Her Obviousness - Part II

Continued from here.
***

Avantika, my cousin, and I, sit on the open terrace in my apartment eating a bowl of fruits. Her eyes are closed, but she isn't asleep, she's listening to me hum a Carnatic raag I heard on the radio this afternoon - the announcer called it Neelambari. I think I have heard an Ilayaraaja song in this raag, or a Rahman song, but I can't place it. I punctuate my nervous explorations in the new raag with electric snaps from my cheery yellow mosquito-bat - necessary mild violence amidst musical serenity. Sometimes, the snap is occasional, sudden and singularly violent, and at other times, when the mosquito gets caught within the wires of the bat, it is a continuous streak that tapers off like an automatic weapon. The smell of the freshly cut fruits is joined by a faint burnt smell of electrocuted mosquitoes.

"Hmmm," Avantika says, "You're getting stuck - same phrases again and again."
"Show me some lenience! I only heard it for ten minutes this afternoon," I reply, popping a papaya into my mouth. I remember suddenly that I once bought a book that listed many Carnatic raags with their outlines. "Wait," I tell her, "Let me get this raga book I have and see what I can do!"

Just as I stand up, I hear the gate of my apartment complex opening, and see a bike making its way into the parking lot. On the bike, is a girl dressed like a Taliban operative in a helmet. She wears a full-sleeved T-shirt over her kurta, a dupatta veils her face and a helmet sits on her head, shades cover her eyes, and white gloves adorn her hands. Gopal closes the gate behind her, and leads her to the lift.

"Ah, Gopal and chick are here," I announce. Avantika looks vaguely in my direction and says, "Pass me the bat?" I leave the bat with her and go to the main door, as the doorbell echoes around my empty apartment.

I open the door and find the woman still veiled - I wonder if she is being protected from her Quranic parents, but a long, pointed bindi puts those thoughts at rest. Gopal says, "Uji, meet Sundari. Sundari, this is Ujwal, my closest friend!" Life had come a long way for me from when I was his chauffeur.

"Hi," Sundari says, taking off her veil, revealing a single silver nose-ring. Time stops, and images of a bizarre party come whizzing back to me.
"Hey," I say. I am not sure if I should remind her of our previous meeting, because she doesn't make any noises of recognition at all. If I tell her that her home phone number is 24342037, I am sure she will have a blocked artery. I just say, "I have a feeling I've seen you before."
She says, "Yeah? I don't know..."
Gopal butts in, "Uji used to be a musician. He plays that instrument that looks like a half-football with a trapezoid metal plate."
"The sarod," I tell her. Gopal is putting on his cool-act, he
Her eyes widen, and she says, "That's impressive!"
Gopal says, "Yeah. You must've seen him at a concert - he keeps going to kacheris here."
"Yeah," she agrees, "That must be it."
I smile. I have never seen her at a concert, I'm sure. She's not the kind of girl one would miss. And if I had seen her, I would have spoken to her, reminded her of that party, and reconfirmed her phone number. "There are enough concerts in Madras for two regulars to have never met," I say, bringing a philosophical quietus to the issue.
"Let's go to the terrace? My cousin is there," I offer.

We troop through the apartment to the terrace.

"Where's your cousin?" Gopal asks. I admire his dedication; he has come with a woman, but still displays great curiosity about another.
"She must've gone to the loo," I say, as Gopal takes over the mosquito bat, helps himself to an apple, settles down on the easy chair I was sitting on, and asks Sundari to feel at home. She sits on the floor, leaning against the wall, and I sit beside her, still finding myself unable to take my eyes off her nose-ring.

Avantika enters the terrace carrying a beanbag and a mat, "I knew we'd need more seating."
"That's Avantika, my cousin," I say. Gopal nods, and I wonder if he finds her interesting. It is difficult to be objective about one's cousins - and I had seen Avantika since she was called Jullu (she was named Manjula, but changed it when she was just six, because Baba Sehgal's song tormented her) and wore frilly frocks with polka dots, pink hearts, teddy bears and other random creatures on them - but Avantika is fairly pretty. She might have been a lot more attractive if she were a little thinner, though. "That's Gopal, and that's Sundari," I finish the introductions. Avantika nods in their direction.

She dumps the beanbag on the floor, sinks into it, and throws the mat in our direction. I catch it, and turn to Sundari, who stands up. We spread it, and settle down on it.

I still can't believe she doesn't remember me.

"So, what do you do?" I ask Sundari. Sundari immediately turns to Gopal, and they giggle together. "I told you!" Gopal says. "Just downstairs, I was telling Sundari that you were like a respectable uncle, and that you would interview her about her employment and marital details."
"I'm just asking her what she does!" They laugh again.
"I'm a dancer, and I act in some drama," she replies.
"Vernacular drama?" I ask her, hoping to remind her of something.
"Yes," she replies.
Gopal asks, "Which vernacular?" Now she must surely remember me.
"Tamil," she replies, expressionlessly, "Oh, one of my shows is next Sunday. You guys must come!"

