Stories for Haroun: A fishy tale

In the lake in front of our house, the water is clear and shiny. When you stand beside it, you can see your face, like in a mirror. And you can see lots of fish in the water. There are so many fishes: red, blue, green, yellow, pink, black, white …. There are some with long pointed tails; they are the “sword tails”. There are some with black and yellow lines on them, the “tiger fish”.

In the morning, lots of children used to swim in the lake. Some of them were such expert swimmers! They swam across the lake and came back. They shouted and laughed and had a lot of fun.

The birds in the trees around the lake woke up and joined the children. They said twit-twit, caw-caw, and so on. The whole area was filled with happy children, happy birds, and the happy noises they made.

In the beginning, the fish were scared of the kids. When boys and girls jumped into the lake, the fish dived deep into the water and went right near the bottom. They would hide there in the weeds and wait for the swimmers to go away.

But over time, the fish lost their fear. They came near the children and began playing with them. One day, a pink fish bit Haroun as he was swimming in the lake. Haroun was not hurt, he was just tickled. Slowly, the other fish also started nibbling the children. For the fish, it was great fun. But all the children were not like Haroun. Some of them started crying.

Some of kids were so scared that they stopped coming to the lake. And you know, fear spreads from one person to another, like cough and cold. After some time, there was no one at the lake in the morning.

Their parents asked them, ‘Why don’t you go to the lake? You love swimming, don’t you?’

The children said, ‘The fish bite us! We don’t want to get into the water.’

So one day, the parents of all the children sat down in a big meeting. They drank tea, ate boring thin-arrowroot biscuits and decided to put a net in the middle of the lake.

The following day, hundreds of workers came in with miles of metal nets. Two divers went into water and chased away all the fish to one corner of the lake. And after that, the men fixed the net right along the middle of the lake.

The children came back. They swam on one side of the net and all the fish were on the other side. As the little boys and girls swam, the fish watched them from the other side, their faces very, very sad!

Do you think the children were happy? Yes, they were, at the beginning. But soon, they started missing the fish. They realised, the fish had never hurt them.

They had just wanted to play.

The boys and girls were so sad that they stopped coming to the lake. One morning, the lake was all empty. Not even one child came.

So the papas and mamas sat down once again. They drank tea and ate biscuits and talked and talked. In the end, Malu’s mother, Mrs Nair, came out with a brilliant idea. She said, ‘Let’s put a door on the net. Let the fish come in through the door and play with the kids. If they bite, we will push them to the other side and close the door.’

Akash’s father jumped at the idea. And Avana’s mother! And everyone else agreed.

The next day, workers came again and fixed a door on the net.

The fish came in through the door, played with the children. And the pink fish even nibbled Haroun and his friends once in a way. But no one was ever scared of the fish any more. They knew, to become good friends, you have to fight at times!

This happened many years ago. Akash and Haroun and Malu are big men and women now. But even now, if you go to the lake in front of our house you can see a net with a door. It’s right across the middle of the lake.

Photo: Courtesy Wikipedia

Kolkata

7 February 2012

Immersion of governance?

On 6 November 2011 in Kolkata, a noisy procession is on its way to immerse a Jagaddhatri idol late in the evening. It has a disc jockey playing loud music, contravening anti-sound-pollution laws. After the group burst firecrackers in front of Chittaranjan National Cancer Research Institute, the biggest government-run cancer hospital in Bengal with hundreds of critical in-patients, police intervene. The people in the procession attack the policemen and chase them into the nearby Bhawanipore police station. They also pelt stones and bottles, damaging vehicles.

The Act 2 of the drama has been telecast, though not live. The policemen, most of them in mufti, but wearing helmets, were trying to close the collapsible gate of the police station from within, but the mob was trying to open it and get in. There were several women in the group that attacked the station, proving, if proof was necessary, that women of Bengal have arrived. The rabble kept throwing things at the cops within, but the latter were strangely subdued.

