A little pilgrimage

 

Being a bookish guy, I’m not much into physical activities. But walking on pilgrimages seems to add a different dimension of physicality and I’m able to surpass my individual capacity and surprise my own humble self sometimes.

I share a special bond with my brother and we are here at Rishikesh at the yearend to say a bye of gratitude to the year going out and greet the new year with hope in the lap of mother Ganga. We bathe in Maa Gnaga’s holy waters early in the morning and start on the foot track to the holy shrine of Baba Neekanth. The track passes through verdant Shivalik hills of Rajaji National Park. It’s fresh and rejuvenating. At the grossest level it’s a nice exercise for one’s legs and lungs. For those who are looking for the nutrition of their souls, the names of Maa Ganga and Baba Neelkanth do the task naturally.

We go on day one and return pretty joyfully in the evening. The next day we again take an early morning bath in the holy water of Ganga Maa and suddenly feel so reinvigorated as to start walking again to the holy shrine. The same happens on the third day. And before we realize we have walked to the holy place on three consecutive days. Our schedule didn’t allow us to continue the walk on the fourth day, otherwise I believe I would have continued for maybe a week at least. Bathing in Maa Ganga’s sacred waters cleanses one of age-old sins. So getting one free of tiredness and fatigue is a mere cakewalk for the divine waters.

Each day, an old woman would greet us from a distance during the last stretch of the track to Baba Neelkanth. This is the offseason for the pilgrimage and very few people hit the track. She peers into the distances to spot some odd pilgrim. She is an old woman beaten by poverty, age, circumstances. Almost beaten by life and its leela, she has a pleading voice. It strikes you. Her helplessness and disadvantaged situation acting like a speed-bump, pulling at your conscience, forcing you to slow down, look at her. And that sometimes forces a few pilgrims to take out a coin or a ten-rupee note and offer it to her.

On the way up, the first day, we have given her ten rupees. She would continue showering blessings at your back as you walk away. I heard her till the next bend and waved and looked back a few times. On the way back, she again accosts us as fresh pilgrims. ‘Tai, you can see I know. We already met on the way up!’ I laugh. ‘Yes son, I know. But beta I have to ask from you even on the way down because I have collected too little money,’ she tells us very honestly. We give her a little money again.

It gets repeated on the second day as well. Somehow I felt very easy with her and talked and joked and she laughed. On the third day, December 31, we decide to give her hundred rupees as a new year gift. And what does a tiny currency note mean as a gift if you don’t sit by that person and have a word of empathy and kindness? So today we sit by her and offer her the gift money.

Then the spontaneity of those somber, kind, holy moments created a simple reality of human-to-human connect. Its real significance would strike me later and it does even now with a powerful effect. As we held her hands and offered her the new year gift with kind words of happiness and joy in the new year, the check-dam of her age-old emotions burst out. She started crying. These were the tears of pain, happiness, suffering, hope. All mixed in one. She seemed a little baby crying for affection, for sympathetic human touch. My brother is a spiritualist in practice. I have a very high regard for his genuine values that he keeps on the practical platform of life. But what he does now even stumps me. I see him putting both his hands on her head, affectionately covering her head. He touches her like a father, like a son, almost like a god.

Her lifelong pains melt. She flows. She cries profusely. I have no doubt that ours happens to be the first human touch of love, respect and dignity in her entire life. Her soul felt it. Asa poor begging woman, the best she can expect from the people is some charity money even from the kindest of souls. I felt she wasn’t prepared for this warm, genuine human touch. The way she gave into it seemed as if it was her first experience that made her realize she was also a human being. She is also something above and beyond a beggar. I know there are people who would throw a thick wad of money even without taking care to notice how did she look. But will that enrich her soul the way this touch did?

