The Classic Storyteller’s Handbook requires every story to have a beginning, middle and an end. The Modern Storyteller’s Handbook also says that a story needs a beginning, middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order. It also defines a beginning, middle and an end very loosely – the first few sentences of the story are its beginning, and the last few are the end. Whatever is left in between could safely be defined as the middle.
A story needs to mature before it ends, or the critics will say that it ended abruptly. I don’t give a bandicoot’s posterior about the critics, but I believe in the theory – a story does need to mature before it ends – it is like a good whiskey – no point drinking it before it is mature. Or like a good game of hide-and-seek – if the seeker seeks before the seekees can prepare themselves to be sought, there’s no point.
Often, when I have looked back at those days, I have wondered whether I was the seeker or the seekee. I did a lot of the seeking and chasing, like when I went to Delhi, but she did some of it too – for instance, when she looked for me for desperately every time my phone was disfunctional and I was being my disassociated self. Then I sometimes think, does a relationship need to have a seeker and a sought? Aren’t both the parties usually seeking the other, for whatever reasons? And then I get sick of “seeking” thoughts – both thoughts about seeking, and seeking those thoughts, and revert to my usual sick thoughts.
“You’re such a sick guy!” she said.
“That’s not what I meant,” I tried.
“Da, you’re incorrigible.”
“Machi…”
“Ok, I’ll grant you this much – your intentions are noble, but the way you put them across needs some polish.”
“All I’m trying to say is that this country’s going to the dogs.” Almost as if on cue, a dog walked past us. Both of us smiled.
“How do you do this?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Have these props come in at the right time?”
“It’s this theory I believe in. You believe something is there, and it is.”
“Eh?”
“Look. A hippo!”
“Man, you’re good at this.”
“And look at that…”
“A mastodon! One hasn’t been sighted in Bangalore since the ice age!” she exclaimed.
“Right. Getting back to what I was saying, have you ever seen a village? Basic water and sanitation aren’t available, but people are laying optical fibre cables!”
We loved these freewheeling conversations that seemed to mix fact, fantasy and fiction, start and end nowhere, much like Modern Storytelling.
I recall another conversation.
“If you were given one superpower, just one, what would you ask for?” she asked.
“I’d just ask for unlimited strength.”
“Boring.”
“Ok. The power to fly.”
“Blah.”
“I’ll be happy with that - imagine being able to fly.”
The expression on her face made me feel as boring as a Hindi movie maa.
“Why? What would you ask for?”
“I’d like to have this power by which I just do a little swish with my hand, and a pile of shit falls on the person standing in front of me.”
I laughed.
“Pile of shit,” she said, swishing her hand.
“Pile of shit,” I mimicked.
To this day, when I get angry with someone, I just swish my hand, and mutter, “Pile of shit”.
***
But this story needs a beginning – it had to all start somewhere. And it did. I remember it was exactly the thirty-first day of October, because that is the day Indira Gandhi died. Now, I share my birthday with Indira Gandhi, and somehow, I remember the date she died, even though I often forget our birthday.
Back then, I was the violinist for a little-known, pompous, talentless ‘fusion’ band that claimed to fuse jazz and Carnatic music – we also had a pianist and a percussionist who played both the tabla and the drums. Much to the distress of my mother and passers-by on the road, we practised at my place – everyday, for six hours. My sister, whom I refer to as Akka, more out of habit than respect had come to town for a weekend.
While practice was in full flow, our pianist who came back into our room after drinking some water, said, “Dude, there’s this super-hot chick in the adjacent room.”
“I hope you aren’t referring to my sister,” I said.
“Well, your sister is kind of hot, but this girl is something else.”
“Let’s just start practice,” I said, starting off our piece de resistance, our locus classicus, magnum opus, circus maximus. This was the only piece we played with any promise, and as our improvisations warmed up and sounds of the instruments intertwined till they were one, she walked in. Not my sister, but the other one. I believed, for quite a while, that our music was arresting. But when she walked in, I understood what the word meant.
