Ismail

I ended up watching The Kite Runner this Saturday. The film has been made skillfully, balancing the bright and the dark sides of Kabul’s history. The streets of Kabul resembled those that I had seen in my native district of Kutch, and the people looked quite the same. My grandmother used to tell me stories of how Kabuliwalas used to bring their produce of cashews, almonds and apricots to sell in cane-baskets stacked upon carts which were pulled by donkeys or camels, year after year, until they disappeared. I wished I could see at least one Kabuliwala someday, somewhere.

The ‘little Hazara boy’ Hassan and his friendship with Amir Agha also reminded me of an episode from my childhood. When I was about ten, I lived in a village in Kutch for a couple of years. I used to play with children in the village, amongst whom one was Ismail. He was the son of the only potter in the village. There was only one school in that village, where we all used to study.

Ismail used to turn up near my house almost every evening after school to play marbles with me and a number of other children our age. The rules of the games played with marbles are such that if you win, you end up richer by a few marbles, and if it’s a bad day and you go losing, you may even lose all your marbles. I used to have a good aim from a distance, but when it came to pushing a marble gently without disturbing others, there was nothing to write home about. It is at the end of the game when this skill comes handy. Ismail was perfect at that, and we often used to team up. He hardly had anything for pocket money, which was just enough to buy food for him, so he would borrow marbles from me, and I then let him have his part of those which we won from our games.

He studied at the school up to the fifth grade, and one day he left school to help his father herd their donkeys. He still used to meet us in the dry river-bed, where we often used to go in the evenings to make houses out of sand. He often met us on his way home herding his donkeys back and ask whether my jar of marbles was still to its brim.

When I left the village early one morning, I had again seen Ismail herding his donkeys out of the village. A few years later, I visited the place, and went around looking for everyone who studied with me at the school, everyone with whom I had played – marbles, cricket or just about anything. I learnt that Ismail had been bitten by a snake one day, while he was out at work and died after he returned home later that night.

The last sight of Ismail I remember is that of him smiling and waving at me, as I left the village and he started for work.

Ismail may not have uttered words like ‘for you, a thousand times over’ or may not even have been as dear a friend of mine. But I remembered him the most, when the child Amir Agha recites a poem by Rumi, while he and his father were being transported inside a fuel tanker from Afghanistan to Pakistan. The poem is from Mathnawi 1, 1510:1513, and it is titled ‘Who are we in this complicated world?’:

If we come to sleep

We are His drowsy ones.

And if we come to wake

We are in His hands.

If we come to weeping,

We are His cloud full of raindrops.

And if we come to laughing,

We are His lightning in that moment.

If we come to anger and battle,

It is the reflection of His wrath.

And if we come to peace and pardon,

It is the reflection of His love.

Who are we in this complicated world?

Paradise, found

It has been long since I've been meaning to write this, and there has been a lot happening, in my world at least. But as life would have it, procrastination and action have long bridges to be crossed between them. I'm sitting by my bedroom window, looking out at the overcast sky, listening to some music and waiting for the skies to pour again. Perfect weather for nostalgia.

My thoughts take me back to the mountains that I explored over two weeks, a couple of months ago. The trek started with a day-long rafting trip in Hrishikesh, located at the base of the Himalayas in northern India. Even though the city is regarded as a holy place for pilgrimage, along with the many temples, shrines and communes, there also exist exciting adventure opportunities such as mountaineering and rafting.

The Laxman Jhoola at Hrishikesh

After a few hours of rafting, a couple of hours of swimming in the calmer part of the Ganges and diving from the highest rocks on the banks of the river, I set out on a walking tour around the holy town. The place has a pristine touch to it, with prayer chants buzzing into your ears as you walk past every nook and corner. Monks, real ones and beggars sporting saffron outfits, walk around the city along side hippies and the spiritually curious from all over the world. Even though the environs and lifestyle in the town remain nearly rural, its surprising how the place attracts people from the most developed parts of the world to seek solace.

A monk reciting the Geeta

The next place we set out for was a village close to the Indo-Tibetan border in the Garhwal region. Mandoli, the base camp for our trek is a small hamlet with hardly fifty families living there, plenty of naturally chilled water and no power. The flowers, vegetation in the region are exotic but for food, they grow only potatoes! So, the first thing we were told was that for the next couple of weeks we'd be having a highly potato-intense diet for all our meals.

The average temperatures are usually single digits, and the water freezes you head-to-toe. People in that region are the friendliest possible, kids the most innocent. Women have sharp features and a shy, dreamy-eyed look when they stare at us urban creatures. Even though they may be used to seeing hundreds of trekkers, they themselves must've conquered the mountain ranges a number of times in their lives they don't fail to express surprise and awe when you tell them you plan to climb up to Bedni Bugyal or Roopkund. It may as well be coming from their knowledge of the vulnerability that urban residents are subject to, and the luxuries they crave for.

