The Masseur who reads

       I was waiting for my turn at the Ayurveda massage centre....No, this is not some seedy place where bikini clad babes would go to work on your body. It is bang in the middle of the city, a huge place that resembles an abandoned house, with consultation facilities and a medical dispensary. The thought of stripping down to underclothes in front of strangers and displaying an old creaky body ravaged by time, is not really a pleasant one. Here two men go to work on your body in a dark room, with copious amounts of hot oil, pressing hard on joints and synchronized pounding of your back...You feel so defenceless

   While I was waiting my turn, a man walks in carrying a few Malayalam books. They are handed over at the counter and some other books are returned to him. I was curious and asked what is going on. He said he is a travelling librarian and has come to issue books. The books were of a certain kind which are not read by young adults or lazy housewives, in search of instant gratification. I was then curious to know who is the reader in the Ayurveda Centre. Apparently the reader was busy at work and had given the books that he had borrowed last month at the counter to be returned. I asked the travelling librarian how does it work? He explained that the requests for books can be placed online and it is supplied once a month.

   I took down the details of the travelling librarian. (I later enrolled myself in this library too) Then I went in for the massage. Two men were inside in a dark room and I was asked to take down my clothes and lie flat on my stomach while two pairs of hands pounded my weary body with oil.  I asked who is the reader between the two? A short bearded young man admitted he is the reader. I appreciated his tastes in literature while admitting that I haven't done any serious reading in Malayalam in ages. 

    We got chatting. While my reading in Malayalam was largely limited to authors of 60s to 80s, (the golden period as one would like to say for any literature) his range was vast. He suggested many new writers who, he thinks, I ought to check out. Over the next few months during my visits, he introduced me to many new age writers in Malayalam. V J James, T D Ramakrishnan, A S Priya, K R Meera, Subash Chandran and many others. I either borrowed or bought books of these authors. I also  discovered to my astonishment that he has read many world classics also in the translated Malayalam versions. Kazantzakis, Kafka, Orhan Pamuk, Sartre... you name it and he has read it. (Along with Chetan Bhagat and Shobha De for good measure) I was looking forward to these visits which combined body cure with adrenaline for the brain. I saw a little bit of myself in him, from my school days, thirsting for books, reading whatever I can lay my hands on 

    He told me that he studied only  up to 12th Grade from Thodupuzha, his hometown. Circumstances at the home prompted him to learn a skill and earn a living. Hence he turned to Ayurvedic massage which puts bread on the table. He said he writes in his spare time and is toying with the idea of a movie script. I asked him to let me see a sample of his writing. He shyly brushed off my suggestion. I started carrying some books from my personal library for him to read. These were promptly returned on my next visit. I invited him home to check out my library...

     Over the past few months I became irregular at the Ayurveda centre. The work front got tough, with very few holidays and a transfer to Kolkata looming in the horizon. I went there last month, eager to listen to some suggestions on the latest works in literature while getting a hot oil massage. Unfortunately, I was told that he had left this job a few months back.

     I took the news with great disappointment. An Ayurveda massage clinic is the most unlikely place where one could meet a discerning reader and have a cerebral discussion. I don't meet readers at the workplace. Increasingly, it has become a place for disgruntled souls, looking forward to an evening of drinks and party games. Life's vagaries dealt him a wild card, but I hope to see him one day as a successful novelist or a screenplay writer.....Although I have no friends in the literary world, I wish I could do something to get him a break in life. I fervently hope for his success....

Basheer, the sultan of love

                  You could mistake him for a wayside mendicant, snake oil seller, tea vendor, uncared grandpa....Anything but a romantic, a lunatic, a prolific teller of tales. Vaikkom Muhammed Basheer spent the last years of his eventful life with a friendly moniker, Beypore Sultan, ensconced in an easy chair under a Mangostene tree in the compound of his home. With birds, bees, butterflies and snakes for company. Through his last years he wore just a lungi, without covering his chest and spent his time on the writing board under the Mangostene Tree. He would reply to every letter from his many fans. 

