by Ruskin Bond
The lane was so narrow that it was difficult even for two rickshaws to pass; along with bicycles it was impenetrable. Cyclists had to get down and negotiate their machines with difficulty through the congestion. As soon as the rickshaw entered the by-lane, direct sunshine disappeared, the heat also lessened, it was less uncomfortable. But the rickshaw made little progress, it moved from one jam to another. Actually there was nothing unusual about it – that was the way traffic moved in those lanes. The lane had so many twists and turns that soon Virendra lost his sense of direction. But he had full confidence in the rickshaw puller that after some time he would pierce through some opening very close to the destination. On both sides of this perpetually slow-moving traffic the lane had a world of its own, and it was like experiencing a panorama of pictures as one rode through.
It had everything. It had shops of all kinds. One could see shops where textile material and clothes were sold – in many such shops the shopkeepers with folded legs sat on mattresses, small tea shops, shops selling sweets; one would sometimes see some shops on terraces just next to the street where some bare-chested sweet-maker was stirring boiling milk in a large cauldron continuously, or someone heating oil to be used for frying some savoury, washermen doing laundry, small jewellery shops where one could see the craftsmen at work, ubiquitous paan and cigarette shops – everything.
That scene went on and on, and although there was no direct sun, the discomfort from the heat was not only on Virendra, it was on everybody, and suddenly through one opening the rickshaw emerged into the main road, very close to Virendra's destination. The rickshaw stopped on the opposite side of the street where the restaurant stood. Virendra felt pleased that he had reached the destination soon – the hunger had peaked. He paid for the ride, crossed the street, reached the restaurant, pushed open the spring door, and stepped inside.
FIVE
'BUDDHA HIMSELF!' SOMEBODY CRIED FROM INSIDE AS Virendra entered the restaurant.
It took a second for Virendra to follow the sound and locate the spot where the call came from. He was totally surprised. It was Vishwamitra Khanna and Harjinder Singh, his two close faculty colleagues from the university.
'Oh, no!' came out from Virendra's mouth, although from his face it was obvious that he was happy at this totally unexpected meeting.
'Oh, yes!' Vishwamitra Khanna responded, enjoying Virendra's surprise at finding them there.
While the restaurant focused on Virendra, not comprehending what was going on, Virendra, obviously pleased, strode past several tables and reached the spot where Khanna and Harjinder were sitting. He stood there for a minute, looked at Khanna, then at Harjinder, and asked smiling, 'Well, what are you doing here?' And before they could answer, he pulled out one of the two empty chairs at the table and sat down. 'Really, what brings you here?' he asked again.
'First, tell us what brought you to the city at this awful hour?' Khanna returned the question.
'You mean rather who brought me?' Virendra asked.
'All right. Who?' Khanna responded and Harjinder looked on amused at both of them.
'The Devil Himself,' Virendra replied eyes twinkling.
Khanna laughed. 'And where have you left this eminent company? Should you not have brought Him along to the restaurant? Would He not feel hungry?' Khanna asked Virendra laughingly.
'No. Today He is fasting. It is a sacrificial fast. He wants a sure victory at the end of the day,' Virendra replied.
'In that case surely He must have given you some impossible assignment; when you fail He will break your neck. What is the assignment?' Khanna asked.
'Yes, you have got it right. He wants delivered to Him two precision-machined stainless steel parts for the electron microscope in two hours' time. On a day when the university machinists are not available.' Virendra's face betrayed a tinge of pain though his overall expression was sarcastically humorous.
'Well, that means you must have a good lunch now. Especially because if He breaks your neck tonight, this could be your last meal!' Khanna smiled.
'Surely, how perceptive of you. And isn't it considerate of Almighty to place you two right here, so that we may have a last chat together!' Virendra said.
'Is it the MatTech machine again?' Harjinder asked.
'Yes.'
'What do they have to say now?'
'They have sent a young man who has just joined their company. Seems competent, but going nowhere trying to defend a faulty design he probably himself does not believe in, and parroting the company stand. He is here for a few hours only; in the best of circumstances he could do little. To top it he has brought with him wrong-sized parts, and to compensate for it wants us to immediately produce two custom-designed precision-machined parts on a day when our great university machinists are not available. So I took some tips from a couple of machinists at the university, travelled to the Coolie Bazaar of this great city, touched the feet of the owner and a machinist of a small workshop soliciting some help, and by God's grace they reluctantly agreed. But the machinist threw me out of his shop because he does not tolerate anybody around while he works. So I am here for the next one-and-a-half hour.'
Khanna and Harjinder listened intently and seriously. 'Has this man come alone? Did you know that he was coming?' Harjinder asked.
'No, he has a sidekick. From the side of the Indian agent representing the interests of MatTech in this country; he does not understand any part of the machine. He does not have to; they have collected their commission. Yes, I knew they were coming. But there were no details of their work plan – how long they would be here, what they would do when they were here, etc. Of course, that is normal.'
