It would be totally dark , dark as dark can be, the nightly power cut, the silence under a million stars. Summer holidays in my village always had that extra dimension. One can really feel what starlight is, now in Hyderabad experiencing moonlight on a full moon night is difficult! And the stars do twinkle, you stare at the bright ones, it takes some time and then after a while as your eye adjusts to their intensity they start twinkling. I would scout for the constellations , without locating them, the sky would be an alien place, even now when I look up, I try to locate teh two of them Ursa Major "Saptarishi Mandal" and the straight line to a dim pole star "ohhh that is North" exclaiming on my yet another discovery even now it still feels like a discovery! Ohh that is North! and the other one the Orion (Kalpurush).
The powercuts , in summers are a must in villages, they are a part of your life , people decide how they are going to spend the evening, depending on when the power cut is scheduled.What was striking though was they were always on time. 6PM sharp as sharp as it can be, I hated it, never liked the concept of time really. why do we have to breakup a day, the powercut should be as long as the summer heat is bearable, recess and games period should aitomatically lengethen to accomodate a proper game. It always passes so quickly when you are having a good time, and slows down when you are waiting for it to pass. I would wonder how punctual teh powercut guy is , what wuld happen if he felt asleep or just forgets. But thats his job he would probably be bored alone in the room, once he has pressed that button he really has nothing to do other than wait for another hour to press , to press teh next one , or maybe he gets some secret pleasure in putting people in and out of misery.
Almost always people end up being on the terraces. In our village the houses of our relatives are all clubbed together in a small patch of elavated land there are 5 families and the bonding is quite strong, we share a common ancestry down to abt 10 generations, I am the 11th. The gardens and then the fields to the east and a small river to the south. A small village of about 200-250 people where everyone knowns everyone. As the houses are so close all the terraces are connected.So every one is on them, my dad and my uncles this was teh serious group always finding fault with us, there would always be something wrong with us. so we tend to avoid that area, they have a particular area where they sit down on those long arm chairs . Then there would be the ladies, my mom and other aunties, again grown up group .....to be avoided, then there would be my sister and some other bunch of kids basically howling at everything, Me and some other group werent rally kids or adolosecents somewhere in between, sometimes we would take the other kids toa corner point at some tree and tell them that there is a ghost on that and when teh trees start swaying, the ghost is on the move and this whole bunch would start howling louder :) We would sometimes get a spanking for all these but thats the price :).
Sometimes we would just lie down on teh straw mats and fall asleep, there would be at times music from some place fading in and out , we would try to memorize them and then forget it the next moment. It would be magical the music fading in and out with the light breeze on those evenings, Nothing not even a Bose can give you that experience.
These visits stopped after 8th standard and I also stopped at looking at things that way, but once in a while when somethign reminds you of those times, you remember every bit of it , even the smell of the straw mats on the terrace.
No comments:
Post a Comment