Settling the account forever

 In its dealings with a person, destiny keeps its account book always open. The account is never closed from her end. It's always open. It needs a penance to close the account by the person himself, wind up the calculations forever, come out of karma's loop and take an indefinable shape on the canvas of eternity.

The caning masters

 Headmaster Pirthi Singh was a famous caning hero during our schooling days in the late eighties in our village school. Caning was the best as well as the worst of education. There wasn’t much thought behind education techniques. The students took schools as the symbol of hell on earth and the teachers—all of them pretty energetic caners—used brute force to quell the rebellion. Headmaster Pirthi Singh was the squadron leader from the teachers’ side. He had an impressive assortment of canes in his office, of different woods for various purposes ranging from casual rebukes to hardcore bloody punishments. There were mulberry switches to give an acidic, pungent taste on the skin. These were used for slightly built students. However, for the thick-set errant rascals bamboo canes came into use to rattle the bones with strikes.

There was a plant called basa that grew in plenty along water margins during those days. Its stem was juicy and moderately thick. It served a fantastic rubbery beating. The teacher was at liberty to strike with full force as the rubbery stem would rule out bloody scenes. But it would still give a pretty hard thwack on both the bones and the skin. The stem would break after a point. The teacher would emerge triumphant that he broke the basa cane on the path of justice and reformation. The student had his own victorious air if he didn’t cry and bore it with just wincing and contorting limbs. The students who didn’t howl while getting thrashed carried a lofty air around them.

Headmaster Pirthi Singh would hit upon instinct. The rooms would go silent and heads would bury in books as he came down the corridor scanning any opportunity to unleash further caning. There were occasions when the entire class would be thrashed en masse. It was taken for granted that a village boy wouldn’t study. The only way was to force them like the farmers forced the bulls into the yokes. A painful harnessing would follow. The same was the case with village students.

Pirthi Singh was so famous as a striker that many students got christened as Mutdu, Paadu, Haggu—the derivatives of the outcomes of nature: peeing, farting and shitting—as a result of the strikes. One chap was named Haggu as he belonged to the group who couldn’t stop their fear from turning their pants yellow. Haggu went onto become an SDM (Sub-divisional Magistrate) but was still the very same Haggu to his classmates. He was in full gratitude. ‘If not for the raw fear of his caning, I would not have studied at all!’ he maintained in full humility. A bit of slightly funny and mildly offensive name, but that was nothing in comparison to the success and the consequent good name, fame and respect in its wake. 

Lazy bums

 The dove indeed is a silly, lazy bird. They seem to have anchored their perspectives in some utterly laidback chamber of brain. And when the parents have such condemnable lackadaisical attitude, the children definitely suffer. They are averse to any type of cockiness that enables the parents in any species to fight for something more for their kids. They seem to lack that tact, prudence and bitchiness that enables parents, especially the wards like babblers, to turn their children the center of the cosmos. This artlessness makes the dove eggs and babies almost sitting ducks to chance factors and predators.

Given their silently brooding ways, they look perilously nudging the baseline of extinction. The other birds, with their heightened activation and rich and vibrant forays into grabbing more of life and living, appear to be the powerful leaders of the birdie kingdom. The doves, on the other hand, given their characteristic simplicity seem shrouded in obscurity.

I haven’t seen a single successful attempt out of a dozen nestings that I have witnessed in my courtyard over the years. The day I am lucky enough to see a dove hatchling successfully taking its maiden flight would serve as a charming memoir. The hatchlings, if the eggs are lucky enough to survive, look so helpless, tiny fluffy scapegoats to be toed around by the murderous incertitudes of circumstances. The mere fact that there are still doves in the world, despite such dismal success ratio, proves that there is larger intelligence in operation than the human mind. It mysteriously functions and creates exceptional, lucky chances to help some odd chick to survive now and then. The cosmic intelligence spins out what we consider miracles with random lucidity. Otherwise, the doves seem all set to cooperate with the negative forces of the annihilation of a species. Suppose all the predators are taken off the scene, still the eggs and hatchlings are under as much risk as when the sky is crowded with the enemies like flies.