'What are the chances that they will be able to put the machine in working order today?' Khanna asked.
'Dim. That is strictly a formal answer politely taking into account probability. The real answer, I believe, is nil.'
'But then why are you going through the killing process of coming to town in this damned heat, running around workshops?'
'I am doing it because I don't want them to complain that they did not get this and they did not get that, and make an excuse. Also I am doing it to satisfy myself; I would be able to say that I did all I could.'
'What would you do, if as you suspect, the machine remains inoperational after they have tried whatever they are going to try and leave today?' Harjinder asked.
'I really do not know. They have already collected the money— the business of these foreign transactions is such that they can get the money released as soon as they have deposited the shipping documents to the bank—the machine does not have to work. Naturally, for this, I cannot go to the Hague. I can initiate a move for blacklisting the company and its agents, but that would be the last step. I would wait a bit more and give them a chance to rectify – they have to replace a section and make some modifications.'
'How long has it been exactly since you placed an order for the machine?' Khanna asked.
'About five years. If we had put the money in the bank it would have doubled by now.'
After Virendra said this, he saw from the corner of his right eye a person coming close and standing next to the table. Virendra turned his head and looked up. It was the waiter, wearing a white uniform, and looking at Virendra. He placed a glass of water in front of Virendra and asked, 'Saab, will you place your order now?'
Virendra looked at Harjinder and asked, 'Have you already ordered?'
'Yes, we had our lunch already. We are just waiting for a cup of coffee. Go ahead and order for yourself.' Harjinder answered.
Virendra looked at the waiter and asked, 'What do you have today? At one time you used to make that preparation of beans cooked with tomato and cheese. Do you still make it? Is the old cook still there?'
'Jee saab,' the waiter replied.
'Then get me a plate of that, spread over a toast. Beans on toast. And go easy on the chilli.'
'All right, saab.' The waiter took the order and disappeared. Virendra tur
ned his head to follow the path of the waiter and for the first time looked at the restaurant and its clientele today. He had come to this restaurant after quite a long time.
The room was quite large, adequate for a four by four arrangement of sixteen tables – each table placed in a diamond orientation. The tables had no cover, the top had a bluish green sunmica on them. The wooden chairs which still retained their original varnish had seats woven with cane ribbons. There was no consistency in the furnishing; however, overall there was a certain neatness.
The side that faced the street was entirely glass; the lower part painted opaque green from inside; the transparent upper part allowed a lot of light in. At one end of that glass wall was the entrance. On the other side of the door, just where the side wall started, sat the cashier, or perhaps the manager, on a raised wooden platform overseeing the entire room. Virendra and his friends had sat at a table which was set against the opposite wall. While Virendra faced the wall and Khanna faced the street, Harjinder faced the back-wall of the restaurant. The back-wall had two doors: one went to the room where at one time billiards used to be played, and the other went to the kitchen. The walls were buff coloured, somewhat glossy; the lower part of the walls was of the same green colour as the glass. A painted red stripe went round the room where the cream and green on the wall met. The room felt quite pleasant with the desert-cooler running somewhere in one of the back rooms; its cool and moist air went through the restaurant and out through a partly opened window behind the cashier. Desert-cooler fans usually make a big noise; the distance here made it sound like a quite tolerable whine. The restaurant was about half-full with customers; all men, mostly office going people from nearby places. Only a couple of men were having lunch, most seemed to be eating snacks.
Virendra turned back his head towards the table. Khanna was just lighting a cigarette. Virendra often thought Khanna was quite a unique character. He taught physics at the university. He joined several years after Virendra did, but from the beginning he steadfastly refused to get into research. He declared that his research had ended with getting a doctoral degree and a stint of post-doctoral work, and publishing a thick paper in Physical Review. He adhered to his resolution absolutely, despite a clear bright head and excellent training abroad, living in a milieu of colleagues almost all of whom were busy in some research activity, worthless or worthwhile. He defied administration's prodding. It could do nothing about firing him. Regardless of the rules the system had no such real ability, nor could they lure him into research through a promise of promotion. Finally the administration gave up. Khanna was indifferent even to administration's failure; he carried on what he thought could be done meaningfully from here. Teaching.
And he did not marry. He refused to give up his independence. Here he defied his parents' and relatives' urgings, and more importantly, successfully dodged the procession of potential in-laws who at one time used to queue up on the street where Khanna lived. The time he thus saved he devoted fully to teaching. Initially he used to spend day and night in the activity; he had now relented somewhat, but teaching was his first passion, that was what he liked most. While after years of teaching many in the faculty became weary, he continued to have enormous patience in answering even the most trivial questions that students used to ask.
