People learn from life’s experiences and apply them to the stock markets and to their investments. I have all the time learnt from the stock markets and applied the experiences to life itself.
I still remember the last general elections quite vividly. The NDA seemed to be in an unassailable position. Not because of its own strengths but by default because of others’ weaknesses. There were those opinion polls carried out by experienced psephologists. There was the “Shining India” campaign. There was the economy doing rather well for itself and cheery balloons everywhere in the stock markets. There was the charisma of Atal Behari Vajpayee which in itself was quite significant. All opinion polls predicted reduced number of seats for the NDA but still gave it a comfortable lead to emerge as the party of governance. Even the exit polls predicted more or less the same. And there were my friends in the stock markets and outside it thinking the same conclusion and putting their money by their conclusion. And all the while I was thinking……
“So, Papa, what do you think? How many seats for NDA?” my daughter asks, knowing fully well my interest in politics. At that stage even she must have become interested owing to the heat and dust the Indian election always generates.
We are sitting in an out-of-town, open-air dining place and I am in a pleasant mood having imbibed 60 ml of the cardioprotective brownish liquid that I call rum. There is more pleasantness in the thought that in a short while I will be protecting my heart even more.
“120,” I say, raising the glass and enjoying myself at the splash I have made in her mind.
“120? 120? But even the opinion polls are giving almost double. You are joking, right?”
With my son it is different. If Papa has spoken, it must be the truth! He gives up more easily. My daughter is a kitten, she would fight.
“But why do you think 120?” whines my son not liking the prospect. He likes Vajpayee and would not want to see him lose.
“It’s not like that,” my daughter looks at her brother. “He is pulling our leg. Don’t you remember how he gets when he drinks?”
“I am not pulling your leg. I am serious. I think it will be 120, if that.”
I am serious. I remember all previous stock market crashes and all previous beginnings of the bull markets. I remember the suddenness of the busts and the hesitant beginnings of the upsurge. But I remember something else. I remember a phrase that is oft repeated in the stock markets (which nobody pays attention to) and which must have been crafted by a person with a gift of language. I also remember a more crudely put observation by my own stockbroker who does not have the gift of the language.
“All bear phases are prophesied in exultation and all bull markets live off pessimism,” is the phrase.
“When everyone thinks that this will happen, that will happen,” is how my stockbroker puts it.
“When everyone (or almost everyone) shares the same opinion, the opposite will happen,” is how this all translates in my brain.
Or, to put it mathematically, the load of an opinion increases in inverse proportion to the likelihood of it becoming a reality.
My entire estimate of the seats for NDA was based on the fact that practically everyone thought that they were coming back. So, I thought that would not happen.
I have applied that rule to almost everything in life and have found it to come true almost every time.
____________________________________________
My stockbroker is a bit philosophical. He goes even further and then he sounds absurd. However, I really do not know whether what he says is so absurd.
When there is a crash, people find reasons for the crash because everything must have a reason. The political situation is rotten and the stink has spread to the stock markets. The GDP is coming down and that is the reason for the crash. The major companies have come out with results below expectations and their weight has crushed the markets. The tap of reasons keeps spouting…..
My broker says, “There are no reasons at all for the markets to fall. They fall, that’s it. Reasons are excuses, justifications that people find after the fall. Ditto for the rise – justifications for something that would have happened anyway.”
We like to think of the reasons for the fall or rise as the causes of the action that follows. But if you believe my broker, the action or the effect is all that is there. The causes are secondary, the causes are excuses, and the causes come after the effect!
Absurd?
I thought so when he ventilated his thoughts for the first time. Having grown more grey hair on my scalp since then, I am not so sure. And my broker? Well, he has a head full of just grey.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
LINCOLN MEMORIAL
When you go sightseeing, you go sightseeing. I mean you do not think that you may become a sight yourself! But believe me it happens sometimes. As it happened to me when I went to see the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. It sure will count in my mind as one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. The only good thing about it is that only one person was there to embarrass me when it happened.
____________________________________________
After the conference at Raleigh got over, I had a few days of leave remaining. So I went over to Kamlesh Patel, a friend from my college days who had married and settled in the United States. I thought a few days of rest and home cooked food at his place would work miracles for my upset tummy. But I have never been wise.
The moment I set foot in his house, there was a twinkle in Kamlesh’s eyes. I could see I was more than welcome and was glad for it. He introduced me to his wife. She proved to be so talkative that I felt completely at home within a few minutes of setting luggage in the guest room.
After a small visit to the toilet as I emerged out of my room, Kamlesh asked, “You have not stopped drinking, have you?”
“No. Why should I?” I shot back.
“No, no. Just thought I should buy a six-pack for the evening,” he said by way of explanation.
I remembered my upset tummy and began saying, “No. Kamlesh, in fact it is not necessary and besides, I have this upset……” At this point of time I heard footsteps of his wife approaching. Kamlesh immediately cut me of and in an inordinately loud voice started, “Yeah…… yeah …. I remember….. How can I forget that…? You were so upset that evening … it was a dry day back in India … and you did not have any liquor at home…..there aren’t any dry days in USA. So let’s go and fetch a six-pack.”
I could see that the whole speech was for his wife’s benefit especially because the incident where I became upset because of a dry day had never happened. The whole talk was actually a camouflage for the word ‘upset’ that I had uttered.
“Devika, we will go out and fetch a six-pack,” Kamlesh announced. It actually came out like a question, and simultaneously a request.
Devika nodded. She looked at me and gave me a smile.
Once out of the house, Kamlesh slapped me on my back and carped, “Ssalle, eik chance mila hai, who bhi khatam kar dena chahta hai kya?” (I get this one chance of drinking in a while and you want to put paid even to that?)
Gradually it came out that his wife did not approve of drinking and so the poor fellow never got to drink. The only exceptions were when his friends (only old ones, from India) came calling. That explained the twinkle in his eyes. I mean, I may have been really welcome, but the chance to drink was the reason for the twinkle!
In the store, the guy selected some Irish brew. The bottle was ominously dark, but the liquid inside seemed even more ominous, actually evil. Well, to be fair to Kamlesh, he did ask me about the choice. But when you are a guest at somebody’s place and you see how eagerly his hand moves to this particular concoction, you would be cruel to disregard what his heart desires. And that too a person’s whose wife does not allow him to drink and who just may be getting his elixir, god knows, after a year .. 2 years … he did not have many close friends back in India.
I had the liquid poured into a glass before I drank it. My suspicions were right – it was not the bottle that was dark, it was the beer that imparted the threatening color. It was dense and tasted strictly ruthlessly harsh. Instantly I was reminded of chiraita. When I was a child, my mother sometimes used to make me drink water that had sat on chiraita sticks overnight. That water also used to be equally dark in the morning. And the taste? Ugh! My taste buds used to be dead to everything for hours after and I positively hated my mother, her mother, her mother’s mother and the entire lineage till it reached whatever chimpanzee gave birth to that line. The way this concoction tasted, Kamlesh’s ancestors could stretch back to macaques and langurs. And to think that I had to consume three bottles of this positively malevolent stuff. The only positive in the whole setup was the pizza that kamlesh had ordered. I tried to drown, not with much success, the bitter taste of the sinister liquid in the sting of the pizza toppings.
Kamlesh went to sleep happily humming under his breath an old Hindi song I couldn’t decipher. In words that wobbled in his mouth before coming out, he reminded me that tomorrow morning we were going sightseeing to Washington D.C.
I tried to sleep. But the remarks that my stomach made about the ordeal it had to suffer were positively acerbic. When did sleep drown the acidity I do not know, but I did sleep for sometime. As I woke up, there was just a bit of dis-ease in my stomach and when I belched, a bitter liquid reminder of last night came out with the rumbling nothingness of gas. I brushed, gargled, shaved, bathed and made myself a gentleman and felt far better for the effort.
We got into the car – Kamlesh, Devika, Devika’s brother and sister-in-law, and I. In the boot were kept a 24 pack of coke and a pack of what I heard called “Theplas”. After we were out of the city, Devika offered me a thepla and a coke. I started eating. My god, my mouth was positively on fire which I quickly doused with the cold coke. But I loved the feeling and even the taste! I have already said before that I am not wise. I asked for another thepla which really pleased Devika – that told me who had cooked those spiky-spicy things. Barely had I finished the second thepla when I was offered another and yet another. The drive lasted 4 hours. In those 4 hours I must have downed about 10 theplas and about 4 cans of coke.
Kamlesh stopped the car on a flat grassy ground and about half a kilometer away rose the Lincoln memorial. Everyone got down. When I did, I found that I had a nail boring its way into the region where my esophagus ended and my stomach began. The pain was excruciating and pointed at that region. But worse, I had a tummy that would put to shame a full-term pregnant woman and walking around was rather difficult with my tummy wanting to go everywhere before the rest of the body reached there. I fell behind the group and stealthily stole away.
Once a safe distance from the rest, I tried spotting a toilet (restroom in American lingo). I couldn’t. By then it had become obligatory that I find one and find rather quickly. I spotted something in the distance that was a circular building and I thought had a chance of being a restroom. I walked there and, to my utter relief, found that it indeed was one.
Once inside I looked around. This part of the building described a semicircle. On one side were the commodes behind half doors that you could latch from inside but which were such that you could see the occupants’ legs from beneath. On the other side were wash basins in equal numbers.
This presented a problem. Having till then lived in India and having been practically born and brought up on the Indian style latrines, I just could not sit western style on western style seats. So, in the year that I had spent there, I had mastered the fine art of sitting Indian style on western commodes! But with these half-open doors, it was a bad pose to adopt. Outsiders did not see legs touching base besides the pot and took the stall to be vacant. Soon they found out that it was, contrary to their logical deductions, occupied. This made other logical deductions and foreboding cloud their minds. However, I was in luck – there was absolutely nobody inside the restroom at that time. I quickly mounted one of the pots that were shaped like a magnified version of the lamp that you light in the temples.
No sooner had I so ascended the pot, than a storm got unleashed. A succession of short bursts, like the staccato from a machine gun were let lose from the muzzle. It was just unsubstantiated sounds and they lasted for – may be a full minute or more. At the end of it, delivered of the onus, I rose, zipped my pants and came out. Mightily relieved and having regained the flatness of my stomach, I must say.
As I came out, I saw that there was a man in front of one of the wash basins washing his face. As he heard the door of the stall close, he turned towards me, looked me in the eye, and gave me a smile that I will not forget in a hurry.
____________________________________________
After the conference at Raleigh got over, I had a few days of leave remaining. So I went over to Kamlesh Patel, a friend from my college days who had married and settled in the United States. I thought a few days of rest and home cooked food at his place would work miracles for my upset tummy. But I have never been wise.
The moment I set foot in his house, there was a twinkle in Kamlesh’s eyes. I could see I was more than welcome and was glad for it. He introduced me to his wife. She proved to be so talkative that I felt completely at home within a few minutes of setting luggage in the guest room.
