SYNOPSIS

It is a long story, slowly moving like a broad river in its journey through the plains. It is just an effort to highlight some sober facts like the true meaning of nationalism, religion, politics, and humanism. The work has very sharp political connotations. But I would like to clarify that while espousing the cause of clean politics, I have taken very dagger-sharp cuts at certain political forces whose brand of politics results in reversing the basic meanings of religion and nationalism. But it is for sure that all such literary efforts from my side are just a battle cry against bad politics, rather than going against any particular political force. By having creative cuts at the razor-sharp edges of most of the political blocks in India, I have tried to carve out a straight-faced deity whom people have in mind when they envision their interests in the safe hands of the state.

One of the characters is a beautiful girl named Phulva, the gypsy girl. Through the trials and tribulations of her beautiful path through the society of the settlers, I have tried to depict how these almost stateless, religion-less people do come into friction with the sedentary society to create sometimes ecstatic and oftentimes tragic episodes. She smiles like a lotus in the perilous waters of a muddy pond. Also accompanied is the pleasantly sweet-sour path of the now-vanishing nomadic culture that once caressed the settled society with the suddenness of a fresh and fragrant gust of wind. When the gypsies pitch up their campsite on the fringe of settled---and the so-called civilized society---always there are showers and sparkles as the merging fronts of two different entities rub past each other.

The main protagonist is a lame Hindu religioner. Well so much for his Villainy! But there are reasons for badness. After detailing the circumstantial forces, which put him on the path of selfishness--and ultimately his brand of utilitarian Hinduism--I have tried to depict him in the light of multifaceted sun of faith. Through the testing admixture of religion, spirituality, blind faith and religion, I have tried to churn out substantive meanings, which have eluded the mankind puzzled by the conflicting dilemmas of faith, superstition, ritualism, or the religiondom overall. At the other end is his guru, the man with the real, selfless, utility-less mission of spiritual awakening. Through this contrasting set of religious personalities, I have made a humble effort to point out a little arc along the infinitely drawn out compassionate folds and contours of Hinduism.

Heartily mixed up in the silent pace of the tale is the old Muslim fisherman. The silently brooding--and expertly following the principals of humanism--frail man plays a far-far weightier role in the tale with his effortless maneuvers instigated by a heart lit by the unsung lore of true humanity. The man from Bengal, a direct victim of the partition-time butcheries, carries along the seemingly insignificant path with firm, humanistic strides.

Then there are smaller players the disciples, good and bad dogs, stoically suffering animals like donkeys in the caravans, and plainly villainous bunch of thugs who can always put their foul smell in any fragrant orchard--all jutted against the exciting admixture of fate and human deeds.

It is a highly literary work. The target audience is all those who love real humanism devoid of all misinterpretations and miscalculations.

Two Souls in the Night’s Restless Swathes

1          

              Two Souls in the Night’s Restless Swathes

The night was verily dark, as it should when shrouded under buxom, dark clouds. Or was the gloom due to the degenerative dogma and tradition’s swindlery? We’re not sure, as both averred their reasons with equal dexterity.

In this pitch dark, two huts, perched on the back of a mound, cowered under the wicked weather. Wobbling clouds seemed ready to pour down their monsoonal wrath over the straw, reed and grass of the two shelters.

Countless ephemeral, insected souls gnatted, droned and burped: the ephemera forgetting its transcience and fragility to flippantly sing to the tunes of this sweat-laden, hot and humid night of a day bygone or the one waiting to arrive. We’re not sure of the day which fathered this restless night or even the night which was to mother---or had already done so---a new day. But for sure, it was a time in the last week of July, when the monsoon is at the crest of its pleasant fury over the plains of northern India.

If we had the eyes of an angel, or even a mammon’s, we would have come across the descriptive details of the surroundings. The mound, in comparison to the mountainous elevations, was a mere gobbet; littlest of a hillock. Still, it appeared accentuating its rise above the plain; asserting its gob of earth with a historical pride. Sardonically it seemed looking around with aloofness for being an oddity against the geomorphological scalpel of the past. And equipped with kansh and jhabua shrubbery, foliaging its slopes with pinchy prickliness and swordy needleness, it seemed to puff up its lump as a veritable fortress.

Apart from the two thatched hutments, a banyan tree crowned the hillocky gobbet. The banyan was medium in age and girth. In the dark, clouded night it looked awful. Its trunks, twigs and airy roots hadn’t yet developed to that hanky-panky treeness which makes a banyan the erudite king of the plant kingdom during its old age. At this stage of youthfulness, eight or nine second-tier trunks branched out symmetrically upwards from the main one, with airy roots coming more than halfway down to the earth with the jauntiness of a brat; the hanging aerial roots (with a vagrant lucidity) serpented down in the dark like the virgin hair on the chin and cheeks of a ‘face yet to be shaved for the first time’ or a man in becoming. Its robust foliage, defying all the diktats of a bad weather, rustled for its pleasure’s purity.

The nocturnal eye, then, would come across the pond. Imposing darkness hadn’t been able to scuttle away the verve of its wavelets. Wavy epicures lapped at the base of the mound from three sides, as if trying to wake it up. In deference to the rainy season, the pond had gaily acquired a new margin line across the grass along its shores. And this fickle limiting line, smirkingly, seemed to be still eager for a landward jaunt. There was nothing obnoxious in the fact that the pond had transgressed its panchayati area; and like a small sea it had merged into the water standing in the paddy fields, lying along its southern extremity. On the other hand, it reached, almost nefariously, to the objectionable vicinity of the tar metalling the district road, defining its northern fringe. There the waves mockingly lapped against the bricked embankment, as if full of scorn over the unpalatable noisy waves created by some lone vehicle laboring along this pot-holed road.

In the shallow mire, formed due to the submergence of grass crescenting around the mound, pummeling flappings of the fish came out distinct from the fizzling chorus of insects, frogs, toads, leopard-toads, snakes and tortoises.

“It is a mangur fish-flock,” one of the inhabitants of the elevated earthy gobbet might’ve whispered, if faced with a question about the matter.

These were big, broad-snouted cat-fish, stretching their muddy colour for about feet-and-half along the spine. From their snouts, six or seven thick beard like outcrops hang out, making them look like the bearded exorcists of the fish-world. Here was the slippery ground for their frolicsome lovemaking. Mirthing in the ecstatic mire, their submissive bodies rolled amidst the soft needles of the partially submerged grass. Aha, the grandeur of love! The Inclement weather, like an idle, false phantom was hung above flaccidly and powerlessly, unable to intervene in the love game.

The unpaved, earthen embankment serving as a pathway link between the road and the mound had submerged, as water had surged down from the sandy upland soil. There the fields got saturated with water as quickly as they felt thirsty again.

To the north of the road was the sleepy village, lying uneasily and dingily in this gloomily humid night. And the road, which had been metalled with tar about 20 years back, serpented forth on its depilated journey. The administrative insensitivity of two decades was its real burden rather than the traffic and the monsoon.

It was thus such a night, when the time was humidly and ploddingly moving at an unknown hour. Two plaint huts stood with their submissive impressiveness, as if waiting for the autumn when the stout, broad banyan leaves falling from above might add to their sinewy, thatched roof-coverings.

Restlessness in the humid bowls above foretold the monsoonal fury; occasional outbursts when it rains incessantly throughout the night. Suddenly, the peering peek of the migratory birds—ducks, pelicans, herons, waders, cranes, etc—got them amuck and they buttressed the noise manifold.

A ‘darker than darkness around’ cloud was astutely plodding towards the big tree from north-west. The dark vault’s edge must have been over the fields on the sandy plateau. Sand seizing the loosened-up roots of tall jowar and bajra crops sensed the approaching cloud with an abhorrent look, for it tantamount to an addition to their tilting angle and its consequent force of maternal hold.

Those excited vapours in a whirlpool were now adding rapidly to their size and sublimity. A luscious gust of wind quickly perpetuated the sway of dark mass over the grey dull clouds up to the road, which seemed to have gone to sleep after a heavy tome of tiring schedule. But its sleep was broken, every quarter of an hour or so, by the bumping and jangling journey of some sleepy truck plying unpluckily to its destination in the neighbouring state of Rajasthan.

From the rustling leaves of the banyan a cuckoo sang, or rather cooed squeakingly. Aromatic pungency and sweetness of its reproachful birdie song traveled far in this humid night. Perhaps, it was a strayed one, windblown to this part by a strong windstorm which lashed the village late in the evening. So, it was telling its lilting, little tale of sorrow from the big tree on the western margin of the mini-lake. An owlet, meanwhile, insidiously broke the sorrowful melody by its baffling howling. But, it couldn’t break the reverential reverie of the bird of song, which went on unmindfully; and now when the edge of the darkest vault of the sky reached its sheltering tree, the contrite bird’s sorrowful tones changed to a eulogy for the approaching rain.

