One more step, one more breath

All you need to avoid a fall is to take one more step, then another, and then another. You should be bothered about just one more step, forget about miles and more miles, these are meaningless without your step. One more step keeps you the journeyman. It means you are right there, still moving, still fighting. Victory is always alive as long as you are ready to take one more step.

Just like life means one more breath, living means one more step. Don’t fall, take at least one more step, then another, only this much. That’s all you have to do for life and living: one more breath, one more step. And your one more step becomes more significant than the endless miles and still more miles. Your step defines miles not the vice versa. One more breath, one more step. And you retain your chances to reach somewhere, where you surprise yourself the most in your achievement.

The darkness isn’t completely dark as long as the tiniest of a flicker burns steadily, unsteadily in any corner of the cosmos. It holds the chances of light, of a win, of a fight, sometime when conditions are more suitable. Hold your light. Hold your chances of a blaze. It can even be the littlest star shining in your fatigued eyes from the farthest distances across stormy clouds.

Just look back, some small-time remark of appreciation, some grateful bow, some serious acknowledgment, some feeble smile, some tiny reward to the tune of INR 500, some words of praise. Hold them. Cherish them. Pick them up from the dusty corners of your room. They are the treasure. They are the light, they are the breath, they are the one more step. One more step is as important as the complete journey. Or even bigger than that. A tiny flicker of light, lost in the darkish wombs of loss, is as big as the big-bang of primordial light and fire that created this universe.

Long before you conquer the word, learn to be happy with the tiny rewards that hold your dreams in piece, which sustain the life of your goals just like one more breath sustains your life. This tiny word of appreciation will one day turn into a massive trophy, a massive applause, with camera lights flashing around and thousands screaming fans. This little smile on your lips will turn into a broad grin of triumph.

Hold the littles in your life, acknowledge their role like one more step keeps the journey, and one more breath keeps life together.

A mouthful of sand

The summer is at its peak. Hot loo vaporises the beads of sweat before they trickle down. It’s almost noontime, and the sun is moving to its tortuous best. A little sand-swirl swings in its tiny typhonic trajectory. It is shifting towards her. She moves away, but then forgetting herself runs towards the infant asleep among crumpled soiled clothes put in a broad wicker basket under a tree. She has to take up the little one before the sand-swirl passes over it. She stalls the ill omen by a whisker. The baby is safe, she smiles at it.

Her already fatigued body groans with pain as a result of the effort. The child whimpers, she gets a frown, the littlest trace of it, but then effortlessly turns it into a smile. She is a mother after all. No child exists to make them perfectly angry. Under the shade of the mulberry tree, at the corner of the tiny agricultural plot of land, she sings a lullaby. Her song spreads over the red hot, yellowish tomatoes baking under the sun.

She sings well. It sounds an oddity against the background of rough Haryanvi outpours of farming retorts, abuses and crude diction, the famed ruff and gruff of the peasant dialect in this part of northern India. Their behaviour beats even their diction, by the way. The musicality gives a clue that she might not be a Haryanvi. Her looks stamp the truth even further. She is petite, dusky, round faced with delicate features. She has come from far, from a different world altogether.

The child is asleep again after suckling at the drops of her maternal affection. Nothing satisfies a mother more than giving something extra to her child. She now shades her eyes with the palm of her hand to look into the distance. The sandy path leading out of the village lying in the silvery blue distance is forlorn. The heat rising from the sand shakes the horizon like—she recalls it in a flash—the steam swaying over the cauldron on the fire pit at home.

He is nowhere to be seen, her husband, who is expected to bring her food. It was supposed to be a breakfast, but it’s now almost lunch time. She has worked on empty stomach for around five hours, taking just waters to subdue the guttural complaints of her empty stomach.

She isn’t feeling as bad as she should, given her position overall and particularly today. Her five month old son is around, almost as a saviour, casting a lifeful shadow like a tiny fluke of cloud, sheltering her from the fire of hunger, loneliness and self-pity. The breaks from work, to hold him, to sing songs, to breast feed him, to change his cloth diapers, are more comforting than even the rest under the mulberry’s dense shade.

She takes her dose of energy by looking at the sleeping child’s serene face. It’s as happy and calm as the face of the wealthiest person on the earth. After all, all of us are born with the same share of happiness. It’s another matter that it gets robbed off as we grow, making most of us poor and leaving just a few of us rich.  

She takes a few swigs of water. Immediately she feels fresh to start again. The sun is almost firing over the summer tomatoes. She is worried about the loo. It gives sunstrokes. If that happens, it will be worse for her child. She wants to keep herself safe, for it means keeping the child safe. Mother’s feverish milk isn’t good for the child’s health. But then she has to work, there is no option. After all, the daily outputs of 30-40 kg help her in running the household.

