UP AND DOWN: TO JAIPUR AND BACK
Kanhaiyalal Kumawat is our lab technician in NBRC. He is a sweet guy, and I am sorry to say that I can’t say much more about him. It so happened that he went off home to get married just the next day that I joined the place, and the only introduction I had with him went somewhat like this:
KK: So you have joined today?
DA: Yes.
KK: Have you signed in the register, in Sir’s lab?
DA: No, not yet. Will you tell me where it is? When you are going to Sir’s room just let me know. I’ll go along.
KK: It seems that you folks don’t need money.
DA: What are you saying Kanhaiyaji. Of course I need money.
KK: So you need money. Then what will happen to people like us?
DA: Well, we can all make money together.
KK: Hmmm.
He probably said something, but I couldn’t quite get his dialect. I reflected in the mean time on the stupidest thing that anyone could say to another person in their first introduction. Later, I heard from all my labmates that Kanhaiya is the nicest fellow on this side of India who has the rare talent of dramatizing everything. It seemed to me then that I was the only person bereft of such performance, where there was unanimity in everybody’s views on his abilities.
It was his wedding somewhere near Jaipur and we reached there from Delhi, covering a mere 300 KM, before him. And we waited there like the leopard waiting to pounce on his prey.
The guests poured in, all mainly simple village folks. We, the seven of us including sir seemed among them like clowns from the city pretending to fit into the groove of countryside camaraderie. The wedding ceremony, such a symbol of rich people babbling and pretentious costumes malfunctioning, seemed in such a case a complete misinterpretation by the confined senses of our little urban mentalities.
The seven of us, it seemed, were deserted in the middle of the Rajasthan desert. Fields and wide expanse of fields were all that surrounded us on four sides. The fields were empty and were cut by tracks this way and that. They had no crops. The barren look reminded me of some infernal intellectual joke spewed in disdain in some neurotic art flick.
I was glad to come back to my senses. The urban mentality had caught up with my imagination. I blended myself into the enchanting nuances of the village folk. This time around, I felt free from a certain vicious cycle of wicked thoughts accumulated through two decades of living among bricks, grease and pollution.
The folks were clad colourfully in their local dresses, veils over the faces of women and turbans over the heads of men. The young were a disappointment in their cool-dude western shirts and dusty trousers. They did not look their race. They looked like crows in the land of the peacock.
Anyway, the groom finally arrived. From a distance I saw the Sun fall on his dark skin to produce a bright smile. The smile was full of warmth and humility, and a certain hint of shyness as well. He alighted from the car to display a full Rajput party costume complete with a little dummy dagger and a volumptious turban peaking into a white feather.
The seven of us were standing in the middle of a field by the side of an unpaved road, waiting for the groom to arrive, so that we could enter the wedding ceremony with him and the full entourage declaring his entrance.
The wedding hall was a shamiana and tent under some banyan trees in the middle of the barren fields that have been reaped to yield the wealth for such an occasion.
Some people were engaged in having a late lunch, squatted in a row on the ground while others were engaged in siesta or in a light chat among fellow folks. Dal, bati and churma were the fare, the famous Rajasthani food.
Coming back to the urges of urban needs, I will not mention the origin of the idea, but the fact that it floated like fungal spores into all our minds to create the same devilish craving of the routine urban thought process. The thrist was called beer, and the word was assimilated before even the complete four-letter word was completely uttered. Beer, in this remote village, in the middle of nowhere? Sounds freaking crazy.
So, four of us, having roughly surveyed the little surroundings, finally ended our search to a lone liquor shop. It sold some cheap whisky, rum, locally fermented stuff and a beer called ‘Bullet’. Taking into account the risk of poisoning ourselves with spurious alcohol, we decided to go in with the tried and tested beer. Ten bottles were bought for six of us and the driver. There seemed to be only one in-her-senses person.
Once such a devilish thing such as beer enters the mind, then even the most saintly wedding ceremonies cannot fix our attention. Life seems dyslexic and there seems to be no meaning but the strange meanings that hyperactive brains conjure.
Time went on slowly, till it was seven thirty when the first bottle was opened by one of my fellow mates. In this beery discourse, I forgot to mention that we had some potato pakoras and carrot halwa, and in this we also had to attach a meaning. We had it to avoid acidity so that our beery tryst might not end up in vomiting waste. Simply put, no puking!
Seventy-five rupees per bottle, so the beer better be good. As it happens, it turned out a bit disappointing. At an average of eight percent alcohol, there is a decent hit after consuming one bottle. But it wasn’t the case with this lot. The stomach filled up more and more, and the mind yearned for even more.
