A sad little story

 Parveen’s left leg is afflicted with polio. Earlier he had a seventy percent invalid card that entitled him for a little pension. Further, there was a possibility of getting a small government job under the disability quota. But at the time of the card’s renewal, the CMO at the district civil hospital was in the foulest of a mood. Was he beaten by his wife on that day? No. He had been publicly shamed by the health minister who suddenly arrived for an inspection of the facility. Having lost his composure and looking for the means to scatter his woes upon those who stood at the mercy of his mood, he looked at Parveen from a new angle, an angle of vendetta, and found him just thirty-five percent disabled. As if angels suddenly materialized and healed Parveen overnight, as if providence was on a pleasure tour and half-cut the poor boy’s bitterness. Parveen thus lost his little pension as well as the slim chance of getting a peon level job in some government office.

Fate seems to have found him an easy target to rob him further. Parveen was doing a job at a warehouse of second-hand books, performing his job very seriously. He was riding pillion with an office colleague when a speeding car hit the bike. He now has a big fracture on his strong right thigh and a rod implanted to support his bone. Sometimes, the fate’s affrighted whimsies take fancy for you and your miseries just pile up. And you will have angry CMOs and speed masters, all safe with their stylish criminalities, spoiling your little world, robbing you of even the little-little pieces of life’s joy. I have seen him trying his level best to be self-standing in life. An honest boy with limping normalcy, a kind of smooth peculiarity. But as of now he is totally dependent upon his family.

The ATM Guard's Igloo

 The temperature is almost 50°C and the heat index is still higher. You can feel the heat creeping into your bones and turn them to ashes. You can say it’s a burning fire almost. The ATM booth has a full blast of air condition. It’s practically a snowy Himalayan cave. The moment you open the glassed door, the greeting gusts of cold welcome you. And you, standing half in fire, half in snow turn a statue for a moment; paradoxes get paraphrased into the quizzical look of your eyes. There is no cash in the machine. Thankfully. The guard has put a ‘No Cash’ board on the machine and is peacefully sleeping. Snoozing serenely in his refrigerator because that’s what it’s as of now. He is safely cocooned inside his ice-pack and outside the blindingly envious loo whimpers and challenges the people to face it. ‘I will burn your eyelashes if you dare to face me!’ it roars. Well, this happens to be one of the few perks of being an ATM guard. One can sleep in a refrigerator when the world is on fire outside and there is no cash in the machine.

The forgotten icecream

 Nevaan’s father has promised him to get ice-cream on the way back from work in the evening. The first day he forgets and promises to get it the next day. The same thing happens the next day but at least he remembers and promises to get it the following day. The same thing gets repeated for three days. On the fourth day, his father, as if at complacency’s cusp, not only forgets to bring the ice-cream, but forgets to verbally renew the promise of bringing it the next day. It means, with the promise gone, he won’t bring it at all. Now this is too much for little Nevaan. His kaleidoscopic dreams shattered, his ballooning robust optimism gone, he is inconsolable and keeps crying for half an hour, face down on the bed and the sheet almost wet with lamentations. His small body is swaddled with waves of sobs cusped with censorious overtones. They have no clue about the reason for such teary outpour, so keep asking why is he crying. Finally he shouts with meaningfully accelerating pain among flooded sobs, ‘I won’t tell! And I won’t eat it even if you bring it!’

Diwali musings

 Pick up a dry leaf and take out the carpenter ant that has got into the toilet seat. I sometimes rescue even house flies and mosquitoes. They will be a nuisance, one may say. But the chance to be a savior is too big a reward for such deterrent considerations. I try to keep my foot on a hold as a beetle crosses, or a slug crawls away, or a frog hops away. I know a tread of caution is for my own benefit. It will save me from a fall sometime in future. If you learn to not walk over insects and beetles on the way, you will surely escape the thorns and potholes of life that come your way. If you can rescue an insect or bug of your dislike from a basket, basin or drain, you are prepared to forgive people. These tiny acts of salvage hone the spirit of sympathy, love and care in you. They blunt the edge of apathy and neglect that sees us turning a blind eye to so many unbecoming things around us, where we can bring a positive change without creating too much turbulence in our lives. It’s better to have a little bit of time to stop and take out a drowning beetle. If not for this, you will hardly try to save a drowning man in future. Goodness is a habit. It can be practiced. The vast workshop of life has so many tiny tables for us to carry out our little experiments. To me rescuing an elephant and saving an ant is more or less the same. That particular savior emotion is the main thing. So watch your step and avoid crushing insects unnecessarily. You gain a lot from it. You learn to be careful and responsible. Most of the times when we think we are helping others, we are in fact helping our own selves.

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The first half of November is supposed to be the best. The winter is opening like a soft bud. The birds sing at their best. It proves it’s the best part of season. A beautiful, fluid mix of balmy cold and warmth. But we have turned it the worst. The metallic haze and toxic smog grips the skies like the steely talons of an eagle strung over the soft fur of a rabbit. The eyes burn. Throats ache. The sip of life, the air, turns a slow dose of death. The north Indian planes look like a huge prison. The sun looks pale and sick-faced as it peeks weakly over the polluted planet. But then even on such a sickly gloomy morning there are thousands of swallows flying in the sky. So many of them! With so many birds, it seems as if everything will be all right. The sky seems to bless the earth through these freely flying birds. It’s the time to plant more trees and flowers. It’s the time to walk a bit slower and do something that will leave the planet worth staying for the coming generation.

