Perpetual Motion

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At some point in my teenage years, there was a time when I wanted to be a scientist. That was the time I was reading biographies of scientists and some books on science. I was besotted with the idea of perpetual motion. Wouldn’t it be possible to evolve a device or a system that perpetually produces more energy than it consumes, resulting in a net output of energy for indefinite time? It would be the answer to half the problems the world faced. What a great invention it would be!

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Our Physics Professor Devassy was a friendly person and one could approach him with any doubt. He would hear you out patiently and tell you how to proceed. One afternoon I went to him with my hopes about the possibility of developing a perpetual motion machine. Professor Devassy was not impressed. Such a machine just cannot exist, he said, since the law of conservation of postulates that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

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He nearly dashed my hopes, but I was not convinced and decided I would pursue the matter. My efforts were intensified when I read that in 1618, a ‘water screw perpetual motion machine’ was developed by a person called Robert Fludd. This was the first recorded device that produced useful work, that of driving millstones, but for some reason, it did not go on working endlessly. Several others had made similar attempts to develop such devices.

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I was fascinated by the possibility of magnets. I imagined a simple device: a wooden ramp at the top end of which a magnet would be placed. It would attract and pull a metal ball up the ramp. Near the magnet would be a small hole that would allow the ball to drop under the ramp and return to the bottom, where a flap allowed it to return to the top again.

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Prof Devassy dismissed it: the device simply could not work because any magnet strong enough to pull the ball up the ramp would necessarily be too powerful to allow it to drop through the hole. Faced with this problem, I tried several tacks. Like, if it were an electromagnet which loses its magnetism the moment the ball reached the top? This could easily be achieved through a relay that would get activated when the ball reached or crossed a critical point on the ramp.

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Any perseverant scientist knows that his ‘Aha!’ moment will come, sooner or later. Mine did, one night. I had an early dinner. The book I had taken to my bed was a collection of proverbs. I must have read for fifteen minutes before I dropped off to sleep. ‘Eureka!’ I cried.

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The next thing I knew was that I was in the Stockholm Konserthus on the 10^th Dec in the company of Prof Devassy who had recommended me for the Nobel prize in Physics for inventing the perpetual motion machine. King Carl XV Gustaf of Sweden pinned the Nobel Prize Medal on my lapel, ceremoniously handed over the Nobel Prize Diploma and the document confirming the Nobel Prize amount. As the resounding applause died down, I was requested to make my acceptance speech and explain the principle behind the invention in simple terms for the benefit of the august audience.

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I made no secret of my elation at being made a Nobel laureate and dedicated the distinction to Professor Devassy who, I said, was the inspiration. Adding the appropriate things about the honour conferred on me, I explained that my machine was based on two simple proverbs: ‘a toast always lands the buttered side down’ and ‘a cat always falls on its paws’. ‘The procedure is simple, ladies and gentlemen,’ I expounded.

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Apply butter to one side of a toast. Strap the toast onto the back of a cat with the buttered side facing outwards. Take the toast-cat assembly to the first floor. Drop it through the window. Force of gravity will let the assembly fall towards the ground, but as it approaches the ground, the whole assembly will rotate through 180° so that it can land on the buttered side of the toast. As the buttered side of the toast approaches the ground, the whole assembly will rotate again through 180° so that the cat can land on its paws. This will keep happening regularly so that the toast-cat assembly will spin midair. Now, it is easy to convert this rotary movement into mechanical or electrical energy by connecting the cat-toast assembly to suitable gadgets!

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What do you want to be when you grow up?

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I had nurtured different ambitions at different stages in my life. My earliest desire as far as I can remember was to become an oracle in the small temple in our village. Entranced, I would watch him preparing for his performance. Attired in nothing but a short thin red towel, he would collect hibiscus and other flowers and place then a fresh plantain leaf along with several items which included turmeric powder. Armed with a ‘sword’ that jangled, he would start dancing, ever so slowly to begin with. As he got into the act, the pace of the dance would quicken. Then it would enter the frenetic zone and he would be in direct dialogue with God. That’s when it would happen – he’d hit his skull with the sword. This masochistic game would go on until those who stand around him watching the spectacle were satisfied that he had lost sufficient quantity of blood. A lot of turmeric powder would be applied the forehead of the oracle would be all red and yellow. To my young mind, being hurt was a small price to pay if one could communicate directly with God!

