Balance. Balance. Balance.

 Uncontrolled emotions will turn us suicidal, depressed and at the most a brooding misfitted poet. Uncontrolled mind will leave us open to the chance workshop of the devil. Anything negative may come out as a dark product. Uncontrolled energies will see us lunatics. Uncontrolled biology will find us turning into sex maniacs and rapists. Having control over life is only meant to avoid a 'part' of our nature or existence from becoming 'everything', thus shadowing all other dimensions of life. We get hijacked by one impulse. Then it's a stunted growth. Holistic growth, call it evolution, needs Balance among various aspects of our existence. As Buddha said Balance is the key to a really joyful life. Keep the parts in place. Maintain all the impulses firmly in place. Don't deny any part of your existence but please don't allow just 'parts' to be 'whole'. It's a multicolored bouquet with fresh flowers of body, mind, emotions, energies. Maintaining Balance among them gets us a fulfilling life full of nice relationships, jobs, growth, faith, love, kindness. If we are driven by just one impulse then it acquires too big a force, driving us in one direction, imbalanced, and we turn mere products of our impulse and randomly developing circumstances. Use all the 'parts' of your existence and we become creators of our own self. Because there is no excess of one particular driving force. As humans we can grow and evolve only as creators, not as circumstantial products. To be a mere product would be degradation and disregard for the tremendous potential of awareness that mother nature has given us. So again remember: Balance, Balance and Balance. At least listen to Buddha if not me! Everyone talks of Balance but how to do it, one may wonder. There is a very simple technique for it. Allow yourself to be softly braced by various aspects of life that touch and test the different parts of your existence. Live an experiential life in totality and allow mother existence to caress your multilayered and multidimensional self in various forms at the level of body, mind, emotions and energies. Don't run away or shun any particular aspect of life. Embrace the experiences that come your way. And where all are sovereigns, nobody would emerge as a tyrant to manipulate your life in an imbalanced way. 

A dandy lizard on a summer noon

 A shikra is a light-built hawk, ashy blue-gray on the top and rusty brown underside. It loves open, meagerly wooded country. It’s a swift flier, almost incredibly elegant, with quick strokes of wings ending in a glide. It flies close to the ground and shoots upwards to grab a perch upon a branch with solitary sovereignty. Hereafter, it gives a desiccating look for any mice, small bird, lizard or squirrel who, perchance, lowers its guard for a moment that may allow it to sire a successful hunt. It may seem to carry a kind of effeminate nonchalance for a hawk but its birdie persona is interspersed with enough skill to dispense with the life of any little rodent that turns careless even for a moment.

The predator gives a piercing, harsh, challenging call. Well, now it eyes a love-struck pair of garden lizards in the branches of the curry leaf tree basking at the peak of heat with its exotic elegance. Tiny clusters of whitish flowers leave aromatic pools of air around the couple. There are honeybees and butterflies enjoying the feast even in the noontime heat setting up a lifeful rhythm. Tiny guys expertly, uncomplainingly facing life’s gubernatorial challenges. The bees, the butterflies and the in-love garden lizards make it festively buoyant. A melding interface of food, love, death; the elements juxtaposed so nearby, side by side. I muse with a stoic smile: a circumstantial texture peppered upon the small tree; dismal indices of smallish ironies; and God’s inherent instinct of eternality above and beyond all this.

The noon is meticulously bright. Swathed in the distressing pools of longing, the male lizard is bright orange around its torso, she a shy soft pink. Hypnotized by the jingling placations of love-lust combo, they are perfectly oblivious to the hawk eye peering at them through the leaves from a top branch in the tree. Then the hawk falls through the branches like it has been shot dead, a free fall. They are lucky that the tree has enough leaves left on it to make it a noisy fall. The sexual energy quickly transforms into panic and they forget the tentacles of love and take onto their heels, individually, separately, for life. They become invisible. The hawk changes many look-out positions to spot the runaway couple. They are not to be seen. Changing colors in league with the times, a nice tactic to dupe and survive.

