Travails with Chachi

by Louise Fernandes Khurshid

  And here is where our taxi stand was much in demand − seeing as we had not only Pinto from Karnataka, but Reddy from Andhra Pradesh, Murli from Madras and Akbar Pasha from Maharashtra.

  I tell you I never knew it existed. I didn’t realize how beautiful were the lands south of the Vindhyas till Pinto persuaded me to take a long distance assignment, all the way south of the world. Till then I had taken Agarwalji, our local mandi merchant, at face value. When he said Etawah was the best UP had to offer and UP was the best India had to offer I believed him wholesale. How was I to know he was referring only to the potato crop?

  I remembered Agarwalji’s words because, on both sides of the road from Hassan to Chickmagalur I could see potato leaves fluttering in the wind. ‘Not quite the strength and texture as the variety we produce back home,’ I remarked to Pinto. ‘It can’t be all that bad,’ he jokingly countered. ‘After all Indiraji did return to power from Chickmagalur!’

  It was early October 1994. Our first stop in Karnataka, Pinto’s home state, had been Bangalore. We had entered the state through the Kolar region – best known for its long since defunct gold fields. Our savaris were a pair of portly netas on a whirlwind pilgrim tour. Their stars had not been too bright and so they wanted to seek the intervention of the South Indian gods. (Good idea, I thought. If they can turn up two South Indian PMs they must be pretty effective!)

  While my savaris slept off the effect of rich Tirupati ladoos and self-consciously rubbed their newly tonsured pates, we drove into what must have once been a beautiful relic of the British Raj. There was nostalgia in Pinto’s voice when he talked of the Bangalore he grew up in. While I looked with awe at the majesty of the Vidhana Soudha on his right, Pinto kept cursing this concrete periscope-shaped monstrosity on his left. Some famous person called Charles Correa designed it, he said. That didn’t seem to impress him and, to tell you the truth, I, too, thought there was something untidy and unfinished about the structure. He talked with equal regret about the ‘passing away’ of all those old British homes and gardens, with their abundance of flowers, which had given Bangalore its reputation as a ‘Garden City’. All buried under a wealth of residential skyscrapers and shopping complexes ….

  All the same, compared to my own lower income group DDA flat in Delhi’s rapidly expanding concrete jungle, the lovely landscaped gardens and sparkling white buildings of Bangalore looked like something out of this world. But my North Indian pride didn’t allow me to show too much enthusiasm.

  ‘Wait till you see my own area,’ Pinto said. Our savaris had decided to fly back to Delhi from Bangalore and so we were totally on holiday from this point. So here we were, on the road to Chickmagalur – coffee country and the place where Pinto’s forefathers had lived for over a hundred years. We had already passed the Bahubali Gomateshwara at Shravanabelagola – standing over 1,000 years in solitary naked splendour. What a magnificent sight! Pinto had been driving a taxi in Hasan so many years earlier when the Mahamastakaabhisheka (the grand anointing) of the statue had taken place and he had some fascinating stories to tell. Then, 30 kilometres past Hasan, we saw some signs to the famous temples of Halebid and Belur – the last remnants of the Hoysala Empire.

  Where was the dirt? Where was the filth? Where were the slogan shouting, rabid, chanting, saffron-clad youth I had been seeing in so many of the temples up north these days? Even I, Madath Singh Yadav, the last of the non-believers, was tempted to kneel down and pray.

  As we rounded the bend of the town of Mudigere, we entered coffee country in earnest. It seems there was a shorter route to our destination but Pinto had attended the local school here for ten years and he was on a major nostalgia trip. His eyes started to get moist. Even I was touched. The air was fresh, the countryside lush, and the coffee bushes green and full on the branch. I thought of the fine dust of the Indo-Gangetic plain, billowing up and clogging one’s nasal passages. And I wondered. What was it − this business of livelihood − that had taken a man like Pinto so far from his roots?

  In an hour’s time we entered Chickmagalur town. The tip of Pinto’s noise curled. ‘How filthy this town has become,’ he exclaimed. Filthy? Surely he must be joking! Where was the filth? This town was heaven compared to some of the top towns of UP. This fellow didn’t know a good thing when he saw it. Where were the pigs rolling in axle grease? Where were the open garbage dumps with eagles and kites perched on surrounding trees? Where were the underwear-clad, desultory youths sitting on charpoys in their underwear and playing cards? Where were the old men chewing tobacco and spewing paan juice? What was it about this part of the South that made people look so energetic and so purposeful?

