A Sozzled Cook and a Guest who came to dinner

 When Sanjiv Handique posted this fetching, beautiful painting of an old little home in Digboi, the town he and I grew up in, my heart skipped a beat and an old story – one I grew up with – returned.  

Mum and dad lived in an identical home a stone’s throw away from this one, just after their wedding in the mid-1950s, when mum was a nervous eighteen and dad at the first rung of his accounting ladder.  A large central room with a fireplace, which was what the Brits gathered around in those chilly winter evenings, a bedroom each on either side and a pantry - dry kitchen of sorts- at the back.  The kitchen was well behind the house – the small building at the back in the painting - and had a paved covered path leading to it (this is crucial for the story that follows, so, as Rajni would say, Mind it).
 
The bungalow was surrounded by evergreen jungle, a rich, wet forest of an explorer’s dreams.  Dark, forbidding, terrifying mass of green, is how mum saw it, so she awaited dad’s return from office every day and wouldn’t walk beyond the garden (gardening, hence, became a lifelong passion).  They had an old loyal cook, Pillai, who, after his day’s cooking was done, would retreat to his quarters and knock off a couple of pegs of his ‘braandy’ before heading back to lay the table for dinner (these were Brit days.  Mind it).
 
One evening, mum was startled to see Pillai’s sozzled face pressed against the closed glass window outside; he had a look of a man who had seen a nasty, unfriendly ghost and he was gesturing wildly, but could not speak.  Should she let him in? When he looked like he was about to faint, she opened the door with trepidation and he rushed in and dropped to the floor in fright, gesturing to the back of the house.
 
When mum hurried to the pantry and looked out of the window, she stood frozen: resting on the paved path to the kitchen was a large tigress with three cubs. Mum stood there, in a daze, staring in fascination as the cubs played around, while the tigress watched on – I am told – in amusement (an amused tiger is something you have not heard of.  It endorses mum’s storytelling capability).  She did not seem to mind being ogled at by a dumbstruck human and was in no hurry to leave.

 
A while later, there was the sound of a Fiat (1100, that quaint old car) driving up the road to the Bungalow – dad was returning home.  The tigress got up and the family – mom and cubs - walked over behind the kitchen.  Mum saw her take a short jump over the little drain and then wait for the cubs to do so.  A moment later, they were gone.
The guest left behind a story that would traverse seven decades, a hundred re-tellings, much embellishment and a deep family nostalgia for a fairytale world that had once been.  

 
And, yes, Pillai turned teetotaller for good.

The Over-Achiever Bias

 Humans were never genetically altered to over-achieve.

The rarefied class of those we call over-achievers – people who, by general consensus, have done more than anyone (or the vast majority) could – is one that I am familiar with.  In this layer of the atmosphere of  achievement, I have met many in the thirty-two years since 1989, but no one I have met – not one – has been compassionate or outward-focused or unhurried or caring in a way that would make them humane.  Or a good listener (but, that shortfall, as you know, does not limit itself to over-achievers).  

Every one of the overachievers I know has been egocentric, stressed because he (or she) was unkind to himself or herself and to others, engendering conflict in the process, and self-focused to the point of ignoring the basis of our genetic heritage of a hundred thousand years: sociality and community bonding, that the tribal societies we now consider primitive prioritised above all else.  The language and actions of the modern day overachiever, even when they do yoga to ‘de-tox’ or set goals of weight-loss, are  aligned to a self-centric compelling desire for overachievement that is as incomprehensible as it is unreal and damaging.  Or take the running of a marathon: some – very few of the many runners I know – are the natural marathoners who run for the joy of running and would stop when they choose, to laugh with a child, or greet a friend on the road and shoot the breeze.  Most run because it gives them validation of some sort; they are in competition mode with themselves or others and conviviality is an unaffordable distraction.   

When you read the motivational spiels about achieving your true achievement-potential, have you thought of just what that means?  If you have, and if that thought has resulted in an answer, I would be grateful for the clarity, for I have – I really mean this - no idea of what a human’s potential is; we can measure it for a vehicle based on its horsepower and torque and for the boiling point of water, but for a human?  It is not the desire to create the next best app or a cool electric car – that, as Elon Musk demonstrates in his behaviour vividly, is egocentrism at its zenith and leaves in its wake the usual collateral damage that today’s businesses see within: team members running hard to stay in the same place and using meaningless, trite language to seek affiliation to a peer group, extraordinary variations in pay and inequality in society that engender trepidation, neglect, jealousy and retaliation, the creation of an utterly fake public persona by equally stressed PR folks who are asked to transform a beast into a butterfly in the media and the endless desire to seek validation and praise from everyone, as a billion posts on Linkedin demonstrate. 

