What Does She Think Of Herself?

A few years ago, walking down the road in Kanpur, I noticed a small boy, holding his mother's hand, walking in front of me. Suddenly, the boy broke free from his mother's grip and ran. He almost came under a car but the driver, a young woman, applied brakes just in time.

"Kya samajhti hai apne aap ko!" the boy's mother yelled while looking at the car -- What does she think of herself!

I was quite suprised by her reaction: instead of scolding the boy, she was getting angry with the woman who had actually saved her son's life by applying brakes in the nick of time. Then I realised, had the driver been a man, she would have at the most shouted, "Dekh kar nahin chalte kya?" -- Can't you watch out while driving? But the sight of a woman on the driver's seat (in the car as well as in life) was a bit too unpalatable for this boy's mother. And therefore, the 'What do you think of yourself.' The mother kept throwing angry, backward, glances at the car till it was out of sight, and only then did she give one slap to the boy for sprinting out of her grip.

It is the 'What do you think of yourself' syndrome that bites the Indian, man or woman, whenever Arundhati Roy writes or says something in public.

I am neither a fan of her, nor a baiter; I haven't even read her, though I am aware of what she writes about because of the noise made in the media. And I think it is commendable on her part to raise issues that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. In the process, she at least creates awareness and every newspaper-reading Indian gets to examine or re-examine the issue she is raising. The opinion you arrive at after examining the issue is a completely different matter -- you are free to agree with her or disagree with her.

But why go after her hammer and tongs as if she was a witch going to eat up the nation? It was to understand, and perhaps explain, this question that I wrote my previous post. But the point seemed to have been lost. As far as Kashmir or the Maoist movement is concerned, your opinion may be different from mine and I have no quarrel with that. I only sought to address one simple question: why does the whole of literate India seem to be seething with rage every time Arundhati Roy opens her mouth?

She is hardly a threat, after all. She does not run a political party that can influence people. She does not even command a small-time political outfit. She is not even as influential as individuals such as Medha Patkar or Baba Amte. She is not even being a writer -- just a one-book wonder. And yet, so much of rage, so much of anger -- coming from people who have learned to live with the likes of Bal Thackeray and Raj Thackeray?

The answer is simple. Arundhati Roy is a woman -- a woman who is attractive and articulate, defiant and daring, who effectively uses glamour and celebrity to draw attention to the issues she raises. Too unpalatable for Indian sensibilities. Indians must revolt: What does she think of herself?

Had the same views been expressed by a khadi-wearing, jhola-carrying gentleman called Arun Roy, instead of Arundhati Roy, no one would have wasted their time and emotions in retaliating.

There is a genial doctor called Binayak Sen, who spent the best part of his productive life in Chhattisgarh, treating and fighting for the oppressed, and yet languished in jail for allegedly being kind to the Maoists. Now tell me -- and do tell me the truth -- how many of you had even heard of Dr Sen until he was released from jail pretty recently following intervention by the Supreme Court? And yet you bristle with anger and activism when a certain Arundhati Roy speaks her mind on the same issue. Why so?

An Indian woman is supposed to be shy and coy and conforming to the rules set by the society. Until very recently, the storylines of many Indian films, including Hindi films, have been about taming the tomboy. In the first half of the film, the heroine defies tradition and raises eyebrows, but in the next half, she is tamed by the macho hero into being as soft as a snowflake. The audience gave out a collective sigh of orgasm: "Wow, he taught her a lesson." It walked out of the theatre with a smug look, happpy that the social equilibrium remained undisturbed.

The mindset hasn't changed since then. Problems still arise when a woman stops being a doormat and decides to raise issues and ask questions. That's when we Indians take a big gulp and exclaim in outrage, "How could she? What does she think of herself?"

Why People Hate Arundhati Roy

I first saw Arundhati Roy on our black and white TV, in a film called Massey Sahib that was directed by her husband Pradeep Kishen. Though at the time I did not know she was the Arundhati Roy. She played the role of a tribal woman, if my memory serves right, and I found her quite attractive.

Then, of course, we all got to know Arundhati Roy. The Booker and all. There were two other people with India connection who had won the Booker before, but Salman Rushdie did not live long enough in India, while Naipaul was never born in India -- they were as good as Brits. The news of their winning the Booker, for the lay Indian, must have been as significant, or insignificant, as the mayor of an American city inaugurating a library. But Arundhati Roy, by winning the prize, brought about a revolution. Just how Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai, by winning the Miss Universe and Miss World crowns, made the average young Indian woman look at herself in the mirror again, Roy's Booker breathed fire into the ambition of the ordinary Indian who had always dreamed to be a respected writer.

I never bought a copy of God Of Small Things: I read a few passages from a colleague's copy and did not feel encouraged to invest money in it, even though those days -- this was in 1997 or 1998 I think -- I was buying books left, right and centre. Maybe I hadn't matured as a reader then, even though I was old enough.

I also never got around to reading any of Arundhati Roy's Outlook articles, maybe a few paras, though, thanks to the debates they always kicked up in newspapers and news channels; I have been aware of what she is writing about. It is clear that she likes to take up the case, or the cause, of voiceless people who do not have a strong spokesperson backing them. And I think that is highly commendable. Take the Maoists for example. If you treat Maoists as enemies, you will never win the battle against them. But if you look into the reasons why Maoist rebels are born in the first place, you might have a solution at hand. But then, an exchange of gunfire is far easier than making an effort to change the system -- so what if a few policemen lose their lives? Maoists, after all, are not enemies planted on Indian soil by al Quaeda: they are our own people -- very poor, very deprived and very humiliated.

When you are living in a big city, say Delhi, where everything is just a phone call away, right from the morning milk to the pizza for dinner, life is so hunky dory that you tell yourself -- "Wow, India has progressed so much! Couldn't have imagined this happening 10 years ago!" True. But it is only the cities that have progressed, India hasn't. In a city, all you need to do is walk up to the gate of your apartment with your child, and soon a school bus will arrive to take the child to school. But in non-urban India, children walk for kilometres to get to school. Just imagine pairs of tiny feet walking five or six kilometres just to get to school. Can it get any more cruel? In many cases, they have a river or a stream falling on the way: they wade through it too.

Now, how many of the pizza-eating crowd have ever bothered to take up the cause of such people -- people who are poor, who live in remote areas, who fight not only their fate but also the system perpetrated by the state? Yet they all like to talk about the harm that Arundhati Roy -- of all people -- is causing to the nation!

What's so drastically wrong if Roy spoke in favour of Kashmiris seeking freedom? Kashmir does not become an 'integral part' of India just because the Indian government says so. It is for the Kashmiris to decide whether they consider themselves to be an integral part of India or not. If they think so, well and good, but if they don't, just too bad. People like us, who don't live in Kashmir and are not even remotely concerned with it, have no business forcing them into being an integral part of India. Cyril Radcliffe had left Kashmir out while partitioning India, but when Pakistani raiders entered the Valley in October 1947, the maharaja acceded to India and since then, the 'Kashmir issue' was born. Even when there was peace in Kashmir, the Kashmiris referred to us as Indians -- which meant they did not consider themselves as one. Slogan-shouting is one thing, ground reality another.

The Indian government is aware of the ground reality, that is why it did not book Arundhati Roy for sedition. I am sure there were many benevolent Britishers who thought that India must be freed from British rule, but I don't think Britain tried them for sedition. That's the beauty of democracy. You speak your mind. The day you are hounded for speaking your mind, you are no longer living in a democracy but in an autocracy.

The real reason why there is so much of anger against Arundhati Roy, every time she writes or says something, lies elsewhere. It lies in the Indian mindset. She is attractive, intelligent, articulate, bold and defiant -- something unpalatable for the chauvinistic Indian, male or female, who want women to be always conforming. So they go after her, hammer and tongs, even while being indifferent when serious cases of corruption are exposed day after day. Recently I put a status message to this effect on my Facebook profile, and was greeted with several angry comments. I would like to quote from two of them:

-- Can the freedom of speech in a democracy be stretched to challenge the sovereignty and integrity of the country? Rights come to citizen along with responsibility. Citizens should heckle her instead of government doing that.

-- The anger of people has increased with every irresponsible statement she made which has shown complete disregard to this nation. The nation cannot sit back and ignore her when she keeps on making those politically provocative statements again and again and again!!!

Nation. Sovereignty. Integrity. Big words. But, then, we are a big nation. A very big nation. Yet threatened and outraged by the views of just one woman activist. Why?

Till I Met You!

Today is Kishore Kumar's death anniversary. Kishore Kumar! -- I can do without women, but not without his voice. Never.

His songs mark my existence, they are the core of my being. People associated with my childhood, my growing-up years will fade one day -- my mother is already gone -- but Kishore Kumar's voice will remain just as fresh, an unbreakable pillar from the past.

He sang countless songs, most of which I like, needless to say. But there is one song which I totally identify with -- beautifully written, composed and sung. I am proud to say that the lyricist is on my friend's list on Facebook (I was the one who shamelessly added him out of hero-worship), which means he is very much a part of the present and not yet of the romantic, unreachable past. Am talking of Amit Khanna: he wrote quite a few memorable songs for Kishore Kumar, the best known among them being Chalte chalte, mere yeh geet yaad rakhna, kabhi alvida na kehna...

But this song is special. Lie back, plug the earphones, shut your eyes and -- enjoy!

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Women Versus Women

Last week, I attended the debate that Outlook magazine has been organising in major cities to celebrate 15 years of its existence. This being Chennai, the subject of the debate was 'Moral Policing in a Democracy.'

