All Balls

I have a window seat in the bus from Mysore to Madikeri and we have stopped for a moment on the outskirts of Mysore.  I look out of the window at the shell of a now-abandoned industrial shed – a two-storied structure running along the length of the road for some distance.  I can see right in, for some of the glass panels in the windows are missing, the result no doubt of assiduous miscreant action, and the resultant view is of an empty, forlorn structure.  By the gate in front, there is no security guard, only an equally forlorn temple with stained, patchy marble on its walls, the red paint on the 3 little domes on top now peeling off, yet suggestive: Hanuman once resided within.  Weeds abound and, amidst the unkempt front patch of green, there is no signboard of a company or indeed any sign of occupation.  Yet, I know this shed well as, in the 1990s, I often passed it by on my way to Coorg and in the mind’s eye I see the signboard in its simple font just behind the wall by the side of the gate.

Make no mistake, this relic in the industrial bin deserves much more, for it serves up a timeless lesson we must never forget.

For, a quarter of a century ago, in the economic euphoria of 1991-1992, this industrial shed represented all that could go wrong with the liberalisation initiated by Dr. Manmohan Singh, providing us with a window into gluttonous excess and the insatiable desire of human nature to gamble.  Indeed, - no exaggeration - this now-defunct industrial shed was the symbol of an India that had never been seen before and that,since those years, has been seen in episodic bursts.    

I had just got a job after my MBA in 1991.  Being a careful sort and loathe to take risks that I couldn’t understand, I put my savings – that were, at best, meagre – into bank deposits, while everyone around me enthusiastically participated in the stock market to get a piece of the fireside sale of a lifetime – an opened-up India that seemed to be going very cheap.  The stock market saw a stratospheric rise over a few months in 1991 and early ‘92 and every conversation centred around the companies that were, to use a cliché, the flavours of the moment.  I felt left out, almost incompetent, and decidedly ill-equipped, despite an education in corporate finance. 

Harshad Mehta was the icon then, of course, and we all now know just how much of a rogue he was, manipulating the public sector banks (that, led by SBI, were happy to be manipulated, many of the managers swimming with the tide and putting up their own money too) to finance his stock purchases, buying stocks in full public view to lift them up and then dumping them for profit, only to move on to bigger prey.  His favourite theme was ‘replacement value’; he’d pick a company and fantasise (often in interviews, so that the gullible were lured to their siren song) on just what it would cost you to build this company from scratch – much more than the current stock price, needless to add.  Hence, he’d assert, buy the stock today.   ACC, for instance, was a favourite of his.  But no company exemplified his egregiousness, perhaps even daring, than an anaemic, plebeian enterprise on the outskirts of Mysore called Karnataka Ball Bearings, run by promoters who could, at best, be described as ‘dodgy’.  It had defaulted on bank loans and was on the verge of going bust (though there was little doubt that the promoters, in true-blue Indian promoter style, would emerge unscathed from the debris).     

As I stared at that now-hollow building, I recalled the many stories Mehta had spun around this company: on its replacement value, on the land it held, on the prospects of future business growth (for ball bearings, for Pete’s sake!)  and so on, all of which was spun out of thin air, in a slick exhibition of contrived fiction.  Across the country, speculators ranging from dhobis to doctors (to dieticians, donors, drivers, directors, dancers – desis, in general) began to punt on this seemingly bejewelled enterprise, thronging the offices of their brokers who traded (in those days) on the stock exchanges in the big cities.  No one knew anything about this company, many possibly did not even know what it purported to produce, some had not heard of the stock market until a week ago, yet ignorance ruled.  They bought because Harshad did, and that entitlement was both thrilling and liberating.  The resultant boom in this company’s stock price only reinforced their resolve to put in more money in a fatal display of what is now known to be the Confirmation Bias, even as Mehta made it known that he was buying more every day. 

He was India’s first stock scamster, a Johnny-cum-lately with a desire to be rich in double-quick time, for whom means – any means, particularly those involving chicanery – justified the ends.  He was, equally, India’s stock market bull, and his visage, one must admit, did resemble the bovine, as cartoonists were quick to capture (one wonders if they missed out on the casino action and got their revenge in print).

