Love’s Bannerol and the Priest

4

                       Love’s Bannerol and the Priest

The Muslim watchman was born at a nondescript village in the southern part of undivided Bengal decade-and-a-half before the independence and the fateful partition. His birth place was an erratically laid out fertile land by the rivers depositing Himalayan dust after a long, long journey. It was a land of rice fields, dotted with mango, coconut, banana orchards and gardens---the vast alluvial plain, the handiwork of many mighty rivers like Bhagirathi and its tributaries; full of deltaic marshes, swamps and bogs; washed by a high monsoon  rainfall over the freshly laid out sediments.

Bengal, as we know has been the original seat of the British Raj, where cultural nationalism sprouted forth from its medieval dust in reaction and response to a whole gamut of freshly laid out western ideas and culture which the burdened head of the colonists dumped for a rest during their civilizing journey across the globe. So the lucky land, the deltaic land, of White Man’s burden as well as the ravaging Himalayan rivers got a rich sedimentation of ideas and earth. What came out of this enlightening and revivalist churning? It was a distinct Bengali culture which opened its eyes to become the harbinger of socio-religious reform movements, which when out of its cocoon changed to cultural nationalism on its road to evolutionary national feeling. What next? Bengali bhadralok on tenterhooks for the freedom of mother India, of course. Aggressive nationalism, the militant nationalism, came in between. Then the independence and tearing partition.

It was in this State, credited with tomes of such important historical facts, our watchman fellow was born. Creaky chatter of cultural and religious exclusivism had slowly and slowly started to brews its tumult. However the common man on the street was still unaware of the weepishly regressive guffaw of such absolutism, the mother of full fledged communalism. So, communal carnage, two-nation theory, though just a decade away, hadn’t yet disturbed the whole-some Bengalese cultural cuisine. Paddy, inland fishing, coconut and jute coir-working, handicrafts and emerging industrial centres in their infancy in Calcutta, Alipur and Howrah had their own long, rough and rumbling history under colonialism. Yoked in this bitter and hard chain of survival the common man, the labourers still found the talk of caste, creed and religion less important than two meals a day.

His father did any type of labour as the situation or opportunity put forth. He was their only child, whose worn-off and almost suffering appearance brought more and more intensity in their parentage. He sat nearby without slightest trace of hip-hopping childhood curiously watching his parents planting paddy seedlings, harvesting the same ripened crop, making jute bags or mattresses. Unplayful melancholy always seemed to fend off a child’s merry-making rainbow from him. Seeing him thus the couple laughed sometimes saying he was a stoic in the previous birth, whose meditative trance had barged even into his next birth.

Their small hamlet situated along a tributary or distributary of one of the rivers criss-crossing the deltaic Bengal had its usual big grey area of stifling natural troubles. The damp, humid and rain soaked terrain frequently came under the sweeping storm of water born diseases like jaundice, gastroenteritis, amocbiasis and diarrhea. The last one had struck, almost fatally, the already weak infant nearing his first birthday, leaving his health in shambles. They stretched every sinew of their filiality to save the only precious addition to their small family. Always shooing away, through their love and care, the death cooking up a conspiracy to snatch away their child, they did all they could to conceive another child, so that their insecurities could be shared by another little lamp shining inside their home in all its sheen and glory.  But, as the fate’s stage-managing would have it he was not destined to share parental affection with other siblings. He remained their only child, growing up very slowly and precariously.

The weak child remained on the anvil of malarial bouts almost every rainy season. His parent’s anxiety and insecurity came in added installment on each new birthday of the star of their eyes. Still, the boy with his frail clasp to life, with his little Muslim tarboosh over his small head was the tango of their hearts.

According to the five fundamental Islamic tenets a Muslim must/should: first, hail the unity of God and surrender to the Prophethood of Muhammad; second, offer prayers five times in a day, Friday afternoon’s in a mosque; third, as a sacred act give helping alms to the unfortunate fellow human beings; fourth, during the month of Ramzan, fast every day from dawn to dusk; fifth, must try within his means to pay a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once during the lifetime.

As for the first and the second, their faith in the Almighty had grown to be more close grained since the birth of their child for whose life the poor couple invoked His mercy; what to talk of five times a day, they did it whenever his pitiful face poked a sorrowful grimace. Third injunction was perhaps not decreed for them. The next seemed to be nothing short of a crest jewel for the poor family; as at least by the grace of Prophet’s fasting, crimpling ration of the house got some decelerating brakes during the holy month. The last one, even considering the infinitesimally long rope of ‘variegated resources’, was beyond even the wildest of their dreams.

The village mosque was years old. It smiled solemnly with its moss greenish dark walls. Dome stood sulkingly as if in clamminess to the older times. The pigeons flappering grubbily inside its vaulted interior sent out a gabbling echo. Plaster worn-out here and there showed bluish-red small bricks. Broken window arches and haggardly hanging minarets at four corners made the whole look of it as if it was in a sort of hallowed ancient chasm with its dim religious charm. It had the typical inventious heterogeneity of Bengali architecture groomed from the Sultanate period. Bengal at the centrifugal periphery of the Mughals; many local Muslim dynasties; medieval Sufism; Chaitnya’s primordially drenched keertans---so many twirling blithe historical facts which still seemed to suffuse a distinct Bengali fragrance during this last phase of colonialism.        

The mosque was the only educative point to name in its capacity as the maktab, Muslim elementary system of education wherein the maulvi taught Urdu and Bengali syllables, alphabets and numerals in communion with sacred Quranic principles. Classes were held for just two or three days in a week. Shorn of any childish twittle-twattle, sitting absently before the teacher was the easiest thing for the boy. Teaching with preaching being a hassle free thing for the children as the idealistic serious injunctions were out of the imaginative sphere of their softly scintillating little hearts. The boy carried an odd pal of seriousness around him and by the look of it only he seemed to smell the importance of holy words. It is however another matter that the inanimate statue like face ogling without batting an eyelid at the maulvi’s face was in fact lost in the gutergooing pigeons above in the alcoves, niches and cornices; without looking at them, just lost in the ominous noisy aura without thinking or feeling anything. Others meanwhile passed their time in suppressed giggles and faddish, naughty manoeuvres completely invisible to the cocking maulvi.

The students of all grades sat together. So, in between those talimi moments (purported for the elder children), the younger ones were given cramming lessons of Urdu alphabets. However, such engrossed parroting chorus could be heard for too little a time to leave any firm and lasting imprint on the children’s fleeting memories. For the rest of the time only pigeons seemed to squabble over the alphabets inside the mosque. At such an impressionable age learning has to be continuous and somewhat repetitive with the effectivity of a playful newton force so as to leave a permanent imprint upon the unblemished and clear surfaces inside their curious minds. As did the invention of movable types by Johann Gutenberg, stamping the printed word’s fundamental axiom with a million newton force upon the weepishly regressive face of illiteracy; upon muckraking medieval dogma; upon guttural, poorly pathetic oratory with its limitations and gossipy spool of tricksteries. Joyous and firm synergy of tip... tip... tap... tap... click... click carried with it an air of liberation, of revivalism, of renaissance.

Without any fault of theirs, children in the maktab learnt almost nothing of Urdu. Self-obsessive air of vanity about the ragged, stagnated and moot system was too trivial to do any justice with the great literary corpulence lurking from the Urdu’s huge coffers.

Urdu being the crest-jewel of poetics with its vocabulary, idioms and literary traditions almost touches the primal song of softest of emotional hearts. Its grammatical structure based on Western Suraseni Apabhramsa allowing it to draw heavily from Central Asian, Turkish and Persian sources. Its genesis in Allaudin Khalji’s military camps, bazars, monasteries, salons, court rejoicings gave it enough pathos and softly suffering pangs. As naturally it grew to be an ample companion to the heart’s multi-hued outpourings. Ghazals and nazms of Mirza Galib, in their profound mystical mystery stretched it to the extent of moksha or liberation. Devotionally drenched medieval Bhakti saints took Godly sips from its big bowl which contained the emotional pinnacle of the human heart and the mind’s linguistic reach.

Unfortunately, inside the maktab carelessly inane introduction to the alphabets, now and then, was nothing but a slap in the face of this great and lively language, which was dangerously growing old for want of lively fresh breath.

The boy who seemed sagely in his sworn silence, by the look of it, envisaged the nearest possible talent or prospect—if left alone in his own world with only Urdu as an accomplice without any disturbance—for a new whiff into the literary panorama of Urdu : Who knows in masnavi, in ghazal, gasida, marsia, rekhti or in nazm? But unrelenting fate as well as supine society very rarely allows the most potent seed in a human being to burst out in its full blossom. Harsh realities snuggle around the most fitting seed burying it deeper and deeper with each passing day. And most of us with our ordinary fortunes grow-up to be the helpless human beings without the protective courageous company of that specialty buried deep beneath time’s sludge.

He too was to grow up in a similar fashion. And the traditional Urdu poetry which reached its pinnacle under the Delhi School forgot to even guesstimate about the promise and potential of some odd creative urge buried in the shallow grave of his uninteresting childhood. He just grew up, showing a peculiar agnosticism to life. His parents never made him work leaving him slouching idly at their little hutment. But he didn’t even seem to enjoy his idlehood. Even the growing communal monomania and bristling pace towards freedom wasn’t sufficient to instigate a human chasm over his face which could at least indicate that he wasn’t in a coma.

Then one year before freedom, when communal tumult as well as the hasty urge for freedom were at their combined peaks, something happened which unfailingly happens to all human hearts, at least once in lifetime. His sleeping senses of yore got a sweet tug as cupid struck him confirming that he in fact was a human being. At the age of fourteen he went crazy for a girl from the same hamlet. His senses so meek and unresisting were almost awefully infatuated under this surrendering soft pining stupefaction.

Opportunity for such love in Islam is very, very frugal. Muslim men in their narrowly taut interpretation of hadis in the Quran treat women very unfairly. Religious skullduggery dances in its full pyrotechnics when it comes to the interpretation of holy laws directing women’s place and way of life in the society. Putting them behind the veil; forbidding them from leaving their houses unless guarded by a male relative; getting them married at a very early age; yoking them into the duty of bearing maximum number of children while sharing a husband with other women; while the blue-beards cracking a whip at the pick of a second. Add to it the negligible chances of education. When on the social scene, it’s almost equivalent to a jihad against the kafirs.

His senses by consenting to the heart’s murmur could infringe upon any one of the sacred doctrines about women. Also, if according to Koran, nikah becomes valid only when the bride nods in affirmative to the groom, then his infatuation too was valid, at least in the eyes of God, provided her heart too beat the same way. Whether it did or not he wasn’t sure or hopeful about his luck.

If forms of divorce, remedies for widowhood, of remarriage, of sexuality, of property and inheritance laws (regarding women) were originally treated favourably, or at least equal to the men by an unbiased Prophet, then why did the sub-continental Islam threw an opaque light on the straight lines in the pages of Quran, making the reality look the other way? He was thus in store for a few kicks in his weak ribs and a few slaps to his beloved if she chose to be one.

Twanging bumps inside his rejuvenated heart ordered his sense of sight to be interested in seeing just her. She was of his age. Religious conservatism and all the taboos left aside, most fatal fact was that she was the daughter of village strongman, under whose patronage his father worked and almost cringed whenever he saw his employer.

Mustering up all his courage along his spines, he’d ogle at her whenever he got a chance to visit her home. She was of average looks. But to him she was an angel from the jannat, in its full opulent beatitude.

“Is my father still at work?” he’d stammer out shyly and abashedly to the queen of his dreams standing before him. “Mother needs him at home for some work,” he almost choked due to his love-lornness.

The girl somewhat blushed. Infatuation was oozing from his face. She saw it. The emotions’ vastitude was too overbearing for him to hide it. The girls have more control over a gay heart’s joyous symptomaticity. She quickly dispelled the blithe blush; then almost teasing him said with a serious, effeminate and uncaring voice, “For what work?”

Struggling with his imperious heart he managed to say, “Mother wants some money...she’s going to bazaar.”