After a small visit to the toilet as I emerged out of my room, Kamlesh asked, “You have not stopped drinking, have you?”
“No. Why should I?” I shot back.
“No, no. Just thought I should buy a six-pack for the evening,” he said by way of explanation.
I remembered my upset tummy and began saying, “No. Kamlesh, in fact it is not necessary and besides, I have this upset……” At this point of time I heard footsteps of his wife approaching. Kamlesh immediately cut me of and in an inordinately loud voice started, “Yeah…… yeah …. I remember….. How can I forget that…? You were so upset that evening … it was a dry day back in India … and you did not have any liquor at home…..there aren’t any dry days in USA. So let’s go and fetch a six-pack.”
I could see that the whole speech was for his wife’s benefit especially because the incident where I became upset because of a dry day had never happened. The whole talk was actually a camouflage for the word ‘upset’ that I had uttered.
“Devika, we will go out and fetch a six-pack,” Kamlesh announced. It actually came out like a question, and simultaneously a request.
Devika nodded. She looked at me and gave me a smile.
Once out of the house, Kamlesh slapped me on my back and carped, “Ssalle, eik chance mila hai, who bhi khatam kar dena chahta hai kya?” (I get this one chance of drinking in a while and you want to put paid even to that?)
Gradually it came out that his wife did not approve of drinking and so the poor fellow never got to drink. The only exceptions were when his friends (only old ones, from India) came calling. That explained the twinkle in his eyes. I mean, I may have been really welcome, but the chance to drink was the reason for the twinkle!
In the store, the guy selected some Irish brew. The bottle was ominously dark, but the liquid inside seemed even more ominous, actually evil. Well, to be fair to Kamlesh, he did ask me about the choice. But when you are a guest at somebody’s place and you see how eagerly his hand moves to this particular concoction, you would be cruel to disregard what his heart desires. And that too a person’s whose wife does not allow him to drink and who just may be getting his elixir, god knows, after a year .. 2 years … he did not have many close friends back in India.
I had the liquid poured into a glass before I drank it. My suspicions were right – it was not the bottle that was dark, it was the beer that imparted the threatening color. It was dense and tasted strictly ruthlessly harsh. Instantly I was reminded of chiraita. When I was a child, my mother sometimes used to make me drink water that had sat on chiraita sticks overnight. That water also used to be equally dark in the morning. And the taste? Ugh! My taste buds used to be dead to everything for hours after and I positively hated my mother, her mother, her mother’s mother and the entire lineage till it reached whatever chimpanzee gave birth to that line. The way this concoction tasted, Kamlesh’s ancestors could stretch back to macaques and langurs. And to think that I had to consume three bottles of this positively malevolent stuff. The only positive in the whole setup was the pizza that kamlesh had ordered. I tried to drown, not with much success, the bitter taste of the sinister liquid in the sting of the pizza toppings.
Kamlesh went to sleep happily humming under his breath an old Hindi song I couldn’t decipher. In words that wobbled in his mouth before coming out, he reminded me that tomorrow morning we were going sightseeing to Washington D.C.
I tried to sleep. But the remarks that my stomach made about the ordeal it had to suffer were positively acerbic. When did sleep drown the acidity I do not know, but I did sleep for sometime. As I woke up, there was just a bit of dis-ease in my stomach and when I belched, a bitter liquid reminder of last night came out with the rumbling nothingness of gas. I brushed, gargled, shaved, bathed and made myself a gentleman and felt far better for the effort.
We got into the car – Kamlesh, Devika, Devika’s brother and sister-in-law, and I. In the boot were kept a 24 pack of coke and a pack of what I heard called “Theplas”. After we were out of the city, Devika offered me a thepla and a coke. I started eating. My god, my mouth was positively on fire which I quickly doused with the cold coke. But I loved the feeling and even the taste! I have already said before that I am not wise. I asked for another thepla which really pleased Devika – that told me who had cooked those spiky-spicy things. Barely had I finished the second thepla when I was offered another and yet another. The drive lasted 4 hours. In those 4 hours I must have downed about 10 theplas and about 4 cans of coke.
Kamlesh stopped the car on a flat grassy ground and about half a kilometer away rose the Lincoln memorial. Everyone got down. When I did, I found that I had a nail boring its way into the region where my esophagus ended and my stomach began. The pain was excruciating and pointed at that region. But worse, I had a tummy that would put to shame a full-term pregnant woman and walking around was rather difficult with my tummy wanting to go everywhere before the rest of the body reached there. I fell behind the group and stealthily stole away.
Once a safe distance from the rest, I tried spotting a toilet (restroom in American lingo). I couldn’t. By then it had become obligatory that I find one and find rather quickly. I spotted something in the distance that was a circular building and I thought had a chance of being a restroom. I walked there and, to my utter relief, found that it indeed was one.
Once inside I looked around. This part of the building described a semicircle. On one side were the commodes behind half doors that you could latch from inside but which were such that you could see the occupants’ legs from beneath. On the other side were wash basins in equal numbers.
This presented a problem. Having till then lived in India and having been practically born and brought up on the Indian style latrines, I just could not sit western style on western style seats. So, in the year that I had spent there, I had mastered the fine art of sitting Indian style on western commodes! But with these half-open doors, it was a bad pose to adopt. Outsiders did not see legs touching base besides the pot and took the stall to be vacant. Soon they found out that it was, contrary to their logical deductions, occupied. This made other logical deductions and foreboding cloud their minds. However, I was in luck – there was absolutely nobody inside the restroom at that time. I quickly mounted one of the pots that were shaped like a magnified version of the lamp that you light in the temples.
No sooner had I so ascended the pot, than a storm got unleashed. A succession of short bursts, like the staccato from a machine gun were let lose from the muzzle. It was just unsubstantiated sounds and they lasted for – may be a full minute or more. At the end of it, delivered of the onus, I rose, zipped my pants and came out. Mightily relieved and having regained the flatness of my stomach, I must say.
As I came out, I saw that there was a man in front of one of the wash basins washing his face. As he heard the door of the stall close, he turned towards me, looked me in the eye, and gave me a smile that I will not forget in a hurry.
ASHA BHONSLE LIVE AND DEAD RATS
I do not like what Maneka Gandhi has done to science labs in the name of animal rights. I do not see eye to eye with animal rights activists who think that in the name of science, scientists torture animals. I believe that these people have just no idea how much of their own health is indebted to past research on animal systems – most medicines that each one of us takes have been developed primarily in animal labs. Much of our knowledge about the way our physiology works is derived from research on animals. Without this research on animals the life expectancy of human beings would not have been what it is today.
Be that as it may, I have once been guilty of a crime in the animal lab that I could have avoided entirely.
The Salk Institute for Biological Research in La Jolla, California, has a vast animal facility in the basement. I was involved in breast cancer research in this institute. I had to first of all produce cancer in the rodents and then see which genes were mutated in the cancer tissue. This also involved removing ovaries of female rats so that their bodies did not produce estrogen, a hormone that can promote breast cancer.
Initially ovariectomy (removal of ovaries) appeared to be a difficult task to me. The rats had to properly anesthetized and precise incisions were to be made for pulling the ovaries out. I was taught the art by a lab technician called Barbara. She always carried a severe expression on her face whether she was teaching me or drinking beer. It did not help at all. I soon started having all kinds of accidents. Once an improperly anesthetized rat started walking all over the place with its innards hanging out! I was so shocked at the sight that I did not even pick it up to be re-anesthetized. Barbara picked it up for me and made it smell ether. It should have been the rat with an expression of severe reproach on its face. But in this case it was Barbara who displayed that expression.
However, practice made it easy and eventually I became very adept at it. So much so that I could have done the whole thing blindfolded. The drill went something like this:
Put some cotton at the base of a broad mouthed tube and pour some ether into it. Ether is a good anesthetizing agent. Put this tube inside a sterile hood which has a table too for you to work. Pick up a female rat from the cage and make it breathe the ether fumes. Once it is unconscious, pick it up, put it squarely on the table and with a scissor give a cut on both sides of the backbone between the backbone and the hind legs. Poke a scalpel into the opening thus created and pull out the innards. The ovary will look like a flower. Hold it properly at the base and cut it off. With the help of a hot coil cauterizer, cauterize the area so that the blood flow stops. Stuff the innards back into the opening and then clip the opening closed. Do the same procedure on both the sides and cut off both ovaries. Put the animal back in its cage which is maintained at 37 C temperature. Take another rat and repeat the procedure. It got so that I normally had one rat exposed to ether while I was operating on the other. Also, when I pulled out the innards, the ovary would be the one organ I would be holding between my scalpels and not any other part of the anatomy. I worked very fast and everybody knew that if someone could take out an ovary faster than it could make estrogen, it was I. I must admit that I was also quite complacent about the fact.
On a particular day, as I was setting an electrophoretic gel, Saraswati came and sat besides me. Saraswati was the head of the lab and a highly accomplished scientist. She was also one of the best human beings I have ever encountered in my entire life.
“I don’t know how I am going to do all the things slated for today,” was how she began the conversation.
“Why? What happened?” I asked, still working on my gel.
“I have to write this report and get it done today itself. That itself will take me to 11 AM. I then have to make this presentation, that cannot be put off at all. That should take me to lunch. Post lunch, I have to be at the President’s office and answer his queries about future plans. God knows how long that will take. Then I have to ovariectomize 120 rats. I cannot put this off either. I don’t think I will be able to reach home till well past midnight if I start now.”
“Shall I make some coffee for you?” was my response to that.
“What? What has coffee got to do with this?”
“Coffee will get your mind off this for some time. Besides, over coffee I can tell you that I will do the ovariectomy for you.”
“Why will you do that for me? You have your own work to think of. Besides, these are 120 rats. No, no. I will see what I can do about this.”
I eventually persuaded her. Later I asked Ingo, my German friend to look after my gels while I went down to the animal lab.
My calculations were that at 5 minutes per rat, I would require about 10 hours to ovariectomize 120 rats. That would take me up to 5 in the evening.
I began in right earnest. Each cage contained 10 rats. I timed myself that each cage should take just about 55 minutes and no more.
At 3 in the afternoon, the phone rang. I picked it up. It was Vineet. This guy worked at Genentech and was a music and liquor buff.
“Hey, Avinash. You coming to the programme?” he asked without any preamble.
“Which programme?” I asked still working. I hooked the thing between my shoulder and ear and continued to handle the rats.
“Don’t tell me you have not heard about Asha Bhonsle performing live today evening at LA?”
“Oh, is she? Well, I can’t come. There is a bit of work and I won’t be free before 5.”
“That’s not a problem. I can’t be free either before 4.30. But tell you what, I will wait outside the gates just about 5. You show up and we will go together. Otherwise I will push off alone. Too good to miss.”
