The Eighteenth Parallel

by MITRAN, ASHOKA

  An unmetalled road branched off ahead, poorly lit. Chandru took the road. Some of the many houses on either side of the street had electric lights, but the majority were lit only with hurricane lanterns. The street itself was neither dark nor deserted. The chatter that filled the air at all hours of the day came from the girls in green skirts and blouses who stayed in the St Francis Convent girls' hostel. Next to it was St Mary's Boarding, an orphanage for boys which housed a school and a hostel in the same compound. Orphans yes, but the boys did not lack for mischief. No boy could be well-behaved when about fifty girls lived within peeping distance just on the other side of the wall. The boys were initiated early into an awareness of the other sex.

  This awareness had been with Chandru for some time now. Life had been such a straightforward uncomplicated affair before these stirrings made themselves felt. Chandru was now passing through the Kusini Paracheri slum. He remembered how as a small boy he had taken the name to be pejorative. He later found it was the name used by those who lived there. This slum was the only fully Tamil-speaking locality in this predominantly Telugu city where Urdu was the second important language. But what Tamil! He found their dialect almost unintelligible. All the men here claimed to be butlers serving English people, barring a few who were car drivers. The men were not gregarious. Even when a group sat together over cards, they were never noisy, perhaps because of the customary restraint they had to practise in the English people's houses where they worked. The women compensated amply though for the men's reserve, conducting their quarrels for hours together, screaming at the tops of their voices, ever hovering near a climax but always stopping just short of violence. The men would be present throughout, sitting around smoking bidis, even dozing off. When they woke, if they found the women still belting it out, they redoubled their efforts at yawning. It was a place full of dirt and slime, onion peel and chicken bones, dogs and pigs. The reek of roasting meat and the screams of coarse, ear-polluting invectives filled the air. But even in this slum, there were a few girls whom Chandru noticed. Why, he'd even managed to find out the name of one of them. Pushpa.

  He was at Keyes High School now. This short stretch was indeed full of schools. Keyes High School was the biggest and the most prestigious girls' school in Secunderabad. A variety entertainment by the girls with tickets sold to the public was an annual ritual here. Plays, one in Tamil, one in Telugu, some group and solo dances, a few jokes, a brief address by the headmistress followed by an elaborate one by the chief guest—Chandru had seen it all nearly every year since one or the other of his sisters, older or younger, was sure to be a pupil there. The last time he attended this school entertainment, however, he felt self-conscious, something he had never felt before. Nervous, shy, expectant, glad and aroused, he had been in the grip of an unsettling mix of emotions. A change had indeed come over him, making him a little like the boys in the boarding school.

  Chandru kicked the ground. For some time he had been aware of these new stirrings that were crowding out the old thoughts. This state of mind was brought on by a woman, but a woman with no individual identity. She was a mere she, female. Any girl he saw on the street merged with this she and set up a tumult in his mind. The list of his women tormentors was by now rather long, from Pyari Begum next door to Pushpa in the Pariah settlement. There was also the brigade of those whose names he didn't know, like Nasir Ali Khan's sister. Now wait. Could it be that he'd gone to cricket practice today for her sake?

  Chandru kicked the ground viciously with his unshod foot—not a wise move, especially when you had a bicycle alongside. He bruised his big toe. It began to bleed. Ah! That was some relief. The sight of blood, he found, was soothing to one's mind. This cruel streak was a recent development. The wild thrashing he had given the buffalo that evening had been part of this compulsion. It was only now, after all these hours that Chandru realised how cruel he had been to the animal. He felt it all the more due to the blows he had himself received. Well, unlike that absolutist Narasimha Rao, Chandru had never found it easy to make moral judgements, to have clear distinctions between good and evil. That confrontation with Narasimha had indeed given him a severe jolt, but he hadn't become fully alive to the situation in the city till the woman at the oil mill had driven him out. 'Don't get us into trouble. Go, go away from here.'

