chalchitra

The fat god has arrived. Shivareeing through the roads of Mumbai, millions of people dance their way home, welcoming lord Ganesha. For nights, the architects have molded clay to beautiful shapes, to which people would tuck their heads and murmur their prayers. Days of workmanship have gone into conjuring the contours of the tiniest feature of the idol.

For hours, the followers would queue outside the pandal, chanting pious songs. A bellwether would emerge from the crowd: a kid in his thin voice would lead the chanting of Ganapathy bappa morya, and the rest in the line would closely, unanimously follow the pitch, stressing different syllables each time, making it lyrical. The brown pandal tarpaulin would be raised and the devotees would stagger in and gather around the daan peti. The lights would dim and a short chalchitra would follow.

A story is dramatized using Indian mannequins of gods and humans; the gods painted blue and the humans dark-skinned trolley back and forth, in tune with the voice-over recorded in Marathi. Earthly beings face the atrocities of a devil. A gigantic chimpanzee looking monster, painted black, thump-march the stage, killing whoever comes in the way. He randomly fists his chest to enhance the devil-like appearance. The women in the crowd flinch, a hand planted on the chest. The kids laugh, looking at the shabby devil, that’s anything but scary. There’s a giggle in the crowd when a hand would pop-out from a tree or from behind a hut on the stage to move the devil along the rail.

When tyranny reaches the brim, God-men pray to Gods. But when no God can be of help enough, not even the trio of Brahma-Vishnu-Mahesh can stop the devil, they implore together, Shankar and Parvati, plunge their palms, and the entire universe calls for the elephant-god.

What follows are the series of prayers. There’s a lightning in the sky. Thunder echoes on earth. A light blazes beneath the curtain, behind which the god-of-the-season resides. The curtains slowly lift up. The giggle in the crowd stops. Men, busy ogling women, angle their heads to the stage. The palms are folded into a pranaam. And as the curtains are lifted, there’s a resounding cry of Ganpathy bappa moraya. At that instance, the lid of the halogen flips, and darkness hovering around the idol is consumed by light.

The grandeur deity is standing on one foot. The other leg crossed- bent in air as a pause of a dance. The left hand is holding a Trishul, which flies and beheads the monster. The right hand is raised in a blessing. Godly instruments are grasped in other two hands, which will bring peace on earth. Now the entire stage lits up. The flowers emerge from under the stage. Birds sing in different melodies. The humans begin to frolic in victory. The Heavens descend on to earth and thank Lord Ganesha for his mercy. A carol plays in the background.

But in all this drama, all this theatre, what is seen first is not the protruding stomach or the long trunk that snakes through the body and assumes a skyward curl. What is seen first is not the trishul that’s hurled or the pause of the idol. When the curtains are drawn, when the chorus of the lilting hymn pervades the pandal, when the God is open for darshan, what is beheld first are the tiny radiant eyes of
Ganpathy. The powerful glow in the elephant god’s eyes, one is enthralled, transcended to a saintly state.

Even while their own eyes are shut, they know that they are fine. Their pulsating hearts settle. The hours of fatigue drains into oblivion. They aren’t worried about the pickpockets who would be wading through the crowd in this dark. The elephant-god is watching.

So when they shut their eyes, they see the halo of the elephant God. At the back of their eyelids, a perfect sun-rim has formed. Darting at this godly light, lost in this divine appearance, the family's remembers and there's an utterance for children's health and prosperity.

The lights go dim.
Speactators disperse in knots.
Curtains fall.
Another set of devotees stagger in.

Two wise men

I like the traffic. The shrill honks reducing behind the curtained cabins. I like the crowd. Cluster of people walking on a footpath to get to their destination. The tap-tap of their feet. The hurling cars at the signal. The flurry at a zebra crossing. I like the unexpected ringing of phones. I like quick decisions, not hurried, but quick. I like the interrupting spasms.

