A piece dedicated to my colleagues in my lab. A bit of sarcasm and a lot of masala used, which in no way reduces the respect I have to my Professor, a very respected and knowledgeable person. Some day if I become anywhere near where he stands right now, I'd take no better testimony than something written about me on a sense as much or more sarcastic as this.
And as this had been penned over a few evenings after getting back to room, on a frame of mind I'd not exactly term as one fit for writing. I guarantee this piece of prose to have an inferior quality when compared to a lot of other articles of mine......
{
Crap. But I just thought I had pressed the Snooze button in my mobile under thirty seconds ago. How awesome it’d have been if I could freeze time now. Would give a fortune for that. Fortune…ha!
As the legendary Swaminathan in R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days opines, so very truly, Monday mornings are undoubtedly the worst part of the week. Coming just following the ephemeral weekend. (God, why did you make only one weekend a week….) With words of appreciation for Swaminathan and with enough gaalis to the Sun to make the appearance over this metropoiltan area this early, my hands moved in an error-free naturally-imbibed, instinctive course to the snooze button of my mobile alarm. As if sensing my mentality, which it nowadays seems to do very predictably, my mobile too resumes its slumber….for another few minutes till the “snooze” module in its code gets interrupted all over again. Bless thy, who invented the concept of snooze…. And God, do send me the name of thy who invented alarms…. I’ll do the rest.
Interrupting my chain of thoughts for the infinite-th time already in the hardly 8 – hour old day, the alarm module in my phone starts its cacophony all over again. At last the negligibly sliver conscious part of my mind triggers to active mode from sleep mode and the nervous system in my body generate the signals to my seemingly (maybe, a tad hopefully !!!) hands and legs, “Wake up idiots, you go to go for WORK !!!!”
At last, the physique starts to succumb to the perennial reality. One part of the body votes, “Lo bhai…ab toh uth jao. Jaana hai....” But the ruling party, which still holds the majority vetoes it, “Five more minutes....just five. No more than thazzzzzzzZZ zzz….”
By the time the no-confidence motion is brought into picture, the whole part of the body stirs up in a jolt. The same mouth utters the two sentences in sequence, “S**t, its already nearing 9...How is that I daily end up getting as late as this? ” and “Damn the guy who invented the snooze option...”
With a visit to the washroom as brief as it can get ( I do keep telling myself, “Yaar time nahi, time nahi....got to go fast..”), after a handful of minutes, I find myself cycling ahead to the harsh realities of my lab. The ethos they call research. I don’t care even if an asteroid is right now plummeting directly towards me from the heavens, with an estimated impact in T minus 30 seconds. Because any day, I’ll prefer a crashing asteroid to a bashing Professor, errr...my boss, to speak.
As ever I am infallibly greeted with scornful visages. God, you created men, you created women…both of those are manageable. Need you had created bosses, at least in hindsight....? I try to display the little amount of Colgate that hopefully is still present in my demeanor…. too old ploy. And with the sthaayi bhaav, the resigned expression, I settle down to my “workstation.”
The day…just began.
I sure will not blame a person for expecting stuff that change the world from me every alternate hour I spent in front of my whitish command prompt, grinning at me from inside the depths of my laptop machine. But I only can pity with someone who expects the same from me a couple of weeks after he’s seen me work.
After a couple of hours staring at my laptop, trying to contribute whatever little I can to bug enormous Anaconda level codes, I am stirred back to the world outside computers when I hear a sound from behind, “Chalo chalo....lunch time !!!!” Looking at my watch, I realize that its break time at work time – lunch time....
A sixty minute break covering the sojourn to and from one of the canteens in the campus, which (in)conveniently is located a little far from my department is a very refreshing part of the day. Topics of varying degrees make the cut - from Linux kernel to dressing sense of modern girls, from engineering technology to weekend movie at the Gymkhana. Well, anything under the sun. Or over it, for the matter. And by the time we return, the Omnipresent (ohh no…it ain’t construed as the God anymore….that title was recently handed over to the person they call boss…) is standing at the gate, reminding me of the chowkidaar at my village. The countenance says it all – somebody is not too very happy as the timer set for our lunch break had expired nearly an hour ago.
