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.    

The women that are no more

 

Those were the buxom old ladies who still lumbered around quite seriously, still pulling the cart of domesticity, till the last decade of the century gone. They had seen much of the last century. They carried manly strength, a thick-skinned temperament and rough farming hands. They had much to give and almost limitless strength to bear. Further, they were broad shouldered and possessed huge breasts which hang down to reach their navels in the old age. These had breastfed many children, not limited to the ones born of their own wombs. In the extended big joint families there was a kind of communal breastfeeding for the dozens of children. There would be many lactating mothers at any point of time to fulfill the children’s needs. The children too took liberty to suckle as per their choice or availability of a feeder when the pangs of hunger struck.

These women were full of motherhood and offered their breasts to even the unfortunate ones in the neighborhood whose mother was either dead or was too sick to feed them. They would roll up their kurta and pop out the nipple. The hungry child would suckle and draw the nourishing drops of life. They also won’t bear the sight of the child crying of hunger in the buses and trains or at the stations. With a quick assertion of motherly guts, they would pop out the full-of-milk nipple, get the infant suckling at it, cover the area with their chunri while keeping their head still covered.

When they grew old, and their breasts hung down to their navels, they would tell the weaker young ladies of the modern age with their smaller breasts, ‘We can still squirt out more drops of milk from our old boobs than you the weak ones of the modern age!’

As the world of we humans gets more and more complex both within and without, the drops of milk are vanishing as the human physiognomy is changing under the onslaught of pollutants and modern lifestyle. A few decades down the line, maybe we will have all the babies produced in artificial wombs in the labs. The human body will hardly have the strength and capability to bear children naturally. But well that’s change. Isn’t it? 

Gritty old ladies of the past

 

Tai Rishalo was a wise, old woman. Widowed early with many children to rear, she managed to keep her brood’s neck above the waters to survive and sustain in the pool of life where the storms of low social position kept their little boat tossing with adversarial winds. She but kept her sense of humor above any other mood. Carrying her basket of vegetables and fruits, she sprinkled the staid village air with her puns, mimicry and jokes. She built a position of respect for herself across all castes in the village. She had a stupendous memory and would narrate almost endless fables and stories of princes, princesses, prets and parrots. She could sing, dance, joke and mimic with great effect.

Tai Rishalo loved Haridwar, especially visiting the holy banks of Ganga Maa in the auspicious month of shravan. The latter meant the cusp of all earthly delights for her. Her group of elder women would load themselves with wheat flour, pulses, rice and bales of clothing and start for the pilgrimage. They used multiple modes of conveyance to finally reach the holy town. Here they stayed in dharamshalas and cooked their food to keep their visits monetarily feasible. Some of the women in her group were so old that when they started from the village, many people joked that surely a few of them will definitely stay back with Ganga Maa forever. But all of them would beat all doubts and returned safe. Not only that, they would even climb the hills to reach neelkanth mahadev temple; a stupendous feat, given the fact that one of them, Tai Malho, was sitting on the edge of her grave.

I remember a rainy day when they started their pilgrimage. It was a gloomy, wet day. All of them old and Tai Malho the oldest of them, in her late eighties, frail, bony, slightly better than the crooked stick she held in her hand. She moved with her rickety steps in the street mud like a poor skeleton taking a stroll after jumping out of its grave. I thought I had seen the last of her on that rainy day. But there she was back in the village in a slightly better avatar after spending two-three weeks by the holy river. She had even managed to walk uphill to the holy shrine of neelkanth, a steep climb of almost eighteen kilometers. She gave credit to Tai Rishalo for her survival. ‘She makes you laugh so much that the yamdoots possibly get doubtful and take you far younger than your age because you are laughing so much!’ she exulted.

However, there was a false scare born of the trip. Tai Srichand ki bahu, uncle Srichand’s wife, a robust fair-colored woman with buxom breasts who had nurtured many handsome big-shouldered farmers, caused plenty of scare in the family after her return. She was uncle Srichand’s fourth wife. His previous three wives had died, earning him the name-de-plume of ‘wife-eater’. But our fourth Tai survived and almost two decades younger to her farmer husband, she beat him in the race of life to become a widow in her seventies.

During those days, just a few trains plied between Delhi and Haridwar. Our gang of old Tais would launch an assault with their big bundles to occupy any space available in the unreserved general compartment. The passengers would look horribly at unease but when the elderly peasant women started singing and sharing food with them the things would take a cozy U-turn. During one such scuffle to grab her footing in the crowded compartment, Tai Srichand ki bahu got a nasty elbow strike at her copious breast. A lump emerged as a result. She returned crying from the pilgrimage, loudly proclaiming that it was cancer and she would die. She unleashed torrents of urgency on her sons. They took her to a doctor and only the doctor’s words that it was just a temporary fibroid that would melt away by itself she returned to her usual jolly mood.

All those Tais are gone now on their further journeys. When I remember Tai Rishalo and her fondness for Haridwar, I always feel that she must be enjoying her days on the banks of Maa Ganga after shedding her bodily form. Their memories bring a sweet childhood nostalgia.           

The story of a village student

 

Bansraj was a big, broad-faced, bassy voiced thundering bully at our village school. He was a born rebel and breaking all disciplinary injunctions appeared to be the axis of his life. The teachers of course beat him hard and even mistreated him to put his errant ways on course. He simply hated the teachers and with mathematical derivation hated me as well because I stood in the teachers’ good books on account of my disciplined ways. The teachers liked me because I crammed what they asked us to. I was a shy boy and stood as the most intelligent among a group of peasant boys who attended the school unwillingly and took it as a prison. Always in vendetta against the teachers, he would then bully me as his revenge against the system of education. I was really scared of him to be frank. We—me and a few other students who diligently followed the teachers’ instructions—were lily-livered sissies and Bansraj seemed a far grown up guy who already knew how we were born and the why and what of all ‘those’ tabooed things in the fifth standard itself.

