1872

notes: Today Neelkanth took one end of your arm as you were standing at the door. Surprised, not knowing what to do, you had walked him to the gate and back. He had hung onto the end of your arm. You could make out he was saying many things down there, words floated upto you like left over bits of thread at the tailor shop. When you bent low towards him, his small eyebrows went up to see your face enter his skies.. You also paused then, to just look at your youngest son, a small creature, like a poornaa viraam at the end of your arm, looking up at you. He nodded his head before he even understood your question. How intently he sees you, as though wonderstruck. You smile at him, to break the spell the little creature is in. He looks away, points at something on the ground and says something. You bend lower. Even in these days, when at best, you are only pretending to work, you think, you have hardly noticed him. You think you should pay a little more attention to him sometimes. It would do you good. He becomes more animated as you walk on, showing you objects of play.. He wants to touch the cow. You stand around as he does so. He sits on his haunches to look at an insect climbing up a stone. You were the first in your community to do many things- to sing and act and paint and do theatre. You had to struggle to make a man's enterprise of it. Now when there is little to do.. sometimes you watch the children. Your older son, Babaraya takes long walks with you and you begin to share some of what you have collected, your special many knowledges that the world does not quite know how to value.. with him. You have to fight off a feeling of precariousness.. a feeling you have had before. You know that what you know has value, you remind yourself of that. What you feel unsure of is how it will help your child.

(The flying studio passes by a large tree, Babaraya laughs delighted as some of the branches scratch him, the children rush to the window. Noisy pink mouth are straining out of a crow's house of straw. A squirrel is carrying its bushy train from branch to branch. A bird practices a structured note in three pieces, its small body expanding and contracting like a bellow. The studio passes by the heart of the large tree and suddenly, before them, is the open sky and the flowing line of the Brahmagiri hills.)

Dada:

I grew up under Trymbakeshvar's large skies. One celestial brush idling over the skies gave birth to my Brahmagiri hills. 
 Dada:

---

Little Neelkanth returns excitedly to where Sarasvati sits on the bed, the others follow and clamber to where the cots are joined, warm as nests. Wrapped in her children, she tells them the story of a river.

Sarasvati:

In a time when there was no plough, how did the rishi Gautam have a green field? He flung seeds here and there on the ground like everyone else, and still when his crop came up, it came together like a coherent sentence and made a pretty field. This got Gautam a lot of respect on earth, and it got him the jealously of the gods.

They sent a hungry cow to his field. Some say that they prayed to Ganesh first and while he detested their lowly plan, he was bound to oblige the hard working devotees, the ritualistic masters. People often pray hard to destroy things, you know..

Sarasvati stares at her children, all with a black mark at the edges of their forheads to drive away the evil eye, all secured with a holy amulet tied to a black thread, around their stomachs.

The elephant god disguised himself as a cow and entered Gautam's field.

Mahadev: Hey Mandakini, show how?

Mandakini leans down a bit, and swinging her large head, wanders in this field of children, taking swings at the 'crop' of little ones. Srikrishna giggles, Prabhakar begins to beat her up.

Gautam saw a large cow lumbering among his radiant crop, looking insolently at him, her jaws slowly making mulch of his magical farm.

He would wonder for a long time after, he had merely flung a piece of straw at her as he chased her out, how did she just fall down and die?

However it happened, he had the death of a cow on his hands, and Gohatya is a crime with no easy penance. Gautam prayed desperately to Shiva, his body still as a corpse.

(Mandakini perches her right foot on her left thigh and stands, hands aloft, like an ascetic. Neelkanth slides down Sarasvati's shoulder, she catches him in her lap.)

Sarasvati:

Shiva knew the first forgiveness was a bath in the Ganga. But the Ganga was so far away. The wild head Neelkantha ( Sarasvati looks fondly at her son) decided to ask Ganga to help Gautam. Ganga would not refuse the blue skinned god, you remember, she had lived in his hair.

