We stay on top of the world near the North Pole like a gigantic snow-flake. Santa Claus is our dear friend, living just to our north, protecting us from Polar bears. We do not have to dream of white Christmases like Bing Crosby sang of, because it is a given that we would have white Christmas unfailingly every year. In fact, we have white Christmas every day of the year!
If you do not believe what I say, just come and stay here. I tell you, you will never go back! Of course, I did not mean you will freeze to death here. On the contrary, you will fall in love! You will fall in love with the ice caps, you will fall in love with the snow-flakes and more importantly, you will fall in love with polar bears. I fell in love with a she-bear myself.
I am going to tell you that story of romance.
The total population of Canada is 16009. Like legendary lord Krishna, I have 16008 she-bear friends in Canada. Now you know why Canada has only one man and so many women.
You could possibly argue that this low Canadian population is a byproduct of the biting cold weather that drives out the humanity from here.
As I recollect, a mixed bag of hilarity and romance started unraveling one fine morning where I was living. That memorable morning set in motion a series of events in the future, which I became helpless to block or even to control. I became a speck of dust caught in a snowstorm of events and I started drifting down the highway of life uncontrollably, unable to exercise my free will. You will see.
It was summer where I was living. Day was just breaking out. The snow was only five feet deep in the driveway. I had just woken up and was still half-asleep while sitting in my living room. I was looking outside, enjoying the supreme beauty of my snow blower. I was debating whether I should blow out the snow. To blow or not to blow—that was the question that haunted me. Hamlet of the to-be-or-not-to-be fame would readily have agreed with me.
The snowfall during the night was so heavy that it effectively shut down the road traffic. The city was yet to wake up to mobilize the snow ploughs to return life to normalcy. The snow in my front yard and the road were not separated by a sidewalk, since the sidewalk itself disappeared in the heavy snowfall. It was while seeing this unbelievable sight that I had the Hamlet moment.
At the same moment, I was besieged by an eerie sensation. Even though I was the only one living in the house, I suddenly got an uncomfortable feeling that somebody else was there in the living room with me. I was overtaken by an unsettling perception that someone was watching me from close quarters. Then I realized that I had left the door open overnight. Unknown to me, somebody must have slipped inside my home.
I turned around to where my peripheral vision led me to. There she was—a she-bear staring at me right in my living room! At least, that is what I imagined I saw, as my still-sleepy eyes sent rapid-transit information to my mind that conjured up the image of a she-bear. Later, when I would shake myself free from this momentary hallucination of sleepiness, I would realize that the intruder was none other than a female whose car got stuck outside in the snow. She came inside seeking help from a Good Samaritan, or at least a muscular Samaritan who could push her car around the snow dune of the Canadian winter wonderland.
She was covered in immaculate white snow. The snow-clad figure of a female wearing a parka whose open hood appeared to be the gaping mouth of a bear was all a semi-awake man like me could see on that morning. This imprinted in my mind a tangible image of a bear and it stuck. The only way I could describe her to you is through the imagery of a she-bear.
My very first reaction, naturally, was fear. Only the other day I read in The Arctic Times that my neighbor was eaten alive by a polar bear. A shower of cold beads of sweat sprinkled profusely out of me, overtaken as I was by fear. But something was different about this bear, I realized, as I slowly stepped into the world of wakefulness. She stood out. There was something in her looks that told me that she was different from the rest. She was a paradigm of supernatural beauty endowed with an otherworldly grace. She walked into my living room, and, as I would realize later, she walked into my life itself.
She came to me with her feathery steps heralding a tomorrow full of promise and happiness. She walked in with the jingling music of her anklets, promise in her eyes and joy in my heart. Her dazzling smile resembled the brightness of a million twinkling stars that were sprinkled across the arctic sky. She was soft as a snow-flake, gorgeous as an autumn moon, and in sharp contrast to the color of the midnight sun. She was cool as icecaps. She was singularly beautiful. How she took my breath away!
