How the World Came to Me [4]

Beneath our feet there will be pebbles and rocks, some of them colored. Cheta’s waters were so clear that one could see the pebbles on his bed. One could see the little fish swimming amid them. There was a bamboo grove that Cheta flowed through. The bamboo twined above him and formed a canopy. It let in discrete beams of sunshine which lit up his waters with quivering patches of light.

Iphi lay farther southwards where the tribal hamlets began. His pace was languid and bed wide which he filled up during the monsoons. I still do not know whence this river came. It drained somewhere in the plains of Assam. His bed yielded strangely shaped rocks. Some looked like faces, some like people. In autumn kans grass grew on this bed. The banks of Iphi had not been bridged. One had to ford him. When you did so the ice cold water tickled and numbed your feet. Many fish swam in it. Some had an ochre back. With a little skill and patience, you could scoop one out of the water with your hand. In autumn and winter we will picnic on the banks of Iphi. I was nine when I raised a castle of sand and pebbles on his bank. I also brought back a stalk of kans grass.

Deo

To reach Sally one had to walk northwards. You crossed Deo on the way and trudged up a hill. It will be a couple of kilometers’ walk before you reached this lake. Clouds rested here sometimes when they got tired of their vagabondage. If lucky, you could find yourself in the embrace of a cloud. I cannot describe what it is like to be embraced by a cloud. You know the feeling only when you have known the embrace. Sally’s water was a blue faintly tinged with green. Sally was surrounded by a brooding, frowning forest. The canopy of the forest here was sparing in letting in even sunshine. There were trees around which bore blossoms when it was time for them to. When they did many shades of ochre and red reflected in the water. Sally was a watering hole for the animals inhabiting the forest. If you were lucky you could catch the sight of a mithun quenching its thirst. These bisons with their stockinged feet roam the forest and are prized by the tribal people for their meat and hide. One day I walked through clouds and a shower of rain to reach Sally and heard the mating call of the mithun. If you dared to stand on the edge of a precipice which was close by you could see the flat plains of Assam far away and the broad expanse of the Brahmaputra. If it were to be a rainy day you had to be careful. The trees above, the grass below, abounded in leeches. Some were thick as a human finger. It was not unlikely to have one drop inside your shirt from some branch.

Our playground too abounded in leeches and was ringed by the flames of the forest. In June and July they will be in full bloom. An especially big one stood by the fine-leg boundary. When fourteen, Shourob and I decided to raise our cricket team. I was a lanky lad, rather tall for my age. I will bowl gentle off-cutters, at least tried to. I was no tear away. But on a good day I could be rather good. On a bad day, though, the ball just won’t heed my hand. I was thirteen when I had bowled five consecutive wide balls in a game. It was drizzling that day. But it did not matter since we played with a synthetic ball. The first ball of my first over will always make me cold and nervous. Then I used to bowl what was my idea of off-spin. I will pitch the ball a little way outside the off-stump and hope that it turns in. Of course, many times it turned away instead. As I ambled in I knew that I am not gripping the ball well. When ten minutes later I walked back to where I was fielding I was struggling to hold back my tears. We saw ourselves as a brotherhood and I had let my mates down. That day a very lonely thirteen year old boy had walked back home through a drizzle.

The pitch on which I bowled five consecutive wides.

                                                   
Shourob and I did raise our cricket team. He was the captain cum the wicket keeper. He managed to get his father to buy him a pair of ‘keeper’s gloves. Shourob had a lot of enthusiasm. But he was rather roly-poly and no good at keeping wickets at all. But, then, he will say, “If Ian Healy can make it, so can I.” This Australian was rather portly too, but could be as nimble-footed as a fawn. We were fourteen young gentlemen who called ourselves the ‘Prenex Cricket Club.’ What does ‘Prenex’ mean? This is what I had asked Shourob when our team was named. The name was his choice. He was gracious enough to own that perhaps it means nothing but at least it sounds stylish. Today I know for sure that ‘Prenex’ indeed means nothing.