It does serve another purpose. Her husband beats her a bit less. It often is like this. Whenever she doesn’t bother him with money to buy the daily necessities to pull the rickety cart of their humble home, he sobers down so much as to only throw abuses, instead of the kicks he delivers in the other scenario. To avoid bothering him, and be lucky with abuses only without the incentive of kicks, she home delivers tomatoes within the village, at a price suitably lesser than the street hawkers, to tilt the deal in her favour.

Despite fighting it out day and night, with sweat, kicks and social scorn, she feels like she doesn’t exist at all. Not here at least. She is invisible, casteless and exists like a dirt-road side bush whom nobody sees particularly. But she exists in memories. Vivid memories of her small hamlet in Jharkhand flash over her lone self. That was the time when she lived. Now she just survives.    

She remembers that world. The flashes from there help her in meeting a present that is completely devoid of her past, and more poignantly, where she can’t think of future beyond the grasp of another day with her infant in her arms and the toddler holding her hand. It’s like dragging an ungrateful life like a stone tied to your foot. You are secretly eager to leave it behind and move on to get better luck in the next birth. Well, belief in rebirth is a big invisible blank cheque. It helps, man. You fill up your figure as you deem fit.

She works for some more time. The hunger has returned. The baby is scowling again. She offers her milk. It is pacified. Again the flashes from a world that was, reach her to provide solace, a replacement for bread: the greenery, the huts, the small hamlet, the stream nearby, the pond, and the tree. The big banyan in particular. She had grown playing hide and seek in its leafy green mess and aerial roots.

That was the world where she really lived. Here it is no life; in fact, there are so many occasions when she even wishes to be dead. But then even death repels those who look forward to it as a benefactor. It prefers to stay cruel and unwanted encroacher into destinies. That’s what makes death what it is.  

She recalls her mother’s wails as they brought father’s body. He had died in a coal mine collapse. To keep the day’s white for his brood of children, he had worked in coal mines near Rajhara town. Sakhui village, Padwa block, Palamu district, Jharkhand, she reads the line in her mind as many times as possible, regularly, lest she forget it.

It contains her roots. One shouldn’t forget one’s roots. She knows it well. That will be even worse than dying and make this living meaningless. She has written it on a paper and put it next to the silver earrings, her most valuable item on her bridal self. She gets worried about it. Has she lost it? That’s her back up because she doesn’t trust her mind now because it’s plagued with so many worries. After all, it is her domicile, her certificate of identity. She will write one more copy, she decides. It’s better to have two. It’s safe.

A quaint hamlet of 600 or so souls. Their faces loom large over her father’s body. Tribals, scheduled castes and Muslims, surviving at the fringes, in blackness, in soot, and die a black death. They had to put a lot of effort to wash the black from the corpse but had to given up, hoping that mother earth won’t differentiate among white, black or brown in offering sleep in its sandy womb. The burial had to be postponed for a few hours. The village head had gone to Daltonganj, the district city about 13 Km away. The coalmine labourer was buried outside the hamlet among the cluster of tiny earth-mounds that served as the cemetery.

She sees her world, vividly, as if she has hyperopia, disabling her to focus on the world nearby and taking her far-seeing eyes to peek into distances.

There is a solitary mango tree in the distance. There were so many around their village. She recalls the huge one by the pond. She had jumped from an overhanging branch into a group of frogs. She chuckles as the scene strike with vivacity.

The cool breeze blowing through Mahua trees sashays over hundreds of kilometres and calms her down and comforts her, listens to her plight, her loneliness. She laughs loudly as she recalls a drunken melee at a marriage in the village. The drink made of Mahua flowers is the poor villagers’ companion in celebration, just as are its wood, flowers and seeds. She closes her eyes and inhales the typical smell of Mahua. She isn’t that far from her home, she feels. The distance though is more than 1,000 km.

She has picked up a little bunch of lady fingers today to sell in the neighbourhood. Ramtorai, she picks up one and holds it. She says it loudly. They call it bhindi here. People cackle with laughter when she calls these ramtorai. It’s almost entertainment to them. Pumpkin is konhra there. But it’s Kaddu here. Cucumber is Kundri there. But it’s Kheera here. She has been learning fast. She wants them to laugh less at her.   

There were oranges and melons along the streams; at least, a thing of delight for the eyes, if not for the stomach. She finds the treeless monotony here intimidating. It’s an agricultural monolith propelled by mechanisation. It’s in the grasp of paddy and wheat monotony. Her husband owns just a little bit of land, so they are into vegetables to survive.

Hunger is terrible now. All efforts to not think of it are futile. Her mouth waters as she recalls the instrument of beating hunger back home.  It strikes her imagination: the corolla of Mahua flowers, a fleshy blossom, pale yellow coloured saviour when they hadn’t almost anything at home. So delicious, fresh, exciting, disagreeable, pungent and sweetish! A riot of sensations, a poor man’s delicacy.