She was now sure of his spellboundedness, so with a flattering pride said unabashedly, “Going to bazaar. For what?” her tone changing to ‘caring a littlest fig about him’ as if to keep him on the track.

That sounded somewhat assuring to his reddish buzzing numb ears, “For purchasing rice, salt, and...” he stopped with a faint smile caressing her feet.

In Indian sub-continental societies love thrives on faintest of gestures and almost invisible chaste symptomatic guesstimates. Mystical murmur of pining hearts goes on ripening, blossoming with changing seasons, when only nature in its full candour seems a sharer of all the pain. That is why nature is such a hallowed subject in the ‘love part’ of the folk-lore here in this part of the world.

To share his agony, on a certain day, he decided to go to the fishing pond of the girl’s father; as if to quench his love thirst by watching at least some part of her world. His heart was beating with wildest of curious imaginations about what she was doing at that time. The pond was about a kilometre away from the village. But the intervening landscape baroquely dotted with bushes and trees over the uneven surface increased the perception of distance as well as the loneliness of the path. Its dull vestigial aura seemed to pleasantly sulk like his heart.

“If I meet her coming from the other side,” he once again lost himself in dreamy thoughts.

A tart sensation sauntered across the pores of his darkish skin.

“Here in this loneliness, will she smile at me or not....”

Inside the heart of his hearts he’d a faint glimpse of a tiny flower inside her secretive heart which threw a romantic raylet piercing through her make-believe coquettishness which on the surface of it seemed to naughtily chide, saying ‘she didn’t care a rap about him’.

“Not only smile, she will even speak out her love for me. Without caring for the world as no one is around,” a sweet wave swayed across his body.

He looked around to confirm the unblemished solitude of the place. The thought of she speaking of her love for him, gave his overworking heart the biggest and most ingenious thump of his life.

Contemplating heart’s zealotry like this he reached a place from where a portion of the pond’s water became visible to his eyes. But what he saw there made his heart beat still faster, thus beating the previous record.

“Was it she!” his throbbing self wasn’t sure.

His courage gave in and he stopped. How to face her here in this loneliness? He kicked himself for this cowardly indiscretion which pushed forward his hesitant legs.

“What if she is really there? My father would be there as well as hers. And suppose she’s alone. If someone comes after I reach there,” his heart sank and legs prompted his afraid self to show a clean pair of heels from the scene.

Under the spate of such purple thoughts and emotions he moved forward. Pond’s vision went on increasing towards its full size.

“It’d be far better to face her here than at her doorstep,” he braved himself up.

The pond was mostly visible to him now. But nobody came into his view. Suddenly, to a mighty hiccup of his heart, there in a far corner, which until then had been left out of his eye-shot, was standing the pearl of his heart in a boat, chirpily upbeat with an oar in her hand.

His starlet had rowed haphazardly, as zig-zagly as his love thoughts and—as if to spring a surprise—evaded that portion of the pond which fell within his increasing eye-shot. Full view, however, undid all his overwhelming doubts. In hush-hush silence and soul-stirring solitude opportunity had gifted some precious moments of togetherness.

“Where have the fathers gone?” the question gave him a realistic nudge, spoiling the charm fancy’s feather-touch somewhat.

She, in all her girlish spirits, was playfully balancing herself in the small boat which slippingly shook at the subtlest of wayward push from her nimble heels. She seemed more of a ropewalking acrobatic girl dodging the crisis with the oar. This pleasing dissonance between girl and boat showed her newness to the adventure. Her chirpy balance and oarwork made the boat swerve and circle around in its watery histrionics. She let out the feministic laughing cries of fear, adventure and surprising mirth in all their joyous synergy of body, mind and spirit. Completely unaware of the onlooker she was enjoying each and every moment in rapturous harmony as if to redeem all the losses which the Islamic women suffered in their role as the bonded servitors in society.

The breeze played around her faded blue ankle-length kirtle, flapping it around her maturing legs. Upcoming curve around her bottom excited him for the fraction of a second with almost a feather-touch of sexuality as he gloated over it. But love at this age is beyond lust. Heart’s vastitude is too suffusing for the growing up sexuality. And the pleasurable proximity of that excitement was gone even without him having an inkling of it. The Bengali Muslim damsel, lurking between girlhood and womanhood, in the boat, among the fish jumping above the water surface occasionally, stood with her slenderest of sexual charm like a mythical mermaid, half woman and half fish. God knows how many virginally fresh young loves have been inspired by the woman and the distinctness hallowed around them, leaving ever memorable and inspiring impressions, which affect and mould whole of lives.

If Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, infatuated Julius Caesar and Mark Antony with her beauty, bravish charm, scintillating skills and scholarship; if great poets and philosophers sang and marveled at her physical, emotional and almost mythological secretness inside her heart, then this girl in a boat with fish flopping around in the water was undoubtedly capable of leaving an indelible, everlasting imprint on a virgin heart fallen in love for the first time.

She had removed her coarse, big and broad head-cloth (which usually covered almost the whole of her upper body) and dumped it by her side as if in disgust over its veily weight. Her narrow shoulders, long arms and the upcoming breasts covered under a full-sleeved kurti made her appear more charming than she really was.

“How I wish if I were there in the boat with her. Holding her hands...” he sighed. “And then suddenly a fish flop up, frightening her to fall in my embrace!” a sweet sensation caressed his genital area, as the growing seed of virility sprouted forth its little sapling.

During these dreamy moments, the girl during one of her swirling sweet manoeuvres caught a glimpse of the love-dazed boy, worshipping her with his ogles. Shyly she stopped her learning efforts at rowing. The boat meanwhile continued to circle around under her feministic inertia. Conscious of the fact that she was now looking at him, he blushed bashfully and was almost flabbergasted. His heart pounded with such ferocity that a toad jumped into the water from the corner of the pond as if the vibrations struck him. Emotional convulsions almost brought him at the brink of entailing the frog into the water with a bang.

If the feministic pinpointing impression, particularly smile, streaked inside the creative insight of Leonardo da Vinci and metamorphosed into the ever-active mythological smile of Mona Lisa, then this mermaid of the boy too thunder-bolted an everlasting impression inside his empty heart of yore. Love painted itself on a spotless canvas. Even if the time had the swiping potential to wipe away all sand dunes from the desert, it must’ve felt helpless before this painted oasis inside his barren heart; the ever defying traces of subconscious impression from the chaste, subsurface world of love: the girl, the fish inside the pond’s murky water, boating, pisciculture. Such everlasting and unmiffed colourisation of the heart with its vaticinal aura becomes a life force; the only purpose of being on earth. And small scalps like him never let such divine impressions slip away as a mere transient casualty, rather these are stored in a secret niche inside the immortal crate.

He didn’t know what to say to the girl whom he was thinking about day and night for the last four or five months. She looked somewhat embarrassed of the way she was playing. He, meanwhile, was perpetually failing in his efforts to force out a word. His heart’d leaped inside the pond, twisting and tossing around the boat and a pal of utter dysphonia enclouded him. Subtly blunt hesitation glued to his tongue preventing love’s first syllable to come out; the first word of real consequence and affectivity. Steamrolled under this physical and emotional muteness, he stood with his five senses intermixed in such a way that he only perceived a big, buzzing and vacuous zero.

She was standing in the middle of the boat with her legs somewhat apart along its width to keep it in balance. As only natural happenings can break such deadlocks of love, of minds, of hearts she suddenly lost the balance thanks to some uneven force born of either the left or right foot. The small boat shook violently with the propensity of dislodging her off the deck. She let out a cry.

“T...Ta...Take care!” momentary time’s snooty chaos broke his muteness. “Don’t move. Stand still in the middle.”

Regaining her composure, she stood motionless. The oar dropped over to one side balancing the wood. The boat now moved obliquely in his direction. Finding her so harmless, so innocent like an astonished fish, caring boyhood surfaced over his placid heart, making him somewhat bold. She stood so beautiful, so helpless. Care for her erupted inside his heart.

“I’ll row it properly for you, if you like,” he blushed more than the girl.

She couldn’t say anything. Teasing chirpiness which came so naturally to her when he came to her house was nowhere to be seen. She was conscious of the loneliness as well as the small raylet emanating from the secretive chamber of her heart.

“Actually I came to see my father. Where’s he?” he tried to calm down his love-lynched, shaking limbs as he softly stepped into the boat beside her.

With her ‘I don’t care about you’ naughty gesticulation she shrank away, very cautiously though, fearing a fall and sat at the other end of the boat. Pointed end of the gunwale was topped by a triangular sitting board. Sitting on this, she looked in the other direction.

“Came for money to purchase ration,” she said coming to her normal ease.

Much to his huge comfort she’d straightway jested making a face. It was his standard query whenever he came to face her.

“Oh no! Not this time,” he said shyly easing himself at the other end handling the oar. “I just felt eager to help him with his work today.  But where’s he now?” Once again he fell back to his punch line.  

By the look of it he seemed more womanish of the two. His heart’s coweringly babbling buoyancy was too much.

“But all say that your parents never get you to work,” she said flatly.

Though she said it in full innocence, still it seemed a bit taunty. He felt himself quite low when she mentioned the common fact known to all the villagers.

“It’s been like this since my birth. They never want me to do anything for them,” he said ruefully.

To an extent his loving fancy dithered from its earlier exciting flights. He pondered over his idlehood, temporarily forgetting about his haunted heart. He wasn’t rowing the boat. It just wafted away into the pond, guided by little waves. They didn’t look at each other, nor said anything after the unromantic drift of their conversation. Gliding over the wavelets the wood reached midway into the pond. They were looking in different directions. He to the right and she to the left. Water beneath their eyebeams, in all its versatility, seemed eager to proclaim its oneness, regardless of the eyes casting looks in different directions. This silence gave enough time to their hearts to exactly ponder over what they thought and felt about each other.

In a very mild tone, almost to the extent of a whisper, she said at last, “Abbu and your father have gone to the town to bring a new fishing net and fish seed.”

Her understanding eyes were now fixed at his almost sulking face. His features weren’t so bad. But permanently tragic grimace masked over them made him look broodingly piteous. Yes, she cared for him. The boy had his own kind of sorrowful charm, at least for a girl of his age. His piteousness and ill health didn’t seem to be on the side of vulgarity or bad appearance. He seemed to be a prince from a gerontocratic state where all subjects were too serious as if none of them had seen a childhood, and he had been by mischance exiled to this clacking and gruffly gesticulatory world.

“At what time they’ll be returning?” he asked still disheartened.

Initial throbbing impulse of his heart had been reined in by the reflection over his passive part in a human society. But she wanted him to recall his heart’s wave-storm.

“Unmnn...I don’t know, but abbu was saying he’s some more work in the town. A meeting with a baabu I think,” she softened the corners of her lips letting a faint encouraging smile hover around there.

Supportive ledging in her voice broke his reverie anchored in the water. He turned his face in her direction and looked apishly into her eyes. Proclaiming oracle lurked there. Her smile seemed to graft up the sorrow penitently layered over his face with her love.

“It may take them till evening,” he seemed in control of his heart as well as mind at last.

A love-talk with presence of mind! How difficult it may get! But thanks to her, she was easing him on the right track.

“Ooomn...as if you know the real value of time,” she teased in her normal way.

He smiled away the naughty pun. “You were rowing the boat wonderfully,” he gave a smiling soft retort.

She smiled a bit embarrassed. “As if you can make me learn to row it properly,” she made a face, half blushing.

“I’ll if you ask me,” he shyly whispered becoming possessive about her, with almost the sweetest satisfaction of his life.

“Why’ll you take the trouble of getting me learn this,” she said trying to keep her butterflying secret of which she was proud.

