So what, then, went wrong? It was obvious that Muslims − at least some crucial sections − did vote for the combine. And now the combine was comfortably ensconced in the Mantralay. So why the self-doubt about leap frogging into South Block? The left eye of my friend from Meerut started to twitch uncontrollably. ‘Do you seriously believe we can sell ourselves as a national party if we go along with the parochialism of checking for citizenship papers and announcements of throwing out Bangladeshis?’ he burst out.
This was very strange! Why, if they felt like this, were they pandering to Bal Thackeray’s megalomania? I asked. (I have just learnt the meaning of this big word, thanks to my DPS-educated son and my journalist ghostwriter.) Why pander to Thackeray’s so obviously insular and parochial sentiments − sentiments so impractical in a metropolis (another of Bablu’s big words) like Bombay. Why didn’t someone intelligent point out to him that even the Tamils had their tigers − and they had fangs more terrible than Thackeray’s? That when the world talked of the tiger it first talked of the Bengal tiger. And that when the conservationists talked about saving the great beast through ‘Project Tiger’ they focused on UP and Bengal and Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka and even Rajasthan but not his beloved Maharashtra.
And, far more serious, that when he talked of throwing out all non-Maharashtrian ‘outsiders’ from his home state, he was making Maharashtrians in other parts of the country and abroad vulnerable to similar prejudices and persecutions. Had any one of these fellows, who prided themselves on their well-planned strategies, thought of this?
While I spoke my eye caught a glimpse of a faded BJP poster left over from the last assembly poll in the area. It talked of throwing out all Bangladeshis from India and citizenship cards and all the kind of things these BJP ideologues were now ranting against. But this was Rajasthan and not some communally tense backlane of Mahim or Bandra. So this had also been the slogan of the BJP when it fought on its own? What, then, were these BJP netas whining about?
‘Yes,’ the Kanpuria said, ‘but have you heard anything further about it since we came to power?’ His friend from Meerut nodded sagaciously. ‘Slogans are only for elections. It’s only stupid people who try to put them into effect.’
By this time we had passed the Jaipur turn-off and were well along the road to Sariska. As we passed a sign for the Bharatpur bird sanctuary the third chap, my compatriot from Etawah, said sarcastically, ‘Better not tell Bal Thackeray that the Siberian crane migrates to Bharatpur each year. He may twist Behen Mayawati’s arm to put a ban on its flight!!’
23
THAT’S NOT CRICKET!
THE SMELL OF GARAM GARAM MIRCH KA PAKORAS, RUSHED UP my nostrils as Chachi bumped to a halt outside our home. I’d had a long and dusty journey back from Sariska and after that strange fare of daal batti churma these Rajasthanis love so much, the prospect of home cooking was most welcome.
The little lady must be cooking up a storm if the khushboo, the unmistakable aroma has reached all the way out here, I thought. Something is definitely up. Either she has seen some new gadget for the kitchen at the Pragati Maidan mela or Bablu has put her up to getting some money out of me.
I had meant to be tough. No more money till Chachi gets a new set of tyres. But, as the last gulp of bel pathar ka sherbet washed down the last of the pakoras, my heart was all maum batti melting away, and my purse was in Bablu’s hand.
They don’t call me Madath Singh Yadav for nothing.
‘So what is this latest scam?’ I asked the ladla beta. ‘Which expensive school trip do you want to go on now?’ The boy was fairly bursting with excitement. In his right hand was the inevitable cricket ball (now become almost a permanent fixture since he got selected for the school cricket team). In his left was the prospectus for an airline special offer − two return tickets to Dubai for the price of one − with special passes to the famous Pepsi Cup match at Sharjah thrown in!
Now, cricket is not quite my idea of an exciting game. Give me a good old fashioned dangal any day − with the oil and sweat of our local pehelwans, those hardy wrestlers, mingling with prime UP dust. But Bablu tells me I have to leave my ‘Yadav past’ behind and ‘get on with the world’! So here I was, my mind saying ‘No’ but my head nodding ‘Yes’. The time was April 1995. The game, sports commentators predicted, was going to be memorable.
