Day’s Dark and Night’s Light

 

Rajasthan is the land of desert, valiant Rajputs, marvellous architecture and millions eking out survival from the meagre offerings by nature. The nature itself seems to survive on its famished last crumbs. However, this reticent, unbuckling flora and fauna has its own pertinent, sandy charm.

The Aravali range running north-eastwards from the desert state’s south-central point appears forlorn, denuded, weathered, parched low mountain. After all, it is one of the oldest mountain ranges in India. Its eastern slopes, gradually merging in the Vindhyan highlands, provide a little sip of vegetative solace to the desert state, for here the sands do not shine in their typical hot fury.

The real charm (for the tourist) and horror (for the locals) of the desert sand starts gradually from the western side of the Aravalis. The Aravalis thus stand like a bulwark against the creeping sands from the west. Sadly, as the blatant onslaught of the unchecked human lust plunders the Aravalis of even its famished, stunted mix of subtropical dry deciduous and thorny forests, sparse grasses and shrubs, the low fence is slowly-slowly giving away.

Before the cruel ribbed skeletons of the sand dunes confirm the full hatred of the rain Gods for this deprived land, we come across the western slopes of the mountains covering western Udaipur, eastern Sirohi and eastern Pali. Here we get the stunted forests. Still to the western side, the Luni river fed by its rainy tributaries like Bandi, Sukri, Khari and other lesser streams flashes down in its milder fury during the monsoons, provided the Arabian sea branch of the rain-bearing clouds does not cross over parallel to the low mountains.

When the winds arrive from the north-west and the Aravali puts up some semblance of resistance, the rains reach to the level of 50-75 cm. This is the maximum rainfall and that too when all the climatic factors are beneficent. During that short period of time, the reddish-brown soil, due to its little water-bearing capacity, just abundantly lets the streams on its barren chest in gay abundance. We then have the streams to feed the Luni, which like a life-line amidst the dead soil struggles ahead like a valiant Rajput princess leading her small army against the marauders. The desert river then loses the last vistas of its gurgling presence in the Rann of Kutch.

Starting from the western slopes of the Aravalis, its reddish-brown desert soil slowly turns to dead desert soils. From the base of the old rocky hills, a narrow strip of dwarfish, stunted, wide-spaced growth of trees gives way—almost abruptly—to cacti and stunted acacia. Along the still surviving stream beds, we can spot a bit of semi-desert vegetation of thorny bushes, hardy ferns, acacia, salvadora or peelu trees.

Here lies the district Pali of Rajasthan. During beneficent monsoons—of course a rarity—tiny streams gurgle down the small wooded strip along the western-most slopes of the Aravalis. These little sandy valleys once in a while acquire a rainy river character. However, it is always doubtful whether sufficient rainfall will occur to give enough hydel energy to enable the water from the source to reach the point of merger with river Luni.

Our story starts from a tiny tribal hamlet in the little valley of a rainy stream surrounded by low, weathered crystalline ridges of the Aravali. It was a settlement of the saperas, the snake charmers. There were times when their ancestors provided an almost exclusive form of entertainment to the masses at public squares and to the princes and princesses, Maharajas and later their visiting English guests.

During those happy free times, the Aravalis too boasted of more greenery. However, now the first half of the first decade of the swanky new century gone, times had significantly changed both for the cradle of nature and its child, the human being. Mining for copper, lead, zinc, tungsten, mica, asbestos and unchecked grazing onslaughts by the famished cattle, sheep, goats and buffalos of the sahukars, the mini-landlords, had turned the mountain look far more dreary and desultory than it was just a couple of decades back.

The peasantry on the desert plains struggled with nature to get a sparse field cover of jowar, bajra, maize, barley and cotton. The camels lost the undisputed sobriquet of ‘desert-ship’ as roads came up linking the major cities. However, in the still more famished countryside, they still ruled supreme as the man’s most convenient friend in the hostile sands.

Bhanwar Singh sapera was forlornly returning home after a couple of month’s absence from his tiny tribal hamlet in the Desuri tehsil of district Pali in south-central Rajasthan. Sukri river—a tributary of Luni—starting from its hungry dry mouth in the western slopes of the Aravali range, lay moaning and pining with its dry bed because it was mid-June. The heat was at its peak and dry desert winds sighed from the western side.

With his meagre savings after entertaining foreign tourists in Jaipur, he thought it safe to save some money by avoiding the eventuality of buying a travel ticket. Since railways provide more possibility of a ticketless journey, using his now customary expertise he reached Ajmer by a train. However, here he was robbed of twenty rupees by the ticket checker. In disgust he decided to make up for the loss by spending another day in the city of pilgrimage. From here onwards, cramped in the third class general compartment of a train (with his gourd pipe and snake basket) with pounding heart, he reached Marwar junction.

Heera, the black snake, hadn’t been defanged. He had caught it in Ajmer as it had sneaked into a house and they had called him for the job. After capturing the intruding reptile, the snake charmer had immediately christened him such. Heera was still fanged because its new owner had the more urgent task of catching the train instead of setting down to the task of breaking snake fangs.

He thanked God for allowing him this part of the journey without any untoward incidence such as a snake bite or the appearance of the ticket checker.

In a very cool and calculated manner, he deliberated over the pros and cons of travelling in the same train up to Rani station, nearest to his settlement. However, discarding the idea of a free ride for too long in the same train, considering it greed that would definitely fetch him trouble, he lingered on without moving in the direction of his hutment. So for two more days, his snakes, including the now defanged Heera, swayed in Marwar to the mysterious vibrations of his blowing pipe, the been, the famed spell-binding, almost magical wand to control the snakes.

On the third day, just as a crowded train was about to leave, he sneaked into the overcrowded bogey all along with his provisions, a not so marvellous feat as the stickiest of bums gave him way for the fear of what he carried.

Even his snakes must have heaved a sigh of relief as the thick soles of his leather papooses hit the coal hot platform gravel at Rani. Before reaching Rani, as the train passed over the dry Sukri river, he had paid his homage to the river by tossing a 50 paisa coin into the sand. From here the journey on the road was less perilous, as moving eastwards it cut through the Aravalis on its onwards march. Pleading in a more pitiable tone, graver even than a beggar, he hitched ride on camel carts; then on a truck. He got down where the road passed over the dry river bed and proceeded on foot up the parched stream bed.

From here onwards, the dusty dry river bed, bound by the scantiest of reddish-brown low banks, went south-eastwards to take its faintest of arid valley into the Aravalis. Getting down he smeared his perspiring brow with the dry sand. It gave him a tremendous feel and smell of home. Heat and drought were at its peak. Around him on the tiny rocky mounds even the cacti seemed gasping for breath and moisture. Low thorny bushes scattered over the denuded hills appeared welcoming. Some thoughts were nagging him.

There in a pit on the river bed, some water must have stayed till late summer. But now in its place there was a little patch of salt marsh and in it a fearsome black cobra pair was lost in copulation; gyrating to the surrendering instinct. They coiled around and rose high in the air in their urgency to beat each other’s fanged passion. At the pinnacle of their ecstasy, they rose so tautly high that from a distance they appeared standing on their tails. Their usual slithery, fanged ferocity was buried under the veneer of gay abundance. His snake charmer’s instincts instantly egged him to catch them; but something held him back. And here cradled in the dusty lap of undulating hillocks adorned with summer-parched, pale, widely spaced, coarse carpet of grasses, shiny thorny acacia and euphorbias, he lay down under a desultory kokko tree by the riverbed and watched the mating snakes.

