Where is the night?

 

                                                                Paper collage by Bipasha M

The electricity went off in my area. In Delhi. For an hour.

And finally after years, the darkness settled back in. Even if it was for the briefest while. Like one nano second of a heartbeat. A tiny pulse of a long forgotten time and experience that unexpectedly gifted me with a deep sense of calm, aliveness and an awareness of my presence as a human on Earth.

With the electricity gone, the area fell silent. How much we live with white noise around us can be gauged only during such moments. The shops which used to shut at 10pm, closed shutters earlier that day. People who walked the streets at night stopping for ice-cream, also made their way back home. For a precious half an hour, all was dark and quiet around me. There was a soft summer breeze and I could finally hear some insects of the night.    

That night I remembered how much my body misses the rhythm of the darkness. How much my eyes need the rest of the darkness, I saw that night. And for the briefest while, I felt complete in my body, like those of my ancestors who once roamed the land in sync with the rhythm of the Earth.  

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Long hours of ‘load-shedding’ was a common things in erstwhile Bihar while growing up. Many times, power cuts happened because of sudden thunderstorms or cyclonic weather. Our bodies were so tuned to nature then that we never felt the discomfort. Darkness was a much needed ebb and flow of life – a time when families gathered together on the verandahs, laughing, telling stories, watching the stars in the sky, chasing fireflies in dark corners, listening to the sounds of the night. Sometimes, a black cat would sneak past us into the house looking for food taking advantage of the darkness. In smaller towns, we could hear the yelp of the foxes close by. Those were times when we respected the darkness. Even though we spent many hours outside waiting for the electricity to come back, we never ventured beyond our verandahs. There was an unsaid rule that we all followed – not to go into the garden or nature areas; for it was the time of the spirits of the night to own their spaces.

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We had camped somewhere in the Changthang region of Ladakh, 15000ft or more above sea level. It was bitterly cold and a strong wind blew at night. This was way back in the early 2000s when adventure sports gears were not available in India. I had a worn a warm fleeced jacket brought from Benetton and felt chilled to the bone. The rest of the small group of trekkers had retired into the tents, but I stayed outside drawn to the night despite the icy breath of the wind. In that utter darkness of the mountains, the Milky Way shone bright along with a dazzling display of trillions of stars. Countless stars fell and shot across the sky. Somewhere a lone wolf howled. In those moments while I stood transfixed as the wind buffeted me, I felt incredibly tiny. Not insignificant, but tiny. That moment in the darkness was a turning point in my life, a time that eventually changed the course of my life.

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The landscape was raw and felt ancient. It was a stark reminder of what we have lost here in India. The village in east Nepal could be accessed after a 45-minute walk from the main road. Most of the houses in the village had electricity used by yellow 60-watt bulbs. In the night, the light was not so harsh.

One night, the electricity kept switching off and on. In those moments of inky darkness, I would run outside to experience the night. Our host’s lovely family found my behavior peculiar and asked why I was so interested in the darkness. I fumbled for words then. How could I explain what it meant to live in the constant glare of light in the cities, how we cannot see stars in the night sky anymore, not even from mountain villages, how we are disconnected from nature moving towards a darkness of the soul with all the light dazzling around us.

But the question made me realize how much I missed the essence of the night. In cities and elsewhere these days, I feel safer in well-lit places. But my body longs for a space and time when I can be alone with the silence and darkness of the night.

One Rainy August Day

Rain fell in a steady drizzle. The trees and the hills beyond were the colour of moss—dark and ancient. Some old memories stirred. Of dark monsoons days in my childhood when rain fell incessantly and steadily, turning everything wet, silent, and gloomy. Of days of our ancient ancestors when rain rejuvenated the Earth for life to flourish. A pair of lapwing stood guard on top of the asbestos roof that covered the neighbor’s terrace shrieking their heads off whenever a myna or a bulbul came too close. I wondered if they had nested on top of the roof instead of in the fields. They did not, however, shoo the pigeons away who sat along with them in the rain.

The bulbul parents were oblivious to all the shrieking around them. They would just hop in and out grabbing at small bites here and there as the little one fluttered around. I realized that they were not feeding the chick; instead they were teaching the young one the tricks of their trade and how to be smart about reaching to the food. Once in a while, a grey pied myna would fly and disappear into one of the many holes in the dead tree that was still standing next to the gate. It seemed like a magic show—a fleck of grey disappearing and reappearing in the greyness of the clouds and the dead bark. While the rain kept the humans indoor, it brought a shy and introverted black and brown coucal out of its hiding to forage right in the middle of the puddled streets. 

