Fall of a bird

Fall of a bird

I shudder every time an animal or bird, no fault of their own, die without any farewell.

Terry Tempest Williams described how she found a whistling swan dead by sea shore, “her body contorted like an abandoned lover” her beak in sand, no one around, legs having done the last walk, upside down, like the wine glasses in a rushed bar at the end of a hard day. and how she gave the swan a quiet burial, not before lying next to her and imagining the great bird in flight. It nauseates me that there is no burial for this creature.

A few years back, In my office, from the window, I saw a pigeon dead on the tin roof above the coolant duct. We used to stand by that window to have coffee every day. I saw the hollowing eyes and the caricature decaying each day for a month. alone and quiet she lay, sometimes a breeze disturbing some feathers. No one to remember or know how much she loved who all, and what all. What she nibbled, which part of the glide over the farm contour she relished, what was her favorite fly position in a long dive across the sky.

In a sane world, I would like to believe this is a devastating news. But, the traffic kept going, people came in and out, in cars, for Friday parties, and the winter razed on. I saw her lying there in the parapet (just below the glass window), a game of hide and seek that had the dreaded result foretold. There will be no going anywhere for her.

Someday, in the not so distant future, a new add-on to the flock might want to fly close to human inhabited places and would be stared down by an elder, citing the whitest of them all who flew too close to the sky.

Recognition

 

I want to be known as being kind and loving to my mother till her days end or till my days end.

I want to be known in forests as the squirrel player, brooks sitter, pine hugger, and one who sat with cows grazing, waiting till they came to him for a scratch on their back or on their temples.

I want to be known as one who had all the time on earth to stand and stare at the change of seasons, the city park pigeons quenching thirst at a poodle,  the rains in mountains, the lone old Labrador limping and walking on winter mornings with a woolen wrapped pullover in a silhouette of fog, the first wet pine bushes that turn pink to green in Narkanda.... As one who came each day to see the mushroom grow at Someshwar hills, who played with street dogs at tea estates (Kausani) – arriving a specified time to meet them at clockwork, noticing who has a scratch on their nose and who has found a partner.

As one who, in Delhi’s simmering summer heat, remembered the rush of water rivulets over the banyan tree on the road to Lobanj (Kausani), around which an old wandered “baba” had put on a Shiv temple, tending gardens, handing over prasad and tea to weary truck drivers to Almora…

I am the one to sit with the chai wallah in Kausani or the dhabha owner in August rain lamenting the loss of travelers and water , listening to the vegetable vendor who sent his kid to his brother at Haldwani for studies.

I want to be forgotten to family and society and occasionally turn up as a remembrance in a college reunion at pub, on the third drink half-drawn – “hey, you remember, what’s his name…” – I want my name to be forgotten, just a half-remembered face you had spent some time with.

The dark clouds must be out this cold winter at Ranikhet just below the Inspector Dak Bungalow near Jhula Devi temple. Overlooking the dark forests behind them (which are dark even in hot summer middays), one can never be sure amidst whose observing eyes you might have passed a hundred times. I want to be the one Leopards never thought about, the temple bells never tolled for.

When you take off the slippers at Chaubhatia temple, and walk past the two stone shelter bus stop where goats have siesta midday on the lone bench, leaf half hanging and eyes closed to lush greenery at the Garden of Eden,  I am the one the only-shop Maggi seller looks at says “long time since you came, sir. You now Lali has a new calf.”

 

 

Her departure

Her departure (small fiction)

 

It got to a point where he wanted nothing complicated should happen… even in those TV serials.. the ones you know, set in small towns in places like Vermont or Narkanda or Harsil, mountains and streams flowing from them, a few shops and a bar (or equivalent) and lots of gossips. Strangers attracted to each other in the town. The “background-plot-situation-resolvement” theme of drama life replicating real life.. no, no – he did not want strangers to meet. Or let them meet but let the mountains snow, let streams be not devoid of fishes or changing to ice slabs jostling in winter for a stream of flowing, liquid winter sun in their veins. Let the Bar signs flicker the same way, let the radiators not work for days when there is a winter powerline snap. Something should not change, he muttered, as he lay in the bed. The plot of changes in life no longer cut it for him. She gone like meander of cranes that graced this open land and lake each summer.

