Faith’s Prisoner

 

Kalu had—we need to use the past tense for he is no more—almost full faith in hard work as a daily wage earner; but he had a still superior faith in getting fully drunk on the major portion of his meagre earnings. And that made him a loser at both ends.

His employers—the farmers, the people adding some more walls to their houses and all those who needed labour in any form—knew that his faith in hard work made him helpless to do at least two workers’ job in a day. As per the inapplicable law of humanity, he should have got double pay for his single day’s work. But the world is ruled by the ‘quantitative’ aspect, not the ‘qualitative’. So right from the beginning, it was a gain for the employer.

As per the applicable law, the hardworking labourer had no right over the unseen and irretrievable half of his well-deserved wage. So year after year, they kept on paying him only half the amount due to them in reality. So what if almost the entire village was indebted to him, the simple creditor but never tormented them on this account, for Kalu was no sahukar exploiting the needy through the exorbitant rates of interest.

For each piece of work he did, a kind of little bonus undid any feeling of exploitation. The people knew his superior faith in cheap, local variety of liquor. Thus after each assignment of work lasting many days and even weeks, he got a bottle worth his half day’s wage. And that squared up things pretty nicely for both the parties. With a bottle of cheap liquor as a gift, Kalu would forget and forgive anything under the sun. The grossest of wrongs committed against him would stand undone just with that magic of alcohol. 

Out of his highly subsidised wage rates borne by his faith in hard work, he had to take big, bitter swigs, sips and draughts of local desi liquor to still more affirm his faith in the Goddess of oblivion, hallucination and cessation of work, during which period the poor chap was spared of the bone-breaking physical drudgery.

Thanks to the inherent charity involved in the system of wages, many people just rushed to hire him. There was almost a mad scampering around the harvesting seasons when the profit-driven farmers just bayed for his blood. Now at least some stakes were raised for him, for the competition-subdued farmers tried to out-do each other by ensnaring him by offering the liquor of superior varieties as a bonus.

If we subtract the cost of his daily sips of ease going away from his own pockets, in the hard monetary sense, we can surmise that the poor fellow broke his back virtually for nothing. We can say that both his faiths supported each other in equal measure.

****

Their community of Lodhi Rajputs had migrated to this part of the countryside Haryana about four-five generations ago, in 1830s to be precise, when the Britishers dug the Western Yamuna canal to supply water to Delhi. His forefathers were hired to dig the canal. They completed the task and settled in the area. The earliest settlers engaged chiefly in taking fruit gardens (mainly berries, guavas, blackberries and mangoes) on lease and do their drudgery on them to carve out a living. The horse was their main pet animal and consequently the tonga was a favourite mode of personal and professional carriage.

Later, the things changed as everything is meant for change, either for good, bad, both or on exceptional occasions, even neutral. So the swift currents of time left a mark on their form of occupation and life styles. However, one thing didn’t change and it was poverty and doing drudgery daily to survive as landless people.

Kalu’s grandfather had died decades ago, leaving his ever-humorous wife in charge of four sons and four daughters and the upcoming trail of grandsons and granddaughters to carry along in her cart of widowhood. She was just in her late thirties. The onerous duties of a single landless parent with an ever-increasing family hardly quelled her comic attitude towards life. She simply laughed away most of the routine challenges of life faced by a poor, socially low-placed family. Her funny anecdotes, crude humour, jibing puns, serious folklore stories and unsparing laughing bone made her arduous journey easy for herself as well as others. The family matriarch just laughed away the hard husbandless, multi-childrened days selling watermelons, sugar beet, berries, guava and mulberries, all made still sweeter by her accompanying humour and the tongue’s nice work. Even the drowning of one of her sons in the canal, taking its life-giving and life-taking course along the village fields, could not cower down her cherishing of life for too long and she was firmly back on her feet.

Her days were as toiling and tiresome as could be expected of any widow with many children, creating morsels out of misery, but her fun and pun-loving nature greased the creaky wheels of her widow-cart; and the matriarchal family just trotted ahead with she and her brood playing their assigned parts. It just stopped to get them married off now and then. So the daughters got alighted from the cart driven by the grey-haired carter but the load remained almost the same, for their place was easily taken by the daughter-in-laws. However, even though both the daughters and the daughters-in-law bore almost the same weight, it but made much difference to the speed and direction of the cart. The journey was made further complex as the grandchildren very quickly took almost all the empty spaces without giving her any respite.

