Romancing with food

 

Well, this episode is from the last Mathura journey. We are travelling in the early morning bus to the holy place. It’s quite dark at six in the morning. There is a little halt at Ballabhgarh to allow new passengers to board.

It’s also the time for some to relieve themselves almost inside the sheds of a makeshift vegetable market where there will be a buzzing market after an hour or so. Many passengers go and look around for a little space to squirt jets of extra water in the bladder onto the heaps of garbage lying in open just behind the empty vegetable market.

But the best use of time is effected by a passenger, a thickset man in late thirties. He also goes down and comes back with a disposable bowl full of piping hot gulab jamuns. He carries the air of an eager boy looking forward to an early extra-sweet breakfast. The cold, staid interior of the bus is sweetened to the core as the vapors from the heap of sweetmeats and his slightly embarrassed smile infuse the chilly air with love, harmony, peace, food, smile. 

The man appears a cute gentle giant. ‘Let this silly world get anxious about big things and get diabetes even with salty samosas. Here I’m enjoying my life in this little world with my gulab jamuns,’ he seems to exult.

He has a horse-like mane at the back of neck but his crop is thinning at the top.

Here he arrives with his little mound of hot shiny gulab jamuns and scans the seats for a suitable place to enjoy his early morning food. It turns a sweeter world with his sugary appearance.

A nice start of the day beginning with the worship of stomach to be followed by worshiping Radha-Krishna in spirituality-smitten Vrindavan. What a sweet man! An embarrassed smile conveying a simplicity lying in a big mound in this man who looks all of heart and hospitality.

From all angles, he looks a person who is not affected by everyday annoyances. A sweet man carrying robustly sculpted taste for sweetmeats. I would always welcome such sweetened souls rather than acrid thugs high on the steroids of power, wealth, influence and dominance.  

The romance of pilgrimage

 

Me and my brother love going for Govardhan pilgrimage during winters. The weather is good and walking on naked feet for 22-24 kilometers is great for mind, body and soul. Every step you take, every breath you inhale, every word you chant in devotion to Radha mai takes you to a higher dimension of evolution.

We start in our small car early in the morning at four-o’-clock, park it at Sonipat, catch the 4:40 bus to Mathura, deboard at Govardhan chauraha, take another bus to the pilgrimage town 22 kilometers away, have tea and take breakfast of home-cooked parathas prepared by our loving and kind elder sister, and start walking among the excited throng of devotees.

It’s relaxing to be part of a commonality, a generality, a healing collectivism of being Radha mata’s and Giriraj’s devotees. It melts the too heavily concentrated sense of individual identity wherein one’s own issues and problems feel too heavy and burdensome. No wonder one feels light as a part of this devotional herd. The people who would have otherwise sunk in the bog of loneliness feel light, connected to fellow humans, to a greater cause while walking on a pilgrimage with fellow devotees.  

The return journey is more exciting—changing buses, metro ride and finally a night train. It feels almost like an extension of the pilgrimage. It sometimes tests nerves but then gives very nice lessons in practicalities of life and the art of being realistic.

We try to go for the pilgrimage every weekend during the winters. This Saturday the bus to Mathura stands cancelled. The buses have been ordered to go and attend some political rally by the government.

We stand dejected. Just imagine getting up at three in the morning and then come rushing to take the bus to find it cancelled. But then we hear a conductor from a nearby booth harking a sweet invitation: ‘Hardwar-Hardwar-Hardwar!’

His words chill, thrill and trill in the chilly, foggy morning like an aesthetic waterfall.

The bus to Hardwar is ready to move. And so are we! We board the bus, reach Hardwar, take holy bath on the pious Har ki Paudi, ascend the little hill to have darshan of Mata Mansa Devi, enjoy the sweet-sour vibes of the narrow market street along the Ganges, take ride in the galloping spirituality of the pilgrimage town.

