If We Keep It Quiet

‘It’s best if we keep it quiet,’ the Headmaster said.

The young boy remembered those words and the Science teacher.

His parents agreed to take him to another school. The Headmaster offered ‘a smooth transfer even though it’s mid-year’. Couple of schools owed him that return favour.

The Science teacher was reprimanded. He taught there for thirteen more years. There were other complaints, also kept quiet. He got the National Best Teacher Award a year before he died in a hit-and-run accident. 

Many years later, a fine summer morning, the retired Headmaster was walking in a park with his young grandson. A man in his late thirties came up to him and said, ‘It’s best if we keep it quiet.’

The old man collapsed.

The boy later told the police, ‘That man said something. I can’t remember. If only I could.’ 

Stories of the First Night

‘You look tired. Go and rest in the bedroom,’ her half-day-old sister-in-law suggested.

‘Rest for…?’ she wanted to ask.

Instead, she smiled shyly. She made a mental note of ‘the’ bedroom, not ‘your’, not ‘his’, ‘the’. She was bored, not tired. Isn’t he supposed to be with her tonight? She turned to her mother-in-law.

The older lady nodded kindly at her. ‘You go ahead, dear. It is the room on the right.’

It was a decent bedroom. A bed, dressing table, chair, an attached bathroom, air-conditioned too. Someone had deposited her suitcase there. No cabinet or cupboard though. Where should she hang her clothes? The chair should do for tonight. She had a quick shower and put on a new nightdress. Was it too frilly, a bit too daring? She sat on the bed. Too firm, coir mattress was it? She tried bouncing. She moved to the window. She looked best there, she thought. She got tired of standing, sat on the bed again, near the edge, ready to rise quickly. She crossed her legs at the ankles, and presented her profile to the door. After a while, she lay back on the bed, daintily on her side; then sprawled on her back, hands and legs apart, a near-perfect X right in the middle.

She did not want to nod off. That would not do.

That might make a cute story, but it would not sell with her gang. The veterans would say, ‘Yeah, get used to that.’ The unmarried would call it uninspired. She did not want to be the first one without a proper first night story.

The custom started with Nirmala. They were nineteen when she married. Nirmala had told her parents that she did not want to waste life studying. They immediately got her married to a 28-year old engineer in the army, tall, dark, handsome, terribly bald too.

‘Did you carry a tray with a glass of milk and a banana to the bedroom? Did you share it fifty-fifty?’ the gang wanted to know.

‘You idiots,’ Nirmala had laughed, ‘that’s been scrapped.’

‘How can tradition be scrapped?’

‘Who takes foodstuff to the bedroom? Do you want ants on your bed?’

That touch of reality set the mood.

Nirmala recollected, ‘He had one condom. He struggled a lot to open the packet and made a hole in it.’ They had laughed. ‘What to do, we used it.’

‘How was it?’

‘Pregnant, am I not?’

Supriya married two years later. Her first night was in a hotel room. Not enough space at home. He had a few pegs of whisky. She was allowed a sip or two. They sang songs. She made it sound very romantic. Nice story but sounded fictitious, they had concluded.

Anandam was next, at twenty two and a half. She reported that she was molested. It was hard to imagine her skinny, asthmatic husband forcing himself on her. She used to be the shot-put champion in school. None of them dared to voice their doubts about her tragic drama.

Jasmine’s story was hilarious. They had used oil, she whispered, blushing.

‘Massage…?’ a naïve unwed asked.

‘No… you know… for that.’

‘Oh…’

They had surreptitiously taken the bottle of oil from the storeroom. It had the label of J&J baby oil, but the bottle they had had oil that had been used to fry chilly or peppers. His mother liked to conserve oil. Jasmine joined in the gang’s laughter over her story with ‘burning private parts’.

She had no hope of matching Jasmine’s performance but a half-decent story was the night’s first imperative.

He turned up one hour later, looking haggard.

‘Those damn aunts! Last night they took my room and I had no place to sleep. Tonight, they wanted me to drop them off, no one else would do. Bloody aunts! I am knackered.’ She sat up in bed, rather ungainly from her pose of crucified suffering. He continued, more gently, ‘Don’t bother. You lie down. You must be tired too. Sorry for the delay. Why don’t you turn off the lights?’

Turn off the lights, indeed! Was he trying to finish off the night? The situation seemed grim. Will she have to do a strip-tease? Yeah, right, she could imagine his amazed look. He might exchange her for those aunts.

She was standing by the bed when he came out of the bathroom.