I remember in the seventh standard we were sitting in a verandah at the school. The teacher had gone away to while away time, asking us to read the next chapter from our science books. Bansraj was in a catty mood that day. He had, maybe, experienced too much about his body’s reaction to the girls’ presence, a group of them sitting a few paces away from us. Calm and composed, his back against a column, his legs lazily spread out in front, his knickers rolled down to the knees, Bansraj, excited with the pre-puberty heat, gave a live demonstration about the part of human anatomy that has been kept hidden with good social effect. He laid bare the secret truth. ‘See-see, see the helmeted soldier!’ he kept drawling in his toady notes. The girls giggled, abashed to the last core of their blushing self.

The next year, having further gone into the corridors of gupt gyan, he declared to our little group of students who crammed the lessons to qualify as good students, ‘See, don’t be too proud of your homework! Your parents too did the dirty thing, gandi baat to produce you!’ In this way we had the biology lessons long before the science teacher would try to explain it with lots of inhibition and suspicion in his own mind. We were scandalized to know the heavy truth. Well, the teachers tried their best to tame the bull. Master Karampal, a broad-shouldered strongly bearded man, used his muscle power to rein him in.

After the matriculation, Bansraj straightway got into the senior secondary and the university of life itself. First into selling shoes and later as a private money lender, he used his guts and gumption to make some money. Later he turned into a close confidante of the local Congress MLA and further boosted his financial prospects. ‘You have been a self-satisfied, contented man. Had it been me with your type of education, I would have ruled the world!’ he tells me.

He now understands the importance of education. So taking the cause of education very seriously, as a means of ruling the world, he sent his son to the prestigious Doon Valley School. He spent a lot of money on his son’s education. But the boy performed mediocre. ‘And he even missed playing mischief and enjoying life. He turned kamjor for the game of life like you guys,’ he rues.

However, Bansraj has risen in the estimate of our former teachers. He fondly calls them guruji. They too are very happy about his rise. ‘We thought you will turn into a murderous thug. But you seem to have done well Bansraj!’ they congratulate him.

The reason for his success is that he didn’t explode suddenly with his rebelling energies to stand out as a criminal and outlaw in one go. He used the energies in little-little shrewd ways, smartly, intimidatingly, clawing his way through the social jungle and at least got his family financially secure. Master Karampal, who would beat him the most during our school days, is an old man now. But he has now every reason to praise Bansraj. His former pupil now operates as his agent for the lucrative private lending business. He trusts his former pupil to manage monetary things very well. Well, to raise myself in his esteem I cannot even present him my poetry books because he was our history teacher.    

The little story of a teacher

 

Uncle Mahender, fondly called Masterji, has been very ardent about fulfilling his roles and responsibilities. He is nearly eighty now. During his teaching days the teachers received a paltry pay cheque. He used every single paisa very-very carefully to raise his five children and gave them good education from the rural standards. His meaning of education has been centered around technical education. To bear the costs he would break all records of the maximum number of shaves using the same blade.

Masterji has a sweet tooth and throughout his life he has consumed copious amount of sweets without much adverse consequences for his health. A few years ago, he welcomed me at his house with a gesture his son says he won’t show even to a state Governor if he happens to visit the house. Masterji brought out his box of specially made laddoos from his secret chamber and opened it in front of me so that I could help myself with sweets. It was almost an eighth wonder, as his son says.

Masterji is now nearly deaf and blind. But even more painful is his memory loss. He is sitting in front of the house and I stoop down to shout ‘hello’ in his ear to draw his attention. ‘Do you recognize me Masterji?’ I ask. ‘Hum, yea, yes, you are…Tina’s brother,’ he hits the arrow of memory on the margin of perfect ten. But then he wants to be more specific. ‘You…what do they call you…you I think have a popular name…what was it?’ he is giving a push to his brain to spell out my name. The villagers call me Soofi, Suuppi, Soopi, etc., all the rustic derivatives of my pet name Sufi. ‘Never mind Masterji, the main thing is that you know who I am at least,’ I console him. I don’t tell him my name, leaving this little puzzle for his feeble mind to solve and get some exercise. The old age seems to shed away all the layers we have built-up in life.      

Survival chronicles of a common man

Dharambeer has been very cautious and careful in life. He is an athletic, tall man, a kind of agile panther with both ends tapering to give him the exquisite appearance of an elongated oval figure. He isn’t portly but his stomach is wide enough to adjust unbelievable amount of eatables. Just like a python can struggle to fit a deer in its stretched mouth, Dharambeer too once put his best foot forward to eat almost five kilogram of tinda (Indian round gourd).

He was faced with a dilemma as he sadly looked at the over-ripe vegetables in his field. These could no longer be sold at the market because over-ripe tinda don’t cook well. Usually the farmers pick them and throw them either to the cattle or into roadside ditch. But the thought of something—belonging to himself—going waste severely jolted Dharambeer. He but had a solution. Nothing better than eating them raw. In accomplishing the feat he surpassed a medium-built buffalo in gobbling raw, over-ripe tinda because probably even the animal would have serious issues against finishing the entire heap. He munched with purpose, with steely determination, led by his fear of seeing his belongings going waste.

