A Busful of a Sky

Roop Lal is in his early thirties, comes from a village in Haryana, has graduation to his credit, belongs to the scheduled caste and thus the reserved category and hence should have been into a government job, but he isn’t because the famed political weapon of job reservation helps only those whose fathers and grandfathers have been lucky to get it. In a rare outburst of his otherwise genteel demeanour he did even lash out judgementally, ‘Why don’t they limit the reservation facility to just first generational claimants so that more and more poor dalit families get covered leaving out the rich kids of richer dalit parents who climbed the reservation ladder to give good education to their children’ But then it might do good to many poor dalit families, it however isn’t politically suitable to most of the parties in India. And also who cares about the opinion of a common man. India on a daily basis has trillions of such valid opinions. Only the politically effective ones survive. So his opinion having gone down a filthy drain, Roop Lal has hitched a job ride on the Delhi State Transport’s bus as an adhoc conductor, the mammoth public transport carrier in the national capital having decided to work as per the profiteering private sector by enrolling temporary workers on its payroll, on strict private sector rules of miserly payment counted on the basis of hours spent on the crowded bus floor. In this manner you escape the problem of overstaffed, nonperforming, overpaid, long-term parasitic employees and provide at least employment to a larger section of the society. Well, it seemed to be the only justification. Further, it is very convenient to delist and push out the temporary employees as the changing winds would require. 

 

Each morning he arrives in Delhi, travelling in the packed passenger trains full of cackling commuters, who travel on the same path, day after day, months after months, years after years, playing the same game of cards, discussing the same politics till some member of the group goes missing either on account of retirement, or when somebody dies. He also has been accepted by one such group of card-gamesters who put tiny sums on stake, grab the same seats in a corner in the same compartment. So lost in the dead serious game of cards he reaches Delhi. Salutes Delhi! This is his overpowering emotion. He likes Delhi because it gives him bread and butter otherwise his nagging wife would have definitely eaten his soul. She is too much of a fee-fawing feminine version of a monster, and he a wee bit gentle to weather the storm on a daily basis, so he feels more than obliged to the DTC and Delhi that these keep him busy in their clattering noise far away from his ranting, rampaging wife.

The Delhi around him is two-eyed. Two cosmically bulging eyes having different visions, different dreams, different destinations. One of its pan-shots swankily zooms on the glizz-and-glamour of the resurgent India. Whether it is the right-eye pan-shot or the left-eye, it is not possible to tell. The eye's flash-shot pervasively covers the classic tragedies spread out in black and white. It’s a grizzled, murky screen having classic comedies and tragedies spinning, whirring around the same axis. It’s the first Monday in the second week of December, the festival of Muhharram to be precise, and another chilly fresh day for Roop Lal who has a reason to smile today because his wife just completed weaving the woollen jersey that she had been working upon for almost couple of months during her non-ranting time. So in lieu of so many of his sweetmeats that he regularly fetched for her as a bribe to stop her mouth from ranting for some time and relish the sugary melt in her mouth. He is looking a bit smarter in his black and white patterned woollen jersey.

Many offices are closed on account of the Muhharram. It means a bit better luck for him for he can accidently drop some coin on the DTC bus floor and still left with a realistic chance of retrieving it. At least he could see through a radius of few feet around him. Great solace. The air too is not stuffed with guffaws let out by infected throats and lungs, disordered stomachs, cheap scents and Deodorants from Palika Bazaar and above all the usual individual and collective frustrations. When the manufacturer of these low-floored and environmentally friendly buses offered them to the DTC (along with the alleged ‘kickbacks per piece to the Sheila Dixit government’--the prevalent rumour embalinng truth, falsehood, judgement and frustrated opinions in the jib and jibe of meaningless, ineffective talk) the real cost of the vehicle was just meant to carry this type of load. The festival load. The holiday load. The once-in-a-time-load when people do not travel on account of holidays or some other emergency.

On this observable stage a 14-year-old man-kid jumbles into the finally justified interiors of the poor green line bus. Boy he is a man rather! Carries a pole that would tower above the poor bus if its vertical angularity is completed. He is holding it at an angle, slanted, his small hands manoeuvring it smartly and the camel is safely in the room, the roomful of a bus. The pole is the dancing axis of so many types of cheapest kid toys as you might say can be afforded by the childhood mushrooming in slums. All fellow-riders watch him in half amuse and half irritation. A few lampoons even laughed at the free show. Anyways, coming back to this character valiantly playing its part in the grizzly black and white ever-spooling movie. He rushes in after killing all the apprehensions and objections of the bus conductor about the pole falling and the kids-stuff getting a playground on their heads. Roop Lal’s protest is too feeble, the boy’s resolve to cling onto the footholds in Delhi is too strong. Even their voices have starkly different pitches: the bus conductor speaks in slow-paced affably roughened notes; the boy-cum-manly-resolved passenger has a sabre-rattling tone. Left with no option, Roop Lal now fights for his bus-conducting right of asking for the ticket money.

Even here he has to fight a battle. It’s a bargain. The boy finally shows him a 10 rupee bill. Where do you go, tell me first, Room Lal tries to be tarter. The boy-entrepreneur is not sure, how can he be, his business might take him into any situation at any place. He doesn’t seem to have any destination in mind as well. His days in Delhi hawking the poor provisions take him to nameless destinations, the squares, the crossings, the T-points, the streets, the sidewalks. A bus ticket but takes one to a particular destination. The boy is thinking fast. He has to justify his bus-ride budget of 10 rupees. But the toy pole is too heavy, even more difficult to manage it within the confines of the bus. The effort is distracting him from being clever to dupe the conductor. Sensing it the conductor is regaining his lost confidence and finding law on his side is speaking even more sharply. The boy pretends to shuffle, and manage a stage show of fall-avoiding manoeuvres.

