From the 'blues' to 'I am loving it'

10th March, 2008
Returning after just three days with the family at Calcutta to this absurd, dreamy, lost, landscaped township full of trees and birds, with sudden spouts of flaming pink bougainvilleas, at one corner of this hated dusty coal mining town, this unimaginably dirty town, that hasn’t heard of sewerage or rubbish disposal systems, taken over by rough pan chewing, tobacco chewing people from Balia and Chhapra, the emptiness hits you. You can’t imagine why you are here and what you are doing here and, in general, what’s going on. You can’t imagine examining how you are and if anyone happened to ask you the question you would mentally shoot the fellow and reply with a wan smile, “Cholchhe” and hurry on.

Its hard to imagine that only a few days ago, the first day of the forty fifth weekend (a luxury of a 3 day weekend) of the presumed one hundred and fifty two weeks of your banishment (which is the minimum, the maximum being till retirement ten years later), you were turning over in your head the idea of not seeking a transfer to Calcutta at the end of the minimum three years, since at your present location once more you had the time to write (you were on another start on a novel, putting together the framework). This was a golden opportunity for you to set out on the path that would enable you to live on writing alone, for here there was no sweat-wringing, draining commuting to work, no endless repetition of the same work, no family to be attended to and the job wasn’t too demanding.

But to get back to the blues. Last night C asked me how I was. It was the last night of the weekend at home and I told him that at the moment I didn’t know how I was and that if he asked me the question on different days of the week the answer would be different. On Mondays, I would tell him how many-eth Monday of the 152 Mondays it was. On Wednesdays I could tell him I couldn’t be better. On Fridays I could tell him, that this life was good except for the travelling that one had to do every week.

But to get back to the blues. At this moment at three thirty on such a March Monday afternoon it is suddenly urgently important for me to know how the transformation takes place from such immense loneliness and the feeling of being utterly lost that cannot be defined (I choose the word ‘blues’ instead) to acceptance, and then attachment to the situation. What I find is this.

The first assault on that feeling is by the activities that one must make a superhuman effort to perform at office, for that is why one is here, the interactions with other people who are so, so different in that they don’t have this creativity worm in their head and are considered normal in that the limit of what is required of them is earning a living, any living. Then at the end of the Monday office hours with a cigarette at the tea shop in the ‘little shopping complex’ (it should not be mistaken for the swanky things that metropolitans are use to.

It is a row of properly constructed shops with asbestos sheets covering the porch in front, set behind a levelled concrete quadrangle, stepped, to follow the ground contours. On its left side is a wall that separates it from the Durga temple; there is a Shiva temple to the left of the Durga temple and a Hanuman temple to its left and Kali temple to its left and then a Ram Sita temple. The first shop on the left of the quadrangle is a sweet shop and its owner has set up a shed adjacent to the left wall below a radhachura tree where jalebis, singaras and alu chops are fried in succession throughout the evening. There is another tree against the left wall to the front near the road. Between the two trees against the wall a plank has been nailed to two small stumps and serves as a bench where some regulars, middle aged locals, sit and chat out their boredom throughout the evening. Knowing that the owner likes his tipple I wouldn’t be surprised if a bottle were to be nested somewhere between the shed and the wall later on in the evenings. Some faded dirty red plastic chairs have been provided for the customers, mainly students from the nearby Pataliputra Medical College, which existed in its infancy in the late 1970s, auto-drivers, local labourers and a few forced-bachelor exiles like yours truly.

The next shop is a stationery shop, whose owner stands up and says namaskar to me with folded hands whenever I visit him, and who will stare at you blankly if you asked for ‘Pears’ soap or any glycerine soap. How about Surf Excel ? No. In all sincerity, meekly and apologetically he states that he only has Tide. The next one is a grocery where the sugar is brown. He stocks biscuits but in large packs and since I couldn’t buy them as I had no container to stock that quantity of biscuits he gave me a plastic air-tight container for free which he emptied of mosquito repellent tablets and advised me to wash well before use. I still buy my biscuits from the stationery shop, in small packets. The grocer stocks, rice, dal, cooking oils, as well as jharus and phool-jharus stocked against a pillar in front of his shop.

The next shop has been shut for a very long time. I was told that it was owned by a drunk who rented it from the coal company, whose township this is, at fifty rupees a month and rented it for fifty rupees a day to a fellow who ran a take away joint (again, its different!) which exiled forced-bachelors blessed. When it was doing well the drunk jacked up the rent to a hundred rupees a day and the fellow shut shop.