The blossoms are dried under the sun to turn brown to be used later. It gives her goose-bumps as she recalls the blossoms springing from the ends of the smaller tree branches, in bunches from 20 to 30, approaching ripeness, swelling with juice, falling to the ground. And she and other children laying the first claim. She is smiling. The memory has driven away all the pains of life. The gathering of Mahua windfalls. Drying of the flowers on dung-coated earth. Gossips under Mahua tree. The oil-fried Mahua blossoms. The distillation of spirits from the dried blossoms. Well, that was life. None of it exists here.

Remembering the past means remembering herself. Although physically present here, nobody seems to bother that she exists. So she captures a piece of that world in her memory.

Mahua blossoms fall till June when the fruits ripe. We don’t shake the trees or break the fruits. It will not bear fruits if fruits are plucked by hand. We wait for their natural fall. The ripe fruit is about the size of a peach. It has three different skins and has a white nut or kernel inside. The fruit is used in three ways. The two outer skins are both eaten raw and cooked as vegetables. The dried inner skin is ground up into flour. Oil is extracted from the kernel which is used for cooking purposes and for fake-mixing with ghee.

The trail of thought comes clearly. It feels triumphant like a lesson crammed to the hilt in a nursery class. She is thankful to the God that despite the hard living, she has retained the memories of her land.

She recalls the pleasant, acidic taste of hair plum and the pinch of its thorny thicket. They used to jest that it was their apple, the poor man’s apple.

She isn’t new to agriculture. They had a little plot of arable land. Sanai was grown as green manure. The goats really liked it. She remembers the robust crops of maize and bora paddy. She helped her mother in her backbreaking toil in the tiny field. That world in the memories is more substantial than the one around her.                  

Then there was the storm which blew her away from the land of her dreams.

Her mother found it impossible to feed the multiple hungry mouths around her. Her sister’s husband stayed in Delhi, a fact of high esteem for anybody in that part. It doesn’t matter if that person spent nights on the pavement, and worked as a labourer during the day or even begged.

He was visiting their place and offered to help her by getting job to her eldest daughter in Delhi.

“I will make her life,” he proffered with a glint of hope in his yellowish eyes.

So she travelled with him to Delhi, the land of dreams, where everybody had money, even the poorest had big bucks in their wallet. She was scared of the bigness of things around her. Everything was in a mad rush. It was so noisy that she stated crying. The craziness of hurtling things and people held her in a tight grip.

It was a world squeezed in a tight fist by the railway line, between the railway stations of Azadpur and Subzi Mandi. It was so close to the railway line that the stinking air pushed by the trains left a clanking, steely storm day and night. Honking, clattering trains were the biggest facts of life, the facts which defined the world itself. These were tiny hutments and hovels, piled one upon another, encroaching by millimetres into each other, to leave no privacy, no space for anything you can relate to a human being.  Illegally constructed on the railway’s land, it stuck to the polluted, dirty neighbourhood like a leech that won’t go even if crushed to bloodied death. And there it drew the feeble chances of survival for countless unfortunates hiding there.

Everything related to life was in a miniature, except the human misery, which was bigger than the trains passing by. It was a black hole which had sucked the whole world into itself. A human swarm which buzzed mindlessly. There was everything, but it was squeezed so tight that it felt like you are standing in a crowd with no space even to scratch your bum. On top of that the incessant clatter of rails bore into your bones as the vibrations crept into your spine as you lay on the wood board to get what they mean by sleep.

From this hovel, he ran a business of arranging purchased brides, a business born of the ill-famed practice of female infanticide in north India, particularly in Haryana, where patriarchy demands a male heir, even from those who have hardy inherited anything and possess no education and skills of any kind to make a living themselves.

There is a significant chunk of marriageable age vagabonds in Haryana who are not eligible bachelors from any angle. They are from poor families, are almost illiterate, have low or no land-holding, and don’t exist anywhere in social standing. They come with the added qualifications of chronic drinking and smoking. But they need to have a bride; otherwise, their souls won’t rest in peace after death. And here comes the business of selling and purchasing brides.  

The unfortunate girl is taken as a sex slave cum servant by the incompetent drunkard, her best utility being an instrument of giving birth to a male heir so that the father can get moksha or liberation after his death.

She was bought for INR 75,000. A bit overpaid, many said.

That very day, someone in the neighbourhood bought a buffalo for INR 82,000. Quite underpaid, still many more said.

So she is the unpaid servant. About sex we need not say anything. About heirs, she has already started the prospects. But to fulfil the role of a mother to her children, who will have almost no inheritance except poverty and misery, she has to kill her present to salvage another day. Her partner, after all, spoils more than he earns in their shared life.

The baby is crying. She comes back to this current world. The shadows have lengthened. The memories have served her like lunch.

