Ice Cubes on Desert Sands

 Summers. North India has started to burn. Heat has broken the record of many past decades. Temperatures above 40 in the last week of March! Something seems to have gone wrong with nature. Heat emerges with bumper buoyancy. Hot dynamics grip everything with such force that all will yell prayers for the Monsoons.

In the desert state of Rajasthan things must be even worse. The sand as the birth soil isn’t too attractive. It may have its nostalgia, but on a day-to-day basis it appears a curse. Ask the ones who are born there. So many people come out of Rajasthan to avoid the burning cauldron during the summers.

Two lanky boys are moving across the streets of this Haryanvi village. Haryana is a semi-arid state. But for somebody belonging to the desert state, semi means almost full: full with life; full with bread; full with water; full with green trees.

They are tall and thin. They have migrated from the desert state. Necessity has pulled them out of the sand like water flows from higher level to the lower one. They have to beg. But begging has its own share of pitfalls including reprimands and harsh words.

“Why don’t you study? Why don’t you work?”

So they have put the saffron sail-cloth on their poor boat to navigate safely, holding onto the winds of faith. Their clothes are soiled. But the saffron sashes around their necks indeed cover a lot of holes in their personas. They expect to be taken as wandering ascetics. They have even mastered the artful words of bringing blessings to the house they stand in front of.

The woman chides them the moment they knock against the rusty iron gate. They but decide not to be deterred by the initial rebuke. Stealthily they steal glances at the two small cars parked in the front yard. These are old cars. But to them a car is a car. Hummer or Maruti 800 doesn’t make any difference.

So they continue with their blessing words of good fate, long life, endless prosperity, and more. It’s morning and yesterday it hailed and rained a bit to take temperatures a bit down. To them it seems like a land of perpetual rain and prosperity, although it rains just marginally more than their homeland. They have thorny bushes there; here there are some semi-arid varieties like neem and acacia. And that changes the world for the best. It’s a shift from the worst to the best. 

They feel that the woman cannot cross certain limits to turn outright abusive and threatening. This is the chink. They have to prod their way in.        

“You have hard words but a heart of gold. You can never think ill of others even if you sound a bit impolite,” the elder one nails it.

“What do you want? No money I tell you! I can only give you some wheat flour,” her voice mellows down somewhat.

They let their foot further in. It’s an opening.

“There is no better deed than feeding the hungry. It’s a direct holy feat. God sees it instantly,” they take their chance.

She seems to be awaiting God’s attention on some front, so agrees. They barge in. It’s a spacious house with peeling plaster and mundane furnishing like you see anywhere in a village in Haryana. To them, it’s an abode of prosperity. They sit down on the unplastered brick-laid floor in the courtyard.

It’s too early for the family to have their lunch, brunch or whatever. So she makes chapattis for them. The vegetable curry is already done. They can see the chapattis are coming straight from the tava, not the stale leftovers from the previous night which people usually give them and throw to the stray dogs also. Every time she comes to put another chapatti, they are ready with more words of blessings from the God.

The younger one asks for ice. They must be having refrigerator, he has guessed it right. It is available in every household here. Ice is a big luxury to him. He comes from burning sands. Pitchers burn like hot oven there. They drape sack-clothes around pitchers and pour drops of precious water to prevent it from boiling. He already has many ice cubes in his water utensil. He opens the lid and checks out to see how far these have melted. He is concerned. The ice is melting. He wants replenishment.

“Please give me ice,” he is literally pleading.

She laughs at him. “It’s not that hot this morning. There is cool breeze,” she says.

But he looks at her with eyes which are crying for ice. She has to get it.

As she pours ice cubes from the tray into his cheap, dented aluminium utensil, she can see the twinkle in his eyes.

Ice that is just ice to her, is something more to him. He has seen fire in life, the fire which seeps into everyday life in the desert. Ice has a bigger meaning to him than anyone else around here.

She notices it now. His clothes are also wet. Not dripping exactly, but he must have been completely drenched thirty, forty minutes back.

“What happened? Did you fall in water?” she asks.

The elder one is laughing. “Water turns him crazy. Hardly any water back home. We take bath just once a week there. When he saw the pond outside the village, he straightaway jumped into it like a mad frog,” he is laughing.

Water that is just water to her, is luxury to this boy. She tries to fathom the reason for his ecstasy over ice cubicles and pond waters where buffalos waddle, but fails to understand. Little does she realise that people run out to count drops of rain on the sand at his native place. So water is a treat to him.

Like most of us fail to understand that the things which seem dustbin cheap to us might be the symbols of opulence to so many others. That a broken doll on the garbage heap, a shiny wrapper, and a single-wheeled broken toy are still items of magnificence to many unfortunates. If we do, then we won’t begrudge most of the problems in our life.

The Old Moon and the Imperilled Landscape

 It was very cold and the time was frozen around half an hour before the morning twilight on January 13, the day celebrated as Lohri; a day before Makar Sakranti on the full moon next day. The pallid rays of a pale moon had quickly grown feeble during the last hour before the morning twilight. The night had been chilly, clear-skied, frosty and fogless: an exceptional January night, not in being chilly because cold and January are synonymous, but in being clear-skied certainly. The moon, just a day from its rounded fullness, had been exceptionally bright.

Nightlong, almost near the peak of its circular beauty, it had fulfilled its luminous duty. Its milky beams over-rode the pointed shafts of light from the distant stars. After all it was his world; the stars had their own at mammoth astronomical distances. The moon was thus the brightest, bulbous star, eager to brush out every strain and tainting, shadowy tar. Its beams spread like snows over the sleeping horizons across the sleepy distances and languorous miles.

