Deadly lovers

 

The female fireflies of the genus Photinus have a lovely love-thirsty courtship code carrying a sensuous shine, when they are ready to mate, to send loftily high, seductive signals to the males regarding their willingness for lovemaking. This courtship blinking triggers a surrender mood in the males and they run to embrace love. Then there are killer females of the firefly genus Photuris. They seem to have cracked the code. They also send the all goody apparently Photinus-sounding love signals. Seeking the divine direction of an unquenchable love-thirst, the Photinus males flutter to embrace love. They pursue the multifarious glamour with eclectic passion. They miss the desired destination by a long-long mark and it soon turns to death’s ever-lasting final embrace. Then the sensuously stylish ladies, the Photuris females, eat them with awful female valor. The sensuous flowers turn out to be thorn traps. The males hardly getting a chance to even nurture any kind of repenting reflections over their choice. Well, there are always bound to be stormy ripples in the sea of love. This is what we call cracking the code of love to eat your man. And we always relate the beastly, clawy contrivance to the homo sapiens only! All the shades of human character seem to be already etched in nature. All the fifty shades of gray and more seem to be structured inherently in the subconscious entrenchments of the energy field walloping around us. Isn’t this creation a motley mess of wonders?

Year-long summers

 We are piling up data like no other hunter-gatherer, among any species on earth, collects anything. And on top of that we have computers to store data, so here come more and more numbers with each passing second. One little statistical fact: June 19 was the first and the only day since March 11 when the maximum temperature was 30°C, a day of least maximum temperature during the interval. I mean it happens to be the least maximum temperature in the interval from March 11 to June 19. Nothing surprising here, it’s a routine burning summer in north Indian plains. My only worry is that the most of March had more than 30°C temperature. It makes March a summer month. Where is our spring in that case? We have to shift it to the second fortnight of February which once used to be the peak of winters. There would be a time in the coming decades when the coldest days of January, as they stand now, would qualify as a brief spring. Finally we will have year-long summers. These are the perils of global warming. It’s fearsomely hard-hitting. The fragile frontiers of varied seasons will give in. The illustrious legacy of winters, springs and autumns will be held by myths. It surely will happen unless we plant trees, save forests, cut pollution, abandon our deceiving double standards, give an ear to the circumspecting nerves, and on top of that somehow systematically tame the bug of consumerist greed in our brain. 

Musings from a tiny corner

 Most of us have our favorite spots. Some feel at complete ease at some little backstreet café or a tea shop or cinema. I like my little corner in the small garden. To me it’s a seat of spirituality’s sovereign comforts. It’s shaded with a pair of parijat and bhelpatra trees sharing the space with magnanimously consensual smiles of brotherhood and friendship. They are small trees but sufficient to shade a little corner for a village writer. There are hibiscus, marigolds and sadabahars around. I sit there in the morning to steal some momentous reflections and cultivate some healthy perspectives about life. Both these are holy trees in Hindu mythology. Their shade above feels like spirituality canvassed over my conscience. This is the corner where I feel oodles of gratitude to the almighty. This is where I’m fully convinced that in our lack of thanklessness to God, we forget sores of things He’s worked out in our favor, which get masked by the common visible factors of our misery.

The tailorbird couple objects very forcefully but now I’m used to their non-stop abuses and take it as sort of background choir to my solitude. The sadabahar in the crack, my favorite little flower, is withering. I’m afraid it may die. If it holds for another fortnight then the monsoons may revive it.

Mother nature seems to know when to release the chokehold on our throat. Just when June turned almost unbearable, the western disturbances brought clouds and brief thundershowers got the temperature down helping us survive the heat. Five days of cloudy skies and life is back on the track. Jungle geranium’s bulbous assortment of tiny clusters of flowers has added some vibrancy to the heat-beaten soft pink. The Mexican petunias have soft-purple bell flowers under the shade. The sadabahars have grabbed the opportunity to add luster to their light purple flowers. The sun-burnt roses have full smile of lush red blooms around them. Jasmine’s little white flowers spray their fragrance in full spirits. It counts as a huge transformation, a wondrous resurgence, just in a matter of five days. I see it written with an unselfish flair on the flowers with a preciously subtle message.

Resetting, recovery and rejuvenation come far more naturally than we think. We just have to hold on till the favorable turn of winds.

A love-struck hoopoe is giving prolonged bursts of oop-oop-oop for the past few days. Let’s hope he finds a perfect lady love. The male koel is always sweet in its love-calls unlike the shaky female who gives tumultuous, undulating notes. These are but the seductively vibrating notes that drive the restfulness of the male koel’s sweet notes above the virile stirrings of subsurface male passion. The peacocks have pitched up their hooting frequency anticipating monsoons. Just with a few pre-monsoon showers there are numerous baby frogs. Once the monsoon arrives I think they will take over the entire village. 

