The town and the gown

     A walk down the road that goes inside Vijaynagar leads you to narrow alleys clogged with immobile traffic, cows, push-carts and pedestrians. Families are separated by a single wall . The old men of the neighborhood would stretch out on charpoys pulled outside their door on the street and talk their way throughout the day. I never understood what they talked about when sometimes as I walked past them I could pick up snatches of their gruffly conversation. They usually revolved around politics  and new tenants. Most of them had a string bed outside their door. That, and a couple of chairs and a coffee table formed a makeshift lounge in the public street. They expanded their family space outside the slight confines of their home by projecting beds, clothes-line, chairs and vehicles onto the road. The road that had been built as a two-way had thus been eaten into by protruding families. Even a single truck congested and jammed the road. And our grandpas would sit on their thrones and croak at the driver asking him to reverse gear.

    These were the thoughts that generally filled my find when I started living in Vijaynagar. I spent the first two months at a friend’s pigeon-infested room that overlooked a large ditch and a dairy whose owner kept a dozen milch cows. The cows were tethered near the half-concrete, half-dung road and fed on dry oats. Though generally quiet these beasts standing almost four and a half feet at the shoulder and a pair of ringed horns was a nuisance to passersby. Sometimes a cow would break loose and spread panic among the people on the street. Once I saw an urchin pelt stones at a huge cow and the animal nearly gored an unsuspecting young woman who was keeping to the right side of the street. A grocer chased away the animal that not knowing where to go ran bulldozed into a pack of street dogs. The dogs yelled and tore at the ground. A commotion followed. The woman screamed at everyone that stood near her while the shopkeepers and the local men screamed at the dogs now and then at the cow and her owner.

    But once I also saw a lad who washed dishes at a food-outlet taking a chapatti to the cow that was tied to an electricity post. I noticed that this was an everyday routine, perhaps a rule that the owner of the hotel had imposed on his employees. The first chapatti of the day was sent to the cow tethered at the turn of the road so that the day’s business would flourish.

    The two-month stay at my friend’s rooms was dominated by the figure of the landlord-a cantankerous man past fifty who filled his time selling grocery and recharge vouchers out of the iron bars that formed the front wall of his shop that also doubled up as his house. His parents, wife and children lived in the three-room house that was fitted with all modern gadgetry. In the morning the family scattered away for the day. The children were sent to school in a school van while the old couple went on their regular visits to neighbors and sometimes sank all day long on the sofa in front of the TV. The landlord began his day by shouting at his wife who would then slide away to the room at the back to dress and water the flower pots near the kitchen. A deeply sonorous clanking sound was followed by a serrated noise as the landlord opened his shop. Metal clanking against steel produced a singularly disturbing noise that woke me up many times in the morning. I was left helpless in the middle of my sleep. The landlord grunted and projected his anger onto the metal clippings that locked his grocery. The array of noises would reach me in my half conscious state till a particularly irksome sound would completely jolt me out of my sleep. I cursed my friend for renting that pigeon hole that did not even allow one to sleep peacefully. When I peered down through the window I saw the landlord attending to his first customers. He grunted in a friendly way and laughed through his missing front teeth, lit a bidi and started a conversation that contrasted sharply with his angry flare-up against his wife. He rolled up his sleeves, took a deep breath and gestured at me to come down. I did not trust that man for some reason that I found difficult to articulate. His piercing, business-like gaze caught me again. I removed my head from the window and hastily came down. He shot a paternal glance at me and surveyed me from head to toe before introducing me to his customer, an old man from the neighborhood who had come to buy milk. I was introduced as a stoodent who was staying at his rooms for a month due to the scarcity of alternate dwellings. He was dressed in a threadbare white kurta and the lining of his trousers was frayed. His blood-shot eyes, coarse hands and boorish features bespoke a man who had lived an active life away from home.