I knew almost immediately that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her and with her only. It was love at first sight. I was intoxicated with love. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that I would set my eyes on such a ravishing beauty. Cupid was at work.
We met often after that first encounter. Her very presence triggered an avalanche of dreamy thoughts in my mind. I wrote the following poem, "An Ode to Tomorrow," to commemorate our first encounter and to celebrate our love-affair that spilled out of many todays and spread across many tomorrows.
The poem spiraled out of me, carrying my free-spirited elation at resurrecting from a long, boring existence, to be greeted by a burst of refreshing life with promise of romance and, hopefully, love.
Oh darkness, you the carrier of the evil
You held me hostage during freezing nights
While I longed for tomorrow’s sunlight
To wash away the many sins of your shade.
Many a night did I spend with my heart
Laden with anguish; this night won't pass
With no sight of tomorrow’s glittering sun
To light up my day to make me upbeat.
Oh hazy night, you’re the secret incarnate
You store in your heart many hidden plots
Covering earth like a black blanket
A contrast to daylight’s transparency.
Oh darkness, mistress of the mischievous night
You will vanish and tomorrow will set in
Lit with a bubbling hope and a bright morning light
From a smiling sun awake after a night-long slumber.
This poem officially heralded our love affair. She read the poem voraciously and daily. Our love-at-first-sight syndrome soon underwent metamorphosis to lead to a full-fledged Romeo-Juliet romance. One thing led to another, and soon we started going out on Friday nights. We went out for dinner at the Ice Caps restaurant.
We usually have a romantic, candlelit dinner. At dinner, she tries to eat me, thinking that I am her food. But then I apply my masculine charm and dissuade her from her love-driven murderous tendencies. I divert her attention to the Hungarian goulash we ordered. She eats the goulash along with the plate. The waiter-bear comes around and makes passes at her. I get jealous and shove my plate into his mouth. He gulps that down with relish and goes away happily, leaving us alone.
I soon found that she was fixated with my credit card. Whenever I would leave my card in the bill plate for the waiter to pick up, she would grab it, and wolf it down. I then would perform Heimlich maneuver on her, which I learned from Canadian Heart Association’s cardiopulmonary resuscitation course. She would throw up the card along with the Hungarian goulash. I would then fish out my American Express Card from the mess she barfed out. The card would start talking to me, “Don’t leave home without me, buddy; better still don’t throw me to the wolves.” I bit the bullet when my bear girlfriend was likened to a wolf.
Usually I do not tip the waiter-bear. I leave my plate and a burned-out candlestick as my tip.
Folks, don't think that I did not notice that sneering look written on your face! Is that not for my mean habit of not tipping? But at least, I leave my plate as a tip. Lots of my graduate student friends from you-know-where do not even do that. They just take the plate home!
My friends do not follow the American Express Card principle of "Don't leave home without it (a plate)." But then, they are eager to follow the My Home Express Card
principle of "Don't leave restaurant without the plate." This results in plates stacking up when my friends leave their homes.
This scenario begets a very interesting phenomenon: by the time a typical graduate student is done with his studies and starts packing to get back to civilization, — that is what my friends claimed as doing: going back to civilization — he hoards, on average, 23.7 plates. The garage sale they hold just before leaving the country is rumored to be frequented by restaurant owners who have set up a plate-retrieval campaign.
This problem was brought to the attention of immigration ministry, who set up a ruling whereby student visa availability was made conditional to an oath that students would give in front of the parliament building to the effect that they would follow the American Express card principle of leaving home with the plates. There is intense lobbying by plate owners to appoint a senate subcommittee to see to it that the immigration ruling will be fully implemented.
The problem is, however, not as severe as purported by the Canadian press, because in Canada, all our plates are eaten by polar bears, who roam around our neighborhood freely. Santa Clause of the North Pole ends up retrieving them from the polar bears and distributing them on Christmas Eve to diners across Canada.