An exclusive experience: arresting, exquisite, strong and sumptuous. Just because we stayed open to faith, pilgrimage and joy.

We return at night with the same smile and satisfaction as we would have if we had gone to Mathura as planned.

A little cocktail revolution in the ordinary day of a commoner. This much all of us can manage.

Dear reader, always remember that sometimes mother existence has a different plan. We just need to be open to it. Many times, it turns out to be better than the one we had chalked out ourselves.  

 

The perfect wife

 

Rampal is a hardworking farmer. A submissive, uncomplaining man carrying a peculiar kind of long-suffering look. But there are traces of a kind of indefatigable spirit, a resourcefulness, a subtle versatility which is seen in hardworking people.

When he is busy in some work one can see a taskmasterly air around him. The reason is his bossy, nagging, overbearing, imperious, voluble, commanding wife. In the throes of strange restlessness, she is very exacting on the cool temperament of her farmer husband.

The meek, uncomplaining husband prefers working in the fields. But when there is nothing to work in the fields, his wife uses the resource with nice human resource management skills.

She is a highly querulous woman—speaks at least hundred words for his single word muttered under his breath. So when he is free from the farming duties, she has a list of all the pending repairs, modifications, amendments in anything ranging from masonry, carpentry, electricity, plumbing, cooking, kneading and much more that misses my mind at this moment.

He is very comfortable with the idea of learning something new under the command of his human resource manager wife. The proud hubby is always there to fulfill the plans of his wife with an open-chested maneuver.

The multi-skilled husband is busy in the year-long symphony of coy domesticities. With her hands-on matriarchy, she has groomed a jack-of-all-trades to plough their domestic cart.

A self-taught (wife-taught rather) multi-skilled husband, his case can be a notable discourse in feminist studies.

All said and done, he is indeed an unconventional icon in a critically patriarchal society.    

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.   

 

Linguistic mayhem

 

There are some cute Haryanvi versions of English words. The self-made dialect born of farming twistology wherein the unpolished, earthbound senses, fuelled by rawitude and pehalwan-pride, give hammer strikes at the sharp, cutting-edge linguistic blocks to make smooth, round pebbles which are easy to manage with rustic tongues.

Raw, earthy, playful, brimming with innocent swagger and unlettered wit, the soil-born spirit knows how to get the high-flying linguistic puzzles down and dusted and make a new product as per the rhythms of lowing cattle and screeching tractors.

No matter how chaotic things appear to an urban guy, the Haryanvi farmers will give the feeling that everything is perfectly arranged and there is no scope for further improvement. They have simple tongues, which know how to figure a way out of complex phonetics.

With a sudden surge of bravado and confidence, you may hear a farmer making a ‘Llounsement’ which stands for ‘Announcement’. Don’t jump out of your seat if you hear it at an airport coming out of the mouth of a well-dressed, educated appearing Haryanvi.

Take or Tek stands for heart attack. Many farmers have heart issues due to the traditional fatty diet, which turns out to be too much for the system in an era of far less work in the fields due to the mechanization of agriculture. Less laboring work and the same diet of doodh, dahi, makhan and ghee mean clogged arteries. So one hears this word many times in local parlance these days.

Konch is coach. One hears it many times because there are many wannabe Olympic gold medalists seeking coaches in various sports especially in kushti and boxing.

Staap is staff. You stand a reasonable chance of hearing it in state roadways buses. Some policeman would tell the conductor, who approaches him demanding ticket, that he is ‘staap’ and thus need not pay the bus fare.

Tractor is taktor or taktar. That’s bow the children grow up treating taktar to be god, the boisterous farm-wise super-vehicle to smoothly play rough with life.

These innocently twisted words carry lots of weight. Rustic tongues possess hilarious ingenuity to smoothen complex words like a mighty river smoothens pebbles and stones on its bed.

With much pride and rustic confidence, making a mockery of the authority of language, the farming community fabricates its unique vernacular ethos. The charming exaggeration of their attitude adds icing on the cake.  

