Virtual Realities

by Neelum Saran Gour

  ‘You’re as mad as you always were.’

  ‘Who was it?—one of your writer johnnies—who said something like, “When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained?” ’

  After dinner Sravan put the question uppermost in his mind as delicately as possible: ‘So I understand, Buddhoo, that you’re presently a gentleman of leisure?’

  ‘Unemployed, if that’s what you mean, and very nicely put,’ Buddhoo replied cheerfully. ‘And I’ve come looking for a way to relieve my leisure as profitably as possible: enjoy your hospitality and exploit your patronage.’

  Sravan digested this in silence.

  ‘Let’s get this clear. Other than spin yarns, exactly what’s your area?’

  ‘Area?’

  ‘I mean, what can you do? Accounts, proofreading, typing?’

  Buddhoo uttered a hoot of laughter, totally unsettling Pragya, whose first easy acceptance was now quite complicated.

  ‘Typing! Is it possible that you’ve forgotten that fiasco of mine back in ’70?’

  Sravan flushed suddenly as an uncomfortable and ridiculous memory came flooding back into his mind.

  ‘Hell, no! Not that one, please!’

  ‘What’s this now?’ asked Pragya, her curiosity aroused.

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it,’ said Buddhoo, sweetly malicious. When Ravan and I were lodge-mates, we tried all manner of things to earn a bit of cash. Once Ravan said to me: “Buddhoo, you good-for-nothing oaf, we all know you can talk at the speed of light, but why don’t you learn to type? You can type out my scripts and I’ll pay you enough for your bidis.” Ever a tight-fisted skinflint, this. Well, I’d do anything for him, so sure enough, I learnt to type double-quick. Now there was once a bad-tempered English district collector who rather plumed himself on his literary gifts. Somewhat like our Ravan here. This gentleman wrote poetry in the time sandwiched between dispatches and reports, and he had a native Hindustani babu to type them all. One day the poor babu was terrified to behold the sahib emerge from his chamber, raging like a furnace, frothing at the mouth and tearing his auburn hair. “Babu!” he fumed. “You have ruined my poem! The poem I wrote for little Richard-baba.” “By your leave, Sahib, the undersigned has typed the same with painstaking punctiliousness …” quavered the babu. “Oh, damn you and damn your nigger English!” shouted the sahib. “See the mess you have made. I began my poem with the noble apostrophe, “My son, my pigmy counterpart!” Now look what you have done to it. You’ve inserted a space right in the middle of the word pigmy and a goddamned comma where it’s got no business to be and the wretched thing now reads: ‘My son, my pig, my counterpart!’ And it’s already been posted to the Statesman!” ’

  Buddhoo waited for the commotion to subside.

  ‘So what happened to me during my tragic experiments with the typewriter was similar. Next door to our lodge lived a young lady who Sravan was rather sweet on. Once he composed a lengthy ode dedicated to her which began with the solemn address, “My pen is mightier than the sword.” ’

  ‘I’ll tell you what happened, Pragya,’ interrupted Sravan. ‘This treacherous bastard offered to type it out and post it! I might have known …’

  ‘Absolutely inadvertent, my dear Ravan.’

  ‘Nonsense. You intentionally joined the words “pen” and “is” together so that the opening line …’

  ‘My penis mightier than the sword!’ Pragya shrieked with laughter.

  ‘I was only learning to type. A raw hand.’

  ‘Rubbish!’

  ‘But how did she take it?’ asked Pragya.

  ‘Oh, that was the woeful end of a tender romance which had all along stuck to chivalrous lyrics and gifts of jasmine gajras for her chignon and courtly salaams in the direction of her balcony. She wasn’t amused. And her brother, who was a numbskulled tough, took it as an insult to the family izzat and his chaste sister’s maidenly modesty. We were almost constrained to change house.’

  ‘Your typing days ended?’ Pragya chuckled.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ admitted Buddhoo, mock-rueful.

  ‘That was about twenty-five years back. I trust you’ve learnt to practise greater responsibility in your scripts,’ retorted Sravan severely. ‘But seriously, what’re you planning to do now?’

  ‘I think its hardly fair to push Buddhoo around so soon,’ intervened Pragya. ‘Let him settle down and give us the pleasure of his company and liven us up a bit. We need it. An overdose of seriousness in this house, Buddhoo-bhai.’

