Thirteenth Day

This is part of something much, much larger. But it sort of holds up on its own. And, I haven't written in a while and the blog feels neglected. Hence.

***

My grandfather died when I was 17. We lived in Dehradun then, and he died in Madras. My father was a bureaucrat and we lived all over the country. This meant that I met him only when I came to Madras for the holidays, once a year, sometimes twice. 

He was a journalist with the Express, and he wrote a weekly column on politics and current events. Each day, he left for work only after a leisurely lunch. On many days, he never went anywhere. So, we read all the newspapers together. And we deliberated about the news. Our discussions stemmed from what we read, but very soon, we found ourselves far, far away from where we started, debating, discussing, throwing ideas and arguments at each other. I remember refusing to eat for a whole day after a long argument we had on the ethics of begging. I was indoctrinated to never give money to a beggar -- I was encouraging begging, my mother said. But he argued (and I never found out whether he was being serious or just playing devil's advocate) that I was being inhuman. I think I told him I will earn my food, and that he need not give me anything. He let me be hungry until I asked my grandmother for food the next evening. I don't know if that exercise taught me anything else, but it sure taught me hunger. 

I wrote to him regularly when I was away, and he replied unfailingly. He rambled and went off topic in almost every letter. He was often obscure, and he assumed I knew many things. Like, he would write about something he read in the EPW, and say, 'It makes the standard utilitarian arguments.' But I was 12. I didn't know what utilitarian was. It was a wonder that he wrote such precise, clear, forceful editorials week after week. I was, perhaps, his outlet for all that went on in his head. 

One day, I heard him speak at the University of Madras. He spoke on the space where language and culture meet, and linked it to Tamil patriotism. He spoke in a language that was neither English nor Tamil, switching so seamlessly between the two that his tongue had a fully formed structure of its own. I wondered if he was making a subtle point with that exercise. 

His lectures were famous, you know. He had this New Years' Eve lecture each year on contemporary politics and what to look forward to in the coming year, and I was told that the halls would be overflowing and people stood in the aisles for two whole hours. Each political party would send its spies to find out what he lauded and what he criticised. 

It was almost cruel that after a stroke, he lost his ability to speak. He taught himself to communicate through guttural sounds and gesturing, but there was no way he could lecture. He lived like that for four years. He was healthy enough to walk around sometimes, but other times, he was wheeled around by a nurse. 

One day, four months after the stroke, my uncles who lived with him noticed that he was reading a lot of political theory and making furious notes in some old diaries. When people asked him, he revealed nothing. Just a grunt or two dismissing their questions. Then, a month or so later, he demanded that he be taken to the University of Madras library each morning for half a day. My uncles, glad that he still wanted to do something with his life, made the arrangements. 

He read all sorts of journals and essays. He started maintaining boxes and boxes of photocopies. He cut out articles from newspapers each morning and put them in folders. His poor nurse bore the brunt of his compulsive arranging and rearranging. 

He met some of his lawyer friends every other day and spent hours discussing things with them -- apparently, he would write what he wanted to say on a piece of paper, and they would respond vocally. Each night, after dinner, he would write. First, on one-sided paper. Write, edit, rewrite, tear pages, write again… Then, he would transcribe his first draft into notebooks. These were refined with a red pen and fully re-copied. After almost two years, he handed four notebooks to my uncle and asked him to get whatever was written there typed out. 

It was about two hundred pages in print, and it was a meditation on the notion of equality, from its underpinnings in philosophy and political theory to how and why it was the cornerstone of human rights. For him, everything else was negotiable. Equality wasn't. Everything stemmed from equality, he wrote, and so, if we understood the idea, we would understand the entirety of political science. It was a grandiose thought, perhaps a little too sweeping. Still, the grasp over his arguments, his cogency, and the sheer breadth of knowledge made the argument as convincing as it could be. 

He covered equality in interpersonal dealings, you know, between husband and wife, parent and son, boss and employee... "micro-equality". And he covered "macro-equality", in the way Government deals with people, in the way large corporations deal with each other, in how nations negotiated deals... His thesis was that they are all manifestations of the same idea. The prose was like one of his editorials -- sparkling, crackling with wit and wisdom. His ideas were crystal clear. His arguments were as strong as fortresses without being as imposing. It was incredible.

I remember reading it then (while I read it, his voice rang in my ear as if he were reading it out to me) and not really understanding it. My father, though, read it over and over again for months. He made copious notes while he read. He even sent my grandfather three letters about it. He never got a reply. 

My grandfather's health deteriorated almost immediately after he was done with bringing the book out. I had gotten into IIT Delhi by then, and was waiting for college to start. It was a great time to be in Dehradun. Away from the crippling summer on the plains with nothing to do and an admission in a top course in a plum college.   

Each evening, I would go out with this girl and come back really late at night. She was my father's colleague's daughter. Dehra was quite safe, and neither of our parents cared that we were out after dark. I had a motorbike, and we went on long rides to deserted places. She was smart, though she behaved like she didn't like being smart. She was moderately pretty, but behaved like she was much prettier. She had a fascination for scatological humour.

One day, in some thicket, at dusk, we kissed. I hadn't kissed a girl before, and I burst out laughing. She asked me why. I said, "It's strange, isn't it? That we express our fondness by locking lips." She said, "No. We lock lips because it feels good. I'm not fond of you or anything." 

Kissing became a regular feature, although we barely went much further. My hand went inside her shirt once, and I felt her back and worked my way up to her bra when she stopped me. She giggled about it afterwards.

One day, her parents were out of town, and she told me most nonchalantly that she wanted to try having sex. She was a year older, studying in Delhi, and some of her classmates had done it. I was nervous, but she was confident. I was also excited, of course, that some girl wanted to actually do it with me. She insisted, more than once, that she chose me only because I was "available and attractive enough". 

So, we gave it a shot. No pun intended. 

I sent our watchman to buy condoms and swore him to secrecy. I went to her house by afternoon. We kissed first, and I made nervous attempts to take her top off. She broke off suddenly and declared that we must drink a little to make the whole thing more relaxed. I had never drunk before, and I gulped the vodka like it was a glass of buttermilk. She did the same. A couple of rounds of this vodka, and we almost naturally threw ourselves at each other. After some fiddling with each other's clothes and the pack of condoms, we had awkward teen sex… Limbs getting in each other's ways, not really knowing what to grip and how, never sure what can be done and what cannot, not finding the right spots.  

I even remember her saying, "Don't look down there, you pervert!" And I wondered once, loudly, "Ok, if I don't look, how do I know if I'm hitting the right place or not." I was too nervous to even find it funny. Pressure of performance, perhaps. Of course, every now and then, we got going, and we felt that incredible rush of pleasure. But largely, we were like two people looking for treasure in a dark cave with no torches.

I asked her more than once, "Am I in?" and saying, "This condom doesn't let me feel anything, so I'm never sure."

We weren't wholly unsuccessful, although I had expected it to be a lot more fun than it eventually was. She concluded that the foreplay was more exciting than the sex itself. I insisted that it would improve with practice. She said we would practice the following day. I agreed. Still naked and tired, we threw our limbs around each other and fell asleep. 

I woke up way after midnight, much later than the time I usually got back home. For the first time, I experienced that heaviness you have behind your eyes after you've had sex. My head was pounding. I was groggy, I felt like I was under sedatives. I wore my clothes quickly, gave her some desperately breathless goodbye kisses and rushed back home. 

Outside my door, there was this little note, 'Thatha passed away. We have left for Madras. Wait here for instructions.' It was a functional note, no frills. But I could sense their anger at my disappearance. I wondered how they might have rushed to Madras. They would've taken a taxi to Delhi, and a flight from there. I was away from home for almost the entire day, and I had no idea when the note was written. There was no way of telling if they had left in the afternoon and were already in Madras, or if they left in the evening and were now in Delhi. 

I first called my father's friend in Delhi, where we usually stayed. He groggily told me hadn't heard the news, and asked me questions about it. I told him I had no clue. It was three in the morning, and I was scared to call my grandfather's house in Madras. I guessed that my parents would have gone straight to the airport, and taken a flight to Madras. I could hear my father's voice asking me what I had been up to. I decided to call in the morning.

Then, I had this brainwave. I called my brother's hostel -- he was studying management in Ahmedabad then. But someone told me that he had left a few hours ago to Madras because his grandfather had passed away.

It took me almost half an hour to register that my grandfather had died. The first emotion I had was of guilt. Guilt for being away from home when the news came in. Guilt for thinking of how to save my skin for being away, when I should have been grieving over his death. Guilt for having sex when he died… I don't know, it was a combination of all these things, I think. 

That's what made me leave for Madras immediately, without waiting for instructions. I took money from my father's cupboard, and got into the earliest bus to Delhi. Then, I went to the airport, but found the tickets too expensive. After half a day of hoping in vain for tickets on some train, I got into the unreserved compartment on the Grand Trunk Express the next evening. I didn't tell anyone how I was coming. It was the guilt, perhaps. It was also, strangely, a sense of adventure. 

My family in Madras couldn't contact me for two days. In the middle of the mourning over my Thatha's death, there were relatives and friends looking for me in Delhi and Madras. My mother's sister, who lived in Calcutta, flew to Dehra, and asked around. That girl I slept with broke down and confessed to having spent the day with me. She told my aunt that I left at only two in the morning. My aunt and her parents asked her what we were doing till then, she merely cried. This bit of news reached Madras around the same time that I did.

