“Wordsworth-saab, want some fresh bananas?”
I am sitting on the steps of the Jehangir Art Gallery in Kala Ghoda, Bombay, opposite Elphinstone College. It's a hot and dusty day. It is 3 p.m. Sunlight arcs across the architectural details of this antiquated art district of Bombay. I am a bit exhausted and irritated when the man in an unwashed loincloth approaches me.
His eyes have that curious look of having seen it all, as if he can divine my thoughts. “Don’t disturb me, please,” I think. The idea was to shoo him away.
I am making background notes on yellow stick it notes and pasting them in a notebook for the novel I am planning to write about India, the country where my grandfather, Papa Wordsworth used to live and work. For clarity’s sake, I will call him Papa Wordsworth here. Yes, the same William Wordsworth, the grandson of the romantic poet William Wordsworth, my great, great grandfather, whom I will call Grandpa Wordsworth. Let me explain: Grandpa William Wordsworth had a grandson named Papa William Wordsworth – who was principal of Elphinstone College – whose grandson I am, William Bennett Wordsworth.
Elphinstone College also houses Bombay’s archives. I have been doing research there for, may be, two weeks. In these two weeks I progressed from reasonably well off to quite broke. It doesn’t matter, at least, to me. I am following my instinct. A story is what I want.
According to my research, grandfather was designated as an observer when the Indian National Congress, the party, was born. This is a pleasant revelation. I am an Indophile like him. I have loved India since the days I read about it in my grandfather’s yellowed volumes in his book-lined study. I loved his teak-wood-shelved study and the smell of old books. The musty smell still lingers in my mind as I sit here and look at a part of Papa Wordsworth’s life. To think that he walked these streets, that his shadow fell on these stones. Good Lord!
“Wordsworth-saab, please, buy some, they are fresh from the gardens,” the pleas are getting insistent, a tendency I notice in this great country. A “no” is probably a “yes.”
Again? But wait a minute, how does this old man know my name?
Papa Wordsworth was the principal of Elphinstone College somewhere around the turn of the nineteenth century, the eighteen-eighties, to be precise. Between Jehangir Art Gallery and Elphinstone College is MG Road on which the traffic is pretty raucous, horns blaring all the time. I have overspent, and my budget is all but depleted. I am ruined unless my literary agent, one David Darwin, could win me a million pound advance that he said the Wordsworth name could fetch. I never knew there is so much money in writing. But where is the story in this humming, screeching, hollering metropolis, where the crowds are as the ones in a fair in Hyde Park. It’s so hot, something I hadn’t bargained for, and dusty. Dust swirls into my eyes.
“Nature’s best fruit, Wordsworth-saab,” he is getting desperate, I can see from his sightless, cloudy eyes. I guess nobody has bought from this man since morning, as he sits beside the road looking earnestly at me.
I wave him away, show my displeasure. Go away, old chappie. I am hot and bothered and don’t like his importuning.
I see that roads in India are so noisy, unlike in England. First of all, the automobiles make a lot of noise. They seem to be working on some outdated internal combustion engines here. I am sure things haven’t changed much since my grandfather went back to England. I like the quaintness of these antiquated automobiles. It’s almost as if I am living in another century.
I see several antique Morris Oxford cars on the street. They are as round as toads. They call them ambassadors here. And there are many Italian Fiat models, which would have adorned automobile museums in my country. They make a big racket. To add to that, Indian drivers are horn-happy. Don’t mistake this, no reflection of racial bias, but they really like to create a ruckus. I ask Akhil why Indians talk so loudly, and he says, may be, it’s in their blood. Akhil is showing me around, he knows Bombay and says he writes. He is supposed to get me the big story idea. But I don’t see anything inspiring about his leads.
How does this wrinkled old man know I am a Wordsworth, the progeny of the grand literary tradition I am trying to propagate, alas, without success? I knew I would find my story in Bombay; discover something that I can expand into a novel. But, this heat and noise is killing me. My job as a journalist came to an abrupt end when The New English Sun sacked me for writing an article detailing the sexual preference of the English football team. Imagine. Most of those jocks there are homosexuals! I know these things. That revelation “wasn’t done” said my editor and he sacked me, the progeny of the Wordsworth tradition, I, William Bennett Wordsworth. Thereafter, I started writing short stories for literary journals and dabbling in collecting rare books, rare first editions of famous authors.
“Wordsworth-saab, want some fresh bananas, from the plains of Marathawada?”
His sightless eyes are rheumy behind his broken glasses; his skin is folded in a million small wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. His clothes haven’t seen water for, may be, years. His hands and legs are so thin they look as brittle sticks peeping out of his kurta and dhoti. He has a bamboo basket full of bananas before him and he is squatting on the corner of the stairs that lead to the art gallery.
“Are you speaking to me?” I ask the man in Hindustani. I know the language.
He nods.
“How do you know my name?” I ask.
He pauses. He takes a long time doing that. As if years, no, no, decades pass before his unseeing eyes.
“Wordsworth- saab, the same eyes, the cleft chin, the dimples around the eyes. How can I mistake that?”
I try to control the surprise from registering on my face.
“You mean you knew my grandfather, William Wordsworth, the principal of Elphinstone College?” I ask pointing to the college around which young students were disporting playfully.
“Yes, the grandson of the big English kavi samrat, emperor of poets, William Wordsworth,” he wheezes.
So he knows about Papa Wordsworth and his grandfather, my great, great grandfather. How does he know?
I am interested. I call Akhil. “Akhil come here, I told you I am discovering old roots. Here, it is. This man knows about Papa Wordsworth.”
Akhil and I squat in front of the old man.
“How do you know my grandfather?”
“When you have seen empires fall before your eyes, a people gain freedom, how difficult is remembering a face? Eh?”
His eyes are defiant, glowing with some vague pride of his people, the great Mahrattas. They ruled India once.
“Even then, I suppose, I could be someone else, an imposter,” I say.
“No. I am sure. You have his eyes, his cleft chin, and his cheekbones. How can I mistake? I was his chokra-boy. I used to work in Elphinstone College then.”
“What’s your name, baba?” Akhil asks him.
“Babubhai Kothare, from district Gandhidham, Gujarat.” His voice is broken from memories churning inside his mind. Like every Indian from rural India he mentions his village’s name after his own.
My grandfather lived in the eighteen-eighties. Therefore this man must be more than a hundred years old, this Babubhai. At least a hundred and twenty years. Yes, he looks that old. Look at his bone structure. Lord, he looks as if he could go on living for another fifty years.
“How old are you, Babubhai?”
He tries to remember. Then he gives up.
“I don’t remember. Who will remember? Do you want some fresh bananas Wordsworth-saab? I must sell this whole bunch today. Or...” his feeble voice trails off.
“Babubhai, tell me your story. I will buy the whole bunch of bananas from you. How much is it anyway?”
“Let me see, there are five dozens here. So, sixty bananas. At fifteen rupees a dozen, seventy-five rupees.”
I give him a hundred rupees, “You can keep the change.”
His eyes light up, he is overjoyed. His whole face crumples into a thousand crinkling laugh lines, a dry laugh, or, was it a cough, escapes his throat.
“I will tell you all about it, Wordsworth-saab. I will tell all about your grandfather. Just a minute, where should I deliver all these bananas? Do you have a bag?”
I don’t have a bag, “You keep all of it. Here I will have one, Akhil you have one too.”
Akhil says, “Thanks, Bennett, I am hungry. I think I will have two, Babubhai.”
We eat bananas squatting before Babubhai, the traffic around us zoom. People walk past to their destinations near and far. I want to hear Babubhai’s story and, may be, just may be, a story, a novel, will take shape.
“Come with me,” Babubhai eventually says after stuffing the money into a cloth purse and putting it inside his kurta.
“Where?” Akhil asks.
“To my house, my home.”
We cross MG Road in a sort of convoy. Babubhai ahead of us, and Akhil and me tagging behind him. The vehicles are noisy and blare their horns. Guess they have some maniacal need to be noticed.
Blimey! I am nearly run over by a taxi that screeches to a halt inches away from me.
Babubhai walks to the far end of the Elphinstone College gate where it intersects with the City Civil Courts. There is a cot made of strung rope leaning against the iron railing. Beside it are several bags, and a tin trunk.
He straightens the cot on the road and sits on the David Sassoon Library Road. Opposite us is the green garden of David Sassoon Library where people sit around and chat lazily. It seems so peaceful here.
“Sit, this here is my home,” Babubhai motions to the cot, and shouts, “Chotu bring tea for my guests. They are big people from foreign country, England, I used to tell you stories about that great country, didn’t I? Wordsworth-saab’s grandson himself.”
I wonder how a man can live on the street and call his cot his home. There are many like him. What would he do when it rains? I want to do something for him.
Chotu brings tea and squats on the road in front of us.
Then Babubhai tells me his story. Well, that is another story, which I intend to shape into a novel, but in short, the gist follows.
He was a chokra-boy who ran errands for my grandfather William Wordsworth, principal of Elphinstone College, grandson of poet William Wordsworth.
“And Wordsworth-saab, he used to be so kind, so humble in spite of his white skin, and so kind. He played a big role in our freedom movement.” Babubhai said looking intently at me.
So, he knew about my grandfather’s role, though meager, in the formation of the Indian National Congress. I felt my chest expanding with pride.
The Indians as well as the British treated him, meaning Papa Wordsworth, with great respect, as he was the grandson of a great poet and bore his eponymous name. Papa Wordsworth sympathized with the aspirations of the Indian people. That’s why when Allen Octavio Hume first established the Indian National Congress; he invited grandfather to be an observer.
Then came the Independence movement and Babubhai had seen all the movements and processions pass down MG Road before his own eyes. Grandfather returned to England and died when I was around twelve. Then Babubhai retired and the college authorities allowed him to live in the college premises. Then he started selling bananas squatting on the pavement, to earn enough to get by.
“Now I will show you something,” he opens a tin trunk, kept beneath the cot. First he extracts a plastic bag and then produces an old and yellowed book handsomely bound in leather.
“Here, take a look,” Babubhai’s trembling hands extend the book, his voice breaking in reverence.
“The Collected Works of William Wordsworth,” I read and exclaim, “Grandpa Wordsworth’s poems!” Then I look at the imprint, “A first edition, too.”
“There’s more,” Babubhai wheezes as he opens the cover.
I hold the book reverently. Inside it is written, “To my grandson, William Wordsworth, who, I hope, will inherit my poetic legacy.” The handwriting has broad cursive strokes, the way English actually should be written.
My great, great grandfather Grandpa Wordsworth’s own writing. My grandfather, Papa Wordsworth, didn’t do much writing, but he did carry on the legacy, I admit. Nevertheless, this work must be worth millions in the international rare books market. I know I am a collector.
I browse through the book. It is full of annotations by my Papa Wordsworth in his own hand.
“Priceless, the book is priceless,” I whisper to Akhil.
“I want you to have it,” Babubhai tells me.
“But Babubhai this book is worth a million, in fact, several millions pounds. I can’t keep it.”
He smiles a wry smile, “Then you can come and buy some more bananas from Babubhai, I will be right there,” he said pointing to Jehangir Art Gallery.
Then I make a quick decision. I know that if such a precious volume were left on the roads of Bombay, it would be lost forever. As it is, it would be of no use to Babubhai. I had to sell it and do something for Babubhai. But what?
“Here take this money for this book,” I give Babubhai all the money I had with me, around five thousand rupees. That would last him till I found a buyer for the book.
“You don’t have to sell bananas anymore.”
“Really?” His eyes are incredulous. I know he can’t take all this excitement on an Englishman’s face, what with the stiff-upper-lip types he was associated with.
“Yes, I will find a buyer for this book. And then I will come back and do something for you,” I knew he couldn’t understand what I meant and as to how a tattered old book could fetch a lot of money, even five thousand rupees.
Yes, I intend to sell the book. The commission will go to fund the novel I am about to write, temporarily titled, “William Wordsworth’s Legacy.” My agent David Darwin would be a very happy man.
Meanwhile, I have started planning for the William Wordsworth-Babubhai Kothare Facility for the Homeless in Mumbai.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
THE E-SLAVE
The instant message she read was terse.
Night-witch: Do you have a soul?
You know what day it is?
Wednesday, no, Friday, no, Saturday? You don't seem to care, do you?
Jenny thought for a while, stumped for an answer. She doesn't know what day it is. She is so disoriented by the night shifts that she stopped caring. The message quickly disappeared without an answer as Night-witch rapidly typed questions after irritating questions on the messenger. Who is this Night-witch?
Jenny's actual name is Janaki. But the call centre where she works changed it to Jenny, which is her e-name, or electronic name. With the electronic name, she also had to fake an American accent, which she was trained to put on while answering calls. She works in a call centre as a voice-based support executive. She works in what they call a technology park. Her office is on the fourth floor of a modern building with central air-conditioning. The park has green lawns and well-paved roads, a rarity in India. But just outside this futuristic city, runnels of dirty sewage spill on the road and small children defecate in the open.
All night she attends to phone calls from far away United States of America for a multinational insurance company. The company she works for – Compucom – got the contract to receive and manage all the insurance company's incoming calls. The calls start coming in every evening when it is morning in the USA and end in the morning when it is evening in the USA. She sleeps during day and in the evening is picked up by the call centre bus and comes to work in a narrow air-conditioned office with rows of tables with 20 of them in a space of about 40 feet by 4 feet.
There are 250 executives like her all working night shifts. One of them is Night-witch. She doesn't know who because she doesn't know all her colleagues. Most of them leave in a month or two and are replaced. So it is difficult knowing everybody's name and faces.
She has only a few friends. She eats with them during the dinner break from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. After that they are supposed to swipe their identity cards and be at their workstations throughout the night. The nights are long and arduous and she feels sleepy. But to take a break she has to log out of the computer first. If she logs out too often the supervisor, one Mr. Sheth, will ask questions.
Mr Sheth sits in a cubicle the size of a toilet. He is a harried and harassed man, always studying his computer screen. His mind is filled with productivity figures like how many calls were attended on a particular day and how much each employee has produced. When there are problems like abusive callers, Jenny summons him, and he sorts out the problem. Like the time a drunken caller was abusive with her a few days ago. “You m***$^& you don't know anything about me. How can you manage my insurance policies?,” he said in his alien accent with which Jenny was now familiar.
No amount of sweet words and training could pacify him. That was when she called Mr. Sheth.
Mr. Sheth came to her table. All the other executives were watching.
“Hey Mister, he said into the phone. You are not in the proper frame of mind. Please come back when you are sober and we will attend to your call.”
“**&&^&*” from the other end.
“Look we have no time for callers like you. Please behave or I will have to report you to the police.”
Report to the police? From India? About a man in the US? He was kidding, of course.
The caller hung up.
“Handle them politely but firmly,” Mr. Sheth said and disappeared into his toilet-sized cubicle.
Pooja is Janaki's friend. Pooja's online name is Pamela. They both share the same birthdates. March seventh, both of them are Pisceans. Both, pacifists and accepters of fate. Pamela is getting married and all she talks about is the lengthy traditional rituals she has to undergo before marriage. She is from Punjab and weddings there are quite elaborate.
She has to make gold jewelry, buy silk saris, another silk ghagra-choli with elaborate gold filigree for the wedding reception and a house and furniture for themselves in Navi Mumbai. Jenny and Pamela get along well. They walk to the transport buses together and sit together and are inseparable.
“Who is this Night-witch, Pamela?” Jenny asked one day, when they were traveling in the bus together. They always called each other by their e-names to tease each other.
“I don't know. Why?”
“She sends me these instant messages and before I can reply, she disappears.”
“Strange.”
“Yes, strange. Most of them are questions that upset me a lot.”
“Girls are vegetables, they get bored and listless in the midnight shift,” one night the instant message read. That night the office was solemn with only the clicking of mouses and key depressions sounding like the chattering of a stream over a rocky bed.
Before Jenny could reply the message had disappeared. That was rude. She should report it. She went to Mr. Sheth.
“Mr. Sheth of late I have been getting some funny messages on my messenger.”
“Does it bother you?”
“No it doesn't but I think it interferes with my work. It disturbs me sometimes. It affects my productivity.”
“Okay I will look into it.”
One day Jenny came to the office and saw the horizontal blinds pulled tightly across the windows.
“They don't want us to even look at the dark sky and the lights anymore,” Pamela said.
“This is not fair.” Jenny said.
“Like everything is fair over here,” Pamela said.
“We are nothing but slaves, friend.”
“We are e-slaves with e-names and pseudo identities.”
When Jenny went back to her workstation a message on the instant messenger popped up.
Night-witch: Do you have a soul?
Jenny: No. My soul has been sold.
Night-witch: They have even sealed the toilet windows. You have no soul, no sleep, e-slave. You don't deserve sleep for selling your soul.
Jenny: Who are you?