Balancing the wood on his right shoulder bearing the biscuit-coloured raggish, patched sacks containing the snake wicker baskets he moved ahead. In his left hand he held the chief weapon of a sapera, the been, with the pride and majesty of a soldier holding his sword. The first stars were twinkling in the evening sky over the cooling earth when he left the path by the river, took a side turn and ascended the tiny footpath up a smothered ridge to reach his village in its lee, protected from the hot sighs of the real desert to the west.

To this side of the slope adjoining a dry stream bed and almost reaching its margins, a few reddish-brown, semi-arid plots of land had been prepared but these were seedless waiting for the rains. In fact, everything animate and inanimate seemed chanting ‘rain...rain’. Iron oxides present in the weathered old crystalline rocks of the Aravalis gave its reddish, sandy, loamy character to pass off as the natural colour of the place in place of the usual green we associate with the countryside. However, the more everything yearned for rain, the lesser was their capacity to hold water.

Here in this lowland, the soil wasn’t totally barren and yielded coarse grains when it rained.

His family, spread out in the open enclosure surrounded by mud walls around the hutment, met him without any emotion, as if his safe return was almost granted and he had just returned in the evening after setting out in the morning for routine work.

****

The wrinkled brow of his father seemed more worn-out as if some big worry had been pasted on the family patriarch’s broad slanting forehead vanishing under the thick folds of a heavy turban (it is really big and cumbersome in this part of the world to protect against the sun).

It seemed the old man was simply waiting for a fresh ear to vent out his woes.  

‘People from the forest department have made our lives hell since you left. We have been lucky to stay here for I fell at their feet on behalf of the whole clan. But we hear that people in Bali tehsil have been thrown out of their lands. Who cares for the tribals like us? For hundreds of years, we have been living in peace with nature with our starved forests for many generations. Now they say that the land belongs to the mine-owning sahukars and the government!’ he lamented in a piteously drooling tone.

For decades, the fragile eco-system of the Aravalis had been plundered unsustainably, and when the first symptoms of the blatant rape of nature arrived, an overzealous government, silkily following the new-age mantra of the new century, in cahoots with numerous environmental groups, went on to impose many face-lift measures. So under their overarching drive, the tribals were found to be the encroachers who plundered nature. In its spree of zealously declaring areas after areas as protected zones, sanctuaries and national parks, the government dilly dallied with the issues of tribal land rights, while the systematic plunder of the already famished Aravalis by the forest mafia (involving rangers, industrialists, poachers and politicians) continued as before, for they knew how to dodge the law because it was a puppet in their hands.

Sometimes the tribal department officials arrived on the scene. With thumping hearts, the poor inhabitants of this still poorer forest awaited with bated breaths that they might get some semblance of legitimacy in the register of land records. Nonetheless, the forest acts are/were too harsh for the tribals. The mystifying ecological provisions, like a hard task-master, suspiciously look at the areas where these poor people have been living since the time immemorial.

Before the last assembly elections, the election manifestoes of almost all the political parties had cackled:

‘Regularisation of all land records; inalienable forest rights; inheritable rights over the traditionally occupied lands; merciful issuing of lease deeds, etc., etc.’

However, once the new seat of power had been established, all the flimsy ink in the declarations vanished in thin air only to be again raked up at the time of the next elections in future.

****

Roop Singh, his elder brother, had not returned home for the last five days.                       

With six-seven fellow tribals, he was deeper into the Aravalis, seeking fiercest most snakes in those rocky ridges and semi-arid slopes covered with tropical dry thorny bushes, wide-spaced stunted trees of mahua, khair and occasional sheesham. Here surviving on occasional game of hare, birds, jackals—while their goat and sheep herd nibbled at the faded little grass and shrubs to give them some milk—they looked for jahar mora, a black shiny button that allegedly soaked venom when put at the snake bite. It was, they claimed, obtained from a big, dangerous mountain frog. Apart from this, they wandered far and wide into this tropical thorn forest consisting of ber bushes, babool and khardhai for herbs and medicinal plants with miraculous healing properties which they later tried to sell to an almost disbelieving crowd during their snake circus in the streets of the more civilized world.

His father said, ‘Poor Roopa left happily saying that this time he will catch some animals to look like a mini-circus and then showcase these at Connaught Place in Delhi, where angrez log just shower hundred rupee notes like these are mere one rupee coins. The poor boy doesn’t know that the person who told him such Delhi stories has returned like a beggar this time. Poor Ratna...!’

‘What happened to him?’ Bhanwar Singh got worried.

‘He came back lamenting that the big, educated people in Delhi now think that we torture animals. He was beaten up by the police. His snakes, the monkey pair and the pet bear were snatched away like he had stolen these from somebody. It’s a great feat that despite robbed of all his property, he managed to reach here!’

Here as well, like most of the laws that flaunt their muscles only against the weak and the dispossessed, the Wildlife Protection Act, 1970 banning cruelty to animals got suddenly rejuvenated thanks to a fretting, fuming animal activist from Delhi. So the circus industry right from the street-side snake charmers to the big organised circuses with their entertaining trails of animals and artists got almost a fatal blow.

Meanwhile, the real culprits, who plundered Mother Nature at the institutional level, cutting thousands of acres of land on a daily basis, polluting the skies with millions of tons of toxic fumes, smothering life out of the seas with nefarious pollutants, all these and more went with their business as usual with a clean hand and legal documentation.  

****

In front of their tiny hutment, a dusty square was marked by a stunted pair of neem and peepal. The curbing around this pair contained little alcoves where they worshipped the snake Gods and their ancestors. Then there were chambers to put snakes in them. Water was the costliest item for oblations here. Faith can stretch out the last ounce of materialism, so whatever might have been the condition of the drought, these people still offered water and crumbs to the deities, expecting them to make their life better. On these morsels survived ants; on water the neem-peepal pair; and on the living offerings of frogs, lizards and insects the snakes thrived.

‘Kala has stopped dancing to the been tunes,’ Bhanwar said after performing his thanksgiving homage at the holy place.

The morning was changing into noon. The sun was baking hot. His old father put his big bundle of intricately twisted head-cloth on his head and picked up his old, blackened big gourd pipe made of dried vessel of gourd. Its neck was ornately carved and painted. The central bulge or the belly as they called it had little round mirror pieces and coins sticking with gum and tar. From this central bulge emerged two pipes, one longer than the other. The wooden shorter one had modulating air holes and the metallic longer one took those deep bass rumblings and mysterious rhythms to the protruded snake hood.

Drawing his tattered dhoti to hide his private parts while sitting on his haunches, the old man said, ‘Those educated fools say that a snake doesn’t dance to the been’s tunes! I hope Kala hasn’t paid too much heed to their nonsense in the city.’

He grunted and put the lid off the round wicker basket. It was a huge snake. Its coils almost filled up the entire basket. However, it didn’t show any interest in the sudden burst of light. It kept lying as before. Its closed hood was hidden somewhere among the coils; only the tail showed above. With caution the old man tickled the tail.

‘You were out for a long period of time, I hope the nag hasn’t regained its fangs in the meantime! And you are lazy enough not to be bothered about such issues,’ he turned to his son with a stern glare.