She sees two figures on the sandy path coming from the neighbouring village on the other side. So she had been looking in the wrong direction. He is coming from the other way. And lunch? Forget about that. She looks agitated. Even anger creeps in, strange though, given her petite, humbled, unassuming persona.

Her heart starts beating faster. Her breathing is more laboured. The hours-long toil on an empty stomach hadn’t been able to break her proud spirit. But the visuals, turning from vague signals to specific outlines, leave her jolted. Something seems to have snapped suddenly. She gasps for breath and almost falls down. Taking the baby in her arms she cries. 

“It’s that accursed woman. O he the filthy bag has...how can he?” she wipes her tear tears with the corner of her headcloth.

All the hard work in the field seems wasted. She has been fighting to make a home and he kicks at it with such impunity. Repeatedly. Not that she minds too much about the kicks he gives her after getting drunk. That doesn’t appear more than anything beyond the normal, acceptable routine of life. Even the talks and gossips of he having an affair with this woman is tolerable. But to be seen with her, his little sense of worth gets torn away.

She has been just a plaything to her husband. A purchased bride is more of a servant. Even with his low social standing and almost no reputation, he has been able to lord over her. After all, she is just a purchased bride, bought from the hut of misery like farmers trade in cattle. Her price is lower than a good, rotund, glossy black buffalo. No surprise that she occupies almost no place, no name, no dignity in the village.

Even the street urchins take her in casual stride like they do the beggars roaming around. She moves around totally invisible, like a ghost. People just see through her. The only fact known about her is that she is a lowly-placed Muslim from the poorest of a poor family and has been bought at a price lower than an average buffalo.

He is drunk and walks with a swag: an arrogance which seems to be drawn out of a feeling to insult and wound his wife by taking his torture one notch high, to a point where any woman, no matter if she is the gentlest or most aggressive, will feel the brutal pain of it. He seems to have run out of kicks and abuses. So here is the new method to torture his wife, to give her deeper cuts and injuries.

The two of them are walking on the field divide now, having left the sandy countryside path to reach their patch of land. She can now see the face of her husband’s companion. She feels something more painful than slaps and abuses. The other woman is hardly attractive than her, but is quite robust. Somebody’s wife from the so called low caste in the social hierarchy, she walks proudly with a Jat farmer, even though he is haggard, famished, hawkish, and even qualifies below many men from her own community. But then in a caste society, being born in a dominant caste takes precedence over most of the deficits own is born with and makes himself into after birth.

The other woman in her husband’s life!

Her soul burns. It is more insulting than that barrage of nasty legs and hands, and still fouler tongue. The other woman has a better social standing than hers in being a caste born. More importantly, she is not a purchased bride, bought like a buffalo at some cattle fair. The distance between them decreases. It arrives with more visuals now. The other woman has a proud, jibing, mocking look on her face.

A storm is building up in the otherwise unmoving waters of the little lake of her being. He has already started abusing her even before entering their field of tomatoes. Choicest abuses, redder, hotter than any tomato around. From the heap of rotten tomatoes, sorted out while packing in wicker baskets for selling, he picks up a handful and hurls at her. She turns around and crouches down to save her child from getting hit by the slimy, smelling projectiles. She can feel the rotten juice sticking to her kurta, the soft plops and hard hits.

She runs to lay the child at a safe distance. He expects her to take to her heels and is mocking, shouting at the top of his voice.

“Go and run to the hell hole you came from, you filthy bitch!”   

She has already given him a male heir, two in fact, the other one, almost three now, is with her forever prone to faint mother-in-law at their small, misery-personifying home back in the village. So he feels free. If she vanishes in thin air right now, he will be the happiest person for the riddance. 

To his mild surprise, he sees her coming to them now. “Bah, so she seems eager to get introduced to you.”

The other woman shamelessly titters. There have been historical injustices to her and her community. Any chance to humiliate a Jat’s wife is most welcome.

Her husband and the other woman are standing side by side. She forms the triangle at a distance. The man moves forward, raises his hand and slaps hard. It happens with effortless ease, no cause, no effect. She just stiffens her face, not showing any trace of pain, no tears, no howling. Perhaps this boldness is meant for the other woman, her way of dissent, her small effort in not showing them the effect they want to see. After all, a man strikes a woman to see basically the tell-tale effect of his brutish aggression.

He strikes on the other cheek. There is perfect silence. The hard skin of his fingers goes plop on the soft skin of her cheek. She is unmoved. He is feeling ravaged by anger. This rebelliousness is worse that she hitting back. In the grip of cheap liquor, he pauses as if thinking of devising some newer way to insult and humiliate her.

It fuels the mocking spirits in the other woman. She takes it on from the point her surprised lover has left. She catches the mutineer, who has rebelled not to cry, by her hair and raises the other one to smack her hard on the face. The uprooted girl’s small hand comes to life. Before the plumpy hand adds to her insult, her finger catches the soft, wavy wrist. The attacker’s bangles get crushed, puncturing her skin. There is blood. The injured woman shrieks with disbelieving anger and attacks.

