The Tenacity of the Lungi-clad Diseased

The Tenacity of the Lungi-clad Diseased

He wore a long drawn face, he was not a simpleton!
Came at an ambling pace and he won’t be left alone,
By the quartet of female company and the shrill tones;
Tho’ ill-fated with an impaled assembly and weak moans!

Past mischief in his eyes couldn’t twinkle to belie the dread,
Clamorous grief of eager voices for one who earned their bread!
Gathering around the bed where he retired like close to death,
One healer’s hand to understand the cause of the laboured breath!

He spoke from within a full-grown beard about the pain he suffered,
He broke into tears for the dozen he cared, he may have bothered!
Blood in his urine was his ‘punishment’ for all the meat he butchered;
More were his fears less than his lament to leave his family hungered!

The checkered lungi with maroon stains with much dirt and grime,
The hollowed cheeks and fetid breath showed he was past his prime.
He was prolific to father progenies and poverty was his own crime,
The bewailing of the two spouses added volume to his death chime!

But he wasn’t dying much as he believed in the words of some quack!
Faith interred in his darkened forehead gleamed as he was taken aback;
The confused joy infused spirit and he became capable of a wisecrack!
“All my days in prayers gives me power to be once more on horseback!”

DIWALI 2012

HAPPY DIWALI 2012, ONE DAY LATE!

The sprightly urchin was barely more than one metre tall but he enjoyed tirelessly pushing the cart harder and faster. His six little brothers and sisters could not have had a jollier time jumping, wobbling and wrestling amongst themselves with carefree abandon while riding on it! Those playful kids thus formed a happy sight out of the window of my car, notwithstanding the after-thought that a count of seven only contributed to population boom!

            It was the last time on the vacation that I was making the two hour journey from my town to Guwahati to board the plane to Delhi and so I savoured every view unlike my previous lamentations!

            Two hours at the airport were spent without talk or food or drink but only gazing at the outside, at pretty air hostesses in colourful sarees, plentiful cute little kids gamboling hither and thither and mute televisions!

            There were very few people inside the plane and the loudest presence was a wailing kid who cried the whole time because his visibly embarrassed young parents did not know how to make him shut up! The air hostesses dedicated much of their time to the cute little half-pint to cause only a trifle jealous annoyance to a fat man with dazzling clothes and jewellery, whose bald head was an exhibition of ample testosterone levels!

            A taxi ride later and in total, after ten hours, I was back into my room with none of my room-mates being home! I frantically dialed the numbers of near-by restaurants to order dinner but to no avail. Thus, I had to exercise my own cooking talents and raced against time to make it to my hospital for night duty. The solitary auto-rickshaw driver initially declined to hazard out amidst the war-like onslaught of crackers but later on gave in to one dialogue, “I am a doctor and I must reach my hospital!”

            It was Diwali and I had overlooked that the whole day, right from the arrays of banana trunks alongside the road I travelled, the attire of the gorgeous ladies in the airport, the greetings of the crew of the plane and the several empty seats, the much more than normal illuminated view of the Earth from above, the deafening sound of the crackers while I was on the taxi ride, the closed restaurants and the hazardous auto ride to my hospital until I attended to many dozen patients who streamed in with burns to various parts of their body who were even then upbeat in celebration mode!

            Today, as I relax in my room in a post-night off, the whole thing is sinking in at last! The crackers are still bursting and the lights are shining bright!

THE STORY OF SKYFALL

ABOUT SKYFALL

A sleepy lady to the right for whom an expansive and cozy seat was like heaven and a stoic brother like Hans Bjelke to the left formed my little crowd who ultimately watched the much anticipated movie, Skyfall, braving the high volume of negative reviews the whole week!

            The opening ten minutes had good action sequences including Bond barging his motorbike against the parapet of a bridge to fall on a fast-moving train and while being on top of it, bending backwards in Matrix style in the last second to cheat death in a tunnel!

