Brave summer flowers

 The last week of April with its baking hot 40°C days. The sun seems to have insatiable appetite to vaporize the entire pool of moisture from the face of earth below. The moment you step out it feels as if you have been put in an oven. So those who can help it have run to take shelter in the shade. But the wheat-harvesting farmers cannot help it. They have to face the apocalypse to beat the demon of hunger both in their stomachs as well teeming millions over the planet.

The pale, yellow, still left out leaves wilt and droop under the fiery onslaught. Submissiveness and surrender, in the absence of any alternative, is the mantra of survival and resurgence when the situations change in the future. Big trees fall in a storm. A blade of grass survives because it bends to the storm knowing fully well that it can have no say in the beginning or stopping of a storm.

Seamlessly and ceaselessly blazes the sun. The heat touches its peak between two and three in the afternoon. The streets get deserted. But right under the baking sun, two brave beings hold the baton of life. A boy is flying a kite. His boyhood’s armature blunts the heat’s knife-grinder to spin mauve loops of laughter and fun. It’s windy and the kite with its long tail sways to the hot endearment of the burning, sighing wind lashing against its paper. A little white butterfly also defies the fiery diktats and goes kissing nectar from little bulbous groups of red peregrina flowers. Well, let’s make it three—the boy, the kite and the butterfly. That’s what living is—swimming against the tide.

Put your feet on the ground, the skin may peel off. The sand is on fire. Exactly for this purpose, to save the humanity’s soles from burning, a hawker of bathroom slippers is plodding his laden bicycle with bright, attractive, multicolored footwear. His hawking tagline, punch-line rather, is very interesting. ‘Chappal lyo, gents lyo, ladies lyo!’ he shouts with confidence and brave clamor. Well, beyond meanings in spirit, in letter it means: ‘Buy slippers, buy gents, buy ladies!’

There is some water in the narrow, open water drain outside the yard wall. Beyond that there is a little patch of semi-wilderness, the last refuge of the snakes in the village. The snake must have been very thirsty to crawl out on the hot sand to take a few lolloping sips of water. It left a majestic crawl-art on the sand. A liquor-lover coming gyrating in the heat’s eddies sees the curvy lines drawn on the sand. I run out to stop him from breaking the rickety iron gate for he is banging with fists in all seriousness to warn me of the snake. ‘A huge black snake got into your garden,’ he warns. ‘The line stops at your gate. It’s surely inside your house,’ he wants me to faint with fear, looking expectantly into my eyes as if baiting out utmost fear and phobias. In the evening many people talk about the snake in different colors and sizes. The color varies to cover the entire range of spectrum. The length of course is stated to vary between a dozen feet to its half. The girth between thigh and bicep. Well, I think that’s how myths develop.

There are sun-burnt flowers still holding onto their belief in blooming and smiles. The bonsai bougainvillea has a bouquet of wispy-petaled violet flowers. I bought it from a nursery keeper who had worked in Pune for some time. The way I carry myself, I look barely a senior school passout.

The stay at a big city makes you feel more enlightened about things of knowledge and facts. Even though he may not have passed even primary school but that stint at Pune makes him take himself very seriously, especially about the names of his flowers. As we bargain about the price of a bonsai bougainvillea he has to correct me multiple times. ‘Yea, it looks a nice bonsai,’ I agree. ‘Yes, very nice bone size it is!’ he corrects me. During the time it takes to strike a deal he has corrected me at least four times. He is sure that I’m not educated enough to pronounce its name correctly. ‘Bone size sold really well in Pune. Very important educated wealthy people were my regular customers for this item,’ he is very proud of his bone size plant. ‘Thanks for the wonderful bone size,’ I correct myself at last. He is relieved at teaching me the correct name of his much esteemed plant.

The brave sadabahar in the crack in the wall looks unperturbed of the heat. Used to the extremes, I suppose. The garden trees have lost their shade. Thanks to a neighboring house, I can sit in the shade till late in the morning. At least in the morning there is dead-leaf charm and autumnal joviality which a person of poetic sensitivities can barely afford to miss. Despite the fire in the air, there are butterflies, simply because we have at least sunburnt flowers.