  She threw one of her arch, sidelong looks in Sravan’s direction, irritating him enormously. Then she took charge in her prompt, decisive way. ‘We’re rather cramped for space, as you can see, but you’re most welcome. Only you’ll have to share Babuji’s room, make do with a foam mattress on the floor. D’you mind?’ She looked at him anxiously.

  ‘No problem,’ assured Buddhoo.

  ‘Babuji’s unwell. Recovering from a stroke. The physiotherapist visits every day.’

  Buddhoo clucked in an appropriately sympathetic manner. ‘I’ll be fine. Babuji and I shall get along like a house on fire.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Sravan speculated. ‘He’s very peevish. A problem parent. Likes no one but himself.’

  ‘I promise to be charming,’ grinned Buddhoo, unfazed.

  ‘You’ll have to work overtime. Exert all your magical appeal.’

  ‘That’s settled then,’ said Pragya. ‘That’s where we’ll put you. It’s just next door.’

  2

  ‘There’s this potential fortune I’ve amassed, yaar. All packed away in two aluminium trunks. You’ll never guess what it is.’

  ‘I won’t even try.’

  ‘Fifty nameplates. Politicians, writers, lawyers, even a bit star in the films. All collector’s items. Taken me half a decade’s devoted labour. Braving risks to life and livelihood, to say nothing of my immaculate reputation. Night after night of planning, military scouting, escapades. You could say it’s my love of adventure, pinching the nameplates of bigwigs.’

  ‘Never got nabbed?’

  ‘Just once. My advice to the artist-pincher is: never diversify. The fruit of that shattering chapter. See—I was on the point of pinching two nameplates in one night. Two high-class, keenly competitive lawyers of the high court. The night was fair, the moon hid behind a cloud. Away in the bagh a jackal bayed—you get the scene. Okay, now just as I was about to pinch the second one, a reckless thought surfaced in my mind. Why not exchange the two? I mean, why not? Let’s wait and see what happens. Wait and see I did, and there was lots to see. And hear. In short, Mathur’s clients headed for Misra and Misra’s clients headed for Mathur and their munshis went stark mad trying to restore order and the two learned counsels nearly came to blows in the Coffee House, each accusing the other of using touts to grab the other’s clients! Uf! Some spectacle, with the manager of the India Coffee House bleating, “Order, order” and of course there’s no such thing as contempt of coffee house, so there were the two learned counsels, having a field day. Should’ve seen their ugly mugs. The law of contorts and distorts, ha! Okay, the case was duly investigated, the swapped nameplates discovered and they got their chowkidars to lie in wait for me. I will now skip over the next few sequences as irrelevant to the central argument of my theme …’

  ‘You let them rough you up?

  Buddhoo sighed. ‘What to do, yaar? It was a case of IPC Sections 379, 380. Who can stop a lawyer from taking the law in his own hands? A man’s got to—what’s the damn word?—ah, adjust, adjust at all costs, so I thought it best to adjust my hide to the lathi and practise some active passive resistance. Not the Gandhian brand, because I’m vicious and vindictive, let me tell you. I had my vengeance by pissing into the learned counsels’ mailboxes for weeks afterwards … But coming back to my fortune, pretty soon it’ll be time for me to e-mail Sotheby’s. Stolen nameplates—Amitabh Bachchan’s dad’s, Shahnaz Hussain’s dad’s, Firaq Gorakhpuri’s, Ni
rala’s, Mahadevi Verma’s, Munshi Premchand’s, Sushmita Sen’s maternal granddad’s! This collection’s got a great future—I just know it. Just waiting for the price to escalate a bit more and buss!’

  They sat up late, remembering old times.

  ‘Remember that All India Poetry Festival in Aligarh? And how you and I represented the All Allahabad Federation of Creative Artists?’ asked Sravan.

  Buddhoo shuddered. ‘Do I? It haunts my sleep.’

  ‘Me president, you secretary.’

  Pragya was interested. ‘Great! Who were the other members?’

  Sravan answered with a straight face. ‘There were no other members. The All Allahabad Federation of Creative Artists comprised just two members, Buddhoo and I.’

  ‘And no one can dispute the fact that we were the two most creative artists in the city.’

  ‘Well, Pragya’s had an overdose of my creativity for fifteen years now,’ laughed Sravan. ‘To your creative talents she hasn’t had complete exposure, but you’ve already given her a mild demonstration.’

