The Tiger of BCKV

By the time I reached room number D1/1 (read D One by One), a couple of guys have already hammered fear into my heart. I have been summoned to this room by its inhabitant, a person I have never seen. The guys say he is the worst one in the entire block. They have narrated to me, their encounters in hushed tones. The picture they painted in my mind is a very dark one. My future is suddenly looking bleak. Why the hell has this creature summoned me? I did not get involved in any trouble. I can’t think of a single good reason why this guy wants to see me.

It’s been a week I joined this University. The hostel I am staying in is named after Dr. Prashanta Chandra Mahalonobish, renowned statistician. This hostel houses about hundred and fifty students of different semesters of B.Sc Agriculture. I am one of the forty seven that joined last week. Ragging is banned in this hostel, so we have heard. Instead what a fresher is subjected to is called ‘Boring’. It is something the seniors have emphasized as being extremely important for the well being of the ‘unity and culture’ of this hostel. An integral part of this process is to approach seniors in the hostel and request them for introduction. By the end of the ‘boring period’, one is supposed to know each and every occupant of this hostel. One also has to keep a record of how many seniors he has got acquainted to. The guys with the least numbers will definitely find it ‘difficult’, seniors have assured. What exactly they meant by ‘difficult’, they didn’t elaborate and we did not have the courage to ask.

A senior is privileged to take as long as he likes to reveal his name. He is allowed to make you do or say anything, however silly or humiliating it may be, as long as he does not physically assault you. Finally, if he is ‘satisfied’ with your ‘performance’, he may choose to introduce himself to you. Once he introduces himself, he cannot ‘bore’ you again, unless of course you have presented some opportunity in the form of a ‘disciplinary breach’. There was another perk associated with this system. The senior who ‘gets’ to bore you on a particular day has to take care of your evening snacks, that is, you get to eat anything you want in the evening, and it will be paid for by the senior.

There are different kinds of guys in this hostel. There are some who are too busy to be bothered. They just ask you your name and a few harmless questions; tell you their name and a few tidbits about themselves and off you go. These guys are good for your numbers. There are others who, like spiders waiting for their prey, are just itching to catch hold of a guy and ‘bore’ him. I am very afraid of these guys, the really noxious ones that derive fun humiliating a fresher. These guys are a real bad omen for you numbers. You have to be really lucky and extremely smart to satisfy these guys and get your introduction. But then there is a third type too. These are the ‘sweet’ guys. They are really pleasant guys, with whom one really likes to interact. With them, you don’t bother about the numbers. Getting a few such guys in this hostel is like finding an oasis in the desert. I have met a couple of such seniors though. The presence of these guys in this hostel is really comforting.

Till now I have kept quite safe. Though my numbers are not that great, yet I haven’t faced too many jerks yet. But now that I got summoned to that ominous D1/1 room, I think my ‘dream run’ is over. I don’t know what my near future holds in store for me.

I gently knock on the door. No answer. I pause for a couple of moments, take a couple of deep breaths. I take a look around. I am standing on the corridor of D1 lobby, in front of the first room. It’s five thirty by my watch. It is past dusk and darkness is quickly rolling in. My throat is dry; I don’t know what awaits me inside this room. I swallow some saliva, run my tongue over my lips, and knock on the door again.

“Yes”, says a deep rumbling voice from inside.

I clear my throat and say, “Dada, may I come in?”

“Come in”, comes the reply.

I slowly push the door open. The room is dark except for a small circle of yellow illumination on a table at the far corner- a table lamp. A tall figure is seated on the adjacent bed, hunched over the side of the table. I wait for a few moments. As my eyes get adjusted to the scant illumination, I see two cots joined together, placed against the far wall of the room. In the space between the cot and the left wall of the room, a study table has been squeezed in longitudinally. From where I stand, I see an old rusty table lamp, a steel tumbler, a small immersion heater, a walkman stereo player on the table. All the windows are closed, there is a heavy burnt, smoky odor hanging in the air.

The tall figure turns his head towards me for a long second, pulls out the plugs of his walkman from his ears and rises. The guy is much taller than I, standing almost at six feet and one. With him standing in front of the small table lamp, I can’t see his face clearly.

“First Year?” he asks.

“Yes Dada, my name is Abhigyan Saha.”

“Ok, Mathura Bagan?” he says in his deep rumbling voice.

Mathura Bagan is a Tea Estate not far from here. It is where my uncle stays with his family and is mentioned as my permanent address of residence. One thing I have noticed is that each of the seniors knows our names and where we come from beforehand. It seems they have done a sort of home work on us first year students.     

“Yes Dada”, I reply.

“Is it too dark, do you want me to put on the tube light?” he asks.

“No Dada, it is fine”, I say. The lighting is nowhere in my list of worries at this moment.

“Good”, he says, “actually the tube light is screwed up. But wait I will make it a little better.” So saying, he lifts the lamp shade upwards and directs it towards one of the walls.

