The Man behind your 'elegant ears adorned with earrings'.

A point shaped jutti, an old, black bag with a scribbling in white, a buttoned bandh gala kurta paired with white pyjamas, white beard growing on his chin, wintry white hair and rotten teeth that display a childlike smile. He is happy to have been offered a seat. Meet Mr. Sukhram, your neighbourhood man who has been engaged in the work of piercing ears and nose since 1965. This work might seem trivial to you, but for him, it’s art. The cheerful smile that adorns his face never wanders away as he speaks to us about his life and work.    

Mr. Sukhram carries a black bag that reads “Nak kan chedne wala; bina dard ke. Sukhram." (The one who pierces your ears and nose, without causing you pain.) His eyes dazzle with a gleam of light.

The 70 year old man has been wandering the streets of Delhi for over fifty years now. He charges a mere 50 rupees (less than one USD) for a nose or ear piercing.

Upon being asked about his community, he tells us in a hoarse voice that he’s a Banjara. In the ancient times, when there weren’t any transport mode such as cars, trucks etc. available, his ancestors used to transport things from one Agra to Delhi to Jaipur via bullock carts. “Yahan toh lohe ki mang hai, vahan se namak ki.” He adds. (There would be a demand of iron here and that of salt from there.) His ancestors would tell him these stories.

He lives in Zakhira in North Delhi and is from the village Sond, near Palwal. He is happy when we recognize the place.  With one daughter and two sons, he is excited to tell us that his son works as a dentist in the village. We congratulate him. He exclaims, “Yes with your blessings!”

So, how does he manage to travel the streets every single day energetically?

Through his wrinkled smile, he says, “I like the work that I do. My children ask me not to go. I tell them, Son, I walk, my nerves work, and my blood flows. If I sit, my nerves will be jammed.”

He has so far journeyed across Kirti Nagar, Model Town, Shakti Nagar, Naraina Vihar and Raja Garden among other places. During the summers, he works till 7 in the evening. He eats his food during the morning and takes two cup of tea in the afternoon. During the afternoon, he takes a nap in a nearby park.

The equipment used to pierce
through the nose or ear. 

Women get their ears pierced in Kashmiri fashion. And these days, it’s not just women; men too have started getting their ears and eyebrows pierced following the recent trends. It’s a sum of 900 rupees for a piercing on the eyebrows.

He recalls an instance where there were foreign visitors from the US in a house in Karol Bagh. They were excited to get their nose pierced. He was delighted to have people around him. He spoke Hindi, they spoke English. They clicked his picture; clicked the driver’s picture; clicked another picture with him. He tells us that he was joyfully happy to have been clicked! 

While the birds chirp, he is excited to tell us another tale. Last month, while on his usual travels, a young girl was sitting on her porch. It seemed as if she had been awaiting someone's visit. As Mr Sukhram cried out his trade, the girl along with her mother rushed from the inside and approached him. The 21 year old, young girl offered him sweets and thanked him. She recounted her experience with the man when she was two years old. The girl had been ever afraid of the man and his cries since the time he had pierced her ears. However, as time passed, the girl realized how beautiful she looked with a pair of earrings dangling by her ears. That was how she went on to thank him for the same after two decades. That, recounts Mr. Sukhram, has been the most grateful time in his life. He was extremely happy to have heard that story! And so were we!   

His great grandfather and grandfather were all in this job. There appears a warm smile on his face as the old man recounts the experiences of his life. At the same time, we were at once transported to another place and time. The wrinkled lines on his wide forehead told you of the distance he had travelled as a cheerful man, not bogged down by the hardships of life.

Is there any bad thing that he remembers about his work? we ask.

“There is no mistake I’ve done in this work” he says with pride that reflects through his tobacco-stained teeth.

“People are happy to have their ears pierced.”  

“No one forgets me. I go on.”

Every morning, with a bag on his shoulders and a confident smile on his face, he ventures out like a Banjara, traversing the streets of Delhi with his hoarse cry, “Nak kan chedane wala!” (The one who pierces your nose and ears.) He goes on with his work even though he doesn’t have many customers left. That reminds us of a famous expression: the size of your audience doesn’t matter; keep up the good work. 

So the next time you hear such cries, do stop by to have a word or two with him and thank him for his work!

The New Moto E Gen 2!

