More Ordinary than the Common Most

 

Do you still remember that guy in The Broken Dream?!

Well, he was now trying to forge an identity on the anvil of the corporate sector with the crude and heavy hammer of hard work, little realising that this was urban India, polished, smart, suave, not his countryside where things were as they appeared on the face value, good or bad. Here it was all about smartness: a shrewd, clever mentality and attitude that you naturally acquire when part of a massive crowd struggling to survive in cramped spaces and always falling short opportunities. And naturally you take fellow human beings as rivals only; it is difficult to think otherwise. There is cut-throat competition and you need smart, light, sharp chisels hidden in your pocket to work less and plan and strategise more. Here you have to wear the mask of extreme politeness to prove your education and civilised status, even though that very moment the second layer of your skin might be demonically on fire. However, true to his straightforward convictions he spent much of the times on his desk, from dawn to dusk, lost in the perseverance of the soul, while many suspicious eyes took breaks to look over his back, their eyes full of insecurity and mistrust.

Having slipped from the summit where he was just about to put his triumphant flag when the strong uncontrollable blizzard just saw him toppling down the treacherous slope, he had somehow managed to hold onto this tree jutting out the precipice. It was just instinctive reaction to survive. He knew he had to earn his bread and butter and of course there were many eyes on him still trying to find out how he would act now. When he started his climb again, already on the wrong side of age to build up a career in academic publishing, he saw many already in senior managerial positions even though they must not have read and experienced even a quarter of what he had learnt from both in books and the overall open book of life. And wherever he landed up with his ambitionless self carried by unassuming persona, full of cemented ideas and many brimming convictions, his heart full of the miseries, and mind stuck up to just the job, he left a mark, and his presence was felt a bit more disturbingly than  it should to ensure a safe journey through the corporate corridors.    

After his selection to the state civil services he was once happily packing his common stuff to join the duties of Subdivisional Magistrate when the Congress Chief Minister of Haryana had got loose motions over this tiny 'coming to power' and used all his majestic powers to piss at the hard work of all his poor batchmates. They had every reason to take themselves to be the first-hand witness to all the ‘Congreslike’ corrupt ways, as they termed it suffering in helpless cynicism, of judicial manipulation. With the pieces of his broken dream in his pocket, he had then come to Delhi to earn his livelihood in the ruff-and-gruff of the private sector. He had started to drink, to create that hallucinated reality wherein the things which really pinch otherwise took a backseat and many pseudo-realities came to the forefront with their trivial convenience, to stop the time at a juncture where the past’s pines, present’s pinches and future’s insecurities melted into a strange ennui. He would continuously blabber, ‘Lo! Hee…hee Gandhi-Nehru geenies would not leave me in peace!’ A common man wants to have extraordinary reasons for his downfall. If defeat be, let it be at the hands of the strong and the mighty. It still somehow gives him a pat on the back gesticulating that it was no common fight, it was a good one and you were pitted against the strong and the mighty.

Even though it was pretty coincidental, but it affected him a lot, taking a flake off the purple crust of his wound. His hard innings in the publishing office had just started, leaving him just a small time, nameless, powerless slogger on the editing desk. He literally cried once during the weekend drinking binge, ‘They have robbed me of my soul’s labour of ten years...these...ugh...Congress pimps of criminality!’ And somebody whom he did not know, and not having anything to do particularly, having a Congress flag on his office and house nearby where he had taken his rented accommodation, had turned out to be his enemy, as if the latter had heard his outpours. Why did this stranger whom he had not even seen turn out to be his enemy? He was his landlord's enemy yaar! So the influential Congressite took revenges by forcing down nails into the new tyres of his old car. He got it done to anybody and anything that was apparently related positively to the enemy. It was quite individual, general level action, reaction or whatever, but he as the oversensitive victim took it personally, and very-very particularly. ‘...Congress....you just make a staunch anti-national element in me! Guys please throw these goons out of power because if they get another chance, I fear this law-abiding common citizen of India will end up as a terrorist! So save country, save humanity and save this common man! Pleeeeaaasssseee!!’ After all the new tyres from an editor’s salary are more precious than they actually should, but that’s how it was and it took him into a furnace of rage.

He was trying his level best to come to the terms of a reality that he had not even considered as the worst case scenario; his worst case scene having been the PCS if not the IAS. An editor on the other hand is almost nameless and faceless among the tomes of proofs and manuscripts at various stages. On top of that it is like walking on the razor’s edge, you just cannot afford not to make a mistake. The world is yet to see the first perfect editor. On top of that it was academic publishing, the crazy professors taking slingshots and still it paid like pocket money. The world was changing very fast around him. People were getting unimaginably high salaries around him, and these were the students who had looked up to him as inspiration. He had even instructed them proudly so many times. It looked a still bigger failure, or fall rather, against the background of these pinching facts. Bigger fall, he read bigger causes. Oofs look at the frustrated common man’s cynicism born of little-little defeats and falls that he pours out ineffectively from the little personal stage, namelessly and facelessly. Psst just storms in the tea cups! 

Corporate career is great. It keeps you on the razor's edge. He liked the innings to begin with. He worked harder than required in fact. He felt the pleasure of learning as he was forced to grow his skills at all levels. But it’s dissipating as well. It saps you in the long run. He felt this dissipation while coming back at the end of a tiresome day in office. ‘So it’s always advisable to slowly built an alternate pedestal in the medium term--say for the next 5 to 10 years--so that when things get too hot in your present position you can easily jump onto that one.’ Given the heat and attrition felt in the smouldering issues he was already having some inhibitions about the long-term survival in such an environment, especially if one is just equipped with simply one visible weapon, the hard work. He had the faint idea what it can be about. ‘This new platform can be based on the real passion.’ So while he was toiling it out against his real interests, he avoided getting frustrated with the solacing thought that it was just a temporary effort to create a bit more stable platform to jump bigger into the space that would justify his talents, skills, sincerity and calibre.

He had to convince himself to stay on the mundane path, slogging at a job that was almost incomparable to what he had achieved in the PCS. He forced himself to forget that his magisterial chair had been unjustifiably snatched away and he had been made to sit on a chair where anybody decently educated to the postgraduate level could have sit without all the hard work he himself had gone through. He forced himself to take it as a sort of investment for the future. He was trying his level best to cling to his dream; to keep it alive; to slowly and systematically chalk out a medium term plan; to invest time and money in moderate amounts and when the things were ripe jump onto the platform that he deserved. All this was easier said than done. His father who always supported all his actions, ranging from follies to the best ones, felt the pinch of seeing him slogging it out at a level where he would have reached in any case even without all the penance he had done. His father’s health was falling and so the necessity was even more to stay in the job. The more he worked, the more number of projects he accomplished, almost mechanically, trying to forget his identity, just the work like any other pettily self-absorbed happy colleague around him, the more would cynicism strike back. Still he had to work. He had to forget that he would have been a red-beaconed officer, if not for that debacle, and again he would grumble from the safe hideout in his rented room. 

Having burnt and baked well in the furnace of knowledge and experience he spoke and acted impressively and that would instantly create ripples in the senior’s mind because in his flashes of brilliance he very much appeared like a replacement for the senior position. A talented junior having the conviction that he is surviving in the job on the basis of hard work not the senior’s goodwill, very easily becomes an eyesore to the boss. Of all the sectors in the private industry, publishing is lucky or unlucky to have all the highly qualified, educated, bookish-type big-dream-holders of the past who carry a bitter cynicism in their wounded selves, having failed to achieve their dreams. When you re-build your innings from the scattered pieces of the original dream, having full knowledge that the new one is going to be just a mundane dream like any other lying unrecognised in the society, almost of the level achieved by even those commonest souls who in fact never had the urge to build any dream but still reached that milestone just like it was the most natural thing for somebody human, from the mere status of being human, you feel the pinch man. You still try to justify your struggle, you still want to fight to forge a bit less common identity and having failed to do even that, a cynicism creeps in you. The very same happens to this class of highly educated people forced to survive in the editorial departments. Editing is very rarely the first career option for any young soul. It is mostly a fall back, almost a contingency plan, an effort to carve out bread and butter when all other options given your educations and skills are spent. So the people in the editorial departments are the wounded soldiers. They have the mind and education still nudging and aggravating the bitterness forcing them to almost misuse it to pamper their distrust and slain ego and cut any bud of a prospective rivalry to their hard-fought managership.

