A STAR CALLED JOE

Joe has passed on.

We had been friends since the early 1980’s when met for the first time. Though we lived in the same city for about three years and worked in the same organisation for just about decade, our paths crossed again and again, in New Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai as he went job-hopping and I got shunted from state to state.

I had had a taste of Joe's sense of humour even before I actually saw him! On confirmation, Joe was posted as Assistant Accountant in Bombay (Main) branch. So was his batchmate Damodar Menon. They had a letterhead printed jointly with 'Menon & Manimury, Assistant Accountants' emblazoned on it – a la Lovelock & Lewis, or Aiyar & Cherian, Chartered Accountants. I had happened to see this piece of stationery even before I set my eyes on either of the personalities involved.

I still remember a joke narrated by him. A Sardarji was visiting Europe and was intrigued to see people wearing masks and costumes and dancing celebrating Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) as part of the Carnival between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday. He asked a passer-by what the merriment was about and got the obvious and terse reply, ‘Mardi Gras.’ The turbaned foreigner thought to himself, ‘Ye kaun si gaali hai jo hum nahin jaante? (What is this abusive word I do not know?)’

Joe had a way with kids. As a bachelor, he used to be a regular at our rented house in PTP Nagar, Trivandrum. He got along famously with my son Hari and his playschool-mate Miriam (our colleague and neighbour Kora Ipe's daughter) – both four years old then. These two kids used to call him Joe (no 'uncle'). He used to be so much a part of their lives. A relative who called on us overheard them refer to Joe in their conversation asked them if Joe was a boy who went to the same playschool as they did!

On Sundays, he would join us at home for lunch preceded and succeeded by games of Scrabble. Which reminds of words like SITCOM and QUASAR which were rather new to the language in those days and rare words like SYZYGY that he introduced us to. No prizes for guessing who won the games.

On some of these days, the lunch would be preceded by a glass or two of chilled beer. As Joe popped the bottle and poured the frothy amber liquid into the schooners, Hari would sidle up to him. ‘Pour some for me, Joe,' he would ask, stretching a small glass. Joe would turn stern and say, ‘No. Not for you!’. As Hari continued to plead, explaining, ‘A small glass for the small boy!’ Joe would tell me, ‘We shouldn’t be drinking in the presence of kids.’ He would never smoke in front of children, for he was keen that he should not set a bad example.

During the days I was in regular touch with Joe, he used to smoke, rather heavily. The blood donor's forum which we were a part of approached Joe in their membership drive. Joe joined but cautioned, 'The suction pump would first go "Puff, puff!", drawing the smoke running through my veins before it starts drawing blood!'

During one of the occasions when I saw him for an hour or two in later days, he did not light a cigarette. When asked, he said he had quit smoking, though I suspect he had only reduced the daily quota.

Joe was an avid reader. It was he who introduced me to Sci-Fi and its patron-saints Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. And he tried to inculcate reading habit in kids. We still have what is referred to in our home as Joe’s Alphabet Books that he had gifted to Hari – a set of five volumes from My First Library series brought out by the Readers' Digest in association with Mothercare.

Given the range of books he read, Joe HAD to be a repository of knowledge. And he was a great quizzer. I recall participating in some quizzes either as a partner or as a rival. I used to marvel at the way he used to hazard ‘intelligent guesses’ and score points. I recall as vividly the way my similar attempts at second-guessing would fall flat.

I used to think that a cloud is a cloud is a cloud is a cloud. Till I met Joe, that is. Joe took me through the cirrus, cirrocumulus, cirrostratus, etc to the cumulonimbus and the cumulus. Thanks to Joe, I learnt that what I had all along thought was a red star was in fact a planet, Mars to be exact.

A little-known fact was that Joe was a star-gazer. He had spent many weekends with us. After sunset, he would go up to the terrace with Hari to watch the stars. In a matter of weeks, Hari could identify some constellations like Ursa Major and Sirius. On days Joe was not with us and we went up on the terrace, Hari would draw our attention, ‘Daja, that is Joe Uncle’s star, the..e..r..e..’

It was from Joe that I had my little education in astronomy, that stars are identified by their color, which indicates their temperature based on which they are divided into spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, and M, the hottest being O (blue in color) and the coolest stars being M (red). He also told me how to remember it by the mnemonic ‘Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me.’

This evening, after the sun sets, I will get onto the terrace and look at the sky. I am sure there will be a new star shining in the blue sky: Joe.

The Call of the Cuckoo

I am a happy man today.

A few months back, my cuckoo clock had stopped. Inexplicably. The interiors of our house had been done up and, for a change, I had shifted the cuckoo clock from its original place in the living room and hung it from a nail on the lintel above the French window. And it died. Well, not exactly dead: it had been comatose for over a year and a half. When you give a swing to the pendulum, the clock comes alive for a few minutes and then goes to sleep. I did not know why.

