by BS Murthy
"It's not mere conviction but the courage to act upon it that characterizes men."
"But it requires the strength of character for that,' he said, and began recapping his childhood. "There was hardly any schooling worth naming in the village setting in those days but one could still get into the first-form in a nearby high school through a written test. When I was nine, my father made me seem ten the cut-off age for admission, and took me to a nearby town for the test; even as I sat nervously in the exam hall, the invigilator, who was brash, made it worse for me and so I refused to take the test; but the offender's apology that my father extracted as a sop made me relent in the end, and lo I was into the first-form that you call class six now. We were no more than a handful that made it to that school from our village then and my seniors used to vie with each other to take charge of me, each claiming that my grandfather had entrusted me to his care. But as it all tended to turn farcical, I asked them to let me be on my own; what a joy it was walking all those five miles both ways, well, sans the backbreaking schoolbags of these days. But, when my grandfather took me back to school to retrieve the umbrella I forgot there, it was no fun to my weary legs, more so as he lectured about the pitfalls of forgetfulness all the way; maybe my subconscious absorbed it all for I consciously avoid being forgetful."
"Did you find it?" I asked rather instinctively.
"The odds were one to ten as you know and it was no odd case any way," he said. "But the thought of umbrella brings my grandfather's fondness for rainy season that I share. It was his wont to have his siesta lying in the easy chair in the verandah, and in the monsoon time, whenever he woke up to a deafening thunder, he would declare that 'it portends downpour,' of course gluing his eyes to the pitch-dark clouds in the sky. Like all landlords, he too used to rivet his eyes onto the sky, worried about the kharif crop, and how as children we loved when it rained and used to dance in the downpour wetting ourselves to the roots. But for my mother it was always 'oh, enough is enough' but my grandfather would say, 'why not let them enjoy now for they might give up all this as grownups'. How true, but then the phases of life are varied, each with different possibilities of fulfillment; when it ceased raining all kids used to place indents on the elders for paper boats for playing with them in the roadside water pools or backyard water bodies. Why the rainy season afforded the
elders their small pleasures as well; as I see in hindsight, all used to ogle at women's legs as they hitched up their saris as though to save their hems from getting soiled on the muddy roads. I wish I lived a little longer in my village to cherish more of my life but then maybe I shouldn't be greedy for I had enough and more of the village life."
Chapter 13
Vignettes of a Village
"If city life is characterized by chaos, village life was all about orderliness," he continued. "Unlike the present-day multi-class urban societies, in the villages of yore, while the Brahmins held the high ground in agraharams and the intermediate castes occupied the middle ground, the peasants, and the artisans lived on the peripheries. So there was hardly any intra-class social interaction to speak about and that's why I had no idea about the lives of the marginalized, but from the way they dressed and behaved, it was clear that their life was sustained on the economic crumbs thrown at them by the landed classes. The well-heeled among the privileged classes were wont to play rummy if not baestu, also a card game in which the loser becomes a lose-all kudael; oh, how women dreaded at the prospect of their men taking to cards, more so baestu, lest they should become kudael. That my mother prevailed upon may dad to give up cards he was fond of, I came to know much later; as she was wont to play a round or two of rummy with me and my friends, my dad used to grudgingly remind her how she had coerced him to give up his favorite pastime."
"Well, but what puzzles me is the attitude of a friend's wife, who having had drinks in her college days was averse to her newlywed husband having a drink or two."
"That's the illogic of women's logic," he said with a wink, and continued "Those were the prohibition times, so, sans the so-called Indian Made Foreign Liquors and with toddy being a taboo for the gentry, the potion of the peasants, the well-heeled went without a drink. Thus, blessed with one of the three W's but self-denying the other, the ardent were wont to womanize; well the nature's calls in the open opened up the opportunities alike for the promiscuous and the sex-starved men and women to indulge on the sly what with the bushes yonder providing secretive cover for illicit sex. By the way what's this pride in one's caste and the prejudice against the others' after all that covert sexual inter-mingling for generations; and what about the bane of the home toilets that give with one hand and take away with the other; why while affording privacy to the personas, don't they deprive safe ways for the straying folks; well, man seems to rob himself of the freedoms that nature granted him."
"It may be the case with the middle-classes, but don't celebrity affairs give a fillip to promiscuity?
"The current page three liaisons seem a passing show while the liaisons of the wealthy with the nautch girls remained enduring news for a couple of generations," he said. "Maybe being few and far between, the affairs of yore had a charm of their own but in their current day profusion, they seems to have taken away much of the naughty sheen out of them; whether in life or in sport, rarer the fare, all the more it's memorable; oh what aura cricket's '3Ws' - the West Indies' Weeks, Worrell and Walcott - had, and all of them put together didn't play in as many test matches as the Tendulkars of these days.'
"Maybe Bradman, Dhyan Chand, Pele, and even Laver, in spite of Federer, prove your theory of aura."
