Weeping Carrots

A hot, sultry evening in 1997. It is the annual day of the pre-primary section of the school. The auditorium is packed with proud parents watching indulgently as their children parade their skills in singing, dancing, and story-telling. The pièce de résistance is a pantomime put up by the kids, in which they act out the part of various vegetables.

Each vegetable is supposed to come dancing to the stage, introduce itself, and extol its virtues; I am full of carbohydrates, I am good for the eyes, for protein you have to eat me, and so on. Finally, all the vegetables come together holding hands and dance in a circle, emphasising how all of them are equally important for proper nourishment and good health.

The pantomime begins and the four-year-olds suddenly find themselves the centre of attention. While some take to their new-found celebrity status like ducks to water, a few are standing rooted to their spots, paralyzed by fear. There are sprightly tomatoes and terrified cabbages. Confident aubergines and sulking pumpkins. Prancing okras and stricken shallots. Potatoes disoriented by the powerful stage lights and teary-eyed beans wilting in the heat.

Two carrots come on stage, a boy and a girl. The girl carrot, already a nervous wreck, sees her parents and grandparents seated in the front row, forgets her lines and promptly breaks into tears. “Appa...” she cries, holding out both hands and beseeching her father to rescue her from this terrible situation. Some of the other vegetables, already on stage, snigger wickedly, especially the yam and the snake gourd. The drumstick and the bitter gourd are also equally mean and the situation is rapidly spinning out of control.

It is left to the boy carrot to save the situation. Showing admirable panache for one so young, he comes up to the mike and putting up both hands on his hips, looks at his fellow-carrot and the audience in turn and announces with a regret-tinged smile: “Arey, yeh gaajar to ro rahi hai!”

The entire audience collapses in helpless laughter.

Yesterday. A hot sultry evening and we are sitting in the same auditorium waiting for the function to begin. It is the farewell function for the outgoing Class 10 students. The carrots and the beans and the other vegetables have all grown up to become self-confident, personable young men and women and it is such a pleasure to just look at them. Most of the batch has managed to stay in the same school and have grown together and the ties of friendship and camaraderie that bind them together seem even stronger than ever before.

I sigh and wonder how quickly time passes.

Picture Courtesy: www.growingyourownveg.com

The Biscuit tin Rider

During the summer vacation months of April and May, the buses which plied the route from Bombay to Mangalore ran full. Without booking at least a month in advance, it was impossible to get a seat on any of them.

One hot summer day in May, I find myself stranded in Mangalore without a ticket to Bombay. Lugging my suitcase, with sweat trickling down my spine, I visit the tiny offices of all the major bus operators for a seat on a bus leaving that night, only to be turned away every time. No seats are available. All buses are totally booked out.

Finally, the booking clerk in one of the offices offers me a biscuit tin.

“Sorry?” I don’t understand what the man is talking about.

The booking clerk patiently explains to me since the bus is completely full, he cannot offer me a seat of course, but he can place a tall biscuit tin in the aisle, provided I was willing to undertake the 24 hours travel sitting on top of that biscuit tin. Normal charges would apply, he adds for good measure.

Such was my desperation that I agreed and forked out the money.

Only when I boarded the bus did I realise that I was not the only “biscuit tin rider” on the bus. The intrepid bus operator had ensnared three other unfortunate souls besides me and there was not one, but four biscuit tins in the aisle, placed at strategic intervals.

Although years have passed, even today I can think of that journey only as a metaphor for sheer physical agony. By the time the bus stopped in a roadside restaurant in Kundapur for a short break a few hours later, my back was on fire. Somewhere along that long night, I guess I became inured to the pain but the pangs of regret and jealousy I had felt seeing the other passengers leaned back in their seats in quiet slumber, were enough to keep me awake the whole night.

Talk about the kindness of strangers, relief came the next day morning when a passenger offered to exchange his seat with me for the biscuit tin for an hour. I was touched by this gesture and told him I couldn’t possibly accept his generous offer. Fortunately he insisted and very soon my protestations sounded too feeble even to myself.

Ah! The sheer pleasure of sinking into a proper seat and allowing your inflamed back some much-needed succour!

Believe me, it is in moments such as these one starts contemplating the possibility of God and such other weighty philosophical issues.

Photo Courtesy: www.columbuspolarity.com

Video Nights in Belgaum

The other attraction in taking a “luxury coach” from Bombay to Mangalore was that most of these buses had a video player and colour television and showed at least three movies during the journey. This was during the early ’80s, when most middle-class Indian households had not even a colour TV to boast of, let alone a video player. So there was something incredibly satisfying and romantic at the prospect of leaning back in your seat and watching a movie as the bus negotiated the dangerous hairpin curves of Bor Ghat or as it sped swiftly through the deepening night along the Konkan coast.

The videotapes were invariably pirated camera prints of the latest Hindi film releases. Since the whole process of making a camera print involves someone sitting with a clandestine video camera in a projection room, most likely with the connivance of the projectionist, or even in some undetected corner of the movie hall, and videotaping a movie when it is actually being screened in a theatre, one could hear applause and catcalls in the background and see the back of some of the viewers’ heads as they got up from their seats and made their way across the aisle for a smoke or a toilet break.

The prints were grainy and the colours were awful. The soundtrack, often stepped up for maximum volume for the benefit of the viewers at the back of the bus, screeched painfully and reverberated within the confines of the bus, making sleep nearly impossible.

The passengers took these minor inconveniences in their stride and grumbled good-naturedly and without malice and sat stoically through the movies.

