মুক্তেশ্বরে মুক্তি ( Manumiting mission Mukteshwar)

For a metropolitan individual peace to ears is heavenly dream. To him silence is scarce while for those in the lonely hills, noise obliterated. This unfriendly and distant human behavior brings noisemakers from the plains to disturb peace in hills, while the reverse simpletons tend to lose their sanctity.

Whichever the case may be, silence is hard to find these days in the hills in India and it’s a luck to discover a whispering, winding,  way lined by rainbow colored nameless little flowers. Ready to perceive and withstand,  obnoxious, high pitched odours from Indian Railway toilets for two nights to discover a road without shoe marks, a voyage from Calcutta was eagerly waiting. Mukteshwar was the name that came first likely for it’s mystical Bengali script that lay before you a journey to freedom reminding you of the word ‘mukti’. Little did I know about Mukteshwar’s windy nature, its jaw dropping temperature and the sound of rain it mimics bolt from the blue when the wind streamlines through the Deodars .

Before the middle of December on the thirteenth I guessed it would be chilly but sustainable with layers of wool and a jacket. The first evening passed by in lazy walks for a kilometer or two around the village bazaar of a few shops and a ‘choumatha’ ( four roads crossing)in front of IVRI’s (Indian Veterinary Research Institute) main entrance. This crossing is a vast open space very unlike that in crowded cities. Acclimatization at around 8000 feet was not that adequate on the first day. So we returned to our hotel only to find that the electricity had vanished. But the service men cared little and kept smiling much to our awe. Electricity keeps fleeing here giving you little chance to store some hot water or charge your modern day connecting device. The men from the hills are not worried about this. They kept discussing about the present political scenario in the state. It had already started drizzling by then.

After a sumptuous, affectionate dinner from the hotel boys we planned to be back to our room in search of a cozy space below the specially made blanket for the hills. It was when we felt something soft below our shoes. The snow had started settling. Unable to witness in sheer darkness the only thing we could do was to curse our fate realizing little what was in store for us next morning.

Sleeping well in pitch darkness and nothing but absolute silence, we were awakened by impressive heavy knocking by  Surinder  the ever smiling, helping running man with a pot of hot tea to sip and a picture perfect view of four feet snow. In whichever direction we looked through the large sized window, it was a thick blanket of snow and silence. The nature was unwilling to speak. Such succulent silence you never would witness anywhere.

After we had burnt our lips unable to restrain ourselves to put our feet in knee deep snow for a few clicks with Canon, someone reminded me of Calcutta. It would snow more he said for the forthcoming days and the roads will never be cleared for the next seven days or so. It was such a sudden sullen thought that it made me sit and put my fist below my chin, plunged in shattering thoughts. The roads will be closed and I am a prisoner in Mukteshwar, I thought. The electricity was still not back and the storage geyser surprisingly empty.

It was ten in the morning when we were ready for a splendid breakfast with ‘puries’ and ‘alur dom’.  The snowing had stopped, the sun bright right over our head but the mercury kept plummeting . It was such a distressing event on one hand while an unbelievable thought of silver screen heroines in scantily clad dresses in ankle deep snow and ice crept in my mind. I imagined how the prisoner of Zenda felt during his days in castle unable to leave.

If you don’t do it now you face the music , I told myself. With a little life left on phone I rang up the police to listen ‘ have patience’ in a compassionate voice. Mukteshwar  remains closed to traffic for now was what I heard. I contacted my friend Kushal  Dasgupta at Calcutta and asked him to help us out.  It took another ten minutes to clear the bills. With four of those ever smiling hotel nonentities and a broken plastic room- cleaning  stick for support,  I started my voyage with a salute to Columbus. The snow was not less than three feet deep and my legs kept slipping, unable to trace a rough surface. But the four held me as tight as they could never leaving me for a moment. Who they were I thought, forgetting that  they were only those common simpletons from the hills extending their help for nothing. The walk that started nearly three feet deep in snow with hard  rocks below lasted  four hours covering eight kilometers with no less than four falls strong enough to break your patela  or ankle. But it never happened for those four,  who lifted us each time with sheer muscle power. The walk was a hell for the weak novice cosmopolitan so  called entity, who hardly utilize ten percent of their endurance. I still remember the four- hour  unbearable physical exercise up and down the hill, waddling in heavy deposits of snow and ice on the shortcuts away from the main metal highway only to cut short time and reach destination by daylight. Each time I fell sick it reminded me of Dersu Uzala, the man born from mother nature whose sheer endurance still puts every human  being to shame.