In this newly adjusted illumination, I see him properly. A tall and lean guy, dark complexioned, with black wavy hair, wearing a dirty crumpled T shirt and a dirtier pair of crumpled white and black check pajamas.

He comes towards me, inspects me from head to toe in a searching glance. He has a very different kind of eyes. They are very big; in fact they are very beautiful, bright eyes. I can sense a feeling of curiosity and slight amusement in his eyes. He has a very particularly well taken care of moustache. And below that thin curved expanse of facial hair, he has a pair of thin lips darkened and chapped by excessive smoking. The lips that, in spite of the stoic expression he has on his face, are perhaps very minutely twitched with amusement. It may be a mistake though, can’t be sure in this dim setting.

“ICSE Board, so you studied in English medium?”

I have joined this University in the five percent ‘Other Board’ quota. Other Board includes all boards of secondary education other than West Bengal State Board of Education.

“Yes”, I said

“Hmm, stay right here, I will be back in a couple of minutes”, he says. So saying he turns back towards his table and picks up the steel tumbler. Inserting two of his fingers into the tumbler he fishes out something and tosses it onto the floor. Then with the tumbler in his hand he walks out of the room. I look to see what he just tossed onto the floor. It is a Bidi stub, wet with the contents of the tumbler. I can’t help flinching in disgust. The floor is strewn with hundreds of stubs. There is an empty glass of tea, probably from the hostel canteen sitting on the window sill with three or four more stubs extinguished into them.                          

I look around the room; there is a small wooden cupboard, the door of which is broken. On top of the cupboard is a beautiful earthen figurine with its maker’s inscription at the bottom. I can’t read the name, not that I want to. Every object in the room other than the table top and bed is covered in a layer of dust. The surface of the table is covered with old sheets of newspaper. The paper has turned yellow with age. It is burnt at one place, right through into the wooden surface, most probably by a forgotten live Bidi. The ceiling of the room is covered, no sorry, engulfed in cobwebs, a thick blanket of cobwebs. The room reminds me of Miss Havisham’s banquet hall, in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Presently, the door opens and the guy walks in with the washed tumbler in his hands.

“Do you want some tea”, he enquires in the same rumbling expressionless voice.

“No, thank you Dada”, I answer.

He pours some water from a bottle into the tumbler and adds sugar from a tin can he has taken out of his broken cupboard. He wipes the immersion heater lying on his table with the edge of his dirty t shirt, immerses into the tumbler and plugs it to the connection mounted on the wall beside the table. He now turns back towards me.

“I like to brew my own tea. It has a different taste. The canteen tea is very bland”, he says, this time with a twitch of a smile at the corners of his dark lips.

“Of course it will taste ‘different’”, I think to myself but don’t offer any comment. I just give him the most pleasant smile I can muster up.

He comes up to where I am standing. His eyes look down into mine from an altitude couple of inches higher than my own. His large eyes, having taken on a more prying avatar, are looking into mine; trying to break open the can of my soul and peek in.                

“Do you know that there are two tigers in BCKV?” he asks in a very somber tone, the words spaced out evenly to have a theatrical effect.

By now I have lost most of my fear of this person. He seems quite normal to me. But I am not one to lower my guard so easily. I put up an innocent face, make my eyes seemingly as wonderstruck as I can, and reply with faked curiosity, “There are tigers in BCKV? No Dada, I didn’t know that.”

“There have been two tigers in the history of Bidhan Chandra Krishi Vishwavidyalaya; one was Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy himself. Do you have any idea who the other one is?” he asks. His eyes are looking straight into mine. This time his eyebrows are arched upwards to give a mysterious look to his dark handsome face.

I widen my eyes slowly in a faked expression of alarm and nod my head in the negative.

“The second tiger of BCKV is standing right in front of you”, he says.

I blink my eyes a couple of times but say nothing. I bring a look of admiration mixed with apprehension on my countenance and look away from his eyes. If this guy wants to preen, let him do so. I am not a fool to tweak his ego by saying anything for or against and invite trouble for myself.  Till now I have performed very well, I think to myself.

However, tiger or not, this guy is definitely not like the others. The way he looks, the way he stays, his bohemian trappings makes me think of him as a renegade. His expressive, bright eyes set onto his dark chiseled face, his careless three day stubble and moustache, does give him a fierce look.

Then all of a sudden, taking me completely by surprise, he says, “I have heard you have a very good handwriting?”

Now from where does that come? Where does my good handwriting figure into all of this? I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. I do have a decent handwriting; I have spent years cultivating a handwriting that many have said could be made into a font. But I don’t want to come across having to do some letter writing job for this guy. It is really very boring having to write love letters on behalf of people simply because one is calligraphically superior with a decent stock of vocabulary. I have suffered this in school.

“I have some work for you”, he rumbles; the menace and theatrics no more there in his voice.

Just as he is about to say more, “Knock Knock, Dada can I come in?” comes a voice from outside.