"Well, the lesser gentry were left content to gossip about the card-playing and the cunt-craving sort, pardon the turn of phrase," he said. "Once a troupe of nautch-girls performed at our village temple, and as the show was on, our neighbor's servant went up to the lead dancer, and having drawn her attention to his master, he handed her a hundred Rupee note that she took nodding her head; though I couldn't grasp the import of it all then, her naughty smile as she coyly tilted head is still fresh in my mind. Soon after, when I happened to witness a Bharatanatyam performance by our neighbor's granddaughter from Bombay, the sensuous nuances in her classical movements insensibly shaped my sense of the feminine sensuality; how I find repellent the bawdy gestures of those gaudy women-in-trade. Well, whatever be the proclivities of the folks, the kids were left alone for the most part as the rat race for private schools had not yet begun then; and to be fair to my father, he was never behind us to come out with flying colors at school; but these days how parents have come to push their kids to excel at studies. It's as if kids have become the parental means of fulfilling their unfulfilled dreams; what funny times we've come to live in; how sad that parents are averse to accept less than A+grade for their kids; if only the progeny starts demanding to know about the parental scores!"
"Who knows, that day may not be far off."
"M aybe that's the only cure for this parental paranoia, why I know a mother, who forced her second daughter to study medicine simply because the elder one was already pursuing a course in engineering," he said, and continued with his childhood saga. "Summer times were made memorable by the annual visits of my paternal aunt, the one who saved me from drowning in our village tank, and her husband, who was a lecturer in a college of physical education, and so he had a long summer vacation. Being childless, they used to love me and my siblings like their own children; how all of us used to cling to him all day; he being a jovial person, it was a great fun to be with him. And where do you think we used to spend the summer times, well, on foldable cots right under the neem tree shade in the side yard. That was the only time when I used to leave my grandma's bedside, why, I never heeded my mother's call to sleep in their bedroom, not that I loved my mother any less but my affinity with my grandma was compelling, maybe it was in part due to her story telling. One of my uncle's favorite taunts was that, being the namesake grandson, he hoped that at my marriage, I would pr
esent him the wedding suit promised by my granddad. When I was five, he taught me how to make the opening moves on the chessboard but in spite of my later-day penchant for the middle game, I'm clueless about the endgame till today; well, neither could he master the art of partaking the palm fruit directly from its socket that I tried to teach him; how our kapu, who plucked the fruits from the tree, used to tease him saying that the village kids were smarter than the townsmen."
He paused as if to relive his childhood in the nostalgia of his old times.
"But the icing on the cake of their long stays was provided by the snacks that my grandma was wont to serve in the afternoons, which she never prepared in the normal course; wasn't her son-in-law a privileged person being her daughter's husband?" he said on resumption. "Well it was my dad who introduced me to carom in later days and I followed him with the so-called scissors strike, which might puzzle your opponent when you are in form but could frustrate your partner when you are off color. When I took to cricket in my school final and bowled for the first time, the batsman realized I was a born leg spinner and that the googly could be a few false steps away. Didn't Bradman opine that leg spin is the most difficult to master for any bowler, and when done, it would turn out to be the most difficult ball for any batsman
to handle? Whatever, thanks to my youthful distractions, I didn't work to build on my natural ability to make a mark in the cricket world, and if not, who knows my name would've been taken in the same breath as Warne and Chandrasekhar; but being born in the latter's era, when cricket was not a fetching proposition, it could have been a hand-to-mouth existence for me as well. But M uralitharan the smiling off spin assassin has been my eternal favorite, how anxiously I got glued to the TV set for his 800 th wicket; it was another matter that a wicket more or a wicket less wouldn't have made any difference to his stature, but then on the badge of honor, statistics have their own corner."
"Isn't it silly that cricket has become a religion with Sachin as its Godhead?"
"Maybe for those 'score kya hai' guys, whose knowledge of the game borders on zero while their interest in the game is limited to India's win, and that reminds me of a cricketing joke of our days," he said turning mirthful. "The naughty answer to a novice enquiry about the filed position in a cricket match was that there was 'no cover, no extra cover, there is just a deep gully between two fine legs', and my uncle couldn't cal it foul when I told him about it. Why, in later years, I used to drag him to our stag parties though he was a teetotaler, and whenever the party jokes turned bawdy he was wont to cry foul; how charming he was in that 'naughty umpire' role. But he was not all that charming when it came to my auntie's socializing, why he had indeed confined her all through to the four walls of their house. But when he began grumbling in the later years that she was good for nothing, I told him he was committing a foul; not having let her out in her prime time lest someone should ogle at her, that he felt secure for her lost appeal, how could he expect her to change the tack; well he allowed me to take such liberties with him."
"M aybe donning all the roles of life perfectly is possible for none."
