Re-routing

How long does a journey have to be before it qualifies as one? I ask because I’vehad some that were four feet long, some 25 feet, others that were the length of India, andyet others that, with a slender needle of a silver plane, tacked together great sheets ofocean and continent. The four-foot journey was the longest.

Four feet is the breadth of an average surgical cot. For two years it was the breadthof my world too—a world that smelt of cold, canned oxygen, and sweetly sickeningether. I was leashed to life with lengths of tube and watched, slack-armed andlimp-legged, as a ventilator, with measured pomposity, bullied the blood in my veins fromsluggish blue into throbbing red. It seemed to me that I was trapped between twotemperature zones—the tundra of a heavily air-conditioned intensive care unit, andthe torrid heat of the ulcerative colitis that boiled and bubbled in my large intestine.

There were red lights and green signals on this four-foot trip too, just as there hadbeen on the subcontinental journeys of my railway years. The way I was positioned lying onmy side like a child’s rag doll, and looking through the railings of the surgicalcot, it seemed to me that the world had bars superimposed on it and life could be viewedonly in segments, if one had to make sense of it.

Hushed references by the doctors to parts of myself that I hadn’t known existedbefore and were called the ‘cerebellum’ and the ‘cerebrum’, made meeventually understand that for reasons known only to my central nervous system, I haddeveloped a rare complication—polyneuritis. That helped explain why turning from oneside to another across the four-foot breadth of surgical cot was for a long while theimpossible journey—the hardest of my 33 years of life. One day, I did succeed inmanoeuvering myself about with the clumsiness of an upturned beetle. But that took twomonths. Till then, fortunately, I had my mind.

I don’t know where the brain ends and the mind begins, but even when neuro-signalswent wrong and stalled my body like a bogie in a railway siding, my mind travelled inmemory, untethered. And in my mind the signals were mostly green—a moving on, alongthe great Indian railway map, leaving behind the crew-cut lawns that bordered army paradegrounds in Jabalpur for the hillsides of Garo, where panthers promenaded by moonlight;grinding along old railway tracks, with the fireflies of Assam behind us and the lights ofMadras ahead. I say ‘us’ because we had travelled as a family from station tostation on Indian soil wherever my father’s work took him.

Nobody who wasn’t a ‘railway child’ in the ’60s will quiteunderstand what it meant to be ‘transferred’! Life in the old posting was alwayscarefully dismantled and packed away, together with furniture in crates and crockery inwooden cases, to be reassembled in a new ‘somewhere’. There were transfercertificates and report cards from old schools to new ones, and farewell parties andgoodbye treats—and I was always rather heartlessly glad. When you were in a place itwas
f-o-r-e-v-e-r; and when you went, you went, in happy anticipation of a great blaze ofimpending glory that seemed to flutter like a pennant around every curve of the railwayline.On departure day, excitement and a sense of adventure so bumped into each otherinside me that it appeared my heart could hardly afford other emotions. The autographbooks were signed in and shamelessly dated ‘for eternity’; promises were made towrite to ‘best’ school friends, and then—‘good-bye! goodbye!’, wewere flagged off into the future. By the time we reached the station and boarded therailway officer’s saloon that was to be our home-in-between-homes, familiar faces hadalready, if imperceptibly, misted over in memory. We delighted, instead, in the novelty ofmeals on wheels, sofas that metamorphosed into beds at night, and limitless supplies oficed water from saloon fridges that smelt faintly and exotically of coal smoke. Then theold and generally asthmatic steam engine would strain on its metallic lungs—and wewere on our way, cheerfully exchanging old landscapes for new ones! We children alwayschorused in rhythm with great engine wheels as they gathered speed with unexpectedefficiency—"Cheese and Biscuits, Cheese and Biscuits, Fish n’ Chips, Fishn’ Chips, So - oo - up!"

