2
Life and Times of the Tale
Throttling despair and perspiring tension
of the night had been calmed down by the lulling melodies of the heavy downpour
which lasted till the wee hours of morning. Insects were silent as if in a
dazed suspense. The little hillock seemed racking its brain worried about the
hurtling rise of the water around its base by a few inches. Coquettish,
black-storming-bugbear had vented out all its watery fury and now looked absently,
dull coloured, waiting for the indefatigable dawn to cut through its exhausted
fabric.
It was just a few minutes to five in
the morning. Twilight with its searching looks was groping in the faded dark.
Similarly, the indisposing melancholy of the awakening villagers—who slowly,
slowly woke up demurringly---was cheered up by the religious raylet. The priest
in the newly constructed temple situated inside the village was playing
devotional songs on full volume; surrendering notes of devotional music, traveling
on an incessant journey reached the two huts outside the village. A tractor
with its trolley broke the road’s quietude. The women in the trolley singing
songs of reverence for the pontiff whose preaching they were going to attend,
as it was Sunday. The Sadhu’d
lit up his first fire of initiation in the hut. The holy fire in his squarish altar,
the religious hearth, burnt tongue-tied for sacredness as he poured samagri
and chanted holy mantras. Incense fragrance fought the damp smell, as
the performer adjusted himself in a meditative repose and soon lost himself in
a mysterious trance; the roving religious wayfarer, ever listless and forlorn.
But what was that which sounded so
irreligious in this delayed Brahmamuhurat? With its screwing gusto it
tried to cut off the religious stream. Oh, it was the infuriating hooting and howling
mockery by thousands of poultry chickens. They furiously henpecked the futility
of fattening fodder scattered around. The mourning sizzled over the sacred
religious strands. Their crying seemed to match the poetics of great poet Mohammed
Iqbal. The Indian poet who as a secular nationalist had given a clarion call of
utmost Hindustani patriotism: “Sare Jahan Se Achha Hindustan
Hamara!”—”Our India
Once he had lusciously sung:
“O my India
Thy present state I can’t bear,
At thy murmuring plight
Lurks in my eye a tear,
It yells out a warning
For the all to hear.
Divinity’s clarion-call
Makes my pen write a funeral song,
Aah! Thy Gardener committing wrong!
Slapping into a flower’s flawless
beauty,--
A stigmatised blot so haughty.
Even the heaven with an angry persistence
Seems ready to wipe out your
existence.
Let the nightingale not coo about
The golden glory of past,
The bygone’s complacent shout
Must not create the future’s doubt.
Voice a unified symphony
Echoing in the sky’s company!”
The voice of secularism, of unity, so
fatal, so irreligious!
The watchman was lying on his paddy
straw bed half awake, half dozing. Multidimensional religious stream streaked
into his ramshackle shelter. Suddenly the Sadhu blew his shankha,
the conch shell, whose sententious notes huskily flew over the shanty hutment,
with the propensity of blowing it away.
The pond upkeeper was startled by this
sudden reactionary vicissitude. He sat up in his bed. With utmost constraining
reservation, he murmured, “Allah!” accompanied by a rickety yawn which
seemed almost portentous for his frail bones. Incense smell from the second hut
reached his nostrils with the fragrance of a common religion, common God
lyrically testified by the Hindu devotional songs blaring from the temple
loudspeaker, like appellations to one common Supreme Being. From the farthest
vista of his heart a small ray of faith burst forth.
He had never been a regular namaaz
reader. Even during the all aglow of his heydays, if there were any, he did it
on Fridays merely following others doing it, under the sacred injunction of the
Koran. But even that too had ceased as he trudged forward just surviving on the
path of life, while the tricks and impostures of time and fate jaded his body,
perhaps even the soul. He was now just surviving, on the brink of it to be
precise. His wrinkled and suffocated-sallow-cheeks, creaky old bones vouched
for this fact: survival physical, economic, social and sometimes even
religious. Ropy veins turgidly distinct over his weather-worn skin gasped for
blood. He seemed to be on the last morsels of the life force.
He was living with his religion of
deified love for the fish. His transition from youth to the present age had
been mysteriously crisp and agile, to the extent he hardly remembered his past.
And now when the power of faith sneaked into his rag-tag hutment, he at once
jumped to his praying posture and spread out his hands to receive Allah’s
mercy. Sitting thus with his face towards west, the red flame from the other
hut’s eastern opening peeked in through the sinewy holes of his hut. Small
religious raylets from the Sadhu’s altar came in chirpily in full
childishness, forgetting all the factors of differential religiosity. These small
beams messaging multiplicity of the truth seemed to enjoy the frail fingers
raised in faith after many years.
However, the cocks snooking in the
poultry farm were hell bent upon scoffing at this divine communion. Divine
messages are after all divine, which never get divine interpretation from the
humans. And now when the day was to be at the helm of affairs, the divinity shuddered
and sneaked into its unknown cave.
Sunrays with their sonorous splendour
broke through the fatigued cloud. Melodrama of countryside life slowly-slowly
squabbled away the taciturnity looming over in the lazy air. Taut farmers,
mostly women, controlling the rough and rumble of their male-buffalo driven
carts made their way to the fields; vehicles were in a fracas over the road ferrying
students, office goers and labourers to the district city 20 Km. away to the
north east of this village; children deprecatingly coming to the village
school; villagers yelling and cursing obscenities at the buffaloes gone deep
into the majestic allure of the mini lake.
Unflinching devotional sonority of the
temple loudspeaker still played a song of Meera, the ecstatic saint poetess of
medieval India
“Beloved!
I’m ever forlorn and wanderlust for
thee,
Thy eternal love pines and writhes
inside me,
I’m alone and athirst from yores,
Where ist thy satisfying and solacing
love’s source?
Like a lamp I wish to burn.
