by R K Laxman
He assigned the dinner arrangements to one of his nephews, a smart fellow called Sambu. Sambu who had heard of Nalanda Caterers stepped into Narasimha’s office one morning.
Narasimha stared at the young visitor unsmilingly, knitting his already knit brows even further. And from the depth of his lungs he gruffly pronounced, ‘Sit down.’ Sambu regretted coming to Narasimha’s office at once.
For a few minutes they discussed the number of invitees to the party, the sort of dishes required, and so on. Sambu felt annoyed by Narasimha’s peculiar style of questioning and answering and felt like leaving and looking for some other caterer. But as the dialogue proceeded Sambu began to get a kick out of the eccentric manner in which Narasimha discussed the menu.
‘Brinjal is God’s own creation. You must have a preparation of that. I won’t say the same thing of pumpkin.’ All this was said with a belligerent expression. Suddenly Narasimha bellowed ‘Govinda!’ staring at the door leading to the interior.
‘Coming!’ said a voice.
‘What do you mean, coming! Drop everything and rush here at once!’ Narasimha shouted, his forehead furrowing as he looked furiously at the door. When Govinda appeared he voiced some doubts about certain preparations and dismissed him abruptly. Thus for nearly an hour Sambu derived a private entertainment while they discussed the catering.
On the day of the dinner, half a dozen cooks, along with provisions and vessels were brought to Dr Raghu Raj’s bungalow in a private van.
Sambu sat relaxed in a chair on the veranda, surrounded by close relatives and friends after the mid-day meal. He was telling stories about his office, its politics, his boss and his mannerisms. He kept the gathering roaring with laughter. He was a good mimic and knew how to weave a narrative thread. His listeners relaxed, responding to his subde touches of humour. One anecdote led to another; from the imitation of his boss in the office he moved on to the colleagues he worked with, then to the tax officials he had to deal with. Finally he regaled the admiring audience with his latest experience: the story of Narasimha and his assistants, who were at that very moment busy slicing the vegetables, mixing the spices, pounding the rice and boiling water in preparation for the dinner, not too far away.
Just as Sambu concluded the hilarious account of Narasimha and his associates, Narasimha who had been sitting quietly in a distant corner strode to the middle of the gathering, stood arms akimbo and bellowed, ‘I am not going to prepare the dinner. I am withdrawing my staff and walking out this minute! I am insulted! Come on boys, drop everything—let’s go!’ He stormed off towards the kitchen.
The audience was struck dumb, suddenly realizing the enormity of the simation. Then everyone said in one voice, ‘Who insulted you? Don’t go, please. Come back, Narasimha!’ With the dinner guests expected in a few hours, this was a recipe for disaster. They waylaid Narasimha at the doorway, preventing him from proceeding towards the kitchen. They pleaded with him and begged him to retreat. He stood unmoved, stubbornly repeating, ‘I am insulted! I am insulted!’
‘What happened?’ everyone asked in unison again. Narasimha stared at the assembled company with eyes blazing like cinders. He roared, ‘You dared to make fun of me and my manners. Didn’t you? Remember nobody ridicules me and makes fun of me! I’ll not cook one grain of rice for you ungrateful lot! Go feed your guests at that cooking joint in the tin shed on the pavement over there …’
Sambu who was responsible for all the dinner arrangements panicked and ran into the house to alert the women. They all rushed to the veranda. With folded hands they begged Narasimha to forgive them and order the cooks to return to the kitchen. They even offered to pay more than what had been agreed upon. But Narasimha stood like a rock unmoved!
Finally Dr Raghu Raj was informed at his clinic about the calamity that had occurred. He dropped everything, got into his car and asked the driver to take him home as fast as he could. When he reached home he jumped out of the car at the portico, with the stethoscope still dangling from his neck. He hurried through the crowd towards Narasimha who was still filming like a volcano. Without any change in his expression he brought his palms together, offering cursory respect to the master of the house.