An episode of love and war played on a yellow parijat leaf nearby. It’s a horny flea couple. They take a tumble on my newspaper and finish the action while still rolling and fly off.

The ants want a pucca house. Who doesn’t these days? They have drilled a hole in the cemented bricks in the yard. A tiny heap of sand, a mark of the excavation work undergoing below the ground, stands as the testimony to their worksite. It’s a busy world with the ants happily carrying grains to their new granary.

The Indian robin, almost a resident bird of the small garden, hops around and tastes a few ants along with the grains in their mouths. But the ants aren’t bothered. They are so many as to not miss the few odd ones that go missing on the labor line.

Maybe there was a lizard on a branch near my shoulder. The shikra dives and lands on my shoulder like a missile. Both of us get startled beyond imagination. He struggles away angrily. I am not aware of the lizard’s fate.

A fat brown male cat comes panting, mouth open and the tongue hanging out due to the heat. He checks the yard and pees on the wheel of my scooter, sniffs at many plants and deposits himself on the wet ground under a hibiscus in a corner. He looks all set for a noontime sleep. 

Romancing with peace

 

Remember the wonderful time you spent on a beach facing a calm, bluish lagoon? Its soft bluish ripples gently tugging at your soul. Silence and peace seeping into your ruffled, wavy self. Remember walking on the soft sand of a desert on a wintery, windless day? The sand cotton soft and the sun kindly warming the rigid clods of pain. Away from the hot sandy blizzards, the mirage buried under the sand and you joyfully watching the footstep trail, gently tugging at your soul. Remember rolling on undisturbed pastures on a balmy noon away from the icy shrieks of windstorms? The grassy softness assuaging all hard knots of suffering inside? Remember a calm lake? Its soft ripples gentling tugging at the aggrieved self, asking why are you so sad? Remember the spotless blue sky of the spring season, looking amusedly over the colors that have sprouted below?

Stormy seas, heaving lakes, disturbed desert or wind-lashed pastures hardly beckon us. We move away from them. They remind us of the storm within our own self. Most of us carry tiny invisible storms within, invisible storms let loose by the onslaught of nervous energy. There are waves of random thoughts, overbearing emotions, fears, insecurities, complexes. That’s why the symbols of peace represented by the kind, peaceful face of nature appeal to us so much. They are like a healing pill, a medicine of peace that we soak, inhale and gulp down to do away with the stormy sea inside.

Most of us carry a choppy sea inside, tossing the boat of our existence. The wind howls and waves shriek as the nervous energy moves randomly like in a puzzle game, seeking a way out of the troubling alleys and corridors within. Shaken by this stormy onslaught from within, it’s quite natural for us to run around in order to seek solace. It primarily is the base of our eternal urge to connect, interact, build relationships, friendships, setting families, careers and all that we engage in order to make it somehow meaningful.

There are people within whom the storms have died; so much so that they are a human representation of all the peaceful scenarios given in the first paragraph. They possess the peace of silent, bluish lagoons in them. They have the serenity of a wintertime desert on a windless day. They have the gentility of gently rolling pastures. They have the flowering of joy like the spring season. They have the summer warmth of kindness and empathy to melt others’ icicles of pain. They have the autumnal surrender and detachment to carry an unconditional smile. They have the coolness of winters to undo the burning hot turmoil in others. The best of natural peace out there gets sublimated inside their persona. They come to represent the calm, peaceful, assuring, healing aspect of mother nature.

Won’t the people feel these peaceful vibes coming from such souls? They surely will. When we talk of enlightened sages and benevolent saints, maybe we have the vast picture of calmness, peace, tranquility, stability in a human form: A human representation of all the beautiful things in nature that heal and assure our tossed self. The gentle sea, the calm desert, the peaceful lake, the softly musing sky, the soft carpet of pastures need not say anything to us to undo our pain and suffering. They pass the message just by being there. Similarly, the vastly stabilized self of a spiritual person gently, invisibly strokes our hair, kindly embraces our presence without any judgment. They are not left with any possibility for judgments because these are born in a tossed self only. No wonder, the people will look for such gentle souls. They might be hiding in forests and caves but we somehow seek them out. Just to watch them, be with them and feel their presence. Because it heals. It pacifies the storms within.