            The movie reached its zenith too early with Adele’s song! She lulled my lady into sleep and a loosened handgrip was cue that I could be all ears to only the Digital Dolby! My brother was similarly absorbed and thus my mouth could only remain shut!

            From that point, the movie degenerated and was no more solid and rather dissipated in random directions like formless fluid! The characters over-indulged in detailed speeches and too much sarcasm!

            The Bond girl had more than trifle resemblance to the late break-dancing King of Pop and all she did was shave his beard in great detail. The second fiddle Bond girl only died a hapless death with a glass of liquor on her head!

            Fortunately during this time, my lady was awakened by the giggles of the blonde villain and she made it bearable to watch the mad man recite a bad rat story and act out a  whim of gay overtures once just for the sake of it!

            The villain still managed to over-shadow Bond all the time probably because the latter was not helped by a school-boy ‘Q’ who gave him only a gun which was however no match to the one in the hands of the former who used it to shoot dead every police official in London and terrorize M and Bond to flee to an isolated picturesque Scottish locale!

            The effeminate villain had already transformed into an Amrish Puri of Hindi cinema! Thus Bond, M and one old man like Ramu Kaka prepared earnestly for a final show-down with that solo face of evil. We had been made to believe that he was all the while in the quest of emancipating revenge!

            If not anything else, we liked the way he made a booming entry with that high-decibel sound box tied to his chopper!

            Pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, bombs and finally two much costlier LPG cylinders ultimately managed to bring down the ramshackle building in which Bond and M were hiding! So, that was Skyfall! A dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere!

            The time that was left in the fag-end of the movie was spent in explaining to my lady why Bond was not doing the amazing stuff he used to do in all his previous movies! I almost did a good job when she exclaimed, “Stupid villain! Why can’t he shoot that moron in the head while he has all the time to draw a circle in the ice?”

Because it is not the end!

We have to hold our thoughts and count to ten!

Feel the Earth move and then,

Hear the laughter burst again!

Let the sky fall,

When it crumbles,

We will stand tall,

And face it all together,

With a LOL!

           

           

Diary Entry 10.11.12

If I were a shuttlecock travelling to and fro between two towns then I would rather be smashed hard than lobbed because I cannot afford to meander even a little; two hours is the maximum I can expend every time! The court is too big and I love both the racquets whereas the playtime is only ten days! But I am not a shuttlecock and so I have to drive a car hundred kilometres every time between the two towns and what costs me minutes are the brakes working out of fear that lies in front of every dog, in the back of every cow and every side of strange men in lungis!

THE QUICKEST MATHEMATICIAN!

THE QUICKEST MATHEMATICIAN

He was an old and wizened man with such great curvature of the backbone that only his staff, which looked like a diagonal of a circle of human form, kept him from falling forwards! His sallow face with hollowed cheeks was less noticeable than the luxuriant growth of all-white beard from his chin down to his caved in abdomen like the nest of Sociable Weavers! His presence was thus death-like and there was a sick feeling and odour when he laboured for his breaths while a cold sweat broke from the creased forehead of his haggard countenance. He held a dead chicken in his arms close to his chest!

            The driver of the car that had only moments ago killed that fowl trembled at the sight of that deadly man behind whom a crowd gathered instantaneously and which multiplied in strength every passing second. The fear in his heart increased proportionally. The old man was no longer an infirm adversary! The driver had hallucination of a cannibalistic monster!

            Md. Ali only spoke softly like a very old man would do and he asked the driver to hold the dear dead bird because it seemed too heavy for his arms and heart to carry it any longer! He spent the next three seconds in calculations and nobody could even understand the problem when his answer came!

            One and half kilogram of meat and a dozen eggs per year till ten years and he named a final price: 1100 bucks!

            The quickest mathematician thus triumphed and the smile which was hidden behind his beard was as big as the bundle of notes he hid within his lungi!