Across all the companies he worked for he found himself surrounded by insecure colleagues who more so pampered the boss as more and more of their deficiencies would come to surface in comparison to his soul-absorbed hard work. He was after all from an educated peasant family, and hence hard work came naturally to him. But considering their natural right to be more educated, well-mannered and better polished they parroted their excellence in terms of smart work in comparison to his mere hard work. Now he could never find out the riddle of this smart work. If there is a script full of errors needing corrections at many levels more than one to just make it a decent book, where you just have to follow the basics, if doing even that comes to be counted as hard work only, then he always spat hell on the so called smart work. Smart work to him came to be this: Appearing far more sophisticated than you actually are; appearing to be more busy than you actually accomplish; managing things in a politically correct way not to create insecurity in the erring boss; instead of taking the project to a smooth finish, creating issues that would apparently need extraordinary solutions, taking more time and projecting light on you that you did a very tough project; to manage to appear a not-so-smart subordinate who appears to survive on the superior’s kindness not the hard work, etc., etc. What the hell, where do all these gems of smart work help in turning a horribly messed up piece of writing to a presentable book. He would just give his best shot in accomplishing the worst of projects without allowing it to be taken as a tough project because there were no issues in it and of course it would naturally come to be counted a very common-type project. In any case he kept on hopping from one publishing house to another, hoping to find a better, less politicised environment, where there would be better bosses and colleagues. But it would never be because the same set of people staffed the offices in publishing. Go anywhere. All this while the feeling of what he could have been ...if not for ‘that’ debacle...kept on pinching him with bigger force.  

 

In one company he came across a brown-eyed human machine. A kashmiri pandit. He always told him ‘think more feel less’. A very practical advice but not for someone like him whose wound was a bit deeper leaving him oversensitive regarding his hardened convictions. Like any other oversensitive person trying to be the Phoenix he used to write poetry and to get into good books of the educated superior he showed it to the manager sometimes. The great practical man who had won a great career fight to emerge as victorious far away from guns in the valley told him that poetry is nothing but malady for the mind.

There was a very long-pending chemistry project. Many editors had got cold feet looking at the thousands of handwritten classroom type jottings with beetle nut and gutka spots sent by the eccentric professor. The manager smartly pampered his Jat ego, called him a Jat many times, to inflate the legendary pride that this community pumps up after being addressed as such. The Jat editor thus got ready to sacrifice his editorial blood for the Kashmiri manager, like many of his kinsmen were doing as real soldiers in the valley. For almost one year life meant just that project to him in all its forms. There were big stakes financially. It was for the IIT entrance exams and there were advance orders. Everybody knew something big was coming and even the CEO acknowledged the tireless worker sometime during the lunch hour. But then the group of smart workers was getting exposed in the light of such soulful, hard-worked assault on the editorial desk. There must have been many rounds of smart works involving poisoning ears. As he neared the finish line braving across the pining sands, the manager turned colours like a chameleon. He and the smart workers were pitted against the hard worker. More poisoning of ears by the cool arse, farting otherwise on the chairs. The manager hissed venomously like a kobra. He knew how to bite...instinctively like all the slithery reptiles of the species.

There was a new entrant, a friend and colleague of his from the previous company. A brilliant editor but extremely poor in selling his skills in the recruitment test involving verbal and the written sections. He even facilitated the answers to the questions that they asked in the recruitment process to enable his entry in the company. He just wanted a friend as his colleague again to make it more tolerable for him in the killing monotony of the work. Since his applicant friend did not have the capacity to present his skills smarty, he as the over-excited friend even talked many times to the manager to turn the tables in his friend’s favour. He was a friend indeed. He knew his friend was a peerless editor, but just for that little deficit in not being extrovert enough to sell it he needed this help. Great news, the friend was selected, even though just a year back he had been rejected in the previous attempt. This friend of his turned out to be smarter than he thought and pitched his loyalty for the manager and bargained his friendship to get long-term benefits for his family. Well, pardonable, no issues and no grudges! Basically we ought to think for the benefit of our own family first. Just to be human man! The manager must be having super-smartness to make him think more about a bright career and feel less about losing a friend.

As the manager played cat and mouse with him to draw him to the exit gate he wondered it was just impossible to come across a more spiteful person. In his weekend drunken outpours he forgot about the erring Congress now and had his helpless revenge in indoor cries, ‘You swine...It was simply my folly to expect a friendly kiss from a snake...the helpless creature is bound to bite only.’ He was so grossly mistreated by the said Kashmiri man that, well, he thought in his nightmares, if a community could give birth to even a single such human being then it’s better that Kashmiri pandits left Kashmir valley because it is too heavenly for such vindictive people. A wound direct to our own individual self can turn us against others’ collective wound. His typical Indian mind bound by parochial limits reacted like it does often times: we react and spit venom on the religious, caste and regional basis after getting hit in our individual man to man skirmishes. It’s so easy to generalise! Burning with anger and lynched with helpless agony, his year-long penance gone down the drain, he even nursed sympathy for the militants in Kashmir. ‘Kashmir valley is better without pandits!’ he tried to have his raging revenge by thinking as badly as possible. Almost all of us can be demons in thoughts, and we seek reasons for such demonic thoughts. He was such presently, all because of this man and his smart managership!

A Machiavellian manager believes in the principle 'the end justifies the means'. Very smartly such an individual follows the principle: 'I will do anything necessary to achieve my objectives.' Such a manager runs after this credo like fish swimming in the waters. With every breath he inhales the tendency to manipulate others and force them to perceive things in his terms. Utterly self-serving and duplicitous, the Machiavellian manager is made for success during these not-so-good times. The cold hard steely rationality in him reaches a peak to become almost amoral. Ever driven by these tendencies such a manager engages in more political behaviour than anyone around. The mind is always ticking to plan such schemes as will allow him to take advantage of others. Well, he could verify it from his personal experience. Each and every bit of this definition bespoke a thorough lynching by the Machiavellian hunter.

So this particular Machiavellian hunter was inherently spiteful, at least to him, simply because the junior did not seem appropriate for a peaceful future. Possibly he himself had the nastiest of communal experience in the valley when he had to leave home and hearth and rise like a Phoenix in Delhi again far away from the heaven here in the rut and grit of the maddening crowd. Whatever might have been the experiences, our experiences cannot overhaul the instinctive basics of life. All of us are good and bad as per our convenience. The manager must have had one million justifications for his actions that literally drove someone to madness. But full credit to his capabilities; his designs were just meant to achieve certain objectives like a computer.

As he gave him cuts after cuts, the poor to-be-slaughtered lamb wondered, ‘There is not the least bit of human element!’ Haa...haaa just visualise the keema being made of a soft flesh like him by such a heartless, stony juggernaut! Buddies, just count your stars lucky that there was just one such hunter playing all his cards in the basement corridors of the company where he had finally decided to retire from come whatever may. To the now gone numb guillotined editor, the superior’s eyes glinted with inhuman, brown, snaky predatorship. Those eyes now seemed to just monitoring the basement to strike poisonously at anything not matching his designs. God, this man's mind was ticking 24 hours a day to plot, plan and do away with everything to his dislike like weeds in a farm. Well, well, well... the manner this modern pseudo-chanakya was torturing the hapless editor and was plotting with such insidious finesse that the poor academic worm would have dropped his corrective pen to pick up a killing gun and join the jehadis in Kashmir! More than that such an individual might force you to pick up guns against the real you...the real good self...pump bullets into you softer flesh to become better equipped in surviving in the mud. After countless tortured days and endless gloomy nights while he futilely fought to save his job, working harder than ever, he was rapidly losing the last bits of confidence still fuelling his fight for bread and butter. If such a strong-willed person is hell bent upon pulling you down, it becomes a mere countdown leading to your crash in the gutters and it happened.

That feeling of victimisation, that pain of unjustified punishment, that fundamentally unreasonable logic of all the hard work going into the drain, and more importantly those who were already having a nice time, now getting even better enjoying the cool rewards of the project accomplished within a fortnight of his exit, all this and more drove him literally to insanity. Even what had happened to him in the civil services appeared nothing in comparison to this. There he was just a vague, faceless victim of the far bigger system; here he was direct victim of somebody’s ambition. For almost a month he was bedridden in a delirium, burning with impotent rage and resentment. It was a real loss. He felt like a goat killed in that halaal way, slowly-slowly put to death, to give more pain, for the taste and sadistic pleasure.

All of us would very much like to shoot off to glory like Phoenix from the ashes. But then we have our limitations. All of us cannot be heroes; otherwise the concept of heroism will become redundant and this ordinary world will have too many heroes. He was far commoner now than he was earlier. As the fever ebbed out to give him a semblance of normalcy, he again had to work, to earn his bread and butter and mind you it was no extraordinary situation, everybody else in Delhi was doing it. It involved thousands more capable than him and possibly in worse conditions still. That was the only solace and he picked up his corrective pen again.

 

It was a supposedly better publishing house this time but here the daggers were drawn along different lines. The plush interiors were suffused with richly clad, profusely scented and overenthusiastic vanity about the empowered women and girls. He had decided to keep a very low profile; not to get highlighted either for the good or the bad. With his simple countryside brain this was all he could strategise. It was all that smartness meant to him. In their pleasant narcissism bright, attractive, cultured females are no less in bitching and jealousy against their own replicas than the illiterate peasant women. In fact here the situation might get even worse given a brighter platform and more awareness. There were so many young girls and women, all of them good looking, all of them from good families, all of them ultra modern, and all of them bitching and jealous of each other. He had to maintain a balance; no animosity, no friendship; and distribute his attention and loyalty to all of them, that literally meant to none of them, without making them realise any particularity and consequently unleashing their anger. 

