Caravans Surely Halt (Even if for Briefest Moments); and during those Moments Stories Move

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         Caravans Surely Halt (Even if for Briefest Moments);

                  and during those Moments Stories Move

The sunshine blossomed fully that day.

All charged up by the mendicant’s comic canard the fishermen were supplely engaged in their work. Left out to heal his self-inflicted wounds, lying in his hut, the monk’s superciliously elfin angst shot blind arrows in four directions targeting all and sundry for their irreligious culpability in the crime against his holy self. A monumentally meek Bhagte had departed for his home after doing at least one hour service at his guru’s place. It was such an obfuscatingly long drawn out hour, its every second hammered out so tortuously, as the mendicant’s tongue lashed the servile disciple’s back already buckled under the load of impregnable indigence.

There on the flat grassy elevation, the caravan spread out under the palliative sun-spray came to life. Succulent dollops of gypsy life unshackled the tethering frigidity forced upon them by a chilly night. The caravan wasn’t of a particular nomadic type. Many nomadic sinews were interspersed to make it a closely knit gypsy net. Five or six carts of the iron-smith nomads were standing with the dignity of little shelters; their yokes nosing down into the ground as if arrogantly insisting for some rest. Punctilious carpentery made them look aesthetically appeasing works of art and craft.

Ponies, sheep, goats, monkeys, quails and dogs seemed resting pawns on a chess-board left in the middle of a game (an endlessly peripatetic gypsy game in fact), waiting for the resumption of the moves once again; each move heavily pregnant with innumerable possibilities. So, procrastinately they stood, the ever rumbling pawns, mustering up as much rest as possible before the inevitable kickstart and the resultant sudden spurt in the game.

The enticing aroma of some enigmatic gypsy charm inculcated in their wander-lust spirit (either high or low on culture?) through centuries old sloshing around was strangely visible on this sunny winter day in a strange, mazely-reflective way.

Swankily a monkey was riding a goat. Even the provoking apish hubble-bubble on the animal’s back couldn’t break its long-said meekness and it just kept its face brooding over a pointless conjecture. A quail was invectively wailing in its cage. It sounded as some peregrinatory psalm consummately eulogising some sylvan Goddess lost in meditative trance at a place whose solitudional virginity is yet to be conquered by any gypsy foot. As if reined-in by a peculiarly dame fortune, horses and mules stood pensively; not interested in grazing the weather-beaten grass of the squarish elevation. Some small calves, probably purchased a few days ago from the village where the caravan had stopped, were enjoying their momentous state of being; completely free from any pleasant (and thus heart-wrenching) memory from the immediate past––for example, how happily they suckled the teats of their mothers!––as well as unaware of the burdensome future to be pulled and pushed by reined muzzles. Children were running helter-skelter pursuing their exhilarating stake in the universal spirit of childhood. Under the lenitive lucency of a sunny noon women were chit-chatting on strange topics, because here they hadn’t those envious neighbours to whom they could dedicate their talkativeness. Callow hammering by a boy on the anvil; the sweaty jewels on his brow glinted for a crystal-gazing into his iron-willed future; facial chasms with each strike portraying his future as a hardworking iron-smith banjara. Unrhythmic music of his drudgery on the iron block was being applaudingly praised by the melodious Hindi film songs playing on the radio nearby. Most of the menfolk had gone to the village: some to beg; some to perform little street circuses with their bear, monkeys and snakes; some to sell magically healing herbs, beads and stones which the villagers believe to fall in their hands at some strange places; some to sell spicy special things from distant lands; and of course some were roaming the streets uncannily claiming to have their toe in the paranormally invisible world.

Writhing under the pain of heavy truncheons striking at the puzzled matrix of futile elements (each and every one of them turned to a purple futility due to the unsurviveable concoction of religion, soul, spirit and above all humanely common, uncommon worldly desires of the physical self) the religioner lay revulsing in his hut. He felt helplessly emasculated from both worlds––this one and the spiritual one. Suddenly, with the severity of an heart attack a snaring hook nailed the flesh of his heart, and the golden chenille having the painful hook at one of its ends pulled his suffering self, with the enticing aroma of a feminine force, to the happenings of last night. Dolorously dragging his memories along its velvety lucency the cord left him like a baited prey before the lubriciously enigmatic beauty of some irreligiously sensuous sculpture.