  By this time I had started feeling rather uncomfortable. I have this regular savari – an UP politician who had studied abroad – who used to say that UP produced the ‘crème de la crème’ of India. (I used to think that meant that the malai was better in UP, but apparently what it was supposed to indicate was that we North Indians were, for some reason, superior people.) But looking around me – at the clean, well dressed village children; at the cow dung-floored school yards where young boys played football; at the light-eyed maidens balancing their copper vessels on their hips; and at the old man in the main square reading out the Kannada newspaper to a group of young women – I wasn’t quite so sure.

  While I agonized about my situation, and about the misconceptions I had lived with all these years, we entered the outer Baba Budan Giris – the horse shoe-shaped range of hills named after the Arabian traveller believed to have brought the first coffee beans to India. The vegetation grew lush and the teak and saal forest gave way to bamboo of the kind you would only see again in Assam. All along the route the stream gushed down, pregnant with monsoon water. And the wind howled through the trees with an agonized moan.

  I struggled in my mind to make comparison with this piece of heaven and the place I called home. The trees here stood taller, the water looked cleaner, the sidewalks were broader and the roads easier on Chachi’s nerves. I could tell that Chachi simply loved this part of the country. Did UP have something to commend itself over this?

  We stopped at a wayside stall where Pinto ordered us coffee – ‘one by two’ – one cup divided by two. I passed up on the steaming hot idlis and dosas and longed for a good kaathi kebab. Aha! I thought. Here is where we score. There were no roadside dhabas here offering kaali daal and khasta rotis and a comfortable charpoy to rest on. There were no desi sharab addas and their local todi made of fermented palm or coconut sap, didn’t quite compare. True there was plenty of wild game but no guns around with which to hunt them. And, would you believe it, the locals didn’t chew tobacco!

  But even as I tried to make a virtue out of these macho pursuits the hollowness of the boasts came back and hit me straight in the face. It didn’t need my companions’ raised eyebrows to tell me to quit while I was ahead.

  10

  ‘OM JAYA JAYALALITHAA’

  THIS WAS MY SECOND WEEK ‘DOWN SOUTH’. THE PREVIOUS week’s travels in Pinto’s home territory had been a memorable experience. More than I, it was Chachi who had been most happy to go on – something quite surprising, as she had been getting rather lazy of late. We continued to be at a loose end. What did we care? Though the savaris we had driven down from Delhi had flown back, they had paid for the return journey in advance and so we had the option to pick up new passengers along the way. In fact, Gurcharan had already located an adventurous couple that were doing the ‘Kashmir-to-Kanyakumari’ route and were waiting for us to pick them up from Cochin.

  ‘What luck!’ Pinto exclaimed. ‘Now I’ll be able to show you how we “southies” grow tea. Our immediate destination: Cochin via Coorg, Mysore, Gudalur, Ooty and Conoor.’

  Let’s face it, we may not openly admit it but you and I in the North have grown up with the preconceived notion that there is something somewhat inferior about ‘southies’. That everyone south of the Vindhyas is a ‘Madrasi’ and black as Dhanbad coal. That the climate is chul
lah hot all round the year, only to be aggravated by continuous slushy monsoon showers.

  Armed with this terribly wrong notion, driving through the poinsettia-lined coffee estates of Coorg and breaking bread with the tall, light-eyed warrior race from this Western Ghat area, was certainly a chastizing experience.

  ‘Lack of education,’ Pinto’s friend Kurien said. Kurien, whose father worked with some big shot Malayali businessman who owned extensive rubber plantations in the neighbouring state of Kerala, had himself moved across to Karnataka 30 years ago and made a roaring success of trading in elaichi. He could afford to speak. And I was forced to remain silent. I dreaded answering how UP compared in literacy levels to Kerala − which Kurien informed me, proudly, had already hit the 100 per cent level!

