A Shopper Dog

 

The village has enough space, at least at the fringes where it melts in the farmlands, for the liquor-lovers to sit on the ground after the dark and get done with a quick wining session. The dining part would be later covered by brawls within houses and outside. Usually they take it neat and clean. Sometimes, on special occasions, they get something to eat along. The dog that we have already mentioned always howls is seen coming with a polybag in its mouth. It seems to have taken it very seriously, holds it with a serious purpose as if it will help him in beating the pangs of isolation and alienation among the groups of stray dogs.

There is something inside the bag and a single knot holds the secret. The way it trots with its grocery in its mouth, it appears that the dog is sure the contents are nothing short of gold from the standards of the canine world. It seems a little bundle of longing, joys and pathos. Our pursuits are usually centered around the little bundles that hold the source of our caprices and hallucinations tied in multiple knots in the bags. So the dog has every right to take its possession very seriously.

It looks lonely but somehow magnificent with its object. The booty holder seems to be on lookout for a suitable place to open the parcel. With extraordinary delicacy, it sneaks under a tractor trolley parked in the street. With fertile imagination and concrete capacity, it opens the single knot after a spell of dexterous pawing and mouth pulling. The first item it draws out is an empty disposable glass. The second is a plastic case for food delivery. Its lid is tight shut and inside there is some curry redolent with spicy prospects. But the little disposable tiffin’s lid is beyond the water-mouthed maneuver of a dog. The retriever of this precious item is busy, giving it all in its capacity for this value-driven approach to add to the taste buds on its tongue. Meanwhile, a female dog comes stealthily from behind. Nicely gets into position and pees with meditative effortlessness on the canine shopper’s shopping bag. Some of her friends, looking hard-nosed and thoughtful, curiously stare from a distance.

His shopping vandalized, the offended shopper whines angrily, gives a spurt of howl and runs after her to teach her a lesson. Her friends then escape with the provisions to play with it and scatter the contents in the street to add to their part in the chaos around.

Grandfather's Googlies and Bouncers

 

Grandfather was named Pohker. Later they added 'Master' to it because he turned out to be a teacher, an unorthodox phenomenon among the work-brute peasantry, almost equal to a snake turning white among a den of black Cobras. The inspiration for the name being the Hindu month of his birth as per the lunar calendar. He was born on a date roughly falling in January, in the lunar month of Poh. The event must have taken place in the winters of either 1904 or 1905, he was never sure about it. Those were the times when they grew up watching and marveling at the rudimentary flying objects, the ancestors of modern planes. They called them something that would roughly come to be translated as cheel gadis or kite carts.

I would consider myself very lucky in one regard. I always thank God that Grandfather never played cricket in his life. There is a rigorous acceptability for hard words in peasant families. The peasants carry a heady attitude that prowls like the ramrod straight arm of the marching soldier. The addicted frenzy for rough words takes even the children in its grip. Habits are merely transferred across generations, after all. So the children in peasant families have tart tongues. Breaking the restraining ropes of etiquettes, they speak back upon their elders. With a strict guardian’s rigor, the elders have still tartier fists and kicks to sum up the equation. At least that was how it was while we were growing up. And still worse during the preceding generations.

This incident happened while I was a college-going rebel. Grandfather was considerably old at that time, in his late eighties in fact. He had a sharecropper for onions. Grandfather stocked his part of the produce in the barn, waiting for better market price. But the rains arrived before the better market conditions. The barn roof leaked. Now rottening onions will allow you to give any diabolical interpretation to the domain of bad smells. The stinking onions will eat your nerves. His preservationist plans gone haywire, he was required to sort out the rotten onions from the sound ones to protect himself from a total loss. So Grandfather needed an assistant to sort out the sellable onions from the stanching heap. I was forced into the assignment.

Rotten onions carry a swashbuckling charisma. The bad odor comes leaping and lunging to eat into your nerves and suck at the last traces of gentlemanly streak in you, if any. Grandfather, his olfactory senses dulled by the advanced years, got into the job with almost a curatorial instinct. But to me the pungent encroachment into my nostrils was darkly evocative. I kept grumbling my dissent as my hands ran through the gore of decaying onions.

