Balakrishna was born into the bustle, variety, and vivacity of a mega city (Pune).
When his aunt passed, there was no one to look after his grandfather, a widower, who lived in Natore. The old man couldn’t leave the town right away. Land/property grabbing by Dabangs and Bahubalis was common in the state of Bandarpur.
He shifted there for a few months (as he thought/planned). Working from home, from his ancestral abode, was simple enough, as the electricity supply and internet was decent.
But Bala had never experienced the life of a town.
He would be wasting his weekends here. The people must be so stupid here. Look how they dress. They don’t know anything.
The first month was tough.
He saw children playing cricket in the passage next to his dwelling. He joined them once. This was his sole socializing experience in this wretched place.
And then, one day, the country locked down. China had attacked the nation and everything was on hold. Soon the Red Army captured all of our nation. We were a colony again.
People could only get rations that the crimson helicopters dropped weekly. All offices closed down. India would be reconfigured in the ways of a command economy.
How was Bala to spend even a day in this hellhole; especially with the new restrictions?
He started taking long walks to clear his head. He marched on a different route every day. It surprised him how even a settlement like this had so much going on. At every length and every corner, there was stuff to be looked at, distinctive sounds to be heard, and an abundance of emotions to stir the soul.
On the 35th day of strolling around, he discovered a farm. It was an enormous paddy field. He couldn’t figure how the land was being used across the whole expanse. Some patches were submerged in water. A little area had trees growing on it.
A variety of birds flew in to sit on the branches of the old marshy woods. They were fooled into believing it a wild spot (it was still a place people dwelled around). Bala found a spot where he would just gaze at them and breathe in the calmness of the pristine vast expanse.
He sat there with a flask of lemon mint lavender tea, and spent hours just gazing. He enjoyed the breeze blowing through the crop. The spot looked different in the morning, daytime and sunset.
We really do live in a beautiful world, he mused.
By the end of the year, he could tell between 28 shades of green, 10 shades of brown and 8 shades of blue.
The walks helped him escape the trauma of the war and its aftermath. Treading around gave him perspective.
He loved taking pictures. Every time he went out, he took snaps. Little by little, as he captured the townscape and the life of the people occupying its space, he realized the plethora and variety of subject matter he was able to capture. The area he considered so inferior and tacky provided him with wondrous ideas and inspiration.
The thin lanes of Natore were built hundreds of years ago. The sweet shops peddled lai, anarsa, and chamcham. The ghoda tamtams were visual delights. Each of the 4 seasons showed him a different aspect of creation.
He acceded that the little insignificant lowbrow down-market town had everything he could ever need to be happy.
In the emergency-like scenario, he could get his hands on 2 novels- Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, and Midnight’s Children by Rushdie. He read the former 5 times and the latter twice. Rereading was not all that bad, he found out. There was enough to go around.
Slowly, he felt he was receiving a cleansing of sorts; and it went deeper than the vertical extent of his skin. He had scrubbed off years of decadence and avarice.
His mind was not cluttered anymore.
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