One and Only Influence in My Life: To My Children 13

If you ask me the greatest influence I ever had in my life, I need not think twice. Later in my life many people, both historical and local people have moved me in certain sense, but when I talk about influence, I have only one name in my mind. You could be influenced when you are young and your mind is like a lump of clay. Anybody could mould you but you don’t even remain in that shape. You tend to change at every moment. The day you see Schwarzenegger on screen, you hit a gym. Another day you pick up the autobiography of Charlie Chaplin, there you go, your all effort is to become a Chaplin. Then you read Mahatma Gandhi and feel like him for some time. You listen to a song and go to a music class to become a singer. You read some romantic poetry written by Changampuzha or Edappally or Keats or Shelly, you start feeling like a lover in distress. When you are young everything moves you. But influence; that’s life changing and it cannot be done by everyone or everything.

My influence was Shibu Natesan, the artist. In the previous chapters, I had mentioned some of the incidents relating my attachment with Shibu. Here in this chapter I am going to tell you how I got influenced by this man who is just three years elder to me. Shibu and I are cousins. Our parents had a cross marriage within the family. His father married my fahter’s sister and my father married his father’s sister. For almost ten years we grew up together till Shibu’s family shifted to a near by town named Varkala where I later went to do my pre-degree course. Shibu was an agile child with big eyes and long dark hairs. He was not too tall. As he was skinny he could run faster than me and like dogs we were always running. He ran a few paces ahead of me, and puffing and panting I ran behind him. We ran through the edavazhikal (alleys) in Vakkom, which were filled with sugar like sand. Now these alleys are cemented or paved.

Shibu was the first person in my life whom I saw with a pair of suspenders attached to his knickers. All his knickers had suspenders and he never used to wear a shirt if he was out of school. The suspender of his left shoulder was always loose and it kept dangling around his elbow while running and his left hand automatically kept pulling it up to the shoulder. With a small stick held on his right hand, he struck a discarded cycle tyre and he imagined it as a bus. The tyre rolled and we all ran behind it. We all had discarded cycle tyres as our private ‘vehicles’. But Shibu’s was the best always because he used to reinforce one tyre with another tyre forcefully fixing the latter inside the groove of the former. Cycle tyres have two iron linings at the internal curves. It holds the tyre strong even if one could press it to different shapes. We used to go and stand in front of the cycle workshops in the village junction and plead with the shop owner for sparing a few tyres. Finally he would relent and Shibu chose the best for himself and gave me the ones with broken iron linings. So whenever I ran behind my tyre, it went like a wave instead of rolling like a wheel with dignity.

Once, my grandfather made a push cart for me. Two wooden wheels fitted at the either ends of a plank which was connected to a long shaft as handle made the push cart. One could push it and run and could imagine driving buses or cars or whichever vehicles we fancied at that time. We did not have too many options to fancy during those days. Buses were made by two companies: TATA and Ashoka Lyeland. There were a few Benz, Bedfords and Fargos but slowly they disappeared from the village. Amongst the cars we could only imagine Ambassadors and Premier Padminis (FIAT). Once in a while we saw a Standard car. Ships we saw in picture books, flights we saw in the sky and train we saw going through the village. So while pushing the cart we imagined these limited range of vehicles and according to the size of the vehicles our mouths over worked to make similar sounds of the engines. Whenever we wanted to travel by train, we took a piece of coir, tied the two ends and stood inside (quite a number of children) and ran in a line. Each child represented a bogey and the coir circle defined the contours of the train. And whenever we wanted to have a joy ride on a motor bike, we collected arecanut (beetle nut) tree’s fronds and made one child to sit on the broad edge and rest of the kids pulled the other end. As the earth was undulating the imaginary bike had to negotiate several bumps and pits. Thanks to this most of the kids in the villages including Shibu and myself had bruised bums, knees and torn bottomed knickers. And on holidays, all the kids looked as if they had been just created by God almighty out of dust.

Shibu was cunning enough to snatch that push cart from me. Instead, he swapped it for a swan cart. This swan cart was a small cart in the shape of a swan with multiple colors and was bought from Kanyakumari (Cape Comerin) during a family visit to the holy shrine there. As the base was thin and narrow, while I pulled the string the swan cart kept falling down. And in the meanwhile Shibu was taking all the pleasures of driving different vehicles with my push cart. He whirred past me several times, honking horns with his mouth and I had to jump aside with my hopeless swan cart. This was one incident that I clearly remember for his cleverness but that was quite fascinating. When I joined the first standard, he was already studying in the fourth standard there and he took a good care of me. Even I remember the color of the shirt that he used to wear during those days; orange and black checks all over. It was quite Mondrian like though we did not have any clue at that time who Mondrian was.

Shibu attracted me in several ways. First of all he presented himself as a person who could do anything in the world. Our world was limited so climbing a tree was one of the biggest tasks which he could do easily. Making tyres (I think we had this obsession for mobility even in those days) out of used and discarded rubber slippers was another task. We used to hunt for rubber slippers which could be converted into tyres. Shibu carved perfect circles out of the slippers, made small holes in the middle of them and fitted them on a thin iron or bamboo rod. It was further pushed into a hollow pipe or bamboo piece, which was then tied to a long handle. When his innovations and creativity reached to its height, he collected some plastic clothe hangers and bamboo pieces and made a steering wheel out of it and fitted it to the edge of the handle. And it heightened the pleasure of imagining. Even today, in Kerala, some crazy guys replace their cycle handles with original steering wheels!

Whatever Shibu did was something unique and innovative for me. During the summer holidays, whoever had lands would call laborers to ventilate the earth by digging the upper layer of sand. You could call it a kind of ploughing. The laborers came and they dug the land up leaving a lot of solid earth blocks all over. These earth blocks absorbed water when it rained and the layer underneath got fresh air and manure. Shibu and myself used to hunt for bigger sand blocks. Shibu carved the shapes of elephants, horses and different creatures out of it. Sitting under the calming shade of huge trees, we enjoyed these sessions of sculpting. I never had the proficiency to carve anything though I used to mimic whatever Shibu did. Our tools were twigs and bamboo pieces or some knife pilfered from the kitchen. When Shibu handed over each finished piece to me, I displayed them under the tree for other friends to come and enjoy. We had already been destined to become artist and curator, it seems in retrospection.

Another great feat that Shibu could carry out was his proficiency in drawing things on the mud walls. He with sticks and stones, drew pictures after pictures on the walls. I would suggest ‘cat’, then he drew a cat. I would suggest car, then he would draw a car. Even at that tender age of ten or something, his grasp on form was really commendable. What surprised me during those drawings sessions was that Shibu started a line somewhere which I thought would form the nose of the person, which later would end up as the elbow of the person whom he depicted. One day he drew the image of a bus and I could not understand why he foreshortened the image; he was giving a perspective to the bus, which I could not perceive. On another occasion he drew a bus in profile and its front was slightly bent like the tip of an expanded triangle. I could not understand the logic of it either. To appease my curiosity, he took me to the junction, waited for a bus to come and showed, how, seen from profile, the body of the bus has a nose like projection. I was convinced. Today, I could draw a bus and a car (Ambassador car) because I used to copy what Shibu used to do.

Shibu left our village as his father, my uncle started his studio (a painting atelier) in Varkala. Then we met only during the summer holidays. My father let us to stay in Varkala for a prolonged period so that we could stay together with our cousins. Shibu’s house in Varkala was near a Kavu (a small forest with a temple in the middle). We spent most of our time inside the kavu. Shibu used to tell me stories of the movies that he had seen during the years; he used to relate the class bunking experiences, about teachers, their nick names (one name I still remember ‘Kushnan’) and so on. He would introduce me to his new friends in Varkala. We never used to play anything in particular. Instead we walked all over the village or sat inside the kaavu. We lay down on the huge roots and day dreamed. Shibu took me to the small streams and rivers where we caught small fish using bathroom towels. We collected these fish in a glass jar, mostly empty Horlicks bottles, and brought back to home only to take them back to the stream and let them free after a few days.

‘Ovu’ or natural mineral water stream was another wonder world that Shibu had introduced to me. Shibu and many boys of his age used to go and take bath under these mineral water falls that came from the Sivagiri Hills. As most of those boys did not have many things to do, they used to spend a lot of time in and around these ovus; they climbed hills, collected berries and mangoes. It was heaven to be with Shibu during those summer vacations and we together explored several secrets. Years later, when we were in College and had stopped taking bath in places like that, we had found another use of those hills. As young college going boys we would climb these hills and sit on the branches of the cashew nut trees that covered the hills. From that vantage point we could see the village down there. We could see the waterway which had once been the artery of Kerala’s water transport, now lying disused. We could see people going about with their daily lives, we could see people working in the farms and fields, we could see people idling at the way side tea shops, we could see college boys and girls taking short cuts to reach the main town by climbing over the hills, we could see people taking bath under the streams, we could get occasional glimpses of women taking bath there under the ovus.

While sitting there we would hear some murmurs and hushed up giggles. Shibu told me that those were men and women just making out. There used to be a lot of perverts at that time in that village. They used to hide behind these cashew nut thickets and when the college girls passed by they would jump out in the middle of the desolated paths and flash their organs. Seeing the madness, girls would scream and run downhill. The pervert would withdraw into the thickets. Shibu used to tell me about the scenes he used to see when he visited those places alone with a sketchbook and charcoal in hand. He had witnessed a lot of scenes of people doing sin. But in village sins could take place only within the thickets. There were no places to hide. There used to be a lot of snakes in those thickets and wherever there are snakes there must be sin too. One day, while sitting on one of the branches of a tree, dangling our legs down and taking a full view of the village life down there, Shibu told me how he witnessed a dead body hanging from one of those trees in the last summer. He told me that the man was dripping of worms. Ever since, I never felt like going to those hills.

When I joined for the pre-degree course in the Sree Narayana College, Varkala, Shibu had already become an established figure in the village. There were reasons for that and all those reasons kept me pulling towards him as if he were a most powerful magnet in the world. When I was in the ninth standard, Shibu one day came to my village and talked to me about a special kind of trousers, which was called ‘Jeans’. Bellbottom pants were in vogue and I also had a few pairs, which had given me a squarish look. Shibu was in his first year degree at the Trivandrum Fine Arts College and he had already started showing symptoms of a rebel. He used to come back from the college and tell me a lot of stories when I visited him during the holidays. His words were like magic. He introduced me to books and articles, which I had no taste for previously. He changed the style of his drawings and with tremendous easiness he started capturing human beings and anything around him in a very expressionistic manner. He started talking about names which I had never heard of. And he was full of magic. I pined to reach Trivandrum along with him.

