A Suicide In Runikhata

I wonder how many Calcuttans have any idea where Runikhata is. In 1989 I had never heard the name either. I was on my way to Gaylegphug for the first time in life, in a Bhutan bus and waiting in the middle of a desolate highway on a dot of a hamlet called Samthaibari. Waiting for army escort to come and take us to the Bhutan border town. The main convoy of trucks had gone ahead towards Guwahati with their army escort and we were to turn left (north) towards Bhutan outside the Bongaigaon town from where another escort van would help us complete the journey. Just two buses but packed with passengers. When the army escort jeep proved elusive for about 15 minutes and our driver was getting nervous, it was suggested that we should go up the route to this village called Runikhata which had a police station and the bus could wait inside the complex safely, as it was fortified.

The driver had reasons to be nervous. Assam was reeling under the Bodo agitation and we were in the heartland of this extremely violent agitation that took hundreds of lives and disrupted normal civilan life for a few years. Trains were suspended to the North-East for months, if not years. Even the insignificant hamlet of Samthaibari had bullet marks on the abandoned street-side dhabas.

Runikhata, it turned out, was a Bodo village on the outskirts of an elephant infested deep forest that would start from there and continue up to Bhutan for about 30 kilometers. There were other Bodo villages on this route where many Bodo men and women would board or disembark the bus. These two Bhutan buses every morning in either direction were their only means of transport. They were mostly local passengers though. 

On this narrow jungle road the most bone chilling sight used to be the remains of a bombed out army truck where more than 20 soldiers were blown off several months ago by the terrorists. I remember another sight on this route. Most of the Bodo villages had a library near the bus stop. The villagers weren't very affluent (but none of them ever looked shabby or visibly poor) but their love for books was evident in the presence of these libraries. I have never seen a library in such remote parts of India anywhere.

Between May 1989 and September 1990 I had made several journeys on this route. Mostly by public transport or the dangerous army ration truck that would pick up supplies from Bongaigaon. Dangerous because the army was the prime target of the terrorists. I found it very thrilling that this was a dangerous thing that I was doing. Apparently as harmless and innocuous as a ride in a truck but fraught with the real risk of dying in a moment.

Ever since I came back from Bhutan I never had an opportunity to even talk about these names like Runikhata with anyone. Even Aisling wouldn't know this name because being foreigners in Bhutan they were not allowed to enter that part of India even for transit purposes to go to Phuntsholing. So these names remained buried deep in my consciousness. Therefore, when I read the name of Runikhata in a news item this morning I reacted more than just emotionally. 

As it is, the news is really shocking. A class ten boy in Runikhata has commited suicide because he couldn't take an online examination as his father couldn't afford a smart phone. Read the news here . There have been other similar suicides in India which also affected me but because this was Runikhata, with which I somehow feel emotionally connected, my emotions were really stirred.

I made a post about this incident in facebook. Perhaps I was looking for some cathartic effect. One of the first comments was from a lady facebook friend. I had met her online through her curiosity and interest in birding and trekking. She has even come to our flat. She is a senior from my daughter's school and went to work with some big multinational in the US. I have no idea why she came back. I believe she is from either IIT or IIM or perhaps both. Right now she possibly does nothing except take general interest in everything on facebook. 

She felt the boy in Runikhata was stupid. I told her that her privileged upbringing has not only made her insensitive but has also dehumanised her. And asked her to get lost (after she failed to take the subtler hint dropped initially). I probably should not have been vulgar with a lady I hardly knew. I was not only hopping mad about her insensitivity and this "I know it all" attitude, I felt she needed to be tackled bluntly. But evidently I was not in control of my emotions.

Even without getting into an argument over the complex issue of why a child commits suicide, I felt like asking her, as a child if she had ever been denied (by her parents) any object of desire or need that most of her friends had. Denied not on any moral, ethical, health or disciplinary grounds but because the parents just didn't have the money to afford it. I have gone through this and I know exactly how it feels. Imagine this scene that was common to most middle class Bengalis in the 70s or before. 

You are playing cricket with your friends on the footpath with a rubber ball. A speeding car flattens the ball and your game stops. In the evening you ask your father for 30 paise to buy a new ball. It is the 20th of the month and your father says, let the month be over and let me get the salary then we shall see. Now this is a salaried father. In fact even my mother worked. And they were not miserly.