The perilous churning of contrasting elements

 

These are strange, enervating, fuddled times.

Troublous pensiveness in the air.

Languidly palpitant sense of insecurity weaving puzzling spools of illusions.

Bayonet fighting among ideologies has left strange crossbreeds.

Communism has borrowed so heavily from capitalism as to leave the latter pauperized in ideological terms.

Democracy, on its part, has overblown itself so much that democrats need to turn autocrats to put the house in order.

Communism has to cast respectful glances in the capitalist corridors to find out exactly what it meant to do in the first place.

Capitalism has to lay down the golden mantle to seek some new relevance in the masses of grounded depravities among those where it could never reach and who in fact are the real drivers of its engine.

The left went so much to their left that they got scared to fall into an abyss and have to get to their right to regain their footing. They have to stop clearing the mossy tombstones of their founders, exulting internally and mournful outside, and draw new-age inspiration from much berated rightists.

The same goes for the rightists. They are the liberals of their end of extremity. They unbolt the same anger at the same enemy presented in different colors than the leftists.

Tariffs are the new torpedoes of war. They hover around undisguised. Diffidently now; with a potent force then.

Trump has started this new weapon of the new-age war, the war through torpedoes of tariffs. 

Swarms of drones are the new locusts. They seize the hitherto unseizable opportunity; conceive the inconceivable options to take war to the last nook corner into the civilian lanes and alleys. Targeting is more pinpointed, surgical and lethal. One particular person can be ant-picked from among the swarms of humans around.

The imperious desire to be more lethal.

Malevolence moving, humming pacifically. For the kill.

Evil-glowering of destruction and death.

No longer the bestial shouts of fighter jets. No vainglory of ballistic missiles. Just panting timbre of blades carrying the little voice of shaitan. Terror frozen in small civilian hearts.

Humanity with its somber, protracted sigh watching helplessly.

Ringing intonation of mischief taking a U-turn to retain childhood fancies through robotic warfare.

Artificial intelligence a pill for our collective stupidity and dementia. Over a period of time, the autonomic functions of human brain, which have equipped us to rule the planet, will fall out of practice, making us dulled poor masters of smart rich machines.

Robotic soldiers soon will be the elderly general’s childish computer games. Clicking here with a silly boy’s glee; killing thousands of kilometers away with the precision and seriousness of a deadly predator. 

Wild fires will be gone. You need forests for that. Right? So we will have more and more social media wildfires triggered by the weather elements of false narratives, fabricated data, rumors, made-up stories and juicy throng of lies. The spittle string of conceit showered on dunderheads.

The protracted sigh of truth and justice drowned in the liquidating timbre of dark-tongued devil.

We have the inherent streak of violence in our genes to tear flesh in wars. We can’t bear the torment of joy.

Ugliness easily outweighs loveliness.

Festering wounds cast a black magic spell and invite followers to get addicted to them. And they jog-trotting after it. Quizzically. Demonstratively.

Peace and joy will be left behind beckoning despondently. But there will be less flesh to tear and claw because of the mechanization of the human body. Still we will continue tearing each other through ideas, ideologies, business rivalries and ever-combating politics.

Entire earth is basically a big house that always carries undercurrents of violence, stratagems and cunning schemes to outpace the other—your neighbor, your irksome family member, the rival caste men, the rival ethnic people, the rival religion, the rival business, the rival continent, the rival hemisphere.

There is an undeniable, unsavory antipathy towards the other; willfully abhorrent and contemptible.

Existence on earth is defined by self-interest, rivalry and competition across all hierarchies.

Bonhomie is just a mournful conjecture. A way-worn adjutancy.

Humanity is betrothed to the dark woman of violence.

Even the spreaders of love for humanity—the spiritual and religious heads and their sects and institutions—are industrious rivals ingratiating each other in their unusual manners. They bawl and drawl to catch more and more followers. And to validate their brand of ‘love for humanity’ they will easily break the rival heads.