At that time nobody wore jeans. I remember in some of the films, then young Hero Kamal Hasan wearing bellbottom pants made out of denim. It was a phase of transition in the field of fashion. The seventies hangover was still around. Shibu told me that he was going to buy a pair of jeans from another city called ‘Kollam’ (Quilon). We were visiting Kanyakumari for some family function. We were all playing at the sea shore and Shibu threw his slippers into the sea. A few times the waves brought the slippers back. Then one slipper came and the other did not. Shibu waited for sometime. It was a family event and the whole family waited for the single slipper to come back. As it did not turn up, Shibu took the other slipper out and threw it back to the sea. Throughout the trip, he went around bare footed. This was an absurd action and it was the beginning of several absurdities of Shibu, which had bowled me over.

Shibu brought a pair of jeans and then one more. He shared one with me. It was almost sharing a great experience. Wearing a pair of jeans and a crape shirt was really an event in my village. I wore a very tight jeans and a shirt several times bigger than me and walked to the nearest railway station. People came out of the shops to see me walking and they were seeing for the first time in their life someone who was wearing something called jeans and a very large shirt.

There is a story behind very large shirts. ‘Pokkuveyil’, a film by late film maker, G.Aravindan was released in early 1980s. Though commercially it did not do well, amongst the intellectual circles, this film was a rage. Balachandran Chullikkadu, a young poet who had taken Kerala by storm with his poems and recitals was the hero in the movie. He enacted the role of a young man who was a self exile and the film was developed on a raga played by Hari Prasad Chaurasya. In this slow moving movie, Balachandran Chullikkadu walked with a slight bent on his back. He wore large shirts and always wore a white mundu. The young radicals of that time in Kerala fell in love with this character and many young boys started dressing up like him. Shibu designed his own shirts and got it stitched by a local tailor. He wore a mundu (temporarily discarded jeans) which reached above his ankles. He wore leather chappals and started walking with a bent. To add effect to the whole appearance, Shibu started carrying a huge umbrella with him. He spent several hours sketching local people in railway stations. He became a self exile in an agile society and the family members started giving him strange looks.

In the family circles, Shibu became a talking point because they judged his transformation as a result of his education at the Trivandrum Fine Arts College. As usual they all assumed that he was smoking marijuana and other stuff. In fact, though he tried them once in while he was never a regular smoker. We smoked cigarettes while he confided several things to me. When these changes were happening in Shibu’s life, I joined Varkala SN College for my pre-degree. I had this habit of finishing my syllabus at home and college was a complete bore. So instead of going to college, I spent time with Shibu, and he too skipped college once in a while for me. He introduced me to huge volumes of Picasso, Dali, Van Gogh and many other world masters. He spoke to me about the colors of Titian, perspective of Vermeer, light in Rembrandt and revolution in Goya. He spoke to me at length about Durer and his etchings. He related the stories of Andre Rublov and Ivan’s Childhood. He introduced me to the world of literature, art and movies. And the music was yet to happen.

Interestingly, like two young souls, we also got addicted to the life and times of Vincent Van Gogh. Shibu spoke to me about Irving Stone’s ‘Lust for Life’ and gave me a copy of it to read. Then he procured a copy of ‘Letters to Theo’ by Van Gogh. We were mesmerized. Since then we started behaving like Van Gogh and Theo. I was Theo and he was Van Gogh; he wrote me letters every day and he illustrated his letters with drawings. Then he sent them to me by post. I anxiously waited for them and the moment I got them I read them several times and replied him on the same day. It went on for several years in and from many countries wherever he sojourned, till emails happened. Shibu was intense in his writings, he had observations about anything and everything. When he was in Baroda, pursuing his masters degree in print making, these letters became very intense and often he spoke of the struggles that an artist faced both in the work front and in life. I had to be Theo to the true sense. Once from Baroda, Shibu wrote to me about what he smoked and how he smoked. And I was very much moved by his description. During those days my poems used to get published in some local magazines and journals. Once I got a remuneration of forty rupees for one of my poems. I took a twenty rupees note out of it and sent it to Shibu. Next week I received a mail from Shibu saying that he bought a few packets of cigarettes with that money.

During the college days Shibu was extremely intense. He went through different phases in his works. He was a super realist in the beginning. Then he became an impressionist or post-impressionist. Then he became an expressionist. Then a neo-expressionist and later on he became instrumental in establishing mediatic realism in contemporary Indian art context. In between, when he was a student in Trivandrum, he had an abstract phase. He painted several canvases in an abstract style, which he abandoned at some stage. One of the shocking things for the family members and most amusing thing for me was that Shibu during his abstract phase wanted to experiment with objects also. He started collecting different plastic and metal objects from different places. One day he started melting them and with the molten plastic and metal he painted on a plywood sheet. Layer after layer he added objects and molten plastic on it. He had not even heard of Anselm Keifer at that time. If he knew Keifer without fail I also would have known about him. But this experiment was happening quite naturally. However, these kinds of experiments also came to an end very soon.

But Shibu was always different and this difference was something that I wanted to create or emulate in my life. Shibu used to be a great story teller. He could present any incident in a very interesting way. Had he been a writer, he would have excelled in writing also. Lucky for me, he did not become one and became a painter. Thanks to his walking style and unheard of dressing style, Police used to pick him up once in a while. He had this habit of sitting at the railway stations and sketching people around. One night, after alighting from the shuttle train that ran between Trivandrum and Kollak, at the Varkala station, Shibu was sitting and sketching the people on the platform. It was dark and suddenly someone caught hold of his shoulder. It was a police inspector and soon he was bundled up and taken to the police station. Under the clear light in the police station, the inspector took a good look at this young man in his strange clothes, sketch book and umbrella, and started laughing. Shibu stood still staring back at the man’s eyes with defiance that came to the fine arts college students naturally. The inspector flipped through the sketch book and appreciated his works. “So you are a fine arts student?” asked the inspector. Shibu nodded his head in agreement. “Okay, you should not be seen at odd times in places like railway station. Anti-social elements are very much there,” said the inspector. He let Shibu go because he knew about fine arts college and also he knew about the students who went there were mostly crack pots.

Whenever Shibu recounted the fine arts college students’ encounter with police force, he recollected this particular story of a common friend who was once caught by another inspector in a similar context. This time, the inspector was a bit more intelligent and informed but in a quirky sense. The student stood shivering before the inspector. Taking this as an opportunity to play his quirkiness, the inspector started raving and fuming. He bullied the student a bit and shot this classic question: Who did Picasso? The student was taken aback for a moment. But he had a sense of repartee and promptly he gave the answer, “Guernica, Sir.” Crestfallen, the inspector let the boy go and never arrested any other fine arts student in his life.

Crack pots, mad people, people with strange characters, poets, lovers and some people who were overawed by the presence of geniuses gravitated towards Shibu and without any reservations he introduced all of them to me. By that time, I too had moved to Trivandrum to join my graduate course and I started spending more time in Fine Arts College than in my own college. Shibu was a sort of hero in the college as everyone respected his talents. He introduced me to so many people. We spent several hours together in the public library premises where we met writers, madmen, drug addicts, idlers, intellectuals, philosophers, homosexuals, film makers and so on. Homosexuals had always a strange attraction towards Shibu and me. They came around us and asked for favors and for us it was fun to fool them by giving them hopes.

Shibu had a very serious love affair with a woman who was a few years senior to him. She knew me and once in a while we spent time together discussing art and literature. After Trivandrum fine arts college and before joining Baroda, Shibu rented out a couple of studio spaces in Trivandrum city and that became my hang out. We smoked for hours and listened to Hindustani classical music. Shibu was the one who introduced me to classical music. Shibu had some initial set backs in his education and career but after his Baroda stint, he started going from strength to strength. And from Baroda he wrote to me about his life and art. Also he introduced me to Bob Marley and reggae music. That was one of the most interesting moments in my life.

I was deeply in love with a girl and I had not yet opened my heart to her. One day I did it and she accepted me. My joy knew no bounds. That was the day Shibu came back from Baroda. He had been talking to me about Bob Marley and his music, through the innumerable letters that he used to send to me from Baroda. When he came, he brought one recorded cassette with all the LEGEND songs plus a few other tracks. At his Trivandrum home where his girl friend stayed, we sat, smoked and listened to Bob Marley. ‘Coming in from the cold’ was the number that attracted me most at that moment. May be I was in love and I wanted to identify with the mood of that song. ‘It’s you, it’s you that I am talking to now…why do you look so sad, and forsaken, when one door is closed don’t you know another is opened” My experiments with women were all flops and now another door was opened and I was hoping the best to happen.

Bob Marley later on became an obsession for me. Shibu went on to study the history of reggae music and today he is one of the rare people who know anything and everything about the history of black music including that of reggae. I too pursued a bit of the history of black music as a part of my interest in the history of black liberation movements.

A series of events that took place between the years 1990-1992, took me to Baroda Fine arts faculty where Shibu had already finished in post graduation. I joined the art history MA course. Shibu was staying in a rented apartment in Baroda. I spent my days and nights with Shibu in Baroda. While he painted, I sat and read. We listened to music while smoking weed. We gossiped and joked and some black guys living near Nizampura even took us for a gay couple. One day, after my education I left for Delhi. Shibu wanted me to go to Mumbai. But somehow, Mumbai was not my choice. I came to Delhi. Within a year Shibu went to Amsterdam for further studies. He kept writing to me from there too.

Years passed by. Shibu became Shibu Natesan as we know today. We had some issues between us. We had a severe fight in 2005 and stopped talking to each other. For a long time we did not talk at all. One day, we met in Delhi and he said hello and I too said hello. Then we became friends again. I don’t know whether we are friends or cousins or things like that. There is something that bonds me with him and him with me. We still fight while we chat in Facebook. We have different opinion about life. We have different approaches now. But there is something that holds us together. Could it be love or sin?

Dreaming a Revolution and the Arrival of the State: To My Children 12

Your mind is like a wine cellar when you are young. You feel emotions and passions bottled up, labeled and racked, and pushed to some cellars in the nether grounds of your mind. They mature there, making you pine for something unknown; you search for meaning in everything. You are not like the wine; but you are like the cellar, dark, damp and deep. However fresh you may look, underneath it there must be an ocean with mammoth waves breaking their heads while they lock themselves with their salty, frothy and foaming water tusks. You wander like a homeless destitute. You prepare war machines against anything and everything because you think they are all conspiring against you. You are doomed to live but you want to die. You are destined to become a martyr but you are caught up in your petty emotions. You are supposed to become the savior but you feel you are a coward from inside. You know you want to fly but at the same time you feel the dead weight of custom pinning you down like a hapless creature at the hands of an impudent school boy.

