My favourite short stories

If you were to compile a list of your all-time favourite short stories, which are the ones you would call upon? I recently finished reading a short story anthology that I picked up at one of the second-hand bookshops near Town Hall, and the question has been playing on my mind ever since. Included in this short story collection were some stories that I had read previously and at least two of them deserve to go into my list of faves.

However, compiling a freelance list of this sort is fraught with danger. The exercise brings home a sinking sense of inadequacy and exposes one’s limitations in terms of breadth (or lack of it) of reading. My nightmarish fear is that anyone with a taste for short fiction will go through my list with growing severity. “No Chekhov?” they might frown. No Saki either? No P. G. Wodehouse?! Where's Somerset Maugham? Jhumpa Lahiri? Satyajit Ray? Rohinton Mistry? And so on and so forth they might ask, reeling off a long list of names as I shrink in embarassment and shame.

Bravely, nevertheless, I shall take the plunge, on the strength of my own individuality and preferences. There are of course, some parameters to be laid out. I propose to discuss very briefly short stories that I adore, stories that I read over a period of time since my schooldays. Many of these are evergreen stories that one gets to read time and again in various short story collections. From the ones so discussed I propose to narrow down and draw up a list of approximately ten favourites. I can already foresee a bias towards earlier writers, and there is unlikely to be much contemporary writing.

After Twenty Years: Illustration from "Outstanding Short Stories", S. Chand & Company (Pvt.) Ltd., New Delhi, year unknown

One of the prime contenders for the list is a story that always manages to thrill although I have read it umpteen times. In After Twenty Years, O’ Henry tells the remarkable story of two friends who fix a rendezvous for 20 years later – and keep it, but with the most dramatic consequences. O’ Henry’s penchant for shocking the reader with a sharp twist of irony is at a pinnacle here as it is in another story of his, The Last Leaf, in which a failed artist eventually goes on to paint the masterpiece he has only talked about all his life. The Gift of the Magi, also an O’ Henry offering, stands out for the stab of emotion that hits the reader in the end. I have read this tale of love and sacrifice again and again, and a lump sticks to my throat every time.

Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace stocks a similar reservoir of shock and irony, which is unleashed in the very last line. It is a story marvellously told and for that reason it serves as an excellent ambassador for the writer across numerous short story collections. Boule de Suif by the same writer offers a penetrating insight into Prussia-occupied France of the latter half of the 19th century. The narrative compellingly exposes the hollowness of the gentry even as it leaves the reader with a deep sympathy for the anti-protagonist, Elizabeth Rousset.

C. Auguste Dupin’s investigation of the murders in the Rue Morgue in the eponymous murder mystery of Edgar Allan Poe remains a classic, evoking a certain thrill and awe with a touch of the sinister. Dupin himself was a forerunner of his counterpart across the English Channel, Sherlock Holmes. Their creators, Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle respectively, overly romanticised many of their sleuths’ adventures and borrowed liberally – and with a great degree of inaccuracy – from the exotica of the mysterious East. Yet many of their stories are a delight to read. Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Speckled Band, a strong contender for my list of favourites, combines romance, death, fear and adventure as Holmes summons his deductive prowess to crack one of his most intriguing cases.

Holmes listens in rapt attention: A Sidney Paget illustration from The Strand magazine.

In possibly the only case of its kind, Holmes is outsmarted - by a woman - in A Scandal in Bohemia, and in a somewhat singular peep into how the great detective’s gender prejudices were stilled, Conan Doyle, in Watson’s shoes, writes: “ And that was how … the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of ___, … it is always under the honourable title of the woman.” The story makes it a strong contender for my list for this unusual characteristic alone. This distinctive trait leads me to another story of failure, and the gentleman in question is none other than the little Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. Published as a short story sometime between the two World Wars, Agatha Christie’s The Chocolate Box has Poirot narrating to companion Hastings the one occasion when his little grey cells failed him in his illustrious professional career.

The Man who saved Pumpelsdrop is a breezy story that describes the ascent of a town from the furrows of economic depression to the happy air of prosperity. This Walter J. Turner tale fed my schoolboy ambitions of becoming an economist and it continues to entertain although I am today merely an economist manqué.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More is often regarded (arguably so) as comprising the cream of Roald Dahl’s short fiction. Originally published in this collection (and later in others), The Hitchhiker never ceases to surprise and entertain with its account of an unexpected highway passenger’s uncanny abilities.

I am getting back home now. If one is to cast a glance at the gamut of Indians writing fiction in English one is compelled to give a wide berth to any dogma on what constitutes Indian identity. Yet few writers have managed to capture the nub of the average Indian’s life in the manner of R. K. Narayan. In my opinion, his novels are more engrossing than his short stories. Nonetheless, I can think of at least two contenders from his oeuvre for our list. One is a short story drawn upon the characters of his novel, The English Teacher. His wife desperately ill and unresponsive to medical treatment, Krishna is compelled to consult an astrologer as a last resort. To neutralise the extremely inauspicious position of the stars the astrologer can offer only one shocking remedy – Krishna must see a prostitute if his wife is to survive. The rest of the story describes how Krishna deals with this devilish dilemma. This is my favourite R. K. Narayan story but I do not know its title. I have no remembrance of where I read it and it is certainly not present in the two readily available short story collections of his, Malgudi Days and Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories. My choice therefore, falls upon The Doctor’s Word, a story that is remarkable for its deft portrayal of human nature. Here, Raman, a doctor with a reputation for ruthless honesty in the matter of life and death, struggles with the realisation that the survival of his latest patient hinges more upon his prognosis than his medication. The story has been reprinted in more than one anthology.