Again life. Sorry....work. The midday sun beating through the window fall is so attractive that it almost invariably lures one or the other guys to sleep. There are some things a coffee can’t prevent. If you ever care to doubt it, send an insomniac to my department.... I swear I’ll get him to sleep like a baby within a week.
Around the time the Big Ben announces mid day in London, Bengaluru, five and a half hours ahead, slips into yet another of its romantic evenings. And the pristine surroundings at the campus add so unique a charm to the setting sun that people, who once you thought could hardly think of stuff beyond header files and pointers, start giving you philosophical lectures on Shakespearean concept of romance and Wordsworth school of poetic thought. Its chai time and the next hop is the bakery near to my department. I ruefully make a trade-off of the rich blended canteen coffee and the evergreen helping of Bhel Puri for the extra overhead incurred in terms of the time taken for a shuttle to and from the canteen.
Back from the chai break is when the janta decides to unwind. The wireless network of the institute gets a little busy as people from our labs start their networking on the social front. Facebook, G Mail, Orkut, Picasa…. Thus opens the cloud, often accompanied by visages ranging from guffaws courtesy a Facebook video or a gentle smile, courtesy a picture of college days.
There is this day of the week where there is a weekly meeting, where Professors (Goddd, I thought singular form itself was too hard to handle…. You invented plural…) sweep down on we, the “engineers” like vultures closing in on their prey. The whole spectacle starts off with a musical chair contest – who occupies the seat farthest from the table. I really admire those Professors who perfectly know what I do not know, because they never ever ask me something I know. One of these days I really got to conduct a sting operation video of the meeting and send it over to the National Human Rights Commission. Let them know what is happening.....
Thankfully, this just one day of the week….
As the clock moves further in the direction in which it has traditionally kept moving since its inception, the thought of dinner and home sweet home start corrupting the minds of the peers. But the big hurdle still remains – send the day’s work update to the Boss. Oh shit…. Surely I can’t write about the afternoon discussion we had on the merits and demerits of Bru and Nescafe coffee…. Or the evening chat we had on the various flower trees that adorned the Gulmohar Marg. This is when the Dan Brown-ish element in each of us kick in. Literary merits are stretched to their limits as (farzi !!!) pedants discuss elaborately at length and at last compose vintage mails, the curtain-downing act of the day. And with the eternal satisfaction of having done something revolutionary, the expedition back home begins, least bothered about the repercussions of the sent mail which is sure going to reverberate in my inbox first thing tomorrow morning.
All that tomorrow. All that after a real good night’s sleep…..
}
Uhh oh… guess I missed out to add the while(1), which should’ve been the opening line of this post…..
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
His Holiness of X-Point
The sage of X-Point sat on the culvert at the cross roads, cross legged with a plain visage and a composed gaze, concentrating completely on the maid buying karela yards off. In front of him was a little less holy, but nonetheless holy disciple, squatting. Worshipful, deferential and all attention.
A passing crow lightened itself. The reverent found himself at the wrong spot. At the wrong moment. A groan, a look of frown, rage and frustration, the latter two almost completely dominating over the former bhaav.
His eyes rolled over to the spot.
“The vicissitudes of Kaala,” so began the reverent, “are truly tumultuous. We maanav raashi....eat the fruit of our karma. We are all misfits. Ethereally, to be sitting on this unholy man made structure at this very moment when this emissary of Yamaraj acted, is a real misfortune. But it was scripted in His abode and whatever the script, we are mere actors. We come, we act, we perish....the stage still remains for us to come tomorrow, the next janma. Sacrifice and resignation....is the key to nirvana. ”
At the chauraha, an urchin hurled a stone at a limping dog. Being an amateur, he missed. The dog. But not the disciple’s clean shaven head.
“Aah revered. Sacrifice and resignation….what a noble thought !!! O Gurudev, may I rise and impress upon that young aatma the wickedness of his action? That the path to naraklok should best be avoided? Oh revered, do excuse me a moment.”