“Alright. That’s fine by me. If I don’t show up, you push off.” I told him and hung up.
I worked faster now. Who wants to miss Asha? I looked at the state of things. There were two cages remaining and I was onto the last rat in the cage that I was presently handling. The next hour was a blur. I strained at it and took less time than usual. When I got the last cage down, it was just past 4. Just time enough for me to complete the job, go upstairs, wash my face, have a quick coffee and run for the gates.
I put the first rat down onto the table. It was breathing nicely and had gone to sleep from ether. I gave it two quick cuts on the back. Poked my scalpel inside and pulled the innards out and was going to give a quick cut when I noticed that between my scalpels was not the ovary but a piece of the intestine. Shit! I searched for the ovary. There wasn’t one to be found. I pulled more material out and looked. No ovary! Then I found it. It still did not look like an ovary but I thought that it was one. I gave a cut. I poked on the other side and came up with the same predicament – no ovary. I repeated the same thing here too.
On to the next rat and to the same predicament. What’s wrong? I thought. This never happens. Ovaries love me. The moment they know that it is Avinash holding the scalpel, the jump squarely into the scalpel! And now when I am rushed for time, the gland is playing a trick. One after the other, to all the 10 rats I gave the same treatment. I cut what seemed most like an ovary. I pushed the cage back into its place, dashed upstairs, washed myself, got a cup of coffee, ran out while still drinking it. I was just in the nick of the time.
Asha regaled us till well past midnight. We came back almost by 4 in the morning. I lay down on the cot without sleep, just to get my back straight.
At 7 I was back in the lab. When Saraswati arrived I told her that her rats waited for her downstairs. She thanked me and said she would go down around noon.
I went to the basements to look at the rats. That was standard procedure. Part of post-operative care. You look at the rats. See whether they are behaving properly, whether there is any bleeding, is the wound healing nicely etc. etc.
One look at the last cage and I found out what had happened last evening. These were male rats! In my hurry I had picked up the wrong cage and tried to find ovaries in the males. God knows what I had removed in the name of the ovaries.
This presented a dire problem. Saraswati would come down in a few hours. If she found out that I had ovariectomized male rats, she would be suspicious of every single thing I had done thus far. What to do? I decided on the only course of action that seemed to drive away all problems.
I killed all the male rats by suffocating them on carbon dioxide. Deposited them in the cold storage for dead bodies. Picked up another cage and made sure these were female rats. Ovariectomized these rats. Put them at 37 degrees for an extended time so that the healing would be quicker. Then deposited them back where they belonged and dashed upstairs.
Saraswati did not notice any wrong doing on my part. I do know though that those 10 male rats lost there lives entirely due to my desire to hear Asha Bhonsle live.
Be that as it may, I have once been guilty of a crime in the animal lab that I could have avoided entirely.
The Salk Institute for Biological Research in La Jolla, California, has a vast animal facility in the basement. I was involved in breast cancer research in this institute. I had to first of all produce cancer in the rodents and then see which genes were mutated in the cancer tissue. This also involved removing ovaries of female rats so that their bodies did not produce estrogen, a hormone that can promote breast cancer.
Initially ovariectomy (removal of ovaries) appeared to be a difficult task to me. The rats had to properly anesthetized and precise incisions were to be made for pulling the ovaries out. I was taught the art by a lab technician called Barbara. She always carried a severe expression on her face whether she was teaching me or drinking beer. It did not help at all. I soon started having all kinds of accidents. Once an improperly anesthetized rat started walking all over the place with its innards hanging out! I was so shocked at the sight that I did not even pick it up to be re-anesthetized. Barbara picked it up for me and made it smell ether. It should have been the rat with an expression of severe reproach on its face. But in this case it was Barbara who displayed that expression.
However, practice made it easy and eventually I became very adept at it. So much so that I could have done the whole thing blindfolded. The drill went something like this:
Put some cotton at the base of a broad mouthed tube and pour some ether into it. Ether is a good anesthetizing agent. Put this tube inside a sterile hood which has a table too for you to work. Pick up a female rat from the cage and make it breathe the ether fumes. Once it is unconscious, pick it up, put it squarely on the table and with a scissor give a cut on both sides of the backbone between the backbone and the hind legs. Poke a scalpel into the opening thus created and pull out the innards. The ovary will look like a flower. Hold it properly at the base and cut it off. With the help of a hot coil cauterizer, cauterize the area so that the blood flow stops. Stuff the innards back into the opening and then clip the opening closed. Do the same procedure on both the sides and cut off both ovaries. Put the animal back in its cage which is maintained at 37 C temperature. Take another rat and repeat the procedure. It got so that I normally had one rat exposed to ether while I was operating on the other. Also, when I pulled out the innards, the ovary would be the one organ I would be holding between my scalpels and not any other part of the anatomy. I worked very fast and everybody knew that if someone could take out an ovary faster than it could make estrogen, it was I. I must admit that I was also quite complacent about the fact.
On a particular day, as I was setting an electrophoretic gel, Saraswati came and sat besides me. Saraswati was the head of the lab and a highly accomplished scientist. She was also one of the best human beings I have ever encountered in my entire life.
“I don’t know how I am going to do all the things slated for today,” was how she began the conversation.
“Why? What happened?” I asked, still working on my gel.
“I have to write this report and get it done today itself. That itself will take me to 11 AM. I then have to make this presentation, that cannot be put off at all. That should take me to lunch. Post lunch, I have to be at the President’s office and answer his queries about future plans. God knows how long that will take. Then I have to ovariectomize 120 rats. I cannot put this off either. I don’t think I will be able to reach home till well past midnight if I start now.”
“Shall I make some coffee for you?” was my response to that.
“What? What has coffee got to do with this?”
“Coffee will get your mind off this for some time. Besides, over coffee I can tell you that I will do the ovariectomy for you.”
“Why will you do that for me? You have your own work to think of. Besides, these are 120 rats. No, no. I will see what I can do about this.”
I eventually persuaded her. Later I asked Ingo, my German friend to look after my gels while I went down to the animal lab.
My calculations were that at 5 minutes per rat, I would require about 10 hours to ovariectomize 120 rats. That would take me up to 5 in the evening.
I began in right earnest. Each cage contained 10 rats. I timed myself that each cage should take just about 55 minutes and no more.
At 3 in the afternoon, the phone rang. I picked it up. It was Vineet. This guy worked at Genentech and was a music and liquor buff.
“Hey, Avinash. You coming to the programme?” he asked without any preamble.
“Which programme?” I asked still working. I hooked the thing between my shoulder and ear and continued to handle the rats.
“Don’t tell me you have not heard about Asha Bhonsle performing live today evening at LA?”
“Oh, is she? Well, I can’t come. There is a bit of work and I won’t be free before 5.”
“That’s not a problem. I can’t be free either before 4.30. But tell you what, I will wait outside the gates just about 5. You show up and we will go together. Otherwise I will push off alone. Too good to miss.”
“Alright. That’s fine by me. If I don’t show up, you push off.” I told him and hung up.
I worked faster now. Who wants to miss Asha? I looked at the state of things. There were two cages remaining and I was onto the last rat in the cage that I was presently handling. The next hour was a blur. I strained at it and took less time than usual. When I got the last cage down, it was just past 4. Just time enough for me to complete the job, go upstairs, wash my face, have a quick coffee and run for the gates.
I put the first rat down onto the table. It was breathing nicely and had gone to sleep from ether. I gave it two quick cuts on the back. Poked my scalpel inside and pulled the innards out and was going to give a quick cut when I noticed that between my scalpels was not the ovary but a piece of the intestine. Shit! I searched for the ovary. There wasn’t one to be found. I pulled more material out and looked. No ovary! Then I found it. It still did not look like an ovary but I thought that it was one. I gave a cut. I poked on the other side and came up with the same predicament – no ovary. I repeated the same thing here too.
On to the next rat and to the same predicament. What’s wrong? I thought. This never happens. Ovaries love me. The moment they know that it is Avinash holding the scalpel, the jump squarely into the scalpel! And now when I am rushed for time, the gland is playing a trick. One after the other, to all the 10 rats I gave the same treatment. I cut what seemed most like an ovary. I pushed the cage back into its place, dashed upstairs, washed myself, got a cup of coffee, ran out while still drinking it. I was just in the nick of the time.
Asha regaled us till well past midnight. We came back almost by 4 in the morning. I lay down on the cot without sleep, just to get my back straight.
At 7 I was back in the lab. When Saraswati arrived I told her that her rats waited for her downstairs. She thanked me and said she would go down around noon.
I went to the basements to look at the rats. That was standard procedure. Part of post-operative care. You look at the rats. See whether they are behaving properly, whether there is any bleeding, is the wound healing nicely etc. etc.
One look at the last cage and I found out what had happened last evening. These were male rats! In my hurry I had picked up the wrong cage and tried to find ovaries in the males. God knows what I had removed in the name of the ovaries.
This presented a dire problem. Saraswati would come down in a few hours. If she found out that I had ovariectomized male rats, she would be suspicious of every single thing I had done thus far. What to do? I decided on the only course of action that seemed to drive away all problems.
I killed all the male rats by suffocating them on carbon dioxide. Deposited them in the cold storage for dead bodies. Picked up another cage and made sure these were female rats. Ovariectomized these rats. Put them at 37 degrees for an extended time so that the healing would be quicker. Then deposited them back where they belonged and dashed upstairs.
Saraswati did not notice any wrong doing on my part. I do know though that those 10 male rats lost there lives entirely due to my desire to hear Asha Bhonsle live.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
LOST CHANCE TO TEACH
He was sitting there on the dining table wearing his green woolen shirt when I reached home from the college in the afternoon.
Father was to come back from Delhi by the morning flight which reaches here at 9. But the flight got delayed. I had to go to the college. When I came back having finished teaching, I found him sitting on the dining table, brooding. He looked darker somehow. His face lit up upon seeing me. But the joy that was always there on his face when he came back home was absent. I sat opposite him, started eating my lunch, and we got talking.
“So, how was the conference?” I asked.
He was a numismatist (someone who divines history by reading coins), an epigraphist (one who reads inscriptions), a Sanskritist, and a historian dealing with ancient India. One of his pet problems – one that had received his attention for decades – was that of the Aryans. How does one view Aryans? Did they come from outside to India? Or were they basically from India and diverged out from here? Or were they everywhere and so neither did they come from anywhere or go anywhere? Or, is it that ‘Arya’ was a cultural title and no implications of a race should be read in it? Splendid problem to think about.
“Was good.” Was his succinct and subdued reply and I immediately understood that something was wrong. This is not like him, I thought. Normally, you just have to ask about the conference and his exuberance propels a torrent of words out of his mouth. Whether you understand or not, whether you care or not, he is not going to stop till he has dried up all the thoughts that have been welling up inside his mind. He was passionate about his subject you see. He was single minded and right from his waking moment of the day till he lay down to sleep, research problems were the only thing occupying his mind. I suspect that the night brought more coins and more inscriptions in his dreams.
