Summerstorm

 The sun is getting hotter with each day as if driven by obsessive self-admiration over the heat and brightness. The noons are dazzling with soaring luminosity. The leaves are baked dead by the forty degree plus sun. The noontime is no doubt a big oven with everything for a nice roast. Just a gentle hot breeze and dry leaves rustle with a song carrying the essence of crumbling, charming prodigality of mortality, of shifting forms, of transfigurations and transformations. The parijat is a mere leafless sketch in black and white. A sandstorm in the evening and what remained of the pale leaves still precariously perched on the seat of life on the branches was also forced to let go of its worldly clasp and flow away. A bare almost lifeless tree it seems but there is semblance of aged but wise and graceful profile of an old man.

In the morning next day, I see a tailorbird’s nest-cup on the ground. The storm can break the branch but the nest is intact. It’s for nothing that we call them tailorbirds. They are meticulous in their art. A laborious, expertly weave of grass, hair and cotton. As I’m marveling at the master tailor-work, I see a tiny beat of life. A hatchling—mere half of the human little finger—is lying on the ground. The pulse of life itself has a big force even in tiny frailest of bodies, and that’s why maybe the ants kept away waiting patiently for the pulse to die down, as if paying respect to life, following a dharma. Well, it was lying on the ground throughout the night and surprisingly still possesses the beat of life. Where were the ants? Maybe they were busy somewhere or were conscientious enough not to eat something alive.

There are two more hatchlings nearby. One of them is considerably small and dead, the other has some movement. But these two are sticking to a thick strand of a buffalo’s tail-hair that had been utilized in nest-making. I hold the bigger alive one and its dead, almost weightless sibling dangles, swinging to the breeze, already on the path of dust-in-making. I know any effort to pull the dead one away would almost result in tearing the living one.

Since there are nestlings alive, I deem it my duty to fix the nest. I try to fix the nest, consisting of three parijat leaves stitched together with strands of buffalo hair and swabs of cotton, among the crumbling dry leaves on the sad-looking tree. It needs some tailoring skills to reattach a tailorbird’s nest to a branch. I use a needle and a thread to sew the system to a branch and put the survivor hatchlings in it including the dead one.

The parents return and throw lungfuls of abuses at the human whom they suppose to be the one who tossed away their house in the dark. They straightaway get into the business of parenting once they find that the nest is funnily reattached in an artificial manner. They soon arrive with worms in their beaks to feed their kids. Thinking about the last evening’s storm isn’t part of their nature. They live in ‘here and now’. After some time, while they are away, I get onto a stool to see the position of the household inside the leafy cup. The pair of the dead and the barely alive, strung together by a hair strand, is gone. The only healthy baby is sprawled comfortably inside the nest. Most probably they discarded the dead along with the half-dead, not having the means to undo the hairy entanglement. That shows their love is perfect, yet very practical in nature, bound to some primal laws of survival of the fittest.  

Clangy-blangy fall of a farming vessel

 The farmers keep a big tin pan, a basin rather. It’s used to gather cattle dung in the barn to take it to the dump site. We call it tasla. Not a great item to look at, on account of its task, it but is as important as the brass plate in the kitchen. When a tasla falls on the ground, it makes a thunderous sound as if war has been declared between two groups of rowdy farmers. It freezes the moment in the entire neighborhood. Its clangy-blangy notes spread out with the intensity of a mini-bomb’s explosion. Sometimes it startles love-cum-fight sessions between the peasant couples to whom there isn’t much of a difference between love and war. Lovemaking happens to be a type of war. And sometimes not just humans, the birds also get stalled in their beautiful moments by the storm-surge of a tasla fall, like it happens this morning. A beautifully fan-tailed peacock and a reciprocating dull-looking peahen standing face to face on a wall and just on the verge of a cheeky-peeky-beaky kiss. A tasla bangs on the ground in the locality. As the noisy tempest is unleashed, the kiss gets lost and the startled love-birds run for life.

We aren’t sure how many farmer couples, sparring on the charpoys, leapt out of their duels, but yours truly can see at least one more effect on a helpless animal. It’s a heavily pregnant cat slowly moving on the top of a seven-foot high yard wall, carrying its sweetly overloaded stomach with the majestic mien of maternity. It need not be told to be careful; natural intelligence at work. It’s there in every ounce of existence. But the clang and bang of a falling tasla can spoil all natural equanimity born of inherent intelligence across species. It jumps as the tasla slays peace, or even secret wars on charpoys, in the locality. But as a mother it has to be careful. It seems uncertain whether it should go down or not. It then very cautiously slips along the wall, her front paws scratching the wall plaster. The feline would-be-mom neatly lands with a very soft jump. And we humans think that our knowledge is a product of our thinking. In fact our thinking overshadows the infinite natural intelligence pervading around. Remove the dust and see the bigger picture. But not when a tasla falls. We all including humans, peacocks and cats share a commonality, a common trait of getting frozen for a moment when a falling tasla slays the status quo.