We had our tasks allotted. Shourob’s responsibility was to pick up fights with the boys of other schools and neighborhoods and then challenging them to a game with us. Being well endowed, he was difficult to beat up. I, as the vice-captain, was expected to practice my bowling a lot and keep in top form. Lingi was supposed to be a handy bat and bowl tight when needed. I feel that he had some genuine talent. He discharged both roles honorably. He was a buffoonish boy, even for a fourteen year old boy. He too was into making comics and hired Sanu as his illustrator. Together, they produced a strip populated by bald headed gangsters. Sanu was one of our strike bowlers. He bowled his off-breaks firmly rooted in the crease without a run up. We all were mystified by this preternatural talent of his. There was James who played no role in particular. Generally the last ‘man’ in, he will walk to the pitch dragging the bat in his wake grinning from ear to ear. Mostly, he will return a ball or two later grinning from ear to ear. And there was Langkam whose deliveries sometimes bounced twice before they reached the batsman and exhausted themselves before they reached the ‘keeper. We were a league of extraordinary gentlemen.

How the World Came to Me [3]

I have forged many friendships since, both within and without me. These have been friendships I have held dear and still do. I have known many heroes too, from the Phantom to Beethoven. I have seen and known the tree leaves when they are green and when they are brown. I have known an earth mottled with sun and shadow. I have always loved this piebald earth as it is beneath a tree on a sunny day.

As one winter followed another I grew from a child to a lad. Some of the gods faded and some others were exiled. The world lost a little of its eloquence and became a little more gross matter. But, fortunately, it did not cease to speak to me entirely. Nor were all my gods banished. I still occasionally felt them about. As the first faint traces of down appeared on my upper lip, I still felt and awaited the fragrance of spring. But now the hills seemed a little less lofty, the forest a little less forbidding. The river which flowed outside the town seemed a little less far away. I could reach out to them on my own. I was fifteen now and I was a tramp. I worried my parents often. My school lessons did not command as much of my attention as they thought they ought to.

They could not have commanded all my attention. Too many things laid claim to it. My child’s pantheism was being replaced by a new layer of thoughts. The first pimples had marked my cheeks and the first dent had appeared on my heart. I had also taken to trekking to the river on my own.

Deo could be benign and playful. Deo could be mighty and cruel when fed by the rains or the melting snows. Almost every year they will lay a bridge spanning him and he will sweep it away with unconcern. I was told that he sprang down the hills at a place called Itha Popu. The earth there was sacred and blessed by the gods. They still descended there sometimes, though they had long given up consorting with men. They found us unworthy. One had to be a doughty warrior to make this pilgrimage. The walk was long and took one across hills, vales and thick palls of mist. I have always sought the gods and wished I could make the pilgrimage. I never could. Those are treacherous hills, my tribal friends will tell me. Unless your hand bore a sword or a gun with skill you could end up being the prey of a wolf. I knew that they stalked the hills. In the night one could hear them crying out to the moon.

The moon will rise as a giant silver orb. It will be long in rising behind the hills. The moon will light up their crests with its gentle shimmer. It will spring up the sky in a sudden instant. I will look out of the window to witness this instant. It never got old. Some stars will now be dimmed and some others will be put out. And somewhere, very far away, the wolves will cry out. Their cry will beat against the hills and spread far. The moonshine will noiselessly slide down the tree leaves. It will noiselessly crawl upon the earth, suffuse the earth. Sometimes, a lone cloud will bathe in its cascade and look unreal. Moonshine cast shadows too. But they were delicate shadows of a leaf or a cloud. They will be erased by the slightest touch of any other light. If we switched off the lights sheaves of moonshine will pour into the house. I felt them against the back of my hand. They felt cold to touch. Or so I thought.