And here we are talking about a daily wage earner father in a remote village in Assam reeling under the impact of the lock down and struggling to organise a square meal and perhaps failing every day. 

My father had no vice. He did not drink, gamble or go to the races. He had no expensive habits. He took a second class tram to work. He saw no point why he should spend 3 paise more on a first class ticket only for the cushioned seats (which he hardly ever took) and the slow fan. My father spoilt me rotten with gifts and toys but even he would often wait for the month-end to get a 30 paise ball for me.

My daughter, I can say, has never been told this - wait till the month-end. In fact she has never had to ask for anything. They all come before she can ask about them. She has no idea how it feels to be told no. She is so satiated with everything that she does not even want anything.

Today when I spend Rs 12,000 on a bicycle saddle, double the cost of an average Indian cycle, I know it is that child that is spending. Mike Tyson has this expensive habit of buying luxury cars. I know where he is coming from. 

Touching The Knees

I have been practicing yoga at home since the lock-down. Initially I did a lot of rope jumping or skipping as we call it. I even mastered the art of cris-cross but after some time the rope broke and I got kind of bored jumping ropes (though I think it's an excellent aerobic exercise). So I shifted to practicing yoga. 

I daresay that I made some progress with certain poses. The basic salamba sarvangasana is almost cracked and I can raise my legs straight almost from the shoulder now. It's now a matter of practice and time before I am able to hold the pose for 5 minutes. As of now, it's about half a minute perhaps :-) 

I can rotate the legs 180 degrees to the back of my head without any support and get into the sarvangasana pose from there. When I do the halasana the body indeed looks like a "hal". I can sit in padmasana for ten minutes on each side - meaning left leg up first and then right.

I was also trying to get to perfection with the front bend pose called janusirasana where you stretch your legs out, hold the back of your feet with the hands and then bend down to touch the knees with your forehead first, followed by your nose and then the chin. 

After trying every day to get there for about two months now and making progress bit by bit, last evening I finally first touched the knees with my forehead. I felt such a sense of accomplishment to just brush against the knees. The progress is like the hour hand of the clock. It is moving but you cannot see it unless you look after an hour. 

I know I have a long way to go before I reach even 80 per cent of perfection but it is definitely a milestone. 

I have yet to be able to hold the back of my feet with one hand holding the wrist of the other. I have yet to bend the back almost totally straight from the pelvic region. I have yet to flare the elbows out fully as my head touches the knees. But I am getting there. And I will get there. There is no rush.  

Another pose that I want to perfect and I am currently working on is baddha konasana or the butterfly pose. I am close but not quite there. I give this pose about five minutes every evening. In this pose the knees should touch the floor and one should be able to bend forward with the spine straight and touch the floor in front with the forehead. The knees are almost there but not quite. Bending forward I can bring the forehead within about four inches of the ground. I will probably take a couple of months more to get there if I do it every single day. Let me see how it progresses.

My Commute

I live just south of Rashbehari crossing and my office is a straight line 3.25 km from home. On an average evening I jog more than this distance in the Lake. But during the working week I drive to work. My father, incidentally, used to take a second class tram.

Before Covid-19 hit us, the three of us - my daughter, my wife and I would go out every morning in our diesel Renault Duster. My neighbour's daughter, who studies in the same school and class as my daughter would also come with us. After dropping off the two children at their school - Modern High School for Girls - I would drop my wife off at Dalhousie and then come back to my office. In the evenings I would pick my wife and go home together. My daughter and her friend come back home using public transport. Therefore my daily commute on a working day involved driving for about 25 to 30 kms burning around 2 litres of diesel.

This was our arrangement until lock-down struck us and left us all home bound. When it was partially lifted (20th May, 2020 - the day Amphan hit) and going to office was no longer considered a criminal activity, I grabbed the first opportunity to get back to work. Attendance wasn't compulsory but to me getting back to the work place was very important. It has a therapeutic effect on my mind. I realised this during the protracted period of sitting at home. Office is not just a place where you work. In today's world most work can be done from anywhere in the world. But to us old timers the office is like family and I missed being with those old familiar faces. I may not be talking to everyone every day but being in the company of known persons is important. 