My favourite Ranji story: Illustration from Ruskin Bond's "Three Stories in Cricket", The Students' Stores, New Delhi, 1990

Leaping across the Vindhyas we come to a writer for whom India is home. From Ruskin Bond’s expansive repertory I draw three contenders. Ranji’s Wonderful Bat is about a budding boy cricketer who has lost his touch with the bat and is on the verge of losing his place in the school team. The Girl on the Train is a more ‘grown-up’ story that ends with a twist. My favourite Ruskin Bond tale, however, is another Ranji story: Koki Plays the Game. It is to be enjoyed for its sheer charm as it captures the nuances of small town ‘maidan’ cricket, with young boys playing the game for sheer fun and pride. A far cry from today’s masala matches and a throwback to one’s own days of innocence. In the story, the gender barrier is broken as Kokila, Ranji’s girl next door, migrates from bowler-in-the-nets and cheerleader to twelfth man, and eventually makes it to the playing eleven in style.

Dal Delight: An illustration by Suddhasattwa Basu from "Best of Target Stories", Living Media India Ltd., New Delhi, 1991

Another ‘desi’ story scoring high on the delight quotient is Dal Delight by Subhadra Sen Gupta. Set in nawaabi Lucknow, the narrative takes the reader through a mouth-watering experience, giving anxious but exciting moments when Mohammad Qadir’s shahi menu is held hostage to the kite-flying whims of Nawab Hasan Ali.

The last contender is The Imam and the Indian, to include which I will have to bend the rules a little, for strictly speaking, this is a prose piece that meanders over the lines that separate essay, autobiographical experience and short story. Yet, its uniqueness is striking. This Amitav Ghosh product truly speaks of an age that arrived somewhat late in Indian English writing, addressing as it does the conundrums posed by a juxtaposition of different cultures. That it should have come from the pen of an Indian, a people largely self-absorbed and self-obsessed, is what makes it remarkable. If the Imam’s railing against the writer for the treatment meted out to the dead in his country is deeply startling, the more sympathetic but equally perplexed voice of the simple Egyptian villager brings the essay to an end on a note of amusement.

Now, the denouement. Having discussed the probables, the final selection turns out as follows:

After Twenty Years (O’ Henry)
The Last Leaf (O’ Henry)
The Necklace (Guy de Maupassant)
The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Edgar Allan Poe)
The Adventure of the Speckled Band (Arthur Conan Doyle)
The Man Who Saved Pumpelsdrop (Walter J. Turner)
The Hitchhiker (Roald Dahl)
The Doctor’s Word (R. K. Narayan)
Koki Plays the Game (Ruskin Bond)
Dal Delight (Subhadra Sen Gupta)
The Imam and the Indian (Amitav Ghosh)

Ten short stories and one prose piece.

The world is perfect!

A friend of mine has this interesting email signature:

...........................................

My face in the mirror
Isn’t wrinkled or drawn.
My house isn’t dirty
The cobwebs are gone.
My garden looks lovely
And so does my lawn.
I think I might never
Put my glasses back on!

..........................................

Mera Bharat Mahan?

It would be incredible were it not a fact. At a government hospital in Chennai (in Royapuram, to be precise), two mothers gave birth at the same time. The hospital staff mixed the babies up so that the parentage became suspect when it came to handing them over. One of the two babies was male, the other female. Inevitably a furore resulted. DNA tests were conducted. It took a week but eventually the babies were handed over to the right mothers. A silent thanks to technology. A million curses to the hospital which could not handle a matter at once as simple and crucial as this.

In another event, this time in Tiruvallur, five children fell ill and were admitted to the government hospital after they were administered measles vaccine shots (which are meant for children below 13 months of age) at a Primary Health Centre earlier in the day. Three of them died. Another death occurred, for the same reason and on the same day, although the child received his measles vaccine at another PHC. Reportedly, the vaccines came from the same batch and might have been contaminated. However, about 20,000 other children have received vaccine shots from the same batch thus far without any incident. So what went wrong in these tragic cases? At any rate, four deaths later, the batch has been withdrawn from use and samples sent for examination. Perhaps I should say ‘purportedly withdrawn’. For the way things work, some careless nurse might still use one of the vials tomorrow and some more deaths may follow.

Both these incidents are reported in today’s Coimbatore edition of The Hindu (www.thehindu.in). I have no words to express my disgust and revulsion.

New Year and a scientific error

The last fortnight has seen a spate of New Year days. Last Monday, April 7, was Ugadi and Gudi Padva, for the people of Andhra, Karnataka and Maharashtra. This Sunday the 13th marked the beginning of the Tamil New Year (although there has been a fair bit of controversy over the decision of the incumbent DMK-led government to mark the beginning of the Tamil calendar with the month of Thai, which begins in the middle of January). The next day, the 14th, was Vishu for Malayalam-speakers, which coincided with Baisakhi in the Punjab and Bihu in Assam. A prominent exception to this spate of New Year days have been the Gujaratis, who celebrate their New Year on the day after Diwali.