"What do you do, Gopal?" Avantika asks.
"This is turning into a group discussion," he replies. Sundari laughs, I smirk.
"I think Gopal is currently unemployed. Though he has a plush fellowship that pays him a lot of money for nothing, and a book deal with Oxford University Press," I offer.
"What's the book about?"
"The book is a history of communism in India. Early communists, when and how the CPI started, its factions, its mushroom organisations, student movements, labour movements, Naxalism, everything. I'm tracing the ideology, and its manifestations."
"Oh wait!" Avantika exclaims, suddenly, "You're Gopalakrishnan Menon, aren't you? That's why you looked so bloody familiar!"
Gopal blushes, "Yes. The very same."

After college, Gopal joined the Party full-time. Barely a year out of college, when he was still a known figure in the hostel, word got around that he was climbing up hierarchies with alarming tempo, and was put in almost sole charge of overseeing campaigning in two districts for Panchayat elections.

By this time, he could deliver full-fledged speeches in chaste Kannada that put native speakers to shame. He spoke with calm which suggested that he was in control of what he had to do. He spoke with vigour, but never let emotions run high. He was brutally honest, about himself, about the Party, and also about his opposition. The audience never felt like he was cheapening the democratic process by rabble-rousing, the audience never felt like they were being spoken down to, they never thought he was insulting their intelligence. He used humour, he used sarcasm, but never overdid the rhetoric. He never spoke of a problem without offering a rational solution. He never criticised unless he had a better alternative to offer.

He was just twenty-seven when he got appointed as an observer of the politburo, and he became close friends with the leading communists of the country. Gossipmongers said he might move back to Kerala and set himself up for a long tenure as Chief Minister. Others said he was too big for that; he was only looking Delhi-wards. A magazine, in a feature on the leading youth politicians, claimed that Gopal was approached by both the Congress and the BJP with unimaginable sums of money to switch over, and that he refused. It also claimed that Gopal had Sitaram Yechuri's number saved in his phone as "Sita Darling". Gopal regularly appeared on TV channels as a talking head, sharing his views on the economy, polity and occasionally, Hindi cinema.

It was around this time, somewhere in 2007, when I just got into business school, that I heard that Gopal quit the Party. The media, too distracted by India's early World Cup exit, gave it almost no thought. The reports were brief and vague - he had left the Party due to disputes with the leadership, and there were rumours that he might join one of Big Two.

Gopal surprised everyone by joining two IIT graduates and floating a new party that aimed at bringing the young, educated middle-class to the forefront of politics. His move was hailed by the media as a bold, ideological choice.

But I had my doubts.

At the party to which I first chauffeured Gopal, we had a long conversation deep into the night. The party had died, everyone had passed out, save for a couple who had locked themselves in a bedroom even before we arrived (we heard noises from in there even at 5 am), Uma was asleep on Gopal's lap and he was twirling her locks, like he had done all night, the music had changed, by Gopal's choice, to old Hindi film songs. I sat, nursing my seventh orange juice, and Gopal was on his seventh vodka, happier that usual, but still sprightly and alert.
"How can you be a communist and hang out with this crowd?" I asked him.
He laughed, "That analysis too simplistic. I am communist, true. I believe in the ideology. But I also live in this world, you know. I mean, look at the party - most of the leaders come from backgrounds that are privileged, and live lives that are very comfortable. Our ideology isn't against that. In any case, the communism we advocate isn't strictly Marxist, right? It is a tempered communism. It is the communism of our age - we are as communist as we can be within the constraints of our polity and times."
In hindsight, his reply is self-contradicting and made no sense at all. But when he told me this, I was one year into engineering college, and had encountered every form of ideology only through him. I believed him, and respected him even more - his principles were not a blind following of an existing system, but one that was seen through the prism of modernity.

Gopal was in college for a month after that party, and he seemed to take a liking to me. He often took me to the city on his bike, on Party work, showing me around parts of Bangalore that I never saw after he left - the gullies of Shivajinagar, Cottonpet, Majestic and Chamrajpet. He took me to villages around the city, from Nelamangala to Kanakapura to Ramanagaram. He said, "The first step towards a complete education is to know that there are different kinds of people in this world, and, at the same time, realising that, ultimately, they all have the same basic needs." Again, it was just the sort of pop philosophy that sounded nuanced at the time, but so superficial in hindsight.

Three days before he left, he called a meeting of the Party chapter in college, and gave us a little farewell speech, where he announced that he wasn't taking the job he was offered by a software establishment, and that he was going to serve the country through active, full-time politics.

He said that he wanted the chapter to run and grow to neighbouring institutions. He also appointed me as his successor to run the chapter. Even that, he did in the most fair manner - he told the general body that he wanted me to be the leader, but because he didn't know what they wanted, and because he believed in democracy, he asked them if anyone else wanted the job. No one dared oppose Gopal's candidate.

For a few months, Gopal supervised chapter activities, and I worked hard to get more membership, and help with party work around the college. But once Gopal became too big to look into our affairs, I lacked the energy and the drive to take it forward. The chapter died by the end of the year, and I lost all touch with Gopal.

