A Long One but Blame it on the Rains

Wonder if someone questions you about the merit of the decision to pursue a course in a B School. Will you feel hurt? Terribly disappointed to hear it from ‘that’ person and decide to change the course itself.

Blame it on emotions or that particular rainy afternoon. Some people get too emotional about small things. No wonder that ends up changing their life quite a bit- because outcomes of Rainy days are never known. But for good or for bad- rains are special.

As a kid I remember reaching the school on a rainy day with barely 5-6 of my classmates present. It was such a sad feeling, the school was not declared closed on the rainy day. I remember, I had ran out of the rear gate of our school, bluffing Peter who used to guard it, shouting “Mera Tiffin rikshe pe rah gaya! Mera Tiffin rikshe pe rah gaya!” As if I was going to get my Tiffin back.

‘Hurrah!’ Full six hours of roaming around the streets in a torn raincoat, which prevents your identification and creating one of the most relished days of your life.

Some people have this travelling bug in their horoscope, some say ‘Chakra on the feet’. Mine is such.

I remember having once accompanied my elder brother to ‘Nai ki Mandi’, to buy some vegetables. I was about two years old and still a liberated soul. This area of Agra is the first (and the worst) to get affected in communal riots. We had to buy vegetables from shops right at the entrance of the market and the reward was a kite we had bought from the adjoining shop.

As true and responsible siblings would do, I was warned never to go beyond in that market.

Everything had been fine until one day, ‘Nitu Ki Dadi’ saw me, may be a two and a quarter year old- all on his own- buying kite from the “Ustaad Patang Wala” - a kite shop in the most interior and dreaded area of that market. One would need to cross numerous crowded crossings and innumerable lanes to reach there, over two and a half kilometers from home.

While the old lady had kindly ‘escorted’ a ‘small’ kid ‘safely’ to his home, what could a weeping mom say? I used to take permission to buy kite from the shop in front of our house :). At that point of time Mom used to co-author text books for Agra University with Papa, giving good opportunity to me to escape her attention.

Her getting the job of a lecturer in the university and the follow up admission of mine in the School had occurred as a chain of events soon after.

In the kindergarten, when I was still amongst the shorter kids, I remember having taken a ‘knife’ to the school to impress the girl who sat next that I was also a grown up. As not expected, the young lady had informed the teacher about it. ‘Bechara Romeo pita to koi baat nahin’, the teacher had also confiscated the knife.

It could only be recovered after the teacher realized that this student of hers will not let her go back home after the school was over without taking his knife back. That knife, forever used as a paper cutter by Papa, still occupies its respectable place on dad’s reading table.

Moral of the story is- This event had also occurred on a rainy day :)

It was class one when I had run away from the school on the rainy day. And why from school alone?

In those days, during the rainy season with the falling of first drop of rain from the heavens, the city electricity would go off creating a black out (Generators and Invertors were not common then).

As ‘wise’ the elder kids normally are, in our family too, they had managed to let the lit candle fall on the newly purchased dining table, got an edge of the table burnt and merrily blamed it on me.

In the follow up of events a class one kid was rescued by his father far off from the house on a pitch dark rainy night, surrounded by a lot of angry street dogs, as he was leaving that house ‘forever’ for being wrongly blamed for damaging the table.

I wonder what could have happened had not Papa heard a lot of barking dogs that night from one direction and rightly thought I could be with my best buddies.

In class first, I had scored a “perfect zero” in “Recitation” in the first term exam. The second term recitation exam was even better; the nun was naming one poem after the other if I knew how to recite those.

Recite those??? I had never heard of those. And then the poor teacher had asked if I remembered any poem on earth. I had responded happily that I had learnt one of the poems from the first term because during the first term examination she had told me that she would make me recite the same poem again in the half yearly exams.

With the combined effort of the teacher and the pupil, the poem was completed and the student was given 6 marks out of 10.

Teachers are magicians; they can draw rabbits out of hats. Atleast I was never sure if I would come first in the class or flunk in half a dozen of subjects. Ok, you got it ......... I was ever so inconsistent.

But first time I had hit the Jackpot was in Class Two, first term exam and I had got second rank in the class.

I was the only one in the class who was collecting his report card himself and had to wait till the time my parents came from college and pick me up, so I had luxury of time to ‘flaunt’ my achievement to every newcomer. And that too happened to be a rainy day, so in a way I was trapped in the school.

The boy who had come first had committed a tactical blunder of sitting next to one Mr Aziz (who was bossing around there), by far the richest person in the class, and also the most ancient sculpture of class II. The Mom of the first ranker was also there and was more than keen to welcome every mother that entered the class and enquire how well her child had performed.

