The Pregnant Baby

 

It’s an effort to pass it off as a mall in this town of Haryana, even though it is no more than a street urchin in front of a self-sustaining, mature, confident young man. Delhi isn’t too far, and almost everybody, to whom the issues like malls matter, especially the teenagers and young adults, has been, one time or the other, to the famed Ambience and Sahara in Gurugram and scores of other malls in the Delhi NCR.

However, you just cannot scamper away to those famous places every time your eyes burn with desire to watch the latest release; your tongue lets loose a stream of saliva to dab into something chatpata, some pizza burger sandwich chicken fry; your wallet appears too heavy and eager to shed some bucks to get some famous brand, some trousers, underwear, undergarments, jeans, shirts, tops, trackpants, sneakers, chappal, joota and more.

We get as much itchy to spend as we are eager to earn. That’s where the consumer culture draws its lifeblood from. And these days you don’t want to hunt around in a dusty, sweaty market to get your cravings fulfilled. There are too many shops and too many provisions. You need many items of many types within shortest time. You want it at one place. So a small town, with its inhabitants having tasted the luxury a mall offers, has to have a mall.

And here it comes taking the first tottering steps of a toddler.

The three-storeyed mall has come up to at least partially fulfill the shoppers’ and idlers’ dreams. It’s an adolescent town running to meet its mature city-self down the decade. One side on the ground floor has garments, footwear and a couple of saloons. The other side has struggled. Subway struggled there, so did pizza wallas, and so did the franchisee-less efforts at cuisine by enterprising dish-makers. The peda and lassi wallah left. They left with more enthusiasm than they opened.

A Patanjali store, sure of its brand, on the nationalistic upswing, has taken the space of three stores by removing the walls in between. It has more display cases and rows than the number of people at a time. Still we survive for future. The brand gives all indication of growing, growing and still growing. Let’s see how far it goes here.

On the second floor, one side is ready to take shoppers in. But it is all shuttered up, no takers so far. The other side is yet to have its separate blocks of shops. Even the floor tiles are missing. You just have the all-clear view across the glass front along the outer side.

We missed the basement part. It has a huge, stuffed to the gills, provision store. The rest is parking lot where hardly anyone parks, apart from those who have set up business here. The teenagers just try to get suddenly invisible, now standing here, now gone, and steal some kisses behind the pillars in the basement.

A boy and a girl kissing, though still a considerable scandal, is no longer the sin it used to be a decade back when it fetched honor killings as natural consequences. Now it fetches leering, jealous remarks and sniping hooting. That much is digestible for a goddamn kiss. Of course there are many, who don’t have a girl in their lives, even in this freeway decade, when many successful macho boys claim that girls are more easily available than even the brandless shirts in rundown stores. So these pining, girlless souls prowl around to catch it preferably on camera, and leave it in the endless stream of the social media.

Domino’s arrived with a bang, “Try all new Dominos”. They had the push of their brand. Unfortunately, not many takers. It closed. Displays are still there, waiting for a new player to relieve them of their wasted duty.

On the glass-fronted marketplace side of the mall, Looks Unisex Saloon is displayed in white letters on a tar black board. Its plush interiors and golden embellishments invite with a modern smirk. To surpass the rickety level of small town modesty, both males and females are welcome. Well, that makes it modern by default. It’s a humungous effort to catch up with modernity. The rate of change has lagged a bit in the society lynched by patriarchy.

By the salon’s side, New York Slice are gone. Unique Collection, the garmenters, look over the counters to spot some serious buyers. The staff at Giani’s since 1956 broom the not so stomped floor, trying to make it swanky clean. They are trying to look damn busy, thinking their up-to-the-mark seriousness will draw people. By its side, Satyam Medical Store sells condoms, I-pills, toffees, chocolates, napkins, but hardly any takers for medicines. They must be selling some headache pills and ENO to survive.

