The Mountain Mist still Exists

 

Dal Lake is indeed the pride of Srinagar. During the winters when the temperature goes below zero, its waters freeze allowing the children to play on the slippery playfield. The quayside along the road circuiting the famous lake gets buried under thick snowflakes. The frozen lake appears like a huge runway cradled in the lap of mountains. The boulevard facing the frozen water body is wet and muddy under squelching shoes and skidding vehicle tyres.

The surrounding hills appear like huge snowy tents floating in the skies to shelter humanity from the tough weather elements. The weather-beaten chinars defy these snowy diktats. The higher mountains shine feebly in the background of greyish haze. Their tops lost in the misty maze of clouds. The slopes appear as if flour has been sprinkled over them.

Here on the icy playground the dwarf played. Then one day the ice cracked a few paces from him. He saw a child being drawn into the water. His small, stunted, robust figure lunged forward showing surprising agility. Although he got hold of the child’s hand, the congenital challenge to his physicality prevented him from applying bodily force matching his soul’s will. The child drowned. Anguish whiplashed his face as a chilly wind hit his puffy features.

In Kashmir people wear a type of great coat, a long coat of wool or tweed, called Pheran, during the winters. But he was so endowed with his particular faculty concerning height that even during the summers the smallest of shirts kissed his heels.

The next day, the authorities forbade everybody from playing on the precarious snowfield.  The shikaras stood like ships stranded on treacherous sandbanks. Little icicles were lying here and there waiting for the children to be picked up, kicked, thrown at someone’s woolly cloak or to be hit with a piece of wood. But death lay in waiting somewhere below some weakness of frozen molecules, where some playful foot might get into the chancy snare. The leafless trees bordered the lake in a continuous blackish zigzag like a peculiar barcode of winter.

****

In a shivering frenzy, the winter had unsheathed its icy fury that was symbolized by the sword-like icicles hanging down the eaves. The snow-sabred foliage of chinars stood like greyish spectres in countless swathes of white. The snowfall had been so heavy that the accumulation outraced the slip-off from the slanting roofs. As a result, many roofs looked painted in white. The soil on the palm of mother earth seemed replaced by the snowflakes. The ice becomes the soil in winters. Shivering bones, drooping figures and chattering teeth was all that we could make of the phenomenon of being human. The people tried to carry on with life hidden under as much wool and animal skin as possible.

Still the religious festivity and fervour pumped up warmth in the soul. The spiritual warmth, fraternity and soulful hilarity seemed to defy the cold, frigid dictates of life on the eve of Bakr-Eid falling in the second week of January. The arrival of the holy day suffused the marketplaces with new energy. The finely carved, pillared balconies and the ornate arches above the ground level shops witnessed a fine spectacle below. The uppermost balconies crowned by the overhanging ice from the roof top patronisingly loomed over the busy marketplace. The people were excitedly busy in shopping for the festival. The excited voices of the vendors flaunting heaps and heaps of exquisite bakery and meat items spiced with the soul of Kashmiriyat made it up for the lack of sunshine.

Eid is the festival of fraternity. Its charm is multiplied when the weather gods shower snowflakes as gifts. The Hazratbal shrine, its precincts clothed in cottony snowflakes, has a special charm during the Eid prayers.

Passing through or rather letting the people overtake him, for he had very short strides, he hastened to add his low, gruffly voice to the undercurrents of the teeming faithful.

There were women in cloaks. They wore the traditional hijab, a black cloak from head to ankles with its face flap (having eye slits). Some had a black cloth tied as a hood over the face and the head leaving only the eyes open. However, now the tradition seemed adapting to the newer times. Brightly coloured—yellow, red, green, chequered—headscarves could also be seen. Though tied in all protection, these colours left at least half of the face open. The burqas also had minimal embroidery around neck and cuffs.

A woman in a multi-coloured scarf and a long brown jacket over her cloak passed him and he was struck by her beauty. But she was too tall for him. The feeling of his short stature hit him really hard at such times. After all, he had the full heart of a man. A heart is seldom crippled by any physical shortcoming in the body. It’s its own master.

From a distance he saw the women praying, their arms stretched in front, the palms cupped out to beseech love, joy and prosperity in life. He too bowed his large head, contemplating over the Almighty, and prayed for peace and normalcy to return to this place. After all, it was once known as the ‘heaven on earth’.

****

It was a snowy Sunday. The National Highway had been closed due to snowfall leaving the valley isolated—even the Srinagar-bound flights had been cancelled—in its white icy cradle. The valley would now survive on the stocks of essential commodities, kerosene and LPG. The snowfall continued till afternoon on this Sunday; then it stopped leaving alleys, side-alleys, main streets and the cross lanes in Srinagar under a thick layer of snow.