 

Must be three days in a row – not being out of the bed – sun crumbling through the white curtains, down disappointed each eve. The smell of the air never lies. It is chilly; from experience (and a bit of intuition), he knows that the Apple trees should be out blossoming, the last bus from Uttarkashi to Gangotri would be gone, only a newspaper fan, its driver Sulaimaan, would be out (due in an hour) picking sims and bartering cigarettes for JCOs posted in remote mountains that his van swings through.

 

If the day would just end  and no one calls or notices his being or passage. Let the glass sills freeze, and birds return disappointed from other side of the glass, having lusted for the sweet nectar of flower by his bed. He does occasionally get up and stumbles to get his coffee. This morning, he wanted to hear some violin (may be “Autumn from the four seasons”), smoke a cigarette (its red wedges burning slowly towards him, a phoenix leaving ashes on its wake), may be sit alone watching the lake glimmering to morning sun. They had this thing and now he has it, but it is never the same, is it, once someone departs? Why do things change, and can’t continue without plots and twists?

He wonders will sheep still gather by winter dusk in the evening in the long banks of Bhagirathi flowing in trickles this winter? He is warm in his place, and he is crying this heart out, but he has not forgotten the herders, their coat stitched-half stitched and worn-out- and dirty from yesterday’s rain fury, alighting a beedi with a wet match, their guttural sound calling sheep to bank, their shouts of greetings to other fellas.

Tomorrow, there will be a small time in the evening when they will celebrate Karthigai Deepam in his beloved Tiruvannamalai (the mountain is the flame, as Ramana said), but today, he is just surviving…

Her Leaf, Her ways of the World

Her Leaf, Her ways of the World

One, complete-in-itself, nature's fabric on another, amidst the lap of Nakuchia taal, amidst maggie packs and chai wallas, amidst mockery of crowd and spider-threaded abandoned wooden boats..amidst water-laden skies..fractalled, mandalrot-setted, nature symmetry-superimposed, perfect in camouflage of Autumn seasons, perfect in colors hued and hissed and spewed and fed and transitioned, perfect in slow amalgamation of red into orange, perfect as Christmas trees are, perfect as all decaying sentient beings are, in their loneliness, in their graves, perfect as a sunshine on rocks in a roaring dark cloudy day in hills, when a ray of sun-burst is hope, perfect in its brevity and fragility and early disintegration, and amidst the despair of quiet passage, perfect in its confidence that more will come, that Earth and sun and her tree mother will laden earth with thousands of her clones, that insects will roll in, that birds will gather as nests, that her own frail body will disintegrate but launch a thousand new entities.. in free give and take that nature perfected, so quiet and graceful in her solitudinal rhythm.

Prayer

Prayer

Oh sweet lord, is there a place then, let me ask you this,

In your sweet little garland of an Earth and in your naughty herd

Is there a place then, as I was asking my lord,

Where my face won’t matter, where I will be taken in faceless, where it is ok to be poor or ugly or luckless or culprit or ill?

Where, sweet Jesus, if I go and touch a hand or an arm, them would turn my face to the sun and we both will glow in thy name?

Is there a place, I now ask you my savouir, one more time then,

where you could come in, not as redemption, not as resurrection, but as a man of word

And be wordlessly accepted as a man of word?

