Soulless, hybrid beauty

 

A hybrid rose can have nice colour and exquisite design. But it lacks the basic essence of a flower, fragrance. The beauty is skin deep, a mere cosmetic effort at the surface. It's haughty and arrogant, a kind of constriction within itself, an insecurity, a fear, an aloofness, a separation. The soul is missing. They seem too self-absorbed. Like so many apparently classy, well polished gentry. They stand with touch-me-not attitude. And the bees and butterflies stay away. They find it totally unapproachable. The marigolds, on the other hand, are little humble, down to earth flowers. They aren't showy. They are common looking. But they have a soul, a depth, a delicate fragrance. Most importantly, they have nectar to offer to the butterflies and bees. With their openness and genteel receptivity, they are buzzing with little winged insects. They have broader connection to life and living. I can feel their soul through their soft fragrance as I sit by them. They exist in a dimension where they touch many chords in my heart. The smell-less roses are as distant and soulless as a beautiful pic of them or even well designed plastic flowers.

The illustrated contraries of chance winds

 

This woman in the neighborhood has indomitable spirit and is firmly full of vigor for A-division street fights. She looks like a world class wrestler with shrill abusive words. No wonder people usually try to save their skin and bones. This morning she has put a big heap of discards at the little square and set it on fire. A huge plume of dark smoke engulfs my establishment as the wind is blowing into the house. If you commit the mistake of saying something against her on the issue of a smoky fire in front of your house, she would be more than happy to upgrade her endeavor and shift the fire right within your courtyard.

She seems to possess unrestrained optimism about the chances of her victory in street brawls. Keeping silence minimizes the damage these days. I do the same and brace myself for smoke-choked house for some time. But then the wind suddenly changed and her own house was completely lost among the dark plumes of smoke. It remained so for half an hour. The wind changed again once the smoky affair was gone. Now when it blew again into the house, it bought beautiful fragrance of jasmine flowers from the wall of another neighbor. Well, sometimes coming from the unknown interiors of the womb of happenings, circumstantial winds favor you if you keep silent. And winds are winds. They dutifully carry all the illustrated contraries. No use of pointless jibing at its ways. They have a duty to carry smoke as well as flower fragrance. Bear up with smoke sometimes and you will surely have your share of beautiful fragrance another time.

The loss of soulful connection

 

You don’t need to have just ears to listen. You can do it far better with your soul. If not this, why would one listen to the beautiful songs of silence in solitudional woods? The voice, whisper and songs of silence that come embracing you to console, to befriend, to comfort, to reassure, to rejuvenate. You need to ‘have’ a soul to listen. Of course everyone and everything has a soul. By ‘having’ a soul I mean one is aware of its presence, its lively throbbing, its guiding light, its essence, its imperishable nature beyond the bodily encasing. Its real feel, its vibrant awareness is what I mean to ‘have’ a soul. The trees, plants, grass, flowers, birds, snakes, earth, sky, stars and all and sundry have a soul. And they listen. I sometimes say a few gentle, appreciating words to the flowers and they smile better. Yes, they do! But you need to have a soul-to-soul connection to feel that. I tried it with a snake but it scampered away and so did I after that brief period of calling it a ceasefire along the human-snake line of fear-fire, the very same primal fear blocking soul-to-soul contact. The next time I intend to use the voice of silence and words of gentility through the eyes instead of oral words. It might work. You never know.

But sadly we are losing soul-to-soul contact. The once beautiful relationships are falling apart. Words of love are replaced by hard rhetoric and arguments. And looks have changed. The eyes are more used to stare these days. A stare speaks for thousands of hateful words. There is distrust and insecurity. There is a sinister willingness to get fitted in the angry stereotypes being cast by those who would benefit from a divided society. In Delhi a young man stabs another. The trigger was that they happened to stare at each other. The crime acquires more serious proportions because the stabber happens to be a Muslim. Someone stabbing a coreligionist stands a chance of being defined as one-to-one illegality. But in case of the two parties belonging to different religions it becomes something far bigger than a crime. Communal haggling, shoving and pushing followed the incident.

Somewhere in the capital, a man pounces on a woman and takes away her gold earrings. But gold is very dear to our ladies. She desperately clung to the snatcher. Her two daughter-in-laws ran and all three of them clubbed him down. But maybe he loved gold even more than all three of them combined. He swallowed the earrings. Now the police have the added task of admitting him to a hospital and ensure that the precious items are retrieved safely at the exit point. They will come out provided the bearer hasn’t the appetite to digest it and make it a part of his anatomy forever. And if the gold comes out it will still retain its value irrespective of its latest exit point, just like heroin and illicit drugs capsules retain their market value after they are successfully retrieved from bellies, anus and vaginas of the bearer by the client.