“Yes”, says Mr. Tiger.

The plump figure of Sujit (one of my batch mates) waddles into the room in his characteristic white printed short kurta and blue pajamas. “Dada, I have come to introduce myself”, he says “My name is Sujit Kumar Ghosh. I am from Malda.”

“But brother I am already talking to this brother here”, says Mr. Tiger pointing towards me.

“Okay dada, I will come later then.” Sujit turns to go away, but then turning around, he says,” You are also from Malda, are you not?”

“Oh! You already know a lot about me it seems. Come then you can sit till I complete introduction with Abhigyan here.”

Sujit, with an air of familiarity and a satisfied smile on his chubby face waddles towards the cot and is about to seat himself on it when Mr. Tiger rumbles, “Not there.”

Sujit stops and turns around.

“Go and see what is there behind that wooden cupboard”, he instructs Sujit.

Sujit complies, but then not finding anything that can be used for sitting; he looks around perplexed and says,” There is nothing here Dada.”

“No there must be a bottle of Thums Up, I kept yesterday. Bring it out and sit on it”, Mr. Tiger rumbles in a very matter-of-fact manner.

My heart skips a beat. This guy is screwed, I feel sorry for Sujit.

Sujit looks with disbelief at the senior from his own district. His round eyes seem ready to pop out through the heavy glasses he wears to augment his severely myopic vision. Though I feel bad for him, I can’t help feeling amused seeing the comic expression on his face.

“Don’t waste my time. I don’t like saying something twice” says Mr. Tiger in a slow, menacingly authoritative tone.

Sujit takes out the bottle and with the look of a betrayed martyr on his face squats over it. Mr. Tiger inspects to ensure that my chubby batch mate’s round bottom is in contact with the mouth of the bottle. Having satisfied himself, he now turns towards me.

In the last six to seven minutes, the radical changes that occurred in the atmosphere of this room have left me shocked. I have realigned my position regarding any writing job that this terrible guy has to offer me. I am now ready to write a novel, let alone a letter for Mr. Tiger; in fact whatever it may take to save my glutes and hamstrings the torture of squatting on a 300 ml Thums Up bottle.

“So, where were we? Yes, I want you to help me write a couple of posters for my final presentation for the degree. I will give you the content you just have to write it neatly on chart paper.” So saying, he hands me a sheet with some scribbling on it, “this is what has to be put down on chart papers”, he says.

Seeing the scribbling, I understood, whatever this guy may be talented in, definitely it is not his hand writing. It took some time for me to decipher what was written on it.

“I didn’t ask you to get up, did I? Sit down”, booms his voice. I look up, and find Sujit with a destitute expression written over his face as he goes down on his haunches, back to squatting position. I feel very sorry for my comrade.

“So when would you like to get on with it, will you start right away?” his awful tormentor asks me.

“There is a group of people in my own room. It will be better if I work in this room. But it’s too dark in here to work. I can do it tomorrow morning, if it is fine by you”, I say.

As much as I would like never to visit this awful room again, I also understand that as long as I am in this room, Sujit will have to squat on the bottle. It will be better for him to quickly get over with whatever Mr. Tiger has planned for him.  Moreover, the guys from second year have asked us all to gather for some ‘fun-filled activity’ tomorrow morning. I will have an excuse to skip that tomorrow.

I look at Sujit. He is in a pitiable condition. He is crying silently. Tears are streaming down both his chubby cheeks and his glasses are clouded with vapor.

“So tomorrow first thing in the morning?” Mr. Tiger enquires of me.

“Definitely Dada”, I answer with all earnestness.

All of a sudden, there is a commotion outside in the corridor. It sounds like a couple of seniors are ‘boring’ Madan one of my other batch mates.

Voice 1: “What’s inside your pants?”

Madan: “Nothing Dada.”

Voice 1 and 2: “Nothing?” (Loud laughs are heard)

Voice 2: “Off with your trousers; let us see if you are telling the truth.”

Voice 1: “Haven’t you heard him? Take off your pants”

Madan: “No, dada please.” (Madan’s voice sounds choked)

Voice 1: “Then tell us what’s inside your pants, quick.”

After a long pause

Madan: “Anus” (Madan tries to answer in the most scientific words)

(There is a roar of laughter outside; a couple of more voices have joined in. All of them are laughing themselves into splits)

Tiger smiles in an amused manner, opens the door.

One of the seniors says to Tiger, “Krishna da, the guys coming from your district are real samples. There is another fat one. That guy too needs some treatment” Madan too is from Malda, like Sujit. The last sentence was for Sujit. I look at Sujit and he looks at me. I feel like laughing out loud, seeing the comic expression on his face, but I can’t.

Tiger brings Madan into the room. Sujit has moved away from the door with his bottle. His tears have dried up. His face now bears a look of curiosity. He too is relieved, I guess, since the attention now is on another guy. He has moved into a corner behind the new entrants, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

“Take off your belt.” Mr. Tiger, alias Krishna da (as I have just learnt) orders menacingly.