Today it came to life again. All I did was to shift it to its original spot and apply a few drops of oil on the chain to smoothen the movement. Now I know why my cherished asset had folded up. The wind flowing in through the window would meddle with the swing of the pendulum, and cause the movement to stop. In its original position against the feature wall, there is no such intruder.

The cuckoo clock is one of my prized possessions – a souvenir of my trip to Europe in 1997. I was attending a training programme in the Maastricht School of Management in Netherlands and took time off to hop over to Germany. A cruise of the Rhine was one of the highlights of that weekend.

To the north-east of the Rhine Valley in Baden-Württemberg is the wooded mountain range called Schwarzwald (Literally, the Black Forest). The village Schoenwald here is where cuckoo clocks were first designed in 1737 and are still manufactured and sold. I purchased my ‘original’ cuckoo clock from a shop that called itself ‘Die Uhrenmacher des Schwarzwaldes’ (The Clockmakers of the Black Forest).

The first cuckoo clock I saw was in the study of an uncle. It had Roman numerals and rich ornamentation featuring a chalet with carved leaves, flowers and deer heads with antlers. A boy of ten, I would accompany my grandfather to my uncle’s house, mostly on weekends. As we trudged along the untarred road, I would hope and pray that we would be there about five to ten minutes before a full hour – so that I could see the spectacle of the cuckoo peeping out of the cage and flap its wings.

When grandpa prepared to bid goodbye and it was time to leave, I would plead: ‘After the cuckoo comes out once more, please!’

Even since, it was my desire to own a cuckoo clock. Mine is a poor cousin of the one my uncle had. It has just a one-day movement while my uncle’s boasted of an eight-day movement. My clock has two weights – one for winding the clock and the other for the cuckoo. There were three weights in the version my uncle had, thought for the life of me, I cannot guess why.

As a child, I was fascinated by the contraption and asked my uncle (He was a school headmaster) how it worked. He had no answer. Now I know how. It is a pendulum-driven mechanical (though quartz models have now made the scene) time-piece that tells you the hour using an imitation of the call of the cuckoo. It has an automaton of the bird that appears through a small trap door while the clock is striking. The bird moves while the clock strikes, typically by means of an arm that lifts the back of the carving.

The weights are made of cast iron in a pine cone shape and the ‘cuc-koo’ sound is created by two tiny pipes in the clock, with bellows attached to their tops. The clock's movement activates the bellows to send a puff of air into each pipe alternately when the clock strikes.

Another question I asked my uncle was why the clock face had in place of 4, a IIII instead of IV. This may seem trivial, but have you noticed that in most clock faces with Roman numerals, IIII is often used in place of IV for the 4 o'clock. The answer he gave me was that in was in deference to the wish of Louis XIV that clockmakers opted for this variant.

He added that there was another theory doing the rounds: ‘IV’ is an abbreviation for ‘Jupiter’ since Roman times. (Recall that in INRI, the I’s stand for J and that some of the police stations (Bhowanipore and Lal Bazaar, for instance) in Calcutta still have the words Station Hovse emblazoned on their facades) So they decided to use "IIII" so that their clocks didn't have "1 2 3 GOD 5 6 ..." written on them.

But, recently, I heard a new explanation. Imagine a watch face with roman numerals with IV instead of III. Look at the numerals opposite each other – all of them are in perfect balance, except for the 'heavy' VIII and the 'light' IV. Optical balance can be attained by printing a 'heavy' IIII. This does gel with the theory of visual balance attained by using 10:08 in the advertisement for watches and seems quite plausible.

Someone told me the other day that of late, my blogs tend to be more educative than experiential. He did not add which of the two he preferred. Coming to think of it, he never said he even liked my blog. Is there a message in that?

FENG SHUI, JUGAAD, 10:08 AND SOS

The other day, a friend forwarded to me a message, which among other things, said that according to Feng Shui, 2011 is a very auspicious year because October 2011 has 5 Saturdays, 5 Sundays and 5 Mondays. This is very rare, the message claimed, as it occurs only once in 823 years. Therefore the Chinese consider it the Year of Moneybags. Those who forward the message to ten people would come by a lot of riches before October 2011, the message assured.

When I was a child, the world war had just ended and India was a nascent nation with little resources and many mouths to feed. Food, clothes, paper, everything was in short supply. In the 1950’s, even calendars were hard to come by. It would often be end- January if not early February by the time the calendar for the new year would reach home.

It was in the era of shortages. At that time, I did not know the Hindi word jugaad which literally means an improvisation necessitated by lack of resources. Had I known that word, those were the days which I would have termed jugaad-days!

My grandfather was great at jugaad. He discovered that the calendar for the month of January in any year is the same as that for the month of May in the preceding year. Naturally, February would be June (minus, of course, the last one/two days) of the previous year. So, till the new year’s calendar arrived, you could make do – jugaad – with the previous year’s!

Later, the bright spark that I was discovered that in leap years, the calendars for January and July are in sync; in non-leap years, it is October that is identical with January.