The rain had slowed down and thin clouds fleeted in and out of the distant hills. Water dripped from the huge tree in front of the house. A rain-drenched hush fell as dusk approached. The sound of crickets and other insects grew louder. A pair of owls hooted from top of the dead tree. Bats, replacing the black kites of day time, soared across the dark sky. And late at night when most of the houses had switched off their lights and its inhabitants fallen asleep, a few fireflies showed up in the big tree dancing away in the wet night.

The Sea and I

Agatti, Lakshadweep

N Ikka points at the stars ahead. There are three big ones vertically aligned. He says we need to head in the stars’ direction. The sky is inky black, thousands of stars strewn across its vastness. The boat jumps along with the waves as we hold on to the plank we are sitting on. The excitement of being on a fishing boat at night dies down eventually and wonder replaces it. Our whispered conversation ebbs, and F and I just sit there in silence.

The faintest of light appears in the eastern sky, and slowly one by one the stars acknowledge the presence of the approaching sun and begin to recede. In the semi-darkness, much before dawn, F nudges me and points to the back of the boat. Under a still bright crescent moon with a shining star above it sat a fisherman on his mat facing west, deep in prayer. Around us is the silence of the vast ocean.  

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The sun is high in the sky and beating down unrelenting. The sea is indigo blue. I wonder how the fishermen can see through the dazzle of the noon sun. I am wearing my sunglasses, yet squinting through it. But their gaze is fixed scanning the surface of the sea for signs of tuna shoals around. There seems to be none, as we keep going further out into the sea. The live bait fishing early morning was full of excitement for me. It was routine work for the 11 fishermen on the boat. Though they are not, I feel tired and doze off under the shade near the bait fish tank. MK wakes me up with one word – Dolphins.

In one-tenth of a second, I am at the bow of the boat peering down at the blue water. There, just next to our boat, on both sides, are about twenty or thirty dolphins swimming along. So close, I could have touched them if my arms were a little longer. Sharp and sleek bodies moving as fast as the boat. Suddenly, they all move away together. Just as I am thinking that the show is over, they return jumping and frolicking. I want to jump in, touch them, feel them, swim with them, say a big thank you for being with us humans for so long. A few minutes later, they disappear leaving me wondering if it was all real or just magic.

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It’s my last day on the island. I am standing at the edge of the eastern jetty, the deepest blue sea spread ahead of me. There’s something different about the current today. Or so I feel. Small eddies form below the jetty and I can see a shoal of a deepest blue fish. There’s a stillness in the air, a rise in humidity. A sign that a thunderstorm and rains are approaching. I stand there under the afternoon sun in awareness of the ocean that is breathing, ebbing and flowing, in a beautiful dance with the moon. This is where life started, billions of years ago - in the womb of the Earth. I had lived for 12 years in a coastal city, but it is here that I experience her magnanimity and strength. I turn back, forever changed.  

In the Land of the Blue-Green Sea

 The east coast was three shades of never-seen-before blue; the west coast a deep green that kept changing with the sun. And I was there, somewhere in the middle, lost in nature’s grandness.

The island of Agatti, like most islands of Lakshadweep, is small and can be covered end-to-end within half an hour, if you are on a motorbike. Which means the sea is always with you wherever you go. The sea’s constant presence, however, did not prevent me from being shocked to momentary stillness every time I caught a glimpse of her colours in the month that I was there. During one thunderstorm that I witnessed, the colours shifted with the mood of the weather – light green, dark green, grey, light blue and dark blue – as if the sea was playing her own grand symphony.            

Placed within a unique geography, Lakshadweep is as beautiful as the tourist brochures want you to believe. Perhaps even more if you get to know the sea. But as life in the island started to reveal itself, it became clear as the water that there is no other place in the country like these islands.    