Ivan Boesky, a repulsive corporate raider in the US after whom Gordon Gekko, the character in the film “Wall Street” is modelled,  once said (to students at UC Berkeley) in the 1980s, “Greed is all right, by the way.  I want you to know that I think greed is healthy.  You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” And Mehta, with his smooth snake-oil salesman demeanour, massaged logic, colourful suits and masterful art of pretence, was the representation of this unleashed, sanctioned-by-society greed; he had the entire system in his pocket, meeting the heads of industry and government and, in some cases, managing their money.  The stories around him – a luxury apartment and a Lexus, for instance – enhanced his stature and, to a still-socialist India, straining at the leash of the Mahatma’s need-vs-greed legacy, The Big Bull provided the sanction they needed.

When the music finally stopped, as it always does, the mayhem began. Sucheta Dalal first wrote of the scam and boom turned to bust.  The price of Karnataka Ball Bearings collapsed in a heap, leaving speculators aghast.    As Warren Buffett once said, "Only when the tide goes out, do you discover who's been swimming naked." Suddenly, Mr. Invincible, the man-who-could-do-no-wrong was the Target and his downfall only hastened the demise of the company housed in that building by the Mysore-Madikeri road.  

While both are now a forgotten asterisk in the episodic recounting of turbulent post-liberalisation economic history, a quarter of a century later there is another stock market boom and the ‘this-time-it’s-different’ story resounds in the hall of delusion.  

…and it was in 1996, when I first read The Warren Buffett Way by Robert Hagstrom Jr that I first understood the principles of investing.  As the bus drives past, I finally see a small signboard in a corner.  “Trespassers,” it says, “will be prosecuted.”  

I’d imagine this building is a heritage that Mysore, the Heritage City, does not want.  Yet, perhaps, by the gate, the honest story of this enterprise must be written – much as Ashoka wrote his edicts – with the post script that I first read in Bhisham Sahni’s immortal novel, Tamas: those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.    

Judge A Man By His Questions.......

 “Ma’am, I have two questions, which are related to each other.  The first question is divided into two parts, the first of which is related to the third part of the second question and has direct relevance to your assertion that……” by which time I had switched off, staring at my fellow student in rather open astonishment. 

Every batch has its talented stalwarts: academics (who are the most uninteresting, particularly those who stand shoulders above the rest), sportsmen, clowns, sleepy-heads, drunks (called ‘bewda’s), late-nighters, gossips, Cassandras (in my batch, the Cassandra was a male though and his eternal byline was ‘Be careful’), dare-devils, the depressed-in-love-and-will-complain-to-you Devdas’ and the corpo (short for Corporate, ie, Goldman Sachs or McKenzie) type.  Our batch had all of these, with this one addition: a professional questioner. 

Most of us, when we strained ourselves to participate - for there were marks for that - could only produce a question like, “Could you please explain that again?” (the primary driver behind this question being that the Professor hopefully then remembered our name at the time of scoring Class Participation).  “What are the topics for the exam?” was about the most intellectual we could get.    Hari – for that is the name that I shall assign our professional questioner – was different.  He asked a question, because it was not just a question, but an inquiry, if you see the difference, a way of delving into the recesses of something, and emerging breathless for oxygen at the end of it.

Hari was one of the earliest students I befriended on campus back in 1989, possibly because we both had (and still have, by the way) the same surname.  I wasn’t in the same section as Hari, but over the two years, there were courses that overlapped and, when I did find myself in the same classroom, I’d wait for The Hand to rise, for it was fascinating to watch.   He came into his own in the right-brain classes – the ones involving social sciences, strategy, creative thinking of any sort or shades of grey – and stayed right out of the quanti courses that require in-built masochism and suicidal intent, in which respect, as you have already surmised, we were both alike (but that’s where the resemblance ended).     

A  well-built chap with curly hair and specs and a bit of a loner, he had a particularly intellectual look about him as he strode around the hostel block, taking large steps with a slight trademark stoop.  His habit of taking his specs off and chewing on the stem, while gazing penetratingly at the Professor only intensified the appearance of an intellectual, and when he put his hand up to ask a question, there’d emanate from the class a collective groan, for it meant that the next few minutes would be spent in phrasing, paraphrasing, re-emphasising and adjudicating the question itself.  At the end of his question, it was normal for the exasperated Prof to ask in mild irritation that the question be repeated please and could it now be kept short, for the class is only of an hour’s duration?   

But, it was when he invented a new style of financial investing that the World sat up and took notice.  

