The lokhandi rakshash (iron demon)

 

Railway companies launched first railway projects in British India with Christmas gaiety to add to their plunder of resources. The purling pioneers, the scheming teamsters, busy in introducing railways in India. It was a godless game, unsparing, unsentimental, involving hardcore business.

The practical and startling burst of logical energies by the colonizers. While the oriental masses sought and waited for the unnamed largesse of luck and fate (based on faith in gods and idols): the maddening reveries, the irritating expectancy, the lethargic love for the powers unseen.

Vagueness mumbling around among the native subjects, the Westerners meanwhile gobbled practicalities with gourmet’s delight. With pinpointed focus, the colonizers first whitewashed the colored silhouettes of the oriental panorama and then, as fiery accompaniment to heartless logic, painted it with steely monochromes of loss-gain. Dully surmised: an era of humiliations and privations for the natives.

Despite all this, the story of laying the first railway line is quite interesting. The princely states funded the projects as the then Calcutta and Bombay competed to get the honor of having the first railway line in India. Among the caterwauling and ecstatic scintillations, the ship carrying the engine and allied equipment for the Calcutta line lost its way in the choppy seas and reached Australia instead of the destination port.

As the patrons of the proposed Eastern railway bustled with itching vexation, defeat hard on their heels, the Western railways won the race and completed the project ahead of their rival. So symbolic of the West’s win over the East.

The Bombay-Pune line was opened with much fanfare. It let loose a tidal wave of excitement, fear and rumors in the Indian society. Gossips went boisterously adrift among the natives. People had all the time for impractical, fissiparous, episcopal talk. It (the train) is a lokhandi rakshash (iron demon), they said. So no high society or upper caste Indian should travel in the demon cart. If you sit in it your dignity will be in ruins, the pundits admonished. Pitiful sarcasm and plain fear floated around.   

Some native plain-speak patricians maintained that the iron demon ran too fast taking the ill-fated travelers to the destination in too short time. With confidential smirk, they maintained that it results in shortening the unlucky travelers’ lifespan. Some said the iron demon thrived on human and animal sacrifices on its demonic iron path. For every mile traveled it needs multiple sacrifices, they whispered with fear and apprehension. Well, the bloody sights of accidental hits on the tracks might have sired this belief.

The native could travel only in the third class carriages. These were open-sided compartments having just roofs overhead to save the passengers from direct onslaught of weather elements. The Britishers maintained that the Indians don’t need closed compartments because they don’t feel the heat like the fair-skinned rulers. These third class compartments were open to all Indians irrespective of caste or social rank. The higher caste Indians raised objections that they won’t travel with the untouchables because that pollutes their bodies. But to the Britishers all Indians belonged to one class, the lowly class of ignorant native masses. So they kept the rule that whoever pays the fare gets to travel in the train. 

Youth: The perennial foolishness

 

Youth is blunderous and foolish; of altercation and itching adolescence.

It was another physically uplifting and mentally relaxing Govardhan parikrama. On the way back in the afternoon we get into a shared car from Govardhan chauraha. It’s an Ertiga, a seven-seat vehicle.

For such car pools, they squeeze three passengers on the front seat by the driver’s side, four on the middle seat and three at the back. At 200 rupees per passenger it fetches 2000 rupees for ten passengers who are packed so tight that there is hardly any space to even shift one’s bum by just a millimeter.

I’m squeezed on the front on a little pad put on the hand-gear panel, one passenger each on both my sides and the driver to the right of all of us. To allow any meddling with the hand-gear I have to give the best of my effort, fixing all my energies on the toes that are continuously trying to get a better position to make the tensed body slightly relieved and keep it short of the breaking point in terms of mind and body both.

The wiry young driver fits in the little niche available to the extreme right on the car’s front seat. How does he manage to drive from so little a space is a miracle in the art of driving.

The middle seat has three passengers, an old woman, a young girl and a young man. The young man bristles with irritation and unease when the driver tries to force down the customary fourth passenger.

The young man is cozily fitted with the girl. He doesn’t want any intruder. The driver tries to put the old woman between them and then force another male passenger by his side on the left.

The young man panics seeing the chance of losing the cozy feminine proximity. He throws the typical male chivalry. ‘I’ll pay for two seats. Don’t let anyone in now!’ he flaunts his bravado.

I don’t care about money, he wants to show, confidence oozing from his bearing. The girl must be surely impressed.

The backseat has three passengers including my brother.

The boy strikes a conversation with the girl. ‘I think I know you,’ he says. ‘Are you from that locality, near this place, around that square, the grey painted house?’ he strikes gold in acquaintance. Yes, she is from the house he mentions.

I don’t think it’s a chance meeting. He seems to have planned this journey; must have been following her itinerary through some means, maybe some informer in her circle of friends. Most probably, he has been following her and now trying to pass this meeting as a chance occurrence.