    Last year I went to Alliance Francaise auditorium to see a play (Under the Mangostene Tree) based on Basheer's Stories. The play captured the essence of Basheer, his life and his stories. Most of his famous stories were written in the 1940s/50s. I read most of them while I was a schoolboy. I had missed the subtle humour, incisive observations and deep emotions of his characters. When I read them today I feel transported across time zones. Basheer's life is the stuff made of legends. He ran away from home, participated in the freedom movement, was jailed, took on many roles as English tutor, Beedi maker, palm reader, homeopath, face reader, sanyasi.....He spent time travelling the length and breadth of undivided India. His life  took many turns. He lived a rich but ordinary life. But he captured the romance of life, the humour and the sadness.
    Last month I saw a another play by the same theatre group called "Perch". This time it was called Moonlight and skytoffee. The stories were based on Basheer's stories "Love letter" and "Three card poker player's daughter". Although this time around it wasn't as good as "Under the Mangostene Tree", I was enchanted by the performance of Aparna Gopinath....lively, fiesty and full of beans. Skytofee and Moonshine being the secular kind of names that can be carried by the offspring of keshavan Nair and Saramma, the protagonists in "Premalekhanam" (Love Letter), one of Basheer's famous stories.
           "One Bhagavadgeeta and plenty boobs", is the title of a rather provocatively named story by Basheer.. But I don't remember any bigots in Kerala having an issue with that. As I mentioned elsewhere in this blog, when someone asked him what he would do if all Muslims in India are sent to Pakistan, he said he would masquerade as a Nambudiri Brahmin and continue living in India. Story goes that during his time in jail, he'd dress up as a Brahmin and murmur slokas and splash holy water on those entering the portals of the jail. It was seen as an eccentricity by other inmates. He worked as a sports goods seller and would go around in a bicycle dressed in jacket and suit and a bowler hat to boot. Story goes that he could instantly judge whether the hapless customer would buy or not. One day he fell from the bicycle and lay splayed on the road in full splendour,  sports goods scattered around him....
               Reading these romantic stories from the 1940s, we get a sense of the time. They were better times. And they were original stories, from the rich tapestry that was his life. Several of Basheer stories have been made into successful movies. One of the earliest ghost stories " Bhargavi Nilayam" was based on a Basheer story. The characters in his stories are the earthy, every day kind of guys. There was no right or wrong, good guys and bad guys. A Basheer character is unique in that they represent humans with all failings and eccentricities.
       Life is fun....because I have no one...murmurs another lonely soul from his stories. Those words could be a balm to lost souls. To the desperado who has reached the tether of life, it could be a shot of adrenaline. It is also the quest of the lonely soul for elusive love... An entreaty to love. And behind all that humour, there is that huge sense of loss
   Basheer found his life partner Fabi in 1959. Reading through his old letter many women wrote him it is clear that he could be flirtatious with his many fans. Fabi was not someone who could match his intellect. But every visitor to his home in Beypore was treated like family. He was immensely proud of Fabi's cooking and he loved her deeply.
   It is said that when Basheer returned five years after running away from home, he slowly knocked on the door at midnight and his Umma (mother) asked him to get in, wash his feet and sit for dinner. He asked his Umma how come there is food at midnight. Then it struck him....His mother has waited with his dinner for the past five years , hoping that her lost son would turn up one day.... 

Dealing with dirt

     

The sun is blazing hot. The stench is overpowering. The men and women were dressed in rags with a maroon waistcoat which distinguishes them as contract workers, not regular employees. Many of them appear to have crossed the normal age or state of health to be profitably employed. They are busy sorting through mounds of garbage which have just arrived in small trucks from the living quarters nearby. Many of them don't wear gloves as they shift all organic waste to huge pits. Cows and buffaloes are grazing nearby, trying to find something to eat from the garbage.
  If you want to know how lucky you are, I'd invite you to stand near these mounds of garbage where humans sift through the stuff that we throw away. Try to do that for about an hour in one week. Your world view will undergo radical changes. There are men and women, teetering on the edge of existence, segregating plastics, glass, cloth, styrofoam, aluminium packets etc from the large amount of food waste and other stinking rot that we throw away from our homes. 
       Two years back, in the workplace, we decided to segregate garbage into bio-waste and recyclable. This involved pressing the services of hundreds of contract employees to wade through the muck and clean a huge mound of garbage.  Earlier all that unsorted garbage had grown into a mini-mountain over the years, spreading its stench for miles and also igniting fires of its own volition. This attracted stray dogs, cattle and vicious criticism from a bunch of disgruntled employees living in the vicinity. At the end of a one month effort, this whole mound was demolished and we made pits to convert bio-waste into compost and sought the help of local authorities to dispose off the plastic and other solid waste.

   That’s when I had an inkling of something called garbage terrorism in our midst. The local authorities refused to take our garbage for disposal. Although they could not legally refuse. The municipality/ corporation said you deal with your dirt. You can’t dump it in our garbage yard. We were looking for solutions to deal with this huge stinking problem. We were told that there are dealers who are ready to pick up plastic and other waste. Meanwhile we kept the plastic and other waste tied neatly in big garbage bags and stored it in an old dilapidated building. The dealers came, took a look and said all that plastic will need secondary sorting and washing before they can take it for processing. That was an impossible task to carry out with our resources. We finally told the conservancy contractor to deal with it and dispose it off safely.