It was a lively debate, with plenty of active participation from the audience, and I am fortunate to have attended it. The audience kept booing a former vice-chancellor of Anna University who, during his tenure, had forbidden jeans and T-shirt on the campus, the reason being if female students wore jeans and T-shirt, it would distract the teachers and therefore education would suffer.

Supporting him was Dr Tamilisai Soundarajan. This lady needs introduction. Her father, Kumari Anandan, is a well-known Congress leader from Tamil Nadu, but the daughter chose to join the BJP and even contested the last elections from North Chennai. Dr Tamilisai is also a medical doctor.

"I know it better, because I am a doctor myself. There is something called excitement," she thundered, seeking to explain medically the effect that the sight of a T-shirt/jeans-clad female student can have on the male teacher. I wanted to ask her two things:

1. Madam, by the same logic, male doctors should not examine female patients. What if the stethoscope keeps landing at the wrong place out of excitement? Worse, what if they wrote the wrong medicine out of excitement?

2. Madam, if the teachers get excited by the mere sight of a T-shirt-clad female student, do they deserve to be teaching in the first place? Did they complete their PhD's in a jungle, living in a cave?

But I didn't ask her these questions because she was already being hounded. Moreover, I was just a fly on the wall, taking notes: I was determined not to become a participant. By not being a participant, one can write with total objectivity.

But one statement made by the lady keeps ringing in my ears -- and mind you, she is a doctor! When the subject came to young people visiting pubs, she shouted:

"If you see your sister or daughter drinking in a pub, won't you give her one tight slap and drag her home?"

The panelists cringed. And then she thundered again, "I am a doctor, I know the harmful effects of alcohol."

I don't really blame her. She was merely echoing what you call the typical Indian mentality. In my personal experience, I have seen it is the women who have all the fun in the parties and the pubs because they know how to hold their drink unlike the men who are prone to get drunk and therefore more susceptible to the ill-effects of alcohol. But never did Dr Tamilisai say, "If you find your brother or son drinking in a pub, won't you give him one tight slap and drag him home?"

The men are excused, you see. The onus is on the women to be well-behaved and keep the so-called Indian culture together. A man can go out of town on work and gladly romance a colleague or engage a sex worker, nothing happens. His wife might give him hell if she ever finds out, but the society merely winks mischievously. But if a working woman were to do the same, the scandalised society would take it upon itself to brand her a slut.

Indian society is still very primitive and chauvinistic, which does not appreciate a woman taking her own decisions. Even something as simple as having a drink all by herself is likely to be met by raised eyebrows. An Indian woman, if at all she has to drink, must do so only in the company of her husband or boyfriend or when she has a bunch of friends over. If she enjoys a drink all by herself, and if people come to know about it, they call her a 'loose character'. How can a woman enjoy a drink alone? So hard to digest she is having fun without the permission or approval of a man. That is the truth, and no one can deny it.

When I say chauvinism, I don't mean male chauvinism. Women, in my opinion, are the biggest enemies of women. One does not like the idea of another having a good time. Often, such jealousies are the result of grapes being sour. A woman who has never been asked out by a man for a cup of coffee or a drink will always look at couples sitting in a coffee shop or a pub with a tainted vision. Imagine two women living under the same roof, say hostel mates. One gets all the male attention, while the other gets none. You will invariably find the one, who does not get the attention, constantly warning the other: "You must be careful with men. You don't know what they are capable of. Avoid them." But if the deprived woman happens to find attention as well, then man ceases to be an evil creature and the hostel room becomes a rosy place to live in.

It is not too difficult to find one woman sympathising with another for having an abusive or an impotent husband; but if the aggrieved woman happens to have a one-night stand or feels good in the arms of another man, she is instantly branded as loose-character by the same sympathising woman.

Suffer,
and I am with you;
Seek pleasure,
then to hell with you.

That's the kind of emotion that works between women.

It is quite evident from the angry comments that my previous post has attracted. It is the story of a woman called Ms C, who is bold as well as beautiful (and therefore more of a threat to women than men),and who, one night during a party, has no-strings-attached sex with a colleague of her husband in his car. She has a good time, and the next morning she wakes with no sour feelings but only a backache caused by the lack of space in the car. I wrote that how I respected her for being bold enough to enjoy sex for the sake of sex without inventing an emotional excuse.

But no one agreed with me. And then it struck me, why so. I realised that if you are Indian woman, certain rules apply:

1. You should not think of sex unless there is a man who grants legitimacy to your thoughts;

2. You should not even dream of having sex with any man other than the one mentioned above;

3. You can have sex with another man, but for that you need to be sufficiently 'carried away';

4. But the next morning, after being 'carried away' the night before, you must be found choking with guilt, shedding copious tears, even contemplating suicide. It is very important that you show signs of guilt or else the society will put the 'Loose' stamp on your character certificate.

But if you don't comform to these norms, you are branded a slut. And why? Not because of morality -- because no one has been able to define morality -- but only jealousy.

Ms C, after all, is a woman to be jealous about. She is beautiful and she is bold. She falls for the charm of a man and decides to have sex with him, without inventing stories in order to justify her act. Why should she justify it -- and to who? She is pretty much sure what she wants. All she wants is good sex for that night and she gets it. The next morning she does not wake up with suicidal thoughts or shed tears of guilt. She goes to work as usual, ableit with a backache.

Now that's what is needling people, who can't digest the fact that an Indian woman can enjoy sex with a stranger and at the same time wake up the next morning without a trace of guilt. Oh boy, how can a good-looking woman decide to enjoy sex on her own: shouldn't somebody tame her and tell her about moral values?

But no one grudges a man enjoying sex. In fact, the society conspires to see to it that he gets to enjoy it, legitimately or illegimately. But when it comes to women, the society is jealous. Women are a source of enjoyment, how can they seek enjoyment -- it is highly immoral!

I know for a fact that the baiters of Ms C are mostly women, because men would only like her tribe to grow. It is the women who disapprove of her action and the explanation is simple: "How can you enjoy it, you bitch, when none of us can't?"

And finally, a word for those troubled souls who, every time I write on the subject of sex, ask me the same 'What if your wife' question. Such souls never go into the merit of a post and instead choose to get personal and dirty.

Dear Troubled Soul, if you think I am a hypocrite who advocates free sex on one hand and at the same time cringes at the thought of my wife going for it, you are wrong. Perhaps you are the kind who tells himself or herself every now and then, "Shucks, how could I even think about it? What if my spouse did the same to me?" But unlike you, I have the luxury of expressing my thoughts freely because that's the way I want it. If you don't know how to speak your mind you are a vegetable. And my thoughts are neither a slave of my wife's presence, nor is my wife the slave of my presence or my thoughts. We are two individuals who respect each other and who do not let insecurities curb each other. Does having a wife mean that I, as a writer, should not express my thoughts on sex? Does having a wife mean that I cannot stand up and clap for Ms C?

I am here to stand by my beliefs, not to entertain the insecurities that you express.

The Backache

It's a true story and a recent one, something that happened last Saturday.

Ms C, a strikingly good-looking woman, hailing from Punjab but currently living in Chennai, had accompanied her husband to a dinner party organised by his office. It was a gala event, held on the lawns and attended by nearly 500 people. It was one of those sophisticated evenings when alcohol and perfume combine to give off a smell that tickles you in the right places; when women look magnetic and the men attractive; when decorum mingles with flirtation and they together lend a certain sexiness to the evening air.

Ms C's husband can be counted as attractive, the well-bred sort who can charm women as well as men. I have seen him several times, but never met him or shaken hands with him. For that matter, I don't know Ms C too well either -- I have been, as they say, only on 'Hi-Hello' terms with her. But I know about her quite well: how she locked her husband out one whole night just because he had forgotten their wedding anniversary (the poor man sat on the stairs till the milkman came in the morning); how they made love seven times in a single day during a subsequent wedding-anniversary trip to Mauritius; how she was thrilled when the husband presented her a diamond pendant on her birthday (I even know the price of the pendant: "Half a lakh rupees").

All this I know because Ms C's best friend and confidant happens to be a friend of mine. They work in the office and during lunchbreak every afternoon, Ms C invariably pours her heart out to her best friend-cum-colleague. Occasionally, some of the titillating details find their way into my ears.

So last Monday, a day after the dinner organised by her husband's company, Ms C walked into office with a severe backache. Everybody at the workplace sympathised with her and asked her to take it easy: the world never lets a pretty woman suffer. And then, during lunchtime, the reason behind her backache came out tumbling. She had had too much sex.

During the dinner night, Ms C had fallen for the charm of a husband's colleague. She had never met him before, he too was seeing her for the first time. Sparks flew, and while the husband was busy making small talk with his bosses, they slipped out to the parking lot and made love in his car. It was a Maruti 800, which has enough room to hold a small family but is small enough to contain the lust of two people. So space was a constraint and therefore she got a terrible backache.

Apart from the physical pain, Ms C had nothing to complain about. She had had a good time, she said. She finally had sex with someone she liked instantly, without making elaborate mental preparations to explain or justify it. It was a fuck for the sake of a fuck: no mess to clear up the next morning, except attending to a backache.

All these years, I had never thought very highly of Ms C -- she was too flawless and model-type to be taken seriously. But once I heard the backache story, my respect for her touched the sky.

We all want sex -- good sex, actually. Sex is something which even animals have, but good sex is something that remains invariably elusive to the lay human. And therefore the search. We often go to great lengths looking for it, and even after having found a potential source, spend a substantial part of our lifetime wondering -- should I or should I not? And even if we decide to go for it, another chunk of the lifetime is wasted in cooking up a socially-acceptable justification for the desire to have good sex. By the time the sex happens, it is so deliberately mired in emotions that pleasure goes out of the window.

