The Caravan Arrives

14

                                   The Caravan Arrives

For the last ten days, lightly dark and fully dank fog had been layering over the village from dawn to dusk. Sunless, the countryside activities got freezed to a trickle. The landscape seemed to be on the coldly black side of destiny. The village, two huts, banyan, pond, grassy plateau and the adjoining alkaline wasteland modestly faded their shivering existence into the voluminous sprawl of fog, frost, dew and cold breeze. All pervading green paint of wheatlings submissively saluted the winter with their bent heads under the force of dew drops.

Under the subtle blend of a dense foggy medium, the sound traveled somewhat fastly. So the road sounded nearer than its actual distance to anyone hearing the noise of slowly moving vehicles on it. To the watchman cramming chorus of the children in the school seemed to come from the pond itself. And the customary abuses hurled at the buffaloes by the villagers from the roadside baulked so nearby as if these had been heaped upon the faultless poor watchman, or still in rarest of a case even upon his neighbour. Such was the winter in which a shivering January was wooing inside a blanket.

Cramming chorus of the school children armed with childhood warmth sent a fiery dart across the pond giving some strength to the watchman almost sitting over the bonfire. Draped in cumbersome big wooly blanket, bonfires were the next requirement for the old man-–next to his breathing–-during the winters; so, numerous little ash-heaps could be seen all around the pond. In their conversationalist clairvoyance the letters, syllables and numerals penetrated the hydra-headed time’s veil separating him from his childhood, and a constellation of dreamy echoes reached his ears from some moment inside the mosque. Lost in them he’d talk into the friendly glow of his winter companion while breaking small prickled branches for its survival.

A shrill, high pitched and monotonously strong tone of a spray-machine seemed to fling the gauntlet in opposition to the flagrant weather. Some farmer was spraying his wheat crop with insecticides and pesticides.

“Agriculture requires too much of poisoning these days,” engagingly he thought, “Thank God, we don’t have to do the same in pisciculture! Otherwise, I’d have fainted of those fumes,” his nostrils gave a twitch. “But, what if someone poisons the pond?” he stood up fully warmed up, while each and every pore of his old skin loosened up under the warmth of a protecting resolution.

There in the foggy gloom, the storks in the shallow southern fringe of the pond were stoically and serenely waiting for the fish to get entangled in their strong bills dipped open inside the water. Isn’t their fish-mongering mysticism in complete contrast to that of the kingfisher which jumps down (or drops down) upon its prey.

The dense covering of fog had made the task of predators easy manifold. Poor visibility and biting cold had certainly dimmed the watchman’s enchanting peerlessness. So, burdened under the calculated apprehension of such thoughts as well as the physical weight of the blanket, he came across a funster group of sparrows playing a birdie game in a small puddle of water in the alkaline wasteland. Their feathering was all drenched up. It sent down a shiver across his frail figure hiding beneath the clothing.

“They are stronger than me!” his silent thoughts fell into a comparative mode which in turn drifted into a calculation of days since he bathed for the last time this winter.

As far as his neighbour is concerned, he seemed of elephant proportions in that moss green military blanket heartlessly exiled by Bhagat Ram from his trunk. Shrouded in the glum and censorious times of the winter his present religious innings had taken on a shivery-snaily note with the tentative steps of an ever-so-impressive sorcery; because it is the most important religious tool with a newly arrived mendicant, who is interested in carving a clouty niche in the worldly walls he has willingly and happily allowed himself to be enclosed in. Sorcery with its sharp penetrating hypnotical power certainly has the capacity to affect some holes in those thick walls through which disillusioned eyes see an illusionary beam of light.

Bhagte’s religious-self which had been so easily caged in the hotch-potch obi, servilely sauntered inside the barbed fences to facilitate each and every need of his spiritual mentor. His spotlessly clean faith could have never questioned the ways and means of the exorcising godhead. So, very blandly he was acting as a conduit between the monk and the small bevy of paranormally itching solace seekers. It gave him a feeling of being an important player in the holy scheme of the God on earth. His seasonless faith always found him consensually at the forefront of the gate between the sufferers and the healer, like this chilly night when he escorted out three God or evil fearing persons from neighbouring village with their remedies for the unseen twists and turns behind their betraying and languid fates.

“Don’t forget to sprinkle the ash all over the house with that owl bone!” tenaciously the monk reminded the persons plagued by misfortune, as they descended down the elevation bearing his hut.

In reverential spontaneity they affirmed in childlike obedience.

By this time of the year inundated part of the embankment had decreased to remain as a moat separating the mound from rest of the walkable embankment. So, instead of taking the circuitous route across the fields, the devotee and the guru now used the boat to cross the watery trench. This facility had come as a blessing to the lame monk and hugely eased the tough task of his nocturnal gameship with the paranormal.

Very cautiously Bhagte paddled the small boat heavily loaded with four of them. Standing under the banyan his religious mentor felt great satisfaction for the fact that at last his religious reputation had caught on some rusty, rickety wheels here in this countryside as the word ‘Fatehpur’ buzzed in his ears like a compendium of all the wriggling ecstasies of his heart.

“Where have’u come from?” That had been the sage-savant’s first query as they sneaked into his hut, just when a cold evening was handing over the baton to a chilly night; their faces sulking as if painful pustules had been accursed all over their bodies by an animus genie.

“We’re from Fatehpur. Maharaj, please save us!” they had almost wept as they touched the paranormal physicist’s blessed feet. It seemed as if a tenebrose fate had howdily bludgeoned them, griming their lives with loss, disease, domestic quarrels and many other jarring, drab and dry consequences, which most often force the sufferers to believe in their supernatural causes.

Now, under the mistily indolent glow of a fogged down moon he saw their figures coweringly walking over the embankment. Then the ever-trustful face of Bhagte leavened his master’s senses.

“He is a nice and firm believer in God, or rather me,” he thought, with some sarcasm, about the faithful simpleton (simple to the extent of seeming crappy and cranky). “If not for him, I’d have died of hunger here among these irreligious, ignorant fools. He’s even more supportive than this crutch.”

He rolled his fingers over the supportive souvenir of Sadhguru Parmanand. For decades, without enjoying any restful hiatus, the wood had uncomplainingly bore the weight of his itinerant mendicancy. After suffering the rave and rant of scurrilously serenading time, its surface had turned into a very smooth chocolate-black colouring. It seemed as if the Sadhguru’s piousness resided in this wood and through its inaudible homilies tried to calm down the stodgy worldly raylets-–with their ever-so-potent propensity to play irreligious truant-–emanating from the chink in the religioner’s apron. So, residing in the wood the Sadhguru’s religiosity was waging a battle royale from the side of spirituality by keeping him trudging on the path of mendicancy; stoically bearing the acerbic spate brought about by his doddering and dodging infirmity (physical as well as religious). Thus the undemanding mendicant staff-cum-support was paddling his pace on the path of religion. Only inputs from the bearer had been some rags or leather on the armpit saddle and metalling at the lower end to provide an iron armoury to the heavily beaten vanguard.

As far as his superstitious solace seekers are concerned, it too wasn’t that he was fully convinced of their folly. In all his exorcist sagaciousness as the performer of those hotch-potch rituals, he felt himself to be in a pandering morass where his own mystical magic prowess cast glum, mistrustful looks, ever imploring his physical self to perjure against the spiritual one. And for the incredulous laymen these matters are such that nobody is convinced about anything perfectly. Witchcraft is such a web that a brush with it leaves anyone of us with some bruised wings and a strugglery by our suspecting selves. What matters most in this matter is that in a fit of unseen and causative intoxication sometimes some material (or seen) sinew of the problem at the hand gets untangled somehow. And it was exactly the same with the Sadhu. His religious self was never fully convinced about the black-magic experimentation, rather glum doubts most often adjured by gently pulling his holy robe; but very promptly the mediocre slit into his soul pushed them inside the vacuous niche and suffocated them to death. So, in the next moment he justified all that was happening and evolving. And he justified himself thus:

“They’re not fools if they come to me. By the grace of Lord Shiva, I open the entangled knots of their fortune. After all tantra-mantra has great power. And someone like me who’s been a reclusive and repulsed all worldly pleasures throughout life; when someone like me who’s burnt his soul in that hard penance urging the Almighty to bestow divine powers, to cure, to heal, to destroy the evil laden misfortune, then what is wrong in that?”

Also, it was not that his mildly doubting self drifted into the conscientious deadpan as simply and straight forwardly as the above homily by his religious self. Beneath this tartan surface there was a world of sparkling sparks laced with touch of irony which momentously flashed and then died with a flushing spontaneity. Inevitable are such struggling sparks-–if you’re in a full time ritualistic religiosity-–between the utter and utmost divine light and the glow of human passions. A bit troubled by these disparate thoughts he walked up to his hut and stood there facing serene south.

The watchman as usual had retired in the cozy warmth of his pallet. But his rest was never consistent with the longevity of a sound sleep and any type of fin-flapping by the fish would make him jump out of his straw bed and enter the knee deep water to share their sorrow, their joy, their breeding, mating, playfulness in the upwelling water around the shores due to the certain pattern of breeze and their nocturnal shoaly movements. In fact he was fully aware which type of fish would come to which part of the pond, at what time and for what purpose. Thus, his sleep lasted for peaceful intervals. Given his ways with the fish-world the watchman too could be called a nocturnal man like his neighbour. But, nocturnalities of both men on the mound, by the luck or whatever else, were going on with much ease because they very rarely coincided with each other.

The ritualist’s forte of contemplation was broken by some sounds which seemed so strange and disturbing on this chilly night obscurantly leavened with a mistily intoxicated and dozing moonglow. These were the sounds of children full of warmth in the rigorous lucidity of childhood, totally unperturbed by the coldness; displeased and sullen-sounding chidings by the elders; sarcasmic, morass-laden braying of a donkey (which was the first one to draw his attention); perennially naysaying neighing of horses and mules; credulous mimicry of sheep and goats; barking of dogs like the garrulous trumpets in the ever existent battle-loyale; and one or two radios blaring dolefully melodious tunes of filmy songs.

