Tales from bygone days

I have been going voraciously (all over again!) through the priceless works of James Herriot while simultaneously watching the once-famous TV-series All Creatures Great and Small on youtube – someday there will be a blogpost on these themes too – and wondering how he did it: how he remembered all those quirky little details from more than twenty five years ago and wove them together into such fascinating tales. I have thousands of little memories too, but they don’t hang together to make whole and meaningful stories! Which is why I feel so uncomfortable when Pupu goads me to start writing them down. In order to make me hunker down and get on with it, she even took the trouble to write out a short list of anecdotes she has herself heard and enjoyed over the years. So let me see if I can make something out of it…

Our department of  Economics at Jadavpur University has always harboured more than a fair share of nutcases. Some arrived that way, some went round the bend over the years. The reasons were many and various. For a few, at least, it was burning too much of the midnight oil that did it. One of my own classmates used to photocopy whole books as soon as any professor wrote out a list of recommendations, and assiduously stored the ever-growing pile in a special room, resolved to start reading them all together in the last few months of the undergraduate course (today’s pampered semester-oriented kids won’t be able to imagine this, but we had to read the entire course for the final examination at the end of the third year). We watched her with growing alarm, and then the inevitable happened: when the terrible finals were knocking at the door, we heard that she had attempted the impossible, suffered a nervous breakdown, and been forced to give the exams the go-by for that year. And I remember a senior, bearded and nice and wild-eyed, mild-mannered but evidently never all there – pity I have forgotten his name – who manfully struggled through the written part of the master’s finals, but lost it during the interview. We were loitering in the sun-drenched corridor, chatting about what was waiting for us, when one of the professors on the interview board rushed out, looking more harried than we had ever seen him before, and begged some of us to go in and rescue him (or maybe them from him). Apparently he had already been on a knife edge when the interview began, somehow answered one or two questions sensibly, but then blown a fuse: on hearing the third question he had gone into a sort of trance, and when the profs, imagining that he had either fallen asleep or was unable to answer, tried to prod him a bit, he had started rocking vigorously in his chair with a leery expression on his face, all the while chanting in a sing-song voice ‘jani kintu bolbo na, jani kintu bolbo na’ (I know, but I won’t tell you)! We had to coax him gently out and take him home. Heaven knows what eventually happened to him. How’s that for a little story?

I have heard Richard Castle yell after his teenage daughter going out for a late evening in the city with friends, ‘Don’t do anything that I would have done!’ I understand his feelings exactly, because over and over again I have done horrible things which make me shiver now when I remember them, and there is no doubt at all in my mind that I survived only because my guardian angel knew that I was destined to die another day. You have already read Fool in the sea on this blog, I suppose: here are three more that I can vividly recall.

During those college days, I often travelled from Kolkata to Durgapur by ‘local’ trains to save money, but whenever I felt like splurging, I took either the Black Diamond Express at dawn or the Howrah-Asansol (now Agniveena) Express in the evening. I have lost count of how many times I travelled on those trains, but a few trips I do remember. There was this one morning when I was coming home on the Black Diamond. It goes without saying that I had boarded a second class unreserved coach, and it was chock full of passengers, many of them with mountains of luggage, trunks and holdalls and all. A few minutes before the train would enter Durgapur station, I had jostled my way through the crowd towards the door opposite the platform: I had hardly any luggage, and I figured, young and lithe and silly as I was, that jumping off the train on to the tracks would help me get off much faster than fighting through so many people on to the platform. As luck would have it, I was leaning from the door, not even bothering to hold on to a rod or handle, when someone from behind, pushing his way ahead with an enormous tin trunk in tow, shoved me hard with it in the back of my knee. You know how the leg buckles involuntarily when you are hit like that? Well, the next moment I had crashed down on the adjacent railway line, and as a hue and cry went up on the platform opposite, there I was on my back, looking up dazedly at the sky, time seemed to have stopped, and the wheels, one after another in endless succession, were clattering past me, inches from my right hand. I got off with nothing worse than a few bruises and feeling like an idiot, but it isn’t the kind of memory that is easily erased.

