Her Obviousness - V

Sorry for the delay.
***

It is nearly two-thirty AM, and I am at the Chennai Central station. That unearthly humidity hangs in the air amidst moderate to not-so-moderate temperatures, the sea-breeze bids goodbye for the day with an unsaid promise to return tomorrow, the ineffective air-conditioning whirs, trying to drum up some enthusiasm. People lie in various levels of comatose, on steel chairs, plastic bucket-chairs, on suitcases, bags, dhurries, newspapers fashioned as dhurries, on hard concrete, or on the cool marble flooring in the new waiting room. Some are waiting for trains that should have come yesterday, others have trains to catch tomorrow. Some work here, others have no other place to sleep.

A nasal voice makes occasional announcements in three languages, the sort where some numbers, like six, are high-pitched, others, like three, are low-pitched, and the rest, like seven, are of medium pitch. Prefixed and suffixed by a gong, the whole thing sounds like a Vedic recitation.

Most of the shops are closed; a tea shop with an incongruously awake and alert shopkeeper is open, and so is another little hole in the wall that stocks chips, biscuits, fried knickknacks, chocolates, sweets, soda, and cup noodles. The noodles excite me, and I help myself to a cup. In my hurry to eat, I open the cup too early, and the noodles aren't boiled enough. But I am hungry, I gobble them up eagerly.

My idea of spending the night at the railway station doesn't seem very smart anymore. Gopal left last night, with Sundari, to Bangalore. Their train was at eleven-fifteen. Uma arrives, from Bangalore, by a train scheduled to arrive at four-thirty, but often arrives earlier. It sounded like the soundest of plans - drop Gopal, say bye, act like I'm going back home; once the train leaves, slip back into the waiting hall, and wait for Uma's train - but it isn't.

I have two hours to kill now. Sleeping is an option, and it sure seems like the most desirable option at the moment, but I fear that the sheer coolness of this exercise will be lost if I slept through it. I want to tell people, "You know, I once spent the night at the Central station, and there, I saw..." Somehow, "You know, I slept at the Central station one night," just doesn't cut it. It doesn't have the makings of a tellable story.

But staying awake hasn't given me any stories either. I'm sandwiched between a fat man who snores like an asthmatic rhinoceros and a drunk whose head has comfortably settled itself on my left shoulder. The station is lifeless. No, wait, it isn't lifeless, there is surprising amount of activity, but nothing worth reporting. People are doing what people do in a railway station - waiting for trains. This exercise is heading towards resounding flop.

The word 'flop' that passed fleetingly through my conscious makes me wonder if I'm spending the night in this station only because I want to tell this story to someone. If that is the reason, I could just make up a story - tell people that I saw a young couple who looked suspiciously like they had just eloped, or that there was this man who delivered a shady looking bag to another man who quickly tucked it within his t-shirt and disappeared. Real-life untrue stories are easy to invent - the art is in striking a balance between the reassuring boundaries of possibility and the subtle thrill of the marginally unordinary.

But this doesn't answer the original question - am I here for a narratable story, or am I here just for the experience? Do I want to tell myself that the station holds no apparent stories? I say "apparent", because each person here, in this newer waiting hall, must have a reason for why he or she is in the station. Some might have finished a job assignment of some sort, some might be visiting relatives. Someone might have come to Madras for a funeral, a wedding, an engagement, or one of those undefined "family functions" and someone else could be going somewhere for one.

One of these guys might be missing his girlfriend or wife terribly, and might be going back to see her. On a whim. Another might be going back to see some girl his parents have lined up for him. Overcome by shyness, he will probably look at her through the corner of his eyes, while his father asks her what her hobbies are. He will hope that she can sing. The old lady sleeping in the far corner might be visiting her son, she might be upset that her daughter-in-law, from another religion, cannot be bossed around - or she might be happy that her daughter-in-law has found a voice she never found.

For the vendor in that tea stall, afternoons might be as exciting as nights - he probably hasn't seen one in years. The afternoon air, like the night air to me, is alien to him. His sleeping self knows it well, but his consciousness is unaware. Lunch is like dinner, going for a matinee is like a night-show.

None of the people in the waiting hall look like holidayers, though, except the two foreigners I saw entering the AC waiting lounge. That is strange. Do Indians not go on holidays? Or do the Indians that go on holidays not wait in the halls of railway stations?

I wonder - am I here to ponder over these life-altering issues? Create stereotypes for sleeping people in the station? Am I here out of sheer laziness? Do I not want to drive up and down twice in five hours? But if I am lazy, I should sleep. So, I reject that idea. I guess I am here because I find an excitement in this, an adventure even. When Uma arrives, I will tell her that I've been here all night, and she will think I'm strange. I like people thinking I'm strange. But there I go again, defining myself in terms of how people will think of me. Is everything I do just for effect?

It is shocking how innocent boredom can lead one to rethink one's life.

I bury myself in the book that keeps me company - a collection of Raymond Chandler's not-so-short stories. The one I'm reading is called Trouble is my Business. Chandler writes in stereotypes. The men in his books come in five varieties - the gritty, world-weary, sarcastic, Philip Marlowe, who "collects blondes and bottles"; the rich old men with slightly dishonourable backgrounds, whose money the world is after; the  smart, suave, smooth, big-time gangster, (though Marlowe eventually shows he's smarter, suaver, smoother) who has a convoluted plan to get the rich old man's fortunes; the honest, hardworking small-time crook, the sort that needs the money, the sort that is willing to work for it, the sort that's not wily enough to be the big-time gangster; aad lastly, the dumb small-time crook, who says stupid things and indulges in random acts of violence before sleeping the big sleep. The women in Chandler's books, they're from another world. A character says about one of them, "Every time I think of that dame, I have to go out and walk around the block,". He invented the femme fatale - the maddeningly alluring, coldly calculative, morbidly manipulative sort, whose only fault seems to be that she cannot keep her hands off Marlowe.

In a sense, he does just what I did a while ago - sees faces in a crowd, and categorises them into pigeon-holes he invents for himself, and writes stories around them. There is a joy in stereotyping, there is a joy in telling stories about caricatures.

The story simmers and rages to a chilling end. Marlowe ends up with the girl, but only briefly - he has to be available for the next girl in the next story. He says this girl was nice, but he doesn't have "the money, the clothes, the time or the manners". I smile. I'm like this, sometimes. I don't have the time, the money, the clothes or the manners. The only difference is that I hate to admit it to myself.