‘What happened?’ he asked. He came to her side, looking alarmed, protective, ‘Did you see it?’

‘Huh?’

‘The spider…’

‘The spider…?’

He took a torch from a drawer of the dressing table. He squatted on the floor and surveyed the scene beneath the bed. She joined him.

‘I have seen it once or twice, quite colourful one, you know, the huge variety,’ he informed her. ‘I have not figured out its hideout.’

She looked interested.

They stood up.

‘Which side do you want?’ he asked.

‘Huh?’

‘Which side of the bed?’

‘Oh… you choose… I am fine anywhere,’ she was back in the shy mode.

‘Ok, right for me. Let me be your right hand.’ He found that funny. She looked at him. He looked incapable of double entendre. It was just nervous, bad humour, sadly.

He flopped down on the right side of the bed. She went to the other side, lay down and waited for his next move. He reached towards her, leaned further for the switch which was on her side and turned off the lights.

‘I am definitely knackered,’ he mumbled, speedily slipping away into sweet slumber.

‘Oh no, don’t do that, you fool,’ she wanted to scream and shake him awake.

She thought she heard deep breathing from his side.

She turned to her side, facing away from him, disappointed.

She felt fingers on her shoulder. She smiled. There he comes!

The fingers moved lightly on her shoulder, to her neck, back to the shoulder, down her arm, back up again. It skirted past the thin strap of her nightdress. Push it down, she felt like urging. It moved away, down her back and away. She thought deeply, lying perfectly still.

What if that was the spider? She felt gooseflesh first and excited thrill next. What if she turned and found it on his face? How will she displace the arachnid?

She paused when a new line of thinking troubled her. What if her gang had set her up? What if they had told him about the story pact and that’s how the spider entered the scene? Will they do that to her? No, she decided, they were not that imaginative. She decided to try it out on the next one in her gang to get married.

She reached down and picked up her bedroom slipper. Soft but firm, that will do. Spider or no spider, her story needed a good ending. It should feel like a smack to the face.     

Love Sick

Sreekumar is a nice, brilliant chap. I have no doubts about that, not about him being my best mate either. But, I would not have recruited him in my department given a choice.

The new venture is exciting and challenging. That could be the high of early days speaking. As in most pioneering stuff, life and work will surely be great once we get through the initial drudge. It is for that I hired two lieutenants to guide the dozen overconfident not-so-exceptional flunkies who think they should not be doing donkey-work. 

I was lucky to get Girija, a quiet lady with an amazing academic and professional track record who could have reached greater heights if she had focused on her career instead of trying to balance that with a marriage, and that too a troublesome marriage. As for Sreekumar, I know that he can do a great job as the second lieutenant, as long as he is not backed up against the wall and pressed for an explanation.

It is tough to explain the problem with him. My first encounter with his ways might shed some light. We were in grade six. Our class-teacher that year was a martial middle-aged lady with the manner and countenance of a bull dog, the kind of stuff that’s called fearsome force of nature. In the middle of her tough regimen to turn cherubic angels into battle-ready men, Sreekumar went AWOL for a week. He returned and presented a crazy nonchalance when the class-teacher demanded an explanation. He offered the succinct, ‘Bus miss.’ The bull dog thought its tail was being pulled and attacked viciously. The ensuing fracas in that school, in those dark ages, followed the predictable punishing plot. Sreekumar barely managed to avoid expulsion.

With him, such incidents turned out to be the rule rather than the exception and, as his best friend, I had the misfortune to be in the neighbourhood.

In college, my love-interest of those days confronted him and she enquired why he frowned upon our relationship. He replied, ‘Stupid stupider.’

In graduate school, a bunch of bellicose right-wingers felt reasonably aggrieved when Sreekumar described their views as, ‘Constipated wit.’ We escaped with cracked lips and swollen knuckles.

Every day in office, I expect some big honcho to forward a message or mail from Sreekumar explaining our work as, ‘Syphilitic fuck.’ True but troublesome that would be.

Strangely, nothing of that sort happened, crossed-fingers knocked-wood et al. Girija and Sreekumar divided the empire and ruled effectively. They rarely crossed boundaries and avoided each other like the plague. I did not try to educate those two about teamwork. Life was ambling along nicely.

One quiet evening, at a bar, I tried to tell Sreekumar about Girija’s marital troubles which she had confided to me during a one-on-one session of performance appraisal. He concentrated on his drink and told me to ‘Shut up.’

Last week, we faced our first major crisis. We had a few big projects to complete. Girija called in sick. I wondered if it was caused by illness or abuse. I stepped in to cover for Girija.

