Unreal Reality chapter 9

In Berhampur the tall silk cotton tree was in full bloom with eccentric -smelling flowers whose scent haunted you for a furlong as you walked the road. In the evening Jagannath's friends used to gather near the Ramalingam tank for gossip. The water glistened with lights from the nearby garden restaurant where Jagannath and his friends used to sip coffee and if the money permitted , some pudding or other snack. Nothing much happened .The water in the tank stayed still with an occasional ripple caused by a dry flower from the acacia tree .What was Jagannath's mission ? Sit still on the cement benches with his friends wisps of whose chatter entered his ears like the occasional breeze which rustled in the leaves of our coconut tree in Gollalavalasa ? There was this danger of the dream coming to a close as the lights went off and the curtains were down.Did he come here for nothing ? For two months the typhoid worm cornered him and excised him of the devils that had taken permanent residence in him as he went through the labyrynth of his experiences The temperature would not go down despite medication as his body emitted a warm charcoal-burning glow which he started celebrating as though he was basking in the December sun.The body did not matter ; the after-glow of 102 degrees of temperature mattered . A sort of catharsis happened . Nothing really mattered , not even the rumble of the large intestines leaving behind a disgusting feeling in the pit of his stomach or the autumn-fall of thick dark hair . The smell of the slept-in pillow with strands of fallen hair mocked at the very basis of his existence in a most overt manner.When the time came the physical existence came unstuck like so many hairs uprooted from your scalp.

What was there for him to do ? He drifted rudderless in the high-seas of uncertainty and pointlessness . There was this double-think which gnawed at the very vitals of his soul. He laughed at himself , at his own essential stupidity which formed the logical basis of his daily transactions. The thought meandered ; the dichotomy between thought and “underthought “ was growing as dialogue proceeded. The soul fizzled down in thin slowflakes of rationalism . Nothing was certain ; not even the perceived solidity of the three-dimensional world . Then , one day , as he lay supine facing the greyness of the September sky he thought he was slowly sinking into the viscous blood-and-sand , his own breath becoming more and more difficult with the vital fluids draining away from his blood vessels. He lay there , alone , living the horror of the nightmare as women opened his clenched fists forcefully and thrust a bunch of steel keys into them. Years later , when poetry came to him , Jagannath recalled the nightmare :
“Lying supine
I experience fear-pain
Passing through death-tunnel
Oxygen-drained, slowly
Embedded in whirl-pool
Of viscous blood-and-sand
Clenched fists
Cold sweat
Horrific visions
Of tail-dropped lizards
Existence-erasing
Fear clutching at the throat
Draining the last drop of blood
Slowly snuffing out life.”

Jagannath started to love death . He wanted to die slowly entering the darkness of the death-tunnel savouring every bit of the delicious self-obliteration .It was a dream within the grand dream . There he saw the floating aura of his own soul escaping its physical bondage through the half-open window of the bed room .He saw it as a flickering oil-lamp slowly burning like a floating paperlantern in the sky above our mango tree.

In Berhampur Savitri-atta never gave even a hint of the unceremonious way in which she would leave this world. Her eyes were confident and full with a power of which she was deeply aware , the arrogance of a dignified woman who mastered all the rules of the world . In life she complemented her husband as if they had come into this world together. Who would imagine that one day she would trip on the moss-laden surface of the well in her backyard and slip into the twilight world of sleep from which she would never wake up ? Sleep became her in life , as it became her in death. Nobody ever thought that there was any need for any ceremonies preparatory to her final journey. It was natural that she died , something as natural as the fact that she had lived . When Jagannath heard from her children that she had passed away he merely said "oh , she has gone !" as if she had gone to a relative's house in Sompeta. That was how everybody who knew her reacted to the news of her death.


Jagannath's aunt Vinodini lived full forty five years of her existence on the surface of the earth as if she had come here with a clear mandate for a life of that many years. When she laughed the sound came from her deep throat so tragically that Jagannath thought she carried death with her as though it was a part of her existence.He knew that she would one day be struck by a cancer of her innards . It lay encrypted on the copper-plate of her destiny that she would go it alone in the vast wild wastes of her terrestrial existence. She laughed at the thousand and odd trivialities of life including the volcano in her stomach , which would eventually erupt and overwhelm her , obliterating her existence. Deep inside Jagannath wanted her to make a difference to the world not because she mattered to him so much but merely because he was afraid that she did not matter to the world .Once when he was travelling , as a 12-year old , with the family to Rajam to attend his uncle's marriage he slept on the bare wooden bench of a third class railway compartment with his head in her lap. She mattered to him then very much because he needed her , as a child ,as an extension of his dead father who had existed only in his dreams. She had come from the same womb from which his own father had emerged .Jagannath believed that she carried something of him having shared the same dwelling for nine months as an embryo in the amniotic fluid of her mother's womb.

How long would the dream last ? Jagannath thought , again and again , that it was drawing to an abrupt close .He had sat on the low guava branches in Srikakulam , at the age of sixteen, and looked into its skyspaces , terrified . The changes that had come over him overwhelmed him and convinced him that he was not different at all from other specs of consciousness that roamed the world . There were millions of those tiny luminiscent particles , each one of them so much like him, floating about in the ethereal world like multitudes of flickering fireflies on an amavasya night . For a brief while the idea that he was the chief protagonist of the dreamplay that was being enacted receded to the background and was replaced by a terrific fear of the whole show coming to an abrupt end .



End of Chapter 9

Unreal Reality Chapter 8

In the beginning there was order. And sense , as we understand .What is sense? Do you mean it
makes logical sense, as we understand, that is - that the cause leads to effect . The obvious question
he asks is what is so logical about the cause leading to effect ? How do you know that it is a logical thing for an effect to follow a cause . What is logical is only the connectivity through time .In other words things happen in time .Chronology is a big thing .Nothing but time connects things . The
connection is flimsy ? So it is. That is how things are. You want everything to follow a pattern ? You
believe everything follows a pattern . The scientist or the thinker maps the pattern and thinks that
he has achieved something . You have achieved nothing because a pattern does not really matter.
Things happen in succession , not because of an inherent cause-and-effect relationship. Because you
are not able to decipher the Big Cause . Why are we here ? Do you know ? Without the knowledge
of the Big Cause how does one trace the small effects to their causes ? Can we say that the headache of a person who is a patient of jaundice is traceable to the cold draught of the morning ? Again one is using the same fallible human logic . How else will one convey the absurdity of the whole thing ?Jagannath always wanted to look at the inner truth. There is no other truth than the inner truth.
Everything else is skin-deep. When he looked at anything his eyes looked for what was below the
surface. When he looked at people it appeared as though he was looking through them and not at
them leaving a disconcerting feeling in them. Nothing was real . It is the shadows which stretched
on the ground behind them that preoccupied him. It is the shadows that are real .You are unreal .
You are a reflection of the Reality , a reflection of the shadow itself. These funny rules of the natural world only cover up the essential truth .Because they impose limitations on the physical existence.They impose clearly defined contours limiting your understanding of the physical objects. Men,things , trees and the blue sky - everything is limited and circumscribed. How does one get at the truth ? Jagannath always thought that in order to arrive at truth the rules making up the truth haveto be demolished . Because it is the contours that define the objects and a contourlessobject is born
out of an undefined idea. It is the ideas which stretch into space like kites floating in the sky whenseparated from the strings. Space is unlimited and undefined .It boggles the mind to imagine the
billions of stars glittering in the firmament without limiting edges . It gives you a headache to think of the infinite possibilities present in the universe when you lie supine on the roof watching the
starlit sky of the amavasya night.