There are three stories left in the book, all enticingly dangerous, but I need a break. I get up to buy myself some tea. As I near the tea shop, I wonder if that's a good idea - it might affect my sleep. But again, how much will I sleep once Uma arrives?

I don't even know why she wants to spend the weekend here. She's getting married in the wee hours of next Sunday, there is a cocktail party the Saturday before, and a soporific reception on Sunday night. I am sure there are lots of things she has to do - shopping, planning, inviting. Maybe she needs space to do something she hasn't done enough of - pondering. She's unsure of Arun, or she's unsure of the permanence of marriage. But marriages are not necessarily permanent, she knows that. Maybe that's what worries her.

I'm being presumptuous, I know, she's probably tired and just wants to sleep. The more I think of it, the more convincing it sounds. She has had too much wedding planning over the last few months, and wants to get away for a weekend, think of other things, and go back to Bangalore fresh.

I amble to the tea shop, and ask for tea. And then I change my mind, hot milk might be a better idea. "No sugar," I tell him. He tells me in a grumpy mumble that the sugar is already in the milk. I give him six rupees, and take the paper cup from his hand. He asks, "What sir? Diabetes already?" much more brightly. I smile, "No, no. I just don't like sugar in milk." I sip on the milk, it isn't all that sweet after all.

He asks, "Are you Kannada?" I'm surprised, but he explains, "Your Tamil accent..." I nod. He adds, "Also, you are very fair. First, I thought you were a North Indian, after I heard you speak Tamil, I realised you might not be." I smile again. I take another sip from the paper cup, and feel the warmth go down to my stomach. I have no obligation to stand there, I know, but I remain. He continues, "You don't talk much, do you? I jabber away to everyone who comes to the shop - I have to stay awake, no?" I smile again, I really don't know what to add to this conversation.

He continues, undaunted, "I come here three days a week. You know, if you come here every day, it's not too bad. But when you come here three days a week, your sleep gets disturbed. Your body, you know, it has a clock inside it." This is where I switch off. He speaks for a while on body clocks, afternoon naps and various domestic issues that invariably end with him not being able put mutton on the table for his family. My cup is nearly empty, I keep up the polite nods and hmmm-s.

He asks, "Sir, what train are you taking?"
I say, "I'm just waiting for the Bangalore train... Have to pick up someone."
He looks at the large station clock, and his eyes widen, "Sir! You're too early! The train will not come for another half an hour."
I wonder if I should tell him that I've been waiting all night. I don't. I just make some noise that suggests that I know.
Like a bolt from the blue, he asks, with a twinkle in his eye, "Sir, girlfriend aa?" I glare. He grins. My glare turns to a smile, I put the empty cup of milk on the counter, and leave.

The train chugs in purposefully almost exactly half an hour after I finish my milk, just like the tea-stall vendor predicted. Pairs and pairs of groggy eyes stare out the grilled windows, the enthusiastic stand at the door (in a tearing hurry to alight, of course), and the lazy will wake up only when the porters wake them up.

Uma emerges from one of the air-conditioned compartments in a loose t-shirt and bright orange pyjamas, hair tied-up in a haphazard bun, carrying a backpack and another little bag. She sees me, smiles, and her step quickens in my direction.

"I've missed you," I say, hugging her. She doesn't say anything, not even a hi. A smile of contentment fixes itself on her face and she clutches my arm fondly as we walk to the car, wordlessly holding hands. This was the typical Uma emotion - a muffled sort of joy.

We reach the car when she breaks her silence, "New car?"
I look at the grey WagonR - I only bought it to bring a modicum of respectability into my existence - with stifled pride, and say, "Yeah. Like it?"
She throws her bag into the backseat, settles down in front and says, her voice barely betraying emotion, "It is a little uncle-ji..."
Only Uma can talk like this - say something that someone else might have said with a twinkling eye, a wink or tongue firmly in cheek in the most inexpressive manner.

The parking fee comes to seventy-five rupees for six hours, and I rummage in my wallet for change when Uma asks, "When did parking at this station become this expensive?"
Avoiding her eye, I say,"I spent the night at the station." She doesn't ask me for an explanation, but I find myself constrained to offer one, "I dropped Gopal and that girl..."
"Can't bring yourself to say her name?" she asks, again, in that same distant tone.
"Nothing like that! Pah!"
She smiles. "What is he up to in life?"
"Gopal?"
"Yes."
"He's writing a book of some sort."
She stares out of the window for a long time, observing early morning Madras. I don't think this city is especially pretty. Large parts of it are just dusty brownish grey buildings and dusty brownish grey roads. She throws her hands out and feels the wind against her arms. Then, she asks, "Fiction?"
I have forgotten what we were talking about. She asks again, "Gopal's book - is it fiction?"
"God, no." I say, cackling. She looks at me questioningly. "He tried writing this novel some time ago... I told you."
"Oh. That one," she says, with her hands still outside the window, "I was surprised when you told me it was bad. He wrote some really good plays, you know."
"I thought he only acted."

Uma first saw Gopal at a rehearsal for a play for which she designed costumes and sets. He played an odd character whom nobody, not even the playwright, fully understood. The character was on stage even as the audience were settling in and sat on a high stool at the back of the stage, looking around expectantly, checking his watch a couple of times, not too fidgety, not too dispirited - just like a person waiting for a show to start. The play started. Gopal's character, who had no name, reacted to the play like the audience - he laughed at the jokes, he gasped when he was surprised, he frowned when he was confused and nearly cried at the climax. He didn't speak a word, he didn't get off the stool or get involved in the story.

No one was told what or who he was, but everyone remembered him.

A reviewer, who noted that a couple of characters in the play referred to the eyes of God always watching over men and their actions, wrote that "Gopalakrishnan as God watching over us, was an eerie presence." Someone else called Gopal a mirror, "...an interesting device to show the audience who they are." A third review said, "The unsettling story was accentuated by an unexplained panopticon-like person scrutinising the proceedings."