Turmoil, turmoil everywhere born of the loss of soul-to-soul connection. In Nainital there is a gross abuse of animal rights. A Muslim youth is caught violating the modesty of a cow. A severe breach of conduct even punishable under the laws concerning animal rights. But from the religious point of view it’s a sin. So riots follow. The more we lose contact with our own and others’ souls, the less we pardon. We turn intolerant and unforgiving. We then just need reasons to get angry and hateful.

The social sediments settling after long last

 

The gypsies seem to be settling down after centuries of whirlwind roaming. This is the time to settle history for once and all. Forget the past and begin a new chapter. But they start from a very disadvantaged position. They don’t possess anything apart from a few items they travel with. It’s a world fighting for inches of land. Common people fight for a few yards and the countries fight over few square kilometers. They too seem looking to drop the anchor finally. They have boarded the sides of their tents along a road in the town. They know municipality guys and the police will push and prod them to keep moving like they have been doing for centuries. So they add some weight to the anchor in the troubled waters. The national flag carries a lot of weight. So they have the tricolor flying full mast. Holy cow also carries a big load of faith and reverence. There are cows tethered in front of their sacks. The children of course may have some milk from the dried udders of the famished cows. They expect the patriotic guys to come to their rescue in case a municipal operation is launched to evict them from the premises.

Dissolution, expansion, evolution

 Joyful dissolution of the self! A flower blooms up fully. Opens its heart to the elements around. Draws every ounce from its potential to smiles and fragrance. Opens up completely. And then painless dissolve! This dissolution is further expansion only. Now the petals fly around in a broader dimension. Beautiful, self-surrendered parts of its previous existence now lie scattered as pious homage to mother earth. That is the purpose of life. We have to give back something better than what we took. That is evolution, expansion. Like this flower offers fragrance and smiles to mother earth in return for the sunshine, soil and moisture. The sole purpose of our existence is to be a better version of ourselves.

Kiss the storms

 Storms are storms. Just storms! Nothing else. They do not have much to offer both to nature and humans. They swirl, shriek, shake and prance occupied by an illogical spirit. It is just like nature throwing tantrums. But tantrums are never substantial man; they are just a fragile symbol of something going out of loop for some moments. Look at nature, storms are just temporary, tiny speed-breakers on its peacefully laid out benevolent road of survival, sustenance and evolution. It applies to our lives as well. So when the ship of our being gets jolted by the angry winds just remember this is not the substance of your life. It lies in miles of peaceful, dreamy and majestic waters waiting to kiss the hull of your ship. Coming back to the poor storm. It is just a puny piece of funny quirkiness possessed with suicidal and self-consuming dispirited and rampant self. It dances in pain. While it fizzes and fumes, it burns in its own fire. It dies. While its cremation takes place just be a good pyre-keeper and fulfill all the rights diligently. But keep a safe distance from the fire. It is sure to die. And, more importantly, you are sure to survive to see the flowers blossoming in that very dead ash. So please believe in peace, in tranquility, in harmony, in noiseless distances waiting for you while you feel the heat of the burning aberration. Be a spectator. Be a valiant survivor. Do it for the sake of normal, undisturbed nautical miles lined up to allow the passage of your ship to a lush green island of your destination, where you can drop anchor and enjoy the stillness of life for sometime. It has to be done. Because the course of normalcy is self-sustaining, kind, beneficent, forgiving and parental. The storm just burns in its fury. Allow it to do it. Harmony, orderliness and tranquility draw life-giving sips from their own substance, from the core of their own essence. So be a good businessman. Join the latter's bandwagon. For you own gain.

Being in the womb of non-being

 And everything, dear readers of life, turns out to be just moon-lit fog! Just a sea of shadows, non-being, rippling against its shiny beads of being!

A fleeting grey cast on a still fleetier darker cast, the latter itself a cast on further casting. Endless spools of impressions jumping from being to non-being and vice versa.

Dancing particles in murky haze on the dark stage. The eternal darkness, meanwhile, now and then flashing a smile to show the matter, her teeth, to bite a fleeting morsel of being from the primordial bread of non-being.