From the six months that I knew him closely, I found it very difficult to believe that he had any deep affiliation to ideology. I sensed, from his dealings with other Party workers, that he joined the Party only because he had a Kerala background, and the structures in the bigger Karnataka parties were much harder to break into. When there was talk of him moving back to Kerala, again, I knew it couldn't be true, because Kerala had a strong communist culture, and it would be more difficult for him to stand out there. Gopal was taking the route he knew best - to hold himself out as this suave, next generation politician, being seen at the right places with the right people, and doing and saying the right things.

I speculated, therefore, when he quit the Party, that he had done something unforgivable - my mind pointed towards a misuse of Party funds, because he was quite monarchic about the funds that our little chapter had, handing them out arbitrarily to people and for causes he thought were most deserving. Word must have gotten around, I thought, and the other parties wouldn't touch him now.

He had fallen from grace, needed a soft place to land. So, I theorised, he founded this new party with two inexperienced, idealistic IITians, and came out of the mess looking like he had taken the moral high ground.

His new party, like a couple of others like itself, didn't really take off. It found a small group of excited city-kids who threw themselves into development activities in a few Panchayats in Karnataka hoping to increase the party's base, but they broke no ground. They lost badly in every election, despite Gopal's presence, and slowly dissolved. One of the IITians made some remarks about Gopal's lack of interest in the party, and maintained that Gopal was only using this party to re-position himself into the role he took up once the party ended - of that of a researcher and writer.

I am still unconvinced of these allegations, because I met Gopal again around this phase. I was finishing IIM-Bangalore, when Gopal's new party made a visit to the campus, to try and recruit management graduates into their fold. Gopal made a speech, in his characteristic, rational, calm, meaningful style, about how India desperately needed a younger generation of politicians. The speech brought tears to some graduates' eyes, and they offered full support to him. But it amounted to very little.

In Gopal's own words, "You know, Uji, the problem with having middle class India as your vote base, is that they are too busy being middle class India to bother with anything else." He added, on another evening on my terrace, "These fellows think they're better than the people in the villages, because they're cool and educated. Such rubbish. They sign ridiculous online petitions without even finding out what they're actually about, and they do little else."

That evening, when Gopal spoke at IIM-Bangalore, I met him backstage. "I hope you're joining our movement, Uji!" he said.
I shook my head, "No chance - I'm not getting conned twice into your movements!"
He laughed heartily, and said, "Okay then, give me your phone number at least. We'll have some beer some day. You drink, don't you?"
"I do, Gopal."

We had that beer on the night when his party formally dissolved. Gopal was shattered, "This was inevitable, I know. But I really tried," he said. "I really tried, Uji, I really tried." He held his head in his hands and wept. This couldn't have been a performance - Gopal was a trained actor, but he wasn't this good.

Gopal's political career was, quite conceivably, irretrievably finished.


Sundari looks a little puzzled, and so I explain, "Gopal used to appear on TV a lot, as a political expert in these news channels."
She is impressed by that, "Not bad, dude! You never told me."
"You come on TV each week, I didn't think you'd find this too exciting," Gopal says. "Oh, Sundari anchors a show on classical dance on Kalaignar TV..."
We nod.

Gopal then says, "Oh, Avantika, I asked Uji what you do when I spoke to him on the phone. And he didn't have much of a clue. I expressed my doubts on whether you are his cousin at all."
Avantika laughs, taking the mosquito bat from Gopal's hand, "What did he say when you asked him?"
"I said that you did some sociology or something like that, and that you were coming to Madras to give an interview for some journalism... or something like that."
"He's not far off the mark," she says, zapping a colony of mosquitoes with three ferocious swishes.
Gopal smiles, "Uji has a shady history with women, which is why I had my doubts."

"I'm sorry," I say, "Gopal has the shadiest history with women."
Sundari seems too thrilled by this statement, "Ooh! You have to tell me!"
"I'll let Gopal do the honours."
"Why, da?"
"Please?" Sundari asks again.

"Okay. So there have been some women."
"How many?" she asks.
"Um, you can't really put a number to these things, no?" I say, "It's like asking how many grains of sugar in that dabba."
"Bastard, it's not that bad."
"You guys have to tell me now!"

Gopal sighs, and starts, "So, first, there was this girl in my IIT class back in Thrissur."
This is too funny for me. I imagine Gopal as a seventeen-year-old geek grappling with problems on pulleys and weights and slopes from Irodov's confounding little book, and hitting on another seventeen-year-old at the same time. "She was the hottest in our class back then... If her facebook photos are anything to go by, she's still quite hot."
"Why did it end?"
"We were seventeen. You really expect these things to last forever?!"
"They could, I mean, why not?" She is asking him that in full earnest.
I expect Gopal to dismiss her with sarcasm, but he doesn't, "Well, we drifted apart - I went off to Bangalore, she stayed behind in Thrissur. Different worlds, different altitudes."

"Then?" she asks, "Who comes next?"
Gopal thinks for a while, as he polishes off the last pieces of fruit, and says, "Sushmita - she was in my engineering college."
"Wait, this is that Sushmita two batches senior to me? As white as white can get? Shortish, specs... Thick lips."
"Yes, sir."
"Wow. How long did that last? Wasn't she infinitely irritating?"
"A month or so. She dumped me, actually. Apparently, I was too lost in my own world to care for her."

