Route No 23 A

I have been an odd man in many ways.  I was a self styled misogynist; yet women always intrigued me, even if it was in an asexual way. The less they noticed me the more I wished I would be chased by them.  At one point I was afraid that I would soon be an afflicted soul, a la, Mungeri Lal of the Haseen Sapne fame.

And then suddenly something happened.  I was thrown into this large and impersonal whorl of people that was known as the City of Madras.  Out of sheer desparation over my political activism and the resulting academic crisis I faced in Trivandrum  my father enrolled me into a college that was known for breeding slaves:  Loyola College.  The students of Loyola were known as the Slaves of Loyola, in contrast to the Princes of Presidency.

Loyola college was a long bus ride away from where I lived, the Central Government Staff Quarters at Besant Nagar.  Home to one of the best beaches in south India and the free spirited movement of Annie Besant, the place seemed to be designed for youthful romance, with its avant garde air about it.  Hear this: Rukmini Devi Arundale chose the neigbourhood of Besant Nagar to set up her liberal Kalakshetra Academy, which cocked a cultural snook at the Tamil orthodoxy of Bharatanatyam.

Top that ambiance with a cosmopolitan community of middle class teenagers, raised all over India, as their parents got transferred every three years. Many of them, especially the women, took to the arts, hoping to follow their civil service parents in their bureaucratic footsteps.  I guess you get the picture now:  It was a perfect setting for a seventies style romance - even for an unromantic philistine like me.

23 A was one of the most colourful routes for getting from Besant Nagar to Loyola. It serviced three of the best women's colleges of Madras that packed in a heavy fire-power of some of the prettiest and the brightest women in the city.  And it connected the most promising among the upcoming residential neighbourhoods of the city:  Indira Nagar, Tiruvanmiyur and then the more traditional hot spots such as Alwarpet and Luz Church Road. 

R - let me just refer to the subject as that - boarded the 23 A to Stella Maris every morning at the same time.  Clockwork precision and punctuality were just one of the many hallmarks of her solid character that I would discover over the next two years.  With a patent jhola filled with books and with thick glasses, R did not conform to your idea of the head turning, traffic stopping beauty.  But even at first look it was difficult not to notice the self assured confidence she exuded, presumably arising from her brilliance, her sense of purpose and the easy contemporariness of her world view that she wore about her so lightly.

And yes, the general impression that she conveyed of a woman who was not looking for a mushy bus-stop romance gave her the added charm of a challenging romance that was difficult, yet so worth taking a crack at.  Notwithstanding all that, if I did not take the same bus as R everyday, I guess I might not have had a story to tell.

But the bus was not all that there was to it.  Over time, our paths crossed more often.  At the local temple where I was desparately derisking my bet on the IIMs.  At the Theosophical Society where I went looking for books to prepare for the civil services that I never made it to.  At the Soviet style ration shops where the long queues levelled all middle class families, no matter whether they were Class I or Class IV employees of the government.  And not the least of all, the  numerous debating competitions in the local colleges, where R was a regular fixture, unlike me.

Interest quickly turned into inquisitiveness as I figured out that R was reading Sociology, was always either the first or second in the class, was a Vaishnavite by faith and the only child of a well respected officer in the Audits and Accounts Service,who had brought her up to be a woman of independent thought and opinion.

Weeks rolled by as I engaged in this unrelenting pursuit of knowing more about R, her antecedents and tastes.  The more I heard, the more I liked every bit that I heard.  Under normal circumstances one would surmise that was the start of a well researched and rational romantic episode, if ever there was such an oxymoronic possibility.  

Three or four months into life as a Loyola student, the desire to develop an acquaintance with R grew.  Our paths now crossed even more often, by design - by my design as you might have guessed. I attended debating competitions as a member of the audience, even if the parochial debating club at Loyola would not nominate me to represent the college.  For a similar reason I started timing my meetings with Lord Ganesha . My family was puzzled that they no longer had to push me to the queue at the ration shop. 

As the weeks, months and all of two years rolled by I was an authority on R's reading interests, her sartorial preferences, the number of different bags she carried to college, the select set of people she would acknowledge on the road or elsewhere, the number of circumambulations she offered at the temple, of her slightly fidgety mannerisms as the wait for the bus made her restless. 

And alas, one day, quite like a Malayalam art move it all came to an abrupt end.  My course at Loyola was over.  I was soon to leave for Bangalore in what was a decisive turn in my life, the start of a destiny with the institution that I realised much later shares a date of birth with me.  Quite like the nitwit hero in Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Kodiyettam I moved out of the world of 23 A, not having spoken a word to R, with a heart full of memories and unsure feelings.

As I look back at those years and the years thereafter, R was not the only woman who had caught my fancy.  There was an M at the Sion Koliwada bus stop in Mumbai who made me learn Marathi in the hope of building a conversation with her some day.  And there was an MG who made me read Auden, Keats, Burns and Shelley in the hope that I may have enough in common to talk about - until she eloped one day with a classmate of hers.  All these still-born acquaintances had one thing in common:  They were all silent art movies that left a strange stirring in the heart that one does not know to describe. 

I have never understood love.  So I cannot claim to have experienced it.  I have always found romance a foolish pursuit. I have even scoffed at people who give up so much else that is valuable, like family, career, home and so on to pursue a call of the heart in the name of romance.

But then there are these episodes which leave me wondering what it was that made me that invest so much of my energy in knowing more about those women. Was it that thing they call love and I just did not know it?  Or, was it just another one of my fancies to win a coveted trophy simply because the women looked so difficult to win over? 