The New Year is believed to spring from the transition of the sun from the raasi Meena (Pisces, or the Fish, among the constellations of the zodiac) to Mesha (Aries, or the Lamb). This year the transition brought to an end the Tamil year Sarvajithhu, and the beginning of the year Sarvadhaari. The Tamil calendar (which draws from the overarching Hindu calendar) consists of an iterative cycle of sixty years, with Sarvadhaari numbering twenty-second. It appears that the Tamil calendar does not follow an ordinal number year system. After consulting the almanac, my grandmother announced that the current year is the 5109th year of Kalyuga, and that is the only number that we seem to have, in contrast to other regional calendars in the country.

The Tamil year is a solar calendar while the calendars followed by the Kannadigas, Maharashtrians and Andhraaites are luni-solar, adhering to the movements of the moon as well as the sun. In the luni-solar calendars the months commence with the bright half of the moon. This explains why Ugadi (and Gudi Padva) is celebrated a week before the Tamil New Year (and Vishu, Bihu, Baisakhi et al). Ugadi always falls on the day after amavasya or the new moon. India's diversity extends to the various calendar systems followed by the people. For example, people in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra follow the Shaka era with the year 78 CE as the base year whereas those in Gujarat, Rajasthan and India's neighbour, Nepal, follow the Vikram Samvat era with the year 57 CE serving as the base year. Another interesting difference between the two is that while both are luni-solar in nature, the months in the Samvat calendars commence with the dark half of the moon (that is, the day after the full moon), in a mirror-like contrast to the Shaka calendars.

Despite minor differences, all calendars are rooted in an overarching system that may be called the Hindu calendar, which marks the year to the season. The Hindu calendar is based upon the observations made by astronomers of the sub-continent from Vedic times, with modifications being made periodically. The calendar system that we follow today seems to have taken roots around the middle of the first millennium CE. Curiously, despite their advanced attainments in astronomy our ancestors ended up making a mistake with the Hindu calendar. This lay in the phenomenon called the precession of the earth’s axis, wherein the motion of the earth around the sun is influenced by the rotation of the earth’s axis. Our astronomers, while aware of the phenomenon, failed to take it into account while calculating the length of the year. Consequently, the Hindu calendar year is about twenty-three minutes longer than actual, which implies that it accumulates a whole day in about 60 years. In the approximately 1400 years since it was designed, the present calendar has accumulated (with a minor approximation) a whopping 24 days. In other words, our calendar presently tells us the seasons with a lag of approximately 24 days, which is almost a month! Thus, the New Year, which is supposed to mark the transition of the sun from Meena to Mesha (or Pisces to Aries) is actually out of sync with the actual event for the sun has already entered Mesha following the spring equinox, which falls on March 21. Similarly, our observance of Makar Sankranti, which indicates the movement of the sun from Dhanusha to Makara (or Sagittarius to Capricorn) is late by a period of approximately 24 days. The actual event marking this transition has already occurred in the form of the winter solstice (when the sun shines right over the Tropic of Capricorn) on December 22! In this way, we are no longer celebrating our festivals in the same seasons as our forefathers.

This error in our calendars has not remained uncorrected. Far from it. Newly independent India set up a Calendar Reform Committee in 1955, led by the physicist Meghnad Saha, which tried to rectify the gaps in the traditional calendar system. On the basis of its recommendations, a uniform Indian National Calendar encompassing the various regional calendars was adopted in the year 1957. However, the use of this calendar is confined to official usage. For popular purposes, we continue to use our erroneous regional calendars.

So, does this take the sheen off our New Years? I don’t know. We live in an age where the significance of events has largely been forgotten and replaced by a cultural symbolism. In other words, we celebrate many of our festivals, not so much for their underlying importance but more as a matter of custom: because they have been celebrated year after year by people before us. Thus, while there is compelling reason for us to rescue our calendars before they turn into an overly embarassing anachronism, there is still enough justification to see the joie de vivre and enthusiasm of our festivals as a cause for celebration in themselves. That, at any rate, is my two-bit!

(While this post draws from several sources in order to confirm the facts mentioned, for an interesting and a more detailed and complex discussion on the scientific error bit one may refer to http://www.frontline.in/: article entitled Medieval Mistake under the issue dated March 15-28, 2008.)

Telugu-speaking Tamils

On the day of Ugadi recently, my grand-aunt was here and we got talking about the Telugu-speaking communities of Coimbatore, for whom the day marked the beginning of the New Year in their calendar, which seems to follow the Shaka era. (The Shaka calendar is approximately 78 years behind the Gregorian calendar, so that this Ugadi marked the beginning of the Shaka year 1930.) The most prominent among them are the Vishnu-worshipping Naickers, who also call themselves Naidus. The word Naicker seems to come from Nayak, which was the title for middle-level chieftains under the Vijaynagar Empire. The Naidus of Coimbatore are a prosperous community who have who contributed much to Coimbatore’s twin reputation as a city of entrepreneurs as well as a centre for higher education. Their enormously successful foray into the textile industry in the first half of the 20th century was made possible by the investment of sizeable agricultural surpluses accumulated by virtue of money-lending and shrewd economic sense, a sine qua non in matters of commerce. Even today, almost the entire stretch of Avanashi Road, from LIC at one end to SITRA on the other, is Naidu territory. (One must add that there are some sub-castes of Naickers whose mother-tongue is Kannada. E.V. Ramasamy Naicker ‘Periyar’, for instance, belonged to one such sub-caste.)

