Street portrait

The warm evening sun is the best for photography. Seated on a wheel-equipped platform just large enough for him, the man with only stubs for his legs has been watching me. It has not occurred to me to take a shot of him, for fear of violating his dignity. But he beckons from his spot on the tiny traffic island and asks me to take his photograph. There is no indignity in his demeanour; without hurry he smoothes out the checked cloth on his seat, moves the matchbox, beedi packet and coin bowl out of sight behind him, sits bolt upright and squares his shoulders for the portrait, as a car honks impatiently behind me.

“We’ve met before”, he says after approving the outcome of the shot. “You were here on the night of the Ganesh visarjan, right? Don’t you remember, we had a chat?” Now I do remember, embarrassed it took me so long. He smiles as he sees the recognition on my face and we shake hands on meeting again. Then I step back through the invisible glass pane to return to the security of my middle class life.

evening sun –
something in my eye,
a gnat I think

On song

There are no tickets for this concert, no scramble for good seats, no angry glares in the direction of invisible people who haven’t turned off their mobiles. I can listen to it from my bedroom, but it’s much nicer to do so sitting in the uncomfortable white plastic chair on the back porch. The small feathers on the magpie robin’s throat rise and fall with its song.

There are scientific theories about why birds sing, but listening to the clear stream of notes, I’m unable to imagine that this bird is doing it for anything other than sheer joy.

velvety caterpillar

the magpie robin

cocks its head

Heartbreaker

The two small girls sitting in the grey-brown dust are playing something like pat-a-cake. The one letting the dust trickle between her fingers is wearing a dress that’s a bright shade of red. The one watching is wearing nothing at all and her hair is a bleached shade of brown. It’s the colour of malnutrition.

sun and clouds

the little girl snuggles up

to her mother

Pavagadh

None of it is unfamiliar – the crowds; the religious merchandise; the instant photo studios with their garish backdrops presided over by a vengeful Mataji; the tired donkeys standing with bowed heads and swishing their tails to whisk away the flies from their sores… Yet on the misty Pavagadh hilltop everything is new, simultaneously fresh and timeless. In the middle of this bustle, a man is fast asleep on a rock outside the entrance to a temple. A fading sign above him proclaims the powers of Jungle Baba.

A little girl with a golden Jai Mataji headband stops to stare at the sleeping man. A short while later her mother comes rushing back and scoops her up in her arms. The stream of devotees flows past uninterrupted, upwards towards the Mataji’s shrine.

half mist half drizzle –
a half-eaten garland hangs
from the cow’s mouth

Ice cream

Although he sighs to himself every so often, the old man – hands folded in his lap and pen neatly clipped to a shirt pocket that betrays the outlines of a mobile phone – sits patiently enough. The boy is completely immersed in his little plastic cup of ice cream. Once in a while he surfaces to look up for approval, and the old man nods and smiles encouragingly.

When the ice cream has begun to melt, the old man takes over the flat plastic spoon. The boy’s white-rimmed mouth is always ready even before the next spoonful.

The old man’s shirt pocket lights up. “Yes yes”, he says to the mobile. “We’ll be home in ten minutes.”

evening breeze
the langurs on the wall
watch every movement

Schoolache

She was among the prettiest girls in school, one of at least three I had a secret crush on. One day we collided in the corridor outside our classrooms. I feigned annoyance and called her stupid, she merely laughed her tinkling laugh. For one long moment we looked each other in the eyes before returning to our separate lives.

stuffing my satchel –

the suddenness
of the school bell

Ice cream

Although he sighs to himself every so often, the old man – hands folded in his lap and pen neatly clipped to a shirt pocket that betrays the outlines of a mobile phone – sits patiently enough. The boy is completely immersed in his little plastic cup of ice cream. Once in a while he surfaces to look up for approval, and the old man nods and smiles encouragingly.

When the ice cream has begun to melt, the old man takes over the flat plastic spoon. The boy’s white-rimmed mouth is always ready even before the next spoonful.

