DADA

DADA

Dada, our father who passed away at the ripe old age of 90 recently, belonged to the old school when PDA was a strict no-no.  So I have to really rack my brains to reminisce about some tender moments spent with him in my childhood days.

I do remember those early winter mornings, when I used to climb into his quilt and listen to the story of “Androcles and the Lion”. While narrating it for the nth time (for some reason, I always found this story fascinating) he used to nuzzle me with his perennial stubble, which was not a very unpleasant sensation. I still remember the coarseness and the tingle on my cheeks which must have been tender those days.

He was a selfless RSS worker (it took me years of adult life to accept this resignedly), hence he was always saddled with the most thankless tasks by the pompous asses who ruled the roost. He used to bicycle to distant “Shakhas”   (branches of RSS which conducted the daily drill and games), trying valiantly to keep them alive. As a child of 5 or 6, I had no option but to accompany him on these expeditions. In cold winter evenings, I used to ride the danda (the top horizontal bar of the frame) of his old bicycle (among other things, one of its pedals used to be always broken), always sleepy on my return journeys and often shivering with cold. Sensing my discomfort, he used to stop midway, take off his pullover, (knitted from cheap wool by my mother during her free periods in the government school where she used to teach) and drape it around my frail shoulders. I can still feel the heat of his body (generated from vigorous cycling) conducted through the pullover, dispelling the chill from my bones like magic.

Even in those good old days, it was not safe to leave the bicycles outside overnight. The locks could be picked in no time. So dada had to carry the bicycle up the stairs every night to park it in the balcony of our first floor flat. I remember one little game we often played to my great delight. While sleepily riding the danda of his bicycle on my return rides, when we used to reach home, I used to pretend to be sleepier than I actually was and refused to get off the bicycle when he had to carry it upstairs. The strong man that he was, from years of “Surya Namaskaras” (a yoga exercise), he could easily carry the bicycle upstairs with yours truely precariously perched atop, to my great delight and excitement.

I remember with love, a word he never actually uttered with us, the tingle of his stubble on my cheeks, the warmth of his pullover around my shoulders and the wild excitement of getting carried atop his bicycle over the staircase. 

RITUALS

RITUALS

We continued our morning walks after moving to the central Mumbai suburb of Sion. But somehow it was not the same. Instead of the picturesque environs of “Sagar Upvan”, we had to do with the bye lanes of Sion East, which were full of second grade schools and colleges of various hues. The children were always milling around on the roads. One school had their students dressed in whites for the sports day and they were pretending to play various games ranging from cricket to football, on the narrow sidewalk, already crowded with morning walkers, maids, milkmen and the newspaper delivery boys. I thought it was pathetic. The girls studying in the junior college nearby were clad in the cheaper versions of the dresses worn by bollywood starlets in their latest movies. (The maids wore the cheaper replicas of the dresses made popular by the actresses on popular soaps). The boys were always rushing sleepily to their classes while chattering excitedly all along. The stray dogs always thought that they owned the place and fought and shat all over indiscriminately. All things considered, morning walk ceased to be the pleasure of yore and became more of a chore.

          Then somebody introduced me to the dilapidated apology of a garden on the Sion fort, not far away from our apartment complex. We had to climb 85 stairs to reach the garden. There were another 70 odd stairs if one wanted to reach the top of the keep. Otherwise, people walked on the walkway which went around the castle. It was far from clean and quite slushy in the rains. But slightly better than the roads and devoid of the obnoxious morning traffic dominated by empty cabs, speeding needlessly. The garden had a laughter club, a clapping club, a karate club and the ubiquitous gully cricketers. Some middle-aged women were busy doing grotesque contortions which they must be thinking as exercise. One dapper looking old man played ‘ring’, (a rubber tube in round form, an ancient version of the Frisbee without the excitement, played in the style of badminton), with two ladies. I wonder wherever they still find the ring.

          We soon got into the groove and sort of adjusted to the poor man’s jogger’s park. I soon became very good at breath control. Every corner, every secluded spot, which was not occupied by the ubiquitous lovers, reeked of urine. So you either had to hold your breath or exhale while passing these places.

          When I was diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency and advised to get some sunshine whenever possible, I started climbing to the top of the castle and sat in the sun for a while doing my breathing exercises and believe me I was the most normal human being in that keep of broken walls. I found a good unbroken spot on the parapet wall where I could sit cross legged, do Pranayama and soak in the sun. But to my utter dismay, somebody had spilled some lentils (Daal) there. So it was totally uninhabitable. I had to settle for the second best spot where I had to sit with feet dangling over the parapet wall. Whenever the lentils started to dry, somebody would renew the deposit without fail. I had a good mind to tick off the guy who was doing this to me. Finally I did see him once. He caught my attention because he was being followed by a cackle of crows cawing excitedly. He opened the polythene bag he was carrying and deposited the remnants of his yesterday’s dinner on the same spot. The crows swooped in cawing hungrily. To my horror, the guy kept sitting cross legged among all the noisy crows, looking at them with glazed eyes. Then I knew that this was a hopeless case and if I so much as whimpered in protest against his rape of a perfectly sittable parapet wall, he would kill me.  Reason? His eyes were full of religious fervour and his look betrayed that he was making an offering to his ancestors via these crows (in Hindu religion, the offerings to the crows are expected to be directly transferred to the ancestors). 

          I felt he must have treated his progenitors real bad to be required to do this every day without fail. I remembered some of the prayers I had memorised in my childhood. One prayer ends like this:” If you recite this once, your greatest sins will be washed away; if you recite this twice, all the riches of the world will be yours and if you recite this thrice, your greatest enemy will be destroyed”. Another prayer ends thus: “If you recite this prayer in the morning, the sins of the previous evening will be washed away; if you recite it in the evening, the sins committed during the day will be washed away and if you recite it morning and evening, all your sins will be washed away”. These prayers definitely do not advocate that you commit sins so that you get the opportunity to say the prayer and absolve yourself from their after effects. But we tend to interpret these things to our own advantage. Religion does not teach us to sin but we find it convenient to assuage our conscience with prayers and rituals and use this as a licence to do anything during the day. Recite a powerful prayer in the evening and hey presto, you are as pure as morning dew again. The more you sin during the day, the more bizarre the rituals in the evening. I could go on and on, but this is the time when I feed grass to the white cow every evening, so ciao for now.