..Holy Dhoti..

"Memories and rhyme
forever chime
Thy famed name, thy beauty prime
Are worse than a worthless dime."

Looks like someone reached out for a spade and started digging my past. The kind of past which I never wanted to bury in the first place but the dust of preoccupation enveloped and concealed it from my view. Two gentlemen have managed to help me puff out the dirt that had settled over my brain.

This time around, I have decided to walk down the memory curve for as long as I can... Before the air of manipulation and stupid wisdom starts spoiling my story-telling-and-recounting capabilities.

Grab a recliner and pull out your couches. Reach for your books. Fill your plates. Sit back and close your eyes. Remember your good old days, forgotten friends. Celebrate their antics. Hear their legendary sayings. Learn from their mistakes. Cherish their feats. Live with them. Remember all those half-breath runs to the game room, or crooning your prayers in broken sentences in the wee hours of the morning, you hiding-beneath your cot to skip an evening prayer or a drill session, or a mundane Ashok Krishna Dutta's lecture on the Republic Days... how you gobbled a Rosogolla long before the Gods even caught a glimpse of it...

"From a distant blur
Memories Unfurl
Is it snow or some cloud.
Or my final exit's shroud?"

This is the story of a white piece of cloth, Holy Dhoti. Years would roll down the alley, generations of boys would come and go but it would never leave Vidyapith. Kunjan had a tough time teaching me how to wear it, for the first time.There are two ways of wearing a dhoti:

1) In haste. Even God doesn’t know how the dhoti remains intact. Callously tucked, the kurta folded. You wore it that way when there was a minute left before the last knell was rung. For every activity three bell-rings were there. Periodically, the old rusty piece of iron was hammered, to let out the crass metallic zing. The third and the last bell was our real red flag. You arrived after that and you would be swatted like a dhoti on a dhobi-ghat.

You also wore dhotis that way if you had never learnt to wear them in the first place. The first lesson that your guide imparts you is important. Unfortunately while Kunjan was sweating it out trying to teach me a thing or two as to how it was adorned, I kept looking elsewhere. I was enjoying the predicament of other new boys who were looking as funny as me; some even tumbled while trying to carry it off with elegance. The skill was not something you could master in one evening session of demonstration.

2) At ease, with all the time in the world to squander. You know how to wear it. Either you have it in your genes or you have acquired it while staying in Vidyapith; watching your guide tie the knots and tucking it, making the creases etc. with precision.

I never really managed to wear it neatly. All through my Vidyapith life, I wore it in a way of my own. Most of the time, I wore it in my frantic run towards the prayer hall gasping to make it before the third bell. I never knew what it felt to tenderly prepare the creases. Never even had a clean dhoti and kurta for that matter!! I borrowed it or fished it from somewhere all my life. The smell of a clean dhoti must have been infectious. The placid white one seems so cool to me . . Dhoti has to be the most liberal and beautiful attire in the whole wide world.

O!! How I long to wear it now. You might think I am just being rhetoric or that I am stoned. But someday, I fathom myself in that old mossy prayer hall of ours, with hymn book in my hands, calmly sitting in a pearly white dhoti and punjabi and making my silent conversations with God.

With time, every atheist turns to God. He has to.