The idlers

 

The people in villages have lots of time for idle bantering, gossips, and spinning exaggerated tales of mythical proportions. They have tremendous lungpower for pumping funny as well as tormenting folklores. Men over hookahs and cards are more talkative than even women. The latter have lots of household chores to dispose off.

The idle minds are workshops of stories where facts and fiction mix to spin fabulous as well as harrowing tales. Mountains are manufactured from molehills. A little fact can be stretched both ways (good and bad), just by the sheer incidental flow of circumstances. If you are lucky—and happen to be a protagonist related to the said fact or fiction—it will be stretched to such mammoth glorification that you are at the risk of dying of heart attack because of the sheer shock of overjoyed self. If unlucky, the very same fact or fable gets stretched the other way around to the darker negative side. You will then surely become a monster instead of hero. Then you are in danger of dying due to heartbreak born of shame and embarrassment.

The people in chaupals have big needles to puncture each other’s ego. Someone was heard saying about someone, ‘He is not even a complete ‘I’ yet he uses ‘we’ to connote his presence.’ The context suddenly changed and another man emphasized his point with the parable, ‘A blind man can never be sure about the completion of his marriage—even when all the formal rituals are completed—unless and until he has his bride in his arms.’ To this someone more mischievous further increased the degree of possession to confirm the marital status. Then god knows how someone else ends up telling this joke:

Jat: ‘Listen you O old woman. Bring a chapatti. There is a dog at our door.’ Wifie: ‘There is no chapatti left.’ Jat: ‘Then bring my stick. Why allow him to go empty handed?’

Then again the wind changed and the conversational flow moved a decade back when a family that was known to be belligerent and aggressive was wiped out slowly over a period of time, the last man being murdered a decade ago.

Sukhi Ram, a long-limbed old man, was the surviving patriarch of a one-time big family having many lawbreakers who killed and got killed in abundance. The glory of their heydays gone, the sun setting, their clout diminished and shrunk to insignificance, the old man moved as a pale shadow of their former criminal glory.

One narrator in the gathering in the chaupal is telling this about Sukhi Ram:

Shekhar the barber would take full bantering liberty while giving a shave to the old man. The old man listened mutely, hardly reacting, almost surrendered to their wrinkled, rotten fate. Then, when the shaving was over, he spoke, calmly, with calculated pause: ‘Son, it’s a matter of time. Time changes everything. There was a time when I would thrash the likes of you with my jutis. And if the juti slipped off my hand during the strikes, the bearer of the juti strikes would pick it up and offer it to me with full respect so that I could continue with the beating. Wasn’t it honor to be beaten by me?’ Well, that was plain fear. But then times changed, as Sukhi Ram said.  

The forceful gentility of divine feminine

 

Mahesh has been graced with lots of feminine nuance and courtesy in his walk and talk. Graceful, soft-spoken, poised, measured with a lithe intonation in his personality. It makes him stand out with a charming feminine fervor.

This identity stands out like a black sheep in a group of brown ones in a deeply patriarchal society like that of Jats. A soft target in a society dominated by brash, haranguing, blustering, derisive, unrefined, mocking machismo.

In fact many people make sarcastic, barbed, belittling remarks about his soft, disarming, calm-edged manners. In a conservative patriarchal society, grace is always mistaken for weakness. Masculinity is hungry for noise. Most of the people parade their loudness as a kind of strength. 

The effeminate man has been on the path of devotion and many women, feeling safe in his company, are friendly with him. They have formed a little group for devotional song performances.

Apart from his feminine-grace-laden sweet persona, he is quite ‘straight’ in the rest of matters and things. He is a householder and has grown-up well-settled children now.

 This episode is from the times when he was struggling to establish his delicate graceful foot in the crudely lurching cart of macho-spirited farmer community. The odds looked against someone having such soft manners and feminine intonation in the choppy sea of extra-assertive masculinity.  

Some boys would even doubt his manhood. One such boy, named Kapil, was quite unsparing, polemically flippant and significantly assertive in his remarks, almost denigrating him to the socially sidelined status of the off-beat gender.

Mahesh kept on absorbing this rude harangue with poise and grace. Then a smile before the strike and his silence sharpened into speech. The words weighed properly, not flung in anger. A very precisely placed sentence, answering mockery with sound measure. He spoke in his soft voice, with relaxed manners, slow-paced, calm: ‘If I show my thing to you, you will have fever for a week!’

Blandishment of soft power. Triumphant without raising his voice. Very effective like a little puff of perfume overpowering loads of sweat.

The iron hammer pounding air; thunder wasting its power on stone. The rival turned speechless. There was nothing to say anymore. The soft-looking and gentle-sounding boy had given an all-conquering strike with a tender yet firm finality.

The alchemical reversal with surgical wit: the goldsmith giving a soft tinkling strike to undo hundreds by the crude ironsmith. A whisper without a shout. Polish and nuance defeating force.

In effect, on the normal plain of human experience, this is what we call a blacksmith’s singular strike surpassing hundreds by a goldsmith. To nail it down in one clean strike. But here the blacksmith happens to be a man of very soft, feminine demeanor. But resolute and manlike simultaneously in a subtle way.

A small sad tale

 

It happened about three decades ago in a village in Haryana. Subhash son of Kuchi Ram Valmiki was good in studies at the village school. His elder brother was a cleaner at the school. The teachers would praise him for being good in studies and standing first in the class.

A lone eagle in the little community of untouchables who had it in him to cut through the vital voices of casteism and undo a bit of historical injustice carried by the small community in the conservative village.

During middle school, he would go and clean classrooms after the school was over. One has to do something extra to undo the inherited disadvantages at the caste and community level. So the boy would work hard in studies and in cleaning the rooms to somehow beat the intergenerational disadvantages and lead a normalized life without too much of road-blocking social stratification. And education was the tool to offer resistance to the caste-born structural, oppressive ‘othering’, a systemic dehumanization of the low-born people.