There was a certain year – probably 1983, when I was twenty – when I suffered from carbuncles all over my body, from the bottom of a lower eyelid to a knee. Seven or nine in all, I forget. God, the way they hurt and bled, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Some of them were eventually cured by pills, a few were excised by doctors under local anesthesia, but one of them, the one on my left hip, I tackled myself alongwith a friend. I remember it had been giving me no end of trouble (I used to carry a cushion to college to sit on, and it frequently turned red by the time I came home – deucedly embarrassing, even if you discount the pain and the inconvenience) – and late one night, after we had been drinking heavily, we decided to get rid of it ourselves. Believe it or not, all we did was to numb the area with an icecube, put a pad of rubber between my teeth, and used nothing more than the scissors, scalpel and tweezers from a ‘biology box’, if you know the sort of thing, all perfunctorily dipped in boiling water and swabbed with Dettol. We scraped the whole ghastly thing out, while I screamed bloody murder at my friend the surgeon, then we lapped on a lot of Nebasulf powder on the gaping wound (not even stitches, because neither of us was confident enough with a needle and thread), put a rough bandage on it, drank some more and fell asleep. Next morning 90 per cent of the horrid pain was gone. I did take a Tetvac injection and a massive dose of antibiotics afterwards, but I don’t think any physician would recommend the process, unless you are on the battlefield, or have been bitten by a poisonous snake amidst some wilderness. And I most certainly wouldn’t like to do it again.

The same year – or perhaps it was the next – I made a holiday trip to Barajamda with an elderly friend. A young cousin of his lived there, working for Durgapur Steel Plant at the local iron and manganese mines. The tiny town is located on the Odisha-Jharkhand border, and can be reached either from Chakradharpur or Rourkela. It is (or at least was then-) surrounded by dense forests teeming with wildlife and tribal people, mainly Ho and Santhals. Look it up on google maps if you will; it is a stone’s throw from hamlets with interesting names like Bolani, Barbil, Gua, Kiriburu and Meghataburu; the Simlipal Wildlife Park is not too far away. One day the cousin, who was only a few years older than me, took me on a motorbike trip to the little town of Noamundi across the Saranda forest. The Tatas have been running an iron mine there since pre-independence days, and they have a nice club on a hilltop which DSP officers sometimes used as a watering hole. We enjoyed ourselves rather too long, so the shadows were lengthening when we set off for the return trip, and we were only halfway through the forest when it became pitch dark. And I mean that literally: townsfolk will never know what real darkness means. When my friend stopped for a few minutes and switched off the headlamp, I couldn’t see my hand before my face; and when he switched the light on again, we saw a long queue of tribals, both men and women, black as ebony, wicker baskets and axes slung on their shoulders, returning on foot from the day’s work in such uncanny silence that you had to rub your eyes to make sure you were not seeing things, their eyes glowing in the light like those of any wild animal’s. Eerie feeling, I can tell you.

So anyway, by the time we had reached the edge of the forest and could see some lights twinkling in the valley beyond, we had to stop, because I was desperate to relieve myself. My friend had barely turned off the engine when he heard a muffled noise very like a sneeze, and whispered, ‘What was that?’ but I was already heading towards a large boulder by the roadside. Then there was this truly heart-stopping moment when the boulder got up and started lumbering towards me, as tall as I was and three times as wide. Brother Bruin, probably drunk on mohwa or shivering with a malarial fever, had been dozing when our approach had rudely awakened him, and he didn’t like my intention one bit. He wanted to take a swipe at me, I guess, but I didn’t wait to find out. My friend only yelled ‘Suvro, bhalook, pala!’ (run, it’s a bear) kickstarted the bike and zoomed off, leaving me running desperately after him with nary a backward glance. Usain Bolt would have been hard put to catch me that day. The biker stopped only after he had gone almost a kilometre, and a truck was coming up the other way. You can imagine how I swore at him, but all he said was that in such circumstances it’s always every man for himself. I have never forgotten that lesson.

Just a few of the rather extreme things that have happened to me, but they might give you an idea why, like Harry at the end of Book Seven, I have had enough thrills to last a lifetime. 

Back to poetry

হায় রে রাজধানী পাষাণকায়া!

বিরাট মুঠিতলে  চাপিছে দৃঢ়বলে 

ব্যাকুল বালিকারে, নাহিকো মায়া। 

......

দেবে না ভালোবাসা, দেবে  না আলো। 

সদাই মনে হয় আঁধার ছায়াময় 

দিঘির সেই জল শীতল কালো,

তাহারি কোলে গিয়ে মরণ ভালো। 

I have been reading Tagore deeply again. The above is an extract from the poem titled Bodhu, The Bride, and tells of the existential angst of a very young, newly-married girl whom marriage has transported to a prison called the metropolis.