The disciple sprinted after the urchin, who was a trifle slower than himself. But a couple of dogs too joined in although finally the forces of truth and sacrifice prevailed over himsa. He cuffed the urchin soundly and came back panting. He took a while to compose himself, brought back the tranquility he left over from his run and settled down beside his Guruji once again,
“Sacrifice and resignation…. How illuminating those two words seem to me. It seems as though someone has just cleared a pool of mud water that had formed in the annals of my shallow mind. The keys to life beyond. The key to nirvana. Please continue… Swami.”
X-Point resumed his discourse, “ Calmness....an unquestioned acceptance of all that fate flings at thou. The perpetual salesman Dale Carnegie did ensconce the truth when he said to co-operate with the inevitable. I have always admired the serenity of the cauliflower. If ever I were asked to explain tranquility, I would simply place a cauliflower in front of me....and remain muted. For it, calmness is not ethereal, it is eternal.”
“Learn to admire thou son…” the prophecy thus continued, “ Learn to accept fate the way the cauliflower takes it – unflinching in acceptance. You cut him, you boil him, you garnish your table with him, you eat him. And he....what does the pour soul do?”
The ever attentive pupil couldn’t suppress the doubt lingering in his mind, “But the wicked cauliflower… o Swami !!! What about them? You serve them to your peers after mincing them, frying them and spicing them. What do they do? They do all but bring pain to the believer of Lord…. He who was ignorant of the existence of the wicked seed. They give you diarrhoea.”
“Silence Vyasa,”growled the hermit.”It is your greed that compels you to eat more cauliflower than prescribed. The perfect amount of the sabzi never did a Lord’s true believer any harm.”
“But my Lord, does not the cauliflower commit an atrocious deed? Doesn’t it offer its soft and succulent body and entice the beholder into sinning? Although a believer of Lord, poor mortal amen’t I? How are we supposed to resist the wonderful seductress of the vegetable kingdom?”
“O idiot! You are deluded and corrupted. You have changed the gender of cauliflower with a sentence and brought Woman into the picture. Woman....is a maya. She is a source of temptation.... The repository of all the evil in the world…. The earthly avatar of Satan.”
X-point unfolded his legs and shook himself up from the culvert. The maid was returning after buying a week’s ration of vegetables from Pappu’s dukaan. As soon as she crossed, the disciple was mesmerized the smell of jasmine emanating from the bunch of flowers she sported on her hair that he didn’t notice his Guruji stretch out.
“The path to one's self is never straight. There will be a light to guide you, but you must recognize the light. You must also see through agents of Satan. Aaah vanity. Let us follow this path. Do not mind that maid before us. She is a test.”
With an expressionless visage yet a pair of gleaming eyes, concentrated fully on the maid’s behind, the sage started to amble along.
A couple of steps behind the disciple followed suit, the disciple. Deferential, silent....and eyes focused. Where his Guruji had taught him to focus....
A passing crow lightened itself. The reverent found himself at the wrong spot. At the wrong moment. A groan, a look of frown, rage and frustration, the latter two almost completely dominating over the former bhaav.
His eyes rolled over to the spot.
“The vicissitudes of Kaala,” so began the reverent, “are truly tumultuous. We maanav raashi....eat the fruit of our karma. We are all misfits. Ethereally, to be sitting on this unholy man made structure at this very moment when this emissary of Yamaraj acted, is a real misfortune. But it was scripted in His abode and whatever the script, we are mere actors. We come, we act, we perish....the stage still remains for us to come tomorrow, the next janma. Sacrifice and resignation....is the key to nirvana. ”
At the chauraha, an urchin hurled a stone at a limping dog. Being an amateur, he missed. The dog. But not the disciple’s clean shaven head.
“Aah revered. Sacrifice and resignation….what a noble thought !!! O Gurudev, may I rise and impress upon that young aatma the wickedness of his action? That the path to naraklok should best be avoided? Oh revered, do excuse me a moment.”
The disciple sprinted after the urchin, who was a trifle slower than himself. But a couple of dogs too joined in although finally the forces of truth and sacrifice prevailed over himsa. He cuffed the urchin soundly and came back panting. He took a while to compose himself, brought back the tranquility he left over from his run and settled down beside his Guruji once again,
“Sacrifice and resignation…. How illuminating those two words seem to me. It seems as though someone has just cleared a pool of mud water that had formed in the annals of my shallow mind. The keys to life beyond. The key to nirvana. Please continue… Swami.”
