THE WOMAN ON THE ROCK

I was climbing down the long flight of stairs that rode on the back of a long rocky natural slope, on top of which sat the South Delhi Kali Bari (house of goddess Kali) when the guard called out “Arrrey… Arrey... !! Mataji toh gir jayengi”. I turned back to see an elfin figure in a saffron saree hanging on for dear life from the railing that ran along the staircase. But instead of holding the railing to climb the stairs, this elderly woman was on the other side of the balustrade, trying to haul her way along the slope. I rushed to her aid. By now, gravity had bent her body into a downward pointing arrow and I mulled over the appropriateness of giving her a firm push to help her along but then decided against it. Though precariously placed, she seemed determined and proud, so instead I just stood behind her so that I could break her fall in case she slipped…

As things turned out, it wasn’t necessary and granny managed to make her way towards a rocky outcrop on the slope and sat down. Considering her actions and surroundings, I had expected to see a weather-beaten face, undisciplined and stained teeth, like dirty naughty children breaking through the line at the morning assembly and a disheveled and disorientated air that accompanies every tramp. And yet, when she settled down on that rock face after giving the spot a thorough dusting, she turned towards me and smiled with the sort of poise one might associate with aristocratic grand dames one might encounter at polo grounds on a Sunday afternoon. “Thank you, young man”, she said and smiled through her sparkling teeth. She wore her downy white hair short, and her saffron robes were clean and crisp. She looked like such an oddity on that mossy outcrop that I just had to ask “What’re you doing over here, ma’am?” She seemed a little surprised by the question. “Me? Why, whenever I come to Delhi, this is where I choose to stay…” But why not inside the temple? Why here, exposed to the elements on a rocky slope where one can’t even lie down and sleep… “Well, that’s my little experiment. I don’t intend to sleep but instead I’ll chant through the night… And anyway, I don’t like restrictions… neither rules nor walls… I’m happy under the open sky (and she said the last bit in a rather refined Anglo-Bengali English).” I was carrying a packet of Britannia cakes with me and so I asked her if she was hungry enough to want to eat a few…? “No, no, son, I shouldn’t… I’m 82 (she was remarkably nimble for her age and her unlined face didn’t seem to be much older than someone in her late 50s or early 60s) now and have managed to keep myself away from every ailment till now but I should watch what I eat or else… (she grinned) I will get into trouble…”

Mataji doesn’t want me to reveal her either of her names, neither the one she has as a sadhavi, nor the name her parents had given her, but this is her story… in her words…

“I was born into the raj bari (royal household) of Kumilla which was a part of the state of Tripura. After the partition, Kumilla became a part of what is now Bangladesh. It was a very happy childhood and while my mornings and aft ernoons were spent running around the corridors of the raj bhawan and in the arms of my uncles and grandfather, listening to stories and playing pranks, my evenings were spent sitting on a cot in our courtyard with my grandmother while Shiraj kaka, the Muslim cowherd sat at our feet. His nimble fingers would work on the jute ropes he made and his soulful voice would seem to bring the stars to life as he sang beautiful songs about everything from the joy of the monsoons to the pain of separation… life couldn’t have been better. Then one day, one of my favourite uncles died, just like that… Suddenly, the man who carried me in his arms and told stories about kings and saints every afternoon was gone the next afternoon. I couldn’t get over it. I asked myself, where did he go? Why did he go? And if we are all to die, mother, father, grandfather, grandmother… everybody, then why bother with living? I didn’t know whom to ask…

One of the saints my late uncle oft en told me stories about was Swami Vivekananda. So as I grew older I started reading his books. This was the time when Bengal was in the grip of nationalistic fervour and Vivekananda’s nationalistic ideology inspired me a lot. Somewhere I read thathe felt that while India had produced more than its share of lions in every field, we still hadn’t supported the women of this country enough to help them emerge as the true lionesses they are meant to be and to that end he resolved to set up an educational institution and ashrams for such women. While still a child, I wrote letters to organisations that run in the name of Maa Sarada (Rama Krishna Paramhansa’s wife) and Sister Nivedita (Swami Vivekananda’s Irish student who dedicated her life to Vivekananda’s ideals) and soon as I was old enough to join them, I told my parents I had made up my mind never to get married and dedicate my life towards becoming the lioness Vivekananda wanted the women of this nation to become. I wanted to work towards alleviating the suffering of the poor and the needy as well as in the service of the Almighty, and it really was tough to tell where one ended and the other began. My mother had always been very supportive but my father was your typical conservative and domineering zamindar and he wasn’t too excited about my plans. However, I’d made up my mind to never do something just because I have to, and from that day, till today, I have lived my life on my terms… Of course the tremendous respect my parents and the whole family had for Rama Krishna Paramhans, Maa Sarada and Swamiji, and the powerful tidal wave of the spirit of independence that had engulfed Bengal helped them let me go.

