Emotional Statements from a Wispily Silent Smaller World

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  Emotional Statements from a Wispily Silent Smaller World

Just at the point where the pond’s western embankment met the road, there was an electric pole. On this morning, anyone having a telescopic view of empathy for the smaller world would’ve come across a tragedy near this pole. A pair of crows was lying electrocuted on the ground.

The watchman was going to the village to fetch buttermilk for the dog. His footsteps came to a mourning halt at the sight of this dead bird-couple. Their eyes were dead open (as if life’d hurriedly exit through them, forcibly tearing apart the eyelids). Beaks were tightly shut. Still holding on to chapatti pieces! Even these bread pieces looked like a part of the dead bodies. Now, just estimate the tragedy’s exact depth: the parents were carrying food for the nestlings!

His heart was mellowed to the core. To it the tragedy’s terms weren’t separated in bird and human columns. With utmost care he stroked their black feathering. His fingers tried to open the beaks but they were almost inseparable. He then decided to give them a decent burial. While he was taking the dead birds to the alkaline wasteland hundreds of crows hovered above his head. As he was burying the birds his mind flashed back to the winters. He looked around to find something in the white salty crust. A little tragic event of similar nature became alive in his mind:

One shivering winter morning he was strolling over the whitish dust track running across the salty wasteland. Right in middle of the path he saw smallest of a mice he’d ever seen. There was no squeaking mousy maneouvre by the little rodent as his feet halted near it. It was frozen to death. He bent down to inspect if there was any trace of life. Alas, there was none of it! Lying upturned, its tiny nozzle snouting towards the sky seemed to marvel at the schism between life and death. Its four little paws seemed stretching out to blunt the cosmic focus of voidness staring frigidly, fatally from above. Blackish eyes were wide open; still invisibly holding on to the last scene of dark gloomy sky of the night. He turned it over with the help of his little finger. Brown fur didn’t show any mark of harm. ‘Poor little creature! Died of cold during the frosty night!’ his heart gave the tiny corpse its share of mourning. This littlest of life had escaped into the biggest space above. But still it seemed eager for a final earthly connection: a decent burial, lest some crow did the final rights in its own gory manner. He picked it up by its tail and took it near a big tuft of bunchgrass in the secluded recession of the wasteland. Here he dug a hole and gave the last remains a permanent earth-encradling.

Now, filling-up the crow-couple’s grave he was in fact filling up the moral and emotional vacuity inside human hearts for the smaller world.

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There’s always a small world; much, much smaller than the big world of humans. It mightn’t strike our vapourisingly dormant senses. But for the hearts which’re interested in the lesser fortunes of this smaller world it still exudes a celestial illumination.

Firmly wedded to its faithful conscience this small world goes on with its snaily pace: the world of insects and ants going on with the rhythm of constant cosmic struggle; wild and sweet world of animals, cattle and dogs; musically flying world of birds. This’s the world embaled in the larger one; world having homes inside larger homes.

If we try to peep into this smaller world at the end of autumn, when the winter is about to knock at the bigger world’s door, we find a world in drunken stupor. So near to us, yet astronomically miles away from our sleight-of-hand manoeuvres! An Elysian world swarming full of life!

For an eloquent elucidation of the above mentioned smaller emotion, consider the world of ants. During this summer of our tale most of the villagers did complain about unprecedented ant swarms in their houses. The small, silent and snaily world of ants going in a queue; on and on as if the eternity wanted to manifest itself through that endless unspooling of tiny labourers out of the ant-holes.

This barely visible insect is a wonder of ironclad will. If the law of proportionality has any basis for being accepted as a world record, then an ant is the strongest living being on earth. How? Because it can carry a load fifty-six times its own weight! So, go and toss the elephant’s record into a trash. If still want a proof, put a load fifty-six times its own on its back.

O.K.! Let’s give a break to this grotesque hypothesisation and assess the real essence of an ant’s feat. What’s even mightier about it is the will power it conveys on the ground around our unconcernedly trampling feet. So many of them die on the path, but the queue goes on and on (mourn-free!).

Go on; go on O ant on thy mission, for the human feet can’t put thou into submission!

Historically too it has been proved. For, despite coming of age of the modernity’s trumpery and rapacious ruption of human desires, unfaltering ant queues haven’t changed a bit.

Now when the autumn was knocking at the door of winter, the ant world was engaged in a talismanic struggle to fill up its granaries along the long corridors of their mine like holes: ant caves in the ground, in the walls, in roofs and floors. Almost everywhere! During the last week of September bajra (millet) had been harvested. Its little greenish-gray grains were lying in heaps inside the houses, waiting to be filled in sacks after drying. The weight of a bajra grain falls within the range of an ant’s weightlifting feat, so, unmindful of time’s shadow or light, day or night, the ant queues were engaged in grain-gathering spree.