This made me often wonder, when I was in my thirties, if I was built differently (and wrongly) and hence, if there was a need to course-correct and try to achieve more.

I now know better.

The people I know to be overachievers have used phrases like, “We must work hard and play hard” or “Conflict is inevitable” and are glued to entirely fictional tokens of perceived excellence with convenient logos that include the now-familiar ‘stretch goals’ ideology, all of which repel those who hear them (that includes me!) and seek to divide rather than unite.  Competition of this sort and with this attitude bears a cost that society, and now the planet, is unable to bear.

The only goal post that we need to see everyday and to aspire to reach is to be happy with oneself: at times, this results in achievement of the kind that is recognised as such, but for most part this itself is the achievement, for its own sake .  It takes, as a dear friend of mine once said, very little to be happy.  Yet, it is a goal post that seems to recede into the distance as the chimera of cheers keeps the castle aloft in the sky. 

The real mirror before us shows no chimera, so let us listen to ourselves while in front of it.  Time has never been our enemy and let us not make it one.

Money In The Exit

 

B for Absent-Minded

 Sandy B was the most – THE most – absent-minded person in our batch at IIMB.  Today, he is a prof in the US, which is appropriate placement for that absent-mindedness (as distinguished from his brain, which is formidable and has awed me no end).

Sandy B was my neighbour in the hostel, so I saw a lot of him.  I mean this literally because he often forgot to wear all his clothes or remembered to wear but forgot where those clothes were.  He would emerge from his room that had last seen any attempt at organisation around the time of the Chola kingdom with a loopy apologetic smile which - given the sore sight he presented – was necessary to mollify viewers, even those in our close circle who were inured to the spectacle.  He could never remember if he had had a bath and would then employ some utterly questionable methods (on which I shall not dwell) to determine the answer.

He had heard of exercise as being a human activity, but never thought of it as something that was applicable to him (from more recent photos of his, it appears that there has been an education).  In stout (and, how did this pun get here?) defence of the generous adipose around his tummy, he would quote Obelix, “My chest has slipped a bit…” with an endearing grin, which then got two other worthies, Santy and Sampy (no, they weren’t twins), to jiggle his belly a bit. 

The other part of him that interested the citizens of Bangalore were his hands. If you asked him for directions to somewhere, his hands would come to life and twist and turn in impossible ways, until you recognised that you were dealing with a Superior Talent and chose to figure out the route yourself (stuff like Google Maps has made our life immensely boring and I am all for banning it). 
ps: his dad forbade him from using his car, for which, of course, the larger populace of our city is immensely grateful. 

Sometimes he would sing (in a fetching voice with the superior talent that Bongs – including those who walk around modestly clothed – possess), but while singing, the arms would move and his fingers would keep the voice company, twisting and turning in scale progression, his head nodding away, the eyes with a far away look. This was because he thought he was on stage. On other occasions, he would speak to himself with a puzzled expression, saying, “Now, how did that happen?”, with his forefinger on his chin and a look of surprise, while surveying the fifteen others who were clutching their bellies (not his, for a change) and grinning away.    

Of course, if there were any assignments to be done, Sandy B had forgotten all about them immediately after.  To prevent that, he decided to make it a point to write them down diligently.  He would then misplace that book.  But, in his support, he never forgot to ask us to inform him of where he had misplaced the book that would remind him of the assignment.  So there. 

But the best stories were (and, probably, still are) of his travels, for he seems to reserve that raw talent for the larger world.  We learned from his engineering batchmates about his train journeys to and from Bangalore and the general impression was that miracles do happen, else he should have been an illegal immigrant in Colombia.  Once, we were told, he exchanged his second-class berth for an army man’s first-class one, because the fauji wanted to be with friends.  Later that night, of course, he got himself into hot water when the ticket examiner came around: absent-mindedly, he fished out his ID card and then tried, in vain, to convince a stern, disapproving, unbelieving ticket examiner that he had done no impersonation. The experience, in the words of our stellar representative of the human race was, ‘harrowing’. 

The next time we meet, if he remembers the place and the time and fetches up, I shall have to put my forefinger on the chin and say, “Now, how did that happen?”