This self-earning-boy isn’t just a man in vocal resolve and glint in the eyes; he is the one in action as well. Roop Lal seems to paw this little mouse, and he the bullying cat, like the little mouse will plead for 10 rupees, so his voice now has even a bit of entertainment streak. The boy balances his load and himself against sudden brakes by the driver and without much effort takes out a 50 rupee bill from his pocket. He demands a DTC day-pass costing 40 rupees. Man-o-man! How much this kid earns to afford the pass? Anyways that is none of our concern like most of the Delhi things should not be. One fact is inescapable: the well-meant boy is well-prepared for the day. The way he has tied the muffler, the way his cheap jacket is buttoned up to the collar, the way the trousers well-fit his thin legs and the way well-cleaned shoes purchased from the road-side hawker, all these portend a good successful business plan. With his day-pass he is a legitimate passenger, throughout the day, in any green public transport to any destination. Possibly he has already spent almost the day’s profit in the bus ride, but that will keep him a legal bread earner for a day.

For the bus conductor the problems are never over even on a less-crowded holiday. One problem with the new DTC bus is that its door opens too invitingly with a welcoming whisper, as if it is specially inviting you for a joy-ride. Carried by the swift winds of one such invitation, an Adivasi family now raids the semi-occupied bus. The conductor baulks, 'Not without tickets you thieves!' 'Hutt you miser, we have money!' the black old lady draped in a big raggish blanket shouts. God knows how many of them there are! It is a collectively lampoonish unit cocking a snook at the organized hordes of Delhi. One monkey-like infant immediately grabs the hand-rails overhead and tries gymnastics. One of its hands busts the balloon tied at the upper end of the toy pole. Both its owner and the conductor shriek painfully. So many ragged kids carry their unsuspecting selves to the empty seats and dump the homeless spirit for a while. Their neighbours almost vomit. A slim woman carries a toddler on her shoulder, one infant in her lap and most probably another one inside her as the glossy black bulge of her abdomen shines from the short kurti she is wearing above the gracious folds of a dirty long skirt. It has become a thoroughfare. The conductor fights for tickets. They stand their positions, gibberishly, savagely. And where are they going? Whole of the NCR is their destination. Going nowhere, still everywhere. It is just a matter of holding onto the ride till the fight with the conductor acquires serious colours. They have a resolve to keep occupying the bus for as long as possible. Roop Lal has is duty-bound to either legitimately extort money out of their torn pockets, or throw them out. If the ticket-checking squad catches so many ticketless passengers, he might very easily lose his temporary job. He fails to draw even a penny out of their pocket, so he now prays that they disembark at the earliest and for that he has to keep his fight on, so continues he with all his tongue’s might, continue they riding almost deaf-eared. To bring him luck, they just dump themselves with the same teasing indecency like they had raided the bus and vanish from the scene. Roop Lal exhales out a stormy breath of relaxation.

The bus conductor looks at the boy. The boy smiles back. The boy entrepreneur now appears the most civilized and well mannered one. He goes to the boy and helps in adjusting the pole suitably so that his balloons are safe. He takes out a 10 rupee note from his leather bag of collection and gives it to the boy. He will have to reimburse these 10 rupees from his salary. The boy takes it more as a friendly gesture, and less as charity. He disembarks near a very crowded square, looks back at him with a faint smile, and vanishes in the jostling crowd. The bus moves on.

Life doesn’t Smile Back

Early winter mornings are fresh even in the most polluted and dirty places of the NCR. Heavily encumbered sectors in Noida do have their share of early-morning charm as these try to find out the order and symmetry meant for them in the master plans. In the industrial-cum-service-cum-slummed sectors one might get daunted by the defecating, exciting, commercial, crass and crying hullaballoo raising its hood against any voice of sanity and order.

The buildings are semi-daunting: a curious mix of residential-cum-commercial styles. You see a bit of house, a bit of manufacturing unit, a bit of service industry, a bit of business, a bit of exploitation, a bit of comfort, a bit of pain, a bit of life and a bit of death. It is a self-absorbed world, a cesspool, a whirling system drawing so many survival-lorn masses from the nooks and corners of India. They live identity-less here. The enterprise thrives here. The owner goes smirk in his big car. The labourers go pitifully, deeply shackled by the unending tasks and limitless responsibilities.  Many of them are losing the bodily and mental feeling of being a human; they act, feel and think like the rodents in the open gutters, their bits of the holy Ganges where they eat, drink and sleep at the very place where many others defecate and procreate. But then very near to these hell holes, just round the corner of the next street, you have plush glass-fronted offices, closing its air-conditioned interiors from the grisly, blackened and metallic world of manufacturing just in front across the dusty, potholed road. Within a radius of just half a kilometre you might even have a world-class swanky megamall and cheesy shopping centres, restaurants and multi-starred hotels. It’s a world beyond any notion of perfection, the best and the worst face to face, darkness and light mixed in a curious haze.  

She is walking with slow, struggling, almost painful steps. Just like the surroundings around her stand out with their teasing oddities, and she cannot avoid looking at these pinching realities however hard she might try to ignore and however tough her own situation might be, they, things, people, scenarios around her also cannot ignore her presence. They turn back to have a look at her. She carries a big looming attraction with her persona.