We move onto the holy shrine of Lord Neelkanth. She is still crying with love and gratitude for that human touch and we can hear her blessings till the next turn. On the way back, I can feel that she is peering into the distance to see us. As we reach her she greets us with a cheerful demeanor and smiles. As we sit by her to have some more chat, the sweetest fruits of human touch and kind words drop like a blessing on us. She opens her soiled, torn cloth bag and takes out the treasure of human love. We get the best new year gifts by a devi. In our absence, she had hastened to a nearby path-side tea seller and bought gifts for us. She gives us our gifts like a kindest mother. It’s a packet of Kurkure crunchies and a small packet of biscuits. We are the richest people in the world. I’m not a fan of crunchies but this one I would relish like a little kid. After all it’s a gift by a mother.

Did our few ten-rupee notes and one one-hundred note open this lottery of human affection? No. Money is too small to buy human empathy and love. It was the human touch and kind words. Touch the closed stony gates of a poor human and see what treasures topple out, the treasures that would have withered and died unseen if not for your soft touch.

We feel so indebted for the priceless gift that we offer her some more money and she takes it with confidence and faith like a mother receives her well-deserved share from her sons. She is very happy and points to her tattered sari and says she will buy a new one with this money.

As we get up to go and express our hope to see her again sometime in the new year, she starts crying again and says who knows she may not be alive by that time. Through tears she says that her life might be over before we come again on this path. I can feel that she would very much like to meet us—for that human touch. Thankfully there are enough kind souls who would at least give a bit of money which is also necessary for survival in this world. But how I wish there were more people who provide human touch as well, a touch that reminds a poor person that she also is a human being.

We moved slowly on our path, her blessings showering like rose petals from behind. It was a sad feeling, somehow; leaving someone behind with sad tears—even if these are of gratitude and love—is too much for a poetic man like me. I looked back a few times and waved and she waved in reply. At the bend on the path I turned again, had a glimpse of her waving hand, heard a feeble reverberation of her blessings and moved on with the hope that she will be there when I return sometime in future.

An old farmer

 

Tau Hoshiyar Singh 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 available 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 the living 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 the 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. 

Life lessons by a little angel

 

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 craves 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.

Furthermore, 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.

A drop of love on my table

 

The houseflies go gloatingly nibbling at your peace. You are helpless and watch wrathfully, nursing animosity. To rub salt on your wounds they land on your face, the representative of your worldly identity. That seems like vandalizing the holy altar of your existence by stomping their dirty feet on your skin. You turn taut with attention; muster up all determination to be at your quickest best. Then you take a ferocious swipe. You hurl all agility stored in your cells. But the houseflies are always quicker than the best of your shots. They escape unharmed. In fact you have a high risk of pulling some muscle due to the sudden jerk to your limbs.

They doze past your swatting newspaper or any other weapon you have at hand. They buzz away with elegant novelty in the art of escaping. And with a sneering, bantering buzz again land on your skin, to itch your frustration again. This behavior is in close proximity with making a mockery of your sense of being a human, the supreme species on the earth. Over a period of time, you settle for mild reconciliation and finally sign armistice from your side.

Out of the thousands of strikes and swipes, effected with crouching hate and anger, I have hardly bruised even a wing in my confrontation with the houseflies. But this day it was a golden chance to strike with ravenous glee and kill two foes in one little strike, and undo all the humiliating hops of yore. But there are moments when such an act would sound full of revulsion and, more seriously, dishonorable.

A housefly pair is making love on my table. The fiery flakes of my revengeful self turn to cool showers of curiosity. I’m stopped from sledge-hammering this stupefying dream of these two tiny insects. At this tiny point in space-time fabric, a little episode of sensuous and voluptuous frequencies is unfolding with surrendering grace. I’m reading my morning newspaper. I turn pages. I move. I shift, sigh, yawn and finally hum an uncouth Haryanvi ragini about a farmer’s love, which is basically an animalistic lust. I’m gloating over them like a shameless peeping tom. They are just a couple of feet away. They are oblivious to any kind of danger today. Aha, love’s animated, flattering tones! All the force of fear and survival now focused on giving a pleasurable crescendo—to heave their species onwards from their end. I take my illegal prying into their private matter even further and start taking their pictures. My mobile is just inches away from them. It seems a bold couple. They aren’t shy of getting filmed in their moments of deep intimacy.