‘What happened, Narasimha?’ said the doctor. ‘I thought we were all friends. This fellow is my nephew. He did not mean to insult you. He has great respect for you, Narasimha, I know it. You are like his elder brother. Forgive him and advise him if he has done anything wrong … for my sake.’
‘His mimicry made me look like a fool … doctor sir.’
‘I know, I know! But Sambu did not mean to be disrespectful to you. He will apologize to you if in any way you feel hurt. But that boy has always been like that. Even when he was at school he used to mimic his teachers. He is very good at imitating politicians and makes people laugh …!’ There was a ripple of mirth among the gathering. ‘He does it very well. Great men like Nehru, Radhakrishnan and our chief minister—he imitates them without meaning to be insulting … want to see a sample of it, Narasimha?’
Narasimha seemed somewhat favourably disposed towards the proposition, perhaps feeling honoured to have been counted among eminent men who were fit for mimicry. Without waiting for Narasimha’s formal approval the doctor summoned his nephew and asked him to show his talent. Sambu hesitated at first but realized the important role he would be playing in averting the crisis. Dr Raghu Raj asked the gathering to be seated. He offered a chair to Narasimha and sat down next to him.
First Sambu gave an imitation of hawkers in a railway station, followed by his mimicry of a popular movie actor. After that he came up with a rib-tickling imitation of the chief minister. He concluded with a parody of Nehru addressing the nation on the night of 14 August 1947 in a voice vibrating with emotion: ‘… Long ago we made a tryst with destiny … At the stroke of the midnight hour, India will awake to light and freedom …’
By now everyone was doubled up with laughter. Even Narasimha was clapping, a smile on his lips.
When it was all over Sambu came to Narasimha and said, ‘I am sorry, Mr Narasimha, if I hurt you in any way.’ Narasimha patted him on the back and said, ‘No … no … not at all. It was a great fun …’ He ambled off towards the kitchen grinning, followed by his staff.
The Saga of Ramaswami
Just after Ganesh had closed his chronicle of the ‘Servants of India’ with the story of Narasimha, he read in the morning paper that his favourite author was coming to town for a short visit. Ganesh was beside himself with excitement. He called out to his wife who was somewhere in the inner rooms, ‘Geetha, Dharmaraj is coming! I must have him over for a cup of tea.’
Soon the tea party was arranged. Along with Dharmaraj a dozen other chosen guests who were his admirers were also invited. The author arrived on time; soon, as was his habit, he was monopolizing the conversation, not giving the others a chance to get a word in edgewise. He was an extremely interesting narrator and kept his listeners spellbound.
Halfway through the tea session he asked, ‘Ganesh, I hear you are writing about domestic servants of India. Well you must include this story which comes from my own experience.’
Immediately a hush fell on the room. The guests drew closer to the great man expectantly. Taking a look around him, Dharmaraj began his narrative. Many years ago, a little boy of about eight or so came into our household as a domestic. His name was Ramaswami. He was from Tirunelveli in the south. Severe drought had struck his village—and everyone had been forced to emigrate, looking for food and jobs. Ramaswami had come all the way to Bombay.
We liked him at first sight. He had a remarkably bright and cheerful nature; his eyes shone in his dark face. We decided to take him on. But he was too young to be of any real help in the household. So he was assigned the job of keeping our little son company. He played with our son all day long, teaching him all sorts of little tricks and games, and never letting a moment of boredom enter into his waking hours.
We had a view of the sea in those days
before the skyscrapers sprouted in front of our windows. One day Ramaswami saw a ship like a tiny dot far out on the horizon. He watched it intently without taking his eyes off it till it inched out of sight. Then he turned to me excitedly and questioned me about the sea, the lands across the ocean, life on a ship and so on. I answered as best I could, wondering somewhat about the little fellow’s interest in the sea and ships.
In a couple of years, when our son started school, Ramaswami found it difficult to occupy himself. Since we had enough hands at home we promised him that we would find him a suitable job elsewhere. He was lucky. Soon he got a job in a house where the master was distantly connected with shipping activities. We were sorry when Ramaswami went away. He was not a member of our family but he left behind an emptiness as if he had been one.
