A Summon

A recent one of Katu taken by me

January 4, 2012

As almost all have left for Bodh Gaya to attend Kalachakra Empowerment and Teachings by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, it’s more than deserted here at the far corner of Uttar Kanada, where Dougueling (འདོད་རྒུ་གླིང་།) Tibetan settlement (Mundgod) is situated. Yeah, ‘it’s the last Kalachakra Empowerment by His Holiness the Dalai Lama ever’ from the rumor mongering silliness must have attracted more devotees this time, but the impact is both ethereally significant and morally upsetting for a Tibetan. For here, it’s more than deserted.

In the fading twilight of collapsing dusk I am crouching by the tethered pet dog named Katu of the next door, who have left him all alone the whole day letting him indulge in his dissolute sleep. He has left the crumbled pieces of Parle-G cookies in a steel plate uneaten but a single piece thrown out infested with those tiny red ants. As I crouch by him, he habitually sits on his hind-legs by me pressing his furry body against my legs and then lies down but with his sort of gruff choking breaths abruptly after short intervals don’t seem to trouble him at all. His furry white skin smooth but stiff, the odor of his body not that unpleasant and all I care is an animal’s quality of being placid thus. And for the time he is my unspeaking company but as he feels I am by him so I do the same.

The more than hemisphere moon is already out there just off a lonely bright star. The sky is clear. The fading twilight slips away from the tiny front yard. The single brick but cement plastered and whitewashed column of the open-porch looks fatter before me; those hanging stuffs from the wound up old telephone wire around it give it an impression of a big man with those stuffs slung around his waist in silhouette. Those wailing dogs rather like out of temper for being unable to bear such desertedness first time ever for many. They rampage and chase in stampede at a sight of something strange and the deafening barking all the time. Yeah, they are playing their roles here more actively for now. The invisible but the low humming buzz of mosquitoes fills the space around me and Katu has to fend them off mostly sneezing vigorously.

Even if I don’t feel loneliness at all, I find such time rebounding with free and kindling vibe that sometimes prompts me into a sort of soliloquy easing out my emotional heights unheard. But Katu casts sudden glances at me when I speak alone, can be the hereditary trait from my late ambitious dad. I don’t care. But it lets me muse deeper to listen to an apparently summon of the sort. I chuckle.

Now those screeching crickets hidden at nooks and crannies around are active. And the intervals between their choruses are calmly pleasing like a privilege to go into reading A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul (his immortal comic masterpiece), the setting, though of Hindu tradition, relates in many ways with my own displaced and dispossessed parents and their hardships. Yeah, I can find myself in it, my world. The pungent Bru coffee helps me up.