X-Point resumed his discourse, “ Calmness....an unquestioned acceptance of all that fate flings at thou. The perpetual salesman Dale Carnegie did ensconce the truth when he said to co-operate with the inevitable. I have always admired the serenity of the cauliflower. If ever I were asked to explain tranquility, I would simply place a cauliflower in front of me....and remain muted. For it, calmness is not ethereal, it is eternal.”
“Learn to admire thou son…” the prophecy thus continued, “ Learn to accept fate the way the cauliflower takes it – unflinching in acceptance. You cut him, you boil him, you garnish your table with him, you eat him. And he....what does the pour soul do?”
The ever attentive pupil couldn’t suppress the doubt lingering in his mind, “But the wicked cauliflower… o Swami !!! What about them? You serve them to your peers after mincing them, frying them and spicing them. What do they do? They do all but bring pain to the believer of Lord…. He who was ignorant of the existence of the wicked seed. They give you diarrhoea.”
“Silence Vyasa,”growled the hermit.”It is your greed that compels you to eat more cauliflower than prescribed. The perfect amount of the sabzi never did a Lord’s true believer any harm.”
“But my Lord, does not the cauliflower commit an atrocious deed? Doesn’t it offer its soft and succulent body and entice the beholder into sinning? Although a believer of Lord, poor mortal amen’t I? How are we supposed to resist the wonderful seductress of the vegetable kingdom?”
“O idiot! You are deluded and corrupted. You have changed the gender of cauliflower with a sentence and brought Woman into the picture. Woman....is a maya. She is a source of temptation.... The repository of all the evil in the world…. The earthly avatar of Satan.”
X-point unfolded his legs and shook himself up from the culvert. The maid was returning after buying a week’s ration of vegetables from Pappu’s dukaan. As soon as she crossed, the disciple was mesmerized the smell of jasmine emanating from the bunch of flowers she sported on her hair that he didn’t notice his Guruji stretch out.
“The path to one's self is never straight. There will be a light to guide you, but you must recognize the light. You must also see through agents of Satan. Aaah vanity. Let us follow this path. Do not mind that maid before us. She is a test.”
With an expressionless visage yet a pair of gleaming eyes, concentrated fully on the maid’s behind, the sage started to amble along.
A couple of steps behind the disciple followed suit, the disciple. Deferential, silent....and eyes focused. Where his Guruji had taught him to focus....
Monday, December 20, 2010
That somebody's....me?
Dedicated to somebody. An long known yet lot unknown somebody.....
If someone had asked me what I was doing, I would have been absolutely blank for an answer. Luckily, no one did. In fact, had I seen someone doing what I was doing, I would've pitied that man for the state he was in – mentally handicapped.
I was trying to count the tiny sparkling grains of sand on that seashore. The sands.....of time.
The evening sun was still hot. Strictly speaking, was it the evening sun..? No, rather I'd call it the late afternoon sun. A boy and girl, a furlong away, in their very pristine and kiddish form were as ever building castles on sand. “Innocence,” I pondered, “is as blissful a quantity as ignorance.”
I stared at the horizon on the west. The mating of the blue line of the ocean waters with the clear blue skyline. The fusion of two substances in its purest form. It seemed as if the water, beyond the point, fell off a cliff dragging along with it, the bright blue sky.
Bright blue sky. We used to call it sky blue. In fact, whenever the school reopened after the long-on-paper-yet-short-on-ground summer vacations, we used to flaunt our new uniforms and bags in school. I always used to get that bright white shirts and sky blue shorts from the Kumar's Emporium, on the Nayagam Streets along the banks of mellifluous flowing Kabini. The uncleji with a jerry-laden topi on his head, omnipresent at Kumar's billing counter, always used to give me two packets of Poppins and a chilled bottle of Fanta. Although my dad seldom allowed us in family to use soft drinks, he was always a different self when we went shopping at Kumar's twice a year – once at school reopening time, to buy those lovely brand new uniforms for me and my sister and another during Diwali, for buying new attire for entire family. And my sister always used to cry that she wanted “that” ghagra choli, although it always turned out that the one she liked was always a size bigger than her. And those sessions in which my Appa would coax her to “adjust” with a Ghee Dosa and filter kaapi at Venki's and a candy bar after that. And boy, didn't we love the smell of the hot filter kaapi at Venki's... anything I'd give to go there for that Ghee Dosa and Venki's kaapi.