First, a prelude.  My class included the pre-eminent Godfy, whose primary passion apart from academic excellence was to smoke the 555; indeed, when we referred to him as carrying six packs, it had an entirely different meaning.  Hari noticed with astute attention - for he was a smoker as well - that Godfy tended to discard his cigarette just a touch before it extinguished and was quick to have the last smoke or two of the 555, something that hardly escaped the attention of those jobless worthies (called ‘fatru’s), who then passed this priceless information on to the gossips, who then relayed it to the finance whizkids, who then looked for stocks that had long lost favour but possibly had one last smoke left in them, resulting in a style of investing called the’cigarette butt strategy’ subsequently promoted by mere mortals such as Warren Buffett in the US and Harshad Mehta in India.  But, make no mistake, it all originated with Hari.  

Sometime late in the second year, Hari asked me if I would act in a play – a Greek tragedy called ‘Antigone’ - that he intended to direct for a theatre festival.  The last time I had acted was when I had pretended to be ill on seeing a  particularly healthy, revolting dinner and on that occasion Mum had clearly had her way.  So, there was, where the theatre department was concerned, a clear and present (and yawning) gap in my education, but Hari would have none of it, insisting that I fitted the part like a glove.  In retrospect, one thinks that there was only one glove on the rack, so he just made it fit.  Once into it, I realised, with growing concern, that he had slotted me into the role of an important chappie in the play, probably the most important fellow in it and there were pages and pages reeking of medieval stuff to be mugged. 

I decided to be the questioner in this case and use his key skill against him, create enough nuisance for him to say, ‘Let thy be out or whatever’ but before I could get my act together, he asserted that I was to kiss the lady protagonist on the cheek and that was when the true horror of what could follow struck me in the pre-frontal.  I imagined the hooting while I was on stage, all engineered by garrulous, raucous, fatru, entirely worthless classmates who lived for a laugh and couldn’t empathise to save their grandmothers.  I imagined raunchy comments and ‘once-more’ calls.  I imagined  subsequent months on G-Top in the company of my best friends, each of whom was, beer in hand, recounting how I had messed up the most rudimentary of tasks while they were all trying to help in the audience. 

Those were the days when it wasn’t uncommon to have wild elephants a couple of kilometres from our campus on Bannerghatta Road and, if you had asked me if I preferred being left amongst them to this dreadful fate, I might have thought deeply and weighed the options.  

So, I went up to Hari and said, ‘I am dropping out of the play’.  He asked me to take on a side role instead – say, one of the Second Guards, where all you had to do was to stand at attention and take away the dead bodies when the third scene ended - and I continued with a ‘No’. 

When the play was finally staged, I was in the audience alongwith my garrulous, raucous, fatru, entirely worthless classmates and happily one among them.  We all gave Hari a standing ovation, though none of us had a clue on what the play was about. 

The ovation had a clear reason: for while the play was being practised and perfected, Hari had missed a number of classes and, in turn, many questions each of which would have had parts, sub-parts, conjunctions, prepositions, contradictions and dilemmas. 

My Kabuliwala

It’s a dark monsoon afternoon and I have just read Kabuliwala, Tagore’s beautiful, haunting story again.  When I first read it in school,  I remember,  I had sat there by the window, staring out onto that street in Indiranagar, lost in thought.  The story was moving and filled with imagery, and as the mind saw what the eye could not, I felt goosebumps and a moment of thrill.  For those images in the mind were from that magical childhood in Digboi.  

Because in Digboi we had our Kabuliwala too.  I see him now, as I peer through the sepia-tinted mist and look back in time, a tall, slim man with a scraggly beard, sitting on the floor of the portico of  Bungalow 75, my beautiful, immaculately British home.  Behind him is the circular driveway, with the large banyan in the middle, against which he is silhouetted on this bright day. 

He has come a long long way with others from his land, walking for days on end, jostling for space for himself and his sack in packed, claustrophobic train compartments, marking town after town and language after language to get here,  and those worn, compressed Pathani slip-on shoes have borne the travel with forbearance.  His dress – the Pathan’s trademark kurta-pyjama – was once white, but now wears a brownish-cream hue, as indeed does the cloth sack which has now been opened out on the floor.  He brings out one tin after another and opens each up for view, in front of Mum and me.  He takes his time, for human endurance is but a prelude to patience.  