Agatti: Photo - Bipasha M

Almost the entire population follows Islam as its religion with a floating population of ‘outsiders’ largely in Kavaratti, its capital. Though some anthropologists have mentioned Wahabi and Sunni as the main sects here, one can find many traces of Sufism in their rituals and ancient healing traditions. Socio-culturally, they carry the lineage of their Kerala ancestry. They are a matrilineal society, the only other being Meghalaya, where the property passes from mothers to daughters. Unlike Meghalaya, here the husbands do not stay with the wives but visit them from time to time and have to pay money (similar to dowry) to the wives’ family during marriage negotiations. Apart from the island of Minicoy where social mobility of women is known to be higher, the rest of the islands have patriarchal value system where the men take most of the family and financial decisions. As such, participation of women in community level decision making seemed less, with them functioning mostly in the background. Gender segregation at the society level is high, with free interaction between girls and boys being almost non-existent. All across the island I saw young boys and fishermen largely occupying public spaces including tea-stalls, beaches, markets, and jetties, while groups of women and young girls would mostly chill out at the beach during sunset. This segregation also finds its manifestation in one of the simplest yet most obvious aspect of island life, where girls and women don’t know how to swim and are prone to major sea-sickness while travelling on sea.   

These aspects might make the place seem similar to that of north India’s many highly patriarchal and aggressively ‘male’ cities and villages. But this is where things get fascinating. These islanders are one of the warmest, friendliest, and most hospitable communities I have ever come across in the country. People are ready for some conversation and chai at any point in time. Despite gender segregation, there is high level of dignity and respect for each other, something which I find sorely missing in the plains. After I dropped my ‘mainland’ guard, I walked, sat, cycled freely without any fear or looks over the shoulder, even during times when electricity went off pitching the whole island in absolute darkness. The community operates under an invisible cloak of cooperation and collaboration even when ideologies and ideas did not match, for they know that all are dependent on each other in the small space that is their home. One can easily understand why crime rate is almost nil and incidences of domestic violence limited; I did not hear any raised voice or arguments in the month that I was there. With education a priority for all, marriage and child bearing are much delayed with women getting married after the age of 22 or 23 years and men after 25 years, trends that are in stark contrast to those in the mainland.             

It was sublime, the first day of Ramzan as the island slowed down and time reversed and people hurried to the call to prayers. In the days that followed, I would wake up early every day while the island slept and spend a couple of hours walking from the blue sea to the green one, observing life in the tidal pools, lying down on coconut fronds and watching clouds glide across the blue sky, or sitting quietly listening to the sea and the wind.   

Agatti: Photo - Bipasha M

I had to make a hurried exit from the island due to the covid resurgence across the country and the tightening rules there. As the flight made a turn towards the mainland, the island came into full view from above. A tranquil piece of white and green against a vast backdrop of blue appearing as if in a dream, for I couldn’t make out where the ocean ended and the sky began.

Indigenous earth-based traditions regard water as transformative. Living with a beautiful community in the midst of a world of water, I came back a changed person.      

Lockdown Reflections

 

Image by: Bipasha M

She comes and sits quietly at her usual perch. Sometimes she caws loudly to let me know that she’s there. But most often, she waits silently. I don’t know how or when our friendship started. But one day I noticed this crow sitting a foot away from me as I kept the food on balcony ledge. She started coming closer and would eat the food as soon as I would keep it. Then came a time when she would wait for me to make balls of cooked rice and place it only for her. Few days ago, she accepted food straight from my hand. She took it very gently to ensure that she didn’t hurt me with her beak. Unlike the bulbul, mynah, and the squirrel family, she doesn’t come every day and that’s okay with me.

I started actively feeding the birds since the lockdown. Initially, I would leave rice grains and forget about it. Slowly, I began noticing the birds that came at different times to either eat the food or take a dip in the water bowl. Now I have a family of mynah, a pair of bulbuls whose little one has flown the nest, some 15 odd crows, and two families of squirrels that I consciously leave food out for. When they allow me near them, I feel accepted and trusted. It’s a feeling that I have never felt before with fellow human beings.         

At the end of the year, I can say without an iota of doubt that this has been the most precious gift the year has given me. If the year hadn’t slowed us down, I wouldn’t have known my non-human friends so intimately or seen migratory birds fly right over my terrace or watch an exquisite delicate turquoise damselfly hover over the orange flowers.

I like the slow pace. Of life. Of work. Of my thoughts. And of my body. I don’t feel the regular restlessness that tends to creep in despite being at home for three-fourth of the year. In its place I feel a deep groundedness. My work is as much impacted as others, but I am not anxious about the future. I am enjoying the way my body has slowed downed with the onset of winter. I am happy when my periods coincide with either the full moon or the new moon, as if my body is trying to realign and find its way back to the moon. I want to play the flute, not learn how to play, because I feel the wind wants to speak to me. I am slowly learning to extend the concepts of consent and reciprocity to soil, land, Earth and the plants in my balcony garden. When I grow, it’s with the consent of the seeds and soil. When I take something, I leave a bit of my hair in return.