The problem Jagannath faced from childhood onwards was the absurd illogic of the daily
transactions of the world. When he became the branch manager of a bank his problem was not how
to run the bank branch efficiently and earn plaudits from his superiors . What bothered him was the
superstructure of a bank built upon thin pieces of commonplace logic codified into the do's and
don'ts that skirt the Reality , pretending to exist on logical foundations. The money is not the truth
nor are the people who bring money and take it .What is truth ? Absurd limpets of bank customers
strutting around as if in dream bearing shadowy discs of silver money into its portals ? And the
bosses who wore many-layered monocles and ,hawk-like , supervised the manager walking about
in apparent control of the nebulous banking system ? Jagannath was totally confused . Who are
these ghost-like creatures shrieking out in eerie silence across the marble-topped counters of the
Bank? What is the apparent justification for their existence ,an effect which can only be traced to the Original Cause ?Money as a gross statistical aggregate fascinated him. Not because it felt good to have crisp new currency notes in your wallet which gave you the power over things and people . Not even because money meant acquiring beauty and living a life of rhythm and symmetry.Jagannath enjoyed being asymmetrical and out of rhythm. Symmetry implied conformity with the imperfect logic of things born out of a limited comprehension of the nature of things. Who wants money for acquiring such imperfect things ? Money itself is a product of the imperfect workings of the human mind far
removed from the Big Logic.



Computers break down the basic code of life. The accounting system of his bank depended upon
these silica-based machines which seem to understand the algorithm of life better than any other
imperfect human system . Everything in the bank that dealt with cash got translated into soft
menu-driven programmes written in the binary code. This way Jagannath found it easier to
understand the complexity of the Big Logic and tear down the utterly inadequate human logical
system . But the programmes are so stereotyped and so much modeled upon the limited logic of
the human mind and a severely circumscribed value system it represented that Jagannath got tired
of them soon .The Rules of the Logic are so predictable and so boring ! What are the Rules which
made these rules imperative in our workaday world ? Should one not have to enter the very heart
of these idea-machines and crack the Basic Code which governed all those logical postulations one
mistook for science ? Through a systematic destruction of an extremely fallible human logic the
entire value system which the computers uphold in deference to the society they serve can be
toppled in no time . You enter the Disc Operating System and destroy the very foundation for the
running of the multitudes of tiny logical systems operating to manage the various subsystems that
made our life . How easy and how vulnerable !
Jagannath hated symmetry . In a chaotic world the artist tries to bring about symmetry . He always
felt that attempts to bring about symmetry would take you away from the Reality. And then the
need for capturing the rhythm of life ! Underneath the rhythm lies the heart of matter , the very
nature of things. Symmetry is achieved through a structure which should be destroyed in order to
arrive at Truth. This is because your idea of Beauty is derived from a distorted sense of Reality in
order to grasp the Reality it is essential
to destroy all those physical layers that have hidden it from us.



What is ethics but an extended logic born of the limited working of the human brain over centuries
of existence of the human race exclusively created for the purpose of ensuring its survival ? What
ultimately matters is the survival .It is the framework of the ethical system which keeps changing .



There is nothing absolute about what is right and what is wrong .It is the current agenda of the
society that keeps determining what is right , not necessarily the most logical thing. One thing
fascinated Jagannath very much . In the Bank incidents of frauds take place at fairly frequent
intervals. What motivates these people who commit frauds to take enormous risks knowing fully
well that the system will ultimately throw up the fraudster ? Jagannath looked at the bank's
accounting systems with fascination .It is not the menu-driven programmes that interested him . It is
the mind of the computer that mattered. That is where the Reality resided . It is not the ethical
system based upon an abstract altruism that interested him . It is the shadows of the Reality thatcaptivated him . What are these frauds but flimsy attempts to move away from the structures of an impossible accounting system , which in turn depended upon an imperfect logical system far removed from the Reality ?For thirty years Jagannath thought that the truth eluded him , the
nebulous Logic , which is the mother of all logical systems .


The banker - accountant always goes red in the face when the apparent inconsistency of
accounting transactions stares them in the face. For every goddamn debit entry there has got to be a
goddamn credit entry .Jagannath thought about the exciting possibility of the existence of a
suspense entry in the grand scheme of things . What if the books of the universe did not tally in the
ultimate analysis and the trial balance ended with a suspense entry ?

End of Chapter 8

Unreal Reality Chapter 7

Jagannath loved to talk to rollypolly Rajeswari whenever he used to come to Ichapuram during the college vacation. She made such fine upmas for him full of microscopic mustards . He sat looking into her eyes on dusty evenings as she cut her tomatoes for the evening's dinner . She did not love her husband who was such a fine husband, albeit advanced in years, and a fine printer . It was such an impossible situation , her husband being several years older than her and with nothing between them except polite conversations about what she made for the evening dinner. She wanted him , however, in her own way ; he needed nothing from her except watch him silently as he sat on the floor eating his dinner. She looked forward to Jagannath's visits because she wanted to watch him eating her upmas . It was funny the way the whole thing worked out . She wanted her husband ,sometimes ,to tell her that he needed her as also tell him that she wanted a baby from him . It was a no-win situation because he wanted to tell her that it did not really matter if she did not need him .

Their destinies together unfolded as both sat dusting thousands of wornout printheads which they did not need for any current print job. For the first time Jagannath experienced the utter futility of human communication :


“Her upmas were so delectable
Albeit with just a tinge of sadness
Her mangalasutra had a thread of black
Which rose and fell as though it was gold
Her eyes were pools of sad knowledge
Which brimmed over kajal-lined contours
Her tumescent tummy bulged with
Imagined babies not one but two or three
One would blame it on flatulence
Induced by late night indulgence
Her man was no prince riding on a white horse
He was a fine printer nevertheless
Who had a way with lithographic typefaces .

So that is that. The jasmines in her hair
Shone against the darkness of her back
She smiled like a princess from among
Wornout printheads and squeezedout inktubes
What if the printer is on forty-wrong side
He was a fine husband and a caring friend
(Rajeswari ,have you taken your B-complex?)
At his age shyness didn't become him
He wanted to tell her what lay encrypted
On the flatstones of their foreheads
(The lettering wore off due to ravages of time)
He shared a printers affinity with Brahma
One thing emerged very clearly and unmistakably
The patter of little feet could be heard distinctly.

Her husband could never tell her this
His drooping eyes said it all , however.
How would she know that a few years later
The whites of his eyes would focus on her
And the horror of it all dawned on her
He , the expert proofreader that he was,
For once misread the inexorable writing
On the tombstones of their destiny ..”

One day her husband came home excited full of news of a new printing contract. His eyes flashed in excitement although the new contract brought no promise of immediate monetary gain to him personally. Rajeswari looked at him with inexplicable disinterest. He wanted to assure her that everything was fine between them .But where is little Krishna the patter of whose little feet could still be heard amidst the din of the printing machines ? Jagannath remembered the shadows that played on the mud walls of the Sompeta house as the petromax light hung to the roof waved gently in the breeze . When it rained little rain-insects hovered in a luminous halo around the light and their exaggerated shadows played on the mud-walls .