All agog with excitement, I eagerly sniff into each tin,  which are filled with mystery and enchantment.  The most fascinating smells emerge from these tins: of spices – clove, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg - and dry fruits – walnuts, dates, badam and raisins, which he calls ‘kishmish’, with a certain flourish.  Yet, beyond those strong fragrances of spices and dried fruits, enticing enough for a child to be wide-eyed and snuffling, is the smell of that old sack itself.  It is the odour of experience, of a World-weary traveller who has lived the rough life and walked the earth.  If you close your eyes and breathe with depth and discernment, there is the resonance of blood and sweat and a thousand stories that speaks the history of this man, the Kabuliwala.  The smells tell you that he has walked the highways, slept on logs being transported on goods trains and in railway stations that reek of compacted humanity, tussled with those who harassed him, starved in difficult times and eaten where he could afford to.   

Yet the man is hardly the weary sort; he has a smiling, hesitant countenance that laughs easily and speaks in a Hindi-Urdu combine that is comical, oddly sing-song, but effective enough.  When the child in front of him laughs at this unfamiliar language with its expressions and intonation, he joins in too.  Is that grace or innate simplicity, unable to understand that some aspect of his manner is being laughed at?  I see this man's face and figure in Gurudev's Kabuliwala: one that speaks of honour and dignity and an extraordinary physical strength that will be used to protect these oddly anachronistic values.  

The Kabuliwala hasn’t come to sell us his wares alone; he is a halting, shy story teller too.  In every new house that he visits, the questions must be the same: Where are you from?  How did you come here?  Whom have you left behind, back home?  Religion isn’t a question, for, as I see through that mist, those are liberal days.  Mum’s questions are more familiar, as the man has been here earlier:  What is it like there now?  Where will you go next? Questions of work and detail, rarely one of learning, for the Itinerants are the World's real teachers.

He knows that these conversations draw customers in; the more time he spends telling a story, the easier the sale.  These customers are the negotiating sort though, so his bargaining is good-natured and gentle and appealing, and he is in no hurry to move on.  He looks at me with a kindly eye, and it helps that that’s the way to a good sale too; ‘Baba, please try the kishmish,’ he urges, and, of course, I oblige, taking a handful and popping them in, hygiene fears be damned.   

When Mum gives him the money, he brings out, from the recesses of the kurta, an old cloth pouch with a drawstring and shakes out the contents - lots of coins -  on a cloth. My excitement is now at its crescendo, for the coins, which smell strongly of cardamom, are, in themselves, a revelation; I ask him for the old brass-coloured, flower-shaped ten paise coin, in exchange for a more modern one that I have,  and I do a couple of more investigations and trades, examining all the coins with fascination, in particular the 1-paise and 2-paise ones, before Mum holds me back.  But the Kabuliwala doesn't really seem to mind at all.   We watch him pack up at leisure even as the conversation flows, and the fragrances dissipate into the warm air; he requests Mum to recommend another home that he could go to. 

And then he stands up, this tall, gaunt, yet powerful figure and, in a smooth motion, hoists the sack onto his back.  He is off, walking down the driveway in a long and easy stride. I stand by the portico, jingling the coins in my hand, and watch till he has turned the corner - beyond Bulbul Auntie's home - and is lost to view.

The mists of memory recede away, a reluctant lift of nostalgia on this cloudy, gloomy afternoon.  There is a whiff of cardamom in the air, a memory that has lingered for the last fifty years, preserved by Gurudev’s abiding genius. 

It is time to close the mind's book and return to the present that awaits with impatient expectation.  There is work to be done.

The Day of The Jackal - reprise

I was at the farm yesterday for the first time after the heavy rains of mid-May.  My neighbouring farmer, Ramappa, took me to see his farm pond (the photo above), which is larger than the one I have and deeper, and is next to his borewell.

"When you made your pond next to the borewell three years ago," he said, "I did not understand why you were doing this.  This year, the bore ran dry and I got the pond dug next to it for the sowing.  The pond is full and the bore, which had run dry, is now working!"  

There's a delight in that weather-beaten face and I look back at the many months and a score conversations with this then-recalcitrant fellow and feel doubtfully vindicated.  Doubtfully I say, for I am not sure if the pond could have recharged the bore this quickly (a couple of weeks), but he is hardly the person to hear my misgivings.  