 

 

A Soldier Never Dies

A soldier never dies, they say, he just fades away. 

As I walked past the empty plot of land that once had an old house on it, I thought of a remarkable fauji who had lived for many years there.  It had been a tiny little non-descript home, painted an unappetizing shade of green and its demolition left the city no poorer.  

Yet the elderly couple who had once lived there were a fascinating study.

About a couple of years after we moved to Bangalore, my father was delighted to meet his classmate from college, a now-retired Major from the Military Police, VR Menon. They lost little time in renewing their friendship and found an interest that brought them together for a couple of hours each evening, a passion for brisk, long walks, often followed by a small drink at either person’s home. 

VR was a fauji to his last atom and about as different as could be from Dad. He had a luxurious moustache, every strand of hair in immaculate position with Brylcreem (alas, no longer a staple in the contemporary bath), while Dad abhorred moustaches and never had one. If Dad was a fun-loving, jovial person, VR was overtly quite the contrary, his demeanour - aided by Brylcreem moustache - forbidding and as stiff as his fauji backbone.  When amused, VR’s moustache would twitch a bit and the eyes would narrow for but the briefest moment, which provided much relief to those around. And, if my father was easy going, VR had a temper that was legendary. 

Indeed, it was his fury, sharpened by a keen sense of right and wrong, that had plagued him for much of his life. A story was often heard in the Malu circles in Bangalore of an incident in the 1960s in the Kashmir Valley, when VR came out of his house in the Army base on hearing his elder son yell for help, followed by a dog’s snarl. The Alsatian belonging to the Brigadier of the base, no less, had bitten his son. 

Now, the rule in the Army is simple: a Brigadier’s dog is to be treated broadly on par with the Brigadier. VR took his son in, brought his gun out, and shot the dog. The Bangalore Malu circs were unanimous in their view that this incident, possibly aided by other bouts of fury, decreed his retirement at the level of a Major. VR seemed to agree as well. He once remarked, with candour, to my Dad that a donkey that joins the army cannot but retire as a Major. I do not quite remember his tone of voice when he said this. Was it regret? Pathos? Humour? Yet, notably, he never quite saw the need to change. In conversations over an evening drink, he would have the most simple solutions for the World’s ailments, each such solution aided by the liberal use of a Point 22 automatic that he believed was useless when kept in the armoury.  As a discussion on corruption, for instance, warmed up, his moustache would move an inch upwards, the eyes would narrow (that’s the smile quotient) and he would say: ‘shoot the bloody fellow, that’s the answer,’ and the ladies in the audience would either be in splits or full of ‘Aiaiyoo’s or ‘Guruvayurappa’ or some such invective. 

VR’s family was a study in contrast. Ammu aunty, his demure wife, was small and rotund in appearance, with a sweet high-pitched voice and open smile. She, so the Malu circs opined, channelled her husband’s behaviour with skilled gentility that no Point 22 could answer. It was impossible to not like her and VR was devoted to her, recognising her ability to moderate his own impulsive nature. 

VR and my father became so close in the three or four years that they walked together that, when my father died in 1984, he went into a depression, refusing to talk to anyone for days. He must have picked himself up as only a fauji can, for, some time later, I began to see him on his evening walk, now alone. The pace of the walk was brisk, the back erect and, when he saw me, the conversation would be formal and brief, yet those expressive eyes under the bushy eyebrows would mist up for a brief moment.  Or did I imagine this? But I knew that he missed Dad, as much as I did.  Theirs had been, like the odd friendship we experience in our lifetimes, a meeting of souls.  

A couple of years later, the family shifted from that home in Indiranagar – the one I had walked past – to a small apartment off Richmond Road. While Ammu aunty and mum stayed in touch, for VR the link had been broken. 

Some years later, his wife passed away. 

I have yet to meet someone who has been as devastated by a spouse’s death as VR was. She was getting on in years and wasn’t in good health, yet he was inconsolable. Many months after her demise, I knocked on his door and did not quite recognise the old, gently bent man who opened it for me, the eyes half-lidded, the expression one of disinterest. He had stopped his walks and, instead, moped about the home in the evening of his life, in search of meaning, avoiding the company of those who knew him well. It was hard to visit him again, for there was nothing to talk about, no connection to bond.  We were a chasm apart.  

So, I did not visit him again.

I once read an article by a surgeon where he describes a surgery as a partnership between the surgeon and the patient. A surgeon can only, he had said, fix an engine; the patient must provide the spark for it to run. VR had lost the spark and passed away in the early 1990s. 