  The woman had not really wanted to drive him away though. It was just that even Monda, though apparently safe, was far from that. The times were such that all over the country, under a sudden diabolical spell, unbelievable things had been happening to unlikely people in unexpected places, places that had known no strife for years, places much safer than our Monda. But at such a time, just look at me, wheeling my bicycle along this dark alley, hoping for a glimpse of Pushpa, dreaming of a girl from a royal family whose name I don't know, and going to cricket practice conducted by her brother.

  No. No. No. No. Chandru kicked the ground again and pummelled the handlebar of his bicycle. This time his feet were certainly injured, which meant that he wouldn't be able to put on his cricket boots till the bruises healed, which in turn meant that even if Nasir chose to ask him again to cricket practice, he wouldn't be able to go. Ah, respite at last. Respite from all the ugly thoughts that were churning up his psyche.

  Even after entering the Lancer Barracks compound, Chandru continued to wheel his bicycle rather than ride it, though there was no need for this. It was just that he felt disinclined to change his mode of locomotion for the last few yards after having used it for a whole two miles. Lights were on in all the houses. Numbers twelve, eleven, ten, nine – Janardhan in his underwear – back to the door – eight, seven, the Mannas' house—Morris, Terence, Julie, Laura. Julie would be sitting staring at a corner. Laura, lying supine on the floor, listening to a gramophone in very bad repair, playing a record in very bad shape. Mrs Mannas would be asleep. Mr Mannas would be drinking. The radio was blaring out a typically Islamic song broadcast from Hyderabad Radio. Listeners' Requests would go on the air in half an hour. But of course there was no chance of listening to these Hindi songs in his house. His family tuned in only to the far-off Tamil stations, Madras or Trichy, no matter how bad the reception.

  Father didn't seem to have returned. Mother was waiting in the veranda. 'Why are you late?' she asked.

  'Got delayed.' What an answer, thought Chandru even as he said the words.

  'But I asked you why.'

  Chandru stood his bicycle against the wall and went straight in to the back of the house, climbed down the steps and walked up to the buffalo shed. The buffalo saw him in the dark and shuffled about to register recognition as it were. Restless circling of the stake had shortened her tether considerably. Chandru unwound the coils and refastened the rope allowing it a fair length. Then he put an arm round the buffalo's neck and hugged her, and was rewarded with a flick of its dung-coated tail.

  When he came into the house again and the bright light shone on his face, Mother noticed it at once. 'What's that big lump you have on your forehead, son?' she asked.

  'Oh that. I was hurt playing cricket.'

  5

  I was all this time under the impression that Father had lost his money in the Arbuthnot Bank. But it seems to have been the Quilon Bank, not Arbuthnot. The man who lost in the Arbuthnot collapse was my grandfather. It had all happened long before the collapse of the Quilon Bank. How much would my grandfather have lost? Some eighty rupees, perhaps. Anyway, losing money in the bank seems to have been a hereditary hazard in our family.

  The man who got the blame for the collapse of the Quilon Bank was Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Iyer. But this is all mere hearsay; heard from other sources, none of them reliable; from people who couldn't remember in the morning where they had left their snuff boxes at night.

  As for this Sir CP, I have seen a few photographs of him always in profile, turban round his head. These photographs used to put me in mind of those turbanned heads drawn on the walls of certain sheds set apart in railway stations. The logo was complete
d by a word written beneath the figure: 'GENTLEMEN'. There would be another profile at the other end of the shed, of a woman, with the word 'LADIES'. Perhaps in those days Sir CP's face was considered ideally suited for all graphic representations of manhood.

  Father never stepped out except in that uniform favoured by Tamil migrants, his shirt tucked into a dhoti and a coat over the shirt. The dhoti was worn with an end of the cloth separating the legs. We called it the bicycling dhoti. If he wore a cap it meant he was going to the office. No headgear was used for other trips. I had made countless trips to these other places with my father ever since I learnt to walk. And after we came to Lancer Barracks, buying any little thing involved a two-mile trek to the market.