Now that I am happily married by God's Grace, thanks to what was a perfectly rational decision between two sets of parents I guess these questions are no longer relevant.  Except when I experience a fleeting interest in a Poorna Jagannathan in her Delhi Belly role as Menka.  Luckily, these fleeting crushes do not sustain the way my interest in R, M or MG did.  I quickly dismiss them as a case of middle-aged male menopause, a peccadillo that is unbecoming of the husband of a devoted wife and father of twin boys.

Nanni. Namaskaaram.

Letting go...

You may wonder why this post comes right on the back of the earlier post.  The reason lies in my lethargy.  "Clinging on" was written quite some days back as I thought of the many successful people that had passed through my life.  But then I never got down to posting it.  I guess it does not matter.  This is after all my private space.  I write when I can, when I wish to.

And the one thing that I saw common to all of those successful men and women was this extra-ordinary desire to move on, every day, every moment.  With a great sense of anticipation of some important destination that they had locked into their auto-navigation system, often behaving like memory-less beings wherever the situation called for it.

And this piece is being written as I look sometimes wistfully and sometimes emptily through the wet windows of the second class coach, as the dangling creepers lining the face of the laterite walls outside caress the sides of the rattling coach.  For some strange reason the swaying delicate creepers and the dirty and rain washed coach reminded me of the helpless, delicate and lachrymose heroines of our  movies who have to subject themselves to filthy, yet powerful men who thrust themselves upon the woman with all their rugged coarseness.

This is has how it has been, every time I boarded a train to leave Trivandrum.  It has always rained, as if it was part of the city's customary farewell package to me, with the clouds adding to the O' Henry-esque gray within me and without.

The difference this time though was that I had decided to make an earnest attempt to leave an important part of me behind:  The longing to go back and call the few friends from the past that I had been trying to keep up with. 

The friends were all from my school.  They were part of the past that I was trying hard to cling on to.  Some fifteen years back I had reached out to them for the first time after many years of absence from Trivandrum.  It was part of my slow realisation that the race for corporate success did not excite me any more.  And in the style of the Beatles, I wanted to get back to where I once belonged. 

There was much warm requital from many of them.  I was overjoyed at the response of my friends. I felt like the proverbial prodigal. 

But soon, with every passing trip, their eagerness started fading away.  As did the numbers of people who would return my phone calls or who would be interested in meeting up.  Finally, one or two remained, who would make an attempt to keep up and meet.  And then disappointingly enough over the past three trips I  realised that even those faithfuls seem to have started getting weary of it all.

As I thought about my numerous attempts to go from clutching on to memories to clinging on to people and places, I realised that there was something amiss in the whole experience.  Somewhere I seemed to have missed the possibility that my desire have been one-sided.  The requital may not have been as enduring as I thought it was going to be.

And so I realised the significance of what I had heard in many a spiritual discourse:  The importance of letting go.  I realised I did not have an answer to why I had the desire to cling on.  But I knew the time had come to let go.

With a sad deliberateness I pulled out my antique mobile phone and started deleting a number of phone numbers from the rudimentary contact list I had put together over the past twelve years or so.  My heart felt heavy, even after I had deleted all those numbers.  But somehow I knew it would pass.  Those men who gave those discourses ought to have known.

Clinging on...

I have a great desire to cling on to my past, especially that of my childhood.  I fondly remember my days as a young boy in Trivandrum and Ernakulam - the schools I went to, the songs I heard, the houses I grew up in, the joint family in which we were all raised, the black humour of my school mates and so on. 

It is not because it was a period of unmixed joy.  On the contrary, nearly all of these settings had enough unpleasantness that I would not want to cherish. As an extremely sensitive boy it did not take much to cause me hurt. Not the least of all the sadness of those days is the precipitous and rapid fall from being a nearly invincible academic rival across the entire state to a nearly failed student -  if only I had collected my grade at the end of the first year of college, which I never did.

And that makes me wonder why I wish not to let go of much of that past in Kerala. 

In sharp contrast, I am quite happy to forget nearly all aspects of my life in Madras, except for the fact that those were the only two years that all five of us lived together as a family.  And of a certain fellow passenger on whom I showered mute admiration for the two years that I took a bus to Loyola College.  More about that strange affair in another post, where I nearly spoke my mind to her more than two hundred times, but never did.

So it is that I still wear a single dhoti and sleeveless banian, as I did as a young boy in Trivandrum.  My idea of religion still consists of going to a Kerala style temple and worshiping in the Malayali tradition. I still watch Malayalam movies from that era.  I cannot seem to like any film music better than the songs of Yesudas and Jayachandran from that time.  The most memorable monsoons to me are those where the rain water rushed in one torrential sweep down the open sewerage in front of my grandfather's house in Trivandrum, leaving me wondering how long would the water take to find its way into the emaciated and nearly extinct Kili river that I had been told it would eventually flow into.

So it is that every time I go back to Trivandrum, hoping to see vestiges of those days and events that I love to cling on to.  And then I realise sadly that every thing I turn to has changed - from the roads to my school classrooms to the British library, the YMCA sports club...Not to mention the people who have all bowed to mortality, even as I hoped that someday I would walk up to them and say, Do you remember I was in your English class? Or, do you remember that incident where you caught me flying paper rockets inside your physics class? Just as much as I wanted so much to say to the late Narendra Prasad, who fought with the Principal that he (the Principal) withdraw my suspension order and be allowed to stay.  But I never did speak to Prasad because he suddenly went to sleep forever, with his many unspoken sorrows that gave him an aura of mystery.

Why do I wish to cling on to those memories?  Why do so many of us want to cling on to the past - even though we know it is costly to do so?  Even though all the examples of worldly successes we see around us tell us that the key to getting ahead in life is to move on?