Froggy Elopement with a Retrenching Menace

7

            Froggy Elopement with a Retrenching Menace

Next morning guruji were to read out and explain the most important chapter about the laws of karma, the deeds, from the Bhagvat Gita. The disciple considering it a day of reckoning for his first pupilship absented himself from the session on the pretext of having a fever.

Die had been cast... err pelted in fact. He escaped through the back fence, doing it with a kind of froggy jump. It’d have surprised anyone noticing it along with his disability. His heart throbbed freely as if an unknown locksmith had broken the chains, locks and cuffs which had come to web around it during his stay at the ashram.

He’d started to grow to the fattish and bulky side of early youth. All his starving chambers of childhood had been filled to brinks by the healthy food at the hermitage. And as he grew with a palpable acceleration, his weak, inanimate stick was found incapable of supporting the vigour and health in his lurching strides. His guru therefore—to prevent him from falling due to a weak support—arranged for a big, bulky wooden crutch with a leather armpit saddle. The wood was in fact oversized for him at that time as if made in estimation and anticipation of his fully grown visage in a few years time.

He started quickly, almost ran in fact, with the help of his only helpful and usable thing he’d got from the holy man. It was an unusual sort of walk. A sort of ultra-hip-mimicking which could only be translated for description into a kind of froggy jump. In physical sense, he was covering even more distance than a commoner with two normal legs. His guru had tried to provide him such elevation where one needed zero legs to walk triumphantly through the worldly sojourn like a purposeful cog in the cosmic machine running for some unknown, or unknowable perhaps, cause. But for years, the young disciple was dreaming of a firm-footed worldly walk over the earthly sand of his chosen path. And this hard-pedaling with an overpowering attitude needed two legs to see through the worldly mire having least of values or morals.

“What’s the use of traveling with the speed of light at the farthest of a place in space where nobody knows you or even aware of you?” such must have been a chiding from his soul to the guru’s.

“Whyn’t effectively jump like a frog, where everybody sees you clappingly!” this rebuking retort might’ve inevitably followed.

Froggily he went towards the place to which the gypsy boys had pointed.     

It was a pretty rag-tag gypsy encampment, thumbing its nose at the sedentary settlements with their sundry sycophancy. It seemed pretty much irrationally alive like a windblown leaf resting at a place for sometime, which the breeze of fate provided before starting to roll over again. Wait, they were doing in fact the same! Preparing to go! Tents had been folded up. Donkeys and mules once again could be seen as beasts of burden as the raggish saddle-bags were almost bursting at seams; some carts were being loaded upon; some women were waiting eagerly on the back of their donkeys; a few of them were tightening the saddle-girths; a boy was trying to dehobble his pony; a girl was forcing a protesting fowl into a cage.

The hungry hounds were being tied down to the carts. Taught monkey couples were sitting soberly in the carts with children, who were trying to make them recall their apish ways through their monkey-mimicry. But their ludicrous imitation was failing as if the howlarious animals had suddenly turned to asceticism. Some children ran in consummate boisterousness as their mothers tried to catch them. Chasing mothers seemed to train the homeless prodigies in the great gypsy lesson: ‘Never fall in love with a particular place, sons.’

The young Sadhu got panicked at the eternal wanderers’ haste. Like a pricked soul he went romping around the caravan site just on the verge of losing its lively habitation status, and once again be taken over by the interspersing staleness inanely scattered around in the form of wilderness of that charmless terrain. His heart gave crippling blows directing him to leave no leaf unturned in finding the old frog. He scampered through the vanishing camp site, minding his eyes perfectly well lest they fail in pointing out the gypsy boys he had met the last evening. Time, now, seemed to frog away in infinite leaps and bounds.

Much to the respite of his eyes on a threadbare search, he spotted the weird strangers of yester evening. They were fully engaged in the twists and turns of yoking an unwilling mule into their fully laden cart. Very strange to its otherwise meditative quietude, the poor beast was resisting to its extreme hinge. Perhaps, it’d been newly trained and hence was unaware of the inevitable grindstone between the shafts.

“Hey friends! Why are you going so early?” he yowled with plight.

They, both of them in a queer hush, looked at him with nongypsy eyes. Maybe due to his wooden support they recognised him instantly. Their looks told that they were surprised. After all, they never expected such windblown type uninstitutionalised tit-bits with a stranger to have any role, consequence or existence even in the most immediate future of the day-to-arrive.

“Oh you! So you still remember it!” charmer’s friend, who’d spoken so few words yesterday, exclaimed in surprise led by the peregrinatory psyche which very rarely stumbles upon anything worthy of reminiscences (save that very moment when they happen to come across it). So, the gypsy spoke to him in a very hazy tone as if it’d been a long haul of time since they met.

“But we’re leaving now,” both of them carefreely chorused as if out of a mysterious retribution against any particular place under the sun.

“Old frog is in such haste, he won’t even speak a word,” yesterday’s silent spectator told him. “Old frog on an old donkey and both of them in fact start earlier than the rest of us and still reach last at the new place,” he spoke with effort, followed by laughter, while he pushed the obstinate beast between the shafts with an elbow push.

As the yoke hurriedly fell upon the beast’s blithe neck hair, the huge stash of almost unworthy provisions in the cart shook with the propensity of toppling down. It shook even the young Sadhu. In discomfiture he put more pressure on his arm-saddle.

“Please, take me to him,” he pleaded, turning the virgin crop of his chin all around, trying to notice a huge froggy face.

As if happy over getting the stubborn mule into the cart, old Nanku’s part-time-disciple hurriedly led the lame religioner across the mess being piled upon whatever form of transport they could lay their hands upon.