I was sitting at a distance of say twelve feet from him in a corner of the barn. With a calculated familiarity with old-age born wisdom and patience, Grandfather kept his cool despite the whirlwind and spark of my igniting words of dissent. Probably he thought that even a single good, intact onion would be a nice bargain by keeping cool despite my waspish comments. He looked refreshingly restrained in this avatar.

Grandfather possessed strong-looking, lean legs and still steelier nerves. But very few good onions on one side and a big heap of rotten ones on the other, growing bigger with each passing minute, forced him to change gears in his demeanor. His hopes nosedived and temper rose. We were mired to our elbows by this time. He became aware of the enormity of his crop loss. So he did what he had postponed for so long. The cannon then burst to my igniting promptings. He hit back. He used his not so useable onions. The vollies were hurled. But his canon shots ended as monumental, metaphorical and spectacular failures. He missed all punitive attempts. Like an impish oaf I ducked, using all the experience and agility born of village games. The pulpy, squashed onions hit the wall behind me.

I can only thank God for the absence of cricket in Grandfather’s life, that there was no cricket when Grandfather also played games as a boy. Otherwise, his throwing skills would have found the target to good effect. Getting a stinking squashed onion on one’s face is too big a punishment for any crime. Isn’t it?

Little Nevaan's World

 

All activities are a playful game to Nevaan and everything a toy. A little heap of woolen socks nicely washed in fragrant detergent, for example. He is doodling on the wall. Childhood is always eager for a bear hug with sweet, little, innocent mischiefs. It’s a dreamscape entirely in a different dimension that unfortunately we forget as we grow old, as thinking mind makes blatant transgressions into the flowering treescape of pure heart.

As he doodles, he seems one of the utmost summiteers of unbridled creativity. His lines are snaking through the established shapes and designs to chart out fresher domains on the canvas of childhood. We elders are extensive on rhetoric but puny on content. But boundless is the childhood’s content. It’s like riding the wave crests glowing on a full moon night. So, as he rides his shiny waves, paddling his little doodle boat with a chalk piece, he hits the shores, so needs more space to keep rowing. He needs wipers to keep enough clean space for his compelling and hypnotizing artistry. The fresh laundry serves a better purpose than what it would do in shoes. The wet woolen socks clean the walls really well.

I am jogging in the yard but my effort to still stay in workable condition is nothing more than a cat and mouse game to him. He leaves the wall clean and catches onto the piece of play offered by a middle-aged man trying to stay in shape. I am the cat so I have claws scratching my back. I am yet to overcome the shock of being a mouse then I suddenly realize I am a thief because the game has suddenly turned into police and thief. I get pounded on my modest bum as he tries to catch the thief who is trying to sneak away from the arms of law. Then he is a boxer decimating an opponent who is just shuffling around the arena. Then all and sundry games follow that he can think of on the basis of all the information he has gathered from watching cartoon programs on television.

Sab gol mol hai

 A little frog is croaking and jumping in a little rain puddle. ‘Why is it dancing?’ I wonder. Probably it’s very happy, I get an answer as per our own equation of happiness. ‘But why is it happy?’ the skeptic inside again tries to get an explanation. ‘It’s happy because it’s dancing,’ this isn’t my idea. It has landed from a higher plane. Things just exist in an unqualified, unconditional state. The ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘how’, ‘when’, ‘where’ are mere cognitive consequences of the neuro-transmitters cascading in the brainy matter. Within its exclusive zone of happening, everything is cause and effect at the same time. Imagine two points on a circle. Each point leads as well as follows the other at the same time. And their journey can be endless on the circular path. Cause breeds effect; effect sires new causes. Creation sows the seeds of destruction; and destruction conceives creation. Everything is round about. ‘Sab gol gol’, as a mendicant friar exclaimed by the Ganges. A big sunya. Here nothingness breeds everything; and everything sums up to be nothing. It’s just a mammoth humming, buzzing, vibratory drama. Play your tunes well and dance like the little frog. To be happy and joyful is a matter of choice. Food, clothing, career, hobbies are what make one feel better and happy. So isn’t happiness a choice? Choose what makes you feel better. Now, who says happiness isn’t a choice? Beyond philosophies, simply choose what makes you happy.