Ashes mine turning to sacred urn,
My tender heart’s wick ceaselessly
glowing,
Sacred, scented oil of my love
overflowing
And keep it burning brightly night and
day
For thy shrine’s immortal ray,
Beloved!”
When Meera had sung this
cosmic-drunken-ditty, Bhakti Movement, the period of devotion, interlaced the
rich medieval Indian History. Two parallel movements of Hinduism and Islam,
Bhakti and Sufi movements incensed such compassion which even dreams might
desire; rebuffing dogmatic beliefs, puritanical rituals, communalism and
sectarianism. Ceremonialism got a searching look and found itself at its wits’
end against this cosmic flicker straying harmoniously to infinite winds.
Hindu-Muslim strands were woven into a
Hindustani texture, a new design of ‘composite culture’ in which Hindu Bhakti saints and Islamic mystics, called sufis, glittered like jewels.
Reconciliation rather than refutation, co-operation in place of confrontation,
and co-existence replaced mutual annihilation, due to which the straddling
edges of the comparative religion jutted and rubbed against each other and got
smoothened out, thus decompartmentalising the society; intermingling religions
in transitory zones rather than separated by the boundaries.
Unfortunately, that spirit died as
medieval India
Now, the devotional song of Meera was
trying to recall that spirit. It looked but the merest of the commonest ritual.
Early-riser, the religioner was now
beatifically napping as if exhausted from the ritualistic gallantry. As for the
watchman, just after his namaaz, when it was still dark, he’d gone for
his customary ritual of opposing the stealthy prowl of the fishmongers. Right
in the middle of the waterspread a pack of watercrows was having a vintage time
in complete oblivion to the upkeeper’s noises from the edges. While all other
birds had scurried away for safety these pitch-black, shiny gallants were
completely immersed in the appetising flavour of the fish. After each dive vanquished
fish flapped for their lives in the predators’ jabbing beaks. Rising sunrays
lit up this centre stage of survival game. The watchman in his rumpled kurta,
and wrinkled pyjama, in their crumpled grey colour knew that only
solution was inside his dingy hutment. Big, iron firecracking tong, whose
opening ends blasted the gunpowder put inside a hole for that purpose at the
one end of its arm. When struck on a brick the pointed end of the other arm
struck the powder-hole and it exploded with a thud and a lot of smoke.
He knew that these pantomimic birds
wouldn’t pay any heed to him at least from that distance. Blasting tong was the
only solution. White sparse strands of a goatee on his chin gave a constraining
twitch as he conjured up something. Small boat anchored at the eastern head of
the mound was the next alternative, a pretty exhaustive one though, and especially
for this frail old man who by the look of it looked even incapable of rowing.
With a certain withered and wizened sense he chose the second one and headed
for the mound across the keekars and overgrown bunch-grass stretching along
the western boundary of the pond; separating the grassy table land by a good 50
metres from the pond.
Hindsight and foresight throbbed
timorously in his old brain inside that small, longish head with beaten, docile
patches of grey hair, as he ascended the slope beneath the banyan’s beard. His
aeonically old eyes, somewhat widely set and curiously bigger for his small,
narrow face, had some redness as if they’d shed tears for ages. Bilious meekness
in his shy, ever escaping gaze gathered some courage to peep into his neighbour’s
hut as he passed it. Much to the satisfaction of his old heart’s slow soufflé,
the prodigious pumpkin was still sleeping or at least it seemed so. His feet
clad in those papooshes, so worn out and old, gave him a totally unassuming and
lost gait as if he’d no destination to go for and no start to begin with.
Bulk of the slumbering Sadhu
gave him a drawling shudder. He’d reasons for this. The last nuisance had been
so troublesome. He, his previous neighbour, was such a vilifyingly jocular
fellow that he could destroy any thug with his naughty slangs. With gusto he
would come out with blasphemous humour. Drunk in his wizardry he treated the
helpless watchman like a little funny living ghost. Whenever he saw him the
prankster enjoyed the sight to the hilt of his humorous, taunting capacity.
Religion was the last and the least
factor which prompted the funny instinct in that roving ruffian, for he was too
hollow brained for that. He had no pretensions about the showy aspect of his
religiosity, thus enjoyed his time more than any loony idler could. Each and
every limb of the watchman had its own sorrowful tale which the garrulous
fellow had created for the benefit of his life’s fodder i.e., fun. When he was
free from his witchcraft, he’d force the old man to sit near him and tug in his
armpits to force out a smile as he himself rolled over in laughter. If the old
man tried to escape he’d just put him under his arm and sashay over the mound
as if the watchman was his young drunken crony.
This diehard comedian’s paradoxical
existence near the ‘practically deaf and dumb moving statue’ was just like two
extremities of nature: Dawn of a spring’s day and the dusk of an autumn day.
The exorcist’s juicy tongue in all its translucence thus whiffed storming jokes
into the calm, dumbfounded air which the helpless old man carried with him.
Sometimes he embraced the forlornly
frail figure of the little watchman and sang, “You’re my sun, you’re my moon,
you’re the star of my eyes. Never go away from me,” fully drenched in life and
spirits.
Sometimes he tutted out a melancholic
tone, “O my old child, you’ve grown so old before your young father and would
die of old age leaving me crying...” feigning the soft-sobbing of fading
flowers, ending with a bone rattling squeeze capable of ending the watchman’s
miserable life.
Pinnacle of the rudist’s wantonly
crude jocularity reached one milestone after another. The old man even thought
of quitting the job as he complained to his employer in a most reserved manner ever
possible. But his barely audible mild and abstract words never sounded a
definite note. They had a mystical muteness like the summer’s and winter’s
fragmentary phrases during autumn and spring; vague in their indefiniteness about
‘which side they stood for’. The pond’s lessee, himself an easy going young
fellow, promptly laughed them away. And as the old man’s habit was, never to
push his cause, he remained there at the mercy of the prankster.