To him it’s comical, the heavy woman attacking the small one. The uprooted woman defends well. He is enjoying the show from a distance.

“Fight, fight you bitches, give each other taste of nice blood,” he hollers and claps in enjoyment.

It’s a full on cat fight. They roll among tomatoes, crush many and get all earth smitten.

“I am his wife you slut!” her hair tangled, tomatoes crushed on her face, she yells with such force that the drunk man loses his disgusting sense of entertainment.

She has pinned down the woman who is almost double her size. The latter is panting, out of breath, her massive breasts heaving with the propensity to topple the small woman off her, beads of sweat surfacing profusely on the coarse skin of her face.

She raises her hand to strike, but it doesn’t come down. Hurting doesn’t come naturally to her. She has just defended herself.

Far away from her native place, with almost no possibility of ever meeting any of her relatives, she knows it takes a bit more to survive apart from the uncomplaining hard work and unquestioning acceptance of slaps and kicks by her husband.

She feels survival needs more. And survive she has to for her children. Perhaps survival requires a bit of honour as well. And honour she has salvaged. It feels better than having a bumper crop and a day without violence at home.

She lets go off the beaten opponent and walks up to her child. The moment she turns her face, tears burst out. She but doesn’t want to be seen weak and crying. She wipes her tears, making it look like she is cleaning her face of the mess it is in. She picks a sickle lying in a furrow on the way. Holding it in her hand she stands by the child.

“More than with you, your husband lies in my cot!” the other woman is heard yelling, the words meant to hurt her, to salvage some victory from the defeat.

They are moving back to the village they have come from. She knows he won’t be back at least today.

Far away from her village, with no chances of ever going back, and almost nonexistent chances of earning some honour in the society she has been cast into, she feels totally lost. There is a vacuum around. Her head is buzzing.

The child is crying. She offers it her empty breasts to suckle for satisfaction. She can barely walk, so cannot afford to waste the last ounces of remaining strength. She has to wind up things. She has to collect the uncrushed tomatoes, then she has to walk back home. She has to see how is her other son. It has to be done as soon as possible.    

The pied piper and the horde of hungry mice

So Friday, August 25, 2017 has earned its bit of dirty history. History by the way is concerned about its load only, good or bad doesn’t matter, these are our own convenient specifications. More than three dozen lives lost, hundreds injured, cars and vehicles burnt, media attacked and law and order scattered to pieces. The moment Dera Chief Baba Gurmeet Ram Rahim officially turned just a rapist human, a common criminal, named Gurmeet, his followers, shocked and not able to digest this humanly avatar of the demi-god, went on rampage in Panchkula around the CBI court which pronounced the judgment.

They were crying, pelting stones, burning whatever came their way, getting tear gas into their eyes, got struck by sticks, and finally absorbed bullets as well into their bind faith. Pitaji, beloved father as they call him, should have been allowed to stay beyond the normal laws for common people, they expect.

Another matter that it took 15 years and 200 hearings for justice to shine. Well, that’s understandable given the ways of stalling justice in the country, especially in the case of the strong and the mighty. However, better late than never. So we can safely call him a rapist now. And address him by his maiden name, Gurmeet, instead of adding the golden-weighted superlatives before and after.

First it was Asha Ram Bapu, followed by Sant Rampal, some Ramvriksha Yadav in Mathura, and so many others. Godmen, in the manner they can hijack the common rules and regulations of the land, are beyond the state. Just to beat your head about this particular Baba and the ones named above would be equal to shedding tears over just one of the symptoms of a bigger malady. The question isn’t about why this particular Baba was born and came to acquire such a cult status so as to challenge the state itself. It will be more pertinent to ask, why such Godmen are born in India. Every street, every locality, every village, town and city has its group of influential Godmen who dispel the evil, fetch the best of boons, make you the luckiest person on the earth. Your hard work, your perseverance, your education and skills, your penance for a cause coming at the bottom of the list required to get success or reach your goal.

In a country where there are billions squeezed for space, for a living, there are bound to be trillions of broken dreams, unmet goals and a Milky Way type of crowded aspirations. It’s plainly about people to resource ratio. More people, few resources, so a fight, few smiles, more tears, simple maths. But in the muck of survival all this boils down to being lucky or unlucky, the two being capable of twisted and remedied by expert hands. So out of the billions, with trillions of shattered dreams, they go in groups to abandon themselves on some holy feet, in respective regions. Out of the trillion shattered dreams, and lifelong, and ongoing struggle to survive, millions are in anyway at the point of hatching some long-aspired fruit. Even the most skewed law of probability will give chance to millions out of trillions. The moment the chicken is hatched, which would have happened in any case irrespective of Baba x, y, z or no Baba at all, the Baba grabs the credit. The maths accumulates the load of appreciation, subtracts the unmet aspirations almost negligibly as the unremediable fruits of the sins of past life. The Baba has no onus to prove. He can take just the credit for the millions savings out of the trillions of broken dreams. In any case, one minus from Baba means one addition to the followers of some other Baba. It keeps on shifting till the hatching takes place. The credit goes to the last Baba where the poor poultry cock or hen is caged with at the moment.      