I was coming from two grimy, gruelling, grief-stricken days on the train. I barely spoke for those two days -- there was no one to talk to, really. Even in that crowd, I had found the space to be lonely. The world in my head was in one of two modes -- over-activeness or completely blank. There would either be too many parallel trains of thought -- memories of my grandfather, the wrath of my family, the absolute bizarreness of my instinctive travel, the fuzzy whirl of having sex for the first time, all running in tandem, coiling around each other, swirling, in my mind like a slow-boiling broth -- or absolutely nothing at all. Zilch. A whiteness. A numbness. 

I didn't have a reserved seat, of course, and that provided its own challenges. I would wait for the train to pick up enough speed so that no one could get in or out, and then go to the loo. For two nights, I caught sleep sitting up on a wooden bench between two men. I didn't brush. I barely ate. I didn't have enough money to.

In Madras, I was welcomed by my mother with a resounding slap. I didn't know which of my infractions that was for. She said, "I was mentally prepared to start a parallel funeral for you." I said, "Don't be dramatic," and walked inside. I was tired, and I thought the least I deserved was a chance to bathe and a hot meal. My uncle didn't like my tone, and started screaming at me. I turned around, and said, "You want to wake up the dead with all that shouting?"

The family was too exhausted to respond to that statement. They all stopped talking to me. The next ten days felt like that train journey -- surrounded by hordes of people who didn't want to make conversation with me. My brain, just like the train, was on those two modes, of hyper-activity or numbness. I had many variations on the dream where I was having sex with a much older woman who lived near our house in Dehradun, where she taunted me for not being inside her. Soon, I was crying and asking her to let go of me. She kept saying, "Make me come, I'll let you go." This dream woke me up many times, sweating and thirsty. 

On the sixth day, I went to my grandfather's cupboard and picked up a copy of his book on equality and read it carefully for the next week. I joined my family at meal times, conversed with them in monosyllabic grunts, like my grandfather used to do, and stayed as far away as possible. I frequently took walks around Alwarpet on hot afternoons, getting lost often, to come back hours later. No one asked me where I went or why. No one cared anymore.  

Finally, the thirteenth day came. After the big lunch to which all sorts of people -- academicians, lawyers, doctors, journalists, students, fans -- came, a cousin was asked to sing. He was a few years younger than me, and was already some sort of classical music star. He must've been only twelve or thirteen then.

The house had a large,  partly open hall and a courtyard. My cousin sat on the floor of this hall, on a mat, with an electronic tanpura and sang my grandfather's favourite classical kriti-s. He closed his eyes, cocked his head slightly upwards, and sang. There was little sentiment in his demeanour -- he was too young for that -- but the music was highly emotional. Open throated, slightly rough and loud, the voice filled the hall with great warmth. Hope emanated from that little boy's music. An aunt who hadn't smiled in two weeks, smiled. Two uncles started singing along, while another cousin accompanied them tapping on a table. Someone remarked that my cousin sang just the kind of classical music my grandfather liked. One of the uncle's who sang along imitated how my grandfather would've appreciated the music. The hall resounded with laughter. The woe of my grandfather's loss was replaced by the warmth of his memory. 

Soon, the hall was filled with people telling stories about the departed. Really embarrassing stories. His sister even described how he would fart silently and secretly in public, and how she learnt to recognise it from the expression on his face. There were stories about him and my grandmother disappearing shadily on many afternoons. One of his cousins said he once saw them walk into a nearby lodge. 

The hall was more electric than it had been even when he was around.

After the crowd cleared, my father, who hadn't said a word to me about the entire incident, put his arm around my shoulder and said, "Next time, call me. I'll put you on a flight." I looked at him incredulously, but I realised he meant it. After a long silence, I smiled. He smiled back. My brother, who was within earshot, laughed, and said, "God, you are the real pet. If I had done this, Appa would've disowned me."

For the first time since I saw that note, I laughed. 

Father, Child and Holy Dinosaurs

In the last five days, I have watched two movies that portrayed a father-child relationship and featured dinosaurs. Apart from this superficial and slightly freakish similarity, I think I can confidently state that Deivathirumagal and The Tree of Life come from two different universes.

The former approaches the subject like a sugarcane juicer would approach sugarcane, extracting every little drop of sugary sweetness it can from the story of a childish father and an too-smart-for-her-age child. The latter, ah, well... The latter approaches the subject with a microscope, a syringe and fine piece of forceps; digging into the cane, showing you little nuances, droplets of saccharine, strands of rough fibre and unexpectedly zooming out, to explore the existence and relevance of the sugarcane itself. Deivathirumagal is about the unordinary, it is about special people in special circumstances, but it is told in the most ordinary of manners, milking the specialness of the situation for every cheap teardrop, being needlessly cute, needlessly melodramatic, needlessly obvious, needlessly over-the-top. The Tree of Life, on the other hand, is about normal people, everyday relationships, regular emotions, jealousies, happinesses and freedoms, but it is about finding the magic in that normality, and still asking questions of it, it is about valuing those emotions, validating them, almost, but still placing them amidst a tremendous canvas. The Tree of Life is a meditation, it is a probing, self-indulgent journey, it is an artist's quest to understand his own emotions, and their place in the cosmos around him.

In Deivathirumagal, as a result, there is constant chatter, the father and daughter have a family-whistle, they have cute duet acts, he tells her stories, and gets proud of her reciting nursery rhymes. In trying to show that special people are normal, the movie forgets that normal people don't have any of this. The love between a parent and a child manifests itself far more subtly, in the way parents look at their children, in the way they discipline them, in their inherent protectiveness, in their pride, their disappointments and their desires; in the warmth of their touch, in the way they hold their them, in quiet intimacy. The Tree of Life captures that - and this is its greatest achievement.

Ultimately, The Tree of Life is Syama Sastry asking Goddess Meenakshi difficult questions in Ahiri; Deivathirumagal is the Backstreet Boys telling you which way they want it.

On a train from Edinburgh to Stirling, Scotland's endless, easy-on-the-eye landscapes reminded me of a Robert Louis Stevenson poem we read in school. Then, I realised that Stevenson, being Scottish, might have been describing this very scenery in his poem:

From a Railway Carriage.
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:

All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And here is the green for stringing the daisies!

Here is a cart runaway in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill, and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone forever!

***

The Bard and I

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

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

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


Silver-feathered sleep... Sigh.)

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

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

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

And then he says,

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

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

Shakespeare then kills me with the next line,

Who doth ambition shun,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grandmother of the Bride

Mohammad Amir bowling is one of the more beautiful sights in the world - fast, fresh, whippy, and seaming, he lights up dull evenings here in Madras. And then there's Mohammad Asif, trundling along from the other end, weaving his wiliness around that unsuspecting outside edge. On one such evening, I sat before the television, watching these two when Paati sat beside me and said, "Will you turn down the volume for a second? I need to talk to you."

Paati always had the strangest things to say, and mostly, they concerned food. She would offer some strange dish, usually, "Shall I make Maggi for you with some kadalai in it?" or "What about bread with tomato and molaga podi, toasted with cooking oil?" "Perhaps you'd like some mango juice - one half of the mango was spoilt, so I squeezed it along with the other half to compensate." I usually listened to these questions, and dismissed them politely. Sometimes, impolitely. But Paati never failed to offer these quirky culinary delights.

On this particular day, it didn't seem like she was offering me anything to eat or drink. I felt she actually had something to discuss. I wondered if she had her leg-cramps, whether her eyes were watering, it could've been her teeth, or her hands, or that shooting headache she complains of sometimes. She once had a 'gastric' pain from her head to her stomach, radiating from end-to-end endlessly.

But she seemed fine. Perhaps she wanted to buy something for the house. Once she wanted to buy a folding bed, in addition to the four in the house, because you need one for the guests. Once she decided that a steel almirah must be duly purchased for keeping my books. Once she demanded a separate TV she never really watched.

"I am organising a wedding," she said, with a faint smile.
I was surprised. Organising a wedding - at eighty-six! It couldn't have been mine, she didn't have the guts to suggest something like that. There was only one other cousin eligible, but my Paati wouldn't bother with his wedding at her age.
"It is between a neem tree and another sapling," she continued, with that smile still lurking on the corners of her face.
I was startled. But I maintained a straight face and asked, "Why? What have these trees done to merit this treatment?" I really wanted to ask her if this was an inter-caste wedding.
"So," she started. My Paati tells the most convoluted stories - like the Panchatantra, where one starts with a story, and then moves to another one, and another one nestled within it, and so on and so forth, before each shell is reopened, and each story is revisited in reverse, and all neatly tied up in the end. "You know, that a niece of mine gave me a neem sapling. I planted it in a little pot on the balcony, next to the manathakkali plant. It was growing really well, and slowly outgrowing its pot. So, I called Sarasu, the lady who sweeps the steps, and asked her to plant it outside somewhere. When she uprooted it from the pot, She discovered that another plant was intertwined with it. She told me that this was great luck, and that I had to marry them off for lifelong fortune."

I wondered if it was some Rama Sene at work - marrying off intertwined couples.

Paati was in her flow now, "So, Sarasu took the plants to the Amman kovil on Boag Road and planted them there. A vaadyaar will come sometime next week and decide the date of the wedding. I have already arranged for a veshti and saree to be bought for the bride and the groom, and one more saree for Amman and a veshti for the vaadyaar." Darth vaadyaar.

