Clamouring Clerodendrum

Delhi is a city of extremes... It swings slowly between  between opposite ends of the spectrum over a period of twelve months, but continues to give us glimpses of its incredible beauty through its flora and birdlife, both of which are diverse and proliferating.  I love its trees and creepers , many of which have travelled from exotic climes ,  armed with flowers in  incredible colours , names, shapes and sizes. I love the wild rose, the thin pink-tipped jasmine, the plump mogras, the passionflower,  the shankh pushp, the madhumalti, the wisteria and the trumpet flowers, to say say nothing of the multi-hued bougainvillea  that can climb trees and walls and electric poles and street wires and then send down thorny leaf-curtains  well-loved by sparrows, but for me the creeper that embodies the spirit of Delhi is the clerodendrum, a hardy creeper that I have seen  densely populating  walls around homes, schools, colleges and public institutions. Most creepers in fact are gregarious, they are nature's climbers after all, and reach new heights  and newer destinations more often than not. 

When a small spot opened up in front of my house, several years ago, I planted a clerodendrum creeper that was eaten alive by an itinerant cow before it could get its act together. In recent years, since cows are now schooled in goshalas and are seldom allowed to stroll down colony roads, unless bedecked in a heavy embellished sheet and patrolled by an attendant,  I embarked upon Project Clerodendrum again by purchasing yet another creeperling from a nearby nursery. I planted it in the same spot , but a giant mulberry tree which was now lording it over the section of the street shut out the creeperling's sun. Listless, it  took on a grass like identity and grew at the rate of  half an inch every year, but couldn't really put a foot forward because it got  very little sunlight. For a while it straggled, living and partly shrinking, until last year,  a newly appointed maali used  a long string to lead the clerodendrum up the walled path.  I  wondered howthe attached string would help if  we did not chop off  the overhang of the mulberry tree.  When I broached the subject with Rakesh,  my not- newly-hired-anymore maali, about trimming the  mulberry branch, he announced that the clerodendrum required no such assistance. Puzzled l began to  trace the movement of  the single vine  climbing up the wall of my house and discovered to my delight that it had  leaped and bounded to a height of 17 feet  and then spread itself out atop the mosaic platform  that sheltered the wardrobes in  our first floor bedroom. 

 Laying down a nest-bed of leaves, the clerodendrum had burst into  several floral clusters and was preparing to  bloom. This  unexpected, magical moment, showcasing  an incredible event, slowly began to  sink in. I have been watching the flower-buds emerge for about a month now, and  continue to marvel at the tenacity of the clerodendrum, and the alacrity with which it  has created a space for itself, traversing a long distance from its roots. 

These are two pictures, one taken from the ground floor, and another captured from the second floor terrace, that document its  climb. The dark steel gray leaves, often seem to me to have drunk of the  summer sandstorms and the winter air of Delhi,  and gained in strength, feeding on a tough soil that nourishes stragglers and survivors enabling them to  thrive and flourish. When  clerodendrums bloom in New Delhi, they radiate warmth and energy  in  brilliant red clusters,  in the cold wintery months, allowing us to draw succour from their  rich vibrancy. Truly, the "flaming glory bowers" of the clerodendrum  epitomise the life- blood of this city.

 Hornbill Homecoming

This is the first-time in my life that I spotted  pied hornbills; four of them, having their morning sun-raiser, as they prepared to fly out to meet the requirements of their day. It was a typical  Corbett morning in late December, cold and misty,  but by 8am, the sun does make a grand  appearance and wash the  gray off the skies, unveiling the beginnings of a  baby blue.  The hornbills sat on a Jacaranda tree, finished with flowering and having dispersed  all of its seedpods, retaining  only a few  petioles with fernlike pinnate leaves. Its tall, spread out branches provided the hornbills  with a wonderful overview  of  possible flight routes. I know nothing of the habits of the pied hornbill,  having only stumbled upon  one solitary gray hornbill  at IIC and another  in Jaipur. Both these birds had flown away, showing little desire to linger and introduce themselves.

