At a Peasant Wedding

 

It’s quite tough to be a non-drinking member of a wedding party in Haryana. Everyone is drunk to be in an enlightened dimension, leaving me the poor earthling struggling with the ground realities. Since truth is decided by the majority, I feel myself clueless and almost an idiot. The marriage DJ starts blaring. The massive woofers and speakers of the music system shake the ground under my steady feet. The liquor-lovers look more sure-footed with their unsteady feet on a shaky ground. The loud blasts of music leave my ribs shaken.

Drunk peasants give a fantastic thrust to their spirits. They challenge all norms of established mindsets, cultural matrix and constitutional niceties. It’s madly adventurous to be among them, I tell you. If you aren’t a fellow seminarist to them, then be prepared for an onslaught by the agents of anarchy.

Hinduism is indeed very liberal. The starting song is a dedication to drunkenness. ‘Bhola takes a bucket of bhang and shakes his bum to ecstatic dance’ is the approximate translation of the rowdy Haryanvi song about Lord Shiva’s fondness for bhang. They are so happy that the Lord Himself loves drinking. Dozens of liquor-lovers turn ecstatic.

Flying drones is prohibited without authorization in India. And so is celebratory firing. But most of what we do in celebration falls on the other side of law. A young man is flying a drone to make it the best marriage party ever to have visited the village. Another is firing angry vollies of bullets into the body of a helpless sky. I try to add value to their fun. ‘A drone just hovering around is no fun and so is the blind and aimless firing into the sky,’ I call their attention. ‘You try your aiming skills at the drone,’ I propose the scheme to the gun wielder. ‘You prove your expertise in flying by taking it away from the bombardment,’ I suggest to the drone flier. Dozens of voices grab the option and they are egged on to start the game. Even random, close-eyed shots would have a better chance. The boozed man’s careful shot shakes the skies. An electric wire finds the aim. Snap goes the wire with a bang. The scared drone crashes on an attic, making it a perfect drone attack.

There is a spin-off from the same wedding. I come home at night, hugely relieved to come in one piece. But someone bangs fists at the iron gate. He is a most distant relative, so distant that you lose the trail of the relationship if you try to go to the source, who has come attending the same marriage function. He is curtly denied entry into any of the houses he thought had a duty to entertain his stay. Perhaps someone suggested that the writer is a good option under the circumstances. So here he comes to my place. He is unsteady in gait but very steadily holds his feeble right to stay at my place. What will you do, if even after you declaring his totally unwelcome status through your gruff behavior, he pretends to be most at ease as if flowers have just been sprinkled over him, making him the most esteemed guest on earth? You have to be an out and out rascal in bad behavior to help him accept his unwelcome status. The roughest cut-sharp notes are simply songs of welcome to him, so here he is sprawled comfortably on the bed and I take my bedding on a cot in a corner in another room. But before that he prefers to be more welcomed through talks. He is very proud about his vast travels. ‘How many places you have visited in India?’ I am finally forced to ask, getting curious about his far and wide travels. ‘I have travelled far and wide!’ he declares. Then he enlists a thorough sketch of his forced entries into the houses in the neighboring districts within a diameter of 50 km. ‘I have travelled a lot,’ he declares with the world-weary finality of a traveler who has just returned after taking a trip around the earth or maybe even beyond. Thank God, this feeling of world-hopping travel got him sleepy and he dozed off.

But well into the depths of night, another liquor-lover is singing his bawdy songs against humanity. He has drunk away his land and domestic peace. The last installment of the compensation money for his land acquired for a new road project was swiftly drunk away. All that was left was a lakh of rupees. A smart guy cleverly branded his old car at 1.25 lakh rupees. The real price must be around 75000 rupees. He gave a discount of 35000 and sold the car for 90000 rupees. The liquor-lover hits the ceiling in hitting the jackpot.

In return of the favor done to the purchaser, the seller gets a promise to use the vehicle as and when needed till he gets a new car himself. It will be an exception though, he promised to the new owner of the dented old car. In addition, there was another condition. This one made the liquor-lover really happy. He had to promise to take the old owner and his group on two trips to Haridwar. Fun trips, they promised. The two proposed trips to the pilgrimage town saw the rest of the money going out of the pocket. The borrowing of the car turned out to be a generality, not the exception as promised earlier. There is no new car purchased by the previous owner so far. The frequent borrowings result in repeated tiffs between the neighbors. And carrying the momentum from one of the numerous tiffs, he is now tearing apart the shrouds of dark night with his piercing shouts.  

A Few Small Moments

 

Time is creeping ahead block by little block. It keeps on ticking to set up the colossal canvas of happenings. And commodified into its pawns we are also shifted around bundled with all our inflated myths. Among the gigantic plethora of events, there are little tales of agonies and ecstasies. This one here seems a sad tale. Life seems to carry a timeworn and dilapidated myth despite all the hypothetical, slow-dawning effervescence about it. And death, the colossal figure, snatches raw freshness to its age-old, wrinkled self.