I was now too stunned to speak. Paati said, "I know you think this is ridiculous, but I believe in all this. See, your cousin in the US gave birth to a boy the day I found these plants, and that other cousin found a good job. All this is because of the intertwined plants." I wondered if discovering intertwined people also brought good luck. What about intertwined dogs? Or cats? Or books?
***

A few days later, she told me, "The vaadyaar came today from the Amman kovil. He is from the Nagavalli Amman kovil."
Thatha jumped in with this little detail, "It's on the platform right next to Sivaji Ganesan's house."
"He said that the wedding will cost a thousand five hundred. Four brahmins will be fed, and some naivedyam will be given to the people who come to the temple that evening!"
"When is the wedding?" I asked.
"On the fifteenth."
"Fifteenth, fifteenth. Sunday." Thatha repeated.
"On Thursday, the vaadyaar will come and collect the money."
"I have been discouraging your Paati from the time she brought it up," Thatha said, suddenly. By this time, I found the whole wedding too beautiful, too poetic to let it die. So, I said, "Thatha, please. It's just a small thing. Let her have her fun."
***

As Thursday approached, and a fever raged within me (the intertwining wasn't bringing me health), Paati began getting expectantly fidgety. "Should I make a sweet for the wedding myself?" she asked me. I gave her some sound logic, "See, at your daughter's wedding, you didn't cook. Only the samayal fellows did. So lets just let it be, no?" "Should I give the green saree to the bride and the red one to the Amman?" "That sounds like a plan, Paati. Amman usually wears red, no?" I said, offering my expert knowledge on the Nagavalli Amman's fashion sense.

Thursday morning, I was too tired from my fever to drive to work. I worked on the internet and a phone, sleeping for an hour, working for an hour, and pretending to be important to the world. Every time the doorbell rang, Paati would jump and rush to open it (her leg pain, her limping, were pushed to the background), only to find the milkman, the flower-lady, the courier-dude, the vegetable-lady, or a man collecting donations for a temple. By evening, Thatha was muttering under his breath, "Kandraavi. Dirty fellow. He's not come at all. Keeping us waiting like this all day. I told your Paati on that day only - don't try and organise something at her age. She can barely walk, and she's trying to organise a wedding."

I looked up from my laptop and asked Paati, "Do you want to go check the plant and the vaadyaar in the temple?"

She agreed immediately. Ninety-year-old Thatha and a four-year-younger Paati trudged down the stairs and in my car to the Nagavalli Amman temple on the platform next to Sivaji's house. When we reached the platform, we found that there was no such temple there. There was an Amman temple, but she was of a different variety. We asked a fruit-seller, who directed us to the road behind Sivaji's house.

When we reached the road, we found no kovil. I looked around, Paati was getting a little irritated, but Thatha got down the car and confidently walked towards what looked like a house. "That's the temple!" he declared. It was, in fact, a house. Thatha tried asking someone where the Amman kovil was, but his deafness meant he didn't hear a word of what was said.

Suddenly, I saw this large hoarding for a festival at the Nagavalli Amman kovil, and hiding behind that hoarding, was the kovil - the size of ten matchboxes, adjacent to a gutter. "That's the temple!" I said. I led them towards it when loud devotional music started playing from a conical speaker above it. Thatha discovered a temple festival office just behind the temple, and Paati immediately recognised her vaadyaar in the makeshift office.

I expected this vaadyaar to be the topless, pot-bellied, bearded, severely sacred-ashed and veshti-clad. Instead he looked like an extra from Goripaalayam. Long, curly hair, almost like a Afro, a thick moustache, a gold chain, a bright green shirt with the top button off, dark green loose pants, rings on six fingers, a pair of shades in one hand and a Reliance phone in the other, and bright, white shoes. When he saw Paati, he smiled brightly and said, "Amma! So nice of you to come here!"

I asked, "So, where are the trees?" Are they still up to naughtiness or have you unintertwined them?
Paati asked, "Why didn't you come home today?"
He said to my Paati, "You see, Amma, the trees..."
And suddenly, someone increased the volume on the loudspeaker, and we didn't hear the rest of the sentence. Thatha hadn't heard a word of the conversation until then even.
Then the vaadyaar shouted out to some boy to turn the damn music off.
When it was quiet again, he said, "The neem tree, Amma... It died."
"Died?"
"Yes, Amma, the leaves all dried up, and it died."
"And the other plant?" I asked.
"Oh that," he said, "That died a week ago."
Paati was heartbroken. The vaadyaar was unmoved, "That's why I didn't come today, Amma." He walked us to a small enclosure next to the temple, right by the gutter, and pointed out the flora to us. The neem tree was just a stick standing on the ground, and the other plant was nowhere to be seen. The vaadyaar said, matter of factly, "So, if you buy two more plants and come, we can get them married off."
"But weren't they to be married off because they were intertwined?" I asked.
"You can always intertwine the new plants," he said.

Thatha, who finally heard and understood what had happened, said, in English, "I think this isn't worth it."
"Lets go, he is cheating us," Paati said, again, in English.

And that was the final word on the entire affair. We got into the car and drove back almost silently.

Two Disappearances - Part VI

Ah, that was a long three days.
***

After twenty-two years, Sharada looked into her cousin's eyes. Frozen in time, cast in glossy paper, they were twenty-two years fresher than her own. Sharada's face, wrought with wrinkles caused both by age and worry, was a sorry shadow of her cousin's. Saraswathi would never look as careworn as her, Sharada thought. Even in those photographs in the last year of her life, she did not look like a person battling a terminal illness, two broken families and a vicious, gossipy society.

Sharada gazed dreamily at the photograph with the tambura, she remembered her cousin's exact expression when she heard an apasruti string. It was that very expression - of slight disgust and slight amusement, caught perfectly in that picture. She would tame those off-key tamburas like she tamed off-key people around her - calmly and ruthlessly. Yet, the person at the receiving end came off feeling like he was being done a favour.

Sharada smiled.

The image of Saraswati sleeping reminded Sharada of the way her nostrils flared and relaxed with each breath, her lips curled into a contented smile, her closed palms tucked beneath her chin. It reminded Sharada of the time when, as a teenager, Saraswathi would sleep off on her lap in the afternoons while Sharada read a book.

The photograph that affected her the most was the one Ajith skipped over - the photo of Mani performing to a sparse audience. Ajith found the inscription at the back interesting, but didn't investigate. If he had looked at the photo closely, he would have seen two women in the front row facing away from the camera - his grandmother and her cousin. The black-and-white photo didn't show it, but they were in matching blue sarees - the shade made popular by MS. It was a concert at a noisy wedding at a noisier wedding hall on Boag Road in T. Nagar. Sharada remembered the entire evening vividly, like she had been living it each evening.

Mani sang that day, accompanied by a young, spirited Veeraraghavan on the violin. An ageing Palani Subramania Pillai sat at the mridangam in his characteristically emotionless fashion. Sharada never found out the name of the ghatam vidwaan. Sharada remembered the exact phrase with which Mani began his Thodi alapana. It was a lengthy, labyrinthine brigha that traversed two and a half octaves at unreal speed - starting with the mandhra sthayi panchamam, snaking towards the atitara shadjam, before settling down on the daivatam. Saraswathi, who was milling about, talking, socialising, paused mid-sentence and turned to the stage.

"Lets listen for a while?" she asked Sharada.
They settled down in the front row. Mani looked at her and stopped singing almost immediately. At twenty-eight, she was that beautiful. Mani collected himself and continued his alapana, although he seemed distracted by Saraswathi's presence in the first row.

As if to collect himself, he rested on the panchamam for unnaturally long, closing his eyes and knotting his eyebrows in concentration. Da pa, he hummed. Da pa ma pa da pa, the violin prodded. "Hmmm," he said, in appreciative contemplation. He repeated after the violin, and fed off that sangati, revolving around the madhya sthayi to come back, each time, to the same phrase. Da pa ma pa da pa. And every time he came back to that phrase, he opened his eyes and looked at Saraswathi, like he expected the phrase to trigger some memory.

Saraswathi began losing herself in the Thodi. Languorous, formless, floating, yet precise, imaginative, structured, it disarmed her. She was listening to a Thodi that was fresh and new, yet traditional and classical. It was a Thodi of paradoxes. It was a Thodi you could touch and feel, but never hold. It was a Thodi that softened Saraswathi's heart.

With each passing song, Mani began ignoring more of the audience and concentrating only on Saraswathi, and she, for her part, forgot that she was at a noisy wedding.

When the concert ended, the bride, a movie actress, came to the stage to honour the artistes. When they were descending, the bride spotted Saraswathi in the front row and called out, "Sarasi!" Saraswathi came out of her trance and noticed the bride standing with Mani. She walked up to her.

"This is Mani. I'm sure you know him," the actress said, "And this is Saraswathi - I know her because she sang at my first wedding," she giggled.

Saraswathi had heard of Mani, but had never heard him until that day. She had seen him at social gatherings. She had vague memories of listening to him when she was around ten years old, but she couldn't confirm whether they were true.

"You sing?" Mani asked.
"Not much anymore, I teach more than I sing now."
"This is Saras' cousin, Sharada," the actress said.
Mani smiled, briefly glancing at Sharada before turning to Saraswathi. Sharada smiled back. The actress then whisked the cousins away to introduce them to other people.

They ate in the dining hall, Mani and Saraswathi safely away from each other's eyes. After dinner, the cousins stayed back to talk to the bride her and siblings, and Mani and the groom's uncle were sitting in the portico of the mantapam, arguing out some musical disagreements.

Saraswathi whispered in her cousin's ears, "I'll come back," and headed to the restroom. On her way back, from a shadowy corridor, she heard a voice, "Janani!" it said, in a stage-whisper. Saraswathi ignored the voice. "Janani!" it came, again. The same urgent hiss. Saraswathi turned to the corridor to see Mani silhouetted against a dim room behind him. He beckoned her again, "Janani!"

She asked, suspiciously, "You're calling me?"
"Yes."