In Ichapuram Jagannath met Madhava rao a schoolmate of his , with a protruding set of yellowed teeth and a broad smile .Madhavarao had decided to quit his studies well before the school final examination and was content with joining the local court as a peon . .Jagannath saw the twinkle of Madhavarao's eye but could not understand why the latter had to work in a menial job . Madhavarao had absolutely no problems doing what he was doing .He told Jagannath that it was great fun doing odd jobs for people in the court . He was lucky that he could get this job where he did not have to make choices , day in and day out . It was for the other suns of guns to make these choices which made their lives miserable. God knows why one had to exercise the options all the time . The most sickening thing in life is the unending exercise of choices involving ticking of ''a , b, c or d “or none of the above “


The days were hot and dusty . The hills close to the town harboured wild animals and naxalites who would attack villages in the broad daylight and kill landlords mercilessly. What lay beyond the hills - another civilisation and denizens of an absolutely alien society ? At night there were fiercely raging fires on the hillside as though thousands of Ichapuram sinners of yesteryears were burning in improvised hell-fires set up in a hurry on the hillside due to lack of ''burning'' space in hell. Jagannath saw that the teenaged girl in the neighbour's house almost always came on to the verandah at the precise moment when he himself stood behind the wooden pillar on the verandah. Papa , as she was called , carried on silly "girl "talk with him which of course he relished deep within. She wanted him to tease her which he steadfastly refused to do . She had a child's brow on which one felt like planting an indulgent kiss .She had her own plans .Strands of her hair danced on her forehead casting thin nebulous shadows on her raised cheeks .There was nothing attractive about her except her "sillygirl" looks which sometimes set Jagannath's heart aflame. She had the untameable spirit of a wild animal .Her eyes reflected determined pursuit .and if she had her way she would have grabbed him by the collar and made him serve her as her faithful servant all his life.


The dream continued after Jagannath had finished his studies and took up his job in Gujarat. Summers in Rajkot were hot during the day but breezy in the evenings. Back in the 10 by 10 cubicle of the hotel room Jagannath felt hemmed in by the claustrophobic strangeness of the hotel . The city, with its neat stone buildings , looked like a cardboard box with its contents neatly stacked . The old man Patel , who stayed permanently in one of the cubicles took strange interest in Jagannath as though it mattered a lot to him to ensure that Jagannath was properly clothed and fed. Jagannath did not like to spend his evenings with this old man who would be reliving his unfulfilled sexual desires through a choice of the most sexually explicit vocabulary . There was something terribly repulsive about this man; he reminded you of a crushed black caterpillar . The dreams that he had dreamed became sour and acquired a rancidness which was disgusting to Jagannath. During the day , when Jagannath pressed the call bell he shuddered to see the strange-smelling waiter , who always attended on him with unusual attention . Why did this man always respond to the bell ? This ghost who smelled strange walked in almost always in five seconds sharp as though he was waiting outside his cubicle , all the twenty four hours ,anticipating every call. As Jagannath opened the cubicle door he found a most obnoxious-looking waiter who refused to go away .He was the very devil who appeared in Jagannath's dreams at the dead of the night offering him foul-smelling blandishments.

In Rajkot the landlord Joshi's daughter wore her innocence on the lambent parting of her hair. She rarely spoke to Jagannath but her honey-eyes said it all. When Jagannath returned from office he used to find that his room was spanking clean and he could not understand for a long time why this girl took the trouble of folding all his clothes and smooth the crumpled bedsheet on his bed.It was clear that she remained trapped in a situation of her own making and she had no choice other than to do all this for Jagannath who felt utterly confused about his own possible response. Her cheeks flushed deep- red when Jagannath even asked for the time .At her stage she had no choice . Otherwise why would she stare at his shadows playing on the opposite wall incessantly without a flutter of her eyelids as he returned from his office and started to change his clothes ? Jagannath looked at the cockroach on the bathroom wall scaling the glazed tiles lazily and spoke his first love-words . The words darted across the length of the bathroom and reached the cokroach which fell from its perch on the wall to the ground and started running towards the wall again.


End of Chapter 7

Unreal Reality Chapter 6

In Ichhapuram the women looked , across the railway tracks, haggard and vulnerable. They had their vulnerability on their bodies deceptive to the eye; underneath there was a steely toughness of spirit and a most cutting irony which was not lost on Jagannath . They did not need his sympathy and a social reformer's gushing empathy . Who needed your empathy ? They could take care of themselves. Did he imagine abysms of bottomless misery in the holes of their eyes ? When the women deliberately let their saree fall over their breasts what was it that lay in the depths of their hearts waiting to be discovered ? Jagannath could not swallow their pride and the utter comic relief their apparent helplessness provided as though the women were laughing at Jagannath , a most despicable member of the human species which conspired to create their apparently helpless condition . Once Jagannath accompanied a bunch of Telugu cronies , at the dead of the night , to a local brothel in Bhubaneswar merely because he wanted to experience it not as a young student trying to go through the chiarascuro of life's varied experiences but merely because he wanted to feel one with the women spiritually .He wanted to take their souls in his hands to comfort them for the nice feelings it left behind in him. That was how his thinking worked in those days. At the same time he felt guilty about God knows what when he confronted the woman who seemed to laugh at him for his apparent lack of nerve.Jagannath espoused freedom which meant not merely of the soul but of the body. It was ludicrous to imagine that the women had forfeited their freedom merely because they bartered their physical forms for a few pieces of silver. But that was what Jagannath thought and believed .

Jagannath abhorred violence .He never approved the physical battering Laxman used to routinely perform on his hapless wife. When Jagannath asked Sitalu why she had been tolerating the violence on her body being inflicted by a thin and wiry husband she laughed it off saying that she had no option . But why would she not protest ? Jagannath looked into her laughing eyes looking for an answer to the terribly vexing question of why she would carry on a love affair behind -the -curtains with a low-caste man knowing full well that she would get a battering at the end of it all. It was all a part of the deal : that was what she used to say to Jagannath. She carried on an affair with a low-caste man because that was what one would expect from a woman who would get a battering at the end of it . And why would she get a battering at the end of it all ? Because she carried on an affair with a low-caste man ! It was all a part of the deal : that was what she would say as Jagannath sat near her in her Gollalavalasa kitchen sipping her tea while her cows were returning home . Jagannath wanted to ask her whether it was true that out of her four children one resembled , in facial features , her alleged low-caste lover but that did not matter and he never asked her the question. Her shining nose-ring sparkled against the fire of the stove as she expected this devastating question from Jagannath whom she loved deeply within her soul .Jagannath sat on the large wooden box near the kitchen expecting an answer from her to this question which he had not brought himself to ask . She wanted the question from him very much because she did not want it from anybody else . He only wanted the answer to the question but never wanted to ask the question because he loved her deeply within his soul .She wanted to tell him the truth which she alone knew if only he asked . He wanted the truth from her from her own account so that he could continue to love her .

A lot of questions came to his mind . What was it that made her go through the banality of an extramarital relationship with a low-caste man who had nothing to recommend as a lover ? When he wanted to ask her the question a lump in the throat came from somewhere and nothing eventually came out of him. Again she wanted to tell him why she went through the horror of this relationship and the absolute pointlessness of it all . There was something about him, Jagannath, which made it impossible to complete the triangular transaction of a fruiless relationship between him , her and the faceless lover because it was Jagannath who made the relationship pointless .

Years later , in 2002, Jagannath tried to capture the pointlessness of an adulterous relationship in a poem:


Adultery
----------
This wretched body
A handful of hungry bones
And aching tissue
Sings the melodious
Mohana raga of
Purposeless passion
His bony fingers
Wrought such fine music
Out of my rosy-hued body
In the warm summer nights
I steal another's man
Our sweaty union
Derogatorily called
Extra-marital love, goes on
Under drawn curtains
And smothered lamps.