The beautiful countryside was lying in sleepy abundance under the frosty, milky blanket with slumberous pride. Everything was open to the celestial torch with nothing to hide. Cold-basking fields were huddled under their croppy sheets. Above was grandmotherly gloating the marvellous moonshine. The wheatlings stood bow-headed in reverence with dewy crowns fine. The marigold flowers were frozen in kissed silence by the milky showers. The flowers appeared happy to surrender their colours to the lover’s mysterious smiles and disrobing powers. White pea flowers boasted their augmented whiteness. Aha, such dolefully beneficent had been the moony brightness. Even the trees did not appear merely dark spectres lurking shadowily over the horizon. They appeared boats of foliage floating in a misty sea.  

In the background of such a brightly lit stage even the sky seemed eager to come onto the earth. Across the milky transparency, its bluish-dusky veil lurked and through it only the brightest stars smiled and showed that there was a world beyond as well. Scattered in the docile swathes of this moon-baked countryside, the villages seemed as mammoth ships silently floating in the white wavy sea of milky light.

At this moment, the moon was well past its prime, as if in shining too bright, to use the full charms of a fog-free night, it had committed a harmless crime. Its setting quarters lay in the north-west, from where it was eager to slip down for some rest. Its strength and vigour had drastically plummeted down, paleness eating into the guts of its plump milky brightness. An old, setting moon, away from the youth’s boon.

Dislodged of its shiny crown, it ogled with a meek, even irritated, anguished, helpless frown. Its sheen was rapidly fading out. Its yellowish pale rays almost eager for a wailing shout. Glumly it was fading over that reddish-brown sandy undulation carrying fields, furrows and crops on its gently unfolding dome. The shiny fruits born of sweat-drenched hours by the farmers in its sandy loam. Accusingly the moon threw pale, protesting shadows towards the south-east. There urbanism, consumerism and crass commercialism blatantly, proudly held their seat commanding metropolitan, capitalist feast.

The area had been earmarked for some development project. It now being defined by a tiny space bound in a map issued under the state government’s gazette notification. A mischief by the developmental hand, ever eager to bulldoze over the nature and turn it into uncomplaining, lifeless sand where lustrous stones will be built over the nature’s burial. Heartless, wanton and depraved! But the nature has no oratory to baulk the words. It but repays in kind.

This pale, mournful moon was preparing to set soon into the misty gloom of the twilight. A new bright sun of consumerism and commerce will be ascending to its dawning height. And the soft natural delicacies will scamper with fright.

Those reed stalks which swayed to the cold shove of a gentle breeze without any greed appeared to say good-bye to the moon. The latter plummeted down further with a bloated face and a sigh. Its pallid face grimacing with a painful nostalgia. Its fading, setting rays tainted with a peculiar dullness, the death, the demise, the oblivion. Its oblong teary face looking down at the landscape: sleepy fields, beneficent swathes of wastes and fallow lands.

Mighty lessons were taught here by the nature to itself and all. The farmer going to the fields with his gear. Those long, painful and oftentimes fruitless days, and at the end the setting sun’s eager rays peering at the sweaty trove on the farmer’s back carrying the shirt’s hoe. Where the long, brooding nights arrived like the deeds accomplished. Where the failures galore, but the hard work was never a bore. The failures defined the success, as the losses stood just as a testimony to the karmic gains. Where the hopes, aspirations and desires varied with the changing hues of the weather. The farmers pawning everything for the feathers in destiny’s crown. Gold forming immaterially—or minimally at the rate of a dust speck for tons of sweat—in the toiled soil reddish brown.

All this will be gone. The moon was also dying with a moan. This charming mystery of the landscape: why the hardest labour fetches minimal returns; why a bit less harder toil results in a soul-satisfying speckful of returns that seems the wealthiest load. All these beautiful, aesthetic, curvy, circuiting strings, the mysteries of the landscape, of destiny, of the see-saw battle between happiness and suffering, between pleasure and pain, between penury and sustainable as well as gluttonous gain, between life and death, between a smile and a tear, all will be lost.

Everything will be gone for a direct, straight, materially penetrating needle of surety: the commercial, unflinching and fixed use of the landscape in a concrete form, where profits will boomerang in proportion to the short-cuts; where compromised humanity, ideology and conscience will not face any ifs and buts; where there won’t be any sweet scent of labour, which will be replaced by mechanical, greasy, muddy panting of merciless competition and mad grab; where concrete blocks and apartments will replace these wondrous solitudes and petalous platitudes basking in unrestrained, free, natural air; where sheaves, stalks, straw and reeds will not sway to the breeze, but blank, rigid, ironed towers will stand mutely, inflexibly to the nature’s cooing calls from increasing distances.

Now the sorrowfully yellowing death rattle of the setting time was arriving with a finishing chime. There on the opposite horizon, the day opened a window to sneak a peek at the imperilled room of the night. Wispily, there was the twilight with its mixed day-night delight. In its mysterious lap, the old moon met a slightly premature death, slumped as it feebly, freely into the silvery sea of mist hung over the tree-line. Slithered it into the sea of death and plunged into invisibility.

The twilight mischievously winked with its unfaithful, teasing look, asking favours both from the night and the day. The old moon was gone with its last ray. And the soon-to-be-doomed panorama, unmindful of the fatality in wait, came out of its dewy slumber. A crane’s clarion call cree…ked over its yawning bosom. The sun prepared to cast its first ray. The fields got up for another hard farming day.

A Soul’s Pyre

 Hate, fury and violence burn to eat their own self. Only love, peace and harmony survive and sustain. How long you have seen a storm screeching? The stronger it is, the faster it eats its own self.