When she craves in self-love to embrace herself, she entwines her milky white, lightful, slender fingers around her dark breasts and grip her own dark curves with her white arms. And the shapes zoom in and zoom out in teasing, self-orgasmic delight.

Like waves, shapes merge in the shapeless fluidity. Being and non-being merge in matrimonial delight on the conjugal bed of holy union in the bedchamber of creation. Being mating with non-being to sire shapes and appearances. Shapes merely the stamp of 'being' by the 'non-being'. A canvas both within and without.

Shapes, sounds, appearances and disappearances, all that we perceive certainly exist, but with equal claim by my non-existence. It's just a microcosm between Is and Isn't. A little pulse. A beat.

Romancing with small-time moments

 A wire-tailed swallow couple is seriously on a lookout for their mud nest. They make chipping sounds as if discussing the suitability of a little terrace porch facing this countryside writer's hideout-cum-writing den. Yesterday it rained a bit and they were quick to lay the foundations by ferrying mud from the street and sticking it to the wall. The swallows usually leave a heap of drops under the nest. So in order to avoid a stack of bird-drops in front of my writing table I just stand under the new muddy foundations, giving them a message that there are humans around, expecting them to abandon their ideas about the safety of this place. But they don’t seem to mind it too much. They sit quietly nearby on the cable network wire. They have learnt, I suppose, that to survive in this world they can’t afford to be too shy of we humans.

It’s a busy birdie world looking to set up families in anticipation of the upcoming monsoons. But opportunities have been diminishing for the birds. The walls are plastered making it harder for the little brown house sparrow to seek nesting holes. As the fissures open inwards leaving us trying to cover up the exteriors through swanky posh interiors and cozy homes, the holes vanish from the walls. There is a half-inch plastic pipe across the wall fitted as a passage for electricity wires. There are no wires leaving it as a miniscule tunnel of possibility. A sparrow is struggling at the opening, flapping wings to stay afloat as its probes its beak for any house-making possibilities there. But the opening is too small for a sparrow, or for any bird for that matter.

The village is full of peacocks. We have poisoned the farmlands beyond their sustenance, so here they swarm into the village, pee-hooing day and night. They are respected birds. Indirectly we may take away their habitat but directly we need to show them respect so that Lord Krishna would become happy and shower more and more material blessings on our head. In any case, beyond what, why, if and but theirs is a pleasant sight in the village.

Oh, the doves, the lousiest nest-makers! They did make a change at long last. Instead of laying eggs at the same famished nest on the tree that has seen so many tragedies, they put the twigs on a not-in-use ceiling fan in the barn porch. The wire is disconnected to ward off even accidental start of the fan. From this angle it seems a suitable choice. They put some sinews on the fan-wing. But there was a storm and the fan took a few circles and the eggs fell. Sadly, again a very poor nesting choice and an example of very dumb parenting.

The babblers are busy through the day because a huge rat snake has been spotted among the little cluster of keekars. The giloy creeper has acquired every inch of canopy to give it the feeling of a few square yards of a real pristine forest. In the thickly leafy tent warblers and tailorbirds have ideal nesting site. There must be many nests for a coucal, the brown-winged big jungle crow, is busy at the site for the last couple of days. They are usually heard with their loud coop-coop sounds outside the village along denser shrubbery by the canal bunds. But this one has taken up assignment inside the village. Where there are nests, there lie the possibilities: possibilities of raising successful hatchlings and chances of successful hunt.

Randhir is a smart man. A hardworking farmer he understands the value of each sweat-laden buck. He looks on top of this world. The old age pension is up by 250 rupees. He is freely eating my morning newspaper reading time. ‘I was going for a shave at the barber’s and thought of dropping for some time,’ he says. He has one 500 and two 10 rupee notes in the pocket of his kurta. It’s a great financial scheme to save 10 rupees. The shaving charges are 30 rupees. ‘I usually go in the morning when their box has hardly any change. So after the shave I push forward the 500 note. It gives them a nightmare at the idea of managing so much of change so early in the morning. Then I offer 20 rupees which feels like I have done them a favor even though I pay 10 rupee less,’ he explains his game plan.

Then he shares the latest update on an old distant relative of his. The concerned farmer is a big built fellow of nearly eighty. In the last five years he has fallen twice, once fracturing the hip and fracturing the leg the other time. ‘I asked his grandson to take care of their granddad but the young man appeared full of complain. “He won’t stop eating ghee like he was young,” the burly grandson complained. What has ghee to do with it, I asked. Ghee strengthens the bones. “You didn’t get me uncle. You eat ghee and you get energized beyond your years. You feel like you can jump around like a young colt with fun and frolics and you end up breaking your bones,” the boy explained. So according to him eating lots of ghee is the main reason for the old man’s broken bones,’ he is laughing.

