Kissing the frog

It's frog season again, that silly time of year when love is in the air and frogs are everywhere.

Down the road on Palolem beach some of the frogs seem already to have metamorphosed into tanned handsome young princes. They strut about on the sand or they stroll along the edge of the water, holding hands with girls who kiss them again.

In my garden the ugly ones still linger, warts and all. Come dusk and they cheerfully hop into the house to try their luck, croaking what sounds suspiciously like 'kiss me quick, stupid'.

A little one hopped up to my bed and gazed up at me with its little bright eyes. Another leaped down from the rafters as I stood cooking, balancing itself for a second on the edge of my hot kadai like a champion diver, before leaping off again. Yet another hid in a pair of shorts that were hanging on the line, and then jumped out onto me when I tried to wear them. There's a frog invariably in the loo, swimming around lazily in the pot (luckily I have a second, sealed loo). And another hidden among the coffee mugs on the kitchen shelf.

To all these hopeful suitors my response is the same. I scream. I take a broom and try to shove them out. I run out to catch hold of some kind soul who will help a woman in distress.

But the frogs don't give up. Every night they're back in the house, croaking their serenade.

I think I will have to kiss one of them soon.

Help!

Bullfight, Indian ishtyle

It's a full moon night. And two bulls are fighting in the middle of the arterial village street. They have locked horns and are staggering up and down the street like two burly drunks. A man shouts at me to get out of the way. Others wave to passing motorcyclists and scooterists. A group of foreign tourists gathers.

When they're angry, one of the local women tells me, they can be dangerous. We wait to see if the crazed bulls will bang into a passing scooter or motorcycle, tossing the driver into the open gutters at the side.

But they nimbly sidestep all traffic and continue their raging dance down the street, conjoined still at the head like Siamese twins. It isn't exactly like the bullfights described in Hemingway's novels. No rockets explode to signal the beginning of the fight. There's no horse to calm or tire the bulls. No dashing matador to direct the bull to his senseless death with his red cape. No cheering fiesta crowd, drunk on wine and bloodlust.

It's just a desi bullfight. In the end there is no blood or gore. The bulls go staggering down the street, still keeping their horns obstinately locked, and disappear into a fallow field behind some trees.

Show over.

And to think that they were probably fighting over a cow!

Two little birds

On my zai bush, filled these days with white fragrant flowers, I came upon the following:

Nest with two tiny birds, a polka-dotted butterfly, a chameleon, a lizard at night, two frogs, tiny insects, a moth, one fat firefly, a small wasp hive.

It's not a bush anymore, more like a teeming chawl with everyone existing higgledy-piggledy one on top of the other.

The tiny brown-and-cream birds with thin curved beaks, who are the original inhabitants of the bush, look very unhappy as they flit to and fro.

One day the little papa bird cries: 'Oh how crowded it's getting in here. And so noisy. How I miss the early days when there was nothing but the two of us and the fragrance of zai. Life was so sweet then.'

'Alas!' the little mama bird sighs. 'Life is not a bed of zai flowers. I can't sleep a wink anymore. If it's not the firefly flashing its vulgar green light in my face, it's the frogs keeping me up with their ghastly croaking. Momo dearest, why not give singing lessons to the frogs?'

'Teach a frog how to sing?' the papa bird cries enraged. 'What kind of a birdbrain do you take me for? I might as well teach a pig how to fly.'

'All this low life around us,' the mama bird muses. 'What will happen to our babies when they're born I can't help thinking. They might get bitten by a wasp, poor sweet things. Or witness a snake eating a frog.'

'A bird's eye view they'll get of all the violence,' the papa bird cries.

'Oh what shall we do?' the mama bird sobs. 'This bush is no place to bring up baby birds.'

'Let's migrate to the city!'

'But will there be worms for us to eat there?'

'Worms! No one eats worms in the city. We'll eat caviar!'

'And watch movies at the drive-in!'

'And sit on taxicabs and buses!'

'Oh what fun. Let's flee,' cries the mama bird.

'Let's fly,' cries the papa bird.

And so the brave little birds leave the zai bush and fly far away to the big bad city where one night they are hit by a drunken driver on a motorcycle which crashes into the wall in whose crack they have made a nest and they die instantly.