Night-witch: It doesn't matter who I am. I also have no soul.
Jenny: What are you?
Night-witch: Do you wish to speak in a phony accent forever?
Jenny: I am getting the creeps!
Night-witch: How do you like to be a creature of the night?
That really got to Jenny. The rest of the night was torture. Her mind was not on the calls she was answering. She became very afraid. The office seemed to close in on her. She couldn't look out of the windows from the fourth floor occasionally and see disconsolate e-slaves like her walking on the street below, going home after finishing shifts that ended in the evening. The whole estate seemed filled with grumpy and sleep-starved, weary eyed people like her. They all had dark circles under eyes, bad skin and hair as if made of some jute fiber. They all looked frazzled. Who was this night-witch? An e-slave like her?
Now she regretted having accepted the job. She had accepted the call centre job without thinking. A job was better than sitting at home and waiting for her parents to find a nice boy to marry her off, she thought then. But this wasn't proving to be the job of her dreams she had imagined.
Some nights there was no water in the rest rooms and it stank. Some days the mosquitoes inside the office restrooms were so thick that she was scared she might get malaria, a disease she dreaded.
“I am scared of getting malaria, working here,” she told Pamela.
“Like the plague?”
“Like the plague.”
“Me, too. I had it more than once. It is terrible. You feel like lying down and dying.”
“Working on the night shift weakens your immune system,” Jenny said.
“By now we might have become immune to malaria, I suppose.”
“It also plays havoc with your digestive system,” Jenny said.
“My digestive system is already a mess,” Pamela said and they both laughed.
Jenny arrived one day and Pamela wasn't on here seat. She started work as usual as the phone at her terminal was ringing with the insistence of a hungry child. Soon she was immersed in the details of people's insurance policies and their troubles with buying security cover for their cars and homes.
She saw Pamela emerge from Mr. Sheth's cubicle. Pamela didn't look at her. Pamela went to her table took her purse and just walked out. Jenny made a note to call Pamela when it was time for the dinner break. She attended 10 calls before dinner each one in a rising scale of tortuousness.
During dinner break Jenny phoned Pamela on her mobile phone from her own sleek mobile handset. That's one advantage of being living on the razor edge of technology. E-slaves had to use technologies to keep up with the world.
“Hello, Pamela what happened?”
“Hi, Jenny, I was sacked!”
“But why? What was the reason?”
“I have been found out.”
“What?”
“You know the night-witch?”
“Yes. The tormentor of my midnight shifts.”
“That was me.”
Jenny's jaws dropped.
“But why did you send those provocative messages?”
“I was bored. That was the only way I could keep myself awake.”
“Come on, you can't be serious.”
“Do you have a soul you e-slave? Do you wish to spend all your life in a narrow workspace answering calls and speaking in a phony accent that makes your mouth ache? Do you want to be a creature of the night forever? Do you wish to be enslaved by people who live thousands of kilometers away, who you will never meet? Do you have a soul?”
That was the last Jenny heard from Pamela.
Night-witch: Do you have a soul?
You know what day it is?
Wednesday, no, Friday, no, Saturday? You don't seem to care, do you?
Jenny thought for a while, stumped for an answer. She doesn't know what day it is. She is so disoriented by the night shifts that she stopped caring. The message quickly disappeared without an answer as Night-witch rapidly typed questions after irritating questions on the messenger. Who is this Night-witch?
Jenny's actual name is Janaki. But the call centre where she works changed it to Jenny, which is her e-name, or electronic name. With the electronic name, she also had to fake an American accent, which she was trained to put on while answering calls. She works in a call centre as a voice-based support executive. She works in what they call a technology park. Her office is on the fourth floor of a modern building with central air-conditioning. The park has green lawns and well-paved roads, a rarity in India. But just outside this futuristic city, runnels of dirty sewage spill on the road and small children defecate in the open.
All night she attends to phone calls from far away United States of America for a multinational insurance company. The company she works for – Compucom – got the contract to receive and manage all the insurance company's incoming calls. The calls start coming in every evening when it is morning in the USA and end in the morning when it is evening in the USA. She sleeps during day and in the evening is picked up by the call centre bus and comes to work in a narrow air-conditioned office with rows of tables with 20 of them in a space of about 40 feet by 4 feet.
There are 250 executives like her all working night shifts. One of them is Night-witch. She doesn't know who because she doesn't know all her colleagues. Most of them leave in a month or two and are replaced. So it is difficult knowing everybody's name and faces.
She has only a few friends. She eats with them during the dinner break from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. After that they are supposed to swipe their identity cards and be at their workstations throughout the night. The nights are long and arduous and she feels sleepy. But to take a break she has to log out of the computer first. If she logs out too often the supervisor, one Mr. Sheth, will ask questions.
Mr Sheth sits in a cubicle the size of a toilet. He is a harried and harassed man, always studying his computer screen. His mind is filled with productivity figures like how many calls were attended on a particular day and how much each employee has produced. When there are problems like abusive callers, Jenny summons him, and he sorts out the problem. Like the time a drunken caller was abusive with her a few days ago. “You m***$^& you don't know anything about me. How can you manage my insurance policies?,” he said in his alien accent with which Jenny was now familiar.
No amount of sweet words and training could pacify him. That was when she called Mr. Sheth.
Mr. Sheth came to her table. All the other executives were watching.
“Hey Mister, he said into the phone. You are not in the proper frame of mind. Please come back when you are sober and we will attend to your call.”
“**&&^&*” from the other end.
“Look we have no time for callers like you. Please behave or I will have to report you to the police.”
Report to the police? From India? About a man in the US? He was kidding, of course.
The caller hung up.
“Handle them politely but firmly,” Mr. Sheth said and disappeared into his toilet-sized cubicle.
Pooja is Janaki's friend. Pooja's online name is Pamela. They both share the same birthdates. March seventh, both of them are Pisceans. Both, pacifists and accepters of fate. Pamela is getting married and all she talks about is the lengthy traditional rituals she has to undergo before marriage. She is from Punjab and weddings there are quite elaborate.
She has to make gold jewelry, buy silk saris, another silk ghagra-choli with elaborate gold filigree for the wedding reception and a house and furniture for themselves in Navi Mumbai. Jenny and Pamela get along well. They walk to the transport buses together and sit together and are inseparable.
“Who is this Night-witch, Pamela?” Jenny asked one day, when they were traveling in the bus together. They always called each other by their e-names to tease each other.
“I don't know. Why?”
“She sends me these instant messages and before I can reply, she disappears.”
“Strange.”
“Yes, strange. Most of them are questions that upset me a lot.”
“Girls are vegetables, they get bored and listless in the midnight shift,” one night the instant message read. That night the office was solemn with only the clicking of mouses and key depressions sounding like the chattering of a stream over a rocky bed.
Before Jenny could reply the message had disappeared. That was rude. She should report it. She went to Mr. Sheth.
“Mr. Sheth of late I have been getting some funny messages on my messenger.”
“Does it bother you?”
“No it doesn't but I think it interferes with my work. It disturbs me sometimes. It affects my productivity.”
“Okay I will look into it.”
One day Jenny came to the office and saw the horizontal blinds pulled tightly across the windows.
“They don't want us to even look at the dark sky and the lights anymore,” Pamela said.
“This is not fair.” Jenny said.
“Like everything is fair over here,” Pamela said.
“We are nothing but slaves, friend.”
“We are e-slaves with e-names and pseudo identities.”
When Jenny went back to her workstation a message on the instant messenger popped up.
Night-witch: Do you have a soul?
Jenny: No. My soul has been sold.
Night-witch: They have even sealed the toilet windows. You have no soul, no sleep, e-slave. You don't deserve sleep for selling your soul.
Jenny: Who are you?
Night-witch: It doesn't matter who I am. I also have no soul.
Jenny: What are you?
Night-witch: Do you wish to speak in a phony accent forever?
Jenny: I am getting the creeps!
Night-witch: How do you like to be a creature of the night?
That really got to Jenny. The rest of the night was torture. Her mind was not on the calls she was answering. She became very afraid. The office seemed to close in on her. She couldn't look out of the windows from the fourth floor occasionally and see disconsolate e-slaves like her walking on the street below, going home after finishing shifts that ended in the evening. The whole estate seemed filled with grumpy and sleep-starved, weary eyed people like her. They all had dark circles under eyes, bad skin and hair as if made of some jute fiber. They all looked frazzled. Who was this night-witch? An e-slave like her?
Now she regretted having accepted the job. She had accepted the call centre job without thinking. A job was better than sitting at home and waiting for her parents to find a nice boy to marry her off, she thought then. But this wasn't proving to be the job of her dreams she had imagined.
Some nights there was no water in the rest rooms and it stank. Some days the mosquitoes inside the office restrooms were so thick that she was scared she might get malaria, a disease she dreaded.
“I am scared of getting malaria, working here,” she told Pamela.
“Like the plague?”
“Like the plague.”
“Me, too. I had it more than once. It is terrible. You feel like lying down and dying.”
“Working on the night shift weakens your immune system,” Jenny said.
“By now we might have become immune to malaria, I suppose.”
“It also plays havoc with your digestive system,” Jenny said.
“My digestive system is already a mess,” Pamela said and they both laughed.
Jenny arrived one day and Pamela wasn't on here seat. She started work as usual as the phone at her terminal was ringing with the insistence of a hungry child. Soon she was immersed in the details of people's insurance policies and their troubles with buying security cover for their cars and homes.
She saw Pamela emerge from Mr. Sheth's cubicle. Pamela didn't look at her. Pamela went to her table took her purse and just walked out. Jenny made a note to call Pamela when it was time for the dinner break. She attended 10 calls before dinner each one in a rising scale of tortuousness.
During dinner break Jenny phoned Pamela on her mobile phone from her own sleek mobile handset. That's one advantage of being living on the razor edge of technology. E-slaves had to use technologies to keep up with the world.
“Hello, Pamela what happened?”
“Hi, Jenny, I was sacked!”
“But why? What was the reason?”
“I have been found out.”
“What?”
“You know the night-witch?”
“Yes. The tormentor of my midnight shifts.”
“That was me.”
Jenny's jaws dropped.
“But why did you send those provocative messages?”
“I was bored. That was the only way I could keep myself awake.”
“Come on, you can't be serious.”
“Do you have a soul you e-slave? Do you wish to spend all your life in a narrow workspace answering calls and speaking in a phony accent that makes your mouth ache? Do you want to be a creature of the night forever? Do you wish to be enslaved by people who live thousands of kilometers away, who you will never meet? Do you have a soul?”
That was the last Jenny heard from Pamela.
THANK YOU TEACHER
He looked at the obituary again, unable to believe it. He read it again and again. The photograph was familiar; the eyes had the same glint, the nose, and the features. Beautiful. A beautiful woman in the full flow of youth. His eyes wandered over the other death announcements, obituaries, and came to rest once again as if drawn to it. 'Shobhana Nair left for her heavenly abode'. How could Shobhana Teacher (they had appended the surrogate surname 'Teacher' to all their teachers) be dead? Surely, there was a mistake somewhere.
Again he looked at the eyes that fixated on them as awkward teenagers not long ago. Yes, they were the same. Just a look was enough to freeze them. When she entered a class a hushed silence would fall over it, in awe of the fragile woman whose beauty and character seemed to radiate through her. In their awkward adolescence, they considered her idealism their only hope against the big, bad world outside. She was a woman who had contributed to her profession and to her students by doing more than what was required from her.
He stared at those luminous eyes disbelieving, his own eyes filled with tears.
He still remembered the day she first came to school. There was excitement all around and curiosity. Soon the buzz spread. Is the new teacher for our class? Is she going to speak to me? I saw her coming down the stairs, oh, what beauty! Was it really her own skin or was she applying make up? Was the bright red bindi she wore very expensive? What sari did she wear today?
They were all children from working class backgrounds. They were students in a school in a remote suburb of Bombay bordered on one side by a silent swamp and on the other by the echoing clatter of rails. He distinctly remembered the school, wall of which were unpainted, the steel reinforcements still sticking out. Inside the classroom, the walls were white washed.
The school couldn't afford fans and in the summer the heat that swept in through the windows was killing. The back yard was thickly overgrown with weeds. These weeds, if he remembered correctly, were never cut but were stomped and flattened by hundreds of feet to play football, volleyball and cricket. Around the back were plantain trees and a few bushes into which they dived chasing colorful butterflies. In those bushes they urinated daily and watched the bushes dry and die, a juvenile revenge for keeping them confined to their classes for long periods. Inside the class it was hot and they perspired freely. Yet it was school, loved and hated, exhilarating and disappointing.
They left it each evening to return the following afternoon, bathed, powdered, tiffin in their bags, note books and text books neatly packed, uniforms washed and ironed. The Hindu girls wore sandal paste on their foreheads. The boys, if they wore sandal paste, were ribbed to no end.
They exchanged comic books during intervals. War comics and Wild West comics. They would read comic books hidden between textbooks in class. Sitting hunched over a single comic book a group of them would eagerly devour the story during the recess. "Read fast, fast na," they would tell the slower readers as they were consumed by the suspense of what would happen next and would fume and fidget.
A boy was suspended for writing obscenities in the toilet. "Aaaaah! What cheek," the girls would exclaim. A girl was suspended for receiving a love letter. "Hey! Fast one!" the boys would shout. This was the kind of news that made it to the headlines in the rather mundane school. The stern Principal, Mukundan Iyer, came with a cane hiding behind him and whacked anyone found playing 'statue' (a game where you had to freeze when two fingers were pointed at you like a gun). The morning assembly and prayer were full of suppressed giggling and whispered comments. All this flashed through his mind like it was yesterday. If it was yesterday, how could Shobhana Teacher be dead?
It was spring outside when she walked into their classroom with the sweet smelling freshness of the jasmine that adorned her hair. She always wore a bunch of stringed jasmines in her hair. She wore a red sari that matched the vermilion in the center of her forehead and in the parting of her hair. None of the other teachers dabbed vermilion in the parting of their hair. That was her uniqueness. She was so different she stood out from the crowd. Vermilion in the parting of her hair was a symbol of piety.
In a society, which resorted to teasing as a means of attracting the opposite sex, nobody would dare tease a woman with vermilion in her hair parting. They would know that she had a husband and that they stood no chance whatsoever. Such was their belief. Not that anyone would dare to tease Shobhana Teacher. She was a woman who held her head high and didn't hang it in shame. She was a woman who could look straight in the eye of injustice and speak the truth. That first day she had stood in front of them like a Hindu goddess, full of confidence, her unafraid eyes surveying the eager faces raised to her.
"Good Afternoon... Teacher..." they had chorused, the 'a-f-t-e-r-n-o-o-n' and 't-e-a-c-h-e-r' bit was long and languid from the afternoon torpor. It was hot.
They listened to her in rapt attention as she spoke in class. Her voice had the sweet affection and admonition of an elder sister or an indulgent aunt, not the sharp, cutting, bullying shriek of the other teachers.
"Thank you... Teacher..." they had chorused when she left class.
She turned around. A smile lit her face.
"No need to thank me... I am only doing my job... It looks as if you are relieved to see me go..."
From that day though the 'Good Afternoons' continued to be sung, nobody sang 'Thank You' when the teacher left. She came well prepared and had all her facts in memory as she stood before them talking about history as if was a story, and was a well-remembered experience in her life. She did not declaim nor was did she badger like the other teachers. She spoke persuasively, giving an example here, a well intentioned but humorous comment to which her students laughed. She held their gaze and they held hers, even the duffers who sat on the last benches were enthralled. She looked at them, compassionately, without arrogance or condescension.
He could vaguely remember an English class in which there was a passage from a lesson that had the exclamation 'bah' in it.
She said a perfect 'bah' with a delicate inflection.
"Bah," he had repeated after her aloud, unknowingly, unwittingly.
The class erupted into laughter.
"Murli, I thought you were a good boy," was all she said turning towards him. That was enough to silence him for the rest of his life.
From that day the mortal fear of being thought a bad boy by Shobhana Teacher would haunt him. No, he shouldn't do that. What if Shobhana Teacher thought him a bad boy? That instant his view of life changed into something that stood for her. With just one sentence she had firmly entrenched him on the side of good as against evil.
Not that he was a bad student. He constantly ranked third in class. But every time his mark sheet arrived on his desk it had the admonition in red ink on it: "Try to achieve the first rank."
He had looked up 'achieve' in the dictionary then. He had a vague idea of its meaning, but wanted to be sure. It was exactly what he had thought it would be. Achieve, achievement, achiever, reach or attain, accomplish. He must reach and achieve and accomplish. And her signature on the mark sheet! A big curved 's' followed by a long line and a few squiggles at the end. Someone who could sign so beautifully had to be beautiful.
