The revolutionaries of free soul

 

I think gypsies have been the real revolutionaries. They are the gutsy, untethered, itinerant, wind-led horses. A layered palette of defiance, dignity and romantic wildness, they have it in them to repel any comforting, collective cauterizing stamp of religion, race, ethnicity, nationality, locality or specific residence.

At great cost—which collective comfort zones provide—they have resisted the normal safe escape route of accepting a casting mould to become a civilized social product. The barefooted, borderless, inassimilable, irrepressible life enjoyed beyond fences. 

Tasting freedom almost like daily bread; their paths defying the urge to harden into roads; belonging nowhere; feeling at home everywhere; carrying joy in their exiled self; ever revolting against fixed addresses. The exilically roaming free-borns have been paying big price for their uncontained culture. Yet the settlers’ derision just sharpens their dignity.   

It’s a high-degree freedom—though coming at the price of social stigmas, denigration, ostracization and exploitation. But their vibrant off-beat colors are the epitome of an exotically un-established wandering tradition. As children of the wind, they embrace the horizon, not a particular shelter and roam on a broad platform surrounding the lean and scraggy linearity of the settlers’ way of life.

They have stoutly resisted the barbaric incursion of civilization into their tribe. They are like an unknown nihilist saying ‘yes’ to an exclusive yet elusive pattern of life.

Civilization—the staunch basher with its boring chameleon colors—has been feigning false victory by condemning their freedom as uncivilized foraying.

Against the exquisitely fine-proportioned façade of the world of the settlers, the gypsies roam with their wild lore. The settlers have a fenceless fury; the gypsies have untamed peace.

They are splendidly visualized elusive fragrance of mother nature. With their own lousy immediacy, they pass the settlements wrapped in their civilizational woes. They just pass with an exemplary emphasis of free will.

The desolate, all bleak settled world full of tense climax and taut excitement. Gypsyism, the unconditionally blooming rosebud tenderly curling around the settled world clogged with overflowing distortions.

The homeless tribes move with sweetly savoring perseverance by the side alleys avoiding the world gloomily radiating turbulence in all directions. Their undulating resonance has not allowed them to be caught in time’s creaky cobwebs as they break its scheduling net with weighty as well as soft silence.

These are spontaneous shuffling strokes, comically cute, hilariously exuberant, amorously amusing and bedazzingly idiosyncratic. A formless pulse smartly negotiating the stormy, mercurial forces. Pictorial and panoramic. A dynamic dimension having delicate brilliance. An exotic adventure. Radiantly rejoicing, dismissing the rewards of formal dignity. A kinetic metaphor for the eternal muse of the first cause, the primal fabricator of this worldliness.

The civilized world meanwhile watches in dissonance and desperation, all jumpy and cranky, shouting moralistic monologues. The gypsies just move with burgeoning exuberance and delicious drowsiness.

The sage

 

He was not friendly with alphabets and numbers. But the free-flowing shapes and colors of life seemed very friendly and familiar to him.

He was in love with the book of life, an avid scholar of it. Enormously elaborate was his understanding of life. Like a curious child he pursued and played with the invisible, trackless toys of mother existence.

No fallacious intercession by the razor-sharp logic and reasoning honed by books.

The spellbinding balance in his approach!

Friendly with the brisk gaiety of free-flowing laws of nature.

Magnificent profusion of wisdom naturally downloading into his system.

And he absorbing all of it like a teen in the healthy throes of lustrous adolescence.

Soft, pliable self untouched by the fiery glint and fierce possessiveness of borrowed knowledge. A solidly sculpted self. A new-risen tapestry in the infinite fabric of cosmos. A softly sparkling interlude rhythmically gleaming in the dark ignorance of customized knowledge. A richly mellowed self. A soft bloom looking at everything with an enigmatic clarity.

Although unlettered he looked a natural scholar, a very wise man who knew and understood things human and natural which most of the educated people would miss.

He proved in his little capacity—that one can learn the fundamentals of life and living in the open rolling vineyards of nature. And that there are always less known colors of life which are beyond the reach of even the wildest guesswork churned out by an educated mind.

A romantic balladeer he bucked the trend that only books and degrees show you truth, make you wise, prepare you for the survival fight on earth.

Primed to be sinners

 

Ingenious ways of killing, not to give death but make life so difficult with pain and torture that even death seems salvation, a favor if someone takes mercy and ends the torture, life itself.

