Skip to main content

Sage



Fiction

His eyes stunned me.  Otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed him at all.  How could I ever expect to meet a school classmate of mine in a jungle of Uttarakhand wearing the garb of a sage?

I was on a trekking expedition to Hemkund and the Valley of Flowers along with a few students of mine.  We were all nearly exhausted after the previous day’s trek from Govind Ghat to Ghangriya followed by the present morning’s trek to Hemkund.  We were at an altitude of 3600 metres, nearly in touch with the angels or at least the clouds.  Some of my students had cheated by ascending Hemkund on the backs of hired ponies.  A teacher has to be very understanding, almost like a god who is eager to forgive his creatures, his very own creatures.  That’s why our ancient tradition puts the guru on a par with the gods.  But meeting Shivan on the way to the Valley of Flowers unsettled me notwithstanding all the understanding I had acquired during the thirty odd years of my career as a guru.

Shivan and I were not the best of friends in school.  Shivan was the black sheep while I was a line-toer.  Whenever I was sick of toeing the line I went with Shivan to the rubber estate near the school to have a cigarette with him during the lunch break.  Shivan had brown eyes.  “Cat,” we called him.  His eyes resembled a cat’s.  When Shivan hurled his choicest abuses on those who called him Cat, I felt both admiration and pity for him.  Once I gathered the courage to pat on his back and say, “Why do you bother?”  He stared at me with his cat’s eyes and said, “Come with me.”  I went with him.  To the rubber estate that lay outside the school campus.  Those were days when walls had not begun to divide borders. 

Shivan gave me a cigarette while lighting the one he had thrust between his lips.  I watched the smoke emerging in circles and spheres from his lips.  I lighted my cigarette too.  “Never mind,” said Shivan when the smoke made me cough. 

My admiration for Shivan boomed.  I couldn’t even smoke while he could create art out of the smoke that emerged from his lips. 

“Shall I create a cloud now?” Shivan asked me one day.  I admired the cloud he created with the cigarette smoke.

The friendship ended soon, however.  The annual exams came and Shivan failed.  I went on to attend college and eventually became a teacher.  There was absolutely no connection between Shivan and me after school.

Until I met him three decades later on the way to the Valley of Flowers.

“Life is funny, man,” he spoke through the beard that covered his lips and slapped my back as he used to do when we were in the rubber estate, he creating clouds with cigarette smoke and I struggling not to cough.

He had been staring at me while I was ascending the trekking path with a few students of mine.  The eyes caught my attention.  Cat’s eyes.

I stared into those eyes which stared back into mine.  That’s how we met.  I told my students to go ahead.  The Valley of Flowers awaited them.

Shivan told me that he had left Kerala during the Emergency in order to escape arrest because he was a political activist questioning Indira Gandhi’s dictatorship. “I really didn’t know anything.  I just acted as my leaders told me,” he said.  “Later I learnt that all political leaders are the same.” 

His political leader wanted to make him a martyr in order to gain popularity for the party.  Shivan was shrewd enough to see through the game.  He ran away to escape being a martyr for the sake of some crooked politicians.

Shivan’s journeys took him to Haridwar.  Then Rishikesh. 

“These swamis,” said Shivan, “they are no better than the politicians.” He met hundreds of them in Haridwar and Rishikesh. “So I carried on.  On and on.  Searching for something.  Something which my cat’s eyes could not catch.  And after a lot of trekking, trekking you say, trekking, after a lot of trekking, man, I reached here, in this jungle, peaceful jungle…”

“I’m glad you found peace at last,” I said.

“Peace,” he grinned through his unkempt beard.

I couldn’t decipher whether it was a question or an exclamation or a sarcastic statement.

“I wish I could spend more time with you,” I said.  “But my students are moving on and I have to be with them.”

“Dharma,” he said. Rather cynically, I thought.  “Go on, fulfil your dharma.”

I was about to leave when his voice arrested me, “Hey, do you by any chance have a cigarette with you?”

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniMay 17, 2017 at 11:31 AM

    How much trekking does one have to do before finding peace? Is it really possible to be in peace with oneself?

    Your story of one Siddhartha in the book left me asking the same question.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 17, 2017 at 7:19 PM

      There's only one place where we can find peace: within. No trek, no exercise can help unless we accept the horror within. But treks and exercises can make us confront the devils within.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
12 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
19 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
15 comments
Read more

Randeep the melody

Many people in this pic have made their presence in this A2Z series A phone call came from an unknown number the other day. “Is it okay to talk to you now, Sir?” The caller asked. The typical start of a conversation by an influencer. “What’s it about?” My usual response looking forward to something like: “I am so-and-so from such-and-such business firm…” And I would cut the call. But there was a surprise this time. “I am Randeep…” I recognised him instantly. His voice rang like a gentle music in my heart. Randeep was a student from the last class 12 batch of Sawan. One of my favourites. He is unforgettable. Both Maggie and I taught him at Sawan where he was a student from class 4 to 12. Nine years in a residential school create deep bonds between people, even between staff and students. Randeep was an ideal student. Good at everything yet very humble and spontaneous. He was a top sportsman and a prefect with eminent leadership. He had certain peculiar problems with academics. Ans
11 comments
Read more