The Story of Pariah | Naina Sethi

1

“I assumed you would not return.” He smiled, directing the murky gaze of his eyes to my wearying footsteps.

 I am, for ethical and legal policies, not allowed to divulge in pacifications or prejudices of any sort, but when I reached out my hand and gave his palm a slight rub — rough and weary from the borders, but warm and tender from the deep center, I felt our brush within this life would stay with me, longingly.

He was Pariah.

On a windless afternoon that had stalled in itself oppressive heat, I was walking from a station the rail metro had unloaded me, to the building wherein lay my family’s flat. As I passed beneath a throng of peepal trees, I briefly masked myself under their dim shade. I heard the flutters of crows flying in the midst of the trees’ gloomy crowding, each time to perch upon a different branch.

My father was an ornithologist. When we took evening walks together — my memory’s prized possessions they remain — he would shed life’s practical worries and weave his mind around our ever presence in the wild, and thereon lament of our irresponsibility towards nature’s dwellings.

My eyes led their gaze over to, what I had forthwith guessed, a destitute. He sat by the sidewalk, disheveled, and rested atop his head was a spiraled turban, an ash-brown cloth that circled and curved upwards. I approached him with a simper and dusted the earthy flakes off his turban’s surface, providing in him a hope to restore the wounded atoms that he dealt inside. To my amazement, he unrolled and stretched his eyes wide —as two lotuses glimmering in gold — and presented from the depth of his robe, a black pungi for my glare to appreciate.

For my interests in life are myriad, I beamed with curiosity.  Admiring my indulgence, he began to stream into his pipe learned notes of ingenious caliber, thus starting off an astonishing music, a subtle yet sorrowful sound, which upon entering my ears — to my extreme bewilderment — screeched through my mind, surfacing the unexplainable guilt and repressed memories I had stored away, as dreams, or as fragments of somebody else’s life, a long time ago. An image of a crescent moon — displayed upside down in agony — spirited across my thoughts, quivering the fright of my being.  Whooshing in a bin the charmer had kept by side, a cobra of a subtle color, like that of the mid-latitude dessert, released itself; it spread out and furled, signaling to my scrutiny, two ocelli patterns engraved on the rear of its hood.

Yet, it was the music — not the cobra — that seemed to have piqued me so deeply; the resonance I felt to it ached my insides, as if a cord had been squashing my spine while ascending upward, into my head.

In my early years, I would — everyday, almost — listen to snake charmers like Pariah call out the children who remained slugged into their houses — like insects preying over a stale crumb — to witness their charming. Their pungis would echo as far as the stretch of the dried river, assembling us all — of wide-ranging and dying sects, beliefs and gods — in a dignified circle, at one common spot.

Many afternoons when I was not be allowed to vent out of the house — for the dangers in the city have always been unprecedented — I’d peer through the front gate’s tiny holes to observe the figures of snake charmers moving along the dirt of the road; this way, I delighted in having even their blurry presence illuminate my uneventful days.

When I left home and paid subsequent visits — as I had been then — I never heard their melancholic rhythms again. The music that whirled in the air as unavoidable meditation, capturing people into its profundity and confinements, no longer presented its worth.

Before meeting Pariah, I had — perhaps with the passage of life — shelved my memories of snake charmers into a forgotten dimension. I don’t know where they went nor how they swept away — all I was glad at that moment was for them to have come back to me — and for I to have recognized them.

“I am mostly alone and not used to this kind of camaraderie,” Pariah spoke calmly, “but since you insisted that it is for the sake of preserving the art of snake charming, I had to walk myself out of my small world and talk to you.”

“What is that you do?” He added, after a brief pause.

I was, too, uncertain of my future — I wished to tell him. “I do a lot of things,” I giggled obscurely, “studying sometimes, traveling… and often, I research and write about dying human practices and beliefs.”

 Smiling, as if unperturbed by his profession’s depletion, he assured, “ask… before people such as I, only few to be counted along your fingers now, shall be forever no more.”

2

On many starry nights, I briefly exiled myself into the forest — a multifarious seclude in the day, but that filled with misery at night — to be away from my deranged mother, who would have surely seized me to her thoughts had I stayed much often.

 I knew well, that she understood the meaning of existence better than anyone, yet I wasn’t ready to be entrapped wherein my life could be forever concluded, particularly at those moments when I knew I was yet to have a great one ahead, and elsewhere — away from the feeble hut I refurbished every monsoon, as the thickness of the rain mussed its composition of mud and wood, unknotting and floating my house over mighty floods.

“Pariah!” She once glowered her opiated eyes within mine. “Don’t you consider how difficult it is to be left with nothing promised but the laughter and ungrateful words of people,” she spoke sullenly, losing herself within her injury —“like a blister that your father burst?”