There is then the Telugu-speaking community of Devanga Chettiars, weavers by tradition but carrying the belief that their ancestors were kshatriyas. They have contributed to the city one of the landmarks of Coimbatore – the Devanga Chettiar High School near Poo Market. They worship at the Sowdeswari Amman Temple on Raja Street, along with another Telugu-speaking sub-caste of the Chettiar clan, the Komutti Chettiars, who apparently prefer to be called Vysials. The latter are businessmen, and seem to specialise in jewellery. Besides, some of the famous saree showrooms, such as Nalli’s are also believed to be owned by members of this caste. (Somebody correct me if I am wrong!) The Vysials have also left their imprint on the city. Many of the jewellery shops on Raja Street supposedly belong to them; in addition, they have a whole street named after themselves, Vysial Street in the heart of Coimbatore.

A Telugu-speaking community with a curious name is the 24-Manai Telugu Chettiar. They are again a trading community, but are clustered mainly around Madurai and Thanjavur, and in Kongu Nadu they are spread across the towns of Pollachi, Udumalpet and Coimbatore. T.S. Avinashilingam Chettiar, a doyen of education, and founder of the Ramakrishna Mission Vidyalaya as well as what is now the Avinashilingam Deemed University, was also a Telugu-speaking Tamil, belonging to the cotton-trading community of Tiruppur Chettiars (I presume they have a more formal name that I am ignorant of). Both of the remarkable institutions that were founded by this Padma Bhushan awardee and lifelong bachelor were born out of the enormous profits earned by his family during the War years.

There are probably many more Telugu-speaking communities that I am not aware of (and which I shall be extremely happy to be informed about). The upshot of this discussion is that contrary to perception, Tamil Nadu is not as homogenous a land as it appears. It is a land enriched by the presence of various communities that are Tamil by virtue of many generations of residence here, and speak the language eloquently, but break into a non-Tamil tongue (which, besides Telugu, can be Kannada, Tulu, Marathi or Malayalam) upon their return home. They have preserved, in more or less pristine form, many of their traditions and customs, even as they have probably evolved new ones. Such ecumenical diversity is a cause for pride and celebration.

Whence and why did such various groups of people make their way to these parts, abandoning their original towns and villages? History probably has elaborate insights to offer but I choose to end this song of sixpence with a delightful extract laced with wry humour:

My ancestors were Telugu-speaking Naidus, but the family had lived in the Tamil country for many generations. My seventh grandfather cut down the forest, ploughed the first field and built the first house in our village. We must have been in Tamil Nadu even before that, but from where in Andhra we came and where we lived until we made a home in our present village remains unknown. Nor do we have any idea as to whether we came as conquerors or perhaps as refugees…The only clue is a very old sword sheathed inside what looks like a walking stick, which has been in our family for as long as anyone can remember. On the strength of his slender evidence, the martial background of the family was presumed, but rarely insisted upon.

(The passage is taken from the memoir Climbing the Coconut Tree, authored by Kasthuri Srinivasan, industrialist and founder-director of the South Indian Textile Research Association - SITRA. Srinivasan was a recipient of the Padma Bhushan, and an illustrious son of Coimbatore. There is today an art gallery in his name on Avanashi Road in the city.)

Seethakkaathi Marakkaayar and Tamil poets

Seethakkaathi Marakkaayar lived in the early 18th century. He was a wealthy man, a Muslim and an owner of ships. If one is to judge from the paeans composed in his name by the itinerant and innovative Tamil versifiers of his era and later ones - and I am taking M. Krishnan’s word for this - he was an extraordinarily generous man, a benefactor of poets. The indigent freelance poet, who wandered from land to land visiting one prospective patron after another, went to him with great expectations. Apparently, the songs in his praise that have outlasted him suggest that he was a person with a great love for the Tamil language, and show that he let nothing, least of all religion, come in the way of his noblesse oblige when called upon by a poet with a hole in his pocket and free-flowing verse at the tip of his tongue.

Thus, one such verse in his praise, translated by M. Krishnan from the Tamil (as is the case with all verses in this post), reads as follows:

Spent with his blaze the sun is red; the eyes
of women redden in the toils of love:
the poet’s heart grows red reading the classes –
and Seethakkaathi’s hands are red with giving.

These lines come from the stylus of Padikkaasuthambiran, a contemporary of Seethakkaathi. This poet also has to his credit some angry, resentful verse in self-castigation of his pursuit of poetry, a calling that embraced the goddess of learning only to be abandoned by the goddess of wealth. One such vituperative poem goes thus:

Foredoomed, with many callings there, we chose scholarship witlessly, thinking it great.
We did not learn the street magician’s art, dance the pole-dance, or practise sleight-of-hand.
Not born full-breasted prostitutes, we did not, abandoning accursed Tamil, enter service with women as their go-betweens.
To what a wretched life have we been born!

The fortunes of the poet depended greatly upon the munificence, or lack of it, of the patron he went visiting. These patrons, who could be mighty kings, but more realistically speaking, were generally little more than petty chieftains, landlords or merchants, could be unpredictable, ranging from the open-handed to the tight-fisted, and from the miserly to the downright mean. It was not uncommon for the poet, trudging for days together from his village to the town, to arrive at the patron’s stately home and sing his laurels employing the latest novelty in technique and rhythm, only to find his expectations belied. For example, here is a verse by Ashtavaadhanam Saravanaperumal Kavirayar of Ramanathapuram laden with a thick patina of satire:

‘Whom visits me?’–‘A poet’–‘And where are you from?’
‘From Vadakasi.’–‘What brings you here?’
‘Your fame has brought me here.
Hearing of you we have composed sweet verses in your praise.’
‘You were not wise. Which of my long line of forefathers has
listened to verse? A slight unknown in all my ancestry
is what you bring! Go far away before there is bloodshed.’