In this quaint alley, boasting three-storeyed buildings having glass fronted wooden-framed windows overlooking the street, a rut had just been created by a cumbersomely driven pony cart. There was snow everywhere, snow on the fencing grills encircling the open fronts of the ground level shops, snow on the roofs, snow on the leafless chinar branches in front of houses, on a hand-pulled cart lying almost abandoned in a pile of snow. Only the electricity poles and wires seemed to escape the icy onslaught. Pigeons in hundreds were flocking out. Many flying, flapping mid air, others sitting lined on the wires stoically, some sitting and walking on the whitened ground, and many others cooed from the projecting ledges over the upper most balconies.

****

Like weeds and pests, the insurgents threatened the agriculture painstakingly nurtured by the Indian State for almost six decades. Hence these needed to be eliminated. After all, no hardworking farmer would like his hard work to go in vain and won’t dither from using poison to do away with the nuisance. The army was fraught with the tough task of neutralising the terror capabilities of the militant organisations.

The LeT with its parallel cells (functioning independently) was a big menace for the security forces. Its stealthy structure was expertly funnelling funds to the parallel cells through informants operating so disguisedly that even their family members had no clue to their deeds. So the snow kept on falling, the army busy in cracking codes; the messengers and informants busy in whisking away secrets to and fro; the code names cracking over the radio call with its tick tick ‘Cheetah 786’ and many more.

It was a gruesome thaw in the snow. The mentors across the border kept busy in expertly pumping intrigue. Shady characters with blooded hands zealously engaged in jihad and organised terror attacks as per their version of service to God. The army going, as a result, overenthusiastic in countering the threats.

The army top brass was nudging their heads in puzzlement about this commander having the authority to issue Lashkar communiqué. The faceless man was known under a different identity to the over-ground cadre. There were various alias about him. His operational secrecy was impeccable. Even the long-standing operatives were not too sure about the real identity of this planning, guiding force.

The public relations chief of the outfit, working under a covert identity, himself had vague ideas about this inspirational figure, as he sneaked threats and fatwas to the newspaper offices and expected the said great man to be hidden somewhere in the command bunkers in the hills. In the cadre itself, there was a talk that ‘the chilli in the Indian eyes’ had been spotted giving a hell-raising speech against the Indians. Some said he organized a training camp in Sumblar forests. There were also talks of his movements in the forests of Bandipora mountains.

****

The dwarf didn’t remember his parents. As his short, stubby limbs grew in their stunted roundness, he realised his status and put himself in a world distant and apart from the rapidly, furiously, long-striding mundane life. To the latter, he was just a show-casing object to be laughed at and ogled at with mocking muse while with his short, stubby legs he put up an effort to catch up with the fleeting scene around him. But Srinagar on the eve of the new millennium was running away still faster. Terrorism was at its peak and so was counter-terrorism. Attacks, counter-attacks, gun smoke, rattling shots pulsed in the throbbing veins of this once majestic capital of the heaven on earth.

Dwarfism is a unique effort by the God to make Himself understand the ideas and persona in the cramped self inside the tiniest of a cell. Here soul is ever hitting against the body’s narrow confines. It’s a tragedy while the society finds something fit for some leery, jesting moments as in a circus. But then these days, even the circuses were vanishing rapidly.

He was aware of this fact that his mere presence somehow enlivened people’s spirit, as if they forgot their bigger worries after looking at someone so different and sidelined. Sometimes they felt pity and pity being a sublime emotion made them feel better. Usually, the people were amused directly and as amusement lightens the mind instantly, its effect could be seen in their easier spirits.

He was doubly unfortunate. One, he was a dwarf; second, he was homeless and all alone. Whatever care that could have been spared for him was robbed by the panicked environs of this worst decade in Kashmir’s history.

In the busy big bazaars having gun-totting security personnel, in the lanes and bylanes smelling of intrigues, in schools, offices, houses and shops the life overall chugged ahead with a scratching, itching ambiguity. Who will come out to be who could never be guessed. So people went hurriedly, guarding their innermost feelings to themselves.

Then a corner-side tea stall operator took fancy to this trundling, slogging character and gave him the job of tea-boy. Across the square, the military picket found it a bit refreshing to get tea from this circus item but not before he would take a cup himself from the kettle. These battle hardened soldiers wearing bullet-proof vests, clad in intimidating fatigues and crowning helmets certainly eased their pent-up tension while joking with this ‘aflatoon’—as they called him—while his employer, so gentle in manners and words, looked on with certain satisfaction from across the square.

One day, suddenly even this new-found niche of some stability and dull dignity was robbed. The military intelligence had spotted the amicable tea-shopper as a highly suspected cog in the underground network of the mysterious Lashkar commander.