So you think about revolution. During those days, when I thought about revolution, burning several liters of midnight oil, learning about the great feats achieved by the great communist thinkers of the world, I used to feel a strange thrill passing through my spine. Like the invisible fumes coming out of the cellars where the wine mature, I used to feel the fumes coming out of my body. I was just seventeen years old and it did not taste sweet at all. May be, turning sixteen or seventeen was almost like entering a great threshold that would lead you to something really fascinating called manhood. You fume from inside because you have already given yourself the license to smoke and when you smoked you felt like a man. When you felt like a man you thought of changing the world. So you read a lot at night and smoked a lot. You smoke as if you have been waiting all these years to smoke. You smoke as if you were choking all these years and just now you got a tube of fresh air pushed into your nostrils. You smoke to live and you smoke to dream.

Smoking must have a history with the revolutionaries. That’s why most of the revolutionaries smoke. If you look at the people who have revolutionized the world, you would see them with cigars or pipes or cigarettes in their hands or on their lips. I believe, smoking became fashionable amongst the revolutionaries because it added to their manhood. In fact the revolutionaries might have spent a lot of time in the forests and uninhabitable locations where they had to pump up their adrenaline levels through regular intake of nicotine. So they smoked. Then it became a custom and a rule that all the revolutionaries should smoke. Perhaps, Mahatma Gandhi did not smoke though he was a great revolutionary. But in his autobiography he speaks about his experiments with tobacco when he was a young boy. Revolutionaries smoked in Kerala. And those revolutionaries who later adapted themselves to the Parliamentarian politics also encouraged smoking as a part of their frugal life, inclined more towards the working class. Now the communists and the Marxists have become very rich in Kerala. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) – CPM- has more assets than any other corporate houses in Kerala.

Interestingly, when the party was still Spartan and frugal in its approach, it had established a factory that produced beedis (local cigarettes made out of tobacco leaves). The idea was to organize the beedi production sector under the leadership of the communists. So the workers in the beedi factories became communists. The party wanted each beedi worker take time out of his/her work and read out the party newspapers to the other workers who made beedis. The reader amongst the workers got the day’s payment through contribution. And while they made beedis and listened to the news from all over the world, which often said that the communist revolution was there around the corner and the working class was going to rule the world, they smoked and while they smoked they felt empowered. So here we have the history of a communist party promoting the consumption of tobacco in a corporate way and making it look like a revolutionary act. They propagated the idea of Spartan life through the consumption of beedis, black tea and vada made out of thuvar daal (parippu vada). In those days a communist could survive any war if he had been given these three life supporting items: beedi, black tea and parippu vada.

I also grew up imbibing the legends of the beedi smoking revolutionaries. And there was one point of time when I thought that if you smoked beedi, you would naturally become a revolutionary. Also the parallel movies in Malayalam too promoted such an idea. All the heroes in those movies were revolutionaries and all of them smoked. So it was difficult to be a non-smoker in a place where everyone smoked to revolution. I too was dragged to this fascinating myth of revolution at that tender age. I smoked and befriended a few revolutionaries in our village.

As you know, my village was a very closely knit place with people who knew each other and all of them knew the details of every household there. In such a situation, being a revolutionary was a very difficult thing to do. I should add that by the word ‘revolutionary’ what I used to mean was someone who worked against the mainstream society and who always worked towards toppling the existing government. Also it meant that a revolutionary worked from the people’s side though people often shunned them for their anarchic life style and extreme political ideologies. So a revolutionary was a man who lived an underground life while physically living an over ground life.

Growing up in 1980s was a very funny affair. It was the post-Emergency decade. Also it survived a decade that showed the world examples of political extremism in the form of local rebellions. During the 1970s India witnessed the growth of radical left wing ideas amongst the youth and most of them became the followers of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or in short CPI (ML) or simply ML. They were the people who refused to join the parliamentary experiment of the Communist Party of India. This faction of young communist workers created a movement in Naxalbari by terrorizing the landowners. Henceforth the extreme left wing radicals were called the Naxalites. Being a Naxalite in 1970s and 1980s was very difficult as the state hunted the workers down by hook or crook.

There were many custodial deaths during the police raj of the Emergency years all over India. Most of the youngsters were picked up from their homes or hostels accusing them of being the members of CPI (ML). Rajan, an engineering student was killed in one of the police camps and it snowballed into a huge political issue that brought sympathy for many radical activists groups. Most of the intellectuals of the 1970s were supportive to the political activism of the radicals. But as they feared the state’s ire, they were passive supporters. In Kerala, the young ML activists formed the Samskaarika Vedi (Cultural Platform), which was by nature a cultural movement but had strong political affiliations with the ML Movement. Being a part of the Saamskaarika Vedi was one of the dreams cherished by the radical youths of our times.

When I was spending my formative years in Vakkom, the ML movement had left its radical political activism in Kerala and had become a platform for politico-cultural and social critique. However, the state kept a close watch on the activities of the ML workers. These activists worked in a humble way. They pasted posters with anti-imperialist slogans in them all over the places. Wherever you traveled along the length and breadth of Kerala in those days, you could see identically written posters on cheaply colored newsprints. The lettering and font size were identical in these posters though they were written in two different places. While looking at those posters quite regularly with revolutionary dreams in my mind I used to think that revolution had only one kind of handwriting!

Villages are the places where you find extreme people; or people with extreme characteristics. Within the context of revolution, I remember this lonely crusader for justice in Comrade Devadethan. Tall, handsome with a thick mop of hair and handle bar moustache that reminded me of the Beatles (which in retrospective I realized as I did not have any clue about the existence of Beatles. The first international rock band I came to know about was ABBA, which came to Kerala as a movie depicting their world tour. One of my cousins was deeply interested in anything western and he took me to watch this movie). Comrade Devadethan appeared in the village quite often with a cycle fitted with an Exide battery, a loudspeaker and a mike. He pushed the cycle along the streets and spoke about imperialism and the anti-imperialist struggle. The ruling party, for him was an agent of imperialist forces.

Comrade Devadethan came from a well off family in Vakkom. He was interested in sports and politics. Immediately after his college education, he got a job as bus conductor in the state transport corporation. Inspired by the Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI) established by Comrade Shibdas Ghose in 1948, Comrade Devadethan became our village’s own revolutionary. He left his home for an ascetic life and settled in a dingy lodge near a temple. The lodge was an old house with three or four rooms with a well in the courtyard. People who worked in coir factories or people who came to the village for some work lived in those lodges for a meager rent. Comrade Devadethan, by shifting to this accommodation proved his affiliation with the working class. One day, he dreamt that the revolution would come to our village. He might have expected tanks to roll in. But for the time being his lonely collaborator was an old Hercules bicycle.

Comrade Devadethan used to put his cycle on stand at the market junction and used to speak about the impeding revolution without heeding much to the strength of the audience. But in a market junction you would always get a good audience as lot of people including car drivers, head load workers, vegetable vendors, strollers and idlers used to hang out in that place. Comrade Devadethan spoke to them in all his earnestness and the village listened to him with the equal earnestness and they forgot all what he said the moment he pushed his cycle to the next junction. This used to be ritual for a prolonged time till Comrade Devadethan, growing disillusioned about his efforts in converting people to the path of revolution, left his cycle behind and took more of a Gandhian path by walking all over the village, distributing pamphlets that he had written and printed in some cheap printing presses. In his clean white mundu and shirt, I saw his hairs and handle bar moustache turning complete grey and then into white. Then one day I left my village and I did not see him ever since.

It was my first encounter with revolution other than posters. Comrade Devadethan told us that the government could be overthrown and a people's republic could be established. But how, was the question and like in the minds of several teenagers of that time, in my mind too this question became an obsession. This was the time that I started reading Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz through the translations done by the poet K.Satchidanandan. I had not yet started reading the ML literature at that time though I knew about the Naxalite actions in Kerala headed by Ajita and K.Venu. In 1980s, things were slightly different and the hopes of revolution were still around though we did not know how to go about it. Attacking police stations, fighting against the state from the forests, capturing lands from the landowners or attacking the military with crude weapons were failed projects so we could not think about them again. So we decided to bring revolution through cultural activism.

There used to be several street play performances by the ML activists. I used to go and watch some of them. These performances often happened in the village junctions where the activists created their arena by sitting in a circle with lit cycle tyres for light. Anger, frustration and hope shone on their faces, which had turn yellowish red by the embers of the fuming and burning cycle tyres. It was a very fascinating sight. I did not know where these young people came from and where they were going. But they were there right in front of me; that was the reality. I felt very bad when I walked back home after seeing these performances. I knew I was a coward and was caught in the web of different desires, aspirations and frustrations. I wanted to become a writer and a revolutionary. It could have been a revolutionary writer or a writer of revolution. But at the same time I was looking out for venues where I could become popular. I wanted to act in films and serials. At night I was a blasphemer and during evenings I was a believer. I went to the temple and wore sandal paste mark on my forehead. I wanted to be away from women but I was drawn to them like iron filings to a magnet. In short, I was finding myself unworthy of becoming a revolutionary. I was really a confused teenager.

I found solace in pleasuring myself, reading and fighting my own demons of frustration. One day, it was a hot summer day, I was walking back home from a library in the next village, around three kilometers away from my home. I still remember the book that I had in my hand. It was the screenplay of ‘the Cabinet of Dr.Caligari’, the cultic Gernam movie by Robert Wiene. As I always found it later in my life, if you are a seeker the books and directions that you want will come to you quite naturally. During those days I was reading a lot of international literature, film scripts and anything that was suggested by my friends whom I thought were really radical in their lives. I never thought in a village library I would find the screenplay of the Cabinet of Dr.Caligari. But it appeared before me amongst the books as if it was revealing a great secret only to me. While walking back, near the school where I had finished my schooling just a couple of years before, I saw this man who would become my short term guide to revolution.

