by BS Murthy
"But of late the parents are tending to deprive the children of their childhood by mindless discipline or by over indigence?"
"Sadly so for freedom to act and express is the essence of childhood," he said throwing more of his money into the fireplace. "Nowadays, while some mold their kids in the crucibles of manners to showcase them as 'gentlemen prodigies', most of the rest just give in to every whim and fancy of their kids so as to exhibit them as brilliant models of 'unbridled originality'. What with the world is in the materialistic fetters, love has come to acquire monitory color, and the parents too have come to believe that by pampering children with what money can buy, they are showering the kids with parental love. Haven't you heard them say that they didn't have all those goodies when they were kids, jolly well forgetting that they had childhood for company as they grew up?"
"Sadly for the stupidity of man the kids pay the price of their childhood."
"If the childhood curiosity is the foundation of life, its fagade is designed by the youthful exuberance, but sadly as man, he lets his vanity to transform the edifice into an abode of woes," he continued. "I think it's in the village soil that the childhood can be soundly grounded as villages are nearer to nature while the child is a stranger to vanity. But as I left the village at ten into a small town, it was as if I part-distanced myself from nature, and entering adulthood in a big town, I lost the innocence of childhood. Worse still was being wealthy in the middle of my life; why, the later-day success induces man to uproot himself from his past reality and to implant himself in
the make-believe terrain of the surreal. How small doth the sense of outgrowing make man really? Yet, the world is crazy to make it big, larger than life itself. It seems that man tends to downsize the things past to make his current holdings seem bigger. What a fallacy! The beauty of life lies in its fulsomeness, well to illustrate it in a weird way, aren'tthe skinny things on the ramp an apology to womanliness. And pitiable still are the filthy rich on the corrupt stage of life. What a pity that life robs the rich of its beauty, and what's worse, entices them with its ugliness."
"As one's sense of being can't be stagnant, maybe, man thinks in terms of outgrowing others."
"That is by chanting the 'dream big' mantra, never mind one's lack of abilities for the fulfillment of those dreams, baneful any way," he said, as much of what he had was burnt by then. "But stepping out of my illusion now, as I enter into the realms of reality, don't I see the need for money to see me through the rest of my life. What a paradox that my money turned into ashes should provide a new monetary vision to me! How much money would you take along on a holiday or an errand? Would any carry a suitcase of currency that he wouldn't ever open during the trip and how many make it back with the wallet still bulging. Why not apply the same analogy to life given that it's no more than a sojourn? How nice it feels that I'm left with just enough to start life afresh. Or is it a little too much even for the proverbial rainy day? How my obsession for wealth blinded my vision of happiness, or was it insecurity. Wonder even the moneyed feel insecure on the monetary front! Won't that prove financial insecurity is not an index of the bank balance but is the proclivity of one's mind? Can't I see that it's the small things that make the big picture of life? Whatever, having shed the overburden of wealth, how light do I feel!"
"You should be wary in your situation for the lightness of being could as well suck you into the vortex of regret," I said in spite of myself.
"Thanks for cautioning me," he said sounding formal in his state of ecstasy. "Don't I see the memories of yore surfacing as if out of the wraps? I don't know really where to begin and how to end as my mind is being swarmed with so many episodes."
"Well, you've to begin somewhere and it has got to end sometime," I said prompting him, "Why not pickup the threads from the roots of your life."
Chapter 3
Cradle of Life
While I was still in the cradle life had signaled that it wouldn't be a case of the runof- the-mill for me," he began delving into his extraordinary life. "You know that kids don't mind the change of guard at their cradle as long as it was kept rocking. But I was insistent that the one who began should hold on to it till I slept off. I was not even two then and I've a vague memory of it. That's not all, in those days, women invariably used to wear silk saris while performing their daily puja only to change into cotton saris after it was over, and were I to be hungry during her puja time, I was insistent that my mother breastfed me in her auspicious attire without changing into her mundane dress, well I've her word for that. The first time my parents took me to the movies is so vivid in my memory. As I was drawn to the heroine, holding sleep at bay, I glued my eyes on her whenever she appeared in a scene. When she failed to grace the silver screen for long to engage my eyes, I sank into my mother's lap that was after instructing her to wake me up as and when she reappeared. Well, my mother ignored my diktat, and when I woke up on my own, I saw her on the screen. What a fuss I
made that my mother let me miss her earlier appearances! All my mom's assurances that the heroine had reappeared only then and that she was about to wake me up didn't cut ice with me. I was not even five then."
"How remarkable it was all that is apart from your photographic memory!"
"Without a solid memory to back it, wherefrom would a sound memoir emerge?" he said with a glint in his eyes. "M aybe we tend to have a grasp of the sensuality of the opposite sex well before we develop a sense of our own sexuality, and it was a teenage girl's enamored look that ushered me into the turbulence of adolescence. That day, as I was crossing a house in a side-road, it is still vivid in my eyes, as though on cue I turned my head, (he had turned his head sideways as if he was reliving that moment) and found a teenaged beauty with her eyes lost for me. Oh as the fuse of her gaze lighted the bulb of my sexuality, the sensations I had experienced then are beyond my ability to picture in words for you. Though the nascent beats of my infatuated heart made me loiter around her place ever after, I could not see her again. But the memory of the manifestations of the sexual attraction I induced in her never waned, and so, I came to regard that house as a shrine of my life. Maybe, she was a visitor at the house who might have come to wake me up sexually and not to fulfill my life in her possession. Whatever it was, are not small pleasures the lasting ecstasies of life?"