Before they could pinpoint him, he brought out a pistol from almost nowhere and fired, hitting a young soldier in the face before he himself was riddled with bullets. His body was now lying sprawled in a most horrid manner. Around him the gun-totting security men stared with mechanical, emotionless eyes; the urgency of the operation robbing them even of the few moments left to the colleague with whom they had spent many moments of their imperilled life in the valley. The last pulse gone and the dam of patience and control was broken. A friend soldier ran and fired a volley into the militant’s dead body. Others scampered to take control of him. After all, the military is all about discipline.

Aflatoon stood paralysed. In one strike, the destiny had snatched away the two human beings whom he had come to like the most, the dead soldier and the tea-shop owner. Both of them spoke to him without the least glint of mock and entertainment in their eyes. They saw him exactly like any other human being around. The eyes of the tea seller and the young, ever-smiling soldier carried a comfortable openness for his dwarfed self wherein he never felt pitiable or an object of jest. He could feel it. It made him feel so normal. Whenever they looked at him, he felt like a normal human being. He had lost two friends. Both were two helpless cogs in two different countries and set-ups.

The very same friendly Sikh soldier, who earlier jested and bantered with him, now prodded him with his deadly gun.

‘You too owe some answers, for you aren’t as much above earth as you are under it! You pygmy Muslim, you never gave any hint of the suspicious nature of your master!’

He was tortured; though in its milder form because the interrogators themselves took fancy to the jibing game of interrogation with this unusual suspect. He created ripples of laughter as he winced with pain to slaps and cigarette butts on his skin or pull of ears and hair and kicks. It was over all good fun to the soldiers. 

As he came out beaten, ashamed and humiliated, the locals spat at him, suspecting him to have played truant in complicity with the military.

He had been taught a bitter lesson:

‘I’m a dwarf, but more than the punishment of God, it is the inflated egos on both sides that squeeze life out of me. My Kashmir also bears the same fate, being grounded between these two heavy millstones! God was far less punishing in throwing my life in this little bodily cage than hurling me in this corridor of uncertainty and making me a suspect in all eyes. I’ve become an eyesore to all. One can hope to survive by taking sides but I’ve been robbed even of that!’

The Voice of Insult

 

He belonged to one of the low steps on the caste ladder, and as it happens usually, he was very poor; so his place in the world was now limited to the pitiable existence of an insect in the dust while the higher world fleeted more importantly. Absorbed in countless agonies at every step of life, he had his little share of some tiny ecstasies. After all, nature does very little discrimination in opening her smile on the persons of various castes and classes.

At his nondescript settlement, as it opened its idyllic eyes in the second half of February, a whole array of mist, fog and dew danced on the bucolic stage in the pre-twilight aura. He got up early and visited the fields to relieve himself of the nature’s call. So early in the morning, his mind less burdened with the worries of survival, he peeked into the rising hues of light across the fog. Without any discrimination, the light, fog and mists became his playmates.

An hour before the morning twilight, the sky was clear and visibility on ground was perfect, then some mysterious climatic wand would be swayed and the fog arrived like a silvery bluish pall of strange expectance. As the twilight broke over the light fog, it appeared as if the day was breaking from the sky overhead, illuminating a bluish circular stage around him, making him the undisputed king of this small sleepy world.

Sometimes the layers of mist would just float in pre-dawn tranquillity, hiding the lower canopies of the trees and then slowly, playfully, gently the scene around him would change, determined by those naughty floating particles carrying tiny load of condensation on their backs. His imagination would float with their ease, making him totally oblivious to the fact that he was born in the scavenger community—the bhangi or balmiki caste.

Well, on August 15, 1947 India won its freedom; but it was decades to go for the dawn when the proud Parliament of free India would first bring in the legislation to emancipate the manual scavengers—the community to which Ramu belonged—engaged in wretchedly degrading and criminally dehumanising task of manual scavenging at the lowest rung of Hindu caste hierarchy; and many decades still further when the pious intentions of Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993 would in fact percolate down to practice.

It was a province in India where the freer sun of India dawned a bit hesitatingly because the instrument of accession was still to be signed. The ruler was dilly-dallying with a multitude of interests. For decades, the people under the double shadow of authority—English and the ruler—had grown dispirited under the squeezing, oppressing talons of the two masters whose respective spheres of powers had sharp edges to tear their easy meat.

The monsoons had more or less done their task of turning the countryside lush green. Just like any other person of his caste, Ramu felt the brutal, confining chains of the obnoxious system of casteism. The real freedom appeared almost an unattainable dream. He wistfully looked at the casteless groups of birds flapping their wings in this natural pool of water on the outskirts of the sleepy township, which boasted of all the materiality of the ruler’s power and ordain.

