8
A
Saga of Ecstasies and Agonies
An unpaved and dusty
pathway, after defining the western boundary of the village emerged on the road
at a point almost midway facing the pond. From the west cultivated fields
reached the path for a pleasurable proximity to the residences of those who
toiled in them. Its emergence on the road was prominently displayed by the two
schools facing each other at the path’s both ends by the road. Their walls gave
this thirty feet wide disheartened path a definite street like look in its
final phase (or the first?), as the 200 metres long wall of the High school on
the eastern side, and the primary school’s little less than half of the former
on the other side, gave it a proud and educational ending. Similar was the
ratio of the schools’ extensions along the road, where the High school’s
imposingly lofty one-storeyed walls, with a huge silvery gate of grilled iron,
reached up to the eastern margin of the pond, where another street emerged on
the road. The primary school’s stretch along the road was a little less than
the partially submerged western embankment of the pond.
To someone coming
from the path between the schools, the pond’s view welcomed with its watery
exaggeration among the misty margins vanishing into the southern fields. As the
two ends-–western and the eastern-–couldn’t be seen while coming from this
street, the water seemed to belong to a portion of the sea sprawling its
stranglehold to unknown distances on the
left and right sides.
Agriculture was
calling at its peak with a pinpointing insight into the kharif harvesting
season waiting to arrive after the monsoon’s retreat. A labouring, angry noise
of some tractor handling a sharp turn in a corner of some field gave a mighty
exhale of exhaust smoke which hovered in the air making the heavy agricultural
air pregnant with numerous possibilities.
Casting a net in the
bulging bowels of the pond at this point of season was the toughest job for any
pisciculturist. But our watchman fellow was ever ready to spring such
surprises, as long as the matter at hand was the fish world. A proverbial
satisfying look could be seen on his face for the fact that more the surface
area of the pond, better the gas exchange and hence happier the fish. Also, the
water movement in the mini lake made the system stable which is necessary for
the prevention of unhealthy algae. He knew that it was the best period for the
fragile pond ecosystem under his overseership, because it involved both salt-water
as well as fresh-water characteristics involving critical elements of pH,
nitrate, salinity, temperature, ammonia, alkalinity and calcium. Even though
specifically unaware of the role of each of the above mentioned factors in the
life of the fish---for wisdom is no slave to formal education---his stupendous
dexterity in the job had enabled him to have an understanding realisation of
all these things with the help of a keen beam from his mind’s blowtorch. Today
he seemed more serious than ever, as he’d a row with some urchins from the
scavenger community, who’d set snares for the ducks along the pond’s edges.
A netting party was
on the scene to perform the tough task under the old man’s guidance. They’d
circled around a corner. Three of them were pulling the net rope, coiled around
their shoulders and waists, with the effort of a horse. Their feet were struggling
in the muddy earth of the bank. In knee deep water one was forcing down the
upward tilt of the rope where it emerged out of water. It was the weighty lower
end of the net which was being dragged along the muddy bottom of the water,
while the other end floated at surface indicating a long line of the net-cast
as the floaters crescented between two ends imprisoning the fish between the
net and the shore. The pullers’ slanting figures with their heads bent down and
forcing cries gradually decreased the netline’s crescenting sprawl in the
water, while about ten of them in chin deep waters struggled along the floating
line, untangling the net as it was dragged to the shore. The netted fish
meanwhile flapped against the netting more and more ferociously. At the other
end two of them were holding the rope. Their resting figures pleasantly saw the
netted part of the water inside the loop getting narrower and narrower to its
last limit when the fish were to be left as a muddy heap inside the net pulled onto
the shore.
The upkeeper was
directing the operation from his boat swerving along the netline. Now and then,
some hand popped up from the water along the netting and threw a special fish
into the boat. These were good quality fish which got into their hands untangling
the net under the water. A big stash of net covered almost half of the boat. It
was of even bigger proportions and hence in the next stage it was to be used to
cast an even bigger catching loop in the water. The watchman’s frail muscles
seemed to contract with the effort of those pulling the net.
All of them in the
fishing party were from Bengal . Among those
sweating along the rope was another Muslim. Call it the grace of Allah or
something else, this man was veritably the antipode of our watchman fellow. Muscles
around his shoulders had become synergetically structured thanks to his
numerous energy-sapping efforts at the rope, rowing, netting, eating fish and
tortoises and the likes. A band of white silvery beard along the jawline like a
moon’s crescent gave him the look of some perversively courageous religioner.
In comparison to his fellow religioner’s beard, the rag-tag goatee brooding
over the watchman’s chin (on the first careless look of it) seemed a pale
shadow in the name of a facial outcrop. But on a second pondering and
pinpointing look it seemed unmiffed and undwarfed in its saggy effervescence.
By the road, hordes
of Bihari labourers were treading fast to the fields. Their small
muscular bodies clad in numerous high coloured T-shirts, bushirts, kurtas,
short loin-cloths of checked linens, pants and even farcical jeans: all
inspired by the Bollywood heroes whose films they got hit or flop from cheap
front benches in the cinema halls during their spare time. It was only to cater
to this sort of oozing taste in all its alacrity that the Hindi film industry
repeatedly ended up sowing the same trees of paradise in each and every make or
remake. One of them was carrying a radio blaring at high volume as the
songstress eulogized their unwavering optimism in hard work. Still there were
many in this land of their emigration, who (forgetting their role as the
cheapest and the most efficient source of labour) squeaked at them ‘ungovernable
brutes of the badlands’.
