(This is the second part in a series of ... many. Continued from here)
The writer’s
question was more prosaic: “Do you enjoy fiction?”
“Yes”, I
said.
“May I
tell you a story?”
“Of
course.”
Perhaps,
my memory fails me or a lovely marmalade nostalgia has tinted my perspective,
but it strikes me as perfectly natural that he should propose to tell a story
and I would readily agree. Time wasn’t an immediate constraint for either of
us: my PhD was barely beginning and there were miles to go (though that never
prevented me from sleeping well); he was a writer, who wrote in the mornings
and researched – “gossiped” or “idled away” being less charitable adjectives –
from noon to night. The larger point I want to make, though, is somewhat less
immediate: time was rarely in short supply, for many of us then.
“I want
you to picture a man of forty-eight: tall, beard as white as salt,
the island of baldness forever encroaching on the sea of his hair, his nose
being his only distinguishing feature, though its excessive length made him
look more crooked than distinguished; his – “
“— Are
you describing yourself?”
“Ah, I
gave too much away, didn’t I?”
“You
might as well have said: ‘Picture me.’”
“But, I
didn’t want to say it, because I wanted your objective opinion.”
“On how
handsome you are?”
He burst
out laughing. An old Purandaradasa song chiding the disrespectful tongue played
in my head.
Luckily
for me, he didn’t seem to mind.
“Let me
cut to the chase, then”, he said.
He
continued:
“The
other day, I was talking to Shesha – you know him, don’t you?”
“The PUC
Maths teacher?”
“No”, he
said – his voice falling away, in slight disappointment, “Shesha is the sweeper
at Smriti Bhavan.”
“Oh”, I
said, wondering why he expected me to know him.
“Well,
Shesha told me this story about a landlord’s house being burnt in his village. It’s
not too far away, this village – four hours, two buses – from here. He told me
a few boys and girls from the forest did it – they had a gun, wore khaki. Picture
this: four persons, a pair of guns, some oil, a few matchsticks. A house
blazing. The hills and the trees are quiet witnesses.
Here’s
the thing: no one dies, though. The landlord’s wife and children escape because
they happen to be away, on an invitation to the temple by the priest. When they
do get there, a very perplexed priest greets them. He asks them why they’d come
without notice. They insist the priest’s new Brahmin trainee had sent for them;
the priest says he doesn’t have a trainee; in fact, he’s never had a trainee,
Brahmin or otherwise. Meanwhile, the landlord, who had decided to give God a
miss to nap in his bedroom, finds the house burning, but his front door
miraculously – and inexplicably – thrown wide open; he flees outside. The
burning has real consequences: the very next day onwards, Shesha’s relatives
stop walking all the way to the river to get water – a clearly shaken landlord
has opened his well to all. Like the bard said: all’s well that ends well …”
I
chuckled and asked:
“So,
Shesha is from a formerly untouchable caste?”
“Yes.”
“And
Shesha’s people have something to do with these gun-toting forest youth?”
“Those
gun-toting forest youths are Naxals.”
“Naxals?
In these parts, in these times?”
“Oh they
may be factitious, but they’re resilient – come 2020, mark my words, they’ll
still be saying: the red flag on the red fort, in ten years!”
“So
you’re suggesting that the landlord realized that opening the well to all might
placate these Naxals in some way”
“Yes,
but – ”
“And
that Shesha’s people have something to do with them?”
“No, you’ve
got the relationship mixed up: I’m suggesting the Naxals may have something to
do with Shesha’s people.”
I mulled
over the statement, not entirely sure what he meant.
“And the
Brahmin trainee?”, I asked, “A benevolent Naxal in disguise?”
“The
priest claims that it was God himself, in disguise. The landlord believed him,
though somewhat reluctantly – the priest made him part with a few hundred
rupees as donation to the benevolent God as a token of gratitude.”
“Well,
there’s precedent: Hanuman adopted the Brahmin guise too … you never know.”
“If
there is a God”, the writer proclaimed so that everyone in Ice Land could hear,
“then he is here – in these bondas and kaapi.”
The
light through the window had turned the colour of clementines; the smell of
incense wafted from behind the proprietor; a bunch of bored bank clerks from
the corporation bank walked in quietly and stared at nothing in particular.
“So, why
tell me all this?”, I asked the writer.
“I
thought you’d never ask.”
I
laughed.
“I told
you all this because I wanted to know if you’d like to come to Shesha’s village
with me …” the writer said, taking off his glasses and placing them on the
table.
He
continued:
“... I
am going next week to meet with these Naxals. Shesha’s told me he’d arrange a
meeting; they often come to eat in one of their houses.”
I
remember being taken aback by the suggestion, but my pulse didn’t quicken, no
sweat trickled down my brow. Instead, I remember, clear as the Suvarna in my
memory’s eye, the reflection of the slowly spinning long ceiling fan (even then
a relic of an earlier era) in the writer’s glasses.
And, the
hotel radio was playing a popular Kannada film song that went:
She saw me,
I saw her,
She saw me.
*
(Continued: Part 3)
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