Past Now Beyond

His feathered headgear and his red striped attire would have definitely earned him the title of a ‘funny cock’ if he was with his friends in his hometown today. But Anuj was a different person, a different personality and in a total amazingly different world deep inside a remote jungle in some strange island which didn’t seem existing on this planet but was very much on this earth itself.

Anuj was sitting in the shade of a huge tree and slicing off tender bamboo shoots. He then lit a small fire out of charcoal and dried leaves and heated a small iron rod and with the red hot iron, he drilled holes in the bamboo shoot he had just sharpened. Clearly, he was making flutes. Flutes! How so? Do art and technique have hereditary descender? Anuj was thirty-two and all these years he never knew to even identify which is a Margosa shoot or which is a Mango shoot! And now, he was making flutes! Not one, not two…in a day he could make ten of them. Humming some ancient note, occasionally breaking into primeval dance steps to take a break and then happily engrossing back in his work, Anuj was a faraway figure of his early thirty years of life.

Anuj was born in a well educated tribal family in the jungles of Jharkhand. His grandfather and father were the head of the Munda tribe in the village. Surrounded with numerous tamarind trees and mango, margosa, citrus and many other such trees he lived in almost a paradise which was full of fragrant wildflowers and in a large family where the atmosphere was jovial and vibrant with love and peace. His ancestors were all sons of the soil and had tremendous knowledge about their environment and the medicinal properties of each and every flora surrounding them. They wanted Anuj to learn about their traditional art and knowledge, but Anuj was reluctant to practice his ancestral occupation. Instead, he wanted to soar the skies and become a pilot in the Indian Air Force.

When Anuj was in school, the government started felling down all the

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trees around his village to make roads and bridges. That was the time he shifted to an army school and as he was bright in studies he didn’t have any problems in getting admission there. He made a lot of good friends there and played with them. One of his friends was brilliant in cricket and he later became the cricket captain of India and even won the world cup for the country. Anuj’s passion and inspiration both were very strong. After his twelfth, he appeared for the National Defense Examination and passed it. Later he realized his dream and became an Air Force Pilot. His mother was shockingly surprised one day when her smallest son Anuj, soared in the sky high in a chartered plane flying all by himself and as he rose up and then landed down near his home his mother was screaming aloud fearing that her son might get harmed and hurt! Mothers… all mothers are the same always concerned for their child even when they grow big.

A few years back, Anuj was on a mission and he crash-landed in this remote unknown land when his fighter plane was hit by a missile and caught flames. He somehow ejected out even without a parachute.

From that day, Anuj has lost all contact and connection with his old world. No mobiles, no satellite, no sensors work here. No tourists visit this place. It is a completely different world altogether. The tribal people have accepted this strange outsider person as God’s own person as he landed straight from the skies. The tribe's head had seen a dream where their God had told that he will be visiting them and the next day, Anuj crash landed there. Otherwise, no one can enter this place and be alive. For Anuj, his past has moved far beyond and he has reincarnated almost into a tribal simple folk carving flutes, singing, dancing, wearing tribal clothes and eating their food and there are imminent happiness and peace on his visage. I doubt as much if he gets the chance to return to his old world, he may still choose to stay where he is today, in his own world.