A few moments in the spring

 We have a solid proof of the spring—a peacock spreading its fan-tail for some dancing moments. Brand new tail feathers, sleek, sprightly, strong, long enough to be flaunted and not too long to be cumbersome—like early youth free from the limitations of both childhood and mature age. To be too fashionable comes with its costs. Walk a bit unfashionably and you get some arbitrary windfalls on the way. And some of these give a sheer sense of freedom, the freedom of not being bound by anything or any routine. Too much of fashion is a reflection of our peculiarities, a veritable remonstrance against the simplistic tidings of the soul. And going with the worldly illusions, it romanticizes the path towards perilous excursions.

The squirrel is greedy. The grains are primarily meant for the sparrows. It not only eats them to its heart’s content but ferries jowl-fulls to its house somewhere in the group of trees nearby. It’s very pushy and chases away the sparrows. A few brave ones try to nibble at its fluffy tail but that isn’t too effective. There is no discomfort at the squirrel’s end. So as the octogenarian fixedly nibbles down their share, the sparrows wait on the nearby branches. Patience has some intrinsic value. In our confusion and hurry we just thwart the fruit of patience waiting at the next turn.

To consecrate this truth a babbler arrives. As far as quarrelsome tone is concerned, a babbler is an ever-exterminating tyrant. They hand out impious, bitter reprimands to the less noisy birds. Now it’s the squirrel’s turn to run. It tries to stay its ground with some impertinent attitude but the babbler is too quarrelsome for it. The babbler now occupies the property and seems to hold onto its version of truth like a conventionist holding onto his powerfully twisted myths.

A tailorbird—not a party to the issue and hence in an ideal position to enjoy it as a fun game—is hooting, applauding, shouting. Chik-chik-pik-pik-tik-tik-lado-lado-maro-maro. Full enjoyment. Or maybe even some painful cries as if it has got a boil on its buttock.

Ultimate freedom of expression and right to live—the right to sleep rather: a puppy sleeping right in the middle of a street having its routine traffic of two-wheelers, tractors, walkers, cattle and much more. I see him sprawled to deepest slumber. He is still in it as I return after a couple of hours. There is still peace in the world. Well, you have to believe in it first in order to have it. You have to believe in the kingdom of silence and peace with its invisible gold insignia.

There is another freedom of expression, a kind of swooning and frenzied liberty, that I witnessed by the side of the road. It’s a group of adolescent boys on a trip. The bus has seen wide open fields on its journey. But then an all-open option might mean no option at all. You need a milestone to mark your arrival. So the driver, looking for a suitable clue to an appropriate clearing, stops in front of a power sub-station on our village’s outskirts. The long front wall is freshly painted. A beautiful mushy cream milestone with bright blue border and orange stars in the middle. So a few dozen of them get down finally and line up to relieve themselves of extra water.

You certainly need milestones. The open fields were too dull for the momentous event. They leave ostensible but somehow artistic wet lines on the wall as a mark of their arrival, of utilizing the basic freedom of expressing themselves through relieving in the open as we Indians love to do with our inflexible sentimentality for being natural and open with the nature’s call. The time has a traitorous abnegation of our footprints. So put firm prints of your arrival. They move on with a deep sense of satiety on their young faces. Well, for the time being at least they have assiduously left a mark on their path.  

A little boy's romance with life

 Nevaan: ‘When I was small, I used to do like this.’ Me: ‘Oh, as if you are old now. You are still small.’ Nevaan: ‘Mama, don’t call me small!’ Me: ‘OK, you are old then.’ He brandishes his watergun and aims a squirt at me. It’s still cold enough to get scared of a watergun as if it’s a bulleted one. Me: ‘OK, you are still small.’ He is angry: ‘Don’t call me small!’ Me: ‘What do I call you then?’ Nevaan: ‘Call me young.’ Well youth has many takers. Even five-year-olds are its suitor now.

Nevaan: ‘Ma, please give me a gold coin! Just one!’ His mother is speechless under the weight of the demand. How I wish that gold was as light in our heads as it’s in the heart of a child—a mere plaything. There are infinitesimal shadows in the grown-up minds; mountains of the little molehills of substance. The physical faculties grow and they blindfold the innocent in us, splintering us from being ‘within’ and fall prey to the call of the faraway mirages. 

Little Nevaan’s truth: ‘Ma I’ve started telling lies.’ A child’s lies are better than grown-ups’ truth. Their incertitude far more sure-footed than any iron-hard logic of the elders tethered to the certitudes cemented as wisdom and experience. Their imprudence livelier than any discretion of the older bones.