Mind you, I used to adhere to the My Home Express Card principle of leaving diners with plates, just like my friends. Well, sort of. It was not exactly like that. It was more like the plates refused to stay inside when I left the diner, attached as they were to me, having formed a friendship during dinner. They more or less escorted me out of the restaurant, into my car, and finally, into my home. But now I am a changed man. I am a born-again Canadian practicing the principle of loving your restaurant just as much as loving myself. I am refusing to be escorted by a bunch of nitwitted plates.
After our romantic dinner at the Ice-caps, we usually go out for a dance at the North Pole bar. During the slow dance, she almost crushes me to death with her intimate bear hug. I end up running for my life. All of love's labors are lost!
But come next Friday, this lovers’ quarrel is easily forgotten. Love conquers them all! We are always back in our favorite restaurant the next Friday to reenact the same drama of us having our dinner at the Ice Cap, her trying to eat me, me applying my charm to make her eat beef stroganoff, me getting jealous of the waiter-bear making passes at her, me shoving my plate into his mouth, him going away relishing the plate, me offering the burned-out candlestick as my tip, us going to the North Pole bar for a dance, her trying to crush me to death with her bear hug and me running for my life.
This drama gets reenacted continuously. During these weekly romantic encounters we discuss a myriad of topics, like the research of Canadian physicists on the possibility of negative absolute temperature existing in Canada in direct violation of the laws of thermodynamics. We also discuss about the prominent personality of Santa Clause who lives only two blocks from her and how ice storms usually make her day. One day she even suggested that Santa Claus should be appointed as the prime minister of Canada and Christmas should be declared as the Canadian Independence Day!
At last I found the true love of my life. I found the meaning of life that I had been seeking all along. I have confidence in my lucky stars that our love is eternal. My love for her has blossomed by leaps and bounds. She is the best thing that has happened to me. She is the very epicenter of my dream world.
Often, I get overwhelmed by wistful exhilaration at the mere thought of being in love with her. Our love story is a testament to life’s balancing acts of happiness and sorrow to build a world endearingly real, away from the tantalizing fantasies, and this we do not mind at all.
To us, love meant walking hand in hand with pounding hearts in a field mounded with snow, littered with blindingly bright snow dunes in the daylight. It meant skipping a heartbeat while embracing each other in the profound silence of a starlit night in the winter wonderland of Canada. It meant murmuring to each other, looking at the giant Arctic sky that could well have been a giant umbrella. It meant humming a love song to each other to convince ourselves that our love affair was well beyond a mere illusion. It meant being caressed by her long, flowing hair fluttering in the soft breeze, carrying lavender fragrance. It meant enacting a fairy tale where I called her Snow White when we strolled over fields of white snow.
I could go on and on. Suffice it to say, our love affair is much more than a fleeting moment. We both believe that marriages are not made in heaven, but in the Canadian Arctic. Wedding bells are around the corner! Guys, what do you know? We are planning to get married in the Arctic Cathedral.
When you hear the resonating sounds of the Arctic Cathedral bells and when you get drenched by countless snowflakes that the arctic breeze sprinkles upon you, then you know those bells are ushering in an era of everlasting happiness for both of us; then you know those snowflakes are our wedding confetti from heaven; then you know that love is in the air; then you know we are ebullient with the joy of togetherness; then you know my and her world is replete with boundless happiness; then you know my and her lives have attained a state of exuberant joy; then you know that our minds are intertwined in a bondage only death will part; then you know we plan to live happily ever after!
All of you are invited to the wedding! The ceremony will take place this summer. Remember to dress up in your winter clothing.
7THE SKY IS FALLING
It was in the year 1975 that Chicken Little appeared in front of Thoma’s rental home in Mannuthy. He came to the front yard of one fine morning. He crowed at the top of his voice: “Cock-a-doodle-doo.”
