Marginal Man

by Charu Nivedita

  When I went to Sri Lanka, I learned that there is absolutely no connection between Indians and cleanliness. The length and breadth of the capital city was as clean as the surface of a well-polished mirror. There were no mountains of garbage anywhere. The place was so spick that I couldn’t even guess what they did with their garbage and where they disposed of it. To my utter astonishment, the army personnel were cleaning the streets like they were corporation-employed sanitary workers. When I asked my friend in Colombo about this, he told me, “Now that the war is over, the soldiers have found something else to do. That’s why they’re cleaning the city.”

  “You’re always taking a dig at Indians, Tamils especially,” Kokkarakko would tell me.

  I see. Well, if that is so, then answer my question, Kokkarakko. You are aware that there is an enclave called Little India in cities like Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Penang. Why do you think, that in all those cities, only the Little India enclave is like a vast garbage heap filled with noise and commotion, chaotic as a mental asylum? Let’s talk about Singapore. If you so much as drop a cigarette butt or a bus ticket on the road, you are fined; if you spit, you are fined. Peeing on the road is out of the question. When the traffic lights turn red, pedestrians cannot dream of heroically dashing across the road or dodging oncoming vehicles. For Indians, public propriety is unthinkable. They throw garbage all over the place like confetti, the walls are their favorite urinals and the roads are their choicest spittoons. Unhygienic as they are, waste constantly issues from all nine apertures of their body and you’ll see them digging every hole, be it their nostrils, their ears, their eyes, their mouths, or even their anuses. Singapore’s Little India is nothing but Tamil Nadu in miniature. You will hear L. R. Easwari’s devotional songs being played at earsplitting decibels and you will see discarded cigarette butts, boxes, matchsticks, bus tickets, and maybe even sanitary napkins and condoms, strewn everywhere. Damned ignorants think they’re immortal and walk blithely across the road because traffic can’t kill dead brains. A Singaporean Tamil told me that it would take the country’s entire army and police force to bring Little India to heel, but the army and the police force evidently have better things to do, so they simply left it alone.

  Recently, on a Saturday evening, an unfortunate mortal died in a road accident in Singapore’s Little India because he tried playing immortal when the traffic light was green. He was a Tamil. In order to express their solidarity, and their hatred for the murderous traffic, the local Tamils drank to his memory and began to attack vehicles and shops in the area.

  If you read the news that is published in Tamil Nadu about the Sri Lankan Tamils, you will be consumed by a raging frenzy to exterminate every last Sinhalese person on Planet Earth. Every alphabet, comma and period in those articles is fed by animosity. Who will dare deny that Tamils beat up the poor Sinhalese fisher-folk who came to visit the church at Velankanni? Tamils harass Sinhalas and hound them out of the state, but what if I tell them that there are two hundred and fifty thousand Tamils among the four hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants of Colombo? Their feathers don’t get ruffled there, do they?

  A friend called Ravi once invited me to travel in Colombo with him and his family and I accepted. During that trip, two incidents helped me understand the Tamil mentality better.

  In Colombo, Ravi and I got into one auto while Ravi’s wife, Priya, and her ten-year-old son, Sundar, got into another. Our driver was a Sinhala, theirs, a Tamil. The Sinhala driver did not sound his horn even once. (The same was typical of Thai drivers. Kokkarakko and I never heard the faintest sound of a horn for five hundred kilometers, starting from Nong Khai to the Mekong river, and finishing at the villages.) The Tamil driver rode with the fury of a demon charging into battle, blaring his horn like a war trumpet the entire time. When we finally reached our destination, Priya and Sundar were already there. They had been waiting for us for ten minutes. According to Priya, he never stopped squeezing his horn.

  After hearing this, I asked Ravi, “If this is the attitude of the Tamils after a fierce and bloody war in which they had to endure a most brutal ethnic cleansing, what would they have been like before it? I think they all have a serious problem on a subconscious level.” How is it that the Prabhakarans of the Tamil media, who go to Sri Lanka to scream about the injustices the Sri Lankan army metes out to the Tamils, omit the other side of the story?