    Then he almost sized me up with his unfeeling stare. After making himself comfortable in a cot placed at a right angle to the iron grills of the shop, he decided to open up with me. It was hard to say he was speaking; he grunted. He exposed his teeth stained after years of chewing pan masala and with a weak smile started revealing his family history and whereabouts. He spoke proudly about his daughter-in-law who was also a salaried office-goer. Then he asked me about myself. When I told him I was studying for an MA degree he let out a short grunt and mumbled something. In short he looked dissatisfied. There should be something other than that A, he said. I must have looked lost then and for the first time our eyes locked. He intended to explain things better, moved closer to me and shooed away a dog that had comfortably curled up under the cot. After declaring that the Arts stream had no value these days, he undertook a vicious diatribe against a nephew of his who had failed his hard-working parents by flunking his science exams and then choosing to study an arts subject that he could not even remember. He added that his working daughter-in-law had studied commerce. Then he made a dismissive gesture with a swing of his thick-set shoulders, clicked his fingers and called for the landlord who emerged with a packet of milk.

    The sun was brilliant in the late-October morning and columns of sunlight fell and faltered on the broken pavement half-laid with bricks where the old man now stood. I was dazed from the half-sleep, the bright morning light and the pompous authority with which that old man standing in front of me generalized, classified and swept everything clean. He finished saying his byes to the landlord, barked a namaste to his wife deep inside the house and again addressed me but in a friendlier way. He wanted to know my home state. When I said I came from Assam, he peered at me and actually smiled. He declared that he had stayed in Assam for a decade on a posting when he was a CRPF jawan. I replied categorically that there was no CRPF presence in Assam. The narrow smile between his teeth immediately vanished. He might have considered it rude on my part to rebuff him. Instead of correcting himself he suggested between deep grunts that he had spent years in the villages of Dimapur in Assam. He sounded his words with a native force that desisted me from correcting him. A nerve in my most sensitive part was touched and itched and desired me to correct the man’s blatant geographical error but I was cut short by the barrage of words that followed. The man seemed in no hurry to return home with his milk and seemed to be gaining in aggression. He continued, piling blatant geographical errors on the rubbish heap of his depraved perception. There, I spent ten years, he repeated, before avowing that there you either shot or get shot yourself.

     My de facto landlord was all the time kind to me. He extended his circle of kindness to all students and for some reason deemed it a privilege to talk to them. This man happened to have a small outlet near his shop where he sold bags. The outlet was so small that an adult person could hardly stand inside and move his arms but the landlord made up for the paucity of space by displaying his bags out on the street. Once as I returned to the rooms and was passing by the shop to climb the staircase, he greeted me and asked me to look at his bags. Then he launched an encomium for his stoodent customers. Only stoodents buy my bags, he declared with pride. He snatched one from the stand, turned it upside down, crumpled it with his fingers and said that its durability was guaranteed. Stoodents who come here once always return, he declared, spat and puffed hard at his bidi.

     A walk around Vijaynagar was all that was needed to understand the landlord’s enthusiasm for student-customers. The two main entry gates to Vijaynagar from the arterial road that links it to the university was flanked with eateries, tea stalls and shops with glass windows that displayed items that ranged from teddy bears to rust-coated nails and hammers. A walk down one of these roads leads you to the heart of Vijaynagar where roads intersect and go four different ways. The shops that line the streets thrive on out station students who have come to study at the university and rent rooms at exorbitant rates. The student crowd presents an authentic thali: a body of young people that strings together cultures, tastes and languages of different parts of the country. In the morning, it is a familiar sight to see young men and women from Manipur and Nagaland in bright dresses and capes walking briskly for work or to the university. Some of them dress up in their brilliant, dainty sarongs and when you come across a group of them at a street-corner you could be very easily take yourself to be in Imphal rather than in Delhi. As a native of Assam, I have never come across women so free-spirited and independent back home since many of the societies of north east India are still overwhelmingly conservative. But the women I see on the streets of Vijaynagar do not remind you of the violence-ridden states they have left behind; they are on the contrary constant reminders that they belong to a generation that have tried and succeeded in coming out of the trapdoor of violence and counter-violence that still define the social and political configuration of many states in the north east.

