A Short Story
She always wanted to retreat
to the mountains, but did not know it would be this way. She had left behind a
family, a set of people that had a strong bearing on her life, that were her
debt-bonds. But she had finally had the courage to shirk them, shrug it all off
and make a life for herself.
Standing by the large window
of her small one-room tenement, Arannyaani peered outside to
greet yet another day - new-born and fresh, so unlike the city’s cacophonic,
crusty existence. Silence sheathed the scene, cloaked the cedars and oak like
mist. Birds free as spirits flitted in and out of the canopy chasing mirages
strumming the lyre of her heartstrings. The sapphire sky granted its
benediction on the bountiful earth below with its hills and conifers. The
tranquility seeped through the window frame, stilled her mind and suffused her soma.
She knew it was the right choice, rather, her rightful destiny. She had clambered
to her swarg that did not reek of
human vitiation – no crowds, no noise, no pollution or dirt.
Arannyaani – the
one of the forests and hills and dales - had left the urban jungle and come
home to rest.
She had brewed a regular cup
of chai – some things, some habits
had to stay as a link to the past… a past which was of her own making though it
hadn’t turned out exactly the way she wanted or would have liked it to. She was
not ready to convert into a satvic, an
absolute saint - no, not yet. She had always loved the idea of tea, an immortal
brew that in her country had outlived sundry other human preoccupations.
Sipping the faithful concoction memories flooded her mind and she was
overwhelmed.
A
picture perfect garden, the tinkle of tea cups and laughter, the people – young
and old, the patter and rush of feet as everyone – on two legs and four legs –
went about their routine. Youth and love and romance...
Charting out a life alone, at
this late stage, was not going to be easy, but when was it ever so? She had
always sought to face challenges on her own terms. After a lifetime of yoga she wanted to master meditation to
experience “nirvana”. Yoga had been a part and parcel of her
existence since childhood. The rigour of controlling the breath, centering the
mind and prising the sanctum of self, had a cosmic hold on her. Watching yoga gurus on television was her initiation
into the discipline. Since then gleaning books and taking short-term courses in
small-time schools had kept the flame burning. But it was her hidden desire to
go to the Himalayas like the rishis
of yore to learn the art of living in its original abode.
And here she was now, at last,
in the lap of Himalayas to keep her promise to herself of seeking
“realization”, the truth that Marriage and Family had failed to lead to.
Arannyaani slips out of her fantasy and family world and onto the streets below.
The streets of the hill-town curve suggestively and hidden by trees and other
topographic features seem to suggest a lithe woman in a sensuous gyration. In
her mind, Arannyaani is young again - beautiful with lustrous hair
that fall like a silken shawl on her
nape and shoulders, framing a stunning face.
The harsh years in between had taken its toll but Arannyaani had retained the freshness of being deep inside
which showed outwardly as an intense yearning. Slim, with shaven head, as she
walked out now, she personified exotica that could not be ignored.
Hair
she had pared to shed vanity; shed, to cut off the shackles of her identity, the
knots of her past.
Arannyaani walked slowly, deliberately, in light steps for she had nowhere to go.
She strolled seemingly endlessly, from wilderness to civilization, until she
encountered tiny, hole-in-the-wall shops selling handicrafts, woolens, organic
vegetables and fruits, ‘home-made’ chocolates and cheese, tea and herbs, and
even yellowed, musty, dog-eared, second-hand and rare books. Though not grossly
commercialized yet, the hill-town had the semblance of urban trappings that
would keep her going for some time without her chickening out, turning tail to
head for the next metropolis.
But what she saw next, she was
not prepared to see or accept. Piles of garbage, plastic bags and paper, food
and other traces of tourism’s tentacles - residue of human excesses - posed a
conduit to her past life. In her naiveté, more likely “denial”, she had imagined
the remote recess of Earth to be pristine and untouched even today. It mocked
her escape to asceticism and that was simply too much to take.