I tell my friends that the idea was to see our great Indian cricketers win at Sharjah. But, the truth is, I really wanted them to win at Sharjah after beating the pants off the Pakistani teams and not after winning a match against Sri Lanka. Returning on the same Air India flight as the victorious team should have been an experience to remember. Certainly Bablu went to town with the autograph business. But I couldn’t help thinking that we might as well have watched the match here in Delhi on Doordarshan or Star TV. What a great pity!
Thank Krishna that I hadn’t gone strictly on holiday. Surprisingly, when the boys at the taxi stand heard of the travel offer, they got all equally excited. Sardar Gurcharan Singh, whose family runs taxi services in places as far-flung as Southall, UK, Canada, South Africa and a sexy place (his brother’s description) called Rio de Janeiro, immediately suggested we check out the prospects of branching out to the Gulf. Murli has a brother in Dubai and he has been telling us grand stories about money growing on date palms. I thought I should at least explore the possibilities of a place to go to when the Brahmins have their revenge on us UP Yadavs.
Oh, I know you’ll say: ‘Look at this fellow, Madath Singh Yadav. His jath wallahs are ruling the roost in UP and Bihar. Everywhere you look there is a Yadav in the front seat − from constable to chief minister and everyone in between. What business does he have to be talking of a place to escape to?’ But that’s precisely the problem. If my two clansmen chief ministers in UP and Bihar were not so blatantly using the caste card maybe I would sleep better. Then maybe my Tau’s childhood friend, Pandit Bimari, would not be wearing his holy thread on his sleeve. And maybe Thakur Lambemoochwala would stop sharpening his sword each time we Yadavs have a community get-together.
But, as usual, I digress.
The whole group from the taxi stand had planned to travel together − close shop for a week and get Sohan Singh from Jor Bagh, next door, to help out temporarily. The cost of the fare was a little more than travelling from Delhi to Bangalore and all of us well deserved a holiday. Murli’s brother’s electronics warehouse business was sponsoring his, Bablu’s visa and mine. Gurcharan also had a brother in Dubai. As for Pinto and Akbar Pasha, as you know, between the Mangaloreans and the Bombay Muslims they’ve got the Gulf pretty much tied up! So they had no problem. And Reddy says there is an organization of Andhrites in every country so they would help him.
Unfortunately, just before we had to leave a very lucrative offer came our way. A regular customer recommended the business of some people who had recently broken away from the Congress group − said they were prepared to pay cash down. That’s always an unbeatable offer for us DLY taxi wallahs!
It seems one of their bright-eyed boys − some political maverick called Ranga − had been threatening to ‘cut motions’ nine times in Parliament and apparently needed to do a lot of running around to houses of Opposition members to garner their support. (If you ask me, I couldn’t understand why he ran around so much. My understanding was that when you wanted to cut a motion all you had to do was take a Lomotel or Imosec tablet! But when I said this aloud to Bablu, the brat said I was not only ignorant, I was ‘unparliamentary’ as well.)
So, in the end, it was just Murli and Gurcharan who joined Bablu and I on the Air India airbus from Bombay’s Sahar to Dubai. Joseph Pinto was particularly sad because his father’s coffee estate owner-boss’s son-in-law was also going to be attending the cricket matches. ‘Look out for him,’ he said. ‘He’ll be the man who is chain smoking!’
The flight was another story! Murli has not forgiven me for what he called my ‘misplaced patriotism’. He wanted to travel either Gulf Air or Emir
ates Airlines − on both of which he could get a hefty discount. I argued I also could get a discount but I felt it was the duty of all Indians to travel the national carrier. Trouble is, our national carrier also took this for granted and so didn’t seem to give a damn how they made us sweat in the airport corridors without a mention of a cold drink or tea when they delayed the flight. Not a mention of a ‘sorry’ when they held us up further − even after we got our boarding passes − because their computers had failed and duplicate boarding passes had been issued by mistake!
‘I once had a savari, a former Air India purser-turned-politician, who said the airline had been rated the best in the world around 1970-71. Did you know that?’ I said, valiantly trying to defend my choice of airline.
‘Chad yaar, let it be,’ said Gurcharan. ‘Tell me another. I prefer to believe the latest nickname of AI: “Almighty Informed”!’