That pun loving tantrik, the
black magician, was a follower of occult powers, which prescribed salvation
through senses. These people followed mysterious sex oriented rituals performed
in a gory manner. Yoni Puja (vagina worship); ecstatic frenzy of yoni
kissing; arising of kundalini or the centre of sexual energy; hypnotic kama
kalpa or the supernatural art of love making; numerous ritual postures of
sexual intercourses; rituals of deflowering virgins in which minor girls were
horrifyingly raped to appease the sex Goddess; tattooing the evil mark of kalika
beneath the left breast with a knife; enjoyment of magical sex through vaginal
contraction; numerous aphrodisiacs for the arousal of full erotic nerves; even
sexual intercourse with female corpses were some of the cursing facts of their
occult world, the evil world of witchcraft, satanism, devil worship and sadism.
The overarching belief over all these
gory rituals was the conviction that only by overpowering the passions with
this sort of unchecked indulgence they could achieve supernatural powers.
It was this sort of exciting sexuality
which fantasised that depressed woman of the village. One night when her farmer
husband was out on his night-long irrigation work in the fields, she stealthily
came out of the village and threw herself at the feet of her sexual charmer.
Then the witchcrafty sexual razzmatazz started. Lantern was burning on a very
high wick that late night, filling the hut’s interior with an excited light. He
put off all her clothes and massaged her limbs with different scented oils:
Jasmine for hands, neck and cheeks; champa for her bursting breasts; sandalwood
for thighs; and saffron for the feet. She just moaned helplessly. Ecstatic
release occurred just as he tinkered around the genital area with his
sandalwood laced fingers. It was so divinely different from her earlier
monotonously boring sexual life. Even in her dream of dreams she could’ve never
imagined that sort of ecstasy. He knew how to arise her again. Then he did it
with direct contact between eyes and sexual organs. Tantra’s correct
posture with head, neck, and back in a straight line and the whole resting completely
on the buttocks. He just went on and on, whispering grunts chanting a mystic
syllable of self control, as if he was on the most potent aphrodisiacs. She got
it thrice by the time he harnessed the fullest libido of his sex energy to
reach the highest stage of transcendental ecstasy. And there she was lying
soaked of all her desire. Her wheatish oil smeared body shone fully satisfied,
a bit exhausted nonetheless.
Once over with his sexual meditation,
the young tantrik went outside. After a hearty sexual escapade he wanted
fullest of laughter for his supernaturally funny brain. He dragged the sheepish
old man out of his hut and threw him over the recuperating naked woman.
“Don’t curse me tomorrow that I didn’t
give you a chance,” he managed to say amidst peels of laughter, “We’re good
neighbours, so must share all good things,” the ruffian thundered from the
summit of his supernaturally cruel humour.
The old man almost fainted over the
dozing woman now in the ecstatic lap of sleep.
“No, not any more!” she pleaded from
her slumber without opening her eyes and slipped him down to her side as she
took an avoiding turn.
The horrified old man ran away into
the darkness, his kurta emanating fragrance of so many oils. The thug
meanwhile rolled over in laughter by the side of woman, where sleep calmed him
down.
Such were the reeking doldrums in
which the old man pallidly survived; until the fussy and furious farmer kicked
out his wife’s mystic beau. Once the bugbear was gone his last fortnight had
been spent in luscious quietude, surrounded by the humming, ringing murmur of
insects, birds and the ceremonious air tinkering with the restless waters of
the pond. Rustically rude village with its totally unsearching looks ignored
him, much to his desolate blessedness. Alas, there’re so few places on earth
having balmy solitude where people with no urge to exert their existence can
survive in tones with forlornness. Much to his peevish discomfort, the beacon
of disturbance had already been sounded as a garrulous leopard-frog was
immersed in its tittle-tattle inside the little boat. It almost flew into his
face as it jumped into the water with its last arrogant croaking.
From stern to stern the skiff measured
about three and half metres. In its middle it elongated to its maximum width of
about three and a half feet; the same being joined by a narrow wooden board to
enable the rower to sit in between and row it out. Placed on the floorboards was
a small heap of pebbles which he used to throw at the fishmongers. An aluminum
bowl, smeared in mire and pond weed was gently swaying in one inch water inside
the boat. It was for throwing out the water if it happened to enter it. Small
water puddle in the middle of the boat swashed back and forth maintaining the
dampness of rudder wood thus preventing cracks in it. There was no typical oar
to row the boat. In its place a long,
thin and light bamboo pole, longer than the boat, was resting over it.
He untethered the boat. Holding the
long rowing pole, he straddlingly balanced himself as the wood beneath
slippingly shook. Creases around his small mouth strained in duress; thinly
connected sparse eyebrows over his sad pair of eyes narrowed to a slant down;
narrow nostrils puffed out a small storming breath. His semi-dark colour, made
so strange by rough and rumble of skin’s weathering, took a purple colouring as
the effort pushed blood across it. By the look of it he seemed on epistle of
debility, utterly incapable of rowing the boat. But wait, the boat curved to
its left and swirled away with a decent acceleration as if under the spell of a
prodigious push. His stupendous dexterity in handling it with his frail hands
made it a surprise item to look at; in fact the only noticeable thing about
him. The mastery of it, in its cheerful exactitude, made one now understand why
the pond’s lessee had employed him as the overseer of his pisciculture.
The watercrows (cormorants) in their
full felicity made him row around the pond. A hard work for the old man indeed!
But strangely he never seemed to be fed up with it. He was exhausted and worn
out for all the causes except this work overlooking the breeding and rearing of
fish. It was an amazingly accolading fact.
This work couldn’t jeer down his
solemn spirit, except that he felt reasonably hungry. He snapped his fingers
with the avidity of a child and rubbed his small, shrinked belly where hunger
was knocking gingerly. With a sweet remonstrance it was demanding its modicum.