I was not a girl, and I was not married in childhood, and I grew up in a small town, neither a village nor a great city. Yet when I read the poem first at about the girl's age, it resonated with enormous power with something in my soul. Barring a few short snatches, and the first three years of bringing up my child, my mood has reverted again and again to the way this girl felt, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago.

Perhaps no one less than Tagore can understand. In his youth he wrote

 মরণ, তুঁহুঁ মম শ্যাম সমান, O Death, You are the beloved Lord,

 and yet, when he was on his deathbed, he dictated 

দিবসের শেষ সূর্য 

শেষ প্রশ্ন উচ্চারিল পশ্চিম সাগরতীরে,

কে তুমি -

পেল না উত্তর। 

As Emily Dickinson wrote, 'through a riddle, in the end, sagacity must go'.

and meanwhile, for the rest of us,

যদিও সন্ধ্যা আসিছে মন্দ মন্থরে,
সব সংগীত গেছে ইঙ্গিতে থামিয়া,
যদিও সঙ্গী নাহি অনন্ত অম্বরে,
যদিও ক্লান্তি আসিছে অঙ্গে নামিয়া,
মহা আশঙ্কা জপিছে মৌন মন্তরে,
দিক-দিগন্ত অবগুন্ঠনে ঢাকা
........

উর্ধ আকাশে তারাগুলি মেলি অঙ্গুলি
ইঙ্গিত করি তোমা পানে আছে চাহিয়া,
নিম্নে গভীর অধীর মরণ উচ্ছলি
শত তরঙ্গে তোমা পানে ওঠে ধাইয়া;
......
ওরে ভয় নাই, নাই স্নেহমোহবন্ধন;
ওরে আশা নাই, আশা শুধু মিছে ছলনা,
...
আছে শুধু পাখা, আছে মহা নভ-অঙ্গন
ঊষা-দিশাহারা নিবিড়-তিমির আঁকা -
ওরে বিহঙ্গ, ওরে বিহঙ্গ মোর,
এখনি, অন্ধ, বন্ধ করো না পাখা।    

Musing in early winter

Winter is in the air. The breeze is balmy, the sky is blue, the nights are getting long and chilly, it’s ever so much nicer to sleep.

Pupu asked, ‘Baba, why don’t you start writing stories again?’ Indeed, I have been wondering why the wellspring dried up more than a decade ago. As for stories from my own bygone days, I tell them impromptu without conscious effort, but when I sit down at the keyboard to write them down, they don’t come back to me. Maybe some of my readers will help to jog my memory?

Passing reflection: While driving around my town these days, it often strikes me that 90% of the creatures jaywalking or zooming around on bikes and posing a very nasty threat to public safety weren’t even born when I started teaching thirty years ago. Look at this article in my newspaper today (Ei Samay, November 05, 2017). Are you one of those who would shed a passing tear over the lost lives, or would you, like me, mutter ‘the more, the merrier’? My only concern, I am sure, is for all those luckless non-insane drivers and pedestrians on the roads whom these monsters endanger. When will the type be finally chased off the streets and highways, I wonder?

I looked up my twitter account after more than a year today. I never post anything on it, yet there are 126 ‘followers’ there. Heaven knows what they are ‘following’! And most of them haven’t ever got directly in touch with me for ages.

I am writing in my classroom, even as a lot of teenagers are quietly answering a test around me. How many years, how many batches have passed this way! Those who were bubbly kids are dull parents now; I thank my lucky stars that I can still hold the current crop’s interest much better than most people of my age can. It’s not just a romantic thing: they bring me my bread and butter. Some wise old advisors had expressed most solicitous concern about who would come to my tuitions if I quit my schoolmaster’s job. I am glad I have been able to lay their worries to rest.

It is not easy to keep many youngsters in a bunch interested, believe me – and that too with something as ‘boring and burdensome’ as studies, without being ‘cool and fun’ most of the time, day after day, year after year, for decades together, with a reputation for having a ferocious temper on a short fuse. Try it sometime. With me, the same parents who are so desperate to get their kids in here begin to grumble at some point about why those kids are so eager to come here even during vacations and school exams, and why they pay so much attention to things I say. One of the strongest reasons, I suspect, why those parents cut off all connections with me as soon as the ‘course is covered’. Most old teachers become brutes or bores, and it’s very hard not to. School- and college teachers survive only because their jobs are protected, whereas with private tutors, who are being ‘tested’ by every new batch, reputations soar, stagnate and then collapse within fairly short cycles: before my own eyes, many of them have sunk back into obscurity within twenty years or less. It is very hard and slow work to build up a reputation; keeping it is harder. These kids were born in late 2001 or early 2002. Those who were admitted to my classes then had already heard of me as a fairly ‘old’ and irascible teacher, then they discovered me. Now these kids are about to leave, and the children who are coming in next were born to the generation that passed through my classes in the early and mid-90s. It feels strange to think about how the kids of 2030 are going to regard me, if I am around and at it still. They’d be born of those who left my classes between 2000 and 2005!

