Marginal Man

by Charu Nivedita

  Santhanam showed me pictures of his janavasam. His moustache was an exact replica of Khanna’s Daag moustache and if only he hadn’t shaved it off at his fiancée’s behest, he might have been spared an encounter with Yama several years later.

  Santhanam used to live in the postal staff quarters in Teynampet, which, like all government quarters, resembled a filthy slum. One day, when he was returning from his walk in Nageshwara Rao Park, he saw a man lifting his veshti and urinating in front of his house, his black dick in full view. Little did Santhanam know that the man with the black dick was Lord Yama come in person. He was angry. What kind of bastard urinates in front of somebody’s house, holding his black dick for all the world to see? he thought.

  “Sir, would you mind doing your business somewhere else?” he shouted, but the man with the black dick didn’t seem to hear, so he clapped his hands and raised his voice. “Saar, don’t pee there!”

  By this time, Lord Yama had finished peeing and turned to face Santhanam.

  “You fucking Brahmin! I could finish you right now, but today is my birthday and I’m off to see my leader, so I’m sparing you. Just remember you’d be dead meat by now if not for this happy occasion,” Lord Yama bellowed.

  Santhanam began to tremble like a naked man at the top of a mountain and his heart was pounding furiously against his ribcage.

  “W-what d-did I s-say?” he asked. “I only asked you to go urinate someplace else.”

  “You fucking Brahmin! No motherfucker has ever tried to get my attention by clapping hands and addressing me like a lowlife.”

  So saying, Lord Yama left the place. When he did, Santhanam’s eyes fell on a poster. Lord Yama was telling the truth. He was a VIP in a political party. The posters, all featuring his smiling mug, wished him a happy fortieth birthday and a long life.

  “It would have been the day of my death if it hadn’t been the day of his birth!” Santhanam said. “But I don’t understand how he knew I was a Brahmin, Udhaya.”

  “If you’d been sporting a moustache, Santhanam, he wouldn’t have known.”

  It took me a whole month to write about the ‘70s in Hindi film. If Rajesh Khanna hadn’t been sporting that weird moustache in Daag, and if Santhanam, who hailed from a family where it was unheard of men to have moustaches, did not decide to sport one, I would never have written this section.

  While we were talking, Santhanam happened to mention Amar Prem, a movie I’d never seen, but whose songs I adored. My favorite song in the movie is Kishore Kumar’s Kuch to Log Kahenge. Amar Prem was adapted from a Bengali story written by Bhubhutibhushan Bandopadhyay about a woman whose circumstances force her into prostitution.

  In the sorrow of Bandopadhyay’s woman, Pushpa, I glimpsed the sorrow of every Indian woman. I felt the sorrows of every Indian woman become my own when Kishore Kumar sang Kuch to Log Kahenge.

  I listened to this song over and over when I was writing this chapter. When I told Anjali the next day about it and sent her the video of the song.

  “So, you were under Sharmila Tagore’s spell the whole of yesterday?” she asked me. “Is her dimple a black hole for men like you?”

  In the month it took me to write this chapter, I began to live in the 1970s. I thought about Rajesh Khanna and Dimple Kapadia a lot. I would often speak about Kishore and R. D. Burman to Kannan as he was a fanatic of Hindi film songs. Kannan was a generation younger than Santhanam and me. Just as we’d listened to Burman on our radios in the 70s, Kannan watched his songs on television in the 80s. Despite his late start, Kannan was miles ahead of me in Kishore Kumar trivia. There was nothing he didn’t know about the man. He gave me this little nugget once: when Kishore was a popular actor in the 50s, Mohammad Rafi once lent his voice to a song that was mouthed by Kishore. The song was Aja Bhai Dastan Teri Ye Zindagi from the movie Shararat. Kannan even sang it for me. I only know a bit about Hindi movie soundtracks from the 70s. I was scarcely acquainted with Bollywood’s output from the late 70s to the 90s. In 1990, I returned to Chennai from Delhi. Shortly thereafter, I worked in Vellore for four years. In undertaking the daily six-hour commute from Vellore to Chennai, I’d completely lost touch with the world. It was in the trains that I’d pored over Latin-American literature.

