Keep Off the Grass

by Karan Bajaj

  He jabbered on. ‘I think you need an authentic Indian cigarette to wake you up. Here, have a Wills Navy Cut. It won’t help you win friends or get laid as the ads show, but it will definitely wake you up.’

  He was right. It was harsh, quite unlike the Dunhill Lights I smoked in Manhattan, and screamed cancer. The smoke burnt its way down my throat, slowly waking me up in a few drags.

  We walked out of the room and I was immediately struck by the sharp, uneven beauty of the IIM campus. The view from our shared balcony was straight out of those sucker tourist postcards that people put up as wallpaper on their desktop. Directly in front of the student hostel was a courtyard with hibiscus and gulmohur trees, not flowering but not completely bare either. Behind us was an Olympic-size playground with a basketball arena, a mini-soccer field and even a skating rink. (‘Is that a goddamn skating area?’ Sarkar said, equally taken aback as his eyes followed mine, but for different reasons. ‘What kind of a wimp skates in India?’) The main institute building adjoining the residential hostel seemed to be some sort of a neo-impressionist architectural marvel. From the distant view we got from our balcony, it seemed like cubes were placed over each other to form a complex castle-like structure. I’m usually suspicious of people who climax at seeing oddly shaped buildings and say stuff like ‘great endeavour of the mind’ or ‘victory of the human spirit’. But this view of the imposing building moved me. Not to the point of having an earth-shattering orgasm or anything, but still, it was impressive.

  ‘What? You thought all of India was like Gandhi’s ashram?’ said Sarkar at my obvious surprise.

  I felt ashamed. He was right. I was behaving like a redneck tourist from Kentucky (which I was).

  Still, I wasn’t too far off the mark, as I would learn later. The campus stood oasis-like amidst the crumbling infrastructure outside. While potholed roads that ensure a bone-breaking ride are not unusual in India, the road leading to the sprawling IIM campus was a real mother. During one particularly harsh monsoon, a visiting professor from Romania or some other exotic eastern European country received a little more than the authentic Indian experience he was seeking when his airport cab sputtered and died on the flooded road. He had to wade his way through shoulder-high water to reach the campus. And if that wasn’t enough, the unlucky bastard went on to collide with a floating, dead buffalo and lost his laptop in the ensuing chaos. After shaking off the sordid memories of his introduction to the IIM, he must have wondered how the best business school in the country could be so oblivious to the management problems that abounded in its immediate environment. But as we would soon discover, that precisely was the unofficial motto of the denizens of the business school: ‘Ensure your own house is in perfect order even if everything around you is in a shambles.’

  Sarkar perched himself on the balcony ledge smoking a cigarette, clearly enjoying the pleasant summer breeze.

  ‘So, where’d you go to school? What’s your story?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not even mildly as interesting as yours, firang. Mine is the typical Indian story, similar I would presume to almost everyone else’s here. No clear ambition, no governing interests. Just drifting along, doing things I’m supposed to be doing, collecting degrees along the way. I had an engineering degree before I came here, though I must admit I’m a horrible engineer. I can’t even screw on a light bulb, but thanks to the wretchedness of our education system, I graduated with honours from the IIT.’

  An honours student from the Indian Institute of Technology? I knew enough about those to know that he was way smarter than he claimed to be. His story was not too different from mine, though. I had done physics at Yale by default, and had realized my complete inaptitude for it before drifting into a soulless banking job.

  I was about to tell him that when we heard a shrill voice call out from behind, ‘Hey guys! Are you going for lunch?’

  It belonged to a small, bespectacled guy with thinning hair as oily as his smile. ‘Myself Chetan Sharma from Mumbai, chartered accountant. I heard you were an investment banker in New York. I wanted to make an introduction.’

  Word travels fast in India, I thought. We made the perfunctory introductions. Once the smile was gone, Chetan had a worried, anxious look on his face. I didn’t want to judge him too harshly and so soon, but he did resemble the Gollums on Wall Street: bankers whose obsession with their year-end bonus rivalled the fixation of the legendary Tolkien character. Or as Brad Pitt (more eloquent, in my opinion, than Tolkien) said in Fight Club: ‘The things that they own start owning them.’

