Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

If you read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories, you will understand what makes a city, its people and their lives.  The stories collectively say what Rome is to people who stay in the city or visit it. However, the themes are diverse. The Boundary is about a family which moves to rural Italy leaving their city life. P’s Party is about a writer whose preoccupation with a woman works itself into a hysteria of sexual desire and then he does something he lives to regret. P’s Party moves at a pace brisker than other stories in the collection.

More than the stories, it’s Jhumpa Lahiri”s languid, carefree prose which drew me to the book reminding me of the pleasures of reading her Unaccustomed Earth. However, it was a bit strange to imagine that I was reading a translated work, originally written in Italian, of a writer who until a few years ago wrote famous books in English.

At the time Roman Stories became available in India, I had read its review and had decided to get my hands on the book, but other releases in subsequent weeks had somewhat diminished my interest in it. One day I was in a large book store not for any particular book but to generally update myself with the latest releases and to reconnect with some old ones. A foreigner within earshot was asking a store assistant if they had Roman Stories – and the latter was not able to follow him. There was a copy of Roman Stories in front of me – I picked it up and gave it to the foreigner. A conversation ensued.

“This book is a translation from Italian and only a few years back Lahiri was a sensation in the world of English writing,” I said breaking the ice.

“Ohh…she is a scholar. As much as it is difficult to write a book in our own language…” He replied.  

The interest the book review had generated in me, which had diminished in subsequent weeks, rushed back. I purchased Roman Stories.

A theme that keeps recurring in the stories is the immigrant problem. Well Lit House is, of course, about a migrant family which bears the brunt of xenophobia. Most of the family moves back to their country of origin and the husband chooses to leave the white locality.  But the migrant theme keeps recurring in other stories suggesting that it’s now impossible to consider the Roman demographic scape without considering them.

But other characters also come up. A diplomat’s wife, an elderly lady who lives alone, youngsters who have taken to criminal activities, the book is a truly inclusive canvas.

A Room of One’s Own

I always knew A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf was a novel (maybe my ignorance) and was surprised to discover one day at a bookstore that it’s a compilation of Woolf’s lectures at Oxford. The lectures are on literature with a keen focus on feminism. From Woolf’s childhood and how she was brought up as against her brothers’ upbringings to the misogyny of famous writers and thinkers, it includes everything. Woolfs, by the way, were a huge brood of siblings.

The lectures are a constant attack on patronizing attitude towards women. The attacks are well-reasoned arguments from a proud feminist and intellectual, and not laments of someone seeking sympathy. Woolf shines a light on women geniuses who had to give up on their pursuits because of discouragements and beliefs of a male-dominated society. Some of these women live in perpetual obscurity. She talks about talented women who had to give up on their talent and continue to live in obscurity overshadowed by their male relatives, or known only by their association with them. A very-talented sister of Shakespeare, who had undeniable literary talent, lies in an obscure grave. Similarly, there are many other women who gave up on their literary aspirations sometimes in fear of what other male writers would say about their outputs and it was considered completely normal to do so. She also talks admiringly about 19th century greats like Austin and Gorge Eliot.

A Room Of One’s Own is not political feminism with some predefined villains and an agenda. The views are mainly framed by personal experiences and reading. 

Chandra and Cats

Chandrakant sees a WhatsApp message and is immediately put off by it. That resident- what was his name? Chandra can’t recall – has again made a silly comment and triggered a comment storm in the group.

Comment explosions had hardly bothered Chandra earlier. But ever since he had become head of the executive committee two months ago, every comment that had a potential to trigger a comment storm worried him.

Sometimes people attacked him directly. Sometimes they sent cryptic messages to target him. Chandra, otherwise a sensitive man, is slowly getting used to it.

The cause for concern is an elderly woman and some stray cats she feeds. The cats have made the society their home. Under the staircase, in the children’s playing area, on the window sills, they or their bodily waste is everywhere.

They defecate in the children’s area burying their fecal content in the sand often exhumed by children while playing in it. Several of society’s children have contracted viral infection. Now any kid falling sick is blamed on the sand.