Of all the always-expected happenings and mishaps in an environment that is suffused with so many educated, good looking, narcissism-lorn young ladies, one particular issue was raising its head. There was a Hindu princess and there was a Muslim princess. Both were popular and in demand in their own ways. Both had their share of male adulations and attention. But then such exclusive popularity and being in demand among the same set of people can very rarely go smooth. There are bound to be edges of attrition. They had their own delicate touches in the form of unique looks, sense of fashion and what not. They were on an equal footing in all the elements of this rivalry to be more influential and popular except in one sense that the Muslim princess had a bigger clout having being there in the company for a longer time. The Hindu princess was a fresh lotus in the pond and basically on account of being a fresh gust of breeze was creating ripples that was much resented by the Muslim princess who got insecure that she might lose her footing.

Having a bigger history and deeper clout with that particular company the Muslim princess took front-footed shots at the subtle charming deliveries of the Hindu princess. It started just as a skirmish between two individuals but it had all the propensity of acquiring very particular sharp edges running into religion, personal lives and even the affiliations of those around. These personal skirmishes were smouldering in the form of many so called official project related issues, as they say it, but is it possible to keep personal prejudices, likes and dislikes away from the professional issues? So others were also getting drawn into the quagmire. To him it appeared to happen repeatedly, unjustifiably, without any professional reasons and without any provocation by the poor Hindu princess. That was the impression carried by the appearance and strengthened by the more aggressive, loud-mouthed minority princess who looked a tormentor and the other one just a meek sufferer after some time. The reasons of catfights became plainly personal after a point.

The minority princess had definitely a bigger clout. The Hindu holy cow was seen shedding tears many times. It would bring a few men almost on the verge of fighting for her cause. But the offended princess would bite back with more ferocity even though almost teary eyed on the surface. If the Hindu holy cow raised an issue, other educated Hindu lambs eating the grass of hypothetical secularism ran to defend the Muslim princess. After all religion was a main issue and nobody wanted to sound communal by siding with the princess from the majority clan. She had this minority shield. Caught in a difficult situation, she was even heard shouting the plaintive tales of Muslim sufferings in India. She had numerous tales of army atrocities in Kashmir to share while the sheepish colleagues appeared excusing themselves for the majority’s tyranny. She was educated enough to know this secular conscience in educated Hindus and never missed a chance to be pampered in office like a real princess. Under the bombardment of her endless tales of Hindu atrocities against Muslims, the secular bread earners, the educated chicken-hearted Hindus, were ever so eager to prove they had read enough books to turn a blind eye to anything done by her to assure her that they loved and cared for her. Many would run with hankies to wipe her tears and mutter against their own religion and curse the Hindu princess who was not letting her in peace so far away from her home in the valley.

Earlier during the build-up of the Modi wave that catapulted him to the PM chair, she was always splattering venom against Modi and was casting Nazi type holocaust forecast of Muslims in India if he came to power. It was here that he lost with her. To him the Congress was the main enemy and since enemy’s enemy is your friend by default, he was pitching all out in Modi support as a revenge for his little debacle from power during the Congress rule. Once during the course of her endless anti-Modi tirade during the lunch hour, he lost it and asked her, ‘Do you think the Muslim population of India would be sent to gas chambers if he comes to power?’ It was scandalous, not expected among educated, law-abiding, educated, secular people. It was a communal remark. She had many tears to shed to the higher management and he was severely reprimanded. In fact would have almost lost his job had not he shown that uncharacteristic silence during the reprimanding session.  

The educated Hindus enlightened by the hypothetical lines of secularism now clearly allowed the Hindu cow and the bull by default to be bitten and smothered by the victimised princess. This falling out with the minority princess put him in a light where he clearly came to be perceived supporting the cause of the Hindu princess. Very easily there were rumours that he was having an affair with her and that is why he had splurged communal venom on the helpless suffering minority princess. The males smouldered in the fire of jealousy for having missed what he achieved. During his drunk forgetfulness he was now shouting ‘Kudos to Hindu secularism!’ as much as he shouted of the helpless pain in that meeting where she had again shed tears to turn the tables in her favour and he had been reprimanded by the well-meaning bosses for being so savage to think communally and that too in a publishing house among the most enlightened gentry in India. He cried aloud, ‘Is there any overenthusiastic RSS or Bajrang Dal guy who can issue Hindu version of fatwa against this woman!?’

He had lost his right to professional excellence with the blot of the communal issue on his editing face. The more he worked, the more difficult they became. They even jibed that with that type of mentality he better fitted the khaki-shorts and stick-holding gang. The more he worked, the more were the rumours of his liaison with the Hindu princess. The more was the noise by the ever-crying minority soul in the company, who had seas of tears to shed for the atrocities on Muslims, about Modi’s genocidal plans against them, etc., so more was the effort on part of the enlightened Hindus to prove their secular credentials. They were now outrightly supporting her despite nightmarish professional blunders of late. To save the soul of the Indian constitution they had to help her in the job come whatever may. These enlightened Hindus thought that they were the last hope for a secular India, and he being the chief enemy to their clean motives with his scandalous affair with the Hindu princess. With maximum number of projects under his belt, but with communal slur on his face, bearing the tag of the tormentor of a helpless minority princess, he came out of the increment review meeting, the revised figures of his take-home in his hand. He had got an increment of just 500 rupees equal to the oldest employees in the company, old Ram Swarup, the peon who was working for the last two decades. It was sheer insult. But rightly so, he was just a hardworker and not smart enough to be called a secular person, the stamp and authenticity of being really educated. They said he is hardworking, does the maximum number of toughest projects but that does not save him from being an uncouth peasant. He is just not smart enough. With his 500 rupees increment, feeling almost a year-long work gone waste, he yelled, of course after getting drunk, ‘God knows when bigger plotters would join this particular publishing company and dismantle the hideous rein of that poor bitchy minority princess ruling over those gayish, half-woman secular subordinates!’ His soul drenched in misery, he was lecturing a much younger boy from Varanasi, who had rented a room in the same block and listened to him with particular attention. He tried to brainwash the young man, taking it as his revenge against the secular class.

 

'Educated Hindus', read it as synonym of 'pseudo secularists', consider it their Bhagwan-ordained duty to criticise any type of Hindu cultural pro-activity. They press the panic button if Hindu consciousness takes slightest political path. They start croaking in large numbers, putting their knowledge and linguistic skills to the best of their abilities. Haa haa funny species!! They end up creating more insecurity in the minority community. This type of hypothetical lip service also qualifies as a form of communalism. The world will be a far better place if these champions of secularism try to bring down paranoid insecurity prevailing archaically in the minds of the minority community.

Well so much for the debate! Pseudo secularists have made it endless to keep their language skills sharp. Away from this world, a Hindu khaki-shorts clad man was heard lamenting: 'The worst of a Hindu will still be less aggressive and more accommodating than the best of a Muslim!'

His every mistake being counted as a blunder, and the minority queen’s blunders passing of as inconsequential slip-ups, life was getting worse. How do we change this world for the better with such differentials? Secularists of all genres pounced upon this class enemy. There were many more issues with the minority princess. Using her clout and being in the best books of the superiors she would never miss an opportunity to pull him down, his hard work lying scattered around him, being struck down by her smart strikes. Getting mistreated like this he was being again pulled out from his drunk, hypothetical support to the Jehadis in Kashmir. She was also from Kashmir. When he would come back after a frustrated day, he would reflect in a rabidly communal manner. His drunken revolts now targeted the minority community she belonged to. Not being able to take particular targets, he as a petty Indian took generalised pot-shots. He was truly a big mocking fan of Hindu leniency! He had read history as one of the optional subjects during his civil services preparations and knew enough facts about the medieval period to fuel his tongue during the drunken sprees.

Hindu pliancy flows even swifter than the Ganges in Monsoon torrents. Fastly carried by the forget and forgive dharma, the educated Hindus would prefer to just flip over gory pages in Indian history--such as Taimur Lung wiping out the entire Kaafir population of Delhi and thousands of desecrations of Hindu temples and idols to build mosques having gates upon Hindu idols so that the true species of Allah could walk over them--and gloatingly stuck at pages of Hindu tyranny like semi-aggressive acts of naked Sadhus breaking a mosque to just commemorate the birthplace of Ram Lalla! Hindus can afford to be better students of History!  

Things got so bad and he just on the point of being asked to go that he cursed her now by her religion not as a wrong-doing individual. During the final build-up to his smartly managed exit, even at their worst they had not anything to say against his performance. He had finished more projects than anybody around and that too the intentionally given toughest ones to land him in a soup.