“Nanku dayaji, this Sadhu wants to meet you,” he said flatly stopping behind a bent figure and without even waiting for the old man’s reaction he turned back and vanished in the hotch-potch effulgence scattered over the dull and dreary terrain.

The appointment seeker was left alone to face the old frog’s turn of head, provided his big, juiceless wrinkled earlobes under the strain of large, bulky ear rings-–which dangled down with the propensity of tearing them apart-–had left enough sensitivity in his eardrums to vibrate in stimuli to such a half-hearted accost from behind.

The old man looked back as if from a nightmarish dream, his hands still inside the torn and tattered saddle bag bulging on the bent back of an equally pittered and pattered donkey.

“Hoomn...” old frog grunted and cast an intimidating look in the direction of the familiar voice.

Not finding any acquainted face near the distance from which the voice had come, he once again straightened his face and got busy in increasing burden on the beast.

‘Nanku make sure my bowl doesn’t enter your heap!” an old gypsy blurted out from a distance, the sound seemed to come hollowly out of his filthy, torn knee-length black robe over a yellow linen cloth draped around his legs in a single layer. Gaping holes in the lower wear showed his stubby legs.

The young Sadhu could see three-quarter of his face, when the fearsome gypsy had turned it. Generality of his face from that angle made him look a vengeful strategist. However, more it was the case with the gypsy’s appearance, more impressive he seemed to the pupil from the hermitage. Colour of his skin was strangely blackish purple. He was so broad-mouthed that his face in wrinkles almost made one remind a big and old toad, which knew enough cunning wizardry to resurrect all the past ghosts for their fun, happiness, revelry and pleasure. His muddily shaggy eyebrows whimsically slanted upwards. For his entire ragamuffin self, he should’ve been a disappointingly thick-bearded person. But strangely he wasn’t. His elongated cheeks and arching chin had pathetically sparse grey stubble, indicating he shaved his measly face with some ghastly knife of his. And this cleanshavenness evinced his froggy look fully, in fact to the extent of portraying pleasure of any painter in the world. His eyes were peculiarly small for his large crotchety face. His forehead seemed to be that of a perpetual browbeater as it placidly hung over the middle elongation of his face. Bluish black thick lower lip shut over the thinly timid upper one as if he was keeping mum waiting for an ample opportunity to pour out his entire slandering diatribe against the whole humanity. His outstanding ears were hung placidly like an elephant’s.

All in all it seemed as if his physical self had an utter callophobia. He looked a retrograde religious guerrilla. And still to top it all, there was a sort of ribaldness about the fellow, which went unexplained by all we’ve seen and described earlier.

To the juvenile senses of the young mendicant, Sadhguru Parmanand seemed rubbishly off-the-mark speck in comparison to the haunting awe, as well as fun and farce surrounding this figure. Mythically proportioned magical aura around the old, homeless wanderer dauntingly etched out a charming sartorial arena inside his heart.

For his coverings, old frog had a very dirty and haggled loin-cloth appareled around his legs, while the upper part was attired in a sheepskin dropped over his shoulders. The skin looked ghastly because it’d not been cleaned after skinning. Patches of dried meat and hair embroidered this costume. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, if we come to know that he’d used the same knife for skinning, with which he shaved his chin. His apparels and attire seemed so anciently worn-out that one would’ve thought he was born wearing them.

All these things made him look like a blossoming hub of mystery, occultism, charms and black magic. Chink-n-chunk of it was that the young Sadhu was at one overcome by this persona. Piously pale figure of the Sadhguru was easily swatted away from his conscience by the sweeping storm created in his senses by this grimy figure.

“How great and powerful he seems with all those invisible magical powers!” old frog’s new-found elegist thought. “Secrets of so many tricks and magic are perhaps lying hidden inside this,” he ogled at the pathetic burden on the beast.

By now one or two carts had started to leave the site, which bulldozed old frog into a herculean sense of immediacy. He almost jumped to take his customary leading position; otherwise his old donkey will once again find itself a laggard as the master porched his hand over his myopic eyes to see the tail end of the moving caravan. His donkey, which was till now basking contentedly under the burden, got a zingy-jerk as he perched atop the bursting saddle bag. He dug his heels into the beast’s flanks to put it in top gear. And the donkey of course did budge with a huge effort.

It sent a chill down the young Sadhu’s throat. He too stretched every sinew of his power to match the donkey’s initial gallop.

“Listen to me maharajji! Aahaam... excuse me great charmer...” he stammered amid the jerks of his crutch.

He’d spoken as loud as he could. The old gypsy didn’t listen, or didn’t bother to listen. But, when the follower yowled into the phrase second time he turned his back.

“Yes! You spoke to me Sadhu maharaj?” homeless traveler asked with a jesting grin.

“I’ve to ask you about the magical tricks you perform,” young religioner asked hurriedly, coming straightway to the point.

“Did you saw me performing some of them in the village yesterday?” the donkey rider spoke with a croaky pride.

“Nno... well, yes!” he had to lie, thus becoming a fake spectator of the bygone game.

“Well, how were they?” the performer stole the rare opportunity of some audience research.

“What to say, great magician? They were really superb! Yours are the greatest I’ve ever seen! You seem to be even more near to the God than the Sadhguru at the ashram!” he played a pampering trick upon the trickster.

“But they don’t sell much, at least not from people like us. Beforehand people take us as cheats. And see what I get–-flour, an odd paisa, jaggery and lots of rebukes from the elders not to enter the area again because it puts bad affect on their children,” old frog meekly browbeated a croak, which looked so odd on his overpowering, almost warlike, appearance.

“Can you please teach me some of them?” holy man’s disciple requested.

Of course, old frog’s sorry tale had not entered his ears, because as usual he was hinged around his own idiosyncrasies.

