I believe that I had become frightened and run to my father when I heard a feriwal for the first time as a child. Babu had woken up. I must have asked him all sorts of questions, because Babu said, ‘You’ll see him tomorrow.’
The feriwal had come to the door in the morning. Aama brought out a nanglo. I spied from a hole in the wall. Whether it was Aama’s shawl or the feriwal’s clothes, I saw a flash of white.
‘Why did you give the feriwal so many things on the nanglo? Turmeric, salt, rice, lentils?’ I asked.
‘He’ll fight and chase away evil spirits,’ Aama said.
Spirits of the dark roamed in the night, perhaps watched us in our sleep. Through eyes torn wide I could see their shapes, darker than the dark, standing and stealing forward.
‘The feriwal goes out alone in such hours.’
In your hearts dark mysteries begin to gather.
Another feriwal visited on another night some time later. A cascade of moonlight had fallen from the skies to spray itself inside the house. I got out of bed and stealthily parted the curtains to peep outside.
It was a man shrouded in a large white shawl. He went downhill past our house. The dog snarled a little well after he had passed, pretended to bark once.
When I had grown up sufficiently, I became capable of looking my idols directly in the eye. Therefore, one morning, after offering him many things, I asked, ‘I can’t understand a word of what you chant. What do feriwals like you really say, brother?’
He said that they were devotees of Shiva. He asked me to note down a line: Where the jogi blows his feri horn, there is the lord’s protection.
I thought of Shiva, of his age. Certainly, Shiva was a person, from a mountain somewhere under the Himalaya, of a certain place and of a certain time. His shelter was security to sufferers. It was the age of valour. He would blow his horn into the four directions; the reach of his horn’s blast was his realm, his right and his peace. The rival who heard the horn and remained quiet accepted defeat.
‘Even today my feriwals blow their horns in the night to challenge all rival powers.’
One day, I had reached Simana, the border town. The day was overcast; after loading firewood onto a truck we accompanied the contractor to his home which was also a tea-shop.
We entered the house through the shop. It was a soot-darkened, dim chamber. My feet stepped on a man.
When we step on a person, we know it even through the soles of our shoes. I stopped, froze. The man didn’t say anything, didn’t move. It felt unnatural, inadequate. ‘What’s here?’ I asked.
The householder, who had already walked ahead, replied, ‘There’s a feriwal jogi sleeping.’
‘What?’ I gasped.
I set foot with care. It was as if my foot had fallen off. I stepped on yet another man.
‘How many are there?’ I shouted angrily.
The householder had already passed through to light. He answered with irritation, ‘There must be twenty-five or thirty.’
‘Twenty-five? Thirty?’ I seem to have asked, peered into the darkness of the soot-smeared room and gasped, ‘Thirty feriwals!’
Thirty feriwals in the same place! I found the number and the gathering abhorrible. That there could be a congregation of feriwals, that they could be many and plural, that one of them could be the same as another of them had never entered my imagination. My feriwal was a solitary creature, walking alone, never knowing of any other feriwal. I have always seen statues of the Nepali tiger as solitary creatures; a tiger is formidable as it is—supplied with wings, it may come soaring over oceans; but I am revolted by the idea of an army of such tigers. There can only ever be one such tiger in this world.
I came to their room. I saw that they had opened one of the higher windows and light had entered the room. Two of them had woken up and had dug up embers from the ashes in the hearth; the fire no longer smoked. On the earthen floor stretched many straight and bent bodies, each pulling a dirty shawl to cover his face. A whiff of the mingled odours of little men and their dirty and dusty clothes. A kind of oppression reigned in the room.
After arriving at the bazaar at Suke, I reported everything to an older acquaintance. He said, ‘That is how every ideal topples, one by one. There is but one eternal ideal: God.’
But God as an ideal had fallen a long time ago for me.
An ideal, of a mystery of mine, had lapsed today, and another will fall tomorrow—of patriotism, of virtue, of literariness—and gradually all my ideals will become depleted. And, after that, am I to continue wearing this life as if a tattered rag?