“Bewitching bitch!” he cried. “Historical hindrance to asceticism! Enticing the sages, like that evil nymph Menaka from the heavens who disturbed and nullified Sage Visvamitra’s several decades of penance,” an inexplicable supernova of hate burst inside him.

Agitated phalanxes of his aggrieved religiosity called for the blood of that sacrilegious soul for the sanctity of his religious altar. With a pathological grunt he mustered up the shattered pieces of his bereaving reputation and straightway headed for the caravan site.

Perversive tumescence of the stranger (both his physical appearance as well as the ebullient thoughts inside it) was easily sniffed out by the hounds who reproached him back with their garrulous barks. They were controlled by an old man having a long beard. The old gypsy was wearing a worn-out red headgear. Without respect and repulse he invited the Sadhu to sit with him. His mischievously old eyes rolled in a very strange and indefinable way, giving just this much inkling that too many sweet-sour tastes of a nomadic life had taught him to––in order to avoid any unnecessary hassles with the settlers––meet each and everyone from the sedentary culture with, if not an inviting accost and genteel words forthrightly, at least a mild neutrality which with its objective brace won’t touch any subjective pulse readying to be instigated inside the newcomer’s mind.

A one eyed, having pronounced lips and some tufts of hair on his receding chin, man was unraveling the cryptic future hidden beneath the prognosticating lines mapped on the palms. He was wearing a tattered, coarse woolen shirt under a felt shawl. Some children from the village had gathered around him. With rib-tickling excitement they were forwarding their hands to this comically gazing dirty gypsy. It hurt the Sadhu because these disrespecting brats never came to him even though he was available there all day and night. He exhorted the young boys to go back home, to which the one eyed man, with a wink from his only eye, irritatedly responded by challenging the game spoiler.

“I can lay bare your past, present and future. Just let me hold that hairy hand of yours!” angry gypsy threw a hot-potato at the monk.

The monk laughed it away making it appear that he didn’t believe a fig of it, though in the secrecy of his heart he feared the monumental prowess of this filthy looking gypsy. He, thus, just started parroting his forte of magical powers with such fee-fawing gesticulatory words so that nobody would come forward with a request to see any of these fearsome tricksteries.

“I can drive out meanest of evil spirits haunting most innocent looking girls and women!” this proclamation of his had an odd force.

Egoistically driven by this paranormally maniacal thrust, his grunt was clearly audible to the group of giggling gypsy girls returning from the village. It sounded as a sudden suffocative swipe to one of them.

Rolling his reddening eyes around, to find the nymphetic foe to his religiosity, the Sadhu belched amidst fisticuffing chasms, “Bad souls attack mostly such girls!” involuntarily his finger swerved in air and stopped sagitally in the direction of just arrived group.

As if to leave one of them as the object of pointing by the revilist finger, all of them (under the impulse of some sudden push with its dirty designs) dismembered themselves from the group, leaving dead-struck Phulva standing stonily, as if the hateful exorcist had accursed her to apetalous inanimation.

“The bad man, the bad man, the bad man...” the starlet seemed caught in a swirling cosmogenic storm whose cosmic chasms furiously blew the stardust around her.

The religioner’s whole being was thunderstruck by an unworldly schismatic convulsion. Even in the night’s blanketing swathes the scintilla had seemed so provocatively dangerous to the stony walls of his religious fortress which’d gone filthily mossy and indecorous after almost four decades of stony encirclement around his worldly soul striking constantly from inside. But, for outsiders at least these were impregnably imposing ascetic walls built with the decades-long blood and toil of mendicancy. Worldliness imprisoned inside shrieked furiously. It put full blame on the beauteous little spark which had reflected on the wrong facets of those ghostly lingering walls. Shaken by the fear of the imminent fall of those stony walls, the prisoner heinously accursed that flowery source of the irreligiously provoking raylets.

Unable to bear his blood-thirsty gaze, she ran away and vanished inside the old woman’s little shelter.

