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.