A few years later he dropped in to see us. Now he seemed taller but the flashing half-moon smile against the dark background of his face remained the same. He spoke in a voice that showed signs of cracking. He announced happily that he was learning to read and write, thanks to his employer’s encouragement.
After talking about his village and his uncles who made endless demands on him he was soon talking to me about ships. He had somehow learnt a few simple shipping terms like ‘merchant navy’, ‘cargo vessel’, ‘passenger boat’ etc. and proudly brought these terms into the conversation again and again. I asked him why he was so preoccupied with the sea and ships. They had nothing to do with him or his ethnic background. He came from a farming class. Perhaps no one in his village had had a glimpse of the sea. ‘I have loved the sea from the very first day I saw it,’ he explained simply. Had he the wit and the knowledge, he would perhaps have said: ‘Because it is there!’
Then suddenly Ramaswami disappeared from our lives. Occasionally our cook or the servant gave us fifth-hand news about him. Sometimes the rumour went round that Ramaswami had left Bombay and had gone back to his village to rescue his father from the harassment of his stepmother. As time progressed there were constant alterations in this plot, villains and victims changing roles and crafty uncles, meanwhile, trying to grab whatever they could while the going was good. The cook and the servant contradicted each other in their respective versions and took sides in a batde taking place a thousand miles away from them.
But Ramaswami himself turned up one day and put an end to the controversy. He had gone to his village, he told us, to seek the blessings of his elders before he sailed abroad! He had managed to enrol himself as a sailor in a merchant ship and he was sailing away for Panama.
I could not believe my ears. This fellow had no formal education, money or influence except an uncanny obsession with the idea of becoming a sailor on that dot of a ship which he had seen inching along on the horizon through our window years ago. And now he was actually going to Panama! I wished him well from the bottom of my heart when he took his leave of me. I did not see him again for a couple of years.
Then he suddenly made his appearance again. He was loaded with a bag full of trinkets and gadgets, cartons of duty-free cigarettes, whisky and perfume—all gifts for us! He stood nearly six feet tall and flashed his famous smile, now framed in dark, luxuriant whiskers. From the moment he walked in he talked ceaselessly about the places he had visited and the experiences he had had on the high seas.
He spoke excitedly for several hours. But I was not able to chart the course of his voyage precisely since his pronunciation of foreign names and places still had the characteristic Tamil twang. Even such common words as New York, Puerto Rico or San Francisco needed some decoding before I could make them out. But it did not really matter; I became totally absorbed in the young man’s sheer joy and his refreshing disregard for details—he had journeyed halfway across the world but all he could speak of was the sea. Wherever there was time to go ashore at ports of call he had been carefully conducted on shore and brought back to the ship safely by experienced mates. This seemed to have been his routine.
Even such outings sometimes, I could gather, turned out to be risky. He told me that once some Burmese brigands, attracted by the fountain pens, watches and cigarette lighters he and his friends brandished, attacked them with evil-looking machetes. But Ramaswami and his friends were more than a match for the marauders; they ran for their lives and took to the rice-fields. I enjoyed listening to his stories for they were ungarnished, unfilled, having the freshness of a child’s observation. But I knew his own feeling was that his style of narration lacked elegance and failed to convey to a learned person like myself the full force of the spirit of adventure, danger and suspense that his stories contained. So he leaned heavily on unbridled exaggeration which he somehow felt made up for his shortcomings as a narrator.
Curiously, nearly all his experiences seemed to be full of villains, violence and action, though he himself was extremely benign, law-abiding and gentle. Somehow he seemed accident-prone. Once a boat capsized in the sea near the Gateway; Ramaswami was one of the crew members to escape death. The propeller of the upturned boat kept rotating, churning the water and sucking the drowning men towards its deadly blades inexorably. Some were sliced up like salami. Luckily, when Ramaswami’s turn came, lengths of floating ropes and odds and ends wrapped round the propeller, bringing it to a stop. There were pictures of the survivors and a detailed report of the disaster in the morning papers.