Another day, she was teaching an English lesson (it was abridged from a famous book, he couldn't remember which one) that had a character named Sambo in it. Now, Sambo was black and the lesson was unashamedly racist in describing his dark skin and flashing white teeth. When a student read that part everyone snickered looking at a dark-skinned boy, Damodaran, sitting in the extreme left desk in the middle row. Damodaran, too, had smooth, dark, velvety skin and flashing white teeth. When the lesson came to Sambo capturing a crocodile and flashing his teeth, someone said, "Like our Damodaran," from one of the back seats and they all laughed.
The duster descended with a bang on Shobhana Teacher's table. The laughter fluttered and then died on their lips.
"Who said that? Stand up if you have courage," she said between clenched teeth.
The class fell silent. You could even hear the wind howl in the swamp outside.
"What do you think, because you have a bit lighter skin you are superior? 'Do your parents teach you this at home? I will throw you out of this class and have your parents come here begging to take you back."
"What rubbish," she continued after a few moments' silence, which seemed to last till recess. Her eyes were flaming, truly aggrieved and hurt. "At your age have you become so hard and inconsiderate to talk like this? What have you seen so far? Better go and beg in the streets than come here and make such comments."
Everybody shifted uneasily in his or her seat. The prospect of having their parents come to school scared them, as did the prospect of being beggars in the sweltering heat outside their classroom windows.
She stood there glaring at them. She considered it an insult to her not to Damodaran. Damodaran was crying. His soft sobs filled the silence. She went to him put her hands around him and asked him to go and wash his face. Then followed a long discourse on how people perceived each other. She talked of how color was made an invisible weapon to subdue and divide people. How the invaders and colonists thought that ethnic Indians were inferior because of their darker color. How they were sorely mistaken.
Not a single student ever teased Damodaran again.
He could still remember the incident when he had to participate in a debate and he was scared at the prospect. He had to address the entire school and he felt that they would surely murder him with their eyes. The very thought made his knees shake. It was Shobana Teacher, the president of the debating society, who gave him the subject of the debate when he met her on the first floor verandah. The very sight of her made him tremble and stutter. It was then he saw her from up close. Her skin was much more finely toned than he had imagined. It was as if her skin had no pores and required no powder or make up. There was something inexplicably beautiful about it. The red bindi had a character all its own. It sat on her skin like a shining red sun, dominating her face. It really seemed like an invincible third eye looking at him. In the effusion from the bright afternoon sun, she had seemed like a wonderful creature.
"Don't be shy like a girl," she said smiling. As if girls were shy. Not a single girl in his class was shy according to him. Their shyness was only imaginary, a veil, a front, to hide their words and feelings in a society that deprived them of their legitimate rights.
"Can you speak on 'Should India Remain a Democracy'?"
Again he was silent. He wanted to escape and run away. Those eyes looking at him seemed even more intrusive than that of the whole assembly staring at him when he would speak.. What if he was to stumble and forget his lines? What if?
"You need not think about them." She said as if she had read his thoughts. "You have to think your thoughts and express them. Think about what is inside you and what you feel about it. Say what you feel is right. Read and understand your subject. No problem if you are wrong. Speak with conviction. You will improve as you go along."
Suddenly it all became clear. It was as if he was being given an opportunity. He had never had the attention of his friends all to himself. Now this, this unforgettably beautiful woman, was giving him a chance to speak to them about his ideal world, what he wanted it to be when he grew up. That was true courage and he felt courageous standing before that bold and radiant woman. That debate completely changed his outlook towards public speaking.
Then he clearly remembered the school annual day when the play 'Mrs. Addis' was to be performed. Everybody, even her jealous colleagues, admitted that Shobhana Teacher would fit the role. Some clever make up was applied to her face to turn her into an old woman. She wore a caftan that reached to her toes and had small round glasses perched way down on her pert nose. Though her stance was always proud and erect, she stooped her shoulders for the role and said her lines with a slight tremor in her voice. So convincing was she that many parents who attended couldn't recognize her as Shobhana Teacher.
"Teacher, you looked exactly like the real Mrs. Addis," students gushed, though they could never have imagined what a fictional character who lived somewhere in the western world would or should look like.
"Yes, it was a superb performance, just solid and fantastic."
"Teacher, you should have been an actress, you would have given a tough fight to Hema Malini."
Such were the stories woven around her, which ultimately invested her with almost legendary traits, a halo of sorts. Now lost in sweet memories he felt his skin prickle with goose bumps as he imagined the massive crush he, like many others, had on her.
Then he passed his final year in school and entered college. With college came a new life and a freedom and radical idealism of the dopey, rebellious and hippyish seventies. Nobody had prepared him for college, no, not even Shobhana Teacher. She, being from Kerala, was the product of an intellectual ferment altogether different than that prevalent in Bombay then. In the confusion that ensued, school and Shobhana Teacher were forgotten. He never even visited school again except once to collect an award she had announced for 'achieving' the highest mark in her subject. How he had 'achieved' something he had badly wanted! Newer, adolescent crushes were developing in the college campus and his schoolboy crush for her was temporarily forgotten. He felt lost in the thousands of loud-talking boys and girls who considered college a place to flirt, romance and play pranks. The teachers didn't give a damn who attended class and who didn't. Teachers in college never took any interest in their students. They didn't even know their names. Yes, one teacher remembered the number of the table on which he worked in the laboratory when he met her to clear a doubt about Charles Law.
"Table number 21, hope that clears your doubt about “Charles Low”?" This teacher had said as if it was some lowly task she had to perform.
He wanted to learn why things were done a certain way in the laboratory, not mechanically repeat what he was told to do. At the back of his mind must have been the ideal teacher that Shobhana Teacher had been urging him to learn and understand.
"What is the purpose of analyzing these powders and solutions day in and day out? Tell us how it would be useful and what we can do with it."
"You do what you are told to do and fill up your journals," was all “Charles Low” would reply.
Then came the news that Shobhana Teacher was diagnosed as suffering from an incurable disease. Cancer. Why had it to be her? She had to resign. That was the time his father had a fall on the way back from the market and had died after two months in hospital. Things happened so fast, he could not even think of going to the school to meet her. How would he face her after all these years?
Then one day he saw her! He was in a train and she was on the platform of Chembur (a Bombay suburb) railway station. His eyes were drawn to her as if by some magnetic force that existed, unknown to both of them. There she stood proudly erect and dignified. The disease had done nothing to lower her values and her self-esteem. Only the hair had gone gray, a dignified gray, but the eyes were still sharp, focussed as if blazing with an unquenchable fire. It seemed life had chosen her to display how courage could be had when faced with adversity. The train started and was moving away.
He saw her glance in his direction. He raised his hand and waved. Their eyes met briefly, locked, it seemed as if a million words and thought passed between their eyes. Words and thoughts of suffering, pain and disillusionment. For a brief moment her lips parted in a smile. Yes, she had recognized him, after all these years. How their worlds had changed since he had seen her step into their classroom carrying the sweet smell of jasmine? How can she die? She cannot. She still lives in the minds of students like him.
"Thank you, Shobhana Teacher," he folded the paper and whispered reverently to himself.
Again he looked at the eyes that fixated on them as awkward teenagers not long ago. Yes, they were the same. Just a look was enough to freeze them. When she entered a class a hushed silence would fall over it, in awe of the fragile woman whose beauty and character seemed to radiate through her. In their awkward adolescence, they considered her idealism their only hope against the big, bad world outside. She was a woman who had contributed to her profession and to her students by doing more than what was required from her.
He stared at those luminous eyes disbelieving, his own eyes filled with tears.
He still remembered the day she first came to school. There was excitement all around and curiosity. Soon the buzz spread. Is the new teacher for our class? Is she going to speak to me? I saw her coming down the stairs, oh, what beauty! Was it really her own skin or was she applying make up? Was the bright red bindi she wore very expensive? What sari did she wear today?
They were all children from working class backgrounds. They were students in a school in a remote suburb of Bombay bordered on one side by a silent swamp and on the other by the echoing clatter of rails. He distinctly remembered the school, wall of which were unpainted, the steel reinforcements still sticking out. Inside the classroom, the walls were white washed.
The school couldn't afford fans and in the summer the heat that swept in through the windows was killing. The back yard was thickly overgrown with weeds. These weeds, if he remembered correctly, were never cut but were stomped and flattened by hundreds of feet to play football, volleyball and cricket. Around the back were plantain trees and a few bushes into which they dived chasing colorful butterflies. In those bushes they urinated daily and watched the bushes dry and die, a juvenile revenge for keeping them confined to their classes for long periods. Inside the class it was hot and they perspired freely. Yet it was school, loved and hated, exhilarating and disappointing.
They left it each evening to return the following afternoon, bathed, powdered, tiffin in their bags, note books and text books neatly packed, uniforms washed and ironed. The Hindu girls wore sandal paste on their foreheads. The boys, if they wore sandal paste, were ribbed to no end.
They exchanged comic books during intervals. War comics and Wild West comics. They would read comic books hidden between textbooks in class. Sitting hunched over a single comic book a group of them would eagerly devour the story during the recess. "Read fast, fast na," they would tell the slower readers as they were consumed by the suspense of what would happen next and would fume and fidget.
A boy was suspended for writing obscenities in the toilet. "Aaaaah! What cheek," the girls would exclaim. A girl was suspended for receiving a love letter. "Hey! Fast one!" the boys would shout. This was the kind of news that made it to the headlines in the rather mundane school. The stern Principal, Mukundan Iyer, came with a cane hiding behind him and whacked anyone found playing 'statue' (a game where you had to freeze when two fingers were pointed at you like a gun). The morning assembly and prayer were full of suppressed giggling and whispered comments. All this flashed through his mind like it was yesterday. If it was yesterday, how could Shobhana Teacher be dead?
It was spring outside when she walked into their classroom with the sweet smelling freshness of the jasmine that adorned her hair. She always wore a bunch of stringed jasmines in her hair. She wore a red sari that matched the vermilion in the center of her forehead and in the parting of her hair. None of the other teachers dabbed vermilion in the parting of their hair. That was her uniqueness. She was so different she stood out from the crowd. Vermilion in the parting of her hair was a symbol of piety.
In a society, which resorted to teasing as a means of attracting the opposite sex, nobody would dare tease a woman with vermilion in her hair parting. They would know that she had a husband and that they stood no chance whatsoever. Such was their belief. Not that anyone would dare to tease Shobhana Teacher. She was a woman who held her head high and didn't hang it in shame. She was a woman who could look straight in the eye of injustice and speak the truth. That first day she had stood in front of them like a Hindu goddess, full of confidence, her unafraid eyes surveying the eager faces raised to her.
"Good Afternoon... Teacher..." they had chorused, the 'a-f-t-e-r-n-o-o-n' and 't-e-a-c-h-e-r' bit was long and languid from the afternoon torpor. It was hot.
They listened to her in rapt attention as she spoke in class. Her voice had the sweet affection and admonition of an elder sister or an indulgent aunt, not the sharp, cutting, bullying shriek of the other teachers.
"Thank you... Teacher..." they had chorused when she left class.
She turned around. A smile lit her face.
"No need to thank me... I am only doing my job... It looks as if you are relieved to see me go..."
From that day though the 'Good Afternoons' continued to be sung, nobody sang 'Thank You' when the teacher left. She came well prepared and had all her facts in memory as she stood before them talking about history as if was a story, and was a well-remembered experience in her life. She did not declaim nor was did she badger like the other teachers. She spoke persuasively, giving an example here, a well intentioned but humorous comment to which her students laughed. She held their gaze and they held hers, even the duffers who sat on the last benches were enthralled. She looked at them, compassionately, without arrogance or condescension.
He could vaguely remember an English class in which there was a passage from a lesson that had the exclamation 'bah' in it.
She said a perfect 'bah' with a delicate inflection.
"Bah," he had repeated after her aloud, unknowingly, unwittingly.
The class erupted into laughter.
"Murli, I thought you were a good boy," was all she said turning towards him. That was enough to silence him for the rest of his life.
From that day the mortal fear of being thought a bad boy by Shobhana Teacher would haunt him. No, he shouldn't do that. What if Shobhana Teacher thought him a bad boy? That instant his view of life changed into something that stood for her. With just one sentence she had firmly entrenched him on the side of good as against evil.
Not that he was a bad student. He constantly ranked third in class. But every time his mark sheet arrived on his desk it had the admonition in red ink on it: "Try to achieve the first rank."
He had looked up 'achieve' in the dictionary then. He had a vague idea of its meaning, but wanted to be sure. It was exactly what he had thought it would be. Achieve, achievement, achiever, reach or attain, accomplish. He must reach and achieve and accomplish. And her signature on the mark sheet! A big curved 's' followed by a long line and a few squiggles at the end. Someone who could sign so beautifully had to be beautiful.
Another day, she was teaching an English lesson (it was abridged from a famous book, he couldn't remember which one) that had a character named Sambo in it. Now, Sambo was black and the lesson was unashamedly racist in describing his dark skin and flashing white teeth. When a student read that part everyone snickered looking at a dark-skinned boy, Damodaran, sitting in the extreme left desk in the middle row. Damodaran, too, had smooth, dark, velvety skin and flashing white teeth. When the lesson came to Sambo capturing a crocodile and flashing his teeth, someone said, "Like our Damodaran," from one of the back seats and they all laughed.
The duster descended with a bang on Shobhana Teacher's table. The laughter fluttered and then died on their lips.
"Who said that? Stand up if you have courage," she said between clenched teeth.
The class fell silent. You could even hear the wind howl in the swamp outside.
"What do you think, because you have a bit lighter skin you are superior? 'Do your parents teach you this at home? I will throw you out of this class and have your parents come here begging to take you back."
"What rubbish," she continued after a few moments' silence, which seemed to last till recess. Her eyes were flaming, truly aggrieved and hurt. "At your age have you become so hard and inconsiderate to talk like this? What have you seen so far? Better go and beg in the streets than come here and make such comments."
Everybody shifted uneasily in his or her seat. The prospect of having their parents come to school scared them, as did the prospect of being beggars in the sweltering heat outside their classroom windows.
She stood there glaring at them. She considered it an insult to her not to Damodaran. Damodaran was crying. His soft sobs filled the silence. She went to him put her hands around him and asked him to go and wash his face. Then followed a long discourse on how people perceived each other. She talked of how color was made an invisible weapon to subdue and divide people. How the invaders and colonists thought that ethnic Indians were inferior because of their darker color. How they were sorely mistaken.
Not a single student ever teased Damodaran again.
He could still remember the incident when he had to participate in a debate and he was scared at the prospect. He had to address the entire school and he felt that they would surely murder him with their eyes. The very thought made his knees shake. It was Shobana Teacher, the president of the debating society, who gave him the subject of the debate when he met her on the first floor verandah. The very sight of her made him tremble and stutter. It was then he saw her from up close. Her skin was much more finely toned than he had imagined. It was as if her skin had no pores and required no powder or make up. There was something inexplicably beautiful about it. The red bindi had a character all its own. It sat on her skin like a shining red sun, dominating her face. It really seemed like an invincible third eye looking at him. In the effusion from the bright afternoon sun, she had seemed like a wonderful creature.
"Don't be shy like a girl," she said smiling. As if girls were shy. Not a single girl in his class was shy according to him. Their shyness was only imaginary, a veil, a front, to hide their words and feelings in a society that deprived them of their legitimate rights.
"Can you speak on 'Should India Remain a Democracy'?"
Again he was silent. He wanted to escape and run away. Those eyes looking at him seemed even more intrusive than that of the whole assembly staring at him when he would speak.. What if he was to stumble and forget his lines? What if?
"You need not think about them." She said as if she had read his thoughts. "You have to think your thoughts and express them. Think about what is inside you and what you feel about it. Say what you feel is right. Read and understand your subject. No problem if you are wrong. Speak with conviction. You will improve as you go along."
Suddenly it all became clear. It was as if he was being given an opportunity. He had never had the attention of his friends all to himself. Now this, this unforgettably beautiful woman, was giving him a chance to speak to them about his ideal world, what he wanted it to be when he grew up. That was true courage and he felt courageous standing before that bold and radiant woman. That debate completely changed his outlook towards public speaking.
Then he clearly remembered the school annual day when the play 'Mrs. Addis' was to be performed. Everybody, even her jealous colleagues, admitted that Shobhana Teacher would fit the role. Some clever make up was applied to her face to turn her into an old woman. She wore a caftan that reached to her toes and had small round glasses perched way down on her pert nose. Though her stance was always proud and erect, she stooped her shoulders for the role and said her lines with a slight tremor in her voice. So convincing was she that many parents who attended couldn't recognize her as Shobhana Teacher.
"Teacher, you looked exactly like the real Mrs. Addis," students gushed, though they could never have imagined what a fictional character who lived somewhere in the western world would or should look like.
"Yes, it was a superb performance, just solid and fantastic."
"Teacher, you should have been an actress, you would have given a tough fight to Hema Malini."
