Beauty and truth

 

Truth is the mind and beauty is the heart of the ultimate reality, if at all we can have some terminology to comprehend it with our limited senses. And art straddles the tenuous bridge holding truth and beauty together, binding each to the other with almost a synonymous bond. Economics will hardly have any valuation for truth, beauty and art. The beholders of truth, lovers of beauty and practitioners of art may try to monetize their domains, but they mostly fail. Truth, beauty and art stand, somewhere, in the bylanes, in almost secluded corners, away from the mainstream commerce and monetization.

Ghosts floating in Tau's room

 Tau Hoshiyar Sing is nearly hundred and almost blind. Still he is smart and calculating enough to find his way using the bigger landmarks still visible to him and go for walks without tumbling even once. Sadly, he has met a tragedy at the far end of his honest, hard-worked farmer life. He lost his eldest son, Randhir (in his late sixties). Randhir was a very close friend of mine and a genuine well-wisher. So it’s a big loss to me as well.  

I’m sitting with Tau (uncle) in his little room, he lying on his charpoy and me on a chair by his side. Irrespective of age a parent would always feel the pain of losing his/her children. A slight tremor in his voice makes me feel the pain inside him, but otherwise he is as much composed like always, in full acceptance of life. His faith in God is as firm as usual. In my limited experience, I find him one of the rarest people who have such firm, rock-strong faith in the almighty even without going to a temple or worshipping a deity. I have never seen him entering a temple in my life, never performing a ritual, or going on a pilgrimage. But when I talk to him about God, he takes the name of God with such reverence and hundred percent confidence and honesty as to make him a highly spiritual person. And why won’t it be? After all, he has produced crops by irrigating them with his sweat, nurturing them with the nutrients of honesty and integrity. Nobody can point out that he committed even a single mistake that hurt someone’s interests. Godliness dawns in such people of its own. They are spirituality in practice, naturally, by default.

Whenever I meet him I joke that he can hardly see and uses his experience and smart brain to cross the streets and make others believe that he is still able to see and present right there in the race of life. And he always protests that he can ‘see’. So whenever I see him, I stand in front of him, change my voice and ask him to recognize me. Of course he fails to recognize me. When I laugh that see didn’t I tell you that you can see far less than you claim, he would slowly, dismissively say, ‘I had seen you clearly but I forgot your name because my memory is somewhat affected now.’ It means Tau takes the importance of eyes far more than the mind.

So in a light-hearted manner even now I’m prodding at his soft-spot regarding his eyesight. Then Tau is irritated a bit and lowers his guard. He then gives me a clue as to why he is trying to protect the honor of his eyes. ‘My right eye is almost gone. I can see only bigger things hazily with my left eye. So this left eye gives me a slight idea of the world around and allows me to walk. But all that adang-dhadang (honky dory) stuff is visible to my blind right eye,’ Tau tells me. I get straightened up with interest. I know Tau has entered the talk of the paranormal world even though he hardly believes in it. ‘I see much ulta-pulta with this blind eye. Like many people coming and going through the wall, appearing over the ceiling, someone going to the barn to get fodder. They aren’t scary in any sense. All of them well behaved. And always in clothes. The women also hold purdah over their face. Earlier I used to get curious about them. But now I don’t even think about them. They keep doing their business,’ Tau tells me with total indifference.

Well, his age seems to have given him extra-sensory perception. He surely sees disembodied souls floating around. After exiting the body, the individual consciousness still retains two elements out of the five. These are air and ether. So the disembodied souls float around with their two elements, carrying the predominant tendencies and inclinations found in their five-element body before death. Time trapped, they say, they float around to somehow fulfill the karmic balance before taking a body again. They are mere bubbles of air and ether floating around, looking at alive humans with jealousy for having a body and being able to carry out so many things. While in their endeavor to do something, they can just float around and sometimes interfere with the weakened energy systems in certain individuals. But what will they do to a robust farmer like Tau? He is very much comfortable to see them as companions during lonely nights in his little room.

