Small Things

Rain rained hard, the newly tarred roads looked new and black and the old tarred roads with potholes that were innumerable, like the holes that an inexperienced dosa maker’s dosa made, looked ruined, broken and smashed. The rain drops like silver lines shot down on earth and in it went, never to be seen again. The silver lines made small bubbles in the water in the potholes. The bubbles didn’t form a round, there was too little time for forming a round, and they rather looked like domes, domes of mosques. The sandal colored water in the potholes formed brown- orange pastries once the rain ceased, it stuck like wax to ones shoes if stepped on or in. The thick paste went in deep into the designed dug in roadways on the soles and stayed there like deep ugly secrets that have to be forced out for a light soul, sole. Anything that is sharp and thin would do to force it out, from a knife to a broom stick but not words, how much ever sharp they were. The thick paste if left in the roadways of the sole, it would make you feel them all the time, a bump under your shoed feet, protruding, heavy and irritating. Abandoning those shoes wouldn’t help as the rain would come again and potholes are disappearing nowhere, may be something else would help like not stepping on or in those potholes and not letting the mock brown- orange pastry get under your feet. The wheels of vehicles that go down into the potholes and come out of it paint themselves brown- orange and leave a trail on the new black roads, as a reminder of the past or even a warning of the coming future. The school girls in uniforms wear black slippers, giving their nylon socks and Bata shoes a rest, a monsoon holiday. The boys have brown- orange dots and shapeless patches painted on their shirts and trousers from the muddy afternoon break’s rainy football match. The relentless advertisement on radio and television of Poppy umbrellas leave the common man humming’mazha mazha kuda… ’. The nursery kids refuse to let go of their fancy umbrellas even when they bounce around in crowded buses without a vacant seat or footrest. The biker women cover themselves partly in ridiculous colors of plastic material, raincoats, and the wet sari cling to their legs once they get down from their bikes and walk into their work place. The men on bikes look like mini hulks as the air puffs up their fully covering raincoats. In the traffic signals the travelers in cars listen to the radio over the sound of the wipers. Darkness fills the rooms, humid air shrinks the doorway or enlarges the door making it a strenuous ordeal to close the doors and if closed, open the doors. The cloudy days and dark corridors make the day at college a romantic one. The sound of rain becomes the sound of music and adolescent lovers listen to a lot of music and do a lot of dreaming. The combo of hot chai and parippuvada or dal vada from roadside dhabas tastes tastier but the ice cream shops take a back seat. The washed clothes take days to dry and your favorite jeans are always wet and heavy on you in the rain. Students blame the rain for everything, “why are you late?” “Because of the rain ma’am”, “where is the homework?” “The rain wet it all ma’am”, as if they were inhabitants of a refugee camp with a leaking tent. Wet umbrellas are left open to dry in the balconies, porches, classroom corners, supermarket corners, office corners. Then, gradually the rain ceases, then stops, sun comes back, umbrellas stay home, Bata shoes prolong their leave for some more time, and brown- orange pastries turn into hard cakes, football matches happen in heat, women abandon their raincoats, men are reluctant to let go of their mini hulk form, college is romantic only for the lovers, the dreamers give dreaming a break, the doors and doorways behave better, the jeans dry up, the roads turn grey, the earth becomes dusty, the jingles of Poppy umbrellas fall out of trend, kids forget their umbrellas, students find another excuse for not doing the homework.

I love rain and all that it brings with it, or rather all that I think that rain brings with it. I don’t go around inspecting the world when it rains and see if people are actually humming the poppy jingles, but, I would like to believe they do, even if the Poppy stops manufacturing umbrellas I would still like to believe that people sing that song during monsoon. I think it is so with me because I have this memory of walking through the vegetable market, when I was a kid, near our house and there one of the vegetable vendors happened to be singing this particular song. I remember it so well for some reason and since then without me realizing it I was living with this bizarre belief that people sing this song in the rainy season. It is strange and stupid but I love it and I wish it was true. I also believe that, as you touch a tree bark with your palm the bark from within sends a glowing vibe through your palm into your heart which stays there forever and makes you stronger.