She said, “Go on. Don’t mind me.” It was asking for the impossible. Don’t mind her! We were fairly good actors, or so we thought, and we continued playing. Towards the end, I heard some beautiful humming, almost as beautiful as its source. I said, like Belafonte famously did, “Sing a little louder”.
When the song was over, she smiled, and was about to say something when my sister summoned her. She made a gesture that we didn’t comprehend in our dazed state, and against our will, we allowed her to leave. For a whole five minutes, we sat in silence.
“I’m off,” the percussionist declared.
“Cool. Tomorrow then,” I said. I walked down the stairs to find her standing at the doorstep.
“You sing really well,” I said, walking towards the garage.
“You play really well too,” she said.
“You don’t have to polite.”
She just smiled.
As I got on my bike, she said, “Hey, it’s fine. I’ll take an auto…”
“Huh?”
“Um, I’ll take an auto. You don’t have to drop me…”
“Uh? Oh! I was just going to the cigarette shop.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, bu-but I could drop you. Where are you going?”
“Airport Road… Um, where’s the cigarette shop?”
“Um, J-Just down the road.”
“Oh, ok, cool. Um, I’ll, um, see you around, then…”
There it was again – that arresting smile as she walked out of the gate. Then, it struck me.
“Hey, there are cigarette shops on Airport Road,” I said.
“Of course there are!”
She hopped on, and we were off. In another sense, we were on.
***
Grandfathers are usually fascinating– they use their experience to great effect in weaving theories of life, explaining modern phenomenon, and understanding the youth. Grandfathers with a sense of humour are even more fascinating. Women with a sense of humour are the most fascinating, because there are so few of them. She once told me, “As a woman, you can be butt-ugly, but if you’re funny, the guys love you.”
Her sense of humour came from her grandfather.
“Ours is the worst religion,” he told me, “Jesus says, ‘You work hard, and you’ll make a lot of money.’ Allah says, ‘You pray five times a day, and I’ll give you oil.’ What do our Gods say? ‘Shave your head, and take away laddoos.’ ‘Give me murukku. Kozhakattai.’ That’s why we are like this.”
Insightful, I think.
“You know, at the end of each street, there’s a little temple. The vaadyar there, with his big tummy, and pseudo-Sanskrit decides each morning what he wants to eat. Say he feels like having some semiya paayasam, he tells these middle-aged women who come there, ‘Today, give God semiya paayasam, and your cable guy wont have a power cut all day’, and by afternoon all of them will bring him the tastiest semiya paayasam.”
“If you hate this religion so much, why don’t you just convert? Pray five times a day, claim your oil well, and live in peace?” she asked him, irritatedly.
“I’m too old a dog to learn new tricks. You, on the other hand, have all the energy.”
***
There are some events, some small incidents that you recollect, remember, relive literally every day of your life. There are also times when you use three words when even one of them would convey, express, communicate what you are trying to say. I often have the urge to annihilate such people. I also think people who start each sentence with the word “basically” deserve to be gagged, bound and made to watch Tamil soaps on a large screen for the rest of eternity. But that is a separate point. Coming back to the crucial issue, there are incidents you relive literally every day of your life.
This one happened on a Sunday – the Sunday I came back from Madras after an interview with The Hindu – one of those interviews that ended with, “Thank you. We’ll get back to you. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” It was two Sundays after I had made my fruitless expedition to Delhi. An expedition born out of a suspicion that ended in an endless argument.
Akka asked, as I entered the house, “Are you going to be at home for dinner?”
My Akka was turning into my Amma – both were most worried about where I would eat. It was almost as if nothing else about my life mattered. What happened at the interview? Did you get a job at The Hindu? Did you tell them you were a cardholder of the CPI(M)? All these were questions I was left to ask myself. All she was interested in was whether I was going to eat at home.
“I’ll just call you-know-who and let you know.”
“She won’t have dinner with you now.”
“Why?”
“You don’t know?!”
“No.”
“Ask her,” she said, with a little grin on her face.
