arrest

 

A friend has a sententiously honeyed heart. He is as observant of the present carriers of youth—the opposite gender, of course—as I’m of book titles massed around. Recently his father received a WhatsApp call, ‘Your son is in custody on rape charges.’ The fake police officer spoke with gruesome, jarring authenticity. With exulting clamminess they continued, ‘If you want him out, pay money without delay. There is no time to lose because there is pressure to register FIR. If it’s done, nobody can save him from prison.’

The malevolent bluff is then surreptitiously changed into reality by the menacingly maneuverable algorithms of artificial intelligence, which gleans facts about a person’s voice, image, manner and produces a virtual reality—the life-like audio and video of that person. ‘Father please save me!’ his son is heard pleading in the background. The artificially generated voice of his son beckons paternal fears. His father finds it plausible just like my father would believe if the fraudsters had called him saying his son has robbed a bookstore. It was sheer luck that the old man’s account wasn’t plundered by the ultra-modern heathens. His grandson arrived as a grand good-luck gift. He called his father immediately who informed him that he was on the way from office.

A visit to the Ivy Cottage, Mr. Bond's place

 

Being an avid Bond fan, I once thought of writing him a letter—a real handwritten one posted through the traditional mail. Just the typical Ruskin Bond image sitting and looking from his window for inspiration is enough to lighten my being. He has written for fifty years from the same spot. What stability! I usually go to bed after reading some pages from his collections. It makes the world feel so simple beyond all complexities. Long time back I almost met him. Well, that is a good story in itself. Recently I thought of acting on my resolution of writing him a letter—a real handwritten one—and post it with one of my books. I’m scarcely confident about my handwriting but here I wrote carefully like a secondary school boy. The letter was never posted. The other day I saw it in the sheaf of papers and thinking of doing it some justice I reproduce it here:

Dear Bond Sahib,

Hope your cutely funny bone is still strong enough to help you keep going on the literary path. We need it. I’m an old man—into my fifth decade—pretending to be a child in my excitement while writing to one of my favorite authors.

I have seen you once in real life. In fact we had a short talk. It was in the autumn of 2006 or 2007. I climbed up the hill to reach your place, Ivy Cottage. And what a timing it was in terms of my arrival! There you were at your favorite window, restfully looking into the misty distances in the valley below. I’m an uncouth person—almost. I startled you by hollering some crazy fan lines from the road below. I hardly knew what I was shouting in childish nervous excitement. But I remember I had also piped, ‘Thanks for giving us so much lovely literature sir!’ Well, this I clearly remember. Probably it got you out of the marveling eerie born of my muddle-headed verbal volley from below. You were generous enough not to pour water on me. ‘Come sometime when I’m free,’ you gently said. How I wish I was some butterfly or a sparrow and land on your window sill to find out if you are free!

 

Well guys, the unsent incomplete letter carries a strange sad charm. Isn’t it?

Recently I thought of giving it a try to meet Bond Sahib. I plan to stay at Mussoorie for a couple of days and try my luck.

I’m walking on the Mall Road looking for a suitable accommodation. Something catches my attention. A glimmer of hope. It’s a small hotel named ‘Write Star’. Very attractive name so I go in. Something in celebration of writers, a rarity. And a writer looking to spend a night would obviously go to a hotel named as such. The boy at the reception has watery eyes and a guilty startled look, possibly due to being new to the job. I enter the tiniest lobby, hailing their naming sense in hyperbolic terms. But my enthusiasm startles him even more. After he uses all his brain to make a sense of my congratulating eulogy for their name, he manages to say, ‘Yes sir, Bright Star is a good name.’

Well, he thought they are named Bright Star! My mood dampened and I came out and started to walk up the Mall Road. I intended to stay very near to Bond Sahib’s residence, popularly known as Ivy cottage, to maximize my chances of spotting him.