All of them walking
in a huff cast inertly jealous looks at the Bengali labourers of the fish
trade. Their look of surreal criticism and clicking of tongues with some ambiguous
skepticism reflected the clichéd light on the story between the Biharis and
Bengalis. And while they passed so close, inevitably some mischief was
bound to pack a little unsavoury punch. The heat of two totally different
cultures, two societies and two brands of people: one conscientiously literate
and firmly in saddle with a rich and fat haul of history, art, literature and hygienic
sense of living; the other with its glory feebly harking back to the later
Vedic period in sixth century before Christ when Buddhism and Jainism prospered
in its cradle. Alas! Now, it was totally
dumb and deaf to those loftily roving reminiscences of the two sets of great
principles, one of which in disgust took shelter outside the land of its birth,
and the other languidly survives thanks to some lofty commercial phrases. So
here was Bihar : centre of poverty-enforced
migration; illiterate, caste ridden, feudal set up still swooping and playing
truant; disorganised economy---all coming in as handy tools for the funniest of
politics. All of these were buzzing with such retrenching conjunction that the
intelligentsia in its unsparing suppleness termed this migration of starving
people as ‘Biharisation of north India Bihar had taken a vow to ‘turn whole
of Delhi Bihar ’.
*
* * *
Apart from such baby-pink
tussles among the different strands of the hugely diasporic Indian society,
there was a commonality linking the diversities across the length and breadth
of this vast country. It was the public anger against Pakistan Kashmir its state idea; the incendiary
core of its very existence. Funnily daring and sabotaging manoeuvres of its
intelligence agency had opened numerous faceless fronts against a development
aspiring India
Unfortunately, when
such a large common denominator, under the aegis of cultural nationalists, is used
to divide religion to get an abhorable number left, then it becomes the ghastly
and sworn divider of society on communal basis; a stage for the politics of
vandalism and religion of cynical enthusiasm. Religion remains out to be a
prank to banter with, to vocally combat jehad, to torment most common
and poor of men with hard shelled words about nationality, affiliation, faithfulness,
etc., etc. And in such a quagmire, the teeming novices who don’t know how to
swim in religious waters, very often get scalped in.
The other
representative of Islam in the village was an ironsmith. A poor migrant from
Uttar Pradesh he stayed at the district city. He was a small bow-armed and
bow-legged man with very heavy and muscular limbs. His iron-willed hands had
gone animally insensitive and hard, thanks to his daily worship at the altar of
anvil and hammer. In addition to his razzling hard work he’d to gobble up the
iron pills of desi cursory glances at his typical Mohammedan appearance
and bigoted loose talk of the revenge seeking rusty farmers, who finding
Pakistan too far chose to settle score with this tiny representative of the
hated neighbour. Ignoring all this taunty tagging at his goatee, the ironsmith
worked for a livelihood in front of his rented shop at the village bus stand.
Whenever the watchman
visited the barber shop adjoining the ironsmith’s, he would just flit in and
out, ignoringly slipping away like the similar charges repulsing each other-–scatters
of Islam flowing away from each other lest the bigger coalesced particle might caught
the attention of the big consensus against Pakistan and thus open the pandora
box of some misunderstanding and suspicion.
Howzzzaatt! Is’t the punch
line of a possible third world war spruced up by a clash of civilizations?
Islam on the back of dark fundamentalist forces galloping with cries of jehad
and the proceedings going around tackling it. Monstrous convulsions of a few
bigoted souls have branded a whole religion as anti-world, anti-peace and
anti-humanity. So here we are, buoyed up against jehad, with our hate
looks upon the poorest and humblest of Muslims with distrust, hate, anger and
farce.
*
* * *
Monsoon clouds were
playing hide and seek with the sun on the verge of dusk. Crimson rays were
tapering towards grayness. A cloud’s margin which was now hovering over the
natural water reservoir of the village was silhouetted by the highest of
sunbeams. A kite was flying in the sky. The kite and glowing fringe of the
cloud seemed flaunting some mystically vague message. Stirring pull of the
kite, flown by some farmer’s son from the roof of a farm-house, serpented
towards the north-west in pursuance of the glowing rim of the cloud.
The kite was
abandonely nose-diving, and then it vibrated sideways with a very low period of
oscillation, making it seem flaunting a gesture of denial; an avowed sway of
negation to the just spoken proud words of the fat Sadhu to the pond
overseer. It seemed to support the poor man.
There was no solace
to the Sadhu’s languidly bereaving self. His clout had remained limited
to his sole disciple in the village, the ever obedient and servile Bhagat Ram
or Bhagte. He accursed the villagers for such a lackadaisical response to his
religiosity. So two months passed, nothing changed except the fact that now the
watchman in complete contrast to his initial rabbit fear seemed to have
emboldened a bit and, thus, was somewhat at ease in his movements over and
around the place. To the religioner, this lack of shudder in the neighbour’s
ever brooding gait at his corpulent sight seemed mocking at his uninfluential
and stagnated religionhood of which he was bursting with pride on the day of
arrival.
Apart from this, only
the monsoon retreated leaving behind mild wintry spores during the month of
October: the month when summer prepared to go southwards; when tall green paddy
with ripening spikes turned yellow; when the pond called the birds from the Himalayas through environmental telepathy. It was the
month of transition when the winter was solidifying its feet at sunset and
sunrise. Some mist veiled the countryside at both these times. Hazily not-so-bright
sunrays in the murky sky were just a pale shadow of their summer time reflected
glory.