The poet would leave no stone unturned to thaw the heart of the most pitiless of misers. Thus, Chockanaathappulavar tried to seduce the springs of kindness in the bosom of a certain Bhoja, saying:

Bhoja, when as a thunderstorm you showered
gold-rain upon the spread of the earth beneath,
not a drop touched me, for my poverty
shielded me wholly with its deep umbrella!

In the case of Seethakkaathi, one imagines, poets sang his praise in all sincerity, free from the anxiety that their lyrical labours would be found wanting by a man so generous. Legend has it that a weary poet reached Seethakkathi’s town only to hear of his death. Making his way to the cemetery where the merchant was being buried, he burst into verse, his elegy hinting that the patron’s life had been claimed by the weight of poverty that the poet had brought with him. At this, the dead Seethakkathi’s right hand, bearing a diamond ring, flung open in the direction of the disappointed seeker. Even in death, the great patron did not disappoint.

(The contents of this post are based upon M. Krishnan’s essay, Verse for a living, from Ramachandra Guha, ed. (2007) Nature’s Spokesman: M. Krishnan & Indian Wildlife, Penguin Books, New Delhi. This book is a must-read for nature-lovers, enthusiasts of Tamil literature, aficionados of cricket, and lovers of the English language.)

Letters to the Editor

In one of the more humorous of his numerous delightful essays, M. Krishnan states that he held the view, in his younger days, that one who wrote for the correspondence columns of a newspaper had passed the litmus test for incipient senility. For “the fact that he has time for such correspondence (let us take it that one letter in ten gets published) shows that he has reached the age of superannuation”.

Having just typed out, printed and posted a letter complaining about the rat and cockroach menace in trains, I am already beginning to feel a little jobless and worried about the screws in my head. I try to comfort myself that the letter was written to the Deputy Director (Public Grievances), Southern Railway, and not to a newspaper. But I know in my heart of hearts that all said and done, the honourable Deputy Director is still a close proxy to the newspaper editor. For there is a letter, on this very day, in the correspondence columns of The Hindu, written along similar lines.

I have always wondered about the vocation of the people behind the names that regularly appear in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ column. For a while, I also used to wonder what they looked like, but have given it up long ago, impeded as I am by my severely limited powers of deduction as well as imagination. So I stop myself after making a mental record of the names that appear repeatedly. (Although it may be truer to say that the names inflict themselves on the mind with their frequent appearance in print.) Thus, the names spill out somewhat easily; I can effortlessly reel out names of some of the more activist readers of The Hindu – Hilda Raja, C. Varadarajan and Kasim Sait from Chennai, Shahabuddin Nadeem and Ved K. Guilani from Bangalore, Amit Arora from Mumbai and Pachu Menon from Margao. Together, they fulminate on anything and everything under the sun, be it the auctioning of cricketers for the Indian Premier League, the ruckus over government-formation in Pakistan, the 60,000 crore-rupee loan waiver in the latest budget or the stepping down of Fidel Castro as ruler of Cuba. Then there is Kangayam Rangaswamy, who until sometime ago, used to write in regularly all the way from the United States of America. Meanwhile, after a longish absence, T. Marx wrote in the other day from Karaikal, commending the Supreme Court for setting up a Special Investigation Team to probe riot-cases in Gujarat. Being a namesake of the father of communism, his letters must surely be heart-warming for the editor of The Hindu, a newspaper with manifest left-wing predilections. Little wonder that his latest letter stands at the head of the ‘Letters to the Editor’ column, with the title ‘Ray of hope’ bestowed upon it (by the indulgent editor, who else?). Closer home, my neighbour two houses away, K. Vellingiri, puts in an appearance now and then every Monday in the ‘Reader’s Mail’ column, which publishes letters exclusively from readers of the Coimbatore edition. Out-writing him to the editor from the same neighbourhood is Sripada Rajan, although neither of them, unfortunately, seem to have anything very substantial to say. (This is an attribute common to several such writers of frequent letters to the editor.) Some letter-writers are distinctly annoying. One such source of constant irritation is someone who I shall choose to call by his initials, KDV, a resident of Coimbatore. KDV seems to be inclined to criticise anything and everything, and at the very least, has an opinion to offer on matters that may be best left to persons more knowledgeable. Thus, his rants have ranged from the closure of the cash counter at the Saibaba Colony Telephone Exchange to the gender, racial and religious prejudices of the American media, even as he has proffered sage counsel to the leaders of the PPP and the PML(N) in Pakistan, asking them to do their best to restore democracy in their country. The frequency of his published letters is so high that I seriously wonder if he writes not one or two, but a dozen letters to the editor every week, each on a different topic to improve the chances of publication.