A skirmish between liqor-lovers and honeybees

 The liquor-lovers suddenly realize it’s very hot. The question of sweating like pigs during the drinking sessions can no longer be dismissed airily under the colossal caveats unleashed by boozed self. There they go expressly head-hunting for a solution to the problem. ‘As you sweat in excess, the alcohol inside seeps out through the skin-pores and that’s the reason we no longer get the feeling of sufficiently drunk these days,’ one of them explains in a metronomic tone. The nippy swirl of hot winds seems to conjure disaster by pouring out all the alcohol from their innards through sweating. They have enough willpower to go looking for a solution and find one in fact.

There is an abandoned storeroom in the locality. They decide to fix an AC in its back wall. As they break an opening in the wall to fix the air conditioner, an anxious and jostling crowd of honeybees attacks them. The group is semi-drunk while all this happens. They get defeated and retreat from the battlefield. The next day, they look indescribably beautiful—in their own ways of course—with swollen and strange-shaped eyes, noses, lips, foreheads, cheeks and chins. They appear to have come under a deluge of whiplashes by the angry insects. But it’s not over yet. The party with weirdly beautiful faces returns to the battlefield to settle the scores. It’s a war that is being fought over two days. The bees won the first battle skirmishes on day one.

The new-faced liquor-lovers raise a huge pal of smoke under the bee-comb. Many honeybee soldiers fall down beating their wings, gasping for breath. Under attack by the killer deluge of the smoke the honeybees move away, leaving behind their larvae and stocks of honey.

It was a very safe hideout for the bees, both against the heat as well as the honey buzzard. But then the liquor-lovers’ right to beat the heat proves stronger than the bees. I sometimes wonder that this creation is merely a series of bigger rights imposed over lesser ones, a kind of blatant supersession and expansion moving from lower hierarchies to bigger ones.

Since we are talking of the liquor-lover group, it won’t be misfitting to talk about one particular member of the group. As long as he can open his eyes, after getting sloshed to upper limits, he has enough willpower and strength to give a blow back for his wife’s attack. She is a strong peasant woman. So he full drunk and she all fury result in inconclusive fights. Both carry the marks of night battles to the next day. She then decides to tilt the scale in her favor. He is lumbering sloshed to guts and moves with unsteady steps, having just enough senses in him to somehow—miraculously though—maintain his shaky vertical against a fall. She welcomes him with a smile and lavishes the glory of her sweet words unlike the angry cat that gnawed at his face whenever he returned home fully drunk. She purrs like a joyful cat and seduces him to drink more. He happily complies and falls asleep, or rather not able to move or open eyes, a total blackout. With unconquerable dignity she then sits on his chest and slaps him to her heart’s deepest content. The next day he carried perfectly blue cheeks. ‘It’s the side effect of the spurious liquor that you drink. You are lucky that it affected just the cheeks,’ she explained.  

Take a long walk before decising to marry

 In the year 1988, a Serbian artist named Marina Abramovic and her German partner named Ulay, much in love and looking forward to marriage, egged on by the unfaltering command of mutual infatuation, fully enamored with each other and eager to share the paradisiacal joy of matrimony, decided to walk from the opposite ends of the Great Wall of China. They planned to marry at the point they met on the historic wall, considering it an aesthetical and classical culmination of a journey to mingle into each other at many levels. It was a nice trekking from both ends. They walked pleasantly and finally met at some point. But they met with the realization—airlifted into the momentum of newer truths—that they didn’t want to marry and returned to their places separately.

Seeing the life through a fresh kaleidoscope, after going through multitudes of dew-fresh experiences, you turn a stranger to your old self. You are no longer held at ransom by the beliefs and emotions that defined your former sense of being. Maybe walking on open paths, with their daring allurement, with their untrampled and wild prospects, makes you see the truth better. The long-eyelashed coquetry of flimsy, skidding emotions gives way to a healthy pragmatism. Inhibited and repressed truths about the self and the others sneak out as you lose your grip on them. The bindweed and wild clover on unpaved ways, which you dismissed earlier as inconsequential clumps of weed, guide you to a mysterious unearthly splendor which any well-planned, properly paved and designed rosebed, properly gated and guarded with the grills and railings of our fears and insecurities, would fail to accomplish. The floating façade made of large-scale assumptions crumbles down. And the absurdly overstretched, congested self opens to glorious scenarios.

So all the couples who are in a dilemma about marriage must walk for a few hundred kilometers from opposite directions and meet on the way. Walking on earth gets us grounded and makes us realize the futility of staying on cloud nine forever. As you walk and see the naked realities of life, without pretentions and hypocrisies, with each kilometer walked you get better like wine with age. Your vociferous ideologies melt down and the smart, savvy, lionized self reshapes to acquire more realistic outlines.