Sanu was my constant companion in tramping. We were fast friends. On the play ground I was often baffled by his off breaks delivered with an action that defies description. His flight had a knack of landing inches short of your toes and getting you stumped or clean bowled. He was not as good a batsman. But he was a mean hand at carom and beat me at it often. Sanu had an obsession with heroes, from the Superman to the Phantom. So did I. So, it was natural of us to try creating a hero of our own. Thus, at the age of fifteen, I got into my first creative collaboration. He did the drawings and I wrote the story. It was about a noble intentioned mummy from four thousand B.C. coming back to life in our times. Appalled, Taraka takes to some Batman like vigilantism. Curiously, Sanu drew our hero with a bald head. When I asked him the reason, he said it is easier to draw a bald headed man. The strip was never completed. I have published a strip since. But it was a different joy altogether creating my own hero at the age of fifteen. Perhaps, someday I will revive you Taraka. I let you go as a lad. But, maybe, as a wizened man I will find you again.

A little hillock lay behind our school. A temple stood upon it. Cheta flowed down the hillock into the woods that lay on the southern edge of our town. At the hour of the quiet and still dawn we could hear the hushed murmur of this stream from our house. Inside the woods, upon level earth, Cheta broadened out and became even quieter. Sanu and I will go to these woods often. Ten years ago they still seemed untouched by man. There were giant trees. One had to crane one’s neck to see their crown. Nameless creepers clung onto them. There was a tree which had been struck by lightning and charred. It was an almost sixty feet giant and looked like a sovereign, proud and lonesome.

How the World Came to Me [2]

Besides the hills, clouds and elephants what enthralled me was the sky. The night sky. The sky I knew as a child was not miserly in revealing its riches. As a crimson sun will slide down beneath the horizon, it day’s work done, and an unsure twilight will be conquered by the night, this sky will clad itself in its countless jewels, the middle of it thickly streaked with the Milky Way. On these dusty plains I have never seen the sky sporting this trail. The sky that domes these plains is too turbid to be necklaced thus. There will be a time in the year (perhaps winter) when the seven seers shone upon the tip of a hill and as the seasons wore on they slid farther across the sky, apparently engaged in their profound dialogue. Winters did not allow for it, but during our brief summer Baba and I used to do a lot of star gazing sitting in our little lawn after sundown. I liked to inhale the aroma let out by the earth and the grass after what had been a hot day by our standards.My age was not yet in double figures but I fancied myself as a budding astronomer.

Besides owning an elephant and wanting to be an astronomer I had other ambitions. I wanted to be a dauntless adventurer and lead my conquering armies into strange lands. All my strange lands were in the backyard and I had enough phantom armies of my imagination to lead. I fashioned swords out of sticks and waged many a gruesome battle. However, sometimes attempts at extending the battle front to our garden earned a scold and rather strict instructions from Ma to avoid waging battles in the future.

Not all my discoveries were of lands of fantasies. I discovered the gods too. Not the gods that were handed down to me but those of my own fashioning. With a primitive’s wonder I saw my gods everywhere. I would fashion stern images of them from earth and offer them blossoms from nameless plants. I offered them sacrifices. Yes, the victims were mostly unfortunate insects. Looking back I feel it was not all cruel boys’ games, my gods were real to me. At least till the age of eight. But my submission to them was never complete. The ritual done, I often crushed the image beneath my feet. This is what I will do to my gods, I will think, I will make them and mar them as I choose. But now I know that you cannot always choose your gods. Sometimes the homage is extracted from you and you have no choice but to pay it. And not all gods are propitiated by nameless blossoms.

There were more real things that I sought to discover. There were insects that I pealed off to see what lies beneath their wings and shells. I aspired to achievements in entomology too. Thus, a lot of time was expended in either slaughtering insects or collecting insect relics. Once I picked up the skull of a drone by an ant hill. The colony had apparently feasted on him. What will an entomologist say? Does a drone have a skull? Nevertheless, what I had picked did look like a skull and seemed as though it had belonged to a drone. It was my proud possession which I showed around for sometime and elicited the jealousy of some other ten year old boys. Play stations were yet in the future, we were sufficiently content with insect relics. However, my tribal friends were much better in collecting relics of an osteological kind. I think I was eleven when one day Karge strutted into the class with an important air. We suspected that he has made some significant acquisition. We could not, however, imagine that it will be the skull of a golden langur which he soon proceeded to fish out of his bag. The simian had been bagged by his father during a foray into the forest, he told us. The temptation to acquire it for a few comics was great. But I kept from doing so since I was not quite sure how Ma will react to the trophy.

