Tiger Tiger

The tiger, I had come to the conclusion, was a mythical heast.

Years of tramping up to its supposed haunt on days spent peering out of car windows, open jeeps, elephant backs and machans on freezing mornings, and even on foot (quite illegally of course) for four days and nights at Ranthambore (where you are supposed to trip on a tiger if you don’t watch out and the beasts answer to their names), and not a sight. Cheetals aplenty, sambars, nilgais, barasingas and blackbucks, wild boars straight from the pages of Asterris, all these were there. The tuskers in Corbett all knew me by sight and posed for photographs, but of the larger camivores, not a sight. That is, if you don’t consider the possible ear among the elephant grass, which could have beerraleaf or the thing like an ant near the horizon which disappears by the time the binocs are focussed or the sudden movement just beyond you when your co-passenger on the elephant or jeep screams ‘tiger oye’ and the mahout or guide glares at you.

Of course, there are signs in plenty. Pug marks dot the track as if a government sponsored canine rally it just over, droppings indicate severe epidemics of gas-tro-enteritis among the carnivores, left over kills hunt at orgies in open air, and the roars at night that could be ‘Him’ or a misfiring Maruti.

At Corbett and Sunderbans, Sariska and Ranthambore, Gorumara and Jaldapara, Periar and Rajaji, I drew similar blanks..

I was baffled by all this till the film ‘Electric Moon’ provided a clue. Thereafter I went on keeping a sharp eye for forest jeeps with pug mark tracks, hidden microphones in elephant grass and butcher’s vans making delivery runs.

All this till Kanha happened. Falling for the spiel about kipling country from the attractive lady at the tourist office. We booked into the jungle lodge, at Kanha Tiger Reserve and took a slow train to Jabalpur. An interminable wait at the bus stop for the lone bus only to be told it won’t make an appearance, and exorbitant and jarning marathon taxi ride, a jungle lodge disclaiming all knowledge of reservations, the power cuts and candle-lit dal roti, did not augur well for the trip.

The early morning jeep safari at Rs. 8 a km, our eyes firmly giued to the audiometer and the mind busy calculating the budget and cash balance (credit cards not having penetrated kipling country yet) kept our attention away from cheetal, pug marks, droppings, etal – till the second day.

It began well with a bull buffalo threatening us for photographing its cows, a barasingha with a bureaucratic reluctance to move and mon pug marks when finally hi-tech piped in. A wireless message to the effect that a big cat had been spotted on a kill made us rush to the nearest track and carry on from there on elephant back.

Suddenly, six feet from us, a sight that made all the trouble worthwhile – the Real Thing. A pair of tigers on a kill. Dissatisfied with the short glimpse after a long wait reminiscent of a ‘darshan’ of a deity and tipped off by a ranger that they will return to the kill, we returned the next day. For a handsome tip, our h=mahout let us stare uninterrupted for almost one hour at the gruesome sight of the feast.

Finally, we kill , or young buffalo was almost exhausted and a very brief battle for the spoils ensued, accompanied by roar, trumpeting elephants and screaming tourists.

The sudden commotion made me drop my camera and the unforgettable sight was captured only in the mind’s eye in audiovisual splendour. For the roar of the free beast of six feet is something you cannot ever forget. The creature in the wild appears to be a completely different species from the sad specimens we see in our zoos and circuses.

I’ve come back converted. The tiger is alive and roaring..

Short Story

THE MARRIAGE STORY AND ITS MORAL

I was on a Calcutta-bound Rajdhani when a fascinating family drama unfolded across the passage. I was occupying a berth on the passage side of the coach. Opposite me the four berths were taken by two couples - a pair of young billing- and- cooing newly weds and a comfortably chattering and graying pair.

I could gather that the senior pair of partners were on their way back home after visiting their son in Delhi, while the junior ones were going to their home town on a vacation.

Lulled by the soothing chatter and contemplating the blissful state of matrimony – I was single then – I was dozing off, when a disruption in the flow caught my attention. All was not well with the young love-birds. He had ceased billing and was scowling into a newspaper, occasionally snapping at her in gruff growls. She had stopped cooing and was staring fixedly out of the window, occasionally snapping back in shrill retorts. There was less of the turtle dove and more of snapping turtles in their demeanour.

Why this dramatic transformation? The mystery had to be solved. A bit of judicious eavesdropping, made easier by the rising decibels of their snaps and counter-snaps, threw light. The issue at stake was their destination.

On their first holiday home after marriage with both sets of parents being in Calcutta or

thereabouts, whom should the children visit first? The bride was all for going straight to

her place from the station. She argued convenience, sentiment and agony of long

separation. He differed and argued prestige, tradition and precedent in favour of his own

folk in the suburbs.