Now the visualities were to follow as his penetrating gaze invidiously groped in the galactic dark fortuitously spread over the place of the sounds, the little grassy plateau. He saw bonfires at three or four places. The glow was visible over the prickly foliage of the keekars separating mound and the squarish upland. Those who were standing around the fire, their faces dimly reflected light back to his suspiciously searching eyes. Then the dark outline of some tents suddenly propped into his visual discernment. Yes, the gypsies had chanced across a temporary home.

“Oh, these irreligiously wandering lampoons have arrived here to disturb the pious plethora calmly spread around here,” subtle cranks in his conscience instantaneously heaped calumny upon the homeless wanderers.

The very mere retrospection that once he too was a part and parcel of these uncivilized savages fuelled his antagonism against the poor ramblers on the dusty destinationless path.

“But, isn’t it an odd time of the year for them to slothfully barge into here?” he felt a mysterious qualm against the peregrinating horde.

The above feeling of sickness was born of the fact that these nomadic tribes from the neighbouring state of Rajasthan were often forced to migrate out during the summer months, when very unsustainably dry and drought conditions forced them to throw their hat in the ring of better pastures.

“But now these days, who cares about which part of the year it is? Perennially they are on a crazy trot. Forever after a disillusioned mirage, thirstily they run a mad race over the sand dunes and then die a sandy death,” irate religious iridescence inside him preachified.

This thought vivaciously exuded his religiosity’s heraldry of late –-of an influential rest at a place, in the nearest vicinity of a settlement. So, standing at the top of the mound, he felt as if finally he’d got his feet stabilised on some worldly possession. It made him forget the fact that for almost forty years he too had been a wanderer. Thus standing at the bearer of his ritualistic weight (which had given him wanderless vocation) he puffed out a steamy gust of contemptuous air in the direction of the caravan site as if to accurse it to perditious blizzards, where they too would finally meet some rest.

“They can certainly harm these villagers because the idiots can escape anytime in any direction after playing mischief. And who can handle those humbugs who cheat the benign village women,” his thoughts diverted to the welfare of his religious subjects.

Humbugs tormenting his caring conscience were the pawns from late old frog’s clout. Their gaudy, gamiest tricks always unfolded so many lethargic, suspicious creases around those clichéd eyes of the villagers, as a wave of surprise rumbled all over them starting from the corners of widely parted eyes. But anyone except him doing this seemed a foolish fraudster to him. So, the fad and falsity of these people, many of whom would be wandering tomorrow through the village streets turning the religiously pious trade of exorcism into a dirt-cheap thing (like telling the fortune written on palms just for a small bale of fodder for their cattle) made his blood boil. A mere imaginative notion of this eventuality hugely whetted and rasped his hate for the temporary rivals, who could commit irreparable harm to the mystical aura shrouded around witchcraft by their unsanctimonious handling of the trade in an ordinary world’s earthen lucidity, and that too just for beggings in return. He imagined their womenfolk walking almost secretly through the streets claiming to cure infertility among men and women, selling potent vitality boosters, evil dispelling amulets and many things alike, thus trampling under their witchy feet the tiny plants of his own black-magic which he’d been nurturing so heartedly. He condemned them as the devils quoting the scriptures and thus turning each and every line loathful and sacrilegious.

“I’ll find out in the morning, whether there’re such people in this caravan or not,” he tried to calm down the circumfused eccentricity which had so promptly flushed an antagonising disequilibrium into his state of  hiatus-contemplation he was basking in after performing the energy-sapping witchcrafty rituals.

“But these may not be those kinds of fellows. Maybe these are just foolishly poor and simple ones who just wander begging in the streets, showing cranky little games of their monkeys and bear. Or at the most sell things like ruddle, multani, rock salt, ahrar and other dry, coarse cereals; make those noisy porringers and other metal basins, and to sell them they make a beggar’s fleecing noise, more fiery and portentous than any of their sheet-iron product dumped from the highest of a height.”

He imagined them to be anyone and anything under the sun, but not the uncivilized savages practising his type of blindfolding religiosity.

“If any fraudster from the caravan helped by a chance occurrence happens to perform some little miracle, nobody can estimate the volcanic pepping-up of the reverential spirit among these foolhardily working beasts. And that fellow, unholy and dirty like shit, would end up making a permanent base here, thus butchering his only religious ritual---the nomadic wandering ritual performed for some still more wandering Goddess---to enjoy the fruits of a settled profession exploiting all these uncertain and flickering lines in the puzzled-picture of fate, destiny, religion and his some newly accepted God. Just for some trivial momentous gains in this life even a gypsy would dump his ageless gypsiness!”

From every ounce of his settlement-aspiring religiosity, he accursed such a gypsy rival. He wasn’t sure about the real girth of his paranormal clout in the superstitiously warped psyches of the villagers, hence his insecurities exudingly cropped up such a rival figure.

“Amn’t I too like them? Wasted life in purposeless wanderings and now come to stick to this place,” this thought had a voluble prick at his self-vaunting pride soaring itself to the Everest, while looking lowly at the gypsies strutting in the abyss. “You too are just the same!” painfully the thought struck the nail on its head.

“Oh, No!” he almost spoke aloud, as the visuals of mistreatments meted out to the itinerant citizens of some still not defined waifish state by the vagrant brats, verdantly crunched his vague, motley identity comprising an infirm human being, a religioner, a citizen of an invisible Hindu theocratic state, and above all someone involuntarily holding the signpost by a path passing through narrow, parochial morass.

“No! I’m not like them!” he whispered plethorically. “I was born in a family settled in a village. We never wandered like them. It’s only me who sacrificed the home and hearth for the sake of God and set out on the path of monkship. These fools wander purposelessly following the footsteps of some devil. While me and rest of my ascetic brethren carry His force to each and every nook-corner of our land.”

He thus swept away the unholy and belittling pie-crust of denobling thoughts about his real identity which cleared his mind of the polemic despondency, making him feel as the worldly son of God.

“They might as well be just ironsmith nomads, who brazenly spoil their hands in preparing iron dainties like small sheet-iron vessels, drums, boxes, scythes, shovels and axes. And to sell all these butchery things, the ever wandering carters use most malleable, soft and melodious voice. Witty village women find it so easy to befool this sing-song selling and the poor fellows end up getting almost nothing save bellyful of fodder for their cattle, which under the ordain of some beastly datum uncomplainingly go on pulling their heavy carts; their hocks ever on the verge of giving in. What a spitefully severe hard work for some survival crumbs for the cattle and themselves! And they would never take any short-cuts between all this metallic drudgery and their survival crumbs. But isn’t witchcraft a short-cut in asceticism?” his ever-affirming conscience once again played a little churlish truant.

Metaphorically verdant character of the ironsmith gypsies and their ever-conscientious steps on the nomadic path had suddenly sprayed pithy raylets over the inaccessible dark vales inside his religious character.

“No, witchcraft is not a short-cut!” the self-conversationalist reaffirmed his convictions. “It’s even more painfully laborious than their beating a thick block of iron on the anvil,” his head felt a spinning tinge in response to a reminiscential reflection of those nerve-wrecking, flagrant and hydra-headed black-magic gesticulations. “There is a world of difference between them and me. They’re just some foolish progenies of some sages whose senses went haywire after the hard penance. They thus devised this shallow, puppetish way to earn some mild penance by wandering like ascetics, pretending to be utmostly honest in their worldly survival deals. Voluntarily they agree to be taken in by the lopsided bargaining by the villagers, thinking that this stunt of theirs-–getting minimum output of hardest input-–would appease God in proportion to the remaining drops of sweat still due to His children who defaulted on them in the bargain. But all that is a falsity. A mere fig of imagination by their warped gypsy psyches. Because if it was so, why they are still counted as slothful savages?” his spirit seemed eager to seek revenge for his lost days as a wandering friar, when he too roamed purposelessly as if under the black charm of some gypsy hypnotism.

“Befooled by their bumpkin savagery these fellows just go on following some foolhardy notion of nomadic penance, which makes them fit for nothing except idiotic rags bundled in those carts,” he laughed at their subjunctive fates.

Carts of these gypsies were bulky, which matched their animalistic efforts with the heavy hammer upon the red hot iron. These were black wooded structures filigreed with round-headed knobs and nail-heads, making the pattern seem a pleasing lattice work. Tyres were all wooden, but didn’t lurch sideways. Their fixation on the axle was such that they rolled parably with a perfect vertical datum. Ruddily driven by two oxen or male buffaloes these carts stylistically moved in parallelism with their owners’ wander-centric spirit without showing slightest trace of proclivity towards fatigue and attachment to a particular place.

Portentous thoughts of these grand carts made his eyes look for their existence in the caravan restfully sprawled under a veily vivaciousness of the milky-way maze of a foggy moon.

“There’re a few of them,” he sculpted an imagination about the carts. “But it’s a mixed caravan of gypsies, because ironsmith type never pitches tents like these. They would just sleep on, beneath, around or any position connected to their carts---even if that means great hardships at the hands of weather. That again proves their foolishness.”

Had it not been the grumpy, broad and low pitched weary bark of the old black dog, he might’ve cramped his armpit tightly squeezing the crutch saddle for a considerable period of time. Something must have crossed the prickly fencing painstakingly erected by his valet-cum-devotee. In order to provide it with some subtle security for the sake of mound’s henceforward holy inhabitation status, which required some man made inaccessibility from any side, Bhagte had cleared the bushes and shrubbery around the south-western crescent of the parabolic east-west elongation of the mound and then erected a prickly acacian twig-fencing starting from the moat to the water’s edge on the other side; leaving a few feet space between two wooden posts to act as a gateway from which a foot-track passing below the tree reached the mound top. In that pattern the fence, starting from the north took its protective arc to the south-east where it ended at the point of contact between pond and the mound. His ascents and descents on this linear path had made it discernable as the way to reach the religiosity available in his guru’s hutment.