The next shop is a pan and cigarette shop, very ominously dark and insignificant, despite a dirty red cloth hanging from the aluminium sheet covered table for making pan right upto the floor and shiny pouches of pan masalla hanging from two thirds of the way up between the pan table and the top. The owner isn’t visible as he doesn’t sit on the raised platform as pan-shop-wallahs generally do, as here customers are far too few and he would fall off the place out of boredom were he to sit waiting for them the whole day. Instead, if one were to approach it he will appear from the left, silently, ghost-like. To the left of this shop is a dark curtain of an undistinguishable colour. The fellow lives with his wife and three visible children. Visible, because two are toddlers that are running all over the place with the third elder girl of about eight trying to mind them. She also minds the shop when daddy is away and once accurately gave me a Filter Wills and the correct change without asking me the price as I had expected her to. However, the shop-keeper’s age and since these fellows marry at fifteen, leads me to think that there was every possibility that he had a couple of adult boys working as auto drivers or khalasis somewhere in this decrepit town.

The shop to the right of this shop sells potatoes, onions and a few three or four day old vegetables and opens in the evenings, when it pleases the owner. Sometimes the shop is closed for a month when its owner goes to his ‘native’ village to Gaya or wherever.

Further to the right is another shop which too opened only on evenings, again at the whim of its owner, who worked as a clerk in the coal company. You could have your TV or music systems repaired here, all the locals did, if you had enough courage or planned to replace the thing shortly and were short of cash as many, obviously including yours truly, here were. He even repaired black & white sets.

The last shop sold milk and bakery products, (again, different! Bakery products means biscuits and puffs of the kind found in tea shops all over India and not Black Forest pastries). He has a large wooden board saying “Doodh Hai” in large Hindi letters on one side and “Doodh Nahi Hai” on the other for the convenience of customers. The tea shop where I have my tea in evenings is to the right of this shop at the edge of the concrete quadrangle.) I puff out the relief ‘Monday over’.

I get back to my room, change, groggy with sleep, write down the expenses incurred, which I started doing very religiously, right down to the last fifty p so as to be able to tell my wife exactly how much I spent on cigarettes and alcohol, which was insignificant when compared to the unnecessary wardrobe or kitchen cabinet or washing machine (maids are still cheap and easily available) though the final picture of where the thirty five or forty thou for the month went was never worked out. This takes about half an hour. Then there is puja. And after that I am not really there till called for dinner sometime after nine.

Tuesday mornings are heavy with where I was falling behind in the job re my boss and getting a fresh start on things. At the end of the day after running around the boss and tinkering over this or that job that I am never sure of and which I find quite amusing and absurd or bossing over the department I start liking the place. After tea and a cigarette at the tea shop I am keenly waiting to start on ‘my writing’ which so far has mainly been this blog. I am scared of the novel that I am supposedly writing. But neither my wife nor my boss will kill me if I finally don’t manage to write it. But what the hell, Tuesday is over!

Wednesday is positively better. The work is fun. Mornings whiz through starting with chai at the tea-shop and a cigarette from the ‘ghost’, and the newspaper that I have again begun to take from October, 2007 but don’t manage to find time for except for the time that I am having my brief lunch that I carry from ‘home’ and Puja. Of course it helps that it is nearer the weekend.

The evenings are easy paced after any shopping that I have to do and the mandatory tea and cigarette at the same tea shop and muri followed by self made black tea, which takes about 45 minutes. There is music on the lap top, a collection of Rabindrasangeet by ‘unknown’ artists and now three songs of Amy Winehouse that have possessed me and then Puja and then writing interrupted by dinner around quarter past nine. Though I still can’t afford to access the net at my place it’s nice. Lots of space. No unnecessary expenditure of time and energy on the concerns of my wife. No listening again to how she lost out on all avenues for employment because of my family. It isn’t an issue with me. She lost her life marrying me and I lost mine marrying her and we didn’t choose each other. No quarrels. And some time on my hand that I still have to learn to use better.

And thus on to Friday, happy at the prospect of being at home on Saturday evening with the irritation of the prospect at the interminable five hour journey that takes all of the Saturday evening in that impossibly crowded Black Diamond Express and getting back to the choking madhouse of a city and all the patient hearing that I have to give my family in matters that are their personal concerns and do not interest me at all and all the things that I have to get done in one Sunday and all the things that I have to get done in one second Saturday in a month and that do not all get done.

That’s how the transformation from the deep dark blues to ‘I’m loving it’ takes place.