    Four months back I finally made up my mind to leave my friend alone and look for rooms myself. My friend discouraged me because sharing a room indeed saves a lot of money but I decided to move on. My friend was on a state government scholarship which allowed one to survive in a metro city only by doing violence to one’s health. It is very hard for the tribe of landlords and their predatory agents to understand students like my friend. The local people naively assume that young people who have left their families behind to study in Delhi always happen to be well-off economically. Little do they understand that there are students who also come from remote provinces who fund their expenses by selling ancestral property whose industrious fathers think that sending their children to a good public university is more important than preserving their familial heritage and patrilinial inheritance.

    Here the proverbial conflict between the town and the gown is palpable. The locals are locked in a relationship of love and hate with the ‘outsiders.’ It is not very difficult to understand why the local population prefers student tenants. Once while I was looking for rooms with a friend, we were led on by an old broker. After showing us a precarious top-floor room, he smiled and told us that the room had been occupied before by a person who cracked some really tough exam to join the top echelons of the government. In another case, a landlady made no qualms to hide her admiration for her two tenants. She told me that both are well-to-do lawyers who have been staying in her house since they were students. Based on her tenants’ ‘performance’ she made a strong case for staying at her house. In another instance, I saw an old lady screaming at two boys, tenants at her neighbor’s house. She ended her tirade with ‘Don’t you think about your parents back home? How will they feel when two men from outside comes and blares music till two in the night near her bed?’ That was a moment when I immediately empathized with the lady.

     Finally I got a room in a three-storey building at the end of an alley near a gurudwara. The room was big enough to accommodate only a person at a time. There was no place for extra furniture. But what motivated me to rent that room was the fact that the landlord did not live on the ground floor or even nearby. He was a landlord in absentia and therefore I could live like a free man, I thought. I would not be subject to the owner’s patronizing gaze every time I go out or come back. On the very first night, a man (the next door neighbor) came and tried to warm up to me. He said that my room had been occupied by a student for five long years who attended coaching classes for government services. His tone was very patronizing. He seemed proud to have a student living next door. He admitted that his circumstances had prevented him from continuing his studies when he was young. Before he left, he asked to tell him if I had any problems. The next morning, I discovered that one of my water tanks atop the terrace was leaking. (I did not know for how long the room had been lying vacant.) I heard a hoarse cry the next moment. My neighbor was back. He seemed agitated. “Yeh Dilli shahar hain. If anyone even complains, the police will come and you will be in trouble. Climb the terrace immediately and fix the leak. See, your landlord does not live here.”                    

 

    

  

      

Chaatra Marg

          There was still some light in the window when I walked out of my room. When I reached the university gates the shadows had already lengthened and the lights had started to come on. It was early summer and distant clouds promised rain. There was a light breeze and I decided to take the path through the university gardens. As I took the narrow side track, I saw the familiar sight of the high-voltage lamps that lit the way to the sprawling gardens abuzz with swarms of insects, and birds noisily settling down in the high branches of the trees. Elderly men and women taking their evening walk marched smartly in jumpers and canvas shoes, greeting each other occasionally with a short burp and sometimes with an affected show made with the hands and a bend at the waist. The security guards stood beside vast flower pots in front of a gate or outside a building with grim expressions on their faces. They lazily walked around their designated spots and smiled or waved when they saw a fellow guard. And apart from them, there were the students in groups or senior research scholars, lonely, headphones on, books tucked in their hands, and the stray dogs that had come to take shelter at the vast sanctuary near the University Health Centre. Neat rows of wire meshes skirted restricted areas in the lawns. Some people were practicing yoga in open grass courts while others led their pet dogs who strained at the leashes and bared their teeth at any stray dog that happened to pass that way. I followed the broad tree-lined avenue that cut across the campus through the gardens and forked out at the street that straddled the university.

     The road that straddled the university ran parallel to most of the important buildings. It was a broad track with pavements and lanes for bicycles and cycle-rickshaws on both sides. A wide assortment of petty businesses and stalls flanked the sides almost occupying the pavements, while students in small and large groups jostled for space with cycle-rickshaws on the lanes. When I exited the gardens through the iron turnstile, I saw a small crowd outside the Student Union Office. The courtyard was littered with pamphlets pronouncing the names of student leaders with their respective portfolios. Fresher students looked nervous and chatted excitedly among them. The help-desks set up by various political parties with a stake in the university did little to defuse the clamor that prevailed. The one-room office from where the student leaders worked was bustling with students standing in queues outside makeshift counters and some of them were quibbling with their elected leaders over deadlines and delays. A man in his mid-thirties, with an thick moustache and his political affiliation pinned to his breast pocket standing outside the office, gave me an anxious smile as I passed him. Two young women argued with a cabulliwallah over two extra paper cones where he sold his heavily spiced chhana. And the traffic moved slowly, their movement hampered by groups of young men and women trying to cross the road every hundred yards.    

