The Sound of Thunder

Now, I am not particularly familiar with the way people in other parts of the World go through their morning routine, but we – without a doubt – are different.

Take the watchman who lives in our neighbouring building which is an office.  The tap that he uses abuts our low wall and I have learnt much from watching this spectacular display of gargle-calisthenics.  

When I have my tea at 6.30 am, it is accompanied by a stereophonic sort of sound from across the wall from a stricken man, caught at the throat by an angry lion and in the last throes of Life.  Just when you think he is done for, he grunts in approval and begins again, this time with a guttural sound of a masked warrior in battle looking to intimidate his opponent, which notable effort is followed by vicious, targeted projectiles of water (combined, no doubt, with Patanjali tooth powder, the remains of which are helpfully on display on the wall).  This is immediately succeeded by his sincere attempt to pull his small intestine up the windpipe and out of his mouth, but he has sadly never succeeded.  Being of a never-say-die disposition, he nevertheless does this everyday  (We try harder – Hertz).  There are normally about seven such attempts at intestine-travel, after which it is time to wash his face.

“Wash” is about the politest word one can use: he takes water in his cupped palms and slaps his face with it in angry retribution, moving his head rapidly from side to side about twenty times. It's likely that he was once a coal-miner and now thinks that he hasn’t yet left the job.  

And then, once this process of ablution is complete – an engrossing 8 minutes during which my tea turns cold and I make important notes of his movements – he turns away from the tap with a satisfied expression and goes back to the front of the building, with an ominous sound of thunder moving away from the sky above to the distant yonder emanating from his viscera.  He then goes back to doing what watchmen do best when they are not sleeping under a blanket: sleep on it. 

The Man With The Harmonium And Harmonica

 I heard my first RD song when I wasn’t yet ten, and I remember that wonderfully warm living room of the Vishvanaths in Duliajan, the quaint record player (they weren’t called turntables then, thankfully) with a 45-rpm record playing Yeh Jo Mohabbat Hai from Kati Patang, and I remember the smell of Flit and the sound of air-conditioning and the garrulous conversation of the adults in the room as I strained to listen to the song.  

And I remember listening to a long record when they visited us in Digboi one day and my extended-family sibling, Sharu’s musical laughter when I read from the jacket and told her that Aao Twist Karen – a funky RD twist that – was sung by two people, Manna Dey and another guy called Chorus.  

And I remember the thrill of being gifted Hum Kisise Kum Nahin on my 12th birthday by the Ramans - a wonderful gentle couple they were, and they knew I was nuts about music.  That record still lies in the family’s ageing collection, awaiting a recall to the player, but it is far too precious now to be played.    

And I remember the thrill of listening to offbeat RD songs – Jab Andhera Hota Hai, which I have heard a thousand times and asked myself, How Did He Do This? and Ek Hi Khwab, a slow conversation, with memories…..

At cultural festivals in college, when everyone around - except me - listened to rock and Pink Floyd and Jim Morrison and Dire Straits were the Chosen Ones and all the conversation was about albums and quizzing and Life and grass, I’d wait to get back home to listen to my comfort food.  With RD around, there could be no other chosen one.  And I remember cycling back from college one dull, tepid afternoon after reading a letter, and then playing that song – my favourite RD song, with that misty dialogue about the moon in the middle - in my head.  And I remember that when I had stopped at that store on Richmond Road, now long gone, a stray dog with exceptionally liquid eyes stood expectantly by the side (and he got a bun for his effort).  

And I remember watching the rain one day and thinking of Ajnabee and Manzil, and then listening to Lata’s rendition of Rim Jhim Gire Sawan – where the base guitar is the finest ever and the smell of rain lingers…..  

And then, there is Yeh Sham Mastani while watching the golden sunset at Random Rubble and I have found a melancholy in that smile of mine. 

With every song of RD’s there is a memory, almost always a happy one, and they return, like old friends.  And, now when I listen to him, which is pretty much every day, the kids ask me to tone down the volume and to take a break, which is heart-warming to hear, for it makes me wonder if I have grown up at all.    

