Father's Friend

 Once Father was getting some house-fixing job done. Some wooden rafters and beams were put up outside. A liquor-lover really appreciated them for the quality of their wood and make. ‘He will undoubtedly return at night to steal them,’ Father concluded. To guard his provisions, Father started sleeping outside. A charpoy was set down. The street dog Kalu became his new favorite for the guarding job. Who doesn’t want company in the dark? Kalu got pampering words and lots of buttermilk as remuneration for his help in the guarding job. On the third night he received even a bigger dose of love. Thinking that the canine part of the watch party must be feeling cold while sleeping near his charpoy, Father dumped two dry paddy bundles on the dog that had just retired for the night. Care is good but an overdose of it isn’t recommended. Moreover, the poor dog wasn’t aware of the scheme. It thought it was an attempt at its life. It bawled out into the night and continued to bark at Father from a distance throughout the night. ‘It’s good to be kept awake at least,’ Father consoled himself.

The first butterfly

 The real start of the spring for me is the sight of the first butterfly after the most frigid phase of the cold. A butterfly is the sublime gist of sunrays and flowers. I see the first butterfly on the twelfth of February. It dispels all doubts about the weather. The spring is here. The honey buzzard is seen again. The sparrows, crows and the rest of the birds that consider the village their home raise alarming chorus. The crows take themselves to be the sentinels of the birdie locality. They swoop up and down like angry fighter jets around the enemy object. The big eagle but looks a stealth fighter around which the smaller fighter planes appear the machines of the last generation.

And there is further hope. A neighbor has painted his little house with the greenest of the green lime-wash. It can put any parrot to shame. The green color is forever welcome. The forests and pastures are vanishing, so the green walls are good for the eyes at least. How I wish they would give oxygen as well!

Nevaan’s watergun has also smelt spring. Ferocious squirts of water reach up to a distance of twenty feet. So I have to run. Spring means one has to have spring in one’s gait to gallop with the Holi spirit pervading around well in advance, entitling young kids to shoot down elders with their water shots. After decimating me with the watery cannon, he is now trying it as a water sprinkler in the garden. A bad job done quite evidently. ‘How is it?’ he asks. ‘Very bad!’ I take my revenge. ‘So what? I like it very much!’ he says and targets me again.

I have to remember that he is a few months short of his fifth birthday and is grown enough to take things very-very seriously. He is very particular about wearing mask in the car and keeps an eye on the speed limit display on the dashboard. A car and the speed digits signboards are favorite items on the road. A car sign and 40 means you cannot drive over 45 at any cost. He keeps screaming about the policeman. He seems a very law-abiding little citizen of the republic. 

A ticketless busride

 Well, once we tried a ticketless ride in a bus. The 1983 world cup victory was roughly seven years old at that time. The momentum was carried throughout the country in the form of a massive craze for the game. I must have been thirteen or fourteen at that time. We had a cricket match at the neighboring town, lost it badly and thought of winning it against the state roadways. We didn’t return as a triumphant unit. We came back like a scattered, defeated army in retreat.

I and another dusted player in the one-sided match chose a rickety roadways bus, almost a jangling junk cabin, for it appeared to provide the best chance of a ticketless journey. Each of us carried a one rupee coin on our person. The rest was spent in devouring bananas to beat the pathos of humiliating jeering and abuses by the few dozens of spectators leering from the side of the host team. The fair was only this much, one crisp rupee or coin, so who won’t try to save the precious thing. We hid the property in our socks. The conductor approached for at least a half ticket. We lamented and cried a chorus, ‘No Money with us!’ He muttered his anguish but left us to our own fate.

We sat almost hidden in the corner at the rear end where the massive spare tyre dumped right inside the bus gave us a precarious perch. The roads were potholed and the buses went almost cascading as if jumping over the off-road ravines of the present day. It shook one’s bones. Maybe it provided skeletal strength to the people. All well so far. But the flying squad came in the way of this totally bumpy ride. The burly inspector knew the secret of the coins in the socks. He must have grown up doing the same himself. Our hidden property was drawn out and put at the disposal of the state government.

As a consequence we had tickets in our hands apart from critical reprimands regarding our immoral conduct. A village elder stared at us. We knew him well but he looked apprehensive as to our domicile. As young boys we had our screen of boyhood anonymity. We knew it quite well that if we got down at the village bus stand another round of grilling would be launched by the village elder. It would then leave bigger tidal waves that would reach our own doors. So we presented ourselves as boys from the neighboring villages as we confidently disembarked at the stop preceding out village and walked off, trying to drill it in his mind that we weren’t from his village as he suspected.