There was a gang of robbers in a forest. Its leader was a bloodthirsty soul. He took pleasure in robbing people of their wealth and possessions. It gave him strange, paranormal pleasure. He relished that look of fear in the victims’ eyes for losing the valuables. But he needed more pleasure from the victims’ plight. More than the dread of losing valuables, he was addicted to the terror in their eyes as his people wounded and tortured them before the final kill. This horror of injury, blood and death in the victims’ eyes gave him more pleasure than the costliest diamonds. His delight reached its peak when he saw the ultimate fright in their eyes--the fear of death--as he went for the kill.

One day his band came across an old ascetic. The brigands hadn’t robbed and killed anyone for the past one week. They were thus thirsty for money and blood. A mendicant though won’t give them any valuable, but the terror in his eyes while facing death was no less for the gang leader’s evil soul.

They tied the ascetic and a huge bandit raised his sword to behead him. Death was imminent. The outlaws expected an outpour of panic from the bearded old man. Their ears were ready to receive the very same plight of crying words, pleading to be spared.

The head-bandit was looking at the old man’s face. His bloodthirsty soul was waiting water-mouthed at the spectacle of fear and cries in the face of death. But the old man was as serene as before, totally unaffected. To break his calmness, the leader even brought death an inch closer by ordering to count till ten. The beheader was to strike at the count of ten. The head bandit thought now it was impossible to escape fear as death approached in just ten steps. He had made it visible, just ten steps away.

One of the bandits started the count. With each number, a brighter smile surfaced on the old man’s lips. Before the final count, the bandit leader stopped his striker. The old man kept on smiling.

“You are smiling! You have no fear of death!” the head-robber asked.

“I have experienced death and its pain. It’s not as scary as we make it. To stay alive can be more painful,” the ascetic replied.

“But the experience of death makes it even more fearsome,” the bandit frowned.

His ego had been puffed up over the years; swelling on peoples’ fear for their possessions, injuries and finally the life itself. It had been his driving force: a bloody calculation of his progress in life; a measurement of his devilish desire; the scale of his monstrosity, which he took as excellence and superiority over fellow human beings.

Now the foundations of his treasure were breaking down. There was a challenge to his bloody conviction.

“I was a warrior one time. I was renowned for the power of my sword. I had enemies and unable to defeat me and inflict wounds on my body, they killed my family. I cried in pain over their death. Then I slaughtered them to the farthest known links of even their distant most relatives,” smile had gone from his sagely face.

The bandits listened in rapt attention.

“I bathed in their blood, laughed to the capacity of my lungs over their painful cries. I was trying to bury my pain under the pile of their bodies. Though I increased the number of my revenge killings, the pain inside won’t go. I was thinking that I am removing my pain, I was but making it mountainous. Then I came across the wife of someone who had himself beheaded my wife and children. Killing her would have given me the maximum pleasure. I raised my sword to kill her. She was pregnant. Just a week or so from delivery,” he closed his eyes.

The bandits sat down, laying their weapons by their side. It was an audience now.

“She was imploring me to kill her after she delivered the baby. She said she would consider it the kindest act done to her if I spared her life till the baby was born. She was in a way asking me to spare the baby. I told her that it won’t serve any purpose because in any case I will kill the newborn also after killing her. But not in her womb or before her eyes, she asked this much favour. She was holding my legs. I was trying to shake her off but something stopped me. She was a mother. I remembered my own mother, the way she must have been killed. That left me shaking. I was ready to kill an enemy’s wife for revenge. But my hands were trembling to kill a mother,” tears were rolling down his bearded cheeks. 

The bandits were listening as if to a sermonising seer.

“I decided to postpone my revenge for a week, thinking it will add to the pleasure in killing both the mother and the newborn. She gave birth to a girl after a week. The momentum of killings was still on my head. It still possessed me. I killed the mother. When I stabbed her I was shaken by the look in her eyes. She still carried the look of acknowledging my kindness in postponing my revenge. She had it all through the week. I had thought she was trying to save herself with that look, trying to arouse pity in me to spare her and the child’s life. But I was wrong. She had fulfilled her promise that if I spared her life for a week, she will consider it the kindest act done to her by anybody. That look on her face while dying showed it clearly. It robbed me of my hate. It killed the devil in me. And it condemned me to die each moment till I really die,” the old man looked into the sky.

There was pin-drop silence. One of the bandits even felt like offering some water to the old man. But he checked himself.

“The baby girl was my punishment for the revenge killings. I tried to kill her but my hands gave in. The game of death had possessed me. It had gripped me with such force that I was not living. I was already dead. I was roaming around as a dark agent of death. I was not living, I was already dead. I died long before my body will die. I went mad with repulsion. I hated my bloodied hands. Leaving the girl under the care of a friend and paying him for her upkeep till her marriage, I ran away. I was running after my death. But even death seemed to have discarded me. It laughed sinisterly from a distance. I tried to kill myself. But I was so weak that even self-injury won’t come. So I roamed around, neither accepted by death, nor by life, just a ghost lingering between life and death. Years of roaming around have left me detached both from life and death. As I take a step forward, I don’t know if it is meant for life or death. This melting of difference between life and death has at least removed the scars of blood from my soul. I can sleep for a few hours peacefully. And I can smile. Death thus has lost any meaning to me. So has life. Nobody can restore life in me. That’s impossible with so much blood on my soul. But if you give me death, I will consider it as a favour,” the old man seemed to implore the bandits to come and strike.

What was there for the bandit-head to feast upon? This old man didn’t possess any valuable. More importantly, he did not even have the fear of death. What will he take away from this killing? The food, this game of death, appeared stale, meaningless. He asked his group to throw their weapons. He had tears in eyes. He knew it was easier to continue the life like before and some day die at the hands of some more ferocious robbers or soldiers. That would be the fine end to it. And exciting as well. But to live differently to die another way was almost impossible. In fact that would be the real punishment.