 This time round, I could gaze at these pretty robust-sized birds, much larger than the magpie robins, mynahs or pigeons I usually encounter, and continue to admire their beaks and plumage because their backs were turned to me. They sat calmly, unlike the usually garrulous and restless babbler crowd. Initially, all the birds gazed out into the horizon, but  the two  birds on the right began to gaze over their shoulder, responding to some commotion  in the  neighboring mango tree. Lo and behold,  a trio of sand coloured baby monkeys  were climbing up the leafy branches of the mango and  steadfastly  making their way up to the Jacaranda.  The bird sitting on the lower branch took off, without a backward glance. The two birds to the right continued to watch for the  baby monkeys speeding up to the jacaranda, finding footholds on the trunk and on  thinner branches and when they felt the monkeys were too close for comfort, turned, clutched their perch  in the manner of  race-worthy cyclists, dived off the tree and were airborne. One hornbill continued to wait, doubtful perhaps that the baby rhesus could reach a branch that was so high up.  In a matter of seconds one little rhesus stood at the intersection of the trunk  with the branch. So hornbill number four hastily sprinted off its perch. The other two little macaques, following the leader, decided to jump back to the mango tree, break off orange green leaves and chew on them.

The jacaranda tree emptied out and became a silent spectator. The macaque troops had swelled with the  addition of  older siblings and an indignant parent; all of them began to frolic and  forage amid verdant mango foliage. Watching this live-show from the sidelines, ensconced on a sofa behind enormous french windows,  provided  a stretched  hotspot of joy. Were the  little monkeys playing  a game with the hornbills? Is this the way that different species communicate? Nadeem, who drove us into the forest mentioned that  monkeys  often broke leafy branches for the deer to partake of. A  birdwatching stroll the previous evening had drawn attention to the nest of a pair of hornbills atop a tall fish-tail palm, near the Tree Top restaurant. Possibly they flew down  from there to this tree every morning. I found them on the Jacaranda tree again the following morning, but they flew off  before the charge of the primates began. Not finding the hornbills at their perch, four tiny primates peered into my room, pressing their forms against the glass and standing on the narrow wooden frame,  trying to make sense of a slow moving dormant  species.  When I tried  to take a picture with my cell phone camera, hoping to preserve  near human expressions digitally,  they scampered off, returning with an older sibling or parent, to subject me to yet another momentary scrutiny. After a few minutes of this, they left in search of more promising adventures.

  

 Obliterating Reason and Dismembering Learning 

 It is a truth universally acknowledged that newspapers are not the bearers of good news, especially in these days of dismantling, wherein ideas  and speech are under threat,  people are being pulped and  places,  things and institutions are being pried open, torn apart  and reduced to rubble.  At Delhi University, we celebrated our 100th year pretty much in mourning, because intent is afoot to levy even more damage upon this venerable institution, after what has been almost two decades of ill planned expansion that had little thought for the students being inducted into the system. There was  simply  was no attempt to ramp up infrastructure, physical, material or human,  in terms of  level playing fields, classrooms, libraries, laboratories and  an adequate body of well-cared for  teachers. 

 To add insult to injury, or (drawing out an appropriate metaphor from our ancient past), to add  ghee to the sacrificial fires in which the university's ethos  has been flung, Departments at  Delhi University whose powers have shrunk and  have being continually muffled decided to adopt  the national mode of dissemination which operates on the following algorithm. 

1,  Decide upon something

2. Never bring it up for discussion or debate

3. Implement it with the greatest urgency and secrecy  as  work  that must commence immediately, come hell or highwater.

 The   3 step  algorithm  above reveals how decisions are  taken by one power-centre  with utter disregard of  due process, and the rights of others,. Such decisions when taken, clamp down upon  ideas and  put both  human beings and  the institutions  they inhabit in grave danger. At the end of Step 3, invariably disconnected hell is allowed to  break loose, and this is pretty much what has been happening at Delhi University.

 I  cannot pinpoint the exact  moment when  this happened. I can only provide  approximates because now for some time I have been living in a silo, brought on by Covid, death,  loss and ill health and have kept at my job pretty much like a blinkered horse in harness,  lumbering through hours of internet teaching.  Meanwhile  the university has been beleaguered for well over a  decade now and its woes have increased in arithmetic and geometric proportions.