Sex is actually an act of pleasure -- procreation is a pathetically secondary purpose. Gandhiji looked down upon sex as a tool of pleasure; he wanted the act to be strictly reserved for procreation, if at all the need arose. But in order to procreate, you need to be sufficiently pleasured to carry out the act of procreation!

Gandhi, for that matter, was married at 13 and became a celibate only at 36 -- after a good 23 years of what they call marital bliss. Twenty-three years is a long, long time to have -- or enjoy -- sex with the same person. But, strangely, in the autumn of his life, when he was old enough to be a great-grandfather and should have abandoned thoughts about sex anyway, Gandhi was still testing his will power to resist the pleasures of sex by coaxing women to sleep naked with him -- disregarding the psychological impact his bizzare acts might have on the young women. In the present day, the so-called 'Brahmacharya experiments' would have landed Bapu in jail under multiple charges of sexual harrassment.

And here is Ms C, who had one clean experiment with pleasure. No psychological residue, no ugly remnants. Only a good feeling and backache.

Appetite For Life

In precisely three months, I will turn 40. I hope to write a long and sentimental post a few days before I reach the milestone -- the milestone that officially marks the entry to middle-age. But right now, when the time is 3.20 am and when I was quite busy rewriting a chapter for the Chennai book, I don't know why the thought suddenly struck me that I would be 40 soon.

Maybe because this evening, when I went to work, the office boy handed me an envelope that contained four Mediclaim cards. Two things struck me as odd: no. 1, one of the cards issued was in the name of my mother, who is now up in heaven (my fault: I should have officially communicated to the people concerned that my mother is no more, but I presumed they all knew); no. 2, on my own card, my age was given as 40. You can fool the world but you can't fool the HR department which is instrumental in getting you medical benefits. If your date of birth is December 26, 1970, the HR guys are naturally going to calculate your current age to be 40: they won't wait for the clock to strike twelve.

Fuck, I am forty! Fuck time, really. The bitch makes no noise while it is ticking away. It deliberately ticks on the sly, as silently as possible, so that it can spring surprises on you just when you are feeling good about life. What a sadist bitch, I tell you. She sucks your blood without you realising it, and then one day you look carefully into the mirror and discover the damage she has done. By then it is too late.

But it is never too late. Show the middle finger to her and you might just live. Ms Time must realise we no longer live in the pre-World War II era when tuberculosis cut short promising lives even while they were in their forties: D.H. Lawrence and George Orwell, to name just two. Today, life begins at forty. And that's because our parents are living much longer and their assuring presence makes us feel like kids even whle we are in our thirties. The forties, therefore, is the new teenage. So celebrate, ladies and gentlemen!

But we all know such a celebration is only delusionary: forty, after all, is forty and not fourteen. Real celebration is when you are able to turn the tables and screw Ms Time so hard that she doesn't dare touch you until you have seen at least 88 summers. Am talking about Mr Henry Miller. He was no Hemingway, but he was no less. Both Miller and Hemingway survived the two World Wars and lived happily ever after -- none of them died of tuberculosis. And the reason for this, according to me, was their libido and appetite for life.

I have hope. I not only share Mr Miller's libido and appetite for life, but also his date of birth.

Break-Time Thoughts

Tonight I feel like taking a break from writing and coming back to the arms of my long-neglected blog -- and maybe write something about writing. There is little else I have been doing or thinking about these days that is worth articulating on Ganga Mail.

I have been writing like a madman; and when I say writing, it does not mean I am producing thousands of words when I sit in front of the computer with a bottle of whisky at my feet every night. There are times when as many as three hours are spent on composing a 15-word sentence. That speaks either very highly or very poorly of my skills as a writer. And there are times when an entire night is spent staring at the screen and nothing writing-worthy comes to mind.

But then, as I have always said and believed, writing is something that comes to you. You cannot go to it. But for writing to come to you, you must be in a state of readiness to receive it. And you can be ready only if you are already at the computer, toiling with words for hours or weeks or months together -- and then the sentences that you've been wanting to write come magically to you.

I can't call myself a writer yet because I've published only one book and another is still being written. But I know well enough by now that writing is an extremely lonely exercise: nobody thinks you are doing anything of consequence until the final product is out in the bookshops. So you are left to your own devices. Friends try to help of course, but you can't expect them to jump up in excitement every time you scream, "Eureka!" They have their own things to do.

Writing, in my opinion and little experience, is not so much about what you write but how you write it. And that's the most painful part: to summon the words that accurately describe the situation or emotion you are seeking to convey to the reader. The simpler the situation or the emotion, the more difficult it is to get the right words and make a sentence out of them. Alcohol sometimes helps, while sometimes it makes you go overboard. Eventually, it is only in a sober state the next morning that you decide how exactly a particular sentence should read. So Eureka again, but you keep the Eureka feeling to yourself when you are sober. And then night falls -- time again to dash naked across the virtual street to flaunt your achievement with words in a drunken state. Eventually, a book gets written. Hopefully, I get to write mine soon.

The title of my second book has just been decided, finally, and 40% of the manuscipt is sitting in a folder on my computer. The remaining 60% is still in my head, waiting to be fleshed out. Obviously, many more agonising months lie ahead. After all, I am not Hunter S. Thompson, the legendary American journalist who made writing look as simple as chewing gum.

Apart from writing, I have also been reading a lot these days. By reading I mean dipping into books that I've been constantly ordering from Flipkart.com. They are books I would like to read cover to cover -- someday maybe -- but since I don't have the time to do so right now, I fish for passages that provide me with the required nourishment to keep me going with the manuscript.

I shall reproduce one such nourishing passage, from The Gonzo Papers Anthology, a 1,200-page compilation of Hunter S. Thompson's dispatches as a journalist, which I ordered recently from Flipkart:

Dear Colonel Giang,

I am the National Affairs Editor of Rolling Stone, a San Francisco-based magazine, with offices in New York, Washington and London, that is one of the most influential journalistic voices in America right now -- particularly among the young and admittedly left-oriented survivors of the antiwar Peace Movement in the 1960s. I'm not an especially good typist, but I am one of the best writers currently using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon...

The last line, oh, the last line.

Liaquat And Other Stories From Kanpur

A day after I arrived in Kanpur, my father suggested – just like the olden times – that I get a haircut. So in the evening, I walked down to Liaquat’s saloon. Liaqat and I go back a long way, in the sense he has been cutting my hair right from the time I was eight or nine, till I left Kanpur in 1994. After that, I may have visited his saloon a couple of times, in the mid-1990’s, during my trips home. And now I was going after 15 years. The saloon, called Unique Men’s Parlour, turned out to be shut. I enquired from the shopkeeper next-door and was told that Liaquat opened the saloon only at five. Fifteen minutes to go. So I walked down the road, bought a cigarette, lit it up and strolled up and down, just to get a feel of the place. It felt the same, just the way it felt decades ago, only that there were many, many more houses now and that now I could smoke openly unlike back then when there was always a risk of being spotted by a passing neighbour.

By the time I returned to the saloon, Liaquat was already at work, snipping away at the hair of a teenaged boy. I walked in and asked, "Liaquat bhai, kaise hain?" He merely nodded at me and continued snipping. I sat down with a Hindi newspaper. And then it struck him. He stepped out, spat the pan masala he had been holding in his mouth and extended his hand, his face beaming, "Arrey dada, kahaan hain aaj kal aap?”

"Chennai mein."

"Badi door chale gaye hain. Ab to marriage-warriage ho gayi hogi?"

"Haan, ho gayi."

"Aur bachche-wachche?"

"Abhi nahin."

And so, the journey back in time began.

Liaquat went on to explain how he had planned to open the saloon a little earlier that evening, but how circumstances prevented him from doing so. He had just stepped out from home when it began to rain. So he went back home and asked his wife to prepare the chicken he had got earlier in the day. After all, he hadn’t had lunch. After he had had lunch, and was about to leave, some guests came home and tea was prepared for them. And so he thought, why not have tea as well. Therefore he could open his shop only now, after having had his lunch of chicken followed by the tea. All this explanation was totally unnecessary, but this was vintage Liaquat. In the 45 minutes that I spent there, I heard the rain-chicken-tea story repeated three times as more people – mostly hangers on – started trooping in.

In small towns, it is common for people – jobless or working – to hang around in shops in the evenings. From these shops – be it a paan shop or a saloon – they watch their neighbourhood go past. They are the much-feared 'society'. They discuss and speculate about the lives of people they see walking past, and often juicy details – real or concocted – tumble out. But mostly it is the physical appearance of the neighbourhood girls that are discussed: "Just look at her, how she swings her butt while walking" or "Look, look! Till the other day she was flat-chested, and now see how pointed her breasts are."

Liaquat’s saloon used to be a hotbed for such discussions many, many years ago. At the time Liaquat himself was young. But over the years he became conscious of that fact that not all his 'custoomers' would be amused by the lewd talk. And there was always a risk: what if the brother of the girl whose butt the hangers on were admiring was right there in his saloon, getting a haircut? Liaquat began to shun such elements. But the small talk, even though sanitised, continued to be the mainstay of the Liaquat experience. It is no fun getting a haircut at his saloon without the small talk and the bantering going on in the background. Even today, as I discovered that evening, his saloon is the ultimate answer to 'Things you wanted to know about your neighbourhood but didn’t know where to ask.'