I should not have been surprised when Sreekumar went AWOL that same day leaving me in deep muck. Didn’t Yogi Berra say it was déjà vu all over again? My calls and messages to him went unanswered. If I was not confined in office, with the dozen imbeciles, I would have gone to his place and dragged him to work.

On the third day of absence, he sent a message, ‘Love sick.’

I nearly blew my top and readied myself for a final confrontation. I cursed him for leaving me with the tremendous load and that too for love.

On the fourth day, I got a call from Girija’s house. Her father informed me that she had died of an aneurysm that morning.  I informed the team of the loss and arranged for taxis to take us to her place. We planned to return to office after paying our respects. We still had lots of work to complete. I did not bother to inform the still absent Sreekumar.

We went to her parents’ place. Her father took us in. Her mother sat alone near the head, staring blankly at the face, weeping silently. We tried to leave unobtrusively after doing the rounds, but Girija’s younger brother requested us to wait for thirty minutes, till the body was taken for cremation. He found seats for us in the small courtyard and filled us in on the details of her death. I studied the crowd. The scene was the usual. Relatives looked busy or sad. Neighbours and friends waited patiently, silently, like us. I noticed a bored fidgety man standing with his own group near the front gate. I guessed that that impatient one was her husband. The ambulance backed up into the compound. The driver and his companion carried a rusty metal stretcher into the house.

Her mother stood up and beckoned her son. Girija’s brother nodded at her instructions. He went outside the compound. A minutes or two later, he returned with a man who must have been standing in the street, a little away from the house. The man went up to her mother. They hugged, supported each other. The man looked at Girija’s body one last time. Sreekumar’s face was expressionless. He looked haggard. I heard her mother tell him that Girija would never leave them. He nodded. Then, without a word, he left the place, his head down. He did not notice us. Before leaving with the body for the cremation, her father came up to me and told me to take care of Sreekumar. He told me that my friend had been in the hospital all the time, keeping watch outside the ICU. Her father was scared that he might do something silly. We waited for the ambulance to leave, and then returned to office. 

Her Unremarkable Problem

A few days after their engagement, she met his first crush. They were in a coffee-shop. The lady was sipping latte and reading a book of poetry. He took her to the lady’s table and introduced her, rather proudly, as his fiancée. The lady said ‘lovely’. There was the what-are-you-doing lovely-to-meet-you chit chat. The meeting lasted barely a minute. She wondered why the lady seemed evasive, or impatient to get back to the poetry. Back at their table, he told her that the affair had lasted a year. She asked if the lady was ‘into poetry even then’. He nodded. Weird, she thought, he hardly seemed the type for ladies ‘into poetry’.

At their wedding reception, she met two ‘old girlfriends’. They were the friendly sort. They teased him, her too. She felt jealous when he blushed. That turned into irritation when he gushed ‘we should get together soon’. They laughed and teased her, ‘keep an eye on this ladies’ man’. She did not like the way they said it.

In the first year of marriage, she came across a few more of ‘his women’, that’s how she called them then. She sulked at first. He told her that he did not matter to them ‘at all’. She wondered why he did not say ‘they do not matter to me at all’.

One of the ladies was downright rude. He accosted that lady on the busy Main Street and she pretended not to remember him for a few minutes and when she did, she winced, quite visibly. She seemed, strangely, relieved when he introduced his wife. The lady even gave her a strange look. Only later, when they were at home, did she realize it as a pitying look. She observed more closely the next time, and the next time. He was right. He did not seem to matter to them at all. That irritated her. She sulked for a while. She winced whenever she thought of her unremarkable problem.

The Day After

He thought for a while before answering, ‘Don’t know about the first time but there was this teacher. Never felt so small. I wanted to smack his smug face and tell him, ‘Man, I too can ask questions to make you look the fool you are.’ He made me feel so angry, hardly slept that night. But then, the next day, I knew what I had to do. Study more, what else? He was right. But, he didn’t have to rub it in, right?’

He answered couple of questions about his early years. ‘I remember the first story I shared, gave it to a friend, a good friend. How will you feel when someone mocks your baby? Sure it might be ugly but it’s still your baby. Even I knew that it was a pathetic story, well, not just then, a little later. I am not sure what I said to her. Well, if it was real friendship, it would have lasted.’

He talked about the rejection letters, one after the other, how that never touched him, and then the big break, how that too didn’t affect him personally. ‘I got a prize and some money, well, not much, not even enough to take my family out for a meal. But nothing really changed. My father talked to his friends about his two kids, the doctor and the engineer, never about the writer. Nothing new, all my life I waited for the day after to forget what he did to me, if not forget, ignore. You can’t take it out on the old man, can you?’