So, if not for a transgressor from that side why the dog inside its kennel would put its sleep at the hotbed (or coldbed?) of a gelidly languid night. The great reality of geometry had made its canine sense smell and show unbiased attitude to any of the masters available at the mound. Its shelter had been made more warm by the watchman who’d put some paddy haylofts around it. Here in its canine hutment the dog had retired early like the pond overseer, following the principle of: ‘Old men and old dogs sleep early.’

Looking in the direction of the fence the dog barked laboriously, each guffaw distinct from the other, with a considerable amount of effort involving heavy movement of the head, the ribs and of course the furious shaking of its fur. Also it wagged its heavily hanging bushy tail giving a clear indication that something was there. The Sadhu thought someone might’ve entered from the Bhagte’s makeshift gate in the fencing, so he fixed his gaze in that direction. Below the big tree’s shadow nothing came into his view except some shadowy trace of two small wooden poles holding in between them some prickly branches signaling a closed gateway to the mound. But since the dog was barking into the western direction he rolled his searching gaze along the fencing to look out for the intruder. Now the dog had gone up to the banyan and was barking more heavily with a pendulous movement of its heavy and shabbily hanging tail, showing that its bark was not wild and unintentional, but a pet one.

“Who’s there?” the monk almost matched the dog’s bark, and saying this he lurched hurriedly in the direction.

The intruder was a little donkey, not more than a medium size goat. Its topsy-turvy twists of childhood were frightened by the dog and bouncily it came hurtling up in the monk’s direction. The gray-white cute little fellow, panickly meek without braying, went trampling like a naughty desperado over the flowers and vegetables so nature-centrically grown by Bhagte on the mound top.

The religioner’s precocious anger went furious, “What the devil is this?”

The dog meanwhile was putting up fiercest resistance possible in its old age. Without having any clue to the fact that hind legs are the most lethal weapon with a donkey, the poor fellow was hell bent upon attacking it from behind and consequently its old body was getting a barraging fusillade (most of them on its insensitively heavy nozzle) as the jumping young donkey furiously threw its hind legs in the air. The dog’s plight would’ve been put in a perpetual gear, if the Sadhu hadn’t bumped the lower end of his crutch into the little devil’s belly as it sprayed kicks in four directions near him lower down the slope. Under the ingratiating impact of the religioner from up on the slope, the little beast rolled down the slope into the bushes. But without getting a chance to hail his victory, the crutch bearer too fell into the pinching bushes.

The little donkey’s panic went into burning cinders as it found itself rolling down the slope under the weight of bulky human. The dog meanwhile jumped over the fallen enemy and despite constant thuds from the young ass’ hoofs it kept the culprit down in the bushes. After a few moments embaled in a frozen-fright the donkey succumbed to the coarsest and crudest growls of the saggy black mass blanketing it and stopped its protestations. Victoriously the dog maintained its perch on the dusted foe.

Shakingly the religioner got up. His shocked head benumbed to midnight black saw hallucinated constellation of buzzing, blindfolding lights. With a flushing spontaneity the fall had sent down frightening shiver along each and every pore of his skin. He felt as if he’d been imprisoned in a menagerie where fierce animals jumped on his throat. Overcoming this heart-attacking shock he rummaged his hands in and around the bushes to look out for his primary support, the crutch; which he found nearby (as if the wood too had rolled down to follow its master in order to be at the nearest when he finally stopped rolling). Smoulderingly the shock was turning into a megalomaniacal rage as he pulled out his favourite saffron sash––which so proudly hung around his shoulders before the fall––from under the donkey’s hind quarters. Arrowed by the panicky rumpus the little ass had defecated on it. The condition of his dear cloth sent his rage soaring to hellish proportions.

“Now I’m convinced these are the same fellows I doubted. Just arrived and already on with their problematic games. I... I’ll teach them a lesson!” he gnashed, still trying to regain his balance.

But balance seemed to be brutally sundered from his whole self (including the wood) and he disparately fumbled in the bushes. As it happens in such helpless situations we accept the first help which comes our way with a supportive hand. He too at once grabbed the bony hand without even looking at it. Those frail butter-fingers felt reasonably strong, as the watchman pulled him upwards out of the bushes.

Slender frame of a female or rather a girl, looking taller in the subtle blend of the moonlight and tight knee-length female robe of a gypsy, made her appearance on the scene. Yes, she was a girl because she had no head cloth. Grand agility and urgency in her gait confirmed her paradisiacal girlhood. Prickle twigs entangled in the lower end of her kameez made her running a limping one as she swooped down to save her little donkey. Sweet-sour cries, shrieks and mild abuses seemed in total disharmony and incoherence with her language leavened with the sweet intonation of some springy dialect originated from Rajasthani. With a small stick she thoroughly thrashed the old rag-tag coat of the dog. Springing away from its prey the dog ran away; its whining barks made it hear coming from a longer distance than it really was.

Trembling with anger, and unable to speak a word as his rage reached dangerous abattoirical proportions, the settlement-lorn friar looked at her.

She then made the little sufferer stand up. With the grand height and gait of her compassion she embraced its neck and head. Little animal broke its stony shockedness and gave a complaining bray as if telling her all that had happened.

In response to the little donkey’s suffering bray she angrily whetted her euphonious voice, “Phew, such criminality to a little donkey! What harm it had done to you?”

The religioner didn’t speak. Each and every pore of his soul was bristling with rage. To catapult his venomous angst to the highest pulpits, culprit beast’s sympathiser seemed provocatively curvaceous in the moonlight shrouded in a strange lunar spectrum; a full blown, rage provoking female to the religioner because the innocence of her face wasn’t visible.

“Bewitching female––the ever persistent foe of asceticism!” he muttered, in his brain’s millions of neurons the unholy nymphet of dreams during his youth flashed as the compendium of his hate.

“What sin it had committed which enraged you and your dog… dirty, fat and ugly like you… to such an extent that you both decided to kill it?” she hurtled her shrill verbal charge, which made it sound as incongruous as a flower trying its best to bite as a prickle.

“Sometimes devil resides in most beautiful of things!” the religioner’s rage took monstrous proportions.

“Do you eat donkey meat?” she vented out her sweet ire. “Oh yes, you must be! Otherwise why you should be so fat, ugly and strange?” probing feminal fireflies seemed to hold a candle to the religioner’s daytime appearance.

From the lower slope she was petalously grumbling, the godman gave the appearance of a pandering, demonic broccoli hanging predaciously over the bunch-grass tufts.

At the apex of thunderous gurgling by his rage the godhead exploded, “Every particle of your body be eaten by dirtiest worms from hell!” he cut the side of his tongue as he gnashed his teeth with an abnormal lethalness.

Agelong captivating, bewitching, haunting and now the plain words of insult! The condition of his ascetic sash, the fall, the femininity struck him like a stroke from the hellish vanquisher.

She was just taken aback by the ferocity and archaic hate stuffed inside the flash flood of his words.

“You bewitching gypsy girl!” butterfly flutter of her words had made him realise that she was a girl. “I pray to God, a male devil from the hell may possess your seducing, haunting spirit, otherwise you’ll abuse the religion and morality in this world! That little monster of yours destroyed my hard work on these flowers and vegetables!”

“Destroyed my flowers and vegetables!” mimicking melodiously she unsheathed the unharming sword of her words. “You talk like a big farmer,” she said it in a girlish taunt, “and still weep over little marks made by this innocent small animal. In my place your God will curse you with the fate you so heartedly pray for me, you fatty! See, how this little one is still shivering. And where’s that devil dog? I’ll kill him!” she turned her head in all directions to find out the second culprit.

She found the guilty standing quietly, tired, near the tree and threw a clod at it, which might’ve hit its paw and again it ran away with a weeping bark. It seemed to add injury to the religioner’s insult, who took it as a strike at his infirm toe––though not on slightest account of harm to the dog.

As the runaway disciple of Sadhguru Parmanand the notion of relationship between the sex (read it a female) and sageship in his mind had come to an abrupt halt in a morass of divine displeasure, loath and discontent. Neither like the Sadhguru’s life-long ascetics he knew the spiritual essence of sex, nor was acquainted with the worldly essence of it freely harnessed and enjoyed by the laymen devotees. For him the long and wordy scriptural relationship had come to an abrupt halt at a strange entity like a sentence ending with a paranormally peculiar sign-bog involving the mud of a full stop, question mark, mark of exclamation or any other linguistic sign indicating the termination of a sentence.

Writhing in the same mud, he hollered, “The devil may fuck you to death, you unholy, irreligious bitch!”

Her modesty scurrilously infringed upon, she gave a knife-shrill cry. “Then you deserve one too!”

Her slender arm forced another clod in the direction of the genesis of harm to her gypsy pride. Hitting the wood, the earthen lump struck his infirm leg.

For the justifiable cause of their modesty these gypsy females very promptly become a menacing thorn from the springy flower of earlier. Her chirpy anger laden with budding girlish emotions made it once again clear that she was not as grown up by age as her slender figure made her look in the eloquently silent incandescence of the moon in foggy medium. Just after hitting the reviler, her first instinct would’ve made her run towards their temporary fortress. But the little beast didn’t know this ‘after hit’ maxim of humans, and hence it didn’t budge from its place despite her chiming pulls at its neck-cord. Vocabulary of her somewhat fearful emotions was sounded by the small bell attached to the cord, which twinkled a warning to the little beast to run, but stonily it kept on standing there. She didn’t have the heart to run all alone and thus leave her pet at the mercy of beguilingly approaching enraged figure of the monk, who came almost tumbling down the slope like an atrociously fuming avalanche broke loose by some small hit at the dangerously lurking snow over a deadly curvature.

“You bitch, devil incarnation, dead ash scattered beneath the feet of holy sages!” he was muttering in razor-cold rage.