At the rehearsals, for days, Uma did not even know Gopal was a character in the play. He sat on the stool for the three hours as actors rehearsed and re-rehearsed their lines, blocked their movements, the director stopped the play every now and then to issue orders or discuss something, the backstage crew figured out their parts. And when it ended, he got off the stool, hung around in the background for a couple of minutes, and without saying a word, left. It was like he was in character throughout. Only ten days before the show, when he asked Uma what he should wear did she realise he was actually going to do on stage what he did every day in the rehearsals.

After four shows, one afternoon, Uma came to the rehearsal to see Gopal engaged in an enthusiastic debate with the director over the finer points of a new script. "Uma, can you read this and tell me if you like it?" the director asked, "This guy here, Gopal, he wrote it." Uma gave him a searching look, but he hardly reacted.

Soon, the rest of the players arrived, and the rehearsal proceeded as usual. When they were leaving, the director called Uma aside and said, "I think the play is brilliant, but I have a crush on this guy and I want someone to read it objectively." Uma smiled.


The play is set in the drawing room of a bare Brahmin-looking house somewhere in Madras. A woman, a violinist, waits for her brother, who was once a child-prodigy Carnatic violinist, to come home after fifteen years. She has a little argument with the help who insists she has been too jumpy all morning. Their stern father, a legendary violinist himself, is barely alive - the world doesn't know if he even comprehends life around him. Everyone hopes the return of his favourite son will help.

The son, now a photographer living anonymously in Delhi, arrives. We learn that the son ran away from his talents years ago. The reasons are ambiguous - a combination of his father's over-disciplining, pressures of being constantly reminded of his genius, and an aversion to incessant travelling is hinted at.

His sister says, "Appa was jealous of him, I think. He told me, 'I spent two years learning to play that raagam perfectly. He took two hours.' It wasn't a vindictive sort of jealousy. No. But it made him push my brother more than he should have been pushed. The jealousy drove my father to want to be a part of my brother's genius, by moulding him and mentoring him too much." 

The son shows little interest in his father who invisibly disintegrates, but takes a fancy for his young student - a girl from the US. Their repartee, musical and conversational, culminates in a tender moment where the son reveals a story he had been hiding within himself for years.

"When I was fourteen, I had a concert in a town near Ernakulam," he starts, "I can't remember the name of the place now. It was in the evening, and when I reached the station in the morning, there was an unexpected thunderstorm. The venue for the concert was an open air place and I expected the concert to be cancelled. But it wasn't - this was Kerala, right? A fairly decent audience showed up, and stood in the rain holing umbrellas.

"This sort of thing should have inspired me, but it didn't. I played horribly, losing focus, trying strange ideas that I never tried before, being very fractured and insipid. It was like I was deliberately trying to get rid of the audience. But they refused to leave. Every single one of them stayed till the end and left silently.

"When the concert ended, I had this thought that I wasn't able to get out of my head - that the entire trip had been slightly wrong. My mother usually saw me off when I left for the railway station. This time, she was asleep. There was too much salt in the curd rice she packed for the journey. I usually called her before every concert, to discuss the concert plan with her, but the rain meant that there was no working telephone around. I usually called her after every concert again, but I couldn't.

"I had another concert after this. In Bangalore. And I was supposed to take a train from Ernakulam. On the way from this town to Ernakulam by taxi, the rain suddenly stopped. It was unseasonal rain, and the driver said it was just a passing cloud.

"I tried to sleep, but I couldn't. On the way, I saw a hill with a temple on top that took my fancy. The hill was not very tall, and it stood out in the flat coastal landscape. There was this bright light coming from the temple - someone had lit a really large fire. I asked the driver if I could go see it. My train was much later in the night, I had a lot of time to kill.

"The driver told me that there was a road two-thirds the way up the hill, but I had to climb the last stretch. I could do that, I told him. He asked me, 'Sir, don't you want to make that phone call home? You will not find a phone until the station now.' I considered that question for a second, because he delivered it like it was some kind of warning.

"But I ignored him, and asked him to go. We snaked up the hill road through some really dense forests - the vegetation did not look that dense from the bottom. There was one thing, though. We could see the light from every part of the road. At one point, the road just ended. The driver said, 'I'm too old to climb, sir. But just follow the mud path. It is a little steep towards the end, but you should be able to manage fine.'

"I trudged along the path that climbed gradually, and it was much like the road - snaking around the hill carefully. It was very unlike a path made by people on foot, which tend to cut corners and go through little crannies. It was as if someone deliberately wanted you to be able to see the light until you reached the top.

"At some point, the path narrowed and led itself into this shrubbery of sorts. The path was lined by four feet of dense bushes on each side. It got steeper, but never too tiring. It was getting slightly darker as I climbed, and the light shined even brighter.

"I tripped over a stone, after which I tread carefully, my eyes glued to the little road. The last part of the path led into a rock-formation tunnel, which was hardly fifteen feet long, and when I emerged from it, I was at the top. The climb was rather easy, and I wondered why the driver said he was too old to make it.

"It took me a couple of seconds to realise that there was something wrong - the light had been put out. There was light, but that was from the fading day. The temple was deserted, the door was locked with an old padlock that looked like it hadn't been disturbed in decades. There was no smoke, no sign of any flame having been lit anywhere.

"Dejected, and frankly, quite spooked, I hurried down the path, through the rock-tunnel, the shrubbery and the forest back to the taxi. The driver was fast asleep, and I woke him up. I told him what I saw, and unfazed, he said, 'Oh, they lock it after six, I think. The fire would have gone out once the firewood ran out.' It was a completely plausible explanation, but there was one flaw. There was no other way down from the hill, and I saw no one pass me while I climbed up. The driver remained silent when I asked him about this. Something in his silence suggested that I shouldn't probe more.

"I reached the station by around ten at night. By this time, the phone booth was also closed. Again, that thought struck me - that something was amiss. I bought myself a pack of biscuits and a cup of tea for dinner, and got on to the train to Bangalore.

"I reached Bangalore in the morning, not having slept for most of the night, and found the sabha secretary and his wife at the station. They were to send their driver, but they came. Instead of being pleasantly surprised by their presence, I was disconcerted. This trip was not going to plan at all. I got down from the train, and they asked me to sit down on a nearby bench. I asked them what was happening. The lady merely asked me to drink some coffee. The secretary told me that my mother was seriously unwell, and handed me a train ticket to Bangalore - the train was to leave in minutes.

"I rushed to Madras to find out that my mother died even before I reached Ernakulam.

