35
A Night of Kaliyuga
The morning’s crepuscular colours had defeated
the panoplied night. Clouds streaked over the eastern horizon were giving way
to the eye-of-day. Modest mist was there. Sun’s purple red envisage glimpsed
through a cloudy window. Misty pond seemed murkily labyrinthine. It was tranquil
without wavelets except at a place where the sunrays reflected as little,
little shiny stars as if waterlilies had blossomed during the night. It smiled
like the pond’s little orchard. Above, the sky hung morosely in the monochromes
of white and dead brown.
In the surrounding fields, fully grown
mustard shone with its pristine yellow fickleness. Dew diademed wheat spikes
stood with upright pride for being the embodiment of farmers’ labour. A spotted
owlet, whose shrieking howls during nights sends ominous shivers through the
village alleys, was still continuing with its vestiges of night work. Softwood
trees, the poplars, which a farmer had planted along his field embankments,
appeared demure designs of nature as each branch and twig had lost leaves
during the winter. The windfall was extraordinarily complete. It presented a picture
drawn in a starchy mood when the painter had consumed all his paints and was
left with only one, dark grey, to paint this monochromatically pallid autumn
scene.
It was under such moments the caravan was
slowly, slowly opening its eyes. The inhabitants of the God’s home on earth,
meanwhile, were still asleep. In the village however things weren’t as normal
as presupposed by this beautiful cold morning yawning outside the village. The
villagers had had a sudden rap on the knuckles. In response it was bemoaning
gibberishly. As misfortune comes in tragically geometric progression while our
defence and resistance is just an arithmetic laggard, something had definitely
happened, which was spreading its mourning tentacles as angry hearsay accelerated
its steps along the streets and side-ways.
The coldly plain truth was this: during the late
night a horrible news had tragically fallen upon a family. Their young soldier
son had died fighting the militants in Kashmir
valley. It was a fearful, tragic corollary because many young armymen from the
village were posted in Kashmir . The bad news
was firingly precipitating mournings around. Word had it that his body was to
arrive in the evening accompanied by the district bureaucracy and the local MLA––Ram
Ratan (who by the grace of all his Gods had been provided an axe to sharpen his
patriotic principles).
It was a colossal loss to the whole village.
Afterall those who die for the nation, their loss are mourned in every
household. In the culpability quotient Pakistan Hindustan . So, by the
nationalistic law and logic of it, our old Muslim watchman too had his own
little share of culpability in the sin against this village, because the
valiant soldier had died fighting his co-religious zealots waging jehad against India
His work as the party’s MLA had been
immensely forgettable. In all fairness it was none of his fault. The communal
admixture in the constituency was such that each and every ignition by him
proved a damp squib. He knew there had to be a big news-making blast to make
the heat and light reach the top mandarins now enjoying the power at the
center. They’d criminally neglected him. Why? The constituency he represented
seemed so cowardly bleak on the saffron hued map of India, because in it the
contrasting shades of green were very little, little dots, some of them even as
tiny as the frail existence of our watchman. So for most of the time the young
politician, who always imagined himself to be galloping to the realms of
political stardom, was drowned in sorrows. Ever in mercurous mood he cursed the
arrogantly presumptuous rural youths whose blood never boiled for the cultural
nationalism. How could it? Unlike him there were so many mundane modes of survival
which kept the youths yoked to the cart of worries. The hoodlum horde residing
in the temple, however, was an exception in this matter. They were ever ready
for his cause. But how many fellows of this nature can a society have? And as
politics survives on the razzle-dazzle of blindly following mobsters, taut and
pert (fully following the party’s ideology) followers were always lacking in
numbers behind him.
The political sun rises many hours before the
ordinary sun of this world. So even before the constituency was to see the sun’s
first ray, Rajiv Malik (his first name was something else earlier, but he’d
rechristened himself to prove his loyalty to the first political family of the
nation) the unsuccessful contestant from the Congress party in the last
parliamentary elections, barged into the MLA’s residence. Gleaning with some
optimism the MLA was slowly, slowly surfacing from the water of his sorrows. He
was counting his prospective nationalistic jujubes ripening on the tragic tree
of this happening. ‘This time there has to be an explosion of our type and its
sound must be heard in Delhi
Very entrance of the Congressman was a pouting
prank. “Hellow Ram Ratan sitting afraid of Muslim bullets, lest an accidental
or even intentional shot pierces your real Hindustani heart like the brave jawan in Kashmir !”
the foe banged on a sofa in feigned, mock exasperation.
“It’s you people who’re afraid of their fury,
not we! That’s why you pretend to support them,” Ram Ratan countered.
“Then where’re those tall claims to protect
every drop of Hindu blood from their mercenaries? Not a drop, it’s a
six-feet-tall very handsome lad we’ve lost. Tragedy committed by you people!
You people uncorked the genie and are now running helter-skelter to escape it.
Don’t you feel ashamed now? Even a Congressman’s heart is boiling for revenge.
Shame! You people are hypocrites. How I wish I’d been there in your place!”
banging his head in despair the Congressman took to his heel.
Once outside the enemy’s den the Congressman
chuckled, “These people are such sentimental fools. End up committing such
follies at the spur of those nationalistic emotions. And history never pardons
such openly blatant shows of excitement. We, cool-as-cucumber Congressman are
the masters of political art. Do our wrongs slowly, slowly with so snaily
impassivity that no historical blunders are created. The more these fools play
the Hindu-Muslim show, the better it’d be for the Congress. The more soundly
Muslims are walloped by these rampaging impotents the more would be their rush
to our camps. So instead of preventing them from targeting the minority we
should remain the mute spectators, or even help them implicitly in doing so.
Just as I’ve done! A clear cut Hindu-Muslim polarisation of votes is the only
chance of Congress coming back to power. Our hereditary Hindu followers +
Fearful Muslims=Government of India! Now this poor little Hindu is going to add
some strength to this equation of our power!”
* * * *
Still, the optimists would try to soothe down
by saying, ‘The people here don’t think this way.’ It’d, but, be a gross
misinterpretation of the historical facts; because suddenly overnight, once the
mob-fury had arrived from nowhere in the past. Like the mourning whispers were
vitiating this tranquil morning degree by degree, similarly the communal calm
effortlessly running from the medieval times had been tarnished at the time of
partition. Mythological milieu of communal bonhomie was blatantly disregarded.
Communalism arrived with its own brand of bloody boisterousness. Whole
countryside turned blood thirsty in response to the depredations and atrocities
in Pakistan
Angst was brewing up to the critical limit of
a genocidal flare-up. Furious rumours and talks of ‘brutal killings of Hindus
in Pakistan Pakistan Sind ,
Punjab and everywhere in the holy land of
communally political Islamists.
So much so for this gruesome irrational hate;
let our readers take some time-out from the tale and seriously ponder over this
mob frenzy. We can even construe a helplessly failing theory to understand why
at such times the pathological cruelty is so successful in thwarting the basic
principles of humanity. Won’t that be worth trying? It’d serve another purpose
as well. Theories, irrespective of however minionally they crawl before the
reality, enable us to predict future at least as per our currently prevalent parameters
of perceiving the reality. The theory for our dear readers goes like this:
Electrochemical impulses or the targeted
messages received by our sensory organs, travel through our nerves at the speed
of 30cm/sec. So it takes a little time span for our brains to process this
information and provide logical interpretations of the received signal. In a
mob there is a jumbled jargon of messages. Eccentrically atrocious bombardment
of impulses, thus, sees us foxed and illogically swayed by the emotionally
instinctive imbroglio. It precipitates whole lot of perfunctory impulses as a
corollary to this gibberish instinctive assault. There is thus a rap on the
knuckles and we give away like quicksand. Out of fickleness we cry, ejaculate
with ecstatic frenzy, sob, throw tantrums, abuse and show physical
manifestations in accordance with the immediate deduction of the preceding
reactions. It might seem semi-farcical, illogical, irrational and grossly
immature after a while; after the mind has gone through the processing of
information. Flagrantly stimulating shoves of sensory stimulation borne by
buffeting rumours and gibberish noise drastically reduce this communication
time between the brain and the sensory organs. It prevents the individual
brains from processing the coherent units of information. Incoherent confusion
occurs, which further results in mammothly stretched out impulses. Raucous
emotions then turn to trepidations, which inhumanely start eyeing depredations.
The mob thus becomes a haystack, hungrily ready to be engulfed by a flame; the pile
of hay and straw having no chain of thought, ready to burn for another bloody
chapter in history. And the history comes on the brink of repeating itself as a
farce after that initial tragedy. Stone pelting, loot and arson, mass murder,
stampedes and the rampaging marauders become the narration and characters of
this bloody new chapter. Nobody escapes the fury except the safe luminaries
inside the power circle, who further fuel it from a fortress-safe distance by
using the disillusions smudging around.
* * * *
In the misty morning the rising turmoil was
caught by the temple’s chiming bells as some devotees came and returned after
offering prayers. The puritan’s protégés, notwithstanding the fact that nobody
in the whole village needed either their mourning tear or even a masked-up
graveness (however callous the loss might have been), awoke with the impulse of
arriving at wrong places with wrong motives. Quickly they saw this chance to
add their own unmeaningful talk to the mournful parleys and jumpstarted for the
house where the tragedy had befallen.
Uneasily intuitive wisdom had finally dawned
upon the nightmarish priest. He was fully convinced of the unfulfillment of his
devious designs to successfully foray into the gypsy fortress without the
resident ruffians’ banally blatant cooperation. The sacrilegious fire hissing
out its platitudinous tongues to eat up the sacrosanct beauty had taken its
toll. The sadist’s wizardry and hocus-pocus escapist manoeuvres had been burnt
to ashes. His eyes were now red for the cruel wizardry of abnormal sexuality.
All he could do now was to take the vagabonds with him, while deliberating over
his esoteric designs in such a way as to befool them into taking his ebullient perversion
for the object of their lust as just the exorcist’s tantrums like earlier. So,
after a few pampering words he too luckily jumped into the escaping vehicle.
The strategist was virulently thinking of a
plan, while the rattle-brained fellows just emptily rattled along the old
vehicle. Theirs was the prodigally wasteland fire, which despite all its fury
was burning as if to burn only itself. He but was thinking of some spurious
social fire intended to be ignited by an amber from the netherworld burning
inside him to consecrate the satan. Sexual satan in him was relentlessly harnessing
all and sundry ideas––some of them reaching up to the farthest end of inhumanity’s
dark spectrum. Unscrupulously he was conjuring all possible permutations and
combinations. It was a really tough job. To break the almost invincible
fortress of the peregrinators, whose strongly protective aura around her turned
him dead white, and steal the most precious jewel he required avowedly devoted
cooperation of some villagers to fill up the numerical disadvantage in the
ranks of these foolish templeprecincts-occupiers. Then his agelongly clean
cloak of asceticism had to be kept spotless as well. But, why’d these
simplistic farmers abominably prey upon these undefaulting nomads? Puzzlingly
amorphous thoughts were eating him.
“Can Bhagte’s boy’s death help?” a flash of
hope steered ahead a bit of resolution.
“No it can’t! It’d be just like going into
the war with a teacher’s stick. The whole village is in mourning, so the shouts
of witchcraft against her won’t serve any purpose,” the resolution was promptly
repulsed.
It was for the first time his merciless heart
had thought about anything related to Bhagte since he left his home yesterday.
He was totally deaf and dumb to the silent screams of the servile villager who’d
served him for almost four years.
“These bastards are the only ones whom I can
fool to steal the girl to a place of my liking. But, what after that? They’d
tear her to shreds without even allowing me to touch her!”
He was fully conversant with the pestilence
of their riotous lives. He found himself diving into the hidden depths of their
real character. Their churlish drunken rage; their avatars as gamesters of stews and taverns; their jollity drawing
cuts amongst themselves (and whoever drew the highest lot could even drink
blood from others’ throats). Unequivocally the images arrived at a conclusion
in a disparate nutshell: they won’t even pay heed to the God or devil if they
themselves arrived and asked them to stop. Following it further, a premonition
arose from the fire inside him and warned he could as well end up jeopardising
his own flesh and blood. But he was helpless. Such forewarning elementary
truths couldn’t reach his senses writhing in sadism’s tight clasp. At any cost
he had to carry out his stratagem. But how? He was precariously thinking, while
the apparitions of uncertainty constantly demurred the design of any possible
plan. Meanwhile, her image kept haunting him, providing vicious perseverance to
the sacrilegious fire inside him.
It’s a bit surprising that even during the
present times, when individualism reigns supreme at the soaring heights of its
selfish lucidity, nationalism is still at least hypothetically revered. There’re
so many hands offering wreaths whenever something connoting nationalism
happens. Or at least it seemed to be so by the look of a large crowd gathered
in and around the courtyard whose flower had earned martyrhood while fighting
for the country. All and sundry faces wore a genuinely gloomy look of revenge
and retribution.
The condolence gathering was then joined by
the wily mentor and his foolish brat pack, all of them without any slightest of
a soft, soothing feeling for the departed soul and its family. Concomitantly
they earned a place amidst the grievers. An expression of enforced gloom in all
its mourning mundanity masked their faces, covering the tittering triteness
which could still glare mischievously as slightest of a smile around the corner
of their lips. The priest, however, was in a bit of advantage in this matter,
as the elflocks of his thick beard could always hide the glaring immoral legacies
of ninety percent of his facial expressions. And majority of the rest (most of which
were now viciously Machiavellian) glimpsed their macabrously unethical
lethalness through his elfishly big, wide, red eyes.
In grave tones people were talking about the
spiral staircase of life and death. In an extraordinary erudite manner some of
them were transforming the death’s ambiguously erratic aura into a mundanity
meant to bring about unfettered freedom to the ‘imprisoned soul’. But the
subject matter was coming barreling towards the perpetrators of death.