Death approaching so slowly, with painstaking bits, as to make it maid of honor. The tortured body dying with urge to embrace it.

Life dysfunctional, the only function left—to cease to exist.

That’s the benchmark of human cruelty. Not of killing; but of making life so painful as to make death a reward, a favor; of turning it reverse—making one anti-life, the survival instinct feeling like a demon, the worst enemy one can have.

All this is clearly written in the open book full of petrified details of fossilized past. The book of bloodied history—visible-invisible wounds and cuts at individual, collective and institutional levels—chronicling mankind’s gravity-defying will to inflict pain at all costs in any situation.

The ugly ducklings ruling from the dark underbelly. The palace and seat of governance above glittering with polished protocols and illusionary facades.

The flimsy make-believe textures, tastes, complexity of flavors, tangy sauces, herb-spiced flavors, the roof-top parties, the apparent truth and beauty ruling the world. While in reality, ugliness and falsehood running the machine.

The dark gods of hypocrisy ruling like the utmost sovereign, ordering royal princes and father king to be murdered, usurping the crown, celebrating their memories, ordering a magnificent mausoleum for the murdered kin for offering prayers for the peace of their souls.

The foundation is cruelty; love is merely a duping façade.  

The burning kiln of lost love

 

In keeping with the great syncretic traditions of India, Ranjha (a Muslim) after being bashed and thrashed by Heer’s wards and taunted by merciless society became an ascetic—a Gorakhnath sanyasi.

The burning kiln of lost love, the golden billows of pain, firing him into high orbits of spirituality. His heart exiled from itself; his grief opted for shelter under the healing cover of saffron robes.

The tragic love-tale is much sung, but his ascetic journey is put hindermost in folklore. The very same worldly wheedling enunciating love in terms of what he gave, what he received. But truth is never straight like this give-take equation suggests. You will see it if you look a bit slantwise. And avoid the oft usual credulous cauterizing.

As a Hindu ascetic, maybe, he wasn’t lolling sullenly as the thrifty tongue might tempt you to believe. Maybe he crossed over the dark cave—exceedingly impenetrable to the strenuously accustomed masses peering from behind the grilled posts—and tasted the real honey of love as a much broader lover. Maybe he turned a flame that no longer required a wick; a heart that got widened and vast beyond a particular lovely face; a house that got emptied to let the sky pour in with all its glory; his tears distilled and sublimated into mystical chastity and divine clarity; a lover transformed into a peaceful witness; a spating river that broke the banks of bondage to become a sea; the ash of dead love cooling down to become prayers.

The arc from wounded to boundless love: walking away from his former tormented identity; the sweet desire of a lover for his beloved shed like it was burden on the soul; his loneliness distilled into stillness and listening; his wounds healing after learning tranquility; his possessive cravings transforming into easeful presence; his love no longer asking rewards or compensation for his suffering; sitting in silence and no longer asking for fruits of madly selfless love for a woman; his love collapsing inwards to bloom like a lotus in a muddy pond.

But he is portrayed merely as a crestfallen, ashen-hearted loser, moving hollowly and despondently, jeered and leered by the motley squawks of sadistic tormentors.

I think, with his odd escape—a gaping hole in his heart; his heart nailed to the image of his beloved, his desire bound to the pearl of his heart—he reached where not many so-called successful lovers would ever reach.

The old woman

 

Saturday, the day of Govardhan pilgrimage. We have ordered tea, to enjoy parathas prepared by our sister, around nine in the morning before starting to walk for the yatra.

An old woman stands nearby asking for ten rupees to fund a cup of tea for her. The unfailingly ingratiating tone.

Usually the alms seekers prefer currency notes, but they have to put it in the form of a request for food and tea. Money is needed by all in the world. Tea and food is available in plenty at langars organized by the people of faith at the holy town.

The old woman is clad in soiled saffron robes. She isn’t a beggar mendicant, that’s clearly visible; just someone seeing tough days who has taken refuge in the religious stream flowing through the place; someone in an encasement of adversities, the wrong hand of destiny using knives, scalpels and needles in its kitty to force an un-required surgery.

We have a few words with her, kind words, so needed in this increasingly mechanical world. Followed by what slightly qualifies to be ironical bantering on our part. The word ‘family’ crops up followed by the word ‘children’. A flood of tears starts from her eyes. We request her to sit with us and have tea and paratha with us.