The rains had shallowly submerged the western vicinity of the mound, and this water had shaken hands with the pond water by crossing over the latter’s low and irregular western embankment. So, the little gob of earth was, at this time of the season, surrounded by water except from the south-west. Here, it was touched by a pouting portion of land outcropping from a grassy, small plateau, running along the western side of the pond. So, if one standing on the road was to be caught in by the fancy of the sorrowfully potent song of the cuckoo, he’d have to take a long path to reach the tree: firstly, following the road in the western direction, then turning left, passing through the paddy fields with utter care over their rain-beaten narrow field-paths or the embankments; then taking a turn to the east which’d take him to the plateau; and lastly, after treading over the soft grass of this table-land, helpingly outcropping lip of the plateau, tasting the bunchgrass at the base of tiny gobbet, would leave him below the banyan tree with its welcoming beard rubbing gently against the newcomer’s head, with their rooted diligence and ecstatic over touching something after that eternal hanging in the air. Thus the watery infraction between the road and the bearer of huts, made it seem and feel archaically distant than its real separation of a couple of hundred metres from the road.

The village to the other side of the road was lost in the folds of that bugbearing weather. Except the fact of it, there was no other proof which could indicate its existence at this apparitional hour. Even the dogs’ prognostically-driven barking and howling had fallen silent and it seemed as if not a single soul was awake in the rural settlement.

Two souls, however, were lying irretrievably restless, taking thoughtless turns on their pallets, as the voracious darker edge passed over the thatched roofings perversively enclosing a humid and mosquito infested interior. With a purgatory look the hutments seemed ogling at the dark mass rapidly covering the swarthy sky above, while the lilting rainy fecundity shyingly winked at the desperation below.

One of the archetype huts faced east, with its back to the banyan on the western margin of the oval elevation. The other wasn’t laid out straight. Almost inconsequentially, it faced south-east and stood almost despicably between the eastern margin of the tiny hillock and the entrance of the second hut. Hadn’t it been for this obstruction, the other hut would’ve claimed a clear courtyard, where the rising sun would send its ochre rays, sailing over the pond, without any hindrance; the saffron magnanimity reaching to every nook and corner of the light-thirsty, damp and unhealthy aired structure. Like the bully-boys of Hinduism, of late, quibbling over the crown of nationhood; of Hindustan, Bharat or India.

The other one, somewhat directionless, with its escaping hilt, resided disheveled over the uneven curve of the mound, where both the upper base and slope claimed to be the real substratumic base holding it. There seemed to be some cardinal indiligence about this asymmetry. Its layout glimpsed of that diamond, which’d shone like a full gem under the revivalist and optimistic rays of the sun at the previous dusk; but whom the rising new and glittering sun had found as the wrong faced, thus turning the refracting light to a perilously perversive one. The gem itself blindfolded and awfully surprised, vindictively cast its piercing, sanguinary eyes in a direction, where there was no hope, no chance of progress. Just for the loss of this direction the whole gem structure, the inner one, had acquired such a deadly, illusionary incurvation that even the lapidary, with the redemptive eye, dithered for the fear of preening, festering light riding upon supine wavelengths.

Distance between the huts was just a few metres, but the darkish gloom and the shrewd, humid stupidity piled amidst the 1000-year-old sky above, made it seem rapaciously large. The mulling dark cloud, now hovering over the trees along the eastern margin of the pond, scamperingly noticed this glitching fissure. With its soft reproaches, it mingled into the nightish shades above the dark foliage.

The fissiparous tension piling up in the society giving rise to social-fold-mountains, with their defining contours—two religions, two cultures and possibly two nationhoods—embaling itself into a cumbersome mass day by day, from years, centuries, was now scurryingly running along the excited water vapours.

Lying helplessly under the heavy atmospherics of the kind discussed above, and overpowered by the incorporeality of his beliefs, the Sadhu in the east facing hut took umbrageous twists and turns on his humble sack cloth bedspread. The scion of mendicant friars, the reverential penate, the prelate of this hut lay praying for the sleep, which won’t come in but wait gingerly at his doorstep.

The other hut sheltered a soul sobriquetting as a ‘Mohammedan’ in its present earthly avatar. It seemed as if the Prophet’s sentinels, today in their rarest of adventuristic ineptitude, were shoving away the sleep off his hutment. While, the frogs, the mandarins of the small, noisy world, croaked their cacophony ever increasingly, which made his ears lose the love-lapping notes emanating from the site of mating mangurs amidst the mired grass at the foot of eastern edge of the elevation. It irritated him, for he didn’t mind sleep as long as he heard the fish splashing their fins and tails merrily and lustily, which reached his ears subduing the noisy insects. But for those frogs! Their occasional braying for the rains would find him taking more turns in his humblest bedding.

The Sadhu, contemplating newness of the place, as well as the suspicious curiosity about his neighbour was lying loose-limbed. It’d have been a far better idea to lie in the open, because the humidity was just smouldering inside the hut made of bunchgrass, reeds, paddy straw and all those sinewy things from the grassy world which’d snugly boast of its warmth during the winters. But for this time of the season, the interior was unbearable. Perhaps, the open roof of the sky over the mother earth’s little gobbet was too new and unacquainted to the religioner, who certainly thought twice before surrendering himself to the open air’s bonhomie amidst the blurring dark. His bedspread, made of sack-cloth, covered the paddy straw layered over the ground to soften the hardness below. Like the hut, it too would’ve been a winter night’s delight.

The sickening and humid air inside the hut was unnerving, depriving the God’s follower of all his sleep. Soullessly he was lying, while the blurring dark drawlingly won over the light dark cloud. Nothing in particular yet everything in general boosily suffused his agitated mind. It parried off the whole sequence of a good and sedate sleep, which starts from a tranquil and calm surrounding; and then the Goddess of sleep transcends the physical harmony, with its lullabying steps, transfixing the fortress of ‘consciousness’. The restless seer was still to get the first one, hence the satisfying sleep was miles away from his portals.

‘Maharaj Ji! That’s all I’ve been able to manage for you,’ Bhagat Ram’s devotionally pulverized voice echoed guiltily in his ears.

Bhagat Ram’s ever obedient face in its full devotional suffuseness hovered brightly in the dingy dark snarling around him, as he thought of the simple parishioner. Then he reflected upon his own arrival in the village four days ago.

Trudging along the glenny pathways of life he’d come almost from nowhere, as Hindu mendicant friars, the Sadhus, following their seership reach any place where air can get access. At least in India, the motherland of Hinduism, it holds unfailingly true.

His ochre coloured, sleeveless long cloak shone in truest spiritual colour when he reached the village suffused with the saffron rays of a dusking sun. The horizon had been saffronly lit with the colour of sacrifice, surrender, spiritual passion and divine abundance.

A distant relative of Bhagat Ram, who knew him only through vaguest reference, the Sadhu knocked at the villager’s humble home, when the darkness was softly striking at the village’s door. For the next two days, he enjoyed the infinitely pensive host’s service, who seemed ready to overhaul his very existence for the visitor’s comfort. We don’t know what this religious relative of far had in his mind when he reluctantly knocked at the door which opened before an unknown face. Most probably, a night’s stay was all he’d in his mind and then move further along his endless path supposedly leading to salvation in the dust beneath the feet of Lord Shiva. But the attractive impressiveness of his host’s inclination towards disciplehood, which clearly lurked behind the reverentially performed service, got some definiteness in the Sadhu’s vagueful journey, and on the third day he spoke of his mind to the disciple-in-waiting.

“Bhagte,” he said, as the host was nick-named, in his miserable, grave voice, “I’ve been through every nook and corner of the country for the cause of God. This village seems to need a priest. So, I’m thinking of having some rest and help the villagers in their religiosity.”

The would-be-first-disciple went beserk with devotional joy as he heard these divine words.

Just a fortnight ago an aggrieved villager had beaten a tantrik, the exorcist, with his crude fists and sabre-rattling kicks. His bullwhipping cries emanating from the bridle tight and abusive tongue had overtoned the painful cries of the exorcist, who’d ended up fleecing the simple farmer’s wife when she frequented his hut for the purpose of a haunting spirit dispelled from her body. The weariness, the languor feeling borne out of the spit and spite of a tough peasantry survival had made her desire thirsty for a fresh whiff of air. She’d found her evil spirit suffused with a fluid colour as she ended up in the witchcrafter’s religiously charming embrace; his rosary pressed against her rejuvenated breasts; mystically chanting lips smooching a treatise for the dull colour of her own; and his fingers, adorned with so many magical-stone studded ringlets caressed her rough and disheveled hair. Her paranoia, the devil spirit, as the villagers had witnessed it, was miraculously gone. Alas, the hard world of reality has little concern for such ecstatic flirtations! The hoax was one day laid open and apocalypse let loose. The artful, religious trickster saved his life by crawling away, unseenly to an unknown place, after the venomy bull had left him as a lifeless mass embaled in his fearsome black cloak, witchcraft trinkets and the beads of rosary rolling in the dust around.