  Perhaps the  credit for the maximum damage  in arithmetic progression done to the university rests with the DU VC, who, in hindsight one realizes,  was probably given the mandate to introduce the semester system.  When the VC asked colleges for their opinion on the semester system, a majority of colleges voiced their misgivings about the unsuitability of the semester system for DUs and gave detailed reasons for the same, including the fact that such change  could not be brought in overnight, without protracted deliberation. Nevertheless the VC persuaded  Departments of Science to implement semesters forthwith. Heads of Science Departments turned cartwheels and obeyed. Science Departments in undergraduate colleges once served as as proxy waiting-grounds for students with ambitions in the realms of medicine and engineering. The semester system with all its modular data churning worked effectively for the  science departments and  now the dropout rate is much much lower ever since the semester system was put in place. Once roped in, students who enroll in the sciences are ambushed by the time crunching of the semester system. The  flourishing Humanities  which faced no enrollment problems on the other hand were arm twisted into semesterisation, a year after,  the  Science Departments.

We managed to avert the ill planned four year program then. Relentlessly hemmed in by the semester system that provided no academic break from modular teaching,  zero review of the academic schedules, no   analysis nor discussion that could lead to any academic evaluation of pedagogies across disciplines and its impact upon students; colleagues across departments struggled with the new curriculum and programs that were pushed in by the state and across disciplines tried to beat in method and meaning into  truncated and ill-designed courses.

 The semester system  also cut  short vacations for students and teachers alike. We were all on the great wheel of progression where we dealt with ideas. The system decided that  therefore teachers and students did not require  any kind of break. So for ten plus years now, Delhi University follows a punishing calendar, with a minimal autumn break  that is barely for a week, followed by a    week long winter break that starts with Christmas and has teachers reporting to work on the Second of January.  Covid has further exacerbated the schedule where the university now  follow different academic calendars for all five undergraduate and post graduate years. Long summer vacations are now unheard of. In fact this year again there has been no summer vacation.

 The rise of regulatory bodies such as NAAC, and HERA and  the introduction of the NEP2020, in the interim , not merely reduced and diminished the UGC but also gave short shrift to any balance or reasoning.  The Covid pandemic's disruption of   every day life at the university also allowed for the implementation of  all kinds of regulatory mechanisms and systems to be set up, without  any discussion with general bodies of teachers, academic associations and disciplines, and resulted in the formulation and  implementation of  policies injurious to students and university and intellectual life in the short and long term.

   Czar Jagadish is at UGC, fresh from his JNU rampage. After , shredding  academic life at JNU altogether,  he is now in hot pursuit of Delhi University, since this is an older and  larger university, and will take more time than JNU to be disbanded. Meanwhile syllabus framing of university curriculum, semester by semester, in all the disciplines is afoot. The plagarized proposals, copied and  pasted from foreign university schedules, and pointed out by concerned academics  from Delhi university has not sent shock waves or even shame waves through the corridors of control and power brokering. Such syllabus making, semester by semester, without any inputs from the teaching community  is unheard of. No university in the world has ever  dared to carry out such an absurd project.

 Facelessly Department Heads carry out orders that are issued and work to implement them. The adhoc  teacher's work force that  the university has nurtured again for well over a decade has been pushed to the brink, because it is an unfortunate narrative about innumerable young people, who battle for job security despite the years spent in education and training.. In most instances, these young citizens have put their personal, academic and professional lives on the slow burner for no fault of their own. In innumerable college departments, across disciplines , including my own,  the number of permanent teachers has shrunk.  Most Adhoc teachers are a harried lot, constantly subject to intimidation by a system that grows feudal and regressive by the day and refuses to speak to them and address their pain. 

 Meanwhile, the university continues  to experiment with academics. The mantra it flirts with is perhaps one of the many  reportedly mouthed by the premier, namely, "Hard work is better than Harvard."   There is also the issue of  young students whose 12 plus years of schooling is to be  soon rendered irrelevant because now a CUET test will declare their suitability for university education. These youngsters are going to enroll in a university where their  teachers are clueless about the curriculum. Not only were the teachers  not consulted , the plan has been to turn them all into unthinking  functioning units, implementing orders, and obediently drafting syllabi.  In any case, how does  replacing one central examination with a competitive examination level the playing field? It only makes everything  far more arbitrary and also sets up the process for the teetering and tottering of the schooling system. This is not reform or repair, which is always welcome but a large scale unconstitutional demolition of education through the length and breadth of India.

A few years ago there was a plan  to project Delhi as a UNESCO Heritage City. This was shelved and  Ahmedabad was projected in its stead. Today, English, one of India's many  modern languages and the language that houses innumerable disciplines  and allows us to have global connectivity in every discipline is being driven out  by the new syllabi. Students are not to be taught or trained in the English language at any college in Delhi University, because of the new orders that have been issued. This is a far cry from a scenario in which literature and language has been taught by English teachers to every student  at the university. Generations of students from other disciplines have been enriched and improved by the exchange that the English syllabi provided and have been thankful for their empowerment.