I eat lunch silently waiting for him to tell me more. He does not. Instead, he just tells me about which other people he met while in Delhi. He tells me that there was a lot of fog out there in Delhi and that was the reason his flight got delayed. He also tells me that he is tired. Tired! In the afternoon? That is not my father. He is never tired. He may be 67, but tiredness is something that he has never expressed, not in the afternoon at least. There is definitely something off beam here. I decide to probe and probe directly.
“So what discussions took place in the conference?’ I ask. This is a more involved question – I am asking now about the details. And he comes out clean.
“I think I should quit this subject. It is now out of my range. I have suddenly no locus standi here.” He says and he is very sad in saying this. It is as if a dear relationship has broken and he has to move out of the house when he has no desire to.
“Quit?” I ask and my incredulity must have shown. “I mean I don’t understand. After a lifetime of reading and researching and writing and lecturing on the subject, you think you have no locus standi in the subject.”
“Yeah,” he says. It has all been hijacked by the geneticists now. The geneticists called the shots in this conference. And that is right too. They say that they can compare genes of the bones that we have dug up, compare the genes in them to the present day population in India and abroad and find out just who were these Aryans. Our theories have no meaning for them. They come from an alien discipline and make all our efforts of decades look utterly meaningless. They have no knowledge of the intricacies of history and yet they think they can tell us just who the Aryans were.
“I mean, I have no complaints. This is natural and genetics has power where Archaeology does not. What was galling was that I did not understand their arguments at all. I have no knowledge of genetics. If only I could understand the basics of this, I would have no cause of quitting. I can then combine my knowledge of history and the understanding of genetics and move on. But I think it’s too late for that now. And, anyhow, genetics is science and I am not a science man. So……” His voice trails. His face becomes darker. So that is what it is, I thought. Now I am a person who understands genetics. If I teach him, will he be able to pick it up? He has no background of science. He is old. But on the other hand, he is sharp, he can grasp things well. May be he will be able to pick up the things quicker than I think.
“Why don’t I teach you enough genetics for you to understand the drift of the geneticists in the conferences?” I volunteer. And I am pleased by the effect that this one sentence has. His face lights up suddenly, the excited man is back. The shoulders are no longer drooping.
“You think it is possible? You think I will be able to pick that stuff up fast enough? It is science after all.” He asks. But there is more hope in the questions than anxiety or doubt.
“I think so. I think if we sit down together a few hours a day, a week will see you understanding most of the stuff that you need. And then, if there is something that you need on top of that from time to time, you can fall back on me and I will explain that.” I say, taking the classical teacher approach – encourage, motivate, even when you may have doubt yourself. It is astounding how often and how quickly miracles are achieved by this approach.
“I think I would like to have some tea,” is what he says in reply to this. That means that he is happy and would like to converse more now. Tea is the liquid around which we have always talked, argued, sparred with our ideas.
I know things are back to normal.
But then right after the tea, he says he feels sleepy. Must be the tiredness owing to lack of sleep yesterday night and the delay at the airport in the morning and all of that. He goes over to the bedroom and sleeps. I go upstairs to my study.
I cannot shake the feeling that something else is wrong too.
X X X
At the dining table for the dinner, he is radiant. Ecstatically he announces to all, “Avinash is going to teach me genetics!”
The fare before him is something that he can drool over. Parathas stuffed with bathua (Pigweed or lamb’s quarters, cooked like spinach and tasting similar to it). He loves them. I hate them. But today I do not protest. I have seen him in a pensive mood before. This mood actually takes him over quite often. He is most chirpy and happy in the morning just after he wakes up. We are opposites in this matter. I am like my mouth is still sleepy though I may have woken up. I am like my words are cold blooded and need warming before they can get out of my mouth. He is like everything wakes up when he does. I remember my irritation with him in the morning. He would like to chat me up and I would like to have him shut up. And since you don’t tell your father that, I am irritated. Then he sits down at the dining table for the tea and opens up the newspaper and the pensive mood starts to spread over him. Sometimes the things darken beyond just being pensive. He loves to read of politics. Politics is never positive in our nation. The news therefore darkens his mood. It is better when he comes out with an acid comment. If he does not, the thing clouds his mind. Then you see him as pensive but he is actually going cold inside with pessimism. I have seen him pensive with a coin in his hands. His eyesight is not good. So often he calls me or my mother and asks, “Do you thing this drawing is of an elephant or is it a horse?” Not that he cannot make a difference between the two animals. It is just that the ancient Indian coin makers often did not bother about the shapes of animals and so one thing looked like other. I have seen him pensive with a book in his hands, his tongue touching the upper palate of his mouth, his hand busy with the big toe of his foot that he has pulled up on the sofa. But today’s pensive mood was different. It was tinged with an unfathomable sadness – something that I have never observed in all the years I have lived with him, not even when I flunked one of the most crucial exams, not even when my grandfather died, not even when my grandmother died, not when he underwent a retina operation which threatened to steal his eyesight, not even when he suffered a bad paralytic stroke and took a whole year recovering the full function of his limbs and there was the specter that he would never be able to use his hand to write his books.
I have also never seen him so tired in the afternoon that he would wish to go to sleep.
So I do not protest.
I gulp down the bathua parathas to quench the hunger. He eats them slowly with evident relish and quenches the taste buds. He talks about the Arya problem now. He gradually reveals what happened in the conference that he could understand. He talks about his own speech. He is now relieved – he knows that he will be taught genetics and so he does not have to think of quitting the field that has become so dear to him.
“Shall we begin tomorrow?” he asks.
“Yes, why not?” I reflect his eagerness.
We talk awhile and he says he wants to go to bed a bit early. He says that it is better to do so since he would want to be fresh and receptive tomorrow for the genetics lesson. But that cannot be the case. I know him more than that. Happiness would make him read more, talk more. He is really tired.
One more thing that I have been noticing for almost a year now. He is still wearing his woolen shirt. Agreed that he really likes this shirt. Agreed that it is winter. But in Nagpur, and that too so early in winter, the temperatures rarely plummet so much that you have to wear warm clothing. And then all his life he has been a person who has weathered winters wearing just a vest. He has always found it strange that people find it cold in Nagpur during winters when the temperature hardly dips below 13o C. Lately however, the things have changed. The neighbor’s young son wears a vest even in the winters and works in the garden. He finds that strange now. “Only when he catches a cold will he understand,” is what he says when he looks at him.
X X X
“Avi!”
This one word, a loving diminutive of my own name, uttered sharply with more stress on “A”, is the scar that so many of my childhood dreams bear. He woke me up at 4.30 sharp in the morning. All his childhood he had studied in a Gurukul where you wake up at 4 in the morning and start with your morning chores and then spend the “Brahma Muhurta” (the hour of Brahma, the best time to study as per Hindu culture) studying. He liked the discipline of that system and wanted me to abide by the same. Agreed that he made that concession of a half hour. But it was not enough for me. So, get up I would, take up a book I would, but lapse into sleep with the book on the table. Eventually, after many of the dreams died premature death, it was mutually agreed that I should wake up at least at 6. This has become a habit and I get up at 6 always no matter how late or early I sleep.
So, when in the morning, this same diminutive is uttered at 5 by my wife, I wake up all groggy, confused and angry. My wife is standing besides the bed, still in her nightwear.
“The bell,” is all she says. In an instant I know something is wrong.
My wife and I stay on the first floor while my parents occupy the ground floor. Over the years an arrangement has been perfected – whenever they need us, they just have to ring a bell which sounds upstairs. One bell for myself and two bells for my wife. A bell so early in the morning only announces trouble.
I throw off the sheets and go downstairs. My mother is at the door and her eyes tell me that there is something wrong.
“Your father,” she says. “Just take a look. He came back earlier than usual from his morning walk and is not feeling well.”
He is lying on the drawing room divan. And although there is a bit of morning chill, he is bathed in sweat. The green woolen shirt is still on his torso. Even at this time I have not the slightest of the inkling what is to happen to this green shirt. On his face you can read the spelling of pain and the alphabets are in the upper case. To my queries, he tells me that he has pain in the chest and that too to the left. I then ask him the most important question I can think of.
“Are you feeling breathless,” I ask.
Years ago, just after marriage, I had started feeling pain in my chest on the left hand side. I was mortally afraid that my heart had gone weak at this early stage in life. So, one day I asked a physician whom I knew very well to take an ECG. The guy told me that there was no need. However, I insisted and told him about the pain. He had a good laugh at my expense, told me that if I could not find a better use for my money, he would oblige. He took an ECG, showed the result to me and told me that you have spondilitis. Later, he confirmed the diagnosis. Once this was done, he told me, “If you are going to have a heart attack, it is not just the pain you will feel. You will be breathless too.” This is exactly what I remember and ask.
He nods. He does not speak because even speaking makes him breathless. I take instant decision. No ambulance. That will be too late in arriving. I take the car out. I make him sit in a chair and then slide the chair out to the car. I make him sit inside. My mother sits at the back and we move without wasting time. I decide to take him to a physician who has been treating him and knows his case history. My mother has brought a homeopathic medicine with her and she gives it to him. It is the homeopathic version of nitroglycerine. We are merely five minutes out of our house when he tells me, “Why do we not just go back? I am feeling quite right now. Besides, I have to complete the Presidential Address that I have been writing for the last two days. There are several important things that I want to mention in this. Precious time will be lost in the hospital.”
I am firm and tell him that he has to see a doctor.
“But yesterday too at the airport I had the same feeling. I became okay in just about 10 minutes. It is the same thing again. I think it is indigestion. Why don’t we turn back?”
I continue driving and he continues to fret over his Presidential Address. So he had a mild heart attack at the airport yesterday morning too is all I think. We arrive at the doctor. I find immediately that I have brought him to the wrong place by the inefficiency that I see. But it is too late. The doctor has arrived, has checked his blood pressure, has moved on to take his ECG. After the whole thing is over, he says, “It is heart. His BP is low, just 100 by 50. But at the most it will develop into an angina. No need to worry. We will admit him now for observation. He should be able to go back by the evening.” Whether he is telling me this just to sort of pacify me I do not know. If he is doing that, he does not need to. I am quite hard at these things.
He is admitted. He is on his bed with strict instructions to lie down and not to speak. But he is telling my mother how important his presidential address is! All his life he has been an academic and on his sick bed too he cannot stop being one, incorrigibly being one. I cannot describe my emotions about this. I am concerned, yes. But I am proud too – what a father to have. When ordinary people would be concerned about what will happen to them, he is concerned about his presidential address and the new things he is going to present and about his thoughts regarding certain coins that surfaced just some days before! I want to tell him to stop talking. But the other part of me is too weak to say this, too glad to have a father who can be so obsessed with his work.