The engine, as it always seemed to me, responded with a chorus of its own."There’s more-to-come! There’s more-to-come! Come on! Come on! Comeon!" It urgently exhorted its long line of recalcitrant carriages to embark zestfullyon yet another arduous journey. We stood at the windows, which also had bars, buthorizontal ones not vertical, and waved to India on both sides of the tracks. Merrilytattered children on buffalo back in bearded rice fields, and crowds of commuters,sweating patiently at railway crossings, waved back. It made me imagine that all the worldloved a traveller, and I felt good! "Sad to say, I’m going away! I’ll comeback a-n-o-t-h-e-r day!" I called out to the vanishing township. I never did to anyof my father’s old postings—but one. And that was to Bombay, to Woden Row, toBeryl Court as it dreamed the scurrying years away.

I never left Beryl Court behind so, in a sense, there was no ‘re-turning’ toit. It was always there—the boldest scrawl in the palimpsest of memory. In a way,there were two Beryl Courts—the earlier and the later. The earlier was when we firstmoved from Calcutta to Bombay, in the ’60s.

When I was five, the younger set at Beryl had a circus. In lieu of wild animals we hadElmo Samuel’s dogs and Ravi Pothan’s mother’s ill-tempered cat. I wasshamelessly exhibited as a ‘Boneless Wonder’ in spite of my knobbly knees andspiny arms. With the rich proceeds we treated ourselves to pani-puri eaten off a cart. Onthe way back the boys squirted a lolling drunk with iced pepsi cola, "just to makesure that he was still alive", and we enjoyed all the heart-stopping thrill of achase by an individual with murder in his eyes.

We came from everywhere to Beryl, but when we were there it was like a real-lifeversion of Happy Families. The railways did that to people. I guess it’sbecause nobody ever stayed on long enough for minor annoyances to acquire a more seriouscomplexion. The old lime-green wooden shed in the garden was the children’s‘club house’. We met there to plan the week’s activities: kite flying andcricket matches, trading in Superman and Phantom comics, panja competitions, and games ofmonopoly. Our monopoly set was cleverly ‘home made’ by the older boys and girls,and in a way was reflective of the culture of Beryl Court. On it strange names hobnobbedamicably with each other—Grosvenor Square and Dhobitalao, Berlin and Parel.

Every now and then a new shoot of excitement poked through the earth beneath our feet!One day, someone announced with dreadful relish that parts of a dead body had beendiscovered in a bonfire in a back garden lane and hugging ourselves with excitement, werushed out to see. It turned out to be only a set of discarded dentures.... Then the clockon Raja Bhai Towers struck six and everyone raced home to tea.

When Mohan Pothan completed marine engineering and sailed away on a ship to Borneo;when Elmo was sent to boarding school in Bangalore; when we were transferred away to anupcountry station in central India, the earlier Beryl Court ‘ended’.

The magic threshold had been crossed by the time I returned to Beryl for one last year.Father had by then retired from the railways and the family moved to our hometown in thesouth. But I went up the coast to Bombay to spend a year before I got down to earning apostgraduate degree in literature. My aunt and uncle lived in Beryl Court and they askedif I’d like to stay with them. I did.

When Malathi Jhanji invited me to join Dionysius—a drama club that met every weekin an upper floor flat of Rafique Chambers down the road from Beryl, I didn’t realisethat my membership thereof would shape many of the future journeys of my life. TheDionysius crew was a motley one. There was Gerson Creado, Nathan, Arathi and Samir. Therewere yet others, but I can’t remember them clearly except for one more—Vipin.

Vipin was a ‘journeyed’ individual too, and he was destined to undertake onelast great trip in his life. "My father was a doctor," he explained to me,"and when he was still young, he met an American medical missionary, Dr ThomasDooley, who was in Delhi on his way to a jungle hospital in Laos. Dooley, as my fathertold me, had a gift for opening people’s hearts to an awareness of the world’sproblems. He opened my father’s too. My father then worked helping the young Indiangovernment control the spread of tuberculosis among unfortunate Tibetan refugees streaminginto India. My father opened my heart in turn—and that’s what I want to do morethan any thing else. Not in Laos. We have our own ‘Laoses’ in India, and when Ifinish studying medicine, one of them will be my life."