I developed a hunger for the printed word quite early. All I can recall is that I have been reading since the time I learnt to read. It was not often that I felt the need to talk, even now it is no different. But I will have lengthy conversations with the characters in the books that I read. Since not all the conversation took place in my mind, very often I was found muttering under my breath. Ma will joke that it is the sign of a juvenile dementia. I empathised with the people and animals I met in the pages of books and occasionally felt one with them. I had felt in my veins the savage anger of Buck the dog when he finds his master slain by the Indians. It was the only master Buck had loved. To all the rest before he had only submitted.

Just as I loved the word I loved the earth. The earth, in fact, was one giant word to me. Many meanings lay in it and many moods for the child that I was. I tried to gather both from its feel and fragrance. And, of course, I wallowed in it a lot. I liked it when during sunny summers its skin will peel in little eddies of dust raised by the wind. It saddened me when in winters the earth will change to a deep shade of grey with no blossom shooting out of it. Sadness since has remained for me a deep shade of grey. The earth spoke through what it yielded. Through the trees and the blades of grass which grew upon it. So, I elicited the earth’s eloquence by planting a sapling and watching it grow. Since I wanted to be an adventurer I also tried to raise my own forest in the backyard. I planted many saplings, nameless and wild, on a little patch which was my own. A little blade of elephant grass I planted grew to a height of twelve feet. It never failed to awe my friends. I had my own little forest of Dengali. The Phantom himself used to gallop through it on his white stallion.

Sometimes, on some windy day, the clouds will gallop across the sky like dark stallions. They forebode rain. The rains were always. The rains were not a season. I resented the clouds because they kept me from my strange continents. But I liked the fragrance the earth let out when washed by the first drops of rain. And I liked the pitter-patter of its drops upon the roof. I liked to watch the drops roll down tree leaves like ephemeral little pearls. The rain also unleashed the denizens of a marvelous strange world. The frogs will hop about in little puddles. I found them amusing. The earthworms will crawl out of the netherworld. The ants, their colonies flooded, will busily rebuild. And I will float a paper boat in a puddle and play seaman.

There were creatures I adopted, while sometimes I forged an unspoken friendship with one. We had planted a creeper rose which crept up one of our windows. In spring time it sprouted little crimson flowers. Once a spider spun its web between its leaves. The spider was an emerald green. It had little black dots for eyes and wore sadness on its face. I took it for a pet and took to dropping ants on its web. Once it ate an ant in my presence. It was perhaps cruel, but its little, sad dot eyes remain the most human eyes seen by me.

There were other pets which belonged to me beside a brook. I had to leap across this thin trickle on my way to school. Creepers and bushes grew on its either side. Ladybugs lived on their leaves. They were unusual; their backs were of a silvery shine. If you held one against the sun it became a little rainbow between your fingers. They all belonged to me. One day I brought a couple home. I tore out their wings and tried to feed them on leaves. They died. Rainbows must not be brought home. They must not be owned. They are fragile and cease to be if you do.

We had a little snake in our garden. Sometimes it basked in the bed of marigolds and sometimes in the bed of dahlias. Ma never taught me to fear it. She only asked me never to bother it. You cannot speak of friendship to a snake. So, with the snake I forged a friendship never spoken.

How the World Came to Me

I was bred in the hills and the world was late in coming to me. Nor was I keen on seeking it. So it waited yonder, far away, as I wet my toes in the brooks that wound through the woods down the hills. The world I grew up in was ringed by hills. Many a brook trickled down their thickly wooded cheeks. 

Sometimes I did long for the world that lay beyond the hills looming upon mine. At times, my own world seemed too little and too aloof. But the longing would only flit through my mind and rest as I also nurtured a fear of what might lie beyond. Because, in all the life I have lived, I have nurtured a fear of strangeness. This is perhaps why I do not take easily to people who are strange to me. May be, the hills make you aloof.

