From a walk I come to this wayside tea stall. The stove is
already lit and a kettle hisses on it. A husband and wife, unbeaten by the
hardships of life, enthusiastically do their chores. I observe the
paraphernalia of their business; a few aluminium vessels, tea making devices, a
small wooden cupboard and a little cash box. A bench made out of several pieces
of abandoned wood is kept by the side of the trolley on which these utensils
are kept. It is has a canopy over it. Though the concept is of moving it to
their living place once the day comes to an end, most of such trolley-based
stalls are more or less permanent on the pavements of any city in India. They
are moved only when the policemen ask their owners to do so. Cities, despite
their harshness towards the economically deprived, have developed some sort of
kindness to accommodate the poor sections. Perhaps, policemen take their weekly
bribe from them, some pittance or a few rounds of free tea, a free shave, a
free meal and a bunch of free fruits when money becomes too dear to be
transacted. The city is on its wheels, always rolling, hardly resting. But
these wheeled stalls on the pavement never moves; they witness the movement out
there on the roads. Life passes by, in varying colours and paces. But these
wayside survivors remain there, without changing the course of their lives much
though they wish it to change proportionately with the changes happening before
them. Then they slowly find happiness in their existence. That’s why unlike the
rich and obscene, powerful and health conscious on the joggers’ park, these
people do not talk much about money. This couple who runs this tea stall does
not talk about money. My Bengali is very poor still I could gather their
conversation and make sense out of it. They talk about computer education; they
are talking about their son’s education.
Sitting on the wooden bench I look at the road with all
intention to overhear the conversation of this couple. But they stop talking. I
ask for a cup of tea. Surprisingly, nobody has come to the stall to have a cup
of tea so far. Am I too early or too late, I ask myself. But the lady, who
looks like the thinner version of a Laxma Goud character with a rustic sense of
charm about carrying herself, takes an small earthen tumbler, which is called a
‘kullad’ in India and pours hot tea from the kettle. The smallness of the
tumbler makes you to give and take it with some kind of a body language
(perhaps, added by the hotness of the liquid which has been poured into it right
then) that resembles reverence. I understand it as reverence only. You are
filled with some sort of strange gratitude to anyone who gives you a cup of tea
like this. I realise that in your hotel room, or in the restaurant or an
upmarket coffee stall, you do not receive a cup of coffee or tea like that. You
show your arrogance; you are paying a lot of money for showing off your
self-importance. You can be absent minded when you open the packet of brown
sugar and transfer its content to the shiny porcelain cup in front of you with
a smile etched with cream by the unsmiling boy at the counter. You can look at
your lap top screen and jab away digits and letters into it. You can read a
magazine or newspaper. Or even you can have huge decisions in your life over a
cup of coffee, with no reverence towards it. But in wayside stalls your body
turns into an expression of gratitude. I realize it with a smile. I sit firmly on
that wooden bench, which is a collage of refuses.
Silently I sip at the kullad. The feeling is intense. First,
the dryness of baked clay touches your lips. Your lips are already dry. You feel
earth, provided if you have ever felt earth in that fashion. If you have
memories, you go into reveries where you see a lump of clay on a wheel, turning
into a small cup, fingers of an unknown man, child or woman picking it up from
the wheel while it is still circling, with trained fingers. They are coarse but
still look at the dexterity with which they pick up the supple clay. He keeps
it on his side. Someone picks it up with a lot of care and beat the bottom of
it with a paddle. Someone else comes and takes it to the sunlight where
thousands of such clay cups are drying. Then faceless people come, they pick
the dried ones and stack it up elsewhere. When a huge number is ready in this
fashion, a few people carry them to rustic kilns where they fire it. When the
fire embraces the earth, water content in it goes out as vapours. From their
earthy brown and grey, they turn into fiery red. Later the fire is killed. The
cups are taken out. From the potters’ basti, they travel by different modes,
carried off carefully and reverently by unknown people to various parts of the
country, where unknown people like me sit at the way side and kiss them with
reverence. Hot tea, then touches your lips. You could hear a silent hissing at
the edges of the cup and at your lips. It gives a jolt in your brain. The tea
does not taste like the teas that you have already tasted in your life. It is
different because the tea maker is different. You are drinking a part of the
tea maker’s life. The tea has his or her story in it. It is hot and it is
different.
