Eclipse

A long solar eclipse was visible in Bangalore on Friday, January 15. Since the eclipse was to start at 11 a.m. and go on till 3 p.m., the children's school, like many others, decided to declare a holiday. I can see why. I wouldn’t want to have the responsibility of making sure any of the hundreds of children under my watch did not run out during lunch break or glance out of a window to look at the sun.

We didn’t watch the eclipse. I tried to find out about safe ways of doing so. But where to get the special lenses needed to view this extraordinary phenomenon? I read in the papers that glasses were on sale at Gangaram’s and Sapna Book House for not much money. But I decided not to get them. You can hardly buy pure sweets uncontaminated by food coloring, even in premium sweet shops. Polyester fabrics are passed of as silk in this, the heartland of Mysore silk sarees. Should I trust my children’s eyesight to the promises of a book store that these plastic lenses would definitely shield young eyes from damaging sun rays? I decided to brave the empty chatter of ignorant TV reporters to get our visuals of the eclipse.

My quiet neighborhood was eerily quieter. The silly chipmunks hid somewhere and stopped their endless squealing. The warblers fell silent. And the crows broke into an angry chorus, not unlike the TV pundits on Face the Nation, around the time of the eclipse’s start. Then, they too disappeared.

After the eclipse, my daughter and I played badminton outside. The yellow shuttlecock pinged off our rackets like Tweety to our Sylvester. No real birds braved the last couple of hours of daylight that day.

I remember a really long eclipse years ago in Calcutta. My parents shuttered the windows and sealed shut the curtains with safety pins so that not a chink of harmful sun rays penetrated our home. You were supposed to take a shower after, and throw out all the drinking water at home and fill the containers afresh.

Those were pre-television days, so my brother, sister and I occupied ourselves with board games and went through sheets of playing Hangman. We knew the eclipse was over when we heard boys from a nearby slum bang doors and shout from the streets, "Grahan daan, grahan daan," as they waved baskets over their heads. In Hindu mythology, eclipses are caused when the demons Rahu and Ketu try to swallow and consume ("grahan karna") the sun and the moon, but are foiled by the gods. The alms these street boys tried to cadge off us was some kind of ransom money. I miss the fanfare and mystery that went with eclipses. Now, they're scheduled to the exact second and reported like a cricket match.