"I'm getting a feeling that your life may not be just sound and fury and certainly not a twice told tale."
"Coming to storytelling," he said, "there is none to better my grandmother at that. It's true, all grannies of yore were storytellers of note, and what cradles of tales they made to stir the curiosity in children! But now, which child has a grandma for company and which mother is fit to play that role when it's her turn? Whenever I said that she was repeating herself, my grandma used to challenge me to recap it; that I remember every tale she told me has as much to do with her narrative ability as my uncanny memory. You know, I didn't read any of our epics in the later days, and yet, I'm a sort of mini authority on those. But the icing on my childhood cake was the absence of school regimen till I was nine. You can gauge my fortune if only you contrast it with the kids these days who are bundled out to nursery schools with donkey loads of books that they could hardly grasp. How sad, times have robbed childhood from kids in other ways too."
"Oh, how I wish I grew up in your times," I said. "Though I'm half your age, still I didn't have a quarter of your leeway when it came to going to school. I was packed off to a nursery school before I could unzip my knickers. Maybe, the rural-urban divide persists in some ways even these days."
"How mirthful that childhood period was though we didn't have a tenth of the exposure the kids these days have to the ways of world," he said with a glow in his visage. "But it was different with girls even in our days, why they tend to get exposed to their sexuality well before boys can grasp a thing about their thing. Wonder how they used to conceive those man-wife and doctor-patient games. Once, when a girl had chosen me as her doctor, and as o
thers wrapped us up in a makeshift tent, she exposed her private parts for my physical examination and it was then that I realized that she was made differently over there. Thanks to the movies and the media, now all know all there is to know about sex, but it was only when I was fifteen or so that I got an idea of it from a married woman. Later with her sister, I had a mini affair; oh how we were always at necking and petting though I didn't press further for fear of making her pregnant. Whoever knew about condom those days and by the time I
came to know of it, my rival for her affection had penetrated into her life without it. Sadly for me, ignorance was no bliss for once.'
"Won't lost opportunities leave haunting memories?"
"But don't they last ever longer to our hurt," he said with apparent disappointment. "M aybe it's my software of love that could have activated her sexual passions to seek the hardcore gratification with my rival. Or who knows, she might've been a flirt to start with, but for me the fact of inactivity was a lost opportunity; well, the ethos of the times and the sensitivity of my soul together contrived to handicap my youth for I won the hearts of women and yet I failed to gain their final favor. Whatever, how frustrating it was failing to have all those fair things that fancied me. But in these sexy times served by pills, isn't it fun all around what with girls willing to open up other ways too for detours. Who had heard of anal sex those days, and if only I had a scent of it, my story of youth would have been composed in stanzas of fulfillment. Well, I could never cease mulling over those missed chances; especially the loss of her favor even though in the later years I had more than made up for all those misses. Why each woman is unique by herself and every encounter is apart in itself."
"That way, youngsters these days have plenty of ways for their sexual fun. But on the flip side, the premarital sex deprives lovers the joy that is the longing of love."
"But then, you can't have the cake and eat it too," he said. "Whatever every fool of an ass has a girlfriend these days while in our time even the smartest had to rest content with the yearning looks of the enamored dames. Why it's the longing for love that shapes the nature of one's love life and in adulthood it's the childhood anecdotes that serve as antidotes to its vagaries. But the beauty of childhood has an ugly facet to it. How many lament that they were not of the Birla household as their later-day Amabani-like riches fail to offset their sense of childhood deprivation! Let us put it differently, being a Rockefeller is not good enough if you are not a Rockefeller's son as well. It was as if my miserly grandfather chose thrift to catapult my father into the zone, but that didn't help my father's vision to expand the fifteen-acre family holding to make the grade. In a way, my grandfather was a colorless man and none seemed to have missed him in his life or death, not even my grandmother. Being a miser to the core, he was not even superficially warm."
"I for one believe that of all the infirmities of man, miserliness is the most debilitating," I said. "Why, don't we have the true life story of the miserly millionaire woman that made it to the Guinness Book of World Records? You might know that she was in search of a public hospital that too in the U.S to cure her son's aliment in a leg, which sadly for him, led to the amputation of his limb. Oh, what would have been his feelings when in the end; her millions fell into half-a-lap of his? That's why I find the regulations of the state like banning smoking for the so-called public good so meaningless."
"The prohibition and other such symbolize the personal proclivities or much worse the political agendas of the powers that be and no more," he said. "Coming back to my miserly grandfather, he bestowed all his affection upon me and used to maintain that he would bequeath that landholding to me and not to my father. While my father's prudent spending was an anathema to him, I didn't show any inclination to spend a farthing then. I was just a kid anyway, and I found nothing around that induced want in me. But as I grew up, I had realized that there was sex for sale but by then my grandfather was dead and gone. Even then, an inexplicable sentiment delayed my tryst with the sex workers for that long; what layers within the layers and circles within the circles that make life, so seemingly seamless from birth to death?