Psychotic savagery of his angst had been sharply serrated by the contrasting rasp of unprostrating and unbuckling face put up by this gypsy girl on the one hand, and the primordial look of helplessness in the eyes of solace seekers against the paranormal, who after entering his hut looked at his face as if he was their last saviour.

Furiously rambling down the slope from the mound top where his neighbour’s bone-shaking effort had helped him to climb after that fall---his volcanic anger riding roughshod over the mutant (due to the transfixation between the world of materialism and religion) rogue gene---he let out the darkened aspect of his mendicancy’s attitude and aura in smouldering exasperation:

“I’ll accurse you to death! You hit me with a brick! Hit my asceticism! You foolish girl from a fallen culture! I’ll make you pay for it!”

The extraordinary intonation of his fury, the oddity in his monstrously provoked rage (which was at least thousand times more than a reacting angst after being hit by an unharming clod thrown upslope by some feministic hand) got her whole self caged in the fearful webs of uncertainty. Awe-struck and hypnotized by this raging boulder coming almost rolling from above, with benumbed senses she just waited-–because all thoughts of an escape had darted away at the apparitional sight of this smouldering spectacle in the semi-dark–-for his inevitable arrival.

Edified in the cesspool of his callous rage, he in a spoofy flash caught her unplaited hair and shook her with a lethal swipe which purported the mordant passion of his abnormal hate. Horror struck the whole her supple, lithe body. Acuity of this strange psychotic savagery cut the bud of her charming offence with its brutal hatchet. In its caustic callousness the religioner’s figure seemed a goofily waffling spook.

At the peak of raucous agogment of his rage, he hit his crudely thick fingers on the back of her neck. Like a thunderous stroke of lightning the jounce was too benumbing for her pliant nerves. She thus stood stonily. With a hallucinogenically clenched jaw he struck again. Atrociously hideous fingers this time fell on the petalous tissues of her cheek. The second strike brought the flower out of her frozen coma and made her realise that she was no stone. She thus gave a soul-wrenching shriek which would’ve certainly reached her people, but exactly at the same time an unending bray of a big, strong donkey at the caravan side––as if cursing the Sadhu for his heinous crime––embaled her sweetly panicked notes in the rudely rumbling jigsaw-puzzle of its noisy song in an inestimable melee with some moment.

She let out the sweet parables of her cries two or three times and then stopped as if all her anguish and hurt had been worded off under the squeezing clutch of those brutally strong, hypnotizing hands. She seemed a harmless, feathery, passive little sparrow in the prancing claws of an eagle. His overpowering and subduing rage––like he felt when he madly tormented, through his exorcising rituals, the supposedly haunted physical self of an unfortunate female, with the very propensity of squeezing the life out of her––kept her shaking as if to hunt out the mightiest devil possessing this provocative female.

“Sometimes the evil hides inside the most innocent and beautiful body!” thunderous fisticuffs of some tormenting, haunting misogynist-maxim of his soul chuckled in mock exasperation.

The fragile saviour––who’d, led by his parable rectitude, suddenly appeared on the scene to help his neighbour and in a similar enigmatic manner disappeared from the happening’s stage after helping the portly figure on the mound top––jumped into the fray once again. When the girl shrieked he was immersed in fish-flappings on the other side of the mound. Nearby, in a netted-off portion hatchlings played safely. However, the helpless cry of the gypsy girl sent down an activating spark, which penetrated the shell of his benumbed old heart and fell upon some immortalised love crystal lying beneath the modalities of the time’s impassive dirt. And a filial raylet reflected. It very strangely energized his debilitated body. With the swiftness of air he ran upslope feeling a lithe anger (perhaps for the first time in our knowledge).

Without saying a word the virgin little volcano of his anger spewed out mildly smouldering cinders upon the predator, who felt a sharp thud at his left shoulder. Caddish and manic zeal of the religioner tormenting the girl got a sudden rap on its knuckles and he fell like a dead log.

Replete with renewed instinctual rage the fallen sage grunted like a demonic dog. With another beguiling shriek he took a swipe at the attacker’s knees with his wood. The hit was hard. Springing in the air a bit, the watchman slumped down. Holding his knees he groaned agonisingly.

“Ooh, how you... you dirty piglet!? How... how you... you Muslim earthworm??” he scowled, words were just failing him as he panted under the severe pang of exclamatory excrescence of lava from the second volcanic blast of his rage. Contemptible swapping of his senses left him fluffing for wards, “How... how dare you... hi... hit someone who sips tea with car-owning politicians?!” his throat squelched to provide wording to his heart dead-struck by this impossible happening.

The watchman was in great pain, so he kept on rubbing his rickety knees. In fact, in physical terms he was worse sufferer. But from a mendicant’s reputatious side he was guilty. He had a clear inkling of this dodgy proposition, which would’ve compelled him to accept any number of strikes by the Hindu ritualist without making any fuss.

In his fit of cursing the painfully prostrating figure of the watchman, the raver forgot the sobbing girl who slowly left the mound, still subdued by the dark panic which was made universal as the moon got shadowed by some lonesome flake of cloud. Before leaving the place, she’d looked at the rescuer.

“Thank you, baba!” very beautifully the thanking phrase had curved over a rosy sob, which for a moment embalmed his hurt.

The Sadhu’s curses and abuses knew no bounds and limitations, and at the pinnacle of one warning he declared: “I’ll get you killed in the morning?!”

Without speaking a word, the watchman too deemed it fit to leave the mound and try to pacify his strangely sulking heart with fin-flapping songs in some remote southern corner of the lough-like pond.

Afterwards, lying on his pallet the religioner gulped down big draughts of insult and rage. His mutterings gave much trouble to his tongue as his ire concentrated its sagital aim at the Muslim watchman. What enraged his presumptuously ebullient heart was the realisation of the limited revenge-taking capacity of his clout. Every sinew of his soul cursed his first disciple as a poor, pathetic lout who’d no teeth to bite anyone showing such ignominious disrespect to his guru.

His culprit-seeking tentacles tetchily caught the poor villager in the web of his anger. “That is the hellish problem with these poor, low caste villagers. Day in and day out the fellow, the dour faced sheep moves around with absurd cowardice. His look ever fixed to the ground seeks to see the vaults of heaven in abyss. And the fellow with a mousy heart is under the illusion that he’s earning the religiosity of all the worlds by performing all these trivial tidbits for me. If I tell him what this wormy Mussalman has done, either he’ll pretend not to listen, or meekly ogle at this dirty wrinkled sack as if afraid of a similar fate to himself as well,” selfless service of the poor villager came crackling down like lifeless autumn leaves.

His blame-game with Bhagte hit a snag. An uneasy turn in the bed followed. And the pandering face of the lessee with a condoning look at his employee caught the imagination of his writhing soul. The pond lessee in his annoyingly jolly and jubilant ways always seemed to be in a disrespectful hob-knob with some taunty truant whenever his uncaring cursory look fell on the religioner. His very appearance on the mound carried the puissant message that he was there just for business instead of any sort of lumpenisation by the way of falling in any type of religious bickering. To eat lots of fish, earn as much profits as possible, and to top it all enjoy the delicious slice of his passion from the cake of nymphomania––which he did very subtly (retaining his social slate bearably clean) during his countryside itinerary––were the cadenced parameters of his self epitomised personal religion.

“And when that atheist scoundrel comes here lollingly, he impersonates ignorance of my big presence as if I’m even smaller than that ant-like old man of his. More than Muslims, Hinduism has been stigmatised by such people, who don’t know how to respect the beholders of their spiritual pride. I shouldn’t even think about telling him what this dead twig has done, because instead of pulling him up for this heinously irreligious thing, the mere imagination of my suffering spectacle would catapult him to the highest height of fun and frolics. Phew! Why blame him for the fallen way of society these days? It’s bound to happen as long as there are politicians paying a criminal lip service to... to religion... to His people....”

Feverishly his boiling thoughts flopped into the lethal cocktail of religion and politics. As it always happens, since his electoral win Ram Ratan hadn’t shown his face to anyone from the village. The inveterate politician in him was cuddling and gurgling over his gloomy prospects as a junior minister in an insignificant ministry named cultural and youth affairs.

As for the culture the state didn’t boast of any garishly shining, aesthetically attracting elements in its agriculture-defined coarser ways of life. Music wasn’t fine tuned. Their favourite instruments in all their musical gaucheness (we shouldn’t be too demanding to the farmers in this matter) did in fact provide some rhythmic upholstery to their hardened hearts sometimes looking down the entertainment pulpits in a rude agogment. Bellicosing raginis (local folklore songs in Haryanvi dialect) lolloping over the choppy beats of brawny fingers, palms (and sometimes even fists) on the tautly stretched rubber over the mouth of a pitcher signified the modish musical croonings of these farmer hearts. Music thus seemed to be almost ineffective and mildly sentimental punctuations of heart in the crude phrases of their hard lives. But the new generation had a somewhat softer heart (in accordance with the lesser amount of manual agricultural labour due to the fastly emerging mechanisation) for the melodious Hindi film songs. Old timers still gruffed over this immoral fall of the society.

Literature too–-like music–-was laid at some hazily distant end of the primordial furrow ploughed by the first Haryanvi farmer. It won’t be an exaggeration to say there’re fewer lines in Haryanvi literature––please, exclude the tribals and gypsies––than any other society in India. Possibly, it’s due to the dichotomy between the spoken and written aspect of the language. These people speak Haryanvi and write Hindi! Spoken Haryanvi is an intransigently rustic dialect of Hindi formed by a virtual linguistic fornication between almost untwisting and unsophisticated tongues of these work brutes and urbanely chaste and baroque Hindi words. In order to save their tongues from any unnecessary drudgery (which they think is required for speaking in Hindi) these people have twisted and turned the patron language in such a laborious way-–just as they do with clods in the fields-–that most of the stylistically sophisticated edges are worn away leaving behind rudely uncombersome and sluggishly rustic words, to speak whom the tongue is saved of sharp twists and turns.