Kala didn’t respond. Taking up the snake’s lethargy as a challenge to his art, the mastery of the snake charmer started in full flow and wisdom, its vibrations after hovering over the basket wispily serpented across the coils. It needs a tremendous throw by the blower’s throat to play this instrument. The cheeks and the throat get puffed up almost to their last restraint. The eyes pop out wide, almost on the verge of coming out of their sockets. The throat muscles twist in such a manner that the veins protrude as if the neck has been put in a strangulating noose. The lips have to be pressed so hard against the pipe that they bear permanent marks of puffy craftsmanship.

The old man drew out every ounce of his art and craft to get the snake respond to his tunes. His face was perspiring but he won’t give up. It seemed the old man would faint any moment. Then the cobra rose in its full majesty.

From the corner of his bulging eyes, he saw Bhanwar getting up and touching the feet of the eldest surviving clan member—a sort of patriarch to the snake charming tribals of the area. The old man had witnessed the spectacle. However, more than the feeling of pleasure over this win of the sapera’s dexterity over the snake’s venomous timidity, the clan chief expected the player to come and greet him respectfully. But the player’s success had come at too big a price. So he would rather incur the chieftain’s wrath than lose his pleasure.

Its hood drawn taut, the snake hissed menacingly at the flute end. The deeply rumbling tones seemed to hypnotise it and made it harmlessly sway its hood. The reptile seemed lost, dazed and spellbound as its intoxicated hood gyrated slowly, ponderously in the air, following the gentle sway of the instrument in front of it.

Drawing big sips of success, the old player suddenly clutched at his side in pain. Holding at his stomach with one hand below the ribs, he greeted the old clan leader.

The still elder sapera chided him:

‘It’s not the time to waste your energy like that in a show of arrogance with that snake. Where’ll you play with a snake if the lands are snatched away from us? Our complacency will find us bundled out from our lands, which they say doesn’t belong to us because we don’t possess the chit of paper proving our rights to it. Not only that, they are now forcing us to abandon our traditional occupation. Talks are circulating that in the cities, they now beat the saperas, take away the snakes and set them free in the forest. Damn with the forest and animal laws of theirs! Both our occupation and settlements have become illegal now. Water is just about to cross over the heads. Either we take action or perish. We have decided to sit on a dharna in front of the assembly building in Jaipur, demanding our rights. If they don’t pay heed, we’ll obey their laws. We’ll set our snakes free; but not in the jungles—we will leave the poor reptiles in the very houses of its new friends. We’ll throw them into the assembly building and perish of hunger!’

Writing with pain and clutching the side of his stomach, Bhanwar’s father reasoned, ‘But the police will beat us and put us in jail!’

‘The cowardice of this sort will ring the dooms bell of the adivasi samaj! Be ready with all your snakes, you will get to know the day of the protest march in the meantime!’ the clan leader left the place in a hurry to spread his message across the others hutments in the area.

****

Roop Singh hadn’t returned, nor was there any information about the group that had gone hunting deep in the Aravalis. With the more energetic enforcement of the forest laws, such time-worn and old forays were increasingly coming into the fold of illegal activities now. Systematic plunder by the larger players had of course enforced the legislature to formulate protective legislations, but those bigger players knew it very well how to dodge the executive and the judiciary.

As cosmetic measures to prevent the laws from dying, minor facelift measures like arresting the tribals in violations of the forest laws kept on occurring now and then. Thus, even without his family having any inkling to it, poor Roop Sigh and his friends had been arrested. Crime? They had killed a chinkara antelope. But what about the bigger killers who slaughter entire forests, thus killing not only the antelopes but every species dwelling in the forest? They are not the offenders. They are the lawful parts of the system that decides what is wrong and what is right.

His father was definitely ill. After that excruciating bout of pain that started in his right flank and with tremendous pungency spread to his whole body, he was now crouching almost decimated. Poking his fingers into his ribs, the unregistered medical practitioner in the nearest settlement of the civilised people had declared kidney stone, a big one as if he could see it. Now this stone had become a drag on the old man whose soul once flowed freely, but now the freely sailing ship of yore had been anchored to the stony thing in his physical self.

Rolling the hard-wood frame of a kanjira type frame-drum in his hands, the old man said with a sigh, ‘I don’t know what has taken Roopa so long over there. I’ve polished the frame. All it needs is a lizard’s skin!’

Hunting wild monitor lizards was one of the many other purposes of the visit.

The old man was wearing a home-spun, open-fronted vest of coarse cotton. His dark hairy arms and muscular chest vouchsafed a tough life lived in those trying circumstances. Letting the frame roll in the direction of one of his grandchildren, he got up from the cot and walked with bent back to the hut entrance. He emerged with an old frame-drum with blackened dark-brown skin drawn for some folklore tunes. Its rhythm and deep bass sound had so many times provided company to his dexterous been music while showcasing his snakes.

Beating his fingers on it he started his tale of sorrows, ‘Though vaidya promises to draw the stone through his potions and concoctions, but I doubt his ability. For a month I’m living on practically nothing but his liquids. With the passage of each day the pain is increasing. If you have saved something from the trip then we can visit a doctor in the town.’

‘Why waste their money on your never-dying wish to live forever old man!’ his wife cackled.

‘Shut up you venomous old snake!’ the old man threw the drum at her.

Drawing every single penny from the pockets of all the family members and after borrowing something from the neighbours, they mustered up their cash resources to the tune of 300 rupees. Bhanwar Singh put on his unwashed black long shirt and a similar coloured loin cloth tied in a knot around his waist and tucked the money in the safety of its folds. They set out for the dusty township in the lap of Aravalis.

The X-ray, some medicines and the travelling expanses found them plundered to their last penny. All this had happened while the treatment hadn’t even started. The doctor said he needed an operation and its cost was beyond even the wildest of their dreams. Looking at their famished position, the doctor suggested they could knock at the doors of the civil hospital at Pali. But they will have to buy medicines even there.

Dejected they returned home. Tormented by the pain, the old man ogled at the X-ray film and his bleary eyes stared deep at the place purported to be the stone. Then he poked his finger into his side to arrive at the similar point in his body.

After adjusting his fingers here and there for a while, he sighed with satisfaction, ‘The devil lies here. It’s almost for nothing they want to rob us of plenty of money!’

The emerging bout of pain was making him desperate, leaving him prone to any type of helpless, illogical step.

‘I can cut out the devil myself! Then I’ll put boiled oil with nettles and some other grasses that they say will heal a wound even extending along a completely torn apart body!’

Writhing in pain, he went out and borrowed somebody’s shaving razor in the hamlet. However, the vision of upcoming pain and blood left him cold-footed and he threw away the razor swearing at himself for showing this excitement.

The local herbsman suggested another concoction—the meat of a black buck boiled with some stones, roots and herbs.

‘The killing of a black buck will be like committing a robbery!’ the old man sighed resignedly.

Under the Wildlife Protection Act, it had been declared a protected species.