In the lobby on the ground floor, a very smartly fixed cubicle covered with flex-boards welcomes you. It’s Batra Lemon Corner, a red cubicle with price lists of nimbu lemon, jeera lemon, milk rose, pista rose and many more displayed all along the upper half of the set-up. The lower half of the cubicle still carries the signs of its past. The previous entrepreneur, Sip and Bite, tried to seduce young boys and girls with a group of patties, aloo patties, macrony patties, chilly patties and still more. The past that never was, it hardly began, and ended. It but still survives to remind some bored eyes that there are patties in this world.

On the ground floor some shutters are closed, but they have attractive displays. These are shops in making. Auram, by Nisha. No clue what it may mean or stand for. Only time will tell. It may remain anonymous, the entrepreneur may decide to call it quits at this stage only. A nail art saloon, D’nails, get any design on your nail. It seems progressive. Till a decade back those who look at the board didn’t even realize the importance of decking up face, forget about nails that got broken while dealing with buffaloes and bulls in the fields. Dollar, always on top, upcoming. These are rich red letters bordered with white on a pitch black board. An aggressive style statement for the undergarment brand. They have been around for some time, so may storm through the initial apathy of window-shoppers.

Like a dead, open-mouthed whale, the green Subway cubicle has been closed with more enthusiasm than it was started with. Or is it open forever? Sub in white and Way in yellow, in a white elliptical background. Metal chairs and plastic tables are neatly stacked inside. At least there is grace in closing down. The owner seems to be a diligent person. There is also a plastic room cooler and glassless display case. It was a world that saw its end coming even before it was born.

Nearby, Amazing Kids is yet to come with its collection of kids wear. The starter must be keeping a close watch over the kids loitering around holding the fingers of their parents. United Colors of Benetton is operational on full pace. The spacious interior has enough privacy for flirtation among the sales staff. Shopping wise there isn’t much of botheration.

Priya Retail Store, shop and save. The invitation is very sympathetic. But is there any saving after shopping? Ever? Anywhere? It’s about spending. Baker’s Hut has nice, suave, white, brown and grey tiles. Who cares? The attendant is yawning like he has just woken up, even though it’s almost lunch time. City Heart Restaurant has claustrophobic interiors. An LED blares as if in the musty backseats of a disc. Teenagers just sit around to watch some song, drink water, do their stuff under the tables and go out. In the garments store next to it, even the notice of 50% discount offer repels more people than it attracts.

Very few people take the lift, after all it’s a matter of just two flights of stairs. But its door has advertisement stickers arranged very nicely. These are city brandmakers: Family Dentist, Verma Pathology, Rawal Retina Centre, Bansal Health Square, City Computer Point, etc., etc. Small people with big dreams. Well, isn’t world made of such people only. Those who are no longer small, hardly live.

The third floor is the liveliest one. They have two screens of Max Cinema on the one side. Opposite is a long and spacious gym, running along the full length of the mall. You can see fat middle aged women, their children gone to schools, and husbands packed off to workplaces, sweating out on the treadmill to chuck out tummy and bum fat at noontime. It’s also about getting a bit of Godsent opportunity for some fling to bear up the sinisterly boring tide of the creepy mid-life crisis and boredom.

Max Cinema entry is a bit livelier. They do some business at least. Not that they play nice movies all the time. The business puller is the fact that they provide privacy and darkness. Icing on the cake. Couples with thudding hearts sneak in to get corner seats to hold hand and do a bit more as would not make them repent the cost of INR 300 for two seats.

Two teenagers are stopped by the guard who asks them to take the Centrefresh out of their pockets and deposit on the counter. “You stick it on the seats,” he is in a position to chide. Those who don’t have a girl actually do this, possibly as revenge and a sort of rebellion by their teenaged self.  

National anthem gets played before the movie starts. Nobody wants to court controversy, so all stand up willingly, unwillingly. They get down even before the last note is finished. Nobody wants to lose even a precious second in the cool darkness.  

In the national flag, saffron and green are separated by white. How symbolic! There has to be peace between them. But who will play white?    

It’s the cinema that really makes the story for this mall in its infancy. The heaviest footfall was when Dangal was screened. It was never livelier. What a crowed! The owners may have the first night of complete sleep during Dangal screening.