Aaah..kaapi. It all changed when the small town guy me got admitted to the college in town around 60 km and two bus routes away. For someone whose world revolved around Mudaliar Street where my house was located, the St. George's high school where I completed my schooling, the local avatar of “Times Square” Nayagam Street and the Kabini river, life ceased to be as slow and simple as it once used to be as I was sucked into the charms and pace of town life. Che Guevara and Karl Marx became people I worshipped although their communist ideologies scathingly decried idolatry references. You would rather splash concentrated sulphuric acid over a mug of water bare handed than to buy a “Made in USA/UK/Germany” merchandise.
But all that was teens – the psychology of youth, as I explained to myself later. I will never know how or when but it so happened that all the enmity against all those multi nationals in the world and the “corrupt ideology” of capitalism deserted me in favour of adulation in an equal or probably an exceeding measure. Branded clothes seldom got off my torso as the metamorphosis by the time I reached my final year in college took me through short bursts of mental turmoil.
Looking back, it was the final year in college, when I really imbibed the depth of the term metamorphosis. A black and white story, out of the blue, turned vibrantly colourful. There was this somebody who I met (rather, I'd like to believe I was destined to meet) The meeting was ever etched in my memory – a strange and unique one at that. She a fresher into college, I found her struggling to convince the canteen bhaiyya that she was short by 1 rupee and 4 annas and that she would pay up the next day. Somehow, I nudged in and offered the missing amount. There was nothing abnormal about the cute “Thank You” that followed up that incident. It was casual meetings here-and-there in the campus subsequently, lit up by either side with gentle smiles. If I were to pin point what made me ask her for a cup of coffee sometime after a month, I'd have had to brood for the answer but the fact still remained. The smiles persisted, the only difference being that we were smiling across the table, two cups of coffee that emptied over an hour ago separating us, yet the smiles no less blossom.
The small conferences across the canteen table over cups of coffee slowly made way to short, and eventually longer “walks to remember” circumventing the college campus. Rumours spread across the campus, as with my class. After all, they were bound to talk what they talked when they saw what they saw. There were times when I despised the whole world for going on speculating the way it did without caring for my explanation, although if some intellectual ever had the sense to do so, I honestly didn't possess a solid answer to counter. I didn't know. I didn't want to know. And I didn't know if she knew.
But the better part was she didn't care. And her resilience taught me too. To take it in my stride. A very simple question from her put an end to all the turmoil in my mind, “If those people who spread that rumour mean nothing to you, why should you be bothered by what they speak?” There was no objective answer to this question, yet this question managed to answer all the questions raging in my mind.
Everybody complains that final year in college spans on the scale of time, a value nowhere close to the actual time it should take. When life was beginning to take the path it never treaded a priori, life was, as well, beginning to approach the end. Or at least the life in college. Separation was as always hard as was inevitable. As the reel in my mind started to roll through those final days in college and that parting gift, that cute handmade greeting card of her’s which I still keep a lot priced than a lot of supposed memorabilia, I was interrupted. As ever the interruption was perennial and yet, it wielded the same power as it used to do over a decade ago in college.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“What are you dreaming? You still acting that scene in canteen, 1 rupee and 4 anna one?” Shrugging, I woke up to a sound which once upon a time I loved to hear. Once upon a time? Well, I’ll let that question remain a question. I rubbed my eyes. It took my eyes, some real adjustment to focus on the red ball that lost most of its royalness but yet maintained a visually pleasing elegance. The sun was retreating…the same red ball to rise at a place thousands of miles away, at the same time, on some eastern horizon.
“The usual. Cappuccino. Two cubes of sugar. Not stirred. I took an Espresso today. I didn’t feel the usual, needed a strong dose of coffee.” I wondered. If this radio, which always unerringly used to switch on in my presence and blare non-stop, would ever comprehend the meaning of silence. Oh yeah, she had to. After all, what bare minimum I could expect from someone who always professed her desire to explore nature, is to know silence profoundly.