He rowed back to the mound, tethered the boat at its former place and while
ascending the little hillock picked up a handful of dried keekar twigs
and branches from a heap which he’d stored as his cooking wood.
His chulha was on the eastern
side of his hutment, so here he was spared of a staring sight gaping through
the religioner’s entrance way. Loutish Sadhu yawned in complete
ignorance of his neighbour’s presence, who lit up a small fire in his cooking
place. The old man prepared four or five chapattis. As for subzi
he’d none. In latter’s place he boiled chilli in salt-sprinkled mustard oil in
his squalidly old aluminum pan whose handle had lost its heatproof synthetic
cover. So a saggy rug of black cloth
huskily protected the fatiguing skin of his fingers and palm.
This humble spice of his had a good
making. His eyes burnt from the nasty fumes as the chilli divulged its venom
under heat. These offensive vapours circled over the mound in all their playful
naughtiness and babblingly sneaked into the neighbour’s hut. Foolish gallants’
huffing nuclei entered the wide, hairy nostrils of uncomfortably dozing
religioner. He odiously sneezed, breaking his squiffy sleep. The cook however
couldn’t hear it as the perpetrators of this offence were hissing and sneering
in his frying pan. He wouldn’t have thought of making the environment spicy
till qeyamat, the cataclysmic day of judgment, had he got a proper
idea or assessment of the nemesis’ propensity to astray to the four winds;
spraying suffocating vexation all around.
The irritated religioner straightway
headed for this disquietly harassing source.
From the corner of second hut he cast a squinting look. Tiny creature,
coughing, was blowing air out of his weak lungs to revive the dying embers
below his delicacy. Bending on his knees he almost yowled into the smoke.
The robust onlooker, almost six feet
tall even while bending over his wooden support, gave a thoroughly searching
look with his bulging eyes protruding in their reddish intensity. Piteously
desperate, small skinny figure struggling in a pal of smoke seemed just a mere
speck which could be trodden to death even by a human. The spectator muffled
his nostrils with his shoulder cloth. His bare upper part seemed a bulging
boulder with thick overgrowth of grey bushes. His right shoulder had grown
asymmetrically muscular, stronger and bigger due to its life long struggle over
the crutch saddle. Below his knee length yellowish-orange loin cloth, his left
leg rested over ground like a thick stump of wood. Right one would’ve been too
heavy for a medium built man, but unfortunately its overall girth and length in
comparison to its paddling partner evinced its deformity.
The watchman was caricatured in such
an abstract way that he seemed to be related to himself only; nothing in the
world was connected to him in any way. Pittered and pattered body seemed to bid
its time in stoic rejection of everything earthly. Prodigiously fat onlooker
almost pitifully jeered at the small skeleton fatiguing its breath in the
huffing smoke. Cross-eyed, he’d see the lower portion of his neighbour’s legs
as the pyjama was tucked upwards due to the bending knees. Those unwashed,
squalidly old feet of his, with whitish dead skin the on heels, slighted his
existence even more. They seemed so lifeless that his footfall might’ve never
discriminated a step on to a feather bed or the stony one studded with prickles.
The burly religioner vent out a deep
breath as if to hoist away the feathery figure along with the rising smoke. His
rudrax and sandalwood beaded rosaries seemed to calm down this dissolute
gesture. Jutted along the billet even his infirm right leg, greedy like the
covetous kick of a footballer, came to life as nothingness of that figure
roused an avariciously playful, kicking desire. Its big toe barely reaching down
to the ground as if in a hasty completion of length, while the heel hang up in
the hair, looking absent and soft for it’d never shared its burden. Still, the
whole mass of this leg could match, or even outweigh, the combined tissues in
watchman’s both legs. It took a caracolling twist; the force arising from the shoulder
turned his big flappy, muscular arm taut. Tightening of skin around a tattoo of
Lord Shiva on this arm, much to the felicity of God brought some holy
distinctness in its faded and spread out outlines. Rollicking time had taken
the sheen off this green engraving of yesteryears. The pigment inside the
wheatish-dark skin had lost its alacrity, and looked solemnly as a symbol of ageless
divinity. Still, it didn’t take many tellings to recognise the cosmic destroyer
of creation in Hindu mythology, Lord Shiva—the cosmic destroyer of creation
originating from Lord Brahma and sustained by Lord Vishnu.
The watchman’s frail fingers spread
out on earth to support his bent back seemed harmless paw of a strange old
bird. His vulnerability, extollingly exaggerated the badness residing in each
and every surrounding thing, both living and non-living. Just from the appearance
of it, without analysing anything else, the religioner looked a curmudgeon
hobgoblin in comparison to the pond upkeeper. The pond overseer surviving by a
quirk of fate, mocking perfidiously at death, whose pneumatic sphinx hovered
around the world in complete oblivion to this frail figure. Perhaps, there was
nothing to be snatched away from him.
Rough, purple, thick lips which the Sadhu
kept somewhat apart in his normal facial expression as if in some unknown
disdain, pouted zig-zagly in the absence of an outline under the perennial
shadow of rough hair. Uneven yellowish teething fawningly flashed around his
unclean tongue lopping in its flummery arising out of life-long chanting of mantras.
His eyes above the reddish dark, small unbearded patches of skin were
grudgingly fixed upon the sharer of the mound. Roughly thick and rich crop over
his broad knob stood in one-sidedly pompous contrast to the ragamuffinly sparse
coverage over the narrow, brittle skull of the second person on the mound. The
latter must have been shaved at least a month back because the dull and desultory
silvery strands had a testy agility which glimpsed in complete contrast to the
rest of his body.
The wrinkles on the sacred brow paste,
which’d acquired folds under the force of enquiring curiosity, changed to their
former straight layout as he let out a comforting breath. Next intake smelt of ‘the
might’ accompanied by a shoving rebuke by his mind which now questioned that
repulsive, shuddering oddness lasting for the fraction of a second when he’d
ascended the mound yesterday. All his doubts about the religious ownership of
this little oval elevation almost staved off into thin air above the smoke hovering
around the weak old man.