Very smartly Kalu too had been provided a ticket to ride in the cart by the invisible forces of destiny present at the time of his parents having sex. He found the silvery-haired, black, wrinkling matriarch still going strong. But by this time her strength and resolution was depleting as he stepped ahead in his childhood, nestled in a joint family housed in a small brick house that quite commonly had a room on the upper storey. This along with its semi-plastered front wall—leaving the back and side walls unplastered as an indication of how far they still had to move up the social ladder—evinced the tell-tale signs of their joint hard work. The roofs were still not layered with brickwork and the floor too was of mud and dung paste. The small house was thus crammed like a hen-coop where the messrs mother-in-law Vs daughters-in-law were inevitably involved in a game of hen-pecking.

Fortunately, the children aren’t much bothered about such grown-up’s bickering, so Kalu had a full throttled childhood filled with pond and river swims, joyrides on the family horse, riding tonga at a hurtling pace, scaling the highest branches in the family-leased fruit garden, sweet-sour sensations of stealing from under the keen eyes of the family matriarch and still ahead the great excitement and experimentation with sexuality in the form of masturbation and feigning sex acts like the elders with the children of both sexes—how could he help being a witness to the very same, given the still blowing passions of his parents, uncles and aunties within the narrow confines of their tiny house.

The new elements of controversy were added as the grandchildren turned grand-boys grand-girls. The cord of her control was broken and the matriarch diligently held out the baton to the three new families, but not before getting the eldest son’s eldest two sons (that included Kalu in addition to his elder brother) getting married. It was almost a child marriage and still four-five years before they turned the real householders, enjoying the fullest throngs of sexuality just at the threshold of early youth.

In the meantime, Kalu still had to grow both mentally and physically; drop out of the school after class 5 (a clear generosity from the primary school, given so few attendances, no homework and almost no educational learning). The schooling was a mere fun-drag for five years, almost a ritual. He simply declared one fine day that he won’t go to school anymore, come what may. This decision and its bland declaration fetched him a few parentally abiding thwacks from the fresh patriarch on the body of his erroneous son. However, it was expected—later or sooner. So Kalu was adopted as a new labouring hand to the family’s pool of resources.

Their grandmother remained with the youngest son. And from there, she still tried to support all her progenies; though now she had to put up sometimes drama, the other times show subtle shades of diplomacy and now and then feign neutrality and favouritism to support her status of being with one and not the other two. Still the old mother in her had enough calibre to manage all this. She would continue to do the job till she will die suddenly of liver cancer a couple of years into the grandchildren’s real matrimony.

****

Long before he purchased his first whole pack of beedies as a fresh school dropout in his new thatched house, he had already been experimenting with smoking in the secret on the left-out stubs and one or two complete ones stolen from the elders’ collection of these leaf-bound little cigarettes of tobacco.

As he grew up, so did the strains of vagrancy; but one thing also grew and that was his belief in hard work. His dusky limbs grew stronger and his height opened up to an average level. He now smoked in the open like a grown-up right there in the presence of his parents. A first-rated drunkard initiated him into the art and craft of opium and alcohol meanwhile. The habits grew as did his passion for hard work. Now there were no more fruit gardens—save some exceptions here and there and even these had been truncated to a very small size—so they started taking cultivable land on yearly lease to muster up the price to be paid to the owner and surviving morsels for themselves. Off and on, whenever he found time from their own cultivation, he worked as a wage labourer.

His strength grew and so did his reputation as a first rate worker who wasn’t just interested in seeing the sun progressing from dawn to dusk, but found pleasure in watching its differently angled rays at various points of the day reflecting in his sweat’s puddle. Happily profited by getting two day’s work accomplished in a single day at the rate of a single day’s wage, they praised him for the copious amounts of alcohol he would swig down after his backbreaking working hours. Initially his family tried to check down the riveting flow of this fuming river of intoxication, but their piecemeal efforts were easily checkmated.