‘Well, I had my fair share of success. I got her, didn’t I? What a lovely wife! Did I really deserve her? I guess that went to my head. I went overboard with my gift and the party for her, well, you know the hype that goes with V-days. I must have looked a real fool. I know that now, in fact I knew that even before the police charged me for murder. God, why did she have to laugh at me?’

11 Steps To The End

Around 9 am, on a Wednesday in February 1997, Ajit was sauntering to his workplace. His serious demeanour and ponderous walk hinted, not too subtly, at his professional status (fourth year PhD research scholar at the Institute), and the other attributes (pot belly, thin legs, owl-like eyes behind thick glasses, cheap attire) did not make those clues cryptic. He was on the stretch of road between Ganganahalli and Mekhri Circle. It had rained the night before. He paused beneath the shade of a tree. He shifted a cloth bag from his left shoulder to the right, wiped his glasses and face with a wrinkled snotty handkerchief, pulled at the errant elastic of his underwear, scratched his head and then the left armpit. He thought about how that spot could capture the essence of Bangalore. In the wet shade beneath the canopy, it seemed like the cool green soporific Bangalore of old. Just a little beyond, there was the heat, dust, pollution, unruly rush of vehicles and a society unsure of itself.

Someone discarded a cigarette (cheap, without filter, a quarter remaining) from a passing vehicle. Ajit could not be sure if it was from the bus to Hyderabad or the noisy tempo-van heaped high with sacks. The cigarette rolled and rested (rather miraculously) at the edge of a small pothole in the middle of the outer lane, with the lit end balancing over the hole, still burning. Ajit was not a smoker but he could not help thinking that it seemed like a cigarette resting on an ashtray, between puffs. He watched the cigarette and counted the number of vehicles that went near or over it, without displacing or destroying it.

On the other side of the road, a poor couple started fighting. Ajit glanced at them briefly before returning his attention to the cigarette. That domestic scene seemed rather commonplace to him. The woman was howling, as if in pain, but kept charging at her husband. The man held her back with one hand, and slapped her with the other. A young man intervened but the woman chased him away. A crowd gathered to watch that engaging spectacle, on that side of the road and on Ajit’s side too.

A Maruti 800 passed over the cigarette. Saritha was on the passenger seat, looking out to the left. The crowd around Ajit caught her attention. She found it strange that a dozen men and women were staring straight ahead while one man was looking down. At first, she thought that that man was ogling at her. She turned around in her seat, first to the left, to see what that man could be looking at; and then to the right, to understand more. Her husband Karthik who was new to driving was distracted and troubled by her movements. He eased his foot off the accelerator, and steered the car closer to the centre of the road, essentially taking up both lanes.

Loud horns came from the vehicles behind but Karthik, now even more flustered, maintained his course and speed. That slow procession continued till the crossroad near Ganganahalli market. A Contessa tried to overtake Karthik on the left. A cyclist, trying to cross the road, jumped in front of the Contessa and the Maruti. All of them braked and managed to avoid crashing into each other. Karthik had braked but also swerved to the right, taking the Maruti close to the edge of his lane, nearly butting into the onward traffic on the other side.

A bus from the village of Devanahalli (this was before the construction of the international airport in that part; and, long after politicians and businessmen had divided the area around that village among themselves, if one believed credible rumours) was speeding past that crossroad near the market. That bus deviated slightly to avoid Karthik’s car. Mrs Ramesh was going slowly on a scooter to the left of the bus. Unnerved by the proximity of the bus, she tried to halt. She put her feet down, slipped and fell to the right along with her scooter. She escaped the rear wheels of the bus. The vehicles behind her stopped in time. But she must have landed oddly, probably because of the weight of the scooter on top of her. Though she was wearing a helmet, she suffered a fatal blow to the head at the base of the neck.

