32
She Returns
With alliterative cadence the time just
ticks away in tune with the cosmic swing of divine pendulum; without caring
about disapprobation from the human history; cultural and civilizational leg-pulling;
ignorance of our bodies to read the death’s futurology written over each
passing second.
Good or bad, our efforts and endeavours
can’t take us to the impervious den, in the cosmic womb somewhere, inside which
the cosmic clock ticks away seconds on that dial of cosmological constant. So
our ‘urge to live’ gives just a contemptuous look to the sagacious floater, the
time, ever flying on fleeting clouds.
Still it isn’t that starkly murky tale.
Though caught in the time’s warp the creation still enjoys resplendent pageant.
Seasons change. After a frigid winter there is spring; when the nature is
bridefully adored with pear-shaped emeralds and cloudless amorous climes.
Multicolours obfuscate all the tragic paradoxes of black and white.
In the locale of our tale, the basant
(spring) starts from the Basant Panchami day, when the Holi pole is
erected. The countryside, like a shy dusky lass, smiles with varying hues of
the sun. Saffron, ochre, orange, yellow and red of the misty mornings and
graciously fine evenings! Silvery, grayish-white peerless maze of the noons ! Impeccably sweet bird songs!
Under pious injunctions from the celestial minstrel picturesque flowers get
procreatively provoked. Lush green wheatlings, pristine whites of peas, longing
yellows of mustard and macroscopically numerous wild flowers bob upon the
blossoming breast of the excited countryside damsel.
Exalted gorgeousness of scent and
colour sends a tumult among the insects and larger winged kingdom. There starts
an inexorable search for beauty, fragrance, honey and scintillating colours.
With desirously connubial priorities beauty breaks free of its winter-time
servility. Shyly and provokingly it camouflages here and there, turning the flora
and fauna infatuatedly love-lorn. While all of them tenaciously go searching
for it, fearing the gustless and malignant summer packing its bags in the
southern hemisphere would blow it away with its hot-stormy gustation. ‘Before
the amorous beauty turns invisibly amorphous and is exiled to some cooler
climes with the returning migrant birds, let us perform love plays in her
flowery orchards!’ the crazy suitors chorus hurriedly while making pleasantly
lusty plans to cherish each and every particle of the beauty. The lovebirds fly
around for their share of love; harbouring an antipathy to the summer because
it’ll wither away the beauty and they’d be left here just to engage in hot calumnies.
Lofty beauty, but, is never fazed by
the lusty intrigues of the puny, miasmal seekers. It’s never found stuck up in
the quicksand of flawed premise. It survives. It’s immortal. If not in outright
worldly semblance, it still shines as the sacred baptism of lode-star. In every
new avatar it emerges neo-classically elegant. Veiled by the red evening skies
it’s fully sung of nature during the joyous springs. It smiles as the wild
countryside shower personifying summer’s boisterous escape towards the antrums
of coolness. Winter’s sunny calms and mystic maze of sheltering ecstasy from
the frigid icicles is another fine facade of beauty. Lost in the autumn’s
solitary scene the fairy still smiles shyly like a dew-drenched daffodil in the
morning––it’s just another graceful column in the beauty’s palatial palace.
Truly, ‘A thing of beauty is joy forever!’
All is possible in the nature’s unorthodoxly
effervescent game. Loveliest of a smiling spring has a virile, loury sky above;
hanging precariously without any buttress; its heart smouldering with a
smothering infatuation, which in turn gradually turns to domineering
debauchery. The resultant lewdness casts a lurid eye-light over the luxurious
solitude of the effulgent beauty: claustrophobic eyes’ craving, aiming a buffet
at the rosy pride, in case it can’t be possessed. Strange are the ways of
nature. Beauty, truth and the vanity of human cravings juxtaposed!
It was thus the day of Basant
Panchami in the third week of this fabulous February. Village lads had set
up a tall and towering Holi-pole in the alkaline wasteland to the south of
scrumptiously grassy little upland.
This day is celebrated as the start of Basant
Kama Mahotsva (the spring festival of love and lust) during which the gaily
condescending God of love shoots profusely lusty arrows all around.
On this late-winter noon , it was calm to the nimble enthralling of
senses. So calm that it appeared to create an extraordinary slice of silent history.
Sun was unpretentiously shining upon the vibrant profusion of nature’s colours.
Pond’s water was serenely stand-still. Breeze was non-intimidating. Gentlest
brace of airy brush swiped littlest of silvery shiny ripples. Ducks were
swimming effortlessly; so unbirdily that they appeared just inanimate floating
toys. Along shallow edges other birds too obeyed this trim and taut whip by the
Goddess of peace. Seeing them thus one would’ve thought they were recuperating
their energies before the long flight back to the hilly summer abodes.
The temple stood majestically. Bell-chimes
occasionally broke the sovereign sway of silence stooping over the landscape.
Now and then the devotees were going in and coming out of the gate facing the
broad, smoothly brick-paved linkage to the ruggedly metalled district road.
Inside the premises, the banyan’s freedom had been religiously curbed around by
a lubriciously cemented preaching pedestal around the mythologically mighty
trunk. Sitting on his spiritual throne the priest was preaching the sitters
whose eyes showed they were mired in a monumental confusion on hearing the scriptural
talk about Him from the mouth of this godhead.
The resident disciples (the ruffians of
earlier, they were now eligible for this title just due to the Godly address of
their present residence) were snoozily sunbathing on the roof of their large
room in the south-eastern corner of the precincts. The mound’s earthy head had
been chopped to fill up the accruing soil on all sides to create a sprawling
space. In the welcoming embrace of this comfortable compound stood the faithful
machine––the rustic wanton which’d always flown with wild abundance, their
vagrant energies steering it to the hilt. It looked somewhat jaded, rusty and
older now. Perhaps it was on account of lesser use. The reason for this stood
near it. With the temple arrived the mode of conveyance as well. It was a rickety
second-hand Mahindra jeep, which some devotee might’ve offered to the guru
as an obeisance to undo the trouble in his gait.
There at the other end of the pond
stood the honoured shelter built with extraordinary dexterity. Feeling security
as well as satisfaction the watchman was sleeping outside on a charpoy.