It was a literary pilgrimage from Library Chowk to Ivy cottage, Landour on Lal Tibba hill. As I said I made it a goal to at least see the literary prince of the famous hill station, if not meet him personally. He is ninety and deserves to spend his time in the way he deems fit. So I thought of basing myself at some modest hotel in Landour Bazaar, a little down the hill from his residence. Packed like a mule I walked almost 6 km uphill, panting and exhausted. When was meeting with famous writers easy?

There I stood on the narrow road by the famous cottage whose window overlooking the Doon valley has opened so many pages of simple, beautiful stories, notes and sketches. From the frustrating chaos, Ruskin Bond, with his famous ease and poise in life, draws our simple, charming, funny, witty strands to spin lovingly flowing threads of simple words, which he uses to weave beautiful stories. He makes life look so easy and tolerable. In fact reading him at bedtime is almost healing in nature. It calms down your nerves. After a hard day his words have provided balmy support during cold, dreary nights. I feel like thanking him personally.

His house has changed a lot since the last time I remember it. It’s gratifying to see a writer’s economic fate taking a healthy shape. Ivy cottage looks very impressive now with new front tiling and fresh paint. I think they have added another floor. It looks a safe and happy place, solid and equipped to shelter and protect an old writer and his adopted family. It has a solid roofing now, in contrast to the corrugated tin roof that had given in on a stormy night, pouring water into his study. Now there were more impressive windows looking into the misty valley below.

Right in front of his house I had a brief talk a man whom I found sitting by the road on the bend. He turned out to be a kabadi wala. He tells me that he gets an opportunity to go to his study to collect old newspapers and other paper waste that he might consider to discard. He tells me that Ruskin sahab is still in possession of sharp wits and can walk enough to attend to his private needs.

The narrow, steep staircase ascending right from the road seems inviting. But as you crawl up to the small landing and look at the main door, a quite, respectful message on a plaque softly whispers to you to protect his privacy by not buzzing the doorbell. I hardly stand a chance of getting admitted. Then a group of about ten young men, fresh-faced collegiates, appeared on the scene. As the college boys enquired about meeting him, I sensed my chance of sneaking with them. He is children’s and young boys’ and girls’ favorite author. I think maybe he will oblige these young flowers. So I encouraged them to queue up on the stairs and somehow pluck out a chance to go inside. I positioned myself in the middle of the line so as to troop in with the young students.

They were well-behaved boys, lovers of books; not the ones who arrive here on thundering bikes with flashy girlfriends sticking to their backs and then go on to loosen the bed hinges in cheap hotels, spurting stains on the bed sheets, filling the waste bins with used condoms. I think in entire Mussoorie that day these were the ten odd boys, well behaved and lovers of books who came to meet Ruskin Bond. I am sure all of them will do well in their lives.

‘Please don’t ring the bell’—we are staring at the request. The polite author is still better in not putting a warning sign such as ‘Beware of dogs!’ They are decent boys. Reading the plaque none of them dares to break the rule and press the doorbell. We were whispering encouragement to each other to give a slight knock at the door instead. That won’t break the rule written on the plate. Then their maid came upstairs, squeezing through the crowded stairs. She was visibly irritated. Who would take the extra trouble of attending almost a dozen uninvited guests? She went inside carrying our request to at least see him from a little distance and just pass greetings.

She returned after a moment and told us that Mr. Bond was away. He was at Dehradun for his grandson’s birthday and would be available at Cambridge school on Saturday. We were knocking at his door on a Sunday—long way off the mark. But the boys had their fan moments, a very diluted one though. I talked to them as the self-published author of about 20 books. Since they were already in that fan mode, they readily accepted my writer status. We held a little discussion about the pleasure of reading. I gave them tips about writing and shared my favorite books and authors with them. They even took a selfie with me.