And, in this birthday week of his, I have listened to all of RD at the loudest volume society can tolerate to tell those busy work-obsessed, Instagram-cocooned Millenials in the office next door to chill a bit and sway on the terrace of their decrepit building to the Mozart of Memory.  

We All Have A Story To Tell.....

Walking in the hills isn’t just about views and endurance and thrill.  It is about stories, ones that you hear, others that you imagine, a few – a precious few – that you see.

On the first day, Anand and I see a nervous barking deer shoot out of the undergrowth a few feet away and sprint across us.  This is rocky, uneven terrain at 7,000 feet, when we take every breathless step up that relentless hill with exaggerated care, but for the barking deer, it’s home and we are visitors unwelcome.  That sprint and leap is a story to see.  

Two barking deer

A couple of days later, on our return from the summit of Syari at around 11,500 feet, we see a Van Gujjar family - mother-and-child - grazing buffaloes in the valley below, beside their dilapidated hut.  They are an isolated family, these gentle nomads, there has been a storm this week, raining buckets and hail, and the night time cold is mind-numbing.  How, just how, do they live here? And that little boy calls up to us and asks, “Do you have biscuits?”.  We do have one pack, and we leave it for him and carry on, as he skips over the rocks and those crevices with alacrity to climb to our level.  Even in these remote parts, there is a deep conflict within the nomads of the mountains, for the Van Gujjars are seen as Them, not Us.  That is a story, but one for another day.   

 

If we remove the baggage these Van Gujjar little ones carry, they will fly.  Can we?

And down by our camp at 4,500 feet, along the spectacularly fetching svelte Assi Ganga river – called so because eighty streams flow into this river before it joins the Bagirathi – is an abandoned, skeletal two-storied structure, a building that had turbines and powerhouse equipment to generate power from the diverted flow of a rushing river.  The story?  In June 2013 –- exactly ten years ago – just a couple of days before it was to be inaugurated, a mid-day cloudburst caused devastating floods and landslides across the region, becoming the country's worst natural disaster since the 2004 tsunami. The Assi Ganga swelled as it had never done in living memory, a lifeline-turned-foe, a raging monster unleashed, and pulverized the building, sweeping away a score or more of human lives and submerging the turbines in silt.  The walls of that building and the metal beams that had once held the roof tell that story, one to which I can attribute – with dispassionate, though not indifferent, reflection – a salutary lesson. 

The view from our base camp.  ...and that's the powerhouse on the Assi Ganga

 

The man who runs this little shop, a hospitable, cheery soul who called us in for tea and biscuits, lost his all that day in June 2013. He is eager to talk, a garrulous narrator with a keen sense of detail and expressive articulation.  We listen.  

That is a story. 

 

I am an amateur bothersome trekker.  I huff my way up, am terrified of walking on ledges, imagining every possible worst-case scenario, will slip anywhere, given half an allocated chance, and sleep minimally in cold tents.  But I do it because I want to, which must surely rank as a form of masochism.  A vain hope that practice would make perfect.  The forests that we walk through, once we are done with the steep chir pine monoculture slopes above the camp, are gorgeous, filled with broad-leaved trees of oak, kharsu and maple, shrubs with edible fruits, rushes of cane and occasional deodhar and, at higher elevations, firs, with their tall uncompromising trunks and golden oak. 

These are forests with leopards and black bear and, as we walk, I imagine the first watching us with curious feline eyes and the second – the absent-minded hulk with poor eyesight – pottering around the forest in search of tubers and roots.  A Himalayan black bear is a large fellow with a half-moon on his chest and very little on his mind.  Almost always, the encounter with humans is an accidental one, when he will easily attack with ferocity, which is what terrifies otherwise brave Pahadis.  And he can mangle a human countenance.   Everyone – and I mean everyone – has an incident to relate of an unhappy encounter with black bears.

Each of that is a story too.  And, they play over and over in my mind when I walk those dark, nutrient-rich forests of humus and character, home to the belligerence of bears, the secrets of serow and the fantasy of fungi. 

Renu saw a leopard jump across the path on her way up to meet us and I would not mind seeing it return.  The two Bhutia dogs that met us somewhere on the way down will strongly disagree.  They stay close to us – in fact, they insist on getting in our way in the middle of our four-person convoy – when we go through this dense leopard country.  If they could speak, there would be a story or two there to tell as well.  