Some things get instilled in your mind and stays there without an effort. You don’t acknowledge them, you naturally over look them. Those small things are always there though, refusing to let go of you, linking you to your origin, your raw true self with that faint, feeble yet unbreakable thread of theirs. Whoever you are, wherever you go, whatever you do, the small things in you decide where you end up, as what.   

Wounded paws

The pain was scrutinizing, deadly. He fell on the ground, his eyes bulged out and through them he saw the innumerable number of human feet running towards him and then it came again, the blow. This time the pain wasn’t as deadly as the first one, this time the blow was just a relief. A relief from the fear that was life…

Statistics say that this year the poachers have done a very good job. Tiger poaching would be the one area in which humans have exceeded far above the expectations. Tigers are killed like they are born to be killed. If tiger teeth are good medicine for one disease, tiger paws are good for another, tail for something else, skin for decoration and I am not very sure about testicles and balls but even that is sold for a good amount of money I am sure. Which part is sold and which aren’t doesn’t really matter does it? A tiger’s life is worth lot of money and that is all that matters. Kill the tiger, skin it, chop it, and sell it. The Chinese are waiting with open arms and tons of money. Money is all that matters. The forest officials work for money and they don’t really bother which way the money comes from. A poacher’s dynasty is surely richer than the government’s and we know all things in the world is inter-related and inter-dependant. Anyway, what happens or how it happens out there isn’t something very well known to me. All I know is that the tigers are killed and the future for them is terribly bad and vulnerable.

When poaching happens in its own efficiency, tigers are also killed when they are spotted in villages one kilometer or so away from the forest areas. “Tiger is a threat to our cattle, to us, to our lives and lively hood”, the villagers say. Yes, they are right. When you decide to make your homes by clearing off forest lands, there would be consequences, it is your fault and don’t you sound so helpless. If tiger could speak the human language it would say “you humans have destroyed our homes, you steal from us, you leave us no place to live in, you intrude in our lives and take away our peace, you gift us fear and we are afraid of you all the time, you torture us, you captivate us, you kill our mothers and leave our kids to die, you are murderers and monsters who conquer our homes and make it your own and evacuate us from wherever we belong, you inflict fear and pain in us so much that we do not know anymore what we are to do once born, our mothers are afraid and so we are, fear is so much a part of our lives that we never for a moment parts with it, you humans stink and we do not want anything to do with you. Why do you come in big noisy vehicles, ruin our soil, take away our peace and torture us daily, every hour of the day? We aren’t doing it to you. You spot one of us anywhere nears the houses that you have built for yourselves in our land, you kill us or you captivate us, and you send us off to zoos. Do you know anything about our lives other than the tricks that you play on us to trap us, to kill us? No, you know nothing and you never will. Even if you do it would not make you any better because your vision is clouded in the blood money that you make out of us. Your lives are wasting this planet. This planet would do much better without your lot.  Our homes are shrinking day by day and we know that you know it better than we do, and that is what which takes away all the hopes that we ever have had. We are living because you are not letting us die. We are your creations aren’t we? We have no right to choice, to freedom, to peace, to contentment, to home, to water, to food, to space, to privacy, to family, to life. We exist because you want us to. We exist for you to kill us. We do not understand what you do with all this money that you make. Do you eat money? Is money the most basic need of yours? No, we know it isn’t. Money is only something that you would like to have so that you can have all the materialistic gains of the human world. For attaining that non-essential luxury of yours you ruin us, you crush our lives. Is that fair? Well, fairness in the human world has undergone a lot of change lately and we haven’t been able to understand it fully. All we can understand is that the world of yours is complex and evil and monstrous. If we had a choice, we would never be a part of it. Our lives in the forests, that you have left to destroy later, have become very uncomfortable. Yes right, you do interfere a lot but other than that, we have very less of an area. We have a territorial issue you see, we need our space and that is all we need but space isn’t available anymore. You have shrunk our forests to such tiny fragments of land, haven’t you? We become independent and move on with lives separately once we are matured and this custom forces us to find our own space which is no more available. The non-availability of space makes us competitors and battlers. We kill each other. Yes, you kill us, we kill each other, and natural causes kill us, all in a way is caused by you, human being. Aren’t you proud of it? Our life is dear to us, and we would like to live and not merely exist for you. Could you please not make your extra big money out of us? Could you not provide us with some space and privacy in our land? Please, we beg you. We beg you to leave us alone.”