Postscript: Inspired by the interaction with a gentle soul who is on the path of becoming exactly such a person.

Summerstorm

 The sun is getting hotter with each day as if driven by obsessive self-admiration over the heat and brightness. The noons are dazzling with soaring luminosity. The leaves are baked dead by the forty degree plus sun. The noontime is no doubt a big oven with everything for a nice roast. Just a gentle hot breeze and dry leaves rustle with a song carrying the essence of crumbling, charming prodigality of mortality, of shifting forms, of transfigurations and transformations. The parijat is a mere leafless sketch in black and white. A sandstorm in the evening and what remained of the pale leaves still precariously perched on the seat of life on the branches was also forced to let go of its worldly clasp and flow away. A bare almost lifeless tree it seems but there is semblance of aged but wise and graceful profile of an old man.

In the morning next day, I see a tailorbird’s nest-cup on the ground. The storm can break the branch but the nest is intact. It’s for nothing that we call them tailorbirds. They are meticulous in their art. A laborious, expertly weave of grass, hair and cotton. As I’m marveling at the master tailor-work, I see a tiny beat of life. A hatchling—mere half of the human little finger—is lying on the ground. The pulse of life itself has a big force even in tiny frailest of bodies, and that’s why maybe the ants kept away waiting patiently for the pulse to die down, as if paying respect to life, following a dharma. Well, it was lying on the ground throughout the night and surprisingly still possesses the beat of life. Where were the ants? Maybe they were busy somewhere or were conscientious enough not to eat something alive.

There are two more hatchlings nearby. One of them is considerably small and dead, the other has some movement. But these two are sticking to a thick strand of a buffalo’s tail-hair that had been utilized in nest-making. I hold the bigger alive one and its dead, almost weightless sibling dangles, swinging to the breeze, already on the path of dust-in-making. I know any effort to pull the dead one away would almost result in tearing the living one.

Since there are nestlings alive, I deem it my duty to fix the nest. I try to fix the nest, consisting of three parijat leaves stitched together with strands of buffalo hair and swabs of cotton, among the crumbling dry leaves on the sad-looking tree. It needs some tailoring skills to reattach a tailorbird’s nest to a branch. I use a needle and a thread to sew the system to a branch and put the survivor hatchlings in it including the dead one.

The parents return and throw lungfuls of abuses at the human whom they suppose to be the one who tossed away their house in the dark. They straightaway get into the business of parenting once they find that the nest is funnily reattached in an artificial manner. They soon arrive with worms in their beaks to feed their kids. Thinking about the last evening’s storm isn’t part of their nature. They live in ‘here and now’. After some time, while they are away, I get onto a stool to see the position of the household inside the leafy cup. The pair of the dead and the barely alive, strung together by a hair strand, is gone. The only healthy baby is sprawled comfortably inside the nest. Most probably they discarded the dead along with the half-dead, not having the means to undo the hairy entanglement. That shows their love is perfect, yet very practical in nature, bound to some primal laws of survival of the fittest.  

Clangy-blangy fall of a farming vessel

 The farmers keep a big tin pan, a basin rather. It’s used to gather cattle dung in the barn to take it to the dump site. We call it tasla. Not a great item to look at, on account of its task, it but is as important as the brass plate in the kitchen. When a tasla falls on the ground, it makes a thunderous sound as if war has been declared between two groups of rowdy farmers. It freezes the moment in the entire neighborhood. Its clangy-blangy notes spread out with the intensity of a mini-bomb’s explosion. Sometimes it startles love-cum-fight sessions between the peasant couples to whom there isn’t much of a difference between love and war. Lovemaking happens to be a type of war. And sometimes not just humans, the birds also get stalled in their beautiful moments by the storm-surge of a tasla fall, like it happens this morning. A beautifully fan-tailed peacock and a reciprocating dull-looking peahen standing face to face on a wall and just on the verge of a cheeky-peeky-beaky kiss. A tasla bangs on the ground in the locality. As the noisy tempest is unleashed, the kiss gets lost and the startled love-birds run for life.