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Most of the time our hate for someone is merely an instrument to undo and hide our own guilt about the incidents and happenings which took us to a point of unbridgeable differences with that person. Hate is a very convenient tool. It’s fuelled by anger. With the tools of hate and anger, it’s very easy to put all the blame on someone else for the fallouts. In our own court, the hammer of hate and anger sets our conscience free while holding the other party culpable for all the wrongs that have befallen.

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From the ones who sound most affable to the ones pounding your nerves with obnoxious ferocity, all of us are equally distant from the most presentable best 'truth', simply because there is no absolute 'truth'. The only absolute truth may be that there is no absolute truth. The so called truths are merely flimsy bubbles floating in the sky. So guys glide freely cacooned in the bubble of your truth with only this much caution that you don't crash too often into other's bubbles floating around. This is what good and bad might be all about. Otherwise, this existence does not even care what this hypothetical talk is about the absolutes, sin, piousness, etc., etc.

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The utmost exciting and the most forgivable weakness--Love. If love be thy weakness, let it be. You won't miss being strong.

May Musings

The perch-pole’s length has been increasing as the temperature rose in May. It’s a very high, lofty platform for the white pigeons to enjoy the lower world from a higher platform. These are docile, domesticated pigeons with clipped wings. They fly with a lot of flutter, out of habit, the birdie habit to fly, and land on their little perch point after a few sorties in the sky. The struggling flight carrying faint rebelling undertones as the languidly looming horizons cajole with the prospects of free flights. But the attitude of gratitude for the owner is strong enough to quell the spirit of freedom. They land on their little open cage. Domestication piles up habits, loads of habits in fact. The roots blended with a sense of uprootedness; the sweetened taste of petty vagaries. It gives a sadistic penchant for taming punctualities. Out of sheer habit the pigeons sit on their high open platform in the merciless noontime heat, even though there are shady trees around. The boy should fix a shelter box on the open, flat board which the pigeons consider their home. Otherwise the sun may roast the pigeons and the eagle will arrive to enjoy roasted meat. Why persist with the habits that give you sunstroke or even roast you alive, I wonder.

Not much bothered about the white pigeons getting roasted alive under merciless noontime sun, the parijat shows new leaf shoots. As if apprehending burning fires and the last drop of water getting vaporized at the peak of the hot season, it went into a panic mode and in mad frenzy to dodge the death’s dragnet shed its leaves that dropped almost endlessly. The garden bore a sad autumnal look. So many hardy big dry leaves as would make a little mound. From its luxuriant buxom look it turned into a skeletal sadhu doing penance in the Himalayas; a lean and fragile monk with swordfish spirit. I would term it as stoic detachment to green foliage. If it gets too attached to the luxuriant canopy, it will lose so much water to even die and unable to hold its seeds. Nature is unsparing. It demands sacrifices. Each thing, plant, tree, grass blade, stone piece, everything in fact has to bow down to the laws to retain its shape. As a concerned and caring parental entity, the bare skeletal tree carried its dry pods of seeds, so many of them that even though each gust of wind scatters hundreds every minute, still many will be left to keep its lineage alive.

It’s the young lad of a tree carrying its palpable adolescence. And with the new shoots coming up you can enjoy reading newspaper under it in the morning. New shoots carry a unique, fresh aura. After its tapasya, the young tree seems in excitement of love and procreation. Its dark brown button-shaped seed pods fall in a drizzle—an orgasmic surrender; a sort of foreplay among the hot sighing winds. Then the monsoon will arrive like a bride with its large-hearted surrendering overreach and conceive its offsprings. A mother with springing affections. A fresh enthusiast of new life. A carrier of entrepreneurial dynamism. The seeds will come to life. Some seeds fall on my head also. Misplaced enthusiasm, at the most. Maybe the tree wants to take roots in our minds from where mother nature’s concern has been severally uprooted. Or maybe the tree is playing some mischief by hitting me on the head.

Then the plumber-cum-labor man arrives to fix a broken tap. Regular work with shovels, spades, pick-axes and pipe-wrenches bestows muscular arms and strong hands. There is an imposing crocodile tattoo on his hand. I complement him for it, telling him that the great crocodile looks suitable for his work-hardened limbs. He is slightly embarrassed and tells me, ‘Well, I asked the tattoo maker at the fair to draw Shiva but he was high on afeem and Shiva came out like this!’ I stare deeply and try to find out any semblance of the great God’s supreme stature in a godly niche in the skin graphic. There is hardly any trace of Him here. But with the mind’s intensely intellectual excretions one can spot, or even innovate in imagination, eccentrically methodical designs and patterns conveying meanings of other dimensions, just like abstract art, to justify whose strangest lines and shapes one has to have a huge mind to spin out new meanings or even blindly babbling speculations. So it looks a masterpiece of abstract painting. I get inclined to view it as the modern art form but my reverie is broken by the bearer’s gentle tone. ‘It was sinful on his part, so I gave him a hard beating. But he was very professional at least in digging deep. The ink is so thick and deep that it won’t go away however hard I rub,’ he clarifies the entire story behind the tattoo. Indeed the high-on-substance tattoo maker has left a well-rooted heritage on this man’s skin. His free-flowing hands drawing a plenteously aesthetic design as per the diktats of a free spirit, carrying soft blends of awareness and unawareness.