She passes a kid left alone in this uncaring world. Forgetting its own suffering and neglected self, the little boy creature looks at her, rather stares at her. A small sack on his back, the rag picker, dumps his burden and looks as she crosses him. He watches from behind. She is aware that she has drawn his curiosity. She looks back and gives a feeble smile that she can afford for this orphan. He does not smile back, getting conscious he turns his head. Maybe she has to smile differently now to make it look like a smile, she thinks.

She has had a moment of look into his eyes. He had manly eyes on a kid’s face. When you are left alone so early in your life to enjoy or suffer life on your own terms, you just become one of the thousands of flies fighting for space on shit and sweets with the same relish. You just know one side of life—survival, by any means and at whatever cost. And what does this survival produce: stunted, frail, sick, dehumanized, spiritless multitudes who just add to the census sheets of India. But they serve a purpose. They carry the shining tag of economic boom and growth on their frail shoulders. They survive by any means. That is their biggest achievement. She realises all this. Even she has to work, come whatever may. She has to reach office on time. She has decided to walk through this stinking short-cut from the metro station to her office. She needs to appear physically fitter so that they will stay positive about her after this long break. She needs a bit of walking, some exercise, to make her appear a productive part. The famed Indian corporate mechanically operates on give and take principle: you give your 100% in an unsparing competitive environment; it will give you survival crumbs.

She sees multiple females in the same body: The widow, the prostitute, the raped girl, the mad women (carrying the sex toy for so many frustrated and hungry souls). The hydra-headed creature begs, picks up rags, sells its diseased body, part time even operates a tea stall in front of its ghetto, tries to pick out the moments of the day. She herself is far better placed, she realises. She at least has one identity, however tough her situation might be. ‘Look at the ganji aurat,’ his soul almost dead, he sells the harbingers of cancer and there are many around him who ignore cancer warnings to buy those poisonous sashes carrying gutka and tobacco. All of them look at her, in the typical Indian way of staring at a woman. It is beyond lecherousness, they are watching a spectacle. She has no hair left, eaten by chemotherapy her beautiful locks of hair are gone. Her face has become a mask of terribly suffering expression. She is out of breath and each step is a struggle. Their glances pierce through her, it’s even worse than those lecherous glances thrown at her in her pre-cancer condition. She tries to ignore, but she can feel the burning red gazes piercing through her back, more painful than chemo rounds. She stops and comes back. Walks straight back to the tiny wooden stilted outlet. They become apprehensive and stand mute avoiding her look. She is looking straight into their eyes. She picks up a cigarette pack, points to the warning and shouts, ‘It’s cancer, haven’t you seen it, better to realise after having it.’ She leaves the shame-faced group behind and tries her level best to regain her composure. She knows she looks different, and will look complete stranger to her colleagues, who would address her by her name but their eyes will be looking at an unrecognisable stranger.  

She thus goes along a dead poor world that even cocks a snook at the great plans in the plan books for this great Delhi suburb, the pride of Uttar Pradesh, Noida. This group and many others like them, nameless, faceless, just settle down at any place among the industries, their tiny hovels, a curious world of dwarfs. But they live and survive as the tall people who sleep and fuck proudly in congested, hiccupping, afraid air and bring about additions to their teeming world like ant-swarms. They have their holy places as well. A drop of gangajal in the sewage nullah gurgling with puss and bacteria of the uncaring humanity. The mandir stands nonchalantly. Its Gods having forsaken it. It seems never to have been accepted as their earthly shelter at all. Anyhow a poor man's God is no God at all. It has been proved. But she has to believe even in the poorest of the poor Gods, to survive, to stay in her job, to support her daughter who in standard eight shows prospects of a very bright student. More importantly, she cannot afford to lose her job because her husband does not earn at all. She stays with him because in India staying with the worst of a husband is perhaps more convenient than a husbandless woman. So she needs blessings even from the whatever types of Gods this ghetto has to offer. Passing by the makeshift temple she puts her right hand to the left of her breast. It falls into a vacuum. Breast cancer, half of her maternity that fed her daughter removed. She is praying and gathering courage to face the office staff with her changed exterior.

The mosque minaret too sulks over this majestic swarm lost in a terrifying fatality just somehow holding onto faith like their broken spirit holds onto their more broken bodies. A mere purposeless appendage. They have their open shit plots. The stench too overbearing and thus fighting to retain its status and repel any encroacher coming with a non-shit purpose. Just imagine what will be the garbage dump site of this bigger garbage pit—it is literally a hell hole. It but serves as the playground-cum-business-cum-schooling arena for the orphans, half-orphans, bastards, urchins, nameless boys and futureless girls. A fat pig brushes its shit-smeared snout against the holy muzzle of a robust bull chewing the half-shit fodder lying in abundance in this kaliyuga  playground.

Well, well...she just has to pass through one more street carrying the dirty gist of life in these perilously throbbing veins wherein the blood is poisoned, the organs are diseased and the future is nonexistent. May be even God does not know what stays in these streets. Probably He is not bothered either. And why should he be! He is the king of the heaven. Why should He have any business with such hells? She but has a business in this hellhole, each step is meant to draw courage. Just cross this street, pass the main road, walk a few paces and turn left. It’s there, her office, an academic publishing house where she works as a receptionist, the job that requires an attractive, healthy, chirpy, enthusiastic persona. She has to retain her job. She just stops for some moments, unseen to the better world outside and takes a final sip of courage to face the world as it is.

A Mutinous Fart in the Fields

The early winter is pouting like a dusky beauty in this last week of November, to appease, to assuage, to help, to strengthen and to make everybody’s smile more charming. Through its mist-laden cool nights and sun-tanned days, it is trying its best to invigorate the flora and fauna that usually gets lynched by the weather extremes in North India.