“These politicians are the dirtiest species on earth. That day the motherfucker made such a show of it as if I’d a vote which he could fleece in his favour. The idiot was boasting of so many Hindu things as if he’d lay down his life defending Hindu dharma. Fool talks of that... that Ayodhya, of Pakistan, of revenge against Muslims, while right here the one whose feet he touched is humiliated by none other than a little leechy Muslim. Nothing can be done of this country. It’s the same country where once even the mightiest of Kings used to wash those sagely feet and even drink that water. Now it’s utter dark age wherein they are humiliated like this,” he felt an atrociously raucous pinch at his heart.

Sleep was to be the only panacea to the frettings and fumings of his tortured soul. And there he was spread out in his straw bed, a graffito of human ordinariness despite his life-long efforts on the path of religionhood. Perhaps the pious injunctions in the scriptures are too good to be really true and the reviling barbs of this ‘physical self’ mostly prove to be a tough nut to be cracked by the spiritual brushwork.

The girl must not have told anyone in the caravan about the incident because in that case the gypsies, without caring for the consequences, would’ve certainly swooped up the mound. After suffering the harsh mistreatment at the hands of the religioner, the lithesome new soot, basking in the twilight of girlhood and womanish teenage, left with swiffy sorrow; her gypsily nimble footsteps following the primordial soul rewinding to the first faintly-fluid and genuinely warm light radiating from the initial stars and galaxies at the time of creation, when there was no humanely-spangled splice between the cause and effect; no abstract conflagration between material and the spiritual; when the gaudily mythological incandescence wasn’t fighting a battle of creation among quirky idiosyncrasies of the vivaciously gregarious createdness and the primordial intention. Souls following such steps are never revengeful.

Instead of that poisonous whiff of air into the narrow opening in the bud-–the emerging threshold of womanness from the girlhood-–embaling a full springily petalous flower, which certainly suffocated the spirit of immortal flower of feminine beauty deep inside the opening bud, she wasn’t concerned about the anachronistic hurt to that futuristic full flower, rather some maternal instinct made her sweet heart feel the pain of that fatherly frail figure bent down in the dimly white moonlight holding his knees in pain. So, instead of getting the tormentor ghost beaten, a pitying spangle from her heart made her worry for the saviour who looked time-blurringly old and weak in the moonlight leavened with an eerie secrecy. This shift of pity from the self to someone else in full forthrightness certainly put an end to the possibility of an avenging quarrel with the caddish dweller of the mound.

Moreover, she might’ve an inkling of the domineering presence of the bulky reviler on the mound, which must’ve made her beautiful mind understand that any deed from the gypsies will create troubles for the sheepish frail figure. With a wispily good natured female instinct to subtly sip down immodest trivialities, she also bore it with a forgiving genteel sense, taking it as a forgettable incident of bad behaviour by some insane, settled person venting out his loathsome frustration upon a nomadic girl.

Alack, look at the irony of it! The watchman’s frail hands while helping his neighbour did not attract even a cursory attention from the monk. But, when the same pair of hands turned to support someone else they clanked as the claws of an enemy eagle in the religioner’s heart. Apprehending gravest of consequences, footsore due to the nippy incident, the watchman rumped and bumped by myriads of thoughts had made straightway to the south-eastern corner of the pond. There among the bogs and ingrown mossy vegetation his heavy heart instantly, in sympathetically stringed instrumentation, jingled with caring and supportive notes for  the fish flapping in labour to lay eggs near the water edge.

Jollified struggles of the fish instantly lifted the pal of gloom from his mind still purring over the incident. “Oh, mrigals are going to give birth to new lives tonight!”

During the day he’d seen their heavily pregnant bodies flapping lethargic tails in the water grass. He had an ambiguous perception of the webbily mystique fact that when new blooms come into being in any form in any floral or faunal species, those struggling moments are replete with sagely and silently divine struggle which lends a fresh impetus to the purpose of creation. Like a worshipping devotee with an immensely caring heart, he sat on the shore to be as near to them as possible. Warmly burdened under the wearing-out big saggy blanket, he seemed some high priest musing over waterborne life and its formation from sacrosanct pulpits. Euphonious symphony of the water cradling new lives in it took the compassionate beat of his heart to some new pinnacle, and he raised his hands in praying posture; mumbling words of Allah for the maximum survival of fishy lives from among lakhs of eggs, larvae and hatchlings now cradled in the water molecules. Captivating croonings of creation sang a lullaby for the old child. Sleep thus layered over him and he heaped, just a couple of feet away from the water, into a knot inside the protective warmth of his blanket. Very soon the cold grass of earlier changed to a soft and warm bed beneath him.

Curving, coiling, silvery-black figures of the fish in labour, meanwhile, splashed and sputtered the water making parably jingling notes which seemed to sing an allegory for his immortalised love in the form of that slippery, agile soli fish. In a deep slumber he dreamt the topsy-turvy soli dancing with complete bouncy-jouncy rhythm in the pond.

When the morning came the sun couldn’t chuck-up the fog’s sponge. It was giving an impression as if the clouds had lowered down their vapory fluff. Even the acacian bushy plantlets suffered a shivering horripilation. Their prickles had been sheathed down by benumbing small silvery dew droplets hanging pedantically from the pointed edges. Even the impregnable banyan with its hanging beard and broad faded-green canopy had the appearance of an eloquently silent old sage of the plant kingdom. Fog had completely soaked into the canopy which might’ve made any owl hiding there feel that it was in the remotest recesses of some dense mountain forest. Pond’s illusionary excrescence knew no bounds (like the reflective sea-sprawl of dilettantism) because the confining limits weren’t visible. With a nippy grit and instinctual secrecy the fishmongers were trying to bring some enlivening warm agility into the shivery, scug surroundings.

Spiffily lithesome and wild instinct in the horses of the nomads got a diluted liberty in the foggy surroundings as they scattered around to graze on the lushly dewed grass. The vast engulfing gloom of the floating droplets on tiny solid nuclei had subdued the petulant charm of noisy and fair-like night time activities at the caravan site. Dew and mist laden, their tents bore an opiated look. Above, the sky had lowered down its sails as if to keep a check on their drollily flirting and aboundingly absconding migratory culture; to keep them stuck-up to a place for one more day. Goats and sheep were jutted against each other so besottedly that it looked like a big bale of warm wool, wherein the aseptic cold wasn’t able to dig up any shivery hole. The hounds masked a sorry look. Without their ritualistic morning barks they appeared to be new ethicists suddenly metamorphosed from their earlier mordant savagery. Prime beasts of burden, the donkeys, ponies and mules very strangely had decided not to leave for grazing. In rapt rigidity their stonily resting postures epitomised the prayer of fatigued souls, knocking at the firmament, pleading that the caravan shouldn’t leave today itself––just after a night’s halt.

Children hadn’t run out of their rags. Sitting around callisthenic bonfires elders were sipping tea. These warming conclaves were getting warmth into their frozen limbs. Quite unnecessarily a radio was blaring local folk songs, which sounded totally out of rhythm and melody to their ears habituated to listening mystically cadenced chants of peregrinatory songs. So, all in all it gave an impression of unnecessary waste of batteries.

Nobody would’ve believed that they arrived at the grassy upland just a night ago, because scrawnily pitched up tents burdened under a dull and gloomy weather bore a bucolically old look as if they had been there like this for centuries. This sedentary glint surfacing from the gypsy encampment was in stymied contrast to their ever-impassive and impatient march over the spindly and sloppy destinationless path, which they followed as if ordained by some strangely sceptred ostracism.

It was around eight o’clock. Bhagte hadn’t yet arrived, so the religioner was still in his bed. The disciple’s reverence had been by now firmly festooned around his holy neck; hence he needn’t scoop out his religiosity’s formal show, led by the conflagrant doubt that by not doing so he’d be harming the reverence-crop cultivated inside the poor villager’s God fearing heart. He was thus lazily snoozing inside the hut, his body somewhat debilitated as if he’d had bristling nightmares about that scurrilously abrasive incident.

Dew in all its wetly-agile glitterati found a rarefied woolen surface over the watchman’s blanket. But when he jerked it, daughter-like droplets smilingly sacrificed their silvery existence and slipped out into the corridors of non-existence once again.

His first gaze fell at the place where new fish-lives had been delivered during the night. “By the mercy of Allah they’re over with it. Long live small eggs that I can’t see!”

He ran his placatory fingers through the water, soft-pedaling little cherubic wavelets purported to be lullabying caresses for the invisible infants.

The ignominious reality struck suddenly. “The Sadhu’ll break my legs!” he shuddered and his neighbour’s inveterately irascible visage slitherily went bristling through his body.

He felt a stickling pain wavering across his knee joints. Drawing up his pyjama he found the blow had been tetchily hard. The wound was frozen as he saw blue patches on both his knees.

“If he’s his wish fulfilled, he is going to get me banished from here,” it was an anguished smile, while he rubbed his injury so as to melt its heart a bit, which’d allow him to move limpingly.

Quite naturally, his sonorously rectitudional self didn’t mull over the impotent rage of his neighbour. Very stoically he seemed surrendered to any fate befalling on account of his helping hand raised in favour of that victimised unknown girl.

Once, chucking call of communalism had snatched away both his parents in a single stroke. But even after suffering such ravagious losses, even after becoming the innocent victim of an unpardonable sin, the testament he heired hadn’t even a single phrase of hate and revenge. Thus, throughout his life he’d been a human subject of India, divinely oblivious to that nasty chapter in Indian history whose lines were written with blood and gore.

Walking over the footpath by the caravan site’s northern edge, he came across skinned-out pigeon featherings. The scattered sinewy fur gave the tragic inkling of an unnatural decimation of once flying, flip-flopping birdie life. Life’s uncertainties and transcience remorsefully ambled up to him. With a shiver he felt the thunderous punctuations of an uncertain fate in life’s phrases.

“These innocent ruffians never miss an opportunity to chuck up each and everything coming their way,” ruefully the thought chaperoned his small head.