“When you people wander with such young girls through all sorts of places, at all sorts of times who can save them from being haunted by evil spirits!” he gnashed a mutter, his bulging red eyes following her punishingly budding, irreligious figure.

To this a sturdy nomad with vacant slapped an unbelieving ‘no’ in his face.

The exorcist eyeing the naysayer’s raggish baggy pants croaked angrily, “You’re just a foolish homeless wanderer. How can you understand all this? You people are blind even though the God has the mercy to give you eyes. For, why should you go on rambling from place to place seeing and coming across same things, and still believing that it was perhaps something different? We, the God’s people, who’ve tortured our eyes in the nastily penancing smoke of our fireplaces, can see such black souls hiding behind a flowery face. And such possessing souls after coming face to face with us always run for cover. See, see how she’s run away!” boiling malcontents in the cauldron let out nefariously hallucinating vapours, which got him almost choked as he pointed in that direction.

The exorcist’s theatrics left those around him in a strange puzzle.

A goggle-eyed, clown-faced fellow (his fashion philosophy all greasy and holed) stabbed into the fearsome eeriness invectively hanging in the air like a spell around them. “Aaahaa... as if you can see through the air! Inside a body!” his sardonic boorishness tried to dispel the paranormal ill-smell sprayed by the exorcist through his sharply pungent hotch-potch exclamation. “And if by your words there exists any such thing then yours is the body and appearance fit for the dwelling of such a thing… a filthy lame dungeon for the ghosts!” he cracked a laughter.

Very precisely the clown-faced gypsy hit a counter to the religioner’s sorcery-laden oracle, because the talk of paranormal can’t be won over by a decent debate using only normal linguistic words, rather it can only be laughed away in a single, mimicking swipe.

“You... “ the ritualist stopped the obscenity striking against his lips, as well as the excited muscles of his crutch-bearing hand ready to strike the wood at the non-believer’s head. “All of you people have been befooled by this dark crystal of evil and doom hidden beneath the shiny oyster-shell! You’ll realise this only when unaccountable misfortunes will come sliding down on you!”

Canonised morals choked in the suffocating, smouldering smoke of an abnormal rancour and hatred. Every ounce of his revengeful sorcerer-self bayed for the poisonously possessed juice of that ripening gypsy fruit. Agitated witchcrafty storm in his soul wished he could have that girl as  helplessly victimised and tied down with a hung head before him so that the tormenting beast in him could pacify its mysterious lecherousness by playing the ritual of dispelling evil spirits from her; by disheveling her hair beyond combing; by making her so afraid with  those black-magic theatrics so that the emerging springs on her cheeks shudder away to infinite distances; by playing footsie with some mean instinct of squeezing the very life out of that helplessly delicate body of hers.

Charm-busting buffoonery of the clowny gypsy once again shattered the superstitious glass house which the sorcerer had erected around the group through his mysteriously hotch-potch gesticulations. If philosophy and science took centuries to unshackle the superstitious myths from their predominating hold on the humanity’s mind, then taunting farce can accomplish the very same in a single stroke.

Before the exorcist could try again to reclaim his lost position, his eyes fell upon new additions to the gathering around him. These were gypsy men with unculturally ruffian appearances who’d just returned from the village. Some were gauche, but heavily built; some were fidgetily thin and tall looking repulsive in their long, unkempt hair; rest of them were a motley mixture between the two former types, who clad in their all sorts of vestures (picked from as many places as the caravan stopped) seemed pathetically pettifogging.

The very first look on their uncivilizedly brooding visages encircling around him convinced the outsider that if the girl were to tell them the night’s happenings they’d just pounce upon him and compete with each other to get maximum hits to their credit. And then they would vanish from the place as if there had been no gypsies at all at this place for as long as any mind around can recall. So his perversive enthusiasm came plummeting down like a crashing meteorite.

But, the nightingale-like sweet girl was a lover of peace and order. It was not her nature to create a ruckus about such incidences. She was, thus, not seen out of the old woman’s hideout.