Waves of tiny ants crawl
Under the burning skin
Tingling, tickling
The underside of the knees
This stupid pathetic creature
Wants me to whisper
Love-words into his seedy ears
I cannot do so because
The magic of my electrified body
Belongs to me alone
And not to this moron
He does not exist for me
He is a faceless identity
Who is only marginally different
From the usual man in my bed .


I look in the mirror
I have gone through this all
The creaking door ,
The sound of the flush
The gathering of the clothes
The inane small talk
The attempts at politeness
It is so painfully boring .
This wretched body
A bag of hungry bones
And aching tissue
Remains as yearning as ever.

Jagannath's cousin Laxmi had her first bout of depression, like her mother, at the age of eighteen. She sat morose and hunched up in Gollalavalasa with tears streaming down her cheeks .Everything was wrong with the world and there was nothing one could do about it . Her splintered personality took no notice of Jagannath who tried to superimpose some external meaning on the entire thing.He tried to comfort her saying that everything was not wrong with the world and even if it was , it did not really matter to her or to Jagannath . She did not apparently agree probably because she felt that the the world was beyond repair. The more he tried to comfort her the more she cried because he gave her the feeling that he was responsible for all the ills of the world. Jagannath felt absolutely distraught and could not look her in the eye. It was only the next day that she shifted the blame on to her brother and Jagannath felt relieved .

After marriage Laxmi went into a second bout of depression this time leaving a permanent scar on her fractured personality .She felt that her husband had no business to carry on an affair with a girl in the neighbourhood .She also felt strongly that he might kill her because he did not like her at all and wanted her to go away to the dark inky infinitude of the other-world.She kept vigil at night because he might strangulate her or liquidate her otherwise because she had heard of such things happening. She had her own logic as to why this would happen .Her logic never failed and it was better she remained vigilant. It was this logic which haunted her all the time. There were phantoms of people all around her who were making wild gesticulations at her trying to make her feel that her inner logic was at at fault .

The spectres of people around her were closing in on her jabbing their filthy fingers at her face. Weren't they responsible for the refusal of her child to come into this world ? She had no option other than to protect herself against these dangerous people who were getting ready to finish her once and for all. The dark rings around her eyes betrayed no emotion but only fear , a stark fear of the cruel world which was gunning for her all the time . Alone she stood in this terrible world trying to defend herself against their machinations .


Years later, Jagannath recapitulated her condition in a poem:

“Ramblings of a Schizophrenic
---------------------------------------
My splintered consciousness is
A medley of broken images
Shards of shattered tough-glass
Pierce through forced attempts at order
Dark and threatening circles
Close in on my eyes, concentrically.

My muscular male arms
Negate my underlying femininity
Sometimes I am male, sometimes female
Sometimes I am me, sometimes somebody else.

In my unified moments
I attempt in vain
To gather pieces of broken glass
For a multi-hued kaleidoscope
The kaleidoscope remains a dream
I only collect bleeding injuries.

My soul lies inert, in a glass jar
In the amniotic fluid of primordial confusion
As research material for neuro-scientists
Cushioned in chaos, there I lay
Afraid that the jar would break one day. “




End of Chapter 6

Unreal Reality Chapter 5

Jagannath's closest friend Satyanarayana accompanied him like a shadow everywhere in Berhampur. The two of them went everywhere on an old bicycle with Jagannath riding on the backseat.In the evenings they sat in the paddy fields away from the city breathing the fresh air of the fields. Together they experienced life through the coloured glasses of Jagannath's imagination. Satyanarayana listened in wide-eyed wonderment as Jagannath let go his fantastic imagination and invested ordinary events with a complex mysticism which left his companion entirely breathless.Deep inside he was enacting the stage-play of a most frightening loneliness behind apparent cheerfulness.There was no sorrow in his eyes but only bewilderment . During the Shivaratri night Jagannath and his friend would visit the Nilakanthaswamy temple near the cremation ground to experience the mystical power of Shiva who presided over death.

On hot Sunday afternoons Jagannath heard the heavy footfalls of several people on the road beside his house as they were carrying a marigold-decked dead body to the cremation ground and stopping near his house to lay the corpse down for a minute as part of the ritual. Their shouts of Ram Ram pierced the still afternoon air and slowly faded away as the procession disappeared behind the Ketaki bushes .

Years later, in 1986, Jagannath saw Raghavan, a dear friend of his , wrapped in white cloth that smelled of formaldehyde , staring into the blue sky of the Vadodara crematorium. The defiant smile on his lips was unmistakable as his brother lit the fire that reduced him to nonexistence. Jagannath refused to believe that Raghavan no longer existed. A very bizarre theory took shape in his mind .People said that Raghavan no longer existed . How could anybody's existence be wiped out from the cosmic space once he had come into existence ? Till Raghavan was born he had not existed but once he was born he began existing in Time and Space . Later ,in 1986 he ceased to exist in Space but did Raghavan cease to exist in Time ? Once a person is born he continues to exist in the vast space of Time with a clearly defined y-coordinate of time .

Adjoining the Neelkantha temple the cremation ground was home to several ghosts ..As dusk fell Jagannath looked through the opaqueness of the dark night for a fantastic display of weirdly floating flames rising from the bones of the dead. In the eerieness of the amavasya nights Shiva drank poison , little by little, and as it sank into His Cosmic Being darkness overtook the world .Once when Jagannath was walking on the road to his house he saw black death overtaking an ancient lady , as if it was the most natural thing to happen to her. At the precise moment when Jagannath passed her by . an electric shock from a table fan touched her soul and lifted her up as if to complete the electric circuit .

Suresh , Jagannath's friend in Berhampur, laughed all the time at the silliest joke that went around in his group of friends . When he laughed he sounded pretty silly but underneath the flippancy lay the most serious concern for the world and a ludicrous unfounded tension about what was going to happen to the world. The world mattered .He of course mattered . Otherwise who would worry about the world ? Years later the world went around searching for reasons for his decision to embrace the waters of the Bay of Bengal in Gopalpur when there was nothing apparently wrong with the world The world hardly cared . But it was curious to know why this gentleman had to walk into the sea . To prove what ? To save whom ?


Sridevi looked straight into your eyes. At the Venkateswara temple , during a classical music concert her eyes challenged Jagannath's intellect from behind a pillar. When she looked at him he felt miserable and totally inadequate . Why did she have to make him feel puny and insignificant in God's scheme of things ? Her large eyes were mirrors to his own nagging inadequacy. Love ? Love meant nothing for Jagannath . There was something utterly absurd about falling in love with Sridevi . She knew that and the way she looked at him it was clear that she meant it.But Jagannath needed her . He needed her more than she needed him. But this excruciating realization that she need not have to be loving him hit him each time she looked at him through the corner of her eyes. Jagannath tried to make her look at him through the corner of her eyes so that she will bruise his fragile ego in a most delicious fashion .It is a pity that she did not oblige him.