Such were the stories woven around her, which ultimately invested her with almost legendary traits, a halo of sorts. Now lost in sweet memories he felt his skin prickle with goose bumps as he imagined the massive crush he, like many others, had on her.
Then he passed his final year in school and entered college. With college came a new life and a freedom and radical idealism of the dopey, rebellious and hippyish seventies. Nobody had prepared him for college, no, not even Shobhana Teacher. She, being from Kerala, was the product of an intellectual ferment altogether different than that prevalent in Bombay then. In the confusion that ensued, school and Shobhana Teacher were forgotten. He never even visited school again except once to collect an award she had announced for 'achieving' the highest mark in her subject. How he had 'achieved' something he had badly wanted! Newer, adolescent crushes were developing in the college campus and his schoolboy crush for her was temporarily forgotten. He felt lost in the thousands of loud-talking boys and girls who considered college a place to flirt, romance and play pranks. The teachers didn't give a damn who attended class and who didn't. Teachers in college never took any interest in their students. They didn't even know their names. Yes, one teacher remembered the number of the table on which he worked in the laboratory when he met her to clear a doubt about Charles Law.
"Table number 21, hope that clears your doubt about “Charles Low”?" This teacher had said as if it was some lowly task she had to perform.
He wanted to learn why things were done a certain way in the laboratory, not mechanically repeat what he was told to do. At the back of his mind must have been the ideal teacher that Shobhana Teacher had been urging him to learn and understand.
"What is the purpose of analyzing these powders and solutions day in and day out? Tell us how it would be useful and what we can do with it."
"You do what you are told to do and fill up your journals," was all “Charles Low” would reply.
Then came the news that Shobhana Teacher was diagnosed as suffering from an incurable disease. Cancer. Why had it to be her? She had to resign. That was the time his father had a fall on the way back from the market and had died after two months in hospital. Things happened so fast, he could not even think of going to the school to meet her. How would he face her after all these years?
Then one day he saw her! He was in a train and she was on the platform of Chembur (a Bombay suburb) railway station. His eyes were drawn to her as if by some magnetic force that existed, unknown to both of them. There she stood proudly erect and dignified. The disease had done nothing to lower her values and her self-esteem. Only the hair had gone gray, a dignified gray, but the eyes were still sharp, focussed as if blazing with an unquenchable fire. It seemed life had chosen her to display how courage could be had when faced with adversity. The train started and was moving away.
He saw her glance in his direction. He raised his hand and waved. Their eyes met briefly, locked, it seemed as if a million words and thought passed between their eyes. Words and thoughts of suffering, pain and disillusionment. For a brief moment her lips parted in a smile. Yes, she had recognized him, after all these years. How their worlds had changed since he had seen her step into their classroom carrying the sweet smell of jasmine? How can she die? She cannot. She still lives in the minds of students like him.
"Thank you, Shobhana Teacher," he folded the paper and whispered reverently to himself.
DON’T CALL ME, I WILL CALL YOU
“Don't call me, I will call you,” Thomachen said.
This was the fifth time Kuriachen heard those same words. He was sitting on a folding chair by the phone and suddenly he felt like throwing the phone against the wall or banging it down. Instead, he place it gently back and wondered at the callousness of his friend, Thomachen. Nice friend he was indeed.
For days, Kuriachen had been pursuing Thomachen with a proposal for his second daughter, Mercy. Thomachen put him off every time with some excuse or the other. Kuriachen had never thought his friend could be so smooth, treacherous and vile. But he was the father of a girl and it was difficult being that, especially when he had three daughters. It was as if he had depreciated considerably in the eyes of society just because all his children were female. As if they were a burden.
But he had brought up his daughters like gold.
“My daughters, all of them are like gold, all my daughters,” was his constant refrain. “Any boy would be lucky to have my daugther as his wife.”
But as they grew older and the prospect of marriage came up, he discovered an ugly face of the people, even friends around him.
“Aren't you marrying off your daughters?”
“What age are they?”
“What business is it of yours? If you have a proposal tell me. Why do you constantly needle me like this?” Kuriachen had shot back, half playfully.
But the full realization of the reasons behind their teasing was apparent to him. Never had he felt that his daughters were a burden. They were sweet and loving girls. They didn't know the ways of the world. They were never meant to know. All they were encouraged to talk about at home were shorthand and typing speeds and how they were progressing with the diphthongs.
Kuriachen worked at the Atomic Energy Commission office as a stenographer. His wife, Annamma, was an upper division clerk in a central government office. Both were cushy jobs, with lots of benefits of their own. For example, if they wanted they could take leave for months together and nobody would ask them for an explanation. That had happened when his first daughter, Maria was expecting. Annamma had taken leave for almost six months to care for her. If in the middle of the day they felt sick, they could leave the office and not be marked absent or as being on leave. They had facilities like free medical care, free hospitalization, dearness allowance, provident fund, gratuity, bonus and travel allowance. These were some of the privileges they enjoyed as government employees. What more could they ask for? When he got a job in a government office, Kuriachen's joy knew no bounds. And when he married a girl who worked in a government office, he was thrilled beyond words. Together, with both of them working for the government, life would be an interminable succession of joys and happiness. Or so he thought.
The birth of his daughters made him realize that he had to save money. A lot of money. Because giving them away in marriage would not be a joke. He would become a joke if he didn't get proper husbands for them. They had to be tall, fair and with jobs, preferably, in government offices. So when his elder daughter, Maria, was of marriageable age, he set about finding a husband for her. Thomachen's son was first in his list. Georgie was fair, well-built, personable and worked in a bank. He had asked Thomachen several times if he could visit him and talk things over. But Thomachen, shrewd and vile man that he was, kept putting it off. He and Thomachen worked in the same office and they went by the same bus to work and attended the same Mar Thoma church in Chembur.
“Thomacha, why are you avoiding me? Why don't we sit together and discuss things over? After all we are friends and have known each other so long.”
“Kuriacha, the time will come. What's the hurry?”
“I have girls to marry off. Don't you realize?”
“The time will come for them. Let Georgie finish his computer course.”
Georgie's ambition was to go to the United States, and he was learning computer programming for that.
“He can learn computer programming after marriage also. Can't he?”
Kuriachen knew that Thomachen was greedy and he considered his son like a fatted calf to be traded to the highest bidder. He was open to bidding now, and knew that once he committed to Kuriachen, he would be tied down to the proposal by public consensus. So he avoided raising the matter with Kuriachen, and studiedly avoided him.
That was when Maria got a good marriage offer, and everything happened so fast that Thomachen and his son was forgotten.
Matthew was a good match for Maria. He worked in the Port Trust and was tall, handsome and a good husband. Kuriachen considered himself very lucky to get him as a son-in-law. The proposal was from a friend of his wife's. The boy's father accepted whatever Kuriachen offered as dowry because Maria was working in the customs department and had a good salary. Besides, it was a government job and everybody's mouth salivated at the mention of a government job -- a steady and secure income for doing virtually nothing.
“In a government job, nobody can question you. It is nobody's business to question anybody. The government is of the people, so who will question the people?” Kuriachen had said to his wife when talk was going on about the proposal.
Before the marriage, he redecorated his flat in Chembur. They had taken out all their fixed deposits, and decided this was a good time to spend it on re-doing the house. He had a western toilet put in place of a squatting Indian toilet, bathroom tiles in the kitchen and toilet, plaster of Paris and paint in all the rooms and a chandelier-like lamp put up in the front room. He bought cloth for new curtains, cushions and cushion covers matching the wall color. A few framed photographs of his parents and their wedding photograph were all dusted and hung in the front room. All this cost money, but he was sure people who came to the house would be impressed and they would come with proposals for Mercy, his second daughter.
But nothing of that sort happened. Mercy worked in a private company and nobody wanted a girl who worked in a private company. That was when Kuriachen developed high blood pressure. He had initiated talks for many proposals, but everybody said the same thing:
“If the girl had a government job we would have agreed, but she has a private job.”
“Don't call me, I will call you back.”
“Only government serving girls will do for us.”
It was as if, he, Kuriachen, who worked in a prestigious government department had become a pariah dog. He was proud of working in a government office, how could they downgrade him so much because his daughter worked in a private office. Moreover, Mercy was still writing exams and trying to qualify for a job in the Railways or the Income Tax office.
The doctor advised him to take it easy and not to get too upset about anything. But how could he not get upset when he had lost all credibility in their community. He was very careful to invite both Thomachen and Georgie to Maria's wedding. Not to show off, but he still had Georgie in mind for his second daughter, Mercy. He had gone personally to Thomachen's house with the wedding invitation with Annamma. Their words had been cordial and they had talked most amiably about office matters and the coming revision in pay scales. But on the day of Maria's wedding, he kept an eye peeled for Thomachen, his wife and Georgie. But none of them showed up for the wedding.
Was something wrong in the way he invited them? But he had shown them all respect. An invitation with a personal visit by both the bride's father and mother was supposed to be a great honor, and nobody ever turned down such an invitation. Where had he gone wrong? After that when he met Thomachen, he seemed cold, distant and forbidding.
“Thomacha, if I did anything wrong please forgive me. Why didn't you come to the wedding?”
“What? I am not saying you did anything wrong Kuriacha… ”
“Then what is wrong? If Maria is already married then let's talk about Mercy. She is of marriageable age, more beautiful than Maria, only… she works in a private office.”
“No, but I said let Georgie finish his computer course then we can talk of these things. I don't want to disrupt his studies.”
“But then these things… you don't know how it is. Things happen with lightning speed in marriages. I want to cement our friendship and this liaison was in my mind for a long time. Why don't you give me your word?” Kuriachen said, his pressure rising.
“How can I give you my word when I don't know what Georgie has to say about this?”
“Georgie is a nice boy, he will agree if you do.”
“How do I know?”
“Why didn't he come for Maria's wedding? Do you think there was some shortcoming in my invitation?”
“Nothing of that sort, Kuriacha. I had some other engagement on that day.”
“See, we are friends. We are working in the same office. We go to the same church. We know each other's family backgrounds. Do you think you would get a better proposal? If it is a question of money, I am willing to withdraw from my provident fund and pay you.”
Thomachen was evasive as much as Kuriachen was persuasive.
Then Thomachen received this proposal from a rich Indian settled in America. For a while, Thomachen's dream of sending Georgie to the United States seemed a reality. The girl and her father were coming to see the boy shortly. There was excitement in Thomachen's house, and sadness in Kuriachen's. Naturally, the dowry would be a princely amount, no doubt about that. Much more than Kurachen could ever afford.
“That stinking dog, born and living in poverty…” Kuriachen fumed to Annamma.
“Don't get so angry or your pressure will shoot up.”
“What if it shoots up, eh?” asked Kuriachen, as combative and confrontational as ever.
Then Kuriachen had a mild heart attack. It began as a dull pain in the chest and soon radiated to his arms and legs. Annamma rushed him to the free Atomic Energy Staff Hospital where he continued to fume despite being told to relax and take it easy.
“Doctor, how can I relax when someone I trusted like a brother has let me down so badly?”
“You stop thinking about it, or your condition will deteriorate,” the doctor said.
So Kuriachen spent a few weeks in the luxury of the free medical care under the watchful eyes of his wife, daughters, nurses and doctors. His dear daughters, whom he had brought up 'like gold', came and nursed him like the loving daughters they were. In those few days, he realized that he was lucky in having three lovely, well-behaved daughters. They understood him more than any ill-mannered boy like Georgie would ever do. Maria took leave and was by his side all the time and had to be persuaded to go home every night. Mercy brought him food and medicines, and made sure that he took all the prescribed medicines at the proper time. The youngest, Molly, was in school and was too young to understand what sickness meant, and she spent her days in blissful unawareness of her father's condition. Annamma would be with him at night, and would go home only in the morning when Maria came to relieve her. He felt rich and happy in those few days as a result of the love of those three wonderful human beings.
'That Thomachen, let him burn in hell. I don't care', Kurianchen thought.
Soon visitors came bearing the news from their Mar Thoma parish. Secretly they all knew the cause of Kuriachen's affliction. They comforted him. They told him all about Thomachen's greed.
“That girl, she is retarded, ugly… she can't speak two words of Malayalam,” they said to console him.
“Who would want a boy like Georgie? He is a duffer too. Heard that he was not making any progress in computer class.”
Kuriachen recovered and started going to work. He would see Thomachen, but would not speak to him. He could see that Thomachen felt guilty at the turn of events, but made no overtures towards him. Kuriachen gave him a cold glare every time they passed each other. The animosity was mutual now.
Then, as if it was some quirk of fate, news came that the Indian father (who was in America), whose daughter was being considered for Georgie, was being repatriated back to India. It turned out that he was an illegal immigrant who had overstayed, and was detected by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. That broke Thomachen's heart. Georgie was not making any progress in computer programming and his dreams of having him settled in the United States were shattered. What use is an ugly, retarded girl living in India, even if she would bring a big dowry? The engagement was broken. It was Thomachen's turn to have high blood pressure and he had a heart attack too, a major one.
Kuriachen went to visit him in hospital.
“Edo, would it all have come to pass if you had listened to me, eh?”
“Kuriacha, I am very, very sorry, forgive me.”
“You deserve to burn in hell, not forgiveness.”
Thomachen recovered, though slowly. He didn't have loving daughters to care for him. Boys were boys, and Georgie was a boy with his own preoccupations.
Church members now shunned Thomachen, and not Kuriachen.
“Where is your American daughter-in-law?” They teased him openly.
One day on their way to work, they met in a bus.
Kuriachen could see that Thomachen was suffering a lot because of his follies. He was not the smooth talking Thomachen of old. He was downcast, pale and had grown thin.
Kuriachen sat beside Thomachen.
“How are you Thomacha? See, there is nothing to worry about. I have gone through it also. You will make it. But remember, one should be honest and not a hypocrite like you.”
“Kuriacha, I ask your forgiveness…”
“When I had brought my daughter's proposal, you were busy talking with that American, weren't you?”
“That is over… don't trouble me anymore with that… the very thought of it rankles me. Tell me how is your family?”
“They are fine. Mercy has passed her Railways test and interview, and has been selected.”
“Oh! Is that so?”
“Yes,” Kuriachen said proudly.
“That means she is a government servant like us? With provident fund, medical, gratuity and ample leave?”
“Yes… yes… You forgot free travel three times a year to our native state of Kerala.”
That night Thomachen phoned Kuriachen at home. The subject of their discussion: Would they consider Mercy's alliance with Georgie? No, they didn't want any dowry at all. Just a beautiful daughter-in-law with a job in the Railways would do!
“At last he had the decency to phone me back,” said Kuriachen with a triumphant laugh.
This was the fifth time Kuriachen heard those same words. He was sitting on a folding chair by the phone and suddenly he felt like throwing the phone against the wall or banging it down. Instead, he place it gently back and wondered at the callousness of his friend, Thomachen. Nice friend he was indeed.
For days, Kuriachen had been pursuing Thomachen with a proposal for his second daughter, Mercy. Thomachen put him off every time with some excuse or the other. Kuriachen had never thought his friend could be so smooth, treacherous and vile. But he was the father of a girl and it was difficult being that, especially when he had three daughters. It was as if he had depreciated considerably in the eyes of society just because all his children were female. As if they were a burden.
But he had brought up his daughters like gold.
“My daughters, all of them are like gold, all my daughters,” was his constant refrain. “Any boy would be lucky to have my daugther as his wife.”
But as they grew older and the prospect of marriage came up, he discovered an ugly face of the people, even friends around him.
“Aren't you marrying off your daughters?”
“What age are they?”
“What business is it of yours? If you have a proposal tell me. Why do you constantly needle me like this?” Kuriachen had shot back, half playfully.
But the full realization of the reasons behind their teasing was apparent to him. Never had he felt that his daughters were a burden. They were sweet and loving girls. They didn't know the ways of the world. They were never meant to know. All they were encouraged to talk about at home were shorthand and typing speeds and how they were progressing with the diphthongs.
Kuriachen worked at the Atomic Energy Commission office as a stenographer. His wife, Annamma, was an upper division clerk in a central government office. Both were cushy jobs, with lots of benefits of their own. For example, if they wanted they could take leave for months together and nobody would ask them for an explanation. That had happened when his first daughter, Maria was expecting. Annamma had taken leave for almost six months to care for her. If in the middle of the day they felt sick, they could leave the office and not be marked absent or as being on leave. They had facilities like free medical care, free hospitalization, dearness allowance, provident fund, gratuity, bonus and travel allowance. These were some of the privileges they enjoyed as government employees. What more could they ask for? When he got a job in a government office, Kuriachen's joy knew no bounds. And when he married a girl who worked in a government office, he was thrilled beyond words. Together, with both of them working for the government, life would be an interminable succession of joys and happiness. Or so he thought.