From my family I was the only one who went out to work. My wife is happy working from home. All she needs to do her job is her laptop. My daughter's school is closed. So I was the odd one out. I decided not to use the car for the short commute. Instead I started using my cycle for the office commute. Truth be told, on day one I drove to work. But from the next day I started cycling.

There are many reasons for this particular choice. I am a serious hobbyist as far as cycling goes. I have often considered going to work on my cycle on the odd days when only I go out from home (and my wife and daughter stay back due to some holiday that does not apply to me) but for various reasons it did not quite happen so far. This time several things went on inside my mind that helped me take the final plunge. 

First, when I saw the pollution free atmosphere that the lock-down gifted us I felt nostalgic about the old Calcutta of our childhood. And then I felt guilty about driving to work for such a short distance. This guilt feeling further gripped me when I spoke to some of our peons. They were coming cycling from places as far away as the interiors of Garia or Nepalgunge, easily covering a distance of more than 20 km each way. 

As it is, while reading the horror stories of the migrant workers first and then the Amphan victims, for the last more than two months I was feeling very guilty to be as privileged as I am - sitting at home safe and secure and getting all the modern conveniences without a problem. So at some subconscious level I think I felt cycling to work was perhaps the least I could do to identify with the less privileged members of our society. A sort of redemption for the sin of being privileged in a nation of millions of poor people. 

My small contribution to the environment through cycling is also important to me. I think it is ridiculous for a fit person to be driving to work over such a short distance. Another fact perhaps helped me go for the cycle. Just before the lock-down I had sold off my motorcycle meaning to replace it with something new which never happened. When I had the motorbike I often used it while going to work alone.

Now cycling to work for me has a few small problems but plenty of advantages. A. Calcutta is very hot and humid during this time of the year. I sweat a lot and arriving at work looking prim and proper is not possible when you cycle in the hot sun. So I choose to wear darker shades of clothes. After arriving I use a fat pocket towel to wipe myself dry. B. If you are not used to cycling in Calcutta you might find the traffic and even pedestrians on the road quite intimidating. But if you are used to it, it is not such a big issue. Of course one has to be careful, particularly with pedestrians who look through you as if you don't exist. C. If it rains it may take up considerable time on the odd day but luckily I don't have any deadline to reach office. D. There is a chance that there might be a flat tyre. While I carry a spare tube and all the implements needed to replace it, I am not sure I will want to do that on the road side in office wear. It hasn't happened so far, touch wood. If it does happen I shall see what to do. I would either walk back home or towards the office depending on where it happens. Ever since I went for puncture resistant tyres (that cost more than an average small car tyre each), I have never had a flat. But it does not mean it cannot happen. 

In my office I am lucky to be able to park the cycle in our ground floor garage space where there are security staff. If I had to park the cycle out on the road I wouldn't bring it. Even if people don't steal it, too many curious onlookers will finger its parts and ruin the bike.  

Some ask me how friends and colleagues see my new way of commuting. Friends who cycle as a hobby love this and are encouraging. Colleagues find it funny and some pull my leg. Peons, with whom I have always had a cordial relationship, hold me in higher esteem now. My other white-collared colleagues all drive to work, some from a distance that is less than 2 kms. Some come riding motorcycles. Few even bought new motorcycles to come to work. No one among the "management staff" cycles to office.

The problem in our society is that cycling is seen as a poor man's compromise. No one rides a cycle with any pride or love for it. Even the blue-collared worker does not like cycling and they all curse themselves that they have to suffer this hardship. Most of them aspire to own at least a motorcycle. 

I had the good fortune to visit Amsterdam a few years ago. Virtually the entire city cycles there. Outside railway stations or launch ghats you see literally thousands and thousands of cycles parked. I wonder how people find their own cycles back at the end of the day from that confusion. Every one there has a car but no one uses it for average commute. They enjoy cycling even in biting European winter. And none of them rides any fancy bike. They are all ordinary cycles with butterfly handles and brakes on the pedal. The city was not always so cycling friendly. Amsterdam changed the character of its roads sometime in the 60s and 70s and made it more cyclist oriented. And their citizens took to it with a lot of pride. I am told other European cities like Copenhagen or Brussels are also similar. 