Rajeswaramma , the spiritual mentor of Jagannath's mother , had her own reasons for living and dying. When she lived she explained no reasons why she lived but nobody asked her that . But when she walked into the unknown one of those days everybody wanted to know the reasons . The sea did not ask her anything . Perhaps she faded into nothingness , not even the sea .Was this or was that ? Her disciples tried to demystify her because it was very disconcerting to have a guru who cannot be explained .The process of elimination began . Neti, Neti. Nothing worked .Ultimately everyone gave up. A much easier thing is to worship her as an explainable guru in a picture-frame . That was what they all did. God has no attributes .He is colourless and formless. He is Conscious and Unconscious. In the ultimate analysis Knowledge is Death .Nachiketa wanted to understand life and ,in the process, embraced Death . Year later, Jagannath wrote the following poem:



“Nachiketa
-------------
What is death?' asked Nachiketa
Experience viscous nonexistence
Which is mockingly immanent
Embrace death in order to spite it
The raucous laughter of Yama
Resounded in the Hall of Death
The laughter of self-exterminating
Self-renewing knowingness
It is dangerous to know death
For knowing is self-annihilation.

Nachiketa's father sent him to the
Land of Death from where none returned
For in his death lay his salvation
Nachiketa saw death in the glassy eyes
Of his father's old sacrificial cattle
In their death lay their deliverance
Nachiketa sought knowledge
Dangerous knowledge which is death
And cessation of all knowledge .”



Sitapati ,a distant relative, went bonkers. He had tried to understand the world through the use of mathematical symbols.The world cannot be explained in symbolism because the symbols are only fronts for something much deeper, much beyond the finite world. He tried explaining God in esoteric symbols and fell flat because the symbols were all the handiwork of his fellow-human beings. How could one explain the Dream, the exquisite Dream of which Jagannath was a part ? All the questions seem to be right but where is the key ? Sitapati tried finding the key and broke his sanity .It was a wonderful thing to look at the world through a mad man's eyes. An engineering graduate , Sitapati went bonkers trying to explain the world on pure engineering principles. His question was if a bridge can be explained this way why not the whole world ?Where did he go wrong ? How can the dream be explained in a purely cause-and-effect sequence based upon a finite understanding of the world ?


Bharati, Jagannath's classmate in B.A., accepted Jagannath in a most phlegmatic way. She never questioned him. In return he made her uneasy in a most undignified manner questioning the very basis for her continued existence. Still she never questioned him . She was like a tiny wild flower on the hillside bush asserting her white floral existence in the rocky landscape .Her fragrance haunted him through dark inky amavasya nights .She was an exquisite soul whom Jagannath worshipped from a distance .The more she refused to acknowledge him the more he adored her .How could she accept him as a part of her mundane life without touching the very core of his inner being ?

Unreal Reality Chapter 4

In the shravan it rained like mad . The wet days stretched for three days and three nights washing the dusty foliage of the trees gleaming bright .The birds slept fitfully on the lower branches not daring to venture into the wet nights .At the dead of the night the hum of the steady rain on the thatched roof with yellow water streaming through the roofends muffled the drip-dry flutter of the birds' wings on the mango tree.In such rain where would the women go with their soaked grams and jaggery to distribute them to the women in the neighbourhood ? The women would sit before the Goddess's picture and offer puja all by themselves . They would recite the Namams from the book and offer flowers and leaves and then put upon themselves and the children turmeric-yellowed rice .And then they would read aloud the story which narrated how a king and queen of yore benefited from doing this puja in the form of several favours like restoration of the lost kingdom , the birth of a son etc. . Whoever read the story or listened to it would attain multitudes of mundane benefits like good health , wealth , children , destruction of enemies etc. Widows who listened to the story would never again become widows in future births

During the Rath Yatra of Jagannath the children roamed the streets of Sompeta with a few coins in their pockets. The hawkers lined the streets on both sides selling several sweets and eatables which were so delicious that the children would roam the streets drooling over them the whole day .The flies did not deter them .Lord Jagannath presided over the congregation of thousands looking on with His beatific smile . Wasn't it He who bought cheer to the crowds who had eagerly waited to pull His chariot the whole year ?He , this little Jagannath in the half-pants , stood transfixed waiting to build eye-contact with Him , with Him in whose dream He existed , fearing that the dream would come to an end bringing a delicious end to his existence .

Srinivasarao cared so much for Jagannath through the school years. The eldest in a family of seven children Srinivasarao basked in the sunny glory of Jagannath's apparent academic success as though the latter was his own brother .He tailed him everywhere like his alter ego defended him against the insensitivities of the school system and , most of all , against the school bullies.The earnestness on his face at times embarrassed Jagannath while he ,on the whole , enjoyed the heroworship showered on him by his friend. Together they wandered the streets of Sompeta ,hand in hand , and later ,in the streets of Srikakulam where they had studied together once again in the school.

Srinivasarao married a pretty girl with eyes which laughed for apparently no reason.Her kajal-lined eyes brimmed with the joy of living and there was no trace of death in them when Jagannath stayed with them ,one day,in their Srikakulam house. This young girl of eighteen , while giving birth to a bundle of shrieking life, crossed over to shadowy nonexistence leaving behind fragrant jasmine-smelling memories in her near and dear ones . Death was considered eminently suitable to her .Her silvery laughter indicated no imminent poignancy of death but the fishlike eyeballs moved in her marble eye-whites like shadows of a coconut branch in liquid moonlight .She had come to this earth a trifle too early and it was clear that she would go away to the other world entirely unannounced .

Sharanyacharya was the indulgent Telugu teacher who had a soft corner for Jagannath. He had a smooth glowing face with hair neatly tufted on the head.
He wore a white dhoti and angavastram and a “ triple one” on his forehead.
He always had the most resplendent smile when he taught his class the exquisite poetry of the classical literature. When Jagannath participated in in the elocution contest and made his speech on Rabindranath Tagore he stood transfixed and clapped uninterrupted as though it was his own son who brought the laurels .
His two daughters loved Jagannath deeply and when they looked into his eyes he felt an excruciating happiness as though they always belonged to him and had never really separated from him. It was his fondest wish that they would take him into their arms by turns and comfort him deeply .

Tiruvengadamma , the elder one, looked highly spiritual as though it was her soul and not her physical being , which was talking to Jagannath .The girls in the class brought all sorts of eatables for munching through the class but never did Tiru eat anything in life .She never needed anything for her physical self . Her soul came out of the shell of her physical existence often to communicate to Jagannath who felt stifled and at loss to say anything . Her dreams never coalesced with Jagannath's despite her continous efforts. Her father understood that and never tried to bring about a union of their souls. Jagannath felt miserable and lonely .Goddesslike she played on him through the fantastic power of her soul. Her body was like a leafless flower-creeper with a lone flower at the top . The creeper never shook even once against the most powerful gust of wind .Her own leaflessness made her soul pristine and glowing.

Her sister , a shadow of her elder sister, laughed through her eyes . There was no soul in her eyes. But only a spirit untramelled by wisdom . When she walked it appeared as though she danced , her graceful body movements reflecting an inner happiness untouched by pain. Strands from the tufts of her hair played upon her forehead gently like the breeze that played on the waters of the Nagavali river during summer. Jagannath always felt that she meant to bend forward and gently play with his hair to comfort him .

Kannamma ,Jagannath's grandmother's sister , who became widowed at a young age, lived till the ripe age of seventy with her brother. It was her avowed ambition to keep her brother's wife under check all the time , a job which she accomplished quite well. When the end came she frothed at the mouth reliving the seventy years of life without a soul of her own. There she lay stretched on the bamboo stretcher waiting to be taken away to the cremation ground with the eyeballs screwed up to the heavens entirely dissatisfied with her life and complaining to the gods of the raw deal she had at the hands of the destiny .Should she die unsung with a few drops of gangajal put into her quivering mouth by her brother ? Her face looked grotesque and determined that others , particularly the brothers wife , should die a worse death , entirely without ceremony and join her at the portals of the other world for her to taunt and avenge herself to her hearts content .