The old man’s shirt pocket lights up. “Yes yes”, he says to the mobile. “We’ll be home in ten minutes.”

evening breeze

the langurs on the wall

watch every movement

Treasure

Sanjiv always contrived to sit close to us on the school bus. Since he was two years younger, we called him bacchu. To make up for this handicap, he let us in on the secret of the treasure on the roof of his house. Having obtained our half-hearted oaths of secrecy, he told us about the block of precious stone, worth at least a million bucks. We didn’t believe him, of course, but we didn’t completely disbelieve him either. A million bucks is a lot of money.

When Sanjiv’s family moved, we asked what had become of the treasure. He hesitated for just the slightest moment before confiding that his father had buried it somewhere, and was going to reveal the spot only when Sanjiv turned twentyone.

“What if he dies before that?” someone asked.

a metallic fly
on the bus window
blue
or maybe green

La Dernier Metro

The millipede is black with regularly spaced yellow markings. Its resemblance to a train at night is enhanced by the smooth way it glides along the ground on its many wonderfully coordinated legs. Suddenly I am transported back to a night many years ago.

A couple of minutes out of Neral station very little was visible other than the fading station lights. Though my father was sure of the general direction, the narrow paths across the slushy ground were difficult to pick out in the feeble light of our torch. “It’s just ten minutes from the station”, my father kept insisting, but we blundered through the darkness for what seemed like hours before my father exclaimed AH! All our torch showed us was a bunch of trees, but they were mango trees. Two minutes later we were knocking on the door of the owner’s mud-and-wood house. The kerosene lantern-lit face that appeared at the door abruptly went from suspicion to delight, and half an hour later we were polishing off the last of the bhakri and smoke-tinged vaal.

Later at night my father and I sat out on a charpoy under the mango trees. “That must be the last Karjat local”, my father remarked as we watched the near-empty train glide through the darkness. “La Dernier Metro” I think now, decades later.

The hug he gave me before I fell asleep that night was perhaps the closest this matter-of-fact rationalist man who was my father ever came to expressing what he never put into words.

flashing fireflies
the silence broken only
by crickets

Karvandha entrepreneurs

Dried karvandhas, with their sour-tangy taste, were a standard item on offer at Neral station, ten paisa a paper cone. My father decided that fresh karvandha juice might be a good idea. We spent hours sitting in the river washing and sorting the berries. The unsatisfactory ones we simply chucked into the water, which had the additional benefit of distracting the little fish that came to nibble on our toes. Whenever I got bored of the whole thing I dived for pretty stones, and very soon I had a good collection.



By way of market research we tried selling the juice at the station. Acutely embarrassed, I never once sang out “Karvandha juice karvandha juice, small glass fifty paisa large glass seventyfive”, the way I was supposed to. I merely thrust the glasses in my charge silently towards the bars of the train windows. As far as I was concerned, if anyone was keen on buying the deliciously pink-violet liquid on display, nobody was stopping them from asking what it was or how much it cost. I sold two small glasses the whole of that afternoon.



riverside
bulbul chatter
from the berry bushes

Driver Shaikh

Naturally, we liked the jolly drivers best, the ones who joked with us or just smiled silently to themselves when things got a bit uproarious on the back seats of the school bus. When one of these popular drivers was dismissed, we were shocked and upset for the day or two it usually takes children to get over things that don’t directly menace them. There was a hushhushness about the whole thing and we never found out what transgression had taken place.

Driver Shaikh was not one of the popular drivers. Always stern-faced under his khaki turban, he tolerated no nonsense on his bus. It was only much later that it occurred to me that he wore a turban because he was bald.

Driver Shaikh was employed by the institute my father worked in. One day he came home to pick him up in one of the institute cars. “Your father is a noble man”, he said to me out of the blue, nodding for emphasis, as I loitered at the gate waiting for my father to come out of the house. I had no idea what he meant. My father was just…my father.