Beyond the trials and tribulation of a terribly overpopulated society, where deprivation is bound to prevail given the skewed people to resource ratio, there are other factors which boost a cultman’s chances to acquire superhuman clout, wealth and influence.

The caste system in India means a major part of the society has been treated as subhuman species for thousands of years. This inherited poverty, deprivation and low socio-economic standing leaves a huge mass of people who, their fathers, father’s father, and so on, have been ill-treated like they are mere goats and pigs. As the casteless and creedless mass of a Baba’s followers they feel equal like anyone else around. They feel a full human instead of the fractions across the ages. Like a long drag on Bidis makes them forgetful of the miseries of life, the visits to congregations and gatherings at ashrams make them feel unyoked from the heavy burden of caste they drag. A low caste means you are low, always, it drones in your head, all the time. You are low, you are low, keep your head down, further low, smile even when he spits on your face, tweaks your ears, takes puns at you, gives a kick at your poor arse to uplift his spirits, still you have to smile. You have to wear an unaffected mask, while the shitty life moves on. Here, at the Guru’s feet, they put their masks to get some fresh air. Here they become they, the real, un-lowed, their genetically crooked spines stretching to a high, the slouching shoulders, the vestiges of low, squaring for some moments to feel like a bird getting its wings untied to fly, like an unyoked beast of burden getting allowed to run free in a pasture land. No wonder the followership crosses all limits in devotion and loyalty.   

Drunk husbands beating their wives and squandering away even their meager resources is the common most fact in the struggling section of the society. Drugs and alcohol symbolize the worst form of the evil to the poor women. No wonder, as the Babas at least ask their followers to refrain from drinking, the women feel they cannot have a bigger well-wisher. So you have miles-long queues of poor, condescending women, waiting to kiss the feet of the holy man who is at least trying to make their menfolk quit drinking and correct their behavior.

Poverty has its alternate truths in a reversed world. When you decide to get healed just by the Baba’s touch, of course there will be some immediate improvement, which in any case becomes a miracle. It simply is Placebo effect. Psychologically you believe and the body responds positively. So the Baba’s shower healing blessings, the suffering mass decide to get healed, and healed they get in the short terms at least. It then becomes a necessity to keep the blessings going, no matter you keep taking medicines along the way, get treatment, spend money in hospitals, but once you decide that it is the effect of your Baba’s blessings, everything you do becomes a carrier, a mere instrument, of the holy man’s blessings.

The invisible, unknowable, unattainable God is too far. Convenience needs a Godhead nearby, whom you can see, touch his feet, kiss his robe. So the cult-men replace God. They are near and more effective than God himself. And people want their God to be nearer.   

At the management level, it’s primarily about money. Anything purportedly meant to do everything with religious financing is beyond the tax and revenue regime of the country. You just make a Hindu religious trust, you then govern your own financial destiny. The rules and regulations of India don’t have anything to do with this territory where all types of black, white, yellow and red money flow in unchecked torrents. And where there is unaccountable money, rest of the vices easily follow. With money you can easily become God. You can keep people’s dreams alive by giving them as much as a free lunch now and then. With your opulence and grand show, you can create stars in damn shitty famished eyes. It’s very easy to become the God of hungry frustrated souls. There are millions to whom even a favour only to the extent of free weekend meals in a community feast turns more significant than God himself. Money pulls the clout, it builds the loyalty. There is simply no other weightier factor. So with all the donations to religious trusts and gifts of money, land, dollar, ruppes, beyond the pale of tax and revenue norms, within no time Babas become super-rich. With money rest of the journey becomes very easy.  

Once they have billions of money with millions of cemented hungry loyalties around them, politicians come scavenging like dogs on dead bodies. Politicians are comfortable with mafia, murderers, smugglers, drug dealers, human traffickers, as long as they get votes for them. The Rapist Baba has a long history of alliance with all the major political parties. A rape charge undertrial gets donations to the tunes of hundreds of millions by the Haryana government, the state’s ministers bow down to touch the Baba’s feet, the Chief Minister attends the Baba’s functions, what else the common people need to further convince themselves about the divinity of their father figure. In every constituency the Baba has thousands of diehard supporters to whom matters of faith come to an end in the Baba’s thick beard. They are the ones who decide the winner and the loser during the state assembly elections. They give money to Baba, the Baba gives them some food and occasional shelter for devout gatherings with the same money, the rest he uses in building a fleet of super-luxury fleet and making movies in which he slays the evil as the messenger of God. The government makes his movies tax free so that the devotees feel flattered.   