He read voraciously. Besides physics, he read newspapers and magazines of all kinds. There were fixed times when almost without fail he could be found in particular sections of the library. These were: the new-journals section, the section of physics texts, the section of reference books, and the room for newspapers and magazines. And he patronised frequently the four tea shops and the two restaurants of the campus. From morning to night. Very rarely, almost never, did he have food cooked at home; only once a week he would let a servant boy come and clean the house. Once in a while he would get in the mood of cooking; he would invite a couple of faculty friends then – without their families. He had very little social interaction, even when invited he would stay away from social gatherings.
He had two other interests. One was watching professional sports, the other was travel to esoteric places. His usual personal expenses were not much; he saved enough money to buy the most expensive television set, to be turned on only when some top international sporting event was on, and never otherwise. And once in a while, he would simply disappear from the campus. Nobody would know where he went. And one fine morning he would return with stories from either a Nepali village next to Namche Bazaar – the starting point of all Everest expeditions, or from the tiger-infested Sunderbans on the shores of Bay of Bengal, or in a somewhat rarer venture with on-the-spot information about food and food vendors on the streets of Hong Kong. And once—this was announced beforehand—he said that he was going to watch the Olympics in person, through his own eyes; and if it meant starving throughout the year he was prepared to do so. He went and he nearly starved himself before that.
What Virendra liked about Khanna was the simplicity, purity, and above all the quality of his engagements, although Virendra's own daily routine was so drastically different. Virendra appreciated Khanna's interest and concern about his work. Virendra used to discuss physics with him on occasions, but mostly enjoyed his company because the information he stored used to get continually updated. In nonscientific matters, even when they used the same data Virendra rarely agreed with Khanna's views or conclusions. He enjoyed his company more for the fuel Khanna carried than the fire.
Harjinder Singh, on the other hand, was a totally different kind of character. An electrical engineer specialising in circuits, thoroughly domesticated with a family of wife, two daughters, and a son, involved and astute in family matters, socially conscious, professionally active, almost perpetually unhappy about the milieu in which he lived. He struggled in a set-up in which he found that it was the system that determined and limited his professional accomplishment and not his innate and acquired abilities. He rejected, he rebelled, but totally because of social and economic constraints, could not kick and leave the system. Beyond this anguish, which was not limited to Harjinder but to many colleagues of Virendra, Harjinder was a person of much sensitivity. He had a feeling for literature—he had a considerable exposure to world literature—and quite uncommonly, a sense of history. The sense of history came from his family background; it was a natural part of his upbringing. His father was a university professor of ancient Indian history and literature. Harjinder once told Virendra that he wanted to study history formally, but there were social forces which worked against it. Relatives, even his father, first asserted and then ruled that he should study engineering, because of better job prospects. He did well in the entrance examination to a regional engineering college, and that sealed his fate forever. It was followed by postgraduate work, and then abroad for doctoral work; one followed the other as if no alternatives existed. He had several job possibilities abroad after his highest degree, but he had to return. There were family pressures because he was the eldest son and he had an inner urge to return to his home country and work here with whatever knowledge he had acquired.
He was married soon after his return through parental negotiation. The girl he married was even more against settling abroad than Harjinder was, so the matter ended there. Later, whenever there were moments of deep frustration, Harjinder thought of trying for a position abroad, but some hindrance or other came up, and now his age, which was approaching fifty, was the foremost disqualification. He had long reconciled himself to the fact that the time for that choice was over.
Virendra did not have many but a few close friends in the university from various departments, but he did not see them regularly or often. It just happened that each one of them was an intense professional, and when Virendra saw them he would spend endless hours hearing about their work and the intricacies of their fields of specialisation. There was Nadkarni in mathematics, Patnaik in computer science. He had a couple of friends in the humanities department as well. Rana of fine arts, who was an arti
st, captivated him with his professional knowledge; they would spend hours together going through Rana's collection of prints and his library of art books, and in the process Virendra picked up some understanding of modern art.
All this flashed through Virendra's mind in a couple of seconds as he turned his attention to his table and the table's occupants. Virendra looked at Harjinder and repeated his old question, 'Really, what are you two doing in town?' He hoped that this time he would not get a light answer.
Harjinder answered seriously, 'Oh! Khanna's cousin and his family from Assam are to pass through the station on their journey to Delhi by Assam Mail. So he was coming to town. I had to buy railway tickets and get reservation for me and my family to go home next month. So I had to come to the station. Khanna thought that I must have that pleasure trip today. Now my job is somewhat done, but the Assam Mail is three hours late. So here we are.' Harjinder made a face.
'Hmm,' Virendra responded. 'You can never believe the timing of the long distance trains, including those which are called superfast. When they are called superfast their timings are excellent as they are introduced, because they are still prestigious. And the railways charge special fares for that. Gradually they become like any other train, and scheduled timings are ignored. Sometimes they quietly slow it down also, for example, the Kalka Mail. Then they introduce another new train with a faster time schedule and a higher fare tag, and in time that also meets the same fate.'