She walked to him, and said, "Janani?"
Mani's face fell. He looked at her closely and asked again, "Aren't you?"
"Aren't I what?"
"Janani..."
Saraswathi frowned, "No."
"Janani... The old man with the Veena, that town on the hill... Railway station..."
"No."
Mani looked like someone hit him with a club. He muttered, "Sorry," and walked through the door that led to the side exit. He walked briskly, opened the side door and found himself in a narrow back alley.

"Sir!" a voice called behind him. It was Saraswathi.
He stopped.
"I just wanted to tell you - I have never heard anyone sing like you."
"Thanks," Mani muttered, slightly flushed. They were walking towards each other now, involuntarily.
"Sir, can I learn from you?" she asked, almost floating towards him. They were only a couple of metres apart.
"Come home tomorrow, I'll listen to you sing, and we'll see," he said, standing two paces away from her.
"Thanks!" she said, taking one step towards him. They were within touching distance now.

"Saras?" came Sharada's voice from behind her. Both of them took a step back.
"I'll see you tomorrow, then," Mani said, putting on a formal voice.
"Yes, sir," Saraswathi replied, sounding even more formal.

Sharada realised that she had walked into a moment where even though there wasn't any physical closeness, there was intimacy. She wondered for years if her entry that day delayed Saraswathi's crime by a few days. She also wondered if she could have averted the whole thing if she had walked in moments earlier, if she had just stopped Saraswathi from running after him into the gully.

Sharada couldn't sift through those photographs anymore. She felt the kozhakattai in her throat growing, butterflies in her stomach flying more intensely, and drops of saltwater on her cheeks with each passing photo.

Sharada wasn't too fond of nostalgia. She found it awkward, even slightly disturbing, to look at old photographs, remember the 'good' times. Somehow, the good memories tended to throw up bad ones. The two were always intertwined, like in those photographs. For every photo of Saraswathi looking ravishing, there was Mani on the other side of the camera, prowling around her to capture her charm. For every carefree smile, every happy phone call from Saraswathi in Kodaikanal, there were phone calls from Mani's wife, and the questions that the world asked Sharada about her cousin. Nostalgia tickled her, and pricked her at the same time. Sharada couldn't take it.

Just then Ajith knocked on the door and cried, "Paati!"
Sharada didn't say a word. Ajith called again, and again. The knock grew louder, and more worried. "Paati? Are you there? You don't have to come outside. I just want to know if you're okay." Sharada didn't say anything. She picked up her TV remote and turned it on. The Kerala TV channel had started its early morning Guruvayoorappan bhajans. She increased the volume until it drowned out Ajith's demonstrations.

The phone in her room rang. She turned down the volume and picked it up. It was Ajith, "Paati. I'm going to Kodaikanal. I'll be back in a couple of days."

Sharada did not react, just put the phone down and sat on her bed.
***

Ajith didn't go to Kodaikanal. He called Shankar instead and asked if he could meet Mani for another interview.

At eleven o clock, after a lengthy breakfast at her house, Ajith and Nethra found themselves at Mani's gate. The house, as always, looked disused. But, the gate was locked from the outside. Ajith called Shankar's phone and found out that Mani had been rushed to hospital - he had lost consciousness that morning. Shankar could barely speak on the phone; fear made his voice tremble.

When they reached the hospital, they found Shankar and Mani's brother, Sadasivam running around, completing all the formalities. Amidst filling out forms and making payments, Sadasivam told Ajith, "If Anna becomes conscious again, the first thing he'll want to do is get back home. He hates this hospital business!"

Sure enough, the next morning, a conscious Mani kicked up a fuss and shifted back home. First, he complained that the ambulance that brought him was dirty and bad, and demanded that the ambulance that took him back should be the posh, new one. Then, he pointed out that the bed they gave him was uncomfortable, "This is the one you give to dying people, no?" He told off the doctor for missing his rounds and delaying Mani's discharge.

When he reached home, the first thing he did was order Ajith to come and finish the interview that afternoon, "I have only three days left to live," he said on the phone, his voice, once an arresting baritone, was now too feeble and unclear to even convey this message intelligibly. Shankar translated it for Ajith.
***

Ajith sat by Mani's bed, now housed in the same dingy room upstairs where Ajith met him the first time. The curtains were drawn and there was little light in the room. Ajith sat on a chair and Mani, leaning towards him on on one side, was almost on his lap. Ajith held his dictaphone right next to Mani's mouth as he asked him the questions.

"Sir, your second disappearance, in 1987-88... What caused that?" When he asked him this question, a piece of a jigsaw suddenly fell in place - the dates in Taapi's photographs were all late 1987 or early 1988.
Mani took some time answering the question.
"Unrest," Mani said, finally.
"Can you elaborate?" Ajith asked.
Mani didn't say a word, he turned his head and faced the ceiling in silence. Ajith was supposed to infer that Mani wanted to say nothing more.

"Sir," Ajith tried again, "Do you have any interest in any other arts? Say, photography?"
Ajith realised, as soon as he asked it, that the question was too direct. Mani's eyes turned almost instantly from the ceiling, to Ajith and glared at him. There was no response to this question either. Ajith had hit a dead-end. He had to pursue his story elsewhere.

Resignedly, he asked, "Sir, do you have any regrets about your musical career?"
"No," Mani said, clearly having lost the inclination to talk anymore.
Ajith asked, "For instance, you haven't been given the Sangeetha Kalanidhi..."
"No regret about that, definitely," he said with a start, "MD Ramanathan never got it. Ramnad Krishnan, Mali, Rajarathnam Pillai, Palani... These people were not treasure houses of music? Lots of connoisseurs, musicians listened to my music, many of them loved it. I'm happy."

"You stopped performing after your wife's death... What was the reason for it?"
"I loved her a lot. I almost died in 1988, she saved me. The only thing I could give her in return was my music... One she died, I had no reason to perform, no one to perform for. Anyway, all this is there in that old interview that you've read."

"It doesn't make sense to me," Ajith said, frustratedly. Mani was startled. Ajith said, "You didn't love your wife all that much. Both of us know enough to know that. That can't have been the reason."
"I'm too weak to smile. I would have smiled otherwise," Mani said, "That isn't the reason."
He paused, collected his breath, and continued, "I had been a bad family man - ignored my wife, my children, immersed in my musical world..."
Ajith still didn't understand why Mani held up this facade. Both of them knew it wasn't always Mani's music that separated him and his family.
"When I lost my mind and nearly died, my wife came looking for me. She nursed me back to health. I realised that she had no source of income apart from me. She did some tailoring, but that wasn't enough. I had to keep performing and teaching to keep her alive. So, I performed to keep her going. When she died, I saw no reason to continue performing. I had lost interest in the process for fifteen years anyway."

It was an unconvincing story, but it seemed closer to the truth than what Mani had been telling people all along.

"Your wife came looking for you. Where were you at that time?"
"You don't know? I thought you knew more."

Ajith didn't know what to make of that.

Mani carried on, "I had a house near Kodaikanal then. I was staying there, alone. The weather didn't agree with me, I almost always had a cold and severe breathing problems. One evening, I went for a long walk, and I became breathless in a fairly secluded place. I fell down that day, and I woke up a few days later at home, with my wife. We stayed there until I was strong enough to travel again. We sold that house, and came back to Madras to start over again."
Mani began coughing uncontrollably, and Shankar, who was under strict instructions not to enter the room, rushed in. Mani motioned to Ajith to leave, as he still coughed. Shankar, peering through his thick glasses, told Ajith, "He'll call you when he's better. See you then."

Mani wasn't going to tell him the truth, Ajith had to ask his Paati.
***

To continue.

The Two Disappearances - Part V

Inexcusable delay. My only reason is that I was distracted by a stem-cell researcher.
Find all previous parts here.
***

Sharada's house has two bedrooms; one where she sleeps and the other were Ajith sleeps. But neither bedroom really belongs to either inhabitant - Ajith's books are in his grandmother's room, and some of her sarees are in his. The radio is in Ajith's room, and she listens to the afternoon radio concert on her way to sleep on the bed there. His room has more light during the day, and she reads the newspaper there (the drawing room is always dark). Ajith likes listening to music in Sharada's room - he thinks it is quieter. Ajith partially closes the door only late at night when he wants to watch pornography, and even then, he doesn't lock the door - he only turns the screen away from the door.

Spaces simply aren't private in Sharada's house, save the bathrooms.

But there are spaces that have become private because no one looks there anymore - like the lofts in both bedrooms. Sharada, her husband and her cousin had collected an assortment of junk during their lifetimes that found their homes in that loft. There was old, dismantled furniture. A folding chair on which Ajith's grandfather spent much of his waking hours in his fifties. When his son bought him a new one, reluctantly, this was broken into three pieces and relegated to the loft. Three legs of their first dining table was there, hiding amongst back issues of physics journals. The cradle on which Ajith and his father rocked, remnants of the small table on which Ajith did his homework, the chair that broke when Ajith made out with his girlfriend on its arm, all lay defunct and disused.

Then there are those vessels that the family brought from their ancestral house in Tirunelveli when they moved to Madras. Vessels large enough to cook for forty people in forgotten shapes and forms. There was that one in which his great-grandmother apparently made soan papdi once a year, another copper vessel used to store water in which Ajith bathed till he was five. There was also that other vessel in which Ajith's father burnt his hand trying to taste boiling payasam whilst it was still on the stove.