He seems a very smart guy; knows how to build up a conversation with a girl. I’m from this and that, near your house, we stayed in a rented apartment, I saw you on the roof, you are maybe Sudhir’s classmate, he was my classmate in another school near that place. He seems to have done his research.

We are listening. She is doing B. Tech. He has joined his father’s business.

The conversation is progressing well. The driver and the boy between me and the driver get itchier with each sentence flowing from the girl’s mouth after the initial temerity melts and she starts talking comfortably. My young neighbors cringe visibly as the conversation at our back involves smiles and laughter.

Aah, the evocative idioms of youth! Unabashedly comparative, relative ethos of adolescence! I can feel the hormonal storms of jealousy boiling in the bodies near me.

Youth is so foolish. It takes everything so-so seriously. And personally.

The two boys in front feel as if their masculinity is tarnished when the girl is taken away (they feel sure of it) by another boy even though they don’t know any of the person involved in the talk emanating from the middle seat.

The driver and his neighbor share a collective identity as the ones who have lost a girl to a feral cat who has no right on her. A rival tomcat is courting a girl! How is this possible given their own handsome self in the near vicinity!

Oofs, the cross-pollination of affection!

The two boys in the front seat get fidgety with the passage of minutes. Youth is so-so execrable. The driving turns more and more brash. The driver is now driving like it’s a serpent at full speed on the busy highway.

I know that he is trying to assert his masculine endowment through heroic, dangerous driving. Or maybe he is trying to scare the couple by taking utmost dangerous turns.

The other boy is egging him on. They didn’t know each other before this journey started. But now they are close friends in their binary as the losers who bear the ignominy of a girl being whisked away from their clutches by a third thug.

The other boy is speaking as if he is drunk, like a heartbroken majnu who doesn’t care about life anymore; a loser in love who is ready to face even a violent death provided the rival is also crushed to pulp on the highway.

Every time the boy and the girl strike a new topic of conversation, dangerous driving touches a new high.

Not able to bear it anymore, the offended driver takes out a pouch of cheap stimulants available in the market like food ration, chews at its corner, spits out the plastic piece with disgust and squeezes the semi-fluid concoction into his mouth.

It gives an instant high, they say. With this new bout of intoxication he does his best to add one more number to the teeming list of road accidents in India.

The fat old woman shouts that she has to see her grandson’s marriage. She engages in a hit and run verbal duel with the driver.

Meanwhile I keep praying silently—I have to invest the entire pilgrimage’s punya to reach home unscathed and not get mauled like a worm on the highway.

It was a big relief to get out of the car after a couple of hours of missing dangerous crash on the busy highway by a hairbreadth dozens of times.

Well, we nearly turned into a casualty of hormonal storms clashing foolishly among the young people.

 

The roots

 

A fair-colored slim boy of twenty-two, Ayaz Ahmad is a Muslim from Kashmir. He works as a truck driver with a contractor specializing in earthworks.

I ask him if he can understand Haryanvi. ‘Of course, I can understand most of it. I’m a gujjar. I understand Rajasthani language because it’s the language of our tribe, the nomads, our ancestors!’ he says with perky pride.

Then I realize that Haryanvi and Rajasthani are similar in crude countryside intonation. ‘Haryanvi is similar to Rajasthani,’ I hear him saying with a touch of Haryanvi in his Rajasthani-based dialect.

His ancestors were wandering nomads from Rajasthan. They must have been Hindu. Those were relatively easier times for crossovers—geographic and religious. They must have migrated to Kashmir and there they took up Islam.

The way he says, ‘I’m a gujjar!’ gives an idea about his feeling of pride for their primary ethnic identity. ‘Gujjar’ connoting more about an occupation, a pastoral living, a distinct nomadic culture. And the way he puts it, it seems that he is more secure in asserting this base identity than he would be in asserting his religious identity which is an add-on to his basic identity.

People, however far they might bloom in the sky in the form of flowers, fruits and new shoots, have a devotional respect for their roots, the roots hidden in the soil, grit, grime, dust of time. They maintain a mythic connection even with the most distant roots they can recall.  

The buffalo is bigger than the brain

 

Ask a Haryanvi farmer about his young son and there is a big probability that he will share his qualifications in terms of weight. The mass of muscles holds far more significance in the farming psyche than any other bundles of skills, qualifications, specialties, achievements, etc.

A simple light mind but burdened with excess gravity of land issues thus making it a weight-centric world.

The farmers are light in thought and heavy in hands, so there is this natural inclination to analyze things in terms of weight.

An uncluttered brain, but burdened brawn with society’s problems of bread and butter.

I have heard it (judging the human worth in terms of sheer mass of muscles) so many times among the farming folks that it seems to be almost a natural rule. If the young man is 100 plus in kilograms then the proud father would tell about this with such spirit and enthusiasm that can never be touched by a father whose son has completed multiple PhDs.