That’s the dilemma of being earthlings.

That’s how life has incidentally evolved on this little place.

That’s what life means to the Homo sapiens, the group of venturesome black head lice.

Love is a mirage and now even the mirage is getting naturally supplanted by hostility.

I sometimes wonder, what would happen if earth is someday challenged by some other form of life, from some far off planet in the cosmos, having a totally different meaning of life than we have here.

I mean suppose we have a confrontation with a technically superior but a form of life to whom cooperation and common interest (antipodal to our existence centered around rivalry, competition and self-interest) is the basic instinct that has factored their evolution.

Won’t we appear heathens to them? And they would, of course, try to mould it as per their own interpretation of life. However, I know that we will be very strong rivals even when pushed in a corner by a far more technically superior form of life.

The benefits of being a poet

 

Among the fraternity of writers, the poets stand the least chance of pushing their economic prospects with the help of their art. But recently the tag of being a ‘mere poet’ helped me economically.

There are situations where being perceived to be poor helps you save the costs in a project.

Poverty and poetry are synonymous. Sometimes this combination gives pleasure instead of the usual pain.

I went to avail the services of a senior advocate in the high court for my 21-year-old court case about my PCS appointment. He is a very successful lawyer. His house looks like a five-star hotel. I had a discussion with his junior.

When the issue of fees arrived, he went into his boss’ cabin. The groundwork had been done quite diligently by the time I entered the esteemed lawyer’s cabin.

I betook myself with loads of poetic translucence, which is actually poverty showcased for one’s advantage.

‘My staff has informed me that you are just a poet. Merely writing poem-shoems. So you get this huge discount. But please don’t tell anyone about it. We charge standard fees and if you tell others about the discount we are giving you, even they will come seeking the same by pretending to be poor like you. About you we are sure that you being a mere poet must be very hard on money,’ the renowned lawyer appeared full of compassion, sociable and amiable towards a failed poet.

Someone had warned me that he is a headstrong man. But thanks to my status of being a mere poet, I got almost 50 percent discount on his hefty fees. But ironically even after the hefty discount it was a big assault on my smallish pockets.

However, as you all know these are interesting times. We have started to pay for clean water, pure air and clean earth. So expecting justice without paying ample sum of money is mere wishful thinking. Without money a plan is simply a worthless exercise in the art of illusions.

 

The buffalo is bigger than the brain

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little gift

 

Safed aak (white madar or crown flower) is a shrub having lovely clusters of white flowers with lavender core. Officially named calotropis gigantean it’s a large shrub majorly found in climes on the drier side. According to Shiva Purana, Lord Shiva likes aak flowers, so the garland of aak flowers is offered to Shiva for peace, prosperity and social harmony. Further, its latex is used as arrow poison as well. The shrub has many medicinal uses also.

There is an aak shrub in front of our house. An old man sometimes arrives in front of our gate asking for flour. He is from a group of cattle herders from Rajasthan who roam around with their big herds of large-horned skinny cows. The cows belong to some rich landholder back in the home state. These are poor cattle keepers who work for the sahukar on a fixed salary, a paltry sum barely enough for two times bread and butter. They guide the herds through the increasingly thin spaces of wild growth and public pastures in the north Indian states.

This particular old man asks about the aak whenever he arrives on our doorstep. ‘I would take a sapling whenever I go back to my desh,’ he would say.

India is a land of myth, legends, faith and belief. Maybe the shrub holds some auspicious importance for their tribe back home. The old man has grace and gentility born of a positive acceptance of one’s old age.

This time when he came to ask for a little bowl of wheat flour, he told me that he will be going back to his desh on the occasion of Diwali and wants to take a sapling with him. I helped him in taking out a sapling by digging earth. It was a nice sight to see him walking slowly with his sapling and flour bag.