All this inconvenience was made up amply by the reception we received at Dubai Airport. The combined welcome of Murli’s and Gurcharan’s clans was overwhelming. I was embarrassed that there were no UP fellows to receive me. But kya kare? Ask a UP wallah why he doesn’t seek better pastures and he promptly says: ‘I don’t need to go to the Gulf to eat sand. Rajasthan is close enough!’
Life is, indeed, wonderful in the Gulf. But up to a point. Because, though you may have money, and though you may have material wealth, what will you do with it at the end of the day? Indeed, at the end of the day, even after a lifetime in these lands, you remain as you begin − merely in transit. You are at the mercy of a ‘sponsor’, necessarily a local Arab, on whose visa you entered the country. You cannot change your job at will. You cannot own a business completely on your own − the local sponsor has to be a partner. And, at the heart of the matter, at the end of the day, you cannot own do bigha zameen or even do gaz.
With this insight into the ‘ex-patriate’ situation everything began to make more sense. It became clearer to me why the Indians in the Dubai and Sharjah – who would normally mix freely in the Motherland − tend to stay apart in the Gulf. Why the Kerala ‘moplah’ insists on speaking his own language and refuses to learn a word of Arabic. Why the Mangaloreans stick together in the Carama area. And why winning cricket matches against Pakistan has become such a matter of prestige.
It is all really a matter of establishing one’s identity.
We reached Dubai on Saturday, 8 April − a day after our team had been ruthlessly hammered by the Pakistanis. That evening everyone, but everyone, had an opinion about why the match had been lost. Riding in the front seat of Gurcharan’s relative’s taxi, I heard − in the course of just one day − several theories. One chap said our boys had been out to the discos till the wee hours of the very morning they played the crucial match. Another fellow said, ‘It’s our own richy richy countrymen here who unsettled the team − you know the types who will throw one dinner party for them and dine out the rest of the year on: “You know Azhar bhai saheb was saying he really admired my Lalique collection,” and “I told that Kambli fellow he should get more serious about his game,” and “Tendulkar is cho chweet. If he was a Punjabi I would have flown my daughter, Lovely, in from England.”’
Whatever the reason for their defeat, it was a subdued crowd that watched our boys play against Sri Lanka. And as Ratnayake mounted his runs and our chaps fumbled through ‘wides’ and ‘no balls’ I thought I heard this bush-shirted, chain-smoking gentleman sitting behind me mutter, ‘They couldn’t get Veerappan. They couldn’t get the LTTE. Now they can’t even get the Sri Lankan cricket team .…’ Good God, I thought to myself, here was Joseph’s father’s boss’s son-in-law. Could the world be any smaller? And, as Pinto had predicted, at the end of the day there were more cigarette butts on the floor by his feet than wickets on the floor by the crease!
As it turned out, our izzat remained intact. Just about. Errant boy Vinod Kambli spent the day bringing in juice and water to our players but wonder boy Tendulkar calmly slammed us to glory. What excitement! This was reward enough for Bablu and I. But my Dubai hosts were strangely silent. They pointed out to the empty stands, directly in front of us and said: ‘The real drama and tension would have come had those stands been full. Those are the Pakistan stands. The real maza of the game is when Pakistan fights − I mean, plays − India.’
It was so obvious. Cricket to expatriate Indians and Pakistanis is not just a sporting activity. The tension we, here in India, have been feeling in the last few years on the Kashmir issue has been part of life for the two groups for years before. For Sardar ‘Pappi’ Singh of ‘Sind Punjab Restaurant’ it is a matter of such izzat that he distributes mounds of mithai when India wins but locks himself inside his restaurant for days on end when we lose. And when this happens, I’m told that countless Pakistani youths congregate outside his restaurant and dance the night away!
‘But surely that’s not cricket?’ Bablu, fresh from getting Sachin Tendulkar’s autograph, asked. At which everyone started at him and said: ‘Who’s talking about cricket?’
As it turned out, we didn’t get to feel the real tension. We didn’t get to wave our country flags at each other. We didn’t get to shout slogans of ‘Vande Mataram’ and ‘Allah-o-Akbar’. That, we were told, was the ‘real fun’ of the day.
Fun? That sounded to me like the stuff riots are made of. But obviously these Dubai chaps exist on a different level altogether. All this was too much for me.