Madan takes off his belt, his gaze down on the floor, the look of a defeated man on his face. It seems to me he has gone beyond despair now.

“Now, unzip your trousers and lower it”, comes the next command in the same menacing tone.

Madan unbuttons his trouser, unzips it and is about to lower it when all the seniors shout at once, “Stop.”

“Now put your hand inside and tell us what exactly is beneath your trousers”, asks one of the other seniors.

Madan puts his hand inside and then in a moment of sudden realization he says, “Underwear”.

“That means you were telling a lie, till now?” thunders one of the seniors, while the others are holding their sides to refrain from bursting out laughing. It is with a lot of effort that I am preventing myself from rolling with laughter. My condition is like a novice on a tight rope, I can fall off any time. So I keep my act together. The four or five seniors who had accompanied Madan into the room leave. They take Madan by his arm and drag him along.

Krishna da looks at me and says, “Now you may go. I want you here tomorrow morning. If somebody asks you to do something else, tell him I have asked for you. My name is Krishna Gopal Adhikary. Is it Okay?”

I nod my head in agreement and walk out of the door.

As I open the door and walk out of the room, a barge of cool, fresh air assaults my senses. I sneeze a couple of times in succession. I gulp in a few lungful of fresh evening air to drive out the stale burnt air in my lungs and to revive my senses. I look into my watch, its five fifty five. I have been in this room for just about twenty five minutes, but it seemed like ages.

“Dada, can I go now?” I hear Sujit’s voice on the inside.

“You can go now, but I want you here in my room by five o’ clock sharp, tomorrow evening.” The rumbling voice of 'The Tiger of BCKV' commands.

I do not wait there any longer. I make my way quickly through the dark, empty corridors, towards my room.

Story Of A Weird (Weed) Night

(All characters in this story are purely fictitious and bear no resemblance to anyone. The story is purely imaginative and not meant to allude to any particular incident.)

Those days I was in Navi Mumbai. A few months earlier I had joined a very reputed pharmaceutical company in the city. Along with me sixty other young people had joined as part of an on the job professional training program.

I stayed with four of my colleagues. We had rented a small two bed room duplex house. I, Joy, Raj, Sanju were the first people to move in. Balu joined us a month later. His sister and her family were staying nearby, and he had put up at their place for the first few days. Balu moved into our house with an old bamboo cane sofa set, which was lying unused at his sister’s.

Our house had a hall, a kitchen and a big bath room on the ground floor. A flight of stairs on the inner wall led to the first floor where there were two bedrooms and a small bath room. There was a big veranda attached to the bigger bedroom. It was my favorite place to relax.

Joy was a stout and chubby guy. He was fun loving; bong by origin, but hailing from Gujarat. He loved food and would go to any extent to have good food. Every Sunday he would leave early in the morning, and roam around malls and shopping centers in various parts of Mumbai. Then he would find out a hotel that hosted a buffet, have his fill and come back. In the evening he would come back with stories of extraordinarily cooked tandoori, or a perfect glass of mocktail. He was a gadget lover too and preferred to be on the right side of the current trend.

Raj, the guy from Dehradoon, was a quite fellow, with dreamy eyes. You wouldn’t even realize his presence if his phone was kept in the silent mode. He had two mobile phones, one to receive missed calls from his girl friend and the other from which he made the calls. One or the other would always engage one charging point in the house. Nevertheless he would join in for any adventure or fun, and I liked him for that.

Sanju was a funny guy. He was an amiable fellow, a good singer, a simple guy who spoke fast and in a rather excited voice. He would sometimes hang his mobile phone from a band around his neck, and push it inside his inner wear to prevent its theft. He had an infectious laugh. I, Sanju and Raj, shared the same taste in cigarettes, Gold Flake.

Balu was a tall lanky fellow, with a baritone voice of extraordinary quality. I always felt he could have made his name in the theatre. But instead he chose to sit in our hall, and discuss worldly affairs, the effect of which would be greatly irritating, especially if it was late in the night. But it was good to have his sofa in our living room. We would use it for our telephonic conversations late into the night. I had also made some improvisations to use it as a bench for my weight training.

Joy had a number of relatives in Mumbai. He would visit them and tell us about the fabulous food he had, refrigerators full of chocolates in their house and such other things. Once he told us about his rich uncle who had a son, his cousin. This cousin was older than Joy and was a rock star in the making. Joy told us he would always be high on weed and sit in his room playing or listening to rock music.

We challenged Joy that he was telling lies. He had no such drug addict cousin and that he was making up stories. We dared him to bring us some of the stuff if at all what he said was true. All said and done, we had forgotten this entire episode, until one Saturday evening when Joy came up to us and showed us a packet. It was a small zip lock bag containing a single pellet of a grayish stuff. He said it was high quality ganja; he had borrowed from his cousin.