He then started pecking at the grains and worms in the ground. While he was merrily munching on the rice, he suddenly remembered that he was not there to have an eating spree. This thought jolted him into the task at hand—the one he came there to perform. He sprang into action immediately, having gotten enlightenment.
“The sky is falling,” he announced, crowing as loud as he could. Thoma, Ann, and their children filed out of the home and gathered around the strange rooster, with puzzled looks on their faces. Ann immediately looked at the sky and begged everyone to get into the house to avoid injury. Thoma contemplated making a spiced curry of the stray rooster.
Then all of a sudden, the sky started falling! Chicken Little resumed his act of pecking at the seeds, satisfied at his important announcement having materialized. The children, in total disregard for the warning issued by Ann, spread out to the street to meet and greet the falling sky. And then it happened: A land of two acres with a house on it fell from the wide sky above.
The house and the attached property was rightly called the ancestral home, since it was the very first home that the family undisputedly owned ever since Thoma was excommunicated from his original ancestral home by his own siblings..
Even though the property was a gift to the family from Josh, his siblings preferred to believe that it fell from the sky. They believed, or rather liked to believe, that it was one of those accidental happenings of life—like winning a lottery, which conveniently left no room for obligation, accountability or good, old-fashioned gratitude.
***
It was in 1975 that Josh bailed out the family from the canyon of hell that Mannuthy life had proven to be. The disbursements from the graduate school fellowship and teaching assistantship from the Canadian university barely supported him. He tightened the proverbial belt and starved himself to save enough dollars to send to the family to purchase a house in Amballore. The exchange rate against the Indian rupee was favorable enough to accomplish the impossible dream.
The consequences to Thoma’s family would have been disastrous if this had not happened. It meant that Number-Six would not have gotten a free land to build his home and bring up his family; it meant that Number-Six, Number-Eight, Number-Nine, and Number-Ten would not have gotten higher education, which subsequently enabled them to get into respectable careers, leading to respectable matrimonial alliances; it meant that Number-Eight would not hav
e gotten a free land whose proceeds went towards her dowry; it meant that Number-Five and Number-Seven would not have gotten free lands as if they sprang out of the sky above—it also meant that these two would not have made huge sums of money by selling their properties; it meant that Rita, though belated, got to pay off her long-owed dowry to Tim.
Most importantly, it meant that all in the family were saved from the pit of starvation and death. It heralded an era of normalcy where Josh’s siblings could lead respectable lives with dignity. The support that Josh extended was what Thoma had desperately needed, and what Ann had urged God to grant, in her daily prayers. Mannuthy citizens witnessed the miraculous rise of Thoma’s family—from rags to riches; from nothing to the zenith of prosperity—and bestowed acclaim on it.
Josh, like George and Kareena in the family, owed nothing to their siblings to be obligated to support them. Just like Kareena, he got out of his home while very young and supported himself through the national merit scholarship he received from the Indian government. These three had fended for themselves to stave off starvation and miraculously had survived to be able to support the rest in the family that Thoma and Ann brought to this world as if there were no tomorrow, as though children’s nurturing rested with the world. As a matter of fact, the younger ones’ upbringing was done by these three.
When he embarked upon a challenging graduate study and a possible career path that unfolded in front of him, Josh could very well have taken care of himself by saving enough to support his own future wife and children. But he did not. The future would dramatically reveal that he miscalculated on a monumental scale and committed the blunder of a lifetime by giving away his hard-earned savings. He would later find out that two his siblings, Number-Six and Number-Nine, colluded to trap and endanger him.
This story of treachery was reminiscent of Thoma’s own life. He brought up his siblings at the expense of supporting Ann and the children but was then eventually expelled from his ancestral home by his own siblings. Josh was aware that the backstabbing ran in the family like a genetic disorder, had enough vision to foresee this repeating, and took precautions to ward it off. However, the tide of the events would go against him and his siblings would manage to outmaneuver him. They would stab his back. The history would repeat.
Amballore House Page 9