  Colleagues in the English Departments in colleges  continue to express their anguish, but we need everyone from every other discipline and every walk of life : colleague, parent and student to grasp the enormity of this fundamentally flawed premise. We  need to allow the fatal  implications of such arbitrarily imposed dictats to sink in. In a multilingual nation, instead of ensuring proficiency in English, this attempt  to erase it from the curriculum, deeming it  the language of the colonizers  is an illiberal and ignorant attempt to put the clock back, and  will only jeopardize our local, regional, national and international strengths. Such erasure and renaming, is much much more pernicious than the changing of names of roads, places, and cities.

Into that abyss of atrophy, dear citizen, let not our country be pushed.  We must awaken to the crisis that has befallen us!

 Footnote: How is it that newspapers report that   the teaching of English  is to be implemented  in primary schools in Gujarat under the NEP? why does an ill wind   continue to blow through the portals of  Delhi University? 

Mothers of Languages

Maaen Hazaar-chaurasi!

 Morning has broken

the home minister has spoken

 "No more English in the North-East, or the West

 East or South,  Hindi is the best!!"

 "Macaulay left but his grandchildren still linger."

 Venkaiah shouts: "Why let the English tongue malinger??"

 Did Venkaiah say this in Hindi? We do not know. 

The  English newspapers  recorded the  show.

  Ajay Devgan fired his volley 

and such a Drishyam it was. 

Out came Kangana with a rally,

This Hindi Queen, she made Sanskrit the cause.

These are our principal stakeholders, 

who without perusing files or folders, 

 Think they measure the national pulse

 And  issue decrees on impulse!

 Ours is a nation of  believers in  the mother tongue

 who  have  ostensibly of   tongues and mothers  sung

Look at the lesser Minister of State.

 who  declares without debate 

the expulsion of  sons and daughters,

 into  the stagnant cess of non Hindi waters. 

 Meanwhile the Don from the Planning Commission,

with a partner in crime from the  D O Science  Mission

 In smooth English enunciates the  New Education Program

Which makes it clear why all of this is  such a sham!

Every policy,  strategy, every rule and  bit of learning

 is framed in English from the previous century's turning.

Each mother tongue has been snipped and curbed and tied

For    masculine men can do unto mother tongues little beside,

 what continues to be  done to mothers and daughters worldwide??

 Mother tongues were treated very badly, 

Shredded , pierced,  ripped, snipped  and now,  sadly, 

 Our mother tongues are starkly bereft.

 for  their literatures have been ravaged and left,

 Our macho leaders know not this

and  a unisize mother, seek amiss.

Blinkered, patriarchal,  atrophied  and brutal.

 Such men  rule that a  myraid tongues, fetal, 

Add up in  their math to  one mother in total.

They forget , these myopic males

 about  mothers, the multi-form females.

In our subcontinent, a thousand tongues bloom 

carefully nurtured by loving mothers,

 Away from the  hostile  paternal fume

they gently lilt and sway like feathers.

 Ratna Raman

 

 

  Driving Stakes Into Our Heart : All  Hail (Hell?heel? Heil?)  Delhi University!

For a few years now, the expression 'stake holder' has begun to bother me. Possibly because I grew up in a simpler world where language was not so complex. What are the various meanings that the word stake connotes? 

At its simplest it seemed to be an active noun dating back to ancient times where  people  sharpened long sticks and then skewered whole animals on it. In one of the poems of Robert Browning that I teach, Fra Lippo Lippi speaks of the Christian martyr who was being roasted over an open fire and asking to be turned over to cook on the other side. So the stake when I visualized it was a sharpened stick , used for cooking no doubt, but  capable of injuring  living species, both animal and human.  Oddly, if we tweak the word  stake a little "steak"  or packaged meat is what we arrive at, with the same pronunciation, with an altered spelling. Perhaps the spear and the harpoon, were metallic versions of the stake  that could impale and injure. These  weapons of war, from the iron age were intimidating, to say the least, and  humans eventually continued  harpooning whales and seals, endangering them and pushing them into extinction.

