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Hi, this is somebody who has taken the quieter by-lane to be happy. The hustle and bustle of the big, booming main street was too intimidating. Passing through the quieter by-lane I intend to reach a solitary path, laid out just for me, to reach my destiny, to be happy primarily, and enjoy the fruits of being happy. (www.sandeepdahiya.com)

Sunday, February 19, 2023

A Coin's Sticking Warmth

 

Those were diminutive, sleepy times in the eighties of our childhood during the last century. Now after almost four decades, little-little memories peek over gentle facades. I must be eight or nine. I was walking by the pot-holed district road on the way to our fields about a kilometer and half from the village. The little tales in schoolbooks with their moral lessons, at least during those times, laid a complex and experiential field to test the lessons.

I was also put into a predicament. I found a fifty-paisa coin. My brisk pacing got slowed down. I had to avoid moral bankruptcy. A fifty-paisa coin carried enough weight till that time. It would fetch ten sugar candies or even fifty little buttons of candies that came one for a paisa. I carried it in my firm, warm, moist, tight fist. Candies would make the day of any child any day in any age. I hope they still carry the same charm.

Still it wasn’t my money. I knew by rote learning that one should be honest and should try to return the lost money to the owner. I saw a group of girls cutting wood by the road and instantly the opportunity to clear my conscience arose. ‘Has anyone of you lost a fifty-paisa coin?’ I asked them. I was expecting a no but one of them said yes. It dumped my spirits. The coin seemed to be glued to my palm. ‘Tell me where did you lose it?’ I raised the level of my enquiry. She was a very intelligent girl. ‘Anywhere between that point and the village school on the road,’ she swiped her little axe along the road to cover two kilometers of stretch. Under the spell of mouth-watering candies, morals can be stretched. I elongated my next query along the lengthened morals. ‘Tell me the year on it,’ I asked. To clear my conscience she had to fail in the test. She hazarded a guess that came to be wrong. So there I carried my coin with a clear conscience and in full honesty.

Friday, February 17, 2023

Tau Hoshiyar Singh

 

Tau Hoshiyar Singh is in his nineties now and is almost deaf and nearly blind. ‘Tau, can you recognize me?’ I ask him. ‘Yes,’ he says, trying to sound confident, his mind already working on the problem. ‘Then tell, who am I?’ I put up the teaser. ‘Pappu,’ he says. ‘See, you cannot see at all,’ I try to make him confess that he cannot see. ‘Yea, I meant to say Suppi’s brother,’ he hasn’t lost the confidence in the least. Does he mean to say I’m my own brother or he has recognized me as my brother? ‘But you said Pappu,’ I try to make him flinch from his firm perch. ‘Yea, It’s the same,’ he says coolly.  

The Many Versions of My Nickname

 

My Sufism-loving father gave me the nickname of Sufi. But the bucolic tongues twist it to Suppi, Scoopi, Soopi and scores of many other rustic derivates. There are just three or four people in the village who can pronounce my name properly. Tau Surje thought I was Sukhi Ram, so called me Sookhi. Then there were a few old taus who called me Subbi.

The Simple World of an Old Man

 

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.

On Festival Eve

 

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.