"Then came Uma?" I ask.
"Yeah, Uma," he replies, and turns to Sundari, "So, Uma was this girl, slightly older than me. Really really hot. And very very smart."
She cuts him off, "Oh wait. This girl is like tall - maybe your height - fair, light-eyes..."
"How do you know?" I ask.
She tells Gopal, "Gopal! I've been telling you for a week now! I have definitely seen you at a party years ago. I even spoke to you that day! You were there with her. At my cousin's friend's house in Bangalore!"
Gopal says, "I've been to parties in that house many times, but I have no recollection of seeing you there at all. You know the strangest thing - you're so pretty, that I can't believe that I might've seen you and then forgotten about it."

How dare he? That is my line!
She blushes.

I am dumbstruck. She remembers the party, she remembers Gopal who spoke to her for ten seconds at that party, she remembers Gopal's girlfriend whom she only saw from a distance. She spoke to me for more than an hour that day, even exchanged phone numbers, but shows no signs of recognition whatsoever.
***

To continue.

Her Obviousness - Part I

Breezy romance (like Subtle Subramanian). The blog was getting too meaningful for my own good!
***

A few days after my fifteenth real birthday - I have two, one official birthday, in November, from my forged birth certificate, and one real, the actual day on which I was born - an uncle, inebriated, declared to a large family gathering, "This fellow here," pointing to me, "He'll make it big." He paused, and said again, "But he'll be the most boring of us all." My family, an assortment of old-moneyed caricatures living amidst small-town Karnataka's high society, all stared at him incredulously briefly, and burst into a volcano of laughter. At the cost of being dramatic, I must confess: that evening, I knew I had enough of this life.

A seat in a prime engineering college, much to the shock of my family, who didn't think beyond the failing family business, brought me to the outskirts of Bangalore - to a crowded hostel characterised by smells of urine, stale sweat, dirty underwear and cheap deodorant.

I came back home, each vacation, growing less fond of my cousins and uncles, and grudgingly accepting my parents' grumbling about my career choice, only to rush back to the comforting smells of the hostel. When that was over, my family, disillusioned by my older cousins who seemed happy bringing the old-money down to old-no-money, and buoyed by my uncle's tipsy prophecy of untold successes, urged me to come back and take over. I bought two years' time, telling them I needed to do an MBA.

My family disintegrated in those two years - a couple of cousins moved to the Middle East, taking their parents with them, one aunt died, large properties were sold, suits were filed in Courts in and around Mangalore, and everyone got together for one last meeting where the properties were settled. My parents bought a plush flat in the eastern extremities of the town, and settled down into their hermitage.

I moved to Chennai, gainfully employed at a bank, the gains were much more than I expected them to be, lived a life of monotonous anonymity that showed no signs of "making it big". My uncle's prediction, I realised, was just drunken gas. Only the second part of the his prediction, of being the most boring person around, seemed to be coming increasingly true over the years.

Gopalakrishnan Menon, the hero of this story, or the central character, to be more correct, for he doesn't engage in much heroism anywhere, is the only person about whom I made a similar drunken prediction - I said that the world would know his name one day. I don't know what to make of him - he's not finished with the world, and it might be too early to write him off - but he seems far far away from anything earth-shattering.

He called me this evening, and said, "Uji, I need a place to hide a girl for the night."
I reinterpreted this line, like one does with everything that Gopal says, as, "I am bringing a girl along. I hope that extra bedroom is clean and empty."
I said, "Sorry, man. I have a cousin staying over. She's sleeping in that room."
Gopal said, "No problem, da. This girl and the cousin will sleep in that room, we'll canoodle on your bed. I just need a place to hide her."

In six years of knowing Gopal, he hadn't made a request this unintelligible. I tried asking him what this deal was, and why she was being hidden. He evaded, and told me he'd tell me when the time was right. I told him that I didn't want police at my door, and he told me stop being dramatic.

My first encounter with Gopal was in my first week in college in the toilet. He threw the door of the loo open, walked out content, and declared to the queue of boys waiting to get in, "You don't feel like the holidays are over until you crap in one of these shit-holes!"

It was my first week, and I was warned that these seniors, cackling away, would pounce on me if I reacted to their jokes. But I couldn't help it, I guffawed with them. One senior, a particularly thug-like variety, glowered, "What do you know, fuckin' fuchha? Must've come straight from your amma's lap." Gopal turned to me, his shampoo-commercial hair strewn over his face, and a shiny earring peeking from one ear, winked, and turned to the thug, and said, "You're so full of shit." The queue cackled some more, and forgot about me.

I saw Gopal act in a play the next week - he performed with a theatre group in town - as a waiter given to philosophical outbursts, delivered in a deadly, robotic monotone. Moving constrainedly and speaking expressionlessly, he got the audience cheering each time he entered the stage. I didn't watch or know much theatre then, but I thought it was an extraordinary performance, for, off stage, he was maddeningly energetic and his face conveyed meaning even when you couldn't hear him speak. A classmate, who claimed to have a background in theatre, dismissed it, "He was playing the character so two-dimensionally. There was no depth. I mean, he was just that - a waiter who makes philosophical statements." I disagreed, but not vocally.

