About spirituality among other issues…

I’ve always thought helping a blind man reach the foot over bridge is a better way of reaching god than a week long fast (read self-torture), where you deny yourselves food and water. Torturing the body that the divinity up there so benevolently gave us.

I think even the idea of fasting doesn’t stop there. Isn’t fasting supposed to be saving the food that you have and giving the rest to the needy? Like the haves giving part of what they have to the have-nots? Like bourgeoisie to proletariat?

I’m not atheist. I don’t think there is life in stone idols either, nor am I a great supporter of the Brahmos. I go to the temple when I feel like, for a change. Usually it is when I’m expecting something and mom says, “Pray to god and everything will be fine.” Dad has a better way of putting it. “Walk to that uphill temple and back, it’s a good exercise, you know. While you are at it, also say hi to Ayappa,” he would say.

I go to the temple because of vested interests, because I have something to ask of Him. Ayappa Temple in Ambarnath west is good for its quiet. I hate it when they put on those devotional tapes. The same is with the temple at Mumbra, though when it is not the tapes, it’s either music from people's mobile phones or the smoke from someone’s cigarette that make me grind my teeth together.

My idea of spirituality seems to be different. It is what sociologists like to call humanity. It is behaving the way good samaritans would, helping out. Not going out of the way to do anything, but doing what one must while at one’s own work. Helping blind men find their way. Spreading smiles. Petting animals you find on the road. Giving a seat to a wrinkled old man or a really fat woman (who’s otherwise obstructing movement inside the train compartment).

I find peace in being quiet. Being blank. Nothing to think. No idol. No prayer beads. No mat. No incense. Just me. Time with me. Quality time.

My Den

I want to build an underground house, our home. My partner has let me call it “apna den” and she benevolently responds with a tiny hum whenever I refer to it.

Heavy with worry and understanding the fact well that my plan is a little crazy and out of the world, I put it in front a colleague, who I think, holds vast knowledge about land and land dealings and where the land price is rising and which company owns land where. I asked him if my idea is feasible. Of course, he said, much too coherently, for it suddenly hiked up my hopes. Don’t Eskimos live in igloos? He asks me. See, what is an igloo? It is an underground house!

I don’t believe him now. My geography textbooks taught me that igloos were just built of ice and were at the ground level, not up, not down. But then, the textbooks could be wrong, and no doubt, my teachers had never been to the Tundra, let alone see an igloo’s insides! May be, an igloo did have secret rooms inside, a ‘den’ as I call it.

Our conversation couldn’t proceed that day.

I hadn’t wanted to burrow always. For a long time, all I wanted to do was spend an ascetic life, away from people, but closer to myself, up on a tree, in a tree house. But to my partner, that was a bit inhospitable. Or so I think. And won’t there always be the danger of falling down one great dawn, while trying to yawn in the big lawn?

I wonder how I started thinking about a home under the ground. I tell my mom what I want to do and she says all of us will die for want of air.

Constantly pondering if the plan would work out, I brought it up again with my very knowledgeable colleague. This time over, I asked him about the chances of such houses springing up in Mumbai, considering the space crunch in the city. What he said poured a whole ice-factory over my head.

He said Hafeez Contractor has been asked to build an underground parking lot for Mumbai, which will stretch from somewhere near the erstwhile Victoria Terminus to Flora Fountain. Even this plan is yet to be realised. When the parking lot is built and is successfully being used, may be the government will think of something like underground housing. Is this called left in a lurch?

I am not going to wait for some Contractor guy to build his parking lot or whatever. I am going to burrow my partner and myself a den. I want it and I will. Soon.

EYES

I tell nearly everyone I know about the people that I meet, see and talk to while in the train. I can remember them, their gestures, and the colour of their skin, the way their hands and head moved as they talked even while I’m talking about them, mimicking them in front of my friends. They all have pictures of themselves in my head. May be this is why hordes of people seem familiar, I might’ve seen them on one of such trips and then I coax my head to try and place the place to the instance.

But now, many of these characters that I meet inside trains will have a face.

I met a character today. He did not see. He feels around his way all day with a folding stick to guide him.

As the train edged close to the final destination station, our visually-impaired champion started digging deep into his trouser pockets and fished out wads of tenners. He then felt the corners of each note, straightened the dog-eared ends and counted them, placing one on the top of another.

The other pocket now. Out came currency notes of varied denominations. I assume the longest one that he felt for; he would consider the hundred-rupee note. The medium sized one would read FIFTY RUPEES in ten Indian languages and English. The smaller one would obviously be tenners. After the manual note-counting machine was done with processing, each denomination rested cozily in each one’s family bundle, inside the cozier confines of our champion’s trouser pockets.

A fellow traveller and myself couldn’t help grinning widely at each other for quite some time while we witnessed this.

Shopping qualms

Just a wheel in the machine

I am standing inside a shop where they sell cameras. I am here to get my first camera- a digital one (which means I do not have to spend dough on films and processing, but I can directly hook it up with my computer and ogle at the pictures that I clicked). The costs will eat up a whole month’s salary and a little more, but what the heck? I’m buying a camera!

The salesman inside the store just asked the owner, “without, na?” the owner nods. I feel the camera he’s going to give me is handicapped, without something means it lacks something. I ask him what it is. He says, “Bill.”

“Bill? Clinton?”

I gather he meant to say he wouldn’t give me a bill or a receipt when I would pay him. I don’t like the sound of that. My dad won’t like it. He’ll ask to see the bill, receipt and the guarantee card before he looks at the camera.

The salesman is showing me what button does what. He just put a scratch-resistant sticker on the LCD screen and does it so neatly that it reminds me of a condom!

They don’t want to pay sales tax. A bill would mean they sold something, on which they would have to pay tax.

Icky.

The camera I longed for so much is now in my hands. But I am cold towards it. I didn’t look into dad’s eyes when I said he did not give me a bill/ receipt for this purchase. His eyebrows went up a bit and then he sighed. He knows the world works like this.

I know it too. But the sacrifice of a month’s salary and a little more seems worthless now.

The shopkeeper gave me a “box piece” alright (box piece- the complete box with the camera and all its paraphernalia, so it is considered tamper-proof) but he’s tampered with my satisfaction of acquiring something that I’ve been longing to get for so, so long.

There have been a trillion, gazillion times when I see something and want to capture it, save it for future scrutiny and show others what I got. I have seen numerous things that could’ve been beautiful pictures if I was armed with a camera just then! Damn.

Then a tiny sparrow said she’s happy that I finally got a camera. It has rubbed off on me. I spent last night trying to remember what I had glazed over when the assistant was explaining what happens when you press what button. I am learning!

Why?!

Why is it that sometimes something is right in front of me and I cannot reach out to it? Why is it that sometimes things are clear and I can’t make sense of it? Why is it that sometimes I want to say things to people and am not able to do it?

I have a long path to tread on to reach my destination. A person I know whizzes past on a vehicle. I want to hail and show my thumb the way I want to go, but why is it that I don’t do it? And when I do, the person is easily out of earshot.

The milk had spilt long ago. I wonder why it is still a wound. The story was right in front of me, a page one lead story. It just doesn’t cease to prick me. Why is it that I just cannot let it go by, into the voluminous editions of time?

Why is it that I stare into empty space, thinking about nothing? Why is it that I can’t hear things properly? Why is it that I read backwards and up and down and round and round when I am reading? Why is it that I go blank when I talk to people? Why can’t I talk like others do?

Why indeed?

Blank