  I struck up a friendship with Krishna when I was subsequently posted back to Chennai. Unfailingly, we would meet at the Lighthouse on Thursdays and converse for hours. Krishna’s friends would be there too. One day, I noticed a dark, sticky man in the group. Krishna introduced us, but only perfunctorily. For the sake of conversation, I asked the man where he worked. Krishna pulled me aside and gave me an earful. “I know you’re a stupid cunt, but you don’t want folks thinking you’re three sheets to the wind and making fun of the guy. That’s Goundamani, currently the most popular comedian in Tamil cinema.”

  To remedy my three-decade Bollywood blind spot, I’d bombarded Kannan the film whiz with a series of questions: “What’s Tariq, the Yaadon Ki Bharat, heartthrob doing now? What became of Neetu Singh who performed a sexy number in the same movie? How’s the Khanna-Dimple relationship going?”

  His answers were shocking to say the least. Khanna and Dimple had split after eight years of marriage. Dimple, after retiring from Bollywood post her marriage to Khanna, made a comeback in the 80s as a sex-symbol. In the 90s, she dabbled in art-house film.

  Having heard everything about everyone, I spent quite some time thinking of Rajesh Khanna. He was considered to be the first superstar of Hindi cinema. Indian women went bonkers at the sight of him. According to Kannan, several women supposedly had near-orgasmic experiences merely listening to his voice in Aradhana. There were apparently a good number who seriously contemplated suicide when he and Dimple split. When he visited Chennai, there were some five hundred girls hanging around his hotel till wee hours just to catch a glimpse of him – and all of them were ready to jump in bed with him, just so you know. This in mind, why the fuss over a man wanking at the thought of a sexy woman when a woman too takes a male superstar for her fantasy mate? Anyone care to tell me what the big deal is?

  There was another thing I failed to understand. How does a superstar like Rajesh Khanna, every woman’s heartthrob, fail as a husband to one of the most beautiful women in the world? Dimple is reported to have said that she lost all her happiness the day she married Rajesh. He could give her no happiness, but he was a source of pleasure to countless Indian women. What sweet irony!

  Kannan asked me if I’d watched Khel Khel Mein. The film was trashy, but I loved the song Khullam Khulla Pyar Karen. “How’s that movie’s star Rakesh Roshan doing? He of the hazel eyes…” I queried like blind old Dhritarashtra who was seeking an eyewitness account of the war from his charioteer.

  “That was exactly what I was coming to,” Kannan said. “Rakesh’s son Hrithik has become the man whose body every woman thinks of when she fingers herself.”

  Bloody hell! So this was the divine-eyed bastard Anjali had told me about, the one she said she thought of when she was jacking off recently.

  “Ranbir Kapoor is one of the most popular men these days,” Kannan said.

  I’d known of Randhir Kapoor, but who the fuck was Ranbir now?

  Kannan apprised me that Prithiviraj Kapoor’s scions had made a mass-entry into the film industry and had become well-known faces in the country.

  “What about Tariq?” I asked again.

  “Tariq acted in merely eleven movies between ’73 and ’95. Disillusioned, he quit film and started working as a manager in a logistics company. I’m sure you’re not as ignorant to not know that Tariq’s cousin Aamir Khan has become a superstar himself.”

  In the present day and age, the youth have sophisticated technology that gives them access to porn and sex chatrooms. Oh, the conveniences of technological advancement! It has enabled couples separated by physical distance to masturbate while looking at each other’s naked bodies on video cha
t. Newspapers have reported that hundreds of condoms were found in the toilet of a call center in Chennai. Now let me tell you something that’s going to shock you. In the 70s, it was highly unlikely that a young man of twenty would have spoken to a woman who wasn’t his mother or his sister.

  Hindi movies were the only available source of entertainment. When I was discussing this with Santhanam, who was only a couple of years younger than me, he said that his mania for Hindi films and songs had ruined his life. Apparently, he used to listen to Hindi music for at least six hours a day like a possessed madman. Vividh Bharati, Ceylon Radio’s competitor, used to air Hindi movie songs from nine in the morning to eleven in the night. Santhanam was able to listen to Vividh Bharati as he was studying in Chennai while I only had access to Ceylon Radio.

