A BIOGRAPHY
Mumbai got introduced to the Television in early 70s. His household had to save for over a year and it was the Diwali of 81, that ushered in the rectangular shuttered box which found its place on the lounge table. The shutters were drawn open only after his homework and revision was completed and checked. They were then closed at 9.30 till the next evening, as was probably a norm in that era when Cinemas ruled the world of entertainment.
Except on a Thursday.
At 8.30 pm the family had an early dinner and all would gather in the front room to watch the weekly episode of Bollywood movie songs, Chayageet, in black and white.
Back then, he pondered, life generally was black and white. Rightly or wrongly.
But it was the happenings after Chayaageet, that was occupying his thoughts now.
It had been 40 years ago and many of those memories were mere fleeting images on a rollerscope movie.
After Chayageet, the TV would be shut down from a button on the set, the shutters would be drawn and the main switch on the walls too would be closed. Mumbai would get ready to retire for the night. Traffic would ease up.
Breaking through that silence, a late evening melodious cry would ring from the road outside, as clear to him today as it was many decades ago.
"Baba bolat nahi kaaa?
Maai khaanaa detey kaaa?"
2 people walked hand in hand,
Both holding each others hand, out of necessity.
The older, as he was blind,
The younger, his granddaughter, as she was very little.
Both leading and comforting each other.
In their other hand, each carried an old Dalda tin.
He would take 2 chapatis or rice and the left over Curry from the evening.
The curry would go in 1 tin.
The chappati or rice in the other.
It surprised him at first, that they would mix curries from various households in that 1 tin cylindrical box, but later he got used to it and he would pour his aamti into the Dalda tin, often peaking in to see the inside of it.
The old man and his granddaughter would accept and leave.
Not a word was said.
Nor was it necessary.
The old man wore a Saibaba type knee length kurta, which must have been once of a white colour. But that handloom colour was barely recognisable later, as it was stained with splodges of brown and black patches. The sleeves of his kurta came down upto the elbows and were frayed at the ends, where the lining had come loose and the linen threads were sticking out loose.
And like Sai, he had a towel wrapped around his head with a small tail sticking out over his left shoulder.
The little girl wore a frock which stopped just above her knees. There was no doubt that she had been wearing that garment since it ended below her knees.
She had curly hair, a mose which was upturned and though her legs bent inside she had a spring in her step.
She was his eyes.
His face and his gaze, like those whose eyesight has left them, was always tilted towards the skies.
Both walked those streets barefeet every night seeking to quench their hunger.
He would wonder over years to come, which of his acoustic memory was stronger and attracted him more towards those Thursday evenings,
The Chayageet songs
Or
"Baba bolat nahi kaa?
Maai khaanaa detey kaa?"
He couldnt exactly remember when it happened.
But Supaa, the little granddaughter started coming home for the odd chores. Filling in the odd day when Manjulaben, the domestic helper, took days off from work. She would occassionally come in the evening to help cut and slice vegetables, peel peapods or garlic cloves. She would never accept money for this help.
"Namak khayaa hai aapka Maaji ", she would say.
Next day was Ashaadi Ekaadashi.
Aai, had strict moral codes and would fast the whole day.
She was planning to prepare cucumber, tomato and sweet potato vegetable mix for the rest of the family.
Supaa was helping her with the vegetables. She could easily chop them into fine even pieces with her eyes closed.
That day, however, the knife went past the tomato. The sharp edge of the steel blade couldn't differenciate between human flesh and tomato.
It sliced through the tip of her ring finger. A shriek was followed by a lot of activity. Aai and Papa took her to the doctor.
After that day, Supaa was never to be seen in that home ever.
Human blood is not special. As like other vertebrates it has red and white cells, electrolytes and other transport goods.
It gets quickly denatured in air.
And so that evening, no one found the taste of the Vegetable mix any different.
Aaji has fasted too and ended her fast that evening with the vegetable mix.
It had been exceptionally hot that day and her body needed to replenish the electrolytes rapidly.
The rate of absorption from our intestines is determined by our body needs.
Sodium was rapidly taken into her blood stream, as she was quiet dehydrated, to build up her stores.
Everyone knows...
That Sodium is integral part of Sodium chloride, salt.
Or as Namak, as the locals call it.
The sodium atom has learnt to share it's outer electron with the poisonous Chlorine, in turn losing its identity, just to enrich the human taste.
