By Devendra Gautam
Just a little shy of his 80th birthday, my neighbour in our multihorse township has devotional feelings gushing from deep within even as I continue my perennial struggle with nightmares.
One of these days perhaps, I should, instead of horsing around, talk about my nightmarish problem with real horses grazing in real patches of the shrinking green in our rapidly urbanising world as part of efforts to find a lasting solution.
Wonder if horses also have nightmares…Hold on and let me transcribe ideas on a canter, lest they fly off like the pegasus.
Early in the morning, I come across my neighbour’s powerful feelings as hymns run through his audiovisual system, complete with clasped hands and a live rendition straight from the horse’s mouth — with a little help, I guess — from his spouse of identical age. After all, husband and wife are like the two wheels of a cart, right?
At that pass, it is perhaps natural to have devotional feelings. I would not know as I am far away from it.
What I know is this: My neighbour has a huge responsibility on his frail shoulders.
Occasionally on the old couple’s verandah, an ancient, weather-beaten sun rises. From their little, otherwise comfy world, I often hear her talking to them in a lyrical voice, and singing hymns of yore in a sweet and soft voice.
As I have observed in a couple of such cases, memories are short, forgetfulness is a long shadow and bodily functions are beyond control.
In her prime, the neighbourhood granny must have been a nightingale, a darling of her parents and a heartthrob of many. I should graze no further into an alien corn.
Instead, let me return to my granny and her old age in our poet’s paradise on the lap of rolling hills in western Nepal. How she used to recite verses from Bhanubhakta Acharya’s Ramayan without a flaw every single morning, along with sacred mantras in Sanskrit after taking a bath even towards the sunset of her life! Her fascinating tales would make a gaggle of not-so-disciplined children – my sisters, cousins and I – fall in line in a house brimming with members of three generations.
What a wild world it was, what wild children we were and how she used to discipline us all!
For example, if we went for long without bathing, she would narrate how those animals thriving in our heads would hang us all in a peepal tree. So powerful was the effect of her tale that peepal trees standing on our school compound used to send a shiver or two up our spines.
Under such a storyteller, regular bathing was not an option, it was a compulsion.
Especially tormenting used to be the session in which we had to close our eyes and recite our prayers before eating, delicacies like khir (rice pudding) in particular. Under her grannyship, I remember walking through narrow foot trails on craggy hills and fertile plains dotted with houses, crossing a suspension bridge over a roaring brook by the side of a rural bazaar and coming home to her maternal home sitting comfortably on the lap of a hill.
With age marching on me like a warhorse, I may have forgotten many of her tales but I now realise how great granny was and how great her lessons were! They taste as sweet as khir these days.
Back to my neighbours of the multihorse township.
It has been days since I heard a child-like giggle from the matriarch as phone calls with their children and grandchildren based abroad have become few and far between. And her hubby, the otherwise clean-shaven 78-year-young bubbling with energy, sports a beard that may draw birds and bees if the foliage continues to grow at this rate, with his lips pursed perennially.
I have ridden horses along narrow trails of the sub-Himalayas and found the animal to be a true friend of humankind.
But dealing with the sinister-most nightmare – growing old in a country bereft of youthful and toothless giggles – appears to be no easy task.
Will our competent government full of youthful zeal give this problem the kind of attention it deserves?
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