I do feel a different kind of restlessness though. A restlessness of presenting myself in the new world, of stepping into my true potential, of being my wild self, and of establishing a new narrative. There’s a world out there where people deeply trust each other, collaborate and cooperate, and only follow the language of the heart. I have seen glimpses of this world and felt its breathing growing presence.        

This year taught me for certain that the only true reality is being grounded to our beautiful home, Earth and being inherently connected with all beings nature. That when things fall apart all around you, when you fall apart, She is the only one, who is and will be there for you. And bring you home.

Monsoon, The Phenomenon:

As temperature begins to climb after spring is bullied out hurriedly by the approaching summer, thoughts of the monsoon begin to stir somewhere at the recess of the mind. These thoughts are always there, though at a very subconscious level as people go about their daily lives. The countdown to the arrival of the rain bearing clouds begins in earnest when the thermostat moves beyond 40 degrees C in large parts of the country.

India is not defined by its searing summers, as many would think. Rather, the annual seasonal reversal of wind patterns that bring some of the heaviest rains in the world, it’s the power of the monsoon that leaves nobody untouched, connecting all our souls in a strangely sublime way. Despair that it’s too strong or too weak, anguish that it didn’t arrive on time, the jagged anticipation of the dark clouds, the visceral fear of flood or famine, the relief, joy and effervescence, the romance and poetry, the moodiness and constant wetness, the festivities…..the emotions around the monsoon are just as many as the number of people in this country.

Monsoon in Mandu: Image - Bipasha M

During my childhood in Bihar, monsoon meant wearing shin length raincoats and plastic shoes to school which we would deliberately take off while coming home giving us an excuse for getting wet. It also meant wading through stagnant waters to get to the bus stand, making paper boats, and pushing them across these waters to compete whose boat went the farthest. It meant school holidays during days of incessant rains when we would tuck ourselves under covers and read storybooks through the day or sit on the windowsill and day-dream as the rain drizzled outside steadily. On days when the sky would stay dark and rain refused to stop, worry lines would creep in on the faces of our parents and elders. Discussions would veer towards the rising levels of Ganga, and a time when the river breached her banks during the dark of the night drowning people in their sleep and destroying properties.

In the first phase of my stay in Delhi, the crisp autumn and clear blue skies during the peak of winter held sway over my thoughts and emotions. Oh, I did love the rains, but it was in a dramatic, nostalgic, angst-ridden way that younger years tend to elicit, full of longing for things hard to define, and a love for life that can be expressed only when the world around gets washed off all its dreariness. But in all this, for me, the monsoon remained a season which heralded the approach of autumn and winter.

Fourteen years ago, when I landed at Mumbai’s airport, it was a typical grey day with a steady drizzle and sleek wet roads. That was my first brush with the monsoon in the city and which continued to define all the years of my stay there. For this is the land where I understood the glory and the power of the phenomenon, what it means to live for four months with grey skies and continuous wet conditions, of having walls and clothes covered in moss, of carrying a change of clothes every time you stepped outside, of getting totally drenched due to the force of the rain despite all your measures to stay covered. And this is also the place where I understood what unadulterated joy is when the first drops of rain begin to fall after months of heart-numbing and physically-draining mugginess, when this joy is reflected in everybody’s faces around you, when “poush aala” rings out from everywhere, when the city suddenly comes back to life.

Monsoon in Maharashtra coast. Image: Bipasha M

Some of my defining monsoon moments though have been in places outside of Mumbai – at the sea coasts when we watched the rains arrive on darkest clouds across the sea and cover us swiftly, within minutes, with a force that was almost like a physical blow; or amongst the fluorescent green hills of the Western Ghats shrouded in clouds and mist with numerous waterfalls rolling down the mossy rock face. It was during these moments and places that I could intimately witness the magical sway the monsoon has over this country.

Last year, the monsoon made an extremely short and bipolar appearance in Delhi leaving us to deal with a rather sizzling and long summer. This year, post an unprecedented thunderstorms season that lasted most of summer, the monsoon arrived sooner than usual and then weakened. As it continues to gathers strength, and the air here grows thick with heat and heavy moisture, my gaze is fixed eastwards waiting impatiently for the full arrival of the monsoon clouds.