Those fading shadows of a simple life

Those fading shadows of a simple life

There will be those who will always shine and live by the code of a competitive life. It fuels them, and there are many names to it – some call it a disciplined life, some success, and some power that everyone secretly craves for and never admit to want. I am no one to refute that; in fact, I might have pursued that. But as on date, I am no longer mainstream, and it took years to reach here – from oblivion enforced to reflected glory to now free-will oblivion. This was a long call to reach my ears; my only regret is I kept ignoring it through  blinding city lights and pursuit of happiness (that in themselves were never that). My only regret is that I did not heed or respect it, by hoping it will fade away in this neglect. Every time the splendor of this lone voice stood ignored, it kept silent but never left.

The sea secretly craves for its blind ancestral coacervaetes; the blind sea turtle, all just born, feeble legs still not out of calcium egg shells, hears the primordial call of salty waves and smells the planktons in foamy crests and heads alone to the ocean. It has more courage, willing to disappear into abyss and danger of an unknown world – but the courage it shows, the sand marks it pushes in its hurried bid to rush back are evidence. I lacked that courage for long, but the voice kept travelling with me, like shadows by rail tracks, like sun beams through sugarcane fields. At last, I acknowledge this force, and hope to spend time in its shadows. Oblivion, obliteration – many names given. Thank you so much for that! I appreciate this grace and thank all those who came my way in all manners. Their inclusion weaves the fabric of this brief life and I would have had it no way (though no one controls their destiny).

Edward abbey, Helen and Scott Nearing, Thoreau, Dick Pronecke, Wendell Berry, David Coperthwaite, Harlan Hubbard – All I understand from reading them is that the simpler life is more spaced out and relaxed. That a small boat wafting aimless in the drizzle wind, as free as Beavers building dams, as free as the last rain on the winter mountains, is far better than a glorified life in pursuit of many things. Thoreau wrote that the forest trees are his cathedral, Harlan Hubbard wrote that conscious living is a pursuit of deletions from life, not accumulations.

There is a particular beam of sunlight, at around 7 am each day in winter, that permeates through the upward winding road by the Archery ground at Ranikhet. A large pine tree bathes in its glory next to a church converted to cloth weave center for Army Widows. There is an Oak tree above Rani jheel that awaits the glory of this sunlight reaching it by midday (after the pine tree has let her go). There is a lonely tea stall next to the only Post Office at Kumaon Regiment headquarters at Ranikhet, where, inside the large glass jar, a few Peanut-studded biscuits await my coming. If this Covid situation improves, I would very very very much want to be soaking in them hot thank you so much! Thoreau found it at Walden, sea turtles in ocean, Scott nearing at Maine and Vermont rural farms, - why would I not find that simple life of oblivion now that life is bestowed so freely upon me?

The seed and her savior

The seed and her savior

From the tiniest of the objects, long, soft, or warm, nature creates her symphony of motion and life affirmation activities. Here is what she does, for example. She puts a small entrapment with tiny skin, a pod to hold just two seeds. And then awaits the coming together of the frost and sun (and a brief conundrum of stars too, but let’s not go there yet). If it rains, it will wait. No hurry. If its too hot, ok. Too cold, I can live with that. And when the fine day arrives, she opens forth the two seeds it hid in the pod (like sleeper cells invoking their trigger) and throws them in a spring recoil as far from the tree as it can. Thus the Witch Hazel tree spreads its wings and increases her chance at living.

It is like the trees heard what the Lord said – “some seed fell on the path, some on rocky ground, some among thorns, and could not grow; other seed fell on good soil and brought forth much fruit….”

Why then shall we await this destiny of sorrow or joy, they ask the lord hesitantly, when “with a bit of blessing and nature’s wand upon us, we can invoke where we seek the farther land, how we seek the moors, and what permutation of the sun and rain and the stars will nourish our growth.”

Is it not then moral, nay our prerogative, to seek the happiest circumstances for our growth, and if the opportunity presents itself, and with a bit of work, should we not grow wings and not yet fly, be merry and not yet be unaware of what surrounds us, seek company and yet not let them hamper my shine?