Interestingly, the count of women among these regular letter-writers, after also including those names that I have not mentioned here, is negligible. Of the ones named above, only one is clearly distinguishable as a woman by her name: Hilda Raja. I suspect Sripada Rajan to be a woman (partly from the name, and from the content of her letters), while Pachu Menon, by the utter ambiguity of the name to me, may also be a candidate. What should one make of this? There are three theories that immediately surface: one, that most writers of letters to the editor of The Hindu are men; two, that most readers of The Hindu are also men, and; three, that most readers of English newspapers in Tamil Nadu, considering that The Hindu is the most widely-circulated of its ilk by a huge margin over its nearest competitor in the state, are again, men. The first theory definitely holds good if one is to take published letters into account; the last two are somewhat tenuous but possibly true.

Can we generalise these theories across the entire English print media spectrum in the country? If we were to use the letters to the editors of the various English-language dailies in India as the basis, the answer would probably be in the negative. To my knowledge, no other daily newspaper in English devotes as much space to reader’s feedback as does The Hindu. Therefore, there is not enough data for the lay person to support such sweeping observations.

Meanwhile, as India’s population ages and reaches superannuation, I have no doubt that letter-writers writing to the editor will flourish and multiply. Even my city compatriot, KDV, will sooner or later begin to face the heat. But I have no doubt that with his boundless zeal and energy he will continue to best the competition for a long time to come. I am sure that even as I am typing this, he and other members of his clan are already planning their next letter to the editor.

However, to grudgingly confess, writing to the newspaper is not a bad thing really. At the end of the day, it is an important way of getting the world to feel your pulse, of registering your grievance and airing your opinion. Fulmination and protest is not only necessary but also integral to a democratic setup. As a matter of fact, such opinion-building and peroration is eminently desirable in order to create a more informed and articulate public discourse. Viewed from this position, it may not be too far-fetched to claim that sensible writers, who complain, criticise, comment and have something substantive to say are, in fact, rendering public service that contributes to the common good.

Indeed, M. Krishnan, with whom we began this post, himself underwent a change of heart in the course of his essay, modifying his unkind position when he discovered that "these selfless people are, in fact, the pillars of our democracy. They risk brawls in public in the interests of equity, and I think their letters, far from disclosing senility, prove their virile community spirit and mature daring."

May their tribe increase!

Yeh Chand Sa Roshan Chehra...

She held my eyes
Like she always did
Brown with a reddish tinge
Hazel, perhaps?

Lustfully
I stared
At her charming face
Fair as the moon
She let my eyes travel
Over her sinuous curves
I yearned
For her body, soft to the touch
Of one so debauched
As myself
I longed to reach out
And caress her naked
She walked away and looked
Back over her shoulders

She was a mother; her children
Born out of wedlock
And yet I wanted her
Badly, in my arms

I could see
Her reading my thoughts
I pleaded
But dignified and proud,
Determined
To give Man no quarter
A last burning look
Of her moon-lit feline face
Was all that she could spare
As she drew in her claws
And jumped off the wall
Leaving me with the sadness
Of having come tantalizingly close
And lost.

Romba Thanks!

“Do the buses to Coimbatore stop here?” I enquired on Friday, at the bus-stand in the temple-town of Karamadai. One of the three gentlemen, to whom this query was addressed promptly replied, “If you want to take the service bus you will have to wait outside on the main road. But all the town buses start from here.” I was pleased, not so much with the crispness of his response as with the genial way it was offered. It immediately seemed to mark him out as a country man, probably a resident of the town. “Romba thanks!” I said gratefully, using a colloquial expression, part-Tamil, part-English, meaning ‘thank you very much’.

This revived a line of thinking upon which I have pondered upon in the past. Is there at all an indigenous equivalent for 'thank you' in many parts of this country? In the normal course of things, it seems to me, it is unusual to verbally express thanks in the first place, which indicates that any help rendered is considered to be a part of, as Reader’s Digest would have it, ‘all in a day’s work’. Which makes it a cultural characteristic. So, one might express one’s appreciation through one’s body language, such as a sideways wiggle of the head, which is particularly common in the Tamil country. Or it might be expressed in the tone of my voice in saying “Sereenga” or “Sereenganna”, seree being Tamil for okay, with –nga and –anna serving as suffixes indicating a sense of respect. Of course, if I am profoundly grateful or somewhat highly cultured, I might be quite voluble in an extensive articulation of gratitude. But this is decidedly unusual when you are dealing with strangers. Which explains why, sometimes, people look up with some surprise when I say thank you in a bank or a shop. It serves to remind, somewhat painfully, that my manners are excessively urban and westernised. And that I am a cultural misfit in my own land. To my relief however, ‘romba thanks’, which is conveniently positioned between the wholly anglicised ‘thank you’ and the conventional countrified practice of not explicitly expressing thanks at all, seems to be fairly common colloquial usage among my generation and succeeding ones.

What about other parts of the country? During the days in Ahmedabad we said "Aabhar". To passers-by who threw the cricket ball back to us. Whenever we sent it flying all the way down the terrace. Which was a literal translation into Gujarati of 'thank you' and sounded somewhat contrived. It reflected our middle-classness, with the very fact that we were apartment-dwellers indicating a cultural position removed from that of the passer-by on foot or bicycle.

I do not recall any local expression equalling the brevity of ‘thank you’ in either rural Maharashtra (Palghar, Beed), rural Udaipur or the Nicobars. The conventional way of expressing gratitude was through one’s body language – especially through one’s face, combining the modesty of the supplicant with a beam of happiness or a radiant smile. Of course, an effusive articulation of one’s feelings followed where one felt overwhelmed by the kindness shown.

