by BS Murthy
"Wonder how the rural Indian poverty line came to be drawn at thirty-five rupees when these days the village folk flaunt five-hundred notes for a bus fare of fifty?"
"Well aren't statistics the damned lies," he said. "Instead of gloating over the blessings of life, man these days laments about the vicissitudes of fate, but in the days of yore thanks to the karma siddhanta, even the have-nots were happy for they didn't suffer from the pangs of jealousy; what an idea karma is, attribute others' fortune to their goodness in the previous birth and try being more humane in this one for a better time in the next round. But the 'dream big', 'why not me' and the 'me too' ethos of the day has become man's bane as his insane pursuit of the moolah makes his life inane, and who can vouch for that better than me? Given my innate nature coupled with the ethos of the times and the philosophy of my upbringing, I shouldn't have been left holding the wrong end of the get-rich stick."
"It is the mistakes that give substance to life, don't they?"
"It looks like the beauty of life lies more in its memory than in its living," he said. "While the cow dung cakes were used for cooking food, kachika, its ash served as the family tooth powder; it was left for one to pick up the smoothest portion of it from the hearth, and all you needed for a clean tongue was a piece of palm leaf; why, they were as good for a head start for the day as the present day toothpaste and the metallic tongue-cleaner, but in recall, they acquire a beauty of their own. And in our town days, when tooth powder was all that my dad could afford for us, I didn't feel wanting to have the merit-cum-means scholarship that was up for grabs; well I was only eleven then, but I could see that many of my classmates needed the dole more than I did though my miserly grandfather thought otherwise, but my dad, who, as I told you, didn't deem it fit to claim the freedom fighter's pension, was proud of my decision."
"How contrasting it was, pardon my saying, from your latter-day 'grab by all means' credo."
"Why didn't that occur to me all these days?" he said and paused for long before he resumed. "In the hindsight I may say it was all owing to the gradual dissipation of the patriotic fervor in our free India, sadly, as Kamaraj put it, none thinks as an Indian but as an Andhraite, a Bengali, and a Bihari et al. And going back to the preindependence days, it was my dad's rashness that might've prompted his father to hasten his marriage; it was another matter that his one-upmanship in finalizing a
match behind his son's back left him with the egg on his face. But as if life has its own way of compensating, the beauty of the bride and the aura associated with the lovematch made our surname a household name in the whole Taluka. Whatever, my grandfather was adept at the soft-sell of the irrelevant while missing out on the big picture of opportunities; how his double-speak used to amuse me in the matters of matchmaking. If his protagonist were to be the groom, he used to proclaim that dowries were on the raise, and should it be the other way round, then dowries had no other go than to nosedive; and how eager he was to know the 'income' as well as the 'other income' of whomever he met! Nothing odd about his enquiries as everyone was at it in those days, but then he tended to be more than just curious that was in spite of the rebuff he got from the first dalit government official from our village, who said that he was paid enough to live well-enough. Why when it came to job choices for boys and groom preferences for girls, the under-the-table-earning came into in the reckoning; well where were the taxmen peeping over your shoulder those days? Don't ever buy the argument that old is gold for Kautilya wrote about bribery in his Arthasastra of yore; but it's one thing to satiate the corrupt and another to entice the decent; oh how we businessmen came to corrupt our country's ethical core by inducing one and all onto the corrupt path of easy money!"
"Regretting might increase one's guilt but it won't undo the wrong anyway."
"M aybe life was not designed to be that way and even otherwise, how many come to reflect upon their lives before their end?" he said. "The fact of life is that you're the only constant of your life and all those who enter into it through its revolving door are its uncertain variables. While the warmth of a given relationship could be cherished as a lived-feeling even after the relationship itself ends; how stupid it is to expect eternal love, eternal friendship et al and feel bitter when confronted by the reality of life, sadly we tend to defuse the past feelings with the change of personal equations thereby making our life a zero-sum game. So as our false sense of superiority brings our tryst with warmth to an avoidable end, still we wouldn't be able to feel our loss in the euphoria of success and if ever, one realizes the folly, as I do now, one feels lost."