Her cleanliness fetish had
seen her house spic and span at any given time in those heady, happy days when
she was a house-proud homemaker, apart from being a woman of many parts. And in its extreme, her obsession had seen
her declutter and junk the paraphernalia of luxurious living that she thought
she or her family could do without and had turned spartan. Asceticism emerges
out of Excess. Easy prosperity, at times, can be liberating and so it was that she
cleansed her system of the materialism bug. She recycled and donated
knick-knacks, clothes, some books even, and junked memories, hurts, slights,
and regrets. She now felt formatted and spare of space that had too many
unnecessary files and clogged registries and unused icons! The trash she now
encountered came crashing down upon her like a ton of unwanted debris.
She
could not just turn away and escape anymore; she had to do something.
Next day, early morning before
the shops had opened and the streets belonged to themselves Arannyaani set out missing her daily ritual of tea by the
window. A gunny sack and a broom in hand, a handkerchief covering her nose, she
struck an incongruous stance on the deserted roads. She rummaged through the
garbage and started collecting riff-raff – polythene bags, milk tetrapacks,
packaging, plastic bottles… filling her sack, which got chockfull in no time.
She swept the streets and piled the trash next to the already over-spilling
bins that were waiting for the municipality garbage dumpsters to relieve them.
In the city, she had relentlessly
ticked
off pedestrians for chucking garbage - bus tickets, chocolate wrappers, banana
skins - onto streets, spitting public, or shopkeepers dumping waste by the
roadside. She was, of course, always told to mind her business. Educating or
admonishing people do not work, she had realized; maybe, shaming them just
might.
On the first day, people
gawked at her; some sniggered at her appearance, at her bald pate. Many others
were too blasé even to give her a second look. Each new day began with
“meditating” over sunrise, “meditating” at the Ashram and ending up for a
rendezvous with Waste that she had sought to purge from her Past. For Arannyaani, her tryst with the elements of Nature pure, of
the first few days – with its fragrance and sounds, rhythms and enchantments -
had been rudely replaced by filth and stench and eyesore. She traded the perfume
of the pines for the stench of rotting food, the pleasure of gardening - turning
and feeling the scented soil - for sinking hands in human filth. To
experience the pristine beauty of Mother Earth she had to first wade over the Mountain
of Waste; this was to be her Fate.
What
is that about Yin and Yang, Joys and Sorrows, Past and Present being the two
sides…?
The collected waste needed a
dump where it could be sorted out, a warehouse, a home. So, Arannyaani brought trash bags home and as the garbage
piled up the backyard become a dump-yard. Arannyaani’s world revolved around flip-flops, broken fragments of
plastic jars, glass pieces, pearl-pet bottles, rusted iron bolts, nut, wires,
meshes, screens, until all those shards swam and danced in her mind’s eye like alphabets
and numbers in a dyslexic child’s brain. At night, this cosmos haunted her, taunted
her, until kaleidoscopic patterns started emerging like constellation of stars
or clouds creating and disintegrating in daylight sky.
Having stepped knee-deep into
collecting dirt, she now set about cleaning pieces that could be reused. Thus
plastic lids – chrome, vermilion, cobalt blue and green – and cut-outs of jars got
strung into a screen for a doorway. Flip-flops - in primary colours - that once
graced individual pair of feet got scrubbed off its grime and cut into diamonds
to be wedged into a rug for people to tread on collectively. Discarded metal
parts became the innards and skeletons of birds and beasts. Polythene bags got ripped
to strips to be woven into bags and coasters. Paper was beaten to pulp, to
death, to be reborn as respectable papier maché receptacles and holders. Wet
garbage got composted to produce the finest of silken soils that she could run
her fingers through and whose heavenly scent she could breathe deeply in.
The
cycle of destruction and regeneration was turning again… waste was being wheeled
into recycled art.
Now Arannyaani was not only collecting garbage every day, but was simultaneously
selling her wares at dirt prices, too! Curious onlookers who by now had got
used to her presence made beeline for her arty utility items. Soon children
from the neighbourhood joined her. Shopkeepers became more circumspect about
littering and women from nearby houses lend their whole-hearted support. She
got local hands to do the segregating, cleaning and scrubbing. Arannyaani’s backyard became
a dumpyard-cum-compost-pit-cum-studio-art gallery-cum-meeting place for simple
hill-folks.