   Mrs Ramesh’s body was not released to her husband that day because a doctor was not available for the post-mortem. Relatives, friends and neighbours gathered to console the heartbroken Mr Ramesh and the devastated young kids. Two doors away from Mr Ramesh’s house, a Mr and Mrs Kumar had a big fight that night. They would have fought even if the Grim Reaper had not visited their neighbourhood. Their fights had become a regular feature in recent months but that night, it turned rather ugly. It started rather tamely with Mrs Kumar telling her husband that he would not be as sad as Mr Ramesh if and when she died. Exasperated, spiteful and truthful too, Mr Kumar retorted that he agreed with her. She accused him of having another woman. For the first time in their married life, Mr Kumar hit his wife. She threatened to report him to the police. He told her to ‘go ahead and make my day’. Then, between loud sobs and even louder curses, she asked him to swear on his mother’s name (his mother was already dead; but, she could not think of another person, dead or alive, capable of disciplining him) that he did not have another woman. Mr Kumar complied and swore on his dead mother’s name that he (‘of course’) has another woman. His wife fainted. He emptied a bottle of water on her head, but that had little effect on her senses. He called for an ambulance. When the ambulance arrived and Mrs Kumar was carried away on a stretcher, their curious neighbours wondered if they were having a double dose of death that day. At the hospital, Mrs Kumar was revived and admitted for a night’s observation. Her tired husband admitted to her that he had lied and that he did not have another woman (he thought of adding ‘unluckily’ but decided against it, only to reduce medical expenses).

After his wife slipped into a tranquilized sleep, Mr Kumar went to a phone-booth near the hospital and dialled Mrs Rajan’s number.  He had not told his wife the whole truth. He thought he was in love with Mrs Rajan, a young beautiful colleague. He was quite keen on a romantic affair, rather sure about desiring a sexual relationship, though equally unsure about divorcing his wife. Mr Kumar enjoyed talking to Mrs Rajan on the phone, outside office hours, though the conversation rarely strayed away from official matters. Mrs Rajan received his calls with professional courtesy, and if she was not troubled by grievous personal troubles she would have told Mr Kumar to ‘sod off’.

That night, her husband Dr Rajan picked up Mr Kumar’s call to hear the excited whisper, ‘Hi, it’s me Kumar’. The best description of Dr Rajan is ‘weirdo’. His external appearance fitted the stereotype of an absentminded scientist. He got a faculty position at the Institute with a bit of luck and a lot of ‘connections’. For nearly a decade, he survived with publications in obscure journals and his intellectual airs. He even got a beautiful and smart wife, again with a bit of luck and an arranged mismatch. It did not take her long to realize that his absentminded persona hid not only a limited intellectual prowess but also, impotence and a growing insecurity. She did not share her predicament with anyone, bearing her cross on her own. She decided to give him time, hoping, praying, for a change, a miracle. Three years into their marital life, there was a shakeup at the Institute. A new Director took charge, conducted a performance appraisal and, without mincing words, told Dr Rajan and other substandard faculty members that they had to prove their worth to have an extension of their contract. Dr Rajan knew his own limitations. He sought spiritual help. The night he heard Mr Kumar’s voice on the phone, he realized what he should do. It is possible he would have realized the same without the call. He left his wife, job and rented house to join a spiritual group.   

Dr Rajan also left behind a misguided research scholar named Ajit. Though Ajit was in his fourth year of the PhD programme, he did not have any publications to his name. He had not made any headway with his research thesis. Worse, after being abandoned by his supervisor, none of the other faculty members wanted him as their student. Thus, two weeks (11 working days) after observing the cigarette (he had noted that the 11^th vehicle had crushed the cigarette), Ajit was chucked out of the Institute. He found himself jobless at the end of (roughly) 11 events. 

About three months later, 11 weeks actually, there was a scientific conference in Bangalore. On the fourth day, in the 11^th session of the conference, a scientist talked about his group’s extensive work on natural and man-made disasters. He had discovered a curious feature: that every disaster has 11 stages (on average, of course). The next speaker talked about a similar study but with a different conclusion: disasters (even man-made ones) are a result of random events, with no memory of past events (like a martingale process and a fair game, he noted). If there is a God, he or she plays fair dice, the speaker concluded, inviting brickbats.

Ajit could have contributed to that scientific study. 

The Recurring Problem

My affliction was not a surprise. A great grand uncle ran away from his wife because of the same. The next generation, my grandparents’ lot, was spared. They did not have the time to be affected. But, their kids exhibited a relapse and it was back with a vengeance. An uncle was stopped in his tracks at Madras Central. He was returning from a retreat, rejuvenated and liberated, gone cuckoo too. He tried to board a train by jumping in front of it. Collecting his remains proved to be easier than its disposal. It took a week to gather his close relatives for the last rites. They were in various places of worship; and, that was not due to hereditary troubles alone, domestic conditions too played a role. As for my generation, they got it real bad. Cousins speak a foreign tongue dense with devotion, inner self, charity and gurus. As if that was not enough pain, that ilk makes sure that charity never extends to the dining table. I avoid them. Unappetizing topics of discussion along with postprandial hunger ruined the baggage of affinity carried by genes and corpuscles.

