The Window

 

‘The Window’ is a beautiful Persian movie. No big efforts at super-heroism, no ironies of heart-breaks, no bombastic romance, no gooseflesh rippling drama, no thunder-stricken rigmarole of saving the planet from the aliens. It’s not about chafing thoughts, it’s all about the frolicking gaiety of common emotions in the life of common people.

Beyond the grinding millstone of bigger caprices, it’s about sublimated emotions. It creeps genteelly like a flowery vine. It’s a long-drawn painting of beautiful hills, smatterings of snow on the slopes, chatty streams, green pastures and a sense of virginal peace to tow all these along. There are no chivalric, lionized doctrinaires delving into deep mysteries of human existence. It’s a gently flowing painting on a self-absorbed canvas. The human characters simply add to the soft shades of the softly evolving painting.

In his small world, little Ali takes soft, chiming steps to be a nice human being. With a working-man’s prudence, he contrives a canvas and paints his simple pictures using pomegranate juice, egg yolk, charcoal and leaf paste. He paints to bring a smile to a girl who is bedridden and cannot come out to play. The old, reclusive painter who teaches him to paint has an unfinished painting by his son who has gone missing.

The missing young man loved portraying virginal, untouched scenes. He has left an unfinished painting of a lone tree on a hilltop against the background of snowy peaks. As a sort of gurudakshina for his old painting teacher, little Ali roams around the hills to find the location of the tree in the unfinished painting. He finds the place and this is where the old man comes across the grave of his lost son.

Then the caravan of life takes Ali’s family away. Before they move, little Ali gives their small TV set to the sick girl’s poor family. She already has started smiling looking at those softly drawn pastures, streams, sunrises and hills painted by Ali. Through his little acts he is learning to paint a real life beautiful picture.

Hunting for a Hunter

 

During our childhood, my brother loved birds, mostly as pets. Flying birds cannot excite a child like they stimulate the poets. He fancied catching a hawk and carry it as his pet. A boy with a hawk surely would go as the undisputed leader of the neighborhood urchins.

Shikra is a relatively smaller bird of prey. The wilderness around the village was yet to be tamed. It meant we had many shikras in the sky during those days. The bird hovered in the air—at one point in the sky like a helicopter—as it took aim at some field rat among the bunch-grass, sedge and shrubbery around the village pond.

The majestic hunter caught my brother’s fancy. He mustered up his band. They observed that the small hawk suddenly swooped down, literally fell over the rat. There would be a scuffle of few seconds before it took to air again with its take-away. And here the band of boys smelt a chance. They procured a big, wicker-worked fodder basin used to feed cattle. They planned to hide among the bushes and drop the instrument made of mulberry switches and canes over the hunter, while it struggled on the ground to tame its prey.

The thing was thrown hundreds of times over a period of weeks. And finally they had the catch. The cattle feed basin landed on an impressive cluster of bushes. The hawk made a timely escape. As they approached to retrieve their hunting gear, a big black snake hissed from under it. A snake being too much for a pet, they ran away leaving the snake with its nice kennel. An elder person had to go and fetch the thing after the snake had rejected its new home, finding it reeking with cattle saliva and sunlight filtering through the narrow chinks.

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.