Summer shades in the countryside

 

Nevaan’s birthday falls in the last week of April. Even the mornings look tired due to the heat. And the charmless air almost guilty over the village. Then a triumphant sound creeps across the sullen sky. Six sarus cranes, three pairs, three husbands and three wives, announce their flight path over the village. They go in a line, in a slightly curving arc of faith. I reckon they extended their stay in the plains by three weeks or so. Places have a tendency to turn homes, they have their own pull, and develop a nostalgia before we realize. But then the heat here will almost scorch their wings. So they have to leave. The manner of their call and the conscious arrangement show that they are up for a journey to spend the summers in the Himalayas among forests, valleys and lakes.

They hold the baton of grace, faithfulness, unconditional love and marital fidelity in a world where love is getting brittle day by day, thinning like air, vaporize like water from the desert sands and fall like pale, dead autumn leaves. Their call carry excitement about starting on a new journey. And for those who might care to listen, it’s a full-of-love, best-wishing goodbye. Happy be thy journey and return safe for your winter stay!

The crane spirit is for elegance, rest and pause. They are married for life and never allow their love to go stale. They keep the flicker alive through beautiful courting displays, dancing, calling, bending necks. It’s a lovely mating dance. For matrimonial harmony, both sexes take up responsibilities in building nests and rearing the kids. A crane couple involves two happy soulmates seeped in their little world. Both of them happily undertake long risky journeys over mountains, deserts and forests. I really love the fact that they are the tallest flying birds because the sarus stands almost six feet tall.

The rich people may have the ACs to deal with the heat. But the poor people have to go out in the burning heat to earn a living. However, sometimes mother nature does them a favor. The western disturbances work as a mass atmospheric cooler for the burning north Indian plains. They bring down the temperature by a few degrees through cloudy skies, sporadic rains, scattered hailstorms and cool winds. The sun that could have burned the poor man’s skin turns a bit kinder. But then the rains and hailstorms destroy wheat and mustard crops as well. It being the harvesting season. It’s never a win-win situation for all of us. Mother nature is helpless in this.

The trees know the implications of climate change. The trees in my little garden have been dropping their burden, fearing a famine, like the crew on a boat flooded with water throws away its cargo. Every gust of wind brings down showers of rustling dead leaves. The trees stand bare, with open declaration, ‘See, we don’t have anything left now.’ Only the guava tree is as green as before. The flowers have vanished. Only peregrina has its red clusters of little flowers where the honeybees hover around in competition with a few butterflies and the purple sunbird couple to get the still left out nectar. It’s like various types of African animals gathering around a little mossy puddle of water at the peak of the dry season.

The nomadic chain has been broken, its pieces flying apart, by the crude hammer of modernity. The big caravans are gone, just like the joint families broken up to form tiny nuclear families with their bigger-than-ever woes and pains. The long lines of banjara carts slowly lurching along the roads and dusty paths are gone. Now we have a customized motorized tricycle with a bike torso and an open carrier body pulled at the back. The banjara riding the vehicle and his wife, children and provisions heaped at the back, going a bit more speedily, but clueless as to what to do, how to do, how to fit in a world that has changed beyond their imagination. One needs roots to survive in a hurrying world, otherwise it will shake you like a furious storm. They now seem to look for a suitable point to pitch the tent forever. And this banjara woman sat on a desert cooler in the mechanized tricycle’s cargo hold. Of course, you need to stay cool to beat the heat.

The Naxalites blew up a police vehicle in Dantewada forest of Chhattisgarh. Eleven soldiers, including the civilian driver of the rented mini-bus, died in the explosion. Another driver, driving the rented Scorpio SUV, can pay thanks to his tobacco-chewing habit for survival in the incident. Actually his vehicle was in the front and was on the way to run over the IED implanted on the road. But a split second decision to take a pinch of tobacco, thus slowing down, allowing the mini-van to overtake him and meet death instead of his vehicle, gave him and others in the vehicle a lease of life. Well, he and the jawans in his vehicle were lucky, just like those in the mini-van were unlucky in overtaking.

A sad tree

 

The mourning tree...it was once a huge, luxurious semal (silk cotton tree). In March and April it used to smile with big, red, luscious flowers. Then the sand mafia came. Greedy for the river silt piled around this tree, they scraped away earth, cutting its big roots. The tree survived somehow. But it hasn't smiled even once, not a single flower, during the last two years. And now when the spring is at its peak and flowers are abloom on uninjured semal trees, this sad tree stands without even a single leaf, forget about flowers. It's its way of showing its mourning over the loss. It still greets me with its sad barren silhouette. I feel its pain. With a little extension of our sensitivity, we can feel and be aware of the joys and sorrows of the non human component of life on earth. The flowers are their smiles. The sap oozing from the cuts on the bark are their tears. Their luxurious canopy swaying to the winds is their dance. The ripe fruits, shadow and fresh air is their kindness. It's all there. We just need to be aware of it.