It’s really wonderful how these small, small efforts end up in fistfuls of grains at the base of a wall in a corner and from there an even more treacherous journey of fighting against the gravity along the walls to reach the destination somewhere in a tiny niche in the roof made of wood and stone slabs. What a collective and organised effort! Going slowly, slowly; silently accelerating to a mountain’s might; unmindful and unaware of the brazen losses under harried human feet; the Herculean effort’s harmonious symmetry sagely oblivious to the killings, injuries and writhings in pain due to the distraughtly stranded human feet. Stoically passive about mind-blowing failures like the golden sinews of their soulful endeavour lying scattered around by the cursing broom-swipe of the farmer’s wife: a momentous annihilation of the weeks-long effort. Once beaten, they still make a come back. Queues are formed again. The mission starts; devoid of the senses of victory’s pleasure and failure’s pain. No mourning delay for the valiant martyrs. Deeply interfused with the level most plain of reality; the amphitheatrical base for writing the genuine lines of struggle by the utmost epitomist. Thousands of tales of bravery and epic struggles taking place in the dust around our feet. And we, the masters of a bigger world, go on faltering at each and every footstep without learning anything from the battlefield of hardwork and determination.

Perhaps, a greater common cause is the panacea for all individually suffering dualities like pleasure and pain, success and defeat. It’s so because the whole is beyond the reach of pinching partiality and duality’s extremity. Possibly, the small world of ants is too complete and wholesome to be disturbed and fazed by some turbulence in a part of it.

Another commendable feat in the smaller world is that of potter’s wasp. Labouring over smallest of dust specks it ends up making an earthen house which can embarrass even a human potter. This small freshly calibrated earthen lump proudly sticking to the walls tells the tale of tirelessly forthright effort.

Then there’re awfully cobwebbed death corridors of the spiders. Isn’t it an odd contexture of death? A kind of fishing net in the air. And when the fleas, mosquitoes or for that matter anything under the limit of death’s force in a strand of cobweb gets stranded in it, just look at the highest effort of the smallest creature to get rid of it.

This common sight of a spider killing the entangled insect seems just a trivial manifestation of the inevitable law of nature. We the occupants of a higher world with our higher purpose of life can go over, without feeling any pain or anguish, this constantly unfolding natural, fatal inevitability in the smaller world. Perhaps, we too are just the same for a still greater world with its higher forms of life going after a greater purpose. This higher than us world too must be going with its larger mission and activities taking our world as an insected one.

It’s really wonderful how many smaller worlds bask in their own celestial illumination inside the icily eccentric bigger world––the world of us humans––clattering and clinking with loadfuls of assumed, esteemed significance. These smaller worlds are like Elysian tendrils; their slender shoots winding up the bigger trunk of the host tree, progressing and propagating quite succulently. While the bigger braggish world, growing more and more gibberish, never cares to (or is unable to) cup an ear to the silent majesty of these most harmonic lyrics of peace; its hardened senses unable to catch the cottonwool-soft messages from these little Elysiums. The bouquet of nectar, meanwhile, is whisked away by the inhabitants of these tiny worlds: nectar from the great flower multihued in the colours of primal spectrum; the flower lucently unconscious of its own beauty and perfumatory power.

These worlds like gay abandoned monodists are ever singing encomiums for the eclectic realms of the primal cause. The nectarine world of bees in their hives: sweetness of so many flowers concentrated in little, little racks and still the beauty, sweetness and fragrance of each flower unstinted, undisturbed and unstigmatised! Beautifully fluttering world of the butterflies, which even the most petalous of flowers envy! Love finds heavenly space to live and breathe in those hilarious escapades of butterfly couples among the petals, leaves and grass. The world of birds: the humanity’s flying colours; flying with the message of love, peace and harmony. Below, the man at war with humanity––battlefields covered with decaying corpses and cries of help. Above, the delicate feathered life chirps an angelic message, ‘Live like us! Live like us!’ And the terrible voice from the ferocious world harking back, ‘Gosh, we’re the champions, we’re the winners!’

The human world ever mired in patently unfair and contentious mood never understands (unable to take a clue from these peaceful smaller worlds) how the most Herculean, mountainous and laborious tasks can be accomplished without injuring anyone, without strife, without stepping onto others toes. Doesn’t a weaverbird’s nest hanging harmoniously safe amidst the prickled branches give the same message? A wonderful feat of noninterventionist monumental struggle which goes on with mesmerisingly soft and light percussions and results in a bunch of goodies and total safety for the nestlings: soft and safe against all dark nights, rainy storms and dusty winds. So many sinews sagely snatched from afar and enticed into the edifice of monumental palace of the birdie world. Watching it one might claim to have glimpsed divinity, though not like an enlightened yogi during meditation, but in the form of an appreciating heart musing over this silhouetted sinewy aspect of divinity.

