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.