36
Just Another
Day
It was the sunniest
of dawns. A dazzlingly confident sun rose over the horizon spotlessly clean
without the least trace of mist. The morning had an intriguing mix of
self-mockery and self-assertion. An emotionally persuasive blue sky was
tangibly hung over the cold surface of the present time’s reality where the goodness
is crushed everyday.
There were palpable
undercurrents of the night’s admonitions. The storm had rained down all its
fury upon the face of earth. Its despicable drudgery so wantonly vivid, so
clear! Riot of the dark had been arduously daunting. Without the least trace of
conscientiousness the spring’s pubescence had been nipped in the bud.
Some old mendicant’s
mythically established blessing that the villagers’ crops won’t be destroyed by
rains and hailstorms had been baulkingly breached at last. About hundred years
back the villagers had served a friar so reverentially that in all his
spiritual gumption he blessed a survival security to their crops against any
form of natural calamity. And as history proved it, no amount of natural bouts
of the weather’s fisticuffs could prove him wrong. At last it was the fallen
priest of our tale who brought about the fall of that holy man’s word.
The nightstorm’s
desecration had black-washed the farmer’s labour. Wheat crop stood destroyed at
its spiky prime. Mustard’s yellow, pea’s white and each and every wild flower
under the genesis of infantile spring was holocaustingly butchered down. Nature’s
fury had stingily swaggered and mercilessly kicked at the belly of teemful
springy maiden leading to miscarriage. Storm’s swagger cut down trees and
twigs. Little lilting leaves singing encomiums for the upcoming spring were
nihilistically blown away in the darkness. Life’s roses had been swept away.
Oh, the destructive facet of nature––or the devil’s demonology?––which
promenaded promiscuously in the dark and robbed early spring of its pompous paraphernalia!
Still, the nature
plays itself! Strangely the smothered beauties had a graciously defiant look
for a life lived beautifully. Smilingly they lay there bidding adieu under the
rays of a curiously rising sun dubiously trying to take an exact estimate of
the spring’s loss apportioned to every nook corner. Hope dies never! So many
nests had broken, still the audaciously screaming and chirping birds set out to
look for some opportune twigs and branches where the palings of their sinews
would knot down life once again. And of course there were exhilarated overtures
from the paradigmatically calm face of the thunderous face of afore:
“I did that just
for thy sake, because after a night’s destruction some flowers still bloom for
the sake of beauty, truth and love!”
Alas, this type of
victory of love, beauty and truth is limited just to the nature because it’s so
facile that the two phases––destructive and constructive––are indubitably and
indispensably working for the same cause, the cause of evolution and progress!
On the other hand gubernatorially assaulting and attenuating human blitzkrieg,
equipped with its accoutrements of narrow motives, false pretences, lust,
greed... is so mammothly and irreprehensibly damaging that no destructive face
of nature can match it. But our veily craft is such that even such callous
volcanic eruptions of vileness go unnoticed like just another day! What is
discernable is only the destructive face of nature which stoically bears its
big share of flak from us. It was just the same this morning.
Our loss of
credibility is barely visible, because quite miraculously the infuriating world
inside our hearts appears so innocuous from outside! The outer shell of physicality
very rarely shows the breathlessly snarling storm inside the unholily ruffled bosoms.
However, the divinity, cursing this inner thunderstorm inside we humans, had
taken another rebuking step (first being the taking back of some holy man’s
blessings for the crops’ safety against bad weather) by revoking another holy
man’s blessing that no soldier from the village would die in a battle.
Annulment of both these blessings had been effectuated by the abysmal fall of
the religioner of our tale. And thus the insular village, as far as the crops
and soldiers are concerned, came to the bemoaning threshold of losses. A
spurious initiation indeed! In the span of a day two protective blessings
peremptorily went back to the utmost cosmic store-house of quintessential aphorisms.
Certainly, a creakingly harsh bad omen!
