A Harking Hiatus in the Watchman’s Mute Journey

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        A Harking Hiatus in the Watchman’s Mute Journey

The festival of Diwali fell in the early second week of November. This greatest festival of the Hindus, elucidating the return of Lord Rama to Ayodhya after fourteen years in exile, solemnly and noisily tries to bring light even to the darkest and deprived-most shelters. But some people were calling this festival of light a ‘dark Diwali’ this year. Sanctity of the festival had been ominously trespassed by a tragedy which struck the district city. The day before, in a fierce fire multitude of life and property were gutted. Agonisingly glaring inefficiency of the local fire station, total absence of disaster management plan in the district administration, the role of the electricity department in allowing the death trapping high voltage wires hang down dangerously in the narrow bylanes full of firecrackers-–which became the graveyard of many dozens of people-–were the fusillading factoids which gave rise to choking rumours that arose in the sky along with fifty gutted shops with man and material.

The people were giving tumultuous jerks to their brains in calculating the exact number of deaths by multiplying the official figure with anything onwards from three, four, five... depending upon one’s past experiences. Also, the state government in its efforts to go scot free had dumped the news that the cause of the fire was the electricity wires hanging just a couple of feet above the full stretched hands of an averagely tall person in the congested bylanes of the most important market in the city, which was bulging with Diwali time firecrackers. In an insane impromptu, local media too had meekly run into the caretaker government’s-–because the results had presented a hung assembly and the most important issue, that of providing a leadership to the subjects was hogging the limelight-–dousing propaganda. Who cared now? After all the elections had been held, results declared, a new motley coalition waited in the wings, and above all the political insecurities of the politicians were at bay-–at least for the present. So the issue if not politically important , then what else could’ve upraised the tragedy to a mourning news level; a churning stage of the hazardous issue in fact, which could result in a plan to avoid such happenings in the future.

Still Diwali is Diwali. The festival has had the capacity to adapt to the capricious cascades of times from the majoritarially good days during Lord Rama’s era to the present one when it’s meshed up in the tyrannising strangleholds of a hugely overpowering badness. But even after giving full credit to the amazing adaptability of this greatest Hindu festival, one can not fully ignore the firecracking newness which seems to be in cahoots with the devil through its boom, bust, smoke, injuries, deaths and pollution.

So Diwali was to be celebrated. The festive mood was already evident on this evening with misty congeniality strewn over the paddy fields where harvesting was going on in full throttle. Stray bursts of firecrackers reached the watchman’s ears as he walked by the road holding a ten litre plastic can in his hand to fetch drinking water from a hand pump in a nearby field. The farmers were returning tired after a day long paddy harvesting work and preparation of seed beds for the upcoming wheat crop season. There in the distance some of them were setting up longish thatched structures for the mushroom cultivation during winters to augment diminishing returns from the agriculture.

Further at a distance, on the sandy elevation and beyond, tired and forcing noise of the tractors was being given a soft, soothing pacification by the jingling murmur of paddy grains as the labourers beat the sheaves on the drums.

Unfailingly patient footsteps of the old fisherman were preceded by the easily paced-–almost a leisurely resting gait-–walk of two young farmers.

“What’re you unto these days Bania?” one was heard to be saying with an offbeat seriousness; his sturdy, work-worn hands swaying in soft synchronism with his simple thoughts inside his head topped by a decent growth of curly dark hair. 

“Can’t do anything except farming,” the other one exhaled it slowly, making it sound like half desperation and half liking for the tough job.

“But God and government once again ruined the game!” the other one complained with a farmer’s look of compromise with his ever-existent helplessness and his angst’s mediocrity.

Short, sturdy and cherubic faced Bania looked a bundle of unsophistication and simplicity in his soiled maroon baggy trousers and a rumpled boorish shirt. As for age he was still a minor, but in farming his experience matched any middle aged farmer in the village. It was so because he was into full time farming for the last five years. His father being a chronic asthmatic patient, a very healthy and strong Bania-–it was his nick name as usual in the rural society-–took the responsibility on his shoulders just after his matriculation from the village school. Amply guided by this principle of hard work, this stout young farmer with a broad smile (his herculean hands acquiring more and more statuesque shape) worked in his fields with tireless energy.

“Yes, earlier it didn’t rain at the time of paddy plantation. Even the tube well failed to keep the water standing in the fields,” Bania expressed his grudge against the late onset of the monsoon, due to which the very heavy irrigation required in the initial period of the crop irretrievably dented  his pockets, because diesel prices had suddenly shot up by forty percent.