Thus became his identity in the village: The hardest worker and the hardest drinker.

He formed drinking groups in the other low caste neighbourhoods, which further dented the already skewed economy of his hard work. These were but his heydays, as he got all the compensation through his illicit relations with two or three badly treated women, the sufferers of domestic violence and crimpled-by-poverty housewives in the underprivileged, landless locality. The freshly adolescent snake of his passion hissed in their groins, many-many precious minutes and sometimes even a complete hour when he was high on opium. To checkmate his rampant passion, the father brought his wife—a mere wispy girl—to make him enjoy the conjugal bliss. She, just a tiny streamlet of sorrow, surrendered herself like an obliging, uncomplaining girl-bride to his stream of passion and orgies.

Irrespective of what went in his personal life, the prospective employers still found him the very same Kalu, the forever good worker. After all, the social position of a man is determined by two factors: a) either what he actually gives to others freely or at highly subsidised rates; b) or raises his material status to the extent that although others might not get a penny from him all along his life yet a prospect does exist, however far the hope might galore.

Kalu belonged to the first category. So they liked him without investing too much on their part to sustain the emotion. What he did with his meagre earnings was nobody’s business. Their only motive was to get his help in their business at a highly subsidised rate; which he did like before, so there was hardly the question of his fall of status as a very-very hardworking, honest labourer.

Can a person be good by remaining good to others and being bad to himself? His addiction ensured that he could never be good to himself even if he tried his best, utilising the golden quality of any human character—hardworking nature and a soul that always got attracted to work like iron to the magnet. Many times, he worked assuming work to be his only reward. However, this type of philosophy very easily ensures a highly troubled domestic life. As he was bad to himself only, how could he avoid being bad to his better half? The poor wife-cum-girl or girl-cum-wife suffered all the fire of his frustration.

Now he took days out of work and drank right from dawn to dusk and then again deep into the night. But people still kept on liking him; for he seemed to be making amends for the lost days on the working days by toiling even harder than earlier. Nonetheless, the economy of it was futile, for he got the average working pay even though he worked thrice as much, driven by an unavoidable fury of work that only alcohol made him to forget.

Within no time he was the father of two sons: a suitable threshold for starting a separate family unit.

‘From now onwards manage your own affairs and bake your bread on a separate hearth,’ his father tried to yoke him into responsibilities.

His wife cooked on a separate hearth but they remained in the same thatched shelter run by his parents. In addition to Kalu’s hyperactive role on the poor stage of the famished household, his elder married brother (now a father of three himself) and two younger unmarried brothers kept it a happening place. During all this turbulence, the family had some moments of respite to get the only daughter married off in which the family matriarch, though she stayed with her youngest son, played her maternal as well as monetary part much to the chagrin of the daughter-in-law she was staying with, who accused:

‘You fatten your old flesh on our crumbs and shower your affection on these neighbours!’

****

Now we enter the deciding phase of Kalu’s life. He was in his mid twenties now.  

If we trace the story from his wife’s angle, it will portray another independent story of sufferings and privations. But let us consider it just a tributary stream of sorrows that emptied its surrendering worth into the major stream of the husband’s bigger woes. The fact that her husband was the hardest working labourer in the village, in addition to the another fact that he was the hardest drinker as well, made her life miserable beyond measures. All in all, the poor lady suffered in poverty, deprivation and the barrage of her husband’s acts of verbal and physical abuse. To the rest of the village, he was the very same Kalu who worked double for a single wage and responded nicely, respectfully to their working calls.

Is our goodness or badness decided by the number of people who think we are either good or bad? The poor lady almost worked like her husband but was still a bigger loser; because the husband took away her wages from the employers even before she could hold out her weak hand to gather the fruits of her labour.

Some conscience-driven folks even tried to follow the principle of equal opportunities of work and wage but were faced with the much dreaded threat from the numero uno taskmaster that if they again tried to separate his account from his wife’s then he will never work for them. Now, who wants to incur losses these days just on mere principles. Although they could easily get a replacement yet that would be at the best at a rate of one wage and single day’s work—a huge scale down from Kalu’s prospects of at least double work for a single wage. So the better sense prevailed and they too became party to his exploitation of his wife.