His hut on the mound was now lying in lonesome lassitude, soulfully waiting for some religioner seeking shelter after a long, long journey across the infinite, oblivious and endless pathways of Hinduism.

Human failings apart, religiosity is the ceaselessly ravaging river, and squinty eyed suspicion, wonderfully, gives place to adoring religious look in the quickest of time possible. So, Bhagat Ram a witness to the skeptic spectacle which occurred just two weeks ago, found himself once again at the surging devotional front. Too religious for his 35-odd-years’ sojourn on earth, his morally cowering mannerisms found him earnestly desiring a religious figurine in the village.

Now, Hinduism has been, perhaps, scribbled down most comprehensively and ingenuously by the Supreme Power. Blurring dark clad exorcists; the ever wandering mendicant friars; totally unattached meditating yogis in the toughest climes of the Himalayas; alm-asking peregrinators; the temple priests; the ashram dwellers on the collective path of faith; as many sects and further derivations as there are individuals : All of them embaled in one pious knot. Such is the greatness of Hinduism: so many paths to be followed according to an individual soul’s intonation; the overspreading saffron colour of God, colouring each and every soul, from the most scheming ones to the perfectly surrendering ones; the infallible, ineffable God’s regimen containing everything from the complete vacuous calm to bellicose verbosity, with little coquettish gurgitation of the masses, swaying to the tunes of both extremities, lying in between.

A small sinew in the nest of transcendental gospel, Bhagat Ram requested his guest to turn the stigmatized hut holy and put the rough villagers on the path of godhood, which was easily accepted by the Sadhu. In every Indian settlement religious vacancy of this sort is as happily filled up as the upcoming breath.

Yesterday, medium built and short statured Bhagte, with his absolutely dark, well oiled hair and clad in his new grey coloured kurta-pyjama, had reverentially labored over the empty hut; his simple, straight mind culling out each and every provision he could provide for the comfort of the new entrant to the hut which was lying somewhat irreverently after that imprudent fling of its previous dweller. It took him a whole day to veer away the old feel as well as the look of it. He did it with his ever eschewing gaze. His selfless service changed the scandalized aura of the mound to a sanctified place. He was almost at war with the bushes, thickets, bunchgrass clumps and keekars as they’d unfurled their rainy season’s brawny foliage with such greenish greediness that their prickles and snippingly sharp blades would’ve deterred even the waddling buffaloes in the pond.

The result of this day-long and ineffably selfless service was that the hut was restored almost to the extent of being a decent, tiny countryside holy hutment. The furnishing, of course, came at the cost of his home. So, the pride of his little worship-place inside his house was now reticently facing the hut’s open entrance, as the flap had been folded and tucked upwards. It was a blue coloured, medium sized clay idol of ever gracious (and cutest among the Gods in Hindu pantheon) Lord Shiva; whom its worshipper-guest had picked up as his first necessity at the new place. And the encoring look of the new religious entrant had found various other articles and things of daily usage dovetailing the household God to the hut. Best of Bhagat Ram’s wall hangings, the calendars of Gods and Goddesses glossily and triumphantly looking downwards with dates, months, births, anniversaries and holidays fidgeting helplessly at the feet of the divine figures, were now tethered to the twiggy sinews of their thatched new home. Two pitchers, a plastic bucket, a mug and some aluminum utensils lost their place from the neat and clean kitchen of the house’s lady, whose unopposing look even after witnessing the day long forays of her husband into her scarcely adorned kitchen proved only one thing; that she was equally smooth wheel of this matrimonial cart.

Today, at dawn he’d, enclouded by a medley of thoughts, come here following his callow disciple. While walking along the long, tortuously slippery, grassy and narrow field embankments valiantly dividing the flooded paddy fields, he had the most arduous and plummeting of a journey. Herculean effort was distinctly scribbled over his creased brow, as he walked precariously on the pathlets, where only the farmers could tread without crinkling their ankles. He called forth all Gods to prevent their devotee’s bulging body from falling into the mossy green water. He walked so tight limbed that the loose fat padded around his bones felt vehement pressure on each and every cell. Sly desultoriness in his strides evinced an infirmity; an oddity with its plummeting sorrowfulness, given the robustness and ease of his other limbs; revelry. He dragged himself forward, his chin up, upbraidingly bearded, and in the heart of his hearts, he, somewhat accusatively, somewhat fearfully, gruntingly, rhythmically chanted the mantra of the Lord beholding his faith.

“...Om Namah Shivaay, Om Namah Shivaay, Om Namah Shivaay...” imploringly he went on with his silently suffering prayer to prevent a religioner’s fall in muddy waters.

By the grace of God he swaggered along the unfriendly path. A bracelet and a small-beaded rosary tied around his arm spiritually controlled the strenuous surge across his big muscular and grey-haired hand squeezing the crutch-head in its armpit. It’d all the bearings of undoing his leg’s infirmity. The three legged man-wood mixture miraculously avoided a fall, while the fickle and normal gait of the villager leading the way got him many times slipping and stepping into the mire. The simpleton was, perhaps, too novice for such a careful walk. The Sadhu on the other hand had numerous bolstering experiences of such treacherous steps. By seeing them walking so paradoxically one would have imagined it to be an inchoate scene of an interesting anecdote.

Each time the path’s manic gripes found the poor fellow slippingly avoiding a fall, the religioner mused over the common, earthly householder’s trivial gaudiness.

He’d laugh unsagely, and by the time the perplexed face of Bhagat Ram turned back to the bearded muser, the same emblematic sagely serenity, which’d attracted Bhagte’s devotional spirit, would saunter back in a flash, as quickly as it had vanished. Now, this made Bhagte feel guilty for lacking in his service to the God.

“Perhaps it is God’s way of reminding His existence to a common householder like me,” he had gathered words, apologetically, trying to come out of the conundrum, “for He is gracious enough to bestow two proper legs to me. Still, I don’t know how to walk properly and you Maharaj....”

He stopped suddenly and almost shivered for the fear of drifting in the direction of the holy man’s deformity. Though it would’ve been a moral truism to a triumphant God had he completed:

“...with whom the God has been unkind. Still you walk unfailingly on this treacherous path, for you’ve served him throughout your life.”

Bhagte walked silently, cursing his fate for undoing all the pious work of the last three days.

Agitated soul of the Sadhu almost rattled by this unintended pun went cursing, ‘Accursed! Accursed! Why doesn’t the God punish you with a broken leg? Only then you would’ve the taste of it!’

Lost his prayer, so lost his stride, and failure---the perennial naysayer---found the Sadhu wallowing in the flooded paddy with a huge splash; and that too at a place when he was just about to put his last step on the little grassy plateau. Such a wonderfully dexterous feat had been nullified at the last step.

Crestfallen Bhagte jumped from his dew-diamonded, grassy elevation into the crushed paddy. The Sadhu’s small trident, which his free hand held, pierced the wet earth’s breast, as the pointed end bore the force of his fall. His vermilion coloured cloth bag which contained the Shankha (the divine conch shell), the Kamandla (the vessel of gourd for storing the holy water) and various other oblivious things which only a religioner like him would know, fell into the flooded field.

The Sadhu’s bulgingly protruding eyes widely set under slanting and bushy eye-brows had all the attendant intonations of a ‘chewing alive’ gesture, as he stood shaking on the accursed embankment, while Bhagte ferried the holy things out of the field. He was but a sage. Such earthily common reactions weren’t expected of him. To his devotional bewilderment, Bhagte found the dripping beard of the holy man proffering a serene smile hidden under the thicket-like hair, as he struggled out of the puddle with the bag and the trident.

The muddy moss was splattered over the yellowish-red sleeveless robe of the religioner. It looked wantonly tabby.

Wearer of this strange coloured cloth, piously grinned, “Sometimes, somewhere, God reminds his own holy people,” he said subduing all human expressions which a shaking fall would bring in. “When I fell I heard the Lord’s divine voice ordering me to bring back the religious runaways of this village,” he put all that devotional aura around him, as if giving a clarion call to summon all his religiosity earned on the pathways of mendicancy. “I got this little punishment from the God, for the misdeeds of the dwellers of this village,” he sagely said, making the simpleton cowering guiltily for their unholy, irreligiously common household ways.