The birth of his daughters made him realize that he had to save money. A lot of money. Because giving them away in marriage would not be a joke. He would become a joke if he didn't get proper husbands for them. They had to be tall, fair and with jobs, preferably, in government offices. So when his elder daughter, Maria, was of marriageable age, he set about finding a husband for her. Thomachen's son was first in his list. Georgie was fair, well-built, personable and worked in a bank. He had asked Thomachen several times if he could visit him and talk things over. But Thomachen, shrewd and vile man that he was, kept putting it off. He and Thomachen worked in the same office and they went by the same bus to work and attended the same Mar Thoma church in Chembur.
“Thomacha, why are you avoiding me? Why don't we sit together and discuss things over? After all we are friends and have known each other so long.”
“Kuriacha, the time will come. What's the hurry?”
“I have girls to marry off. Don't you realize?”
“The time will come for them. Let Georgie finish his computer course.”
Georgie's ambition was to go to the United States, and he was learning computer programming for that.
“He can learn computer programming after marriage also. Can't he?”
Kuriachen knew that Thomachen was greedy and he considered his son like a fatted calf to be traded to the highest bidder. He was open to bidding now, and knew that once he committed to Kuriachen, he would be tied down to the proposal by public consensus. So he avoided raising the matter with Kuriachen, and studiedly avoided him.
That was when Maria got a good marriage offer, and everything happened so fast that Thomachen and his son was forgotten.
Matthew was a good match for Maria. He worked in the Port Trust and was tall, handsome and a good husband. Kuriachen considered himself very lucky to get him as a son-in-law. The proposal was from a friend of his wife's. The boy's father accepted whatever Kuriachen offered as dowry because Maria was working in the customs department and had a good salary. Besides, it was a government job and everybody's mouth salivated at the mention of a government job -- a steady and secure income for doing virtually nothing.
“In a government job, nobody can question you. It is nobody's business to question anybody. The government is of the people, so who will question the people?” Kuriachen had said to his wife when talk was going on about the proposal.
Before the marriage, he redecorated his flat in Chembur. They had taken out all their fixed deposits, and decided this was a good time to spend it on re-doing the house. He had a western toilet put in place of a squatting Indian toilet, bathroom tiles in the kitchen and toilet, plaster of Paris and paint in all the rooms and a chandelier-like lamp put up in the front room. He bought cloth for new curtains, cushions and cushion covers matching the wall color. A few framed photographs of his parents and their wedding photograph were all dusted and hung in the front room. All this cost money, but he was sure people who came to the house would be impressed and they would come with proposals for Mercy, his second daughter.
But nothing of that sort happened. Mercy worked in a private company and nobody wanted a girl who worked in a private company. That was when Kuriachen developed high blood pressure. He had initiated talks for many proposals, but everybody said the same thing:
“If the girl had a government job we would have agreed, but she has a private job.”
“Don't call me, I will call you back.”
“Only government serving girls will do for us.”
It was as if, he, Kuriachen, who worked in a prestigious government department had become a pariah dog. He was proud of working in a government office, how could they downgrade him so much because his daughter worked in a private office. Moreover, Mercy was still writing exams and trying to qualify for a job in the Railways or the Income Tax office.
The doctor advised him to take it easy and not to get too upset about anything. But how could he not get upset when he had lost all credibility in their community. He was very careful to invite both Thomachen and Georgie to Maria's wedding. Not to show off, but he still had Georgie in mind for his second daughter, Mercy. He had gone personally to Thomachen's house with the wedding invitation with Annamma. Their words had been cordial and they had talked most amiably about office matters and the coming revision in pay scales. But on the day of Maria's wedding, he kept an eye peeled for Thomachen, his wife and Georgie. But none of them showed up for the wedding.
Was something wrong in the way he invited them? But he had shown them all respect. An invitation with a personal visit by both the bride's father and mother was supposed to be a great honor, and nobody ever turned down such an invitation. Where had he gone wrong? After that when he met Thomachen, he seemed cold, distant and forbidding.
“Thomacha, if I did anything wrong please forgive me. Why didn't you come to the wedding?”
“What? I am not saying you did anything wrong Kuriacha… ”
“Then what is wrong? If Maria is already married then let's talk about Mercy. She is of marriageable age, more beautiful than Maria, only… she works in a private office.”
“No, but I said let Georgie finish his computer course then we can talk of these things. I don't want to disrupt his studies.”
“But then these things… you don't know how it is. Things happen with lightning speed in marriages. I want to cement our friendship and this liaison was in my mind for a long time. Why don't you give me your word?” Kuriachen said, his pressure rising.
“How can I give you my word when I don't know what Georgie has to say about this?”
“Georgie is a nice boy, he will agree if you do.”
“How do I know?”
“Why didn't he come for Maria's wedding? Do you think there was some shortcoming in my invitation?”
“Nothing of that sort, Kuriacha. I had some other engagement on that day.”
“See, we are friends. We are working in the same office. We go to the same church. We know each other's family backgrounds. Do you think you would get a better proposal? If it is a question of money, I am willing to withdraw from my provident fund and pay you.”
Thomachen was evasive as much as Kuriachen was persuasive.
Then Thomachen received this proposal from a rich Indian settled in America. For a while, Thomachen's dream of sending Georgie to the United States seemed a reality. The girl and her father were coming to see the boy shortly. There was excitement in Thomachen's house, and sadness in Kuriachen's. Naturally, the dowry would be a princely amount, no doubt about that. Much more than Kurachen could ever afford.
“That stinking dog, born and living in poverty…” Kuriachen fumed to Annamma.
“Don't get so angry or your pressure will shoot up.”
“What if it shoots up, eh?” asked Kuriachen, as combative and confrontational as ever.
Then Kuriachen had a mild heart attack. It began as a dull pain in the chest and soon radiated to his arms and legs. Annamma rushed him to the free Atomic Energy Staff Hospital where he continued to fume despite being told to relax and take it easy.
“Doctor, how can I relax when someone I trusted like a brother has let me down so badly?”
“You stop thinking about it, or your condition will deteriorate,” the doctor said.
So Kuriachen spent a few weeks in the luxury of the free medical care under the watchful eyes of his wife, daughters, nurses and doctors. His dear daughters, whom he had brought up 'like gold', came and nursed him like the loving daughters they were. In those few days, he realized that he was lucky in having three lovely, well-behaved daughters. They understood him more than any ill-mannered boy like Georgie would ever do. Maria took leave and was by his side all the time and had to be persuaded to go home every night. Mercy brought him food and medicines, and made sure that he took all the prescribed medicines at the proper time. The youngest, Molly, was in school and was too young to understand what sickness meant, and she spent her days in blissful unawareness of her father's condition. Annamma would be with him at night, and would go home only in the morning when Maria came to relieve her. He felt rich and happy in those few days as a result of the love of those three wonderful human beings.
'That Thomachen, let him burn in hell. I don't care', Kurianchen thought.
Soon visitors came bearing the news from their Mar Thoma parish. Secretly they all knew the cause of Kuriachen's affliction. They comforted him. They told him all about Thomachen's greed.
“That girl, she is retarded, ugly… she can't speak two words of Malayalam,” they said to console him.
“Who would want a boy like Georgie? He is a duffer too. Heard that he was not making any progress in computer class.”
Kuriachen recovered and started going to work. He would see Thomachen, but would not speak to him. He could see that Thomachen felt guilty at the turn of events, but made no overtures towards him. Kuriachen gave him a cold glare every time they passed each other. The animosity was mutual now.
Then, as if it was some quirk of fate, news came that the Indian father (who was in America), whose daughter was being considered for Georgie, was being repatriated back to India. It turned out that he was an illegal immigrant who had overstayed, and was detected by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. That broke Thomachen's heart. Georgie was not making any progress in computer programming and his dreams of having him settled in the United States were shattered. What use is an ugly, retarded girl living in India, even if she would bring a big dowry? The engagement was broken. It was Thomachen's turn to have high blood pressure and he had a heart attack too, a major one.
Kuriachen went to visit him in hospital.
“Edo, would it all have come to pass if you had listened to me, eh?”
“Kuriacha, I am very, very sorry, forgive me.”
“You deserve to burn in hell, not forgiveness.”
Thomachen recovered, though slowly. He didn't have loving daughters to care for him. Boys were boys, and Georgie was a boy with his own preoccupations.
Church members now shunned Thomachen, and not Kuriachen.
“Where is your American daughter-in-law?” They teased him openly.
One day on their way to work, they met in a bus.
Kuriachen could see that Thomachen was suffering a lot because of his follies. He was not the smooth talking Thomachen of old. He was downcast, pale and had grown thin.
Kuriachen sat beside Thomachen.
“How are you Thomacha? See, there is nothing to worry about. I have gone through it also. You will make it. But remember, one should be honest and not a hypocrite like you.”
“Kuriacha, I ask your forgiveness…”
“When I had brought my daughter's proposal, you were busy talking with that American, weren't you?”
“That is over… don't trouble me anymore with that… the very thought of it rankles me. Tell me how is your family?”
“They are fine. Mercy has passed her Railways test and interview, and has been selected.”
“Oh! Is that so?”
“Yes,” Kuriachen said proudly.
“That means she is a government servant like us? With provident fund, medical, gratuity and ample leave?”
“Yes… yes… You forgot free travel three times a year to our native state of Kerala.”
That night Thomachen phoned Kuriachen at home. The subject of their discussion: Would they consider Mercy's alliance with Georgie? No, they didn't want any dowry at all. Just a beautiful daughter-in-law with a job in the Railways would do!
“At last he had the decency to phone me back,” said Kuriachen with a triumphant laugh.
THE TENDER COCONUT VENDOR
He said his life has been like an elevator.
“Up... down... up... down... up... down... all along.”
He sat on D.N. Road under an arch of the building in which I worked. He had before him bunches of tender coconuts, all so tender and green and soft enough to be shredded with a sharp knife that rested on a thick denim cloth. He would raise one leg so that his upper leg was horizontal, spread the thick cloth on his knee and shave off the husk of the tender coconuts with deft motions of his long knife. The knife, sharpened to shiny silver every night, was worn and the blade curved in with constant application. It was sharp enough to slice anything in a deft stroke of Mahmood's hand.
Every afternoon, I would descend in the creaking elevator, which had sliding doors, made of wood. Since Mahmood had likened his life to an elevator, I somehow associated the elevator with him and riding in it was as if I was having a lazy conversation with Mahmood. I have seen sliding doors made of steel on elevators but had never seen sliding doors made of wood. The novelty wore off after I became accustomed to its quaintness. After getting down from the elevator, I would walk a few steps to his stall and have a tender coconut. Since I was also from Kerala, he gave it to me for rupees seven though the going rate was rupees ten. First he would shave the bottom half of the coconut and then cut the hard shell in a neat ring and hand me the open end of the coconut to drink the sweetish liquid inside. Then he would neatly incise the husk and fashion a spoon, and with the spoon, scoop out the tender meat of the coconut for me to eat.
“This is not our Kerala coconut,” I said one day.
“No, these are the ones that come from Karnataka, our neighbouring state.”
“The taste is different.”
“Our coconut water is so tasty. Aaah, I remember the coconuts in our fields. I would climb on top of a coconut tree, sit there and have about four or five before coming down. Mother would scold me. Haahaha...” he reminisced.
Everyday we would share pleasantries like this about our beloved Kerala. We were both homesick for our lush native state, draped in the greenery of evergreen coconut palms.
“Tell me, how did you come to Mumbai?” I asked him one day.
“What to say, except that fate brought me here.”
”Did you run away from home?”
“Yes,” he said with a wide and sincere grin. The grin was typical of Malayalees. Malayalees have their own sense of humour and are a fun-loving people except when they are provoked or when injustice is done to them. He had a handsome face. The hair stood in a neat tuft on his head and receded smoothly and evenly to the back of his head. His eyes were wide-set and had the glint of humour. His face was typically round and broad like that of some ageing Malayalee film star.
“Why did you run away?”
“Those days, I wanted to work. Bappa (father) said I had to study and become a big man...a manager. Now I realise Bappa was right and olu (I) was wrong.”
“So you ran away.”
“Yes, when I failed the fourth standard.”
“Then you came to Mumbai and started the tender coconut business?” I prompted.
“No, it was not so easy. I had to work with a Hajiar shaving tender coconut like this. Then I washed dishes in a hotel and then became a waiter and saved enough money. Then I started this business.”
“So, you have been a tender coconut seller till now.”
“No, saar. This is a good business. In a day, I can make a thousand rupees at three rupees profit per coconut. I sleep here on the pavement. I don't pay any rent.”
“Then, where is all the money?”
“Long story, saar.”
“Tell me, I am interested.”
Vehicles honked and cruised past us. The afternoon was hot. I had to go back, ride the rickety elevator with the sliding doors made of wood to the second floor to my mundane office tasks. But the story that emerged, so slowly, so diffidently from Mahmood's mouth, riveted me to the spot. He was discreet now, whispering confidentially.
“You know George Coleho, the trade union leader? Now he is a big minister.”
“Yes.”
“Well, he and I were friends. We would sleep on the pavement outside the West End Watch Company before he became a big minister.”
“Oh, really!”
“If you meet him, tell him “Mahmood Narielwalla says salaam” to him. He will remember me.”
I wondered where I was going to meet the big Union Government minister who changes parties and loyalties like he changes his kurta and if at all he would remember a tender coconut vendor from the streets of Mumbai.
“How do you think I will meet him?”
“You all are big people going around in taxis and airplanes. You will meet him someday somewhere. Me, poor Mahmood, can never meet him now.”
“Yes, I will make it a point to tell him if I meet with him,” I said winking at him.
“I really prospered in my tender coconut business and he used to come and borrow money from me. He said he would set me up in the hotel business. He did. He got me the permission to start hotel Republic. Do you know hotel Republic? I started that hotel.”
Hotel Republic was a narrow and dingy eating joint and I had feasted in its dark interiors on hot mackerel curry. I nodded.
“I was doing very well then. It was like I was ascending to the topmost floor on my elevator at that time. I had money. I had everything. Then my friend left me to become a big leader. I was left without a godfather in this city. In this big city, you need a godfather for everything. Then the police harassment started. It was like riding the elevator down the floors then.”
“Why did the police harass you? What did you do?”
“They jailed me for a month saying I was running a prostitution racket. A few prostitutes may have come there to eat. How could I refuse them? After all, they are also human beings. They may have talked to a few people inside. That doesn't mean I am in their racket. In the hotel business, you can't deny anyone who is hungry, can you? It is business.”
“Yes, I mean, no.”
“Then I sold the hotel to a friend from my village and I was again down like an elevator to the ground floor.”
I chuckled.
His reference to the elevator was quite funny. He said it with a shake of the head, a wide gesture with the hands and a laugh like a snort. His face crinkled into creases and I too got carried away in the waves of laughter it set off.
“Then I started the tender coconut business again,” he said when we had finished laughing, “It is such a lovely business. I love this business. It breaks my heart to peel these tender green children of mine. After all, which fruit offers water to quench the thirst and food to satiate hunger? Which one? Tell me. Yes, they are my children. I look upon them as my children. I sacrifice my children for the thirsty and hungry. I have nobody in this city. Not even a dog to wag its tail at me.”
I thought for a moment and said, “No. None other than coconut.”
He nodded his handsome head in assent.
The afternoon was warm. The lunchtime crowd had gone up the creaking elevator into their cubby holes to yank at the creaky wheels of commerce. I was hesitant to let him continue. I had work waiting for me upstairs on the second floor. He, too, seemed pensive and distracted.
I walked to the elevator and waited for the taciturn elevator operator to open the sliding doors made of wood. The outdated relic seemed to shudder and falter when he turned a round crank pin made of shiny brass that would start it. It groaned on its way up and the lights that were on each floor cast criss-cross shadows upon us.
In the evening, when I descended the same elevator, the tender coconut seller was nowhere to be seen. The next afternoon also he wasn't there and in his place was a young boy doing his work. I bought a tender coconut from the boy who seemed lost in a world of his own. I didn't ask him who he was or where Mahmood, friend of minister George Coelho, had disappeared.
The next day, I overcame my hesitation and asked the boy where Mahmood was.
“Didn't you hear? He had an accident and was admitted to St. George Hospital.”
“Who are you?”
“I am his nephew. I am looking after his business till he is well again.”
The next day, I took special permission from my office to visit a “relative” in St. George Hospital and made it to the hospital, run by the Mumbai Municipal Corporation. I took the elevator to the fourth floor of the hospital to find Mahmood resting in a largish ward with a roof so high that it could have accommodated three floors of a modern housing flat. The hospital ward hadn't changed since the time it had been built by the British and the cots were all of wrought iron, clearly showing on them the wear of the ages. There, on one of these cots, dwarfed by the tall walls, which tapered into the roof above in huge criss-crossing beams and rafters, lay Mahmood. His face had lost its cheerfulness and looked haggard. A sheet was drawn over him and he was propped up against a single pillow. The sheet was of coarse cotton cloth, which looked pale yellow with much washing and rubbing against the washing stone. Behind him was a small veranda and there were patients on cots in the veranda too. Beyond that, I could see the ships moored in the Mumbai harbour. As I watched, a huge crane was lifting some containers and stacking them on the wharf.
