Almanac’s predictions

Ira Pande

I never cease to get impressed with the accuracy with which our desi almanac creators predict the change of seasons. Basant is traditionally regarded as a marker of the onset of spring in India. However, until just a few days ago, when it was bitterly cold and foggy in north India, few would have believed that such a change could take place just two days before Basant Panchami. Not many can deny that climate change is upon us, and yet, once again, the Hindu almanac had situated the festival just at the right time. The days are now sunny, and although there is still a nip in the air before the sun rises and after it sets, the earth has burst into a riot of colours as flowers bloom everywhere. Over the past few years, the capital’s horticulture department has imported thousands of tulip bulbs from Holland and people throng to the public parks and drive on Shanti Path to see their glorious display. The Rashtrapati Gardens are thrown open to the public so that those who do not have gardens of their own can walk among the stately display that brings a smile to everyone’s lips.

Each year, our family panditji sends me an almanac that is prepared in Haldwani (sadly, in the news for all the wrong reasons nowadays) with intricate calculations of the movement of the planets. Calculated by a Joshiji whose family has traditionally done this over generations, it is meant to prepare the readers who can decipher these meticulous log tables of the fate that awaits them through the year. I am afraid I can’t read them but there is a ‘varshphal’ (the annual forecast) that one can follow. There is also a calendar of the festivals post-March because the Indian new year begins not on January 1, but on the first Navratri of Chaitra. The ninth day of the Navratri is when Ram Navmi, the birth of Lord Rama, falls.

Hidden fragments of such information come to me as a muscle memory of my childhood days spent in Nainital. I am certain all regions of this vast and diverse country have a similar list of local celebrations. For instance, the day after Makar Sankranti (January 14), when the sun enters the Tropic of Capricorn, is a cute local festival in Kumaon when we feed sweet shakarparas to the crow to thank it for not abandoning the hills even when all the other birds migrate to warmer lands. Then, there is ‘deli puja’, when little girls go with baskets of flowers to decorate the thresholds of homes with the first wildflowers that bloom after winter in our hills. These celebrations have kept local identities alive through the vicissitudes of invasions and displacements. Perhaps, it is these that constitute in us a pride in our local identities as members of one area or another. I am an Indian, of course, yet a part of me is also a fiercely proud Kumaoni with her own dialect and set of beliefs. Together, they bind me to this land and its geography in multiple ways.

The slow erasure of these fine differences among the current generation fills me with a certain disquiet. For millennia, we were able to preserve our diversity as unity but now, with the emphasis on one land, one religion and one set of beliefs, the future looks very different. However, I am sure that most of us will continue to cling to our individual cultural and religious identities and resist the homogenisation of India into one monolithic nation.

My generation has reached the age when almost every month, we attend a prayer meeting for a close friend or a colleague. With each such goodbye, we lose a part of our lives that was attached in multiple ways to so many others. I have often written fondly of the days when we were in Chandigarh for about 20 memorable years. Among our friends were colleagues of my husband’s bureaucratic life, my own circle of university colleagues, artists, performers, lawyers and some whackos too. Our children grew up together and went to the same schools, played cricket and swam, fought and made up and bound us all in a tight circle of mutual love. Some friends still continue to be close, some have disappeared and some may not be as closely in touch but each time we meet, it is as if we were never apart.

Among such friends was PK Verma, whom we lost a few days ago. Piyush belonged to an eminent Allahabad family and his siblings were in university either with my sisters or with me. Later, when we came to Chandigarh, we were neighbours in Sector 11 and his lovely wife Shubha became as dear. Over the next few years, our children became friends and the two houses were a common stomping ground. Shubha’s parents became known to us as Amma-Babuji and her children called my in-laws Jiya-Baba. I don’t know anyone else who was as disciplined and healthy as Piyush: he played golf, walked each day, did the crossword and played bridge to keep his mind as sharp as his body. That such a person would go so early and in such a painful way is something we cannot come to terms with.

Farewell, dear friend. We will miss you deeply.

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