Bablee ( Part- 4 ) —

{ Recap – In the previous part, Ganak related to me about the sorry plight of his eldest brother’s marital status. This he had acknowledged upon asking me the question, why they brothers are not getting married. Then he disclosed, his two elder brothers already been married once but suffered a disaster. }

It may sound weird to reader, why I cultivated friendly relation with Ganak. In fact, in our life we tend to go through the curiosity of many things but we don’t notice about that. I give you a paradigm. Every person who is educated enough, may despise people of slum area or people engaged in menial job, but on the same, when he finds a pot maker making pots on his potter wheel, he at once stops there and begins to watch his working intently, fully engrossed there. My self too had an inclination to know about the life and culture of people who didn’t belong to our class. On the other hand, we too foster a curiosity to know about the life of celebrities, only because we don’t belong to the class of the celebrities. These are two facets of the coin. The same phenomenon was occurring with me

To continue the friendly terms with Ganak too had some reasons. First was his mocking outlook towards the life, that ever amazed me. No doubt this outlook towards the life had been germinated from encountering the bitter realities of life ; people of such class begin to face from the early life. Rather the life taught them lesson that life is not the same as learnt in the bookish contents. To him, life had got its own metabolism and this was indeed a philosophical approach, and that was evident in his deportment. Second reason, I imbibed was, had the financial background of his family been strong and supportive, he might have come up as a highly educated person. A quest for knowledge, I always found in him

The third reason was, his being helping hand. If I was in search of some plumber for petty repairs or to get painted flower pots etc, he had the ample knowledge of so many menial repairing jobs and he easily did that. The last reason may sound hackneyed. Whenever he was short of money and desired to quench the thirst for drink, he would opt for some tricky option. In that case, he preferred for cheap intoxicant substance, i e. dry substance. His main dry addiction was “weed’s extract or hemp leaves’ extract,” that’s called ‘Bhang’ in vernacular.

When he had no work in hand, he often visit the distant located villages of the outer skirt. There in open fields, the wild growth of ‘hemp’ shrubs were prolific. In our region, such addict person firstly rubs the green leaves of hemp vigorously, by applying pressing  force of palms of both hands . On being crushed, these leaves begin to ooze out the dilute extract, this gathers on the surface of the palms in black  layers. Now when layers of extract slightly dries, they rub both the palms and a dirt of black substance they find, Its “Bhang or ganja” and used as intoxicant in smoking.

In next process, a smoker takes tiny quantity of this Ganja and mixes it with the tobacco powder emptied from a cigarette and again refills back into the cigarette paper. Now his ‘substance’ is ready to smoke. On smoking this substance, with in minutes smoker would come into the grip of ” high” mood of tipsiness and begins to travel in another world.

As I told earlier, the location of his residence from my private office was at a distance of about half a km and from his house, my newly constructed house located one km away.  In this way, I too had the option passing past his residence, whenever I wished. On coming to good terms with him, intermittently I preferred to return back home through his residence. This was on purpose as well, I happened to make a halt at his home. Now, he was so frank with me, I he had had some desire to drink and lacked money, he would ask for that from me.

Although, in common, I feel hard to consume the country liquor, but when I had to pay for the stuff, I too gave company to him in drink session. An another development too took place because of my this kind of sessions at his house. A formal conversation got initiated with his other two brothers which with passing of time became informal. Often I noticed, whenever Ganak had some chat with Manik, after a short while it turned up into a bitter altercation. This phenomenon I used to take as normal as sibling rivalry. Though the exact ’cause’ behind this bitterness revealed later on. So far as his eldest brother’s concern with Ganak was, as I told eldest brother was saint type.

Whenever Ganak became unruly and aggressive after consuming alcohol, eldest brother gently implored him to maintain the peace. Never Ganak was affronting or offensive towards him, but always, by folding his both hands dramatically retort, ” O! great devotee of god! Kindly take yourself inside your own room. You are not needed here in the soiree of Satanic people,” and with this would give the same mocking, derisive laugh. Ganak was given to address his home as, “Asylum of bulls.” In our India,  bull also connotes sarcastically for man still unmarried or without a partner. In common, it carries  a meaning for a place dominated by males having no female partners. As he already had told, both his brothers got married but the present status of them were devoid of wives as well.

A common tendency we often observe in every bachelor is, whenever he fancies about his future wife, he ever wishes to have a beautiful, charming and perfect girl in house hold affairs. This fancy in a natural way Ganak too fostered. Besides, he had had his limited vocabulary of some English words and phrases, he was used to apply that undauntedly, whether he was drunk or not.  The fondness for beautiful women he fostered in a unique way. It was obvious that in his job of white wash, he was to take consignments from various classes of people. In this consignment, often mistress of the big house, who as a house wife were supposed to stay back at home whole day, used to discuss about the color sheds’ choice and other requirements regard white wash with him.

This is a common occurrence in the present social system, when the master of the house is supposed to be out in his bread earning, woman commands the household business. After all, a home is the domain of woman only and every woman ever wishes to put her house in an attractive display. It often happened, every such white wash project of a big house was but to take weeks of time. This drive of two to three weeks time was always enough for Ganak to get infatuated with the mistress of the house. Amazingly it was “one way traffic” type infatuation. The poor lady of the house always remained ignorant of this fact.

The period of time, I am talking about was about the year of 2000 and mobile hand phone sets were not used in common. It was a costly affairs, though land line phone facility was in fashion but confined to limited good numbers. On the pretext of having occasional discussion with master of the house, he succeeded in collecting the phone numbers of so many such houses. Otherwise for people’s common use PCO ( Public Call Booth) service were common to serve the purpose. Whenever, Ganak was in a gloomy mood, he was in a habit to try such collected various numbers from PCO. It chanced, he would get connected a call to the lady of the house. On phone call, merely he would talk formal things and well being of the family. Never he could dare to exceed the  barrier of decency. But this short term conversation was enough to work as an ointment to his gloomy heart. ( End of the Part-4. Cont’d ) Penned by — Vinay Pharasi —–