During monsoon the Nagavali flowed to the brim washing away hundreds of half-burnt funeral fires to the distant ocean. Jagannath stood on the river bridge in Srikakulam and watched the river waters touch the temple steps . In summer the river dried up leaving a barren river-bed on which funeral fires raged. In the afternoon Jagannath walked through the cinders of the burnt out fires and felt under his feet pieces of broken bones and charred wood . Sometimes he would come across whole skulls with huge holes of eyes staring at the blue sky.When the rains came the skulls were filled with water but they continued to stare at the blue sky till the flood waters came and washed them to the sea at Kalingapatnam.

The afternoons were hot and dusty in Sompeta. Suddenly the skies opened in the evening and gusts of strong wind and rain followed .It rained the whole night flooding the streets and the shanties where the poor lived in their improvised shacks. In hot summers the same poor lost all their earthly possessions in huge infernos of fire which engulfed the entire streets of thatched hutments. There used to be only one fire engine which used to fill its water tanker only whenever the fire call came . The nights suddenly blazed in a splurge of orange amid agonised cries of poor women. The summer afternoons were hot and smelled of melted tar. The road workers made huge fires on the roadside in order to melt tar for laying on the road. They burned like hell-fires for days on end until the road was completed and the workers poured loose earth to douse them. Rural men sat on the roadside puffing away at their smelly bidis and when they smoked their eyes flashed and their faces flushed in a most contented fashion. Ebony-skinned women worked in hot summer sun , their blouseless backs burned by the blazing sun. The women internalized the hell-fires of their existence puffing at their cigars with the lighted ends in the mouth which burned their insides in delicious pain. The fires burned endlessly as though their funeral fires had begun when they were born from their mother's womb and continued through their life till their deaths.





End of Chapter 4

Unreal Reality Chapter 3

Once ,in Sompeta , a rumour was rife that the world was coming to an end.There was this Ashtagrahakutami , the union of eight planets , which signified that the apocalypse had arrived.Strange , hideous creatures roamed the streets at night .Headless monsters would be knocking at your door at midnight and if you opened the door you would freeze to death at the sight of the devil .Jagannath had terrifying nights ; while the whole world had slept he stood wide awake awaiting the arrival of the headless monster.Jagannath spent countless hours praying to Hanuman who alone could deliver you from out of this danger. Jagannath always looked at the lone tiled structure in the Jaggarao's garden with a fear in his belly . That was where the bodies were cut open for post-mortem.

There was another low-roofed tiled structure in Jaggarao's orchard which housed the rain-metre which mystified Jagannath .How did the metre gauge the rain and measure it in so many inches of rainfall? When there were heavy rains the Sompeta roads were flooded with knee-deep gutter water Jagannath had to wade through to reach the school only to find it closed. The rain-gauge was a conical –shaped device which collected rain-drops into a flask at the bottom forming a column of water the height of which indicated the rainfall. When it rained in Sompeta it was for two or three days at a stretch . The crows sat listlessly on the mango trees occasionally flapping their wings in order to shake off the wetness. The rains did not last the whole season . Soon the hills became dry and devoid of vegetation .The black-berry bushes yielded rich succulent berries .The lizards came out into the open as the bare hillside began emitting hot waves of reflected sunlight.


The nights were opaquely dark and bitingly crisp .The kerosene lamps on the roads of Sompeta stood ominously like jack-of- the –lanterns waiting to pounce on the stray passers-by. Jagannath was deeply afraid of the little flickering ghost-lamps that seemed to be wandering in the vast expanse of the amavasya nights. He had heard of the lamps chasing people walking on deserted roads. He tried to rationalize to himself the phenomenon of the wandering lamp-ghosts .As corpses burned on the lighted piers late into the night their bones crackled to release flickering specks of strange phosphorescence into the atmosphere .At least that was what he thought. Jagannath several times woke up in the morning to hear the plaintive cries of the tituva bird . The mournful cry of this bird portended certain disaster and death.

The world looked so unreal .Was the mango tree and the kerosene lantern on the court street real? The shadows of the flickering panchayat lanterns stretched weakly into the heart of the liquid moonlight shadows but retained their grey textures.The dried leaves at the foot of the mango tree rustled meaninglessly as the sleeping lizard suddenly woke up from its half-awake state to catch a passing fly.During the day Jagannath pursued stray dogs with sharp stones and as they yelled in pain he shook in sweaty fear at the prospect of spending an eternity in burning cauldrons in the deepest parts of hell .

On the outskirts of the Sompeta town Dr.Gullison , the missionary from Canada stayed in a moss-laden bungalow which inspired awe in the children .On Sundays the children of the town ,many of them in rags, collected in the portico of the bungalow waiting for delicious blobs of European cheese to be dropped in their outstretched palms by the Doctor's servants. The children then went to the Protestant church nearby where they waited in queue to receive free milk , made out of imported milk powder, in oversized brass vessels put in their tiny hands by their greedy mothers. The milk tasted good and was found useful by the mothers for making a part of it into delicious curd. Dr.Gullison had a heart of gold .He served the community with devotion . His pretty nurse-daughter worked as the superintendent –nurse whose broken Telugu amused the poor patients at her father's hospital.His protégé , a certain Dr. Copullai , worked wonders for the eyeless. The legendary Copullai restored eyesight to hundreds of poor patients .


It was Dr.Puri , the native Oriya doctor , who attended on the lower middle class patients who believed in the efficacy of the Telugu medicine .Telugu medicine meant the Ayurvedic system. When Jagannath had headaches with vomiting sensation all the ladies surrounded him attending on him with motherly affection.When there was fever Dr.Puri gave small pellets of lehya which was supposed to take its effect only under strict diet. Once Jagannath became terribly ill .He thought that was the end of the dream –state he was passing through. He was delirious with high fever and as he slipped away into another world he almost came face to face with Him .There was this confusing obliteration of his physical self as the ladies pushed a bunch of his house-keys into his hands. The boy is getting into fits !The gaggle of concerned women shouted.The iron keys thrust into his palms would prevent him from slipping into unconsciousness.


Jagannath dreamt of his father who had never existed for him except in his dreams.He had heard the silent moans of his mother several times at the dead of the night.His father , the angel of his dreams ,pursued him like the insubstantial shadow that strode behind him in the lazy Sompeta afternoons . He was an exquisite dream , a fragment of his imagination that had never existed .As he lay beside his mother with his head on the bend of her elbow he re-lived the electric pain of his existence , a highly charged electric existence that was finally to blow up in a fantastic explosion of orange and crimson phosphorescence. Several years later ,in 2003,Jagannath encountered the flimsy nonexistence of his father once again in the foggy outreach of a fish city .As he prayed at the Panduranga temple he could instantly recognise , through the unbroken connectivity of the Lord's photoelectric refulgence ,the blinding luminiscence of his all-knowing smile


Satyanarayana,Jagannaths grandmother's brother ,was the landlord of the house where Jagannath's family stayed.The one-room thatched house always contained roomful of people.Satyanarayana, a thin wiry angry man,enjoyed exercising his masculine authority over his helpless wife.When he spoke his eyes flashed as though a live volcano erupted through them .His angry mouth was full with half-eaten khara betel leaf with pungent pan masala.He charged a full Rs.15 for the one -room thatched house he had let out to Jagannaths uncle.Jagannath faced him always with trepidation.At night Jagannath slept alone on the verandah and sometimes on the road facing the house .He was deeply afraid of the old man because everything about him suggested an imminent explosion which would burn Jagannath off without leaving a trace.When Satyanarayna uncle spoke the lava spread like from a freshly erupted volcano.The expletives in his speech issued at the speed of a sten -gun .