“Inertia,” long back the legendary Issac Newton had observed for laymen, “is the reluctance of a body to change its current state.” I wondered if lethargy was a word that conveyed the same unpleasant meaning in a more pleasant manner. I was toying between the beauty of Newtonian physics and the structure of English language when she embarked on her usual demeanour. Module two in her algorithm went to execution as her legs came up in an aggressive pose, the target being my back as though she was assigned to execute the final penalty kick in the penalty shootout in the Italy-France Soccer World Cup finals in 2006, which Frenchman David Trezeguet shot out of target to hand Italy the soccer World Cup. Although Trezeguet, as any other Frenchman might miss, I had complete faith in the precision of some people to execute some steps with clinical precision, even if they had never in life seen a soccer ball. Thankfully, Newton had proved long before I attempted to that every action had to have an opposite reaction (equal and opposite..?? Not very sure of the former…) and that very action of hers evoked a response from me, which was to lift myself up from sand and thrust out my hand for my coffee. Filter kaapi..?? Boy, no one in the Gen X goes for filter kaapi, that is for the oldies. A Cappuccino from one of the nearby coffee shop (the Gen X equivalent of Venki’s) is the trend of the day. So there was me, with my coffee in hand and she with hers.
“Kitna old girl friends ko dekha yaar apne dream mein?” With all its sarcasm intended, I realized that some things will never change. Years of life, job, marriage, kids...nothing can alter very minute nuances of character that are bound to come out of suppression when the optimum opportunity comes along. The radio went into active mode and all this unfortunate listener could think of was when would the power to the radio be cut off. Sporting my usual smile, which seemed to recharge the radio rather than put her off, I started walking in the direction of the car park, a couple of hundred metres away. Although she didn’t like it, I don’t know why she started following me, the radio still at its peak output. The smile in me integrated into a gentle laughter. Very often, I could predict the next move or sign she would make. Not always, yet often was good enough a consistency. But I never could explain why she did so. Nor was I sure if she knew the answer to the same. And I knew, at least this time, that she was going to follow me to the parking bay.
I realized that I had reached the car park bay when I got a sharp pull on my collars from my back. I had instructed her umpteen numbers of times that I am best left alone when I get into one of those “Do Not Disturb” modes yet she keeps violating that law and keeps getting agitated reactions from me. Somethings though, never change. Rather shouldn’t. But today I was rather enjoying the non-stop chatter, the way I used to over a decade ago. The Cappuccinos replaced by ordinary coffee, the car bay replaced by the crumbling yet lively canteen. Or rather, the other way around.
“You have any intentions of getting back home or you plan to sleep the night here on the beach?” For the umpteenth time today and that raised to another comfortable umpteen times in the past few years, my chain of thoughts snapped. “Well, I guess you’ll remain stranded here if I choose to stay back and hence, I think it’s a wiser option to get back home.” I too hadn’t lost my tone completely, I observed. At least when I was speaking to her. The modulations in indentations were as crisp as it was ever.
Locating the car in the bay, we headed in its direction.
As I turned the Audi A4 onto the Express way heading east into the hassles of the city, I shot a glance through the rear view mirror at the setting sun that was just disappearing over the horizon. She sitting beside me, didn’t notice. The setting sun had seen them all...from the cups of coffee to the long walks to remember. And those long drives as well. All it didn’t see were those that mattered. The dreams of a dreamer.
If someone had asked me what I was doing, I would have been absolutely blank for an answer. Luckily, no one did. In fact, had I seen someone doing what I was doing, I would've pitied that man for the state he was in – mentally handicapped.
I was trying to count the tiny sparkling grains of sand on that seashore. The sands.....of time.
The evening sun was still hot. Strictly speaking, was it the evening sun..? No, rather I'd call it the late afternoon sun. A boy and girl, a furlong away, in their very pristine and kiddish form were as ever building castles on sand. “Innocence,” I pondered, “is as blissful a quantity as ignorance.”
I stared at the horizon on the west. The mating of the blue line of the ocean waters with the clear blue skyline. The fusion of two substances in its purest form. It seemed as if the water, beyond the point, fell off a cliff dragging along with it, the bright blue sky.