Rambeer is feeling the balmy solace of this November sun. His eyes are closed and he looks more pensive than a rough farmer like him should. To be linguistically correct he should have been called ‘Ramveer’, i.e., brave like Sri Ram, but in the farming community the finer edges get broken to leave a blunt-faced reality. So for the convenience of the cattle- and women-abusing tongues, he is called ‘Rambeer’. He has many nagging thoughts plaguing his simple mind not used to calculations outside the sums and deductions related to agricultural inputs and outputs.  

Like many other farmers he has also been done in. He is feeling fucked. The other day he had got his virgin buffalo force-mated with a seasoned male buffalo. There were all signs that the young animal was ready for mating to be pregnant for the first time. It was braying all night and had gone romping around flirtatiously, broke its rope, and when they caught it, it was a ghost buffalo with mud all over its body, shrubbery dangling from its horns. Typical signs of a mating call, they say. He was not the one to go missing on a chance to get fresh milk in the family so had immediately hired the services of a muscular, lecherous male buffalo belonging to an equally lecherous farmer. Initiations are seldom smooth. There was quite a scene as they facilitated the act. The unsparing male buffalo landed with its forepaws on the denying young little filly. The lusty monster’s nostrils full of guffawing, frothy, salivating, sneezy liquid. Fearsome sight, but then the street urchins clap at the scene as well like they are witnessing street circus. The poor animal underneath lost its footing and fell under the masculine black weight.

He now cursed, spat and muttered that he has been painfully banged like his young buffalo. He recalled the eventful scene yesterday and said aloud he himself has been treated in the very same manner by the bulkier buffaloes, the bigger forces: the weather, hence the God automatically; and then its representative on earth, the market, hence to the poor farmers like him, the Government again automatically.

Gentleman, farmers suffer at two very distinct levels. Either it’s the impersonal hand of God that simply holds them by ears and smilingly makes them see the mysterious spectacle of undoing all their hard work. If the God is busy doing some more important undoings somewhere else, thus sparing the tillers for some time, the Government does it from His side. Low prices hit the farmers even worse, because here they complete the crop cycle with certain dreams but return almost empty-handed from the market. So caught between these two supernatural forces, the poor farmer gets just one weather-saved and market-saved crop in four seasons. And that surplus keeps him on the path of survival.

This time paddy has been fucked by the Government-cum-market force. Rambeer’s face had glittered like he had struck gold under the hoofs of his male buffalo, 12 years ago, when he sold Basmati rice at INR 2600/100 Kg. Mind it that was more than a decade ago. Can you believe the same stuff fetched a paltry INR 1400 this season? Almost half! That too a dozen years down the line. Meanwhile the costs of farming inputs had skyrocketed. It indeed defies logic. Some educated farmer might very well crib aloud, ‘Capitalism how can you leave a certain section in lurch like this?’

Rambeer as a landless farmer had taken a portion of some other big farmer’s land on rent for paddy farming. The sum they agreed upon was just on the basis of the expected price of at least, in the worst case scenario, INR 2000/100 Kg. Robbed of all his profits by the fluctuating market forces and stockists’ manipulative mantra, he returned from the market with just the money that would go into settling the rental amount. It meant he had simply worked for free. The landholding farmers have pretty thick skin that makes them immune to any sentimentality born of a crying landless farmer. So there was no option of sharing the loss. An agreement is after all an agreement and if you do not keep your word, people won’t give you land on rent anymore in the coming seasons. So keeping the word was most important. And why would a better placed farmer get a hole in his pocket by such acts of philanthropy like waiving off a bit of debt in lieu of unpredictable market-born losses? So Rambeer had just simply handed over whatever he had got from the grain merchant to the bulky better-placed farmer. Anyway, if the market forces and the shining economy of India, for their survival, presume such acts of kindness from a bit-better-placed farmer, then to the hell with such a system. Those who have hundreds of millions in Swiss accounts are better for such philanthropy. The Swami who was recently talking of getting that money back had been cowed down by the lady with glassy eyes and Italian steely resolve.

Rambeer’s reverie is broken by the arrival of another farmer who tills the neighbouring patch of land. Nursing the market insult, he hatefully stars at the stunted growth of his winter tomatoes. An ex-serviceman, in late forties, this farmer has been working with all his army ethics on his small landholding. 'This country is up for bloodbath, I tell you!' he frets and fumes like an aimless light machinegun. Rambeer even gets scared. Gosh! Guys there is real fire in the eyes and practical intent in the farmer-ex-soldier’s words. 'The fuckers have stashed all the money in Swiss accounts. That’s our money man. While they cheat us through low agricultural product prices and very high cost of livelihood. The behen****s... ', sorry guys an angry farmer cannot do without gali-sali, 'have fucked farmers at all fronts.' 'Unemployment...these graduate farmers of the 21st century India are not dumb like their forefathers. Believe me man the day will come when they will just barge into Parliament and just kill the lawmakers there!' Dear-o-dear what a stormy spectacle it becomes. He is literally shaking as if we just now have the first leader of the peasant uprising in this agrarian belt. He seems to recall his still bigger losses in life, ‘I have never been lucky, hard work does not pay as they say in the books. Even in army behen****s fucked my chances of a promotion forcing me to retire just at the age of 40 and that is when you need the financial back-up for your family, your kids are growing up, you need more money.’ The dispiriting spectacle of his stunted poor tomato plants takes him back to his in-service miseries. He is wearing a faded, coarse-clothed army shirt that helps him in farming like denims did with the cowboys.