His frail body lay curved. After every ten or fifteen minutes he took turns as
if to allow the sun’s warmth to penetrate all his limbs. The dog was sleeping
sniffly under the master’s charpoy. Little grassy plateau at the other
end beyond the prickled plantation was warming itself like a lunch table for
the guests.
Sultry calmness with slight airy
whispers was lullabying the landscape to sleep. It was as mellow and harmonious
as the sylvan Goddess in the remotest corner of a forest, on a full-blown
autumn noon, lies too lazy to even disembark the oldest and driest of leaves; and
like a cynical doubter the time standing in dismay over the dry, dead leaves
still clinging on to the stalks; unexcited inanimation, meanwhile, elusively
flirting around.
With bated breath the grievous monotony
of silence was waiting for some genially cheerful kiss from the airy-fairy to
turn this sullen and sad reverie into a purling frolicity. It was thus holding
on to the waiting game, expectantly looking at the loury sky if it knew
something about some such transformative agent.
That something was just a breath away.
With loveliest of gentleness the prompty-whisper of its solitary muse touched
the landscape’s sullen soufflés. Eager eyes hummed a welcoming hymn. Spiritual
semblance of the water’s gentle murmur fell in the ears of desultory sylvan
Goddess. She turned Her eyes to the newcomer’s still elusive half-a-tone. Like
the freshness of rebirth, white lily on the corpse’s forehead rekindled to
Shelley’s ‘nosegay of violets, daisies and tender bluebells’. Aha, even an
envious autumn casting translucent eyes to fondle the spring’s fairy face!
With its gypsy mirth the fresh gust of
air came from the visionary vales. With its usual clinical self of detachedness
the caravan moved briskly, raggedly flaunting its scattered pomp. With none of
the half-baked measures---just too straight-faced---it came driven by the
cadence of an ever-lasting journey. The broad path connecting temple to the
road was crowded with carts, donkeys laden with old figures, sheep and goat
flocks, horses, mules and a camel pair walking in a pensive guise. The caravan
moved ahead unconcerned as if urged just by the breeze. It was a long queue
trailing along the road from the side of the district city. The caravan was
returning after three years and during this period of free-roamings in north India
Birds in the pond came out of their
pensively pleasured eerie. Without frightening others a pack of ducks took flight.
Who knows it might not return to the pond? At least not during the summer if
after reaching high in the air their feathers got some message from a flying
cloud that temperature in the hills was no longer frigid. Or with the help of
some mysterious birdie sense they got some intuition about the rapturously mild
hallucination of the vales calling mellowly and promising a cool summer-tinged
ecstasy. Meanwhile, the waders standing on the muddy banks coyly gazed; their
sprightly eyes skipping a few flutters.
Some wrinkled hollow cheeks bore
noticing spasms looking at the change in this pathway leading to the caravan
site. Perhaps advanced age’s burden of experience is too profuse. Hence, even
to the gypsies some footprints do seem acquainted on the paths which their
vicissitudinous journey follows ceaselessly. Thus a few of them intently looked
at the new broad path and the new structure towering above the banyan.
Glossing over the tragic paradoxes of
their fluctuating fates, children’s laughing cries chorused with bleating sheep
and goats. Overall gypsy felicity too, veiling the caravan from the settled
social glares and attraction, didn’t look out for any addition to the village
and carefreely moved along the easy path with extraordinary self-restraint
which so often---almost unfailingly---found them stoically indifferent to the attractive
importunities put forth by different places coming their way.
The caravan was really big. Gypsy trail
covered whole length of the schools along the road and then taking a turn it
almost reached its latest destination. Two camels at the far end came one after
the other. The riders were lurching atop the humped beasts. Their body
movements, compromising the long lurches of the lanky desert-ships, made them
appear engaged in a little journey of their own on top of the animals. All in
all it was a testimony to the nomadic motto: ‘Ever on the move!’
Cowering bleats of the sheep made no
bones of the fact that only in humans there’re many a slips between tongue and
lips. ‘Animals never get stuck up in the grim atmospherics of real, hidden
intentions and the faked verbosity!’ black goats inside the pack appeared to
sing in a black-armband protest.
The caravan’s hustle-bustle carried
with it a strange sort of incidental music which entreatingly sailed over the
pond’s tranquil, watery bed-spread for some rest and water. Many of the animals
were sneaking into the water to draw out a mouthful of it. While the herders’
swaying sticks, strange whistles and clucking tongues bade them orders to join
the flocks. For it was no time for watering. Seeing them still unnecessarily
blanketed in warm yellowish-brown wool one might’ve pitied them because it was
late winter (or it could be called early spring) when the humans were coming
out of their sweaters. However, beyond all such seasonal apprehensions the
gypsy trail moved with hitherto-unassailable seasonless propensity to be ever
on the move.
Mighty bulls of the cattle flock walked
a bit less arrogantly, probably feeling castrated due to the rags sheathing
around their pizzles to prevent the wanton display of power to mate
unnecessarily with lusty frolicity. So the incendiary inclination of their
private parts was hitting its fury against the imprisoning doublets––the animalistic
urge to procreate going through the fire and water of a gypsy path.
In the papery-meek sheep flocks, nimbler
interjections of goats appeared little oases in deserty surroundings. The caravan
dogs, while passing the street between the schools, yelped expostulatorily at
the village dogs lionfully doing the same from their dens. Temple
Crying with their standard rickety
excuse, the carts lurched and jerked on this new path. Faintly revolting
nostril-gusts of the yoked bulls were harking for a halt after a long journey.
The donkies walked in prodigious self-absorption; completely unaware of the
burden above; even unmindful of the vicious extravagance of naughtiness being
committed by the monkeys on their backs. Oh, the ever-abiding handmaid of burdening
destiny! In complete contrast, the mares galloped diligently with an expertly
inspiratorial message: ‘Complete thy fun-lessons of each journey with the same
unflinching, untiring agility!’
Away, away from the socio-culturally
restrictive pressure-cooker atmosphere of the immobile settlements, this gypsy
trail was similar to the work of wanderlust, humanely unrestrictive God who
like an infinitely inspired painter drew an endless line with brilliant strokes
of colourful multitudes. This brilliant sketch now arrived here much to the
exclamation of early butterflies (of an infant spring) awaiting the spring’s full-blown
artistic strategy.
