Sorry for the delay.
***
It is nearly two-thirty AM, and I am at the Chennai Central station. That unearthly humidity hangs in the air amidst moderate to not-so-moderate temperatures, the sea-breeze bids goodbye for the day with an unsaid promise to return tomorrow, the ineffective air-conditioning whirs, trying to drum up some enthusiasm. People lie in various levels of comatose, on steel chairs, plastic bucket-chairs, on suitcases, bags, dhurries, newspapers fashioned as dhurries, on hard concrete, or on the cool marble flooring in the new waiting room. Some are waiting for trains that should have come yesterday, others have trains to catch tomorrow. Some work here, others have no other place to sleep.
A nasal voice makes occasional announcements in three languages, the sort where some numbers, like six, are high-pitched, others, like three, are low-pitched, and the rest, like seven, are of medium pitch. Prefixed and suffixed by a gong, the whole thing sounds like a Vedic recitation.
Most of the shops are closed; a tea shop with an incongruously awake and alert shopkeeper is open, and so is another little hole in the wall that stocks chips, biscuits, fried knickknacks, chocolates, sweets, soda, and cup noodles. The noodles excite me, and I help myself to a cup. In my hurry to eat, I open the cup too early, and the noodles aren't boiled enough. But I am hungry, I gobble them up eagerly.
My idea of spending the night at the railway station doesn't seem very smart anymore. Gopal left last night, with Sundari, to Bangalore. Their train was at eleven-fifteen. Uma arrives, from Bangalore, by a train scheduled to arrive at four-thirty, but often arrives earlier. It sounded like the soundest of plans - drop Gopal, say bye, act like I'm going back home; once the train leaves, slip back into the waiting hall, and wait for Uma's train - but it isn't.
I have two hours to kill now. Sleeping is an option, and it sure seems like the most desirable option at the moment, but I fear that the sheer coolness of this exercise will be lost if I slept through it. I want to tell people, "You know, I once spent the night at the Central station, and there, I saw..." Somehow, "You know, I slept at the Central station one night," just doesn't cut it. It doesn't have the makings of a tellable story.
But staying awake hasn't given me any stories either. I'm sandwiched between a fat man who snores like an asthmatic rhinoceros and a drunk whose head has comfortably settled itself on my left shoulder. The station is lifeless. No, wait, it isn't lifeless, there is surprising amount of activity, but nothing worth reporting. People are doing what people do in a railway station - waiting for trains. This exercise is heading towards resounding flop.
The word 'flop' that passed fleetingly through my conscious makes me wonder if I'm spending the night in this station only because I want to tell this story to someone. If that is the reason, I could just make up a story - tell people that I saw a young couple who looked suspiciously like they had just eloped, or that there was this man who delivered a shady looking bag to another man who quickly tucked it within his t-shirt and disappeared. Real-life untrue stories are easy to invent - the art is in striking a balance between the reassuring boundaries of possibility and the subtle thrill of the marginally unordinary.
But this doesn't answer the original question - am I here for a narratable story, or am I here just for the experience? Do I want to tell myself that the station holds no apparent stories? I say "apparent", because each person here, in this newer waiting hall, must have a reason for why he or she is in the station. Some might have finished a job assignment of some sort, some might be visiting relatives. Someone might have come to Madras for a funeral, a wedding, an engagement, or one of those undefined "family functions" and someone else could be going somewhere for one.
One of these guys might be missing his girlfriend or wife terribly, and might be going back to see her. On a whim. Another might be going back to see some girl his parents have lined up for him. Overcome by shyness, he will probably look at her through the corner of his eyes, while his father asks her what her hobbies are. He will hope that she can sing. The old lady sleeping in the far corner might be visiting her son, she might be upset that her daughter-in-law, from another religion, cannot be bossed around - or she might be happy that her daughter-in-law has found a voice she never found.