And, if that wasn’t enough, I had friend Murli beaming from ear to ear because three of our team − Javagal Srinath, Venkatesh Prasad and Anil Kumble − were all Bangalore boys. Gurcharan, too, looked pleased because Navjot Singh Sidhu, who was declared the ‘Man of the Series’, was from his home state of Punjab. All I needed was to get home and have Akbar Pasha boast of how many Maharashtrians there were around − Tendulkar, Kambli and Manjrekar and, for good measure, Team Manager Ajit Wadekar.
This was most embarrassing. Maharashtra, (despite Bal Thackeray) had an excellent contingent, as did Karnataka. Andhra produced our captain, Mohammad Azharuddin; Punjab the best of the season in Navjot Sidhu. Even Delhi, Gujarat and West Bengal were featured. But no sign of UP and Bihar. Something was very wrong here.
An idea came to me. I thought: I must contact jath wallah Mulayam and ask him to pass on the word to his dost (now ‘former friend’) Kanshi Ram. After all, the Planning Commission allocates funds on a state-wise basis and Parliament allocates seats on a states-wise basis. Even the Supreme Court has approved the basic concept of reservations. Why have we never considered a statewide quota system in cricket too?
Before I could get excited about this idea I heard my bureaucrat friend mutter: ‘We’re obviously more serious about the business of cricket than the business of running a government.’
24
MAN SMART, WOMAN SMARTER
SO DUBAI, THEN, WAS NOT AN OPTION. HOME, SWEET HOME, it was for us. Back to the chaos, back to the red tape, back to the dust and the grime and the belching diesel fumes. How I missed it, even after just ten days of being away!
The next morning, washed, buffed and oiled for action Chachi and I were back cruising the Delhi streets. As we reached Janpath I noticed an impressive line-up of police cars outside this corner house. I noted, with interest, that as she rounded the corner, Chachi backfired loudly. When she does this kind of thing it’s a sign that she’s either not pleased with the passenger or that she wants me to stop a while. So I looked around with greater interest.
There was none in sight − at least no one who looked like he or she needed my services. There were certainly enough brass and enough uniformed guards around to make me nervous about the state of my taxi. The last time I stopped to observe such a tamasha some crazy lady cop rounded the corner and ordered this monstrous crane to tow me away….
Can you imagine my surprise when, just as I had revived that memory, round the corner walked this diminutive, kurta-clad figure with a hairstyle Dadu would have described as ‘parr kati’ (cut feathers
). I did a double take. I could have sworn that this same character, then in impressive police uniform, had already driven into that impressive residence in one of those laal batti cars.
Where was the red light? Where were the screaming sirens? Where was the uniform? Could this be why Chachi wanted to stop?
Almost immediately after picking up this savari, I tried to strike up a conversation. There was something familiar about her but I just couldn’t put a finger on it. Although she wore an ordinary enough outfit, her bearing was almost military. ‘Where to?’ I asked. It was strange − she seemed almost uncertain as to where she was going. Almost absently she first said: ‘Tihar Jail’. But she immediately corrected herself and said: ‘Police Lines.’ Then, even while I turned towards the place, she tapped me on the shoulder again and said: ‘Police Headquarters.’
This was a bit much. What did she think I was: a complete loafer with nowhere to go? I almost asked her to step out when it occurred to me that Chachi was quite happy to be given the run around. That was unusual. Obviously she approved of my passenger. Who was I to ask her to leave?
In the end the lady changed her mind once more. ‘Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg,’ she said. ‘This could mean one of three things − an appointment with some lawyer in the Supreme Court, a report at the Police HQ at the ITO crossing, or an interview with a press person further down the road. Immediately things fell into place. The face became all too familiar. I surreptitiously checked my speedometer. No sense asking for either a speeding ticket or a brief visit to Tihar Jail. This was the very same smart lady cop who had Chachi towed away in front of my eyes. ‘Crane Bedi’, I think she was called.
‘How dare you take money from her?’ Bablu ki Ma slammed into me when I told her about my encounter. ‘Didn’t you know who you were dealing with? That was Phoolan Devi and Mayawati rolled into one. And you say even Chachi approved of her?! Why couldn’t you keep your meter off for once in your life?’ This really was a bit much. Where did she think Bablu’s exorbitant DPS fees came from? But I opted to remain silent. It wasn’t worth the nagging.
Travails with Chachi Page 12
