Half of What I Say

by Anil Menon

  HALF OF WHAT I SAY

  HALF OF WHAT I SAY

  by

  ANIL MENON

  First published in India 2015

  © 2015 by Anil Menon

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  1

  I AM DURGA DHASAL. I’M GLAD TO BE HERE, TO SHARE YOUR SPECIAL moment. And it is a special moment. You are graduating from Delhi

  University, a fine university by any standard, especially your standard, since you are now done with it and need a job. (Laughter.) Yes, this is a sunlit day, an important day, and a day whose memory will provide a pale warmth for the rest of your short, competitive, ulcer-ridden lives.

  I’m joking, I’m joking! I look at you and think: what great new beginnings, what stories waiting to be told, what worlds waiting to be made. It’s great to be out of college, isn’t it? No doubt it’s scary. But it’s great to be in that stage of your life where you have inserted the key into the ignition and are about to start the engine. Take it from me, there’s no other moment quite like it. So give yourself a big hand. (Applause.) I remember it was a great day for me as well. I too was wondering what my future was going to be like. I didn’t know it was going to be hair implants. (Laughter.)

  When you were in college—see, I already use the past tense— when you were in college, I’m sure you had all these great late-night conversations on the meaning of life, the existence of God, what’s wrong with politics, and so on. Later on, as we settle into jobs, marriages, adulthood, we seem to forget we were interested in these questions. Sometimes we think about those conversations and smile nostalgically. How passionate we were! How idealistic! How much time we wasted on unanswerable questions! Suppose you are at an office meeting, and the boss asks you, so, what’s the next item on the action list, do you think you will reply: finding myself ! (Laughter.)

  Yet, in college we can say these crazy things and dream these crazy things without feeling we’re crazy. Or, we know we’re crazy, but sanity is not that big a deal. Look around you, bhai. You know more than half your friends should probably be locked up. (Laughter.)

  These conversations—kapats, addas, gup-shup, my generation called them—are what you will miss the most. Sure, we can call our friends whenever we like, but is it the same as lying on your friend’s katmal-infested bistar, snarfing down his home-made laddoos, knowing you should be studying for the Electronics final, but instead arguing about whether Dara Singh could beat Rambo in a UFC fight? (Laughter)

  For many of you, it’s the first time you got to really know somebody who’s not a school friend or a blood relation. They may be from a different state, speak a different language, be of a different gender, had experiences you didn’t think were possible, and have opinions that leave you speechless with disbelief. They are completely different from you, and you wouldn’t have your best friends any other way. You find yourself growing like you’ve never grown before.

  So how do we keep growing? Surely it can’t end with college! Surely we can’t reserve it for a few Art of Life weekends?

  One thing I sometimes hear from older people is: sure Dhasal, all this growth business is great but we buggers have to live in the real world. And the real world is brutal. It’s cruel. We have to work in dead-end jobs. You’re just lucky.

  They’re right. I am very lucky, incredibly lucky to be standing here. Yes, I’m a genius and was born with a six-pack, but that’s not what I mean. (Laughter.) I’m not talking about the random coincidental or accidental event that just happens to be lucky or unlucky for you. I’m not talking of that kind of luck. That kind of luck is bogus. I remember my Aayi—that means mother in Marathi—telling me a nice little story about bogus luck.

  Once upon a time, in one of the six hundred thousand villages in Bharat, there lived a farmer, his wife, and the apple of their eyes, a son. And everybody said, oh he’s so lucky to have such a tall and strong son. The farmer refused to use Monsanto’s mutant crops because his son had filled his ears with the evils of GE farming. Then everybody said, oh how unlucky he is to have a Maoist for a son. But when the locusts came, it turned out that the farmer had made the right choice because the locusts had learned to love Monsanto crops. The farmer made a lot of money. Then everybody said, oh, how lucky he is to have a son who knows what’s what. The farmer bought a nice bike with some of the money, gifted it to his son and the son went and had a serious accident. And everybody said, oh, how unlucky he is, his son might now be a cripple for life. Then a war started and every kid in the village ran off to join the army, except for the farmer’s son who was confined to his cot. And everyone said, oh—(Laughter.) Exactly. This kind of luck is bogus, because as Diogenes said, call no man lucky until he is dead, and if he is dead and you aren’t, then guess who’s luckier?

  But there’s a different kind of luck. I call it bacch-gaya luck. With this kind of luck, no matter what happens later, there’s never any regret. I know I’m lucky to be here because no matter what happens, I know my life would have been worse, if what happened had not happened when I was young. Bacch-gaya luck is a terrible kind of luck, because it’s like a rope thrown out for a drowning man. Miss it and you’re doomed. For millions of our brothers and sisters in the six-hundred thousand villages across this great lan
d of ours, they may simply never have this rope thrown out to them.