Now, what do Feng Shui and the Year of Moneybags have to do with jugaad? Be patient, gentle reader. It just occurred to me that as 2011 is not a leap year, the calendars for October and January are identical. If October 2011 has 5 Saturdays, 5 Sundays and 5 Mondays, so must January 2011. And May 2010. Therefore this month of five long weekends is not an unusual feature, I surmised.

How right I was! The entire calendar for 2011 is identical to that of 2005. And 1994. And 1983. And going forward, 2022. And 2033 and six years after that. Each of these must be Years of Moneybags for the Feng Shui-gullible Chinese! Looks like there would be at least one such year every decade, not every 823 years!

So this is clearly a cyber-myth propagated and perpetuated by us who swallow whatever forwards we receive and in turn pass it on.

That reminds me of what quizmasters consider a chestnut. Mr Knowall asks, ‘Why is the time shown in most of the advertisements for watches and clocks 10:08 or near-about?’ The Smart Alec who answers, ‘It commemorates the time of U S President Abraham Lincoln’s death’ is awarded the points. And if your answer is 'Watchmakers in the US were given a tax benefit for displaying 10:08 as the time to commemorate the time of Abraham Lincoln's death', you get bonus points!

Nothing could be farther from the truth. The answer is probably quite simply that it looks better, as the clock has a 'smile' on its face (not just a marketing gimmick, it really does look better than a 'down turned mouth' at 8.20). For aesthetic reasons, one would not like the two hands neither nearly covering each other nor nearly in a straight line. By default, the 10:08 looks pretty good.

Aesthetics apart, it makes eminent practical sense: the hands stay clear of other subsidiary dials. Day/date window are most often are at 3, 6 or 9 and this position does not obstruct them. Most often, the logo of the manufacturer on the face is placed above the centre, and having the hands at 10:08 causes the viewer’s eye to naturally follow to the trough, thus bringing the view right to the trademark. Also, the brand name which is embossed often below the centre, is clearly visible in the 10:08 position.

Another popular quiz question: ‘What is the expansion of the distress call SOS? ‘Save Our Souls’, did you say? Imagine the wireless operation in a sinking ship sending out a distress sign – ‘Save Our Souls’. Very evocative, yes, but absolutely baseless! The fact is that in it is a backronym, not an acronym, in the sense that unlike in acronyms, SOS came first and then the expansion! There are other Imaginative (Imaginary?) expansions too, like ‘Save Our Ship’, ‘Send Out Sailors’ and ‘Survivors on Ship’!

The reality: in Morse code, S (did-did-did) is represented by three dots and O (dah-dah-dah) by three dashes. SOS (did-did-did dah-dah-dah did-did-did) was an easily recognizable signal because of the rhythm of the beat. )

Reverting to Feng Shui, I did not forward that message to ten people: I do not want that pot of gold!

A ROOM WITH A VIEW

Last month I was in Mumbai for a couple of days. Courtesy the corporate that was playing the host, I was booked in The Taj Mahal Palace & Towers.

The checking in formalities included producing a valid identity, something that was not there when I had stayed at the same hotel in 2004. Must be a measure of precaution introduced after the 26/11 gruesome drama was played out in the hotel, I told myself.

‘Sir, would you mind waiting in the lounge while I get a photocopy of your ID card made?’ the girl smiled.

As I stepped into the lounge, the hostess there offered me a welcome drink, beaming. The fresh lime juice, garnished with mint leaves and rose petals, served in a highball glass with ice cubes, was obviously refreshing on the hot, sultry day.

The girl returned soon with my ID and the key to the room and said, ‘Let me take me to your room, Sir.’ As the lift started its ascent to the 15th floor, she informed me, ‘Your room will be 1505, Sir. It’s a beautiful sea-facing room.’

And that reminded me of another room with a view. This episode was told to me by my friend Suhas Kelkar, manager of a bank branch.

The story is set in the early 1970s. His boss was a man who loved the good things in life – rich food, fine clothes, a game of golf, and the like. Whenever he came to Bombay, he preferred to stay at the five-star Taj, though, according to his service conditions, his entitlement was for a room in a hotel of a lower category. The epicurean that he was, his preference, obviously, was for the sea-facing room.

Like any junior who could not afford to incur the wrath of the boss, Suhas somehow obliged the boss by accommodating this request. I do not know how he met the difference between the bill and the amount the boss was entitled to, but that is not one of our concerns for the present. Let us assume that it was by some sleight of hand which I am not privy to, but the fact is that Suhas kept the boss happy.

Suhas had to, because if he did not oblige the boss, he would find himself posted in Silchar or Gummidipundi, Buland shahar or Vakathanam and a transfer from Bombay was the last thing he wanted.

My friend was at his wit’s end when the boss announced a visit at short notice. It was a Wednesday and boss was arriving on Friday. The test match was on and the Aussies and the English team were in town. The hotel was booked. Not a room to spare even in the neighbouring Hotel Diplomat, leave the upmarket Taj alone.