The sun was shining
with a distinct purposiveness as if to portray just another day. However,
shinier it became on this cold wet morning, more clear became the startling
loss. At least corporeally it was visible, because the unseen netherworld of
our inner selves is rarely visible unless under some direct divine ordinance.
Brilliantly the sun cast its rays over the bluish fish carcasses marking death’s
gently cadencing homilies along the pond’s edges. Gentlest of breeze sailed
bewailingly over the bodies of little daughters. Surfeitingly the crows were
playing a feisty game. The winged visitors had left in a shudder. If the things
had been like the day before, they might’ve extended their excursion by a
fortnight due to the unusually low temperatures for this late winter. Now,
without the sheen and splendour of their flapping feathers the pond seemed
soaked of all its spirits. Its waterspread bore a debilitatingly calm look as
if it’d overmourned.
Deleterious odyssey
emanating from the human hand had torn down the old man’s shelter. The cozy
hutment, protectively so smug, was now rioted down to pieces. Its scattered
pieces were still reverberating with sounds of disarraying doomsnight. Abode of
the old man and the old dog built over so many days of labour by the weak hands
(engaged in redefining, revamping and revitalising his trivial existence on
earth, accompanied by countless yelps of patience by the dog sitting along) lay
there scattered to pieces. Brutally smashed up, their humble belongings were
now just garbage without an owner and a protective roof.
At the other end of
the pond, adoring the mound, the temple all washed down by the nightstorm shone
brilliantly with pulsating perception. Its hefty sikhara, the curvilinear top, was standing majestically upright in
the air. Whether the souls of the dead fish were tonking their crying charges
against its walls or not, we don’t know. But the structure symbolising His
presence, unperturbed by any natural or human cataclysm, was proudly shining
for some mysterious truism. Its priest was back to his ritualistic business---of
course after affusing a world of penance; perhaps after a temporarily trivial
fit of remonstration arising out of his coming to realise his incestuous
incendiarism. But that was well past, hurriedly uttered in the morning’s wee
hours as he washed his holy trident of blood. And there he was under the ever
forgiving roof of God to perform the rituals in His name. Scratchmarks on his
face gave him a perpetuating look of painful grimace which he masked by
applying holy paste on his face and uttering pious words with all the humility
of a pious person. As remorseless a priest as he was the day before!
What about the erratically impulsive lechers? When
they got up from the adulterated sleep in the morning, even their berated and
ferociously fearless hearts got a chilly shudder at the site of frail corpse. The
old Muslim’s wide-eyed dead body had acquired a deadly snarling look. It stared
at them as if it was still trying to shoo away the dragonflies from the
eternally sleeping flower. As a sinner’s utmost principle is to leave the site
of crime as early as possible they left the scene, but not before they crawled
up to the sleeping flower and very patiently took turns to kiss her lips so
hard as if to bite them blood red. But there was no sanguine semblance left in
those cosmically shaped doors to her sweet verbosity to provide colour of gore
to the sadist in them. Infinitely disgusted they ran away from the scene like
they’d done so many times in the past. The wastrels thus whisked away to
nowhere to allow some unit of time lapse itself away so that the already blunt
edges of policing---bugged with the general administrative despondency---could
get more rusty; thus further incapacitating it so that it could not pinch their
hardened skins.
Also in this case
it was highly unlikely that the administration would clamour too seriously for
an enquiry, because the sufferers were rightless citizens of Indian democracy.
Moreover, the politician was there to calm down any ruffled feathers in the law
room. Thus the ghoulish augeans (who intermittently thumbed their noses at the
society, ‘We don’t care a fig about you!’) were sure to return with their
criminally sarcastic reproach after a few weeks’ intervention.