The 'hanted' house

 The one-time sleepy nearby town that I remember as one busy market street surrounded by lower middle class households is now almost an adolescent city. A little world so big with its sleepy attraction; bountiful providences of urbanism now kissing earth and the land value that was once measured in acres is now done in yards. A protuberant belly of possibilities. Obscenely bulging, modernist pathologies greedily feasting upon the sublimating humility of free lands with their tiny corners of untamed wilderness. There are industrial parks and zones coming around as this part of the Delhi NCR gets its turn to become congested, industrialized and polluted. The urban lark spreading its wings with rigidly designed viewpoint.

They now have a funfair also on the ground where once Ramleela used to be staged. A lovely, twinkling, sparkling constellation of consumerism. The advertisement fliers and pamphlets announce Ferris wheel, handicraft bazaar, dance and singing competitions, stage shows, shopping bonanzas, camel ride and hanted house. Yes, you read it right it’s ‘hanted house’. Probably they mean haunted house and the poor ‘u’ is left to woo the art of non-being.

The group of boys in the neighborhood, who spend most of their time in the streets, have come really ‘hanted’ from the fair. They have toy bugles and horns of multitudinous pitch, notes and frequencies. The musical toys share a magical chemistry with their restless enthusiasm for fun and frolics. They are now giving the best of their lungpower to the toy musicals ranging from the shrillest, which can drill a hole in your brain, to the loudest that can shred one’s eardrum to pieces. It sounds like war music. I deem it fit to stop reading and make the most of the music. I try to choreograph a few steps to go along the angry music. Soon I realize that I’m too amateur to do full justice to this playful ruckus and din. A full lunatic may do something about it. Half-lunatics like yours truly, with his still considerate discretion, stand no chance at all. 

The cycling days

 Childhood has a tendency to have a breezy swipe over all miseries and disadvantages born of limited circumstances. In our childhood, there was no variety in cycle models. Those were big, bulky, rotund Atlas and Hero cycles made for tough elders to carry loads over the dirt tracks. So how would little children with little legs learn cycling? That was the question. The kids of today carry a big advantage in having tiny cycles with supporters that train them into the art even before they realize that they have been learning cycling. When we were growing up it was the same cycle for a centurion and a little kid. It was the same cycle that carried fodder bales and newly wed brides. The very same cycle to go on love errands and carry out devious designs.

We would whisk away big, rusted, age-old cycles at great risk of severe punishment. It was an item of luxury at the village level. Almost possessed the same status as a medium range SUV does these days. So you can evaluate its importance. The saddle would reach almost to our head level. So we learnt cycling in kenchi (scissor) style. A master art of convenience, equipped with all the unconventional over-ridings. The little rider would get into the triangular frame under the bar and take his leg across for the other pedal, hold the handle with one hand and cling to the saddle with the other for support. Others would push and prod from all angles possible to maintain the balance; almost a sight like ants clinging to a big grain. The bicycle would then tumble and bury a few children with the rider trapped in.

It would then, with the passage of time and enhancement of skills, graduate to the bar style—swinging the hips down on both sides while paddling to meet the length and the bum staying in air over the bar because sitting on the saddle would find the riding toes several inches above the pedals. It would give a serpentine trajectory because each push down on either side would see the handle being tilted in that direction. It was a very jerky and effort-taking style especially when you had a pillion rider behind you. That would require a big effort to maintain the balance.

I remember an episode when I had graduated to the bar style as a thin thirteen or fourteen years old. Perched on the carrier at the back my chubbily cute friend sang bawdy Haryanvi raginis as I took the lurching behemoth on the pot-holed district road passing by the village. Those were the days when you were lucky enough to have a clear road for many minutes at a stretch. The traffic was sparse and we went almost unchecked on our voracious exploration of the countryside.

It was a fine day and the road all clear for me to heave Grandfather’s big old bicycle. A few hundred meters ahead I saw a peasant woman going by the side of the road. And I panicked that I may hit her. There wasn’t anything coming from either side; the entire road to my service. I lost control over the direction. The bicycle seemed to go of its own volition. It was a logjam of contradictory thoughts across my boyish nerves. The big bicycle went relentlessly at full throttle, as if magnetically attracted to her. It went directly darting into her and with a bang it bashed into her broad peasant woman’s behind. All three of us rolled pell-mell. Boyhood gives you enough agility to jump to your feet quickly. Before she could recover from the shock and give a rippling outburst, we were running away into the shrubberies.

She was a huge farming woman with an ox-like torso. And she kept thundering threats and abusive words brandishing her sickle at us. She sat on the fallen bicycle for a good half hour waiting for us to arrive and twist our ears and give a few hard hits at our back. But we were wiser for that; with all the time at our disposal. We simply sat at a safe distance patiently listening to her lamenting vocals and incessant burst of hot temper. She but had lots of work to do in the fields, so left after raising a big storm of threats and foul words.

As village boys we were short on resources but long on ingenuity to draw fun games out of rudimentary things. There was another fun game that we frequently engaged in. We would take turns to roll into a circle to fit inside the hollow of a big discarded tyre and roll the cargo down a slope. A group of stronger boys waited down the slope to operate as the brakes for the rudimentary machine.