The Sadhu realised that these persons, who dig so many wells at different places each and every time they come to a halt, couldn’t be made to stick around his version of things. Settled villagers were best suitable for that. So, with a groveling look at the old woman’s little tent he started out from the place. While walking away he spotted some little donkey calves. One of them hooted a laughing bray which fell haemorrhagingly heavy on his skull, and he grunted an oath that the intruder of the night was the same one. Recalling this, his lurching gait brought back the ache in his full leg which the fall had resulted in. Once again he looked in the direction where the girl had vanished from his vision. His revengefully cataclysmic urge to drive the spirit from her touched a new height.

“You evil spirit! You got me down by that wormy Mussalman! I’d make a ghost of that man and leave him to haunt the evil spirit possessing you!”

Alas, it was an impotent rage, for the pacification of which he didn’t come across any means or machination. So, like all genuine revenge-seekers he decided to bide his time, waiting for the happenings to occur favourably for laying his deadly snares. Judging by the preoccupation of his mind it could well be averred that the schismatic chink in his religiosity had suddenly broadened to double its former size. A dangerous thing, indeed!

                                              *  *  *  *

These disenfranchised, stateless and assetless subjects of Indian democracy, who open their eyes at so many different places on so many mornings, had carried their peripatetic spirit to the village for a temporary rest. Their culture, though unostentatiously unornamented, with a palpable assertiveness made its newly arrived presence felt in the village.

Even the eldest of them (the one having fabulous culinary skills) with her avowed aim of sticking to life infinitesimally took her blackish wrinkled self to the village to earn (mostly in beggings) the survival morsels for herself and the goat. Weirdly clad in a long kirtle (or call it a great-skirt) whose folds counted as many numbers as the wrinkles on her body, and the upper garment in the form of a Rajasthani kurti whose breast part was in the shape of a prominent bodice having two conical projections (which in her case drooped emptily, while other young women’s buxom breasts filled those spaces to conical hillocks) she roamed in the village streets; her snaily steps showing no worrying hassles, because she knew that the caravan would be waiting for her at its previous place, as Phulva was there.

In both her bony hands she wore yellowish rings (were they made of bones?) whose radii---changing their nouns from the bracelets to armlets---went on increasing upwards according to the once feminine tapering of her young arms. But now they were so loose that they jingled charmlessly around her hands. In fact, to keep those poor pieces of gypsy fashion from slipping down (and consequently being lost at some place without even her coming to know about it) she’d tied pieces of clothes on both her wrists. Ever-ornamented gypsy will in her frail body was trying its best to keep these priceless ornaments of her youth. She was still clinging to her other cheap jewellery as well. After all a feeling of being ornamented is no slave to costly cut, carat, colour and clarity of a diamond only. Those trinkets like bracelets, anklets, earrings and nose stud made of a very cheap metal (or alloy?) still glowed with weirdly baroque designs which in their unsophisticated artistry told the timeless tale of their nomadic culture. In her gypsy ornamentation she seemed like an insipid sculpture of ancient times which once had been chiseled down in full creative rutilancy.

Moss-green tattoos, in the middle of forehead to serve as a sort of bindi, upon the chin, on the sides of eyes, on the back of palms still gave an inkling of their existence through their faded galore. Assiduous survival of these marks on her skin made her a valiantly surviving specimen of archaeology: a rich fragment of the past derived from the great cultural history of the land they came from, i.e. Rajasthan.

Very, very surprisingly her supplely elfin fingers could still work on thin iron sheets to make mugs, little buckets, basins, winnowing pans and other rudimentary things. It’s however another matter that she’d to wait for others to strike hammer or cut the iron. So, wittily she was still maintaining the life of her work by doing just ten percent of the work which went behind preparing a single piece, and most of that too was limited to saleswomanship. For each and every item of hers she bargained parably with slowness, calmness and serenity spiced with jocular musings in between (perhaps, to draw out the customer from the attics of seriousness) which’d result in flour, jaggery, dung cakes and some other bucolic provisions falling in her favour into her bale.

Impressed with the old woman’s entertaining and amusing bargaining, a young girl of the village developed a soft corner for this granny from far off places. She gave her something to eat, and while the hollow cheeks were gratuitously drooling over the taste of this delicious delicacy born of a culinary skill which had slowly, slowly piled over those raw chewings of the uncivilized times to reach the present tasty state (as the settlers churned out different ingredients while sitting on a fixed desire to devise different tastes at a single place), the ruthful girl came out of her house with a russety female overcoat and dropped it over the gypsy’s frail shoulder. Smile on that old face of hers told that a dispiritedly tired whiff of gypsy breeze had come across a refreshingly pleasant, gemmy flower in an addressed orchard.

