The posts on this blog deal with common people who try to stand proud in front of their own conscience. The rest of the life's tale naturally follows from this point. It's intended to be a joy-maker, helping the reader to see the beauty underlying everyone and everything. Copyright © Sandeep Dahiya. All Rights Reserved for all posts on this blog. No part of this blog may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the author of this blog.
A small group of Sikh farmers still carries the farmer agitation on the Singhu border. A nihang Sikh comes visiting the market from the protest site. The blue-robed warrior of Sikhism is seen at an Airtel service centre. His old-looking base mobile set isn’t working. He offers it to the elegantly dressed lady on the counter. ‘You keep it and give me a new one. This one might be of some use to you,’ he says. How I wish this world was as simple as this man of religion thinks it to be.
Diwali falls in the first week of November. The government is trying its level best to curb pollution on the occasion of our grand festival. The firecrackers are banned. But a liquor-lover sets up a huge fire of tyres to meet the shortage of firecrackers. The entire village is wrapped in a thick, black shroud of smoke. All this happens during the day. He has set the nighttime tempo for the firecrackers from the black market.
In the town, sweetmeats are more ubiquitous than grocery items on the festive occasion. Even a puncture shop has sweets piled up on a table in front of it. The puncturewala-turned-sweetmaker even said a firm ‘no’ to my request for an air fill in the tyre of my scooty. ‘There is no air in the tank,’ he told me with an injured pride for not taking him as a full mithaiwala. ‘Take mithai,’ he offers. I have to move on with my half-deflated tyre.
In the town, almost three-fourth of the road’s width is occupied by the sweet vendors displaying their items. Almost every outlet has throngs of shoppers.
The snake charmers are forbidden from keeping snakes in their baskets these days. In order to collect charity money, they are clad like yogis and play their gourd flutes, been, in front of the stacks of sweets as if a snake would surface from the clods of sugary sweetmeats. By the way, presently sugar seems even more dangerous than snakes to the humans. So they have a nice replacement for the snake hoods.
Despite the ban on firecrackers to save Delhi from pollution, there are more crackers available in the black market than the normal one. There is an illicit fun in cracking dummy bombs and firing toy guns. Pungent smoke covers the sky. Eyes burn and you can feel the smoke going straight into your lungs. How wonderful it would be if we celebrated Diwali in its real spirit instead of just letter-driven lip service.
I put an oil lamp under the Parijat tree. It glowed for fifteen hours. In the morning, it seemed as if the tree has paid it a homage with a drizzle of flowers around it. The post-Diwali morning carried a heavy layer of smog. A cold, shivery, metallic blanket holding the fates of our lungs in its tight grip. Imagine, there are still climate change skeptics. Thankfully, a breeze rolled up and dispelled the post-celebration gloom.
The black-market bombs do one nice thing. As they give a blast, the monkeys think that we have started a war against them. Hence, they are on the back-foot for the time being.
Early November is the best part of the year for me. This part of the year is seminally fresh. You can see through the transparent liveliness. The river of time is slowly meandering carrying little buoyant waves. The early winter is so relaxed, playful and carefree in its pre-puberty days.
The roses sway in gentle cool breeze. In salubrious early November, the flowers blossom up fully, open up their self completely, then willingly scatter their petals without pain and suffering. They kiss the ground with as much passion as they blew kisses for the air. Look at them carefully, they greet you and acknowledge your presence with a fragrant smile.
Little pinwheel-shaped Parijat flowers carpet the yard in the morning. The small-sized tree has a distinctive place in Hindu mythology. The holy tree lets loose a fine drizzle of highly fragrant little white flowers as the sun peeks over a dewy, misty morning.
The dew-kissed marigolds are sturdy. They stay for a few days. In garlanded form, they make sporadic forays into mythology.
A skink crawls slipperily on the floor, sneaks under a flowerpot and bumps into a lizard. Both of them then run for their lives in opposite directions.
The loveliest roses are nourished by dewy nights, balmy sunrays and gentle breeze. I have enough flowers to sustain the little ball of honeybees. They have lost their orchards and gone are big honeycombs, so even a small ball of honeycomb is welcome. It’s better than none at all. The little ball of honeybees must be feeling in a paradise with showers of night-blooming jasmine flowers so nearby. They get busy on a very early breakfast. They are whizzing about amid booze and gossip.