The caravan carried with it its own
type of incontrovertible air about which no particular culture could feel or
think disputatiously. It was just as incontrovertible as the facts like ‘the
hardest thing isn’t a rough stone, but a beautifully cut diamond’.
Aha, the softening strokes of gypsyism
colourfully dispersing the diacritically rhythmic interplay of patterns on the
vast canvas of socially institutionalised colours, forms and sketches! Under
this gypsy light’s illumination whole of the monotonously stale picture of
earlier turned into a palpable piece of great painter’s artistry.
With fortitude the caravan was taking
last steps to its one more new site. The site and its surroundings had by now
fully awakened from the lazy siesta under warm sunrays. There were more ruffled
feathers in the pond as the freely roaming cavalcade created ripples in the
water. In perfect compatibility with caution many birds perkily lifted
themselves in air, while others still floated with an uneasy wait as more and
more sheep and goats flocked to that side to drink water.
Oh, these birds! Aren’t they also mystically-mysterious
wanderers just like the gypsies? Their enigmatic sojourns across the sky’s blue
lap seem didactically writing the message: ‘Ever remain flying for the sake of
fanciful flowers. They bloom in a little orchard paradisaically laid-out
somewhere.’ Even the most insipid of horizons with musty moods start buzzing
with enlivening orchestration in response to such songs. Alas––and only God
knows why?––still there’re deadwoods which never gyrate lifefully to such
nimble twinges!
The priest’s walls were immensely
unresponsive to such soft vibrations as the passing of these homeless humans. His
precincts thus remained untouched by the upcoming newness. Hence the resident
disciples’ sleep wasn’t broken. The priest fully engaged in the appellative
artistry of Godhood didn’t even raise an eyebrow in the nomadic direction.
Expectant eyes and ears of the devotee audience were too eager for the fruits
of faith. So they too were oblivious of the new wave of humanity passing so
close to them. Perhaps the residers inside the decorously glossed thick walls develop
stony surroundings around their hearts making them taboo territories for soft vibrations.
In illumining contrast to the above, the
gentle gypsy shove sailed over the pond’s calm waters and ruffled the diligent
sinews in the thatched hutment. In interface with this humanistic sensitivity
those tiny, weightless things swayed their light heads. Like children the old
master-pet couple opened its mistily dreamy eyes and ogled at the gypsy
spectacle moving up the grassy little tableland at the pond’s other end.
Delphic silence lazily layered over the
grass was now totally awakened by the peregrinatory diaspora, as the nomadic
trail found a temporary halting place like a river in furor reposes its
turbulence in the calm waters of a midstream lake, where the water frees itself
from the narrow valley’s squeezing entail and happily spreads itself along the
spacious length and breadth of the laughing lough, untill the lost river
redeems its existence through an outlet. Just like the water restfully pooled
in such a lake, the gypsy-lore with its wander-lust treasure-trove congregated
at the new caravan site.
To make it easy for tent pitching, the
sheep and goats were whistled away to graze in the bunch-grass and jhabua
shrubbery separating the pond from the caravan site. Vacuousness in the air
began to be filled by the ecstatic voices of the children as they jumped from
the carts, donkeys, mothers’ laps or for that matter any type of nomadic mode
which brought them here. Unmindful of the grown-ups’ tedious task of setting up
the temporary settlement their childhood avarice for playing saw them running down
the new turf, creating little, little childstorms.
Horses and mares strutted around to
search for freshest of blades emerging from the frost beaten carpet, now fastly
recuperating under the copious command of an upcoming spring. Unyoked bulls
took long sips of sap like vital juice of rest. Genially they swayed their
horns. Relief oozed out of their innocent eyes for completing one more austere
journey. Their stoic muse illumed the silly, dark dichotomy in the humans’
tendency to ride roughshod over smoothest of a path. ‘Ride the rough seas with
confidence and ease!’ was their finely-honed message for the struggling animal
inside the humans.
The camels took their place at both
ends of the pathway reaching up the little plateau. Their arid audacity made them
seem two towering pillars of the gateway to the gypsy court. Sheep and goats
grazed amidst incriminating bleats like poor subjects struggling tooth and nail
at the outskirts of royal pageantry.
Oh, the mystical birds coming to the
ground to display their multicoloured plumes for a short period of time and
then flutter away again!
Caravan paragons set up their tents
along the plateau periphery in order to protectively maroon their possessions
and womenfolk. With each new tent, the look of the place gradually turned to a
safely circumscribed caravan fortress. From its permanently settled structure the
eager village must’ve felt a chasm, ‘You look so settled when at a place! Why
then ever on the move?’
Monkeys threw dithering shrieks at the
petulant children who misbehaved with the naughty ancestor and ran away. In
still more angry retaliation the beasts almost strangulated themselves with the
cords taming them for the street circus. Caged birds chirped bewailingly as the
puppies’ paws perturbed them from outside. Donkeys stood with a subtle silence;
no change in mood even after all the encumbrance unloaded from the back, save
some occasional outcome of emotion from the deep well of a confused concept
strugglingly coming out in the form of braying, bemoaning all the historical
chastisements.
Now and then, with cackling and
fluttering sound flocks of ducks either landed onto the pond or disappeared
into the encomiumly-blue sky. From a distance the women-farmers hewing fodder
in the fields stood up for the twin purposes of giving some rest to their backs
as well as to have a curious look at this new addition to the grassy locale,
whose feeble sounds breezed down pervasively to offer them a chance to have
some rest. Others, laden under big bundles of fodder, while passing by the caravan
site were casting congenial looks at the gypsy women. It but resulted in requisition
of some fodder by the latter.
Proverbially pleading they sang in
beggary, “O mother, whom thy mother, the holy cow, has given birth are very hungry!
Give some fodder!”
The oxen meanwhile greedily stared at
the lusciously green fodder. A look at the poor beasts mellowed the lady
farmers’ matriarchal hearts. Casting a look of piety at the poor sons of holy
mother they unburdened their heads and lessened the load without indulging in
any recrimination as it normally happened in village streets while bargaining
with these gypsy women selling their petty things.
The process of pitching the tents, of
bringing their new houses to order, kept its superbly streamlined pace with the
change of noon into
afternoon. However, in contradiction to the village’s settlement-lorn cadence,
the air above the caravan site deliberately condoned the nomadic axiom:
“O gypsies don’t commit the mistake of
taking a clue from the permanent book of solidly founded idiosyncrasies of
these villagers! Don’t put your house in too much of an order, because thy
ulterior destination awaits afar!”