Here in Calcutta it is just the reverse. The government, instead of trying to promote cycling as a cost effective and sustainable mode of transport and make it safer for people to cycle, made rules making cycling on city roads a criminal activity. I believe they have relaxed this rule after the lock-down. I didn't care to find out if the road I cycle on is within the allowed list. I dare a policeman to come and stop me one day. I shall see how to deal with that. He will also see how to deal with a particularly stubborn citizen.

Let us hope some day in future our city planners will have the wisdom to realise that cycling to work needs to be promoted and encouraged and not banned. But till such time we have these colleagues who drive to work over 2 kms it will have to wait.

Life of a Tree

They came equipped with all the cranes. In fact two cranes and a backhoe excavator. The main road was blocked from two sides so that no traffic would come and they could work in peace. They were replanting a fallen tree. A large one. It was reclining on our building for close to two weeks now. It used to be a large tree but now it is just a long stout wooden staff. A man with an axe had come the previous day and hacked off all the smaller branches that had green leaves. Nex day the other larger branches were chopped off by a man standing on the dolly of a boom crane. He used an electric chain saw because these branches were fatter. The large fallen tree with so many branches was shorn of all its branches. Then they pulled the slanting tree out of the ground and rested it on the footpath where some disinfectants were painted on the exposed and cut wood. After digging a deep hole where the tree stood they put the trunk back, essentially a straight piece of wood with one thin branch holding a few leaves and some roots. They covered the base with freshly dug mud so that it does not fall back again.

I was wondering. Why are they taking so much trouble? If they could pull the tree back (it was uprooted somewhat and leaned against our building during the super cyclone Amphan - see pic on the left) as it was it would be fine but after chopping off all the branches what is the point of planting it back? Why not plant a new sapling instead? It will grow much faster than this old tree. This tree, will actually never grow back to what it was. At best some new small branches will come out of the place where there is a Y now. It will look quite ugly actually.

But then a realisation dawned on me. To us Indians that old tree is a person. It has life. It is like we are trying to save an old injured man. It is not just another tree that we want there. We want this particular tree to be revived. We want it to live. I wonder if this view will be taken anywhere else in the world. 

We take great pride in the fact that one of our finest scientists, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose had scientifically demonstrated that plants have life. Whenever vegans talk about cruelty to animals Indians say plants also have life and it is equally cruel to kill them for food (most food crops are harvested after they die and most vegetables are basically fruits that are collected without killing the plant but who will argue with logic).

When I shared the news of this replantation on facebook it was shared by complete strangers and got likes and comments from many many viewers. I was indeed amazed. For the record, three trees in our neighbourhood were revived like this.

We might forget in a few years. So it is best to note down here that while we were holed up in our respective houses fearing the Covid-19 infection, Calcutta and coastal Bengal was ravaged by a super cyclone called Amphan. This happened on May 20, 2020. Though life loss was minimal due to timely evacuation of people in coastal regions, disruption to normal life was severe. Parts of the city were without electricity for close to a week. Rural south Bengal was worse. Telecom lines were down for weeks. And most visibly hundreds of trees were uprooted and fell all over the city bringing down all sorts of cables. Even lamp posts and traffic signals were flattened. I have never personally seen such fury of wind.

Traffic signals in our neighbourhood

The tree in front of our house also fell. It was a large tree. About the height of our 4 storey building. I do not know what variety it is. It had the leaves that were similar to an Ashwath tree but obviously it was something different and not quite the same. The tree, along with several other trees on our side of the road, that is the western flank of the road, fell. They all fell to the west, suggesting the wind was blowing here from east to west. 

The tree in front of our neighbour's house fell on their boundary wall and broke it. Our tree reclined on our building and didn't fall to the ground. On the next day I realised some of the leaves had wilted. I thought the tree was perhaps dead. It did not break our building in any way but I was worried that another strong gust of wind might push it down and break our and our neighbour's boundary wall if not injure people. 

After a few days when we discovered that no one so much as bothered to come and even inspect the fallen tree we went to inform the office of the local councilor. She is also the Chairperson of the municipal corporation as well as the local MP. Quite a heavyweight. Someone from her office told us they don't have any manpower as every one is stuck in the lockdown and advised us to inform the local police station, which we dutifully did. Police noted down our name, phone number and address. 