The old gypsy charmer was surprised. Religious scion of the sedentary, civilized society wanting to learn from someone condemned religionless and stateless peregrinator, whose forefathers died in a stigmatised oblivion, before they were at least given some identifying clause as ‘denotified tribes’–-of course with criminal tendencies-–by the Britishers in 1871.

“Teach you!” old frog asked quite surprised, in atonement with the above distinct passage.

“If they start beating you in the middle of a trick, you won’t even be able to run for life. Strange are the ways of these settled people!” the gypsy gnashed his teeth in liaison with the mysterious gypsy retributory grumble against the settlers.

He after all represented the distinctly disjointed cultural (or uncultural) slice of these eternal wanderers, which seemed barbarically foolhardy to the so called civilized world.

Old frog keenly rummaged through the young Sadhu’s form and shape which was now lurching along the slowing down donkey. ‘A worshipable Sadhu, and that too a lame one!’ he mused inside his secret self.

“Aye! Upon my mother of magic, mai kalkatta wali, you’re a Sadhu, lad,” he snidingly chuckled. “I can assure, you can fox them double than what I do. And they wouldn’t dare to whisk you away. Cheat them with the help of what those fools believe to be... be... aa... something called God,” he spoke revengefully, as if he was venting out disaster prophecies against the permanent home-dwellers.

The young religioner didn’t speak to this. He just accelerated his limping pace to match a sudden spurt in the donkey’s energy in response to a trilling kick at some still sensitive muscle left out in its body. The entourage meanwhile caught up with them.

“A Sadhu, a person of their God,” he made a gesture of farce, “wants to learn magic tricks from a banjara. For what, man? To surprise your God or... “

“I want to surprise and flummox the people,” tartly came the reply.

“Hhooo... long live, dear!” old frog almost jumped from his saddle-stash. “Want to surprise people. But already you are capable for that with all those... aa... preaching-sreaching, an... and... ritual-situal. Don’t you?”

“No! I’m sorry. Even my guru can’t do that. Though he preaches so much,” the disciple said this with a peculiar mixture of joy and sulk.

Ashramhead’s visage was fastly diminishing inside his soul as he frogged along the donkey.

“Your guru can’t do that. Well, you people only boast and talk. What can you do, rot at a single place throughout life?” old gypsy mocked at the humans glued to the same place.

“Not me. I... I left home. Then...” the young mendicant interrupted softly.

Old frog wasn’t listening to him. “I make a fool of myself by magical acts without... your... a... preachious talk. And you and your... aa... guru only talk rubbish without acting. Haa... haaa... ll of us are big fails!” he opened his broad mouth to its full stretch to cherish the doomed failures of the permanent encampments. “You however can be successful if talk like him and act like me. A combined pupil of two gurus so as to fox as many people as possible,” he brought out the equation with the help of his strange gypsy wit and logic.

These words seemed nothing less than heavenly to the young runaway religioner of the sedentarily permanent world.

“So, it means I can become a disciple of yours,” he directly grabbed the indirect proposal. “Now that I’ve parroted sufficient religious talk; it means half the work has been done. And for the next half I need your help,” he was walking without a single trace of fatigue and uneasiness.

“But even I’m not aware of where are we going now. I know so many of them. To teach you, it will take some time, as these things come by practice. It’s not like that... your... aa... guru’s easy, soft talking. To make people see what they aren’t used to see. It needs time and practice, son,” he was looking far ahead, where the morning rays were getting into forenoon’s groove, as if there lay the next destination.

They were romping along a very rugged topography, a kind of wasteland. Traversing along the ups and downs of a dry and shrubby terrain, right from the start they had left the dirt road and made their own path in pursuance of an unknown, melancholic nostalgia of yore. By now this new path had been spanned for a mile or so from the previous destination and about two miles from the ashram.

It had been a gypsy-like stay at the hermitage: the place only to be left behind suddenly for a new destination. Determined he always was. Now, he’d become quick minded too. Leaving the holy man’s hermitage, without caring to even look at it for the last time, was a molehill to him; because once he’d bore the mountainous pang of leaving his home as if it was an anthill. He’d, for now, decided to be carried away by the caravan.  A real mendicant friar indeed!

“Then I’ll go with you and make you my guru”, he snowballed his convictions into a quick decision.

“What will your guru at the ashram think of it… and your family...?” old frog optimistically said, casting a wary eye around.

“Forget about them. I care about them as little as you do. As the world is an illusion and the whole earth is a single home; each and everybody is a relative as well as a perfect stranger at the same time. To remain stagnant at a place means death, while movement is life,” he suddenly recalled the pious phrases from the Sadhguru’s numerous sessions of preachings.

These had been picked up abstractly from different contexts, but suited his running away mission quite well. It left the donkey rider almost spellbound. It was the way he said it that was more impressive than the content itself.

Old frog rued the spastic failings of his uncivilized tongue before the civilized ears. “Oh, how I wish I could talk like that!” he froggily moaned. “My magic game would have been a great entertainment according to their own likes, dislikes and habits,” he raised both his hands in air and mournfully struck his thighs for his gypsy tongue’s fauxpas.

The young Sadhu consoled him, “I’ll make up for that by giving clean voice to your tricks, but in return you’ll have to teach me all you know,” he was becoming worldly wise with froggy leaps. “A talking and preaching magician!”

He could see it clearly that his religiously laced words had influenced the old frog in the very same way the latter’s tricks had created an instant niche inside him.

And when cart of the two boys, driven by its some inanimate and unknown self-will, came from behind on its inevitable lead over the wearing down donkey, the old frog  requested them to give some place to the new entrant in the caravan, which they did after having their due share in jokes involving old and lame frogs. One of them pulled his hands from atop while the other pushed his buttocks first and then heels, as the young Sadhu, at his wits’ end nonetheless, got a cascading upliftment and in a jiffy’s melee found himself lying facedown on the ill-smelling rags. It was followed by a painful landing of his heavy wood on his back as the gypsy on the ground catapulted it into the air with all his might.