I have seen them a few times earlier also, enjoying the moments of togetherness; looking out for a healthy moment to join their bodies for the full fruition of love-lust combo. Seeing them together is almost mirth-exuberating spectacle. Looking at the way he has to change many colors, I feel that he is forever trying to deal with fresh tantrums from her bountiful books. As a dandy lizard, the male carries a lot of confidence of cosmic magnitude, a sort of self-assured, heraldic march, especially when its girlfriend is around. It raises its head and stares at you head-on. I have no doubt that it wants to impress her with a brave stance against we humans. I have faced situations where he has stared at me with gutsy posture from just a few feet away. Comfortably ensconced in a successful love’s saddle, anybody would give the impression of a king feeling robustly positive and on top of this world after self-coronation. Aaah, the heat, follies and dew-moistened rosy auguries of love, or maybe lust, maybe both together, sometimes one over the other and sometimes the reverse! In fact the combo is highly shapeless to define it in a particular way. But I’m happy that it didn’t repeat the same folly while facing the hawk and showed a clean pair of crawling paws, otherwise the lady would have lost her love necessitating her to go seeking love again after a few sad moments. 

A sunburnt summer flower

I consider myself a summer flower on account of being born right in the middle of summers on May 5. Fiery summers making me feel like a sunburnt summer flower. But a little astrological fact sooths with its cool brace. It was the Budh Purnima day when I arrived for my current innings on earth.

Here I’m basking—sedate, pensive and sensitive—in the solitude of pale fallen leaves, sunburnt roses and some odd butterflies still darting about on this late morning of my birthday. It’s a small corner, a little peaceful niche in a world embroiled in lawsuits, lamentations and calumnies. Here I sit as a sovereign of my dwarfish, puny world; the sun a bit short of the baking point at this moment of the day.

The curry leaf tree is laden with clusters of little white flowers. These must be very succulent. Hundreds of honeybees are quenching their thirst on them. It creates an opportunity for the red-vented bulbul couple. The two of them stretch out their necks to pluck the bees. Four butterflies are also tastefully busy in enjoying a breakfast. The purple sunbird couple looks somewhat irritated at the nectar-sucking pandemonium. They think it’s their prerogative only, so they harangue their witticisms from nearby branches. It’s a buzzing, delighted, entranced little world at the cusp of gastronomical delight; a world with its refractory charm standing wholly for me with its indispensable fidelity.

The same tree bears the fragile little nest that allows the doves to lay eggs without putting an effort to make a new nest. One more couple lands to inspect. Denounce the dolts for their laziness. I always do whenever various dove couples lay eggs in the same nest, one after the other, only to lose them to cats, crows, gravity, et cetera. Thankfully, the tragedy is postponed for some time. The locality seems busier than their liking. In the stingy hubbub, a few bees bump into them and they flutter away, noisily clapping their wings, the take off somewhat loud for their peaceful nature. The butterflies and the bees also bump into each other. Well, everyone is entitled to participate in the feast on my birthday.

A tailless cat is eating the top ends of some still green blades of grass in a corner in the garden. The old women, they are all gone now, used to say that the cats and dogs eat grass as a medicine when they have stomach issues. He makes plenty of weird faces while taking his medicines, like children make while taking bitter pills. This particular cat is thoroughly wicked. Thinking that his poop will be mistaken as the deeds of my favorite cats, getting me angry enough to give them a hiding, the pettifogger relives himself on the terrace. But I know his tricks. Despite his vices and faults I allow him to take the grass medicine because depriving an indigestion patient of medicines would be a sin.  

Undaunted by the fiery summers, like rose-hearted guys still surviving in a stone-hearted, artless, brawny world, the petunias in five pots, making full use of their favorable circumstances—they have to face direct sun only till eleven in the morning—have enough blossoms to beat the sultry shades of sadness born of a yard littered with dry, pale leaves and a lonely birthday boy among them. Their infallibly pure, sprightly, indomitable, bright smiles wish a very happy birthday, gently offering lolling sympathies; a soothing balm over the burns, cuts and wounds, the result of strange antipathies presented by fate.

It’s a little flowery shrine with a potted tulsi in between: a live shrine with a living goddess with her living bouquet of flowers. They have to do a little less than half-day’s wage to survive. The sun can try to wither the blooms till only a bit past eleven in the morning. Till then they obey the law and bow their heads in reverence to the God of light, waiting for the wall shadow to creep over the edge. The rest of the day is manageable once they are out of the direct onslaught of the fiery streams. The tulsi reinforces her holy status each day as a sesame oil lamp is lit under it at the evening twilight. The holy incense smoke adds beautiful smell to the smile of the flowers around the venerable plant. So as good neighbors they share their part of offerings. That makes it a very happy neighborhood. Dozens of petunias of varied colors flash their smiles, beating the hot winds with their colorful spirit.