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It was in the year I started going to school, that the dirt track connecting Cannanore and Bangalore which passed through our village was being upgraded. Workers were busy levelling the dirt road, carrying gravel in baskets and molten tar in tins or buckets, spreading the gravel evenly and then pouring the hot black liquid on the track, all this under the hot summer sun. I watched all this for about three days when a contraption I had never seen in my life appeared on the scene. Referred to as the ‘engine’ (Actually, they pronounced the word as ‘injun’) – it was coal-fired, and had two broad heavy metal wheels and a hooded cabin in which sat the driver, his hands clasping the steering.

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When everyone sweated it out in the hot sun, there was shade wherever he went in his ‘chariot’; when all others worked standing, walking or running, he worked at his seat; he was the first to be served at tea-time; he was so powerful that his fingers could move the behemoth he sat in. Wasn’t I impressed? I was enamoured by the perks his job carried. I wanted to be an ‘injun-driver’ when I grew up.

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It was in one of the bus journeys that I discovered my next passion: the conductor. His whistle stopped and started the bus; he collected all the money; he had the authority to decide whether (and how much) to charge for the luggage; he was the last word in deciding whether a child would travel free or on a half-ticket (or a teenager on a half-ticket or full fare). As passengers without seats struggled not to fall into the laps of those seated as the bus careened and swerved, the conductor was steady as the Gibraltar. I was naturally spell-bound. A bus conductor is what I wanted to grow up into.

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The job of the TTE in the train, somehow, did not appeal to me as a model profession I wanted to pursue. True, he was immaculately turned out in his spotless white trousers, black jacket, tie and gold-braided cap, but he did not seem to exude the authority of the bus conductor.

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All these were in my pre-teen days. A couple of years later, my ambitions changed – I wanted to be an English professor like Prof Madhukar Rao of Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam who treated his students as his equals and whose freewheeling classes were great fun. What if some used to say that the secret of the pink cheeks of his was the dash of rouge from his wife’s dressing table? He looked good and he was good. That was all that mattered to me.

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And then I wanted to be a math wizard like Prof Veeramony. Son of a clerk in a private firm, he was a self-made man. He had financed his studies by giving tuitions for those in junior classes. After getting a job, he continued the practice in order to supplement the income, but the question of their getting any favours did not arise at all. In fact, he respected students who did not seek tuitions. He has a booming voice that resonated in the classroom. He was a great singer, and would render the popular romantic numbers of Mohamed Rafi and Yesudas with such feel. Very handsome, he was admired by the girls in the college, but seemed totally unaffeced by all the attention he was getting.

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He was, of course, a great teacher. I have not come across another who could draw a perfect circle on the blackboard. In the Pure/Analytical/Projective/Solid Geometry classes, he would draw the lines and circles given in the question using a chalkpiece. As he said, ‘Draw the perpendicular from P on AB’, one could hear a series of taps on the blackboard and see a dotted line through P at exact right angles to AB. One wondered how he managed that and waited for the next time he’d do it. All he did was to hold the tip of the chalk, place it lightly at P and just run it towards AB. Voila! Instead of a solid line, you had a perfect dotted line. I must confess that it took me a fortnight’s practice during lunch recess to come anywhere near his seemingly effortless feat.

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Becoming a banker minding someone else’s money was never on my agenda; that I ended up as one is the greatest tragedy of my life.

FLIGHT INTO DANGER

09 August, 2009.

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We had landed at the Tan Son Nhat Airport in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) in the morning. Our flight to Buon Me Thuot (BMT) in the Central Highlands was not due to depart until 5 in the evening. As we had a whole day to spare, our son Hari and his wife Radhika took us for a spin in the city. Everything about HCMC, the commercial capital of Viet Nam (The administrative capital is Ha Noi), from the crowded streets to the skyscrapers and highrises to the swamps to the church steeples to the squalour reminded me of the commercial capital of India.

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On weekdays, Radhika told us, it is a tiny ATR aircraft that that plies between BMT and HCMC, but during weekends when the traffic is heavy, it is replaced by a Boeing 707. Hari, who stands 6’3” tall was understandably delighted: in an ATR, he would have to bend double and more; a Boeing meant more legroom, more headroom, more comfort.

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The computer system of Vietnam Air was down that evening and the girl at the check-in counter had do issue manually written boarding passes. She was obviously used to mono-syllabic names and surnames like Hung Tan and Loi Dung and had to literally grapple with our Indian names.