With tears in his eyes, Bhanwar Singh vowed to hunt a black buck. However, the old man showing surprising calm held him back:

‘Son, it’s better to die than to see the days when you are condemned a criminal for following the occupation of your forefathers; when the very means to save your life and earn your livelihood become the occupation of a thief in the eyes of the government. It’s then better to die of a stone instead of being humiliated and made to die thousand deaths in the form of restricting our movement through our lands like one tries to restrict the passage of free air through the skies. What hope lies when our small time killings of animals and their capture becomes the greatest sin on earth? All this while, they kill far bigger, they kill rivers, forests and this entire earth. Our means to livelihood are crimes and their massacres are mere development. But I can assure you son that these, I mean our innocent takeaways from Mother Nature, are no sins, for if these had been so, the collective sins of our forefathers would’ve sent all of us to hell. It’s no sin to survive like taking honey sips as the bees do without eating the flower itself. The sinners are these outsiders, the big people, who come and break the whole plant; not just the flower...and we become the culprits!’

Exhausted with pain, the old man dozed off.

It was the day of their protest demonstration in front of the state assembly house in Jaipur. The tribals in big numbers had marched to raise a voice for their rights. However, Bhanwar Singh could not join them on account of his father’s ill health. Yet he had donated his snakes for the cause.

‘In case they don’t listen to you, forcing you to let your snakes into the big house, my Kalu will take full revenge from our side!’ he said with moisture in his eyes.

With forlorn steps he ascended the ridge. Reaching its crest dotted with thorny bushes, he put his hand over his eyes to look for any sign of his brother whom he hadn’t seen for many weeks. Mercilessly the hot wind blowing from the thar desert hit his back with a wild dusty fury.

The Experienced Fool

 

Starting from Ram Jhoola, the main street moves south with bathing steps on one side and ashrams like Geeta, Parmarth Niketan and Swargashram on the other. The narrow bazaar street has snack and tea hawkers, mendicant friars, beggars, cows, stray dogs, two wheelers, native pilgrims, and tourists both foreign and local.

It pulsates with energy. There is a very nice coffee point upstairs a row of ground-level shops overlooking Ma Ganga. The broad marble-paved bathing pavilion of the Vanprastha ashram is at the end of the boulevard. Two little marble-paved sections face mother Ganges for meditation. After that there is a drop of 8-9 feet to the first step on the Ganges.

The mother river makes a musical chiming. It has been drizzling off and on for the past one week, letting loose cool gusts of breeze down the valley. The holy river’s current is very fast and one has to hold a chain in the hand to steady your feet while standing in the knee-deep water.

The mendicant friars live like any other part of nature. It isn’t a fight for more possessions, gathering and collection. In the morning they sit on both sides of the busy path, cashing on the early-morning spirit and verve of the visitors. What do they possess? Not much save a piece of saffron loin cloth, a cloak of renunciation, a stick, a cloth bundle having a kind of sleeping rag and something to cover them with, and one cheep steel bucket. That’s it. Everything else is irrelevant. You see them sitting on their haunches, sipping tea, eating the prashad, the ceremonial offering.

If you pursue the path in its further pull to the south, beyond the mild rush of humanity, you will come across an establishment named LAST CHANCE. Here you can grab a soiled bedding on the floor in a narrow dormitory. It’s an unpretentious set-up, fronted by a manipulatedly wild little lawn and the dormitory in the back. Here you can have your tiny mattress on the ground. In the tiny waiting-cum-entrance hall, you have a tall, narrow bookrack displaying some run down titles. You have the option of a tinier side cubicle with a sliding plywood door for 500 rupees if you are a fan of privacy. The bathroom and toilets are to be shared by all though.

There is an endless stream of pilgrims, just like you have the endless stream of the holy river going on and on. The poor people pawn their happiness in the shop of future births in lieu of all the drudgery for little survival crumbs in the present birth. To beat the nagging tidings of the pathetic present times, they have to absolve themselves of all the past and current sins. So they throng the mother’s welcoming waters. Very poor people, consumed by chronic worries over the most basic things of life, like stunted, weather-beaten vegetation of the arid climes.

They have greenery in their dreams that lies either in the next birth or their progenies down the line, at least a couple of generations into the future. They move as a group, like a flock of sheep, bunched together, trying to muster up collective courage, assert its dusty identity. It’s a rare outing for most of them because they are so comprehensively yoked in the fight to survive, beginning each day as a new chapter of challenges.

They have been robbed of their independent spirit, their free-will gone into the deep caves of hibernation. They have been chained too hard and have forgotten the swag of life. Their smiles are restrained. However, all of them know that mother Ganga doesn’t discriminate between the rich and the poor. The mother river’s waters are a great leveller. Here the King and the pauper immerse their head under the same category of ‘the sinners washing away their sins’. 

Sitting among the sadhus makes me feel better somehow. It reaffirms faith, values and beliefs that have lost their sheen over the years. You very well know that they have renounced more than they have taken. In totality, they are the givers. They are the flag bearers of faith. They make you realise that it’s possible to be happy without sitting on the mound of possessions with a snug expression of worldly competence.

Beyond the realm of possessions, probably they have a little permanent reservoir from where they take tiny sips of solace and meaning in life. They are the ones who have at least realised the futility of chase because the chase never ends. It persists forever. It goes on and on. Hence they have kicked the bullshit idea of being in the hot pursuit of success, name, fame and material possessions.

Sitting with them, you feel absorbing the fragrance of their rest, repose and peace. It has a healing touch. It puts balm on your bruises. This I think is a real blessing, nothing short of a miracle. Miracles lie buried in the small, small commonalities of life scattered around you. You just need to get a bit restful, watch over, read between the lines, do your small bit of duty, and allow the blessing to reshape your life for the better.

Given the possibility of innumerable mishaps that may strike us, the mere fact that one returns safe after going out is in itself nothing short of a miracle. But it gets embedded in the routine that we take for granted, and expect more and more. If you aren’t satisfied with the little, little miracles of life, believe me you are just cutting your chances to face the bigger ones.  

Inspired by the free spirits of the mendicant friars, I take up the tiny challenge of trekking up to Lord Shiva’s Neelkanth temple among the higher hills, the path cutting across the Rajaji National Park. I started very early in the morning. The day was just breaking around 6 o’ clock. Not able to find the alley leading to the hills farther from the Ganges, I ask a babaji about the way.

‘Are you going alone?’ he asked before pointing out the route. ‘It’s better to have someone with you if you walk through a forest,’ he put up a bit of advice born of his own experience on the lonely path of mendicancy.

I just smile away his word of caution. Little did I realize the dangerous proportions the man-animal conflict had acquired since the decade and a half when I last walked on foot to the holy place near Rishikesh. On top of it, that walking pilgrimage was during the month of shravan when thousands walk to the holy temple. So walking among a group of pilgrims is safe even though the trek crosses the tiger reserve, where at least the elephants put up a resistance sometimes—if not the tiger—as their natural habitat further diminishes with the passage of each day. Now it was off season. You couldn’t expect any fellow walker to the holy place. The absence of mankind simply means that Mother Nature takes over to heal its bruises. I but had the same old safe image of the walk roughly 15 years back.

I crossed the taxi stand and many drivers looked expectantly. They were sure that I will hire a cab, but I disappointed all of them and moved towards the eerie darkness and silence of the forest just beginning to stamp the signature wilderness right ahead of the taxi stand. The narrow asphalt road wound up gently along the wooded undulations of the Rajaji National Park. The rain-washed forest appeared to re-impose its authority after being severely bent down by the summer’s assault resulting in pale leaves and broken tree spirits.