Beyond an occasional longing for that beyond, I longed for little else, for I loved the world I lived in and was content in it. It had everything that I needed to live with then, fleecy clouds perching atop hills, shiny beetles beneath the blades of grass, the moan of the wind on a stormy night as it ruffled the trees, lying under the quilt I would imagine it to be the moan of a marauding monster, and the sky of a shade of blue I have not seen since I left home.

The rain always lurked in some corner of that sky and every now and then came swooping down upon the land. But on some days, alas how far apart those days seemed then, I woke up to a sky not laden with grave, grandfatherly clouds but awash in the tender glow of a baby egg-yolk sun gingerly peeping behind the hills, creeping up the sky. I remember we used to rejoice on those days. The washing would finally get a chance to dry, and I to frolic in the backyard, to build my castles, to explore my strange continents where even stranger peoples lived, and to assist Phantom in fighting the pirates. If the clouds did not snuff the sun out during the course of the day, Baba and I took a walk in the evening. We generally took the road that led out of the town. One did not need to walk too long to walk out of the town. Fifteen minutes, or twenty, perhaps, depended on how fast one walked. As those little houses receded behind us, I  quizzed him on everything that was of pressing concern to me then, from how hot it is on the sun to why the leaves are not purple. He, on the other hand, would quiz me on the books or the comics that I might be reading then. Sometimes I would say, “You know, if I get the chance to, I can make magic better than Mandrake.” I do not recall that he ever showed any disbelief.

The house in which we lived in those days will appear strange to a plains dweller. It was wooden and rose above the ground on stilts of cement, each about three feet high. But this is the way houses are built in that far away fastness where the earth is prone to shifting its back sometimes. The wooden floor showed a few faint cracks at places. I knew all of them by heart. But to me they were not mere cracks but mighty canyons and valleys. They never posed a problem to me, however, for I was a giant and could leap across them as one leaps across a puddle. I had a corner in the house. It lay beneath one of the bedroom windows. It was my kingdom. It was where I had set out on a wooden raft with Tom and Huckleberry, it was where I had ridden the high waves with Captain Ahab.


My window did not face the hills but another did. They looked rather sullen to me. And they seemed resentful of the clouds which will veil them as though they did not exist when it rained. Sometimes, the sun will shine as the veil still held. Then many a colour I could not name then and cannot name now will flit upon it. Or, sometimes, it will serve as a canvas for a rainbow. No one, as I knew, had ever passed beneath a rainbow. What about the birds then? I will wonder.

It was not just the clouds, the hills changed colour too. Only they were slower in it than their rivals. With each passing season the ceaseless forest which clothed them changed to a different shade of green. I could not name those shades then. I still will not be able to name them. I am rather incompetent with colours.

I was fond of watching the passage of seasons and awaited their passage. But it will be a long wait because winter occupied most of the year. There will be a foreboding of it in the air by the end of September and vestiges of winter will linger in the air till the end of April. But no matter how long the wait, winter gave way to spring. It always does, everywhere.

Spring rode on many signs, more colours, more birds and buds on the branches of trees, but for me the most inevitable augury of spring was the smell which preceded the season. Each season had its smell for me and spring had its own. One day, while the far away peaks will still be swathed in snow and the earth and the naked trees will still slumber in the embrace of winter, will waft in a gust of wind carrying that smell. I cannot describe it and have no name for it. Apparently, there is a great deal that I cannot name. But for me the smell was the oracle that foretold that soon the grass beneath my feet will no more be a pale, sickly yellow but will change to a brighter shade of green and that the sun will show up more often. And that, soon, once again, there will be beetles and grasshoppers about. It also meant that the river which flowed a little way outside the town will no more be a faint trickle. The snows will melt upon the peaks filling it with water and Deo will gurgle and chuckle loudly running down to meet his brother Dibang. Spring was also when you rolled on the new grass and let your skin smell of it. I did. Besides, there was something else to look forward to. It was the season when elephants walked down the street we lived on. No, they were not wild but were owned by the tribal chieftains who were in the lumbering business. The beasts will walk back home in the evenings after a hard day’s work and I will run out to the veranda to gape at them. I dreamt of owning an elephant someday. Not because I wanted to be a lumber jack but because it seemed like a kindly, sagacious animal which will make for some good company.