Liaquat is not your regular small-town barber. He is fashionable. Only that his sense of fashion sense hit the pause mode sometime in the 1980’s. He still wears shiny shirts and white trousers – as worn by Jeetendra and Mithun Chakraborthy back then. But Liaquat’s own hair has thinned over the years, and so has his bottom, which would be emphasised by the white trousers earlier. What he retains is his skills and warmth – a warmth that is typical of a small town.

Kanpur isn’t a small town. In fact, it is the biggest city of Uttar Pradesh. It was typically a British city before Independence, and I am told – though I am not sure about this – that there was a time when the British population outnumbered that of the natives in Kanpur. But the city is broken down into various mohallas – neighbourhoods – in most of which you can still savour the small pleasures of living in a small town even in the 21st century.

Very close to my house, on a busy road, is a cattle-shed where about half-a-dozen cows and buffaloes are milked every morning and evening. Though packaged milk is available, those who want it fresh from the udders have the choice of signing up with the doodhwala on a monthly basis. (When I was young, one of the chores assigned to me was to fetch the milk and to make sure the milkman did not carry water in the bucket on the sly as he proceeded to milk the cow). Right next to the doodhwala’s shed is a cyber café, where mostly the college-going crowd hangs around. So, on one hand you still get fresh milk, while on the other you are connected online.

And then, the other small pleasures of life. For instance, when you feel like having jalebis, all you need to do is stop by at a roadside mithai shop. The halwai would gently squeeze the cloth and pour out the batter in small circles on boiling oil. Once fried, the circles would be ladled out into a large bowl containing the sugar syrup. Your jalebi is ready. The thing is, when you watch samosas or jalebis being fried, your desire to savour is heightened several times than when you buy them off the glass-case in a so-called reputed shop.

Just because a samosa is hot does not mean it is fresh – you can always heat it in the microwave, like most big shops in big cities do. You know a samosa has been freshly fried when it need not be so hot on the surface, but the moment you break it open, you see steam rising from the potato filling. In the past few days that I have been in Kanpur, Tiwariji’s samosas have burned my tongue several times. Getting tongue burned in this fashion is a luxury – a luxury I cannot expect in Chennai. Kolkata is probably the only metro which takes food very seriously and where you still find people heading to the nearest mishtir dokaan early in the morning to purchase freshly made roshogollas, shingara (samosa) and kochuris.

A small town is also ridiculously cheap. My wife wanted to buy a dupatta, so last evening we went to Lal Bangla, the market a stone’s throw away from my house. Lal Bangla is a testimony to the never-say-die spirit of the Punjabis. Most of the prosperous shops in the market are run by Punjabi families who came empty-handed during Partition but went on to do well in life as well as business. The owners of many of these shops had started off – so I have been told by people who knew better – by mending punctures in bicycle tyres.

Lal Bangla has always been the ideal, self-contained market for the small town – by small town I mean a place where people are guided by the value-for-money principle, who simply can’t understand why a saree should cost Rs 5,000 or a dupatta Rs 250. Not that the quality of what they purchase is inferior: the same pieces of clothing, when they travel to the metros, become obscenely expensive. Wife was shocked when she enquired the price of the dupatta: Rs 40! At first she couldn’t believe her ears, and then she became so ecstatic that she bought five more pieces of different colours.

Finally, why she had to buy the dupattas. We have a new pet dog at home, a female, just six months old. One morning, just after it was born, she had strayed into our house and since then, has stayed on. She does not have a name, neither was she ever put on leash, because my father was not sure if he was going to keep another dog after the death of Nano (the handsome, cheerful mongrel who died in an accident last year). Moreover, keeping a pet restricts your mobility. But then, as was expected, my father never had the heart to get the dog out. As a result, the dog without a name, who does not know what it means to be leashed and who has only been used to extreme pampering, is the queen of the house. In one of the playful moments, she shredded the wife’s dupatta into tiny pieces.

The dog was a bit shy of me the day I arrived, but since has been spending all her time with me. Even when I write in my room upstairs, till four in the morning, she is always there next to me, sleeping on her back like a human. And each time I make a whining sound from my throat (the first time when I had made the sound I had wanted to sound like a whining puppy just to see her reaction), she, without fail, rushes to me to hug me and lick my hands and face.

And the other night, after I had finished my quota of writing, I was sipping my last drink and humming, "O raat ke musaafir, chanda zara bataa de", the song from Miss Mary. I had heard the song a couple of times on You Tube a few weeks ago, and the tune remained in my head. Suddenly, the nameless dog sprang up from slumber and started pawing and licking me. Since then, I have tried humming other songs but this song alone gets her all loving and licking. Strange dog, very human dog. I wonder how she is going to cope with my absence when I leave Kanpur tonight.

A Pilgrimage

There are two things that hang in the air of Kolkata perennially: cigarette smoke and the music of R.D. Burman. It is the only city in India where smoking may be barred by law in public places but – thanks to Communist culture – is not considered taboo or looked down upon. As for R.D., flip through the numerous FM channels at any point of time and one of them is bound to be playing his song, either Hindi or Bengali – ah, the beats!

It is always a pleasure to arrive in Kolkata: to light up a cigarette right at the airport after two hours of abstinence and listen to Pancham in the car while headed home to some pampering by the mother-in-law; and during the drive, to look at some of the most beautiful faces on this planet. Chennai is my wife, Calcutta the highly seductive mistress. I spent last weekend in her arms.

Since I am neither Kolkata-born nor Kolkata-bred, you can’t call me conceited when I say the soil of the city gets your creative juices flowing the moment you step on it. To begin with, the giant hoardings dotting the road on the way from the airport: the energetic punch-lines make you feel as if you are arriving for one big party. (You can’t beat a Bong copywriter. You will find ready-to-borrow punch-lines even when you overhear two lay Bengalis speak to each other. Their conversation is rarely simple and straight; it is either laced with humour or sarcasm or is outright poetry.) Kolkata is indeed a happening city now, never mind if the government is still communist. In any case, at this time of the year, the city is preparing for its biggest party, the Durga Puja. At every fifty yards you will find a skeleton of bamboos waiting to be dressed up as pandals.

Saturday began with a breakfast of hing kochuri (stuffed kachoris laced with asafoetida) and a simple potato curry, followed by mishti doi and rosogullas. A traditional Bengali lunch was waiting, but our stomachs, much to the disappointment of mother-in-law, were full. To burn the calories, wife and a friend who had accompanied me from Chennai went shopping in the Salt Lake area, where we live. Since I have decided not to care about my weight until my Chennai book is done – after which I shall whip myself into shape – I went to sleep. What’s the point being in Bongland unless you can’t afford a post-meal siesta? But barely two hours of sleep and I was woken up. They were done with their shopping and now we were going for a drive into the city.

We drove in a drizzle, going right across the Rabindra Setu, the Ganga looking gloomy under the overcast sky, and then returning to the city to its famous landmarks: Fort William, Esplanade, Chowringhee and, finally, Victoria Memorial. The drizzle had stopped when we stepped outside Kolkata’s most famous colonial building. We were taking pictures when the chanachur man, dressed in Gandhian white (including a Gandhi cap) showed up. The Chennai friend pointed to his wares and asked him what it was. The chanachur man, glad that he had finally found someone so inquisitive, proceeded to provide a background.

“Madam, woh Kranti picture dekhe hain na?” he began.

I don’t think my friend has even seen Kranti, leave alone remembering the particular scene where Shatrughan Sinha masquerades as a chanachur-seller and sings a chanachur-related song (Kishore Kumar’s voice!) only to hoodwink cruel British jailors and save a fellow patriotic Indian – the ever-patriotic Manoj Kumar – from the gallows (I am borrowing from my memories of Kranti dating back to 1981, when I was eleven, so forgive me if I am not accurate). Since I knew he was going to repeat the story, I cut the chanachur man short and told my friend, "It’s a kind of mixture." She took a picture of him, and another along with him: soon he will be immortalised on Facebook. With chanachur in hand, we went on a buggy ride around the Maidan. The next stop was Park Street, but not before we had had paani-puris in front of Victoria Memorial.

At Park Street, wife and friend found themselves a table at Flury's. I excused myself and ran off, first to Music World and then to the Oxford Book Store. I bought two precious books, one of them being an issue of Granta which reproduces the first few pages of Naipaul’s notebook that was the basis for A Wounded Civilisation. Sharp, precise thoughts in long hand. I also bought a number of Bangla books for my father: Tagore, Sirshendu, Sunil Gangopadhyaya. The trip to Park Street ended with a round of egg rolls. It was 8 pm now. The evening had just begun. We were to return to Park Street again in a couple of hours. The Saturday night of Calcutta awaited us.

At 10.30 pm, Someplace Else at Park hotel was packed. As usual, a live band was rocking the dedicated crowd that likes to listen to guitars singing. After a drink each – the most modest brand of whisky available there is Teacher’s – we moved to Roxy, yet another nightclub of the hotel. There, while wife and friend proceeded to dance, I ordered a couple of more drinks. I was too sober to start dancing. But I had barely finished one drink when the DJ announced that he was going to play the last song for the evening. What the fuck! This was Calcutta, and it was barely midnight!

The waiter who brought me the check apologised. "Sir, we are usually open till two. But today is Eid. We have been asked to shut by twelve," she explained. We trooped out. I was upset. I wondered what could be the relation between Eid and nightclubs closing earlier than usual. If the reason was religious, then the clubs should have remained shut that evening. Or was it that the government feared a law and order situation and wanted to take preventive measures by sending revellers back home early? The second reason seemed more likely.