Bemused, my mother turned around, and began to observe thoughtfully, the bamboo poles that held our hut upright — then, one by one, she pulled her hair out off its roots — after which, she peacefully slid her soporific figure across the charpoy, and upon closing her eyes, the mad woman began to chuckle as she sucked her dense fingers through her lips — as if holding onto something accessible to her whim — and sung frenziedly, “Ran away…ran away.”

She never wished for me to pursue the art of snake charming — if I may call it an art — for devotion, discipline, corroboration, I believe are, of the same embodiment.

On the day my father abandoned, I found beside my charpoy, his dark pungi mottled with the many shades of sunset. For the first short months of merriment, I reveled in the pleasures playing the instrument brought to my life, for the pots of money my profession had instantaneously filled became a thing of totter among my quarters.

Then it began slowly —building like a farmer’s fear of drought — the high artistry through which I had held my profession — came to mollify. My pungi, the bamboo pipe of pulchritude and power, no longer corresponded to the air I worshiped into its circular passage, while my toes remained barren, unable to thump and make my earless cobra — Pariah’s own nagin — dance in pliancy.

3

Pariah asked of us to take a break and wished for a cup of evening tea from the chai stall that subsided across the pavement whereupon he performed. We perched along the tearoom’s bench and began to slowly guzzle our heavily milked drink. “Do you know what my name means?” He asked me with a mask of a forced wisdom discomforting his face. “It means: an outcast…someone who has become an outsider.”

I didn’t ask why he came to be named Pariah. I remained quiet in my thoughts, overcome by the shame Pariah’s answer exhibited within me. It was the first time I grasped the assonance of the word: Pariah — a name and an adjective I had been familiar with growing up; in my early years I heard this word melodized along both Hindi and Urdu songs, it also lay persistent along those innocent Bollywood movies of the past century — and its meaning I had always inferred as being: a downtrodden, similarly ousted from a place, or forgotten by a people.

When I first heard Pariah’s name through his lips, the word occurred to my mind as if I had the right to pronounce it through some unknown Anglicized lexicon — as if Pariah meant an angel, a caregiver — when I had always known that it didn’t.

I comprehended, as I sat adorned in two ruby gems and a flounced vintage dress, that I couldn’t make Pariah’s recording unbiased, unemotional, or academic — for I too was a part of his story.

 I turned on my phone’s recorder to let him know that he must continue from here.

4

Snake charming, to my deepest dismay, became an illegal art in our country, a defeat to my folks I wished to dissent.

As I was yet to fulfill my idyllic life, the murmurs that encouraged me to make my move to a big city and earn a living as a snake charmer, grew in my head. I considered the ban as any other diminutive measure laid to attain modernization — unchecked, unheard — and thus, I wandered my way here.  

There were some who greatly regarded my practice and threw a pittance even before I could start my instrument; the police would mostly lay their pity over me, while some would guard off with my blessings, or with a commission that I would gather from my art’s sales, to their surrender. But largely — according to my own prefiguration — the people in this city had no quandary with a snake charmer in their midst, for they weren’t even slightly aware that my art had been, a long time ago, deemed illicit. A few startled faces would merely fix their scrutiny in my direction because they — like you — had not encountered a snake charmer since their childhood had somewhere, a long time ago, passed.

The snake charmers were spurred away from big cities, and had reached as dusts, out of there canopies, in the countryside — whimsical to the travelers, but an abyss lacking even a bottomless pit for us to urinate in. Here the legality seemed void, almost inappropriate, and here my father perched cross-legged along the pavements of many highways, fulfilling the fabled imaginations of his guests to an ancient show of snake charming. It was also here he drank to obscenity as he spiraled his nagin to the motions of his instrument and feet; and here began my mother’s cries and screams at his devastating habits of draining all his consciousness away.

The man could not only trick his cobra in drunkenness, he was also contrived of a cunning design: continually, easily and playfully, he would slip inside my mother’s evening teas, a whitish assemble — just like healthy zests of grinded ginger — until she too became equally disregardful; and as I grew across their oversight, I saw how the art of snake charming came to be called a blemish of the past, a plague that had contaminated persons of preceding epochs from reaching rational levels of a high value.

5

“The art claims low levels of abasement towards snakes,” they wrote in a newspaper article, which a man on his way to the Taj Palace Hotel, upon lowering his eyes to the pavement, recognized me by my profession and stopped his polished vehicle, to read to me a series of humiliations.    

First the man watched my entire show with such otherworldly glee that I believed it to be my move to the big city that had finally endowed my magic back. Along the stretch of his misleading smile, I dreamt of the delectable meat I would be able to consume thereon — but to add to my distress, when he walked forward to hand me a firm hundred-rupee note, through his mouth launched, abruptly and interminably, the shells of philanthropic wisdom upon my helpless landscape.

 I told him that people — like himself — had not evolved, but merely separated themselves from what they deemed to be, the low lives — and I…I yearned to show them the harmony I had felt when I saw curled around my father — in his stable, early years — a cobra that hissed in cooperation and sympathy.

