Marginal Man

by Charu Nivedita

  When the stenographer conveyed his response verbatim, the officers nearly shat their pants. But that was not the end of it. After they left, he summoned the stenographer to his room and made him draw up a list of all those who had not come, snarling that he would show them who he was. If this is not the behavior of a psychopath, then what is?

  This incident was narrated to me by one of the stenographers by name Subramoni. Apparently, Thomas had said, “To come and pay your respects is your duty and to chase you away is my right. But if you don’t come to see me, then you are mincemeat.” This was Thomas the Psychopath’s philosophy.

  “Bastard,” I told Subramoni. “Someone should give him electroshock in his dick.”

  “Then you’ll need to start a concentration camp,” Subramoni said. “He’s not the only one who’ll need it.”

  Now tell me, was I wrong in saying I was a pimp?

  Within two weeks of giving the interview, I resigned my job at the postal department and called up the magazine office to inform them that I quit my pimping job there. The editor published that as well.

  October 10, 1983

  It took the bus thirty minutes to get to I.T.O. from Mayur Vihar and from I.T.O., it was a ten-minute walk to catch the Mudrika. It took another half-hour to reach my office. As the Mudrika buses kept circling Delhi Ring Road, they were always jam-packed. It involved a load of effort to push through the crowd when fellows busy pressing their dicks against female passengers’ buttocks were blocking the way. Finally, bathed in sweat, I fell out of the bus at the other end, squeezed and squashed like an insect, and then got up and did a half-run to the office to sign the attendance register on time.

  Once I reached the office, I was desperate for a cup of tea but I only had enough money for my return bus trip in the evening. Sugatan normally stood the tea, but he’d been transferred a week ago, and I couldn’t ask Akash because I already owed him ten rupees.

  A few days ago, Madasamy came to the office all the way from Janakpuri to see me. I couldn’t just see him and send him on his way without giving him so much as a cup of tea. I’d asked Akash for one rupee, but he gave me ten, saying he had no change.

  A year ago, when both of us were staying on Mall Road, Madasamy and I would meet daily. He was staying in Jubilee Hall and was doing his Ph.D. Jubilee Hall was Delhi University’s biggest hostel where only research scholars stayed. Each student had his own room there. Every Sunday, the resident scholars were allowed to bring one friend to the canteen. I was that one friend Madasamy picked to lunch with him. The non-vegetarian items there were mouthwatering, especially the mutton curry. Madasamy and I lost touch after he got married. It was my fault as he kept calling me over, but I didn’t accept his invitation even once.

  He’d married a woman from a wealthy family. The girl’s brother had been visiting at the time. Madasamy told me he’d gone to the market on the morning to buy mutton especially for me. However, I didn’t come across even one teeny-tiny piece of mutton in the gravy. He then called his brother-in-law to eat. The brother-in-law said that he’d already eaten. Seeing me trawling through the curry for a piece of mutton, Madasamy volunteered to serve me.

  “I think the meat got overcooked and crumbled,” he said, embarrassed.

  His brother-in-law said, “There were only two pieces of mutton in the gravy and I ate them.”

  Then, Madasamy said to no one in particular, “I made a mistake. I should have bought more mutton.”

  I always have shit luck with mutton. Once, I went to my friend Bala’s brother’s wedding. He told me they’d be serving mutton biryani for the feast. As soon as the biryani landed on my leaf, I began to search for the mutton, but to my shock, there wasn’t even a single piece. I slyly glanced at the leaves next to mine. There was no mutton on them either. What the fuck? Was this supposed to be mutton biryani or guska? I called the server and told him in an authoritarian manner to serve me a few pieces. He said he would be back soon and went into hiding. I cursed my fate and ate the guska. Then, I went in search of my friend, Bala, to complain about the mutton-less “mutton biryani.” I found him in the middle of a heated argument with the man who was in charge of the catering.

  “Everyone is complaining that there wasn’t a single piece of mutton!” Bala was shouting. “Is this your idea of mutton biryani?”