  Over the course of the conversation, Chetan gave a disinterested Sarkar and a somewhat fascinated me a detailed description of his scoring ‘always 90 per cent at least’ in school, which I guessed meant straight As, his acing the prestigious National Chartered Accountancy examination and his frustration at being rejected by the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, arguably the best of the IIMs. ‘Chutiyas. The interviewers were asking too many personal questions on soft stuff like listening skills, sensitivity, etc. Are they interviewing me to be an investment banker or a call girl?’

  Clearly, he hadn’t learnt a lesson in sensitivity from that debacle. Chetan seemed impressed by Sarkar’s IIT pedigree and completely stupefied by my decision to quit an investment bank on Wall Street.

  ‘But yaar, why? What do you ever hope to get from here?’ he asked.

  Hmm, where do I begin, I thought, and do I really know? I thought I knew yesterday when I was sharing a joint with a nameless software engineer who shared more of himself with me in a day than most of my colleagues back home shared with me over two years of working together. And I think I know, right now, sitting on this balcony with you perfect strangers who are so blasé about revealing everything about yourselves so easily to each other. I came here to live a real life once again, not an imitation of someone else’s reality. Does that answer your question? I hope it does because I’m getting sick of answering it.

  But I didn’t reveal myself so easily. ‘I don’t know for sure, man. An international experience is valued in Wall Street. Global mergers and acquisitions, economic growth of developing markets and the expected retail explosion in India, all that kinda stuff, you know.’ He didn’t know. He seemed a trifle suspicious but let it fly.

  Chetan’s room was on my right and Sarkar’s on the left. The two sides would go on to represent the two extreme ways that I would try to live my life at the IIM. Although I tended to lean towards Sarkar’s self-destructive hedonistic philosophy, I developed more than a grudging respect for Chetan’s unapologetic naked ambition for grades and jobs, however empty it seemed at most times.

  We went to the cafeteria for lunch. The spread of authentic Indian food there reminded me of the platinum blonde who had found the sushi restaurant ‘ethnic’. She would definitely climax at the food here. But then again, maybe not. This cafeteria wouldn’t be ethnic enough for her. There were no photographs of the Taj Mahal on the walls, no Sanskrit calligraphy on the tablecloth and no intricate drawings of palaces on the plates. Just a whitewashed hall with rows of steel tables and foldable chairs. She would probably be disappointed. The Bukhara Spice on Times Square with its sitar-wielding host was far more ‘Indian’. Boy, was I glad I had got away!

  Sitting there, devouring the best Indian meal I’d had in months, I felt almost optimistic at what lay ahead. There would be new faces and interesting experiences, and investment banking had set such a low base for happiness that it wouldn’t be too difficult to cross that. I exchanged enthusiastic introductions with many of my new classmates over lunch that day. As Sarkar had predicted, most had heard of me and were suitably stupefied by my foolishness, and in one case, even annoyed by it.

  ‘NRI, eh?’ said a short, obese, angry-looking guy with spiked hair in a tone that could well have meant bastard or cocksucker.

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I’m not a non-resident Indian; I’m an American citizen.’

  He shrugged. Same difference. ‘What I don�
��t understand is why you guys come back. Didn’t you think about your roots or about your kids growing up in the American culture, or whatever it is that makes you return, when you left in the first place?’ he asked.

  There was a slight hush at the table. Even for India, where expressing offensive personal views was seemingly as common as asking, ‘How was your weekend’, he seemed to have crossed the line. Not that I could defend myself with any lofty assertions. My coming here wasn’t like Mahatma Gandhi returning from South Africa to lead India from darkness. Assisting India’s development or anyone else’s development for that matter was a distant concern in my mind. How could you save the world when you couldn’t save yourself?

  ‘And since when have you become a gatekeeper for India?’ a calm voice asked him, saving me from the embarrassment of answering. It belonged to a tall, muscular, Mills-and-Boon sort of a guy with a short crew cut, who had been quietly eating his food so far. Like everyone else, he seemed to be in his early or mid-twenties, but his demeanour commanded respect.

  ‘I’m just a concerned citizen,’ the short dude said as if he had just smoked out a CIA agent hatching a plot against India.