I tried to avoid the genetic problem, even resorted to draconian measures with my family to keep the ship steady. I forbade any public expression of faith; banned lamps, idols, loud prayers, rituals, festivals and even the feasts. To my wife and kids, I dictated, ‘pray, in private, if you must; but not in public’. They humoured me; or so I thought.

My son rebelled on his eighteenth birthday. That triggered my decline.

He asked for a birthday gift – a family trip to our family temple. That was not all. Instead of a sumptuous buffet at a fabulous restaurant, as I had planned, he wanted us to have the free community lunch served at the temple. Before I could raise a strong tenor of protest, my wife plucked the sentimental strings, then banged the drums of rebellion and coerced me to grant him that gift. I warned her that we were opening the floodgates. Trouble trotted in to test my tolerance.

My son’s visits to that place became a monthly affair, progressed to weekly and finally daily. He did not have to ask for our company again; my wife and daughter were more than glad to ditch me once every fortnight. To be fair, the ladies were not terribly damaged by those visits and I thought I could cope. But then, malignance has a reputation to protect, and hates to lie low. Our annual family vacation invariably got linked to some temple. The trip to Malaysia, the one I had planned for years, became an extended stay at the temple in Batu Caves. The adult son got to decide the itinerary, and the cantankerous father had to be a good sport.

Initially, I had little reason to worry about my son’s obsession. It did not affect his studies or career. In fact, it seemed to help him focus better on financial and professional matters. Paternal pride was pampered when he proved to be more able than I in the cutthroat professional world. But, over time, I also realized that the communication channels with him were being cut, one after the other. It reached a stage when his calm voice speaking so irrationally about world peace, religion, love and harmony sounded as if a thousand nails were scratching a metal plate fixed in my head.

He got a job abroad and I thought that that would cure him. Instead, he got involved with a sect of expats suffering insecurity and identity crisis. He managed their funds and activities. He arranged chartered flights. He used up his leave to shepherd those lost pilgrims to some clever guru’s commune here. There they contributed their services and a good deal of their savings. He rarely had the time to visit us.

He was posted in Berlin when I snapped.

My wife and daughter wrote to him about my madness. He requested his top-notch management consultancy for a two-week leave ‘to attend to an urgent family matter’.

I was in between trips then, wandering in spiritual lanes, searching for the meaning of life or something tenuous like that. I had been to the Western desert, with a group in flimsy white, to read the message in the sands of time. I reversed to the South to deposit my unwashed clothes and to collect a fresh set. I was readying myself for a heady tramp in the hills and forests of the North-east. My son and I met, next to the washing machine, on the penultimate night of his stay.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Bye,’ I said.

‘How are you?’ he asked.

‘Not how, ask what,’ I said.

He remained silent.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Hi,’ he replied.

‘Bye,’ I said.

He seemed troubled. But that could be because he got nothing other than rice porridge, that too without salt, for every meal during that visit. Even as a kid, he hated porridge. But while I was there, nothing less austere was permitted in the house. He tried to talk to me. I slipped into a vacant stare, a trance that made him drowsy. When he stopped talking, which he did after a few sentences, I recited whole passages from the religious texts I had read during my travels, along with the commentary of wise men I had met. Only the devil could have cited the scriptures better than I. That nearly left him comatose.

Somehow, during that brief encounter, he managed to get my signature on a few documents. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that he wanted his parents with him. He took care of everything. In less than a month, we were resettled in his Berlin apartment.

He tried tender loving care. He had porridge with us, though I suspect that he secreted in more wholesome food. He let me rave and rant about the many interpretations of texts, as long as I did not trouble the neighbours.

I escaped on a Tuesday, two weeks after reaching those shores. My son found me after three days, in the main shopping district, with a group of tonsured, pigtailed, enthusiastic youngsters. I was in the middle of a delightful medley contributing nuggets of wisdom centuries old. We had collected a handsome amount of money by amusing or antagonizing shoppers. My son dragged me home, and the scene must have reminded younger viewers of inconsiderate parents dragging their sensible kids away from an ice-cream parlour.

I was placed under close supervision, with reasonable freedom. I used the Net to get in touch with a guru based in Potsdam who had a large following. I haggled with my guards for a week-long retreat there but they vetoed it. They allowed me a day’s trip. My son and wife came along with me. He was intimidated by the neo-Nazi fashion sported by the bouncers posted outside that ashram. She frowned at the damsel with a daring décolletage who escorted me within for a private session of inner bliss. Once again, I was dragged back to my son’s apartment.