Somewhere in that space was a set of books and photo albums that belonged to Ajith's grand-aunt - the one he called 'Taapi'. She wasn't his Paati, but she was similar - of similar age, build, look, dress sense. But they were vastly different in their temperaments. Sharada was strict and slightly cynical. Ajith couldn't tell whether she was cynical because she was who society wanted her to be, or it was the other way around. She loved Ajith dearly, but sometimes Ajith thought of her love as almost mechanical - she loved him because she was supposed to. She was wise, she was good with finances, and she had a natural feel for human behaviour. But she was dependent - on her husband, her son, and now her grandson - for her courage.

Circumstances taught Sarswathi to fend for herself. Her parents died even before she could register their presence, she lived with her uncle after that along with nine other children. She was, as her uncle put it, too pretty for her own good, and had to learn to cope with all the attention she got from the boys in her school, her college, and even the cousins she grew up with. She learnt quickly - to keep them at a distance, but keep them.

The two girls went to their music classes with the sole objective of being able to sing when a prospective groom came to see them. Sharada perfected Seetapate in Khamas, while Saraswathi, being the more proficient singer, was saddled with having to execute Emani Ne in Mukhari. Her music teacher soon discovered that Saraswathi was too good for this. He wanted to make her a singer. Her uncle had issues with the idea, he stopped her music classes and got her to learn cooking from her aunts instead. Saraswathi eloped with her music teacher. She was only fifteen then. Eventually, her family caught up with her, the marriage was annulled by a court, and her teacher was convicted for kidnapping.

Saraswathi still learnt music, on her aunt's insistence, now with a female teacher. As consolation, Sharada also learnt with her. The two girls progressed steadily though Saraswathi was clearly the better musician. They even performed together until Sharada got married.

The first photograph in Saraswathi's album had the two girls seated together on a stage in matching half-sarees, matching pottus (the black-and-white photo showed them as black, but Ajith imagined them in crimson), matching nose and earrings, their hair neatly double-pleated and ribboned and their eyes heavily lined with kohl. They were surrounded by a violinist who looked more at ease on stage than them, his bow resting by his side and his hands on his knees; a mridangist staring at the camera nervously while holding his tuning stone in his left hand, and their mother holding up a tambura in the background. There was only one microphone placed between the two girls, a flask on Sharada's right with two tumblers by it, a notebook, and a banner behind them with the words, "Vinodini Gana Sabha (Regd.)". Ajith found it funny that sabhas always found it necessary to announce to the world that they were registered.

The photo was taken before the concert started, clearly. Back then, photographs were too precious for people to take chances with live action. If one of the girls shook her head too much or the mridangist moved his hands too violently, the motion blur would make the entire exercise pointless. So, they settled for a photograph where the girls stared at the camera like it was a firing squad. They could have smiled, Ajith thought.

But even in that solemn, posed photograph, the girls' characters came through. His grandmother looked like she was there because she was supposed to be, 'they' told her to be there, and his Taapi looked like she wanted to be there. Something in the way they sat, the way they stared, the way they wore their clothes revealed this. His Taapi looked every bit the stunner she was. Her frame was fuller than her cousin's, she had sharper features, brighter eyes and a darker complexion. One of her eyebrows was raised, as if she was questioning this process.

On the back of the photo, in clear, black lettering belonging to Taapi, was the song list for that evening. Ajith noticed a proliferation of eclectic ragas - Karnataka Behag, Shuddha Bangala, Srutiranjani, Gundakriya - amidst Kalyani and Madhyamavati. If someone as beautiful as his Taapi sang E Dari Sancharintuvo, Ajith would have melted.

Ajith turned the page to find his Taapi staring at him again. She was sitting on a bannerless stage this time, without her cousin by her side. The mridangist was the same as the previous concert, but the violinist was a young girl (Ajith wondered if she was T. Rukmini) wearing a dark half-saree contrasting with Taapi's light one. Taapi looked a little older and prettier than the previous photo, and so did the mridangist - his Adam's apple more prominent than it was in the other photo. On the tambura was an uninterested, feeble, old man who looked incapable of holding the tambura up for three hours. But that's what tambura artistes looked like all the time. The setting looked like a temple. It was outdoors, there were pillars around her, and the background was not a screen - it looked like the pathways of a temple. There were no microphones here, only flasks and cloth bags.

What struck Ajith, though, was the freedom and authority with which Taapi sat on the stage. Her regality suggested that the stage belonged to her. She wasn't just going to sing a concert - she was conducting darbar. She couldn't have performed too much by this time, Ajith thought. She looked barely twenty, she must've been. Sharada was married by this time and had stopped performing. Was it the absence of Sharada's nervousness that allowed her to lord over the stage?

There was nothing written behind the photograph - no date, no kacheri list.

The next page had a curious photo. It was of a young NV Mani in the middle of a raga alapana. The mridangam was off the mridandgist's lap and the ghatam player leaned on his ghatam. The violinist watched Mani in close concentration. Ajith knew there would be photos of Mani in that album, but he didn't expect one so soon. He turned around to find, "12th October, 1969: Found you!" written in a hand that was not his Taapi's. Ajith guessed, correctly, that it was Mani's handwriting. He didn't understand what the photo was about, though.

Ajith excitedly turned the pages of the album looking for an explanation to Mani's inscription, but he was soon distracted by the other pictures. There were many photographs of his Taapi - black-and-white photos that played spectacular games with light and dark. There she was, sitting at a table and turning around to look at the camera, as if the photographer had just called her. There was another one, where she sat on a cane chair in a verandah, the hills behind her, holding a steel tumbler in her hand. Then, he found a photograph of her tuning a black tambura in a dark room. He could only see the outlines of her figure, her face and the tambura, lit by distant, dim, balmy sunlight, and her radiant eyes fixed on the tambura. The rest of the photograph was just black.

There was a photo of her hair, just her hair, and her eyes peeking out through them teasingly. Another one of her fingers as they strummed the tambura. One photo of her feet almost smashed against the camera as the blurred outline of her face could be discerned in the bekoh in the background. Another one, extremely alluring, of one-half of her tilted face in a subtle smile.

Ajith's favourite photo was one in which she slept on one side, facing the camera, her dark eyes closed to the world, a blanket covering everything but her head, her hair strewn over the top half of the face. Again, there was more darkness than light in the photograph; a feature common to most pictures in that collection. The light only drew outlines - guides to define the contours of the subject. Light's lines were only suggestive, the viewer had to participate in the photo to draw the rest.

They had an intimacy to them, it was clear that the photographer loved his subject deeply, in a way that he saw beauty in everything Taapi did, in every single movement of hers. She must have loved him too, for the photographs suggested an affection, almost as if he weren't simply capturing her with each photo, but caressing her with it.

He ogled at the photo for a whole five minutes before telling himself that she was his grand-aunt. He wondered if the photographer had done the same - watched Taapi when she slept. Women looked most beautiful when then, Ajith believed.

Ajith instinctively turned the photo around to see if there was anything written on the back. In her neat lettering, there was "November 1987, Swara", written on it. Quickly, he went back to the other photographs. All of them had the same inscription.

She was forty-seven years old in 1987, but didn't look a day older than thirty-five. She died in early 1988.

Before Ajith thought too much about "Swara", the explanation came in the next photograph. Taapi stood, wearing trousers and a sweater (he had never seen her in these clothes before), at the gate of a house that said, " 'Swara', No. 9, Eastern Hill Street". On the other side of the gate, there was a board that said, "S. Ramachandran, Sharada Ramachandran". He suddenly remembered - this was the house his Thatha owned a little away from Kodaikanal. He sold it when Ajith was fairly young, but Ajith still has vague memories of holidays in that house. What he didn't understand, though, was what Taapi was doing there, and who took all those photographs.

Just then, Ajith's phone rang from the other room. He left the albums on the bed and rushed to receive it. It was Nethra.

He excitedly told her about this album and what he saw in it, when the conversation meandered into other topics. While he lost track of time in this conversation, Sharada entered the house from her shopping and walked straight into the room where the album was kept open.

She dropped her bag of vegetables on the floor and gasped. She then collected herself, went into the kitchen and started putting the vegetables into the fridge.

Ajith finished his call, and noticed his Paati in the kitchen. He panicked and rushed to the bedroom. He found it undisturbed and presumed that his Paati hadn't been into the room. He packed the photos back in the carton and climbed up on the chair to put it back in the loft. Then he realised that he needed to look at them again. So, he put the carton under the bed.
***

The photographs lay, unmindful of the storm brewing around them, under the bed on which Ajith slept. A full moon lit up a hazy Madras night - the streetlights causing the haze. If you looked carefully, squinting your eyes, you might have noticed a star or two, a few of the brighter ones. Otherwise, like all cities, the sky was just a blanket of purssian blue and faint orange.

Sharada's eyesight, even during the day, wasn't the best. She needed a cataract surgery that she kept postponing. By night, she managed to go to the toilet or for a drink of water only using an LED torch that Ajith bought for her from Bombay.

Presently, the torch threw a circular light on the wall behind Ajith's bed, under the loft that held the photographs. Sharada, as quietly as she could, moved a stool under the loft, stool in one hand, torch in the other. She tried standing up on the stool when it made a loud creak. Ajith didn't wake up. Emboldened, she tried again. This time, she made it on to the stool. She opened the loft and started looking inside. She found a box with "Saras" written on it, but it was too heavy for her to move. Those were Saraswathi's books. Sharada was looking for the one with the photo albums. She craned her neck to look around. It could not be too inside, Ajith had just seen it that afternoon.

"It's under the bed," Ajith said. Startled, Sharada almost fell off the stool. "The carton is under the bed," Ajith said, calmly, "Paati, get down." Sharada obeyed. Ajith pulled out the carton from under the bed and gave it to her. He turned on the light, and their eyes narrowed as they adjusted to it. Sharada simply picked up the carton and strode out to the other bedroom without a word and slammed the door shut.