Pakistan-mania had started to unleash the volleys of its contagious verve.
People were talking and listening in boiling consternation as the news poured in that as many as three
young soldiers, all belonging to the same district as well as the same company
of Jat regiment which was ambushed by the militants while on a night patrol in
Kashmir, had been killed.
Perennially hardworking Jat farmers, the controllers of social as well as economic
hierarchy in this rural hinterland of Haryana, were thus on the verge of losing
their legendary mental indolence which normally shows agriculturally conditioned
apathy to the extremities of emotional spectrum. So, disparagingly the
rural-rustic ear––whose drums so often beat in meek acceptance of reality––was
melancholically harkening with repugnance this time. Communally laced covenant
against Pakistan Pakistan
As it had happened many times in the past,
melancholically melic and seemingly suave voice of sanity from the mouth of
depoliticised sage of the village, Choudhary Ram Singh, went unheeded. His
euphemistic tone adoring the elemental truth in the whole episode, suggesting
the politicised religion of the partition time mobsters was as condemnable as
the present rightists’ culpability in keeping the communal card alive at the
cost of precious blood of our jawans,
sounded unpatriotically incursive.
“Pakistan India India India Pakistan
But this little talk of venting out the anger
against the real culprits was too blithesome. To the mourning crowd, as to all
those on the other side of border, it was a war of religions. And as per this
communally visualistic notion, Islam was the only culprit responsible for the
death of these young sons of the soil.
The sky’s ruffled face too, like it’d the
full cognizance of the tension brewing up below, was showing bad-weather
elements. Already the winter rains in January had been more than normal.
Atmospheric disturbance seemed clearly enunciating the lurking danger. At noon a fluently entertaining
spectacle happened in the western sky. The wind was westerly. Rambling for
chilly pleasure, it suddenly swiped the clouds like a barber’s razor, shaving
off the thick black cloud from the western side. Nicely gratifying azure sky
holistically smiled. The shaving line was moving eastwards where with guts and
gumption thick clouds had piled over the sun. For a moment the windwork appeared
to make it a very pleasant sunny day. But, perhaps the day didn’t want to be a
shiny one. Footloose and fancybound gusts of wind stopped. Eastern movement of
the clearance stopped. In a mysteriously reverberating trance the atmosphere
appeared strangely polarised. It remained in such a languorously suspended
state for about fifteen minutes––as if it was enamoured by the paradoxicity.
Air today was caught in a cyclonic spiral, so in the next half an hour the whole
sky was once again overclouded.
The priest hadn’t moved out of the village
since morning. He was there in the midst of tragedy, visited a few households
of his cronies and constantly sought after a chance to further the gleam of his
designs from the pits of tragedy. Weather’s inclemency and algidity was
betraying the fervid fervour of disorganised and desultory asceticism persistently
stirring uncontrollable fits of revenge against the perennial melody of her
body. Much to a bit of solace to his abnormally crazed and creaky soul, he’d
come across some reasons to be imperiously hopeful which certainly didn’t exist
when he entered the village this morning. As the chilly day went on becoming
darker under the spell of riotous atmospheric elements, puzzling slackness
shrouding his head (in proportion to the big intermingled locks on his head)
went on clearing. For the atmosphere (both above and below) in the village, as
the repugnant reptile of his sexual enragement perceived it, was becoming more
and more subservient to the callous design of his motives.
The reason for this glimmer of hope was the
cannonading condolence vehemently speeched by the exclusivist icon––MLA Ram
Ratan. The politician’s every communally poisoned word was encouragingly
tonking at the lethal strain inside the religioner. After shedding so many
nationalistic tears, the heavily overcast and chilly afternoon saw his departure
for the airport in New Delhi
By half-past-four in the evening, bearing
capacity of the heaven’s ruffled face gave away. A deploring and coldly
repentant rumble in the clouds sounded a signal to the sky’s brimming cup of
woes. A huge lightstroke cut across the sky’s vault. Rain started. As if the
ultimate incorporeality was trying to wipe down the smouldering fire burning
inside the hearts of these agitated villagers. But the falling drops of
immateriality, though freezing cold, were having no effect against the
mournfully smouldering fire. Emotional range of these bucolic hearts had been
tested severely by the death of brave sentinel. Cloudy incrust made the
nightfall so imminent: about a couple of hours earlier than the naturally
scheduled time under normal conditions. The waiting game was taking its toll.
Restlessness was toning up its stridency with each passing minute into the
night’s flowing locks. Intermittent rains and snowfall in the dangerous state
had delayed the airlifting of the martyrs’ mortal remains.
Since morning, every passing second had taken
a big toll on the politician’s verve and effervescence. The overtly excited tactician
in him had made frantic calls to those higher in the rightist-nationalistic
hierarchy. It was after all the rarest of a chance to get noticed by those
higher on the party’s political scale, because he’d just a miniscule haystack
in the name of ideological fodder in his constituency. In vain he’d requested
the big patriotic guns to at least attend the valiant soldier’s funeral. But in
all their politically perfect prevarication the top-notch mandarins evaded his ‘political-promotion’
desiring overtures. Much to the preposterous mockery of his desperation, all he
got was a few condolence messages; and that too to be shared with the family
and village of the departed soul.
The party had at last tasted the nectar-cusp
of Indian democracy. A young soldier from almost a secular-safe village in a
communally insensitive state, dying for the cause of country was too little an
issue to deserve the time of those now forming the part and parcel of the Government
of India. So, with an aura of indifference and invulnerability they were too
busy in protecting the pride of India
Oh, how much he envied those local satraps
from the lands of dangerous communal polarisation! As a stirring embodiment of
the political opportunism, his heart was terribly clamouring for the higher
leadership’s attention. Every pore of his political soul was cursing the
secularly antidoting decades after partition which’d decommunalised the
countryside to such an extent that even the martyrdom of a soldier fighting
against the imperious jehadis wouldn’t
coddle the communal passions of the people in his constituency. His unspooling
tale of political woes found his image terribly let down by the skimping
central leadership of his party. Caught in the ravages of fickle emotions,
esoterically he took a vow that he’d consecrate the pyre with Muslim blood. For
good and all, his political adamancy raised its battered and bruised hood of
nationalism. After all, he as the representative of Hindu pride had to
liquidate the huge debt over kafir
heads of the villagers owned by the jehadis,
the fiendish fierce Muslims, who killed the young Hindu soldier from the village.
By the time the special air force plane,
fighting the perilously bad weather, arrived at the capital’s tarmac it’d grown
midnight dark, though the time was just a couple of hours after the invisible
sundown moment.
Though nervous and jumpy like a springing,
hopping beetle, he gave an ample example of his propriety for the intended job
by asking the rowdy horde (his political acumen helped him pick them up from
among the few hundred people) to be near and around him. In a state of
torturing volubility and excitability he traveled with the body to the district
city, from where the district administrative officials sleepishly joined the cavalcade.
Almost whole of north India
Smouldering angst in the villagers’ hearts had
been safely facilitated and protected by the solid roofs over their heads,
against which the heaven’s teary drops and strongly sighing gusts of wind were
having no effect. The wet houses, some leaking poor roofs, drenched trees, and
muddy-wet clothes of those coming and going through the dark streets
represented the tell-tale signs of icy-mourning. It was however an altogether
different story with the homeless wanderers, temporarily sheltering under their
makeshift tents. Here rain and windstorm didn’t need to play an allegory to
show their effect as in the village, because each and every droplet forced by
the windy push danced to its fully effective worth and satisfaction, consummating
the whole potential of rainhood. Its searing cold shoves got it imbibed into
the peregrinators’ makeshift settlement. In a fit of intemperance about its
unalterable traits, it was on a sort of drenchy prowl to maul each and every
gypsy sinew. With overwhelming comity the flocks of sheep were standing
freezy-still. Their furcoats having accepted defeat as water percolated down to
the skin.
Despite all these hazardously messy
pyrotechnics of the weather, there wasn’t even a lightest carping voice from
the caravan. We find fault with our fate only when we’re convinced there is any
alternative available for the destiny to bestow us with. So these homeless
wanderers were unfamiliar with such desolate whimpers. For them bad weather
elements were as normal and acceptable as a movement from one place to another.
To their forefathers, who took up this task of making forays into the distant
lands, spring like auspicious and autumnally moron look of seasons must have seemed
just a perpetual journey on the path of homelessness. Black and white mundanities
were all they were conversant with, so where was a chance of their pining for
colourful festivities and multi-hued pageantry. Thus the grisly lightning
virulently cutting across the precipitating mass of clouds had no terror as
such. The sturdy bullock gave just a defiant shake of its prodigal horns. It
looked so lavishly brave––legendary scion of the mythical bull, which according
to the folk traditions holds earth on its mighty horns, causing earthquakes
whenever it chooses to sway its head. Even the desert ships, the camel pair,
seemed so taut straight in this chilly, stormy sea. With meditative panache,
the donkeys seemed to proudly cool their heated backs after carrying the civilization
thus far. Overall, the caravan looked tiniest of a lamp stunningly braving the
fury of mightiest of a storm.
Without any pity the freezing rain was
dancing with its no-holds-barred enthusiasm. Now when the children had fallen
asleep in the laps of their mothers, old balladeer and his musicity were still
awake with the stormy night. Under the artistic force of musical verve and vim,
from his throat was emanating an old, old gypsy song still having an emotional
cognizance of the dying folk traditions. Aha, the sonorous music by the hoary
old and bulky big gypsy! Sublimely unaware the musical rhythms rode the chilly
crests of the wind. Once in the village their fading, last, mysteriously
elongated and inaudible notes came to realise the reality and tried to
tranquillize the agitated hearts. But perhaps, music is too divine and
outlandishly purist to leave any soothing, appeasing resonance in the puritanical
ears. Not to be discouraged down by the nerdish apathy, the gypsy musician went
on and on with his atypical peregrinating audacity. It appeared as if his
musical fit of delirious joy would beat the capacity of clouds which thundered
more vigorously and poured down more water to turn the merry-making droplets
into disgruntling pincers.
Where was the most beautiful shell on the seashore
in this rainy, dark, cold and stormy night? The beautifully hardened shell,
against whom most vicious of waves went back defeated into the sea ; crisply
and hopelessly, without budging the gypsy scion even a bit, while the elves
clapped joyously from above. Where was she now? Was she in one of those brave
makeshift tents? No! The watchman’s filial affection was too much to allow the
daughter spend the night in those rain-soaked ramshackle shelters, where by now
almost half of the water falling from above
had the capacity to at least gently shove the clothes.
Right at the time of nightfall, the pond
upkeeper had arrived at the caravan site. Half drenched and shivering under the
polythene sheet he was draped in, he seemed to have crossed seven seas. His
filial request saw Phulva, a woman with an infant and few other children
heading for the paternal safety inside his hut. And there inside his hut, the
stunningly graceful flower had now closed its petals to the world. The votary
of security, father’s hut, was so proud for its existence to shelter this most
precious thing on earth. While, the rain gustfully lashed the polythene sheets
securely imbibed in reed and grass woven to the fibers and fabrics of a
weaverbird’s nest. The lantern was burning to show how a sleeping flower looked
like.
In the village, electricity had been blacked
out at the behest of first raindrop, as is the norm with state electricity
boards to cut the power supply whenever the clouds hover over the countryside
or breeze just reaches the threshold of windiness. The bereaved village hiccupping
with mourning agitation looked caught in terrifying gloom this night. Lustily
gory ideas were fulminating in the priest’s mind as he came to fathom the
trauma smouldering inside the villagers’ hearts.
In the dark evening, when the rain was
picking-up towards its peak, he had come back to the temple accompanied by
another rowdy element. Cloaked in a raincoat, which once again fell in his way
as a symbol of someone’s faith in the village today, the priest appeared of
arboraceous proportions. Giving two hundred rupees to the young brat (although he
was at the periphery of badness, yet he needed to take a few steps
ahead––because he still was a part of the village society––to find himself face
to face with the twisted tableau of devilry) the religioner handed him an empty
bottle.
“Bring this medicine from the city as quickly
as possible. It is for some ailment. Keep rest of the money yourself! Go!”
vulture like scavenger (chucking up all morality) had ordered.
The boy with fastly warping, astraying senses
did the job with great interest and a mammoth sense of adventurism. Criminal
psyche in formation inside him patted his back exultingly.
Taking the so called bottle of medicine in
his hand, he held it against the lantern light. With a concealed frown the
liquid inside was elatedly shining. Those little wavelets appeared jostling
with chilling threats. A big blast of thunderbolt cut like a shrieking sabre
across the bosom of sobbing sky. Spurious colouration of the fluid in his heart
stormed against his hairy chest to burst out and mix with the bottled one. The
evil spirit had totally griped him, as he emerged elfishly from his residential
room. While crossing the closed doors of sanctum-sanctorum he shuddered a bit,
as if the evil spirit crisply shivered for being so near to the seat of God. The
big banyan braving the storm ruffled its wet, frozen foliage as if its
mythically holy erudition had been shammed by the dweller beneath. The
mischievous tabby dog came running. Tautly mean, it wagged its tail. His
perilously proselytised heart poured affection on the beast, because he was
afraid and the dog seemed a big support. Prosily whistling he fondled the dog’s
wet fur. The pedantry beast followed him in rare muteness as if it was too
happy after having smelt all the criminal misadventure inside the priest’s
heart as well as the bottle.