"Don't they say perfection is in the realms of heaven, a myth any way, and not to be found on earth," he continued. "Well, those joys ended as my dad shifted to a small town, where I joined Chandu in the second form, and when he suggested that being co-tenants, we better be in the same section, I sought the help of my father's uncle, who was a teacher in the same school. I don't know why, but he didn't favor the move and to discourage me, he told me that with girls around, it would be embarrassing if I were to be unequal to the teachers' queries in the co-ed section. So I had to wait till I got into a college to have a girl for a classmate, and as if to make good the school-time loss, I promptly fell in love with her; that's another story any way. But what an irony it was that while the father denied me an administrative favor, his son granted me an astrological boon; I was too raw to appreciate the variety that is bigamy, and what a fuss I made at that like prediction! Maybe it was more a reflection of the times than my own naivety at that age; earlier, whenever the topic turned to her marriage, mockingly holding my hand, our village postmaster's over-the-hill daughter used to say that she was waiting for me to attain the marriageable age; well there was no adolescent twist to it for, as you know, our family moved out of the village when I crossed ten."
"M aybe I need a break before you move on," I said lighting a Gold Flake King.
Chapter 14
A Teacher of Note
"Landing in that town was no earthshaking moment for me as the urban life then retained its rural character though not its ethos," he began as I was ready with my pen and papers. "But still I missed my time in the green fields where I used to pluck the
tender cereals from plants and pick up the ripened palm nuts from the ground. M oreover, as my grandparents stayed back in the village, my grandma's tales were a thing of the past, literally that was, fori had no more of her clock sense; oh, how many times in the daytime she used to ask me to go out to note the position of the shadow in the side yard by which she reckoned the hour to the quarter. Well, we had a wall clock that got stuck at 4 shortly after my grandfather tried to teach me how to read the time, and maybe her foresight made her develop a mind clock driven by those shadow lines."
"Don't you think there is a mental drag to our scientific advancement; while researchers strive to expand the frontiers of human faculties, the products of their endeavors tend to dull the creative urge of mankind at large?"
"Good observation; getting glued to Pogo and playing video games these days, wonder how that helps the kids to explore and experiment, but without any gadgets to name, we used to make playthings on our own, well with the parental know-how; didn't I tell you about paper boats, but there were a host of others, whistles from coconut leaves, blowers from jute stems, telephone handsets out of matchboxes with sewing thread for a cable, just to name a few. Moreover, how fascinating it was for the kids to watch the womenfolk at play in assorted games, especially the skill on exhibition in chintapikkalu played with tamarind seeds spread on the floor. Whatever, the cinema was a sort of consolation in the town; oh how tempting it was for the kids, which remained a taboo with the parents? I suspect that as most could ill-afford the movie going, maybe it was an excuse for them to sneer at the stuff that the silver screen presented. But aided by the tax sops when theatres arranged special shows of Navrang and Do Ankhein Baara Haath for school going kids at confessional fare, it was a bonus for us to watch them from the chair-class; I still remember the festive atmosphere when we went to see those Shantaram's movies, and since Hindi was as alien as Latin in the South those days, there used to be a translator, who gave a running commentary in our mother tongue. But for such a fare that was rare, parents kept the curtains down on the movies, but the allure of the forbidden stuff, made some of us to cheat them for an anna to make it to the matinee to watch the fare squatting on the floor right in front of the screen."
"What a transformation with kidshaving pocket monies these days!"
"Well before that, when my brother, hardly ten then, gave up the movie for the day for want of a seat in the balcony, I realized how times change even in the family setting," he said. "But in contrast, in the excitement of it all, we never bothered about how uncomfortable it was to watch from such a close range, though it was not the case for once as I was caught in the act when I took an anna from my mother on the pretext of buying a notebook to make it to the matinee show. Before I could reach home after the movie, my mother smelled a rat as she had come to know that I had bunked the post-lunch session; and so she wanted me to show the notebook that I bought. Well, I had the presence of mind to show her a fresh-looking one for the rest were anyway worn and torn, but she proved to be more than a match for me by catching me on the wrong foot; why she pointed out our teacher's remarks of the day before, and I owned up my backdated bluff at the very first blow on my back; and wiser for that slip, I coached my classmates to portray my future ab
sences as playground holdups."
"It makes me recall how a classmate of mine got away for claiming that the Chambers Dictionary cost five times its price as his illiterate parents were taken in by its bulkiness."
"That's about the blissful ignorance/' he said, and continued. "Right outside our school gate there used to be two ice lolly vendors, Janakiramaiah the old man and Ratnam the young guy, who somehow liked me; once he took me to a matinee when I was nearly crushed in a stampede at the ticket counter, maybe, fate had preserved me, for the second time that is, to inflict bigger blows later; I've told you how I'd escaped from being drowned in our village tank before that. You may know what his gesture might've meant for me but you can't guess what a burden it was for him to spend that extra anna on me; not that every one of us bought ice lolly to improve the duos' bottom lines. Why, many parents were unable to spare one Rupee for the section-wise group photograph at the end of the academic year, and you can figure out the disappointment of those who lost out and the haplessness of their parents on that count. But thankfully, there is more money in more hands these days, and I can tell you that today's poor have more to spare than the middleclass of yore. When the high-end express buses were first introduced, I knew how scary were the village folks to travel in those, why even in the ordinary buses, they could pay the fare only by digging deep into their pockets."