The first person I greeted was the seller of fake jewellry. He was a short, heavy man with broad shoulders who claimed to be a descendent of one of the sages of Benares. A coarse red cloth with ‘Ram’ printed on it diagonally and horizontally upholstered the basket in front of him. He called out to a lanky young man with the face of a boy who eyed his wares as he was walking past. He held out a ring with a blue stone in his fingers and said, This will keep you from evil, boy. No? Then why don’t you try this? with a swish of his hand, and the next moment there was a bracelet made of beads in his fingers. The young man grunted and walked away.

 

     I crossed a culvert that ran parallel to a shop selling stationery and reached the spot where I had my evening tea. It was a dark uneven clearing amid the ruins of a construction project that had been abandoned long ago and offered a clear view of the road. Several tea-stalls stood on a line with stools in front for customers. Most of the students had their favorite tea-seller or the tea-seller who gave them the maximum freebies. The one I frequented was run by an old man who wore a T-shirt under his kurta. The tea-stall was subaltern culture. It reminded me of the discarded furniture from our dormitories that were piled up in a dead alley overlooking the basketball court that separated our hostel from the fountain. Half broken chairs, some without an arm or leg and wasted planks of wood were invested with an amount of credibility by some members of the college non-teaching staff. Every afternoon after the lunch hour, the college carpenter and the electrician came there with their band of men for an adda. The men were almost invisible from our dormitories. But one day when I went to that alley and sat down for a cigarette on the remnants of a chair, the view it offered startled me out of my calm. The red-brick building of the dormitory stood out marvelously against the tree-lined skyline. So did the black of the doors against the brick. Human figures were clearly demarcated against the walls and the basketball court stretched out like a starched piece of cloth on a table. A view from the dark, ignored corners to the spacious lawns and courts. From the dark alleys toward the lighted halls inhabited by class-riders.

     

     And now the old man’s wobbly tea-stall appeared before me like a resplendent apparition. On the side of the pavement. A run down wall overlooking a ditch where the municipal department dumped the day’s wastes. A shed which the people on the streets ignored. Posters of various political groups vied for space on the crumbling wall. Happy drunks had painted walrus-moustaches on the faces of student leaders beaming from the posters in the late hours. Drunkards and drug-addicts abounded the place even in the day which was why the old tea-seller had once admonished my friend who had a sudden black out induced by the heat of the sun while sitting there with a cigarette. He, incidentally, had never touched alcohol or drugs in his life.

 

     I used to go there and take my seat on a concrete slab upholstered with dirty rags every evening, and every time I saw the street in a different light. It was a discovery. Looking at something which had always been there but was never seen because of the lack of a vantage-point. From my makeshift seat, I could see the flight of vehicles and pedestrians. It was similar to the sensation one feels when circumstances force one out of the normal scheme of things and he or she could come to understand normalcy only in retrospect. You never know what is commonplace and ordinary unless you look at it from an extra-ordinary vantage-point.

 

     The old man’s wrinkly throat convulsed into a hearty laughter as he welcomed me. His laughter was an index where one could measure how familiar he was with a person. He admitted only a slight tweak of his lips when he welcomed a stranger. I remembered him accosting me the first day I went to him for tea.

 

“You new here? Naye ho?”

“Yes.”

“Kahan se?”

“Assam.”

“Assam! Yeah it’s a big province.”

 

     I never understood what calculations made him say that. But gradually his stern features thawed to make way for a happy-go-lucky old “chacha.”