Won't that make life intriguing to live, engaging to observe and exciting to recall? Looks like I won't be able to make it linear for you."
"I think it is as it should be for life tends to stray laterally on its linear course."
"Well you seem to have a way with words," he said sounding appreciative, "and that would come in handy in your endeavor to be a writer."
Chapter 4
Outlook for Re-look
"If not ingrained in concern, love is a flippant emotion, which is of no avail to the loved ones," he began proroguing as a prelude to his recall of his life and times. "M ore than the outer manifestations of love, it is one's inner feelings that further the cause of the loved ones. But we tend to take the spendthrift spouse as a personification of love and the prudence of a caring parent as an indication of its absence. Don't we also see families better off for the premature death of their profligate heads? Yet, wonder how man comes to perceive that without him, his family would be vulnerable in the rough and tough of life! It's nothing but man's vanity, which won't allow him to either live or die in peace."
"How unfair it is for the fair sex that man associates vanity with women."
"But then isn't it a man's world?" he said. "Well, my grandfather for all his love for us lacked the wisdom of care to match it. Maybe impelled by his love to make us richer or goaded by his greed to accumulate wealth, he took to the perilous course of usury, unsuited though for the calling he being a weakling. Lo, he sold all the landholding to raise capital for his high interest lending. While he lived chasing the mirages of usurious returns, after he died, my father was left staring at the principal amount as bad debt. Well, it was like he had pulled the rug that carried the weight of his unsettled family from under my father's feet. Perhaps my father would have better reconciled with his ruin had the old man gambled away the money or womanized with it; maybe that would have been a source of perverted pride for us in our diminished position."
"Deprivation for a cause is a gain by itself while purposeless loss is a double jeopardy of life."
"Anyway, my dad didn't give a damn but tried to be on his own as Upton's salesman," he continued. "How he lifted our family from the ruins makes a saga of its own; well he was a capable man by any measure. When he was all set to start a loose tea business after his retirement from the service, he was undone by the cancer in his food pipe. What with death staring at him in the face and the terminal pains making life unbearable for him, he wailed not over his fate but that his father spoiled it for his progeny. That the future well-being of his family bothered him more than his impending death moved me no end, and I told him it made no sense worrying over something that he did not bother about all along. Oh, how he suffered those terminal pains?"
His eyes turned moist to start with only to turn into a deluge in due course, which prompted me to offer him my handkerchief.
"These days," he continued regaining control over his emotions, "as I see myself in the mirror, I feel I am very much like him, and so he on his deathbed looked like a replica of his father. Why, there was no seeming resemblance between them until then. M aybe, towards the end, man goes back to his roots in other ways too. Well if
only Satish was born by then, maybe my father's love for his grandson would have enabled him to keep death at bay for that much longer. Why it was his love for me that let my grandfather recover from a paralytic stroke to stand erect all again. When he suffered the stroke, I was away studying engineering in B.l.T, Mesra, and by the time I reached home and rushed to him, he had been in the hospital for a week. As I approached the entrance of that general ward, I met his stare from within, and how his eyes glowed as they espied me! M aybe, the glint in my eyes catalyzed the spark in his eyes, ensuring the miracle, whereby he walked out of the hospital in a week! If the miracles of the Christ were to be true, I think that they owed
more to his empathy for man than to his being the Son of God. But then his grandson's perceived depravation might've pained my father no end adding to his misery, and besides of what avail enduring those cancerous pains. Well whenever I think of my grandfather, I recall the nurse who never took off her eyes from me."
"What has life come to as kids grow up without grandma's tales and grandpas live without grandchildren's love?"
"The saving grace of our life was that Satish and his family stayed with us," he said. "Maybe it's the birth that shapes life for fate to guide us into the grave, or is it fate that governs the birth for life to follow the set course, we would never know. Whatever the package of life is such that one has fulfillments to cherish and disappointments to live with that is from the childhood itself. But it's the balance of mind that makes it even for man at every stage of life that is hard to achieve any way. Why as a poor man's child, you have nothing, and as a rich man's brat, you have more than plenty, and either way it's no cradle of balance. M aybe middle-class birth is more conducive for equivalence as it enables one to learn the lessons of life early on for one to have a better perspective of it later on. When I was fourteen, 'Liberty' introduced ready-made apparels in India and my father wanted to buy a pair or two for me, though he himself wore that ill-tailored stuff; why, those days, unlike in the North, the tailoring standards were ever so appalling in the South. But my mother thought it was unwise to habituate me to such costly things not knowing what the future held for me. What a pragmatic approach it was! But as I climbed up the ladder of wealth, I lost sight of all the values of life that she imbibed in us all. By the way, as man has come to barter his liberty for servitude for mundane gains, the hallowed brand, like many old values, had lost its appeal to the crassness of the masses, especially the political class. It's high time that we pay heed to the prophetic words of the American Judge Leonard Hand, who said that "Liberty lives in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it."