ONE SCORE YEARS AND FOUR

A few weeks from now, I would have completed my 24th revolution around the sun. The earth will once again position itself, exactly at that point on the ellipse, where it was at my birth- in poetic symbolism of life.

I was born in the wee hours of a monsoon morning, the seasonal rain greeted me with a melancholy tune.
I was born at quarter to three- Clock hands with outstretched arms greeted me on arrival.
I had arrived five years after my parents marriage, a late child, much sought for.
My grandparents lit the candles before the deities. They are no more and I have forsaken the deities out of ideology and not irreverance.

My father who had sported a beard, in silent woe of childlessness, shaved, for the first time in years. The razor pierced his flesh and the scar in monumental memory of my birth, stills adorns his chin.
I brought bloodshed into the world, thus.

My mother, who, bearing the curse of primordial sin in the garden of Eden, conceived in pain.
The labour pains may seem belittled today, in comparison to the sting of having a prodigal son.

The physician must have been relieved after the caesarean.
The electrician too, because he had a hard time keeping the lights ON in the ominous monsoon rain.
It must have been his curse, that ruined my tryst with Electrical Engineering , many years later.I deserve it, I ruined his sleep.

The nurse too might have cursed, as within an hour I had puked in her arms.

I was born in a hospital established by British missionaries, chained to colonial history.
It will take me a life time before I can escape the guilt of ingratitude to the church.
It was none of my business to explore their hypocrisy.


I was christened "Pramod", meaning happiness. I was condemned to make others happy, even at the expense of my own.

Its been a score and four years since I first cried to be weaned. one score and four since I was given the elixir of life.

TO whom need I show my gratitude?
To whom am I being ungrateful as the elixir is today,replaced by wine?
To no one. Certainly no one.

No Wait... there is one.

I regret puking in the nurse's arms, the lady whose warmth I first felt. She who aroused my senses for the first time with the sense of touch.

Candles, labour pains, blood drops in the basin, a cursing electrician,
the warmth of the nurse.....

Enough!!!!....Enough of this madness,
" BEARER , FILL MY TUMBLER, I NEED THE WINE, THE PATH AHEAD IS LONG AND THE SENSES WILL PROVE A BURDEN.
FIX ME A DRINK,IT'S ALLRIGHT,
THE WOMEN IN MY LIFE ARE ALL IN THE HEART.
THERE CAN'T BE ANY IN MY BED"

CHAPTER II

My wine glass has been filled and drained, filled and drained, filled and drained... and the senses slowly bid leave.

"Bless you, good bearer; for the hands that serve are more sacred than the ones that fold in prayer."
But, I do wish there were bangles on them.

NO!! OUTRAGEOUS RUBBISH!! BLASPHEMY!!.

How could I have said that? What is it that he's filling my tumbler with?
No woman shall feel my warmth, nor shall I crave for it.
For the heat, does not suffice even to maintain my own aging body.

I approach, the conclusion of my 24th lap. A few weeks, a little while, a moment of rest, I shall set off on my 25th revolution around the sun.

I may never complete it, for my fragile self is beginning to give away.It's been weakened with the afflictions of 24 seasons. Expanding in the summers, collapsing in the winters...it will be ripped apart soon.

I was born on the 169th day of a non-leapyear. 169th, and 196 left to go.
(1,6,9-1,9,6..1,6,9-1,9,6..1+6+9=1+9+6 pa rampapaam pa...I like the way it rhymes.)

While I was tumbling down to earth on that monsoon morning, Sally Ride, had launched herself into outer space. Presiden Reagen smiled, the white skins roared, an envious President Andropov of Russia, dropped his wine glass..
Vodka...Vodka...
THERE FELL VODKA ON THE SACRED KREMLIN FLOORS...as I arrived.

What irony! what divine satire!
What magnificense of plot only genius can conceive!

Because on my twenty fourth birthday, the earth's centrifugal force will throw me off into the infinitude of empty space.
And my Vodka, needless to say, will spill off.