“But however heavily one may irrigate with a tube well, it can’t match the rain’s effectivity, because artificial watering requires more fertilizers to compensate for the nutritious cloud waters. Also it needs more pesticides and weedicides,” Bania’s voice went on graving as he came to revise all those quibbling facts which lay buried in the little pages of his tiny pocket diary as usually lying inside his breast pocket. His peaceful face acquired a few lines of worries.

His companion took the farming litany further, “And then the monsoon raised hopes. Bulging spikes all around,” with half-closed eyes he lauded the normal downpours after that initial lull.

Bania gave a resigned smile, so odd for his age. “Then the whole effort almost reduced to a naught.”

He’d said the truth. About three weeks before the harvesting season, the unpredictable saga of the nature unfolded in verbatim, when one evening the atmospheric elements in an intemperate scuffle with each other let loose a furious windstorm and a brief spell of very heavy rain. So, within an hour of this atmospheric chaos, the whole sprawl of a very rich paddy crop with its cogently strumming sheaves was toppled down by the stridently usurping wind. ‘Oh the evil rain at such a critical time when the grains swell and ripe. Now they willn’t grow more than they are presently. And harvesting would be dauntingly difficult in the fallen crop!’ was the common refrain of all the farmers as they ran to watch their buffeted crops after the weather cleared. All it meant that the crop production was to be almost half of what an acquiescing heart’d estimated seeing the crop crowns in an amazing assonance with perfection three weeks ago before that sudden weather-lashing.

“Then there’s still worse news. Ramphal has just returned from the grain market, and when I asked him about the latest price, he just said gloomily, ‘For the false peace of your soul it’s better if you don’t ask me’ ” his weather-polished darkish skin acquired a purplish hue under the shades of tension.

Nonchalantly the teenaged farmer with glowing eye-balls said, “Yes, yes I know about that. My heart is too strong for the bad news. For basmati rice it’s even below 800 rupees per quintal. Why to worry, if one is sure that either God or the government is going to burst his buttocks,” he laughed and struck his bottom. “Even if the prices reach 900 mark, I’d be saved of a loss!” his left hand caressed the small diary inside the breast pocket, as if just from the touch of his insensitively hard finger-tips he cogitated the delicate figure after circumspecting over those long lines of input costs of every sort, except the incredulously hard labour by himself, his younger brother, sister and mother.

The watchman’s heart poured out sympathy for the young agricultural spartan. It was Bania’s hand pump from which he fetched his drinking water. Following them silently in his silent ethos, he looked back at the flaggy memento of his faith fluttering on the whitewashed grave-structure on the Muslim cemetery mound by the road, and prayed for the profit of such a young farmer, whose eyes innocently peeking out of such a robust physique always sympathetically searched the watchman’s poorly pathetic existence, whenever he saw him drawing water from his hand pump.

“Let it be. I’m used to such things,” the farmer of his prayer was gratuitously heard to be saying as the watchman straightened his neck.  “Tell me something about you. I’ve heard that you are going for mushrooms this year,” he asked his fellow walker clad in grey-white pathan style kurta-pyjama.

His generous features contorted in a strange way, “Aye, don’t make me recall all that horror!” it was a voice of some hardworker’s certitude, cherishing its own woes. “I’ve put my hands in a bear’s asshole. Imperiled on both sides! It’s going to tear me apart if I get them out, and if not I myself die of effort. Me and wifie can’t even make love as those bloody nocturnal fungi keep on propping up throughout night. And if we start doing it those bloody insinuators exhort us for idleness and immorality. And...” he controlled his words amidst a laugh, “and wheat husk has made a permanent place in the home minister’s pleasure-safe because throughout the day she’s to work sitting amidst all that rubbish,” very easily the simple farmer’s conscience changed the irony into humour, which comes so easily to these hardworking fellows in all its synonymous alliteration, even during most trying and desperate situations.

By the bear he meant mushrooms he’d ventured into. But the back-breaking manual labour of picking mushrooms during the nights, costly inputs and his wife’s dawn to dusk frivolities in the wheat husk used as seed bed in the chambers had made the whole thing a sort of bugbear for this thirty something farmer.

“I understand your position. But who gave you the idea in the first place?” Bania sympathized, after getting his share of laughter.

“That foolish rectummed Ramphal got me embroiled into all this,” he said edgily, enjoying each moment of his rigged mushroomy fate. “He himself repeatedly gets fucked by the big bear but again and again he turns to the devil’s buttocks.”