A ruffian boy from the dominant farming community also accompanied him sometimes. This boy was exploring his adolescent sexuality in a deeply traditional society where the word ‘sex’ was a taboo. Not being able to find any avenues to vent out his curiosity, he wrote sexually explicit messages on blackboards in girls’ rooms. The valmiki boy was blamed for it and severally penalized for the offense. Deeply, historically entrenched practice of untouchability was still powerful enough till that time to allow the teachers to touch him very intimately through sticks, slaps and kicks.

He was kicked like a dog by many teachers (all upper caste guys, diehard conservatives and very eloquent in making a low caste realize his low status). With inherited pride they pulled his hair and he was dragged around by the exclusionary social patriarchs—menacing marginalizing motifs of casteism and stigmatization.

The punishment must have been far less severe for a boy of upper class. Without any doubt about it. Punishment for the same offense is hierarchical in nature. Inequitable distribution of justice. This also seems to be a powerful social law, as effective as any natural law.

After the humiliating punishment, he felt stripped of all dignity and social standing he had built for himself through studies. His enthusiasm to rise through social ranks was silenced forever. He crashed into the lowly place of his untouchable community, lost interest in studies and after some time dropped out of school altogether.

A small, malnourished, black, fox-faced boy he then tried to turn handsome like his ideal hero Mithun Chakrovarty, kept stylish hair, wore heeled shoes, went to Bombay to pursue his dreams, and finally returned to the village to work as a casual laborer to feed his four children and a cantankerous wife. Little summary of his life: a subtle fossilization of caste identities.

Strange are the pathways taken by the lurching lorries of our fate. Some erring moments unleash massive miscalculation and topple the table itself on which one is trying to play the cards of destiny.   

 

The germs and seeds of animosity

 

There are irreconcilable communal tensions in various societies world over. The bug of communalism has rebranded itself in post-modernist world with shinier, more attractive colors.

An uncle from another state is all praise for the Haryanvi Jats: ‘They wiped out their population to make it all clean in Haryana. But the Hindu farmers in our state weren’t up to the mark in their cleaning act. In fact the Haryanvi farmers had put up a proposal to us, “Your area still has lots of gochani (a wheat and chana mixed crop, a weak variation and not sufficiently productive) left, so we will come to cut the harvest and make it just wheat. The chana has to leave or it gets obliterated. One crop only. Only the wheat crop is beneficial for the farmer’s economic welfare. Mixed crops spoil the taste. You guys just have to provide us food while we reap the harvest and make it a suitable monoculture.” But then this chap Gawahaar Lal butted in and undid their plans. Military was deployed in the area. And lots of gochani was left in our state. We have been bearing its consequences since 1947. But the sage ruler is now doing good to make it feel like one crop in the field. We feel safe. Earlier it was impossible to even set out of the house after the dark. They are too violent and have criminal tendency and hence ruled as mafias and dacoits. But now they are forced to be well-behaved and are minding their own business thus leaving us in peace.’

Humanity is like an ever-boiling soup comprising ingredients proud of their insolubility in the broth of unified goodwill. What follows is brazen zealotry in the name of religion; human flesh and bones strewn around like fish scales and entrails. An infuriated mis-creation throbbing with devilish pulsation. The communal debauchery. Ground squelching with muddied blood.

And what does all this come down to? It writes a few lines (the same stale lines written with bloody ink smelling of hate) in the same chapter (the very same chapter plotted by the blood-mongering parasite of hate) in the very same book (the book written by the ever-tormented souls) of anxiety, fear, phobias and intoxication with power.

On the solitary trail

 

The green, shimmering, sashaying gown of mother earth fluttering to monsoon winds on my solitary trail. The rain-lulled path is indeed a solitary trail now. The thin ribbon of solace and verdant solitude is clad in grasses, bushes and reeds like a shy countryside lass.

A lovely musty solitary feel to the fern-shadowed trail. An emerald hush layered over it. You just inhale musty silence and sweating peace here. And each slow step on this wild-woven passage counting as meditation.

I quietly embrace this solitudinal offer from the moss-breathing earth and walk in acceptance and full humility, paying homage to these moments. Mother nature’s green-drowned footsteps on the monsoon-softened ground echoing in the form of an overgrown silence.

August rains have been far more in intensity and volume than the normal mark for the month. The solitary trail is overgrown with grasses, reeds, weeds and shrubs. One has to walk very cautiously at each step on the rain-scripted earth to avoid naughty snakes slithering in the grass-swallowed track.

It indeed is a solitary trail, almost untrodden green—with one exception, a sole presence (apart from me) in this calmly breathing wilderness and leaf-slick solitude. A lone man softly moving through this jungle-leaning corridor. A pilgrim of his own kind on the thicketed way. A little interjection in the otherwise undisturbed rain-held remoteness on this verdure-bound way.

He is rubbing hemp leaves on his palms to collect the black soot that will turn to weed for filling his beedis. Mother nature has been kind to him. There are long rows of wild hemp plants on both sides of the mist-clasped trail. He will collect a few beedis worth of weed on his palms.

The man isn’t in disharmony with the living quietude of the path. He is a silent, peaceful man, gently working on the leaves. His lean figure emanating laid-back and easygoing air. His persona almost earth-attuned. He is not overcautious like most of the so-called teetotalers who don’t touch meat, wine, drugs and weeds. But they carry their own nasha of power, influence, wealth and politicking. This silent man appears to be carrying an unruffled soul. With an affably detached self, he readily agrees to get videoed and photographed, just making a little request to not put it on ‘net-pet’ as he puts it.

Weed inhalers are generally mellow-hearted laidback people, not harming mother earth with overblown worldly aspirations like the most of us do. Yes, they harm their own interests and that of their families. But they aren’t over-spirited participants in the chaos that is being splashed around by the so-called sensible gentry.

The man is very soft-spoken and grounded in simplicity. He seems to be quietly amused by my silly eagerness to take his pictures and make his video while he peacefully goes rubbing the hemp leaves on his palms.  