  ‘You certainly have,’ agreed Pragya. ‘And I’m looking forward to more.’

  ‘You little know what you’re in for,’ said Sravan. ‘Anyway, to come back to the All India Poetry Festival in Aligarh, Buddhoo and I sent out handbills and collected about three hundred bucks. We went to the festival and were received with great ceremony.’

  ‘Ravan read out his famous “negative poem”.’

  ‘What was that?’ Pragya asked.

  ‘This humbug here, your husband, used to have a lot of literary gimmicks up his sleeve. For the festival he composed an eight-line poem and crossed out each odd line. The special thing was that the cancelled lines weren’t excluded from the text. They were part of the original poem and expected to stay right there.’

  ‘Sort of an inverse text,’ explained Sravan.

  ‘So there were two poems dovetailed into one. Eight lines adding up to one sense, and the four cancelled lines adding up to something quite different.’

  ‘The even lines moved forward in meaning. The odd ones moved backward in meaning. Ingenious it was. Poem, anti-poem, sense, counter-sense, experience and its alter, get me?’

  ‘How exciting!’ exclaimed Pragya. ‘What became of that poem, Sravan? I never saw it.’

  ‘Oh, a squib,’ dismissed Sravan. ‘It wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. The funny thing was that it was.’

  ‘But really, it was a marvel. We raved over it at the Jai Ma Kali Students’ Lodge. Some of us swore it was one of those rare ideas unthought-of in the whole history of literature. Ah, you humbug. You shrugged and put on your self-effacing face.’

  ‘At the festival the poem proved a problem,’ recollected Sravan. ‘How on earth was I to read the blasted thing? Those cancelled lines. It was the pre-audiovisual-aid age, remember? Luckily they brought a blackboard and I wrote up the cancelled lines.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. You alternately read out the forward lines and pointed at the silent lines written on the board. The audience got the hang of it. An unconventional sort of reading.’

  ‘But it was a hit. And that play we did for All India Radio, remember that? I did the protagonist’s voice and you did all the rest.’

  ‘Including the heroine’s,’ laughed Buddhoo. ‘Ha, some play. Classic tearjerker. Usne Kaha Tha.’

  ‘We needed cash to buy text books—we’d spent our money from home. We thought of roping in a few other fellows but the fuckers were unwilling, so we said to hell with it, we’ll go it ourselves. And it had a biggish cast!’

  ‘Did you manage?’ asked Pragya.

  ‘You bet. We got the books we wanted—though as usual I plugged that year.’

  ‘Buddhoo had sound reasons for plugging every year,’ chuckled Sravan.

  ‘It was my love of learning, Pragya. I believed in devoting two or three concentrated years to each year’s syllabus. Nothing slipshod or hasty. Solid education for me, see? It’s because I repeated each year that you’ll find me one of the most educated guys in your circle.’

  ‘That play turned out so well that we actually went up to Delhi with it, this time as president and secretary of the All Allahabad Federation of Dramatic Artists.’

  ‘My God!’

  ‘At Delhi we didn’t make it to the competition.’

  ‘Got sozzled,’ informed Sravan. ‘And trapped in a subway.’

  ‘A subway?’

  ‘Yes. We kept going down the steps, crossing the street underground, climbing the steps at the other end, and staggering across the same street and so back down the first flight of steps …’

  ‘Very confusing,’ injected Buddhoo. ‘I didn’t know where the fuck we were going. Finally we accosted an auto-wallah who’d been watching our antics with keen relish. We said, Oye, Srdaarji, Sasriakaal, Waheguru da Khalsa, Waheguru di Fateh, all the rest.’ To which he said, “Oye, hullo-ji, puttar. Sasriakaal. And what you are trying to do, ji?” Cross this road, we told him. Which road is it, can you tell us? He said, exploding into laughter, “Kissturba Gandhi Marg, ji.” Kiss who? we asked. He repeated the name. ‘You’ve been on it for the last hour, puttar.’ I remembered thinking what a long road it was—and built on several levels. India was getting impossibly advanced for me. I said so. “Very advanced, ji,” agreed the sard. “And going round and round.” He made a rotatory movement with his hirsute hand. “Up like this, yo! Down like this, yo! Exactly like the two of you.” What? we slurred. “Hanji.” He grinned. “That’s what the two of you have been busy doing for the last hour. Into the subway, out at the other end, across the street, into the subway, out at the other end, across the same street! Heh, heh, heh!” ’

  ‘But did you finally reach wherever you were trying to get to?’