"One more pond this year Sir," he adds and I offer to match him in this challenge, foot for foot. 
And to round off this happy news, I see the pugmarks of a canid by the pond. It's the day of the jackal.

Three Men in a Boat

It did not seem ironical to me that the subject that would probably be most useful to us in our post-MBA life was taught by the most incompetent.

Rather, it seemed like fun, for the three characters who taught us Personnel Management and Industrial Relations (as HR was then called) were unintentionally comical.  They were as different from each other as chalk from cheese, yet the glue of incompetence held them together; about the reality of their subject, they knew nothing, about the theory, well, even less, if indeed that was possible.  The two who taught me were gentle, possibly gracious, with their grading of the hurriedly incomprehensible stuff that was written in the tests held, so even as this is written, there emanates a feeling of gratitude.

The first of this triumvirate was a small, fair, chubby, bald fellow, with a genial air and a charming smile, called Lele – a name that undoubtedly led to hours of fruitful speculation on variations, opposites (‘Dede’), alliterations (“Lele lekhak leke lao” for instance) and puns (“Le le le Delilah” from Tom Jones).  His entire demeanour was apologetic: he’d shuffle into class with some papers and smile up at the diligent ones who had deemed it necessary to attend (most didn’t).  Then, with an air of “Terribly sorry to have woken you up before lunch”, he would proceed to lecture with a firm, valiant air.  Nobody, of course, paid him any notice.  Occasionally, he would deem it useful to bring in some humour that he had used with every class since 1982 and these were moments of joy for us, for it enabled a release – I’d laugh more than necessary and go back to idle speculation.   Our senior batch, of course, had given us the low down on Lele’s exams: easy, routine, hence focus on other subjects and that was, shall we say, the last nail.  

The second fellow was Sampangi Ramaiah, whom I nicknamed SamRam.  He apparently taught us Industrial Relations, having worked in some public sector or the other.  Now, this should have given him the early ropes, for industrial relations in the public sector are notable by their absence and the subject could have been lightened up with conflicts, broken glasses, politics and intrigue, which would have, no doubt, gripped our collective attention.  Yet, this sober, taciturn fellow would turn up with the most boring – and by this I mean mind-numbingly tedious, frustratingly dreary, horrendously useless – theory, speaking largely to himself and the absorbing projector that seem to take much of his attention.  The feelings of the audience, if those were indeed feelings, were mutual.  He would cling to his material, as if a bear hug would facilitate knowledge transfer, and this attachment was only countered, sadly, by the class’s collective detachment to the same piece of academic drivel.  It did not help that a number of these classes were in the afternoon in a cool classroom. 

SamRam seemed to wander through the classes with little aim, and it was comforting to know that all not-so-good things also come to an end.   I once asked my friend Sampi, who was a mimic beyond compare, to imitate SamRam and let it be recorded for posterity that, for once, Sampi struggled to perform, for such was the perfection of ordinariness that SamRam had accomplished. 

Yet, the numero uno of this trio was clearly Bijoor.  In incompetence, of course, it would have been hard to judge if indeed he took the cake (or, more accurately, dropped it), for such things are perceptional, but clearly he was in many ways in a class of his own.  Much of the impressions I have of Bijoor are from my mates in another class, for he did not (thank God for the mercy) inflict himself on Section A, where I was.   He taught Section C and it would hardly be out of place to note that what he did was a C-section on them,  making unnecessary incisions on an unsuspecting public.  Bijoor had views (often extreme) about everything, and expressed them apparently with ferocity, and the rather cold fact that he taught Personnel Management hardly seemed to constrain him on expressing opinions on more pressing world matters.  Each class, of course, meant discussions amongst us subsequently about his current perambulations, and in that sense the classes were undoubtedly more engaging, but no one ever had a clue to this venerable gentleman’s course.  He was, I remember, a member of every committee in the country that would have him and those meetings provided the odd relief to the class that otherwise, in a word, reeled. 

The collective influence of the threesome was to inhibit any molecule of aspiration that might have existed in any student to pursue Personnel Management (admittedly, those molecules to begin with had been scarce).  We had a bunch of guys who taught us Organisation Behaviour as well, for this was seen as quite distinct from Personnel Management, the distinctions no doubt enriching many an author.  The OB guys knew their subject, but were as idiosyncratic as a Papua New Guinean with a hernia, and we shall leave that story for another day (though on SKRoy, I have written with feeling).  