Let the world fight over big issues. He is happy with his aak sapling. It’s a kind of Diwali gift for his family in the desert state.

I pray that the sapling grows and blooms in front of his house. I imagine and feel ineffably soft whisper of ‘peace with life’ in his yard when the sapling blooms its first flower while the frivolous claimants of bigger greatness go hopping, skipping, grinding groaning, prancing and haranguing.

The somberly gleaming flame of the old man’s dream Diwali gift; the lewd blaze of hypocritical beings trying to assuage the sores on their soles born of endlessly bigger and bigger pursuits. It’s a world of extreme polarities after all.  

Meeting a red sand boa

 

A lovely mid-October evening. The sun setting relaxedly over the paddy fields ready for harvesting. A narrow asphalt road circuiting through farmlands connecting villages away from the state highway.

Traffic is sparse. It allows me a peaceful evening stroll. Glorious rays of the setting sun bathing my face. An empty dumper truck comes hurtling from behind. It thunders past raising dust. Then after going for 40-50 meters it takes a sharp turn, comes very near to jump into the agricultural fields by the side, but then regains its trajectory.

My first impulse is that the driver is drunk, which resulted in this risky jerk to the vehicle on the empty road. And I laugh sarcastically, imagining a drunk truck driver so early in the evening when even the sun hasn’t set yet. A drunk driver—we are so quick to form negative opinions and impressions. It would prove to be a wrong impression as I move on.

A snake is coiled a couple of feet into the road from the right side. I look with restrained animation. With his quick and kind awareness the truck driver saved the snake by taking a sharp turn, thus taking a risk on the narrow road—hardly wider than the truck’s width. Instead of a drunk driver, he proves to be a kind, aware, alert human being. I pray for him and his family for this act of kindness. As I come still nearer I see that the snake isn’t moving. But it’s completely unharmed. However, it doesn’t react with the usual panicked agility and scampering nervousness associated with snakes when a human is around.

It’s a red sand boa. The setting sun’s glorious rays shining on its coiled and composed majesty. As I stand just a couple of feet away, it slowly crawls back to the field from where it had come to cross the road to reach the other side. It enters the harvested field and lies still by the narrow field divider. I take a view of the nearby fields on this side. Empty fields, laborers busy in setting thatched huts for winter mushrooms. The other side has a couple of acres of dense growth, wilderness secured with reeds, grasses and bunch grass. It’s uncultivated public land not immediately under the risk of being cleared for some human-centric purpose.

The harmless slow-paced snake, which barely crawls like an earthworm in comparison to other snakes, is trying to reach that bushy lot. The winters are coming and that part being on the southern side will have plenty of sunshine and sufficient hiding space. So I know the snake will definitely try to cross the road again. But it will take a lot of time for it to crawl to safety to that side. And roads are full of careless drivers. Not everybody is as alert as this kind driver. Some even kill snakes knowingly if they see one crossing the road in front of them.

I really like this snake and my first instinct is to put it in a polythene bag and take it home. There is a myth that it’s very auspicious and billionaires pay up to 25 crore rupees to keep it at their homes. Even at my worst I won’t be greedy enough to sell an animal or reptile into captivity. But to be frank I had this instinctive reaction of keeping it at my home. Greed, to be sure. But then I laugh. Happy to be cured of temptation. Everything has been monetized by the mankind. With our new-fangled ideas, the mankind is delusively pursuing an unquenchable thirst, weightily and contemptuously. Aah amorous, elemental evilry!

I take a sad look at the endangered snake. Then I seek out a shisham tree’s branch and touch it softly with its end. It coils itself into a defensive posture. ‘Relax! Don’t worry! It’s Ok!’ I say. Lifting it by putting the branch’s end into its coil, I carry it safely to the dense wilderness on the other side and put it among a thick clump of grasses. Here it can safely pass the coming winter. I feel very happy about helping it to enter a safe zone. But the real hero in the little episode is the truck driver who saved this rare sand boa. Let him be blessed with peace and joy in life!