Well, in the farming community, the buffalo seems to be bigger than the brain. Their simple straight wisdom wears no make-up. There is just the dust of plain hard work, which turns them prone to look at life in terms of weight.

I recently asked, with a soft academic timbre, a hefty guy about his son. I meant to enquire about the young man’s education and the career he is into. I expected him to mention the boy’s educational status given my domain of books and literature.

‘O, he is going great. He turned 120 kg recently,’ he gushed with pride as he stood with a naturally proud stance. The stance born of being at ease with a head where ideas travel very lightly, but shoulders carry the weight of stony issues of bread and butter.

The boy’s weight almost double of me! Double qualified than me in the farming lingo despite the fact that he is a mere matriculate and I hold three master degrees in different subjects.

No wonder, with my bookish weight, I carry a sultry, stifling air in the company of the farmers in the village.

Weight is a far-reaching elaboration of someone’s worth (by default) among the farming folk.

A farming body is trained by harsh seasons. It breeds lightness of reflection in the head and a capability of bearing weighty responsibilities on the shoulders.

Unadorned thinking in the brain; rock-solid endurance in the body.

The outsider

 

Ashiq Dar is from Kashmir. An operator of heavy machines (Poclaine earthmovers), he works very hard, presently working for a contractor who is into legal sand mining from slightly high sandy plateaus of agricultural land in the plains of Haryana.

Ashiq earns 22000 rupees per month. We have a parcel of land on the elevated agricultural plateau called thali in local parlance. The surrounding farmers have removed many feet of sand to level the fields to make it more productive and arable with irrigation from the field channels. Our land thus stood as a tiny tableland, its margins caving in, the slopes falling.

It came to a point when it was no longer arable. So finally we are forced to remove a few feet of sand to level it up like the surrounding fields. And Dar’s heavy machine is shrieking with force, removing sand.

They work late into nights. ‘Isn’t it too much? The working hours?’ I ask. ‘Just doing my duty. The owner paid us full salary even during the two months of lay-off during the monsoon season,’ he says as a man of conscience. A hardworking man has certain compunctions by default.

Earlier he worked in a company where he operated the machines for 18 hours daily for three years.

This contractor provides food and shelter. He leads a sparse life, almost in isolation and exile. You can imagine the sparseness of his life by the fact that his monthly expenditure is just 2000 rupees including the phone bill.

He was married three years back. I ask him about his marital status. ‘Well, what to say? I’m married and unmarried both,’ he says resignedly. His wife quarreled and forced him to separate from his parents right after marriage. But things took still worse shape even after setting up a separate home and hearth. She left him to stay with her parents. There have been brawls, shoutings, beatings, police reports. Laws have changed in favor of the Muslim women. If he goes for a divorce, he will have to pay maintenance money to her. So the issue is painfully lingering on.

‘She is able to give me 24-hour headache. That’s her full time job. During the time when I’m not operating the machine, more and more updates keep pouring in. They lodged police complaint and got my father arrested. Then it’s about my public image as well. She is still my wife officially and imagine someone telling me that your wife was standing there in the market, talking to this man or woman, doing that,’ he looks in pain.

I understand his frustration, the grating cry of his loneliness. He takes cover behind non-stop work and douses himself with more work to forget the tension at home. I know I have heard only his side of the story. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, either this or that way of centre. But despite that I have a feeling that he is a wronged man. It shows from the way he works non-stop.

I give him sweets as Diwali gift. ‘Happy Diwali!’ he says. ‘Happy Eid in advance to you whenever it comes,’ I say. He is genuinely touched. I can see moisture in his eyes. Honesty has unaffected manners.

A hardworking Kashmiri man working day and night here in the plains in north India, saving every single penny, leading the life of an ascetic almost. Facing scores of domestic problems born of a marriage gone sour.

And then it’s only such people, working hard and innocent of any wrongdoing, who suffer on account of some communal flare-up.

There are scores of such little stories lost in the dust, confusion and oblivion of daily grind of life. The real traitors and betrayers go scot free despite their incendiary motives and vulgar desires.

Notes in the air

 

An ASI demands money from a man in Delhi. Otherwise I will implicate you in a false case, he threatens the man. The filthy dark side of misuse of official position; the little hatchlings of despotism running their miserly, avaricious show at little nook corners where small-time people get caught in the net of their greed and have to pay to get out to run the show of their pitiable daily life.

The man but carries some counterbalancing courage and secretly lodges a complaint against the corrupt cop. The latter is put under a scanner.

In consequence, a vigilance team keeps watch from hidden quarters while the complainant hands over 15000 rupees (crisp 30 notes of 500 denomination) to the bribe-seeking cop.

As the vigilance team pounces to catch one of their own ilk taking bribes, the corrupt cop, sure of the futile striving of any other sort, hands over the possession of money to the free air. He throws the notes into the air. As if the sky, in throes of cosmic generosity for this little erring kid, would take all blemishes on its blue apron thus absolving him of any wrongdoing.

