Marginal Man

by Charu Nivedita

  The female hornbill takes fifty days to hatch her eggs and it never leaves the nest during this time. It is the male of the species that must hunt for food to bring to the nest for both the female and the fledglings. After three months, when the chicks are bigger, the female breaks the nest open and comes out. She leaves only a tiny opening for the passing of food. After the mother leaves the nest, the chicks remain for another three months.

  “Do you know what the female does if something happens to the male and it is unable to return to the nest with food?” Kiran asked me.

  “It will wait for its mate and eventually starve to death,” I replied.

  “Is that true?”

  “Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.”

  I quoted the words of the 57th song of the Kurunthogai that were written by Siraikkudi Aanthaiyaar:

  When the makandril birds which live in water swim as a pair, they feel pain even if a flower comes between them, for they feel as if they have been separated by several years. Without my lover, I too feel the same pain and I feel death is better, says the woman.

  When she heard, she had a merry laugh.

  “Your Tamil poets are such big liars,” she said.

  After reading all that I have written of my relationship with Kiran, I started to think that even birds and beasts enjoy better lives than human beings. A recent article in the newspaper bore that out.

  Boopathy (33) was from the village of Sinthalavadampatti near Palani. One day, he went to a Tasmac shop. As the side dish he ordered were late in coming, he helped himself to those of a certain Ganesan (35) from Kaalipatti. This led to an argument between them. When the men sitting around them tried to intervene, Boopathy attacked them all with a beer bottle, and in the ensuing melee, Ganesan, Perumal (50), Gnanasekhar (29), Muthusamy (53), Subramoni (45) and Manian (45) from Manjanayakkampatti were injured. The others eventually managed to calm Boopathy down and sent him on his way, but Ganesan and his friends pursued, waylaid and attacked him. Boopathy stabbed them with his knife and Ganesan’s gang assaulted Boopathy with a sword. Both Boopathy and Ganesan suffered major injuries and were hospitalized. Boopathy succumbed to his injuries and died. The pair never knew each other before the fateful Tasmac fight.

  In Tamil Nadu, most of the Sikhs own automobile shops while most of the Jains from Rajasthan were pawnbrokers. In Delhi, most Brahmins from Tamil Nadu work as government clerks. They seem to have been born for this job that seems to exist only for them. Although the Tamils are efficient employees, due to their lack of fluency in Hindi, there are only a handful of them in the Delhi administration. There was a Tamil who was appointed deputy commissioner in my office. My friend Sugata Kumar was his stenographer.

  One day, Suagta came to me and asked, “Why does this deputy commissioner dude always ask his wife to prepare curd-rice for him? Don’t you people eat anything else?”

  Though Sugata was a Malayali, he’d grown up in Delhi, and hence never knew much about the Tamils. It was quite possible that the deputy commissioner and I were the first Tamils he’d met.

  To answer his question, I had to launch into a long explanation.

  “Being a Brahmin and being a Tamil are not the same thing. Non-Brahmin Tamils and Brahmin Tamils have different preferences as regards dress and food. I am a thirty-two year old Tamil and I have never eaten curd-rice.”

  I worked in the civil supplies department for seven years. Not many people lasted long there. I was left alone as there was a shortage of stenographers and because I never once received an under-the-table payment. During my years of service, I was heavily influenced by one Mr. S. K. Khanna, an officer. He had an imposing height, a handsome nose and a rosy complexion, and he loved women. Who doesn’t? What made Khanna different was his open and uninhibited display of interest.

  Under every deputy commissioner was a lower division clerk, an upper division clerk, a stenographer and a chaprasi, but in Khanna’s branch, there were three clerks, all of whom were lower division. Had there been an upper division clerk, the deputy commissioner would have had to dance to his tune. I thought it was rather clever of Khanna to not include an upper division clerk in his posse. As far as I’d known, none of the other officers had been able to alter their teams.