Pain is sitting like stone in many hearts. Just a word of sympathy and it melts. She sips tea, eats paratha, and shares her sad story. More tears. Copious. Outpouring of pain. But it helps a human being. The cutting icicles of pain flow out, giving a temporary respite.

She has three children—two sons and a daughter. Her husband died two decades ago. Her children have thrown her out. Dishoused. Her side of the story. However, if someone talks to them—I mean her children—they will surely give ample reasons justifying their tragic deed.

Beyond demonizing stereotypes at both ends, truth is always in the middle, or a little bit left or right to the centre. I accept the blame on her children’s behalf. However irritating the parents, or nagging in habits, or idiosyncratic in behavior, it’s the children’s duty to take care of them. No other option. There is absolutely no justification for throwing one’s parents out. 

The old-age homes won’t admit her. They maintain that she is too old for admittance, being 82 years old. It’s quite funny that one is deemed too old to be admitted to a vradh ashram. Maybe they admit reasonably fit elders who can do some productive work for them in lieu of humble boarding and lodging.

She stays in a tiny room taken on a monthly rent of 2000 rupees. Her entire month is spent in walking around seeking charity and alms to collect the room rent. Food is never a concern here. There is a beeline of the people of faith holding langars and offering fresh, hot food.

Stomach full with breakfast; heart emptied of a bit of stony pain. She smiles through tears. A beautiful motherly smile reminiscent of our mother as the sun casts bright yellow rays on this cold morning.

We take leave. I give her 500 rupees. She needs it but still says, ‘Beta you have already given me tea, food and 10 rupees…’

I gently press the note into her withered palm. Putting a gentle reassuring hand on her shoulder, I move on my path.

 

The dispossessed and disinherited

 

The ironsmith nomads, gade lohars, are finally seeking to settle down in a world that is fleeting faster than ever. In this jet-setting space age, their lurching, creaking carts are left too far behind in the race of excellence, progress, growth and development.

They sometimes stay for months at a time at a little square in our village. That adds cross-cultural colors to the society for a brief period of time.

Their women and girls are beautiful in raw, exotic ways. These days they allow the vagrants from the settled streets to flirt with them. Earlier they used to have a tart, befitting reply for the eve-teasers. But times have changed and the once-famed gypsy pride of their womenfolk has diluted to allow the so-called civilized settled men to take mischievous pot-shots at them.

The green glens of gypsyism are gone. The large swathes of free-roaming regime now cluttered in narrow unsurpassable paths. It’s a slight but subtle compromise to allow life to take a tolerable shape in a world where the distance between them and the rest of the world has increased with a dangerous speed. A little allowance to strum the chauvinistic heartstrings of the settled males. A harmless prick on their once rock solid pride and chastity.

Once, when they were staying in village, there was this lavish marriage of two gypsy girls in the camp. The bridegroom arrived in a bus with the marriage party from a Delhi suburb where they had fixed their old gypsy cart in a mud and brick structure by the pavement to finally dock the ship.

The marriage was an exciting affair. The nomadic girls danced well much to the delight of the boys and men in the village. The marriage feast was also great in taste and variety and the villagers enjoyed it heartily.

The villagers burped and smirked: ‘Ancient gold and silver which they keep hidden in the wooden frames of their sturdy carts!’

A lovely panoply of images of harmonious existence and blending of cultures.

The dera then moved ahead on it journey.

They arrived again after a couple of years. This time an old woman from the camp died during their stay at the village. But the villagers won’t allow the homeless dead to be cremated at the site of the settled people.

The gypsies sullenly moved on to cremate their dead at a place where nobody would raise any objection.   

 

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.

The item seller

 

‘Item le lo, item le lo,’ the hawker’s voice rings in the village street. A group of adolescent boys would wink and share mischievous smiles.

The word ‘item’ stroking a pleasant fire of desire. A crazy curiosity foregrounding the looming unleashment of masculine desire. The excitement and curiosity about ‘those things’ beneath covers and clothing.

Among a group of village brats, just mentioning ‘chaddi-boddi’ would spread a layer of sexual excitement over the adolescent skins till 15 years back. The item seller arrived frequently then.

The item seller still comes sometimes but not as frequently as the old times. He was the sole to-go person for the poor women in the village during the times so conservative that even a female undergarment left for drying on a cloth line would start scandalous whispers.

The item seller carried a tin box on his cycle containing ‘items’. He just shouted the word ‘items’ without specifying what exactly included the list of items.