A lizard stays among these pots and the portion of the wall nearby hidden by the flowers and the pots. It’s her happy world carrying a unanimous and cordial air. Safe also. The fleas and mosquitoes who fall for the flowers end up finishing their journey here. She rarely misses her dinner. The bright oil lamp always has some moth or two, drawn by their passion for the flame, and then it’s the turn of the gecko’s tongue which is equally passionate about jumping at crazy, infatuated moths.

During the day, the life-giving sun tries to soak away all the life donated by it. It’s only the jollity, verve and optimism of the children that brings us back from the lolling lackadaisicalness onto the stage of life in the evenings. Rooftops and terraces are overtaken by the kite-fliers. And irremediably sullen monkeys, in heroic abdication of their foppery, peep over the parapets of the roofs, lost in deep deliberation to find places where there are no kite-fliers. They bear a sullen look, considering it as an infringement on their rights to rascality on the roof-tops.

There are two boys representing two types of kite-fliers in the locality. The one is the kind, his childhood in full bloom, who suddenly picks up a stone and throws it. In the same groove, he loves kite-flying without tail. The dives, ups and downs of a tailless kite present a real chance for fun and frolics. It’s challenging and adventurous. There are flurried notes with forceful, quick pulls and prongs of the cord. The other boy is a well-behaved one. He would just look over a stone on the way and thus maintain the level of happiness as before. He uses a tail for his kite, proportional in length to the speed of the wind. He wants a steady flight. The kite is safe against the playful windy shoves. The holder’s hands are relaxed because not much action is required. The adventurous one then decided to fly his kite in a windstorm. And taking inspiration from the kite-tails of the other guy, he used a forty feet long tail to give his kite a chance at survival in the storm. The windstorm ensures that there is even more excitement and fun with a tail this time. All this seems to be done in celebration of my special day.

Suddenly realizing that I may become a shuddering bystander in the game of life, struggling against the grip of self-denial, chastity and privations, I receive a special treat in the evening. A most welcome one: a few drops of rain in the season of dust-storms and hot loo. The drops feel icy cold and hit the sand to create one of the best smells, the smell of mother earth. The dusty leaves get a bath. It makes everyone very happy. A 100-year-old gypsy woman missed the moment though. She was dusted like the trees around; soiled with a century of age in addition. So her daughter-in-law, once the sudden downpour passes off, puts her on a charpoy by the side of the busy road passing the village, takes off her clothes and gives her an unhurried washing. Nothing special about it, it’s almost as normal as a little boy or girl getting a bath at a public place. A 100-year-old woman is shrunk to the cuteness of a baby. So a baby bath it is, at the most. 

Everybody has an allergy

Farmer Ranbeer drops in the morning. ‘Haven’t met you since many weeks, so came to see you,’ he greets me in my yard. He seems apologetic because he can easily read my mind that is full of thoughts whose summary is that the host doesn’t approve of the guest’s visit and considers it a waste of time. But farmers have thick skins. They don’t get bruised by such subtle hostilities. Theirs is a tough world where something has to be loudly visible and concrete solid to be taken seriously. So my feelings and thoughts are irrelevant and his arrival is supposed to be born of my invitation and his acceptance of the same.

Secluded in the yard corner, far away from the maddening crowd, basking in the soothing gaiety and enormous serenity, I’m reading newspaper. To me he seems a loafer tramping around on a mission to slay all traces of peace from the remotest corners. My face wears gravity even though he carries an affable personage. He is slightly stalled—just a trace of it—by my quirky countenance, and quickly grasps the affectionate strings ever-available in his goodwill for me. He considers it to be a very friendly visit and drags the chair very near, as would do justice to a joyous smalltime prattling between two idle-most people in the world.

His left eye is watery and blood red. Lost in my covert conjectures, I surmised ‘Eye flu!’ It strikes me hard with cold disdain. Eye flu, the harrowing word, boldly italicized upon my once editor’s psyche on the page of my insecurities. Knowledge, apart from being the solution provider to many challenges, is also the cause of many of our problems in the modern-day life. The farmer isn’t bothered much about my unease. Maybe the idlers and loafers suffer the least weight on their brains. The world of knowledge keeps us on the edge. I give him malicious looks. ‘You should take rest and not loaf around,’ I testily tell him, almost rebuke him in fact, my knowledge of the eye flu’s contagiousness giving me anxiety attack.

‘It’s nothing,’ he laughs. It was nothing to his wife as well. Ranbeer had gone to the village chemist for eye-drops for some mild irritation in his eye. He got the drops, came home and settled on a charpoy to receive the eye-drops in his eye from the work-hardened hands of his farmer wife. She like all farming women was thrashed like a hefty heifer during her husband’s prime but now pulls all levers, including ears sometimes, as the hubby grows old and she still retains immense powers. In the Jat community the availability of power in the limbs is the main deciding factor in the game of life. You rule like an egomaniacal king when you have power and strength in your bones. You fall down to slavish level with the passage of strength from your body.