Her arguments soon gave way to sniffles tending towards sobs thus trumping his

arguments. He now suggested that they appeal to the superior experience and wisdom of

the couple opposite for a solution to the impasse. She demurred slightly and agreed.

The senior duo, in contrast, seemed all this, while an advertisement for domestic bliss.

The perfect contentment, the absolute relaxation in each other’s company – in short, a picture of comfortable matrimony that made me wistfully re-examine my riotous single state.

The question was put to the gentleman and he eagerly took the mantle of the judge and ascertained all details by close questioning . He gave his verdict. “You must visit the place that is closer to the station first” The sweet young thing clapped in victory, but our he-man objected, “just a minute. Measured with a tap, konnagar in the suburbs is just as far as Salt Lake. It is the psychological distance that is more, “he quipped. The judge agreed.

The verdict was revised - they should first visit whoever came to receive them at the station. The young lady squealed in victory. It was her parents who were to receive their darling. Our young man seemed to accept defeat with bad grace, grumbling under his breath. “ If my parents had a car and a chauffeus……”

The elder wife, meanwhile, was taking it all in silently but her expression had undergone a change. Her smile grew fixed and then disappeared, a grimace replacing it . Now she stepped in, or rather burst out.

“Oh yes Fine chap; you are to give advice. Remember 30 years back when we were coming to Calcutta for the first time after marriage? Whose house was closer - Ballygunge or your stinking Bandel? Whose parents had come to receive us, mine or yours? Who sent the car? And where did we go?

The dam had burst. The flood swept all. For the rest of the journey, not a single word was exchanged between our senior citizens. Surprisingly, the juniors appeared to have made their peace but things could not have been worse across the aisle.

Years later, when I married, my parents-and in-laws were separated by an ocean..

Review

White Tiger- Review

This year's surprise Booker winner appears to be a cynical attempt at garnering awards and sales by blatantly pandering to the western media's preoccupation with India's ills.
The protagonist of the novel is a rebellious and exceptionally intelligent boy of the Halwai caste in a small village in Gaya who works in a tea shop and is latter picked up as a driver by the local Jamindar. This boy - “the white tiger” - a rare creature among the obsequious Indians - kills his employer in Delhi and absconds with money meant for bribing a politician. He then proceeds to set up a taxi company catering to the IT industry in Bangalore as a way of salvation. The interesting point to note here is that the employer murdered by the protagonist is shown to be the most sympathetic among the members of his class. He is the 'good' master as opposed to the 'bad' masters, and the White Tiger adores him. He resorts to murder upon getting disillusioned with the perfection of the master's character. Adiga doesn't fail to mention here that the good master was 'good' simply because of his American education, and that it were his Indian educated counterparts who lacked moral fibre. A unique and novel hypothesis no doubt.
Adiga's skill as a narrator is evident and the plot is crafted well enough to keep the reader engrossed throughout, making it a potential bestseller. The writer's adroitness with the techniques of narration is also apparent from the fact that the entire story is written from the perspective of and in the words of a semi-literate self taught working class man, who has picked up his vocabulary largely from eavesdropping. Despite being a difficult style to sustain throughout a novel, Adiga has accomplished this.
However, the novel is written without sympathy or affection. Moreover the depiction of India is replete with numerous factual errors. The funeral procession is supposed to have marched from Gaya to Banaras - a physically impossible feat, and a women is shown to be leading the procession - an equal cultural impossibility. Adiga has a poor idea of India's socio political structure, for he has portrayed halwais as of the lower castes, which is not the case, and seems to think that drivers in cities necessarily double as personal slaves. Adiga claims that drinking while driving occurs only in India, the reason being “this is not America”. This would be news to most readers. Such careless homework takes away from the impact of the story whose premises are that the solution to the India's poverty is individual violence by the oppressed against any representative of the oppressors.
The obvious target audience of this book, the white imperialist Western world, is apparent from phrases like “Rama, a Hindu God”. No Indian audience needs clarification as to who Rama is and any reader of a Booker winning novel is meant to be literate enough for cultural references.
Adiga was a correspondent with Time magazine and travelled in the Hindi heartland on business. We presume the novel is based upon his limited observations during the short trips. The novel has received both critical acclaim and heavy sales post the award. A great business strategy this may be, but as literature this definitely does not qualify.