  It is quite something to be able to listen to songs on a tin-box radio that even a scrap-dealer wouldn’t touch. Most of the time, the white noise and the crackling were louder than the music. To pick up a signal properly, the transistor needed someone to grip it the right way. If the battery ran out of juice, we had to wait an entire week to get a replacement. We simply couldn’t afford an electric radio. Did you know we needed a license to have a radio at home? We used to have to visit the post office quarterly to renew the license. Santhanam surprised me when he said that there was a license called villai that one needed to possess in order to own a cycle. But transistors, unlike radios, needed no license. Santhanam had the luck of being able to listen to music being played on a gramophone in Srivilliputhur. Every music aficionado knew and loved the HMV logo in those days.

  Santhanam says that there have been only two grand experiences in his life thus far. His first one was getting laid on his first night; the second great thing happened in ’71. He’d skipped college to go to Safire and catch a morning show. That was his first time watching a movie in an air-conditioned hall. On a huge screen, with a quality of sound he didn’t know existed, he watched Shashi Kapoor’s Sharmilee.

  “Udhaya, do you remember the song Khilte Hain Gul Yahan that Kishore Kumar sang to Burman’s music? My body and soul tingled when I heard that song in the theatre. I can still feel it. It was just so divine! Rakhee’s feline eyes, her otherworldly beauty, Lata Mangeshkar’s spellbinding voice!” Santhanam gushed. O Meri Sharmilee was another intoxicating song from that movie that I must have listened to more times than I care to remember on my tin-box transistor. Fortunately, Naseem had a Sony tape-recorder his father had sent him from Singapore that was a blessing to us Hindi music maniacs.

  I made Kokkarakko read the chapter I’ve just finished. When he was done, he sat motionless like a rock.

  “So, how was it?”

  “Terrible. There’s not a jot of excitement here. You’ve lost your way and your head reading too much Tarun Tejpal.”

  That was his terse verdict.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Capital Experience – Delhi Diaries

  With the exception of Delhi, I have never, at any point in my life, been emotionally tethered to any place. Mandi House and the surrounding libraries and theatres were the sanctuaries in which I became acquainted with and eventually became a culture hog. It was in one of those theaters that I first got introduced to Uday Shankar through his film Kalpana, who looked like Lord Shiva. The man Uday Shankar is the reason art has such a great impact on me today.

  Between 1978 and 1990, when I was living in Delhi, I used to keep a diary. It runs into thousands of pages. It would make absolutely no sense to squeeze its contents between the covers of this book, so I’ll just accommodate a few snippets alongwith comments that surged while transcribing the diary for the novel.

  February 6, 1980

  In Mandi House, Ramabadran and I were watching the play Madhyama Vyayoga which was enacted by a troupe of actors from Kerala who were called Thiruvarangam.

  The word “madhyama” means “middle.” In the play, it refers to the middle child of Kunti, Bhima and the middle son of a Brahmin called Keshavadasa. Keshavadasa was making his way through a forest with his wife and his three sons when the Ghatotkacha, the son of Bhima and Hidimba, started to chase him through the forest, asking him for one of his sons. His reason for wanting one of them? Just so his mother could break her fast by eating a crunchy human being. The flabbergasted Brahmin immediately said that he would never give up his eldest son while his wife held on to the youngest son. So, the middle son volunteered himself as food. “Madhyama, Madhyama,” Ghatotkacha says, “get ready.” On hearing this, Bhima, who was exercising in a clearing, thought he was being summoned – as he was also a middle son – and went thither.

  The old Brahmin beseeched Bhima to save his son. When Bhima told Ghatotkacha to spare the youth’s life, Ghatotkacha replied that he had to return to his mother with a human being in tow. (His mother was an ogress). Bhima then offered himself up in the place of the Brahmin’s son. Ghatotkacha agreed to take him in his stead. However, Bhima laid down a condition. “If you want me to come with you, you must beat me in a duel.” Bhima won the duel after a protracted fight. Ghatotkacha still requested Bhima to accompany him to his mother’s house.