Swindlers and beggars of all mintage come to stand before the door of the house. Therefore, my house has a rule: to the disabled and the helpless we happily give coins, a handful of grains, tea, an old coat. If a swindler comes and stands at the door, in accordance with the household rule, we give him a squash fruit. There are always squash fruits strewn all over the gully in the backyard, so we give them one. The swindlers accept even that, demonstrate their humility and helplessness, and leave.
They said the horn was blown again last night; a feriwal was standing at the door with his multi-coloured bag. The wife had prepared a large platter of foodstuff to offer, but I stopped her, picked up a squash fruit and gave him that.
The feriwal looked at me with scorn, refused my offering, walked away.
One of my ideals had certainly been shattered, but the person and psyche that I am hadn’t been chipped in the least—I was alive and whole even if a little worn. I found joy and strength at the door: forget just the one ideal, even when the entire store of a man’s ideals are destroyed, his psyche remains whole.
I have become much stronger after bearing this blow and I can say this emphatically: Man didn’t have ideals earlier, but his ‘life’ was truthful and whole. To deny this is to blaspheme against life. The exercise of collecting ideals came much later, and more and more ideals were added. But life can be lived without adding meaning to it through ideals and ideologies. A leaf, an unknown insect, a day—how they live life is truly how life should be lived, without becoming fodder to ideologies, without being torn apart between them. Not by looking to the few great deeds—perhaps I will never accomplish a single act of greatness—but by looking to the myriad and ordinary do we learn of life: All work is merely work. They never let you live out just the unadulterated life. We were not born into this life to spend it kowtowing before ideologies.
A Pocketful of Cashews
After accepting on the palm of his hand the bag of cashews he had bought for his son, Rajman once again stepped into the darkness of a blackout. He now walked with the knowledge of a comradeship and warm possessiveness arising from the privilege of grasping and caressing the fifty-gram weight and plastic sleekness of a fistful of cashews. He crossed a drugstore, a cave of brightness created by damming and preventing light from spilling out into the street, and the doors of a rice-and-oil shop shuttered since some time. On the chest of a dark building erect above him were smeared three rectangles of a grimy, pale glow. Along the street ahead was barely a smattering of lights to count. ‘I’ll walk slowly; let it take longer.’ He enjoyed his cleverness. Joy wafted about him like vapour.
‘One is meant to walk home slowly—walking as slowly as I do now—keeping nothing on the mind, making it empty and weightless. I would run to the office in the morning, and run home around this time. That routine brings a sharp ache in the knees. I’ll walk slowly. Let it take longer.’ Really—it was the let it take longer that really pleased him. Trying to really pin down the idea, and with an insight, he said—‘Let it take longer.’ The joy spilled into the darkness, evaporated in filigrees, and dissipated. But it hadn’t floated away very far. He walked with caution, to avoid startling the joy, like a man on tiptoes around a new hen.
Many rushing bodies hurtled past; he gave way to none. He marched ahead, planting his feet with conviction, and nobody ran into him. A small man nearly knocked into him, but he caught hold of him and gentl
y set him aside, and that made him feel magnified. He had been feeling inflated for some time now: the being within him found mysterious the processes through which a man suddenly finds himself growing in stature. He made himself even taller against some passers-by.
He swerved at a familiar spot; the road curved there. The stairs climbing down to the road had spilt there instead, he suffered the injustice of having to surrender a path. As he charted the black lines made by rain-washed soil and dug his heels into the asphalt and marched ahead for fifteen steps, he thought of nothing. ‘It takes effort to think of nothing.’ After that, he didn’t think of anything. His calves, exposed under the inadequate overcoat, were cold. He remembered his hands, shoved into pockets on either side. In the right pocket were the plastic bag of his ‘self’ and a cold handkerchief. He bestowed the handkerchief to the possessionless left pocket: an act of justice performed by the subconscious, a generous deed. ‘There is a blackout,’ his mind echoed what was already known to it—it must have been enjoying itself.