The morning twilight had a mysterious shade, a cocktail of puzzled emotions. Silence buzzed through the wooded pores. A vague sense of insecurity crept in as I moved into the twilight darkness of the solitary woods. It turned into fear as I read the warning boards of elephants and tigers put up by the wildlife department. With my enforced attempt at bravery I kept on walking.

When you are scared, the forest loses its charm. The heartbeat accelerated its tempo as a sign of the ruffled feathers of my courage. Sometimes we just keep moving knowing fully well that the best way is to turn back. A strange force pulls you against your will. There was absolutely nobody to be seen. My ears ached to hear the friendly purr of some vehicle on the road. There was no engine to be heard forget about seeing one.

I heard the tinkle of a cattle bell. A cow was walking down the road, coming out from the darker recesses of the forest. I could feel the cattle’s fear as it walked almost taut on the tightrope of fear. I felt a kind of courage and company after looking at the animal. To my surprise, the holy animal looked even more relieved after smelling my humanity. It turned back and started walking almost at a canter as if followed by something of which it was really scared, most probably some predator stalking the cattle in the pre-dawn eerie silence.

The cow literally threw itself at my behest and started walking behind me even though I was walking into the forest from where it had escaped. I could feel its fear and the sense of protection that my presence provided it. It kept on walking for a good few hundred yards. But I was walking into the forest from where it had come out in panic. The intelligent cattle realized that there was no point in following me. It slowed down its pace and was left behind. I looked back and saw it almost running from the forest to reach the crowded vicinity of the religious structures, hotels, restaurants and thousands of beggars and mendicants along the holy river. 

Your fears make you more imaginative even than your freedom. I started looking around apprehensively. The broad-leaved deciduous forest clamped with thick undergrowth had all the vibes of hiding entire hordes of predatory animals. I could see heaps of elephant dung melted by the overnight rain.

‘Elephants,’ I found myself telling to God knows whom.

After walking in this scary agitation for almost two kilometres on the main tar road, I reached the point where the foot track left the road to sneak into the wooded slopes of the Shivalik range. The shrine lay 8 km through a steep climb across the elephant dominated sanctuary. The warning boards increased in frequency and with each new board about the elephant danger, the clumsy grip of my courage on my mind gave in.

I found it impossible to continue ahead. I hadn’t seen anyone since I had crossed the taxi stand. The wilderness had been reclaimed by the groups of elephants. I could see the temporary sway of humanity in ruins that had been built during the pilgrimage season when thousands walk daily on foot on the track. At that festival time, the temporary tea stalls and refreshment counters dot the pathway, putting the wildlife on the back-foot. But now with the disappearance of the makeshift thoroughfare, the forest had reclaimed its solitude. The makeshift tea stalls broken by the elephants broke my spirit. And the heaps of their dung kept on increasing in girth and frequency. My courage finally gave in. I just wasn’t prepared to beat my fears. The risk to life beats the adventurous spirit very soundly.

With a severe pang of judgement at my lack of guts, I turned back and almost ran to the point where the foot-trail had branched off from the motorway. An abandoned tin roof shelter, miraculously spared of ravages by the elephants, appeared a paper castle if some elephant decided to come charging in. There I stood waiting for some human being to arrive on the scene. I am yet to recall, in a long time, when I felt such camaraderie for a fellow being of my own species.

God certainly listens to our prayers. There it came. The sound of an engine killing the forest silence felt like a symbol of our triumph over all and sundry on the earth. I ran to the turn in the road and waved them to stop. The driver didn’t even look in my direction.

‘These are booked vehicles by one group of people. Nobody will give you a lift,’ he yelled his help to my frantic wave of hands.

He tickled some raw nerve of my courage and I resolved to go up again into the sinewy foot-trail across the wooded slopes, half of my heart telling me that I will be surely trampled by some irksome elephant. Well, all it needs to change your fate and make you lucky is a positive shift in someone’s heart. 

I heard them calling from behind. The jeep had stopped. Probably they had taken the option of peeing and coincide it with doing the holy deed of helping someone in need. But if not for the primary urge to urinate, they won’t have stopped I’m sure.

I ran towards the vehicle that had stopped at a distance near the next bend of the hill, as if some angry tusker was already after my life. I had to hurry lest they change their mind to help me after relieving themselves of the extra water in their bodies.

It was a group of shastris from Allahabad who had been engaged by some believer to recite Bhagwad Gita on the holy banks of the river at Haridwar. Clad in spotless white kurtas, yellow bordered dhotis, prominent vermilion and sandalwood paste markings on their forehead, they were suffused with colours of devotion. They welcomed me into their Avadhi courtesy.

I blurted out my elephant fear once I was sure that I really occupied the back seat of the traveller jeep. The driver being a local guy agreed with my getting scared.

‘They would have surely trampled you to death,’ he seemed sure of it.

The group of Pandits wondered why the hell I was wandering alone in the forest. I guessed that any kind of explanation ranging from nature walks to spirituality to pilgrimage would fail in its attempt.

‘I’m a researcher,’ I plainly lied. ‘And I walk alone to do research for my project.’

The eldest of the group whom they addressed, half in jest and half in seriousness, as ‘Pandeji’ turned out to be an Avadhi poet. A poet cannot afford to lose an opportunity to get an audience, so as a follow up to their introduction of him, he peacefully recited an Avadhi couplet. It sounded spicy and full of literary wisdom. As a former romantic who once tried to pass off as a poet, I could feel his rhyme’s charm. It was a subtle bond, poet to poet. I informed him that I write also. He conveyed that he was very happy to share my company on the back seat where the shocks of travelling are catapulted in their best capacity in any vehicle. Well, in any case, the poets must always be in a position to occupy back seats and absorb the shocks of life without complaining much. If you love the front seat then poetry is not the thing for you. 

To substantiate my fears and to stamp the significance of their help, the driver put on sudden brakes. The jeep suddenly screeched to a halt. The sweet reverie bred by casual talk spiced by a forest drive met a sudden death. Two elephants stared at the vehicle right in front. The tusker male appeared fully in charge to turn the ride a gliding one down the slope to a different destination, hospital, instead of the holy temple. Sensing threat, the tusker took a few menacing steps towards the vehicle. The panicked driver immediately put the reverse gear and took the vehicle back into the leeway of a bend downhill.

Getting this initial victory over the humans, the pachyderms leisurely moved on their morning walk on the smooth forest road. We saw them crossing the next turn. The driver thought of moving a bit further as we crossed the next bend. The tusker again turned back and charged, forcing the vehicle to again sneak downhill in the safety of the turn. The elephant couple again moved on. We also crept once again to the next bend where we could see them moving ahead. That’s how it went for some time. We would stealthily creep out of the bend, the elephants would threaten to charge and move onto the next turn followed by us. In this way, at every turn our ritual of peeping out, turning back and again moving slowly kept on.

With their heavy bulk they were not in a position to ascend the steep wooded slope upwards. The problem here was that even the valley side was too steep and densely wooded for such a bulky animal to sneak out of the human range. The elephant couple was struggling to find an escape route. We advanced at the gentlest pace, ready to hit the reverse, should they charge at us. I was even ready to take to my heels in case they approached too near. I was sure to beat the reverse march of a jeep on circuitous hill road with my forward march. So I had my option at the tip of my fingers to execute the emergency mode any time.

