The hospital and the silence after the storm

Staying in a hospital is not a pleasant way to spend one’s time .Especially when you are with someone who is so fearful as it can be .I haven’t seen anyone as little brave as my uncle for a very long time. The real boredom is because the illness is not so serious; in fact it is a micro level fever. You feel really jaded when someone is sleeping in front of you all the time, it’s the time when you turn into a temporary insomniac.

The only time I got out of my place was to buy drugs or to give him drugs. Our ward had three sections separated by big white movable wooden screens. Not entirely separated, there was a small path on one side of the screen leading to the window; the long window facing a large housing board colony at the end of the third room, my only way out of boredom.

We occupied the first section near the entrance; the next one was empty while the third one was occupied by a middle aged man. I never asked him about his problems, though he was very keen on chatting with me. No one can listen to something that one can’t understand, for he was talking to me in Telugu. His whole family was around him, a very quiet wife and two beautiful children; the elder one was always trying to bunk, the younger one was rather chirpy asking silly questions seriously.

The first day at the hospital was eventful as I got to meet a yesteryear gangster. Looking at him one would imagine him to be a comedian; skinny and short with a prominent goatie. He was not strong, but that’s the physical aspect .He was bold and his will-power was evident from the fact that even under tremendous amount of pain he was able to laugh at himself and make others laugh. His back was scratched with lots of dressings and plasters, according to him it was a silly train accident that landed him in that hospital.
He was drunk and was playing cards with his friends at chetpet railway station, on a platform between two railway tracks. He moved forward to give way for the first train and the same happened with the second train but third time he was not lucky as the train approaching was a goods train having a projecting ladder on one of it’s sides. That struck him hard and made him unconscious for two days. Earlier he had spent almost ten years in prison, and now a changed man all set to start a new life.

The second day was dreadful; there were two visitors to our middle aged Telugu man. Two fat middle aged women, like the people who come in weight reduction advertisements. As soon as they entered the ward they started talking, the decibel levels were slightly lesser than a heavy thunderstorm. My uncle took a towel and tied around his eyes and ears, while I tried to cover my ears with some cotton. They could see what we were doing and the fatter one started scolding the two children as if they were not responsible for our plight. It did not stop there; the fat lady slapped the fatter lady and the fatter lady retaliated by pushing the fat lady. Now the decibels were just hovering around ultrasonic range. I closed my eyes as tightly as I could and cornered myself into our room. When I opened my eyes, the room was as calm as my classroom after lunch. That is when I witnessed the silence after a storm.

The camel in the rain

I’d decided to take on French as my second language. Fortunately a friend of my father knew a French lecturer from Calicut University; he lived at Malaparamba almost twenty kilometers from my house at Poilkav.

I expected to meet an old fellow with grey hair, wearing a Chaplin coat, which was my view of a college lecturer especially a French lecturer who had been in France for quite a long period. To my surprise he wore no shirt at all, covered only by a checked lungi and a loose fitted shoes, he stood upside down on hard cemented floor. He was unbearably philosophical and the only thing that made him French was not his crystal clear French accent but his well groomed French beard.

Madhan sir’s house was at the top of a hill where no vehicle could travel, thank God I didn’t have one otherwise I could have faced parking problems. The path about the hill was not a pleasant one, all sorts of insects roaming around, but the greenish tint around was certainly pleasing.

I was returning to Calicut bus depot, walking along the footpath with an umbrella to shield from the scorching sun. Suddenly, it was drizzling and within minutes the drizzle turned violent and unimaginable .First rain of the season, brings out the aroma of the soil. Mango showers had set in early and it was raining quite heavily. Mango showers are generally accompanied by heavy thunderstorm and lightning, while the wind was almost catching up with Shoaib Akthar.

On crossing a bridge to the bus stand, a stranger approached me. He had a look of an AGMARK keralite wearing a white mundu and creamy shirt coupled with a trademark rubber ‘hawai’. With nobody around the place he was almost pleading to get him to the bus stand under my umbrella. The bus stand was at least a half mile from there. I couldn’t reject him, as and when he got into my umbrella he behaved like the Camel of the Arabian deserts. He came very close to me, pushing and holding me tightly with his right hand.