All this time the Sadhu had
been left spellbound by the ‘trivialness to the extent of nothingness’ of the
watchman. ‘Nothingness’ wasn’t just limited to his body; it seemed to penetrate
the whole air surrounding him, making him almost invisible to the searching
glares of society. Thus lost in a searchful trance, the spectator was completely
oblivious of even the hustling noise of vehicles plying on the pot-holed road,
their grubby blowing of horns and buffaloes bellowing dispassionately in the
pond. Even the large grilled-iron gate of the school, with its silvery grey
sheen like a big star facing the pond found his eyes unsmackingly wide open.
Loud tun, tun, tun... of the school bell indicating morning prayer
petered out without drumming up his unhearing ears. He was totally immersed in
this awkward mismatch between existence and non-existence: Frail whiffy
airblows let out into smouldering fire; snooty sizzling of oil and chilli; fit
of cough which violently shook the rib cage visibly distinct under the
stretched cloth. Perhaps an existence underpinned by a counterweighing
non-existence.
“You must use a blow pipe. Your old
lungs aren’t worthy of making a fire this way,” it just slipped out of the
religioner’s tongue, without a trace of pity for the coughing old man.
Turning his head, the watchman showed
his enigmatic face to his new neighbour. All features, except his nonsearching,
sad eyes were so small that he seemed incapable of sensing the big realities
around. Eyes blind to the colourful spectrum seemed to be totally bathed in a
world of piteous grim and grey; small ears perhaps just capable of hearing
softest of whispers; narrow nostrils just enough for a morsel of air for
survival and few fragrances; ever sewn up barely visible lips shut up a tongue
which was acquainted with so few tastes.
In a nutshell, life seemed imminently
about to finish its viandry. Seemingly so near to death, yet there was a
peculiar survival instinct which made him seem ever death-defying little
strange creature; ageless, who’d been there like this for years and would
remain so forever. One couldn’t comprehend either his younger or older visage.
With profound resignedness he cast a
lost look at the big, bearded face. Futility of his intended escapement written
all over his ever pauperising envisage.
Guesstimating about anything which could
slight the cook even more than his appearance, the robust figure emerged fully
from the hut’s corner. He failed. No vilifying remark of his had the pungency
to make its presence felt in his neighbour’s apparent vacuosity.
In a lurch, unable to find anything
blasphemous about the watchman, the religioner caught a sinew of religious
relativity and said:
“Oh my, you are a mussalman!” he muttered with a fake agony riding the ever beaten
back of comparative Godhood.
Indeed in this part of north Indian
countryside a Muslim religioner was a rarity. As far as this fact is concerned
his exclamation was justified, nonetheless, the beserking disappointment in his
grunt was in complete contrast to the satisfying surprise when one comes across
an endangered species.
“So you’re the Muslim watchman of this
pond,” continued the religioner, staring at the dumbfounded little man.
“A Muslim as the saviour of fish,” the
Hindu on his slighting spree went on. “You people can butcher so many. Aah...
the mercilessness!” the trickster almost broke down under the pang of his saying.
He came so near and unto the cowering
little figure that fearing trample unto death under his bulk the Muslim turned
his head to the pan, beneath which fire suddenly fulminated as if under the
command of mighty whiffs of words emanating from the Sadhu’s mouth,
brewing up tumult around.
“What kind of a Muslim are you?” he
said more irritated by the pungent smell of the old man’s delicacy. “A
protector of lives! While your religion gives only one command of slaying the kafirs,”
he brought out the thickest dotted line of Islam’s critics which is known
throughout the world.
The Muslim didn’t say anything. He just
pretended to be engrossed in his work which was so fastly coming to an end.
“Aah... now I got it,” he stretched
this one sided acquaintance. “Mercy for a little time! Bravo to your patience!
Till they grow bigger and meaty and after that spoil this Hindu society by
getting them habituated to meat eating.”
Prospective religious owner of the mound
jabbered the communal slur. The reason was only one---his slight apprehension
about this slight neighbour’s impediment to his full ownership of the tiny
elevated piece of earth which they just chanced to share between them.
The poor old man couldn’t make much of
this disdaining mockery. Jocular sluttery of his previous neighbour, though
seemingly outrageous, was at least tolerable as it involved a monkiness whose
clownship danced only at a superficial level. It was too lampoonish to delve
into the badlands of class, creed and religion or anything for that matter
capable of creating a permanent, aching niche in a human heart. His new
neighbour’s wrath right from the start was unarguably hackneyed which seemed to
sledgehammer its way into the worn-out heart. It was something imperiously
obsessive about inhuman exclusivity, which hurt more, pinched more. He didn’t
say anything, just felt the mountainous separation of the two religions; that
the other man on the mound was a Hindu; he a Muslim; a vague feeling like a school
child as if the two words were antonyms for each other; antonyms like
fire-water, water-fire, God-devil, devil-God, earth-sky, sky-earth....
Finally, he tried to make himself
stand in good, secular stead. Stretching to his improper vertical with his
bowed upper back and neck, he decided to face the inevitable acquaintance with
his new neighbour. Religionless
reverentiality was glaring from his small Muslim face. Crease folds in his pyjama
around knees made it seem dog-eared. He looked so helplessly forlorn, beyond
all passions and prejudices.
“Sala…n…mmn,” he caught it, the Muslim
formal greeting, just as it was about to slip out of his tiny mouth. “Namaste
maharaj,” he whispered almost inaudibly with a slight bow of head,
gathering as much politeness as he could.
Enforced genteel politeness and
helplessness could match the state of any courtier in the durbar of Balban, performing paibosh before the medieval Muslim
king, who’s become legendary on account of his strictest of strict court rules
and regulations.