A friend of mine, a doctor, keeps trying to build one successful hospital after another of which he can be the absolute boss. I was never so materially ambitious – I might even call myself too lazy for that sort of thing. I like my leisure too much, I strongly dislike being harried and worried, I prefer not to be beholden to a lot of people (as you invariably become if you want to make it even halfway big in business or politics), I have lived a large part of my life in the dreamy mode and greatly enjoyed it. But I have found to my own satisfaction that I am good with young people, so I might have done well for myself if I could set up a full-scale boarding school. Ah well, dreams, dreams...

I have been re-reading some of my old blogposts, and, in connection with everything that I have written about the kind of amoral capitalism that is currently rampant all over the world and the need for a new socio-political paradigm, as well as the sheer evil of growing economic inequality all over the world, I am smiling wryly to myself to see how an economist – Thomas Piketty – has suddenly become a bestseller with his Capital in the 21^st century, which has not only pinned down said inequality as an incontrovertible fact, but also condemned it as an unmitigated, and quite avoidable, evil. Of course, like everything else these days it is entirely likely to be forgotten soon as a passing sensation, but at least an issue very close to my heart has for a little while found a place in the sun. And there is no harm in hoping that the world might actually sit up and do something about it, with a little more consequence than the launch of iPhone 49.

One supreme lesson that life has taught me is that humans hardly if ever learn to strike a balance in anything. We forever only keep swinging from one insane extreme to another. I noted this first in writing when I was drafting My Master’s Word in late 1993, and the lesson has only been driven deeper by all I have seen in the last quarter century. So in reaction to the likes of Richard Dawkins come movements like the Taliban and ISIS, and I greatly fear that in reaction to the era of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos we shall have the era of Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot all over again. To use Conrad’s telling phrase, we only have a choice of nightmares. Perhaps the poet was right: always the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

I have been reading a lot of serious books lately. Shashi Tharoor’s recent work, An Era of Darkness, was truly impressive: you would have to be as obtuse as Niall Ferguson ever to claim again that the British Empire was at all good for India. It hurts, though, because I belong to that breed, maybe long outmoded, who really thought well of the British for a very long time, and still cannot stop admiring them for a lot of things they did worldwide. Maybe, Tharoor would say, it is so only because I was lucky to be born among the privileged classes, and so we never had to face the full horrid brunt of colonial exploitation. Another recent work, Churchill’s Secret War by Madhusree Mukherjee, has also likewise made me very ambivalent about a supposedly great man. I never went to the extreme of regarding Sir Winston Churchill as the ‘greatest Briton of all time’ (only an ass could say that, someone who had never heard of Shakespeare and Newton); I had always thought that with regard to his attitude towards Gandhi he was not only nasty but ignorant and petty-minded, but at least I always admired him deeply as a magnificent writer, a supreme master of English prose. But this book pretty convincingly demonstrates ( and I have read things like this before) that Churchill was almost personally responsible for killing off nearly three million poor and helpless people through the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, not because he couldn’t help it, but essentially because he liked the prospect, seeing that he thought of Indians (or rather, specifically Hindus, the majority of the population) as ‘a beastly people with a beastly religion’ who dared to challenge the authority of the one thing he loved and adored, the British Empire. Indeed, he lived long enough to admit that he had been wrong about them, but only in private, and the monstrous wrong was done and no amends were ever made about it (somebody, says Tharoor, has estimated that Britain owes India at least three trillion US dollars). I suppose by the time I die, I shall not have too many heroes left.

In the newspaper two days ago, I read this article about a young dance teacher somewhere in my own town lamenting that these days kids don’t seriously want to learn anything, and in this they are wholly supported by their parents, whose only ‘ambition’ is to make their children ‘famous’ overnight, if only by getting up to ‘perform’ (the word now reminds me of circus animals only) on the stage at the neighbourhood pujo. To think that Shakespeare wrote about young people chasing the ‘bubble reputation’ so long ago! What would he have said about us?

Yes, I know I have been rambling. So I had better sign off here before you get really exasperated. On the other hand, if you liked reading till this point, let me know, will you?