"My father didn't know how to contact the sabha in that small town... No one even remembered the name of the town. When they finally found out the details, they couldn't contact the place because the phone lines were down and it was impossible for anyone from Ernakulam to travel in that rain. The messenger set out as soon as the rain stopped, but by the time he reached, I had left for the station. My father was forced to contact the sabha secretary in Bangalore."

He paused for a long time, before saying, "I felt I had to run away that day. And I did."

At the end of this story, the young girl hugs the son comfortingly, and soon, the hug evolves into a kiss and the lights fade out.

Next morning, a lady arrives at the house and declares herself to be the son's live-in girlfriend. They even have a two-year-old daughter.


Here, the script that Uma read said, "Interval." She put it down, picked up her phone, called the director and said, "Do the play."
***

To continue.

Her Obviousness - Part IV

Chandni Kedar floats around the terrace, the melody forms a part of the atmosphere, its phrases, the pulse of the teentaal bandish I picked up from that recording rings in the air.

My music isn't deep, ever. Even when I ponder, like I often do, I only ponder the notes, only ponder the glides, the connections, the phrases of the raag. I read of music and its higher purposes in many books; for me, music is what it is, my purpose is the raag, my contemplation is the ornateness of the notes that make it up. I wonder if my music lacks pathos as a result. I have a feel for music, I know; my haphazard training has meant that it has developed primarily through feel and not through mechanised training. I wonder if I should, for instance, contemplate the moonlight as I play Chandni Kedar, make the listener feel its softness through the music. But then, if I just meditate on the raag, shouldn't its natural construction emit the feel it is supposed to?

It's not like I haven't tried. I meditated on a radiant light while I played Deepak, but the raag suffered. I tried playing like the rain when I played Megh Malhar, but I realised that I could play many raags like the pitter-patter of the rain or the pounding of a thunderstorm. I wonder if these purposes are too obvious. What is the purpose, say, of Bhairavi? Or Gaud Saarang?

Sundari keeps beat with the drut teentaal in the Carnatic style. In some ways, I like it, it gives me a framework to play within. But it distracts me. I finish the drut with two long rounds of improvisation, and end with a complicated set-piece of threes. Even Gopal, hard as he is to impress with music, seems suitably soothed.

I am out of practice, though, I can feel it. Some phrases don't come out the way I want them to, some don't have the right feel, others don't pack the right punch. The stresses are a little off and the clarity of expression doesn't match the clarity of my thought. In improvisational music, what you imagine and what you execute must be a part of the same transaction; you must not be able to tell one from another, each must flow from the other, each must push the other. If your physical faculties struggle to keep up with your imagination, cyclically, your imagination suffers. Today, after this downward-spiraling internal tussle between idea and expression, I know that I not only have a long way to go, I also have to re-traverse the path I have un-traversed in the last month.

If you ask me why I haven't played the sarod for a month, I won't be able to give you a satisfactory answer. I haven't been all that busy, I admit - I am at home on most days by seven, on some days, even earlier. But I've spent my evenings vegetating on obscure sites on the internet, solving crossword puzzles, reading conflicting opinions on socio-economic-political issues (often ones that have no relevance to my existence - like the healthcare systems in the United States), going through blogs and profiles of women I will never meet, watching videos of cute babies, virtuoso musicians, mimicry artistes, ridiculous Sandalwood song-and-dance routines. I have spent them getting lost amongst cheap plots in cheap novels of espionage, intrigue, thrill, women of otherworldly allure, popular science, popularly wrong or popularly misleading science, ingenious methods of mass destruction, imagined motives, imagined communities, imagined realities.

Somewhere, it begins with a laziness to pick up the instrument and sit down with it. This laziness slowly transforms itself into guilt, and every evening, when I come back, a voice inside my head tells me to play, and I plead with the voice for some time to let my mind calm down after work. Before I know it, time evaporates from under my nose, I droop off, and wake up the next morning. My mind turns numb to the pricking of this guilt in a few days, and soon, the musiclessness becomes a part of my routine.

The sarod, unlike some other instruments, requires a proper sit-down session - it needs space, physically and mentally, it needs time, it needs a single-minded devotion. I told myself, over the last month, that my job did not give me this space, and that my music would, naturally, erode and die. How easy it is to lie to yourself.

All that was until I encountered Viayat Khan's Chandni Kedar recording, Live at the Taj, the cover says, accompanied by his brother, Imrat Khan on the surbahar, an instrument with a hauntingly deep, low, bass timbre. Here was a Kedar with a quirk, the komal nishad that made fleeting appearances to liven up proceedings. And every time I played it, Sundari opened her twinkling eyes, and gave me a look of pleasant surprise.

"Too beautiful!" Sundari says, when I finish my rendition.
"Thanks."

There is a long silence, only punctuated by Gopal's incessant fiddling with his phone. Avantika sips her glass of water poignantly, and I suspect it might not just be water.
"Who is your teacher?" she asks.

Avantika laughs, "Tell her," and turns to Sundari, "This is his favourite story."

I am flushed, it is my favourite story. It is the only thing I'm proud of.

"No one taught me," I say. "One of my uncles," the one who made that prophecy, "Is a collector of musical instruments. During a trip to Benaras, he discovered this sarod made in a style that was abandoned a hundred years ago for the newer model. He wanted to buy it, but the guy who owned the shop refused to sell it. He offered to make one in the same model, though. My uncle brought that replica back, proudly, and showed it off to everyone. I just picked it up, and started fiddling around... I was around eleven then, you know. In six months, I began playing some small tunes - film songs and stuff, you know, Didi tera dewar...
"No one taught the sarod in Mangalore - that's where I grew up - so, I learnt from another uncle, who is a vocalist, mimicking whatever he did on the voice on the instrument."

"His technique is almost blasphemous sometimes," Avantika juts in, "It shocks sarod players' consciences. I've seen that look on some of their faces, it's too funny!"

"That is super-cool!" Sundari says, "As in, you learnt all the instrument techniques from scratch? All by yourself?"
"Yeah, pretty much."
"Impressive, man."
Gopal says, suddenly jumping into the conversation from the corner of the terrace, "This Uji only looks like an unimpressive bumpkin. He's actually a dude. In other words, he's the opposite of what I am!"
This is Gopal fishing for a compliment. I don't react, but Sundari falls for the bait, "What are you saying? You're really a stud, man! You're doing a cool fellowship, you write so well, you're on TV all the time..."
"I live in a little shit-hole in T.Nagar with an aged uncle. I have no job, I have nothing I want to do." He is taking this too far now, but Sundari laughs this bait off.

