A Glimpse

 

 

Come my beauties, cooed Moni, scattering a handful of puffed rice in front of him. A flock of pigeons descended in a shower in the temple courtyard, in a hurry to get to the rice before their neighbours.  They strutted around cooing and babbling and gobbling up the rice greedily. Moni looked on indulgently. This was his morning ritual. He woke up, fed the birds and then went with Kanai  Baul to have a bath at the hand pump behind the temple.

  

Moni got a piece of soap and two thin cotton towels from the dark, little room tucked away in one corner of the temple, originally meant to be a store room. He then went to call kanai Baul who was sitting under the banyan tree in front of the main Kali sanctuary. “Come kanai baba , let’s go have our bath.” Moni marvelled again at the dexterity and the sure - footedness of Kanai Baul . Nobody seeing him move would guess that he was blind. But Kanai Baul was a permanent resident of the temple like Moni and his body had memorised the contours of the temple. He didn’t need eyes.

 

“Ah Moni. You’re a good boy. It’s Ma’s grace that I found you on the temple steps when you were an infant. Only she knows the secret of you birth. She knew that I would need looking after and arranged things so marvellously. A blind singer and his young assistant who can make you dance to the rhythm of his dubki! We don’t lack alms, do we?” Kanai-Baul laughed uproariously.

 

On reaching the hand pump, Kanai Baul squatted under it and Moni pumped the handle vigorously. The pump sputtered and then let out a steady gush of cold water almost drowning the bather under its onslaught.  It was Mani’s turn to bathe. He sat under the pump and waited. The first burst of water splattered on his head soaking his hair instantaneously.  Water sluiced down his face creating a curtain in front of his eyes, cascaded down his back, streamed down his stomach into the thin strip of cloth wound around his waist and ran in rivulets down his legs.  He scrubbed himself vigorously up and down, in and out, spluttered, gurgled, spat , honked, till the water stopped.

“Moni have you finished?” Kanai Baul asked plaintively. “My arms are aching”

“Yes baba,”  Moni said. We’ll go as soon as I dry up.”

 

On the way back they stopped at a small roadside tea stall. The tea stall owner greeted them and made them two cups of hot, piping ginger tea. Along with the tea he also gave them home-made biscuits from one of the big glass jars arranged in front of the counter. As they munched their biscuits and sipped their tea Kanai Baul asked, “Moni, did you see her this morning?”

“Who” said Moni, playing the innocent.

“Kali of course! Who else?” exclaimed Lokhon Baul.

“No, I didn’t.” Moni  muttered.

Kanai Baul hearing his incredulity, said forcefully like many other times, “I have seen her Moni when these eyes of mine could still see. She’s pitch black, with ruby red eyes and red claws. She lives in this temple. My predecessors saw her too.”

“I’ve never seen her!”

“You don’t call her with enough love. Call her tomorrow loudly, beseeching her to come and maybe she’ll come, a queen, as black as the night, her eyes as red as the hibiscus flowers we offer to the Goddess, her beak and claws are red too, as red as blood. She won’t peck food from the ground like the other pigeons. She’s an emissary of the Goddess! You’ll have to coax her to eat from your hand. And if she does ….”

“Yes, if she does, what happens?”

“ It’s different for each person. She sometimes answers a question that you didn’t even know you had in you, sometimes cures an illness, sometimes makes your heart brim with love, sometimes puts you face to face with…..”

“What?”

“I have spoken enough. Come let’s go. People have started coming to the temple.”

They paid for their tea, took their instruments, from the room and took up their usual position in the courtyard of the temple. Lokhon tuned his ektara and began  a song

 

That night Moni dreamt of a pigeon with glossy black plumage, red coal eyes, alighting on his shoulder, digging her vermilion claws into his flesh.

 

The next morning as he threw fistfuls of puffed rice into the air, he cried aloud fervently “Kali, Kali,” and for a moment he seemed to glimpse a flash of black at the corner of his eye. He spun around and the grey pigeons rose in alarm into the air before settling back again.

 

“I’ll try again tomorrow, he thought excitedly”.

 

Arunima