She picked up the phone, “Hey!”
“Why wont you have dinner with me tonight?”
“Eh?”
“Akka told me you wont.”
“Oh, that…” Beep, beep. Engaged tone. This was my trick of avoiding uncomfortable questions.
“Akka, what happened?”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“The phone got cut…”
“She’s engaged.”
"It got cut, di. Not engaged."
"Dude, engaged. As in, she now has a would-be."
In my most unconvincing tone, I managed, “Wow. When did that happen?”
“Why? You thought she’ll marry you?” she said, still grinning.
“Of course not! Pah!” I was devastated, shocked, dismayed.
***
It was a kela in the most royal sense of the term. All of South America put together didn’t produce kelas on this scale. At Cubbon Park, where we performed the last rites, I asked her some important questions.
“Why was the Universe created?”
“Dude, wrong speech.”
It was the most important question. If the Universe wasn’t created, then we’d be living in empty space, and time wouldn’t have been the empty signifier it is right now. Sorry, wrong speech.
“Why Cubbon Park?”
“Oh, I just thought it’d be trippy, with all the couples around.”
Trippiness. Yes. As if losing out to a black-spectacled, French-beard sporting, laptop-carrying, sandhyavandanaming, fake accent show-offing, non-resident was not trippy enough.
“Where did we screw up?”
“Chronology of our births.”
My only option, therefore, was a time machine. If I was a little crazier, I might have started re-learning the science that I had gleefully dumped for more liberal learning.
“Why not?”
“Why?”
That put things in a whole new perspective.
“Did you ever love me?”
“I’ll have to think about that one.”
She did love me. I could feel it. She thought. And she said, “Perhaps not.”
“Any chance of a divorce?”
“Bastard.”
On that day, I decided I’d wait for that divorce. She’d get bored of his speaking in Engineering short forms, his nostalgia for sessionals and internals, his calculating, scientific approach to lovemaking and his attempts to estimate the distance in light-years from his house to the Department Store. But, my decision changed soon. Another girl waltzed in, and on this occasion, I wasn’t chronologically challenged.
***
I met her only on one other occasion – bumped into her at a concert in Madras, actually.
“You’ve put on weight.”
“Don’t fucking fuck around.”
“Marriage clearly hasn’t civilised you.”
“I’m still better off than I was with you.”
“But how the weight?”
“I’m pregnant da.”
“You’re not fat enough for that excuse.”
She had no reply to that. It was very unlike her. The rest of the evening wasn’t this exciting though. The concert was extraordinarily brilliant, and walking down from there along the beach to this curiously titled restaurant called “Pupil” humming the song she first sang with us was really nice, but dinner got boring. We had hardly anything to talk about. Her sharp wit and biting nastiness had given way to some random kitty-party jokes. Her stunning waist curve had become aunty-hips. She was worried about random things like the fact that the gas guy hadn’t come. I kept calling her Mami and she didn’t have a retort. Clearly, she had become an auntyji!
Yet, there was something enticing about her. Something that told me that underneath all the aunti-pankti, she was still the same. After much dilly-dallying, I agreed to spending the night at her place. It was there that I got my interminable bout of hiccups. Water, sugar, holding breath had all been tried unsuccessfully.
Her last remedy was to close my nose and my ears, and blow as hard as possible. I told her that it was physically impossible for me to close both my nose and my ears at the same time. So, she closed my ears, and I held my nose. Something made her lean towards me, and without realising what I was getting into, I leaned forward too.
Just when something was about to happen, the doorbell rang. Microsoft’s star employee was back. I dont know about her, but I felt horribly guilty about this. The next morning, we got up and behaved like nothing had happened. Strangely, there was no awkwardness, and we were back to being who we were. But then, every time I think of our relationship, I think of that one second, when both of us, strangely, just let go.
***
Thank You!
Arun, for the pile of shit. Kai, for her continued support, blessings and inputs. Vidya Balan, for all the inspiration, and an arresting smile (Marry me?). Most importantly, Francis, for being Francis.
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