The night I dined with them.

I was gormandizing the food on the dinner plate, oblivious of the ladies and the gentleman, patiently awaiting my audience. Most of my life I had taken them for granted; I saw no reason to mend my ways now. Besides, every time they had presented me with their affection,time, and effort, I have reciprocated by being well-mannered, obedient, and patient. So, our scores were even and there was no reason for more bartering, or so I had thought.

We were in a strange room. One could not definitively call it a dining room or a drawing room, or even a bedroom. Also, strange was the assortment of furniture of this room. True, I was sitting at the dining table. But the gentleman before me was sitting on a wooden frame easy-chair that had no symphony with the straight-back in which I sat. One of the ladies, a tiny one, sat at the far corner of a massive king-size bed. She was merrily knitting away from two woolen balls, the colours of which I could not distinguish. The other one, much larger than the little lady sat herself on a decrepit single-bed which could barely sustain her. I wished I could swap the two women to improve the geometric sanity of this room. Then there was a third one who sat far away in the darkest corner. She seemed oblivious of my presence. Even in the dark she was reading something through a thick black frame of spectacles. I had a feeling I had visited her before.

All the light in the room came from a single source. The glowing wick of an over-sized clumsy clay prodip that lay before me on the dining table. It seemed as if it's creator was a kindergarten kid who had been provided ample clay to play with.

A tad irritated as to why I was being subjected to such an interrogative atmosphere, I looked the gentleman in the eye and asked him "Is there something you want to ask me?". The hazel eyes glinted, and I could see the flickering flame of the lamp in them. He got up slowly, as if time had no value to him, walked up to my table, picked up the comb (till then I had no idea that a comb was lying there), and went back to his seat. Then he kept back-brushing his hair till I could see the regimental strands even from where I sat. This surely must be a drill to test my patience. I decided to play ball. Then, almost as I was starting to think that my question had got lost in the conundrum of this room, in came his reply, "Yes, why are you here?". Taken aback by the barefacedness of the question, and the paucity of an apt reply, my mouth stayed open for an inordinate amount of time.

The hilsa on the plate had been very palatable, the taste of it lingered at the tip of my tongue. However, the lips were going dry as my mouth stayed open. "I came to eat", i managed to say eventually. "Well then, eat well, dadubhai, and don't speak while you eat. The food might get stuck in your wind-pipe!". The retort was so definitive that for the next half hour, I kept eating what was on the plate. The luchi alur dom' the machher matha, the gaendal patar bata, et, al. Every time I ate something, one of the ladies would ask me how it was, and if I wanted more. Even if I did, I did not want to say so. I had a feeling this wasn't a "free lunch". Nothing in this world comes for free. Of that I was sure.

By now, my pupils had got attuned to the dancing flame, and could see things a little clearer. The little lady was smiling at me from the corner of the gargantuan bed. I wondered why she needed such a big bed. I was preparing myself to ask the next intelligent question that could avoid a riposte like the last one. The gentleman interrupted me, "It is time for me to go to bed", he said. Then got up from his easy-chair and walked silently to the massive bed. The little lady muttered something under her breadth that vaguely sounded like she disapproved of his abrupt disengagement from the ensuing conversation. Oblivious of the disapproval, the gentleman, now brought out an over-sized mosquito net out of nowhere, and fastidiously started hanging it around the bed. In no time, the netted cocoon was made ready. He crept in it, making sure to leave any lingering mosquito out of his den. Then he went to sleep, with the air of a man in complete authority even in slumber.

Strangely, the little lady was not complaining anymore. She was knitting away with the dexterity of a weaver bird. From where I sat, it looked like a red sweater with a yellow teddy bear on it. She held it up for me to see and asked,"How do you like it? It is for you !". The red sweater she held out at me would have been perfect for a three year old child. But at 29, I thought I was a little overgrown for it. I said, with an air of euphemistic pity that the youth reserves for the elderly, "It is very beautiful, didima; But, I think it is a little small for my size". The lady seemed hurt. She looked away and muttered, "But to me you will always remain a three year old toddling through the room".

Like a blinkered horse traversing a monotonous pathway, oblivious of the scenery around, the diurnal chores obfuscate the memories that accompany us all through life. They only rear in surrealistic moments like these; and when they do, they leave a gaping hole that I now felt inside me. I carefully took the sweater from her tender palms and held onto it.

I looked at the lady sitting in the small decrepit single-bed, anticipating her to be the next to say something. Instead, she just smiled at me through those benign eyes that were embedded between the chubby cheeks and a rotund forehead. A smile that demanded no reciprocation, attention, or conversation. A smile that emanated pure happiness. I remembered running through the corridor and up the steep stairs as a child to see that smile on mashidida's face. It was a distant moment that came before me, as real as the smile now was. My mouth opened to say something to her, but the moment had already passed and the words remained entrapped in the quagmire of my thoughts. The calmness in her face, and the constant heart-beat in my ear played together like a storm and it's eye. With bated breath I let the moment pass.

