Fragments of an Unbroken Mirror: I. It’s Yesterday Once Again

In my solitude, I have clearly seen things that are not real.  – Antonio Machado

The nature of my work being what it is, I didn’t see the setting sun for quite some time. Until today.

This afternoon, when I left my workplace, the bloodless winter sun was hanging near the horizon behind a veil of fog and dust.  On the other side of the road, boys were playing cricket in the big park that’s called Park Circus Maidan. Dust kicked up by cricketers hung like an ochre blanket over the field, around which elderly trees stood like disinterested spectators. The trees, many of them barren, and all of them heavy with undisturbed dust of many rainless months, were desperately waiting for a shower.  

For some reasons, there were just a few people on the pavements and hardly any vehicles on the carriageway. The men with broken cheeks in shabby shirts and short dhotis selling bhelpuris and pani puris at the park entrance had no customers. … Although the city has changed inexorably over the past fifty years, neither the taste of pani puris, nor the look of the men who sell them has changed. 

My friend Jyoti lived near the Park Circus Maidan when we were in school. Jyoti and I spent many afternoons in this park, chatting and eyeing up girls, me smoking a secret cigarette and Jyoti – he had all the makings of the teetotaller he is today – looking at me disapprovingly. 

Today, a relentless winter breeze has been blowing since morning. A mild shiver passes through my spine as I wait at the bus stop.  Suddenly, I am gripped by a mildly intoxicating fear. The place is far too quiet, far too empty, it feels almost surreal.  And the city looks different in the magical yellow light of the setting sun. I stand flabbergasted on the eerily quiet road and try to figure out what has been happening. 

It is perhaps the perfect setting for a double-decker bus to arrive … the red Leyland double-decker with the proud head of a Royal Bengal tiger stencilled on its side … the double-decker that has been discarded long ago by administrators who has no sense of urban poetry … the double-decker without which the story of my childhood, which I am going to tell you in a moment, would be incomplete. 

And it must have been a special day for me, or the world. The front seats on the upper deck of the bus are unoccupied … I recall, there was a time when I would exchange anything for a front seat which allowed me a panoramic view of the road ahead. 

As our bus moves along, as buildings, trees, and lamp posts march backward, the roads become emptier and the evening light mellower. The two men who were arguing noisily behind me fall silent. 

A translucent canopy of stillness hangs over the world as we go along familiar roads past familiar structures like the new shopping mall on Amir Ali Avenue, the perpetually grey façade of the Modern High School, Calcutta Cricket and Football Club, and along familiar flyovers.  Yet, the sparse pedestrians seem far away and the place looks different from the humdrum metropolis I saw just hours earlier. It seems unreal, more like a faded sepia picture stuck with corner hinges in a photo album with thick black pages, an album that had been lost long ago. 

The bus goes on a journey more in time than space. The Kolkata of the twenty-first century fades away from before my believing eyes and a similar but very different conurbation from a different millennium takes its place.


It’s yesterday once again.

[This is the first chapter of my memoir Fragments of an Unbroken Mirror, which I dream will become a much-loved book.]

Let ME TOO speak out!

Over the last few days, women victims in India have been breaking down the Chinese Wall of shame and coming out against sexual assaults. We always knew there were sexual predators everywhere, including at workplaces, but the extent of the evil, now that it’s being spoken about, is more than horrifying.

It would be safe to think that for every woman who has chosen to go public with her protest, there are many more who haven’t. So far in India, women have come out only from two fields: the entertainment industry and the media. It would be laughable to think that men in other professions would be any better. So, what we see now is the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

It is deeply disturbing. I salute the women who have come out. They deserve immense respect because they must be going through intense pain while reliving in public what they have suffered in private till now.

I do hope the society will treat the victims with the respect and sensitivity they deserve. I do hope the criminals will be called out, and at least some big fish will go to jail. But it won’t be easy.

In November 2013, Tarun Tejpal, a high-profile editor, sexually assaulted a colleague, who happened to be his daughter’s friend, on a lift in a Goa hotel. When the details, including CCTV footage came out, it seemed to be an open and shut case. But after five years, the man is out on bail, and the victim would have been dragged to courts repeatedly, adding societal insult to her personal injury. And it doesn't happen in India alone.

Recently, US senators chose to ignore Dr Christine Blasey Ford’s moving testimony against a sexual predator who shows no sign of remorse. Promoting an accused predator to the Supreme Court of the United States after a sham of an investigation was a public indictment of a completely credible victim.

But I do hope ultimately, the Me-Too movement in India will lead to a more civilised workplace for women in a country where lots of men bow before clay images of women, but grope them and rape them when they are in flesh and blood.

