THE MOTHER DAIRY MAN

“Brand new flavour hai, Sirjee. Bahut chal raha hai aajkal.”

He looked up at my face to see if that insight impressed me. Almost like an afterthought he added, “Orange candy jitna hi daam hai.”

Amidst all the touting and Haryanvi-accented Hindi sales-pitching, I kept looking at the display placard. Kulfi Paan was indeed a new flavour. Almost exotic to me. The elongated curls of the letter K in the placard hinted at a familiar font. Before I could recollect the name, the ice-cream vendor produced a box of matchsticks from the recesses of his soiled ganjee (vest) and nodded to a middle-aged man nearby.

“Unclejee shaam ko roz ek beedi peene neeche aate hain.” My jaw remained often yet.

Despite manipulative school teachers, cool-as-a-cucumber bosses and determined women, the vendors of New Delhi are easily the shrewdest class of human beings I have dealt with so far. They are crafty; they look gullible and before you know it, you cannot seem to do without them. The ice-cream vendor, when probed, told me of two separate places available for rent nearby. (Later, I looked the places up and found them to be indeed ‘to-let’). The amount of information he held about the locality was indeed enormous. Early morning, you could find him roaming around the Rajiv Chowk Metro station with a kettle in hand, exchanging tea for money and banter with the many Blueline bus conductors, NDMC sweepers, peons and ayahs serving the many houses and offices in the vicinity of Connaught Place’s concentric circles. By 9 AM, his Mother Dairy ice-cream cart would be rolling its wheels. He had a total of 17 placards of the different flavours and types of ice-creams at his disposal. Regardless of their availability, he would put up three different placards every day. And in case you wanted to relieve your thirst in a more fluid way, his cart also contained a sizeable number of Aquafina water bottles.  

These vendors have a knack of sizing people up at the first go. My only other transaction with the Mother Dairy man had involved an orange candy four hours previous to the Kulfi Paan proposal. My 30-day beard prevented him from upgrading me to ‘Unclejee’ instead of ‘Sirjee’. Judging by the exact change and specific product I asked for, he knew I must have had the orange candy quite a few times in the past. And, to top it all, he happened to remember all of this as I came back a second time four hours later, in the space of which he had served at least fifty customers, considering the torrid heat that day.

Needless to mention, whenever a conversation about Delhi pops up in any other city or town, crook is a word regularly heard (apart from rape, of course). And the umpteen vendors, dealers, shopkeepers, auto – and taxi-wallahs have a lot to contribute to this image. Given that you need to be necessarily tactful to conduct business in the capital, the level of tact shows a graded increase as you explore their various locations. Sort of, like a pyramid. Industrious people like our Mother Dairy Man would represent the initial level of resourcefulness. Second place would probably be the cloth merchants of Sarojini Nagar who have, for generations, managed to lure women of all shapes, sizes, orientations and levels of self-esteem with a promise of beauty and presentable appearances. As you move up the pyramid, you encounter those auto-drivers who ply their trade around the airport and railway stations, perennially prepared to fleece those stranded in the city from distant shores. More than once, I have heard instances where these three-wheeling touts pick up passengers near the terminal and trade them to other auto-drivers at the outskirts of Dwarka. You see, Dwarka is this fast-developing satellite suburb adjacent to New Delhi. After the advent of the Metro railway system, business has been really modest for autos in and around the suburb. Hence, they are often willing to pay another auto-driver twenty-thirty bucks in exchange for a lambi sawaari (long-distance 

passengers). High above the pyramid, you have the irascible property dealers and agents who promise to waive you off the relentless red tape surrounding permissions, tenders, etc.

Like all pyramids, both edible and economical, the brunt is borne by the people at the bottom. The Mother Dairy Man’s day does not end with sunset. Before 7 in the evening, he has to go to a Mother Dairy outlet nearby and buy his wares for the following day. There he also helps out in dispensing the average Delhi family’s gargantuan appetite for milk. (A typical family of four in the city easily consumes around two and a half litres of milk). Then after he has washed himself of the day’s grime and tedium nearby a corroded water pipe close to Lady Irwin College, he goes to sleep at a deserted pavement near Himachal Bhavan.  