I put my hand on its hard bark. A handshake. An acknowledgment of we humans' rapacious ways. I feel sorry from the side of the humans. 'Don't worry, I am trying to smile with flowers and one fine day I will welcome you on this solitary trail with my flowers!' it seems to say. Well, best of luck you fighter tree. You are injured but big and strong. Keep your faith alive. Let's hope for the best during the next spring. And till then our handshake and greetings continue...in my heart and your wooden tissues, let this friendship stay fresh!. It's a lovely friendship and I'm honoured to be your friend, privileged to feel your pain and would be joyous in sharing your spring smiles.

Barsana Holi

 

Those were the days when I still felt young enough to experiment with life. Barsana Holi is very popular as we all know. A friend arrived with his car and proposed a visit to enjoy the famed Holi at Radha Rani’s village. I agreed to the plan. Free offers are a big weakness with we Indians. The Holi was nice and colorful as can be expected. The revelers were dancing in the pillared open-air pavilion of Radha Rani temple standing on a rocky hill overlooking the sleepy village doused in a riot of colors.

A couple of trans-genders, elegantly decked up in a damsel’s sixteen-shringaar (maybe they tried to look like apsaras and seemed to succeed about one quarter in the mission), were dancing with lots of verve around their slim hips. They locked their fingers into ours and had a nice swirl dance. Then they sweetly proposed that we should stay overnight. We said a firm NO which they accepted gracefully. But then a middle-aged well-fed roundly built Pandit smartly filled the vacuum. He nicely coupled with one of them and danced a sensuous, colorful dance of celebration and desires. After the moves as their heads came near I heard him muttering the phrases of copulating proposal which his dancing partner happily accepted.

You feel you have a right to take bhang on Holi. Totally new to the experience, I gulped down a full ball of bhang. My mischievous friend fed me sweet sugar-drenched halwa after that. They say that the bhang’s effect gets multiplied after taking sweets. Soon I find myself in a dreamy, jerking world. I start explaining to him the difference between the languorous liquor nasha and the one resulting from bhang.

‘Liquor gives you a slowly rising and ebbing high. A kind of gentle wave builds up that takes you in its pleasant undulations. You feel slow undulations, an evenly slowed time, a kind of even and leveled forgetfulness, a type of gentle plateau. Its graphical presentation would be evenly poised wavy patterns that go onto flatten, their crests coming down and reach the horizontal line as you pass out,’ I tell him. ‘Bhang on the other hand gives it in jerks. Not waves but pointed ups and downs like on an ECG graph. You will have a straight line and then it will suddenly fluctuate to accelerate out of proportion. Suppose you are sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle plying on the road and you see a car coming from the front. One time you will see it small and drawn back almost a kilometer and then suddenly it would flash big right in front. In a flashy jerk,’ I elaborated.

I was convinced of the validity of my philosophical analysis of the difference. I was intellectualizing and laughing. Then the ill-famed effects of bhang surfaced. I felt my heart pounding in my chest. I heard hammers striking and tonking in my head. I was sure that it was just moments away from exploding. I was scared that the heart would come out bursting through the chest. All celebratory color went off my face. A pre-death feeling, I was sure!

‘I’m going to die! And I mean it!’ I declared to my friend. He was out of his wits. ‘Should I take you to a hospital?’ he said, his body shaking with fear. But I didn’t want to die as a bhang-drunk man on a hospital bed. ‘Take me to my place. I’ll die in my room. Let them think I died in sleep,’ I was bothered about my clean-boy image and thought of leaving with a clean reputation, not that of a substance-abused soul.

Poor guy, totally out of wits, he sped at top speed, completely sweat-laden with anxiety and panic. All along the way I kept reminding him that I won’t survive and death was certain. It was crazily scary and death seemed so near. Thankfully I didn’t cry otherwise it would have robbed me of reputation in his eyes for being a death-scared sissy. The clocks of death were tickling and thumping in my brain and the chest. The head felt like it will blast and scatter into hundred pieces. I would count the experience as staring at death from very close quarters.

We reached my place in the wee hours. My head was exploding with pain. I devised a nice mechanism of standing near a wall and slowly bump my head to rattle the tight claws of pain in the skull. The poor guy nearly fainted thinking that he was witnessing my death pangs. Then I vomited. The bitterest and the vulgar most thing I have ever puked in my life. I think I threw out death itself from my portals. Slowly the dark angels of death departed empty handed. I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was the most beautiful of a sunny day. The birds, the fresh air, the trees, and most importantly my breathing, my life! What else you need?! Why the hell we complain as long as we are breathing?! It felt the biggest blessing to be just alive on a lovely spring day. It felt like I will never have any grudges anymore in life.

The art of surrender

 

Two events, roughly 125 years apart, bear witness to the validity of the principle of surrender, of unqualified, ageless surrender to be precise. It bears fruits. The first instance dates back to 1890s. Of all the so-called low caste communities, dhanaks are known to be the least submissive to the dominant landholding castes. They are dark-skinned proud natives who have the guts and foul words to rattle the eardrums. They also possess enough stick-wielding prowess to match the previous two traits. They don’t carry social power and standing, but they hold their head quite high and can definitely quarrel when faced with casteist slur.