Ruskin Bond’s house on Lal Tibba hill is a great literary landmark at the crest of the queen of hills, Mussoorie. Having read many of his books, I could easily identify the places that have inspired his stories. So wandering through Landour bazaar, clock tower, church, post office, camel back road and cemetery gave me a surreal feeling of being in his tales personally for the next two days. It’s sad that I couldn’t see him at least. Although his maid says he is in Dehradun, but maybe he was chuckling from behind the door while he passed this innocent lie. But it was nice to have a feel of the places that have inspired the stories of one of India’s greatest and most admired living writers. Well, as I said, 18 years ago he had dodged me when I had caught him sitting in his famous window. It was a smaller world then. Mussoorie was far less crowed. His house looked pretty ordinary. And when I harked his attention he mischievously said, ‘Come sometime when I’m free.’ Well there is always another time and I’m hopeful.          

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.

A creepy, crawling encounter

 

There must be cockroaches in the house otherwise why would a big rascally centipede enter the house. Well, rural houses usually have many claimants including snakes, rats, lizards, frogs, spiders and many more. Maybe the centipede got angry for not finding a cockroach. An angry x, y, z is almost suicidal, be it humans, reptiles or animals. And if there is an angry creature nearby, you feel the pinch. I felt it. A sharp pain in the left big toe. I’m watching news, sitting on a chair, right leg crossed over the left, leaving the left toe open for attack by the angry centipede. The body seems to be its own master. We overestimate our conscious, voluntarily done efforts to save and preserve it. It knows far more than we think. My conscious part is absorbed in the political slugfest going on the television. But my toe has independent authority to save itself from a big, bullish centipede. I find myself jumping in the air. The toe knows how to save itself from a centipede that has decided to bite the hell out of it. The automatic vigorous shake by the toe and its ally foot and their bigger sister leg is enough to undo the centipede’s brazen attempt to taste my blood. There is a needle sharp pain. Thankfully it couldn’t pierce the skin.

The calculating and planning human has taken a backseat. It’s only the life force in the body responding to the emergency. The left foot is angry as can be understood. O God, the way it counterattacks! It swings into action. And the slippered foot is pounding the enemy, knowing exactly how rapidly to strike with full force. It’s done so swiftly. The centipede is a juicy mass in an instant. It happened so quickly. I’m staring at it as if someone else has done it. Where was I while all this happened? It wasn’t me who did it. The body did it of its own volition! Imagine the instinct of self-preservation ingrained in each cell of the body. And still we overthink and burden the mind about  preserving it. The way it strikes at a centipede in retaliation over a bite at its toe proves that it’s always on guard against the predators both visible and invisible. I think we can allow it more freedom in its functions and not burden its natural operations with our unnecessary worries.

I’m not sure how a saint would have behaved if attacked by a centipede. I hadn’t even stepped on it. It just attacked. Some karmic balance I suppose. Of course the saint’s body would have jumped in air at the bite. But I’m not sure about his foot going into retaliation of its own in an instant.

I don’t think I could have caught it alive because it would have crawled under the hideouts available in plenty in the room. As a normal person staying in society, you have to put a boundary beyond which the parameters of sin cease to operate. You have to take measures to maintain the safety of your place. Maybe that dharma is bigger than the killing of poisonous reptiles that sneak into your place.

Little Maira, my two-year-old niece, is enthused at watching her Tau’s body jumping like a monkey. She laughs. Thank God centipedes don’t have blood. It’s a watery juice of life oozing from the carcass. And a child would always take you out from the complex world of thoughts about sin, nobility, kindness, etc. As I’m staring at the consequences of my foot’s retaliatory strike, I hear Maira mumbling, ‘Tau isne sussu kar diya.’She meant‘uncle it’s peed’. And that lightened the moment instantly. Holding my leg, she is staring at the dead multiple-legged crawler mired in the watery discharge of its life force. We both laugh then. God would always pardon you if you are sharing laughter with a little kid, even if you are laughing at a dead centipede.