  We have 33 percent of the world’s extreme poor. These are people who have roughly less than 50 rupees per day to spend. 33 percent!

  A child who is born in a poor country has a 1 in 6 chance of dying before their fifth birthday. This chance is 1 in 165 for a child born in a rich country.

  How are such numbers possible? It defies belief! How can we all live on Earth, this one world with its one sun, and pretend that we belong to different worlds with many different suns? What can we do when our pretence becomes so real, we become unable to recognize our common humanity? And most important of all, what can we do to bring those unfortunates, condemned to live in shadow worlds by these acts of misrecognition, out from the shadows and into the light?

  I grew up in such a shadow world. You’ve seen me countless times on your thresholds. You’re waiting in your car, impatient for the light to turn green. A kid darts out, raggedy sister in tow, offering a clutchful of car deodorizers, flowers, magazines, peanuts. That was I. You’ve seen me sitting at the corner of a pavement, waiting for nothing in particular. You’ve seen me laughing and marvelled that I should have anything at all to laugh about. You’ve seen me many times, but perhaps you’ve never seen me at all.

  Unlike many of you, I wasn’t raised in English. I didn’t learn to speak English till I was thirteen or fourteen. For the first fifteen years of my life, I attended a Marathi-medium school, then a Hindi-medium school. Even now, when I count or calculate, my mind shifts to Marathi.

  I don’t want to give the impression I was unhappy or unloved. I had a loving Aayi, a father who was strong and kind and I had five siblings, three brothers and two sisters. I was the youngest, and judging from the exasperated look on my mother’s face and the guilty look on my father’s, I guess I was bit of a surprise. (Laughter.) My father’s name was Sukhdeo Dhasal. He was a jawan in the

  Indian army and often away for extended stretches. He was from

  Phulgaon, a few miles from Koregaon, where a famous battle had taken place in 1818. My father was very proud of this battle because a Mahar regiment of some seven hundred men under a British captain had taken on Peshwa Baji Rao II’s mighty army of 20,000 cavalry and 8,000 infantry and won. He would often take me to the memorial pillar and talk about the battle as if he’d personally fought in it. So for a long time I thought we were Englishmen. My siblings and I would reenact this battle, and I’d play the role of Francis Staunton, the brave English captain who had led the Bombay Light Infantry. In any case, though Phulgaon was only twenty-two miles from Pune, it was a century behind it. There were few opportunities. Fortunately, in 1978, my father was assigned to the 35th Light Infantry Brigade in Delhi. He was in Meerut when our bogus luck took a turn for the worse. You are all too young to remember this, but the CRPF mutinied in Delhi in ’78 or ’79. They blocked the streets, marched upon Race Course Road, and gheraoed the Prime Minister. Brigadier Kalkat took his troops to Delhi and in a lightning-quick morning operation all the ringleaders were captured. The powers-that-be decided that the 35th Brigade would henceforth be stationed in the capital itself. My father was given quarters and he immediately wrote Aayi to join him in Delhi. We sold the do beegha zameen we had in Phulgaon. There was no one to take care of it, and it was pretty clear none of my siblings had any talent at farming. We had no sentimental attachment to the land whatsoever. I was thrilled to go to Delhi. We all were. Aayi brought new clothes for all of us. I remember taking the Rajdhani, it was my first train ride.

  Most of you probably don’t consider a train as your first real girlfriend. (Laughter.) I do. I fell in love with the train. Not that particular train, but the idea of the train. I couldn’t get over its strength, its thundering power, the fact that a couple of human beings could control something so magnificent. I think I lost my awe of magic that day. I knew I was seeing something completely different from all the magical devices I’d heard in my Aayi’s stories. I didn’t have the words, but I remember my heart swelling with pride that we humans were capable of such a machine. Even now, whenever I see a train, I remember my first girlfriend, Mumbai Rajdhani. (Laughter.)

  Three years after we moved to Delhi, my father had his stroke. The Indian army isn’t kind to its broken parts. We had to move out, the pension was horribly inadequate to support a family with eight mouths. We shifted to Kanchan basti. One of my father’s contacts had a junkyard business in Kanchan Basti and my eldest siblings were put to work. I knew something terrible had happened to the family, but I didn’t grasp just how precarious our situation was. I only knew that I hated what had happened. I hated the basti. I hated having to go to the filthy lavatories, I hated the mosquitoes that plagued us at night, I hated the hut we called school, I hated having to interact with the savage kids, I hated the fact my father was flat on his back all day and all night, I hated seeing him cry when my mother changed his soiled clothes.

  I remember my seventh birthday, my first in the basti. Aayi was so happy. I couldn’t understand why she was happy. Our lives sucked. We were living in hell. She was working as a maid servant. Her husband was a paraplegic. So why was she smiling? She put a sandalwood tilak on my forehead, cupped my chin, and said majhya nandlal kiti chikna distos ga. My son is so handsome.