  “Saar, wait! Look, there is mutton in the biryani!” the head-caterer said, showing him the pieces.

  “Well, well, well! If there was mutton, why did you go into hiding when I asked you for some?” I asked caustically and left the place, resolving to never attend weddings where non-vegetarian food is served.

  I remembered the countless biryanis I’d eaten at weddings and sunnat ceremonies in Nagore. There would be four people sitting around one large plate. Got it? Four people and one large plate. It’s called sahan sappadu.

  This is still practiced in places like Koothanallur and Muthupet in Tiruvarur, Keezhakarai in Ramanathapuram, and Kayalpatnam in Thoothukudi. Sahan sappadu is a meal of rice with five curries. It also goes by the names nei soru and thalichcha soru and is a 450-year-old tradition in Nagore. You had dal and kalia in the first round, brinjal pachadi in the second, thanikkari (meat) in the third, korma in the fourth and milk rice in the fifth.

  THALICHA

  Ingredients:

  Toor dal – 1cup

  Mutton – 0.25 kg

  Ginger-garlic paste – 2 tsp

  Curd – 2tsp

  Raw banana – 1

  Potatoes – 2

  Green chilies – 2

  Carrots – 1

  Tomato – 100 g

  Onion – 2

  Brinjal – 2

  Cloves – 2

  Cardamom – 2

  Turmeric

  Chili powder

  Coriander powder

  Tamarind

  Coconut paste

  Cinnamon – 1 piece

  A few sprigs of coriander

  A few sprigs of mint

  A few curry leaves

  A mixture of oil and ghee

  Directions:

  Cook the toor dal. Marinate the mutton with curd, ginger-garlic paste and salt for 15 minutes.

  Heat a frying pan over the stove. When it is hot, add three tablespoons of the oil-ghee mixture and drop in the cardamom, cinnamon and cloves. Add the chopped onions, tomatoes and green chilies with the coriander and mint leaves and sauté.

  Once the contents of the pan have been sautéed, add 1 ½ tbsp chili powder and 1 tbsp ginger-garlic paste and fry well.

  Add the marinated mutton and stir so that it gets coated with the masala. Cover and cook for 10 minutes.

  In another vessel, take 1 ½ tbsp curry masala powder, 2 tbsp coriander powder and 1tbsp turmeric powder and mix well with 2 cups of water. Pour this mixture on the mutton in the pan. Close the pan and allow the mutton to boil.

  When the mutton is half cooked, add the cooked tur dal, tamarind water, potato, raw banana, brinjal, carrot and coconut paste and mix well. Lower the flame and boil for 20 minutes. Lower the flame and boil for another 20 minutes.

  Add some curry leaves and keep the dish covered.

  The thalicha will be ready to eat in 5 minutes.

  One important thing you should know is that people from Nagore never consume oil unless it is mixed with ghee. This is probably why I love ghee. I buy it pure from Srivilliputhur as you get cow’s ghee there which is fat-free.

  I was surprised with the extremely opposite culture of Nagore’s eating and drinking customs and the habits of conservative Brahmins where the drumstick has to be eaten by keeping it on a plate and scooping out the flesh with your finger. Water has to be drunk looking skywards – it’s no big deal if the water gets into your nose and you die. You must cook only after you’ve bathed,etc;

  I described the sahan sappadu t
o Anjali in all its excruciating detail – how, in the end, the tomato pachadi, the seenithova and the plantain are all mashed and doused with phirni.

  Anjali gagged and wanted to throw up.

  Let’s go back to Madasamy.

  The last time I saw him was the day we were searching for pieces of mutton in the gravy in his house. Three years had passed since then.

  “Why have you become so aloof after your marriage?” he asked. “You don’t write in the magazines like you used to. I smiled without answering his questions.

  Madasamy was confused. He didn’t stop probing. Since I had married for love, he suspected something was wrong.

  “Did you come to your senses once your desire and passion were spent? How’s your domestic life? Do you have any problems?”

  Though I kept mum for his first two questions, I vehemently answered the last one in the negative.

