Travails with Chachi

by Louise Fernandes Khurshid

  These children of today! You would think they’d be happy just going to a good school like DPS rather than the local village pathshala that I had attended. But no! They want to behave like burra sahebs and are embarrassed that their fathers do honest jobs.

  I left a disheartened man. Chachi burped overtime. She was not pleased.

  But as I drove towards Connaught Place, after dropping off my next savari at the New Delhi Railway station, I thought to myself: maybe I’m being too old-fashioned. Maybe I should try to keep up with his times. So I made a quick turn and headed towards Palika Bazar, which was, I remember Bablu saying one day, the place to buy stereo equipment and recorded tapes.

  At the first shop an oily youth whispered through the corner of his paan-stained mouth: ‘We also stock some delicious porno flicks.’

  ‘Porno flicks? What are these? Some kind of mosquito swatters?’ I asked.

  The man sniggered and said, ‘Bhola baba from the backwaters of UP. No hope for you. Better give you the tame stuff.’ I listened to the so-called ‘tame stuff’. It did not sound tame to me – distinctly raised my blood pressure. But anything to keep the ladla beta happy.

  That evening I sat with my notebook and pencil and tried to transcribe the words − to make some sense of what this young generation liked. The first tape I tried was apparently someone called ‘Apache Indian’ and the song hit his greatest. Whatever I could decipher sounded something like this:

  Wine your buddy, wiggle your belly,

  Dip and go down in de new style-e,

  Why non go op, why non go down,

  Bobble ana rocka to the new style aron.

  You fir line-e-to, you fir wine-e-to,

  A do de boom shack-a-lak, it had de bran new style,

  Wicked said a wicked chacha, no said a while.

  Raga mortis style-a be de discipline chile,

  Dip an go down arch-a well versatile,

  Move on go down and do de shack-a-lak-a-lak

  Getting in a groove ka you are de top notch

  Bobble ana wine gar, a ripe on de ah…

  I was defeated! The rhythm was good. Something my friend Gurcharan Singh would find very catchy. But the words! They made no sense!

  That evening a rather chastized Bablu returned home. Brought in a glass of lassi laced with hari mirch and pudina and in a voice very little heard around the house, whispered: ‘Papa, I’m sorry.’ Though my heart had started to bleed I was not willing to let him get off the hook so easily. So I turned on ‘Apache Indian’ once again and showed him the words. I had the satisfaction of seeing he was embarrassed. But, predictably, it took no time for the brashness of youth to take over. ‘The problem with you is that you are basically square, Dad,’ he said. ‘You won’t understand this new rap. And anyway, “Apache Indian” is not the only chap around. You should hear Baba Sehgal. He makes a lot of sense.’

  Aha! I was delighted. Because from my other pocket I produced a second coup. Baba Sehgal’s ‘Dr. Dhingra’. I had already halfway transcribed the first song, entitled: ‘Oh My Darling’. It went like this:

  Oh my darling, Baba coming,

  Thodi si timing, doing missing.

  Oh my darling, Baba coming,

  Thodi si timing, doing missing.

  Oh meri gori, fantastic chori,

  Mere pyar ke bori, I’m very, very sorry,

  Nakra na karo, tumhe kheenchoonga lorry.

  Aik bar bol diya, do bar bol diya,

  Third time boloonga, fourth time boloonga,

  Fifth time boloonga, no mein sorry.

  Bablu was getting mighty red in the face. I was having a maha good time. And so I continued.

  Aage aage hai ladki, peeche mein hu sayana,

  Duniya kahe Baba ho gaya hai diwana.

  Peeche peeche one girl jogging from Bhatinda,

  Bazu bazu second girl coming from Canada,

  Teen, char, paanch, che,

  Saat, aat, nau, das from Batala,

  Tu hi, tu hi bas mere hai Madhubala.

  Jhoot nahi bol. Teri khol doonga pol,

  Tu hi nahi foreigner, basically BTM.

  Behenji turning mod, behenji turning mod.

  Behenji turning mod, behenji turning mod …

  The screw was well and truly in. Bablu was blue and purple. By this time Bablu ki Ma was also in the act. She was not so worried about today’s music making no sense as about what sense it did try to make at times. ‘Which way am I to look when my son is dancing to the tune of “Choli ke peeche kya hai, choli ke peeche …?’ she burst out. ‘And that number about “Sexy, sexy, sexy…” tauba, tauba, kya zamana hai?!’