After every performance in the Dionysius, Gerson, with his eyes behind his spectaclesshining like those of an eager beaver, insisted on what he called ‘apostmortem’. One season, the play was ‘badly mauled’ and the‘postmortem’ was a particularly long-drawn-out agony. Vipin and I decided thatwe did not want to witness anyone being turned into fresh minced meat. So we slipped outinto the evening lights.

In five minutes we were puttering down past the Causeway, past Sassoon Docks, and outtowards the tree-lined charm of Navy Nagar. But Vipin suddenly turned off into a side roadand worked the car into a lattice of streets and back alleys and busy main roads that Ihardly knew where we were going, except that the sights and smells outside were foreverBombay. There were old childhood smells of peppermint in glass bottles in pavement shops,agarbathi from a Hindu shrine, and roasted gram sprinkled liberally with salt and lime andsold in paper cones in the band stand. And there were new sights since I’d been herelast—video parlours and burger joints, both bursting at the seams with collegians outon an evening’s date. We stopped at Cuffe Parade and walked on freshly toasted sandand looked out to the sea.

I recall looking at a brave little boat and thinking that beyond the flaming bowl ofthe horizon, beyond Africa and Europe, beyond the Atlantic, thousands of Asians werecharting new territory for themselves on the great American map. I said to Vipin,"Funny how that little boat is ploughing eastwards, and yet most people I know arechanting ‘Westward Ho!’." And Vipin looked at me with a sad world ofunderstanding in his deep-set eyes. He said, "And what do you say?" Iwasn’t sure what I’d say—so I said nothing. But I know now that though westood next to each other with the same sea wind ruffling our hair, Vipin, in that moment,had grown almost imperceptibly distant.

Then we were on our way again, wheeling about the streets of my childhood and I felt asense of deja vu strike my consciousness like a breaker on the shore. To my left an oldstone building took shape in the dusk, almost out of my past. Jhansi Castle, that was itsname, was richly evocative with its spiral wrought iron staircases, grey fretted stonebalconies, and long narrow deep-set windows. The romance of it came seeping back over theyears to this moment in the car with Vipin.

"Do you see that, Vipin," I pointed to Jhansi Castle, "it’s beenrebuilt. But when I was a child there was an accidental fire there in which a man waskilled. He couldn’t get out in time because he’d had polio and was confined to awheel chair. I remember seeing him sit on a balcony, when I was a child all those yearsago, and play on a mouth organ. He played with his soul. His favourites were ComeSeptember and Evergreen Tree. You know, I almost expect to hear it waft down again now,"Oh darling, will our love stay like an evergreen tree?"

Vipin slowed down the car for a bit and said gravely, "Yes—will it?"

I had a feeling, in that moment of standing in my past and journeying into the future,with no particular phase of existence called the ‘present’. I could hear oldmouth organ melodies, and see Vipin’s jungle hospital that ‘would be’.Hutments and unwashed humanity; eradicable disease, yet chronic and deadly—could you,should you fashion life out of the substance of someone else’s dreams? I suppose Ihesitated. Maybe I shrugged my shoulders just a bit. I can’t remember. And then, Iguess, I lost him forever. Only Vipin was not just ‘someone else’.

There was journeying once again. I left and never did return to live in Beryl,It’s true I came back once more, but only as a passerby. For the rest, I just carriedit in my mind and heart wherever I went. As for Vipin, he travelled far, to a remotevillage called Nambari which, by coincidence, was in Garo. He wrote now and then and theletters, when they arrived, were travel stained and many-sealed. Sometimes they spoke ofquiet satisfaction at the battles barely won against disease and ignorance, and sometimesof bravely fought despair. I still have his missives carefully preserved in a chest ofdrawers, but more importantly, cherished in memory. One says, "Nambari is one ofhistory’s forgotten villages. The progress made by independent India seems to havetiptoed past its borders. Prejudices are stubborn—it is all but impossible toconvince people to believe in what they can’t see. And because theycan’t—people die. Witch doctor types are still called in to treat bites fromrabid dogs. A man contracted hydrophobia. Honestly, I’ve never been so frightened inmy life. Yet I must stay on. I dislike a coward. At sunset the only light we have outdoorsis the cold phosphorescence of fireflies. I have only my old transistor to remind me thatI’m still in India.There are so many Nambaris...I sometimes almost despair.There’ll need to be many more workers in the field before we have anything like aclean patch."