The seeds, progenitors – carriers of genetic code- condensed life, as they fly though the air (just one time for their destiny is earth), seem to ask why await the assigning of happiness that diffuses all around us and that we ourselves can choose and pick and try and be?"

On reading a book with illustrations in childhood

On reading a book with illustrations in childhood

The illustrations I saw in childhood have stayed with me. Phantom punching in Indrajal comics, Mandrake's magical house, James Herriot's Yorkshire Moors and him hurrying to a barn to give birth to a calf, the little girl who dies of cold on a Christmas in Hans Christian Andersen's tale, the hound's crying call in the story, the lone wolf on the snow in jack London's book.

I always wanted to read All Holmes' stories in a walnut grained leather bind, sober and matte- finished, with an etched pipe on the front, smoke lacerations on leather slowly becoming fog on the back leather strap, where the hound is partially hidden, her red eyes staring at you.

I always wanted a minimalist house, like in Chandamama (or in Tamil ambulimama) where husband wife sit in middle of an austere room and a thief is hiding behind a clay pot on the loft.

When it rains in hills, at Ranikhet or Manila or Bhimtal, I would wish the window, which, when opened, would let in branches of a pine tree or neem tree in, like Ruskin bond had, at Maple cottage, having returned in abject poverty from England to pursue a poor but determined writer's life in Dehra...

How birds die..

How birds die...on the road or sky, instantly, without favour or regrets, guided by no force and slave to no man, in flight and in motion...with no past to favour or chance withthem..alone..unaccounted to all kind deeds done and to previous births..hidden..like a tree trunk in the sky or like wind..without regret or pathorsignature..without succession planning or progeny or much agony of loittering around...without leaving a tuft of hair or fig or wing to no purpose...as silent as they come, leaving as silent as one left..unafraid of leaving them all - relations and land and this beautiful Earth that nurtured them..going as one as one that came as a tiny speck..

(A friend wrote why remember death amidst life, as bird soars.I think I am remembering the brevity of life. It's vulnerability, its flickering amidst 2nd law of thermodynamics that entropy will increase. Thus songs of death are about wonderment of life, albeit concealed..)

The Wilting Flower

The Wilting Flower

The wilting flower is a joy to behold too. It had lived a great life of sunshine and breeze and petals that showered pollens to the flirty kisses of bees. It had seen the wondrous growth of forests and touched the bellies of small squirrels standing inquisitively on their hind legs. It has played its glorious innings swaying to evening breeze, shivering to rain drops, looking lovingly to the moon-lit lake so glorious in its solitude.

Some believe that because she is drooping, all her strength is gone and what else could she look at when she looks at vigorous leaping sunflowers but the regret of losing her youth. That is presumptuous. She sees the firming up of vigorous young limbs in others as hers did once, and can feel in her a reinvigoration of her old, natural charm. Nowadays, her petals shrinking, her roots gasping to absorb water, she ends up seeing the earth more than the sky she was born to leap to. But, she would unhesitatingly admit she had a good life. She let a few Petunias grow with her when the wind threatened to uproot them. She and a few friends stood supplying flowers to the nearby temple of Jhula devi near Chaubhatia cantontment. She once brought inquisitiveness and smile to a small child, who was exploring the bushes on her own.

She is old but not gone yet. Not yet written off…the ants still greet her on the way to work. She can still see in the mulch some of her colleagues and knows she will join them soon. She sees the soil matrix from where she can no longer absorb water with sadness but also with gratitude. It’s a good life, it’s a good life, she tells herself. The fulcrum of life and death, where she has been placed as an observer of seasons, she is afraid of and is also glad about. She is tired and sometimes longs to lift her eyes to see the farther off lake as its water shines in midday sun, when everyone naps in the hills. She likes how rain droplets fell with a thud on her upright face, stirring the stamen and stirring her pistil. She knows with age (and hopefully wisdom in this brief stay) that a hung face need not be a gloomy one. Hers is not!

