“Oh, is that so?”
“Being a Tamil and being a Brahmin are not the same thing, you know. What about the folks from U. P.?”
“Lazy, good-for-nothing fellows.”
“Biharis?”
“The filthy guys who are a century behind everyone else.”
“Bengalis?”
“Egoistic chutiyas, but they’re lookers.”
Akash’s opinion was not at variance with the general opinion. The stereotypes weren’t a big deal at all then.
Raman’s house was in Sarojini Nagar which was one of the addas of Delhi’s Tamil population. One kilometer from the market behind the house was Chanakyapuri, a plush locality where you could find an embassy for almost every country on the map. Raman and I used to go there to watch movies at the Chanakya Theater.
The Delhi babus usually made some extra cash by renting out a room – the birdcage “accommodation” the government put them up in – to the Madrasi babus.” Raman approached one of the Delhi babus and found me a room in the house of a Garhwali in Netaji Nagar. If Sarojini Nagar was a middle class locality, then Netaji Nagar was definitely lower class. While Sarojini Nagar was full of babus, Netaji Nagar was full of chaprasis. I lived there for a year. The Garhwali family had four children – two girls and two boys. The boys were permanently in my room. In the mornings, the head of the family would also while away his time with me. I suffered his company for the sake of his wife’s ginger tea.
During my twelve-year stay in Delhi, the city and its inhabitants never ceased to amaze me. In the eyes of a smalltown chap like me, everything about the place seemed so extraordinary.
However, I did have my fair share of difficulties there. For instance, finding and boarding the right bus was a confusing affair. In Tamil Nadu, the buses had huge boards on which their point of origin and point of destination were printed in big, bold letters. Above this, in smaller print, you’d find the names of certain connecting stops. The buses in Delhi just had this information scrawled in chalk in Hindi on a cardboard. Though I could read Hindi to some extent, the writing wasn’t always legible. The problem was that the same bus plied different routes at different times. By simply rubbing out “R. K. Puram – Tiz Hazari” with spittle, you could chalk in the new route – “Tiz Hazari – Shalimar Bagh.” Just when you’re thinking that things couldn’t have been any worse, let me tell you that they used Hindi numerals instead of Hindu-Arabic numerals.
Government buses were still better; the private buses started rolling only when it was replete and bursting with people. The mini buses were moving hell. They stopped the bus not only in the bus stops but wherever they wished to. The private bus drivers and conductors were not paid a monthly salary but paid according to the number of people they took in.
Sarojini Nagar and Netaji Nagar were both in South Delhi whereas my office was in the North on Under Hill Road. To get to my office from Netaji Nagar, I could either catch the Mudrika bus from Ring Road which went all the way around Delhi or I could make my way to the Secretariat and catch the 220 or the 240 to Delhi University. I chose the second route even though it took more time. Both the 220 and the 240 were like heaven’s chariots as the young goddesses who studied in Indra Prastha College and in Delhi University mostly traveled by these two buses. I would admire them all as one can’t pick out a single rain drop when rain falls in torrents.
The sari-clad women who had no qualms about showing-off their breasts were Delhi’s curiosities. Never had I seen breasts as large as these women’s, not even in my wildest imaginings.They were more concerned with covering their heads, wearing their sarees like a sacred thread between their breasts. In an anthropological magazine, I’d read that certain South American tribeswomen go about naked while the men wear a penis sheath. After looking at pictures of these tribals, I pondered over how culture reflects the diversity of the human race.
These women also wore a blinding shade of red lipstick. I would occasionally get lipstick smears on my shirt after a long bus journey and this became a subject of jest among my colleagues. Akash used to joke about the Punjabis’ addiction to lipstick. (I’ve never met anyone who could poke fun at his own culture the way Akash did).
“Punjabi women put on lipstick as soon as they wake up,” he said, “even before they brush their teeth. If you marry a Punjabi girl, you’ll spend your month’s earnings just buying her lipstick tube after lipstick tube.”