An elderly farmer told him later, ‘O my rich son, why did you put the seams of your stomach at risk by eating like an angry bull. You could have easily avoided the tinda from going waste even without eating them. Why didn’t you simply save them to dry under the sun to use the seeds for further sowing in the next season?’

He carried the same cautious attitude in saving every single paisa. Regarding the cropped land he went overboard and struggled to grab every square inch of land in the agricultural farms around the field-dividers separating his land from the neighboring farms. When he cut barsham fodder he became an artist. He performed the task with the delicacy of a goldsmith working on a little item of jewelry. Thus passed the decades. He had saved a few lakh rupees from all the sources including his little landholding and his job as the village postman.

Then his sons came of age. Like young energetic colts, they galloped quite freely. He had to cave into their persistent badgering about buying a car so that they could start their careers as cabbies in Gurugram. So the fruit of his lifelong care and caution was invested in a car. They drove it with enough youthful zeal to turn it into an old dented car within a year. Destiny has its unique ways of summarily disposing what we propose.

I feel sad for him as he walks very dutifully carrying his bundles of letters in the village streets. But I would term it as a successful life. His caution has kept him on a tight leash. He has walked very straight without looking sideways. A very disciplined life I would say, almost like a tapasya.

The wind-breaker

 

Tau Chunni Lal was the reputed wind-broker of the village. He broke wind with great effect and that came to be his primary identity for the village-level fame. You need to break wind with good effect to become a village's numero uno wind-broker. His windy catapults were almost like massive cannon shots in comparison to the normal pistol shots of the rest of the villagers. And he was always very humble and unassuming in the art. Perfectly detached in the matter. I don’t think he felt proud about it. He wasn't even bothered about the reactions caused by his windy fireworks. He looked so free and natural about it, no pretense, no effort at hiding, no endeavor to appear, or sound rather, what he wasn't. There was a marvelous acceptance and spontaneity about his situation. As a free citizen of India he broke wind with utmost sense of liberation. Tau Chunni Lal comfortably lumbered through the street, unleashing the audible symbols of his freedom. These were hugely impressive, arriving in multitudes of rumblings carrying amazing range of pitch, notes, frequencies and volume. I think he played a great role in sharpening the linguistic intonation of our little tongues during our childhood as we put up best effort to imitate his sounds through mouth. It's good to be remembered. He wrote his little history on the windy canvas through the pen of sounds.

Sleeping in a cinema hall

 

Dada Lakhmi Chand (1903-1945) was a famous ragini and saang artist from Haryana. People call him the Shakespeare of Haryana for his folksongs. He nailed many bitter truths of the contemporary society. Further, the folk bard, in an oracular manner, sang about the harsher truths of the coming age also. Kaka Maharaj, who stays in a hut by the canal, is an ardent fan of Lakhmi Chand’s raginis. So when a movie based on the life and times of the famed artist was screened at the brand new multiplex in a mall at the town, I offered to take him for watching the movie.

He hardly leaves his hut and very rarely goes to the town. But he agreed for the sake of his folk hero. As I drove him through the town, he found it changed beyond his expectation. ‘It’s a new town altogether!’ he exclaimed like a little boy. He was stumped by the swashbuckling mall and still more by the elevators and lifts. It was all antipodal to his grass hut by the canal. But I think he graced the worldly set-up with his naked feet.

Waiting for the show to begin he had tea with a sense of bewilderment. It was a prime seat in the uppermost row. The movie was about the life and times of the great folk artist—a little biographical treat. He but had come expecting a full show of his raginis only. He found it meaningless and funnily dramatized. So he cozily folded himself in the chair and slept peacefully even among that ear-bursting din in the cinema hall.    

On a secret mission

 

We have seen many cows peacefully chewing the cud right in the middle of roads. They serve a good purpose. The rampaging motorists have to turn careful and slow down, for their own safety at least. We think twice before hurting a cow even involuntarily. So cows on the road is a usual thing. But what about a dog sitting right in the middle of a highway? Well, it looks a clear attempt at suicide since stray dogs hardly carry any faith-born protection like the cows. The red brown dog seems relaxed in the face of death hurtling past at so close quarters.

I also rattle past the stoic dog in my battered, old little car. I’m on a mission, a secretive mission. The winter is quite harsh for my middle-aged bones now. With each passing season, the winters pose a bit bigger threat to my ageing bones. I deliberate over the issue and decide to buy some brandy to take little teaspoons in warm water at the end of the day. People have a particularly clean view of my persona, so even brandy, intended to serve against cold as medicine, is as good as buying a contraband item.

The main problem is that brandy is available at liquor shops. You stand out as a hardcore drinker if you find yourself standing in front of a liquor outlet in broad daylight. I’m at a town near the village but I imagine the peeping eyes of many fellow villagers even on strange faces. I have to be quick and hide the secret item quickly in a bag I’m carrying for the purpose. Nobody would accept that you are buying just brandy from a liquor shop. Even the shop assistant gave a disappointed look when I asked for a mere ‘brandy’. As if I had demanded a kitchen knife from a cannon factory!

I go for a half bottle. He demands 500 rupees for it. I’m ecstatic as the little squat bottle is safely hidden in the bag. For another half bottle I decide to visit some other outlet to get some other brand of the product. But only one brand is available at the town and finally I buy the same one. Surprisingly it comes at 400 rupees. So the other guy duped me for 100 rupees. Then I reflect, ‘Maybe I saved 100 rupees instead of losing. Because had I purchased both bottles from the same outlet that would have meant giving 100 rupees extra.’ 