Yet, my closest – and nervous - encounter with wildlife on this walk isn’t any of these.  At Chai Thatthar, where we camp before the final day’s ascent, I go for a short walk down from my tent, stepping on a rich carpet of leaves and humus.  When I return, puffing up the hill, there is a rustle and movement in the leaves and I look down to see a Himalayan Pit Viper.  As I watch, it moves a foot away and stops, looking away from me, body coiled back in striking position.  I walk slowly away and breathe easy, but that was close.  Back in Bangalore, I identify the snake in Ashok Captain’s excellent book on snakes and read that it is ‘a quiet, timid snake, not likely to bite unless stepped upon.’ Snakes should advertise these qualities, me thinks. 

At Siladhuni, a pit stop on our way up, we chat with the cheery old fellow and his laughing wife who run a dhaba there, as he makes tea, that horrible, ghastly, syrupy stuff called Maggi and humungous, oily bread pakodas.  He smokes two packs of beedis every day and wears old decrepit shoes, but can walk up the path that we took three hours to do in half the time.  There is no lesson in this story, certainly none about the merits of beedis.  So forget that I mentioned this.

The shepherds come up to Kuari in the monsoon for weeks.  They pray at this little dolmen.  

At Kuari, where we spend the first night, we chat with two shepherds, an uncle-and-nephew pair, and I marvel at their inner resilience, physical agility and strength.  They have loyal Bhutia sheep dogs to protect the flock from leopards, but little protection from a changing weather pattern, for these hills of the Lower Himalayas are the frontier posts of climate change.  If we had time, this pair would have a hundred stories, real, imagined and predicted, to tell. 

 

At Kuari, Day 1 and Night 1

A hike makes us best friends

There are sweet stories to tell too: at the base camp by the river where I stay before and after the hike, I wake up each morning to the roar of the water rushing over rocks, and a faint mellifluous singing in the forest by our side.  The song wafts up to me over the river’s turbulent trundle and I open the door to listen.  It is four-thirty and the Himalayan Whistling Thrush is up early and has begun his recital, a delightful melodious incessant song of joie de vivre, of exuberant enjoyment, of attention to living in the moment.  Isn’t this a story with a lesson too? 

And, finally, there is the story of Bandarpoonch, the beautiful mountain that we see in front of us, when we rest on the summit of Syari at 11800 feet.  As the Pandavas ascended the path to Heaven, they came across an old monkey, it is said, lying in their path, his long tail a formidable obstacle.  Bhima asked the old simian, to get it out of the way; the tone was harsh, even arrogant, much as we demand today of the rivers that torrent down from these majestic heights of invincibility, rivers that we prayed to in earlier times because we believed in limits to our power.  The monkey, serenity personified, begged to be excused, for age was hardly on his side and asked if Bhima could move his tail for him?  Bhima, the Mighty One, took this lightly, but, well, to cut a long tale – or is it tail? – short, he could not move it an inch (or whatever nano measure was used in those halcyon days).  And then, when realization dawned, not a moment too soon, he begged forgiveness of Hanuman. 

That is the story of Bandarpoonch and I see every analogy of
human hubris I can in the re-telling.  Two days later, I see – with discomfort and awkward horror, for I am part of the problem – the gouging of hillsides for the Char Dham highway and, to my left, a hillside lost to a road that cuts through its mid-rib.   The landslips and boulder-falls that have resulted are Nature’s warning.  We need eyes – wide, open eyes – to listen to the stories that truly matter.    

Anand listens to Farida Khanum. 
Aaj jane ki zid na karo.  

 

 

 

 

 

Dollar Parity to a Pound (of Flesh)

 August 13th, 2011, the first day of Bees Saal Baad, our batch reunion. 

An expectant silence as Prof Prakash Apte began to speak. “As you guys know,” he intoned in his dry expressionless voice, “when I set a question paper for the senior batch, I hope it will dissuade the junior batch from taking my course in the following year……” 

Some laughter around the room as the finance majors in my batch from IIM Bangalore relived, in that instant, the moments we had spent in the examination room in the monsoon of 1990 (I am sweating now, so you get the gist).

