Sehra

Sehra’s significance to Arabs is understandable, their lives after all revolved around the desert. But sehra’s magic to us is no less significant. Perhaps centuries of contact with Arabs and their literature

allowed it to grow on us with similar sense of foreboding and tilism. Sehra means same to Arabs as ocean means to seafarers. Both are vast monolithic spaces; enigmatic, risk-prone, adventurous and tantalizingly mysterious, short on drinking water. Sehra is parched, lifeless and inanimate yet one of the most enduring tales of love (Laila and Majnu) was played out in its inhospitable sands. At more spiritual level its monolithic space holds most fascinating conundrums of life.

The Rip Van Winkle Dream

Even though this far in time, the images are crisp and sharp crystallized in clear focus as if I went to sleep as a child one afternoon like Rip Van Winkle and woke up thirty-five years later. That stone built house with ’roshandaans’ and red tiled sloping roof, which I once called home, looks so endearingly romantic, yet as a little boy I felt it depressive and bleak. The construction in crudely cut boulders gave it a deep gray tinge of a foreboding castle while new sharply geometric, cubical constructions on the rear of our house looked cool, impressive and very trendy. Roshandaans (a misnomer for high ventilators) are no more in vogue, these simple contraptions were constructed high on wall and operated through two strings attached to vertically swinging panels. But the strings were hardly used, for most of summers Roshandaans remained open and closed through the winters, in between some gaurayya (sparrow) will find a mate, build nest, rear children and fly away to the annoyance of Mom. Once I took my rubber ball and offered to knock down the nest but one look at Mom’s aghast face made me wonder until a long time at mysterious ways of grown up people’s non-linear thinking. It also gave me first glimpse of life being lived in the gray rather than in black and white. Rajamma gave me my name ’Babu’, she came to wash dishes and mop the house. Some times she would come with her young and very attractive copper complexioned married daughter Poshamma but then I was too young to flirt with her. Some times she would come drunk with ’taaRi’ then Mom would push us out of the house off the front door. If Poshamma too came drunk, her bulging red shot eyes transformed her beautifully chiseled face into a fearsome psychopath’s face. Some times Rajamma would come with a basketful of ’sita-phal’ (called shareefa up north or the ’Custard Apple’ in English) and pester Mom into buying the whole lot. That day we would eat sita-phal until we got sick of it.

Polynomial

We had on our right Mr.Wahab as our neighbor, a house teeming with little children. If it hadn’t been the army cantonment and its ethos of strict secularism, that family would have reinforced my stereo typing of Muslims permanently but thankfully people in cantonment were not identified by their religion or their cast but just by their name. It isn’t that Mr.Wahab wore shervani and fluffy cap but the house reeked of dried urine. The most enduring image of that house is of a kid roaming around naked waist down with his peanut sized bandaged penis dangling like a pendulum. When I asked Junaid, their eldest son, what’s wrong with his brother he cringed in extreme embarrassment. Back then, mothers covered little children’s chest for fear of them catching cold but it was fine for little kids to move around the neighborhood naked waist down. I have had very few Muslim friends, perhaps because they are fewer in number, but they have always added a strange kind of intensity in relationships. May be this is because of xenophobia borne out of insecurity of a minority. First they just don’t trust you but once they do they do so whole-heartedly. Junaid was my buddy.

On our left, Harpal Singh lived with his family. Poly, his daughter was my age, laconic and coy. Her younger brother, I don’t even remember his name, always wore pajama. Since kids do a lot of running and pajamas aren’t exactly conducive to running, I hated him. I don’t think there is a thing called platonic love; it’s all plain sexual infatuation. If at all there is platonic love it must be between two little kids. Poly’s proximity was always soft, soothing and blissful.

Later in college when I read about polynomials in Math class. it reminded me of her, lithe and supple. Poly wasn’t her name, I realized this much later when I visited her one last time as a college student in Meerut. She was still laconic and coy. When her mother called her Po’lli, I realized that her name was Po’lli a distortion of the word ‘Bholi’ due to Punjabi folk’s tendency to convert ‘bh’s into P’s as in ’paadshah’. When I asked her if she still remembered those days in Secundrabad, she didn’t look at me, but said, "Yes. Of course!" She made my day. I guess, I need to revisit my thoughts on platonic love.

The Wizard

Our house wasn’t a cottage but four houses joined side by side in a block. In front of each house was a tennis court sized henna-hedged enclosure and a rickety wooden gate not hinged but tied by steel wires to a pipe firmly planted into the ground. This was late sixties therefore there were enough open spaces and all around sprinkling of tropical trees like Ber, Imli, Peepul, Jamun Keeker Neem, Gular and Sheesham etc. Beyond the boundary of hedge was a grassy tract of empty land where we used to played cricket and other games and then a road parallel to the houses having leafy trees on both its sides. Across the road slightly off to right was a hockey ground. Since the ground was carved out of a sloping land, it fell sharply at one side, which made It look like a very large shallow tank.
The other side of hockey ground had row of Keeker trees obscuring view of the recruits training facilities. It was an absolutely bald piece of land, not a blade of grass on it, glistening under high sun so brightly to blind our eyes but in declining sun glowed like dull amber. Army men would come in the evening and play, sometimes even inter-regimental matches too were played there. A Major in the army, a Sikh and apparently a hockey aficionado often came to watch the men play hockey. Sometimes he came on horseback and sometimes in his very old Morris Austin car. He had a bizarre gizmo, a short steel rod, which had two foldable pads on one end. When opened these pads made a small seat . He would sink the other end of rod into the ground forming a tripod together with his legs. I am not sure if it was a comfortable seat. While men wormed up, we the children would pick up their sticks and play in the D area with their coach, a gray haired old man commanding extreme awe and respect from the men. All of us were to defend the goal and the jolly coach would make us go round the D like bees after honey and bang in goals after goals. But then this is the least you would expect from Major Dhyan Chand wouldn’t you!