But isn’t this interesting that old Tau sees entities with his blind eye? By the way, he doesn’t believe in ghosts. And what will ghosts do to someone who doesn’t even believe in them. Tau has put all his belief in one super-entity—God. And that too without having to go to a temple, without performing rituals, or going on pilgrimages. He has established it—his faith—right there with a firm farmer’s foot. And the ghosts play around him on lonely nights.

‘You are lucky Tau in that you get a free movie watching with your blind eye,’ I laughed. ‘Hmm!’ he intoned again pretty dismissively.  

Little Maira's small world

Playing with my two-and-half years old niece Maira is great fun. Coming down from the levels of burdensome intellect and going down to meet her innocent joyful being is elevating and uplifting in many ways. It seems going down but it’s going up in a substantial way. The joy up-shoots like anything. One tastes ‘the lightness of being’.   

A child will help you in breaking many barriers that one has built around himself. As a clown with lisping tongue, acting funny and speaking even funnier, you slay stress like a shiny knight in armor.

We are playing on the sunbathed terrace on this balmy winter noon. A flock of Asian Pied Starlings floats lazily in the sky. They chatter and twirl, taking gentle, unhurried turns and loops in their flight. It’s a playful flight, not the one for survival and sustenance. Little Maira goes ecstatic at the joyous sight. And here I’m habitually trying to put more knowledge in her little brain. I point out that these are Asian Pied Starlings. I repeat it many times so that she remembers the name. Then I ask her what is their name, pointing to the flying flock. She is worried for a moment. ‘Birds!’ she shouts and jumps with joy.

Yes, birds they are. The simpler, the better. Why get bothered about sophisticated nomenclature that our intellect-obsessed mind carves so much for? Enjoy the creatures that fly as birds only. Or, in Krishnamurti’s lingo, see them just as ‘life’. Nothing more, just plain life.

Then Maira knows how to go suddenly invisible right in front of your eyes. It’s a child’s magic. All she needs to do is to put her little hands on her eyes and disappear from the world around. It’s her beautiful truth that she too is invisible to others when she cannot see anything around with closed eyes.

How I wish that we too had the belief and conviction of a child in closing our eyes to all that is unbecoming and painful! We can at least try to close our eyes to the painful past and go out of its sight.

The hawker

 

Kala walks, hawks and talks like an expert vegetable seller now. But if you make a list of their success rank, he comes last. There are very serious quality issues about his vegetables. ‘But how will I purchase better quality if you don’t buy these from me, giving me some profit so that with the money I can get the premium class,’ he says. Well, he has a point here and makes some sense in this. To help people to give him more profit he generally overprices his substandard veggies.

He is from the village itself and more successful ones are migrant Biharis who visit from the town. So he brings personal touch in the bargain. He shouts people’s names also after the list of his items. He would shout your name for ten days at a stretch. If you never even say ‘no’ and stay hidden in your house, it doesn’t affect him. The next day he would call you with the same sweetness. He called me for ten days and I kept hiding. Finally my own conscience reproached me and I came out of my hole like a crab from the seaside rocks. I could see his triumph for having drawn me out. He gave me his severely substandard bananas at eighty rupees per dozen. At the city you get very good ones at sixty rupees only. But then you have to pay extra for being specially addressed by your name by a hawker.

His vegetable-hawking song went like this: aloo,  piyaj, tamatar,  bhindi, tori, ghiya, kheera ... suppee (this one for my name Sufi). It sounds like he’s selling suppee along with the vegetables.

Claim your little greatness

 

If you cannot climb Mount Everest, don’t get disappointed. You can try to do your best the way you find it the most suitable for your individual make-up for greatness and grittiness. Just don’t compare your feat with others. Let it stand alone. Like this man who created a world record in his pumpkin boat. An American, named Duane Hansen from Nebraska, travelled 61 km in a pumpkin boat. The gentleman grew a 384 kg pumpkin in his garden. Lesser pumpkins are meant for the kitchen. This one was special, meant to make history.  He cut a part of it to make it a boat and set foot aboard and away they went down the Missouri river and treated himself with the Guinness World Record on his sixtieth birthday.