So after one bottle, we were in the mood for mischief, so some of us did a few things which were called ‘naughty’ and demanded to be mentioned in this memoir. After one bottle, one of my companions somehow convinced the phone-struck driver and grabbed the wheel of our Chevrolet Tavera to give us a few spins over the grassless, dusty fields. Emotions took over me, and my hands and feet started feeling itchy at the opportunity to touch the steering wheel and gas pedal. Oh, what a concert of pure symphony it is to produce the dramatic effects that ever can be produced on a four-wheel motor vehicle. I pushed my companion out, and sat in the hot seat. Then I drove with panache and style over dusty fields, like a hero out of wild west movies. This continued for some time till everyone else got fed up, so I had to relinquish this beautiful Bullet-fuelled dream.
Time came at last, and the driver came home to his car from his telephonic arguments. At last we pushed off into the wilderness hoping to reach order before midnight. The journey back didn’t prove to be smooth, but it proved to be rather interesting. We suffered a flat tyre. Could it get any better?
In the dark, on a highway with a flat tyre- typical Hindi film territory I thought, but nevertheless real life. It was nearing the end of the journey, so we were all mentally tired and physically desperate to reach home. An influential bloke in a suave SUV gave us ears, and send for a car at his office to help us out. But we fixed the problem, and were on our way again. We travelled a long distance. We needed a break to have some food before it was too late. We took a break at a Dhaba.
The food was good, the rotis were a bit dry and the dal had less salt but we were not in any mood to be critical. We had all that we could muster and some Coke to gulp them down. Then we had Pan to end a perfectly horrid journey.
At last we reached. We reached NBRC, our home, at three-thirty at night, from where we started at eleven-thirty in the morning. I reflected on the metamorphosis that we underwent in the span of sixteen hours. We were well dressed and smelling good. But now we are covered in Rajasthani sand and smelling like bad liquor. It was sunny and bright and hot when we had started, and now it is dark, the dark that heralds a new dawn. We were fresh and enthusiastic, but now we are tired, silent and know in our minds secretly that we need a day off from the lab. It wasn’t a fruitless journey and other than the Rajasthani coating of sand, it was a pretty useful trip for the mind. It was one of those trips into the unknown entities of life so that we are made to start thinking from a totally different paradigm. And if a professor had something to say to his students in a lecture, it should be on the lines of: Solving a stuck problem from the start by taking a different point of view; often such trips open our eyes to the various variabilities and probabilities of life that usually escape our notice from our restricted field of vision. “Oh, cut the crap!” I say.
Dwaipayan Adhya
KK: So you have joined today?
DA: Yes.
KK: Have you signed in the register, in Sir’s lab?
DA: No, not yet. Will you tell me where it is? When you are going to Sir’s room just let me know. I’ll go along.
KK: It seems that you folks don’t need money.
DA: What are you saying Kanhaiyaji. Of course I need money.
KK: So you need money. Then what will happen to people like us?
DA: Well, we can all make money together.
KK: Hmmm.
He probably said something, but I couldn’t quite get his dialect. I reflected in the mean time on the stupidest thing that anyone could say to another person in their first introduction. Later, I heard from all my labmates that Kanhaiya is the nicest fellow on this side of India who has the rare talent of dramatizing everything. It seemed to me then that I was the only person bereft of such performance, where there was unanimity in everybody’s views on his abilities.
It was his wedding somewhere near Jaipur and we reached there from Delhi, covering a mere 300 KM, before him. And we waited there like the leopard waiting to pounce on his prey.
The guests poured in, all mainly simple village folks. We, the seven of us including sir seemed among them like clowns from the city pretending to fit into the groove of countryside camaraderie. The wedding ceremony, such a symbol of rich people babbling and pretentious costumes malfunctioning, seemed in such a case a complete misinterpretation by the confined senses of our little urban mentalities.
The seven of us, it seemed, were deserted in the middle of the Rajasthan desert. Fields and wide expanse of fields were all that surrounded us on four sides. The fields were empty and were cut by tracks this way and that. They had no crops. The barren look reminded me of some infernal intellectual joke spewed in disdain in some neurotic art flick.
I was glad to come back to my senses. The urban mentality had caught up with my imagination. I blended myself into the enchanting nuances of the village folk. This time around, I felt free from a certain vicious cycle of wicked thoughts accumulated through two decades of living among bricks, grease and pollution.
The folks were clad colourfully in their local dresses, veils over the faces of women and turbans over the heads of men. The young were a disappointment in their cool-dude western shirts and dusty trousers. They did not look their race. They looked like crows in the land of the peacock.
Anyway, the groom finally arrived. From a distance I saw the Sun fall on his dark skin to produce a bright smile. The smile was full of warmth and humility, and a certain hint of shyness as well. He alighted from the car to display a full Rajput party costume complete with a little dummy dagger and a volumptious turban peaking into a white feather.