But, everybody knows that they don’t become too possessive about a place, a thing or a person and undisputatiously walk on their path without falling prey to the settled inveiglement shining signpostly on both sides of the path. Yet, such transient humanistic relationships still bloom out like an oasis during their stopovers. In a way, isn’t it a miniaturised representation of our existence on earth? Beautifully humanistic relationship which just comes out itself, during these little moments of their first (and most probably last) meeting is in harmonical comparison to our beautiful relationship with the whole creation during our ‘life-sojourn’ on earth.

The gypsies know the certainty of moving from here to there; we must, thus, accept it that they might be the persons who’re best prepared to accept and handle the final departure from the life’s caravan itself. Like wild breeze they move from place to place facing circumstances sometimes stagy and sometimes staid, and in the meantime silently the death plucks, without any hassle, a life or two. Such had been the case with the old woman’s husband who had died a few decades ago.

After finishing her eating the old woman tried the offered garment which in a moment was seen hanging loose around her frail figure, as the village women gathered around and laughed at her full-of-life manoeuvres. One of them, thinking that the gift and food might’ve mollified the old seller’s die-hard bargaining spirit, insisted on bringing down the price of a little tin vessel. But it was firmly declined by the invigorated gypsy. Irritated village woman asked if she feared a beating from her husband for selling the thing at a low price.

The old woman responded with sagely calmness: “If cravings and desires don’t die even after death, then surely he’ll! But only in my dream, because the poor fellow died a long, long time back!”

The night of that day was a full-moon one. The moon was seen almost fourteen percent larger than its normal size, thanks to the unusual proximity among the celestial bodies playing role in its waxing and waning. The rarity of this event had broken the record of 133 years when the moon had been seen as such. It looked as if the moon through its enlarged inveiglement wanted to have a full view of the gypsy girl’s beauty, which had already started hush-hush murmurs in the hearts of village youths.

The old woman was warming her frail limbs near a little bonfire by her tiny shelter. Gelsemium Phulva was milking the obstinate goat of the woman. It look a long time for her slender fingers to milk out as much fluid as would be sufficient for the woman’s tea. The droll squeezes at the animal’s teats could let out only a few drops in every pull. The goat seemed to enjoy the girl’s fingerwork on its udder.

Finally, the girl got up with the tumbler, only half-filled with the tenuous liquid.

“Oof, that was a tough job, deeji!” she complained of the nearly infructuous job. “See, just this one after all that pain in my fingers,” she slanted the tumbler near the glow to show the output to the goat’s owner.

“Ahuummn! Demons take this cunning goat of mine!” the woman threw a dung cake piece in the goat’s direction, “When one is old, even the dimwit animals start playing chicanery with him. All that I earn, whole of it, except a few mouthfuls for me, goes into that swelling belly of hers. I’m sure this cheat goat deliberately keeps milk in its udder so that it can add to the fat bulging over it. If it remains so I’ll sell it to a butcher!” the woman’s grouse heard serious.

“No, no deeji! Please don’t even say that. Animals never do it intentionally. Whatever she gives us back is perhaps more useful than what we give her,” Phulva sounded a veritable metaphor of kindness. “She isn’t getting fat on your things, instead––I think––she’s going to become a mother,” a sweet repentance about why she complained in the first place became audible in her voice.

“You’re growing as clever as you’re nice,” the woman said. “Let’s prepare tea or I will freeze to death.”

A few sips of the hot fluid tranquilized the old gypsy’s freakishness, “It’s not that all of them in the village are bad,” her eyes glowed affectionately, maternally caressing the shining gypsy tiara warming her slenderously long fingers on the fire. “Today, I met someone like you... not as beautiful as you,” to the old woman Phulva was the undisputed queen of beauty in the world, “but still very, very beautiful, and what’s more important she had a beautiful heart,” quite contrary to their gypsy forgetfulness of all the nongypsy faces and things, the face of that kind village girl came alive to her old and feeble imagery.