He was getting stubborn now, even more obstinate than the roofless street urchins. Vowing to focus on being smarter and less of a hardworker he again entered another publishing house. He had turned very snobbish by now. Being smart was not just his cup of tea. He was technically almost peerless in his editorial work, but being smart was just not his cup of tea. Possibly, more than a better edited book they need smarter, more convenient people. In the bookish, stuffy, insecure interiors, infested with poor little clerically educated funny Indians of this new publishing multinational company—that’s how he termed people and the interiors now—a farty, gayish, woman-bodied poor man—that’s how he looked at his boss now—was sticking to his chair for almost a decade! His eligibility and skills: poisoning the ears of a bigger, smarter female who herself had God knows what means used to reach that departmental head position; giving negative feedbacks about his talented juniors; nurturing a servile intern because new joiners are not a threat to his position; etc. Only one thing was clear to him now, and this he jotted in his journal without drinking, in full sense and using his bugged, injured logic:

The academic publishing sector in India is infested with bottom-licking, non-creative, semi-skilled managers who are the products of a very poor system of education that just puts clerical eligibility in their little poor Indian brains. With severe leadership and team-building limitations, these insecure funny middle level managers, just think 24 hour a day to plot and scheme and strategise against any potential threat to their position. Unluckily Indian corporate is infested with semi-skilled insecure bosses who stink with their poor ass in their positions just by swiping away the careers of real hard-working subordinates.

All his efforts at being a smart worker went haywire again. This particular poor little creature who could torture him with such an aloof and cold smile that he appeared worse than a butcher. He termed him as barely a man in a woman-type body: A terribly vindictive poor little demon in his indirectly lethal ways. His superior managed by gratifying the ego of a just-saved from spinsterhood, ageing boss. The latter was yet another perfect example of a vicious, vindictive, scheming modern ageing single woman who knows her strengths to serve her professional utility. ‘Just like any other poorly informed Indian, this gang of people with severe technical and editorial limitations pay hypothetical lip service to smartness, coolness, polished manners. But does it help in making a rubbish script into a nice book?’ he would question. He knew he was a dumb hardworking donkey who could just pull the worst laden cart full with unresolvable papers to the safety. Forget about smartness. He can just bray without being smart. 

Every time he left a company, he would hope for a better system staffed with better people who would just not swipe his hard work with their smart broom. But it would not happen. Only God knew what was to become of him.

 

Smiling Back at the Self

 

Nature is not with anybody. Neither is it against anyone. It is for us to decide whether we are with it or against it. The onus is on us! Since we are a part of it, it suits our purpose if we go with it! Going against it means going against ourselves. But that is what we are doing presently!

The pretty faced young environmentalist had spoken well at the environment seminar in a prestigious public school and concluded with the above well-meaning lines. She had studied environmental studies and was now working with an NGO fighting for environmental issues. The organisation ran a monthly environment and nature magazine as well and the young activist did more than her salary justified for the editorial part of the publication. There are various compartments of identities, hopes, aspirations and desires inside us. She loved the cause of the nature and environment, but then somewhere inside her, as a normal young girl, there was the innocent ambition of moving up on the material ladder of life, having a car, costlier mobile set, some flat of her own in future, and many such mundane hopes as any other educated girl in Delhi would have. Many of her colleagues in college who had chosen more convenient subjects like economics and business management appeared to have already taken a big leap in that direction getting good salaries and CTCs.

Possessing better knowledge, drive and debating skills than even the brightest girl she could recall from her circle, she always tried her best to compensate for the lower CTC—even lesser than the dimwit school friend who was now making more money in fashion designing—by thinking about the larger cause she worked for. The cause of mother earth! But the biggest cause is the cause of the self. So she always felt the pinch and many a time wished she should have chosen a better, more lucrative subject. The young girl in her had the soft dream of a comfortable life, having all the basic amenities around her. But given the fast-paced consumerism that comes tugging at our hearts and more so at our wallets, the resources are never sufficient. We have to have more. She was no exception to this. She had her little girl’s cute cynicism building in her.

Her manager who generally wrote the editorial for the monthly magazine was outstation and not in a position to write the piece this time and she had been given this extra responsibility to write editorial for this month’s issue focussing on poverty, hunger and environmental degradation. We have our own weapons and tools to criticise. The catapulting throw is powered by our little-little miseries as individuals. But then speaking for the common cause can provide us the safe route of justified cynicism, without sounding outright jealous cribbing. With her mind calculating the prospects of a better career, the heart-chores trying to reach the farthest limits of her purse to get the costliest gift for her boyfriend on his approaching birthday, she wrote with strength and conviction.       

 

Despite hogging some mediocre limelight for making advancements in various fields India still ranks at the bottom of the list in terms of quality of life. In fact even very poor African countries are better placed than India in this regard. The reason is simple: the economic statistics that put India in the league of rapidly developing economies are just limited to the economic fortunes of mere 1 percent of the total population. How has this miniscule section of Indian population come to grab almost 80 percent of the total wealth and give a very deceptive picture of the Indian growth and development? The answer is very simple! Political-industrialist nexus has allowed the plundering of natural resources to an unbelievable extent. Take for example coal. The industrial house acquiring a coal block has to spend just 100 rupees per ton (including royalty and extraction costs) and gets legal rights to sell it for 5000 rupees. This is plain theft! How can anyone justify such mammoth profit margin? It applies to the rest of the resources including minerals, forests, petroleum, natural gas, water bodies, lands, etc. All that a big industrial house is required to do is to take the particular minister heading a crucial resource ministry into confidence, set up a deal regarding the massive returns for the party, individuals and the institutions. That is how unimaginable sums of money get deposited in secret accounts abroad. This money is then used, not for development works, but in parochial ways meant to perpetuate the ways and means of the system that allows this loot. Consider a reverse scenario! Suppose rules and regulations are reformulated to increase the royalties to the extent that the industrialist is left with a logical profit margin on the basis of investment made. Like if the industrialist has to pay back 2500 rupees out of 5000 rupees made for per ton of coal. These 2500 rupees coming back into the governmental coffers as direct visible money can be used for developmental works directly related to the quality of life of the 99 percent of the population. It will avoid a situation where just 1 percent of the population sits on majority of the resources, directly or indirectly. This is no communist dream! It is pretty much based on the market principles. Let the investing industrialist have the best returns as per the money-making ratio in rest of manufacturing and services sectors where people put up best of their management skills to earn decent sums. If it is not done then we will definitely have scenarios where the Prime Minister has to eat humble pie at the hands of criminal coal ministers having nexus with coal mafia and big industrial houses.

These were very avid and pertinent questions and issues that she raised. Reading it again she felt proud for having spoken out so loudly to reach at least the two thousand magazine subscribers. With her sweet innocent ambitions taking a temporary backseat, she definitely enjoyed the dozens of appreciation mails from the readers praising the editorial. And of course, she believed a bit more that she should feel proud of earning her bread and contributing to a social cause. In the mirror of the self inside her, she peeped to find her face happily smiling back. At least today!   

   

                                               

 

 

Legitimate Tears

 

When your dreams lie shattered around you, do not cry. If you do that you do injustice in more than one sense of the term. One simple mathematical fact: Shedding tears would not help anyway. Understood that there are scattered pieces of the diamonds you had been working on. Now they are broken, shattered and may cut through flesh if you just close your eyes and prefer to cry. Kids have a copyright over crying and rightly so. We elders can spare this copyright infringement. Just look around the dashed diamonds, your so called broken dreams. Just see the glimmer in still shapely left out pieces. The dream is the soul; it just cannot die if some hammer momentarily dislodges its outer shape. No hammer in the world has the luck to kiss the soul of your dream. It’s always safe. That’s its fate. Simply. Plainly. Why cry if the thing has not died yet. If you do, it’s just like mourning the death of someone who is still alive. I think we can simply avoid this irrational act. Broken shards of your dreams are, let us say, the blood-thirsty and hard chisels. They can help you in cutting through such mighty rocks as you could have never imagined. So it is simply better to cut bigger rocks for larger prospects instead of allowing the pieces to cut through your physical and mental selves.

She was a motivational speaker. She had delivered the above speech and the likes many a time to gather her share of conference money and acclaim. Tired employees told her it seems to give them a new direction and meaning in life. Her exquisitely polished manner, sleek hair, business suit, fragrant classy perfumes and radiant smile made her look a perfect personification of whatever she spoke: success and succour. But make-believe polished exteriors apart, all of us carry naked bits of truth stuck up to our nudity, below the outer layer, the invisible, private, inaudible world, that rarely shows its face even in the privacy of the bathroom because we get so habituated to see ourselves like others see in our public avatar.

The CEO of the company that had organized that motivational retreat at a sea-side resort in Goa was beaming with pleasure, promiscuity and her effeminate proximity, ‘You are a diva, you can put life even in a dead body. What powerful words, so uplifting!’ He was drunk and considered it his right to flirt with the one who had been hired to pump motivation in those servile souls who cringed before him. With a polite thanks and a still more formal smile she backed away from the famed gamer with the opposite sex.