Our faked destination was two kilometers from our village. ‘He will think we are from this village!’ we chimed with scheming laughter. Then we walked across the agricultural farms for two kilometers with tickets in our pockets. It was a nice walk with roadways tickets in pockets. On the way we planned that we had to keep a very curtailed and low profile lest he saw us and grill us about the crime. The elders were very efficient informers during those times. They would share the news of such infringements to the entire village without fail. So we kept ourselves on keen guard for a few months and even afterwards avoided coming across that particular village elder. It’s good that the life in the old age gives dulled memories to the beholder of ripe age. Even many months later he just curiously peered into our faces. But thank God there was no direct recalling into the chambers of his conscious brain from the vague imprints of our mischief lying faded on his subconscious mind. 

Ice-candied days

 Those were the little lights of childhood dawning upon the summer-time dusty bleakness with plenty of slurping charms. Without them the baking noons would appear full of famine, agony and melancholy. There would be a sudden surge in our spirits. It was an item of instant gratification. Almost a savior to save us from the broadened, sprawling tyranny of heat and dust. And their carrier was nothing short of romanticized hero. It became so important that the rest of the items over the globe seemed inconsequential specks. The ice-candies with their lure and legacy!

The ice-candies would stand out as life-supporting oasis during the hot, dusty, sweltering days of summer. With colorful ice-candies around even the treacherous hot season would turn into a vintage climate. The sound of his rubber balloon horn would give him the aura of a regal chauffeur of our dreams. He carried the little vase of joy in his wooden chest box insulated with thermocol padding inside and iron sheet on the outside. And we would throng the bicycle with chaste passion.

The schools would be off for almost two months and the children waited for the ice-candy sellers to shout in the streets. The greed for these cheap colored beauties knew no limits. The children would plead for paisas from the elders, get some, take the candy, slurp it down and come back to the house to fish out some old book, copy, notebook, diary, glass bottle, iron wares, plastic discards or anything acceptable to the seller, get their candy, lick it away with even more greed and then more greed would turn them scrap collectors to roam the street, scamper over dry dung and waste heaps to salvage anything that would add to get an extra ice-candy.

It was a fascinating conquest of our fancies, unleashing unbridled gallantry in the heart of even the dourest ones to contrive some rancorous caprice to devise some extra means to get one more ice-candy. The children ran helter-skelter with overstrained nerves to lay their hands upon anything acceptable to the seller. Those who were successful on a particular day tittered affectionately while those who were yet to color their tongues with the bright colors carried a wearisome, damnable look in their lost eyes. They walked crushed and crestfallen, their spirits mutilated and they looked with dusty sighs at the ones carrying the lascivious item in their hands which slowly melted on their tongues with inundating delirium.

With the rise in temperatures and the rapidly thinning morals, the greed would further shoot up to burgeon into banditry. The mysterious charms of the little colorful pieces of ice would metamorphose into a pathway robbery. The more formidable ones among the ice-candy lovers would plot to plunder some cheeky seller. They would hide on the margins of the path just outside the village and pounce upon the wooden candy box loaded on the carrier. A bit more disciplined ones like me would watch from a distance and clap for the fortunes of the destiny-makers.

On one occasion, the wooden chest of ice-candies was on the ground and the owner thoroughly overpowered. A sturdy peasant woman ran with sickle in hand to defend the poor seller and save his provisions. The pointed thrusts of her kicks, slaps, whiplashing tongue and warrior queen kind swipe of her sickle saw the looters routed and running away from the scene of crime. She was able to save almost three quarters of his provisions. The ice-candy seller thanked her like he was her long-estranged real brother. ‘You ought to have some muscles on your arms to hold the bicycle and keep it from falling even if these little ones pull from all directions!’ she reprimanded him. He seemed to have fallen into utter submission and agreed to her thesis. In any case, she was rewarded with the best class of dark orange ice-candy by the humbled and dusted seller who offered his product out of gratitude. She had been harvesting wheat in a nearby field in the sweltering midday June heat. Profusely sweating and slurping on her reward she went back to her work. Well, that was a well-deserved ice-candy if there was any that day.

We had ice-candy looters right within the village also. They were civilized and respected looters using a smart tactic. They were the grandpas, like even I witnessed my own grandfather performing the feat from across the corner. They would begin with severally reprimanding the seller for spoiling the children, even turning them into thieves in their own houses, stealthily taking out wheat, jaggery, books and notebooks, thus trashing them as junk for an ice-candy. Thus reprimanded the seller would be instantly on the backfoot. But they had a solution. They paid a little tithe, a kind of goonda tax. The seller would produce a nicely melting glossy ice-candy as his answer to the village elder’s complaint. And the issue would melt like ice in the heat. Then the elder would slurp the cold, sweet ice-candy with hollow cheeks, completely forgetting that just a minute ago there was an issue named as ‘the ice-candy seller spoiling the morals of the village children’. 

The need for polyandry

There is a lovely concept of yin and yang energies in Taoism. Yin is the female component, the all-embracing emptiness, the womb, the Shakti of creation. Yang is the male component, the all-pervading tendency for expansion, manifestation, materialization and fullness. No wonder they are cause-effect and effect-cause simultaneously. Emptiness is self-sustaining, but fullness can be an instinct at the most. No wonder men have such hunger to fill the emptiness pervading around, symbolized by women.