His name was Sasi and I was seeing him for the first time in my life. He smiled at me and he was smoking a beedi. He was dark complexioned and his cheeks were sunk into his jaws and his eyes were big and they bulged out of their sockets giving his face a Kafkesque look. Hesitantly I smiled back. He took my father’s name and asked whether I was his son. I said yes and added that I had never seen him in the neighborhood. He offered me a beedi and I could not smoke it in the middle of the road. So I suggested that we walked back to the school (which was closed for the summer vacations) and sit in one of the classrooms (some of the sheds from the classrooms functioned did not have doors), smoked and talked. He agreed with my idea and we walked back. Once we settled in one of the dark classrooms with thatched roof and four sides covered with mats made out of bamboo painted black, he took the book from me and flipped through it. He looked at me again and smiled. Now I could say that it is how most of the people get converted.

The moment was intense. He was silent and so was I. I did not know whether he knew a bit of English so that he could read what the book was all about. He did not seem to be educated to me as he was having all the characteristic of a worker/laborer (this I would see described in a very interesting way by John Berger in his Ways of Seeing, years later). I was curious to know why I had not seen him all these years in the village. Then he told me his story. While listening to the story, I was witnessing my life taking a new turn and I was wondering why I did not come to know about this man all these years.

“I was a born to a working class family living near that coir making fields,” he started telling me. As he explained the place where his house was located, I knew it for sure that I had crossed that house several times during my secret expeditions to the coir making fields with Sunil Lal. He could not study beyond high school, that was years back and he became a coir worker. He came from a backward caste and he did not want to mingle with people. One day, he left the village. He got into a train from the nearby railway station and on the next morning he found himself in the railway station of Calicut (now Kozhikode) in North Kerala. He joined the workforce in the town and worked as a hotel boy. He washed vessels in the restaurants and worked day in and day out. While working in the dark damp innards of the hotels he came across people who taught him about revolution. He was inspired and he became a strong ML activist and his mission was to organize the workers in the hotel sector. Years went by and now he had come to visit his village.

“Is it a permanent shift or will you go back?” I asked him. He looked at me, smiled and again lit a beedi and pushed the packet to my face. I took one out and I was in a dilemma whether to light it or not as the first one itself was strong enough to make me dizzy. Bracing myself up to the situation, I lit the beedi, took a deep drag and puffed the smoke into the darkness of that classroom where a few years back I sat in my sorry knickers and shirt and I imagined that the revolution had already started. He said he was not sure of anything. He talked about revolution and he asked me how to organize my life as a revolutionary. He wanted me to become intense in outlook and purpose. He talked a lot of things of which I heard half and left the half to fodder my reverie. Finally he asked whether I had read the collected works of Pablo Neruda. My answer was ‘no’ though I had already read a few poems by Neruda and had read Neruda’s autobiographical writings. He said that my reading was inadequate. He got up and asked me to follow him.

We did not take the main road, instead we struck the alleys those were dark even during the summer days thanks to the huge trees standing on either side of them. I was thinking that I was going through the forests in Bolivia as Che had done. Finally we reached his house which was not better than a shack but had kept neat by his old mother. He took me into his room which was dark with un-plastered laterite walls. He pulled a wooden box out and opened it before my eyes. The box was filled with books and most of them were neatly done with calico binding. He took out a fat book and handed over to me. It was a book of Neruda’s poems translated by Satchidanandan. I asked him to come to my house so that I could show him my collection of books. He politely declined my invitation and told me to meet him by the next week in the same class room in the school building. I nodded in agreement. I could not have done anything else as I was already in the web of revolution.

On the same evening when I came back from the temple ground where I had gone to see my friends and the girls who came to the temple, and also to watch the television news (as a recreation club had set up a television set for the public near the temple), I saw a different atmosphere at home. My mother was crying and my sister was mumbling something to my mother and both of them were looking angrily at me. I asked them the reason for this sudden change in atmosphere and they confronted me with this question: “What are you doing with the Naxalite? What is your connection with the Naxals?” Soon things dawned on me; before I reached home, someone in the village had already reported to her that I was spotted with a ‘Naxalite’. I tried to explain things to my mother saying that I did not know this person as a Naxalite or something, and what transpired between us was just the question of literature. To prove my point I took out the book of Neruda’s poems and showed it to them. They did not look convinced. My mother warned me to stop meeting him and return the book at the earliest. I agreed. That was my problem: I was agreeing to anything and everything.

Anything done surreptitiously has its own charm, and the terror involved in it makes one to work under cover with a feeling of thrill. I was thrilled to work like that. Now I was hiding things from my mother, which I never used to do before and was meeting Sasi in the school building. Like any newly converted would try to convert a few more people into the new faith, I was also trying to get a couple of people into this new fold. Shibu Natesan came visiting one day and I tried to convert him by introducing him to Sasi. Shibu met him and was not impressed. He was studying in Trivandrum and might have been meeting better revolutionaries. He did not come around after that to meet him. Then I caught Mukesh, who was one of the closest friends of my school days, and Abhilash, another friend who thanks to his bulky body and very protected life, had wanted to breach the norms given any chance.


Mukesh was an aspiring poet. His idea of poetry was very romantic. Two major ambitions were there in his life; one to get his poems published in some journal and two, to become a lyricist in the Malayalam movie industry. During the summer vacations, after reading Brecht, I had this idea of writing one act plays. Mukesh was my partner in crime. We wrote some plays together, most of them had only two characters (as if we were Becketians), which was done for the convenience of the writers who could also do the acting part. We wrote plays, rehearsed in the empty school rooms and auditorium and debated amongst us about the possibilities of sending these plays for local and state level competitions. I even tried to compose the poems written by Mukesh into songs. Mukesh was frank enough to tell me always that my tunes always reminded him of popular film tunes. This was true because I did not have any training in music. My music came from practicing film songs while drawing water from the well. And during the pre-degree days I got some training music and playing tabla. With this minimum experience in hand, I tried to do many things. One day someone was desperately looking for a triple drum player for a theatre festival and Mukesh suggested that I could play it for them. He took me to the rehearsal camp where I was presented with the triple drum. It was the first time in my life I touch a triple drum. But I was enthusiastic for two reasons that they promised to pay me Twenty rupees and announce my name in the mike during the program. So I played triple drum for the group and that was the first and last time I played an instrument on stage.

Mukesh was an easy convert as he was ready to do anything that I did. He believed that I was doing the right thing. But Abhilash was a tough nut to crack. He was an entrepreneur from the very beginning. In his courtyard there was a big gooseberry tree which throughout the year yielded a lot of berries. His mother used to pickle them for domestic use. Abhilash stood at the gate that opened to the street where he would show an innocent smile and would beckon people who went to the market or went about with their daily chores. Some would get trapped to his innocent maneuverings. Abhilash would talk to them about the sweet berries in his courtyard and ask them whether they would like to taste the pickled ones. Once they tasted it, he would insist that they should buy it at least for five paise. They would surrender to the pressure of this cherubic young boy and pay up and eat pickled gooseberries even if they did not want to do so. He would give them a glass full of cold water from the well for free.

So when we approached Abhilash with our plans to do revolution in the village, he was not enthused. But finally, the fame that would come upon us during the post-revolution posed something attractive for him. So he joined. Thereupon we started visiting Sasi in the desolated class room in our former school building. We talked and the more we talked the more we became convinced of revolution. And to bring the first wave of it was to inform people about the changes happening in the cultural scenario. Hence it was planned that we should show the controversial movie, ‘Agraharathile Kazhuthai’ (The Donkey of a Brahmin Habitat) by late John Abraham, in our village. This film was banned by the Tamil Nadu government for the controversial content of it. It depicted the life of a Brahmin professor who adopted a baby donkey. Sasi agreed to get the print and projector and we had to divide the responsibility of organizing it amongst us.

Mukesh said he would write slogans with me. Abhilash, with his entrepreneurial spirits intact, said he would prepare glue out of wheat flour. We together managed to get some cheap newsprint on which we wrote the slogans and announcement of the movie. We pasted it on some of the key walls in the village and people started wondering who all were behind these actions. Sasi became the target. We were waiting for the great day to come. We were going to come out of the closet. We were going to declare our revolutionary intentions to the village. But a few days before the screening, Sasi disappeared. He was not seen anywhere. We send some of our collaborators to his house to ask for him and his mother told the boys that he had gone out of the village. This information put us into deep trouble. If he was not there who was going to take up the responsibility of these moves. I looked at Mukesh and Mukesh looked Abhilash and Abhilash looked at some remote corner of the sky with paleness spreading across his face. We too looked at the same direction and we found his eyes fixed at the muddy clouds with a deep red evening sun seen as a streak behind it. Did it remind him of the cap of a policeman (we had at that time the conical caps with a red lace and yellowish base for police constables)? But it did remind me of the state and its brutal force. Suddenly I felt I was not doing the right thing. I was just a coward.

So we went into hiding. In fact, we did not go anywhere. Mukesh went back to his lyrics. I went to back to my readings. Abhilash went to his polytechnic activities. I took special care to remove all the revolutionary literature from my book shelf. Somewhere in my mind I was secretly hoping for that glorious day when a jeep came to a screeching halt at my door step with policemen running out of it to capture me from my hideout. But the very thought of it made a lighting to pass left and right into my brain. I wanted to be a revolutionary but was not ready to pay the price. Lucky I was that on the same day my mother came with a news of her transfer to Trissur (in central Kerala) with a promotion in her job profile. Now the situation was like that we had to shift to our uncle’s place in the next town from where we, my sister and myself, could go to college. We shifted soon and years later, I came to know that the police from the local station made enquiries about me and my friends and the people, who were good to us, told them that we were from good families and were good students that we should be kept out of this case.

That was the end of my on ground revolutionary activism. It doesn’t mean that I stopped my revolutionary thoughts altogether. It was to take other forms in different locations. I was just a lump of clay waiting to be molded at different wheels by different hands.

Perhaps, Sasi was the first potter who threw me at the wheel, though I never met him afterwards.

Farewell to Thee Charles Lindberg- Life and Times of a Warrior Friend- To My Children 11

They all called him Thacchu. I don’t know what does Thacchu mean. But some pet names have such strong impact on the people who listen to it. Musicians, boxers, wrestlers, film stars, local goons, sports stars and underworld mafia dons and so on have such pet names. Pet names are given by parents, most of the times. There are cases in which people get pet names when they are in schools. Friends give very affectionate pets name to their friends depending on the character they reveal in these relationships or in their general physical look. My parents did not give me any pet name but I got one when I was in school. Thanks to my obese nature, my friends called me ‘Baby Elephant’. Now when I look at the kids in the metro cities mostly boosted up with artificial nutrients, I try to compare my ‘fatness’ with their fatness. I was nothing. But in a village where most of the kids looked several years smaller to their actual age and impoverished, even if you didn’t have a pair of tusks and a trunk, just a pair of chubby cheeks would have naturally gained that particular pet name for you.