It was a world of hungry males around her. She was in her late thirties but could beat any younger employee in feminine radiance. Finding the head lion away, a junior manager rushed to grab his chance, ‘My God what speech you deliver! I never thought life will become so meaningful after all the messed up projects in the office and still messier situation at home!’ He seemed ready to kiss her hand. She was having just a lime breezer, very well in control of herself, and very felinely warded him off. Then there were many more eager souls approaching her, coming to congratulate apparently, but with the real intention of impressing her to take her to bed. That of course is the invisible, almost inevitable, buried under the clothing and good gracious mannerisms, the real, naked basic, primal instinct of the educated males to come wooing an equally educated female.

All of them seemed to sense their chances with her. She was famous enough in the corporate world to lay bare bits and pieces of her personal life on the open platform of gossips and desirous gesticulations. She was a single mother. Her daughter safely put in a boarding school in Mussoorie hills. Whenever the guilty pangs of depriving a girl from the grooming love and affection of her mother would stalk her, questioning her popular march in leadership and management motivating talks, she looked at the bank statements, the account details of hundreds of thousands she siphoned off to the reputed school’s account towards her daughters education and boarding fees. An inner voice would tell her that she might fail as a mother. But then the world around was all praise for her, both as a person and as a professional. She had all the reasons to believe herself to be exactly what others told her to suit their purposes and motives.   

Her husband had dubbed her too ambitious. An Indian man prefers a docile and manageable wife playing slightly subordinate role to his patriarchy however talented she might be. ‘You are too self-centred and ambitious to adjust to the smaller confines of domesticity,’ he had shouted during their last days together. Those words pinch her many times. She recalls these many a time while her audience is applauding her inspirational oratory. From the broken shards of her broken marriage she definitely carved out her destiny. To prove the equal right of her matriarchal spirit, she took up the responsibility of raising her daughter singlehandedly.  But was it enough?

The biggest challenge for a beautiful, successful, single, middle-aged woman is to pick out the right man to go into bed with out of every Tom, Dick and Harry falling at her feet. She has allowed two men to follow her into the bed after her marriage broke. Both were married, of equal stature, and talked intelligently, approached her with utmost care and as it usually happens after enjoying the fruits of their disillusionment had gone back to their wives and families. Sometime she felt like they just used her body. So she was very careful now about men. A void was but building up in her because at some stage you need a partner and especially when you and others consider yourself to be a success story.

In the resort’s party hall, the spirits and souls were now getting more intoxicated. Louder talks, stretched out phrases, peppier dance numbers and more flirtatious deeds. Caught in the whirl of the times, she had graduated to some cocktail rounds from the earlier cautious breezer and the world around appeared no longer needing any type of inspiration. A perfect world, drowned in its booze-born, slow-paced aura. She pined for space, tranquillity and shelter in a caring man’s arms. She came out of the party hall, walked over the sprawling lawns to exit through the sea-fronted gate to walk with stumbling steps to the sea calling through its roar across the beach. Walking through the waves kissing her feet, she felt a hand on her shoulder. The lecherous CEO was following her. He knew about those other two company heads and very well thought he could be the third. It was dark, she was alone, the sea roaring to add to his surging passions, so no polished mannerisms required to reach a woman. On top of that he was drunk, and knew she was drunk also. As a successful hunter he knew from his experience that straightforward approach clicked many a time. He spun her around and before she could react or think anything his lips were on hers. She had not been touched by a man in this raw manner since almost six months. Tipsy and beyond all thoughts and reflections she found herself helplessly melting under his rapacious surge. He was on her now. All wet on the sand she was just about to give in if not for the momentary steamer light that went piercing through her eyes. ‘Move out and climb however high, you but will be a convenient game for the successful men around you,’ her aggrieved husband had shouted when they had parted finally. During those times he had looked less attractive, almost unsuccessful and plainly jealous to her. In revulsion she pushed the predator away. Used all the physical force that all her inspiring words would allow her to muster up. With a wounded self, she beat his scared mass like anything. His hunting demeanour going wrong, he just left, ran away rather and would not tell anybody about it.

She was lying on the wet sand missing her daughter by her side. She missed a genuinely caring male hand on hers. She could afford to cry in the dark inaudibly by the noisy sea waves. It will help her in keeping herself as presentable as she was during the glorious day. She allowed her naked real tit bits to lay bare their identity in full nudity. She cried. She still remembered what she had spoken about during the day.        

 

 

The Miracle Boy

 

In a sleepy mountain hamlet, there was an orphaned boy named—sorry nicknamed—Yamdoot, meaning the one who carries out the errands for the God of Death.

Within a couple of months of his birth, both his parents departed for the other world. One of her buas, his father’s sister, lashed by a storm of pity for the infant, took him under her care. But then death seemed fond of this new arrival in the world. Within a couple of years, three deaths struck the thatched cottage by a gurgling water channel in the foothills.

Now whenever the little one cried, she thought the angel of death was singing a dirge. So her lullabies changed to cursing words and her fondling fingers adopted the shape of claws that seemed eager to smother him to death. Few of her goats and sheep entailed their masters, which was enough to convince her of the child’s ill-omened presence.

Despite many protestations by one of the boy’s mausis, mother’s sister, she somehow managed to cast away his ill-omened shadow from her cottage. Now the onus was on this mausi, but she herself by now eyed him with suspicion. Nonetheless, any chance of kicking him away was belied by her husband who would laugh at her superstitious nature.  

“Death has its own invisible, secret ways to pick up the targets. Why should we club up that thing with the presence of this little poor one?” he would laugh with his simple farmer’s logic.

So the poor child got some semblance of love from the farmer who cultivated his narrow striped fields contouring along the hillside and took his herd to the pastures further upslope. The mausi, however, was a fussy lady, so to save the poor boy from the bombardment of her tantrums, the kind uncle often took him along while he worked in the fields or went up into the pastures with their small goat herd.

Thanks to the unrelenting hard work of the family patriarch in the coming years, they seemed to prosper from the parameters of a self-sustaining economy. However, the mysteriously unfolding canvas of happenings is ever under the risk of being bespattered with the callous colours of tragedy. So again the mildly glistening colours of normal luck were swiped away by the coal-black colour of tragedy.

He was around eight by that time and like so many occasions had gone with his kind and gentle uncle upslope with their goat herd. It was a windy afternoon. Bulbous heaps of white clouds were being carried over the peaks by sighing mountain winds. A goat calf tumbled down a precipice bordering the sharp turn of the goat-track along the hillside. Panic-stricken it bleated for life and got stuck up in thickets grown over a little ledge overlooking the sheer rock-fall which appeared almost vertical from above.

Taking enormous risk on his own life, the herder climbed down to the precarious projection along the slope-fall. But then there is a threadbare distinction between life and death. Death which is ever so near, always appears too far to our hopeful eyes. This time it struck both the master and the tiny animal. The poor fellow had unfortunately went down the steep cliff-face just to accompany the helpless animal in its journey to the other world. While the day was closing its shutters upon the tiny hamlet, the boy’s profuse cries and endless tears carried the news to the village.

His status as the carrier of doom and destruction had been confirmed again.

“I always knew that you’ll take our family up to the snares of death. But his senses were betrayed by your innocent looks. Hai, hai, see, whom have you carried to the dank cellars of death?” his mausi almost accused him of murder.

Further, she flatly declared that in order to lift the pall of death from her house, she was required to dispel his ominous shadow from her hut. Of course she did it summarily.

Where was he to go? His own village seemed to be the only choice. So a tired, hungry and wearing tattered clothes our Yamdoot approached his own village in the cradle of a tiny vale. In contrast to those around him with fair colours nurtured by the mountain climes, this poor orphan had dark colour. This coupled with his pitifully brooding features made him look almost synonymous with the nickname he carried on his poor head.

His grandfather still survived. However, he had long since handed over the baton of patriarchy to his only surviving son. The old man was thus ongoing like an old sack in a musty corner in the barn; ever trying to make himself handy in the scheme of things energetically devised by the younger lots. He failed very often nonetheless. So he could have had no role in helping his unfortunate grandson. Now, we draw out our conclusions from the blatant order of happenings and mishappenings—still priding ourselves for braininess?!—so his uncle and aunt flatly refused to give him shelter.

When nobody came forward with a helping hand, an old, childless, widower farmer came up with his lurching gait and hesitating proposal:

“I’m ready to keep him as a helper. Even if what is said about him is true, I need not worry much because the deadly eventuality is sure to strike sooner or later!”

The boy thus started to stay with the patron farmer. Despite his ill repute, which destiny had smeared him with, he grew fast and strong. Since old-age helplessness is weightier than mountains, the farmer’s debilitating energies seemed to be soaked up by his young companion’s strong limbs. People did criticise nonetheless. The prevalence of the rumour about the boy made them oblivious to the fact that their fellow peasant was really old and his lurching gait and sagging steps had in fact already, and naturally, accelerated his pace towards the final destination.         

“This time Yamdoot will snare the old man. The death-attracting magnetism in him will focus Yamraj’s deadly gaze on the old man’s cottage!” the commonest among them refrained.