It was around eight in the night. Fearfully
weird night appeared infinitely furious and darker than any midnight on earth. For some episodic encounter
with the despicable light (incisively deep darkness now seemed a friend to him)
he emerged ghostly from the temple. The bottle was safely hidden in the
raincoat, as stealthily as the fall of his ascetic morals to gutter-level filth
and indecency. Last night’s heaven inside the hut insidiously glimpsed through
the gaping hole. Assailantly his soul yelled at him. His former neighbour,
though terribly trivial to be given even a thought, like a mighty foe
repulsively hit against his cruel imaginations about her. In utmost apathy to the
priest’s moral degradation, the watchman’s little frail figure fatherly related
to the gypsy daughter appeared the most hateful thing on earth. The sadism
inside him made him venomously jealous of the old, frail body miraculously
surviving despite the steadily ebbing away of life from it. In hurly-burly he
spluttered across the watery thickets. The smouldering amber rambled along the
pond towards the hut. There was so much destructive fire in him that even all waters
in the clouds won’t have subdued it.
In a freewheeling dialogue with the satan, he
exactly knew where to strike most inimically. Perhaps, softest of beautiful
things as well as emotions are the weakest points for the predator’s strike.
Softest of a tissue, the earlobe for twisting and piercing! Or thousands of
tiny daughters of the watchman’s filial affection, and somewhere the shiny
little soli among them! An immortal
love––divine and deathless love!
The priest was well aware of the watchman’s
nightlong fatherly coddlings of the agile water daughters during those long wintry
nights, when even the sturdiest of farmers (so proud of their grit-jawed
valiancy) dithered to step out of their houses. The inviolably sacred space for
the slippery shiny creatures in the watchman’s heart had seemed nerdishly equal
to hallucinations to the priest. At least to profane this sacred space in his
frail foe’s heart, he didn’t need to ride piggyback either on the lampoon pack
or a bigger frenzied mob. He could do it all by himself! His soul fighting a
host of desires, fears and frustrations, at last heaved a little sigh of relief
for coming across such a soft target with rich harvest of revenge. When the
target is so soft, harmless and meditatively mute, even the utterly decapitated
of a physical self can commit most sacrilegious crimes against it, provided the
predatory stalker first kills that small, soft, sonorous voice arising from the
farthest and deepest corner of his heart. This voice had already perished in
the vilifying flames of his heart. So, the fratricidal ideas very freely and
stormily cropped up in his mind. Actuating the idea was so easy. Just drop this bottle’s liquid into the pond
and turn it into a netherworld, his wickedness came acalling.
“It’s so easy to do it!” touching the bottle
he exulted, while each cell in his body chuckled in concordance with the evil.
Jerking in fits and starts, the evil was
greedily feasting on the choicest morsels of thoroughly bashed up morality. A scene
of that morning, when the sun aghastly shone over the upturned bodies of dead
fish scattered along the pond’s edges like death’s necklace, suppliantly
suffused his memory lane. A vicious pogrom had been committed against the water
kingdom. The morning bereaved of its usual charm. Some arsonist had perpetrated
the crime in just one stroke.
“It takes just this bottle poured in any
corner of the pond to kill all of them in one stroke!” pond’s gloomy lessee had
coldly sighed, pointing at the bottle lying nearby.
At that time the priest was quite surprised
at the salubrious destructiveness of that small bottle. And as soon as the
ostensibly aggrieved lessee left the scene, he picked up the bottle and put it
in his wooden box, the repertory in which he kept many noxious substances which
aided his exorcist wizardry; grisly substances from the hocus-pocus world,
capable of causing terror even among the evil spirits (if they exist exclusively
apart from the human bodies). Today the worthless collection had come in
pricelessly handy to his repertoire to cause the orgy of violence, arson and
rioting against the agile water dwellers.
Inculpatorily evil designs storming inside
him were incursively matched by the rain pouring down sinisterly with the
intention of emaciating the infant spring: the wheat crop with bulging, green
spikes, prettyish peas and prevalently yellow mustard flowers, all of them had
been mauled by this excessive late winter rain and windstorm.
Before venting out his lethal loath against
the fish world in merriment in the turbulent waters, he went straight for its
sentinel’s hutment, as his pretersensual peevishness couldn’t stop him from
staring at the foe’s shelter before dealing the fatal-most blow. As he waddled
along this new path, the darker night under furiously swaying twigs of the
prickly trees appeared pampering the satan banally hissing inside him. Darkness
around and inside him was applaudingly bestowing him every prerogative to
satisfy his carnal pleasures.
“I’ll destroy all these creatures in one strike,”
the meanness fumed inside him, “and then the mermaid, the most beautiful in all
seven seas, would be mine. Mine only!”
His preterhuman canniness had turned
poisonous. Each and every ounce of his blood belabouring against the veins and
arteries cried ‘pour me into each and every juicy particle of that heavenly
fruit’.
“You’re mine, only mine!” he spluttered,
while sexual perversion took painstaking, almost lynching, turns.
His proselytisation had been complete––from a
lame religioner conjuring hypnotization on people bogged down by the unknown,
to a helplessly suffering human being limping horrifyingly as even the
religious shackles of earlier had broken down; a pyrrhonist on the verge of an
impending catastrophe; inside whom the meanest of instincts which had been
lying subdued, suffocated in the make believe world of venerable reclusory, had
now been brought to volcanic life by their consecration on the heinously
incurvated altar of inhumanness. His new religion was axiomatically in full
control of his physical self now.
Even if all the doors in this world are open,
a thief however would first go to a peeping hole at the back. He too
straightway went to his gaping hole of yesterday. Burgeoning lewdity sprouting
from desire found him involuntarily raising his chin to first put nostrils before
the hole in order to breathe the air which the loveliest luminiferous raylet
had prevailingly scented the day before. As the air hit the wily chambers
inside him, stirrings of uncontrollable and callously aggressive lust once
again flared up the sadist’s inhuman inclemency.
It wasn’t dark inside the hut. Before putting
his eyes to the hole, he didn’t expect her to be there. But he was for a
surprise. The redolence was of course there, spiritually safe inside the snug
heaven. In fine feminal fettle, she was festally playing with the infant. It
seemed as if the child, so innocent like the God Himself, had got into this
infantish impersonation to enjoy the maternal care flowering so perfectly in
that parti-coloured parterre. Other children were sleeping in a heap on the
mat. The eavesdropper cupped his ear to the hole to hear her voice, because the
stormy noise outside (howling its own brand of boisterousness) was too much and
especially here as the woods nearby were at their noisy best.
In all her incorruptible immateriality she
was calling the old man ‘Abba’. Warm glow of her tones and morning glory
of her fresh face made the little space inside look celestially apart from the
strident worldly fury outside. He was taken aback by the sacrosanct
daughterliness in her voice. A religionless lass coddling the old Muslim like
the proudest daughter comfortably ensconced in the filial confines of
household. Either she knew this synonym of paternalism in his religion, or he
might have asked her to call him so. Exploring this fact should be none of our
business. The old, frail father was adoringly ogling at her. A fatherly
protective and lovingly possessive glint in his old, dim eyes appeared creating
a fortress around her, to save the luxuriant proliferation of her beauty from
every storm of life.
Storm inside the fallen anchorite
blasphemously sang lilting liturgies for the satan. Enervating affliction burst
out as a helpless sigh, which equaled the storm’s tempestuousity cycloning
around him. Insidiously looking big dog, so ugly appearing due to the suicidal
bravery lurking from every part of its naughty existence, too pissed at the hut’s
corner, as if out of contempt for the older one warmly snoozing inside. Rain
meanwhile helplessly beat upon the valiant roof. Defeated drops sulkily slipped
down the eaves; the defeated water dripping down the thatching’s overhanging
edges.
She was exuding a daughterly aura. Under its
impact the exquisite calm of the watchman’s reticence had given way to an
accosting articulateness. In his rusted old heart filial emotions were working
assiduously to provide words to the purist father’s sentiments, albeit, the
taciturnity of yore hampered him a bit now and then, as his words mingling too much
emotions became indiscriminate. Or possibly his unspent paternal love and
affection was too overbearing for the discreet verbality. Notwithstanding these
fickle check-dams to the filially ravaging river of his emotions, he was fastly
getting used to the social parameters of love, affection, being cared for and
caring someone. These were the things which’d never befallen his way due to his
non-existence as a social entity since childhood.
Lust, hate, helplessness and the devil’s
glimpse frigidly coalesced inside the pathetic peeper and trenchantly
pooh-poohed at the reverberating trance of the little heaven’s self-sustaining
bliss inside the hut. At the spur of an evil moment, he took out the bottle; opened
it; and poured down the poison amidst the whispering chants of tantric mantras for death and
destruction.
Calculating the arithmetics of his wrong self’s
welfare he came back to the temple, left the dog inside the compound and
ensnared in an endless trail of choicest of evil thoughts returned to the village
to be among the bereaved souls.
Proudly beholding a destructive euphoria, the
poison meanwhile spread cursorily. Reaping acclaims from the death’s quarters,
its piquant chemical reaction turned the oxygen inside water into some useless oxidant
for the fish world. Glibly it invited death to sumptuously add to its kitty.
Wholesome and healthily swaying water of before became an endlessly endorsing
doom. The mass destructor had put the water on fire. In frenetic scramble and
hurry-scurry the flocks of fish tried to dodge death. Thy flapped and gasped
for breath as the oxygen level plummeted down under the poison’s impromptu
command. Fumacious death hovered over the pond. Aah, the acrimonious arson
drenched in mud and water!
While the fishy dreams were being grotesquely
rubbled, the beautiful mermaid bathed in fluorescent hues fell asleep and so
the father and others in the hut. The lantern was burning; its bewitched glow
envying her complexion surreally sizzling over the captivating canvas of her
face.
When the cavalcade accompanying the soldier’s
body reached the village about an hour before the midnight , the rain stopped as if out of fear as well as respect
for the valiant young man and allow his pyre to be lit. Under the dark pools of
midnight-black the funeral was hastily arranged lest the rain might start
again.
Now, there’s a parochial adage that no fury
of rainstorm has the capacity to prevent a pyre from burning. Literally no
earthly storm can rob the departed soul of a chance to see its once body
turning into the pyre’s ashy pelf. So the fiery halo engulfed the pyre with a
wizardly precision, stoically unmindful of the damp wood and the surroundings
saturated with chilly waters. Without any prejudice, under death’s subservience,
it thrived around the soldier’s body waiting to remunerate the five elements
which once bestowed it with life. Amply aided by the mournfully chirping
crickets, a deploring crowd of hundreds or even a thousand paid its obeisance
to the departed soul. Their hearts were griped with grief and angst. The conglomeration
was standing almost hypnotized under the sorrowful wand of mourning. They were
encircled by some mystically emotionless moments. It appeared as if some purity
was in unknowable transition. The graveyard’s desolation and eerie was broken
by an elderly man, a veteran of many cremations.
“It’s reached the body,” he pointed at the
fire. “He was a flower; the fire won’t have any trouble in completing his
journey. So without worrying about the pyre we should leave now.”
It’s a crematorial custom to leave the place
as soon as the fire appears to reach the body in the pyre’s middle. After an
hour someone comes back to check the fire’s funeral performance. The old man’s
voice brought the gathering to life from that reverentially-rapt spell of
mortality. The mourning mass fragmented. People started to go to the nearby
water puddles to wash their hands, feet and even faces. It again was a one more
little funeral custom in the great genres of the present forgetting and forgiving
the past. Bleary eyed district officials took a hasty leave from the scene;
afraid some more formality might come to haunt their eyes weeping for sleep.
Their yawning drivers took a sigh of relief in the cars standing by the road to
the side of the district headquarter from the village near the canal bridge.
Apathy shown by the higher
rightist-nationalistic echelons had terribly let down the MLA. He felt
unbearable pain due to this political vivisection. Agitated heebie-jeebies in
his political soul were making a contagiously virulent noise. Oh, that callously
prosaic attitude of theirs---even when a son of his constituency had fallen for
the motherland. The soldier’s blood had dropped in vain, without raising the
local leader’s status in the eyes of those cacophonically modern beholders of
national pride. He’d won the elections literally as a proxy candidate for the
regional satrap. His party had won a few seats in the state assembly and was
thus servilely functioning as an ineffective coalition partner in the state
government. Consequently this representative from the area was just an
unimportant, insignificant cog in the overall political machine of the party;
just a patch in the political carpet which was recklessly harking for its worth
in the now-achieved beautiful design-work. The mutant pathogens of an
uncontrollable urge to emerge as the most beautiful silken sinew in the
nationalistic carpet were goading him to the pits where all morality was blown
to bits. Oh, that prudish, political, patriotic impersonation by an ordinary
man with selfishly mundane cravings to look like a brave fighter for the cause
of nation in all its glitterati ; the foister, the political piper garnering
votes by creating false pride somewhere, and fear and insecurity somewhere
else.
“Go cowardly and wash your hands of
the blood of this valiant son of the soil!” he thundered operatically at this
dangerous time around midnight ,
as if to invoke ghosts from the graves.
The people had just started to trickle
off to the village. But, since a politician has the sovereign right for a
political mob around him (whatever might be the occasion!) there were hundreds
around him to listen to his verbal efforts at shouldering the patriotic sky. The
priest and the politician’s chosen ones were huddled around the orator as he
raised himself to new heights of vilifying patriotic machoism. Gestures of
political cannibalism freely flew.
“Ours is a race of do-nothings… cowardice
veiled by the apparel of non-violence! Fact of matter is we’re just fit enough
to wear bangles while they pick up weapons for their religion. Only Muslims can
die for their religion, not we! What can we do is only tear-shedding. Only
tears for the exceptionally brave among us! What a shame! It’s nothing but an
insult to the bravely departed soul. Do’u know what’d they’ve done in our
place? They’d have butchered at least ten Hindus for their one loss! Shame!