Local women walk miles to collect fire-wood, at times climbing many trees on the edges of cliffs. The pictures were taken in the evening when our bus broke down on the way to Mandoli and these ladies were on their way home.

Sunshine all day long!

Life in these villages is nowhere close to easy. The villagers migrate from one place to another depending upon rainfall, snowfall and the intensity of winter in a given year. Farming is done on the steep slopes of the mountains without any modern means of transport barring a few trips to the nearest city in a jeep or a state transport bus over the year. Markets for their produce are far away from their villages, so they have to rely on intermediaries who make more money for their produce than they themselves do. Despite all the difficulties, these villagers seem to know some secret potion of happiness to keep up their mysteriously innocent smiles.

The many faces of innocence

Smiles from the mountains

By this time, I had already left behind my life without emails, phones, newspapers, television, music, and everything modern to keep me busy. The only hint of technology I had with me was my camera, which attracted brilliant smiles from the villagers – kids and grown-ups alike.

I could wake up at four in the morning and see the sun rising up to the world, covering the entire landscape in a golden hue. The view was addictive, and one can't stop clicking pictures of the same frame over and over.

The small temple, from which the God escaped...

...and perhaps, went this way!

Colours!

Freedom!

From Mandoli, our group of forty climbed up to Tolpani, an even tinier village with a small plateau on the mountain where we could camp. We stayed the night there, and witnessed new colours of the sunset we had never seen before. The next morning, we started off for a long trek up to Bedni Bugyal passing through Ali Bugyal. Bugyal, in Garhwali language means a meadow. Bedni Bugyal is known to be one of the largest meadows at the height of 12,000 feet above sea level in Asia. Tall trees cease to survive after the height of about 9,000-10,000 feet above sea level. We visited the place by the end of summers, just before it starts raining – or rather, snowing heavily. The place was covered with short grass, and I was told that by September the meadows will be colourful with various kinds of flowers and shrubs growing all over.

The meadows have no civilisation, except for the occasional hermit living in one of the many stone-houses built by the villagers living at the base and more recently, trekkers. We camped at Bedni Bugyal for three days, because we were planning to climb up to Roopkund at a height of 17,000 feet above sea level from Bedni, and return to the camp. For Roopkund, there is a legend saying that a king and his pregnant wife were passing by the lake at Roopkund with their cavalry, when a snowstorm struck and everyone died. We were told that when the snow melts, one can still find skeletons of 11-foot tall human beings, belonging to the king and his soldiers. The story continues: since then, whenever a woman tries to climb up to Roopkund, there is a snowstorm, no matter which part of the year.

On the way to Baguabasa, signposts are put together showing the way

We were also told that the trek from Bedni Bugyal to Roopkund is tougher than the mountains that we had climbed so far. So we eliminated 32 out of the 40 guys, and only eight of us started for Roopkund, via Baguabasa, which is situated at a height of 15,500 feet above sea level. Of the eight, only four of us reached Baguabasa, the other four returned mid-way. Until then, the weather was quite sunny with strong wind threatening to blow us off the cliffs. Suddenly, as we reached Baguabasa, clouds gathered in so thick that we couldn't see a few feet in front of us, and lightning struck as if right next to our feet. Within a few seconds, piercing bits of snow hit our skin, and we all had to run downward, back in the direction of our camp.

On the way back, we hopped and jumped our way down the boulders without even looking behind. Suddenly, I realised that I was alone, far ahead of everyone with nobody around. My footsteps made echoes, and the occasional strike of lightning still made me shudder. There I met a family of four – husband, wife, and two daughters, who were planning to climb up to Roopkund by the end of the day. I was spooked. I wished them luck and started walking back again, thinking over the now not-so-superstitious legend. When I reached the camp, I realised I had climbed down the terrain in an hour and a half, which had taken me six hours to climb up!

Through the rest of the day, I snuggled in my sleeping bag trying to bring some warmth back to my frozen body. The next day, we climbed down to a shy, picturesque village called Wan, about 40 kilometres away from where we had started climbing up.

Our guest house in Wan

People in this village were even more reclusive, perhaps in proportion to their distance to the larger world outside. But they turned out to be friendlier when they got talking. One little girl, barely eight years old, followed me through the village as I went on clicking pictures. Later, she asked me to send her all the pictures once I print them off but she was unable to help me with her own address!

This little girl wanted me to send her pictures back to her, but didn't know her own address...

On our way back to Delhi via Nainital, we traveled through a small town called Kausani, which is an old-style hill station. The town also has an old ‘ashram’ established by Mahatma Gandhi, back in 1929. The ashram has a viewing gallery, from which one can see peaks like Kanchanjunga and Neelkanth. After spending one night and one day at this calm hill-station, we headed to the noisier and more crowded hill-station, Nainital.