The last line remained with me as I studied for and completed my MA in EnglishLiterature.

So Vipin built his jungle hospital, there in an indescribable Indian beyond, while Istudied in a comfortable, clean and homely South Indian town. But in spite of the miles,and the fact that the letters were punctuated now by long months of silence, I kept‘in touch’ with Vipin—in my mind. So, I ‘knew’ it in the bones ofme that something wasn’t quite as it should be with him. His last letter carried apostscript which said, "Wish you were here." I thought it over. However, familycircumstances decided that I would have to go to the United States for four months beforereturning to a ‘suitable’ job in a leading ladies’ college. When Ireturned, I promised myself, there would be a long journey to Nambari.

Then one late winter day in America, a letter arrived from cloudy-headed Samir Badhwar.A single line caught my eye and sent room temperatures sinking to sub-zero. Samir said asmatter-of-factly as possible, "Vipin’s gone down to Calcutta for a bit. He haschronic lymphocytic leukaemia. A bone marrow job might be the best thing, but finding adonor won’t be easy. Besides, he says, he’d rather spend the next year workingin his jungle retreat than the next three in a hospital bed. I’ll say the man isbrave."

An arrow in my heart quivered. A line returned unaided, "There’ll need to bemany more workers in the field...." It was like a finger pointing at me, a symbolic,"This means You." I didn’t feel guilty, just very sad that I’d failedVipin somehow.

The years customarily secret away both memory and pain. I let them hide, in the burrowsof time the sadness of Vipin’s death six months later, but not his memory nor thewisdom that had been so painfully acquired.

With Vipin’s last plea impaled all the while in my heart, I taught charming youngwomen English. Then one October, I caught sight of a government notice inviting teachersand graduates to extend "honorary, noble and selfless service to the needy andunderprivileged in an ‘each one teach one’ literacy, health and hygieneprogramme". You had a range of unhappy locations to choose from. I chose the onefurthest from home—partly because, I argued, that would be the most challenging, andpartly because I was impelled by a swell of sentimentality. Teen Taro village was inparched country off the Jamshedpur-Chandil road. But it appealed to me by being very, veryroughly, in that sector of India where Vipin had worked and died. It seemed a goodsecond-best to Nambari.

I clattered along on the Howrah Mail, with six other ‘noble teachers andgraduates’. The engine, a pompous red and yellow diesel contraption, blustered alongthe sweep of the east coast. There was no fluttering pennant of impending glory for me nowaround every sinuous bend of steel rail, just a great canvas painted with the colours ofsad recollection. We stopped by a wayside station. The cold finger of a north Indianautumn poked through the grey tent of early morning. The air was thick with the smell ofspent engine fuel. I gently rolled the tiny earthen cup of tea about between my palms andallowed myself to luxuriate briefly in the sugared comfort of hot spiced chai. But my eyespicked out the sullen purple hills to the east and I thought, "Over that way, Vipinonce lived and worked under incredible circumstances. Had he the comfort of hot tea on acold morning—I wonder....He had once said that the least attractive part of his daywas mealtime. So what kept him puttering on with neither luxury nor obvious love (exceptmine which had percolated uncertainly over distant miles)? And why was I travelling toTeen Taro anyway?" The answer came to me in fragments—over space and time.

In Teen Taro village, after the last session of teaching the alphabet in Hindi andEnglish for the day was over, it came to me that I was catching up with destiny. Or was itdestiny catching up with me? I couldn’t say. I only remember looking up at a sky litbright as a Durga pooja pandal and thinking, "Where do we go from here? Where didVipin? And wherever he is, does he know that I’ve kept my tryst with destiny?"

A month later, an old rattle trap of a mini bus with sloping seats bumbled alonglopsided dirt roads on its way to the Tata Nagar railway station.