Yes, the affliction of having traversed 24 elliptical orbits is having its toll.

My memory will soon fail me, an incurable alzheimers...the loss of the past.
Before that , I must pen down my story, before I am erased....
the perennial flow of ink....
let it flow...
this is my story...

chapter III

In the dimness of this sanctuary, I can make out a hundred faces, no a thousand...perhaps ten thousand. Men of myriad tribulations.. men who've lost their wealth, their love, their wives.
Men who've gained all and don't know how to dispose their treasures.

They gather around to listen, as I speak, " this is my story...."
The bearer grows impatient, the Bar has to be closed in a little while.
I console him, "We have a rich tradition behind us. Our people have been blessed with the gift of speech.
Bhagvaan Krishna delivered the GIta, 18 chapters of philosophical treatise, all that on the battle ground of kurukshetera.
The chariots and charioteers, arrows and archers, swords and swords men all paused for Krishna to finish."
" This is a land of orators, actions must wait, until the contemplations are over."
Thus, the clocks will wait till I have concluded......my story.

CHAPTER IV
I was born in a hospital established by British missionaries. The social responsibility of my birth was thus, largely owing to the infinitude, of her imperial majesty Queen Victoria's, grace.
So, when they decided to christen me, I offered liitle or no resistance.
I let them strip me in public; as though an infant has no individuality of his own. I suffered the sting of ice cold water, in silence, as the priest dipped and bathed me in it.

OH! the sting of ice cold water... that's when I fell madly in love with the nurse at the hospital, I longed for her warmth once again.

And the wretched saint of a priest. What does he know of a woman's warmth? He recited his hymns in criminal disregard of my sexual instincts.
He recited his hymns......and prayed the holy water wash me of my sins, in the past life and this...


CHAPTER V


Growing up was an unceasing battle against dogma. The violent conflicts in the mind between decades of family tradition and the new age of reason.
My grandfather was particularly fond of studious children. One night after school I made a miscalculation in trying to please him. Those were the days when I fancied the rosy cheeked girl, Rosy in school. I needed a few rupees to buy her candies.
I decided to read my biology lessons aloud.
Biology, life science, with the vulgarity of human anatomy, the study of deep shames that mankind has evolved to hide.
Of all the sciences , I chose biology, Of all the lessons , anatomy.

“Man , though the only vertebrate without a tail, has remnants of the same in the skeletal system. The rest of the structure has been lost in the course of evolution from ape to man..…”
“Blasphemy…Blasphemy….”, came my grandmother’s cry.
“Holy Christ…Holy Jesus….Holymarymotherof god…Holy Father in Rome…forgive this child his transgressions.”

Unaware of the long hostilities between the Vatican and the Royal society of science, ignorant of the head on collision between Darwin and the pope…I was initially, amused by my grandmothers antics.

“But ammachi, that’s what the science book says.”
“To hell with your science books, works of the devil.. what have you been taught in church child?
THE POPE IS INFALLIABLE..”


Within moments she was pulling me along to the Parish Vicar’s house. We took a shortcut through the rubber plantation. That’s when a tree branch broke and fell right behind us, confirming my grandmothers convictions of my great sin.

“See what you have brought forth child, the wrath of the Jehova. We’ll be lucky if our house does not collapse soon.”
[it was officially confirmed, I would have to forsake any further hopes of having Rosy.
Rosy.... Rosy , the rosy cheeked girl at school.]
My mother who alone could have averted the catastrophe in my life that induced a life long neurosis, was away, at her home with my sister in her womb.
What a time for her to decide on her second child, I cursed.
I cursed Mrs.Indira Gandhi too, her god damn two child policy.

“Confess child, confess….confess so that your deeds be forsaken. Confess to avert the wrath of God.” cried my grandmother, as I hung my head before the Vicar.
He drew the cross on my head with his fingers, “……..Holy Jesus, son of God, most merciful, you who forgave the tax collector, the adulterous woman and the thief on the cross, spare this child from the wrath of your anger on the day of your second coming and from the displeasure of your Holy father in heaven.”

“Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa” (my fault, my fault, my own grievous fault)he made me say, as tears filled my eyes and I struggled, not to weep.
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“But comrade, don’t tell me a priest’s orthodoxy had you weeping….” , interrupted the bearer.
“MORON OF THE FIRST ORDER… SON OF A HEADLESS SNAKE….OFFCOURSE NOT”

“I wept, yes I wept…. I wept for Rosy, Rosy the rosy cheeked girl at school who would abandon me…”
“what a lover am I? Unable to buy even candies for my girl!!”

It was religion that thus, took my first love away from me.
Years later, it would be religion once again that ruined my affair with Lakshmi.

CHAPTER VI

It is time now to elaborate on the curse of the electrician. Electricity had once rescued me from the pangs of a premature death. No physician , however great, can use his forceps in the dark. He is as helpless as infantry after a night raid by the enemy.

The power failed, as my mother went into labor. A little while, and the electrician had cursed. The curse ensured that electricity, (or specifically the laws that govern it—or more specifically, the laws by which we govern it.) was bound to betray me.

There would be intermittent power failures ( of blinding ignorance) in my life when I needed most, the light ( of knowledge).

And I must now confess, the electrician has been over accused( maybe even wrongly accused). ‘My story’ was really written by an invisible hand in invisible ink, and the electrician was merely playing his part. A lowly player on the stage, when ‘My story’ was being acted out.
Curses that have been pervading the boundaries of the earth for centuries seek their manifestation somewhere. In someone. Having missed its intended target the curse roams the earth like an abandoned lunatic and must manifest somewhere ( in someone) to culminate its vagabond existence. And for apparently no greater reason than chaos , indeterminism and non causality, I was chosen to imbibe one such vagabond.

The electrician was really history’s amplifier. He was chosen to amplify the curse signal, lest it weakens and dies off.

Now we must traverse greater distances in time….and we must traverse it backwards, to trace the story of a curse that would ultimately culminate in me, in the eighteenth lap of my revolution around the sun.
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Curiosity has always been our curse. In the garden of Eden, Eve; Pandora and her misadventure with the box of troubles. Where ignorance alone can provide bliss, curiosity is bound to wreck havoc.
Bliss is the condition of pre-social man, the un-spoilt child of nature. Nescient and unsuspecting he gave himself wholly to the forces that moulded him.

Raising her eyes to the midday sun, the Yamuna spectating, Kunti recited the mantra and wooed the God of light.
The sun God, giver of life for whom all that is hidden is apparent and to whom all of mortal man’s secrets are familiarities.
Youth is the quintessence of ignorance, and hence the epoch of curiosity. Curiosity is essentially a trait that soothes the indignation of having to be perennially ignorant. Perennial ignorance, man’s cursed condition.
Kunti was young, she was ignorant and (crucially) curious.
No sooner had she wiped her eyes, fatigued from facing the sun; no sooner had the last words of the Mantra left her Aryan lips; the Sun God in all his splendour was before her.
Youth is rich with beginnings and firsts. What a privilege she must have thought, to have the Sun God as her first mate.
She laid for him besides the Yamuna, the touch of gravel aroused her further. The earth plunged into a chapter of darkness, a phase of secrets. The reason being, the Sun God had left his heavenly abode.
No one saw therefore, the union between the Sun-God and Kunti. As he undressed her, he was only being customary (not curious) for he was the all knowing.
Her virgin territories were only unexplored, not unseen, for he was light, the omnipresent.
As she welcomed him, into her it was the conjugation of knowledge and ignorance.
He was the all knowing and she, the young and foolish.
(Much later Kunti would recall the pleasure of this union as she lay beside an impotent husband.)

Three drops of blood dissolved into the Yamuna. Light flowed into the earth again, after the secret scene was enacted. A rooster crowed, quite eccentrically. Had it seen her secret?
Nonsense!!! Roosters are pitiably night-blind. No mortal knew that in her womb. Kunti bore the burden of her curiosity.