The word 'stake' could indicate that  a wager that had been struck and was often associated with gambling, frowned upon by both religion and culture. I read Thomas Hardy's disturbing novel about Michael Henchard who staked his wife for drink and sold off both his wife  and their child  for a meagre sum in The Mayor of Casterbridge.  Since  I had  also been acquainted with the Mahabaharata, I couldn't help thinking that  poor Yudhistra, even if he allowed himself to be tricked by the conventions and forms in play, was staking his brothers, himself and subsequently his wife  Draupadi, while being goaded on by Sakuni , for recovering all manner of material, animal and human wealth, his kingdom, siblings and spouse. The word stake by implying that the loser was required to pay an enormous price, economic or emotional, left me with a sense of wariness. 

Meanwhile, modern life  was definitely a race, and the stakes were high, and you could be a holder of many hopes and aspirations, nightmares and disappointments.  Then of course, gambling was replaced by stocks and shares and companies, who had stake holders , investing in the finances.  The stakeholder, in this case, the investor, small or large became the person who earned a few rights and a lot of money because of the financial investment. All this made the world of commerce  transactional and attenuating and the  market  for stocks and shares that recorded bull runs and bear crawls ( humans turning into  aggressive animals here ) was very risky too. It seemed to  allow a few to gamble with money that belonged to the many.

 Imagine my surprise when from this gray, shadowy world of aggression and capital generation, this word was introduced by a former vice chancellor  almost ten years ago, when he spoke of stake holders in the university.  Disturbing enough to be a stake holder in a dog-eat-dog world..but why bring this term in to discuss  a central university comprised of  students, teachers and karamcharis?  Dinesh Singh was the cog meant to smoothen out the process of the corporatizing of a publicly funded  central university. It was no long about higher education, but the business of higher education. So keeping to the spirit of this sentiment, he ignored students and teachers and karamcharis and announced that he had invited stake holders to discuss the future of the University. These stake holders, had little or no investment in the university, but they had succeeded in the rat- race of life and were summoned, well -heeled and of considerable girth, to participate in the process of driving wedges ( also small sharp pieces of wood, meant to separate) between the real people who studied , worked and taught at the university and their relationship with university life and higher education.

 Teacher, student and karamcharis protested and succeeded in stopping the mayhem that was being unleashed for a period of time. However, remember the old adage about drawing  blood(for those with strong constitutions) or about stealing honey from the bees? The dismantling of  central universities  has been an ongoing process, too heady and too profitable to be scrapped.

The  scrunching of the academic calendar was followed by a bowdlerization of the syllabus. This led to the flight of seasoned intellectuals to  greener pastures(read Private Universities, in India and abroad) . Then a lockdown was instituted on teaching posts, so that while the old retired, there would be no fresh inputs into the system, only Adhocs,  dwindling in perpetuity as they got four month stretches. What else can you call such a period of employment , relentlessly forced on to our bright  young who wanted to teach and could have been trained to become better than the best? 

That history repeats itself and we do not learn  any lessons from it has been proved yet again, by the words uttered by the current Vice Chancellor of Delhi University. 

The stake holders (read the state, and its willing officers),  are now reinventing the first principles of the university. Turning it into an enormous production unit, since the time of the semesters, time, that precious unit of learning and growth has been pulverized and there are no  vacations for students, teachers or karamcharis. Terms are brutally short, although we seem to teach twice as much. Yet, given the paucity of time, students only absorb half of what they normally would, and forget quickly as they move to the next module, what they learnt in the first.

 The pandemic  has only added to our woes. Despite the abysmal shrinking of  vacation-time,  colleges are busy running add on courses and mentoring students as they hurtle out of online classes into online  examination sessions, so that they do not need to take a breather. The university is no longer the grand old space that invited hopeful students and teachers and nurtured them in its environs once. It is now   the site of frenetic activity, and students and teachers are jumping through all kinds of hoops, because the stakes have been set very high.  Now students can get credits from NAAC approved colleges and breeze in and out of one on line course into another. Even Dinesh Singh could not  have foreseen this, when he initiated the process of  dismantling   the university as a centre for learning and for debate, discussion, ideation  exploration and holistic growth.  Now, courses outlined by academics and experts in their respective disciplines  can be summarily rescinded, because the stakeholders do not want it. Who are these stakeholders? How have they usurped the freedom so central to academia?  Private universities were once a troubling space, because there was anxiety about the freedom available to the academic.  That has been sugar coated with the creature comforts that private universities provide to both students and teachers. Private universities take very good care of students who can afford them and of the teachers they successfully cajole to join  forces with them. While central universities seldom collect comparable funds, stellar learning was available to anybody who wished to avail of it, at a very moderate price.  All this is now up in the air.