For the vendor in that tea stall, afternoons might be as exciting as nights - he probably hasn't seen one in years. The afternoon air, like the night air to me, is alien to him. His sleeping self knows it well, but his consciousness is unaware. Lunch is like dinner, going for a matinee is like a night-show.
None of the people in the waiting hall look like holidayers, though, except the two foreigners I saw entering the AC waiting lounge. That is strange. Do Indians not go on holidays? Or do the Indians that go on holidays not wait in the halls of railway stations?
I wonder - am I here to ponder over these life-altering issues? Create stereotypes for sleeping people in the station? Am I here out of sheer laziness? Do I not want to drive up and down twice in five hours? But if I am lazy, I should sleep. So, I reject that idea. I guess I am here because I find an excitement in this, an adventure even. When Uma arrives, I will tell her that I've been here all night, and she will think I'm strange. I like people thinking I'm strange. But there I go again, defining myself in terms of how people will think of me. Is everything I do just for effect?
It is shocking how innocent boredom can lead one to rethink one's life.
I bury myself in the book that keeps me company - a collection of Raymond Chandler's not-so-short stories. The one I'm reading is called Trouble is my Business. Chandler writes in stereotypes. The men in his books come in five varieties - the gritty, world-weary, sarcastic, Philip Marlowe, who "collects blondes and bottles"; the rich old men with slightly dishonourable backgrounds, whose money the world is after; the smart, suave, smooth, big-time gangster, (though Marlowe eventually shows he's smarter, suaver, smoother) who has a convoluted plan to get the rich old man's fortunes; the honest, hardworking small-time crook, the sort that needs the money, the sort that is willing to work for it, the sort that's not wily enough to be the big-time gangster; aad lastly, the dumb small-time crook, who says stupid things and indulges in random acts of violence before sleeping the big sleep. The women in Chandler's books, they're from another world. A character says about one of them, "Every time I think of that dame, I have to go out and walk around the block,". He invented the femme fatale - the maddeningly alluring, coldly calculative, morbidly manipulative sort, whose only fault seems to be that she cannot keep her hands off Marlowe.
In a sense, he does just what I did a while ago - sees faces in a crowd, and categorises them into pigeon-holes he invents for himself, and writes stories around them. There is a joy in stereotyping, there is a joy in telling stories about caricatures.
The story simmers and rages to a chilling end. Marlowe ends up with the girl, but only briefly - he has to be available for the next girl in the next story. He says this girl was nice, but he doesn't have "the money, the clothes, the time or the manners". I smile. I'm like this, sometimes. I don't have the time, the money, the clothes or the manners. The only difference is that I hate to admit it to myself.
There are three stories left in the book, all enticingly dangerous, but I need a break. I get up to buy myself some tea. As I near the tea shop, I wonder if that's a good idea - it might affect my sleep. But again, how much will I sleep once Uma arrives?
I don't even know why she wants to spend the weekend here. She's getting married in the wee hours of next Sunday, there is a cocktail party the Saturday before, and a soporific reception on Sunday night. I am sure there are lots of things she has to do - shopping, planning, inviting. Maybe she needs space to do something she hasn't done enough of - pondering. She's unsure of Arun, or she's unsure of the permanence of marriage. But marriages are not necessarily permanent, she knows that. Maybe that's what worries her.
I'm being presumptuous, I know, she's probably tired and just wants to sleep. The more I think of it, the more convincing it sounds. She has had too much wedding planning over the last few months, and wants to get away for a weekend, think of other things, and go back to Bangalore fresh.
I amble to the tea shop, and ask for tea. And then I change my mind, hot milk might be a better idea. "No sugar," I tell him. He tells me in a grumpy mumble that the sugar is already in the milk. I give him six rupees, and take the paper cup from his hand. He asks, "What sir? Diabetes already?" much more brightly. I smile, "No, no. I just don't like sugar in milk." I sip on the milk, it isn't all that sweet after all.