The way mankind has revolted against nature, we have turned obnoxious to the rest of the species. More than us wanting to be away from the pachyderms, they were far more eager to escape the ignominy of having to look at we humans. Given a choice, all animals would walk to the farthest corner of the planet where there hasn’t been any human footprint.

At last they managed to lumber along the steep slope into the valley. It was surprising how could they manage to get down. But in the limited and ever decreasing options they are fighting to survive. Alas, these may be but the last scion of their lineage. The mankind has sprawled parasitically. This is cancerous growth, destined to result in lots of destruction in future. The world will change more rapidly than we ever imagined. It may be scarier than we ever guessed.

Anyway, we reached the holy temple and had a very fulfilling darshan of Lord Neelkanth. The group of pundits knew an elaborate set of rituals to make me feel like a novice. They looked very happy in saving me from the elephants and in guiding my pagan self through a proper set of rituals. The driver but appeared a bit sullen.

Finding a moment suitable to have a little whispering talk with me when the rest were away, he said softly in a grave tone, ‘See, I saved you. The elephants would have surely trampled you to death!’

‘I know. I’m really thankful to you for that! Can I do something for you?’ I asked.

In reply he just bored his eyes into my pocket, giving me the clue that I could convey my thanks in a more practical way. I offered him 150 rupees. He took it and pocketed it stealthily lest any of the pundits saw him.

‘Please don’t tell them! They will cut this money from what they owe me. You have still saved money because had you hired a taxi it would have cost you at least 800 rupees.’

Back at my home, I told the elephant episode to my mother.

‘Good that you got scared and got into that jeep,’ she said matter of factly.

Mother used to read a Hindi daily and scanned the news thoroughly during her spare time. After a week she called me and showed a one-column news item. A group of 5-6 people from Haryana were trekking up in the same area and were attacked by elephants. One had been trampled to death.

‘Say thanks to Bhole Baba that you escaped from being a subject of this kind of news!’ she said very softly. 

Truth Unlocked

 

What separates us from the rest of our fellow inhabitants of earth is that while doing most of the things that every living being does we seek justice in response to any hurt feeling or loss accruing on account of these activities. Justice! So to save the civil society from the blatant outrage born of our rampant passions, we have structured the notions of crime, redemption, justice, good, bad, moral and immoral.

Unlike other species that are led by the limitations of natural instincts for survival, we humans have motivations beyond mere survival. We have our set of choices that drive our activities in a way that these can shape our primal instincts into goodness reaching the heaven and badness touching the hell.

Justice, alas, has been the unattainable goal so far. During those long and protracted legal battles, the intention of redemption to the victim and punishment to the wrong-doer repeatedly gets severe jolts. Our partisan, bipolar system ensures that despite the best of intentions, the legal system is again and again undone by the class differential. Here again, the rich, famous and the powerful outsmart the investigating agencies. It proceeds as per the ‘law of the survival of the fittest’ to ensure that the less privileged find judiciary almost unresponsive to their plight.

****

In the early fifties of the past century, a crime was committed in the nondescript surroundings of countryside. A zamindar’s accountant raped a peasant girl. For generations it had been going on like this. However, what made it a crime on this occasion was the fact that this time the victim lodged an FIR. Given his status, the zamindar won’t have allowed his munsi even to be arrested. A zealous officer, however, ensured that the arrest was carried out. Fearing that the relatively rich and powerful accountant—with the help of his master—would hijack the law, the officer tried his best to hold the baton of criminal justice firmly.

Nonetheless, we have an over-lenient and over-precautious system with its own oath of ‘not guilty till proven so’. Unfortunately, in its frenzied and deadly focused provisions to save every single innocent human being, it has been letting go scot-free thousands of wrong-doers, for the provisions that save an innocent person save many criminals at the same time.

There is mammoth area of discretion in the hands of law functionaries at every stage. Justice says, ‘I will base myself on the presumption of the witnesses not lying under the oath’; Criminal Procedure Code hesitatingly seems to say, ‘Commit a crime but don’t leave any circumstantial evidence.’

Justice has based itself on so many flimsy grounds: the witness—they turn hostile very easily, in fact it is the most expected turn of events in any case; evidence—it can be easily destroyed and fabricated. It can be easily presumed—as per the laws of class structure—the higher class involved in the case easily takes the justice establishment in its tow after cleanly, legally fulfilling most of the terms and conditions of police and judiciary. And like the mankind’s eternal quest for truth, the ‘quest for justice’ also remains elusive like ever before.

It happened exactly so in this case also. The supposed objectivity in the system’s functioning was easily hijacked. Many people had seen her being dragged away but nobody turned up as a witness. It put the entire onus on the victim to prove that she had been raped. The investigating officer, the inspector whom the zamindar invited to his night-long drunken regalia of music, dance and debauchery, smartly came with the report that the doctor’s observation does not find any signs of rape, rather the semen strains of her lover were found on her person.

During those days, the forensic investigations were yet to shine as brightly as these days to lay bare the dark strains of the evil-doer. As to the torn clothing that could have proved that she had been raped, the said crucial evidence was nowhere to be found. In reality, the rapist had burned her poor clothes and then turned her out of the barn naked to go beseeching justice for her wronged self. God behold the criminal jurisprudence because given the social taboo only the rarest of the rare rape case was reported during those days (out of the numerous happening around) and these solitary ones too became victim to the justice miscarriage.

****

Unbothered about this injustice, the time simply fled off. And now we come to the next decade. At the time of his crime, the accountant had a little daughter. Like all good and bad people, he dearly loved the little star of his mediocre household. The memory how he had committed a crime against a girl from the huts was long past him.

Skyrocketed by the generations of exploitation, the local landowner now had shifted to the city with gold pieces in lieu of the tears of the labour class. Here they had diversified the business to turn richer and more famous. The accountant was a manager of one of the master’s establishments. His girl fully blossomed like a girl should under comfortable conditions. She now studied in a college. The master’s son, with whom she had played in her childhood, now eyed her with the passion of first love’s purity and unadulterated possessiveness. It but became a crime given the earth-sky difference between the families.

‘She is the daughter of a wretched, servile, poor, rapist servant of ours, whom I once saved to enable him to continue surviving on our crumbs!’ the city-level famous father thundered.

However, it was that stage of love wherein the couple’s eyes emanated such light that they turned blind to everything around. Overexcited and no longer able to bear separation they eloped. Given his resources and reach he tracked them down. But only the boy was brought back, heartbroken and almost shackled like a prisoner. In his mourning, he didn’t know what happened to his wife—as he called her now—and how he had been brought back home.

The girl’s father was now at odds against a superior foe. He was not in a position to confront him personally. As law is the refuge of the weak (and suitable ladder to go higher to the strong), he went prostrating before the court to plead justice.

****

To say that judiciary has absolute powers would be quite justified. There are no checks and balances and in its safe corridors—for corruption, extortion and manipulation—thousands of weaklings cringe perpetually to get justice. There are hardly any checks and balances which can bracket, define or limit the system of justice at all levels from sending out verdicts based on most unjustified—but soundly authenticated by the stamp of legality through tempering, bribing, threatening—of occurrences and mishaps.

The conduct of a judge is not to be raked; he cannot be held responsible for the verdict as a human being. However, his verdict can be safely—from his point of view—revoked by the higher judiciary. The dispenser of justice is always beyond any scrutiny. His act may be trashed but not him. Even while a lower court’s verdict is overruled by a higher one, the latter does not find anything farcical, contemptuous or immoral in the former’s judgement.