The little grassy
plateau, once cogently playful caravan site, was now lying desecrated
peremptorily; beaten by weather as well as the billowing human vile. With
amazing serendipity the sunrays were sallying forth to make them chary of the
paths passing through the settlers’ society. The dispossessed and voiceless subjects
of India
The old musician
gypsy with his loose-limbed grace, the bearer of so many infuriating storms
through his artistic assortment of the whole series of musical notes, appeared
hauled into a quagmire. His wounds bandaged with rags; eyes had a far away look
as if all his intuitive wisdom had been buried in the sand under some cruel mirage.
But then as the gypsy sovereign there were the attendant trappings of gathering
up what was left after the vitriolic interregnum completed its desecrating
allegory. Acuity of the tragedy however was such that despite best of his
efforts his shoulders drooped under the weight of those heart-breaking happenings.
Even their animals
appeared aware of the tragedy. There was an apocryphally acerbic look in their
eyes; fear of the dark night still lingering in them. Throughout the disarrayed
night they’d run helter-skelter in the fields and now faithfully they gathered
in silently suffering concourse to share the masters’ grief and sorrow. Even
the comically confabulating parrot, the survivor, bore an utmost pyrrhonic look
and seemed in a state of mortification for the human vanity.
With a drably
lingering yawn the gypsy fabric had been excruciatingly clefted. The scalpels
and scissors---grippingly menacing murals adoring the sedentary wall---had criminally
cut the flying carpet without the slightest pricking of conscience.
The camel pair sat
on the dejected ground in one corner. Their wide eyes collating the damage, and
as a result of some heart-breaking conjecture they seemed no more inclined to
be the taut, pert and lanky gateway to the gypsy fortress.
If at all there was
some warmth for the tattered caravan, it was in the warmly soothing rays of the
sun which sent its rejuvenatingly bright rays with full compunction.
In one of the carts
was lying their most beautiful flower, the memento of gypsy sheen. With
breathtaking ingenuity the death had turned her beauty into statuesque
immortality: eyes closed; its pleasant ambience so serene; all aglitter with
love, beauty and truth; in eternal sleep; the face fully open to the embrace of
vast fatherly sky. The sun appeared enthralled by her daughterly charm. Perhaps
the old father’s soul still lingered in the air; so proud of this ever-blooming
flower which the goblin could never win over. With its cosmic dissension it was
clamouring down the cataclysmic worldly noise.
Drowned in its
sorrows and tormenting grief the caravan then left the place with the mortal
remains of its deceased constituents; making a mockery of the settlers’ parameters
of justice by not even giving them a chance to even think about their loss.
Broken sinews of their temporary nest lay scattered on the little grassy
upland––the leering emblem of sedentary and stagnated self. The homeless
wanderers left the place lest anyone of the settlers undeservedly got even the
littlest figments of some notion about law and justice arising out of their
loss. The survivors appeared dreadfully suffocated by the tiresomely routine
inhumanity of the villagers. They thus scuttled away to bury their dead
anywhere in the world between the extremities of nether world and heaven except
this village, for who knows the departed souls might hark them back to this
place as did Ramsa’s brother’s body lying buried in the scavenger community’s cemetery.
And the caper (for however beautiful she was, first and foremost she was the
daughter of these homeless wanderers) imbued with the illumining, eternal
colours of peace, love, beauty and truth flew away.
The hooligans at
the fringe of criminality, upon whom the core group of ruffians rode piggyback
to carry out their nastily brutish plan, had finally entered the circle of
wrong with its addicting tart taste. None of them had paid for their sin with
loss of life. Basking in the afterglow of victory, cuts and injuries on their
bodies were pandering the walloping, chauvinistic pyrotechnics of the wrong
self: the disillusioned one singing surfeiting lullabies, pampering them to
look at their wounds with utmost pomp and pride.