For an engineering student, Gopal was atypically political. He was a cardholder of the Communist Party of India, often found at political rallies and labour strikes, leading the sloganeering and shepherding the masses. He started a chapter of the Party in college - I joined, out of hero-worship - and tried to politicise college elections. He had a two-point manifesto - regularise the maintenance staff who were employed on contract basis, and make administration more transparent and inclusive. The hostel didn't care. They voted for him because he was Gopal the Great, and he beat the day-scholar candidate by a humiliating margin.

Gopal was most popular in the hostel because he had a girlfriend who wasn't from the girls' hostel. Gopal's girlfriend, a tall, thin, fair, light-eyed city girl, who occasionally drove up to campus in her own car, was a part-time model, we heard. She also did radio jockeying, apparently, and there was a strong rumour that she was a few years older than him, and recently divorced. The last part was untrue, I discovered years later, she had only broken up with a long-standing live-in boyfriend who was also a model, but the rest was fairly accurate.

I spent most of that first year observing Gopal from a distance. He spoke to me a few times - usually issued instructions on Party work - but I never had the courage to speak to him about anything else. He was friends with a lot of first years, but I was always slightly intimidated by his coolness.

One evening, a month before he finished college, he came to my room suddenly, and asked, "You have a screwdriver?" If it were one of my classmates, I might have replied with, "The tool or the drink?" But I was so taken aback when Gopal asked, that I mumbled something, rummaged and fished out a spanner and asked, "Will this do?"
"Screwdriver?" he said, again, laughing.

When I was looking again, for I was sure I owned one, he asked, "You drink?"
I told him I didn't. He said, "Brilliant! Want to go to the city for a party? I need someone to ride the bike back."
I was nervous again, "What party is this?"
"Don't worry. It's this bunch of friends I have in town. Eclectic crowd. You'll like it."

The bike ride was quite a trek through the narrower gullies of town, "Short cut," he said. "If I take the main roads, we'll reach in time for next weekend's party." I hoped he wouldn't be too drunk by the end of the party; there was no way I'd make it back to college on my own. He seemed to read my mind, "I'll tell you the road on the way back, don't worry! I won't get that drunk."

My usual bout of nervousness struck again. I was on my way to a party to which I wasn't invited, and I was going with a guy I barely knew. It wasn't the inappropriateness that worried me - I was known for being inappropriate - it was that I would have to spend an entire evening with people who all knew each other, but didn't know me. I hung on to Gopal's words, "Eclectic bunch." Eclectic bunches were usually very open and accepting. Or, they were the other extreme, cold and exclusive. But if this group had Gopal in it, they were likely to be the former.

As the bike wound around Bangalore, somehow, I found myself at a landmark I recognised - the Cantonment station. From there, again, it was all a whirl of bungalows and tree-lined residential streets. He stopped at one such bungalow, from where muffled noises of a wild gathering wafted towards us - it was the particular combination of loud music and louder conversation. Until then, I had only encountered this in my Mangalorean family gatherings.

Gopal rang the bell, and the noise stopped for a couple of seconds. I heard a woman holler from a room upstairs, "Dude, Annie, open the door!"
Gopal said, twinkling, "Brace yourself for Annie."
This brought two images to my mind. The first one was a matronly, overbearing sort of Annie, who engulfed you in a combination of a hug and expletive filled greeting. The second image was that of a extremely hot Annie, who would make my knees go weak.
What I didn't expect was a stubbled man built like a boxer. "Annie!" Gopal said, giving him a manly half-hug, and said, introducing me, "Meet Ujwal - my junior and chauffeur for the night," and introducing Annie, "Meet Aniket - my political rival." Annie laughed, and said to a puzzled me, "My father is a Congressman!"

The house was a proliferation of levels - we entered into what I thought was a mezzanine floor, but was only a platform that had a drawing room and led to a depression that had a more private drawing room, where two guys tensely followed a game of tennis on TV.

"You remember that chick we met last week at the play?" Annie asked Gopal. Gopal nodded. "She's in that room," he said, pointing to a bedroom that was on a level of its own, "With our man." Gopal's eyes widened, he smirked, and gave an impressed nod. My family parties didn't involve all this - there it was just drunk uncles discussing chemical factories and corporate rivalry, and bored aunts discussing cooking and school uniforms.

Two women, in flashy party clothes ran down the stairs, screeching and squealing; one chasing the other with a butter knife in her hand. They ran straight to Gopal and Annie, split them and ran past. The chased girl jumped over a couch, and the chaser positioned herself on the other side, knife poised to attack. Gopal watched the stand-off with excitement, Annie started chanting, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" He was joined by the tennis-watchers, while the two girls panted, half-smiling evilly, until the chaser lunged over the couch at the chased. They collapsed in a giggly heap on the couch, and fell to the carpeted floor, laughing, speaking excitedly and unintelligibly to each other.

The chased got up, rose to her full height, and said, "Gopal!" Gopal, who lost interest in the fight, and was walking up the stairs then, turned back and said, "Yo!" She said, "Meet my cousin Sundari upstairs. She also does some theatre and all." Gopal said, "Definitely!" The other girl said, "Hey! Uma's upstairs." Gopal said, "Thanks!"

He bounded up the stairs, followed by Annie and me.