With no choice left, Suhas booked a room in another hotel, I think, The Classic or The Paradise Hotel, beside the Diplomat. He persuaded the reservation clerk to earmark a sea-facing room for the boss.

Come Friday, Suhas felt jittery as he received the boss in the airport. During the small talk, he brought up the topic of the Test match and prepared the boss for his stay in a hotel other than The Taj. The boss was not too pleased and made no secret of his displeasure.

‘But sir, it is a sea-facing room,’ Suhas tried to assuage the hurt.

Once inside the hotel, he followed the boss who followed the bellboy who led the way, hauling the luggage. The room was on the third floor.

After the bellboy left, the boss growled at my friend, ‘Where is the sea, Mr Kelkar?’

Whereupon Mr Kelkar opened the door to the toilet, climbed on to the throne, and, twisting his neck at an awkward angle, peered through the gap between the leaves of the exhaust fan. Craning his neck further, he spotted a small patch of blue, and with a sense of victory, he announced, ‘There, Sir, the sea is there!’

THOUGHTS PROMPTED BY ANNA HAZARE

My first posting as the head of a bank branch was in 1977. Kannur branch was located in the district headquarters. My home was in a village in the same district. Though it was just about fifteen kilometers away from the town where my branch was situated and it was possible to commute to work, I decided to take up residence in the town.

It turned out to be a luxury because the house was barely 200 meters from the branch and I could walk down home for lunch! The landlord, a retired civil servant, lived in the house in the next plot. His presence was a source of comfort and his graceful wife was good company for the young bride my wife was then.

On Saturday evenings, we would make off to my village and return only on Sunday evenings. That way we had the best of both worlds: urban life on working days and rural in weekends.

Hamza, a stocky ex-serviceman, was a customer of mine. His pension would arrive every month with unerring regularity on the first working day and he would withdraw the whole of it on the same day. Given the demands on his financial resources, the modest fixed deposit he had that represented his terminal benefits were under threat of doing a vanishing trick any moment.

One day I suggested to him that he should try his hand at supplementing his income – maybe he could buy a taxi car. He was still young. Those were the days when India made only two brands of cars and any intending purchaser had to register his intent and wait for, at times, as long as three years. A brand new Ambassador car cost Rs 50,000, and one had to pay Rs 2,500 for registration. Even though he could rustle up that sum, Hamza could not wait that long. His need was more urgent.

One day he came up with the idea of setting up a small scale industry. He would make pickles. Would I give a loan? I helped him with the formalities – registration and some clearances in the District Industries that would entitle him to a subsidy, exemption from sales tax and concessionary interest on loans. I sanctioned a loan of Rs 5,000 and thus was born ‘Perfect Pickles’.

The next Saturday, Bhawani and I locked up the house as usual and boarded the bus to my village. We returned the next evening. A little later, there was a knock at the door. It was Hamza, tired and drenched in sweat, with a bottle of pickle in either hand. They were old Horlicks bottles, with red plastic caps in place of the original the metallic ones. The bottles sported crude-looking but colourful labels with the word ‘Perfect’ spelt as ‘Prefect’!

‘This is from the first batch of pickles from my factory,’ he explained. ‘This is for you, Sir.’

Clause 29 Sub clause (iii) of the Officers’ Service Regulations flashed through my mind: ‘No officer shall demand or accept gifts of any nature, whether in cash or in kind, from a customer of the Bank, whether a depositor or borrower, or any person otherwise associated or has dealings with the Bank.’

I did not want to hurt this simpleton and told him, ‘I don’t care too much for pickles, that too ones where vinegar is an ingredient.’

His face fell. ‘But, sir, there might be someone in the family who would like it …’ he pleaded.

It was then that I recalled proviso (b) to Clause 29 Sub clause (iii) of the Officers’ Service Regulations which read, ‘Nothing contained in Clause 29 Sub clause (iii) supra will prohibit an Officer from receiving gifts of flowers and fruits and articles costing less than Rs 10.’ Glad that I had a straw to clutch at, I relaxed my standards of probity and accepted the jars.

Later in the day, as my wife and I were watering the plants in the garden, my landlord ambled along and told me, ‘This morning, someone had come looking for you.’ A balding, stocky man with a thick moustache. Description of the visitor’s appearance pointed to the fact that it was Hamza. ‘He said that he makes pickles, that you had sanctioned him a loan and that he was carrying a gift for you.’

My landlord was being polite. He was suggesting, without saying so, that the gist Hamza had carried for me was in fact a gratification for the loan I had sanctioned. I had nowhere to hide.

‘I told him you had gone to your village and were expected back only in the evening. He wanted to know where your home was and I told him. Koodali is where you live, right?’

‘That is my where my tarwad (ancestral home) is and several of my relatives live. We have built our home in Chalode, a few kilometers away.’