He asks, "Are you Kannada?" I'm surprised, but he explains, "Your Tamil accent..." I nod. He adds, "Also, you are very fair. First, I thought you were a North Indian, after I heard you speak Tamil, I realised you might not be." I smile again. I take another sip from the paper cup, and feel the warmth go down to my stomach. I have no obligation to stand there, I know, but I remain. He continues, "You don't talk much, do you? I jabber away to everyone who comes to the shop - I have to stay awake, no?" I smile again, I really don't know what to add to this conversation.
He continues, undaunted, "I come here three days a week. You know, if you come here every day, it's not too bad. But when you come here three days a week, your sleep gets disturbed. Your body, you know, it has a clock inside it." This is where I switch off. He speaks for a while on body clocks, afternoon naps and various domestic issues that invariably end with him not being able put mutton on the table for his family. My cup is nearly empty, I keep up the polite nods and hmmm-s.
He asks, "Sir, what train are you taking?"
I say, "I'm just waiting for the Bangalore train... Have to pick up someone."
He looks at the large station clock, and his eyes widen, "Sir! You're too early! The train will not come for another half an hour."
I wonder if I should tell him that I've been waiting all night. I don't. I just make some noise that suggests that I know.
Like a bolt from the blue, he asks, with a twinkle in his eye, "Sir, girlfriend aa?" I glare. He grins. My glare turns to a smile, I put the empty cup of milk on the counter, and leave.
The train chugs in purposefully almost exactly half an hour after I finish my milk, just like the tea-stall vendor predicted. Pairs and pairs of groggy eyes stare out the grilled windows, the enthusiastic stand at the door (in a tearing hurry to alight, of course), and the lazy will wake up only when the porters wake them up.
Uma emerges from one of the air-conditioned compartments in a loose t-shirt and bright orange pyjamas, hair tied-up in a haphazard bun, carrying a backpack and another little bag. She sees me, smiles, and her step quickens in my direction.
"I've missed you," I say, hugging her. She doesn't say anything, not even a hi. A smile of contentment fixes itself on her face and she clutches my arm fondly as we walk to the car, wordlessly holding hands. This was the typical Uma emotion - a muffled sort of joy.
We reach the car when she breaks her silence, "New car?"
I look at the grey WagonR - I only bought it to bring a modicum of respectability into my existence - with stifled pride, and say, "Yeah. Like it?"
She throws her bag into the backseat, settles down in front and says, her voice barely betraying emotion, "It is a little uncle-ji..."
Only Uma can talk like this - say something that someone else might have said with a twinkling eye, a wink or tongue firmly in cheek in the most inexpressive manner.
The parking fee comes to seventy-five rupees for six hours, and I rummage in my wallet for change when Uma asks, "When did parking at this station become this expensive?"
Avoiding her eye, I say,"I spent the night at the station." She doesn't ask me for an explanation, but I find myself constrained to offer one, "I dropped Gopal and that girl..."
"Can't bring yourself to say her name?" she asks, again, in that same distant tone.
"Nothing like that! Pah!"
She smiles. "What is he up to in life?"
"Gopal?"
"Yes."
"He's writing a book of some sort."
She stares out of the window for a long time, observing early morning Madras. I don't think this city is especially pretty. Large parts of it are just dusty brownish grey buildings and dusty brownish grey roads. She throws her hands out and feels the wind against her arms. Then, she asks, "Fiction?"
I have forgotten what we were talking about. She asks again, "Gopal's book - is it fiction?"
"God, no." I say, cackling. She looks at me questioningly. "He tried writing this novel some time ago... I told you."
"Oh. That one," she says, with her hands still outside the window, "I was surprised when you told me it was bad. He wrote some really good plays, you know."
"I thought he only acted."
Uma first saw Gopal at a rehearsal for a play for which she designed costumes and sets. He played an odd character whom nobody, not even the playwright, fully understood. The character was on stage even as the audience were settling in and sat on a high stool at the back of the stage, looking around expectantly, checking his watch a couple of times, not too fidgety, not too dispirited - just like a person waiting for a show to start. The play started. Gopal's character, who had no name, reacted to the play like the audience - he laughed at the jokes, he gasped when he was surprised, he frowned when he was confused and nearly cried at the climax. He didn't speak a word, he didn't get off the stool or get involved in the story.
