VENKAT RAMAN SINGH SHYAM & S. ANAND
from Finding My Way
Ekalavya now takes in the three distinct shades of green on three trees, mango, guava and mahua, in each tree at least three differently green leaves, the lance-like leaves fringing the mango tree still tender at the edges of new branches inhaling new life, then becoming darker on the sturdier branches that have seen more than thirty crops, spanning Ekalavya’s life, and have delighted in the burden of bearing fruit, where the leaves are less exposed to the late-spring sun, and a third green, nestling in between, luxuriant in matt, protected from the harshness of changing seasons, and thus Ekalavya sees nine unalike greens in three trees, and in this sea of greens there sits a parakeet that is yet dissimilarly green amidst the pale green of the guava, and, if you look closely, the parakeet is green in many ways, its pinions and wings each an unmatched green, its neck at variance with the verdant green of its head, and then the decidedness of the red of its beak like love’s betel-streaked lips, the sun glinting off the beak’s hook, crowning it with yellow, and along one end of the beak the greeny-black eye in profile reflecting the world the parakeet sees, and in it also the caress of Ekalavya’s gaze, whom the bird regards as a friend, and at the tapering end of the beak the nibbled portion of a guava, tender pink on the inside, and a little beyond, the remainder of the guava swaying gently with the satisfaction of satiating the parakeet, a bitten fruit that as a child Ekalavya and his friends would clamour for, a fruit savoured in part but never completely devoured by the parakeet, wearing the wound of desire, unlike fruit that lands in human hands and eager mouths, the happy pleasure of approaching death, slowly, still not severed from the branch of a large tree where it feels good to be just another fruit growing on just another branch, till the pleasure of being bitten alive for the delicious crime of being perfectly ripe by the red beak of death that wears the crown of the sun bestowed by the fortuitous tilting of the earth on a certain axis makes the fruit relish its own ripeness, the experience of death that is not the sudden cleaving of life as happens when a lush fruit falls to earth or is plucked, but death that clings to life, a death that nourishes the parakeet’s life, a parakeet whose life is under threat, unbeknownst to itself, from Drona goading his five pupils to aim for the bird’s eye just as target practice, a death that will offer no pleasure to anyone unlike the parakeet’s gorging on the guava’s yielding pink flesh, for the parakeet, if slain, will not be eaten, it will be killed for sport, where death does not renew life but is merely death, and as he takes all this in, Ekalavya also sees the shiny trail of slime a snail has left behind on a rock where the night’s dew has not fully dried in the mid-morning sun, and he sees also what his eyes cannot see, for he pictures what his ears make him see, the tiger crouched by a distant bush hungering for the fawn that has strayed from the herd, whose skin shudders and hair stands on end for she too sees the tiger with her ears, and as she turns her head upright to look for her herd she’s distracted by the langur that has decided to look gravity in the face, its tail curled along a wobbly branch holding its entire weight, two hands grasping a half-yellow mango denied a chance to ripen to fulsomeness, a mango that’s being sucked for its sourness, its juice travelling up the langur’s body, strands of the sucked flesh sticking out, and to the langur’s surprise, as it carelessly bites close to the stone, a reddish weevil that had been an egg seven weeks ago is hastened into the world a little prematurely as it peeps out of a black-brown spot on the stone, the beetle that grew with the mango, a life seeded within another life, one coming to life as the other dies, a beetle that cannot see, unlike the langur, the delicate coral stems of harsingar jasmine, almost the last of the season, the queen of the night who deigns to share her remnant redolence with the day, the coral reflected in the five pale-white petals that are beginning to shrivel, spread all along the floor of the earth right below the mango, an earth that no jasmine claims as its own, just as no jasmine claims the night as its own, merely letting its fragrance permeate the nothingness of every being for a brief while, a fragrance that always pervades Ekalavya’s being, for, his everything, Sunri, excels at extracting the essence of the night jasmine and trapping it inside a tiny, glazed clay pot sealed with the bark of the neem tree for a cork, the neem’s bitterness sealing the sweetness of the jasmine, a perfume that makes Ekalavya heady all through the year and not just when the flowers are in bloom, but what he smells now is also the end-of-spring honey from a high-perched hive on the mahua tree, a rare sight, red-headed worker and drone bees with beady eyes buzzing about, gathering the nectar of intoxication from fleshy flowers and depositing