After finishing my schooling I went to Kolkata and started working as a volunteer at a refugee home. This was in the days just before the partition and I found it difficult to come to terms with the horror and suffering of that time. And then I met Madame Lizelle Reymond who took me under her wing. I was her ‘little friend’ and it was through her loving teachings that I was born again in her heart.”

Hmm… Lizelle Reymond! The Swiss lady who authored Sister Nivedita’s biography and was a student of the spiritual master Sri Anirvan… Mataji hadan impressive spiritual and philosophical lineage. She had also had interactions with ‘The Mother’ (Rishi Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator and successor). And in spite of spending her days walking along the mountain trails beyond Almora, painting images on smooth river rocks by the Ganga in Haridwar, and sleeping under the great blue dome, she keeps abreast of national issues. “All this brouhaha over Jaswant Singh’s take on Jinnah is just a storm in a tea cup. I remember the great killings in Noakhali when the Britishers emptied the whole Bata shoe factory in Kolkata of all its 300-odd Muslim workers and sent them to Noakhali with instructions to rape, murder and pillage for three days, assuring them that the cops would be held back. My maternal uncle was the police chief in Begumganj and he kept requesting for permission to protect people from the mob but the permission was never granted. He saved as many people as he could… Carnage like Noakhali’s was then used to incite Hindu mobs and this forest fire of hate ended up dividing us.”

I asked her if she ever got lonely, living her life all alone, never having considered marriage or family. “No, I don’t get lonely. I find friends everywhere. And then I have my books. I carry some with me. And some characters from some books stay with me forever, like friends that have come alive from the pages of a book. I find my best friends in Tagore’s books…” And her answer? Did she finally figure out why people die? And where do they go when they die? “No, I didn’t find the answer, but I did figure out that it is ok to die. I have lived my life without regret and there is nothing more I want. No Moh, no Maya… and yet my life has been touched by so much of divine love. Now all I want is a beautiful death” and she smiled a beatific smile. But what is a beautiful death? She said, “When my time comes I should embrace my passing, not knowing who I am, or where I might be, without a thought, a care or an unfulfilled desire…”

I left her on that rock that night, a picture of dignified calmness and contentment. Some might call it happiness… I can’t be sure. But if there is happiness in renunciation, perhaps that picture came very close…

DEFANGED

A lazy Saturday lunch with family and friends at a farmhouse had erupted into an afternoon of fear and frenzy. And a red brick structure that housed the generator unit was the eye of the storm. I first heard a child scream, and then there were others… I rushed out of the ‘pool room’ with my friends and saw their children shrieking and running towards us, all the while pointing at the ominous ‘generator room’ that stood silently behind them. While their nervous parents kept asking what had happened, the children, overcome by fear and exhaustion, took a while to catch their breath. Then the eldest child, with the colour slowly returning to his chubby cheeks, whispered “Anaconda!!”

Another kid stretched his arms as wide as he could, thrust his sweet round belly out and grimaced as he tried to stretch some more until one thought he might split in two and said “this big… even bigger”. Then another child said, “It was a cobra… it had big teeth…” Hearing this, the gardeners and care takers who had gathered around us picked up shovels and sticks and ran towards the room… In the commotion, it took me a while to get my bearings and by the time I set off for the ‘GR’, the gardeners had gotten more than a head start. As I ran, I tried to imagine what might have triggered that reaction… An Anaconda was out of the question. J.Lo and her rubber toy from that Sony-Columbia production must have made a big impression on the kid but those nearly 30 feet long monsters are only found in South America. But a cobra wasn’t all that unlikely in the woodlands around Gurgaon. And a cobra is dangerous. In their attempts to kill or catch the snake, one of them could get bitten… I ran harder, hoping to reach before either snake or man suffered injury… or worse.

Just as I was about to reach, the high pitched babble inside the GR stopped abruptly. For a charged moment or two, there was deathly silence, and then I saw the men emerge. The last one to come out held a long black and now limp snake by the tail, and its head, smashed and bloodied, dripped long thick drops on the wet grass. The men looked rather bemused, unsure whether to celebrate or mourn the hunt. It obviously wasn’t a cobra. I stopped as the men walked up. “Mara kyun…?” I asked… but of no one in particular. They didn’t answer but the one holding the snake dropped it at my feet and then they all gathered around it. It was almost two metres long and nearly black in colour. One of the men had a minor bruise on his right forearm. “Kata..?” I asked. The man nodded and sat down on his haunches. So did the others. The silence, the nodding… it was almost surreal. The parents too had reached by now. They panicked when they saw the broken skin and urged the others to take him to the doctor but that man seemed to have given up hope. He just sat there as if he’d turned to stone and kept staring at the dead snake. “Zehreela nahin tha… wasn’t poisonous”, I told him. The man gave me a bewildered look, perhaps not knowing what to believe. I had told him the truth though. It was a rat snake, a harmless rodent eater.