After some time, some policemen rushed out, wielding lathis. The TV footage didn’t show them seriously hitting anyone, but the mob was scattered all the same. Then the chief minister of the state walked into the police station, shouting and gesticulating, her face glistening in sweat. She could not be heard in the commotion.

Two days later, The Indian Express reported: “Bhawanipore police station in Kolkata had an unusual visitor. It was Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who came storming in, blasted the police and reportedly got two youths, who had been picked up for rioting during an immersion procession earlier, released. … the youths … were Trinamool Congress activists.”

It was also reported that the puja was managed by a veteran offender with several criminal cases against him, who is also a crony of one of Mamata’s brothers.

The news was virtually blacked out by most of the vernacular media, who are in an extended honeymoon with the new state government that came to power in May 2012. The spin followed soon in the shape of a police report. According to the same newspaper, an inquiry report prepared by a senior police officer “is learnt to have indicted officers of the Bhawanipore station for the violence and their failure to control the mob, and criticised them for being rash with those leading the procession. … An officer of the police station has also been booked for misbehaving with the mob …”

The CPI M that ruled Bengal for 34 years was guilty of many misdeeds, the principal one being they replaced the rule of law with a rule of the party. The inevitable question that arises is: What then is the difference between the old government and the new?

Well, even the worst communist chief minister won’t be so unwise – to use a parliamentary word – to personally storm a police station to rescue arrested party workers. They would find malleable police officers and silently work behind the scenes to achieve the same result without making headlines. Communists actually managed to keep things under wraps for a long time in Bengal, until overconfidence led to their misadventures in Singur and Nandigram, besides botching up the Rijwanur Rehman case.

The fact that the new ruling party acted so stupidly perhaps offers Bengal a tiny window of hope. They won’t be able to “manage” the bureaucracy or police with much finesse, and might make fools of themselves repeatedly in similar situations. And it should take the electorate much less than the 34 years they needed to show the door to the Left Front government.

The last period of Congress rule in the state, 1972-77, is etched in the collective memory of Bengal as the hoodlum years, when Youth Congress leaders called the shots in public affairs. Muscle power was their only strength and a rather thin line would set many of them apart from professional thugs. I remember a public meeting where a so-called leader was delivering a speech wearing a short kurta. As he spoke, he raised his arms repeatedly to lift his khadi kurta and show two pistols strapped to his waist.

Later, their descendants, the Trinamool Congress (TC) organised numerous bandhs and countless road- and rail-blockades to disrupt public life in the name of political action. Throwing stones at trams and buses was a regular feature of TC bandhs. At least on one occasion, they even threw a petrol bomb at a bus in Tollygunge in Kolkata. Once, a leading light of the party – presently a minister – personally beat up an ordinary citizen whose only sin was to board a public bus during one of these bandhs. Let us not forget that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee too earned her spurs as a firebrand student leader of the Congress in the 1970s.

The second question that arises is: Does the Bhawanipore incident foretell a return to the hoodlum years?

We do not know the answer yet. But it has been proved beyond doubt that in a democracy, even in a flawed one like ours, a determined electorate can check political dadagiri. It is therefore imperative that people register their protest against the CM and her party for what happened on 6/11.

Although I voted for Mamata in the last election, there were several question marks about her, given her political baggage and methods. She hasn’t really disappointed me. But people like me did have faith in the leaders of the amorphous collective called the “civil society”, who exhorted us to bring about a change in Bengal. Their eloquence helped us make up our mind in the heady summer of 2011. Now that the winter is around, there hasn’t been a murmur of protest from them even after the person elected to uphold the rule of law subverted it with such disgraceful disdain for governmental propriety.

The West Bengal chief minister is no longer a student leader. She led the people’s struggle to excise a malignant government from her state. Her personal integrity has never been questioned and it does seem her heart beats for the poor. But she is also the inheritor of the hoodlum politics of the seventies. If she cannot decide herself on which side of the law she should be, her electorate must force her to.

Murder of crows!

Crow on a branch -  Maruyama Okyo 

Often, the innocent and helpful are also the most unloved. Crows, for example. No creature is more helpful to humans than the crow. In my city, they clean up more garbage than the municipality does, although unlike the municipality, they do not make you pay taxes.