Ganja, cannabis, hashish, weed are the various names by which this narcotic goes.I had tried this stuff once or twice, during my hostel life, but had never really got any kick out of it. Even Raj said he had had a similar experience. I believed that either the guy who sold us the stuff, had sold us poor quality stuff, or it does not have any effect on me.

“Just this one pellet?” we exclaimed.

We hurled expletives at our chubby roommate for having brought such a stingy amount.

“This is useless, it will have no effect at all”, Sanju declared.

“You stupid fellows, you have this first, then I will see where all your bravery goes. But I am warning you before hand, don’t ask me for help when all of you are screwed up”, so saying, Joy handed us the packet and went upstairs.

The three of us got down to business immediately. Balu didn’t smoke. He sat on the sofa, with an elderly air and looked curiously at what we three were up to.

“This is too less for rolling up even a single joint”, Sanju said.

Raj said,” Let’s do one thing. Let’s not use up the entire stuff in a single joint. We will keep half for the night. Let’s mix the remaining with the filling of a cigarette and make the joint.”

So, I emptied a Gold Flake with care so as not to puncture the paper body at any place. I took the tobacco filling on a paper, mixed half of Joy’s stuff into it, by pressing it gently between my fingers. Then using a small paper spatula and a toothpick, I packed this spiked filling back into the paper casing of the cigarette. Our joint was ready. The three of us quivered with anticipatory excitement. Let’s see what trip this joint takes us to, we thought.

The cigarette was lit, and passed around after each puff. The packing of the cigarette matters a lot for it to taste good. I for instance have always found broken or folded cigarettes very bad tasting. Air pockets inside a cigarette make it very bitter and I hated the loathsome taste. The packing of this joint too had not been very good, but still, considering the adventure potential of the stuff inside it, we finished it off, taking slow but deep puffs and holding the smoke inside for some time.

Nothing happened. Damp squib again, I thought.

We went upstairs. Joy was sitting with his laptop, chatting with someone and smiling to his own self. We kicked him on his wide back side and hurled the choicest expletives for making fools of us.

Joy asked,” Did you have it?”

We nodded in the affirmative.

He just smiled and said, “Do you want some music?”

We sat down on his bed. This was the smaller of the two bed rooms. Joy and Sanju shared this room. They had their beds made out on the floor. Joy connected his MP3 player and put on some music. It was rock, metal he explained. I did not like this type of music, so when my phone rang out, I went downstairs to converse with the friend who had called.

How long I had been on the phone, I don’t remember. I remember the continuous cacophony of the unearthly noise from Joy’s MP3 player, mixed with Sanju’s laughing, and Balu’s deep baritone in the background as I spoke into the phone.

After sometime Joy started calling out my name, “Hey Abhi come and see what’s happening.”

I ignored, thinking he might just want to show me some funny You-tube video. I was in no mood to fool around. So I didn’t go upstairs and kept lying on the sofa. But he kept on calling me. Finally giving in to his replentless yelling I went upstairs. The music was still blaring; Joy was sitting with a disturbed look on his face. Balu and Sanju were sitting on the bed and smiling. Sanju looked at me and winked. Raj was sitting in one corner of the room and was head banging in rock star fashion. He was smiling.

I understood that these guys were playing a prank on Joy, so I left and again went downstairs. Within five minutes, Joy started shouting in his shrill voice. This time Sanju too was calling out to me. I went upstairs again. Raj was standing on the bed and head banging with full vigor. Something was not right, I felt. It didn’t look normal. He still wore that stupid smile on his face.

“Raj, it’s enough, stop it”, I said.

No reaction.

“Switch off that god-forsaken noise”, I told Joy. 

The music was switched off. But this had no impact on Raj; he continued what he was doing, only faster. I slapped him on his face- no reaction at all. He was still smiling stupidly and jerking his head. It looked as if he was in a trance, possessed by a spirit. The way he was jerking his head, I was afraid it might come off his torso. We forced him to sit on the bed and tried to talk him out of it, but to no avail. He was on a completely different plane; our words did not reach him. Now I was getting worried. I looked at the watch, it was ten thirty already.

“We have to call in a physician, guys”, I announced.

“No way. We can’t call anyone. If any one comes to know of this, we will get into trouble”, said Balu.

What he said was correct, our neighbors would not find it very funny, if they came to know we were experimenting with hash.

“Shit! it’s already ten thirty, or I would have gone to my sister’s house. You guys could have done whatever you wanted”, Balu spoke again. He was getting on to my nerves.

I was totally clueless what to do. I had no prior experience with this kind of situation. And if we did not do something quickly, Raj might definitely fall ill. At that moment I remembered that one of my friends was well known for being a very ‘adventurous’ sort of person. Why not ask him, I thought, he might suggest what’s best. So I called up Rakesh and told him about our predicament. He laughed out loud and said, 

“It is normal dude, just take off his clothes, and put him in the shower. Try to make him to lie down after that. Don’t let him get out of the house under any circumstance. That can be dangerous.”