The farmers were
preparing the seedbed for the early-sown varieties of wheat in the land left
fallow during the last farming cycle. Above in the sky, the sunrays had a
tendency to coolly whitewash everything. One could see the groups of women
going to fields to cut the fodder grass jollying aground in its full fecundity
at a place at least couple of miles from any of the nearest habitations. Here
they chatted whatever they wanted; played with nature and, God forbidding a
chance, with some farmer beau too. Phrases of their escapades reached villages
too because the fortunate farmer couldn’t help boasting about his sweethearts
grass-hopping around him in the solitude amidst paddy fields, in jowar,
in sugarcane.
Sunrays were fastly
slanting towards south, thus making the noons
lesser bright with silvery incandescence hazing around. Air was becoming
denser. Forcing voices of angrily tilling tractors ricocheted off into the
ripening paddy. Flocks of sparrows swooped over the fields expecting a harvest
time bonus. During this month of kartik, the God of health and boon, a
brand new health consciousness was emerging among the village youths. The
children meanwhile quarreled over marbles in the evenings after the school
time.
To the north-west of
the mound and to the western side of the village---to the north of the sandy uplifted
landscape---boys from a neighbouring village had dug up a palestra. There they
played kabaddi in evenings. Subsiding orange-cool rays perfectly couched
in the isolation shone on their sand-smeared, sweating bodies. Dried jowar
still standing lifelessly in the fields along the canal to the western side
seemed to cut off any rebukes from the elders as well as the call of studies
from their village. Playing in the lap of sandy reddish cool earth, rolling
over one another, exercisingly mixing in nature, fun and workout, they seemed
to be bathed in ecstatically riveting idyllic colours. There was nobody to
watch their limitless lolly-pollying, save some farmer or two on an inspection
tourney to their ripening paddy.
A giant, dark and
dense mango tree, a very big and old hollow-trunked peepal tree from
which came ominously shrill cries of the nocturnals and a big guava orchard
were the prominent sharers of this solitude. After a hard workout, their bodies
fraught with fatigue and sand, all of them would jump into the canal and swim
there till it was dark. A heavy diet of butter, milk and chapattis will
sign a happy note of ending for the day.
This place was a good
two kilometres from the village of our mound and at least one-and-half from
theirs. Though not much on account of the post-modern astronomical reaches of
man, yet the sluggishly luring sand of the path passing by it made it look far,
far away from any human intervention.
This sandy footpath
linked the two villages. During the older days, children from the neighbouring
village used to come by this path for studying at the private High school–-Samaj Kalyan
High School
The school was a
direct offshoot of the cultural and educational inertia flowing from Bengal . Tall and imposing figure of its founder clad in
spotless white and amicably starched linen knee-length kurta and a tight
fitting pyjama, had cemented its bricks with the moisture of his sweat.
He ran his institution through the funds collected from the countryside and of
course some pittance from the government as well. Starting with two rooms which
he got built with the contribution of his own labour in mud and bricks, he
raised it to 50 spacious rooms gaudily skirting around a beautiful park, and a
playground with its purported look of ‘education with play’. Eucalyptus, seshame,
peepal, neem, gulmohar, countless flowers and green hedges around the park
in all their natural ostensibility symbolised the peak point of the great man’s
achievement. Even the colleges at the district city seemed to be dwarfed by
this literacy push from the countryside, as the school’s imposing building and around
2000 students wrote a glowing treatise on the great Bengali’s plumy travails
among the hardworking brutes of this countryside.
It was under the
subsiding sunrays in their before-winter pliancy over this solitary path
traversing among the fields in their lonesome festivity, the Sadhu was
being escorted by two people to the neighbouring village. One was Bhagte, as
usual, in his servile faith firmly fastening its two ends: the ultimate at the
one side and the religioner at the other. Other man was an acquaintance of his
from the neighbouring village. The talk was led by the ritualist in pedagogic
domineering tones about the magical curing properties of his bhabhuti, the
holy ash from his fire place.
Languidly hauling along
the sand the disheartened guru drew some comforting solace from his
disciple’s solo effort in getting him a client-cum-patient. Bhagat Ram’s friend
was a very poor fellow. His son had suddenly fallen ill under the black spell,
as his wife thought it to be, of a witchcraft which the poor boy happened to
step over at a street square, considered to be the most opportune spot for the
evil spirits to strike their unseen felony attack. Her plenteous implorations
had forced the poor low caste labourer to run helter-skelter in search of a
capable sorcerer who could save the life of their boy. He hadn’t brought any
means of conveyance, hence the helpless religioner had been ordained to limp
for about four kilometres to show and prove the versatility of his skill.
When the group passed
by the exercising vagrants with their steepling muscles, one of them shouted
typical nudging satire, particular to this socio-cultural countryside unit,
which escapes too early from the tongue and instantly goes on to burn any heart
willing to be respected in the first place. These fouling local puns spare and
differentiate none. In their rude alacrity they end up bundling everything in
one rustically compact bale of the whole.
So when the holy man
gave attention to these figures with developing muscles, naked except their red
langots, playing truant with a man of God his heart sank.
Most muscular of them
voiced a relaxing gimmickry, “Maharajji, your God is angry with me. My
digestion has gone bad. You see, how thin I’ve become!” he flaunted his bicep
as a prelude to his proclamation, and promptly an egg propped up.
All of them laughing
bashfully rolled over in the soft sand of the palestra.
The Sadhu knew
the futility of tackling such flabbergasting histrionics of the youths, thus
pretended deafness. But when he saw the bluntly flat face of the visitor to his
hut, who of course knew the young men because they belonged to his village, he
felt himself slighted. After all he was going to his house to raise his holy
stature by several notches by curing the ailing boy.