Parents are worked up. There is tension in the air. All of them don’t express their anger by posting comments on the Whatsapp group, some of them do. Chandra knows the actual anger is much more than what’s expressed in the Whatsapp group. He is concerned if anything serious happens to any child, residents will direct their wrath at him.

The lady who feeds strays always spoils for a fight. She doesn’t admit the stray cats are responsible for anything and a violent argument ensues. But Chandra knows whenever he approached the lady to tell her not to feed strays, he was too diffident.

“Caaa…can I request you to feed the cats outside the society?”

“What’s your problem if I feed them here? What harm these poor things have done to anyone?” The woman had retorted loudly.  She has a reputation of being eccentric. She doesn’t need any provocation to go completely hysterical.

Because of her hostility, no one is willing to approach her to ask her to not feed the cats inside the building.

When Chandra had been approached with this problem about the lady, he was just a few weeks old in the management committee. Earlier he had heard about the woman and had thanked his stars she was not on the same floor as Chandra’s. Being approached with the problem was the first time Chandra had felt the rough side of the job.

He was always reluctant to volunteer for a position in EC. He had done it to avert a crisis. The former EC team’s term had expired and no one was volunteering to form a new EC team. Chandra is a private person but he often sticks out his neck for common interest…and surprises himself by doing so. He never knew so many residents would vote for him. When they did, it was a mixed feeling. Euphoria accompanied by foreboding.

It is then that Rajat came up with an idea. The idea was not particularly novel, but it felt like a magic bullet which could solve the problem.

“Let”s ask our facility manager to catch the cats, put them in his scooter and leave them in a far- away place where the felines wouldn’t be able to find their way back home,” Chandra had said.

A big basket was purchased. It was put in the leg space of a scooter. But the FM couldn’t catch them. He tried a week later, making sure the cat feeding lady wasn’t around.

After a few failures, the facility manager left food laced with sedatives strewn in various places. It helped him to catch the cats and put them in his basket. The cats were transported, one at a time, to a distant location.

It was discreetly told to some residents in the society, and the word spread among other residents. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief.

Residents had expected the cat feeding lady to come to know about the covert operation and create a racket. But that didn’t happen.

She was uncharacteristically composed going about her life as if nothing had happened. Some people said she had come to know about the location where the cats were released and was going there to feed them. Some said they had seen her going by scooter carrying food. No one knew what had really happened.

Be that as it may, the security guards and facility staff were told to make sure no cat entered the society. Some years ago they had been able to successfully prevent dogs from entering the society by simply keeping the main gates shut.

But cats are different. They have good memories. After sometime all the discarded felines retuned to the society. Cats are also nimble. They can scale walls.

This time the cats were again given food laced with sedatives, captured and released outside. And the entire skyline of the society was covered by iron mesh. That helped.

After sometime people forgot. But they started complaining about rats. Their numbers rose and it became normal to see them scurrying around. Then someone said we need those cats back.

Chandra and the cat loving old lady laughed. Chandra because his terms was up by then. The cat feeding lady because of a sadistic pleasure.

Papyrus – A fascinating read if a little parochial, a book review

After defeating Darius 3 to conquer Persia, when Alexander had walked into Darius’s palace and into his living room with his acolytes, they had found an exquisite box. Alexander had asked his men what he could keep in the box that would be befitting its exquisiteness. Gold and rare stones his men had replied. “No, I will keep my Iliad in it,” the world conqueror had shot back.

We have always had a strange relationship with books. Books have been revered, feared, assiduously preserved and burned. A look at how books continue to face proscription around the world – whether it’s Rushdie’s Satanic Verses or Orwel’s 1984 – will tell you that our relationship with books has hardly transformed.  But books as we know them certainly have.  Books have evolved from engravings on stones to papyrus and animal skin scrolls to how we know them now. These developments range several thousands of years. Books predate and coexist with any historical event (empires, emperors, invasions, periods) you can think of. They form fascinating history, and Irine Vallejo has narrated it in Papyrus in a fascinating manner.

