Pa and the Elephants

 

My father demanded peace. New clothes, with their authoritative tautness and showy bickering, pinched his skin, burdened his bones and ruffled his philosophical demeanor. ‘New clothes are very hard on the skin. They put a kind of weight on you,’ he would complain. ‘They pinch and intimidate you,’ he would add. So the new set of clothes would go into watery deluge for three or four days to beat out their pinch, showmanship and gimmickry.

As the clothes would wear down with usage and mellow down to old age softness under the rigorous scrutiny of hundreds of washings, he would get in groove with them, finally accepting their presence in sync with the repose inside. ‘The only problem is that when a pair of clothes is really worth wearing in softness, it’s the time to discard it,’ he complained. My mother and sisters won’t allow him to feel at his best and go decked up in extremely soft, read it tattered, kurta-pyjama just because he found them suitably soft and non-pinchy.

Pa loved smoking, first huge cigars during dandy youth, cigarettes in the slowing-down middle age and coming to a chain-smoking spree of beedis in the later part of life. But ganja was a strict no. Once while visiting Rishikesh, he got inspired to taste the unfamiliar substance. An old sadhu was taking majestic draughts at his ganja-filled chillum. Pa followed as a well-obliging newly hatched disciple. Then standing at Ram Jhoola swaying over the watery sprawl of Ma Ganga and a cold wind buffeting down the valley, he saw philosopher Plato walking over the Ganges waters. Many will term it as hallucination. But to me these are the realities belonging to a different dimension. Pa loved the works of ancient philosophers and had thoroughly read Plato’s works. So maybe Plato decided to give him a darshan, albeit when Pa was a bit tipsy on the swinging bridge.   

Father felt it best when he visited Rishikesh. ‘I feel it so light in my being when I’m there,’ he told us. Once Father returns from his Rishikesh trip. The bag isn’t yet on the floor before he tells the biggest news spinning out of his time by the Ganges. ‘Elephants would have eaten us!’ he reads out the scary news. Maybe still under shock because elephants don’t eat humans, they trample them. ‘Oh did they attack you?’ Ma is concerned. We prepare ourselves to listen to the hair-raising episode. ‘Yea, very near to that!’ Father builds up the momentum of the scary news. ‘How?’ Mother is serious. ‘We were going in the forest and there we come across them!’ Father stops as if still haunted by the biggest land animals on earth. ‘How many?’ Mother wants to judge the scale of danger on the numerical ladder. ‘Well, must be a big party because there were many heaps of dung on the path. We were saved just by a whisker!’ Father’s eyes are wide open with fear. ‘You guys got scared of the elephant dung,’ Mother laughs in her simple ways of a hardworking woman. Pa is irritated, ‘They were just couple of minutes away because the dung was still steaming.’ It was winter and fresh elephant poop let out vapors as a proof of its freshness and hence the just recent presence of the elephants. Mother has to accept the gravity of the danger. ‘What did you people do?’ she asks innocently. ‘We took a U turn and tried to run to the capacity of our lungs and legs,’ Father seems tired like he has been running all the way from Rishikesh to our village.  

Mid-November Musings

 

A bluejay or Indian roller (neelkanth) sits silently on the top branch of a dead neem tree. Dry, dead trees are nice perch points for birds because they can have an unrestricted view of the surroundings. A brooding fellow it seems, a silent bird with stagnant emotions right in the middle of some breezy, fluid moments floating around its beautiful navy blue and reddish brown colors. Then suddenly breaking its scholastic insights, it gives a vocal blast as it takes off yelling pakrr-pakrr-pakrr. The resounding warning startles almost all the birds around. Maybe it finds the morning too boring and decides to ruffle a few feathers. The pair of hummingbirds that is enjoying on the marigolds, which seems a novelty in taste because I haven’t seen them feasting on the marigolds before this, also shoots off for cover among leafy canopies.

Marigolds, the sturdy, unassuming flowers that keep their smiles for weeks. I have seen honeybees taking a siesta under the warm afternoon sunrays on the marigolds.

A Parijat branch hangs low. Whenever I pass under the tree, it touches the crown of my head. I feel blessed. When a tree’s branch braces against you, take a pause and feel the touch. The tree is extending its hand to greet you, bless you, touch you to heal. We just need to accept it.

I missed it to tell you before. There was only one rockchat in the house to begin with. It spent considerable time in the garden, yard and the verandah, and sometimes in the room itself. It shared my solitude with an equal right to the house. It looked a lonely bird that seemed to somehow feel the solitudional vibes emanating from the house. Then one fine day it had a partner. In this species both the sexes look the same, so I would take the liberty of christening its gender as per my convenience. I would say he is a boy of the house who has wooed a lady after having a feeling of getting well settled in the house. Now both of them are very happy together. All of us are looking for a touch of solace through companionship. Now they are spirited enough to enjoy their playful supper till dusk. The mosquitoes are flummoxed by a sudden dive in temperature. They keep knocking at the window panes and door wire-mesh. The rockchat couple nicely jumps around to take airy morsels. The littlest inconvenience is that now I cannot make out which one is the boy who got his partner here.

