The Pickle Slice in a Stale History Book

Was our freedom movement as free as we think it to be? He had thought along these lines many times. As a lecturer in history his soul would feel the prick of these off-beat ideas about the most important event in modern Indian history: the Indian freedom movement. But then his spirit was always shackled by the carefully crafted history, the subject, with its list of personalities who shaped the destiny of the country during the struggle. He had given countless lectures, telling the same bits of facts to changing batches, but the subject and its players never changed. While he told them the conventional bits of history, there were nagging bits that revolted inside him, tugging at his conscience that as a teacher he has to expose the students, even as a historian, to a new angle of thinking, to a new perspective, not to misguide the students, but to guide them to a path, where competent liberty of thought and opinions took one to unchartered heights of creativity and interesting unfolding of destinies, to envision new paths, to dream afresh, to explore more.

Unfortunately his subject was almost stagnant. The India of his teaching days was changing fast, but it was doing it in a common way, almost uneventfully, so the history books ended with tomes of theories and opinions about the freedom struggle and concluded the post-independence decades in just a little summary having development statistics and majorly wars with Pakistan and China. During his three decades of teaching career, he thought he just did a rote repetition of the same things. He himself changed, the types and calibres of the students changed, he even earned more under the revised pay scale under the new pay commission, even India changed to have more literate people and the resurgent more-moneyed middle class, but the history books were almost the same that he taught when he started his career.

It was his farewell lecture today, the conclusion of an innings. Instead of spending it in celebratory bonhomie with the staff, colleagues and students, he decided to put out his thoughts today. There was hardly any chance of being misinterpreted on this final day, at the most it would be dubbed as an emotion-laced farewell speech, more from the heart, and less of a mindful academic talk. To the mixed gathering of the staff, colleagues and students, he tried to speak as a history teacher, just this last time. He took them to be the biggest class he ever had and spoke with firm academic conviction, giving a free leeway to the off-beat historical hatchlings that had always zoomed with subtle force in him. Today he was telling his own history, entitling himself to have his own judgments born of the historical sense of three decades after repeatedly reading the famed historical lines, almost etched in stone to be meant to be the absolutist version of reality. To him history meant beyond the question-answer routine to get maximum marks by writing the expected answers. After giving a good brief about the events that sound important to our independent struggle, he was heard telling the audience now getting a totally new dose of historical pill:  

The colonists who had the power and efficiency to rule and exploit the lands thousands of miles away from their homes cannot be supposed not to possess anything about the exit strategies. With the beginning of the 20th century, it was written on the wall that the coming decades of the century will see the cascading effects of freedom movements. As great managers they started planning exit strategies. This strategy was meant to minimize the losses at their end and leaving the least ill-will. So amidst all the freedom movements that were naturally evolving, they facilitated the platforms that best suited their interests in the post-independence scenario. They were ruthless against the true nationalists who were branded as terrorists. They were wiped out literally. Thousands were sent to Kala Pani in India in this context. Now do you understand why Bhagat Singh was allowed to be hanged? Why was Subhas Chander Bose kicked out of the mainstream freedom movement even though his confidante was legitimately elected Congress president? Why more nationalistic sounding Congressites like Sardar Patel remained in the shadow of Nehru? Simple fact is that the Britishers were cleverly facilitating a Western-educated class of leaders who were 75 percent Westerners and would be the safest options during the critical decades before and after the Independence. It was a well-managed transfer of power. It was a well-managed first ring of Western-educated leadership that did not allow the real black, native nationalists of India to take the hot seat of the freedom movement and the chair after independence. Just see the decades before independence and you will realize the great undercurrent of British in particular (and Western in general) facilitation profitably flowing under the so called native black river of independence.

He was serving a differently-tasting slice of history. The pickled history, tastier, not so stale. It appeared the glamorised version of the stale history lessons. He was retiring on 31^st of March. The audience was clapping vigorously. The disastrous second innings of the UPA government had shown what it means to run a coalition government, how different political parties can be kept quiet just to retain their support, how public offices can be allowed to be blatantly misused to appease the ruffled feathers in coalition partners. Anna and team were voicing the mass angst against Sonia’s proxy rule, the office of the Prime Minister had lost all dignity as media buzzed with unending jokes about the puppet prime minister. Parliamentary elections were a couple of years away.