I ask my mother to go home and bathe and then come again at a later time. I tell her that the doctor himself does not think that this can turn out to be any serious. She does not want to go. But she yields to my practicality.
X X X
In the afternoon, his dead body is brought home. I bring my mother home in my car.
The body is made to lie in the drawing room. It has to be prepared for cremation. My friends, colleagues, the priest, his students, his colleagues, everyone who is connected in whichever way to him, arrive. I have to bathe him and then give him new clothes. But the green woolen shirt won’t come off his body. There is a slight swelling around the torso and it is difficult to get the shirt open. I have half a desire to tell the priest to leave it be – he so loved this short, it will not be wrong if he takes it away with him. But I bring a pair of scissors and cut the shirt open. Other preparations are done and the body is cremated in the evening.
When I come back home, things are silent. I do not know how to console my mother. Oh there are other people around. But there presence is a blur behind which her tears only wait. I cannot weep because I have to support her and console her.
Since then, I have never wept – the moment has passed. I have only thought and thought.
The man was greedy for knowledge. He hated death. But not because he would die. The problem was like this:
“What is the meaning of learning so much, hoarding so much in your mind, and then dying off? I mean, it would be okay if you died provided that in the next birth you start from where you ended the last time around. That does not happen and it is cruel.”
The man was greedy for knowledge. He would read practically everything. At the age of 63, when most people have already quit most of their activities, he learnt computers and then learnt how to go online and read up things in his subject that were available. All his papers after that were submitted to journals electronically and online. This also meant irritation for me. Every 10-15 minutes the bell would go and I had to rush downstairs.
“I don’t know what happened to the file I was writing. I had saved it but I cannot find now.”
Suppressing my irritation from being interrupted in my own work, I would search for the file. “What was the name of the file?” I would ask. “I have forgotten,” was quite often the reply. Now, I mean, can you beat that? He does not remember the name of the file and he wants me to find that! So I would ask what the contents were and then mount a search based on content. Often I would find the file in an unrelated folder.
“What is this file doing here?” You think I asked this question? You are wrong. He would be the one asking it of me. I mean, come on, I should have been the one asking it.
Sometimes files went entirely missing – no trace at all. And he would not agree that he had failed to save them. It was always the computer that was playing some mischief. So, two bit “experts” were very often called to set the computer right.
At other times it would be some problem with the internet. Some other time about diacritical marks – Sanskrit words creep in when you are writing about history. So he got installed a special software that allowed him to work more easily. When troubles with the use of this software arose, it was double trouble for me. I knew nothing about this software and was supposed to troubleshoot whenever he landed himself into a soup!
All through I troubleshooted for him, taught him a few things about computers and working online, using a word file, other programmes that make life easy. But most of the time I did this with irritation at the back of my mind from having been interrupted in my own work.
There was only one time that I agreed to teach him with a lot of pleasure. I loved him you see and could not see him down like that just because genetics was intruding upon his own area.
But that chance was lost so quickly and so suddenly.
May be, just because it was such an ardent desire in him, he will be born again with all the knowledge intact in his mind and will start from there. If so, he will have to learn genetics all by himself.
I lost the chance to teach him genetics and send him prepared to the next birth.
Father was to come back from Delhi by the morning flight which reaches here at 9. But the flight got delayed. I had to go to the college. When I came back having finished teaching, I found him sitting on the dining table, brooding. He looked darker somehow. His face lit up upon seeing me. But the joy that was always there on his face when he came back home was absent. I sat opposite him, started eating my lunch, and we got talking.
“So, how was the conference?” I asked.
He was a numismatist (someone who divines history by reading coins), an epigraphist (one who reads inscriptions), a Sanskritist, and a historian dealing with ancient India. One of his pet problems – one that had received his attention for decades – was that of the Aryans. How does one view Aryans? Did they come from outside to India? Or were they basically from India and diverged out from here? Or were they everywhere and so neither did they come from anywhere or go anywhere? Or, is it that ‘Arya’ was a cultural title and no implications of a race should be read in it? Splendid problem to think about.
“Was good.” Was his succinct and subdued reply and I immediately understood that something was wrong. This is not like him, I thought. Normally, you just have to ask about the conference and his exuberance propels a torrent of words out of his mouth. Whether you understand or not, whether you care or not, he is not going to stop till he has dried up all the thoughts that have been welling up inside his mind. He was passionate about his subject you see. He was single minded and right from his waking moment of the day till he lay down to sleep, research problems were the only thing occupying his mind. I suspect that the night brought more coins and more inscriptions in his dreams.
I eat lunch silently waiting for him to tell me more. He does not. Instead, he just tells me about which other people he met while in Delhi. He tells me that there was a lot of fog out there in Delhi and that was the reason his flight got delayed. He also tells me that he is tired. Tired! In the afternoon? That is not my father. He is never tired. He may be 67, but tiredness is something that he has never expressed, not in the afternoon at least. There is definitely something off beam here. I decide to probe and probe directly.
“So what discussions took place in the conference?’ I ask. This is a more involved question – I am asking now about the details. And he comes out clean.
“I think I should quit this subject. It is now out of my range. I have suddenly no locus standi here.” He says and he is very sad in saying this. It is as if a dear relationship has broken and he has to move out of the house when he has no desire to.
“Quit?” I ask and my incredulity must have shown. “I mean I don’t understand. After a lifetime of reading and researching and writing and lecturing on the subject, you think you have no locus standi in the subject.”
“Yeah,” he says. It has all been hijacked by the geneticists now. The geneticists called the shots in this conference. And that is right too. They say that they can compare genes of the bones that we have dug up, compare the genes in them to the present day population in India and abroad and find out just who were these Aryans. Our theories have no meaning for them. They come from an alien discipline and make all our efforts of decades look utterly meaningless. They have no knowledge of the intricacies of history and yet they think they can tell us just who the Aryans were.
“I mean, I have no complaints. This is natural and genetics has power where Archaeology does not. What was galling was that I did not understand their arguments at all. I have no knowledge of genetics. If only I could understand the basics of this, I would have no cause of quitting. I can then combine my knowledge of history and the understanding of genetics and move on. But I think it’s too late for that now. And, anyhow, genetics is science and I am not a science man. So……” His voice trails. His face becomes darker. So that is what it is, I thought. Now I am a person who understands genetics. If I teach him, will he be able to pick it up? He has no background of science. He is old. But on the other hand, he is sharp, he can grasp things well. May be he will be able to pick up the things quicker than I think.
“Why don’t I teach you enough genetics for you to understand the drift of the geneticists in the conferences?” I volunteer. And I am pleased by the effect that this one sentence has. His face lights up suddenly, the excited man is back. The shoulders are no longer drooping.
“You think it is possible? You think I will be able to pick that stuff up fast enough? It is science after all.” He asks. But there is more hope in the questions than anxiety or doubt.
“I think so. I think if we sit down together a few hours a day, a week will see you understanding most of the stuff that you need. And then, if there is something that you need on top of that from time to time, you can fall back on me and I will explain that.” I say, taking the classical teacher approach – encourage, motivate, even when you may have doubt yourself. It is astounding how often and how quickly miracles are achieved by this approach.
“I think I would like to have some tea,” is what he says in reply to this. That means that he is happy and would like to converse more now. Tea is the liquid around which we have always talked, argued, sparred with our ideas.
I know things are back to normal.
But then right after the tea, he says he feels sleepy. Must be the tiredness owing to lack of sleep yesterday night and the delay at the airport in the morning and all of that. He goes over to the bedroom and sleeps. I go upstairs to my study.
I cannot shake the feeling that something else is wrong too.
X X X
At the dining table for the dinner, he is radiant. Ecstatically he announces to all, “Avinash is going to teach me genetics!”
The fare before him is something that he can drool over. Parathas stuffed with bathua (Pigweed or lamb’s quarters, cooked like spinach and tasting similar to it). He loves them. I hate them. But today I do not protest. I have seen him in a pensive mood before. This mood actually takes him over quite often. He is most chirpy and happy in the morning just after he wakes up. We are opposites in this matter. I am like my mouth is still sleepy though I may have woken up. I am like my words are cold blooded and need warming before they can get out of my mouth. He is like everything wakes up when he does. I remember my irritation with him in the morning. He would like to chat me up and I would like to have him shut up. And since you don’t tell your father that, I am irritated. Then he sits down at the dining table for the tea and opens up the newspaper and the pensive mood starts to spread over him. Sometimes the things darken beyond just being pensive. He loves to read of politics. Politics is never positive in our nation. The news therefore darkens his mood. It is better when he comes out with an acid comment. If he does not, the thing clouds his mind. Then you see him as pensive but he is actually going cold inside with pessimism. I have seen him pensive with a coin in his hands. His eyesight is not good. So often he calls me or my mother and asks, “Do you thing this drawing is of an elephant or is it a horse?” Not that he cannot make a difference between the two animals. It is just that the ancient Indian coin makers often did not bother about the shapes of animals and so one thing looked like other. I have seen him pensive with a book in his hands, his tongue touching the upper palate of his mouth, his hand busy with the big toe of his foot that he has pulled up on the sofa. But today’s pensive mood was different. It was tinged with an unfathomable sadness – something that I have never observed in all the years I have lived with him, not even when I flunked one of the most crucial exams, not even when my grandfather died, not even when my grandmother died, not when he underwent a retina operation which threatened to steal his eyesight, not even when he suffered a bad paralytic stroke and took a whole year recovering the full function of his limbs and there was the specter that he would never be able to use his hand to write his books.
I have also never seen him so tired in the afternoon that he would wish to go to sleep.
So I do not protest.
I gulp down the bathua parathas to quench the hunger. He eats them slowly with evident relish and quenches the taste buds. He talks about the Arya problem now. He gradually reveals what happened in the conference that he could understand. He talks about his own speech. He is now relieved – he knows that he will be taught genetics and so he does not have to think of quitting the field that has become so dear to him.
“Shall we begin tomorrow?” he asks.
“Yes, why not?” I reflect his eagerness.
We talk awhile and he says he wants to go to bed a bit early. He says that it is better to do so since he would want to be fresh and receptive tomorrow for the genetics lesson. But that cannot be the case. I know him more than that. Happiness would make him read more, talk more. He is really tired.
One more thing that I have been noticing for almost a year now. He is still wearing his woolen shirt. Agreed that he really likes this shirt. Agreed that it is winter. But in Nagpur, and that too so early in winter, the temperatures rarely plummet so much that you have to wear warm clothing. And then all his life he has been a person who has weathered winters wearing just a vest. He has always found it strange that people find it cold in Nagpur during winters when the temperature hardly dips below 13o C. Lately however, the things have changed. The neighbor’s young son wears a vest even in the winters and works in the garden. He finds that strange now. “Only when he catches a cold will he understand,” is what he says when he looks at him.