  Some dozen miles short of Mysore I noticed a signboard that read: ‘Srirangapatnam’. That sounded familiar. Pinto immediately came to my rescue. Yes, I was correct. I had seen the name on his bookshelf at home, where a battered volume entitled Storm over Seringapatam nestled with a shining new edition called The Tigers of Mysore. Both were apparently the same book, the second a reprint (by someone called ‘Pigeon’ or ‘Penguin’) of a work written 30 years ago by the son-in-law of the man who owned the coffee estate where Pinto was born. Pinto said that when the book first came out it kicked up a storm in his Mangalorean Catholic community because it was a spirited defense of Hyder Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan − the man hated by the community for allegedly slaughtering 3,000 of them in one single operation.

  ‘Why did he kill Catholics?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t he know that they, like Muslims and Jews, are “kitabis” − people of the book − and hence quite acceptable to each other? But it seems it was not religious fundamentalism that prompted this alleged slaughter. (‘Alleged’ because, according to the author, the massacre may not have actually taken place.) It seems Tipu, who was to the South what Shivaji was to Maharashtra, suspected the Mangalorean Catholics of siding with the British and hence his enemy’s friends became his enemies.

  As we left behind the ruins of Tipu’s glorious campaigns in the dust of the Chamundi hills the temperature started to dip and the road started to bend and curve. Signs in Kannada gave way to signs in Tamil − the script of both languages looking like peculiar squiggles to a Hindi reader like I. The border itself was a blur of elephant grass, lying in the middle of the wildlife sanctuaries of Karnataka’s ‘Bandipur’ and Tamil Nadu’s ‘Madhumalai’. If Kurien’s wise cracks about the North were not enough, Pinto smirked about how easy it was to spot game here, as compared to UP’s premier Corbett Park where, in the inner core area through which no public transport moves, even deer is difficult to sight.

  First a lone one-tusker elephant stood by the side of the road and trumpeted as we drove past. Then a herd of cheetal continued to munch without so much as turning their tails. Next the majestic sight of two male bisons, facing off to impress the rest of the all-female herd, simply took our breath away. Everything seemed in such abundance – even the peacocks! And all this in a sanctuary through which the main Mysore/Ooty highway meanders right through!

  Imagine, then, our surprise. As we reached the junction of Tepakadu – where you make a choice to go to Masanagudi or proceed to Gudalur and Ooty – it was my turn to smirk. Pinto’s picture of an untamed animal sanctuary, untouched by the netagiri he accuses us UP fellows of indulging in all the time, suddenly started to come apart. Ahead of us was a virtual cavalcade of white Ambassador cars, all with flag posts and red lights, out of which an assortment of white safari-suited and crisp tehmad-clads emerged.

  They all walked in single file – solemnly.

  ‘Did somebody die?’ I couldn’t help ask Pinto, who himself looked just as puzzled. ‘I think there is a little shrine near the captive elephant camp here where an elephant is taught to do the puja,’ he volunteered. ‘But that is more of a touristy gimmick. And, anyway, these Tamilians don’t encourage all this god business easily. So I’m just as puzzled.’

  What, then, had we here? All was very quickly revealed. Prominently displayed, and hiding the shrine completely, was this maha enormous black marble slab on which something seemed to be embossed in bold brass letters. And as each neta – for so they seemed – reached it, he fell flat on his face, started kissing the ground and chanted something I couldn’t make out from a distance.

  I was intrigued. Pinto looked uncomfortable. As we wound our own way to the top of the line and the netas had all congregated below, the chanting got louder and more frantic. Now, I had heard of idol worship. Bablu ki Ma keeps her fair share of murtis in our makeshift puja room back home in Delhi. But this was something else.

  ‘Om Jaya Jayalalithaa! Om Jaya Jayalalithaa!

  The chanting started to reach a crescendo. One neta started banging his head on the ground. Another had already gone into a trance and started to roll around in the mud. A third went deadly still and stood on one leg. And all the others swayed with the elephant grass and chanted:

  ‘Om Jaya Jayalalithaa! Om Jaya Jayalalithaa!’

  I was amazed. There, in the interior of the forest, 20 otherwise cynical public men were bowing to a black marble edifice, which proclaimed that the erstwhile ‘Madhumalai Game Sanctuary’ was now renamed ‘Dr. J. Jayalalithaa Game Sanctuary and National Park’. Twenty otherwise sane men making perfect fools of themselves!