This old man had meted out the punishment to himself by dying every moment, dying while life thrived abundantly in the forest around him, leaving him alone, not touching him in any way. So he decided to change. Not for a better life. Not for lesser punishment either. But for a prolonged death, recalling all his sins. Drawing sips of death instead of life for years before death claimed a body whose soul had escaped long time back.

A Gram in the Heart and a Ton in the Mind

 Two monks, one young and the other old, were crossing a stream. A beautiful woman was also standing on the bank. There were lines of worry on her striking face, her mind calculating the risk. The stream appeared daunting to her elegant, feminine self. In the spring air, the bird songs appeared to carry sensual notes.

The old monk looked at her. He understood that she needed help to cross the stream. His moral training of being kind to others fetched the idea of helping her to his mind. But the mere thought of touching a woman shook him up. It was a bigger no on the scale of immorality. He got goose-bumps. His rules of celibacy forbade him from touching a woman. So chanting mantras to clear his mind of the thoughts about the woman, he moved onto cross the stream.

Reaching the other end, he was horrified to see the spectacle behind him. The young monk was crossing the stream. The woman was sitting on his shoulders. It was scandalous to the elder monk. He was gripped by scores of emotions. He felt jealous of the younger monk, for taking the initiative basically; of becoming someone he always wanting to but denied himself from being. He then forced his jealousy into anger over the violation of the code of monastic conduct. He was seething with helpless rage. The thought of touching a beautiful woman was gnawing at his heart. He was again denying some basic instinct as he had throughout his life.

Reaching the opposite bank, the younger monk helped the woman down. She thanked and smiled. He bowed and followed his religiosity to the extent of keeping a straight face and moved away with respect, peace and dignity. The monks started towards their hermitage.

They had been walking for hours. It was evening when they neared their place of penance. The check-dam of the old man’s thoughts broke. Finally he burst out.

“You touched a woman. You have broken the code of conduct. I will complain against you once we reach,” he was still wondering whether he was jealous of the young monk or was it really anger over the violation of the rules book.

The young monk smiled. He put a comforting hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“I left her on the river bank itself after helping her. You are still carrying her in your mind,” he said politely.

The older monk was ashamed. He tried to put her out of his mind as they walked. The younger monk meanwhile walked with a rested mind, appreciating the marvels of nature in the forest.

The message is clear. The things which ought to be simply done, should just be done. Otherwise, their shadows linger in the mind. They grow heavier with the passage of time. This invisible weight is heavier than the stones we see around. Simple, harmless acts of appreciation, of enjoyment, of helping someone cross a stream are better done and closed with a full stop. It’s better for a healthy mind. Otherwise, they linger like conspiring shadows over our conscience.

A missed chance of being good will definitely cast a shadow on our mind. An effort to help the self in being good, on the other hand, will hardly leave any unbecoming imprint on our conscience for pinching reflections later.

Only goodness has a legacy and a future. Hypocrisy and meanness are just bad examples and leave repentance most of the time. To do good is instinctive for a human being, it’s however another matter that we stifle the urge most of the time. To be bad, on the other hand, is not intrinsic to our nature. It is wrongly reflective, a miscalculation, a tragic bypass of the instinct of goodness.

Nurture the seeds of the instincts of goodness like the younger monk did. It gives peace of mind, clear conscience and makes the journey enjoyable. Avoid it and you carry the burden in your mind like the older monk.

The Parrot and the Old Sparrow

 After a long, hard and wearisome journey, the parrot realised it was no longer possible for him to fly anymore. The sunset was imminent and along with the great fire ball, his willpower was ready to surrender and call it a day. His wings tired, his temper losing its balance, and his beautiful colours mired in the hard journey’s perspiration--although it was winter--the parrot landed on a branch.

It broke his heart, this inability to continue on his march to meet the lowest-set milestone for the day. But then it had been a very tough, cold and stormy day. There was no sunlight during the day. And when at last the sun prevailed over the frosty chaos, it was the time to call off its duty, pack its bag of brightness and light the other part of the world.

The winter was at its peak. And anxious, drooping, panting was his beak. With every precious moment left of the day, the saffron slanting rays were melting into the misty bay. More emboldened, the cold was creeping up. Its pinch was becoming bold to take everything in its hold.

With sad eyes the parrot looked at the setting sun. His run had been too long and taxing. He had long forgotten the flight’s fun. Where was that fleeting, winged pun? With each breath and laboured purr, restlessness crept further into his perturbed fur. Each moment passed, pinching him with the realisation of loss and failure. With each mile, the journey had become a drag. The vigour and energy, which had lifted him with brag, were now dumped in a deep pit, from where it was not possible for him to retrieve even a bit.

Then even the last ounce of strength was hit. He was fighting to save himself from a fall. After all, he had so many miles to go. The height of his flight was becoming continuously low. Finally, he bowed before the eventuality and anchored his feathery weight on a branch’s restful bait. Halting, but, didn’t bring the relief it should after a long march because he still had far, far to go.

“Merciless, frost-fanged will be the night!” he thought to his misery’s delight.

As the warmth vapoured off his body, shudder crept over with incremental ease. Anxiously, he ruffled his feathers as if to loosen the cold night’s siege.

“Where to spend the cold night?” he pondered from dejection’s highest height.

Everything appeared alien, uninviting and antagonistic in this freezing twilight. The night moved closer with a scary chuckle across the gray shades of the dreary dusk. The night was so near! It again put him on his toes. He realised the importance and utility of the remaining traces of the day.