A mosque in Nainital

Though popular, Nainital is quite urban in its texture, and comes across more as a shopping destination for visitors than a place to unwind. Some parts of the city have an old colonial touch to offer, but the cycle-rickshaws and an occasional horse-drawn buggy make one contrast the past with the future pulled fast-forward by a six-cylinder V8 engine.

In the last leg of our trek, we ended up in a boiling New Delhi, where our skins peeled away because of the quick transition from the snow to moderate heat to scorching sunshine. I had now returned the world of buzzing phones, impersonal emails, quick conversations, coffee vending machines and junk food. Just then, I received a message.

Although I was sad to leave behind the tranquil world of innocence and was looking forward to my return to urban life, an ultra-urban surprise awaited me in the two words of the message: Hong Kong.

Maqtoob!

One flu over the swine

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and it takes a lot of effort to conjure up people and events out of nothing. None of the characters are real, and all references to apparently real-life events are intentionally coincidental. Please do not expect any apologies for insults to the fictional characters.

Once upon a time, there was a city made up of seven islands in the south of the largest continent of a fictional planet. The city was home to a lot of (fictional) people from all over the fictional world. Cutting the long story short, the fictional world was caught in a mass-masking epidemic which was curiously called Swine Flew. Someone had finally made pigs fly, which although clichéd, appeared novel to the resident villagers of the city.

There was a right-wing localist political party in that city, who took up the common citizen’s cause against Swine Flew. The flamboyant leader, who was himself nearing a century of an age, made public appearances claiming that the city was located on the eastern part of the fictional planet, and that he would not tolerate any influence from any other part of the planet (fictional, of course – the planet, not the influence) on the villagers living in that city. Among these influences from the west figured the flying-pigs-disease quite prominently, that the villagers of the city were catching like a fire. The flamboyant leader therefore, banned people from catching pigs-who-fly-disease and ordered a closure of every fictional and non-fictional activity in the city of seven islands for as long as he wished. Anyone who would not obey his orders would be quarantined along with other western-influenced fictional people, and be left to his/her fate.

As fate would have it, the right-wing localist party had a fictional split and one of the flamboyant leader’s fictional followers turned extra-flamboyant, and established another right-wing, ultra-localist political party. The newly emerged extra-flamboyant leader believed in opposing everything that the flamboyant leader suggested. So he opposed the ban on activity.

There had to be a counter-argument for the flamboyant leader’s ban on flying-pigs-wonder he thought the disease was. Mr extra-flamboyant therefore claimed that the Swine Flew was actually a sign of progress and the times to come, and that the villagers of the seven-island-city ought to participate in the disease whole-heartedly, (whole-bodiedly too). In fact, the extra-flamboyant leader went to the extent of demanding an 85% reservation for the native villagers of the city to be able to participate in the pigs-who-fly-disease and uttered a warning that anyone who would dare to take away his fundamental right on the progressive Swine Flew will have to face his wrath and said nothing about what he’d do to them. Speculation is, that he would make that rebel wear a tight mask covering his/her eyes, ears and finally, one of the two nostrils. He is also reported to urge to those villagers who wish to express support to regressive movement to put up nude pictures on their facebook profiles, while those who support the participation in progress are asked to put up profile pictures of them wearing masks.

The villagers of the city are nonetheless enjoying the duel between the flamboyant leader and the extra-flamboyant leader, while pretending to take sides in the presence of the supporters of either leader. Some villagers are now planning to launch a third fringe to oppose both, the flamboyant leader and extra-flamboyant leader but are yet undecided on the agenda of opposition. Sources from within the third fringe indicate that they estimate it would take a few years to come up with a fictional opposition agenda. Until then, the extra-flamboyant leader welcomes support for progressive pigs-who-fly-disease, while the flamboyant leader continues to issue successive bans on the western influenza.

And that, fellow idle-beings, is enough of a dose of bullshit for the day.

Karma!

A few months back, I was sought for interviews by a number of major international publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Forbes and the like. When the quotes from these interviews were published, my father religiously collected each one of all the articles and took them home and maintained a copy. When I told him that this may happen quite often, he said to me: “My name has never been published in a newspaper. I don't want to miss out on your fame at least.”

I brushed it off thinking it amateurish at the time. Last month, when I was flying out of the city to someplace, I happened to look down from the plane's window, and spotted something that my father has been involved with, in the past. That something is a pagoda constructed for meditation, the sponsors of which are looking to get it qualified as the world's eighth wonder. The structure is the largest stone dome made out of interlocking large blocks of stone with a diameter of 90 meters and a height at the center of 91 meters. When I showed it to a colleague of mine traveling with me, he was awestruck and wanted to visit the place. It was only when I told my friends about the pagoda describing my father's contribution to it and saw their reactions, I realized what my father must have felt about the newspaper articles mentioning me.