As anyone who has stayed in the city long enough to witness the dust winds get worse every summer will tell you, there are some cardinal rules you need to keep in mind if you have to survive the capital’s onslaught. But when you sense your tongue turning green from the brand new Kulfi Paan, you remember none of it. I did not particularly like the flavour (never been a paan person); but neither did I find the need to reprimand the Mother Dairy Man for that. Sometimes, it does not hurt to be taken for a ride, even if you are armed with the filthiest of Delhi’s expletives. I put on my ear phones to drown the evening cacophony at Barakhamba Road. Iron Maiden pleading for a Brave New World. For what it’s worth, the Mother Dairy Man might be the only one around when apocalypse descends on this cursed city. With his dry ice-preserved Aquafina water bottles. And the box of matches guarded underneath his magic hat-like ganjee.    

WARM COLOURS OF THE DARK

There is something about stray dogs on cold nights. They seem famished even if they have just had a stack full of crumbs for dinner. The hunger is, of course, poles apart from the tantrums of the belly.

It is 9.30 pm in Dillibazar, Kathmandu, the perceptive equivalent of 3 AM in Mumbai, even though Nepali time is only ten minutes ahead of IST. The two of us are standing at the crossroads of Pipal Bot, an oft-frequented street in the city by day. All you can see around now is the yellow flare of antiquated street lights forming patterns on the narrow winding road surfaces. Windows and doors in this Emerald Valley-city are straight out of those picturesque postcards you get with your monthly subscription of the Lonely Planet magazine. That was more or less the point I was trying to make to my friend. He looks around to see them for himself. The lights are too feeble to make out anything concrete. Instead, both of us end up following three slender dogs racing from one end of the street to the other in search of nocturnal warmth.

All of us know the inevitable. All of us know how dogs cooperate amongst members in their species to shield themselves from the tormenting cold. And frankly, I don’t blame them. We were freezing our feet out of woollen socks as we sipped diluted milk water with tea bags dipped in them in a bid to keep the lips moist. Imagining how hard it must be for our stray brethren, bereft of hooded sweatshirts, leather gloves, color-splashed scarves and flubber-like thermals, to withstand the Himalayan winter makes me gasp out a jet of precious hot air straight at my friend’s horn-rimmed spectacles.

Through the droplets on his 2.5D specs, I see his eyelashes wince in discomfort. Kathmandu was never a city of brotherly love, or so he might have thought.

Irrespective of the time of the year or weather of the time, the human epidermis yearns for some warmth at the dead of the night. Sometimes, they set the air-conditioning temperature to 16 degrees and curl themselves in a blanket to obtain that. I would like to think that this thirst can be quenched at a psychological level. Maybe, that is why little girls are the happiest when their fathers count stars in the sky to make them sleep. Or stuffed furry toys find space in many female beds where sturdy pillows would have sufficed.

 I remember a neighbour in Shillong who would light a perfumed candle before retiring every night. She would incessantly tell me that it was to prevent foul odours from waking her in the middle of her sleep. Now when I ponder about it, I wonder how reasonable her explanation was. Shillong is one of the last places in India to be sullied for its odious air. The candle probably gave her solace at night in the same way that the thought of his wife and children sleeping in bliss inside the safety and security of four walls makes a soldier spend a tempestuous night at a border check post.

I like to believe that there are these nights when her eyes spring open after a particularly bad dream and scramble around in the dark for a semblance of re-assuring security. I like to believe that after a point of time those pupils rest on the blue-yellow flicker of the candle, fluttering even as the moths and beetles in the cosmos of the room huddle in its light, and go back to dreaming again. I would like to believe that. But then, fireflies would necessarily have to be broken fragments of the stars wobbling above. I would like to believe that too.

As it turns out, I do have an uncomfortable dream that night. Uncomfortable enough to make you get out of a thermal quilt in your bare boxers. I search my pockets for my perfumed candle. A captivating note written by a co-dweeb earlier in the night. Reading it once re-kindles the intent to get inside the quilt again. Perusing it somehow gets those eyelids droopy again.

Someday, a research study will find similarities between the respective molecular composition of stars and firefly body cells. I would like to believe that. Very much. 

DUAL CHEMISTRY

My fascination for oxidative and reductive processes persists as I expose myself to the blistering sun at Marine Drive. Does the sun breathe hope to maintain most human actions and reactions which are inherently devoid of oxygen? Sunshine, at least in this part of the globe does not let your emotions surface. Clouds in the horizon are evocative, albeit a bit sombre. Infra-red perspires out every trace of feeling.