Bhaskar , the little boy of ten ,one day came back from school and complained of a stomach upset .The next day he was laid out on a bamboo stretcher with his eyes wide open and the eyeballs protruding in a most undignified manner.Jagannath could not understand what happened to Bhaskar ?Why was he not getting up and taking his schoolbag to accompany us in our daily trudge to school ?From out of the straw bed on the bamboo stretcher Bhaskar stared at the Tituva bird which made circular motions in the sky above the Jaggarao's garden crying "Ti Ti Ya" .Jagannath thought with a shudder when this tituva would sing titiya for him .He spent sleepless nights waiting for the tituva bird's mournful song .When he woke up in the morning he heard the plaintive cry every day from out of the blank space that stretched above the lone tiled structure in the Jaggarao's garden where they cut open bodies for post mortem.


In the Sharad ritu , on the third day ,the moon shone more beautifully than ever.Girls worshipped the moon praying for a very good husband.They woke up at 4'O clock in the morning and ate cool rice and curd , had their pretty palms filled with the beautiful gorinta-redness and played the hide-and-seek game .Their delicate frames swayed like the wild jasmine bushes that trembled in the face of a strong gust of wind .They laughed intermittently for no apparent reason . When they laughed their oiled plaits shook against their alabaster necks and cast ethereal shadows on their faery-like existence.Jagannath shook with apparent unease each time they laughed .He almost always feared that they were laughing at him and did not know why.

Jagannath spent time , when alone, walking on the four-foot compound wall of the Taluka court delicately balancing himself .There was this hall in the centre of the old tiled structure of the Court where the Judge sat holding his court. Above him oscillated the pull-punkah , with a string one end of which was pulled by a peon sitting in the veranda outside.It was very funny how they called out names of the witnesses.A peon called out the name of the witness in a singsong fashion twice and then paused for a while before calling him for the third and the last time .The heat outside was very oppressive and the clients and the black-coated lawyers huddled to the shade of the only tree in the compound.Jagannath wondered what finally happened to the disputed property . Has the claimant finally got it ?The lawyer's Adams apple went up and down in a most comical fashion as the client looked at him with fervent hope .The Bilwa tree skirting the compound wall yielded rich pulpy fruits ,hard from outside and inedible so unlike the Sitaphal tree on the other side of the compound wall whose delicious fruits Jagannath had plucked many a time .

The Sitaphal tree which skirted the other side of the compound wall bore green-petalled flowers which tasted funny .The children ate the petals for their astringent taste so different from the Ramaphal which ,sweeter and rounder ,tasted even better when ripe.The Sitaphal bore Sita's name while its cousin , the Ramaphal took Rama's name.Before Sankranti the children collected firewood for the ensuing Bhogi festival when there would be a bonfire to celebrate Rama's victory over the evil forces represented by Ravana .Jagannath wore a new shirt , a silken one for the Bhogi festival with several large floral prints .Somebody threw a flatstone onto the sloping thatch of his house-roof which slided on to the ground and landed on Jagannath's head .Jagannath felt that he reached the end of his earthly journey as warm blood began to ooze out of the deep gash on forehead and started trickling on to the shirt with the bright red floral prints.The blood was excruciatingly purple and flowed intermittently on to his silken shirt forming lovely floral patterns synchronising so precisely with the shirt's floral design.The purple wound was made to eat crystals of sugar for that is how one did first aid for a superficial wound.


On the verandah slept the ancient granny of Jagannath's mother on a string cot .Blind and unaware of the world she thought she ruled the world .For twenty years she lay on the cot mumbling to herself all the commands she would like to give to others.She thought she was at the centrestage because all decisions of the family get referred to her . Which was a delightful illusion perpetuated by her children.Her world existed behind her visionless eyelids .There she presided over all the affairs of her family .She had, over the years of darkness, developed a keen sense of touch with which she could instantly recognise people.Deep within she saw herself in the centre of the frightening hell-fires of a useless existence .Nothing mattered to anybody .She would one day be made to lie supine on a palm mat on the ground and await death with drops of ganga water being dropped into her open mouth. She knew that.Not only would she be made to sprawl on the floor but they would take her away on a bamboo stretcher to some unknown place where they would light the fire to her with the smoke rising to the skies.After that they would partition the place where she is now lying with a new bamboo mat to indicate that for six months nobody should go anywhere near the place.


Shaarada the oversized daughter of the head-master always played with girls with pigtails .When she played hide-and -seek it was so easy to spot her behind the wooden pillar .Jagannath who played with the girls on the wakeful nights of shivaratri found it was tragic for Sharada to get caught out so easily merely because of her oversize.On the Shivaratri all the boys and girls of the street kept awake for the night in order to keep vigil over Shiva who had drunk poison and is lying unconscious. On these nights strains of film music came wafting on the breeze while most of the world slept .Sharada prepared tea for all the boys and girls so that they would remain wide awake throughout the night.Having prepared tea she would immediately go off to sleep only to wake up after an hour and resume her vigil.


In Sompeta women worshipped the Goddess of Gauri during Shravan for the welfare of their husbands .The black beads in their luminiscent necks shone in wifely pride that their husbands were alive and would live longer than their wives so that the women would die as sumangalis .It was the lifetime ambition of these women that they would die before their husbands .The women loved their husbands and obeyed them unquestioningly not because the husbands were so lovable and deserved their love but because that was what their mothers had done in their time .They would get up in the morning and rub their mangalasutras to their eyes in respectful adoration.The wife would gently press the tired feet of the man who would lie on the cot with his legs stretched so that the wife would do her job unhindered . The husband would growl if the quality of her work was not to his satisfaction .He would sometimes get up and give her a painful blow so that she would do the job better. The wife would take the blow stoically and get on with the work as usual.After half an hour the husband would start snoring and then the wife would get up from the floor stopping her work . She would touch his sleeping feet with her hands and touch her fingers to the eyes praying to God for longevity to her husband so that she would die before him and earn punya for the worlds beyond .



End of Chapter 3

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

Unreal Reality Chapter 1

Jagannath went through the first flush of his consciousness as a one-year old infant in the cloth-cradle. Existence baffled him .The snugness of allround cloth was an extension of his foetal existence.Did he really exist? Was he a real physical self ? The physical world smothered him. Did he not exist in Somebody’s dream ? This Somebody, unphysical and dream-like, was enacting a dream, of which Jagannath, who was himself unreal and a creature of an ethereal world, was a part .At the age of ten Jagannath moved about in the physical world uncertain of himself trying to blame his existence on the Somebody who appeared to have made him the Chief Protagonist of the dream-play he seemed to be enacting. What if He stops dreaming bringing an end to this unreal existence ?

Jagannath became acutely aware, at the age of ten, that he was not the special entity that he thought he was. By then he had developed a world-view ,a fragmented one, based upon an amorphous mixture of the half-logic of the workaday world and a skewed intellectual grasp of the Reality. He had to reconcile several unreconcileables .If there was a cause, there had to be an effect but what was the cause of the cause? If the universe existed, there had to be a Creator But who or what constituted the genesis? The finite mind grasped a scheme of things where a cause-and-effect sequence seemed
to be inherent. In that dream-state where he existed as a chief protagonist of the dream-play of Somebody, did these physical laws ,which make the cause-and-effect phenomenon an inexorable reality, have any sanctity? Could the human mind not grasp a reality beyond the Cause? The human logic, itself a product of the finite mind, seemed to suggest a beyond-logic which permitted a scheme of things where there could be cause without effect and effect without cause.