Motorola

It's was a moment of excitement to receive the new Moto phone as a gift! This white, sleek phone is a beauty wrapped in white. It comes with a combination of economical price and great features. It supports 3G connectivity. With a fancy Android Lolipop operating system, the user interface is very interactive. #MotoE

My previous phone was a QWERTY phone and as I switched from a QWERTY to a touch-screen phone, it was a new experience. With a storage space of 8GB, there well a hell lot of apps I could download! The 4.5 inch screen gave me a new reading experience. Added to that, a 5MP camera was brilliant to click the perfect photographs for an amateur photography enthusiast! The 1.2 Quad Core Processor and the 1GB RAM combination allows me to multitask uninterruptedly. The high definition screen display is wonderful as it provided me with a brilliant viewing experience.

       

This was a beautiful gift from Motorola! I am very happy to receive this gift !

Thank you Motorola for a wonderful, new experience!

Book your Moto E exclusively at Flipkart

The Four Walls

                                                     

“Sitting by the window” in her “atrocious nursery”, the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper clearly confides in her readers in a communication that is impermissible and forbidden. “There comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word.” The narrator’s husband has diagnosed her with a “temporary nervous depression” and she has been warned by him “not to give way to fancy”. This confinement to the four walls of the room in the rented house makes her develop a great fondness to not only the “big room” but also the “horrid paper” on the wall. As she begins to confide her thoughts to the “dead paper”, she gives a safe passage to her thoughts. She constantly asks her husband to provide her with another room and he makes a “bargain” to let her have the cellar to herself. She soon begins to obsess with the pattern and color of the wallpaper and finds women crawling behind the wallpaper. In order to liberate the woman that the narrator feels is imprisoned and trapped inside; she begins to tear off the wallpaper. She finally gathers to courage to liberate herself. "I've got out at last, and I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back" The narrator is finally able to liberate the woman creeping out the wallpaper.

Bertha Mason, the madwoman in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is locked up in the attic by her husband, Mr. Rochester on grounds that she is “mad” and belongs to a “mad family; “idiots and maniacs through three generations”. Her life is filled with oppression as she is locked away in a hidden room in Thornfield Hall. This is one way to keep her madness locked away from the world outside.

In Kate Chopin’s Story of an Hour, as Mrs. Mallard goes “away to her room alone”, she sits on a chair that faces the open window. The open window gives way to “a new spring life”; “the delicious breath of rain”, “the notes of a distant song” and the “twittering” of birds all symbolizes freedom for her as she had heard the news of her husband’s death. The “subtle and elusive to name” freedom and liberty that came crawling to her as she sat facing the open window is the very same “joy that kills” her in the end. The “powerful will” that had dominated her life is no longer present and she is now “drinking in a very elixir of life”. The open window displays abundance of life and the opportunity for Mrs. Mallard to escape the walls of the house. In contrast to the open window, the walls of the house represent her old life where “men and women have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow- creature.”  

An example from the Restoration Drama of the shield of the confined space provided to women would be the garden scene from Aphra Behn’s The Rover. As Florinda steps out of the house and roams around in the garden, she is no longer under the protective shield or cover of her brother or father. Hence, WIllmore, the wanderer, mistakes her for an “errant harlot” who has her “cobweb door set open to catch flies”. This walled space was like a shield to her that showed her as a maid of quality and honor. The stepping out of that shield meant her to be tagged as a harlot.

Ismat Chughtai explores the female sexuality in her short story The Quilt. The story shows how Begum Jan was a “possession” who was installed along with the furniture in the house by Nawab Saheb. “Having married Begum Jan, he (Nawab Saheb) tucked her away in the house with his other possessions and promptly forgot her.” This lack of emotional and sexual fulfillment in marriage results in the freedom of Begum Jan and Rabbu within the four walls of Begum Jan’s room that is well portrayed by the narrator as “an elephant struggling inside” of her quilt and the “slurping sound of a cat licking a plate”. Chughtai presents this intimate relationship as one woman’s way of overcoming the vacancy of the unfulfilled sexual and domestic needs by her husband. The four walls provide her with a liberty to express her sexuality.   

Jane in The Yellow Wallpaper was diagnosed with “temporary nervous depression, Bertha Mason was “mad”, Mrs. Mallard “was afflicted with a heart trouble”, and Begum Jan “was afflicted with a persistent itch”. They are all diseased and are confined inside the house.