  ‘You should have been fighting with me in Kargil then,’ the tall guy said. Ah-ha, I thought, an ex-army officer. ‘Unless, of course, you were doing more important stuff for the country then. You must have been in politics, or in an NGO maybe?’

  ‘No, I was working in a software firm,’ the short guy said in a small voice.

  ‘Canvassing for funds for war veterans in your spare time, perhaps?’ the army officer said.

  ‘I was busy preparing for the IIM entrance examination then,’ he said, clearly embarrassed.

  The table tittered with quiet laughter.

  ‘Not everyone is born with a silver spoon,’ he said, taking another dig at me before slinking away from the table.

  Sarkar and I introduced ourselves to Vinod Singh, the army guy.

  ‘Don’t sweat it,’ Vinod said. ‘Everyone in India is an expert on nationalism. When we were fighting in Kashmir, we used to hear single-digit-IQ film personalities offer their view on military strategies on the radio.’

  ‘Jingoism is an Indian problem,’ said Sarkar caustically. ‘Misplaced patriotism. Like our friend there.’ He pointed to the vacant seat where the short, fat dude had sat. ‘He would probably rate Navjot Singh Sidhu and Salman Khan as bigger patriots than Mahatma Gandhi or Nehru.’

  Vinod’s body shook with laughter. ‘Sidhu is a cricketer and Khan is a movie star,’ he explained to me. Then to Sarkar, ‘They are heroes in their own right.’

  ‘Heroes, my ass. Ask them to play for the country without wearing a Pepsi T-shirt and Dora underwear, then maybe I’ll believe you. What’s patriotic about being offered a million dollars in endorsements to play a dumb cricket match? It’s a scam. See, that’s why I want to get out of this country. It’s like Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, idiots everywhere the eye can see,’ said Sarkar. ‘Yet our friend has come here,’ he continued, pointing to me.

  ‘Why did you leave the army?’ I said quickly, trying to avert another discussion about my foolishness.

  ‘The cafeteria is closing,’ said Sarkar before Vinod could answer. ‘Why don’t we shift base to a dhaba?’

  Lunches are long, elaborate affairs in India, and I hadn’t realized we had been sitting there for a couple of hours. In my previous life, lunch took all of ten minutes as I grabbed a tuna sandwich every day at the same deli and wolfed it down in front of my computer while ferociously tracking the movement of our client company stocks. Now there were no more stocks to track, the market had closed down for me. Not that I was complaining.

  ‘There is one right outside the campus,’ said Sarkar. ‘We can go on my bike.’

  I had planned on going back to my room to do the suggested pre-read for the next day, our first day of classes, and Vinod also seemed a bit doubtful. Sensing our hesitation, Sarkar added, ‘We’ll be back soon, I promise. No drinking and stuff, just a cup of tea. I need a break.’

  This was the first day and we didn’t know then that Sarkar always needed a ‘break’. Before we knew it, both of us had been convinced to ride pillion on Sarkar’s bike through the mini-riot of Bangalore’s streets.

  We stopped at a highway stall, or dhaba as I learned to call it, a few miles away from campus, and sat down to enjoy a cup of tea. I smelled grass again. After having studiously avoided drugs through high school and Yale, they seemed to be following me around ever since I had landed in India. It made me feel like the Alchemist—the universe seemed to be conspiring to fulfil my hidden desires.

  Sarkar had lit up a joint and was smoking it openly while slurping his tea.

  ‘Hey, aren’t there any cops around here?’ I asked, surprised by his brazenness.

  He in turn seemed surprised by my ignorance. ‘This is not America. There are bigger crimes for cops to bother about than arresting a poor student contemplating life over some gaanja. Here, you have one as well.’

  The joint looked tempting. I reached out for it. It was stronger and harsher than the one I’d smoked yesterday.

  We perched ourselves comfortably on the lone cot. Vinod casually placed his arm around Sarkar’s shoulder. They looked like a gay version from the movie Twins; Sarkar was decidedly short and fat, and Vinod was way taller and built like an Adonis. I would have to get used to the Indian comfort with same-sex physical proximity, I thought. In another life, I would have thought Vinod and Sarkar were gay. Well, how did I know they weren’t, I mused. I’d barely met them. But of course they weren’t. They had revealed everything about themselves so quickly to me that matters of sexual preferences would definitely have come up. Both of them were similar in that way. They had the same self-assured air of ‘Look, this is what I am. Don’t like it? Then screw you. Go change yourself ’.