The book cover sets the expectation with the reader that Papyrus is only about earliest seminal books. But a few pages later you realize yes, it is but you are in for much more. The world that those books belonged to, their politics, evolution of languages, their adoption, starting and ending of civilizations, let alone empires, evolution of educational systems and so on. In short, Irine has dealt with a subject that spans probably all human developments from the beginning of civilization to date.

And yet you never feel that the narrative is going off the tangent. Each incident, personality, event which has contributed to the development of books and help build an ecosystem around them to sustain them and pass them on to posterity, is mindboggling. 

Each one opens up a whole new world of knowledge before you. Kudos of course to the subject she  has chosen, but also to her ability to pull together everything into a coherent narrative.

As I write this, I find it tempting to take you deep into at least one of the many worlds she recreates – its richness of details, diversity and fascinating-ness – but it would be unfair to talk about one and leave out another.

But broadly speaking, the Papyrus can be divided into two parts – ancient Greece and Roman Empire – and their cultural exchanges. The Roman Empire, for all its material achievements, was culturally inferior to Greece.

Rome’s writers were fewer and less celebrated than those of Greece producing fewer books than their Greek counterparts. To make up for it, Romans used to have Greek scribes, who were mostly slaves to rich Roman men, make Latin copies of Greek books and put them in their libraries passing them off as Roman literature.

Before printing arrived, books used to be manually copied and circulated to libraries and for personal possession. Books were costly and were mostly a privilege of the rich; beyond the means of commoners. Rome’s cultural cussedness notwithstanding, books and reading became more democratized and common during Roman Empire.

The book captures the developments that propelled books further post the classical European age very briefly. Great books, storage and dissemination systems that existed outside Europe, particularly in India, at the same time as the classical period in Europe, like Nalanda, have not found any mention. The geographical spread of the main narrative is Greece, the Roman Empire with a long halt in Egypt to cover the Library of Alexandria as the narrative mooring and referral point. The Euro centric focus of the book makes it a bit parochial, but it also keeps open the possibility of a sequel.

Joseph, a Man of Decency and Humour

When we saw Joseph the first time, he had looked and sounded like an academic. Every bit a gentleman, he seemed keenly interested in technology and any manual effort where technology could do the job, upset him.  Joseph had replaced Emilia who, as rumours had it, had been laid off and asked to identify 20 other people whose roles could be transferred to a lower cost economy, following which who would be fired.

Emilia was a German lady who had set up the team, ground up, a few years ago. She knew all the processes like the back of her hand. I used to find her meticulousness a bit tiring. She used to find me a little strange.

By the time we met Joseph, Emilia was firmly placed in our past. We were on the verge of a new beginning, bracing ourselves for a new leadership. In the outsourcing world, each time a role moves from one geography to another, it changes in many ways, although on paper it remains the same.

Joseph was a very different leader. Emilia was opposed to us taking up any excess work even if it meant saying no to our client. Joseph was open to anything as long as the client was happy. Emilia was hands on; Joseph was completely hands off. (He had told in his farewell that his leadership style was handing over controls to the team.) Emilia was obsessed with details; Joseph couldn’t care less about them. Emilia was like a mean machine; Joseph was kind and capacious.

With Emilia it was always like walking a tight rope, facing scrutiny; with Joseph I felt relaxed. As time went by more aspects of Joseph’s personality came through. He was jovial with a good sense of humour. In his presence you never felt uneasy. He used to have small conversations with each one of us, sometimes cracked jokes on his, which made him endearing. He was affectionate and warm.

Joseph had an innate sobriety, but he could be firm when he needed to.

When Issac shared the funeral announcement of Joseph on my WhatsApp one day, it delivered a shock and incomprehension we experience rarely. After sometime, when the news sank, my mind raced back to the last time I had met Joseph in person.

Lockdown was slowly getting a little relaxed. Some onsite leaders were going to visit our Bangalore office. We were asked to visit office to meet them.

I reached office a little late. I gingerly stepped into the conference room where the discussion was ongoing. The atmosphere was jovial. There were laughter and occasional jokes. I saw Joseph standing at a corner looking frail and emaciated. Later when I met him at the pantry, I asked him why he had lost so much weight. “And you have put on weight, Indra,” he replied.