Bowling out the Raj

Now that beating England in Cricket is passe for India, and other erstwhile colonies make for bigger competition, it is difficult to imagine the Euphoria of the first series win against the former rulers, especially for my grandfather's generation.
This was a middle on this issue published again in The Times of India

Bowling out the Raj

My grandfather was a civil servant in British India and was rewarded with a prefix of Rai Bahadur for years of devoted service to the Raj. We grew up with a strong dose of nationalist literature and films—this was the era before television and its numerous khadi serials—and imbibed the fact that all such desi bastions of the British Raj were worthy of ridicule, if not worse. Although we could not quite reconcile our straight-backed, stern-faced grandfather with either the lampoons or the villains we saw on celluloid or found in print, this did not prevent us from grilling him about his loyalties.
His anecdotes about several current politicians and ministers whom he had sent to jail in the days of old—when the representatives of the British Raj were the judge, jury and executors of justice—added to this image. The incongruous note was that the same politicians and ministers did not exactly fit into the heroic image of freedom fighters of screen and print—in fact quite the contrary. Jail seemed to be a fit place for most of the leaders anyway. Nevertheless, we continued to torment him on his loyalties and his role as the enemy of the people. He defended himself claiming that he only did his duty and did it well and administered the province a whole lot better than the erstwhile jailbirds did today.
He confessed to an occasional dereliction of duty, by passivity or relaxed vigil which may have aided these impulsive youngsters and the deep sorrow he felt when an execution, the penalty for such impulses, came up in his district.
He, however, remembered the assassination of his close friend and colleague, an English D.C., with great pain, and spoke of the senseless anguish to his innocent family. In contrast, he had scant respect for the leaders of the local khadi brigade, whose maximum penalty was a few months in a 1st class jail.

Decades after his retirement, when Wadekar and his knights errant were reawakening our jingoistic zeal with their heroic deeds in distant lands, topping it all by beating the British Lion in his own dismal den, the raucous celebrants hunched around the transistor had an elderly member. With tears streaming down his cheeks he applauded the India victory. He told us, “You will not understand what this means to me. We beat the masters—at their own game—the game they taught us.
We beat them in their own home. These lads are all right. They remind me of those youngsters in Midnapore...” It was the field of sports that finally settled the questions of true loyalties.

Nude Interlude

This is one of my middles published in The Times of India.

The Nude Interlude


This is a story of my maternal great-grandfather, the scion of a feudal family in strained circumstances, who was pursuing his higher education in Calcutta with a view to improving these circumstances through the good offices of the British Raj or the courts of justice, whatever luck offered. This he ultimately did, in both the court of justice—as an advocate and later through the British—via the neither very Bengali nor quite Civil nor really Service oriented Bengal Civil Service.
However this story has nothing to do with all this. This is a romantic interlude which predates his career days, when even great-grandfathers are bashful teenagers in repressed times being crushed in the treadmill of education. At the ripe young age of seventeen, he entered the holy and solemn state of wedlock, with a young heiress of another feudal family from the other side of the river Damodar—with as ancient a lineage and as exalted a subcaste as his, but with a significant difference—that of a far better financial position. He did this at the behest of his elders and betters—with the same end in view as his Calcutta education: improving the family circumstances.
His young bride was all of five years old, and brought him vast tracts of land and the means of continuing his studies. But marriage did not mean a life of domestic bliss for the couple. It would not have been practical anyway as he would be more of a baby-sitter than a husband and he would have to wait nearly a decade before his bride came of age and came to grace his household. In the meanwhile he could visit his in-laws on the occasion of ‘jamaisasthi’—when son-in-laws all over Bengal are feted for a day—to compensate for the other 364.
But the young man would not be content with so little. So, on his long trek back to his village from the nearest railhead—on his way back from college during breaks—he would make a detour and cross the Damodar near his bride’s village. Perhaps he did that to get a quick glimpse of his young bride, but more likely to enjoy the lavish hospitality—the birthright of a jamai—at his well-to-do in laws.
On the occasion of our story, he was on his way to one such unscheduled visit when, sighting him at the river ghat, the village belles gave the call, Jamai esheche!—the son-in-law has come—and ran to announce the news so that his hosts could come and request him to spend a few days there. This was the usual ritual.
But this time one member of the bathing party stayed back to stare at the jamai. Who else but the young bride, alone with the jamai for the first time? A classic romantic scene—the river ghat, the freshly bathed heroine, the travel weary hero— but with a difference. Our tiny heroine was in the buff— her only item of apparel, a mini saree, was neatly bunched and held under one arm. My great-grandfather had not bargained for such a meeting with his bride and glared at her in consternation. His bride burst into tears, threw down the sari and streaked home bewailing Jamai choch koreche!—the son-in-law has made eyes at me!