  The Newest Vice Chancellor overtook Dinesh Singh in the  mendacity of his address to the capital at the  Indian Express Adda, when he assured an unknowing public that all the stakeholders have been consulted on NEP and the four year program. Nothing could be further from the truth. The majority of teachers in the university have ad hoc jobs, and continue to be subject to the whims and fancies of administrations that respond to the whip wielded by university officers, who act upon orders received from elsewhere. Permanent teachers who have job surety are currently skirting their way amid  NAAC forms and Promotional Avenues, that in the manner of the golden apples Melanion threw at Atlanta, keep them in thrall. The stakes are high for the state since it hopes to control the business of  higher education. The stake holders are the senior  officials of the university whose cudgeling of the university has broken its back and left it barely conscious. The  stakes are being driven through the heart and the mind of the university, and the holders of these stakes are not teachers, students or karamcharis, but a brute authority that is in control of the game.

After almost two years of a pandemic that has spurred on the grand dream of online education, with the budget declaring the opening of 400 e-universities, Delhi University's students and teachers are straggling back to interactive learning and teaching in a three dimensional world. This is going to be tough. Classrooms and corridors in colleges could possibly provide photo options for journalists who show us crowded marketplaces and streets  in order to scare us in the time of the pandemic.

 Have we as a university planned well for the post pandemic period.? No, not at all, because in a humane university shaping future citizens for a better world which has been reeling under the pandemic, some planning to reopen the university gradually would have been put in place, involving teachers and students in active conversation.  However we are back, largely from tomorrow and for a while we are going to be buffeted by the lacunae that will continue to  dog the university in its daily functioning. Yet we need to overcome , because it is not  young lives that are at stake. Career trajectories of young teachers have the four month old sword of Damocles hanging over them, in college departments presided over by lame duck professors who are watching their disciplines de-materialize while academic rigor goes up in smoke. This  Grand Old Central University,  cringes and shudders because instead of a celebratory  run up to its hundredth year, it  has put up on the stake, and roasted over the semesters  to such a sizzle that  the possibility of  becoming  altogether unrecognizable,  now begins to loom large. 

HIBERNATING HIBISCUS

  When I was little , we went home every year in the summer holidays to Madras as it was known then, and lived in my maternal grandfather's house. Holidays at his home meant immersing ourselves in the patterns of grandparental lives. Thatha had retired  and Paati was done with raising four living daughters and two sons , and now kept house amicably, cooking us all manner of delicious food, regaling us with stories, and an occasional game of chess.

 A variety of  chores  was distributed amongst the younger grandchildren. Paati's daughters , the two or three who came to live with her in the summertime , assisted her in the processes of cutting, chopping and grinding for elaborate  daily meals, to feed  around nine grandchildren and  seven adults,  three times a day.   I accompanied my grandfather on his early morning round of flower collection. When the chandini growing at the front of the house had not flowered,, there would be no flowers for the day's elaborate pooja. Then grandfather and I would set off, very early in the morning, to pluck flowers from the neighbouring stock,  the overhanging closed umbrella  shaped hibiscus or the kachnar, occasionally even the yellow arali, and bring them back in a lovely cane container, that  held arrows at some point in its evolution before it became a receptacle for fresh flowers. Sometimes, albeit infrequently, we brought home  from the vilva tree, three leaves banded together,  that  grandfather declared were sacred and  special to Shiva, the forester, who was accepting of dried leaf offerings. We plucked  flowers from the houses of neighbors from whom grandfather had taken  prior permission: These  neighbors were friends   he had made over  many years. Perhaps they were happy that flowers from their front yard were being offered to the gods, and our flower picking  adventures remained amicable. The betel leaves, also offered to the gods were bought in the evening from a small flower shop nearby.

 By the time I grew up, a young lad on a cycle dropped off a bundle of red rose petals along with a fresh set of betel leaves every evening. Grandma stored these away since they were consumed only after they were offered to the gods. 