The room upstairs looked like it was put there for a party like this. A dining table in the far corner had a huge group sitting around it, throwing tissue around and talking animatedly. The centre of the room was a sprawling dance floor, with low lighting and wooden flooring, with four or five drunken dancers, swaying to music that wasn't loud or pounding enough to dance to.

The gathering was all much older than Gopal or me - most of the people looked like they were between their mid-to-late twenties or their early thirties. I didn't know how Gopal, born and brought up in Thrissur to academic parents, got himself to be a part of this group. I had more respect for him now; he was a man knew how to get around.

There was a couch and a few beanbags in one corner where a bunch of men and women were settled. I recognised one of them as Gopal's girlfriend. In a short grey-and-red dress, barefoot and carrying a glass of beer in her hand, she was more beautiful than I remembered her from her campus visits. For one, she looked older and more mature than she did when she came to campus, and that gave her a dignified beauty. She also looked more at home here than she did when two hundred men stared at her from their windows.

She got up when she saw Gopal, came to him and planted a full kiss on his lips. Gopal recovered, and introduced me to her, Uma, with the same words - junior and chauffeur. She said, "Oh! I've seen you at one of the rallies!" I was flushed. I couldn't believe she remembered me, and wondered if she was making it up. But she said, "You were the one chatting up that girl with black specs, no?" I smiled embarrassedly. "Anything happened with her?" she asked. I shook my head.

We settled down on the floor around the couch, where the crowd discussed TV shows. Gopal and I didn't have much to say - living in the hostel, we hardly knew what the TV had to offer. A plump, happy girl walked up to us from the dining table and said, "Gopal and friend! What will you guys have?" I presumed she was the hostess who had commanded Annie to open the door.

Gopal, who was engrossed in Uma's hair, looked up startled, and said, "Yo! What's up?" He paused, and introduced me again as Ujwal, his junior and chauffeur, and said, "I'll help myself to a vodka. The kid doesn't drink, he says." The clink of a shattering glass was followed by a shriek and collective groaning. Someone had broken a wineglass on the dance floor.

The hostess hollered again, efficiently, "Don't worry! Turn on the central lights, I'll take care of this," and scurried away down the stairs to find a broom. Gopal beckoned me to the bar table, and mixed himself a strong drink, and poured out a glass of orange juice for me. "You're sure you wont have even one drink?" he asked again. I refused.

The party got over its shattering glass induced lull. The music started playing again, the voices regained in volume and once the glass pieces were swept away, the dance floor was repopulated by the same group of drunks. We made our way back towards the couch, when one girl caught Gopal by the arm and said, "Listen, come downstairs. We have to discuss the Bombay show." Gopal nodded, asked me to settle down wherever, and left with her.

I went back to the couch, and sat next to the only other person who took any interest in me - Uma. "Where's your boss?" she asked.
"Some girl whisked him away," I said, still recovering from the term 'boss', wondering if she took the chauffeuring too seriously. She looked curious about the whisker-girl, so I said, "Not very tall, fair, curly hair, red t-shirt..."
"Oh. Her. They were talking about some play?"
"Some show in Bombay, yes."
"That's his ex-girlfriend," she said. There was no discernible expression in that statement. I didn't know if she just said it as a matter-of-fact, or if she was upset or if she was jealous. It hung there for a few seconds, before she suddenly asked, "How old are you?"
I didn't want to answer that question, but I had no choice, "Eighteen!"

"He's eighteen?!" another girl sitting on the couch asked, "Serious?"
"This Gopal's a gay. And a paedophile..." someone drawled, to hooting and laughter.
"Weren't you bonking a high school chick just when you finished college?" Gopal asked the guy who made the paedophile allegation, suddenly emerging from the stairs.
"How do you know?!"
The entire crowd laughed again. Uma said, "By the way, Ujwal..."
"Your name is Ujwal," the drawler asked again, "Brightness..." he laughed. "You can't be very bright if you're hanging out with Gopal!"
Before I could respond, another guy said, "Dude, he's a kid. We should rag him."
The first guy said, "Ok. Kid. Come here. Stand."
I looked at Gopal, but he looked on emotionlessly. I was on my own. "Come on, kid. Stand."
I pulled myself up to stand, but lost balance and fell. It was the most inexplicable fall. Gopal said, suddenly, "Guys, he doesn't know how to stand. Show him."
One guy stood up. Gopal said, "Ok. Then what is he supposed to do?" I smiled, catching on to Gopal's grand plan. "We were thinking we'll make him stand on one leg, with his arms outstretched," the guy who was sitting down said.
The guy standing up said, "Like this!" and stretched his arms wide, and lifted his leg up, and collapsed on to the couch.

When he fell down, Gopal said to me, "Dude, come along. Let's get another drink."
The guy who fell, said, "Dude, sorry for ragging you!"
I said, "Only you thought you were ragging me!"
The crowd clapped and laughed more, and I heard someone say, "Gopal's found himself a kid just like him!" I was beaming, for a few minutes, I felt like the new Gopal - the magnetic student leader, strong, opinionated, popular with the women. The cliches rolled in my head until I reached the bar.