I don’t support and encourage weed smoking. But these people are cool and contended in their own laid-back ways. Mother earth is burdened with over-doers, so such paused personalities can be digested to a little extent provided they keep it balanced with their duties to themselves and their families.

It would be an icing on the cake if they decide not to get married because marriage is a big responsibility and if you get yoked into the matrimonial cart, you ought to fulfill all responsibilities full time instead of getting into a relaxed trance through substances like weed. Marriage plus weed smoking don’t go together. Marriage means full-spirited action to be a committed provider for one’s family. Weed smoking means walking in a by-lane where those who shirk responsibilities try to escape to a different dimension of life which is not compatible with the ways and means of the normal society.

I leave him collecting the fragments of his peace and move on. Mother earth has more tales to tell through visuals, sights, smells and happenings on the path.

Sarus cranes are a symbol of lifelong fidelity, a winged constancy in their sacred companionship. In a world where real love is getting pushed into the corner each passing second, the sight of the enduring union and devoted pairing of a crane couple in lush green is nothing short of an auspicious sign. It’s a shy, grace-bound couple not too eager for the public display of their rituals of togetherness and mateship. They just kept walking, like they fly through their life with monogamous grace, and don’t allow the human-bird gap to be decreased by my curious steps. They don’t fly away at least and that’s their gift to this walker on the solitary trail. They give me enough sight of the quite foreverness and the unbroken duet of their life-song by just walking through the greenery.

There is this friendly drongo. She isn’t camera shy and allows photo shoot from close quarters. Definitely a confident, good-looking girl of the drongo world.

I approach a sad looking puddle of water on the way. This is what remains of the last natural wetland in the countryside around my village. Earlier it was a vast swamp covering many acres that would attract thousands of ducks and other migratory birds during the monsoon and winters. Now it’s just a tiny puddle with a few moorhens, ducks and a couple of kingfishers peeking into its sad waters from the wires nearby.

As I walk further on and reach a lonely hut, it further saddens me. The hut seems abandoned and is already slightly out of order. Kaka maharaj left his hut. He got angry about something and left this hut for a new place. This hut hosted him for more than two decades on his path of spirituality in the countryside. The tiny hut is now getting mixed with nature as grasses and shrubs grow with full freedom around it.

The hut is now packed with a different kind of action, a worldly one instead of the spiritual sojourn. The overhanging branches of a tree canopying the hut are now teeming with the handiwork of weaverbird boys to invite birdie girls to have a look and if they like it accept the suitor and settle for domestic life for the season. Some romeos have put great effort in elongating the grassy foyer to a great length. It’s always a fight for the most beautiful girl through most impressive means of wooing.

The mountains come to my solitary trail in the form of river sands. The Himalayan slopes are washed away by the rain-fed angry rivers and the mountain’s fragmented self arrives here in the form of canal sand. You can feel the essence of Himalayas in this sand. Take a fistful and smell. Yes, it’s that typical Himalayan smell.

My dear friend, the silk cotton tree, is happy at last. Couple of years back the sand mafia had scraped too much earth from around its trunk cutting even the main lateral roots. It turned sad and stood with its pale leaves. No fresh shoot, no flowers for two years. No smiles. Now the monsoon has been more than normal this season. The tree wears a new green suit like a handsome man freshly in love. So happy to see and meet him. I shake hands with him. I’m sure he will smile this season with his luscious red flowers.  

The bookworm

 

As a bibliophile (defined as someone who reads to perceived excess) who devours books metaphorically, I have a feeling of kinship with my fellow bookworms who stay among the pages in books. In a world ever prone to smother lyricism, through quick entanglements, in favor of more squalor and harshness, a metaphorical bookworm musing over a real one presents a tiny piece of amusement. In a world obsessed with big fights for bigger stakes, the small carries an added significance.

So dear readers, let’s drop our ideological squiggles, critical and prescriptive outlook and egocentrical detailing to enjoy the restive promenades of tiny bookworms in the tantalizing obscurity of closed books in bookshelves. Pause in your proclivity to throw desperate die—as an escape from the reality by effort at coping with some false sense of inadequacy—to salvage some formulaic salability in this world of products, products and more products. Forget about work, worry and weariness and feel the definitive rhythm of a bookworm hiding among the pages of an old book while a restful reader carries on with his reading.

Mind you, when talking of book-dwelling insects, sometimes people generalize it too much and include larvae of beetles, moths, cockroaches and termites as bookworms as well. But they aren’t so in any sense of the term. They are outright destroyers, the criminal book-destroyers. They damage their own house out of sheer greed; just like we humans do with mother earth by using our comparatively bigger brains to hone sinister craftsmanship to exploit the littlest bit mother earth has to offer. Termites start eating the wooden shelf and later end up chucking-up the books as well.

The real, and most common, bookworms are the silverfish or booklice. They are ravishingly scrupulous in comparison to the book-destroyers. The personalized advocacy of the ‘will to live’ as a species doesn’t force them to craft and re-craft indignities to present them as natural survival instinct and thus take more than what is needed.

Maggots thrive in the muck. The bookworms, on the other hand, are the intellectual worms. They stay in the sea of words, the golden cocoon of knowledge and wisdom, eating sugar, starch, molds and glue.

It was feistier for them in the old times. The books had leather and cloth binding using glue having organic matter (maida or bleached wheat flour). Microscopic mold and fungi prospered in dank, dark libraries, archives and museums gorging on cellulose (plant fiber available in paper) and other polysaccharides like starches and dextrin. The bookworms had full privacy in dim, humid environment.

At their worst, they consume just the portions of books containing polysaccharides, leaving the paper slightly ragged at the edges, which seems even faintly artistic to a laidback and affectionate reader like me. Despite their full riot of life, the old tomes still remain readable. They take just as much as they need, which is very little in amount and hence still leaves the book readable. They aren’t voracious eaters either. A silverfish can survive without food for more than a year. Little fasting critters they are. Silvery sages with their attendant aura of a vague strain that develops when one’s self becomes free of impulsive forebodings rummaging through the psychosomatic system. 