But maybe that's not how the story ends.

The bride wore bulbs

Tulsi got married the other night and the whole village celebrated the wedding. I was invited and went out of curiosity to see this marriage of a sacred plant to a god.

There is something so simple and serene about a Tulsi plant lit by the quiet flame of a diya in the evening. But for the wedding, my neighbour Nirmala had decorated her Tulsi with strings of tiny lights and the bride looked quite garish. On the ground beside her a little fire was burning and there were coconuts and flowers. Men and women went round the Tulsi crying: 'Govinda! Govinda!' Afterwards crackers were burst and everyone was given pedas and a handful of puffed rice and jaggery.

But who did Tulsi get married to? – I asked. Amazingly, no one knew. In fact, they were quite thrown by the question. 'See those sticks tied to the Tulsi?' a young man finally told me. 'She got married to those sticks. They are her husband.'

Nobody knew the story of Tulsi or understood the significance of the ceremony. Nobody had thought about it and nobody cared. I always thought traditions in villages remained deep and pure, that villagers themselves were rooted in these traditions, that the old myths were central to their lives. But it's not so. The whole thing is just a farce, an empty ritual. Time-pass.

People will embrace anything and everything if it's sanctioned by religious tradition, and they won't find it absurd at all. It's all right for a god to marry a plant. Or for a man to marry the sun or a tree or a fish. The wedding of a (rather ugly) plant with sticks is celebrated. But the prosaic reality of a man loving and wanting to marry another man, or a woman wanting another woman, is regarded as strange and weird and sick, even criminal. What a strange world it is.

The village idiot

I can hear Babuli talking to himself long before he shows up at my door with the morning milk. After he's delivered the milk he looks at me hopefully, wrinkles his nose and says with a wheedling smile: Got two rupees on you?

Babuli is what you'd call the village idiot.

The first time I saw him I was secretly delighted. I had never thought to meet an authentic village idiot and I was full of curiosity about the state of his mind. Was he retarded? Was he mad? He shuffled up to the door in dirty baggy shorts and shirt, his thin body so hunched that his eyes remained fixed on his bare, mud-encrusted feet. Silently he poured the milk into the vessel I held out, but every now and then he snatched a quick look at me so that his hand shook and the milk spilt. His smiling glance was at once lustful and shy and confused and creepy, and I realised later this is because he has no front teeth, while the yellow canines on either side of this dark wide gap protrude like Dracula's. He gave me the creeps for a long time till I understood that his weirdness is only a form of extreme shyness with strangers. And that Babuli is actually quite vulnerable and sweet.

Because his brothers ill-treat him, Babuli lives with another family in the village where the woman of the house is kind to him.He dotes on her: helping out in the fields, taking her buffaloes to graze, delivering the milk. He doesn't receive a salary but they feed him, take care of him and occasionally give him some money for cha-beedi.

Money, therefore, is something he doesn't have, and so I offered him some work: to dig a pit and plant a mango sapling. By the end of the exercise he had trampled down two other plants, thrown mud all over the place and practically buried himself alive in the pit while the mango sapling remained forgotten. My neighbours gathered one by one to shake their heads pityingly and tell me how crazy he was and how incapable of doing any real work. I've since learnt to give him work he can do, and he seems to walk a little more upright for the money he earns.

What I've found over the last two years is that Babuli is neither stupid nor incapable nor mad. He's a little slow in the head, he has problems with his speech, he has some problems coordinating his limbs, he has problems working hard.

But his biggest problem is that he's the village idiot. And being condemned to be the traditional village idiot is a lonely job. I had expected Babuli to be a source of amusement to villagers, but no one laughs at him, not even the children when he talks to himself. In fact no one pays much attention to him. And that's his tragedy. Because what Babuli wants is to have people talk to him, to be included in some warm closed circle. Perhaps he even dreams of being loved. But 'who'll marry him'? - as the villagers say.

Instead the village idiot smiles his funny smile at anyone who will smile back. And he talks a lot, mostly to himself. Sometime he sings softly. He's invariably cheerful. He reminds me of the clown with the smiling face who's crying inside.