There is really no scientific basis to my observations, and I have always tended to be dismissive of my thoughts on this matter. But my arguments were bolstered when I was reading the novel Shantaram. Talking about the long stream of patients who would come to be treated at his clinic in the slum, Gregory David Roberts observes:

He went out without thanking me, as was usual with the people I treated at my hut. I knew that he would invite me to dinner at his house one day soon, or bring me a gift of fruit or special incense. The people showed thanks, rather than saying it, and I’d come to accept that. (p. 243-244)

Coming from a man belonging to a different culture, and therefore probably more sensitive to the cultural differences between his part of the world and ours, this is surely a significant comment.

I might want to preen myself now, imagining that there is reasonable ground for the contention that the average Indian generally does not say thanks, and that there is no exact equivalent for ‘thank you’ in an Indian language. But there is evidence to the contrary from the Hindi belt. What does one make of dhanyavaad, Hindi for thanks? Even if one were to dismiss it as a product of Sanskritised Hindi (but not uncommonly used in some parts, such as among the relatively urbane of southern Rajasthan for instance), and therefore at a remove from the everyday Hindustani of the common man, one is still confronted by the more popular shukriya. But given the latter’s Urdu origins, and the fact that Urdu was the language of the nobility, my argument is that uttering thanks is still a class phenomenon, attributable more to the ‘cultured’ classes. In my view, the aam aadmi is unlikely to care whether or not you thank him for the trivial assistance that he has rendered you.

Of course, nothing in this post is definitive. Any useful comment either in support or in opposition to my argument, or offering a fresh perspective on it, shall be greatly valued. To all those who spare some time on this song of sixpence, romba thanks!

On travelling sleeper class...

Ironically, the more I travel by AC three-tier on our trains, the more I begin to appreciate the pleasures of travelling plain sleeper class. This is although, or maybe precisely because I’ve been travelling quite a bit since December. Which has been eleven train journeys in all, of which only five were completed in sleeper class. And two of these were night journeys from Coimbatore to Chennai and back en route to Calcutta recently. So that makes it nine long distance journeys (eight of these being at least 1500 kilometres long), three of them in sleeper class and the rest by AC three-tier.

Why, what’s wrong with AC three-tier, you ask? It is, well, suffocating. One is so completely cut off from the sights and sounds that one associates with train travel. You can’t look out of the window, and even if you are on a window seat, you have to really wonder how it is on the other side of the tinted glass. Is it sunny or cloudy? Is it cold or warm? Is it really windy or just the train trying to live up to its reputation of being an express? AC travel does not help you with answers to these questions. Nor does it let you enjoy the tadak-tadak of the train, as it rolls along the rails. Mind you, this is the most fundamental aspect, the very essence of train travel, this tadak-tadak sound. It is to a train what aum is to the soul. It is a sound which has to get inside you and touch the very bones to give you the thrill that comes of travelling by train. Equally thrilling is the rumbling of the train as it crosses a bridge. The longer the bridge the more exciting it is. (My favourite is the crossing of the river Krishna just before Vijayawada when one is northward-bound. As a child I loved to peer all the way down at the river-bed with my head pressed to the window, and enjoy the kick I got at the way my head reeled!) Unfortunately, such thrills stop short of an AC coach, which is more or less acoustically sanitised in this matter.

I haven’t even mentioned the countryside yet. Isn’t that the most exciting part of travelling by train? For me, it certainly is. When one sets out from Coimbatore to Mumbai by Kurla Express, the train snakes its way through the Kongu region with its beautiful paddy-fields ringed by coconut palm trees. There are lovely farms with groves of coconut and occasionally, mango. The soil is black – you can see this from the fields that have just been ploughed. At Salem, the route branches off from the Chennai line, and the train chugs away towards Bangalore. The countryside here gives you a sense of isolation, and nature overwhelms the settlements, which grow increasingly few and far between. The stretch up to Hosur is remarkably beautiful, with its undulating terrain and the hint of woods here and there. As the train makes its way into Karnataka, then Andhra, and finally into Maharashtra (where it makes its entry from the Solapur end), the soil grows red, brown, blackish and then brown again while the tiled roofs of houses in the countryside are replaced by thatch, slate (particularly around Gulbarga) and once again, by red tiles. The fields give way to waste land and craggy hills of rock before agricultural land claws its way back up to the tracks. And then there is the beautiful stretch, the ghat section between Lonavala and Karjat, where the large number of tunnels is as great a source of delight as the breathtaking valleys.

Often, when you wake up from your siesta and begin to wonder where your train is, a sense of geography is offered by vendors and the myriad wares that they are presenting for sale. En route to Delhi, bhelpuriwallahs doing the rounds of your coach quietly proclaim the train’s entry into the Telangana– Vidarbha country. Nagpur announces its proximity in oranges being sold in bagfuls. Agra and Mathura are indicated by boxes of petha, the sweet for which the former is especially famous. On the Mumbai route, the Lonavala chikki serves as an easy marker of one’s geographical moorings.