It had been meant as a trap, but over time, after both of them got used to it, they began to notice one another. Who is the man whose wild hair I feel on my body all the time, Ganga wondered. Who is this hair clip that is soft like the underside of Ganpati's stomach? Shiv knew when Gautam prayed to him, that if he told Ganga to go to Trymbakeshvar, to do anything, Ganga would not refuse him.

(The children's different eyes, some older some younger in the world, are grappling differently with her story)

So when Ganga went with Gautam to Trymbakesvar, Shiv followed.

Mahadev: Why?

Sarasvati: Because two people who always had him in their minds lived there, and Shiv likes to live in places where people are thinking of him.

---

Mrs. Amelie Caldfield's (nee Thomas) diary, October, 1872

The club house was a riot of young men today. It is tough on the young 'uns( don't I remember my miserable first summer, and of course Gordons horrible horrible stories of how it was when he landed here) for a long while. The heat, the miserable streets, the cooking habits of the native cooks- anything and everything seems ordered to get you down. Which is probably what gives club evenings such a charge: In the select company of 'your own people' ( could we have imagined back home, that one day, that would feel like the biggest treat?), your mind rests, and if you are young, your natural ebullience returns. I was charmed by the lively performance by one young bunch of probationers of this charming ditty, sung to the tune of an old Scottish ( i think) number, with plenty of foot stamping and clapping between the verses. Nothing can pull youth down(sigh). 'Punch' has started an Indian edition, which is much cause for cheer in cantonements across India. The song was an ode to the occasion:

Unexpected bunch

A turbanned Mr. Punch

smoking a hubble bubble

around him (en) deshabille

Many dusky Indian filles

Asking our man for trouble

(and they would roll their eyes in horror at the thought. They was one red haired, endearing fellow who quite fell off the stage with the ferocity of the faces he was trying to make)

The delicate rabbits

Of Englishmen's habits

demand a par-ti-cu-lar humour

Besides the impunity

Of the '57 mutiny

has been giving our boys there a tumour

( I turned to look at Gordon at this point. He lost his uncle in the seige of Cawnpore, he does not take kindly to jokes on that time. Gordon's face was completely impassive, of course, but still, when you are a wife, you can see when something shifts in the eyes.)

A shared snark at the darkies

Togged up in our khakis

is taking the whiskies down better

some Mookerjee writing

in english!! o blighting!

Does he know the alphabet-er?

Mookerjee, Colonel Todd told me later- he is well versed in all such matters, is some Indian fellow who has been trying to print in English. I told him I would like to see that publication! That would be merry indeed.

---

Dada: My father would say that there are two kinds of nectars- the elixirs and the poisons. Both are potent, neither can be spilled, both must be absorbed. Trymbakesvar absorbed some of the nectar that spilled from a heavenly row.

Saraswatibai smiles: The soil of your hometown drank something meant to make the gods eternal.

Babaraya: So maybe when all the earth is gone, Trybakesvar will still remain..

Dada: When you walk in that town, you feel the charge in the air. There amid the mountain mists you know you are walking into your own consciousness.

---

Sarasvati bai is putting the children to bed. At the windows, stars are beginning to burst into the winter sky. She holds a ganjifa card over their heads, with kurma avatar on it.soft fingers of different sizes, some larger, some smaller, pile one over the other, covering it, wrestling with each other. We hear a narration of the Samudra manthan, over Sarasvati bai's hands carefully seperating the fingers and taking control of the card again. As she speaks, the air around the card, around them, is getting pigmented with blue and in the blue, appear white outlines of constellations that overlap each other.. the winged horse, the cow with silent eyes, the jar of Amruta. "and so" she finishes her story.. "a drop spilt from the jar that had been thrown up in the churning of the ocean". She disentangles the pallu of her saree that Neelkanth has wrapped himself into. Prabhakar has been trying to get into the same piece of saree, in imitation of his brother. The baby who is just about walking is hovering about them and stumbles and falls and howls. The pigments by now have entered the frame lines of all the bodies in the frame and are transforming their texture. They all dissolve and we see in a dark room, under a shaft of light from a ceiling tile, Drawkabai at work on the chullah.

---