Shame! A day will come when they will once again rule over us! Take my word!”
in an expediently taut voice he poured out political-cum-communal venom.
“Then what’re we supposed to do,
except shedding tears and prayers for the dead?” the priest asked, knowing
fully well that this question would help the orator take a more lethal step
forward in his lamentation.
Curving along the endless circle of
his desire the priest blew out a huge sigh (or was it a hiss?) of resignation.
In utter dejection he gestured with paramount stoicity. Precariously swaying
fire in the pyre made it look like a weeping rendition borne by his lameness.
But the melodrama was meant to make his coreligionists see their common
religious legacy cursing them for their impotent rage.
“We can do... definitely, why not?
Provided we put nation before the self. We can certainly pay a tribute to the
young fallen blood,” the politician’s hollow talk brimming with empty words
took the mob further on deranged paths. “It’d be possible only if we kill the
individualism in us… individualism which unpatriotically backstages our pride
for our religion, race and the nation. While they’re just blind for their
cause, for their religion! They kill for their religion and we just weep for
the killed. You people have wept for the whole day. Your red eyes make you look
so fearful. That’s the difference between the blood-red eyes of a ferocious
Muslim and the water-red eyes of a weeping Hindu. Oh, that killer’s bulging-red
glare in their eyes...” he couldn’t find words and stopped at the crest of
hateful excitement.
His spineless convictions---fastly
flaring up bogus rhetoric---were taking immoral yawns for some politically
episodic encounter. Forced redness in his own eyes due to the political
compulsions, and the real red in the priest’s where the devil planned clattering
intrigues in all amenity with badness, could beat any blind-red gaze of the
most fanatically ferocious Muslim of the world (the redness which turns him
colour blind to all other hues of humanity). Seeing this different type of
redness in different types of religioners even the angels (with all their
posterities) perhaps depilatorily rub their heads to find out as to why mighty
Father’s children are so negligent-red to His true essence.
Shuffling along his wooden support the
fallen monk tried hard to regain his composure, but his lascivious tongue was
giving nightmares to the shallow, superficial crust of religiondom still hiding
his depraved self from the prying worldly eyes.
He portrayed himself as the victim of
his co-religioners’ cowardice. “Earlier our country was known through the holy
persons, the gurus, the sadhus, sants and mahatmas,” the
priest threw his ‘victim of the modern society’s apathy’ tantrum. “But now who
cares? Religion has taken a backseat. People are irreligiously walking so fast
that a poor lame servant of God like me is left behind... many, many miles
behind! And the people no longer care. Still, I’ve the duty to follow them
slowly, slowly, while praying for their well being. People’ve almost discarded
religion and the servants of God to such an extent that they no longer notice
the humiliation of people like me by a Mussalman. He hit me one night. That
little thing, he hit me one night! He... bravely holding the symbol of his
religion amidst we Hindus! Do’u know the fate of a sole Hindu, just as he’s
among us, among Muslims? Either he’d have committed suicide or they would’ve
butchered him. And here is this skinny satan! He casts religious aspersions at
me. Whenever our eyes meet, his glance appears mocking at me, ‘Lo, here I undo
all your holy work by getting so many fish decimated around your holy place.’
Aah, this criminal ignorance and religious non-commitment from my own people!”
he stopped as if all his acting energy had pissed out under that bout of make-believe
victimisation.
Straddling with lamenting élan his
browbeating talk had stretched to the vicinity of a short political speech. The
religioner’s bogus rhetoric made him a pedantrist in the politician’s eyes. The
latter however took some consolatory sips from the fact that the lame mendicant
was only validating the religious connotation of his political point. Still, a
politician’s bushelled heart can’t bear such a rival who takes the centre stage
for so long. Lost in the starry showbiz of politics, he once again regained the
stage.
His political cacophony took
horrifyingly painful twists and turns, just like perishing moths in flames. “I
as the democratic representative of your pride, hopes and aspirations consider
it my God-ordained responsibility to bestow you the very same, until my last
drop of blood!” feigning a fighting soldier’s grandiosity he thundered in this
social battlefield of Muslim anarchy. “And if an outsider Mussalman, of the
race and religion of the people who did this to a son of ours,” he pointed towards
the burning pyre, “is still free to perpetrate his sacrilege, then it’s the heinous-most
shame to us. Such a frail man!” image of the ant-like frail old watchman in his
goatee and innocently large empty eyes, the dweller of that ramshackle hut and
owner of that calendar with Koranic verse (whom he’d never seen in person; just
heard a bit about him), ferociously swooned over his patriotic senses, and he
continued, “Such a tiny Muslim as would not be fit for a fight even with a
wasp, is bravely keeping the flame of his religion burning in all its
destructiveness. And our bright star has been broken by his brethren out there
in Kashmir !”
Now that the scheme had taken a turn
as he wanted it to be, the priest elatedly thanked all his Gods. The ruffian
group was standing near him. Like rustling bats they were visibly getting bored
with this verbal tempestuousity. The vandal squad’s wanton verve was monkishly
waiting for some practical mischief. Decadent banality spread over their
eardrums no more accosted this dull, actionless political speech. The priest smelled
this agitation inside their grotesque hearts. So, while the politician was
still speaking, he played his next card.
“You too have got a reason to feel
your blood boil for this frail Muslim foe of this powerful politician,” he
offered an obsequious flattery. “Should I tell you, why? She, for whom your
desire pines so painfully, calls him ‘abba’.
He’s now her protective father. She’s sleeping in his hut tonight. It’s the
safest place to lift her from, because once inside the dera even this whole village can’t dare to touch her. Come on you
foolish ones, today is the best chance for you to get the most coveted fruit
after all those silly escapades of yours!”
Instantly a chemical reaction
spuriously hissed forth with its recessionary tailspin. Ludicrously impulsive,
their hands touched local made pistols and other sharp edged accessories to
their delinquency tucked under their trouser belts. Boringly errhine talk of
the politician now became totally relevant to them. After all they too had
something at stake––a juicy share from the incestuous pie.
“That Mussalman has to be cut to
pieces like they cut animals daily to eat them!” head vandal catapulted.
Concealed frown of the religioner’s
grieving soul changed to an assuaging smile. Head hoodlum’s irreverently
slouching words, audibly ordaining death to the culprit, sent a trenchant wave
of excitement among a few dozen souls jostling for wrongful crumbs at the outer
fringe of vandalism. While rest of the confused mass comprising of hundreds of people
stood there strangely brooding, unable to make out whether these were nailing
white lies or requiem dedicated to the brave soldier.
Argute morphia of politics had now
reached its criminally-high point. “Weakest of a Mussalman has the guts to
survive among thousands of Hindus, while they’d eat up a Hindu if thousands of
them find one among them. And... and what’s happening in Kashmir ?”
he was catching any sinew from anywhere, haphazardly flaunting his political
prowess. “Most of those who die fighting these terrorists are our sons of the
soil from the state. Army, mind you, will never be able to subdue these
religious fanatics. Do’u know why? Very simple! The strength of Indian army is
just ten lakhs, while the terrorists number fifteen crore! Their loyalty lies
across the border! To that holy land of their religious brethren!”
Hats off to the political circus! On
the one hand hundreds of bereaved souls were mourning the death; angst brewing
up in them with tepefaction. And here he was, at the wrong end, to pour out
fire to boil their patriotic nerves in order to turn them into an exemplary
cortage, who like hypnotized mobsters just ogle at his anointed iconhood
surrounded by the fiery halo of nationalism for inspiration. The brazen-faced
midget was absurdly hoeing religious dirt to throw it flagrantly into the eyes
of commoners; to make them blind; to ostracise that secular rusticity from that
indifferent parish society.
The demagogue ever-besieged in a
medley of communal controversies, sallied historically, “My respectable elders
are still here who’d butchered these bastards so comprehensively fifty years
ago!”
Old, slowly souffling hearts pumped
more blood to fill the chests with taut, airy pride, as the blemished images of
those tenebrously chaotic times flashed with communal chiaroscuro before their
dim eyes.
“But alas, already light blood of ours
is becoming more watery with every new generation!” he stormily added. “While
theirs is ever getting denser, dark-red; is ever on jehadi move towards sanguine saturation. Those bloody clots would
then stop the blood in our arteries, causing death to this country!” he was
speaking in a snake-supple, cavalier fashion.
The disingenuous priest cupped his
ears to hear the voice of communal satan, tenuously raising its hood as people
started murmuring grumbles over their historical ignominy at the hands of
Muslims.
As is the habit of God, He certainly
casts a little luminiferous light, whenever the darkness tries to put everything
under a pal of gloom. It’s however another matter that this Godly manoeuvre
most often fails––evil times as we live in––to expose the shadowy underbelly of
the wrong. So, even if the small ray with its acme of reality tries bravely,
the execrable dark at the cusp of its ill-found pride (ruling the roost due to
its numerical strength during the present times) very quickly chucks up the
reality’s sojourn across its incorrigible extension.
Thus spoke the quiescent goodness
through the sane voice of Ram Singh, the teacher:
“It’s the politics and narrow self
motives which make a religion good or bad,” his voice fell like a bombshell on
the mysteriously fidgety, politico-religious zealot and the tricksty, fallen
monk. “All religions preach love and compassion for fellow human beings. So if
one is rigid to other’s faith then it means he isn’t true to his own religion as
well,” for a moment his voice astounded the pall of gloom with its littlest
thunderbolt of reality.
Pilloried politician at once
catapulted a retort, “Do’u hear folks! Here’s the tortured one, who is
unfortunate for being born as a Hindu after dozens of Muslim sojourns starting
from the time of their so called Prophet!”
It was an elatedly-shining pure prank;
laughter was, thus, inevitable. But very quickly it fell off the ladder, as
they guiltily looked at the burning pyre, which was now on the side of waning
after consuming the body. After a momentary twang of sorry feel, they once
again concentrated on the MLA’s rabble-rousing talk.
He was grotesquely engaged in twisting
the tableau of goodness, “Given this bipolar reality, he has been an uneasy
soul throughout his life. Soul of a Muslim imprisoned in a Hindu body!”
The angry politician poured forth his
revengeful blasphemy against the apolitical misfit (or unfit?), who stood
against all he stood and lived for; and whose views and activities he was fully
acquainted with.
To settle old political scores he
continued ignominiously, “Oh God, we have even a former Muslim to enjoy the
cremation of most valiant of a Hindu! In a few decades that’d be the common
fate of this holy land
of Hindus Hindustan !”
His verbal assault had been too
sarcastic. More than the verbal meaning it was the tone and tenor of his throat
which burgeoned venom. So, otherwise cool and composed temper of Ram Singh too
tilted a bit to the side of instigation.
The proud participant from the side of
goodness tried to match the politician’s rhetoric. “Ok! I’m a Muslim from yore
and Hindu in this birth. At least I’ve the privilege of being born in the humans’
religions. But what about you? I think people like you belong to the inhuman
religion of Satanism, where devil is the God, hatred and violence are the
rituals, and antithesis of a particular religion forms the scriptural base!”
“You’re proving yourself to be a
Muslim by talking like that!” the MLA seethed with anger. “In this birth of
yours you can’t do anything except sympathise with them. I pity you. God has
played a cruel joke on you. The so called intelligentsia of this country too
has been punished by the God in a similar way,” he baulked summarily.
“Would you please take the trouble of
telling me,” the human being asked politely, “which God, Hindu or the Muslim,
has punished the people like me?”
The fretful beholder of Hindu pride
was at the dazzling cusp of political pyrotechnics, “I think no God would take
the trouble of even meting out punishment to a tormented and possessed soul
like you.”
“And our Gods are too holy to punish a
Muslim soul. It must have been the Muslim God who exiled you due to some
mischief of yours!” the sycophant priest came from the side of this dharmarakshaka, defender of the
religion.
The teacher’s sane voice had most
often tormented the anchorite’s wizardry. So he too pooh-poohed his grudge
against the Muslim soul in a Hindu body.
“Oh yes, Sadhu maharaj! You’ve every reason to speak from his side,”
Hindu-muslim or Muslim-hindu human countered. “Not so beggary fate of people
like you, who had been starving for thousands of years, owes a lot to these
patriotic votaries of so called resurgent Hinduism.”
“Oh, shut up you Mussalman!” an
abusive cry carrying the molecules of mutant pathogens emerged cacophonically
from the gang of vandals.
It was recklessly disrespectful to the
former teacher of the body sourcing this evil phrase. Irresistible chronicler
of goodness couldn’t bear it anymore and slapped the abuser hardly, who pounced
upon his former teacher with all humiliating mud and slime. Like a scene from
the wanton-most brazen age it was glaringly shameless. Few elders came to
rescue the teacher who had fallen on the ground. As was expected the whole
bunch of retrograde brats stepped ahead to protect the head honcho. A fistfight
resulted. But who would’ve taken too much risk for the teacher. There were so
few people like Bania in the village, and even he wasn’t present in the
village. When after many efforts they were set apart, the vandal who’d started
all this took out his local made firearm. Firing in the air he proclaimed:
“I’ll kill that Mussalman and let me
see who saves him!”
He appeared greatest disciple to the
priest. The MLA too rubbed his hands with gleeful anticipation. Promptly, a few
dozen potentially criminal brats from the village––eager to come under the shade
of criminal awning––adventurously coalesced with the exquisite ruffians. In
full ferocity they ordained death to the Muslim as a mark of respect to the
departed soul. A criminal fire was burning inside their hearts, as if the dying
ambers in the soldier’s pyre had caught the criminal fodder inside them.
Some people tried to pacify them. But
the politically exploded bomb was to inevitably result in some destructive
consequences. So, their uncontrollable fit of rage easily prevailed over the
feeble, fearful opposition.