When I reached high school, someone gifted me with a shirt which had the pictures of cats all over. So the first day I wore it, someone hailed me ‘Cat’ and that stuck for some time. There are some pet names that do not stick at all. As the time passes, pet names too vanish. Then you regain them when you are in a professional situation; in an office or field. If you are stingy, you get a name, but then it is not a pet name. It is called a nick name and nick names are often considered to be insults than appreciation. But there are nick names that are caused by the special abilities shown by people in their professional situation. For example, if a police officer is extremely good at cracking cases of kidnapping, he would be called by a name like ‘bacche wala’ or whatever. And the person who carries this nick name proudly listens to anyone who qualifies him with his nick name. Also when you are too nosey about others’ lives, you cannot go without getting branded by a nick name.

In my childhood most of the friends had nick names. And now if you take out those moth eaten, sepia turned, black and white photographs from those days, especially those farewell photographs of primary schools, you would rather find a galaxy of animals, creatures and aliens than friends with proper names. There in that corner you see Arun, the giraffe, in the front row you see, Johny, the Cat and so on. This frozen zoo from the yester years is presided over by one headmaster, who often goes universally with a nick name like ‘thresher’ or ‘thrasher’, and another galaxy of aliens and animals who look like your teachers. A school, in that sense is a place where names are invented for special purposes. Some stick some don’t. If a name sticks, then you should be assured that the person who goes with that name continues to highlight those qualities in his later life too. And at times I wonder how a boy who had a nick name like ‘Shinto, the divine’, later appears in your life with a divorce paper in one hand and proposals from a few other women in the other hand. Some change radically and radical changes are absolute changes.

In our village everyone called him Thacchu and he was not a terrible boy with any special ability to beat people or something. He was good at running and during the school annual sports meets, he got several cups for different kinds of races. And nobody knew why he was called Thacchu. He took it for granted the way others took it. But I did not call him by this name. Somehow, I was very close to him during my upper primary and high school days. I did not want to call him by that name because his original name was more appealing to me and that name suited to his personality. Strong and agile, his name original name was Anil Raj. And I called him Anil Raj and he responded to that name. Perhaps except for the teacher who called out names from the attendance register none actually did care to call him by his original name. Villages are like that. Everyone is known for his or her physical or intellectual attributes. So you have stock characters in any village. You have a Raman who is going around to help people, a Krishnan going around to read the palms of the luckless people, a Tulsi climbing coconut trees, a Sreedevi who had gone mad, a Santa with loose morals, a Kinkini who was a village belle, a Sivan, who was thug in the junction, Sathyan who was a handicap.

But one day I too was forced to call Anil Raj with a different name. I called him Charles. And he instantly liked it. There was a reason behind it. We were in the eighth standard, still were in knickers with a side bulge on the left or right front side as most of us were not familiar with the concept of using underwear, and all of us were realizing our male characteristics, often feeling horny at the sight of the teachers' unconventionally cut blouses and occasional glimpses of the navels and so on. In the Malayalam text, there was one chapter that related the story of Charles Lindberg, a man who first flew an indigenously developed aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean. You should know that our only way to the world was bits and pieces of information like that and our internet was imagination, which had several times better bandwidth than the present ones. So the moment we came to know about Charles Lindberg, we all were excited. We were excited that extent that we all decided to become pilots then and there. Last week we had taken the decision to become a footballer as we had learned about Pele, the Brazilian footballer.

Changing decisions, once the bell rang for the usual recess, Anil Raj rushed out of the door and straight away went into the courtyard of the school where after the assembly hours, the physical education teacher spent time with his boys playing badminton and volleyball. Anil Raj ran in between the courts and nets and huffing and panting, I too ran behind him without thinking why I was chasing him. In childhood, as you might have noticed, the kids really don’t need any reason to run. They are like dogs and crows who keep trotting even if they are not expected to do so. I went behind him and he did not stop. He climbed the stairs and I waited downstairs. Then I saw him coming down with his lips pointed to make a whirring sound and hands spread on either side of his body. He came like a bird and then like an aircraft. Actually he was so moved by the story of Charles Lindberg that he had already assumed the personality of the flyer. I understood it. He came and landed near me. And he told me that he flew across the Atlantic Ocean. I jumped aside to avoid a group of dolphins passing by. I smiled at him, hugged him and called him ‘Charles Lindberg.’

After rechristening Anil Raj as Charles Lindberg, I tried to get validation for my proselytizing efforts by going around and telling friends about the recently taken place historical flight across an imagined Atlantic Ocean right down there in the school courtyard. They called me ‘Cat’ and left me to my imaginations. But somehow, everybody’s Thacchu, and my Anil Raj allowed me to call him Charles, a further shortened form of Charles Lindberg. When someone else tried to emulate my affection for him he growled at them like a tiger and scratched them with his rough paws. It was then I carefully looked at his face. It is said that in everybody’s features, there lies the features of an animal or bird. That’s why caricaturists and mimicry artists could attribute birds’ and animals’ character to the well known personalities. With fear and anxiety thumping inside my chest as I had never seen Anil Raj in such a fury, I looked at his face that day and found his face resembled that of a wild cat. When he pouted his lips, on either side of his cheek there appeared three lines each which looked like whiskers of a cat and his eyes were one shade gray than the brown or black eyes of other children. He deserved the name ‘cat’ than me. And he just did not like anybody calling him ‘Charles.’

Anil Raj came from the neighborhood. His father was an army man and they were four siblings; three boys and one youngest sister. It was rumored that Anil Raj’s father came back from the military, became an alcoholic and married another woman in another village. His mother toiled day and night to bring the boys up. Father visited them once in a while and there used to be fights at home. The whole neighborhood knew about it but in villages family fights were just regular events. You would miss them if you don’t listen to the noises of people abusing each other verbally. Women came out on the road and fought with other women by scratching and pulling down their waist clothes. In these sessions of abuse, they brought out several stories about their extra marital affairs, escapades and romances etc. But none cared. The next day you could see the very same women who fought like two ugly animals going to the market as if nothing had happened in the previous evening. Men also fought and when they fought someone lost a tooth, someone gained a bruise and all these things were the background score of the village life. Nothing really mattered though everything mattered in different ways and fell into the plan of a larger scheme.

Anil Raj used to take refuge in his friends’ places or he used to come around in our place and we went out together to the radio workshop where other guys joined us to listen to popular music. In one of the chapters earlier, I had talked about the history of Radio in our village. The gulf boom in late 1970s and early 1980s had brought several National Panasonic stereo cassette players in our village as there were many men who had gone to the gulf countries as laborers. These cassette players were brought for repairing in a shop run by a young man whom all of us called ‘Podiyan Annan’ (Podiyan means Small). He repaired anything under the sun and he had these two huge stereo boxes in which he played music on request. We used to hang out in his workshop that he ran from an old house and learned the songs by heart. Some of my friends used to bring cassettes from their homes to sell to podiyan annan and the money was used as pocket money. Podiyan annan in turn recorded songs with a fast dubbing system and sold those cassettes to local clients and made some extra money. People were enamored by the technology and Podiyan Annan was always in great demand. Once when we got our cassette player for the first time, sometime in 1984 Summer, I took it to his workshop as it was not working however I tried my tricks. He just looked at it and pressed the pause button. Then it worked. Pause button was the problem, which I could not understand at that time. These days, pausing is a daily game, right from music to chat to sex.

Anil Raj and I spent several hours in that old house where we met other friends. But he was slipping away slowly. When all of us reached tenth standard (school final) we were either drifting apart or were trying to concentrate on our studies. After the tenth standard a few of us went to the pre-degree college in a near by town called Varkala and some of us became wage laborers in workshops, construction sites and so on. It was very painful to know our friends drifting away to the worlds of hardships and different experiences. Several threads were snapping and several threads were getting knotted. But the old ones always reminded you of the golden days that you had spent together; those were the days that you came to know about your manhood. You taught each other about the secrets of bodies. You read a lot of rubbish on sex and imagined that everything was true.

But once you are back from your work place or from your college classes, we did not feel any difference between each other. We went to the school ground where elder boys played cricket wearing pads over their lungis. That was the funniest sight I had ever seen. There was a full fledged cricket club in the village. But none of them wore trousers or a pair of jeans. They all wore the traditional lungis and played cricket. Of course things changed later with the arrival of a new generation. We used to spend our times in the school ground watching cricket players running between stumps and the bowler coming from the urine shed end. We joked, sang songs and planned our futures. But things were not happening the way I had expected.

Something was happening in the village. And I came to know one day when I was coming back from the second year pre-degree class (Standard Twelve). I saw Anil Raj standing in the middle of the road grabbing the neck of a local goon. When we were in school this guy was a local terror. He collected money from all the vendors who sold things in the market. He even extorted money from his mother who was a vegetable seller in the market. That day, Anil Raj was finishing his legacy for some reason. I had never seen Anil Raj so brutal and arrogant before. He hit him hard. And the other guy cried. Blood was oozing from his forehead and nose. Anil Raj asked him to run and he ran. He ran behind and kicked him. He fell on the asphalted road and bled. I was shocked and numbed. I could not do anything. Anil Raj raised him by the collar and hit him several times till he begged for pardon and ran like a dog.

I was standing near the ration shop where shell shocked women and old people stood watching the gory sight unable to react. Like me they too were witnessing the birth of a new local goon in Anil Raj. He walked towards me. I was cringing from inside. But he came and grabbed my right hand. With his left hand he opened his shirt and showed me his left nipple. It was bleeding. “Look Johny, that bastard bit me here. I gave what he wanted.” I could not say anything. The bite was the other man’s last ditch effort to save himself. But that bite had infuriated Anil Raj like anything. I could not believe what I had seen. I asked him what had happened to him in the meanwhile. He said nothing. He asked me to go and he entered an alley which hardly people used thanks to the presence of a small forest filled with snakes in the vicinity.

Slowly, the grapevine in the village brought the news of the establishment of a gang in our village. It was called ‘The Company of 18’. I tried to figure out the meaning of the name of this gang. I need not have gone much further and I could have gone out of my home and asked Anil Raj himself. But now he was more reclusive. He was not seen much out in the street. He stopped meeting me. But there were always young boys around him, protecting him and passing information to him. My friend Sunil Lal joined the company as a formal member and once in a while, while coming back from the temple premises where I used to go to meet my friends, girls and to catch some television news, sometimes I met Anil Raj and Sunil Lal and they told me the story of their new gang, which had already started terrorizing not only the villagers but also people in the other villages.