  Bablu tried to beat a tactical retreat. But before his ankle crossed the threshold I pulled it back. Both the little lady and I were on the roll. We hadn’t had the better of the smart aleck in a long time and we didn’t plan to let him go in a hurry.

  ‘Oh Papa, there’s no reasoning with you. You’re just square!’ he repeated. ‘Is Jackie Shroff square?’ I asked. The actor was then Bablu’s latest hero. He looked at me suspiciously and reluctantly said, ‘No.’ But even as he said this he knew he had lost the battle. Out came my final bullet. I grabbed Bablu ki Ma around her ample waist and lustily sang out from the last and final tape the man from Palika Bazar had sold me. The song was from the Jackie Shroff starrer Stuntman and it had the hero himself singing: ‘Amma dekh, ah dekh, tera munda bigda jaye. Amma dekh…’

  12

  PLAGUE ON THE SANITARY INSPECTOR

  TO BE FAIR TO BABLU AND HIS BRAT BUNCH, THAT EXPENSIVE DPS education hasn’t exactly gone waste. Their taste in music may be dubious but both his mother and I were most impressed with what seems to be a genuine concern for the environment around us. As children we were little conscious of such things. Keeping the house clean was a woman’s work. Men, even boys, were way above that kind of thing….

  You will remember the time because the whole country was all caught up with that terrible plague scare. Bablu’s school had finally opened. Only too soon. For 15 days before that he had been plaguing his mother and I about getting our house in order. Nit-picking about the garbage dump opposite our flats, which only the bandicoots visited regularly. Poking into corners of my garage where assorted discards of Chachi’s youth lay gathering dust. Writing letters to his Dadu about cleaning up the streets of my native village in Etawah. ‘Dadu’, he wrote, ‘if you see any live rats around kill them and burn the carcasses. If you see any dead rats immediately inform your local health inspector. That’s one possible sign of the “Black Death”, plague. The newspapers and magazines are saying we have an epidemic of the plague. Have you ever heard of this bimari?’

  Heard of it! Certainly Dadu’s generation would have heard of the plague. Whole families had been wiped out when one such epidemic hit our area. Dadu had then been a little boy, but I do know that the sight of his grandmother helplessly waiting for death still haunts him some nights.

  ‘Even so, don’t expect much from the village,’ I told Bablu. ‘The sanitary – rather unsanitary – situation is too far gone there. Don’t you remember that trip, just after the monsoons, when the apologies-for-drains vomited their contents onto the streets? Don’t you remember those crude, turn-of-the-century, excuses for lavatories, the contents of which are still cleaned and carried away physically by human scavengers?’

  ‘But, Papa, that’s medieval!’ Bablu said.

  ‘Medieval, who?’ I asked.

  ‘Ancient,’ he explained, with a pained expression on his face. ‘For heaven’s sake, surely Parryware has now come to stay?’

  ‘Parryware? What have Parrys sweets and what people wear got to do with lavatories?’ I demanded. Now, I ask you, if I myself didn’t know that ‘Parryware’ was not a reference to a sweet company but actually almost a generic name for bathroom fittings, then how did Bablu expect my aged father and his other hookah-smoking contemporaries to know? ‘Let’s get our own house in order first,’ I said, trying to change the subject.

  W
ithin no time our house was spic and span. All the oil spills and diesel smells around Chachi had been wiped clean. Even the neighbours had been persuaded to use the garbage dump rather than surreptitiously throw their kitchen waste outside their neighbour’s backyard in the still of the night. But the municipal garbage dump – well, that was something else. When his school closed one week early because some plague cases were reported in the capital, Bablu sat on our heads with his civic science workbook open wide. In a spirit of great virtuosity (and, I think, also blue funk), he and his friends decided to harass the civic authorities into cleaning up the offending garbage dump. First he made phone calls. But after four wrong numbers and six wrong officers he gave up. So Chachi and I were roped in to drive them to the office of the ‘relevant authority’ to make a formal complaint.