it in fine chambers of wax, their buzzing carried by the wind that hauls in its hair the moisture of the Halon river gurgling at an invisible distance, the Halon in whose waters Sunri is fishing for tiny shrimps, whiskered orange creatures, almost translucent in the morning light against the golden-brown ribbed sand bedded with pink pebbles in the knee-high water the shape-shifting river bears at this time of the year, water that will contribute to the length and breadth of the prodigious Narmada, water that will merge with other waters, each given a different name, never mind that water does not even know or care it’s called water, water that will merge into the ocean and, surely, the one drop that nourished the mahua tree of this Khandava forest will make the ocean that one drop less salty, and there will also be in the ocean one drop of the water that touches Sunri’s hands as she pushes back the bangle fashioned by Ekalavya from the wood of the khirsari tree, the clasp of love, gently pushed back from the wrist to the forearm as she gathers the inch-long shrimps in her woven-bamboo fishnet, and there’s so much distance between the stream and the river it will help swell, so much distance between the river and the unseen ocean it will merge into, that Ekalavya is merely happy to be aware that a drop of mahua honey, a guava baring its pink flesh, a langur that makes both head and tail of the world around it, and the parakeet unmindful of the arrow that could soon wrench its life, the lost fawn, Sunri gathering prawns at a known distance are all part of the unconsciousness of existence, a landscape that will never be taken in by a naked eye in a single glance, a wordscape that undulates in a time-space axis where the unreality of perception is caught in an expanding moment haunted by neither beginning nor end, a landscape where besides the many shades of green that adorn the trees there’s also one tree that’s completely bereft of leaves, an old silk-cotton kapas, stark naked and sienna, a tree still loved as a roost by birds, especially crows that adorn it at twilight, that perch and stay still, the usually talkative crows conferring in silhouetted silence, a tree that wears black birds for leaves and fruits, a tree that casts a fine shadow on full-moon nights at the hour past midnight, a shadow more luminous than that of any full-bodied tree with fragrant flowers, luscious fruits, evergreen leaves and a colony of nests, a shadow you cannot see if you are in a hurry, if you are passing by, like a tourist merely shooting for fun, like Drona with his entourage of five disciples, Yudhishtira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula and Sahadeva, asking each of them what it is they see, and as Ekalavya strains to hear them from his unseen position, a hound begins to bark, rupturing his raptness, and discerning its position from the direction of the sound, Ekalavya unleashes, soundlessly, decisively, seven arrows in swift succession to form a basket in its open mouth, zigzagging across the canine’s teeth, not scraping the tongue or the cheeks, stunning it into traumatized silence, realizing that if his aim is to break into two the arrow of arrogance that Arjuna will release at the urging of Drona any moment now, an act that will cause this expanding moment of multiple landscapes merging into one another to collapse and shrink to an instant when Arjuna will seek to trigger the death of a parakeet oblivious to everything other than the flesh of the guava clinging to its beak, Ekalavya has to indulge in an act of cruelty on the dog, to ensure that the parakeet lives he has to inflict some pain on the dog, a pain it will be relieved of later by its minders, and the awareness that he has to shoot seven perfect arrows to muzzle one creature so that he can split Arjuna’s arrow in peace and ensure that another creature continues to tweet fills Ekalavya with both remorse and pride, remorse over the state of the now-quietened dog, and pride over how dexterously he wields his bow unlike the city-bred louts out for a picnic.
Meanwhile, all that Arjuna sees is the eye of the parakeet through the eye of the bow.
Published with permission from Navayana.
Venkat Raman Singh Shyam is an artist who lives in Bhopal. Born into a Pardhan Gond family in Sijhora, near the Kanha forest in eastern Madhya Pradesh, his hunger for art led him to do every kind of job from working as a truck assistant to being a cycle rickshaw-wallah in Delhi. Mentored by his illustrious uncle Jangarh Singh Shyam, Venkat has since shown his work all over the world. Most recently he participated in the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) is the Queensland Art Gallery. Finding My Way is his first book, a result of his collaboration with S. Anand.
S. Anand is the publisher of Navayana. Working with the artist Venkat Raman Singh Shyam on the book Finding My Way over the course of four years, helped awaken the poet, writer and musician in him that had lain dead for nearly twenty years. He has since found himself often amidst words and music.