A space had become private in Sharada's house.
***

(To continue. In three days. Sharan style.)

Two Disappearances - Part III

Sorry for the delay. For those who don't know, all parts are aggregated in the label called 'the two disappearances'.
***
Untitled

As high school girls in Neyveli, we were unabashedly romantic. Brought up hopelessly mawkish mythology, drama and cinema, we believed that one day, a man would walk into our lives and change it forever. We would love him passionately, deeply, he would love us back; then we would bear his children, bring them up, care for them, get them married; we would weep when he dies, and he would if we died before him. Life taught us that romances, marriages and relationships are far more complicated. In this story, though, I am only seventeen years and eight months old. Forgive me if I'm a little naive.

I remember only the strangest details from that summer afternoon. I wore an olive green sari with a darker green border. Don't blame my aesthetic sensibilities - my mother bought it for me. That day, she also made my curd rice too milky - she overestimated the heat's curdling abilities. She also miscalculated the amount of time it would take for me to come from Neyveli to Thanjavur. I reached the station five hours before my train to Madras. My Chitappa, a lawyer, had some work in Thanjavur escorted me to the station and left me to my fate.

When a train slowed down at the station, accompanied by its hoot, I noticed a beard and grey eyes. I looked away immediately, because I could feel their gaze on me and it made me a little uneasy. Still, I wanted to see them once more. For a second, I toyed with the idea of getting on the train and seeking those eyes. But I contained that desire. The train began moving.

Like they do in the movies, I stood up suddenly, picked up my bag and ran with the train until I caught up with the nearest door. I was about to leap into the compartment when I felt the gaze on me again. This time, it was from my left. When I turned to the platform, I saw those very grey eyes, adorning a six-foot-two-inch-frame, a handsome face, long, unkempt hair and the prettiest of beards. I froze. Those eyes looked unfazed, and that face broke into a faint smile.

He asked me in a clear, young voice, "Looking for me?"

I was flooded by another image. Of a temple in Neyveli, gas lamps and a moonless night. Of laughing faces, waving hands, swaying heads. I could hear the music again - a clear, young voice, its clarity and tone untarnished by the high notes or speeds it was trying to negotiate. I felt that high again, that meaningless rush of romantic love!

"Are you who I think you are?" I asked, nervously.
He was.

The train had left by then. The platform was deserted again. There might have been a wind blowing, one of those comforting winds, or that might just be my romantic mind adding details to the event. I brought it to his notice that he had missed his train. He said, "I didn't even know where it was going." I looked at him incredulously. He only grinned.

"Let's go somewhere?" he asked.
I considered that offer for a second, before asking, "I know a place. Are you feeling up to a walk?"
"Can I ask you something?"
"Yes?"
"Your name?"
"Janani."
He liked my name, I think, for he repeated it with a certain fondness. "I'm Siva..."
"I know."

We first took a bus. I rested my head on his shoulder. I felt his initial uneasy excitement at my boldness, but soon he was comfortable, and leaned against me. My love story was playing out just as I had imagined it. We spoke a lot, of our families, of our friends, of childhoods, likes, peeves, idiosyncrasies, and music. He spoke of his music with a slight tinge of pomposity. He had the air of someone who believed he was the greatest, but wanted to hide this belief from the world.

I asked him, "What are you doing these days?"
"You've ever heard of wandering musicians?" I nodded. He said, "I'm not one. I'm just a musician in hiding!"
I asked him what that meant. "My brothers are trying to get me married off to my neighbour. She's a sweet girl. But I can't live with someone who's just sweet, no?"
"And that's why you ran away?"
He paused for a moment, before he said, "I was hoping I'd run into someone like you."

Our trek involved walking through paddy fields, a marsh, a thicket and finally to the summit of a secluded hill. It led to a little settlement of no more than thirty families. It was almost ten in the night when we reached there - the entire journey had taken us six hours.

He asked me, again, what we were doing there. I told him, again, to be patient.

I led him to a house from which the most haunting Vagadeeswari ensued. We entered the little hall, where an old man was playing the veena, with his eyes closed and six other men listened. If the artiste sensed our entrance, he didn't show it.

We sat at the back and soaked in the taanam. It was the most slow, detailed, heavy taanam we had ever heard. The old man gave each swara such care and attention, they seemed to come alive. He played phrase after phrase around the rishabham, grandharam and the madhyamam, going back and forth, up and down, sliding and staccato, over each of those notes, slipping in and out of a rhythm. My grey-eyed hero watched in disbelief. His aesthetic sensibilities, his theatrical style were all being dismissed by an old, frail man on a veena. The entire room was in a trance when the veena began booming in the ati-mandhra taanam. The variety and quality of the sounds of the veena were beyond anything he had heard before. In that small space, one could hear the subtlest of the veena's tones. And the old man had much to convey through the faintest of touches, and the subtlest of flourishes.

When the taanam ended, the old man fumbled for the glass of water that was behind him. His student, seated next to him, gave him the glass. Siva realised the man was blind. The man suddenly asked, "Janani is here? At this hour?"

I replied, "Yes... I'm with a friend. He sings."
I could feel Siva's nervousness when the old man asked, "Sing for us? Is this sruti okay for you?"
Siva hummed a Thodi phrase and said, "Yes. This sruti is perfect."
The old man said, "Can you sing Ritigowla instead of Thodi?"

Siva started with a striking tara sthayi phrase in Ritigowla and started adding layer after layer of sangatis over it; like garlands. The old man exclaimed, "Bale!" Siva's imagination was relentless - like cyclonic downpour! The little audience had never heard anything of that sort before. In ten minutes though, he was done. Exhausted by his own high, he was panting at the end of the alapana. He collected himself before launching into, "Janani Ninnuvina", the grey eyes twinkling naughtily in my direction each time he said "Janani". It was nearly midnight when his Ritigowla ended.

The old man asked us if we had eaten anything. We hadn't. Everyone in the hall walked with the man to a nearby house, where his sister fed us. When we were done, we settled down in the courtyard there. The old man started again. It was Ritigowla, again. Siva, who was chatty, happy and proud until then, went silent. If his Ritigowla rode on its sheer vitality, this one had pathos. Siva's was rough, even brash, this one was smooth, yet heavy. Siva snaked around the raga, like a young man on a motorbike through heavy traffic, the man drove along effortlessly, like the traffic didn't exist at all.

It was morning when we were done with the music session. Siva didn't dare sing again that night. One of the men invited us to stay with him. When we walked towards his house, Siva pulled me by my hand into a bylane and said, "Thank you..." Those grey eyes, in the early morning sun, moist, staring into my own, conveyed love and gratefulness in equal measure.

(This is a short story in Tamil by noted writer, P. Srivaralakshmi, who wrote under the psuedonym 'Janani'. The original, untitled, was found amongst the author's papers after her death and translated into English by Vasudev Iyer.)
***

"What happened to her?"
"We stayed in that village for almost a month. That veena player, Shanmugasundaram, taught both of us. We were nearly married, when her family caught up with her. They took her away..."
"You didn't go looking for her?"
"I went to Neyveli, where she claimed to be from. No one there knew any Janani!"
"You never met her again?"
"I'm sure I did, although she behaved like she was seeing me for the first time."
***

Nethra called Ajith excitedly, "Dude! I went to this book launch by this guy called Vasudev Iyer. He's translated these short stories by women writers in Tamil. As in, he's translated women's writing in Tamil to English... Short stories."'
"Okay?"
"Wait. The point is, there is this story... It is exactly the one that NV Mani told you..."
***

"There are some things I should tell you," Vasudev Iyer said, sipping on his Cappucino, "This piece was not very well written, I did a lot of editing, a lot of adding to bring it to a publishable form. My guess is that it was never intended to be published. A personal diary of sorts, I think..."
"And it ends there?"
"Rather abruptly, yes. A slightly pointless story, I know..." he said, and added, "God. Why don't they serve filter coffee here?"

After a brief silence, Ajith asked, "Then why did you include that in the anthology?"
"It seemed interesting, the idea. And it was rare and unpublished. I got it through her grand-nephew. No one's read it before. And it gives an insight into a young girl's mind..." Nethra's expression of contempt deserved to be photographed.
"How true is it? Any idea?"
"Srivaralakshmi lived in Bombay, though she grew up in Neyveli. She married someone who worked there and moved with him. Whether she met any musician when she was young is a mystery. No one remembers such a story, although some old man mentioned something about her wedding being sudden."
Nethra asked Ajith, "But if she died in Bombay when she was thirty, Mani couldn't have met her again..."
***

"You met her again?" Ajith's voice said through the recorder.
"Almost twelve years later." Mani's replied.
"Where?" Shankar's asked.
"That's a story for another day. I'm tired now," Mani's said.
"When?"
"I'll call you..." he said, and added, "I hope you will not publish these stories about women? I'll tell you enough about music. You can write about that..."

Ajith turned off the recorder.
***

That night, when Shankar rolled out his mattress on the floor, next to his teacher's bed, he couldn't help but wonder what Mani must have been like when he was younger. By the time Shankar met him, Mani was nearly seventy - he had just about retired, and Shankar thought of him as a musical sanyasi. He had never seen Mani talk about anything else with any passion or conviction. To think that he might have had a girlfriend, or even that he had women on his mind at some point was vaguely disturbing.

Ajith sat by his laptop, transcribing the interview. He heard the part about the woman over and over to see if there were any more hints on her identity. What did Mani mean when he said he had met her again? Was she his spunky grand-aunt who left their house suddenly? The story seemed to suggest she could have been, but some of the facts didn't fit.