Just when we were about to step out, we noticed groups of people being let in through the backdoor to yet another of the hotel’s nightclubs, Tantra, which specialises in trance music. I quickly lit up a cigarette and took a few drags before stubbing it out. We were let in through the kitchen. Once inside the hall that was pulsating with heart-thumping beats, I regretted having stubbed out the cigarette in a hurry. Inside, people were smoking freely. Since the place was officially shut, official rules did not apply.

The DJ, a gym-fit bald white man wearing a full-sleeved cheque shirt, was in a trance himself. We danced for a while and then I broke off for a smoke. I am not a fan of trance music. A pretty girl in white salwar-kameez came to me and asked for a cigarette. She stood next to me and smoked. It was pointless to strike a conversation, so I let her be. I returned to the dance floor, we took some pictures, and left. The next stop was Venom on Camac Street. Venom, according to me, is the most happening disco in Kolkata, for the simple reason that it plays my kind of music. The DJ was playing Apni to jaise taise when we entered. We limped out at three in the morning.

Late Sunday morning, we were at Dakshineshwar, the Kali temple where Ramakrishna Paramahansa attained nirvana. What I like most about Dakshineshwar is not the Kali temple but the row of 12 Shiva temples that overlook the serenely flowing Ganga. I was here exactly a year ago, when Chai, Chai was beginning to hit the stands in various cities, and I had silently prayed to the 12 Shivas for the success of the book. This time, though, it was just a courtesy call: I made no requests to Shiva. In any case, Sunday morning, when most of Kali-fearing Kolkata descends upon Dakshineshwar, is not the right time for a one-on-one audience with god.

It being a Sunday, much of College Street is closed. The idea was to have Mughlai paratha at the famed Coffee House opposite Presidency College. But the Coffee House had just shut, and was to open only at four. So it was back to Park Street again, to have lunch at Flavours of China. The best Chinese food I've ever had. A few more books bought from Oxford. Finally, shopping at the South City Mall – one of the country's biggest and plushest. My friend, in one stroke, made the careers of several attendants of several stores by helping them achieve their month's target in a matter of hours. If not anyone else, at least they will remember her with deep gratitude: "Mone achhe Chennai thheke ek mohila eshechhilo?"

Sunday night was dinner at home, catching up with some close friends and relatives. It’s a typical sit-down Bengali dinner; food is served in a particular order, starting with rice and daal and ending with chutney and paapad – with half-a-dozen vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes in between. More conversations, of the Bengali kind: sarcastic and humorous.

********

Monday evening: Rajdhani Express to Kanpur. I slept through most of the journey. At night, though, I was awake long enough to notice a couple get cosy on the berth diagonally across. They had boarded at Gaya. The woman first put a child on the top berth and then climbed herself. The man, after placing the luggage underneath the seats, followed suit. He pulled the curtain and in the darkness, they sat close to each other, chatting. Her hand rested on his thigh and his hand, occasionally, reached out to touch her breasts. At times she let him fondle her and at other times playfully shook his hand off, her bangles jingling in the process. I watched them with my eyes wide open till the man climbed down and went to his berth to sleep. In the morning, I heard the child call him chaacha, while the woman called him bhaiyya.

********

Tuesday morning: I reach Kanpur. For the first time, mother is not at the gate to give the hugs. But the mango pickle she made last year has been preserved and I have it during lunch.

Why I Don't Want To Be Rama

For the past two days I have been reading and rereading a fascinating travelogue called An Indian Odyssey by Martin Buckley.

In the book, Buckley traces the journey of Lord Rama, as described in the Ramayana, right from his birthplace Ayodhya to Sri Lanka, where he defeated demon king Ravana and rescued his wife Sita but put her through the famous fire-test before taking her back. In tracing Rama's footprints, he tells the story of present-day India and the conflict in present-day Sri Lanka. What an idea!

Reading his book, I got to learn more about what is contained in the Ramayana than I ever got to know from the sugary episodes dished out on Doordarshan by Ramanand Sagar. Oh, those interminably long scenes that showed Arun Govil, playing Lod Rama, smiling forever. Several precious minutes would be consumed by that supposedly divine smile before Rama would proceed to mouth a dialogue. By the time he opened his mouth, the serial would be over and one had to wait until next Sunday.

Ramanand Sagar, needless to say, died a rich man. I know of women -- my mother included -- who had orgasms, of the devotional nature, by merely watching Govil's stupid smile. For them, it was not Govil but Lord Rama who was smiling. What the fuck.

But despite all the devotion, I wonder how many Hindu families actually possess a copy of the Ramayana. Even if they do, how many have read it and enjoyed it like a novel? Most of us are only aware of the select, cliched anecdotes that we have gathered from sources other than the Ramayana. But in reality, if Ramayana were to be made into a movie that strictly followed Valmiki's script, word to word, it would be given A-certificate.

Buckley knows his Ramayana. With the Westerner's curiosity, he has read and reread it. Throughout his book, he punctuates the accounts of his journey with relevant tales from the Ramayana, and in the process, summarises the epic for us in a lucid, matter-of-fact manner. Initially I skipped the Ramayana bits and stuck to his travels, but once I started the Ramayana part, I found it even more gripping.

So in the end, it always takes a Westerner to show us the way to the lanes and bylanes of our own country, our own history, our own mythology. Well why not, they have the passion, and when they pursue it, they pull out all stops. Had I hit upon such an idea, the first thing coming to my mind would've been: "But will I get such a long leave? And where will the money come from?" We Indians, like Rama, are tied down by duties and responsibilities. And the Buckleys, like Valmiki, get to write the books.

What Do I Do Without This Song?

If you happen to enjoy the song, spare a few moments to read this post which I wrote nearly five years ago, when there was no You Tube to bring alive the lost songs of childhood.

The silky voices of Bhupinder and Asha Bhosle, under the baton on R.D. Burman. Enjoy!

A Dark Anniversary

The same day, the same time last year, I had gone to sleep with the knowledge that both my parents are alive. Then, around four in the afternoon, I got the call that I dreaded. I had always expected such a call at an odd hour, like eleven in the night or two in the morning.

At four in the afternoon, I had just finished lunch and was getting ready for work. I was feeling good and fit when I stood in front of the mirror and wore my favourite black T-shirt. That's when the call came. My father broke the news rather apologetically. As if he was sorry that my schedule had to be disrupted. After he hung up, I called my wife and then went on to wear my jeans and splash aftershave on my chest and face. The splashing of the aftershave was an involuntary act undertaken to buy time: I needed to think, with a cool head, how to get to Benaras as quickly as possible.

Driving to the airport, I felt somewhat relieved. My biggest fear was over now. I no longer had to worry about my mother dying. But it was during this drive that another fear took over: can I bear to see her lying on a bed of ice? With each passing moment, the eventuality of seeing her in that state was coming horrifyingly closer. I wanted the clock to slow down. But time is a bitch: it always takes you to places where you don't want to go. So the next afternoon, I was in Benaras.

August is a strange month for me. My wife's birthday is on the 23rd, my mother died on the 28th, I cremated her on the 29th, and her birthday is on the 31st. If my mother had waited for just three more days, she could have witnessed her 59th birthday; and if for eight more days, she could have seen her son as a published author. This is one regret I shall always carry throughout my life.

I think I have coped quite well with the loss of my mother. I have not shed a tear till date. Though I dream about her frequently. The dreams occur mostly in the mornings, when I am half asleep and half awake. But even during such dreams, I am fully conscious of the fact that my mother is no more. Even this morning, I dreamed about her. It was again an early-morning dream: we are visiting a hill station when someone raises an alarm that my mother has collapsed and is dead. As I rush up the stairs in my dream, it suddenly occurs to me, "My mother has already died once, so what if she dies again?" And then, another thought comes, "I saw her being burnt to ashes, how can she come alive to die a second time?" I soon realised it was only a dream, and I turned around and slept for some more time.

But a few days ago I came very close to crying. I was surfing channels while having lunch when I stumbled upon disturbing images that were so familiar to me: National Geographic channel was showing a documentary on the burning ghats of Benaras. It became impossible for me to swallow the food. The images were so stark and real that they took me back to the darkest day of my life.

I distracted myself by thinking of a half-written manuscript sitting inside a folder in my laptop. I reminded myself that I have to finish it someday and show it to the publisher. It will be an account of Benaras, from the eyes of a traveller who also happened to cremate his mother there. Though I hesitate to go back to it because writing it would mean reliving those moments again and again. Sharing a few paragraphs with you:

Considering that the fear of losing you had tormented me for so many years, I was surprisingly calm when I received the news. I had just finished lunch and was about to get ready for work when father called. “Your mother is no more,” he told me. He was very calm. He then gave me the details: how you, him and brother were having lunch, sitting in a circle on the floor, like many Bengali families still do, when you suddenly arched back and went lifeless in a matter of seconds, in the arms of brother.

After he hung up, I called up wife and also my office. Then I got up and wore my jeans and put on some aftershave lotion. I smiled at myself in the mirror. I wanted to see if a man whose mother had just died was capable of smiling. I was. Tell me, ma, was there anything abnormal about smiling at that hour? For years you were caught in the battle between life and death, and now the battle had finally ended and there was peace. Doesn’t matter if death won; death had to win someday. Life is sand, death is concrete. Life is uncertain, but death certain. Why not make peace with the victor than hopelessly siding with the soon-to-be-vanquished?

I even smiled at colleagues who started coming in after they got the news. But they did not return my smile. For a fraction of a second I found it odd, then I realised that they are not supposed to be smiling at the moment. I quickly wiped the smile off my own face. They all asked me how it happened. I repeated what father had told me. Calls started coming. I repeated the story each time. In less than an hour, I had repeated the Last Lunch story so many times that it felt as if I was reporting your death first-hand. As if I had been in Benaras, all of us sitting in a small circle on the floor and having lunch when you suddenly decided to say goodbye.