The cart lumbered roughly on the bumps of the newly forming path. Second chapter in his mendicancy had started. His next mentor followed him on his donkey. In a way, he was moving fastly on the path of asceticism; in the sense that he snapped the past ties with one painless stroke.

During his stay at the hermitage, he was left at the mercy of listening to the travelogues from fellow disciples, but now he was a free wandering gypsy Sadhu-–provided we can derive any such classification-–with a charmingly roaming guru.

Prospects with the stateless rovers seemed optimistic, if not outrightly brilliant. His physical inability perhaps could be subdued down in the mobility and dust of moving caravan from place to place; drinking water from different sources; rolling in an ever-increasing pandora box of experiences; and to top it all the tricks of the old frog.

“But I’ll never change the colour of my robe. Otherwise, they will beat me away taking me for a gypsy vagabond,” he deducted, shrouded in an eclectic rainbow of inducting thoughts, as the hip-hopping cartwheels played with the rough and stony dust of a virgin path.

It was a late autumn day and augured well for a new start, as nature too was shedding old blooms; hoping new buds would smile during spring after a freezing journey through the winter. Subtle sweet nuances of the transition of seasons, in their twilighty sojourn, were reveling in a wonderful cocktail of love and tragedy. This de-individualisation of nature during this bitter-sweet mixture of cool and warm seemed to sing an elegy for the ultimate mesmerising silhouette; and bless a success in every human adventure or misadventure, for we are after all only naughty little children of mother nature.

His new guru rode the donkey with a point-blank expression, but his funny and awful features seemed to be keenly immersed in a strangling string of thoughts in a peculiar language of silence. As it’d been happening earlier, he was left behind. But this time as he made up the ground, he found the cart waiting for him. His concerned disciple had persuaded them to stop for him. It certainly spruced up the impassioned soufflés inside the tricky stage-manager’s rusting heart.

“How nice it’s to have a disciple!” his obliged heart directed a thought. “Now I understand why those... uummn... a... those gurus roll in the dust of a single place. Ahaa! So many servile disciples always ready to fall at their feet and obey even while in sleep. This one, even though a lame one, seems to be enough for this... a... what they call?” he cudgeled into the grey areas of his brain. “Yes! Holy guru,” he pumped pride in his ribbing.

                                            *  *  *  *     

They barged into a great combination: the old gypsy for the tutelar part and the lame young Sadhu enjoying the tutorship to the hilt. They included a dwarf clown in their group and their street games involving a fearsome gypsy’s magic, controlled within civilized limits by the religioner through his crammed holy words-–he too came out with a little trick in between which he’d learnt till then-–and the puppetish satire of the clown, changed the fortune of starving old frog of earlier to such an extent that he now rode on a young and strong donkey. The old donkey, some dear cash and cumbersome kind had been exchanged for a very old cart, which was capable of a journey between not too far destinations at a single stretch as it needed to be tied down with ropes to keep its planking intact because it was in shambles. Still, it was a great convenience for the lame religioner as well as their increasing bales of strange provisions.

It was his initiation into the sham part of religion. Little naughty frauds accompanied with fun, churlish impostures, conjuring up tricks along with jibes were the elements of this new tutelage. Most important thing was that it was paying. It pacified his, the disciple’s, soul so much when he saw his guru munching food to the capacity of his over-working jaw. Also, the magician had discarded his loathsome sheepskin, and in its place he’d a linsey woolsey knee-length tunic which made him look like a strange religioner from an unknown (though civilized to a bearable limit) land. While the well-calculating young Sadhu could always and only be seen in his ochre, saffron and vermilion coloured linens.

In return of all this, inside the privacy of their tent as well as in open wild spaces, old frog taught him sorcery and spells. All these were galvanised with numerous sweet-sour tastes and experiences of a nomadic culture. He was a quick learner. Wrinkles crevassing across the weirdly sparse stubble on the gypsy’s broad face would rejuvenate into palpating vales whenever his disciple performed the tricks even to the extent of befooling the master’s all senses of foreboding. All this was of so much interest to the young Sadhu that he hardly got any chance to ponder over the nonchalant first part of his disciplehood at the ashram. When there was nothing else to be done he found himself amidst the lullingly gossiping gypsy groups.

There’re so many missing links between what we face, perceive and the exact reality. Every type of socio-cultural entity tries to sew up this ever chiding unknown slash by an assortment of beliefs, rituals and occultism. For this very same purpose, the caravan had a sort of fetishism, in the form of worshipping certain inanimate objects, which the religioner never had any clues to. He just sat there as a mute spectator, while the gypsies propitiated their sense of the unknown.

The peregrinators, worshippers of an unknown free-roaming Goddess, promulgated Her unchained chants by making love in open under the star light. Their lusty whispers and grunts reached temptingly into the young religioner’s ears. But very strangely, here was the thing at the merest mention of which, his previous guru’s injunction hammered rattily over his head. Every cell of his being had crammed the long and wordy inverse relationship between sex and sageship, that is, if one existed the other wasn’t to be found in any part of the body.