  I didn’t return the balance to Akash. That morning, we’d run out of kerosene but somehow, Nalini and I had managed to finish the cooking. I used the ten rupees I owed Akash to buy kerosene.

  Akash is very particular about money (who isn’t?) so I thought he’d demand the balance in a day or two, but he didn’t mention the ten rupees for many days. One day, he remembered and said, “It’s real damn difficult to find one and two rupee notes these days, isn’t it?” I nodded in agreement.

  I was able to repay him only when I got my salary. I approached Ram Singh and asked him to lend me one rupee, promising to return it the next day, but he said he didn’t have one rupee to give me. Then, I asked him to spare eight annas, promising to return it the same afternoon, but he said he didn’t have eight annas to give me either.

  “I have only thirty paise,” he told me.

  My urge to drink tea had intensified. I thought of asking Dogra a cup of tea then and I would pay later but lacked the courage to do so as I already had to pay him last month’s due.

  Once I realized I wouldn’t be able to borrow money from anyone that day, I decided to make some on my own and went in search of my customers and I found Bhatnagar.

  “Anything I can do?” I asked him.

  “Can you get me a signed ‘Issue Today’ permit?” he asked in return.

  It usually wasn’t easy to procure an ‘Issue Today.’ If a person required five bags of cement, he had to show his ration card to the assistant commissioner and submit an application following which he was given a permit stamped with ‘Issue five bags.’ On receiving this, the permit section would accept his application, but he would have to wait in queue along with several others. His number would be called after a month and a half. However, if the application came from a well-connected person, the assistant commissioner would give him a permit stamped with ‘Issue five bags today’ and the person could collect his bags the very same day.

  At any given time, there were a hundred people or more standing in line to see the clerk who issued the permit – women with squealing babies, men chewing betel, men smoking beedis and so on. A VIP couldn’t possibly stand in this queue full of riffraffs, so it was the assistant commissioner’s task to send one of his chamchas to the counter with the VIP applications and get the clerk sitting at the counter to issue their permits immediately. If an applicant somehow had private audience with the permit clerk in his room, the chances of him getting his head torn from his body by the folks standing outside was high. This is because the common folk are subjected to all kinds of exhausting formalities. They must walk long distances, stand for long hours in several queues and wait patiently for months to get five bags of cement. This was why there were riots when someone jumped the queue.

  The previous day, I was taking notes from assistant commissioner Pandey when Gupta (one of his chamchas) entered the room and said, “Anand is refusing to issue permits for the applications saab sent. Please summon him and speak to him.” Gupta sat down. Pandey immediately sent a chaprasi to summon Anand.

  “Janaab, you can call me and hand the applications to me directly. I will do the job. But I don’t trust this man,” Anand said, pointing to Gupta.

  Pandey’s face fell and he sent Anand away. It wasn’t possible to hand the applications directly to Anand as the clerk cannot leave the counter when the permits are being issued.

  Unlike most others, Anand refused to make money through dishonest means. This also meant that he did not abet with people who made money dishonestly. At the other counters, the clerks themselves would write on certain permits, Discussed with AC. Issue five bags today, and sign them. One needs a good deal of cunning, efficiency and skill to hoodwink the people standing in line in front of you to pull this off. While writing a permit for the person standing in front of you, you have to simultaneously write another and it should be done in such a way that the person in the queue should not suspect that you are making him wait because you are busy getting somebody else’s work done. You also have to keep an eye on the side door. Pandey’s chamcha might walk in with more applications. Say you need to pee, get up and covertly take the applications and hide them in your pocket. Being a permit clerk sure takes a lot of skill, doesn’t it?

  After Gupta left, Pandey summoned Anand again and pleaded with him saying, “So many VIPs come here. It is to get their work done quickly that I send Gupta to you. Why can’t you just issue the permits? Look Anand, only if we understand each other and cooperate in a friendly manner will things go smoothly. Otherwise, nothing good will happen.”

  “Okay, how many applications did you send with Gupta yesterday?” Anand asked.