  My fondness for Khanna had a lot to do with his initiative to build a restroom for the five hundred people who worked in the civil supplies headquarters. Our office was housed in a very ancient, jerry-built building that the Big Bad Wolf could have blown down with a huff and a puff. It must have been an Englishman’s stable – or his pigsty – some two centuries ago. The building consisted of small dark corridors whose walls were lined with small dark cubbyholes. It was in these cubbyholes that we worked. If there was a power outage, the place would be as dark as a closed coffin, and the darkness had a suffocating heaviness to it. The women always came prepared with candles and matchboxes for these hours of darkness.

  There were five hundred staff who had to handle upward of a thousand visitors daily. Now, these one thousand five hundred people had to make use of one single toilet which was in a dilapidated state of affairs. There were only a couple of urinals. The officers, of course, had separate toilets, and better ones too. The top honcho, the commissioner, had a toilet attached to his room, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was marble-tiled with a Jacuzzi and bath salts.

  The toilet with the two urinals, in addition to not having facilities to defecate, had no door except for the women’s toilet. It was just three cement walls and a tin roof. Two people could stand shoulder to shoulder and take a piss. You also had to endure the leaking roof and the leaking pipes. It was hard to stay dry in that miserable smelly armpit of a place. And, like it was the main attraction, the toilet was situated right in the middle of the building.

  Before Khanna, I had to perform clumsy – sometimes disastrous – acrobatics to relieve myself. With the arrival of Khanna, the toilet was revamped into a neat space where a person could piss and defecate leisurely and comfortably.

  Every year, when the budget was presented in the Parliament, a few hundred thousands were set apart for the amelioration of the civil supplies department. The administration would spend only a few thousands and return the balance to the government. It was not possible to spend the entire amount in just two months February and March. The accounts had to be balanced by the end of March but our officers were not capable of this. Khanna was the only officer who took a substantial part of the money that had been earmarked for us and spent it without worrying even slightly about the consequences.

  “We must be careful to submit proper accounts,” he would say, “And by accounts, I mean bills, and for bills, we will just have to make an irresistible deal with the suppliers, that’s all.”

  It was with this money that he bought Sushma a refrigerator and a washing machine during one financial year.

  There were three women in Khanna’s personal branch – Mini, Baljit and Sushma. I was part of the team only because the department had no female stenographers. Mini was too shy for Khanna – she was a Malayali who didn’t know a word of Hindi and who was too diffident to speak English. Baljit, being a sardarni, was bold as brass, and Khanna lacked the courage to make advances to her.

  Which left Sushma. She liked Khanna and Khanna liked her. Both of them were married with children.Their romance became irksome for me as Khanna would call me as soon as I arrived in the morning and enquire about my health and well-being like he hadn’t seen me in months. At the end of the conversation, he would casually ask if Sushma had come. When I answered in the positive, Sushma would look at me and press her index finger to her ample bosom so as to say, “Is he asking about me?” Then, she’d pout with her painted lips and give me a wink.

  The wink was understandable, but not the pout.

  I would nod my head in affirmation to her gesture. Khanna would ask me to send her to his office.

  W
hen I told Sushma she was wanted, she’d apply another coat of lipstick and give her face another layer of compact. After tucking her saree in properly, she’d catwalk to Khanna’s room. Mini would lower her head coyly and Baljit would snigger. I had to follow her to latch Khanna’s door from the outside once Sushma was in so that they could get on with their “important business” without any disturbances.

  Roughly two hours later, the buzzer would sound.

  “Udhayji, please unlatch the door.”

  During those two hours, I would have to take his calls. Around ten of these callers would be women. I would tell them all the same thing: “Khanna saab has gone out for inspection.”

  Some women would mutter, “Bloody inspection” and hang up. Others, thinking I was lying, would unleash curses on me. Can you believe that, when he was with Sushma, even his wife and the lieutenant governor had to be lied to?