The elderly lady in the darkest corner of the room looked up from her newspaper. She voiced myriad concerns under a single breath. Some regarding my lack of diet, my slender physique, my thinning hairline et. al. My assurance did little to appease her that I was being well looked after. Walking upto her and touched her feet as has been customary from the old days i requested her permission to depart. She poked those slender finger through my thinning hair and in a voice strangely baritone for a woman she said "boro hao". Strange as the blessing may seem to an already 29 year old lad, I did not dispute the veracity of it. Today, I had learnt to remain silent and refrain from trying to measure the depths of unfathomable affection.

Eventually, i rose to beg my leave of the caucus. I picked up the comb that lay on the table. The red sweater wrapped tight around my arm. The smile from the adorable lady (still sitting cross-legged on her single-bed) to fill the gaping hole in me, and the blessing of "boro hao" from the one in the dark.

I turned around and kept walking as the morning sun broke through the blinds.

The Rendezvous

As the river beneath meanders through the labyrinth of hillocks, my mind dodges through the pragmatics of life, trying to find the poetry of the past. For a person who has suffered from chronic reveries, an altitude of 30,000 feet, provides an opportune ambiance for the mind to play. The lingering oblivion never fails to raise the innumerable whats, whys, and whens that the earth fails to evince. As i fly over the dry mid-west of the North American sub-continent, memories rush by me like stray bullets. Some, like flies that do not stick long enough in ones clasped hands. Arduously, I try to ensnare a few of them.

A blur of lean teenage faces from a bygone era float before my eyes. The uncertain mustaches, the unkempt hair, the sporadic beards. The boisterous croaks proclaiming an unknown land to be their own. Those unselfish hours of doing nothing, but plotting against the harmless. Those innumerable bus trips to the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd stop (... and then there were none!). Those unending discussions about future (when none knew what it meant). The tea sessions that consumed more time than intended, and yielded nothing but the need for more such sessions. The ice-cream parlours, where ice-creams were cheap, and time, cheaper. The plethora of other eat-outs (Rajvans, Navaratna, Mathura, et.al,), where the gang could meet, and would not leave until the shutters came down. The projector stops and all is dark again, except for the constant hum of the Airbus.

Ten years ago, we were an unsophisticated bunch. Stealing mangoes, chasing thieves at midnight, provoking local drunkards to fights, climbing hill-tops infested by thieves, flooding hallways with buckets of water, drinking the worst of concoctions, smoking the best of stolen brands, and sending roommates to tuition classes at 2am in the night. Somewhere down the line, that ride in a turbulent whirlpool was bartered for a hammock by the lake. Today, i desired to fall off the hammock to meet that bunch of ruffians.

The memories do not flow like a cascade. They hit you in unplanned sporadic downpours. As I try to reconstruct my thoughts, a cacophony of feminine laughter interrupts me. It reminds me of a ring of boys surrounding two(or were there three ?) girls, who typically kept sending extended bouts of synchronous laugh-waves that would echo in every corner of the 50 acre campus. The bus stand, the library, the drawing hall, the AD (administrative) block, they all fell victim to the symphony of the sirens. In a place where an expression of emotion to the slightest excess actuated a reprimand from an authority (typically a couple of bike riding "brothers" who were the self proclaimed guardians of all feminine objects spotted in the campus), I think that laughter kept the group alive. Not to mention the fact that the guys were always apprehensive to crack a joke in the group for fear of igniting the laughter fit in these women. Ten years on, Seema and Divya still do the same when they meet. I wish for sanity's sake that they would stop, but for old time's sake, i wish they didn't.

The flight time is 8 hours. We have reached about mid-way. I look down at the barren fields of the mid-west, and the narrow rivulets cutting through them. The view is vastly different from the high-rise skyline of the east-coast. I wake up Divya to have her witness the change in the topography. Meanwhile, I try to stretch my legs and get some sleep. But there isn't enough space for them. So i slide them under the front seat. Some things don't change. I have never managed to fit my legs appropriately. In the hostel, I would slide them between the rods at the foot end of my bed frame to be able to sleep straight. For some though, the case of sleepless nights was less a matter of long legs and more a matter of wicked roommates. Rishikesh Kumar (Thakur) was that tormented soul; Vishal Mishra , Animesh Kumar and I being the infamous roommates.