Cinema is pushing the revolution of bringing boys and girls together. The surrounding area is deeply conservative. Teenagers and adolescents don’t look forward to watch hit movies. They like those lean weeks when there is no super-hit spoiling their hideout by the surging crowds. They prefer flops, when hardly anyone comes for the show. The big, dark and cool hideout is the perfect bargain for 150 rupees. A lot of intimacies unfold, with just a few dozen couples busy with their expression of love and lust in far corners, in the middle of the rows, or anywhere the contriving self of a flushed adolescent deems it fit.

You may have the best of a girl with the worst of a guy, the best of a boy with a horribly thin girl, both good looking, both average, both funny, or many combinations probable in between. As many combos as you can ever think of. It’s an eclectic mix. It’s not about choice. The floodgates have recently been opened, so you cannot be choosy. It’s only about having a boyfriend or a girlfriend. On principle. Choices, what, when, how, where and why come later.

Girls come with their faces covered with headcloth. Well hooded for secrecy. The strains of patriarchy are still surviving. Honor killings are still not totally unheard off. It’s better to be cautious. The headcloth, which kept women in almost slavery for centuries, is now an instrument of freedom, of anonymity, of facelessness. With it you just become a girl, a generality, you lose your name. You cover your face and you lose your identity to become just a girl. So the scornful eyes of elders will just curse a girl generally, instead of you particularly.

The small town girls on the path of unshackling themselves from the chains of tradition and patriarchy wear jeans, suit and salwars, in awkward imitation of the world in the movies and the Delhi NCR. Some look terribly funny though. But it’s more important to assert your independence. It can come at the cost of sounding funny. A dignified slavery is worse. A funny independence is better. Somehow. Don’t have the logic for this. Just that it feels so.  

With hooded faces they loiter around, almost on tiptoes, keeping a strict watch with their eyes, lest they be recognized by some acquaintance. If they haven’t actually seen it, at least all of them have heard of honor killings that were rampant, as little back as 5 years ago, in each and every settlement in Haryana. So it’s about flying with the wings of age, of curiosity, of sex, intimacy, kissing and holding hands. The mall thus grows in operations; month after month more people come, making it less scandalous for the young ones. Let’s hope the theft becomes a routine affair of life, to draw it out from the illegal shadows of minds to turn it just a mere simple fact of life, to stop rape, to vanquish molestation.

Let’s hope freedom brings genuine love in people’s lives. Till now it appears like a mischief and theft. Things are changing slowly though. Let it be a vibrant society, which is engrossed in higher purposes of life, instead of people being forced to explore their sexuality almost till the end of their life. Where the virtual world, defined by the so called virtues, keeps on acquiring weirder and weirder shapes, taking the person further and further from the real potential he/she is born with.  

A Day on the Railway Platform in a Small Town

 

A superfast train rubles past without stopping, raising dust and many a wearied feather. Rub of iron on iron. Packs of migrant Bihari laborers with their families descend from a not so swanky, classy train that stops at this not so illustrious district centre. Small people, they look all the same in their smallness. They carry huge gunny sacks crammed with clothes, utensils, flour and rice—the bundle of dreams.

 Linesmen are busy working on a section of rails. Vibrating sounds of hammer striking the rails chime through the cool air. Red cloth banner set on the rails under repair, nearby a man in orange shirt, holding flags, red and green, is looking in both directions for trains on the rerouted spare tract in the centre.

Two students, going to Faridabad for exams, are passing time and beating youth’s over-exuberance through friendly mock-fighting. Jhelum express is late. One of them is blaming the other for setting out late. The hoot of a fast train is approaching. It's all rumbling iron. From the dense green foliage of the banyan by the platform number one, a squirrel is tik-tiking in some serious argument.

A short portly woman clad in a dirty sari approaches the students. One of them gives her a coin and asks her to pray that they reach on time. If they get late, he will find her out in the evening and will take all her collection as a punishment. She is assured of the crowd where she can escape into anonymity, and shakes her grey, untidy, unwashed bun of hair in consent.

