1872

Dada:

I grew up under Trymbakeshvar's large skies. (smiles) An art student took his paintbrush carelessly across the skies and the Brahmagiri hills came into being.

(The studio passes by a large tree, the children rush to the window, a crow has made a nest of thatch, pink mouths are straining out of the nest, noisy in their call for food. A squirrel is carrying its bushy train of a tail from branch to branch. A bird squeaks a structured note in three pieces, repeatedly. 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.)

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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.

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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.

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At bed time Saraswatibai sits with the children and tells them the story of Trybakesvar Sarawatibai:

In the ages that preceded all ages, in a time that was before all times, that was not a point, but beyond the point, always beyond every point.. the gods and the demons were children in that time, and always engaged in competitive fights, that we call their battles. They had encountered the frightening spectre of death while at play. They wanted to defeat him. But for that they needed Amruta, the nectar which would give them immortality.

Fear made bravehearts out of them. They uprooted the mountain, Meru, put it on top of a tortoise and wrapped the giant snake Vasuki around it. The devas gathered on one side of the mountain, the asuras on the other, and like a tug of war on the largest scale you can imagine, they churned the ocean.

The skies were full of the gems that the churning threw up. A white horse with wings, Kamadhenu, the cow whose dark eyes have the containing silence of the smoothest riverbed pebbles. An onlooker would have been dazzled by these new stars. But no one else was looking, and those who were churning, had no use of leisure, they only wanted the amruta.

They wanted to drive death, push him away from their playgrounds, so they could play and fight amongst themselves forever. In the machinations, the fights, the interventions that were made to distribute the Amruta when it finally appeared, a few drops fell to the earth. Trymbakeshwar was one of those places where a drop of the nectar of the gods did its alchemy on the soil.

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