“I’d rather marry a Punjabi girl, Akash,” I said. “If I marry a Madrasi girl, I will be a little more than a glorified servant, fetching and carrying for her. Moreover, Tamil girls are more aggressive you know...”
“It’s rather rare for Punjabi girls to marry Madrasis. They look down on your lot – your height, your brownish complexion, your thick moustaches. And besides, they think you boys don’t have enough muscle.”
“Arrey gandoo! You think your potbelly is muscle? Stamina is what is below it.”
“You’re a different sort of Madrasi, man, not like the other chutiyas.”
After Netaji Nagar, I lived in Ramabhadran’s house in R. K. Puram. He was a senior Tamil writer. I first met him at a meeting held by the Delhi Tamil Sangam. When he heard where I was staying, he invited me to be his guest for as long as I wanted. Only after moving into his house did I realize that it was worse than the Garhwalis’ place. Though he worked for the central government, he was ruled by his nagging, money-hungry wife. One of the three bedrooms in their house was already let out to a student. The second bedroom was given to me. The writer, his wife and their nine-year-old son occupied the third room.
(Owing to the lack of space in Indian households, the entire family has to sleep in a single room and you will often find the husband, the wife and two or three children sleeping on an eight by ten bed. If I ask someone how, under such circumstances, the couple manages to have sex, the person would rebuke me for being a dirty-minded bastard. You will see a similar arrangement and adjustment on a two-wheeler. The husband drives it with two children sitting in front of him with his wife and an infant child at the back. There was also a fellow who managed to accommodate a Great Dane.
A friend of mine told me that her entire family – husband and wife, a sixteen-year-old son and a twelve-year-old daughter – sleeps in the same bed. Is this obscene or is it just my gutter-brain? My friend confessed that this sleeping arrangement was making her increasingly uneasy.
In a recent Tamil movie, the main actors kissed – lightly, very lightly – on the lips. The theater immediately erupted in deafening applause. The same thing happened twenty-five years ago when Kamal Haasan acted out the first ever kiss in Tamil cinema. This makes me wonder: haven’t Tamils learned to kiss for real yet?
When Jackie Chan leaps from one cliff to another, people clap because he is performing an impossible stunt. So, if Tamils clap when they witness an onscreen kiss, does it mean that kissing is such a daring, adventurous and near-impossible act?
An actor participated in a television show. The anchor asked the audience if any of them had any desires that only the actor could fulfill. At once, a middle-aged woman rose and said that she would like to kiss him.
In Europe, kissing in public is nothing uncommon and nothing to be ashamed of, but in Tamil Nadu, even husbands and wives are reluctant to kiss each other. So, it’s something out of this world when, on a TV show with thousands of people watching, an Indian woman asks to kiss an actor. And what if I tell you she actually got to do it? But don’t drop your jaws. Keep them closed. It was only a peck on the cheek. After getting a kiss from the actor she so desperately wanted, the woman was interviewed. She said, “When I got up to kiss him, I asked my husband to leave the room.” Like, what the fuck? Thousands of people can watch her kiss an actor but not her husband? These dynamics of marriage are unique to Tamil culture.
Recently, there was some gossip about the love affair between the daughter of an actor and an a
ssistant director created a big stir. There wasn’t a single jockey who wasn’t talking about it on the radio. The girl’s father, a sixty-year-old, had acquired the sobriquet Casanova for the kinds of things he did onscreen to acquire a woman. More importantly, the objects of his love were always the daughters of rowdies who terrorized people. In one movie, he falls in love with the daughter of a Pakistani terrorist. As proof of his heroism, he is shown to survive a spray of bullets from multiple machine guns without sustaining so much as a scratch. Sorry to disappoint all those of you who assumed he must have been wearing a bulletproof vest. His somersaults were responsible for saving him from getting punctured.
As he was someone who would do the craziest and the most devilish things imaginable for love – in films – the fact that he opposed his daughter’s real-life relationship became a conundrum for all Tamil people. When a journalist asked him about this, he said curtly, “That is reel and this is real.” Even this aristocrat was no different than the average Tamil when it came to sleeping arrangements. (He slept in the same bedroom as his wife and two daughters).