 Platforms are a favorite place for those who have lost their minds—or who knows it is actually they who have regained theirs. A woman stares at a point for so long that you fear she will drill a hole in the ground. Smell of pakoras wafts with a pungent, oily fizz. The newspaper stall looks unburdened of its load of morning news. The stationary kiosk appears to seek students’ attention.

Under the base of the footbridge on the platform, a shoe-mender has his portion of the stomped world. Polish, wax bottles and soles define his boundary. A cargo train chugs past at a high speed that is surprising for her lethargic, old woman type bearing. The long trail of faded, beaten maroon cargo bogies raises a storm. Bored commuters, waiting for their passenger trains, look at it with jealousy.

 Life seems on a mysterious pause before hitting the rails. Those who stay on the platforms rarely take bath, unless they get drenched by the rains—clothes, sweat, mud, gripe, soot and all—leaving them more stinking than ever. A fat boy is standing, looking at everybody but still nobody in particular. They have their own world, those who have something to do with a bit dissimilar functioning of the brain. Shouldn't call it malfunctioning, but yea definitely it works differently, taking them into a special world, unseen to the stomping majority around.

 His bottom on a fertilizer sack-cloth and knees drawn up to his chest, a man is taking deep draughts at a beedi. He is aged well beyond his real years. Looks 60, but don't be surprised if he turns out to be just 40. Poverty seems to be in love with old age. His gaunt features have acquired an unsparing penetration, a hawkish tenor, like he will jump into criminality at the slightest instigation.

 And here she, he, o no he, she rather, both in fact, comes. Many a head turn. A boastful, proud hybrid, cocking a snook at the dirt cheap normalcy scattered around. The prince/princess of his/her world goes cherishing a peculiar freedom beyond confinements of gender and social roles. She/he has carefree air, walking and playing two roles at the same time. Both males and females look at him/her with a strange curiosity. He/she moves with manly swag and feminine coquettery. The only emotion it creates in males and females is plain curiosity, even some traces of derision.

Let's call him a he for convenience. He wears a see-through black, body-hugging top. His shoulders are masculine in the manner they sway and swing with each step. Arms are also long, like an attractive damsel’s curvy one, but these are drawn tightly with traces of worked on muscles. He holds them like a lady of grace. His chest is flat and would have passed off as a teenager boy’s prospects of a decent manhood. He wears black track-pants having orange flowers on both bums. His legs move in a feminine rhythm, in tempo with the swings of arms with elbows drawn in and forearms slanted out.

Look from behind and you may think a slim teenager girl is walking with a bit of teasing promiscuity opening its bud. The despos may even get aroused. He is dark. His hair is also cropped midway through the length and style of a boy and a girl. Unlike, many transgenders who jump into exaggerated tones of sounding and appearing feminine, he has left his natural identify as it is, right there in the twilight, no light no dark, no shame no fame, nonchalant, lukewarm, impassive and self-absorbed. He moves creating a wave like a snake-head creating a wavy ripple as it glides through the still waters of a lake. Most of them can't help staring, some even do with a mocking laughter.

 The mother is there. Sitting like all the soot and grime has polished her misery to the extent of bleaching her bones. Her kurta and long skirt are soiled beyond the parameters of color. Her dirty, torn at many places, dupatta is spread in front of her. A child, barely a year old, is lying by her side. It is playing with a plastic cup, nibbling at its edges, touching it with its legs, taking its tiny tongue out.

Wait, there is another baby, couple of months old at the most. It is packed, like it will stay safe during conveyance, only its face out to the big, intimidating world. It is crying. She has put a bottle of milk to its lips. It cries anyway. Don't think she has enough milk in her bosom. A group of smartly clad college girls passes. The one with a backpack of books takes a moment out to look at the unfortunate mother and adds to the coins on the torn duppatta.

 And life simply moves on like it is doing around the globe and further into the deeper recesses of the cosmos. There are parallel currents of agonies and ecstasies at all points and places. Learn to observe it closely and minutely. It enlarges the perspectives. It broadens the range of your emotions. It lights up many a shady areas from your being and drives away many assumptions and insecurities. It trains you to be an aware person. And awareness straightaway takes you very close to your real self. Those who are shaking hands with their true self have the best prospects of love, happiness, joy and contentment in life.