  The scenario was repeated there. But we were determined. Determined even when the sanitary inspector in charge of our area looked us in the eye and inaccurately aimed a long stream of paan juice-cum-spit over our heads into an already overflowing dustbin. Just when we thought we had got a word between his chewing and spitting, an untidy khaki-clad peon, wearing torn brown sneakers and scratching his nether parts, walked in with an important looking document under his arm. Between the peon and the officer they found a rusty teaspoon and slid it under the envelope flap to pry it open. An immediate change came over the man. From what looked like an invertebrate poured over his battered desk the man sat up and sat smart. Short of saluting the letter he did it all!

  We were intrigued. Imagine our surprise when, suddenly, the man who had been looking at us till then with jaundiced eyes now started to offer us tea and ‘snakes’. I say, what’s up, I thought.

  We found out shortly after. It turned out that the chief minister of Delhi had decided to take a personal interest in cleaning up the city and, of all the mohallas, ours had been picked out for his special attention. Wah! Wah! What luck! Tea and pakoras later, Mr. Smarty Pants Sanitary Inspector was shaking our hands and meticulously taking down our address and the location of the offensive garbage dump. In triplicate, of course.

  The day of reckoning dawned. Bablu ki Ma took out her rayon saree (not yet tested by the American authorities for fire resistance). She had been cooking for two days and turned out a table groaning with choice UP specialities – with a few Punjabi dishes thrown in (contributed by Gurcharan’s wife) to make the CM feel more at home. Bablu and his friends lined up outside the house with new brooms, bought – would you believe it – with their own pocket money! I was most impressed by their enthusiasm. Even more impressed that Bablu’s best friend had taken out the safety pin from his ear and actually trimmed his hair. I, too, was persuaded to give Chachi a day off and stand by for manual labour. Finally we were going to drive away the rats from our neighbourhood.

  Suddenly a siren sounded. And then another. And another. The excitement in the air was palpable. Pinto and Gurcharan Singh had brought along their families for the tamasha and they, too, were excited. The siren sounded nearer. Then nearer. And, as we cheered, the first of the cavalcade came round the bend. A beaming, somewhat bald-pated, gentleman pushed his head out of a darkened window and waved cheerfully at us. Bablu ki Ma beamed back and bent her head in namaste. Bablu and his gang saluted smartly. I stepped up, ready to shake his hand.

  But the cars did not slow down. The cavalcade continued unabashedly. And as the last car turned the bend that took them out of sight, one siren faded. Then another. Then the last.

  And, as we stood gaping, our brooms at half-mast and our egos in the dust, it became all too clear to us. Our rivals in the neighbouring mohalla had bribed the sanitary inspector….

  13

  TICKETLESS TRAVAILS

  ELECTIONS, THEY SAY, ARE A TESTING TIME. YOU PASS SOME. You fail some. If you are anything like Trivediji, the UP politician I keep referring to, then you try to buy your way to a win. If you are like my biradari brother – nicknamed ‘Softy’ Singh Yadav by Bablu – then you strong-arm your way through.

  But, before you get into the area there is a little, inconvenient, matter of securing the election ticket.

  Getting your hands on an election ticket, two enterprising regular savaris once told me, is somewhat of an art. ‘There are very few left, in the Nehru/Gandhi mould, who get their ticket handed over on a platter,’ they said. ‘Now, increasingly, you have to use cunning and blackmail (political and emotional) and, more often than not, some plain old-fashioned palm greasing. As they said this, my two passengers first winked at each other and then, almost in unison, maroed an eye at me as well. ‘Kyon, beta?’ I asked myself, ‘iska kya matlab hai?’ What is the meaning of this?

  I was to find out soon enough. Chachi, with her usual arrogance, believed it was her recent dent and paint job and air-conditioned comfort that attracted the stream of enthusiastic big tippers. I knew better. It was November of 1994 and elections to several state legislatures had been announced. But why such popularity for me – a simple, distinctly uneducated, DLY taxi driver? It seems the word had got around that Trivediji – who was quite high in the Congress party set up at the time – favoured my taxi service when he visited his constituency. And so a beeline of ticket seekers wanted me to ‘put in a good word’.

  Who was I to complain? Ever since these babus at the election office started getting tough on election spending the margins of profit have gone down considerably. So a man’s got to make up somewhere!