Perhaps, sub-continental girls cherish this dodging secret—which occasionally shines over the crazy lover’s heart, leaving it in a pal of gloom for rest of the time—more than the love itself. With a naughty secretness, they make the best out of this process itself. But, unfortunately, by the time they are over with this hide-and-seek and surrender to love’s full blossom, it’s too late. Love in such situations just tries to make the best of a bargain. After all, if it knows beforehand its conviction and eventual kiss of the gibbet, then it prefers to fissure out slowly, slowly as a romantic springlet which almost immortalises the lovers’ Indian sub-continental folklore. And the whole world knows, history proves this, that this love is the greatest on earth. It is like a lotus sprouting above the muddy, sordid surliness. The ever smiling, fundamentally chaste love unfazed by the sneering fault-finders; the purest white light, immortally burning with the oil of so many lost-loves, softly asking the misanthropic paranoids to sheathe the bloody sword; love in its divine cloister incessantly immersed in a yajna throwing so many broken hearts into the sacred fire as the oblations to keep it going, and the rising warmth ever trying to fight away the worldly cynicism.

He’d not been able to express why he should take the trouble of getting her learn boating.

“What if somebody sees you with me in this boat,” she said testily, putting up a dilemma.

In affirmation of inherent fears and suspicions on the path of love, he almost shivered. The consequences scurried over his mind for a moment.

“Abbu’ll kill you and beat me mercilessly if not kill me altogether,” warned the girl, getting her share of fear.

He remained silent looking the other way.

“Afraid of my father!” she pouted followed by a twisting narrowness of lips which indicated feminine defiant spirit for the protection of her love.

There was an imbroglio. Their hearts had been caught in a net. Imbued in the same colour, both wanted to say the same thing, ‘I love you.’ But it was the most difficult thing to do. They wanted it through a mysterious symbol which the other might not take as an openly proclaiming consent to love. Two hearts; two nonconsenting halves of a single love being taken on a singular journey by a boat, while the forecasting angels looking uneasily, for the world was no sea where a boat could carry two hearts for ever.

He was rowing the boat in a big circle in the middle of the pond.

“What if my father comes?” she cautioned again.

“At the most he’ll kill me,” much to her pleasure, this time he spoke boldly with an unwavering voice.

“And me too,” she mimicked playfully with a hidden confidence, as hidden as her liking for the boy.

This newfound possibility of sharing her father’s fist-work seemed to energise his hands and he rowed as quickly as he could. She giggled girlishly, looking at him fixedly. He diverted his eyes after short spells, as if her love smitten look was too shiny.

He stopped rowing to give some rest to his aching muscles totally new to such a tiresome work.

“Are you tired? Now, give me the oar I’ll try to do it,” the other half of his heart sweetly proposed to bear his burden.

Suppressing his breathlessness, he protested as the male companion ought to do when in company of a lady. “Oh no! I’d just stopped to look around. I’ll continue with it,” he assured her.

“The fish have grown quite large now,” he noticed a big, noisy splash in the pond.

“Yes, it’s been sometime since the net was cast. It was to be done two weeks ago, but the old net was bitten by rats. That’s why abbu is in the town today,” she giggled.

Suddenly, a soli fish, small and shiningly agile, too luxuriously agile in fact, splurged out of water. Hitting the wood’s border it flipped into the boat. Its silvery incandescence dancingly struggled in two inches of water inside the boat.

The girl let out a cry of excitement. She had many things in common with the awfully acrobating fish. She saw her slippery, small shiny replica. Her eyes glowed as if out of wonder after suddenly witnessing her grayish-dark complexion turn to a silvery, agile glow. She stood up and clapped out of scintillating sensation. Her small breasts curious and eager to bob out against the cloth, thin slender back and all those things which’d already envisioned a womanness about them danced in a secret harmony with her fish replica. The fish in a tizzy seemed to struggle for a new crack of dawn for Islamic women after centuries of dusking squib. Its hypnotic twitch and twirls seemed to symbolise a torn and tattered revolt against numerous Koranic misinterpretations concerning women. As a sojourning, rejoicing memorabilia of Islamic women’s liberty and empowerment the girl seemed to jingle amidst those ancient chains. Her diminutive lover watched this glimpse of freedom which was inexplicably surrealistic yet so far away in the future. A lavish sensation sprawled across his mind’s aisle. How beautiful the Islamic woman seemed when on an equal footing with man; when a genuine womanish smile attired her face instead of thumping pain resulting from medieval sly digs at her. Flip-flapping soli and the joyous girl spellbindingly raced across his empty, indoctrinated mind as well as heart. The rendezvous impresario danced with its humanistic doctrines. For the appeasement of which God? We don’t know.

He adored her, in all her mirthing fish continuum, with his worshipping looks. She appeared so compassionate, lovely, gracious and worshipable like the Virgin Mary or any other Hindu Goddess. This’s what the true love does. All those inhibitions and enslaving misinterpretations inside this human being born as a Muslim were nipped in the bud by a small strike by the enlightened scythe of the true spirit of a true religion. There was a look of marvelous ease and satisfied peace on his face; to the extent that he looked like a true sage of an authentic religion; a primal revisionist who could recall all the original Prophetic injunctions, putting aside the dusting hadis, thus allowing the Prophet’s true sheen to glimmer not just for his followers but for the humanity at large.

He was thus sitting on the tiny hull of the boat in a trance over his love spraying around like the fish. The boat meanwhile jerked slowly from one side to another as if in a stark admonition that this love’s glimpse of epic proportions could be as momentous as the life of little soli if thrown at the shore. The fish could gaspingly survive in the shallow water inside the boat. Same was about their togetherness. It could hope only to survive as long as those floaty moments clandestinely stole out precious seconds for them.

The flapping, flirtatious love-crave imprinted immortal vestigials on his crystal clear conscience, where his barren past had left no mark: forever shining marks (in their infancy) of liberal romanticism, pure humanism, religionless soul apostled by the girl and the fish. It was such a lofty milestone in his life, almost the peak point of his body, mind and spirit’s creative synergy. It seemed as if his uncheckered past was waiting for this lofty phrase, for this lofty proverbial light whose gleam and voice would fade into the dimness of his old days.

Lost in a dream they’d spoken a few words. But the number of words can’t and shouldn’t be made to count the amount of love.

Defining moments of life are after all just moments. They suddenly crop up in all their fledgling luxury and then taper off in a hurry, almost tragically.

“Shabeena! What’re you doing there?” her father shrieked from the shore sending down soaring repercussions across the pond’s water.

For a moment even the soli fish shuddered under the impact of this hell raising voice. His single sentence gushed so much fire that he off-balanced everything. Like the perplexed round eyes of a fish fearing death she turned her head in that direction, then a littlest eye-contact with the boy and then again faced the inevitable eventuality, expressionless like a lifeless statue.

“In Jahannum’s name, why’re there? I’ll kill you. Come ashore!” he barked clenching his fists and grinding teeth.

The Prophet’s dearest child was his daughter Fatima, love for whom inspired Him to say filially that those who showed special favours to their girl child, they willn’t be touched by the fire of hell. Alas! These words had no meaning for the girl’s father, who was shrieking out fire to burn her.

Devastated by the hopeless situation she was on the verge of fainting for a moment, but then like the ever suffering Muslim woman regained her senses to bear the burnt without letting out faintest of whisper.

“You bastard, bring the boat to the shore, or I’ll drown you right there!” he directed his life-threatening voice at the boy.

Dumbfounded the lover stared at his beloved with a pleading look of what to do.

“Father’ll kill you,” she declared completely dead-white, forgetting her own fate.

He thought of an escape by jumping into the water. But he’d a realistic assessment of his swimming prowess. Knew it too well that by the time he’d struggle out of any corner, the monster will be there waiting like a deadly butcher. Under the deafening spell of an excruciating fear he once again looked at her. Life had vanished from her face. Surrendered to fate she nodded passively. Like a calf going to the butcher house he tried his trembling hands at the oar. Numerous uncertainties as well as certainties waited at the shore. First stroke took the boat in opposite direction. An idea struck, as it always does when one is fearful for life. Why not race ahead in the same direction? And then run into wilderness with his first and perhaps last impression of love. But his untrained hands and already stiff, weak muscles ruled out the adventure beforehand. Fully aware of confirmed inevitability, she helped him row the boat in the direction of her father. In all meekness she had picked up a bamboo lying inside the boat. She was learning to row; learning to face the loveless hard reality.

Watching them meekly coming to him the man kept mum. He seemed more dangerous without his bellicosing verbosity, for it was a like a lull preceding a ferocious storm. He seemed to be gearing up the spurs of his murderous angst.

“Will he beat you?” he whispered penitentially for getting her in this trouble.

“He’ll kill me,” she said stonily. “And me too,” he united their love’s futile fate.

In the raging gripeness of his fury, her father watched the wood approaching him. His chewing looks not able to discern whom to prey upon first, he, she or the whole boat itself. His bursting, swooned mind was gearing-up to give most vengeful orders to his thick fists, which clenched involuntarily.

The boy’s eyes caught upon the little soli, still dancing as a symbol of their love. He stretched forward to get his hand at the jolly creature as if to exclude it from their doomed dark fate; save the moments of his immortalised love; the symbol of his love. He tried to catch it but it slipped away. He tried two, three times but failed. She was watching silently. Then without thinking or feeling anything, prompted by a mysterious sensation, she stepped forward, stretching out her hand to help him.

Her father gruffed volcanically and catapulted vulgarest of an obscenity he could manage.

Their joint effort caught the slippery fish. His fingers and hers webbing around the shiny fish. With a swash they threw it into the larger freedom of water; like an oblation at the altar of their love; liberating those moments of togetherness; freeing away the indelible impression of fresh, virgin love; away from anyone’s reach.

As the boat neared the shore, the man lunged into waist deep water. All his cursing anger fell firstly on the girl. Holding her hair he shook her violently as if to fear her life away. After a few hard hits at her back and slaps at her soft cheeks he grabbed the main culprit. Pulling him off the boat he pinched him down underwater; his facial convulsions showing that he might even drown the poor boy. He then propped the boy up, who gasped for life. After an exhaustive watery session, during which both water and the child bore the punishment, he dragged him on to the land to bestow punishment upon earth for its own share of the crime. His kicks danced macaberously. At least for the moment, saving her life the girl ran towards home to get her due share in the confines of the house. After venting out his full fury the strong man left him like a dead wood and hurriedly set out for his house to drag her out of her mother’s meek grasp and give her what she still owed for her crime.

All ye social researchers, who’ve guts to analyse the comprehensivity of violence against women may start cudgeling up your brains about what might’ve happened to the poor girl.

As per thy psycho-analytical theory, accruing feelings and emotions during a female child’s upbringing in such societies make her almost passive to biases and tortures. Her response to violence is a stereotypical sheepishness. Taking heart by this argument, we shouldn’t loose hope. She would definitely come out alive.

According to social learning theory, she and her father in their respective roles of ‘mutely helpless’ and ‘boiling aggressive’ just played their normal and expected roles. The socialisation processes as well as the family relationships are such that the aforesaid roles become almost sacred, inviolable definitions of the two genders.

And as the all powerful patriarch of the socio-political critique, his subjugative and unflappable hold to avoid any misdemeanours on her part didn’t count as violence. Rather it was the duty of a worried father.

As the victimised child valiantly survives in a survival theory, she did survive. Batterings and victimisations at physical, emotional and psychological levels hadn’t stalled her suddenly. It’d all evolved, since her early childhood, in perfect harmony with the cycle theory of domestic violence. Her bearing power of victimisation had been growing with her.

Her little lovely adventure in the boat made her family jump-start to the conclusion that she was bursting with youth and desire. Fearing lest her raging passion might hatch an adulterous conspiracy, they deemed it fit to get her married off. So, she was to be married as soon as they could manage it.

He was left with a symbol of his love in the form of a small soli fish and the girl traversing amidst the wavelets inside his heart. With passage of time its grandiosity was to remain the only leading light of his heart. Duty for his love would mature to such an extent, enough to wake him up at nights hearing the flapping fish near the shore and by decoding their mysterious signals he could estimate wind direction, temperature and salinity of the water.

His parents knew that the strongman’s heart had become an ever-active volcano now, which will continue to pour lava over them. So with the prized possession of their parenthood they left the place and took shelter in a filthy hovel in Calcutta’s slum area, where poverty let loose its fury on the packed crowd.

