Like the Queen of Hearts, I too have often believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. And sometimes as many as sixty! The count of sixty, however, is reached only if you permit me to reckon the middle of the night as ‘before breakfast.’ My ability to willfully suspend my ability to disbelieve is phenomenal in the wee hours. My imagination, too, is most active when I awaken with a start from some deep dream in the middle of the night. Let me make it clear here that I am a fussy sleeper. I wake up if a mosquito flies past too fast. I wake up if there is a distant roll of thunder. I wake up if the headlights of a car shine too brightly through the curtained windows. I wake up if some passing angel sneezes or swishes her robes too loudly. I wake up if a neighbour decides to grind batter for idlis and dosas at dawn. I wake up if some distant train whistles before steaming off into the night. And I wake up if my phlegmatic phone clears its throat preparatory to ringing, even though it decides to put off ringing – at least for the nonce.
Then I lie in bed, tossing and turning, and imagining the sixty impossible things that I need to believe in before breakfast!
It is in the days before Diwali that my imagination gets taxed way beyond its batting average, because I awaken more frequently with the blast of crackers. There was a time, long long ago, when crackers burst all night long right from Dussehra onwards till Diwali. And we managed to sleep through the noise night after night as peacefully as any innocent babe. But with the frequent bans on fireworks and crackers in these past several years, loud explosions during the day or night have become rare. Each cracker that goes off with a bang is unexpected and startles the birds sleeping in the trees and me sleeping in my bed in equal measure.
In our time, we were normal children. Naughty, noisy and a nuisance for everyone. We badgered our parents to buy huge quantities of fireworks which we lighted in the days approaching Diwali, till a certain ennui set in. Then we looked for ways to add zest and excitement to bursting the remaining crackers. Indeed, we found many ways to spice up our fireworks. Throwing a ‘bheel patakha’ that exploded on contact at an unsuspecting passerby often added that extra thrill. Rudely startling Ramu Kaka while he was dusting bookshelves was guaranteed to evoke a howl of protest. Exploding crackers in ‘matkas’ and enclosed spaces like a stairwell added an interesting whoomp to the blast, but that too became monotonous after a while. So we explored still newer techniques of bursting crackers to add excitement with a dash of the forbidden – what the cooks these days call ‘tadka’. A friend once burnt his fingers, trying to burst the cracker while holding it in his hand. On another occasion, my friends and I tied a ladi – a string of crackers – to the tail of a stray donkey and lit it. The cheeky devils that we were, we derived great pleasure in seeing that poor animal jump in fright and confusion. Of course it was an evil thing to do! Of course we deserved a good hiding for it! So of course we were thrilled because we did it!
The children today are a fortunate lot. They don’t have to search for more exciting methods of bursting crackers. Crackers themselves are the forbidden fruit. The bursting of the banned crackers requires no additional ‘tadka’! The children have to only find ways of bursting crackers without being caught. It is for this reason that children sneak around in the middle of the night to light the ‘atom bombs’. The result is the random explosions that I hear in the night, startling me in much the same fashion as Ramu Kaka used to be. I then lie awake, trying to anticipate the next desultory explosion. But there is never a succession of blasts or a plan or a design. Even the direction is not the same and I am left imagining the different possible and impossible things that I want to believe in. My imagination keeps running riot, 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 in the morning to light the fuse of that one cracker that he had? Was it a young boy who exploded that last cracker? Or was it a young girl? Or was that blast nothing but the sound of a motorcycle engine misfiring? I wonder whether the crackers were set off by some stragglers of some wedding procession. I wonder if that mousy woman living next door had finally gathered enough courage to shoot dead her philandering husband who had come home past midnight with lipstick yet again on his collar?
