Showing posts with label holi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label holi. Show all posts

Friday, March 09, 2012

Holi Kites

I step out from the gates to draw something from the air outside. A calm predates the madness - a viral outbreak - that is to come. I notice that calm reflected in the faces of a trio of cows stationed strategically so as to block access to one of the bungalows in the neighborhood. The cows direct their blank gaze to their right, up the alley; a couple of colored shapes enter the horizon, and come running down the slope, towards me. They fail to notice me, or either find me un-noteworthy, and rush past me - I notice the maroon all over them. Their haste even catches the curiosity of pups - one white, one brown - that stagger to the middle of the road to understand this strange creature that today didn't even push or kick or stone them or pull their tails for a dirty laugh. Then another pair of boys come running from the direction of the labor colony to the N-E, distracted towards the skies.

The boys all converge outside Az's tall gate. Soon, an ownerless kite glides into the picture, cut from its line in likely an epic battle. Kites are a recent addition to Holi; makes me worry over the wrong reasons rooftops are being used. As they watched the kite arrive, so do they stare in longing as the kite keeps afloat long enough to glide out of the picture as well, into the park, where it decides to rest in defat. A kid holding a plastic cricket bat run and picks it up from the grass. He's happy despite that he hasn't desired what he had today.

What surprised me is why the other boys hadn't fought for that kite. It turns out that another defeat had sent another one spiralling down, this one carrying some statistical certainty of landing right where those boys are. The littlest kid tries a smart move as he slings his Langar 20ft up, but narrowly misses catching the line. An outgrown kid finally gets this one.
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Sunday, March 01, 2009

Real Fear

"It could've happened to anybody." And with that premises, I walk with fear on the roads of Delhi, just having been a witness to somebody in a miserable condition being pushed deeper into misery in broad daylight. Things aren't the same anymore. The paranoia will set in - not just me, everybody else - after all it's not everyday that you see such things happening right in front of your eyes...somebody being taken down from a distance. My friends have felt fearful walking through crowded lanes in Muslim-dominated areas, much because of the hype machine that has reduced "Islam" to another word for "senseless killing", prejudice. A similar fear is manifest to certainty these days, but not on Muslim, but Hindu/Sikh turf, and walking through those lanes is a dosage of paranoia: you are aware of what these people can do to you, and take every step expecting your doom; your eyes moving like a pinball, searching for their faces every direction; you start hating their kids - cute and innocent - because you know what menace lies inside them; you expect every distraction as a ploy, and walk with pacing steps in a straight line, fearful to look in the that direction only because you're too familiar as to what could be your fate; the roads hint of the few lucky ones who made it through, those hints being as frightful as much as comforting. You walk on, because there are no other options. You live in such a society, and you live with IT, year after year with the same recurrent fear.
But you are certain that it would pass away: those menacing kids sneaking up on you with water balloons a few days around Holi.
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