Pa's childhood experimentation with beedis

 

Father started experimenting with smoking beedies while he was in class three. Grandfather notched up many devices with squirming moralities to teach him a lesson. Father was tied to a wall peg like a tiny bale hanging in air against the wall. He was made to sign a declaration that he would never smoke and sign it 1000 times in the presence of witnesses. He was hoisted in air and dropped multiple times on the ground as a deterrence. He was made to draw lines on earth with his nose, each time saying ‘I won’t smoke!’ Teachers were asked to be extra punitive. While all this was being done, everyone around was smoking hookahs. So the tactics failed and Father happily continued smoking beedies into his seventies. We also tried smoking on Pa’s leftover beedi stubs. But it was bitter and the thing never appealed to our taste.   

Village marriages of the bygone era

 

We eagerly looked forward to weddings at our village during childhood, especially the girl weddings. Cheap, various-colored sweets looked like divine desserts in those days. But then a girl’s marriage would mean the groom’s wedding party coming to the village. It’s very difficult to decipher the entire set of monstrosities unleashed by the sloshed wedding party members. It was a special day for them under patriarchal rules. So even their most goonish conduct was viewed as funny at the most. They were entitled to the entire set of follies expected from a sloshed person.

They would mistreat the music band members, kick the groom’s horse, wallow in mud, shout profanities, make lewd gestures and make passes at the entire village womenfolk. Save the groom, whose face radiated some semblance of grace for getting a wife, the rest of his party would be a perfect example of ugliness and puerilities. It was a kind of unutterable indulgence that chucked out the entire village’s peace.

No wonder, thrashing the groom’s party before seeing off the bride wasn’t an exception. They would unleash a firmament and the helpless villagers, cumbered with fathomless woes, would forget the sublimities of welcome offered to the party a few hours ago and pounce upon the evil. It was a gigantic necessity to do so in most of the cases.

The drunk revelers would do snake and monkey dance to the drumbeats and throw coins and even 10 rupee notes in the air. It would enkindle a stampede among the onlooking village boys and they would rush to pick up the coins. Then the impervious baratis would beat the culprits who had picked the coins. And the beaten boys would take revenge later. As the buses and other vehicles started to go back, they would throw stones to break the maximum number of windowpanes and rival heads if possible.

Once we felt well recompensed when we hammered a wooden piece into the exhaust pipe of a wedding party bus and it won’t start causing a lot of anxiety and inconvenience among the foes. This slimy novelty was hurtled in their face because one of the boys from our group had been slapped because he had caught a 10-rupee note mid air that was hurled into the skies by a wildly drunk barati in celebration. So the bus won’t start for a long time and once it did there was a hail of stones. That’s how weddings were celebrated during our childhood in the eighties of the last century.

Pet-pals of our childhood

 

My brother loved pets during childhood. We still remember those dogs, cats and birds. A few of them stand out. Kalu was a tiniest, skinniest puppy that was bought for fifty paisa from a neighborhood urchin by my brother. It was touted as a bad bargain by the elders as it was almost on the verge of death. It kept its neck tilted as if as a declaration of misery and sickness.

The village school was nearby and we would come during the recess more to check if Kalu was still around and less to have a hurried lunch. But Kalu was a hard life in a frail body. Mother would go to the fields to get fodder and keep it chained in a wall’s shade and would return before the sun crossed over and baked it alive. Once she got late and found Kalu stretched out under a merciless sun, struggling for breaths. She thought these were death pangs. But once in the shade and some water dropped in its mouth, it made a comeback and never looked back.

Kalu wasn’t an all-black dog, it was speckled black and white and we chose black from the binary scheme of its coat to name it as such. It came to be a sturdy dog in its youth. Childhood frailties don’t always mean the same in youth. It was now a big dog and well behaved in manners. But it would lose its temper slightly at the sight of a farmer in the locality.

One day, in anger the farmer poked at Kalu with a hayfork. Kalu lost one of its eyes. Father worked at Delhi with Life Insurance Corporation. On his return at night, we shared the catastrophic episode. We had never seen Father leading a quarrel with his little pack. But that day he led all of us to the farmer’s threshold and all of us delivered a handy condemnation and wholesale remonstration. More than Kalu losing its eye, the fact that we the educated guys went for a verbal fight made the news in the village. Kalu was nursed back to health and performed well even as a one-eyed canine. It looked very cute with its squinting look. But then one day, it followed the ladies, Mother being one of them, going to the fields. It involved a kilometer of walk along the tar road. There it met its end under a truck like most of the village dogs did during those days.