X X X
“Avi!”
This one word, a loving diminutive of my own name, uttered sharply with more stress on “A”, is the scar that so many of my childhood dreams bear. He woke me up at 4.30 sharp in the morning. All his childhood he had studied in a Gurukul where you wake up at 4 in the morning and start with your morning chores and then spend the “Brahma Muhurta” (the hour of Brahma, the best time to study as per Hindu culture) studying. He liked the discipline of that system and wanted me to abide by the same. Agreed that he made that concession of a half hour. But it was not enough for me. So, get up I would, take up a book I would, but lapse into sleep with the book on the table. Eventually, after many of the dreams died premature death, it was mutually agreed that I should wake up at least at 6. This has become a habit and I get up at 6 always no matter how late or early I sleep.
So, when in the morning, this same diminutive is uttered at 5 by my wife, I wake up all groggy, confused and angry. My wife is standing besides the bed, still in her nightwear.
“The bell,” is all she says. In an instant I know something is wrong.
My wife and I stay on the first floor while my parents occupy the ground floor. Over the years an arrangement has been perfected – whenever they need us, they just have to ring a bell which sounds upstairs. One bell for myself and two bells for my wife. A bell so early in the morning only announces trouble.
I throw off the sheets and go downstairs. My mother is at the door and her eyes tell me that there is something wrong.
“Your father,” she says. “Just take a look. He came back earlier than usual from his morning walk and is not feeling well.”
He is lying on the drawing room divan. And although there is a bit of morning chill, he is bathed in sweat. The green woolen shirt is still on his torso. Even at this time I have not the slightest of the inkling what is to happen to this green shirt. On his face you can read the spelling of pain and the alphabets are in the upper case. To my queries, he tells me that he has pain in the chest and that too to the left. I then ask him the most important question I can think of.
“Are you feeling breathless,” I ask.
Years ago, just after marriage, I had started feeling pain in my chest on the left hand side. I was mortally afraid that my heart had gone weak at this early stage in life. So, one day I asked a physician whom I knew very well to take an ECG. The guy told me that there was no need. However, I insisted and told him about the pain. He had a good laugh at my expense, told me that if I could not find a better use for my money, he would oblige. He took an ECG, showed the result to me and told me that you have spondilitis. Later, he confirmed the diagnosis. Once this was done, he told me, “If you are going to have a heart attack, it is not just the pain you will feel. You will be breathless too.” This is exactly what I remember and ask.
He nods. He does not speak because even speaking makes him breathless. I take instant decision. No ambulance. That will be too late in arriving. I take the car out. I make him sit in a chair and then slide the chair out to the car. I make him sit inside. My mother sits at the back and we move without wasting time. I decide to take him to a physician who has been treating him and knows his case history. My mother has brought a homeopathic medicine with her and she gives it to him. It is the homeopathic version of nitroglycerine. We are merely five minutes out of our house when he tells me, “Why do we not just go back? I am feeling quite right now. Besides, I have to complete the Presidential Address that I have been writing for the last two days. There are several important things that I want to mention in this. Precious time will be lost in the hospital.”
I am firm and tell him that he has to see a doctor.
“But yesterday too at the airport I had the same feeling. I became okay in just about 10 minutes. It is the same thing again. I think it is indigestion. Why don’t we turn back?”
I continue driving and he continues to fret over his Presidential Address. So he had a mild heart attack at the airport yesterday morning too is all I think. We arrive at the doctor. I find immediately that I have brought him to the wrong place by the inefficiency that I see. But it is too late. The doctor has arrived, has checked his blood pressure, has moved on to take his ECG. After the whole thing is over, he says, “It is heart. His BP is low, just 100 by 50. But at the most it will develop into an angina. No need to worry. We will admit him now for observation. He should be able to go back by the evening.” Whether he is telling me this just to sort of pacify me I do not know. If he is doing that, he does not need to. I am quite hard at these things.
He is admitted. He is on his bed with strict instructions to lie down and not to speak. But he is telling my mother how important his presidential address is! All his life he has been an academic and on his sick bed too he cannot stop being one, incorrigibly being one. I cannot describe my emotions about this. I am concerned, yes. But I am proud too – what a father to have. When ordinary people would be concerned about what will happen to them, he is concerned about his presidential address and the new things he is going to present and about his thoughts regarding certain coins that surfaced just some days before! I want to tell him to stop talking. But the other part of me is too weak to say this, too glad to have a father who can be so obsessed with his work.
I ask my mother to go home and bathe and then come again at a later time. I tell her that the doctor himself does not think that this can turn out to be any serious. She does not want to go. But she yields to my practicality.
X X X
In the afternoon, his dead body is brought home. I bring my mother home in my car.
The body is made to lie in the drawing room. It has to be prepared for cremation. My friends, colleagues, the priest, his students, his colleagues, everyone who is connected in whichever way to him, arrive. I have to bathe him and then give him new clothes. But the green woolen shirt won’t come off his body. There is a slight swelling around the torso and it is difficult to get the shirt open. I have half a desire to tell the priest to leave it be – he so loved this short, it will not be wrong if he takes it away with him. But I bring a pair of scissors and cut the shirt open. Other preparations are done and the body is cremated in the evening.
When I come back home, things are silent. I do not know how to console my mother. Oh there are other people around. But there presence is a blur behind which her tears only wait. I cannot weep because I have to support her and console her.
Since then, I have never wept – the moment has passed. I have only thought and thought.
The man was greedy for knowledge. He hated death. But not because he would die. The problem was like this:
“What is the meaning of learning so much, hoarding so much in your mind, and then dying off? I mean, it would be okay if you died provided that in the next birth you start from where you ended the last time around. That does not happen and it is cruel.”
The man was greedy for knowledge. He would read practically everything. At the age of 63, when most people have already quit most of their activities, he learnt computers and then learnt how to go online and read up things in his subject that were available. All his papers after that were submitted to journals electronically and online. This also meant irritation for me. Every 10-15 minutes the bell would go and I had to rush downstairs.
“I don’t know what happened to the file I was writing. I had saved it but I cannot find now.”
Suppressing my irritation from being interrupted in my own work, I would search for the file. “What was the name of the file?” I would ask. “I have forgotten,” was quite often the reply. Now, I mean, can you beat that? He does not remember the name of the file and he wants me to find that! So I would ask what the contents were and then mount a search based on content. Often I would find the file in an unrelated folder.
“What is this file doing here?” You think I asked this question? You are wrong. He would be the one asking it of me. I mean, come on, I should have been the one asking it.
Sometimes files went entirely missing – no trace at all. And he would not agree that he had failed to save them. It was always the computer that was playing some mischief. So, two bit “experts” were very often called to set the computer right.
At other times it would be some problem with the internet. Some other time about diacritical marks – Sanskrit words creep in when you are writing about history. So he got installed a special software that allowed him to work more easily. When troubles with the use of this software arose, it was double trouble for me. I knew nothing about this software and was supposed to troubleshoot whenever he landed himself into a soup!
All through I troubleshooted for him, taught him a few things about computers and working online, using a word file, other programmes that make life easy. But most of the time I did this with irritation at the back of my mind from having been interrupted in my own work.
There was only one time that I agreed to teach him with a lot of pleasure. I loved him you see and could not see him down like that just because genetics was intruding upon his own area.
But that chance was lost so quickly and so suddenly.
May be, just because it was such an ardent desire in him, he will be born again with all the knowledge intact in his mind and will start from there. If so, he will have to learn genetics all by himself.
I lost the chance to teach him genetics and send him prepared to the next birth.
Friday, September 21, 2007
AN OPEN LETTER TO KARUNANIDHI
You are an atheist sir. I am not an atheist. I am an agnostic. I am also a teacher and a scientist. Having seen even the scientific concepts crumbling and newer concepts taking their place, the best course for a scientist is to be open even about the accepted hypotheses – you never know which of the hypotheses by which you currently lay stock will crumble tomorrow all of a sudden and an entirely new hypothesis which now seems correct will seamlessly take its place. If this is the state in science which concerns itself with fact, it is better that we leave God alone. We can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. I believe that it is better to be ambivalent about the existence of God. It is also good to not to scoff at people who believe in such an existence and to not to scoff at people such as you who do not believe.
The uncertainty is not just limited to the field of science. It is there in the field of History also. Till Heinrich Schliemann dug Troy up exactly where Homer had suggested it is, everyone thought that Troy was a mythical city concocted for literary purposes by Homer. Closer to home, everyone had written off Dwarka as a mythical city and the flood that sunk it to be as mythical till S. R. Rao found Dwarka exactly where it was supposed to be, sunk under the sea. Saraswati was an equally mythical river till scientists provided definite proofs for its actual existence.
You talk of any field of human enquiry, and the uncertainties are there. You talk of economics, you talk of the direction that economies of different countries will take in future, you talk about where the terrorists will strike tomorrow or will not strike, you talk about what course will politics take tomorrow, you talk about whether you yourselves will be alive tomorrow or not, there are uncertainties.
In the face of such glorious uncertainties, first of all how can any one be an atheist? Is it not better to be an agnostic? But let me not talk of that – that is your considered position having hardened from years of practice and adherence to it. Let me talk of Rama and his being a character imagined by Valmiki. You have imagined many characters in your novels. You say that they are totally imaginary. On the testimony of many writers more and less accomplished than you, on reading autobiographies of numerous such writers, I know that every single character they painted in their writings had a root in some real person somewhere. Only the name was changed or the character was lifted from one scenario and planted in another or the characteristics of the character were changed slightly. As philosophers say, we can only copy and not create – every character you describe in your novels is an altered image of some real character that you have come across in life or have heard about. In the face of this – you yourself being a writer – how can you say that even if Rama as a character was imagined by Valmiki, it was not an image, true or altered, of some real life person? Also, there is this chance that Valmiki wrote as Homer wrote, describing what he actually saw. Can you deny it?
You are not just an atheist. You are a politician too. You change your stance about issues at the drop of a hat when it suits you and gives you political advantage. You change your coalition partners when it suits you to do that. You are a politician and you know that you have to give in to public demand at times – when the tensions run high, when a thing becomes emotional, to douse the fires, you have to do this. You do not apply your rigid position as an atheist in these times.
My request to you is to look at the uncertainties all around you and reconsider your position as an atheist. My request to you is to convert yourself into an agnostic – that I think is the only thing a human being humbled by these uncertainties can be. But, as I said earlier, that may be your considered position having hardened from years of practice and adherence to it. My request to you is to at least reconsider your position on this one matter of Rama.
I am not asking you to reconsider your position that Rama is imaginary. All I am asking you is to keep silent on the matter.
Is it too much to ask?
Or is it that it currently suits you to wax eloquent on the issue?