It was a fantastic show by the religious trickster. Effective to the extent that all those validating points of the Ultimate Truism, the indefatigable truth enshrined in the scriptures, through their defining mythology, fables and Godly narratives, hovered almost emblematically around him. Bhagte had his own share of this truism through religious folklore, in which Godliness in its devotionally bewildering array, dawned upon the earth in the form of rishis, munis, yogis, acharayas; or in a nutshell all and sundry people on the path of religion. Service of the holy people, who in turn were serving the God, was his simple idea of dharma---the religion---of devotion, of goodness, of morality and all. His eyes got their own share of wetness, as he prostrated before his guru, his pious benefactor.

There on the grassy, small table land dew glittered from its perfectly green turf under the curious glare of an upcoming sun. Though not too far from the road’s south-western curve on its west-ward journey, the little plateau looked forlorn, almost in distant solitude, as the intervening side, whence the disturbing foot may come, was all inundated with water. The Kabuli keekars, a semi-arid variant of the acacian floral category, sprawled their luxuriant green branches along the margins of this little upland. Wilderness seemed safe as it lurked till the distant horizon to the southern end of this grassy piece of land. The whole look of it seemed to fritter away any human disturbance from any side. This self-engrossed solitude might’ve appealed to a sage’s soul, but strangely the Sadhu’s uneasiness went on increasing as he lumbered along his support over the untrammeled and fresh virginity of the jeweled grass. He felt too far from the settlement he had enjoyed for three days.

“I hope you’ll not leave me in that prickled mass out there,” he’d sighed groggily, pointing accusatively in the direction of thick growth of keekars along the eastern margin of the pond.

In this little fit of unsagely temper, he’d completely forgotten the hut and the banyan tree which Bhagte had pointed out as they emerged on the road from the village. The brainwashed sky scattered a very bright sheen over the grass. The calculating Sadhu almost hobbled over a very bright coloured sparrow, most probably an exotic, migrant species, which seemed to be lost in numerous grassy glitters. Miraculously it escaped as it sprinted away, leaving a small plume from its plumage. Again the Sadhu’s cheeks, under the secrecy of his beard, parted for an exclamatory and pleasant laugh over this little birdie adventure.

Bhagte, meanwhile, walking beside him at a small distance heaved a mountainous sigh of relief, and praised the God in most exaggerated words, as the little winged visitor flew to safety.

God’s servant, the religioner, bent down and picked up the little wonder of nature, the rainbowy little feather, and held it against the sun. With somewhat effected stoic muse, which’d some colourings of a strange aversion arising, gathering its strength after lying for so long, so deep inside his soul dwelling in a body which was supposed to be beyond such extreme emotion, sensation or feeling. It propped its head up. The venerable guest, the sermonizer, in his heavy voice worded this sermonette:

“Strange are the ways of God! Such beautiful things in such little shapes and sizes! Most often we’re taken in by the artistry, taking the togetherness of beauty and goodness for granted. But sometimes, biggest of devil dwells inside smallest of most beautiful things.”

Under the convulsive force of strange pathos of angst, he threw the weightless charm into the air. But he couldn’t effect any harm to it, for the gravity defying, littlest ounce of beauty bore no plummeting force, and flew away resplendently, mystically high above his head; an eddying whiff of air carrying it proudly at its head. The earth trotting ‘man-of-God’ limpingly trudged forward as the ecstatic beauty, now shoved by a filial gust of wind, flew away high above the ground.

While all this happened, the roving religioner’s eyes bore the stony and foretelling look of a puritan, which the lay believer in his innocent puzzleness took to be a sermonizing prophesy. The eye-twitching bright hallow around the reverential guest, the distant relative, the worldly scion of the omnipresent, suddenly shone blurringly and in a fit of devotional hiccup---as well as not knowing much what else to do---he found himself prostrating before the Sadhu. His guru stopped at once. The disciple could no longer control the thunderbolt of Godliness; he fell onto the slush laden feet of his pious benefactor.

Languorously hobbling, the ritual practitioner, at last saw the huts and the stoic tree on the small geomorphic upliftment. He exhaled a sigh which seemed to pacify his bigotry. Big tree’s thick foliage, under the radiating gleam of clear morning sun purported auspiciousness. The proficient ritualist stroked his beard out of sheer thrill of feeling big, mighty and shaggy like the tree.

“Om Bholenath! At last a place to rest and then move further on the path of sainthood,” the religious-run-about-of-yore sighed, as he ascended the new bushy pedestal for his penance and pilgrimage.

The roving religious runaway had taken the sanyas, the path of Godhood, for the exact reasons which are ever escaping the profane logic of a commoner. So such fleeting conclusions are escapingly beyond our compression. Yet, a few abstract facts we can certainly muster up as he limped to his new destination.

He was born with an infirm leg; grew up with a deforming uneasiness in the lower ranks of the Hindu caste hierarchy; and as a humble godhead had, throughout his life, prevented a fall from his chosen path like he’d—till the last unfortunate step—avoided a fall in the paddy fields by the wonderful acrobatic balance of the wooden support under his right armpit. Yes, religion was his crutch. Perhaps, the bestower of the beneficial religiosity was kind enough to support him with many versions of faith. So, haunted devotees would find him a rowdy exorcist dispelling the evil spirit; common house holders with their mild beliefs would get the opportunity to sway their heads to gentle rites; believers in palmistry could listen with bated breath, as he unfolded the map sketched over the beholder’s palm; star and luck dreamers would match their past facts with his tongue and pleadingly asked for fortune boosting amulets. He had used all of this as he lurched forward in his life with his wooden crutch under his arm and the religious one inside his scheming mind and heart with ever burning lamp of faith, forever invoking the God’s grace for the benefit of his mind overflowing with ritualistic tricksteries.

As he pummeled the mound’s hump top with the flail-force of his supportive stump, chirpy sparklings of the early sun, in all their naughty fickleness, tugged at his morose mood seriously contemplating the pros and cons of this new place. Brightly optimistic raylets seemed to resuscitate him from the austere moodiness which enclouded him heavily, after that little feather had flown over his head triumphantly with its beauty’s infinite weight.

“God is great!” invoker of His grace exclaimed. “Almighty’s grace always confirms the togetherness of beauty and goodness. But those little devil laden nymphatic things always defy the ...” he muttered and waved his hand above his head as if to scoff away the tiny plume still beautifully weighing over his conscience.

To Bhagat Ram, bathed in devotional demeanour, all this meant nothing but odd ways of the people near the God. So, once again he just bowed, almost apologetically shy for his mundaneness; for his not getting the vaguest of idea about it. His conscience was spotlessly clean to the extent of being foolish even in the eyes of crudely rustic villagers. Perhaps, truest of love and compassion resides in social misfits—or unfits—like him.

The Sadhu folded his hands before the Sun, Surya Devta, for a reverential Surya Namashkar. His palms weren’t jutted straight against each other. Through this crevice, a sort of breach in his religious fabric, sun rays sneaked inside with a part of society, a part of worldliness. The hollow between his folding hands, the small oval chinky opening, through which amorous passion’s pangs constantly kept on bombarding the sage’s almost excitable religious body. The window had never been shut off completely, but its alluring light hadn’t found full atonement from his austere self. At least his public visage as a religioner had been intact. It’s however another matter that the lurid, worldly shine and sheen kept on casting unholy, impure dark shadows over his inner self, inside the secretive world away from public gaze. And there he was; the true man of God for the ritual service of the believers.

It’s not that he wasn’t aware of this unreligious strand in his holy attire. In fact his life had been spent in bringing narrowness to the chink’s present width. But the ordinary world with its extraordinary charms carved and paneled this doorway with such power and artistry that it was just impossible to shut it down. He’d accepted it as an inevitable, phantom accomplice to his religionhood. Perhaps, the creative discernment of the cosmic mind kept the greatest faculty with it while making humans in Its own glimpse, leaving us on earth to play a big show holding our religious, social, political and economic scalpels.

It was in this way the mound got one of its habitants; the big Sadhu with his flaccid paunch, old vociferating chubby cheeks covered under long unkempt scabby beard. As the newcomer ascended the little slope, he’d the slightest glimpse of a faintest figure near the second hut. In the flash of a moment, equal to an almost half cycle of the eyelashes, the visual speck took escaping shelter in the hut with a shudder. The moment’s trilling symphony was too short for the sighting sense to provide enough cogitative fodder for arising any psycho-physiological instinctive reaction. But what escaped his five senses, invariably left an indelible, scabby shove to his sixth sense—the narrow parting, the breaching chinky crevice. So, this rabbit like gallopy escape of the shadow lingered itchingly over his big, broad, vermilion and sandalwood pasted brow.

The sinewy architectural triumph, furnished devotionally, found little appreciative eye, as a ‘praiseful pat’ aspiring Bhagte introduced the labour of his faith. His guru’s newcomer’s curiosity had been totally caught by the unimpressive, wearisome and pallidly gloomy neighbouring shelter; wantonly, asymmetrically obstructing the finely undulating courtyard at the crest of the mound. In the name of a hut it had been just scribbled hurriedly, uninterestingly. But strangely there hovered around it a sort of slumbering tranquility in which the shadow of a figure had sneaked in.