The man at the stall opens a fresh packet of bread with no
brand name etched on the cover. He rips off the polythene cover, takes a plate
crumbles the bread into more or less identical pieces and adds some curry to it
from another vessel and mixes it with his fingers as he talks to his wife in a
tone which oscillates between wailing and hope. I think about him eating the
mix of bread and curry as his breakfast. But he walks past me and goes to the
iron railings that part the pavement from the road. All the railings, road
dividers, public walls and all possible surfaces that are owned by the public
sector undertakings are painted in a faint blue and white. Kolkata is slowly
turning into a city of blue and white stripes. Like the colour coded cities all
over the world, Kolkata slowly assumes the colour of blue and white. You think
about it. What could be the reason for such a government decision? In South I
have seen most of the temple cities have brown/red/saffron and white stripes
all over the places. That connotes the presence of religious establishments
there. It is a great feel to see a temple pond reflecting the red and white
stripes on the walls around it with the shiny gopurams inhabited by innumerable
images of gods and goddesses. This reflection is the inverted sight of the
world around. It puts the world in perspective; part real and part illusion.
But in Kolkata you don’t see such reflected images of the world. The more I
think about the logic of blue and white stripes the more I come to think of the
white saree and the blue border of it worn by late Mother Theresa and her flock
of sisters. Mother Theresa had adopted this city and alleviated many from their
destitution. She wore white saree with blue borders. But my friend tells me
another story. West Bengal whose capital is Kolkata is ruled by Trinamool
Congress led by Mamta Banerjee, a strong leader who came up from the roots but
turned into a corrupt autocrat. She too wears cotton sarees, to emphasis her
humble origins. But the information given to me is a bit shocking. Someone from the ruling party runs a paint company and all the paint for turning the city into blue and white
stripes come from his company. When the man goes to the railings with the plate
of crumbled bread in hands, I think about the man who runs a paint company.
The tea stall man puts the bread crumbles there at the
pavement and walks back to the stall. I ask for one more cup of tea and the
woman pours it into the same kullad that I hold before her with some sort of
unintentional reverence. I come back to the bench, rather a local
constructivist collage (I cannot help mentioning it) and once again sip at the
cup. This time memories do not flow. I have come to terms with the memories.
But I watch the theatre of life unfolding before me. Tens of crows come down
from the nearby trees. They have been sitting there all the time, which I have
not noticed before. I had seen them, while walking at the lakeside, right in
the middle of the lake, on a leafless tree with each branch filled up with
crows as if they were black flames from a surreal lamp in the shape of a tree.
These crows clean the place within a few minutes. They do not fight each other.
They wait for their turn. These crows look healthy and they all have shiny
black feathers. They do not make too many sounds. After having their breakfast
they fly away. What surprises me is the attitude of both the crows and the man.
They do not go to the man to say thanks. The man does not even look at the
crows once, expecting some kind of gratitude. Perhaps, it is daily ritual. They
are already bonded in an invisible thread of selfless love; unconditional love.
Love is a problematic word. I consider it as a linguistic
problem. As there are not too many words to express the human bonding filled
with kindness, care and gratitude, we all use the word love. From parental love
to the love talk of spiritual gurus, from lovers bonding to city planners’
caring for the city, for anything and everything we have only this insufficient
word, love. But it has become a powerful word of its own merits and rights. It
is perhaps one word that has not lost its charm after all these ages of overuse
and misuse. The adjective ‘unconditional’ makes it further problematic. Most of
the people develop relationships with the others on conditions. When people get
married they take vows of marriage; these vows are conditions. When attend
spiritual sessions, we follow certain conditions. When we love our pets we
expect certain returns from them; another set of conditions. We are full of
conditions. We do something for the world because we expect certain things in
return; name or fame or fortune. If we are not getting it, we leave it there.