Then the laughter vanishes. An angry babbler above in the parijat tree eases itself and the fluid drops on his pocket as he is spread out relaxed in the chair. It feels like a grenade has fallen. It’s not about the spoilt kurta. It’s always about the money. He looks flustered and in panic. He checks his bucks. A bit of tiny fudge on one of them but still workable. He is relieved. But that breaks his willpower to stay eating my time despite all my covert and overt signs and signals of wanting to be left alone. He gets up and leaves. I thank the entire population of babblers on earth. 

The smart beetle

 Anyone who has worked in the corporate must have heard about ‘smart work’ scoring over ‘hard work’. In the competitive corridors of corporate buildings the so-called smart guys rule supreme. The victory of smart work over hard work spawns many an anecdote. Hard work is symbolically very dramatic. But it’s the smart work that pulls the strings of the mules. It carries a progressive veneer; smartness coming handily convenient. Just like this little rove beetle does. The ants are the hardworking laborers of the insect world. So inevitably there are supposed to be smart corporate guys among insects to take advantage of poor hardworking ants.

The rove beetle is very smart. Using its skill of smell and touch it dupes the ants into taking himself as an ant larvae. The befooled ants protect the impostor and nourish him like their own. The poor ant parents believing they are raising a handsome kid. Meanwhile, apart from all the bounties ferried by the tireless workers, the rove beetle feasts upon the ant eggs and their young ones. Isn’t it a real smart work? Now take a close look at the successful corporate guys around you!

Natural tricksteries in nature

 There is a beautiful set of program hatched by two species of fish. This is a mutual agreement among a species of larger fish and a much smaller fish. Normally the bigger fish eat the smaller ones. But here the predator-prey equation has been postponed for mutual benefits. It’s a ceasefire; burying the hatchet for gains beyond hunger and food. The group of bigger fish becomes stationary, almost sedately retired, and opens their mouth and allows the smaller fish to enter their jaws. Once inside, the little cleaners pick up fungus and other parasites from the mouth. They continue their cleaning services all over the body as well. One party gets its dinner and the other gets cleaned up.

The question is, how has been this fear of the smaller fish for the bigger one stalled in the evolutionary survival chain? To signal that they mean to perform a clean-up service operation, the smaller fish perform a kind of ‘undulating dance’. The bigger fish forgets its hunger and the more pressing issues of cleanliness strike home the message. They stop swimming, open their jaws and turn relaxing like one lies for massage and pedicure.

But then there are always very keen observers of others’ behavior also. A little fish named sabre-toothed blenny has been keeping a keen eye on the housekeeping, cleaning and picking dance of the real cleaner fishes. So here they play smart and perform the same dance. The bigger fish allow them to come near without eating them. They mistake the looters for ministering angels. The cunning blenny then takes a bite of flesh from the unsuspecting host’s belly and scampers away. Well, this would count as paying the costs of cleaning services. But to a different species though.

It seems we can no longer solely count upon human frailties for the darker shades of character. We have co-sharers of the burden. There are species that are anciently ingenious in their machinations to loot, plunder, deceive and run away with their booty. In the game of survival, there is a highly creative incandescence that lights up the cells in all types of manifestations around. 

Deadly lovers

 

The female fireflies of the genus Photinus have a lovely love-thirsty courtship code carrying a sensuous shine, when they are ready to mate, to send loftily high, seductive signals to the males regarding their willingness for lovemaking. This courtship blinking triggers a surrender mood in the males and they run to embrace love. Then there are killer females of the firefly genus Photuris. They seem to have cracked the code. They also send the all goody apparently Photinus-sounding love signals. Seeking the divine direction of an unquenchable love-thirst, the Photinus males flutter to embrace love. They pursue the multifarious glamour with eclectic passion. They miss the desired destination by a long-long mark and it soon turns to death’s ever-lasting final embrace. Then the sensuously stylish ladies, the Photuris females, eat them with awful female valor. The sensuous flowers turn out to be thorn traps. The males hardly getting a chance to even nurture any kind of repenting reflections over their choice. Well, there are always bound to be stormy ripples in the sea of love. This is what we call cracking the code of love to eat your man. And we always relate the beastly, clawy contrivance to the homo sapiens only! All the shades of human character seem to be already etched in nature. All the fifty shades of gray and more seem to be structured inherently in the subconscious entrenchments of the energy field walloping around us. Isn’t this creation a motley mess of wonders?