For an ideal life, Hinduism prescribes four stages: childhood, studentship, householder and ascetic. Sadhguru Parmanand nurtured his pupils’ celibacy just in accordance with the natural purpose that sex should not be allowed to be overbearingly haunt the soft and impressionable selves, even if that meant condemning it as irreligious and unholy even just to think about it while at the hermitage. “You’ll know about it, by the grace of God, when you enter the life of a householder,” he used to tell them in a stern voice. And for the others, who chose to skip the third part of life–-a householder’s-–and enter the evolutionary cycle of sageship, he would handle the topic at the mature level, for they were children  no more to be made to shrink away from the unholy thing in a fee-fawing teacher’s stern voice. Here were the numerous yogic forms and meditative techniques to fully harness the most potent source of energy-–the sexual energy symbolising the creative instinct in the universe–-to energise the soul to the extent that it reached the farthest end of realisation of the cosmic purpose behind the creation; instead of being  perpetually wasted as the semen erupting at the ejaculation for a momentary beatitude, for just a temporary felicity, which sometimes meets the beautiful end of procreation, giving a new chance to some soul to adopt a new body and get engaged in fulfilling its little share for the purpose of creation. “That purpose of procreation is being taken care of by the householders,” the Sadhguru would tell his young ascetics. “You’ve adopted the path of everlasting heavenly pleasure, and for this the most powerful energy has to be utilised to its fullest potential so as to enable your souls to rise higher and higher to knock at His heavenly doors.”

Thus, as was the case with other haphazard remembrances of the Sadhguru’s teachings, he remembered celibacy too in its abstractness, though in a strangely crazy manner. So, one full moon night in summers when a young gypsy fulfilled first night rituals with his bride in an adjoining tent, moaning cries of the young girl excited him to the extent that he stealthily entered his tent and ended up masturbating. It’s however another matter that after his moment of enlightenment he cried his eyes out for breaking the most holy tenet of his self-nurtured religionhood. Hence, after that day he only had nightfalls, when some nymphatic little houri came in dreams and let loose the accumulated sexual energy in the form of semen, for there was no other spiritual use for it. And he would wake up in the morning accursing the provoking damsel as well as the damned fluid painted as a stigma on his holy loin cloth. He then started using a langot, a T-shaped tight undercloth which safely squeezes the genitals in a knot to prevent visibility, excitement and injury used by the wrestlers while in the wrestling ground. Still, the irreligious fluid found some way to sneak out of his tightly squeezed genitals under that instrumental cloth of celibacy, at its own free will every fortnight or so when he was at the peak of his youth. Apart from this, he was totally celibate in the literally formal sense of the term; hadn’t even touched a woman––utter and utmost celibate, akhanda brahmachari, crest-jewel of asceticism.

He accompanied the caravan on its march through much of north India. People’s look of spawn for the vulgar and savage looking gypsy got far, far diluted when he performed his tricking games in the background of young Sadhu’s talk of God, ethics, morality and myths. These were easily cantering days and he improvised many tricks of his own which could be, in all religiosity, played upon the public’s rectitude. Their short stays at places while sauntering around here and there were in harmonic resonance with his jiffy pauses among jerks with the crutch. At each stay, at each slacking pause after a froggy jaunt, he saw the world from his self-besieged physical self with its self-pledged thoughts and convictions. Running from pillar to post, purring over his mendicancy, he just zeroed in on the full magical potential of the old, naughtily little scamster.

They passed along numerous temples, ashrams, sects, pilgrim places; saw and sensed the iniquitously superficial covering of people’s faiths in different forms and packages. Gypsily from each and every place he picked up a sinew or two. Then he’d the permanent and inviolable juris-prudence of the conventional religion from his first pupilage. Skewed twigs interwoven with the soft grassy and straight sinews of the holy man, and trimmings of sartorial gypsy knots and nomadic feelings and smell; such was the nest which was upcoming for his survival as a conventional religioner. Though, for the present the process seemed pretty much unconventional, almost to the extent that someone might’ve condemned him as a fallacious gypsy masquerading as a Hindu religioner, or a mad and crazy Hindu friar who’d been apostatized by the homeless sophists. But nobody could see that he was really iron-willed-–as he was at the peak of his youth–-to be insular to any sort of apostasy against his very own religion.

The pair also boasted of some outmanoeuvring wins over some of the sects and friar groups which came their way by chance, just as wild breeze comes for head on collision against hulking and rigid rocks. The pair’s sorcery-cum-religious jumblement swept like a billowing wind over the opponent’s mouldy heads. And if there was a chance of defeat, their bumpkin meddled into the affairs with his stifling satire, thus turning the issue at hand into an unholy shamble, which went on to prove that all of them–-both parties–-were big losers and victory had secretly vanished from the scene.

Full of pride and confidence in their fallacious reasonings the mocking sophists had barged ostentatiously into various hermitages like Baba Shambhu Nath, Baba Ganesh Nath, Baba Gorakh Nath and many others, as they scuddled along their destinationless path, thus disturbing the hermitages’ calm and cool air with spitfire and crusading, tedious talk.

Baba Gorakh Nath sect has two subsects, kanapada and aghoda. The former literally meaning ‘ear pierced’ has its followers with large glass rings–-at least 3 cms. in diameter-–dangling dangerously from their soft earlobes. They look impeccable religionists with those ear rings.

Just after entering their hermitage’s self sworned quietude, our young Sadhu had some inhibitions about their look.

“Are they more acceptable and religiously capable with those huge ear rings?” he’d thought.

His earlobes congealed under a quivering sensation, fearing they might end up bearing the same fate as well.

Other prominent item with the kanpada sadhus was a big, bulky staff; so thick that a whole tree trunk might have been wasted for a single piece.

“Their both legs are crippled, otherwise why do they need such a load of wood?” he’d jested with himself, as he went crouching over his own.

The pair’s jumbled jugglery was too much for the hermitage head’s prolix talk of mores. When the pupils of the uneasily wide eyed old man sensed the looming defeat of their guru, their tongues acquired haggling tones and fists tightened their grips around well oiled woods. The guru belched towards his disciples imploring them to chastise the unbuckling competitors.

“Expurgate the evil! Split their ears and land them in perdition!” the head religioner fumingly damned them to wormy catacombs.

