Gaze

At a lecture on native language and Indian English writing, I first felt his gaze upon me. It had this reassuring warmth, as if I were sitting at the perfect distance from a campfire in mild winter. It came from three rows in front of me combating the harsh air-conditioning, enclosing me in its cosiness - it was like he picked the ideal spot to get a clear view. The gaze was distant, but pointed; it was welcoming I smiled at him, once, and he turned away immediately. After that, I pretended not to notice, and he pretended not to look. The gaze followed me after the lecture, as I walked through the lobby, down the stairs and into an auto.

A week later, I felt the gaze on my neck, from behind me, at a book launch. I was surprised to see him, and that manifested itself in a smile. He was bolder now, he smiled.

I remember his face vaguely - it was shaped like an elongated egg and punctuated by a round nose that ended almost as soon as it started. His hair could only be described the word nondescript. His eyes were as genial as his gaze. He wore a dangling earring in one ear - but that was a fashion fiasco I could live with (or eliminate).

There was this moment, after the launch, when we passed each other, a colony of butterflies fluttering in my tummy, when I hoped he would say something. He didn't.

The gaze was upon me frequently over the next few weeks, at a concert here, a play there, at the beach, even at a bookstore. He often moved in my direction, exciting those butterflies each time, but never said hello.

I am in a concert now, and I feel a warmth that I only vaguely remember now. I turn around, to see an elongated egghead and nondescript hair. I am in the blanket of his gaze now. The earring has disappeared - perhaps he works in a cultured atmosphere - and his eyes look tired, but the gaze still envelops me snugly, and I can still feel it upon me even when I'm not looking.

The concert starts, I drown in the tambura's drone and melt into the song.

The concert ends, I head out into the cavernous lobby. He approaches me, with purpose this time. The butterflies wake up from a six year slumber.

He talks, finally, in a baritone warmer than his gaze, with clarity of expression that suggests he has practiced this speech, "Some years ago, I came across a short story by Haruki Murakami. About this guy and girl who walk past each other, but don't make conversation."
I say, smiling, "They know they are 100% perfect for each other..."
"And yet, they don't talk. They just walk past."
"And the guy says he knows exactly what he would have told her had he walked past her now."
"Yeah. He'd tell her a story."
"One that starts with 'Once upon a time...' and ends with, 'A sad story, don't you think?'"
"Yes... That story."

We pause, breathlessly, and I say, "Sorry for ruining your speech."
He says, "I like the way it went." He pauses, and says, "You disappeared." He wants an explanation, I think.
"I moved. I don't live here now. I'm only visiting..."
"Oh," he says, indeterminately. If he intends to convey sadness, he fails. He asks, "Coffee?"
I cannot, I know, but I make it look like I'm giving it some thought before saying, "I should be going, I'm in a hurry."

I walk away, leaving him jolted. The gaze is on the back of my neck until I disappear amidst the crowd. I walk out to the blustery evening, and wait on the pavement until a car pulls up. My daughter waves at me from behind the glass. I open the door, hurry into the warmth of the car-heating, and close my eyes. The car stereo starts - I drown in the tambura's drone and melt into the song.

Her Obviousness - Part IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her Obviousness - Part III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To continue.

Her Obviousness - Part II

Continued from here.
***

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

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

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

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

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

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

We troop through the apartment to the terrace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I had my doubts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To continue.

Her Obviousness - Part I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Shebait

This piece first appeared on mylaw.net.
***

In the wake of the Ayodhya judgment, I learnt a lot of law. The place of birth is a juristic person, apparently. Wait till the income-tax department, always looking for newer people, juristic or otherwise, hears of this. Two of the cases were dismissed on the grounds of limitation. That's rich. You're deciding whether some character called Babur built a mosque in 1528, and whether he destroyed a temple to do so, and you dismiss suits because they're filed beyond limitation.

Merits aside, the judgment threw up some interesting concepts - the "next friend" and the "shebait". Both terms sound shady.

I've heard that in Indian politics, the major political parties have their outwardly democratic structures - the President, the Vice-President, the Spokesperson and so on. But most politicians, apparently, also have an important figure around them, called their "best friend", who wields enormous power over their decisions - right from what he will have for lunch, what he will wear for a meeting, whom he will meet and what course the economy will take. A "next friend", I discovered, is someone like that. That treasure house of authoritative legal knowledge (I'm serious, ask the dudes in the big firms to swear that they've never relied on it to figure out what futures and options are), Wikipedia, defines it as "a person who represents in an action another person who is under disability or otherwise unable to maintain a suit on their own behalf as a result of their circumstances, who does not have a legal guardian". Our politicians are mostly in disability, they are usually a product of rather unfortunate circumstances, and their guardians tend to be illegal.

