A Laborer of Love

 

The early winter of mid-November carries a sort of primeval magic and brings vanloads of smiles to the little garden. With its soft brush, the early winter seeks to iron out the flaws and wrinkles in our tangled fates. Everything seems fresh as if holding onto some newfound belief. There is a joyous yearning to bloom and expand.

The scarlet, yellow and orange marigolds are dew-bathed. They are unpretentious and decent in colors and soft in smell. They don’t lead an extravagant life and are the octogenarians of the flower world.

The festive spirit seeps into the Jesus thorn. The sorrowful writhings of its prickly stem take a backseat as its red flowers take the front seat in a modest show of flowery pageantry. It’s simple button-like flower with two dull red petals twirled around with a yellow centre. A kind of Taoist symbol of the merging duality. It’s aptly named—thorns on the stem and the Lord’s smile winning over the thorns.

The yellow English rose is shapely and attractive. It’s a hardy flower and stays for a few days. But there is no smell in it. The flowery soul is missing in the flowers that have no smell and look good only. The desi gulab is redolent with fragrance. It’s soft and malleable; its petals scatter without pain and sprinkle their perfumed existence on mother earth like in homage. The smell-less hardy English rose stays for a longer time. A kind of over-attachment. It turns into a piteous corpse while still clinging to the branch. It wants to retain its beauty. The petals start decaying making it ugly after a time.  

Coleus (mukundi or pather choor) appears to be an illuminating and intuitive plant. It has heart-shaped scarlet leaves with green frills around the edges. Its leaf itself seems a flower because it’s decorated as such. It’s said to cure many diseases ranging from cholera to cancer.

Did the honeybees go away for a few days to dupe the honey buzzard because he got greedy and started coming daily? They have returned now. It’s a bigger ball. Probably they allied with another little group of lost bees and formed a bigger one. This time they have chosen a strategically more secure branch on the curry-leaf tree. Late November has many flowers in my small garden and they need not go too far to collect pollen for honey. As I stand in the garden, a delicate fragrance of wild honey wafts around me. It’s better to have little winged visitors who go dancing on the flowers. It keeps your hopes alive if you have the delicate smell of honey wafting around you.

The birds also feel better. You can make it out from their songs. Asian pied starlings are very gossipy. They always land on a tree in a little group and are always very excited and talkative. They seem to have a lot of things to chatter about. But somehow they don’t seem bitchy.

The main advantage of having cats in the garden is that the squirrels stay away. They are great at stealing eggs, especially the eggs of scaled munias. The rufous little bird with a black and white checker-work on its breast is not quarrelsome. Their notes sound sweet even when they are angry. The nest is high on the branch where the cats cannot reach. So it looks a likely case of successful hatching this time.

These are hard times. To attract love one has to make a lot of noise and be at one’s showy best. The little guy, the purple sunbird, is in a flurry. He is excited to get some love. The Parijat trees have started to retain their flowers to make seeds as December approaches. The sun is emerging above the mist with its minute-by-minute evolving compassion to give warmth after a chilly night. The little bird takes a sip of the dew-laden white blossom. It then hops around in excitement, showing exquisite energy through its flitting and flashing maneuvers. It slightly twitches its tail and shakes its yellowish underside as the furtive notes of chik-chik-fich-fich-sich-sich-hitch-hitch pierce through the air.

Marvelous is the play of passions. Its magnetic appeal makes it both miraculous and mundane at the same time. Love, and oftentimes infatuation, keeps one hostage to the core of its melody. Flying with flamboyance, chirping out its ephemeral emotions, it is calling its partner. I hope she hasn’t ditched him for a handsomer bird.

You have to work hard and be serious to retain the love of your lady. Love might be mystifying but there are practical matters to attend as well. It jumps onto the banana cone, a scarlet leaf is unfolding at the upper end, exposing another row of tiny fingers with wispy, hairy ends. It takes a quick sip from a tiny banana finger and seems sobered a bit. It then gives quieter, sweeter notes of peek-peek-peek.

You cannot just call back your lady by being all out aggressive. Aggression is devil driven. It breeds emotional self-destruction. Pain and loss are its selfish sidekicks. You have to be magnificent, primarily with maturity. You have to show your softer side. It now looks a deadly charmer indeed. And there she returns, putting his soul at rest. They are very happy to be together again and go hopping around the neighboring trees.

A Miracle that Life is

 

The game of life and death is admirably enigmatic and stays as big a mystery as it ever was. The eldest woman in our locality is still going perkily to get her old age pension. A decade back her pulse was gone. It wasn’t tragic and scary for her family as one isn’t too serious about old people these days. She was very old even then. The only issue was that her daughter’s fire ceremony in marriage was just minutes away when she stopped breathing. The marriage function was irreversible at that stage.

A new beginning at the threshold and an old chapter closing. It made the situation a bit tricky for the family. So they shifted the corpse to an inner room without announcing the news of her demise to the public. The marriage ceremony was happily completed. The girl was seen off to go to her in-laws’ place. Then they decided to check on the corpse. They found her awake and in proper senses. ‘Why did you put me in the room, I couldn’t see the pheras of my granddaughter?’ she muffled her complain. ‘But you were surely dead!’ they exclaimed. ‘Yes, I was gone to a distant place but the big mustached fellow yelled, “It’s not your time yet, why are you here?” and they pushed me back.’