Hits were of course severe. At last they just slinked away with caustic injuries. The episode somewhat parted a curtain to show him a glimpse of the limitation of a gypsy-cum-religioner. And from that day he wasn’t as enthusiastic as earlier.

In this way he’d spent three remaining years of his minorhood with the old frog; during this period his stationary convictions and escaping tendencies had been constantly finding an outlet through the nomadic sojourns. He was becoming socially as well as religiously wise as he pilfered witchcraft from the old gypsy and his heart effectuated earthly beats in concert with the people’s bucolic struggle for livelihood.

As a smooth cog in the caravan machine he didn’t find time to contemplate a separation as had been the case on two previous occasions. But certain tendencies or inclinations are impressed on conscience so forcefully that they become the veritable facts of life. As if haunted by an elliptical mockery a dog always pisses on a zocle lifting one of its hind legs. Under a vague sense of impunity a donkey left to graze never returns to the tethering place by itself, while all other animals get habituated to do the same, forgetting their wild instinct of escaping into wilderness. Also, a donkey under its secretly suffering sworn pledge would be eternally happy to straggle bearing a burden on its back, rather than trot less piteously pulling a little cart laden with same amount of load. Its soul is inclined to negate the direct vertical vector of its load’s gravitational pull, rather than slide it along a horizontal component. That’s why there’re so many donkeys with saddle-bags and so few with carts. Maybe they carry the load on their back taking it as their own.

Thus, the first guru had failed in putting a cart after him. And he ran away from his hermitage derisorily mocking at the poorly pious holy man. Now, in all his effulgence he was very happily getting loaded upon his back, with his escaping tendency patiently waiting in its ascetic garb.

One more thing, efforts of the first guru were to put additions to zero, so as to get a positive addition. However, the pupil desired multiplication of or with zero, which fructified so charmingly in his partnership-cum-pupilage with the old frog, as they very dextrally multiplied black magic and religion. Alas, spiritual evolution in that case was going to be zero, however big the magical multiplier might have been.

Just as small fishlets grow up fastly as ducks paddling in the water compel the tiny creatures to move fast, which consequently ends up as an exercise for the fish in their childhood helping them grow up fastly, our adult Sadhu–-he was 21 now–-was growing up, thanks to numerous ducky movements at the surface of his water into which he’d chosen to take a plunge as a little lame larvae. So, as an adult religioner he’d a definite inkling about the outright extortion of the commoner’s faith forfeited to the godheads.

One particular bad-weathered night, when like many other such occasions the protégé learnt magical charms and other tools of spoofing under the guidance of his crudely flippant teacher, very blithely the dark cast its dragnet; when not a single lamp was burning at the caravan site; when children were sleeping or feigning it in the arms of their mothers; when the cattle, donkeys, horses, mules and sheep stood motionless and mute to the trenchant fury of thunder, lightning and rain; when not a single voice could be heard in small make-shift tents; when all of them were hiding beneath each and everything they could avail of, old frog finally romped home into his last destination. He died half drenched in cold water without a single flicker to light the path of his final release of breath, and without anyone praying for his soul at the last moment. Totally rain-soaked, when they got up in the morning, they found the storm’s last trace in the form of old gypsy’s sagged corpse, which lay there all empty as if he’d poured out each and every magical swindlery of his into the disciple’s religious bag, whose tumescence indicated that very definitely something had entered into it.

Death with its jaws of steel thus consummated old frog’s journey in a single masochistic bite. They accepted the actuality with just a knee-jerk reaction by their very, very mildly mourning selves. Only their wild calm seemed to sing a dirge for the old companion of the caravan for so many years. In a sort of giddy eloquence of their free ways, nobody shed a single tear for the departed soul, just as old frog himself had never done so in his lifetime. Heir to the tricks, cart, donkey and the crass heap of old gypsy’s provisions, however, was from a village settlement, and thus both his eyes sent down two saline lines just enough to reach his jaw line, when he saw the corpse of his guru, which still seemed to take pot shots at him, being taken on its final journey.

“Don’t worry one day you too will be taken like this,” an elderly fellow said in a lighter vein, patting his shoulder in the name of a laconic condolence.

And they chugged off into the woods. He didn’t know whether they buried or cremated the corpse. When they came back, young Sadhu stared at them with spurn as if they were returning after a feast of riotous blood and gore.

That night as he lay all alone in the tent, honking reminiscences of the past three years flashed in his mind with their little gestic galore. He could remember it too well, how the old frog had foiled an attack by havoc wreaking mongrels in a village, who wanted to chew off the strangers’ flesh and bones in the dark of night. They would’ve effectuated their reviling intentions if the old gypsy hadn’t fended off their grimy clatter of teeth with his sheer presence of mind. He watered down the beasts’ scorning ploy by remaining icy cool. Even as a dog had got its teeth into his leg, he patted and caressed it so lovingly as if he was his own, leaving the man’s oldest friend in limbo. So, within moments the hassling hecks rolled apologetically around their feet.

This particular rendering of a brave job by the old gypsy, Nanku and old frog they used to call him, made him feel as if the deceased had been an adopted father for the last three years. That in consequence drew his memory to the toiling and bent down figure of his father back in the village; for a few moments, his mildly bereaving thoughts trespassed into the forbidden chamber of a religious friar’s mind. He recalled the appearances of all the family members, but they came to him inanely faded as if he’d met them in some previous birth. Then, even these faint figures slammed their old, worn-out door in his face. After all, a yawning gap was irksomely eating into space and time differential between the renegade and the rest of his family.