  What was the use of all that literacy? I asked Pinto and Kurien. Now, we North Indians have also used film stars for gathering votes − sometimes even given them tickets to enter Parliament. But we have never worshipped them like gods. Why, when such gimmicks were attempted to gain votes − as when the Congress used the man who played the screen Lord Ram against V. P. Singh in his Allahabad bye-election − they invariably fell flat. But could my so highly literate South Indian friends deny that the late N. T. Rama Rao, from neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, got his real fan following from playing mythological roles of Hindu gods!? Out of which window had education gone when women immolated themselves at the death of the legendary Tamil cine actor-turned politician, M. G. Ramachandran? And from which learned text did these political worshippers gather their latest mantra:

  ‘Om Jaya Jayalalithaa!’

  Yesterday it was a game sanctuary. Today it may be a new strain of wheat – proposed name ‘JJ 22’, or something like that. What about tomorrow? What is the guarantee that the day after tomorrow there won’t be a change from Chennai to ‘JJ Nagar’ or ‘Jayalalithaapuram’? Or the renaming of the Tamil Nadu end of the river Kaveri as the river Jayalalitha?

  ‘Om Jaya Jayalalithaa! Om Jaya Jayalalithaa!’

  What a prospect!

  11

  AMMA DEKH, TERA MUNDA BIGDA JAYE

  ‘OM JAI JAGADEESH HAREY! SWAMI JAI JAGADEESH HAREY!’ You would have thought that this chant, at least, would have soothed Chachi and made her forget that amazing ‘Om Jaya Jayalalithaa’ experience. Instead she seemed just as disapproving of my taste in music. Perhaps it was because what was blasting on my newly acquired stereo set (to compensate Chachi for attempted dismemberment!) was the filmi version made popular through the cult Bollywood movie, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai!

  ‘Your taste in music leaves much to be desired and even if you have to listen to Hindi filmi music you are at least five years out of tune!’ said my savari – this time the lady journalist who has offered to ghost write my memoirs. What to do? With these women it seems we men can never win. First Bablu ki Ma and now this journo. To which, Bablu (the little harami) countered: ‘You’re not exactly top of the pops with me either, Dad.’

  It was my turn to glare. Top of the Pops? Were we thinking of the same thing? I started to ask. Only to encounter an immediate about face. My otherwise bratty son, threw his hands up in mock surrender, licked his index finger and marked a point in the air. It had been some time since I had got the better of the little harami. I didn’t need to turn the churi in further to remind him of the occasion. His red face said it all.

  If I remember right thi
s happened around nine years ago. I had been riding along the Ring Road, minding my own business, when I spotted this bunch of schoolboys trying to flag down a Maruti. ‘Some parents have really indisciplined sons,’ I said aloud. And then I saw my own Bablu with his thumb outstretched .…

  Chachi screeched to a halt. She, too, seemed outraged at the sight. I called out: ‘Get in kids. I’ll drive you to school.’ To my surprise Bablu responded with a groan. Funny, I thought he would be pleased.

  To counter his obvious annoyance I reached down, put my favourite tape into the recorder and turned on the volume. ‘Chahe koi mujhe junglee kahe .…’ wafted out in quadraphonic sound. My latest acquisition. But as Mohamed Rafi yodeled out to Shammi Kapoor lip synch and Elvis Presley’s twist, I heard a suppressed snigger. It was the fair, pimply one with the Brylcream-ed hair and safety pin in his right ear. My blood started to boil.

  ‘Yaar, Bablu,’ he said. ‘What is this rubbish?’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘Man, don’t you have anything from this century?’

  Bablu had the grace to look embarrassed. But whether it was because his friend was being rude or because his father was old-fashioned, I couldn’t quite tell. I did, however, note that he had conveniently neglected to tell the brats that the taxi driver they were ordering around was his very own ‘old man’.

  The journey to their school – the Delhi Public School at R. K. Puram – ended only too soon for me. As Chachi screeched to a halt, the pimply youth peered in the direction of the meter. When he saw it hadn’t been running he looked annoyed and opened his mouth to say something. But Bablu hastily butted in and said he would ‘settle the bill’.