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My passport stated my name as Koodali Thazhathu Veettil Rajagopalan and was the poor thing floored! Which of these four components was my surname? (I thanked my father that he did not add the mandatory ‘Nambiar’ to my name which would have added to her misery.) She was non-plussed.

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She did not speak English and as Viet Namese was Greek to me, there was a communication issue. Driven to the wall, she did the obvious thing: she tossed a virtual coin a few times to decide which of these was my surname. Koodali it is, she decided. On the boarding pass, she wrote: KOO DA LI/ MR T R and handed it over to me with a smile that spelt – and smelt – success.

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Even before the lift-off, I dozed off. So did Hari. That resolved a problem that had intrigued Radhika from the day she married him: how does Hari drift to the slumberland the moment he gets on to something that moves – a car, a bus, a train or a plane? She now knows that it is coded in the DNA he has inherited from me.

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HCMC-BMT is a very short haul – under an hour. As we reached the destination, clouds enveloped the aircraft. The sudden jerks, abrupt descents and ascents woke me. We dropped down to prepare-for-landing height and suddenly gained height and again went through the clouds. There were a few very sudden and substantial drops in height. A substantial percentage of those aboard were on the distaff side and they did the most natural thing: they shrieked in panic. I realized that panic knows no language. The shriek sounds the same in Malayalam, Armenian, Bengali or Spanish.

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The public address system spluttered and came alive. There was an announcement. We were not enlightened because it was in Viet Namese. However, the about-turn that I could feel the aircraft took told me that the pilot had decided to abandon any further attempt to land. We were well on our way back to HCMC.

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Once on the ground, the passengers were herded into the airport bus. We were told we had to return because of the squally weather and the rains that lashed BMT. The flight would leave the next morning and we had to make our own arrangements for the night.

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However, the bus did not move. We saw the pilots, crew, ground staff and officials go into a huddle. While most of the passengers stayed on in the bus waiting for it to head for the terminal, a few got out of the bus, and walked ahead, heaving their baggage, towards the terminal.

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After about half an hour, the officials changed their mind. They had a message that that the weather in BMT had improved and the flight could land. So the passengers trooped again into the airplane.

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Once again I dozed off, so did Hari. Once again we were airborne, once again we flew through clouds, once again we fell into air pockets, once again we gained altitude, once again we lost height. The plane started bobbing like a ball. This time the turbulence was more violent and the aircraft was tossed about. More and louder shrieks and screams from the rear, the front, the left and the right.

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Bhawani held my hand very very tight and I could feel the sweat on her palms. Her fear permeated into me, osmotically as it were, from her hand to mine. She heaved a sigh and said, ‘The ones who walked out of the bus are the only ones who are destined to survive this air crash.’

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I just couldn't stop thinking about my mother and siblings. And of course my younger son Gautam who was in Bombay. They might hear of an air crash in Viet Nam but would think Korean or Jap bearing the name KOO DA LI/MR T R had died! No one would know that I had perished mid-air. If that be the fate, so be it, I consoled myself.

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Well, all’s well that ends well. Soon enough, the aircraft steered clear of the clouds, the plane aligned with the runway for landing and we landed with a teensy little bump and all of us let out a collective sigh of relief.

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It was as much a dramatic beginning of a long placid holiday in Viet Nam as a sobering thought: how fragile human life is!

CAMBODIAN DIARY

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Total Recall

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Drivers of tuk-tuk (The Cambodian avtar of our very own Phut-Phut) in Phnom Penh swarmed around the weary passengers disgorged by the bus from Ho Chi Minh City. The one I engaged haggled hard, but once the price was settled, he became cordial and compliant. He was keen to drive me around wherever I wanted to go; and whenever. To be picked up from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) after dinner? No problem. Royal Palace? Fine. To the airport at five in the morning? Okay, I’ll be there.

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But how do I locate you when I get out of the FCC, I asked. Here’s my cell number, said he, fishing out a visiting card from the hip pocket of his bermuda shorts. I could not conceal my surprise at the name: ‘Spiderman’. In response to my query about the unlikely name, he said, ‘Much easier than Mam Bun Heng.’ His compatriots had names like Camera, Superman and Computer, he added. Quite practical, I thought. Names foreigners would find user-friendly and easy to recall.