However, the four walls can be both a means of confinement and one of liberty. As Virginia Woolf puts it in her A Room of One’s Own, “a woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write fiction.”

Woolf admires the differences between men and women, and centres her essay on why women have not been able to develop and enhance their own personal technique and design in the sphere of fiction. For Woolf, a room will help women to liberate themselves through their writings and be able to reach out to a large world.

I’d like to conclude by saying that even in their confinement, women have found a way to liberate and release themselves.

Together on the Streets, Unmasked.

                                             

Her voice came from the balcony where she stood with an early morning cup of tea and a newspaper. “Morning, Sweetheart!” she said. Lying in bed, yawning, I could sense something different in her voice. It wasn’t the usual cheerful one that she’d wake me up with; her voice had a touch of false assurance. She might have had nightmares the previous night of the protests. I can visualize her round green eyes staring wide into the ceiling as she wakes up from the horror; her sweaty palm looking for mine in the dark but receding in reluctance. I tried looking through the door that she had left slightly ajar for the sunlight to creep in. A faint smile twisted her illuminated features as she thought of the disagreeable day that lay ahead. 

As I swayed my legs off the bed, there were several terrible thoughts that ran from one end to the other in my mind. I rose to my feet and went up to admire the scent of rain. The sunlight penetrated through a cloud in the vast sky. The cheerful chirping of the birds in the bright sun that shone after a brilliant shower mesmerized my ear.

The war that would ensue in the approaching decade was full of blood and horrifying corpses. I began to ponder over the decision of taking her along to the war front or leaving her behind, letting her die each day in the infinite wait for justice. She had often dismissed such thoughts of mine calling them ‘a figment of my imagination’ and something that ‘existed only on my mind’. In the past few days, she had often comforted me with false beliefs and assurances. My fellows would soon be out on the streets, with determined faces and protesting voices. This has become a regular affair in the past couple of days following the court’s verdict regarding section 377. A horrendous number it had turned out to be for all of us.

I wore my slippers and directed myself towards the bathroom. The water that the shower poured out assaulted my tender skin. The court’s verdict had done the same a couple of days ago, the bruises of which had not yet been healed. I could not get the thoughts of it out of my mind; neither did I want to. Fear did not let me rid myself of such terrible thoughts and anger made me want to think about it even more. That three digit number that was displayed on the placards was our new mantra. As I had walked silently yesterday, arm and arm with friends and strangers, I wore a dejected look behind my mask. The mask I wore was green with frills of pink hanging by its side. I thought of Aphra Behn’s words as I wore that mask, “Because whatever extravagances we commit in these faces, our own may not be obliged to answer ‘em”.

That very day the verdict came out, I was filled with anger. That anger gave way to something I had always dreaded: fear. Behn’s words let me be free with a mask on. I was not recognizable with green and pink mask on. That kept my identity concealed from the people. I could commit any “immoral act” without any restraint.

They had declared our relation a “criminal act”. It was surprising for me to think how I probably will never have the courage to remove the mask and live with her peacefully. I grabbed the towel and put on fresh clothes. Was it truly against “cultural and religious values” like the court had said? Maybe it was actually because those cultural and religious values are in dire need of evolution. Why were we denied liberty? Was our categorization somehow non-human? It was as if I seemed to know every answer yet did not have the courage to tell. I lost courage every time I thought of the society. I was well aware that the verdict was odious. Yet I was afraid to rebel against the government. All this while, I had just been a passive protestor.  

I brushed my hair and put on a blue scarf that brightened up my white shirt. The trousers I wore were well ironed and my black bellies were the ones that had been supportive during long marches. I looked in the mirror and saw a pair of narrowed brows that had numerous questions paired with an irrational fear. All this while, the only thing that had been bugging me was losing her. I was afraid I might not see her again.  

“Are you ready yet?” she asked hesitatingly from the balcony as she stared at the street. Her question made me shift my train of thought to her beautiful voice. I went outside and kissed her on the forehead. She kissed me back.  We were at home and were not required to mask ourselves- not yet at least.

Years down the memory lane at school, girls in our class had sensibly begun to doubt our sexuality; walking by small groups, I would overhear comments, some intentionally loud for me to hear: they found our love “queer” and “disgusting”. My classmates would often address us with cuss words and “lesbo”.