Hard facts of life were too tortuous for his soberly calm heart lit by a single starlet. Destiny’s propensity is always to put us in shoes we haven’t ever worn. Just as a small personal hurricane whiffed away his beloved, a greater tornado awaited numerous combined fates. India got independence, but along with it ran into a mercurial heavy weather of communalism. Muck-raking insinuations of the communalists reached dizzying heights in fresh and independent air. Cataclysmic fire of mayhem was all around and fate of humanity just a mere fish in a futile pan. History’s biggest forced migration took place. Monstrous birth pangs and ramifications occurred as a different nation-state was born along the two diabolical fractures in Punjab and Bengal. The tissues of two wholesome socio-cultural entities were torn apart to suit the changed nationhoods: inking of a ghastly deal; like the cosmic cricket’s one ball chance or mischance; so many fates decided by one single rash shot. Eleven million Hindu, Muslim and Sikhs were uprooted from their ancestral homes. One million got perished while seeking refuge in a new nation.

His parents became just two unknown numbers in the list of one million dead persons. His name didn’t figure in the list of those who’d been sacrificed at the altar of a new Goddess called religious nation-state. He watched all this with a resigned passivity. At numerous instances incidental spin of the coin or the accidental throw of dice fell in his favour and he survived. To the other side of the border a new religiously spiced nationhood was up for grabs. Muslims from the Indian side of Bengal were in for a heady rush to their redefined motherland. But one needs something to take along to a new destination. At least one runs to a safer place to save even the trivialest of possessions. He hadn’t anything except a lotus light inside the farthest corners of his heart, which no communalist could blow out. So he remained in India like a tiny sinew strengthening the torn and tattered out secular nest of free India.

Now, he wasn’t related to anything. Fisheries were the only occupation or worldly thing he could’ve related to. As a poor labourer he worked in the fish farms. Netting, pulling, separation of the fish, markets, boating, inspection of seeds all done in a lifeless, mechanic proficiency but guided by a faint, murmuring crave emanating from the only lively thing inside his heart, which stretched his engagedness in the job to the extent of a mad craze, yet so silent, sober and stoic. Physical debility is no opposition to such soul driven passions. Multi-hued reflections of life, soul and spirit just danced at only one surface. Mastery in the field was inevitable. But perfectly unassuming mastery—without being related to anything else—fetches nothing except subsurface streaks of genius which are harnessed by someone’s dexterity and social-skills, leaving the master just an unsung and pauperised fortune maker. He was just of similar type as far as the fisheries were concerned.

He worked in inland fisheries in West Bengal; tasted the salinity along coastal Orissa; pulled nets in fresh water of the Ganges in Bihar. With the independent march of India, he’d moved to the western side with the spread of pisciculture from its eastern side along the Gangetic plains. The profession became food for his secretly diminutive thoughts as well as frugal thoughts for his food. His expertise groomed to such and extent that even the officials at the local fisheries department developed cold feet when they came to know an odd surprising, almost out of world tit-bit about the fish from his mouth which would sometimes open only when the matter at hand concerned the agile water dwellers. It was with such a septuagenarian status, about a year ago, he was spotted by his current employer at Jama Masjid market in Delhi. The pisci-farmer from the village had some other reasons too to bait-in the old genius, in addition to what a Bengali friend of his in the market told him about the old man. It was in such circumstances the new watchman-cum-adviser had reached this Haryanvi village about 2000 km. away from his homeland. It was a virtual pardesh; literally, a totally different socio-cultural set up in comparison to the polished culturalities of Bengal. After all it was the land of sturdy villagers, the descendants of indefatigable Central Asian settlers, who cleared mighty forests for agriculture about 3000 years ago. Simple, straightforward without any urbane etiquettes rasping around their edges, these hardworking people found it easier to grapple with bulls and buffaloes than softer—or as the urbanites call them finer things of culture—things of life, like say holding a slippery fish in hand or talking and behaving with a greater role of mind than the heart. They were led by a rustic, simple, straightforward heart’s instinct.

His arrival in the village, where the conventional green revolution dictated agricultural activities predominated, was an indication of diversifying modes of occupation being adopted by the people in the struggling countryside. Mushroom farming and inland fisheries were two emerging important factors which were providing some succour to the countryside put at unease by the increasing needs of these changing times.

Efforts and guidance by the Fish Farming Development Agency had given some hope to the educated unemployed youths of the district. Almost all the villages in Sonipat district, thus, had their village panchayat ponds leased out for pisciculture after an open auction. The ponds were thus serving twin purposes of pisciculture and buffalo wellowings.

Traditional beliefs about vegetarianism were losing ground and commercial proposition seemed to prevail over the conservatism and stigma springing up with a mere touch to meat.

District Fisheries Seed Farm situated along the road to the eastern side of the village also provided some half hearted incentives and vague clues about the blue revolution.

As an active player in the new scheme of things, the watchman had been happily employed by the villager. There was however another possible impact of his trivial, almost ionic addition to the State, where a nationally emerging Hindu rightist party had become a tiny force to reckon, with its new religio-political manifesto in coalition with an influential state level party. The political party was trying to instigate the sons of the soil to come out of their thousand-year-old repressive shell over a defensive, coward core which bore numerous attacks from the North West frontier. Irony was that a particular qualification was needed to be a part of this new found enthusiasm—at least be a borne Hindu, if not a full fledged practicing religioner. To the capacity of its vocal chords it was giving a clarion call for Hindu pride.

Back in his home State, the communist monolith erected on the principles of socialism was getting some jolts from a resurgent Congress as well as the rejuvenating Hindu pride. If someone heard the old Bengali watchman whispering—provided he knew politics at all—that he was a Congressman from inside but a Communist from outside, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Congress was surviving in Bengal inside some pathetic chamber fearing to come out in open against the Communist musclemen and bullies ever ready to vanquish any anti-Communist sentiment. They’d do anything like crop burning, thrashing, poisoning the pond to kill the seed of any Congress related idea as well as any private initiative to reap capitalistic profit. Of late however, the Communists were facing someone who was not as submissive as a Congressman. Beholder of Hindu cultural pride, RSS, had arrived in West Bengal. Its defiant khaki clad workers were holding shakhas, or camps, around the state. Its founder, K. Hedgewar had studied medicine in Calcutta during the militant-extremist phase of freedom struggle. He had some flirtations with Anushilan Samiti. But his rightist Hindu nationalism couldn’t find favours with the leftist overtures of the Marxist supporters of the Samiti.

Inertia of this new religious connotation of nationalism was spreading out to virgin lands. Watchman’s fellow Bengalese could absorb it in their State as the transitory phase ruled out any sudden social-shock. But far, far away from his home State, where the tsunami was accumulating in the land of his emigration, there was every possibility of being absorbed by a flood. While, for the political and ritualistic practitioners of fundamentalism it was quite easy to ride the crest of this new tsunami. Here in this part of the country where last of Muslim seeds had been pulled out after the local battles at the time of independence, this iota of Muslimness had every chance of being made a weed to achieve nationalism, patriotism, religionhood or just to satisfy the plain greed of a selfish heart.

A Pre-religioner

5

                                   A Pre-religioner

     The Sadhu was born at a time when the last phase of Indian freedom struggle was groping around, clueless. Suddenly, the imperialistic balloon had burst with a hell raising noise. Prejudices ingrained for the last three decades gave rise to the devil’s incarnation. Whole of Europe was caught in a mudslinging, flagrant malady. These raging and griping imperialistic convulsions from Europe shook distant Asiatic lands. A loathful Mahatma Gandhi, perturbed by the splurging fire, gave a quick quitting call to the Britishers, lest his land might become the violent badlands of imperialism as well. “Britishers, Quit India!” he said in a pinning voice octaved by a heavenly non-violent urgency.

Europe was thus once again caught in the devil’s snare! Oh poor Christianity, the wetherer of so many storms! Tired of crusades in early medieval times, it’d another enemy-in-waiting: the rational earthly spirit to be precise. So, the ghastly repression and burning alive of medieval scientists followed. Earthly voices of Copernicus and Galileo seemed an ungodly few-faw-fum intending to shake Biblical God’s palatial mansion. Then the fissures in corrupted Christianity came along. Displaced faith and holy-triad found themselves in a dead pan. Protesting voices against Catholic Christianity’s dogmatic woes resulted in slaughters of Protestants. Then emerged the Renaissance: enlightening revival of colourful thoughts, spicy colours, chirpy and mild indulgence in mundane life to the extent of romanticism. If we leave alone the Greek period, there had been just pellucidly dull tilts to a dogmatic monotony. But this time it was something really fresh. But unfortunately, after this refreshing sip (with its rejuvenated acumen) once again we across an alluring tilt to a monotonous craze. This time it was imperialism and colonialism, driven by the ‘White Man’s Burden’.

And now when the corpses of imperialism were being counted, a new thing had been conceived in an uneasy, frightened war-time womb. It was the black and white stage of escapism from the mayhem witnessed during World War Second. It turned the masses shoddily away from life’s bitter-sweet variety. Alcohol and sex, two new Goddesses emerged in the western pantheon. The western society now seeked liberal varieties in different mixtures of cocktails and promiscuous sex. An almost blindfolded society leapt over many spicy, humanely divine things. The purity of love and relations fell prey to an uninhibited copulation between the male and female. Mechanically rational fucking and cordially invited ebriated emotions consoled western world as it staggered out of biggest of graveyards after the second world-war.

It seems the Occidentalism very rarely finds (as does the ecstatically erotic cocktail of the Orientalism) a synergy between materialistic libido and spiritual murmur. So the western society was in a difficult pregnancy, preparing itself for the post-war period of total biologically rational sex and baited ebriated emotions. Everything became so certain, dull, colourless and tasteless. What else you expect if you start fucking at mere pindrops. Where is the charm? Human society is built upon what goes on during the time separating copulation from the outdoor offerings of the mundane life i.e., the practical moments defined by the absence of copulation. Only in the natural animism of the fauna (excluding human beings) there is a natural permissiveness about sexuality. But there it is controlled by inbuilt cycles. For rest of the time they roam in wilderness, almost sexless. Ever-active sexuality of human beings is what separates us from other animals. And the social build up has arisen only because we’ve tried to control it through social mechanisms. These controlling mechanisms provided certain time periods when we beautifully created the world of ethics and moralities. Thus, in humans there lies a humane world between the meeting of opposite genitals. Cut away the inbuilt inhibitions between both sexes and what we face is crumbling down of social fortress, because those inhibitions are the very foundations of human society.

So in the post-war west there was no such exclusivity of our blind passions from the normal everyday life. So the social foundations shook. Divorce, family break ups, suspicious parentage, perpetually defying siblings, loveless but lustful relationships butchered the peace of mind. In fact everything suffered. Orientalism, at the other hand, with its virtuositic charm, multi-hued pluses and minuses, still glitters in its faded and subdued modern aspect. Now, it’s the ‘Asiatic Brown Man’s Burden’ to peel away this inhuman dullness and mechanic monotony from the western social fabric; to paint it in charming colours and help it shine like it did on two previous occasions---the era of Greeks and the Renaissance, when it not only reached Orientalism in its charm, but almost surpassed it to unachievable heights of human body, mind and spirit in a divine tango.

                                                   *  *  *  *

He (the Sadhu) was born in a different district of the same state where the village of our tale is situated. He was an unfortunate boy with a birth time deformity in his right leg, as well as the social deformity of low caste in an occupation based social hierarchy. At that time it was one of the most traditional (almost unwavering conservatism) societies of northern India. Third in the series of five malnutritioned siblings of a prematurely ageing mochi, who made jutis, the traditional leather footwear of sturdy farmers clad in their dhotis. One brother-sister pair preceded him in age, followed by a similar pair younger than him. He grew up with an uneasy whimpering. Precociously arriving responsibility, which the elder children in the family face, wasn’t the case with him, as it’d already been heired by his elder brother and sister, whose childhood very quickly greyed to maturity. Nor was there any exuberant love and care proffered upon him, as it was the exclusive domain of his younger brother and sister.