All was quiet on that front for a few weeks.

On a Sunday, my son brought home a nice Bulgarian girl. She did not even roll her eyes when we offered a lunch of porridge. She seemed normal. I wondered if my wife would counsel her about my son’s congenital spiritual failings. In my state, I could not offer any guidance. Those involved in matters of the heart tend to be optimistic in the early stages. The female of the species expects the male to improve with time, and the male assumes that the female will preserve status quo. I was thinking about such when my son asked us for permission to marry her, more for show than substance or serious consideration.

His mother gushed with delight. I remained silent. The three of them stared at me, probably trying to decide if they should take me seriously.

‘Well…?’ my wife prodded gently.

‘I need time,’ I said.

‘What for…?’ my son asked.

‘I need time,’ I repeated.

So, I was given a week. Two days later, I disappeared once again, but returned on my own that night.

‘Where were you?’ my wife asked.

‘I went to Potsdam,’ I replied.

My wife and son looked at each other, slightly alarmed.

‘And…?’ my son prodded, not too gently.

‘I went with a letter for the guru. In that letter, I wrote about your marriage plans, also requested him to guide me,’ I said.

‘Well, what did he say?’ my son asked.

‘He did not accept my letter,’ I said.

‘So, what does that mean?’ my son asked.

‘What do you mean what does that mean?’ I asked.

‘Are you going to approve my marriage or not?’ my son asked.

‘Of course not… that was guru’s way of telling us.’

My son exploded. I could not make out what he was saying, nor could my wife. But we figured out that he was laying down new ground rules. He forbade all public expression of faith; banned lamps, idols, loud prayers, rituals, festivals and even the feasts. He dictated to us, his parents, ‘pray, in private, if you must; but not in public’. We humoured him, or so he thought. Our daughter joined us in Berlin. She did not seem perturbed by the new rules laid down by her brother. The wedding involved a visit to some office, and then friends joined us for a sumptuous feast at a grand hotel. We lived happily ever after.   

Off and on, I still surprise and force-feed my family porridge, to ward off saintly thoughts.

(If you want a morbid take on a similar theme, try the Malayalam movie ‘Thaniyavarthanam’.)

The Speaker In Between

The grand old man of Indian science was the first speaker in the post-lunch session. He had asked for that challenging 2 pm slot. He believed that such an august audience needed him, and not soporific lesser mortals. His mental and gastric faculties too required that exertion, however disagreeable that twin assault might be to others. He arrived with his entourage of professors, lecturers, students, technical and secretarial staff. They followed him and his words faithfully, never deviating from their place in that evolutionary order. For more than fifty years (from silicon to bucky-balls, cuprates to blue-phases, macro- to nano- materials) his research factory has produced scientific articles like the dailies, tweaking names, rearranging figures, the different presented in a similar whole. He raised his Caeserean snub nose and surveyed the packed house, rather pleased and quite surprised to find a full auditorium. Even the floor was taken. He frowned when he saw one of his cronies seated in front, nodding sagely, in dotage or in stupor. That relic was known to rise once during every session with the question, ‘Doesn’t this go against the second law of thermodynamics?’ Not that the grand old man did not have an answer to that. He had an answer to everything he did not understand.

The large audience was there not for him but for the foreigner scheduled at 3 pm, the third and final speaker in that session. That star had a cult status among the intelligentsia, having astounded the world with three original papers when he was just an undergraduate student in the early seventies. He spoke on the God matter. His prodigious talent was still evident. None in that audience were able to figure out if his subject had been technical or philosophical.

Slipping in between these two giants, the second speaker at 2:30 pm, a diminutive unknown from a local research lab, shocked the audience. She started with the picture of a vulture with its head in the rectum of a dead carcass. That generated a collective queasiness in that audience already left lightheaded by the first speaker. She spoke with a great deal of enthusiasm about how the vulture’s system relishes and tolerates the toxic feast. Then, she shifted to the subject matter of her research. She began with the clichéd disclaimer that every great intellectual work is a result of 10% perspiration, 10% inspiration, 30% luck and the rest, plagiarism or a great deal of twiddling the thumbs.