She has retained at least double of his, so she is a formidable and petrifying force now. Haughty, stern and austere, no wonder, she rules the kingdom now. From an earlier avatar of a tyrannical king, he has now fallen to the level of a grizzled old social democrat and she a ruling-by-fist communist autocrat. He has to hope that she soon acquires a weak memory of the past. Or if not, at least listens to the conscientious commotions of her female heart, forgetting all the poignant recalls from the past when the hubby was the king.

On his part, he cannot afford to fall into any misdemeanor born of habit. He has groomed a nice new trait in him: in response to her ravings he gives supplicating, meek looks of a puppy. He is ageing wisely, a kind of melting of the grand discordance (at least on his part) between a husband and a wife, a peeling away of chauvinistic sentimentalism, an ability to keep things normal despite the better half’s chastisements.  

She stares at the brand new medicine vial. She is illiterate but has pictographic memory. Everyone needs such skills to stay alive in this memory-crazy world. Her face turns very serious as if she is busy in solving the most puzzling equation in the mathematical world. She doesn’t open the medicine and carrying a doctor’s mien goes into the store room crammed with agriculture tools, barn equipment and discarded electric gazettes. She returns after five minutes from the dusty-musty place, some cobwebs jewelling her hair.

She is quite perturbed over Ranbeer’s spendthrift ways. She remembers his hard-fisted financial tyranny when he used to be the king. It resulted in her entire life being spent clad in a select few rumpled, worn out salvaar kameej and chunris. ‘It’s the same medicine. See, just same-same! Why waste a new one. There is a bit left in the old one. Use it!’ she commands. She isn’t, even with her pictographic memory, much concerned about the expiry date printed on the medicine. ‘The old medicine was at least five years older than the expiry date. But she has to spend the old one first otherwise our house will break down due to the wasting habit of mine. So in order to finish the old bottle, she drops the medicine throughout the day,’ he laments.

No wonder, his eye is blood red now. But worrying about such matters is not for them. He laughs away the petty talk as if nothing has happened. So it stands proven that worrying is basically a disease of the well-informed or rather too much informed. The farmer with a deep-red eye takes leave, jocosely looking forward to a restful day, leaving me still wondering and apprehensive about the transfer of the possible eye flu in his eyes.

It reminds me of my own episode of red eye and the people running away in office. I worked in the editorial department of a publisher during those days. It was an oral homoeopathic medicine that I was taking at the time. Editorial being a very taxing job for one’s eyes, I usually used some general eye-drops to relieve the eyes of the strain. One day, after a bad day at office and having lost my focus, by mistake I dropped the eye-drops on my tongue. My taste buds complained a bit, a small hint at change of taste, but not much. It was followed by dropping the oral drops in my eye. But the eye singed with pain. I had a blood red eye like Ranbeer. Next day my manager—always strongly explicit with disdain, disgust and aversion—ran away from me, grimacing with repugnance, as if I carried plague. ‘Eye flu, eye flu!’ I could hear him muttering. With my contagion strain I turned infallible and the manager a mere harmless slanderer. My teammates maintained a distance. ‘You should have taken an off. It’s clear-cut eye flu!’ my manager rued. I told them the reason but they laughed and took it as a joke. Keeping their sensitivities in mind I took three days leave. The ever-fighting manager, forever reaching higher and higher to the capricious cusp of his deranged self, temporarily forgetting his inveterate hate, morphed into a kind gentleman, in fact seemed very relieved about avoiding the eye flu pandemic in the office.

Ranbeer leaves but it seems a visitors’ day today. Very soon, Master Randhir, a retired teacher from a neighboring village, arrives and confidently occupies the just-relieved chair. His nose, turned bold purple due to the ceaseless rub of the hanky, is working to the fullest watering capacity. His hanky already sloshed due to his effort to stop the endless stream of water. It’s the nastiest cold, as worse as it can be. This is an apocalypse of pandemics, I shiver. To the hell with Corona-type symptoms! Socializing is very important. Go and live your life, embrace people in bear hugs, especially if you have a running nose. It shows how much you love your fellow humans.

The retired teacher is in his early seventies and hard on hearing. Doing me favors, he draws the chair even nearer. His major activity is wiping his nose all along. Nicely cornered, I resign to my fate, kill my irritation, slaughter my frowns and set out to entertain my guest.