A ladybird seems dead in the water bucket. I bring my fingertip near the drowned little colorful flier. Instantly crossing the vast chasm between life and death, it uses its energy held in reserves and crawls to the hand of the species that has destroyed countless fellow earthlings. I look at its beautiful red wings speckled with little dots. It gives gleaming insights into the vast array of natural colors and self-evolving designs.

I try to put it on the night jasmine flowers but it looks full of gratitude and moves up the finger. Getting it off is a very delicate, and tough, job. I am not aware that someone is watching me very closely. A rockchat has witnessed the rescue operation. It’s keenly interested in what I’m doing. Its dull rufous brown color is misleading. It’s not that dumb as it seems. Smartly it picks the ladybird and darts away, giving a triumphant chick-chick note that carries a wry sense of humor. Probably it thinks that I’m offering the little colorful beetle to it.

It’s one of the pair that hops around in the verandah and the yard and the garden ticking out ants, spiders and other little insects. Sometimes they sneak into the room and are very keen to explore the cage of we humans. They survey the room from the ceiling fan and their dark little eyes seem lost in the encyclopedic fog spread by our hopes and desires. I would say it’s a very inquisitive pair of birds and they want to know more about me. Once, one of them, boy or the girl I’m not sure, sat on my writing pad and very comfortably and assuredly eased down a drop on it. Maybe it gave me an autograph.

Sometimes, the rufous brown Indian rockchat is mistaken as female Indian robin, but it lacks the reddish vent and is slightly larger in size than the robin and carries a slightly curved slender beak. It flies like thrushes and redstarts and loves to hop and fly around human habitations. No wonder they have laid claim to the house. They slowly raise their tails as they take little jumps on the ground while picking their feed. They help this lazy countryside writer in keeping a check on the spiders in the verandah. Sometimes they come out even at night when there are moths around the bulb. The pair, quite unlike their unassuming dull color, has a vast repertoire of calls including territorial calls, begging calls, feeding calls, distress calls and roosting calls. But the usual call is a short whistling chee delivered with a rapid bob and stretch. Sometimes, they give company to the tailorbirds with their alarm calls, which is a harsh chek-chek. And when they are very happy after a nice lunch, they sing like thrush in their moderate, few-numbered notes. They are naughty sometimes and try to imitate the sound of other birds.

The honey buzzer got greedy and regularly flew down for three consecutive days. Now the bees aren’t just there to go flying around and gather honey for it. They left the site in irritation. You have to take away only that much as it won’t spoil the game altogether. Sadly, now my little garden looks incomplete without the bees. The flowers will miss them. Hope the tiny winged visitors won’t forget the garden and will come back some fine sunny day to get pollen for their honey and more flowery smiles for the plants.

A little rodent moves quite cluelessly in the flowerbed. Is it a shrew or mole rat? I’m not expert enough to know the difference. To a layman’s eye, there is hardly any difference between the two. I wish it to be a mole rat because they say it brings luck. What is the harm in wishing oneself a bit of luck? These are hard times after all. It’s twilight and a bluejay (Indian roller or neelkanth) suddenly swoops down from the neem branch, where it was sitting stoically for the last half an hour, and takes off a gecko from the compound wall. The gecko will have a nice flight till its carrier lands. Stay indoors you wall lizards if you don’t enjoy flying in the twilight.  

An Elephant Ride

 

I was once walking on my little legs by the side of the famished pot-holed road passing the village. I was coming back from the fields. A road-roller and an elephant were going side by side on the tattered pot-holed road. Three PWD guys on the road-roller, a bulky iron elephant itself, went with a lumbering muse. The real elephant carried four sadhus who maintained the mammoth creature for their mendicant journey. They had exactly the same slow, unmindful pace, none of them willing to overtake the other. Traffic wasn’t much during those days. Now and then a bus, truck or tempo would crawl respectfully from front or behind and carefully maneuvered the crossing by taking its tyres below the road on the opposite side.

I walked behind watching the spectacle unfold. Who would mess with a road-roller and an elephant on the road? So the vehicles maintained their distance. The PWD guys and the elephant-riding sadhus looked very confident on account of their solid occupancy of the road. They even chatted in a friendly way, going slowly side by side.

The sadhus had opium chillums in their hands and the PWD guys got desirous of some free spirits. They requested and it was accepted by the sadhus already in free spirits. Two sadhus got down with a chillum and got onto the road-roller and the driver enjoyed the smoky bonhomie. The road-roller rolled almost of its free will. The other two PWD guys stood in front of the elephant as it put its trunk under their bums to hoist them on its back and there they enjoyed the inhalations of freedom with the couple of sadhus on the elephant. And there I walked behind looking at their merry ways. It was a far gentler world then.

Chand the Great

 

Chand is in his early fifties now. He is unmarried and works as a truck driver. He is a simple, unassuming guy. You hardly notice any airs around him. But he has a specialty. Presently, the current generation has lots of social-media ventilated issues to talk about. But if we go two decades back, Chand was a solid topic to be discussed about, especially among the endowment-size crazy youngsters. Without any competition, Chand was, and most probably still is, the best-hung guy in the village. Literally, every male would lose confidence in himself at a mere look at Chand walking dourly.