All of a sudden I remembered about the stories about the thieves in the town ,a week ago my cousin had clued-up about how well dressed young men would get under your umbrella’s during rainy season and steal your valuables.

We were walking over that very deserted bridge, dancing all the way with my left hand on the umbrella and the other on my back trouser, trying to guard my money. Alas, we reached the crowded end of the bridge and a red bus was fast approaching us in the opposite direction. My heart was pumping up and in a moment of madness I pushed the stranger on a muddy pavement ,running all the way to the other side of the bridge, and managed to hold on to a red bus. Looking back through the rear window of the bus I heaved a sigh of relief thinking that I’d outwitted a smart thief.

I heard somebody saying ‘rendu nathapuram’. That was exactly opposite to the place I was heading to.I got down at the next station and managed an auto back to the main bus stand.

The rain was at it’s best bashing everything around, through the glass pane of the closed auto I could see a bleeding man wearing muddy cloth “screeeech” ,the auto man braked his sedan to get an old couple into his auto. For a second, I thought someone spotted me.

Back home an hour later, I couldn’t digest the fact that my cousin had lied to me.
I should have remembered; he was good at making up stories.

As a little boy

Numbers fascinated me, and it still does. As a little boy, my father unfailingly picked me up from school at the dot of four and drove me home in his dark blue Kinetic Honda. It was seven kilometers of monotonous journey and thick evening traffic made it impossible to reach home before four thirty. My father has this queer habit of never moving his lips while he drove, not that he feared any insects entering his mouth but he preferred to take us home safely.

As I said, it was monotonous and I had to find a hobby, something that would keep me occupied for half an hour every evening. They taught me multiplications and divisions in school. Borrowing for subtraction was one thing I never liked, and would feel a void in my brain whenever I tried to subtract a big clumsy number from a number with lots of zeroes as its tail. Addition was my favorite, it was simple, one at a time and you could merrily add numbers all through the day. I used to spend most my time counting; the number of chairs, number of steps to my class, number of traffic signals on the way, number of white cars and so on and so forth.

There were a lot of hoardings (name boards in front of the shop) around the place, especially the soft drink boards above each little petty shop, beaming the famous brands with the names of the shops at the bottom of the board; as it were the explanations to the asterisk of a “conditions apply.”

I liked Pepsi; at that time one of my ambitions in life was to drink at least one bottle of Pepsi before I die. The blue and red trademark was so appealing to me that I hated Coke for its sheer bloody red. This rivalry was just the prelude of a year long hobby, the Game of Count. I would count the number of Pepsi and Coke boards from my school to our corner Juice shop at Greams Road (that had a Pepsi board at that time and a Coke board now, may be that was also a reason for my love of Pepsi.) and then to our single-bedroom apartment near Anna flyover. To my disappointment Coke won on most of the days, and I would never accept it; calling for a re-count the very next evening.

Soon, I got bored of counting the boards; I began counting the names of the brands even on the grates stocked in front of the shops. It was a tedious job, I couldn’t count Pepsi and Coke at the same time, and therefore, I made a schedule. I would count Pepsi on Monday and Tuesday and Coke on Wednesday and Thursday. When Coke count came very close to Pepsi on Thursday, I would consciously wink my eyes at Coke boards and behave as if I never saw them, and thereby giving a chance to poor Pepsi. Friday was reserved for adjustments, I looked for shops that I had missed on the first four days and would enter the new data into my little rough note, provided Pepsi was lagging and somehow that was always the case.

After many a re-counting, I realized that Pepsi could never win alone against the mighty Coke. What Pepsi required was an ally, and I thought Thumps up was Pepsi’s natural ally (I Know it’s not, and you know it’s not but I didn’t know that then, you see I was a very little boy then and ‘believed’ myself to be very intelligent.) Similarity in the color combination, the appealing blue and red alliance was enough to convince me that they were bottled by the same company. And finally, after all my efforts Pepsi won the Game. It was all my effort; I considered it as a great achievement of my school life.

I never reckoned the orange and green drinks as soft drinks, they were drinks of children and I dealt only with drinks of older men, for my father would never allow me to drink any of those brown drinks.

Whenever I go near my old school, involuntarily I begin to count the name boards. Well aware that Thumps up is officially a coke brand, I must find a new ally to my dear Pepsi.

P.S: This is not a work of fiction