  One day, a higher official came to see Khanna. He saw Khanna’s door locked from the outside and asked me where he was. I gave him the standard reply. And just then, unfortunately Khanna buzzed me. I picked up the phone and said, “Yes sir?”

  The officer glanced at Sushma’s empty seat and understood everything.

  “Arrey, Madrasi babu, you are doing a good job. You will make your way up in the department very soon,” he said sarcastically and left.

  Khanna tended to his office work only on Sundays as he was busy with Sushma during the week. He asked me to come to work on alternate Sundays to give him a hand. If I refused, Nalini wouldn’t be able to visit her mother in Chennai. She insisted on seeing her mother at least once a year but that depended on Khanna. If I refused to work on Sundays, he wouldn’t sanction my annual leave and Nalini wouldn’t hear of going to Chennai alone.

  We couldn’t absent ourselves to work without permission. In most government offices, there are usually ten people to do one person’s job, but in my office, there was one person to do ten people’s jobs. The department rarely recruited new employees as most of them thrived on fat payolas. They’d work hard for five years, buy a house and a car, get a license – in some relative’s name – to run a ration shop and quit.

  Almost every day, Mini, Baljit and Sushma got all their work done in an hour while the stenographers and those employees in the cement division had a heavy workload. Mini had the time to sit in her cubicle and read Malayalam novels – she told me she’d read Asokamithran in translation – while Baljit and Sushma sat around with Surender Mohan Pathak’s crime novels.

  I never took any bribes, but it had nothing to do with principles. Even without taking bribes, I felt like a pimp. So if I took a bribe, it would have been equal to selling myself.

  One day, I returned home late at night from work when Khanna called me, asking me to go back to the office as there was some work that needed to be done urgently. I drank a glass of water, cursed Khanna using every swear word I knew and left. This was one reason I hated the fact that my house was close to my workplace.

  “What is with this LG saab, Udhayji?” he said. “I had to leave home as soon as he summoned me.”

  Khanna was a man of refined habits. Even in his anger, he wouldn’t resort to cussing. I’d never heard him use words like behenchod or chutiya even once.

  Underneath the irritation in Khanna’s voice, I heard a note of gladness for it’s not every day that the lieutenant general summons you and gives you a personal chore to handle. There was going to be a function at the lieutenant governor’s house for which he urgently needed a hundred liters of pure cow’s milk. We knew it wasn’t so easy to procure such a ridiculous quantity of cow’s milk in Delhi on such short notice. It might be got by traveling forty kilometers to Chaudhary’s farm in Gurgaon.

  Chaudhary was a close friend of Khanna. He greeted us warmly and served us hot jalebis and big cups of milk – around three-fourth of a liter. Khanna emptied his cup in a few gulps while I ate only the jalebis. I refused the milk as even one small pint would give me the runs. The milk Chaudhary offered us looked like colostrum – thick and creamy.

  I’d once seen Chaudhary in the office. He carried himself with the dignity and pride of a typical Jat villager. He had a thick, curled moustache and a strong, firm body that looked like it was wrought of iron. He always wore a dhoti in the style of the villagers.

  Even though they are vegetarians, Haranvis are strong-bodied. When I asked Khanna how this was so, he said, “Even elephants are vegetarians. They may be strong but they don’t know how to enjoy life. If they are elephants, then we are lions, you know? Sher-e-Punjab.”

  Chaudhary didn’t take a paisa for the milk.

  “What is this, Khanna saab? You are the maalik of the Delhi administration and I am duty-bound to give you even a thousand liters if you ask. No, I will have no talk of money.”

  After this friendly reprimand, he put the milk into cans which he loaded onto a box truck.

  On the way back, Khanna told me, “Chaudhary is very shrewd. I would have paid him one thousand for the milk, but just you wait and see how he will come by one of these days and ask for a favor that would cost us more.”