A distant relative of mine fought the last assembly election in Haryana on the INLD ticket. The Baba but, expecting a turnaround in his favour—he was facing a CBI inquiry—decided to go with the BJP. It was open support by the way. This INLD candidate lost by just 2 votes. He, belonging to the influential Jat community who hold huge clout in the social hierarchy, still cannot forget that night when he reached the poor house of an old man in his village. The old man was an OBC, lower in the caste hierarchy, but was rich in the number of votes. They were 8 in all in the little house. All would have been well, given the contestant’s dominant caste status and the fact that both parties stayed in the same village, and the OBC man being wise enough to know the adage, if you have to stay in the village don’t take panga with the crocodile. It would have gone well if not for the fact that the poor family had eaten countless free lunches and dinners at the Baba’a dera, congregation halls, where frustrated females from the countryside get a chance to get out of the loops of patriarchy to have a casual fling, a paramour with some bites of free food. The branches, which had purchased their loyalty apart from making Baba a symbol of God to them, serving as one-stop point of entertainment, freedom, fling, food, frolic, faith and dignity.

With folded hands the old family patriarch, with tears in eyes, his voice shaking, said, “Chaudhri Sahab, you can kill us if you want. But we just cannot vote for you. It’s the order of our God.”

The poor Jat was defeated by two votes.

This is what makes the Babas like him so potent. Politically. And once you are so significant in the scheme of political things, the politicians of the land will even stoop so low as to touch the feet of a rape undertrial.

Only money can buy such loyalty. Make laws to stop religious funding which makes them mini-empires within the state. If you cannot do that, in greed of clump of votes, then please stop cribbing about the Baba. There will be so many others following him.

Deadly injured mosquito

It’s the last week of August. Humidity tickles the nerves instead of the heat. The Monsoon is about to complete its trip. Once again, in this part of Haryana, it is leaving with lot many promises unkept. Deficit rainfall is the norm here. In any case, the Monsoon hardly abides by the law of averages. It’s either too much or too less. Nature has, after all, lost its equanimity, its level-headedness. It’s irritated and grossly impulsive. The nature, I mean. And rightly so.  

As the light peered through a humidity-soaked sky, I decided to make the most of this cool morning. Reading under the open overcast skies has its own charm. While the world got up, yawned, stretched its arms, got ready to dab into the birth-time energetic spirits to go jogging and exercising, I decided to pick up this nice book and use my time in the best suitable way I can think of, reading.

The light picked up from across the bluish dark curtain hung over the skies. A cool breeze blowing, carrying the invisible vestiges of the rain the previous evening still looming in thin air. It appeared like it stopped raining just five minutes back. The words and sentences had a lucid meaning. It was like writing on a clean slate. The brain, after all, is unclogged of extra garbage at this time. The book is touching. The sentences fetch deeper meanings than they carry at any other time of the day. I read with a trace of smile on my lips. In fact, I felt like I was doing a holy deed early in the morning, like a sage sitting over yagna. I got attuned to the phenomenon, of literature, of reading.

If there were sages in ancient India, there were demons also, the fabled rakshsasas, who threw meat and bones into the holy fires. They laughed with their deep, rumbling peals of guffaws. An avid reader is the most a modern human can come close to be a rishi, sage, of ancient India. And the demons? Well, there are countless. In millions, and of course, billions. Mosquitoes. The carrier of death, fever, dengue, chicken guinea and what not. They buzz with multiple layers of preening sounds that crawl over your skin, bruising and itching it long before it strikes with its bloodthirsty snout. It can be easily ultrasonic. You can feel the drone’s deadly hum from a distance long before your eardrum alerts you to the hurtling missile in your direction. On top of that they are blood thirsty. Who knows, all the demons of the past may have turned into mosquitoes of the present.

Here it droned to spoil my morning. Dengue-wallahs bite early in the morning, my alert system sent a warning against the poisoned missile. I saw it then. A huge one, almost as big as a house fly. I’m sure it must have bullied a few houseflies on the way to its mission. The chopper’s buzzing wings cut across the chorus of chirping sparrows on the courtyard wall. In a panic mode, I took a swipe at it. Guess with what? With my book man. What better weapon a bookworm can arrange on such a short notice? The elegant piece of literature turning into a weapon of defense! The rascal deftly dived, enjoying the catapulting rolls in the swirls of air sent down by my papery weapon. Even a mosquito is too good for a book these days. Uffs.  

I jumped up from my chair, knowing fully well that it will surely succeed in its mission if I keep sitting. Still eager to keep the meanings in sentences clearer like before, I started walking and reading in leisurely circles, pacing up and down the courtyard, sure that the deadly projectile is ineffective against shifting objects. I even took consolation that now it was doubly beneficial, reading-cum-morning walk. And here it was again. A super-mosquito, I recoiled with fear. I saw it just about to land on my hand decently holding the book. These are not the times of niceties after all. This time I saw it clearly. It had the ill-famed black and white bands across its hull, the deadly enemy, the dengue one.