“So Mahmood, what happened? I didn't see you and asked your nephew what happened.”
“Yes, friend. It was a tragic accident. I closed my shop and was crossing the road to go to the Republic toilet to urinate. Suddenly, this taxi came out of nowhere, knocked me down and ran over my hand. I cried for help, but nobody came. Do these people have a heart? I lay there writhing in pain and I said, “Allah, take my life if that is what you want. I don't want to live. Why make me suffer like this? I have seen good times and I have seen bad. Why make me go up and down like an elevator?” Then, my friend Azhar, who has a business selling and repairing cameras, saw me and got me admitted in this wretched hospital. At night, the bugs come out and suck the blood and life out of me. What can I do? I can't even get up. I cry again to Allah, “Take me away, don't let me suffer like this.””
“Mahmood, you will be okay. Don't worry. They will take care of you. If you need any money, I can help.”
“Help? I don't want charity. What will I do without my business?”
He is a proud man, he won't accept charity, I thought.
“What happened to your business? You nephew is taking care of it, isn't he?”
“I will never be able to shave tender coconut again,” he said tearfully. His handsome face distorted into creases of agony and the tears streamed down his unshaven face.
“I will never be able to run my tender coconut business again. Serves me right for hurting all those tender children of mine,” he repeated.
“Why?”
With one hand, he removed the sheet that covered him.
I recoiled at the sight I saw.
I was staring at a stump that was once his hand.
As I descended in the smooth, large elevator that didn't creak like the one at my office building, I wondered if his friend, Honourable Union Minister George Coleho, would ever know or care about what had happened to his old friend Mahmood Narielwalla.
“Up... down... up... down... up... down... all along.”
He sat on D.N. Road under an arch of the building in which I worked. He had before him bunches of tender coconuts, all so tender and green and soft enough to be shredded with a sharp knife that rested on a thick denim cloth. He would raise one leg so that his upper leg was horizontal, spread the thick cloth on his knee and shave off the husk of the tender coconuts with deft motions of his long knife. The knife, sharpened to shiny silver every night, was worn and the blade curved in with constant application. It was sharp enough to slice anything in a deft stroke of Mahmood's hand.
Every afternoon, I would descend in the creaking elevator, which had sliding doors, made of wood. Since Mahmood had likened his life to an elevator, I somehow associated the elevator with him and riding in it was as if I was having a lazy conversation with Mahmood. I have seen sliding doors made of steel on elevators but had never seen sliding doors made of wood. The novelty wore off after I became accustomed to its quaintness. After getting down from the elevator, I would walk a few steps to his stall and have a tender coconut. Since I was also from Kerala, he gave it to me for rupees seven though the going rate was rupees ten. First he would shave the bottom half of the coconut and then cut the hard shell in a neat ring and hand me the open end of the coconut to drink the sweetish liquid inside. Then he would neatly incise the husk and fashion a spoon, and with the spoon, scoop out the tender meat of the coconut for me to eat.
“This is not our Kerala coconut,” I said one day.
“No, these are the ones that come from Karnataka, our neighbouring state.”
“The taste is different.”
“Our coconut water is so tasty. Aaah, I remember the coconuts in our fields. I would climb on top of a coconut tree, sit there and have about four or five before coming down. Mother would scold me. Haahaha...” he reminisced.
Everyday we would share pleasantries like this about our beloved Kerala. We were both homesick for our lush native state, draped in the greenery of evergreen coconut palms.
“Tell me, how did you come to Mumbai?” I asked him one day.
“What to say, except that fate brought me here.”
”Did you run away from home?”
“Yes,” he said with a wide and sincere grin. The grin was typical of Malayalees. Malayalees have their own sense of humour and are a fun-loving people except when they are provoked or when injustice is done to them. He had a handsome face. The hair stood in a neat tuft on his head and receded smoothly and evenly to the back of his head. His eyes were wide-set and had the glint of humour. His face was typically round and broad like that of some ageing Malayalee film star.
“Why did you run away?”
“Those days, I wanted to work. Bappa (father) said I had to study and become a big man...a manager. Now I realise Bappa was right and olu (I) was wrong.”
“So you ran away.”
“Yes, when I failed the fourth standard.”
“Then you came to Mumbai and started the tender coconut business?” I prompted.
“No, it was not so easy. I had to work with a Hajiar shaving tender coconut like this. Then I washed dishes in a hotel and then became a waiter and saved enough money. Then I started this business.”
“So, you have been a tender coconut seller till now.”
“No, saar. This is a good business. In a day, I can make a thousand rupees at three rupees profit per coconut. I sleep here on the pavement. I don't pay any rent.”
“Then, where is all the money?”
“Long story, saar.”
“Tell me, I am interested.”
Vehicles honked and cruised past us. The afternoon was hot. I had to go back, ride the rickety elevator with the sliding doors made of wood to the second floor to my mundane office tasks. But the story that emerged, so slowly, so diffidently from Mahmood's mouth, riveted me to the spot. He was discreet now, whispering confidentially.
“You know George Coleho, the trade union leader? Now he is a big minister.”
“Yes.”
“Well, he and I were friends. We would sleep on the pavement outside the West End Watch Company before he became a big minister.”
“Oh, really!”
“If you meet him, tell him “Mahmood Narielwalla says salaam” to him. He will remember me.”
I wondered where I was going to meet the big Union Government minister who changes parties and loyalties like he changes his kurta and if at all he would remember a tender coconut vendor from the streets of Mumbai.
“How do you think I will meet him?”
“You all are big people going around in taxis and airplanes. You will meet him someday somewhere. Me, poor Mahmood, can never meet him now.”
“Yes, I will make it a point to tell him if I meet with him,” I said winking at him.
“I really prospered in my tender coconut business and he used to come and borrow money from me. He said he would set me up in the hotel business. He did. He got me the permission to start hotel Republic. Do you know hotel Republic? I started that hotel.”
Hotel Republic was a narrow and dingy eating joint and I had feasted in its dark interiors on hot mackerel curry. I nodded.
“I was doing very well then. It was like I was ascending to the topmost floor on my elevator at that time. I had money. I had everything. Then my friend left me to become a big leader. I was left without a godfather in this city. In this big city, you need a godfather for everything. Then the police harassment started. It was like riding the elevator down the floors then.”
“Why did the police harass you? What did you do?”
“They jailed me for a month saying I was running a prostitution racket. A few prostitutes may have come there to eat. How could I refuse them? After all, they are also human beings. They may have talked to a few people inside. That doesn't mean I am in their racket. In the hotel business, you can't deny anyone who is hungry, can you? It is business.”
“Yes, I mean, no.”
“Then I sold the hotel to a friend from my village and I was again down like an elevator to the ground floor.”
I chuckled.
His reference to the elevator was quite funny. He said it with a shake of the head, a wide gesture with the hands and a laugh like a snort. His face crinkled into creases and I too got carried away in the waves of laughter it set off.
“Then I started the tender coconut business again,” he said when we had finished laughing, “It is such a lovely business. I love this business. It breaks my heart to peel these tender green children of mine. After all, which fruit offers water to quench the thirst and food to satiate hunger? Which one? Tell me. Yes, they are my children. I look upon them as my children. I sacrifice my children for the thirsty and hungry. I have nobody in this city. Not even a dog to wag its tail at me.”
I thought for a moment and said, “No. None other than coconut.”
He nodded his handsome head in assent.
The afternoon was warm. The lunchtime crowd had gone up the creaking elevator into their cubby holes to yank at the creaky wheels of commerce. I was hesitant to let him continue. I had work waiting for me upstairs on the second floor. He, too, seemed pensive and distracted.
I walked to the elevator and waited for the taciturn elevator operator to open the sliding doors made of wood. The outdated relic seemed to shudder and falter when he turned a round crank pin made of shiny brass that would start it. It groaned on its way up and the lights that were on each floor cast criss-cross shadows upon us.
In the evening, when I descended the same elevator, the tender coconut seller was nowhere to be seen. The next afternoon also he wasn't there and in his place was a young boy doing his work. I bought a tender coconut from the boy who seemed lost in a world of his own. I didn't ask him who he was or where Mahmood, friend of minister George Coelho, had disappeared.
The next day, I overcame my hesitation and asked the boy where Mahmood was.
“Didn't you hear? He had an accident and was admitted to St. George Hospital.”
“Who are you?”
“I am his nephew. I am looking after his business till he is well again.”
The next day, I took special permission from my office to visit a “relative” in St. George Hospital and made it to the hospital, run by the Mumbai Municipal Corporation. I took the elevator to the fourth floor of the hospital to find Mahmood resting in a largish ward with a roof so high that it could have accommodated three floors of a modern housing flat. The hospital ward hadn't changed since the time it had been built by the British and the cots were all of wrought iron, clearly showing on them the wear of the ages. There, on one of these cots, dwarfed by the tall walls, which tapered into the roof above in huge criss-crossing beams and rafters, lay Mahmood. His face had lost its cheerfulness and looked haggard. A sheet was drawn over him and he was propped up against a single pillow. The sheet was of coarse cotton cloth, which looked pale yellow with much washing and rubbing against the washing stone. Behind him was a small veranda and there were patients on cots in the veranda too. Beyond that, I could see the ships moored in the Mumbai harbour. As I watched, a huge crane was lifting some containers and stacking them on the wharf.
“So Mahmood, what happened? I didn't see you and asked your nephew what happened.”
“Yes, friend. It was a tragic accident. I closed my shop and was crossing the road to go to the Republic toilet to urinate. Suddenly, this taxi came out of nowhere, knocked me down and ran over my hand. I cried for help, but nobody came. Do these people have a heart? I lay there writhing in pain and I said, “Allah, take my life if that is what you want. I don't want to live. Why make me suffer like this? I have seen good times and I have seen bad. Why make me go up and down like an elevator?” Then, my friend Azhar, who has a business selling and repairing cameras, saw me and got me admitted in this wretched hospital. At night, the bugs come out and suck the blood and life out of me. What can I do? I can't even get up. I cry again to Allah, “Take me away, don't let me suffer like this.””
“Mahmood, you will be okay. Don't worry. They will take care of you. If you need any money, I can help.”
“Help? I don't want charity. What will I do without my business?”
He is a proud man, he won't accept charity, I thought.
“What happened to your business? You nephew is taking care of it, isn't he?”
“I will never be able to shave tender coconut again,” he said tearfully. His handsome face distorted into creases of agony and the tears streamed down his unshaven face.
“I will never be able to run my tender coconut business again. Serves me right for hurting all those tender children of mine,” he repeated.
“Why?”
With one hand, he removed the sheet that covered him.
I recoiled at the sight I saw.
I was staring at a stump that was once his hand.
As I descended in the smooth, large elevator that didn't creak like the one at my office building, I wondered if his friend, Honourable Union Minister George Coleho, would ever know or care about what had happened to his old friend Mahmood Narielwalla.
FLIRTING IN SHORT MESSAGES
“I am coming to the next meeting of Neterati in New Bombay, I will send short messaging texts, for directions,” she had written to me.
I was going to meet Savita Fernandes for the first time. We had met online at a literary community that exchanged messages and networked in the disembodied medium of the Internet. Neterati had grown from a few members to around seven hundred proving that there were writers around India looking to network and wanting support in their quest to be known writers one day.
So writers and would-be writers trooped in to Neterati and poured out their anguish and angst, and their feeling of inadequacy in a world that was increasingly being unkind to writers what with many of their works remaining unpublished. She looked quite pert and pretty in a photograph posted on her profile page and I could imagine an interesting if not intellectual conversation with a kindred literary soul. She liked reading Tolkien and wrote prose, short stories, and poetry.
The success of Neterati proved how aggrieved and alienated writers were in India, pushed into a corner for want of a media that would accept their oeuvres and the need for a forum where writers could express their feeling when writerly dreams went sour. The brainchild of a writer and strategist who called himself 'The Ghost in the Woodworks', this community had decided to marry online disembodiment with person-to-person contact where writers could read their works.
Every meeting of Neterati that met once every month was eagerly looked forward to and avid scribes would listen intently to writers and offer criticism and encouragement.
Savita is a biologist doing research in a government-funded laboratory in Pune and I am a technical writer based in Bombay. I call myself a, 'corporate whore' for I sell my talents to the highest bidder in the burgeoning market for writers in the sweatshops that outsource business from the US. I write content for web sites mostly in the United States and barely would I finish one when the next request would be clamouring to be done.
The next meeting of Neterati was to take place at the residence of poet Manisha Gidwani, poet of repute, a Neterati member who lived in CBD Belapur. Savita had come into Bombay from Pune earlier in the day and was traveling to CBD Belapur where we were to meet and then proceed to the meeting.
I could feel my pulse racing and heart thumping when I boarded a bus to CBD Belapur. Neterati conducted what it called exercises every week. As I sat down in the bus for a long drive my mind skimmed over some of the recent exercises in which Savita and I had participated. An exercise, devised by the imposing talent of the moderator of the board, the one called The Griff, consisted of members writing short blank verses called clerihews about each other and posting it online. I had written about Savita:
Savita Fernandes researcher of plant biology,
She spends quality time on word morphology,
Her writing has a truly distinctive voice,
But she says she is a biologist not a writer by choice!
To which she had replied:
Srinivas Iyer writer of web site content,
Teasing acolyte writers isn't his honest intent,
Front Page and Dreamweaver are his tools,
But his writing is only meant for fools!
So we had exchanged articles, short poems, limericks, clerihews and our friendship had grown.
When a brief lull had occurred in our exchange of smart verses she had sent a personal message, “Why no pomes, jokes, stories for several days?”
To which I had written back a clerihew:
What are Pomes dear Savita?
Are they the teachings of the Gita?
Are these pomes coming from deep within your heart?
With the potential of a million heartaches to start?
When she reached the outskirts of New Bombay she began messaging me for directions. In the morning she had visited her place of birth in Vile Parle where she still had an uncle living in a rundown bungalow in a Catholic locality beside a Catholic Church and school. She could never forget her childhood there and made frequent visits, more to seek continuity with the past, than the love of her uncle and aunt.
Her parents had sold their house in the same locality and moved to Pune, which was then a retirement paradise where accommodation was available cheap.
As she crossed the Thane Creek Bridge she sent a short message on her cell phone. Then the messages just flew between our two cell phones, in a torrent of radio signals through virtual space. We had decided earlier that we would only message full words and wouldn't use the truncated short messaging language that would use the short 'whr r u' for 'where are you'.
“I am nearing Vashi. Where do I get down?” She messaged.
“There is a lot of time. Enjoy the scenery. What do you see?” I messaged back.
“I see a lot of mangroves, feel the cool wind, the sea shimmering.”
“Reminds me of the romantic poets.”
“Which one?”
“Keats.”
“Quote one.”
“Wide sea that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory!”
“You have a good memory.”
“For pomes, yes.”
“Hahahaha!”
Then the messages stopped. She fell silent.
“Where am I?”
“What do you see?”
“A flyover and a lot of chimneys spewing black smoke.”
“You are nearing CBD Belapur. What do you see inside the bus?”
“Why? A pot-bellied conductor, with a dour expression and the look as if he is anal retentive.”
“Hahahaha! You are funny. What else?”
“There is this balding man sitting in front of me, his hair is fifty per cent gone.”
There was a balding man sitting in front of me too.
“Oh! Do be careful.”
“Why?”
“Balding men can be dangerous.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Hormone imbalance causes premature balding, what is he wearing?”
“A tee-shirt, frayed collars, I can see his stubbly cheeks.”
“What is he doing?”
“He is reading a novel. Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings', and he is messaging somebody.”
“Who?”
“How do I know? He is looking very intently at his cell phone.”
“How do you rate him on a scale of one to ten?”
“He would be four, I guess.”
“Oh! I thought you would be kinder to him.”
“Why? You haven't seen him, so, how can you say I should be kinder to him?”
“Because he is reading Tolkien, you like Tolkien don't you?”
“Yes, that doesn't mean I should rate him any higher than I did. He is not my type. Besides, he is older.”
“I see!”
“Why, 'I see!'”
“Nothing. Where are you now?”
“There is a nasty, penetrating smell,” she messaged looking out of the window at a tall building with a huge vat-like structure on top.
“That's the beer company Bombay Pilsner. What are you wearing?”
“Guess. We had the exercise on colors. What color did I write about?”
“Pink. You wrote about your 'Pink Obsession'. You are wearing a pink top and denim jeans.”
“And....”
“You are wearing one of those earrings that dangle like a chain.”
“And....”