By talking about
the politician we shouldn’t make a travesty of our tale. But our readers will
have to bear this inevitable burden. If there is anything on earth which caricatures
or even stands perfectly analogous to the murderous cruelty of eating human
flesh, it is the game of such a politician if not the politics itself. With archetype
political ping-pong and hypocrisy he was casting communal spell on the local
media lost in the lengthy sheets of nescience. For the vestal purposiveness of
running the human society’s affairs he was speaking to help them write an
article of bravery in commemoration of the valiant soldier and the
nationalistic aftermaths:
“It was just
inevitable. Though the administration tried its best to save the lives of those
Muslim banjaras and the watchman, but
people had been too much instigated by that murderous deed of jehadis in Kashmir .
Such things are bound to happen unless and until the minorities in this country
fall in line with the path of loyalty.”
The artful dodger
trumpeting with political pomp and spectacle was sniggering over the fact that
the religionless wanderers too had been at last caught in the politico-religious
net and rechristened as Muslim gypsies.
At the cusp of
patriotic fervour he, the harbinger of national pride, was eagerly awaiting the
next day’s write-ups in the media which’d surely portray in bold headlines how
about a dozen Muslims had been killed by the patriotic mob seeking revenge for
the soldier’s death.
“The number of
deaths in this communal riot would definitely add my constituency’s name in the
list of communally sensitive areas. And they’ll very soon realise my worth,”
his soul was upbraiding those who’d let him down in the past.
The Congressman,
meanwhile, was gleefully anticipating the pseudo-secular propaganda to be
launched by the learned gentry of the country which will definitely turn the
tide of mass-opinion in their favour.
What about the
frail old man, the watchman, the Muslim who was slayed on the day of Eid-ul-Juha? Well, ritually the least of
a follower of Allah, just surviving
on the Islamic frugality of being born to Muslim parents, he proves to be the
most pious of His followers if we don’t commit the mistake of judging one’s
humanism by the number of rituals performed; because till now the rituals have proved
to be poor chisels to carve out His image from the stone of institutionalised
belief systems. The day of his sacrifice for the sake of that odoriferous
flower commemorates the self sacrifice of Prophet Abraham. The old watchman’s
sacrifice on the day of Eid-e-Qurban
(festival of sacrifice) was more pious and holy than any congregational prayer,
religious festivity or any number of animal sacrifices made by the Muslims all
over world on this occasion. His sacrifice born out of absolute sincerity and love
for the religionless girl commemorated this festival of sacrifice more
pompously and in supremely glorious manner than by any Muslim in any part of
the world.
His self-sacrificed
frail old body lay there in the abandoned house perhaps purposively left out by
the time for being his altar. Bania, the sturdy young farmer, returned to the
village by noon . Without
even taking a glass of water he accompanied Ram Singh to the spot. The
devastated teacher appeared spiritlessly entailing the fag end of his
remonstrative spirit against the wrong bursting with unholily unsavoury motives.
Perkily agile young farmer too walked dejectedly for the pitiful fate of his
friend of one night.
In the desolate
courtyard yawning with overgrown thickets and bushes they dug up the
sacrificers’ graves and buried the master and his pet side by side. And there
was lain the Muslim, more Muslim in the eyes of Allah than any preaching
mullah in any theocratic corner of the world. In a remote and sleepy corner
of the world, surrounded by the countryside, in a grave in the solitary
courtyard of an abandoned big house, lay the truest of a Muslim.
After performing
the last rites, the teacher with a bandage around his broken head and a stitch on
his bloodied lip, skeptically walked back to the village. Righteously impulsive
spring had gone from his gait. Abject indignity loomed cumbersomely over his
injured head. He walked inanely as if he’d buried his audaciously harking and
protesting spirit along with the sacrificers. Gone was that everlasting
scuttling with its infinite eagerness to rise up against the bad for the cause
of good. The heir to the great Bengali’s legacy had finally fallen off the
parapet while religiously remonstrating against the evil’s nepotism. Perhaps
the canny wizard of malapropism with its parallel anomalies in many avatars––social, political, economic,
religious and cultural––is too harsh and noisy in the present times to pay any
heed to the feeble voices of sanity!
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