Frost and Fire

 

Usually, our fears are directly proportional to the doubts we have.

A sword fighter has a beautiful wife. She is in awe of his reputation and is almost daunted by the force of his persona. She respects him, but love is missing in the secret chamber of her heart. As it happens, she falls in love with somebody outside her marriage. As if that is a small problem, to make it still worse the lover happens to be their servant.

Lies and deceit can be hidden, but love has the natural propensity to shine like the sun from behind the clouds. It comes to light. That is its nature. As per social norms, love usually stands out scandalous.

The offended husband challenges the servant for a duel, taking it for granted that he will surely kill the illicit lover, thus giving the opponent a painful death and earn more laurels for his swordsmanship as bonus. The deed will not reek of cold-blooded revenge and his motive to kill the servant will lie buried under the fair game of duel. So it is supposed to be a sure death for the poor servant.

The sword fighter hides his revenge and anger under the art and craft of his swordsmanship. Most importantly, he is sure of victory, because by the logic of it, how can it be otherwise, pitted as he is against a man who has so far merely picked up the scabbard from his master’s famed walls to clean it. And he being a master swordsman whose reputation chimes across the four corners of the state.

The servant is thus sure of his death. He has accepted his fate, death. When you are eying victory, you are also eying safety to yourself from the corner of your eyes. And you have fear also, because without that the sense of victory cannot sustain. With a sense of victory you just cannot be fearless. There is something to fight for and achieve and for that you have to remain alive. This breeds fear.

The servant, on the other hand, has accepted death and failure. His acceptance is hundred percent. He has no doubt about it. And when there is no doubt, you become fearless. The swordsman isn’t totally free from fear because his certainty about his victory falls short of the servant’s certainty of his defeat and death. He isn’t as sure of his victory as the servant is of his defeat.

So, irrespective of the fighting calibre, the servant is more fearless of the two, simply because he is under less doubt. In his fearlessness he decides to let loose all madness in him before his death. He doesn’t hate the opponent. He isn’t angry. His acceptance of death enables him to give all to life before death. The sword-fighter, on the other hand, cannot give all in the fight, because he is fighting to save respect, prolong life, take revenge, and all these with further expectations from life. Life itself means fear.

The offended husband takes manoeuvres as per the art of sword-fighting. In pre-death fearless madness, the lover strikes his sword as if he is striking with a stick. To all the conventional strokes of the sword-fighter, he hits back with the most awkward and unorthodox ones. Fearlessness in his eyes creates fear in the opponent’s eyes.

The servant kills the master! Why? Because he is sure of his death, and because the master isn’t that sure of his victory! How can he be? He simply cannot. He is fighting to save a lot of things and fighting to save things cannot allow you to be cent-percent fearless.

The Lonesome Shadow

 

It’s Holi on March 13 and unusually cold for the season. It feels almost like late winter. It’s not the usual riotous Holi but still there are plenty of drunken shouts and stampedes of fun. In the afternoon he feels extremely weak.

Holi is celebrated to honour the most vibrant colours in our spirit. However, the festival has lost its footing in both letter and spirit. It now seems to bring the worst in us—muck- and mud-slinging, drunk driving, molestation and street fights. Many girls in Delhi have reported the cases of semen-filled balloons hitting them. This unethical, unpardonable sling-shot catapults the beastly mentality against women by several evil notches. Every girl has all the reasons to feel unsafe in Delhi. The semen-filled balloon is a representative of the deeply entrenched sexual frustration in the Indian psyche. It pours out in the goriest of ways and means. The more they pretend to ignore and suppress it, the more diseased they get under the veil. The children hardly get exposed to healthy information about their sexuality. It stays the most secretive and all-important topic. It grows like a creepy parasite in the shadows.

On Holi, the liquor industry awaits gleefully. Drinking alcohol in excess is what we make of our festivals these days. 

He is heavy headed, a consortium of conflicting thoughts lying jumbled up like a pathetically tangled mass of ropes. Uncontrolled thoughts are like a mass of snakes slithering around viciously. There is a strange taste in his mouth. He rolls his tongue around the inside of his mouth. He feels some presence. The thinnest of hair in the mouth leaves him scared. He tries his tongue. He takes it out by scratching the tip of the tongue with a pinch of thumb and index finger. There it is! It’s a very tiny one.