"Are you guys drinking vodka?" I ask.
Avantika laughs, "Yeah. Want some?"
I walk into the apartment, and holler from inside, "Yo! What are you guys drinking this with?" I know that my fridge has no soft-drinks or juices.
"Cold water!" Gopal says. That is disgusting, vodka with cold water. I fish out some whiskey from my cupboard and fix myself a drink with ice.

Just then, I get an SMS, from Uma, "Awake?"

I call her back immediately, "Hello!"
"What's up!" she exclaims in a way in which only she can, mixing the excitement with a slice of restraint.
"I'm just drinking whiskey! What's up with you?" I ask, sipping my whiskey. It is a single-malt, bootlegged from Pondicherry, and goes down my parched gullet eagerly.
"Coming for the wedding, no?" Uma asks, sounding slightly tense.
"Of course! Why are you even asking?"
"Generally..." She pauses. I sense that she wants to tell me something else, but doesn't know how to. I wait for a few seconds for her to say something, before changing the topic to my eccentric guests, and the mini-performance on the terrace.
"The girl must be cute!" she says.
"Gopal has his eyes on her," I say, dryly. Then I add, remembering suddenly, "You remember that party where I first met you?"
"Vaguely!" she says, sounding vague.
"Yeah. So, I met this girl there. I even spoke to her for some time. But she doesn't remember me at all!"
"You reminded her of your conversation?" she asks, matter-of-factly.
"No! But we spoke for quite a while. And I remember her so clearly."
"Uji, did you say, 'Hey! Remember, we met at that party?'" she says, imitating my voice alarmingly accurately.
"No, man!" It is a ridiculous question to ask, I'm sure.
"Well, then how do you know she doesn't remember you?"
"She spoke about that party, she spoke about seeing Gopal there. Hell, she remembers you!"
"Hmmm," Uma says.

There is another pause, again awkward, where I sense Uma wants to tell me why she called, but she isn't able to bring herself to. We speak of other things. We discuss each other's jobs for a while. She writes on films and drama for a living, and she tells me that she has this idea for a book of famous stills from Indian cinema, with some comments on each of them. Her choices veer between the cliched and the eccentric. She has the immortal beam of light from Kaagaz ke phool in mind, she also thinks of the last freeze-frame in Charulata. From Sholay, she tells me of a shot of Jaya on the balcony - I don't recollect it, but she assures me it is worth it. She wants to include a couple of shots from an Adoor Gopalakrishnan movie I haven't seen. "Gopal was named after him, you know?" she says. We discuss this and more for a bit, until I get through many more sips of my whiskey, before I get impatient, "Listen, Uma. You didn't call me for this chit-chat, did you? Because I have to go back to my guests at some point."

Uma laughs nervously, and says, "Ok. Listen. I am getting really nervous about this wedding."
"Next Sunday, right? Isn't it a little late to be getting nervous?"
"Better now than after, I think."
I laugh, and ask, "What are you nervous about?"
"Random things, you know. I've been seeing Arun for a year-and-a-half, yes? But living with him is a completely different deal, no?" Before I can react, she continues, "I mean, who knows what I'll discover about him, what habits will irritate me... I mean, it's all okay to love someone, and I love him, okay? But I'm getting a little tense about the permanence attached to this wedding."
"Why don't you live with him for a while before marrying him?"
"Yeah, right."
"I'm serious."
"Dude, we still live in India, as much as we try denying it."
It is time now for falsely confident advice. "Hey, it'll all be perfectly fine! I mean, he's a great guy, you love him... Yeah, you'll probably find some things about him that you don't like - and you'll never discover these things unless you live with him. But those are just small compromises, right?" I don't know Arun too well at all. I have this theory, that you can never know a person unless you drop societal niceties when you talk to them, and I've met him only twice, in very civil, very social circumstances. But this is cliched advice, I don't need to know Arun, or even Uma, to give this speech. Like the horoscope advice in the papers, "Control your temper to avoid confrontation", it is applicable to any person, of any persuasion, on any day of the week.

She reacts with silence. I drone on along the same lines, telling her of stability, long-term vision, and lasting relationships. I morph into a nondescript self-help book.

She says, suddenly, "Can I come and stay with you for a couple of days?" She pauses, and continues, "I just need to get away from this world for a bit."
I am taken aback, but I don't let it get in the way of my response, "Yeah, sure!"
"Thanks!" she says, sounding relieved. And she adds again, "Listen, no Gopal for those two or three days, please?"
I almost saw that request coming.

Some time ago, Uma came to Chennai for a weekend. She wanted to get away from her work, her extended family introducing her to various eligible boys, and her boss who was developing a dangerous crush on her. I didn't live in Chennai then, I would move there a couple of weeks later. She stayed with Gopal at his uncle's house. Conveniently, Gopal's uncle was out of town.

I have heard this story from both parties, and my version is a little muddled.

Uma told me on the phone, the evening I told her that I had met Gopal after years, "It was too much fun, you know. We walked all around Madras, going on aimless walks on the beach, around Georgetown, in the bylanes around the Central station. We came back home, drank lots, watched art movies, read poetry to each other... It was a lot of fun. It felt like we had finally gotten over the fact that we had broken up."

Gopal, on the other hand, said, "So, she came one afternoon. I picked her up from the station and showed her around the by-lanes. We saw all sorts of stuff, we bought strange books off pavements. Then I took her to Georgetown, bought her Burmese noodles. We went to the beach, we drank, we watched movies. It was highly romantic.
"We did some hanky-panky at night," he added, "And she promised to come back next weekend. But she didn't. And she didn't come on the weekend after either. Then, one day, out of the blue, she called me and said she was seeing this other guy. Some fucker called Arun. He's a lawyer, apparently. Sounds like a bloody bore, no?"

Uma had a different version of Arun, "You remember this guy I told you about? The cute, fair, tall, slightly plump guy..." I remembered her mentioning some such. "So, I'm seeing him now."

Gopal said, "He has a fascination for cars, apparently. So hackneyed, man. I'm sure he's a James Bond fan. She deserves better, dude, don't you think?"