The Story of a Cricketer

 

He never knew that his craze for cricket will turn into a dream that will be kept alive somehow. Growing up in the seventies and eighties, the madness would get into his soul on dusty, holed pitches in the playground speckled with bunch-grass and patches of alkaline waste outside the village. He could have done batter in studies if not for this obsession with the willow-lashing game.

What did the countryside urchins know about cricket, except Kapil’s famous feat at the world cup, and that two people run madly between the stacks of bricks facing each other from some yards, with a dusty land in between, somebody throwing mindlessly, and someone swinging the tattered bat still more mindlessly, and still more people running madly after the cork ball that had all the freedom of taking whatever course it preferred to take?

Well, this isn’t even the A of cricket. The real game of cricket starts many notches further. It’s a very technical game having thousand nuances and mind-games. So it was more of baseball cricket that gripped rural India during the seventies and eighties and it ate countless hours as much as it ate all other sports. Having spent a major portion of his youth in baseball cricket on dusty, holed grounds, he got into Delhi Police as a constable, a gross underachievement given his academic potential. But then cricket was the predominant thing for his soul and I cannot see him holding any regrets even decades later.

Even after getting yoked into matrimony and police duties, he kept the flame alive, and continued throwing around his bat whenever and anywhere there was a possibility. A bit of momentum he transferred to his kids. He gave the best of affordable facilities to his son. Settled in a town, sent him to coaching, pushed him to gym and gave him expert diet.

The boy rose above the level of baseball cricket to play cricket, but not beyond the city club level. He isn’t dejected. The dream is still alive. “Such big innings are played across three generations at least,” he says. “I have got him to a level where he will be able to guide his son to at least national level,” he has the patience of the Pacific Ocean in just being there for centuries.

Well, it’s more suitable to keep the dreams alive, across generations, in fact. Then they stand a chance to get fulfilled. Isn’t it hope and dreams personified? I think only some inherent love and liking for something takes someone so leisurely with limitless patience on the path of life. And at least there is a direction and a clear sense of purpose the family is carrying. Best of luck guys! I really appreciate your loving passion for the game. With so much of love for the game, you just cannot help being bitten by the sweet bug of a really compassionate self.  

The Deadly Injured Mosquito

 

It’s the last week of August. Humidity tickles the nerves instead of the heat. The Monsoon is about to complete its trip. Once again, in this part of Haryana, it is leaving with lot many promises unfulfilled. Deficit rainfall is the norm here. In any case, the Monsoon hardly abides by the law of averages. It’s either too much or too less. Nature has, after all, lost its equanimity, its level-headedness. It’s irritated and grossly impulsive these days. The nature, I mean. And rightly so, for what wrong we haven’t done to her.

As the light peers through a humidity-soaked sky, I decide to make the most of this cool morning. Reading under the open overcast skies has its own charm. While the world gets up, yawns, stretches its arms, gets ready to dab into the birth-time energetic spirits to go jogging and exercising, I decide to pick up this nice book and use my time in the best suitable way I can think of, reading.

The light picks up from across the bluish dark curtain hung over the skies. A cool breeze is blowing. The invisible vestiges of the rain in the previous evening still loom in thin air. It appears like it stopped raining just five minutes back. The words and sentences have a lucid meaning. It is like writing on a clean slate. The brain, after all, is unclogged of extra garbage at this time.

The book is touching. The sentences fetch deeper meanings than they carry at any other time of the day. I read with a trace of smile on my lips. In fact, I feel like I am doing a holy deed early in the morning, like a sage officiating over yagna. I get attuned to the phenomenon of literature, which is nothing but one more effort to portray another aspect of truth from the endless space-time continuum of events and happenings.

If there were sages in ancient India, there were demons also, the fabled rakshasas, who threw meat and bones into the holy fires. They laughed with their deep, rumbling peals of mocking guffaws. An avid reader is the most a modern human can come close to be a rishi, sage, of ancient India. And the demons? Well, there are countless. In millions, and of course, billions. Mosquitoes. The carrier of death, fever, dengue, chicken guinea and what not.