My wife, who was a bit ahead in the race, suddenly looked back and cried aloud, “Look, at the end, there is no more snow.” There was so much joy in those words that it took me another half a minute to realize the truth. The risk of this journey is hardly one percent of what the mountaineers face and   this put my smartness in a shambles. 

  

That very moment my telephone started  ringing, Kushal Dasgupta was on the line. Hearing that we were out of danger and as if  he himself  was out of penance he jumped out in sheer ecstasy saying, “If Jatayu would have been there he must have uttered, Mukteshwar theke mukti  (free from Mukteshwar)”. This witty  alliteration was so appropriate and so powerful that it made me lose my pain in joy. I looked at my saviours and asked, “Where are we now?”. To my utter disbelief they replied,” Why Sir? We are in Mukteshwar,  Sir. We have only left behind the campus of IVRI and walked another three kilometers.”  Nothing but the sheer size and the vastness of  IVRI campus put me to embarrassment unable to compare it with anything I had witnessed so far. Does the BHU have a larger campus? I wondered. Dasgupta was still on the line expecting me to reply.” No you are wrong my dear, its not ‘from’,  its ‘Mukteshwar-e mukti (Free at Mukteshwar)”, I said and kept on laughing like Jatayu all the way to Calcutta on train.

 I felt happy and fulfilled that I  could pay those four ever  smiling men for their hard work, realizing every moment that the money I spent never equaled their worth. It was for the first time in my tenure on the holy platform that I touched O.Henry’s heart and felt the resonance of the saying ‘It is better to give than it is to receive’. It was a life time experience, a God gifted one, of my approval of the thought that  one could never touch  the wit and the wisdom of  a language until he knows how to read and write it and truly accept it to be ones mother tongue.

(After I had resumed my office at Calcutta I came to know that about 100 tourists were rescued from Uttaranchal and at least 50 poor men and children died from cold.  )

A miser and a conservationist

Away from explicit, rigid, non negotiable expressions of disapprovals live a layman’s world where these two are inseparable and coexistent like one’s shadow. I have often found a conservationist being referred to as a miser in public place much to the latter’s amusement. These days the educated form crowd, bringing into shape those invaluable existences into valuable standards of behaviour. Every one seems to be educated in this age of internet, ready to put forward his views like a cheap ‘ready to fry’ envelope of mouth watering battered marinated fish. Silence is scarce, beyond reach of a gullible magic box eligible to cast his ballot in an untruly democratic country.   The public is thickly populated in twenty-first century, much thicker than the quiet listeners of the sixties of twentieth. You rarely would find people listening to you and pay heed. We are all kings in this new world but not very much like what Tagore referred to in “Amara sabai Raja amader ei Rajar rajotye” (we are all free like king in our state).

            My father’s friend, already dead by now, quietly put off the electric switch behind a person, carelessly leaving an empty room. People use to call him nuts, saving money for no one. Improperly turned off taps would find him finishing the left out work. It was one thing that made co-habitants see shades of red but they kept on reffering him as hoarder . This half dead, lean, meatless man would save, torn pieces of blank unused papers believing trees will be lost soon for making as few as half a dozen paper.

            Who is this ‘nuts’? I don’t know. I have often seen a scarcely read man, likely self groomed, a self styled existence who persistently nurtures his nous, unnoticed, an un-smart soul indeed, haunted at every corner of his living by his nonexistent, tempestuous dumb countertenor.    

            In today’s world where human interest other than in self is absconding, conservationism is in exile making room for a miser impersonating others. This is likely the future of modern man with changes coming faster than the speed of an  ultramodern computer chip. He adapts to the speed very much like the inhuman ‘transformers’ on screen unable to role back to his basic self.