The bookworms are silvery shining, segmented soft bodied insects, less than 1 mm in length, having six tiny lobster legs on the front part, two antennas on the front and three hind antennas jutting out from their silvery butt. The book dweller is a sophisticated little insect with two compound eyes. A note of caution. They are very agile fish in the sea of words. So one has to be exceedingly engrossed to see their anatomy in the fleeting seconds you have when you suddenly open the book and the little privacy-seeker creeps away.

A silverfish can live up to three years and is capable of regenerating its antenna within a few weeks if it loses one in case you snap shut a book, egged by some misspent mirth, too forcefully injuring the book dweller. On a crucial note, be gentle in opening and closing a book. It avoids maiming some silverfish. If you happen to maim a pair of lovemaking silverfishes, it’s heartbreakingly sad. Being caring and considerate in handling your book is culturally appropriate for the community of readers. Personally I find the sight of a silverfish in my book a juicy glimpse, a good omen to the start of a reading session.

They are even more ancient than the dinosaurs. In pre-historic times they survived by eating plant matter under the bark of trees. But there was a danger of being eaten by earwigs and spiders there. Inside the books, the risks are from restless readers and overcautious library keepers throwing pest control pills into the racks. 

They have complicated mating rituals. Love is all radiant, exotically unfolding and ruddy in its procreative folds from microscopic maters to the mammoth ones. The female silverfish produces many whitish oval eggs out of which white babies emerge to play among words penned by famous writers sleeping in the closed books with the timeless and mammoth ease of a mountain.

As a bibliophile, who gorges on open books, I have a feeling of familiarity and softness for the silverfishes who feast on a closed book. I don’t snap a book too forcefully to avoid injuring some lazy silverfish swimming in a sea of words. After all, it’s the little critter’s home. And I let out a plum exclamation when I see one.

Sometimes when I happen to see a silverfish scampering away to safety, as I open the grand spellbinder of a book, I just muse over the world of these small silvery beings. Little questions emerge. Does the nature of the silverfishes vary in accordance with the genre of the books they reside in? Are those who stay in poetry volumes softer than those tasting the paper in crime thrillers? Are there critters who share and feel Shelley’s moth-desire for the sun? Or the ones mirthing with spellbinding master satirists? Or the ones who feel affinity with speculative, craggily backboned desires dotted with human fallacies, creeks and coves? What about the marriage between two silverfishes from different types of books? What happens when a silverfish crosses over from a work of poetry to hardcore philosophy? Or from a science book to arts? I amuse myself by imagining a lively multi-ethnicity of books worms in my library.

I accept their presence in my books that my father bought decades ago. Generations of them, from young striplings to old crippling, staying in our old books.

Something staying, living, playing, procreating and dying among words and pages of a book acquires an august status in the eyes of this rural bibliophile.   

Honeybees on a poet's head

 

Bookish guys are usually lazy. Poetic in a practical world; grandly aloof, musing over time’s mossy transience. So I find myself congratulating India for its digital platforms to provide online financial and administrative services. I’m elated the moment I come to know that I need not go to the district court premises to get my driving license (DL) renewed. It can be done online. It feels like a gift. Wow! So I apply in high spirits. I pay the fees and upload all the required documents. Now I just have to wait for a brand new DL. I keep checking for the latest status of my application. But the process doesn’t move ahead. It shows the same ‘document scrutiny’ stage for more than three weeks. So I go to the district mini-secretariat with all my application printouts in a file, just like one does in an offline application.

As I’m walking towards the e-Disha Kendra, located on the sprawling district secretariat campus, a man comes running. ‘Bumblebees are here! They are attacking people!’ he shouts a warning to me. I see big bumblebees reconnoitering the air for human enemies. I take a turn and start moving away by the side of the block towards the more crowded place of steno kiosks, notaries and lawyer chambers. The ratio of the enemies per bee would be high there. They have targeted a man. He is crying for help, flailing his arms to ward them off. They are biting him with more force in greater numbers. It’s like getting stuck in a quagmire. The more you flail your limbs, the more you get stung.

Someone has started a smoky fire to deter the natural drone attackers, known for their volatile temper and painful stings. Two soldier bees are stuck in my hair on top of head on the right side. They furiously buzz their wings. I know the rule. Never move your hands to ward them off. If you do so, you are instantly locked as the target and hundreds of bee fighters would attack you. So I walk like Dr. Manmohan Singh, keeping my arms stuck to my sides, not moving my torso in any direction or angle. The disciplined, non-threatening walk of an academician.

I can hear the man who has been attacked shouting, ‘Hai they are eating me, please save me!’ You can hardly do anything to help someone in this situation even with the best of your philanthropic emotions. The bees in my hair are angrily buzzing but I keep my arms jutted to my sides. Dozens are hovering around me. The moment I swipe my hand to get the bees off my head, they will pin me down as the next target. When I feel that I’m safe in a narrow corridor I start brushing with a soft hand, my fingertips barely touching the hair, to get the bees away. They unleash the entire stock in their weaponry on my head. Bumblebees sting very painfully. For an instant I go numb with pain. But I’m successful in getting rid of them. Thankfully I haven’t been spotted striking their soldier friends by the other bees.

I hastily cross a narrow strip of lawn between the blocks to move towards another section, the older blocks which aren’t spacious and airy like the one that I have just crossed. It’s an old, claustrophobic, musty, rusty maze. It makes me feel more secure as I move into its outer corridor.

An old man and an old woman, husband and wife visiting the courts for some official work, emerge from the new, spacious block. The bees have entered its main lobby. The old couple has broken the rule. They are panicked and vigorously waving their hands above their head and around their face to keep the bees off. Hundreds are hovering around them attacking and stinging at free will. To make it still worse for the man (in comparison to his wife, who is waving just hands), he is forcefully waving a cloth in the air around him. It invites bigger attacks. The woman shouts feeble cries for help. The man is simply focused on beating with the piece of cloth. They are tired. They walk a few steps and sit on the ground almost giving into the bees.

