Glaring Shadow - A stream of consciousness novel

Chapter 13 - Vignettes of a Village

"If city life is characterized by chaos, village life was all about orderliness," he continued. "Unlike the present-day multi-class urban societies, in the villages of yore, while the Brahmins held the high ground in agraharams and the intermediate castes occupied the middle ground, the peasants, and the artisans lived on the peripheries. So there was hardly any intra-class social interaction to speak about and that's why I had no idea about the lives of the marginalized, but from the way they dressed and behaved, it was clear that their life was sustained on the economic crumbs thrown at them by the landed classes. The well-heeled among the privileged classes were wont to play rummy if not baestu, also a card game in which the loser becomes a lose-all kudael; oh, how women dreaded at the prospect of their men taking to cards, more so baestu, lest they should become kudael. That my mother prevailed upon my dad to give up cards he was fond of, I came to know much later; as she was wont to play a round or two of rummy with me and my friends, my dad used to grudgingly remind her how she had coerced him to give up his favorite pastime."

"Well, but what puzzles me is the attitude of a friend's wife, who having had drinks in her college days was averse to her newlywed husband having a drink or two."

"That's the illogic of women's logic," he said with a wink, and continued "Those were the prohibition times, so, sans the so-called Indian Made Foreign Liquors and with toddy being a taboo for the gentry, the potion of the peasants, the well-heeled went without a drink. Thus, blessed with one of the three W's but self-denying the other, the ardent were wont to womanize; well the nature's calls in the open opened up the opportunities alike for the promiscuous and the sex-starved men and women to indulge on the sly what with the bushes yonder providing secretive cover for illicit sex. By the way what's this pride in one's caste and the prejudice against the others' after all that covert sexual inter-mingling for generations; and what about the bane of the home toilets that give with one hand and take away with the other; why while affording privacy to the personas, don't they deprive safe ways for the straying folks; well, man seems to rob himself of the freedoms that nature granted him."

"It may be the case with the middle-classes, but don't celebrity affairs give a fillip to promiscuity?

"The current page three liaisons seem a passing show while the liaisons of the wealthy with the nautch girls remained enduring news for a couple of generations," he said. "Maybe being few and far between, the affairs of yore had a charm of their own but in their current day profusion, they seems to have taken away much of the naughty sheen out of them; whether in life or in sport, rarer the fare, all the more it's memorable; oh what aura cricket's '3Ws' - the West Indies' Weeks, Worrell and Walcott – had, and all of them put together didn't play in as many test matches as the Tendulkars of these days.'

"Maybe Bradman, Dhyan Chand, Pele, and even Laver, in spite of Federer, prove your theory of aura."

"Well, the lesser gentry were left content to gossip about the card-playing and the cunt-craving sort, pardon the turn of phrase," he said. "Once a troupe of nautch-girls performed at our village temple, and as the show was on, our neighbor's servant went up to the lead dancer, and having drawn her attention to his master, he handed her a hundred Rupee note that she took nodding her head; though I couldn't grasp the import of it all then, her naughty smile as she coyly tilted head is still fresh in my mind. Soon after, when I happened to witness a Bharatanatyam performance by our neighbor's granddaughter from Bombay, the sensuous nuances in her classical movements insensibly shaped my sense of the feminine sensuality; how I find repellent the bawdy gestures of those gaudy women-in-trade. Well, whatever be the proclivities of the folks, the kids were left alone for the most part as the rat race for private schools had not yet begun then; and to be fair to my father, he was never behind us to come out with flying colors at school; but these days how parents have come to push their kids to excel at studies. It's as if kids have become the parental means of fulfilling their unfulfilled dreams; what funny times we've come to live in; how sad that parents are averse to accept less than A+ grade for their kids; if only the progeny starts demanding to know about the parental scores!"