After this a group of municipal workers came to remove the tree that had fallen on the shed put up by the local club in front of their club room. I asked them about the fate of our tree. They said this tree will require cranes and ropes etc and only the Parks And Gardens 

Kite Runner

Very fast read. I finished the book in one go reading it through the night right up to the next morning well past break fast. Binge reading :-)

I can see why this book became as famous as it did. It is written in a very easy language. You don't need a dictionary to understand a single word. The story's backdrop is very different. It's exotic Afghanistan. A country associated with violence and mass killings and not even remotely linked to literature. The book shows very realistic portrayal of the place. The story is very well told. The central theme of the story - redemption and retribution for past sins - is very well handled and executed. There are various layers and sub plots and complications of life. 

But it reads like a Bollywood movie in places. Certain scenes happen only in Bollywood formula movies. Like the final scene with the Taliban Assef. It's a little difficult to believe really. Such things don't happen in reality.

Also every time you think X will happen after Y, it does not happen and something totally different happens like a Z. That's also a cliched Bollywood style these days. Surprise for the sake of surprise.

I can understand that such a book would be a bestseller because it has all the elements of a bestseller - an exotic locale, immigrant life, almost true and seems like autobiographical, redemption of guilt etc. But I can also see why it has never won any award anywhere in the world. This book will never become a classic. It can sell millions of copies though. Apparently the book was on top of the NYT best seller list for two years :-). I am not surprised. It has everything that will please an American audience. Hosseini is a master chef and knows the recipe for a good dish that would be a big hit. But he may not provide any nourishment for you.

PS: I learnt about a new type of people. I am afraid I had no clue about the Hazara minority of Afghanistan. May God save them.

Dubliners

There are many books on my book shelf that I have not read. Some I bought. Some I got as gifts over the years. Some are extremely desirable gifts. Some are more like dumping by booksellers who couldn't sell something (in fact I want to relay dump them on some unsuspecting wannabe reader). 

As I confessed somewhere, I have not been reading a lot in the last 30 years or so and quite a few of these unread books have piled up crowding my shelf. Every time I look at any one such title I feel guilty about it, particularly if it is a book that I really want to read. The Dubliners was top of the list of such unread books. 

I think it's there for more than 30 years now. Aisling gave it to me as a gift, I can't remember when. Possibly when I was in Mongar. I had read only Araby as part of my syllabus in college. I quite liked the story back then. But somehow when the book came I never quite got round to reading all the stories. So in lockdown I picked it up and made a mental resolve to read it, come what may. I am happy to say I have now finished reading it. 

How did I like it? Well confession again. I had to struggle through the book. First of all, these are not really stories. Nothing much happens in most of them. There are certain characters that react in a certain way to one another. It's a different style. Totally different. 

Also, to appreciate the stories you need to know about Dublin, the Irish people, classical music, the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism (is there such a word?) and also the Irish political scene of the 1930s. This particular edition has copious notes to make the context clear to readers like me. But if you have to refer to some 3 notes for each average page and they are at the end of the book then it becomes a very very slow process and the flow of reading is interrupted. So barring very few I did not refer to the notes. 

So I had to struggle through the book. The language is beautiful. I could identify certain scenes with the Calcutta of my childhood that filled my mind with joy but those moments were very few and far between. My mind was drifting away totally to something else from time to time. If I stopped reading for a while it would take me a long time to find out where exactly I had stopped. Boring is the right word perhaps but I am a little hesitant to use it because James Joyce is a big name in literature. 

Grapes of Wrath

I had purchased the Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck in 1996. That is what my scribbling on the book's title page says. It was a paperback edition. That is the year Monisha and I got married. I cannot remember exactly from where I bought it or why. But I bought it. I guess I read about it somewhere. Possibly in some must read before you die kind of list. Google was yet to be invented and the idea of an internet was known but was possibly not experienced. So I must have read it in some magazine or newspaper. It is entirely possible that I bought it from the book seller who used to come to the ET office with a suitcase full of books on the recommendation of one of the more erudite colleagues.

Anyway, without getting further into what made me buy the book or from where, let me confess that I did not know much about this book before I bought it. It is seen as an American classic is all that I knew. Prior to this, my knowledge about American writers was limited to Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway only. 