Gopal re-poured the same two drinks for the two of us, without asking me if I wanted something else. The hostess appeared at the bar with another girl and said, "Gopal, meet Sundari." The name struck a bell, but I couldn't place it. Gopal immediately said, "Pri's cousin. Theatre of some sort..."

The girl's face was defined by her nose - she wore a pretty single nose-ring that seemed to distract from everything else about her. Once you got past the nose-ring, you discovered that she was maddeningly pretty - large eyes, long eyelashes, knotted eyebrows, not-so-long curlyish hair, not-to-fair, not-too-dark.

"Yeah," she said, in a voice that seemed younger than she looked, "Not theatre, really. More like traditional vernacular drama."
Vernacular drama, I thought to myself. Gopal asked the question I wanted to ask, "Which vernacular?"
She smiled, "I used to do Kannada when I lived here. But now I do Tamil... I live in Madras now. Going to college there now."
"What year are you in?" I asked, almost involuntarily.
"First year," she said.
"A kid like you!" Gopal declared, and left us to our conversation. The conversation wasn't anything great, I remember, there were long awkward pauses, and longer silences. But I had a feeling I liked being there, just talking, and I presumed she liked talking too. When we were leaving, I asked her for her phone number. We didn't have cell phones then, and so she scribbled a landline number on a piece of paper.

I never called, and nor did she. And we didn't even hear of each other until this evening when Gopal, out of the blue, brought her to my house to hide her from her parents.

De-familiarisation

I hadn't heard much about Ramesh Vinayagam till last evening - I only knew that he composed the music for Nala Damayanthi and was doing some research on gamakas in Carnatic music. I met him about the latter - an interview-article on his study is on the cards - at Ram's place, and the topic of conversation invariably turned to cricket.

Something about musicians from Madras makes them passionate cricketers or cricket fans - most Carnatic musicians worth their salt can reel off Test match statistics like the names of the 72-melakartas. I have a theory - that the temperament required for Carnatic music and Test cricket is similar. In both forms of art, the action unfolds layer-by-layer requiring patience, the thrill is latent, so latent that obviousness is derided upon, the subtleties miss untrained eyes and ears, and the excitement is in the pulse of the drama and not the spectacle of it.

When the meeting was ending, Ram said, "I am now going to ask Ramesh to perform my favourite trick... This is what I show him off with."

Ramesh smirked, and took out his cell phone. I wondered if he was going to do some kind of magic. He pressed some buttons, scrolled up and down a menu, until he zeroed in on something. The drone of a tambura emanated from the phone. He cleared his throat with a sa-pa, and I followed, unconsciously.

Now I was curious - what is this trick that involves a tambura drone?

He hummed a few phrases of a raga I didn't immediately identify, and launched into a Tamil song. The raga unfolded in the strangest of ways - my mind found both madhyamas, the sadharana gandhara, the chatusruti rishabha (rendered plainly), a nishada, a daivata... But the notes didn't define the raga, that was not it. It was one of those phrase-based ragas, and this had the most eclectic collection of phrases - a little like Kapi, a little like Keeravani, a bit of Simhendramadhyamam here, something else somewhere else, a flash of something that sounded like Neelambari even!

It was a beautiful song, a beautiful raga. But the word used was 'trick'. Was the raga the trick? Or would he do something with it? I wondered if he would change the tambura drone and show me how this was some raga I knew, but rendered in a different drone, it sounded so unfamiliar. I spent one verse trying to remove the drone from the music, and listening to the tune for familiarity. Nothing.

The verses came in the same frolicking pattern, in rhythmic cycles of three, still in that same raga, still bound by those phrasal boundaries, exploring little nooks within them.

Now I knew the trick was in the song itself. He wasn't going to do anything with it - he was already tricking me, somewhere, somehow.

In the last pallavi, a phrase of curious familiarity suddenly lodged itself in my head. A sa-da-pa-ma... I had heard this somewhere, definitely! I thought of the phrase just before it - ri-ga-ma-pa. Then it struck me, the ingeniousness of this trick, and the image of an Aquaguard flashed in my mind. I followed the tune until I could predict it - it was just a tune so removed from its familiar contours and Carnatic-ised that it had me fooled!

When he finished, he turned to me with the obvious question.
I said, "I think I've figured it out! It's that Western Classical tune - Fur elise?"

He smiled, impressed, "Yes. The raga is called Beethovenapriya!" And he went on to sing a few more phrases of the raga - a sketch of its geography.

A raga isn't a scale, you know, that is the English language's worst deformation of Carnatic music. A raga is something that has rules, yes, but the rules don't come from outside, they come from within it. Ask Janaranjani, Begada, Sahana - all ragas that seem like a random collection of swaras and phrases - they have a logic to them, a feel, if you like, a meaning. You can find within them an infinite universe.

Ask Beethovenapriya, and she'll tell you the same.

The Bard and I

I can state with great nationalistic jingoism (or jingoistic nationalism) that I have read more Kalidasa than Shakespeare. But that isn't a great achievement - in fact it is a matter of great literary shame (or shameful literacy) - for, in twenty-six years, I have read only two verses of Shakespeare. Both the verses were found in my fourth standard English textbook, and come from this poem called Under the Greenwood Tree. And even in that fourth standard textbook, there were poems I liked more than this one - like Silver by Walter De La Mare.