He massaged hard with the palm of his hand the smooth film of plastic, as if scouring a vessel, slipping and sliding his fingers over it. He was compelled to walk on, standing erect through the darkness. The cashews were his joys for the day, this bagful of cashew nuts. He wished to take it out and look at it.
It was pitch dark.
His happiness arose from the fact that he now possessed cashews—‘It seems I am ecstatic!’ He saw a lamp with a large bulb wearing a miniskirt of darkness—Freud’s sexual satire. That lamp should always be whirling, like a mantra-inscribed mani wheel at a Buddhist temple. ‘I really admire Buddha,’ he had said. ‘Buddha’s simplicity is admirable,’ he had said to Ranveer, ‘Buddha’s simple prescriptions are good.’
‘Don’t others have it?’ Ranveer had scolded him. ‘It’s just that you’re incapable of appreciating clever men.’
In the darkness another self within him emerged laughing heartily, and walked another ten paces, still laughing. He had never eaten a bag of cashews by himself. His body slackened on the road—‘I never did eat it.’ He had already become a youth and then a man while still harbouring the greed to some day buy a loaf of bread and eat it all by himself; even as he goofed about, incredibly, an enormous ‘tragedy’ had already precipitated. ‘A man’s youth is spent so quickly.’ He had wanted to drink milk worth two rupees. But in the rush to grow up and become a man he had forgotten to do it. So many desires had died, deprived of regular attention. ‘If I had done it—I would have had done it today.’ His father would come home drunk, wake up his siblings, him—he would hand them puris, laddoos, rasdaana and nimki, spread on a newspaper, and make them eat, even if in half-sleep. One of his younger brothers would cry as he ate. When he had had the opportunity to eat, those nights were the only memory he had of really eating. ‘Mother fed us every morning and evening, but we forget that. We forgot that,’ he was saying elatedly—he had become a similar father himself. ‘Cashew nuts are delicious.’ He tasted it on his teeth, at the base of the tongue.
His teeth were coated with the cream of ground cashew; the base of the tongue was plastered with the thick, white cream. The mouth sensed the nuttiness of roasted cashews; its smell unfurled in the mouth: the aroma of the salted white nut, the sappy wood of magnolia, ink, the waft rising up off the earth after a hot sun. He had clamped shut his jaws, trapping the tongue.
He felt the urge to take out one cashew nut and eat it. He didn’t know whether he walked slowly or quickly, he just kept striding obliviously.
In the instance when his face bathed in the wanton harsh white lights of an open sweets shop he heard—‘Don’t bring home all sorts of sweets for the children. They develop a bad habit, they’ll stay up waiting, refusing to go to bed.’ He had walked quite a distance since acquiring this knowledge. His Kamal waited for him similarly on this day—he opened his mouth in joy—his son Kamal, only recently recuperated after a bout of typhoid, waited for him, awake. ‘What do you want to eat? What shall I bring you?’ he had asked in the morning.
‘I want cashew nuts.’ The boy had been dreaming of it for some time.
‘Write it down on a piece of paper and put it in my notebook—I won’t forget it,’ he had instructed, called his son to his side, and made him write with his own pen—‘Cashew nuts.’ He kicked aside the obstacles put before his eyes by the blackout—My son is waiting!—and continued walking.
A man was reading a cinema poster in the roving light of his torch. Rajman was suddenly gripped by the need to know the time. There was no benefit in knowing the time—‘I’ll reach home soon.’ His son must be looking at the watch, frequently. He was filled with the joy of fulfilment. Now, he slowed down his feet. His heart even smiled a little in the dark. For some reason he was muttering: ‘Routine life is full of terror.’ He saw his home in the light that filled his eyes.
‘When they open the door, I’ll go inside. I’ll pretend as if I didn’t bring anything; I’ll take off the overcoat and throw it over the chair. He will have come to stand by my side. I’ll suddenly remember and point to the overcoat pocket. I’ll tell him look in the overcoat pocket.’
‘I took one out and tasted your cashew,’ I’ll tell my son, ‘Cashews are tasty. One day, I’ll buy a packet and eat it all.’