The Company of Eighteen meant nothing but a gang of eighteen people. But the membership was not limited to that particular number. Many became core group members and many became just side kicks. The Company of Eighteen also meant the general age group of the people who were involved in these gangs. All over Kerala state such gangs were becoming operational at that point of time. There were not too many job opportunities and gulf also was becoming less lucrative. Films like Rajavinte Makan (Son of a King), Abhimanyu, Aaryan and so on were projecting Mohan Lal as a young well meaning man turning into an underworld don. It could have been the filtering effect of Deewar or Zanjeer of Amitabh Bacchan. But in 1980s Mohan Lal was making waves in the Malayalam film industry as a wronged young man. He played the roles of a well educated victim of the system. He played the roles of a jobless young man with a lot of dreams and also he played the roles of underworld dons. He gave the hope to the young boys that if they organized themselves into gangs, they could achieve whatever they wanted and also they could take revenge on people and the systems that made them so and in the process they could have proved themselves innocent by clarifying their philosophy in life.

Anil Raj and team were the victims of this outlook. They formed themselves into the ‘Company of Eighteen’ and they found themselves to be holding very strong power over the villagers. The gulf returnees entertained them with costly drinks, cigarettes, porn movies and clothes. Whoever wanted a dispute to be settled, invited the gang members to involve in it and in return they received money. As the name and fame of the gang grew local police also became alert. Once Anil Raj was arrested by the Police. The local politicians were waiting for an opportunity. The Congress men went to the police station and bailed him out. To counter this, the left parties supported other gangs in the other parts of the village. So the gangs fought between each other for political and personal issues.

The major attraction for many youngsters to join these gangs was easy money and access to women who were living alone. Anil Raj once told me about his escapades with many women in the village who entertained him in the midnight hours. But he was not that kind of person who would have done anything for carnal pleasures. However, he was as rebel without a cause. Rich people from neighboring villages invited him and his gang for fighting with their rivals. Like football teams going to play in other villages, this gang under the leadership of Anil Raj went to far away places to fight for others. When they came back some came with broken jaws, loosen teeth and eyes with dark patches. They were becoming really famous. One day I was told that Anil Raj was invited to Mumbai to join underworld. And it was true that he had left for Mumbai. The rest of the gang was waiting in the village to hear from him. Most of the gang members were my school mates and they respected and loved me for that. They passed information to me and shared stories with me whenever they could spend time. Several times they invited me to drink with them and hang out with them but I was afraid of doing anything in open. Besides, inside I was a coward and could not have stood a hard blow from any thug coming in the darkness to wreck revenge upon my friends while I was there with them.

All the gang members practiced Shoto Kan karate. They invited one master from a far away village. The master came and he was a tailor by profession. He taught the boys the techniques of martial arts. I too was pursuing the same course but in a different dojo, where Sempai Siva taught martial art for spiritual uplifting. Sempai Siva later became a yogi, initiated by a Guru, he went all over the world to spread the teaching of the yogi who initiated him. I met him several years after in Trivandrum airport lounge and he was impressed by my body at the age of forty and when I told him that I still practiced karate he hugged and congratulated me. He gave me a signed copy of his own writings about spirituality before waving good bye to each other.

Soon, my village had several boys with black belts. They were literally ruling the village. But they were all for me if I was in trouble. The interesting thing was that when my family shifted to Trivadrum for facilitating our education in better colleges, our house was taken by these gang members on rent. We couldn’t have done anything. They used our old house as their centre of operations but the moment we wanted it back they vacated the house without raising any objection.

I remember an incident where they showed their loyalty to me. I was pursuing my pre-degree and to become an all rounder I was learning music and tabla. Students used to get concession tickets in private buses. I had to spend fifteen paise for going to the Tabla class. One day while coming back from the tabla class, the conductor refused to give me concession ticket. He demanded full ticket from me. I refused to pay. There was a bit of push and pull in the bus when it reached the main junction of the village. My house was near the last stop and the moment the bus reached the last stop, to my surprise I saw the bus surrounded by sword wielding youngsters on their cycles. I realized that someone had seen me having a ruckus with the conductor at the market junction and he had gone to the gang’s adda by his cycle and before the bus reached the last stop they were ready to take the bus driver and conductor for insulting their ‘friend’.

I had really a tough time in dissuading my ruffian friends from injuring the poor conductor. He was doing his duty. But the fraternal loyalty felt was so intense on that day that they were planning to kill that poor conductor for my fifteen paise. Anil Raj called the conductor out and asked him to apologize to me. He did so. But later on I came to know that the conductor was my sister’s friend’s brother and they belonged to a very poor family. To support his sister’s education the boy had to stop his studies and work as a bus conductor. Now it was my turn to apologize to him and without my friends knowing I went to him and said sorry for whatever had happened.

Anil Raj came back from Mumbai. Nothing had happened to him. But he became more and more recluse. As time passed I left for Baroda and my friends were getting tired of their own activities. They wanted to live a life of dignity. But the past had come to haunt them. Those youngsters who were insulted by this gang were getting ready to strike back. Many went into jails for different charges and came out as living vegetables. Anil Raj went to the Gulf countries and he was jailed for bootlegging. Once he came back, other guys with better physique and better intelligence had taken the lead of the village. Things had already changed. Boys were anymore allured by the heroism in the streets. They burned CDs and made money. They talked a different jargon than the ones we used to talk when we were youngsters. Anil Raj found it difficult to cope.

He was a refined man, once he told me during one of my visits from Delhi. Anil Raj told me about his life and his sentiments for people. While talking about the follies he laughed at himself. He spoke of the insults and injuries he had suffered in lock ups and jails. He did not mind getting beaten up by his rivals as he could fight back. But unilateral tortures were insulting for him. He pined for revenge but he was a spent force by then. He could not fight against the police and the strong systems of the government. The politicians who had used him once for their ends were not giving any damn to him. Many people who were afraid of him during the days of his glory now did not give him any weight. They started avoiding him. He could see all these things and he was learning to live with and in shame.

For the first time in his life, Anil Raj told me about a love affair he had in the village. Nobody knew about it. Perhaps, his close associates knew about it but I did not know. When he related the story I knew the girl in the plot. She was my student and was a god fearing girl with a very soft conduct. I could not have imagined her falling for the charm of a village villain. “Yes, she was in love with me and she waited for me. I thought I could marry her but things were not happening the way I wanted. I was in jail in gulf and here she had to get married to another man,” he said. “Do you feel hatred for her?” I asked him. He did not say anything for a long time. Then he lit a cigarette and looked into my eyes. His gray eyes glinted as his yellowing teeth. “No, I don’t. I don’t hate her. But I don’t understand why she could not wait a bit more?” The question lingered in the air for sometime. I told him something this effect that for a village girl however educated she was it was difficult to wait for a lover who was languishing in jails in some gulf country where penal laws are stringent. He did not say anything for sometime.

Anil Raj got married to another girl, as expected. Often, it is said that when you get married you become a refined man. But it does happen only in rare cases. You in fact ruin the life of a girl. I did not know this girl. Still I do not know her. But next time when I met him, Anil Raj was a shattered man. He did not resemble his former self at all. His elder brother had become a chronic alcoholic. His younger brother had gone to some gulf countries and was trying to rebuild his life after his stint in the gang. The youngest girl was married to a good family and was leading a good life. Anil Raj was alone though he was married.

Last time when I met him, it was dark. The electricity board had shunted power for an hour or so. We were standing in the junction as in the old days, but this time a bit more matured and in our late thirties. We could not see each other in the darkness. We lit cigarettes. “Johny, have I done anything wrong to you?” he asked. “Come on man, you have not done anything wrong to me. You were always there for me whenever it was needed,” I told him and jokingly reminded him of the bus incident. He eyes glinted in the darkness. And in silence we deeply dragged at our cigarettes. “Do you know, this is my last attempt to regain my life? I am going through a very terrible time Johny,” He said in a slow and low voice.

“I think I am having some illness which is not curable,” he said.

“What kind of illness?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. Then he added that he was waiting for a Visa to go to a gulf country and if he gets it he would be a changed man.

We smoked and stood there for a long time. The current was taking more time to come back and light up the streets. And I had to leave for home. Anil Raj also sounded tired and wanted to go and rest.

We shook hands and parted ways. He went into the alley where once the Coir factory stood. I walked ahead.

Next morning someone shook me up and told me ‘Thacchu has gone. He hanged himself last night.”

I just could not believe it. I did not go to see his dead body. Perhaps, I knew I was the last person whom he confided with and he had not told me too many things. But I felt he had said farewell to me forever.

Common friends told me that he had some terminal illness that he contracted while living in Mumbai. Some people told me that he was depressed because he could not marry the girl whom he loved. Some people said that he did not like his married life. Someone said he did not have children because the custodial tortures had rendered him impotent.

Anil Raj was gone. And he was standing there in that junction with me last night.

Even today I cannot refer him as Thacchu, which had become a by word for terror in my village. I always called him Anil Raj.

May be if everyone had called him Anil Raj, he would not have become a goon. But that is just a speculation.

I forget all those sword wielding gory episodes from his life. But I remember the day he flew his flight across the imaginary Atlantic Ocean at our school courtyard.
Farewell to thee Charles Lindberg.

Love as Disaster Capitalism: To My Children 10

Whenever I think about the love affairs that I had during my childhood, adolescent and youthful days, I remember this story of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I read this story titled ‘Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane’ in a collection of short stories by him called ‘The Strange Pilgrims.’ Interestingly, I read this story while traveling in an airplane. It is all about an anxiety ridden encounter of Marquez with a very beautiful woman whom he happened to see in an airport lounge. Marquez liked her at the first sight. Like any other young man would do in such situations, Marquez too imagined so many things about her. He even imagined getting married to that ethereal beauty.

His flight was announced and he went into his flight. And to his shock and wonderment, the woman came into the same flight and walked along the aisle only to sit next to him. She looked like an angel. Marquez was tongue tied. Flood of words came and they were stopped at the floodgates of her beautiful silence tinged with the arrogance emanating out of her consciousness about her own beauty. She called the stewardess and asked not to wake her up for any meal. She went into a deep sleep as the flight took off. Marquez waited for her to open her eyes during the long flight. And he had the choicest of words ready for her. But she did not open her eyes. Just before the landing of the aircraft, she woke up as if from a dream, opened her vanity bag, touched up her face with sponges and brushes. And finally she walked out of the plane cabin the way she came inside stately and royally like a princess.