(Just revisited Silver. These two lines are so beautiful:

From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in silver feathered sleep


Silver-feathered sleep... Sigh.)

Under the Greenwood Tree is a curious poem - I still don't understand it fully. I think I must blame my Shakespeare illiteracy on B. Madambudithaya, the man who compiled the Karnataka State syllabus textbooks for picking a poem that leaves me baffled all the time, even eighteen years after my first encounter with it:

Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird's throat,

Right. Wonderful. Who is "who"? And who turn "his" merry note? When someone lies with me, do they lie and in speak the untruth? Why can't the Bard make himself clear?

And then he says,

Come hither, come hither, come hither:
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.

Thankfully, my English teacher told me what 'hither' means, and saved me some agony. On an aside, has Shakespeare forgotten about wild animals in the forest? Or did the English forests have no such creatures? Only winter and rough weather? Really? That's easy. "He" will bring a couple of sweaters along.

Shakespeare then kills me with the next line,

Who doth ambition shun,

Argh. What a line. Drafted in the same convoluted vein as an income-tax legislation. Firstly, it takes my mind a couple of seconds to wrap itself around the meaning of "doth". Not to mention the thou, thee, hath. And then, I have to get down to figuring, "Who shuns ambition".

All this is too much for a fourth standard kid, especially one who can't see unapparent meaning.
***

My mother, who has a literary bent of mind, then made me mug some portion of Shakespeare's legendary All the world's a stage for some speech competition - you know, one of those competitions where various kids' parents write speeches for them, bully their kids into mugging them up and delivering them with a fake accent and irritating intonation, and the teachers judge which kid's parents write the best speeches? Yeah. So, my mother with a literary bent of mind wrote a few lines from that poem for that competition.

The poem gave me sleepless nights. If all the world's a stage, everyone's acting in the drama (which would mean that everyone's backstage waiting to make their entries and exits), who's watching? I began, for days, thinking of life as this flop play being performed to empty audiences. I began seeing dead people stare at me from backstage, envious of my continuing role. It scared me at every level - was I going to be a bit part that no one ever remembers? Or the fellow they point at, snigger and say, "Oh God, this guy's such a ham!" Many nights, I woke up, thinking, "Please, please. Can we do that scene again? I didn't get the chance to rehearse properly.

But then, again, there's no one watching, right?
***

At some point, I watched Shakespeare in Love, without understanding much. I pretended to understand, though, just like I pretend to understand national politics, because in my line of work, pretense and posturing is as crucial as actual knowledge. Around this time, I discovered some weird Shakespeare graphic novels in my school library, and they interested me greatly.

(Ok, fine, I'll admit it. They were Shakespeare stories in comic book form.)

They provided me with many afternoons of entertainment, and gave me enough background to remain relevant in conversations about Shakespeare. I watched Maqbool and Omkara with only these comics as my placeholders. (And oh, Langda Tyagi and Kesu Firangi did look like Iago and Cassius in the graphic novel!) Which is why I was able to say smart things like, "Oh, in Maqbool, the three witches are replaced by Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah as soothsaying policemen..."
***

My grandfather quotes Shakespeare often. Something about mercy, justice, rain and twice-blesseth. I don't think he remembers any other quote, but he makes it a point to point it out that he has read real literature while I haven't. I tell him that I tried, many times, and I tell him that I never understood. He tut-tuts and remarks that education standards in the country are falling.
***

This morning, as I turned my merry Kalyani throat to the sweet mixie's note, I realised why I was never able to comprehend Shakespeare. My inability arises from a mistake and an arrogance. The mistake is my presumption that Shakespeare wrote in English. And the arrogance is that I don't need any annotation to understand English. The reason I read Kalidasa with annotation is because I know that my Sanskrit isn't good enough to read simply from the original.

Once I accept that Shakespeare didn't write in English, I can easily convince myself that I should get an annotated version, with the meaning of the verse in plain English. Armed with this, I shall revisit the Bard with a vengeance. And who knows, soon I might be able to quote that verse about mercy, justice, twice-blesseth and rain.

What a guy!

I sit in the Bangalore Cantonment station, it is slightly after 11.20 pm. The date, one that we won't forget for some time now, is April 2, 2011. I wait for the Cauvery Express - scheduled to arrive by midnight, though often late - immersed a Coetzee I have read before. There is a continuous muffled roar of fireworks in the background, even the sleepy station has a diffused joy about it.

This guy, in a blue Benetton t-shirt and faded blue jeans walks down the platform and settles down next to me. I can sense a contentment in his eyes, and a serene smile on his face. He stares at the empty railway tracks with that same distant expression.

I read my book quietly, stopping over an achingly beautiful passage, only to turn away to attend the occasional SMS, and a short phone call from my brother, and another from a friend.

The guy in the blue t-shirt looks at me, with that same expression, and says, "We won."
I smile back and nod.
There is a momentary silence, after which I say, "What a guy!"
He nods, "What a guy!"
Then it strikes me: do both of us mean the same person?

And then he says, "Twenty years, six World Cups. Finally!"
I smile. Obviously the same person.