My father would capture the cobra, calm, still as an egg, and survey her growth. Her endless coils, drawing and expanding, reminded him of the strange vicissitudes of his own existence; her venomous bites symbolized the misfortunes of man — but her entire being — from the twirl of her tiny black tongue that was equipped in absorbing scents of her onlookers, to the thinning of her tail — granted undeniable praise in her name — and she thus became the emblem of purity: anybody a cobra passed without biting, but more importantly — any artist who beguiled her in her deafness with the music that gloomed, withering out in the pain for having left its home, its pungi (like the pain I have to endure for having left my village) — brought glory to the community he aboded with.

Even as my father became an imbecile, he always opposed, unfailingly, to the stitching of his nagin’s perilous lips, and never did he deprive her of her venom. He was unlike the counterfeit charmers that came to our ruination, who performed with their paralyzed cobras in pretense. From him I learned how to sway and venerate my instrument.  

The man, his skin reddened by the potency of the sun, then contended that the authentic snake charmers from the faraway land of Egypt had been only those who performed without an inch of cloth on, for no trick could be concealed in such a condition, unlike the simple charmers such as I, whom he thought as being involved in superficialities, as opposed to the real artistry of their Egyptian counterparts.  

The charmers from the bend of Nile — while we would have surely been inspired by their surreptitious techniques — functioned in different means, and perchance, even if our practices were to be similar, our music still told stories of unique histories, and distinctive mores.

Moreover, I could not apprehend how nakedness possibly averted an artist from deceiving an audience, for what artist would he be, who could not deceive under challenges?

 A snake charmer’s skills are determined by the raising of a snake — all being deaf, moderately blind and stubborn — from deep darkness, I thought.  The rotations of a charmer’s pungi leads his beloved’s opaque sight to conquer the space upward, while the thudding of a charmer’s feet encourage her to become free and willful. If anyone wished to highlight and embellish their performance further, perhaps in the pursuit of producing variations of the art — I assure — none of us displayed qualms.

 We were all artists — and by befriending snakes — we talked to our audience about life.  Our art was an association, the maturation of souls, not a rivalry.

Naturally, the man’s accusations profaned me until a morose temperament came in a possession of me. His generalizations — unreasonably commanding and righteous in his mind — compared my life’s art, its entire meaning, to unknown artists — those who lived in a country I had merely heard of, but never had I seen the sunrise that stretched into its horizon, nor the species of snakes found in its terrain.

I had been charming only occasional onlookers in the big city, just as I was by the countryside — but that was with keenness, at least — now I came to feel faithless: like a banished devotee eager to find his way back into home.

“My mother is dead and if I had married, my children would have been about your age,” Pariah considered, as he downed the last sip of his tea.

6

After my conversation with Pariah ended, an image of the forlorn man immersed in his ordinary life’s personal undertakings hung over my head through the passing of several nights; his was a specimen of multiple setbacks and obstacles, in a need of dissection through ways that could only provide truth and empathy to his story, something my idle profession had limits in pursuing.  

I did not promise that I would surely be using his story for research, for I secretly didn’t wish to lose his worth to systems and formalizations. Upon opening his life to me, he never spoke of our purpose for sitting across to each other; but instead, he uttered only specks of his life’s struggles — as if our lives had been, for that evening, embedded into slow moments, dissolving into time, one by one.

Pariah’s story had the unwarranted truth he had always known — his was the result of what becomes, when the dysfunctional forces of life, family catastrophes, negligence and degeneration, upon birth and through growth, pierce a being.

Pariah had no other option: just as his round pungi, the cajoling sound of its music, and the coiling of his cobra, he too remained all this time captured inside a circular trap — a deceptive existence since his forefathers’ times, that now travelled, lastly, into Pariah. In them lay the identity that was for generations unable to escape the trap’s circumference, but then came Pariah — the last affiliate to the yesteryear’s embarrassments, and because of the new time and age that he breathed in, this long entrapment was surely to cease with him.

When I visited home a year and a half ago, I found him at the same spot where we had first met. As he recognized me, there released from his mouth, a thankful whimper in the air.

“Students from nearby college come to see my performance regularly,” he spoke in a gratifying manner. “They say I am the snake charmer economist — a matter of supply and demand — you see, for I am the only supplier here,” he joked, comforting himself that he had been well.

 7

 A few weeks ago, I passed along the same street in search of him.

I asked the owner of the chai stall if he had any knowledge of Pariah’s whereabouts. The man padded a handkerchief over his sweaty face and with a tiresome sigh, concluded, “people like him are invisible here and not of anyone’s concern.”

His employee heard of my inquiry and ran after me. Pariah had, about six months ago, left for a city located along the dearth of the Thar Desert, where he now sold peacock feathers and faux-antiquities to tourists.

Indian Review | Author | Read the short stories of Naina Sethi on Indian Review Literature and Arts Magazine | Visit us for more literature and art.