It is the very same shirt that gave him a chance to become a part of what the common man presumed to be ‘the liberation movement in independent India’. His ex-army shirt gave him an opportunity to contribute his common part to the common men’s movement led by the common man and his team of self-proclaimed common men and women?! Yes of course it did! It saved his life just a day before he and Rambeer had planned to add to the weakening voice of Anna from his Ramlila maidan platform as his fast entered the second week in the terribly hot and humid Delhi in August. It happened a day before they had planned to see the great Anna who had literally hijacked all forms of media in the country. The farming ex-soldier was cutting Jowar, the long-stalked fodder crop, moving his sickle with expertise. The fodder crop had overgrown grass on the ground. His sickle must have touched the reptile. With its venomously instantaneous hitting prowess, the cobra struck at the hand wielding the instrument. Sometimes you are unlucky to fall even on the smoothest of ground, without hitting any obstacle, without walking carelessly, even while watching your feet. At other times, you might be lucky not to trip even once while the terrain around might not spare even a single smooth step. It was one such stroke of luck, the good luck that we need and aspire for so much. The cobra hit precisely the way it should when provoked like this. The farmer reacted with the usual not-so-agile reaction of the hand whose beholder is just cutting fodder lost in so many mundane things. But he was lucky, an odd chance, an exception. His army background saved him, or more particularly his army shirt did, or more specifically his habit of wearing his clothes always with full sleeves, or still more specifically the big cuff button that you have on army dresses saved him, or still more particularly his caring wife was the beholder of luck in that only yesterday she had retagged the about to get off button with her needle work. It was a little chain of good causes that fetched him that bit of life-saving luck. The cobra’s snout hit the big button, as providential as a bullet meant to hit the soldier right in the middle of the heart, hits rather the coin, five rupee coin in the pocket to get ricocheted. The black hooded reptile’s fang got entangled in the button hole. The official army wares have big buttons, if you can recall. Both the human and the deadly reptile panicked out of their wits. The farmer ex-soldier but deserves more credit in that he did not faint. With death hanging down his cuff button, he used some odd still-working chamber in his brain to throw away the reptile with the help of his sickle. The cobra was as longer than his height. When he had stood, holding his hand at it maximum possible distance from his face, their eyes meeting for the flash of a second, the reptile’s head still higher by a few inches, he had stolen a look at its tail still touching the ground, and then he had just given the best shot of his life in blowing away the enemy with his sickle. That was the closest he had faced death.      

The Anna movement had caught Delhi in the whirl-wind of many such disgruntled hardworkers! Both Rambeer and the just saved ex-soldier-cum-farmer had added to the disgruntled clamour in the Ramlila maidan under the presumption that they are playing their tiny parts in the new revolution. A new liberating moment in the country’s political history. But all this would just end up as a damp squib, the movement just acting like a safety valve to let out the over-boiling mass angst. There would be just another political spin out: Kejriwal and his socially active band of non-descript workers who would also get a ride in the political bandwagon and the great Anna will again go fasting innocuously at his village in Maharashtra. The mountain turning out to be a molehill, the future seemed really for some political jerks and pulls by Kejriwal and group who defected to have a share in the ruling pie.

However, on this sunny November afternoon, in the year 2011 to be precise, right here in the fields, the real but always ignored stage of losses and sufferings, there is a mini-storm, a tiny-revolt in the butter-jug. The soldier still appears to carry that revolutionary spirit that he mustered up in yelling ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ towing the aged social worker’s clarion call to set people against the mighty and the corrupt in the country. Two ranting, aggrieved farmers now at least believe that they have a right to grumble and nurse their injuries through verbal outpours.  

The Self-Performing/Made-to-Perform Puppet

 

Contradiction is inherent in nature. Positive–negative, acidity–alkalinity, dark–light, and many more, are all manifestations of a homeostatic balance. You know stars are held by this same dual, contradictory nature. Gravitational force pulls the molecules to the core; at the same time super-temperatures force the molecules to stay away from the core at a feasible length. The stars smile and shine just because of the contradictory chemistry of these two opposing forces. Remove either of these and the star meets its death. Remove gravitational pull, the star will explode as a supernova. Remove the escaping force born of high temperature, the star will get sucked into its own core as a black hole. So survival means a fine zone in the twilight of creation and destruction. Natural laws apply to the humans as well; they hold the same validity if we treat an individual as a system. A human life is a wonderful phenomena sizzling like a shiny star in the twilight of humility and pride, altruism and selfishness, good and bad, faith and atheism, creative and destructive, etc. So the greatness lies not in casting off one side of this undercurrent. It lies in just tilting your balance just a bit on the side of the so-called good aspects in the pair. Why? Because we are social phenomena as well, apart from being the natural ones. Our consciousness equips us to shine and survive like a star–but with a definite purpose. The purpose of general well-being; of helping others in maintaining the same balance of survival; of contributing proactively to the overall balance hung between two contradictory frames. We can contribute more than our natural states have defined for us. Believe me! It works. Just help someone in need. It can be a tiny bit. You will feel yourself elongating your natural self a bit to the positive side. This is being human.