“You have a Ray-ban Predator model, perched on your hair.”
“How do you know all this? We never met!”
“Just guess work.”
“But how?”
“Because you like pink you will wear pink on a weekend. Because you are on a short journey, you will wear jeans. The earrings were just a guess. The glasses, naturally, you will wear glasses in this heat.”
“What else Sherlock Holmes?”
“You are carrying a blue duffel bag.”
“Wait a minute, you are not the man sitting in front of me. Oh!” she sounded disappointed.
“Who? The balding man with dandruff in his hair?”
“How do you know he has dandruff? I didn't mention it.”
“I know.”
“How?”
“Look at the seat across the aisle.”
She turned her head, her eyes met mine, and a brilliant smile lit her face.
“It's you, you liar,” she messaged for the last time.
We both laughed at the same time and gestured at each other.
The balding man in the front row looked back, shrugged, shook his head, and went back to his book and short messaging texts.
“Crazy adrenaline-pumping youngsters,” he punched into his cell phone to whoever was receiving his messages.
I got up, crossed the aisle, and sat down beside Savita Fernandes. We had a lot of catching up to do.
I was going to meet Savita Fernandes for the first time. We had met online at a literary community that exchanged messages and networked in the disembodied medium of the Internet. Neterati had grown from a few members to around seven hundred proving that there were writers around India looking to network and wanting support in their quest to be known writers one day.
So writers and would-be writers trooped in to Neterati and poured out their anguish and angst, and their feeling of inadequacy in a world that was increasingly being unkind to writers what with many of their works remaining unpublished. She looked quite pert and pretty in a photograph posted on her profile page and I could imagine an interesting if not intellectual conversation with a kindred literary soul. She liked reading Tolkien and wrote prose, short stories, and poetry.
The success of Neterati proved how aggrieved and alienated writers were in India, pushed into a corner for want of a media that would accept their oeuvres and the need for a forum where writers could express their feeling when writerly dreams went sour. The brainchild of a writer and strategist who called himself 'The Ghost in the Woodworks', this community had decided to marry online disembodiment with person-to-person contact where writers could read their works.
Every meeting of Neterati that met once every month was eagerly looked forward to and avid scribes would listen intently to writers and offer criticism and encouragement.
Savita is a biologist doing research in a government-funded laboratory in Pune and I am a technical writer based in Bombay. I call myself a, 'corporate whore' for I sell my talents to the highest bidder in the burgeoning market for writers in the sweatshops that outsource business from the US. I write content for web sites mostly in the United States and barely would I finish one when the next request would be clamouring to be done.
The next meeting of Neterati was to take place at the residence of poet Manisha Gidwani, poet of repute, a Neterati member who lived in CBD Belapur. Savita had come into Bombay from Pune earlier in the day and was traveling to CBD Belapur where we were to meet and then proceed to the meeting.
I could feel my pulse racing and heart thumping when I boarded a bus to CBD Belapur. Neterati conducted what it called exercises every week. As I sat down in the bus for a long drive my mind skimmed over some of the recent exercises in which Savita and I had participated. An exercise, devised by the imposing talent of the moderator of the board, the one called The Griff, consisted of members writing short blank verses called clerihews about each other and posting it online. I had written about Savita:
Savita Fernandes researcher of plant biology,
She spends quality time on word morphology,
Her writing has a truly distinctive voice,
But she says she is a biologist not a writer by choice!
To which she had replied:
Srinivas Iyer writer of web site content,
Teasing acolyte writers isn't his honest intent,
Front Page and Dreamweaver are his tools,
But his writing is only meant for fools!
So we had exchanged articles, short poems, limericks, clerihews and our friendship had grown.
When a brief lull had occurred in our exchange of smart verses she had sent a personal message, “Why no pomes, jokes, stories for several days?”
To which I had written back a clerihew:
What are Pomes dear Savita?
Are they the teachings of the Gita?
Are these pomes coming from deep within your heart?
With the potential of a million heartaches to start?
When she reached the outskirts of New Bombay she began messaging me for directions. In the morning she had visited her place of birth in Vile Parle where she still had an uncle living in a rundown bungalow in a Catholic locality beside a Catholic Church and school. She could never forget her childhood there and made frequent visits, more to seek continuity with the past, than the love of her uncle and aunt.
Her parents had sold their house in the same locality and moved to Pune, which was then a retirement paradise where accommodation was available cheap.
As she crossed the Thane Creek Bridge she sent a short message on her cell phone. Then the messages just flew between our two cell phones, in a torrent of radio signals through virtual space. We had decided earlier that we would only message full words and wouldn't use the truncated short messaging language that would use the short 'whr r u' for 'where are you'.
“I am nearing Vashi. Where do I get down?” She messaged.
“There is a lot of time. Enjoy the scenery. What do you see?” I messaged back.
“I see a lot of mangroves, feel the cool wind, the sea shimmering.”
“Reminds me of the romantic poets.”
“Which one?”
“Keats.”
“Quote one.”
“Wide sea that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory!”
“You have a good memory.”
“For pomes, yes.”
“Hahahaha!”
Then the messages stopped. She fell silent.
“Where am I?”
“What do you see?”
“A flyover and a lot of chimneys spewing black smoke.”
“You are nearing CBD Belapur. What do you see inside the bus?”
“Why? A pot-bellied conductor, with a dour expression and the look as if he is anal retentive.”
“Hahahaha! You are funny. What else?”
“There is this balding man sitting in front of me, his hair is fifty per cent gone.”
There was a balding man sitting in front of me too.
“Oh! Do be careful.”
“Why?”
“Balding men can be dangerous.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Hormone imbalance causes premature balding, what is he wearing?”
“A tee-shirt, frayed collars, I can see his stubbly cheeks.”
“What is he doing?”
“He is reading a novel. Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings', and he is messaging somebody.”
“Who?”
“How do I know? He is looking very intently at his cell phone.”
“How do you rate him on a scale of one to ten?”
“He would be four, I guess.”
“Oh! I thought you would be kinder to him.”
“Why? You haven't seen him, so, how can you say I should be kinder to him?”
“Because he is reading Tolkien, you like Tolkien don't you?”
“Yes, that doesn't mean I should rate him any higher than I did. He is not my type. Besides, he is older.”
“I see!”
“Why, 'I see!'”
“Nothing. Where are you now?”
“There is a nasty, penetrating smell,” she messaged looking out of the window at a tall building with a huge vat-like structure on top.
“That's the beer company Bombay Pilsner. What are you wearing?”
“Guess. We had the exercise on colors. What color did I write about?”
“Pink. You wrote about your 'Pink Obsession'. You are wearing a pink top and denim jeans.”
“And....”
“You are wearing one of those earrings that dangle like a chain.”
“And....”
“You have a Ray-ban Predator model, perched on your hair.”
“How do you know all this? We never met!”
“Just guess work.”
“But how?”
“Because you like pink you will wear pink on a weekend. Because you are on a short journey, you will wear jeans. The earrings were just a guess. The glasses, naturally, you will wear glasses in this heat.”
“What else Sherlock Holmes?”
“You are carrying a blue duffel bag.”
“Wait a minute, you are not the man sitting in front of me. Oh!” she sounded disappointed.
“Who? The balding man with dandruff in his hair?”
“How do you know he has dandruff? I didn't mention it.”
“I know.”
“How?”
“Look at the seat across the aisle.”
She turned her head, her eyes met mine, and a brilliant smile lit her face.
“It's you, you liar,” she messaged for the last time.
We both laughed at the same time and gestured at each other.
The balding man in the front row looked back, shrugged, shook his head, and went back to his book and short messaging texts.
“Crazy adrenaline-pumping youngsters,” he punched into his cell phone to whoever was receiving his messages.
I got up, crossed the aisle, and sat down beside Savita Fernandes. We had a lot of catching up to do.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Christmas with Cheriachen
Cheriachen is sad. It is Christmas, a season to be joyful, and none of his children are around. It’s a day to be happy and jolly but he is not the least happy. He invited me for lunch on Christmas as my family was away and I went, as I am an acquaintance. We are related, yes, but a very distant relationship, in fact, he is a cousin four times removed.
The afternoon is a wintry cool, not too hot, not too cold, the plants in Cheriachen’s balcony dance in a complicated rhythm weaving patterns on the roof of his plaster-of-paris roof where Christmas baubles and streamers hang forlornly.
“There is no future in India. You know something? You should have gone abroad long ago,” he says morosely, “there is no happiness, no future here. Only sadness.”
“Then why didn’t you go?”
“See I could have gone. My brother is in the US, my daughter is in the US, a daughter is a nurse in Ireland, I can go and live with them even now, but I am comfortable in my life here, though I am not happy, I am not very unhappy here,” he says chastened.
“The same with me. I have learned to adjust. But I read there are guns in schools, violence, and racism, in fact, color discrimination, ten times that we have here.”
“What color discrimination? What are you talking? My daughters are as white as milk, put them next to the white Saiyips, you can’t tell the difference,” I forgot that Cheriachen and his children, though they were a darker shade of beige, considered themselves white, as white as an Occidental.
He pauses as his wife enters and offers me a cool glass of some colored water and Christmas cakes.
“How are you?” she asks me perfunctorily to which I give the standard answer. There is great tiredness and deliberation in her voice, as if she is not feeling too well.
“We were corporate employees. Our lives are gone. We get a pension, which is enough to make ends meet. Our children are enjoying the fruits of our labor.”
I remember, Cheriachen and his wife would walk the three kilometers from home to railway station every day, and not waste money on rickshaws. They would scrimp to the point of starving themselves, but they would save every extra Rupee. They taught their three daughters the value of thrift, and the children all grew to be responsible adults who knew the value of money, and, most importantly, how it is retained and not frittered away.
I know his routine nowadays as I live nearby. He goes for a walk in the morning, comes back exhausted, looks at an animated picture of a waterfall with sound effects, birds chirping, water falling on rocks, which the company he worked for gave him as a retirement gift. That’s all the nature he can afford in the concrete building in which he lives. The building is part of a complex named “Sahyadri,” in Vashi, New Bombay. Then he sleeps the whole day before he goes for an evening walk for purchasing groceries.
The phone rings insistently.
“Lillykutty, pick up the phone, it may be Jessy,” he says from where he sits. He has arthritis and a lot of other illnesses of old age, and is slumped in his chair, his chest collapsed into himself, his stomach protruding, and his face sagging with tissues that were once taut and healthy. His eyes have large circles under them due to sleeplessness, or, due to extra sleep. He sleeps all the time.
“It was difficult,” he reminisces, “bringing up my girls, the work was hard, I was a storekeeper you see, and if something is missing you have to take the rap. I slaved all these years.”
“Jessy is on the phone,” his wife Lillykutty says, “she wants to wish you.”
He gets up heavily from the chair and waddles to the phone re-tying his loose loin cloth around his waist. It had slipped.
“Haaaan, happy Christmas,” he cackles, “how is Shinymol? Fine? How is Joji? Fine?”
Static and an excited metallic voice at the other end.
Yes, he is happy for some time. But the happiness doesn’t last. His face droops again, his eyes again take a haunted look, he sinks into the chair.
“There, I mean in the US, they work only five days. And they don’t have to work like the company has bought our souls. They do their work and then go home. On weekends they go to beach resorts or holiday homes. If you don’t have a job the company pays you five hundred dollars a month, imagine. Around Rupees Twenty Thousand for doing nothing, just sitting at home. It’s not like here.”
It seems he is very upset and disgruntled, “Is that so?” I prompt.
“My other daughter, Jomi, who got married recently to a doctor, she is luckier,” he says pompously, “she is in Ireland and only works three days in a week and rests for four days, and draws a handsome salary, unlike here, you work six days and… all the harassment…,” he groans and shakes his head.
“And free healthcare, do they have free healthcare?”
“Yes, everything is free, absolutely free. Even education. I remember the difficulty I went through to get my daughters admitted to nursing school. I had to pay the hospital fifty thousand rupees. Then the fees, and after passing the miserly stipend they get for two years. Then for the passport, I had to bribe the officials. Yeverywhere corruption. God, it was so awful, but now they are enjoying a good life. God bless them,” Cheriachen says.
“Jomi took her doctor husband to Ireland, and he has a job in the same hospital where she works,” Lillykutty says from the kitchen. She sounds morose and depressed, too, two unhappy people in an empty two-bedroom flat. She is preparing our Christmas lunch. The smell of mutton and assorted curries fill the flat in Sahyadri housing society.
“Jessy’s daughter Shinymol studies for free. You should see her photographs,” he fishes out some photographs from the bottom of a pile of newspapers on the teapoy, “she is so fair, chubby, and fat, anyone would want to take her in hands and kiss her.”
“I guess it is the food they eat there. I read it is full of fat.”
“No. Not that. They don’t have to exert themselves, no? All they walk is inside their houses, from this room to that. To go anywhere they sit in a car, to go to school they sit in a car, to go to church they sit in a car. Not like we used to do. When I was a boy, I would walk five miles to our school, in Kerala.”
So that’s it. The number of empty, wasted miles spent walking is making Cheriachen a bitter man. He should have been in another country, sitting in a car, I think.
The phone rings insistently again.
“Lillykutty, it must be Jomi from Ireland,” Cheriachen says from his chair. He doesn’t make an effort to get up. He can’t.
Lillykutty comes into the room. Picks up the phone and says the usual “Merry Christmas.” She sounds happy.
Then she say “What?” into the phone and listens for a while. I can see her face fall, her body sag. Then she says, “Why do you want to do that? God, help us! God help us!”
Some static from the other end, a distraught voice. She motions towards Cheriachen.
Cheriachen comes to the phone, smiles joyfully, says, “Merry Christmas,” his sagging face muscles stretch, up, up, as he listens. He is imagining in his mind the heaven from which his daughter is calling him, free of worries, free healthcare, in fact, free everything. He is about to cackle when the whole muscles and integument of his face drop like a stone dropped from a height.
“What?” he says and looks at Lillykutty. Their eyes meet. There are tears in Lillykutty’s eyes. She sobs. Cheriachen puts down the phone. His eyes glaze with tears.
“Now, why would she want to do that? She has everything, works only three days a week, has around two lakhs salary per month, a good-looking husband, has everything virtually free, everything free….”
“We found the best husband for her, imagine, a doctor, handsome, too. We arranged the best wedding for her in the community. Now she says she wants to leave him, and she can’t get along with him,” Lillykutty says.
I look away. The rest of Christmas with Cheriachen was a torture, for me, at least.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
My Latest Short Story
Here's the link to my latest short story, on Christmas, this time (Link to "Christmas with Cheriachen" page). Please read and comment here or on the Caferati board.
The story is about a lonely couple who spend Christmas away from their daughters, who are in ersatz heavens (according to protagonist Cheriachen) - US and Ireland - where there is much joy and everything is free, free, free. They are in for a rude shock.
Friday, December 15, 2006
Do You Believe It?
“Three in one, three in one. Three movies for the price of one.”
He looks tired, his hair has not been dyed for a long time, white strands show under the black color that has been washed away. His voice grates. The evening is hot. The junction is clamoring with vehicles.
Pakya spits, drinks the glass of water in the smudged tumbler, gargles. Sweat beads, and drips inside his shirt.
“Which picture?”
“Loot Gayee Laila, Don, and Unkahee Chahat.”
“What?”
“It’s a hit. Laila’s honor has been looted. Genuine movie, what acting, just like real.”
“How much?” Pakya asked.
“Rupees fifteen for three movies, aree, baap, no sisterfucking theater will show you three movies. This Javed Kanya guarantees.”
There’s a poster of Amitabh Bachhan and Zeenat Aman, stars of Don, and a lurid poster of Loot Gayee Laila. Laila shows a lot of smooth, chubby thighs, and a heavy bosom. It is dark and Pakya can’t see too well. The tea stall is clamoring with people sipping tea. A stove hisses below a steaming vessel, the stall-owner adds to the cacophony by banging his ladle loudly on it.
Should he go in? The so-called theatre is in a slum, there is a dark room that opens through what can be called a door, some seedy looking characters lounge near the door, suspiciously looking like murderers or rapists or both.
Pakya takes the glass of tea and sips it, downing it with the slow deliberation that wants to make the sweetness last.
The night is young and Pakya badly wants something to happen. That would include a visit to the dance bar, which is expensive, or this dingy, ugly little room in a slum that shows X-rated movies for Rs fifteen on a big LCD screen.
But he doesn’t like the look of Javed Kanya, who is dressed in white shirt and trousers, which were white once. That was long ago. Now it is a shade of brown. He is one-eyed, he squints. His long-sleeved shirt isn’t buttoned. The shirt front is open and the sleeves flaps about as he moves. His mouth is masticating betel nut, and when he speak the red juice runs down the corners of his mouth.