Well, a few people have shared a similar experience during their near-death experiences. But it remains a big mystery. Usually we take them as hallucinations of a brain struggling to survive. But I’m open to the idea that there may be more to the issue beyond the scientific explanations.  

Schooldays

 

Those are the days stashed away in a dusty closet. But they hark my attention sometimes to those times of lovely sweet-nothings. The schools of the eighties of the past century in the villages appear like at the other end of the planet in the literary queue. These are fiercely creative and competitive times, unsparingly pushing us into the grip of selfish subjectivity. Modern education seems a savage downpour upon little heads.

But as students at a village school in the eighties, ours was a totally different world. Seeped in the sublimity of simple emotions, untouched by frustrated aspirations, we had all the time to be lazy within the premises, as if recuperating to go all agog after the school. We were all very lazy at the village school. The students and the teachers competed against each other in being relaxed and at peace with one’s being. The only time when the teachers showed some agility and quickness was while thrashing and shouting abuses with a cool nonchalance.

The students, in turn, were extra agile in evading anything distantly related to the studies. Laziness would get into an enchanting bloom during the winters. The winters would arrive with limitless grace to bestow the balmy days under the open sun for all of us to dose like a sunbathing python after a hearty meal.

It was a small world and the expectations weren’t high. In fact, there was hardly any expectation from almost all the students. As the temperature dipped, the main priority shifted to get extra Vitamin D. The classes would shift to the huge playground. Heavy on brunch, the teachers dozed on their chairs. They would bang the stick on the ground once in a while, throw some harsh word—they were very charismatic and ingenious in their favorite cuss words—and after the temporary fit of anger would again get cool under the warm sunrays.

We would also go into automation mode—like a drowsy cow mulching fodder with eyes closed. We munched upon the dry grass. We chewed a lot of it during the long-drawn days, waiting for the sun to cross the horizon. Doing jugali like a buffalo is a kind of meditative practice. It takes you beyond the hard edges of time. Time passes off without too much of a burden. The birds sang in the trees with a virtuous acclaim. And we would lose a bit of that poise only during the last period as we waited for the last bell to go active again the moment it was heard and go hopping for an active evening spurred by a voracious variety of childhood antics.

A Happy Man

 

Most of us are running after a job, car, house, man or woman under the belief that after achieving this we will become happy and joyful. The mirage keeps shifting and the misery of life follows us to the grave. Rashe but isn’t trapped in this game. I offer him two quarters of liquor for a small errand, a very small task in nature. He isn’t interested. I offer the option of giving the reward now itself with the additional choice of him carrying out the task later, at a time of his choice in fact. It doesn’t change anything. The fact is that he doesn’t require the thing today and taking the trouble of hoarding something for tomorrow isn’t in his dictionary.

Today his friend’s friend has a little function. Rashe’s friend will surely take him along. So why bother about a thing that is of no use today. I envy the stability of his mind. On the other hand, here we are the lesser fellows cowering under weightier issues, and forced on a precarious walk on a rope drawn between the poles of madness and genius. The walk is so heavy with the baggage of sizzling assumptions on the path of intellectual adventures. In a way, we are plagued with the fear of our own ideas. While he goes slowly and simplistically, moving like an elephant, coolly digesting all the melodrama around.

Tau's version of epics

 

Happy to be in his nineties, he would be still happier if he hits a century. He loves cricket and he knows the joy of hitting a ton and also the agony of getting out in nineties. He worked in the fields till a few years back and when his body could no longer keep up with his farming zeal, he tried his best to stay at the helm of the affairs and would lumber up to the fields and shout instructions at his son and daughter-in-law to do the chores properly. But even his vigilant overseer’s eyes failed him and his enthusiasm dimmed with the fading lights in his eyes. He now spends most of his time at home.

Well, farming has been his religion and agricultural tools his religious idols. His ears have also stopped keeping up with his enthusiasm to eavesdrop on what is going around. But his tongue is thankfully still prompt and spiffy. With all this background, Tau Hoshiyar Singh has his farmer’s version of Ramayan. We are talking about Lanka. ‘It was built by that devta who is often seen with his wife,’ he enlightens me on the subject. He means the God who is depicted with his wife in the pictures. ‘What name is that?’ he is asking his better knowing self slumbering in the subconscious chambers of his brain.

The problem is that lot many devtas are seen with their wives. We name a few trying to match what he has in mind but he clucks his tongue in a strong no. He then gives a clue. ‘It’s the one who has that snake around his neck,’ he hits the jackpot. ‘OK, you mean Bhagwan Bholenath!’ we chorus. ‘Yea, that’s him. He made Lanka but Ravana being a clever devotee and Bholenath being very simple, the city of gold was grabbed by Ravana as a reward for his penance,’ the story behind Lanka unfolds.

He has something to share about the masons and bricklayers also. ‘Lanka was made of gold bricks. Bholenath told the masons that the little pieces of bricks left out during the construction will be theirs as a reward. The workers but got greedy and would break far-far more pieces than required in order to increase their takeaway. In fact, they broke more than what was used in the walls. The angry God then punished them, “You guys will remain broken in economic means just like bits and pieces you have broken here!” So the masons and bricklayers are poor people. They keep on breaking bricks and however hard they may try they stay as poor as earlier.’ By the end of this narration, he felt sleepy and pulled over the sheet over his face and very soon we heard nice rhythmic snoring, giving enough clue to his bright chances of scoring a century of years on earth.