He seems to have cold and bad throat and lies down to listen to Osho’s speech to power up the brain’s processes. Osho’s speeches on YouTube give him an unexplained peace. He can feel the words. It turns out to be a motherly lullaby and he dozes off. It’s a very sound and satisfying sleep. Words and phrases of the Holy Master sound like a dream. He wakes up very fresh. The audio is over. It has been three quarter of an hour. Sleep is a great saviour, without it we will just burn out with our worries.

This Holi completes 7 years since his father left this world. Father loved gardening. Most of the potted plants and roses that he had planted are still there. Sometimes the son feels his father’s presence in a fresh blossom on the rose he had planted. The son thinks his father is still around.

On this Holi, he is holding his 10 months old nephew, his younger sister’s son. The boy is fiddling with the light green fresh leaves of a plant his grandfather had planted in a pot, and which was later transferred to earth in the small flower bed. The child is running his fingers through the leaves. He closes his eyes and feels that the child is playing with his grandfather’s beard. He smiles, and again he feels his presence. Life has too strong imprints for death to wipe them completely. These are the dusty prints from the past. They keep bringing smiles now and then.

Wild Candy

 

The archetypal distressed genius, Maradona, who wrote the shimmering lines of his life with his left foot (and left hand), died on November 25 at the age of 60. He always courted skirmishes on and off the field. Beginning as a cheeky burglar involved in daylight robbery, the destiny catapulted him to become the audacious marauder playing tricks with feigns, passing steps, acceleration, stops and side turns. It flummoxed the opponents. 

He had a tendency to steer around the normal as much as he veered around the defenders. To him the world itself looked like he was in a stadium, sidestepping over social norms and sometimes even the law. No wonder, he remained a pleasant, unbridled, obese trickster even long after he hang his boots. An unfettered and effervescent spirit, we may say.

The stocky paragon of Argentinean pride inspired a fierce devotion. To the millions of his followers, it was a quasi-religious experience. You could love him or hate him, but you couldn’t ignore him. His innings on this planet has turned out to be a eulogy to a life in tantalizing excess, ranging from superstardom to drugs to domestic abuse to guns to cocaine to involvement with organized crime: A lotus out of the muddled tumult of muddy waters. Or we can say, it was an awe-inspiring darkness coupled with the silver-lining of his genius.

He flirted with football with an impetuous cunningness. Moderation and discipline wasn’t in his dictionary for his story is a testimony to excess in all he did and thought. A banner sums it up: ‘It does not matter what you have done with your life, it matters what you have done with our lives.’ He was indeed a heady rock star who commanded the stage.

‘I am Maradona, who makes goals, who makes mistakes. I can take it all, I have shoulders big enough to fight with everybody…’ He gave enough credit to his vaunting words through his Aztecan sorcery with football at the Mexico stadium.    

From winning the 1986 world cup indisputably single handedly to be unceremoniously kicked out of the 1994 event on doping charges, he dribbled between glory and ignominy. God was with him through ‘the hand of the god.’ At the one end of his excellence, he is credited with the goal of the century. But then his gluttony for goals in life included food, alcohol and drugs also. In fact, Maradona and moderation never fitted in closely. From a lithe demigod of an athlete, he went on to turn into a sniggering puffed up drugs addict. From holding the world cup, and the consequent slaloming into countless hearts, to barely holding his life in his fist after a cocaine-born heart failure twenty years ago, he had hit crest and trough of life without injuring his reputation.

The ‘Hand of God’ punching the ball into the English net during the 1986 world cup quarter finals. His ruggedness was pinching but his playing style was far more bewitching. In his football mad home country, he was the quintessential ‘Golden Boy’. Like he out-jumped the England goalkeeper Peter Shilton, almost twice his height, feigning to head but hoodwinking the referee by patting the ball with his left hand, to score the ‘Hand of God’ goal, he jumped over literally all norms to score goals and lead life the way his free-will dictated.