For a snap I felt he avoided my question, but the thought dissipated soon after. Only to return more than a year later when Issac shared the WhatsApp message, the invitation to Joseph’s funeral.

And I slowly realized that my question to Joseph about his weight loss was an unintended knock on a door Joseph wanted to keep firmly closed. That the weight loss had been caused by his terminal illness and its attendant treatment: intestinal cancer.

He left the job three to four months after I met him at the office. Typically when anyone resigns, particularly if the person was in a leadership position, the name of their next company spreads like bush fire. Joseph’s resignation news wasn’t accompanied by any of that. There was no gossip. Not many people, in fact, seemed to know about it.

On the farewell call something was amiss. Joseph said he wasn’t going to join any company, that he wanted to start a business. When people asked what business he wanted to start, he said he would figure that out once he was out of the company.

At that time it had sounded somewhat strange; it’s only in hindsight, after I heard his death news, that the pieces came together and made the whole. That his cancer was at an advanced stage, that he knew his days were numbered, that he didn’t want to reveal it and spoil our party.

In retrospect, when I put together Joseph’s joviality with the physical suffering he would have been going through and the knowledge that his days were numbered, the poignancy of it all reminds of that character in the movie Anand.

Joseph passed away eight months after the farewell call. His cancer was at the last stage. The treatment in Bangalore had failed and he had decided to spend his last days in his native place, in Kerela. 

The humorous man that he was, he would have been laughing at us during the farewell call – hearing us praise him to the sky, trying to figure out his plans post the job.

The names have been changed. 

Shravan Kumar’s Agony

Shravan left home for office. He would catch a bus to the metro station. His office is just opposite the metro station. In last ‘six or seven’ years Metro has reached every corner of the city. And then there are flyovers and underpasses connecting the city further.

Shravan has seen most of it happen in front of his own eyes. After all, he has spent roughly 30 years in the city. Albeit, he still feels like a stranger in the city…. At least a man on the margins.

He never learnt the local language. Not because he had any contempt for it, but because there was no need to learn it. Initially speaking some broken English was enough, but slowly knowing Hindi became necessary. Although Shravan knew Hindi better than anyone in the city, the population, food and cultural change that took over the city, use of Hindi being one of them, didn’t make Shravan very happy.

Shravan is from north. When a job brought him to the city, he didn’t like it and wanted to leave the following year. But one year led to another, but Sharavan never left.

Now the city feels like an extension of himself…. a place where he truly belongs…. or does he ? Are people like him really considered as insiders or outsiders pretending as insiders? Shravan is not really sure…but by now his town in the north surely considers him an outsider, he knows. He has not been there for ages; their old house was sold out some years ago. That place where he grew up, the lanes, the street corners, the shops, the tea stall – all have surrendered to the inevitability of change.

His friends, Lekhu, Kamal, Dipu, are all settled in different parts of the country. With some of them he has managed to stay in touch, others have dissolved walked into the mists of time.

A car zipped past Sharavan and he jumped back to the footpath. Nowadays having a car has become a luxury. Back when Sharavan owned a car, many people had cars. But then they brought in rules making car ownership problematic.

They removed all private parking but didn’t increase the number of paid government parking slots, and increased their per hour rates instead. They started towing away cars parked in wrong places.

When people protested they said the city had become too polluted, there were too many cars , that so many cars weren’t good for the climate, what planet are we going to leave for our children. These were the polite versions; the impolite and informal one was the city owed its woes to the people who had come from outside. Like Shravan.

Even as car ownership became problematic, public transport improved – particularly the metro.

Sensing that car ownership was becoming a luxury few could afford, some car owners and manufacturers created a brouhaha. But nothing changed. Slowly people started avoiding taking out their cars and using public transport, instead. Sharavan sold his car with a broken heart – it was a 16 years old hatchback, but had served him well.

