Keep Off the Grass

by Karan Bajaj

Vinod rolled his eyes and we both laughed. ‘I’ve solved most of the tutorial sheets,’ I said. ‘Do you want some help?’

  ‘Thanks a ton, man, but I’m good,’ he said. He yawned. ‘I’m going to head off to sleep. What time is the quiz?’

  ‘First thing in the morning, 8:00 a.m,’ I said ominously, expecting him to get flustered at the amount of work he still needed to get done.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘I must have talked too long on the phone. I really must sleep now, can’t do without my eight hours.’

  Not a word about the quiz and the fact that he was so completely unprepared.

  Inspired by his nonchalance, I went back to my room and decided to nap for a couple of hours before hitting the books again. I switched off the lights and tried to sleep to the soft strains of Pink Floyd escaping from Sarkar’s room. But sleep eluded me. Fleeting images of past happiness crossed my mind. Simpler, uncomplicated times: hiking in the Grand Canyon with Peter, Radha and Jeanne, my closest friends from Yale; camping in Alaska, listening to the heavy rumblings outside the tents, agonizing whether we should stay quiet (Radha was sure it was a grizzly bear) or shout (Peter was convinced it was a black bear); their surprise when I revealed I was going to India to ‘search for myself ’.

  I felt wretched about my existence now. My time in India hadn’t helped me get any new insight into myself. Instead, it had struck a serious blow at the only things I hadn’t been confused about: my intellect and my ability. Stats problems jumbled through my head—random distributions, normal curves, probabilities—as I lay half-awake, half-dreaming, trying desperately to stop. It became worse: statistics mixed with accounting mixed with Yale mixed with Wall Street mixed with surprised friends mixed with angry parents mixed with Vinod fighting off a soldier with a bayonet. I finally gave up all attempts to sleep. This was criminal, I thought, two hours wasted just trying to sleep, and now I felt even more exhausted.

  I went to wash my face to begin on the statistics tutorials again and caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. Puffy eyes, sunken face. Just what was I doing here, I thought. I smiled. It seemed almost comic. I had come ten thousand miles to study the intricacies of how business gets done in India. And how exactly was this supposed to help me when I went back to Manhattan? I would probably be at an interview for a job at the bank again where some interviewer would look at me quizzically and ask the same question that everyone was asking me, ‘And why exactly did you go to India?’

  I would finally lose it then, I guess, and tell him what I really thought.

  ‘Because I’m stupid,’ I would say. ‘But that’s okay. You don’t need Einstein to analyse the revenue streams of our underwear client. I’ll do just fine.’

  I cheered up at the thought of giving that answer and made my way to the examination hall.

  Eight a.m. Tense, anxious moments as the quiz was handed out. An immediate rush to act as folks started scratching their pens against the paper without fully processing the question. I did the same. Busily doing something sustained the illusion that I was solving the questions. I finished two of the three questions very quickly, confident that I had got them right. If the stats quiz is supposed to be the indicator of how one ends up academically at the IIM, I thought, with a sudden burst of confidence, watch out as the dumb American strides to the top.

  Several things happened as I read the third question. From the corner of my eye, I saw a classmate suddenly convulse in his seat. He seemed to be having some sort of a seizure—white foam and the works, like Sanjeev Kumar in one of Mom’s old Bollywood movies. Some of us rushed to his seat, wanting to help but not knowing how to as he continued to writhe on the floor. Within seconds, Dr Pal, the medical doctor in our class, came running from the opposite end of the hall and took control of the situation. Very soon, with an efficiency that would make 911 proud, the institute ambulance came to take him to the emergency room. Order was restored.

  As we were returning to our seats, I realized that apart from the few of us who had been distracted enough to get up, the others had kept working through this entire episode as if nothing unusual had happened.

  There were many times, this being one of them, when I almost envied my colleagues for their single-minded pursuit of grades and careers. Their goals were concrete and stationary, not moving targets like mine. This clarity made them happy, at least temporarily, as they crossed milestone after milestone, racing towards the finish line of the rainbow that never ended. Not that I was any superior, heck, I didn’t even know what my undefined loftier ambitions were. I was just an overfed, confused American searching for his soul—the biggest cliché in the world.

