Skirmish with a ghost

 I’m just a passing phenomenon. At the quantum level I have no boundaries. At the level of microscopic particles, the smallest that we have spotted till now with our instruments, I’m merely and assemblage of spark; I’m just a boundary-less conglomeration of tiniest sparks amidst the same going around me. Now the question arises who am I. I consider myself as a part of this overall conglomeration of tiniest energy sparks that has identified with certain characteristics to automatically spin out a certain pattern in the energetic conglomeration to manifest at the level of body, my thoughts, emotions, circumstances.

Human body is a far-far short-lived phenomenon than we consider. Each cell in our body vibrates with millions of transitional movements each second. A massive force of change at the core of our assemblage whose effects we feel in the form of changing thoughts, passing emotions, shifting perspectives, fluctuating views and more. That means I’m just an energy field with certain predominant proclivities that is being—always—cut through other energy fields that are floating around, or I am passing through them.

From here arises the concept of getting affected by entities, disembodied souls and all the scary world of ghosts and ghouls. All these are mere symbolic representations of the energy fields that leave effect on us, somehow interfere with our cellular and molecular structure, the energy assemblage that we consider ourselves to be us. Their manifestations in our system are in proportion to our own pain, suffering and fears. It’s just a synchronicity with that particular frequency. Of course a field of pain and suffering would look anchor point in a similar pool of energy. Then there are stories about their weird, fearsome shapes and appearances. Their nasty appearance is an assemblage of our own pain and suffering and fears. We generate a reality according to our imaginative fears. I have no doubts some people see such fearsome, weird shapes but these are mere the impressions of their own fears, augmented by the foreign energy field of pain that is passing through them at the moment, created on the screen of sense-perception.   

Some say that most of the thoughts and emotions passing in us aren’t our own. They are triggered by entities. That’s plain and simple crap. They are simply responses and reactions born of what my energy and cellular arrangement—which I consider to be me—in overlapping with other arrangements (bodily visible or not) as I walk on the stage of life. This is inevitable. That’s how it is, because at the quantum level I have no boundary as such and one part will mix and come into contact with the other with as much naturality as one portion of air is always passing through other portions all the time. So my thoughts and emotions are my own, be that due to the passing of any type of energetic pattern (aligning with me or not) through the quantum space that looks like my body at the level of normal sense perception. How will your bubble stay aloof and untouched by all that is floating around you as you move on the journey? Put your body under the most capable microscope and it will show you as an assemblage of subatomic sparks surrounded by similar twinklings. So my thoughts and my emotions are my own, just a stimuli to the vastness surrounding me. It simply cannot be otherwise. So take ownership for what goes inside you. As a conscious maker of your circumstances, some meaning out of this utmost meaninglessness around, the onus is on us to manage our thoughts and emotions. The talks of tantra and ghosts seem fascinating. Very interesting like a movie. Enjoy them but don’t give it undue importance. It is a merely a symbolic representation of the interaction of varying patterns of energy that happens by default because there are no boundaries among various parts at the quantum level.

My own experience in this domain happened about 15 years back. I worked in corporate at that time and stayed on the outskirts of Delhi. It was a small two-storeyed house with some open wooded lot on one side and an abandoned house on the other. I was a regular worshipper of Mahakali at that time. My mother had prepared very sweet beshan laddoos for me. I was on cloud nine with soft emotions for someone and was on a late night call with the symbol of that affection. I was leaning against the parapet wall facing that abandoned house and eating the sugary laddoo. All smiles and laughter and goodie feelings, unbothered of the time and place. It was midnight, exact zero hour as my neighboring bunch of boys would tell me later. Well, eating sugary laddoo at midnight leaning over the wall looking over an abandoned house where someone had committed suicide. This statement didn’t mean anything to me prior to the experience. I wasn’t aware of the time, about sugary sweetmeat, about the suicide in the abandoned house. I didn’t know anything about it. Who would be bothered about normal worldly crap when he is on a late night call with someone special?

I was grinning, like a horse, with the solace of the sweetest emotions and lots of sugar in me, one big laddoo already in me and the other half-eaten held in my hand and the time midnight. My horse-grin stopped suddenly. There was a buzzing humming vibration in the air around and I distinctly felt something colliding into me. As if something entered from the back. It was so impactful at the normal perception level that I instinctively straightened up as if someone had pushed a force against my back. The outside agent was so palpable as to trigger a panic reaction immediately. All love was kicked away. By instinct Mother Mahakali’s name surfaced on my lips and hurriedly I came down. There I was lying on my bed, my neighbors, all nice gentle boys from Bihar, surrounded and looking at me with concern. ‘Bhaiyaa are you mad! Eating laddoo at midnight! The abandoned house by our side has a history of suicide,’ Radhe, the gentlest of them, was much worried. Faith is always stronger than any fear. I was a pretty serious worshipper of Mahakali at that time. So I was perfectly normal after that initial trigger of fear. I was joking, laughing, giving them a live commentary about how does it feel to have a ghost inside one’s body.  