At the time of birth, his right leg’s asymmetry wasn’t a glaring one. It won’t be caught by a simply voguish look. His staggering strides as a toddler, however, clearly showed that all wasn’t well with his right leg. But, poverty enforced slackness, or compulsory carelessness, never got his parents to turn a serious eye at the defect. Determinism was at its supreme. Remotest possibility of such cures, in all its aspects in this part of the world, was at least half a century away. So, the deformity grew up sketchingly resulting in a full fledged limping walk of a club footed child.

His low caste prepared him to bear all puns, pranks and taunts—humorous foolish folklore associated with his caste—with a slithery attitude, without slightest remorse borne out of a stoically resigned sense as if they were just calling his name; his very identity. In addition to the funny and foolish—almost to the extent of countryside mythology—folklore of his caste, his jerking walk made him a pick out of the rest of his fellow community members. After all there were so many quizzical proverbs about their brain’s lacunae as would be sufficient for any abdomen’s howlarious diet. They were called the Kings of foolish kingdom; numerous facts snazzily distorted to create jokes; their compulsive helplessness moulded in a pell-mell order to chalk out dunderheaded protagonists of glibly flowing comic tales. Perhaps it was the only form of entertainment for the sturdy work brutes. These funny episodes were coloured with such tabby dullardness that even the person claiming to have never parted his lips for a laugh in his whole life would have broken his accursed moroseness, surrendering himself to a fall in the dirt and kicking amidst sand-blowing bellicosing laughter. When someone saw a peacock graciously walking, exhibitionistically dancing or flying with its buttock-bursting herculian effort, it symbolised the comic aura hallowed around the boy’s caste. If someone from the boy’s caste happened to be there, the farmer would’ve relaxed his work-load by rudely grinning: “Hey look at that, my God! The mol is doing pulghoo...pulghoo…Haaa...Hhha ...Ha...the chol is doing chalghoon...chalghoon....Mol is dancing dreaming a rain,” as the cowering fellow chickened out of the scene.

History and myth of this analogy between the boy’s caste and the national bird of India goes like this:

Sometimes in the earlier times a brave fellow from the community got crazily interested in the fabulous flight of a peacock.

“I’ll fly like him,” the man resolved.

Cudgeling up all his profundity and faculties of reason he gathered all instruments of flight. A big broom to serve as his tail, two huge winnowing tin-plates tied to both hands for the wings, an inverted tumbler tied over head as the bird’s crown. And the bird incarnate proudly presented himself to his reverent wife.

“Hey wifie, don’t you think I’ve become a complete mor!” he envisioned before her.

“But how? I’ve never seen anyone attempting that,” she raised meek doubts.

“Your husband will do that,” proudly he patted her shoulder.

He attempted the historical effort from the top of a high sheesham tree, but fell on the ground with slight protestations by his artificial feathers against the deflighting force of gravity. A hand and a leg broken and the shrieky bird lay in his smashed equipment. His wife ran quiveringly to call the farmers working in the nearby fields.  

From that day onwards, the bird and the community were very rarely mentioned separately.

There were many people from the same community who were parts and characters of many jocular fables, whose authenticity many villagers avowedly litigated for being the witnesses to the abnormally foolish spectacle. In easy spirits, facts or fictions, nobody cared about the actuality of these happenings when narrated in a typical style encompassing unsophisticated story telling, enunciating narration, and comic acting to the limits of a drama, buffony puppetry and mimicry. Validity of these prankish fables became sureshot when one came across the real self of a character who was earlier acquainted through a funny little tale. The feckless air about these poor, foolish characters would let loose unrestrained laughter in its full feathers, so the onlooker too ended up surrendering to a riotous foolhardiness.

Those were somehow easy times in this part of erstwhile Punjab province, when compared to the gruffy flukes of the second world-war, as well as the intensifying freedom struggle in India itself. Colonists’ sheen in all its acumen hadn’t been able to reflect upon this self-possessed rustic, self-surviving part of Punjab province, which later, in 1966 to be precise, became a separate state. For the tireless farmers of this part of north India, ceaseless work in the fields for a survival was the only duty, de-emphasising all other more sophisticated and higher order duties like patriotism, nationalism, motherland, etc. Fight against nature in the fields was the only beacon of life. Britishers had never looked to redraw this tagline of theirs. And to them in this self-swaying small world the foreigners seemed of no avail, neither for hate nor for sympathy.  This loosely relaxed rurality was occasionally given a curious jolt when sahibs and mems chanced across the countryside while on a hunting excursion. Only the legendary Jat leader Sir Chhotu Ram’s pinning voice broke this slumbering sobriety. As a very proficient provincial minister he concentrated his time and energy for the rights of these farming simpletons. It was just on his account that the downtrodden farmers had been freed from the imprisoning fat bahis, account books, of local moneylenders where a few lines determined the fate of many peasant generations.

Sometimes, frustrated with the rigescence and ominous aura of present times, an odd veteran farmer of pre-independence period, now could be heard saying, “That period was far better than present times. At least the guilty was sure of a punishment. Now all are too free. Nobody cares about independent law and order.”

“They brought a tractor. The first one! I saw it by my eyes. Couldn’t believe as it ploughed unbelievable stretch of land,” another would say in a thankful tone.

“And they gave prizes for the mightiest bull, cow or buffalo with maximum milk, tallest of jowar or sugarcane,” another might say, lost in that era of ‘20s and ‘30s, reminiscing how they put tireless efforts to win the first prize.

To earn one’s two times meal with the consecration of their own blood and toil was their motto. Recalling along the same sanctified lines they would peep further back in time, around the hey-day of their grand fathers at the time of revolt of 1857, when Delhi had fallen and many British families had taken shelter in this countryside.

Cherishing his undying farmside shibboleths, another oldie might’ve said as well, “To protect a refuge seeker was our duty. So those gore angrezs were welcome, but as long as they themselves earned their part of meals. Fate can make even softest of hands work hard without bothering about blisters. Menfolk worked in the fields, around scoop wheels, drove kolhu bullocks in thousand of circles. And those fairy like women of theirs, they matched each step of our arrogantly ugly females. Their angelic children threw pebbles at birds preying on crops in the fields from high scaffoldings. And... and... do you know, one chap even succeeded in fleecing a houri-like young memsahib? Aaahaa... what luck of him!”

                                             *  *  *  *

His father Nathhu Ram too was linked to one such casteist banter which defined his identity. Attired in his filthy, tattered homespun peasant vest and a piece of see-through, patched linen cloth serving as a loin-cloth tied in multi-layers around his dark, hairy legs he was a typical scion of the downtrodden humanity: a lower caste man engaged in a bitter struggle for survival; providing grains for his big nest hustling with wife, five children and still surviving parents. Apart from his community’s voguish work in leather, he labored in the fields for the sake of unhealthily big bellies of his children. Unceasing hard work had taken its toll. He seemed too elderly for his forty and five years on earth. Long greying beard made his appearance like a sage too much bothered about worldly matters; his unselfish heart ever pulling him up to wage a grihastha yudha, a war for the cause of one’s household.

Their house, albeit a bigger one considering his community, too seemed weary and bothersome like the patron. Unevenly laid out unplastered brickwork gave it a too rickety look, as if it would wilt under pressure of the bullying vibrations of the children’s noise hitting against its unsymmetrical walls. Bricks enunciated timeness almost to the muse of an archaeologist’s virtuosity. There were many types of bricks picked up from different sources. Some were purple blue, well baked ones holding their place under the duress of emerging holes in their vicinity where the inferior yellowish-sandy ones gave away to the unseen fits and fury of time; dirt creeping down at the base of the wall, mixing in the primal earth below; completing its purpose in an unlively form and then entombed in a bigger dirt still fulfilling its purpose as the bearer of human civilization.

The bricks came from different sources. Some had been purchased, some asked as alms in broad day light and others appeared almost overnight. Roofing was made of snaggy logs covered with a thick layer of clayey soil. Vituperative thwacks boomed below whenever anyone of the naughty ones succeeded in completing a staircase-less climb. Still, there was some solidity about the whole look of it; built as it had been on the foundations of labour’s altar. It had been consecrated by the spirit of sweat and toil of the patriarch. How contrasting it was in comparison to the shaky foundations of two-nation theory, on which a new nation was to be erected; its facade hanging dangerously even imperiling the fate of its neighbour.

Front portion of the house consisted of a narrow, rectangular room partitioned into two with the help of a mud-brick thin wall which rose up to about two feet below the uneven roofing, which had its own world of sparrow nestlings. Shaggy roof-sticks laid tangentially across the logs left it cavernous enough for the spirited birds. Sinews hang down and swayed as the house’s vault decoration. Sparrows chirped in a playful choir. Below, the mud plastered floor had a high proportion of bird drops and sinews. In one portion of the room, into which the main weathered down wooden door opened felicitously, Nathhu and his wife slept, as if to protect the family from all dangers. Four of the children occupied the second portion to the right of their parents’ chamber. The lame boy and his grandparents had the remotest corner of the house. These were two small shelters at the back of the house, separated from the crowded front part by a little courtyard. This open space in between had delipitated side walls struggling to reach at least up to half height of the front room, while at the back they meekly vanished into the dingy structure just a couple of feet higher then them. Of the backside dungeonic shelters, the one to the right seemed remotest as it was still lower than the other. Its roof had fallen, so it was brimming with those unfortunate things which didn’t need a cover at night. Roofing of the other, which covered three sleeping bodies at night, had even more glaringly uneven wood.

Two trees, a mulberry and a blackberry, completed the courtyard’s part in the coupled symmetry of the house. Their luxurious and rich vegetative gown seemed to undo the poverty enforced feline-forlornness of the house. Under the glitter of a fresh dawn these nature’s tassels shone like a shy bride in her sheeny apparel, hennaed hands, and the maternal eyes going ecstatic over the pious nupitals. Prized-possession of the house was in the bread earner’s roomlet. It was a broad framed, rusted bicycle with a huge carrier at the rear and a big basket at the front. It had been specially equipped to suit the diversity of the man’s tasks which he took to keep his family alive.

In the same room, a stone slab had been tucked into the wall in a corner to serve as a shelf. On it was put the object of his pride. In fact it was the only special thing which broke the monotony of the generality surrounding him in its few shades of caste, occupation and foolish fables. A pretty catty thing was this Magic Lantern. It was a rusty, squarish tin-box structure of an optical apparatus, throwing magnified images of pictures on the back screen. Two eye-like cylindrical tubes protruded from the front panel, and when their iron-sheet cappings were removed, dull faded lenses peeped into the enlarged vision inside. Dim light coming across the back sockets made of a transparent plastic sheet met the magnified eye sight groping forward through the darkness enclosed inside the box. Inside niches along the back sockets had two narrow openings (slit-holes) into which pictures could be inserted. Once into the play the darkness inside came alive with static pictures of Raj Kapoor, Ashok Kumar and their fellow stars and actresses who to the villagers seemed mythologically vague, unknown and surprising like the scenes from Mahabharata and Ramayana which formed a major proportion of Nathhu Ram’s dog-eared pad of pictures. That was a time when not a single cinema hall existed in the whole area which now forms the present state of Haryana. There were just a few circus-like wandering groups who occasionally opened the unbelieving countryside eye to the motion picture. So at least to the children this tiny spectacle based on a simple technology was almost worthy of worship in its playful grandiosity.

In a sleepy town or a city the enterprise might’ve accrued some coins where children had some pocket money, but here in this countryside sustaining itself on a barter system among different communities, using minimum of currency, it was destined to be a fun game. And it remained so. If the poor man insisted for some coins, the bullying look of the farmer might have rebuked: “Why’re you so crazy and cunning? Asking money for just a peep into this rattle hole! Come on, come with me I will give you something from my barn.”