 

Decades later, after I had filled my home with ornamental plants and succulents, and then expanded the green cover to the front of the house, I rescued two hibiscus bushes , one from a construction site where an old house was being torn down and  the other from a friend who was giving away surplus plants. The only ground left  for the hibiscus shrubs was behind my home, in the service lane which received abundant sunlight. Divesting them of their pots, I planted the small shrubs to flank both sides of the back door.  A bougainvillea at the head of the lane provided a pink and green canopy and  a thick curtain and the hibiscus are now  ten feet tall. Although I sighted buds, I rarely ever  saw the flowers. 

All this changed during the days of lockdown because  preparing for lectures and cooking  urgent meals in coordination with a  different life outside the house; was now replaced with pottering around the house in the early morning to  new rhythms that  demanded being rooted to the house   I noticed from an upper floor,   numerous women who  never introduced themselves,  routinely gathering  flowers every morning.  The hibiscus is a prayer worthy flower, everywhere in India,  flamboyant and noticeable, so my plants was routinely stripped of their flowers on a first-comer basis. 

 On one rare occasion, I stepped out into the service lane and saw both bushes in flower, and captured this  magical moment on camera.  Manju who has resumed helping  me with housework in the mornings has now declared war on the  foragers of flowers. In an earlier time,  Manju  used to live and work on her ancestral farm in Pashchim Banga. When she comes in to work, she brings in all the flowers that she can see. Of late there is an efflorescence of  hibiscus   inside  my home. I do not have the courage to challenge  assumptions  that  involve an  omnipresent God   who cannot  view flowers in the bush, or to rebut the argument that flowers in bloom cannot  bring joy to passersby  while retaining their own  leafy addresses. For now, Manju has taken this matter out of my hands, with her morning collection.

 

                     All In A Morning's Work

 I stepped out into the street today, armed with my mask to buy a small crinkled cantaloupe from  the fruit vendor. Another vendor cycled by slowly and I noticed that he had a stack of beautifully carved stones that are  amazing kitchen equipment requiring zero maintenance for upto thirty years.

I stopped him and we began a masked conversation, wherein I admired the chiselling he had done on the stones. Each stone slab  was  exquisite and a finished art work, reminding me  after a long long time that  everyday objects  could be  both functional and aesthetic, and add to working pleasure  every time they were put to  use. I use a silbatta (or ammi kallu as we call it in South India)  in my kitchen and it belonged to my mother-in-law. She would often use it to rustle up a small handful of dry or wet chutneys when the big and small mixies were not required or unusable in the event of a power cut. Now it sits on a ledge outside my kitchen, and it is a pleasant spot to grind and crush small spices and leaves, and little bits of rock salt when I cook.

 Silbaatas, other than being effective kitchen assistants could generate mirth and raise a laugh as I discovered when my daughter came home  from primary school with  news about an ohjective test on household objects and what they were made of. "Amma,what is a silbatta?," she had queried and I had pointed to the ammi kallu. "Oh! she replied, her face falling, "I didn't know this is called a silbatta and is made of stone. In the test at school I crossed out stone and circled paper as the correct answer." Amused at the idea of the  paper silbatta  I explained that  the grinding stone was named differently in different languages, wondering if it was solely up to mothers and language teachers to establish links and connections between languages. Shouldn't teachers of other disciplines also endeavour to do the same?

This year, it will be  thirty years since my mother -in -law passed away, but her silbatta continues to be one of the workhorses in my kitchen, because the texture of  crushed ingredients  in chutneys that silbatta -grinding produces followed by the effortless   wash  with water cleaning -up -after remains unparalleled. Over time, my silbatta has been worn down to smooth stone so I asked the iterant vendor if he could re-chisel my silbatta for me. He agreed and I brought it out  from its perch in my backyard to the front door where Bablu settled down to work his craft. A couple of neighbours also brought out their  old silbattas for chiselling.

Twenty minutes later, here below  is  my   new  Bablu -chiselled-silbatta., with its personal stone accessory. I  took an ordinary photo and then staged the next photo, on a red cushion.

  Kavita who comes in to help with  kitchen work  has been wanting a silbatta and I had promised to pick up a new one  for her, reluctant to part with mine. My sister confirmed that she too required a small  table top silbatta, although she hosts mom's  granite ammi  on her  terrace. Here are  two new guests, handchiselled  by Bablu, enroute to their new homes.

 After a long, grim winter,   the weather seems right and the possibility of connecting to the quiet pleasures of the quotidian have begun to surface. With many thanks to Bablu , here is looking forward to summery buttermilk  times, redolent  with the flavours of   fresh currypatta and green chillies,   silbatta -crushed with rock salt and hing!