Bulaavaa -A short Story

Bulaavaa…. (Divine Calling)

Satnaam was a cop assigned to a fairly busy market place in Delhi which helped him to make some extra moolah every day. By afternoon this day, when he had sufficient earnings he was enjoying a comfortable break in front of a row of shoe-shine boys who were busy wooing customers with their contraptions in front – a wooden stand holding various bottles of different kinds of liquids, a set of boxes of wax polish and a kind of a slanting foot step on which the customers put their foot with their shoes on, for the boy to do the job of shining it.  He watched a young man putting up his foot on one such, and heard the following conversation with the boy that ensued.

The boy: “Sirjee, color laga doon? Sirf dus rupiah saheb”. 

Young man: nahin beta polish kaafi hai

Boy : kamse kam cream lagaa lo sahib sirf paanch rupiah hoga.

Young man: Arre Kahana sirf polish karo bus aur kuch nahin……(Rs 1.50)

The boy was sad. A good “deal” was lost. He went about his job nonetheless, and just as he finished, our cop Satnaam in full police uniform decided that he will have his turn, and put his foot with that heavy cop’s shoes on the foot-step. The boy’s heart sank; he could neither dare ask the cop for payment nor was he sure what the fellow will ask for. He decided not to ask and started the routine of a simple wax polish. Satnaam was a veteran; he asked the boy to apply color to his thick shoes!! The boy could only curse his stars for the day.

Satnaam was however quite a popular figure amongst the kids in his apartment block. On the days when the earnings were good, he would buy sweets for his boy and other kids. No wonder the kids simply loved this wonderful chaacha. The seniors too had a great regard for this man as he was a regular visitor to Vaishno devi shrine and Harminder Sahib at Golden temple Amritsar, and organized periodical jaagrans in the apartment complex.    

Sharma was a small time cab provider to the local residents of a suburb in Delhi. His meter always showed a 20% higher mileage and he always had legitimate arguments for undue billings. With his knack for extra earnings and a tight leash on his drivers, business was good and he was making good money. He would however constantly crib about high costs and going by the expression of people who listened, he made quite an impression. Within a two- year- span of starting with just one car, he had today a fleet of four, and like our Satnaam, was a keen organizer of jaagrans, and visited holy places on a regular basis.  

Rawat was a retired private sector employee.  During his tenure as the number one in the company’s regional set-up, he helped Sharma since the time the latter started off, by routing all the company’s requirement to him. Sharma would during those days try and keep Rawat happy with some cleverly disguised free personal trips as Rawat was a stickler for propriety. Rawat –after his retirement-- Sharma and Satnaam were all residents of the same apartment block.

Rawat would often help Satnaam’s son with his problems in Maths and English, and thus Satnaam had a great respect for Rawat which was shared by Sharma who felt that his business today owed a great deal to Rawat’s help during initial days. The fact that the latter was upright, pious, and simple, hugely helped in sustaining their respect.

One day Satnaam and Sharma decided that they will take Rawat along with them in their next trip to a holy place. They thus invited him to have darshan at Amritsar Golden temple as they were planning a trip, during the week-end. Rawat after some persuasion agreed to go along but since he was not very comfortable being financed for the trip, insisted that all the expenses will have to be shared.    

Both Satnaam and Sharma were happy and gushed about “bulaavaa”, (a divine calling) as according to them only when there is a “bulaavaa” from providence, such holy visits fructify. Rawat after the initial reservations -- he wasn’t particularly comfortable with his company – was already feeling better, as his long cherished desire to visit the shrine had at last been fulfilled. In all his years in service, he was somehow not been able to visit this place, and now with this coming true, he started believing that it was indeed a “bulaavaa” and finally even felt grateful.        

They left and reached Amritsar by late afternoon on a Friday, and checked into a hotel. Rawat was a trifle disappointed -- his earlier euphoria partly waned- to see that all the three were to share the same room. He was however mollified when he realized that he will sleep in the floor alone with the other two sharing the double bed, this arrangement surprisingly was very satisfactory to his friends also as sleeping on the floor (to them) meant a kind of a disrespect.

His friends wanted to have some drinks and snacks and Rawat being a teetotaler and a vegetarian by choice decided that he will leave them in peace to enjoy them-selves, and go for a stroll. At the lobby he met with his friend Deepak who it turned out was the lobby manager at this hotel. Rawat knew him from his official trips to Jullundar in the past and used to stay at the “Maya” where Deepak was the manager. The two were very close and both were happy to see each other again.

Rawat and Deepak had a lot to catch up and spent close to an hour chatting about a hundred different things which only friends who meet after a long time can understand. An interesting thing emerged out of this; the room his friends had taken came free as Satnaam using his police contacts had arm twisted Deepak to agree. Even the car arrangements had been given free. Deepak was a bit uncomfortable that his nice friend had these guys as his companions, and requested Rawat to keep this info to himself and not mention anything about him to his friends lest they try and take some more advantage. Rawat’s earlier gratitude was getting eroded fast.