A pilgrimage

 

I had the luck to go on a pilgrimage to Gaumukh in the second half of October. I saw Maa Ganga's two temples: a glacial one at Gaumukh and a man-made shrine at Gangotri. The former for a journey within; the latter for finding your footing on the ladder of faith before you dive within. As you walk in the opposite direction to Her powerful currents, She cleanses you of darkness. She roars past you, outshouting the demons within you. It seems as if She is ferociously rushing past you to decimate the backstabbing illusions following you. She sprays Her divine waters to cleanse your little-little mistakes and stumbles that we unjustifiably term as sins. She emboldens you to stumble over stony path to finally find your footing, like a mother looking over her toddler falling while learning to walk. She wants your tired legs to know the importance of pause and rest in the art and craft of walking (life). As She powerfully cuts massive mountains, it seems as if a strong mother is assuring Her children,  'I will cut a valley for you. I will lay a path for you.  You just learn to walk!' And once you get the lesson and complete the little assignment given by Her, She is there with Her motherly smile to welcome you in Her man-made shrine.

The story of a little bead

 

He is a saffron clad-baba, aged around forty, gently swaying his wooden staff to avail a lift on some two-wheeler. He is well built and a mere look at his ears bearing glass rings makes his identity evident. He is a follower of Nath sampradaya, a follower of Baba Gorakh Nath. He couldn’t have thrown his staff in front of a more suitable vehicle. With the Baba confidently pillion riding I ask him the whereabouts of his journey.

Becoming an ascetic wasn’t his conscious choice. His parents hadn’t any child even after many years of marriage and they made a vow before the holy fire in an ashram belonging to Nath Sampradaya that if they had children with the great saint’s blessings, they will offer the first born to the sect to be raised as a complete renunciator on the path. With the great saint’s blessings they had four children and keeping their vow they offered the first born to dhoona, the holy fireplace at the ashram. Now the very same sadhu is pillion riding my bike.

He has been to all corners of India on pilgrimages and evaluates people’s worth in terms of their disposition towards kindness. The latter aptly measured in terms of their opening the purse for charity donations. These are hard times. A baba has to have something in the purse to survive because everything is monetized. Literally every breath we take seems to come at some financial cost. So this baba too is entitled to innocently covet money like all of us do. I don’t have any right to expect too many spiritual and hard-penanced elements in this baba’s life because asceticism isn’t his choice. It has been handed over to him by his parents. Thankfully he seems to have accepted his fate and doesn’t seem to hold any grudge against them for depriving him of a role on the normal worldly stage.

The crux of his philosophy that he told me can be summarized in a few lines: ‘Health is the biggest blessing a human being can possess. Health is as important to a fakir as it’s to a king. Both cannot follow their path with full commitment with ill health.’ Well, cannot agree with him more.

As he disembarks from the bike, I teasingly ask him, ‘Should I give you 100 rupees maharaj?’ As I’m drawing out my purse he comes to a fresher spark of life, ‘Of course beta, of course, some chai pani!’ The major advantage of being a sanyasi is that you get entitled to call everyone a beta, anyone from newborns to centurions. He has quick eyes to scan the contents in my wallet as I search for the promised 100 rupee note. The money is given. But these are hard times you know. Nothing seems sufficient, at least financially. I am expecting a smiling blessing but I find him serious and pointing to the lower side pocket of his saffron robe. The cloth is well-washed and looks quite new, not worn out at all. A bit of stitching has gone in a corner of the pocket.

‘The robe is torn beta. Baba would be pleased if you get him a new one,’ he sulks. I am about to laugh and say, ‘Baba, it just needs a stitch that would come for free, so why take the trouble of getting a new one for this.’ But I keep quite. ‘Maybe even a baba needs safe new pockets to do justice to the charity money by keeping it well guarded in sturdy pockets,’ I tease him within myself without giving any outward sign of my insights.

In any case he has decided to further lighten the weight of my purse which is already light. ‘I don’t have a clue to the price of an ascetic robe. How much do you think it costs?’ I ask him. ‘About 600 rupees!’ he tells smartly. Now I realize he has blessed the 500 rupee note in my purse with his kindly gaze and with this additional amount, apart from the one already in his grasp, the charity would match the price of a robe. I feel primarily sad at such times, if nothing else. So resignedly give into his charity-seeking enthusiasm and hand over a 500 rupee note to him. I casually look at the 100 rupee note in his hand. He instinctively puts both of them in his cloth bag as if afraid that I may ask for the smaller denomination to be returned in lieu of the bigger note.

Before I realize he has drawn something out of his pocket, grabs my hand and secretly puts something on my palm, folding his hand over my closed fist as if he has handed me the most miraculous nag mani, the gem of alchemy. ‘Keep it with you and it will save you from all dangers, make you a millionaire, make you the luckiest man on earth!’ his blessings are profuse. After all, 600 rupees in one stroke sometimes turns out to be more than the entire charity that they collect in a week. Most probably I have just contributed to his ganja smoke at the most.

I am about to burst out with laughter at his blessed gem but to help him assume that I’m in awe of his blessing I keep silent. It’s a five-mukhi rudraksh bead, that too a fake one, most probably. But to make him happy I keep it in my pocket. I have no reason to be angry at him. I cannot hold too lofty spiritual expectations from him because the path isn’t born of his conscious choice. He was just pushed into it, like most of teeming millions that we see robed in ascetic cloths across India.

He is still speaking and before I hear some other financial plan for the upkeep of his saintly ways I shoot away like a rocket. He was still speaking while I sped away. I don’t know why but I rode pretty fast after that. Maybe it was the reaction of my subconscious mind for losing some money because money has turned out to be as dear as life these days.