He thus retorted back
in a much vaunting baritone voice, “Aye, what a horribly pathetic figure, son!
What’ve you done to yourself! Come to my hut someday and I’ll turn you somewhat
healthy, so that you are no more ashamed of yourself.”
This time they tested
the ultimate waters of the sea of laughter from the side of the ritualist,
while the young man severely bashed up by the retorting taunt stood racking his
brain to find something for revenge. Bhagat Ram too felt buoyed up against the
casteist strangleholds, as the boys belonged to the arrogant farming community
which rated itself even above the Brahmans, who in turn from the Vedic times
claimed to be at the top of caste hierarchy. But here in this countryside, at
this period of time, grandly hardworking farmer community of the Jats
ruled the castiest roost. With a supposedly ever pure conscience–-which they
claimed to have been burnt to golden ashes and hues in the holy fire of
hardwork in the fields–-they condemned the Brahmans as the surreal
prophets of doom, using their bedeviled superstitions and rituals to exploit
the other castes. From 1900 to 1950 farmers of the area had conscientiously
followed Arya Samaj founded by Swami Dayanand in 1875, who had led a revivalist
crusade against the anathema of ritualistic religion. But after that the ritualism
was fastly reverting back to its earlier position.
* * * *
Festival of Dussehra
arrived in the third week of October. Celebrated to salute the seigniorial
triumph of goodness over evil, it was the day on which Lord Rama had defeated
and killed the demon King Ravana. The rakshas, evil forces, with the
intention of a murderous assault at humanity from a point blank range had
challenged the systematic moral values of the universe. Thank God, it was so
easy for the Godly spirit to emerge out as winner because three quarter
goodness fought against a doomed badness with its one quarter share. But now in
this ever active miff between these two aspects of creation, the odds were
heavily in favour of the God’s unsavoury, dark child with its seventy five
percent chunk in the humanity’s shape and size.
Although it’d never
happened in the village before, but this year Ram Leela had been staged for the
preceding nine days. Life of Lord Rama had been played in the evenings on a
squinky wooden stage. On the tenth day of Vijayadashmi, which was the culmination
of Durga Puja festival in the watchman’s home state, three funnily daring
effigies of the demons Ravana, Meghanatha and Kumbhakarna were waiting to be
burnt.
A motley crowd in
full apathy to the real meaning and significance of the occasion had gathered
around the effigies of the evil. A bunch of young brats and buffoons, who knew
nothing except jestering, mockery, innovating obscenities in their perplexing
freckles, and strongest modes of laughing, were at their tweaking satire’s
peak. Their cackling seemed to taillight the evil. They and many other such
groups, though somewhat milder than the main one, for the last nine days had
been casting the mocking beams of their indurated selves at the stage, thus
turning the whole holy enactment into an entertaining comedy. Their favourite
character was Ravana, who laughed so incendiary and kidnapped Lord Rama’s wife.
So whenever the fellow playing Ravana, with his huge whiskers, thundered in
mike one could easily see a blessing look on most of the faces for their immortally
mythicized compeer. In a piquant comparison to the demon king, Lord Rama’s
graciously ambling figure, clad in ascetic robes, wanly limbering to look for
his wife seemed to them too uninspiring, caught in the morass of
ever-obsequious mores. So, majority of the people-–about seventy five percent
of them-–vigorously clapped for the demon king. But for the myth’s sake their
darling character was to be burnt today. Hence, under a snootily vague sense of
revolt against this ever-fatal mythical ordeal against the evil, they were
enthralling their skewed souls with mumping carnivalities.
A moderately tall
figure in his early fifties, clad in a silky grey long-shirt, a plain white dhoti
with blue borders and a little
piece of head-cloth, was trying his best to prevent the Lord’s play
ending as a farce, in which Ravana might get victory. His reddish smart
features seemed languishing, spiritless, drenched out of energy in fact, due to
the nine days’ labour for the sake of a hugely mitigated goodness during the
present times. He was, to be precise, the organiser-in-charge of the show
personifying the unmootable victory of a sedulous goodness over a cannily
ingenious badness. He was vicariously placed in the buzzing farcical chaos from
the side of the goodness. But, it was a totally dichotomous game, in which the evil’s
buntings were flying unflinchingly even on this day of Dussehra. So his deep
set and wise looking eyes were clouded with concern and dismay. Those eyes of
moderate proportions seemed to shut their hair-paneled doors against the noise.
His clean-shaven upper lip was shorn of its finely vaulting undulation as it
compressed its partner in order to prevent a foul word falling out of his mouth,
while the medium-bridged long nose appeared to sniff out the smell of devil.
Some women in facial
veils sat huddled in a pack, whispering and laughing secretly at the nailing,
mercurial jestery. In fact, they were the target audience whom the mockers
wanted to appease and make laugh. And they would go to the extremes of ridiculous
verbal foolhardiness to get the job done.
All of it boiled down
to a mocking chaos. In the mob’s discreet discrepancy, slenderest voice of the
organiser announcing the chanting of some psalms before burning the effigies
went out like a damp squib without falling on any ear. As a suitable proxy to
the boring sacred songs, they demanded a lusty loquacious dance on the latest filmy
hit song by one of Ravana’s courtesans. Their hell-cracking shrieks and natterings
forced the girlish looking boy, who played the role of the courtesan in a gaudy
green bodice with rags stuffed inside and a long shiny pink kirtle, to come onto
the stage and give argute pelvic thrusts; while a motley song involving some
western beats amidst smatterings of desi notes blared from the loudspeaker.