They took on annual lease a few acres of land to plant marigolds. The crop was very good. Marigolds—yellow, orange and scarlet—swayed as the symbol of their efforts, for both of them were almost equally hardworking by nature. The prices were really good in the flower market in Delhi about 50 kilometres away. The big bales of flowers meant big bucks as well. However, it also meant bigger prospects of money for drinking—not only for himself but even for his fellow drunkards from the village, who now swarmed around him like flies around a lump of jaggery.

Many times, when he had lost his senses, he woke to find the money missing from his pockets. After all, it is so easy to rob a fully drunk man. So the whole season passed with almost no spare money and the rent for the land lease was yet to be settled. However hopeless the situation turned, in addition to a more and more whimpering wife who continuously pointed out the impending disaster, it but won’t create much worrying lines on his face. Those who have faith in hard work, they worry less about failure to the same extent. And Kalu was really a tough nut to crack. He knew that he had strength to earn the money through toil and blood and pay the debt. So he laughed off his wife’s desperation and started working with even greater zeal; of course, he continued drinking with equal zeal as well. Lease debt plus the exorbitant interest mounted and at last he started to feel the pressure.

The sky high prices of tomatoes in the vegetable market attracted him monetarily—perhaps for the first time—with the prospects of a short-cut to earn some quick money by reversing the earlier ratio of double work for a single wage. Each and everybody in the farming community was talking of tomatoes for these were fetching hefty prices. A crate of tomatoes appeared like a tiny bar of gold.

Taking a shortcut from his usual means of hard work to way lay the debt, he purchased a raw, handsome, buxom crop of tomatoes at a hefty price. The new scales of profit had already been set up in the village. In the previous season, a seven acre plot of tomatoes had fetched 60,000 rupees to a farmer. Entailing his dreams, many more farmers from the village had planted tomatoes this year.

Simply deriving his equation from the previous year (and also from this year’s early signs of a hefty price because the early-sown varieties were making farmers delirious with joy), he purchased an acre of young standing crop for 25,000 rupees. Easy money shone through the fat, greenish tomatoes of hybrid variety standing in the hired land—for he was just required to pluck these as soon as these ripened: A tremendously easy task in comparison to his earlier drudgery.

Only the first visit to the market with his crateful of ripe tomatoes was sufficient to turn him glum. Instead of a wad of notes, he returned with famished pockets. The prices had crashed due to the glut in the market and he had drunk away the pittance he got in return of his bumper crop after payments for plucking, picking and transporting. Perhaps the providence was unforgiving regarding his earlier equation of work. For double the work, he had always earned almost half in return; and the equation won’t just change like that.

Market kills! The onion that once toppled the government in Delhi; it on another time gets thrown away at 50 paisa/kilogram. The farmer is always held by his throat by the market fluctuations. In its fluctuation of prices, it almost butchers farmers, especially the landless ones who rent land or purchase standing crops at fairly high prices because then the market looks good. Then the weather plays cat and mouse. Earlier it was only the weather given its divine unpredictability that tormented and tortured them; and now came the market with still greater inexplicability, fluctuation, unexpected shocks, surprises and jolts. So between the paws of two mighty cats, the little mouse rolled, getting mortally bloodied.

Kalu also rolled bloodied between his hired standing crop and the market. The owner planter had put up a very grand show of hard work that had been amply supported by an equally grand show of weather conditions. So the crop was amazingly good. However, equally grand show in every nook corner had uniformly showered bumper productivity in the surrounding countryside. Tomatoes were as big, ripe and succulent as their hopes. Even the hardworking Kalu found it difficult to keep up with the picking labour rate on account of exceptionally large amounts of ripening daily.

The market crashed with surplus. Too much of luck to too many farmers isn’t digestible to the market. Prices ate dust. On successive days, his earlier equation of more work for a lesser wage hit newer and newer lows. The poor fellow, for the first time, had drunk away the last portion of his meagre earnings. And when the tomatoes said good-bye to their span of fructification, he was left with only 5,000 rupees at the end of the season. Fluctuations in prices had meant he had been electrocuted.