“Why, oh namaste of course,”
the Sadhu responded to the humble accost without any warmth. “Leave namaste
alone miyanji. Don’t you think others have got a right to survive in
pure air around here,” the religioner rebuked, recalling the offensive fumes of
the old man’s chilli-delicacy.
“Wind is blowing in the wrong
direction...” the cook’s voice trailed off.
He meant to say that the slight wind
blowing east-west was the main culprit. But who cares for such delicate and
suffering words as if brought forth amidst infinite pathos. ‘Nothingness’ about
the old watchman included of course the words imprisoned behind his ever shut
mouth.
“You people always do things in a
wrong direction and then condemn others for the evil consequences following,”
practitioner of Hindu rituals said, once again returning to hate-preachings. “We
prostrate before our Gods with folded hands which prompts you people to go for
a spread out hands posture. We face east while praying, so in disgust you
people turn your foolish and merciless faces to the west,” he further propagated
the dangerous quotient of religious differential. “What a wanton sense of wrong
direction! When we wash our hands we pour water down our hands. And there you’re
with your foolishness again. You people wipe water down your elbows wetting the
clothing and all,” his bullying aggravating with each point.
The ignorant Muslim gained so much
from this comparative knowledge. To him it seemed just a religious preaching,
though delivered in aggressive tones.
“We marry once. You immoral ones do it
many times. Cut down that foreskin of yours,” he pointed to the old man’s
genital area where the object he was hinting to was quite discernible beneath
his kurta, as the wind hit against the fragile cloth.
Shyly the old man looked down tracing
the gaze of the religioner. He wasn’t wearing his old saggy boxer underwear.
The pyjama was too delicate and thin to provide full privacy to the
private thing.
“And ours...mine is intact. The symbol
of akhanda brahmacharya, utmost celibacy!” very proudly he completed the
comparison, ending with a firm pointing to his own thick penis dangling visibly
against the veily, taut loin cloth.
This religious bragging was becoming a
sort of depraving mockery. Watchman’s saddest, lightless and perfectly
unsearching eyes now vainly groped around for a way out. His mouth shut up like
a wall, perfectly mum over his meekest of goatee. Without knowing much to say
or do, he just bent down and picked up the pan containing his delicacy whose
explosive tension had gone naughtily titillating over the little geomorphological
gob of earth.
“You blame wind, the ever beneficent
Lord Marut, for this nuisance,” the Sadhu said groggily pointing to the
acrid thing in the pan.
Poor creature of Allah just
held the pan slouchingly, as if he was offering the sample of his culinary
skills to his new neighbour, whose temper went fulgurant.
“By the way, who got you here in this
area?” he almost scowled upon the little figure, with an obviating tone as if
to get rid of him here and now.
This at least was a reasonable query
from the Hindu religioner. His mind knew tit-bits of local history. How the
countryside in this part of north India India
The old man’s consternation would’ve
gone on and on driven by the platitudinous remarks, like the husky, haughty
drone of a toad, hadn’t the disciple’s voice come in between with its full
docility. The lackey had arrived to serve his master. His piously dappled voice
reached daintily into the hot headed religioner’s big ears lost beneath his
unkempt hair.
Plaintively morose figure with its
frugal eatables escaped into its dungeon hutment as the Sadhu turned his
frowning brow away from him. Promptly, the latter was forced to abandon his
fuming earthly polemics, lest it should cast some shadowy clouds in the
disciple’s heart where the sun of faith shone in its full luxuriance. His ever
fugacious worldliness went fleetingly. Villager’s sallow mind found him the
ever holy man of God, the renounciator of the charmless, juiceless vacuity of
worldly illusions. Ritual connoisseurship of the morning, fresh paste of
sandalwood and vermilion coated over the mendicant’s brow, sent down the
devotional sensation scampering across his simple senses. Once again his faith’s
phrase plodded past each and every cell of his God fearing body:
“Your worship, I’ll
stake my life upon your religiosity!”
Catapulting worldliness of the
chameleon in all its curtness changed to gay abundance. “God bless you with his
mercy!” he raised his blessing hand over the knelt head.
Once inside his hut the solitary
lounger with his old thin worn out limbs felt a deep, deep relief. Sitting
before the plate having morsels of life, his little hunger had gone as if
thwartly fed by the husky words and prying looks. He closed his eyes as if to
take him away from the crawling, hallooing and clattering worldly visions; to walk
on the remotest wood-path where no human being came his way, accosting, forcing
him to utter, “Walaikum Salaam.” With a heavy and sad wistfulness he ate
his little crumbs.
Stretching as an arc from north-east
to west, the district road passed the village situated inside its loop across
the countryside fields. This line of mobility branching off the national highway,
linking Delhi Punjab , penetrated into the district Sonipat of the
former. Its famishing, pot-holed, one-laned serpentine body trudged forth in
its western journey across this state known for its agricultural production;
majority of illiterate and semi-literate rural rustic and hard working farmers;
emerging urban centres, mostly the district cities where modernity and
metropolitan culture sneaked in, radiating from the cosmopolitan capital of the
country, blandishingly situated in an inward niche at the south-eastern
boundary of Haryana. National Capital’s administrative area spread for at least
a couple of thousand square kilometres into the transitory semi-urban and rural
area merging into the State without any cultural barrier, except the
notification clauses in the National Capital Territory Act. Influential
megapolis sedentary culture seeped into the rustically dullard agricultural
lifestyle of the countryside through this transitory zone as well as the district
roads.