A few paces further, he saw the dorsal, pectoral and chest fins among the skinned out fish hides. The little decimated carcasses seemed still sorely missing their protector.

There were premonitory traces of anger in him because it was a fishy matter. “Hummm! Greedy idiots have done away with some fish too. They must’ve put baited hooks into the pond when I was asleep.”

The thought of fishing nail hooked his mind to the baiting food. “What kind of baits they’ve used? Earthworms are the most common one. But it’s not a rainy season. So, it’s really hard to get them. Who, but, knows about these wandering people. They can bait fish with objects one can’t even think of. And the poor water daughters when come across something so different, they take it as a delicacy and the result is this,” he thought, staring at the victims of illegal piscary, which the nomadic foibles easily allowed them to commit as ordained by their strange stateless gypsy law book.

Under the piscine law, every fish has a sceptred right––if the purpose of its creation is to be nutritious morsels for some starving abdomen––to be cooked as a delicious delicacy under the care of artful culinary hands. These after-death rituals provide a funeral dignity to a fish. The watchman had a meditative intuition about the sanctity of a dead fish in a frying pan, because the last rites have to be in aesthetic accordance with once beautifully agile life. His thoughts thus drifted towards their culinary skills.

“Have they eaten it raw? If so, then the fillets from belly and liver must be cooking inside their stomachs now,” it sent a spindly shiver through his heart for the undignified treatment meted out to the daughters of water by these ignorant piscivorous wanderers.

But on closer scrutiny of the residuals, he realised that skinning hand was not a barbaric one. At least it seemed to know about decent culinary knife handling: a cook, not a butcher.

“The man must have gone through at least a thousand of them in his life,” he estimated the figure by reading the knife deed of that unknown, strange gypsy figure.

He imagined a strong black gypsy cutting the fish from vent up to the lower jaw; doing away with the gills; skinning its both sides across the whole length from head to the tail. Then he’d the cinematic vision of purple strips and slices of meat cooking with the strong odour of salt, mustard oil, chilli and whatever other extraordinary spicy things they might’ve with them.

He doubted the smelling sagacity of his nostrils, “They’ve lost their ratty discernment, otherwise why didn’t the cooking odour reach me,” he found himself somewhat guilty as a watchman. “And the breeze too was coming from this place,” he felt the pinch of this little chink in his duty as he rummaged his bony fingers through the scattered silvery strands on his elongated head.

Now, he decided to have a say to the nomadic piscators in his capacity as the pond upkeeper. With this intention he lifted his face to the caravan site. He came face to face with an old lady sitting cross-legged in her dirty rags beneath smallest of a shelter. It was merely a polythene sheet dropped over a stick dug into the ground. In her small, old, delicately fragile shrewdness she seemed an aeonically wrinkled piscivorous petrel.

“Then amma you’re the one who’s gobbled down this much,” he complained pointing to the fish remains, while daring to have a look into her narrow merry eyes.

“Hi-Hi... Hee-Hee!” she gave a slithery chuckle which stuffed a jousting prominence in that entire lattice-work of age on her keen, puckered face. “How can I eat so much, son?” she seemed pleased as if he’d paid a compliment to her.

“Then somebody from your dera has done this,” this time he was a bit annoyed, but its visual aspect was hard to be discerned on his black morose face.

“Why somebody, son? I’ve done it myself,” risorial water once again dashed down myriads of wrinkled ravines all over her face, while she adjusted the disheveled and frilled gypsy attire on and around her to make her more presentable.

“In funnery with me, amna?” he gathered as much tartness as he could, “Earlier you were saying, ‘you did not’ “, this time his narrow face showed some displeasure.

“Oh misunderstanding, son! What I meant is I didn’t eat the whole of it. I need only this much,” she raised a fried cake of meat mixed with crumbs of bread from an enmeshed aluminum bowl gone out of shape like her. “But yes, I cooked the thing,” she confessed emboldened by the unharming nature of the man, who seemed just in a tete-tete rather than a watchman’s bullying accost.

Still proudly holding out the sample of her gypsy culinary skills, she warmed her tattered old self with some self-praise, “You know, I prepare this thing so good that I’m known in the dera just for this. That’s why I’m with them, otherwise my fate would be like a dirty rag left out at the once caravan site, while they run away once again.”

A look at the rissole prepared by her, once again restored the inevitable calm in the tranquil waters of his temper, where the thoughts of unfishy treatment to the agile daughters of water had stoned a disturbance. A look at the delicacy convinced him that the fish hadn’t been disgraced on their path of fishy martyrdom; rather they had met a decent culinary burial for the sake of some needy, hungry bellies.

“So you’re the caravan cook…!” now he asked this just for the intention of getting some information about the whys and whats of these homeless wanderers.

She gave a cocky chuckle which shook her rumpled body as if her physical self was struggling on the Jacob’s ladder of life in order to reach disburdening destination. “No, no... not like that! I don’t know what you settled people go on making out in thin air while rottening at a single place. ‘Cook of the caravan,’ what does that mean? Possibly, you’re the cook of this village,” she popped out her witchy, old, masky face from her tiny shelter and made a wry face in direction of the village smoked out of the view by the foggy greasepaint over the countryside canvas.

Bucolic spinelessness of the ever-on-the-move nomadic spirit made that gesture of hers seem a farcical purring over the canardical mores and morals. A mere cog in the social scheme of settled society, he didn’t say anything to this mocking contempt of the old woman for the village and the villagers.

A look at his pathetically sulking face made her feel his caged-in plight amidst the settled society, so she deemed it fit to explain it further. “See, whenever they get something which they consider special, they come to me and request me to prepare a delicacy with all my experience.”

“Then you must be a respected person in the caravan,” he forgot the origin of their conversation.

Also, today he seemed inclined to get some word-warmth after at least a month of shivery speechlessness (at least to humans it was so; apart from this the dog, fish, fishmongers and his silent self occasionally disproved his dumbness).

“Oh, not really so! They’re all selfish persons. It is only when they need my cooking skills that they feign respect for me. Otherwise, for rest of the time they entertain themselves by cracking old-age jokes at me. Even these nuisant children snub their mucus laden noses at me,” she recounted her old-age woes and slapped the muzzle of a big goat (perhaps her only prized possession) which scratched its horn against her back.

Till now the watchman hadn’t seen the goat inside the littlest of a ramshackle tent. The old woman was reclining her weak, creaky spine against the animal. In response to the hit the animal mimicked in high pitched cockiness, as if to throw the old crinkled nuisance out into the cold from the warm confines of her woolen skin against which the old sack was juxtaposed in order to avoid a chilly death.

“Then stop cooking for them,” she heard the watchman saying when the goat stopped.

“No, I can’t!” she clicked her tongue. “Who knows they might leave me like a sick old donkey to die here among these savage people, who’re so stone-hearted with rigid minds that they never budge from their petrifying places. So fraudulently they’re stuck up at a place that even if someone is dying and crying for water, they won’t care to put a few drops in his mouth,” from the troubleshooters in her own caravan she once again pin-pointed her anguish at the permanent home dwellers.

“Then they’re all bad fellows. I thought them to be so, amma,” monumental conscience inside his tattered body protruded a soft emotion for the old gypsy woman, who by the look of it seemed a centurion.

“Not say all of them! How can you say this for my Phulva?” filial warmth went spluttering over her old skin.

“Phulva! Is she your daughter?” to him the name sounded mandolin-sweet, because the gloom and doom thronging its sagging spirits over the old woman’s decimated lips quickly gave way to some mystically synergetic succulence as she brought the name to her mouth.

“Oommn... not from my belly. But, yes! She’s my daughter by heart,” very strangely the gypsy woman knew the language of emotions as well.

She seemed to enjoy this conversation with the stranger, because more than the shivering cold it’s the absence of sympathetically spoken words which very cryptically emboldens the wrenching jaws of death around old bodies. So she was getting some warmth from this little wordy bonfire lest the yawning mortality riding on foggy droplets might mistake her for a cold corpse hiding under the tiny shelter.

“Does she care for you?” the fisherman asked. He too, on this winter morning, seemed interested in talking to a human being as if the hibernating social animal in him had broken its slumber for a break, compelling him to become social for some moments.

“Oh yes, she does most of the work for me. Sometimes washes my clothes. Look, she washed it yesterday in the pond,” from among her provisions she held forth her long gypsy apparel which had been thrashed to neatness.

It was a black, half-sleeved female robe: its upper part in the form a tight bodice done in ornate mirror-work and lower down it broadened (with prominent side-splits) to almost give it a triangular shape. Its hem had artistic gauge-work. Possibly it was her bridal wear.

The cloth must have been swankily hemmed during its prime, but now the decorative sheen of the pleated frills had gone making it seem like the dried stalk of a flower whose petals had borne time’s clichéd deed.

“But as far as I know it, you people arrived here after sunset, yesterday,” his mind reasoned.

Last night while walking to the pond’s southern end, after the incident on the mound, he had been surprised by their enigmatic arrival, just like a magical appearance on the scene. The gypsies had arrived at the grassy upland following the cart-track traversing across the southern countryside. Starting from the alkaline wasteland this dirt-path took its serpentine lonesome journey to its final gateway onto the narrow, metalled approach road linking villages of the district in that direction to the district road. Most often these followers of offbeat path took these substratumic links at the base of mobility’s hierarchy to reach their addressless destination.

“So what?” the old woman understood the query intentioned by the fisherman’s factual reference about the time of their arrival. “She washed it at night. There!” she pointed to a clear opening into the pond in between the bushes, shrubbery and keekars. “Our Phulva is so beautiful!” she almost sang the name in their dialectically derivated fragrance of a gypsy flower epitomising the literal essence and meaning of beautiful flower world. “And still does all this hard work. Eyes of those village vagabonds tell it clearly that they’ve never seen someone as beautiful as she, among all of their ever bathing and... and––what they call it?––coquettish village girls whose most of the time is wasted in trying to look good and beautiful, so there’s hardly any time left for them to think and feel beautifully. It’s nothing, just a big drama out there!” she pointed her frail finger in the direction of the village.