The seven of us were standing in the middle of a field by the side of an unpaved road, waiting for the groom to arrive, so that we could enter the wedding ceremony with him and the full entourage declaring his entrance.
The wedding hall was a shamiana and tent under some banyan trees in the middle of the barren fields that have been reaped to yield the wealth for such an occasion.
Some people were engaged in having a late lunch, squatted in a row on the ground while others were engaged in siesta or in a light chat among fellow folks. Dal, bati and churma were the fare, the famous Rajasthani food.
Coming back to the urges of urban needs, I will not mention the origin of the idea, but the fact that it floated like fungal spores into all our minds to create the same devilish craving of the routine urban thought process. The thrist was called beer, and the word was assimilated before even the complete four-letter word was completely uttered. Beer, in this remote village, in the middle of nowhere? Sounds freaking crazy.
So, four of us, having roughly surveyed the little surroundings, finally ended our search to a lone liquor shop. It sold some cheap whisky, rum, locally fermented stuff and a beer called ‘Bullet’. Taking into account the risk of poisoning ourselves with spurious alcohol, we decided to go in with the tried and tested beer. Ten bottles were bought for six of us and the driver. There seemed to be only one in-her-senses person.
Once such a devilish thing such as beer enters the mind, then even the most saintly wedding ceremonies cannot fix our attention. Life seems dyslexic and there seems to be no meaning but the strange meanings that hyperactive brains conjure.
Time went on slowly, till it was seven thirty when the first bottle was opened by one of my fellow mates. In this beery discourse, I forgot to mention that we had some potato pakoras and carrot halwa, and in this we also had to attach a meaning. We had it to avoid acidity so that our beery tryst might not end up in vomiting waste. Simply put, no puking!
Seventy-five rupees per bottle, so the beer better be good. As it happens, it turned out a bit disappointing. At an average of eight percent alcohol, there is a decent hit after consuming one bottle. But it wasn’t the case with this lot. The stomach filled up more and more, and the mind yearned for even more.
So after one bottle, we were in the mood for mischief, so some of us did a few things which were called ‘naughty’ and demanded to be mentioned in this memoir. After one bottle, one of my companions somehow convinced the phone-struck driver and grabbed the wheel of our Chevrolet Tavera to give us a few spins over the grassless, dusty fields. Emotions took over me, and my hands and feet started feeling itchy at the opportunity to touch the steering wheel and gas pedal. Oh, what a concert of pure symphony it is to produce the dramatic effects that ever can be produced on a four-wheel motor vehicle. I pushed my companion out, and sat in the hot seat. Then I drove with panache and style over dusty fields, like a hero out of wild west movies. This continued for some time till everyone else got fed up, so I had to relinquish this beautiful Bullet-fuelled dream.
Time came at last, and the driver came home to his car from his telephonic arguments. At last we pushed off into the wilderness hoping to reach order before midnight. The journey back didn’t prove to be smooth, but it proved to be rather interesting. We suffered a flat tyre. Could it get any better?
In the dark, on a highway with a flat tyre- typical Hindi film territory I thought, but nevertheless real life. It was nearing the end of the journey, so we were all mentally tired and physically desperate to reach home. An influential bloke in a suave SUV gave us ears, and send for a car at his office to help us out. But we fixed the problem, and were on our way again. We travelled a long distance. We needed a break to have some food before it was too late. We took a break at a Dhaba.
The food was good, the rotis were a bit dry and the dal had less salt but we were not in any mood to be critical. We had all that we could muster and some Coke to gulp them down. Then we had Pan to end a perfectly horrid journey.
At last we reached. We reached NBRC, our home, at three-thirty at night, from where we started at eleven-thirty in the morning. I reflected on the metamorphosis that we underwent in the span of sixteen hours. We were well dressed and smelling good. But now we are covered in Rajasthani sand and smelling like bad liquor. It was sunny and bright and hot when we had started, and now it is dark, the dark that heralds a new dawn. We were fresh and enthusiastic, but now we are tired, silent and know in our minds secretly that we need a day off from the lab. It wasn’t a fruitless journey and other than the Rajasthani coating of sand, it was a pretty useful trip for the mind. It was one of those trips into the unknown entities of life so that we are made to start thinking from a totally different paradigm. And if a professor had something to say to his students in a lecture, it should be on the lines of: Solving a stuck problem from the start by taking a different point of view; often such trips open our eyes to the various variabilities and probabilities of life that usually escape our notice from our restricted field of vision. “Oh, cut the crap!” I say.
Dwaipayan Adhya
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