"He's so refreshing," Uma told me, a month into the relationship, "Never tired, never irritated, never complains of work, or the pressures of the world. He's a big-shot in his law firm, but it doesn't affect what he's like outside. Such a breath of fresh air, to be around him in the evenings!"

"They seem very settled, man," Gopal said, resignedly, "I'm not saying she should dump him for me, but she really should find someone better. Anyway, thank god she never found out that I was getting some relapse of feelings." Uma found out, soon enough. She ignored Gopal completely for a while - and that was the least she could do for his well-being, give him that little distance from her - and Gopal eventually stopped talking of Arun and his mainstream-ness.

It was in this context that I re-connected with Gopal - he saw me as a window to Uma, and he tried, in convoluted ways, to gaze through it. Sadly for him, she closed the curtains firmly. In this second-coming, I saw a Gopal who was a faint shadow of his earlier self. He got drunk and sobbed about his failed party, he withdrew into his uncle's house and buried himself in writing some fiction. He showed me a few chapters of the book, they were stultifying beyond belief. I don't know if you can describe it as fiction at all, much of the book seemed like a pompous autobiography masquerading as a novel about a young student leader getting disillusioned by a nasty system. The novel was unbecoming of someone of Gopal's intelligence - it was biased, the characters were dreadfully two-dimensional. I thought of Gopal's understanding of people as so perceptive and nuanced, that I couldn't digest this drivel. I wondered if his circumstances had forced him to paint his characters in such clearly black-or-white shades. The writing was boring, the character arcs were predictable, he segued too often into political sermons and morality tales. In short, it was the opposite of unputdownable - unpickupable.

I don't know how the novel ended, because he never finished it. He found the strength, somehow, to be objective about the book, and gave up.

What intrigued me the most during this time, was that Gopal managed to maintain his regular media appearances. He remained a much-wanted talking head on TV and wrote columns for newspapers and magazines. His opinions still leaned as leftwards as they had when he was in the party, but because be fashioned himself as an academic, and not a politician, they were seen as having more credibility.

Gopal and I became each other's only close friends in the last year or so, walking around the bazaar, drinking tea and whiskey, riding around the city on his bike, and making whimsical trips to places around Chennai. Gopal has vast interlocking networks of politicians, academics, writers and dramatists, who hang out in my balcony often. He uses my apartment as his lounge, and I don't complain; I don't have too many visitors otherwise.

I don't know how I will handle Uma's request. It will be impossible to tell Gopal that Uma will come, but she doesn't want to meet him. If I tell him that I'm going out of town, and he finds out I'm here, he'll get very upset. He has a house key, he might even try taking advantage of an empty apartment.

But then, Uma will come only on that condition. "Yeah, sure. No Gopal for those days," I concede.
Uma says, "Great! See you next weekend?"
It is Thursday today, "You mean day after tomorrow?"
She checks something and says, "Oh yeah! Yes, day after tomorrow."
"Done."

I walk back to the terrace to find my three guests locked in what looks like a fierce debate, but on closer inspection, turns out to be merely a dissection of Gopal's rebel-plan for Sundari. "Mussolini had a greater respect for human liberties than your parents!" Gopal says. She seems a little uncomfortable with the statement, but says nothing.

Gopal then plans a weekend getaway, to Bangalore, and lays it down like it is a military operation, "Tell your parents that you're going with a couple of friends, and come. Even if they refuse, just leave. Drastic action is the order of the day."
"Which weekend are you planning this?" I ask, hopefully.
"Tomorrow night," he says.
"You're also going?" I ask, with more hope in my voice.
"I am." I am relieved now. Uma can come without fearing of bumping into Gopal.

"Come along?" Sundari asks me, with those pleading eyebrows of hers - in two words, turning my solution into a whole new conundrum.
***

Have had a very tough two weeks. Too many night show movies, concerts, partying, a trip to Bangalore and work. And, I'm off westward today - for the first time in my life, beyond Jaisalmer. Back in two weeks to tell you more of this story.

Her Obviousness - Part III

Continued from here. All parts together, are here.
***

"How is Uma?" Gopal asks. He asks me this question every time we talk of her. In the time when I was Gopal's understudy-cum-manfriday, I developed an unclassifiable love for Uma. She was a whole five years older than me, she had a job, and lived in a world that I barely comprehended at the time. It strikes me that she was, then, as old as I am now. Through the eyes of a eighteen-year-old, twenty-four did seem like an eternity away - it is that natural feeling, isn't it, where ages seem older until you actually live them.

Uma accompanied Gopal to most of his rallies and meetings, and because he spent most of his time hobnobbing with the bigwigs, we spent most of our time talking to each other. There was always an aura of melancholy about Uma; but it was an assured melancholy, as if she was very happy being like that. She was social, sometimes, too social for her own good, had multifarious friends in multifarious surroundings, but she never fit right into anything - there was a removedness about her involvement. Even when she spoke to me, in conversations that were often preciously private, she never looked at me - seemed to be addressing a third person who invisibly sat in front of her eyes.

We didn't use Gopal as a crutch to hang out together for much longer, we met independently of him. Afternoons, when I rarely had class, were spent together inhaling book-dust in Bangalore's cubbyhole bookshops, and drinking diluted beer in its gloomy pubs listening to lazy music. If you ask me what we spoke about on those afternoons, I will struggle to tell you. We spoke about books, I think, we loved very similar authors - the Americans, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, and the Indians - Ghosh, Seth and Narayan. Often, we walked down MG Road, when it still had its boulevard, slightly buzzed, slightly melancholic, completely silent and absolutely content being in each other's company.

She was from a family that heard a lot of Carnatic music, though she didn't know much, and I remember conversations about Hindustani and Carnatic music. We both loved O.P. Nayyar, and despised A.R.Rahman, and went on long drives in her car, listening to and singing along with old Hindi music cassettes.
"How do you know all these songs?" she asked me, once.
"My father," I said, "Was a fanatic." My family didn't like my father's obsession, because they came from a family of Hindustani vocalists, all descendants of my great-grandfather, who was a close friend of the legendary Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, in addition to being a respected doctor. My grand-uncle had an indelible impact on Yakshagana music, being one of the pioneers who gave it a Hindustani music twist. Uma's grandfather was a leading concert-organiser of his time, and her family, who viewed me as an adorable kid who was, perhaps, in love with her, organised two concerts for me that year.