The warehouse-type buses of the past

 

We have surely added to our convenience with the years advancing on the path of material progress. I vividly remember our times as students at the nearest town—for senior secondary schooling and later college education—during the nineties of the last century. There were smatterings of roadways buses plying on the potholed road. Those were big, rattling metal godowns meant to carry the passenger cargo crammed from floor to the ceiling. It would start with full occupancy of seats from the originating station in the neighboring district. As it moved towards the destination, it would absorb dozens of students, old, young, laborers, government servants, women, men all awaiting anxiously at the rural stations along the road.

The buses were sturdy brutes and angrily chugged ahead with the passengers numbering many multiples of the normal seats. The seats meant for two people would have four passengers squeezed tightly. The aisle would have people stuffed like farm sacks. People would squeeze into the foot spaces between the seats. There would be brawls and even fights. The lecherous and lusty ones took advantage of the crowded situation and freely molested the girls and women in that stuffed environment. And long after you thought there wasn’t space even for an ant inside, you had scores of people hanging from the footboards of the doors, just their toes stuffed into the maze, one leg hanging loose and the hands clutching at the window-side pipes, grills or whatever came handy to avoid a fall and getting crushed to death. And there were still more people waiting on the upcoming stoppages. Then people—mostly students—would get onto the roof and many clung to the backside grills. There would be hardly any space left for the conductor to move up and down the aisle for tickets. It was miraculous how did they even squeeze through at all. Those bus rides carried a very high fatality rate for the shirts and trousers.

On the way to our destination town, our village was the second last stoppage, so by the time the barely visible bus under the human assault reached our station, we, at the most, had some distant possibility of climbing either to the roof or clinging to some little square inch of space among the legs on the footboard. Most of the drivers—fearing the coming apart of the vehicle itself—would just speed past, leaving huge plumes of angry smoke in our face. The most capable ones ran after the bus to catch any little chances as it slowed down near the speed bump. The second in skill and strength grabbed at any inch of space on the railings and footboards. And the odd ones like me who carried the weight of books in their bags and an injury idea in the mind would wistfully look on and get late for the classes. I remember so many bus rides, my toes precariously perched on a few inches of space on the footboard and clinging to the window-side iron pipe with all strength. But there would still be someone who would try to cling to you at the last station before the destination. So reaching the town in one piece was a successful day at schooling.

For most of the students it was a fun outing. The majority of them played cards, gossiped about girls, fought gang wars over girls and smartly planned their love-lust journeys while lounging in the parks and lawns. The youth was still pretty untamed. There were bloody fights over ego hurt in love. There were belt assaults over cinema tickets. Everyone thought he was Dharmendra or Amitabh capable of wooing a girl and squashing the rivals.

The girl students were outnumbered five to one by the boys. Short on supply, more in demand. Each girl had multiple suitors. Just receiving a casual look by the girls was taken her willingness to engage in an affair. Then a blind pursuit would follow. Those were the days of fights for love, love letters, clandestine meetings in some friend’s room, scandals and more.

Most of the students would while away time and started gathering at the bus stand in the afternoon, waiting for the girls to arrive at their booths for the buses to their routes. It was a big, buzzing love station, secret signs, winks, hidden flying kisses. There were many who had their hearts crushed for a girl from a different bus route than their home places. So they would accompany the flower like bumble bees on her route and returned late in the evening to their places after a hard day at youth’s callings. Books and studies lay at the far end of the scheme. And the girls who managed to graduate in all this pandemonium were the pioneers indeed.

Two frogs out of the village well

 

My first independent trip as a traveler came in the first year at college. Me and my uncle—more of a friend because he was of my age, being the youngest of a dozen children fathered by my granduncle—went to Shimla. We have saved enough from our paltry pocket money to give us courage to see the larger world out there beyond the boundaries of our village and the nearby town. As per the fashion of the times, we had long pantaloons, belts with elaborate shining buckles, leather shoes, printed shirts with side-slits to carry them well both in and out of the trousers. All this was topped with dark oversized sunglasses to make it a photogenic presentation.