He was wandering with the raunchy, addressless gypsies, to whom each and every place on earth was without identity, without any distinct and wispy seductiveness. For them a compass, distance scale and all other parameters of identity of a place had absolutely no value. He was thus even unaware of the direction he was in from what once used to be his home, or the distance which separated poor Nathhu Ram’s household embellished in poverty from one of his free roaming prodigies. In fact from the first day he left the house, he’d never cared–-like a true ascetic–-about the direction or distance from the original home. And now, an eruptively thrilling sensation sauntered across his religious self, making him feel he was at the other end of the earth, where it was a futile farce to even think of them.

After his second guru had been suddenly snitched away from him by death, he kept up with the wandering pace of the nomads for a few months. But the problem was that now the historical disparateness between the society he came from and the gypsies’ started taking a dig at the rank outsider: the representative of permanent and cumbersome twig among the ever-flying gypsy sinews. Thus, he started to look like a totally outside element now when the froggy bridge between them had gone. Inevitably, the long-haul and short-haul of it was that the perennial homeless horde now seemed thickly gross and stupid; poorly teeming with its peculiar crassy gawkiness. He felt suffocated in replication of the gypsy clout, which constantly gave in to an unknown path’s gimmicks, as he followed it ploughing a lonesome furrow in all his religious gaiety. His ungypsiness with its plausible distinctness started to have a row with the sand beneath gypsy feet which seemed disinclined to bear any mark on its clear surface.

He could earn more than other gypsies through the magical tricks, but he’d no one from the caravan–-except the clown whom the young religioner thought to be half-minded–-to share the little profits with. For all of them he couldn’t do it, and a single one he didn’t find. Also, their socially criminal negligence of him seemed to impute his outsideness. A typical unconcernedness ruled the roost of their hearts, and for someone like him who came from a society where the heart is ever ready to play a cameo with concerned looks from fellow dwellers, all it looked as if he’d been outcast even below the ranks of his caste in their village. He felt his body to be totally log-jammed, completely unrelated to anything or anyone in the caravan. He was just wandering with them for the sake of an alternative, which thanks to the God he found one day, as the tempting tastes of the settled world cast their spicy galore in its entire earthly appetising aroma. It seemed a heavenly world, a world fit for the godheads like him, in comparison to the savage loiterers he’d been wandering with for the last three years.

Ditto to the Godly trysts, at the outskirts of a village where the dera had an extended stay, a small temple was under construction. The young Sadhu at once smelt a chance there. For a decent religious first impression on the minds of those concerned with the temple, he utilised the teachings of his first guru, which during his gypsy jaunt were playing a submissive second fiddle to his bellicosing tones of witchcrafting religionhood. Knitting together the abstract and vague remembrances of the Sadhguru’s lessons he loitered around the construction site on the pretext of an overt support to the Godly work. In his sprightly religious tone and gestures, he’d talk to the workers, to the onlookers, to the people who had contributed to the cost or for that matter anyone who’d the slightest interest or stake, equivalent to a single brick, in the upcoming earthly home of the cosmic unknown. A good thing was that he saw no other representative of his élan in the near vicinity. Immersed in the glaring flurry of religious activity, they didn’t care to know where he came from, as such whys and wherefores about a journeyman on the path of religion only serve to negate the people’s reasonless faith in Him.

A week or ten days passed in this way. Nobody cared about the regular visit of the Sadhu there. At one noon when they were resting after lunch, tired, resting with constructive spirit over their heads, one of them threw the favouring dice which the Sadhu was waiting for so earnestly.

“Sadhu maharaj! The temple will be completed in about a month. We’ll need a priest here to look after the idols and perform worship. I think you being a young devotee of God seem fit for the job,” his voice sounded authoritatively assuring, indicating he definitely was in a position to proffer the job.

The proposal drew heavy positive nodes from the bysitters. Much to the solace of the soul standing at the cross-roads, the priest-in-waiting grinned broadly. Curling hair of his virgin beard seemed whole-heartedly obliged to the temple makers for giving a chance of rest to his rattled limbs due to the whole gamut of guffawing gypsy forays.

It was in this way the raw and archaic group moved forward, leaving him at the village, without even caring to know that something had been left behind. He was just subtly left behind as simply as the unwanted stuff discardedly scattered over the once caravan site. It was as chancy as he’d joined them. Just out of the savage and religionless fiefdom, now he was wanted promptly by the settled, religious society. He was very, very happy indeed. By all accounts it was a good achievement. After all he was now one of the God-sent persons to take care of His ‘place’ on earth. Or call it this way, a small temple under his authority for the practice and nurturing of his faith.

The temple being still under construction, its would-be-priest had the right to pass instructions about the style of its curvilinear shikhara, or tapering top, look of the sanctum-sanctorum, idols of his favourite Gods, a small adjoining cellar for himself, etc., etc. The instructor felt a great pride in being the first head of that small temple.

Whatever maybe the painstaking labour, time, artistry and cost behind the process of erecting a temple, the priest is the easiest thing to get without any meddling by any sort of steely opine. In fact, by the grace of God, the first religioner to set his eye upon the new holy place, most often gets his wish fulfilled.

The new priest, young like the temple itself, educated in the two required forms of religiosity could definitely sway the heads of devotees with his talk of parroted lofty ideals-–ever existing to the extent of far and hollow universe and perpetually receding God at its farthest margin-–learnt during his first tutelage, while the tricks from second part of his disciplehood could certainly strengthen his small claim as the representative of some sort of divinity.

He remained there for about three or four years. But his wanderingly motivational energies were strong enough to upset many apple carts loaded on the path of mendicancy. So once again his escaping tendency had been sharpening its claws. He felt the sick feeling of getting tied down and tethered to the same boringly small temple, chained and bound in some invisible encumbering trappings; same idols with painfully pensive gaze; same charmless rituals devoid of any underhand manoeuvres; same set of devotees with their abysmally lackluster and almost rusting faith; the same set of people in disenchantment, hypnotised by a cynical enthusiasm for being atheists or agnostics; the same level of influence, stuck up at a very low benchmark.