  “Eight.”

  “Gupta gave me fifteen and your signature was on eight of them. The rest had ‘Discussed with AC. Issue today’ written on them and they were signed by Gupta.

  “Is it? I shall ask Gupta about this. But Anand, you shouldn’t have told me in front of Gupta that you don’t trust him. If you wanted to say something like that about him, you could have said it to me privately. After this, will Gupta be willing to run around when I ask him to for the VIPs?”

  Pandey summoned Gupta again and when Gupta came, he sent me away. They were probably going to discuss how to deal with Anand.

  Here in the cement branch, the AC and the babu were on back-slapping terms. They smoked together and even ate from the same plate. Babus made ten rupees per bag of cement which to them was a well-deserved reward for talent, not corruption. This was how they did it: While sending cement from the factories to the market, they would put three blue stripes on certain sacks containing controlled-rate cement; the sacks without these stripes were meant for open market.

  An official of the cement company often came to Gupta saying, “Bhaiya, as the workers are illiterate, they have inadvertently put blue stripes on 3000 sacks meant for open market. Would you kindly allow them to be sold in open markets?”

  Gupta would go to Pandey with their request and would come back with Pandey’s assent. This meant the duo made a profit of thirty rupees per sack of which ten rupees went into Gupta’s pocket. Thirty thousand rupees for the man in a single stroke! But Gupta couldn’t take the entire amount as it had to be shared with everyone in the cement branch. So, a clerk in our branch would earn five thousand per day. And what about Pandey? I was told he earned six-figure sums.

  In the other departments, a person might come to an officer with a request to operate his own granary. The red tape he was given translated to six months waiting time which meant he had to pay a rent of one hundred thousand rupees to the owner of a warehouse. Greasing an officer’s palm would clear the file in a week.

  I worked in another division where I couldn’t afford to become a “liability” to the assistant commissioner’s affection. How was I to go to him with Bhatnakar’s request when I’d already gone to him once already that month? Before he granted me the ‘Issue Today’ permit, I had to answer a barrage of questions. “Who’s the applicant? Is he known to you? Is he here now?” I doubted
he’d concede if I approached him a second time. He might just write ‘Issue five bags’ which would be of no use.

  I decided to chance it. I was overwhelmed with the desire to drink a cup of tea and was willing to go to any lengths, no matter how ridiculous, for it.

  “Fine, bring me your application form,” I told Bhatnakar.

  He left saying, “I’ll be back in a jiffy.” After ten minutes, he still didn’t appear.

  My desire for tea was driving me crazy. If I couldn’t get money, I’d have to spend my bus fare and resort to ticketless travel. I’d traveled without a ticket once when I was broke.

  The next day was payday and I had to show up at work, but I couldn’t think of any way to get eighty paise for my morning trip to work. Even the old newspapers had been sold for scrap. I ended up traveling ticketless to office. Ticket inspections often happened at the ITO Overbridge stop so I decided to get off at the previous stop, but the bus didn’t stop there and I got afraid. When the bus stopped at the next signal, I alighted and walked back to ITO and boarded a bus that was engorged with people. Still afraid, I kept an eye out for the inspector, resolving that if a khaki-clad person got on the bus through the front entrance, I would get out through the back and vice-versa. But what if two inspectors boarded, one from the front and one from the back? How many days’ imprisonment would I have to endure? I decided not to beg them for mercy in case I got caught.

  Thankfully, I didn’t get caught. I casually got off the bus when it slowed down before crossing the exchange store, not waiting for it to halt at the bus stop.

  Though I didn’t ever want to endure a similar ordeal again, that too for a cup of tea, I found myself involuntarily walking to the tea shop. I saw Bhatnakar standing outside the entrance to the office and called out to him.

  “The application is almost ready,” he said. “I’ll bring it to you.”

  I took him aside and cadged a one rupee note from him. Then I went and had my tea in peace.

  Note: There are no dates for the passages that follow. They must have been written before October 1984 as there is mention of Indira Gandhi in them.