But Not a soul knew...
That the sodium atom, with the single electron orbiting its outer shell, that was now running in Aaji's blood stream, a few hours ago was circulating in Supaa's.
Aaji has spent her childhood on the slopes of Sahyadri near Rajmachi fort. Her folks had built a small house in Khandala, where they would return every summer.
"We used to carry the bricks from the kiln to the site", she would proudly declare. For her, each wall of that Khandala home had a story to tell. Her stories of the village folk, of some scary outings on Amaavasyaa nights, of the lashing rains and of the tin roofs blowing away in wind were part of his consciousness too.
So, it was no wonder that when she passed away she had wished her ashes to be dispersed high on the Sahyadris along the streams.
"Let me remain in these world forever", she had wished.
Papa, Kaka and he had then climbed 400 meters above sea level to fulfill her wish. Along the western facade of Sahyadris, lie the ruins of Rajmachi fort, which was once a bastion of the Maratha empire.
Its's eastern side has a dense vegetation with a perinneal stream running through it. The tree canopy is so dense that sunlight barely reaches the forest floor. An odd dear or wild boar could be occasionally seen drinking from that stream.
A musky smell hung in the air from the wild flowers and the leaves strewn across the forest floor.
There was no other better place to lay to rest Aaji.
Kaka hummed what Aaji used to sing in her low tones at dusk, whilst lighting the lamp in front of the 'Devghar',
" Kira kirati raat keedey
Zaalyaa teenhi sanzaa ".
( raat keedey - night insects, cicadas
Teenhi sanzaa - dusk)
As if on the cue, as they descended the western ghats that evening, the male cicada insects started their courtship singing by contracting their abdominal muscles to attract the females and carry out their basic instincts.
The evening air was full of 'Kirr Kirr sound from the raat keedey..
They say that as the Universe is getting older, earth's rotational speed is slowing and days are getting longer and longer over the millenia. Yet time relatively moves on.
And so time did move on in that household,
A little slower, perhaps, than at the start of universe.
But time did move on.
The Western Ghats are older than Himalayan mountains and influence Indian monsoon weather patterns by intercepting the moisture-laden monsoon winds that sweep in from the south-west during late summer. The mountain range runs north to south along the western edge of the Deccan Plateau, and separates the plateau from a narrow coastal plain, The Konkan, along the Arabian Sea.
Indian monsoons bring a spectacle along the slopes of Sahyadris that enriches life much beyond the
Deccan region.
The small springs and rivulets tumultuously cascade as small waterfalls along the basalt rocky hillside. The raging torrents relentlessly carve through rock and soil, carrying with it the golden sediment of dust, soil, broken denuded trees, oxygen, salt, nitrogen as its cargo.
These of course are simple ingredients to ignite life.
The Ulhas river forms and gathers momentum when many springs and rivulets join forces along the
khandala-khopoli route and slices across the lower plains towards the Western coast of India.
It splits at the northeast corner of Salsette Island into its two main distributaries, Vasai Creek and Thane Creek. Vasai Creek forms the northern boundary of Salsette Island and empties west into the Arabian Sea.
The seven islands of Bombay were 16th-century Portuguese territories lying off the west coast of India, that were handed over to England.
The islands were later merged into one landmass by land reclamation projects. The resulting island of Bombay was later merged with the nearby islands of Trombay and Salsette that lay to its North to form Greater Bombay.
And it is at Northern end of Greater Bombay, that the sediments from Ulhas have been deposited for time immemorial.
Explosions of life can be seen as the river snakes out to sea. The northern Greater Bombay coastline has fingers of land caressing the sea with sites of serene beauty with sweeping beaches, majestic glorious shoreline against the swooping back drop of the Mangroves.
The Vasai creek is a highway with tidal seawater and river clashing each other during the day
This fertile shoreline has been the home for the fishermen, or Koli, as they are called locally for centuries.
The Koli community has integrated with the land and sea mass and the mangrove plantation.
They know of the tireless work of of a hero that lives along this shoreline.
The humble mangrove crab.
It's creates burrows under the mangrove roots allowing river water to reduce the salinity in that ecosystem.
The crab eats dead leaves, small larvae and recycles the muddy saltladen shoreline through its gut.
Thanks to this crustacean engineer, the ecosystem is continually recycled.
