Skirmish with a centipede

 There must be cockroaches in the house otherwise why would a big rascally centipede enter the house. Well, rural houses usually have many claimants including snakes, rats, lizards, frogs, spiders and many more. Maybe the centipede got angry for not finding a cockroach. An angry x, y, z is almost suicidal, be it humans, reptiles or animals. And if there is an angry creature nearby, you feel the pinch. I felt it. A sharp pain in the left big toe. I'm watching news, sitting on a chair, right leg crossed over the left, leaving the left toe open for attack by the angry centipede. The body seems to be its own master. We overestimate our conscious, voluntarily done efforts to save and preserve it. It knows far more than we think. My conscious part is absorbed in the political slugfest going on the television. But my toe has independent authority to save itself from a big, bullish centipede. I find myself jumping in air. The toe knows how to save itself from a centipede that has decided to bite the hell out of it. The automatic vigorous shake by the toe and its ally foot and their bigger sister leg is enough to undo the centipede's brazen attempt to taste my blood. There is a needle-sharp pain. Thankfully it couldn't pierce the skin.

The calculating and planning human has taken a backseat. It's only the life force in the body responding to the emergency. The left foot is angry as can be understood. O God, the way it counterattacks! It swings into action. And the slippered foot is pounding on the enemy, knowing exactly how rapidly to strike with full force. It's done so swiftly. The centipede is a juicy mass in an instant. It happened so quickly. I'm staring at it as if someone else has done it. Where was I while all this happened? It wasn't me who did it. The body did it of its own volition! Imagine the instinct of self-preservation ingrained in each cell of the body. And still we overthink and burden the mind about  preserving it. The way it strikes at a centipede in retaliation over a bite at its toe proves that it's always on guard against predators both visible and invisible. I think we can allow it more freedom in its functions and not burden its natural operations with our unnecessary worries. 

I'm not sure how a saint would have behaved if attacked by a centipede. I hadn't even stepped over it. It just attacked. Some karmic balance I suppose. Of course the saint's body would have jumped in air at the bite. But I'm not sure about his foot going into retaliation of its own in an instant.

 I don’t think I could have caught it alive because it would have crawled under the hideouts available in plenty. As a normal person staying in society, you have to put a boundary beyond which the parameters of sin cease to operate. You have to take measures to maintain the safety of your place. Maybe that dharma is bigger than killing of poisonous reptiles that sneak into your place. 

Little Maira, my two-year-old niece, is enthused at watching her Tau's body jumping like a monkey. She laughs. Thank God centipedes don't have blood. It's a watery juice of life oozing from the carcass. And a child would always take you out from the complex world of thoughts about sin, nobility, kindness, etc, etc. As I'm staring at the consequences of my foot's retaliatory strike, I hear Maira mumbling,  'Tau isne sussu kar diya.' Means 'uncle it's peed'. And that lightened the moment instantly. Holding my leg, she is staring at the dead insect mired in the watery discharge of its life force. We both laugh then. God would always pardon if you are sharing a laughter with a little kid, even if you are laughing at a dead centipede.

Flood and storms in a little yard

 What do you need when there is fire? Water of course. There was a sandstorm and thundershowers. There is most urgent need for water at this part of the year. But water was furiously splashed by the storm. The trees were shaken, seriously ruffled, jolted painfully in fact. Such storms further elaborate the rustic revelations of the countryside. Many trees fell, branches broke and countless leaves blown away. But they have to bear with it. And they do it with astounding, rosy equity of being, following their tree dharma, always keeping up the intrinsic spirit of resilience. The same storm that breaks their branches, takes away their seeds to far off places for the survival of their species. I have groomed a few marigolds in the shade. Their growth is mediocre considering the time of the season. But their mere survival in this heat makes them special. However faded and small the smile is, it still is a subtle allegory to beauty and truth. When the honeybees buzz over them it seems to put melodic reverberations on the songless lips of the summer. The flowers have been roughly shaken, badly manhandled in fact. However, I’m happy with what remains. I help them in getting to their feet again and smile once more to serve as the symbolic sovereignty of beauty over the beast.

The busy ant-hole in the bricks in the yard comes straight in the line of the flood when it rains. But they don’t complain. Actually the defender groups clump together and plug the opening, saving the cavity from getting flooded. They choke the rushing waters to a trickle, then even that trickle must be gone. I think the little baby ants deep in the cavity won’t even come to know about the storms and floods outside. In the face of a crisis they just do the needful instead of holding dismissing discussions. Many of the frontline workers die in the bargain. But they survive as a colony, not individually. All of them are just ants, not ant x, ant y or ant z. Their little world carries a pleasant innocence about it.

Once the flood is over, it’s the same busy world the next sunny morning. They are calmly consistent in their schedule, storms or no storms. There are crumbs around the gate. The tireless laborers have been carrying their cargo for their warehouse.

The temperature drops sharply on account of the drizzles over the last two days. It’s cool. You feel slightly cold under a simple ceiling fan. Isn’t mother nature amazing? She can help us cope with the most of our modern-day problems, provided we give her some respite from our rampant onslaught. 