  Father would start on one of his little expeditions in order to fetch some vegetables or a little mustard. He wore red ear-studs, the stones dimmed with grime. His hair was gathered into a knot. I would go and stand before him in my oversized shorts and double-breasted coat. This coat, made when I was in my third or fourth standard, served me till I entered the ninth since it was sewn to fit a growing boy. It wasn't that I liked the coat. But going out with father wasn't possible without it. When we were barely ten paces from home, Father would stop and enquire of Jaffar Ali, 'How are you, master?' Mr Jaffar Ali would be watering his beloved crotons, a large pipe in his mouth. These friendly chats stopped when we acquired buffaloes and it became known that they had a predilection for crotons. The half-hour chat with Mr Jaffar Ali ended when Mr Mannas would peep out of his house, which was next. A 'What mister?' from Father signalled the next half-hour's chat—with Mr Mannas this time. At other times I would have gone straight in and helped Mrs Mannas who would be peeling onions to the accompaniment of muttered imprecations. But when with Father, I just stood at the gate, observing him and Mr Mannas minutely while between them the English language was hanged, drawn and quartered. If the older Mannas girls happened to pass by, I wouldn't even acknowledge their presence. A few yards further, Father would stop to talk to Mr Kesava Rao, greeting him with the Telugu version of 'What mister?', 'Emi babu?'. Half an hour later, Father would be at Mr Masilamani's, buttonholing him with the Tamil version of 'What mister?', 'Enna dorai?' Fifteen more minutes were lost in this way. Father never took the wider roads on these trips to the market. It was always through the lanes and bylanes, turns and about-turns. Rarely did we pass an alley, without his stopping to point out a house with remarks like, 'This is where we were when the plague struck.' Or 'This was our home during the floods.' Any old woman glimpsed on these premises would prompt a half-hour chat. I wondered if it was to indulge his nostalgia that Father chose this route through the lanes visiting his erstwhile habitations. If the pride of the Mohenjodaro civilisation was its underground drainage system, one could say this of Secunderabad that its culture resided in its maze of lanes and alleys.

  Many of these lanes had waist-high stone poles erected at their entrance to prevent the entry of vehicles. But even without this precaution, vehicles would never have entered most of these lanes, criss-crossed as they were with open drains and the occasional steps that were needed to connect different stretches of the road which were not all of the same level. There were very few lanes where it was possible for a bullock cart or a tonga to go. The tonga of our town was a horse-drawn coach. What was special about the tonga was that, unlike in the bullock cart, all the passengers could sit with their legs hanging, assuming of course that the number of passengers matched the number prescribed on the tongas themselves. But one never engaged a tonga unless there were at least six passengers. Two in the back seat and two in front were normally accommodated while two more were squeezed in the interstices. This last was the position invariably reserved for me whenever a tonga was engaged by our family.

  The process of engaging a tonga was a nuisance. Tongas could be fetched either from the railway station if you walked more than a mile, or from Manohar Talkies, after a convoluted journey through the lanes in quite a different direction. Whatever the route, fetching a tonga was not an adult's job. Nor was it possible to send little boys because they were not likely to be taken seriously by the tongawalas. Thus the task always fell to me. I would mutter my protest before I started on my errand. On the way I would hear Morris' Tarzan-cry as he swung among the roots of the banyan tree. Years later when we left Lancer Barracks, left so many people and things behind, the deepest wrench for me was parting from the banyan. It was here that I played many miserable games of monkeys-on-trees with Anglo-Indian and Muslim boys, with them always throwing the stick over the wall, and me jumping over it to get to the street to retrieve it. Morris and the banyan tree were the two things that never failed to fascinate me. Each time I went to fetch a tonga, it was only after a quick climb up and down a hanging root that I would move on. This of course usually left Morris and my other Lancer Barracks companions speculating on the nature of my errand. What could be more urgent than play?