As the nymphet
started a luring dance-–she’d become the talk of adolescent boys in the village
forgetting that he was a boy-–a chubby drunkard, fully boozed up for the holy
festival, got onto the stage and made up for any paucity still remaining in the
entertainment. Their desire stroked up by several notches with each of the dancer’s
lusty hip movement, forcing them to throw appreciating rupees and paisas
at her (forgive us for calling the boy so, for they couldn’t have imagined him the
other way).
The Sadhu, who
had been provided a chair in one corner, was experiencing some dancing twitch
in his defective leg which couldn’t help but show some sensitivity to the sheer
hip-hopping beats of the desi-cum-peregrine jumblement. Bhagte was
standing with his arms crossed over his chest. With his back supporting a wall,
his expression betrayed a loath for the erratically placed musicity which
severely dented the religious fervour on this auspicious day.
“Nobody can believe
that she is a boy!” the Sadhu marveled at the slim and slender court
nymphet of the Ravana sending hearts hiccupping with her rhythmically
systematised body movements.
Her apple like made
up cheeks, heavily glossed pink lips, ever moving hips and buttocks in all
directions, thumping thwacking feet on the stage with chiming anklets, and
gorgeously voluptuous made up buxom breasts, made her look like dancing for the
victorious effigies depicting the evil, whose progenies had grown threefold
since the Ramayana era.
“Huummm!” Bhagte
sighed at the humans’ dereliction of the goodness on this auspicious day. “He has
been hired for one thousand rupees,” he spoke flatly for his guru’s
information.
“But it’s very bad
though. Doing all this in the name of God,” the Sadhu assumed his
religiosity once again.
“Maharaj aren’t
there many such apsaras dancing in the palace of Lord Indra
“Bad... what did you
say?” the Sadhu pretended not to listen, biding his time for a preaching
explanation.
“I mean, the Gods
watching the dance of young women in all types of revealing dresses,” Bhagte
repeated for an odd and rare statistic efficacy of his statement.
His religious
benefactor looked up.
“It’s one of the
nectars which the Gods have to taste for the perfection of their existence and
immortality,” he once again sounded preaching like the language of law, the
legal (religious) jargon intended to convey as many facts as possible in a
single phrase of a little sentence.
Bhagte didn’t say
anything to this. He was wondering over the hard tapas, or penance, by
the yogis who abstain from such pleasures of life. Such abstinence, including
his guru’s, followed by the God’s people on earth seemed to him even
more rigorously holy than the God Himself. He was thus left devotionally
overawed with the religioners’ self-denial and its infinite endurance on the
path of life.
Then suddenly someone
from the crowd torched the effigies which burst with the firecrackers stuffed
inside them, leaving the play’s Rama in limbo as the poor, uninteresting fellow
waited with a burning arrow. His bow had missed the legendary task assigned to
it, hence the poor decorated piece of wood hung dilatorily. The rioters laughed
at him. The effigies were burnt, but not before thundering their victory in
these evil times. The organiser beat his head in disgust and slumped back in
his chair.
“Ravana is great!
Ravana is great!” they jeered, as if they had been appointed squires by the
evil to propagate a hell-raising diatribe against goodness.
Just at the same
time, in a street the pond upkeeper was returning from a shop with his humble
purchasings of rice, salt and few candles. Some street urchins were bursting
firecrackers for the festivity’s sake. One of them in order to accentuate their
rendezvous threw one around the watchman’s leg from behind. It kissed his
dog-eared pyjama and exploded with full ferocity. Its sound was however
devoured by the drawling continuous cracking of the effigies at the other end
of the village. Startled fragile man jumped in air, as if blown up by the
joyously exploding evil at the other place. The boys clapped in their twitchy
apery. There, the audience caught in a raging passion’s melee rejoicingly
danced for the devil’s misdemeanouvres in all its grandiosity. It seemed as if adharma,
a sinner’s unreligiosity, had emerged out winner with its greedy, lascivious
ordeal.
* * * *
It is, or perhaps was
because it’s struttingly vanishing, a custom related to this festival that at
night sanjhi (a female replica on the walls made of whitewashed clay
stars sticking to the bricks with the help of dung) is removed and its parts
are put in pitchers with holes around the upper periphery. A fire is burnt
inside. These are then carried by the womenfolk on their heads to the pond
under the fleecing smile of a cool moonlight. They go knee deep into the water
and leave the pitchers to float over the water. At the same time brats are
ready with their heavy sticks to break them. Then women try to, or at least
pretend it, save their pitchers from the marauders. But at the same time it’s a
bad omen if a pitcher swims to safety across the pond, glowing over its water.
Now, it might happen
that, in the ensuing melee and confusion, a poor pitcher ends up bearing whole
lot of strikes by the vagrants who in their utter concentration on a single earthenware
find its voice of burst too luring and thus go on beating the water until a long
time after the potsherds have become a part of the bottom mud. Meanwhile, some
other pitcher shows the ominous inclination to swim to safety.
A young girl
whispered to a still younger one, giving her the burning pot:
“Go and float it into
the water from behind that keekar,” pointing to the small semi-acacian
thicket by the shore near the western embankment of the pond, which was now
visible at least up to a little less than half the distance between road and
the mound, as water had started to be soaked into the earth on its western
side, where the still inundated bogs, water grass and shrubbery made the area almost
impenetrable.
She did the same.
Hiding the pitcher she crept silently unseen by the pot breakers, and left it
over a supplely moonlit crest of a wavelet, which after wispily hitting the
edge was exuberantly going back to some feisty spot inside the water’s lakish
sprawl. To add to its unhurried escape, she stroked the water with her small
hands. With the thrust of an oar, the pot was in a moment beyond the reach of tallest
of sticks in the attackers’ hands.