I always feel it is easier to slip on and off for food whenever the train halts if one is travelling sleeper class. Here too, the food on sale on the platform gives you a good idea of where you are. Maharashtra (also northern Karnataka) is vadapav-land. The northern stretch towards Delhi, particularly beyond Jhansi is aloo-puri pradesh. And south of Maharashtra, you know you are in familiar territory when your eyes fall upon hawkers vending idli, dosa and omelette on the railway platform. Further south, particularly from Vijayawada downwards, the cuisine turns more discriminating. Omelette gives way to biryani, thayir satham, lemon rice and even puliyasatham. The larger food stalls in Vijayawada, one must not forget to mention, may offer piping hot pongal or idli-vada, served with excellent sambar-chutney, if you are lucky. Such pleasures may not be yours if you are travelling air-conditioned class. For AC coaches are generally positioned at one or the other extremity of the train, which means that you find yourselves at a far end of the platform, with no food-stall (or bookshop) in sight. You are thus, more or less entirely at the mercy of the pantry car.

With sealed windows and regulated temperature, AC travel is synthetic, artificial. Not infrequently, one may end up with somewhat troublesome co-passengers, who being unfamiliar with the ways of using the linen offered to them, may actually end up using that of their fellow passengers’. Such a misfortune befell me twice recently during my travels.

Travellers in sleeper class, it seems to me, are quite free of the stiffness that one may find among the upmarket passengers of the AC coaches. One of my recent sleeper class journeys was from Delhi to Coimbatore by Kerala Express. For company I had a nun who could speak only Malayalam, two young chaps - Malayalis working for the Arya Vaidya Pharmacy here in Coimbatore, and another couple of Keralites, a 20-year old girl and her older male companion. It was great fun, although I was the only one in the group unable to speak any Malayalam! When I missed a meal on the first afternoon, the nun fed me with tamarind rice and onion pickle. And the next day, believe it or not, we all played snakes and ladders, a game I hadn’t played in years! How singularly entertaining an otherwise silly game can be when played in a group of six on a train!

For all my noisy tomtomming of sleeper class travel I must, at the end of this post, acknowledge the bitter truth that sleeper class coaches are nowadays overrun by roaches and rats. For all his financial wizardry, it appears that the Hon’ble Railway Minister is now up against a challenge that is oxymoronically speaking, both modest and menacing. Perhaps it may help if he were to ensure that trains are thoroughly cleaned and fumigated before they set forth on their long jaunts across the country. At any rate, as a result of the humble rat and the humbler cockroach, my sleeper class journeys turned out to be a terror at nights, with the latter crawling all over me and nightmares of the former biting through my luggage playing on the mind all the time!

So now you know, for all my rants about the pleasures of sleeper class travel, why I travel the way I do!

Athanda Ithanda Kumbhakarnan Naan Thaan Da

I’ve become something of a Kumbhakarna these days. I dare not count the hours that I’ve spent sleeping in the past week. Sleep, pee, shit, eat, sleep, pee, check email, eat, go online, pee, read, pee, sleep. That’s become the daily routine. Makes me feel as if I’m little else than stomach and testicles. Shit! You know, that’s why I’m writing this and forcing myself to revive my moribund blog.

Stomach and testicles. That’s how a zamindar in Bengal described his bitterly poor tenants to an English officer. Although from the insights that one gets into the debauched lives of the zamindars of late colonial Bengal, one might say of our illustrious zamindar friend and his ilk that they were probably all testicles, and more testicles. Thanks to Cornwallis, perhaps? Sorry, I’m talking about a book. A humdinger of a book, actually. A Princely Impostor? is its title. It’s a superb story, grippingly recounted. Was the Bhawal sannyasi really Ramendra Narayan Roy? What really happened in Darjeeling? Almost exactly a century later, the gaps remain awning gaps. That’s the beauty of the narrative. And boy, what an end! Fact, as they say, is stranger than fiction. Excellent fodder for a movie. (Maybe I should get in touch with Sugata of New Theatres Limited.) I’m glad I bought the book. Fittingly, in Calcutta. A toast to the Bhawal estate. Another to Partha Chatterjee. Yet another to Patnaik, from whose bookshelf I first picked up the book - out of sheer curiosity. And of course, one to Pannalal Basu, subordinate judge of Dacca district. He taught philosophy at St. Stephen’s College before joining the judicial service. What a courageous judgement it was for a lower court judge!

It’s been funny weather out here in Coimbatore. For the last ten days. Cloudy and rainy. Today it rained like it was monsoon. I got drenched on the scooter and stopped at the Ayyappa temple to take shelter. It was fun to watch the Asokapuram schoolkids. They were playing in uniform when it started raining. They were having the time of their lives. Some were dancing. Some playing catch in the rain. We were also like them once. What wouldn’t I give to be their age and play cricket on the ground again!

Dataone broadband is the latest saga to hit my life. I wanted a new phone line with a broadband connection. The line will be given in two-three days, I was told. And that the broadband connection would be ready in a month’s time. Two weeks passed. No sign of the lineman. I went to the Thudiyalur telephone exchange. The lineman turned up. He checked. “The box is full. No capacity for a new line”, he declared. Back I went to the exchange. Today. The AE is a lady. Seems quite prompt. But why do I have to present myself in person for things to move? Anyway. Would you like to take a wireless phone instead, she asked. You get a speed of 144 kbps. Unlimited downloads. All for a monthly bill of Rs. 250/-. Damn it, something is better than nothing, I thought. Filled up the form. Come back on Saturday, she said. Between 11 and 12. Hopefully then, Saturday should mark the end of the dial-up. And of 3500-rupee phone bills. Will let you know. In another song of sixpence.