  The first to test my source of clout was this rather portly, dhoti-clad man with a paan chewing habit that put Jawai Babu to shame. He arrived in Delhi a week before Diwali and paid an advance on Chachi’s services for five days. He had a novel approach. Each time we set out for some five star residence in the VIP green belt area he would make me load a large and terribly heavy box into the booth. After the fourth trip I started to get very curious. Was this a variation of what Bablu’s political science teacher sarcastically called ‘suitcase politics’? Tauba! Tauba! This man was quite a chalu cheez! Nothing so mamooli as money. Nothing so mundane as mithai. Stocked in each box was an assortment of prime Shivakasi fireworks, which must have kept a score of unprotected child labour busy for over a month!

  Unfortunately, the scam worked too well .... On the third day itself the man had me drive him to the airport. Mission accomplished. He checked into the evening flight to Chennai with a grin as wide as an Id ka chand, a smile as wide as a half moon. The promise of his ticket was apparently firmly in the bag.

  The next was a duo that would give Laurel and Hardy a run for their reputation. The fat fellow was poured into a shining white outfit (which Bablu ki Ma still insists on calling a ‘supari’ suit). The thin man, who Bablu described as a ‘cross between Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler’ (whoever they are), nervously chain-smoked Ganesh brand beedis. It was only on the fourth day that my savaris started making overtures to me. Could I introduce them to my politician friend? ‘For a consideration, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But on my terms.’ And my terms were that they should stand by at a discreet distance while I gave their biodatas to my big shot friend. They could only watch from afar while the ‘deal’ was struck because Trivediji, like his entire political breed, did not like to advertise his corruption.

  I hope my politician friend never finds out. I’m sure he must be extremely puzzled as to why I kept handing over copies of a taxi bill long since paid! The way I figured it: if the chaps get the ticket I can claim the credit; if they don’t, they will just have to accept that the gods were not with them this time. That their kismet was bad.

  While all this was going on, I got to learn a lot about the politics of the South. When they told me they were Congressmen I asked the Laurel and Hardy duo who their greatest political opponent was. They said the man to watch was some chap called Chandra Babu Naidu who came to power by revolting against his father-in-law − the late N. T. Rama Rao. And, in the neighbouring state of Karnataka, constant dramatics could be expected from someon
e called ‘Bainganrappa’ (or was it Bangarappa?) ‘What are your (Congress party) chances?’ I asked.

  ‘Great!’ the two chorused. Interesting, I thought. All my savaris − never mind which political party – seemed to say exactly the same thing! ‘What about the SAPA?’ I asked.

  As my biradari bhai and blue-eyed boy of the ancestral village headed this party I had a vested interested in his political well-being. My Tau, Nakli Singh Yadav, has been nagging me for years to emulate his example and join politics instead of driving a taxi. ‘It’s not too late,’ he keeps saying. He knows of even bus conductors and convicted dacoits who have made it big in this field! Can you imagine that?!

  But I digress. My passenger brought me back to the present with his puzzled query: ‘SAPA? What means that? Are you referring to Samajwadi Party, which is more concerned with the Yadav samaj and stirring up the Muslims? As far as we chaps in the South are concerned, they don’t have much of a chance of making it national.’

  ‘And what about BAJAPA?’ I asked. ‘That sounds like some trendy band master,’ the Charlie Chaplin look-alike joked. But he obviously understood what I was getting at because he promptly declared that the BJP was ‘non-existent’ in the South.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I butted in. ‘I myself drove some South Kanara-based BJP wallahs from Ayodhya to Delhi on 7 December 1992. They were trilled to bits about some photographs they had taken at the demolition of the Babri Masjid. “Fabulous souvenirs,” they had boasted to me. In fact, they even planned to make some money selling copies to their hefty contingent from Karnataka. So what are you saying that Karnataka has no sympathy for the BJP.’

  That shut the man up. But only temporarily. He then launched into an elaborate explanation why the BJP, with only four seats in the then Karnataka state legislature, could not hope to better its 1983 record of 18 out of 224 seats. Who was I to argue? I have heard these speculations so often. Sometimes they have been accurate. Most times off the mark. Why just yesterday another such savari − this time saffron clad − had sketched out all details for a massive BJP landslide. And the day before yesterday another chap − whose only piece of luggage was a battered green bullock cartwheel − said his Janata Dal Party was ready to sweep the polls.