When he had discussed his agony of selling his car with Nagesh, who had migrated to Ireland some years ago, Nagesh had said, “this is exactly how things are in Ireland, and continued, “the Irish govt does it to regulate pollution and cars crowding the city and causing traffic snarls.”

But how did it answer Shravan’s question? Nagesh always failed to see the emotional side of questions. Shravan didn’t appreciate being relegated to aggregates. But that was long time ago…at least eight years. Shravan doesn’t remember talking to Nagesh after that.

After a few text messages from Sharavan to Naresh had gone unanswered, Shravan had written him off as a friend. Similarly, so many others who Sharavan had once considered at least companions if not friends had disappeared into the folds of time.

Friends have always been difficult to come by for Shravan….now at this age he finds it more pleasurable to talk to himself. Recently he read a book which said the nature always wants to talks to us if only we have time to listen. So when he goes for morning walks, he looks at trees and slowly he has started feeling they are talking to him. Sharavan crossed the road…and walked into his office.

The Nutmeg’s Curse: A Review

To tell one story Amitav Ghosh tells another story in The Nutmeg Curse: Parables for A Planet In Crisis. The book is a sequel to The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Albeit the connection between the two books ends there. The Great Derangement had a tight scope: apathy of serious literature towards climate events.  Nutmeg’s Case, the sequel, on the other hand, has an expansive canvas: the book seems to carry the onus of telling the whole story about how capitalism is to blame about our present climate woes.

The narrative starts with brutal takeover of Banda Island by the Dutch for nutmeg but from there it moves to America during civil war. And from there, it further goes to other regions of the West to talk about the pernicious effects of treating the Earth as a resource.

But, to the decerning reader, the purpose of this narrative excess is always very clear; in fact as the countries and events come into the narrative sweep, the clearer it becomes: a strong indictment of imperialism and capitalism for looking upon all inanimate, natural things as resources to be used to fulfil greed.

The book scrutinizes both past and present to make some interesting points. The pandemic, which rocked the world couple of years ago and whose grip the world is slowly emerging from, was handled better by less capitalistic and “developed” countries like Cuba, Vietnam and even some African countries. According to Ghosh, their equitable societies and systems helped them respond to the pandemic better.

Wars, even those going back to the 19th century, are some of the biggest contributors to climate change. On a more specific note, Ghosh blames the advanced technologies used in famous war campaigns of the 19th century; the Opium War, for example, is one of them. There are many such advanced weaponry deployed by super powers in the wars they wage in modern times are equally to blame. “These technologies are not out of use in peace times,” he observes.

Amitabh Ghosh traces the origins of anti-climate activities to supremist beliefs which enjoyed wide subscription mostly among the educated white elites in the 18th and 19th centuries in England. Obnoxiously racist, these theories insisted that ‘weaker races’, African and other non Europeans races, would eventually die out, justifying colonial projects and the exploitation of humans and nature they involved.

The book observes that our pursuit of scientific truth to the exclusion of everything else has obscured us to the secrets of the natural world. That centuries of imperialism have marginalized the belief that nature is a living entity. That this marginalization was brought by imperialism relegating natives to the margins. And that movements around vitality of nature are breaking out in different parts of the world.

Amitav Ghosh is one of the greatest living writers. And as is expected of him, the book is an excellent piece of argument on why we should singularly blame capitalism and its various expressions for the  planetary crisis we are going through, but to blame capitalism alone, overlooking the industrialization that the communist countries went through in the 20th century, is to discuss one side of a problem.

It’s harmful if climate concerns get appropriated by the global Left. The more to the centre climate concerns remain, the easier it is to build a consensus across ideological barriers, to enlist more people to the cause.

Colonialism shouldn’t be seen through the prism of capitalism. Capitalism as an administrative idea hadn’t shaped up in the 18th and 19th centuries. If some men’s profiteering motive is capitalism, then it can be argued that capitalistic tendencies come more naturally to us unless we are conditioned by information/ awareness specific to a time period. Some people acting out of avarice in a world without international rules and oversight, is mere chaos, not capitalism.