Reading took a backseat and the revenge started. It was too big to get invisible into the cowardly mosquito anonymity in thin air. It had grown too big for its cowardly skin. Its confidence protruded through its bubble-strong body. I tracked it to the end of the wall. While I struck it against the wall, the instinct stopped me from using full force to avoid a dirty palm having a crushed mosquito carcass. The hand moved with the agilest movement, but struck with minimum force against the wall. May be I wanted to injure it critically and enjoy a slow death with no blood on my hands. It was too big to go into that last moment’s topsy-turvy dive to escape. And of course sometime you hit the nail on its head, hit the jackpot, win the lottery, win the best girl in the college in your favour. Similarly, you hit your target, the mosquito, in the second attempt only.

With the scared anticipation of a high school girl waiting for her result, I took away my palm. The feeling was worth winning a million in a lottery. My trophy lay against the wall. Not crushed. The force was perfect to send the idiot into a coma. One of its wings broken, the other jutting out, some legs broken, the rest swished together, its deadly snout projecting out as if in utter pain. One of its antennas moved a bit, to make it icing on the cake that it wasn’t instant death. I saw the black and white checked pattern on its body. What a kill man! Couldn’t believe my luck early in the morning.

The rose and the fire in its last lap around it

Status quo can be easily carried. It can be dragged. A slow fire can smolder over a long period of time, before bursting into flames. But flames have to die fast; they cannot go on at the slow pace of cold wars. So actual wars chuck out their own selves very easily. Intrigues but can drag on for months, years and decades, like they have been dragging in Kashmir since independence. Things picked up for a possible conclusion after 1989. After the eruption of violence, again there was a lean period, when Kashmiris had languorous dreams of Azadi, ISI counted their chances and laid out more elaborate schemes, and India tried to convince itself that Kashmir indeed is an inseparable part.

In the status-quoist mode, the issue can drag for another two decades, and another two, because that’s its nature. It sustains, it persists. It stays like that dull pain that allows you to carry through the day, staying there in the subconscious, and then striking now and then to claim the fact of its existence. Clear cut fractures don’t persist, because they aren’t tolerable, they cripple. It plops out. Either they stay or you. It’s either you or them. In status quo, all exist, and struggle through mildly painful air. Full blown pain forces us to stop somewhere.  

Well, it’s a point of no return for India. A belligerent India cannot accept the idea of independent Kashmir even if the whole world turns against it. It’s final. Period. And with India’s growing stature at the international level, and Pakistan getting isolated, American’s need for India as a buffer against China, it’s almost impossible that Kashmir issue will get too much of support internationally. But then simmering status quo again is bleeding India at many levels. Its feet get a drag.

Somehow the recent flare up, the real fire instead of the suffocating, irritating smoke, will drag the issue to a fast conclusion. Because how long a fire will burn? It eats itself. The only chance for the fire to survive in the long run is in smoldering slowly, taking rationed sips from the fodder of issues. So the burnout will stop. Well, unless India allows the post-burn hiatus to again turn into simmering status quo like it happened after 1996, when violence plummeted down after touching its bloody peak.

A fire is bound to burn to its finish. Hate can persist, but not all out bloodletting. Hate will persist for centuries, but real actions of violence have to meet their bloody end. The violence in Kashmir has touched a new high. If it goes on increasing, it will become irrelevant after some time. At least Kashmiris, if not India and Pakistan, will realize the futility of it because they are the people involved with real flesh and blood in the issue, the two other entities are the bloodless and boneless states. Peace will appear a good option then. What else can show the true colors of peace than the bloody colors of war? Wasn’t UN born from the ashes of two world wars?

The paradise is burning. It could have gone on smoldering for decades. But is that life? Stone pelting, mass protests, pellet guns, civilian casualties, blinded teenagers, missing youths, every Kashmiri on the boil with stone in hand and with a sense that they are giving their best for freedom. The worse it gets, the brighter it burns, the good it turns for India. Fire eats itself in the long run, it will stop on its own ashes. It will be worst for the present Kashmiri generation, but good for the next one that will build their lives afresh on the ashes of burnt dreams, and still better for India to come out of the status quo. It’s another matter if you can really celebrate a swanky house built on a mass grave. If you can, then you have all the right to feel victorious.

The flare has picked up to its conclusion. As the last of the crazy souls leap into it, holding to the most futile idea of independence, as the paradise gets wilted, as the heaven turns to hell, fiery tongues lollop higher, only to be crashed onto their own ashes.

Status quo is tolerable, even with incidents of violence here and there. But a full throttle fire has to die down. It dies when it has consumed everything. As they say, death is the beginning of birth. Let’s hope for a new beginning.