Bright blue sky. We used to call it sky blue. In fact, whenever the school reopened after the long-on-paper-yet-short-on-ground summer vacations, we used to flaunt our new uniforms and bags in school. I always used to get that bright white shirts and sky blue shorts from the Kumar's Emporium, on the Nayagam Streets along the banks of mellifluous flowing Kabini. The uncleji with a jerry-laden topi on his head, omnipresent at Kumar's billing counter, always used to give me two packets of Poppins and a chilled bottle of Fanta. Although my dad seldom allowed us in family to use soft drinks, he was always a different self when we went shopping at Kumar's twice a year – once at school reopening time, to buy those lovely brand new uniforms for me and my sister and another during Diwali, for buying new attire for entire family. And my sister always used to cry that she wanted “that” ghagra choli, although it always turned out that the one she liked was always a size bigger than her. And those sessions in which my Appa would coax her to “adjust” with a Ghee Dosa and filter kaapi at Venki's and a candy bar after that. And boy, didn't we love the smell of the hot filter kaapi at Venki's... anything I'd give to go there for that Ghee Dosa and Venki's kaapi.
Aaah..kaapi. It all changed when the small town guy me got admitted to the college in town around 60 km and two bus routes away. For someone whose world revolved around Mudaliar Street where my house was located, the St. George's high school where I completed my schooling, the local avatar of “Times Square” Nayagam Street and the Kabini river, life ceased to be as slow and simple as it once used to be as I was sucked into the charms and pace of town life. Che Guevara and Karl Marx became people I worshipped although their communist ideologies scathingly decried idolatry references. You would rather splash concentrated sulphuric acid over a mug of water bare handed than to buy a “Made in USA/UK/Germany” merchandise.
But all that was teens – the psychology of youth, as I explained to myself later. I will never know how or when but it so happened that all the enmity against all those multi nationals in the world and the “corrupt ideology” of capitalism deserted me in favour of adulation in an equal or probably an exceeding measure. Branded clothes seldom got off my torso as the metamorphosis by the time I reached my final year in college took me through short bursts of mental turmoil.
Looking back, it was the final year in college, when I really imbibed the depth of the term metamorphosis. A black and white story, out of the blue, turned vibrantly colourful. There was this somebody who I met (rather, I'd like to believe I was destined to meet) The meeting was ever etched in my memory – a strange and unique one at that. She a fresher into college, I found her struggling to convince the canteen bhaiyya that she was short by 1 rupee and 4 annas and that she would pay up the next day. Somehow, I nudged in and offered the missing amount. There was nothing abnormal about the cute “Thank You” that followed up that incident. It was casual meetings here-and-there in the campus subsequently, lit up by either side with gentle smiles. If I were to pin point what made me ask her for a cup of coffee sometime after a month, I'd have had to brood for the answer but the fact still remained. The smiles persisted, the only difference being that we were smiling across the table, two cups of coffee that emptied over an hour ago separating us, yet the smiles no less blossom.
The small conferences across the canteen table over cups of coffee slowly made way to short, and eventually longer “walks to remember” circumventing the college campus. Rumours spread across the campus, as with my class. After all, they were bound to talk what they talked when they saw what they saw. There were times when I despised the whole world for going on speculating the way it did without caring for my explanation, although if some intellectual ever had the sense to do so, I honestly didn't possess a solid answer to counter. I didn't know. I didn't want to know. And I didn't know if she knew.
But the better part was she didn't care. And her resilience taught me too. To take it in my stride. A very simple question from her put an end to all the turmoil in my mind, “If those people who spread that rumour mean nothing to you, why should you be bothered by what they speak?” There was no objective answer to this question, yet this question managed to answer all the questions raging in my mind.
Everybody complains that final year in college spans on the scale of time, a value nowhere close to the actual time it should take. When life was beginning to take the path it never treaded a priori, life was, as well, beginning to approach the end. Or at least the life in college. Separation was as always hard as was inevitable. As the reel in my mind started to roll through those final days in college and that parting gift, that cute handmade greeting card of her’s which I still keep a lot priced than a lot of supposed memorabilia, I was interrupted. As ever the interruption was perennial and yet, it wielded the same power as it used to do over a decade ago in college.