Not that there was no respite, of course. The movie timings were more or less fixed and rest of the time you could sleep or daydream or look out of the window. The first movie started once the bus had left the choked suburbs of Sion and Chembur behind and got onto the Eastern Express Highway to Pune and beyond. The second movie was put on around 3 pm which got over nicely in time for Belgaum and Hotel Ramdev. The third and final movie, which I seldom got around to watching for obvious reasons, was screened around 9 pm and finished close to midnight.

Sometimes you were lucky enough to catch a really good movie from an original print instead of a pirated one. One such movie which I saw on such a bus journey was Mere Apne, which also marked the directorial debut of a man called Gulzar.

Photo Courtesy: bp1.blogger.com

A Bus to Mangalore

Not exactly the right time for a light-hearted post, but God knows, all of us deserve a break from the sustained grief and melancholy of the past few days. Forgive me, if you find the levity of this post inappropriate.

There was a time when I used to travel quite frequently between Bombay and Mangalore. This was before the Konkan Railway had opened, when trains from western India had to make their way down south close to Madras, go transverse, and then loop back up along the Kerala coastline, to reach Mangalore. It was a journey that took close to 48 hours and was guaranteed to test your patience and physical endurance.

A quicker alternative was to take one of the so-called “luxury coaches” from Bombay to Mangalore. It was less comfortable than the train, confined as you were to your cramped seat for a whole day and night, but had the advantage that it cut the journey time by almost half.

There were many operators plying this commercially-lucrative route and, I suspect, they continue to flourish even today. Most services from Bombay were either early in the evening or late at night. But I preferred the morning buses for a particular reason and it was called Hotel Ramdev.

The morning buses reached the half-way point of Belgaum around seven in the evening and halted at that excellent hotel for a whole hour. Now Ramdev, catering as they did to the weary traveller, had a well-stocked bar; the quality of food served was also quite good. So the more experienced and enterprising travellers, knowing that time-management was of utmost essence here, jumped out of the bus even before it entered the parking lot, quickly freshened themselves up and headed straight to the bar to tip back a couple. Once blood circulation returned to the tired limbs and aching backs, they tipped back a couple more and trooped to the restaurant to feast on the food they had pre-ordered at the bar itself.

When the bus pulled out of the parking lot, these gentlemen came out of the restaurant a bit unsteady on the legs, but none the worse for wear, and clambered onto the moving vehicle with a smile on their lips and a song in their hearts.

Never once did they miss the bus.

Photo Courtesy: http://travelbyvolvo.blogspot.com

Turned On by Sardars

A recent post by Santosh about a Sardarji’s valiant quest for Nestle yoghurt in Trivandrum transported me back to the Trivandrum of the ’70s where I grew up as a teenager and where my nephew D caused considerable embarrassment to his parents with his infatuation with Sardars.

Before you start doubting the sexual orientation of D, let me hasten to tell you he was hardly three years old at that time.

We lived close to the military camp and Sardars were a common sight. In the evenings, little D would watch with admiration when young Sikh military officers with the wives riding pillion, with one kid standing up in front and the other wedged between the parents, zoomed past in their scooters towards the city. “Sardarji!” he will yell gleefully and the look on his face at that time would be one of sheer beatitude.

Very soon young D learned role play. He will take a thin handloom towel (thorthu in Malayalam) and ask his mother to wrap it around his head. Since it was a small child’s face, the thorthu had to go round several times before the trailing edge could be tucked in, to D’s satisfaction. The imaginary beard in place, D would then seek out his father’s helmet (my brother rode a two wheeler those days) and place it on head. The helmet would come down to his forehead and almost cover his eyes and it was also quite heavy. D would then walk slowly and rather precariously towards his tricycle.

The tricycle, meanwhile, has been miraculously transformed into a scooter and our young hero could be seen for the next five minutes laboriously working the kick-starter. This again was an elaborate ritual where he muttered dark words of frustration, tilted the tri-cycle to the side a few times to flood the carburettor, and looked at his imaginary watch in dismay. Finally with a great roar, the scooter started and D climbed on it with much satisfaction and rode off at high speed, his small hands furiously mimicking the clutch and accelerator controls, while the entire family looked on in amused indulgence.

Then happens the incident at the supermarket.

My brother and sister-in-law are shopping for groceries with D in tow. He is his usual placid self until a Sardar walks into the supermarket and D loses it completely.

“Sardarji!” yells D and frees himself from his mother’s grasp. He runs to the Sardar and embraces him from behind and bites his bum for good measure, before the startled Sardar can even start to realise what is happening.

Frankly this final part I find hard to believe considering the difference in height between the Sardar and the three-year-old. It is quite possible my sister-in-law embellished the incident somewhat to enhance its recountability.

What the hell! It is still quite a good story and the family in its usual kind and considerate manner never fails to remind D of this incident at least once a year.

D’s response:-

The shopping story is true, though I don't recall biting the man. Another highlight was coming to Delhi for a wedding when I was around three and a half. Compared to Kerala, it was turban heaven, every conceivable colour you could think of.

Even last month, when I was up in Mohali covering a game, we were talking in the ABC commentary box about the colourful turbans and the effort it must take to tie one every morning. Not a task for those who wake up, jump in the shower and wolf down some breakfast before rushing to the stadium!

I don't think I've tried a turban since those long-ago days, but I do now live with a Sikh. After that kind of childhood and all those Sikh-and-ice cube jokes to rile a friend when I was in college, I guess it was almost inevitable that I'd end up with a Sardarni.

Nice description of me trying to start my bike. It was a pretty lengthy procedure and I'm often reminded of it when I watch my nephew repairing his bike

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Image Courtesy: www.sikhlink.net