Everyone is at a loss about what to do. I shout and ask them to keep moving towards our side. The man seems to have surrendered. He can barely walk. The woman performs slightly better. She keeps pleading in a helpless tone, ‘Pour water! Pour water on us!’ But where is water? I feel utterly helpless. What to do? I can feel their pain but what to do. A young man comes rushing out from the new block. He is waving a black piece of cloth around him to avoid getting stung. He has a mosquito repellent spray bottle in hand. The bees attack him also. He is spraying clouds of mosquito repellent around the old man. But it’s almost ineffective.

Our family has a history of death due to bumblebee stings. My great grandfather was attacked by an entire swarm of bumblebees while returning from the fields after a hard day of tilling land. It was early 1890s and there was hardly any medical facility in the village at that time. He died because of excessive swelling which the village hakeem couldn’t manage. I feel on the upper right side of my head. There are two lumps. The crown of my head is numb.

The faces of the old couple are blood red due to multiple stings. By this time they seem to have given up to fate. You want to help but how? There must surely be better and more efficient ways of managing a bumblebee attack. At least I don’t have any clue. Neither has the district administration.

It’s a weighty fact that someone can be almost drawn to the portals of death right there in the middle of district administration centre, the axis of local police, judiciary and bureaucracy. Where you have the district collector, police superintendent, magistrates and judges. But the powerful authority is clueless as to how to help an old couple getting painfully stung by hundreds of bumblebees, crying for help while slowly moving from one block to the other. The response is just to watch, wait and allow the bees to stop stinging. Big cars, sirens, gun-toting guards, arrogance, systematic loot and plunder. All helpless in the face of a bee attack. The officers, judges and magistrates must be watching from safe, sealed windows.

The bees keep attacking the old man even while he has reached the crowded notary stalls. Finally the attacking squad dissipates. Someone takes the old couple to the hospital. I hope they have injections against bee bites. A thin plume of smoke is splaying the air as disaster management response.

I enter the block where my file needs to be submitted. There I stand with two lumps on my head holding an offline folder as a follow-up to the online application. I complain why wasn’t document verification done since I have uploaded all the required documents and the website says I need not visit the office physically. ‘Because you didn’t submit the file,’ the woman tells my curtly. ‘Then what’s the difference between offline application and online application?’ I’m about to ask. But I think the better of it. She might get offended and raise some unnecessary issue about the file, requiring more visits. So I keep mum and enjoy the offline process after having completed the digital version.

The one who is out of the rat race

 

The fog with adulterous traces to turn noxious smog. A chilly mid-November morning. Whom do we call the dimwits? The ones whom we couldn’t fraternize for forgery and cheatings required to outsmart others on a routine basis in daily life; who unquestionably can’t be turned shrewd like the smart majority; who have a void somewhere wherein the inherent innocence tranquilly stays in a safe chamber. Bo is more or less the same as I remember him during his boyhood. He has grown in body but the child inside is ageless, beyond societal spoliation. He must be carrying some nerves that despoil the spoiling agents’—the agents that ensure the transformation of innocence into shrewdness—best efforts.

Bo is a big man in his early forties. He can smoke as many beedis as you can manage to offer him. This is a foggy, smoggy, chilly morning. I see him working on his brain, performing a kind of exercise. He has spread his palms against a wall and hitting his forehead, gently with nice rhythm, against the plaster. He then shifts gears and hits the side of his head, then the other one, followed by the back of the head. Maybe he is shaking his nerves from the spell of irresolution, probably born of hangover caused by country liquor.

Normally he breezes past you with triumphal air without even looking at you even if you greet him with a wide grin and huge bouquet. Sometimes he startles you with ‘kya haal hai’ when you are least expecting it. But today after these soft penitent plummets at his head, he seems to have discovered some socializing fibers in his nerves. ‘How are you?’ he says. He doesn’t seem to ask because ‘how I feel’ hardly means anything to him in this off-course, uniquely poised state of being. Well all of us have our own peculiarities and eccentricities. He has his own. But I take it as a good omen when he speaks. I’m eager to reply to his statement but he has already moved on before I can send him my first word.

Every dog has a day

 

Those were almost decrepit establishments, almost filching with moralistic shame. Even the most liberal person would pass by them with a judgmental smirk. There seemed to be something incoherent about it, a kind of ashen-faced entity, almost embarrassed by its very existence. And its clients would seem to be trying to guzzle all their conscience and commiseratively—shoring up courage—approach the prison-like bars on a front defined by stale paint and peeling plaster.

The interior was laden with stifling privation in semi-darkness. Dispirited and caught in miry ruts of social chastisements. The racks inside—cold, plain, blackish shelf-racks—staring icily. A sort of implacable tragedy held up in the musty dim-lit interior. And the shop attendant behind the grills seemed a prisoner, sullen and brooding. But the bottles contained the magic potion of riotous revelry—alcohol.

That’s how the wine outlets of the last decade looked in the towns. Almost facile and nauseated. Then the number of drinkers busted the ceiling. The spirit had a temporary puddle to douse the scum of life for a few hours. And with a plum glee (like rain pattering on lush green foliage), the wine merchants prospered. Alcohol and spirits acquired mainstream position to douse the scab and slut of life. The ill-boding, nit-wit image was gone. The cloth wallet changed to fashionable Gucci purse.

The ultra-posh, shiny wine outlets are now making up for all the undemonstrative, ragged past. They glitter like jewelry showrooms with fancy lights and plush interiors. The bottles gleam with naughty assiduity in fancy illustrious displays. No longer the squeamish and morose attendant. It’s confident staff behind lovely counters. Of all the trades, alcohol industry has made the loudest mark in terms of change in the shape and look of their outlets. It just shows how much money is now pouring into its coffers.