The dove-and-magpie couple necking each other next to me is a focal point of interest; another chemical scrap in a bottle. Like a Stolichnaya, attraction is unadulterated. Time, though, brings in the tannins. Some of the well-brewed bottles of grow into genteel, gallant men with their tailored suits and impeccable table manners. The coarse ones just grow bitter. Dessication is inevitable in every relationship; but then every fruit does not ferment into a viscous wine.

Hormones are another case in point. They drive the most ruthless of minds in ways stranger than the most gripping of pulp thrillers. One of the most coveted of male traits is emotional refrigeration. That explains most of their vices – from drinking to promiscuity to full-throttle tyranny. I worked under this person (say Jeff) for around a year in a capacity close enough to observe him from 16x angles. Close enough to think of him as the most pragmatic and guile of human forms. To put it without any subterranean clauses, Jeff was the model shark. The way he demarcated work and pleasure, and blended it to further the objectives of the bigger picture was remarkable. The type who toys with emotional ambivalence to extract his ends, while managing to remain ethical through out. Actually, he eluded all known categories of XY-chromosomed movers and shakers.

So when an evangelical Fagin like him told me that an interaction with college kids had left him searching inside hopelessly for answers, I was astounded. When calculative minds like him begin to ponder over things like distant dreams and wishes, you kind of begin to believe in the mid-life crisis phenomenon. Try as we may, men cannot spend their lives jostling on testosterone. Even the most rugged of Harley-Davidsons needs to be handled with care. Women, on the other hand, are chemically combustible. They get triggered by the most diverse of objects and circumstances. However, the kind of reactions that oxytocin triggers are dense and wholesome. That is probably why women have a reason to back up their most impulsive of actions. Women never really have a model prototype they aspire to be. They develop in a way more holistic than men will ever be.

 Masculine frustration is the most abominable of abstract nouns. I sense the truism as the male necking his paramour next to me walks off in a fit of rage. The petulant kick to start the bike reveals more than it hides. The lady, on the other hand, is characteristically stoical. Her sense of composure is flawless, except for her eyes. A drop of sweat trickles down across my lower neck to soil my T-shirt collar.

Empathy needs a chemical equation.

SOLE CHEMISTRY I

When the natural order of things goes against your senses, it is work. We, human minds will always covet the forbidden. And so, we created this whole dichotomy of work and leisure. Sometimes you wish life was a double-barrel gun where we work so as to gain leisure and we squander our time so that we can finally give in to things against our will. Instead, our lives turn out to be the relentless pursuit of leisure at different places and positions.

There hangs a rope at the entrance of the Irani cafe I am writing this from. They say it is present for the elderly to help them ascend the Portuguese stairs. Irrespective of our age, each one of us needs such an arrangement; if only to ascend the staircase of time. My spine-equipped sister Sherlie needs one to give her solace from the most extreme of fears. As she moves up from the monotony of a blue-pleated, knee-covering skirt to the randomness of attire in an Indian college, she holds on to the rope of faith.

Her brother thought he could narcotize the mesh of jute to while away the years of existence. Every month a new drug; every evening a more lethal cocktail. It is only in those feeble moments of clarity of thought that stops coming naturally once your hormones are active, that you realize the folly. The symbolic rope of life’s rocky ascent is more a glimmer of its phonetic cousin – hope. We are all aesthetes, and so we hope. But does the indulgence of senses really help? Even the most wasted of hedonists have their moments of envying monks. And then, leisure becomes work.

Perhaps homo sapiens are better off morphing into vegetating macro-amoebas. Or maybe, they ought to evolve into hyper-aware bodies that constantly pump red fluids. Until recently, I thought hyper-awareness is something only marijuana could provide. That was before I stumbled upon Somerset Maugham.

Fatalists argue that if all human reactions are innately biochemical, there should be a rigid tipping point. A glut of either work or leisure could be the answer. All that intrigues me now is the nature of the reaction that happens every moment in a day’s work. Is it oxidation, or does it relentlessly suck away the fading O₂ of hope?

Meanwhile, I end up leaning on the rope as I descend the stairs.

THE HACKNEYED THEOREM

Mathematics is a permanent disfigurement of your face, if you are born with a Euclid of a dad. All your childhood, you are supposed to figure out your own response mechanism to issues that concern you. As if life is a linear equation in two variables, with the other equation absent. Or, a right triangle with only the hypotenuse length known.