I had a little red and black rectangular Panasonic camera to capture the moments pumped by the adolescence youth in us. We hit it off with a lot of spirits. Trekking to Tara Devi temple we soon realized that people already knew where we come from. The little shrine is situated ten kilometers down from Shimla on a hill from where Shimla glittered like a tiny heaven. I had been here as a part of the school children tourist group for fifteen days. That was a few years before and the pull of that free fun still beckoned me to the hill. During that trip, we had camped on a hill on the way to the shrine. It was a quaint British-time bungalow where we stayed. It was sheer fun. Well, of that sometime later.

Well, how did the people come to know where did we belong to without even having a word on the issue? Our actions speak louder than our tongues. We had been dislodging dead pine trunks down the slope. ‘You must be from Haryana! No wonder!’ a man exasperatedly sighed.

We captured the best dining moment of our lives at a restaurant at the erstwhile summer capital of the British India. It was a very high-end facility from our rural standards. The table had knives, forks, napkins. We hardly had any clues about this. But we felt bound to use them, so we followed others with a lot of anxiety. Then the beautiful aroma and wonderful taste of the food relaxed us, making us bold enough to click the best moments of life so far. Our bowls and plates had been wiped clean to do justice to the every paisa spent on the order.

There was a gentle hum of the urban people eating with dignity and perfect decorum. We had eaten too fast, we soon realized. The people basically talked and enjoyed the time there and took little bites in between. We had plainly gobbled down the food. The people who were already there when we arrived had barely touched their stuff. Sitting in a restaurant isn’t all about gobbling the food straightaway, first lesson. So we thought of prolonging our stay there. The bowls with warm water and lemon slices arrived. ‘See, they serve lemon juice as well to help digestion!’ we told each other. So this being our last item, we took elegantly stretched time to finish it like the real gentlemen do. We squeezed the lemon slices with a well-meaning look and sipped the digestive juice with a meditative muse. In fact we took many pictures of the cherishing sips. All this while a gentleman—a real one—casually looked and unhurriedly carried on with his lunch. A thorough gentleman not to get judgmental at all. His look didn’t betray even the slightest condemnatory hint towards our manner of treating a finger dip as a stomach wash. So we had a prolonged lemon juice drinking spree.

Then the moment of second learning struck with a nice punch. Very coolly the gentleman squeezed the lemons, expertly dabbed his oily fingers into the acidic concoction and elegantly wiped them on the napkin. The only saving grace was that he didn’t look at us even once while doing all this. A real gentleman, passing the message without making us feel embarrassed. Now it was difficult to stay there anymore due to our shame. We somehow managed to chicken out. Our entire schooling hadn’t taught this much as this visit to the restaurant did in a little time span.

We had shiny clothes, large shining belt buckles and still bigger glasses for our brattish faces. Now here was this beautiful Mall Road boulevard humming with tourists as the evening handed over the baton to a mercury lit arena. A perfect night for a lighted boulevard. But dark goggles are for shading the sun, the night is already shaded. To us a picture was incomplete without sunglasses, especially if you possess them. So we imitated an entire set of filmy postures with our hands on the hips and the legs positioned in varied ways to do justice to the sunglasses. All this while two girls, urban girls a bit senior to us, swankily clad in T-shirts, kept staring, giggling, saying something to each other. Now I realize that it was plain flirting and teasing to get us onto some encouraging frequency. But we weren’t exposed to such fine nuances. We felt offended. We thought they were joking at our expanse, making fun of us, little did we realize that teasing girls are a boon for the boys. It was a belated lesson, which I realized a few years later, as I vividly recalled their behavior, that it wasn’t an insult. It was a beautiful bait of youth. It was a tantalizing teasing. As urban girls and maybe a few years senior to us they knew far more in the domain of boys and girls. So quite foolishly, we felt insulted, scorned at them, threw daggers of hate at them, muttered our dissension in their direction, left the scene to carry on with our photo shoot at some other location.