Have you seen a weaverbird’s master art? Their nest is a stirring symbol of safety and coziness. Its dazzling tautness equips it to stand safe and sturdy against inclement weather and hostile predators. The tangled and entwined repertoire bestows it a syncretic sense of safety where their little ones enjoy highly efficient upbringing. The sturdy nests hang with an appellate authority. Their nesting colonies on a safe tree are almost celebrated landmarks of the birdie architecture.

The doves are plain stragglers in comparison to the weaverbirds. Theirs is the weakest of a nest, a see-through, fragile, careless assemblage of few dry twigs; very small, just big enough to accommodate a few eggs; a sullen and grumpy assemblage; a living legacy of being in cahoots with the forces of destruction. If the hatchling is lucky to come out of the egg, every minute spent by it seems bizarrely traumatic. The pathetic chick looks shorn of any prospects in future. It survives only if the goddess of mortality is on some elusive excursion for some time.

You can count the eggs standing under a dove’s nest as it’s at a suitable height for a person of average built to raise hands, stand on toes and take them off. I have to be brutally candid on this. From even average parenting standards, the attempt is gruesome, distasteful and perverse. The eggs would look safer anywhere except the nest.

The doves look innocent but now I feel they are plainly dumb. From aesthetical point of view, one may take them possessed with admirable restraint but from the standpoint of parental duties it looks a repository of foolishness. You need front-end courage to defend and save your brood. The rising and falling beats in the game of survival need a stern attention. They show lovely character and good disposition when they perch on the top of a wall and coo. But all this vanishes when it comes to the practicalities of being parents.

The same flimsy assemblage, on the curry-leaf tree in our courtyard, at a height of eight feet has seen four breakfasts for the cats, crows and even an eagle. And now another one is on the way. They just lay eggs, but hardly bother about making a safe nest. There are two or three dove couples in the area. They are thoroughly lazy. They simply make love when the nature calls and lay eggs that are easily whisked away by the egg-mongers. Then they are free from the tensions of raising their kids. I think it will require some wise owl to gather them and put up a lecture about some safety measures while preparing a nest. 

Little happenings at a small place

If mother nature takes away, it gives back as well. It wipes the slate clean and then ascertains that there are fresher lines drawn symbolizing resurrected tales. The bees are gone and the empty hive gives a pinching sense of alienation. But the hundreds of sparrows among the group of keekars just outside the yard wall keep it alive and buzzing. They are very chatty, suspenseful, always busy in their birdie gossip. When they change their notes, it makes them sound as if they possess multi-lingual creativity. They flit around during the day, with a kind of self-effacing candor, taking the major portion of their meals from the millet that I put on the wall.

A giloy creeper has completely covered the clump of keekars. It has shed its leaves during the winters but the network of stems is still dense enough to provide a finely netted ceiling. It harkens the little brown sparrows with a welcoming ambience. They find it safe enough to spend their nights here. The little holes among the densely twisting barren stems of the creeper are like tiny hutments flooded with winged visitors.

The very next day, once the honeybees left, some of the sparrows arrived to roost among the little group of small trees in the yard. As if they were waiting for the bees to leave the garden. So the garden turns a big chiming birdie funfair at dusk. They chat a lot before retiring for the day. But they are very respectful to the night, not a movement, not a sound, paying homage to the goddess of silence. They arrive ten or fifteen minutes before the oriental magpie robin. The dashing fellow is still keeping to his perfectly timed twilight arrival. His biological clock is in perfect sync with nature with the days slightly longer presently. But he has to quarrel now to retain his paw-hold. Some sparrows must be sitting on his favorite branch for the night rest. It leaves him in a grumpy mood and so there he goes with his querulous notes. And finding it to no effect, like a naughty imp he head-butted straight into the bough and reclaimed his lost perch. He fights for it every day. Sometimes, in the middle of a cold, lonely, long night, the magpie robin lets out a sudden note as if all its bottled up pathos are suddenly let out to sail into the cold atmospherics like a song of desolation and loneliness. 

A little exercise

The main charm of dewy autumnal mornings is the shower of little Parijat flowers that covers the ground, like offerings to mother earth. It's a little exercise in nurturing care and consideration in my farming gene pool. Walk carefully so as not to crush even a single flower. If you sensitize your conscience to at least this level so as to avoid crushing a flower, there is hardly a chance that you will crush a heart, an organic representative of thousands of beautiful, multi-colored flowers.