The seven-year-old boy knew that theirs was the meanest and the pathetic most existence on earth. His father was employed as a manual scavenger to remove human excreta from the dry latrines of the training centre of the Maharaja’s little army under the tutelage of his British masters. Well, so much had changed in the form of lifestyles and fashion before the eyes of Ramu’s father. However, one thing remained the same which kept the deprived section pitted into the same horrible, ill-branded work of picking up human faeces manually. Ramu’s forefathers, the so called untouchables, slave chandalas, who were employed in cleaning the society of its most pitiable and dirty by-products, had a positive outlook towards the arrival of the Britishers. They believed that the enlightened white man will definitely do something by bringing some science in the domain of sanitation.

‘After all in their country there cannot be people like us. And still everyone must be purest and cleanest!’ his father wondered oftentimes.

However, why should the Britishers be unduly bothered about the mode of disposal of human excreta? In the enslaved country, they were fighting for bigger stakes, which demanded they must look over the social prejudices prevalent among the native population. So when urbanisation and industrialisation took first tentative steps under them, scores of manual scavengers were needed to clean both private and public dry latrines.

The twentieth century had seen decades of political movements in India and their patriotically charged reverberations echoed in princely India as well. Ramu’s father had his own dream-like versions of these andolans led by the Mahatma who had given them the name of Harijan, the people of God. Pocketed in this tiny province, where the free rays of India were still to shine, on this free morning, his fate came to be crushed by a British military expert, who shamefaced for the defeat and boiling in mood for packing his bags, found an outlet in this poor scavenger. The Englishman saw the cleaner affectionately offering a pure rose to his still purer girl child with his dirtiest of hands after he had removed the night soil from the apartment. He punished the cleaner by holding his face in the night soil. It proved a sacrament to his soul; this dip in the karambhoomi of his forefathers enlightened his soul. The humiliated man, as if unafraid of death and taking many clues from the freedom fighters, whose stories reached his ears through hearsay, got up, the filth dripping over his face. With a heaving breast, he yelled in the man’s face:

‘I’m not willing to live after this insult but I’ll live on to see you and your whole clan along with your shit being packed off forever from our land!’

He spat; not at the white man but on the ground, his soul heaving against his body. Meanwhile, his fellow scavengers trembled with fear. With firm steps he moved towards a water faucet, took a bath—all this while recalling what he had heard about the Mahatma—and once clean he thundered: ‘Safai Karamchari Andolan!’        

Ramu saw—as he came from the playful walk or rather jaunt—his father’s head and face turn a mass of pulpy red under the brutal strikes by the Maharaja’s sepoys, who under the spell of hurried loyalty went overzealous for the cause of their sovereign.

‘India gets freedom and even these dogs here in our Maharaja’s dominion start barking!’ a Brahmin sepoy gnashed his teeth. But he could sense the inevitability of the fall of his cherished sovereign.

Crying and shivering for the same fate, Ramu ran full 20 kilometres to his village, where the rest of his family lived. It was very late at night when Ramu beat his furtive palms against the rag-tag reed thatch door of their hutment. As fire was lit up and the monsoon clouds rumbled still at the tail end of their rainy orgy, he shivered in the lap of his blind grandmother, fatigued, torn, tattered and almost dead.

Next day, two of his fellow scavengers brought the body in a cart. ‘The word doing round in the city is that he turned a traitor,’ one of them said hesitatingly and his cowering eyes seemed to believe what his tongue was hesitating to put forth.

His grandmother, the old wrinkled black fairy, who couldn’t see but created and weaved a whole world through her words, was the one to whom he felt nearest in the family. In his otherwise ever-prostrating and servile childhood, sitting in her lap and listening about a world fantasised by her hollow-cheeked babbling, he would become the prince sovereign, who was casteless and beyond any stigma.

Of all her stories he remembered the one about herself with most vivid colours. She had once told him:

‘Even though not in the least ashamed of being a balmiki, somewhere deep down the heart, I feel that I’m a Brahmin, for I wasn’t born to your maternal grandfather. Years ago someone had dumped a newborn girl in a dry discarded well, half of which was full of waste and garbage. Blessed be Lord Hanuman for a herd of monkeys gathered around the well and started mocking at the human buffoonery in chattering, screeching voices. And who later became my father and the man who became your great grandfather rescued me and took me home for he had a big flock of boys only. He had some love in his heart for a girl child. Thus I was raised as a bhangi!’