She noted the twiddling of thumbs in government offices. She compared the mountains and highways of garbage, and secret landfills, with the vulture’s meal. She revealed that the residents had revolted and dumped truckloads of stinking waste in the only clean site in the city, the legislative assembly. ‘Lady Luck stepped in then,’ she gushed, ‘remember the discovery of penicillin?’ Her research lab investigated the strangest of strange events. Within hours of dumping the waste, the stink had disappeared and the toxic mounds had mutated into a garden of exquisite beauty. ‘Was it a miracle?’ she asked the stunned audience. She concluded with the admission that her study had been put on hold when she had requested access to the genetic makeup of the occupants of that site.

Did the case end there? ‘It got curiouser  and curiouser’, as the literary sort might say. That scientific study found no mention in the published proceedings of that conference. As far as the world was concerned, that speaker in between never existed.

Left Right Left ... Right Right Right

‘How is he?’

‘Very bad state…’

‘Rascals… all of them should be hanged.’

‘Thought you’re against the death penalty…’

‘Well, I’m ready to hang them myself!’

‘If there are such among us, how civilized can we be?’

‘Are those his folks?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Who are they then?’

‘Don’t know… people like us?’

‘Why aren’t they here… his folks?’

‘Guess…’

‘You can’t be serious.’

‘What do you expect? They can’t be expected to be martyrs for his cause.’

‘Have you seen it?’

‘Parts of it…’

‘What’s it about?’

Silence

‘Come on… it’s just me.’

Whispers

‘Bloody hell…’

‘But…’

‘What but…?’

‘Did they have to do this for that?’

‘Makes sense though.’

Silence

‘What would you do?’

‘Nothing of this sort…’

‘Right… what if it was…’ whispers

‘Stop it! That is not the same as this!’

‘But, what if it was that?’

Silence

‘You would do the same.’

‘I would not… it’s just not right…’

‘Even if it’s right to feel the way you do…’

Silence

‘Why did that idiot have to do that here?’

‘Name the right place to do that.’

‘Anywhere but here, surely…’

‘Everywhere, there is a ‘that’ that will not be right.’

Silence

‘It’s scary, actually… so much that is wrong, not sure what is right.’

‘Makes one wonder if it’s actually too much right and too little wrong…’

‘I guess the trick is to do the wrong thing in the right place.’ Laughs

‘Hush, don’t laugh here.’

‘Ok… or, should it be the right thing in the wrong place?’ Muffled laughter

‘Oye, you will end up like him… wrong thing in the wrong place.’ Laughs

Rite

My son would have been twenty five today. His mother has arranged a fourth anniversary prayer service. I am not invited.

She found his body, the note too. It did not say much, my life is over.

We managed to keep it off the papers. The police helped with their disinterest. They took him to the morgue, filed his note. They knew about the hushed-up incident in college. They must have hoped that it would not snowball into a controversy. His friends created a scene in college. The Principal asked me to talk to them, and I did. His mother said that I did not care enough.

A week earlier, he was busy with the cultural festival in college. The main show, the rock festival, was on the penultimate night. Every generation has its Woodstock before ending up like their parents. Every year they try to be the wildest. His friends told me that he had been busy backstage. And, that they had seen her stoned or drunk or both, straddling and necking some out-of-towner. They did not get a chance to talk to the disciplinary committee, they told me. The morning after the rock show, she had reported to a Dean that my son had raped her. The college called her parents, not us. They decided to keep it a college matter. My son was expelled. Two days later, he killed himself.

His mother wanted his room to be left as it was. I agreed. She must be keeping it like that even now.

His friends used to drop by in the first few weeks. They told me that the girl had stopped attending classes. But, not for long, she returned after a month. They reported that she was shunned by all.

I wanted to meet her. One of the lecturers who had remained neutral during the in-house disciplinary meeting helped me out.

I met her at the lecturer’s house. At first, the lecturer refused to leave the room; finally, agreed to be in the next room, with the door left open.

The girl stared at me defiantly. She smoked without asking for permission. I took a seat, not opposite, to her side.

I did not know what to say to her.

I know he did it, I told her.

My son kept diaries. He wrote about his dreams, his experiences, just short notes, but long enough. Just fun, that was his point of view: the prankster, the voyeur, the bottom-pinching, the carefree grope. He did not write after the rock show. There was no time, I suppose. I removed those diaries before his mother discovered them. I promised myself that I would cremate that too. I still have those notebooks. He was my son.  

She kept on staring at me. What did I expect: a good cry, a switch-like moment, darkness to light, a break?

I did not tell her about the diaries. I could have asked her if I should reveal what’s in those diaries. That would kill his mother, I could have argued.

The lecturer came back and told me to leave.

His mother got to know that I met her. She asked me why. I shrugged. Even otherwise, we would have separated, I think.