The judge is accepted to be beyond any strain of susceptibility. So if a judgement is not upheld by the superior judiciary, it is from the point of view of insufficiency of implementation and application of laws. So the judgement (effect) becomes erroneous, leaving the black robe of justice (cause) spotlessly clean. No wonder, there are malpractices which stand clean on the scale of constitutionality. 

The legal fraternity boasts of its black gown! What a choice of colour! Pour any quantity of filth on it, it but will remain the same! The politicians perched at the highest level wield the rein in their safe hands. They directly indirectly recommend the names of the judges. In most of the cases in which some hapless individual is pitted against the mighty institution of the government, the very same lawyers whom that meek fellow hires at an exorbitant rate to defend his interest against a belligerent state dupe his client covertly—in majority of the cases—and hobnob with the governmental agencies. It happens so frequently that it virtually becomes a rule with law and judiciary.

Higher the treason to the real spirit of a common man’s justice-seeking cause, the greater the rewards, including appointments to the posts of judges. It won’t be surprising to find a practising lawyer suddenly sitting as a judge—the tier of his seat being directly proportional to the treason or compromise with morality.

****

The unfortunate father whose daughter was missing ran from pillar to post for two months. The report had been filed against the rich and famous by the lesser mortal. And who cared for such non-issues during those days, after all the belligerent media of the 21^st century was a far cry when even the radio news was out of reach to the masses. The city police colluded with the accused. How could they dare to bring him to the books for he, to add little contribution to the general rot of the system, was in hand-in-glove with the local politicians and musclemen.

The sessions judge tried to play a proactive role to ensure conviction and find the truth. But if one cog hasn’t been corrupted, the other can be tried. In this case, the stronger party had a go at the police and they systematically and diligently weakened the case. The police produced the accused before the court with much flimsy and untenable evidence—as if it were acting like defense. This help plus an astute amount of legal time purchased by the rich man made such a weighty defense statement that the judge, fully convinced of the accused’s hand in some wrongdoing, merely ogled in shock, despair, resignation and helplessness while granting bail. He knew the important and defining role of police in ensuring conviction. The fact here was that the girl was missing, but the police was investigating the case from a partisan, biased and improper angle. As the case went ahead, he just stared in mock exasperation at the deliberate lapses in the functioning of police regarding the missing girl.

Nevertheless, the quest for truth and justice was the court’s duty, so despite the severe handicaps of the system, the honourable judge continued to put pressure on the police to find the truth behind the missing girl. However, the path to truth was obstructed by the best of legal advisors. These are the luminaries who can make and break witnesses and turn the truest of evidence into most pathetic nonentity or change a speck of dust into something that can make or break a life. Under their sustained and dexterous onslaught, the judge had to quell the spirit of justice and he declared the accused free and innocent for lack of any tangible evidence. The puzzle of the missing girl was left as an open riddle so that people could ask the question, ‘What happened to her?’

Her father and their well-wishers were devastated. Their combined baggage of grudges went somewhat like this:

‘...money and muscle power has ensured miscarriage of justice...she was such a charming nice girl, look it has hardly led to shock and anger against the farce.... It is jungle Raj, her family has been devastated while the perpetrators are roaming free and happy.... Mere slogan shouting in private won’t help, we should hold protests, demonstrations to make justice time-bound, make system transparent—it was a law student. Shame on Shyam who turned hostile to the memory of his love and said under oath that he had nothing to do with Sarla!’

Many had seen the boy and the girl going around as a couple but nobody came forward as a witness to the alleged love affair between them. For months they had been dilly dallying with the mute requests, to no effect, made by an almost inconsequential prosecution staff in the case. The girl’s father was no more in a position to take the legal battle at the next level.

****

Following our trail of justice or rather injustice, we now come to the seventies. Aspirations soar and spiral upwards. Following this law, the hereditary zamindar drifting along the developing India had become an absentee landlord and based himself as an influential businessman. Still looking upwards, he sent his daughter—the youngest of his brood and the peach of his heart—to a college in Bombay, the city of dreams and development.

She was really beautiful, its whole feeling seeping into the very pores of her skin. She carried an aloof, dismissive air.  Her flirting coquetry raised many an aspiring eyes towards her. Over all, she didn’t appear to care a rap even about the most handsome, powerful and influential face of any man around. She thus became a coveted trophy on the campus and who’ll win her heart became a matter of gross, illogical, infatuated war among the lovers.

One of her suitors was the scion of a prominent national level industrialist family. Arrowed and slain by the criminal negligence shown by her to his humiliated, arrogant, slithering advance, he would shriek into the ears of his friends:

‘She is a fool. Puts on so much of air...even our servant’s status would match her father’s!’

As can be naturally estimated, theirs was a politically linked family. His father had twice been an MLA. Being brought up in this evil opulence of money and politics, he had all the devil’s pampering to his young and budding ego. His ever-agitated soul thus went to the lowest gloom of unrequited love. After his decent, balanced advancements bearing no fruit, he like an ever-obliging lover went on his knees to plead his love; wrote his heart’s demands on a paper with his real blood. And like the intensity of fire mysteriously, stealthily burning for the decimation of the moth around the flame, her secret enjoyment in tormenting him by her feigned manners of ignorance about him, she brought this pampered spoilt brat to the brink of his inflamed passion’s blind fury.

Reaching the next stage of frustration, he began intimidating her. The more he tried to stalk her, the more aloof, withdrawn, dismissive and cold she became to his treacherous advances. The poor girl was fully convinced that he was merely putting up a showy drama—for how could someone harm somebody whom he really loved—so like a fire prolonging its burning in order to tickle and flirt with the moth’s wings, she got out of fuel, rather say, she burnt herself out.

Lost in the hopeless pit of his unrequited love, he stabbed her right in front of the hundreds of horrified eyes on the campus lawn. For each of his innocent pinch to his heart, he gave her cold-blooded murderous stabbings. Her father was crushed beyond imagination at the sight of his decimated rose. Like all who have money and muscles, his first instinct was to romp home to the portals of justice by taking the short-cut of doing it himself using the resources at his own end. However, whether we do it or not is determined by our relative strength (money and muscle wise) vis-à-vis the opponent. Hence after the initial fretting and fuming, this fact dawned upon him and the aggrieved father ran to the institutional law to seek justice for his slain girl.

Many a time, the law had been at his side because by the grace of God his interests had pitted him against the weaker ones. Now but he was up against a bigger force. As a true conniver himself regarding where and how the case can be deliberately weakened, he took utmost care to avoid such a pitfall. However, the proximity among the top cops and the boy’s prominent family ensured almost a tardy and wilfully neglected investigation right from the beginning. (It will remain so as long as the ramparts of endless paperwork lie between the cold-blooded murderer and the victim.)

The evidence was criminally mucked up by the investigating officer. His acts of omission and commission ensured that the weapon of murder was never found. The police officials bombarded the trial court with wrong information; then shrewdly deflecting the case of justice, they made the prosecution’s case so weak that within six months the murderer came out on bail. Once out of the jail, he regained all his former luxuries in full style. During the ensuing long and protracted dates during the coming months and years (fetched by the deceased’s father using his level of clout and money) the ugly nexus between police and prosecution made the defender’s case so weighty that the fabric of justice was once again torn.