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Individual is for the social system; social system is not for the individual. System is always larger and will prevail when it comes to protecting its common interests in opposition to the individual ones. If the individual finds the system suffocating and intolerable then he has to bow out of the system and take natural state of freewill in jungles, which is just going backwards and denying the evolution of culture and socialization. ‘Individual will’, mind you, is always determined by the ‘general will’. Perfectibility of individual is not a totally hypothetical concept altogether. It is attainable. The mankind can give a full throttle to the individual freedom on the platform provided by the social system. He has to obey certain laws nonetheless. There is no chance for him to escape the arena. To play the game and win it, you have to stay in the ring with your status of a social player. The system is too big. If he attempts an escape, it becomes a suicide morally, socially and physically. The attempt to escape is futile. Just by taking birth on this earth, the individual surrenders his right to possess a totally free individual will. He has the irremovable tag on his conscience, on his physical self, on his convictions: the tag of a citizen of the kingdom of the social system.

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Guys, individual freedom has always remained a fundamental ideal and belief since historical times. However, it is not to be achieved by casting off all society and civilization or by going back to a so-called 'natural state'. The perfection of man, his freedom, his liberty, his happiness, and the growing mastery of his own destiny, all are dependent upon a clear understanding of certain laws of nature and society. We have to accept that both nature and society have worked according to these laws to enable us to get the idea of this so called 'freedom'. So the pursuit of the baby’s interests should not turn us blind to the interests of the mother.

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Why does truth pinch most of the time? Simple, because it is no chocolate, sugar candy or mellowable sweetie-pie lump of ice cream! It is a hard, sour, iron ball guys. It has pinching rough stony edges to its surface. Come into contact with them and they will take a few flakes from your skin leaving a red or purple bruise depending on the intensity of truth contained in it. Now the question arises, 'Why does it almost always leave a grimace on our face instead of a smile?' The simple fact that all of us almost always rub cold shoulders against this ironed ball having thorns for our soft skin, proves one fact: that we are not subjectively inclined to accept the objective reality as it stands in abstract. But doesn’t it mean that we have moved poles apart from truth and its manifestations while going on the path of individual and collective improvisations at the subjective level. May be the reason for our success in emerging at the top of the food chain in the game of 'survival of the fittest' is that we have institutionalised ourselves to negate and defy, and do without, certain basic truths that form the core of creation and nature. Nothing wrong with that! It, however, is paradoxical that most of these scions of truth--against which we have always been taking cudgels--form the core of our moral, humanistic, religious, spiritual and aesthetic vision enshrined in preach books. Strange!

A Half House

The dying year had inaudibly moaned in the clatter and chatter of the New Year Eve’s celebrations:

You salute the rising sun and the upcoming fates,

And dump the rest as mere names and dates.

But my burdened self on death bed (or in labour pain?) sighs,

'Dears, you forget those fallen promises amidst these hasty byes!'

 

But there were not too many takers for the dying year’s hymn, the soon-to-be-past calendar entry and swiftly it was January 1.

The crowded was intoxicated by a promising future:

This foggy, cold midnight says,

The next sun will have fresh rays

that will warmly gloat over the wrong shades

bitingly, filthily draped around the beleaguered, beggared, deprived mass of flesh,

Tomorrow it just won't be mere trash!

A beginning it will be, all new and fresh!

The New Year had struck its first second on an exceptionally foggy and cold night. The drunken revellers around India Gate had enough of shouting, blabbering, clamouring, jostling and even dancing to have their share of forced fun under the dimmed yellow glaze of mercury lights. It was young India, metropolitan India, celebrating the New Year eve with the enthusiasm and expertise of the Western world. The motley mix of crowd was singing a welcoming hymn for the arrival of the New Year. They also said a hasty goodbye to the year that was just gone. Premature welcome notes and hasty obituaries are seldom feasible. But human frailty rarely takes on the feasible things by instinct because unfeasible things appear too common; and feasibility teases with its daunting impracticality. The year that was gone did not matter much now; the year that had taken birth meant everything to everybody. Lost in the boom and bang of welcoming festivities, nobody appeared to pray for the dying year. We rejuvenate and kill our time; we do the both. All energies and intentions focussed now on enlivening a fresh time. There were but some souls that were trying to recall how much she or he was to be blamed for the past year’s death. Even in this little group there was still some exceptional soul or couple of souls at the most who still carried lifeful memories, all fresh and alive, of the last year. The last one or two such odd people did so because the present might have appeared too gloomy to them to participate in the futuristic revellery.

She stood alone in the crowd, looking more backwards unlike the rushing forth, firecracking stampede around her. Like any other young girl enjoying the freedom in the crowd, she had tried her best to sway to the exhilarating tunes of the time. She was beautiful, tall, slim and dove-eyed with Kohl in her eyes, a presentable replica of the famed Bengali beauty, much in demand and taste in Delhi. She had manners, culture, custom, education and a seductive nose ring to add to her interesting persona. She was a casual drinker but today she had not taken drink. She wanted to stay fully in senses to feel her situation as it should given her condition. She was both maker and the breaker of the self. She had this realisation and appeared ready to accept all the good and the bad that life offered her now. She had had her decent share of fun and education at the JNU, the prestigious institution where taboos do not subdue basic instincts and the young souls unyoked from blindfolding curiosities about the opposite sex have full enjoyment and lofty education. Now on this densely foggy cold night, she seemed more to reflect back than looking forward to an interesting new year. One could easily see that she was terribly alone in the crowd. Leaving the pleasantly agitated crowed, looking almost without any tinkling in her heart at the firecrackers busting the foggy cloud, she silently left the place to reach her rented double roomed apartment.