The landless farmer

 

Harichand was a broad-shouldered, squarish man with an impressive bear paunch. Just like any other landless struggler in the rural society, shorn of any economic or social legacy, he had to pull his family cart in a way wherein the last step was just sufficient to push the next one, a painful but terribly aware living where the present grips you so hard that you barely get any time to either reflect over the past or muse over future. Clad in soiled dhoti and kurta he stockily squared up to the routine challenges of a poor household. He had many children and some of them grew up with us playing in the neighborhood.

One of his various vocations was to ply his tonga to the market town and carry cattle feed sacks for the farmers. He remember him walking stooped, cautiously, carrying a quintal of cattle feed sack on his back. The more the weight you can lift on your back, the lesser of it you have to carry in your mind. In addition to all this, for some years he rented a berries farm on the outskirts of Delhi. With the start of flowering, he would pile his horse-driven tonga with all the necessities of setting up a hut and start with his wife, leaving the children under the care of their grandmother.

His youngest son found the village primary school almost a prison and the yearly sojourn among the berry trees appeared the ultimate meaning of freedom. Harichand would use all tactics to deter his son from following the tonga. He started with shouting words and soon graduated to thrashing. It failed. He tried starting very early in the morning, thinking the little one would be asleep at the time. But the school-scared kid would smell his plan and he would keep awake all night. Then the concerned father tried to tire out his obstinate son by making him run after the tonga for many kilometers. On one occasion, he had to yield to the tiny runner after the latter had broken all previous records by following the tonga for almost ten kilometers. With this excellent focus and hard dedication, the little kid got freedom from the school for forever.

Then the times changed. The berries farm was gone for more lucrative land use. Now Harichand took farmland on lease within the village to make a living. He had a balding pate, snow white beard but stayed as robust as ever. Now his many children had children of their own. It was now a big family that couldn’t sustain at one place and they fell apart to take care of their own struggling course.

Poverty breeds further poverty. He kept working his own bit. He possessed the loudspeaker of a throat, very useful in scaring away the birds eyeing his fruits and vegetables. He used it to good effect in sending warnings to his children within a radius of one kilometer around the village, yelling their names, asking them to come home and attend to more important tasks than just playing. We played almost three-quarter of a kilometer from his humble house. Then his voice would come sailing over the trees, village school, the pond, threatening his children to immediately return.

He possessed a sword, but held it with a calm demeanor. We saw him standing with the weapon when a drunk Jat farmer tried to molest his adolescent girl. He stood composedly with the sword in hand while the offended girl gave a nice example of taking revenge herself by profusely hitting the erring man.

He also possessed a big bamboo bow and scores of clay balls to hit the enemy birds. We were inawe of his big bow and clay bombs. There was a rumor that he could catapult them to a distance of one kilometer.

During his last years he was leasing our twoacres of land to plant marigolds and vegetables. Then for the last two years he further sublet it to another farmer, taking the money in one lot, passing it to me in installments to have a slight economic advantage from the situation. That is all he saved from it. Just a chance to use that money for some months. I wasn’t aware of it and when I came to know this I took it as a little help that I could provide him. From the annual settlement, he still owed me INR 21000 from the lease amount. This time he hadn’t paid it on the promised date. So I thought of visiting his house. He was lying on a cot. ‘He has been having fever,’ they told me. From the folds of his dhoti—very near his genitals—he unfolded the roll of notes and handed over ten thousand rupees. It carried the sweat and smell of his private parts, the essence of his existence. ‘See, what are you forcing me to touch!’ I tried to maintain a funny touch. I asked them to drop the sweaty wad of notes in a polybag, intending to put it under the sunlight to dry.

He had kept it safe like it was his treasure. There were risks in the needy joint family. ‘What about the remaining?’ I asked. ‘I’ll give if I get well!’ he exclaimed ironically. ‘Of course you will get well! What can a simple fever do to your robust figure?’ I assured him. He sighed resignedly. Once outside the house, his son told me, ‘He has liver cancer.’ Harichand couldn’t fulfill his last promise because he died soon after. He died in early sixties, carrying a little debt to me and a few others. As a friendly gesture I freed him from the unsettled issue. That’s all I could do for him.