In the first half of the ‘90s, the
time of our tale, the traditional ways of rural areas had at least tasted the
spicy modernity which connoted everything related to the urban centres. It was
a decade of churning. Agriculturally defined culture of the countryside
settlements, within 100 km of the big national capital, was gruffingly
awakening its simple eyes to the luxuriant feast of urban glitter. Rural
pertinacity about its careless ways had started to feel the urban ebullition
emanating directly from the multimillion city, as middle aged High school
passouts commuted to Delhi
The crescent of modernity, call it
urbanism, was like the first or last quarter of moon which has the feeblest of
light in the night sky. Yet, distinctively feline rays make a peculiar mix of
light and dark, which turns the sky in a quandary. Moon’s first quarter trying
to extend the fading traces of sun’s last rays; the last quarter bringing as
its tail the great fireball rising below the horizon; the crescent ever trying
for the sun of urbanisation as well as urbanism.
Still, the predominant means of the
survival-agriculture were fastidiously held up against the enterprising
flummery. “Hush girlie!” it seemed to say bathed in its rustic rural
endearments.
Embaled in such times was this sleepy
village. Untrimmed nature of this typical rural settlement could galore with
inhibition at the bragging hallow of light in the south eastern sky on certain
dull clouded nights, when its four thousand dwellers were plunged in dark. It
was the bright urban crown of Delhi National Capital Territory
Here in this village cattle mooed;
women worked putting on facial veils; joint families were in majority, but
under explosive tension of the emerging social fabric; farming tractors were
the most luxury vehicles, and practically each family had a cart; at least half
a dozen families owned Maruti 800 cars; Bajaj Chetak scooters and motor cycles
were in perhaps a couple of hundreds; at least half the families possessed TV
sets, most of them Black and Whites, which relayed two channels, DD Metro and
DD National; sex was the greatest taboo, it’s however another matter that
numerous extramarital relations blossomed in night’s dark; land holdings were
getting smaller and thus farming more and more encumbering; around ten percent
of the adult male population commuted to cities for jobs or daily wage earning,
and about hundred students went to the college at the district city. Such were
the simple but vital statistics, the indicators of overall socio-economic and
cultural scenario prevailing in this medium sized rural settlement.
Here the time just plodded past.
Drunkards of the village boozed their time away with local made breweries like
Murthal No. 1, Jagadhari No. 1, Panipat No. 1 which had a fair chance of
adulteration. Prattlings between old and young blood around a hookah
reached incredulous humorous levels; the smoke rising happily with a lot of
endearments. Loafers and young ruffians, though almost outcast from the
mainstream society, passed time in their own abysmally narrow, deep and dark
world devoid of any sort of unbelievablenss. Groveling spirits cast their
fullest black charm upon this miniscule group. They wouldn’t care a fig about
goodness even if it scowled at its highest pitch. They were acquainted with
each and every ounce of luridity possible in an astrayed human heart. Their
guttural stubbornness broke its armorial defence whenever they loosened their
spirits under overpowering alcohol. In such wanton abundance they would pawn
away bills, lives or anything; the gamesters who could put anything in the
world at the gamblers’ stake and if all finished still insist for another hand
by pawning God Himself.
We shouldn’t fall prey to prolixity
for their sake, as there still existed noble souls which followed the dark with
their luminosity; with the God-ordained message of good’s victory over the bad.
However, their overnicety kept repeatedly failing. Perhaps, only God knows why
it sometimes puts goodness on a losing pedestal giving the evil a chance to
yell out a victorious call in all its haughtiness; faceless fiendish curse
slapped into the face of divinity.
Newly brought about economic changes
by the union finance minister Mr. Manmohan Singh had made their elitist presence
(with their propensity to accentuate the gap between the haves and have-nots)
felt in the countryside as well. Like the district road which’d never got a
total facelift during its lifetime, Indian version of mild socialism had done
its great duty of seeing through the journey of a poor nation to the path of
developing nationhood, like this district road bearing on its back a heavy
traffic load disproportionate to its starving layer of stone crush and tar. The
politico-bureaucratic peculation had starved it. After all the embezzlement of
public money is perfectly secure under the garb of state control. Wistfully it
was looking for some patchwork, some stitching of capitalism, liberalisation,
of stone and tar. The incongruent patchwork of new decontrolling policies, the filling
of pot-holes, making the ride bumpier, noisier! Disputative noise was to continue
till whole of the road got a new smooth layer.
Under the new economic kick at its
rumps, sustaining village agriculture was awakening to commercialism, obviating
the diversity of crops sown. Fodder crops and many others were quickly
vanishing giving place to the commercial temptation of wheat and paddy
monotony. More and more artificial fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides
bleached into earth’s bosom for survival in the new profit driven emerging capitalist
system.
This garrulous gesticulation of
hysterical changes was manifesting, perfidiously, at many fronts. The prides of
north Indian rural settlements, the wells inside the village periphery with
their sweet drinkable water, were endangered and in fact vanishing fastly.
Sources of drinking water dangerously moving away from habitations as if under
the force of a mysteriously obfuscating force. Panghat culture, a unique
rustic harmony among crudely fussy and innocently coquettish women prattling
and idling their time away while gathered upon the paved, circular pedestal
around the deeply dug source of cool, sweet drinking water, had just become a
part of local myth and history. Now they ferried water in big plastic cans and
drums by carts; the young men on two wheelers; farmers on tractors, in fact
anything they could lay their hands upon.
One storeyed mud and brick houses,
plastered and floored with cow dung and yellow clayey soil mixture were almost
forgotten by now. Concrete housing of cement and brick was emerging in its semi
and full plastered version. Still there were many poor people in the village
who dwelt in small, unplastered, single storey houses without concrete floors.
It was specially so with the landless low caste tiny enclaves called mohallas
within the village, which in their overall piteous look seemed to sniff at the
emerging unbiased social psyche, which was still slightly on the wrong side of
casteism; at least at a semi harming superficial level which could at least
make them realise their low caste---either through a common place pun, low
economic status, being a helplessly mere pawn in grass roots politics or a mere
incessant load surviving as a hangover of the historical casteism, with its
eloquently carrion look, of the bygone times.