A relationship between a man and a woman is driven by the basic characteristics of these respective polarities. A man is basically looking for the same physical gratification in all the women he goes into a relationship with. But a woman is looking for an ideal form to fill up the cosmic emptiness of which she is a carrier entity, or a symbol. If a man has one reason to get bored with his woman (at the level of body), she has multiple times more reasons to feel bored with her man at the level of body, thoughts, emotions, soul-to-soul connect and still more deeper things. The search of a man for his ideal woman is relatively very easy because he is only seeking variants across hair, color, lips, breasts, hips and other body parts. A woman, on the other hand, has a very deep challenge, a deep peek into her own self, where she tries to modulate her expectations as per the silent depths inside her.  

The yin energy is too powerful and limitlessly empty. The yang energy is just the flash of twinkling stars of materiality in the infinitely empty corridors of the cosmic spirit. And man has always been afraid of the yin energy’s potential and insecure about his fragmented attempts as a filler of the emptiness. So at the level of flesh, i.e., the ‘matter’ of which he is the carrier element, he has tried to subdue and cut down the role of women in society. Patriarchy is born of a deep sense of inferiority, incapacity and complexes carried by the men.

Taoists believe that it takes seven years for a man to understand the rhythms of a woman’s body, the next seven years to feel her emotions and mind, and the next seven to know her spirit. In strict mathematical terms, I would say a woman is worth three men combined at the level of matter, energy and spirit. And man knows it and that’s why he tries to keep her limited to a third of her potential to keep her in a relationship. It works in conservative societies where menfolk have come together to formulate social laws and norms in terribly one-sided ways to keep the women enchained as a fraction of their real selves. But it fails in liberal, modern societies. With empowerment and choice women easily trample over multiple men at the level of matter, energy and spirit. So in liberal societies the women carry a bigger sense of their men being incomplete because here they aren’t dependent upon them for survival. Here their freedom frees them from the helpless acceptance of their status like in conservative societies.   

I think the empowered, self-standing and well-educated women should be given the legal option of polyandry. She stands for the eternal void that can receive all the drama of materiality trying to fill up her cosmic emptiness. The reason why a really capable woman needs multiple partners at the same time is very simple. Men arrive in fragments. The rampaging bulls in the bed usually carry small brains. The brainy ones have little emotions. The artists and poets would lack dependability in worldly practicalities. The Einstein type genius would have their own eccentricities. The spiritual guys would be good guide but very hollow as partners because they are looking to save their semen through yogic practices. So why not legally allow them to have multiple partners simultaneously. Like, one for naughty bed fun, one for beautiful poetry, one for hardcore logic and reasoning, one for spirituality. It will solve the problem of broken hearts. Because the broken hearts again go seeking solace and get again broken. Let there be an official trial with polyandry in developed societies at least.

There is another topic quite related to the yin and yang energies. Yin energy is essentially Kundalini energy, the nurturer of the seed of creation, the ground for material manifestation to take place. All the literature on Kundalini has been written by male followers on the path of spirituality. The basics of experiences and bodily manifestations have been gathered—even though individual variations happen across the male bodies as well—and we have texts dealing with the energy’s movement across the various pranic channels, the changes in physiology, the results of these changes and more.

But we have missed a very important point in the Kundalini discussion so far. It has been male oriented. And a female spiritualist reading the text might be driven to believe that her body will also experience the same as a male body. I don’t think Kundalini will manifest in her body in a typical male’s way. She is essentially Kundalini body herself. So in her case it’s not a fundamental transformation. It is only in the degrees of refinement of the same basic quality. A man will be transformed into a fundamentally different entity; she on the other hand will be further refined. Like man goes through a forge and a stone will be crystallized into diamond. It’s a fundamental shift. That’s why the process is so drastic and even mysterious in his body. In the case of a woman it is like refinement of the same ore, for example, refining gold from its natural ore. So it’s not that drastic in nature as in a man’s body. These are subtle transformations, delicate and deep in emotions and thoughts. Her body is already a creative mechanism of yin energy, so the flow of extra creative energy in the form of an awakened Kundalini doesn’t test her system like it does a man’s body.

A man is primarily the dropper of the seed in the scheme of propagation. She but is the entire field where the whole scheme of evolution of a new life unfolds. So even if an extra dimension of energy unfolds in her system, it won’t revolutionize her organism like it does to a man’s system because she is already a carrier of the same essential energetic entity. Qualitatively it’s the same, it’s just a matter of quantitative variation in degrees. But a man’s system undergoes fundamental qualitative changes. It requires completely new rewiring of the system. Hence they undergo such hair-raising experiences. In case of a woman, it’s far too subtle, like her loving smile for her man would transform into loving motherly smile for all. So her transformation is more in thoughts, emotions, soul and spirit. At the tangible level it won’t be felt in the body like a man does.