  ‘Don’t reach for the secret too soon.’ Peter’s words came to mind as I tried to concentrate on the test again, and focused on finishing the third and final question. Whether a result of the distractions I had just experienced or the final sputtering of my tired brain, I struggled and struggled, unable to solve it as the minutes ticked by. I approached it from every possible angle, creating elaborate decision-trees for each of Chubby Charlie’s possible decisions, but there seemed to be some essential piece of data I was missing. A perfect score and resultant deliverance from everyday self-doubt seemed tantalizingly close, but remained unattainable. Two minutes left, another false lead and I abandoned the question to recheck my answers to the others. One minute left and I discovered a calculation error in my answer to the second question. With a silent cry of despair, I started to fix it as the ruthlessly efficient exam coordinator snatched the paper from my hand. Damn, I thought, frustrated with myself, I came so close to acing this but choked at the last minute.

  I walked out of the exam hall feeling morose when Sarkar and Vinod descended upon me.

  ‘Ah, finally our elusive friend. You pulled off the ultimate disappearing act in the last two weeks. So, did you ace the quiz?’ asked Vinod.

  ‘Balls, dude, I blew it at the last minute. Did you manage to get the third question?’ I asked.

  Vinod was nonchalant as usual. ‘Kahaan, boss? Didn’t even get to it. I barely managed to finish the second question, actually. But chill. It’s just a quiz.’

  ‘What about you?’ I asked Sarkar, eager to be reassured that we were all in the same boat, sinking fast.

  Sarkar didn’t answer the question. ‘Let’s skip the autopsy, guys. It’s almost noon, half the day has already been wasted. Hey Vinod, what say I give our American friend a real Indian education today?’ He winked.

  ‘I think he’s getting more of it than he needs already,’ said Vinod.

  ‘The real management lessons of India aren’t in the classrooms,’ said Sarkar melodramatically. ‘You have to meet the dealers and the pimps, self-made entrepreneurs who are single-handedly fighting the system to provide high-value goods to discerning customers. So valued are their services that they don’t find customers, customers find them. That bastard, Kotler, should have taken some lessons from them instead of from corrupt cola giants.’

  ‘Cut the crap, will you?’ I said. ‘I’m in. Where do we go?’ Anything to forget the mess I had made of the quiz.

  ‘Vinod, do you mind getting the booze while I take him for a glimpse of enlightenment?’ Sarkar said.

  ‘Only if you promise to shut up when you are back,’ Vinod said.

  I followed Sarkar to his bike. ‘Okay, so we need to score gaanja from somewhere,’ he said, rubbing his hands. There was a wild glint in his eyes. ‘My usual supplier is the dhobi, the washerman that is, but that bastard went off on a holiday without informing me. I finished off the stash yesterday before the quiz. So where should we get it from? Now, let’s approach this problem analytically, like a B-school case study.’

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious. ‘Dude, are you sure? You are new to Bangalore too, and I don’t want to get into any trouble with the police and stuff. I’ve got enough to deal with already.’

  ‘Hop on, firang, this is India. Where there is money, there is a way,’ he replied and
we set off on his bike towards the city.

  Unwittingly, I was mentored in the fine art of searching for banned substances in India that day. ‘Okay, here is Rule Number One: always start in areas surrounding bus stations and taxi stands,’ Sarkar shouted above the din of the traffic. ‘Bus and taxi drivers are notorious dope users.’

  ‘Why them?’ I asked. ‘In India especially, I thought it would be the addiction of the rich.’

  ‘Hardly. Taxi drivers dope out of necessity rather than for recreation,’ he replied. ‘Supply-demand economics. Driving a bus or a taxi is quite a coveted job in India. You get a decent salary, take your family out for free rides, sometimes even make money from tips—when your client is a foreigner and not an Indian, that is. Indians don’t give tips. Entry barriers are low. You don’t need to clear any examination to get your driving license. Just get your photo taken, pay a small bribe and you get a brand-new license in a matter of minutes. As a result, hundreds of unemployed young men want to become bus or taxi drivers every year, a situation that all the vehicle owners exploit.’