During our visit the next weekend, my grandmother told me, ‘Soon after you left last Sunday afternoon, someone had come looking for you. He said he was a pickle-maker to whom you had granted a loan. He wanted to gift you two jars of his product. I sent him back to Kannur.’ There was nothing I could do. Even my grandmother had come to know I was a party to the graft!

But then, if my landlord had told Hamza that I lived in Koodali, how did he reach Chalode? Obviously, he had first gone to Koodali, briefed everyone he had met there of his mission before being told that my home was in Chalode. The damage was complete: my reputation as a scamster had spread to the villages of Koodali and Chalode!

I was conspicuous by my absence at the Theyyam in our tarwad that year because I was afraid everyone I would meet there would tell me that they had seen a balding, stocky man with a thick moustache carrying two jars of pickles for me.

WHO BROKE IT?

I would give my right had for a crystal decanter, I confess. As I hold the gleaming beauty in my hands and pour the amber fluid into the crystal glass, pure joy fills my heart. I experience ethereal exhilaration as I hold it (even when it is not frosty and there are no bubbles that die crashing against the floating cubes of ice) and behold it. Dammit, I have a weakness for glass and ceramic ware.

So much so that I cannot resist the temptation to acquire these delicate objects. One of the collectibles I look for in any curio shop (The Cottage Industries Emporium on the Janpath in New Delhi, for instance) is glass or ceramic ware. The only collectible I bought in Brussels was a set of six aperitif glasses. The Japanese tea set my friend Sanjiv Saraf gifted me is one of my prized possessions. The effort I took to make sure that my Frankfurt purchase – a set of tumblers featuring the castles on the Rhine – reached India with no breakages could fill a page. The ‘dowry’ that my father-in-law gave me was over a hundred whiskey glasses, beer schooners and wine glasses of all shapes, sizes and descriptions. Thanks to the care we take in handling them, all of them have survived a 20000 km journey in several instalments from Calcutta to Trivandrum via Cannanore, Mumbai, Calicut, Patiala and Bhavagar and a dozen change of residences.

This fascination for the fragile materials, I guess, arises from the fact that glass was a novelty in my young days. Glass tumblers were rare. All liquid was served in bronze, brass or copper (and rarely, silver) tumblers. For some strange reason, however, the tumblers were called glasses!) I remember that my father used to refer to glass tumblers as ‘glass-inte glass’ in Malayalam (meaning ‘glass made of glass’). Apparently tautological, yes, but was there a better way to describe it in order to distinguish it from, say, a tumbler made of copper or bronze or the Johny-come-lately stainless steel?

Even if a household did possess some glass tumblers, they were kept on the topmost shelves in the storeroom – beyond the reach of children, servants, women and men – to be taken out only on those rare occasions when special guests were entertained. On such occasions, the man of the house would climb a stool and carefully bring down the precious objects one by one and entrust them to the care of one trusted member of the family. It was her responsibility to ensure that the delicate objects are handled with the care they deserve and immediately after use, restored to the not-easily-accessible safe spot they were originally in. Heaven forbid if one of them were to slip from your hand while being washed in soap before of after use. The question ‘Who broke it?’ would echo all over the house. It was never ‘How did it break?’ or ‘Are you hurt?’; it was always ‘Who broke it?’ as if the culprit had deliberately flung it against a wall with all the might at his command, driven by the express intention of smashing it into smithereens.

It was quite a different matter if the guest, his finger scalded by the exterior of the container containing the hot tea, coffee or other beverage (like Ovaltine or Horlicks or Boost) were to drop it. Camouflaging his upset, the host would tell the ‘criminal’, ‘Does not matter’ and direct someone to get a fresh supply and another to clean the floor, all the while cursing the offending guest under his breath for his misdemeanour.

Coming from a middleclass family, one of the first purchases I made for the family from my first salary was half a dozen glass tumblers. It cost me a princely sum of Rs 3. I remember them even today: all of them had a red rim and a red ring near the bottom end. There were three galloping horses painted on the side of the tumbler at equal distance from each other. The horses on one were all black; the second had yellow horses; the others were green, blue, white and brown. Quite kitschy, if you ask me today but in 1969, it was avant garde!

The shopkeeper had put them all in a carton made of corrugated paper. Each tumbler was wrapped in thin paper and placed in one of the six square compartments made by dividing the carton using three cardboard pieces. To prevent chipping or breaking during transit when one knocked against another, if one was placed upright, the ones next to it were thoughtfully inverted.

The entire family was around when I reached home. My father was at his desk, writing some accounts, I guess. I gave the packet to my mother. She unpacked it, everyone eager to see what was inside. No one knows what exactly happened – one of the tumblers was perhaps wrapped rather loosely in the thin paper; or in child-like expectation and anxiety, one of my siblings pushed my mother’s elbow; or – to cut a long story sort, one tumbler crashed to the ground.

Without raising his head from his accounts, my father asked, ‘Who broke it?’

WATCH IT!