It was quite an experience. That particular build-up of energy (which still spun around the cosmos with its pain and suffering after unnaturally shedding the body) cascaded around my system for around half an hour. It was quite a force, moving like tidal waves from head to tail, and then moving up again, as if scanning each part of me for some solace, some synchronicity with its own structure of pain. I could feel my body getting heated up from inside but there wasn’t any sweating. I gave a live commentary of all this with my share of jokes injected in between. Then the poor energetic structure of pain moved on. Maybe it found my jokes offensive. The moment it left me I could distinctly declare that I’m ghost-free. There was jubilation among the group of boys. They really respected me as an elder brother, worked in call centers and more than salary considered girlfriends as the main incentive for staying in stinking Delhi for the pittance of a salary. I would pay for the kitchen purchases and in return I would have home-cooked food with lots of respect. So they danced and we raised a toast to our victory over the ghost. Sorry to disappoint my well-wishers who consider me to be a teetotaler but I have tasted liquor on special occasions and beating a ghost was one such occasion, so we all had couple of moderate pegs each during our post-midnight celebrations. I have experienced all that is good and bad in life. Maybe mother existence wants to keep me level headed and not get egoistic about my purity which is the lighter version of addiction, addiction to one’s good image. Luckily, most of the people consider me a good man.  

And what about the ghost? And midnight? And the sugary laddoo? Well, of course when someone unnaturally exits the portals of life with so much pain as in a suicide, the bundle of energy spins around looking for succor, and some of us come across this part of air that obviously passes through our system, simply because we don’t have boundaries at the quantum level. It’s a houseless traveller looking for alleviation of its pains and gropes around for some anchor support. It feeds on our fear and frustrations. But I believe more in being receptive to saintly energy fields passing through me. To make the negative energy fields ineffective against my house, my cellular structure, is the main domain of creation with volition and effort. That is what making one’s destiny is all about. To be a good manager of one’s own—again I emphasize these are our own, so no point in relegating them to the imposition from the entities—thoughts and emotions. What about sugar and ghosts? Again a very simple scientific explanation. Maybe the sudden bombardment of sugar in the system leaves the cells—and the quantum field around them—flummoxed, lazy, or overburdened, or some other tizzying thing, making them more prone to the entering energy field where it can penetrate a bit deeper into the system to impose its pain and suffering into our system, triggering a manifestation of fear, agonies and suffering analogous to those witnessed by the carrier entity. What about midnight and ghosts? Well, most of us have our most optimum time and circumstances to be most effective. Light is healing and divinity. Darkness is chaos and pain. Maybe the energy system of pain operates at its optimum level in the absence of light.

Jai Mahavatar Babaji! As I write this his big kindly eyes look at me from the picture that I have affixed on the wall. He is guiding me at the moment. It’s my truth at the moment. And who knows Babaji pushed a portion of his divine persona in my direction triggering a chain of thoughts early in the morning. Let’s smile, laugh and make the most of this phenomena that we understand to be our individual life. And consciously take ownership of our own thoughts and emotions, manage them in a way that we are more open to love and grace of the saintly energies and get free of fear from the bundles of pain spinning around.                                                               

The snaky history of a tiny locality

 Tau Tarif Singh, drawing lineage from my great granduncle, was a small man with a huge well-composed demeanor. Very gentle in behavior, soft with words and peaceful in movements, he hardly created any ripples on the stage of life with his presence. There was an exception though. There would be a complete reversal of his persona at the sight of a snake. He would be filled with lightening agility and within the flash of a second he would run after the helpless reptile, hold it by the tail, swing it around in a highly technical way and bang it on the ground with such force that it would make a second strike almost redundant.

Let him see a snake at his house, in the locality, in the village, in the fields or open grounds or even a forest he won’t miss an opportunity to culminate its journey on earth. His biggest feat was holding two snakes by their tails simultaneously and swinging in his special way and banging them on the ground to finish their journey. Surprisingly he was never bitten in the task. To this day I wonder why would such a peaceful and calm person turn into a snake-annihilator at the mere sight of the poor reptile. Maybe some karmic entanglement with snakes; possibly Tau was a mongoose, a peacock or a garuda in his previous birth and his evolution into a different species still retained the predominant animosity against snakes.

