Like the Queen of Hearts, I, too, have often believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. And if the middle of the night is also reckoned as ‘before breakfast’, then the count could easily go up to 60! With imagination and the ability to wonder, anyone can believe the impossible. Since I have these qualities in spades, my capacity for believing the impossible is phenomenal. Especially in the wee hours, if I am awakened suddenly, which I so often am.
I am, let me confess, a fussy sleeper. A mosquito zipping past my ear is enough to rouse me. Distant thunder will do it. The imagined swish of an angel’s robes, the neighbour’s early grinding of idli batter, the far-off whistle of a train, even the merest preliminary clearing of the throat by my otherwise phlegmatic phone—each sufficient to bring me bolt upright.
Then I lie in bed, tossing and turning, and imagining the 60 impossible things that must be believed before breakfast! The impossible things I imagine have no pattern or connection. They owe no allegiance to one another or even to reality. And around Diwali my imagination bats well above its average, for the sudden crack of fireworks startles me more frequently than usual.
There was a time, long ago, when crackers exploded from Dussehra to Diwali and beyond in a continuous barrage. We slept through it all as peacefully as any untroubled child. Now, after years of intermittent bans, such explosions have become infrequent; each one is unexpected and startles the birds sleeping in the trees and me, sleeping in my bed, in equal measure. Or maybe it is simply my old age.
In those earlier days, I remember we were normal children—naughty, rowdy, and a general nuisance. We pestered our parents to buy large stocks of fireworks and blew most of them up in the days approaching Diwali, till a certain ennui set in. Then we sought ways to restore the thrill and invented ways to spice up our fireworks. Throwing a bheel patakha that exploded on contact at an unsuspecting passerby added that extra thrill. The startled howl of Ramu Kaka while he was dusting bookshelves was guaranteed to make us dance with joy. Exploding crackers in matkas and enclosed spaces like a stairwell added a delightful whoomph to the blast. But we soon got bored of all that.
We then turned to more forbidden spice and explored ways to add extra excitement—what the cooks might call tadka. A cousin once scorched his fingers lighting a ‘rocket’ held in his hand. On another occasion, my friends tied a string of crackers to the tail of a stray donkey. The cheeky devils that we were, we watched, delighted, as the poor beast leapt in panic and confusion. It was, of course, a cruel and stupid act and we richly deserved a thrashing. And that was precisely why we found it so exhilarating.
The children today are a fortunate lot. They don’t need to add excitement to bursting crackers, because the ban on fireworks makes crackers themselves the forbidden fruit! Their very possession must be kept secret and bursting them is the excitement—the tadka! The children only need to invent ways of not getting caught. Thus, they sneak out in the small hours to ignite their ‘atom bombs’, producing the random detonations that startle me now exactly as Ramu Kaka once was startled by us.
After each desultory blast, I lie awake, trying to anticipate the next. There is never a sequence, never a pattern. The direction and intensity of each blast is never the same, and I am left guessing the different possibilities. My imagination runs, simultaneously, in different directions!
I wonder whether the solitary bomb that exploded was lit by a child or an adult. I wonder which diabolical child stayed awake till half past two for the sake of that one final cracker. Boy or girl? Or was it merely a motorcycle backfiring, or the last stragglers of a wedding procession?
I wonder, too, why the air quality in Kyiv can stay below 50 after a night of bombing while the AQIs of Tehran and Beirut hover around 75. I wonder if these cities have some cosmic air purifier while the reading in our own Delhi keeps shooting towards 500. I wonder whether the little bombs set off by our children are, in some mysterious way, more lethal than those falling on Lebanon.
Sometimes, I am convinced that my bedroom is in the middle of a gang war. From the north, the henchmen of Chhota Rajan fire shots from muzzle loaders while the gangsters of Bishnoi from the south keep taking potshots with revolvers. Suddenly, someone fires a burst from a Kalashnikov. Then there is silence.
It requires just a slight stretch of my imagination to believe that the mousy woman who lives close by has at last found the courage to shoot her philandering husband, who returned once more past midnight with lipstick on his collar. The pistol shot registers as just another random explosion in the dark.
I add one more impossible thing that I believe to my list. With practice, you too can believe as many impossible things.
K.C. Verma is former chief of R&AW. kcverma345@gmail.com
