Musings

… and quiet flows the Bamba

The weather in winter is wonderful in Rasmai. The scorching heat from the sere fields has dissipated. Gone is the energy sapping torrid humidity of the monsoons. The rabi crop has been harvested and the fields are either freshly ploughed, sown or have mustard, wheat and potato seedlings bursting forth from their fertile soil. In this salubrious climate, being physically at peace, one tends to both introspect, as well as connect to Gaia. 

One such morning, as I alighted from my car on reaching Rasmai, I was reminded my childhood. The lowing of cattle and the smoky aroma of burning cow pats (कण्डा) transported me to a time more than three decades earlier.

Augmenting to this temporal displacement was the redolence of marigold flowers blending with the yeasty mushroomy tang of भूसा  from a haystack. Raucous parrots purloining guavas, contentious babblers pecking at the freshly germinating wheat seedlings and sunbirds twittering in the elephant grass added their auditory contribution to the sense of nostalgia.

Flotsam or, to coin a word - bambsam

The Bamba was flowing (apparently after a gap of three years – more as an election stunt by the state government). Besides the occasional splash of a lost fish, the flotsam presented a sorry melange of thermocol bits, crushed coke/beer cans, discarded footwear, empty plastic containers of toiletries and other disreputable and sordid indications of ‘civilization’. 

However, there was no headless corpse – that gory incident had occurred many years ago! 

The inveterate shirker was blocking the flow of the stream to steal water to irrigate his fields. He had the inevitable unending battle with those who came up from downstream to remove the obstruction in turn to steal water for themselves.