Village dogs went to the roads to die. They actually ran into the vehicles to escape from them. A few other pet dogs met the same end. Rikki but was a different sort. It was a large, handsome brown and white dog. It looked a canine rockstar from all angles. It always created a timorous creak in the hearts of all the female canines. There was an ominous fluctuation in the jealous hearts of rival males as Rikki wooed almost all the females in the entire village.

After its love episodes, it looked solemn, drowsy, almost venerable. An ineffable moonbeam lurking on its august face. Its love-sorties took it to all corners of the village to shower its dreamy gaze at all its fans. Jealousy of rival dogs knew no bounds. A dozen of them banded together and ambushed the handsome Romeo. The destiny’s gale was blowing against Rikki now. It was a frightful and shadowy attack in the fields outside the village. The gusting billows of their anger poured out their immeasurable agony. We were crestfallen as it was declared dead in the attack.

Almost daily pestered by my younger brother, Father came very close to buy an eagle from old Delhi. My brother had been carefully deliberating over the menu of mice and frogs for the esteemed hunter. But then the prayers of our mother were heeded and the hunter bird didn’t arrive. But many pigeons and parrots did arrive, most of whom would die and my brother would mourn the death of his pet birds with loud tears.

Once there was a pair of little Australian parrots in the house. One of them flew away one day. My brother led a frantic search operation after a nippy discussion with his pals. They led their search party across the fields surrounding the village, peeked into hundreds of trees, and shot queries about the runaway parrot at the farmers from the neighboring villages grazing their cattle.

Imagine trying to spot a little bird among thousands of birds chattering among thousands of trees across many square kilometers. But a valiant marksman is undaunted by the unfavorable winds. The relentless search operation made it a local news item. Who says efforts go waste? You always stand a chance of finding even a needle in a huge hayrack if you are diligent and persevere in your effort. Someone informed that a boy at the farther end of the village has a beautiful parrot. My brother and his band sneaked over their yard to check. There it was. Sitting on a stick with its leg tied. The boy was condemned as a wicked and impious brigand, smuggler and poacher (all together) and the bird was retrieved.

Pushed by the benevolent gaiety of childhood, we once saved two hare babies from the fields. But in reality, we had kidnapped them from their house. We customized a big wooden chest as a cage. They grew fabulously. But then they started quarrelling all day and emitted stanching white urine. They had to be given to a bigger pet lover along with the huge wooden chest, sack of feed, a few rupees and plenty of cajoling.

Given their unbecoming ways, they did rounds around the village. Finally, an enterprising one ate them. We raised a protest at this but he flatly told us, ‘See, you weren’t the owners. I was the owner at the time.’ ‘But they were pets for playing,’ we tried to reason. ‘For playing, yea! We tried to play with them. But they were so angry that bit the finger of my grandson. Left it bleeding! So there was no other use. Moreover, there were guests at home that day and we were drunk. So made use of them.’ We demanded back our huge wooden cage contrived from a chest. But to him it belonged to the last occupant. So the question of ownership got muddled along the series comprising all the owners along the line of occupancy across the village. So we lost our claim. We tried to retrieve it by stealth. It was too big for being stolen over the wall of his yard. It crashed and Bablu, the most muscular one in the squad, got a blue toe. We had to run away to avoid a beating.   

Once a cat ate mama squirrel, leaving three orphaned finger-length squirrel babies sticking on an unplastered wall. My brother used all his boyhood expertise in catching them and raised them as their single parent. A slim plastic eyedropper, having a very thin nozzle, was salvaged from the waste heap. The squirrel kids would have a semi-fluid made of milk and crushed bread. They would hold the dropper’s tube with their front paws and cutely drank the nourishing drink. It was a successful rearing. They grew strong. We left them on a neem tree where they grew still bigger and enjoyed the sweet-sour offerings of this world.  

While the village boys hit the hard cork ball to neighboring field around the school playground, my brother once hit upon the scheme to fish out three handsome, full-grown parrot lads from their hideouts in the school’s roof. They were just a few days away from flying and their beaks gave him a bloodied taste on fingers. I would say it was outright kidnapping. They were force-fed for a few days and raised lots of squeaky protests in the room. Then luck smiled at them. Mother inadvertently opened the door and they had their first free flight. It amounted to a real flight to freedom.