Beneficence is perhaps scenically draped in the diligent traditions and history of a particular gene pool in a family. Otherwise why’d the sister of a brawny, muscular (with sonorous strains of decency and good nature interwoven in equal proportion along those powerful tissues) young farmer, nick-named Bania, be equally sweet and kind as the beauty of her face? Yes, got it right! The girl whose face the old gypsy could still recall, was the younger sister of that sturdy, strong farmer Bania, whom the watchman had talked to on that Diwali day.

Tied to a spikelet dug into the ground, the goat’s looping mockery once again sounded sloganeering a taunt. At any other time this mysterious phrase of the animal would’ve ended with a cursing clause by her owner. But now, very oddly it didn’t. Ditto for the reminiscences of  a good natured person’s good deeds, that even our very reflections––in their ever habituated, clichéd tendency towards fluid disillusions––too respond in a decent manner as if inspired and instigated by that good persona.

Very similarly the old woman addressed the goat, “Oh, don’t you take it on your heart Manika! It’s my fault when I curse you like that, not yours. In old age we human beings loose our faculty of seeing and feeling good and beautiful. I know, if you’d your wish fulfilled you’d like to have rivers of milk flowing for me, making me richest in all deras of the world,” bending backwards, she stretched her hand and fondled the goat’s head with her fingers.

The animal too raised its head and closed those darkish, dull eyes of hers, signaling she also felt that way.

Flickering glow of the bonfire lifefully played its existential self over the supercelestially vibrant canvas of the girl. A smile came over her face with the intensity of a time-worn myth coming true.

“Deeji, you’re lucky that you met someone whom you still praise,” there were traces of lavenderous dejection in her sweet girlish tone, “otherwise, who cares for the homeless wanderers like us. What I see in the streets is just the people’s wrong eye, as if they would eat me. Especially those roaming loafers...” her petalous complaint came to a sudden halt.

“Yes, yes Phulva come out with it. Has anyone mistreated you?” the woman felt some serious impinges on her caring emotions.

“Oh, it’s nothing deeji,” the girl waved an allaying hand over the fire. “Wherever we go it’s just the same. And we’re here just for a few days. So, why to worry about the goodness or badness of these people? If they cast a wrong eye on others, then it’s the misfortune of their own eyes, not mine,” it exemplified the springy amplification of beautiful, understanding and knowing thoughts inside the salubrious climes of her panegyrical spirit.

Hugely impressed, the old woman chuckled. “Your head is growing as beautiful as your face,” she rummaged her bony fingers in those mazefully entwined locks of the girl.

                                               *  *  *  *

Ever escaping out of the wintry corset, the fog seemed––pandered by the gaunt and ineptitudional dimness––to practise prometheasnism. Past experiences led people to wish for rains as a panacea against these hazy atmospherics. But as they say, nature is one while the human wishes and desires are multitudinously variegated. This wish of the villagers (who had secure homes to come aseeing the deeds of a winter night rainfall only in the morning) would’ve sent chill through many a gypsy bones.

Undifferentiating nature, thus, sprinkled some freezy cold showers during the night, which fell almost perilously upon the gypsy tents and their animals standing in the open. The spray was, meanwhile, grossly insufficient for the wheat crop. So, much disappointed farmers aspired for more rains. Due to this little rain the battle between fog and sun became interestingly protracted. In their outfoxing attitude both seemed heaping scorn against each other. Then a sunny afternoon swept by a strong eastern wind filled the farming hearts with a wish for pleasantly frosty night, which’d be boonful for the emerging spikes on the wheatlings, because the formation of seed requires a very low temperature (but won’t that be disastrous for the peas at the same time?!). Also, the very same estimation, churning out the possibility in a painful suspension inside an old gypsy’s head, would force him to prostrate before heavens to stop the calamity and bestow mercy to his feeble eyesight which won’t be able to bear the spectacle of those shining white frosty icicles accumulated over the dry paddy stalks, as he kicked the frozen animals to bring them out of icy hibernation.

Such was the nature’s game, sealing different fates in different compartments!