“Tau
today you’ll see what we Hindus of this generation can do for the protection of
our religion. I’ve heard enough of your partition time butcherly bravery. But
when you’ll come to see our great deed in the morning, you’ll feel ashamed of
your weakness for sparing so many Muslims in this country at that time. We’ll
just finish them up, wherever we come across one,” the prime vandal shouted at
a robust oldie who was usually heard reminiscently boasting about his
historical role in the partition-time butchery.
Reactionary impulse of such ferocious
animals is beyond the defining parameters of all the religions and faiths in
the world. It’s just like an earthquake which can shake even the seat of God,
before He finally takes control of the situation.
Political sentience in the MLA
convinced him that now they won’t backtrack.
“Now just go and kill that Mussalman!
And also don’t spare anyone who comes in between,” whispering this in the head
hoodlum’s ear, he left the scene without any further waste of his energy due to
plethoral political-inundation.
As they––about sixty-seventy of
them––were about to leave the place to commit the crime, the only ringleader
left out in the arena called his coterie back for the starker dynamics of his
game plan.
Taking them aside, the Sadhu cajoled with utmost
inter-beingness, “You may kill that almost dead Mussalman. But how to catch the
golden bird? I know all this hoopla would be fruitless for you if you don’t get
her. There is only one way to do it, which’d be possible only if you follow my
plan.”
“But why’re you so interested in
getting her caught in our claws, Sadhu
maharaj?” one of them came with incisively deep ridicule and taunt.
“Oh, you young foolish lots! How can’u
forget the way she humiliated me? An exorcist’s revenge has always to be
fulfilled. I’d condemn her any ill fate just in order to settle scores with
her. Now, without wasting time listen to my plan. When these fools start
killing that watchman or even come to fight the gypsies, don’t become a part of
that wasted mob. Just lift the girl and come to the old haveli.”
Irresistible beats of suspicion chimed
in their foolish brains, “Why haveli?
All this dark land is ours to do whatever we want!” almost all of them rubbed
their genitals, as a mere imagination of her panoramic persona sent gushing
sexual fantasies into their brains.
The religioner moulded his throat for a
well-manicured sex-expert tone, “That’s the problem with you mere mortals. Just
quickly end up wasting your potential without harnessing the full juice of Kamadeva. You people can’t even imagine
about the heavenly pleasure modes which tantriks
have innovated through their penance to take an utmost hold over the sambogh vidya. And mind you, she is no
ordinary girl. The tantric in me can see that. I’d be there to enchant her
through exorcism so that she’d shower sensuous most charms upon all of you at
her own will. After all what does an ascetic wants? Just quenching the thirst
of his friends and fulfillment of his revenge. So, I’d be there with that wine
stock of yours.”
At
the merest mention of the girl they helplessly ran towards the road, shouting, “We’ll
do it! Just don’t forget to be there with our stock!”
All the arsonists ran after them to
collect sticks and other sharp-edged weapons from the village. Bathed in
fluorescent hues of sadism, the priest too tried to run towards the temple lest
he failed to reach the old, abandoned, ghostly structure before the rival
claimants to the fruit of his life-long hungry desire.
As for the racing pulse of
righteousness, Ram Singh; even before the MLA left, he’d already dashed down to
the village. Hoping to ring up the police from one of the few odd telephones in
the village, he’d desperately tried his hand at the dead instruments as the
lines were inanimately insensitive to his heartful sensitivities. After facing
this one more little failure, he thought over the sole alternative left: become
a premonitor against the contagiously virulent storm advancing towards the hut.
So, just ahead of the vandalists he ran towards the snuggish hut to warn the
old man. Running hastily he slipped and fell many a times. Perhaps, it’s almost
inevitable to fall when following the humanity’s premiere colour on the path of
righteousness, because the ensuing dark nullifies the rainbow bridge between
the walker and the destination. The windstorm had broken so many prickly twigs
and branches of the keekars; the path
was thus strewn with numerous needly obstructions, all of them waiting for
their share of blood from the humanistic heels.
The thoughts of dark fate, waiting
perilously for the frail old man, provoked a lump in his throat. This man with
a colourful renaissance of human heart was totally oblivious of the gypsy girl’s
role in the unfolding dirty drama. Cosseted by the irresistible flame of
religionless humanism, Ram Singh ran in the dark night lost in the grandeurical
delusions of devilry. It was still darker along the little footpath
unillustriously passing through the woods along the pond’s eastern edge. In
lacerating hurry he’d even forgotten to bring a torch. So the mud became
treacherously inimical to each and every footstep. The cold, dark night
meanwhile shivered with an excruciating chasm. By the time he reached the hut,
gorgeously humanistic white of his kurta-pyjama
was totally smeared with sleazy mud.
The hut was lost in a totally
oblivious dream. Before looking inside he cast a look of acute disappointment
towards the village. His eyes bore a fastly defeating look. Gone was that
gloriously shining vignette ornamentally holding the title of his book of goodness.
Melodiously cooing pigeons and doves of humanism are, after all, too weak
before the insidious propaganda hellishly let loose by the evil’s progenies. To
his horror, the pandemonium had reached the roadside. His eyes blurred with
obfuscation. Their torch-lights flashed as the stormy harbinger of the
sanguinary mob. Dark desperation, for a moment, made all his efforts seem
highly infructuous.
He removed the reed door. Totally out
of breath he peeped inside. Slouchingly snoozy dog barked. Unblemished aura of
the sleep inside was disturbed. Most glittering diamond’s facet shone in the dim
lantern-light. A look at her spring-like auspiciousness furrowed countless
other worrying creases on the teacher’s brow. The whirlwind, carrying an air of
vilifying machoism, was approaching fastly. And the place, where it intended to
spiral over blood-thirstily, was adorned with such a diamond. At the spur of that
dangerous moment he couldn’t make out who they were. Neither was there any time
to cogitate such things.
Illustrious glory of her well disposed
and graceful face ogled at the man outside. The flower was visibly afraid. So
were the others.
“They are coming to kill you, miyanji!” he furtively pleaded.
It was astoundingly frightening to the
old man. His fearfully surprised old, sleepy eyes stared at the outsider. The warning
tone had deadly, paranormal seriousness, which left him speechless. The dog’s
bark woke up the children too, except the infant who was still lost in an
opulent corner of sleep.
“What’s the matter?” daughter of the
house asked in a slow redolent voice.
“There’s no time to tell all this!
Just hurry up and run from this place! They’re just about to reach here any time!”
he was just going with the fearfully fleeting tide of some inestimable cosmic
fear.
The wickedness came acalling. Their
voices came burgeoning through the wet, prickly foliage of the keekars.
“Come out, all of you! Otherwise none
of you will be spared!” out of breath and fear, the words sprouted hastily,
doing their wordy things only by halves.
His voice came out as clatteringly
analogous to some utmost phobia. All of them jumped to their feet as if their
sleep had been lynched by a horrible dream; their minds meanwhile mordantly
trying to know what the matter was. Woefully afraid, a sort of stampede occurred
inside the little hut.
“Come, run to the caravan!” with
gliding guts the flower commanded, holding the shaking old man by his arm like the
bravest of a daughter.
Like a fearful deer flock they ran
towards the little grassy tableland. The teacher heard them running
convolutedly through the semi-inundated marshy vegetation along the pond’s
southern edge; while collaterally his eyes looked anxiously towards the tiny
jungle swathed in ghostly darkness. And by the time the mob indicated its
nearness through the trees, after a long-long time he heaved a littlest sigh of
relief thinking they must have reached their destination safely.
Insidiously a torch flashed on the
teacher’s mud-smeared face. “So you’ve made them run from here!” execrable
voice of his former pupil thundered viciously.
His culture and conditioning had been
fully coalesced with the evil. The bastard thus committed the crime again. As
if to countervail all those refining slaps which the teacher’s kindred soul had
once reformatively put on his young and catapulting cheeks (when the little
plantlets of depraved self were taking root) he hit the teacher once again. The
beholder of righteousness fell flat on the muddy ground.
They’d have liked to burn down the
hut, but the rain had been too much. Realising the futility of attempting arson
in this chilly dampness (and hence the loss of precious time) leader of the
rancorous guild guffawed vehemently:
“Tear it down! This bloody nest of
that Muslim weaverbird!”
Out of some deep-rooted and religion-born
enmity they pounced upon the hutment. Recycling the dust (or mud?) of his
defeated endeavour the teacher looked aghastly. The bearer of so many storms,
the intrepid structure stood its ground as they started to shake, strike and
cut it from all sides.
“Look at the Muslim hut’s strength!”
one of the mobsters babbled with effort. “Wonder how the littlest and
weakest of these fellows has got such strong instincts to raise a structure
like this!”
Whatever might be the extent of
constructive force behind a creation––and however long the period of nurturing
the cause behind it––the iron hand of destructive force diabolically swipes the
long, long cherished and woven sinews of genuine human cause, effort and
intentions. The hut gave away to the prurient furor, but not before it’d fully
tested the destructive rage of their hands.
The hut’s valiant resistance can give
us a respite for a few moments which we can utilise to catch along, of course
in haste, with that flight of the hut’s occupants who’d run a while ago.
Stupefied with horror as they ran
through the submerged grass along the pond’s encroachment into the fields,
their feet dangled over the dead daughters of the watchman’s compassion. The
poison had by now completed its work. Water was moaningly swaying over
thousands of upturned bodies. The silvery shining bodies seemed to tell the
entire abominable tale as a stroke of lightning flashed across the empty
vessels of the clouds. It was a stirring embodiment of the cosmic fatality:
life was paddling over the surface of death. Aah, the fiendish claw of death
which butchered so many daughters in a single stroke. It was a devastating
denouement. The forlorn father could no longer jump for life over the dead
bodies of tiny daughters. Fuelled by fear and inestimable sorrow his breath was
subverted. His feet got jammed lest they happened to trample over some dying
little thing. The dreary substratum of death netting around his feet caught
him.
His lovely alive daughter pulled at
his rumpled kurta, “Abba, why have’u stopped? Please run!”
she sputtered, which seemed so sweetly odd, given her voice of a song thrush.
“Please run! There’s really something
wrong. There’s a danger!” she pulled at his arm, while rest of the drove
continued with fearful gallops.
“Why’s someone done this horrible sin
to these harmless little creatures!” his heart was weeping. “What wrong these
had committed?” his voice choked over this sacrilege against the fish-world.
He was an utmost humanist; humanist on
account of his religious sincerity to the natural roles assigned by the God.
Thus, the lessee as a professional, he as a watchman and the fish inside the
pond had their own sanctified roles and purposes in his eyes. Assiduously
principled about his role in this scheme he had been going with his work of
protecting and taking care (up to the time of netting when his duty to a fish
met its full stop) of these watery dwellers. His love, compassion, possessiveness,
pain and all other human emotions were defined by his role as a fisherman. He
was submissive to the ultimate will of God about the fate of pond fish; His
netty verdict, when they completed their journey for a particular purpose. To
him pisciculture brought a few dispensations: employment to some, food to
others, and chance for numerous lives to ecstatically flirt in the waters
before the final verdict of death. So, his love for these daughters of his
compassion never revolted when the judgment hour arrived with heaps of
nettings. It was thus a sort of incorporeal effervescence in the heart of this
fish-artist.
This blatant pogrom, hence, left him shell-shocked.
It was a preposterous mockery of the divinely scheduled scheme. In
consternation he felt all of them had been tortured in a most bizarre fashion
and then murdered.
What determines the final nature of a
deed? It’s the intention and means deployed by the doer. A fish dies in a net
too; same is the fate when someone with felonious designs poisons the water.
But see both are worlds apart in His eyes! The former is just a means for
survival; the latter however is a great sin.
Had it not been for the girl, the
macabrously unethical phalanx would’ve found the old man a statue surrounded by
dead daughters. But his living daughter almost dragged him to the caravan site.
It literally required an unleashment of
a volley of kicks to shake off the rain and cold layered over the caravan. With
impunity the rain had left the whole caravan frigidly languid. So much water
had seeped into the sheep’s furs as would be sufficient to flood a big lanary.
Strong gusts of rain and windstorm had almost quelled the tents. But at least the
nature has the mercy not to completely violate the indelible principle of sleep;
though sometimes it makes it disturbingly inconsistent. So, when the frightened
drove reached there, it found the gypsies under a pal of somber snooze.
Hounds were the first to realise their
arrival. Sneaking out of their escape holes they barked portendly at the
watchman’s old pet, which shiveringly cowered near the master’s legs. The banjara pride hushed them with a gentle
rebuke. Saving themselves of the sin of profaneness they calmed down. At last
fuzzily the gypsies, their bones almost frozen, came to realise they weren’t
icily sleeping corpses. Some of them came out of their subverted shelters.
“Dadu,
dadu,” daughter of the whole caravan fearfully cried into the old gypsy’s
tent. “Please wake up, Abba is in
real trouble!” her voice was in incredibly precise synchronism with feminally
ruffled, awful turbulence inside her soft heart.
Her oppressed delicate voice had so
much suppleness and aura of vulnerability as would be sufficient to prompt even
the angels to run to help her. Ours but are too awry times. Statues of Gods
imprisoned in the alcoves are almost helpless to call forth help from their
real selves far away in the haze of infinity. Thus even the human help is
hesitantly hard to come by. But as far as this aureole was concerned, at the
command of her single beseeching voice the whole caravan had ample assiduity
available to defend her.
At that time the pathogens of humanity
were decimating the hut. In less than no time the old gypsy came out. His
filial piety quickly prevailed over all those lingering and grumbling signs of
a sleep disturbed at the peak hour.
“What’s the matter, Phulva?”
protective elder’s affectionate voice had all the capability to soak all her
fears.