She would like to go on that quiet night before the Devi Pooja starts on hills, when like a lull before the storm, all is quiet. When the moonlight reflects all living organisms in one glow. The transition shadow in which rocks and trees and sleeping rabbits and pine trees are twirled into one consciousness – that is her cue to hit the pavilion running!

Even then, when she was but a sprouting, she was this Seeker. Even in her youth, she would not jostle for space with other flower bunches but would quietly pick a deviant piece of sunlight and grow towards it. What then can be so different in this old age and in this passing, she silently muses, when all this brief life was but a joyful union with mountains and rivers and mother earth and nibbling ants?

What can be taken then from one for whom all was given? 

Sick on a Winter's day

It’s the bed unmade, its sheet crumpling and brittle, its curving creases like windswept canyons..

Not wanting to brush or bath or face the world but slumber deep to the winter sun, till noon sun warms my closed eyelids, sweet world doing its own thing - peripherals of traffic sounds from road, a prayer bleeds from  the nearby Mosque,

I struggle to the kitchen, face dry and pillow-lined and slept, body arched with ache of a crumbling edifice, heart full of the aroma of coffee on lips, like the longing of a muted mongrel on a hungry winter night on a star-lit street on a deserted Christmas night….

So many things to do - sit straight up watching the Bhim taal slurping light from Sun,  read Rumi this night of desertion, unsuperimpose the Vitrovian man images as a last act of rebelliousness, hear Nusrat stretch Bhairavi as long strands into the abyss of the night, talk to Aladdin about the futility of rubbing the lamp in the land of gold (why why?)..

….but for this bodyache and the silent energy drain of a “waiting for Godot” sneeze, but for the slow headache that slowly rose from ashes of a burning midday, but for the unrequited love that never goes away..

I switch on the light and wear the blanket and set the face mast to the winter sun, imagine the walk of Le Clezio’s people in the “Desert” , but the body has its own language for the sick – one can only stand and watch from the shore; I flip the channels and engross myself with Kramer’s spaghetti make in Seinfeld, with Byomkesh lost in thought in Ray’s Sonar Kela, with Arnold’s T2 scenes, but this is not a night of that ..it’s my day the body reminds…

This is a lonely path at the intersection of despair and pain, fighting pathogens with Cytokline storms, using steroids to suppress T-cells, CBCs and RBC counts, chills and  volcanic fevers, a shout in between..

So, that’s how day after day shall end ..with afterglow of so many things done with mind and distaste of cough rumbling at midnight.

A few more days before the Sun heats up the spaces and I can appreciate the lady selling her Ginger produce to the grocer at Someshwar bazaar…

The pine forests of Dautiyal

Pine trees swaying in Dautiyal; when Manila mata calls - her temple bells piercing through the oak forest- they sway. When a leopard climbs a tree, when water fills shale digs in Buransh forest, they sway. When little girls play on road back home from Rajkiya Mahila college, when a stranded tourist sits by roadside dhaba, when migrant labour arrives from Ram Nagar swaying their luggage of utensils and stoves, when horticulture department plants a water retention nonnative plant, when Rawat ji closes his tin roof tailor shop after sewing 4 white shirts for a funeral...it sways for the seasons, for the menial tasks that change its environment around.

Take for example, yesterday, when a lonely cow meandered from nearby hills, her neck rope tingling with a battered tumbler, it swayed. Years before her ancestors were planted here, there are memories of old oaks , blurred images of childhood days as a sway sapling. As she ages, she swings to all that moves her and stirs her belly.

They now talk about a metallic road to reduce distance between Ratikhal and batrojkhan. It will steer through ancient pine groves and oak clusters. Someone smoked a bidi and talked of driving a jeep through the new scenic route. A brief moment she did all she could not to stir in anger and disgust.

But the wind kept calling, the forests of Manila swayed all around her. Won't you join the dance, they asked. Yes, she said sadly, yes I will. While I can. While I can.