"Shebait" was harder to crack. Wikipedia has no entry on this word. A google search only reveals a lot of judgments from Indiankanoon.com, which suggests that beyond Indian temple law, the term does not have much use. A friend and I found the term highly useful. "I wish the High Court had more shebait." Or, "Dude, shebait, 7 o clock." "You're coming for this party?" "Depends on the shebait, macha."

And there were the jokes.
Q: How do you describe a Goan prostitute who specialises in temple administrators?
A: She baits shebaits on the sea shore.

My first hunch was that the term was Latin in origin. (I also had a feeling it might be French, given their shebaitic tendencies, but I rejected that thought immediately. Well, almost immediately.) I went through a large compendium of Latin maxims - a delightful old book that a family of rats had colonised. No luck there.

Then, I tried reading those old Indian judgments. They were of little help.

"It is true, it was a suit by some of the shebaits against the other shebaits, for the proper management of the debutter property but it cannot be said as contended on behalf of the appellant that two sets of shebaits were fighting with each other about the management of the properties...."
- Rangacharya v. Guru Revti AIR 1928 All 689

Sounds like quite a cat-fight. These judgments, though, threw up another curious word - "debutter". Who the hell is this guy? "I am putting on too much weight. I must debutter." The context suggested that "debutter" meant the Lord himself. But there was no assistance from Google on why this should be the case.

A friend at the bar, whose office has dealt with a fair number of debutters and shebaits over the years, told me that the term could be of Egyptian or Hebrew origin. He even pronounced the word as "shebayat". I spent a whole night on Hebrew and Egyptian dictionaries on the internet. I now had a collection of some choice swear words in two more languages, but no leads on the word "shebait". That night, I dreamt of shebaits and debutters locked in combat over a copy of the Bible.

In Court, the next day, I remembered - some kindred soul, whose family had no lawyers left, left me a thoroughly soporific book called "Essays on Classical and Modern Hindu Law." Flipping pages of this tattered tome, I came across a sole beacon of hope contained in a lengthy footnote, "... prefer the Bengali term 'shebayat' to describe these persons." Bengali!

One more fevered night of Googling ensued, at the end of which I found the entire story on a book on Sir John Woodroffe (the dude who wrote that book on evidence). "Shebait" came from "shebayat", although the origins of that word are still unclear. "Debutter", funnily enough, is a corruption of the word "devata".

"Dude, that shebait is quite the debutter!"

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.

A Letter

Dear Pretty Girl Running Around Sankey Tank who was being stared at by a Weird Guy,

Hi. I am that weird guy. I know it sounds creepy and horrible that I am writing a letter to you, but I really felt the need to explain my actions to you. I was guilt-ridden when I realised what the whole incident must have seemed like from your perspective.

I realise that you must have seen me running in from a distance. Well, at least, I saw you running in from a distance. I realise that when you saw me staring at you, you must've begun cursing me, muttering under your breath. You must've been complaining about how an averagely pretty girl cant even run in a park without being stared at by random men. You must've been wondering how desperate the menfol in this country get, and how dirty their thought process is. You must've been fulminating against the backwardness, conservatism and horniness of Indian society and culture.

Well, I wanted to explain my actions. You see, I don't usually stare at women. (There are notable exceptions. But they are, well, notable!) I didn't stare at you because you are a pretty girl running around a lake. I never stare at someone just because she is pretty. I stared at you because you looked remarkably like a friend of mine who now lives in the US. The resemblance is almost as striking Rohit and Raj, Seeta and Geeta, Michael, Madan, Kaman and Rajan, Omprakash and Om Kapoor, the Prince and the Pauper. The resemblance, funnily enough, doesn't end with your face, you are about the same height and weight as her also. For almost ten seconds, I thought I was watching her! Which is why I stared at you curiously. I don't think you noticed, but I smiled when you came closer. That's because I realised that you were actually someone else. I apologise profusely for any inconvenience caused.

This letter is also to tell you that if you are actually Don, then beware. The police have a Vijay waiting for you. They'll just capture you and replace you with my friend. And then, she'll destroy your gang.

Thanking You,

Swaroop

Update: Just realised. This is my 100th post! Yay! Is it significant that the tags for this one are 'incidents, ramblings, women'?