He felt a little disappointed for not being the sole dweller or the pious occupier of this littlest of holy hillock.

“Who stays in that?” he asked in atonement with his instantaneous avarice for the sharer of this little oval uplifted place. His eyes meanwhile tried to peek into the new nuisance’s opening, which lay beyond his view from that angle as he was on the western oval margin by the side of his hut, where the tree’s eastern reach foliaged over the western half of his straightly laid out hutment.

“Oh, no one of much disturbance, maharaj. He is just the poor old watchman of the pond,” answered the disciple bathed in manavadharma, the religion of mankind, of humanism, the eternal religion with its immortal values and principles; in sharp contrast to the comparative, man made religions with their relative, manipulative and ever dying values.

The Sadhu let out an exasperating grimace. “Watchman! But for what? Do you people need a keeper for this bushy hump of earth, where the shrubbery is so prickling sharp as to run through the tongue of hardest cattle like a sword,” he said snippingly, like the bunchgrass’, jhabua or jhunds in local parlance, sharp leaves.

“No maharaj, he is for the fish in the pond,” his disciple sounded apologetically.

“Heavens be praised! So if not for the bushes, you people have got a fish caretaker,” the mendicant testily mused, much to the unease of his first follower in the village. “Good Lord, the idea is worth Lord Shiva’s angst. If a caretaker for the fish, then why not for snakes,” he continued in a very light vein, alluding to the Lord Shiva’s reptile companion, which seemed so unmystical to the poor villager.

The simpleton’s coweringly fickle words always left enough loopholes to be exploited by the pun lovers. If such was the case with normal conversation, we can easily surmise the total non existence of debating and argumentative content in what he spoke. So, the pranksters always caught him for the lack of proper words for the proper occasion. Religion, however, was an exception. Devotional sea storming inside him always forced out humble, God fearing, reverential words anywhere, any time as well as any number of times.

Poor fellow realised all this and said with his devotional sorrow, “I’ll try to explain guruji. This pond has been hired by someone from the village, and....”

Quite well understanding religious mentor feigningly interrupted again. “Hired the pond!” he exclaimed, with his eyes rolling for the pun. “Well, this is really too much,” he went on with his teasing chuckle, “I’ve heard everything being hired. From a needle to an aeroplane. But a pond... wonder who wants to mess up his life in this muddy and flooding water....”

He stopped and glumly started wiping out the drying mud and mire from his cloak, then cackled again:

“You people might have a great custom about that. By the grace of God, I hope it doesn’t involve anything unreligious,” ending it with a thoroughly sermonising tone.

After a little jocularity, a little punny jaunt, securely back to his spot where he was expected to be, supposed to be by the believers! He had, thus, tethered himself to his sanctified pole by a little rope passing through that narrow opening, and took some worldly fodder by slightly veering off the path, almost implausibly.

The forever meek follower, returning to his wits, as the holy man acquired his religious throne, said with folded hands, “Maharaj, it has nothing to do with our custom. It is a panchayati pond. The panchayat gives it on lease to the highest bidder. And the lessee does what he can to recover his money from the water. Most often it is the fish business. The fisheries as ... they ...” he stopped out of ideas after this herculean verbal task.

“Does what he can!” his dharmarakshak, the keeper of his religion, murmured, his distraughtness surfacing once again and this time to the side of angriness. “Fat up the fish and then straightway to the butcher’s blade. The killing ground around this mound, and you expect me to put righteousness at the forefront of the village.”

Bhagte found himself dumbfounded. Perhaps, one of those who’d the least say in everything that occurs, happens or concerns a rural settlement, he alone was now being held guilty for the impure public custom of the village’s grassroots representative body, whose not a single member cared a rap about the new religious wisp flowing into the village, once the last one had been disgracefully kicked out. Much to the irony of it, no one except his host had taken the trouble of looking at him for a second time. Aah, the irreligious bestiality of the villagers! Only accursed dogs, with their bloodsucking lice, mites, ticks and fleas barked constantly at the strange thing.

“Oh Shivasambhu!” the new religious wisp implored Lord Shiva, “It is kaliyuga, the dark age. Everyone is doing everything for anything materially profitable,” he lamented.

“It is ghor kaliyuga, the darkest age, maharaj!” the follower furthered his master’s browbeat.

“And who is this helper of the irreligious profiteer?” the discarder of all materialistic things gabbled.

The unseen keeper’s speckful shadow, which had twanged for the fraction of a second, once again knocked stridently at his curiosity. It was just like the intrinsic feeling of painful, surprising little jolt and complaining anger, all mixed, when one is caught upon a prickle.

The follower tried to soothe down the uproarious mentor. “He’s an outsider here. A very, very poor man and completely at the behest of fate,” the villager almost whispered vapidly in a way as would be sufficient to describe a most helplessly insipid human being.

Bhagat Ram’s meekest explanation of the enigmatic figure had a universal appeal, but it wasn’t to the Sadhu’s expiation, who listened with much unease. Just as he was going to lengthen his interrogation, rowdiness of a happening scabbily intervened. Ebullient motley of an irony involving a little accidental tragedy, humour and curiosity raced excitedly over the dawdling pond from the roadside. It was a jilting splash in the water. A three wheeler, running wildly over the itchy road, with a good number of passengers packed to the hilt inside, had lost its luridly snouty balance and off it went into the pond; falling with a thud from the roadside walled embankment. It was a good one-and-half metre high jump from the parapetting pavement. The embanking wall rising up to the level of the road was meant to prevent the roadside erosion into the pond, and the nice, smooth earthfill between the wall and the road provided a good platform for the triangular vehicle’s nosedive into the indolent waters.

There might have been many who saw this sporty spectacle, with their everexisting rustic penchant for humour. The irony of many tragic situations and occurrences is such that, thanks to the instinctive bestiality ever glinting at the surface of our moral self, they seem farcical at the onset bringing a puerile gesticulation at the corners of our mouths. The two men at the mound, standing a good 200 metres from the ill-fated spot had missed the metallic dive storming into the lake-like pond, much to the impetuosity of the dying engine. Gamboling vehicle’s one wheeled nose was the first thing to touch the water, then the rear with its thrusting lateral swing rolled it to its left side. Its right, rear tyre came to a thankful halt as it hovered over the agitated water, while the left counterpart went in for a muddy crash. The dive had drowned the death-fearing cries of the passengers.

Bhagte’s first reaction was a twitteringly shrill cry for the bodies gasping for life under the water. “It shouldn’t have happened!” he’d implored the God.

While a broad, cherishing chasm had lost itself under the thick growth of the Sadhu’s beard as he managed to prevent a riotous chuckle.

“Baah! Oh Lord, why have these poor people suffered this way?” he said, restoring the compassionate tradition of his beatific profession. “I pray to God nobody gets hurt and all come out alive,” the God’s pitying servant came with his slightly delayed prayer; the prayer delayed just by a few seconds, but still worthless as what matters most is the time’s momentary chaos.

There being many women among those grappling in the water, wails and cries sailed over the slumbering tranquility of the water, thus manifolding the tragedy. Survival instinct’s trilling gluttonosity once again upraised the vociferating chubby cheeks under the shaggy beard. Big beard, broad eyebrows and whirlwinding locks of unkempt hair falling over his forehead had given the Sadhu a sort of mask which hid a great proportion of his facial expressions.

“Thank God! Everyone seems to have come out safely,” the disciple said, his panic somehow drifting away.

“God always listens to the prayer of his own folks on the earth,” the godhead claimed his own share in the avoided tragedy. “In my trance of prayer I was just on the verge of squeezing out my life for the sake of these unfortunate passengers,” he made his claim stronger.

Vehicles passing the road got some respite from the bumping scourge, as curious drivers haltered and the villagers, who’d brought their buffaloes to the pond, ghareod the accident site. Full credit to the manufacturers of the vehicle, nicknamed ‘three-breasted’ by the pun loving villagers, there were enough openings on its both sides for all of them to be fished out, gasping for breath like fish, after that delusional underwater moment. So, almost a dozen of them were shaking with fear as they were pulled out of water. First possession, their lives, being safe they cried for their secondary ones like bags, footwear or anything which the visit to the district city had resulted in.

Many of the passers by lurched on their onwards journey, somewhat disappointed as their optimistic question “How many died?” met a loud “No one!”

Thanks to the watery fall there was no gory sight of blood. Injuries if any were of implicit nature like minor dislocations and swellings as their bearers nursed them without any sympathetic eye from the onlookers, who in their deepest selves felt somewhat cheated for not being witness to a serious accident. Perhaps, strange though it may sound, the humans always have a shuddering desire, a relishing urge to ride the crest of a wayward and strayed off moment, resulting in a momentary, almost acrobatic chaos.