He looked around. The forest was lost in an eerie silence. The day’s last vestiges bade goodbye like the feeble truth emanating from a sad couplet. For miles and miles everything appeared surrendered to the gloomy pal of a freezing, imminent night. All the woods around looked solid, unwelcoming and creviceless; without that hole which can become a bird’s hall. His despair and agony touched another peak.

His sad reverie was broken. He heard a muffled, breaking-free, old, juvenile chuckle. It was an old sparrow. The greyish patches in his fur long put under time’s harrow. The oldie was flapping its feathers in a water puddle. So old and bathing in such freezing winter’s hold! The young parrot’s senses went into a chilly huddle, while staring at the scene in the puddle.

Even to a tired body, dejected mind and subdued soul, advice comes very easily.

“Hey such a cold night is waiting! Take care, it doesn’t become death’s baiting! Old fellow, you must take care and should not extend your dare to the limit of catching cold, fall sick and lie on death bed!” the warning came with ease from his beaten, sulking self.

The old bather, the fun freak, stopped in the middle of an ecstatic shriek. But within an instant his seasoned enthusiasm regained its footing. Again the old punster squeaked, chirped and tweeted to match the huge heaves of happiness sashaying across his old turf.

“My old coat has enough room for the water to turn to warm vapours and shun and beat the death’s creepers. Each moment has to be lived like a full day before I fall asleep forever. Before that I have to live fully and fear nothing, worry about nothing, and get everything which can be drawn from each and every moment. I have to milk the time’s udder totally dry bro!” he tweeted, whistled and made a frenzied display of dancing in the muddled waters.

The old sparrow had raised a storm: a riot of happiness; a cascade of mirth. In between, he paused and pantingly opened his beak to fill his old lungs for more life, more vigour and more strength. Everything falls short in old age. The young, beaten, subdued and defeated parrot looked on from the branch. It appeared silly and illogical to him.

“What could have happened to make this oldie so happy?” he wondered.

With his saggy, drenched feathering, the sparrow heaved his old bones to fly up to him for a hearing. The moment he landed on the branch, he brought exciting, adventurous jolt of mirthfulness. The branch shook with the force of his liveliness. The young parrot tightened his claws and ruffled his feathers to maintain his perch. He was hardly done with it when a vigorous pat landed on his tired left wing. The old sparrow’s right wing landed with a casual, supportive and friendly force. Again the force of the old bones jolted the tired young bones.

“Tired!” the oldie asked.

“Yaa,” the parrot could manage a weak squeak.

“Well, most often we get more tired in the mind than the body,” the oldie puffed up his chest, ruffled his feathers, and twitched his tail to rearrange his gear.

There was a little shower on the parrot. He shook with a sense of cold and moved away a bit. The distance between them was too short for two strangers.

“New to the place, humn,” the seasoned native of the land asked the visitor.

The branch was still swaying with the inertia of the vital last drops of life in the old sparrow’s body. The newcomer insecurely, apprehensively, worryingly gripped the wood. A cold night and darkness was all playing in his mind. 

“Where are you flying to?” the oldie asked softly, suppressing his enthusiasm, feeling the parrot’s discomfort.

“I have to go far. Shouldn’t have stopped at all. But then my wings gave in,” the parrot sighed, traces of defeat and loss all strewn over his green.

The sparrow gave an assuring, comforting smile. “During the day, do your best. Night is just and just for the rest. No flight can last forever. Rest is not stopping. It’s just the beginning of another league in the journey,” there was mystic calmness in his old, dim eyes.

The parrot looked at him and sighed. He wanted to say so much about his trials, tribulations, unmet goals, crushed dreams and scattered ambitions. Too much was striking inside to pour out. He preferred to keep quiet.

“Why sit here and ponder over the path which you can’t even see in this impending dark? Dear, I have no family and live in my palatial hole in the trunk of a banyan. Come with me, my place is at your service!” the sparrow spoke with the grace of an old patron.

There was almost no choice for the parrot. In the hot pursuit of another mile, he had missed many a nice shelters on the way during the evening. Little did he realise that one has to stop. Stopping isn’t a defeat. It’s biding time for the victory. And when his body and the day’s last rays both gave in, stopping was enforced. He had to stop and now take the option which presented itself. He thus followed the old sparrow to his wood-hole. The latter whistled all the way, chirped songs and tweeted notes of strange happiness.

“What makes him so happy?” the parrot following the sparrow again wondered.

They sneaked into the cosy, warm confines of the sparrow’s wood-hole. It ran deep and appeared perfect for the best sleep. There was a nice bed of softest sinews. The sparrow’s raw, bursting enthusiasm had turned to a palpable silence, contentment and restfulness which pervaded the wooden abode.

Outside, the weather turned as bad as possible in a single night. A horribly chilly, stormy night. No light for miles in sight. A furious rainstorm lashed the tree as if to uproot the earthy shackles and set it free to fall. But the tree was strong. After all, it was the choice of such a seasoned player, the master who knew the strength and fragilities of the woods. The banyan withstood the deathly throng.

“I live here all alone, but in constant company of my peace, rest and happiness,” the old host spoke with half-closed eyes, resting his slightly crooked back against the wood.

“What makes him look so happy, no longer in pursuit of anything?” the guest again wondered.

“Though the memories and reminiscences sometimes sneak in through my door to moan over my beautiful, active, youthful past. Darted when I fast. Wooed damsel sparrows with mischievous finesse. Raised families, driven by my instinct’s pull,” there was a loud thunderclap outside and the narrator stopped.

Lightening struck somewhere. It shook the earth. A sinister flash of lightening sneaked into the shelter. The parrot shook with fear. The sparrow laughed and assured him of safety. He had seen many such storms.