Ajith's paati, Sharada, thought of her cousin endlessly that evening. The orphaned Saraswathi and she were the only two girls amongst eight boys in her house. Growing up together, they were co-conspirators in everything they did (they were even named after the same Goddess!), until Saraswathi committed a crime that Sharada couldn't be a part of. It was a continuing crime that lasted for years, but Saraswathi behaved like she did no wrong. It consumed her in the end, Sharada believed, as she breathed her last in a hamlet near Kodaikanal, away from all her friends and family. Sharada went to Ajith's room twice to see what Ajith was writing, but only saw Facebook on his laptop.

Mani, meanwhile, slept peacefully.
***

To continue.

Bowl, Jumbo!

Kumble's retirement, though in the pipeline for a while, came a little suddenly - in the middle of a crucial series, when he was captain. It was like one of his iconic jumbos - tossed up slightly, coming straight towards your bat, and you expect to hear a tonk as you defend it silly point, but hear a thud instead, as it takes off from nowhere and hits the 'keeper's glove shoulder-high. Kumble hardly did anything sudden or unexpected off the field - he was never involved in any disputes or controversies, he didn't shoot his mouth off against his opponents, he never had anything bad to say about the selectors and the administration (even when he was unceremoniously dropped from the one-day team, or was made to sit out while Harbhajan played). And this, to me, made his retirement, even more surprising - in the middle of a Test Match, announced on commentary!

Expectedly, articles have been written on blogs (like this one), on cricket websites, in newspapers, and they all give us the same catchphrases - 'grinding the opposition', 'large heart', 'tireless', 'brave' - and they speak of the same things - that match in Antigua, that match in Sydney, that match in Delhi, the fact that he wasn't 'pretty to watch', his superior record at home, all kinds of other statistics to show that he was just as good as the best of his time, his comeback after shoulder injury, and that the loss of his retirement will be felt now. Amidst all this, they forget the most important aspect of his persona - his bowling.

Kumble's bowling has never been just about wearing the opposition down into submission. It isn't about bowling ball after ball, over after over of the same stuff until the batsman plays a loose shot. Kumble's genius, and I use that word knowing fully well that it isn't to be used lightly, lies in little things he isn't often credited for. Kumble was always more misunderstood than underrated. True, he was a hard worker, but he was also a master craftsman. 'Grind' is a cruel, cruel word to describe his bowling. Granted, his bowling was never about the ball that pitches in the adjacent town and hits your off-stump, but it hinged on far subtler variations. He had a traditional legspinner, a googly, a topspinner, a flipper, a shooter, a yorker and the straighter one. To a casual eye, they all seemed like glorified titles for the same thing - the ball that just goes on straight. But batsmen, for years, have tried playing him as a one-trick pony, and they've failed, because they weren't good enough to perceive those small variations. They defend one ball confidently, and the next one looks fairly similar. But by the time their bat comes down on it, its shattered their stumps.

These small variations in flight, turn, bounce made Kumble so much fun to watch. When Kumble is at his best, not a single ball is played comfortably - there is this sense that a wicket might fall at any time. The close-in fielders chirp along, the keeper oohs too often, and before you know it, the batsman has misread one. The ball has turned maybe an inch or two - just enough to take the edge and land in one of the fielders hands or miss the bat completely. That was Kumble's magic. That made for many afternoons of exciting Test Cricket.

I was at a quiz when I overheard two people talking of Anil Kumble's sudden retirement. The news spread almost suddenly as one quiz ended and the other was about to start. Then, I heard from someone that India had declared and Kumble would come out to bowl for the last time. I really wished I'd stayed home to watch that last spell. I know it wouldn't have been his best spell, and I highly doubted whether he'd even pick up a wicket, but that rhythmic three-jump run-up, those flapping arms, that googly you can recognise from a mile, and that shout of "Bowl, Jumbo!" deserved one last look.

In this decade, I've begun to lose some of my favourite sights in cricket - Ambrose retired, and I never saw frightening West Indian pace bowling again, Lara retired and took the Nataraja pull shot with him, Mark Waugh's silkiness disappeared as quietly as his cover drive, Azhar's turned-up collar could only hide his face in shame. This series will see the passing of two more - surgical cover drives that defined off-side play for a generation, and a variety of bowling that I like to call Right Arm Guile. While the latter has found an able practitioner in a young Sri Lankan upstart, its granddaddy will be missed dearly.

One-liners

This idea came to me when I watched the concluding moments of one of my favourite movies. If you can guess what movie I'm talking about, you get a prize. Please note, that while I've joked about this issue in the past, I'm very very serious when I say that this story is completely fictional.

Update: I received the correct answer to the movie by email. The prize has been given. And, the scene, for all of you, is this.
***

White fluorescent lamps lit the airport cafe fairly unimaginatively. Their coffees were nearly finished, and their conversation was on its last legs. There was much to be said, but neither of them was in a mood to say anything. An announcement through the PA told them that she should be leaving soon.

"Writer's block, eh?" she asked him, grinning.
Sullenly, he said, "Its only going to get worse now."
"Right," came a sarcastic reply.

He picked the spoon out of his coffee mug and twirled it in his hands. She watched the spoon slip and slide all over his left hand, like a performing gymnast.
"You inspired most of what I've written so far," he said.
"Rubbish."
"I'm serious."
Now the spoon weaved in and out of his palm.
"For instance, I'm not older than you," she said.
"You are."
"By two months, not five years."
"But you remember that line about fish and the oceans? You said that to me once."

As a climax, the spoon jumped up in the air, spurred on by a flick of his thumb, and landed on the back of his hand. He turned his hand around, held it, and put it back in the mug.

"When?"
"You remember that time when I dropped you at the old Bangalore airport?"
"You've dropped me many times."
"The first time. The morning after that night..."
"Oh, the refugee night!"
"When you missed your train."
"Because I thought 20:10 was bloody ten-ten!"
"Yeah."
"I said something about fish and oceans?"
"You did. Out of the blue."
"Dude, you were meeting me for the second time in your life, but you seemed like you were majorly line-maroing. Throughout the bike ride to the airport, I thought you'd ask me out. And you didn't."

He picked up the spoon again. She pulled it out of his hand, and said, "Its fucking distracting!" She paused, and recollected where her narrative was before the distraction, "Yeah, and then you bought that over-expensive ticket to get into the airport, and walk those fifty metres with me."
"Di, there was no love. But you must understand, when a guy interacts with you for the first few times, you have this tendency to make quite an impact. So, one is always keeping options open."
"Rubbish. You were in 'lowe'!"
"You said that line just before you walked through the departure gate. Fish, oceans, hug, and you were away."
He remembered that scene clearly - the bewilderment, the love.
"I thought I said something about your sense of humour?"
"You told me that if I was slightly funnier, I'd've had a chance."

"But the rest of her character isn't me!"
"Come on. All the three women are. They're all beautiful. They're all sarcastic. They're all impulsive. And they all treat the guy like shit."

"Excuse me, but if I remember my life correctly, you left me!"
"Circumstances. You'd've left me anyway."

Neither of them said anything for a few seconds. And then he said, "You even once gave me that speech about one party loving the other too much, and hence some guilt ensuing. That was Lila's speech, if you remember!"
"I recognised that."
"See, again. Its all you."

"By the way, I don't play the violin."
"But you are Ni. In every other way. I watch you type messages all the time. Your hands are exquisite."
"Thanks. That's the most flattering thing I've heard in a while."
"And, a crucial line is something you said... Oh wait, two crucial lines."
She once said, "Three times in three months! If I didn't know you better, I'd think you were in love with me!" And on another occasion, she said, "I like you. I'd like you better if you shaved more often."

An announcement came for Security Check. She had to leave. "So," she said, "I provide one-liners. That's all. I can still send you some by email when I think of them."
"Don't go?" he asked.
"You left me, dude. Its too late now."
"But I'm back now. I travelled across the breadth of the country, and then from the railway station to this bloody airport in the wilderness. All because I realised I was an ass."
"Dude, this ticket costs quite a bit. And I don't think I'm going to cancel it just because you took a train and a bus."
"See, that's the kind of line I was looking for. I can weave a story around it now."

She half-smiled, and unsurely hugged him. "When will you come back?" he asked.
"Two years, at least. Unless I find a job after that."
"Economic slowdown. You'll come back. But I'm sure you'll bring some white guy with you. I can see it."
She laughed. "I've given you many lines now. Go."
But neither of them left. And then she said again, "I think we need this time. Apart. For you to grow up a little, and for me to think."
It was clear that he wasn't feeling too good. She kissed him on the cheek and said, "Chill da. There are other fish in the ocean. You might never find them, but they are there."

She wheeled her suitcase through the departure gate. He stood till he saw her move out of sight. Maybe, they did need some time apart.

The Love Theme in Ritigowla - Part IV

All the parts are together here.
***

"Hi!" she said.
I'd been waiting there for nearly an hour. I was too eager to meet Ni and turned up disgustingly early. She was half an hour late. I spent most of the one hour glancing curiously at these two guys who seemed to be rating each woman at the cafe. They weren't being to discrete about it, but none of the women noticed them. They'd look at her, and then look at each other, say something and turn to make notes on the paper napkins. I was staring at them, when they froze. They suddenly seemed speechless. I turned to see what they were looking at, as Ni walked in through the door. She had that effect on people.

She wore a green top and brownish skirt, and looked a little like a tree. I had never seen her in anything but a sari before.