He was practical enough to ask my name and the village of my residence. ‘I will pay a visit to your nagri,’ I heard him shouting as I sped away. Most probably he finds me someone who is simpleton enough whose purse can be opened with the slightest effort. But he is grossly mistaken on this. I am happy to contribute to his ganja smoke once but if he commits the mistake of following my track to my village for further ganja doses then the baba will be in trouble.

Here is my plan of action if he is unlucky enough to follow the foolish scheme: I will welcome him at my place, offer him water, serve him tea and ask for food if he is hungry. And the moment he demands money—which he would most probably—I would produce the fake rudraksh bead asking for full refund.

That night when I went to bed I had a hearty laugh: ‘I bought a fake rudraksh bead for 600 rupees. Imagine my lack of business sense and with that sense I once—height of heights—explored the possibility of turning a businessman and scouted some countries in Africa, central Asia and eastern part of Asia.’ The plan lightened my pockets to almost perfect weightlessness. But this reflection at least assuaged those mild bruises of losses whose pinch I feel sometimes during nostalgic moments. No point in going into that all. That’s all the normal stuff as it happens to most of the people; nothing exceptional about that. But the baba has to be careful. Very careful.  

Skirmish with a ghost

 

I’m just a passing phenomenon. At the quantum level I have no boundaries. At the level of microscopic particles, the smallest that we have spotted till now with our instruments, I’m merely an assemblage of sparks; I’m just a boundary-less conglomeration of tiniest sparks amidst the same going around me. Now the question arises, ‘Who am I?’ I consider myself as a part of this overall conglomeration of the tiniest energy sparks that has identified with certain characteristics to automatically spin out a certain pattern in the energetic conglomeration to manifest at the level of body, my thoughts, emotions, circumstances.

Human body is a far-far short-lived phenomenon than we consider. Each cell in our body vibrates with millions of transitional movements each second. A massive force of change operates at the core of our assemblage whose effects we feel in the form of changing thoughts, passing emotions, shifting perspectives, fluctuating views and more. That means I’m just an energy field with certain predominant proclivities that is being—always—cut through other energy fields that are floating around, or I am passing through them.

From here arises the concept of getting affected by entities, disembodied souls and all the scary world of ghosts and ghouls. All these are mere symbolic representations of the energy fields that leave effect on us, somehow interfere with our cellular and molecular structure, the energy assemblage that we consider ourselves to be us. Their manifestations in our system are in proportion to our own pain, suffering and fears. It’s just a synchronicity with that particular frequency. Of course a field of pain and suffering would look for an anchor point in a similar pool of energy. Then there are stories about their weird, fearsome shapes and appearances. Their nasty appearance is an assemblage of our own pain, suffering and fears. We generate a reality according to our imaginative fears. I have no doubts that some people see such fearsome, weird shapes but these are merely the impressions of their own fears, augmented by the foreign energy field of pain that is passing through them at the moment, created on the screen of sense-perception.  

Some say that most of the thoughts and emotions passing in us aren’t our own. They are triggered by entities. That’s plain and simple crap. They are simply responses and reactions born of what my energy and cellular arrangement—which I consider to be me—creates in its overlapping with other arrangements (bodily visible or not) as I walk on the stage of life. This is inevitable. That’s how it is, because at the quantum level I have no boundary as such and one part will mix and come into contact with the other with as much naturality as one portion of air is always passing through other portions all the time.

So my thoughts and emotions are my own, be that due to the passing of any type of energetic pattern (aligning with me or not) through the quantum space that looks like my body at the level of normal sense perception. How will your bubble stay aloof and untouched by all that is floating around you as you move on the journey? Put your body under the most capable microscope and it will show you as an assemblage of subatomic sparks surrounded by similar twinklings. So my thoughts and my emotions are my own; just a response and reaction to the stimuli of the vastness surrounding me. It simply cannot be otherwise. So take ownership for what goes inside you. As a conscious maker of your circumstances, as a creator of some meaning out of this utmost meaninglessness around, the onus is on us to manage our thoughts and emotions. The talks of tantra and ghosts seem fascinating; very interesting like a movie. Enjoy them but don’t give it undue importance. It is a merely a symbolic representation of the interaction of varying patterns of energy that happens by default because there are no boundaries among various parts at the quantum level.

My own experience in this domain happened about fifteen years back. I worked in corporate at that time and stayed on the outskirts of Delhi. It was a small two-storeyed house with some open wooded lot on one side and an abandoned house on the other. I was a regular worshipper of Mahakali at that time. My mother had prepared very sweet beshan laddoos for me. I was on cloud nine with soft emotions for someone and was on a late night call with the symbol of that affection. I was leaning against the parapet wall facing that abandoned house and eating the sugary laddoo. It was all smiles, laughter and goodie feelings, unbothered of the time and place. It was midnight, exact zero hour as my neighboring bunch of boys would tell me later. Well, eating sugary laddoo at midnight while leaning against the low wall looking over an abandoned house where someone had committed suicide. This statement didn’t mean anything to me prior to the experience. I wasn’t aware of the time, about sugary sweetmeat, about the suicide in the abandoned house. I didn’t know anything about it. Who would be bothered about normal worldly crap when he is on a late night call with someone special?

I was grinning, like a horse, with the solace of the sweetest emotions and lots of sugar in me, one big laddoo already in me and the other half-eaten held in my hand. Little did I know that it was otherworldly combination at the midnight. My horse-grin stopped suddenly. There was a buzzing humming vibration in the air around and I distinctly felt something colliding and barging into me. As if something entered from the back. It was so impactful at the normal perception level that I instinctively straightened up as if someone had pushed with force against my back. The outside agent was so palpable as to trigger a panic reaction immediately. All love was kicked away. By instinct Mother Mahakali’s name surfaced on my lips and hurriedly I came down the stairs. There I was lying on my bed, my neighbors, all nice gentle boys from Bihar, standing around me and looking with concern.