“Abba’s
life is in danger!” she spoke out of breath, still unaware of the nefarious
designs of the cruelly devouring fire burning inside the vandal horde and the
fallen mendicant.
Merrymaking tumult of the criminal mob
reached their ears riding the icy moments.
“Hide him in your tent,” the old
caravan head took control of the situation, pointing at the girl’s shelter in the
middle of the site.
There was an awkward avulsion in the
atmosphere. The world was really hard-nosed. Callously aggressive it was
cocking a snook at anyone daring to give a shoulder to the goodness. The
caravan head, usually preceptory and musically artistic human being, very
easily sensed the wrong overtones of these furiously fickle emotions. He gave a
war-like commanding clarion-call of his forefathers. His hands which were ever
eager to dole out a ballad or two to the perennial melody gripped determinedly
around a very heavy stick. By now some of the gypsy males were already around
him and rest of them gathered in the next few uneasy moments. Immediacy of some
darkly lurking danger prompting them to, right at the first reflection after
the freezy sleep, lay their hands upon sticks, swords, axes, lances and other
such sharp-edged weapons which they deemed fit to possess during the endless
journey on the wheezy path of homelessness.
As the apollyonic mobsters lacerated
the hutment, the leader-in-command inimically sweltered, “I know where that
Mussalman is! Those religionless, homeless wanderers have stood up for his
defence! Now the settlers’ pride has been kidnapped by these uncivilized
wanderers! We won’t be in a position to show our faces to our future
generations if we can’t set it free from these uncivilized lampoons!”
And the wave of human regression
aggrandised itself to the bastion of gypsy fortress. Their unculturally focused
torches flashed on the bravely enamouring gypsy faces. The fiddle player,
culturally conditioned by music, was standing at the forefront.
“Where’s that bastard Mussalman?” the mob-leader
barked out a stigmatised gibe.
His and his herd’s hearts thumped with a
horrendous-most carnal desire for the gypsy flower; while rest of the mobsters,
befooled, bayed for the trivially tenuous-most blood and the frailest of bones.
“Why are’u people after that good, old
watchman?” the caravan head asked in an immanently dainty tone, still hoping
for the goodness to prevail upon their defiled souls.
Their perilously searching torch-beams
criss-crossed the gypsy settlement like a rigid, repugnant reptile.
“You religionless and homeless fools
don’t understand the war of religions!” one of the communalists prattled out a
punctilio for the mob.
“War of religions!” the caravan head
exclaimed with the shapely-rebuking elegance of an elder. “No man, I’ve
wandered so much and so far in my life, but never came across a place where
such a thing was happening. Though, I’ve heard and seen war among humans.”
His humanely intuitive wisdom oozing
out of that big body of his clad in a saggy long coat made him appear totally
religionless as well as an utmost pantheist.
Thus another stormy incubus was at the
gypsy front. The earlier one had been fully withstood by them: the humans
embossed with some uncomplaining, stateless gypsy law and the animals engrossed
in clearly defined natural principles. But man-made storms are so astute and
treacherous that even animals take note of them with an apocryphal look. The
sheep hence bleated maimedly. Faithful horses and mules neighed with warnings.
Even donkeys came out of their legendary shell of insouciance and let out
caution-raising brays.
Whereupon the never say die spirit of
the teacher (mud and slime drenched, raising its weapons of peace perhaps for
the last time) tried to pacify the fiery avalanche.
“Please son, I’m of the age of your
father!” soundly strafed teacher pleaded; meticulous ambience of his carefully
manicured pride having been decimated along with his tumbles in mud and water
as he reached the mobsters.
Possibly these are the calamitous
times conceived at the spur of chaotic moments. The fate of orderliness is hung
in the air. Disorderliness is fluently entertaining itself on the nicely
gratifying path of meanness. Under the meek acceptance of this ghastly reality
goodness is waddling humiliated on the slippery path spattered with calamitous
mud.
The teacher looked like a worthless
worm rolled in mud. Vandal soul of his former pupil was thrilled to bits. For
the third time he hit his teacher to teach him the hard lessons of kaliyuga, the Dark Age. Whence to draw
further strength? The teacher gave up with this final fall.
In less than no time, this hit turned
out to be the start of assault by the vandal bunch. Their catchpennily
promiscuous selves attacked with a criminal penchant. Aah, the pliable gypsy
affability, so congenial to the unrestricted nature, forced to be at loggerheads
with the sedentary triteness! The reticent night, now rainless and thunderless,
was still as dark as it could be, because thickest of clouds were still
overhung. Lost in this gloom the angels tried to turn a blind eye to the
beastly aphorisms clad around the humans; the officious and sycophant lessee in
the humans whom the satan bestows a lease of all his ugly manifestations.
While, the monster spleenishly eavesdropped; water-mouthed with its garish
gastronomical sense to lick up the fallen blood and devour the carcasses.
Incogitant algidity. Festally
murderous assault on the gypsy facade. Was it communalism? No it wasn’t. All
such coined nouns come later. First of firsts it was spuriously plain,
destructive instinct riding the crest of carnal desires. Fervid inclemency of
sticks striking the same wood among themselves, wantonly fervorous yelps, persistently
irresponsible flashes of torch-dance, suicidal bravery of the clinking metal,
agonisingly plain cries of hurt and fearlessly grunting ones too. The hotheads
under the pall of mythically dark sectarianism wrecked a quelling havoc.
Inveterate ethos of criminal callousness permeated into the blinding flash of a
moment as the local-made pistol spewed death. Like a big plank a huge gypsy
fell. Under the twists and twirls of this deathful moment even the odium
shuddered and all hands stopped. As the Goddess of blood got propitiated with
this first offering, it licked its lips like a gory gourmand.
Gawkily dysfunctional and insidiously
mutated humans created squealingly fearful ripples among the animals. Their
flocking kinship was broken as they scampered to humanless safety. Ever meek
sheep––so mutely gracious even under the butcher’s scythe––appeared
paranormally panicked as the ravaging lights barged into their eyes. Painfully
strange cries did the rounds. Rapturous rascals’ guffaws, however, quickly
subdued them. Gypsy dogs, the objects of settlers’ envy due to their protecting
faithfulness, ran helter-skelter. Growling, yelping and howling they didn’t
know what to do as the capricious time laid all canine faculty of loyalty useless.
The camel pair, once proudly epitomising the end of their latest journey with
the flair and finesse of long strides, ran for life into directionless
wilderness. The mules, so habituated to the pitfalls of fluctuating fate, broke
their silence and voiced their contempt for the human’s empty pride and self
conceit.
Somewhere inside a dangerously holding
tent, where women and children were huddled for life, a parrot prattled out the
hackneyed words of horror from its cage, “Maro!
Maro!” Goats galloped into the dark as if out of hate for this grotesque
caricature being etched out under an anathema. Monkeys dragged the heavy
sheaves of fuel wood to which they had been tied. Their propitious
mischievousness fearfully sublimated. With an inertly helpless seriousness they
bore the fury of omnipotent human stampede; running wildly, breaking all
humanely set parameters, devising its own commands hypnotized by the perilously
philandering and callisthenically cavil sense. Who can avoid the deluge when
things become as ungodly as the water becoming thirsty amidst its own stream!
In fact, nobody knew who was fighting
from which side, except the philandering ruffians whose eyes were battling for
a look at the shiny gypsy flower. In this darkly unspooling trauma injuries
were toning up their stridency. Heads were being broken. With disarming
openness blood oozed from cuts and wounds. A clear example of human vanity was
that the animals were being showered with more blows than the superior species,
as blisteringly inhuman aims missed the targets and came hurtling down with
impunity on the backs of hapless beasts running here and there in fearful
frenzy.
At least half a dozen shots thundered
revilingly. Even the calculators of casualties, the angels of God of death,
would have been nightmarishly perplexed while trying to find out who fell in
consequence and with what degree of fatality. Oh, the reprehensible-most parody
being written on an additional page in the largest section of human book; the
largest section stretching across aeons of historical pages worded by the infernal
human manoeuvres.
Leaving the others of their ilk to
befoolingly fight under the sordid spell of destructive instinct, the pathogens
were ransacking each and every tent, hurtling the gunnery of torch-beans onto
the horrified faces of the hiding women and children. Failing to see their lewd
light illuminated on her face the transgressors would almost bring down the
fragile structure already maimed and morbid due to the weather’s beatings. But,
as a search launched by the wrong-doers rarely fails these days, theirs too met
its destination. Much to the merry tumult of one of them, picturesque
reflectivity of the flower’s petals sprayed multi-hued vibrancy all around as
he threw the perilous light into one of the stateless fugitives’ tents.
Incursively burnished heraldry of the devil in him let out a criminally
ejaculating cry. He whistled in the group’s peculiar way. Its meaningful shrill
notes wheezed over the tumult and reached the intended ears of his yokemates.
They ran towards the source of this canorous cannonade, while rest of the
rioters as well as the gypsies were dreadnaughtly besieged by the enervating
fight.
“Here, here!” he cried with avarice,
guiding the hoodlums to reach him.
With utmost corruptibility he held the
torch-light on her face, almost stationary, as he fretted and fumed with joy.
Warmly flowing glow of her face had met a dead end. Fumigating beauty of all
her features clearly sensed the impending catastrophe. Prophylactic palpebral-power
of her coy glances was lost in the terrible spiral of devastating uncertainty.
Stonedead look of her flowery, freshly female face seemed to wish, ‘Why hadn’t she
been lost in the darkest oblivion of night so as not to be seen by anyone?’
“Here’s the perfuming peach! Come you
bastards really fast!” he sounded lethally symptomatic of sadistically spiraling
lust.
Horribly petrified she turned her face
to the new-found father. The fearless wild flower suffocatingly shivered under
the rottened whiff of this sedentary storm. With the still left out
accommodative courtesy of her hands she covered her fairy like face. Aah, the
wondrous symbolism of veiling a celestial flower! Exquisite calm of the
symphony of balance among her features was too luxuriant! Painterly
proliferation exuded too much sheen and fragrance! Where is the veil which can
totally hide such beauty? The carnal light trickled through the slitty spaces
between her fingers, blindly zooming inside her closed eyes. Each particle of
the light was torturing her like a callously skimping rapist. She started
weeping for the utmost unease of a virgin being touched by such corporeally
corrupted light emanating from the sadist’s hands.
Modest most of a flower she was. Tears
trickled down her rosy cheeks. For an instant, in a feminal fit of that
indomitable gypsy spirit of hers, she removed her hands from the face and
boldly stared with her tearful, prevailingly prettyish diamonds into the
unknown. But alas, after an instant that spirit gave in and with a huge sob she
once again covered her face. She was audibly weeping now. After all a flower is
just a flower, it will smile, even boldly, as long as there’s a tiny-most glint
of humanity in the onlooker’s eyes. But when stared at by banally repugnant
eyes it gets wrinkled and decoloured by a deadly hue. The sadist’s torch-bearing
hand had magnetically stopped at her. The beam flashed over darkest of unkempt
tresses. Her mother wailed for help. Rest of the women and children fearfully
sneaked into the dark skirting around the flower.
Even the king of hell might’ve
shuddered over the fate of this finest flower, as the rampaging storm gathered
at her threshold. Unmindful of their broken heads and cutting injuries oozing
blood, they (all of them!)––look at the times, those who stand for the worst,
survive the worst as well––reached there. Their lustily thumping hearts were
volcanically profusing so much blood as if to colour the flower blood red.
Sadism chorused in all its criminal crassness. Their lasciviously foul tongues
appeared enough to deflower her petals.
“Oh my, look at the serpentine locks!”
one of them got entangled in the sinuously glaring maze of her hair. “I wish to
be kissed and bitten by each and every snaky hair, which’d be worth thousands
of bottles of wine!”
The tormenting light was sucking her
resplendence. Passionate penchant of sobs shook every particle of her beautiful
existence. The imperiled pearl in the oyster shell! Its protective shell on the
verge of losing; leaving the priceless daughter at the mercy of infinitely dark
and furious sea; while the rapaciously rasping waves dumping their destructive
worth on the beach.
In an angry fit of filial piety, the
old man’s face protectively eclipsed the moonet. The frail father protruded his
face in front of the daughter. His wrinkles, large eyes and goatee shone
upfrontly. Realising this filial protection she raised her face, and her
complexion shone like a halo of crowning light around the frail father’s
mysteriously threatening face.
“You swine, we’d forgotten you!” one
of them yelled in basest of a tone. “It’d be fitting to butcher you for the
young soldier’s peace in heaven!”
The old man’s unobtrusively reclusive
face almost gnarled. Like the weakest and smallest of animals, an utmost
galvanising look of ‘defend-till-death’ spread over the oldly quivering
wrinkles over his countenance.
Just as one of the humbugs made the
most initial of manoeuvres to reach out to the father eclipsing the flower,
there was an attack from behind. A sword slashed the skin. One of the bugged
ones bit the dust. With destroying instinct the torch flashed menacingly on the
sword bearer’s face. Evil was too impellent today. As the first ray of the
flash-torch fell upon the revengeful face of Ramsa, the fallen hoodlum sprang
to regain his feet. Perhaps, the evil’s survivability is the toughest one. The
sword had missed back of the neck. It just ineffectively cut through the hardest
of beastly muscles of his leather-strong upper back. It’s the part which can
bear brutal most of an assault.
Each and every part of Ramsa’s body
was shaking under the force of disorganized and desultory stirrings of the uncontrollable
agony of revenge. His sword flashed. Body pathetically writhed due to the pain
of impervious injury. The injury which even the time had failed to heal. Fate
too seemed to nod with full datum that there were just two ways for this
suffering soul: either to kill or get killed. The second option was easily
grabbed by the injured leader of the humbugs. Under his aliferous fit of
criminal erudition he shot the revengeful gypsy right in the middle of his
chest. Ramsa jumped in air and before falling turned his back as if to reconnoiter
this worldly stage for the last time at this final moment. The crime had been
committed in a smooth-as-silk manner. The bastards gave a loud cheer as if
without it the insidiously mutating badness inside their hearts would burst out
of their chests.
