Minakhi Misra

A cowherd’s been tied up to a tree all day. Another, a herbal potions seller, is holed up in a temple, leaving behind his young wife and two infant children to the care of his Tulsi plant.

Last night, the first man’s mother, finding him finally sedated by drink, tied him to the auspicious Banyan tree of our street with three rounds of strong hempen rope – a human amulet among the hundreds of silver ones tied to it over the years.

The man was inconsolable. He had drunk more than he had ever drunk, shouted more than he had ever shouted, and broken more bamboo sticks on the back of his cow than she had ribs.

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A few years ago, as I travelled looking for a spiritual education, I spent a few days with an old Sufi in Ajmer. I had heard he was a poet and I wanted to learn from him. I asked him where he got his poetry from. Spreading his hands around he said, “It is everywhere. Don’t you see?”

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I have been into quizzing since when I was maybe 3-4 years old. My mom had gotten me these quiz books for kiddos. And I was hooked. There was a daily quiz on radio too that my dad and my brother used to tune in to. I didn’t understand the questions, but I understood the pregnant tension on their faces as they listened carefully in a race to get to the answer before the other. Yet it never really mattered who got it first – both celebrated with high fives and pats on back. I was also keenly around when Bournvita Quiz Contest ran on TV. And when ESPN School Quiz did. And when Kaun Banega Crorepati finally kicked a popular (I hated it!) primetime Odia serial out of the 9 PM spot on our TV.

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“Sir…umm…if you don’t mind…umm…may I clean your glasses? They’re obstructing…umm…the energy in your eyes. In the close-up, I mean.”

Everyone in the room laughed. The author I was interviewing for a documentary looked straight at the quite visibly embarrassed cameraperson and said a deep, sonorous “No.”

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I was walking along the streets of Kolkata one day, when I saw about fifty people crowding around a street vendor.

“What’s going on?” I asked a kid who had just made his way out of the crowd.

“The Puchkawala uncle is giving free coupons. One plate each.”

The kid showed me a paper-plate that he had folded into his shirt pocket. On the paper-plate were two lines, written in Bangla:

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I was in Mumbai teaching one of my classes at a footpath school. There were nine street kids around me, restless and distracted, because one of them was wearing a brand new T-shirt.

It was a pale yellow cotton tee with a minimalist rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine.

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“Did you know that, in India, way more people have access to cell phones than to toilets?”

I was in the elevator of my building, standing next to two high school students holding a stack of A5 sheets. The boy with the curly hair asked me this question just as the elevator started going down.

“I did know that, actually,” I replied, quite truthfully.

Curly looked at the other boy, who was wearing a Batman T-shirt. Batboy pointed to something on the top sheet of paper and nodded his head.

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“What do you do with the books that don’t sell?”

I was in an independent bookstore, talking to the owner about the challenges of running a brick and mortar outlet in the times of Amazon and Flipkart.

“I usually have a sale-or-return policy,” she replied. “If the books don’t sell, I simply return them to the publishers.”

“Oh, but all of them don’t take back the books, no? I know a couple of publishers who simply ask the retailers to pulp the books.”

“Yeah, there are those people too. They find the cost of taking the book back higher than the loss of sales.”

“So what do you do with those books?”

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Confessions of a military traitor

When they asked me to join Special Ops
I didn’t really know what cops did in the guerrilla fights.
I spent countless nights running recon
And watched my six for a sneak-on attack that I knew was coming.

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“We take so many sweets for Lord Jagannatha, but he doesn’t eat anything. Why?”

I was sitting today with Aai, my mother’s mother, and talking about her longstanding relationship with her God. She was telling me of times she had to walk a day and a half to Puri to see her Jagannatha. And she was telling me about all the miracles that had happened when she was younger.

“Who said Jagannatha doesn’t eat our prasad?” she questioned back. “I know he does.”

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