Quite surprisingly, this time he didn’t drink it away. In the simmering hot days of June, he took one more short-cut to offset the negative consequences of his earlier short-cut. These 5,000 rupees he spent on purchasing watermelons, sold the produce in the wholesale market as well as well as hawked day in and day out by the roadside. However, the law of diminishing returns was catching up with him furiously. Gone were the happy days of double work on a single wage.

This investment of 5,000 rupees fetched him only 1,500 rupees. It had been quite a time since he had been unfaithful to his two faiths—hard work as a labourer and the fantastic guzzler of alcohol. Before returning to the first, he decided to pacify the latter, for he had 1,500 bucks with him. Understandable, when one gets this much out of an investment of 25,000 rupees, the further loss of these 1,500 rupees doesn’t make any difference—unless one is a financial wizard.

So he drank these off quite regally. But this time, even his hallucinated world won’t give him total respite. These big figures still tormented him. In the first half of the first decade of the new century, to a landless wage earner in the famished countryside, it was a huge sum after all.

Including the interest, he the landless labourer owed 40,000 rupees to two landowners. While lost in the sea of liquor, he tried to muster up his belief in the other faith—hard work. Sadly, keeping both his faiths (working doubly for a single wage and worshipping the goddess of intoxication with a major portion of the former) in addition to the upkeeping of the family (we shouldn’t forget he had two sons by now: one aged four and the other just two), he calculated that he will require at least two lifetimes to settle his debts.

Hopelessly drawing out the last notes from his pockets and staring at them he lay in his room fully drunk. During this time, he made amends for his brutalities done to his wife. He spoke nicely to her; even purchased her a new salwar-kameez and two sets of T-shirts and shorts for the boys. With the last hundred rupees he went to the nearest tehsil town and returned with three pills that would affirm his faith in eternal sleep and obliviousness forever. These were deadly poisonous sulphas pills that the farmers put in their grain stores to kill the last of the last insects.

Lying in his room on a semi-depilated cot he had already swallowed the two pills when his wife caught him, tried to prevent the third from ending into the destination of death. But she was weak work-broken creature and he was still stronger than her. Caught in the death’s throngs, he gave his first and last parental sermon to his sons standing nearby, scared out of their wits, the younger one howling because the other one was also doing the same.

‘Keep your mother always happy!’ he managed to say as his mouth started to get effulgent with poisonous foams eating his innards.

By the time they took him to the hospital at the district city his soul had more or less escaped from the cage tormented by his two faiths. The doctor knew that he should declare him brought dead, but realising his Hippocratic oath he still tried for at least a couple of hours.

‘It is the costliest life-giving treatment I’m giving him!’ his eyes seemed to say.

However, it was a foregone conclusion that the poor fellow will not survive. The doctor as well as the patient’s relatives were doing their futile duties only. There is but a limit to which one can perform one’s duty. So they had to finally stop this game of duty.

By this time, the cost of treatment had further gone against the tragedy-struck family. At the final call, the doctor’s hands struck to 20,000 rupees on the price clock. He was smartly adamant; declared that he won’t allow them to take away the body unless they settled the dues. Kalu’s father thus again borrowed money, settled the doctor’s fees and settled a part of the dead man’s debts as well.

The circle of debt would continue, possibly till Kalu’s own father’s death and more unfortunately even to the coming generations.

A Samosa with Extra Chilli

 

I’m passing in front of the famous Chotiwala restaurant at Rishikesh. There is a spicy rush at the eating point. The portly pink mascot sits with his tall choti and peers into the crowd with unseeing eyes. I wave at him to effect not the slightest reaction on his face and move on the pathway leading to Lakshman Jhoola.

You have Baba Kali Kamli’s Swarga Ashram community dining halls, first aid centres and rows and rows of the begging friars waiting for at least as much as mother nature won’t mind giving us—just enough to meet our need, keeping us out of the loop of greed.

Further on, you have big mango gardens on both sides. In between you have tiny cottages surrounded by the terai trees, the luxurious variety of vegetation that enjoys the advantages of both the plains and the hills.