"Either way, it amounts to the same thing, isn't it?"
"Needn't be, as your genuine repentance helps you to discover the limitations of life," he said. "But before I lost out on life in the middle, I had so much of it in youth; it was as if to provide me a larger canvas to picture my adolescence that my father moved to a bigger town, where my cousin Raju's parents lived. How elated were our elders at the prospect of a prospering friendship between us; Raju's father pulled all the stops to see that I was admitted into that school Raju was in but to no avail as by then there was no scope for further admissions. But still, Raju took me to the headmaster who said that though he had earlier turned away the parents, he had no heart to refuse his pupil's plea to further his cousin's education. Why not put down his name to posterity as Devanandam."
"By what you said of Raju, it's possible that his persona was at work as much as Devanandam's love for his pupils."
"Why it didn't occur to me, surely it could've been the case," he said a little embarrassed. "But then, to start with, I was not interested in joining that school for its regimen began with the Christian prayers and the very thought of participation in those made me uncomfortable; why I was equally averse to the idea of joining any RSS sakha in the town that I just then left; maybe I was born with a secular mind; it was only after Raju assured me that the prayer was a voluntary affair that I had relented and if not, I wouldn't have had such an Alma Matter headed by Devanandam, a
venerable product of the times when teaching was a noble profession and not the commercial proposition that it had become; why won't this apply to the medical practitioners in equal measure."
Chapter 15
Brink of Incest
"Once Raju and I had become classmates, what a lovely time we have had!" he continued the recap of his times with his cousin. "His boisterousness proved to be the perfect foil for my adventurism, he had his finger in every pie and I too poked my nose everywhere. Though we got into trouble often in and out of school, if not his bluster, it was my wits that used to save the day for us. Whatever, to the delight of all, we were on target when it came to studies; but once we made it to the college, we began to drift apart; he focused to excel at studies and I meandered on the path of adolescence, I say the defining phase of life; while the hard-nosed and the dull-headed escape its snares, the romantics sucked in by its charms make the bottom rungs of the merit ladders. Didn't I say, if only there were to be a five year adolescent recess between the high school and the college, the toppers' list in higher studies would be topsy-turvy. Still to begin with, like me, Raju too struggled to get a breakthrough but unlike me, his career graph had plateaued well below the half-way mark, maybe for want of the proverbial ounce of luck. But, as I came to realize later, life made it even for him all through before death snatched him away in his mid-course, and on the contrary, fate led me to the highs of life before pushing me into its lows; well making it meaningless in the end. M aybe it's the way of life that the flood of it gets balanced by the ebb of fate; wonder what's the so-called 'gaining the upper hand mean?"
"That reminds me of Raja Rao's observation in Benign Flame - it's a peculiar feature of human nature in that we love to see those close to us climb up the staircase of success, but, behind us; if they happen to catch up with us, needing to share the space with them, we feel choked, and were they to overtake us, we feel morose, though they might remain friendly. I
t is because, used as we were to condescend to descend in our affections, we lose countenance, not counting our jealousy, that they too might seem patronizing from the altered stations."
"How can I differ with that after what life had taught me," he said, and continued after a long pause. "There are things in life that are better pictured through symbolisms; in those days of thrift, it was a case of loose dresses for the kids to serve them well into adolescence. The college going boys though were allowed to kick the bulky knickers to wear narrow-cut pants that were in vogue then, but for the girls, their 'menstruation to nuptial' long skirts had longevity of their own, shortened though by early marriage. However, in time, the so-called bell-bottoms came to shape man's trouser; it's as if all vied with each other to ever widen its bottoms; but then, after those stints with the narrow-cuts and the bell-bottoms, as if men realized the futility of triviality in their own world, they had been sticking to the formal wear of the normal trouser. When it was time for me to make it to college, it was time to learn cycling, which is like learning to walk, and both involve false steps but with a difference; while a kid's missteps won't break its bones, a cyclist's learning curve is generally drawn in his own and others' blood as well. Whatever, soon I began pedaling my Raleigh into the arena of youth only to break my heart."