Thanks to the extended two-year Covid-enforced sabbatical, he has developed a cute little paunch and chubby cheeks. The world came to a halt and tiny children got far more addicted to cartoon networks and mobile phones. So his mother, my younger sister, is worried about his chubbiness. He has come to his Mamaji’s place, yours truly, and we force him to play football with a very soft ball, just a bit heavier than an inflated balloon. He kicks unwillingly and walks off with a limp. The next day he remembers the sports injury. He takes a stick and gives a nice demonstration of limping walk. ‘It’s a big sprain I think,’ he declares complete rest. After half an hour I find him limping with the other leg. I pass on my observation to him. He is caught unawares about the information but then recovers well. ‘The problem Mamaji is that the pain keeps shifting from this leg to the other. It’s a strange game injury,’ he clarifies.

The other day we were trying to fit him into the school dress knickers at a shop at the town. Laziness puts you out of league with standard sizes. We try to convince him about the benefits of running and skipping. He isn’t much interested. He isn’t much bothered about the shower of advices poured by all including his wards, the shopkeeper and other parents at the shop. He is interested in a digital slate that catches his fancy on account of its red frame and electronic built. We buy it for him. But then it creates problems for him. His laziness has seeped into his writing as well. He writes very slowly. So his new toy is a headache for him as we ask him to practice writing on it. He but is more interested in making weird demon faces with my name under them. When the order to write is passed more sternly he sits over it very seriously. From a distance I can see that he is writing very cautiously. I go there to check his progress and this is what I see written very firmly: ‘I don’t want to write.’

A protesting march in Febbruary

 This is the third week of February. And here arrives the first windy day with a clear call of the summers. But I prefer to view it as spring. The spring is a brief flowering pause in the north Indian plains. The soil that was clumped tight, as if shivering under the cold elements, is awake now and yawns as dry leaves and dust sashay around as the harbingers of the upcoming summers. Hundreds of Asha workers are marching as a protest demonstration to the mini secretariat, the seat of district administration. They are clad in the colors of revolution—red. The flag is also red with sickle and hammer. They have a long-pending demand for regularization of service and better pay. The march is under the banner of a labor union called CITU. Capitalism has but gone too far for the lurching cart of socialism to catch up with. The sensibility of making money is very steadfast.

Protests like this are just a tardy effort to keep the ideology alive; a kind of consoler march. The ideology is structured too loftily to fit in the sundry world of mundane desires, profiteering and moneymaking. It seems like a funeral march of the penitents whose dream has been marred by the ideological theoreticians themselves. They dreamt too wittily and it turned into a parody. The intent to revolutionize being too eloquent; a semi-parodic act from the beginning, something as futile as marching with its own head on a pike.

They move gallantly, almost with militarist strains. But the seed of the ideology is indefensibly impractical. A contrariety that appropriates the basic needs to a dream within the dreams for a utopian state. A vainly verbose effort at leveling the crop to the same level where each stem is fighting for the sunlight to reach the highest height. The people laugh at the irksome, unsightly speed-bump on the expressway of economic progress. The administration hardly bothers about this type of gathering. But they are highly effective in blocking the narrow, congested road as they file past the bazaar.

Most of them are very poor women from the lowest rung of society. They have bemoaning souls. They hold their manifesto, hoping it will create ripples in the corridors of administration. But there is an air of disempowering atrophy around. They understand that their demands are already discarded, there being no impetus for the state machinery to inculcate their demands. Their cause is no pretty-faced mistress to impress the political lust of the politicians. 

Being with small things in life

The winter has been pretty harsh. Its passage through the pathside grass tells the tale. As the February sun shines I can see the little patches of faded green that fought the cold and now give the wilderness a pleasant aroma along pathsides, field embankments, fallow lands and canal bunds—little sinewy hideouts still surviving for mother earth to keep her flag flying, to still somehow maintain the timeless sanctity of her duty, her divine principle. Gone are the days of large doses of wildly engaging swathes of mother nature. Well that is fabled past. This is enough for me, a middle-aged poetic man with lukewarm sensibilities, moving on the visual surface almost lost in the puzzling quizzes of existence. It’s a representational canvas and by its side is placed earthy palette. There is soulful stillness and I distinctly hear nature’s compositional effort to still get attuned to the changing times. These little ribbons of weather-beaten wilderness alleviate my tensions; a sense of openness permeates my being.

Wild sorrel or common sorrel, a leafy bouquet, stands as a green beauty among the winter-beaten grass. It welcomes me with its clumps of arrow-shaped leaves and juicy stems. It will have whorled spikes of reddish green flowers in early summer. Butterflies and moth larvae feast upon them. It’s not that useless as one may think it to be as you pass it. In Nigeria it’s used in stews. Indians who know about its properties use it in soups and curries. The Afghanis coat the leaves with butter and consume them as appetizers.

Disengaged from the world of utilities and economic valuation stand some stalks of great mullein. It’s a hairy biennial plant that can grow to two meters. It will add to the short spring waiting just round the corner when it will have small yellow flowers densely grouped on a tall stem, growing from a big rosette of leaves. It’s a prince of fallow lands and hosts a variety of insects. Its tall pole-like stem greets me with a very slight nod as a gust of wind eggs it to greet me. Its hermetic disposition has fetched it quite interesting names including Hare’s Beard and Moses’ Blanket.