Today love affair has different connotations. In our country there are extremities about love affairs. Some people kill their own children who are in love with a boy or girl from a different religion or community, in the name of family’s honor. The rate of honor killing has increased considerably in the last few years highlighting the imbalanced cultural growth of our society. Recently, the newspapers spoke of a gory incident in which a criminal on parole killing two women in his family for he thought they were having affairs with some guys whom he did not approve of. Interestingly, this criminal had been jailed for raping a minor a few years back. While such honor killings exist in our country, we have very liberal love affairs happening elsewhere simultaneously. Today, there are parents who approve their children’s love life as it is. They give consent to inter-caste and inter-religious marriages. Today, even the boys and girls are practical enough even to demand dowry for themselves. Love affairs have become a preamble to practically arranged marriages.

In our times, love affairs were really affairs that often shook the core of the village life. In places like villages where everyone knew everyone else as a close acquaintance or as a relative, love affairs were hush hush affairs. If today’s kids do not find the boy-girl difference as a very much pronounced one in terms of gender and social positioning, in our times, even the length of the hair of someone seen from behind with you could have ignited a scandal amounting to the scale of a wild fire. The boy-girl divide was very strong and like the ones who had been parted by the divine intervention at the origin, these souls sought each other like desperate ghosts. Boys did not speak to girls and girls did not speak to boys. In each other’s presence they shrunk to themselves. The boys watched them from a distance and the girls in the process learned to giggle, chuckle and send side glances with darting eyes.
These side glances had their own beauty. You just waited for the girl to look at you. Or if you were a girl, you just anxiously imagined that the guy who escorts you everyday by his bicycle to tuition classes to school, school to tuition class and from there to home, always keeping the right distance between you and him, would come on the right time. You may pretend that he is a pest and you desperately want to get rid of him. But the moment you don’t see him you feel like a day from your life is lost. An important page from a thrilling story is missed and you curse the natural elements for holding him back. You pretend that you develop sudden migraines and headaches. Those were the days of silent gestures. A love affair developed out of silence. It had its own colors and times. It had its fragrance and light. Sometimes you could see your imagined girl friend only by evening. She always came against a setting sun. So you always imagine her as a silhouette. Sometimes you could see your imagined boy friend only eight o clock in the morning. He accompanies you to your tuition class, in distance and silence. So on Sundays you experience eight o’ clock in the morning as an hour of torture in solitude.

Today I am amazed at the ways the girls look at you or boys look at girls. Forget boys and girls; the women and men of my age (forty years and plus) look at each other boldly but with desire filled eyes. There is no meaning to the words like ‘glimpse’, ‘glance’ and so on today. Girls, when they come back from school or college know for sure that some guys are following them and they like them to be followed. And often the guys following them literally come around and talk. They are like friends. When they are not friends they are mutual admirers of evening adventures. The boys look into the eyes of the girls and they do not avert the eyes. The middle aged women look into the eyes of the middle aged men and they do not shrink away from each other. Haruki Murakami in his famous book on jogging speaks of the visions of a young girl coming against him from the other turn, perhaps which is something that makes him run every day in the same park.

Love has a different meaning today. Love is about sharing now. There was a time when we considered love as longing. It was intense pain. It was intense longing. It was prolonged sessions of day dreaming. It was about writing love letters in the middle of the night and search for a place where you could hide it. You thought that there was not a single corner in the house where your parents’ eyes would not reach. You were like criminals who could be caught red handed at any time. So you shiver while you write your love letter and shiver more when you intend to give it to the girl whom you like. But often it turns out to be failed attempts.

In the era of facebooking (some one told me the new word for facebooking is effing) and free text messages, built cameras and skype chats, sending a message across is the most simple thing when you think about a love affair. You want to convey the message that you are in love with someone? Then you send a text message. If the concerned person likes it, he or she accepts your friendship, which you slowly want to convert into a love affair. Or the maximum snubbing that you could get is that he/she would unceremoniously delete your message. Today you could send Facebook friendship requests. You could pose as the most romantic person in the world in facebook and many other social networking sites. After a few years there would be some other technological innovation which would help you to make the other feel what you feel about them without the aid of any handset or monitor. It would be a kind of automated telepathy. You could even have sex with your willing partners even while you are standing in the middle of a buzzing city. Of course, there would be check points to this technology also. There would be booking for cyber raping and stalking if you try to do anything with unwilling partners. After all we are human beings currently addicted to technologies and gadgets.

In our times, to convey that you are in love with some one you needed to wait; wait like an animal who is hungry but not able to catch anything. Your instincts are so alert. And you are in love with so many people at the same time. Each person looks so alluring and so potential and in our times we never used to think about having sex with the person whom you think you are in love with. You may entertain sexual fantacies about your imagined girl friend’s friend or with a film actress or even with a magazine illustration but not with your imagined girl friend. The moment you think about her, she is the purest being devoid of any sexual presence. May be you are so naïve in your approach. In the agenda of your love affair sex is not included. And you want to communicate everything through silence and gestures.

As in Marquez’s story, you wait for the girl. She comes and you stare at her. And it continues for many days and nothing happens. Then you change position thinking that that angle would help you to come into her perspective. And on that particular day she also would decide to change her position thanks to reasons known only to her. And this game would go on for a long time. And one day you come to know that she has gone to another town as her parents got transferred to that place. You feel so bad about things and you even feel like committing suicide but you are such a coward, you even fail to make some one notice your recently broken heart. So you die a silent death in spirit only to be resurrected in a few days’ time targeting another girl at the same bus stop or tuition centre or wherever they flock.

Finally, your glances cross paths. And she recognizes your presence there. You are simply happy. Next morning onwards you are there before her. You are very conscious of dressing and you behave like a grown up man. The only conflict of interest is that your status as a ‘lover with dignity’ is now known only to you and to that particular girl. The whole world is oblivious of your existence. So when the really grown up people come to the place where you stand to buy a cigarette or bananas, they tend to push you or shove you around. And you have to bear with this insult for a long time. You cannot buy a cigarette and smoke to prove your worth as a lover because you are just fourteen or fifteen years old and you are standing a few paces away from your home where your father sits in the drawing room as if he were waiting for some complaint to come against you so that he could pull out his cane and thrash you black and blue. You may want to prove your might by punching at the bulbous noses of those lungi clad ruffians but you realize with all your meekness that you can’t even withstand a hard sneeze of those monsters. So crestfallen you stand there ogling at the girl till she gives you one glance which would weigh several kilos more than the insults that you have just suffered.

One day, you really feel that you could take yourself to the next level. If she is your classmate what you do is that you ask for a notebook from her pretending that you had missed some very important matter about hydrogen doing something with oxygen and making it water. You are all inclined to become a scientist and you don’t want to miss anything. So you ask her with all politeness and earnestness for the notebook. She snubs to by saying that you could get it from one of your boy friends. And you again feel like committing suicide. You become very philosophical for a few days asking yourself whether those covert glances that she used to give you at the bus stop were real or fake. Then you try your luck once again. But this time with making yourself absent from the usual place in front of the bus stop. You are punishing her. You imagine that she would spend torturous moments. She would regret for not giving you the notebook. She would worry about your well being. When you are absent in the class as well as in the bus stop, you would imagine that she would die of pain. And on the third day like a victor who had just got a small cup for a sack race, you would enter the class room only to find that she is already in love with the youngest English master in the school.

During your youthful days, you are like James Bond; you never say die. So you target another girl in a different location, in a different time. This time, she is not from your class. She is in the same school or college but not in your class. You happen to see her at some point and your instincts tell you that she is an easy target. As usual you start your mind game by standing against her at the bus stop. Then one day she looks at you. You are in love head over heels once again. One day, by mustering up all your courage you go to her class (only after realizing that she too is pursuing your subjects) and demand some text or note book. She, without suspecting your intentions gives you the note book and you take that note book (one precious object for which you would even sacrifice yourself. One precious materials that carries the invisible impressions of her touch and fragrance) to home and spend a sleepless night looking at it. Next day you refuse to give the note book to her, which would obviously put her into some trouble during her class and you enjoy her discomfiture with a greater sense of satisfaction.

And the next day is your day. You have recycled your old love letters which had been written painstakingly but read only by you and had been hidden in your collection of old comics. You recycle them in such way that it would look very fresh and intense. You have avoided all the stock images and stock phrases as you have grown two or three years more from the days of the first draft. Now you embellish the letter with some literary allusions and you take some liberty in citing some words with sexual connotations. And you push that letter into her notebook and in the next morning with heart beats which would put those of a hundred meter sprinter into shame, you would go to her and hand over the note book. Next morning, when you reach college, you listen the choicest phrases from your letter being recited from behind the pillars, etched on the walls and black boards. She has ditched you and she has given that letter to everyone to read and enjoy. And that day you come to know that she is the girl friend of the college union arts club secretary and he was behind in spreading the content of your letter all over the place. That day again you do a virtual hara-kiri. But nothing happens to you.

You try out different things with different girls. As you grow up in years, you go behind girls by bicycles or motor bikes but always keeping safe distance from her. You drop love letters on her path. Sometimes it is picked up by her and at times it is picked up by her friend, who is many levels down to her in terms of beauty and looks. Sometimes, it is picked up by her brother who is a local thug or a well known body builder (I used to wonder why most of the beautiful girls all over the world have body builder brothers). I have seen so many unlucky guys who becoming boyfriends of intended girl friend’s friends and vice versa. Giving a shoulder to cry on during the moments of ditching is the biggest trap that the young and women of our times you to fall into. First you give a shoulder, then chest, then lap and finally your life, which you see like a landscape after battle when you look around now. If the letter is picked up by the girl’s brother, then you are refined man for at least six months; three months for joining the broken bones and another three months for getting back to former shape physically and emotionally.

Then one day you find your true love. Then you are really in love. You need not write hollow love letters instead you need to write very thick ones with a lot of content. You write volumes to her and she writes one or two lines as if she were appreciating a crescendo performance by you in one single clap. You do not write such heavy letters on that night and on the next morning she burns you with her scorn and barbed words. She would not talk to you for couple of days and she would accuse you of having interest in some other girls as if you were a kind of remaining specimen of a Casanova in the earth. You go back home and spend your precious nights in writing letters pepped up with poetic allusions and wit. You would never question her demand for having one letter each every day even you meet each other every day and spend almost eight to ten hours together both in class rooms, libraries and whichever corner where you could just take the measurements of her body parts over the clothes. You have changed the concept of your love. Now along with her friend’s and film actresses’ images you can imagine her also a sexually potent individual.