"Isn't it said devoid of calf love, of what avail is youth."
"Maybe all are not made for romance, and youth was still some way from me then," he said and continued. "Before I could acquire my sense of adolescence, I
would've probably begun my sex life in incest; some six months shy of being fifteen, I became friendly with a newly married cousin on a family visit, who made me privy to her dull married life, and one evening, tired for her window-shopping, she asked me to massage her legs to relieve her fatigue, and when I expressed my surprise at the softness of her being, she told me that is the way women are made. After a couple of days, she moved to an old couple's house to be with them for a week or more, and that evening when I went to see her, she asked me to stay back for the night as she was bored to death with the oldies. After dinner, when we were alone, complaining of shoulder pain, she asked me to massage her nape; as I was tentative in my reach, she slid the pallu off her low-neck blouse to unveil her fabulous boobs and the fascinating valley as if to afford me the first flesh feast of my life, oh how tempted I was to lay my hands on her heaving bosom! Well, I was too young and inexperienced to advance farther down and she too might've felt it delicate to goad me to be geared up for her final favor. Maybe to pick up the sexual threads that we both had half-heartedly left that night, she sought my company the next night as well but my father didn't approve of that for he could've smelled incest in the air from her demeanor; if not, who knows, the next time, I would've dared to advance deep into her valley or she might've been forthright with her eagerness for sex. Then I was too raw to know what I had lost but when I came of age, I was wont to wonder whether that bout of massage would've led us to the bed of incest that is had I crossed the threshold of her bulging boobs. Whatever, I could never figure out whether I should thank my father for saving me from committing a possible incest, or curse him for having robbed me of sex with a voluptuous woman at her youthful best."
"Oh, it was your dad again."
"But then he was wont to make life sweeter for all of us individually that was; there might be many who would fetch sweets for the family but I would be surprised if you ever heard of a man who brought home each one's favorite pudding?' he said in an apparent admiration for his dad. "And yet how he made it sour for me as I was on the verge of sharing the forbidden fruit of sex with that cousin; but why blaming him for that as shortly thereafter I failed on my own to build upon the affections of another just wed relative, a couple of years older to me; oh, how inviting she was and how hesitant I had been, well, she was one of her kind, beautiful and vivacious. While I clung to her fascinated by her poise, she was drawn to me charmed by my youth, and in no time we became soul mates. Maybe in time I would have roped her into my embrace but well before that she left the town with her husband, who was on transfer; how excited I was when I received her letter, which heralded an unceasing correspondence between us in which we poured out our affections to each other. Oh how she used to remonstrate if an odd reply of mine was not on the dot!"
"How we both came to cherish that indescribable relationship we only knew," he said after pausing for a while, "of course, apart from her husband, who too was friendly with me. Later, when I was still in college, I failed yet again to savor what was on offer from that woman; she wrote to me that she was devastated to know that her husband was cheating on her and that she was desperate for my company; oh, how she had couched her invitation for a liaison by stating that while I uplift her sagging morale, she won't withhold anything from me. Why it was clear that she was on the rebound but I was not my own man then to rush to her to catch her on it; well, as the crisis blew over in her life, she turned cold towards me, may she was hurt that I didn't turn up when she need me the most or it could be because she was wary of what all she wrote to me in her moment of weakness. Whatever, I am never tired of fantasizing about our possible mating in her the then disturbed bed."
"What a painfully sweet fantasy it is?"