     So the contractor would take all those big garbage bags to the municipal dumping yard in the dead of the night to escape attention of municipal authorities and come back mission accomplished. In the Chennai Corporation controlled premises, the conservancy workers would often go on strikes that would lead to accumulation of garbage in the streets. Residents show their protest by dumping garbage on the front yard of the house where elected representatives live. In our over populated cities, garbage handling and availability of water are slowly growing into major going to be crises which are going to explode in our faces.

       Prosperity brings its own problems. And when there are too many people crossing the line of poverty, they are able to afford mobile phones, packaged food, white goods etc, all of which come in packages which are then thrown away. A new mattress is bought and the old one thrown away. Old non-functional mobile phones are given decent burial as new models take their place. Plastic bags, empty water bottles and many layered chips packets are strewn everywhere.
           And there is frenetic pace of construction going on everywhere in the city. This results in a lot of debris strewn around. The building contractors do not know where to dump them. One could see them dumped in the dividers of highways. It is such an unpleasant sight as one travels around. Isn't it possible to demarcate areas in each block for dumping construction debris?  A building contractor I knew told me that he pays off people to take away the debris and dump it surreptitiously in open areas in the dead of the night so that  future owners of the luxury apartment are spared the unseemly sight of it.
    Yeah...and what do we do to protect the interests of the scavenger class? Ask the politicians. They have passed a clutch of legislation banning manual scavenging. They have passed several acts for protection of contract labourers. Still scavengers die cleaning septic tanks very frequently. And the contractors  who employed them are arrested and thrown into jail for a few days to the cacophony of huge headlines in TV/print screaming about it. The position of contract workers who deal with garbage are at the bottom end of society. Many of them are addicted to alcohol. Can you blame them? After handling our garbage, they have to eat food. (Believe me, if you stand anywhere near these places, you can bid goodbye to your appetite for a long time till that memory and the stench lingers) We could invest in technology for cleaning sewages and septic tanks. But no....that requires a lot of managerial skills, coordination, planning, financial resources etc. Passing an Act in the Assembly or Parliament is the lazy man's easy way out. Throwing the contractor in jail might even fetch some votes. But nobody wants to go anywhere near those mounds of garbage to have an understanding of the problem its totality. We could make a difference from our small household by segregating the garbage. Start a small composting pit or a bin. We can make life a little easy for these forgotten souls who have to then segregate this garbage that we throw away.. But we are too busy aiming for the stars. We have bigger problems to deal with. Let us shut out that dirt from our lives
   I write this out of frustration. After trying so hard to make a small difference in the place where I work. 

Life of lies

     When I saw the young Markus Zusak at the Hindu Literary Festival speaking on the pangs of writing, I was ignorant of his novel "The Book Thief". He spoke about how he had to rewrite the book after finishing it once. These days I try to balance too many things in life and delving into a work of fiction is not a luxury I can afford anymore.

    Often I think of the many twists of life that landed me in a Babu's job.  Your world is consumed by lies. There are everyday events that goes to show how shallow and artificial our existence is.  I often wish I was that Babu who enjoys sunning himself in winter Delhi, enjoying munching peanuts and discussing the next pay upgradation. The beauty of good literature and exquisite music be damned. This is life and beneath this thin veneer of respectability, it is filled with lies. In an average day, I see government employees tampering evidence, concocting and planting false stories, running parallel businesses, collecting bribes, that too for decisions they have no means of influencing. 

   Reading a fine work of fiction is the last thing on my mind. But I plodded on with The Book Thief and I ended it with moist eyes towards the lyrical and melancholy end. It gave me some solace thinking how life must have been unfair to people torn by wars, Jews living in Germany in mid 1940s, how a barely literate accordionist-painter brings the joy of letters to a little girl, how a Jewish fist fighter given shelter in basement writes about ruling the world with words.....  

   It is a book that's narrated by death, about how it was such a beautiful day to die,  about a promised kiss, about the beauty and brutality of life. For once I was thrown back into the world of letters. I was grateful that I still have it in me to enjoy good literature. I read this book slowly ...at the rate of perhaps fifty pages a day. Trying to let the joy of words create mini-explosions in my mind. It is a sad book, and it almost reflected the state of things around me. 

    The other book that I relished reading was the Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carre. This is the official memoirs of the man of whom I wrote glowingly elsewhere in this blog that, if he had chosen a different genre, he'd have snagged the Nobel for literature. I was always wonderstruck by the economy and careful usage of words that he deploys....almost like a battle where he chooses to field his little soldiers who constitute the big picture, the big war..... The most touching part of this book is where he writes of his father, a charlatan, serial debtor and not someone you could own up to. Somehow at the end of that sad narration, one could almost believe that his father made him who he became...A teller of tales. I have always gone through his books missing the plot completely. Totally absorbed in the build up of characters. George Smiley for one. I could almost see him. Loser in love, immersed in the job that is filled with lies of a different kind..... Somehow I see what we all are,  at the end of the day. Living a life of lies....