How many times in the recent past had you witnessed a comon man on the street, conserving? Conserving a clean environment, not throwing his empty chocolate wrapper or an exhausted cigarette packet on the pavement. Not honking an enormously sharp sounding exhibitionistic car horn without suitable cause. A rareity indeed you never even thought of some twenty years back. At one time, a quality which showed up automatically and no one botherd to call it humane as it came up without a conscious thought and willingly with maturity, is scarse and may be needs ‘Finishing Schools’ for a come back. So the water keeps flowing, unused and uncared for  in government taps on streets, street lights keep burning at seven in the morning may be throughout the day, a noisy thoroughfare becomes a smarter avenue for the modern man, slangs flow down the lips in public places, newer babies keep seeing the daylight on pavements without their parents rarely using their brains, teachers slap their pupil without loving and caring for them.

Its time to conserve, not only the water on the street but the slang too, you had memorised in your childhood. May be the next door neighbour with whom you had never cared to talked to, is conserving the air for your next generation. Its time to conserve the word ‘ miser’ you often use for a quiet backbencher who keeps using his dusty gadget which has lost its shine.

My Tendulkars, My Cricket

About the size of two bedrooms an utterly undulated piece of barren land occupies right across my ground floor terrace. Like birds flock to their torn nests by the turn of the evening, eight under weight cricketers, surely below the age of twelve, appear one after other with the little one carrying a drowsy looking bat under his armpit. The shapeless, lustreless rubber ball will now change hands bringing thrill, no less than a seventies’ five-day match with daring Farook Engineer at stumps. There is no one standing behind the wickets, I find. A rather doubtful set of three ugly looking, crooked vertical lines on the moss filled broken wall, marks the fate of the batsman. No one complains about that. No spectators, no actors, no cheer girls is in view. Only a rarely summoned third umpire waits to-day’s thrilling half hour.

            There is so much fun and excitement in this friendly game that it puts the bribe trodden international cricket to shame. Even the honest that cheer the international players and watch these pre-decided matches should hide their face in disgust. But to my utter disbelief the friendly cricket game opposite my balcony too has some fighting inherent. All of my little friends love to bat, none care to move their arm like a half drawn cartwheel throwing the ball. Bowling seems to be tiring. To them bowling is a less attractive option than hitting the ball hard and bringing it to tears. So sometime there is difficulty to get the bit between one’s teeth and often expression of childhood anger evolve disappearing within minutes. These lilliputs  fight, some sort of transient jostling I should say which soon turn into human bondage. Such charming, unadulterated expression of human behaviour you always would envy in your adulthood.

            My duty is restricted to watching. But my honesty and rationality shine high in their mind. One day after some extended display of anger for who should bat first I was given the chance to decide their fate. I took it seriously, encouraging a fair play. I drew numbers one to eight in a row with a prefixed dash and covered the digits with the bat. The younger one was asked to choose a dash first and then the others. After all the markers were chosen by eight of them, I uncovered the digits by removing the bat. It was an easy task with impending clarity and little punctilious behaviour from me at sixty.

            The game was high on note but confusions came faster than the runs. Markings made by the ball on wall came one above the other, making decisions difficult. Display of anger followed by cries became obvious. No one was ready to leave the bat and take up a fielder’s job. Then one day larger controversies came, stopping the game like a bolt in the blue. I had no other option but to interfere. I couldn’t be a dumb spectator and watch these little champs display disgust like the adults. And then I thought, why don’t I gift them a set of real wickets and a piece of nice cricket bat?  The ball came next putting me to tears to see their joy.

CHARLES COLLYER AS A BOY WITH A CRICKET BAT by  Francis Cotes (1726-1770) from Wikimedia Commons

            While watching one such local game of cricket on a lazy Sunday afternoon I thought, how immensely fool the human race is, spending hundreds of pounds for a pre fixed, well rehearsed, pre decided match at an international arena. That half nourished, ill trained juveniles with their never ending energy, I contemplated, play and play and keep playing not loosing their honesty for even a second. The light was dim by now and the kids have reluctantly called off the match at least for today. I felt sorry for them. I said to myself,” Hats off my children, hats off to your truthfulness, righteousness and honesty.”