Lunch with you all is one scene I can report or describe with hundred per cent accuracy without even being there. It is like describing a man brushing his teeth. All our lives, whenever we were all together, we ate sitting on the floor. That was the ritual. Remember the dining table which father bought while we were away on summer vacation some twenty-five years ago? Father wanted to give us a surprise, but the dining table – poor father! – was destined to be used for every purpose other than eating. I still believe that when a meal is seasoned with mother’s love, it is best savoured sitting on the floor: the mother has better access to her children’s plates, be it to serve some extra daal for the protein or to drop some delectable chunks of mutton. The dining table is a bit too formal for the comfort of an Indian mother.

Ganga Mail

The archive-list in the new template of my blog gives a year-wise breakup of the number of posts written. And I find that in 2008, the year I wrote Chai, Chai, I had only 15 posts. Fifteen posts in an entire year!

When you are working on a book, especially doing the writing part, it is difficult to keep updating a blog such as this on a regular basis. It takes me about three hours to write a post, and another hour of thinking and drinking before I start writing it. In those four hours I can add at least four hundred valuable words to my manuscript.

I feel sad for Ganga Mail: it is going to be subjected to neglect for the next few months. The blog has been my conscience-keeper, my only channel of communication with people who care for me and read me. But the book is more important: as long as I don't write a second one and then a third one, I can't call myself a writer. A writer, in my definition, is someone who has written at least three books and shows the promise of writing many more -- may be till the time when at least the state government acknowledges your skills and honours you with a minor, local award. Right now, I am only a journalist working for such-and-such paper, who is expected to polish other people's copies so that the paper reads better and who, in his free time, pursues his literary ambitions. What a pain -- to nurse such ambitions.

I get to work around 4.30 in the afternoon, 10 minutes plus or minus. I return home precisely at midnight. I pour myself a drink and start writing. And then I pour many more drinks. By the time I go to sleep, it is usually daybreak when the birds are chirping. I often wish I had woken up just then and gone for a walk in the neighbourhood park -- but such lifestyles are meant for saner, more sober people.

I wake up around noon and go through what I have written the night before. A lot of rewriting to be done, which takes a couple of hours. At around two in the afternoon, I head to the gym to exercise my heart. That's the time when Desperate Housewives are at the gym, wanting to look good, but they only exchange glances and not words. Suits me fine, because once I am at the gym, I am blind to the people until I have finished my quota of cardio -- a two-mile walk under 24 minutes. Lunch is at three -- that's the only time I watch TV -- and by four I am preparing to head to work.

That's my life these days. Ganga Mail should take consolation in the fact that my third book, which is yet to be written but which has been thought out, would be called by the same name. On The Ganga Mail.

Honesty Is The Best Medicine

Mother is gone. Wife has taken her place. Now I can continue to be a child for the rest of my life, because the past 10 days have showed me that my wife is as good a mother to me as my mother.

The past 10 days have been, to say the least, most horrible in my recent memory. As someone who regularly smokes and drinks and keeps irregular hours, throat and chest infections are like cousins with who I muddy my feet in the neighbourhood pond all the time. But this was a viral infection that knocked me dead. I shut myself off from the world, the worldly desires having already deserted me with the onset of 103 degrees fever, and the only desire that would surface now and then would be to be in the possession of a loaded gun that I could put to my head and end my miseries.

One sure-shot sign of recovery is the rekindling of the urge to live -- the urge to do things you are always used to doing. Tonight, touch wood, the urge has come back and that is how I am here, trying to write. But till this morning, I was almost a dead man, kept on the ventilator by an efficient and a concerned wife. She was perhaps sure I would pull through, but I myself wasn't sure at all.

This morning something else happened as well. As soon as I woke up, someone held a mirror to me -- which did not show the ghostly, unshaven me, the sight I was beginning to get used to seeing, but something more promising. It was a review of Chai, Chai in desicritics.org, a website I used to occasionally write for once upon a time.

After 10 months, it felt nice that someone had remembered the book again, and said nice things about it too. No, the review was anything but flattering. But it spoke the truth -- something I value more than just praise. Here is the review: please read it.

Chai, Chai may have a few firsts and pluses to its credit, but it is also true that it isn't the best Indian travel book ever written. In fact I would rewrite most of it if I had a chance now -- a chance I hope to avail of at a later stage. The best Indian travelogue, as the reviewer says, is yet to come. And that's where hope lies for people like me.

But what really made my morning was the reviewer's thought: "This is Ghosh's first book and I get the feeling that as he writes more, he will add that edge and depth to his existing narrative skills. We may yet see the first great Indian travelogue coming from Bishwanath Ghosh." How many, really, make that allowance for you? I owe the reviewer one good book.

Looking At Life In The Time Of Football And Fever

Today is July 1. I can hear the referee's whistle. It's half time. Six months from now, another knock-out match will be over. The scorekeepers will add one more year to the life lived, or subtract a year from your lifetime -- whichever way you choose to look at it. The score is either 1-0, or 0-1. You are the one who wins, you are the one who loses.

The question is how often do you win and how often do you lose?

Whether you want to enter the new year on a losing or a winning note, today is the day to strategise. Six months have gone past, so what? -- another six months are left to make up and maybe even score the winning goal. But when the opponent team is Life, which always has a trick up its sleeve to mindfuck you, even the best of strategies may not work. The idea, I guess, is to lie low and defend your goalpost till the last minute, and just when Life is caught napping, score a big one.

Last year I won, 2-1. In the first half, I achieved something I had always dreamt of: finishing a manuscript of 64,000 words and sending it off to the publisher. Till then, I hadn't written pieces longer than 2,500 words. But as soon as the second half began, my mother died. Minutes before the final whistle went off, however, the book scored a goal on my behalf by going into second reprint. So 2-1.

This year, the game began under the shadow of the terrible goal that Life had scored against me in 2009. My team, even though playing well enough all this while to defend its goalpost, is still licking the wounds from that nasty goal. Even when I recently went to Coonoor, breathing and sleeping in the fresh mountain air amid pin-drop silence, I dreamt about my mother on most nights that I was there.

The dreams were hardly pleasant ones. We, mother and I, were constantly fighting in them -- arguing with each other, shouting at each other. This is what happened in real life too while she was alive: we were always fighting -- the fight that happens when you love and care too much for each other. You sulk and wait for the other person to call, and then you make up only to fight all over again over something really silly.

So the wound that devastating goal from Life had inflicted on me is yet to heal entirely. It is not easy to get over her death when we had been a close-knit family of four for the past four decades. The empty seat in the audience, whose occupant would have otherwise cheered me, is distracting me time and again.

Today, during half time, as I get a breather, I resolve not to look at that chair in the second half and focus of scoring a few winning goals. Maybe after I win, I would go and prostrate before the chair. Let's see how it goes. The second half has just begun.

Today was not the day to have written a post. I am running high temperature and coughing like crazy. I can feel flames erupting out of my skin. Ideally, I should have been in bed by now, after swallowing a Dolo 650 and a spoonful of cough syrup. But I am also my own coach, and how can the coach disappear during half time? So I poured myself a drink instead, and decided to give myself a peptalk.

The Toy Train

It is seven in the evening and I am in room no. 1 of the 115-year-old Coonoor Club. I am reclining on the bed, nursing a drink and writing this. I have left the door leading to the patio wide open, and I can see the hills lit up like Diwali night. I feel like switching off the air-conditioner for a while: the room has become a bit too cold for comfort. I realise it doesn’t have an air-conditioner, not even a fan. This is Coonoor, not Chennai. Chennai I had left last night.

About 12 hours ago, around 6.30 am, I was at the Mettupalayam station, having spent a sleepless night in the Nilgiris Express from Chennai. These days I don’t sleep well in trains: rarely do I take one anymore unless the destination is Bangalore. So from one o’ clock in the night, I had been wide awake, glued to Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now, trying to decipher the sentences from whatever little light seeped in as everybody else in the compartment snored. And then magic happened.

As I stepped on to the platform at Mettupalayam, I forgot – instantly – that I had just made a nine-hour train journey and hadn’t slept almost the entire night. I felt as if I was stepping out of my home for a morning walk after a restful sleep. The air was crisp and chilly, and the station presented a pretty picture. It has just one platform – on one side the train that had just got us in, and on the other side the toy train waiting to take us to Coonoor. And right across on the horizon, facing the two trains, stood the mountains. It was through these mighty mountains that the train was going to chart its course, as it has been doing for the last 100 years. The trip is now part of world heritage.

The toy train is just that: a toy. Just five small wooden carriages that are pushed – and not pulled – by a steam locomotive. The engine is at the end, while it is a first-class carriage that is right in front. Outside the leading carriage is a panel, the frontage of the train, where a guard sits with red and green flags. He is the one who blows the horn and switches on the lights whenever the train passes through a tunnel. He also doubles up as a guide for passengers sitting in the front carriage. This morning, I was one of those few fortunate – getting the first and a direct view of whatever lay ahead as the train chugged at the speed of a cycle-rickshaw.

Mountains don’t have arms. But when you take the toy train, the mountains assume the form of a bewitching beauty that spreads her arms to welcome you into an intimate embrace. Those who take the road miss out on the intimacy. On the winding road, your mind is primarily focused on oncoming vehicles. And then, you have many other vehicles for company – cars, buses, trucks. But the train takes you through green, virgin territory – as virgin as it has been for the past 100 years. All you are required to do is sit and watch.