Flying so high

It's kite flying season and the sky is peppered with colourful kites. But strangely enough you cannot buy a kite anywhere in the market.

I discovered this when my little nephew and niece were visiting and I thought it would be fun to learn how to fly a kite.

Finally I asked one of the boys, 'Where do you get your kites?' He replied that his friend made them and directed me to a fat boy of thirteen or thereabouts.

'Five rupees per kite,' the boy told me, adding generously, 'Three rupees for children.'

The kites were rather fine with many long tails.

As we three amateurs struggled to get them off the ground – first the blue one, then the red one – we were trailed by two small boys who gazed with rapturous longing at our kites. They probably were too young to have learnt how to make the kites. When one of our kites got entangled in a tree and the other got caught in a bush we finally gave up.

With the greatest glee the two small boys ran to retrieve the kites. And soon they were soaring high in the sky. One boy finally went away but the other boy, an intense little fellow with dark eyes, was there all morning and all afternoon. In the evening he was still there, his eyes fixed on his kite in the sky. You knew he was not standing on the ground but flying high with that kite.

Probably he'll grow up and forget what it was like. He'll learn to get drunk on fenny or to get high on something else. And one day he'll make kites for his son and then maybe it will all come back to him.

Once in a blue moon

In the city I rarely saw the moon or thought to look for it. Electric lights dazzled the nightscape there: flashy neon strobes, gaudy multicoloured bulbs, sodium vapour lamps: synthetic light shining through smog and smoke.

But here, where the sky is an uninterrupted expanse of endless space, you can't help noticing the moon in its many moods and manifestations.

Two nights ago it was a quite extraordinary golden-yellow crescent suspended like the enigmatic smile of some ghostly Cheshire cat. Close by was Venus, the brightest and biggest star in the sky. Together they made everything else in that inky sky pale in comparison.

And yet, despite its magic, there is, I always feel, something a little theatrical about the moon, something that makes the night itself feel uncomfortably like a film set. Perhaps it's because the moon itself in its different phases offers up a different persona every time.

Sometimes the crescent is a sliver of the palest silver, shy and virginal, appearing late in the evening and fading away early.

Sometimes it's a big round passionate yellow moon.

Other times it's only a bland white object in the sky, trying to bask in another's light and failing miserably.

On cloudy nights it will appear in a halo of burnished light. Or, as the clouds are carried along in the wind, seem as if it is riding on the impending storm like a ship on choppy waves.

There are times when it's not the moon but the moonlight that is absolutely mesmerizing. On nights when the power fails, that is when you notice best the silver light filtering through the trees like something almost live. On a particularly dark night everything will be bathed in this dazzling silver light. And you can understand then why in fairy tales fantastic creatures emerge to dance in this light. Or why it is said that the moon brings out the madness in those who have the tendency, for even perfectly sane people are affected strangely by it.

But once in a blue moon one sees a sight that is truly unforgettable. I was on the beach one evening when it happened. The sun was about to set into the sea in the west. And then I saw, bouncing up from the casuarinas trees lining the beach in the east, a full glorious huge yellow moon. For a moment the moon and the sun, on opposite sides of the earth, stared at each other, eyeball to eyeball. And then the sun sank, as if defeated. And the moon, which after all only reflects the light of the sun, had its solo triumphant moment of glory.

The god of small thefts

Listening to villagers talk, one would think thieving simply doesn't happen here.

'Nah, nah,' my neighbour Nirmala says, shaking her head virtuously. There's never been a robbery in our neighbourhood ever, she tells me.

Not robbery according to the village moral code, maybe. But I can think of three things that villagers steal all the time, and which they don't even regard as stealing.

One is mud. People here are mad about mud. Truly. When I wanted to get rid of some mud that was piled up uselessly, my neighbours were scandalised. 'No, no,' they exclaimed. 'You never give away mud.'

Mud is precious. No sooner has someone dug out the mud in his plot to lay a foundation for a new house than it's half gone. Come evening and everyone in the vicinity will be hurrying to the mound, carrying shovels and plastic basins. Like ants they'll scurry back and forth, taking as much as they're able to carry on their heads. An old woman I know is the biggest mud thief of all. Not only is she old, she limps. Yet not even her traditional nine-yard sari will get in the way of her pilfering.