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Kamasutra and Sansara

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More on names. The Indian restaurant in Siem Reap we had dinner in went by an equally unlikely monicker: Kamasutra. Cambodian girls wearing Kerala sarees served kadai chicken and raita. The joint was owned by a Malayali. Along with the bill came a small brochure which exhorted the customer ‘Why not try South Indian delicacies at Sansara in the next lane?’

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Footloose in the streets of Siem Reap the next evening, we spotted the same Cambodian girls in Kerala sarees under a new sign – Sansara with the sign-off line ‘for mouth-watering delicacies’. It did not need a cartographer’s skills to infer that Sansara was right behind it Kamasutra. I discovered that they even shared a kitchen and a chef. Talk of Indian ingenuity!

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The India Connection

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The friendly tuk-tuk driver asked my companion what his name was. He replied, Hari. Oh, Haree as in Haree-haraa, they said in a chorus. They had heard that Indian name in some context. The guide in Siem Reap was thrilled to meet us. Indians built our temple, he said, and gave us our culture. We had Khmer rulers from your country – named Jeyya-Vermman, Yesso-vermman, Sooriyya-vermman, In-dra-Vermman, Udeyya-Vermman and the like, he said in his heavily accented tongue. I felt that being an Indian, I was almost being worshipped. A great feeling!

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A Red Herring

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The young man who took me around the Angkor Artisans Village in the suburbs of Siem Reap where breathtaking handicraft items are made sported a plastic name plate on his shirt. Pram Bir, it said.

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Having seen several shops with Indian sounding names like Archana, Kartika etc, I was ready to bet my shirt that Pram Bir is a corrupt form of Param Veer or Prem Veer. What does your name mean, I asked him. Five plus two, rather, seven. Seven? Yes, because I was born in the seventh month. Quite an innovative method of naming your kids, I thought.

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The Young Salesperson

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There were over a hundred hole-in-the-wall shops under one roof. They all sold souvenirs and trinkets. As we ambled through the aisles between rows of shops, we were accosted by vendors (all women), urging us to step in: ‘All items very cheap, sir’ and ‘Only one dollar, Sir!’ As we passed by one shop, a tiny voice repeated the call. It was a boy, barely three; I suspect he did not know enough Cambodian, but he could echo the ‘Only one dollar, sir!’ of his mother.

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Parallel Currency

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The official currency in Cambodia is the Riel, but US Dollars are as popular. So are counterfeits, I was warned. I had toted up a bill of 25,000 Riels (about USD 6) in the souvenir shop. The woman in charge of the shop took a tenner from me and returned four one-dollar notes. As I peered at them for genuineness, she asked, ‘I didn’t check if yours was a genuine note, did I?’

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Pun on Angkor

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Anchor, I guess, must be one of the most popular brands of beer in the Far East. One just cannot miss the red-blue-and-silver cans in the shops and the huge hoardings on the highways promoting the beverage from the Heineken stable. Once in Cambodia, the competing homophonic brand – Angkor – from the Carlsberg house fights for shelf-space, visibility and market share. The logo of the Angkor brand is the iconic temple. Blasphemy, wouldn’t it be, in other cultures? I mused , somewhat irreverently: does Cambodia have a whiskey in called Angkor Vat 69, a doppelganger the ubiquitous Vat 69 from the liquor giant Diageo?

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Extending the thought, I wondered what the reaction would be if Vijay Mallya were to propose names like Benaras Brandy, Juma Masjid Gin or Velankanni Whiskey for his products. Sacrilege, wouldn’t it be?

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A Thousand Buddhas

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I spent nearly a whole day in the Angkor National Museum in Siem Reap. It is indeed a world class centre of heritage divided into eight fascinating galleries. Before being given access to the halls, visitors are given a brief presentation that introduces the museum and its amenities. Interactive multimedia technology has been harnessed and employed in the headsets that speak seven languages. There are short documentaries on most galleries that tell a full picturesque story.

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The awe-inspiring exhibits and the expertise in curating them facilitate a deeper understanding of the splendour of the ancient Khmer civilisation. The section that impressed me most was the gallery of a thousand Buddhas.

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Tintin in Cambodia

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The most avid follower of Tintin comics would not have heard of the young peripatetic reporter having set foot in Cambodia. But on sale everywhere in Cambodia are T-shirts with the words ‘Tintin au Cambodge’ and a picture of the boy astride a bicycle, with Snowy predictably in tow. Another featured Tintin and Snowy in a ‘cyclo’ driven by a Cambodian in his conical straw hat. Though short on facts, at three dollars apiece, they are not pricey.