“The storms aren’t there to kill. They support life, even though it may not appear on the surface. I have seen it. Most of our fears are phantoms,” he chuckled.

The parrot listened. He again made himself comfortable.

“Well, coming back to my past that sometimes sneaks in to disturb like this lightening did to you now. Age then caught with me. Most of the beauties lie at a distance, teasing you to run after. My eyes but no longer see them. Feeble eyes you know! When I completely shut them off, my eyes, they even sense the death’s blood-thirsty hound. So I open them and just be myself. Me with my weak eyes. I just see the small, dimmed world sprawled in close proximity to me,” the old host paused and pecked his saggy feathering with his blunted beak.

“So his happiness is a compromise with his disability and old age,” the guest thought.

“You know what,” the host broke the parrot’s chain of thoughts regarding the compromise resulting in an enforced happiness. “To justify a well-lived life, when the force of youth is on your side to propel you towards your goals, the conclusion, the slowdown also has to be well-managed, well-paced, voluntary, not an accident. Ending is as important as beginning. With an accidental, aggrieved ending the essence of the beginning and build-up gets lost,” the sparrow’s slow-paced words again dispelled the parrot’s just derived theory of enforced happiness born of old age and weakness.

The parrot’s body was aching and he would have fallen dead asleep, if not for the question which was puzzling him to the extent of forgetting the pains of his fatigued self.

“So I live happily as the tail-end of a great life lived. The force of beginning, starting, acceleration! And the path of letting it go, losing the pace slowly, gracefully, receptively. The deceleration.  Slowing down with effortless muse. To stop finally. It can give as much excitement as the force of starting. And then the final rest. During the slowing down phase, the time becomes slow, the world is a small puddle around your feet. You live like in a dream. A slow-paced one, minutes stretched like hours, days like weeks, weeks like months, and months like years. In slowing down gracefully, effortlessly, one can live a dozen lives lived in the beginning mode,” the old sparrow coughed a bit, and then with a smile, telling his guest that all was well, took a pause.

Some swift sleepy grip would have drawn the parrot into a deep slumber, but then he heard the words again. He driven and lynched by the starter’s force; the other one leading the rickety carriage to its stopping shelter. A journey completed by two characters. A life lived by two protagonists, separately, but summary being just one life. A beginning and an end. The latter part was so comforting that it appeared to seep into the turbulent phase of his own first leg of the beginner’s journey.

“Enjoyed I the choices which the fate sieved for me. Just thankfully took my share. Now I pick up and play among the coarse, discarded chaff which remains unwanted above as the fine particles, much in demand, trickle below. But it’s great fun, I tell you. In youth, we just think that life means rolling in the sieve’s fine brew. However, life can be equally enjoyable among the discarded heap, little malformed grains, sand-grains, specks and twigs. Now I roll like a child in the rubble of the past, which was once waylaid by the youth’s blast. It is now the precious wealth of my old age. Mellows down the rage in this haze. There aren’t any takers for it now. So I enjoy it alone, without that competitive drone,” said the old host, away from the fire, cosily lying at the margin, where the faintest traces of warmth touched his old fur before moving into the cold darkness.

The majestic slow down, as important and enjoyable as the headlong thrust of the beginning. The source, the beginning, and the slowdown. And the end. A cycle.

“And try even to get bold against this winter’s hold,” the oldie chuckled, patting his faded fur with the end of his wing.

“Has he achieved all he wanted in life to make him so happy?” the parrot wondered.

“During youth, I flew majestically high to beat the cold with my blood’s warmth. Now wisdom swarms. I don’t go out in the storms. I just go along the gentle breeze’s pace. So I find ways to brightly light my days with these feeble rays. In this cosy wood-hole of mine, drunk I’m with my age’s vintage wine. I know that I may not go out of this hole to ride softly on time’s back at some new dawn. When death will pick up the pawn, leaving this old fur and feathering engraved in this wooden hole. But it doesn’t make me sick. That time hasn’t yet come. And I have the leisure of stretching moments till then to the capacity of my old bones. Also, that sleep doesn’t appear different from the ones I enjoy now,” a gripping calmness emanated from the each word he spoke.

Outside, the storm was tossing with a self-ravaging fury, consuming itself, jolting everything around, breaking, snapping wood. The banyan was but sturdier beyond any storm’s destructive lust. It stood firm as if the calmness from the old sparrow’s restful soul was seeping into the wood, giving it strength.

The parrot had been in the hot pursuit of the orchards beyond the forests, deserts and ocean, where the fruits of unheard sweetness lay more abundantly than the grass below, where the sweet cooing female parrots, of unparalleled colours and beauty, seduced youth to the pleasure’s farthest end. His happiness lay too far. How could he be happy till he got all that he desired?

“The pitcher of desires no longer exists. I dropped it long time back, realising its weight. If you have it, the desire to get it full can be a real pain, I tell you. Even if you kill yourself to fill it, and suppose you succeed, still there is no escape from the torment. Then the fear of losing it strikes. So where is the rest? I have been having beakfuls of fun. No storage, nothing. It has all been a majestic flow and marvellous fluidity. Like the unforced march of a trickle of water down the slope, moving with the gradient, with acceptance and surrender,” the old host closed his eyes, feeling the soothing touch of that flow with life’s natural pace.

“But I’m happy. It won’t be possible if I hadn’t been happier earlier. To die happy, to happily slow down, one should have been happier earlier during the blasting stage,” the old sparrow tweeted and whistled as if recalling the happier times.

“This old fart must have hit gold during his youth, and now he is just rolling in happiness as a pensioner, munching the leftovers,” the parrot thought.