The girl who’d
ordered the venture, now yelled out of excitement.
“Look, look my sanjhi
is escaping unbroken!”
The boys ran to avoid
the looming defeat. Some went into thigh deep water and tried from there. But
they couldn’t move further into the water, because a few steps ahead the water
was suddenly neck deep and they hadn’t put off their clothes. Some were in
their boxer shorts though, but they hesitated to put off their shirts. So,
instead of jumping into the water and do the deed in a stroke, they preferred
throwing lumps of earth. It made the game more interesting and lengthy, giving
them some more time to spend in the pleasurable proximity of the womenfolk.
The lucky pot however
survived the bombardment. Left in a lurch they ran along the embankment
throwing any object they could lay their hands upon, while the women and girls
flaunted their lavish smile somewhat freely in the moon’s white semi-light. But
their march came to a sudden halt, as their path of chase was submerged under
the water.
The pond’s water was
smiling in its hazy, spiffy twinklings in the milky moonlight. However, after a
few dozen yards of indistinct visibility, the mist tapered off the sky’s only
light into a sleepishly dark blue landscape mosaically sprawled across the
field’s aisle. Light from the potholes began to dissolve into the blissful
dimness of the mist hanging over the water. Still, there was a place left from
where one could throw a pebble and break it. That was the bearer of two huts,
the mound.
Its dwellers were
looking at the pot. In his role as the saviour of a ritual belonging to his
religion, the Sadhu lurched forward to the eastern extremity of the
little hillock.
“Goddamnit! This
nasty inauspicious one has escaped everything. It needs to be broken,
otherwise...” he muttered.
He rummaged in the
grass for a brick piece. Found one nonetheless, and had an aim at the pitcher
with his left hand. But his imbalance around the wood failed him. The throw
landed near its mark, but couldn’t just shake it violently so as to create any
possibility of getting it drowned. The effort shook his tripod structure and he
went flat down on the shrubbery whose needly blades pinched him at many places.
The Muslim saw the
plight of his neighbour. He had the instinct to help him, but the Sadhu’s ever
existing tendency to lock-horns and razor sharp tongue, which would’ve easily
thrust the onus on him, held him back from doing so. His neighbour’s words
which had preceded the accursed throw flashed in the watchman’s mind and so in
order to avoid the bad omen for a common humanity he searched for another piece
of brick, stone, wood or anything. His dexterous hands came across one very
soon. This he targeted at the fleeting, escaping pot. With a subdued, shrill
cry of “Ya Allah” he hit the target, which went bust and was instantly
swallowed by the water.
Festival revelers heaved
a sigh of huge satisfaction. They clapped, whistled, laughed carousally and
improvised countless funny adjectives about the rogue pot. Thinking that the
pious Sadhu had saved the day for them, they yelled unobliged:
“Sadhu baba ki jay! What if he’s lame?
He’s great and mighty nevertheless!”
Small effort of Islam
had come to the rescue of Hinduism, which the Sadhu took as a defeat. He
trudged forward, raging for the defeat at the hands of this weak and fragile
Muslim.
“How dare you break
that pitcher!?” he yelled at the diminutive figure.
“Maharajji... y... yu mmist that,
so I was j... ust helping you,” cowering old man somehow managed an excuse.
“You fool! Your hands
will paralyse! Just tell me why you did that?” the ritualist shook with rage.
Thank God! It was
semi-dark. Otherwise the grueling grills on his features would’ve got the old
man fainted.
“Now, if I’m to tell
those fools that you… a Mussalman,” the Hindu hit the punch line as harshly as
he could, “has broken the pitcher, they will break your head to make up for
their miss-hits at the pot.”
“B... But maharaj,
it would’ve bbeen a... bb... bad omen if I...” the watchman tried to defend
himself with his meekly struggling words.
“You idiot, you
yourself are the baddest omen around here!” the mound’s wanting-to-be-owner cast
a greedy look at the elevation.
“You old rag, why did
you do it? Don’t you know that you’d no right to break that pitcher,” anger’s
soaring mercury touched its peak inside his hot head.
“Why...?” it just
slipped out of the watchman’s mouth.
“Because you’re a
Mussalman!” the Hindu thundered in a very spurious tone.
Only now the poor man
realised that he’d committed a crime. With folded hands he moved apologetically
towards the Hindu religioner.
“Forgive me maharaj! I forgot that... I’m just a...
Muslim watchman of this pond,” he sounded piteously innocent. “I... I...” he
cleared his tearful throat, “was wrong in taking the pot within my duty as the
pond upkeeper. I thought bad omen was meant for the pond, fish, and...” it was
in a wondrously tragic way he completed his apology, surprising nonetheless,
given his ever sewn up lips.
His neighbour felt a
bit empowered on account of these suffering words.
“Ok!” the Sadhu
gave him a nudge by his crutch, which almost toppled down the Muslim’s pathetic
figure. “Never do anything like that in future without asking me,” the paunchy
fellow admonished the little old man.
* * * *
When even after
four-and-a-half decades of nation-state formation, the centre as well as state
governments failed to provide most elementary and basic amenities of life,
people’s own lukewarm awareness made them realise the futility of depending on
the state machinery for drinking water, clean streets, electricity and security
from the crime indolently raising its head in the wake of spiteful unemployment
rate among the youths.