Year-long summers

 We are piling up data like no other hunter-gatherer, among any species on earth, collects anything. And on top of that we have computers to store data, so here come more and more numbers with each passing second. One little statistical fact: June 19 was the first and the only day since March 11 when the maximum temperature was 30°C, a day of least maximum temperature during the interval. I mean it happens to be the least maximum temperature in the interval from March 11 to June 19. Nothing surprising here, it’s a routine burning summer in north Indian plains. My only worry is that the most of March had more than 30°C temperature. It makes March a summer month. Where is our spring in that case? We have to shift it to the second fortnight of February which once used to be the peak of winters. There would be a time in the coming decades when the coldest days of January, as they stand now, would qualify as a brief spring. Finally we will have year-long summers. These are the perils of global warming. It’s fearsomely hard-hitting. The fragile frontiers of varied seasons will give in. The illustrious legacy of winters, springs and autumns will be held by myths. It surely will happen unless we plant trees, save forests, cut pollution, abandon our deceiving double standards, give an ear to the circumspecting nerves, and on top of that somehow systematically tame the bug of consumerist greed in our brain. 

Musings from a tiny corner

 Most of us have our favorite spots. Some feel at complete ease at some little backstreet café or a tea shop or cinema. I like my little corner in the small garden. To me it’s a seat of spirituality’s sovereign comforts. It’s shaded with a pair of parijat and bhelpatra trees sharing the space with magnanimously consensual smiles of brotherhood and friendship. They are small trees but sufficient to shade a little corner for a village writer. There are hibiscus, marigolds and sadabahars around. I sit there in the morning to steal some momentous reflections and cultivate some healthy perspectives about life. Both these are holy trees in Hindu mythology. Their shade above feels like spirituality canvassed over my conscience. This is the corner where I feel oodles of gratitude to the almighty. This is where I’m fully convinced that in our lack of thanklessness to God, we forget sores of things He’s worked out in our favor, which get masked by the common visible factors of our misery.

The tailorbird couple objects very forcefully but now I’m used to their non-stop abuses and take it as sort of background choir to my solitude. The sadabahar in the crack, my favorite little flower, is withering. I’m afraid it may die. If it holds for another fortnight then the monsoons may revive it.

Mother nature seems to know when to release the chokehold on our throat. Just when June turned almost unbearable, the western disturbances brought clouds and brief thundershowers got the temperature down helping us survive the heat. Five days of cloudy skies and life is back on the track. Jungle geranium’s bulbous assortment of tiny clusters of flowers has added some vibrancy to the heat-beaten soft pink. The Mexican petunias have soft-purple bell flowers under the shade. The sadabahars have grabbed the opportunity to add luster to their light purple flowers. The sun-burnt roses have full smile of lush red blooms around them. Jasmine’s little white flowers spray their fragrance in full spirits. It counts as a huge transformation, a wondrous resurgence, just in a matter of five days. I see it written with an unselfish flair on the flowers with a preciously subtle message.

Resetting, recovery and rejuvenation come far more naturally than we think. We just have to hold on till the favorable turn of winds.

A love-struck hoopoe is giving prolonged bursts of oop-oop-oop for the past few days. Let’s hope he finds a perfect lady love. The male koel is always sweet in its love-calls unlike the shaky female who gives tumultuous, undulating notes. These are but the seductively vibrating notes that drive the restfulness of the male koel’s sweet notes above the virile stirrings of subsurface male passion. The peacocks have pitched up their hooting frequency anticipating monsoons. Just with a few pre-monsoon showers there are numerous baby frogs. Once the monsoon arrives I think they will take over the entire village. 

The 'hanted' house

 The one-time sleepy nearby town that I remember as one busy market street surrounded by lower middle class households is now almost an adolescent city. A little world so big with its sleepy attraction; bountiful providences of urbanism now kissing earth and the land value that was once measured in acres is now done in yards. A protuberant belly of possibilities. Obscenely bulging, modernist pathologies greedily feasting upon the sublimating humility of free lands with their tiny corners of untamed wilderness. There are industrial parks and zones coming around as this part of the Delhi NCR gets its turn to become congested, industrialized and polluted. The urban lark spreading its wings with rigidly designed viewpoint.