“Where’s the girl you laughing
mother-fuckers?” like a big gong the injured murderer madly reprimanded his
horde.
A clear monster, he was the first to
regain his criminal composure after committing the evil deed.
Her brother’s martyrhood had given her
a chance to sneak out of the tent. While running she’d looked at the sound
purporting death for her ever-uneasy brother. It was a clubbing shock to her
soft heart. Deepest of a sob lucidly encapsulated whole of her flowery
existence. Her terrified voice trilled a little shriek. She couldn’t move those
nimble nice feet which’d taken her on such distant sojourns.
The frail father
pushed her forward, “Run bitiya, run!
Please!” with an egregious show of strength for his old bones, just as she’d
done when he himself turned immobile while weltering across the dead fish, he
pulled her hand.
But she wasn’t listening or hearing
anything. With her free hand she was clasping the amulet around her neck. Then
with the force beyond the capacity of her soft hand, she gave a pull at the
string. It was broken. With a mysterious feeling of security, her fist
tightened around the tiny encasement. Meanwhile, the watchman was just dragging
her like a dead statue for which all such animated animosities had preterlapsed.
And when the lucidly leering and sexually sordid flashlight once again threw
its blisteringly inhuman beam on her features even this enforced mobility in
her legs gave away. Inculpatorily it was coming from a devilishly defining
distance. It was a raucous ravager; disgusting and unpleasant; rumbustiously
rambling for the meanest of a pleasure. She, in contrast, was too soft: the
flower which won’t have found even the self-sustaining bliss of autumn’s drowsy
afternoons too likesome.
The beam from the bedlam, emanating
and taking inspiration from most horrible of dreams, came hurtling with
impunity. Each and every particle of the wave was infinitely internecine.
Horrified flower’s petals fluttered for the defence of their inviolable
sanctity. There was a convulsively spasmodic storm. Her fear suddenly ebbed to
an end. After all she came from the land where the ladies of court committed jauhar after the death of their warring
menfolk. To save their honour they burned themselves alive, jumped into the
wells, threw down their bodies from the highest towers in the forts, pierced
their sensuous bodies with the merciless ghost-daggers kissing their skins under
their ample clothing and took poison encased in rings and necklaces. The gypsy
women too---following the open paths leading through the lewd spotlight of the
so called ‘societies’---have been historically famous for taking their own
lives to save their honour.
At the apex of that fearless moment,
she put the amulet in her mouth and crushed it with full force. Her eyes shone
with vengeance and pride; with a peculiar feminine vehemence she moved her
teeth over it. The cloth-bound piece was broken and greedily she sucked at the
juice copiously. Her bosom was heaving boldly. But she was, after all, just a
flower whose main essence was beauty and love. So, after this unnaturally
hissing and brave stand, her death-defying spirit gave away. A horrifying fit
of fear gripped her. Perhaps it was the shocking wave of this unbearable fear
which took her out of those beautifully tickling senses, for the mysterious
gypsy poison she had chewed was yet to start its action. Nonetheless, it was in
her system now. Like the mysterious doctor of death, now, it was to perform its
operation of death on her beautiful body.
The proud flower thus fell down grandiosely.
It appeared as if it allowed itself to be wind-fallen for the immortality of
its chastity and virgin status; like the filigreed flower from the pristine
wilderness bidding adieu to this infernal world; the world too limited for its
beauty comfortably ensconced in love and truth; a vulgar world wherein even the
moral gloss over the wrong surface is fastly vanishing.
She slumped down; so slowly and softly
that even the earth didn’t come to know about it. She appeared to divinely
descend onto some surface of unfettered freedom as her figure softly dropped
its beautiful little burden upon her raiment. The old man shook her.
Phlegmatically choking over his words, he was on the verge of weeping. She was
but in a happy oblivion; dreamfully oblivious of the erratic dabble and dousing
of this world. His soul came on the verge of squeezing itself out of the bony
imprisonment. In lustily inflammatory frenzy they were coming towards them.
There was no one to call for help. Eccentrically principled time had been robbed
of its periodicity. The caravan had been devilishly disarrayed. Even the
furious stampede appeared in a quandary.
Even the spurring instinct for life
couldn’t budge him to run for its safety. The frail father lifted the daughter
in his hands, as no one would believe, and struggled ahead of the approaching
storm. Filial piety in frailest of a father is always strong enough to carry
the weight of any young daughter. He almost fell as he put forward a few
waddling steps on the path of veritable futility, while the sadists came marching
to snatch the sleeping flower. The poor father had taken just a few lumbering
steps when the huffish squall wheezily reached him.
“Now, this indeed is the lovable-most
thing in the world!” the rascal with the injured back coddled with mimicry,
while snatching the daughter from the father’s frail hands.
Even the devil would’ve snorted in
perplexity at the fate of this iconically radiant aura. It indeed was a
contentious prize. Lost in the jeweled vision of their evil designs the
wastrels even forgot about the watchman. They were in a dying hurry to escape
with the catch. The genii in one of them, however, caught a fleeting reflection
of the poor old man. The bastard gave mightiest of a fist blow at the old
Muslim’s rickety ribs (without even taking care to know what it resulted into)
as the frail father feebly tried to oppose them after getting up from the fall
resulting from the master ruffian’s push when he snatched the girl.
Blossoming vibrations of her sleeping
figure were too mesmeric for them. After all they could now lay their hands on
her rosy body. They forgot about the watchman as if he’d never existed on
earth. The poor old man had even hit the injured tissues on the bastard’s back,
who in the entire world didn’t even come to know what had happened. But just at
that time a severe blow, almost fatal to the old man’s bones, parodically
struck him. He fell on the ground, taking the least time an injured human being
would take to meet the body’s ultimate support.
Near their feet an unpretentiously
naive cock was cackling for life caught in this humanity’s high-voltage
situation. Fatally fluttering at a place it couldn’t run away as its leg had
been tied to a peg with a string. Out of its derisive ditty it bit the toe of the
one who came dangerously close to become the means of its death. The heathen
cried in pain. In the meshy merriment of his anger he got hold of the sinner
and pulled it upward with a raw jerk. There was an audible twinge. We don’t
know which one gave in, string or the leg. Well, whichever was stronger was
saved of the stigma and pain of being maimed.
Holding the painfully cackling cock he
fumed, “You’re a welcome addition to the feast today!”
Now the sadist communion wasn’t
bothered about rest of the razzle-dazzle going on at the caravan site. The
philandering fugitives ran in the direction of ghostly haveli, the site of their so many incendiary carnal confrontations
whose description would be a vulgar verbiage. Oh, the dangerous-most rasping
drones acromanically hovering over the flower; their lewd pangs dying to commit
an iron-fisted orgy!
Meanwhile, the evil’s helpers were
still preposterously fighting the gypsies. Whatever might have been the reason
for that (or for that matter the wrong never requires a reason) their criminal
zeal had shown an unflinching oddity tonight. Their beastly blazonry was
resulting in a horrible rumpus.
Amorally colossus recidivists ran
squirming with lust which infernally gushed through their cuts and injuries.
The monster holding her on his shoulder ran in the dark with a barbaric
bravado. She of folklore fantasies was totally oblivious of the entire devilry
encircling her. Her flowing long tresses fell upon his injured back. And when
the ineffably onerous desire made one of them fear that he’d definitely die if
further waited for the juiceful raspberry, he let loose his perilous pining
through his defoliating voice:
“Why to be wayled by that lame
turncoat?” he had a dig at the cause of all this waiting game.
The head hoodlum wasn’t listening to his
helpless implorations. Every ounce of his lust was lost in the words of the
priest who’d promised them the utmost sexual ecstasy of a virgin under the
spell of his fetishism.
“Yes, yes!” another gave in and
interrupted, “Whyn’t here and now? It’s becoming unbearable and it will take a
while to reach there!”
Others too let out a slimmishly
consenting murmur as the desire hissed in the measureless caverns inside their
physical selves.
“You bastards!” bearer of the
priceless peach thundered. “Weeping like kids, as if you never got it earlier!
She’s not like those lowly-priced prostitutes. She’s a priceless jewel. No
money in the world can buy her. I’ve sacrificed so much of my blood to get this
most beautiful one. Our pleasure with her should justify each and every drop of
blood fallen from our bodies. Hence, it’s to be something really, really
special!” his tongue, teeth and lips were dying to tattoo their naked wrath on
her skin, but miraculously he controlled himself and the macabrous wave of
sexuality had to turn back just with a kiss at her apparel over the hip.
Others sighed with a graveyard’s
desolation and ran to get their share. Their lips almost took her off his
shoulder. Throwing all of them back he obtusely gnashed:
“You’re only what I’ve always believed
you to be! If you suck all the juice while the flower is asleep, what’d be left
when she wakes up? Bastards, just come to grips with the reality! God’s
greatest creation has fallen in our hands. And you people are so mean and weak
that can’t even wait a bit for an equally great way of doing it.”
Foolhardy lilliputians seemed to get
the message. “It’s to be done while lost in her blissfully consenting eyes.
That’s the only way her whole juice can be harnessed!” gasping with lust the
monopolist rolled his rough hand over her snaky, supple back arching over his
shoulder.
“Let me help you,” fatalistically one
of the rascals proffered. “You appear to have started to feel her weight.”
“I can take her to the earth’s other
end!” he, immorally multi-instrumentalist, moaned with a deflorating sigh.
“I’m sure the lame oldie has something
in his kitty to quickly bring her to senses so that she’s able to see her great
lovers by her thirsty big eyes!” slithery serpent of sadism was hissing against
the incogitant skippet of his heart.
“And while we do it he’ll enjoy it
just through his eyes. If he doesn’t see it happening he’ll die of unfulfilled
revenge against this apple. Strange are the ways of these exorcists. Start
hating such beautiful girls without any reason!” gnawing nihilism in him eyed
the full palate and dirtily chuckled.
The priest was ghostly waiting in the
abandoned house. The humbugs’ casked stock of wine, which they kept in their
room, was placed near him. The droplets of his dirty designs had been mixed
with the potent intoxicant. There’re so many grossly erroneous substances in
possession of an exorcist which can temporarily bestow death to hardest of
drinkers. One such thing was letting out discordant snarls in the adulterated
liquid. Giving him courage and company was their snobbish dog which’d stingily
followed him as if to gobble down his share of meanness. As the material weaponry
to his inhuman designs, his sharpened trident was lying near his feet waiting
to taste blood––should the need arise.
*
* * *
Lost in the devout recitations of
faithfulness, the old dog smelt out his lynched master from among the caravan
smashed to smithereens. The old pet was whining piteously, licking the master’s
hands and feet. The venom exhalers had left the scene, tired more due to the
physical limitation than the extinguishing criminal fire in them. The caravan
site bore the exasperatingly anguished look of after-battle mourning. The whole
settlement had been disfigured, ripped up and soundly walloped. Even the dark
night appeared tattered to pieces. Well past midnight , the gloom sneeringly looking upon the trembling,
tactile tragedy.
The blurting pitch of mourning women
quiveringly quibbled forth the insinuation that a few gypsies had died. Those
who were nursing the rioters’ vengeful vestiges didn’t know what to do, as
their women applied mud on their frozen injuries.
Flustered by fatigued imagination the fate
had scribbled a pseudograph. Fate of these perennial wanderers had been exiled
to the dusty outposts of inhumanity where there was no home (even temporary),
no destination, and no hospital to provide some formality of first-aid
medication. The blustering storm emanating from the sedentary, cyclonic eye of
the hideous monster––the so called socio-political and cultural milieu of the
settlers which criss-crossed their path––presumptuously spewed shameful scorn
upon their temporary settlement. Aah, the thickly stagnated, big and superior world
of the settled society!
Whom to blame for all this? And for
what? After all they were just stateless citizens. Where to go for the
redressal of their physical injuries as well as this literal rape of their
unique folklore? And if at least as humans they found some empathy, it was in
the hearts of people like Ram Singh, who unfortunately were disgracefully
ineffective amidst this so called culture and civilization whose only
effectivity glared through heathenish-sharp edges. So the homeless, stateless and
religionless folks maimed and beaten lay there at the fringe of a civilizedly
cozening settlement reproachlessly basking in the midnight gloom. To blame somebody for a wrong done to
ourselves, we at least ought to have a sense of belonging; a reflecting
relativity in the overall patchwork of society. They had none. And in its
absence the caravan’s latest halt had seen them taking a big beating. Apart
from the loss of few lives, the sexual zealots had whisked away the most
beautiful flower from their garden. Anecdotally wild flower! Too beautiful to
be left blossomed in the gypsy orchard!
As he had been surviving, neglected
even by death (given his perilously precarious fragility) the old man woke up
from the scaffolding world of unconsciousness. Each and every limb was aching,
as if the blow’s severity had been imbibed by the whole body through the shock
waves rattling across his weak body. His head was meshily heavy, not because of
his own unutterable debility and pain but for the daughter. Ghastly scenario of
the hoodlums taking her away flashed in its evil transitoriness in his head
which was so mammothly heavy that he almost fainted again. Aah, the spectacle
of a light-struck old, fragile tree!
However, the errandful dog’s piteous
whining saved him of another bout of unconsciousness. He looked at the tragedy
twisting helter-skelter. With cruel, abominable ease the humanity had been
sabotaged. Suavely pacifying face of the daughter hovered over his senses as if
she herself was trying to console the father for the tragedy befallen on her.