There the notes fly like little kites. Money in the air. The complicated code of alchemical panacea for the impoverished human soul. It must have been a dreamy sight to so many hungry souls bustling with the undying desire to add more weight to their wallets. The sight of money carries an enormous leverage over our moralities, conscience and ethics. It can brusquely change the course of one’s life, forcibly holding one by the collar. So much so that even a man going to a temple for puja would comfortably run to gather some free bucks in such circumstances as unfold in this episode. The gap between what is preached and what is practiced is pleasantly, mischievously narrow. It’s naturally bridged in such situations.

Dozens of passersby jump to grab the free booty on offer. They give a tough competition to the vigilance cops in collecting the money.

Less importantly, the vigilance team could collect only 10000 rupees, some of it they had to take by force from the looters. More importantly, some people managed to run away with 5000 rupees.

A pious inauguration

 

A young couple goes to buy a Thar Rox from a Delhi showroom. The purchase formalities are completed. All documentation is done. The simmering niceties of the courteous staff. Richly fine smiles of the receptionist. The entire establishment smirking obligingly.

The brand new SUV is displayed on the showroom’s first floor; parked there with its well-defined compactness. Magniloquently. The beckoner of distant dreams on country paths and curved intricacies in the hills.

The proud, excited couple is sitting in the SUV accompanied by an employee from the showroom. The vehicle heralds the exciting prospects of many off-road journeys. Lovingly lolling journeys calling munificently.

But before that they want to complete a ritual, which our honorable defense minister performed in France while buying Rafael jets—a lemon squeezed under the new plane’s tyre. As per our cultural traditions, squeezing a lemon under a new vehicle is considered very auspicious. Our beliefs propel our journeys from bullock carts to fighter jets to space ships.

The excited owner but accidently presses the accelerator too hard. Futuristically over-imaginative maybe. The SUV jerks gruffly and moodily. There goes the SUV on its first journey on the path of excitement. It’s an interesting off-road journey right from the start.

The brand new SUV crashes through the glass panes and lands on the road below. Luckily there are no injuries to the passengers. No passerby injured either. Just a poor man’s bike gets a little damage.

Well, that proves to be a successful crash test at least. The company will take pride in the fact. Free real-life testing it turns out to be.

I hope it doesn’t breed distrust between the partners. The wife might get doubtful about her husband’s capabilities of being a good driver of the SUV of their matrimony. I hope this momentary goof-up isn’t incisive enough to be detrimental to their matrimonial health.  

Maybe time itself was overcautiously overloaded and thus nervously goofed up during those moments.

The primordial paternal urge

 

Flatworms are hermaphrodite—one individual having functional reproductive organs of both sexes. Each flatworm guy (or call it a girl) has egg-producing ovaries and sperm-producing testes.

As a result of this unique biology, they engage in a fascinating competitive process of mating. It’s a ‘penis-fencing’ duel. The rivals try to stab each other with their two-pronged penis to inseminate the opponent. The winner carries the tag of being the father. He lacerates the loser’s skin with his lust-lance and injects his sperms. The loser becomes the mother carrying the burden of fertilized eggs.

They fight to be father because pregnancy and being a mother costs much at the level of investment of life energy. Being a father is an act. Being a mother is a tough process. As a mother, you launch the next generation by burning your own life fuel.

In nature there is this fatherly greed and lust to pass on the genes at the minimum energetic costs of reproduction, while being a mother involves huge amount of energetic contribution including pregnancy and post-birth rearing of the newborn.

The willing-to-be-father lancers raise their bodies to flaunt their two-pronged penises. The combatants give their best to stab the opponent. The successful stabber injects sperms into the rival’s circulatory system.   

Sometimes, both combatants end up lancing each other and carry the proud tag of being mother and father at the same time.

Basically, at this level of life’s manifestation, it’s about being stronger or weaker. Today’s strong guy is tomorrow’s weakling in the face of a smarter, stronger opponent. So being father and mother occurs in succession, or simultaneously in too closely contested matches.

The penis-fencing duels may last an hour sometimes. So this is no lovemaking, it’s plain war. Sometimes the smaller guys turn out to be more agile and get a better chance to lance the big, burly rival. Small guys also can win, as they say.

Firing for a Ceasefire

 

The mean streets of geostrategic dominance. A racily written drama of power game where the plot skittles forward with unusual regression in human values. Crunching, wacky, tantalizing game of attrition. A soulless testimony to what we call progress. Incurably slanderous.

Many would naturally say that Trump is super-bright, idiosyncratic, staunch white supremacist. Hounded by the progressive intellectuals, the American president means business though. And ceasefire also. The latter as a means to the former. As a poetic man, I would always prefer bloodless business wars rather than bloodied battlefields with rotting human corpses.

Ceasefire is a lovely term. With ceasefire, India, Pakistan and Trump all claimed victories in their own terms. Though it’s outright funny how can Pakistan claim any type of victory using any yardstick in a confrontation.