There are numbered cottages, kutis, under the pious protection the Swargashram trust and banner. Kuti number 30 is very impressive. The dweller seems to have devoted a lot of attention in managing it.

In these tiny hermitages, surrounded by beneficent greenery, the unending quest to know the ultimate reality gets a stable platform. Here, the seekers of truth can rest and pause, unbothered about the struggles that they have faced so far in life.

There are yoga kendras and Sanskrit vidalyas situated among the groves. Yoga and meditation centres are a hot sell among the foreigners. Lynched by the inhuman onslaught of consumer and cultural monopoly that leaves hardly any choice for adventure, they arrive here to set out a new path of fun and frolics with the soul.

Taking a stroll along these spiritual delicacies, I take a U-turn and start walking back to have a visual revision of these vistas of faith. A destination-less walk can have as many U-turns and side-turns as possible. A foreigner seems eager to talk as I am walking on my destination-less path. It’s a mature conversation and we walk along the Ganges to reach a tea shop.    

The Canadian is a handsome man of around 50 years. He looks impressive with a baritone voice. Holding tea glass in one hand and caressing a street dog with the other, he looks to have a decent amount of share in both the physical and the metaphysical domains. He has spent a lot of time travelling all over India. He is almost proud to declare himself a staunch Indophile.

‘I love samosa. It’s better than the best burger any day. The corporate are destroying the Indian culture. Back home, you travel thousands of kilometres but still you come across the same food, dress, language, lifestyle, weather and culture. So why should I move around there. I love to travel within India because every step takes me to a new experience,’ he enlists the reasons for being so deeply in love with India.

Well, we have been taught that India is ‘unity within diversity’.

‘Allopathy is good for surgery and trauma. In the rest of the cases, it destroys one’s system. I prefer ayurveda any day. But the corporate-driven cultural onslaught is so powerful that in the next two decades, entire India will be the same boring Western caricature. Then I’ll be able to hang my travelling boots and rest at home. No more adventures,’ he looks sadly into a group of sadhus eating at the langar served by an ashram.

I know it’s lovely to have an exotic, chaos-loving spirit. However, we cannot ignore the fact that poverty and struggle are the backbone of Indian exoticism. The mankind’s sole obsession is naturally a kind of stampede to throw away the yoke of poverty and suffering. Things will of course change. The corporations feel this desperation at the mass level. They throw the baits of ambition, hopes and aspirations.

The entire cosmos itself is being heaved around by a mammoth ambition towards more sophistication and complexity. This ambition can only survive with a huge mass of unfulfilled dreams at the base. It cannot afford to have too many success stories because then, with everyone a winner around, who will labour at the base of mundane activities. The pyramid has to have a huge base of losers. The bier of success has to be carried by the bereaving mass of frustrated people. But that doesn’t mean the losers will stop fighting. They will continue waging wars. The corporate will keep their futile hopes alive. Some will jump out of the boiling cauldron. But these will be generational changes in a particular lineage. For one winner, there shall be at least 100 losers, only then the equation will sustain.

The Canadian is already on the verge of losing the hopes of retaining a poor famished India that appeals to his adventurous soul so much. But another cup of chai by an otherworldly figure revives his Indian exoticism. 

She is a beautiful girl in blue silk sari. Who is she and what is she doing here?

She challenged herself to the farthest limits of her insecurities and came all the way from Japan to marry a man who appears just like any other poverty-beaten figure around. He runs a tea stall. She challenged herself to love unconditionally, absolutely in avoidance of any expectations and security; just the pure bliss of giving all you possess in your mind, body and soul to your beloved.

She has a beautiful round face, puts a bindi on her forehead, wears a peacock blue sari with a golden embroidered blouse. She has taken up the role of a traditional Indian housewife in all its meaning and significance. She picks up the empty plates and glasses, arranges chairs, puts into order the stools, washes utensils, reads an elementary Hindi book in between, while her husband and mother-in-law run the tea stall.