No, don't get me wrong. I do like the ephemeral silence. The fleeting sense of serenity. But I'd be feigning if I said I liked to listen to the gush of waves, the whoosh of winds. Or if I would want to keep sitting at a beach, staring at an endless sea merging somewhere with the sky. No, that's not I.

I do not belong to a countryside. I'm a city man. I like the noise. The frenzy. Being on toes. But today, this day, I want to curl myself under a blanket. I do not want a knock or an interruption. Today, this day, keep me away from these rascals. These oppressive creative clowns.


**

Some people like mess. They can't work if they aren't constantly struck with what's called a problem. They look for it: here and there. And when they can't find any, they create them, mother them, until the nebulous monster stares in their face. These people like being on the edge. At the brink and brooming. They like crisis: to solve them and emerege a hero, chest out.

These people will stay afloat in the quicksand. Push them to their porticos to see an early sun, or let loose on a hill to breathe some air, I'm afraid they'll choke their lungs.

Afternoon readings

I would sit at my mother's elbow after the Sunday lunch and fill up the page. Find your way out of the maze. Spot the differences. The complex Shabdkosh, which I would fill with my grandma's help.

Mum would open-up the in between pages of Mumbai Samachar and for more than an hour I would sit on the bed, head down, rummaging through the supplement. And then, if there were still some time for the gully cricket to commence or if the marble game had yet not begun in Champak kaka's garage, mum would read to me the short stories from out of the paper. The fiction stories of Kanti Bhatt, Suresh Dalal, Gunvant Shah would shape in front of me, just below the teek-teek of the rotating fan.

Their vivid stories would fill in the room and mum's narrative pitch would rise and fall behind Jayshri bai's washing of utensils. A nurse helping a patient to get to feet... An old uncle living an independent life... the stories always having a moral, a learning, which mum would stress after the reading. And when at times, a friend would ring the bell and the match was about to start, mum without reading further from the paper would spin her own tale, and even in her quick ending, there would be a message that would remain with me, like the change that would lie in the front pocket of the school bag.

I do not quite clearly remember when these afternoon readings stopped.

Hiatus

Nobody came. Not Shankar. Not Krishna. Not even the Monkey God, whom I visited religiously, every Saturday, for last five years. I was received rather plainly, by a plenitude of sharp penetrating light, the one which I had often seen while shaving a beard, staring into a hundred volt bulb from a foot's distance. It blinded me instantaneously, but leaving enough room, so as for me to know that nobody came.

And in this blindness, when I meandered about, eyes shut and hands stretched, I gathered that I'd missed the floor, which ended quite abruptly not far away from where I'd started. It reminded me of my seventh standard English teacher, who often threw at me humongous words like a pestilential child! who did what was not to be done, who more than once had attempted to convert sentences into indirect speech, which were to begin with in the required format. But she, with her virtue, still kept at her best, showing off her profundity in vocabulary, which I found tedious to ears. Whilst admiring the wisdom of my professor, I had, momentarily forgotten my current crisis.

I fell to an eternal falling. Not the ones you stumble upon in your sleep, a quick short fall from a bed or staircases, which would shiver you to wakefulness. It was rather a controlled fall, with such severe tranquility, that I, who while at my life, beseeched to digressing from mundane could not but acknowledge its creator's sincerity. While I did appreciate its temporal anomalous setting, I was, within a brief span of time, thoroughly equipped with not only its slowness of speed but also the erratic shift of direction in the fall. And for a man, to gauge this, who did not ever understand the sequential pattern of the songs, which shuffled on an I Pod, was a remarkable achievement I believed. So, while I was boasting at my own achievements, I did a fear a trap, perhaps, a crafty plan to put me back from where I came.

Will I be split into multiples of myself to keep-up to the spilling earth? Or will I, one fine day, drop into a mother's womb?

My marrows began to tense. The water from below the skin tansuded through the small pores. And with a sweaty feeling in my palms, I was beginning to fade. My knowledge trapped into the layers of these falls, lost to its ambushes, permanently. My worries ceased.