Blind for the last 20 years, the sudden flashes of reminiscences would take her to childhood when during the scorching heat of June, the whole family dug a deep pit on a dry river bed to collect water. They had to fight for the protection of their pit, which was now moving laterally after going straight into the earth for 6-7 feet. Water quarry (open pit) we may call it. On this merciless hot day, when even the sweat beads won’t surface on their skin, for they had been dehydrated too much, the wind blew a sandstorm on the foot-printed soil around the pit. Twigs and boughs of dried bushes littered around like a cemetery. The water level was plummeting down rapidly and so was increasing their thirst. The father taking all responsibility on his head—for it was now very risky to get below the crumbling roof of the pit as the hole went laterally into the earth, while they anxiously watched from above—sat inside the cave precariously soaking a piece of gunny sack in the mud and step by step squeezed the coarse cloth to collect muddy water in an earthen pitcher. Their hearts beating under the impact of the risk hovering over the patriarch’s body they looked water-mouthed. There was more water in their mouths than in the fearsome pit’s guts. Much to its irritation, they had opened it too much and in trepidation it snapped its jaw. The earth overhead caved in and the family upkeeper was buried alive. Even with their maddest scamper, they could not bring him out before many minutes. The man had been buried under the fine sand for enough time to suffocate him to death.

Later, a similar shock of ill fate took her eyesight two decades back.

The family patriarch named Musla, her husband, was a man of kaleidoscopic libido that allured him to have illicit relationships with many ladies of his caste. However, it became a crime when a lady of the higher caste took fancy to his titillating escapades. It became almost cataclysmic news. It’s as good as the natural laws reversing overnight. The society feels threatened and they react very vehemently.

After getting caught, the lady had the right to accuse the lower caste man of rape. Since then the man was incarcerating in the riyasat jail. They were already outcaste but now the whole family cowered under the additional stigma of rape also. This kind of position squashes you among the lowest of the low.

As a mark of further revenge beyond the state’s formal judgement, the upper caste males along with their servants raped the family females for as long as the hissing snakes of their anger and lust allowed it. In desperation and unbearable agony, his grandmother banged her head against the stone mortar repeatedly and went blind at least to the visual aspects of their miseries.

To prove their human side, they gave a job to the rapist’s son befitting their hereditary profession. All it fetched was one meal a day and in addition carried perpetual humiliation and punishment to the soul as bonus. So Ramu’s father, right from the start of his boyhood, became the manual scavenger doing his duty anywhere the overfed aristocracy decided to scatter its excreta.

One tragedy had closed the doors to light. Whenever fate punished her, she further punished herself by striking her head against anything her searching fingers found. It became a habit.  As a result, her forehead and skull had many scars, perhaps even more than the ones she bore on her soul. In order to prevent the final fatality, they kept an eye on her lest she struck her head almost as an instinctive reaction to her quirk of mood on account of some bad news. Apart from these sudden volcanic eruptions, she was cool headed otherwise, smiled ironically, talked gently and told numerous stories to children.

Now when the dead body of her son arrived, the people around failed to notice her picking up the grinding stone bowl and hit it against her skull with as much force as she could manage. With a mourning cry and equally fearsome burst of blood she fell unconscious. One tragedy had sealed the doors of light to her, now this one brought her out of darkness. The sense of sight that had been exiled by the striking judgement of some precarious time was now restored by the hammering judgement of the tragedy of her son’s death. On opening her eyes she gave a strange cry of joy and sorrow.

‘It’s you Ramu!’ she pointed towards a child of his age, ‘Oh...Oh...where is...umm...let me guess...’

Those around her thought she had gone out of her senses after the gruesome self-strike. Then with a new purpose in her life and the light back in her world, the old lady cried her heart out over the darkness hovering around the dead body of her son.

****

The poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low hardly perceive any further fall or the degradation or the wretchedness caused by the leaps and bounds of ill-fate and tragedies. They take it for granted, a kind of habituation to humiliation. Although Ramu grew up among ever-increasing adversities, overall the life seemed more or less the same to him. The once obstinate Maharaja had, without wasting much time, signed the instrument of accession to India. So Ramu was now a subject of free India, where very soon untouchability would be declared illegal. However, he was many years from the glorious dawn when the mammoth banyan of casteism, standing sturdy and sprawling from many centuries, would finally yield to the face-lifting, almost artificial, stop-gap legislative measures.

There was a new police station in place of the old one. However, the family that had witnessed so much came across one more onerous turn of fate. All records pertaining to the condemned rapist were missing. When some liberal elements, too happy to attain freedom, took up the poor old man’s case, his bail plea was rejected on the grounds that all records were missing. So the trial court could neither grant him bail, nor take up the case to its conclusion without any reference material from the old office. Now the prison authorities at the district jail were worried whether to keep him as an undertrial or as a prisoner. They sought directive from the court regarding it. Almost famished and finished, the rape convict was presented before the additional sessions judge sahib. The latter was much puzzled and directed the district jailor to prepare a fresh charge sheet based on the memories of the still surviving persons and relatives on both sides. The old lady, allegedly raped, came out of her shy, traditional shackles and after a single performance the new court of free India, basing its unbiased judgement on the base of fresh assessment of the victim’s testimony noted:

‘We are sorry that the cause of justice has been delayed so long given the situation prevailing; we owe an apology to the victim because the offender has been enjoying life in jail, so to put up the insignia of free India, we sentence this man to death for the rape of ... held culpable under section ... based ...’