Children of the village called it “Baraha Man ki Dhoban” literally meaning “a fat washer woman weighing twelve mounds.” He tried to remunerate its cost by visiting some local fairs held annually. After all it was a similar place where in a fit of curious and sweet absentmindedness he’d bought it. Thus, when at the fairs he rarely missed a chance to ask the peeper if he was impressed enough to buy it. For rest of the time village children had a free peep into it, depending upon who was at what terms with the poor man’s children. In return they accosted him as ‘uncle’ rather than by his plain name, surnaming it with the name of his community without batting an eyelid. Also, the object was a rare permissible path through which the higher caste children mixed with Nathhu’s lower ones. As they peeked into the casteless box they had to gag their customary pun and disdain for the poor man’s unclean children.

The lame boy, however, as it’s to be expected, was usually left behind in this scampering and hustle-bustle among the playing children. His grandmother had sewn for him a farcical knee-length robe. For the major part of his childhood he was seen in it, without any other piece of clothing on his body. The children found him unfit for the fructification of their fleecing plans. He involved himself as a spectator in this cajoling game, as they were bribing his brothers and sisters with a ‘play and chit-chat with higher caste boys’ to gain access to the peeping hole. With supreme humility he opened the lids for them as his part of the game. Also, on certain occasions, when elders of the family weren’t expected back very soon from the fields, they thronged this lower caste courtyard to taste translucent berries on either of the trees. Here too the children of the mochi went up to any height to bring the sweetest taste of their hospitality for the appeasement of their superior playmates. Hence, even the remotest piece of berry was within the invaders’ clasp. The lame boy couldn’t match his fellow siblings’ non fearing dexterity in tree climbing. Once he’d a hard fall while attempting to play an equal part in the game and they laughed hilariously. From that day onwards he just stood beneath the trees and jostled among the crowd to get the fallen fruit. He just gobbled his own share as soon as his hands fell upon the fruit up for a grab, without caring to forward it to the taboo breaking higher caste children, as was done by his brother or sister stonily collecting the fruits for other’s tongue. The casteless competitor in him made him a hate figure among the village children. He on his part became too gutsy for the children of his caste as he limped through those grabbing scrambles. He hated all the playmates of his fellow siblings. They in return directed all their casteist sleaze on him, as well as the taunting slur offensively aimed at his lameness.

Thus the seed of marginalisation from a normal childhood was born: the fact that he was not like others made him jittery most often. The cunning brats seemed to ogle tauntingly only at the deformed portion of his. He too in return picked out one aspect of their childish surface that they scoffed at him in all their meanness. Shorn off a mild generality of childhood thoughts and emotions, he often found himself giving an attentive ear to this off-stream, particular, clattering wail inside him. Multi-hued rainbow of childhood colourings in such cases veers off to a hard, rigid colour where the wavering fickleness of little heart and little mind can’t abandon itself to free airs. A hard, mature, rationalized and one-sided aspect of a harsh reality glares in its bewildering array, more fatal for childhood than any other disease. For, the childhood if not enjoyed in a bulging gusto in its flickering multifaceted ways and aspects, pulls a child apart and make him look from some distance, from a specified angle, at certain points and circumstances. An impenitent conscience vibrates with an obdurate frequency inside the marginalised compartment of this heart. Unfortunately, these disharmonic wavelets emanating from a part of heart are too overbearing and it’s only a matter of time before they churn out an inhuman concoction as they go on maturing in a rigid and marginalised chamber in a world more and more single faceted, and glaringly unfavourable.

Thus there remained a nagging constancy despite his growing up: constancy of marginalisation, of lameness and of the habit of adamantly looking at only one side or aspect of reality. That narrow margin between his folded hands for a surya namashkar, on the first day when Bhagte introduced the mound to him, symbolised this very rigidness, which had become his telescope to peep out at one fixed object ; a fit of worldly ordinariness, yet so mean especially for an anchorite.

His grandmother’s myth laced, ancient tales were the only blossoming childish points in his otherwise uneasily-whimpering childhood. She told him these stories in the dark of their roomlet. Stories about triumphant princes, beautiful nymph like princesses shedding tears, sorcerer’s witch-hunt, wisecracking dwarfs, ragamuffins frittering away fates by winning or losing a dice, terrifying and fierce demons, mythology defining tapasya of rishis and munis in Himalayas and devil ridden forests. He listened to these exciting tales with exciting horror and pathos of childish pain and pleasure. His favourites were those which had protagonists like blind, deaf, mute, lame, hunchbacked dwarfs and the like. He would go with an iridescent beserking joy as he heard in raptly attendant intonation the impossible tasks performed by these favourite characters. The story about a lame wood cutter who won an effusively beautiful princess in a swayamvara---an open competition to choose a groom---through his wit was the boy’s favourite one. It had been told and retold umpteen times by the hollow cheeks of his granny with the gnats and other insects singing a choir in the background from their cosy holes in unplastered bricks, broken sometimes by a sleepy scrawl from the old man lying in rag-tag charpoy near their pallet, “Oh my...it’s midnight! Why don’t you people stop and sleep?”

There used to be an annual fair in a neighbouring village, in ‘penance and pilgrimage’ type commemoration of a local female deity. On this day, the deity was worshipped and the surrounding area bore a festival look. A ramshackle, sheeny market cropped up for a day to provide some chutney to the visitor’s devotional demeanour: a market of small human interests, ranging from petty amateur vendors to the professionals from sleepy townships of far. Balloons, toys, whistles, swings and cheap sweetmeats for the children; buying and bartering of cattle among the farmers; bangles, pink ribbons, looking glasses, brass jewellery, trinkets and combs for the girls and women; and to cap it all the wrestling competition in the evening were the festivities which made this day so long with its snaily pace and uncountable happenings. Deeply ingrained social prejudices seemed to entomb themselves on this day. The easy environment just smelt of common natural instincts.

The lame boy wasn’t, and couldn’t have been, a regular visitor to this annual fracas. The place was about seven or eight kilometres from his village. The children went on foot, some took lift on bicycles on the dusty road, others went in tongas and carts of near and dear ones and those still left out clinged to the backbars of some stranger’s cart going ricketily in the same direction. So, the fair had more distance as well as charm in the big round eyes of the curious child. He had to grab an opportunity to visit the fair for the first time when he was eleven or twelve years old.

During the just bygone harvesting season, his family had worked tirelessly in the fields of a peasant and this had brought them somewhat closer to the farmer who deemed it bearably fit to give some place in his cart to the poor man’s children ready to go to the fair in best of their clothes. At the merest of a consenting nod from the farmer lurching on the shaft they flocked neatly and cleanly into a corner, huddled together with their much obliged, happy eyes, while the farmer’s kids looked at them proudfully. He wasn’t visible earlier in the pack, but now stood there on the earth wearing his worn out kurta and knee-length faded shorts tied with a string around his belly. His usual outfit indicating that this year too he hadn’t been made ready for a visit to the fair by his parents fearing he’d be lost there. In the past, on each occasion, his grandmother embracingly soothed him down, saying he won’t be able to catch up with the straying children and will be lost like that prince in a tale and then the monster would pick him up. But now he was grown enough not to show white feathers at the merest mention of those few-fawing figures from the other end of folklore. To top it, his granny or any other elder wasn’t present at the scene as the cart started to stagger onwards. Curious glare of the unseen fair spiraled around him.

With the help of his sheesham stick he gave himself a springing jerk and in the next moment he was on the back shaft, his face backwards and legs dangling freely. The foe had dared to perch upon their cart. After all he’d, at so many times, taken potshots against them. The farmer’s children thus gave him scowling looks. The youngest of them with a sudden spurt in his temper tried with all his might to push the opponent off the cart head-long into the dirt. Like an enraged dog which writhes in silent angst for its helplessness of not biting or barking back, the encroacher thought it fit to concentrate all his power in maintaining his precarious perch on the wood. He knew that any speck of scuffle from his side will nullify his chances of reaching the fair. The farmer’s other children meanwhile vent out their hysteria in chewing gestures. Rest of Nathhu Ram’s brood watched haplessly. The commotion drew the farmer’s attention. He looked back and found his little one kicking and floundering against the stony figurine.

“What is the matter, Moola?” he sounded hoarse and groggy.

“He often fights with us and now wants to sit in our cart!” his brood chorused, angrily pointing their accusing fingers at the lame boy.         

This consenting sonority seemed to enforce the tiring little brat and his next tirade sent his foe into dirt with a loud thud. As was expected, the poker-faced farmer with his simple and shallow brain, burst out with a clattering laughter. The lame boy gave a howling cry like a pig when put on a butcher’s block. Rhyme as well as reason very rarely took deep dives into those parishioner hearts of those easy, hard times. Watching him weep like this he very quickly brought the odds in the victim’s favour as his unsparing bull-whip fell on the offender’s back. His naughty brat cried even more soulfully and took a sobbing shelter in his elder sister’s lap. With the same whip of justice he signaled the lame boy to reoccupy his former place. There wasn’t the slightest lurking of any emotion on the farmer’s face. After all, if those sturdy workers started emoting over such inconsequential little distractions, then who would do the blood squelching hard work for them; without losing any time in the shallow depths of their brains, these fellows very quickly roughed down the offensive edges with a totally uncalculating brain. The unflinching motto of their lives, ‘Work with toiling blood for even a mouthful of food, a crumb, a morsel,’ required only this sort of character.

Whiningly the lame boy took his former place. Nobody spoke to him during the journey. But he didn’t care about it. A child going to the fair, and especially the first timer, is lost in a riotous symphony of dreamy imaginations. Drawing inspiration from an exciting introspection over the world of scuffing clamour in his granny’s tales, the boy let loose his foreseeing imagination to match his wildest of fancies about the fair. Vague signs of the fair’s existence came down to welcome him as the cart neared the teeming festivity. Flickering colours at a distance tugged at his heartstrings. Sounds of whistles, balloon horns and bestirred men, women and children scampered towards him in their wildly gyrating beats. His heartbeats responded resoundingly. Clairvoyance in its childish finesse took hold of his temple nerves. At the forefront of mysterious hap and happenings his face was riven with a reddish glow. Certainly he’d looked like a fascinated angel.

     A big vertical swing with its wooden sitting-crates full of excited humans was the most discernable object from the distance up to which they had carted up. Cramped in those wooden trolleys or rather boxes people cackled a mixed wave of fear, excitement or something between the two as the large circular wheel took them upside down during its little flight of fancy. Other children in the cart gloriously chirped about their plans for the day as they came to the fore of familiar spectacle. His wonderment was like when one comes across the huge Himalayas for the first time in life. As the cart wended its way into the festive congregation, it seemed to him a strong gust of wind which could blow him away. Apparitional figures from the tales of his old granny seemed to authenticate her warnings. He feared he’d be lost once the cart stopped and the children took to their heels to catch up with the riveting charm of the fair.

Distraughtly bewildered boy didn’t know when and how someone else happened to share the shaft with him. His squirting thoughts suddenly frittered away fearfully as if a demon had appeared suddenly to kidnap him and hang him upside down over a boiling oil tub, like so many other infirm boys in his demonic cubicles. That was how his foes accursed him during quarrels at the village, yelling at him langda, his nickname derived from his lameness.

He found an old sadhu morosely sitting by him. His rusted trident seemed to be suffocated by a saffron coloured ribbon tied below its triple-pointed end. His kamandla was bulging with prasad, holy oblations mostly sweetmeats. A shaggily stitched croceous bag supported itself upon the shaft, its cord hanging loose from his shoulder. A small mossy leather pouch was tied around his bare belly. Its moth-eaten straps tied to the holy thread passing over his left shoulder and crossing his belly like a cross-belt of spiritualism to fall around his right side near the waist-knots of his old ochre coloured loin cloth. A new reddish-coloured angavastram, a shoulder cloth presented on auspicious occasions, was shinning in gleaming forenoon rays. Its distinct sheen clearly discernable against the background of his otherwise faded aura. The lower end of his crutch followed the cart skiddingly on the earth, as he lazily held the staff by its head crosspiece heavily bandaged with a thick covering of rags. He seemed overburdened than the cart itself, which had meekly adapted to  his jerky maundering as he  gave a big, cumbersome jerk with his heavy fall on its back bar.