I was born.

Savitri

I stood at her pyre, hands clasped. I’d seen those faces, which now stood straight, circled around her burning flesh. I’d seen them while crossing the road, and while buying stationary at a nearby store, and while waiting at the doctor’s clinic at the end of the blind street.

With an eight year old and a sack full of belongings, Savitri took a bus from her village and alighted in Mumbai the next day. This, she told me while mopping the floor under the bed, and into the first week of joining the housework. “Kishan needs to learn,” she said between her chalk-white teeth. “Kishan needs lessons.”

When Savitri completed one month, father enrolled Kishan’s name in a municipality school. So he studied in English, whilst Savitri remained at home performing house chores and lived with us.

One day, when I sat at my room, pensive and tears dulled in my eyes, Savitri strode through the door left ajar. She sat squatted next to the bed and scolded in her husky voice, “Kai re, Kashala radtos?” (Oy! Why are you crying?) She told me her own story. About her drunkard husband and his squandering habits and about their daily fights, which I listened to uninterestedly.

It was much later, when I was over the gloomy mood and had forgotten the break-up with my girlfriend, that it struck me that Savitri came to Bombay perhaps not only because Kishan needed lessons.

I indulged with her in short conversations now and then, and she began to pick a bit of English from me. She would use in her sentences words like spoon and table and plate. It fascinated me how quick she would grasp these words.

Savitri got accustomed to city life. A couple of years later when she got a kholi of her own, she moved out and joined work at two more houses to earn better living.

She called our house the first home in Bombay, and did the extra bit of work for us. When mother went to the market to shop for vegetables and grocery, Savitri would wrap the dried clothes and pile them on the bed and wash the evening vessels, which would accumulate in the sink after tea. Often, while sweeping the floor or dusting the room, she would pose in front of the cupboard and look at the mirror, adjusting the festoon of ghajara clipped to her coconut oiled hair.

It was her calm demeanor that made her likable. Never had I heard her shout or fight with mother, except when she occasionally raised her voice to negotiate for a twenty rupee increase in her salary or when she wanted a week’s leaves to go to her village and mother denied.

She negotiated for what she deserved, until she quit. At sixty three, Savitri put a period to her home-making. She did however for a while visited residences to massage babies and bathe them, until her bones gave up on her. Even years later, she would get us raw mangoes from her village to make pickles. This year there would be non.

Standing at the pyre, I could envisage her figure when she first entered the house with her eight year old. Her bindi, big and round, stuck permanently at the centre of her forehead. I could sense a trail of nilgiri she would linger behind every day when leaving the house at night.

Standing there, amidst vague acquaintances, and tears welling in my eyes, I felt as if she would emerge from amongst the wood and scold me, “Kai re, kashala radtos?”

Office

But what can you do?
This mind is not your own
It scurries away
Like a rabit
Unto the recesses unknown

So while you are at
your morning tea
or into the day busy
This mind of your yours
Yours but not your own
Is out in the open and
it flees before you see

What can you do
but follow?
To and fro
to and fro

And it
Not wanting to be caught
leaves you a little trail
to halt and slow
for your thoughts frail
to grow

But if you keep your breath
and not rue
and catch its tail but briefly
And let it go
you'll pick a virtue.

But now my dearie,
Please prick your skin
You've got job to do.

Weep

And at times, when you do don that armchair, or sit in a lea under a tree where not a single shaft of sunlight fall upon your lap, look back… through the vicissitudes of time and into the passage of past. And in this solitude, in this forlorn longing, when you feel the void and a growing lump in your chest… twist your arms, clutch your hands, twirl your toes, thump your feet and weep: to a friend or a neighbour as you wish, over a phone or under the bough in lone. Weep until your arms, your hands, your toes regain its rest; weep until your feet are worm. Weep until you find repose: to rise and walk unto daylight.