Such was the socio-economic survival
of this parish settlement, slowishly fine-tuning to the changing times and
emerging realities. Its stream still
wilted under genteel pressure from the nature. It had its charming locality beaming
with mild flora and fauna. Gloaming, evasive play of seasons did brought out a
shy smile over these unconcerned, unassuming surroundings immersed in their low
spirits and low tones.
The area immediately south to the
squarish grassy plateau was a sort of wasteland. It looked desolate in
comparison to the lush green fields surrounding it. Bunch grass, jhabua
shrubbery, reeds and faded tufts of grass sadly grown over the whitish crust of
alkaline soil, provided an infinitesimally scraggy intervention between the
lively plateau and active fields. Here with the arrival of winters numerous
snake pellicles glistened under faded milky noons of late autumn, as the reptiles prepared to go into
hibernation. Nearby, the tractors laboured in the fields preparing seedbeds for
the wheat, pea, oat, etc., while the barsham, the luscious winter-time
delicate fodder crop sown a month back, splurged a green smile around.
First crescent of the moon visible
immediately after the sunset over the harvested paddy fields sometimes during
the first half of November; shining like a crown atop the slightly wintry night
attired in yellowish-red shining bridal cloth made of burning paddy straw to
clear the fields. Its flashes fall upon the marriage party: sugarcane, now
chewable with its initial mild sweetness; solitary guava orchard where the hard
greenish young fruits patiently wait for yellowish soft; in the gloaming darkness
migrant Bihari labourers singing folklore melodies by the bonfire outside the
farmhouse of their stay during this wage period at the village; some of them
walking slowly on the field embankments, their small muscular figures visible
occasionally under the flashes of burning straw waste, returning with mealtime
provisions purchased from the small village shops; after a hard day in the
fields, a cool balmy night coming to embale them in its restful swathes and
make them forgetful of all the problems back in their home state: murderous
caste conflicts, extreme lawlessness, hunger, floods, epidemics and many more.
There were numerous small beauties of
this small world. Like the kingfisher perched upon the tubewell pipe some yards
away from the pond’s south western flooded margin. It looked into the misty
rising rays of an early winter morning. Another was fervently flapping at a
stationary point in the air above the morass in pond’s corner. Suddenly, off it
went into the muddy vegetation with a splash, coinciding with the other’s
suddenly realising flight; the shooing off starting with a dropping which
slowly trickled down the curve of the pipe, marking it with the numeral ‘1’ and
a drop landed onto the watered field just irrigated after the preparation of
the seed bed. Some small waders hogging the sallow water edge nearby jumped up
and fluttered away to safety, coinciding with the bird-drop’s impact with the
water. A wren, which was busy in the drip-droppy puzzle of the prickly acacia
boughs hanging over the water, jerked away from her labyrinthine flights and
for some time flew quite straight.
There at a distance in some other
field, two crane couples were treading softly over the early sown wheat
seedlings. Some storks and herons were breakfasting on fish. Overgrown
vegetation in this undisturbed corner prevented their sight by the watchman.
Here in this tiny submerged aquatic jungle fish usually escaped netting by the
human fishmongers. Further south, thousands of swift-sparrows closely perched
along the electricity line made it look like a thick rope hanging taut in the
air. Many of them flew in their customary erratic, criss-crossing and bat like
movements in the air.
Life and times of the grassy plateau
weren’t just limited to its perennial turf. It’d its own varying thrills and
frills. Like when the banjaras, the gypsies suddenly came from nowhere;
pitched their tents and settled the caravan for a short period of time,
swarming the place with their numerous tell-tale symbols of an incessant
journey. Close on the heels of harvesting season, the place went all agog with
thrashing, winnowing and airing; sheaves sashaying amidst rising dust and
pollen in their affable charm as the last fructification step of yet another
farming cycle arrived at last. It was also the playground (when the summers
allowed approach along the earthen embankment) of the village’s cricketing
boys, whose majority of play time was taken up by the ball search in the
thickets around.
As naturally, there occurred verbal
skirmishes, sometimes excitingly close to a full blown quarrel, as hard hits
went cascading through the nomadic sinews scattered over the smooth place. Oftentimes,
though angrily, the cricketers used to move to their makeshift pitch on the
adjoining alkaline waste-land. Here the horrible outfield was at least better
than the ball hitting against ponies, donkeys, or horses that bore the hit solemnly;
the whiff of opposition coming from their starving hounds. These slight shuffles
took a serious note when the homeless wanderers realised that the fielder near
a tent was in fact lost in a playful eye game with their women-folk. Just to
have a tight leash over such unplayful possibilities the young lads moved to
their makeshift pitch, prepared by dumping a trolley load of dry black-soil
lumps of earth.
These naughty bickerings reached the
zenith of their sneak peek if all three claimants happened to be there at the
same time. The farmers’ workload doubled as they kept vigilance with their
rustic dismissive air unless a distant fielder ended up gobbling almost a kilo
of drying pea. Safety of the crops was at its highest risk from the side of the
gypsies. Who knows, they might thrash up a few month’s provision during the
night and vanish in thin air by the time it was a new day.
These things made a spicy sauce of the
village cricket: the ball and the fielders jumping, hopping and skipping over
gypsy dominion. Its final destination could only be decided with the throw of a
dice. If it rattled against their vessels they’d just squat over it taking it a
lot of words in all their varying tones and emotions to get it back. If a shot
was a mighty high flier it ended up landing on a high heap of crop where the
farmer gnarled if anyone tried to spoil the sanctity of his idol.
Sometimes, as during the monsoon
season, forlorn calmness prevailed over the lush green. Silence’s domain just
gently shoved by the cool morning breeze softy creating eddies around the big
winnowing fan left there by a farmer at the south eastern end of the grassy
elevation. Slow movement of the wings seemed to personify the time dimly
pointing to the place with a mysterious premonition to the strained silence.
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