The over-enthused judge felt heroic and proud for accomplishing this—for drawing this first blood—marvellous judicial feat for the cause of mother India.

An overzealous law of a still overzealous new nation ensured that the message of justice should reach across the masses. After the sentence was upheld by the higher judiciary the old man was hanged. A widow now his grandmother took first tentative steps to survive as the family matriarch.

****

The urbanised pockets with their squalor, filth, mud, garbage and stinking wastes offered some opportunities to the scavenger community; and they, with bright hopeful eyes, ogled at the filthy stage which looked brightly and alluringly lit up by a beneficent new sun. To play their scavenging part, the family—consisting of malnutritioned children, spent out and worn out middle aged persons and almost dead but somehow living old bodies—moved to a filthy slum stinking and sticking like a lice to an urban body. And once settling here, saving the pittance that they salvaged from the filth, they lost the rest of the things which were available so far such as an unhindered view of the nature’s beauty, the pond’s water and free walks through the countryside provided it didn’t cross the interests of the higher varnas.

The grandmother during her youthful, seeing days had been a proud participant in the community festival linked to the caste’s not too proud, almost animistic, belief system. Being very near to Mother Nature, the folk dance was rustically gleaned to the proportions of a mysterious exoticism. With new spirit in her eyes, she recalled how for months they prepared artificial animals like lion, horse and tigers using the complex yet so simple folk art. First a cane frame was prepared using water-soaked switches and later it was stitched with a covering of animal skins and clothes of all types. The final shape could put to shame any stuffed tiger adoring the walls of a rich aristocratic hunter. It used to be in the form of a huge mask (the animal torso) to be worn by a man on his head, while the other man stooped at almost right angle carrying the rest of the body on his back.

This year, the old lady hoped they will soak their miseries by dancing all night in the heart of this merciless town. With clever fingers and a quickly recalling mind, she started on her long forgotten folk art. Much to Ramu’s surprise, the shape of a lion emerged from those cane switches, rags and hides leaving two openings in the lower part. She also prepared beautiful dolls of sawdust and clay and painted them bright. There was also a lovely cart of dung, mud and clothes. He was extremely happy to get toys for the first time in his life.

****

Who cares about the health, hygiene and sanitation of those who are expected to be among the filth? The waste water of their dirty unpaved alley drained down an open dug-out nullah and emptied its odorous self into a pit. And there the mud sank into a mysterious pool leaving a grimy layer of water above.

Taking a plastic bottle cut in half to serve as a mug, Ramu went to collect this water, walked a bit further and eased himself of the thing that his forefathers had been carrying on their head. He then realised how blissful were those days when he used clean waters of puddles and ponds to wash him after his toilet. While his bowels emptied to add to the filth around their huts, he was lost in the gloomy darkness in the mug. However, it was still relatively clean water because theirs were the hands that had been assigned the role of carrying human faeces, dead carcasses of animals and stinking mud without any feeling of contempt and revulsion.

These littlest bits of gloomy reverie were driven away by his excited heart that was now galloping at the prospect of watching the clapping dance performed by the grandmother’s lion in the evening.

The afternoon but witnessed a heavy rainfall and it continued to rain towards the night, raising squelching mud around their huts in the narrow streets. The little open space among the huts that was to serve as the ground for the event now bore the nasty look of a mud quagmire. Undeterred they came out. The shiny and beautifully painted lion came in full majesty. But very soon the rain and the splashing and flailing mud turned it into an ugly monster. Even the playful lion of a scavenger has to look dirty. Even nature seemed to be kow-towing the human discriminations. It appeared like a horrible deity worshipped by the savage and filthy people.

The excitement and verve in Ramu’s frenzied senses was short-lived as the favourite lion became an ugly monster. The beautiful appliqué cloth—purchased with the whole community’s donations—turned tabby and evil looking. The success of this dance depends upon the foot coordination between the man bearing the head and the bending man bearing the body. The mud however spoilt the rhythm and the second man tripped and went down. The first one with a stick tied to his back that held the animal torso above his head continued to drag the legless mass behind him. A very strange warmish creature it appeared now. Many of them took turns to enter into the frame. After a time, both the humans and their made-up lion were unrecognisable. It appeared a gathering of muddy ghosts. Ramu, his face and clothes bespattered with mud, wept inconsolably.