The religioner’s inner self crackled with a bemused giggle as he saw the ant like figures of old women with wet, muddy clothes sticking around their disfigured and frail bodies. They looked funny indeed; their totally unsexual bodies making them seem like bandaged mummies from the Egyptian lands. However, our vision fails us if we try to make out what’d have been his reaction had there been young, soft, fully curvaceous female bodies in the mired up clothes. Even the God’s omnipresent eyes could’ve erred while peeping into this infinitesimally murky matter.

As for the docile host, certainly there were susceptibly confusing moments when the unmystical light reflected back through the unsagely window and reached his totally undiscerning eyes. His eyes, but, were under a dark spectacle of devotion and the small raylet carrying the wispical shred of the profound mystical mystery were lost in reverential gloom. And there he was the ever obedient, almost servile disciple. Some may call it blind faith, but that’d be a huge injustice to this first enrolment to the holy man’s club at the village; for the profound love and compassion in its full opulence glimmered at the core of his faith. Provided there is such divine limpidity in a heart, such people only can achieve communion with the God. At least that’s what our holy scriptures make us believe about the satyuga, the age of goodness. But we shouldn’t forget that according to Hindu mythology the present age is kaliyuga, the Dark Age, when according to some unknowable divine reasons goodness is bound to suffer!

The Sadhu’s religiously toned reflexes were sufficiently quick to save his sainthood if put at the sweepstakes. He could sense it well in advance, rather many years before the crop from these earthly seeds slipping off from the pious hollow of his hands would get matured, for his first disciple’s vision of a corny field. The guru thus effortlessly bade a swipe over the pupil’s devotionally harrowed field, intrepidly wiping away the accursed seeds. But sometimes the keenest of eyes miss out on some lone seed which might escape the incredulous swipe. Whether it gets lost, not to germinate or otherwise, we don’t know. And in case it does emerge out as a plantlet, it’s bound to be a mighty stemmed one having gobbled all the incipient fertility; the mighty stem with its primordial light, showing all the dark shadows scattered around the clods embedded over the field. But, isn’t it too late by then?

There seemed to be almost a lugubrious rhythm as far as the religioner’s existential self is concerned. His to and fro swings from the expunging extremities were just as natural as the dawning and downing sun. At the one end was the grubby profanity in all its evanescence which came and disappeared with its impostoring exigency after a buccaneering shove at his religiosity. The other end was sometimes, very rarely though, touched by the transcendental trance, when the communion with the God, the moksha or liberation loomed large, which was gently pushed back by the ever defying mystical secret. This virgin aroma of the sky’s black vault and the soft starlight spliced him, for the littlest of time possible, to the divine, cosmic gingham scrumptiously patterned with stars and galaxies in their ennuing mystery of space and time. In between these two he was the common religious practitioner with his mild, utilitarian mendicancy and the social survival ever pushing him onwards, just as a donkey laden with saddle bags is ever urged forward: ‘Hoo! Barra Barra!’; or the farmers working tirelessly at harvest time, with dust arising out of threshing sheaves; or the yoked bull trotting to the music of lurching cart shafts. It may seem somewhat dreamy, but it was as simple as that.

It was thus his rhythmic existence, quite in accordance with a saying in the Upanishads that all things in the universe have a rhythmic pattern. His was a deprizmed self. He was the one who had deprived himself of a full loquacious light’s glare, under the command of chaste austerity sanctified by his chosen path. And the light when entered the narrow opening it carried only a fraction of the spectrum, which after traveling a longer than normal distance, fell parsimoniously and obliquely over his shut up soul, depriving it of the rainbow of worldly colours.

His first day at the earthy, upfolded gobbet passed in a sort of mental weariness brought about by numerous unresolved and vague explanations which run across a newcomer’s mind in response to almost masticating questions put forth by the unacquainted surroundings. It was somewhat perplexing, yet not a full blown dilemma; so much work inside the brain yet no clear thought formation. Time went brusquely, almost boringly, nearly forgetting its normal flow, and through confused moments—ill defined and moving extremely slowly—a whole week seemed to be etched out of a single day. In his pal of dismal gloom, he thought that he’d been marooned on a distant island while the worldly charlatans loomed leeringly from a far, far distance.

These dull moments made him forget the oddity which he’d perceived for a fraction of a second near the neighbouring hut. He looked around in all directions, but nothing particular struck his eyes. The village, separated from him by the pond’s trench, looked so unconcerned about the new arrival. It somewhat raised a worrying line across his ritually pasted brow.

Bhagte had returned to the village after seeking permission to come back at noon with the lunch. Instantly after his departure, the godhead had entered his new abode. The arrangement didn’t appeal his pleasant sense. Who ponders over the long labour one puts behind small things! Taxing toil of a whole day, in well-nigh zero time got an unsatisfactory glance. The religioner had quite clearly gauged the level of his godship in the eyes of the rustic villager. Hence, at least on his follower he could command his dislike, which he promptly did through his egotistically snobbish grunt as he came out of the hutment.

Just before noon, he descended the little hillock (we might spare this mound such a noun on the grounds of its distinctness and oddity in comparison to the level land of the plains), passing under the tree’s beard airing above his squeamish locks. Ricketily he went up to the tiny plateau. Whole grassy tablecloth glittered in its full ambience under the overhead sun. There was a jal tree at its south-eastern corner. It was an old tree, and its name meant roughly ‘webby-net’ suggested by its appearance. Its stem was not a single log of wood; rather it was a legion of black, unevenly veined mass with a hollow core which was linked to the outer world through many cavities. The dark, narrow hollowness inside the main stem poured out vials of its wrath, as the stem opened its mouth in small woody tongues under thick round foliage consisting of small, light green leaves. It bore a very-very old mythologically fearsome appearance. Its very look suggested asceticism; the regalia of the plants’ stoicism. Its human counterpart laid his bulky back against the haughty wood and fell in a deep slumber, he knew not when.

To the eastern side of the jal tree, the southern fringe of the pond vanishing into the paddy fields was lapping in its serenity; far, far away from the maddening crowd. Blackish swift sparrows were flying over the brooding water as if trying to bring up some turbulence. Egrets, kingfishers and herons---the early migrants---activated the slumbering environment. Warm humid easterly breeze came with intoxicating booze, naughtily tinkling the banyan and the Sadhu’s beards. God-ordained tranquility spread out like a galaxy across the paddy fields, in whose background sunrays reflected the rainwashed yellow and white coloured dwellings of the neighbouring village to the south. Similarly, the front portion of the school at the village of our tale proudly faced the pond with the road in between. There was a revelatory smile across its fading yellow colour from the walls despite all the tragic events; its origination from the lonesome, private initiative of a great Bengali, to its present stepmotherly patron, the State Board of Secondary Education.

By the time Bhagte returned with lunch, his solitude bolstered siesta had spanned a good couple of hours. The sun had crossed over to the western horizon, leaving his uneven pair of feet to be ogled curiously by the sunrays. His crutch was jutted against the hunky-dory wood of the sheltering tree. It must have been a good rest for it too, as the vitriolic shoulder force was now lost in a calm unconsciousness.

Before breaking the sleep’s sweeping extol the disciple for a few moments looked at the calm and serene face of the new symbol of his faith. Sleep, the primal pacifier, had certainly mollified the reverend’s visible features among the shaggy, greying hair. The villager had walked under the hot and humid sun, with the warm water in the paddy fields emanating a mossy smell. The sultry weather had a definite propensity to drain off all devotional cheerfulness which he felt while his ever submissive wife put her best culinary skills at the stake. As he walked across the paddy fields, the vapourising water had a congealed fragrance, which seemed to be a sort of paddy tea prepared in big paddy bowls. It brought about a certain desultory dizziness. By the time he reached the grassy upliftment his head was dismally languorous, which got aggravated as he walked upon the hot, unwelcomingly charmless grass pillaged by the upbraiding afternoon rays.

But all this scampered away as he came across the ascetic’s primordial face lying asleep; the unceasing rhythmic air blowing for life across the nostril hair, just like the easterly warm-cool breeze, the life force of that tranquil solitude.

“Only such people enjoy the utter peace, the ultimate bliss in which God enjoys Himself!” he whispered rejuvenatingly and folded his hands in reverence.

The Sadhu woke-up to the gentlest of reverential shove; almost a prostrating touch to his unfortunate foot.

The mystic came out of the dreamy world with a bulky yawn which put forth a whimpering, “Om!” the divine syllable, as his hippopotamus bulge got a soothing strain, signaling all the senses to start work again.