With ceasefire, Israel, Iran and Trump again claimed their own versions of victories.

Let’s hope there comes a day when the same word ‘ceasefire’ allows Russia, Ukraine and Trump to claim their share of victories.

In the ceasefire equation, it’s clearly visible that Trump is a nice catalyst agent. A powerful ceasefire agent he is.

He claimed that he used trade to facilitate the Indo-Pak ceasefire. He used B-2 bombers to bring about Iran-Israel ceasefire. Now the onus is on him to decide what catalyst role does he play to bring about Russia-Ukraine ceasefire. If he does it, I think he will be a very strong contender for the Nobel peace prize. There is always the next round of noble nominations Mr. President.

Above all, let’s celebrate this ceasefire between Iran and Israel. After all, millions of common Israelis and Iranians, who have no role in causing this war, can go to sleep peacefully after many harrowing nights.

Furthermore, let’s pray for peace in Gaza as well. The ‘two-state solution’ is the best option. Let there be a safe and strong Israel. Let there be a Palestine state. And let Iran remove the Israel-annihilation clause from its state policy. Just three simple one-liners in foreign policy and millions will sleep peacefully unafraid of bombs and bullets.

The spineless foe

 

It’s easy to deal with an enemy who has a spine. The spineless ones are more lethal. Jellyfish don’t have a spine and that makes them a challenging foe for powerful nuclear plants. The slimy adversaries briefly shut down a huge nuclear plant in France recently.

Nuclear power plants need a regular inflow of water for cooling their turbines and reactors. To ensure continuous supply to the plant’s water intake pipes, the majority of nuclear plants are situated along coastlines. The intake pipes have grated screen to filter out the solid material from rushing in and clog the system. Further, nuclear power plants need millions of gallons of water every day to keep the system from getting overheated and cause catastrophe. Even a day’s water stoppage can wreak havoc.

In this recent instance in France, millions of jellyfish got glued to the grated screen thus clogging the entry point and as a result disrupted the water supply. In such a scenario, the inflow of water stops and the plant’s condensers, turbines and boilers groan with agony forcing the reactor to be shut down.

So when the jellyfish get unified, clamped with solidarity with each other, they can even force stop a nuclear plant. If you band together, you can clog the lifeline of your bigger adversary.

The instances of the jellyfish banding together to disturb mighty power plants have occurred in Japan, Israel, Scotland and Sweden earlier. So if somebody calls you spineless, take the insult but remember your worth. You are more fatal as a spineless enemy.

The spiny ones can be obliterated this way or that. Their brash burst of energy exposes them to chances of self-annihilation; their journey a chronicle of sordid madness.

It’s the spineless ones, with their quieter nuances and indomitable scheming spirit, who perpetuate blatant cheatings and give you more cuts than the ones with perfect spine and come to confront you from the front. 

The obstinate colors of life on the face of derisive death

 

Mid February. An adamant winter giving a gentle, pleasant rebuff to the summer slowly treading ahead. The mornings dawn condescendingly on the vegetable market at the town, the town that’s itching with urban lust to become a city, then a metropolis and finally merge with some mammoth urban megalith. The clutter and chaos going up with the rising sun. There is an ineradicable typical smell of a vegetable market in a town. The seasons change but this smell remains the same. A myriad-colored smell—the smell of fresh vegetables entwining with decaying organic discards, mud and dung. It unleashes its assault on your olfactory senses with a squinting spurt. The dealers and sellers shouting hoarsely. The monkeys nimbly crawling on the wires, doing antics and jumping down to run away with something eatable, or at least fir for giving it a try to chew at.  

A bleak, pathogenic, primordial smell pervading the congestion. Paddlers and roaming hawkers arriving with their carts to buy vegetables wholesale and sell them in the streets in the neighboring villages. Householders, directed by their budget-calculating wives, arriving on bikes and cars to buy a week or ten days of vegetables in one go and store them in refrigerators and thus save money. An economizing tussle.

Life trying to ward off death. A dreadful chasm between the two. There are many who have fallen in it. The outcasts, born in hideous circumstances. Their faces speckled with haunting melancholy. The broken pot shards that feel they can still hold water in their shallow curves defined by jagged, broken, sharp edges. A soundless cry on their dark, unwashed faces. It’s a group of children. They walk around with imperious timidity. They compete with cows in salvaging the castaway fragments of stale vegetables from dirt heaps.

Are they Rohingyas, or Bangladeshis, or some tribals from India itself? Whoever they are, they carry the same passport of misery. Their eyes full of innocent but still vile determination to beat the stray cows and bulls in salvaging the castaway, stale, spoiled chunks of unusable vegetables. It’s a childhood copiously fed on spoonfuls of sorrows. Their lightless serious eyes furtively darting around on the filthy ground looking for their treasure hunt. Aaah, poverty the depraved seducer! The dung-smeared bulls move around with a sleepy enchantment and languor. Emphatically moody monkeys crawling over cables, jumping on the tin sheds with clang-bang jocularity.