We struggled to make Raj to stand. He was still smiling stupidly and moving his head. While the other three held him tightly so that he can’t move his head, I undressed him to his birthday suit and then took him to the bathroom. We held him under the cold shower. As the cold water hit his face, he resented it. He tried to force his way out of the shower but we managed to hold him. Finally he stopped resisting, and after a full five minutes of drenching, he said in a weak voice,

“Okay guys that’s enough, I am fine.”

We let out sighs of relief. Finally we were able to restore him to normalcy. I thanked God that he spoke. I had already started cursing myself for entering into what was rapidly turning into a misadventure.

Raj seemed very weak. The vigorous activity of the last hour had sapped him of all energy it seemed. We dried him with a towel. I dressed him up in his pajamas and T-shirt. We wrapped him up in a blanket and made him lie down. I rubbed his palms and the soles of his feet with my hands to generate some warmth. Raj went to sleep.

I had just started feeling relieved, when I observed that I had a strange sensation in my chest. I felt as if something was sitting tight on my chest constricting my chest cavity. I was taking shorter breaths, my chest felt heavy and my head felt lighter. I could see Joy talking excitedly, but his voice seemed to come from a distance. My conscious mind told me something was terribly wrong. I looked at Sanju. He was sitting at the edge of the bed, with a worried expression on his face. I gestured questioningly at him. He pointed at himself and then drew a line in the air across his own neck. I understood, he too was losing it. There was not much time to lose.

“We must immediately go to bed”, I said out aloud.

I went down and put the main door under lock and key. Then I locked the door leading out to the veranda. Joy asked me why I was doing all this. Sanju answered,

“Do as he is telling. I think we are also losing our sense. If we both lose it, it will be difficult for you to control us.”

“Whatever we do, just don’t let us out of the house”, I told Joy. “And today we will all sleep together in this bedroom. No one leaves this room”, I added.

Balu was not happy at all. But the prospect of having to control me (a ninety kilogram guy) gone berserk, later in the night, made him stow away his doubts. He complied without any argument.

Without losing any more time, the four of us lay down beside Raj. I checked out his condition before sleeping. Yes he had regained warmth and was sleeping peacefully. Thus assured I lay down with the others.

I still had that feeling in my chest, and it seemed more pronounced. In order to divert my mind, I started conversation with Joy.

I asked him, “What happened to Raj?”

“He was listening to the psychedelic rock music and started head banging with its beats. He just continued doing it. After smoking weed, you tend to keep on repeating what you are doing. You lose control of yourself, it’s like entering a trance”, Joy said.

“Actually he was trying to scare Joy at first. But even I failed to understand when his fake trance transformed into real drug induced trance”, said Sanju.

At last everything was under control I thought. I was feeling happy. My head was light and there was a sense of light heartedness inside me. I started whistling a tune. Sanju caught the tune and started singing. I added my voice to his. Our voices reverberated in the still atmosphere of our bedroom. I liked the sensation.

Joy whispered to Balu,” Forget about sleep now. These two have lost it. They will not stay quiet now.”

I heard what he said and smiled. I did not care anymore, neither did Sanju. We sang one song after another, I don’t remember for how long. 

In the morning I woke up the earliest. My throat was parched. I took a long drag of water out of the bottle kept beside the bed. I remembered what had happened last night. I thanked the heavens for taking us safely through the night. I checked Raj, he was fine. Sanju was sleeping like a baby. Balu and Joy too were asleep. I pulled the sheet over my head and flopped down to sleep again.

The Kingdom Where I Belong

“The journey is coming to a close, the adventure is about to end, and in three days’ time, we will be going back to our respective houses, where we will embrace our families, see our children, read through the correspondence that has accumulated in our absence, show off the hundreds of photos we’ve taken, tell our stories about the train, the cities we passed through and the people we met along the way.

And all to convince ourselves that the journey really did happen. In another three days’ time, once we’re back in our daily routine, it will feel as if we had never left and never made that long journey. We have the photos, the tickets, the souvenirs, but time – the only, absolute eternal master of our lives – will be telling us: you never left this house, this room, this computer.”

I read these lines out of Paulo Coelho’s Aleph. The words were really meaningful to me at that moment, considering I had just arrived at Hyderabad after a tiring but pensive journey of over thirteen hours. I had gone home to attend the last rites of my deceased grandmother. Returning from home is always a very emotional affair, it always has been, since the last fourteen years. Since after finishing school, I have always stayed away from home. It is people like me who can really appreciate how good it feels to be ‘home’ and also how sad and strange it feels to be a ‘guest’ in your own home.