The skies have a treat. A group of eleven ducks goes quacking in V-formation. These sights are vanishing. There is no free waterbody in the village now. I saw thousands in the village during childhood. The village pond is engaged for fishing. It’s almost a little lake but they have spun a wire netting over the entire area to deny entry to the visitors from the Himalayas. Imagine a world where the ducks are denied entry to swim. The fish swim, of course. But only till the net is cast.  

Quite miraculously, the banana cone is still there after many weeks. Its deep maroon leaves peel off very slowly to the tug of dew and mist. It’s lucky to be still there because there are monkeys in the village. The bully alpha rhesus male faces a challenge. There are many lithe, adolescent heroes who are lustily eying his harem. He carries a big scar on his right shoulder and seems to have lost confidence apart from the prettiest female with whom he loitered around with much majesty, pride and big-time pomp and show as his queen consort. The young swashbucklers have surely lured her away. Well, she is within her rights to choose the prince of her heart. This morning the beaten king was seen with the tailless old queen. He had forgotten her altogether. But now she provides succor to his bruised soul. Earlier he would turn back and challenge we humans right on the spot. Today he simply showed his beaten bum and screeched a bare-toothed abuse from a safe distance. Times change. Nothing is permanent. But he has already crammed the village with his pedigree and this thought should give him some solace.

We match the monkeys in more ways than one. We mess things around—ironically even when we suppose we are organizing things, we are in fact sowing the seeds of more disorder and chaos later on. Our gallant spirit has seen us launching 8400 tons of objects into earth’s orbit. Our space-conquering spirits have seen us catapulting 25000 objects into earth’s orbit. As a result, there is a huge amount of junk that is floating in space. The future spacecrafts and satellites will need decluttering of space. So we will have space kabaris. The trash pickers can take pride in their profession now. It will be much esteemed in the coming decades. Your trash is someone’s treasure, very aptly said. But we are mindlessly turning mother earth’s treasures into piles of trash.

I light a diya a dusk. It’s a beautiful, little beacon of faith that lights my path into the dark folds of night. The next day the clay diya has a left out cotton swab of the wick. I put it in the flowerbed. There are a few tailorbird couples. Cotton is the basic building block of their nest made by sewing three leaves together. They are nice, skilled chaps and expertly stitch leaves to make a nesting cup. I think to be a great human tailor, it must be mandatory to be a diligent tailorbird in the previous birth.

It’s mid November. Gone are the pure mists. We now have the metallic haze, the smog. It kills slowly. Right now it burns the eyes and gives the throat an itch. But the birds still have their morning songs and that is an assurance for the time being. We have to believe in nature to save us like it has done so far.  

During the winters, the entire Delhi NCR, covering many districts in the neighboring states apart from the national capital, gets shrouded under smog. Stubble burning by Punjab farmers is generally blamed for Delhi’s smog. If Punjab fires are majorly responsible for the winter fog in Delhi, then Chandigarh should be equally polluted in November but it stays almost unaffected. Stubble burning is just one of the factors and that too temporary. The political class passes the buck onto poor farmers every year and keeps ignoring the long-lasting issues that make Delhi a gas chamber throughout the year.

Whose right is it to be a bigger excluvist?

 These are the dark spin-offs of the ultra-nationalist ideology.  You keep parroting "Hindu Rashtra-Hindu Rastra" and it creates ripple effects. It inspires (wrongly of course) others also to do the same. If you talk of an over-swiping Hindutva, coloring the entire country in one color, minorities will feel justifiably threatened. The ultra-nationalist Hindu ideology itself is a reaction, an off-shoot, to the blind religious zealotry of hardline Muslim maulvis who have drilled a dangerous fact in Muslim masses that their first identity is that of a Muslim before any other lesser identity like citizenship, designation, role or responsibility.  So the bully boys of Hinduism feel justified in raising a din in the name of their religion also. Originally, hardliner Islam has wrongly inspired fiery sentiments among other religions. A few of the peace loving sanatan dharmis are now trishul wielding mobsters. Main culprit is the fire of sectranism. It now burns in many Hindu hearts. But fiery Hindu hearts will inspire other religious hearts also. So as the shadows cast by the nationalistic sunrays fall over the Indian diversities, we have resurgence of Khalistan movement.  If you overdo it, so will they. The wrong is far more effective in motovating the mobsters than the right. The policy of systematic discrimination against the Muslims has already sown the seeds of second wave of separatism along communal lines after 1947. And the din raised to the proportions of pralya whenever a Chriatian missionary converts a Tribal in forests will force the Chriatians of north-east to think along separatist lines. India is too diversified to be colored in one ideological color. The shiny nationalistic colorists may gain temporary benefits like forming governments but in the long run it will eat the foundations of India like termites. When Hindu youths go lynching over cows, of course the Sikh youths also get an itching to go on rampage on communal grounds and carry Holy Guru Granth Sahib into the police stations challenging law and order. The far rightist ideology colors the insanity of mobsters in patriotic colors. But then in India we have enough religions to bring down our castle. Let's talk of inclusivity. Let the elections be fought over the issues that concern the common man. Let's put the blinding colors of Rashtravadi revolution on the sidelines and pick up simple tools of nation-making.