“The sinews holding life to my body have become weak and almost bloodless. These will not feel the pain of the final cleavage. It will be just like an autumn leaf being painlessly windblown into the oblivion. In this tepid existence of mine, between hot and cold, amid warmth and coolness, a misty torpor pervades my old bones. Beyond the extremes of pain and pleasure, I spend my time in some pleasant, vague proportions of reality. Happiness and sadness seem to have lost their specifications. Neither both exist, nor they are dead altogether,” with a deep look of serenity, the old sparrow looked at the guest.

The parrot appeared restless even in this cosiest of a safe hideout. How could he be restful? A bigger storm of unhappiness was raging inside.

“How come you look so subdued and sad?” the sparrow asked. “Have the conditions been so bad to rob all the real charm and leave the colour on the feathers and soul so dull and poor?”

The pain inside broke all check-dams of restraint and the parrot spoke out.

“Though I’m young but the spirit seems to have sung the last song of life. Too much has been the pain and strife. My courage appears to have run dry now, although the colour on my feathering holds somehow,” the parrot spoke dispiritedly and sighed.

Outside, the storm touched a newer peak. The wind screeched. Rain lashed. Lightening struck. Some tree nearby fell with a huge snapping, cracking sound. The parrot shivered with fear. The sparrow calmed him down. Taming his emotions a bit, the parrot spoke again.

“When just a hatchling, father was gone. Grew I up hearing mother’s moan. The paternal sun thus never shone. However, the biggest consolation was the mother’s caressing, preening, feeding beak. Ate I fruits at love’s supreme-most peak. As the sole nestling, I was fattened on her love’s labour daylong. And then went to sleep hearing her lullaby and song. Aha! Sweetest dreams came with a throng! My whole existence was tethered to her maternal pole. Me, the brightest attractive-most star sole!” there were tears in the parrot’s eyes.

The young visitor was lost in his mother’s memories. The old host looked on sympathetically.

“Under her great grooming, colours on me came bright. Lavishly my green and red flashed as I fluttered and flapped for my first flight. Unbelievable was the pride and compassion as her souring soul’s maternal shades touched the brightest delight. In her eyes I saw a new light. How marvellous was the sight!” the parrot smiled and then stopped as if some painful recalling stabbed the smile.

“Alas, her incorruptible love of yore was arrowed by the fatality’s shot. Again the cupid’s arrow came hot. I became a past, ignorable and with rot. She was now in another spring of love. Incipient love for the future in her womb, I was the past buried in a tomb. I thus became an orphan although both my parents lived. After many cries and anguished, aimless flights bereaved, life’s burden with my soft feathers I heaved.  Young and handsome, I flew with the time’s oblivion and balm. Intoxicating is the youth’s charm,” the parrot paused with some shine in his eyes.

There was a smile. The sparrow nodded knowingly.

“Inevitably I fell in love. Heartfully I cooed with my beautiful lady. Those love-drenched days when the heart was ever ready to sing an ecstatic ditty! Such abundance and happiness was in my kitty. So sweet, silent, mirthful and undaunting were those acceptances of the nuptial responsibilities. Those watchful, eager searches for the hollows in the tree trunks for our nest! Tirelessly we looked around for the best,” the aroma of sweet memories raised the pal of gloom from the parrot’s face.

The sparrow beamed as if dabbing his old beak in the sea of happiness.

“Guided by the love’s brace, we found our place. In that comfortable, safe hole, nothing else but we had all the muse and role. Our identities melted into each other’s. How proud was I when I became a father!” the memory suffused the parrot with a fresh gust of energy.

The parrot stood, flapped his wings and preened the fur with his luscious red beak. The sparrow too got onto its old claws and stretched his wings to unstiffen his old body.

The parrot’s voice had a strained note now. “I will not become like my parents, I thought. I will not be ensnared like they were caught.” 

Some traces of that determination still seemed to raise his spirits for a moment.

“So I clung to my possessions with youthful pride. Alas, the inevitability arrived with chide. In full bloom of youth and colours, all of my brood flew away. My lady-bird came to be infatuated under someone’s cooing sway. It was another fine day when she bade adieu and flew away,” sorrows ran through the parrot’s fatigued, sleepless body.

The old sparrow sighed, stretched his wings and patted the visitor on his shoulder.

“I embodied all forlornness. The loss was glaring in my face. Monstrously unremedied! So I decided to leave that place. And my sulking wings did brace to take up the longest possible flight from the place, where such pains and unfaithfulness abound. So flew I as if pursued by the fearsome-most hound. For many days I have been flying, my soul aching and wings crying. I won’t stop till I reach the place where happiness is not checkmated by such tragedies,” the parrot looked outside through the opening.

“Why should we enter into a relationship and love somebody so completely, if it is bound to go into the gutters? Aren’t all such temporary dives into the life’s stream futile and vain? Aren’t we just mere cogs in the hands of those inevitable, unstoppable machines of fate which make us cheat on each other, abandon the once loved ones and more?” the parrot had burning questions coming out of his aggrieved self.

The old sparrow, full of wisdom, the undisputed king of his life’s small kingdom, looked with solace and simplification of age. Perched safely where youth’s dilemmas and puzzles no longer haunt with their pinch and rage, the sparrow said:

“It’s like a flower ruing and ruminating over other blossoms because its beauty will not last forever and will go to the glooms. Dear, it’s not we who are the ends, rather the beautiful phenomena like love, marriage, procreation which decide the trends. We are just means to these beautiful ends and destinations. So become an uncomplaining tool, tilling earth without any expectations. It isn’t that love exists because we do love someone. Love is the primordial sea without any limits of space, time and individualities. It’s we who sweeten a few moments of life with it till the full stops arrive with a stopping hit.