  Now for the next incident. We were traveling from Colombo to Kandy in a rental car. Sundar suffered from motion sickness; long-distance trips in buses and cars did not agree with his system. On the way to Kandy, he asked the driver to pull up as he wanted to throw up. He did, and the driver immediately cleaned up the mess with a cloth which he folded and wrapped in a paper which he deposited in a plastic bag. The next time Sundar asked him to stop the car, he gave him a bag so as to avoid a mess. It was a remote area where no one was likely to see, let alone pull up, the boy for throwing up on the side of the road, but still, the Sinhala thought it unethical to soil the place. With this in mind, let us consider the behavior of our homeboys on their own soil.

  The Marina is one of the largest beaches in the world and what a horrifying, nauseating sight it is! Several folks squat at the place where the waves lick the shore. Talk about “public convenience!” Besides, the five-kilometer stretch of the beach is generously adorned with oil-stained squares and cones of paper, plastic covers that might hit you full in the face if the wind feels like you could do with a little harassment, empty beer and whiskey bottles left behind by people who want you to know they had a great time, cigarette butts to remind you that smoking the national pastime, and garbage in all its varieties to remind you of the amount of waste two hundred thousand folks can generate. And if, god forbid, you venture to walk barefoot on the beach, you will have to undergo the ordeal Gabbar Singh forced Basanti to endure in Sholay when he had her dance on broken glass.

  Soon after I returned from my first visit to Europe, I put all my trash into bags which I responsibly dumped into a corporation bin and returned home. When I was taking a walk later that day, I saw the garbage strewn over a few miles. I decided that very day that in a land of lunatics, I should also behave like one. So I, in solidarity with my countrymen and women, began to dispose of my trash wherever it pleased me.

  There are thousands of folks who pee and poo on the shores of the Marina, but even they follow certain rules: first, no indecent exposure in a hotspot; second, women are not allowed because the government has constructed free toilets for them. The communist concept of class difference is irrelevant here. Considering the amount of gold these people own, they cannot be called poor.

  One evening, I was returning home from my walk at the Nageshwara Rao Park. There is a Sai Baba temple near Venkatesa Agraharam Street where three roads intersect. A few days ago, I had seen a huge banner on display at this very spot. It featured the picture of a saree-clad, heavily powdered and painted ten-year-old girl who had just hit puberty. Below her picture were those of several older men with Veerappan-moustaches, all of them her suitors, and coincidentally, her maternal uncles.

  I could see that arrangements were being made to conduct a political meeting at the junction that day. The stage had been erected so that it obstructed the road. Rows of plastic chairs, all with ample hindquarters on their seats, were placed before the stage. In addition to those seated, there was a horde of others standing around and staring at the carry-on. As the political figures had not yet arrived, a man costumed like MGR was performing some pelvic thrusts with a buxom young girl to entertain the waiting crowd.

  The Sai Vidhyalaya Matriculation School shared a boundary with the temple. The latter provided free food on leaf-plates thrice a day. A trash bin stood in front of the former and the leaf-plates always lie around it. This is another common Indian trait – if there is a toilet, an Indian will piss around it so that the next Indian cannot use it. There will be another buffoon who pisses at the entrance so that t
he next buffoon cannot enter and will have to piss around the first buffoon’s piss. These pissers sometimes hold up traffic. A few potbellied, red-eyed and red-lipped traffic cops dutifully blow their whistles, but that just contributes to the noise.

  On both sides of the street, different kinds of beggars were rattling their tins. It is believed that the Baba is especially receptive to the demands of his devotees on Thursdays. So, every Thursday, you would see hundreds of them, each with his backside permanently attached to a particular spot near the temple. You have to pay a good bit of money to be able to walk in or around the temple in peace. Now even beggars have a fairly good notion of ownership. A beggar owns the spot on which he sits and none of his counterparts can occupy that spot lest he wishes to be killed and tossed into the Cooum River that flows nearby. Free food, a tin-roofed straw hut to sleep in, no concerns about bodily hygiene, a strip of cloth to cover all that needs covering, and a bank passbook in a bag slung over the shoulder – who said a beggar’s life is hard?