“You’re quite funny to say that about your wife,” Bania recalled, a mischievous humour glinting in his eyes, as the image of round-faced, elegantly featured and medium built but heavily bottomed woman came to his mind to propitiate his young and fledgling sexuality, while the watchman secretly chuckled at this humoursly ironical reality unfolding to him through this conversation between these two rustically hardworking paragons of the Jat community, who fribble with humour as easily and naturally as the twilight does with both dark and light.

“What is funny about that?” the husband replied in serious decor, “See, whole day she mixes manure with that leery, husky thing and they sneak into her salwar. Poor wifie just goes on itching around her groins. And when I approach her in the night, she kicks me back saying ‘Your wheat husk has been doing that all day, so there’s no need of you now.’”

Before Bania could say anything, the old man following them had progressed upon a gradient chuckle which sounded spangly shrill. At last the humour’s humming inertia had been successful in breaking the bastions of his sworn-silence.

“Hee... hee... hi... hi...” it was a humming chuckle with closed lips.

Thank God! At long last some emotion found some vestibule in his soul and came out through it; otherwise his immunity to such worldly emotions would’ve one day burst out volcanically upon the confabulating sentiments strewn around. His triviality had been augmented by the stamp of his iotic religion in this part of the country, about which he wasn’t much concerned, save some fortuitous moments when someone made him realise that. By the appearance of it, his person was amazingly uncompetitive, so the dissuading senses of the humans around him, finding the uncombativeness in him, perceived him with deadly ignorance (we must exclude the Sadhu from this nonchalant matrix). But this dose of desperately neighing humour was too much for his fragile fortress, and thus the socialising agent was released, while its bearer tried desperately to control it.

The farmers at once looked back. They were surprised to hear the chuckle from someone who was to them speechless, the only trace of audibility about him being the thwacking tong and a tin drum used against the fish-mongers.

“Why old man, why’re you laughing?” irritated mushroom farmer said somewhat tartly.

The pond caretaker didn’t speak. Promptly the divine laughter divorced his thin, parched lips. His nondescript features still reflected sincerity and sympathy from across that wrinkle-meshing strewn over his small, narrow face.

“I think the plight of my wife made you laugh. But mind you oldie, if she comes to know about this she’ll knock you down with one fist,” his jettisoned parochial sense once again detoured to humour.

Again the watchman didn’t speak. He just walked up to them and like a culprit stood with his face brooding into the ground.

“Hey miyanji don’t sulk like this. You haven’t committed a crime. Laughter is the sovereign right of any pair of lips,” good natured Bania sounded as sweet and sympathetic as his verily worked out physique.

Gigantically obliged face of the old man stared at the kind young farmer.

“Oh, I... I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have laughed at your agony,” creakingly the old man’s word-drought tried to find an apologising oasis. “I’d never... do...” spasmodically his tongue gave in.

“Don’t apologize like that,” the farmer’s tone got far, far milder, “rather say thanks to your God for not making you a farmer like us, otherwise you too were destined to get the same nuisance into your pyjama,” he suddenly cackled with laughter.

Wispily weak figure of the watchman almost jumped under the impact of this strong whiff of laughter. And as laughter is contagious, it further augmented Bania’s jolliness who forgetting all his agricultural problems gave in to a swinging laughter involving a lot of playfulness by his keen but sincere features. After all to his innocent and rustically hardworking self laughter came so easily. The lines starting from around the mouth went on trudging forward like a facial earthquake which shook his head, but still the convulsions went on further and he bumped his heavy hands upon the old man’s frail shoulders shaking him from head to heels. It was a gesture of friendly peasant humour defying all discriminations of age, class, caste and religion.

“Old man, you earn more than me, and that too without toiling in the fields. Then you need not worry about the government, rain, market and above all a constantly groin-itching wife,” the agonised farmer drew a poker face, which once again sent Bania into ripples.

This time it was a lion’s laughter, as he extruded his tongue out of a fully opened mouth, “Haaa... Haaa... Oh my Ram! Please Satpal, don’t talk about your wife anymore, otherwise she’ll start hiccupping back home.”

“God forbid if she comes to see this strongman with a secure income and easy life, she will elope with him without even caring to change her salwar enmeshed with wheat husk,” the disgruntled farmer took hold of the watchman’s hand and moved the loosely rumpled sleeve upwards, which slipped comfortably without facing any obstacle over the bony hand except a small elbow elevation in the middle.

