I wonder what it was that got me thinking of
Sridhar. That was a long time ago, the
time when Sridhar and I were the best of friends – in our 10th, 11th
and 12th – at an age when everything (and everyone) left an
impression on you.
I had just been appointed the captain of the St Patricks House cricket
team much to my surprise (until I discovered that no one else wanted it). A skinny fellow with an outsized nose came up
to me on the day of the first (and only) match and assured me that he would
score at least twenty runs, if selected to open the innings. Looking around at the ragtag team that was
assembling on the steps of the pavilion, I made the decision to take him
in. Needless to add, he was out the
second ball, an incident I recalled everytime I owed him anything.
Yet, we became friends, best friends. It’s hard to imagine two boys who could have
been more unlike each other, but I suppose friendships aren’t built on
likeness. Sridhar was always neatly
dressed, while I was sloppy and always in hand-me-downs. His family was a traditional Andhra one, his
father never failing to remind the son of the hardships he endured on the way
to managerial success in a large company.
My family was anything but traditional.
His mother was semi-literate and self-effacing, my mother erudite and
confident. His house was about as stuffy
as mine was airy – indeed, the memory of his home is of a claustrophobic living
room, with all the windows shut, and the pungent aroma of an Andhra curry from
the kitchen. Our food at home centred
around eggs and bread.
And yet, we were the best of friends. As we both lived in Indiranagar and cycled to
school in our 10th standard, we spoke of things that most teens ignore
– of poverty and its causes, of values and morality, of the need to form people’s
attitudes to issues, of the desire to change the World. Sridhar was unbelievably
idealistic, believing that another World – just and non-violent - was possible; since the exposition of such views would make him out to be some sort of nut, he wisely kept to himself in class and only had me for a friend. I was as comfortable in his company as he was in
mine (many others thought me insufferably intellectual, a charge I have never denied) and, when the conversations on Utopia were
done, he would talk – gently at first, vehemently later – of the challenge of
dealing with his father, a dark, unsmiling, intense workaholic if there ever
was one. It was astonishing to learn
that he admired his dad about as much as he despised him; he is a self-made,
proud man, Sridhar would say, but a terrible father to him and his elder
sister, and an uncaring husband. His
father had set the goals out for the son: after PUC, came engineering, followed
by perhaps a post-grad in the US.
There was a problem with this script. For Sridhar was not very good at his
academics.
He’d spend hours at his table in his room, with its
closed windows and musty smell, his books opened out in front of him. He’d work out sum after sum, revise his
Chemistry formulae and get his literature lesson learnt thoroughly, but he
would also dream lavishly of a future that he’d influence with idealism. In the ensuing tests, his marks would place
him bang in the middle-to-lower-half of the class, much to his father’s noted
disapproval. “How much did your best friend get?” his father would ask, and, of
course, I had done much better than he had.
To this question, against my own exhortations, Sridhar would never lie,
for he believed that a lie would undermine his moral character. It did not help that our class was filled
with high-achievers, and when the ICSE results were announced, he had just
about made a decent grade.
Sridhar then opted for science (did he have a
choice?), while I joined St Josephs College of Commerce. We would meet every evening at cricket and
then spend sometime on trivia. He was being stressed to perform
better by his anxious father, yet the results in his I PU were poor and it was
clear to me that he was losing interest even as the pressure from his father –
taunts, anger, be-like-me speeches, mild acts of violence like the throwing of
books – increased. The result was
predictable: his II PU results were very poor indeed. Engineering was ruled out.
The father took charge: clearly Bangalore was the
wrong place for his son and what was needed was a fresh start. Admission into
BSc at Loyola College – the father’s Alma Mater? - in
Chennai followed. Sridhar and I agreed
to keep in touch over mail and he seemed enthused at joining the hostel there, away from the family.
We wrote regularly to each other initially; he had been ragged, and hated the first couple of months but seemed to settle down immediately after. As
the year wore on, his replies became infrequent. A few months later, I went to Chennai, as a part of the
College Cultural Team to take part in Mardi Gras, the IIT Madras festival. There I saw Sridhar.
He had long hair and wore a torn pair of jeans and
slippers. In one hand, he had a pair of
sticks to play the drums with and in the other a cigarette that had a rather
funny aroma that I couldn’t quite place initially. When he saw me, his eyes registered drugged
recognition and he walked up with exaggerated nonchalance. He was doped alright; he began incoherently,
asking me about my family and then speaking of the college, his friends, drums,
all in a disengaged language that was unrecognisable, even as I stood appalled
and horror-struck. Looking down at the ‘joint’
in his hand, I made an excuse and walked away, determined to end what remained of our friendship.
A year later, he fetched up at my college with his college's Western music group. If
anything, he was worse off than before and spent a large part of his time
asking around for ‘grass’ that he could smoke. I exchanged a word or two, but kept away feeling, I confess, contempt for the person and for what he had done to himself. What he needed, I believed, was a good knock on the head.
In my final year of graduation, Sridhar landed up
at home unexpectedly. His father, he
said, had found out that he was on drugs and had taken him home for treatment,
locking him up in a room for days on end.
He was now off dope and ready to clear his academic backlog and move
on. We spoke of this and that, my old sense of friendship returning in modest measure. As he ended the conversation, he
asked me (and I remember this as clearly as if it were yesterday) if he could
borrow two hundred rupees for the journey to Chennai, that he would return by
money order in the coming days.
The year was 1987; two hundred rupees was not a
small sum of money. I should have said
No.
As I now inhale the fragrance of the evening– the radiant
Akash Mallige outside my balcony, with its delicate white bloom and long,
nectar filled stem – it’s rummy to think of us people.
I never heard from Sridhar again.