Next day after a deliciously enjoyable breakfast they visited the Golden Temple. Being a holiday the temple was overcrowded. The most strikingly pleasant sight besides the beauty of “Harminder Sahib” was the total absence of ubiquitous beggars one sees in and around a holy place.  And unlike other such pilgrimage sites, there were none of the overwhelming outpourings of bhakthi, no pandas/guides to beguile you into taking their help only to fleece you later, and there were water kiosks in and around the Harminder Sahib, being handled with business – like efficiency, the Prasad distribution well organized, the booth handling facility for visitor’s shoes etc just perfect without wasting of time, all of which made it up for a very good first impression  

But yet to his surprise Rawat felt that something was missing; the solemn atmosphere in anticipation of that poignant moment when one is alone with the deity –in a kind of a “one-to-one”, and that informal warmth of fellow pilgrims one takes for granted, all these which were replaced by the formal business like arrangements, made the ambience- to his mind - less poignant from other holy places he had envisioned.

This flip side – which to Rawat appeared to be a common phenomenon with most of the holy places of visit in these days – made the place look more like a visit to a vibrant a picnic spot teeming with people, with almost everyone talking loudly about things very mundane sans any perceivable reverence to either the sanctity of the place or to the purpose of the visit namely to have “darshan”. This had been a major reason for him to develop a kind of reluctance if not allergy to undertake such journeys and preferring instead the serene atmosphere of his own pooja room to communicate with the Lord. Now since he had come, he tried to concentrate to the best of his ability on “Him” without the crowd distracting his attention too much. 

The darshan part here was just “Maattha Tekna” in the sanctum sanctorum. Hence the audible refrain in all that din was “assi tho maattha tekne aayein hain ji aur karke nikal lenge” meaning “we have come to bow our heads Sir, and we will get this done with, and leave” which was said with such nonchalance as to make one wonder whether reverence had any value, regardless of “bulaavaa” sophistry.    

After a grueling three- hour-ordeal, they had less than ten minutes at the sanctum sanctorum, were back to hotel with matters more material and mundane occupying their thoughts, had a sumptuous lunch and lest there was any doubt about the lack of poignancy attached with such holy darshans, well, within that small interval of time between the darshan and the meals, Satnaam was back to his true self. He easily picked up a quarrel over a trivial fault of the waiter and threatened him with dire consequences especially the possibility of his losing the job!! .      

They all returned next morning from Amritsar. Sharma’s car picked them up at station. And to add to Rawat’s growing unease, within a day of their return, Sharma and Satnaam came calling and briefed him about the expenses for the trip which included a tidy sum for the hotel room besides the car-hire charges at Amritsar, and to and fro station in Delhi!!. Rawat’s disappointment was almost complete.

Rawat initially just felt sad. The reference to “bulaavaa” made by these same friends, together with the remarks made by a friend of his -which he now remembered- namely that in such “bulaavaas” it’s the deity which feels pleased to see his devotee visiting the shrine, both of these appeared to be too obnoxious to him. What kind of “bulaavaa” is this he wondered, and slowly the initial sadness turned into a terrible angst and finally disbelief…as he recalled all the events – from the initial invite from his friends for the trip to the present bogus expense details- and viewed all of it in the context of this latest gesture of his friends asking for a payment which was not there in the first place.

Their ridiculously obsessive attachment to things material without a regard for any decency and their sophistry about sublimely spiritual “bulaavaa” together with their innate ability to deal with both in such facilely flippant fashion, were all a bit too overwhelming for Rawat to digest. And when he began to sense that almost no one besides himself had any inkling to such behavior of these guys and weren’t any wiser to see through this sham leaving him as the odd man out, his disbelief was total.   

He was thus musing when he remembered his grandma’s kind admonition laced with that overwhelming familial love – which all grandmas seemed to possess in abundance for their grandsons – when in his younger days he had expressed a negative view about some of his friends. She had said then “that everything in this gross manifest universe being God’s creation, and with a purpose, it is not our call to be judgmental about other beings without knowing either the past or the present or the future, but to wisely surrender to Him in gratitude for such moments of rare insights as these are His ways of giving you a message”.

Remembering this now, he wondered as to what message there could be in these for him? It slowly dawned on him that while there was no doubt that a visit to the shrine would have been impossible without a “bulaavaa”, it was equally impossible for anyone to be able to understand and perceive this, without His will and abundant Grace. And when there is Grace, humility dawns and you just feel blissfully grateful in perfect understanding/ perception and there is this longing for a union with Him. This is perhaps what is termed “bulaavaa”; a longing desire to have “darshan” after total surrender, answered by Him and accepted by you in all humility and gratitude, whence there is nothing which comes in the way of this union.     

Going further in this chain of thoughts he realized that his initial feeling of gratitude when he got the invite from his friends was probably a kind of “bulaavaa”, and more relevantly there was a message too; namely that his reservations about the need to go His abodes to experience His Grace were not so misplaced after all. The flippant crowd, the din at the holy abode, all of these was perhaps His way of telling him that his own pooja room was in no way inferior to any of these places for receiving His Grace, so long as his faith in “bulaavaa” was intact. God is everywhere and is ever happy to see you any place, any time.  

He was forced out of this reverie by his friends. He quickly settled the dues with them,  went for his bath and was about to start his “pooja”, when Satnaam’s boy came calling to announce that he had obtained a clear 100% in Maths and how grateful he was for Rawat’s help. And simultaneously there was a parcel with prasad from his family guru’s ashram.

He felt grateful to both; to his Guru for His Prasad, and to Satnaam’s son for being his student…..His pooja today was immensely comforting and satisfying……and of course gratifying….

He had no doubt that with faith “bulaavaa” will come one day.     

Ekalavya alias Vichu