“Don, we are showing the old Don, starring Amitabh Bachhan, not the new Don, starring Sharukh Khan, baap,” he wipes his mouth with his hand, and afterwards scoops his private parts with the same hands and kneads them, balls and all. He shifts his hands and legs around a lot, in a sort of filmy style.
“What’s the difference between that Don and this Don?” Pakya asks.
“Old Don, Amitabh Bachhan, new Don, Sharukh Khan. What is Amitabh? What is Sharukh?” He ends his sentence with a derogatory lowering of his jaw.
********
Pakya looks at the inviting posters and imagines the bliss of seeing it all. At least the mystery of Laila’s taut thighs and bosom would be solved when he sees her on screen. Pakya drools. The sensation of lust passes down his head to his toes, pausing at his crotch. He craves some entertainment, the crasser the better. His works in an automobile spare parts shop doesn’t offer him any satisfaction. He is constantly fetching parts for his corpulent boss who sits, and sits the whole day smoking, and ordering him around. The work frustrates him so much that he needs to escape every evening.
“Make up your mind fast, fast. What? Or, you won’t even get a ticket for Rupees Thirty. This Don is the best movie every produced. I can dare anyone to contradict me. Even our real-life Don grew up on this movie.”
“Which real-life Don?”
“Arree, what Don, you don’t know. He grew up here. Have you ever heard of Chota Chetan?”
“Arre, that Don? Who doesn’t? What, you know him?” Pakya is amazed. Chota Chetan is the country most wanted man.
“Know him? We played cricket together, he and I. We sold tickets in black market together. We were close buddies once.”
“And you?”
“Fate. He makes movies now. He controls a criminal empire. I am still a hustler of movie tickets. He sits abroad, I am here.”
So sad. But he could be lying.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe it or not, it’s your choice. Tell me do you want tickets, kali fokat, don’t be too smart, what?”
He turns away to hustle some more.
“Hey Kanya, I will buy your ticket, huhn? But tell me your story. I mean, your story and Chota Chetan’s,” Pakya beckons.
*******
Pakya hands him the money. Kanya wets his fingers with spit, tears a ticket and gives it. There’s a long time for the show to start. The evening is getting warmer. It must be hot inside the theatre.
“Then listen. First buy me half a glass of cutting tea.”
Pakya looks at his face, a million finely etched wrinkles crowd it like spider webs. He has only a few teeth left in his mouth, his speech is rough, disjointed.
“He and I were friends,” he says blowing into his tea, “why, we are friends even now. If he came here we would have a drink. He is from these parts, we grew up together, played cricket together.”
“Really?” Pakya is incredulous. His mouth hangs open. He had only read about Chota Chetan’s exploits from newspapers and television channels. That this ruin of a man knows, or knew, the real Don, the real real Don, not the Don of the films, fascinates him.
“Yes. And we sold tickets of the old movie Don together at the local theatre.”
“What does he look like?”
Javed Kanya tries to remember, but his memory isn’t that sharp. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve and leaves a long stain on it.
“Short, long hair just like you. He always used to toss it off his eyes. And yes he used to walk very fast, his rubber slippers flopping after him.”
“How did he become so big a Don and you are left in this dump?” Pakya asks motioning towards the dilapidated theatre made of tin sheets. Some Hindi music plays inside. It seems odd, but life can be odd.
“I can make a picture with that story. Tell you a secret? Chota Chetan was inspired by this movie Don, the old Amitabh Bachhan movie, I mean.”
“How? You mean the movie Don created a Don in real life? You mean he became a gangster because of this movie? Tell me how.” Pakya asks incredulously, his jaws dropping further.
“Listen, words have power, they are sharper than any knife, can penetrate you more than any bullet. Javed Kanya knows.”
“You think I am a chootiya, a fool to believe you?”
“Abey, don’t call me Chootiya, what?”
Then Pakya remembers he is a friend of the real Don, and shuts himself up and listens.
“Those days… what a life we had. We were only small children, innocent of the ways of the world. We thought selling tickets in black was fun. Chota Cheta was a youngster like you. We did it for want of something to do. Just like that. It would fetch some money to buy clothes, a bike, and we could see movies for free.”
He is silent for a long time. The clamor of traffic around the junction is getting louder. More people are anxiously gathering around the theatre. Javed Kanya seems too engrossed in his story to care.
“We used to sit in the back rows and whistle and clap as Amitabh came on screen. Chetan would be too engrossed in the movie. His eyes would light up, he would jump on his seat, clap, whistle, and throw money at his hero. He was a bit too involved. Remember I told you words have power. ”
Finally, Kanya drank what was left of the tea and spat on the road.
“You know this dialogue, ‘Don ko pakadna mushkil hi nahi namumkin hai’? To catch the Don is not only difficult, it is impossible.”
“Yes. That’s my favorite dialogue.”
“His favorite dialogue too. Those words… that snatch of movie dialog… they have such power… it was written by fire in his soul. He has been on the run for so long and believes nobody can catch him, not his enemies, not the police. I doubt if they ever will. I know him.”
“Aree, your mother’s! What are you talking?”
“Yes. Only he believed in those words so strongly, so strongly, they have tried everything, the police, his enemies, the Interpol, the spy rings, they still can’t arrest him.”
“What? I can’t believe it. A mere dialog of a movie can’t turn a middle-class boy into one of the country’s biggest criminals.”
“Believe it or not, it’s up to you. But this is his story. He believed. I didn’t believe in anything. That’s why I am here, and he is where he is. Now I have to go, got to sell more tickets.”
He ambled away, a broken, decrepit aging man, his hair like wisps of candy floss.
******
After the movie Pakya looked around for Javed Kanya. He was there lolling against the makeshift table that had a cash box and a bossy-looking man sitting in a plastic chair.
“Do you believe me now?” Kanya asked.
“No, I still can’t,” Pakya says shaking his head. He could never believe that a mere movie - floating pictures and dialogues on a screen - can create a real life criminal as powerful as Chota Chetan.
But who knows? He is one of the disbelievers like Javed Kanya here who don’t believe in anything, and drift aimlessly as a leaf in the monsoon wind.
“Disbelief cannot alter the truth,” Kanya says wistfully. The night is hot as Pakya walks home. He fervently hopes he isn’t inspired too much by the movie to become a criminal.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
The Complete Man
“Georgie, you should eat your medicines.”
“Yes, you must,” they all agree.
His brothers Luke and Sam are here to make him take his anti-depression medicines regularly. So are his former classmates and childhood friends, Ravindran, Sanjayan and Gopi.
Georgie is acting strange. He is depressed. He won’t go to work. He lies all day in bed and reads strange, spiritual books. He knocks on people’s doors and says weird things. Things like:
“They are coming for us. Don’t open the doors.”
“There is a riot going to happen. Close all doors.”
“The Americans are going to bomb us. George Bush is coming. Take shelter. Go to the maidan and lie flat on the ground.”
He imagines things and thinks they are for real. He wasn’t like this, his brothers Luke and Sam agree. In fact, Georgie was the most brilliant of the three. A good student, a good sportsman, a good marksman, a good speaker, a good… in fact… good at everything he did. He would score maximum runs for the Red House he led in school, win hundreds of marbles in games, win the elocution and memory competitions, come first in the art and writing competitions, and still stand first in class.
Everybody was jealous. Jealous that he was so talented and they weren’t.
“He was good in everything?” Ravindran, an artist who now has a cult following in the advertising profession reminisced. He is content with the way life has treated him, with a lot of money and fame. For him Georgie is now the past, though he felt sympathetic. He remembered the time they would spend together in the school compound chasing butterflies, and Georgie laughing his good natured laugh. He doesn’t deserve this, he thought. Secretly Ravindran was jealous of Georgie in school . He always tried to outdo him in drawing and painting and each time he failed.
*****
The school term was about to end. Ravindran, captain of the Yellow house, was worried about his house’s performance. They would add up the scores in the art and writing competitions and his house would be last in the list of honors. His main rival was Georgie, captain of the Red House, and nobody could beat him in drawing, painting and writing.
Slyly he made a plan. He tackled Georgie rather roughly from behind during the afternoon football game prior to chasing butterflies. George fell and his hand was sprained and had to be cast. But he came back for the art and writing competitions with his hand in a cast. He scored well and took Red House far ahead of Yellow House. Ravindran had lost face.
*****
“Georgie, you should eat your medicines. You shouldn’t worry about what America or George Bush does. It’s their worry,” Sanjayan said. Sanjayan is now a chief executive of a newspaper group, and is widely traveled. Around him there is the smell of success, which is actually the smell of the various expensive colognes he buys when he is abroad.
“No. It’s my worry, no? My children are growing up. I have to support them, no?”
“But first you got to go to work and earn, to make your children secure, like this you have no security only,” Luke the elder brother says impatiently. He seems an impatient man.
*****
Back in school Sanjayan was the goal keeper of the Blue House and he was also a part of the humungous jealousy that Georgie generated in students of AFAC School (students of a rival school expanded this to “After Farting Attending Classes.”) He couldn’t understand how Georgie could do everything he did with complete dedication and seriousness. If he sets himself upon scoring a goal, he did it with an intensity that was frightening.
He was terrorized by Georgie’s appearance anywhere near his goal post. Georgie’s marksmanship was unerring and he could maneuver himself from any angle to score a goal. No goalkeeper was safe with Georgie around. Jealousy rose like a tide inside Sanjayan.
So when Georgie came menacingly towards him during a friendly football match, he saw his chance. He dived, collected the ball and gave it a kick in Georgie’s direction, aiming it at his face. The aim was accurate. The ball hit his face, and Georgie fell down. The kick of the ball had taken him by surprise. His nose bled and he had to be carried away to the school office before Luke came to escort him home.
******
“He was so brilliant, I was scared of his brilliance,” Gopi says. Gopi heads a knowledge process outsourcing project. He has a fetish for expensive shoes and casual wear.
“Yes, I, too,” Ravindran says.
“But he is still intelligent. He needs your sympathy and he would be all right,” Sam says. Sam is the younger brother, a softer version of Georgie. All brother look alike.
“That’s why we are here,” Gopi says, “I thought he would be someone very big some day. Not like this.”
“What do you mean?” Georgie asks indignantly. He thinks the people gathered in the room are a bunch of hypocrites, and knows what they have done to him. How dare they talk about him this way, as if he was some object, a dog that wouldn’t obey its master?
Georgie prefers not to say anything. He keeps to himself. He listens and listens to everyone’s opinion of him, and grows more and more estranged. Why do they talk about me thus? He wonders. This loneliness had turned into self-absorption, and then into seeking solace in drinks. When the world cut him out, he wanted to cut them out, as simple as that.
But a hypocrite such as Gopi seems to be provoking him too much today.
“He was so quiet and so dedicated to his work,” Sanjayan says, “He would solve algebra sums in no time, and I used to take my doubts to him.”
“This one here is the biggest hypocrite of all,” Georgie thinks. Gracy, his wife makes an entry, balancing a tray in both hands. She puts the tray down on the teapoy and with her slender arms passes tea around the room.
“You all tell him, no? I say to him take medicine, take medicine, all the time. He won’t listen to me, only.”
“You shut up, don’t talk,” Georgie tells her.
“I won’t shut up. You shut up. What?”
“If you don’t shut up, I will shut you up,” George’s face darkens with rage.
“People, imagine how I live with a man who talks this way,” Gracy says to everyone, “I don’t want to live with him. I will go to the police.”
For a moment Georgie looks like he would throw something at Gracy, but he doesn’t. He has a sweet nature, everyone knows.
Instead he says, “Does anyone know what that means?” He points to an elaborately framed picture on the wall. The picture shows a man and a woman, standing close together with an intimacy that could only mean they are lovers.
Everyone present shakes their head.
“The complete man. I wanted to be a complete man, once, perfect in everything I did,” his voice is inaudible.
There is a moment’s silence, as the meaning sinks in. His friends and his brothers look at each other and then at the brilliant man, now the antithesis of his own perfection.
“But, look at you, what complete? You are hardly a man,” Gracy’s harsh voice cuts in and then she ambles towards the kitchen.
*********
Gopi was the boy with writing abilities in school. He fancied himself as a future writer. But competition was stiff from Georgie. A love for literature and fine writing bound them. They used to exchange classic novels in comic format that they would borrow from the lending library paying Rs 1.50 each. Thus they would get to read two classic comics for the price of one.
One day Georgie had exchanged the comic version of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe with Rajendran’s Superman comic without informing Gopi. He came to know of this. Georgie confessed it was his fault. But, jealousy was a big thing, eating into their little personas, especially when they were children just forming the iron-cast personalities of their future lives.
Gopi stopped talking to Georgie. He thought that was the best way to punish him. He didn’t know what harm he had done. Georgie is hurt so easily, he has a tender mind, a tender soul. His soul cried for his friendship with Gopi. It was years later that they started talking.
Now as Gopi sat before him everyone wondered how he had succeeded when Georgie had failed. Gopi owned a car, a large flat, and wore expensive dress shoes. But Georgie’s house was barren, the paint was peeling and he wore dusty slippers.
*********
“Georgie you must eat your medicines,” Gopi says.
Georgie can’t take it anymore.
“See this jealous hypocrite. See what he is saying. Have you all no shame, where were you when I was really in need?” Georgie couldn’t control his words, he has lost touch with reality.
His friends and his siblings sit with mouths agape. Shock: disbelief: incomprehension.
The room falls silent. They do not talk for a long while. They realize they are all guilty of what happened to their brilliant friend/brother Georgie. If only they were a bit kinder to him forty years ago, in school, at home. They are all comfortable in their jobs and careers they have selfishly carved for themselves over the years, but they never even thought of the cruelty they had inflicted. Georgie was like the punching bag in the school gymnasium. Now that it’s too late, they realize that their words echo with hypocrisy, and their attempts at helping Georgie seems like a big sham.
The tea grows cold, the steam stops rising from the rims of the cups. They all rise to leave and Georgie escorts them to the door.
“Anyway, thank you for coming, so kind of you,” he says at the door.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Laughing Gas
She is ahead of him in the crowd. She is wearing the shortest of kurtas and a churidar that is so tight the buns of her behind form a perfect round football-ish sphere in red. The skin is so fair it is almost golden ("The golden girls" is the name he has coined for her type. They seem to have stepped right out of a golden chariot driven by Eros himself), the profile of the face is even and so well formed that water would glide from her forehead and touch only her nose and would slither further down and only touch the fronts of her breasts. She is wearing heels and the sleeveless yellow kurta only covers up to her waist. Aaah, he groans.
Adrenaline pumps. Nitrous oxide, or, laughing gas releases into his scrotal region, dilating the blood vessels, so that more blood pumps into his sexual organs. He had read in medical school that the reason for an erection is quite simply, nitrous oxide, or, laughing gas. Ha... ha... ha....
He remembers the texts he had read in physiology. "Mechanically erection can be compared to an electromechanically controlled hydraulic system. The most important roles in the phase of erection are played by nitrous oxide and vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP)." So the sexual process is nothing but a release of laughing gas, the physician concludes. He as a doctor knows.
He... he... he....
But the exquisiteness of the human being in front of him is what he cannot understand though he has closely examined many of them in the hospital. But then there he is a physician, but here? What's wrong with him? Has he forgotten medical ethics?
He feels an urge to talk to her, but she doesn't look at anyone. She is inhabiting a world presided by the deity Eros, lost in some sweet memory of someone. A man? A woman? That someone is very lucky to at least know her. Of course, she would like to meet and talk to a post-graduate physician such as him.
Model? No. Airhostess? No. Office worker? Could be.
He was sure the work in the mundane and drab office in some congested lane in Andheri would grind to a halt today. Everyone would be staring lustily at her buns, her slow lilting walk, her silky black hair. Could he talk to her.
From what he could see from behind, as he slowly inches forward on the Kurla railway bridge is a soft cheek, and a bit of down around the ear. The slow-moving crowd has come to the end of the bridge and is slowly descending the steps to the west of Kurla. He is careful to keep right behind her, and it's easy because on both sides are slowly inching office goers clutch their rexine bags.
May be, at the exit when there is some more space he can walk ahead and introduce himself with a killer pick-up line. Something like, "Hey beautiful, it's a sunny day, can we make it funny?" No, that won't do. It has to be a lot better than that.
The crowd has moved glacially to the end of the stairs and is dispersing now. The slow crawl has come to an end. Now is his chance. he walks ahead. His heart thudding he prepares to turn around, he does.
"Hi! Darling! Goodu Maarrniinnggguu!"
He could have killed that man, the boor! He feels rage. Some men are so crude. This Road Romeo is dressed in cheap jeans, has his cowlick falling over his eyes, and has a hundred bursting pimples on his scarred face.
He walks ahead, glances back at her one last time. He freezes.
She has earplugs on! She is listening to music. There's no way she could have heard either him or the Road Romeo. He heaves a sigh, then groans, and then laughs ha... ha... ha.... After all, it's only laughing gas.
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