At 6.45, the steam locomotive hissed down the track and positioned itself at the rear of the train. At seven a bell rang out, and five minutes later another. At 7.10 sharp, the train moved. In our part of the carriage, we had, for company, three couples. Two of the couples were very young and newly married. Like the train, their life-journey too had just started. Like most passengers, they were clueless about what lay ahead: only an idea. Throughout the journey, the young men and women were to spend more time looking into each other's eyes than looking outside, where they should have been looking because in virgin territory, even the sight of a blade of grass is like window-shopping for diamonds. The third couple was elderly, in their seventies: they had been through the forest of life, and now were rediscovering togetherness on a route they had never taken before. So they sat erect, savouring the visual pleasure that nature was offering them now. Then there was us, wife and I: not too young, not too old -- we were just two travellers who happened to be married to each other. Nothing theatric, unlike the honeymoon couples, about being together: the real theatre lay outside the train, with the stage changing every moment.

So far, the only time I had seen a toy train -- the truth to be told -- was in Aradhana. In the film, Sharmila Tagore, who is sitting in the toy train to Darjeeling, is wooed by Rajesh Khanna, who is following her on a jeep, with the immortal song, Mere sapnon ki rani kab aayegi tu. I don't know how fast the Darjeeling toy train runs, but I can tell you that the Nilgiris train does not match the 'speed' of this S.D. Burman song.

There was no Rajesh Khanna to chase our train, only small boys who would pop up once in a while to wave at us. The guard, on behalf of us, would smile and wave back. The boys would pop up only when a station was round the corner -- technically they should be called hill stations because they are located on the hills, but practically they are tiny dots of civilisation in wilderness -- oases in the desert of dense forests.

These small stations that fall in the way -- Hill Grove, Runnymede and so on -- are, to me, the real honeymoon spots. Plot to be left behind by the train and you will have no hope until the evening or the next evening till another toy train comes along to take you to proper civilisation. Till then, you can spread a mat and have a picnic. Even time will stand still and have a few sandwiches off you. And if you feel upto it, take the mat a few metres away from the station and you can make love in the open. No one is going to watch you, except a few monkeys maybe, and the birds and the bees. Why go all the way to a concrete jungle like Ooty?

We were, fortunately, not travelling all the way to Ooty. I had heard enough about the place to stop short of being seduced by it. My wife, who had already been there once, shared my sentiments. So we stopped one station short of Ooty. Coonoor it was.

If you have never been to this hill town, let me tell you that there are two Coonoors: Lower Coonoor and Upper Coonoor. Lower Coonoor is where the railway station and the bus stand are located, and it is as congested and ugly as the most congested part of your town or city -- no matter where you live. It is in Upper Coonoor where the real charm lies. The silence there is very British -- a reminder of the times when you had to walk for a while before you came to a cluster of shops from where you bought necessary items such as bread or medicines.

It is the walk that matters in the hills -- one moment you are overlooking a valley and the very next you are admiring a mountain and the lives of people living atop it. Either way, you are wowed. Fortunately, our destination, the 1885-built Coonoor Club, happens to be in Upper Coonoor. Thanks to its silence, I can relive every single moment of the toy train journey. Thanks to its silence, I can still hear the steam locomotive loud and clear, Dhadak, dhadak! Dhadak dhadak!

Marriage

Someone I know, who is just 22, is very upset these days. She had a fight with her boyfriend sometime ago and since then, he is refusing to talk to her. "How does one win back a man without seducing him? What do men want, really?" she asked me this evening.

While he remains uncommunicative, she has no idea whether they will eventually make up or break up. Though she would rather they make up, because she wants to marry him because they have been seeing each other for four years. But at the same time, she is prepared for a break-up as well.

In our society, whenever one acquires a girlfriend or a boyfriend, no matter how young you are, the idea is to get married. The girl and the boy first stake claim on each other and then go out on dates, rather than doing it the other way round. Either way, sex happens. If not sex, then almost sex -- this far but no further.

The root of many of problems when you are in your late teens or early twenties is the tying of every relationship to marriage. But this is a mistake we all make. We realise it to be a mistake only when we grow up and become wiser and then look back and laugh. When I got my first girlfriend at the age of 17 and broke the news to parents, my mother, always the emotional one, hit the roof and dragged me to the puja room and made me touch the feet of the gods and promise that I would never see the girl again. My father, as usual, was unruffled.

He told me, "When I was your age, I also had a lot of friends. But where are they today? I am not in touch with a single one. We have all moved on."

"But I've already told her that I will marry her. What will she feel if I back out now?"

"You are not going to be in school forever. When you grow up and see the world, you might just change your mind. Why rush into decisions now? You are not even in college."

But in the flush of youth, I refused to see his point. Eventually, experience won over impulse. Now when I look back, what a crime! -- choosing your life partner at an age when your facial hair has not even fully grown.

My father was 43 when he had this chat with me. Today, I am nearing 40 and I am perhaps wiser than him. Wiser because, unlike my father who remained committed to just one woman all his life till she died suddenly last year, I have far more experience in the field.

Age and experience teach you the difference between being fascinated and being practical. In my humble opinion, fascination rarely ends in happy marriage because you feel like running away the moment the bitterness of practicality sinks in. On the other hand, if you get married for practical reasons, the togetherness usually leads to fascination for each other.

Some years ago, I knew a woman, a Tamil Brahmin, who was 20 then. Or maybe 21. She was madly in love with a guy who belonged to a different religion. Even while she dreamt of marrying him, she dreaded the lifestyle changes she would have had to make in order to be a member of his family. But she didn't mind doing that: she said she was more than willing to adjust to the new lifestyle because she loved him so much.

Borrowing from my father's wisdom, I told her she was only wasting her time breaking her head over a relationship that was not going to work.

"How do you know it is not going to work?" she angrily demanded to know.

"Because I just know."

"I know why you are saying that. But I am going to marry only him, ok? Any problem?"

"No problem."

Just a couple of years after we had this conversation, she went to London for further studies. I was spared of the constant outpurings about her complicated love story. And then came an email, that she was finally getting married. The groom was a fellow Tam Brahm, someone she had fallen in love with in London. Hello, what happens to the time I had spent listening to the sob stories about an affair which I had predicted would never materialise?

So I won. My father won.

How I wish I could get back to my twenties armed with the wisdom I have earned in the past two decades. That, however, is impossible -- as impossible as people not making mistakes in the flush of youth. But I only hope people don't hinge the best and most productive years of their life on men or women who may never belong to them.

What would you prefer, really: marry someone and then go on a world tour, or go on a world tour and then decide who to marry? When I say world tour, I don't mean it in the literal sense. What I mean is the expansion of mental horizon.

Cumin And Curd

Reena Roy, the actress, thought he was Chinese. Can't blame her: most Indians still think that all people with Mongloid features belong either to China or Nepal. But in spite of his 'Chinese' looks, he blended so well with 'Indian' characters that he went on to become one of the top villains of Bollywood.

As far as my knowledge goes, only in one film did Danny Denzongpa actually play a Chinese, that too a half-Chinese. The film is Lahu Ke Do Rang, in which he turns out to be the half-brother of Vinod Khanna. Their father is a freedom fighter -- also played by Vinod Khanna -- who ends up sleeping with a Chinese woman who gives him shelter while he is escaping from British forces.

Other than that, Danny has always played 'Indian' characters. I have seen countless films of him, but the ones that stand out in my memory are Dhund and Jawaab. Both very powerful fims, minus the usual frills of Bollywood.

Danny, by the way, is -- or at least was -- a good singer too. Search for the song Sun sun kasam se from Kala Sona on You Tube, and you will know what I mean. He has sung it so well that one of the two persons who posted this song on You Tube has credited the male voice to Shailendra Singh, blissfully unaware that it was Danny who did the playback under the baton of R.D. Burman.

This is one song I listen to when I am struck by hypochondria, and it does cure me most of the time. Danny, after all, is a man of clean habits -- someone you can look up to if you want to lead a healthy life. Way back in 1994, when I was a journalist on probation with the Press Trust of India in Delhi, one of my jobs was to scan all the 12 newspapers published from Delhi at the time and make a report on how the PTI had scored against its rival, the UNI, or the United News of India.

One Sunday morning, while scanning the papers, I came across an interview of Danny in The Sunday Observer. It was one of those interviews that changed your life or least inspired you to make amends. But those days, as a young bachelor, I could only feel inspired because there was no provision to make amends. The interview was about the eating habits of Danny.

Sadly, there was no internet then, and the newspaper itself is defunct now, so neither can I produce a link nor can I paste a scanned copy. But it's all pasted in my head. I can sum up for you what I had read then:

Danny hates eating out. He does not trust any food other than what is cooked in his kitchen, with spices brought from Sikkim, where he hails from. He loves jeera, or cumin, because he believes it can make even the blandest of dishes interesting. One evening, Danny and Jackie Shroff were attending a Bollywood party when they scooted just when dinner was about to be served. They did not want to eat the rich dinner, so they returned to Danny's home.

Since it was late in the night, the servants were fast asleep. Danny decided to cook himself. He opened the fridge and found a few brinjals. He cut them into small pieces. He then heated a spoonful of oil in a frying pan and spluttered cumin seeds and added the brinjal pieces. Jackie, who had found a couple of green apples in the fridge, wondered why they could't be chopped and put into the pan as well. Danny thought that was a good idea. When the brinjal and the apple pieces were mildly fried, seasoned by jeera, he added curd to the pan and covered it.