Thirumalgiri Hills

The man who built those houses must have been a nature lover. There were no man made construction in front of the house apart from that busy road. There was a lime painted pulia (culvert) bang in front of the house to let out rain water otherwise it remained dry through the year. Often we would sit under this pulia in summer afternoons and plan our dirty endeavors until one day a chameleon surprised us and frightened us out of our skins. Every few months military guys would come and paint this pulia afresh when word would buzz in air of some hot-shot army honcho coming in for inspection. These army men play funny games, when they have nothing else to do, they organize inspections to feel important much like we planned our forays under that pulia to keep busy.

Beyond the hockey ground was a vast expanse of slowly rising terrain of verdant green until Tirumalgiri hill range littered with all shapes and sizes of rocks and boulders rising sharply blocked the distant view of horizon. The summit straight ahead of my house in the distant hill was the tallest and perched atop was a huge cube shaped rock resembling a giant dice, as if left there by cowardly Gods fleeing from attacking demons. This rock was so precariously balanced that every time I looked at it, I would wait eagerly for it to roll down the hill in a cataclysmic dance of noise, only to be disappointed.

The crystalline Secundrabad soil was rough on the skin, therefore we all had streaks of enamel like coats of dried blood on our skin. Removing crusty patch from skin is an elaborate ritual. Often the center part remains firmly stuck to the skin, so you start lifting it from one end and slowly work your way up to the center and then begin from other end. Finally tired, you just yank it off when tiny beads of blood oozes out of that fresh pink skin. This whole exercise leads to contentment similar to mini nirvana, at least I felt it that way.

One Sunday, early in the morning while sitting on verandah edge I was peeling off one such coat under the right elbow and relishing it, when I noticed a lone soldier exercising under the Keekar tree at far end of hockey ground. Once done with ritual I looked at the hill in front and began contemplating fall of the giant rock. Suddenly I became aware of commotion around there. Men in a group were talking agitatedly while kids too had stopped playing and now standing in a circle. I jumped from my perch and joined the kids. ’What’s wrong’, I enquired. They all yelled at me, "A soldier had committed suicide" pointing towards the hockey ground. Initially I couldn’t see anything but then it hit me with the force of a thunderbolt. The man I had seen earlier as exercising was actually hanging from the Keeker tree. Since the ground behind the tree was rising therefore it looked as if the man was standing on the ground. Until this time I had never seen a dead man, not even from this far. I was a timid kid and perhaps a timid person even now. The sight of a corpse let loose an avalanche of dreadful thoughts. The image of dead man hanging from the tree just wouldn’t leave me. That night I couldn’t sleep until I saw reassuring light dawn.

In the morning I felt very tired, eyes heavy with sleep and the lurking fear still there. When at breakfast I saw Mom pointing at me with irritation and accusing of remaining awake the whole night, I felt relieved. Those words from Mom were electric. I felt no more threatened. That night I slept peacefully, safe in the knowledge that Mom watched me over through the night. From that day on Tirumalgiri looked passive and lot nearer home. Mom is no more but I still sleep peacefully!

Sehra Vs Sehra

One Sunday we were playing ’pithu’ in front of the house, a simple ball game in which one team tries to knock down a tiny tower made from pieces of broken tiles and then reassemble it without getting hit by the ball from rival team. As the game progressed, we heard a three-wheeler with box shaped rear in which a bell shaped metallic laud-speaker was installed, pass by. An angry Lata Mangeshkar was crooning noisily....

mat pooch mujh se zaalim, mere dil ka haal kya hai..
jo zabaaN se kuch kahuN maiN ye mere majaal kya hai

When it passed us, the man in the rear chucked a sheaf of papers in our direction. All of us forgot our game and immediately ran to catch the flying papers. I too was able t get hold of one. It was an ad for movies running in town. On one side it had ’Pooja Ke Phool’ and on the other of ’Sehra’. I found the name ’Sehra’ queer for a movie title but let it pass with a shrug as strange ways of movie folks. Soon one song from the movie became pretty popular,

paNkh hoti to uR aati re
rasiya o zaalimaa
tujhe dil ka daaG dikh laati re

In the beginning that song sounded queer, something amiss, nay the whole structure seemed funny. But with time I began to like it. The song is extraordinarily bizarre. Its composer Ramlal is an unknown quantity. The song is ’hijr’ geet, but has racy tempo of a Shammi Kapoor-Saira Banu romantic song. The hissing steam and whistling locomotive sound arrangement appears completely out of place, alludes to rather steamy sex. In components, the song seems complete mismatch. Yet like magic, complete song emerges a winner like a Jackson Pollock painting. Later when I saw this song played on TV, it broke my heart. The picturization by V.Shantaram is nauseating. I had always pictured it in ’Black and White’ medium of a distraught melancholy
woman singing from the terrace of a desolate building in fading light of dusk.

Much later when I heard Ghulam Ali croon


Sehra ki bheegi ret meN, maine likha aawaargi....


I was puzzled. The words made no sense to me. Sehra always meant to me a flowery veil that an Indian bridegroom wears therefore the song made no sense. When a friend told that it also means desert or rather primarily means that only, a life times mist about ’Sehra’ melted away.