Teenage romance with uncles

 

Teenage girls of the present generation are hyper-smart. They know exactly how to act as pickpockets on sweet-toothed, grey-haired, balding uncles who easily believe in fairy castles. Just to feel the breezy spring of youthful, naughty talks he has a few teenage girl-friends who keep stabbing his pockets for buying costly gifts for their real, young boyfriends. One of his little friends cajoled the liberal-hearted uncle with honeyed words to an extent that it found him joyful enough to open his wallet, fully allowing himself to be stabbed deeply in pockets. It enabled the little girl to buy an Apple phone for her local history-sheeter, goonish boyfriend who had grown glum after a recent beating by the police. So in a way the gentleman helped them in darning the torn collar of their shirt. Of course he didn’t know about the end point of his gift; wasn’t aware that his gift has landed in thuggish claws instead of her soft, fair, pinkish hands. He came to know about it from another source. He was bawling and snarling for a few moments but then his aggrieved energies subsided as they are supposed to be for a man in his late forties. With grating but muffled anger he told me that she had lied to him. ‘We have four cars and my father runs a business,’ the smart teenager had lied about their financial standing. She turned out to be the daughter of a small corner-shop tailor in a narrow alley where a car couldn’t even enter. Her father had a rusty moped only.

Another little one tried the same trick with me at a popular eating point, named Madras restaurant, in the town. I’m eating a dosa with unhindered zeal, having arrived from a trip to the Himalayas, and feeling ravenously hungry after the daylong journey. Maybe she got this sweetened assumption that a graying man in forties spiritedly gorging on spiced dosa is still caught in the unwearying aroma of youthful desires. This proclivity turns the purse strings of such men very loose.

These are very smart kids with their personalized set of endearments to fan the air of desire in the men in their forties. From their clothing and bearing they estimate the gentleman’s financial worth and calculate that thousands can be easily drawn out, while a young man would give hundreds only in terms of dining and petty gifts and would demand much costlier returns in privacy.

She is sitting facing me; her young, boyish boyfriend facing the other way. She ogles at me with love-drenched eyes—at my purse rather. I’m eating very spiritedly, so she thinks I have enough youthful strings to be hummed by the fingers of desire and lose my grip on the wallet. The maiden finery spreading sensuous shine for a liaison. She spreads her arms on the table, puts her chin on the back of her palms and takes a sniper-precision aim for long moments, spraying translucent bullets of fake love. The air around me is profoundly speckled with feigned love-notes. Little does she realize that I lose myself to books only. I smile, get up, pay the bill and leave gently. I take a last look from outside. She is grimacing. ‘Of no use anymore!’ she must be judging me. Well, I’m happy to be of no use in the way they mean it.

The sad nights and vanishing fireflies

 

Probably we saw the lasts of big swarms of the soft-bodied beetle that flies with a glow—fireflies. Their habitats declined and the fireflies that spun the dreamy webs of imagination, poems, stories and parables vanished from the nights. What do they need? They just need that which used to come naturally with nights—darkness in the moist, shady bushes during the monsoon days. The days would be bright, musty and green and the dark nights had fireflies. Now when the lights remain on all night even in the villages, spotting a firefly has become a rarity. Too much light pollution. I think contrary to our negative impressions about darkness, it must be washing lots of lighted pollution that we unleash on a daily basis.

The fireflies dance using their bioluminescence, the males and females looping with their own types of bio-sparks. Aren’t they such beautiful dancing lights! When there is too much of bright artificial light, their bioluminescence becomes ineffective in the males and the females spotting each other.

The vegetation is vanishing, the nights are losing darkness and so the firefly love-festivals are gone too—almost. The agricultural fields use insecticides on a large scale. Where does it leave any place for this soft beetle? For those who might care to listen, let me inform you that when a firefly boy and girl go on a love-dancing date, they enjoy feasting upon mosquitoes on the dining table. So those who have had dengue and malaria should have empathy for them.

Dealing with weirdest dreams

 

Where does such a weird dream come from? I’m clueless. President Trump is working as an electrician in my depilated room. It’s the old style, laborious electric wire fitting he is working on. A lurching bamboo ladder laid against the wall, he has a hammer and a chisel in his heavy hands, making a little hole in the plastered upper wall just under the ceiling to fix little wooden bits in the grooves to nail narrow wooden strips on them. These were used to bind wires on them during the good old times.

The room has dusty green, peeling lime-wash coating on the walls. A green dust has settled on his lovely orange hair. Me and my father—who departed 15 years back—are watching him with intimidating curiosity. He takes a break and climbs down the ladder. We are embarrassed. Surprisingly, President Trump doesn’t seem offended or angry. I mumble apologetically, ‘You are the most powerful man on earth. I don’t know how do we land in your life. But I see the tough phase of the task is over.’ Frankly speaking I don’t have any clue as to how such a thing lands in my subconscious to surface as a weird dream.

The day after

 

I was expecting a pollution peak on Diwali night. Everything has been politicized and everything within politics has been communalized. I saw lots of social media content giving a clarion call to the Hindus to celebrate Diwali with clanging, banging gusto, especially when others can kill animals on their festival, so why shouldn’t we slaughter the clean air on ours. It had its effect. Despite a ban on the firecrackers in the Delhi NCR, these were sold in open, purchased with a right to unrestricted religious celebration and banged and burst with yelling enthusiasm. I also love to celebrate Diwali as a Hindu, but I care for our lungs as well, especially the elders.

The night was breezy which dispersed the pollutants. In the morning there was no eye-burning smog. A cool breezy morning with tolerable level of pollution. Elated over this I carry my Diwali celebration into the countryside with a walk in solitude. Many parts of India are celebrating Diwali today because the lunar calendar overlaps two days of the sun calendar. It gives us the option to celebrate our festival on two days. Good for business; good for the people as well, enabling them to carry extra festive spirit.  

It’s a bright day, the horizon slightly smoggy in the distance. Mother nature spreads a breezy cool hand like a windscreen wiper to take away the pollutants. A perfect time to appreciate Celosia argentea or Plumed cockscomb blooms in a corner. All it needs is a bit of sunshine, dewy moisture, cool breeze and no human foot intruding, and mother nature offers a lovely bouquet of smiles to a solitary walker with poetic sensitivities. We humans might consider them as weeds but they are a perfect breakfast table for a flock of moths who are high on nectar. These are lovely finger-shaped creamy blooms with pink spires on the top. Plumed cockscomb indeed—fluffy with a slightly curved creamy erection, milky white head topped with a pink spire.