They buzz with multiple layers of preening sounds that crawl over your skin, bruising and itching it long before it strikes with its bloodthirsty snout. They have ultrasonic precision. You feel the drone’s deadly hum from a distance before your eardrum alerts you to the hurtling missile in your direction. On top of that they are bloodthirsty. Who knows, all the demons of the past may have turned into mosquitoes of the present.

Here it drones to spoil my morning. Dengue-wallahs bite early in the morning, my alert system sends a warning against the poisoned missile. I see it then. A huge one, almost as big as a housefly. I’m sure it must have bullied a few houseflies on the way to its mission. The chopper’s buzzing wings cut across the chorus of chirping sparrows on the courtyard wall. In a panic mode, I take a swipe at it. Guess with what? With my book man. What better weapon a bookworm can arrange on such a short notice? The elegant piece of literature turning into a weapon of defense! The rascal deftly dives, enjoying the catapulting rolls in the swirls of air sent down by my papery weapon. Even a mosquito is too good for a book these days. Uffs.  

I jump from my chair, knowing fully well that it will surely succeed in its mission if I keep sitting. Still eager to keep the meanings in sentences clearer like before, I start walking and reading in leisurely circles, pacing up and down the courtyard, sure that the deadly projectile is ineffective against shifting objects. I even take consolation that now it is doubly beneficial, reading-cum-morning walk now it becomes. And here it is again. A super-mosquito, I recoil with fear. I see it just about to land on my hand decently holding the book. These are not the times of niceties after all. This time I see it clearly. It has the ill-famed black and white bands across its hull, the deadly enemy, the dengue one.

Reading takes a backseat and revenge starts. It is too big to get invisible into the cowardly mosquito anonymity in thin air. It has grown too big for its cowardly skin. Its confidence protrudes through its bubble-strong body. I track it to the end of the wall. While I strike it against the wall, the instinct stops me from using full force to avoid a dirty palm smeared with a crushed mosquito carcass. The hand moves with the agilest movement, but strikes with minimum force against the wall. Maybe I want to injure it critically and enjoy a slow death with no blood on my hands. It is too big to go into that last moment’s topsy-turvy dive to escape. And of course sometime you hit the nail on its head, hit the jackpot, win the lottery, get the best girl in the college and bla bla. Similarly, you hit your target, the mosquito, in the second attempt only. A great stroke of luck that should undo most of the miseries of life!

With the scared anticipation of a high school girl waiting for her result, I take away my palm. The feeling is worth winning a million in lottery. My trophy lies against the wall. Not crushed. The force is perfect to send the idiot into coma. One of its wings broken, the other jutting out, some legs broken, the rest swished together, its deadly snout projecting out as if in utter pain. What a sight! One of its antennas moves a bit, to make it icing on the cake that it isn’t instant death. I see the black and white checked pattern on its body. What a kill man! Can’t believe my luck early in the morning!

Well, if such a victory cannot make you happy, I doubt which huge achievement will turn you into a horse-grinned champion?

A Lollipop of Happiness for the Kid in you

 

All mundane moments lying around have their potential of happiness and joy. They are meaningless until you spot them. The moment you dispel their anonymity with your caring look, they turn into a huge treasure instantly, at least for the aesthetics-starved heart in the present times.

To me happiness is when everything is soaked in rain in the morning and the diligent newspaper boy hands you a copy of dry newspaper. You feel like proclaiming him a champion and yourself a lottery winner. You just grab your slightly damp copy—newsprint is so soft that it soaks some moisture from the air itself, so the delivery boy cannot help in this—like a prized possession.

Life is not about mountains of mighty triumphs. It's about tiny molehills of such small pleasures. Learn to be happy with scores of little, little strokes of luck that come your way on a daily basis. Simple mathematics is: At the end of the day, the sum total of our little fractions of luck is more than the big shitty stroke of bad luck. Appreciate your tiny sinews of luck, for they constitute the rope of your survival and sustenance. If not for them, things can go wrong in as many ways as the vastness of this universe.