They now have a funfair also on the ground where once Ramleela used to be staged. A lovely, twinkling, sparkling constellation of consumerism. The advertisement fliers and pamphlets announce Ferris wheel, handicraft bazaar, dance and singing competitions, stage shows, shopping bonanzas, camel ride and hanted house. Yes, you read it right it’s ‘hanted house’. Probably they mean haunted house and the poor ‘u’ is left to woo the art of non-being.

The group of boys in the neighborhood, who spend most of their time in the streets, have come really ‘hanted’ from the fair. They have toy bugles and horns of multitudinous pitch, notes and frequencies. The musical toys share a magical chemistry with their restless enthusiasm for fun and frolics. They are now giving the best of their lungpower to the toy musicals ranging from the shrillest, which can drill a hole in your brain, to the loudest that can shred one’s eardrum to pieces. It sounds like war music. I deem it fit to stop reading and make the most of the music. I try to choreograph a few steps to go along the angry music. Soon I realize that I’m too amateur to do full justice to this playful ruckus and din. A full lunatic may do something about it. Half-lunatics like yours truly, with his still considerate discretion, stand no chance at all. 

The cycling days

 Childhood has a tendency to have a breezy swipe over all miseries and disadvantages born of limited circumstances. In our childhood, there was no variety in cycle models. Those were big, bulky, rotund Atlas and Hero cycles made for tough elders to carry loads over the dirt tracks. So how would little children with little legs learn cycling? That was the question. The kids of today carry a big advantage in having tiny cycles with supporters that train them into the art even before they realize that they have been learning cycling. When we were growing up it was the same cycle for a centurion and a little kid. It was the same cycle that carried fodder bales and newly wed brides. The very same cycle to go on love errands and carry out devious designs.

We would whisk away big, rusted, age-old cycles at great risk of severe punishment. It was an item of luxury at the village level. Almost possessed the same status as a medium range SUV does these days. So you can evaluate its importance. The saddle would reach almost to our head level. So we learnt cycling in kenchi (scissor) style. A master art of convenience, equipped with all the unconventional over-ridings. The little rider would get into the triangular frame under the bar and take his leg across for the other pedal, hold the handle with one hand and cling to the saddle with the other for support. Others would push and prod from all angles possible to maintain the balance; almost a sight like ants clinging to a big grain. The bicycle would then tumble and bury a few children with the rider trapped in.

It would then, with the passage of time and enhancement of skills, graduate to the bar style—swinging the hips down on both sides while paddling to meet the length and the bum staying in air over the bar because sitting on the saddle would find the riding toes several inches above the pedals. It would give a serpentine trajectory because each push down on either side would see the handle being tilted in that direction. It was a very jerky and effort-taking style especially when you had a pillion rider behind you. That would require a big effort to maintain the balance.

I remember an episode when I had graduated to the bar style as a thin thirteen or fourteen years old. Perched on the carrier at the back my chubbily cute friend sang bawdy Haryanvi raginis as I took the lurching behemoth on the pot-holed district road passing by the village. Those were the days when you were lucky enough to have a clear road for many minutes at a stretch. The traffic was sparse and we went almost unchecked on our voracious exploration of the countryside.

It was a fine day and the road all clear for me to heave Grandfather’s big old bicycle. A few hundred meters ahead I saw a peasant woman going by the side of the road. And I panicked that I may hit her. There wasn’t anything coming from either side; the entire road to my service. I lost control over the direction. The bicycle seemed to go of its own volition. It was a logjam of contradictory thoughts across my boyish nerves. The big bicycle went relentlessly at full throttle, as if magnetically attracted to her. It went directly darting into her and with a bang it bashed into her broad peasant woman’s behind. All three of us rolled pell-mell. Boyhood gives you enough agility to jump to your feet quickly. Before she could recover from the shock and give a rippling outburst, we were running away into the shrubberies.

She was a huge farming woman with an ox-like torso. And she kept thundering threats and abusive words brandishing her sickle at us. She sat on the fallen bicycle for a good half hour waiting for us to arrive and twist our ears and give a few hard hits at our back. But we were wiser for that; with all the time at our disposal. We simply sat at a safe distance patiently listening to her lamenting vocals and incessant burst of hot temper. She but had lots of work to do in the fields, so left after raising a big storm of threats and foul words.

As village boys we were short on resources but long on ingenuity to draw fun games out of rudimentary things. There was another fun game that we frequently engaged in. We would take turns to roll into a circle to fit inside the hollow of a big discarded tyre and roll the cargo down a slope. A group of stronger boys waited down the slope to operate as the brakes for the rudimentary machine.  