Initiated by the male by striking or jumping into the female (like a typical male of any other species), their lovemaking can last 30-120 minutes. Well, it can give a big complex to most of we humans. Mating comes quite naturally to most of the species on the earth. But to the human mind it comes as a complex ritual. The male houseflies use pheromones (produced by the females) to detect a female by colliding with them mid-air or ground striking. The drone tries to force open her wings. If she accepts his advances, she vibrates her wings to make a buzzing sound. Copulation begins, as it does now on my table. They must have had a very heavy breakfast prior to this as fly-mating takes a lot of energy and they need their bellies full before the ritual of procreation.

The drone fertilizes the female eggs. She then lays eggs in a filthy, warm, moist place. From my table she will go and fly to lay eggs on feces and filth a day after. The eggs will take a day to hatch. The larvae (maggots) will bury in filth and an adult fly will emerge from the pupa. In five to six batches over 3-4 days a housefly lays around 500 eggs in its lifetime of 15-30 days.

I have the choice to allow the rationality of mind—that these are carriers of diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and worms—to stifle the poetic romanticism of lovemaking insects, and squash them down with a newspaper strike. If I do this, I can easily close-up an entire branch of houseflies. It will wind up the new pathways for 500 new houseflies in a week, which would have ended up starting new chain reactions of 500 further houseflies from those previous ones, and onwards similarly. That means I would stop the evolution of millions of houseflies from this end. The rationality of the human mind would encourage one to stop at least one door to the proliferation of these germ-spreading insects.

But is there anything in nature that has not its benefits? Houseflies are waste decomposers and eat poo. A single tiny larva eats about half gram of organic matter in a day. Beyond the side issues of disease transmission, hygiene and sanitation practices, mother nature produces them to decompose the natural and human-produced organic waste including feces and carcasses. There are houseflies because there is excess of organic matter that hasn’t been suitably and properly managed. That opens the breeding potential for these opportunistic feeders. They lap up the putrefying sap with their sponging mouthparts. Moreover, their pathogenic immunity can be studied to help us understand the causes and factors of immunity to help us devise similar medical defense guards for the humans also. So in the scheme of mother nature it’s not clear whether stopping this particular point of evolution would be beneficiary or disadvantageous in the ultimate sense.

I think instead of trying to kill a pair of lovemaking houseflies, I should try to properly manage the organic waste around me, at least on my premises. That seems like a real solution—an effort to remove the cause instead of merely tempering with the effects. Helped by the self-approval of poetic romance, I strengthen my moral fortification and allow the fly couple their moments of surrender to the energetic throng of procreation. They are not concerned about my choice. They take their time, oblivious to my shuffling and flicking newspaper.

The drone then takes off after many prolonged minutes of joyride on the rollercoaster of creation. He has played his limited part in the process. The female has a bigger role to play. Her part has just started. She sniffles around for a couple of more minutes, preens her wings and takes off to look for a suitable filthy site to put her larvae the next day.

Blossoming

 इसको कहते हैं खिलना। इतना खिलना की बिखरना सिर्फ खिलने का अगला, सुखद चरण मात्र बनके रह जाए। पूरा खिलने के बाद बिखरना अर्थहीन हो जाता है। होने और ना होने के द्वंद के परे है संपूर्णता से होना। जियो जीवन भर के, पूरा खिलो। पीड़ारहित बिखरना तभी संभव है जब आपने खिलने में सब कुछ अर्पित कर दिया हो।

और ज्यादा खिला। It happens when you welcome life with the widest bear hug! This is expansion! Then a playful tug of the gentle air will aid in further expansion! A drizzle of ecstasy will occur! The petals will fly away to be a bigger part of a larger dimension! The smile doesn't die. It acquires a broader plain.