“Is it really so?” his face bore a mark of exclamation at the mention of this shiny gem from the gypsy corset.

His mind flashed back to the mound incident. Enigmatic beauty of some starlet had sprinkled some petalously suffering novelty in gloomily moonlit night. Her nightingale-like sonorous ‘thank you’ phrase sucked out some strange emotion out of some blind zone inside his retired heart (as far as spectrum of emotions is concerned) slowly doing only the physiological purpose of motoring blood across his arteries and veins.

The old woman, so proud of this gypsy jade, was heard singing a maternal boast. “She’s just thirteen or fourteen––our Phulvari––yet I can bet no girl in this village is as beautiful as our little flower weathering all seasons like this in the open,” she spread her bony arms in both directions. “But devil chew up these villagers who treat us so slyly! The girl, it seems to me, has been mistreated by someone of those motherfuckers!” very angrily she pointed her clawy index finger towards the village, but it seemed to accuse the hillocky gobbet of earth because it was particularly in between the old woman’s sagital pointing by her witchy finger and the generally spread out settlement,  the village.

Fisherman’s heart missed a beat. It was none other than this Phulva whom the reviler had abused.      

“Mistreated her!” it just escaped his lips, as his bent up spine gave a straightening jerk.

“Hummm... seems so!” the woman with extreme alas breathed out a big vapory spool. “At night she came to me, very sad––extremely sad indeed––which looks so strange for her age. ‘There lives a very bad man and a very good one over there,’ she told me,” the woman once again pointed in the direction, still having a vague idea through her dim senses about the direction the girl had pointed.

“Despite my repeated askings she didn’t tell me more than this,” in dejection she raised hands above her head as if imploring the adrifting whirlpool of the unknown under the norms of some unestablished and unsystematised gypsy belief system.

Sagely equanimity of stoic waters inside his soul’s puddle felt disturbing ripples once again, like when he heard the girl’s cry the previous night. It was a windstorm let loose by the nightmarish tangle between the Godly canons and the human (or devil’s?) fallacies of their readers and followers.

“These settled persons never care for people like us who’ve nothing except these endless wanderings,” defeated tones in her crackling old voice seemed a strange oracle expressing sorrowful wonderment at the puzzle pieces of life.

An empathic emotion riding the crest of some wave in the ruffled sea inside him surfaced on watchman’s conscience, “Oh, don’t take it too heavy on your heart, amma. It’s just that there’re some bad people, as there’re so many good people also. If someone instigated by the badness inside him misbehaved with her, then isn’t it still better that she met someone whom she calls a good one, even though he’s just a...” he stopped himself just when he was about to describe his wispy appearance in comparison to the monk’s boulder proportions.

A middle-aged banjara, the gypsy, showed his encyclopaedically nomadic persona above the old woman’s little makeshift tent. Very quickly the witty discernment in him alphabetised the whats and whys of this outsider in conversation with the old woman. Finding no harming disjointation in the outsider’s character he went back into the middle of the caravan and joined a group crouched around a bonfire. In a fidgety tone the radio was blaring news. News, a diary of events which strike us as a novelty to our ears cupping around to hear some interesting noises, while the feet try to keep their hold firm over our very personal share of the world. It can be very interesting to know and understand how this informative differential of the sedentary matrix sounds to the ears that aren’t habituated to listen to particular sounds, while their feet drollily strut and swagger to the implorations of homeless path of destiny.

The woman’s voice sounded more interesting than the news on the radio, “It hurts me a lot! She helps me so much. It’s only due to her that I’m able to keep up with these fastly flying naughty clouds. Sometimes during those lonely hours, when I fear death’s strike any moment, she sits by me and asks about my past life. Hearing her beautiful voice my past becomes fully alive and death which a few moments ago was about to smother me down, cowardly runs away. And whenever the weather is bad she insists upon me to come into their tent; gives me space of her own while she just sits down by my side throughout the night. May He bestow most beautiful of fate––more beautiful than any other girl in the villages and cities––to this girl of ours!” she raised both her hands paying obeisance to some unknown spirit of their pantheon.

The apostle of innocence, budding and beautifying in its chirpy gypsiness, whose veiled and shadowed charm and aura he’d felt and faddishly seen in the foggy moonlight, now tugged at his heart more and more distinctly and clearly, as the old woman’s words lifted the pal of secrecy and riddle separating her full acquaintance from the watchman’s curious mind.

“The Sadhu shouldn’t have violated the sanctity of this little flower. It’s a crime none of his Gods will forgive him for,” he muttered, which the old woman couldn’t understand.

His last night’s deed seemed holily justified, “Perhaps, God and Godliness cradle inside such beautiful little flowers with sweetly-soft hearts!” his soul put up its righteous vanguard as an antidote to his neighbour’s shrill and moral-suffocating chuckle of rancour and hatred which always condemned the same thing to be irreligious and devil incarnation. “Now I’m ready to bear whatever he does to me. Even if he gets me hanged by those banyan beards!” the small old man determined to the core of his heart, eager for its little but exhilarating stake in the mysterious scheme of eternal beauty and goodness.

During this period of warm socialising discourse, the sun had partially succeeded in overcoming the obstinate invisibility strewn around by the fog. Like liquid gold the yellowish-orange sheen galored with freshness, firstness and virginity of an enlightening spectacle over the perpetual gloom of a descended sky in its foggy impersonation. The weather-beaten, greying jhabua shrubbery glowed more so with the golden hue. In complete contrast to the enlightening flash-forward in the eastern horizon, the caravan site seemed primitively old flashing back to hundreds of years.

And she came as if riding the sun chariot driven by angelic horses. Her fair complexion––the gypsy nymphatic bud––made pristinely golden by the swiffy traces of sunrays. Her fishy lips, full and red, looked as if any time she’d pout compassionately for the sake of celestial goodness. All of thirteen or fourteen, tall and slim in her black gypsy apparel trimmed with ruche, she carried the bloom of a little flower, though she was just an opening bud by age. Plaited frills, hemwork and embroidery around the corners of her neat clothes and strange gypsy floral and leafy designs embellished with tiny mirror pieces around neck made her look bounteously beautiful and agile. It’s only on account of girls such as she that the people’s minds still recount the beauty of mythological mermaid.

Her unplaited and unbraided hair entangled in them the chaotic and turbulent humdrum of some inaccessible vale where the wild and sweet flower smiles in breezily rewarding solitude. Falling backwards, they were not too long. A curly tuft of hair was high-pointedly standing alone at the signpost of feminine symmetry of her forehead. On this crowning lock some fog droplets had mistily condensed, which shone in the morning making her look like the crowned princess of gypsy kingdom.

Her mouth was carved out in perfect geometrical proportion to other facial features. And when it parted it’d the innocent warmth to melt any frigid heart with her request. Her oval face under an idealistically vaulting forehead made her look like the most beautiful houri from the Rajasthani School of paintings during the medieval India.

Almond symmetry of her big eyes gave her the wide-eyed look of a fish; they shone like a pair of celestial-torch having embalming penetration. Girlish charm in those innocent eyes was dolloping like hazy waters wherein little-little lotus flowers of womanhood were certainly eyeing the pristine and primate wild beauty of yore. The worldly reflection in her mythical eyes galored like a strange fluid of light mixing starlight, moonlight and sunlight.

As she came, she looked like the ever-forgiving little Goddess: the sanctity of her beauty completely unperturbed by that bad incident of the previous night. With the gypsy equanimity of forgetting such mid-path fidgety skirmishes, she brought her agile steps to the old woman.

“Grandma, grandma! See, at last the sun has defeated the fog!” quintessentially her girlish heart exclaimed.

Breezily swift she arrived there with spring in her feet and then suddenly stopped with autumnal sobriety; just like a full of life filly which starts ecstatic jumps without any seeming cause and then puts screeching breaks for a halt, this time too without any obvious reason. Perhaps, such mirthful kickstarts by the heart’s molecules in response to some mystically strange chemical reaction-–maybe between soul and the physical self-–give momentously leaping upstarts, when the soul doesn’t grumble over being imprisoned in the worldly chains.

With a narrowly parted mouth, still under the impulse of that enlivening jumpstart when her very life envisioned a life (is it like when a dream itself dreams?) she looked at the man standing below the caravan site. Grateful graciousness in her eyes had the warm dampness of eyes many, many years mature than her age. When seen under the foggily bemused sun, the trivially frail outlines of his little existence, which her beautiful eyes brimming with sparkling novelty had daughterly tried to get acquainted with on that fateful night, now gave their discreet clarity about this fatherly saviour of that foggily moonlit night. She at once recognised him.

“Oh, the good man!” the silent flower whispered.

She couldn’t say anything else. An awe which’d been buried in the cemetery suddenly seemed to revive its ghostly spirit. A look at her saviour made her mind reflect over the thundering violence and hate garrulously vented out by the ‘bad man’. A whitening tinge on her golden complexion made it seem as if she saw the perpetrator of hate clearly, standing mountainously by the mole-hill of goodness. Those bulging eyes, wide mouth, hairy thickets, twisting lines in the corners of eyes sneaked and penetrated through their night time hiddenness and burned around her like a perilously smouldering celestial object doomed to fall in some orchard basking in wilderness.

With consummate alerting notes, his employer’s eponymous voice came acalling over the sunlit foggy intervention between them. The unobtrusively jolly fellow had called his man from the road. The latter instantaneously got it that the vehicle had arrived with fishworkers. Six or seven of them, icily enthused about the job at hand, were crossing the moaty water separating the embankment and the mound. He too at once started for his duty, without turning his face back to look at the girl, though his soul was encoring for a second look at that daughterly lenitive face of hers. Now, he wasn’t afraid of any type of groveling retaliation by his invectively fuming neighbour.

