Humbled by a pig!

“It is 5.23 am,” I told myself as I glanced at my watch. “I guess I got up early. Anyway, SK should be here right about now, right on the dot at 5.30am, as he has always been. Today is not going to be any different.”

I plugged on my earphones to hear the continuation of a podcast that I listened to all through the previous week. It was a day before the full moon, but the cloudy skies and the lack of street lights made the street look pretty dark. I sat on the raised stone fence as the auto-gate slowly closed from inside.

Far behind a parked car, I could see a moving shadow. It looked like the silhouette of two stocky legs pacing haphazardly as if they were swaying. At once, I thought that it must be the neighbour’s son who must be struggling back to his home after a long Saturday night out with the guys.

“Wow!” I was thinking as I symbolically pat myself on the back for keeping up with the routine all these years despite the raging inner demons and concerned naysayers who keep advising me to slow down on account of being a half-centurion! “Only madmen would be running on a Sunday morning when the sane recovers from a stuporous night-out!” they say.

Just as I was drowning in the nectar of my self-praise, I realised that the shadow cast under the car was not that of a man. The contour of two legs soon became four, and a greyish horrendously ugly looking face with a tinge of what appeared like thick whiskers soon manifested. I was 10 feet away, looking eye to eye at Vishnu’s third avatar, Varaha, a wild boar!

Here I was, I thought, at the comfort of city living, enjoying the fruit of my lifelong struggle to benefit from the support of privacy and security of the gated community, I felt I had had it all. Within the luxury of economic independence and intellectual reasoning, the brutal combat of our ancient ancestors and the street smartness of the lesser beings have taken a back seat. Even in my wildest dream, I never envisaged a moment I had to face off a wild beast!

It was the stare between two worlds; one of the modern domesticated kind who had fight-or-flight response limited to his autonomic nervous system versus one who had to fight to stay alive and keep his place in the hierarchy of the pecking order of the jungle.

Hey, they knew even then that the Earth
 was spherical, even before Galleili!

The stare looked like it lasted for eternity. The boar, of course, hungry and desperate for food, did not want a competitor. As if he knew that I was not interested in his food, thank you very much. Negotiation naturally was out the question, so did all civil niceties. 

I turned around to ring the bell to my house as I did not have the gate key. The sudden movement must have startled the beast. It gave a low-pitched snorting grunt as if it was showing its displeasure. Interesting, it was my neighbourhood, and the visitor or rather an intruder, was displeased! Well, that is the law of the jungle. Might is right, and there is no place for logic. This is the ‘id’ that Freud is trying to tell that is put under check by societal pressure and would manifest in a mob situation or when enforcement crumbles.

Just when I thought that nay was near, of me being gored by a wild beast, a beacon of hope came in the form of a beam of light from an SUV. My ride arrived right on the dot just in time to turn the table on the aggressor. Awed by, all it knows could be a more giant animal and a louder roar, its fight mode downgraded to flight as it turned its back to return to where it came from. It retreated.

As we drove along, we saw a humbled pig strutting its behind with its tail between its legs heading towards the secondary jungle. Probably my friend must have been reminded of the carefree days of his childhood when sauteed and spiced wild boar meat with toddy was a delicacy among friends.

That is why we are repeatedly advised by wise men to get back to Nature. Nature gives a purpose to our existence. Its massive structures like the trees, the mountains and elements of Nature awe us to the ground. It impresses upon us our deficiencies and our feebleness. It drills unto us that we are nothing, just a passerby who makes a cursory presence while Mother Nature and the Universe goes on and on without a gap. We are not even a single fragment of a tiny dot in the Milky Way, what more in the ever-expanding dimensions of the Universe.

Lord Vishnu’s bodyguards were cursed to be demons by 4 Brahmans for refusing their entry. These guards (demons) terrorised Earth and submerged it into the ocean. Through Lord Brahma’s breath came a boar. With Vishnu’s powers, it became Varaha Avatar. It valiantly fought the demons and scooped Earth out with its horns. The wild boar, being the third in Vishnu’s 9 Avatars, after fish (water creature) and the tortoise (both land and water creature), is said to be the most primitive of the firmly footed land animal. Long before the Darwinian theory of Evolution, the Avatars actually describe the slow transformation of mankind, from a water creature slowly evolving to gain wisdom and finally achieving priestly states.