Who can forget the goal of the century!? Just four minutes after the ‘hand of god’, he hoodwinked all realistic expectations even from normal geniuses. His 44 strides in 11 seconds involving 12 touches gave us the greatest goal of the century. The 1986 Mexico world cup belonged to one man only. He madly burst into boxes. He crazily brushed off defenders. He maniacally squared off the ball towards the net. He magically outmuscled his tall and giant-type markers. His stinging left footers would be drawn to the net even from the toughest angle. Like a farmer ploughs through soil, his flicks and dribbles scythed through a slew of defenders and hapless goalkeepers. The blast of raw energy through his stocky bundle of animalistic muscles left him an autocrat on the turf.

Polarity melted in the photogenic blizzard of his dazzling runs. He was an angel as well as a devil, a rogue and a genius in the same vein. He was too far from the singularity of existence and very near some unpredictable multitude. He was reckless, brazen, desperado, sublime, elegant and graceful in a space of few minutes between the ‘Hand of God’ to the ‘goal of the century’, the latter almost divine in terms of its guts and audacity. He gathers the ball to his side in the stadium, swings and opens up two defenders, blazes on like a bursting comet, chest puffed out, his tongue leering and jeering and cutting across like a knife through butter, cutting the moorings of a posse of 7 English defenders to romp home to glory. This mesmeric run is unsurpassed. Those 11 seconds, and a run of 60 yards, beginning from his yard to the final romping home after rounding the English goalkeeper, involving stepping on the ball, setting right, left and forward thrusts like a brute steam engine, the opposition scattered in disarray, give us an unforgettable slice of history. Just four years after the Falklands Islands war, where his country lost to the opponents on the turf now, he had given enough to the entire nation to forget the bruise and celebrate victory on the playground. The sweet redemption, almost a kind of salvation for the millions of souls.    

The stocky and strangely built spiral of life, rising from a small shanty town to hit global superstardom, had glorious twists as well as dark knots of drug addiction in his stormy flings with life. He flirted with death with as much ease as he did with the ball, the crazy behemoth.

As the supernova preparing to die out with a dazzle, the tantalizing little giant had to be lifted out of his seat as a bloated behemoth during a world cup match in Russia in 2018.

Imagine his hold on the psyches of fans across continents. A band of Egyptian bandits freed a group of Argentine tourists after coming to know that they were from Maradona’s country.  A hero for the disadvantaged and unprivileged, his pictures on T-shirts boosted the morale of those who were born in slums but had stars in their eyes.

His moves, both on the field and in the larger arena of life, were sublime, uplifting, farcical, even tragic, all mixed in an out-of-normal concoction. His outspoken tongue gave a good company to his magical left foot in expressing the bulging life and spirit in him. No wonder he was a salvation to an entire generation of Argentina.  

His casket lay at the state presidential palace draped in the national flag and his famous number 10 jersey displayed before the final rights. Three days of national mourning becoming that of a head of the state. Here lay the almost singular hope of the country throttled by the military junta, economic backwardness and defeat in the Falklands war. Such full of life men come once in a rare while. Rest in peace brother Maradona!

The Smile of the Forsaken

 

He is sitting on the bench by the tea stall. The white woman, her face tanned by the tropical sun, sits near him and nudges his ribs with her elbow. She smiles and he cackles with childlike laughter. 

‘Ganja?’ he mumbles very naughtily leaning over her. She laughs and offers him a cup of tea. He looks like an elderly father who has something in his kitty that would make his little daughter happy. She is excited like a girl turns all smiles at the prospect of receiving her favourite candy.

‘It’s all gone, not even an ant’s worth to be found anywhere on my body,’ he chuckles.

‘Babaji you promised to give it today. My friends are here. They will jump into Ma Ganga and get mukti if it’s not arranged today,’ she keeps her smile.

A smile is the anchor of all hopes in difficult situations. A cicada unleashes its jarring jaw-harping notes that go buzzing through the air.

‘See, this cicada is so happy without ganja! Why do you need ganja to keep smiling?’ it seems the sadhu isn’t in favour of free-wheeling consumption of the substance.

‘It’s not for our smile Babaji. It’s to tame our shame, our pain, our loneliness,’ she is serious now and looks at the swift torrents of Ma Ganga.