Nobody could’ve
overlooked the mildly serene progress of the Indian economy. But unfortunately
the countenance to the same effect had been limited to just a few facts like
any urban enterprising fellow who’d earlier hundred rupees in his pockets now
advertently carried few times more; owner of a Maruti 800 now boasted of some
other exquisite model; visitor to tawdry clubs now had a domineering eye at
foreign picnicking shores; and a telephone subscriber was now, with a digital
clairvoyance, at the doorstep of mobile and internet.
Most of the villagers
had been reduced to small and marginal farmer status; thanks to the intergenerational
fragmentation of land holdings among the male progenies. They thus survived in
a vicious circle starting with some surplus from the wheat crop, most of which
was then to be spent on costly inputs in the paddy cultivation. The rest kept
them alive on two meals a day; gave a tepid feeling of being engaged in a
farmer’s conscience massaging hard labour throughout the year; an occasional
house repair or even construction; a lucky marriage in the family perhaps; and
if still luckier then a new consumer electronics article entered the
commiserated house .
The electricity was
absent for as long as sixteen hours a day. This was in stark contrast to the
state government’s claim to provide full electricity to the requirements of its
subjects. The other claim, made in full political finesse, was of providing hundred
percent metalled road connectivity. But the pity was that there hadn’t been any
layering over the spitefully beaten tar of the district road for the last
twenty years.
Tired up with the
brace and bit of daily fetching drinking water from the fields, the villagers
had caught some tiny innuendo from the concept of community participation.
Guided by some immaculate social concernedness inside a life-affirming heart, a
drinking water project was being discussed in the village. Initiator was Ram
Singh, organiser-in-charge of the Ramleela, in his ever so demure appearance
(given the unharmonious spirits of the times) clad around an invincible spirit.
He had formed a committee for constructing a water tank near the canal. With
the help of pumps, bore-well water was to be lifted to a tower-tank and then
supplied to the village. Its construction, operation and maintenance cost was
to be equally shared by all those wanting to have a water connection.
But, such small
grass-root steps had miles to go to cover the diabolical administrative
lacunae. Roads needed a holistic layering. Electricity wires needed to be made
current carriers instead of their present status as the crows’ favourite
perching place. Streets needed to be paved with bricks. And of course, life and
property needed a security cover against the spurt in crime which seemed to
club days and nights together while fagging around in its obdurately sartorial
style to harm anyone in any form.
Of late, ferocious kachha
baniyan gang was in the countryside news. Just clad in underwear these
criminals smeared their bodies with oil to undo a clutch at any of their limbs.
Sphere of their strikes included the most modern areas of the national capital
to the remotest farmer in faraway countryside. What made their robberies more
loathsome was the perpetrators’ predilection towards murdering the victim.
The police informed
the village sarpanch that during the night patrolling it’d spotted some
unlawful elements near the village bus stand. As the village was situated in the
northern side loop of the crescenting road, open countryside surrounding it
from three sides, the villagers realised the futility of solely depending on
the police against the anti-social tweakers, because everybody knew-–even the
robbers-–that the police jeep’s beacon and siren will pass by the road as
simply as it had approached. Also, there was a legend about the police always
playing safe without ever taking a risk. It was well exemplified by its
inactive role in the now famous battle-–or call it a bloody quarrel-–for a
piece of land between two claimant families, about ten years ago. People were
damn sure that the police was waiting for the bloodbath to be stopped by
itself. Afraid to get harmed, while the land hungry farmers copiously shed
blood with guns, sticks and axes, the protectors of law were waiting with a
safe circumspection about a kilometre away. They later arrived at the scene to
count fifteen dead bodies.
Interpreting this
history in its full veracity the villagers had made their own security
arrangement in the form of self defence groups. People of every locality kept a
watch in the streets by posting groups of ten-fifteen persons. The motley group
of villagers armed with sticks and forked rakes manning these posts were to be
changed everyday so that each house could get an equipollent privilege to
defend the village.
The village watchman,
who anecdotally shouted each family’s patriarch’s name during nights, imploring
them to remain awake, was the communication agent among these posts if he came
across anything dubious in any nook or corner of the village. He would meet the
vigilant fellows sucking out a drawl from the hookah, and keep them
awake in the innocuously laid out darkness lest they might end up getting a sudden
spank.
One such post had
been set up near a well by the street between the schools, at a place where
another street sneaked into the western section of the village. Beyond this the
outer path further went for a few hundred yards on its straight northern
journey to end at a tri-junction. One path from here went westwards to the
fields on the tiny sandy plateau and the adjoining lowland, all of which was
under intensive cultivation made possible by bore-wells and the canal passing
through the area. The other path went eastwards on its journey kissing the
northern fringe of the village, separating it from the vast celebrant sprawl of
paddy fields, and emerged on the district road at a place where the abandoned
temple–-where the priest had been murdered–-stood staidly, already in some
ruins. Native saint’s commemorative shrine, Sadavrata, was at a small
distance to the village side from this discarded temple under the crucible onus
of time.
Six or seven sturdy
youths were manning the vigilance party near the well. They were passing their
time in a teensy-weensy crinkling of desi jokes. Oddly creative modes of
laughter aptly sallied as the tail-ends of most redundant of jocularity. Sitting
on two charpoys with a hookah in between, they were fluffily
bantering away their time in a happiest hoopla. The moon being in its last
quarterly stage was too dim and was about to be lost in the traces of snoozing
clouds. Rightly adjacent to the well, paddy was belatedly smirking as the
harvesting could start any day.
Time must have been
around one hour past midnight .