A cat mom was once staying in our barn with her week-old kittens. Grandfather turned a cat-killer for her sake. Well, we siblings turned very fond of the kittens. But then a burly male cat came at night and broke one kitten’s neck leaving us fuming for revenge. We were ready for it the next night. Father had his hockey stick and Grandpa had his well-oiled stick. Grandpa was in his late seventies at that time. The rascally cat gave a tough challenge and would have escaped over the high wall if not for Grandpa’s masterstroke. He jumped in air and hit the climber on its back. The cat rolled down and after that Grandpa showed amazing skill and agility in hitting maximum strikes within the shortest time. Very soon the murderer cat got murdered itself. We were so happy but Mother was apprehensive. ‘They say if you kill a cat, God will demand a golden cat from you,’ she reminded us. ‘For that God will have to first give me that much of gold,’ Grandpa seemed ready for atonement. 

Sherry the black German shepherd was Father’s darling. She was the only one who understood his fabulous literary English and responded to his philosophical talks. The rest of the village was clueless to his high-standard angrezi. But then Sherry developed a taste for running after humans and sometimes even taste some scraps of skins on human calf muscles. Complaints arose in very exaggerated proportions. Maybe the people held a grudge against her for her English skills. Father left her with a friend who stayed at the town twelve kilometers away. I think he forgot the basic fact about the canine sense of smell. But he realized it the very next night when Sherry scraped her paws against the door, whining to be admitted in. Father thought that she must have learnt a lesson and would behave well. But Sherry looked for revenge now. I think she understood that the entire neighborhood had conspired against her. Father tried his best to put reason in her brain in classy English. But she scaled up her pursuit of human calf muscles. Complaints swarmed when Father would come back from office at night. So away they went as co passengers in the train to the capital. Father left her in the bathroom, safely locked for a long journey. That was a sad decision but that’s what he could think of as a solution.       

Then there were a few little mushy cats that would sneak into our quilts and give purring, pampering sounds on cold, shivery nights. These were expert cherubs and would materialize in the dark and would look out for the most comfortable quilt. They had a lot of choice.  

Once one little kitten rolled on the ground to kill a common wolf snake, a baby pink, beautifully pattered little snake. Father declared the kitten to be a hunter. He gave special instructions for this particular baby cat to be treated well. He was sure that it would turn into a majestic hunter and would wipe away all the rodents and reptiles in the village. It grew fat on that promise and ran away one fine day, pursuing a girl cat and forgot all our affection.  

I, on my part, had my modest share of stealing eggs from holes and nests under a conviction that if I keep them in my custody, the baby bird coming out will be my friend for life. I kept them in alcoves and skylight ledges, repeatedly checking if my birdie friend had arrived. The eggs but remained good museum pieces. I would only realize and understand the reasons in middle school science books about hatching.

Uncle Surje's Wife

 

Thousands of fungus gnats, tiny insects of the size of one-tenth of an inch, flew into the lighted verandah. They seemed in great spirits, almost in party mood on a special night. I find them dead in the morning. But then maybe they danced to death. There are heaps of tiny dead insects among dry yellow neem leaves and dead rose petals. Dying together with so many of your species must be a strange experience. I broom the floor and almost countless tiny fliers form a fistful of brown sawdust. Where did so many individual points of consciousness go?

It’s a windy mid October morning shoving away the lugubrious, sleepy shades from my little garden and small courtyard. An extremely chatty purple sunbird couple sounds like an excited sparrow played in fast-forward mode on an audio tape. It builds a momentum and lots of yellow and old neem leaves tumble down. A very soft, light drizzle gets inspired, almost wispy brushstrokes of mist, or you can say stormy mist at the most.

Marigolds love October and are quick to give the flashiest of smiles. The bougainvillea is also doing well. It’s a bonsai variety to check its rapid sprawl and the consequent overtaking of the garden walls. During its purchase, when it was a tiny sapling, the nursery guy thrice corrected me on ‘bonsai’. ‘It’s bone-size!’ he informed me emphatically. I stand corrected and call it ‘bone-size’. He had earlier worked at Pune and sold it under the same name to far more important and significant looking gentlemen than me, so that acted as a validation for his name and I accepted it. So the bone-size bougainvillea is trying to break the limits imposed on its wild growth by our scientists.  

In a crack in the wall, there is a sprout of common purselane. It’s slightly sturdy but quite stubborn to grow even on the roofs and walls. It has yellow flowers, which later dry to thorny bulbs and give a pricking retort when you try to pull them out. We call them bhaakri in local parlance. I decide to be stubborn like bhaakri in my restful or call it idle ways. Varied life situations try to tickle at my spine with their urgent toes. I, but, sit cuddling fodder like an old, relaxed ox.