Some people acting without any concern for something is ignorance caused by absence of awareness. It’s not capitalism. People live by the rules of their times. Toppling statues of 19th century figures would cause chaos, encourage unruliness. Not correct past wrongs. Nor address climate concerns. Because Shakespeare’s and Dickens’s works had Jew villains, we can’t blame them for anti Semitism.

Be that as it may, The Nutmeg’s Curse is a compelling read.

Three Friends

Sandip is ready to visit Nil’s home. Nil has invited all the three friends home for a get together. Sandip, Nil and Atanu are friends since college days.  After college Sandeep and Atanu left for other cities for better career opportunities. Nil stayed back since he had to take care of his father’s business. This week Sandeep and Atanu are in the town on vacation. On Whatsapp they decided to meet at Nil’s house, their adda joint from college days. By seven all three of them are together at Nil’s home, in the same room which hosted so many adda sessions, arguments, fights, ribbing during their college years.

There is something about this friendship which makes it enduring. Many had joined the trio during their college days, joining their post-college addas at Nil’s place over filter cigarette and black tea. But none of them stuck. After sometime they become infrequent at the adda sessions and then altogether disappeared having found a new group of friends.

It’s difficult to say what keeps the three together. Even the three don’t know exactly.  They guess, theorize. Nil says: “We have similar tastes.” Sandeep who is supercilious and uses high-brow phrases says: “because we come from similar socio-economic background….”   “Because no other group accepted any of us,” Atanu, who tells the truth in a light-hearted way, observes. But these theories are not necessarily true. There is actually very little in common between the three.

Nil’s family often faces financial hardship for ups and downs in what is actually a small business which Nil couldn’t scale up successfully after he took it over from his father. Atanu is from a steady middleclass background but was a below average student, unlike Nil and Sandeep. Sandeep is perfect in all sense. He was good at studies. His father was a high-ranking government officer. He is somewhat average looking but has married a good-looking girl, his childhood love from school.

Nor is the relationship between the three friends equal. Sandeep, being over-confident and supercilious, mostly calls the shots and the others follow his instructions. Nil and Atanu have a mutual respect for each other and even if they occasionally pull each other’s legs, they never cross a certain line. But Sandeep never spares an opportunity to crack patronizing jokes on the other two.

 Initially Sandeep’s digs had put off Atanu and Nil, but when they ganged up on Sandeep to avenge their perceived slights, Sandeep laughed it off. And that way things got balanced out between the three. But familiarity breeds boredom and people look for alternatives. They had made new friends and stayed away from the group only to return after sometime.

The Old Man at the Counter

We were at Jacob’s, a small restaurant in Karabantakulam, an obscure hill station in the southern part of the country. Murli and I had started early morning from our hotel and arrived in Karabantakulam, famished. While we were wolving down our food (thickly buttered breads and eggs with mutton stew), an old man with pointed beard approached us. “Hi, I am Mr Jacob. The owner of this place. How is the food?” He asked and following some exchange of details we settled down into a conversation. And then the conversation slowly led to a monologue. Mr Jacob was talking about his life and we were listening to him.

He had certainly lived an interesting life. He stayed in Africa for many years and had African blood in him. “I have both Ganan and Indian blood in me.”

It was not until Mr Jacob arrived at the end of the story he was narrating, that we started seeing his sinister side. The narrative was giving him a diabolical aura. “But what happened of Mr Kapur? Did he manage to leave Gana unscathed or…?” Murli interrupted Mr Jacob.

Murli had certainly pushed the discussion with Mr Jacob a step further, implicitly accusing him for any possible harm to Mr Kapur when he was on his way to airport to leave Gana for good.

“You seem to have thought Mr Kapur was an innocuous soul incapable of harming anyone,” Mr Jacob laughed and continued: “the reality is very different from what you are thinking, sir.”

“Why?” I countered.

“Haa…haa…haa…neither that old man was a harmless fool nor was he so generous that he would give the hotel to me free of cost. Never mind that I was its rightful heir. Mr Kapur was a manipulator – a user, that’s what he had built his life on.”

“Is it, how?” Murli interjected.