That reminds me of an incident that occurred in 2002, when a young and dynamic Thakur decided to share room 219 with the incessantly active and cynosure-of-all-eyes Vishal Mishra, the perpetually inquisitive and eternally cribbing Animesh Kumar, and the somnolent plotter Saptarshi Moitra. Thakur had come to Shimoga from the hinterlands of Bihar. An extremely hard working, sincere, ambitious individual with a dream to learn from his surroundings. Nobody had warned the village lad that there would be little to learn from a wily UP-wallah, or a thakur-specific-news-seeking Jharkhandi, and never from a steeped-in-sarcasm Bengali.

This was our third semester at Shimoga, and our first one as roommates. Being CSE students, all three of my roommates were required to prepare a project report on any topic of their interest. I think it was a project to teach students to make future projects. I remember Ani preparing a report on aliens, specifically about the Roswell incident. I only remember it because one could often find him running around in excitement after reading something about the Roswell incident. Thakur would look up from his books, irritated by the commotion around. His smile indicating that such excitement could only be tolerated in case of a real alien landing, and even then, only marginally. Mishra had probably already downloaded a report from Kishee's internet cafe (I am making this educated guess just for the purpose of this article). In short, Mishra and Ani were not a competitive threat to Thakur's standing in the CSE Dept. Thakur had other monsters to fight in the battle outside our room.

On an ominous morning, Thakur had gone for the unlimited-idli-limited-vada breakfast at the mess. The other three being late risers often missed the breakfast. Thakur had left behind his prized possession, the evaluated project report in his cupboard. The newspaper for the day had arrived, and I, barely out of my late night slumber was scanning through its pages. My eyes fell upon an article which had something to do with a very reputed Indian professor at an American university being twice denied the Nobel Prize despite some extraordinarily pioneering work. Two things in that article struck my till-then-dormant brain. The name of the professor, and his photograph. Prof. Thakur (no offense to the great man) was looking out at me through a wave of dishevelled hair and an inordinately large pair of glasses. He looked angry and frustrated, just as the article stated, and more importantly, just as I wanted him to be!

Note: Today while I was penning this incident from my memory, i had a curious urge to look for that picture of Prof. Thakur. Long live the electronic age. I believe the picture below is the exact one that I had seen 9 years ago in the newspaper. Taking a look at it may improve the reader's understanding of the behaviour of the four actors in this ongoing play.



My first instinct was to share it with Ani and Mishra. Both broke into fits of laughter that was hard to control. I pitched in with the idea that this could be a perfect photo to be pasted on Thakur's project report. Now, I have been blamed time and again for being the "planner", and not the "enforcer". As a great man ones said, "The world is a stage, where every man must play his part". So, planner I was, and I played my part.

Ani was so excited by the idea of Prof. Thakur's photo on Thakur's report that he kept jumping around the room in his sky blue 3-quarter shorts. I think it was he who managed to scrounge a pair of scissors and some Feviquick. Vishal's bed was next to mine and our tables were attached to each other. Next to his bed was Thakur's cupboard. He opened the cupboard and brought out the report that Thakur so cherished. He muttered something that sounded like he predicted that this would blow the lid off of Thakur's patience. When you are 20, the fear of the unknown has a narcotic effect. We decided to go for it. Like three expert surgeons doing an open-heart surgery on a hapless patient, we carefully cut out Prof.Thakur from the newspaper and safely glued him to the cover of Thakur's report. Vishal kept the report back in the cupboard where it belonged. All done, we waited.

As a child I have always been very silent and patient. They both come naturally to me. I decided that all that was to be done now was to wait. The bug in Ani's pant apparently did not think so. He had to spread the news outside the room. Vishal followed. I vaguely remember warning Vishal not to leave the room. Once they went out of the room, I was convinced of the impending disaster. I went to sleep. like a dead fish.

I could hear roars of laughter from the next room. Sagar (another of us Thakur-poking demons) was laughing himself insane. So was Pandu. Only Pandu was quieter. I could not hear what he was saying. KK, Deepak, they were all there. Ani's voice was the clearest. He was incessantly explaining to them what we just did. Vishal was hovering in the corridor that connected our rooms. I presume he wanted to keep an eye on the events transpiring in both rooms, as well as keeping an eye on the far end of the corridor, to be able to warn Ani to shut his mouth at the slightest appearance of Thakur.

Sure enough, in a matter of minutes I heard Vishal's voice resounding through the corridor.. " Arre Thakur a gya hai bhai, Thakur a gya..". I imagined a smiling Thakur walking through the corridor, unaware of the crisis ahead. Assuming that something spicy was being discussed, and having an hour after breakfast dedicated to leisure, Thakur walked into room 220 for some gossip. It wasnt long before one topic moved to the other, and then suddenly i heard Pandu's voice mentioning something about project reports by CSE students. Now, why on earth would a Mechanical Engg. student be interested in a CSE project report? And then it was Sagar's turn. He said something like " Arre Thakur tera project report dikha na ?" I knew instantly that it was time to be a dead dead fish. Unaware of the plot, Thakur came hopping into our room, opened the cupboard, took out the report and hopped his way out to 220. I stayed still, waiting for Vesuvius to erupt.