  I took a long drag and passed it on to Vinod, who refused. (‘No gaanja for me. I have very few brain cells as it is.’) He bought a bottle of rum from the dhaba and began emptying it steadily.

  ‘You were saying? About leaving the army?’ I asked again.

  ‘Haan, yes,’ Vinod said. ‘I was very young, barely seventeen, when I joined the National Defence Academy, the Indian equivalent of your WestPoint, that is. All of us were dying to get into a war when we graduated. We couldn’t believe our luck when the Kargil war was announced and we begged to be chosen for it.’

  ‘Peace man. Peace out. No war,’ said Sarkar sounding very stoned.

  ‘Long story short, the war took its toll,’ he said. ‘We killed, they killed, some friends died, others lost their limbs, and we started to understand the politics of it for the first time. The old soldiers were all jaded as hell. It’s useless, they said, as soon as we start driving the Pakistanis away, some politician will want Muslim votes and there will be peace again. War is useless, our biggest enemy is within us, they would say. Nothing made much sense and I didn’t feel like a hero as I had thought I would. I just felt stupid,’ said Vinod. ‘But it wasn’t that, really. It was…’ He paused to drain his glass.

  We stared at him expectantly.

  ‘Well, nothing as such. I was reading a lot, newspapers, politics, war fiction, trying to make sense of things once I got back. When it came down to it, I realized, most of my work was pushing paper around, if I was lucky—and killing people if I wasn’t. And then once… well, it sounds foolish…’

  ‘Don’t stop now,’ said Sarkar, slouching on the cot and suddenly looking interested.

  ‘No, nothing, it was just a stupid incident. My best mate, another lieutenant, had lost his leg in the war. His CO, commanding officer that is, was coming for a visit to the regiment and he was sent to make sure the CO’s room was all right. So there he was, an officer in the army, a war hero who lost a leg for the country, standing on one leg and checking to ensure that the flush was working for the CO’s visit. It was sad in a very pathetic sort of way. And I kind of decided that if I had to push paper and check the
bathroom plumbing for a superior’s visit, I’d rather do it in the corporate world. At least my family would get some money and security. It’s kind of stupid, you know, how small things just set a chain of events in motion,’ he said. He poured another glass for himself.

  Barely a year older than me, and he had lived more than I would live in my whole life, I thought. He was probably having a bayonet thrust at his stomach when I was eating sushi with Christine and trying to figure out how to recover my lost soul in India. The selfishness and insignificance of my crises was suddenly disconcerting.

  ‘Good decision,’ said Sarkar. ‘Of course, you will miss out on the honour of Aishwarya Rai bringing a wreath to your funeral, and Annu Kapoor dedicating an episode of Indian Idol to your memory.’

  Vinod broke into laughter. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. I respect the soldiers, I love my country, I don’t ever want to leave India. But I was a misfit in the army, I think.’

  ‘I think we are all perfect fits in business school, though,’ said Sarkar, lazily cynical. ‘We were all happy with our lives, and came here because we really wanted to get an MBA.’

  It was such a pessimistic statement for the first day of business school that I couldn’t help but laugh. He had given up even before starting; finally, I could tell Mom than I had met my match at running away from responsibility. I took another long drag of the joint.

  The marijuana started to kick in and the world seemed to slow down a bit. The tea was excessively hot, milky and sweet—and tasted delicious. I could feel it slowly, pleasantly burning its way down my throat. The strong petrol fumes from passing vehicles started to smell inexplicably good. I could make out fine dust particles rising leisurely from the ground. The radio was playing soft, pleasing songs in an unknown, melodious language. The rays of the setting sun and the dust particles seemed to fuse together to create a radiant spectrum of colours. Funny, I thought, I couldn’t seem to recall noticing dusk before. I felt a sudden burst of joy. Everything will work out, I said to myself, I just have to make the most of my time in India. However, I thought distractedly, looking at the joint in my hand, I need to be in my senses to do that. I shouldn’t smoke up so much. I had smoked yesterday as well.