The old watchman’s eyes were caressing
this ramified and roughly-hewn gypsy vision. To this loner at the far end of
the pond it felt like his loneliness was pushed back by the lively presence of
these destitute flowers. His senile gaze kept on appreciating the caravan being
set up in all its immaterial majesty; while his now-ecumenical mind was
expounding some ideas and thoughts in response to the sight of gypsy sinews readying
a nest at the other end of the puddle of his responsibilities and careage. Only
instrumentality of these thoughts was that it passed his time in this sultry
afternoon. Then the sepia-toned memories of the last time they visited this
place flashed in his heart. He tried to recall her visage. Put an effort to
scrub some rust off his memory chambers. Alas, he failed to gather a picture!
In its place a halo of light, shining brightly like stillness amidst torrential
troubles, shone in his mind’s eye. A paternal emotion lunged forward as if to
shield the beauteous halo of light caught in the opprobrious encirclement
around it.
A triangle had thus been drawn across
the pond. At its northern nob was the temple, set in religious tradition,
symbolising the priest’s materially tapering faith brick by brick carried
upwards by the religious instrumentalities. His rostrate religiosity, pouting
with materialistic peevishness, ended at the ecumenical ends of the brass trident
on top of the shikhara, where during thunder-storms fire and fury of passions
struck to conflagrate the illusions hovering over his soul.
Geometrical exactitude of this triangle
had the sacred senility sheltered at its south-eastern point. Here was the
masonic work of sinews under which the old master-pet pair regaled its agefully-tired
physicality with safe, secure sleep. Two forsaken creatures, away from the
whole theatrical extravaganza of the society, with harmless stealth spent their
lives here. While the hazardously crowded larger world, so unmindful of the
pair’s existence like they were just insects or a pair of little rodents hiding
in a thicket, ran madly muttering disparaging jibes. The hut, thus, safely out
of the society’s sphere of junk memorabilia, amiably lay in the nature’s lap
just like a perfectly rooted and symmetrical tuft of bunch-grass. Stoically
averse to court any controversy, it still religiously expounded its unaccosting
nature to the trespassers. Outer world’s lustily roaming glares easily slipped
off the lubricious surface of this reclusive hermitage. Hence nothing
transpired in the pokering ears of the bigger world concerning this spiritually
sinewy structure. So the greater motivations of a greater world passed it
fleetingly like a comfortably saddled rider, firmly footed in the stirrups
gallops with the beast occupied by the countless convivial habits of inhuman
motivations and reprisal modes.
At the triangle’s facetiously
fortuitous south-western point was the caravan site: the temporary point in the
limitless nomadic trail, ever eager to move forward as if their forefathers (out
of sheer indignation) had moved out of the settled communities crying ‘deep-rooted
heathens’. With a relishly reclining countenance they now pass both the
drabbish streets as well as the most caressing oases of nature. It just flows,
the ever flowing brook with its fluvial divinity, unmindful of the
bank-shouters’ imprecations. Its cool watery pride and indefatigable spirit
finds it sailing smoothly over the rancescent, rugged rocks without feeling the
pleasure or pain of it.
A triangle is drawn to make a meaning
(there’s at least a geometrical meaning to it) out of the space’s infinite
abstractness. Just as a child playfully cajoles the meaningless shape drawn by
his floundering, learning hand during his earliest days in school, God too must
have been waiting in suspense over this newly emerged pattern on earth. The
destiny’s hands, meanwhile, had already protruded to fetch out some meaning; to
make out an event, happening or mishappening from the space and characters in
the triangle.
Three apexes in their own rights; basking
in the benevolence of their own individual fates; shining at the each
individual crest; making the two others seem like the ones forming just a base.
But from the simplistic, even according to the geometrical linearity, the two
points in the south appeared sharing some proximal coordinates in their
combined comparison to the northern one squeezed in a tight upper corner. A
strange force was working over the triad to prove which the real apex was. Only
the cosmic dispenser had any clue to the exact nature of any yet-to-happen occurrence
in this triangular palestra.
The evening that day was unusually cold
for this late winter part of the season. Cold air came breezingly from the Himalayas , where the coldly sighing nature was showering
icy flakes over undisturbed dales. Sub-Himalayan regions too were witnessing
strong rains and hailstorms.
Shrouded in naively-reflecting thoughts
the old man was on an upkeeping sortie around the pond. Unhurriedly the misty
twilight had set in. Moon’s first half was trying to stop the darkness from
gobbling the once sunny, spacious surroundings. His mind was rummaging through
the basket of events dating three years back. His placid gait was aiding his
mind trying to recollect the interspersed sinews of the past. Much to the
disappointment of his paternally eager heart he was constantly failing to
reconstruct her image in his mind. His heart, however, was fastly pumping
emotional imagery of that daughter figure.
Under the mystical gleanings of these
reflections he sat down as if to devote all his life force to recollect that
face. This caravan was too big than hers, hence he was sadly thinking she wasn’t
to be found in it. He felt mysteriously related to that daughter of those free
roamers. As it happens, very rarely we hold any phobia or fear in our lonesome
capacity as totally differentiated, unrelated and absolutely abstract identity.
It, however, occurs very easily once the apprehensions shooting around find us
chained to some related identity. Same happened to him as well once he found
his emotions attached to the unblemished aura of her hazy reminiscence. A
shivering apprehension snuggled close to his old heart. Prophets and charlatans
of communally charged politics danced in razzle-dazzle hilarity around him.
Through the word of mouth he’d heard about the local MLA’s unnerving hostility
towards all those bearing a Mohammedan appearance. The patriotic party had
already tasted the cusp of central government in Delhi
Sitting helpless and pulverised he was
brought back to his upkeeping senses by a noise nearby. These were giggles
breaking out of suppressedly sewn up lips. The voices after coming out
metamorphosed into fearish exclamations.
“Oh, you naughty ones!” the watchman
jumped up at full throttle. “Even a watercrow may lose a chance to clutch at a
fish but not you!”