  Bhima’s personality was an equal mix of rajasam and tamasam. This is why Bhasa describes him as having honey-colored eyes as well as a set of fangs. Madhyama Vyayog is a one-of-a-kind play for the manner in which it presents the predicament of a man in the middle, who finds himself suffocated and pressed against from two sides. Bhima and Keshavadasa’s son had to endure this suffocation and at the same time, a sort of emptiness. As the father is disposed to love the eldest son and the mother the youngest, the middle son learns that there is no one to love him. This is why Ghatotkacha came forward and said to Bhima, ‘I like you but I have the responsibility to keep my mother’s stomach happy.’

  Everyone ended up going to Hidimba and it was finally revealed that it was all just a ploy to bring Bhima to her.

  The dialogue at this point in the play is stellar.

  Bhima asks Hidimba, pointing at Ghatotkacha, “What is this, Hidimba?”

  Hidimba then reveals Ghatotkacha’s parentage to Bhima. He is Ghatotkacha’s father.

  (I skipped work the next day and went to the Central Secretariat Library to read the play in the original Sanskrit along with the English translation.)

  The Civil Supplies Department in Delhi where I worked was a den of corruption. My colleagues were only too happy that I didn’t show up to work on most days. (I used to spend almost all my time at the Central Secretariat Library). They were happy because my absence meant one less set of fingers to share the grease with. It was a mutually convenient arrangement. I would be in the library from the morning till six in the evening, taking only a short late-afternoon break for a plate of kachori. I still have with me a small mountain of handwritten notes I took in the library.

  Now, let me share with you another slice of my journal.

  February 13, 1980

  It’s a gloriously happy day today because I beat my colleague Bhilai in an arm-wrestling match. The Rajasthani chap is a skinny midget, only five feet off the ground, but he’s as tough as nails.

  I once engaged Bhilai in an arm-wrestling match. He had me pinned before I could blink. Chastened by the lightning-quick knockout, I vowed to beat him within three months. The very next day, at the crack of dawn, I was at the Delhi University ground to begin a fitness regime. Rain, hail or shine, I ran every morning. I told myself that I would have to stop shagging (or at least bring down the frequency) and eat before I slept.

  I remember going to bed dinnerless a lot in Delhi. Every day, there used to be a minimum of three cultural events worth attending. My first preference was cinema, my second was music and dance and my third was theatre. The events usually wound up at nine and I would reach home an hour later. Delhi is a city of pen-pushers who lock themselves in by eight. When I’d ring the bell at ten, Menon, the landlord, would open the door and give
me a dirty look like I’d pulled him out of bed at midnight or when he was at it with his wife. He would let me in and give a deaf ear to my apologies, slamming his door shut hard so as to register his annoyance and disapproval.

  I started schooling in the ‘50s at a government-run primary school located near the Perumal Temple in Nagore. In my school days, getting trashed by a teacher was a routine affair. Sometimes, their punishments would be so brutal that the boys would return home bruised and even bleeding. Unfinished homework got them kneeling-time under the baking hot sun. Some students would piss their pants when a caning was administered; there were others who crapped their trousers. As a shy child who constantly feared embarrassment, I would always alert my teachers by holding up my little finger when I needed to pee. A raised thumb for water, index finger and middle finger for the big job. The teacher would send me out immediately because if she didn’t, she’d have to scrub shit off the floor. Strangely, all through my eleven years at school, I’d never seen a girl issue such signals for a toilet break.

  Vomiting was also a common phenomenon. Post lunch, some kid or the other would throw up due to indigestion. For some reason, the unenviable task of cleaning up the mess always fell to the girls.

  The story of the rise of Seeni Shanmugam Saar is the story of the rise of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. The rise of the DMK party as a political force resulted in a newfound respect and demand for Tamil pundits and scholars. A purer form of Tamil began edging out of the heavily Sanskritized version of the language that was known as manipravalam. It was a time when statues of Maraimalai Adigal, the man who made it his life’s mission to de-Sanskritize Tamil – were being erected in every nook of the state.

  In those fervid times, my father thought it right for me to have a fashionably pure Tamil name. He changed my name from Udhaya – the name my mother had chosen for me – to Arivazhagan.