Chand was childlike in this regard. He never wet his shorts while taking bath, sitting innocently on the tube-well’s water tank wall and giving himself a nice scrubbing bath while dozens of eyes stared in awe. And the legend spread. He was almost a poor man but people far higher in social standing gave him respect due to his USP. People joked that the reason he is still unmarried is because no father would put his daughter in trouble.

There was a story of mythical proportions that even nautch girls on the GB road in Delhi refused him service. One tormented woman, who had taken the risk and accepted money, bit him and escaped while it wasn’t yet over for him, saying, ‘Who wants to be hospitalized for his bloody 100 rupees!’ She slapped him very hard and threw his 100-rupee note on his face. After that he was spurned by one and all in the area.

There was a famous gupt rog vishesagya, the sexologist, in the town. Dr. Lubhash Chugh’s name was scribbled on all walls in the region ranging from temples to schools to private houses. Wherever there was space, he got it painted with his offer of turning docile sheepish males into rampaging horses. That was the only form of advertizing we saw while growing up because he didn’t leave an inch of wall space for any other product or service. Apart from this, secondarily though, he claimed to treat venereal diseases also.

He had grown sagely old after decades of groping his fingers among people’s groins, gleefully looking for the weak spots. The people joked that he had taken nayan sukh, solace for his eyes, of ogling at one million guptangs, secret organs. But the old man was at the shock of his life in his eighties. He still loved the art of checking guptangs. As fate would have it, Chand got a painful boil on his special thing. It forced him to visit the venerable doctor. The old doctor gasped, gasped for life in fact, as he stared at the thing. His mathematics of male anatomy gone haywire, he gasped for words. ‘O my God!’ is all he could manage to mutter as he struggled with words. He was lost in thoughts as if his life’s philosophy had crashed. Then he suddenly flared up, ‘Take him away….go and make it sit down…how dare you insult a doctor by coming with an awakened thing!’ the proportions obviously made him think that it was wide awake. ‘It’s perfectly asleep sir!’ Chand said meekly. Then the old sexologist had a careful second look and slumped into his chair as if he had been finally defeated. ‘Did anyone ever allow you to even touch herself?’ the doctor asked at long last. He had forgotten about the patient’s boil. ‘That’s why I’m almost virgin,’ Chand answered stoically. I think the old doctor would have been more than happy to retire after hitting this milestone in his career.

The Esteemed Milkmen of Yesteryears

 

Those were very simple but careful days. People had their names etched on brass, steel and aluminum utensils. The neighbors usually borrowed kitchenware from each other during weddings. So the post-ceremony retrieval of the items required a strong, unquestionable identification mark. They would also get a tattoo of one’s name and village on the arms to give a clue to their identity if someone got lost at a fair. I remember a little boy who got lost at Haridwar fair. His misspelled village name got him transported to a far off village in some other state. He was lucky to be delivered finally after the failed attempt to deliver him at the wrong address.

Those were also the days when the milkmen served as paramours to lots of work-beaten and bored peasant women. In the privacy of the barn, the milkmen had the luck to stare at them as they milked the cows or buffalos. Romance bloomed usually, followed by boredom-killing intimacies. In the drudgery of a hard life, it was a handy diversion. In the pre-dawn darkness, inside the barn, there was a good chance that the milkman provided some succor to the work-beaten peasant woman. No wonder, the milkmen tried their best to collect milk from all barns before the day broke. As most of the villagers, the males at least, slept peacefully and the peasant women already in the yoke of domestic chores in the brahma muhurat, the milkmen loitered around with a mischievous glee on their faces.

One was Khome Dudhiya. Reddish, thin, his mongoose face always clean shaven, he moved with lots of business in his role of paramour to a few peasant women. His cream-colored shirt and pants were always ironed to notify his hard-edged intent. He bestowed a few allowances to his special friends of the opposite sex. Firstly, he deliberately allowed them to mix water in the milk. He just took long, joyful draughts at beedis and pretended not to look as water turned milk. Now this bumper offer was too big to be ignored by the peasant women. It gave them, and still does, an orgasmic sense of relief to mix water to milk. Next, he gave them maybe a rupee extra for per kg milk. And when he was really happy, he would gift them pieces of cotton clothes for sewing salwar kameez sets. In this simple way, he kept on ferrying milk in his iron drums on his bicycle. It was a very successful life. It is proven by the fact that he was never thrashed by any of the irate husbands on account of his romantic inclinations.

The younger crop of milkmen, who now supply milk to households in the nearby town, also have their share of fun. While the earlier generation had fun basically with the sellers, the stylish young milkmen of the present times have goody-goody times with the purchasers in the town. Many urban housewives also lead a suffocating life within the confines of four walls. The rotund young milkman, whom they consider to be carrying a bagful of libido because of his milk diet, comes handy to beat the boredom. These young Romeo milkmen, as they ride their bikes carrying milk drums, carry a boyfriendly look as if they are going on a date instead of selling their milk. In comparison to the milkmen of earlier generation, these flunky milk carriers have to follow the reversed equation in one more regard: as a special favor to their love interests, they supply waterless milk at subsidized rates.