There was an awfully exacerbating
hiccup among the brattishly fishmongering pack and they ran for dear life. One,
however, was left behind because he held the fishing line in his hand. Possibly
the baiting pull by the fish lured him into delaying the escape by the fraction
of a second. The watchman grabbed this sole left out culprit (for the misdeed
of the whole horde) by the back of his neck. Clearly candid in his duty, he
pulled the line out of water. His torch reflected upon the red face and broad
belly of a fully grown pavankar. Baiting hook was firmly placed inside
its mouth. Its feminally full lips were furtively kissing this metallic noose
of death.
“Please tayoji, please! Please,
forgive me! Let me go!” the boy pleaded, but not before testing all his
strength to escape into the thickety darkness.
However, the trim and taut grasp of the
pond upkeeper’s frail fingers overpowered the little culprit cherub.
“Why, you’re from the caravan? Say, yes!”
the old man questioned him with a fake pungency.
“O...m...me,” the boy fumbled and
grumbled indistinctly in order to cudgel-up some verbal trick. But the childish
fear failed him. Unable to find anything to say he meekly surrendered, “Tayoji
please let me go! Take all your fish back. In panic those cowards forgot to run
away with this,” he held up the basket half full due to their fishing effort.
“So you rue that they couldn’t take it
with them!” the watchman gave a poignant twist to his earlobe.
“No, no....It’s yours you can have the
basket as well!” the offender pleaded.
“Aye, O my mother! Such a little one
trying to bribe an old one like me!” his tone suggested that the culprit’s
culpability had acquired more weight now.
He put the light upon the basket which
the boy was repeatedly pointing to.
“Oh my... good catch indeed!” the old
spartan slapped a compliment on the boy’s back.
A good catch it indeed was. In the
little water inside the basket, anhai (the snake type) was still
jostling for breath amidst the dead or semi-dead heap of mangur, muraki,
birket, lallantika and rehu.
“Oh
my fishing Gods! Virtually all the varieties found in our pond! A good catch
indeed!” he swayed his head in appreciation of the massy mastership of these
little ones. “You ought to have been a fisherman my boy!” he slapped another
compliment on the boy’s back, who with fear contracted it to a stony tautness
so that the hitter got hit instead of him. “Take me to your parents!” he now
decisively ordered.
There’s too much (or even too little)
that fails to meet the eye about the gypsies’ notions of social and family
conventions. One thing nonetheless is quite sure, whatever might be the true
nature of such ambiguously elegance-exuding gypsy parameters, these never get
extenuated along the clearly defined mores of the settlers. Still, to a
watchman a wrong is a wrong, whether committed by a villager or these
wanderers.
A thin flake of cloud perkily veiled
the moon’s half smile, as the boy led him to the caravan site. The women had
started to prepare supper on rudimentarily built open fire places. Feeling
salubrious pangs of hunger the children were sitting around with empty bellies,
dented bowls and blackened plates. When the cooking pot’s lid was opened,
crannily the froth flaunted its completion by hissing out a vapoury sprout of
dining call which was rutilantly reflected over the fire. In subtle musical
seduction, a radio was warming their journey-worn hearts with Rajasthani folk
songs. Its owner must’ve tried really hard to adjust the fluctuating frequency
on the precarious bandwidth linking this tiny, proud possession to a local
radio station in the state of Rajasthan. Enjoying the holistic mirth of
childhood the children were rolling in paddy haylofts. In compactly complete
meekness the sheep had jutted their wool against each other with such masonic
joinery and finery that even a single drop of rain (provided the sky felt an
urge to test this fact) won’t have completed its journey directly without coming
across any woolly obstruction. Bonfires were burning with mettlesome watchmanship
to guard them over the long, shivery night, lest someone got away with sheep,
goat or for that matter anything else; because a thief is a thief, it doesn’t
matter to him what he gets away with, from whatever type of a household.
Different types of whistles were ordering the animals to move, stay, sit or
group around.
Trundling down the slippery slope of
boyish fear the boy led him to the largest bonfire. A thickly whiskered, burly
old man draped in a big saggy coat was sitting on his haunches. His head was
held high under the proud majesty of a heavy headgear. Despite the rugged
brashness of torn and tattered cloth the turban had the semblance of a headman’s
authority. Age and experience glimpsed in his assuagingly wide eyes under the
fatherly thickets of very heavy gray eyebrows. By his side was sitting a sleek
dog, the hunting hound, which growled as if to slake the hunger’s fire inside its
piteously thin abdomen. Thank God, the old man’s old companion had been left behind
at the hut! Big old gypsy’s hairy hand curled around the angry animal’s neck
and in the next instant the dog’s passion was soothed.
As soon as they reached the fireside, a
scuffle started. Four, five boys ran from the fire’s stage and became invisible
in the nomadic trash scattered over the little plateau. Once again the caught
culprit found himself embaled in his lonesome culpability. However, those who’d
run away stood out as their own witnesses against their own offence.
A strange stringed instrument was
placed by the old gypsy. It was a pleasantly weird thing, apparently a splendid
unison between a type of gypsy fiddle and the friar’s ektara. Had the
watchman reached the spot a few minutes ago he wouldn’t have been able to
ascribe the melody to this man who seemed too coarse and physically overgrown
to create such delicate and soulful music. Apart from this the incinerating ambers
and the burning fire unhived the big inartistic body of even the littlest of an
aesthetic facet which the sun would’ve reflected upon during the day.
“He is my grandfather,” the boy
whispered in archetype submission.
“Great way to learn some music in the
bonfire’s bonhomie, sir!” the watchman accosted with his complaint. “While your
children go on fishing on your not so good tunes,” the frail old man was oddly
sarcastic.
“Music never guides us to do the wrong,”
the old gypsy’s husky voice had a subtle sartorial tone of aged wisdom. “Even
the most messy of notes would be still better than our so called good works,”
concluding this little prelude he picked up the instrument and started a richly
melodious tune.
“What happened, my dear?” the old gypsy
musician asked bringing a plausible halt to the lilting tune.
His rough, weather-beaten face was
strangely calm and miles away from all worldly vexations. Friendliness was
gleaming in his big, weary eyes. In symphonic narration this little piece of
musicity proved that rhythms and melodies are no slaves to the outer appearance
of the musician. Promptly the watchman felt himself wrong in calling this
expert musician just a learner. But still the weight in basket was too heavy
for this soft, light emotion.