Sardonically stand a few twiggy mulleins, a kind of spiky rosette of leaves, self-absorbed in their pleasant redundancy. Beyond the gloss and superfluousness of mankind’s manipulation, it stands as the unpretentious, anonymous engraver of the last lines of free nature on this planet.

On the canal bund stands a dwarf shrub called bluemink, or pussy foot or flossflower. Reaching up to three feet high its bluish and purple fluff-haired flowerheads are the harbingers of spring. It seems to be waiting for the first butterfly carrying the colors of spring. It knows how to defend itself well as it repulses insects by secreting a repulsive compound. Then it’s toxic to grazing animals because it causes some mild liver complications to goat and sheep. And the grazers know it through natural intelligence.

There are some billygoat weeds with attractive mauve flowers. It by the way is a medicinal plant and is used to cure dysentery and diarrhea. And the goats, sheep and buffalos don’t need medicines much, so they leave it to bask in its glory.

There is a very nice colony of annual ragweed. They are invasive by attitude and know how to grab their share in this competitive world. They have much-branched hairy leaves, 4-5 inches long, that can cause allergic reactions to some humans.

Riverside wormwood, also called mugwort, has long leaves and safe to be even considered a culinary herb.

Then there are strands of smut-grass, or call it pheasant’s-tail-grass, having whisk-like crown heads gently swaying to the late winter solitude.

Pampas grass defines the second tier crown of this little ribbon of wilderness running along the canal. Only occasional trees hover over them. They have razor-sharp leaf margins having whitish inflorescences on top of their stout upright flower spikes. They stand in clump-forming solidarity with their blade-like leaves. The dark brown and whitish spikes at the end of stems sway to the gentle accosting of breeze. Their clumps carry an indispensable air. They are the fortresses of birds of bush and reptiles.

There is greater pond sedge along the water margins in the thickly overgrown sides of the canal floating over the water in a decided sense of agnosticism.

All these sentinels of wilderness greet me on my solitary march in the countryside. They have weathered a tough winter and now leave us at the threshold of a pleasant spring. 

Friendship with dogs

 A farmer has around seventy buffalos in his dairy in the secluded, forlorn corner in the countryside. Of course, they need security. So his staff has pampered a pack of five stray dogs through generous dose of lullabying words, chapattis and buttermilk. Left free to spend their time, unconcerned about the battle for belly, they growl and bark as the indomitable defenders of the citadel. Their view of ownership is far beyond the dairy premises. Everybody within sight is an enemy. So there they come dashing down the dusted pathway. I was at least half a kilometer away. Their body language gives big clues to their determination to growl, bark and bite. Showing fear and running is an invitation to taste the meaty slice on the calf muscles.

It primarily depends upon the human whether the dog turns out to be friendly or antagonistic. Show the intent to fight and they will keep quarreling. I think inside them they have a bigger quota of loyalty for we humans. The remaining quota of animosity is defined by their loyalty to some other human being. A dog has almost infinite sense of loyalty. You have to just calmly take your portion out of it.

They smell something blameworthy in my approach to their well-milked territory. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. They come fiercely at top speed, barking with deep growls. I stand and watch them coming, raising dust like an attacking cavalry. I smile and shout ‘Kalu’. He seems a hoodlum, his vocals strengthened by steady stream of villainous barking over months after months. He carries an extorting look as well. Now every black dog has to be named ‘Kalu’. Thanks to the norm, I hit it on the nail. My sweet accost meets his approval and Kalu screeches to a halt. ‘Anyone calling me by name cannot be an enemy,’ he comes hesitatingly forward. I tickle behind his ears. He is a friend now. The brownish-red ones are suspicious as if still shaping their response either to bite or sway their tails. ‘Lalu,’ I whisper coaxingly. Lalu melts. In fact both red ones melt in the momentum built up by Kalu and now carried by the two Lalus. Again the naming norms doing wonders. All dogs of that color are named ‘Lalu’. They came as attackers, now they tread and trundle in front of me as friends and escorts, befriended and enjoying the positive emotional convergence with one more human being.

‘Kalva, Lalva,’ The Bihari keeper greets them. He is relieved that I have been spared. Now thank goodness that the dogs can understand the dialectical variations of their names. ‘Kalu means Kalva and Lalu means Lalva,’ they can make it out very easily. The next day I take a chapatti with me and they get a piece each. A little token of friendship and love. They look at me with languid admiration. The friendship is sealed very solidly. They remember the smell forever. A sense of loyalty bestows them potent canine glory. I may forget them but they won’t. Their loyalty isn’t affected by mood swirls hence a lot of melodrama is avoided. It’s not about food. It’s an initiation ceremony into friendship. Now they will even bite for me.