The flowerbeds in the garden give a wild look as ubiquitous weeds take a foothold. Allow, sometimes, mother nature to leave its unrestricted footprint around you. It’s a peculiar medley of weedy world. The shovel, digging fork and hand trowel have lots of rust bestowed by prolonged rest. Human idleness is maybe a boon for wilderness. Mother earth won’t mind too many idlers. Maybe she is wary of too hardworking and smart humans. She has amply rewarded my idlehood.

Little clumps of single-stemmed quack grass with long leaf-blades are nicely clothing earth. There is false tobacco, elephant’s foot, clumps of finer grasses spread like a leafy claw, hairy crabgrass with its wispy hair or call it flowers, matted sandmat or the little ground creeper with sinewy stalk and little leaves, common groundsel with frilled leaves, horseweed with its rosette of leaves. It’s a miniscule marvel, a pampered luxury, enthralling opulence, a grand interlude, a kind of slice of wilderness far away from the twittering long romps of the control freaks trapped in their own cleverness.

There is a friendly rivalry among these little denizens of the grassy world. I gape at the inexorable force of mother nature. It sprawls indescribably. Nature is always at peace while we are forever shuddering and caught in an ensnaring jiffy.

A touch of the untamed grass and distant memories rush up with aplomb and fruit jam sweetness.

Tai Surje ki bahu, the wife of uncle Surje, was a pioneer in neighborhood feminism. She smoked beedis and hookahs with macho voracity. She drank homemade liqueur with a proud exhortation. Novice liquor-lovers got their first lessons in the art in her patronizing company. They would sit around her on the mud floor and gloat over her bartending skills using teacups with broken handles and jarred mouths.

A full bottle got toppled one day. Almost half of its contents formed a puddle in a hollow near her feet on the mud floor. She was quick to act and gave the best lesson in the art of wining and dining. She cupped her hands and splurged the earth-scented cocktail. Her pupils followed suit. It was wiped clean.

‘Every drop matters. We had forgotten to offer a ceremonial drop to mother earth, so she got angry and tried to gulp down the entire bottle. As a good drinker, never forget to offer a drop to mother earth before you start,’ she told them.

She is long gone, but her pupils, in their middle age now, are the present day master liquor-lovers and carry the flag high in the art and craft of full-time intoxication.

Preface -- A Nobody's Notebook

 

These are little snippets of life in the past and the present. I stay at a village and the rural society presents its sweet-sour agrestic culturescape. One may have, especially those who have spent their lives in the cities, an idyllic idea about life in the villages. Well, things are idyllic in nature but you cannot escape the volatility presented by a conglomeration of humans, even at the scale of little hamlets.

Even though right in the middle of it, I stay at its fringes as far as participation is concerned. I live almost within the premises of my house, only coming out when the essentials of life force me out. I have my little garden and small courtyard in my old, cracking countryside house that allows me to even go for walks like a caged lion does—to and fro, to and fro; from one end to the other.

It’s a small world within and a humongous one outside. Little birds, insects, flowers, plants and some small trees in my yard provide me a space, a kind of microscopic view of the larger realities outside. It serves as a little lab of experimentation with thoughts, ideas, perspectives, judgments and of course poetic dreams and imaginations. It provides a bit of stability in this shaky world. I salvage my meaning of life primarily from little happenings among these few flowerbeds and the little clump of small trees in my yard. Life comes peaceful, simple and enjoyable, a kind of little ‘meaning’ amidst all the puzzling realities around.

And a little secluded corner is very conducive to pamper nostalgic memories from the past. So the leisurely bait catches some memories from the swift currents of time. It’s a very nice feeling to visit those times. These memories serve as an exotic spice to make the chronicles still tastier.  

Of course, I peep over the walls also, driven by the natural human curiosity, to see what is going outside. The crude, easy as well as hard-going farmers lead a very loud, interesting life. It but may not fit comfortably with the sensibilities of an introvert writer. Most of the time, things are tragic and comic simultaneously. On the basis of your mood, you have the option to choose either of the two. In the current compilation, I have noted down mostly the episodes and observations that have rib-tickled me positively.

I hope these little anecdotes from my past and the present bring a little bit of sunshine in the life of my readers. If my reader gets a little smile on her lips while reading this notebook, I would take it as mission accomplished.