When Driver Shaikh died of a heart attack, I was inexplicably sad.

two uniformed boys
drop their bags in the mud
I remember to smile

Rainspotting

Had they been well off, they wouldn’t have been on a scooter in this rain. The pater familias is wearing a raincoat with a peaked cap, the woman holds a pink umbrella and does her best to shield the child squeezed between them. The man is completely protected from the rain, yet every few seconds the woman readjusts the position of her umbrella to cover his head. The dark rain spots on the back of her blouse are coalescing into a deep red patch.

The man’s attention is focused on the road.

rumble of thunder

the scooter swerves sharply

around a pothole

Rain

It’s the lightest of drizzles, steeply slanted by the wind. The rain drops come dancing down along erratic paths, almost like snowflakes. The ground is as flat as can be, the street as urban as can be, but I am gripped by a feeling of being in the hills, a misty sense of mystery.

grey sky

an egret rolls and pitches

with the wind

Abruptly the rain intensifies. Soon it is coming down hard and straight. My umbrella is an open cocoon suspended in a timeless rush of water. Somewhere there is the muted sound of a car horn. A bus sloshes past spraying water, and I have a cartoon vision of grinning faces pressed to the bus windows.

In a moment the bus is gone and there is only the noisy silence of the rain.

watching out for puddles

very soon my shoes

completely soaked

Breaking the fast

The sun has set, but the sky is still far from dark, and closer to the ground there are fairy lights strung across a crumbling wall. At the first food stall, I have to rack my recalcitrant brain for a few seconds before managing to remember what the dish I want is called. “One plate of halim”, I order, relieved that I don’t have to point dumbly to the huge pot in which it is simmering. The sparse pieces of meat are more symbolic than substantial, but the halim is warm and soothing and wonderful.

Two long rickety tables have been set out on the pavement, surrounded by closely packed plastic stools. Every stool is taken. At one table are the men and boys – unseparated – at the other the women and girls. There is little talk, everyone sits solemnly watching the plates of food materialising on the table. Poverty is stamped not only on the clothes of these revellers; their silent faces too speak loudly of too much work and too little food.

Suddenly, one girl’s face lights up as a plate of kababs makes its appearance.

red reflections
a truck rumbles noisily
down the wet road

No country for fireflies

That brief stab of light in the darkness – I’m sure that was a firefly.

I’m sure it wasn’t. This is no country for fireflies.

Beyond the garden fence, there is the sharp little sound, like a tiny explosion, of a match being struck, but most of the light is trapped in the smoker’s cupped hands. Then the beedi takes over, its red glow waxing and waning in the dark.

midnight –
without a moon
the silence deeper

Nostalgia wins again, hands down

The sweets aren’t all that great. In fact, they’re kind of bad. I suspected that they might be even when I bought them. But they were so attractively packaged, each of them in the plastic box sitting in its own private, differently coloured, brilliant wrapping, that my consumer resistance never had a chance. And it wasn’t only the powerful magpie lure of the bright colours. No, more than that, there was the fuzzy childhood memory of the magic of standing in front of a tantalising assortment of brilliant sweets, and the exquisitely pleasant agony of having to make a choice.

If there was any hesitation before I bought that box of sweets, it was infinitesimally brief. That irrepressible child wanted them and had to have them, and I knew there was no point in trying to resist. Now the box sits in my ant-proof fridge, and I look at it approvingly every time I open the door to its coolness. But I’ve eaten only two of those sweets so far…

Mickey Heals the World

“Mickey Mehta wants to work together with you to Heal the World. Will you join his cause?” the Facebook sidebar asks. Now here’s something I can’t resist, so I promptly go to Micky M’s Facebook page, which announces “Someone is changing the entire World Today. Click to see who”. My distrustful mind stops me from clicking – so much shady virus and spyware stuff on the internet, after all – but I’m willing to make a guess. Mickey Mehta, working together with all of us?