From the village standards, Grandfather was a reasonably educated man. He was in love with mathematics and that helped him in calculating things with logic without getting clouded by unnecessary emotions. Grandmother was very tart with her tongue and he matched her in the matrimonial equation with the agility of his hardworking hand. Their domestic life, like any other farmer couple, was defined by these skirmishes between the female tongue and the male hand. But she died quite young leaving Grandfather’s hands free to engage in more suitable occupations. Grandfather was neutral to snakes. ‘One has to kill them if they sneak into the house, but one shouldn’t bother about them in the open,’ he maintained. His closest encounter with a snake happened when he was around eighty. He was still active in farming till then. It was evening and he was lying in the field, his headgear bunched under his head and one leg raised in the middle and the other supporting on the other knee. He was smoking a little hookah, his head tilted to one side to draw smoke. Another farmer was sitting nearby. A black snake chose to keep its way straight, instead of taking a detour. Grandfather’s head was tilted in the other direction. The other farmer saw it when it had already crept up to Grandfather’s stomach. Then Grandfather’s mathematical logic worked to save him from a snakebite. He turned a stone, didn’t move at all and allowed the entire length of the fearsome snake to creep over him. After that Grandfather took the longest draught at hookah in his life. ‘I have never seen so much of smoke coming out of me in my entire life,’ he told me later. ‘She was your wife who came to scare you for all your agility with your hands,’ the other farmer joked.

Father was a philosophical man. He could talk better than anyone I have ever heard in my life. His was a world of books. He wasn’t bothered much about worldly affairs. He was an athletic man and could have been at least a national level player if things had gone well. He was brainy enough to be a senior bureaucrat if things had taken a sympathetic turn for him. His oratory would have made him a famous politician if things had happened as they usually happen in the life of a successful man. But none of these happened and he was contended to be a governmental servant with hundreds of books and a philosophical mind. As the family patriarch he had to take the responsibility of killing a big-hooded cobra that had crept into the cattle barn. Mother raised a hue and cry and before Father could realize anything she had handed him a stick to make him realize his worldly duties. Father killed that big snake. I was very small at that time. And the very next day as I scampered around to play in the street I fell headlong and my forehead hit the sharp edge of a brick leaving me all bloody. I still carry the mark. ‘I hit the cobra’s hood and see the karma comes back in the form of this injury on my son’s forehead,’ Father drew his philosophical reasoning.

The biggest cobra that I have ever seen being killed also needs an account here. It was a moonlit night and a majestic cobra sneaked into the locality. The village was pretty open till then. A horse panicked and neighed a warning. The dogs barked. By chance, there were all children and female onlookers at that time. The stick was handed over to the only grown up male available. Dheere cowered with the stick. He was—sadly—nicknamed Langda because his one leg was incapacitated because of polio. Dheere struck quite forcefully, missed the mark and his crippled leg lost footing and he fell down with the strike. But after that he regained composure and somehow managed to beat the entire ground with almost a hundred strikes in rapid-fire and by chance one of the strikes hit the cobra in the middle injuring it, cutting its movements and then the striker had it easy.

My own quota in the sins against the snakes involves killing two harmless little common wolf snakes that had entered our house and my panicked mother handed over the responsibility to me as the new family patriarch. I performed the job with shaking legs. The other partnership in crime occurred when I held the torch and my uncle pounded a harmless rat snake. Yet another time, I firmly held a torch as my younger brother killed a poisonous krait snake that had crept into the garden at night. Kraits usually crawl out in the dark so one has to be careful about them. They aren't too big and can hide in little spaces coiling themselves in a distinct manner and that makes them more dangerous than a cobra. Cobras are full of attitude and don't believe in stealth fight. They would hiss and raise hood to warn you beforehand. Other battles against snakes involved throwing pebbles at the harmless water sakes in the village pond. They would dive playfully and would emerge at a distance. That was quite a fun for both the parties. I remember once I was walking on my little legs on the playground outside the village. It was a faint foot trail in the little grass. A cobra was also enjoying its walk on the same trail from the opposite direction. It stood its ground, maybe finding me small enough to turn a bully. It stood its ground, raised it hood to full spread and warned me to get off the way from a distance. I took to my heels and watched from a distance. Male cobra is arrogant I have heard. There it passed following the foot trail. I remember once me and my younger brother were playing hide and seek in a ruined abandoned house in the village. Its roof had caved in and one wall fallen leaving it open on one side. As we stepped there a big yellow rat snake got scared. Since there was only one opening all three of us were running in the same direction. Indian rat snakes are quite big and lengthy and that makes them quite scary. But they are harmless and mostly get killed because of their similarity to cobra. At that young age a snake was just a snake and I can still remember that nightmare after all these decades. 