Having stayed away from home the last fourteen years, I have come to think of myself as a ‘Lone Wolf’. By virtue of having stayed with my family in Bhutan half my life (during school days), and the other half away from my family; I never got more than a couple of weeks or at the most a month to spend with my close relatives, every year. Yet, there have been lean years like the time when I was doing my masters; I came home after an year and eight months. My family and relatives have always wondered with awe (and also some sympathy), how I stay away, all by my own, far away from my own home and my own city. I have always secretly prided myself for being on my own, taking my own decisions and making my own mistakes. But of late I am suddenly finding all of it meaningless.

The fact which I find most funny about my condition, that I also joke about with my friends is that where I stay, I do not belong; where I belong, I do not stay; where I officially belong, I actually do not belong; yet, where I actually belong, documentarily I do not belong there. Is it very complex? No wonder I too find it mind scrambling sometimes. Actually I always feel like a foreigner, wherever I go. When I stayed in Bhutan, I did not belong there; when I came back to India, people thought (and I too thought) practically I belonged to Bhutan, that is I did not belong here. Since then I have stayed in three different states in India, all places where I really do not belong, yet when I go home to my ‘own’ place; other than my family and outside my house, I know no one, no one knows me, in short I do not belong there too.

Yes, I know, it is indeed very confusing.  

I have never really spent much time thinking about my relatives ever, my maternal uncles, my father’s sisters and their families. Not that I am averse to them or something like that; it’s just that it never occurred to me. After my marriage it surprised me no end to see my wife’s numerous relatives strewn across the city of Jaipur, not only her own uncles and aunts, but her parents’ uncles, their kids, the kids’ in laws and such other far off and complicated relations. All these people were there to attend our marriage reception. In the beginning it was really baffling for me, how can people maintain such distant relationships, it is something I never could comprehend at that time. I myself cannot think further than my own maternal and paternal uncles and aunts, forget their families and their further branches. Even among these few people, other than my uncle Boro Kaku, I have never really interacted with the others on a regular basis, since the last ten to twelve years.

My last trip home brought an altogether different realization with it. As I mentioned earlier, I had gone home to attend the final rites of my deceased grandmother. She had passed away last month peacefully, at the age of eighty four. Since she was staying with my parents at that time, all the rituals were carried out at our home. All our relatives, uncles, aunts, cousins, their families came to attend the last rites. It was the first assembly of its kind in our home. Having stayed away from home most of the time, I my sister and our parents have always ‘attended’ such congregations, this was the first time we were hosting one.

The house was teeming with people, relatives of all sizes and names. There was so much activity; rituals going on one side, food being prepared on the other; oldies were catching up with one another, bursting out in laughter once in a while at old anecdotes. The younger ones, my brothers and cousins had their own secret agenda, slinking in and out of the house silently in a group now and then as if plotting some secret mission. In short the house was buzzing with activity. I always shun such large gatherings, unless it is imperative. But seeing my wife enjoying this big gathering, easily mingling with all these people and being happy, I too thought of giving it a try.

Withdrawing my ‘self’ out of all this commotion, I tried to view all that was going on with a purely objective view. I tried to notice each interaction between these 30 odd people, as they were; without any bias in my mind. The kids were having a whale of a time. Seeing them I remembered my own childhood visits to Boro Kaku’s house. I and my cousin Saurabh played cricket in the veranda all day long. Sometimes he would cheat and we would get into arguments leading to stoppage of play. We wouldn't even speak to each other for a couple of hours thence. Sometimes our noise would disturb Boro Kaku’s siesta; he would wake up and give both of us a sound spanking each and send us off to sleep. I remembered the impish face of little Saurabh and could not restrain a smile.

My wife was moving in an out seamlessly from one interaction to another. No one could say that she comes from an entirely different culture with an entirely different mother tongue.  She has already managed to endear herself to all the elders in the family. I could not but wonder how she managed to do so much, in so less time. My aunts, older cousins, all were full of praise for my wife. They patted her on the head, blessed her with all their heart. This interaction, as insignificant as it maybe, brought smiles and a feeling of happiness to all their faces. I understood that this is also something that I have missed most of my life and have been keeping away from, the rest of it.

In the evenings after the day’s work, everybody assembled in the bedroom. There, amidst laughter aplenty, caused by Boro Kaku’s antics and hilarious jokes, we had our evening tea. Twenty odd people sat huddled against one another under a large blanket, having tea and sharing old stories, told and heard hundreds of times. Stories of my uncle’s college life, my father’s bachelor life, or my aunt’s school life. I have heard these stories many times before, yet this particular instant it seemed very special. I suddenly realized, this is where people belong. Not in the city or village, or the work place, people belong in the memories, in the stories that are shared over and over again. I understood I have found the answer to one question, “Where I really belong?”

By the time I realized as much, it was already time to bid adieu. The ceremonies were over; it was time everybody returned to their respective houses, families and work places. The heaviness in my heart due to the realization of what I had neglected all these years, made me very sad. This parting seemed more painful than the numerous such others before. My wife’s parting tears shed in my aunt’s embrace did not help either. So with a heavy heart, we left, for our routine lives. Seven days of pure unadulterated happiness just came to an end.