In the situation so generated and the cocktail that thus got prepared, every mom and her child that entered would run away from that boisterous lady. All the duty bound moms would desperately look for some ‘bright’ student who could help their child, so that she could get them to shake hands and seek atonement.

In the unfolding events someone conducted massive recruitments in his ‘TEAM’ and by the end of which half of the team of Mr Aziz had been shifted to a new team. And all this was taking place ‘officially’ under the supervision of the mothers of the new recruits.

No doubt the recruitment was about 50% of the class size. Mr Aziz was phenomenally rich; he used all imported stationary and was known for his generosity, he could organize large Ice cream treats. Obviously, the fairer sex did not shift loyalties.

All big things in life happen on rainy days. The team formed that day was to rock the school for the years to come.

Memoirs of a lost world

It is raining heavily here.

Had it been in Agra and 10 years back, in such conditions in the Hindu calender month of 'Shravan' or 'Saawan' we would travel to Mathura, some beautiful song playing in the car, to see some of the temples, to roam around in those “Kunj Galis”, to eat some of the best prepared milk sweets along with the Samosas, then to get geared to start for Vrindavan, visit the temples there, have lunch under some tree, watch monkeys play around you, the elder ones waiting patiently for their share of food while the impatient younger ones unable to resist the aroma would sit on your lap and eat from your hand, they are gods and we would all love that, then couple of people would prefer to lie down under the tree for a nap while some would prefer the car seats, papa would walk down some alley to meet some of his old friend, one need not walk more than a few steps to reach the destination in a 2 sq km town, two kids- one boy wearing a loose knickers and un-tucked shirt and one girl wearing a frock with the torn lower frill touching the ground- will run down the road from that house holding a tray each with glasses of lemon water, they would communicate in a threatening tone how upset their grandmother/ mother is that you are sitting in a temple complex and not in their drawing room, by then papa would come with his friend, his face telling all that he has been given a nice scolding by his bhabhi, his friend would explain that he would not get his dinner if we would not go to his house, we would all talk and happily walk to his home, we would happily observe papa being scolded by his bhabhi like a small boy ‘lallu bahut bada ho gaya hai jo ghar nahin aayega’ and see him stand with his head held down, you know after your grandparents were not there the distant bhabhis had taken care of your then small papa as mother, and part of the ritual of a Vrindavan visit is that papa wants to get scolded by his senior friends because he knows the value of having elders to scold you, because they will not always be there, and these visits and getting scolded are counter intuitive and are also meant to assure the elder people that we are there and they need not worry, that the small orphan boy whom they helped grow up has his children grown up and they have got into the biggest jobs of this country, all the hard work of the friends and seniors has paid rich dividend, the dog in the house would have done all the tricks by then to flatter you, rolling on the ground, trying to catch his tail and running away with one of the shoes just to tell you that he is happy that you are there and he wants to play with you, grown up dogs are very similar to grown up men, they are very much like boys, they will never grow up and would always be like the best pal they were as a pup, he would take you to meet his best friend- the old cow standing in one corner of that house and she has a beautiful name too, then two three or four families would walk towards the ‘Banke Bihari Ji’ wishing every one along the road ‘Radhe Radhe’ and in the next hour or so everyone would be lost with Krishna in one of the most awakened temple, then the shopping spree would start, from the latest framed pictures from ISKON of the child Krishna or the Radha Krishna, of the smallest pocket copy of Hanuman Chalisa, or a new publication from Motilal Banarasi das on palmistry, and after the farewell we would start back, and time permitting one could stop at some old bawdi, or at the Siva temple remains on the back of Yamuna or at Sikandra- Akbar’s Mausoleum, you would pray that the railway crossing should be down and the car gets to stop at the road side pakori shop there- this shop is more than two hundred year shop with no brick structure, just a small shop on the road side which prepares what could be the cleanest, freshest and purest pakori- just amazing , and finally we would be back home, each excited by his day’s purchases and they never disappointed.

I wonder how much I have lost in last ten years, the insecurity and hard work that one generation puts in earning an honest living transmits to the next one. We went for making what was the most easily earned thing on earth- MONEY. What we seemed to have lost in the bargain are much more valuable- more difficult to find and acquire- true friends, true relationships, trust, faith, honesty, time and values- on which a happy life could easily be build.

There could be no balancing act, atleast I failed: ‘Kabhi kisi ko mukkammal jahaan nahin milta’.
Or as I always tell myself, I can take a lot of U-turns successfully and make up for the lost. One day, I will be back in my own world.