The adventures of an ant

 It’s an attractive green glucose packet. Its mere sight leaves a cool lemon flavor in your mouth in this heat. It’s put at a safe place high on another container, far in the recesses of the house. But I should not have forgotten that there are adventurous big ants who prefer to follow their dulcet dreams, take risk and walk for ant-miles, cross ant-mountains, wade through ant-rivers, crawl through the household forest, evade the stomping human feet and reach home to hit gold. Just like the gold hunters went ahead on a risky gold trail.

This was a big black carpenter ant. Drunk on the fountain of youth, wasting life on a tree in the crowded nest reeking with its mundane poor world didn’t match the scale of its dreams. So there it set out on a special mission with glorious grit and gumption. It crawled on a new trail, crawled for hours or maybe days, climbed up the shelves and sneaked through the packet’s double doors to land up in the uniquely priceless paradise of white lemon-flavored glucose. The pack is half empty. It thus cannot crawl up the huge slippery walls. It’s very difficult to crawl back after a point.

Drenched with perspiration and scorched with heat, I opened the lid to find the robust thief stranded inside. The thief was retrieved with the help of a spoon and was really happy to get back to the garden. There it went with its tales of lemon-flavored glucose heaven.

There are some who follow the trail. A smaller one, equipped with its teenager’s nonchalance, successfully elbowed its way on the trail. The pioneer must have left some landmarks to notify a fresh new route. I found this little one deep inside its glucose heaven. After that there wasn’t any more on the trail. Maybe the word spread that it’s a death trap. Or maybe the saved ones told horrible stories of the far off place to scare anyone from following the trail. I hope the rest of them would treat these two as toweringly enlightened beings, full of profound profundities, on account of their tales of far off places. Maybe such adventurous escapades give rise to the proverbial fairy and demon tales of the ant world. Or maybe they turn successful travel writers presenting their crooning travelogues to the common audience. 

The lucky slug

 The slug, a kind of shell-less snail found in damp corners in gardens and wet places, has set out on a long journey. It’s a few meters voyage from one flower bed to another. But in slug-world terms it’s equal to miles for a human being. It has a right to set out on a long journey in the evening and reach home by night. Its path but lies across the main walkway in the garden. Walk carefully fella, you have a responsibility to avoid crushing a slug on its path.

There is a thing called luck. The slug hits a jackpot, gets airlifted on a dry guava leaf and is safely placed at the destination. It takes a few seconds. It would have taken almost two hours to do the same at its pace, if it had escaped getting crushed on the way, the chances for it being rather slim. The bed where the slug has arrived has some weeds and I start pulling them out. A tailorbird finds it as violation of its property and sets out on abusive tik-tikking rhetoric, a pitiless pouring of sharp words. It considers the yard as its house; exactly similar to my feeling that it’s my place. Both are almost the same feelings at their own hierarchy of existence.

A peacock looks expectantly from a neighboring roof. I get a chapatti and invite him in the yard for some evening snack. It lands heavily. I throw tiny chapatti pieces in front of him. It’s hungry and eats with caution. It cannot trust me completely. But this much trust is sufficient that he has come to the garden to eat at least. 

A rat that struck gold

 The rat family, in its little hole, had hit gold. With a little bit of more luck they would have become the wealthiest rat family. It was a quirky chain of events that drew the lot in their favor. A woman, in Mumbai, was on her way to mortgage her 100 grams of gold with a bank. She had some food packet also with her. Out of a feeling of charity she thought of feeding some beggars. But by mistake she ended up making a far bigger charity than she ever intended. She gave the jewellery parcel to the beggars instead of the food packet. The beggars would hardly believe their luck and taking it to be cheap fake jewellery and trinkets they threw the packet into the dustbin. That is where the enterprising rat, on its exploring mousy renditions, realizing the throw-away item’s real worth, dragged it into their portion of the gutter. The police but tracked the sequence of events through CCTV footage and the gold packet was retrieved. The rats must have been very sad over losing their windfall so soon. And the beggar who threw away the gold must have felt that his heart is like the hardest of granite to throw away something after which the entire planet is running madly. Well, the ironies of fate, nothing else. The fate has soaring configurations with the throw of its dice. Countless probabilities unfold ranging from colossal ruins to most extravagant gains.