"And it was no different with another cousin of my age when we met at sweet sixteen that is before it turned into a platonic love. She was all eyes and ears for me, but, so to say, still I didn't make the grade by then," he continued. "But first things first, and that's about my first love, whom Raju named No.l; it started with my fascination for her mesmeric gait only to end up in the memory of her misstep; am I being poetic, why not, after all, it's about my first love. When the admission list was out, I was thrilled that at last I would have a girl for a classmate; I told you how my coed idea was put paid at school. Well, at the time of admission, what an anticipation it was awaiting the arrival of an unknown dame; when I sighted a dusky lass in a light brown long skirt with a black blouse, I wished she were the one that I was waiting for; and as she neared in a swing-and-roll gait that was exciting as well as enticing, her dark brown oni fluttered in the gushing air as if to herald her arrival. When she stepped into the corridor, it seemed as if her gait carried the core of her femininity even as her glance aroused the essence of my masculinity. Why as her bewildered eyes imparted innocence to her face, her inquisitive look greeted my impulsive stare; how charming was her manner and how tantalizing were her movements to my enamored eyes. So to say, her expressive eyes seized my heart!"
"Often it's the first look that paves the path of love, isn't it?"
"How nicely put," he said. "What with her persona planting the seeds of love in my expectant heart, the wait for the college reopening seemed a semester away; so on the D-day, making it early to the class, I sat in the front row, and waited for her to take her place across the aisle. W hen she entered in time and posited herself as expected, I didn't take my eyes off her engaging face; well, I started as a face man before I became a figure man and you would agree, women don't mind my being a turncoat on that count. Her mirthful laughter at some funny remark of the lecturer revealed the dimple in the very middle of her left cheek that lent charm to her face; wonder how a biological imperfection came to personify woman's beauty in man's perception. Soon enough when she caught me at my ogling ways, she seemed to have been pleased at being the object of my fascination, and the lecturer too didn't fail to notice my distraction, so he thought it fit to draw my attention to his exhortation. Tackling him appropriately, as I turned to her triumphantly, I could discern her look of admiration."
"How vividly you remember it all!"
"Who said that first love is neither fully remembered nor completely forgotten?" he said apparently relishing the quote. "As that look fuelled my infatuation, my manner seemed to have enticed the woman in her, and our eyes began to caress each other; while her gaze nourished love in my heart, my stare seemed to have seized her mind. When she smiled at me as if to take my hea
rt into the depths of her dimple for safekeeping and then closed her eyes as though to lock my persona in her retina, I was benumbed with ecstasy. Soon as if enthused by her own eagerness as she opened her eyes to espy me endearingly for affording me an ennobling feeling, my fond eyes began to caress her unceasingly. But then, maybe prompted by her coyness, though she turned her attention away from me and tried to focus on the topic of discussion, yet I continued to savor her sweet demeanor, the object of my surging affection. But soon, as she glanced at me, maybe to gauge the impact of her responsiveness from my response, her face had acquired an aura of love, and thus enamored of each other, we found ourselves espying one another, at every turn that is.'
"What a poetic reminiscence of a first love!"
Chapter 16
Love-less Love
"M y life, so to say, became a stanza of the poem of first love, it's not that my other affections were any prosaic for they were all penned in passion," he continued. "Won't the manifestations of first love and the embodiments of first sex stand apart from the pulsations of heart and the spasms of the body that one might experience in later affairs? And that's why one should be choosy about the body for the first lay as anyway the reins of love are in the hands of heart. Whatever, with the newfound vision to envision women, I got bogged down by the second sex; the more femininity fascinated me for the contours of womanish curves seemed to outclass the symmetry of geometry, all the more I had a measure of my masculinity. My infatuation for women was such that the inflections of their nuances came to be worth pondering over than the intriguing riders of mathematical theorems. When compared to the feminist ways, which seemed puzzling to my inquisitive mind, the laws of physics appeared commonplace; and so, as I began to grapple with the dynamics of manwomen chemistry, the inorganic reactions in the college lab seemed boring. Either compelled by my ardent manner or affected by my sex appeal and/or both, I'm not sure, women tended to respond to my eagerness in their sensual ways, and insensibly, the coyness of feminine demeanor seemed to shape the manliness of my persona. While the desire I discerned in the female espials made me feel desired as a male, their diffident demeanor in my presence afforded me a sense of conquest. Soon women made me realize that I am a ladies' man."