  After the beggars come the vegetable-vendors with their litany of vegetables and prices. The vegetable market also relies on the Baba’s blessings, so they operate on Thursdays. All these vegetable sellers display their produce on Mada Street. The policemen, who are supposed to get rid of these human roadblocks, merely collect their maamool and give these menaces a blind eye and a deaf ear. If you haven’t been to Chennai before, I suggest you visit Mada Street’s vegetable market in addition to the Marina, the Fort, the temples and the churches. On the one hand, you have traders screaming out the prices of vegetables, and on the other, you have the howl of the traffic, a howl like that of a cornered beast trying to escape. It is not something I can further describe in words.

  Commotion of this sort is absent in Venkatesa Agraharam street, but here too, there are a number of roadside shops selling incense, camphor, kumkum, pictures of Sai Baba, spinning tops, small vanity mirrors, combs and whatnot. There were also vendors who had a spread of toys: rattles, pots, piggy-banks, god and goddess dolls and balloons. There were also dealers of plastic goods, tender-coconut sellers with their pushcarts, a man selling stone-studded metal rings, and of course, the ubiquitous fortune-teller with his parrot, a garlic vendor, a man selling slivers of jackfruit, a shop selling fancy gewgaws for women, a stationery shop, a plastic soapbox shop, a footwear shop, and in the midst of this hullaballoo would be a devotee of Jymka Saamiyar standing for hours, holding a placard announcing the details of the saamyar’s next satsang. Just a few removes from him would be an old man on a wheelchair, circling a smoking pot of camphor before people’s faces and dispersing blessings. He wore a turban on his head, a knee-length kaili, and a jubba of the same length. He is an everyday sight, because he has too many prayers to say and too many blessings to give. Thursdays cannot accommodate them all.

  Two millennia ago, Thiruvalluvar wrote the Thirukkural, dividing it into three sections – ethics, politics and sexuality. And now, in the twenty-first century, all three heads come together in the form of the temple, the political meeting and the dance sequences in films.

  Madurai is one place I visit very often, and whenever I do, the sad spectacle of the Vaigai River reduced to dryness never fails to move me. After one such visit, I was returning to Chennai in a first-class air-conditioned coach.

  That was indeed an unforgettable journey because the faces of many of my fellow passengers were familiar to me – I had seen them all in the pages of investigative magazines. I am sure you remember Pakkirisamy’s ghost. (You do, don’t you?) These were also Pakkirisamys, but it was not yet their time to become ghosts, so here they were, moving around like human zombies in their massive bodies. One of them was missing his arm below his elbow (probably a rowdy- turned-politician). Villains in films paled in comparison to the next guy who had a scar on his chest, who wore thick, rope-like gold chains on his neck like a rapper and whose fingers sported rings bearing the image of a political leader. He and his crew sported veshtis that bore the party’s colors, but the sight of their bellies – that looked like inflated balloons – was what had me staring.

  They were talking so loudly that you’d think they’d had loudspeakers implanted in their throats. I was curled up like a baby rat in one corner and I was insignificant, besides, so they wouldn’t have noticed me, let alone my staring. After the ticket-inspector came and went, they opened their pricey liquor bottles and began to drink, and I was shocked to discover that their “travel bags” were actually carrying packages of food. Boxes of chicken-65, fried liver, ginger chicken, fried seer fish, meatballs, fried brain, sura puttu, fried mutton and more were opened and consumed. They had whipped up a banquet. Oil was dribbling everywhere – down their fingers, down the corners of their mouths, down the oil-soaked chunks of meat. These pregnant-looking men, ten in number, were eating a meal meant for fifty. The feast continued till midnight. Their booming conversations would easily have provided me with fodder for several more stories – Pakkirasamy Two, Pakkirasamy Three, Pakkirasamy Four, and so on and so forth. I had believed that newspapers were exaggerators, but after hearing the ten potbellied Pakkirasamys prattle, I realized that what the newspaper reveals is only the tip of one titanic iceberg.