It’s a ramshackle thatched enterprise by the street running down at the end of the bathing steps. A little alley leads from here to the Ganges. Some chairs and stools and wooden benches line up the alley. The sadhus, tourists and pilgrims sit down for tea and cigarettes. She moves around with petite delicacy, the symbolism of her exotic presence larger than the hills to the north.

One of the customers is a short, fiery, slightly built young man with razor-sharp, rolling tongue that stings with acerbic pieces of information, primarily scandalous in nature, with lots and lots of B.C.s. He was born at the premises of one of the most reputed ashrams on the banks of the holy Ganges. His father works at the charitable hospital run by the ashram trust.

‘All this is sham show. Fake babas. It’s basically business. Money. Fuck it, what religion? To have a room here you have to be a foreigner, or possess a gorgeous girl on your arm, or donate rupees in lacs. This man grabbed the property. The previous swami was poisoned. The scandal should be busted. He is always surrounded by 20-30 women who have ditched their husbands for holy dips. They are all part of a big political game. He has a rich family in another state. His children stay in a nice city. He has grabbed all the land up to the hills. India is poor because half the land has been grabbed by these fake babas. If the government takes it back most of our problems will vanish. Do you know who are the real babas? They are the ones who survive in the streets, who beg, stay on the road, eat and bathe in the open, who have surrendered every convenience that may make life comfortable. All the big-name ashrams are money business, popularity and politics. The babas don’t miss a chance to sleep with a woman. Yoga has been glamorized to the extent of being a sex show. It’s like any other product or service. I have seen it with my own eyes. All this big shiny building is hollow inside. There are dalals who manipulate and run the show in lieu of the favours done to them. It’s just like an institution like any other anywhere in any city. Intrigues, strategies, fakery, lies, deceit all are used to sell the services and grab political patronage. The babas are thriving. The Congress used to spank them on their bums. Now they will thrive for a long, long time till the present government is there.’  

He seems a little cantankerous typhoon. You cannot stop him. It’s better to listen or, more suitably, allow his words to enter from one ear and exit from the other without any slowdown midway in the head. If you allow them to take even a slight pause in between, it will definitely take a heavy toll on your mental and physical being. He has enough stinginess to put a robust hole in the fabric of your faith.

There are people at the tea shop who try to defend their faith as he vehemently pokes verbal spears into the soft tissues of their faith. Those who have reasons to keep their faith will go to a fairly long distance to retain it. There is a fight, starting with verbal vollies to graduate onto scuffling and jostling. The attacker on faith is pitted against many defenders of faith.

The Canadian gets into this multi-hued excitement of India and tries to save the little revolutionary. As it happens, the one who tries to stop the fight becomes a sitting duck kind of punching bag. The Canadian gets severe jabs on his ears and scalp. Both parties increase the frequency of their punches as they find there is someone intervening and hence the risk of a full fight is already reduced to a large extent.

The Japanese bride shrieks with shock as her carefully arranged chairs and benches are strewn around. She drops the tray she is holding and runs to hide behind her mother-in-law who takes up her broom lest the ruckus takes bigger proportions and threatens their establishment.

The Canadian gentleman stands with buzzing ears, bleeding lip and blackened eye. India is a happening place after all. The little offender against faith is howling with wounded pride and anger. Choicest abuses drizzle down. A policeman arrives and disperses the crowd.

I feel sad for the Indophile gentleman. I motion him to accompany me towards Ma Ganga a few paces down the little alley. He walks towards the holy waters and sits on a step, his feet immersed in the swift flowing currents. He washes his face. After a few pensive moments he smiles.

‘Sometimes it turns too spicy with eye-watering chilli. Just like samosa is sometimes too pungent. It’s an exception though. My experience of the great Indian cuisine is too big to be spoilt by these exceptions,’ he seems in decent control of his self after the jolting strikes.

‘Mother not only cleanses sins, she dissolves pain also, I mean real physical pain,’ I say.

He completely agrees. ‘But next time I will remember that I am just a witness, only a visiting observer of the game of Indian exoticism. I will avoid the role of a participant in any capacity,’ his smile graduates to a full laughter.

By now I know that he is recovered in the real sense and leave him there by the side of Ma Ganga to reflect more about his search. I then move on my own little path.      

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.