The meal consisted of same north Indian countryside simple, fatty delicacies which suit the hard farming work. There were chapattis laced with butter, mango and lemon pickle or achar, potato subzi and salad mix of tomato and onions. Omnipresent meal item, the butter-milk almost brimmed over the edges of a big plastic mug. In the old Sanskrit texts, it is called ‘nectar’ for its cool, digestive properties. The saint mulched his food gluttonously. He was a man of big appetite and ate sedulously, completely immersed in all the tastes which the food could provide. If one watched him eating for an extended, long moment he might’ve appeared helplessly self-indulgent, somewhat imperious about these little worldly tastes.

It wasn’t in the disciple’s decency book to look at the religioner subduing his hunger, except the casual little look now and then. He was lost in the greenish calm to the south. Scattered trees—black berry, neem, mulberry, eucalypts, mango, guava, etc.—along the field embankments stood almost motionless in the tut-tutting afternoon’s pondering silence. There were few things which inspired overbearing emotions in his simple and steadfast heart. But now the serenity which he’d seen on the sleeping Sadhu’s face seemed to perpetuate the whole southern side. It was really thought provoking. The ever pervasive greenish stoic swipe got into his mind. The confused mass of ideas, exclamation and devotional emotion invectively poured down over his now fledgling mind. What came out was a simple talk. Perhaps too simple to have any meaning in a particular context. It was wildly abstract; but a truth!

“In a couple of months the paddy’ll ripe, then the Biharis will come, labour night and day during the harvesting season,” the simple man put out the wordy crop resulting from the mental harvesting of the last ten minutes.

The Sadhu burped, breaking his devotion to the food. “Yes, by the grace of god!” he said lazily, “You see, He pours down water from the heavens. He has created fields with crops to receive this water. All this for humans to survive by eating...” he burped again and rolled his hand over his full paunch.

“Hummn Maharajji, the ever merciful God!” he raised his folded hands to the heavens for a reverential thanks from the humanity. “The Jats” (the land holding community) “will sell the paddy in market and the Biharis’ll happily return to their state, richer by 150 rupees for an acre of harvesting. Too cheap… but a wholesome amount for them. That’s a kick in our bellies here,” he changed his tone to lamentation.

Bhagte’s innocent remorse was born out of the fact that he belonged to a non-land-holding lower caste, chamars, the cobblers. According to the ancient occupation based Hindu caste system, this community, till a generation ago, saved so many feet from the dust and prickles on the path of life. Modern shoe industry, however, turned their skills outdated. Those who still went on with the occupation were the mere, ungainful shoe menders, boot polishers who went almost begging around in the cities. And the rest of them, people like Bhagte whose fathers died with the dying occupation, without getting an opportunity to prepare the next generation for any other source of livelihood, now carried this transitory load over their backs, while their children constantly tugged at the struggling parents’ rumpled apparel. The next generation’s future was to be defined by the present one’s starvingly running time. So, people like Bhagat Ram, whose name literally involved Lord Ram and devotee, did anything they could lay their hands upon to earn a wage. They worked in fields, at construction sites, roamed as vendors through village streets or anything possible to earn a livelihood. And even in this the cheap labour provided by the seasonal Bihari migrants was giving them sleepless nights.

“Have mercy on those poor people from Bihar,” compassion oozed out of the holy man, who licked his half visible lips as the pickle seemed to have left an indelible spice over them. “They come here from such a long distance. Poor people forced to leave their houses. And see, after such a tireless work at such cheap rates, with their feet almost cottoned in water,” went on the compassionate note as if much obliged to the unknown Bihari labourer who might’ve harvested the wheat which’d just now went into his paunch much to the satisfaction of the immortal hungry rats.

The Godhead’s effort at compassion regretfully couldn’t take his disciple in its fold. Whether the man of God was right or wrong, it is a really tricky question. Times are really hard. Well being of one fate is somewhere linked to some loss in some other quarter. Compassion has become relative, differentiated. Only God seems to possess an all encompassing compassionate fold, where one fate is not at the cost of others.

“God’ll take care of you people too,” the sage redrew another circle for the well being of his poor first follower in the village.

He seemed to speak on behalf of the God, advocating the principle that not too many people die of hunger, rather the deathtraps circuit along many alternative and obnoxious nooses.

During the transitory time between the afternoon and evening they just prattled away their time; the witty sage drawing fruitful conclusions out of the rant. With his religious tongue well-in-check, the overall religious history of the village seemed a little tale as the villager told him all he knew. There was a temple in the village whose priest received whole lot of oblations and ritual offerings from the villagers, especially on festivals. Loudspeaker on his temple’s shikhara blared devotional cacophony during the brahma muhurat, the very early morning time, around four o’clock to be precise. The old village temple to the eastern side of the village by the road was devoid of any idol and priest. About five years ago its priest had been butchered by a village ruffian because the holy man overconfident of his tantrikhood or the black magic power came in between the youth and his lady love. Now this old temple was in ruins and the landmongers were waiting its natural demise from the seat of God. Then there was a holy house, not of the temple status, but far more effective as far as the keeper of the village’s collective morality is concerned. It was named sadavrata, forever fasting in the name of God. It had been constructed in the memory of a pious villager, who on account of his practical goodness in his ordinary life earned the status of a holy man, the servant of God. Kude Bhagat was the name of this symbol of living religiosity, who’d died almost 40 years back serving God not ritually but humanely. People took vow in his name and gathered in sadavrata for settling dispute of every sort. Unfortunately time was debugging the holy man’s village level myth and now the people had started not to care a fig about the legendary injunctions of the pious villager. These were the broad outlines of the village’s dharma, the religiousness, as Bhagat Ram told the newcomer. In addition to these thick dotted Godly lines there were numerous others, shaded, thinly dotted, barely visible or even talked about. These were the mendicant friars entering the village, suddenly appearing from Hinduism’s infinitely vast diaspora and vanishing stutteringly after pleading for alms, charity or an outright favour; people from various ashrams, from  gaushalas, etc. The latest was the exorcist whose stigmatised hut the new comer intended to turn holy for his own survival by propagating the name of God.

Nattily pondering over the information, he returned to his hut. The evening seemed perfectly set in with the yellowish-orange sunrays trying to cheer up the laidback grass sun beaten over the upland. However, weather at this time of the year somersaulted in cahoots with the monsoon winds. A dull grey cloud was raising its dome from the extreme north of the western horizon, when the sage ascended the mound. The banyan’s twigs and branches were too sturdy for the light breeze now blowing from the west, riding the parallel sunbeams. So, only the leaves showed their varying hues to the saffron rays vying for alacrity from the whole tree.

Suddenly some mysterious, throttling conclusion snipped in the religioner’s cogitating mind which made his climb up the mound somewhat more cumbersome. As he reached the top, entailing a small, invisible shove to his thoughts there came a twirling, shrill cry scampering over the pond. The Sadhu squeamish by now due to that mysterious prick at his conscience as well as the yoking effort to pull his weight against gravity along that inclination looked into the distant source of this new fudge. There in the southeastern corner of the pond a frugally-frail-figure was making noise disproportionate to its visible capacity. The noisy quagmire involved chiding, reproaching verbosity, acrimonious clapping of hands as well as throwing of pebbles. All this was in the opposing background of an uproarious mirth and intrepidity of the fishmongers: the water crows, pelicans, herons, cranes and many others, so avaricious much to the trouble of the watchman.

“A very noisy and troubling creature indeed,” the irritated sage muttered. “I’ll see what the man is up to,” he thought about his neighbour-born discomforting feel at both times he came up the mound.

He tried to have an eye over the enigmatic figure at the other end of the pond which seemed to be conscious of his haughty gaze. Suppliantly, the pliable figure however seemed entreating an escape from his eyesight. And much to the thanks of an early nightfall, as the dull cloud shut off the dying day’s last breath, it was left there as a riddle lost among the greenish-dark foliage along the eastern edge of the pond.

The mendicant’s urge to see the pond overseer, driven by a bittersweet curiosity, was enough to make him sit beneath the banyan and wait the watchman’s arrival. Humid restlessness in the environment was on the ascendancy as the monsoon’s dull grey hireling swiped the dotted twinklings over the huts. Aah! The monsoon’s purgative promptitude as if in response to the farmers’ clarion-call: “Rain, rain... rain thou clouds to the utmost capacity of thy watery bowls. Paddy is here to soak all thy doles!”

The atmosphere got almost soaked up in perspiration driven by heat and humidity. The Sadhu’s litigious mind depressed by weather as well as the waiting game somewhat brought down his proud disdain and the ritual tactician slumped against the sagely trunk. Perspiring profusely he quickly fell into a trance (like a short nap) as if it was the only solution for his ruffled soul. As for the night, rain was the only panacea.