This is Not an Obit

In the early 1970s, I used to be a resident of the YMCA Hostel on Chowringhee Road in Calcutta. I had just been transplanted from Kerala and knew as much English slang as an Austrian knew Ayurveda.
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My roommate for a while was Ramu Salivati. (Then a sports journalist for the Statesman, he is no more.) He used to play cricket in the maidan on Sunday forenoons and kept his cricketing gear in the room. I knew nothing of that game then, I know nothing of that game now. (It was fifteen years later that my son, ten years old then, disabused me of my notion that the wicketkeeper is NOT the player standing behind the wickets, preventing them from falling when the guy in front of him swings the bat to hit the ball.)
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One Saturday afternoon, Ramu put on his windcheater and enquired. ‘KT, are you going out anywhere today?’
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I had no such plans. I had just bought a copy of Don’t fall off the mountain by actress Shirley Maclaine and had decided I would read it. I replied, 'No.’
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‘A friend of mine will come looking for me. Ask him to wait, I’ll be back in half an hour,’ said Ramu.
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A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. I did not have to open it, for a man under thirty walked in.
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‘Ramu?’ he asked.
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I told him what I was told to. He said, ‘Balls! He won’t be back until after 10.’
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If he really thought so, he should have gone away. Instead, he said to himself, ‘It’s drizzling and I don’t want to get wet. I’ll wait for him for a while and see if he comes.’
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He took off his jacket and parking himself on a chair, lit a cigarette. I sneezed. I have this allergy for cigarette smoke. He knew it the moment I sneezed. He opened the door to the balcony, went out, finished his smoke and returned to his seat.
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We got talking. Naturally, it veered round to cricket, a subject popular with youngsters. An Australian team was on its Indian tour and was scheduled to play in the Eden Gardens in a week. He asked me something about the prospects of the hosts or about Syed Kirmani or Brijesh Patel or some other player. I drew a blank. I told him I knew nothing of cricket.
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‘Balls!’ he said again.
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‘What was that?’ I asked.
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‘I said Balls.’
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'What about balls?’
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‘Forget it,’ he said, and asked me, ‘Where are you from?’
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After a while, he saw the book I was reading and said, ‘A cousin on mine had read this book and had recommended it.’
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Without a by-your-leave, he took it and put it in the pocket of his jacket. I could not even say I had not yet gone beyond the second chapter. (The book never came back to me. A few years later, I bought another copy and read it.)
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He went to the balcony, lit his second cigarette, puffed hard at it a few times and came back.
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He did not occupy the chair. Yanking his jacket, he said, ‘I told you the bastard won’t come.’
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Before leaving, he took out a book from his pocket and gave it to me, saying, ‘Read this. It will give you some idea about cricket.’
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It was a copy of ‘Kiwis and Kangaroos’.
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When Ramu came, later than predicted by his friend, he was sozzled. In a drunken drawl, he told me his friend who had came looking for him was the author of the book. He had written it when he was twenty-three. He was Rajan Bala. That was the only time I met him.
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Rajan Bala died yesterday.
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I never got to read ‘Kiwis and Kangaroos’. I don’t even know where it is now.
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Oodles of Doodles of Google

Yesterday (7 Oct 2009) when I started surfing the net, I was perplexed ... and then petrified: had the security of my laptop been compromised? Instead of the familiar multi-colour logo, all I saw was an array of thick and thin black lines as in a bar code. I thought Google’s site had been hacked.

I heaved a sigh of relief when I discovered that my fears were misplaced. What I saw was the bar code for the word Google. That was Google’s way of celebrating the 57^th anniversary of bar code.

Till Google told me yesterday. I did not know that I was only five years older than bar code. It had thought it was a much more recent 'invention' coinciding with the mall-supemarket culture. The patent (USP 2612994) for machine-readable representation of data using parallel lines of different widths at different spacings was awarded to Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver on 7 Oct 1952.

It has been Google's practice to experiment with its logo by changing it to commemorate what it deems as significant events. Many may not have noticed, but early this month, Google logo paid homage to Mahatma Gandhi by through its logo.

Another day, another logo. To the utter delight and glee of self-confessed doodle-watcher like me, Google keeps coming out with interesting logos. This was their logo for St Patrick's Day. It is not as if they are occident-centric. For Holi, they had come up with a splash of colors, complete with buckets. And the start of the Chinese Year of the Rat was celebrated with a most suited visual.