Now I’m more balanced and logical in my approach to snakes. I can at least marvel at the crawling majesty of snakes that I come across in my solitary walks in the countryside. They are just creatures like any other creature. In the Delhi NCR there are just two poisonous snakes—out of the forty species found in the area—named Indian cobra and krait. The rest are harmless long earthworms and get unnecessarily killed because of our natural instinctive fears. Knowledge is empowering. It dispels darkness. So now I am more adjusting to their presence.

Kaka Maharaj, who stays in a hut by the canal outside the village, has so many snakes around but this isn’t an issue at all with him. There is a clump of banana trees just by his hut. Once as I approached to pay him a visit I saw a cobra basking in the sun. It scampered into the clump of trees when I arrived. I told about the naga to Kaka Maharaj. ‘This land is for all and everything,’ is all he said. After our talks on the matters of spirituality I saw him stepping into the clump of banana trees to take out a basket he had hung on a frond. He went in quite naturally. He had even forgotten that I had told him about a snake there.

There is mother nature’s little air purifier just in front of our place. It’s a dense clump of trees and vines and lots of undergrowth. Aren’t these green leaves an extension of our lungs. But people take nature for granted and hardly anyone speaks in favor of these green tissues of our lungs. People usually complain of a couple of cobras that stay here. A few sightings and people go paranoid. If you see a snake in the open, don't worry it won't run after you to bite. Rest assured it has far better things to bite for its benefit. 

Almost every other day someone is raising a hue and cry about their sighting by our yard walls. The gate is open with grilled portion on the underside. They can easily creep in. The night is theirs to creep. They are all welcome. But the day is mine. They have no business to be in during the day. They haven’t bothered me so far, so why should I bother about them. Why stretch your fears beyond a point. Just be careful a bit more, that’s all. Use torch while moving in the dark. Walk gently to allow them to creep away as you approach. And they eat mice with relish. The area is almost mouse-free. And mother nature knows more than us. There were mice that’s why there are snakes. And to ensure that the snakes don't crawl at each human step there are plenty of peacocks doing the rounds. They must be eating many little snake hatchlings to keep the number finely balanced. But who is there to keep a check on us? In our case only we can do it, individually and collectively. 

Skirmish between a cobra and a peasant woman

 Randhir is my share-cropper, an arrangement between an idle owner and a hardworking farmer. He has been very hardworking during our decades-long partnership. Earlier he worked very hard but now in his sixties he is retired from active farming, just plies the tractor, directs the farm workers, drinks, plays cards in chaupals, suffers fits of mysterious nature, raises verbal storms against his still strong and robust wife. He is fine with numbers and keeps a little pocket diary where he manages the accounting figures concerning both of us to the last paisa.

The doctors couldn’t give any clue to his swoons so I gave him a spiritual certification that he goes into a Samadhi. He has no clue to what I say so just laughs at it, taking it to be just one of poor jokes cracked by bookish guys. All of us are our own doctors, the best doctors in fact because we know our own system more than anyone else. I was once asking him about what and whys of his fits, how did he feel etc. ‘Well, I hardly remember anything. It just strikes suddenly. When I come back to my senses, I always find a few drops of urine on my pyjama and after that I feel very weak for a couple of days,’ he gave me the medical summary to diagnose.

I researched on it and failed to come to a conclusion. So while the doctors failed to check his fainting swoons and fits, he devised a solution for himself. ‘The tractors jumps and shakes my body quite vigorously and due to this I don’t suffer fits while plying my tractor,’ he looked assured. After that he started spending as much time as possible on his tractor. His wife, who worked equal to two strong bulls in the hard field labor, could draw consolation that hers wasn’t a case of total exploitation as her husband was at least contributing to farming as a tractor driver.

Then the myth was broken one day. Randhir all smug, and looking to the mouth-watering prospects of getting a full liquor bottle and drink in the evening with pals, was plying his tractor on the road on the way to the town. A couple of farmers sitting comfortably by his sides on the mud-guards. Maybe it was the fault of the road makers. They had made it too smooth with a fresh layering of tar, so Randhir’s body didn’t shake sufficiently to avoid a fit. The tractor was running at a reasonable speed and the farmer lost consciousness, suddenly without any prior warning. Both his fellow peasants had to jump into action with the agility of a rat snake to avoid a common fit for all three of them in the roadside ditch. After that Randhir isn’t contributing to farming even as a tractor driver. His wife is aggrieved. She feels exploited in this one-sided equation. But she is helpless in doing work. A life-long habit of hard labor, her Ikigai, she just cannot quit it. But she harasses him a lot, cracks jokes, treats him like a child, takes puns and much-much more.