Furiously flaming frenzy of survival. Harassing, haunting, gnawing, devouring. Horrible paroxysms of the will to live—an eternal tenderness beating somewhere deep down in the womb of worldly garbage. The ground-sloggers amidst rack and ruin. The hawkers and middlemen shouting with burbling, stinging energy. The capricious coax of currencies mollifying all vileness and crossness faced on the path.

It’s a bearable world as long as you can sell your stale vegetables dabbed in acidified colored water to make them gleaming fresh with false promises of health and nourishment. Consumerism sets forth lynching questions. The bloodhound is baying for your blood in the tumult. Scuddling along, it’s always sniffing at your strained smell. Its bestial fangs ever-present, ever-lasting. You have to keep abreast of its swift trot. Either you eat someone’s chance to life through adulteration, giving them a slow dose of poison—your buyer whom you give such a nice welcoming smile—or get bitten by the spiteful hound and find yourself in death throes.

Hard-driven by destiny, withstanding the shameless stumbles, spirits all cheerless and discharmed, absorbing the acute pangs, you try to emancipate the sour most morsels with some weird dignity. Destiny dastardly debased. The migrants pulled in by the delightful roar and potent frenzy of the bazaar. Running away from the monstrosities of life drooling at their native places. The frenzied, spasmodic, sobbing circumstances swatting them away like a gunshot pierces through the fabric of peace in a forest and scares away a flock of sparrows. Running away from nightmarish tormentors of deprived life, they land at a distant place and try to cope with the ingenious cruelty unfolding at the new place. Miseries hop along with a frenzied scampering.

They squat on a little space in the open area in front of the vegetable sellers. With a groaning and grinding effort, like the persistent rub of a rope leaving a mark on a stone, they wriggle, relentlessly haggled by the rival claimants, to get a foothold—their self-marked space to set up a temporary establishment in the morning. There is no legal right to it. It can be swiped away like any garbage heap on the market compound. They also have to pay some monthly money—some kind of protection money to the neighborhood bully who controls the unofficial market affairs—to further cement their claim. Then they have to fight with the visitors who come to purchase vegetables and park their vehicles exactly on top of their little space where they have been cleaning the ground before setting up their shop. They sell cheap clothes, utensils, groceries to the people who are exactly like them but are struggling to survive through some other means.              

They have to arrive early, lest someone takes their marked place, necessitating a brawl. They carry a swaggered dark, grimy look in order to ward off any competitor to the space just with a mere look. They arrive with huge bundles of their wares—clothes, groceries, toys, utensils—heaped on carrier rickshaws, pulling in with purpose. It takes about an hour to clean the dirty floor, pitch poles, draw strings and ropes, put their products in presentable order. They do it with a strained and flustered expression. They count upon the footfall of their own types who work as laborers in factories and farms.

Two little boys, aged six and eight at the most, confront the falsehood and misery of life. Their father has pulled the heavy sacks of clothes laden on their carrier rickshaw early in the morning. He has left them to set up the shop and gone to attend some other task that will add some more bucks to their meager purse. The boys are clad in their school uniforms. They perform the task masterfully. Setting up poles in the cemented holes, cleaning the ground, drawing ropes, spreading a tarpaulin sheet, laying shirts, pants, jeans, shorts, socks, caps, hankies and belts in nicely segregated order. The other day it’s their mother who pulls into the ground with the cart and does all the stuff by herself. She has a dull and drowsy look on her weather-beaten face having fine features.

A thickset short old woman sells peanuts, gazak, grams and colored rice crunchies. She scans the passersby with one eye; with the other she tracks the monkeys who rob her at the slightest lapse in concentration. She holds a big stick to ward off the robbery. She says that her son has betrayed her for his wife. To further worsen the already strained relations, he operates a rival stall nearby. Her husband is partially paralyzed. He moves dragging his left foot. Another paralyzed man operates a tea stall. It’s a tiny sheet iron box on a mobile cart.

Young shop helpers are rubbing potatoes in sawdust to give them a freshly dug look after dousing them in acidified water. These are then sold as fresh arrivals from the fields. All the sellers are looking to sneak in a percentage of stale products into the fresh ones to increase profit. While the monkeys scamper around to cut that profit by a little margin.

Traveling in a bus commanded by a lady conductor

 

It’s a UP state roadways bus plying between Agra and Delhi. The conductor is a woman in black; short, stocky but pretty in face and impressive in limbs. She is extremely efficient and confident about her duties. The tone is bold. She needs it to deal with unruly passengers. She manages it with impressive effect, keeps eyes on each seat to be filled, ensures each passenger pays the fare, guides and gives instructions about the further journey once the passengers deboard the bus in the puzzling maze of the Delhi NCR.