This is what the smaller world is––God’s portrait in His own outlines; in His own myriads of unaccountable aspects. And we the sovereigns of larger outlines have turned ours so grim-looking, fearsome and faceless with the worthless finery of our institutionalised answers to whys and wherefores of His aspects. The more periphrastically we force our certain presumed notions the more our voice (the supposedly pious song) turns a bullish bellow.

The small world of little sparrows; impeccably free and fair! Such a tiny feathery life having such a strong beak raised proudly with a refreshingly can-do attitude! Not shrouded in any extra cacophony it cracks open such hard seeds which even our teeth won’t dare to challenge.

Birds like honeyeaters, sunbirds and hummingbirds reach out with their slender bills to the nature’s little hidden nectar treasuries and sip the cups full of little, little ecstasies. And still the nectar is inexhaustible because these little worlds are contextured on the principle of divine continence.

The fish-eaters like herons, storks, cranes and kingfishers fishing with their long, sharp, dagger like beaks. Big baddies of the small birdie world––the vultures, falcons, eagles, owls––hunting with their talons and hooked bills. Still it doesn’t sound of greedy, gruffy gruels! Insect eaters with their probing beaks––woodpeckers, swifts, swallows, flamingos, bee eaters––picking up tiny insects from leaves and cracks in tree barks. No devious dismanoeuvres here either! The waders wading along muddy water edges on their long legs: the herons, Indian pond herons and scarlet ibis. And no distraught mud strandedness! The expert swimmers––pelicans, mallard ducks, common cormorants, swans, coots––paddling their watery convictions. Don’t they appear too forthright after those wishy-washy dives? Birds of paradise having so vibrant pattern of colours that perplexed, wonderstruck Dutch explorers assumed them to have been fed upon heavenly dew and divine flowers’ nectar.

Then there are still smaller, intermittent aberrations in the considered small world of the ruralites (at least from the point of view of the urbanites). It’s the world of simple, ignorant, rural rustic fellows: illiterate, semi-literate, farmers, wage earners, idlers, unemployed and petty government employees, all struggling in the monotony of the same job, same tensions and same solutions. And when this monotony becomes too cumbersome they’ve only one mode of escapement––getting themselves fully drunk. A wildly footloose journey to a world of artificial ease and phantasmally free horizons from where nagging monotony looks light, hazy and smiles like a lotus in hazy waters.

Most of them, of course, can’t afford the established brands. So they risk adulteration by gulping down bottles and pouches of local made liquor. And those who can’t afford even this take the task of distillation in their own hands to carve out a small peaceful niche skydressed in the colours of calm in a small serene corner inside the big and deadly quiet world of hallucinations. This home-brewed liquor, though, is the cheapest route, yet the life threatening risks involved vanish in the thin air of false castles. It’s a pretty cheap route to enter the long, long corridors of addiction. It just takes tree barks, banana peels, pulpy rotten apples, grapes and jaggery.

If one happens to come across fruit plantations in the fields around the village he’s sure to become an expert brewer after a short chat with the farmer.

In addition to this small back door entry into the world of forgetful peace (or the blockade of senses to incapacitate them from perceiving brawling and boisterously quarrelsome real world jam-packed with worries) there were other entries like opium, hashish, bhang etc.

One’ll surely come across someone smoking opium by the side of his mushroom shed to forget the nightlong drudgery inside. His popping red eyes defying sleep; each deep inhalation taking him to a hugger-mugger world where he finds himself the unconcerned king of the subjects who don’t ask him to bear any responsibility. Time then gently flows without feeling any sophisticated pestering on its back. His tensions which rode so weightfully on his back now turn weightless in this zero gravity atmospherics of some extraneous world.

Taking this ebriated child with itself the rustic mother walks with illuminant insouciance; slowly, slowly creeping up to the huge tree of time like a glowing tendril, so soft, juicy and jovial. Putting forth a beautiful statement with each step: a buffalo or cow calving, the experienced hands veterenising, while the youngsters look on with popping eyes full of fear, suspicion and urgency for this curious happening; such a unique system of things inside the byre, both human and cattle proving the point, ‘Culture is agriculture here!’; an endlessly interesting, gibberish talk among the old, young, employed, unemployed, and people of all castes; water drains almost mud and dung channels in the streets as well as homes; women preparing a bed of straw wisps during the wintry nights so that the new comer which’d arrived a few days ago with placental fluid in its nostrils can sit warmly over it; bellows and brays coming from nowhere and ending nowhere; farmer’s kick at the bull’s ham when it gets slow which results in a sudden jerk accompanied by clattering and clinking of the cart.

And amidst these crude, simple, unsophisticated statements there were enough interjecting grammatical tools which constantly worked like forceps, shears, mouth gags, hammers, chisels, files, rasps, pitchfork and pincers to do, undo, harm, soothe, do good, commit bad to make lemony sour and grape sweet phrases which help our story move ahead.