That night his mother consoled him:

‘Don’t cry son! A scavenger should be the last one to weep for getting his things, clothes and body including face muddled and spoiled by the filthiest of things. That is the karma and dharma of a scavenger. If you don’t soak muck into your soul then it will go against your karma as a balmiki. I’ve heard that no amount of filth on the body can touch the soul. It always remains clean like these higher castes!’

‘But the beautiful, shiny, clean lion was destroyed by mud,’ he sobbed.

‘We’ll make another for you, son.’

‘But again it will go all muddy. Gods want us to be filthy with even our playthings.’

‘Well son, may be a day will come when clean balmikis playing with a clean lion on a clean ground won’t appear unclean to the God, the rain and the society!’                           

With the cleanest emotion of a mother, she took him in her arms to calm him down and he slept. The old woman kept awake for a long time.

‘Will such a day really come?’ she thought.  

The Blueprint of a Common Man’s Truth

 

Carpenter, vendor, construction labourer, hawker, electrician and much more, he has been through the rough and tumble of many professions at various points in his life. Now he seems contended to serve as a night watchman at a construction material godown. Here he just has to sleep and say ‘Who is this?’ from his room if he hears any noise at night, thus indicating the property is well guarded and under observation.

He is ready to take up more, some new assignment to add to his pocket’s weight. So during the day, he is the municipal committee’s official keeper of the ill-kept, stinking toilet booth. He loiters around in the dusty, noisy chaos that most of our cities are. Most of those who pulverize the property with their sprouts and defecations are his acquaintances, the wage labourers well known to him from the area. They would cajole him to give him a tea party instead of giving him a rupee they owe for their misdeed. So he is scouting for any chance visitor who is under the compulsion to enter the stinking box. The torture over and just as the poor person comes out dazed and swooning under the attack of stinking smell and disturbing sight, he attacks and demands the charges. To the strangers he is very authoritative.

Take as many avenues to earn a bit more, it’s never sufficient for a poor man. However, with a rich haul of experience, this 75 years old man looks content, like a battle weary soldier, happy in the knowledge that he has successfully fought at many fronts. A lifetime of grit and grind is barely sufficient to make a little story of few lines. Like meshing whole containers of mud, you get a gram of gold particles. It may not be sufficient but those decades of engagement as a faceless entity give rewards that are felt within if not acknowledged by others. It’s always worthy to have fought in a sub-world where you dig a well for a day, only to start digging another for a new dawn. There was hardly any destination above the one and only ‘seeing through a day’. A tough process but it’s all-consuming, it absorbs you completely.

Six decades ago, he arrived at the district town at the age of 15 from a small village in the countryside of the same district. During these six decades, he saw the district town changing from a big village to a proper city as it’s today, witnessed its changing colours, in the professional sense, and learnt to adapt to the swiftly changing circumstances and times.

His life-long dedication to the cause of setting up a family has entitled him to ‘a bit bigger than a slum hut’ kind of house in a poor locality. He had three sons. One of them died before marriage. The other one died, followed by his wife, after marriage. He left two kids. One he keeps, most probably a son. The other one, most probably a girl, is under the custody of her maternal grandparents. The third son plies an auto in the city and whom he sometimes sees and raises his hand to acknowledge their relationship. The son however keeps his eyes reserved for more passengers in his auto.

Though staying within the same city, the old man doesn’t visit his house more than twice a week. His wife stays with the son. On being asked why he doesn’t stay with the family, he says that it’s just to be independent and free. Possibly his daughter-in-law is a tyrant. He however doesn’t admit it openly.

He tells that one’s eyes should have patience and respect for a person at whom you look at. The other person will surely reciprocate. He will get into a pause and will listen to you at least. ‘Eyes, eyes!’ he emphasizes.

To kill time he has plenty of decades from the past to bask in their nostalgia. He doesn’t find even a single moment in which the present scores over the past.

‘It gets just worse from bad,’ he appears missing his youth.

And he still wants a new job. 

Frost and Fire

 

Usually, our fears are directly proportional to the doubts we have.

A sword fighter has a beautiful wife. She is in awe of his reputation and is almost daunted by the force of his persona. She respects him, but love is missing in the secret chamber of her heart. As it happens, she falls in love with somebody outside her marriage. As if that is a small problem, to make it still worse the lover happens to be their servant.

Lies and deceit can be hidden, but love has the natural propensity to shine like the sun from behind the clouds. It comes to light. That is its nature. As per social norms, love usually stands out scandalous.

The offended husband challenges the servant for a duel, taking it for granted that he will surely kill the illicit lover, thus giving the opponent a painful death and earn more laurels for his swordsmanship as bonus. The deed will not reek of cold-blooded revenge and his motive to kill the servant will lie buried under the fair game of duel. So it is supposed to be a sure death for the poor servant.

