Toll plazas judder me. I have never passed through any without my mind wrought, eyes blazing, head giddy and generally feeling violated. True, there have been happy occasions where I gave a lift to an old man who was a plaza manager by dint of which I didn’t have to pay not one but three tolls. The ‘toll plaza 1 km ahead’ is where I begin to scan the area for possible circumventing routes; then these collectors have the area fenced in in such a way that would probably daunt
All of a sudden the father of the two guys we were dealing with stood up, left the hall and came back with a rifle in his hands. Ulrike Reinhard, a soi-disant futurist and social entrepreneur, was relieved to leave India the first time she came for a conference. Besides the ‘harsh and irritating extremes’ the dirt and the crowd of Delhi got to her. But she also landed an ‘offer’ to set up a school in Khajuraho which she eagerly took up unaware that it was rooted less in
From the balcony It must have been the same view that held the Muthuvan gaze two centuries ago. The tree line, the undulating hills and the Western Ghats segued into the argent skies through a thick veil of mist. In the calm of early dawn Nature stood motionless narcissistically occupied by its own unrivalled beauty, posturing for a heavenly selfie. I sat on the balcony of the homestay, go-juice forgotten, with the wonderment of peering into a zoetrope. A church bell tolled somewhere in the horizon followed by a muezzin’s
A tribal woman, heavily pregnant, leaned against the iron gate sliding it open and walked into the health centre. Her gait was strained as she had broken water. Too weak to press the electric bell she just about managed to spread out a mat on the corner and collapse. She was alone; her husband was a rabble-rousing Captain Cooker with political ambitions who believed pregnant women were hoodoos to be avoided at all costs. The saving grace about him, I was told later, was that he wasn’t a soak and
The last time I came to Jharkhand was when ‘selfie’ was, forget the culture it is today, nowhere in the lexicon-horizon even. It was seven years ago to make a film for a livelihood program funded by the central government ministry of rural development and implemented by Don Bosco Tech in the more backward districts of the state. There was the internet, yes. But smartphones had just made their foray and I was yet to lay my hands on one. The regular one I had took photographs alright – which
There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying. Why don’t you dance?, Raymond Carver. For most part of the wedding ceremony, the bride was missing from the altar. She was puking her guts out because of all the spice she ate. She was also six months pregnant. “My mother told everyone it was gas from eating too much spice,” Jimmy told me with a straight face. I looked at him sideways but did not detect any mirth. It was
They are all Meeras Throbbing notes twanged out from a three-string kamaicha. Wood-ringed fingers tapped on a ghara. A sadhu with the longest dreadlocks sat like the sachem he was surrounded by attitude and subalterns and general onlookers including me. Thick wafts of grey-blue smoke rose from a smouldering chillum that briskly changed hands in the nippy morning. Sensuously draped eunuchs swirled in and out of the billowy screen singing paeans to Meera, the most devoted of the Krishna bhakts. Their raspy voices rose above the temple bells and
It’s like your first dinner with a date – you take a while to gather gusto. Except for the food on the way you know little else. You look around and take in the décor with intensity, inspect the chandeliers, peer approvingly at paintings and nod at waiters. You laugh nervously, not mirthlessly, a few decibels above normal. You forget to drink water. In Pachkoti Hotel – the original, there’s an imposter even, apparently, which is the one you didn’t go to – I sat with my feet off the
There is not much difference when you look at Bahraich from half a kilometre in the sky and from street level. It is a tumbleweed cluster of shanty dwellings, lean-to shops, road-facing sculleries, pointy minarets, lowing buffaloes snacking on plastic, milling rickshaw pullers and little figurines cowering in black, chaffering with lingerie and veggie vendors on pushcarts. Main drags radiate like a Merc-sign from the town centre, the ‘Ghantaghar’ or Clock Tower. The grounds of this Raj relic are the only place where you can stretch your limbs without
Heritage plays a temporal trick – it can make history feel within reach. I walked up the pathway leading to Lahori Gate, entrance to Red Fort, where friends waited. On my right was the eyesore barbican built by Aurangzeb; Shah Jahan, his father, who built the fort, was miffed with the looming gorgon in garish orange. ‘You have made the fort a bride,’ he wrote from his house arrest quarter overlooking the Taj Mahal in Agra, ‘and set a veil on it.’ The high wall today, fortunately, blocks the view