Reams have been written about the way globalisation has transformed India in the two decades starting 1990 when the country, in a manner of speaking, gave up the socialist model and initiated a process of ‘market-oriented reforms’ which have ‘unbound’ India. The country has changed beyond recognition in less than a generation.

This is equally true of Chalode, my village, in the heart of Kannur District in north Kerala. If a modern day Rip van Winkle were to return to this hamlet, he would have lost his way. Twenty years back, Chalode was a no more than just a junction of two roads with a couple of shops. The tiled and latticed single-storeyed three-room building which was my school in the 1950’s is the Agricultural Development Office today. The weed-filled pond surrounded by trees has been filled and converted into a sprawling bus-stand bounded by a row of three-storeyed commercial complexes housing bakeries, eateries, textile shops, margin-free shops, medical shops, watch repairers, dental clinics, photo studios, internet cafes, driving schools and the like. (The use of plural nouns here is not a mistake; there ARE two or more of each, which serve the locality of 3 km radius which has perhaps no more than 1000 households.)

The cell in my wife’s watch needed replacement. We decided to take it to one of the watchmakers. My wife remembered that though the Titan watch I wear worked well, its crown had dropped off. Now that we are going there, let’s get is repaired, she said. I remembered that the cell of the watch a Sheikh had presented me with during one of my trips to Dubai too had died. I took that along. It was an expensive piece, a top brand, but it had been used sparingly, because I had reserved it for special occasions.

The shop was called TimeSonic, suggesting that apart from chronometers, he dealt with audio equipments as well. The absence of any audio equipments was surprising, but the mystery was soon explained: to a Malayalee who pronounces both ‘s’ and ‘z’ in an identical manner, TimeZone is the same as TimeSone and hence TimeSonic.

Shamnad, the young man in charge of the one-man show in this hole-in-the-wall of a shop was quick: he replaced the cells in the ladies’ watch and the Sheikh’s present without much ado. He said replacement of the crown of the Titan watch would take some time. Would we pick it up the next evening? He would give me a receipt for the Titan he was holding over.

As he was writing out the receipt, he made a casual enquiry.

‘Is the other watch up or sale?’

I answered that the thought had not crossed my mind. Nevertheless, I enquired, ‘How much do you think it will fetch?’

‘I have no idea,’ he said, ‘but will find out if you want.’ A little later, he asked me tentatively, ‘How much did you buy it for, sir?’

Having not paid for it, I did not know the price. However, I did not want to tell him that it was a gift. ‘It was bought years back, I don’t recall how much I had paid,’ I told him.

‘If you are selling it, Sir, please let me know,’ he requested.

Nodding, I took delivery of the other two watches after paying for the cells . The bill for the Titan watch would be settled after the job was done.

As we were walking out, he asked, ‘Sir, can I have your phone number, please?’

‘Why? I’ll pick it up tomorrow during my evening stroll. I’m in no hurry. Even if I do not come tomorrow, you need not call me.’

‘It’s not for that. Just in case you decide to sell it …’

The next evening I went to pick up my Titan. After the bill was settled, Shamnad said, ‘That watch … I made some enquiries, Sir. It is not as expensive as all that…’

‘That’s fine.’ I replied.

As I got out of the shop, Shamnad’s voice could still be heard, ‘Still, if you are selling it …’

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

My niece’s daughter was being christened. The function, held in my mother’s house, was followed by a vegetarian lunch.

As I got up after the hearty meal, my uncle who was sitting opposite me looked at the plantain leaf I had eaten from and remarked, ‘You have left nothing behind. A clean leaf – like your grandfather’s used to be.’

Waste not, want not. Yes, that was something my grandfather had taught us – not to waste a morsel of food. ‘There are thousands who have to sleep on a hungry stomach; it is criminal to waste food,’ he used to say. He would eat every bit of what was served – curry leaves and chillies included – and leave an absolutely clean leaf behind. That he was a strict vegetarian, of course, helped. The only giveaway sign that it was a used leaf would be the change in the tint in the green caused by the hot rice scalding the leaf.

All of us in our family have imbibed this respect for food. We are sad that at parties and feasts, even buffets, many throw away a lot of food. When serving ourselves, we take only what we can have, no more. We consume what we are served, all of it.

This has caused us some amount of embarrassment. At times, a guest may keep away a piece of brinjal they do not particularly relish, or leave behind some rice in the plate, to be thrown away. We used to pray that this indiscretion escapes our eight-year old son Hari’s notice, for, he would frown and, in all innocence, ask, ‘Why are you wasting that?’ and may be follow it up with a stern ‘Eat it up!’

Honestly, there have been a few rare occasions when I too had to throw away food. I have never been able to like sarson-da-saag and makke-di-roti, it, despite my five-year stint in Punjab. Any self-respecting Punjabi would bet his shirt on that, to them, is a delectable combination. I guess you have to cultivate a taste for it, like you do for beer or alcohol, which I have not been able to (I mean the sarson-da-saag and makke-di-roti, not the beverages in question) despite my being served these in several homes.

