Divine Bovine

The other day I noticed an elderly gentleman – a regular walker in our area – trying to circumambulate a cow of local breed, possibly because it was his puja day.  I understand that if you do this three times and each such time touch the rump of the above-defined cow (not some other passing bovine since infidelity is frowned upon) and then your forehead, hold your ears with cross-hands and do a quick twist-and-turn and pray for wealth, luck might shift to your side. 

 
While I am uncertain if luck would shift to your side, I do know that dung will definitely shift to your shoe, particularly if it is new, expensive and white (the shoe, not the dung) .  And, despite crippling and persistent inflation and everything that Baba Scamdev and Sigma Sri Sri and Jags-in-turban will tell you, dung is not the same as wealth (if it were, the cows around your home would each have shares in Google and a linkedin profile which says, Author of ‘Downloaded without Bullshit’. She/Her/Moo).

Now, you might find all of this unremarkable, but that is because you are not - when reports last came in - a cow. 

But I digress, as always, so back to the story.  This one was a fine HF specimen and she had strong, unambiguous views about being circumambulated, which were expressed by her turning, along with the man’s slow walkaround, so that she was always facing him head-on, with the other end - the tail-on, shall we delicately say - in Slow Release Splatter Mode.  

It took him a few seconds to realise all this, possibly because of an incomplete education in landscape geography where cows are concerned.  When he did realise, he jumped a step back in the well-founded belief that the cow was likely to poke him in, shall we again say, a delicate place, which thereby increased the circumference of the circumambulation.

And there they stood facing each other.

His problem with the cow now, in succinct summary, was that it would either charge or discharge.  

Now, all this was great entertainment for the public and he was advised by one and all (except the cow that kept its own counsel) to do a quick anti-clockwise round and take the cow by surprise but the idea was rejected:  the opposite of good luck is misfortune , he reminded the 8% of India’s unemployed who were now deeply involved in trouble-shooting and hardware updates.  

All this while, the cow stood unmooved - that is a rather feeble pun - and gave him a stony gaze that reminded me of Fr. Shenoy in high school, after a football had got him in the same delicate place mentioned elsewhere in this news account.

A few minutes later, after aborted attempts made in some embarrassment - for he was now the rock star of 13th main - he decided to do a larger circumambulation, by walking around the block a couple of times, while the cow stayed put, its nose in the abundant garbage that he (and others) had left behind.

I am sure there is a moral here, stay posted.  

In The Flood Lies A Tale

 Sometimes you hear a story that makes you sit up.  This is one such story.

“The water was like the sea.  Trees were floating by.  When I looked outside, my neighbour’s two-storey house was collapsing…..it fell and destroyed our house.

I heard my granddaughter, Mridula, crying as I was trying to get out.  I grabbed hold of her little finger, covered her with a cloth and began swimming through the flooding water.  My son pulled each one of us - my daughter-in-law, my grandson and the two of us - through the water and my back and my grandson’s chest were badly injured.  I cried for help while swimming but no one could hear me.  

When we finally reached the shore and moved through a coffee plantation, a wild elephant appeared in our path. 

I told him, ‘We are coming from a great tragedy, don’t do anything to us.  We are afraid.  There is no light and water is everywhere.  We have just survived death.  Don’t do anything to us.’

And then, his eyes welled up with tears…..

My granddaughter and I sat at his feet and he stood there motionless until dawn when,eventually, we were rescued.  Two other wild elephants stood nearby.”

Isn't this a breathless story?

And, just so that we know, until the 1950s, 85% of Wayanad was under forest cover; 62% of those forests disappeared between 1950 and 2018, while the area under plantations - tea, coffee, rubber, ginger - went up by 1800 percent. A thousand eight hundred percent.   

This, then, is another story, a tale of Wayanad.

These two stories aren’t disparate, for at the hip they remain bonded by a common bind.  Listen to the storyteller.  His eyes - and those tears that Sujata saw in them - tell the whole larger story.

How We Tell A Story....

 The best stories that we hear are the ones that we tell ourselves.  These are the most ordinary of stories, yet there is heroism, longing, sadness, contentment, justification and confirmation.  Those stories form from a lazy haze that works up a pattern upon the stencil we once had etched out on the table.  Each such story is but a version, just as history has always been, and those versions - of crystal haze - are the straws we cling to. If those straws form a bundle, we float under a warm, satisfying sun and – this is astonishing – we can stay that way for a long long time. 

The truth and a fact or two weave in and out of these stories, they have a place like the lamp beside our bed or the bread knife on the kitchen counter.  Elements of truth pick and arrange themselves along the strand of DNA, each a tiny weight of realism.  No story that we hear must be overweight, so the rest – what remains of truth and fact – is discarded into the neat recesses of conniving memory. 

The best stories that we hear are the ones that we tell ourselves.  All else, we have always known to be fiction.