  There’s a saying in Marathi: if you’ve fallen into a well, you can be sure someone will drop a bucket on your head. (Muted Laughter.) That was true for us. Things went from bad to worse. My siblings fell sick one by one. None survived. None survived the fetid fumes of Delhi’s Kanchan basti. Open drains, mounds of rotting decomposing waste, industrial sewage from the urinary glands of neo-liberal capitalism. My parents watched helplessly as cholera, typhoid, malaria, dengue and chikungunya took their children. I was ten when chikungunya took my one remaining sister, Laxmi. I remember her screams from the pain in her swollen inflamed joints, Aayi’s useless poultices, my father’s never-ending ‘Is she feeling better?’ My Aayi prayed and prayed. Why is this happening to us? Why is this happening to us?

  There was a new medicine called Welltrax. It was too scarce on the regular market and on the black market it was impossibly expensive. In desperation, my mother sent me to ask the doctor-saab. I didn’t ask her why she thought he would have a stock or why he would give us any. It was late but I knew the slum like the back of my hand and I didn’t need any lights to guide my feet. I ran like Narada-muni rushing to answer the call of nature. It was the longest run of my life. When I reached the doctor’s house at the edge of the basti, it was late. I rang the doorbell and rang it again and then again. The doctor-saab’s servant, Lalit Prasad, came to the door. He told me to get lost. The doctor-saab was asleep and could not be disturbed. I begged, pleaded, roared that my sister was dying. Something human stirred in Lalit Prasad’s eyes. He told me to wait outside the house. He said he’d ask the doctor-saab. I could hear them talking. Doctor-saab sounded amused, not angry. What was he, Mother Teresa? Listen Lalit Prasad, these people are born dead. Doctors can’t cure poverty. So the girl will be carried away by one villain rather than another. Such is life. I heard Lalit Prasad agree with every sentence—hah ji, hah ji, hah ji—and then Lalit Prasad asked: saab-ji, what should I do with the boy? Doctor-saab’s wife intervened with a shout. Arre, tell the chokra to go to hell. These people never give my husband a minute’s rest. Always hanging around with their hands out, expecting free treatment. Her husband wasn’t making house-calls, let alone to a Mahar’s house. Her husband had just showered.

  I smelled defeat. I ran inside, darted past Lalit Prasad, and threw myself at Doctor-saab’s feet. Please, please, please. I clung to his feet even as Lalit Prasad rained blows on my shoulders and head. I begged in English.

  Now, I must inform you that there are many opportunities to learn English in Kanchan Basti. It’s a popular tourist spot for foreigners. Many white people come to visit us. Tall fair Aryans, so like the Shining Ones described in our Vedas, ten feet tall, gilded in silver, each and every one of th
em. They came, took photographs, made movies. They didn’t seem to mind touching us. At Phulgaon, we had to be careful about touching people. In my father’s time, things had been even stranger, and in my great grandfather’s time it had been horrible indeed. But these people, these Children of the Sun, seemed to have no such taboos at all. They brought smiles, medicines, Bibles, small kindnesses. In particular, there was one blonde-haired woman with lovely blue eyes—Mrs Sorenson—who would invariably pull me on to her lap while she distributed goodies. I would make her laugh by smelling her hair and making happy faces. So I could beg to the doctor-saab in English.

  My sister died that day, her limbs twisted, her mouth frozen in a rictus. That smile is carved on my mind.

  Both my parents died a short while later, and I quickly ended up on the streets. I had long passed the stage of disbelief by then. I was living in the shadow world. I sold flowers, peanuts, toys, windshield wipers. I sold my body a couple of times. As I said, we have met before, at traffic lights, street corners, news-stands and railway bridges. As I speak and you listen, we’re continuing to meet at a million such junctions across this great land.

  So how is it that I am here? I am here in the sunlit world for two reasons that are also causes. First, I’d won the genetic lottery. I have a mind that is good at mathematics, science, languages. Such matters come quickly to me. The second reason came in the form of an empathic soul. The blue-eyed lady—Mrs Sorenson—searched for me, found me, and made sure I was placed in the care of the Don Bosco orphanage. She watched over me. Ultimately, thanks to the kindness of strangers and a freak accident of nature, I got my visa into the sunlit world.

  Except I could not see it that way. Something had happened to me. I had lost the ability to tell worlds apart. I couldn’t categorize: now, I’m in this world, I must behave this way. I could never tell when or where the attack would happen. I could be on a conference podium about to present my research results, and I would be suddenly returned to negotiating for a verandah space in Kanchan basti. One moment I could be lifting my golf club at a lovely resort in Scotland, and the next instant I would be crouched over my sister’s bed. Once a friend took me to a fancy French restaurant and when the food arrived, I was possessed by uncontrollable fits of laughter. But most of all, I couldn’t understand why everyone around me was going around pretending there were all these separate worlds.