In a very short time, he found himself in an age 5000 years ago, when the nascent forms of his present institutionalised faith were emerging. The Rig Vedic age, beyond the misdating anachronism; the era of profound cosmic outpours from the wonderstruck hearts eulogising the nature’s play in whose womb the Godhood lay in its self-referral unconsciousness. The sages, the mystics---whose 5000 years old descendant lay under the banyan tree---sang the ‘self revealed truth’ in their unchecked poetry. Hinduism sprouted forth from this gay-spiritual-abundance.

The Rig Vedic sages with their infinite vision and imagery came and did penance for their mop eyed prodigy lost in this cosmic dream; so blurred, vague and puzzlingly unmeaningful to this scion of contemporary Hinduism.

The sages were lost in the Omnipresent, chanting this superstrong Rig Vedic poetic solicitation for rain, the elixir of life:

                    “O heavenly waters we pray to you

                     For that pure, pious liquid which thou

                     In thy bowls brew,

                     We the thirsty worshippers

                     Know its sweet essence on the earth,

                     Let us get the sip for which we have taken birth

                     O Majestic Lord show us some leverage,

                     Let us get consecrated with that beverage.”                                                                                

                                                                                                                                                                             

About nine o’clock the villager returned with the supper. By this time the light black cloud had connected the eastern and western horizons. The night devoid of even the starlight seemed gloomily dark. As he ascended the elevation to the hut he passed unnoticing his pious benefactor this time napping under a different tree. Though the poor villager held a torch but its dim light painstakingly survived on the last morsels of the frugal batteries.

Much to the irony of it, the torch meant to be a flash light, feebly glowed like a lantern put on a low wick. Devoid of a galoring beam, the ephemeral raylets seemed to lose their own way, forget about their leading the way. Those weary batteries had served him for months. He used them sparingly to the extent of being devoured by the cataclysmic dark. Today too he’d used them only during that part of the path which’d troubled him even during the day.

As was his habit of tongue-in-check he didn’t call out his religious mentor lest he might disturb his meditating trance, if the sage was lost in any. With some superstitious awe, embroidered with golden reverence, he drew on the last morsels of his dying batteries. The weak light slowly-slowly struggled hard against the pitch dark inside the hut. The sacred interior faced him with its mystic dimness. Not finding the stoic there he lighted the small kerosene oil lamp, which’d fought the dark inside his home till the previous night.

He then put his torch on hardest labour as he silently looked around for the religioner. The light was too beaten to penetrate the closed eyelids of the preacher as his follower reached him slowly. Under the mystical aura of the faded light the saint seemed to meditate, lost in his primal trance, while the airy roots of the Bo-tree, the mythical one, kalpavraksha, with its cosmic fecundity spread an ancient spiritual libido around him. He seemed the rishi, the perfect sage of legendary lores, which was too much for this simple believer in Godhood. The dozed off Sadhu looked like a divine incarnate. A severe pang of devotional thunder and lightning in synchronism with the atmospheric one found him falling at the feet of sleeping symbol of divinity, who awoke with a fearing shudder. There was moisture of devotional fervour in the servile’s eyes.

“Sadhu maharaj, I’m blessed to serve you,” was all he could mutter, amidst that devotional hiccup.

Once inside the hut the fakir, holy friar, sat cross-legged on the softness meant to be his sleeping place. The docile server laid out the evening meal on a squarish plank of wood. His mentor still had got that hangover about that riddle arising faint figure.

“Doesn’t this phantomish upkeeper of the pond sleep, eat and have some rest,” he spoke with a mouthful of sweet kheer. “I was bothered about his disturbing presence. The unholy one! Totally unreligious due to his occupation!” he forced the words.

Bhagte didn’t speak. The diner gulped down a few more teaspoons of the sweet semifluid made of boiled rice and milk.

“I think his would be a suffocating presence for my holy ways,” he started again in total disagreement to the watchman’s hut sharing the little hillock with him.

Oh, how he aspired to be the owner of this little gob of earth as its religious sovereign! The owner of this mound by the right of mendicancy, sadhuhood; by the right of being the servant of the Omnipotent, the sovereign of this universe. And in God fearing India it is unholy to question a religioner’s possession which he keeps for the propagation of Godship. The watchman’s hut was thus a nuisance stuck up against his little religious plan. He couldn’t do much in this matter, at least for now. After all he was just another mendicant with just one follower; who just happened to come across this village, just a couple of days ago.

Bhagte lit up a small smouldering bonfire of dried neem leaves to make the mosquitoes flee for their lives. The Sadhu had already rested his back upon the soft straw bed after the hearty meal. It was really wonderful how he could gobble up each and everything even though his heart was so gloomily sulking. He lay burping into the bitter smoke hovering like a mist in the lamp’s glow.

“I hope you’ll enjoy your sleep, maharaj,” Bhagte said from outside preparing to go. “Forgive me for any mistake. But it’s all I could arrange for you.”

“Don’t worry. It’s bearable,” the hut’s new occupant said pacifying his lone follower. “We people don’t need much comfort. That’s the difference between the lovers of Him and the lovers of common worldly trivialities,” he said sagely, much to the comfort of the great sages who sacrificed each and every worldly charm.

All alone on the mound, the saint cast a look through the hut’s small entranceway into the darkness straggled around the second hut. No activity of a human being or light inside that, he could make that out very easily. Restlessness was still grumbling inside him, because the weather inside his body as well as outside was raspily gloomy, hot and humid. Not able to bear the twittle-twattle of the little lightening wick, he splurged his discomfort into the tiny glass protection of the taunting flicker, and instantly the darkness spread inside the hut.

He was in such a state of bleary dissonance, when the second occupant of the mound came with the slowness and agility of an ant, quietly sneaking into its hole: the arrival so wispy not to make the religioner smell any rat. There was no sign of an evening meal or for that matter any other activity in the second hut. If the watchman was not fortunate enough, like the liberation seeker, to possess a supper-fetcher, he must’ve gone without any meals today. His chulha in open by his hut, darkened with smoke, was without any glow. The ash of some previous usage waited a wash as the darkest cloud thundered gruffly, lightning cringed and the rumpled weather pouted with an uneasy chasm.

Indra, the Lord of thundering rain-storms, and Maruts, the celestial water carriers must’ve been hysterically busy this night. Sudden gusts of cool wind indicated it must’ve cut across a heavy down-pour as it reached the village from the north-west.

Guttural gnarl of the clouds puffed some coolness into the huts. The Sadhu heard sputtering of big raindrops on the polythene cover of his thatch. He counted ten or fifteen of them, but the cloud’s twirling acceleration forced him to abandon the count and realise the rain’s reality. The rain starting with its distinct notes turned to a full scale mystical song; the erotic rain-symphony in the dark.

The dark cloud layered over the dull grey one responded to the purring wail of the insect world beneath. Hilarious shower upon the pond’s waters produced a heroically ecstatic mirth as droplets splashed into a bigger existence, forcing down their souls into the molecules all in harmony along the lake-like pond; in big contrast to the land surface with their crashing futility over millions of insected souls and dust specks.

While the primordial urge of the avoidance of death, doom and destruction jingled through the ephemerals; the universal will was holding bravely against the collapse of the cosmos.

Sleep occurs at the crest of subconscious unison of mind, body and spirit. Rain with its lullaby circling around the mound, quickly sent the drenched Goddess of sleep to bless the unsleepy interior of the religioner’s hut. And there he was riven with subtle sleepy energies. Effusively he joined other sleepers, the villagers. The birds in nests with half their brains resting, leaving the other half to be vigilant, however, got awake.

How great looks the world while in sleep! Embaled in forgetfulness; no pinching hard facts to aggravate the illusions! But the futility is that we’ve to rise up again and again till the last sleep to eternity.

The Sadhu was now lying surrendered to a sweeping sleep. With every wake up call this perennial seeker of liberation through the paths of Hinduism had faced more and more disconcerting illusions. But the knowledge of the absolute truth is not to be discovered. It is to be realized, for it does not exist at a particular destination needing a particular belief system to suggest a unique path to reach it. It exists everywhere. We don’t even have to take even a step to discover it. People are there who gain greatest of religionhood without seemingly taking a single formal step on the path of institutionalised Godship. A simple common human being, whose soul’s divinity finds consonance with his earthly existence, is perhaps a true religioner, at least in the eyes of the God. If that is so the other occupant of the mound, the watchman, was a religioner too. True to his duties he was sleeping after a hard day of commitment against the fishmongers.

If one still believes in the path of a particular belief system to reach up to the divinity, then he must have the faith, understanding and realisation—all three unfailingly—of the sacred injunctions which can bring him to the brink of reality. Lose any one of the three; the whole exercise becomes a dogma, a mere practice of rituals. As in case of our holy man the breach in his soul---the ever existing dissonance---very rarely allowed the cosmic consonance of the three constituents of his belief system. His path of mendicancy was thus a flicking sequence of faith, understanding and realisation always rattling against each other.