"Hi!"
"Been waiting for a while?"
"Nah. Five minutes or so."
"So, you've been here for about an hour."
"No!"
"I can tell when guys lie."
And there it was again - the shimmer in her eye, and those eyebrows that seemed to have a life of their own. I smiled wryly.
"You wanted to tell me some stuff," I said, not wanting to waste time.
"Oh yeah. Why I disappeared. Yeah."
And then she went silent for about ten seconds. I didn't mind. The longer she took, the longer I could legitimately stare at her. Her phone beeped just as she was about to talk. I noticed that she had the most exquisite hands in the world. I hadn't felt them yet, but I could tell that they were really soft. Yet, there was a firmness to the way she held her phone. Her fingers, furiously typing a message, moved with such artistry and finesse, that they would have put the best dancers' feet to shame.

She put her phone down on the table and said, "Yeah. Why I disappeared."
"I got that part."
She smiled, and her eyes darted mischievously in my direction. The Love Theme in Ritigowla played automatically in my head - the Hindi smash hits from the Coffee Day speakers were drowned out.
She spoke, "I had this feeling that you had romantic intentions."
I didn't fully understand what she meant. But before I said anything, she continued, "I mean, you were interested in me. Or at least, I got that feeling. And I was with Anand by then..."
I laughed my fake laugh and said, "That's ridiculous! I had no romantic intentions."
"I can tell when guys lie."
What did she have in those eyes? It felt like she could actually see through you with them. She said something more, but the Love Theme was so loud in my ear that I couldn't hear it.
"You don't believe me?" I asked.
"No, I don't."
"I asked Sharanya out that very night. I'd been interested in her for quite a while."
"So, when I disappeared, you thought you might as well do something about it?"
Those eyes were at work again. I laughed again, and this time my laugh convinced her.
"So, you were in love with her!"
"Yeah. But I think the love's sort of fading now." I wanted to smack myself on the head with a violin for saying that.
"That happens, I guess. I broke up with Anand a month ago." That image of Watermelon rolling down the hill flashed before my eye again.
"Love faded?" I asked her.
"Not really, we still like each other. But its unworkable."
I didn't ask her for more details, and she didn't seem too inclined to offer more to a guy she's meeting for the second time in her life.
***

I spent most of that music season trying to guess what concert she would be at. I got very good only towards the end. The December Season just isn't long enough for a romance - especially if I'm the guy.
***

Despite everything that was not going for us, Sharanya and I managed to last for nearly a year. When it ended, we were too jaded to even have a fight - we'd prolonged the inevitable for too long. We were on different tours when it happened - I was in the Western Ghats in Kerala, and she was in Dharamsala on the Himalayas. We had always operated in different altitudes.

She sat in a rundown internet cafe on the main temple street of Dharamsala and composed the email ending everything. She talked of how all the trekking gave her time to reconsider relationships in her life, and that it was clear that ours had to end. Ours was probably the easiest relationship to sort out for her. Her father left home when she was seven, and his whereabouts were unknown. Her brother was last known as a small-time crook in the seedier areas of Bangalore, working his way through the ganja business.

She walked through the arrival gate at the Delhi airport when she saw a cab driver standing with a board that had her father's name on it. He had a very common South Indian name, but she decided to wait anyway. His flight arrived an hour late, and Sharanya went through a range of emotions - from curiosity to nervousness to anxiety to doubt. Would they recognise each other? Would he choose to recognise her? What if there is another woman with him? What is he like?

A man in very British clothing emerged through the makeshift gate - the airport being under renovation. In a bowler hat and overcoat. It was like he was on the sets of some old movie. She took some time to recognise him, he didn't take even a second. Without warning, he took her in his arms, like when she was seven and tried lifting her. Laughing, he said, "Oh, you've grown heavier!"

She never told me where he was all those years, or why he had come back, or why he was suddenly this friendly with her. She spent a week with him in Delhi, before deciding that she needed some time to think her life through. She was walking down Janpath when she saw a bus leaving for Dharamsala. Quick enquiries told her that there were lots of seats empty on the bus. She took it.

By the time she came back to Delhi, her father disappeared. As far as I know, she never met him again.

For months, I asked myself why I'd let Sharanya go. She was almost perfect. She read a lot, watched the coolest movies and plays, and was a regular on the Madras fabindia-wearing, coffee-drinking, pontificating circle. She was really pretty, smart and had a great sense of humour. She wrote very well. She had fervent opinions on everything - she once passionately argued with me on why water was better than toilet paper. Neither of us had put enough effort into keeping the relationship going - it started on a whim on a drunken evening, and we spent the year behaving like that drunken evening never ended.

I was fifteen kilometres away from getting network on my phone - only BSNL provided network to the elephants, bisons and the tigers in the jungles of Kerala. Four friends, three guides and I sat on a fallen branch of a tree waiting for elephants to pass. The elephants ate with great care - plucking grass out of the earth, cleaning it with dextrous flicks of the trunk and depositing them in their large mouths. Something told me one of the elephants wasn't enjoying its grass too much. I don't know why I got that feeling - maybe it was the little shake of the head each time it digested one lot of grass, or maybe it was the fact that it tried cleaning the grass for too long. Clearly, It was only eating here because it was lazy to find better grass.

They seemed to eat forever while my thoughts wandered.
***

"God, you're incompetent!" Sharanya said.
"This guy's bowling really well, di. I cant read the spin from his fingers," I replied.
The bowler, a twelve-year-old kid, who could bowl seven different underarm spin variations with almost no change in action, laughed. She snatched the bat from my hand.
"Seven runs in four balls!" the boy announced. Tension mounted as close-in catchers waited for the one-tup catch. She took her stance - its languorousness matched Laxman's. The first ball was tossed up. It hit the cement floor. She moved towards it spryly and hit off the front foot. The ball spat off the pitch and beat her outside edge.

"Seven runs in three balls!" the boy laughed.

She took her stance again - I could watch her move all my life, it was so gracefully unhurried. The ball was tossed up again. This time she moved back, waited for the ball to jump off the track, adjusted her shot late and punched it between two cover fielders who fetched the ball as it rebounded off the far wall the marked the boundary.

"Three runs in two balls," the boy said and added, "Akka, if you hit it outside the wall, you're out!"
"I know."

The next ball was the deadliest - the boy maintained that even he was never sure of what it would do off the pitch. She countered it in the most obvious manner - she took it on the full and guided it through mid-wicket. The ball reached the boundary in a hurry. Ravi Shastri would have spoken of tracer bullets. She handed the bat to the kid standing at cover and walked away triumphantly. I remember being bowled over by her sheer coolness.
***

Pluck, flick, chomp.
***

"When you go away, it feels like someone's reduced the colour setting in the world with a remote control."
"Yuck. But I can do worse. When you go away, a thousand needles pierce my heart, rendering me lifeless..."
"...and you come back to life with my magical kiss..."
"The kiss that causes whirling winds, lightning, rain..."
"The romantic sort of rain."
"The sort that comes in just when the hero and the heroine feel deep love for each other."
"Like we're feeling now."
We laughed until we drowned out the radio playing in her car.
"I love you."
"I love you more."
"Impossible. Nobody can love someone as much as I love you."
"You don't know me."
"Always a step ahead of me, eh?"
"Please tell me we aren't going to fight about this."
Without warning, or saying a word, she kissed me.
***

Pluck, flick, chomp. Now, a group of wild boar sauntered along purposelessly.
***

"Ah, you seem to have settled down with this girl."
I smiled.
"So, I can leave?"
"Why do you have to leave? And, where does your sort leave to anyway?"
"We don't leave. We're always around. But I might not talk to you as much."
"Kaishiki, no!"
"Don't worry, you'll manage fine."

Amma walked into the room, "Who were you talking to?"
"Phone."
"Oh."
***

Pluck, flick, chomp. The elephant that didn't like the grass settled himself in a corner next to a rock. I couldn't tell the grey of the rock from that of the elephant. The boars walked around as aimlessly as ever.
"Dude, it'd be awesome if Obelix jumped at the boars from behind that rock!"
***

"Why are you lying to me?"
"What?!"
"You have no composing assignment. You're just hiding, that's all."
"You were there when I met that guy the other day. He said..."
"He said that if the two guys he has in mind don't take it up, he'll give it to you."
"But I have to be ready. And, in any case, its good to keep a couple of pieces ready."
"You're just using this music excuse because you know that when you're with your music, I cant be around."
***

She was right. That's where the screw up came. Pluck. She had everything going for her. Flick. Except the fact that she was musically uninclined. Flick again - man, this piece of grass is dirty. I think she wasn't too badly off musically - I mean, she danced well, and had a decent sense of rhythm. Chomp. She just came under too much pressure from me.

The elephants walked away after their hearty meal. The one that thought the grass wasn't good enough, gave the grass some thought. It wasn't too bad. It was quite good, actually. Just that, he'd closed his mind - he'd always thought it was greener on the other side. The Love Theme in Darbar wasn't bad at all, but Ritigowla just seemed better.
***

It was mid-June and I was in Trichy playing at a concert when my phone beeped on stage, leading to some hasty movements and turning off. Anna had travelled to the US with my teacher, and was supposed to come back around that time. I wondered if it was him.

When I opened the message after the concert, I read, "I heard you tackled point a!" The sender was Ni. I didn't realise what she meant for a while. When I did, I replied, "Yeah. Two months ago... Who told you?" "Your brother - I went to the US to play in the same set of concerts." "Now tell me - what is b?" "In person. Come to Bangalore if you really want to know."

I didn't even pause to reply to the last message. I packed my bags hastily and headed to the bus stand. The next bus to Bangalore left in ten minutes, but there were no seats on it. I bribed the conductor who let me sit with him and the driver in the front. This wasn't going to be a pleasant overnight journey.
***

To continue.