He would be subtly, almost secretively, called by the women from the poor localities in the village—they did it in groups to muster up courage—who circled the open tin box and ‘items’ would see the light of the day. Finally.

Sisterhood held in coherence for a circled moment. An interconnectedness of contextual issues. Chastity well preserved from the moral-policing air.

And the magical box would open in the safe circle. Cheapest bright colored female undergarments, trinkets, lipstick, nail polish, powder, lace, bindi, scent vials, perfumes, mascara, make-up kits, sindoor, henna, looking glass, combs. And more.

The girl things, in their cheapest, gaudy avatar. The little box having the big secretive world of feminine ‘matters’ and ‘things’.

And some adolescent brat would crawl up to a nearby roof and secretively peep over the parapet to find out which woman or girl bought what colored chaddi-boddi.

The transgressor would then start a long trail of suggestive, lewd wisecracks. The ubiquitous coat of street-urchin colors. The word would then spread around the village.

The stinging metallic bees of death and destruction

 

The drones came and changed the war. They are more effective than fighter jets and ballistic missiles. A cost-effective mechanical killing by coordinates. Safe sustainable murders measured in pixels. Distance from the war fronts is no longer a measure of safety. Death is delivered remotely. An annihilative silence before sudden erasure, bodies falling, screens going dark.

Death no longer a tragic, intimate, bloody reality. It’s something remote, algorithmic, unblinking, surgical, clinical. Even death disembodied from its evil but still human game of providing chance at equal footing to the combatants, for blood at both ends, for casting the dice for either a win or loss. It’s completely bloodless at one end, the end that holds the cursor and clicks a command from a remote cozy coffee-tabled safe cocoon.  

When low on battery, having failed to attack a military target, the bloodless vultures can stealthily wait and then suddenly take off and attack some civilian target who happens to be near around—some jogger, cyclist, a couple in love or a car full of innocent civilians. Target locked autonomously by the mechanical agent of death, the machine-led relentless predatory prowl and then the precision kill.

Russia is honing the art of drone warfare: the dehumanized, mechanically calculated, cold, inhuman sky-borne violence. The drones smirk like gods without heartbeats. The killers who never blink an eye before slaughtering an innocent life. Death outsourced to these darkly buzzing angels in the sky.

Recently Israel used a bird drone to eliminate a Hezbollah leader in Lebanon. Soon we will have fly drones, followed by mosquito drones and still more mini drones, micro drones, to enter the next level of taking the frontlines to streets, courtyards, small alleys and bedrooms.

We have great capacity to manifest violence in myriad ways. A predilection to disarray, disorder and chaos. We are steeped in the tradition of violence.

Given the digital footprint, each global citizen can be scanned, surveyed, analyzed, condemned and punished by using these micro-drones without the sufferer realizing how and why did it happen.

A new kind of violence and punishment. From sporadic vicissitudes, war will turn an eternal reality. The air humming, buzzing with the underpinnings of some lethal machine barely visible to the naked human eyes.

War reduced to cursor’s movement. Fingers which never touch blood can safely fly steel vultures in the sky to unleash a violence with no witnesses. Massacres would turn mere footage. Just footage.                  

 

Puzzled gods and confident humans

 

Sohan Lal appeared for the post of constable in Delhi police. His father, a retired subedar major in the army, got a fresh dose of faith in gods and goddesses as his son moved from the physical fitness tests to written examination to finally reach the interview stage.

The ex-soldier always ends his day with a few pegs of whiskey. With the prospects of his son becoming a policeman, under the pious gaze of the pictures of gods and goddesses which his recently awakened faith had adorned on the walls, his tongue turned all reverential for kind gods. The soldier seemed full of humility and truthfulness.

Then this stream of faith and love stopped suddenly. His son failed to qualify the interview. The offended soldier got into the war mode against the heartless gods and goddesses. Altercation and verbal skirmishes to begin with.

Then the cask got lighter than normal. More alcohol in his system, the girth and certitude of faith went down the gutters.

A trigger of untruth and antagonism. The evil hoodwinked. The snake of suspicion sneaked in. A volley of unmentionables. The gods dethroned—the grand-paternal patronizing look gone.

The soldier bore a long-suffering look. He over-drank his rebellious self and yelled at the pictures of the deities smirking at him from the walls.

The war started. He tore down the recently purchased pictures when the sun of faith was bright. Now it was dark and gloomy. The gods dethroned and relegated to thorny ground.

Tarty tonalities gobbled up legends. Faith dismantled. He put the pictures in the street and beat them with chappals.