The uncertainty is not just limited to the field of science. It is there in the field of History also. Till Heinrich Schliemann dug Troy up exactly where Homer had suggested it is, everyone thought that Troy was a mythical city concocted for literary purposes by Homer. Closer to home, everyone had written off Dwarka as a mythical city and the flood that sunk it to be as mythical till S. R. Rao found Dwarka exactly where it was supposed to be, sunk under the sea. Saraswati was an equally mythical river till scientists provided definite proofs for its actual existence.
You talk of any field of human enquiry, and the uncertainties are there. You talk of economics, you talk of the direction that economies of different countries will take in future, you talk about where the terrorists will strike tomorrow or will not strike, you talk about what course will politics take tomorrow, you talk about whether you yourselves will be alive tomorrow or not, there are uncertainties.
In the face of such glorious uncertainties, first of all how can any one be an atheist? Is it not better to be an agnostic? But let me not talk of that – that is your considered position having hardened from years of practice and adherence to it. Let me talk of Rama and his being a character imagined by Valmiki. You have imagined many characters in your novels. You say that they are totally imaginary. On the testimony of many writers more and less accomplished than you, on reading autobiographies of numerous such writers, I know that every single character they painted in their writings had a root in some real person somewhere. Only the name was changed or the character was lifted from one scenario and planted in another or the characteristics of the character were changed slightly. As philosophers say, we can only copy and not create – every character you describe in your novels is an altered image of some real character that you have come across in life or have heard about. In the face of this – you yourself being a writer – how can you say that even if Rama as a character was imagined by Valmiki, it was not an image, true or altered, of some real life person? Also, there is this chance that Valmiki wrote as Homer wrote, describing what he actually saw. Can you deny it?
You are not just an atheist. You are a politician too. You change your stance about issues at the drop of a hat when it suits you and gives you political advantage. You change your coalition partners when it suits you to do that. You are a politician and you know that you have to give in to public demand at times – when the tensions run high, when a thing becomes emotional, to douse the fires, you have to do this. You do not apply your rigid position as an atheist in these times.
My request to you is to look at the uncertainties all around you and reconsider your position as an atheist. My request to you is to convert yourself into an agnostic – that I think is the only thing a human being humbled by these uncertainties can be. But, as I said earlier, that may be your considered position having hardened from years of practice and adherence to it. My request to you is to at least reconsider your position on this one matter of Rama.
I am not asking you to reconsider your position that Rama is imaginary. All I am asking you is to keep silent on the matter.
Is it too much to ask?
Or is it that it currently suits you to wax eloquent on the issue?
TIGER ON FOOT! WELL, ALMOST
We have been very very lucky as far as sighting tigers is concerned. The first trip we take into any jungle, we know that we will be face to face with royalty any moment – so far this record has been unbroken; we have always seen a tiger/tigress in the very first trip to any jungle. Also, normally this is a close encounter. The tiger is just a meter or two from our jeep and is in no hurry to dart away. We can watch it ambling along or standing there wagging its tail or sitting down and licking its paws or in various other poses that it can strike.
But seeing a tiger from inside a jeep is one thing and seeing it standing in front of you while you are walking in the jungle is quite another. The tigers, so say the guides, take the whole jeep as one single organism. That is exactly why you are told not to move in a manner that a limb or head pokes out of the jeep. And since the jeep is quite big, the tiger rarely attacks it. So, no danger even if the tiger is just a meter or so away from you and happens to look into your eye while your nostrils pick up its rank smell.
But what if you are on foot, walking in deep jungle and the tiger comes in front of you? Well that is totally different, unnerving, has an element of danger and, therefore, thrilling. Rules in the National Parks in India (at least in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan) forbid you from walking. So this situation is almost impossible. But there is a place inside the core area of a National Park in Madhya Pradesh where you can walk for miles and miles without bending the rule and where the tigers come everyday. This National Park is Bandhavgarh and the following is an account of what happened when we were last there in the month of March.
In this park, atop a hill is a fort. Just about half way to the fort is a statue of Vishnu reclining on his snake-bed or, what in Sanskrit or Hindi is called the Shesh Shayya. The statue is just besides the wall of the hill and natural streams coming down from the hill make a pond of fresh water just in front of this statue. The place is cool and beautiful. This is also the point up to which the jeeps can travel. From here on you have to climb on foot if you want to visit the fort. Once you reach the summit, you can walk on flat ground and take a stroll besides the numerous huge manmade ponds and a natural lake. Opposite the lake is the temple which is raised slightly above the ground and you have to climb a few stairs before you reach it. The temple has a priest who lives in the temple and is witness to goings and comings of tigers everyday. The tigers walk up to the temple quite often and at times swim in the lake and lie in its cool water at length.
Strewn all over are ruins of ancient structures. Trees, grass, shrubs grow both outside and inside these ruins. The guide takes you up to the ruins, waits outside, makes sure that no tiger is lurking inside and then takes you in. This he does with every single structure. He is not making it up to make it more thrilling for you. Once inside, you can see tiger droppings which have gone all silvery with age. Tiger droppings contain a lot of calcium and thus, as time passes, the white of calcium shows on the surface and gives it an almost silvery hue. All over the flat ground are pug marks recent and old, body marks where the tigers had lain down, claw marks on the trees showing their efforts at marking territory, bones of sambhar, deer, wild boars, and other animals that became food long back. A pug mark is so fresh that you know that a tiger has just preceded you. Your blood curdles just at the thought that you may be walking just behind a tiger or, worse, a tiger may be walking behind you. You look back.
That day, as we started to climb, it was 11 in the morning and it was still cool despite it being summer. The climb is not steep except at a few places. Still you sweat and breath heavily because the path steadily rises up. There are alternate places of sunshine and shade. You can stop and rest in the shade and look around. The scenery is breathtaking. Along the route are hairpin bends. These bends are potential thrill spots for the man who thinks – what if there is a tiger lurking just along the bend? It is not an empty thought either. From our previous visits to the fort we know that there are tigers here and they love to be here. Just along one such bend is an entire skull of a Sambhar that probably found the tiger lurking as it was going up or down. Or probably it was killed elsewhere and the tiger brought it to this place to eat in peace.
By and by we almost make it up to the summit. As we are walking a comparatively flat and straight path, a foreigner couple is coming from the opposite direction. There is something in their walk that is not quite right. They are slightly more hurried than normal. Yet, you do not see much urgency or fear on their faces. The female has something like a smile on her face and both faces show something almost like satisfaction. Their guide is walking slightly behind them. As we come abreast, the guides stop and talk in whispers. When we start walking again, our guide whispers to us, “There is a tiger ahead!” This news makes electric current flow through our bodies. “These foreigners have just seen it and if we do not make much noise, we too will see it. They saw it lying down just besides the road itself. So, lets move and lets not talk.”
My children are excited. Right from their childhood they have been seeing tigers at close quarters, but from inside the open jeep. Their excitement is misinterpreted by the guide. He stops us. “When you see the tiger, stay where you are. Don’t run. Promise me, you won’t panic.” We tell him that we are not likely to do any such thing. My daughter clutches my hand. But that is not in fear, it is just excitement. My son whispers, “It should not go away by the time we reach.”
We walk on. We are slower now. We watch where we put our foot. There is burnt grass and dried up leaves on the path. The grass on the path and on the sides of the path is periodically burnt. This is done just before the summer arrives to stop jungle fires from spreading. We avoid putting our foot on the dried leaves or on the burnt grass to avoid making any sound. We hope that the tiger cannot hear our hearts thumping in excitement. And while I say there is no fear, I am exaggerating. There is fear, but it has become a part of our excitement. Without fear, there wouldn’t be excitement either.
We turn a bend and are extra careful while we do. The path stretches beyond us straight and flat – there is no tiger to be seen for as far as we can see. The path turns again and in front of us is an ancient structure. This is a square room atop a platform with a flat roof on top of it. The guide says that this was used as a classroom till a few years back. I cannot believe him. The reason is a banyan tree that is growing out of one of its walls with its primary roots going deep into the plinth of the structure and secondary roots falling from its great branches and embedding themselves into the structure and beyond it into the open ground. The tree is huge and has obviously taken some decades to grow to this size and maturity. As we hop on to the plinth, the guide asks us to be careful on two counts. The structure is weak and, more importantly, the tiger can be inside this structure. He says he has witnessed a tiger inside this structure once. Our advance comes to a quick halt. I move around the room doing a full parikrama watching ahead of me and inside the room all the time. There is no tiger here.
And then it happens. There is a sudden alarm call. A macaque is calling some distance away. The macaque alarm call is quite distinct – the closest analogy I can give is a man coughing spasmodically and loudly. In the direction that the call is coming from is a vast open, depressed ground that is completely green with grass. Circumscribing the ground are trees in the distance. Between this ground and us are several rocks big and small. We start climbing these rocks to move toward the ground.
We now know that there is a tiger somewhere nearby. The excitement in us has reached a peak and we do not want to miss the chance to see the striped one. My son moves ahead of me. I am directly behind him. Some distance away is my wife and the one to bring the rear is my daughter. We walk quite some distance but fail to see the tiger. The alarm calls have also subsided and we decide to sink to the ground. We sit for a while. Our guide says we should go see the temple and then somewhere under a tree, eat our lunch.
The temple is at the peak of the hill. It is a wonderful thing. The wind blows here all the time. Our sweaty bodies are chilled immediately. We climb the few stairs it takes to reach the temple and sit there on the platform with our feet stretched. I go into the sanctum and offer prayers to the resident deity. The priest is pleased and anoints my forehead with vermillion. He comes out with me. When I inquire about the tiger he tells me that it has not arrived so far. But he is certain it will as it does everyday. It had called an hour or so before and must have been climbing then.
In front of us is the lake. After some time we climb down from the temple and select a tree for its shade. Before eating the lunch, we go down to the lake to wash our hands, feet and faces. We climb up, eat lunch, rest a while under the shade and then start our descent towards Shesh Shayya and the jeep waiting for us. The time is 1.30 PM.
We have missed seeing the tiger on foot.
In the evening over dinner the guests on a table nearby tell us, “We were at the fort at around 3 PM. While we were sitting outside the temple, two tigers came and entered the lake and swam for almost half an hour before getting out and walking away. We have the whole scene on our video camera.”
But seeing a tiger from inside a jeep is one thing and seeing it standing in front of you while you are walking in the jungle is quite another. The tigers, so say the guides, take the whole jeep as one single organism. That is exactly why you are told not to move in a manner that a limb or head pokes out of the jeep. And since the jeep is quite big, the tiger rarely attacks it. So, no danger even if the tiger is just a meter or so away from you and happens to look into your eye while your nostrils pick up its rank smell.
