Art, Naturally!

Somewhere in the countryside of Incredible India he roamed like a spirit in those woods, collecting pieces of wood and branches that appeared like a divine form of art to him. There are a hundred ways in which the human mind can express itself, and sometimes the abstract is beautiful.
It was a few years back in my days of youth that I visited him, forgive my absolute lack of memory because I don’t recall the exact place or date, and in that house saw his perception of what he thought to be magnificent art. I laughed out loud (LOLed in its actual sense) at the sight; such figures were a very amusing sight to my innocent and foolish mind. See what that man had done was collect such branches from the forest floor and polish…them that’s all. And he saw beauty in them, figures of men and women and birds and animals and all sorts of other things. He had called it ‘au naturel art’ I remember distinctly. 
 It had achieved a decent level of fame now in the stagnant lands of cultural richness, Bengal. It was a small galleria in the town of the Nobel poet, the town of Shanti-Niketan. This was years later, when I was an adolescent. The memory of the man who saw figurines in wood a distant memory tucked away in some corner. This was slightly different, it was rocks. This particular gallery contained rocks and stones found naturally in the countryside that looked peculiarly like some figure. One like Ganesha, one like a swan and another like a bull…there were all sorts of rocks that met the eye.
  I was never really a great fan on art and was still very bemused at this entire display, quite like the younger version of me. Evidently I hadn’t matured much.  As we walked through the gallery, most of the art was met by cynical remarks and over-smart wise cracks.
 After we left the small gallery my parents tried to explain how very often there is beauty in the abstract. I didn’t quite understand what they were talking up. A couple of years passed and I moved out and went to the city of bright lights, Mumbai, to do my college. This one time when I was flying back to Bangalore and my i-pod didn’t quite seem to work right I found myself looking outside the window. I didn’t have much of a choice as my rather faithful companion had finally stopped functioning like its fine prior self.
Lo! As I looked outside the window I saw so many picturesque images in the clouds. I won’t even go into the details and description of all the things I did see, but I could tell you that I could swear by Jove that one cloud even looked like a tele tubby.
The flight landed and I went back home after the tiring journey from the Bangalore airport to the city. My parents were never told, I really didn’t want to admit to my folks that they were right all along, right through my childhood. The joke was on me. But yes! I had myself discovered now, what they all call ‘beauty in the abstract’  

In New Shoes.

It was the purple of afternoon and most of the others in the kingdom were high up in their abodes engaged in their afternoon siesta. The innocent babe twitched his snout again as the bee flew by, it had been pestering him for quite some time now.  The child’s eyes were fixed on something else though, not quite bothered about the bee buzzing near his face.  He was fascinated by those round robust and rather scrumptious looking oranges that hung high in the branches of the tree under which he had seated himself.  The elders had always said that he was special and he had very thick fur and a peculiarly long tail for his age but this did not mean that he could jump unusually high and get that perfect orange for himself.  The odds really were against him but he never was the kind who would leave believing that the grapes, or in this case oranges, were sour.
   He crouched on his hind legs like he had often seen the elders do whole jumping trees and jumped as high as he could. He may have been the apple of his mother’s eye and the most popular child in the tribe but that did not imply that he could fly up to the realms of the juicy oranges and pluck one out. After all he was only a child. This was followed by a series of recurring attempts, obviously all fails. He had almost given up and had arrived at the conclusion that his love for oranges was futile when he looked up and noticed the most spectacular thing. It was above the tree, far above it in fact. It was this huge orange sphere, the largest he had ever seen. It was beautiful and grand and full of splendour. He wanted it.  
 With all the energy he had in him he leaped up into the air. He was bewildered at what seemed to happen. He kept rising and rising. Past the tree of oranges that seemed so far away earlier. In a while he could look down and see the earth below him. What was happening, he was utterly perplexed. ‘Aah! who cared how this was happening’ he thought to himself, the important thing was that he was getting closer and closer to that gigantic orange in the sky.  He was almost there when suddenly he felt a strong gust of wind against him. He tried to fight it but the wind was too strong for him and he had no control so to speak over his flight. The wind blew him hither and thither like a thistle and slowly and gently deposited him back on the green grass of the gardens that he was previously playing on.
 He lay there in a dilemma of emotions. He didn’t know what had happened today and how he was to ever tell the story to anyone without being laughed at. He decided that it was best to forget all about it, the important thing right now was that he was orange-less. Orange-less. He began to wail thunderously until his mother came rushing and took him back home, cajoling him all the way back.

                                                                           ***

That was the closest he would ever get to the child, his own son. He would have refrained from this too but letting the child touch the sun was too great a risk.  He could afford a smile now having come in such proximity to the child. After many such days of angst and torment this was definitely one of the more pleasant days.  
 He would watch him every alternate day but his love for the child forced him to stay away from him. He was the god of the trade winds; he could bring about storms and have what he pleased from this mortal realm. Never in the history of his immortal life had he felt so helpless, it was all very new to him.
 
That one fateful night where he had given in to a moment of lust had cost him such a great deal. He had never foreseen such a situation at all that night atop the hill. The silken apsara had glided to his side guilt free.  She wouldn’t even hold the scar of that into her vanar form; it had seemed a very good bargain for him. Alas the unforeseen, now this innocent babe played in front of his orbs every single day. The child had almost looked like one of his cherubins on one such day infact, and that had in fact moved him to tears. A god, with a flowing tribulet down his cheeks. 
 He couldn’t tell the child about his existence for the sake of the child’s own sanctity, he had loved the child too much to do that. The worst part was that this love sort of manifested itself as a jealous rage, one targeted at the vanar father.
 The father was unaware of the entire situation, but still he was the one that got to enjoy the childhood of this babe. Why! the child would be called Maruti and Anjaneya, but where was the father’s name. Why should he be fortunate enough? It burned the god, it really did but again he was just as helpless.
 Some day that blue boy who was destined to slay the demon of Lanka would unleash this childs power, the one that he inherited from his father. Someday the wise old bear would tell the child of his real father.  It was up to the stars, but he would have missed the babes childhood by then. It was rather uncomfortable, these new shoes were. He took a deep breath awaiting that fateful day in the distant future when the child will know himself as Maruti. Until then his only companions were love and jealousy.