Grandpa and his bull

 

Grandfather was distinguished as a methodical peasant. As a former teacher, he carried infesting zest for studies, so education counted as his first love. He may as well could be taken as a knight in shining armor, holding his educative torch among the peasantry that was blasphemously ignorant of the importance of the books and knowledge. His love for mathematics was evocative and fulfilling. When it came to farming, he carried the same calculated, measured approach as that of a teacher.

At that time, he was an energetic man in his seventies with the withered athleticism born of a life spent in making destiny by using both mind and hands. He still managed to handle a big ox in his cart. It indeed was a huge task to keep it well behaved. By the look of it, anyone could agree that it wasn’t forgettable mismatch between the bull and the owner. Grandfather would churn out intriguing novelties to keep his stamp of authority over the big beast. But despite all this, Grandpa looked a David controlling the Goliath. The beast was always well short of any adjustment and accommodation on its part to keep the cart on the track. However, the rough and rowdy beast could pull unbelievable load and that convinced its old carter to keep his faith in it. Grandfather was compelled to keep himself alert with his heightened guesswork to tame the bull’s starry tantrums.

Sometimes he had to pull the rope all the way to lie flat on his back on the cart to stop the behemoth. But most often even that would be found insufficient to reign in the beast’s chivalry and eccentricity born of its raw strength. On the way to the field, the bull obeyed within decent limits to Grandfather’s instructions. It moved with some traces of ease, with somewhat jerky consistency. On the way back, but, the urge to eat fodder in the barn was so high that the animal would put itself on autopilot. During those moments, Grandfather looked like a helpless pilot with the machine forcing itself into autopilot mode. Grandfather’s lynchings, shouts, shrieks and cuss words fell on deaf ears. However big the load to be pulled, it would run so freely as if the cart was empty. As a punishment, Grandfather would invite others to dump their fodder load on his cart but that proved ineffective as a counter measure as the cart had its load-bearing limits. The bull didn’t seem in a mind to consider things in terms of the load in its cart.

Positively, it was quite decent on autopilot. It wouldn’t barge into anything or anybody provided they kept a distance, so there was no serious mishap and Grandpa would ride his cart up to late seventies. After that he further went to the fields for another decade either on bicycle or hitching rides on other’s carts.

During his this particular bull carting days, once he was busy picking out weed from the wheat crop. I was given the task of holding the ox’s rope as it grazed on the field divides. I had the strictest instructions to hold the rope very tightly. The bull ate peacefully for fifteen minutes or so but then suddenly realized the allure of the barn fodder. I was then pulled by the rope like a little bundle of fodder.

There were just two options: either get dragged to the village or leave the rope. Thinking wise beyond my years, I let go off the rope. Grandpa was now running behind us. He made a desperate lunge at the rope trailing behind the escaping animal. He missed it given his advanced years. I had let go off the rope and that counted as a cardinal sin in the restrictive farming religion. The bull can be pardoned because it has no concern other than eating. But me letting go off the rope smacked of gross inefficiency from human standards.

Grandpa stood aghast as the bull smartly ran away to hit its muzzle in the barn a good two kilometers away. He seemed undecided over which direction to pursue as me and the bull took to opposite directions. He thought it wise to dispense a bit of justice on the spot itself, so followed me. I would have beaten him in run any day if not for that fall in the water channel. Grandfather gave his favorite palm-swash at the back of the head—well he feigned the strike in a way so as to scare us, but in reality it severally ruffled the hair as his palm went grazing past the nape—and I ducked. He missed it. It wasn’t his day that day.

Thinking wise with his mathematics-loving mind, he started slowly on the march back home, a distance of two kilometers, to get the bull back so that the cart and the fodder could be taken to the barn. I vanished into the countryside of the neighboring village. I knew exactly what to do. I postponed my arrival at the house till the arrival of Father from office at night. That was the time when Grandfather kept a low profile. True to the norms of their conflicting generations, both father and son kept a distance and muttered their dissension for each other only indirectly from a distance. A divided house serves as a chance for an opportunist like me. I silently sneaked in. Grandfather could just give cold stares at me. To rub salt on his wounds, I turned extra affectionate with Father that night, so that the last traces of taking me to justice on the next day would vanish from Grandfather’s mind.