When she reached her place, it very well appeared as an abode well suited to a married couple. An unknown person would have immediately dubbed it as the place--a sweet home--of a married couple. There were insignias of traditional cosy Indian domesticity. Yes it looked like a sweet home. The bed, the kitchen, the living room, the household items, everything gave full inkling of a happily married life. She had done her cultural and caring best in accumulating the vases, the colourful living room rugs, the sofa coverings, handcrafted cushion covers, aesthetic lampshades, attractive tapestries, the curtains, the artefacts in the showcase, the little study in a corner with books, etc. And the now redundant guitar! He liked playing guitar after his busy schedule as an economist with a big accountancy firm and she had gifted it on his birthday. It was a good one having taken her full month’s salary to bring a smile on his face.

All the stage and its setting appeared the handiwork of a wife rightfully decorating her home. She but was a girl, not a wife. The place was just double roomed house, not home. Now it was fractured to even lose its tiny house stature; it appeared just a half house and that too meshed up, like a storm had terribly jostled a nest in the high branches of a date palm, tearing away half the sinews, leaving behind a gaping hole. The man who had generated that wifely care in her, her live-in partner, her heartthrob from the JNU days, a Punjabi youth in excellent in debate and academics and much more in rugged looks, had vacated his share from her carefully woven family set-up. His family continuously insisted on getting him married in the traditional Indian manner to a Punjabi girl of more suitability. Like the famed educated Indians’ instincts to keep the both worlds to themselves, he had dilly dallied for three years—the time during which she brought the best out of her as a partner, as unofficial wife—and ultimately moved towards the family, the last year piling up more bitterness and fights, finally resulting in the little thing of the break-up. To her but it was more than a break-up. She had nurtured her domesticity like a perfect wife. She worked in the editorial department of an academic publisher, came back all tired up after the head-eating work on manuscripts, cooked delicious food and kept home like any traditional Indian working woman does. Her domesticity, her little world but was not safe. After all, there are always all types of odds against the live-in relationships.

She had felt that vacuum building in him. She had tried to be more affectionate, more caring, tried her best to pour the last bit of her physical charm during their lovemaking, but all these alibis irritate a man who has decided to look the other way, who is just looking to justify his decision to separate. The more she tried, the more it created issues. After that he had started shouting more and more over more and more little issues. She was having palpitations about the impending disaster. She knew she was fighting a losing battle. She but loved him, and hated him for his slippery convictions, and as a last ditch effort had forced him into sex—which had become a rarity for the last few months and occurred only of her initiative—even though he was still ranting about a trivial issue. She had hoped to douse the storm of his anger in the feminine folds of her receptivity. But it had been all of a punishment and nothing of lovemaking. The very next day he had left while she was in her office. When she came back it was a house that had been hit by a storm, too shocked to feel the pain she just collected her leftovers. There were vestiges of the past they shared. In the pair of bathroom slippers, in old trackpants, t-shirts left behind perhaps with the instinct that it was her duty to put away the garbage things. There were many things left behind, most of these being of no use to him anymore, including she.    

She could not sleep once back in her broken nest and just dumped herself in the rocking chair where he did the same during the happy times. She just vacantly stared at the scores of artistic souvenirs they had exchanged as replica of their love. The first day of the year opened its eyes outside and she fell into a tired doze of sleep for an hour and got up with a shudder. Getting afraid of her pathetically brooding and suffering self, she realised a modern self-standing girl was not supposed to be broken like this. It was a presumption. A difficult concept to hang onto at this moment, but she forced herself into believing this. It was a fresh day, first day of the year. Like sun was struggling to cast its first ray behind the fog, she struggled to force a ray of normalcy into her life.

Being normal means having breakfast, she realised. Habitually she went to make the toast like he liked it, realised with a shudder that he wasn’t around, tuned herself to make it the way she liked, ate without much thoughts, mechanically. She was but eating her own bits of individuality to help her rise on her feet. And she did rise. She had to move ahead and for that at least today she needed to be outside to discover herself, to find a little purpose to cling onto. She needed a foothold to keep at least hanging down the cliff and not fall into the painful depth. She just left home, aimless, destinationless; just to go through Delhi. The idea just caught her in the fall from the precipice and she found sympathy and solace in Delhi, the good bad Delhi that had made her and broken her. The same Delhi was beckoning her.

   

Walking through a poor locality in Delhi was revealing. Bigger miseries perhaps make you cope with your own cuts a bit better. A little kid aged barely seven or eight came pulling a rickshaw carrier. It was loaded with empty plastic cans and the lad was just going almost half way down on each side to complete the paddling circle. More child self-bread earners washing dirty plates by a kulche stall. So early in the morning and instead of getting breakfast before going to school they were earning their own survival tit-bits. Littlest of children taking a bath at a public tap after the late night stint at the eating point where the midnight revellers had left a trail of dumped sorrows and excreted pleasantries. Childhood almost withered in them. These were the men boys. Getting their skins hardened with antisocial strains; fed by the scorns and abuses of their merciless masters. Well Delhi has so much to cheer about, but far more to ponder about sadly.

She had always nonchalantly passed by this side of Delhi, like any other self-possessed educated better placed youngster in Delhi. With a wounded self, she felt their pitiable condition now. She had received some calls from a woman from an NGO working to educate poorest of the poor. ‘Ma’am please sponsor a child’s education! Please help us nurture a future!’ the lady would almost plead and she politely, trying her level best to subdue irritation would always say no. After all the NGO sector in India has been maligned by the mandarins who carry out business like any other profession in name of charities, funds, donations and what not. She could very well recall the lady telling her that they would share all the details including the family photo of the child getting education with the help of her charity. She saw a tiny bit of purpose in like: To help a poor child in getting education. She resolved to call back the lady as soon as possible; surely today afternoon only. From being almost a dead log of wood, immediately she felt like taking a course, a bit more control of herself.