If you would like to see oodles of doodles of Google (Just can’t resist the temptation to talk in rhyme all the time), go to

http://blog.arpitnext.com/2009/08/google-logo-slide-show-a-cool-greasemonkey-script-for-google-homepage.html

Here’s a bonus from me: if you want to generate the barcode representing your name, please go to http://www.barcodesinc.com/generator/index.php

Strict Compliance

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Those who hate officialese are well-advised to skip this post, for though I know it is not good form to use it, I cannot avoid it while narrating this story.

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The concluding lines of any important letter from the boss and most circulars from the Head Office usually are: ‘Please confirm having noted the above instructions for strict compliance’. To the best of my knowledge and belief, nobody has ever confirmed having done so, but such a confirmation is implied and presumed. The notice calling for your explanation for having done (or not done) something would read: ‘In contravention of the instructions contained in our circular No. … dated …’

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After a couple of years of service, this strict-compliance-business can get into your blood. Not only your blood, but of those around you, as the story of Kurien demonstrates.

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I was relieved from the Head Office on a July Saturday with instructions to report to the Manager of Chalai branch as Accountant. When I went there, he was not present. I was told he had been admitted to the hospital. Anything serious? No, I was told. He had been bitten by a dog on Saturday night. Not to worry, it was his own pet and there was no fear of rabies.

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A few days later, Kurien resumed duty. During a lunch recess, for want of anything else to talk about, I asked him about the canine assault he ad suffered. He said, ‘Oh, that? It was a Head Office dog.’ That was an inscrutable response, if there was one. Pressed for a reply, he elaborated.

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After office-hours on that Saturday afternoon, Kurien had boarded a bus for Kottayam. He had a rubber plantation in the suburbs of the nearby Palai which, in his absence, his man Friday took care of. He had to go there, visit the plantation and see how well his directions were being implemented. He would stay there for the weekend and return on Monday morning. He would be back home only in the evening on Monday, he had told his wife.

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There was nothing unusual in this. His family – wife Mariyamma, son Roymon and daughter Reenamol, why, even his dog Tiger, the scion of a cross between a mongrel and an Alsatian – was used to Kurien being away from Saturday morning to Monday evening during several weekends.

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Mariyamma had an early dinner and tucked the children in the bed. She locked the wooden gate to the compound and unchained Tiger so that it could go round the house. Then she went to bed.

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Monsoon was in full cry and the rivers in full spate. Somewhere between Kottayam and Palai, a bridge had been washed away and the bus Kurien was travelling by would not proceed further. The only option was to return. Which is exactly what Kurien did.

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It was past midnight when Kurien reached back Trivandrum. The glow of the streetlights, thanks to the low voltage, barely lit the roads. He walked homewards as briskly as his legs would carry him, his handbag in his left hand and a umbrella, which proved grossly unequal to the occasion, in his right. As he turned into the lane where his house stood, power went off, plunging the area into total darkness.

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Presently, Kurien reached home. The gate was, predictably, locked. Only after instinctively pressing the calling bell on the compound wall did he realise his foolishness in doing so when there was no power.

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He knocked at the gate several times, but in the downpour, the deadened noise the wood made was not carried to the house. Kurien repented not having paid heed to Mariyamma’s advice to replace the wooden gate with a metallic one. The sound made by pounding on it would have woken her up.

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Kurien called out, ‘Mariyaamme, Mariyaamme, Eti Mariyaammo … Ronmone, Eta Roymone … Reenamole, Eti Reenamole …!’ No response. If it was today, he could have used his cellphone to call them up, but we are talking of the 1970’s. All of them were under the blankets, in deep slumber,

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How long to you wait in front of the gate of your own house, soaked to the undergarments, with no sign of let-up in the unremitting shower? Kurien made the big decision: he folded is mundu, and flinging his handbag and umbrella into the compound, he scaled the gate and jumped in.

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The thud of the handbag had alerted Tiger. As soon as Kurien landed, Tiger pounced on him and thrust his incisors into Kurien’s left calf, Kurien concluded his story.

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‘But then Tiger is your own dog, Mr Kurien?’

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‘Yes, Mariyaamma had instructed Tiger to attack anyone who jumps into the compound, particularly in the night. Tiger was like branch managers who are supposed to ensure strict compliance with the instructions from the Head Office.’

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That was how Kurien who had attempted a rather unconventional entry into is residence was punished by his own pet.

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