Postscript: All excluvist principles draw their sustenance from an atrophied complex, the complex of superiority.  If as a resurgent Hindu nationalist you feel justified in your exclusivistic ideology, don't you think others also feel the same way? Don't you think even a Khalistani will try to justify his/her belief along the same lines? Or do you think that your excluvistic right of  narromindedness is greater than theirs because sanatan dharma is older than Sikhism? From this principle of seniority in years,  the religion of animism followed by Dravadian Tribals deep in the forests of south India has even a bigger claim to hold the copyright over the faith of this particular geographical unit because they were already functioning as a human society with its distinct culture before the Aryans arrived and laid the foundation of what we now recognise as Hindu dharma.

At a Peasant Wedding

 

It’s quite tough to be a non-drinking member of a wedding party in Haryana. Everyone is drunk to be in an enlightened dimension, leaving me the poor earthling struggling with the ground realities. Since truth is decided by the majority, I feel myself clueless and almost an idiot. The marriage DJ starts blaring. The massive woofers and speakers of the music system shake the ground under my steady feet. The liquor-lovers look more sure-footed with their unsteady feet on a shaky ground. The loud blasts of music leave my ribs shaken.

Drunk peasants give a fantastic thrust to their spirits. They challenge all norms of established mindsets, cultural matrix and constitutional niceties. It’s madly adventurous to be among them, I tell you. If you aren’t a fellow seminarist to them, then be prepared for an onslaught by the agents of anarchy.

Hinduism is indeed very liberal. The starting song is a dedication to drunkenness. ‘Bhola takes a bucket of bhang and shakes his bum to ecstatic dance’ is the approximate translation of the rowdy Haryanvi song about Lord Shiva’s fondness for bhang. They are so happy that the Lord Himself loves drinking. Dozens of liquor-lovers turn ecstatic.

Flying drones is prohibited without authorization in India. And so is celebratory firing. But most of what we do in celebration falls on the other side of law. A young man is flying a drone to make it the best marriage party ever to have visited the village. Another is firing angry vollies of bullets into the body of a helpless sky. I try to add value to their fun. ‘A drone just hovering around is no fun and so is the blind and aimless firing into the sky,’ I call their attention. ‘You try your aiming skills at the drone,’ I propose the scheme to the gun wielder. ‘You prove your expertise in flying by taking it away from the bombardment,’ I suggest to the drone flier. Dozens of voices grab the option and they are egged on to start the game. Even random, close-eyed shots would have a better chance. The boozed man’s careful shot shakes the skies. An electric wire finds the aim. Snap goes the wire with a bang. The scared drone crashes on an attic, making it a perfect drone attack.

There is a spin-off from the same wedding. I come home at night, hugely relieved to come in one piece. But someone bangs fists at the iron gate. He is a most distant relative, so distant that you lose the trail of the relationship if you try to go to the source, who has come attending the same marriage function. He is curtly denied entry into any of the houses he thought had a duty to entertain his stay. Perhaps someone suggested that the writer is a good option under the circumstances. So here he comes to my place. He is unsteady in gait but very steadily holds his feeble right to stay at my place. What will you do, if even after you declaring his totally unwelcome status through your gruff behavior, he pretends to be most at ease as if flowers have just been sprinkled over him, making him the most esteemed guest on earth? You have to be an out and out rascal in bad behavior to help him accept his unwelcome status. The roughest cut-sharp notes are simply songs of welcome to him, so here he is sprawled comfortably on the bed and I take my bedding on a cot in a corner in another room. But before that he prefers to be more welcomed through talks. He is very proud about his vast travels. ‘How many places you have visited in India?’ I am finally forced to ask, getting curious about his far and wide travels. ‘I have travelled far and wide!’ he declares. Then he enlists a thorough sketch of his forced entries into the houses in the neighboring districts within a diameter of 50 km. ‘I have travelled a lot,’ he declares with the world-weary finality of a traveler who has just returned after taking a trip around the earth or maybe even beyond. Thank God, this feeling of world-hopping travel got him sleepy and he dozed off.