The end of Gopal's relationship with her came quite inevitably - he was too busy to spend enough time with her, and she was too irritated with his unpredictable schedule and his increasing involvement with the Party. "The Party is his only girlfriend," she said, unwittingly echoing what Bhagat Singh once said about independence being his bride. "If I have a boyfriend, I should be able to talk to him at least once in two days, no?" she asked, tiredly.

I was in a strange position, being a close confidante of both parties. "She's too clingy, man," Gopal said, "I mean, if I go to a village with no network for a couple of days, I'm dead." I wanted to tell him that landline phones were everywhere, and that he could call her once in a while, wherever he was, but, unlike now, our relationship wasn't one of equals then.

This break-up upset me a little more than I thought it would. Gopal and Uma seemed so naturally to fit into each other's lives. Uma's modelling gave her an aura of being stupid, but she wasn't. Sometimes, her intelligence and depth of emotion dwarfed Gopal's. Gopal came across as someone who was all about impact, but even he had an inherent intellectualism about him. He was someone who found justifications for his living, however indefensible his ways were, and went to great lengths, reading, thinking and writing about these theories. She saw through him, and I knew he liked that.

They understood each other in quiet ways that I haven't seen much in couples. They spoke very little, and communicated without any fuss. They never had a misunderstanding that I knew of - and being a close friend of both of them, I knew a lot. The end came because they just drifted apart, they felt very little need for each other. They got each other so well that they never had a break-up conversation. One evening, they had a normal conversation in my presence at his apartment, and by the end of it, they knew it was time to break-up.

I begged Gopal many times to talk to her, and get back together with her. He said, "Your being upset with this is most bizarre. Both Uma and I think you're in love with her, and now when your coast is clear, you're getting upset about it. We are fine, we've moved on. I think you should too."

Uma said, "Uji, I sometimes think you were in love with Gopal and me as a concept, and not the two of us individually."
I disagreed, "No. I'm only in love with you, I'll admit that. But I have no chances whatsoever, I'll admit that also. But it will pass, I think. It is a question of finding someone else."
She laughed, "Then stop getting upset about this."
"But you guys were so perfect..."
"I was in that relationship, Uji," she said, with an air of finality, "Not you."

They kept in touch, I think, for some time, although I lost all contact with Gopal. Every now and then, I'd see her reply to an SMS with the her Gopal-expression, and walk away to a corner when she got a call, like she did when Gopal called. When he came back to Bangalore, for weekends, they would make plans to meet, and occasionally, these plans fructified. But their relationship faded away completely within six months, leaving behind hazy memories that are half-true, half-fantasy, and the satisfaction, Uma told me, of knowing someone as lovely as Gopal.

By the end of my second year in college, my life was so meshed with Uma's, that people presumed she was my girlfriend. In college, that made me a cool guy, I was Gopal's successor in every way. Amongst her friends, though, it made her highly uncomfortable. From the cosy comfort of a close friendship, I watched her draw harsh lines that just made us good friends, then friends, and eventually old-friends-who-say-hi-occasionally. "Oh, each time we meet, we pick up right where we left off, like we've always been that way," we say, to other people. Only we know how untrue that is.

Gopal never fails to ask me, "How is Uma?" every time we talk of her, like he has done just now. Initially, I doubted the genuineness of his question, but of late, I'm convinced that he is actually concerned. She never asks me about him, unless I bring him up in conversation.
"I spoke to her yesterday," I say, "She's getting a little tense about all the wedding planning."
"The wedding planning? Or getting married?"
"A bit of both, I think."

"Who next?" Sundari asks, excited by this conversation.
Gopal goes into a ponderous silence for a few seconds and declares, "There was this other girl, Mandavi..." Gopal stops, and I know why he does. He has confessed to me that this relationship lasted only for a few weeks, and that he is embarrassed about remembering precious little about it. "I don't even remember where we first kissed!" he told me once. He said, "I'm telling you what happened and how, so that the two of us can reconstruct it later."

I wonder if one can forget an entire relationship, however unserious it was.

"But that didn't last long," Gopal said, "Ended as abruptly as it started."

There is an awkward silence - everyone expects Gopal to say something more about Mandavi, but he doesn't, he has nothing to say.
Avantika breaks the silence with, "Anyone wants chai?" She will offer to make some now, but I don't want her chai, it lacks punch, it is too subtle for me.
"Let's walk down to the tea shop at the end of the road?" I ask, and everyone seems more enthusiastic.

Gopal empties the bowl of fruits on to his hand, distributes them amongst us, fairly and equally, in his communist manner, and leads us out of the doorway, down the stairs and through the front gate.

I live in T. Nagar, where South India buys bling sarees and davanis for bling weddings, in what used to be a quiet lane behind the immortal Pondy Bazaar. My mother told me, when I was a kid, that it was called Pondy Bazaar because most of the goods came from Pondicherry. Recently, a book put that theory to rest for me - the name came as a corruption of Soundara Pandy Bazaar, named after a certain Soundarapandian Nadar, whose statue proudly stood at one end of the bazaar.

On weekends, only the brave denizens of the neighbourhood venture out on foot, and only the foolish take their cars outside the safety of their apartment's minuscule parking lots. Pondy Bazaar is frighteningly crowded, and frighteningly popular. You cannot walk three feet without bumping into a bargain or overhearing one. You can buy anything for a little less than half the price he quotes for it, you can find spare parts for anything you own, you can find someone to repair every kind of machinery. In a year and a bit, Pondy Bazaar hasn't disappointed me even once.

But once the shutters fall down on the mega-shops, the gaudy, flashing neon lights rest for the day, their employees work their way into jam-packed buses to their suburbs, the roadside hawkers throw tarpaulin over their little shops, the area acquires a different glow. The roads are bathed in orange, from the hazy lights that dot the roadside, the pavements are taken over by small omelette and tea sellers, a few drunks walk to and from the local wine shop, families and shoppers gather at the eateries for dinner, the occasional bike speeds by, a few cars sail along the street. Strange city maintenance vehicles trundle along - the garbage trucks that make half-hearted attempts at cleaning the streets, another one that emits some spray that apparently de-mosquitoes the area, tow trucks that had a busy day making small money off parking violators, assorted cranes from frenetic construction sites make their way back to their nightly resting places.