‘Ma Ganga is here to absorb our sins, shame, pain, everything. Bathe in her like a baby rolls in her cradle. You will forget all pains,’ the kindly old sadhu puts a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. 

The touch of care seems to revive her spirits a bit. She smiles a bit and bends down to caresses his dog sitting under the rickety wooden bench. He keeps it chained.

‘Why do you keep him chained?’ she asks after a gentle reflection on the subject.

‘We are both chained, not just he. I am chained by having a liking for him and he is chained by his loyalty to me. I know this is bondage, even if a fragile one. But he is as happy with the real chain as I am with my emotional one for him. We have agreed to be chained to each other and walk slowly on our journey till almighty allows us to travel together. After that he goes his way, I will go mine. But till then it has to be a beautiful journey,’ the old mendicant is fondly looking at his dog.

‘Take it gudiya rani,’ her offers her a tiny paper pudiya wrapped around the tiny grains much in demand at the pilgrimage town, especially among a section of foreign travellers. ‘Feed your smile instead of drowning your pain in this,’ he tells her.  

He jumped into mendicancy 50 years back. The old sadhu has shifting, empathically rolling eyes. There is a glint of empathy as well.

He prepares a beedi with the substance of forgetfulness, takes a long, long draught of smoke.

‘Sab sunya hai. Sab gol-gol!’ he cackles with a mischievous laughter.

He offers the next draught to her. She happily takes her turn at the beedi and impresses him with her lung power as she inhales copiously for many seconds.

‘You can be a famous Babaji if you decide to organize your sermons,’ she sees a grand spiritual set-up for him and she as the head disciple.

He thinks he is not educated enough to speak out all that he has realized. He has this propensity of rhyming his speech. Sometimes he succeeds also.

‘The other shore has everything, roads, connectivity to the outside world, hospitals, offices, schools, everything. But here we have swarga. Nothing is left in those ashrams,’ he points to the busy business-like built up on the other side of the holy river.

‘This dog is my last worldly possession. I won’t have any more. It’s blissful to be dispossessed altogether!’ he inhales at his turn.

The beedi is spent. She pays for their tea. She wants to pay for the pudiya also but he says no.

‘Learn to live by adding to your smile instead of subduing your pain,’ he tells her as he takes off the chain from the wooden bench’s leg and starts moving to the solitary alley leading to the forest away from the ashrams and shops by the side of the holy river.

A beautiful, buxom night is building up over the rapid torrents of the holy river. The time is moving towards its mid-night mark. There is silence, serenity, cool breeze, yellowish mercury lights in the street. His dog walks behind him, looking happier than it would be even without the chain. If we are destined to have chains at all, let these be the chains of love. It adds to one’s smiles. Then there is no need to clamp down one’s pain by force. All turns well by itself.

She stands and looks at the retreating figures into the darker folds away from the river bank. She looks at the pudiya. A smile comes on her face. The easy merriment in his eyes still flashes in her vision. The little orphan girl who works as a helper at the tea shop is asleep behind the counter. Her smile further brightens up. She knows the story of this girl as she is a frequent visitor to the tea stall. She recalls the bright smile of this girl when she hands over the tea glass to her. Ironically, it’s the smile of the forsaken that comes as the brightest.

She walks down the steps to Ma Ganga, stands in knee deep waters and respectfully bows down to flow the pudiya among the all-receiving currents of the holy river.

She comes back and sits by the tired sleeping girl on the rickety bench, her feet on a chair and her hand clutching a wooden post nearby to prevent a fall. She caresses her head. The girl is too tired to be awakened by such a soft touch. She then holds her hand, replacing her wooden support by a real flesh and blood motherly hand. The woman smiles. She has added to her smiles. She would no longer need to drown her sorrows to survive. She has decided to get tied to a chain of love. She is going to adopt this little homeless girl and give her the best of life and living.   

An All-loving Dog

 

The dogs are supposed to be unfriendly to some people, if not all, to prove their loyalty and intelligence. An all friendly dog can be more mischievous than an angrily growling one.