So, if a Tamil actor can sleep in the same bed with his wife and children in the same room on the same bed, I don’t see why a Tamil writer and his family would think of sleeping any differently.
Once, when that actor and I ran into each other by chance, he told me, laughing, “I bought your novels, but as I have daughters, I have to hide them and read them in secret.”
Inwardly I retorted, “My books aren’t going to corrupt your daughters any more than your movies already have.”
Though he was a protective father, he couldn’t control who his daughter fell in love with. She’d even gone so far as to approach the commissioner of police to seek protection for her lover as she feared her father might kill him.
Of course, the tabloids were thrilled with this gold nugget of information. The news became the main headline of every paper, relegating everything else to the sidelines – the deaths of five soldiers in border skirmishes, a seventy-billion-rupee corruption scandal, the eighteen-hour load-shedding and juicy tales of women who had conspired with their paramours to murder their husbands. The media circus camped outside the actor’s house.
“I’m no murderer. My villainy is restricted to the movies I act in. In real life, I wouldn’t even swat a fly. That assistant director is just too old and too married for my daughter,” said the actor in an attempt at damage-control.
The media circus immediately rushed to a small street in Vadapalani. The assistant director, the daughter’s lover, was thirty-two years of age and, like the actor said, had been married twice already. He was in the habit of marrying for money. He got his ass thrown in jail. This incident set me thinking: how could the daughter of a dignified father – who did not even allow her to look at my novels – have wanted to marry a scoundrel? But then I also considered this: the actor had been playing the role of a scoundrel in movies for over thirty years. In his films, the lead actress – the daughter of a villainous crorepati – would fall in love with him and the crorepati father would become even more villainous. Finally, our actor, the scoundrel, would either kill the crorepati villain or reform him and marry his daughter. The scoundrel might also commit rapes and the female lead whom he raped would marry him in order to reform him. He might also indulge in petty thievery and fistfights, but his one weakness was his mother who he loved intensely although he didn’t lift a finger to help her. He would get drunk, come home and retch all over the place, and his mother would patiently and uncomplainingly clean up his vomit because deep down inside, she knew that she was responsible for her son’s becoming a scoundrel. Once the scoundrel married the crorepati villan’s daughter, the mother would die.)
As Ramabhadran and I had similar tastes, we used to attend at least one cultural program every day and return home late. This is how it went. Around five in the evening, I would catch route No.110, relieving from office. The bus would crawl in the horrifying traffic of Saddar Bazar. Not wanting to wait till it reaches the New Delhi Railway Station, I would alight from the bus and run a kilometre towards the Maharashtra Rangayan cinema hall, panting for breath. Even then, I could reach only five minutes after the film has begun. Ramabadran would be waiting for me smoking his favourite Ganesh beedi. There would be no time to question my late-coming. We would dart into the theatre and struggle to find our seats in the dark. Ramabhadran would ask about the nine o’clock show at the India International Centre and we would run there. We would try to make time for a cup of tea between laps. The two rotis I had for lunch would not keep me up, all this time.
A Fassbinder or a Fellini would be playing. After the movie, at around 12 in the night, we’d walk to R. K. Puram.
Now, why should Ramabhadran feel obliged to wait for me? Film buff that he was, he wouldn’t be too happy to miss five precious minutes of a serious movie like Fellini’s. Why couldn’t I just hit the theaters alone? The coveted film society in which Ramabhadran was a member was born in the early ‘60s, and since its inception, membership was open to six hundred people, no more, no less. A serious film lover would have to wait for one or a couple of members to die in order to join this exclusive society. Seniority factored into determining who filled the vacant seats. (It was rumored that even Indira Gandhi, erstwhile prime minister of India, was in the waiting list.) As Ramabhadran was one of the founding members of this elite club, I piggybacked on him. Not every member enjoyed certain privileges I was privy to. As he was a large-hearted person who worked with the Intelligence Agency, he was well-respected. Okay, you might be wondering what’s so special about this film society. Are there no other film societies in Delhi? There were many, in fact. But this society screened many international movies when compared to others. One would imagine that the Delhi of the ‘80s had many takers of serious cinema. It did, and it was because we had a zero-chance of watching steamy movies then. These serious international movies came with sex scenes. Moreover, they were never censored when screened in these film societies. I also observed that most of the members of these societies were in their late forties or fifties. One look at the title of the movie and I’d be able to predict the number of people in the audience. If it is Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, work would have to do without me for a day as I’d have to rush to the theater before the seats ran out.