So, from the aggrieved party’s pulpit
he put up the complaining fiat, “This boy of yours was stealing fish from the
pond. Just look at the catch as if all of you people are up for a fishy feast
tonight!”
“Don’t get angry, my old fellow,” his
agedly eloquent eyes appeared mini-seas brimming with so many trifling as well
as stormy experiences.
Slightly irritated, the watchman said
in an anguished tone, “So that is how you people spoil your younger ones. By
being ever so soft to their misdeeds.”
“No sir, I’ll throw him into this fire
if that gives you any satisfying feeling of justice.” without the least hint of
exacerbation of his temper the old and hillocky gypsy threw a bit of cold water
over the watchman’s little fire.
Before anyone of them could realise
what’d happened, a pathetically bearded young man clad travestively jumped upon
the offender as if he---the boy---was an erring pack-horse and started with a
severe whack-work. Proceeding according to the perfect script, the boy reacted
with a full-throated cry.
Having done that, the dispenser of
justice turned to the watchman and said with a sort of disastrous volition, “Now
that should satisfy you old man! Or you want more?”
Even with his most angry self, the
watchman won’t have aspired for such a severe punishment to the boy.
Considering himself guilty of all this the watchman kept mum. His tongue was
trying to find some words.
Caught in an unwitting irony this
weirdly suffering young soul looked tortuously distant from the normal. “That’s
how these people are! And that’s why we people are what we are!” angrily
hopping around the fire he muttered, as if caught in the reminiscential snares
of all those beatings by the farmers when his sheep strayed into their fields.
“It wasn’t me alone!” the boy sobbed in
his grandfather’s lap. “Munarsi, Dhaulia, Mula, Haulia and Puna were also there,”
he unloaded the weight of offence from his sole head.
Hearing these names the still boiling
dispenser of justice yelled aloud and furtively disappeared into the gypsy
sinews glowing in the firelight. The old gypsy helplessly called him back.
Hornet’s nest of justice had been
stirred. Inspectorially he led the culprits onto the scene.
With a consumptive look the clincher
yelled, “Why do’u people give them a chance,” his twitching finger pointed at
the frail representative of the outside world.
He began to thrash them as soundly as
he could. The watchman tried to stop him, but in a fit of fury the steamrolling
justice-juggernaut pushed back the interventionist. The old gypsy too shouted
stopping-obscenities at the purveyor of this instinctive justice, but the
latter won’t listen. The children’s cries distinctly cut across the clanking
sounds of the supper-time caravan in its full fervidity.
“Stop, you Ramsa!” with nightingale’s
melody a voice chirped from behind. Tugging at the sleeve of the man on
rampage, it continued its beauteously restrictive rhetoric, “Why’re you beating
them?”
The defiant dispenser of justice discernibly
metamorphosed and halted his fistworking gallantry. The speaker made appearance
more placidly than the gentlest nightfall in a remotest and serene-most corner
of the farthest forest. Frenetically sprucing up for a warm welcome the fire
burnt more brilliantly. Its flames appeared cheerfully espousing the newcomer’s
cause. The boys stopped crying. Heated tempers lost their fremescence. These
were the exterior signs of some inner consciousness. It was just like some
gypsy regalia had dabbed down the flared passions. In divinely rehumanised air
the boys huddled around her. Their eyes showed their feelings of fortress like
security. The rescuer stroked their hair with the plenteous amiability of an
elder sister.
In self-assured esteem her appearance
was now on the scene. Her pearly form was clad in a shawl and nomadic wardrobe
of strange but exotic colours, fabrics and designs. The flickering fire however
was finding itself with too many shades to do full justice to the wildly
shimmering, bright hues of colour and designs (the work of some unknown
craftsman) as well as her truly galoring complexion and features. Still, the
burning fire threw enough feminally-mystic auras around her, making her look
like a versatile Goddess in dazzling nomadic drapes.
“Once again these fools have given some
reason to these more foolish people to come to us with a complaint,” an
exacting Ramsa was still in a mood to mete out more punishment to the boys.
Her melodiously lilting voice raised a
sweet doubt against the accusation’s veritability, “What wrong they’ve
committed to deserve this sort of treatment?”
“They’ve stolen this man’s fish,” his
anger’s ferocity plummeted down like a damp squib.
The beacon of beauty’s full glare fell
upon the old watchman. Very high on history and tradition, her eyes skipped a
flutter. An eerie emptiness of yore was filled up by an aqueous emotion.
Her lips parted a bit and a daughterly
fragrant whisper escaped, “Oh, it’s you tayaji!”
The old man couldn’t recognise the
fully blossomed ambience of that bud he’d seen three years back. Much surprised
he cudgeled up his brain what to say. He’d by now started thinking he shouldn’t
have come here with the complaint, because it was becoming too much for him.
Feeling his puzzlement the girl once
again spoke with complete confidence as if she knew him from times immemorial, “Don’t
you remember me tayaji?” she pulled back here tresses trying to fall
over her face as if they were a bit squiffy with love, while the fire protruded
its arms to feel the real feminal warmth.
She’d recognised him. Rightly so,
because how much of life can outflow from a dry twig in three years. Even if
all of it escapes out the appearance at least would be almost just the same. In
contrast, three years is a long time for juicy beauty and life to flow into a
just opening bud. The bud had flowered fully to celestial scales. Colourful
gaiety in each petal had blossomed so perfectly that it was just impossible to
comprehend that all this spring-like abundance had surfaced out of that bud of
three years ago.
“Don’t you remember... that...” suave
notes of her tongue gave in under the impact of that confounding memory.
For a flashing moment spring
disappeared from the orchard of her chiseled features. Her innocent eyes
appealingly looked at him, expecting he’ll recall the happenings of three years
ago. But no recognising sign appeared on his face.
“Don’t you remember that girl… the bad
man misbehaved and...” her voice trailed off.
A full glow of pleasant surprise
lifefully surfaced on his barren old face.
“Oh my... oh... yes, yes...” the emotion
was too heavy, so the words failed him.
By now Ramsa had regained an iota of
equanimity in his painfully ruffled soul. “Haan... now I can recognise you as
well. If I’m not too wrong in my memory, you, I think... you at least had the
heart to side with us against those...” he clenched his teeth around his
ready-to-reel-off-obscenities tongue, because that would’ve violated her regal
sanctity.