What bugged his puny mind much more was the existence of dualities . His human mind grappled with hundreds of dualities like yes-no, good-bad, black-white possibilities. Did not a beyond-logic suggest a third, a fourth possibility existing in the cosmic scenario? Jagannath’s dream-like existence flowed through the arid plains of intellectual speculation.He continued to believe that this Somebody in whose dream he existed was laughing at him for the absurdities of his own small little dreams. Could there be dreams within dreams? Once, at the age of 15,he dreamt of the Dreamer ,in a state of delirium .It was an existence-erasing dream as though the end of the world had arrived and nothing seemed to matter. Engulfed in the swirling waters of dark soul-death he cried out in oxygen-starved pain, an excruciating pleasure-pain that stupified his physical existence.


Jagannath dreamt of many things. Of venomous snakes, of criss-crossing planes and of wingless flights. During recurrent bouts of head-cold he went through hallucinations.He felt as though he was in the midst of casuarina trees on the Kalingapatnam beach with the wind buzzing through their needle-leaves. His senses ached with exquisite pleasure. He started actually looking forward to colds. At times he had violent stomach upsets caused by eating too many raw mangoes brought down from the trees with a pebble.The mango-smelling pukes filled the air with malodorous disgust. Running eucalyptus-smelling colds elevated the senses and brought an unearthly sharpness to them. At night the cold winter air bit into the fever-fresh skin filling the vapour-opened pores with ecstacy.When the little typhoid germ struck him,at the age of nineteen, he hoped for a miracle that there would be a catharsis of his soul .Miracles never happened in his life. For that matter nothing ever really happened in life.

At the age of ten, lying on a string-cot in a claustrophobic room he experienced a fear-pain in the belly, a paralysing fear of the unknown as pale shadows stretched across the closing walls and grotesque tail-dropped lizards crawled on the wooden beams of the thatched roof. The same fear gripped him when he passed through a deserted street under a diabolic tamarind tree which housed multitudes of suicide-ghosts who seemed to be calling out in eerie silence .It was the same fear which gripped him when the stomach-churning spirit-smell pervaded the government hospital when he was waiting for his turn to see the doctor. At night Jagannath had his gut-wrenching nightmares in which he saw himself in strange diabolic blood-soaked pits covered with foul-smelling excrescence.


Jagannath had his small redemptions . In the early hours he went out ,bare-footed , into the morning-smelling bed of unkempt grass to pluck fragrant flowers . Leaves covered with droplets from the night’s dew touched his bare skin.In the half-dried river-bed a tiny stream snaked through the brown tingling sand. Jagannath squatted in the muddy waters to let the warm-cool water flow over his body and as he looked at the distant mist-covered Salihundam hills he conjured up visions of the re-birth of the lost civilization which lay buried under the scraggy hills.In the rain-moist coconut plantations of Uddanam stately coconut trees danced against the Bay of Bengal ocean-breeze as his bare feet squished into the sea-washed beach.

Jagannath carried on through life’s journey ,half -aware and half-knowing .Awareness stifled him .Knowledge suffocated him.In that knowing-futile moment he died a thousand delicious deaths .Each time he died he ceased to exist as Jagannath , the dream-protagonist of the dream-play in Somebody”s cruel dream . Each time a different Jagannath sprang up from out of the miserable putrifying corpse of his earlier oxygen-drained dream-existence .Once at the age of ten he lay on the soft under-bed of a bullock-cart as it it slowly wended its way up the dirt track and imagined the excruciating pain that certainly awaited him at the end of the journey.There ,in Ampolu village,the women were waiting to poke wicked fun at ten-year old boys in half-pants during the marriage celebrations .Women in moth-ball-smelling kanjivarams would be singing funny songs mocking at your pedigree

emi goppa varamma
nilamraju varu
maryada kavalani
maddela vayistaru
(What great people
These nilamraju family are!
They go on beating their drums
Announcing that they demand attention)

Jagannath thought of the younger sister of the bride who would come so dangerously close to him entreating him to sing the latest Telugu film song.Silly girl , she would sit on the edge of the string cot deliciously arching over him, while he,Jagannath, ceased to exist.Jagannath remembered with a blush how he had sat very close to the bride and the bridegroom in the palanquin carried by four turban-wearing bearers who shouted into the still air rhythmic' koho kohokko' as if complaining to the gods.

Jagannath still remembered the kohl-eyed daughter of the neighbourhood patriarchal farmer in Vanitamandalam who thought Jagannath was a stylish city-boy who had a thing or two in him.When he showed off his wisps of broken film music he always had a plateful of roasted cashews placed before him.Another time this termagant of a woman,who had broken off with her husband, seemed to have a crush on him . Her eyes were pools of defiant sadness and as the pigeons roosting in the coop outside moaned silently Jagannath thought he felt a deathly chill in her attitude towards him, a slowly creeping shadow on her smooth exterior.She suffocated him and made him weep. She enjoyed every bit of it. The earthen pots were piled one upon the other on the cowdung-smeared floor and behind them, unknown to the residents, lurked dangerous eight-legged spiders one of which killed Jagannath's cousin, Roopa.Yes.It was this very species of the spider which injected deadly venom into the victim. There she lay on the hot river-bed of the Vamshadhara with her eyes closed and unmindful of the low plaintive wail of her grief-stricken mother who had hoped that her daughter would somehow come back to life if they delayed the lighting of the pyre. It was her fondest hope that the same spider which had bitten her daughter on the stomach would come from somewhere and breath life back into her.


It was in the narrow bamboo-walled kitchen of this house that this lady, sister of Jagannath's mother, who had spent a major part of her life.She knew nothing except pure crystals of love.When she lit the three-stone stove, smoke filled the the thatched house mixed with delicious fry-smells and long conversations ensued over sizzling pakodas.The afternoons became hot as the day lengthened over the Vamshadhara sands.The lone boat brought stray villagers, returning from the Gara marketplace ,whose bare feet burned on the hot sands as they climbed the sand banks.Her smoke-reddened eyes had shadows of insanity hearking back to her initial years of married life when she filled the walls of her in-laws' house with bloody scrawls.Her eyes flashed as she sang, hysterically, satirical lyrics on her mother-in-law set to taut music.It was the same sweet voice which had earlier sung

Shantamu leka
Soukhyamu ledu
Sarasadalanayana
(There is no comfort
Without tranquillity
O Lotus-eyed one )

When she sang the sound came from her deep throat like the sad caw of a one-legged crow perched on the tamala tree.She had experienced the heart of darkness.The dark rings around her eyes betrayed the barreneness of her soul which had silently suffered the excruciating pain of having to watch her youngest daughter Shanta walk out on her .Her own tranquillity vanished when Shanta struck up a lustful ,defiant relationship with a peasant's son with absolutely no chance of the relationship fuctifying into marriage.


Shanta had suffered the banality of her existence silently till the peasant's son came along. This man-boy aroused her deeply making her forget her brahminical superiority. His touch exploded on her shattering her girl-woman body which submitted itself willingly to his unbrahmin maleness. Soon enough his touch had lost its magic and in a month's time both of them tired of each other.It was by then too late and Shanta had to walk out of the bastion of her brahminical home into an unknown future.



End of Chapter 1