Baroquely charming beauty, however, isn’t bound by such cross-cultural (or even natural) differentials. As is well said, a rose by any other name would smell and appear just as sweet. Enigmatic beauty of some sensuous sculpture bravely defies the dynamics of changing time’s haste and waste. Similarly, daughterly charm of a budding Phulva arrived as a refreshingly fresh gust of springy air wherever her gypsily nimble steps carried her. She became talk of the village: sadly caught in the perilous centre of this attraction, while the carnalic male eyes of the villagers left their voluptuous tongues lapping lasciviously, as they said all sadistically settled and static things about her half-blossomed figure.

Such was the attractiveness of this poorly priceless gypsy jewel that the village girls started feeling jealous of her. So, if a village girl’s lover sneaked a view of this esteemed flower from some mystically fragrant orchard, her bosom swelled with anguish, disappointment and self pity. Ethereal sheen of this flowering bud was too much and too grand to be hidden by the wild and windfallen gypsy overgrowth around her. Not to bare the linguistic failure to describe her beauty, we can say that she’d the seasonless beauty of the paradisiacal flower.

When she walked through the streets––which she had to do several times in a day, either with someone selling small provisions, or as the most important part of small street circus––she seemed to carry the illimitably beauteous message of innocence and goodness. As the anchoring voice in those little funny games, looking imposingly charming in those weather-worn gypsy apparels of hers, she seemed the ethereal emissary of splendorous and bounteous goodwill. Her slender fingers, which moved while speaking, gave the impression of controlling and directing (like in puppetry) those angelic expressions blossoming like myriad flowers in the orchard of her face. So, while she at the helm of the show, the lilting legacies and sonorous strains of inexplicably wandering gypsy folkscape bared their complicity with secrecy and came out in the form of entertainment, frolicity and fun; having as their crux the same fundamentals of humanity, which lie beneath the veneer of religion, culture, state and nation-state boundaries, and all other men-made compartmentalising differentials.

Her petalously suave nicety was sculptorously sophisticated in complete contrast to the diasporically haggard and roughened edges around their culturescape. It made her look like a culturally chiseled, polished and enameled priceless artifact in the trashy treasure-trove of these assetless, homeless roamers. And the gypsies knew it. So, in order to increase the value of their poorly trivial provisions, there was almost a competitive scramble among them to take her along while going to the village on a hopelessly penny-paying vendoring and hawking of their fastly outdating things. Enthusedly charmed by her golden presence the village males would chide their obstinately bargaining indecent wives. The desirous male in them hadn’t the heart to see that little paradisiacal flower being stormed down by the ruff and gruff of their ill-speaking females.

There were many in the village who’d just ogle at her like busting predators. She was but no little sparrow perennially afraid of being preyed upon. The beautiful feminine pride opening its bud inside her was sprouting forth its natural accomplice, that is, its stingy sheen. So, whenever someone unable to control himself trespassed the confines of her beautifully spreading out sphere of tolerability, she’d come out with a befitting reply along with that cursing little jerk of her lower ruddy lip, which essayed the epitome of feminine reproach (provided the onlooker had at least the elementary inkling of the behavioural language).

But still, where to hide that beauty? Even those repulsive rebukes (with the help of which she tried to seem as shrill and harsh as possible), and sometimes even the obscenities galored as charming, likeable foibles to almost all the villagers. Her love (or even hate) they could never hope to get because she was a flowing flower, while those statically bumming, buzzing black bees could hope to taste and smell the nectar only from the static ones. So, naughtily they flirted with their colourful wings, like hypnotized humbugs, around this mobile flower trying to take prima facie cognizance of the feminine facts explicitly evincing their celestial charm. Her furtively ignoring glances and frowning brow still soothed their ruffled souls like the cold rays of a coquettish full moon of spring. These were but desperately limited efforts of the mortals to pay an obeisance in her beauty’s sanctum-sanctorum, because it was only the sun which could swathe her whole existence in the warmth of its raylets; it was only the breeze that could completely feel the fragrance of her body; it was only the earth which knew how much of physical mass was attached to that feathery beautiful spirit which weightlessly wandered from place to place, and it was only the sky which could sacrificially pour its wholeness on her path. Not to say much, she was nature’s daughter. Hence the fullness of her charms could be enjoyed by it only.