Rajman felt the plastic bag. The curled cashews shifted about. He caressed them some more. Turned the packet around, measured it. It was nearly square, crinkled at the sealed mouth.
‘What will I achieve by eating one cashew nut? Cashews are tasty, but my age for tasty treats has passed. I should be able to let go. I am a father, I live for my son—I worked so hard to save him.’ He remembered the debts for the medicine, for the doctor. He remembered that he hadn’t had a suit tailored that year. ‘I have become really weak on the inside, but the world doesn’t know it,’ a fear gripped him. His colleagues who earned the same salary were always at the billiard hall or laughing at their losses at card games, and managed to entertain women. If someone bought him a drink one evening, he would have to buy everybody a round at another time. ‘No—I must think only of my family!’
The cold light pooled inside a shop, the dark street that came flowing forth, the grains of starlight in the sky—he observed everything and kept walking. But he couldn’t dare look up at the sky again—no, not at all.
He was still holding the cashews. The greed to eat just one cashew nut was still there, and he was still holding the cashews. Darkness had clotted and thickened there. It was wet, adhesive. His heart was crying, sobbing. His foot stepped on a crack on the street, he searched for more cracks to step on and didn’t find one immediately. ‘I’ll step on them! I will!’ Then he became afraid to step just anywhere. Eventually, he froze suddenly and became terrified of walking. ‘Duty!’ A few figures were approaching from the distance, in the dark. He began mechanically walking again. His lesser self, standing guard against the outer world, had been crying. ‘I am still holding the cashews. I’m gripping them even harder now; they will break,’ he experienced that fear, and worried that it would be embarrassing. He loosened his grip, as if around a kitten, and examined if it had died, turned it over and around. He felt that the bag was giving up its ghost.
He showed affection to the bag of cashews just as he would his son, and repeatedly caressed it.
The buildings that had come out in the blackout sat up one after the other, with their English shapes and impenetrability, steeped in the blackness of the night. ‘The son is waiting—my son—for me, for the cashew nuts. I have never brought home a whole bag of cashews for him before. Today, I have brought a whole bag, just for him.’ In satisfaction, he laughed: joy for the dark minutes that had passed. His chest swelled with determination. ‘Life must be secured against irregularities.’
In the village below, the dancing light of a fire from one house entered another house, separated by only a small distance, washing the room in red. The room was bathed in red. He enjoyed the blaze of ringed light. The flames on the
fire died down, but he continued watching—he had become a person with two large disks for eyes, a spoonful of brain, a pair of tongs for legs. He continued to walk and stare into the same darkness.
‘How do I open this bag, Baba?’ he heard his son ask. ‘The entire bag is yours,’ he would reply.
He became euphoric with himself, he remained overjoyed. A filigree of a sentence spoke in his mind—‘I have brought you an entire bag, son.’
‘I almost ate one of your cashew nuts, I nearly tore into the bag.’ He patted his young son’s small knees and said, ‘I am not being happy because I managed to bring it to you without ripping it open; that’s an old matter, that is something else—something you’ll understand when you become a father yourself. But today, I’m putting the entire bag in your hands.’
He had never eaten a whole bag of cashews by himself, Rajman remembered something he had managed to forget, but the memory encountered the exultation careening about in his heart and was obliterated.
He had arrived home. The dog got up, barked, whined and whimpered and lolled up to him. In the electric light on the black curtain raised over the top half of the entrance he recognized the shape of his son’s head.
‘Knock! Knock! Open the door!’ he called out from afar, checked to make sure that all four corners of the packet were intact, adopted the gait of a colossus, and walked into the house.
Power of a Dream
If a dream can be reined and commandeered to a purpose at will, it can transform into power. At such a time, it becomes the third element, obedient to the pair of thought and invention, and thus the most helpful faculty for an individual. Here, a long and cautious study of the subconscious by a psychoanalyst is imperative. But, nature, fatigued sometimes with the monotony of her products, seems sometimes to arbitrarily bestow this gift unto somebody…
Long Night of Storm Page 14