‘Bhaiyaa are you mad! Eating laddoo at midnight! The abandoned house by our side has a history of suicide,’ Radhe, the gentlest of them, was much worried. Faith is always stronger than any fear. I was a pretty serious worshipper of Mahakali at that time. So I was perfectly normal after that initial trigger of fear. I was joking, laughing, giving them a live commentary about how does it feel to have a ghost inside one’s body.  

It was quite an experience. That particular build-up of energy (which still spun around the cosmos with its pain and suffering after unnaturally shedding the body) cascaded around my system for around half an hour. It was quite a force, moving like tidal waves from head to toe, and then moving up again, as if scanning each part of me for some solace, some synchronicity with its own structure of pain. I could feel my body getting heated up from inside but there wasn’t any sweating. I gave a live commentary of all this with my share of jokes injected in between. Then the poor energetic structure of pain moved on. Maybe it found my jokes offensive. The moment it left me I could distinctly declare that I’m ghost-free. There was jubilation among the group of boys.

They really respected me as an elder brother. They worked in call centers and more than the salary considered girlfriends as the main incentive for staying in stinking Delhi for the pittance of a salary. I would pay for the kitchen purchases and in return I would have home-cooked food with lots of respect. So they danced and we raised a toast to our victory over the ghost. Sorry to disappoint my well-wishers who consider me to be a teetotaler because I have tasted liquor on special occasions and beating a ghost was one such occasion. So we all had couple of moderate pegs each during our post-midnight celebrations.

I have experienced all that is good and bad in life. Maybe mother existence wants to keep me level headed and not get egoistic about my purity which is the lighter version of addiction, addiction to one’s good image. Luckily, most of the people consider me a good man. 

But what about the ghost? And the midnight? And the sugary laddoo? Well, of course when someone unnaturally exits the portals of life with so much pain as in a suicide, the bundle of energy spins around looking for succor, and some of us come across this part of air that obviously passes through our system, simply because we don’t have boundaries at the quantum level. It’s a houseless traveller looking for the alleviation of its pains and gropes around for some anchor support. It feeds on our fear and frustrations. But I believe more in being receptive to saintly energy fields passing through me. To make the negative energy fields ineffective against my house, my cellular structure, is the main domain of life—creation with volition and effort. That is what making one’s destiny is all about. To be a good manager of one’s own—again I emphasize these are our own, so no point in taking them to be the impositions from the entities—thoughts and emotions. What about sugar and ghosts? There is a very simple scientific explanation for this. Maybe the sudden bombardment of sugar in the system leaves the cells—and the quantum field around them—flummoxed, lazy, or overburdened, or some other tizzying thing, making them more prone to the entering energy field, where it can penetrate a bit deeper into the system to impose its pain and suffering into our system, triggering a manifestation of fear, agonies and suffering analogous to those witnessed by the carrier entity. What about midnight and ghosts? Well, most of us have our most optimum time and circumstances to be most effective. Light is healing and a sign of divinity. Darkness is chaos and pain. Maybe the energy system of pain operates at its optimum level in the absence of light.

Jai Mahavatar Babaji! As I write this, his big kindly eyes look at me from the picture that I have affixed on the wall. He is guiding me at the moment. It’s my truth at the moment. And who knows Babaji pushed a portion of his divine persona in my direction triggering a chain of thoughts early in the morning. Let’s smile, laugh and make the most of this phenomenon that we understand to be our individual life. And consciously take ownership of our own thoughts and emotions, manage them in a way that we are more open to love and grace of the saintly energies and get free of fear from the bundles of pain spinning around. 

An inverse equation of adoration and hate

 

My brother spent some time in the China office of their company. He finds the Chinese people the most cultured ones. Their aesthetic sense of hospitality for a visitor is outstanding, he tells me. In comparison to the indisciplined chaos in India, he finds China a well-ordered peaceful, contended society. Well, I may not agree with him completely--unless I see things firsthand--but I have a belief that such an ancient civilization that gave birth to Lao Tzu and Confucius must be having deep-rooted fundamentals appropriately aligned with progress and evolution. Anyways, that's another matter. But I believe that with political reforms, and by quitting its ever-excited quest to get more territories, China can be a trend-setting country for the common cause of global citizenship. 

He tells me that Mr. Zia is the best built man he has ever seen. Zia, a very nice gentleman, tells my brother one day, ‘Brother, all the boys in the office hate you,’ he says as a matter of fact. ‘Why?’ my brother asks. ‘Because all the girls adore you,’ the handsome Chinese clarifies.

The big man's little story

 

Petha is a huge man, standing at 6’4” and weighing in the range of 120s in kilogram unit. He grew to be a mammoth lad in the senior secondary school. The potential was spotted by one of his teachers. She passionately introduced him in the art and craft of pacifying the basic instinct. He may not have bothered about any other element of schooling but this lesson he has followed to the core of his body. He hasn’t looked back since then.

Ask him the biographical summary of the last two decades. He answers with the sincerity of a student, ‘I have simply come very handy for the women looking for greener pastures!' As you can very well imagine, there are countless episodes of his amorous passion. It involves the college-going girl of a minister in Djibouti, a very loyal secretary-cum-housekeeper-cum-mistress Fatima, a few nurses, teachers, college girls, peasant women and scores of ladies belonging to the trade of dousing desires.