His intents and intentions were now carrying him to be an off-track historian. His head was throbbing with revolt against the stale history books that he had taught in rote repetition under the compulsion of bread and butter:

I draw a certain constitutional right—A logical and self-derived right of an educated Indian to reinterpret Indian history within logical limits. I just do the same and do not mean anything derogatory to the characters who as per conventional interpretations managed to fetch the centre-stage in the Indian freedom movement. Definitely, the Britishers had far more control over Congress affairs than average Indian believes because for him it symbolises the very epitome of human urge for freedom. But could it be possible that the Congress leadership in pre-independent India was well controlled by the Britishers with an acceptance that since ultimately they have to go out of this country, it is best to have a buffer zone of leadership drawn from English-educated, foreign-returned gentry who will both save them from a revolutionary outpour as well as provide a controlled leadership to the ignorant Indian masses. Beginning with the first decade of 20th century, revolutionary terrorism was becoming a force to reckon with. Lok Manya Tilak was proudly claiming, 'Swarajya is my birth right!' Then the First World War came. The Britishers were just not in a position to afford non-cooperation at the Indian front. See Mahatma Gandhi arrived swiftly on the scene and very soon all questions of Indian cooperation in British war efforts were settled. In a short span of time Indian soldiers were fighting at the North African front. The Britishers had scores of reasons for facilitating Gandhi-Nehru as they had for brutally suppressing and exterminating heroes like Bhagat Singh and sidelining Subhash Chander Bose. The prevailing philosophy of non-violence during the freedom movement was more helpful to the Britishers in every sense of the term. The ideal just minimized the chances of a popular upsurge (of the 1857 kind) against the White regime. This ideology however failed in stopping the bloodshed among the Indians. See the farce: Two million Indians died among themselves and the casualties to the outgoing regime were negligent (almost non-existent)! It was a smart move. Analyse the sprouts of those seeds of Western facilitation sown during those times and you will see the Colonial strains still blossoming in the skewed political stream of so called ‘Free India’.

Well, he might have been within his rights. After all in a democracy we have the freedom of thought and expression within the limits of decency. People seemed to listen to him with casual attention, the kind that is apparently serious at this moment but will go off the moment he stopped speaking. The conditioning of minds over the decades is too strong to be rubbed off to think differently by such mini-storms. All in all these are the storm-in-the-tea-cup type outpours, but if these give solace and succour to a ruffled soul then what is wrong with the audience allowing it to be spoken out in rapt attention with a serious expression. The students cannot afford to revise their syllabus to facilitate the out-going teacher’s opinions. They will fail if they do it. These things serve well only at the level of debates and arguments. Everybody seemed to know it.

Among the farewell applauds, one of his critical colleagues was saying in his friend’s ears, ‘It’s a political speech. Bullshit, why the hell he never spoke like that all these years. He is preparing a political stage. He will definitely join the BJP, I bet!’

Legitimate Tears

When your dreams lie shattered around you, do not cry. If you do that you do injustice in more than one sense of the term. One simple mathematical fact: Shedding tears would not help anyway. Understood that there are scattered pieces of the diamonds you had been working on. Now they are broken, shattered and may cut through flesh if you just close your eyes and prefer to cry. Kids have a copyright over crying and rightly so. We elders can spare this copyright infringement. Just look around the dashed diamonds, your so called broken dreams. Just see the glimmer in still shapely left out pieces. The dream is the soul; it just cannot die if some hammer momentarily dislodges its outer shape. No hammer in the world has the luck to kiss the soul of your dream. It’s always safe. That’s its fate. Simply. Plainly. Why cry if the thing has not died yet. If you do, it’s just like mourning the death of someone who is still alive. I think we can simply avoid this irrational act. Broken shards of your dreams are, let us say, the blood-thirsty and hard chisels. They can help you in cutting through such mighty rocks as you could have never imagined. So it is simply better to cut bigger rocks for larger prospects instead of allowing the pieces to cut through your physical and mental selves.

She was a motivational speaker. She had delivered the above speech and the likes many a time to gather her share of conference money and acclaim. Tired employees told her it seems to give them a new direction and meaning in life. Her exquisitely polished manner, sleek hair, business suit, fragrant classy perfumes and radiant smile made her look a perfect personification of whatever she spoke: success and succour. But make-believe polished exteriors apart, all of us carry naked bits of truth stuck up to our nudity, below the outer layer, the invisible, private, inaudible world, that rarely shows its face even in the privacy of the bathroom because we get so habituated to see ourselves like others see in our public avatar.

The CEO of the company that had organized that motivational retreat at a sea-side resort in Goa was beaming with pleasure, promiscuity and her effeminate proximity, ‘You are a diva, you can put life even in a dead body. What powerful words, so uplifting!’ He was drunk and considered it his right to flirt with the one who had been hired to pump motivation in those servile souls who cringed before him. With a polite thanks and a still more formal smile she backed away from the famed gamer with the opposite sex.

