Editors Note: This is part two of a two part story. Part one appeared in the April 19 edition of the East Tennessean.
Stars dimly lit the night that could in all reality be done with their existence.
The cattle’s carcass burned beyond the huts in the foreground of the panoramic green-terraced therapeutic landscape.
Flames shot only so high and the red and orange went through a chaotic exorcism as the black smoke floated into the sky, plumed and funneled through the halos of waving heat and mirage.
Boys danced around the fire with sticks and skips like they were lords of flies. It looked medieval.
I waited for a hunchback old man to come out with a wooden wheelbarrow muttering plague time requests of, “Bring out yer’ dead. Bring out yer’ dead.”
An old man finally came out of one of the huts. He stretched and surveyed. Looking over, he scolded and chased the boys away.
“He is . how do you say? Um, like the elder,” I was told.
He sat and motioned for us to sit down and commenced telling the same story as the gentleman before about the spotted agile cat to Bhagwan and myself . sort of.
It surely was the gossip of the day. Bhagwan introduced me, and the old man’s bright and yellow eyes looked over my sunburnt face and North Face socks.
From under his hammock-like bench he pulled out his tobacco hooka and held it to my taking. I declined and said what I could, motioning towards my pulmonary well being.
The creek flowed coolly behind him and the watercress and clover attempted to bridge together from both sides. The ebb and tide of the rolling flow, the current of the stream’s deeper water in the middle, foiling the fauna’s attempted architecture as if it was as absurd as the Tower of Babble.
He hit his pipe and leaned back with an exhale of visceral appreciation, his content face suggesting that I don’t know what I’m missing. The sound of the babbling stream beyond brought me to my own craving, “Hey old-timer. How ’bout a beer?”
The Gujar elder leaned to me, awakening me from my happy-place fantasy world beer commercial, and softly placed the sinewy skin of his callused hand on my shoulder and said something. Bhagwan restated it for my ears, “He said, it is good to be young and healthy. But he says that he is old though and will smoke.”
The wise, old toker said something else as he choked on his big sweet-smelling hit, smacking his knee with a laugh as he coughed and hawked. The smoke floated out and the scent feathered my nose.
Teaberry and wintergreen. Molasses and tobacco. The procuring of late summer, Tennessee valley.
The translation of the pidgin cough/laugh missed Bhagwan as he shrugged his shoulders, but I imagined him grandfatherly speaking, going on about with something like, “Rudimentary, my boy – cough cough – Them elementary laws don’t lie. And they sure don’t apologize, now do they? At least that’s what that Walt Whitman used to say.”
Or something else equally raspy and wisdomfied.
He yelled at two younger boys and smoke rose from his ears and nose with amorous order.
Minutes later, they brought over some chai in clay mugs.
I accepted and walked away from the meeting, feigning photography and slyly spilling my drink, hoping to remain unnoticed.
As I searched for the sentries of hospitality to catch me. My head and eyes probing everywhere but down, I noticed heat and wet and a damp sock.
At the stream’s bank two little ones supervised two littler ones in brushing their teeth. Scooped-up clear water wavered on a dripping forefinger of primitive oral hygiene.
Their faces were then splashed and cooled in the midst of water-born thing-a-ma-bobs and blooming little kaleidoscope floras.
The smallest girl who held herself too shy for the camera had floated one of the dear little blossoms between her coal black hair and miniature ear.
She covered her smile and wide eyes like an eager man with a bad poker face holding a straight flush encapsulated by his nervous bursting hand.
As we headed away and the stares guided us through the forest I noticed two boxes of liquor bottles in a small pile of rubbish – firewater for peoples who are analogous to the Native American’s plight.
Bhagwan and I discussed the intricacies. Land that was given years back, now valuable and tourist worthy.
Indian-givers is what it’s about.
Some of the Gujars have been hoodwinked and bamboozled away to less valuable lands, with no grazing areas but pleasantly covered with an umbrella of humming intrastate powerlines. Some refuse and stubbornly hold on through the transparent contracts and hand slides.
The new youth of Gujars, skinny and stressed, are the antithesis of the old robust generation of past, but are still present.
We came upon a clearing and I looked back, as the kids returned to some sort of tag game, laughing and shouting, jesters for the palace.
The old man sat still in the shade of that big, smooth tree and waved a big, slow fathom, in his bench under the shadow o’ sylvan branches and leaves.
A would-be throne for the handless king.

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