An Insane Moon

By Devdas Kakati

Devdas Kakati writes with passion. Equipped with a rich repertoire of words, he effortlessly moulds the language to suit the occasion. He writes forcefully with conviction. Garnished with some scintillating passages and lyrical interludes his writing becomes both poignant and persuasive. Once started, the reader would like to move right through the many intriguing situations and evocative passages. He takes the reader smoothly from crisis to crisis.
In the story Satyaki dropped school to join the militants, comes back after 20 years to his teacher for guidance-I was told that society cheated us. After 20 years of jungle life we got nowhere. I am now asking myself who cheated whom? Did society really deceive us? Or, we are deceiving society?? Or, we are deceiving ourselves???
Said Sipra - The discipline and hard work of the cadets impressed me. I started liking them. At night I quietly cried for them. They were so innocent and they were being trained to be mindless killers. And I was teaching them history. It was so incongruous.
The reader will want to go back to some passages to absorb the sheer beauty or reflect over the intriguing issues of life. The narration brings out the ambience of Majuli vividly.
Devdas Kakati, Professionally a scientist with a Ph.D. from England, is at heart a very sensitive humanist, who has occasionally written fictions and poems. Edited The Brahmaputra Beckons while he was at IIT in Chennai as Professor. He spent the last part of his life in Northeast India and retired as Vice-Chancellor of Dibrugarh University. His present interests include problems of existence in marginalized societies. Devdas Kakati lives with his wife in Guwahati, two kilometres away from the banks of the Brahmaputra. They have a son and a daughter-in-law.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Oct 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781482839753

Book preview

PART I

KINNAUR

1

They did not even feel the need of any conversation as they kept looking at the captivating verdure of Sangla valley till somebody gave a sudden push to Ved from behind and screamed – He is also one of them. Ved jerked out of the spell cast by Sangla’s landscape and turned. Two searching eyes of a strange looking woman were on him.

Ved and Ashwaghose were talking and enjoying the ambience created by the fascinating landscape of lower Himalayas. They did not notice that in the meantime a woman of uncertain age had come out from inside the cottage with an elderly lady towards them. Ved had earlier met the elderly woman – she was Ashwaghose Negi’s wife Lamu. It was difficult to guess the age of the younger woman, would be perhaps around forty years. She was very thin, her long dirty black hair was dishevelled, her eyes were deep sunk and very penetrating. Lamu told her something and both walked across the grass towards the gate. Ved and Ashwaghose kept looking till they disappeared among the lush green orchards.

While staying with their son in Gurgaon, Ved and Sudeshna once visited Sangla valley of Kinnaur district of Himachal. The occasion was the Mundan ceremony of Passang Choki and Nawang Negi’s two year old child. It is the first tonsuring of a boy celebrated as a religious occasion. Ashwaghose’s nephew Nawang was a close friend of Ved and Sudeshna’s son. Both worked in Delhi.

When Ved and Ashwaghose were sitting around in the lawn in front of the cottage of the Negis, Lamu and her daughter Himani were coming out for their regular evening walk. Ved had not met Himani before. Only after mother and daughter disappeared amidst the trees, Ashwaghose said-

That is our only daughter Himani. He released a deep sigh and remained silent for some time.

2

Himani’s dream was to study medicine and work in the rural areas of Himachal. She joined the Indira Gandhi Medical College in Shimla for MBBS. There she met Aklant Kunwar who was also in the same course. He too wanted to work in the rural areas of Himachal and other border states. They soon became close friends and began to draw plans for future work. They both specialized in Community Medicine and later spent two years in Delhi for postgraduate studies. There they met Amritraj Patangia of Dibrugarh, who was studying Rural Development. They also met Sravani Chaliha, also from Assam. Sravani was studying Sociology in Delhi University. They gelled together very quickly. They all shared similar dreams. Once they together went on a holiday trip to Rajasthan and stayed for a weekend in the palace of the Anandpur state near Jodhpur that was converted to a guest house for tourists. There they met Kumari Rishita, the daughter of the Raja of Anandpur. The Raja was a descendant of the celebrated Rajput Kings of Rajasthan of good old days like Rana Pratap. Those days of pomp and glory were long gone, however the magnificent palace was still there and the hereditary owner is still called by everybody as Raja. Anandpur was a small state and was absorbed along with other states of Rajasthan in the Indian Republic after the British left to form the modern state of Rajasthan. Rishita was a lively girl, very sporting and soon befriended Aklant and his friends. She got interested in their future plans of doing NGO work, even offered to be associated with the group and work in the Delhi-Rajasthan area.

I was in Aberystwyth for two years for my Masters. I had some friends in the department of Country Management and Conservation. They were doing things that may interest you, said Rishita.

Aklant liked the idea and later had a stint of a year in England before launching himself headlong in social work in India. With his friends he formed an NGO group. Thus was born Reorient India Volunteers Organization or briefly RIVO.