Lethal beauty

 Bhupinder loved his taxi pick-ups of senior corporate guys in Gurugram. Less work, refined gentry at the back seat and nice pay. Then Corona struck. The offices closed. The corporate guys and gals worked from home. Even after the removal of the lockdown most of the offices remained closed as people adjusted to a new work culture. So he started ferrying tourists to the scenic Himalayas. It elicited a sense of grand imagination. The edges of his aesthetic sense had been severally whetted by the sparkling vivacity of the mountains. He fell in love with the hills, their wild beauty, their untamed resplendent charm. Vow, sheer Himalayan opulence sprinkled around. With tantalizing butterflies in his stomach, his social media posts were full of lovely hilly delights and sunlit sentiments. Then the posts stopped. I missed those beautiful snapshots and reels of mountains, snows, rivers and forests. I asked him about it. ‘Beauty is dangerous. Attraction is lethal. Gurugram is far better!’ he said philosophically.

It happened this way in Kashmir. A paradise it seemed to him and the Maharastrian family that had hired his car. A happy bunch comprising an old retired patriarch, his son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. They had enough education to express the beauty of the paradise in words. Then the snow-covered road tried to remind that it isn’t all bliss in the paradise as they imagined. There are risks and challenges. The seemingly paradisiacal plot is punctuated with hair-raising hurdles. The vehicle wriggled like an injured snake on the slippery ice. A deep gorge just a few feet away on the side. A paranormal proximity to death. The slightest movement of the tyres looked straight bound for the deep ravine. The soft majestic upholstery of nature turned to spiked coffin where even the corpse would feel the stingy pains of the nails.

‘My lungs dried up with fear!’ I can see plain fear surfacing in his eyes as he tells me now. The family had to get down to push and prod the vehicle through the snow. ‘That hundred meters of drive is far weightier than lakhs of kilometers I have driven in my life!’ he summarizes. The recalling of that short hazardous drive seems a long continuance of sufferings even now. Once out of danger the old man had a heartfelt pan-shot of the paradise and declared to his son, ‘Look at this beauty around. But always remember that beauty is very dangerous, usually lethal, and sometimes even fatal. It will seduce you, entice you, and before you realize you are in the pits.’ Then the old man laid to tatters the foolish blueprint of his son’s beauty-seeking scheme. The old man nailed it with luxurious precision. To all this Bhupinder agrees completely. Even with pollution, silent spring, noisy traffic, smoky bouquets, smoggy brickbats, topsy-turvy sobs and smiles, and wilting and blooming dreams, Gurugram is charming and safe. He is happy to be back in the familiar territory.

The savior of a rocking boat

 It’s a very unhappy family; its reputation gone, the land sold and the grandfather and the father rank one and rank two as liquor-lovers in the locality. It means the four young daughters, their grandmother, their mother and the youngest boy, the only lamp among many females, somehow wade through the waters. The last piece of land has been sold recently. They are now remaking the crumbling house. The family patriarchs’ role—both of them anciently addicted to booze—in the project is to get sloshed early in the morning and then leave a trail of drunken mischief that sometimes takes even the laborers and bricklayers in its wake. Sometimes the work gets stopped as the entire construction staff is seen rolling in the sand after availing the kind patron’s offer.

Getting boozed up is their sole profession and they have a thoroughly academic approach in the field. The house is now nearly complete. The young daughters, their mother, the son and a very contended looking young man are surveying the proceedings from the terrace. It looks a happy family with a caring and helping young man around. He is a chap from the neighborhood only. He usually fills up most of the blank spots of duties and responsibilities left vacant by the all-time drunk patriarchs. He is all help personified, twenty-four by seven kind of schedule. The rumormongers allege that he makes love to one, most probably two, three or all four girls. He is passionately relevant to their struggle of life. His lovemaking, caring, eager, innovative blends mean that the rickety cart of the unfortunate family somehow moves on. The lover and the ladies stand together and somehow try to outwit the ill-fate’s constantly conjuring brain to put one more hurdle in their path. And the adherents of prudishly structured morals make faces, put up taunts, take jibes. But does that help the family in any way. The people would rarely help as a society. They would just spread endlessly beguiling toxicity. The poisoned fingers would meander to scrape the little healing crust forming over their wounds to keep the scars alive. The ostentatiously shallow ethical code, programming a censored and controlled social fabric, looks with hate at these little holes. But seeing them altogether, surveying the fruit of their labor sends positive vibes; a kind of musical metaphor among the sermonizing cacophony and hypocritical jabber around them. He is definitely moonlighting as a savior of the rocking boat. 

A youthful spirit in an ageing body

 

Greying, thinning hair and pepper and salt beard. These are the changes in me that I reflect over. It's just natural to spot the change within and without. But aren't the little saplings of banyan and peepul that I had planted are handsome young trees now? Yes, they are! They are the expression of my youth. They are me. If you ever get bothered about age, do something fresh and young in nature, where you will always see the traces of your youth expressed in those creations. Plant trees, for example. Keep doing it periodically so that you always have some young tree lad youthfully swaying to the breeze as an expression of the youth of your spirit.