It may not be a big deal a few years down the line that neither me nor my father will be remembered for our work. But thinking of the pagoda sure makes me want to do more, not for me, but for my father.

Sunday, bloody Sunday.

It was a lazy Sunday, just like many others when you sit down and think of life in slow motion. I received a text message from an unknown number:

Life meant: A cold evening, four friends, a slow drizzle and four pegs of rum.

Life meant: 100 rupees for petrol, two rusty old bikes and an open road.

Life meant: Maggi® noodles, a hostel room and the clock showing 3.25 AM.

Life meant: The last exam paper, one night, one book and eight duffers.

Life meant: One girl, one number, four friends and a fight.

Now, life means: Old friends, many cities, different lives and a longing.

The number was an unknown one because I had left the old contacts’ lists on my previous phone, and moved on to a new one without caring to transfer all the contacts. The brutal honesty of our singular lives does not as much shake us up to rekindle long lost friendships, still.

So these days, even though there are evenings with slow drizzles and pouring rains there is usually only one peg of rum. These days, it is not the question of 100 rupees for petrol or collecting 6,000 rupees and then borrowing 2,000 more to put together enough money to buy an old rusty bike. While the stereo blurted out “Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!” I fished for reasons.

When social networking sites came into being some five years ago, I had a bit of a euphoric feeling about the ability to get back in touch with almost everyone I knew sometime in the past.

Over time, the realisation dawned upon me how different our lives have grown. Those friends with whom you shared a close camaraderie some years ago suddenly seem to be strangers: as if you knew a person who was someone entirely different from the one you are talking to now.

That perhaps was the reason why I chose to keep my past life past, and did not bring much of it further into the present. Strangely enough, the longing still remains even if the choice was a conscious one. On the other hand, I think it is part of the process of growing up and growing out of the world that you used to once live in.

Or perhaps, it’s written.

Maqtoob!

Condomania

So they had installed condom vending machines to reduce the spread of AIDS. Initially people were quite wary of spending and expected them as complimentary gifts. They broke open the machines, took away as much they needed. But that carried grave risks coupled with limited supply. They sought privileged access. Turns out some eager chaps have taken the vending machines home!

Imagine what happens next:

He: "Look babe, what did I get! Lets get ready *blushing*"

She: "Oh wow! But dah'ling... this requires us to put in coins every time we need a pack"

He: "Darn... do we have any coins here?"

She: "Hell no... what are we going to do now?"

He: "I know what we've to do... pay-phones... let me go get a few! I'll be right back, and then we'll... *blushes more* ... happily ever after!"

All ye policemen and municipalitymen, if you're reading this, you know where to look for your condomaniac-turning-phonomanic! And for those who've still not taken any lessons, act now. Better safe than sorry -- there's still quite a few machines out there.

Maqtoob

I remember this word ever since I had read The Alchemist. It is an Arabic word, which means “it’s written”. Someone asked me recently, whether I am superstitious: the question made me ponder. Is it being superstitious when you believe that it’s written? I guess not. Is the belief impractical? I wouldn’t worry about it. It works!

This weekend I saw Slumdog Millionaire, and found it quite well-executed. There was a debate about whether Slumdog’s a pervert, voyeuristic exhibition of India’s poverty and everything bad about India or just an attempt at realism. I wondered whether this was the first attempt at realism by any film-maker, considering the noise that has been made around the plot and some of the scenes of the film. Especially when I remember the 1991 Bollywood art film Dharavi (City of Dreams) directed by Sudhir Mishra, Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay or Dev Benegal’s Split Wide Open and English, August. All these were made in the 90s, when India was just about turning into the “center of the world” as Salim puts it, in Slumdog Millionaire. Nobody cared to peddle the term “poverty porn” earlier, when these films were released. Perhaps, this debate was written too!

A few weeks ago, I had seen a play titled “Kavita Bhaag Gayi” (transliterated as “Poetry is absconding”), which describes a young poet who has forgotten how to write poetry. His loss of prose is blamed on the stressful and frightening lifestyle in modern day Mumbai which is caught in a spate of terror attacks, language wars and disputes over political propaganda. Although the play was thought provoking, but its impact lasts just so long as we step out to get lost in the mobs. Sadly, the satirical taunts made by the protagonist were laughed at by the audience – most likely they were lost as attempts at ridiculing the (parallel, real life) characters in question.

A lesson I learnt from both these experiences is that we as a population get too engrossed in the superficial detail (I know this is an oxymoron, thank you), and are hardly bothered to understand the crux of the matters at hand. And I sincerely hope this exercise is not a part of the larger process of make-believe, of putting up an intelligent face. Besides, by doing nothing about it, I too would be an accomplice in spreading the rot. One does not need to make a choice here: the question is of taking the first step. If one waits for the next person to take the first step, well, this bit is not written for sure. That first step will remain as distant as ever!