No one was told what or who he was, but everyone remembered him.
A reviewer, who noted that a couple of characters in the play referred to the eyes of God always watching over men and their actions, wrote that "Gopalakrishnan as God watching over us, was an eerie presence." Someone else called Gopal a mirror, "...an interesting device to show the audience who they are." A third review said, "The unsettling story was accentuated by an unexplained panopticon-like person scrutinising the proceedings."
At the rehearsals, for days, Uma did not even know Gopal was a character in the play. He sat on the stool for the three hours as actors rehearsed and re-rehearsed their lines, blocked their movements, the director stopped the play every now and then to issue orders or discuss something, the backstage crew figured out their parts. And when it ended, he got off the stool, hung around in the background for a couple of minutes, and without saying a word, left. It was like he was in character throughout. Only ten days before the show, when he asked Uma what he should wear did she realise he was actually going to do on stage what he did every day in the rehearsals.
After four shows, one afternoon, Uma came to the rehearsal to see Gopal engaged in an enthusiastic debate with the director over the finer points of a new script. "Uma, can you read this and tell me if you like it?" the director asked, "This guy here, Gopal, he wrote it." Uma gave him a searching look, but he hardly reacted.
Soon, the rest of the players arrived, and the rehearsal proceeded as usual. When they were leaving, the director called Uma aside and said, "I think the play is brilliant, but I have a crush on this guy and I want someone to read it objectively." Uma smiled.
The play is set in the drawing room of a bare Brahmin-looking house somewhere in Madras. A woman, a violinist, waits for her brother, who was once a child-prodigy Carnatic violinist, to come home after fifteen years. She has a little argument with the help who insists she has been too jumpy all morning. Their stern father, a legendary violinist himself, is barely alive - the world doesn't know if he even comprehends life around him. Everyone hopes the return of his favourite son will help.
The son, now a photographer living anonymously in Delhi, arrives. We learn that the son ran away from his talents years ago. The reasons are ambiguous - a combination of his father's over-disciplining, pressures of being constantly reminded of his genius, and an aversion to incessant travelling is hinted at.
His sister says, "Appa was jealous of him, I think. He told me, 'I spent two years learning to play that raagam perfectly. He took two hours.' It wasn't a vindictive sort of jealousy. No. But it made him push my brother more than he should have been pushed. The jealousy drove my father to want to be a part of my brother's genius, by moulding him and mentoring him too much."
The son shows little interest in his father who invisibly disintegrates, but takes a fancy for his young student - a girl from the US. Their repartee, musical and conversational, culminates in a tender moment where the son reveals a story he had been hiding within himself for years.
"When I was fourteen, I had a concert in a town near Ernakulam," he starts, "I can't remember the name of the place now. It was in the evening, and when I reached the station in the morning, there was an unexpected thunderstorm. The venue for the concert was an open air place and I expected the concert to be cancelled. But it wasn't - this was Kerala, right? A fairly decent audience showed up, and stood in the rain holing umbrellas.
"This sort of thing should have inspired me, but it didn't. I played horribly, losing focus, trying strange ideas that I never tried before, being very fractured and insipid. It was like I was deliberately trying to get rid of the audience. But they refused to leave. Every single one of them stayed till the end and left silently.
"When the concert ended, I had this thought that I wasn't able to get out of my head - that the entire trip had been slightly wrong. My mother usually saw me off when I left for the railway station. This time, she was asleep. There was too much salt in the curd rice she packed for the journey. I usually called her before every concert, to discuss the concert plan with her, but the rain meant that there was no working telephone around. I usually called her after every concert again, but I couldn't.
"I had another concert after this. In Bangalore. And I was supposed to take a train from Ernakulam. On the way from this town to Ernakulam by taxi, the rain suddenly stopped. It was unseasonal rain, and the driver said it was just a passing cloud.