The story of a snakebite

 Shekhar would call me ustad. Later he proved it that he meant it and as a sincere chela got a snakebite by, probably, standing proxy for me by sheer chance or mischance. Our group of friends was young and conjured up the meaning of life through persistent, relentless, regular walks into the dark countryside every day without fail. Four or five of we friends would loiter around, sharing our disillusionment and anguish with a creeping openness, talking about our youthful follies in the dark on the field pathways crisscrossing the cropped fields around the village.

Once on a dark night, on the way back, me in the lead like a genuine ustad, followed by four friends including Shekhar and my younger brother Amit. It had rained heavily. It was a narrow submerged passage of hardened cement sacks and stones, standing as a sort of fording point in a low-lying area around the pond. The rains had partially submerged the rudimentary step bridge. It was a world of brattish, tentative jigsaw puzzles, beyond the claustrophobic set of care and caution, torches or mobiles. A free world decided by the crucibles of dark and deep vicissitudes of fate, beyond the security and systematized steps as we have presently. Now even a rope would seem a snake in the dark and during those days even a snake would be taken as a mere rope.

As the leader of the party walking in a file, I would have stepped upon a snake fitted in a hollow among the partially submerged stepping-stones. But then chance denied it an opportunity to dig its fangs into my foot. As I took the step that would have trampled the snake, my forward foot in the air, the other foot slipped over the edge of a stone. In order to avoid a fall I took a long stride, almost jumped in fact. It meant I leapt over the snake hiding in the submerged crevice among the sacks and stones. Sometimes destiny extenuates you, quite surprisingly, despite all your hypocrisy, brazenness and indolence, and puts the share of the consequences of your very own step in the platter of someone else.

Shekhar, following immediately after me, walking behind step-in-step like a true comrade, completed the job pretty firmly. The snake bit him hard and repeatedly on his calf muscles. He gave a long and loud shriek and went hopping over the water like a misfired rocket. The pond-keeper arrived with a torch. Shekhar’s calf bore many bleeding bite marks because the reptile was trodden over very comprehensively. In this manner, my friend stood proxy for me for the dreaded experience of a snakebite.

My brother is a strong man. He being the strongest of the group took the responsibility of carrying Shekhar on his back, running over the pond’s earthen embankment to reach the road. We ran ahead to stop some vehicle to take him to the venom-curing doctor. Shekhar thought he was dying and supposing dizziness, which was in fact his acceptance of the fact that one turns dizzy by degrees after getting bitten by a snake, to be the call of his end of innings on earth whispered his death-bed wisdom in the ears of my brother. ‘See Sufi is a soft and kind guy. Take care of him after I’m no more!’ Well, I’m sure he didn’t know that he had stood proxy for me for the bite otherwise he would have spared this kind departing-time injunction.

In any case, we took him to the countryside snake venom doctor, famous for treating snakebites with his secret herbal concoctions. He prepared a bucketful of horribly smelly and terribly bad tasting brew and force-fed Shekhar the entire lot. It included some cuss words and raptor-sharp nape-grazing palm attacks on the patient’s stooping figure as he protested against the atrocious concoction. There were mammoth rolling waves of revulsion inside his innards and he vomited like a tube-well. It was the countryside method of detoxification. Shekhar survived the episode. Either the concoction was effective or the snake wasn’t too poisonous. But the incident left a spurious shadow of fear of reptiles on his psyche and he felt its direct effects on his physical health for almost six months. He would be justified in claiming that his snakebite treatment lasted for six months. In the meantime, he gulped down all the horrendous venom-antidote preparations, whose ingredients were family secrets, made by the vaidyas in the entire state. Thankfully he recovered to a position to claim full health. But he says he feels sleepy if he eats stale, cold kheer in the morning.

However, now he won’t stand proxy for me for a snakebite anymore. It’s a well-wrought lesson. Almost twenty years after the mishap he suffers from reptile phobia, and rightly so. Recently, on a balmy winter noon we were strolling by the canal. The canal had been desilted so a smooth silvery bed of shining sand was layered over the embankment. Usually dozens of harmless water snakes can be seen basking under the sun on winter noons. The soft, silvery canal sand was etched with slithery, crawling marks as the reminders of the reptilian sunbathing. As we neared the crawling lines, his phobia flashed live snakes in his brain as he saw the snakes drawn on the sand. He swears to this day that he saw real snakes. I am but equally sure to have seen only lines and no live snakes as it was broad daylight. He yelled in panic, jumped as if the crawling marks under his feet were live, writhing snakes and this time, playing safe and no longer willing to stand proxy for me for a snakebite, jumped up and got onto my back, drawing his legs as much above as he could manage.