The Rajasthan experience gave some new ideas to the group. Both Sravani and Amritraj had come from the soft and evergreen environment of Assam, washed by a network of many perennial rivers and streams. Water was apparently not a problem, rather it was the other way round, making the abundance of water a problem. They were surprised by the desert like look of most parts of Rajasthan. In some places the first daily ritual a young boy in a village would go through was riding a horse to get water for the family from a distant source. They made up their mind to work to provide safe drinking water in scarce areas wherever they may be.

3

Amritraj kept close relationship with his old mates Tirth and Chandy in Dibrugarh where they did their graduation. They had informally constituted a socially conscious group. They discussed social issues and their own dreams. They dreamed of doing a lot of social work one day in Majuli, a river island in the heart of the Brahmaputra near Jorhat. Majuli is known as the largest river island of the world. It is so green that some people like to call it the emerald island. For several reasons Majuli attracted the attention of Tirth and Amrit. They saw Majuli with its strong traditional culture based on a large number of old Vaishnavite Monasteries Satras as the future battle ground of tradition and science driven modernity. With their sharp young minds they felt they could foresee a lot of mismatches in the society. Tirth and Amrit wondered how the two sides of the cultural divide could be harmonized. Some kind of integration would perhaps mitigate the problems to a large extent. Why not try? They thought.

That’s what took Amritraj to Delhi where he met Sravani from Kolkata. That’s how they became part of Aklant’s NGO group RIVO. So it was that Himani was to carry on the work based in Jodhpur and Delhi in association with Rishita and Amrit would come to Majuli to work with his old friends.

4

At the New Delhi railway station, Aklant stood at the door of his compartment. Himani touched his outstretched hand.

Take care.

You too, he said.

So long.

Those were her last words.

The train slid on the rails and slowly moved out. After leaving the platform, it started picking up speed. It looked smaller and smaller, took a turn at a curve, then it was seen no more. The platform was empty now. Nobody around. Himani also slowly walked back towards the exit gate.

Aklant was heading for Majuli in Assam to work with Amritraj.

An intense man under the cool exterior, Aklant had an obsession for social work for the poor, the deprived, the dispossessed. He was one of three sons of a wealthy family of Dehradun area. A brilliant student with independent thinking and always daring to take a risk for a just cause. A natural leader amongst students. He got an offer of admission to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. But he waited till he heard about his application for admission to the Indira Gandhi Medical College of Shimla. He married Himani whom he met in his class in IGMC.

I thought with your background you could one day become a top executive in the growing corporate world of India, even if you don’t join our family business. The father had said when Aklant did not show interest in the offer from the IIT. Aklant’s father was a rich sugar cane farmer of Uttarkhand. Their sprawling farmhouse known as the Whispering Chinars could be seen on way to Dehradun.

No Dad, real life is waiting for me outside the board rooms and the court rooms. Aklant wanted to remain amidst the people and work for them. His heart cried for the marginalized masses, the subalterns of history. As an astute man of the world, his father could foresee that there was going to be a major shift in Aklant’s life. In fact it became clear when he told his father,

You will be alright with my two elder brothers. I don’t wish to hurt you and Ma, but you can let me go, I shall keep close touch though.

Yes, you should be able to do what your heart tells you to do. We are always with you.

So it was. He kept in touch with his parents and also with Himani. He met Himani at the Medical College. They immediately recognized each other as ones of the same kind. They did not want to go for higher studies in Science. They had their own queer ideas about scientists’ life. They thought that scientists led lonely lives in the ill-illuminated laboratories. Aklant and Himani were not quite cut out for this. They wanted to work for the rural people and felt knowledge of medicine would be useful in the rural scenario in India as it was. Their temperaments made them feel more at ease with the wide open world where people really lived. They romanticized a life in vast open fields and lots of sunshine. If Aklant needed a little holiday away from the wilderness of idealistic activities, Himani had that mother instinct in abundance to hold back the child in the man. They were destined for each other.

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PART II

CALL OF THE MONASTERY ISLAND

5

Aklant came to know about Majuli from Amritraj. The story of Majuli immediately clicked. As he learnt more and more about Majuli, the monastery island of the Brahmaputra running through the Luit valley of Assam got a mysterious hold on his imagination. He desperately wanted to go to the island and work for the poor there. The suggestion from Amrit came in right time for him.

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Aklant and Amrit went to the monastery island and started work. Circumstances however made them change their agenda and take up work on flood relief. Aklant perceived prevention of erosion as the first priority in the island. After the flood he started work on erosion by the river at the southeast end of the island. He needed a lot of information, data and guidance for his work. He built up a close relationship with the Principal of the college Haranath, who was a scholarly person and was conversant with all aspects of the island’s life. Three social workers joined one by one – one was a lady Doctor from Gujarat and two young