Some years later, I opened an old trunk and took out a Personnel Management book, looking at it with some surprise.  Opening it and leafing through, I could remember nothing at all.  I was in the same boat as the triumvirate and it was then that I realised my true potential at teaching the subject.  So, look, I say, for a silver lining, and you will find it somewhere, sometime. 

May Day - 2017

 A pleasant and instructive morning, as Sir PG would have written.
  
Ananda, the repository of all forestry knowledge, and I set out early morning into the forest at Jawalagiri in search of the Adenanthera Pavonina (manjadi) tree, which we did not find.  What we did find were elephant tracks - the same male that had been at the farm and its surroundings last night and caused much local excitement. Anand suggested that we follow the elephant and find out where he was.  
Now he does this all the time, of course, so I concurred, but it isn't an exercise calculated to strengthen anyone's nervous system (I am happy to suggest other less taxing options, should you doubt). 

The footprints of the elephant (if you could call large craters, with lava creeping in at the bottom, footprints) were clearly headed into the forest, after a night of crop raiding and local duels with villagers.  At places, these footprints were indistinct on the caked ground, which often made the heart skip a beat (for Ananda would look around with a furtive air of one caught stealing fodder from under Mama's trunk).   We walked carefully past the small lake bed, on which there were signs of chital, gaur, wild boar, a lone leopard and jungle cats, and then reached a rock clearing that I had some years earlier christened Fragrant Rock, for, from the  soil here rise a number of Jalaari trees (Shorea Roxburghii).   
Then we stopped.

Ananda pointed to the valley below, "That's where he is," he asserted with authority; you can be assured, I was unlikely to be the Verification Manager.  
And, indeed, the faint smell - that distinct pachyderm odour - wafted upwards to where we were.  We waited for a while to hear him at work, for elephants are noisy fellows when they lounge around, but without luck.  

We wished him Good Day in absentia and headed back to a patch where a menagerie of bird life - blue bearded bee eaters, parakeets, babblers and mynas and bulbuls and robins, ioras and white-eyes and other birds in the higher canopy - were chirping, whistling, shrieking and calling, and took it all in with enthusiasm, for we were not in Jumbo's vicinity anymore.  In the early sky, the crested serpeant eagle sailed overhead and came to rest on a Terminalia Bellerica; an ominous figure of great size and fine beauty, the yellow on its cheek resplendent in the morning air. 

Our search for manjadi could wait.

A Couple of Minutes in a Lifelong Friendship

The routine would never change. 

Every year, at the onset of my summer vacation, Dad, Mum and I would begin the three day journey: drive up from Digboi to Dibrugarh airport, that is charmingly called Mohanbari, then fly in an Avro to Calcutta, stay overnight with Babymama at 112, Southern Avenue -  enough time to see just how much my cousins hated each other – travel from Howrah onwards to Chennai by the Madras Mail (and later Coromandel Express) which journey took a couple of nights, stay there for a few hours and then catch the Cochin Express to Ernakulam, another overnight journey.  We travelled First Class, not the modern airconditioned one, but the older version with glass and serrated windows that could be lifted up, and with the compartment pretty much to ourselves.  At times, we had the company of VS Menon Uncle and Indira Aunty for some part of the way, at other times we were by ourselves, but never really alone, for one can never be alone when travelling by train. 

I loved the journey as most children do, while Mum hated it as most mums do.  She had to manage much of the rations and hated using the bathroom or indeed leaving the comfort of the coupe, so she’d spend all her time reading or sleeping.  Dad – well, he had loads to do on the journey: he would bathe, shave, pack and repack with neatness and precision, apply generous quantities of talc on himself and on me to ward off the summer sweat, read, write letters when the train was stationary (a favourite preoccupation of his, written carefully in classic, printed handwriting), get down at all junctions to post his letters or to fill up water (which, I conjecture, gave me considerable early immunity),  make friends easily and peruse the timetable with curious vigour.   When VS Menon Uncle travelled with us, I would watch him light a cigarette with a mix of awe and inquisitiveness and wonder just how that smoke travelled inside him.    Much of the talc in the bag was then shaken into in a rolled up piece of paper to get the same effect, but it never seemed to work as well as the real thing: the talc would blow all over the compartment, and Mum would condemn this valiant effort at early childhood smoking.  On one occasion, I inhaled deeply on Cuticura – the original Malayali icon – and coughed until we had reached Waltair junction.    