We trudge down my street and take the right turn on to the Bazaar. Gopal and Sundari walk a little behind Avantika and me. They are engrossed in a conversation about some play she acted in last week. Gopal is giving her some kind of feedback, I gather.

Avantika says, "Pretty girl, no?" I nod. "I think there's something going on," she adds.
"You're meeting both of them for the first time, and you still want to gossip."
"I'm just speculating, pah!"

We congregate around the tea shop, an open air set-up made entirely of tyres, plastic drums and plywood. A young boy sits behind this plywood counter and takes orders, and doles out cigarettes and crunchies along with the tea. We get four teas for the four of us, and I help myself to a cigarette. Gopal gives me a look, and I say, "Dude, I told you, once a week. The habit's on its way out."

I take a strip of glossy paper kept on a plastic plate, ignite it in a small lamp kept for the purpose, and light my cigarette with it. I ask Sundari, "So, why are you being hidden from your parents?" Her non-recognition has made it very difficult for me to talk to her, and this question has taken some courage.

She giggles and says, "Long story, man."
Gopal butts in, "So, some guy was supposed to come and see her today, even though she made it very clear to her parents that she was not interested in this sort of thing."
"So," she continues, "We made a plan. I left home in the morning, and haven't gone back since... My parents know most of my friends, and they would have started looking by lunch time. But they don't know Gopal, so I'm hiding with him. I send them messages from STD booths telling them I'm alive, and that I'm only protesting."
Avantika laughs. I say, "This plan smacks of Gopal."
Sundari beams at him, "Yes. Gopal is planning a rebellion for me."
"That's a bit extreme, no?" I ask him, "Even with your background?"
"You don't know her parents, Uji," he says, "She can't leave the house after seven, unless she is at a concert or a performance."
"Or at a friend's house they approve of." she adds.
"Yeah. It's too oppressive... She's not a kid, right?"
"You know, they didn't even ask me before beginning this matrimony process. Suddenly, I find a guy's matrimony profile in my inbox, and when I ask my Appa, he coolly tells me that he has sent out my profile along with my email address to many eligible boys. I am checking my desktop for something, and there's a folder with my photos - in different poses, different clothes, singing, acting, dancing, at home, with my parents, with my brother, with cousins, grandparents. And, to top it all, a zip-file with all these photos in it! God knows which creep or his father has been checking me out.
"Two weeks ago, they met this aunty and uncle, who saw me act in a play and fell in love with me. So, their son, some boring engineering dude, with some boring engineering job, in some boring software company was supposed to turn up this evening to check me out."
"You decided you'd rather have Gopal check you out," I say.
She giggles again, "Yeah, why not! He's good-looking, and, from what I gather, rather smart also."

Gopal says, "You're the only one who thinks I'm good-looking."
He is lying. Uma always told me she thought Gopal was handsome. Hell, even I think he is handsome.
Gopal is interested in this girl, and he is making it uncharacteristically obvious to everyone.

"Okay, you're not a John Abraham with mass appeal," Sundari laughs, "But you have an appeal about you."
"Yeah. His mass appeals to some people," I say, punching Gopal on his tummy.
"I'm working on it, dude. Strict diets, walks around the neighbourhood... It's all happening."

"Tell me," Sundari says suddenly, "Don't you think this John Abraham looks like his face has been photoshopped on to the rest of his body? Or, like one of those photos you take with that cutout on which you add your face..."
We laugh, and she says, "I was watching him for an hour on Koffee with Karan this morning, and that is the only thought that came to my mind. I didn't even hear what he was saying." We laugh some more.

Avantika is the first to finish her tea, and she asks for another one. We finish slowly, and are happy with one. I stub out my half-finished cigarette. The fact that I don't enjoy it anymore is encouraging.
Trudging back to my house, Sundari walks with me. She asks, "Will you play for us when we go back?"
"I haven't played in a month, I've almost stopped, you know," I tell her. She looks a bit disappointed, so I add, "But I'll play." I make a theatrical look towards the skies, and declare, "I'll play this raag called Chandni Kedar?"
"Like the moonlight?" she asks.
"Yes," I say. I am such a fraud; the moonlight has little to do with my choice of raag, I have just spent the last week listening to a Vilayat Khan recording of it. I like listening to classical music recordings over weeks, they take time to seep in, they take time to get under your skin, possess you and push you to want to recreate the magic. The Chandni Kedar, a raag I never learnt formally, is nearly ripe now.
"I don't know much about Hindustani music," she says, "Although I can identify some raags. Is Chandni Kedar like Kedar? I think I can identify that..."
"Oh yeah, it is. The differences are very small," I say.

We are home, and I bring my sarod out to the terrace, along with my tanpura box. Once the drone begins, I start the arduous task of tuning an unused sarod. The instrument, like most, hates being neglected, and has to be coaxed back into civil behaviour. It takes a half an hour to get the twenty-three strings in shape, and fingers warmed up and ready to play. Avantika and Gopal don't have the patience, and have retreated back into the house, while Sundari watches me tune silently with no comment.

I look up at her, and say, "Ok, I'm ready." She nods, smiling, and shouts, "Gopal! He's ready." Gopal makes some noise from inside the house. She says, "Start, they'll come."

I start, plucking the sa string, and adding a layer of the raag on it with the sympathetic strings. I repeat, until I am sure of the sa. I begin adding notes to the sa now, the ri, the pa. Small phrases, a twang of the support strings, another small phrase, another twang. Then I let out a couple of phrases, very typical of the Kedars. She smiles, I play the phrases again, just to see that smile again. She imitates the curve of the phrase with her hand.

Gopal and Avantika join us in the terrace, with glasses of water in their hands. Sundari whispers to Gopal, "Raag Chandni Kedar." Gopal nods, cluelessly. Avantika says, "Hmmm," to a phrase I play.

The alaap continues, meandering in the lower registers, setting a platform for the raag. I am more unhurried than I usually am, a sign that the raag has made some inroads into my system. Sundari likes the two ma-s in succession, the phrase pa-ma-ma brings that smile to her face each time. I use it more often that I normally would.

She gets a message on her phone, she looks at it, smiles, turns to Gopal and smiles again. I noticed Gopal fiddling with his phone just a few seconds ago. This happens again, and again. I close my eyes, and concentrate on the raag, nothing else can soothe me now.
***

To continue.

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.