One such crab had found its way on the plate of a diner 30 miles south, in a restaurant that was hosting a gathering of five friends celebrating the results of their final year of engineering.
The restaurant was famous for fish food.
From silver pomfrets stuffed with green coconut chutney to kolombi fry,
from Goan style Bangda curry to spiced garlic onion pasted crab cakes,
It sold everything that the Mumbai shoreline had to offer.
Crab meat was a delicacy that the boy relished.
But within a few mouthfulls he started to choke.
His face and tongue was swollen. Red hives started to appear on his skin.
Breathing became laborious.
To any medic, it would be clear, he had an allergic reaction.
To those engineers, it was clear, he was collapsing.
No one knows why, but allergy can develop later in life.
Sea food allergy is common but quiet often not fatal.
It was not the minerals in the crab meat but probably the protein or iodine within it that trigerred the allergy.
By the time he reached hospital, his heart rate had halved.
His face had taken a dusky blue colour, as his blood was rapidly losing its oxygen content.
The Friends were asked to wait outside as the medics were frantically trying to bring back a life ebbing away.
The 4 boys peeked through the glass windows of the intensive unit.
They knew little of medicine. During their engineering years they had plotted many graphs and equations, but they could ill understand the beeping green graph with its upward and downward strokes on the monitorĺĺ connected to their friends heart with cables.
But, they had seen in movies,
a horizontal line on that ECG trace was an ominous sign....
Doctors call it asystole.
That is when the heart has stopped beating.
In layman's term- a heart attack.
The attack on heart can occur when it's blood supply is cut off or when the hearts electric activity fails.
In the later condition, aggressive cardiopulmonary resuscitation, CPR, is used.
The young lady doctor in ICU, who carried it out the CPR, had witnessed it many times.
She knew the statistics.
Only 3% of people with heart attacks outside the hospital survive and that figure improves to 10%, if the attack occurs on hospital premises.
She gave a chest thump and locked her fingers on his chest to drive the chest wall down by 2 inches about 60 times every minute.
Another of medicines unsolved mysteries is worth sharing.
No one is sure as to how in some cases the cardiac activity is restored.
But today, the massage activated a small area which generates the cardiac rhythm.
The electric rhythm created a wave allowing the membranes on heart muscle cells to open sodium valves, causing an influx of sodium atoms, and in turn generating a heart beat.
The flicker of movement on the ECG was greated by a loud cheer by the 4 boys outside.
To generate a laughter, humans and animals, donot need lips or tongue.
It is a basic sound that emanates from deep within the throat.
It's phylogeny goes many millions of years before humans began to speak.
Hence, it is natural.
He was sitting at the bedside of his son reciting Shiva mahatma stotra, when the lady doctor came to check on her patient.
She must have been in mid twenties, perhaps a few years older than his son, wearing smart grey skirt that ended just above her knees and an orange pleated top with puffed up sleeves. The stethoscope dangled around her neck like a serpent.
He was impressed by her professional attitude.
He walked out with her, thanking her for achieving an impossibility and saving his sons life.
It was nearly 1 in the afternoon.
A lady with a bag in her hand walked towards them, standing just behind the doctor.
The two had an uncanny resemblance.
It was soon apparent to him, why.
He noticed the similar curly hair, the upturned nose, the slight inward bowed knees.
He noticed how the older one instructed her firmly to eat at once.
Only a mother had this right..
Before she left, the daughter gave her last night's lunch bag.
As mother reached out for the handle, he noticed something else.
The tip of the ring finger was missing..
Their eyes locked momentarily.
They both knew.
And then she left.
Not a word was said
Nor was it necessary...
And so the story ends.
The biography of a sodium ion over 50 years.
As it travelled from Supaa's blood stream to Aaji via the vegetable mix.
Through Aaji's ashes on the banks of the Rajmachi river and as a cargo through river Ulhas.
Down the western Indian plains around Vasai creek into the muddy rich grounds with Mangrove trees.
The ecological hero mangrove crab and through the crab meat into the heart cell of Aaji's grandson..
Each one them could claim that
' that sodium atom' belonged to them.
That atom, like all other elements was being recycled since the start of universe.
It belonged to no one and yet it belonged to everyone.
Hence,
This is probably not a biography.
For a biography has a beginning and it has an end.
But something like that sodium atom is 'Chiranjeev',
It neither has a beginning
Nor does it have an end...