Isn’t it such a great luck that animals don’t speak the human language? The world would have been a much better and purer place of course but that is not something we need is it? They have voice and they are intelligent creatures but we the thinking man prefers to leave their voices unheard, to deliberately silence their cries, to crush their voices and lives. We will succeed in this because we are capable of it; we are rational, shrewd and cunning. A couple of decades later, if things go by the same standard, let us proudly then say to our children, “there was once a magnificent creature called tiger. It is no more. It’s gone extinct, just like dinosaurs did. There is nothing as great and majestic as a tiger that trod the face of earth. There is nothing as great a sound as a growl of tiger. There is no such beauty as that of those orange stripes, and there is nothing as royal as a royal Bengal Tiger. You lost your chance of living in the age of tigers because we killed all of them.” Listening to this proud achievement of ours, our children will look up to us and praise us. Just like we praise Jim Corbett for all the hunting he did. Be aware though, when the children gain knowledge and goes back to look up on history, they will realize that Mr. Corbett had took upon tiger conservation as he realized the need of it before he was dead. That is okay though; we can always find ways to justify us, aren’t we good at that?

Is there anybody out there who wants to save tigers for the coming future? Is there anybody who is compassionate? Is there anybody willing to fight the war for them? Is there anybody willing to listen to their cries? Is there anybody who genuinely respects them and their lives? Please, come on let us do it. We still have time to mend our mistakes. They deserve it and this planet deserves it. Let us give a longer life for tigers and forests and thus for our beloved planet. Let us act quick, come on.

Story

Stories make up the world or the world makes up the stories, whichever way, stories are something that the world cannot live without. It is hard to understand many of them but it is always something that all love alike, stories are what a person grows with, dies with. There is a story in every being. Some never heed their stories; some dig in deeper each passing day. Some share their stories, some don’t. Some stories are loved, some aren’t. Some stories help one grow, some stories kill one’s growth. Story is omnipresent, entertaining, intense, powerful, unique yet universal. It takes skill to share a story that engages people. Story tellers are not always loved; their stories have to be entertaining, thought provoking and unique in their way. There is just a thread line gap between a bore and a loved story teller.

I love stories and I see stories everywhere, in every person and every animal. Of course I interpret their stories in my own way and sometimes the stories that I have brought up would have nothing to do with them. I shut it all in my head though because being a bore is not that welcoming. Some stories have the power in them to uplift my confidence, convince me the beauty of it. I share those and I care not if I was a bore, because those stories are worthy enough to be shared. It awes me to think of the innumerable stories that exist in the world. A story is born every moment with every passing breath of every life. All stories are connected, a constantly enlarging web that makes life possible in here.

Train I feel is a living thing that feeds on the stories of those innumerable lives that it carries with it at once. Yes, all modes of public transports carry many at once but I find trains a better patron of stories. Train is alive and real, knower of human emotions, of poverty, of relationships, of bridges and rivers, of slum and sewage. Train is an entity that lives on stories.

Emotions are what that gives story its life. No story is born without emotions. Emotions are the basic requirement for life, for stories. Emotions are complicated, hard to live with at times but impossible to live without. Respecting one’s emotions helps you see the story in them. All emotions are equally great, inevitable and invincible. You cannot beat your emotions, you have no choice but to endure them and live with them. Emotions take their time to move, they make you feel them every second of your life. No, they aren’t cruel, they are just uncontrollable.

Fiction is no lie; it is just a beautified, refined, bettered way of sharing emotions that are true. There is a certain level of truth in every fiction and that is the main reason why fictional stories affect people more than they ever realize. I am a person who is largely affected by the novels that I have read. I have even fallen deeply in love with a fictional character, yes; the lack of true ones might be a reason for that but that is a different story all together.

Story is a traveler and the one who heeds it becomes a traveler.