The ground gets carpeted with white flowers under the Parijat. I usually collect them and put them in the flowerbed so that they don’t get trampled. I find it a sin to trample a flower. The flowers then become celebratory lunch for scores of little insects.
The spotted doves and the honeybees are very cordial neighbors. The lazy cat now sleeps under the tree. Most probably, he has seen the nest. I hope the bees will teach him a lesson if he troubles their docile neighbor. Sadly, the doves are very lazy in the nest-making art. It’s a poor, fragile, unkempt, clumsy nest. It’s situated at a perfectly reachable height, making it a treat for any winged or even earthly predator. Looking at their careless, almost foolish ways, I sometimes wonder how do they even survive as a species.
The banana flower cone welcomes all from the sweetest ones like butterflies to the stingiest ones like yellow hornets. Nature doesn’t mind it much because they take only as much as they need. The scarlet cone having nutritious sap is placed on the open platter for all to take their share.
There are earthworms in the garden. They are very near to earth, hence named as such. They are just a bit more conscious earth. The earth that crawls a bit. They crawl, die, decay and become perfect earth very soon.
These are beautiful days. The dusk descends suddenly. A little group of scaled munias is raising a feeble ruckus—they cannot turn noisy even in their worst mood. A hawk is after one of them. Maybe it’s a young hatchling that is yet to learn the entire set of flying maneuvers or perhaps it’s an old one with tired wings. It dives into a clump of trees, followed by the hawk. I can hear a painful screeching sound. Most probably, it’s a successful hunt or a failed escape.
Camouflaged by the shades of the falling dusk, the lazy cat crawls up the tree very cautiously. The silverbills, tailorbirds and oriental white eyes raise a protest. The dove keeps sitting in its poor nest, believing itself to be invisible. It but flew away at the last moment as the cat easily crept up to the nest. The hungry cat reached the nest and got a crunchy early dinner. The dove kept mum at night but cried through the next day. But it turned silent by the evening. The tragedy was almost scripted beforehand given their lazy and slovenly attempt at nest making. It was destined that the cat would have a breakfast, lunch or dinner any time. Its early foray means that it had a small meal. Had it waited for some days, the food would have been feistier. But then they don’t think like we humans. They live in the present.
Beyond the mainstream pruning and trimming, it may sound a sidelined, marginalized narrative but it carries its wholesome spiritual trail and healthy cultural pulse. Modern life is stacked from floor to ceiling, pushing us into musty corners of our own creation. The money-spinning fancy footwork, the mad scrambling for supercilious slice barely leaves any shelf space for little innocent smirks, casual banter and childish merry-go-rounds.
The other day, Balbir ki bahu, a poor woman on the socio-economic hierarchy, died. In patriarchy, you are mostly known as someone’s wife. Very few people know a woman’s real name. She was suffering and prematurely aged beyond her years. But then something rich happened during her last journey. As her arthi passed on the road on the way to the cremation ground, a sweets-laden tempo of a sweet-maker goofed it up. Trays of freshly prepared laddoos went falling in a line along the way. She went floating over the laddoos. Laddoos in place of flowers isn’t a bad bargain. Many dogs felt grateful as they feasted upon the chancy offering.
Before setting her onto the last lag in the journey, i.e., setting fire to the pyre, it was observed that her gold nose-stud was still in her occupation. Her son tried to salvage the last worldly possession but it won’t come off. He pulled very hard but the skin on the old woman’s proud nose stood ground. He had to leave it. Maybe she loved her nose-stud and carried it with her to the other world.
Dhillu is an agonizingly disciplined man. His life’s show falls under the rubric of ‘what will people say?’ He holds the pole of reputation as he walks on the rope of life. His core ideological moorings keep him safe in the bay beyond controversies and bad name. He is but flabbergasted about the uncaring ways of the current generation. ‘Imagine what the world has come to be. Yesterday I overheard a few boys talking. “You don’t speak! You got slapped for your conduct. It was such a big insult and humiliation. You must be ashamed of it,” said one of them. But the champion replies, “What is insult? This so-called shame, insult or humiliation lasts just two minutes. After that it has no business to be in one’s mind.” Imagine what hard skins for such tender age. With this type of attitude, will anything stop them from crossing any limits?’ He is scandalized and seems very much disturbed. Maybe he realizes that he has led his life in a completely unfit way.