The hospitable hosts would proudly serve their well-known delicacy and top it with scoops of butter. As the butter melted in the hot deep green saag and floated in it, my thoughts would go back to the hot black coffee into which castor oil had been poured. (For the uninitiated, this abominable concoction was the medicine in the village homes in my boyhood for de-worming the intestines.) With that vision, do you think sarson-da-saag would go down the throat that easily?

The hostess, obviously unaware of the connection, nay psychological association, between butter-on-saag and castor oil-on-coffee, would lovingly serve huge helpings of the delicacy, much to my discomfiture, prod me, ‘Chakh lo, ji, changa haiga, khub pasand aavega.’ I had no choice other than throwing it away when the hosts were not looking.

The other was the tinde-ki-subzi they used to serve for lunch on Wednesdays and dinner on Saturdays in the YMCA Hostel in Chowringhee, Calcutta. The menu was unalterably fixed. If it is maachher jhhol for lunch, it is Sunday. If it was Friday, there would be chana daal and aalu poshto for dinner. The joke doing the rounds was that it was easier to get the Constitution of India amended, compared to the YMCA menu.

The footman allotted to the residents of the four rooms in the wing which my room formed a part of was Gaurang Prasad, a man from District Chhapra in Bihar. Fair-skinned, tall and lean, he looked different from and spoke a different Hindi/Bengali than the other footmen. Later on I came to know that all the other footmen were from East Bengal. Not just that, Gaurang told me one Sunday morning while polishing my shoes, they are all ‘Mussulmans’, while he was a Hindu. ‘See their names: Alam, Altaf, Rahman, Murad, …’ Not that it mattered to me one bit!

To get back to tinde-ki-subzi. On the occasions it was made and served, after placing the bowl of soup before me at the dining table, Gaurang would tell me, in sing-song fashion, ‘Sir, aaj tinde-ki-subzi hai’ and look into my eyes mischievously, knowing well that I do not like tinda one bit. Gaurang was considerate, though. The astute Man Friday had discovered my weakness for the chutney made of dried ripe mango which went well with roti. He would take away the bowl containing the contentious tinde-ki-subzi and get me a generous helping of the chutney. Not once did he offer me the chutney before serving the unwanted dish and singing his lilting ‘Sir, aaj tinde-ki-subzi hai’, looking into my eyes and taking the bowl away.

That was perhaps his method of driving the point home that I was being granted a special dispensation, implying that the gesture deserved to be reciprocated when giving him his monthly baksheesh.

OF CARROTS AND RABBITS

Hearing my Punjabi, my Sardarji colleague exclaimed, ‘Sirf tinn mainnaanv vich tussi Punjabi sikh li!’ (You picked up Punjabi in barely three months!) This was not a solitary instance: in a month of my reaching Calcutta, I could read Bengali and about two months later, I was able to understand every bit of the conversation I overheard in trams and buses. Ditto with Marathi which I acquired a smattering of while working in Mumbai and and Gujarati during my short stint in Bhavnagar.

It had not always been so. I guess it was the survival instinct that made me ‘acquire’ languages, to use a nascent expression. I was plucked from the village where I had lived all the eighteen years of my life I had never left and transplanted in the heartland Hindi, left to fend for myself. When you are placed in alien surroundings where another tongue is spoken, you have no alternative.

Not that I did not learn Hindi at school. It was part of the curriculum, but those were the days when Hindi was making its stealthy entry into the schools in South Indian states as an ‘additional language’. It was almost like drawing, drill or music where there were classes, but you had no exam. Except that for Hindi, you had to write the exam, but no passing marks had been prescribed.

Even my father who was a Martinet and was the type that would ask, ‘What happened to that 3%?’ instead of complimenting you on scoring 97% in Mathematics, permitted some leeway in the case of Hindi. And, I happily took advantage of it. The result was that my prowess over the national language was not equal to the demands that Jabalpur made on me.

Our Hindi teacher was a tall man with a lean and hungry look like Cassius according to Julius Caesar. He was always clad in spotless white khadi. The first thing you would notice about his was the eight black buttons on his shirt which would reach his knees, giving rise to the nickname ‘Ettu-button-ji’. It was actually ‘Ettu-button’ to begin with, but the ji was added in true Hindi style to reflect the ‘respect’.

One of the first lessons in the book in Class IX was the fable of the hare and tortoise. The homework included writing five sentences each about hares and tortoises. An earlier lesson was about vegetables and I was familiar with the word ‘Gaajar’ (carrots). I decided to bring this knowledge of mine in completing the assignment and wrote ‘Gaajar khargosh khaata hai’ - what I thought was the equivalent of ‘Rabbits eat carrots’. Little knowing that I had in my enthusiasm interchanged the subject and the object, I placed my composition book (A thing of the past!) on the table in the Teachers’ Room.