  As we entered the deafening chaos of Majestic bus station, I was convinced we would die or kill someone as Sarkar swerved the bike dangerously to avoid hitting the billion people on the narrow streets. ‘Why don’t you concentrate on the road for a while? We can talk later,’ I said.

  ‘Ha, ha! Don’t worry, firang, we’ll survive. There is a method in this madness that you will understand soon. Anyway, I was saying, these vehicle owners, they drive their drivers hard, pardon the pun. A Toyota Qualis driver we knew in IIT had once been on the road continuously for almost two months from Delhi to Benares, Lucknow, Rajasthan, Manali, to every place imaginable in north India, with barely two to three hours of sleep every night. How do you unwind from the stress of driving in this inhuman traffic and get ready for the next journey in the two hours you are given to rest? You turn to pills and gaanja, a quick, efficient rejuvenating kick minus the sluggishness and hangover that cheap booze causes.’

  More shouts and screams in Kannada. We had finally arrived at the bus stand. Music blared from bus stereos, passengers crowded around cigarette and tea stalls, carelessly spitting chewed pan on the road and on each other, bus conductors screamed their destinations, banging the sides of buses, and engines revved up or shuddered to death all around us.

  Sarkar parked the bike next to a tea stall and asked the owner, a short, potbellied man with a fierce moustache, ‘Boss, koi jugaad hai?’

  As the owner stared nonplussed, Sarkar started speaking to me again: ‘Rule Number Two: Never ask for the stuff directly, lest someone lets loose a cop on you. Of course, the cop won’t put you in jail or anything, but then he becomes another person in the food chain you need to pay. There is a universal language which works here.’

  He was right. ‘Koi jugaad hai’ or ‘any fixes’ seemed illogical and harmless to the uninitiated, but was somehow clear to the supplier. The fourth guy he asked, an auto-rickshaw driver, responded in Hindi, ‘Hai na, saab. I have everything. What do you want?’

  The conversation moved carefully forward as both avoided stating what was being sought to ensure their tracks were covered.

  ‘What do you have?’ asked Sarkar.

  ‘Everything, I told you. The question is not how much water I have, the question is how much can you drink?’ replied the wizened old driver philosophically. He sounds like a Zen monk rather than a drug dealer, I thought.

  More Zen followed.

  ‘The kind of water I want to drink is forbidden by the law,’ said Sarkar cryptically.

  ‘Water that is too pure has no fish,’ said the driver. ‘The government can outlaw the water but can anyone ban the thirst? The thirsty will find their own pond.’

  They went on for a while until the driver finally said, ‘Saab, Nepali hai, Tibet ki hai, gori hai, schoolgirl, housewife, lawyer, doctor, you tell.’ As would happen many times in these hunts, he had assumed that we were seeking women. It did establish though that he was a fellow corrupt soul, so Sarkar proceeded with his demands. ‘No, we don’t want all that. Can you get us some gaanja?’

  ‘Haan, saab, definitely. Very high-quality stuff. I have used it myself, though I don’t use it any more,’ said the driver. ‘While you’re trying to escape, I’m trying to return,’ he added mournfully.

  They haggled for a while, settling at the princely sum of Rs 750 (fifteen dollars) for a kilo, and we jumped into his auto.

  He started driving us through small, narrow streets lined with filth from the overflowing drains, with stray dogs snapping at the auto and an overpowering stench of rotten waste. Despite the bright day, everything seemed dark and foreboding in the dirty squalor of these narrow alleys. I didn’t like this. A month ago, I was a high-flying banker with a promising future. Today I found myself being driven along stinking drains teeming with rats. How had I missed the romance in this transformation?

  Before long, our man stopped outside one of the rundown houses and got out wordlessly.

  ‘Aren’t you worried?’ I asked Sarkar, desperately wanting to be reassured. ‘You’ve already given him the money and he knows you have more. He could do anything now. People are killed for way less in India.’

  ‘Final lesson for the day,’ he replied, clearly enjoying my discomfort. ‘Yeh bharose ka dhanda hai. This is a trade of trust. Do you kill the hen that lays golden eggs? He knows I’m an addict and will keep coming back again. You tell me, if his stuff is good and reasonably priced, would you go about chasing someone in Bangalore like this to get it the next time? Chill, he’ll be back with excellent stuff. I can’t wait to smell it.’