Contrary to popular belief, crows are non-aggressive and even friendly. If you host a buffet dinner for a mixed crowd of birds, you will see other birds clean up the grains much faster than the crows. Crows don’t have binocular vision. They look at each grain carefully with one eye, then turn their head and observe it again with the other eye, and by the time they are about to peck, the grain has been eaten up by some other bird.

My dear friend Wiki says: “Recent research has found some crow species capable not only of tool use but of tool construction as well. Crows are now considered to be among the world's most intelligent animals.” What Wikipedia doesn’t mention is: crows are democratic too. They practise a form of direct democracy that was in vogue in the ancient Greek city states. At the end of the day, they sit around on the parapet walls of a large terrace to discuss the day’s happenings. In a way, they are similar to our parliamentarians, all of them speak at the same time. It might turn a bit noisy at times but it also shows that freedom of speech is enshrined in the crow constitution too. Since childhood, I have seen with admiration these meetings taking place in the evenings. I watch them even now, in the evening of my life.

Indian Crow

Contrast crows with parrots. In spring, when the peepul tree outside my window blossoms, large flights of noisy parrots arrive from nowhere, drive away all other birds, polish off the fruits in no time, and fly away. They aren’t seen till the next spring. God knows where they spend the rest of the year.

Yet, poets, who are by definition illogical blokes, routinely compose paeans about parrots. The Bangla rhymes for children are full of loving references to them. Crows are absent in literature, except as symbols of death and other miscellaneous dark forces. In Bangla children’s rhymes, so far as I can remember, the only reference to crows is in: Saatta kaake daanr baye / khokonre tui ghare aye. Seven crows row ahoy! Come home, little boy.

Have you noticed, Dear Reader, the crow has been assigned a subaltern role in these lines? It is not surprising; in the caste-ridden mindset of the so-called upper crust of our society, a dark-complexioned person is instinctively associated with “Dalits”. In Cyrus Broacha’s TV show The week that wasn’t,  which is intended to be funny but end up being disgusting most of the time, the person representing Mayawati always has a blackened face! What chance do crows have? “Kaua” is an epithet in Hindi used for the inelegant and the supposedly ugly. The collective noun for owls in English is, surprisingly, a parliament of owls. And for crows? A murder of crows! To cut a long story short, crows are the most unjustly treated living beings.

Since our children grew up and flew away, and particularly since our cantankerous but lovable dog Chorki went to meet his Maker last year, my wife and me live in an empty nest.  Alongside crows, mynahs and sparrows give us company. They too are non-aggressive and friendly, and when some food is on offer, they all come down to our kitchen windowsill. They wait for their turn and never fight. The crow is the shiest of them and the sparrow is the most chipper.

Of all our avian visitors, the most timid and defenceless individual was a mynah. His feathers were unkempt and he had a tired air about him. He would fly on to the windowsill of our kitchen at lunchtime – morning is the lunchtime for birds – and almost lie down. Other birds would eat much faster, leaving him without any nourishment. But he would wait patiently. When everyone else had had their meal and flown away, my wife would offer him something special, which he would accept with an obvious expression of gratitude. If no one paid attention, he would call out loudly and demand food. Over time, he would hop into the kitchen and admonish us if he wasn’t served promptly. My wife concluded he was a senior citizen and deserved to be treated with respect. He too would reciprocate the affection and would eat out of her hand, literally.

Since last month, he has stopped visiting us. A Dios, my feathered friend!

Kolkata, 5 October, 2011

Acknowledgments:

A phrase used by my friend Christopher Hickman in a message worked as a trigger for this piece. Thanks, CH.

The last photograph was clicked by me. The remaining pictures are all courtesy The Wikipedia. Thank you, Wikipedia.

Sunday, 25 December 2011

Meeting Joe after long

I met with Joe last night. It was during the yuletide under a starry sky, with Santa hovering unseen somewhere in the background. Curiously, Joe gave me a leather-bound copy of the Bible as a Christmas gift. Equally strange, I felt it was a perfectly normal gift to have from Joe.