The fauji had faded into the sunset.

The SSence of Maths

If you get off your vehicle on Ulsoor main road – a busy arterial way where pedestrians are uncooked meat, buses are uncrowned emperors and vendors of flowers, footballs and filters the unnamed nobility – and turn into a sidelane into which the market overflows, you will see a higher level of chaos, if indeed that is possible. There are carts, two wheelers, cycles and shoppers, a noisy mass, an agglomeration of diligent humanity that has little room to stop, think or look around.  The movement, the smells, the colours and the diversity represent old Bangalore, once detested, now captured with evocative eloquence in an occasional coffee table book. 

Continue to walk a bit down this lane and do the unthinkable: stop for a moment (after looking around you to avoid moving objects, such as shopping bags).  Look to your left and you see the tiniest of houses with a narrow staircase in front leading to the little room upstairs.  If this was the 1970s or the 80s and you were a student, you would turn in, take the stairs that led to the room and then join the melee of young students standing in the short, narrow corridor, speaking in whispers. 

For, in the room, was the finest Maths teacher that I (and a few thousand other students) have ever known.   

SS – which is how S Srinivasan was called by everyone – wasn’t just a teacher; he was an institution into himself, far above the prosaic identity of St Josephs College of Arts and Science where he taught.  SS asked for nothing – he charged no tuition fees, was perfectly fine with your neglect of homework or indeed your absence from class (it did not even register in his mind) and was happy to admit a late entrant.   What he did get in ample measure was respect and awe, and a reputation that preceded him by miles.  At St Josephs, he was part of a vanishing breed of old-school teachers, each an expert at his subject with a devoted fan following and larger than life, yet humble personality. Yet, it was the tuitions that made him the rockstar

   

SS was devoted to the science of mathematics; indeed, the word ‘devotion’ hardly does justice to his approach which was absolute, whole-hearted, involved, considerate commitment for its own sake and nothing else.  And if there ever was a human who combined such fervour with genius, this man was that human.    

The sweetest words to his ears were when a pupil-to-be said, “Sir, I want to study maths.”

He would then reply, “Why-uh? Are you writing an entrance exam-uh?”

“No Sir.  Actually, I only want to study maths to learn more” (though most who said it didn’t mean it; they had been tutored by the more experienced).

A beam would then appear on his face. 

“Ok-uh.  Come from tomorrow.  You can join the 4 pm batch.”

And that was that.   

SS tutored students every single morning and evening, including his day off at College - which was Sunday.  The door upstairs would open early in the morning and the queue of students – those in their under-grad or studying for CA, ICWA, engineering, post-grad or anything else – would have formed by then.  SS – a small, fair, rotund man with a triple chin, white hair and a stubble, wearing a veshti and shirt – would enter that little room after a morning coffee and take his seat behind an old table, as the students shuffled in and occupied every inch of the room, in two or three rows. He would then take the notebook of the nearest student, pull out a pen that was a fixture in his shirt pocket, spend a few seconds flipping the pages to get an idea of what had been covered and then continue.  He taught so many groups that it was a miracle he could pick the threads up this quickly.

After years of experience, he needed no textbook to look up problems from, for even these were embedded in that razor-sharp brain.  If a student fished out a textbook and asked deferentially, “Sir, could you please look at this problem?”, he would take the book, narrow his eyes, examine the problem in question and then begin writing out the solution, speaking more to himself that to the student. 

“Yes-suh,” he would intone, “this-uh is a simultaneous equation-uh.  Now, let me see……” and, in a low-toned monologue that was accompanied by lucid steps, the problem would be laid to rest.  

The retinue of students around the table would write furiously, trying to keep up with him, or watch with fascination.  A few who had given up hope would stare and wonder if their parents could be persuaded to let them study fine art or music – with these students he’d spend extra time, most often to no avail, for the battle had been lost in their minds years earlier, under teachers who were trained to damage learning, not foster it.  SS saw his task as getting the subject to be loved, just as he did.  And he loved solving problems, a logicist par excellence.

There is no doubt - not the slightest - that SS was a genius.  It may have been the curd rice that he had for lunch or the genes or perhaps both.  As an aside, while the second factor – genes – has been much researched,  the the impact of the first – curd rice – on intelligence must be the final frontier of brain research, as the empirical evidence is compelling.   