Masterji is a considerate man, understands my feelings regarding pandemics—Corona isn’t too far in memory—and tries to assuage my apprehension. ‘It isn’t bad cold that others will catch. No virus and bacteria. It’s allergy. Nazla-nazla,’ he clarifies. Masterji is a long sufferer of this allergy, the triggering unknown substance lets loose his bronchial and respiratory system now and them, torturing him so much as to turn him on the path of spirituality. I bow down to the godliness in him for he thinks that I’m a great saint in making, despite my eye-rolling denials and even open declarations of my worldly shades, and wants me to cure his tragic allergy.

‘I can fill buckets of water with this tube-well on!’ he ruminates. ‘Santji there must be some cure. I know you can search and get me rid of this evil allergy,’ he looks expectantly. I feel sad for him. I feel sorry that I can hardly help him in this regard. But I can see that it has weighed very heavily on his mind.

‘Masterji, you feel sorry and bitter thinking that you the odd one has been chosen to suffer with this horrible nazla and that makes you feel sorry for yourself. But everyone has got a nazla. Some have the nazla of power, some of wealth, some of lust, of jealousy, of hate. See-see, everyone has got a type of nazla. Sab saale nazla se pareshaan hain. I can’t see even a single person who isn’t suffering from a nazla of his own kind. Go out in the street and spread your arms and shout ‘sabko nazla hai’,’ I spread my arms. Masterji cackles with laughter. He is consoled. He realizes that all of us have our own nazla, our own sufferings of mind, emotions and body. ‘Sabko nazla hai!’ he repeats and laughs as I see him off at the gate.

Just nearby a leery young dog, his tongue hanging out with paroxysm of obscenity, is locked onto an old hag of a bitch. The clumsy fellow seems to be repenting in the grip now and being dragged around—an aftermath of its inexpert endeavor, looking for a way out, its suppliant tongue out in submission. And she, the old, wise, clever and capricious one, has all the time to drag and publicly shame him for his impulsive storm. Aaah the hideous deformity of time—its seconds, minutes, hours (and weeks, months and years in case of humans)—after the love-ravage! The bitter fruits of basic instincts, gratuitously bequeathed by the still higher forces drawing the strings somewhere in the unseen mysteries.

Masterji is piqued for a moment but then regains his jeering spirits. ‘Inn saalo ko bhi nazla hai,’ he roars with laughter. 

The material costs of devotional love

The Russian Hare Rama Hare Krishna follower sincerely loves Krishna and Mathura. She has been here for four years. She has sea-green eyes. But then you need a real-life Krishna in your life also. So she is on Tinder to seek a human manifestation of the divine love. An acquaintance of mine, an enthralled connoisseur of wine and women, is also looking for fresher pastures of love most of the time. They hit a match, exchange numbers and start chatting. He is in the deep blue of love, lust, companionship; name it anything, all these mean just temporary escapades of the modern man to help him run from his restless self. He is expertly pulling at the long strings of his expertise in handling women to his advantage. His words are sweet and slippery like exquisite muslin. 'Female spiritualists in casual low-necked T-shirts are very attractive,' he shares with me, almost water-mouthed. Ambling along the tidal fury of raw passion he is slowly pulling the lines. But these are classy fishes needing still classier baits.

‘Most of the people are chronically materialistic,’ she quips, with a mysterious light emanating from under her shadowy eyelashes during their chatting session. The guy sounds apologetic each time she utters the word ‘materialistic’ because he is always after money and women. ‘I need a MackBook laptop for translating my guru’s teachings into Russian…for larger good,’ she tells him as they seem ready to take on each other, testing each other’s worth at many levels. ‘And I need to go to Thailand for some time to mediate in peace and silence,’ she further elaborates her plan, expecting her sex-obsessed Indian Tinder friend, prominently cherishing a fling with a white woman, to come gallantly forward to spiritually meet the materialistic costs of this ascetic scheme. Well, the material cost of this immaterial wish—the gourmet choices of the stomach prevailing like the shadows of metaphysical hunger of mind—is at least two lakh rupees. The guy beats a hasty retreat. This love of a Krishna lover is too much for him. The immaterial demands of a devotee are too overwhelming for him.

I tried my level best to encourage him to fulfill these little demands of a devotee but he won't listen to me. 'See, I know you are very clever like an old fox. You will even convince me to lose this money with a smile. So it's better not to listen to your sermon,' he quipped and ran away from my sermonizing self.