One day, during a heated fight with her husband Ramabhadran, the mistress of the house accused us of being homosexuals. I lost my temper and lashed out at her. Things became messy and I moved out of their house and into West Delhi where I rented a room in a residential quarter, stayed there for three months, and then moved out and into another room. This continued until I found a decent place on Lancer Road.
When Gupta, the bloke who shared the first floor with Menon and me, bought a motorbike, my late-night habits only served to get me into trouble. The new motorbike was parked downstairs. Menon told me that Gupta’s previous motorbike had been stolen two years ago. To prevent another theft, the latter had a strong gate erected at the entrance.
The gate was locked from the inside and both Menon and Gupta had keys. Gupta would lock the door at nine and I would return at ten and shout for Menon. As all the glass windows were shut, I might as well have been shouting at the moon like a madman. After I’d shouted myself hoarse, Menon would open the gate for me and lock it once I was in.
One day I went to a music concert at Azad Bhavan that wrapped up at ten. It was biting cold outside. Most of the people who came to attend had their own vehicles. I was at the mercy of public transport. After waiting at the bus stop for an hour, I caught the midnight service bus and reached home. I shouted for Menon to come down for ten minutes but received no response. Frustrated and unable to wait out in the cold any longer, I dropped the “mister” and shouted, “Hey Menon!” I was worried. What if he wasn’t there? Where would I sleep? Had it been summer, I wouldn’t have bothered to return home.I would have just curled up under a tree or someth
ing. Finally, I decided to force the gate open. I threw myself against it once, twice, thrice. The fourth time, I heard the latch give way. Emboldened, I hauled myself at the gate a few times more. I must have made a racket loud enough to wake the dead. When I saw a light come on in Gupta’s house, I stopped my exertions.
Gupta opened the gate for me.
“Sorry,” I said as politely as I could.
“Better get your ass home by nine. Tomorrow, you’ll have to sleep on the road,” he said curtly.
“I’ll come when I wish,” I retorted. “I never asked you to pull your weak bones out of bed.”
“If you break open the gate and my motorbike gets stolen, then I’ll hold you and Menon responsible,” he warned me before he returned to his house, banging the door after him.
Determined to have the last word, I rapped at his door. When he opened it, he looked like he was ready to pick me up and fling me to kingdom come.
“Listen man, I’m not the one who’s going to be held responsible if your bike gets stolen.”
“Saala Madrasi behenchod,” he muttered, raising his hand to strike me but I fended him off with my left arm and drove my right fist into his face. Menon’s wife opened the door in time to see the blood trickling down Gupta’s split lip. When Gupta realized I had bled him, he yelled like a maniac and ran to his house, returning with a knife.
Menon’s wife was standing and watching fun. I thrust her aside and ran up the stairs to find myself a weapon. My eyes fell upon an ancient Kerala sword near the shoe rack. I grabbed it.
“Saala, I will have your blood for this!” Gupta yelled, rushing at me like a bull seeing red. His wife stood between the pair of us, trying to calm her husband down. In the meanwhile, Menon had been rudely awakened. He came out tying his lungi. People in the neighboring apartments had formed a small assembly outside the gate. A few men came and dragged the seething Gupta downstairs. I followed them, leaving the sword in a corner. Gupta straddled his motorbike and declared that he was off to the police station. The people who had come to help and those who had come to watch tried to dissuade him, telling him that it was illegal to construct a gate outside government quarters. By the time things were sorted out, it was two in the morning.
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