It was a world of hungry males around her. She was in her late thirties but could beat any younger employee in feminine radiance. Finding the head lion away, a junior manager rushed to grab his chance, ‘My God what speech you deliver! I never thought life will become so meaningful after all the messed up projects in the office and still messier situation at home!’ He seemed ready to kiss her hand. She was having just a lime breezer, very well in control of herself, and very felinely warded him off. Then there were many more eager souls approaching her, coming to congratulate apparently, but with the real intention of impressing her to take her to bed. That of course is the invisible, almost inevitable, buried under the clothing and good gracious mannerisms, the real, naked basic, primal instinct of the educated males to come wooing an equally educated female.

All of them seemed to sense their chances with her. She was famous enough in the corporate world to lay bare bits and pieces of her personal life on the open platform of gossips and desirous gesticulations. She was a single mother. Her daughter safely put in a boarding school in Mussoorie hills. Whenever the guilty pangs of depriving a girl from the grooming love and affection of her mother would stalk her, questioning her popular march in leadership and management motivating talks, she looked at the bank statements, the account details of hundreds of thousands she siphoned off to the reputed school’s account towards her daughters education and boarding fees. An inner voice would tell her that she might fail as a mother. But then the world around was all praise for her, both as a person and as a professional. She had all the reasons to believe herself to be exactly what others told her to suit their purposes and motives.   

Her husband had dubbed her too ambitious. An Indian man prefers a docile and manageable wife playing slightly subordinate role to his patriarchy however talented she might be. ‘You are too self-centred and ambitious to adjust to the smaller confines of domesticity,’ he had shouted during their last days together. Those words pinch her many times. She recalls these many a time while her audience is applauding her inspirational oratory. From the broken shards of her broken marriage she definitely carved out her destiny. To prove the equal right of her matriarchal spirit, she took up the responsibility of raising her daughter singlehandedly.  But was it enough?

The biggest challenge for a beautiful, successful, single, middle-aged woman is to pick out the right man to go into bed with out of every Tom, Dick and Harry falling at her feet. She has allowed two men to follow her into the bed after her marriage broke. Both were married, of equal stature, and talked intelligently, approached her with utmost care and as it usually happens after enjoying the fruits of their disillusionment had gone back to their wives and families. Sometime she felt like they just used her body. So she was very careful now about men. A void was but building up in her because at some stage you need a partner and especially when you and others consider yourself to be a success story.

In the resort’s party hall, the spirits and souls were now getting more intoxicated. Louder talks, stretched out phrases, peppier dance numbers and more flirtatious deeds. Caught in the whirl of the times, she had graduated to some cocktail rounds from the earlier cautious breezer and the world around appeared no longer needing any type of inspiration. A perfect world, drowned in its booze-born, slow-paced aura. She pined for space, tranquillity and shelter in a caring man’s arms. She came out of the party hall, walked over the sprawling lawns to exit through the sea-fronted gate to walk with stumbling steps to the sea calling through its roar across the beach. Walking through the waves kissing her feet, she felt a hand on her shoulder. The lecherous CEO was following her. He knew about those other two company heads and very well thought he could be the third. It was dark, she was alone, the sea roaring to add to his surging passions, so no polished mannerisms required to reach a woman. On top of that he was drunk, and knew she was drunk also. As a successful hunter he knew from his experience that straightforward approach clicked many a time. He spun her around and before she could react or think anything his lips were on hers. She had not been touched by a man in this raw manner since almost six months. Tipsy and beyond all thoughts and reflections she found herself helplessly melting under his rapacious surge. He was on her now. All wet on the sand she was just about to give in if not for the momentary steamer light that went piercing through her eyes. ‘Move out and climb however high, you but will be a convenient game for the successful men around you,’ her aggrieved husband had shouted when they had parted finally. During those times he had looked less attractive, almost unsuccessful and plainly jealous to her. In revulsion she pushed the predator away. Used all the physical force that all her inspiring words would allow her to muster up. With a wounded self, she beat his scared mass like anything. His hunting demeanour going wrong, he just left, ran away rather and would not tell anybody about it.

She was lying on the wet sand missing her daughter by her side. She missed a genuinely caring male hand on hers. She could afford to cry in the dark inaudibly by the noisy sea waves. It will help her in keeping herself as presentable as she was during the glorious day. She allowed her naked real tit bits to lay bare their identity in full nudity. She cried. She still remembered what she had spoken about during the day.        

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.