Whatever came out must have been delicious. They had the brinjal-apple dish with bread, accompanied by a bottle of red wine that Jackie had just opened. A perfect dinner. From the interview, I also gathered that Danny, whenever he was shooting outdoors, always sent his boy to the nearest village to get the local, freshly-cooked food. If nothing else, just curd and rice.

I got to emulate Danny Denzongpa only seven years later when I came to Chennai in 2001, when I finally had a functional kitchen of my own. And I realised that any vegetable, no matter how much you hate it, tastes heavenly when you season it with cumin seeds and add curd to it. Cumin and curd are a deadly and a delicious combo.

Aging Is His Enemy

Accomplished yoga gurus are unlikely to have enemies, but the legendary BKS Iyengar has one: aging.

"Nonsense!" That’s been his standard, typical one-word response whenever someone has tried suggesting that he should take it easy because he was getting old. "When you are young, the body has tremendous strength. As you grow old, vitality drops and fear complex sets in. But why should one stop doing what one has been doing for years just because of age? I fought the fear complex and I won," declares Iyengar, the Pune-based yoga guru who will turn 92 in a few months.

The victory is written all over his face: not a single wrinkle, even though the flowing hair is silver. The spine is straight and the chest spread wide. Even today, he devotes four hours daily to yoga practice.

"I wake up at six, and 6.30 to 7.30 I do pranayama. Then I read the papers to know what’s happening in the world. From 9 to 12, I do asanas non-stop. Earlier I used to more asanas, but now I do less asanas but hold them for a longer time, till I am able to penetrate into my inner self and realise that my body is getting refreshed," says the yoga legend, who began his yoga pratice in 1934 in Mysore.

It was strict discipline and commitment to yoga that saw him through the vicissitudes of life, including those initial difficult years in Pune when schools or colleges would make him wait for hours and finally ask him to come some other day. Salvation came in 1954 when Yehudi Menuhin, the renowned violinist and conductor who then on a tour of India, was overcome by a nervous attack. Iyengar set him right in a matter of hours, after which Menuhin invited him to teach in Switzerland. The rest, as they say, is history.

But unlike many yoga gurus of today who use their Western connection to make money, Iyengar remains humble and committed to his practice. He still does the headstand for 30 minutes, besides the shoulderstand and other inversions -- these are the poses that postpone the onset of old age. "Even today my feet don’t oscillate even a bit when I do the headstand," says Iyengar.

Post-yoga, it is time for bath and lunch, after which he heads to his yoga institute where he sits in the library to work on his new book. Iyengar has authored a number of books, including the Light On Yoga, often considered to be a Bible of yoga. "The new book will decode Patanji’s yoga sutras for the common man, especially the younger generation. The depth of the sutras shall be retained, but the words will be simple," he says.

At six he heads back home. Time to watch TV. "Sometimes I watch movies, sometimes serials. I also like watching National Geographic," says the guru. His favourite movies include "CID movies" and comedies. Nine-thirty is dinner time, followed by some more television. By 10.30 pm, one of the world’s most famous yoga gurus is asleep. Iyengar’s guru, the revered T Krishnamacharya, had lived till the age of 100. He died in Chennai in 1989. Another disciple of Krishnamacharya, Pattabhi Jois, who found the ashtanga yoga and was teacher to stars like Madonna and Sting, died in Mysore last year at the age of 94.

Iyengar’s precription for staying young even at 91, apart from regular yoga practice: "I never think of the past. I live in the present. I live moment to moment. I reflect. I reflect when I am holding my poses. That keeps me refreshed."

R Replies

M never replied, but R did. She wants it to be published, like newspapers publish letters to the editor. Here goes:

Dear B,

I think what you are going through is the emotional equivalent of the aftermath of too much porn.

This is the classic tragedy of male-female relationships, men have sex, women make love. Men orgasm in seconds, women orgasm long after their men have left them. Men will give a part of themselves, women will give themselves wholly. Seems to me M made the classic mistake of revealing herself to you too completely. But one cannot blame her. You are like a flame, and us fans are like moths, drawn to you. As long as we are protected by the glass we futilely beat against we are safe, but come to close and we will singe! On the exterior you are a smoking, drinking give a damn, writer, but underneath all that there exists a man far more perceptive to women than the image suggests. A man who reeks of danger, but can see through to the heart of a woman, make her feel like she is the most important person in the world... It is a potent combination that your M probably never stood a chance in the face off!

But what confounds me is why you want to skew the beautiful equation you seem to share with your M. Why not just savor a relationship that few people are lucky to find? Why question to M about What you are? Who you are?

Does it really matter? If two people's minds ignite, and the mind is the biggest aphrodisiac why bring it down to the level of a personal touch? I mean B, face it, a man and a woman could never connect quite so strongly if they did not belong to opposite sexes. Men and women can be friends but the underlying chemistry that seasons their relationship is what makes it so irrisisitable. Those little chats about sex you have with your M are tasty because they are flavoured with attraction and seasoned with the bitter knowledge of never seeing a conclusion. Do you really want to risk what you have for a physical touch that might not amount to as much?

And like the quintessential man, you lay the blame at her feet, or at the door of technology, everywhere but yourself. Did you have nothing to do with this?

The internet is a dangerous addiction, it can take away our loneliness by creating an illusion of a world the way we want it to be and yet it can also isolate us more than we ever imagined by becoming bigger than life itself and separating us from real life and the real relationships we a fortunate to have. But we should not blame the internet or the Mobile phone for our weaknesses, they are only tools that become an extension to achieving our desires. It is up to us to use them well, to stop at the invisible line beyond which decadent indulgence becomes a corrosive poison.

I think, M should make it so you only get virtual hints of skin to tantalize you from now on, and delete your number from her phone!

R

The Personal Touch

Dear M,

It is 4.30 in the morning. By now a man with clean habits should be waking up to take on the new day. But I prefer to see the new day in before going to sleep. That way, I have an upper hand. It is so much better to catch the sun in its nappies than let its rays catch you in your underwear.

By the time I finish writing to you, the sky outside my window would just be beginning to light up. I had to write to you tonight because I want to tell you a few things -- things that have been weighing heavily on my mind of late. We have been talking, off and on, almost the entire day, over phone and internet, but somehow it didn't occur to me to tell you things that I am going to say now. Right now there is calm, and I can think.

You live in Bombay, I live in Chennai. How I wish we lived in the same city, preferably in Bombay. There, we could meet every evening for an hour, just to catch up. We could sit at a spot on Marine Drive, watching the sun dip right in front of us. Or maybe some place in Bandra. Just like Amol Palekar and Tina Munim in Baaton Baaton Main. How I wish I could fly back to that era, don't you?

In that hour we spend together, we could talk; or maybe not talk but just hold hands and watch what's going around us. It is your physical presence that would matter. Being with you would be a relief, a respite, a revival. I would go back home recharged, with fresh hope -- if not anything else, the hope to see you again the next evening at the same spot.

You have no idea how much I crave for your physical presence. In the two years that I have known you, how little have we actually met and had a chat: maybe four or five times? That's about it! Yet we have a minute-by-minute account of what is going on in each other's lives because we are connected 24/7. I see you online most of the day, and you have a fair idea what my day is like. Vice-versa too. When we are not online, we are just a text message or a phone call away. In fact, we are so used to seeing each other online that the moment one of us goes offline for longer than usual, the other gets worried. Remember the other day when I called you at two in the morning, just because you had been missing all day? And how two days ago, when I was attending a friend's wedding anniversary party and the battery of my phone had died, I received a bunch of panicky messages once I got home and put the phone on charge?

That makes me wonder about our relationship: What are we? Who are we? Mere online entities, online friends, who recognise each other by Gmail IDs or the names fed into the mobile phones? Even when it comes to having sex, we get naughty on the chat window and feel gratified. What happens to the flesh? What happens to the touch? What's the point in going to the gym and looking look when the person who you desire and want to be desired by is merely an online entity?

It's not just about sex, M. When did you last catch up with a friend and had a good time? Not in a long, long time, I am sure. Same with me: I can't recall when was the last time I met up with a friend without a specific purpose. Because for non-specific purposes, you can always go online or pick up the phone. The personal touch is dead, and that's what I miss. Really, I don't want friends who have an hour-by-hour account of what my day is like. I crave for friends with who I can spend an hour with, face to face, and feel like a normal human being rather than an online entity.

To tell you the truth, M, the thought that you are available to me 24/7 is somewhat putting off. You shouldn't be so readily available, because it affects your desirability. Availability and desirability do not go hand in hand. So log off and show me your real self. Just imagine going back to the days of Baaton Baaton Main.

The biggest culprit, I tell you, is the mobile phone. It weighs only a few grams, but it makes you carry the weight of several human beings who are attached to your life. Even worse is the internet, which weighs nothing but upon which relationships weighing tons are built. But what are relationships without the personal touch?

Shall we throw our mobile phones into the sea and log out of internet? Amol Palekar and Tina Munim lived happily ever after in Baaton Baaton Main even without present-day gadgets. Maybe if they had internet connnection back then, the film would have been titled Raaton Raaton Main.

Feminine Touch

Then she told me:

"And once, you know, there was this pretty girl standing close to me in the bus. Even when the crowd had melted away, I just stood close to her for no reason at all. I enjoyed each time our hands touched. She was pretty and fair. The feel of her white skin against mine, that perked me.

One more thing. Her breasts were touching my upper arms. She was totally unaware I was taking advantage of her. Poor girl, she was so trusting. I think I enjoy the feminine touch. Not that I want sex or anything. I think I know where it originates from."