The system of justice has been lampooned. A cold-blooded murder in broad daylight is not supposed to take place unless corroborated by some witnessing eyes. Let’s hope under the hawk’s eye things have changed these days. The mechanical eye does not need to get scared of a bullet as a witness. The human eye pretended not to see so many wrongs in the past; to save troubles; to save its own poor skin. It makes the whole society literally a conniver in hiding the real witnesses in its safe crowd watching from a safe distance.

The power and stature of the boy’s family was such that it intimidated the whole college. The students’ petrified families admonished them to desist from any imprudence. All said they were not around the scene of the crime when it happened and the law (so easy to fool it) was blind-forced to suppose that the lawn must have been empty that day; somebody was in the classroom; somebody in the canteen; in laboratories; everywhere except the lawn.

It dragged hopelessly for five years. The additional sessions judge, fully aware of the inevitability of the impotency of justice under his hammer, made it a means of getting advancement in his career. So without perpetuating the agony and farce of it any more, he gave the verdict of not guilty in return for posting as a High Court Judge.

The girl’s father approached the High Court. However, by now the crime was too far both in time and space. In the misty distance, the prosecution itself had left so many unexplored and untouched issues and left it in such a terribly messed up farcical way that it was almost impossible to put together the pieces of circumstantial evidence. The defense case appeared almost super-strong in the absence of any deposition by even a single eyewitness.

From the FIR to the post-mortem report, everything had been messed up in such a manner that though the court accepted the girl died but as to the fact of who committed the murder it stayed beyond the possibility to know and prove as per the known facts in the files. The girl’s father knew that all he could do—at a great cost to himself—was just to drag the case on and on. Disgusted and almost crippled old, he left it to die after his natural death on the sick bed of judiciary...to be lost in the misty corridors of law full of webby provisions, clauses, sub-clauses, conditions, statutes that have the stealth and expertise to acquit a cold-blooded murderer.

Meanwhile, the more influential family of the murderer, after trapping the system to commit deliberate lapses through fabrication and conspiracy, thrived as per their power and status allowed them. The fact of the girl’s death existing only on papers now. It has to be noted that even the blood-stained clothes had disappeared of late.

How can we blame judiciary only, after all it is a game of disproving (majorly) the crime? The major thrust of the application of judicial mind is towards whitewashing the truth, for both true and false parties have equal means to exploit and the superior (mostly the wrong-doer) avails himself of the better application of laws. All it boils down to is the superior legal skills irrespective of the moral debate of right and wrong.

****

Now we move onto the next stage of crime at the next hierarchy. In the ebullient eighties, when the revengeful politicians were inciting mobs to communal murder, loot and arson in Delhi to increase their quotient of loyalty in the darbar of the first political family in the country, one high profile crime happened in the pink city of Jaipur.

Efficiently guided by a don-turned-politician, the father of the absolved murderer of the girl managed to get the grand patriarch of the family elected as a member of parliament. In the mercurial political waters following the killing of the iron lady, a get-together of politicians, industrialists and bureaucrats (who all wanted to discuss aftermaths and strategy for their own better future) was held at Jaipur. The convener was an all-powerful scion of Rajasthan royalty.

The royalty no longer existed in its direct form but thousands of years of history brimming with all powerful monarchy, magnificent palaces, marching armies of staff and servants, unchecked opulence and the consequent unrestrained enjoyment of the same, display, exploitation, rewards and punishment were just less than four decades old. Even though the iron lady had abolished the privy purses, the erstwhile ruling families still wielded considerable power. By the way, they hated her for this and hated PM Nehru even more for usurping the throne of the whole of India, depriving them of their principalities and provinces, putting India as a mass-stricken poverty plagued democracy under elected sovereigns.

Perks, wealth, stature and respect still existed in the desert state for the former rulers to be called princes and kings both in letter and spirit. These foreign educated and alumni of Mayo College Ajmer were in towering businesses, senior-most offices in bureaucracy and foreign services thanks to their regal past. So there were ambassadors, commissioners, judges, secretaries and ministers among the different scions of former royal families.

In the agitated and excited aftermaths of the killing of the PM, with scared, flirtatious excitement this important mass of the choicest section of society gathered in the magnificent audience hall of the glittering palace (now turned into a heritage hotel by the prince) to condole the death and still more importantly to know (without baring the truest thoughts going in their minds) what others thought and how better options could be chosen for future in order to safeguard their self-interests.

Except the humble waiters, who moved servilely and mechanically, without any outer show of interest in the luxurious feast and talk, not a single less important persona was present in the august gathering. The gathering talked as a whole, then in still smaller groups drifted as per carefully chosen interests, then in still smaller ones as they came to the specifics. They were trying to measure up the common frequency. Then in the wee hours, with flushed drunk faces they entered still more seriously into the more private recesses, in two, three and fours to stand trial for their own interests and prospects.

Late next morning, the industrialist-cum-politician was found dead on the bed in his magnificent room. His eyes with a look of acute surprise popped open and blood from the left temple had trickled down to darken the velvety soft bedspread he’d lain himself upon so happily, with stars in his eyes for a better tomorrow. The unlocked room from inside and the presence of no weapon made murder self-evident.

Then started the long and mammoth approach of law for on that night of murder so many important and influential personalities were sleeping and luxuriating in the rooms of the same palace-cum-hotel. The owner prince fretted, fumed and repeatedly emphasised that it was suicide, finding it less stigmatising than a murder on his premises.

‘What has happened, has happened! Now make it a suicide case. I don’t like too much of your policing and snubbing around my palace!’ he fumed at the Joint Commissioner (Crime) a distant nephew of his.

Given their stature, the police could do it in a routine, fair manner to arrive at a convenient report. Mostly the servants were forced to depose in a way to suit the suicide theory. Very conveniently the pistol involved in the suicide had surfaced. The evidence was padded in a manner, amply testified by false witnesses, that the culpability of anybody other than the dead man himself in taking his own life was beyond question. So there were waiter witnesses who deposed before the judge how they had broken the door and described in great detail the suicide scene. The pistol was presented. The real bullet was changed for the innocent spent cartridge taken out from the said pistol and sent for ballistic and forensic examination in its nascent stage in India of eighties.

In this battle of justice, the individual was pitted against the class. So ‘class’ as a superior entity ensured that the murder passed as a suicide. The FIR had been registered on the complaint of the deceased’s friend, the don-turned-politician who might have had his suspicions early on but settled to the fact that the muck was settling down in the jar. So that was that.

****

So the game of justice goes on. All this talk of justice seems another means for the superior to manipulate his will, to cover his evil-doing. Only God seems to be doing justice through his incidental hammer through chance occurrences in which the crime doer of yesterday gets outwitted by the superior wrong-doer of today (through manipulation of police and judiciary of course) who in turn gets undone by some more superior person at the next hierarchy.

The judiciary thus comes out to be the means and mechanism of meting out justice (though by giving wrong judgements) by the divine agency. For if judiciary does not fail today, how will a wrong-doer of yesterday be punished? That’s how it goes fella!

We shouldn’t throw too many bricks at the system of law, for its fallibility ensures that justice is somehow done in the longer sense of the term. However, it is dependent upon the divine intervention—of putting a former evil-doer against a superior wrong-doer of the present.