Apte was a genius.  He taught International Finance (‘IntFin’), stuff like foreign exchange, derivatives and quanti gobbledygook, all super exciting to those who are those Brainy-Competitive-Therefore-its-logical types and have a 24th pair of chromosomes named Masochism.  I have – when reports last came in – 23 disarrayed pairs and none of them displayed so much as a DNA strand of financial intelligence, so I should have given this course a wide berth, but idiocy prevailed over an inner voice that asked loudly and repeatedly, ‘Are you Nuts?’

Apte was an innocuous looking fellow of medium height. He would stride into class, the veritable academic, his body stooped and leaning forward as if delicately balancing the inordinate weight of his brain, hands behind his back, hair combed in a schoolboy manner, whistling a low tune. Working on the assumption that we had read all that he had asked us to (an insanely far-fetched assumption), he would turn to the blackboard and begin a series of arcane mathematical calculations, speaking with passion to the piece of chalk in his hand. 

Our response was either to

a) Stare with our mouths open; or
b) Copy things down furiously in the hope that one day Enlightenment would descend from above; or
c) Curse that hangover from yesterday’s get-together; or
d) Combo of (a) and (c); or
e) Combo of (b) and (c). Notes made under this condition broadly resembled Morse Code. 

In a few days, I gave up hope and contemplated selling toothpaste as my Life Calling.  

Final Exam cometh and Apte was there, of course, with that low whistle. As he handed out the question paper, I looked at it disbelievingly. There was nothing in the whole paper that I could understand, nothing resembling English.  Even American English. I closed my eyes, tried to calm myself and believe that lack of sleep had something to do with it. A second reading and a couple of lines - out of a hundred – made some sense.  The rest was written in some obscure dialect of Swahili.  And I wished he would stop that bloody low whistle.  

In twenty minutes, I answered all that I had ever known, currently knew and would ever know about IntFin on two pages of the answer sheet and then spent an hour and a half in utter misery thinking about toothpaste.  

The big comfort (because our grading is relative, please note the joy in my sadistic tone) was that most others seemed hit by six-sixty volts of pure thermal power directly from the step-down transformer to their cervical spine, because everyone was sitting upright and staring unblinkingly ahead.  

And He was low-whistling.  

Well, in the end, I had got 23%.  As I was cursing everyone – a passing buffalo included – a friend fetched up. “The pass mark,” he said, “is 18%.” That day, I did not just pass, I passed out.

Over the last three decades, there have been occasions when the IntFin paper appeared as a horrible nightmare, with that bloodstained low whistle in tow.  As Prof Apte has now ascended to meet the One Above, all he will ask for is a blackboard and chalk to talk with.  And permission to whistle.

And, of course, he might do a surprise quiz on the Arbitrage Theorem.  God save the Maker.  

I Missed My Tern

Saturday was World Migratory Bird Day
I am now surprised to learn
And among many many birds that fly the aerial highway
There’s none like the Arctic tern.

Whole flocks fly from Arctic to Antarctic and retern 
Ha! now, isn’t that a super cool pun to kill?
A round trip of 60,000 km (your tummy will churn)
Before they settle down with a beer to chill.

A mysterious silence descends before they leave home
Are they meditating on the flight ahead
Or checking Insta and reconfiguring 4G settings to Roam?
No clue.  But biologists call this behaviour ‘dread’.
ps.  I dread meditation too, it’s definitely a syndrome
So, am I a tern intern crossbred?  

Now, if you see a flock of this Migration’s Star Emblem  
And (because you studied engineering) your idioms are wrongly honed
Don’t rush to pick the nearest rock and fling it at them
Because, you’d read, one must never leave a tern unstoned.

Among Otters

 It’s an overcast Sunday afternoon and I wonder if the kids – after a heavy lunch on the third day of their summer camp at KK and Arthi’s lovely village home – will be sluggish and sleepy; not a good time to make a presentation on otters, even a light one.
But how wrong one can be!

We begin by playing a fun game and before I get down to the title slide, there is a barrage of questions: Have you rescued otters? (Answer: No, thank goodness.)  Do they bite? (Yes! Remember they chomp fish for a living. And that’s why I said, thank goodness.). Why are they not amphibians? (Great question!  Can someone answer that please?)  Do they like people? (No, most definitely not, and  with good reason.  But do you like them?)