Then in Ethiopia, he enticed the daughter of a prominent Sikh farmer—from whom he had taken some land on lease for coffee plantation—which earned him a jail term of two years. The African jail was brutal. He survived only because he had too much weight which got cut to a normal 75 kilogram after the prison brutalities. Now in India he keeps a well-oiled stock of afeem to qualify as a brutal bull in the art of passion. He is regular with four or five women apart from giving his own wife every reason to feel contended in matrimony.

What would happen if you are forever excited and high on adrenaline? After all, human system has limitations. It’s not solely made for copulation as people like Petha believe. So now he has high blood pressure. I recommend walks and jogging. But he has all the remedies in copulatory terms. ‘Oh, it’s nothing. One encounter with a luscious woman amounts to two kilometers of walking. By this equation, I walk several miles each day!’ he gives me the consultation talk about this new form of walking by simply taking tumbles in the bed. His mathematics is a clear winner, so I accept his point of view and silently move ahead on my customary walk in the solitude of countryside.

Father and Son

 

My brother Amit is a cool and composed IT professional. He has never been ambitious in the sense that we see people toppling apple carts to rise in careers and professions. A handsome six-footer he has never been too eager to shake the stage too enthusiastically to make his presence felt. At the beginning of planning a career he showed zeal for joining the Indian army and gave a serious try but things won’t work out. Then he dropped the yoke of career aspirations for some time. He took to farming on a part of our land and after finishing the tasks in the morning, he would settle down, after taking a relaxing bath, dressed very-very casually, to read newspaper under the neem tree in front of our house. Father had retired by that time and pulled the family cart with his pension money. Father would smoke and drink tea throughout the day. He still maintained his routine of leaving the house in the morning like during his office days. But now it was the little tea shop in the town where a few of his friends gathered to pass time. He would return from the town in the afternoon.

As he reached home, Father would—having failed to incite his younger son into a volcanic eruption regarding career even with almost cataclysmic fatherly outpours of care, concern and anger—greet the newspaper-reading gentleman with a question in great Krishnamurti’s style, ‘Sir, are you a retired pensioner?’ ‘No sir!’ Amit would reply with a slight embarrassment. Later on, Amit made a career in the IT sector, a bit belated though. But now is doing quite well in his job.

The little world of farmers

Ranbeer is my share-cropper, an arrangement between an idle owner and a hardworking farmer. He has been very hardworking during our decades-long partnership. Earlier he worked very hard but now in his sixties he is retired from active farming, just plies the tractor, directs the farm workers, drinks, plays cards in chaupals, suffers fits of mysterious nature, raises verbal storms against his still strong and robust wife. He is fine with numbers and keeps a little pocket diary where he manages the accounting figures concerning our farming partnership to the last paisa. That is the simple broadsheet of his life. It’s an ideology-free life of a farmer, untangled, aloof from the snarling complexities of the mind.  

The doctors couldn’t give any clue to his swooning fits, so I gave him a spiritual certification that he goes into a Samadhi. He has no clue to what I say so just laughs at it, taking it to be just one of the poor jokes cracked by the bookish guys like yours truly. All of us are our own doctors, the best doctors in fact because we know our own system more than anyone else. I was once asking him about what and whys of his fits, how did he feel, etc. ‘Well, I hardly remember anything. It just strikes suddenly. When I come back to my senses, I always find a few drops of urine on my pajama and after that I feel very weak for a couple of days,’ he gave me the medical summary to diagnose the nature of his medical condition.

I researched on it and failed to come to a conclusion. So while the doctors failed to check his fainting swoons and fits, he devised a solution for himself. ‘The tractor jumps and shakes my body quite vigorously and due to this I don’t suffer fits while plying my tractor,’ he looked assured. After that he started spending as much time as possible on his tractor. His wife, who worked equal to two strong bulls in the domain of hard field labor, could draw consolation that hers wasn’t a case of total exploitation as her husband was at least contributing to farming as a tractor driver.

Then the myth was broken one day. Ranbeer all smug, and looking at the mouth-watering prospects of getting a full liquor bottle to drink in the evening with his pals, was plying his tractor on the road to the town. A couple of farmers were sitting comfortably by his sides on the mud-guards. Maybe it was the fault of the road makers. They had made it too smooth with a fresh layering of tar, so Ranbeer’s body didn’t shake sufficiently to avoid a fit. The tractor was running at a reasonable speed and the farmer lost consciousness suddenly without any prior warning or symptoms. Both his fellow peasants had to jump into action with the agility of a rat snake to avoid a common fit for all three of them in the roadside ditch. After that Ranbeer isn’t contributing to farming even as a tractor driver. His wife is aggrieved. She feels exploited in this one-sided equation. But she is helpless in doing work. A life-long habit of hard labor, her Ikigai, won’t allow her to sit idle. So she just cannot subdue her inclination to start walking to the fields to work and sweat out the miseries of life. But she harasses him a lot, cracks jokes, treats him like a child, and fires puns and much-much more.

There is some wild growth in a corner of one of the fields. A big cobra stays there. People talk about it with awe and wonder. The share-cropping couple has planted laukis. Ranbeer’s wife is helpless in doing hard work. She has to do farming work to keep her life meaningful. So she is busy in weeding out the extra growth among the vegetable vines. The cobra struck at her sickle-bearing hand. It was there under the vines. She fell back due to the shock and the offended reptile in fact crawled over her stomach. She was all alone in the field at that time. Imagine the shock and nightmare of a cobra strike.