And the social cipher of yore felt hiccupping vibrations in the aeonically
suppressed mammary of emotions. A hyperactively crestfallen cry escaped his
tiny mouth; a shrill cry of pain, anguish, mourning helplessness and––behold
the oddity––a revengefully hissing anger which was shaking whole of his tiny
existence. In its own suffering parlance, piteously the whining dog was pulling
at his sleeve. Audaciously startled, the old master got some clue from the old
pet. Blindly wafting across the dark he followed the dog whose run was interjected
with impatiently whining stoppages as his old companion reached him from
behind.
The overindulgent ruffians had
sacrilegiously snatched his daughter. Under the spell of revengeful efficacy
the father’s unalterable altruism of yore was ostracised by the heinous misdeed
of these wrong facets of humanity who always belaudingly ran after the greedily
appetising bits of the evil’s recipe. He went on running after the dog,
falling, slipping in the fields wherein the nature’s cruel joke had been
pranked upon the farmers’ fate. He forgot---the cursingly construing father
reproaching himself for his belatedness---everything about himself.
Reprehensively he condemned his fragile, old age. Crabbily his soul shouted at
his weak physical sinews. Such an abstrusely disposed human being whose mind
rarely showed littlest traces of inclemency (and even that in rarest of rare
provocative situations) now was a flint-hearted human being. His heart
hurtingly pounded against its rickety cage.
Love is religion! Compassion is
religion! Heart is religionless, casteless and creedless! Here syncretism finds
an ideal world for its seminal and holistic defines. It is in complete contrast
to the disingenuous gaol of the mere formality of religious ritualism where
humanism is incarcerated, where the renegades---the religious savants---suffering
the pangs of severe privations construct false facades hoodwinking at the
suffering swarms whose prayers go unrequited.
Here was this man possessing the juicy
jujubes of a pious soul. His heart golden coloured and hallowed by the pristine
resplendence of the aurelian flower. His dog too (drenched in freezing mud like
the master) was smelling the compassionate fragrance. Both of them would’ve
fallen due to the cold on any other such night. But not today. Warmth of love
and truth, the ultimate anodyne, was swarming through those spectrally frail,
old bodies. They reached the old ghostly structure, perfunctorily left out by
the time’s scythe as if for the purpose of being an adjunct to the ruffians and
their panderer’s pot of sins.
“Hiss-ss-ss! Hiss!” the human
decayness was repelling anyone approaching it with a humanely structured heart.
Fatalistically standing, the structure
appeared cordially inviting all evilry in the world through its conspiratorial
whispers. The overgrown courtyard was sneering ghostly. Its sweepingly harsh
gloom and doom was leering to extinguish the incorruptible flame steadily
burning inside two old hearts, the old master and his old dog. Blusteringly its
area appeared elongating itself along vampirely voluminous yards.
In its dark recesses, a lamp’s light
shone surreptitiously. Devil’s dragnet had been cast there. His heart was
painstakingly beating for the daughter’s fate. Without the slightest semblance
of fear he crept up to the door. Drooping like an old little animal taking
position to ensnare rarest of an opportunity to prey upon a bigger animal at
the higher food hierarchy, he lay his hand on the dog’s back, holding its
drenched fur both for courageous communion as well as to prevent it from
barking suddenly. His large, vacant eyes stared from the doorless doorway. The
priest’s assiduously carried out plan had resulted in a carousel feast. Deeply
drunk to the chambers of unconsciousness, the thugs were hideously scattered
around the room. The wine, which they could hardly resist to gulp down whenever
in sight, had pacified their mutinously kicking lust. Stupefied by the wily
substance from the trickster’s box they were imbeciled to the extent that they
took rolls now and then with indistinct mutterings and gabblings like they were
satisfying their meanest of carnal desires in the hallucinated world of
wretched unconsciousness. With a disgracefully arched tail their dog was
convivially eating the cock. Watching the foe’s grossly arbitrary greed, the
old faithful subtly gave a faintly grievous hiccup. It was on the verge of
attacking the powerfully built young nuisance. Its old, old master however
pulled at its fur. The dog wise with age just teetered back from the brink of
barging into the cage of devils.
Desperately
diabolic renegade, meanwhile, sitting against a wall was ogling at the serenely
sleeping flower. In instinctual affinity with the evil, his eyes shone so red
as if the whole fornication had tarried in his eyes tonight.
And there she was,
in the room’s corner where the lamp’s light shone fully on her blissfully calm
face. The beautifully fragrant flower still shining so sanctimoniously amidst
that conglomeration of filthily ringing desires! The little star of feminine
grace and virtue! Its roseal sheen was reflecting a halo of delicate crimson
around the lamp’s wick: the chaste virgin of yore; so calm and serene in its
divinely auspicious dimensions; the symbol of love, beauty and truth according
to the uppermost mythological milieu. Her eyes had unobtrusively put their
shutters down to the world. Eyes closed as if savouring the deepest of a
slumber. Her tresses all held back in the corner supporting her pridefully
uplifted head. There was a subtle symbolism on her meditatively calm face. In
the quietly acquiescing aura around her face there wasn’t the littlest trace of
a vituperative shade or crease on or around any of her features. An extolling
satisfaction for love, truth, beauty and goodness showered out of the
measureless glory of that ageless aura. Water had been splashed in bloodshot
belligerence by the fallen sage to make her open those scripturally pristine
eyes. But it hadn’t served any purpose except wetting the iridescence of her
colour.
Sadist inside the
swindler was neighing nihilistically. Unbridled violence let loose by the lust
was wantonly pillaging each and every particle of his fallen existence. Irrepressible
whoops of lifelongly suppressed sexuality were storming the anarchist’s inner
landscape:
“Oh you witch! You
mercilessly bewitching one! Why have’u tortured me throughout my life? Why don’t
you open these possessing eyes? Now when there’s nobody to prevent the holy
river of virginity from merging into the embracing depths of the sea of akhanda brahmacharya!”
In a billowy hubbub
the impostor beat the ground like a child; ritualistically masquerading
desperate soul now helplessly being tortured by paranormally hoky-poky desires arising
from the worldly dust as the hollow building crashed.
She, the timeless
beauty, was immersed in infinite inexigency. On her face the worldly babblings
ineffectively fell like they fail against a Goddess’ face in a shrine. The
flower was in a paradisiacal slumber where all worldly antagonisms fall
headlong without daring to look up again; the sacrosanct shrine where the
chaste lamp can never be blown out by the vile, mean and contemptible whiffs
from outside.
His asceticism
disfigured and ripped up, the priest cried of his affliction, “Ok then! Let
your haunting soul witness an exorcist’s revenge against its once garb of beauty
and virginity!”
Saying this he
despicably rose up and lumbered towards the girl without his crutch. Decibels
of his lust went into delirium. Oh, how unholy and vulgarly hiccupping waddle
it was. But before he could even go near the daughter, the father with a flurry
ran in and struck the portly figure with the full force of all his limbs.
Fallen sage fell on the ground. With meticulous limberness of a little animal
the Muslim watchman pounced upon the bulging Hindu priest. His features
perniciously sneered into the Sadhu’s
face. Reverberating rhythms of his love for the daughter pumped surprising
power into his fragile limbs. Like a ferociously preying black cat he made awful
cries; beat the fat over the enemy’s thick bones; tore down the foe’s skin with
his old blunted nails.
Barking audaciously,
the old faithful too pounced upon the ubiquitously intriguing temple dog. The
latter was even now getting stronger as he ate up the cock. Suddenness of the
attack however found the big strong dog completely off guard. It made dastardly
howling growls with angered lambency as its canine-essay savouring the destiny’s
favours met a pidgin ending. The oldie with its beaten coat, blunted nails and
many fallen teeth was all over the much fleeced naughty wastrel. It violently
shook its mouth full of the shiny fur covering the bastardly-billowy canine
glory.
But alas, evil
these days is too powerful! A fleetingly shallow and tenuously arbitrary kick
at its shin by goodness is just feebly enough to raise a damp and disappointing
grimace which is inevitably bound to vanish into thin air after a few moments.
Today’s was a blatantly desecrating night burning with a disastrous fire
following the orders to eat up all that stood for goodness (was it for the goodness’
own sacrosance?). The painful paradox between epochal and ephemeral was undone.
Disgracefully powerful dog, symbolising all the hallucinating meanness of its
masters in their adulterated intoxication, regained its callous composure
through raw power. Its vulgar strenuousness burst prodigiously. The monster
caught the old nuisance by neck and swayed the mud-smeared ruckling mass of old
bones. It was ferociously bumping the poor pray in all directions. Oh, that
evil’s pampering by the ruffians; those shouting hurrahs and hullabaloo of the
past, pandering the dog to the farthest limits of mischievous meanness! The
moments were discreetly fleeting towards tragedy. The old dog, a mere liability
on earth, made a rattling and gurgling sound like a dying person; its body
twisted painfully and curled towards death’s luxurious lap.
Father of the
roseate daughter too, after that momentously spiraling spell of goodness’
victory, came dwindling along the slopes of defeat. The priest’s hand got hold
of his small sharp-edged trident––the material remnant from the palatial structure
which’d crashed and smothered many ascetic things like flyfots, vessel of gourd
and whole lot of ritualistic utensils. The injured priest hissed. Venom eaten!
He threw apart the lynching little thing hurting so gnawingly. And as the old
Muslim came assaulting again with his full frail force, he thrust the metal accomplice
to his sageship into the charger’s old chest where in the dim chambers life had
been throbbing for such a miraculously long time. Oh, at long last death
finally came to notice his creepy crawly existence! Melting mercy of his face
contorted to a most fearsome shape. Dying filial affection inside his heart censured
the murderer with such a fiendish snarl that the religioner fell back.
His death soaking
eyes, growing wider and wider, had a last glimpse of the daughter’s sacredly
inviolable face still shining with immortal love, beauty and truth. He didn’t
even mutter the last departing words of a Muslim. That didn’t in any way lessened
his martyrhood, because in the eyes of the ultimate religioner he was not required
to do that as he’d envisioned love’s truest visage. That was all of his
religion. However, as a Muslim---for he had been born to Muslim parents---we
should at least mention that
when he completed
his journey in
the wee hours
of February 21, it was Eid-ul-Juha
or Id-uz-Zoha.
The priest’s canine
companion too threw away the lifeless body of its opponent. Both master and the
pet went in a single swipe of death as if it didn’t want to trouble itself
twice for their subtle and unobtrusive sake.
The blood-smeared
corpse, trident still lodged in its chest, was mockingly staring at the priest.
There was an unflinching, victorious defiance written on it. Its look went on
becoming more and more fearsome as if it still wanted to protect the sleeping
beauty. The once incendiary exorcist was unutterably frightened. In fearfully
mock dismay blood and death stared antaphrodisiacly at the sadist. All trembling
he put his infirm foot on the corpse and pulled out his trident from the
breathless lungs. He was so afraid as if the skeleton-key of the chambers of
ghosts had been opened and they were rushing to chew him. Hurryingly picking up
his things, which would’ve indicated his presence there, he left the room.
Before leaving the place he cast a cursing look at the irrepressibly serene
face of the girl. Her beauty however was victoriously galloping to the realms
of unconquerable bliss. Goddess like piousness of her face struck the evil
inside him. Caught in the razzle-dazzle of ever-unspooling skein of fear he lurchingly
ran through the ghostly courtyard. Sadhguru’s
crutch was braving the paranormally-presumptuous force from all sides today
as the sinner ran away from the scene of crime. Very strange creaking voices
were emanating from his silently supporting wood of yore. In the
delirium-depths of his heart, defeat was blusteringly boohooing.
The near-mystical
soul in the girl had left her beautiful body. Some lives are so purificatorily
sacred that God orders death to pluck the flower without anyone’s notice,
without any hiccup and without the destructive face of mortality. Softer shades
of her splendour and ambience---beyond the reach of all sacrilegious hands---were
now mocking at the religioner running back to his abode.
“People’ll think
these idiots killed both of them, without even caring to listen to what they
might say because they are totally unbelievable to the villagers,” his throbbing
heart was convincing him of his safety.
His cowering
thoughts turned to the goons. “What would I say to them?” he shuddered. Hope
flashed again, “‘Oh, those drinking fits of yours... you fools... overdrunk to
the extent of killing only that old fool... got to a long slumber without
enjoying your dead price. The entire onus is on your rough hands. You can’t
pluck a flower without crushing the petals,’ it’ll be so easy to cheat them,” he
chuckled.
“Murderer! Blood
smeared trident!” exceedingly minimal trace of scrupulousness questioned for
the littlest fraction of a second.
“Oh, he was a mere
Mussalman! I hope my Gods won’t find any reason to be angry with me on this
account,” once again he felt totally at ease with him.
A blistering pain
made him painfully aware of the vestiges of dead Muslim’s assault. He took his
fingertips to the scratches on his upper cheeks and forehead. “Bastard!” he
fumed. “I’d say ‘It was a silly wild cat in the dark,’” he consoled.
With hastened
waddling he crutched ahead to his last and the only refuge. Terribly bloated
itinerary of his asceticism tonight had taken its toll on his supporting wood.
Destructive vibrations of his soul were fatalistically sniggering at the Sadhguru’s wooden-firmity jutted against
his infirmity. Iconically old wood was somehow keeping its dried-up, mortified
woody tissues intact to help him reach one more destination. It appeared as if
Sadhguru Parmanand’s holiness was glued to the grimacing and wearing down wood.
Somehow the crutch saw him to the temple’s gate, but gave in just as he put his
left feet on the threshold. He fell down.
The binding force behind the crutch had gone. At
long last the Sadhguru’s soul ever
lost in heavenly chants had decided to fly to the realms of unfettered freedom.