  Irrefutable logic. And I was now a certified expert in the important art of buying marijuana in India. My parents would be proud back home in Louisville, Kentucky.

  As Sarkar had promised, the auto-rickshaw driver came back with the stuff rolled up in a newspaper. He then drove us back to the bus stand, smiling slyly as he handed over the bag.

  ‘A tip, perhaps? You couldn’t have got the message without the messenger,’ he said.

  Zen again.

  We knew he had taken a significant cut from the money Sarkar had given him, but he was asking for a tip as was expected of him. I was in a generous mood, relieved and happy to get out, and gave the driver-cum-dealer-cum-Zen monk a hundred-rupee note without even a token protest.

  ‘Arre, you rich American, this is what you do after all the time I spent bargaining?’ Sarkar said as we walked off.

  We raced through the city to make our way back to campus for an evening of debauchery in Sarkar’s room. Hesitant as I was to admit it to myself, I had enjoyed the thrill of the marijuana chase and had all but forgotten about the debacle of the statistics quiz earlier that day. Vinod was already in the room, steadily working his way through a bottle of the local poison, Old Monk, and singing along with the stereo. He didn’t stop singing when we entered the room. I liked him for being comfortable enough to drink and sing alone.

  Sarkar lit up our first joint of the day.

  ‘Let’s chase it,’ Sarkar said, and he taught me the fine art of ‘chasing’, taking a quick drag of an ordinary cigarette before inhaling the smoke from the joint. Round and round it went, with cries of ‘chase, chase, chase’, until we’d had several rounds between us (even as Vinod continued to abstain).

  ‘Do you know what happened to Ravindra today?’ I asked, suddenly reminded of his convulsing, writhing body in the examination hall.

  ‘Yeah, I found out,’ Vinod said. ‘He is in intensive care right now. Apparently, he suffered from a severe epileptic attack because he hasn’t been taking his medicines regularly since he came here. Time constraints, I guess, and the fact that your whole schedule goes so completely awry here.’

  ‘Jesus, thank God it was just an epileptic attack,’ I replied. ‘I thought it was something serious like a heart attack or something. This place could easily do that to you.’

  Sarkar laughed. ‘You heartless bastard, thanking G
od for an epileptic attack.’

  The dope was just starting to hit when there was a sudden knock on the door.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I asked Sarkar over the loud strains of some noisy metal number in the background.

  He was standing next to the door. ‘Yeah, give me a sec,’ he said and opened it, looking perfectly sober. He did not attempt to hide anything, I noted. Smoking grass seemed acceptable here; it seemed as common a recreation activity as, say, watching porn in high school. You didn’t really make a public display of it, but you didn’t hide it either.

  ‘Could you turn down the music a bit? People live next door in case you forgot.’ It was Chetan, looking pretty pissed off.

  ‘Chetan, my man, come on in. We are celebrating the end of the stats quiz. We got some grass especially for you. We’ll smoke one together to toast you sticking it to the Man,’ Sarkar said mockingly.

  ‘No thanks, some other time. My study group is coming here for the economics case study discussion, but I guess we will go somewhere else. You guys have fun,’ Chetan replied, his anger somewhat dissipated by Sarkar’s unexpected response. As usual, he wasn’t perceptive enough to catch the irony in Sarkar’s invitation.

  Sarkar closed the door behind him. He echoed the same fleeting thought that I’d had during the statistics quiz that morning: ‘Sometimes, I admire the simplicity of Chetan’s complications. All he lives for is the next quiz, the next case study and the next grade point average. Bastard, there is not a cry of anguish from him about anything deeper than being two minutes late for a project submission deadline,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ I began hesitatingly, ‘I can’t claim to be any different. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been the same—obsessing about my inability to understand basic accounting concepts, struggling with sleep before the stats quiz because I want so badly to do well and trying to make a mark by asking a brilliant question in class. It’s like being back in tenth grade and trying to please my dad with my SAT scores. I came here to get some insights about myself, but all I’ve managed to do is unearth even more demons.’