  When the milk was delivered to the lieutenant general, he praised Khanna lavishly. “I entrusted the job to you for I knew you’d do it well.”

  Then, he asked who I was.

  “My secretary, a Madrasi,” said Khanna. “A very dependable young man.”

  “No doubt,” said the lieutenant general. “There is none more dependable than a Madrasi. But this boy doesn’t look like a Madrasi. I thought he was from our parts.”

  On our return, Khanna told me, “The LG himself has said it. What more do you want? You know, if Madrasis are the most dependable men, then sardarnis are the most beautiful women. I think Baljit is very close to you?”

  I faked coyness.

  “I’m tired of working all day,” he said. “Shall we have a beer?”

  We drank beer and talked for an hour. All our talk revolved around sex, but he was careful to not drop Sushma’s name.

  Khanna was truly an unforgettable man. When he left the department upon being transferred, he invited me and another South Indian home for a big feast. His wife had made all the food and she served us several pegs of Scotch whiskey; she even had a few drinks herself. But what made Khanna memorable to me was his gesture of dropping me home in his car in the middle of the night.

  There is yet another unforgettable personality I remember but whose name I’ll never know. When I was in Possangipur, I used to take a chartered bus to my office. For two years, I noticed this man who used to board the bus at Janakpuri. He looked like an officer in his sharp suit and he carried a briefcase. He avoided sitting with men and always preferred to sit with women even if the entire row of seats was empty.

  When I returned to Chennai, I began working for the postal department. Once, someone from a magazine asked me what my occupation was.

  “Pimping,” I said.

  The reporters made news out of my answer.

  “This is how one employee of the postal department refers to the job he holds,” they wrote, and all the other stenographers who worked with me were seething with anger.

  But I never felt there was anything wrong about what I’d said.

  If my boss had called me a fool, I’d have to take his insult, mouth and all other openings firmly closed. Though I have written a novel on this, I am going to tell you something here that I failed to mention there.

  Many of the officers were like escapees from a lunatic asylum, but there was one man, a Malayali called Thomas, who was a particularly hopeless case.

  Traditionally, when a transferred officer arrives, his subordinate in the new office has to go to the railway station to receive him. Thomas was working as the director in Chennai. He’d returned to resume his duties after a long leave of absence. All the officers in his division had been promoted to the rank of postmaster
general, while he was still director. This was not because of his leave of absence, but because of the adverse remarks written by all his superiors in his confidential report. He was despised for his nasty habit of constantly needling not only the people who worked under him – both junior officers and stenographers – but also his higher-ups.

  Manjula, a section officer who could be described as his twin when it came to torturing people, was to go to the railway station to receive Thomas. She reached the station at four in the morning. The train was running an hour late and Manjula waited in a state of tension although there was nothing she could have done to speed up the train.

  In general, postal employees refer to their superiors only with their titles even when speaking directly to them. If they are addressing the post master general – the PMG – they’d say, “I have done what the PMG saar told me.” They’d be screwed big time if they had the temerity to say, “I have done what you told me.” They’d probably get chucked into a desert, or worse, get a damning remark in their confidential report. There was this one time a North Indian was appointed PMG at the headquarters of the Chennai Postal Department. One of the officers told him, “I have done what the PMG saar told me.”

  “Which PMG?” he asked him, as there was more than one PMG in the same office, and he didn’t understand that the officer was referring to him.

  The train finally arrived at half past six. As soon as she saw Thomas, Manjula ran to him with a big plastic smile and started pouring out greetings: “Good morning, saar. Welcome to Tamil Nadu, saar.” All Thomas did was pick up his suitcase and walk off hurriedly, ignoring her.

  On reaching the office at ten, the junior officers gathered in his room to greet him. Thomas was informed of this. He yelled on the phone, “Tell them all to get to their seats! It is only because of this chamchagiri that work never gets done here. I never asked for anyone to come and see me. Have they begun their antics on the day of my arrival itself? I know how to deal with them!”