The pregnant sparrow and her friends

 After the fiery spell that baked everything to a hard crust some raindrops fell overnight. All seem very happy with the brief shower in the dark. The birds have a spring in their wings and chirp lovelier songs. A few sparrows after darting around with scurrying spirits now decide to relax on the one-square feet surface provided by the railing column on the terrace. They are not sitting on their paws; rather they are sitting flat on their tummies in complete relaxation. One of them looks majestically serene. I believe it might be a pregnant sparrow because this kind of regal mien is bestowed by motherhood only. She looks as if she is their queen. One of them is perched as a sentry on the railing and is looking around in case some cat—pouncing upon a mere, mute moment to turn it into an opportunity—turns the relaxation platform into her breakfast table.

But it never was a world where all can be happy. The very same rumbling of joy for someone is tragic thunderclap for someone else. It was a very bad night for the babbler and the tailorbird couples who have nests in the parijat tree. A cat seems to have crawled up almost fourteen feet where the babbler couple had built its nest. The glossy blue shells of the eggs are now littered in the flowerbed below. It must have been a very diligent cat in its hunting because it chucked out even the little nest of the tailorbirds. The babblers have been surprisingly stoic about their loss. They haven’t raised too much ruckus. The little tailorbirds on the other hand have gone crazy over losing their little ones. They have been heartfully abusing any cat they see since morning.

Lonely in an angry world

 It’s an angrier world than ever. A sleepy, peaceful town in Himalayan foothills loses its peace. A Muslim man and a Hindu man are caught fleecing a 14-year-old girl. There are people who are eager to get into the circle of power and authority. There are so many self-styled keepers of morality and religion these days. They are always looking for reasons to stroke fire and hate. So, one half of the crime is selectively picked up by the Hindu rightists, and it becomes a case of love jihad. The other half, the Hindu part of the crime, is ignored. There are forty Muslim families in a population of 8,000 in the once peaceful town. With the honor of Hindu women and girls at stake, the mobs go on rampage and the helpless minority families who had honestly worked for decades to setup home and hearth run away fearing dangerous consequences. I’m not passing any comments on this; just presenting the facts as it happened, leaving you guys to think over it. Is breeding a hate culture acceptable in santana dharma? But the keepers of religion of all types have nothing else than hate to ignite the hearts of their followers.

Then there is this powerful politician. He can molest, harass, intimidate and stalk the female wrestlers. And still go unarrested! The investigating agencies did their best to dilute the charges against him. But the evidence was so glaring that even despite using all machinations they couldn’t give him a clean chit. All stand exposed. Now, a very mild, almost harmless, chargesheet has been filed. That would save him from jail for sure. But everyone can see it. All stand exposed. Truth is naked. And people understand and they will make their choice.

Standing among all these negative shades, I sometimes feel so helpless. It seems ‘might is right’ show going around with full force. But then the age-old poet in me puts his frail, assuring hand on my shoulder to convince me that art is the way out of darkness’ sway. ‘The soft butter knife of love will one day cut across the stony boundaries of nationality, religion, caste, class and creed. Hail all the artists and yourself!’ he tries to assuage my wounds and injuries.

Well, I know and feel that even the nudity of a classic sculpture is far better than the most decent of modern attire. That’s aesthetics: a stale and presumably happening heritage, a glorified irrelevance, an antiquated charm to create foggy, forgetful moments; the bridal finery of heart and swan-like gait of emotions. But does that change the things on the surface, at the practical level, where grotesque reality is forged by the powerful and the strong as per their whims and fancies?

Out of the depressive folds of big questions of whats and whys, finally the only relevant little question, the question about my own self seems manageable. What am I? My restless mind asks. And something beyond what I consider myself to be, but still an inalienable part of me, replies, ‘A tiny bubble of air, a breath, a cycle of inhalation and exhalation.’

I die every time I exhale. I merge with the unbounded, free air. I take birth every time I inhale. Little bit of air then fuels this illusion of body and its organisms. I keep dying and getting born in a sequence. The duality stands as long as the illusion of this sequence of birth and death follows and guides our sense perception. But the moment they coexist, dying and taking birth, side by side, dying and getting born simultaneously, in and out, out and in turn the same. Then you feel that you just are a ‘being’ beyond all illusionary ‘becoming’. A pulse, a rhythm, a reverberation, a drop in water, a molecule in air, a speck in dirt, a fragment in ether...something and everything at the same time. And most probably ‘nothing’ at all as the perception in higher dimension seems to indicate.