The sword fighter hides his revenge and anger under the art and craft of his swordsmanship. Most importantly, he is sure of victory, because by the logic of it, how can it be otherwise, pitted as he is against a man who has so far merely picked up the scabbard from his master’s famed walls to clean it. And he being a master swordsman whose reputation chimes across the four corners of the state.

The servant is thus sure of his death. He has accepted his fate, death. When you are eying victory, you are also eying safety to yourself from the corner of your eyes. And you have fear also, because without that the sense of victory cannot sustain. With a sense of victory you just cannot be fearless. There is something to fight for and achieve and for that you have to remain alive. This breeds fear.

The servant, on the other hand, has accepted death and failure. His acceptance is hundred percent. He has no doubt about it. And when there is no doubt, you become fearless. The swordsman isn’t totally free from fear because his certainty about his victory falls short of the servant’s certainty of his defeat and death. He isn’t as sure of his victory as the servant is of his defeat.

So, irrespective of the fighting calibre, the servant is more fearless of the two, simply because he is under less doubt. In his fearlessness he decides to let loose all madness in him before his death. He doesn’t hate the opponent. He isn’t angry. His acceptance of death enables him to give all to life before death. The sword-fighter, on the other hand, cannot give all in the fight, because he is fighting to save respect, prolong life, take revenge, and all these with further expectations from life. Life itself means fear.

The offended husband takes manoeuvres as per the art of sword-fighting. In pre-death fearless madness, the lover strikes his sword as if he is striking with a stick. To all the conventional strokes of the sword-fighter, he hits back with the most awkward and unorthodox ones. Fearlessness in his eyes creates fear in the opponent’s eyes.

The servant kills the master! Why? Because he is sure of his death, and because the master isn’t that sure of his victory! How can he be? He simply cannot. He is fighting to save a lot of things and fighting to save things cannot allow you to be cent-percent fearless.

The Lonesome Shadow

 

It’s Holi on March 13 and unusually cold for the season. It feels almost like late winter. It’s not the usual riotous Holi but still there are plenty of drunken shouts and stampedes of fun. In the afternoon he feels extremely weak.

Holi is celebrated to honour the most vibrant colours in our spirit. However, the festival has lost its footing in both letter and spirit. It now seems to bring the worst in us—muck- and mud-slinging, drunk driving, molestation and street fights. Many girls in Delhi have reported the cases of semen-filled balloons hitting them. This unethical, unpardonable sling-shot catapults the beastly mentality against women by several evil notches. Every girl has all the reasons to feel unsafe in Delhi. The semen-filled balloon is a representative of the deeply entrenched sexual frustration in the Indian psyche. It pours out in the goriest of ways and means. The more they pretend to ignore and suppress it, the more diseased they get under the veil. The children hardly get exposed to healthy information about their sexuality. It stays the most secretive and all-important topic. It grows like a creepy parasite in the shadows.

On Holi, the liquor industry awaits gleefully. Drinking alcohol in excess is what we make of our festivals these days. 

He is heavy headed, a consortium of conflicting thoughts lying jumbled up like a pathetically tangled mass of ropes. Uncontrolled thoughts are like a mass of snakes slithering around viciously. There is a strange taste in his mouth. He rolls his tongue around the inside of his mouth. He feels some presence. The thinnest of hair in the mouth leaves him scared. He tries his tongue. He takes it out by scratching the tip of the tongue with a pinch of thumb and index finger. There it is! It’s a very tiny one.

He seems to have cold and bad throat and lies down to listen to Osho’s speech to power up the brain’s processes. Osho’s speeches on YouTube give him an unexplained peace. He can feel the words. It turns out to be a motherly lullaby and he dozes off. It’s a very sound and satisfying sleep. Words and phrases of the Holy Master sound like a dream. He wakes up very fresh. The audio is over. It has been three quarter of an hour. Sleep is a great saviour, without it we will just burn out with our worries.

This Holi completes 7 years since his father left this world. Father loved gardening. Most of the potted plants and roses that he had planted are still there. Sometimes the son feels his father’s presence in a fresh blossom on the rose he had planted. The son thinks his father is still around.

On this Holi, he is holding his 10 months old nephew, his younger sister’s son. The boy is fiddling with the light green fresh leaves of a plant his grandfather had planted in a pot, and which was later transferred to earth in the small flower bed. The child is running his fingers through the leaves. He closes his eyes and feels that the child is playing with his grandfather’s beard. He smiles, and again he feels his presence. Life has too strong imprints for death to wipe them completely. These are the dusty prints from the past. They keep bringing smiles now and then.