I am presenting here her own words as I listened to her a bit guiltily and her eyes almost accusing me of partnership in crime as if saying it was your cobra because it stays in your field. Here goes her post-bite story:

‘I fell down and it jumped on my body and crawled over me. I couldn’t stand up. I started crying. Tried to get up but would fall down. Then I thought why die while running and repeatedly falling down. So I tied my duppatta on my hand, gave a cut around the bite and lay down weeping to die peacefully.’

After fifteen minutes her son arrived and took her to the snakebite healer who uses a secret herbal concoction for detoxification. The patient vomits and goes into diarrheal fits to cleanse the system. It works well. Surprisingly. The success ratio is almost 95 percent. Most of the snake-bitten people get cured.

She was up for terrible vomiting and diarrhea for a couple of days. Ranbeer felt inconvenience about it. ‘Put her cot near the washroom so that there is no unnecessary messing up of the place,’ he managed the situation as a firm family patriarch. Then he went to her cot and consoled, ‘You will get cured, don’t worry. Most probably the snake just gave a hiss on your skin and you panicked.’ Then he lamented about food not getting cooked on time, the usual inconveniences born in the life of a farmer with the wife getting bedridden. She listened to all this, not saying much but resolved to make it very tough for him once she got back to her feet.

These are very tough people. I wasn’t expecting her to go to the fields at least during this season. But she was right there at the farm doing the usual chores the very next week itself. Salutes to these courageous Jat peasant women!  

PS: She was earlier bitten by a snake while taking out dung-cakes from a bitoda, a conical dung-cake store covered with hay and straw. Ranbeer himself was bitten by a snake in the fields few years back. So they are veterans in the scary experience. The farmers world over lead such a tough life. But when it comes to setting narratives and building agendas by the power aspirants, the farmers and their cause lie at the base of their scheme.

The story of an old man

 

Tau Bhoopan has finished his innings here on earth but the anecdotes he sired still fetch little nuggets of memories from the deep abyss of the past. He had a penchant and flare for flirting with norms. He was a certified flirtatious character; always water-mouthed for the opposite gender till late in his old age. So most of his stories deal with his disconcerting overtures to pacify and gratify the undying worms of desire in him. The people seem forgiving and laugh about it.

He indeed was a character. He once came across an English sahib in the privacy of acacia forest and finding him alone pounced upon him like a local panther trying to redeem the native pride. Both of them were strong for each other and huffing and puffing, unable to outdo the other, fell into a well. After a few minutes of water slinging they realized the importance of truce to save their lives. Then both of them yelled, joined the forces of vocal cords to draw someone’s attention. The help won’t arrive for a few hours and meantime they copiously consumed their quota of swearing, oath taking and cuss words in their respective languages. Once they were fished out, they had antipodal reception. Bhoopan was jailed for a few months and the Englishman was treated like a brave prince.

India then became independent and Bhoopan would always claim that he had fought for the country’s liberation from the foreign rule. In a free India, once Bhoopan had opened a tea stall by the road outside the village. He would get up at four in the morning, start fire in the hearth, set the kettle sizzling as a welcome sign for his customers. But he always felt that the number of customers never did justice to his seriousness about the job. He got itchy over the months and when a military convoy passed the road his check dam broke. He fell in front of the officer’s jeep and started crying profusely. The officer thought he was the most wronged person in the area. He asked him about his grievance. A profusely weeping Bhoopan told him about his plight, how the villagers were deliberately ignoring him, as he thought, to make him go penniless. ‘Please point this cannon towards the village once, please, you don’t have to fire, just the cannon mouth towards them will teach them a lesson. They are cowards, they will pee in their pants,’ he pleaded.

In his sixties he was struggling as a sugarcane juice maker. A woman ordered a glass of juice. He made it and while he was gloating over her figure a fly fell into the glass. ‘See, you have put a fly in the glass,’ she angrily complained. ‘Of course, I cannot put an elephant in the glass,’ he countered from his side. She threw away the glass which broke and paid him for the juice. ‘But what about the fly and the broken grass?  Pay for them also. Those were costly items,’ he hollered.

His mischief got hugely manifested in mind, as his body grew old and the basic instinct seeped into his old neurons from the body tissues. A young peasant woman was showing her buffalo, which had been giving mating calls at night, to a bull for calving and fresh milk in the family. It was a tiny grove of trees. Her farmer husband was not at home and fearing a missed chance at getting the buffalo seeded, she herself took charge of the situation. It would have been embarrassing in the presence of someone but since there wasn’t anyone around she tried her best to get the mating done. She pacified the buffalo into a position and whistled to inspire the bull. She had after all seen the process with stealthy eyes as the menfolk managed it. This bull was not that experienced in the art. It was willing, was in the mood and repeatedly getting on but missed the mark. She had seen how nonchalantly the menfolk would help the faltering bull by holding the pizzle and putting it into the slot. But it was a big block in her female mind, conditioned in the chains of patriarchy, to get this particular thing done. She seemed in two minds. She blushed even though there was nobody around. She moved her hand with determination but seemed lacking the courage to do it as if she was scared of it. ‘Daughter, why worry? It looks red and hot but it isn’t so. It won’t burn your hands,’ Bhoopan the expert spoke from behind a tree trunk. He was considerably old by this time and had expertly followed the trio, anticipating some fun that would tickle his lusty bone.

Once, this time older than before, he was urinating by a path. At a distance some peasant women stopped waiting for him to get done. ‘Daughters, don’t worry. You can safely pass. That which you are afraid of is firmly held by its neck,’  he assured them.

As he grew still older he would have lots of fights with his daughters-in-law, sons and grandsons. And people would try to remind him that an old man shouldn’t quarrel and fight with his family members. ‘If not the family, with whom should I fight then? Russia and America? Sorry I’m not capable of that anymore,’ he would say.