Unreal Reality Chapter 2

When Jagannath was ten, Bharati ,his teacher , had incurred the wrath of his grandmother's sister when she ,a kalingi ,married a brahmin boy.Little Jagannath hid his embarrassment when the old lady pulled her up openly .He had a crush on her and hated her being the target of the fury of his own grandmother's sister. Bharati loved him due to his deliciously perverse intelligence or at least that was what he thought .There was this dark inscrutable look on his face which would certainly have attracted her to him.Kameswari , the dimpled beauty of the class, appeared to feel that Bharati preferred Jagannath's scintillating intellect to her own famed arithmetical prowess.Or at least that was what he thought.The sadness in her face appealed to Jagannath very much and it was his innate desire to cup her tragic face in his little hands and console her. He was very sure that she would not live long and it was only a matter of a few years that she would leave this world and go away to the dark inky infinitude of the Amavasya night.

Saraswati came floating into his life , at the age of twenty,like a bird's feather which had fallen from the blue sky slowly riding the layers of air.She was a swan of incredible grace and when she entered the room you almost heard the flutter of her white fluffy wings .Her swan-brain collected no wisdom .Back home ,in Madanapalli , she loved a man dearly .Her pakodas were tasteful and her love overwhelming.Once she was chased by a full-grown bull all the way through the streets of Madanapalli .Her petite frame betrayed a fierce passion for the man she had loved .Jagannath felt betrayed .How could she not love him? The double-think in him of course felt happy that it was not him .Years later a portly Jagannath would reflect on this with middle-aged satisfaction as he exchanged gossip with the matronly Saraswati in her Rajampet house.

When Jagannath was seven ,Tayi , a distant cousin , expected him to teach her a song or two which she could sing before the prospective groom.Tayi was plump like the Sompeta pumpkin ; it was necessary for her to impress the groom with her musical prowess. Impress she did with the Telugu film song :

Neeli Meghalalo
Gali keratalalo
Neevu paade pataa
Vinipinchine
(From out of the blue clouds
and the waves of the breeze
your song reached my ears)

Jagannath's throat choked with emotion when Tayi, his disciple ,sang this song, in abheri raag ,before the groom in full-throated splendour.Years later Tayi ,married and comfortable, decided to call it quits and one fine morning Jagannath heard that the rolly-polly Tayi no longer needed to impress anybody and did not need Jagannath's tutoring services any more.Her blithe spirit haunted him for years, however.


Tayee's grandmother was a tough old lady with a shaven widow's head .Her toothless monologues talked of the glories of her youthful times when she could cook food for one hundred people at a stretch.She boasted that the white man , who stayed in the bungalow outside the town, relished her bobbattu , so much that he, the blue-blooded dora ,would beg of her for an extra helping of her bobbattu each time. The white man liked her very much and would insist on her coming to his bungalow frequently.Of course Suramma would not touch a mleccha and would only drop the prized bobbattu into his outstretched hands from a height of two or three feet .


That was what they did in Gollalavalasa .During the Sriramanavami celebrations when the brahmin patriarchs hosted a santarpan for the entire village moustachioed farmers squatted on the bare floor with the stitched lunch-leaves before them .The brahmin elders would not bend to serve food but would only drop mounds of rice with sambar and vegetables from a safe distance .The villagers would'nt mind it either. During the Srirama navami celebrations the shehnai and the mridangam played the Tyagaraya kritis and Srirama wedded Sita in all His refulgence .


Jagannath's mother's uncle, an old gentleman with close -cropped hair conducted the celebrations with extravagance , slowly squandering away the family lands. He had no known sources of income apart from what he could scrounge from ignorant villagers depending upon his semi-literate accomplishments .Money would come from somewhere but the show had to go on.

Jagannath was born in this very house .In the dimly-lit room where the castoroil-lamp flickered several child-births had taken place unmidwifed and the shrieks of the labouring mothers were followed by the smells of the placenta and curdled mother's milk. At night Jagannath heard the tales of the woman who had turned into a ghost in this very room. This woman, who was half-ghost and half-human, was lying on the cot awaiting her pains when suddenly she projected her tongue, lizard-like,three feet away to extinguish the oil-lamp in the presence of a horrified female relative.Then there was a huge boulder hewn in the shape of a pestle which had been lying for generations twenty feet away .This stone overnight shifted its position to a place just behind the kitchen.These ghostly actions mystified young Jagannath who was besieged with crowds of sceptical thoughts mixed with terrifying fears.

The babies cried out lying on the midwife's knees waiting to be oiled and bathed.The frankincense filled the room with sweet fragrance.The woman warmed her hands on live coals and patted the baby's tummy rhythmically to ward off trouble in the digestive system of the baby.The babies are branded with hot irons on the tummy in the first month to protect them against liver problems.