However, a surprise was waiting in the wings. Before the sowing season, with the boy’s help, the old man had cleared his stone-infested plot of land. Their wheat turned out to be the best in the village. The goats too gave beautiful, healthy calves. The tiny flock of sheep had a thick wad of wool. The mulberry tree in their yard became almost a juicery with so much droppings that both of them could even choose to survive on mulberries only.

“Fattening the chicken before luring him to the God of Death!” they had plain vestiges of jealousy.

Yamdoot was twelve by now. It was perhaps the best season of his life enjoyed by the farmer; coming at a time when the sky had dusk purple curtain over the clouds and shadows were lengthening. Nonetheless, all is well that ends well. Basking in this late life glory, the farmer one day declared Yamdoot as his heir apparent.

First childless and then a widower at an age when his joints had started to complain, the farmer’s tale had been that of dispirited work—just enough to earn him two meals a day—and unmotivated look at the sun of life, childless and wifeless as he was. Whenever he got serious over any matter concerning his well being, people got almost pinpricked and said:

“God has been kind enough to free you from the worries of rearing children and nurturing lineage. Nothing will be left of you after you die, so why do you take all this trouble?”

Now, but, all his sorrowfully sulking monologues got this happy stopover. All in all, his tragic tale ended on a happy note which lasted for three years. He died peacefully with the fifteen-year-old boy by his side.

The villagers had started the countdown for the old man’s departure a long time back, expecting the event to happen sooner than later. Still they jibed:

“Didn’t we tell you so!” thus adding one more mournful feather to the boy’s nickname.

We almost make traditions of our attitudes. So without going much into the details, even the little ones who hadn’t seen the tragedies themselves, smartly adopted the established view that he was called Yamdoot for good reasons. He thus remained an outcaste. However, he was a strong, healthy-limbed and handsome-featured dark boy, who could earn his morsels from what he had inherited from his foster father.

Robbed of any further chances that could exemplify his ill-omened image, bound by the tradition and myth about him, their eagerly suspicious eyes started connecting him to everyday mishaps. So, many a time, a lot many cursed themselves as unlucky if they happened to see his ill-fated face in the morning. But shackling all myths, if something good happened, it was ignored. It didn’t qualify as something odd.

At any place, at any given time, problems and mishaps are bound to crop up naturally now and then. Whenever these happened, people mulled their heads, thinking whether they had been unlucky enough to see Yamdoot’s face early in the morning that day. So it became a myth that if you see Yamdoot’s face as the first object after getting up in the morning, the day will inevitably turn disastrous.

One day, the most influential person in the village started lamenting that it was Yamdoot who was responsible for his bad luck since he saw his face as the first thing in the morning. Later in the day, as the man claimed, his ox-wagon laden with farm produce fell into a precipice on its way to the sleepy town market beyond those ridges in the mazy distance. Inconsolable over his loss, and hell bent to find a scapegoat for the economic tragedy (since he couldn’t find some other means to do it), he accused Yamdoot as the harbinger of doom and destruction for the village.

Following the tradition of hate against him, self-substantiated and biased on account of their own logic, on the testimony of now and then occurring chance mishaps, they managed to throw him out of the village. Accepting his fate as he had always, the young man set up his tiny hut upslope beyond the arable land of the village and shifted there with whatever possessions he had inherited from the old farmer.

Early youth can make or break one. If you find yourself and your capabilities positively related to the society around, you acquire some voluntary, involuntary guiding principles. He was but all alone, a tiny inconsequential speck in the mountainous terrain. All his memories related to that kind old farmer, whose visage anchored him and saved him from the dispassionately heaving waves drifting along in the bay of society.

Thus exiled, he had all his time to himself. That very loneliness and solitude seemed to make him, to wispily guide him along a forlorn path towards a vague destination. During those undisturbed, long, tranquil hours, the silently and broodingly flowing spirit gave its full energy to his occupation. He nurtured his few duties falling between his plot of land and the goat and sheep herd with such unflinching devotion that it became a happening world in itself.

His isolated days had a marvellous monotony. He was but immune to the vacillating, waxing and waning fortunes of the nature around. The striking dawns, beautiful clouds suffused with multiple colours at dusks, autumnal surrender, spring’s rejuvenation, winter’s frigidity, rain’s mirth, storm’s fury and breezy lullabies were just simple facts of life to him. He simply looked at these with his eyes only, while his mind slowly, unhurriedly mulled over his daily routine, which he was required to follow strictly in order to survive as a self-surviving entity. Over the years, his heart had been put behind the smoke-screen of his nickname.

His patch of cultivable land was away from the others. Working there he could see the silhouettes of farmers working in their striped fields along the ledges carved out of the gentler slopes. He never looked at them with the purpose of particularly watching or observing them. Only his chance eye-shots fell on their forms from a distance. It is however another matter that some eager pair of eyes watched his shadowy form from a socially safe distance. If we had a chance to have a close-up of those eyes, we would have seen a glint of sympathy and concern in those beautiful big eyes.

If we unrelate good looks from the fairness of colour—with white at the ruling acme—we could easily see traces of genuine handsomeness on his broad, squarish face. He was a strong-limbed lad of eighteen now. Perspiration drops on his body glinted like stars on the face of dark sky as he worked under the sun, clad only in a piece of linen cloth draped as a dhoti covering him down to lower thighs.

Fondness grew with changing seasons and the fleeting patterns of nature. There was a big bale of emotions and feelings buried safe in her bosom. Whenever she shaded her eyes with her hand to have a look at him, the agony of her pining heart touched a new high. The girl stole as many chances to steal as many glances at him as was permitted by her circumstances. Since the days were passing just like before, her eyes bore vestiges of desperation now.

She was the daughter of the very same person who was the chief mover of the scheme that dubbed the poor boy as the harbinger of doom for the village’s common fate. The early adolescence of a girl, but, is not driven by such calculations, rather she looks at the world against the background of musically soft chanting by an exuberant, excited heart. Her heart looks at the world differently from behind her beautifully vaulting bosom.

When he was turned out of the village, there was a torrent of sympathy and love through the vast, spacious halls in the secret palace of her heart. With the passing time, and he completely immersed in his solitude defined by that disgraceful sobriquet, this love blossomed to the extent that she could no longer bear the situation’s stagnation at the same point.

Love when ascents the acme of its graph, turns one bold and decisive for the leap of faith. So this mountain maiden, pining for her lover, set out of her house on a stormy night. It was an early winter sky laden with black clouds enjoying itself through lightning and thunder-clapping. Though dead afraid, she took hesitant but definite steps towards the alluring destination. Thoughts about him acted as a guide and torch.

His hutment made of logs, grass, reeds and mud was surrounded by a low stone fencing. On the right to the entrance was his cattle shelter made of roughly-hewn stones and a roof of uneven loggings. The low sloping thatch covering the sleepy air over his head was visible to her suddenly in a flash of lightning as she crossed the small fencing. Its dark bluish spark sent a rambling tremor through her heart.

Till now she had been drawn like a helpless, hooked fish by the cord of love through the delightful waters of youth; but now after coming so near to him, the fluidity of her flow was stuck up on the threshold of shyness and hesitation. After all, there was no formal prelude to love between them, holding onto which she could advance and declare her love straightway. Their eyes had never met which could have sent that secret message in the language of heart to arise feelings at his end. So the big mound of emotions for him which lay in her heart now seemed weightier than ever.

She got puzzled and scared, for he seemed standing unconcernedly, without having the slightest hint of the heaving sea of her emotions, at the farthest end of earth. Unable to think what to do next, she sat by the hard support of a cold stone and stared at the tiny, dark structure. Sitting there she gave the hardest of pulls to draw her out of the marshy, muddy waters; but the more she tried, the more distant, unconcerned and faded became his unmindfully busy dark silhouette.

Still younger, she had stolen sympathetic glances at him during his stay with the old farmer. But despite thousands of urgings by her heart, there was hardly any moment when she could claim that he looked at her with particular attention. And even that was almost three years ago. In the meantime, even that real life image had been taken over by his slowly, unhurriedly moving outline in his plot of land at a distance from the village. From a distance his outline was darker than the swathes of night. Darkness had claimed his identity completely now.  

Sitting there, doubts and apprehensions clouded the crystal clear rays of genuine love and passion. ‘How will he behave at her sight?’ the thought sent a chill down her spine.

She now fully realised that it was totally out of control of her girlish heart’s ability to further advance on the love-path so directly. With a pining heart she decided to leave. Still she couldn’t persuade herself from not leaving behind something which the swipes of coincidence might arrange in a way that he may get some clue to her heart’s agony. Her one-sided love was dying to spread its fragrance in the other half of the bond.

She had an unornamented plain brass bracelet on her fair wrist. Wincing with a bit of pleasant pain, she pulled it out. It being just a small article, she could not drop it anywhere. A plank served as the hut’s door. It appeared a suitable point where she could be sure of it not missing his eyes in the morning. But his dog may bark! Her heart was racing with excitement. It had to be done nonetheless. In the heart of her hearts, she even wished that the dog barks, thus waking up the master and leaving both the strangers face to face.