There is some wild growth in a corner of one of the fields. A huge cobra stays there. People talk about it with awe and wonder. The share-cropping couple has planted laukis. Randhir’s wife is helpless in doing hard work. She has to do farming work to keep her life meaningful. So she is busy in weeding out the extra growth among the vegetable vines. The cobra struck at her sickle-bearing hand. It was there under the vines. She fell back due to the shock and the offended reptile in fact ran over her stomach. She was all alone in the field at that time. Imagine the shock and nightmare of a cobra strike.

I am presenting here her own words as I listened to her a bit guiltily and her eyes almost accusing me of partnership in crime as if saying it was your cobra because it stays in your field. Here goes her post-bite story:

‘I fell down and it jumped over my body and crawled over me. I couldn’t stand up. I started crying. Tried to get up but would fall down. Then I thought why die while running and repeatedly falling down. So I tied my duppatta on my hand, gave a cut around the bite and lay down weeping to die peacefully.’

After fifteen minutes her son arrived and took her to the snakebite healer who uses a secret herbal concoction for detoxification. The patient vomits and goes into diarrheal fits to cleanse the system. It works well. Surprisingly. The success is almost 95 percent. Most of the snake-bitten people get cured.

She was up for terrible vomiting and diarrhea for a couple of days. Randhir felt inconvenience about it. ‘Put her cot near the washroom so that there is no unnecessary messing up of the place,’ he managed the situation as a firm family patriarch. Then he went to her cot and consoled, ‘You will get cured, don’t worry. Most probably the snake just gave a hiss on your skin and you panicked.’ Then he lamented about food not getting cooked on time, the usual inconveniences born in the life of a farmer with the wife getting bedridden. She listened to all this, not saying much but resolved to make it very tough for him once she got back to her feet.

These are very tough people. I wasn’t expecting her to go to the fields at least during this season. But she was right there at the farm doing the usual chores the very next week itself. Salutes to these courageous Jat peasant women!  

PS: She was earlier bitten by a snake while taking out dungcakes from a bitoda, a conical dungcakes store covered with hay and straw. Randhir himself was bitten by a snake in the fields few years back. So they are veterans in the scary experience. The farmers world over lead such a tough life. But when it comes to setting narratives and building agendas by the power aspirants  the farmers and their cause lie at the base of their scheme.

A sweet-sour birdie nostalgia

Love is in the air. The air is cool as if suffused with a kind of lyrical prose. A pair of painted storks flies in beautiful bonhomie. Beyond the clutches of unwarranted passions, they are a pair for life and have come here down to the plains during the winters. Till fifteen years back there was enough room for them in the countryside. We had wastelands, waterlogged lands, ponds, tanks and streams. Now everything is taken by the humans to meet the ever-increasing resource scarcity.

We had thousands of birds, including ducks, migrating to our part during the winters. Sadly, as we moved on, maintaining our acrobatic balance on the rope of ever-tightening survival, with our hybridized dreams and dysfunctional desires, ever following the blurred forms of a forever receding future, those promiscuously vibrant times met a hasty end. Now every nook corner has farmlands, human habitations, factories and roads. The last sarus crane call that I heard in the skies above must have been more than a decade back. Those were big birds, almost the kings of the birdie kingdom. Their call was a charming and quirky bugling, a sort of high-pitched trumpeting sound with long-drawn notes that went sizzling in the air. Gone are they now. Even to recall them seems transcendental.

The sweet-sour pain of nostalgia sets up a world of collapsing verses around a poet who attempted to versify the magical mystery of nature around. But my ears refreshingly echo with the sound as I write this. For a moment it gives a semblance of familial comforts but quickly recedes as the present-time’s harsh and hard realities arrive and overtake with haughty urgency. The present is too tightly woven and always seething with grievances. That past lies now like broken shards of glass. As I look at them, there are sighs of estrangement floating around.

Love, longing and loss

 Loss, longing and love brewing a mist in the morning forest. He walks on a lone path. Then the sunrays streak in. Everything turns into love. Loss and longing glide away with misty vapours. Love is nothing but all the lesser emotions sublimated fully.