 

     The bamboo and plastic roof of his shack had a rightful justification for being a world unto its own. A tattered match-box, may be many months old, but re-fuelled with new sticks every time they ran out stuck out from an overhead pole. A lantern hung from the centre of the canvas, its chimney blackened by ash and soot. On another discreet corner, paper bags neatly folded into rectangle bags cut out from newspapers and old notebooks swayed on a hook. The day’s newspaper was stuck between a pole and the canvas that formed the roof.

 

     I sat down for my evening tea. I could see black through the canvas roof. Night had already seeped in.

 

     The old man flicked out the day’s newspaper and grinned at me. The kind of grimace that one wears when he rests on a pedestal of superiority accorded by his own signature.

“Nirmal Verma?” He grinned again and showed his yellow teeth.

 

     I noticed the length of thread fastening his spectacles around his head had turned black from use.

 

     “Nirmal Verma used to drink tea in my stall once upon a time. But I know he is not one whom you young boys remember these days. But I am proud Vermaji used to like my tea.”

 

     I took a moment to remind myself that he was talking about the same Nirmal Verma who went to the same college that I attended now, and was now a great Hindi writer.

I told the old man bluntly that I knew Nirmal Verma and that I was familiar with some of his works.

 

     “Works?” the old man cried stubbornly. “What do you mean by works? Have you read his Samvatsar lecture?”

 

“No.” I said.

 

“Then you are not familiar with any of his writings, no? Huh.”

 

I was taken aback but stood my ground.

 

He spat and then growled again, “Have you read today’s papers?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Why is our Prime Minister visiting America? Doesn’t he know that America is a land of spies and traitors? Isn’t he worried that America might train its guns on us tomorrow?”

 

“Every American is not a spy as every Pakistani is not a terrorist and every Indian a saint…” I countered him.

 

The old man was as generous in his acknowledgements as in his admonishments.

 

“Very nicely put, boy,” he said patronizingly and went on, “Why do our people get targeted and shot in Norway, in Europe and in Australia? Our own people who have migrated to these foreign countries for better opportunities and with no plans of returning? Generations of our people had toiled hard as petty labor and many as slaves for these wealthy foreign nations. Now when they are rich and claim a part of the fruit of development, these foreigners think there is a problem with sharing. They want us to go to their countries as workers but when the descendants of these same hardworking immigrants leave poverty behind and demand a share in the economy, the foreigners resent and bully and threaten and shoot them, no? America, the most powerful country today was originally inhabited by the Red Indians. Now the Red Indians are a minority in that country of migrants living mostly in the western part of the country. They are now beggars and drug-addicts, unemployed and uncared for. The neo-Americans migrated, colonized and dispossessed the Native Americans in their own land. Now they are worried that they might meet the same fate when Indians migrate and settle down in the country. They are a very insecure race, no boy?”

 

     Meanwhile the first drops of rain had begun to fall. Sounds of distant thunder were audible. But the drizzle was light enough to go on working without looking for a cover.

I drank the last sip of my tea which was cold by then. The old man had already ignored two customers, saying it was too late to make another round of tea but obliged them with cigarettes.

 

     He turned toward me, stamped his right leg on the ground and continued, “Nirmal Verma is a brilliant person. Both as a writer and as a man. Someone who bravely proclaimed truth as a categorical entity is removed from day-today politicking. He has been a relentless advocate of the artistic truth, the essential truth in this world. Inimitable as a man of letters, as a man of valued convictions. You boy, do you read science? No? The progress of science is fast and scientific truths are always there to be overtaken by another set of truths or scientific theories. Einstein succeeded Newton as the face of the march of scientific knowledge and as the yardstick of the so-called progress of the human race. The ancient Greeks believed that our knowledge that the earth rotates or revolves is based on nothing but from a series of repetitions of the earth’s movements and is therefore no convincing proof that the earth would move in set pattern in the future. But these nitwits were at least better than their pre-Copernican counterparts.