With her heart in her mouth, she noiselessly stepped ahead. The dog was but sleeping soundly with the master inside. As she put the bracelet in front of the closed door, she felt a soothing sensation of victory; it being the first firm step on the path authoritatively charted out by her heart.

Next day, as he opened his door to a supposedly similar dawn, his eyes caught sight of the bracelet. He was quite surprised because the first instinct told him that it had been placed there deliberately to catch his attention. The oddity of this event struck him with some force. After all, he had been completely isolated from that mountain village and was living in his hutment like an outcaste.

It was a girl’s bracelet. He knew it from the size and the make of it. Any other heart would have jumped with excitement after laying hands upon a bracelet purposely left at his threshold by some unknown but interested girl. However, his separation from the village had been complete and even in the wildest of his dreams, he could never have thought that any girl would dare or care to come this far to his place.

As far as he could remember, he was not in a position to recall even a single face that could have some interest in him. So his mind just explored other possibilities which could have resulted in its chance placing by his door. And after years he was imagining/thinking about something that didn’t fall in the customary fold of his almost otherworldly—as far as the human society was concerned—pursuits.

Right from his birth, his imagination had been thrown into a ditch, so his reflections over the possibilities were rather few and, even these sounding totally extraneous, he struggled to think still further. After that the disinterestedly lurching wood cart of his imagery got stalled in the muck of uncertainty along the desolate path; and he left it there; and after a couple of day’s drudgery of thoughts, gave up the pursuit altogether.

From a distance his silent lover now eyed him with more care, concern, worry and urgency. Her heart struck with sobbing pangs. There was no change or deviation from his earlier silently brooding and detached demeanour as it was visible from the distance which she somehow managed to steal on one pretext or the other during the day.

Already she had taken some hesitant but concrete and bold steps on the love-path. And further unable to bear the love-pangs and the situation’s killing stagnancy, she once again decided to visit the place of her lover during the dark night. This time she was already aware of her inability to carry out the love mission and its message directly to the destination. So again she decided to leave behind something that might catch his attention, putting some serious reflections in his unconcerned mind. With an exciting, soft smile she decided the object must put some ripples in his heart. It must be something that will serve as a symbol of her undeclared, unknown love.

During a country fair held at the foothills, where she had gone visiting the previous year, she had purchased a little vial of cheap, strong perfume and a lipstick. With all the girlish dreams and desires of a lovely future, she had kept these safe and unused. Her slender fingers shaking with excitement, she took out the rickety trunk which her mother kept to store the bridal accessories for the occasion of her marriage. Taking out a beautiful embroidered and filigree-bordered handkerchief, she put it under her pillow along with the perfume vial and the lipstick.

The moon’s first crescent had started shining in the misty vault of the sky even before dusk. With an amusing and solacing sigh, she ogled dreamily at it. The mist was rising; the light was fading; the stars were surfacing and the crescent’s paleness was turning to a bright smile. Each moment appeared laced with hair-tickling possibilities and softly-sashaying loveable uncertainties.

Traversing across that dewily vaulting starry sky, the moon set before midnight. In a world that criminally sabotages the lovers’ moments, the darkness becomes the perfect accomplice turning invaluable servicer for the love’s cause. Stealthily availing this service, she set out like a cat taking every precaution with each step.

She held the perfume vial in the tiny pocket on the inner side of her bodice. It was just the size of her little finger. Strongly perfumed liquid in it felt the pleasantly stormy soufflés of her heart passing through her firm girlish breasts. Her breasts’ soft tissues were in hilarious agitation against the hardness of the little perfume container. The hanky was tucked on the other side of her bodice. She held the lipstick in her hand as if to gather courage from her grip.

Her virgin love of yonder—which is hypothetical in the sense that the lover is just lost in the thoughts (almost metaphysical) of that sweet personage—was now silently, harmlessly heaving with passion and physical yearning. Her heartbeats went onto scale newer heights as each step took her nearer to the cottage of her lover.

She stopped at a distance from the enclosed hut. Its existence was indicated by a lone tree standing in the middle of his little courtyard. With still more furiously beating heart, she pulled out both things from her bodice and sprinkled a few drops of perfume on the hanky. This done she inhaled it deeply as if she was inhaling the whole essence of her lover.

Quickly she put on lipstick on her lips. It was a strong red colour. She wanted a thick layer, so grazed it quite roughly against her rosy lips. Then overpowered by the strongest of lovely desires, she carefully kissed the hanky, holding it on her straightened palm to leave an imprint of her love and desire for the lonesome creature. In the dark it seemed as if she was kissing his hard, weather-beaten, darkish cheek covered with fluffy, sparse locks of virgin beard.

The dog was, but, today in the tiny barn shelter. She heard its sleepy growl as if some goat had stepped onto its tail. She thus decided not to enter the yard. Taking as much precaution as she could manage under her fear, she approached the wooden cross-bar put across the opening in the fence. Then with nimble finger-work, she tied the kissed and perfumed hanky with so much slowness and scared ease as if she was afraid of arousing the littlest yawn by the sleepy fragrance layered upon the soft cloth.

A lover’s smelling power is less than a dog’s; for the faithful friend of man is known for this faculty only. The master found his pet sniffing the object in the morning. He ran to untie it. And he was right in running for it. It was no simple rag; rather beautiful, scented piece of cloth. The fragrance seemed to run the errand of love. He smelt it and a strange sensation hit him for the first time in life. He held it at full length and the earth almost shook under his feet. The imprint of love sent all his senses into a strange jumblement.

Overpowered by shock and surprise, he leaned against the stone fence. His finely modulated features against their swarthy background struck a note of awesome query. Holding its two corners by finger tips, he held it against the early morning freshness and stared like it was the eighth wonder in the world.

First the bracelet and now this one! No, it cannot simply be a coincidence. His mind seemed to vouchsafe and the pangs of strange excitement sent a tremor across his hardy, muscular body. Then, inevitably, the adolescent man’s heart too sent the message that it was a female’s ornate wipe-cloth...and...and the lips! His heart leapt to its highest octave.

He went inside and fetched out the bracelet casually put on a wooden chest. Now he reflected over these with more from heart. And as the heart’s imagery is manifold diversified, colourful and exhilarating than the mind’s, this time unscaled emotions and reflections entered his lonely being.

He was a forlorn young man, almost unrelated to the world. So these emotions subdued him with unusual weight and power. While stoically busy in his oft-usual chores, his mind now mulled over the secret of the bracelet and the handkerchief. Pulled by these anchoring thoughts, many a time now, he looked towards the village; but on the next thought turned his face with a force as the memories came hurtling upslope. How criminally they had mistreated him!

Till now he had been almost oblivious of their condemnation of him; mostly believing it to be his fate, for this is all he had seen while growing up. However, now the two objects had connected him—even though in an intriguing way—to the humans around. He felt the pangs of victimisation. And once this feeling of victimisation arose, he determined that he too would shut the door in society’s face with as much force as it had been doing since he was born.

Since there was no other way for the redressal of the wrongs against him, he decided to vent out all his grievance on the night-gifts from that unknown human—and a female he was sure now—by throwing these into the mountain brook that gurgled nearby. As he raised his hand to throw the objects, his heart felt the weight of it. After all, he was a human being. Having failed to accomplish the task, he returned even more brooding, sulking with a heavy and uneasy heart.

Now however hard he might try, he just couldn’t get rid of the thoughts about that unknown human being who intentionally—he was sure on this account also—left those things in his yard; thus, in the way, breaking all the taboos related to him. Tormented by such thoughts, many a time, he kept awake during the nights in the hope of busting the secret.

During those forlorn moments in the dark, as if lying on a watch-out to meet that person, he would feel a pleasant prick at his heart, ‘What if it turns out to be a girl from the village!?’ He tried to deny this possibility even though the things mathematically proved that it was sure to be a girl. The more he tried to shut out the thoughts, with more force these came striking at the closed doorway of his suffering heart.

His silent lover also knew that his position in the society forbade him from making any advancement on the queries put forth by the things left by her. She thus realised that she will further need to follow the commands of her suffering heart in order to reach some initial, feeble milestone on the love-path. As a girl should do under such circumstances, she gathered the tit-bits of his routine. She did it cleverly without arousing anybody’s suspicion about the love fountain bursting inside her.

Many things being vague, one fact was assuredly known that he took his herd upslope for grazing. After those nocturnal forays, now was the time to let the love-crystal shine in the broad daylight. She was overpowered by a peculiar love-gripped admance against the furious whiplashings of doubts, fears and inhibitions arising out of her status as a young maiden on the path of making her love known to the pearl of her heart, the man whom the villagers had forsaken.