But what if you are on foot, walking in deep jungle and the tiger comes in front of you? Well that is totally different, unnerving, has an element of danger and, therefore, thrilling. Rules in the National Parks in India (at least in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan) forbid you from walking. So this situation is almost impossible. But there is a place inside the core area of a National Park in Madhya Pradesh where you can walk for miles and miles without bending the rule and where the tigers come everyday. This National Park is Bandhavgarh and the following is an account of what happened when we were last there in the month of March.
In this park, atop a hill is a fort. Just about half way to the fort is a statue of Vishnu reclining on his snake-bed or, what in Sanskrit or Hindi is called the Shesh Shayya. The statue is just besides the wall of the hill and natural streams coming down from the hill make a pond of fresh water just in front of this statue. The place is cool and beautiful. This is also the point up to which the jeeps can travel. From here on you have to climb on foot if you want to visit the fort. Once you reach the summit, you can walk on flat ground and take a stroll besides the numerous huge manmade ponds and a natural lake. Opposite the lake is the temple which is raised slightly above the ground and you have to climb a few stairs before you reach it. The temple has a priest who lives in the temple and is witness to goings and comings of tigers everyday. The tigers walk up to the temple quite often and at times swim in the lake and lie in its cool water at length.
Strewn all over are ruins of ancient structures. Trees, grass, shrubs grow both outside and inside these ruins. The guide takes you up to the ruins, waits outside, makes sure that no tiger is lurking inside and then takes you in. This he does with every single structure. He is not making it up to make it more thrilling for you. Once inside, you can see tiger droppings which have gone all silvery with age. Tiger droppings contain a lot of calcium and thus, as time passes, the white of calcium shows on the surface and gives it an almost silvery hue. All over the flat ground are pug marks recent and old, body marks where the tigers had lain down, claw marks on the trees showing their efforts at marking territory, bones of sambhar, deer, wild boars, and other animals that became food long back. A pug mark is so fresh that you know that a tiger has just preceded you. Your blood curdles just at the thought that you may be walking just behind a tiger or, worse, a tiger may be walking behind you. You look back.
That day, as we started to climb, it was 11 in the morning and it was still cool despite it being summer. The climb is not steep except at a few places. Still you sweat and breath heavily because the path steadily rises up. There are alternate places of sunshine and shade. You can stop and rest in the shade and look around. The scenery is breathtaking. Along the route are hairpin bends. These bends are potential thrill spots for the man who thinks – what if there is a tiger lurking just along the bend? It is not an empty thought either. From our previous visits to the fort we know that there are tigers here and they love to be here. Just along one such bend is an entire skull of a Sambhar that probably found the tiger lurking as it was going up or down. Or probably it was killed elsewhere and the tiger brought it to this place to eat in peace.
By and by we almost make it up to the summit. As we are walking a comparatively flat and straight path, a foreigner couple is coming from the opposite direction. There is something in their walk that is not quite right. They are slightly more hurried than normal. Yet, you do not see much urgency or fear on their faces. The female has something like a smile on her face and both faces show something almost like satisfaction. Their guide is walking slightly behind them. As we come abreast, the guides stop and talk in whispers. When we start walking again, our guide whispers to us, “There is a tiger ahead!” This news makes electric current flow through our bodies. “These foreigners have just seen it and if we do not make much noise, we too will see it. They saw it lying down just besides the road itself. So, lets move and lets not talk.”
My children are excited. Right from their childhood they have been seeing tigers at close quarters, but from inside the open jeep. Their excitement is misinterpreted by the guide. He stops us. “When you see the tiger, stay where you are. Don’t run. Promise me, you won’t panic.” We tell him that we are not likely to do any such thing. My daughter clutches my hand. But that is not in fear, it is just excitement. My son whispers, “It should not go away by the time we reach.”
We walk on. We are slower now. We watch where we put our foot. There is burnt grass and dried up leaves on the path. The grass on the path and on the sides of the path is periodically burnt. This is done just before the summer arrives to stop jungle fires from spreading. We avoid putting our foot on the dried leaves or on the burnt grass to avoid making any sound. We hope that the tiger cannot hear our hearts thumping in excitement. And while I say there is no fear, I am exaggerating. There is fear, but it has become a part of our excitement. Without fear, there wouldn’t be excitement either.
We turn a bend and are extra careful while we do. The path stretches beyond us straight and flat – there is no tiger to be seen for as far as we can see. The path turns again and in front of us is an ancient structure. This is a square room atop a platform with a flat roof on top of it. The guide says that this was used as a classroom till a few years back. I cannot believe him. The reason is a banyan tree that is growing out of one of its walls with its primary roots going deep into the plinth of the structure and secondary roots falling from its great branches and embedding themselves into the structure and beyond it into the open ground. The tree is huge and has obviously taken some decades to grow to this size and maturity. As we hop on to the plinth, the guide asks us to be careful on two counts. The structure is weak and, more importantly, the tiger can be inside this structure. He says he has witnessed a tiger inside this structure once. Our advance comes to a quick halt. I move around the room doing a full parikrama watching ahead of me and inside the room all the time. There is no tiger here.
And then it happens. There is a sudden alarm call. A macaque is calling some distance away. The macaque alarm call is quite distinct – the closest analogy I can give is a man coughing spasmodically and loudly. In the direction that the call is coming from is a vast open, depressed ground that is completely green with grass. Circumscribing the ground are trees in the distance. Between this ground and us are several rocks big and small. We start climbing these rocks to move toward the ground.
We now know that there is a tiger somewhere nearby. The excitement in us has reached a peak and we do not want to miss the chance to see the striped one. My son moves ahead of me. I am directly behind him. Some distance away is my wife and the one to bring the rear is my daughter. We walk quite some distance but fail to see the tiger. The alarm calls have also subsided and we decide to sink to the ground. We sit for a while. Our guide says we should go see the temple and then somewhere under a tree, eat our lunch.
The temple is at the peak of the hill. It is a wonderful thing. The wind blows here all the time. Our sweaty bodies are chilled immediately. We climb the few stairs it takes to reach the temple and sit there on the platform with our feet stretched. I go into the sanctum and offer prayers to the resident deity. The priest is pleased and anoints my forehead with vermillion. He comes out with me. When I inquire about the tiger he tells me that it has not arrived so far. But he is certain it will as it does everyday. It had called an hour or so before and must have been climbing then.
In front of us is the lake. After some time we climb down from the temple and select a tree for its shade. Before eating the lunch, we go down to the lake to wash our hands, feet and faces. We climb up, eat lunch, rest a while under the shade and then start our descent towards Shesh Shayya and the jeep waiting for us. The time is 1.30 PM.
We have missed seeing the tiger on foot.
In the evening over dinner the guests on a table nearby tell us, “We were at the fort at around 3 PM. While we were sitting outside the temple, two tigers came and entered the lake and swam for almost half an hour before getting out and walking away. We have the whole scene on our video camera.”
HUNDRED
As the race started and as several cars began vying with each other for supremacy, my four year old son exclaimed, “Look papa, Hundred cars!”
Hundred, for him, is a wondrous word. It is not merely a figure – as a figure though, it is truly astronomical. It is the most expressive word in his dictionary. He loves his parents hundred! He plans to do many things when he is hundred years old! When he is injured, his foot hurts, you guessed it, hundred! The word has a magical, indefinable taste – I know, I have seen him rolling his tongue along its delectable contours. It also has many more colors than a rainbow can even begin to imagine – I am positive, I have seen all those colors in his eyes. Hundred, probably, is the greatest thing in the world. Greater even than God. Or, probably, it is the God.
For my daughter also hundred used to be all great things under the sky. She is two years older than my son and already the word has lost its grip over her. Yesterday I overheard a conversation between the two siblings.
“Akash’s father possesses hundred rupees,” my temporarily owl-eyed son revealed to his unimpressed sister. “He also has a car. You know how much did the car cost? Hundred rupees!”
“Akash’s father must be a poor man then,” the know-all elder sister replied. “Why, it’s Shruti who is rich. Her father has thousand rupees. You know how much is thousand?”
No, he has no idea as yet about what thousand is. But within a year or so the word would become installed in his mind. May be temporarily again, but firmly. Hundred, naturally, would be dumped unceremoniously as something pedestrian, utterly devoid of any alchemic charm.
Don’t we all grow up that way? Updating our Gods at each stage of our life? Given the facility of searching the debris of my years as a kid, I am sure, I will find hundred to be my primitive God too. I too must have dethroned Him as I grew up. As a student, I remember, to have made a hundred thousand my God. That I have discarded recently and now a million seems to be more Godly. An year later probably, ten million will be the new God.
For my son, however, hundred can be non-numerical; it is mutable into something occult, something supernatural. Down the road somewhere, my hundreds, thousands, millions, have lost this capacity to be non-numerical. They have become hard, obvious, plain numbers about which there is nothing arcane, nothing recondite. Surely, it does take away some charm from these numbers. When my son says, “I love you hundred!” he is being sincere. I won’t feel sincere if I say the same.
Hundred, for him, is a wondrous word. It is not merely a figure – as a figure though, it is truly astronomical. It is the most expressive word in his dictionary. He loves his parents hundred! He plans to do many things when he is hundred years old! When he is injured, his foot hurts, you guessed it, hundred! The word has a magical, indefinable taste – I know, I have seen him rolling his tongue along its delectable contours. It also has many more colors than a rainbow can even begin to imagine – I am positive, I have seen all those colors in his eyes. Hundred, probably, is the greatest thing in the world. Greater even than God. Or, probably, it is the God.
For my daughter also hundred used to be all great things under the sky. She is two years older than my son and already the word has lost its grip over her. Yesterday I overheard a conversation between the two siblings.
“Akash’s father possesses hundred rupees,” my temporarily owl-eyed son revealed to his unimpressed sister. “He also has a car. You know how much did the car cost? Hundred rupees!”
“Akash’s father must be a poor man then,” the know-all elder sister replied. “Why, it’s Shruti who is rich. Her father has thousand rupees. You know how much is thousand?”
No, he has no idea as yet about what thousand is. But within a year or so the word would become installed in his mind. May be temporarily again, but firmly. Hundred, naturally, would be dumped unceremoniously as something pedestrian, utterly devoid of any alchemic charm.
Don’t we all grow up that way? Updating our Gods at each stage of our life? Given the facility of searching the debris of my years as a kid, I am sure, I will find hundred to be my primitive God too. I too must have dethroned Him as I grew up. As a student, I remember, to have made a hundred thousand my God. That I have discarded recently and now a million seems to be more Godly. An year later probably, ten million will be the new God.
For my son, however, hundred can be non-numerical; it is mutable into something occult, something supernatural. Down the road somewhere, my hundreds, thousands, millions, have lost this capacity to be non-numerical. They have become hard, obvious, plain numbers about which there is nothing arcane, nothing recondite. Surely, it does take away some charm from these numbers. When my son says, “I love you hundred!” he is being sincere. I won’t feel sincere if I say the same.
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