That was two monsoons ago. Reptiles and most humans, I’ve learnt, don’t get along very well together. Most find them creepy from a distance and are paralysed with fear from closer quarters. And that fear oft en gives way to hate and more oft en than not, people will kill snakes or at least try to if they come across one. And not just snakes. These gardeners from the above instance would regularly kill monitor lizards (gohera) on the farm, imagining them to be poisonous too. However, for their benefit and that of all others who might care to know, lizards, at least the ones found in India, are all non-venomous. Something about these scaled crawlers gives us the creeps. Perhaps it stems from the legend of Satan taking the shape of a snake to lure Eve into sin.

But snakes are far from evil. They are just super efficient predators who are amongst the most effective vermin controllers on the planet. And for those of you who think that we don’t need snakes and can control our rodent populations with our own methods should know that nearly one-fourth of food grains produced are lost to pest like rats and a lot of the rest is contaminated by their excreta. And these rats manage to overrun our warehouses in spite of our best pest control methods like fumigation etc., which by the way leave highly toxic residues on the food that reaches our tables. Snakes and birds of prey like owls are essential for maintaining ecological balance and ensuring that our world isn’t overrun by rats.

And the fact that some snakes are venomous doesn’t make them all bad. We humans aren’t their natural prey and given a chance they will always avoid us. But not everyone is convinced by that logic so when the office gatekeeper found a slender, nearly metre long brown snake with bands coiled under his wooden guard-hut last year, I didn’t want to take a chance and used two empty plastic bottles to truss the snake into one of them. I didn’t know if it was venomous or not but was pretty sure that if I left it here, the guard and the others would in all likelihood kill it or get bitten in the process. So I tied a sack cloth on the bottle mouth that ensured the snake could breathe through it but couldn’t bite and took it with me to the Delhi zoo.

At the Reptile Home in the zoo, I approached one of the care-takers/curators (it’s a fine line separating the two at the Delhi zoo) with my bottled treasure and asked him what kind of snake it might be. “Hey Bhagwan! Yeh toh krait hai! It’s a krait!” Incidentally, kraits are 16 times more venomous than cobras. “You’ll be dead in five minutes in the summer and you might get a little more time in the winter because the blood is thicker,” he said. I later learnt that he might have been exaggerating and though extremely potent, krait venom on an average, takes around five hours to kill an adult human being. The man refused to accept the snake though and since setting the snake loose within the zoo premises would’ve been a bit like dropping a mobile land-mine in a children’s playground, I drove the ten odd tentative kilometres from the zoo to the city forest, this time, constantly checking the bottle to reassure myself and then released the lethal little serpent in an isolated corner of the forest. I’d like to believe that my actions saved more than one life that day.

When the rains come, so do the snakes. So let me share with you a few simple ‘things-to-do’ if you see a snake, in your garden, your bedroom or bath… Lessons I’ve gleaned from my time spent with herpetologists, naturalists and woodsmen…

_ Always stamp your feet when walking through possible snake habitat. Snakes can sense such vibrations and will take the warning and slither away to avoid contact.

_ If you happen to come across one, back away and give it a wide berth. Most snakes can’t strike beyond half their body-length. Run (away) if you want to, they can’t out run normal healthy adults.

_ Don’t try to kill the snake. They are easily avoided and in all probability, the creature doesn’t deserve it; the environment, the granaries and you need it; and lastly your attempts to kill it might bring you within the snake’s striking distance.

_ In the event that a snake is killed, avoid going near it for a while. It is said that even involuntary muscle tremors could lead to a bite.

_ If you see a snake on your property, intimate the fire department, the police or the municipal corporation. If in Delhi, you could also call Wildlife SOS at 9871963535. They have well trained wranglers who are equipped to capture and remove snakes.

_ It is nearly impossible for most of us to distinguish between venomous and non venomous snakes so one should avoid unnecessary bravado.

_ If bitten, try and capture or at least photograph (yes, cell phone cameras should do just fine) the snake. Most government hospitals stock antivenins but these are species specific and identifying the snake quickly will save moments and perhaps lives.

_ Treat all bites as venomous bites, immobilise the area, keep the wound downstream from the heart so that envenomated blood has to travel uphill to reach the heart and get the patient to the nearest hospital. It is a medical emergency. The serpent might still be instrumental in ushering us out of our gardens on occasions but here’s hoping the ‘fruit of knowledge’ will help us understand each other better and build both tolerance and forgiveness, for sins both imagined and real…