What do people do with all the mud they steal? I've seen the old woman heap it lovingly round the base of her coconut palms. But she owns a large coconut grove. What the others do is one of the eternal mysteries. Maybe they hoard it for an early grave. Maybe they sift through it looking for gold. Who knows?

Less baffling is the way they guiltlessly steal flowers. Here they are compelled by both vanity and piety. No self-respecting village woman will be seen without flowers in her hair. And if her bushes have run out, she simply plucks flowers that don't belong to her. Everyone does it. Except me, of course. I hate to see flowers disappear from my little garden. 'But it's for god,' the pilferer will say. 'To do puja.' Villagers are puzzled by why I allow the fragrant zai flowers to bloom and die uselessly on the bush when they could pluck them and stick them into their hair.

Worst of all is the fruit thieving. Come the cashew season and the whole village goes crazy. Cashew trees have a habit of sprawling all over the place. So your tree is usually everywhere but on your plot. Genuine owners will be frantically gathering the fruit, while everybody else will be frantic to get at it before the owners do. Joining the mad melee are the monkeys who leap from tree to tree and roof to roof. Not I know why the monkey god is not worshipped here. He's competition when it comes to stealing flowers and fruits. Or maybe he just resembles them too much to be treated as a god.

The mango tree

Opposite my little cottage looms an old mango tree. It must be older than all the inhabitants in the village, yet it stands majestically, imposing in its dimensions, solid as a mountain swathed in monsoon green.

The mango tree is one of the reasons I settled on this particular plot. I see it all the time, framed by the wall-sized window of my tiny living room. At night, sitting on the hard window seat, looking up every now and then from my book, I gaze at the dark splendour of it against the starry night. I see it from my dining table while I eat and from my bedroom window when I lie down to sleep. The picture it provides is never constant.

These days the mango tree is afresh with tiny new leaves that are not quite green yet, and there is something very tender and young about the old tree. Something even a little sad, as though it can't help grieving a little for the loss of its leaves. But soon, I know, the young leaves will have grown full and vibrantly green, and the tree itself will recover from the loss. Is it so different, after all, with us humans? We shed old leaves as we grow older – old memories, old loves, old friendships. We give up houses and cities and continents, and their passing away is made bearable only by the close gathering of new leaves. Yet every loss through the years will be marked by a wrinkle, a grey hair, a pain that doesn't quite go away. But the mango tree remains serene through every storm, its age a secret: written in its hidden grains of wood.

Yet if only those grains of wood were scarred, like human souls, by every experience of the tree. And if only we could learn to read the grains, to decipher the secret tree script, what mysteries might be revealed to us. But, ironically, it is left to us humans to cut down the tree and convert the wood into paper on which poets and historians will leave their ponderous scribblings. Words and yet more words, while the tree itself remains wisely silent.

This summer the mango tree was thick with mangoes.And all day the boys in the neighbourhood were trying to climb the tree and plunder its luscious fruit. As a child I used to climb my grandfather's mango tree to pluck fruit or simply to sit in the crook of a branch. But this is the great-grandfather of all mango trees, and it doesn't yield itself up so easily. I watched the boys struggle to climb it and then struggle to reach for the fruit. They looked small and lost in the gigantic tree. Mothers and fathers came out to help, to shout encouragement. They came with sticks and stones, as if to force the tree to yield its bounty. Much fruit was eventually harvested, and every family made mango pickle. The mango tree can be generous with its fruit because, fittingly, it belongs to no one. It remains free on its protected green patch, standing proudly over the village.

Once spring is here, I know the little singing bird that wakes me up will sit high up on its tallest branch and burst into song. In the monsoons the fattest and brightest fireflies will flutter about in its leafy branches, looking like stars fallen down from the heavens. Kites will get stuck in it, purple and blue and red kites with trailing tails. And then again the leaves will fall. The tree will look mournful for a while and then recover its serenity as many of us never do. One day i I will be gone,but the mango tree will still be here, rooted to this spot, spreading its branches up to the sky.