The bus reaches the boarding point outside Agra to take the Expressway. There is a slight misunderstanding. The driver has allowed a young man to board thinking there is one seat vacant. The boyish man panics when he finds there is no seat available. He finds it a betrayal. His father is some official in the roadways. He feels he has been wronged terribly in not being offered a seat. He calls his father on phone. A real papa’s boy. When will you grow up, you crying sissy? He gives the phone to the conductor. The father talks to the lady conductor. She expresses her inability to get a seat vacant for his dear son. The father official gets offended, feels insulted that his very own son has to travel standing. Shameful and unpardonable. What is the use of his position then? He fires on all authoritative cylinders.

There are checking officials waiting at the next toll gates. The bus is raided. The boyish man looks with an authoritative leer. They surround the lady conductor as if she has been caught smuggling banned items. They bombard her with accusations—the rules that have been broken in the episode. One of them is enlisting the probable actions that will be taken against her. She defends her position confidently. But they are like hounds. The very same patriarchal mindset. The lady conductor starts crying. A woman passenger seems to be trying to mollify the raiding flying squad.

It’s taking a bad shape for the woman conductor. She needs more people on her side. Me and my brother get down. Both of us engage two staffers and straightway get into accusations that they have delayed the bus, that we paid the luxury bus far to catch our train (there was no scheduled train to catch), bla bla. My brother looks like a six-feet tall wing commander in military style cargos. Imitating him even I’m smartly clad today. They think that even we have connections to be so full of confidence in confronting them. They turn defensive. They ask us to board the bus as if the issue is settled.

When I feel they are no longer on the front foot, I give them my sermon on women empowerment: ‘She is a very efficient conductor, manages it really well. Far better than scores of male conductors I have seen. She is a working woman. Don’t harass her in the name of performing your duties!’ I speak loudly at the mustachioed man, the most rascally looking in the group. The boyish man is puzzled. The lady conductor is shedding tears. We raise a ruckus. The penalties are forgotten. They find it advisable to stop the matter from taking an uglier form. The bus starts again. After half an hour we see that she is her normal professional self again. It’s good to help someone in having a normal day.    

A chronicle of general compartment

 

The crowded Jammu Mail at Subzi Mandi station in Delhi. There are many passengers waiting to board at ten in the night. The train has just three general compartments. These are already crammed to the gills. But surprisingly almost hundred more people squeeze and force themselves into its steely guts. Passengers everywhere. These are mostly migrant laborers with huge bundles and large families. You consider yourself lucky if you can stand on your toes somewhere.

A sardarji is standing, reclining rather in the sinewy opportunity available to fix his fat body in the twisting shapes of crammed space. His wife has a seat by the window. The children are perched on the upper berths. At every new station more people force in. Then a spicy chana daal seller arrives. The father gets a paper cone of spicy daal for his children. Onion, lemon, grams, chili. Mouthwatering. It lets loose a heady smell. It can tickle the water-buds even on the tongue of the most reserved elderly eater. His daughter eats with relish and he smiles forgetting that he is almost getting crushed by the bodies around him. The seller has to squeeze through the wall of bodies.

The tea seller has it easy though. ‘Boiling hot tea! Will burn your skin! So make space!’ he comes hollering the warning. And people further squeeze their limbs, making a safe passage for him.

A woman dozes off for many long minutes sitting on the floor. A poor woman. Then sleep overpowers her and she sprawls her body among the feet. Some people stand on one leg to keep the sanctity of a female body sleeping among boots and shoes.

A slim boy has fitted himself along the back of a seat behind multiplicity of bums. Some have forcibly occupied the entire upper birth and lie pretending to sleep so that nobody asks them to sit up allowing others to give rest to their bums in the freed space.

In such a tight situation, one can expect anything from the best to the worst. The same with the night. It has its own ways. As it moves towards midnight, the bodies relax, become less rigid, pliable and they flow to acquire whatever weirdly warped space is available among the mass of bodies. A strange solemnity creeps in silence.  

Weird-shaped emptiness

 We carry a weird-shaped emptiness inside us; something we have hardly any clue about. And we keep filling it now with a dream, then some relationship, some desire the other time or some ambition or some man or woman or a friend.

We try filling it with some external shape, one after the other. But it never gets filled up, never gets a perfect shape to cover its emptiness.

A strange vacancy. Empty corners always stay, making the filling objects and people unsatisfactory after the trial at fitting. We just seek something appropriate to fill it up. The everlasting quest. Hence the restlessness. 

In a metro train

 

You feel better once you step into a metro train in the national capital—if it isn’t too crowded of course. It’s a respite from the polluted pestilence outside. You set up a type of narrative privilege if you are lucky to grab a seat. Then beyond the clutches of the outside chaos, the time elapses in peace. Traffic-born hassles seem superfluous. The train moves with sagacity. I have a seat and feeling quite at ease with life despite the smog outside.