One or two shadows moved equivocally–-were they specters or humans?-–along the
school walls. Vagrant voices of the young men turned to crooning whispers and
their fists tightened about their heavy sticks.
“Who’s there?” one of
them asked with a defender’s grittiness.
There was no response
from the shadows transgressing into the village.
“Speak out or we’ll
break your skull!” a still more poignant voice echoed tartly.
The voice had the
entire propensity that it was just ready to use its hand. The anchorite had to
speak out, because his disciple, who was walking concomitantly, suddenly
shifted himself behind the burly figure.
“It’s me dear ones,”
the religioner spoke hesitantly, completely aware of their blossoming
youthfulness and its proportionate irreverence almost touching atheism, which
could even go to the extent of their shooting back tauntingly:
“Whose wife you’re
going to visit tonight?”
This introduction had
some kind of universal declaration of identity, thus not getting any clue to
its recognition they waited for the seemingly unharming voice to approach them.
The religioner had tuned his response to the best of his throat, in complete
contrast to his normally crackling, groggy voice.
“Oh, it’s you Sadhu
maharaj!” one of them said
recognising the swaying wooded bulk.
Aaah! How urgently
the ritualist aspired to see them standing before him with folded hands! But
alas, that wasn’t to be the case.
“Why’re you loitering
around at such a late hour, maharajji?” the last word pepped out of his
tongue as if it was just a name of the godhead, rather than the title of
religious respect.
The servant of God
felt a singe, a little insult to be precise. In the secrecy of his suffering
self he gave a cursing, leering snort and kept mum.
With a subjugated
soul Bhagte sheepishly volunteered to undo the crux for the sake of his holy guruji.
“He’s going to my
house,” he took the onus on himself, breaking the jinx of society’s sly stories
weaved out of few fanged facts like the dark, Sadhu, disciple, visit to
the home, etc., etc.
“Oh, Bhagte, you
peacock, dancing well after midnight !”
promptly came the casteist pun.
“We’ve invited him
for a dinner today,” the disciple grinned unmindful of the pun.
“Haan! A feast with
your wife,” the rascal laughed inimically, whom the poor villager’s smouldering
anger couldn’t have given even the slightest of a burn.
His mangled self
quietly took a long draught of the suppurating muddy fluid of caste-born
humiliation.
“But it’s no time for
supper. It should have been in the evening or early night,” this one appeared
miraculously reasoned.
“Actually, Sadhu
maharaj were sitting lost in his meditation… and when they opened eyes it
had become so late,” he lied for the sake of his spiritual benefactor, but the
effort made his heart writhe in a boiling cauldron.
“Sadhuji, how
can you sit motionless at a place for such a long period of time?” an enquiring
one asked podgily.
To the emblematic
scion of mendicancy it felt a bit comely, because it smelt of some wondrous awe
about the friarship’s trancy nuggets. “It’s all the grace of God,” the friar
said calmly, pacifying his silently ebullient soul, “We yogis can do it
for years.”
Nobody from the group
took it seriously as none of them had the intention or capacity to think about
a matter even for a few minutes, why to bother and talk of years.
“I’ve heard that you beat
away a ghost from a woman,” the exorcist couldn’t get it whether it was a taunt
or something serious. “Can you remove this bastard from me?” he began dancing a
haunted macabre, while others surrendered to spiffy twangs of a horrendous,
blustering laughter completely burying the religioner’s faintest of hopes of
getting some respect from them.
“Sadhu maharaj,
remove the ghost from Bhagte’s wife.”
“From his sister-in-law,
who’s so beautiful but remains so sullen.”
“And from his
daughter too. She too is growing fastly to have one.”
With each of these grueling
grills, the recluse and his sole disciple took their devastated steps to a
narrow bylane which led to the latter’s community.
The dawn broke. No kachha
baniyan gang had struck. Everything had been the same as on any other
morning except the square in Bhagte’s locality where some curiously heinous and
fearful objects were placed in a systematic pattern, all neat and clean to a
sorcerers delight except at a place where some ill-fated foot had fallen.
Bones, a small skull, sweetmeats, rice, flour, turmeric, vermillion and blood
droplets were laid out in a witchcrafty snare. What was most fearful was the
fact that exorcism’s altar had been broken at one end, indicating someone had
stepped onto it. It made almost everyone to check his or her and all near and
dear ones’ feet to satiate the awestruck heart. It was so because the evils
were thought to be transferred to the person who happened to put his foot on
the witchcraft.
As they say, charity
begins at home. His guru’s latest exorcist’s innings started from the
disciple’s home itself. Blindly copious faith of the poor villager easily
dropped anchor in the mysterious, paranormal and supernatural waters where the
shiny lotus of his guru’s occult powers cast hypnotic waves all around.
Lamenting pooh-poos
of his mother had forced him to take the help of his Godly guide to dispel the ‘haunting
spirit’– as she put it – from his sister-in-law. People said they had heard the
evil spirit squeaking when the unfortunate lovely young woman got those tormenting
fits.
“I’m a childhood
friend of hers! Died during delivery of my child! Wouldn’t allow her to become
a mother!” people vouched for the authenticity of these words spoken by the
haunting spirit.
To substantiate this theory, the poor little young
women with evincing lithe features had suffered at least half a dozen
miscarriages. Her old, illiterate and fully-braced-with-superstition
mother-in-law, with a firm tenacity to her and many others’ theory of ‘possessing
spirit’, had clubbed day and night together to convince her son, Bhagte to get
his guru throw a poison arrow at the evil spirit. It was for this
wildcat liaison with unknown spirit, the Sadhu and his disciple had
entered the village that late night.
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