We aren’t sure how many farmer couples, sparring on the charpoys, leapt out of their duels, but yours truly can see at least one more effect on a helpless animal. It’s a heavily pregnant cat slowly moving on the top of a seven-foot high yard wall, carrying its sweetly overloaded stomach with the majestic mien of maternity. It need not be told to be careful; natural intelligence at work. It’s there in every ounce of existence. But the clang and bang of a falling tasla can spoil all natural equanimity born of inherent intelligence across species. It jumps as the tasla slays peace, or even secret wars on charpoys, in the locality. But as a mother it has to be careful. It seems uncertain whether it should go down or not. It then very cautiously slips along the wall, her front paws scratching the wall plaster. The feline would-be-mom neatly lands with a very soft jump. And we humans think that our knowledge is a product of our thinking. In fact our thinking overshadows the infinite natural intelligence pervading around. Remove the dust and see the bigger picture. But not when a tasla falls. We all including humans, peacocks and cats share a commonality, a common trait of getting frozen for a moment when a falling tasla slays the status quo.

A skirmish between liqor-lovers and honeybees

 The liquor-lovers suddenly realize it’s very hot. The question of sweating like pigs during the drinking sessions can no longer be dismissed airily under the colossal caveats unleashed by boozed self. There they go expressly head-hunting for a solution to the problem. ‘As you sweat in excess, the alcohol inside seeps out through the skin-pores and that’s the reason we no longer get the feeling of sufficiently drunk these days,’ one of them explains in a metronomic tone. The nippy swirl of hot winds seems to conjure disaster by pouring out all the alcohol from their innards through sweating. They have enough willpower to go looking for a solution and find one in fact.

There is an abandoned storeroom in the locality. They decide to fix an AC in its back wall. As they break an opening in the wall to fix the air conditioner, an anxious and jostling crowd of honeybees attacks them. The group is semi-drunk while all this happens. They get defeated and retreat from the battlefield. The next day, they look indescribably beautiful—in their own ways of course—with swollen and strange-shaped eyes, noses, lips, foreheads, cheeks and chins. They appear to have come under a deluge of whiplashes by the angry insects. But it’s not over yet. The party with weirdly beautiful faces returns to the battlefield to settle the scores. It’s a war that is being fought over two days. The bees won the first battle skirmishes on day one.

The new-faced liquor-lovers raise a huge pal of smoke under the bee-comb. Many honeybee soldiers fall down beating their wings, gasping for breath. Under attack by the killer deluge of the smoke the honeybees move away, leaving behind their larvae and stocks of honey.

It was a very safe hideout for the bees, both against the heat as well as the honey buzzard. But then the liquor-lovers’ right to beat the heat proves stronger than the bees. I sometimes wonder that this creation is merely a series of bigger rights imposed over lesser ones, a kind of blatant supersession and expansion moving from lower hierarchies to bigger ones.

Since we are talking of the liquor-lover group, it won’t be misfitting to talk about one particular member of the group. As long as he can open his eyes, after getting sloshed to upper limits, he has enough willpower and strength to give a blow back for his wife’s attack. She is a strong peasant woman. So he full drunk and she all fury result in inconclusive fights. Both carry the marks of night battles to the next day. She then decides to tilt the scale in her favor. He is lumbering sloshed to guts and moves with unsteady steps, having just enough senses in him to somehow—miraculously though—maintain his shaky vertical against a fall. She welcomes him with a smile and lavishes the glory of her sweet words unlike the angry cat that gnawed at his face whenever he returned home fully drunk. She purrs like a joyful cat and seduces him to drink more. He happily complies and falls asleep, or rather not able to move or open eyes, a total blackout. With unconquerable dignity she then sits on his chest and slaps him to her heart’s deepest content. The next day he carried perfectly blue cheeks. ‘It’s the side effect of the spurious liquor that you drink. You are lucky that it affected just the cheeks,’ she explained.