  
There is a roar of ‘Yes!’, two dozen voices in symphony.   They had seen Wild Karnataka the previous day and cannot quite get over the clip of a romp of otters chasing a tiger out of the water.  

This bunch of twenty-five is not sleepy by half. 
I am mesmerized by them, by their questions and curiosity.  We talk of paw prints and wildlife trade, of mustelids and dens, of crocs and dolphins and Darwin, of crabs and crabby people, of pesticides and bio-magnification.  The older ones – in high school – are remarkably well informed, the younger ones are diligently curious and happily exuberant.  

An hour flies by unnoticed – time and land forgotten - and Arthi signals with a smile that I must wind up now.  The kids aren’t half as disappointed as I am, but there are more questions outside the room too: Can we come with you to see otters? is the common one (When you grow up a bit more, definitely Yes!).
But then, do you wonder, as I often do, what happens when we all grow up? 

A few copies of Walk Through – my first book of stories – that I had found at Random Rubble are passed around.  Cheerful byes and high-fives, and it’s time to head home.   

A day later, I get a message with a photo from Madhuri, a volunteer whose daughter is at the camp: Tanmaye asked me to send this to you as a gift for your talk yesterday.  

Isn’t this just brilliant?  I think of the time and effort this twelve-year old who loves zoology has put in to draw this gorgeous sketch.  Can there ever be a better gift?

The More The Merrier

When I first read about India’s momentous achievement in becoming the country with most humans in it – Population Amrit kaal - I thought immediately, of course, of Balappa.

Since it’s unlikely that you know him – we all have our weaknesses, so don’t blame yourself – he is a farm hand around our area and works a couple of days every month at Random Rubble.  Balappa belongs to an itinerant tribe called the Pujarees, about one of whom Kenneth Anderson, of tiger-hunting fame, has written an entire chapter in encomium (which is about the only non-fiction that he wrote in his life).  He’s in his mid-thirties (Balappa, not Kenneth, who lived in the mid-thirties.  There’s a subtle difference and looks like you haven’t had your morning coffee).  Balappa is slim and wiry as most tribal folk tend to be, and a strong, silent soul with a gentle, but otherwise nondescript, face. 

 
I like the guy because he actually works unlike most other mid-thirties fellows in our area who are philosophers and economists and have a Grand Theory for Everything.  So, when I read this Population Amrit Kaal bit, I congratulated him heartily because he has done more than his bit: he has, hold your length and breath, thirteen kids (when reports last came in).  

His elder brother, Chandrappa, has, in contrast, a meagre eight, after which he threw in the towel and– in the immortal words of Seenappa – ‘got himself stopped’ at the local hospital (damn these doctors for spoiling the show).  Of his other brothers, I sadly know little, but if he ever consults me on a possible location for a family reunion, I will recommend Eden Gardens in Calcutta as the only option that comes to mind (the Grand Colosseum too, but I am a Make-in-India guy.  So is Balappa, by the way.)

The story - and the kids - does not stop here.  His elder son, who is now a sprightly twenty, has two kids as well (also when reports last came in.  A lot can happen in forty-eight hours).  You and I now know from this family history (and histogram plus trend line) that the son has a fair chance of beating his parents’ (otherwise) enviable record (I am taking bets, drop me your odds).   Ananda, in whose farm, Balappa and his Indian Premier League live, is convinced that he knows the root cause.  “Sir, you and I, we talk so much.  We both have two kids each.  He hardly talks!” he says, rolling on the floor laughing at what he is convinced is ultimate dodgy risqué humour. 

 
Now, as a hobby economist, I know that giving girls a sound education is the only long-run solution (assuming Balappa thinks there is a problem, that is), so I have long tried to get him to put his kids in school.  In the past, I have sold private equity to unsuspecting victims, so I can sell pink ice to Eskimos and bisibele bath to MTR, trust me.  I can even sell Amrit kaal to you.  

Balappa will always listen to me with a smile of deference and nod his head in complete agreement with everything I say.  But when Balappa meets me the next time, it is with the news of a new addition to his IPL.