I felt as if my late grandmother had blessed me with this new realization from the heavens. It is a parting gift she left me, to make me a better person, understand myself better.

I felt very sad for the first two days after returning to Hyderabad. But just as Paulo says, in three days time life has again come back to normal, as if nothing happened, I never left this place, I didn’t go home at all. It is as if there is no change at all. The only change being the realization of the importance of family and relations and where I actually belong. In Paulo Coelho’s words,

“Two weeks? What’s that in a whole lifetime? Nothing has changed in the street, the neighbours are still gossiping about the same old things,………., the latest celebrity scandal, the constant complaints about the things the government promised to do, but hasn’t.

No nothing has changed. But we – who went off in search of our kingdom and discovered lands we had never seen before – we know we are different.”

The Next Compartment

Paulo Coelho writes in Aleph,

“We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us, they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms. For example, I can’t see who is in the next carriage, but it contains people travelling in the same time as me, as you, as everyone. The fact that we can’t speak to them or know what’s going on in that other carriage is completely irrelevant. They are there. So what we call “life” is a train with many carriages. Sometimes we are in one, sometimes we are in another, and sometimes we cross between them, when we dream or allow ourselves to be swept away by the extraordinary.”

Yesterday morning, I was travelling to office when my mom called me and told me about Dida’s (grandmother) disorientation of late. My mom had very solemnly informed me that since the last couple of days, Dida had not been her usual, that she was sleeping long hours. Her speech had also been slurring so that, most of what she tried to communicate was not understandable. It was as if slowly she was drifting away. I was told all these to be mentally prepared for any eventuality.

Even as I disconnected the call and put away my cell phone, I remembered my last visit home in July ‘12. Dida had been slightly troubled at that time. She had told me that she could not remember her gurumantra (she had a bound photograph of her guru on the tea table by the side of her bed). She was very troubled being unable to remember her initiation chants and was worried that God would not accept her (post mortem). I was at a loss of words, not knowing how to console my grandmother. She held my hand with a plaintive look in her eyes. I had taken her palms in mine, folded her fingers into the gyan mudra and asked her to chant after me,

‘Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare;

Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare’

She had said, “But this is not my gurumantra, this will not work.”

I had looked into her helpless eyes and had asserted that this is the most powerful mantra, stronger than any guru mantra, and this alone would suffice. After holding her hand in mine and chanting Hare Krishna for some time, I had helped her lie down and asked her to keep on chanting aloud. She kept chanting the mantra, till she drifted away to sleep.

Two drops of tear that had been growing all this while at the corners of my eyes threatened to well over. From what my mother said I could make out that my Dida was biding the last few days before embarking on a new journey. I remembered Paulo Coelho’s allegory of Life being a train. I wished that I could hold my Dida’s hands in mine while she left for this new journey. I wished I could see her safely through the vestibule into the next compartment. I wished she was not alone when the great moment came and she had to cross over.

The same after noon when my father called me up, I understood that the moment of truth had come. I heard my father saying in a very normal tone,

“Babu, there’s sad news, Dida left.”

Although I was fully prepared to hear this, yet the immensity of the realization that Dida is no more, took some time to sink in.

I asked, “When?”

“Just about half an hour back,” he answered.

Dida had been sleeping for a long time after lunch. My parents had woken her up to feed her some milk. She had taken a couple of mouthfuls but the third had just spilt out of her mouth. There was a drop of tear in her eyes. Thinking that she had again fallen asleep, my father wiped the tear off her eye and made her to lie down.  But later as my parents realized, that was the moment she had taken the leap. Now it feels good to realize that she was not alone when she had to cross the vestibule. She was safe in the arms of her son and daughter-in-law as she had gone across.

The Brahman pundit who was overseeing the last rites had said that since it was a poornima (full moon), the journey was on a very auspicious day and that indications were very good. Apart from this, it took us some time to realize that five years earlier my grandfather too had passed away on the same date. My mom said that just as in life they had been so inseparable; it was my Dadu only who had come and taken Dida away to be with him. It gave me much relief to believe that not only was my grandmother not alone while crossing the vestibule, but also her best friend in this life was ready on the other side to welcome her and take her away safely into the next compartment.

I dint think I would post again this year, but the latest turn of events had given rise to some very conflicting emotions and I felt it could be best resolved when laid down on paper. Now that it is laid down as intended, I feel happy again.

In continuation to the discussion described in the beginning, Paulo Coelho also says,

“Love always triumphs over what we call death. That’s why there’s no need to grieve for our loved ones, because they continue to be loved and remain by our side. It’s hard for us to accept that. If you don’t believe it, then there’s no point my trying to explain.”

I thank you Dida for showering so much love on all of us. I shall always remember you in the many ways that you have touched my life. Today I feel very happy for you. I wish that your new journey be full of thrill and plenty of happiness and you make lots and lots of new friends on the way. Farewell.