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.

Dirty talk in countryside

 

Two young Jat boys wrestling in the idle-fields of brash youthfulness with crude humor and rough words. A reprehensible upbraiding of the opponent, grotesquely shattering all civilized norms and disfiguring all etiquettes and civilities.

A plain disrobing of any sense of civility. Plain rascality, bottom up or down. Well curated ragtag metaphors of the god of idiocy.

The impossibly strictest sense of lewd humor. The youthful spirit brutishly bungling, hell bent upon exterminating each other’s honor.

A linguistic representation of some weirdly carnal wrath through stabbing humor.

But the word humor falls short in conveying the entire meaning of this vulgar jocularity.

Boy 1: ‘You and your clan can’t even tear a single pubic hair from my balls. And if you do, you can’t straighten it.’

Boy 2: ‘We will give such hard slaps to your father that he will become a mad monkey.’

(Now how does poor father enter the mud-slinging duel straight after the lancing attack flaunting the steely strength of pubic hair?)

Boy 1: ‘Only your mother will tell what powers he possesses after he rides her.’

Boy 2: ‘Did he ever ride your own mother?’

Boy 1: ‘Yes he did! That’s why I was born.’

Boy 2: ‘Who says he fathered you? Old Bhola rode your mother and then you were born.’

Boy 1: ‘My grandfather is the real father of your father. Ask your granny, who rode her better, my grandpa or yours.’  

I heard this vitriolic verbal duel as I passed by them. The words slaying and shattering the reputations of both clans to smithereens. The thuggish revelry slinging around and spinning webs of their words’ unforgetability. The red and raw mass of its effect turning me conscience-stricken for the sake of our farming community. There I moved away from the scene dominated by these groundbreakers like a recluse and a valueless part of the community of Jats.   

Well, the fate of the farming community of Haryana seems in dire straits. The linguistic vulgarity giving a clue to some mysterious discomfort with cultural ethos, an inherent streak and slitter of vulgarity and a peculiar disconcertment with civilizing forces.  

The outsider

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cunning paradox

 

In the lonely courtyard of being, where plain paper’s desolation listens for the first breath of meaning.

A purling, gnawing restlessness. A haunting mysteriousness. Insistent. Persistent. Rock solid with its uncompromising illusions.

The love-lotus in the life-lake trembles. Beatific, pampering, unfading. Claiming authentic affiliation with divinity, purity, piousness.

It sways, titillated by the waves of wicked, wild lust, as if desire itself were a dark mantra whispered by time. Seeking divinity in rag dolls. The curly headed cherub, carrying his train of lusty entreaties, striving to put life and excitement in her rag-dolled, impassive self.

From its quivering stem rise fruitless fantasies—visions so fragile they appear next to miraculous, vanishing even as they are born. These futuristic amalgamations of flesh and foresight drift like omens, silently heralding a controversy between instinct and illumination.

Notwithstanding humanely institutional interludes—schools, scriptures, ceremonies—man remains basically a beast, evil’s epitome disguised in scriptural eloquence. Mud and filth slinging from lusty skin hidden under striped jersey and quilted jacket. The pock-marked face hidden under a fleecing, lisping mask. Vapid smell doused under clouds of stabbing absurdity of deodorant and perfumes.

Beneath the polished rituals of virtue, there is a gruesome mushrooming of appetite, ancient and insatiable.

Even the aquiline educationist, hawk-eyed and ascetic, senses the unhealed rift: the goldsmith’s preciously precise way, coaxing perfection from fire and patience, and the ironsmith’s grossly wholesome way with metal, striking truth into shape through sweat and thunder.

Between these two rites, the human spirit is forged—half prayer, half wound—forever oscillating between what it dreams itself to be and what it cannot cease becoming.

Notes in the air

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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