The village holy fool

 

Ishwar was called Bawla by the villagers. He was too simple even for the bucolic times during the last decades of the century bygone. What else the society calls a man who isn’t cunning, calculative, scheming and shrewd? The absence of this typical smartness entitles a man to be called Bawla or fool.

He was a huge man, with a rolling gait, mostly on his toes as if he was going downslope and trying to check or put brakes to avoid a free fall. In his simple kurta pyjama he looked like a kindly grizzly bear. In the face of smart clamor around, he bore a perplexed, puzzled look. As kids we were afraid of him. Someone would shout Bawla at his back. Then he would go on rampage like a bull angry over a red flag. He would run after the culprit with a brick in hand, shouting mild imprecations and cuss words that he had mastered.

He was quite poetic in response to the insult ‘Ishwar Bawla’ and would shout ‘Teri Maa Ne Kare Tawla’—something to do with the offender’s mother—before launching a full-scale attack. I but once witnessed his real side. We had gone for a cricket match to his part of the locality and there Ishwar allayed all my fears. He was a gentle spectator and his talk made perfect sense to my thirteen-year-old self. Most of his talk was about the significance of keeping good manners by the children. I could feel that this was the acme of his realization born of his first-hand experience of the errant behavior of the village children.

Now after decades, having gained a bit of insight, I would call him a holy fool, a God’s innocently pure child, too simple to get into the mainstream chauvinism.

Ishwar was unmarried and stayed with his joint family. He was famous for eating copious amounts of laddoos and puris at marriage feasts. There were episodes when he literally emptied the laddoo basket singlehandedly and on being reminded that it was his own stomach and he shouldn’t torture it like this, he would storm out cursing why had they invited him if they hadn’t the guts to pacify his hunger.

He was very dismissive of women. He followed a credo: he would tie his fodder bundle—a huge one as you must have guessed—and heaved it upon his shoulder first and then hoisted it further upon his head. He never requested anyone to help him put it on his head even though his bundle was always double the size of what a big farmer could carry. Usually the farmers and the peasant women would request a fellow man or woman working nearby in the fields to help the bundle onto the head. But whenever anybody asked Ishwar for help, he would snap, ‘Why did you make it bigger for your capacity to lift it of your own? You should have only as little as you can heave unto your head without assistance.’ Still the peasant women would tease him to help them with their fodder bales. It would result in a barrage of his credo repeated in loud voices to make it clear to them. He looked perturbed that they couldn’t make out even such a simple thing even after being told so many times. Maybe it gave him a nice feeling that he was the only sane man in a village of fools. Well, maybe he indeed was.

He knew exactly how to save his life. One particular farming brat was a specific threat. The boy loved to play truants which the target took on their face value. Whenever the boy came driving his tractor and found Ishwar coming on the way, he would practice mock attacks on Ishwar, trying to make it feel as if he was going to run him over under the tractor. Ishwar would run helter-skelter, thinking it was the doomsday. As a man learning from experience, he devised a plan after many rounds of running to save dear life. He would pick up a brick and stand with a ready-to-strike posture as the tractor passed. Self-defense is good.

Once he was getting his shaving done at the village barber shop. The mischievous young farmer arrived there. Ishwar, his immense torso tied under a chador and his big face copiously leathered, looked sideways as his naughty adversary entered the shop. The young farmer picked up a razor from the counter, stood behind the chair bearing Ishwar and started sharpening it on his palm, while staring at Ishwar with a determined expression. Ishwar stared deep into his foe’s reflection in the mirror on the front. His eyes went glazed with fear, plain raw fear of death. He knew it was the doomsday and the enemy is going to slaughter him right there. He knew exactly what to do. There he escaped, flung the chador away with full force and ran out of the shop, all leathered up, yelling at the top of his voice, ‘He is going to cut my throat with the razor!’ A few village elders had to do a lot of convincing to get him back into the chair and make him believe that the boy was just joking. But Ishwar would ensure that the boy was off the scene first. The latter was requested to leave the place. Later, the barber had to deal with a whole lot of doomsday stories told by a shivering Ishwar. ‘He was sure to slaughter me today if not for my timely escape!’ he was muttering.

