As we drove back home on the fine Friday evening, I found that a portion of a road was blocked due to some festival. As I looked into that cordoned off area, it was so (what is the word I'm searching for) shocking. There were many men..... thin men, with white crochet head caps, and green mufflers. It was like a pool of white. All men, in a road flanked by normal cottages. But they seemed to have created a bubble of their own existence. The sun was half down, the sky was mellow. They would have easily fitted into a backdrop 500 years back.
It reminded me of a day I took a wrong turn and entered a gully in old Lucknow. As I proceeded the lane became narrower and the women fewer. On Both sides were similar men, clad in white but with very dark eyes, enhanced by the liberal use of surma. They were squatting on the roadside, some were making kebabs, with unearthly delicious aroma, and the goats, ready to be slaughtered were lined up, right where the kebabs were being skewered. I was generally looking at the road for I could not meet their eyes, and something hypnotic made me just move forward, and then I looked up. Indeed they were looking at me. I pulled my dupatta close like a shawl, and ..and yes, I met the eyes of a goat. It was huge, and I realized that all the tethered goats were huge, like the size of small donkeys and they were looking at me with dumb yellow eyes too. The eyes seemed scarily soulless. It was as if, they were questioning my intrusion in their normal ritual of death. This sent a shiver down my spine, I whirled around and determinedly started to retrace my steps back to where I took the wrong turn from. Fortunately maybe I'd come a hundred paces, which I made up in less than half the time.
The experience was romantic. Similar was the feeling today, when for a moment I thought that somewhere in some frame, time had frozen and it stood still.
I spent the evening not knowing what to do, as even reading hurts my eye, so I can only watch tv. I remained a long time in the breezy balcony, thinking of how the sun would have set in Lucknow 500 years back, when it cast unearthly shadows, on the looming minarets, which were re lit for worldly pleasures, by candles and the glint of sharp, wanting eyes.