  The next day, when I had reached Chennai, I met Santhanam and told him of the events that had unfolded on the train. He observed, “Fifty years ago, the fathers of the politicians you saw on the train must have been pushing handcarts, or selling vegetables, or laying bricks, probably even butchering cows and pigs. Now, their sons, by some stroke of luck, have entered politics and become prosperous.”

  “Be that as it may, but have they been able to lead the peaceful lives their fathers led? Their fathers must have lived to be ninety, but these fellows have undergone bypass surgeries at the age of thirty-five and are still wolfing down prodigious quantities of chicken and mutton. When the political tables turn, when the regime changes, they are thrown into prison under the Goonda Act. In politics, only the party leaders live to ripe old ages, hale and healthy with children and grandchildren, while their followers die at the age of fifty. All their ill-amassed wealth and power are cursed, don’t you see?”

  On hearing my words, Santhanam told me a story from the Ramayana.

  Though Dasharatha had three wives, he did not have children with any of them. Filled with grief, he wandered into the forest one day. Suddenly, he heard the sound of an animal drinking water in a nearby stream. He had mastered the technique of shabdavedi, an archery skill that involved the striking of a target by relying on sound rather than sight. Dasharatha released an arrow in the direction of the sound. No sooner did the arrow fly than he heard a young boy cry out in pain. The sound was not from an elephant, as he has assumed, but from the boy, Shravana Kumaran, who had been fetching water for his parents in an earthen pot.

  Shravana looked at Dasharatha and said, “I came hither to fetch water for my parents, both of whom are blind. They will be waiting for me. Slake their thirst by taking this water to them.”

  On hearing that their son had been killed by Dasharatha’s arrow, the old blind couple cursed him, saying that he too would feel the pain of separation from his child.

  Dasharatha conveyed this to Kaikeyi.

  “That’s not a curse,” she replied, “but a boon.”

  It’s one of life’s riddles when sometimes, a curse turns out to be a boon and a boon turns out to be a curse.

  In Malaysia, Muslims constitute fifty percent of the population, Chinese Buddhists twenty-five percent, and Tamil Hindus eight percent. The Tamil Hindus have erected temples on every street corner and this has had a deleterious effect on social harmony. Every alternate day, their community has some festival or the other and several cars would be parked at the entrance of the temple and all around it. This throws the traffic into pandemonium and disturbs the peace of the rest of the locals. If the Muslim population raises an objection, the Hindus start whining about being denied the right to practice t
heir religion. Incidents fueled by such disagreements led to a communal conflict between the Malaysian Muslims and the Tamil Hindus in 2007. The Tamils felt that they were being treated as second-class citizens in the country. When I questioned a Malaysian friend on the subject, he said, “That is true to a certain extent. If we don’t treat them that way, they will make fishermen of us all, no doubt fishing was what we’d been doing for several generations, but should we continue to do it even now?” However, the Malaysian Tamils, unlike the Lankan Tamils, have not recourse to arms and violence, so the government was able to make certain compromises and adjustments. For instance, the government in Malaysia celebrates Diwali. The political leaders in India wear skullcaps during Ramadan to please the Muslims. Similarly, when the elections come round, the prime minister makes the Tamils happy by speaking a few words in Tamil.

  I was once traveling in an auto from Alwarpet to Nageshwara Rao Park. The auto driver, a stranger, struck up a conversation with me.

  “My body hurts terribly. I was about to go and have a beer when you flagged me down. Thankfully you’re going my way. My body took a bad beating awhile ago, but I’m feeling the pain acutely now.”

  “Why, were you involved in an accident?”

  “No saar. I was beaten up by the cops.”

  “It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to pry, so I won’t ask you anything further.”

  “Oh, you can ask all you want, saar. It’s no big deal, really. You get drunk, have a drunken argument, the cops haul you like a sack of potatoes to the station and you get beaten. Look here, saar,” he said, showing me his hand. “I don’t grow my nails. Do you know why? The first thing these bestial cops do is pull your nails with tongs.” He acted it out, expressions and all. “But now, they keep their sticks to scratch their backs and their backsides. Instead of beating you to a pulp, they send you straight to the coolers because they, with all their brawn and brute force, shit their pants at the thought of human rights activists. So, you spend a fortnight eating free food and you’re released.”