One day you would take her to a movie and during those days it was more difficult than a real elopement. Today boys and girls go together watch movies. In our times, going together for a movie (it is not the movie which is scandalous but the three hours spend together in darkness) was the most dangerous thing. You always imagine that her father or brother would come to the theatre where you go. Though it does not happen you think that her father has employed spies ever since your girl has started spending an extra twenty minutes before the mirror and her father noticed the cosmetics bill has gone higher within one month than her mother’s total consumption of cosmetics till date. Failing to make any changes to her countenances after continuous application of various cosmetic products available in the market, her mother had totally developed an aversion for anything that enhanced skin color.

So you go to a theatre and watch a movie together. You believe that you are Spartan and it is the time given by God for proving your charity, chastity and chivalry. So you spend those precious and tumultuous three hours not even allowing any hair of yours touch her on her body. Next morning triumphantly you ask her about your good behavior and she gives one of the most scornful looks in the world and says, “I have been thinking about those three hours for a week. And I thought you would touch me all over in the darkness.” You feel like a stupid for the whole life in that one moment and to add insult to injury she would add, “Women dress up for women and undress for men.” You look at her as if she were one of the sluts that you have only seen in the dirty magazines. But then you control yourself to behave like a gentleman.

Through accidents you learn to love. I should say you learn to live. Slowly you learn to put up with the insults heaped against you, initially for being sincere and later for being genuinely insincere. I am an old timer. I too had my stint of silent love affairs till I got the real ones. Who said love is an accident. It is a disaster conjured up, invited and enjoyed for some perverted reasons. But disaster has its own charm. It clears up a lot of things and builds a lot many new things in its place. Love, in the conventional sense, is a way to disaster capitalism.

Death in a Café

Death
Utters
Dialogues
Unscripted
Not like a
Jester
But like a
Villain
Taking away
All the pleasures
Leaving
Scars of poetic justice
Behind
To lick up
And forget.
Death
Splutters
Petals of wails
To be rested
In the grave of
Sighs.
Death is not a joke
It could spirit you away
Through
The whirls of
A cup of Espresso.

Judgment Day

On a sunny day, like a breeze
Laden with the fragrance of dreams
You came and beckoned me
To the meadows far and wide
Where a spring from the mountains
Wet the newly blossomed fingers.

Wandering at last lost to oneself
And lost oneself we don’t even know
Why we sought each other until
Seeking itself became the thrill
Like the kids who forget tears
And smile into nothingness.

Still your name heard from a
The shepherd’s bugle and the one
Hanging from his cap’s tip
Enthrall me with memories of
Kisses locked in prints and
The tastes of dark recesses.

Sinners are we as the pilgrims of desires
And on the nights of cloud and storm
Under the shades of shabby shames
We light up our guilt and flood
Into each other like molten words;
Angels do not judge us before apocalypse.

The Last Wall

Four walls. That’s strange. You don’t generally become aware of the four walls that cover you everywhere; it could be your room at home or the home itself. It could be the office, your cabin, even an elevator. Four walls always define your space. Oh, yes architectural experiments would make these walls to look a bit different in form and shape. Some walls could be transparent, some could be semi transparent giving the person who stands outside a feeling that he is looking at a mirror than looking into the secrets of a room hidden by that mirror.

Interesting thing is that you don’t know about these walls in your daily lives. You call your room as the coziest space in the world. You have your music, your wardrobe, your collection of shoes and your books in there and you don’t complaint about the walls. You beautify them with your favorite colors and adorn them with your favorite paintings or posters. Some times you look at these walls and smile as if they were your closest pals who understand everything about you. Perhaps, that’s true also. They know everything about you. Your nudity, your body odor, your scars, your warts, your dreams and tears- they know everything about you. But you don’t find them oppressive.

The moment someone tells you that you are not allowed to go out of your room, these walls become oppressive. It is very difficult too see your friends turning foes. The saying is true that a friend turned foe tells the right things about you. But these walls won’t speak anything against you. Perhaps they are more loyal than your partner in life. They don’t betray you with the change of their emotions. They don’t twitch a muscle in their faces because they don’t have any muscle and they don’t even have faces. They love you with their entirety. They love with their totality.

Still, the moment you feel like stopped from doing anything that you like, you start feeling that you are confined in a room. You call it four walls. You betray your friendship. You abuse the walls, practically and metaphorically. What a pity. Walls don’t talk back to you; they are like silent servants who are old and understand you thoroughly as they have seen you through your life. They don’t even mutter words under their breath. They just love you; still when it comes to a dire situation you just give them away. You push them before the firing line and save your skin. And that’s how masters behave with the loyal servants.

Lying on a bed covered with green bed sheets, her head raised by two pillows and the auxiliary appendages of the cot, she looks around the room, which has suddenly become four walls for her. She does not want to call it a room. These are four walls coated with pale pink color that is supposed to sooth the disturbed minds of the patients who are admitted there. From the fifteenth floor of the hospital, she could see the city sprawling towards the horizon; in the beginning you could discern the buildings. This one you know, this one, you go into every day, that one must be the multiplex, that is the famous shrine of a sufi saint, those are the ghettos where the dirt of the city lives and then again the high rises. Then they fade into a line made of jumbled forms and the rough edges of that line gets dissolved into the imaginary horizon of the city where you think that one could find a sea or a range of hills.

She anxiously looks at the horizon for a while and tries to turn her head to the left where she imagines that her husband has left a few books, her i-pod and her beloved blackberry. She wants to tell all of her friends that she is bed ridden at the age of thirty for no reason. But she instinctively knows that her husband has taken away the lap top with the internet connection. Doctor has strictly said that she should not keep her neck straight. She needs to recline against a support besides the collar that she wears now.

The moment she came down with a severe pain in the neck, her husband had given her one of the dirtiest looks possible in the world, which she translated as, ‘you deserve this as you spend endless hours in chatting with strangers and befriending online Romeos. I have been warning you and now God has given you an apt lesson, now put up with it and face it.’ He did not say these words, but with the same look in his eyes, he said, ‘Darling, do not move your neck. Just listen to some music. Doctor has even said you should not read for some days as it could put pressure on your neck. I love you.” He left her in her suddenly found deafening loneliness in the middle of a hospital room at the fifteenth floor, which she refused to call a room but four walls the moment she was trolley-ed in.

She prays for her imaginations to be true. Some how she turns her head towards the left side to see whether he has left the Blackberry on the table. To her dismay she finds only the i-pod there. She listens to some music for some time and after those few minutes of listening she realizes that she is not in fact listening to any music. She hears some buzzing sound in her ears as her minds wanders off along the walls. She pangs for someone to call her. She wants to share her feelings with anyone of those people who are seen in the chat lines. As nothing happens she decides to review her own medical condition.

It all started when she drove along the Marine Drive with a friend who was on her way to shop for books at the Strand near Fountain. They were talking about the latest arrivals in their wardrobes and the latest books that they were reading. Her friend took interest in reading crime thrillers and sci-fi novels. She was not particularly interested in any literature. She was a very eclectic reader. The blurbs at the back cover fascinated her rather than the name of the author or the prizes that he had won in his literary career. In this way she had read about a guy who spent three months in the Alps alone as he had fallen into creek while climbing the snow covered peaks. She had read about the love life of Rumi and also had read some biographies of people known for some crazy achievements in their lives.

On the first left turn from the Fountain she felt a pull at her neck, which she eminently ignored and to ignore it she eminently indulged in an elaborate session of gossiping with her friend about the coolest gals in the city who had recently started appearing in the celebrity columns of the city newspapers and magazines. However, the more she gossiped the more intense the pain became. Brave men and brave women behave alike in situations where they are required to keep their vanity unscathed. So she did not show a hint of her pain on her face and did not allow her gossiping friend to know anything about her discomfort. If she came to know that she was having a muscle pull at the neck at the age of thirty, it would have been translated into a terminal illness by evening thanks to the good efforts of the friend.

But by afternoon, once she struggled back into her room, she could not help but calling her husband over phone to inform him about the pain and it was when he stepped in after an hour or so that he gave one of the dirtiest looks that a man could bring into his eyes.

Now, lying alone on a bed covered with green bed spreads, she looked at the ceiling. Then suddenly she realized that a ceiling without a fan is a man without his organ. Then her cheeks went red as in an impulse which she could not control. She smiled at herself. She tried to concentrate on other things and she found there was nothing in the hospital room other than her I pod, which she had started hating by now. So she started thinking about her illness. A pain in the neck. The X-ray told nothing. The MRI scanning said nothing about an illness. Many specialists came, suggested many tests and now they all had told her to wait for two more days so that they could observe her thoroughly.

So here she was with an illness which was not yet diagnosed. She was not taking any medicines as the doctors did not prescribe any. She was not even feeling invalidated at any other part of the body than the pain behind her neck. But she was made to lie on the bed with her neck raised and collared. She felt like a culprit put into a torturing machine. She felt that she was wronged against the divine will. This pain was a momentary aberration of her own body, a rebellion of muscles. But it was not a divine punishment as her husband had interpreted. Now she was inside four walls. She felt cabined, cribbed and confined. As she had been a literature student once, she remembered Hamlet for a moment and then she slept.

In sleep, she dreamed of a wall just out side the window amongst one of the four walls. This wall was now looking like a screen and there were several green lights with so many minute profile pictures. Her fingers started moving and she was typing things furiously and the virtual friends were speaking to her as if they all were waiting for her there at the chat windows as children wait for their mothers. She typed out things as per the need of the person of the other end. She pretended herself as an art collector to an artist, a musician to a guitarist, a beautician to an ugly duckling, a culinary specialist to a glutton, a cultural theorist to a hopelessly argumentative man, a fashion model to a designer who was about to launch his brand.

And in sleep she had three orgasms and one long feverish spell with shivering.

When she opened her eyes, her husband was sitting right next to her with a smile on his face and the dirty look in his eyes was gone. “How do you feel now?” He asked. She smiled at him as she was not feeling anything particular. She wanted that dream to continue. But he woke her up again. “This is just a life style illness. Nothing to worry. Doctor has advised a vacation than medicine. We are off to LA baby,” he hugged and kissed her.

She looked at the wall out side the window. It was not longer a screen. It was just a wall.