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“What are you dreaming? You still acting that scene in canteen, 1 rupee and 4 anna one?” Shrugging, I woke up to a sound which once upon a time I loved to hear. Once upon a time? Well, I’ll let that question remain a question. I rubbed my eyes. It took my eyes, some real adjustment to focus on the red ball that lost most of its royalness but yet maintained a visually pleasing elegance. The sun was retreating…the same red ball to rise at a place thousands of miles away, at the same time, on some eastern horizon.
“The usual. Cappuccino. Two cubes of sugar. Not stirred. I took an Espresso today. I didn’t feel the usual, needed a strong dose of coffee.” I wondered. If this radio, which always unerringly used to switch on in my presence and blare non-stop, would ever comprehend the meaning of silence. Oh yeah, she had to. After all, what bare minimum I could expect from someone who always professed her desire to explore nature, is to know silence profoundly.
“Inertia,” long back the legendary Issac Newton had observed for laymen, “is the reluctance of a body to change its current state.” I wondered if lethargy was a word that conveyed the same unpleasant meaning in a more pleasant manner. I was toying between the beauty of Newtonian physics and the structure of English language when she embarked on her usual demeanour. Module two in her algorithm went to execution as her legs came up in an aggressive pose, the target being my back as though she was assigned to execute the final penalty kick in the penalty shootout in the Italy-France Soccer World Cup finals in 2006, which Frenchman David Trezeguet shot out of target to hand Italy the soccer World Cup. Although Trezeguet, as any other Frenchman might miss, I had complete faith in the precision of some people to execute some steps with clinical precision, even if they had never in life seen a soccer ball. Thankfully, Newton had proved long before I attempted to that every action had to have an opposite reaction (equal and opposite..?? Not very sure of the former…) and that very action of hers evoked a response from me, which was to lift myself up from sand and thrust out my hand for my coffee. Filter kaapi..?? Boy, no one in the Gen X goes for filter kaapi, that is for the oldies. A Cappuccino from one of the nearby coffee shop (the Gen X equivalent of Venki’s) is the trend of the day. So there was me, with my coffee in hand and she with hers.
“Kitna old girl friends ko dekha yaar apne dream mein?” With all its sarcasm intended, I realized that some things will never change. Years of life, job, marriage, kids...nothing can alter very minute nuances of character that are bound to come out of suppression when the optimum opportunity comes along. The radio went into active mode and all this unfortunate listener could think of was when would the power to the radio be cut off. Sporting my usual smile, which seemed to recharge the radio rather than put her off, I started walking in the direction of the car park, a couple of hundred metres away. Although she didn’t like it, I don’t know why she started following me, the radio still at its peak output. The smile in me integrated into a gentle laughter. Very often, I could predict the next move or sign she would make. Not always, yet often was good enough a consistency. But I never could explain why she did so. Nor was I sure if she knew the answer to the same. And I knew, at least this time, that she was going to follow me to the parking bay.
I realized that I had reached the car park bay when I got a sharp pull on my collars from my back. I had instructed her umpteen numbers of times that I am best left alone when I get into one of those “Do Not Disturb” modes yet she keeps violating that law and keeps getting agitated reactions from me. Somethings though, never change. Rather shouldn’t. But today I was rather enjoying the non-stop chatter, the way I used to over a decade ago. The Cappuccinos replaced by ordinary coffee, the car bay replaced by the crumbling yet lively canteen. Or rather, the other way around.
“You have any intentions of getting back home or you plan to sleep the night here on the beach?” For the umpteenth time today and that raised to another comfortable umpteen times in the past few years, my chain of thoughts snapped. “Well, I guess you’ll remain stranded here if I choose to stay back and hence, I think it’s a wiser option to get back home.” I too hadn’t lost my tone completely, I observed. At least when I was speaking to her. The modulations in indentations were as crisp as it was ever.
Locating the car in the bay, we headed in its direction.
As I turned the Audi A4 onto the Express way heading east into the hassles of the city, I shot a glance through the rear view mirror at the setting sun that was just disappearing over the horizon. She sitting beside me, didn’t notice. The setting sun had seen them all...from the cups of coffee to the long walks to remember. And those long drives as well. All it didn’t see were those that mattered. The dreams of a dreamer.
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