He seemed mawkish, tired and worn out under the hotly approaching noon, but was worldly prudent enough to perch upon this conveyance. His weight, however, imbalanced the cart’s poise. The farmer realised this by the yoke’s position as well as the lost rhythm in the bullocks’ steppings. Now, things could aggravate to any extent if someone dared to off-tilt a farmer’s pride in this way. It was taken to be almost blasphemous against the religion of agriculture.

“Who’s this stupid mother-fucker?” he belched loudly. The farmer completed even before he could turn his face backwards to see who it was.

The children giggled. Before he could say anything further, his eyes met the unworldly musing face of the sadhu which promptly checked his bull-whipping tongue habituated to such sudden abusive spurts due to those endless hours spent behind the ploughing oxen, sweating and endlessly shouting at them to go on and on.

“Calm down, calm down son,” the old mendicant pacified, without even caring to turn his head.

Much to the surprise of the lame boy, the belligerent looking farmer instantly fetched a guilty smile around thick lips beneath his well managed whiskers.

“Oh, I’m really sorry maharaj! I couldn’t see it were you,” he said politely with such familiarity that it created doubts in the boy’s mind about their acquaintance.

The old friar on his part just raised a careless hand above his head gesturing all was well and he’d forgiven the farmer. A staid grimace spread over the old religioner’s face as if out of repulse for the staggering stagery of this world. As if to forget this world of vanities he rummaged his hand in the bag and drew out his small chilam, a smoking pipe. Struggling to manage his belongings he brought out ganja from his leather pouch, or was it some nefarious mixture of opium, marijuana, poppy seeds and belladonna we’re not sure, and filled up his chilam. A few Cush at the noxiously pungent smoke and the world lost all its malevolency. The trace of malism which had impiously fluttered over his face was now lost in the smoky booze and serenity descended upon his wrinkled face. Alas, it was so malleable! He choked in a fit of cough and water trickled down his reddening eyes.

The boy looked at the strings of strangely perforated beads coiled around the old man’s neck and there onwards his gaze followed all his ritualistic provisions, finally coming to a halt at the sadhu’s crutch. His own smooth dark-brown mulberry stick seemed a crutch-child under the shadow of big and broad support of the sadhu, which like its master seemed to be outworldly, and rustically off coloured amidst the multicoloured festive environment. In a sense, those few colours of abandonment, of asceticism, of the ecstasy of an unbounded soul looked divine but still dull and grave in that market of multi-rainbowed interests.

Yes! If mendicancy finds even the ordinary world as misfitting in its religiously roving shoes, then this full fledged fair of commoners was definitely bulging with pinching vanities and blasphemous noises. The old sadhu thus seemed an exotic migrant species grafted to the place. The boy too was a considered ‘unfit’ for such fairings. Starting with their supporting parallelism, the woods, he bent down on the hindbar and looked for the congenital counterpart of his infirmity. It wasn’t too far. The old man’s weak limb was swinging to the cart’s bumpy jerks in synchronism with his own.

Divided in three parts the reality was perhaps like this: the front part, forcing a way out of the mob’s gaiety with the oxen sweating and the farmer yelling while looking around for a place for stoppage; the middle part of the cart laden with childhood vagaries and imagination lost in the frenetic, festive chaos scattered around; and the rear part struggling to avoid being lost in this spiteful and buzzing world. Of the last, the old man had almost succeeded with the help of his mendicancy and religious credo. At least he seemed to survive bravely as well as respectfully. The lame boy on the other hand sensed his uncertain future, though in the form of a vaguest of tinge inside his heart which surfaced on his boyish conscience in the form of a fear for getting lost amidst this ambiguous worldly fair.

“Come to enjoy the fair, young man,” the old man patted his shoulder.

He was by now in fairly free spirits, where this world as well as the invisible world of spiritualism was engaged in a wrestling game in the hallucinated palestra.

“Yes maharaj, I’ve come for the first time,” the boy spoke inanely.

He didn’t see any sarcasm in the old man’s free gesture. Presence of a crutch with the sadhu whisked away all possibility of the old man turning out to be a natural, bantering foe.

“For the first time! Why? You’re quite grown up. Or you were born big?” the old man jested, exhaling a cloud of consumed smoke.

“No, it wasn’t that. But I was born with a lame leg,” he said it with a sullen ease without feeling any insult because of the similarity with the old man.

Inhaling deeply, as if he wanted to puff down extra smoke for the boy’s sake, the old man sighed, “And your family found it improper to send you to such a crowded place...hope they think well of you. Caring that you’d be lost... ann... not like maaine. Go... t ooff thaa liabiliti inn a fair aat Haridwaar. Naaow they mst ave even phogoten that a ch... childe oof theirs aas lost att ai fair,” he stabbed the secret as the pal of hallucination gradually took hold of the most of his brain’s chambers, making him feel free to divulge the pathos and angst out of a corner where the faint memory still lighted a feeble reminiscential lamp.

“Is’t sure baba, they left you intentionally. It could’ve been that you were lost yourself,” the boy philosophised unsuspectingly, unaware of the rancid social facts of the grown-ups.

“Yu don know aal thiss... sttil ttoo yung for that. Asz a lamey little toyy theey may playey weeth yuu...bBut syou vil ggrow a bBig la...ability onn themnn. Leeve... oOn theer crumBs,” the old man completed his tizzying flip-flap.

The fair’s mountainously concoctious clattering jammed his senses. Ecstatic children in the middle of the cart seemed sibilant and just ready to escape to the four winds, leaving his pusillanimous heart floundering.

“... Ae lame fitt four nothing. Yuur brrotherrz w’eel... kkik you,” he struggled with his foretelling.

The boy turned his head and saw the excited pack. His brothers and sisters seemed cohorts of his sworn foes.

The old sadhu in delectable spirits raised his hand and blessed a nearby vendor, “Alakh Niranjan!”

Vendor’s much obliged soul ran after the cart with a handful of sweets and put it on the heap inside the sadhu’s kamandla.

Nibbling a crumb, he offered a yellow piece to the boy, “Eet son eet ...by tha grase of godd theree ez plenti off...ffor peepul laike yuu an...mee,” he patted the boy’s afflicted leg.

Involuntarily the boy took the piece and put it in his mouth; its chunky taste of colouring and sweetness pulpified inside his mouth. He was unaware of the looming permanence of this taste on his soul: the taste of an infirm religioner surviving on the morsels of mendicancy. As he gulped down the mollified semi-fluid it seemed a pleasing iridescence holding him up amidst all that sniding charivari fairing around. Mightiest of impressions, in fact the life-long imprints chancily flash suddenly, almost as an impalpable shove, over a platitudinously dozing subconscious surface. The unfit, old and lame mendicant misfitted in a multicoloured brawl, where nobody seemed to get anything, or reach anywhere, drawing a respecting and decent look as well as sweetmeats! The old, infirm, religioner walking on a path without being lost in a world beeming with spoofing spooks. Such scuddling and ambiguously tinkling impressions unassumedly survive to validify their practicality over the future’s circumstantial emergence.

The old man put his fingers into his pouch and fetched out a two anna coin. “Haave thiss mye deer... thaat pokit of yuurs mus be ampty,” he swayed his index finger at the boy’s empty pocket.

Tentatively the boy took the coin, not daring to refuse. And before he could think or feel anything the old man alighted from his side as the cart slowed down almost to a halt. Even in those boozy spirits he nullified any chance of a fall by outmanoeuvring the physical law of inertia with the balance of his crutch. The place where he got down was ringing with a lustrous devotional music. Mandolin, harmonium, tabla and sarangi were pouring out their notes in embracing swirls. Holding the coin in his hand he saw the old religioner valiantly mixing into the musical mosaic. As the cart took him away his eyes fell upon the players of those instruments sitting on a wellcurb. A young sadhu in flowing dark beard was singing in devotional tones. Around the wellcurb, on the ground, a circle of reverential humanity was swaying its head, completely forgetful of the vapid jingoism bumming around.

Happily he looked at the rusty bronze coin, as the cart fastidiously jerked forth searching for an open space. Faded sheen of the coin reminded him of the old sadhu and he stared into the clanging and booming enthusiasm. But the ascetic had swarmed into the mobbed festivity. He vanished like the proverbial ascetic mentioned in Mundaka Upanishad:

             Knowledge of peace and tranquility on their palms,

             To the divinity’s delight they survive on alms,

             They take their dispassionate bodies and souls pure

             Through the bright, sunny door

             To mix with the ultimate and immortal lure;

             With His indestructible soul,

             And imperishable spirit

             Unburdened with the time’s toll. 

And that lame Shaivite ascetic, living on alms and grace of Lord Shiva, swam across the colourful hazard, in the search, in the realisation of that Omnipresent whose followers pass the test of mendicancy with an uninhibited tamanna, soul’s full hearted passion or compassion, be that in the form of intoxication, or smoking.

The boy’s impressionable self in the womb of his conscience found it friendly related to that old ascetic. He liked his brave exaltedness; decent and respectful survival in a world stricken with archetype lecherousness swirling in a disputatious air.

“I’ll look exactly like him when I grow up,” his lips parted for a whisper.

After crossing the fair’s main mass, the farmer stopped under a tree some paces away from the dusty road. Fastening the oxen to the tree and tying fodder sacks around their muzzles, he let loose the children into the fair but not before heaviest of instructions; warning them not to get lost, remain in a group and reach the cart in afternoon well before the wrestling competition because at that time the crowd will almost double.

With jangling hitches in his strides, the boy tried to keep with the pack. But carried on wild winds they quickly surged away. He caught up with them, while they stopped for some naughty bargaining or eating something, but bored with that temporary halt they soon drifted away. After all, whole of the fair waited pleasantly to be marauded. Finally, he gave up chasing them.

“Sadhu maharaj didn’t get lost in a whole world. I can certainly reach the cart after wandering as much as I like,” he braved himself up, as the strange, puerile hoot of the fair wavered his heart.

He was thus left with a two anna coin grasped firmly in his palm amidst that friskingly dispersed fair. His stick seemed supporting him on this maiden venture. Attention-hungry vendors let out clarion calls from their make-shift outlets as if they could clearly see the coin in the safety of his fist. Not bothered he moved further, much to the rogue’s chagrin. The fairings’ spire imputatively looped about for almost two kilometres. There was sorcerer’s witch-hunt in all its jittery drowsing and cold disdain. A chump and a hunch were mocking and gimmicking at the putrefying and stale social seriousness through their comical profligacy, while a jimp jill collected coins beating a dholak hanging down her neck. With a clattering heart he raised his hand to open his fist holding the treasure, but drew it back. Unmindful she slantingly smiled and moved ahead. Farmers wonderfully controlling their sodding tempers went on with cattle business masking a fake smile over their agitated faces. A muezzin and a sadhu were growlingly smattering a debate for their religious upmanship. He clapped from the sadhu’s side believing himself to be a Hindu. In a fight, a narcissistic cock smothered down its opponent, which dejectedly limped away with its torn and tattered feathering. His heart poured out in its embracing swirls for the poor cock with broken leg. For a moment he thought of redeeming the loss of its sulking master, but the coin had tasted the protective sweat of his palm and thus won’t go away. A parrot was drawing tarot cards. Its mentor was sitting with a prophesying look. But the boy seemed dubiously sure about something, so the conniving glint in the parrot mentor’s eye met no consent. A beggar, a very old woman, squiggled around him turning him pale whether she was that wrinkled witch of grandma tales who ate children’s soft hearts. Distraughtly he straggled away and perspiring profusely beat her in the run.

As the afternoon sun reminded him of the farmer’s deadline, he opened his palm and cast the look of a grave camaraderie. ‘Why not take it back to the village?’ an inner voice advised. ‘No! Someone or the other is bound to snatch it away. Worse, charge of stealing could be forced upon,’ countered another one. For sure, he wanted to spend it now to get a symbol of the fair which he could boast to his foes.

He stopped by a rickety divan. Bleary bottles contained coloured fluids. The man behind mechanically drew a dank smile. “A glassful of lusciously sweet sarbet for one anna”, he proffered.

“Is it really sweet?” the boy questioned, imitating the elders respecting the value of their money.