“Do we procreate to cling to procreation throughout life? No, we are made to procreate to become the unselfish means for the propagation, for handing over our batons, to perpetuate these beautiful phenomena of love and relationships. We do not leave behind an offspring, but a possible instrument which may come in handy for the sustenance and survival of those very precious moments which got us the taste of love, happiness and friendship at their best. If we recognise it, our spirit gets a solacing rest. If not, we get caught in an acrimonious net.

“We cry and put up a bet that I completely loved her and became the cause of young lives. It was I who caused that buzzing in those hives. But such limitations would have been meaningful had our survival been unlimited, or say the course of our life was uninhibited and unrestricted. But our journeys are to be ended. So just cherish those moments which you tended. If you cling to the stream of these phenomena as if they are your inheritance forever, they then become a drag around your neck, making you a prisoner behind the bars.”

The sparrow stopped and shook his fur as if trying to find some last trace of such bondage.

“Liberate fella, liberate yourself! Just be a journeyman who understands that young flowers on a plant or adolescent leaves on a branch do not lessen themselves or the spring in not ruing over their wispy autumnal fall. They inculcate phenomena. They help perpetuate nature. They sustain the amazing natural gifts of love, beauty and bloom. They also served in a similar way, made some new ray, very feeble though, to defeat a bit of gloom under the shadows,” the oldie’s dull, watery eyes sparkled with hope and satisfaction, as lightening flashed and reflected in them.

The parrot was at long last feeling the vibes of happiness and rest which comes with the acceptance of simply doing the duty and completing the task with full heart.  

“So the only way to remain happy is just to be happy, no matter what the circumstances are?” the parrot had his doubts.

The old host chuckled, tweeted and cleared his throat. The visitor was near the point, although still with his doubts, which was natural.

“Yaa just be happy, no water what!” the sparrow lowered his voice as if in cadence with a divine mantra.  “It’s basically we who repel happiness away from us. We don’t allow it to come to us, embrace us, take hold of us. We set it as a goal too far down the lane in future. Some house, some grains, some accumulation of pleasure, some relationships, etc., etc. We set up goals as the preconditions for our happiness. And the goals keep on piling up, over the years, and set up a wall between us and happiness. And happiness keeps on getting more and more distant from us. I will set up a home and then be happy. Happiness delayed. And then I work over the years. There is no end. I set a goal to raise a family and then be happy. Again it sets up a wall between happiness and us. Like frustrated human log-movers, whom I see in the forest, we just push on. Happiness stays thus a distant goal. Never to be achieved. We make it conditional on endless goals, which are never met, because it’s the destiny of a goal to merge into another bigger one. They never die, only we die. Huge immortals they are. The goals and destinations! In pushing for them, we die; separated from happiness which could have been the greatest gift of life, had we not pushed it away from us.”                                         

The long fabric of the stormy night was slowly melting over the banyan. Outside, the stormy chilliness was fleeting before a promising twilight. Chances were there for a day bright. Clouds parted for the sky’s delight. The parrot’s spirits appeared to cut through the shadows after turmoil and inner fight.

Holding onto the visitor’s traces of hope, the old host tweeted, “The remedy lies in taking away happiness from the far end of our endless goals and keep it safe in our house, like I do store some grains for the harsh winters, near me, in the safest part of my house. It has to be cut away from the trail of endless goals and ambitions and kept with the self, in the present. It has to be set free from any conditions of meeting some goal. It’s a state as good as being healthy. Just being and living for a day. Separate being from becoming. You can be happy if you set your happiness free from the chains of your lifelong dreams.”

The parrot smiled. It was the dawn of truth.

The wise oldie continued, “You should be pushing towards yours goals as a happy person, rather than somebody who wants to be happy in future after completing the goals. The goals never come to a halt, only we do, at the moment of our death. So we die unhappily, separated from the natural state of happiness which could have pumped our life with unthinkable contentment and satisfaction, only if we had set it free from the chains of goal-setting and placed it unchained from those unreachable spots in the future.”

The parrot stood erect like a disciple in front of his master.

The sparrow raised his voice as if carrying his old furred body over to the peak of realisation. “Let happiness be a precondition for our doings, not a poor outcome of our efforts. Do everything as a happy person; instead of doing the deeds to become a happy person. Happiness is a state of being so, not the specific result of some hot pursuit. There is only one way it can be availed. Either we embrace it in the condition we are in, or it just eludes us. Keep it with you while you fly. It will boost your determination to go far and high.” 

The sparrow was beaming with such rest and repose, as can be provided by being happy unconditionally.

The peaceful oldie looked out with hope. “The day today will be warm and sunny. The dawn promises sweetest honey. Youngman, I’m in hurry to go out of my hole, and play my chirpy role on the great stage set around. My feeble soufflés and dim light in the eyes are still enough for the spirits abound. I still see my own sun in the down-hilly twilight.”

The parrot looked on happily, deeply drinking the sips of solace and comfort pervading the wood-hole.

“You go high because the forenoons are there for you with their multiple hues. Go, so that you don’t rue over the day aimlessly lost. Do justice to the old spirit of your host. Take some lessons from my soft feebleness. It will boost your courage. Take clues from the manner in which I make a day out of my night! And top of all, decide to be happy before you take flight!”

The old sparrow came to the parrot and patted him with his faded wing. The parrot lowered his head in gratitude for a great lesson taught. Thanking the host, the visitor flew away into those swathes of promise, where new life, new love, new aspirations and new relationships held sway. But all that was secondary, in future and to be worked upon. More importantly, he was happy in the present. He had decided to keep happiness as a routine, like eating fruits and flying.