But as things turned out the newly married young man in Calcutta didn't find the time or could never get into the frame of mind to read the book in twenty four years. From time to time I made unsuccessful attempts but never went beyond the first few pages. I cannot analyse why it was so. Possibly I had grown bored with fiction. 

These attempts continued and the book somehow remained visible in my book shelf despite two relocation of residence during this period. Finally as a the Covid19 lockdown rolled into its third version I picked it up. By this time I had grown confident that I could easily scale those 500-pagers.  Just before picking it up I had finished To Kill A Mockingbird. The book, I found, had gone yellow. Cheaper editions use a kind of paper that leaks acid and the pages turn yellow after a few years by which time you are expected to finish reading it. Regardless of how late I was in picking it up, I picked it up.

I could never have chosen a better time to pick this book up. A time when millions of unfed, jobless, migrant labourers in India are going through extreme hardship. They are walking with their family and belongings for hundreds of kilometers to their homes in the villages of India. They are leaving the big cities where they had gone to work and are now going back or are trying to go back to their villages where they think they belong. 

Their hardship and misfortune is indescribable. From the comfort of our homes we are reading about them in the newspapers or watching the images on television and facebook. Some are carrying their old mothers on their backs. Some carrying their children on their shoulders. Some are even giving birth on the road side and then walking again. I saw the photograph of a man holding a table fan in his hand as he walks down the highway with his family. It seemed that was a very dear possession for him. This image somehow haunts me. I do not know why. The newspapers are full of incredibly sad stories of human tragedies. I will not get into those details here. I am tired of them. I feel sick. I feel guilty. Terribly guilty that while I read books from the comfort of my house these people are facing such insurmountable challenges. You could just google them up. 

While the Indians are trying to walk back to their illusive homes from their places of work, the Americans in this book are leaving their homes in the dust bowl in search of work in California - the promised land. Both are illusive - the work and better life in California for the Americans and the security and comfort of village homes for the Indians. Both are in an existential crisis. The Indians are not aware that they are not welcome back in their own villages. The resident villagers see them as a threat, being carriers of the disease and are scared of them. Trouble is breaking out in various villages over their unwelcome entry into their own homes. May be not headline news but they are happening. 

The Americans in this story are also not aware that they are not welcome in California. 

Here a family of extremely poor farmers from Oklahoma in the 30s' America, the Joads, dispossessed of their ancestral land and livelihood, are travelling to the promised land of California in search of steady work and a better life. Most incongruously for an Indian like me to conceive, the poor Americans are driving a car or truck, as they call it. No matter how "beat up" the car is it is impossible for me to imagine this in an Indian context. The poor, dispossessed, landless farmers in India cannot afford even a bicycle.  Here the Indian family in a similar situation would have travelled by train, perhaps without ticket. 

But the description of the American poverty is so realistic and palpable that one can soon recognise them as being indeed poor and the beat up car becomes more symbolic of their poverty than their relative affluence. Poor, rustic people think and behave in a similar way all over the world. If you have intimately mixed with a poor Indian family in any village, you will be able to identify with the Joads and see them as really poor farmers, despite their car. I have just accepted that to an American family a car is as common as an image of Kali or Laxmi in an Indian household. Everyone has it. In fact the Joads never had a car. They bought it for this journey and got cheated by the sucker of a used car salesman. Used car sellers are also similar across the world and adopt similar techniques to dupe their buyers or sellers :-) 

I am right now at around page 350. The entire book is 535. I will possibly need 3 more days. The Joads have reached California and the welcome has not been good. They have realised that their dream is already shattered. It is slowly breaking apart. They have learnt a new word Okies. They realise that they are Okies.

Page 385 - "The stars came down wonderfully close and the sky was soft. Death was a friend, and sleep was death's brother. I read these lines today (11th May, 2020) two days after that tragic accident in which a running goods train took away the lives of a family of 15 tired migrant labourers who had fallen asleep in the night on the railway lines near Aurangabad. They were walking towards their home some hundreds of miles away. I did not read the news for details. There are other similar deaths happening on the highways but this got bigger prominence due to the number of victims.

I finished reading the book last night. In the wee hours of this morning actually, Wednesday 13th May, 2020. I will write down my feelings a little later. I am off with the Dubliners now.