“Yes! Or do you expect me to sell mud water here. Have a glass and you’ll know it yourself,” sarbet hawker lost the sweetness of his tongue.

The boy gloomily peeped into the colours and seemed to taste the liquid inside. This done, he trudged on wiping his mouth on his knuckles.

“A lame bastard and got the pretensions of three legged one!” the hawker nursed his irritation after failing to bait the boy.

The boy halted by a cart adorned with burfis made of wheat flour, coconut strips and sugar.

Showing the coin to the man behind, he asked seriously, “How much can I’ve for this?”

“Enough for the satisfaction of your little belly,” morosely opulent figure came to life for having got a chance to cheat the boy, because the coin was worth at least a kilo of sweets.

“But how much?” coin’s proud possessor emphasised.

“Told you na...enough till your last burp!” the man exclaimed.

“No, tell me how many pieces can I have,” the boy said steadily.

“Numbers! Oh Ramji, why the numbers. You are not taking these for learning the count. All you’ve to do is to chew and gulp down for the sake of your tongue, young man,” the burfiwala somehow reined in an impatient fit of angst.

“I need to save ten for my grandma,” the boy scooped almost a war against salesmanship.

“One-and-half legged hazard, you want your grandma sweetened by these...” he fumed.

“No, she is already sweet,” the boy interrupted uncannily.

“Run out of here, or I’ll fuck your sweetened grandma!” the hawker belched impiously.

Tormented by the thoughts of a suitable way to spend the coin, he had unsuccessful flings at many things like trinkets, beetle nuts and even beedies as the chance was ripe with a golden opportunity to have a go at the much tabooed smoking. Beautiful toy world spread out on the chadors over the earth seemed too cheap and unworthy at the cost of precious coin. Even the first object of his fancy at the fair, the big swing, seemed a foolish vagary as he doubled his fist around his coin.

Then he stopped exactly at the same spot where the coin’s previous owner had alighted from the cart. He seemed to be aware of this fact. A narrow pathway branched off into a less crowded direction. Fed up with the imposing mass, he turned into it, curious to know how far the hawkers were lined along that dirt pathlet. This path led to the small temple of the local deity in whose commemoration the annual fair used to be held. It bore less festive look. Without any conscious discernment on the part of the lame boy, texture and type of the commodities sold along this path changed from the mainstream multicoloured festivities to the religious ones. The path had a definite directedness of soft penance and a little pilgrimage in stark comparison to the apathetic pervertiveness of the bleary festivity wildly scattered around. Beautiful toys of the latter here changed to the subtle spiritual sobriety of numerous idols of Gods and Goddesses. Chutney and sweets reverentially gave way to God’s prasad. Instead of trinketish fracas, here one came across weird unearthly world of amulets, rosaries, beads and stones to rinse the malevolent dirt off the wearer. Sinuous double-tongued bargaining was proscribed and in its place a devotional fervour veneered the worldly bargaining of holy objects, that is, make mild profit in a most polite voice and gestures, otherwise the Gods would go irate.

     “Have this amulet and your leg would be cured,” a very poor religious friar from caves scowled pleadingly.

The boy stopped for him and searched for any intended pun. But there was nothing quizzical about the pathetic religioner, who seemed very near to a beggar.

Happy for not smelling a rat, the boy exclaimed, “Really! Will it cure my leg?”

“Yes son, it’s made for divine succour. Inside is the holy vibhuti and a great mantra chanted upon it. And of course the metal is highly auspicious,” he spoke in exigency.

For a moment, the boy felt drawn to the ironical spiral of the miracle spooled around the object. But the robust enormity of the task to be performed by the tiny amulet blurred his potentially believing mind.

Once again he shrank back.

“No! It can’t,” he said somewhat sternly.

“Then rot with your three-quarter-leg,” the religioner-cum-hawker mildly frisked. His pungent retort laced with genteel piety.

On moving further, he saw the sanctum-sanctorum of the female deity. It was a three-feet-high circular structure curbing around a big peepal tree. Cracks had appeared in the plastered brickwork, as the holy trunk had forced its growth into the curbing around it. Earthen oil lamps were burning inside the small alcoves around the circular pedestal. Incense, turmeric, rice, milk, vermilion and sugar-coated balls of puffed rice had heaped over the deity’s abode. Devotees were praying for good fortunes putting their brows on the curbing.

He saw the coin’s giver sitting nearby on the ground surrounded by many of his ilk. Keeping a serene face he was squatted with religious expedience. His new shoulder-cloth was spread on the ground and an amalgam of offerings and oblations had risen up in a heap on it. The crutch was lying useless at a distance. Unconcernedly he raised his hand over the bent head seeking his blessings.

In commune with the devotional festivity of this part of the fair, the boy limped forward. Stooping with his stick he touched the feet of his benefactor with his left hand. The old man who’d looked pathetically worn out in the forenoon, now seemed to have got much needed rest at this little votive shrine after a tiresome, straggling journey. The smoke seemed to have lost its hangover after propitiating the holy spirits inside his brain chambers.

He recognised the boy. “How’s the fair, son?” he asked in an old, wrinkled, blithe tone, a loud fart escaping the loin cloth as he shifted his haunch.

“It’s been a good day maharaj,” the boy started with inhibition, “but I’ve not yet come to decide how to spend the coin you gave me,” he spoke a wee bit fastly, almost muttered looking at the bright yellow shine over the western horizon.

“There’re so many things in the market. Money can get you anything from the worst to the best,” the old man vauntingly spoke as a preacher.

“Worst and...best...ummn...” the boy tried to fathom the depth of the sadhu’s sermon

“Everything is bad if you don’t look at it full heartedly, child. Heart’s true tamanna can turn every thought and act into good,” the sage gave an ambiguous synopsis of his lifelong sadhuhood without penetrating the boy’s head.

“Can I get tamanna for this?” the boy innocently held the coin.

The religioner looked at the coin. “Why not? Spend it in the service of God and it’ll turn to a good thing,” he gave a nice, little and practical version of his enlightenment.

A head touched the sadhu’s infirm toe. Straightening up, the man with folded hands pleaded for accursed death to his evil days. Very piously the old man bade him blessings. In the boy’s eyes the exalted halo around the sadhu brightened up even more. He arrived at a hazy conclusion that under the guiding light of asceticism even a lame person could live without bothering prejudices and puns of casteism as well as infirmity.

A little flash of lightning struck across his puzzled mind, making him sure of the way to spend his coin; on a nice thing with a full hearted tamanna. While coming towards the shrine he had passed by a man with needles and dark green pigment---a tattoo engraver to be precise. He strutted back to him.

Hastily he thrust forward his hand. “Can you sketch a permanent picture of Bhagwan Shiva Shankar here,” he gasped rolling up his soiled right sleeve before the tattoo marker.

The man looked at his slender but hardening arm. “But it’ll hurt and as long as I draw it...” he doubted the lame boy’s seriousness.

Firming up his arm the boy convinced him, “I don’t care as long as it’s a nice act for the God.”

The tattoo marker started to draw his art’s indelible mark on the boy’s soft skin. His needle dipped in thick fluid punctured numerous little wounds. The boy clenched his teeth to prevent even the slightest whimper escape his mouth. In a way it was a religious artwork on his soul’s canvas. Indian ink, soot, gunpowder and charcoal inside the dye ordained him into religionhood. This little tattooy cauterisation gave him sweet satisfaction, as he felt a bit redeemed as well as empowered against those touting taunts about his caste and lameness. That religious acquisition initiated him into his boyish faith.

God’s big imprint curved down on both sides of his arm. Lord Shiva with a small snake coiled around His hair tucked in a knot at the top of head; big cobra, mythological sheshnag, around His neck with its taut hood, lapping tongue guarding the God’s face; a moon crescent over His head, from where the holy Ganga dripped down; a hand raised in blessing by the God of destruction in Hindu mythology.

Religionhood penetrated skindeep as the pigment closeted itself in the dermis of his soul’s physical covering. He felt the excitement of commanding reverence and respect fancying himself to be a grown-up sadhu. His neglected, clean substratum now had a defining Godly figure on it. And it was to be seen whether his boyish convictions about one sided aspect of reality would chime in consonance with this new indelible impression making him a compassionate devotee and servant of God or there would be a inconsonance of sorts leaving him merely a disabled sadhu, so passionate about his religious practice, swinging and staggering in the mire of passion and dispassion.

When he showed his pride possession to the children, back in the cart, they had a hearty laugh at him. “A lame’s God,” they jested, while showcasing their own colourful things from the childish mainstream.

In a way he’d taken a bold step in branching off the main, festive mass.  In a tiny hole of his heart’s palette a distinctly coloured idea had been dropped. And now earnestly he desired it to spread over his whole tablet.

At the village chaupal where some children sat under the neem tree to cram alphabets and numerals, he could be found sitting there on certain days followed by month-long lulls, without unnerving the teacher, because his name wasn’t in the torn-out register. From now onwards he banished even those rare appearances. Loss wasn’t grave. Even if he’d continued with it for years he might’ve, at the most, got his thumb and fingers move haphazardly to scrawl his name. He could do the same with the thumb-print on a paper much to the time’s satisfaction for not getting struck at a ‘penned down’ halt. As for the name, Shakespeare could’ve well said, “What’s there in a name?” They called him langda, the lame one. We for our decency’s sake prefer ‘the boy’ or even ‘a lame boy’ is permitted.

Thus began the second phase of his boyhood. He identified himself with his religious toy acquisitioned at the fair. It soothed him as an oasis after that struggle across the smouldering sand wherein the cacti giggled with farce. Respected aura of the old lame sadhu swirled around his head. As his ideal, he fancied the old man smothering down the prickled cacti, the children with their taunting puns, and the prejudices accruing from his caste and congenital deformity in his leg. Fancyingly he envisioned that one day all his foes will roll at his feet asking for blessings and boon. And the excitement would swelter down a racing cheer to have a look at his futuristic sagely appearance.

He began to insist upon stories concerning religious myths, legends and folklore with their protagonists as sages, stoics, ascetics like Parshurama, Visvamitra, Valmiki, Bhrigu etc., who symbolised all powerful and miraculous Godliness almost to the extent of superstitious awe. His unquenchable appetite for the subject really tested the story box of the old woman and one day she hollowly jested:

“Do you want to become someone like them?”

For answer the boy just smiled with a proud look at the body art.

When his insistence crossed the power of her story telling, the old woman promised to take him to a keertan, a preaching-cum-devotional songs congregation, at a nearby village, wherein the God’s people tried to arouse the Bhakti Rasa, devotional nectar, inside the commoners’ hearts in this dark age of Hindu mythology, the kaliyuga.

The age mired in three fourths of evil, with only a quarter of goodness struggling as God’s lotus. So the groups of religionists tried for the sake of outweighed Godliness, some with true love and compassion for the humanity, some as a mere path of livelihood in these dark times.

The fourth age of Hindu cosmic mythology which started at the zero hour of February 17-18, 3102 B.C., will test God’s creation on earth for about 4,26904 more years from the time of our tale, when God’s incarnation as kalki on a white horse will give a cosmic deluge to the evil with His white sword.

In the same state of Haryana, the epic battle of Mahabharata took place in Kurukshetra at a time when good and bad were on an equal footing, sharing half-half proportions of the humanity. And to tilt the scale in the favour of good, Lord Krishna was born to preach Bhagvat Gita, right in the middle of the battlefield with the forces of good and evil face to face on His both sides. His message was the nectar which evinced itself after the churning of good and bad, in equal proportions, in the same pitcher, for about 8.34 lakh years. For our knowledge, the era was the third one called Dvaparyuga.

The previous one had been the Tretayuga which lasted for 12.96 lakh years. Those were perhaps good times with goodness holding three-quarter weight in social forces, while the evil was raising its head with its one quarter roots in the humanity. Lord’s incarnation, Shri Ram hadn’t that much of difficulty in disposing off the evil during this Ramayana period.

And to top it all, the first era lasting for 17.28 lakh years had been of perfect purity, with its cent percent goodness, when there was no need of any Godly incarnation, because the creation was in its unstigmatised childhood.