At about 8 am, he would wind up, go downstairs for breakfast, change from the veshti to a pair of trousers and, in a slow, deliberate way, pedal his way on an old cycle to college that was twenty minutes away,  steel tiffin carrier with curd rice securely held in the carrier at the back.  He’d return in time for an afternoon coffee and then get back into the room upstairs again, tutoring batch after batch till it was time for dinner. 

During his sessions, everyone had a purpose and there was little room – forgive the pun - for banter, humour or, indeed, harangue and his eyes rarely left the notebook in front of him.  When the results of various exams were announced, there would be sweets all around and a student would deferentially place an envelope with some cash in front of SS, which would then be gracefully accepted with a brief ‘Thank you’.    

There was just the one thing he was chronically allergic to: the IIT entrance exam.  If a student fetched up and said that he wanted maths coaching for the IIT entrance, the fair face with the triple chin would morph into a frown, the eyes would narrow and his plump body would draw itself to its full height (about five feet five inches at best).  An icy voice would then reply, “I do not prepare students for IIT-uh.”  And that was that.

So, obviously, those who did prepare for the IIT entrance were creative.  In those days, one prepared for IIT in one’s 11^th standard, not when one fell off the pram as happens now, so some quick thinking was easily done with inputs from other students and creative answers such as, “I want to learn maths because it’s my special subject” emerged.  

At college, I began studying for my Cost Accounting examination.  This meant that, for two memorable years, I was in that little room three hours a week, as notebook after notebook filled up with his prose.  And for thirty five years, I have carried these precious notebooks around in the hope that I will go back to Permutations and Combinations on one dark, monsoon day.  And in the hope that, as I read those pages with puzzlement (for they seem to be Greek and Swahili combined),  the odd smell of that room will come back along with images of the students hunched over their notebooks in front of that small man, who lived for his craft, expecting nothing, yet generous with the astonishing knowledge that was stored in those special grey cells.  

Perhaps then, caught up in that imagery, I will look at my son and say, “Why-uh are you not doing maths now?”

The Grass Is Greener On The Other End Of The Other Side

One of the notable aspects of my life occurs when people who know I have a Kerala origin and genes to match learn that I am a vegetarian.

For almost all non-Kerala folks, these two are entirely incongruous and cannot happen simultaneously at least in one individual (in the same lifetime).

The tendency is then to do the following 4 things, in sequential order:

a) I am sized up, examined with raised eyebrows and assigned a sub-species name such as Homo Sapiens Malu-bogus. They all want to now see if those veggies have done something to the way I pronounce coconut or quickly or corner or braandy. None of them can pronounce Malampuzha or Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum to save their life, so I see this as downright seditious.

b) They ask me when I became veggie. I once thought of employing a call centre to answer this question, but that was before I read Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, which is the only guide you need to deep existential issues.   

Question: When did you become veggie?

Inspirational answer (since you have now read above book): “I became veggie the year the ring worm shifted residence from pig faeces to human intestines.” Keep serious, introspective expression.

This answer is greeted by a surprised silence (though a couple of folks will come close to throwing up, so do not attempt this at home). Some, who have not experienced a real call centre and hence are unspoilt by civilisation, then ask, “Which year was that?’ to which, of course, you must reply with, “The year I became veggie.” And, then promise yourself a Corner House Ice cream.

c) They – almost always - earnestly plod me on to try non-veggie stuff at least once. The tactic here (forgive the advice mode again) is to fully agree that, yes, we need to try it and that Life is all about excitement, adventure and ringworm side effects, but could I please use the washroom now? Once you enter the washroom, do watch Sholay on your mobile Netflix account from beginning to end, missing no detail however slight and rewinding the songs. Hopefully, when you are back, the topic would be Should We Call the Doctor and the division of the bill.

d) And finally, I am asked if there is any real Malu food that is veggie, while they order appam-and-stew and steamed banana, all of which I suppose they think is grown inside a goat. The ones who ask this question with a smirk deserve solitary confinement on Easter Island. Others really want to know, for Indians have an urge (it is scientifically proven to border on mania) to accumulate information of absolutely no value to themselves. These were moments when I would forget the names of everything that I have eaten all my life and stutter for credibility but I now ask the person to ask Ramu kaka or Google chacha, for the subject is vast and nuanced (a word everybody uses these days, when they don’t say like or bro or dude or herd immunity).

The key, I have learnt - after considered thought - is to put on a certain condescending authority when you answer: that disdain is the difference between your success and mutton keema curry.