Waltair was where I got my annual wooden cooking set and Russian dolls, toys that kept me engaged for the rest of the trip.  That part of the journey was possibly the most exciting, despite the heat, for the train seemed to travel over the Godavari for ever, even as I dropped the usual ten paise coin into the river and begged Mum for another one, without ever understanding why we did so.  And, then, we’d cross the Krishna for a repeat performance a few hours before we reached Madras Central.  Next to this station, of course, was Moore Market, where I had to be held back in chains else I’d have bought the market lock, stock and double barrel. 

It was when we were on the last leg of our journey that Dad would get all excited; his home was in Palakkad, but we’d not get off there now.  Instead we would get off at Cochin, and then, in a week or two, travel up to Palakkad by car.  When the train stopped, first thing in the morning, at Olavakkot Junction, as Palakkad’s station was unflatteringly called, he would hop off and buy tea, halwa (yellow, red and maroon), idlis and chutney for breakfast and two newspapers, one being the Mathrubhumi, in an effort to pump up the local economy.  During this buying binge, he would look around at those who were getting off and getting on (he knew about seven-tenths of the Palakkad population of his age or older) and, in general, become animated, with a gleam in the eye, for he was the quintessential Malayali at heart, waiting to get into a mundu.   

But, it was when the train began to move out of the station that the animation, the fidgeting, the gleam-in-the-eye would reach a sort of crescendo. 

The next station, about fifteen minutes away, was Ottapalam, on the banks of the beautiful Neela river (Bharatapuzha) and Dad would be all ready. 

As the train neared Ottapalam – a two minute stop -, Dad would be at the door scanning the landscape.  He had planned this out – as he always did - by writing a letter a month in advance, enough time to receive a response in confirmation. 

And always, as the train came to a halt, Mum and I would look out of the window and see him alight quickly, walk up to a small, elderly, spectacled, mild-looking man waiting at precisely the right spot, shake his hand and give him a bear hug. 

“Vasu!”, CN Nair’s gentle face would break into a smile, even as, in his happiness, the emotion would threaten to run over and overcome him.  He would hurry forward to talk with Mum, who is a couple of years older than his oldest daughter, and hand over a breakfast packet for all of us.  While accepting it gratefully, Mum would insist that this should not have been sent, that it was a lot of work for Chechi (CN’s wife) and in the next sixty seconds, the three of them – CN, Dad and Mum - would have exchanged all the news that anyone in Kerala needed to know.  As you can imagine, much of the conversation centred around who-was-where and matrimony: marriages, proposals, proposals that didn’t quite have the requisite CGPA, weddings attended at Guruvayoor (a favourite Nair pastime, if you did not know).  I often wondered if the only two things people in Kerala did was to get married or to attempt to get others married off, and, of course, as I am now older and have a better understanding of these things, I know that I was right then. 

Dad would then enquire if CN was getting his pension alright, and, if not, whether there was anything to be done at his end.

For, you see, CN Nair Uncle and his wife, were possibly the first Malayalis in Digboi, reaching there at the time of the Second World War, and finding a place for themselves in an alien culture, far away from home.  They were the courageous, cerebral, dedicated expats of yore and they took, under their generous wing, all those who followed from their home state.  To Mum and Dad, they were foster parents: CN was the wise counsel and friend, while Mrs CN's cooking was, by all accounts, divine. They were, in some way, I recall dimly, related to us, but then all Nairs are related to each other in a web of complex quantum theory that defies normal understanding.

I wonder if CN missed his life in Digboi.  Dad send him regular letters that kept him informed of the comings and goings in the little town, but, remember, that was a world in which nothing ever changed.  And, in these two minutes, of course, there was little time for nostalgia. 

The whistle – that marvellous steam engine whistle that I now yearn to hear – would blow, and Dad would hop back on and wave from the doorway, while Mum patiently explained to her son - who seemed stubbornly incapable of understanding relationships and connections - just who this gentleman was (for the sixth time).  And, as the train steamed away towards the precarious bridge over the Neela, I would press my head against the grill and stare at the lonely, dimunitive figure on the Ottapalam station who was waving back till we could not see him anymore.   

And Dad, of course, would get back to the coupe and write out his next letter.