In the 1890s, Magni was a popular outlaw from their community. He and his group of vagabonds robbed the travellers crossing the scrub forest around the village at night. Confident of his dark-time profession, he carried extra air in his chest during the day. But then pride hath a fall.

A farmer from the village bought a beautiful mare from a fair. The majestic animal instantly caught Magni’s fancy. The barn was within the almost fortified compound of the haveli. It was impossible to enter once the main big copper-spiked wooden door closed for the night. The walls of lakhori bricks worked in lime were too strong to be broken except by hours of hammering.

Magni but had a better plan than launching a loud attack on the walls. He sneaked into the haveli around twilight and hid himself in an upper wall alcove used for storing dung-cakes and farm equipment. There he sat hidden casting greedy looks at the mare below. Unluckily someone saw him. Very silently a group of rotund farmers wielding lathis and pharsas gathered, closed the gate and peacefully stood below the hiding place. There comes down Magni with the highest probability of being lynched to death.

However, Magni was a smart guy also. He knew humility and surrender has its value. They saw him coming down with his buffalo leather juti held in his mouth as the humblest mark of surrender. It qualifies as the highest degree of self-court-marshal. There he goes, keeping his eyes on the ground, shoulder slouched to a big degree, his muddy leather footwear in his mouth, walking with the warm and majestic ease of ceasefire and surrender. Such unqualified surrender deserves consideration even among the work-brute farmers. They let him pass. But after this episode he had to keep a little less air in his chest as he walked in the village streets.

The second incident dates back a few years. There was a huge bully dog in the village. A misuser of the canine power, I would say. It was so dismissive of the lesser canine mortals. It would intimidate women and children, ate the smaller dogs’ chapattis and stole their girlfriends by force. All in all, it wasn’t popular neither among the humans nor the canine folks of the village. It had been to our yard as well. In fact it toppled over the pots containing dalia poultice for the newly calved buffalo. We ran after it but it would escape.

Then one fine day, on yet other mission of mischief, it got trapped because it couldn’t escape in time. We were successful in closing the yard gate before it could escape. Within minutes a few stick-yielding brats arrived to help us settle the score. They had their own grudges against the dog bully. So half a dozen nice sticks waited to dispense justice. Ours is a society that believes in justice, especially if we are in the authority or position to bring it about.

Had the dog growled or reacted in some angry way meaning a fight back it would surely have meant getting lynched to death. Had it yelped in piteous pleading tones, it would have meant a few severe, maybe, bone-breaking strikes. But it was a clever dog, maybe even wise, as smart as Magni was. Like him it knew the value of utmost unqualified surrender. It sat on the ground, brought out its tongue in supplication and hideous abjection and gave such a marvelous show of shivering that the attacking party was left spellbound, almost hypnotized by the show of perfect surrender.

I think had it shivered just a bit more, we would have heard its skeleton creaking and clanking. We were mesmerized. We forgot that we had sticks in our hands. We saw the waters of his surrender dribbling out from under him. He performed the surrendering feat for full five minutes. Yours truly having some poetic bent of mind or rather heart, became the first one to accept the terms of surrender and even the rough farmers agreed.

The surrender papers presented such a big victory that it wasn’t possible to ignore them. I opened the gate. There it went with its tail jutted against its balls, tongue out and body shivering. A slow march to defeat it was. I hope it wasn’t Magni repeating his surrender in a canine avatar.

Bowing with respect to the past

 

Do the past’s facts, assumptions, beliefs and theories are worthy of being put into the dustbin in the light of new emerging facts and theories? Normally we think so. But we shouldn’t forget that the past was once as relevant and useful as the present is now. The past is the building block of the present.

We lived in the caves once and hardly knew anything beyond the raw struggle for survival in the forest. We used that little platform comprising tiny bits of knowledge to construct a small stage. We didn’t even know the shape, size and basics about our planet. Were we wrong? No. That was simply our reality in the past. It was our truth at that time.

The Rig Vedic Indian sages had hardly any idea about what lay beyond the ocean. Did that stop them from evolving an elaborate system of human thought which still holds relevance for us in this modern age? Till a few centuries back we thought the sun was revolving around the earth. Did that stop us from using natural forces, resources, and contriving laws and regulations to shape fantastic civilizations? It didn’t.

There is just growth and evolution. From simpler to more sophisticated. Or maybe it isn’t even complexity. It just is—a transient stage in the stream of ever-unfolding dynamics. Truth is no static entity or something absolute. The only Truth that we may assume is a certain pattern in evolution and emergence of phenomena at any given point. Like a little plant grows in a forest. Its growth and survival are bound by the infinite possibilities of cause and effect. Cause and effect are a sequence in happening. But the trigger points for the cause-effect to take place can be infinite.