The effects of the back to back trips to Old Delhi for consecutive meals was becoming evident. (I’m not sure how apt the usage of the term ‘consecutive’ would be in context of the fact that the meals were separated from each other by a period of 15+ hours of waking.) Guilt was trying to rear its head in my mind, and I had been quite successful in keeping it down by sitting on it with all my might. Any number of kilograms which may have found their way into me after those meals turned my effort to suffocate guilt into a very successful affair. Those kilograms also made the thought of moving out of home in search of adventure a somewhat unattractive proposition. After all, wasn’t it something like “Mann changa/toh kathauti main Ganga”? So why go out in search of anything, in my case — fun and food? Oh well yeah, I realize the master didn’t mean it in the context I was trying to think of it in. By saying this, I still don’t mean to relinquish the right which I possess, like each one of us, to interpret any verbal action on the part of another to suit my interests in the best way. Specially if it’s something said by a celeb mystic. After all, there couldn’t have been a singular meaning alone to whatever he might have said, isn’t it? Spiritual speak pwns any double entendre, any day and big time.
Thus having consoled myself to not venture out, I started putting my plan in action for working on the menu for Iftar. Fruits seemed the best option. Now, don’t start pointing fingers at me. Yes, I still maintain that I had successfully smothered guilt for having hogged on food at Old Delhi twice in the same day. It was simply a matter of convenience. Why struggle with making food when you have something in a ready-to-eat form available?
The sky turned orange in the evening. At least that’s what I was made to believe by multiple tweets and status updates, with some even adding pixels of validation (yeah, Instagram). Okay, I believed them, even though the sky in front of my eyes was a dark gray. I’m no E.L. James, so I would be hard pressed to figure what was the exact shade of gray which I saw, but I definitely know that it wasn’t orange. But who am I to question the power of collectively generated and shared information being aggregated into the truth, one character and one pixel at a time, over social media networks? Or I could just blame Instagram for making us lose our capacity to know and remember colors the way they really are. Ironic how it makes us want to forget what real colors look like by making us want to remember what they might have looked like.
I do know that it rained that evening. Erratic, short lived showers, which made the humidity make my t-shirt heavier. I can’t remember exactly — if it was before I broke my fast or after, although I would like to believe that it was after — that an earworm of a song bore its way into my head.
“barsaat main jab aayega rozon ka maheena”
If there was any possible way in which I could’ve disowned myself, I would’ve done it then. The way in which my imagination conveniently imposed “rozay” over “saawan” in a subtle exhibition of free reining left me more than just uneasy. And now that the song was in my mind, it just refused to get out. (It’s likely you wouldn’t know the song I’m referring to. All I’ll reveal is that it was a Jeetendra-Jaya Prada starrer, because believe me you wouldn’t want to hear it. You’ve already seen the power of manifesting itself in flashbacks which this song has, even after decades.) It didn’t occur to me then, but a while later as I sat looking at the rain (the sky had become dark now, the sun had disappeared taking any traces of orange with it).
While growing up, I had spent a good deal of time in neighborhoods — well, ghettos — which had a majority concentration of a Muslim population. As kids, there couldn’t have been a better place to celebrate Ramadan and Eid. The markets used to be lit up all night. At that age, loudspeakers were yet to reveal their character of annoyance: they were a simple indication of an occasion for celebration then. Through the night, the loudspeakers used to play some of the choicest Bollywood earworms. I’m talking about late 80s and early 90s Bollywood, and anybody who remembers music from around that time can understand really well the levels of atrocity to which music had dipped in that era. Technically, it wasn’t Bollywood music either. After all, it was Ramadan. And ZOMG, music is haram, isn’t it? Then how could Bollywood be played during Ramadan? Simple: by application of some creative latitude. All the songs had lyrics which had been replaced with messages of religion and spirituality. I don’t remember how well we understood or remembered the replaced lyrics as pre-teen kids. I don’t think we would’ve known what hypocrisy meant at that age either. I just remembering laughing at the absurdity of the combination whenever I heard it.
Everyone has always got at least one way of twisting reality. Be it ignoring kilocalories consumed, or exaggerating the color of the sky, or inserting religion everywhere just for the sake of it.