Two women board the coach with their children. Both of them carry infants in their arms. A boy and a girl walk alongside. A man immediately gets up to give his seat to the ladies. The ladies settle in the vacant space. The man stands near the boy and the little girl. It’s not a casual, principled offer of seat. It’s something very human in nature. He is a Hindu bearing a tilak on his forehead. They are Muslims.

There is such a huge chasm between the two communities currently; the fissure nurtured for political gains in the communalized air. One can feel these invisible fault-lines at public places even when things look normal with the common people carrying on their routine life. It’s a livewire, invisible though most of the time. You can feel its slow pulse in people’s looks, gestures and words. But he is a very good man. He allays the tension. He playfully chats with the little boy and the tiny girl. It turns into a very friendly conversation, involving common people beyond the wars on religions. The children become relaxed in his presence; their mothers feel comfortable after the initial signs of slight tension.

They deboard a few stations down the line. He gets back his seat—in fact, earned his relaxation time after this kind deed. The boy and the girl look from the window as they walk on the platform. He waves them a bye. They smile. He has given them a priceless memory that will help them in becoming better human beings when they grow up.

Just before the doors would slide shut, a girl rushes from the aisle and drops the crushed cups and bowls in the narrow gap between the platform and the train. Well-aimed, clean drop of garbage by an educated girl. She has been eating with her friend onboard. They are modern girls clad in tight jeans and revealing tops, all decked up with freedom, the freedom to spread litter on a metro station. Look at the contrast: the man groomed a rosebud for humanity and the girls spread litter. Such contrasting characters so nearby! Well, that’s what makes metro rides quite interesting.

The new geostrategic chutney

 

Jinping wins (Tibet atrocities and Xingiang concentration camps), Putin wins (Ukraine massacres), Trump wins (Convinced felon), Modi wins (… ). Now is the time for us to be like three deaf, mute and blind monkeys or shift to some other planet, for which unfortunately there is no choice except Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and a few others. But Musk won’t take that option. He is the bright-eyed, super-genius macho man of the mighty Trump. The rest of the billionaires beware. Take your rockets out.

In any case, the mighty four have the power to dispatch anyone to some extraterrestrial planet—I mean if not in body but soul at least. The super-strong guys are actually eligible to share the same table and have relaxed talk over wine. Modi of course will have milk. Then who will be their common enemy? Maybe small people like you and me who think they have their own mind and feel like speaking the truth.

Democracy will get diluted like never before. It has already thawed quite significantly in the world’s biggest and the strongest democracies. I think Putin and Xi Jinping are the trend-setting big, bad boys, inspiring the rest to follow their steps.

Who will they hunt if not each other then? Because the most powerful can’t help hunting. They have to go on their predatory prowls. It’s almost natural. I think they will hunt the little voices of liberalism, freedom of speech, truth, human rights, equality, gender parity, etc.

Putin will be allowed to retain whatever he has captured in Ukraine. China will be allowed to take over Taiwan somehow (with the sham show of American opposition to that; and in return for substantial economic gains in bilateral trade with China). If India plays its cards well, it might have some more chunk from the PoK. And America? It will be allowed to have the symbolic chairmanship on the table of the four. The mighty tigers then will be free to play cat and mouse with the little mice, the liberal intelligentsia. But who knows the aliens, who have been taking reconnaissance of our small planet for decades, will finally step in and present a common challenge to the four. Then it will be quite interesting.

As a non-American global citizen I respect the Americans’ choice in electing Trump. I can’t analyze on bigger issues but I think the major gain from being mere Trump to become President Trump is that he will be able to terminate the federal legal cases against him and suspend the state cases till he occupies office. And of course more trade for himself and America in general. As a layman I view it as the major take away: the ability to become above the law. That I think is the real Power. President Trump, wish you a powerful, bombastic, fantastic time in the seat of Power! Our leader is also a big fan of yours. So we see benefits for India unless you get irritated with us.

Now I believe, President Trump, that you were supposed to become the American President. Fate saved you from death just by a millimeter. It had plans. To reward you with power over millions of square kilometers on earth. Sometimes being one millimeter short of death means trillions of square yards of powerful life. The world will be at the mercy of your temperament. Please rule with mercy, benevolence and wisdom of an elder. Because you are the Global Elder now.    

Grounded divinity

 We have created so much electricity that the stars have lost their right to light the earth with their soft, gentle, twinkling smiles. The night sky seems lost. Maybe the sky now looks at the earth for inspiration—to come down, not rise.

Expectation

 

Overall, the sum of pain, suffering, unhappiness, agony, tragedies in life—both individual and collective as a species—is far greater than the sum of happiness and joy. Happiness is almost like a few diamonds in a deep coal mine; the shying crystals hidden deep in the womb of tons of mud, rock, earth, stones and coal. But that’s why we dig a mine. And exactly for the same reason we live; we dig the deep mine of life unearthing pain and miseries to finally reach the few crystals of joy. We walk through the darkest pits because we expect that life will someday get filled with color and joy.

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.