And of course, it was normal to dream about a friend who died a few months ago.

What is curious about the gift of a Bible at Christmas? Well, although religion was a subject we never discussed, I don’t think Joe was seriously religious. While we lived close to each other in the same city, I never saw him going to church on a Sunday morning. In short, in the real world Joe giving me a Bible would be as absurd as me gifting him a copy of the Geeta.

Joe and Catherine got their elder daughter admitted to one of the finest Jesuit schools in Trivandrum, a school where securing admission was tough, and parents would consider themselves lucky if their children did manage the feat. Aarti was a lively child with curly hair and sparkling eyes, and I wouldn’t imagine any school refusing admission to such a bright five-year old. But Joe said, ‘You know, at times like these, I turn into a devout Catholic. It helps!’

As I write, lots of insignificant memories flash through my mind. I know not if they would be of any interest to anyone else, but let me write, simply because I love to recollect them.

Once, I went to Joe’s family house in Changanecherry while he was there. While returning from Trivandrum to Calcutta, I reached Changanecherry in the morning with a plan to board a long-distance train from there early afternoon. In those days of glorious uncertainty without mobile phones or Google maps, I had just taken a chance. After getting off the train, I started enquiring about Joe and his dad, a retired professor of English. Soon, I was walking through a drizzle in a laterite country with quaint tiled houses peeping out of green foliage on either side of the road, accompanied by a man in a lungi and followed by a pack of suspicious stray dogs. Joe had to be woken up.

The morning went past like a flash of electricity, and we started waiting for the lunch with a tinge of sadness. It was still drizzling, and getting rather late for my train. After enquiring in the kitchen, Joe came back and said, ‘Looks like you will have to make do with vegetables, the chicken is still alive.’

Instead of a salt cellar, on the dining table there was a small bottle of saline water with a curved nozzle. I don’t remember if the chicken had been dead by then, but I do remember Joe’s mother laid out a fabulous lunch for us. A kind of lunch for which one should gladly miss trains. Later, a couple of times, she sent us home-made fish and prawn pickles through Joe. They were heavenly.

She must be quite elderly now. Why did she have to suffer this cruel blow?

There was a time when many of our friends were posted in Trivandrum at the same time.  All the offspring of our friends were great fans of Joe, who reciprocated their affection in abundance. I do not how Joe struck up such easy friendship with kids. Maybe, he had kept the child in him alive and would let the young fellow out when he was in company of children.

One day, Joe came to our home with Aarti on a Sunday morning. My children, Doel and Tatai were in primary school then, and Aarti was yet to begin schooling. Joe had planned to take the children to the zoo, but wanted to give Aarti a surprise. So he told Doel, ‘Get ready. We are going to the Ized-o-o’, imitating the Mallu pronunciation of z to make sure Aarti didn’t get the drift.

On another Sunday, Joes (his second daughter hadn't arrived then) and us went to the backwater lake at Veli in the outskirts of Trivandrum. After the usual boat ride and fun and frolic, Aarti got over-friendly with a puppy and picked up a scratch in her hand. It was just an affectionate nibble and nothing serious, but we couldn’t take chances. Joe consulted a doctor, who advised him not to worry. Still, Aarti’s parents continued to feel uneasy, naturally. The next Sunday, Joe and me drove down to Veli once again in Joe’s elderly green Ambassador, armed with two large packets of thin-arrowroot biscuits. We gathered all the mongrels of Veli that afternoon and after making sure that Aarti’s friend was hale and hearty, returned home, relaxed.

A few days ago, I was in Bangalore. We had just moved into a flat on the fourteenth floor, facing the east. On the first morning, I woke up early and went to the balcony. As an icy wind ran a shiver through me, I saw the blue darkness giving way to a dull light as the sun rose gingerly through a mist over a huge city dotted with countless buildings. Numerous windows were still throwing out light. It was a panorama where the day met the night, life met death. I thought it would have been great if Joe had been behind one of those windows. He could have been.