“Then let me start from the beginning. Mr Kapur was an artist who had migrated to Gana and set himself up there. There was a certain glamor about being an artist based out of an obscure place in Africa. Those days his portraits sold for very high prices in international market. But as years went by demand for his portraits dropped. That’s when he bought a hotel and married a Ganan girl, my mother. Mr Kapur didn’t have the temperament to run a hotel – it was lot of hard work and locals couldn’t be trusted with running the hotel without any supervision. Or at least he didn’t trust them. That’s why he got married.”

When I looked around there were only four of us in the restaurant. Mr Jacob, Murli, the cashier and myself. It suddenly struck me that we had not seen the cashier’s face. He was looking down since we came to the place. He was wearing a hat and only the top of his hat we had seen.

It had turned dark; the rain was getting heavier; its pitter patter sound getting louder and louder drowning out the buzzing sound of crickets we had heard earlier.

“Mr Kapur had all the characteristics of an oppressive foreigner, Mr Jacob continued, so the locals hated him. The locals disliked all foreigners, except some genuine do-gooders like father Demalo. But they particularly hated the foreigners who had grown rich. And Mr Kapur was one of them. So the anti-foreigner hysteria which was raging across Gana those days was targeted at the likes of Mr Kapur.

Some local miscreants had somehow come to know that he was going to travel to airport that day and they were lying in wait for him. I visited Mr Kapur’s house before he would leave for the airport and insisted on accompanying. He knew he had no danger from his son, so he agreed. On the way we encountered a mob. I got down from the car and calmed them down. Because I’m half Ganan they listened to me. A small charted plane was waiting for him at the airport. Mr Kapur offered me to go with him. I refused. He boarded the plane and left.

For many years I didn’t know where he was. Suddenly one day a dishevelled person showed up at my main door. By that time I had left Gana for good and settled down here. Initially I couldn’t recognize him but slowly I identified who he was. He said he had gone to the US and started gambling heavily. He had lost all his money to gambling, all his art works had been sold out. He somehow returned to India. He knew some relatives of mine who had directed him here.”

“So where is he now?” Murli was growing restless.

“At the counter. You can settle your bill with him,” Mr Jacob replied.

Mr Jacob had some hypnotic power. He had cast his spell on us holding us captive for so many hours. Why was he telling his story to us? Why there wasn’t anyone else other than four of us in the restaurant? These questions never occurred to us. When I walked to the counter to settle the bill, the man at the counter finally looked up. It was an old, emaciated face of Mr Jacob. When I looked back, Mr Jacob was laughing loudly.

The Pain That’s Bangalore Traffic

Bangalore traffic jams have become terrible. If you are stuck in an unregulated traffic, your wait for the traffic to move seems interminable. Traffics regulated either manually or by automated signals are admittedly better but they are far outnumbered by roads and junctions where there is absolutely no regulation. You have to be there to know what kind of a mess it becomes.

Most of your travel time is spent seeing the unmoving row of vehicles on the other side of the road and waiting for the traffic on your side to move. You start your car and stop and the sequence just continues. Even in this gridlock, the two wheelers and autos don’t seem to spare half an opportunity to squeeze between two vehicles to get ahead. You helplessly see them navigate the frozen traffic and hope they don’t hit your car.

The number of vehicles in the city is more than the roads can accommodate. Nowadays purchasing a car is among the easiest things to do, thanks to car loans and easy EMIs – and everyone seems to have a four-wheeler – and most of the four wheelers are SUVs. At least 90 percent of new vehicles hitting the roads are SUVs or its variants. Some of them are so giant that they appear like moving ships! And most of these giants have only person the driver sitting in them. I am a proud owner of a Maruti Alto.

These machines are fuel guzzlers, so, given that they mostly carry one person, just image the amount of fuel waste! Smaller carriers like sedans and hatchbacks are completely out of favour with car buyers. If you sit back and think it’s scary where we are going. The appetite for personal transportation combined with aspirational value is insatiable. Something should be done to keep some of the vehicles off road at least some days during a week, push people towards using public transport or explore pooling options. Otherwise, it’s scary to think where we are headed.