A cow—dung-smeared and fed on garbage diet, lip-serviced worship and myth—was busy eating the stenchful muck of a colony’s garbage house. Deprived of the entire mythical aura it appeared a big pig just munching the leftovers. A well-off gentleman stopped his car, pulled out a chapatti, offered it to the humble and forgiving creature and fulfilling his quota of religiosity and grabbing his share of blessings sped away. Hats off holy mother! Even though we have forced you to eat garbage, you still give us a chance to fulfil our fleeting religious duties. She stopped by the cow. A beautiful girl standing by a pitiable cow at the garbage house. A few people even stopped to watch this odd spectacle. She felt the cow’s woes. The famed animal in Hindu mythology, the beholder of Hindu pride, the catcher of Hindu votes in communal politics, and who cares really whether it eats excreta-smitten vegetable leftovers tied in a ploy bag. She had always felt deadly scared of the stray cattle. Under the surge of sympathy and pity, the fear took a back seat. She approached the dust-binned holy mother as another wronged person. Her presence was unnervingly clean, perfumed and scented. Even at her uncaring worst she appeared clean and polished in her most casual dress. For the first time in her life she touched a cow. She touched its head. The cow seemed to look around for some offering, the holy beggar. But her touch was even more gratifying. Their eyes met. Hers sleepless and dreamy without Kohl. He had always told her that she looks a sleepy goddess without the kajal. The cow’s forgiving, forgetting, mellifluous dark pair gazed into her painful self. Their sorrows met, melted, and soothed each other. She just kept on caressing the dark grey head raised before her. She had tears. Possibly the cow had even bigger tears. She saw the dirty trail of eye secretion down the corner of the animal’s eyes. A trail of sorrows born of the cocktail of myth, legend and religion. The Muslims would very much like to eat beef; the Hindus on the other hand want her to live eternally even if it meant living alongside a pig in the gutters.  

The mundane realities of a still more common world had taken her in their strides. She just boarded any one of the buses to any of the places in Delhi. A poor man’s daughter, beautiful in her own way, was singing in the bus. The slate pieces tucked in her fingers chimed with melody as she sang a beautiful melancholic Rajasthani gypsy song. When it came to rewards, the peoples’ reaction made it appear like she was begging. She felt the badness of this world: A girl, an artist, a poor man’s daughter singing amidst a crowd of the relatively well off citizens and they just taking her to be a beggar only who asked for unearned money. She had seen many such spectacles in Delhi and these did not mean much to her like they do not to any of the better placed people around. After her performance, the girl walked down to gather coins. Literally everybody seemed to have enjoyed her song, but almost nobody seemed eager to give a coin. ‘We do not support beggary,’ they famously chime. The child artist’s little bowl having a few coins reached her seat. Today she had the heart and time to feel the beauty of the act. ‘The act was better than many of the cinematic bullshits that she watched in multiplexes at the cost of many hundreds,’ she realised. Without listening to any nay-saying calculations by her smart brain, she felt her hand going into her wallet and a 500 rupees bill fell weightier than any coin into the bowl. Many eyes turned towards her and took her to be a mad person. ‘What has happened to this girl,’ somebody muttered. ‘What has happened to me! I have felt the pain that you do not!’ she shouted to everybody and nobody. They were shut off at her revolt. The little girl artist touched her feet. She smiled at the tiny figure and put her hand on the little head. A pair of eyes smiled most genuinely at her.

The bus was plying over the Yamuna. ‘We are the polluters. Just see the rivers of kaliyuga we create. The poison, black, muddy, slithery, foul-smelling monster creeping into the guts of our holy rivers! Where is Yamuna? No it’s not here! We have killed it,’ she could not help ignore the pathetically suffering sewage moans of the dead Yamuna. There had been so many joyrides in his car earlier, over this very bridge, over the same suffering Yamuna. She had never seen Yamuna like this. Yamuna to her like most of us flowed uncomplainingly carrying its load of shit and myth. She cast a glance at the vast stretches. The riverbed was dry, just two black rivulets serpented across the sands like a snake couple carrying poison and fanged proximity. It was a deplorable sight, the suffering, stinking Yamuna. It was a stinking hell, undoubtedly. She had a look of sympathy for the poor Yamuna. It appeared just a big drain of mucking filth and sewage. During the Monsoon, the rains kiss its dirty, pugnacious, purple-faced layer and provide the facepack, the nutritious sandy waters from the hills. For a brief time Yamuna captures back its riveting river glory. A new avatar, Yamuna the holy river, but for how long? Just for a couple month at the most! After that it’s again the same sad drainage. The name but prevails; from the road and railway bridges people throw coins. It blesses them, or at least they feel blessed by the uncomplaining mother, all forgiving, all pious. ‘Jai Jamuna mai!’ a very old hand put all life force to toss a coin into the beggary Yamuna’s bowl, starved of reverence, starved of rains, full of sewage. The Bihari beggar lady balanced herself in the fraction of a second as she stole a Namaste to the river and nearly avoided a fall on the bus conductor who immediately demanded money for the ride in the bus. The woman just had a toothless sheepish grin to give him and he retorted, ‘You have money to throw in the river and you do not have for buying a ticket!’ It was a whiplashing reprimand. Before he could carry on with his rant, the young single woman rose from her seat and bought a ticket for the old woman.

She was seeing across the gloom inside her. There are many things to look around your feet when the bigger world above your head loses its meaning temporarily. The sun had also partially succeeded in cutting across the foggy facade. It was a silvery noon having some vestiges of the dark cold night. But it appeared more optimistic for the sun might smile any moment.