She came in from the balcony and went to take a shower. The previous night, I had asked her to join me in the protests when I was myself a passive one amongst the crowd of protestors. She had not yet made up her mind in this matter. I calculated all the thoughts and came to a very rational conclusion: I was a human being and I could not be denied the basic rights of a person to express one freely. 

I grabbed a blue peter pan collar dress from her cupboard and ironed it well in time for her to see me. She gave me a confused look and let out a sigh. I did not want to impose my will upon her; I simply wanted us to be free. “Free” I whispered. She wore a bewildered look as she went in the adjacent room to dress. I was munching on the leftover nachos when I was mesmerized all over again. She dazzled in blue even though her face was still unsure of the consequences.   

That very moment, I took her by the hand and went down on the street where our fellows had begun to gather. We went across the street where there was more audience to watch what I was going to do. I stood with her in the middle of the road and faced her. She had a questioning look on her face. I told her I was going to remove my mask and that she had to trust me. I leaned closer to her; held her hand in mine and kissed her. As her soft lips pecked mine, I was at peace with my mind and with the very girl I had seen in the mirror back home. We were no longer the masked lovers. I was not escaping the situation anymore; I was rather moving towards it. I could hear the applause and the cheering voices from our fellows. I could hear the lovers’ sighs of relief as they looked at us. As I took her in my arms, I heard a voice among the crowd who blessed us. They cheered us with shouts of approval. I was relieved to know I wasn’t alone; more so, to know we are not alone.

My short story 'Together on the Streets, Unmasked' was published in an anthology by Cypher Publishers, as part of an event organized by IIT Bombay's Mood Indigo. The book can be purchased here http://cypherpublishers.com/#!home

Also visit- https://www.facebook.com/Cypherpublishers/photos/a.691496954268680.1073741827.691488387602870/736981193053589/?type=1&theater

Unconscious Wish Fulfillment?

A man and a woman sat next to each other

masks of blood on their faces

At a secluded gas station.

A man pumping air into them.

A familiar face girl stood nearby

watching me with hungry eyes.

Terrified, with blood full of fear

I rushed and the way hurried me to a dark space.

Darkness gave way to a grey blue room

where I stood on the bed and the girl stood beside me, her presence invisible.

My brother entered the room

and the next moment, he struggled to help himself

as a bullet went through his chest.

Astounded, I turned to the girl who held a pistol in her hand.

I grabbed him crying for help

'Call the doctor', I wailed

while the girl, watching me, shook her head.

I ran and ran and ended up in a labyrinth of buildings

Alleys and passages that led you to a dead end.

'shes the culprit, catch her!' said a voice.

I run, run and run while the girl ran along.

Was the girl an alter ego of my unconscious identity?

Perhaps I was a character in the story of her dream.

A Flaming Cry

Crimson , flame yellow, noir black, shallow shades of blue

Colors of coming alive.

A pair of eccentric eyes

gazing at me.

'Write me down', she whispers.

The color palette gave the eccentric-eyed face savage hands.

Out of the fierce black impressions

emerged a yellow burnt and scarred face.

One could distinctly hear the whispering and suppressed screams.

The woman's black savage limbs dipped in the yellow fired space.

Colors of fading existence wrapped her face in a black and yellow shroud

As the storyteller stood enraptured staring at the painting titled, 'A Flaming Cry'.

Life’s Nemesis

What was sadder?

Watching her blink, yawn and breathe a few days ago

Or watching her lifeless body lay there this morning?

What brought more tears?

Seeing her lying there cold, motionless, lifeless, still, stiff, her eyes wide open in shock

Or seeing her dressed in a pink flowery salwar kameez ready to be taken to burn her to ashes?

Why didn’t they let me go to the shmashana?

‘Because you’re a girl.’

‘Oh. And what about the idea that she was my Amma?’

For the dead old woman’s sake, do not tell me the constraints of being a girl.

She’s gone.

Where did she go?

To a mysterious land called Death.

‘Bitiya, come here, let me tell you a story today.’

Who’s going to tell me fantastic stories now?

For people, her clothes in the cupboard were sarees and salwar kameez

For my father, a small room overflowing with memories.

For, she too has become a memory now.