See, it isn’t only Anna Hazare. There are other selfless heroes and messiahs too striving for our salvation. Is it too much to ask that we lend our support if we don’t have broad enough shoulders ourselves to take on such a heavy task? Heal the World. How wonderfully smoothly that rolls off the tongue! Sign me up, Mickey dada!

But one second – Mickey Mehta? Somehow that sticks in my craw a bit. Sounds too much like Mickey Mouse. Surely his parents didn’t commit as rash and irresponsible an act as naming him Mickey? Then again, the name itself is clear proof that Mickey is an honourable man. After all, which self-respecting scamster would have chosen a name like Mickey Mehta? I mean, seriously, if you were some huckster, what name would you choose – Mickey Mehta or, say, Baba Ramnarain or Ustad Rampuri or pretty much anything else?

Yet I can’t help wondering what his real name might be – Mikhileshwar? No, that would have been Mithileshwar. Mikesh or Mikal? (Well, there are some odd Gujarati names out there, you know.) Mixtup? (OK, sorry, I have no business making fun like this of the serious business of naming.) Mikado (maybe he was born in Japan or something)? Micro (low birth weight maybe?) Mikamber?

No, I’m just not getting anywhere with this. Maybe he’s just plain Michael Mehta – after all, if there was a Michael Madhusudan Dutt, why can’t you have a Michael Mehta? Whoever you are, Mickeybhai, I do appreciate your volunteering to take on this onerous job. I don’t know a lot of people who would do that. In fact, I don’t know a single one.

But still – MICKEY Mehta? I’m sorry, but I think I’ll just wait and see a bit. Please don’t misunderstand, Mickeybhai. And if no Donald Desai comes along in the next few days, I'll be signing up with you for sure.

Dusk

There is just the faintest tinge of blue in the grey evening sky. The drizzle is so faint that I have to wait for a few more miniscule stabs of coolness on my skin before I’m sure it’s real. The movements of the black and white cat in my neighbour’s garden are so slow and deliberate that it’s tempting to think it too is under the spell of this crepuscular timidity.

But there’s nothing faint about the bee eaters. Though their trills are not loud, they have a bell-like clarity. Flying in purposeful squadrons, they flit back and forth across the sky in their untiring search for insects. And now the rain drops have become a little bigger and make a soft sound on the leaves…

dusk
an early cricket
announces itself

International Day of Births

I’m beginning to find it difficult to keep up with this birthday thing. People are having birthdays ALL the time, all over the place. It can get a bit overwhelming. I mean, I have nothing against birthdays – if we didn’t have birthdays we wouldn’t even be here to comment on them, right? But couldn’t the whole thing be done in a slightly more systematic and organised way? Like look at the UN – they have an International Day or Week or even a Year for, say, the Girl Child or Political Refugees, and we can all say sympathetic things about them then and forget about the whole thing the rest of the time. Couldn’t we have a similar arrangement for birthdays? If we can have one Anti-Tobacco Day a year and lay off the smokers for the rest of the year, why can’t we do this with birthdays too? See – supposing we had an International Day of Births as early in the year as we can, say Jan 2 since Jan 1 is already taken – then we could get it over with at one go and live happily ever after for the remaining 363 days of that year. And if we're all agreed on Jan 2, we could just send everyone New Year-cum-birthday greetings at one go. On The Day of Births everyone would have a huge noisy rambunctious whale of a party, and the neighbours wouldn’t even complain because they would also be having a huge noisy rambunctious whale of a party of their own. There could be Birthday Groups of friends or families, where everyone could take turns hosting the party, sort of like carpooling.

Now doesn’t that sound like a good thing to you? Not much chance of forgetting anyone’s birthday, big-time saving on time and effort wishing people round the year. And best of all, parents could finally relax about gifts and back-gifts and putting up a better show than those uppity parents of their kids’ friends because everyone would be too busy celebrating their own birthdays to be able to go to anyone else’s party, and then go around afterwards saying how the cake was too dry and how they know a better event manager who would have done a much better job…

Good idea, no? What, you don’t agree? Well, then I’m not going to send you a Facebook gift on your birthday, so there!