And there was another accident when a boiler burst. Again Ramaswami escaped unhurt, but his mates who were closer to the boiler at that very moment were less fortunate.
Thus from Hong Kong to the Straits of Hormuz, from the Cape of Good Hope to Valparaiso, the maritime highways were filled with death, danger and narrow escapes for our Ramaswami. I remember his account of a sea burial; a fight between a Puerto Rican and a Greek on a Greek ship somewhere on the Pacific Ocean provided the rare opportunity to him to witness the solemn ceremony.
I do not remember any mild-mannered or normal characters that our friend had come across except perhaps for the person he came by in Hamburg who belonged to some divine order. He had come on board and distributed chocolates and cheese to everyone, nodded his head many times with warmth and approval, smiled a lot and gone away.
Then there was the account of an American. He was a millionaire, according to Ramaswami. He took him and his friends in his Cadillac and showed them all round New York till the early hours. He bought them gifts, fed them in posh restaurants, and said many nice things about India and Indians. He finally dropped them back at their lodgings and went his way. Of course, Ramaswami did not know who he was and why he had been so generous and kind. But when telling me about him he repeatedly expressed his deep gratitude as if somehow I would have the means to convey it to him.
One day he came to announce that he was going back to his village in Tirunelveli to get married. He had made enough money and his sister insisted that it was about time he setded down. Naturally, it came as a great surprise to us. I, too, thought it would be nice for him to give up the sea and settle down. We sent him off with our good wishes and blessings, feeling a little sad that we might not see him again.
But in six months he was back, grinning as brightly as ever and bearing a jar of pickles specially prepared by his wife. He left for Aden that night by air to join a tanker and sail for some distant point in the world. He said that he needed a little more money to setde down and therefore had accepted the commission.
Thus Ramaswami took to the sea again and again. Sometimes he said he wanted funds to buy a house or a piece of farmland, sometimes he needed to repair his house or to dig a well. Meanwhile, his family grew. Now the need to clothe, educate and meet the demands of his children required Ramaswami’s absence at sea for months on end. However, his family—four daughters and two sons—lived in style. They wore imported watches and rode about on bicycles. His wife wore Japanese nylon saris and gold jewellery. His house boasted electric lights, fans and sofa sets.
Ramaswami was very proud of his family. He told me his children were the cynosure of th
e whole village. But the poor fellow could hardly be with them. His status among his fellow men as a solvent individual constantly attracted appeals for loans to carry on a litigation, to preside over a marriage, or to clear a debt. Listening to him about his commitments, his problems with his land and so on I could not imagine he would ever free himself from the sea to settle on land. Perhaps he did not even want to.
Unfolding the paper casually one morning, I could hardly believe what I read in bold print. A cargo ship, London Valour, had broken into two in the Mediterranean and had sunk. Among those who perished were a number of Indians. Their names were given; S. Ramaswami was one of them.
The news had a crippling effect on us. We were in agony for days, not knowing what to do. To our horror we discovered we had no clue to his home address. Our servants were all new and had no knowledge of Ramaswami. My desperate enquiries at marine offices in Ballard Pier only confirmed that Ramaswami was one of the victims of the London Valour. A gratuitous bit of information was also volunteered to me—that the captain of the ship had illegally overloaded the ship.
As time went by we reconciled ourselves to the loss. Attempts to reach his people in the village and communicate with them seemed futile.
Later that year my wife and I went abroad. On our way back from the USA we stopped over at Amsterdam and decided to travel by train and see a few other parts of Europe. We went as far down as Sevillia in Spain. From there on we worked our homeward stretch by Tee Catalina which took us through the French and Italian Riviera. The Mediterranean to our right accompanied us all the way. The sight of the sea immediately brought to our minds the thought of Ramaswami. The boy had been drowned somewhere out there in that turquoise-blue sheet sparkling under the sun, skirted by waves of silver filigree.
The train moved on at a steady speed, stopping briefly at various picturesque little stations. We watched the panorama of tiny villages, farms and forests from the window on one side; from the other we could see the sea, castles, cliffs and opulent villas.