There at the mound the labourers pleasantly came out of their vestures as if it was a month of June. Just clad in their all types of funny shorts they swamped the area in between the huts. All sorts of fishy characters were these men. Some were exercising their muscular limbs to get pre-netting warmth. One gave a breezily sharp concussion to his bicep; other, a shark like shovel nosed, spun his hands in never ending movements of fish-fins; another one percussioned his body  like a cute and droll dolphin; still another leapt in air with the agility of a flying fish. All in all they seemed frail man’s marauders brawnily flexing their muscles right in front of his foe’s door. And when the watchman joined the group, to an objectively scrutinising eye he would’ve seemed an all powerful, witty, old mentor of these powerful fellows now getting ready to work under his command.

The religioner was casting sardonic looks at them. Psychedelic cauldron of his anger was brimming with rage even though he tried to control it through carousing sips of waiting for the right opportunity. He felt so helpless that the obscenity which was left in syncope on his tongue at night (when sleep applicated anesthesia to his feverishly tortured self) hoping to awake in the morning and explode wildly at the culprit’s first sight; now, alas, writhed in pain on his tongue making it twitch like a leech sucking its own blood. Unable to bear the teetering avalanche any longer he hid himself in the quilt which Bhagte had gifted him in effervescent obeisance. The monk’s only mute and meek link in any possible revengeful scheme or action wasn’t present there to make a hue and cry (if possible for his divinely undisputatious persona) about the mistreatment meted out to his guru by someone who was least expected to do so, both physically as well as religiously.

Also, the persons whom he had been able to be in contact with were those paranormal and superstitious remedy seekers who themselves had suffered the strut and swagger of destiny. Most of them were sharply filthy old women. Ruffing and puffing in the warm air inside the quilt he culled his mind over his coterie to pick out any single one of them who’d turn into a fearless lion at the mere mention of this crime committed against his venerable spiritual beholder. Alas, all of them were found to be butter-fisted frail unworthies who’d been tortured by crippling senescence, and hence taken to spiritual-cum-superstitious solace in the uncannily ameliorative air weirdly hanging inside his hut.

“These’re really dark, evil times. Only the cowardly crippled and helplessly butter-livered fellows are taking to religiosity. That’s why Hinduism is losing in battle against Pakistan,” his impotently suffering rage was splitting to the seams. “I’ll never forget this crime against a holy man and teach this ant-fucker a lesson when I’m up to it,” he gnashed a resolve. “What’s the worth of my religiosity here in this village? If I feel helpless in taking revenge against even the weakest person in the village, then what’s the use of pepping false pride in myself by counting just the number of these infirm and weakling fools who fall at my feet as if I’d turn them into roaring lions, ready to tear down opposition from both humans as well as ghosts. These are real crooky times. To save ones pride and dignity of dharma one should have a few powerful and strong devotees, or call them whatever, in ones coterie in place of these lambs who piss out just hearing the name of ghosts, even though they’ve never seen such a thing in their lives. And if a Sadhu like me has to build up the honourable temple of his religiosity then he should’ve some strong support, otherwise my days here in this village won’t last even till this crumbling dirty nest falls to the weather,” impetuously impulsive worldliness was very fastly sucking him into the vacuous vortex of rapturously whooping unascetic throes of passion.

Sheepish visage of Bhagte, the first disciple, oracularly appeared in his power-centric imagination. Historically cowered under his casteist trepidation, the fellow appeared a virtual stigma in the name of a disciple, who couldn’t even protect the honour of his guru.

His soul brawled with a heart-wrenching prayer to the Lord, “Oh Shiva, why can’t I’ve a devotee like that big landowner whose fields have almost a monopoly over the western and southern countryside? Even those dirty young ruffians---who’re so quarrelsome without any plausible reason---would fit in the scheme!”

Repulsively attractive faces of some such young tramp characters hovered optimistically in the bad atmospherics of his mood. Their faculties of monstrously mimicking tauntery, abusiveness and bullish boxing he’d witnessed on some occasions made his heart pine for their pupilage.

His agitated self was very fastly convincing his religiosity that to survive and get oneself pushed up in these evil times one needs a propulsion and concussion by some equally dark forces, who are acquainted with the dirty designs of contemporary society, where the crystal-white and adulating faith of people like Bhagte is not a supportive force, rather it’s an obligation to bear with. With a butcher’s cruelty he forgot how the poor villager was fattening him by getting himself battered and bruised by predatorily stepping into his accursingly prohibited resources.

The thought of politician almost brought tears of desperation in his victimised eyes. How cruelly helpless one can feel when one finds himself unable to dispense even littlest of revengeful justice against the pride-bruising crime committed by someone whom he hadn’t considered even worth the dirt lying at his feet!

“These politicians will chuck up even the hides and bones of this country. The cheat was making so many castles in air that day. Took tea with me! Touched my feet! And now forgotten me as if I’m no more alive,” icy dejection froze him inside the warm air pacifyingly ballooned around him by the quilt.

Foibles in his religious apron––perhaps they pinpricked his conscience for being unholily tabby blots on the saffron colour of renunciation––tried to justify to the Lord Shiva his soul’s craving for those ‘other types of devotees’. “Aren’t they all fighters of successful destiny during these evil-laden times?” he reasoned to the God. “Evil can be conquered mostly by hook, sometimes crook. What matters most is the grabbing of luck. Long and arduous path of hard work and honesty most often fails during these bad times, because it’s misfitted in the contemporary world. To survive in the near vicinity of these irreligious fools one has to grab luck in whatever form it comes and with whatever means employed.”

A roving mendicant mightn’t care about these mendacious social loops, for there is a kick of the unknown which constantly strikes at his ascetic rumps and he runs safe from these social snares. But if someone worn-out of such dashes on the safe (or escaping?) path of mendicancy decides to have a paying rest in the near vicinity of such impiously laid out worldly snares near and around a common householders’ settlement, then the holy feet or hands are sure to get caught in these irreligious loops, while the farcical spider (call it the survival) takes its lurching steps for annihilation.

“It won’t be too surprising if someone pulls me by hair out of this dirty place and throws me into the pond just for the sake of entertainment of his nasty senses, while these weaklings, the so called devotees of mine, won’t even dare to ask why he’d done so,” a snaring shudder sent a trepidation across his settlement-lorn ascetic self.

He muttered a cursing complaint to the God for making him such a helpless wasp entangled in the unholy, worldly webs where the demonic spider chuckled at his doomed fate. And when it became unbearable for his insected religiosity caught in webbish mire of worldly reality he got out of his quilt like a soul condemning its own worthlessness. Pathetically browbeating and self-accursing he decided to try his case against the culprit in the latter’s own court full of fishing judges. Hell bent upon decimating his reputation (in order to get sympathetic fire for his pitifully smouldering self) he made a scene before the labourers, the pond lessee and the atrociously afraid watchman. Breaking his self-respect to pieces he performed the melodrama, recounting the numerous atrocities blasphemously committed against him by the watchman. Jollily they took the lame Sadhu to have gone crazy due to the excessive intake of opium, who was now involuntarily turned grandly theatrical under the ecstatic frenzy of hallucinating liberation of his aeonically inhibited senses.

Uncorking of this religiously unpalatable gigantomania left them completely befogged by the pomposity of peeling laughter. The watchman was stunned by this abstrusely incredulous behaviour of his neighbour, whose very limping gait, grunt, breath and stare of revulsion did possess such pathological power that he used to feel fatally suffocated whenever he came across any of these. Behind all his melodramatic puppetry the religioner’s unfructuously drooling moans went wasting their fuel without bringing any seriousness to their jolly moods.

Baited by the Sadhu’s funny inducements, sluggishly luring joviality in the lessee burst forth with full intensity on the dryly plain surface of rude jocularity. Stocky, sturdily built which made him look slightly bow-armed and bow-legged---this littlest of unpleasant deformity, however, came undone when one saw his smart, full-of-life face and its dignity vouchsafed by a thinly chipped moustache--- he completely surrendered himself to jovial abundance.

Sometimes, a stagy lie when told purportedly as a mountain, but having a staid mole-hill of some shred of truth as its causation, becomes a tragically ironical farce. So, the fishermen warmed themselves (except the watchman) with the soul-tickling mirth of laughter fuelled by the elephantoid religioner’s ant-like browbeating joust.

Even if the lessee, in all seriousness, had given a serious ear to the sanyasi’s tantrums, he won’t have even thought about displeasing this old genious of fish trade who made such a lucrative trade as fishing look so trivial, seemingly pauperising and worth ignorable like him (given his unsocial existence or call it social non-existence) to the eyes of the villagers, thus minimising the chance of arising anyone’s jealousy and consequently lessening the risk of poisoning of the pond.

Such was at least the hard reality which’d taught some bitter lessons to the pond hirer in the past. He’d tried various types of fellows for the job. But, in one way or the other they integrated themselves with the village life, or say they found some role or relatedness in the settlement. Some befriended locals, some made enemies, some eyed the village women who came to the pond with their buffaloes, and some wandered in the streets making it a recognisable fact that some significantly paying fishy enterprise was on profiteering tracks. Out of such permutations and combinations of previous watchmen’s socialities there arose someone or the other with the propensity of spoiling the fishing game.

So, here was this stonily passive and unsocial creature, ever immersed in his little world defined by his duty as the watchman-cum-advisor for the pisciculture in the pond, operating at the outer fringe of the village, maximising the profits of his employer by his time-tested knowledge and ways and means of the fish business. But, by nature destiny has her own see-sawing ways. We don’t have the sovereign right when it comes to choosing our social roles and responsibilities; rather they’re suddenly snuffed out of some blind zone of the unknown and loaded over us. This man, who’d very rarely spoken to anyone after his arrival in the village, suddenly found a little savioury role cut out for him, as if the destiny wished he might not die even before his ultimate roll-call was made from the register of mortality, because we turn to completely unsocial ash only after our death and lay buried in the grave. Here was that fairy like gypsy girl with her flowery cause and petalous purpose which sent a socialising, enlivening whiff of air into this living grave which moved with a coffin like unreflectivity (with a little world encaged inside it) around the pond.