"I tried to sleep, but I couldn't. On the way, I saw a hill with a temple on top that took my fancy. The hill was not very tall, and it stood out in the flat coastal landscape. There was this bright light coming from the temple - someone had lit a really large fire. I asked the driver if I could go see it. My train was much later in the night, I had a lot of time to kill.
"The driver told me that there was a road two-thirds the way up the hill, but I had to climb the last stretch. I could do that, I told him. He asked me, 'Sir, don't you want to make that phone call home? You will not find a phone until the station now.' I considered that question for a second, because he delivered it like it was some kind of warning.
"But I ignored him, and asked him to go. We snaked up the hill road through some really dense forests - the vegetation did not look that dense from the bottom. There was one thing, though. We could see the light from every part of the road. At one point, the road just ended. The driver said, 'I'm too old to climb, sir. But just follow the mud path. It is a little steep towards the end, but you should be able to manage fine.'
"I trudged along the path that climbed gradually, and it was much like the road - snaking around the hill carefully. It was very unlike a path made by people on foot, which tend to cut corners and go through little crannies. It was as if someone deliberately wanted you to be able to see the light until you reached the top.
"At some point, the path narrowed and led itself into this shrubbery of sorts. The path was lined by four feet of dense bushes on each side. It got steeper, but never too tiring. It was getting slightly darker as I climbed, and the light shined even brighter.
"I tripped over a stone, after which I tread carefully, my eyes glued to the little road. The last part of the path led into a rock-formation tunnel, which was hardly fifteen feet long, and when I emerged from it, I was at the top. The climb was rather easy, and I wondered why the driver said he was too old to make it.
"It took me a couple of seconds to realise that there was something wrong - the light had been put out. There was light, but that was from the fading day. The temple was deserted, the door was locked with an old padlock that looked like it hadn't been disturbed in decades. There was no smoke, no sign of any flame having been lit anywhere.
"Dejected, and frankly, quite spooked, I hurried down the path, through the rock-tunnel, the shrubbery and the forest back to the taxi. The driver was fast asleep, and I woke him up. I told him what I saw, and unfazed, he said, 'Oh, they lock it after six, I think. The fire would have gone out once the firewood ran out.' It was a completely plausible explanation, but there was one flaw. There was no other way down from the hill, and I saw no one pass me while I climbed up. The driver remained silent when I asked him about this. Something in his silence suggested that I shouldn't probe more.
"I reached the station by around ten at night. By this time, the phone booth was also closed. Again, that thought struck me - that something was amiss. I bought myself a pack of biscuits and a cup of tea for dinner, and got on to the train to Bangalore.
"I reached Bangalore in the morning, not having slept for most of the night, and found the sabha secretary and his wife at the station. They were to send their driver, but they came. Instead of being pleasantly surprised by their presence, I was disconcerted. This trip was not going to plan at all. I got down from the train, and they asked me to sit down on a nearby bench. I asked them what was happening. The lady merely asked me to drink some coffee. The secretary told me that my mother was seriously unwell, and handed me a train ticket to Bangalore - the train was to leave in minutes.
"I rushed to Madras to find out that my mother died even before I reached Ernakulam.
"My father didn't know how to contact the sabha in that small town... No one even remembered the name of the town. When they finally found out the details, they couldn't contact the place because the phone lines were down and it was impossible for anyone from Ernakulam to travel in that rain. The messenger set out as soon as the rain stopped, but by the time he reached, I had left for the station. My father was forced to contact the sabha secretary in Bangalore."
He paused for a long time, before saying, "I felt I had to run away that day. And I did."
At the end of this story, the young girl hugs the son comfortingly, and soon, the hug evolves into a kiss and the lights fade out.
Next morning, a lady arrives at the house and declares herself to be the son's live-in girlfriend. They even have a two-year-old daughter.
Here, the script that Uma read said, "Interval." She put it down, picked up her phone, called the director and said, "Do the play."
***
To continue.
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