The Ivory Throne

                         I had sworn to myself that I won’t be buying any new books or borrowing any from the Eloor lending library until I have finished reading the stuff which already rests in a tidy pile near the bedside and in the bookshelf. I did a quick check of books bought but remained unread. I was astonished by the sheer numbers and also the huge investment it entailed from a Babu’s modest salary. Two things happened recently. A friend gave me a gift of Rs 5000 in the form of Amazon coupons. And here I am buying books of my choice in frenzy, an act that gives me true happiness. Secondly, the Missus handed me a copy of the Ivory Throne written by Manu S Pillai from the Library with an admonition that I ought to finish reading it soon.

   Since the huge tome of 550 odd pages had to be returned in about a fortnight’s time, I decided to read the first chapter which has a gist of Kerala history, a topic of interest to me. I disagreed with the establishment narrative and was about to return the book. I went ahead and read on. And I got totally absorbed in the book and finished it in three days flat in the midst of my hectic work life.

       The book primarily revolves around the women who constituted Travancore Royalty, more specifically, Rani Lakshmi Bayi, who reigned as regent (1924-31) until the prince attained adulthood and her cousin Sethu Parvati Bayi, the mother of the prince. A word about the young author. He is all of 27 years old, a graduate of Kings college London and has worked as Parliamentary assistant to Shashi Tharoor.  He has a very easy and readable style that keeps the reader engrossed in a tale full of machinations, intrigues, twists and the battles for riches and cash allowances to royalty.

      The Travancore kingdom pioneered several progressive measures and legislation. Some of these measures were during the reign of the Regent and some during the reign of Chithira Tirunal Maharajah (the prince who eventually ascended the throne). The central theme of this book is that the Maharani rose above the petty conflicts that plagued the Royal household, and laid the foundation to what became the most progressive state. Whereas the Prince’s mother had many insecurities and even resorted to Black Magic to cut short the reign of her cousin, the Regent. The nephew who succeeded her wasn’t so charitable either, cutting his aunt out of her sources of income as Attingal Rani which eventually led to her leaving Travancore to the cooler climes of Bangalore, shorn of royalty and spending a rich life with children, Grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The Regent’s husband was often (unfairly) accused of interfering with the administration. However the Regent introduced a large element of fairness into what was a tinderbox of communal passions where the Nairs, Christians and Ezhavas were fighting for a legitimate share of power. The Regent took many decisions that insulated her from this power play (like appointing an Anglo Indian Dewan) and also encouraged education of the girl child. She also issued the proclamation that opened the roads around the temples to all cases, a forerunner to eventually issuing the temple entry proclamation some years later.

   This reading led me to another book on the life of C P Ramaswamy Iyer written by A Sreedhara Menon (in Malayalam), which has been lying unread for the last one year. Sir CP, was originally the constitutional and legal adviser to the Maharajah Chithira Tirunal (the prince who eventually took over from the Regent) and eventually became the Dewan. He was absolutely loyal to the Maharajah and his mother. He went to meet Lord Willingdon, the then Viceroy with whom he shared a good professional relationship to terminate the Regency earlier than usual and coronate the King. This book gives credit to CP  for piloting the fortunes of the state in the name of the Maharajah.

          According to him the Regent was against issuing the Temple entry proclamation and merely got by with issuing transit rights to all castes on roads around the temples. If the family of the Regent comes across smelling roses in Manu S Pillai’s book, it is CP’s firm and progressive hand that characterized the golden era of Travancore, according to Menon. But the Maharajah hogged the limelight and CP was credited with most things that went wrong. But just a cursory reading of the various initiatives by Sir CP, would lead one to believe that the era of firm and progressive decision making in administration came to an end after Sir CP. The Left narrative has always characterized him as the villain, who has the blood of thousands in his hands as a result of police firing in Punnapra- Vayalar agitation. He also ran the State with an iron hand which stifled press freedom and other initiated many repressive acts that turned Travancore into a Police State. He even tried to retain sovereignty of the State of Travancore at the time of partition and finally advised the Maharajah against it on practical considerations.

          Manu Pillai’s book cites correspondence between the Regent, Dewan, Resident, Viceroy and others. It is educative to know how they used the English language with economy of words and beautiful turns of phrases. Even drab official letters are a study in elegance. This journey into the past was absorbing, to say the least. The bygone era had men and women of character. Even when they erred or failed to assess the pulse of the populace, one could never accuse them of having done it to line their pockets. History is often not fair to these souls who heralded the beginnings of a revolution, in education, equality of opportunity, industrialization and infrastructure.