His decidedly aggrieved soul had
started to shed tears. “Those devils killed my brother!” mopping his face with
his sleeve he sobbed inconsolably.
The old watchman heaved a sigh of
horror. In the unnervingly intimated environment the boys escaped lest they got
beatings again. Ramsa was now weeping loudly as if his soul had been put to arson
by someone in a fit of matchless barbarity. She sat by him. While doing so her
kirtle of satinet created a sound like some exotic bird was flapping its
feathers at the erotic peak of its mysterious ecstasy.
Her sisterly soft words tried to pacify
this still mourning brother, “Oh brother, why don’t you forget all that,” her
hands stroking the jumbled jargon of his thickly overgrown hair clanked the
trinkets worn in them. Like a lilting song of innocence she continued, “We’re
wanderers. We never put our heart to a single place.”
“Forgive me sister... forgive me
Phulva. I can’t forget! Not under any type of circumstance!” he cried.
The old gypsy’s wisdomful voice echoed
saintly, “Ramsa my child, all you people loved him alike. Even me, who didn’t
have the opportunity to meet that brave brother, love him as much as you do.
Son, we’re after all just homeless wanderers. Please, forgive and forget the
wrong past, son! Such wrong memories should never be allowed to make a home
inside the heart of a homeless wanderer.”
It was about a year and half back when
Phulva’s caravan joined the bigger one headed by this patriarchally hairy
gypsy.
But even the time didn’t seem to
remunerate for the loss of past. Ramsa remembered it like it happened only
yesterday. Cascadingly chaotic scenes of tragedy devilishly kept on tampering
with the wound. Trenchant needles mercilessly kept on tattooing his soul with a
stagnant locus-standi. The young man thus kept on weeping. Feeling guilty for
wrongly tickling his wound, the watchman was trying to think what to say.
At last he spoke slowly, “I’m sorry for
all that has happened today! I wish I hadn’t hurt your heart with this
unnecessary complaint!”
“Why... why should you feel sorry? You
were right in doing that,” Ramsa managed to control his sobs.
The watchman looked at the girl. Though
he didn’t recognise her, yet he knew her now! The beauteous damsel was trying
to lay soft petals in the young man’s prickled path.
The witty old gypsy knew how to come
out of such frustratingly sultry situations.
He croaked like a frog in the mirthy
monsoon waters, “Hey you folks, we’ve a good fish catch today,” he concluded it
with a musical gustation at the instrument’s string, and then started again, “We’re
thus having a great feast tonight,” this time music was steadily rising in the
background, “Aren’t we, sir?” he put the watchman under musical spotlight.
“Oh, yes! Of course! The boys have done
a fantastic job. Practically all good varieties of fish are with us. Sure, it’d
make a memorable supper!” the frail old man came with his happy contribution to
undo the cloud of sorrow.
Flying on enthusiastic clouds, the
musician ordered one of the women to take the bucket and prepare the most
delicious delicacy the caravan had ever tasted. He then invited them to chat by
the fire. The boys too sensed the calmed down air around the bonfire and they
returned. Slowly, slowly the old gypsy’s witty as well as humorous histrionics
about far-flung interests dawned cheerfulness upon the circle. His mind was
interestingly crammed with uncountable incidences of real life situations
homelessly witnessed on the life’s open paths. Feast of a talk it was. The man had
been to so many different places. Born somewhere along the path itself,
gingerly learnt to walk on it, and now here he was––the perspicacious master of
it. A mere look at him was enough to know here was the person whose head never
had a roof above it and thus his heart got an opportunity to feel everything
from subtle, finer vibrations of goodness to the coarse and gross notes of
badness. Real life tales about things, situations and peoples appeared almost
set in epic tradition when told by that mythically aged, experienced and honest
face of his. If not this man, who else would’ve felt the real bonhomie of
springs and autumns, as well as the true animosity of summers and winters?
“Only we know how cold a winter can be.
It was a dry jungle in Madhya Pradesh one night. Whole caravan was shivering
under the merciless cold. But it was pitiless. About four in the early morning the
God of winter almost concentrated His full fury on us. ‘The dawn will find only
our frozen corpses!’ I was managing to think just this. But see this fame. It
was the sunniest morning I’ve ever seen. We came back to life like a snake
frozen in night moves its body on the next day’s sunny noon ! And the people who watch this play of
almost death and just life from so near quarters become at least convinced of
this futility of running after destinations. So, we just move with hurryless
steps. So slow even by the side of those bullet-fast highways. There’s no
difference in running, walking easily or even sitting sagely at a single place;
because the final destination will arrive for all of us. Those who run fast
themselves reach the final place, without even giving a chance to the
destination to move. For slow walkers like us destination too lurches towards
us to meet at the appointed time. And those who don’t move at all, the death
starts moving towards them right from the start knowing beforehand that whole
distance will have to be covered by it only,” he was speaking in a grand and
mesmeric manner like a gypsy sage (if we can presume such a category to exist).
Surely this man appeared to have
hitched his gypsy physicality to his classless, religionless (or for that
matter devoid of any type of categorisation) spiritual self.
Coming as the fantastic full stop to
this intellectual type talk by the gypsy philosopher, the supper arrived. With
affection the old gypsy called her Phulva, Phulri, and Phularia––all the
nicknames derived by fatherly twists to the word ‘flower’ in their dialect.
While trying to put off sylvan tresses from her face, she served supper to the
guest with a daughterly, dewy grace. A teary emotion welled up in his heart. Reason?
It was for the first time since his childhood he was being served food with
such love and care. The moist emotion very quickly turned into a parental
liking for the girl. Perhaps for the first time in his life the thought tugged
at his rumpled kurta, ‘Why didn’t you have a family and a daughter like
her?!’
After the food the nocturnal reverie
was broken by a music-drunk folksong by the head gypsy. Softly lilting tunes of
his instrument (the gypsy version of a fiddle) rhythmically carried forward
their warmth to pacify the wintry horror of the cold whirlwinds sweeping down
the plains from the Himalayas . Surrounded by
this unhindered musicity she shone daughterly like the starmists of midnight .
* * * *
Next day, the sunrays provided a chance
to observe the true majestic mien of this girl whose real sheen might have been
missed by our readers under the firelight last night.