He ate chapattis that always counted in double digits. An honest conscience and big body needs a full stomach to sustain. He looked very relaxed while eating, slowly munching his morsels like an uncaring bull chewing the cud. The people joked about it, but he wasn’t afflicted with the malady of changing one’s ways on the basis of what others say or think.

Once the entire joint family had gone to the fields, the ladies having prepared a big stack of many dozens of chapattis in the early morning to have lunch at home after finishing the farming work by noon. All of them returned tired and very hungry but found the cache of chapattis gone. Ishwar was extra kind that day. After finishing his usual quota, he summoned all the dogs in the village in his booming voice. All the dogs were well fed that day and slept very peacefully.

He knew that it was a cunning world and he had to be very vigilant. So he followed a strict protocol regarding monetary transactions. Whenever he purchased somethingfrom the village grocer’s shop, he would demand a firm, articulate ‘yes received the money’ from the shopkeeper after handing over the money. He was always scared that someone not acknowledging the receipt in his standard ‘aa gaye hain’ would cheat him and would demand the money again. There was a big ruckus in the street one day on this account. The villagers found a very nervous, almost on the verge of fainting, Bihari ice-candy seller, a slight man cowering under the verbal harangue unleashed by the big-built Ishwar. Among the verbal torrents, the burly man slurped on the melting red ice-candy. The matter stood like this. Ishwar had carefully handed over the five-rupee coin owed to the seller in lieu of the purchase. But the seller won’t acknowledge the receipt by repeating the standard phrase ‘aa gaye hain’ which an angry Ishwar kept repeating. ‘He isn’t saying, “Aa gaye hain!”’ he was heard shouting, much perturbed at the seller’s effort to cheat him of his coin. The Bihari seller had hardly any clue to the standard monetary protocol followed by Ishwar. So the poor puzzled fellow stood on the verge of nervous breakdown. Imagine an elephant haranguing a rabbit over a monetary deal gone wrong. Then the villagers clarified the issue to the panic-stricken ice-candy seller. He gently said, ‘Yes, paise aa gaye hain.’ ‘See, only now the deal is done! He was thinking of duping me. Took the money and won’t say it that he has taken it, so that he could demand it again,’ a much relieved Ishwar guffawed while taking big slurps at the melting ice-candy so as not allow even a single drop go waste due to negligence.

Mothers are mothers. No wonder, he too was the star of his mother’s eyes. At the high tide of her maternal surge, she would put boiled milk—many liters of it—in the broad iron basin used for carrying anything from wheat, soil or cattle dung, leaving it to cool so that her lovely son could gulp it down. Ishwar would then consume it like a thirsty male buffalo much to the solace of her heart. ‘And still they say he is a fool and fit for nothing. Can they even match him in this?’ she would let out her maternal grudge against the society.

He was a powerful man as is proven by almost a quintal of fodder bale getting hoisted upon his head without any helping hand. But a gentle giant he was, a mere child in a big body. He never used his physical force as per the dictates of an abused ego born of taunts, jeers and puns targeted at him. Yes, he would be irritated and would mutter, grumble, feign attacks, but all this fell well short of any serious injury to anyone. As per the norms of the raw physical strength, he was capable of breaking the bones of the entire locality singlehandedly. Yet the children could well afford to entertain themselves at his cost.

On the last day of his sojourn on earth, he was seen restlessly running around the village. He was in his late fifties I suppose. In the afternoon, after the daylong running to complete the rest of his journey, he lay at the village cremation ground for the last rest. He preferred to die there itself, perhaps to still keep his credo of not allowing anyone to carry his load. He died without much fuss, taking it like an elephant would call it a final day in a forest, without suffering and without much fuss.