The next year his son got selected. Someone joked, ‘Even gods need threats and beatings these days to bring them to their senses.’

But it’s good that his faith was restored. The fallen deities reclaimed their lost positions on the walls in their house.

Well, these are testing times for both gods and humans—hard days of mechanical give and take.

A par of huge hands

 

Manoj has massive hands which could have made him a great boxer had he been serious about it. He is a farmer, outspoken and very extrovert about his propensity for speaking on the side of justice. As a result, he is found to be engaged in regular social skirmishes, brawls and quarrels. 

A few times his hand also comes into action. But mostly verbal fights with a threat of putting his huge hand ‘there’ off balances the opponents. They chicken out trippingly.

He has this habit of threatening to put his hand in the enemy’s bum, spiritedly gesticulating and brandishing the extra-sized hands.

I’m not saying that this threat is ethically lasting but it wins him big brawny points. This oft-repeated powerful self-assertion has made the gesture of hand and its verbal accompaniment literally a copyrighted act to him.

There is a teeny bop audience that looks forward to him in the craft of feigned punching and thrusting his big hands ‘there’.

In any case, most of the opponents are tweety featherheads and puny tricksters, so they take to their heels at the mere mention of his big hand going ‘there’.

In the contiguous corridors of local folklore, his tongue and hand carry a significant weight. Someone joked that the cattle and buffaloes are lucky that he didn’t turn out to be a veterinary doctor. They, the veterinary doctors, usually put their hand ‘there’ to take out dung to make a diagnosis for cattle diseases.

Indeed it would have been quite difficult for the animals had he become a vet doctor, just like it would have been tough for the opponents in the boxing ring.

The lady with a manly grip on life

 

Bla Bla car pool with a woman and her daughter from Mathura to Sonipat.

We take an early morning bus from Sonipat to Mathura, complete Govardhan parikrma by two in the afternoon after starting at nine, and then seek the most feasible ways to return home.

The return journey is usually challenging because there is no direct bus to our place in the afternoon. We take multiple buses or car pools to reach Ballabhgarh—outside the real log-jammed traffic congestion in Delhi that might take hours—then take a metro train (with one changeover on the way) to reach Subzi Mandi, then some passenger train to Sonipat, then ride or drive back to our village in either our car or on bike parked at the railway station at our hometown. We get back around eleven at night.

But this time we are lucky to get a Bla Bla car pool to Sonipat. A direct car pool to our hometown is a rarity.

The car owner is a criminal lawyer from Kurukshetra practicing at the Punjab and Haryana High Court for the last two decades. A strong woman with manly attitude to take life head on. She means business. Short and simple. Her daughter had law entrance examination at Mathura so she published a ride for three people. The third passenger is a serviceman going home for Diwali vacations.

She drives her Ciaz car like a racing driver, continuous honking and flicking dipper with utmost urgency, clearing and changing lanes with gazelle agility. She is talkative and shares her story.

A confident woman she drives her car even to Bihar in pursuit of her cases. Her parents died early and she was raised by her relatives. She was an orphan and felt like one as well under the care of insensitive relatives.

Later, her supportive husband proved a great factor in her law practice. She now supports education of five orphan girls and helps innocent juveniles unjustifiably snared in the net of law.

She is grooming her daughter quite well. The girl, aged nineteen, is running a café and plans to join her mother as a criminal lawyer after completing her degree.

Her two boys are in school. But they aren’t interested in studies. They mean business and give their mother a logic that even after education one goes on to make money so what is the problem if they can make money without big degrees. She agrees with them to a great degree. They are already earning through stock brokerage and internet marketing. ‘They are already earning more than many PhDs. So I don’t believe in this talk about quality education in prestigious institutions,’ she makes her point.

She says great lawyers and big businesspersons are groomed by the book of practical life itself.

Well, the entire family has a big consensus on earning huge bucks of money. And what is wrong in that? It’s their right, just like anyone else. On top of it, they work very hard to earn honest money. More importantly, the lady lawyer says she has the conscience to help the needy through her legal knowledge. She even works extra sincerely when she is fighting the legal battle for someone whom she thinks to be innocent.

I wish her all the best in this fast journey about hard work and money. She is a successful lawyer, supportive mom, good conversationalist and a furious yet safe driver. She has chartered the specifics of life with firm-jawed determination.

I count it as the story of an educated, successful, confident, empowered woman.

The roots

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.