1872
(The 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.
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. Starts are beginning to burst out of the winter sky. She holds a ganjifa card over their heads, with kurma avatar on it.they each reach out their hand for it, small hands wrestle for it, she seperates them, all the while and takes 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 as 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.