Thus, lost out in such untidy and corroded quagmire of renunciation, detachment and asceticism on the one side, and his self-obsessive vanity playing ping-pong with the former, he cut down his stay there. Off he went, without the knowledge of anyone on a certain night, to a new destination following the ceaselessly creaky chatter of the path of sadhuhood. And, when in the morning they found the temple without its priest, nobody even cared to know about the ‘what and hows’ of his escapement or call it running away, because such are the ways of the people of God.

For the next long-drawn thirty years, he went on being wind-flown from place to place, turning up his nose in distaste as if one nostril wanted to smell something different from the other. Kudos to his friarship, he never got a chance to erect the structure of his desires on any of the numerous little foundations he laid down at various places in his role as a religioner.

As if on a perversive prowl, guiding hand of reclusion took him from the holiest of places in Hinduism, to the most naturally hazardous ones. Constantly on the move, enthralled by the apocryphal cacophony of unknown paths, he didn’t realise time (at least not for the next three decades).

This is the period which all of us face, when steely spine of youth gives the baton to the mild, creaky clatter of the chief bone, already under a huge heap of expectations and tasks at hand. Led by the force of destiny on the path of passivity, when childhood and old age look too far, we during our middle age, just roll amidst overwhelming doubts; subtly blunt for the youth and subtly sharp for the old age.  Similarly, the middle age just rambled over his graduating corpulence, as he went on testing different waters–-and dodging the crisis to his sageship–-gloating over his piece of cake from the ever-fresh delicacy refrigerated by an ever-active mythology and an ever-lasting faith in God and godheads. Thus, on this ‘middle age’ patch of path, he’d just lived and wandered, sometimes surviving on alms, sometimes with a little bit of better fortune, as a mere indistinct figure among the troops of monks and ascetics; when his young convictions didn’t holler on high alert at his religious self. Mendicants of his age and status traverse a path less erratically laid out, so that the soul is not so much on tenterhooks with the physical self.

However, this period too was to come to an end. When the age limbers up to that zone of weepishly regressive late middle-age, instigating the once youthful self, whose juice has been sucked up by the middle-age for its survival, to go ballistic against the cruelly senile pace of the fulfillment of long-held aspirations-–yet so hyperactively hackling-–and the creaking spokes of the rusting wheel of life.

At the crest of such bludgeoning impulsion, he wanted to raise a new imposing structure on the next foundation he chanced to lay hands upon on account of his religiosity. His spirit was oddly rejuvenated, considering the last thirty years of impassive rough and gruff on the path of religionhood. He was very much eager to flit out of the hibernation he’d got into during that long and drawn-out voyage, which by the grace of God cushioned his little falls as he limped on the path of godhood, at least helping him to remain a Hindu religioner. But with a livewire desire, which suddenly flashed inside the dull, dark chambers of his dozing late middle-aged corpulence, panoramic vision of his convictions and beliefs of the time when he’d started on his chosen path came alive in a glaring flurry. He viewed the past three decades with a scuttling disdain and his religious armoury belched with acrimonious gestation.

Just before arriving at his latest destination, he’d decided to visit his village where he hadn’t put his limping footprints for almost forty years. So, after such a long haul of time, the native returned at a somewhat lugubrious dusk when darkness was at the village front. He found the house in shambles. Time’s bestiality had eaten into almost all the bricks and woods. Not a single roof was intact. Walls of the courtyard had collapsed. There was no tree. Gaping holes and breaches in the rubble, shadowed by the upcoming gloom, made it look historically haunted. He felt as if he’d arrived there after a century. Feeling himself as the longest and the lone survivor, he shuddered at the sight of his once sleeping dungeon in one corner as if a lurking wolf would pounce out of it and smither him to pieces in a bid to complete the process of destruction.

The fact was that his parents had died a good time back. Somehow, the sisters had been married off, and his brothers had joined the locality of their own community at the other end of the village. During his absence, caste mobility had come across numerous new facets and their physical dislocation from the place was just a kind and type of that. They’d left the fragile shelter at the mercy of unsparing weather, while the upper caste fellows in its neighbourhood vied with each other to purchase it. So, Nathhu Ram’s two claimant sons to the property were patiently biding their time-–in a sort of auction type suspense-–for the highest bidder, while the land beneath the rubble waited patiently for good times as the bearer of an upper caste, decent house and old bricks shed themselves to pieces hoping to become the unseen foundations of a lustrous structure.

He was now sitting amidst the fragments of ancestral property: one third claimant on account of the inheritance laws, but at the same time, not owning even an inch of the land or rubble due to the law of renunciation. He was just a living shred from the dead shelter’s history.

There were tears in his eyes for a moment, as a complete appearance of the house leavened with all those enlivening little struggles flashed across his mind. After all, it was the place where a mulberry tree used to be, and there... a blackberry, here he started to learn his limping... there in the corner he listened to grandma’s tales. ‘How did she look like?’ he forced his memories to waft back to the farthest end to find anything resembling the old woman. Alas! There was no such figure now. In place of her visage, her stories started to assemble words from the farthest corner of memory lane… then little, little phrases… and then sentences… and in the end some synopsis of his once favourite stories. He wept like a child; whole heartedly in fact. Once the tears he owed to his memories were shed down, all those memories once again crumbled into the wreckage scattered around. Once again, scene of his first escapade from here lit up inside him. It was the most vivid of all remembrances and gave him a freshly vigorous impetus on the path of asceticism. He rose up with new strength, new energy, and new motivation breaking the slumbering passivity of the last three decades.

He thus came out of the rubble as silently as he’d entered, without anyone noticing him.