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.)
At the English club, the young 'probationers' were asked to give performances. The older ladies in the cantonement always sat through the performace, fanning themselves, as native bearers carried lemonade and other drinks around. The officers would often come in from the lawns for the post dinner piece and cheer on the 'young uns'
Unexpected bunch
A turbanned Mr. Punch
smoking a hubble bubble
around him (en) deshabille
Many dusky Indian filles
Asking our man for trouble
The delicate rabbits
Of Englishmen's habits
demanded a par-ti-cu-lar humour
Besides the impunity
Of the '57 mutiny
was giving our boys there a tumour
A shared snark at the darkies
Togged up in our khakis
was taking the whiskies down better
some Mookerjee writing
in english!! o blighting!
Does he know the alphabet-er?
( the boys have made a pretty folk dance of it, and throwing up their legs, sing and dance the piece out merrily, eliciting many a good natured laugh)
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.
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.