In the next Hindi class, the revered teacher motioned to me to stand up and asked me to correct the sentence ‘Gaajar khargosh khaata hai’. I thought I had confused between Gaajar and Tarbooj (watermelon) and corrected it as ‘Tarbooj khargosh khaata hai’, to the great merriment of my classmates. I knew I had bungled and hastily corrected it to ‘Gaajar tarbooj khaata hai’ whence I went to ‘Khargosh tarbooj khaata hai’ to ‘Tarbooj gaajar khaata hai’. By then the class was in splits, with yours truly providing undiluted innocent entertainment.

Though I had not learnt the Theory of Permutations and Combinations yet, that was when its limitless possibilities revealed themselves to me. For the sake of records, let me add that the factually correct ‘Khargosh gaajar khaata hai ’ too issued out of my mouth at some point, but I was not sure it was right and in any case, it was drowned in mirthful cacophony.

Thank god for small mercies: I had not come across the word ‘kharbooja’ (Melon). If I had, instead of 3P2 = 6 permutations, there would have been 4P2 = 12 and the entertainment would have been twice as much!

The story has a happy ending: during my stint in Jabalpur, I picked up a good deal of Hindi and even developed interest in ghazals, sher, shaayri, nazm and khayaal, something I cherish even today.

Keep off the Grass

When my son came home on a holiday about six months back, he left behind his copy of ‘Keep off the Grass’ by Karan Bajaj. I promptly picked it up and kept it safe in my bookshelf with absolutely no intention of reading it, dismissing it as a clone of Chetan Bhagat’s ‘Five Point Someone’, an IIM version of the IIT experience described in the latter. Not that I did not like ‘Five Point Someone’. I just thought ‘Keep off the Grass’ must yet be another campus book. (Like chicklit, is campuslit a genre yet?)

Having read it now, I realize that nothing could have been farther from the truth.

The other day I undertook a train journey and took that paperback along. I found it engaging reading and laced with great humour.

It is about Samrat Ratan, a Yale valedictorian (That word was new to me, though I did know the words ‘valediction’ and ‘valedictory’) and a hotshot investment banker earning half a million in Wall Street, fed up with the money hungry, power hungry environment. It is not in his scheme of things to ‘bust your ass off become a millionaire by thirty’. He decides to quit and find solace from his restless and unsatisfactory life. Yearning for some soul searching, he decides to visit India where he hopes to return to his ‘roots’ and find the answers to his questions. The route he takes is rather unusual – he enrolls himself for his PGDBM at IIM Bangalore.

The book is seriously funny, if you get what I mean. Once the first semester begins, the protagonist realizes that the competitive atmosphere in Wall Street continues to chase him in the IIM. He cannot cope with the assignments and the uncountable quizzes. He develops addiction to marijuana (grass) and this tells on his academic accomplishments. His self-esteem and self-confidence plummet. He hates the mess that he has got himself into and begins to question his decision to come to India, and wonders whether his search will yield him any fruit at all.

Comparisons with ‘Five Point Someone’ are inescapable. In ‘Keep off the Grass’ too, the hero has two classmates (Vinod Singh who is a Kargil warrior and Shine Sarkar who is an IITian) as his partners in all he does. All three share a contempt for the inhuman nature of the rat-race, and often feel alienated in it. The book raises some basic questions which haunt us every day.

Samrat is on a search, but he doesn’t quite know what he is looking for. His quirky quest for self-discovery takes him on a rickety, potholed ride through Bangalore, Jaisalmer, Dharamshala and Benares. The roller-coaster takes him to places, plights and people he had not prepared himself for. Like a night in the prison, for example or getting inducted to Vipassana meditation, having sex with a Danish hippie in the Himalayas, hanging out with a cannibal on the banks of the Ganga, and peddling soap to the formidable Raja Bhaiya in Benares.

What I liked most about the book is the odd one-liner Bajaj throws in: questioning the government’s ban of narcotics, Sarkar observes, ‘It's like me wanting to make potatoes illegal because I don't like their taste’. When asked ‘Any questions?’ at the end of a talk, Samrat wants to ask, ‘Yes, I have one question, can you please tell me where I can score some marijuana in Mumbai?’ And another is the way the chapters conclude. Words from the last sentence of each chapter form the title of the next – it is a continuum.

I did not quite care for the liberal dose of philosophy, though indulging in which, I thought was not consistent with the protagonist’s age (just as not liking it does not quite suit mine!)

I would not say this is a masterpiece but it is definitely worth a read. If you are a twenty-something like my son, you will realize that the questions which come to you at this age frequently (What do i want to do in life? Is this the right thing to do? Why should I do it? And many others) occur to everyone. If you are a sixty-something like me, it will give you a keener insight into the minds of your kids and you will realize why they do what they do. In either case, it tugs at a personal chord.

One reason I liked ‘Keep off the Grass’ must be that Karan Bajaj acts as my spokesman. For, as he makes Vinod say, ‘Books give you a funny kind of solace, that you are not alone, and someone, somewhere thinks exactly like you, and articulates it better.’ Read it with an open mind, you will definitely enjoy it.