 

     Vermaji and his breed of human beings are the ones who take us to the core of the sense of our being through assertion of a core set of values that they claim to be the truth. There is no progression but the sameness of essence in successive works of writers and poets. A book or a poem written today cannot be more truthful than in the aesthetic sense of the word than another written a century ago. Now listen to a story Vermaji told in one of his lectures. The story is from the Matsya-Purana after the world has been destroyed. The Creator Vishnu is floating on the calm waters with nothing but the dark sea surrounding him. The Maharishi Markhandaya is wandering inside Vishnu’s body where everything is pure and radiant. Suddenly he slips out of Vishnu’s mouth and crashes into the waters of the sea. He can only see darkness and water around him. He wonders if he is dreaming or has fallen into the trap of an illusion. The next moment he discerns Vishnu’s floating body, luminous and calm on the water. But Vishnu picks him up and puts him back into his mouth. The Maharishi finds himself back in the same lighted world from where he had fallen into the sea. He finds himself at a loss to understand which of the two worlds he has experienced is the real world. Now boy, what have you learnt from the story?”

 

     He said this with a swagger of his shoulders that was more like an appendage than a part of his shriveled frame.

 

     “You should understand that the nature of reality is always mysterious and incomprehensible to the human psyche. You are sometimes unable to understand whether your experience is real or illusory. And that is the precise moment when you are staring at life in its barest form. That is when you are shorn off your trappings and encounter yourself face to face simply because you do not understand yourself. And this is what truth comprises of. It is not a milestone nailed on the ground by someone claiming to be a seeker till another seeker comes along and replaces the old milestone with a new one. Truth is beyond the everyday and commonplace.”

 

     He reasoned with a final waving of his hand that exposed the torn kurta at his right armpit.

 

     “If truth doesn’t encompass the events unfolding and changing rapidly around us all the time, that truth doesn’t do justice to life at all.” 

 

I got back to him.                                                                                                 

 

     “If the price of petrol goes up today, there will be protests from the common citizens against the hike. If you choose not to identify with the protestors your truth is unjust toward your life because rising petrol prices will affect your life in so many ways, your everyday trip on the bus, and your son’s daily hike on the bike. If the price of sugar goes up, you will have to invest more in order to sell tea and you will have an inclination to increase the price of your tea which in turn will affect many people like me who walk down this road expecting cheap tea from you. Your idea of the transcendent truth sadly leaves behind the only degree of agency that you have over your life. Your truth makes you sacrifice what you have in hand in order to make way for something that you have no evidence of. If your life is an accident, you have a right to be despondent about the listlessness, but at the same time you should be profoundly happy and thankful about getting that which you had never expected and to which you can give a direction. The search for a meaning in life gives meaning to life.”

 

     The twinkle in the old man’s eye told me that he acknowledged my words but he went on to quote a philosopher and then admitting to forgetting the original words, paraphrased him. “The transcendent God which I believe in is not at all concerned about saving this world. He is more interested in saving individual souls as they pass from this world through time. You ought to look beyond history rather than within if you are to be convinced of God’s triumph.”

   

     The drizzle was now a steady downpour. The street was almost deserted now and the lights of passing vehicles formed bright images on the water sliding away toward the pavement. A few young boys walked past, heads bowed, snatches of exciting conversation audible and undeterred by the rain. One of them balanced a handkerchief on his head but pulled it back the next moment. Two women and a boy walked briskly through the rain and took shelter in the bus-shed opposite the old man’s stall. The older women took out a handkerchief from her bag and wiped off the water from the boy’s hair first, and then from his face. The boy stared disinterestedly at a cycle-rickshaw weighted down by four boys, shouting and singing at the top of their voices. They made no effort to cover themselves from the rain.

 

     The old man covered his stall by hauling a tarpaulin sheet across the roof and pulled the stove and the cylinder further inside. The jars of biscuits and other snacks were wet from the rain but he made no effort to save them.  He left the used glasses outside on the pavement. Then he unpacked his packet of bidis, lit one with a lot of effort, and remarked, These boys don’t know that it is not good to get wet in the first shower of the year.

 

     The rain receded soon. It was humid but there was a chill in the air from the first showers of the season. A wind shook the drops of rain from the leaves on the tops of trees. I decided to walk back.

 

     I paid the old man; now busy throwing out the rain water collected inside the used glasses, and took to the street.

 

     “The rains have started. I am afraid you have to close early today. And I hope I didn’t discourage customers during our long conversation.”