It was late autumn. The sun shone brilliantly over the wind-fallen canopies of trees. The sultry evenings were impregnated with the distant calls of winters. This morning was particularly calm and cool. The sun showed all the promise of a bright sunny day. Cool breeze struck the peaks and seemed singing a lullaby to the littlest of fluffy piece of cloud standing almost still in the vast cradle of blue sky.

It was a love adventure in broad daylight. Taking great care to avoid meeting anyone in the intended direction, she took a long and circuitous route and then turned in the targeted direction at a safe distance from the mountain village. Every step turned her bolder than earlier. However, it was a long walk and it was noon by the time she reached the place where she hoped to find him with his grazing herd.

Who can, but, properly estimate the exact twists and turns of a mountain clime? The day which seemed full of sunny prospects suddenly nose-dived on its early-morning promise. A huge dome of black cloud raised its foreboding appearance from behind a ridge. Its peal of thunder was particularly warning. Rising like a challenge against the sun, the force of lightning distinctly flashed even at the noontime. As any girl would, she shook with fear and nervousness. The soothing breeze soon turned into a storm.

Prompted by the weather’s theatrics, the silently suffering doors of her heart were opened and like a drowning human clutching at saviour-sinews, she yelled out his nickname with the full force of her feminine vocal cords; though at the same time feeling the pangs of guilt because the name was almost a stigma which the poor boy carried on his lonesome existence. She was ashamed of it but there was no other way of addressing him to draw his attention. Her almost sobbing cry pattered against the rocks and vanished somewhere, while the fearsome cloud almost eclipsed the day to make it almost night-dark.

She shouted with more force and more urgency, moving her nimble steps in all directions. There was but no response. Now she shouted and cried in between and called him as if they knew each other from yore and had talked to each other many, many times. Against all these unexpected, fearful uncertainties he seemed the one acquainted since time’s start and the only support to her. The peal of thunder was almost unbearable and lightning flashed—so near—with the propensity of burning everything.

Then the first big raindrops began to fall. There was a lull for a moment and with all the capacity of her throat, she shouted once again before being put to silence by the strike of a big drop on her head. There upslope at a distance, he had faintly heard one of her shouts. Now it was confirmed to him that somebody was calling out for him.

More importantly, it was a girl’s voice. His heart’s inner voice that was trying to convince him of the possibility of a girl leaving those two objects in his yard in the dark, now opened the floodgates of excitement. It was a completely new sensation, entirely unlike what he had experienced in life since his birth. And like the one who had been unrelated so far, but suddenly found the pole star of relatedness, he hurried down-slope almost beating his herd along the way.

The fury of the rainy storm was almost unprecedented in the region. Not knowing how to address the caller, he just kept on shouting, as he hurtled down:

“Yes! Yes! I’m coming!”

Fearing for life, she took shelter under a tree and kept on calling him as loudly as was allowed by her feminine force. Then he arrived along the goat trail; his arrival pronounced by the new high of thundering and lightning. Their eyes met for the first time! Time stopped. Rain, thunder and lightning fell into poor background. And all the untold stories were told; all questions answered in a moment; all secrecy was busted; and all mysteries were laid bare. The language of eyes is no slave to words and time. Both of them knew that they were lovers.

Like a sparrow escaping the claws of an eagle, she ran and took shelter in the safe confines of his muscular arms. New height of his love-struck heart was absorbed by the peal of thunder and a terrible flash of lightning. All melted, they looked into each other’s eyes from so close. Distances had vanished. She had got him. Her locks wet, her fair colour over her delicate features shone with the vibrancy of a bright star against the background of night. His big eyes said all his tongue could not.

They were completely drenched in water. Still he tried to shelter her from the wetness, thunder and lightning. Taking her to the tree, he put his wet blanket on the muddied earth and made her sit on it. Then looking at her with utmost devotion like she was a Goddess, he rose and drove his herd under the tree around them as if to protect her from all the dangers in the world.

All the pent up emotions in his hitherto sealed heart now rained more stormily than the rain. Still he couldn’t mutter a word. As a symbol of what went inside his heart, he just put forth the two prized possessions with him: the two little things which tortured and soothed his lonely being at the same time; the things whom he had so many times tried to throw into the pebbled brook, but after each such failed attempt clutched them to his heart with more love and passion.

His fingers shaking under the throes of his heart, he held both the night-gifts in his hands in front of her face. She was flushed with shyness. There was a look of both question and answer on his face. With a shy, feeble smile she nodded. All the stormy noise didn’t exist for them now. It was perfect silence and loneliness for the love-whispers to hear each other even though the lovers didn’t speak a word.

“I...I...had no other way of declaring...my...” she stopped, blushed and hid her face in his chest.

A gust of warmth sashayed over her cold, wet body and she slid herself still closer into his torso. Unprecedented tremors passed through his body. He the outcaste and now so close to humanity, so near to somebody’s care and love. It was overpowering. He held her with such softness as if he was handling a butterfly.

“For nights...I...kept a watch...” he put up an effort to talk like a normal human being after almost endless loneliness in the world, “to...to find out.”

There was again a tremendous peal of thunderclap and she sneaked into the safety of his bosom. “I entered your heart...rather intruded!” she muttered from behind the cosy secrecy his chest.

He ran his fingers through her wet locks. It was like he was caressing society; touching humanity. She could distinctly feel his heartbeats even against the background of thunderous events around. She put her soft palm on it to absorb and assuage his pains.

“Your heart beats faster...due to fear or love?” she pouted.

“It beats for both. Fear for us and love for you.”

“So like a true lover, you wander with love-gifts in your pocket!” she whispered coquettishly.

“These and you are more of a dream to me. Hardly believable or even imaginable,” he sighed.

“So you dream too. Have you ever dreamt of women?”

“Yes...but no...not that way,” he hesitated, “society cannot rob one of dreaming!”                                                 

“I often dreamt of you. But even in dreams you appeared as distant as you look from far away in the village while working in your field,” she sounded cosily complaining.

“So you watched me from a distance. Sometimes my heart leapt suddenly with joy. It must have mysteriously felt the touch of your eyes.”

“As if!” she gave a little slap on his chest.

Their talk and whispers were beyond all natural and worldly storms now. However, the storm too wouldn’t give in. It went on aggravating to disastrous limits in proportion to the sweetness of their heart to heart talk and soul-solacing deepest depths of love and passion. They, but, were now immune to all the noise around.

They were at the peak of their youth. He was beyond the pale of society and forlorn to the limits a human being can bear. She loved him with the passion of a fully ripe girl. The love-bond brought them nearer and nearer till all inhibitions melted and were washed away along with the rivulets let loose by the torrential rain. Deep rumblings of the clouds turned them deaf to all social admonishments. Flashing light made them turn their eyes from the judgemental society. Individualities melted and they became a unit catalysed by love.

As they tightly embraced each other, forgetting themselves, they were groping into the innermost depths of each other. They beat the storm in their kisses, caresses and fondling to reach the inmost recesses of each other’s heart, soul and bodies. The herd, meanwhile, jutted around the tree with animalistic fear and strange detachment.

The peals of thunder looked capable enough to break the mountain. Lightning seemed eager to burn the wet forest. Many a time, the strokes of lightning reached almost to kiss the tree’s foliage, followed by hellish noise. But they were oblivious to all this. In those precious moments, he was busy in removing that archaic separation which had kept him aloof and away from the normal human relations and emotions.

With each silently, pleasantly suffering grunt and esoteric moan, all that debris of fate and society was washed away. He forgot what he had been made out to be; leaving him just a human being burdened with the garbage of fate and its bearers on earth. Though he was making love to her; but his body over hers appeared more like protecting her from the treacherous weather.

The fate had played a sudden, decisive, unexpected role in his life. Today too it played its startling card. Like lightning it had struck those around him, sparing him unscathed and making him the scapegoat as the bearer of that nick-name, the carrier of ill-fate, a veritable agent of death, Yamdoot.

Today too the bolt hit mercilessly.

When both of them were in that mesmerising, forgetting state of oblivion, when all being is scattered to the vectors of infinite bliss and joy, the fate struck again. The lightning strike seared through the tree’s foliage. However, this time he was lovefully arched over the loveliest thing for him in the world and bore the brunt of this bolt.

He convulsed with the last jerk of life that took her body and soul to the farthest end of oblivion and pleasure. The peak of exhilaration and ecstasy! Forgetfulness!

He indeed was a miracle boy.

The strike was so harsh that even the ring on her finger and the silver pendant around neck vaporised, being atomised. However, the stroke of pleasure was still bigger and overpowering. She felt no pain, just the lightening strike of pleasure. The calamity and ecstasy had coincided. There were burn marks in place of the ring and the pendant. And he had been freed from the cage of his ill-omened nickname.

The tree’s foliage was intact, so was the herd which was now running, bleating in all directions. She with a few scars on her body was crying over the body of her lover in her arms.

She made no effort to bury the incident and thus escape from the clutches of a scandal. For the sake of her dead lover, she told the story with details to draw him out of the chains of that ill-omened name. And they laughed at her as the one with a fallen character and then having gone mad.