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Prakash Subbarao's Blog
Aaaj (today) 24th August 2007 (Sha'ban 9, 1428)
Hi! If you are the curious type, you'd wonder what "Sha'ban 9, 1948" is.
In order to satisfy your curiosity, I've hyperlinked it so that you know its significance.
If you were an intelligent sort, your next question would be "Why is this Prakash, a Hindu bloke, so fixated with things Islamic?" That's because I lived in Dubai for six years between 1998 and 2004 and they brainwashed me into having a healthy respect for their culture. I now respect Islam a lot more than I did before I went to Dubai and I now find it extremely difficult to eat non-halal meat as well as pork, ham, bacon etc.
A Hindu Brahmin eating meat of any sort????? Isn't that shocking?
Yes, we Hindu Brahmin's seem to have been led stray by modernism; may the good God's forgive us.
OK. Let's get on with it; I have an interesting tale to tell.
I returned from a whirlwind visit to Mysore late last night. I slipped in to my room just minutes before the clock struck midnight. At this hour, when ghosts walk (if ghosts can really walk), my thoughts went to someone whom I had imagined to have become a ghost by now but who, in reality, was hale and hearty and bursting with vitality. That wasn't how I he had been when I last met him more than a decade ago.
His name is X. He is a resident of Mysore and seems to know all there is to know about Mysore and all the people who count in Mysore (and I am not talking about counting 1, 2,3.....!).
I met X through my wife. She knew him since 1974.
Apparently X was smitten with a certain lady who was the elder sister of one of my wife's classmate and he used to regularly do the rounds of Manasa Gangotri trying to woo the lady. That X was Sindhi and the lady in question, Y, was a Coorgi didn't seem to matter to either X or Y in those highly conservative days of 1974.
Eventually, the lady's heart was won over and they wed.
Soon, however, cultural differences and attitudes surfaced. The clash of the in-laws started and the ever hospitable X's life soon started getting turbulent.
One day, X's mother-in-law visited X's home and in the course of conversation, made a remark highly critical of X's mother. X saw red. Y saw red. and soon there was the mother of all fights.
This fight did not get over, like all fights do, but simmered on for years. In the meanwhile, the couple had children - a boy and two twin girls.
The fight finally ended one dismal day when Y bundled the children off into a waiting taxi and left X.
We knew both X and Y in those turbulent days leading up to their separation and for a short while thereafter.
X took to alcohol and drowned his sorrows from morning till night in ethereal drink. Ashtrays flowed over till it became standard procedure to just flick a butt into a corner and not worry that the house hadn't been cleaned for days. The floor was littered with all types of objects - animate as well as inanimate.
What was worrying was that X seemed to live only on cigarettes and booze!
I left Mysore to take up a job in Bangalore and met X after a few years. There was no change in his lifestyle. If anything, his flat had got grubbier. It appeared to me that X was killing himself and wouldn't last.
We moved to Dubai and soon lost touch with X. There was no occasion to visit Mysore and X wasn't the sort of bloke who would have an email ID or whom one could easily contact.
Fast forward to yesterday. It had been over eleven years since we had heard of X. We were in the same area where he lived but the city had undergone such a transformation that nothing looked familiar.
Suddenly a building caught my eye. It looked similar and yet looked different. I felt this could be X's old house. The building was obviously empty and unoccupied.
On an impulse, I stopped the car and walked into the shop that was just opposite the house. It was a shop that sold furniture.
The person behind the counter was visibly surprised when I bluntly asked him how long he had been there. "35 years" he mentioned. "Where is X who lived in that flat?" I asked him, pointing to the empty bungalow.
"Why do you wish to know" he asked me cautiously.
I told him briefly about my association with X.
Instead of responding to my query, he picked up the phone and dialed a number. He spoke briefly to someone at the other end and then gave me the phone, without a word.
It was X on the line. And he was in the vicinity. "I will be there in five minutes" he told me and materialized soon thereafter.
This story has a happy ending. Somewhere along the line X decided that enough was enough. He gave up smoking completely and drastically cut back on the alcohol. He now seemed to have an inner peace. He had got his daughter's married and was now in the process of organizing his son's marriage.
This resumption of responsibility had delighted everyone around him and added some peace of mind to his troubled soul.
We parted good friends.
I hoped you liked today's blog.
Stay tuned!