  ‘The sardar took us into his auto and stormed down half of Delhi, beeping like mad round the buses like a giddy mosquito, but we were too late. Our turn had come and gone. But drama in real life, we’d had more than our fair share.’

  ‘What fun,’ breathed Pragya.

  ‘It wasn’t fun all the time,’ said Sravan. ‘Not in those years when there wasn’t money enough and nobody wanted our scripts.’

  ‘All of us used to write in those days. It was the fashion.’

  ‘And all of us wrote the same way.’

  ‘I have a name for that grand manner. I call it the Socially Progressive Post-Victorian Rhetorical Cadence.’

  ‘We had great theories on social change.’

  ‘I wasn’t ever part of that set,’ said Buddhoo. ‘Some of you were such phonies. So many little writers talking unstoppably of writing. Wearing their little vanities on their sleeve. Failed writers who’d lost faith in literature, or turned critic. Everyone dreaming of making it big. A regular rogues’ gallery. Each one affected some individual perversity, and most of them had a contrived image. But there was one thing I noticed. Most of them were paisa-smart. I once asked Ravan about it: why are the lot of you such low rats? And Ravan crushed me with that bombastic line of his: “Arré chup! Genius lies outside your conventional judgements.” ’

  ‘Did I really say that? Well, as I told you, we were small-time writers. Most of us had never seen print. When we could scrape together the money, we brought out a few crudely printed pages of poetry or fiction. We wrote serious articles on one another’s work and read them out at our meetings. Nobody outside our circle had heard of us. And we always read out our rejected scripts and set off a loud clamour of abuse against the stupidity of publishers and editors. And frequently in a mood of reckless abandon, especially round Holi, we made a collage of our collection of rejection slips. Ten of us managed to cover an entire wall! Every publisher and editor in the country appeared to have rejected our work. Quite a distinction, isn’t it? Hell hath no fury like an author spurned. The fellows with the most rejection slips were given an award and there was such celebration, such wining and dining and reciting and applauding—even if we had to go hungry for a day afterward. As for jealousy, none
. Man hasn’t lived in such collective harmony as we did then. There’s no fraternity like the fellowship of shared failure. Then, abruptly, I found myself banished.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Suddenly, out of the blue, I received an acceptance! My novel, Dhumil Akash, was enthusiastically taken on by the publishers Mayur-Vriksha.’ Sravan’s voice preserved some of the injury.

  ‘The day I broke the news to my friends, I became a leper. They thumped me on the back, they clapped me on the shoulder, they shook hands with me, they smiled and congratulated me and wished me luck. They even held a celebration for me and put up their usual wallpaper of rejection slips! Only my slips weren’t there. I no longer belonged. There was a chill, a constraint. I’d become an outsider. My presence made them uncomfortable, and I could see that I would never be forgiven. That’s when I first tasted the loneliness of success …’

  ‘Oh, come on now,’ protested Buddhoo. ‘You don’t regret being lucky.’

  ‘But I’ve never experienced that kind of comradeship, before or since—nor known such absolute exclusion.’

  ‘You can’t have everything,’ mused Pragya softly.

  ‘But the loneliness of success is strange—because so few can relate,’ reflected Sravan. ‘There was just one fellow who was truly overjoyed, who didn’t desert me: Hari Mohan Misra. And I didn’t want him flitting round me.’

  ‘Ah, that’s the guy we joked about. Freaked out on you …’

  ‘Oh, shut up. I tried explaining to him that mine was a very mainstream sort of promiscuity, that I appreciated his regard …’

  ‘Nicely put.’

  ‘Naturally. We were very euphemistic in those days. But the fellow published a slender novel at his own cost—and dedicated it to me! I was laughed at for weeks. It was a shitty novel, and just went under—deserved to.’

  ‘I think he gave you the very best thing he could offer. Or maybe the second-best.’ Buddhoo winked. Then added, more seriously, ‘Even if it was trash in your eyes.’

  Sravan made no comment. They refilled their glasses. Then Sravan spoke: ‘You know, Buddhoo, we didn’t know it then, as we gnashed our teeth and mutinied and slogged and cursed our lot, but we were just the right mix of intensity and irreverence.’