SAVOURING NIRVANA
Down where a broad main road cuts past a slender byroad of a semi-urban town, where people, like the rest on Earth, strive to feel happiness. Know love. Experience satisfaction. On all weekdays, except Tuesday, you will see her there.
As industrious as any lean bee, you will see filling its beehive. Two or three times a day, she scoops out colourless water with her right hand from a discoloured purple plastic container held in her other hand, and sprinkles glistening drops of clear water onto her bundles of dill, spinach, reddish, fenugreek leaves, and other vegetables that tend to droop and look pale. As the sun turns bright lemon yellow and moves higher, higher, to linger an hour or two over sweat-spilling heads.
She has all her vegetables enlivened, looking green and fresh, piled on her four-wheel vegetable cart. Parked beside a laterite-stone compound wall of an old house with a red-tiled rooftop gone blackish, and its view is half obscured by mango, jackfruit, and jambul trees with hefty arms spread above it and over its front garden, where orange, red, and yellow marigolds and white, pink, maroon dahlias bloom. Koel’s shrill calls are heard, and grey squirrels like sprites are seen running about. Where black crows caw and nest, green parrots like ripening mangoes rest, perched on the trees' high branches.
You realize.
You need glistening drops of humility sprinkled on you to enliven you. See you care and look around. Smile. Especially to those who threw away and lost theirs. Hold no resentment. Feel sorry for those who refuse to smile back. For they have dropped their smiles and dropped their joy.
The satisfaction. Hope. That rises in you, to see the world freed of poverty. Misery. Ugliness. On seeing smooth, broad, safe, clean roads and footpaths leading to aesthetically built and well-maintained houses, buildings, gardens, and parks. Huge trees cover and shelter large swathes of open land, hills, and valleys. Found in little things as well: life's ecstasy in small things, its handsomeness in tiny details, that highlight its greater grandeur.
As in.
Aesthetically outlined, as with an artist’s black ink and round brush, saffron monarch butterflies. Bees with black and yellow bands. Hovering over sunken sprigs laden with stout bundles of white mogras, tempt you to softly clasp them and raise them close to your nostrils and inhale slowly.
The sight of orange-yellow sun rays gleaming through droplets shines like lit lamps on red hibiscus petals, green grass leaves, and just-washed windowpanes. The little laughs, small smiles. On seeing blue water ripple and glister across a still lake or a water bowl holding it, securing it.
The sight of people gathered around chaat carts parked beside busy roads and street corners, shaded by large peepal, banyan, and dainty gulmohar trees that people cared to keep and see grow unrestrained. Dropping pani-puri, bhel puri, aloo tikki, and other spicy chaats handed out to them, onto their salivating tongue, and chat. Their eyes turned moist, gleaming, as if they were savouring nirvana.
© Devayani Anvekar
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Devayani Anvekar
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Devayani Anvekar is an illustrator and caricaturist of social and domestic issues. She lives in Goa, India. She writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose when drawing fails to convey human struggle. Her written work has appeared in 50-Word Stories, The Metaworker, and is forthcoming in The Genre Society and Witcraft.
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