But well into the depths of night, another liquor-lover is singing his bawdy songs against humanity. He has drunk away his land and domestic peace. The last installment of the compensation money for his land acquired for a new road project was swiftly drunk away. All that was left was a lakh of rupees. A smart guy cleverly branded his old car at 1.25 lakh rupees. The real price must be around 75000 rupees. He gave a discount of 35000 and sold the car for 90000 rupees. The liquor-lover hits the ceiling in hitting the jackpot.

In return of the favor done to the purchaser, the seller gets a promise to use the vehicle as and when needed till he gets a new car himself. It will be an exception though, he promised to the new owner of the dented old car. In addition, there was another condition. This one made the liquor-lover really happy. He had to promise to take the old owner and his group on two trips to Haridwar. Fun trips, they promised. The two proposed trips to the pilgrimage town saw the rest of the money going out of the pocket. The borrowing of the car turned out to be a generality, not the exception as promised earlier. There is no new car purchased by the previous owner so far. The frequent borrowings result in repeated tiffs between the neighbors. And carrying the momentum from one of the numerous tiffs, he is now tearing apart the shrouds of dark night with his piercing shouts.  

A Few Small Moments

 

Time is creeping ahead block by little block. It keeps on ticking to set up the colossal canvas of happenings. And commodified into its pawns we are also shifted around bundled with all our inflated myths. Among the gigantic plethora of events, there are little tales of agonies and ecstasies. This one here seems a sad tale. Life seems to carry a timeworn and dilapidated myth despite all the hypothetical, slow-dawning effervescence about it. And death, the colossal figure, snatches raw freshness to its age-old, wrinkled self.

A ladybird seems dead in the water bucket. I bring my fingertip near the drowned little colorful flier. Instantly crossing the vast chasm between life and death, it uses its energy held in reserves and crawls to the hand of the species that has destroyed countless fellow earthlings. I look at its beautiful red wings speckled with little dots. It gives gleaming insights into the vast array of natural colors and self-evolving designs.

I try to put it on the night jasmine flowers but it looks full of gratitude and moves up the finger. Getting it off is a very delicate, and tough, job. I am not aware that someone is watching me very closely. A rockchat has witnessed the rescue operation. It’s keenly interested in what I’m doing. Its dull rufous brown color is misleading. It’s not that dumb as it seems. Smartly it picks the ladybird and darts away, giving a triumphant chick-chick note that carries a wry sense of humor. Probably it thinks that I’m offering the little colorful beetle to it.

It’s one of the pair that hops around in the verandah and the yard and the garden ticking out ants, spiders and other little insects. Sometimes they sneak into the room and are very keen to explore the cage of we humans. They survey the room from the ceiling fan and their dark little eyes seem lost in the encyclopedic fog spread by our hopes and desires. I would say it’s a very inquisitive pair of birds and they want to know more about me. Once, one of them, boy or the girl I’m not sure, sat on my writing pad and very comfortably and assuredly eased down a drop on it. Maybe it gave me an autograph.

Sometimes, the rufous brown Indian rockchat is mistaken as female Indian robin, but it lacks the reddish vent and is slightly larger in size than the robin and carries a slightly curved slender beak. It flies like thrushes and redstarts and loves to hop and fly around human habitations. No wonder they have laid claim to the house. They slowly raise their tails as they take little jumps on the ground while picking their feed. They help this lazy countryside writer in keeping a check on the spiders in the verandah. Sometimes they come out even at night when there are moths around the bulb. The pair, quite unlike their unassuming dull color, has a vast repertoire of calls including territorial calls, begging calls, feeding calls, distress calls and roosting calls. But the usual call is a short whistling chee delivered with a rapid bob and stretch. Sometimes, they give company to the tailorbirds with their alarm calls, which is a harsh chek-chek. And when they are very happy after a nice lunch, they sing like thrush in their moderate, few-numbered notes. They are naughty sometimes and try to imitate the sound of other birds.

The honey buzzer got greedy and regularly flew down for three consecutive days. Now the bees aren’t just there to go flying around and gather honey for it. They left the site in irritation. You have to take away only that much as it won’t spoil the game altogether. Sadly, now my little garden looks incomplete without the bees. The flowers will miss them. Hope the tiny winged visitors won’t forget the garden and will come back some fine sunny day to get pollen for their honey and more flowery smiles for the plants.

A little rodent moves quite cluelessly in the flowerbed. Is it a shrew or mole rat? I’m not expert enough to know the difference. To a layman’s eye, there is hardly any difference between the two. I wish it to be a mole rat because they say it brings luck. What is the harm in wishing oneself a bit of luck? These are hard times after all. It’s twilight and a bluejay (Indian roller or neelkanth) suddenly swoops down from the neem branch, where it was sitting stoically for the last half an hour, and takes off a gecko from the compound wall. The gecko will have a nice flight till its carrier lands. Stay indoors you wall lizards if you don’t enjoy flying in the twilight.