Thursday, 11 October 2018

A Tribute to the Father of the Nation on his 149th Birthday

Photograph courtesy The Hndu

The Hindu reports that five men were arrested in Delhi yesterday for cheating. But cheating is no big deal, people cheat one another all the time. You are short-changed when you buy beer; the doctor you pay for his service prescribes tests that have nothing to do with your problems. You pay a hefty sum to improve your spoken English, and when you go into the classroom, the teacher needs your help to complete the first English sentence she says. Cheating has been a way of life in India for as long as I can remember, which happens to be a pretty long time! So, for that, please don’t blame the BJP government even if you were an Urban Maoist. Contrarily, if you happened to drink cow’s urine for breakfast, please don’t blame Nehru for the scourge of rampant frauds in India. Accept that it is in our DNA.

Yesterday, I read an anecdote in William Dalrymple’s The City of Djinns. Dalrymple happens to be an authentic sahib, that is, he’s not of the brown variety. After relocating to India as a young man, he didn’t run away. I personally think the reasons (for not running away) should be looked into by the CBI, but that is besides the point.

Once Dalrymple wished to visit Pakistan, and after a lot of efforts with the Indian Immigration, he managed to obtain a temporary exit permit. At the emigration desk in the New Delhi airport, a customs officer asked him to produce his computer, music system, and electric kettle, which he had brought into the country, and had been dutifully noted down in some corner of his passport. A flummoxed Dalrymple protested. He was leaving India for only five days, and nobody carries an electric kettle or music system while on a short visit.

However, poor Dalrymple didn’t know that the conscientious customs official’s forefathers had been trained by Dalrymple’s own forefathers once upon a time. The man in white uniform said, ‘What is the guarantee that you are not already selling your articles to a sleazy shopkeeper near Jumma Masjid? Come on, Sahib, I am not being able to stamp your passport; kindly fuck off!’ (Or something to that effect.)

Happily, the sahib could ultimately make the trip. He rushed back to his home, gathered the stuff, and returned to the airport to deposit the said objects in a custom’s strong room. (This shows that Dalrymple shares my philosophy of reaching the airport at least four hours before any flight.) Anyway, the twist in the tail would come when he would return from Pakistan.

The same custom’s officer, as he was handing back the stuff, ran his hand on the music system softly and looked at it like a teenaged lover. Then he whispered, ‘Sahib, will you like to sell it for a good price?’

Coming back to my original point, we have grown up hearing stories like this. They no longer excite us. They are like pulp fiction, you know what will happen next. But rarely, we come across a fraudster who astonish us with their originality or organisational skills. Like the “CBI officer” who recruited 26 men and women and conducted a “raid” on a jeweller in Opera House, Mumbai in 1987. Never to be seen again!

Like Akshay Kumar in the film Special 26, the protagonists of the Hindu story today, that is, Shekhar Tyagi (25), Neeraj (25), Tanvir (28), Amit Kundu (28) and Sandeep Kumar (29) attract my attention for several reasons.

First, they are all young men in their twenties, who have seen through the sham of what has been proposed by our prime minister to unemployed young men. They have cleverly calculated that if every unemployed young man/woman begin to sell pakodas, there would be no young men/woman left to buy them. So, they ditched the pakoda route to prosperity.

The second thing that impressed me was the secular nature of the enterprise. It’s lovely to see young men rise above religions, castes, and linguistic groups to set up a collaborative venture.

Also, one of them is an engineer, and another is doing Masters. Clearly, they have used the knowledge gathered at college quite creatively.

Finally, who would not salute them for their managerial expertise? The Hindu says:

“They had registered various fake companies and used a call centre-like set-up to cheat people. … They had registered various fake tele-calling companies with government departments and used those to dupe people, the police said.”

The police got into the case when one Ashok Kumar Poddar told them that he was “induced into transferring nearly Rs. 1 crore into the bank accounts of various tele-calling companies for the services of facilitating refund of amount of his dormant insurance policies.” said Deputy Commissioner of Police, Anto Alphonse. (One crore! OMG!)

The police discovered that the fake callers would tell potential victims that their company had decided to renew their insurance policies and pay the maturity amounts. They would then ask the targets to deposit money into (fake) bank accounts so that their claims could be processed. While the target waited for the cheque with dreamy eyes, the insurance company would vamoose.

Mr. Alphonse added, “The various fake companies, registered by the gang, offered services like job placements, tour operation, business support. While the companies registered with government departments only existed on papers, the accounts were opened in the name of non-existent IDs.”

Despite my sneaking admiration for the fraudsters, I take my hats off to Delhi Police for catching them. But what can we do to the beer-seller, the doctor, or the cheater teacher?

Bengaluru

Monday, 01 October 2018