The burden grew within her, from a cell to a tissue, organs , organ systems and finally a baby boy, as radiant as his father.
She bore her child on the banks of the Yamuna in the silence of the dark. An inquisitive world, unaware.
She never saw her first born, only watched his form in the vagueness of the moonlight.
He had an armour and ear-rings of light, permanent affixes on his chest and ears. Much like a tumour, an extra organ. They were gifts from the Sun-God.
The Yamuna accepted, first her virginal blood, now her tears and shortly afterwards her first born.

The holy river guided the floating new born to the abode of a charioteer. It was raining when the child draped in red floated into his abode. (No!! I must be specific. It was flooding.)
The rains always gift new life. It was raining, when Radha- the charioteer’s wife- held the infant to her breasts.
The child had already mistaken her warmth for his mother’s, as she named him Karna.
And Adhiratha, the charioteer, was desperately trying to keep the lamp alight despite an ominous monsoon rain.
Five years of childlessness was terminated as he whispered into the child’s ear, “Karna.”

CHAPTER VII

Lakshmi refuses to believe that I’m disintegrating.
“It’s unheard of ” she exclaims.
She cannot reconcile with the fact that organ after organ, its inherent tissues and the cells thereof are rupturing within my body, like a mass of radioactive Uranium in Kalpakkam, day after day, month after month.
Very soon the nucleus of my cells will be caught too. The ecstasy of bursting into energy, like fire crackers at temple poorams will soon elude the DNA, the master chip of my being. And all my inherent traits would have dissolved into that nebula of free energy.
A black hole and in it, my baby universe.
Impotent and hence childless, the plethora of traits that I have bottled in my genes will be lost.

Lakshmi thinks I am warranting undeserved sympathy.
“You want the whole world to sympathise you. You seek pleasure in being outcast.”

BAH HUMBUG !!!, ‘Sympathy’ , the least profound of all human emotions. I seek my revolver at the sound of the word. Sympathy is the least of my intentions.
I only seek to conquer the silence of death.

Regardless of what Lakshmi thinks, I must be writing……..

My mobile service provider interrupts, “ Life can only be understood if we live backwards, though we are destined to live forwards.”

And backwards we move.

CHAPTER VIII

Those were the best of times in Europe, the victory of the Allied powers was imminent. It was the age of hope, the epoch of progress.
The fate of the world war was decided. The Nazis had failed in Stalingrad. The most ferocious battle in human history was reaching its fag end, the stubborn Red army had refused to retreat.

It was snowing in Russia that day. It was snowing when Stalin’s boys ripped apart the Nazi Swastik and raised the blood stained banner…the sickle and the hammer.
It was snowing when Stalin raised a toast, within the sacred Kremlin walls.

While it snowed in Russia it was raining in Alleppey. As the red flag fluttered again in Stalingrad, my paternal great grandfather was awoken by a water drenched communist flag that came floating into his bedroom.
The precipitation in Russia had saved the world, but to my ancestors it was a threat to their livelihood.
That explains why the rains are always melancholy to me. Sad, but never sad enough to be devastating.
“OHHH…the wretched …”, my great grandfather stopped. Not knowing whether to curse the flag or the rain. Finding himself in knee high water, in what was supposed to be his niche, he confronted a stark reality. It was not raining .., this year it was flooding……

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From the backwaters to the hilltops. From below (slightly) sea level altitudes to the greater (relatively) heights of the earth. To regions lesser influenced by not just gravity but also civilization, my great grandparents retreated.

History would soon( not very soon though) prove that higher altitudes does not imply greater heights and that higher is not necessarily better.
Far away (not very) in the national capital the finance minister agrees with me. In an emotional budget presentation doped with poetical stance, he recites, “Growth for growth’s own sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

But my great grandparents, what were they really retreating from? The life threatening floods or the soul threatening ideology of communism borne by the ominous, drenched, floating communist flag


To be continued...