Sunday, March 18, 2001		Article

WHILE the entire Delhi and its wife went to see the Surajkund Crafts Mela on at Pragati Maidan, we decided to be different and taste an authentic mela taking place on the periphery of the Crafts Mela. The news had travelled that this one had "shades of circus" in it. At the mention of the word "circus", even the adults hid a secret grin, because it was a standing joke that as children, our father had never allowed us to go to a circus. After we lost Dad while I was still a child, we never felt like going anyway.

So there we were — the whole family and its children — for the first time in our lives, waiting at the footsteps of a real circus-cum-mela!

Most of the crowd shopped around in the tiny shops. We joined the circus onlookers who gathered around a rather strained-looking-man with a strained-looking-smile letting out a banshee-like mantra L-a-d-ki j-e-e-ndaaa in a voice that climbed the peaks of hope with the first half of the first word only to descend into a valley of wonderment at the reality of her being jeenda with the second half. This hackle-raising interplay of the high pitch of hope and the low pitch of wonderment of the two words was repeated, interspersed by one staccato uttering of l-a-d-k-i-j-e-e-n-d-a as if she had suddenly been turned into vegetable by the first mantra... l-a-d-k-i-w-i-t-h-b-o-d-y-of-s-n-a-k-e. Then he wailed again l-a-d-ki j-e-e-nda.

I felt myself pushed in with the crowd-momentum despite being suddenly, intuitively, in two minds about seeing the jeenda-ladki-with snake’s body.

I wished I had heeded my intuition.

Ladki was jeenda indeed...but just about...against all odds stacked against her survival. She had, imprinted on a face, prematurely aged, the frozen lines of suffering typical to a midget’s face. A midget, whose body at the moment had probably been twisted to a line parallel to the ground and squeezed into the hole cut out in the black sheet behind her, since nothing stood between her head and the plastic "snake’s body’ under it...as shown to the voyeurs. The face was the face of a corpse. Only the eyes flickered with pain.

To my consternation, I found that we were now firmly entrenched in the applauding crowd and I could not escape even if I tried to. I was almost forced to see the ladki on fire. As a lit match stick approached the sole of her foot, behind her "corpse-mask" she must have had the expression of Roop Kanwar when she was being burnt alive by her drum-beating, dancing brethren in Rajasthan. Except that, I was also a voyeur to this tamasha, and when I raised a hue and cry, they said this was jaadoo and she was feeling no pain because she was a magic-woman.

The next moving-mob-destination was an iron staircase that creaked and shuddered precariously as the crowd climbed up. After reaching a height of over a hundred feet, I found myself looking into the Well-of-Death. The rather flimsy looking Well-of-Death was a wooden structure with makeshift-looking boards joined together by nails, many of which protruded. For that matter, even the iron-structure that we stood on had been put together with bits of wire. The pieces had perhaps not been welded together so that it could be easily dismantled and carried for re-use at some other place. The whole iron and monstrosity was a technical disaster, and the only jaadoo that I saw far was in its standing-somehow with the crowd on it.

But the "climax of the circus" was yet to come. A jeenda youth on a very rickety motorcycle "down there" suddenly tore all the way up the 100-feet vertical wall and continued his tryst with death in circles on the shaking and shuddering, nail-ridden Well-of-Death. At the height of a hundred feet he let go of the handle and waved his hands about...for which lunacy he was rewarded by currency notes stuffed into his mouth.

Suddenly feeling sick, I almost did not hear my nine- year-old nephew’s "One hundred and thirty rupees-total". "And the first four ten rupee notes came from his own team mate", supplied his mother. I had always wanted to know the present worth of a human life. Now I knew, in cold statistics. Ninety rupees for the life of an 18-19-year- old able-bodied male human. How much the handicapped female I had seen before this was staking her life for...towards a much more tortuous death...I feared to guess.

I also knew why my father had never taken us to a circus. At least he had kept our childhood illusions alive while we were still children. Half of them had died on my first visit to the zoo.

The remaining half would have died with the "circus"....