Whether stranger or a familiar face, it was customary etiquette for these farming people to feel the girth and hardness of muscles by holding the arm. If not at that time, even up to a decade earlier, local hardworking culture had wrestling and kabbadi as the two crest jewels of its parochial treasure. So as a courtesy and ritual of acquaintance they tightened their fingers around the arm to feel what was written there or how much of a pancratist the man was. For these people palestra was the keel of their hardworking faith; almost a sanctum-sanctorum in the blistering furnace of an agricultural life. Relaxedly, sons of the soil rolled in the worshipable soft sand, and in this way exorcised the fatigue through preposterously innocent tomfoolery with their profusely perspiring bodies coated with sand. After this they’ll start making bantering issues out of void, matching the Big-Bang explosivity in their funny creativity.

“Hay man, what have’u done to your body?” Satpal almost shrieked with revulsion. “I think you’ve never exercised in your life.”

Though just a pun, it seemed to be loaded with humiliation.

Tormented by his reminiscences of hard work the farmer went on comparatively with some irksomeness, “You need not do all that. Such an easily paying job at your disposable! Just making noises at the weak birds; roaming around the pond most leisurely; pockering at the fish and eating them too.”

Pleasure content in Bania’s laughter nosedived, as he read the hurt feelings on the old man’s pathetically brooding face, while the fish got caught in his fellow farmer’s tongue’s imagery.

“Old wrestler you eat fish! And even then you’ve that bone under your sleeve,” baring his own mediocre muscularity he proudly flaunted a sulking egg, “See! Look at this and this’s without fish. If I get them in thousands like you, I can get my arms grow as thick as my thighs”, he completely forgot that the old man was no fishmonger; he was their saviour.

As a real strongman should always sympathetically pity a weakling, Bania jumped into the fray with his shapely physique very seriously nurtured from a time when he was a mere ten-year-old.

“Miyanji needn’t worry about that,” he moulded his cherubic face into middle-aged seriousness, “I’ve got enough for him as well,” he protruded the braided bulk of his large arm.

From his mannerisms it seemed an answer from the watchman’s side, whose innocently largish eyes ogled at the friendly muscles.

“You’ve that corpulent neighbour of yours. I’m sure that lame wrestler might be eating plenty of them,” the kind young farmer very generously unyoked the fragile man from the punny cart and brought the robust religioner in his place.

Talk about the mound’s strongman thrust a chill down his neighbour’s bent spine. Even in his dreams he couldn’t have dared to add even a single word to any sort of loose talk about the monk. Who knows, it might reach his hairy, big ears.

“No... he doesn’t !” his feeble self protested strongly, trying to firm up his ‘no’ so that it could match the strong vegetarianism prescribed by the monk’s religion.

“No!” Bania repeated surprised. “Then what type of neighbours you both are? You’ve so many fish; still that big body doesn’t get them!”

Fortuitously, the unwitting young farmer had simply spoken the local language of neighbourly concern, care and share. His straightforward mind brimming with simple, nuggety ideas ignored the deep jewel-mine of religious differentials where only a hawk’s eye could penetrate. To his unfailingly unsophisticated senses religious wedge on the mound was as invisible as the air above it.

“You live near him,” the second farmer broke in with the propensity of recurring the old man’s blues, “do you know that the Sadhu has exorcising powers. People say on certain nights he meditates in the graveyard by the eastern end of the pond.”

With a glimpsy look the watchman searched the sayer’s face and found no trace of feint on or around it.

He felt helpless in saying either ‘yes’ or ‘no’, because people have so many self derivated connotations about exorcism. Moreover, the nocturnal circumambulations of his neighbour never counted in his little list of interests. His knowledge about the subject was just limited to a few offbeatly strumming facts like some light inside the second hut, some lambasting hotch-potch phrases and some visitor or two, and all this too only when he got awakened in the middle of the night in trilling assonance with some musical flappings near the mound’s edge. Unconcerned about his neighbour’s nightish matters, so dedicated was he to his own cause that any preying pack of fishmongers in the dark of night never found him fast asleep; as for the Sadhu’s nocturnalities, they always found him dead asleep.

If he said ‘no’ about the Sadhu’s witchcrafty prowess that would’ve sounded like an unholy negation of the monk’s religiosity; or in case he answered in the affirmative then it could well have been dubbed as a superstitious immorality. So, in order to avoid all such paradoxes, the old Muslim escaped into the fields by a narrow field embankment which circuitously did a long cut to the hand pump, while the two farmers got into a daunting talk about the obi.