  A call from Lancer Barracks was the last thing likely to whip up any enthusiasm in the tongawalas at the tonga stand. Most times they didn't bother to reply. Someone would at last, bestir himself to ask where to and how much. I would then ask him in my broken Urdu: what did he expect? Whatever it was, I would agree to it and bring him home. Once back home, I would rush in to look for a safe place to hide. Mother or Father would now ask the tongawala what the fare was. If he said eight annas, they would offer him two annas. The tongawala would then demand to see the boy who brought him there. My people would raise their offer to two and a half annas. He would again ask for the boy. Hot negotiation would follow, after which the man would agree to three annas. Or, equally likely, he would go away in a huff spewing abuse at everyone in the house, particularly me. My father and mother would then accuse me of fixing the fare myself. If only they could have known the travails of a tonga-fetcher, but of course they didn't.

  Now for the purpose behind this fetching of a tonga from a mile away. It was to take us all to a Tamil film showing at the tent cinema on the Karbala Maidan three miles away. In the regular cinemas of Secunderabad, Tamil films were shown only once or twice a year, and that for just a week, though Telugu pictures had a run of four to six months and Hindi and Urdu pictures which came after a showing in Hyderabad city first, ran strong for a couple of months. The Tamil films that lasted two weeks as far as I can remember were just two: Mangamma Sabatham and Sri Valli. Vasundhara played the role of Mangamma, the woman who takes on a philanderer, and in the mythological film Sri Valli, it was Kumari Rukmani, a young girl then, who played Valli. Exhaustive discussions on the charms of these two heroines were held even among elderly people who had shed their inhibitions for the nonce.

  The tent cinema showed only Tamil pictures. It was difficult to say what induced the owners to pitch camp in Secunderabad. They showed nearly sixty films in six months. Twenty free tickets would be offered for every two tickets sold. Although a government appointment had become some sort of memento mori of modern times, those in authority and their families were always offered special privileges in the tents. The shows would allow a half-hour's late start for them. The first showing lasted until ten o'clock at night and the second started at ten-forty. The footage of films would be cut from 20,000 to 18,000 feet to fit the time available. Whether it was the first or the second show that we went to, the tonga was engaged only to get to the cinema. We always returned on foot in procession for three and a half miles through the streets of Secunderabad at dead of night, rousing the suspicions of at least thirty dogs and disturbing the sleep of several neighbourhoods.

  It was quite a common occurrence for a film to be cut in the middle. One day, the film seemed about to break, then it began to run upside down and then quite suddenly it caught fire. We stampeded out of the tent. The show was re-started after half an hour and we went in again. This time we sat in the next class and watched the bit of the film that had survived unburnt. It was Salem Modern Theatre's Subhadra, on which a million rupees had been spent, according to the advertisemen
ts. The length of the film had already been curtailed by a Government order during the war. The version we got to see was further curtailed by the fire.

  Thinking back after all these years of our curious treks back home in the middle of the night, it seems amazing that nothing untoward ever happened to any of us. We took no precautions, had no security measures. My older sister, a fast walker, usually went far ahead of all us. Father and I would be a furlong behind her. Another furlong separated us from my brother and the rest of the sisters. My mother usually brought up the rear all by herself, lagging nearly half a mile behind everyone. On a straight road, we would at least have been within viewing distance of one another. But there were no streets in Secunderabad that ran straight for more than fifty yards. All this, notwithstanding the efforts of a British Resident to build a highway straight as a taut string, to be called Kings way. When Kingsway finally took shape, however, there were eleven curves within its mile and a half span. What had happened was this: the owners of those houses on the path who would have been affected by the straightening up of the road had out-manoeuvred the British Resident. Every curve was rumoured to have fetched Rs 10,000. Ten thousand rupees was a large sum those days.