This spotless black Labrador, the cute and kind devil type, was equally friendly to two claimants. The angry rivals went to the police to tilt its favours in their direction. They tried their level best to use all the hallmarked attitudinal signs in a dog’s behaviour that qualify the owner-pet relationship such as wagging the tail, child-like look in the eyes, cutely protruding tongue like a child and many others.

It was inconclusive as the impish black gem showered equal affection on both parties. The police station incharge was forced to go and conduct the dog’s DNA to settle the ownership issue.

It was necessitated to go for the test in order to decide the animal’s parentage that was expected to help in deciding the issue of ownership also. The police were put in a testing situation because they found it impossible to just shoo away the case as per their whims. One party was an influential journalist; the other was an impressive political activist. The police was thus, on this rare occasion, stretched beyond its comfort zone. The issue was already well fed by the local media by now. It could no longer be whisked away like any other petty issue that plagues each nook corner in the country.

The journalist was a Muslim. Three months back he lodged an FIR that his 3-year-old Labrador pet named Choko went missing. With the police having failed to provide any lead, and the media man being pretty enthusiastic in his own investigation, the journalist reported the police a week back that he has spotted his dog at the house of the ABVP leader, the right wing students union of a powerful political party. A dispute between a Muslim journalist and an ABVP Hindu leader over a dog surely is bound to raise hackles. The left wingers also chimed in to tilt the scale away from the right wingers. Left of centre and right of centre forces also threw their stakes as per their political suitability.

There were more voices to the left and the journalist, helped by an irritated police, took possession of his dog. The story but won’t come to a happy conclusion here only. The very next day, the Hindu outfit leader reached the police station and claimed that it was his dog named Foko and he had bought it from a place named X. The rival claimant appeared full of confidence, driven by a sense of grief and anger born of losing a lovely pet.

The police station incharge faced the dilemma again. Choko or Foko was again summoned to the police station. The two rival owners again fetched all fleecing, cajoling tricks from their repertoire of pet-parentage to get the canine’s affection. The dog but appeared intent upon having two masters simultaneously and shared his affection with both of them with such canine, clinical precision that again both of them had an exact 50% share each. The dog was indisputably equally comfortable with both the owners and names.

May be it was a very smart dog. The police should have roped in a third fake claimant to see if the loyalty dribbled down to one third for all. However, police being police, they cannot be expected to act so wise. They have to act with force and intimidation. Wisdom is for the village headmen of the last century. 

The journalist said that the dog’s parent lived at a place named Y and that is where he had bought it. Since the celebrity dog was already on the front pages of the local supplements of the vernacular press, the police was in no position to hush up the case either for this party or that on the basis of their clout. An impartial enquiry brings a lot of headache to the police.

The police sent cribbing teams to both the mentioned places to collect blood samples from the supposed parents. The district veterinary doctor collected the samples. He too got a shot at duty after a long and boring hiatus. Meanwhile, since the right wingers carried a bigger administrative clout at that time, the police allowed the ABVP activist to keep the dog till the reports arrived. When questions were raised about this for-the-time-being ownership, he said he has submitted all the relevant documents such as vaccination cards to substantiate his ownership. 

The test was then supposed to possess the key to the truth.     

The animal activist group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment to Animals) also jumped into the fray. The state PETA co-ordinator blamed the police for being insensitive to the animal’s welfare for they couldn’t take proper care of him, resulting in a high fever to the dog, under which it turned angry to both parties and growled at both, thus again leaving the situation indecisive like before.

The dog now showed all cordiality with the PETA co-ordinator, who got personal with the issue and went to the extent of demanding FIR against the police for tormenting the animal. He also demanded FIR against the wrong claimant under the provisions of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. The dog thus joined inter-species bonhomie at the PETA facility. 

Presently the right of the dog centred around having its rightful owner. The reports that arrived were a shocker. Both Place X and Place Y theories were nullified. The journalist and the political activist both were equally near or far from the pet’s legal ownership now. Given their humanitarian—animalitarian rather—cause, the animal welfare body was allowed to keep the dog and put up a pet adoption advertisement whenever they felt the dog was ready to take a master.

Possibly it was an over-friendly dog with a mission of brotherhood and love for all. But then, an all loving dog creates problems also. And these are not the times for secular, unqualified, all-loving affections.