The scar is only compounded if you are not exactly a blessed athlete. And you somehow manage to turn your mortifying moments around. Like the 100 metres race in IInd grade where you finished joint last with a classmate who weighed 120 lbs. Or the ignominy of watching distraught as a kid from the neighbourhood gulped rat poison after her dad died. The numbers in your genes are supposed to turn every lowly 6 upside down into a greater 9 and grade every miserable feeling on the number line. As the father would say, you need to have an ever-calculative mind.

I have always believed that mathematicians make the lousiest of story-tellers, with the exception of Lewis Carroll. Their imagination is too stifled by logic. Once at a gathering, I took enormous pains to explain the significance of my T-shirt print (it said 69) to an interested on-looker. Soon, word would spread that the maths guy’s lad knew a little too much about things he shouldn’t know at his age. Sample my dad’s riposte to the significance of 69 – Like the number, the person remains the same even you turn him upside down, invert him laterally or look at him sideways.

Even the most ancient of fungi couldn’t have made the bread staler for me that evening.     

All said and done, the single most damnable trait of mathematically-inclined minds is their pathetic aversion to toe the unproven line. Research and statistics take precedence over desire while determining career options, whether it is for themselves or for their progeny. To them, the adage isn’t ‘Look before you leap” but instead somewhat like “Calculate and then follow.”  Risks are almost allergic, even the calculated ones.  I grew up being fed with the notion that daydreaming was the most rotten of my habits, since it hardly solved any purpose. Took me a while to realise that the only thing that ought to matter is whether I felt happy doing it. Never cook with number-infested minds; they will never let you deviate from the cookbook. 

This post is not meant to be a scathing indictment of all things numerical. In fact, there are so many of these caprices that I can’t seem to grow out of, most notably the counting of every stair I ascend. Or adding up the digits of every licence plate I see and check whether it is odd or even. Evens are favourable; odds are a tad quirky. There is this addictive methodology of determining prime numbers between 1 and 100; I forgot the name though. Reducing something to its lowest / naked terms is one of the most delectable of things, whether it is fractions or human figures. Infinity fascinates me, especially when you wonder how relevant would its idea be in a black hole. Calculus is something I could never decipher but I find in it an everlasting analogy for life. You differentiate and derive chapters from your past and integrate it into your present experiences. I can even predict the reply if I told my Dad about this thought-provoking insight: “Well your marks in calculus never evoked so much promise.” What is logical will always remain familiar; and will, therefore, continue to breed contempt. Infinitely.

TRAIN-TRIPPING

I kept staring at those heels as they made their dripping way amidst the croaking flock. Half-coated in human excreta, they were glistening in the toaster-like sun. Looking at her android-like eyes though, I wonder what she ate last night (apologies, Nirvana).

Scraps. Her life must be full of them.

Ever since we learnt to trade and barter, we have always needed vultures like her to consume our remains and remnants. We have always needed scavengers of our kind to sustain our well-bred supremacy. However, these by-products- like brethren often have no outlet to dispose off their waste, bodily or otherwise.

 Irony is seldom a two-way street. 

The arresting thing about local trains in Mumbai is that you see life in all its schizophrenic dimensions while you commute. It could be the pony-tailed child, whose parents got off a station ago, searching helplessly for familiarity with her eyes. Or, a bunch of middle-aged women too liberal and loud with their words. Call it serendipity, call it what you want, but your ear phones will be impaired the day your travelling compartment is infested by female members of the glib set. Poodle talk and house-warming discussions end up replacing your Coldplay dose of the day. If you happen to travel by Class II, you will know them by the ear-pinching squeaks of bragging that will inevitably compare everything from cell phones to complexions to husbands and hunger. Unlike others, practice makes them pick up worse topics to ramble about.

Then there are the bread-earning solitary men who find vicarious pleasure in pushing and shoving everyone in their proximity a good 12 miles before their station is due. They thrive on sadism, however tenuous it is. Making a 5-seater bench overflow with seven bodies sweating like muddy pigs; clamming up the doors on your way out and inside - remain their preferred pursuits. They come in all shapes and sizes – the tie-wielders with baby cheeks and minimum scalp hairs, white-haired men with amplified voices and bellies that make you wonder if they have egested anything they have eaten during their prolonged stay on the planet.