In Gollalavalasa the mad man ,Pettadu hurled stones at small mischievous boys. Once , as Jagannath turned near the elementary school he saw the mad man,full of gibberish and fury. Jagannath stood petrified. He had a swirling fear under his navel which quickly spread in his bloodstream .The mad man's vacuous eyes flashed fire as though he blamed Jagannath for the evils of the world. It was a cunning move on the part of Jagannath that saved him from the mad man's fury. At the dhobi's cheruvu Jagannath found half-burnt human bones and hair.He was sure that at the dead of the night spirits freely roamed the area .Broken pieces of clay pots were the remnants of the tantric ritual some villager had performed the previous night. One of the villagers was credited with the powers of chillangi , the art of invoking a kshudra devta with a view to bringing about the destruction of an enemy.In order to acquire the powers of chillangi one had to eat human excrescence for three consecutive nights and perform the ritual, entirely naked, in honour of the kshudra devta at the dead of the night at the cremation ground.

As the nine-year-old Jagannath stood on the fringe of the Baruva sea he thought he had seen the edge of the earth , where the sea and the sky meet .It was so dangerous to stand on the edge .Little children would fall off. The earth appeared to be the shape of a disc although the geography taught in the Sompeta school said it was spherical .If one went on drilling into the earth at the spot where one stood, would one reach America ? If one went into the deep seas and not along the coast endlessly ,would one reach the shore on the other side ? One of the worst fears of Jagannath was if everything on the earth including us clung to it due to gravitation and the earth was revolving continuosly woudn't we fall off the earth sometime or other into deep outer space like a lizard on the roof falling to the ground ? As huge waves rose and broke on the Baruva beach Jagannath thought God in whose dream he existed stood at the other shore of the ocean and rolled the waves in continuous sweeping motions of His hands .At night Jagannath slept in a relative's house on the Baruva beach he heard the roar of the sea all night long lying under the inky Amavasya night afraid that the sea would , at the dead of the night , grab him and swallow him into its cavernous stomach.

The little insect which made conical holes into the ground fascinated Jagannath. These insects would become elephants in two or three months.He put them in a rubber-corked medicine bottle and waited for them to transform into full-grown elephants .During the arudra karti it rained the whole night .In the morning pretty red-velvety insects burst out of the wet ground and crawled under the wet grass. Soon they were all over the place filling the green carpet of fresh grass with bright red motifs. Once a swarm of locusts descended on the plains of Sompeta. Millions of these creatures ate every single leaf and blade on the way .They had come all the way from the plains of Siberia crossing the Himalayas. Jagannath used a large green stick to beat clusters of them above the ground and bring them down to the ground writhing. Jagannath imagined the lands that lay beyond the hills near Sompeta .He was sure another world ,like the one he read about in the story of Rip van Vinkle , existed on the other side of the hills. He heard that strange animals like dummaragundu lived on the hills .This animal was so dangerous that it just sniffed your life out of you.

There were fierce tigers in the jungle nearby which sometimes waylaid the buses on the highway .Once Sadanandam the neighbourhood compounder who had a gun with which he killed pigeons went into the jungle to kill the man-eater tiger which strayed into the villages. He headed a procession of the killed tiger through the streets of Sompeta. During sugarcane season big black bears descended from the hills .Once when Jagannath's cousin Samba was cycling his way returning from Narasannapeta to his home a full-grown bear confronted him on the highway.There were two-headed snakes in the Sompeta bushes .Jagannath wondered with which head these snakes thought .Of course snakes do not think .Jagannath had an uncanny sense of the presence of a snake . Once he was lying on a string cot alone in the house with a vague snake-fear spreading its hood in his child-mind . There it was a fullgrown krait clinging to the wooden beam of the tiled roof. Jagannath sweated under his skin .Another time a cobra slithered on the broken rim of the well deceptively looking like the rope of the water-pail. Rajju sarpa bhranti . As acts of bravery Jagannath caught the tails of the water-snakes and twirled them in the air expertly .Of course only water-snakes.

Jagannath dreamt of coils of snakes .Fearful Freudian snakes which coiled around you constricting your throat and slowly draining away the oxygen-supply to your tissues. On naga chavithi he went to the snake-pit along with the women and poured milk into the pit .The children saved some crackers during diwali for the naga chaviti festival . If you accidentally killed a cobra its spouse, the Nagini would avenge herself on you and pursue you wherever you ran to. Jagannath saw several green snakes on the low branches of the hibiscus tree .They coiled around the stem indistinguishable from the tree.These snakes can rise in the air. They bite you on the back of the head and their poison is so deadly that within minutes the victim froths at his mouth and dies.The mongoose is no friend of the snake .He is a friend to humans.In the Panchatantra story he saved the baby from a snake.


End of Chapter 2