There is a lonely date palm standing in the empty harvested fields. Dry paddy crofts too low and lifeless to give it any sense of clothing and company. It must be missing the company of its brothers. Sadly, there will soon be a world when the trees will be barcoded and numbered. No worries. Let’s make the most of what is left. Thankfully we are the generation that is lucky to see unnumbered and uncoded trees.

In a corner there are golden shades of ripe paddy waiting to be harvested—a prelude to nice, luscious aroma on your table.

I stand under a blackberry tree and stare into the bluish haze in the east. A trickle of sunrays plays on my face giving me an insight:

There is light everywhere and darkness alongside. You have to position yourself in life to have your portion of light rays and your little puddle of shadow.

The sultry charm of autumn

 

Why should one’s soul be in love just with the spring? All seasons have their unique offerings. Look at the lovely autumnal surrender. The trees shedding the extras for a walk through the cold winters. The fallen leaves must be murmuring a lot. Listen to their story.

These are old leaves rich with age, gladly abandoning their hold on the branches and falling down with the cool breeze. This is a beautiful version of what we call death, but which is just a transformation in the eternal cycle.

Autumn is basically a collective phenomenon of detachment. Stand in the mist of such mass-scale leafy drops; detachment almost raining with the leaves. Make the most of it; listen to their murmuring rustle of joyfully quitting the stage of life.

And when they quit life with such a soothing rustling song, it shows how fully they have lived.

The fuller the life, the less scary is death. Death then doesn’t appear like an abstract entity, something cut off from life. It then appears like life is shifting to a new level, a new dimension. It then gives a glimpse of a continuity, not something like a dead end.

Videos and thoughts can’t catch such a phenomenal experience. It’s like we try to catch air in our fist by clenching our fingers and it slips out. But open the hand and it’s embraced by the all-encompassing presence of air around. These are the moments when we are totally open with our vulnerability and innocence—like the open hand—and are embraced by a larger presence, undefined and unbound, which hands over a portion of its freedom to us and we feel joyful.

My slice of autumn has a flowery color to it in my yard. There is a flowery drizzle in place of falling leaves. I have collected a huge pile on my table. This is just a portion of the flowers that drizzle in a flowery, scented rain from the two parijat trees in the yard. Scented, dewy, flowery nights; and the rain of flowers in the cool mornings. With so many flowers around, no wonder I find my spirit dancing, intoxicated with the beauty of the countless blooms and the scented breeze.

An evening on the solitary trail

 

A reconciliation

 

He is sitting with a smug expression; in full acceptance of one’s situation, which brings restfulness to life quite naturally. He is sitting on the roof of the tall new house of my neighbor overlooking my low but resolutely sprawled out old country house. Looking down upon me, eh! The world below is busy with routine exhaustless rambling. Despite the unrestrainable threads of mischief in his species’ DNA, he hasn’t yet broken the terms of ceasefire. No slimy gamut of mischief in my garden from his side; no detestable shouts at his mere sight from my side. Both sides contributing their respective share to peace. The best part about investing in peace is that it gets you the handsome most returns.

He is all focus at some point on the distant roofs. Men will be men—he is either eying a lady or some rival. I offer him a fresh ghee-smitten chapatti on the window slab of my terrace room. He looks at it just once and continues with his stare at the more coveted objects. My ego feels bruised and lacerated. Peace is very fragile and ego a hard stone. But I would advise one to keep its glass façade because it allows lovely sunshine into the room of your existence. So one ought to pay even extra to maintain peace. It will still be better than breaking the glass and again revamp, replenish and reconstitute the entire façade. So I quash the germs of malignity, gulp down insult and move from the place, feeling bad that he doesn’t even look at my gift. ‘Maybe he isn’t hungry,’ I think.

I return a few minutes later to take away the chapatti so that the visiting feral cat could have it. There he comes hurriedly but with confident ease. I stand at a little distance. He still keeps the ceasefire and doesn’t snarl or growl. I stand hospitably and he takes away the chapatti as if it was his right and my duty. I think he is just putting up attitude, thinking that if he instantly jumped to my offer, he will appear like a beggar. So he takes it in a very casual way; as if it doesn’t matter to him at all. This is what I term as attitude.

A slow-paced day

 

Life is happy and good because I receive a big carton of pears as gift. Juicy pears enter even the most desolate parts and fill life with joy. But during the transport many big juicy ones have turned pulpy. Joy is never complete; it comes with conditions attached. Here the condition is that I have to ignore the loss. But there is an option to use these partially spoilt ones—instead of throwing them, I use them as ceasefire table items.

It’s Tuesday and the head monkey is visiting the locality with his family. His clan is bigger than the last time I remember. There is new addition to his harem. He is watchful as his clan eats pulpy pears. One little one is trying to catch butterflies around the peregrina flowers.

Fed with pears and the ceasefire still more reinvigorated I am going on my bike. I advise against being too bothered about the side happenings on the road. One has to be very focused on the job. One has to save one’s bones amidst the thundering prancing of the travelling bravehearts. But some things will always fall in your zone of vision. You can’t avoid them even with your brain all occupied in reaching safe amidst all the roaring runnels and gurgling gullies of driving passion on the road.

A massively fat policeman taking a lift on a slender splendor bike. The slim bike grumbles, the thin boy mumbles. I can’t see the boy at all as I catch up with them from behind.

Shri Bansidham Gaushala Society (Reg.) written on a gau seva banner at the back of an e-rickshaw. The narrow and longish vehicle purring to the destination with chapattis, grass and donated food.

A lone quail trying to run and cross the road, making several failed attempts as the vehicles keep rushing past. Mr. Quail, why don’t you fly a little and use your wings for a short flight? You will get trampled or get a two-wheeler guy tumbling on the road.