She’d bloomed in such an impeccable
manner that only the heaven’s piously unruffled face could’ve garbled this
lilac in order to groom it as the divine orchard’s sceptre on the earth. The
Goddess of beauty in Her sheer benign spirits appeared to have chiseled out an
epistle in the form of this fairy, fond virgin whose tellingly taleful frolics
matched the whispery-most murmur by a purposelessly purling brook. Don’t get
surprised if the fact is like this: ‘Some day an earth-lorn Goddess of beauty
impersonated Herself in this girly garb in order to euphonically woo Her
spirits through her silent walks across the cadenced countryside.
She was tall to the slenderly elegance;
tall with a stylistic grace in her nomadic wardrobe. Her pearly form though
clad in trifling fabric, colours and designs, yet the flashing tiara in the
form of her angelic face made her look beyond the confines of all wares. Under
playfully airy forces the feminally foaming fury of her sylvan tresses cast
deepest shadows over her face; deep to the extent of the fairy being
imprisoned. Just like a fleeting dark cloud obstructs sunrays over the most
beautiful flower far, far away in a visionary vale. The veiling tresses however
failed. Why not! Which cloud has the capacity to overshadow the infinite azure?
Her chaste wheatish complexion glowed
with primal pomp and pride; skin so provocatively candid that it appeared gold’s
glossy art. In chaste gratuitousness some Goddess had domed her forehead to
such sculptural dimensions as would only qualify it to be perfect according to
geometrical as well as aesthetical co-ordinates. When she carried it high, she
seemed the indomitable flower never bowing to the strong gusts of air.
Her transfixing eyes were obscurely as
wise as would enable the lyrical fluidity to catch any fleeting moment. Once
netted by those palpebral cords every moment seemed dancing for the realisation
of its existence; like the time’s units ebriated with dewy wines were having
mild hallucinations. Oh, that perfectly almond-shaped pair of eyes, shining
just like a dew-jeweled flower of two colours, spotless white and unstinted
dark! There was a sea of innocence in them; so much innocence that even the softest
of a verse with all its springy charms would’ve found itself incapable of
expressing the singlest of her glance.
When she walked, the whole panorama
moved along in the vain hope of getting a side-long look of love. She, but,
with the agility of a slippery eel diverted her eyes like the mystical Goddess
of songs suddenly hums half a tone and then quickly stops lest somebody comes
to hear it. Justifiably so, because this wayfaring nymphet of the gypsy pride
was worldly wise and understood the vanity of human cravings. While she walked
so aloof, her motifly-arching eyebrows, arching over the diamonds like the sky’s
vault over a dreamy horizon, helped her eyes to express this satirical elegy.
The nose was sculpted with such
unblemished symmetry that even the Gods would’ve liked to smell her breath in
order to recall the deep earthen fragrance which arose aeons ago at the time of
the first wild countryside shower. In fact the pleasing wild beauty of all her
features was such that no bard would’ve felt obsession to pour out verses
exclusively in praise of one particular feature at the cost of springy charm of
others.
Her breathing almost produced new
perfume for the nature’s fragrance. Oddly she had no nose-stud like the gypsy
girls of her age, and it looked fully justified because it would’ve rivelled
the flower. To top it further, it seemed as if no goldsmith in the world had
the dexterity to adorn that nose of hers. Provocatively rose-lipped she was; the
lips ever eager to elate most beautiful of a smile. Oh thou shining starlet glowing
without any artificial aid! The purveyor of shrill gypsy sounds as well as noiseless
calm! Lips thy so distinctly fishy-full and curved so femininely, as no painter’s
brush would’ve been soft enough to draw them on a canvas! And when they parted,
the smile just surfaced naturally accompanied by softened sounds singing
whisperingly, while the great dentist’s pair flashed like the light shining out
of darkness.
Her chin, her cheeks and her jawline
embroidered her face like the most beautiful of a purl criss-crossing around
those features created by God when He was driven by dreams and determination to
cross an earthly milestone of beauty. She was well aware of this nature’s
jewellery in /on her, hence minimal was the number of those exotically designed
tattoos (as is the fashion among gypsy women) on her body save some greenish dots
on the chin and around the corners of her eyes.
Trinkets worn by this splendour-sprinkling
nymphet seemed to be bejeweled by her instead of the other way around for other
females in the caravan. A stone-studded silver pendant splendidly girding
around her neck full of elixir exility was the only exception and proudly
flaunted its ornamentation as the only thing worth bedecking her. Small
earrings hanging from the softest tissue of her earlobes jingled to chant a morning
hymn for this beautifully brave goddess flying on daring wings.
The gypsy maiden, so fresh and virgin
straight from the realm of love! Going darting from place to place, leaving
liltingly lingering blooms behind amidst the untasted pastures; irrepressibly
upbeat and mysteriously romantic, leaving the mark of beauty’s individuality
amidst this wildly wacky and weird world; her subcelestial presence as
effective as the water’s mark on the parched land when the sluice is opened
suddenly; her mazy anklets sounding as the lute-strings of imagination; her
vibrant ambience serenading as a deathless ditty.
Her floridity would’ve stretched the
sonneteer’s imagination to infinite bounds; to the extent of reticulated translucence
where words become meaningless and heart vibrates with cosmic syllables of the
divinity’s language.
The gypsy nymphet looked obscurely so
wise that she would’ve sufficed Shelley’s ‘Hymn to intellectual beauty’.
She was the silence in a glade possessing
epochal rhythm, where even the dispirited nocturnal reverie reverberated with
romantic ballads in lone woods. Aha, kudos to the Gods! In the nature’s unkempt
courtyard this flower, fully sung of nature, growing majestically wild and
beauteous than any garden flower of great care!
Can such a beacon of beauty belong to
anyone or anything exclusively? Not possible. She belonged to all, yet at the
same time to none at all! She was thus just there. Sublimely suasive. Like a
glow-worm in twilight shining for both worlds––the day as well as night; heaven
as well as earth.
Her destination appeared tortuously distant.
In somber urgency and hasty strides she thus wandered like an airy circle, ever
evading the languidly lying settled psyche.
A daughterly
refracting prism to the sun! And just a fleshy soft fruit to the carnalic eyes.
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