Four Stories from Book Fair

4 stories from Metro rides to World Book fair at Delhi

1.       On the way back from a long 7 hour day at the book fair, at the Yamuna Bank intersection, in an uncrowded train, this guy with a heavy bag gets in and turns this way and that way. When his bag brushes real hard on me, I tap his shoulders and ask “what the hell” in an angry tone. He takes off his headphone and looks at me, and says “it seems there is no forgiving in your world” and smiles. “what a strange thing to say” I ponder. Yes, he is right, may be; I want to ask “should there be forgiveness in me, when the action you did was inconsiderate, though not intended?” I do not ask anything. Thankfully, he does not pursue either. I get down at my station on the next stop. We watch each other once, I at the stairs and he across the door panels, as train whizzes away.

2.       At the end of the day, at 8 pm, when the bookfair closes, the crowd inches to the Pragati Maidan station. A small girl is playing in the mud, her dirty sweaters held around the neck by an open safety pin. Her dad is selling some liquid that wades off dirt in clothes, yelling “No need to wash clothes this Delhi winter when Sun is invisible”. Occasionally, she looks up and gets back to her job – of digging mud to find some sharp stone or wood that she can use to dig more mud. 

3.       The kachori seller with two tin boxes mounted on the cycle handle has neatly arranged plastic bowls with two kachori’s crushed in. As soon as about 4 of us gather, he swiftly turns, opens the aluminum drum with mashed alu sabji, and pours it on with masala. Every minute is critical. As the fog mingles with steam, you notice that Winter is actually great. Legs aching, hot snacks at hand, metro lines forming, pirated book sellers shouting on the pavement, - heck, you even smile at the India physical map seller, standing like a caricature from Malgudi days quietly. Ther, in the map, is Delhi all lit up.

4.       In the crowded streets, in loud cheers and soft curses, in the dumping of the “free” accumulated garbage of pamphlets and flyers, the crowd meanders like an angry river. So much movement all around and then you see two people holding a cancer donation box and placard, saying nothing, keeping quiet. Asking us to spare a moment for the dying and dead, with all this life around. Indicating that when all this life is around is when we should consider it. In Katha upanishad, This is what Nachiketa did, when he asked his dad why he is not sacrificing in the yagya altar what he considers precious.

The World Book Fair, Delhi 2020

Nagarjuna, the eccentric hindi-political poet, is remembered by many in a book. Someone watched sadly as Safdar Hashmi enacted his last play in "Halla Bol". The amazing books of Mushtaq Ahmed Yousafi and Shamsher Rahman Faruqi came to the delight of Hindi and English readers (respectively). Perumal murugan compils the heart wrenching stories of caste abuse in south -in "Black coffee in a coconut shell" (the shell in which so called "lower caste" were served in houses of Varnas - hence the title). Gombrich's history of the world is not short at all in the "a little history of the world" - your appetite is just whetted enough to help you leap further.

And as per Murari Sharma's stories, Hills have same problems that cities have (for the "romanticists" envisioning escape) - that of politics, corruption, inequality, and poverty. Would you still go there? The revolutionary poet "Pash" stands amused at this dilemma (remember " sabse khatarnak hota hai hamare sapnon ka marjana?" that he wrote - "what is most dangerous is the death of our dreams"), the forgotten, Dalit poet (as he was called) Lal Singh Dill was not so silent his outpouring is cold and dark.

The evening is settling into a wintry cold breeze; the tired sit by the road and relish the kachori-alu still served by cyclist sellers (as in old day) - the fog engulfs the aluminum vessel and its steamy vapors of the sabzi - the hot and cold indistinguishable , the faces now blurred. A lonely bomb squad dog stands doing its job outside the Metro. The cart pushers await the loading of books, their women sitting silently by the side of the road, laughing- their old seaters thread bare (but not spirits). The World Book Fair 2020 Delhi ends.