What followed, was a blur. First there was laughter, more laughter. Then the laughter stopped. Then I felt someone stalk into our room, open the cupboard, shut it with a bang ! I knew Thakur was back in the room, humiliated and angry. Then i heard some quiet and slow foot-steps. I assumed it was Ani, moving around uneasily near the entrance of our room. Vishal was probably still standing outside, by now realizing well that it wasn't safe inside. I had a tremendous urge to see Thakur's red face and Ani' blue. But I was sure to burst into laughter if i opened my eyes. So i played dead. Ani muttered something that vaguely sounded like an apology. That was the spark that ignited Thakur. The molten lava came running down on us, devouring everyone in its path.

First in line were Ani and Vishal. 9 years on, I have forgotten the words that came out of Thakur's mouth. These were not expletives. They were painfully funny on one hand and painfully sad on the other. He said that perhaps we were people from "big cities" and from elevated societies where it was OK to ridicule someone's hard work; But, for him, a lad from the "gaon", this project report was a prize he wanted to give to his parents, a souvenir, a badge of accomplishment... in short it meant the world to him. Now, none of us had foreseen this coming. Most of us did not even think that the report was worth preserving. That it meant so much to Thakur took us by surprise. Ani, in his moment of confusion kept apologizing to Thakur, and let out a stifled giggle every now and then. This would stoke Thakur's anger even more and he would bring down his full oratory skills on Ani. Vishal was trying to calm Thakur with his casual "arre yaar yeh to bas mazaak thha.." statements. Suddenly, Ani realized that I was lying down on my bed, sleeping. He got on top of me, and kept screaming in his typically low pitched tone " Arre yeh sab Sapto ka plan thha.. useene yeh sab kia.. abhi kameena so rha hai !! ..". This somehow angered Thakur even more and he rushed out of the room. I got up from my longer-than-planned slumber and through expletives from Ani and Vishal, went to wash my face. It had been a nightmare indeed.

I found Thakur at the stairs. I do not remember what i said. I think together we succeeded in calming Thakur down. Ani however spent the next nine years trying to convince Thakur that it was I who had planned the whole thing. Even if that is true, without the perfect execution by Vishal Mishra and Animesh Kumar, the plan would have been doomed.


An era has passed since that day. I do not know if today's student find such incidents funny, or just silly. For us these provided the grist for friendship.

Today, Vishal still has that distinct crackle in his voice. He does not wear those spotted shorts any more. Niether does he stand on the bed with his legs apart before giving an important speech. But he still exudes the excitement that has always shamed me and made me feel unprepared for any occasion. I remembered the numerous parties where I have regularly failed to evince the excitement that he brings so naturally. The guy has the same propensity as before to bring the group together. I feel much of what is Sphinx today is because of what Vishal was in 2001. Without him we would have been islands of human beings floating all over the world, much like the rest.

Thakur remains the eternal source of entertainment. When we met, he did not fail us a bit. Through his discussions (ranging from pseudo-serious to serious topics), expressions, and actions, he reminded me of the good old Thakur. I therefore obliged him by being the good old me. Our pranks on him mainly ranged from mental torture to extreme mental torture that started at 12 in the night and went until 4 in the morning (you know, the usual Thakur-Sleeping-Time). All the while Thakur smiled and feigned as if he was sleeping, only to be given away by his expressions and body movements. Also Thakur does not get angry as quickly as he used to (or maybe i just didn't have enough time to test that.... maybe, Sagar's or Atul's presence could have had a catalytic effect).

Ani remains the same as he was in college. He drinks Bloody Mary, and vouches for its taste and forces others to drink the obnoxious concoction... he then lies flat on his face in 20 minutes and doses off while others stay awake obeying his initial plan of a night-out. Why do I see surprised faces ? We all knew Ani drinks, dint we? Oh, if you are surprised why he disliked drinking when you drunkards were lying around drunk in the hostel aisles, here is why, "You guys weren't sophisticated .. you guys used to drink like animals!" .. and that my friends is straight from the horse's mouth! That apart, the guy is still the same. A lot of information about and a lot of urge to do a lot of things. Still asks plenty of questions. Never got a straight answer from me throughout the trip, however serious the mode of questioning was. Sometimes I really feel bad at not giving him a straight answer... but, not really. I actually enjoy it !

As for me, i am still the sarcastic dog, who deep inside, yearns to meet his old friends. I realized while writing today that fond memories fade faster if not revisited. I suggest wherever you guys are, visit each other as often as you can and rehearse the old times. An oasis in the desert survives because it has the mirages to give company. However untrue the mirages be, they keep the oasis alive.