We carry conditions and norms along with us. The most ironic thing is that the
more we talk about love the more we think about conditions and returns. People
say that their love for god is unconditional. If it is unconditional why people
carry offerings to the god and ask for so many things. It is not unconditional
love. It is bribing and asking for favours. People say that god loves everyone
unconditionally. As we do not know whether god is out there or not, we cannot
believe in his/her unconditional love either. There are interesting stories
about the unconditional love. For example, a man went to god and complained
that when he was in his happy days, he could see two pairs of foot prints
wherever he went; of his and the gods. But when he was lonely, tired and was in
trouble, he could not see two pairs. Whatever he saw was one pair of foot
prints. God smiled and told him; Look, in those days I was carrying you on my
shoulders. It is good to listen to stories. But this footprint story is all
about making you feel good.
Unconditional love exists in rare areas of human
relationship. Whether you accept it or not, the biggest and strongest form of
unconditional love exists in self love. You cannot love anybody else
unconditionally than yourself. The more you love your own self unconditionally
the more you could love other unconditionally. How can you put conditions on
your own self? How can you go to a gym and tell your right hand secretly that ‘look
man, I am going to give you some extra pushes today because you are more useful
than the left one.’ We do not do it. The supreme kind of unconditional love is
there in self love. I am not talking about selfishness. Selfishness is
conditional. You love yourself and use others and relationships for your means and
ends; that is selfishness. Self love is all about taking care of yourself
without expecting anything in return. How can you punish yourself because you
are angry with your face or stomach? If people are doing it, they are all the
victims of perverted thinking not only on an individual level but also on a collective
and societal level. If you love yourself unconditionally and your being is so
aware of that then you could love others also unconditionally. That’s why
sports people who makes the greatest physical efforts to make themselves fit
and competitive (not with life but with other sports people within the given
competitive fields) generally do not hurt others. They know the pain that they
have taken to perfect themselves. How can they ruin others? If someone does it,
then they do not love themselves. They are driven by the passions of revenge
and hatred. You cannot destroy anybody if you love yourself. Hatred comes from
self hating. If you love yourself unconditionally, you will love everyone unconditionally.
If you are not loving anything and anybody unconditionally, the inference is
simple; you are not loving you unconditionally.
The only relationship in which people behave and love
unconditionally is parental love. But let me tell you, this too is a false
belief. Children are brought in this world by parents. So they take it up as
their duty to love them unconditionally. But this unconditional love happens
only within a given context. When things are good or threatening, parents love
their children unconditionally. When parents themselves are troubled, they just
do not love their children unconditionally. They, then deliver their duties.
Think about parents who beat up their children ruthlessly. Why do they do that?
Is it because of unconditional love? I do not think so. It comes from self
hate. We give education to children thinking that they would bring us the
returns. If we are just educating them to be full blown individuals we will not
think about their future. We will think about their present and will be
absolutely happy about it. But most of us think about the future of the
children. When we do it, we are just investing in their as well as our future.
They will have a secured life, which will automatically give us a secured and
safe happy life in future. And we call it unconditional love. But fortunately,
we do a lot of things towards unconditional love when it comes to our behaviour
towards our children. We feed them before we feed ourselves. We try to give
them the best clothes. We try to keep them happy. We try to do whatever they
ask us to do. But remember, whenever we oblige our kids, we are actually
showing love towards ourselves. When we pamper our kids we pamper the kids in
us. We love ourselves so much and in our love for our children that love gets
expressed.
I can tell you for sure that unconditional love stems only
from self love. The more you love yourself the more you could love others. The
more you care for yourself the more you care for others. The more you avoid
rules and regulations for yourself the more you bring down the barricades that
you have set up for others. Self loving is a way to deliverance and freedom. I
am not talking about deliverance to moksha and such romantic things. I am
talking deliverance in terms of happiness. Freedom brings you happiness and
freedom comes when you love yourself unconditionally and love others
unconditionally. Otherwise you will remain as a bonded slave to your
selfishness and hatred. However we qualify our love for nature or kids or ideology
or anything, if we are looking for returns it is conditional; it is not unconditional.
The man who spreads out bread crumbs before the crows shows unconditional love
for them. And for whatever reasons he does it, it comes from the love he has
for himself. He knows hunger so he knows the hunger of the crows. He knows what
quenches his thirst and hunger so he gives the same to the crows. Unconditional
love happens when you are free. A way side tea seller is a better guide than a
guru who misguides you for profit.
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