The scavengers too have their varieties – from the thinly balding eunuchs who venture one step short of molesting you for a penny or two, to the physically debilitated men crooning and soliciting in the hope of economic salvation. The sub-species that you spot, also depends to a great extent on the time of day you board a train. Mornings are for the deformed and the deprived. Any time between 12 pm and 3 pm, you can safely expect to meet kids of all age and gender denominations willing to do anything from sweeping the floors to plucking your nostrils. Eunuchs and their poseurs thrive as the city hustles to get home in the evenings.

A recent VIP ad helps understand the anarchy of Mumbai trains better. It is a marker for the collateral damage that progress, without a lack of planning, could result in. All those who end up believing that India breeds kaleidoscopic ways of living should board a Thane-bound train at Dadar at 1800 hrs IST on weekdays. Surviving the glut of masses is akin to purging on every wrong route that the nation has plunged into since Independence. Apply Murphy’s Law to the Indian story of development. And you get a CST- Thane local stranded half-way at Kurla for reasons whatsoever.  

Activities that take place at unearthly hours inside bogies, running or stationary, lend further credence to the diagnosis of schizophrenia for local trains. You could witness the male and female flesh following their carnal urgings. You could find the compartment transmogrifying into the dining table. If you were me last night, you would have found human bodies defecating on stainless steel seats that substitute for ceramic basin. Serendipity is bigger than you think. Doesn’t matter if you hated the John Cusack flick of the same name. 

INITIATION

“On the other side, on the other side.

Nobody’s waiting for me, on the other side.”

-          The Strokes

(First Impressions of Earth)

In retrospect, I must have been a bit drunk. Or else, the deviant nature of the matter would have struck me then. In front of me lay three new inductees into Bacchus’ densely populated community. One had all but orally egested the last dollop of every chicken leg he had consumed in the last two days. Another one had spluttered out the feeble supper he had eaten three hours ago all over his bed, and was sleeping in contentment over it. The third one had shown, what could safely be called the gift of temperance. Three large pegs down in his first rendezvous with alcohol and he was doing what he always did best in the dormitory – clean up. I began doubting my assessment of the three froth-freshmen when the purportedly sober one started flogging the dozing-over-vomit guy to wake him up. All my doubts were quelled when the former decided that the issue was dire enough to try getting him to his senses by twanging his phallic instrument.

People comfortable with alcohol often end up thinking that time prefers to enliven itself only in its accompaniment. However, some of the most boisterous scenes often ensue when people non-affiliated to liquor end up sipping a swig or two. Take our three sloshed musketeers. They almost went berserk at the bar after a pint of Tuborg each. All those fantasies of the bibulous life that advocates for safe driving and evangelists of abstinence build clouded their notions. They liked to believe that Tuborg hadn’t yet transported him to the cosmos even though the fact that they were tipsy was quite evident to everyone else in Colaba.

The first time around is always the rubicon, my mum used to tell me in those rare moments when she would preach. The hazards of managing a job with my impish feet emulating Maradona inside her belly taught her the discourse twenty years ago. People get scarred when something fizzles out disastrously the first time around. Imagine yourself getting castigated on the first day at work, or pulled up by the cops for bumping into another sedan the first time you take out any vehicle for a spin. Mum tells me you ought to heal yourself out of the trauma and learn to walk again. She ought to know. A junkie-faced goblin as the fruit of her first nine-month ordeal didn’t impede her from conceiving a second child. Hopefully, she got it right with my sister.

Teaching caddies how to fish always makes more sense than giving them a tuna every day. Our venerated trio needed to be shown where to go looking with faded pockets. Men always like to learn the ropes on their own. In that process, however, they end up sticking to a procedure that they end up following all the time. Drinking vodka on a deserted bus stop with the three virgins, I wondered if they would end up doing the same round every time they needed a spirited fix – dissolve the elixir in soft drink cans and have people around them wondering why those guys with the 7Up cans seem to be hollering ‘pussy’ over and over again. The force of habit is often stronger than gravity, something you realise in the first month of Post-Nicotine Syndrome (PNS). Maybe, even stronger than the thrust of your bowels, as the foreign-bred Indian often realises once inside a loo in his motherland.

         At the end of the day, the bridge is yours to cross. You can only show them the flashlight, I thought, watching the repugnant form of inducing consciousness unfold before me. Your fears and inhibitions remain your own to overcome. In a world full of bon vivant - bloated bellies, you can hardly expect anyone to understand the perils of a famished body. No point even telling them if there are butterflies trampling inside.