The infant lying on a cloth on the grass by the road under a forlorn acacia tree, and his/her three years old brother tending, keeping a watch over the baby. Already into the household duties! Their parents, the migrant Bihari couple, working on a construction site nearby.

A lapwing crushed on the road. The feathery carcass. I stop and as I pick it up to give it some dignity of a humble burial nearby, I hear the pittering, warning notes, maybe from its partner. A bird has little blood; it’s more of flying spirit, airiness.

I reach my destination, the place of enlightenment of a local saint. I disturb the watery meditation of a fish as I step into the pond to take a bath. It springs up in surprise and panic, missing my nose by a whisker, going several feet high in the air and lands at a safe place. I nearly fall down.

The saint’s soul reimburses me for the little shock as I, by chance, happen to enter his another ashram on my way back. The cook-cum-caretaker is a kindly man. He shows me the place—the guru’s resting place, meditation rooms, and serves hot milk and sweet petha. He seems a lovely human being doing tapasya through seva. Seva is a very noble form of tapasya. We hold a very nice discussion about the life and times of the saint who shed his body about two and half decades back. His fragrance still lingers and many take solace from it.

Sizzling September

 

As August hands over the baton to September, you have a fluidic canvas of blue, grey, white and black—loafs of clouds floating to give sunshine and shade almost alternately. Some naughty little cloud wets the cloth-lines even though there is sunshine.

One can even beat one’s loneliness by looking at the shifting shapes and turn it into solitude.

After a brief spell of rain if you care to look among the fallen leaves under a tree, you may come across a dead butterfly. She too was a colorful flying leaf on the tree of mother existence.

The beauty of September rain is that it doesn’t upbraid you directly like the previous months when the monsoon was at its prime. The clouds cantering towards conclusion, the sunshine capering about them forming a frivolous game. Then suddenly a brief drizzle comes to wet everything. And before you realize you see the clouds drifting away; they have many interesting shapes and silver edges; leaving behind a green world full of freshly bathed leaves gleaming under the bright sun. The butterflies come out again. Sometimes you get rain and sunshine side by side. You cannot help gasping with ravishing delight because the rain wasn’t expected. But someone gets disconcerted because the clothes on the line are wet again. The September rain is in trilling accompaniment with mischief—old season’s young spirit.

One such naughty spell of rain catches a blacksmith gypsy woman off guard. She is selling plastic ware. Iron-forging days are over. It’s a world of plastic and fiber. The mass-produced items hardly leave any space for them to forge small iron implements and utensils in their little furnaces. So they trade plastic now. She still wears their traditional dress. But they are clearly struggling. It’s impossible to survive as a wandering nomad these days. You need to dig your survival well at a congested place. They are trying to move faster by changing their bullock carts into bike-rickshaws, their sides having a cheap imitation of the nail artistry that those sturdy carts used to have. The big caravans changed to lonesome nomads driving the tattered bike-rickshaw piled with meager possessions and the family. But this swifter movement isn’t enough. So they now turn squatters in urban areas at narrow strips of public land along the roads. They now expect the government to accept them as the citizens of India with identity cards, documents and some entitlements.

On a September evening, we have a brief but heavy downpour. Then the clouds part. The sun plays with clouds in the west. One ought to keep one’s eyes ready for a rainbow in the east on such occasions. If you are lucky you will have your multihued arc in the sky. And coming across a rainbow cheers you up; just like finding a peacock feather on the ground towards which both a king and a pauper will run with equal enthusiasm. The fact is we are seeking colors. So if you don’t get a rainbow on such a rainy evening, the clouds will make up for it. White, orange, red, yellow, grey blue, black—you have the entire range as the setting sun peeks through the rain-soaked veil.

The peacocks are into love games in September. Lots of dancing and you should keep an eye for their love-drops—master-colored feathers. If you find one, rush to grab it before anyone else, and hold it; it’s an asset in many ways.

A bulbul and a sparrow are having a tiff on a wire. The swallows are angry that the little hawk, shikra, is here. They want him out. A squirrel hurries in dragging a strip of rag. It goes up a few feet on the tree and then takes a pause to roll the strip into a ball to crawl up easily and then adorn her house with the new decoration. But while she rushed in, she scared an adolescent gecko. The latter simply panicked at the sight. The leaves drip due to the shower they recently received. Thus passes a rainy September evening. All this is so familiar, yet so-so different.

Musty evenings and dead butterflies

 

Musty evenings, a decoction of sweat and sultry mawkishness. This is the season of mating. A peacock hooting, scattering the suggestive fragrance of its desire to be caught by some coquettish brunette of its species. Creation is fortuitously bound to chance winds at this level. Sometimes it fruitlessly sails through the sky; sometimes it hits home and the dance of desire starts, the fantail spread to handover its thoroughbred royal blue hues to the next generation.

The yard bricks have moss, the air musty, the day grey and old. It gives a very ancient feeling. A little bit before the twilight hits, I light my lamp of devotion under a holy pair—tulsi and shami plants. My little altar is under the peregrina tree. The latter has ample leafy garments thanks to the rainy season. It’s aflame with crimson clusters of flowers—a representative of the smoldering sensuality riding the humid layer. Little grass-green butterflies flutter among the flowers through the day. The flowers are aplenty and hundreds of them drizzle over the place of my clay lamp after fulfilling their blooming duty. And so do a few butterflies that fall with the flowers never to rise again.

It’s a sad sight to see dead butterflies among the fallen flowers around the evening twilight. You smell the musty odor of death. But flowers and butterflies—even when dead—have enough colors in them to still hold the beacon of life. They somehow thwart the overflowing silence of death. And there I light my lamp of faith among old dead flowers and forever sleeping butterflies. A flicker of hope and faith, fallen flowers and butterfly corpses, musty moments hung with sultry detachment, the day slowly dying to finish its journey at the twilight, a humid night taking birth, a lone butterfly still dancing among the flowers owning the entire tree to herself, the birds retiring to roost for the night, and a poetic man witnessing this slowly shifting picture on the canvas of mother existence.