Vogue launched in Calcutta

I saw this huge poster of Vogue on the window of Oxford Book Store in Calcutta's Park Street. Somehow it seemed a bit surrealistic to watch shabby Calcutta go by infront of these glamorous girls on the cover of Vogue.
But who cares? There may be enough low life passing infront of the girls' gaze but enough high life to buy those Rs 100 magazines to make the business viable here.
Jai Hind

The most difficult journey on four wheels

Between October 1990 and June 1992, I lived in a remote eastern corner of Bhutan. Eastern Bhutan was remote even by Bhutanese standards. There was this border town called Samdrupjhonkar in the foothills which was reachable from Guwahati, Assam.

The name was quite a mouthful and that’s why even the locals used to call it just Samdrup. My town Mongar was some 270 kms from Samdrup. The entire journey was through the mountains and on a good day it was about 12 hours by bus – 6 am to 6 pm. On bad days it could easily take upto 16 hours to reach Mongar from Samdrup.

The first town and the first stop on this route was Tashigang at a distance of 180 km to the north from Samdrup. Another 90 kms to the west and you reached Mongar. Tashigang had a few buildings and even a town square with a huge prayer wheel in the middle where the bus would stop for passengers to have a quick bite or leak or both. Many would also take this opportunity to down a few Apsos or Dragon rum quickly.

There were just three direct buses to Mongar from Samdrup. Not daily, but weekly. If memory serves me right I think it was Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So we would typically reach Samdrup on a Sunday evening. Get the ticket for the Monday bus. Spend the night in a hotel in Samdrup. And then travel on Monday. If there was no ticket for tomorrow’s bus, you had to wait till the day after day after tomorrow.

You also had the option to go till Tashigang the next day. This was a daily service and chances of getting a ticket in that bus was better (but even this wasn’t certain). You would then spend the night there in Tashigang. Next morning you took the bus to Mongar, which was also a daily service.

This particular Sunday I realized tomorrow’s bus was full. Even the Tashigang bus was full. I think even the Wednesday bus had no ticket. In the morning I took a chance and went to the bus stand, hoping to get some other private vehicle.

Sure enough there was this loaded Toyota Hilux pickup truck in the bus stand that was going to Mongar High School. In fact that vehicle belonged to the high school and it was carrying ration for the school’s hostel. The cabin was already full – I think the headmaster’s wife was there along with a few of her children. A couple of high school students were perched on top of the load behind. They told me that if I didn’t mind hopping on top of the canvas that covered the ration they had no objection. So I did just that.

Primary school teachers were looked down upon by people connected with the high school in Mongar. Even the high school students or cooks looked at us like we were some lesser mortals. It never quite bothered me really. Indeed lesser mortals were sent to the primary schools. However, I never failed to notice the little nuances in their attitude towards teachers from the high school with a sense of amusement.

I was fairly thrilled by this opportunity. I had traveled in Indian and Nepal Himalaya on the roof of buses and trucks or even a tipper in Nepal and enjoyed it immensely. You get a fantastic 360 degree view of the mountains and feel one with nature.

And I thought this journey would be something like that. But soon I realized how different and dangerously difficult this journey was going to be. Easily this is the most difficult journey I have ever made so far in life on four wheels.

First, I was sitting on uneven surface. God only knows what all was there under the canvas. I guess rice, wheat, salt etc. in gunny sacs. Whatever they were, it wasn’t at all comfortable for human beings to sit on. The other and more dangerous problem was, there was nothing to hold on to, except the thick nylon rope with which the canvas was secured.

But the worst part was, the twists and turns on this road. This road is not straight for more than 10-15 feet at a stretch and probably had a few million bends. So as the vehicle kept snaking up the road, our body was getting flung from side to side due to the centrifugal force. I was clutching on to the rope for dear life. The palm became red in no time. Then I realized that perhaps lying on my stomach would be a better idea. It also started drizzling a bit.

The entire journey for me was spent in trying to work out how not to get flung off the vehicle and I constantly tried various different positions and postures, including standing on the bumper behind. My fellow passengers – the students of Mongar High School – were more hardy than me. Even they were pretty tired of this.

By the time we reached Tashigang around midday I was thoroughly drenched. And my palm didn’t look like mine. It was looking like a gorilla’s palm (have you seen those in NatGeo?).

The VIP lady in the vehicle decided to spend a couple of hours chatting with a friend there and we got a chance to recuperate. Finally the vehicle restarted and now I got a seat inside the cabin and ended the journey more or less comfortably.

I will most definitely go to Bhutan again. This time in my own vehicle. And I hope to do a trans-Bhutan trip. Going up from Phuntsholling to Thimphu and Paro and then via Punakha and Wangdi to Mongar. On the way will be Tongsa and Bhumthang. I will go to Tashigang and then down to Samdrup. I am told that Bhutan does not allow entry through one point and exit through another. But I suppose if I use my connections that I have now, these permissions will come through fairly easily, including the permission to stay in the Dzongs’ guest houses, which are supposed to be top class.

Let me see.

On Smoking And Why I Want To Quit

It’s an irony of sorts. My father gave up smoking when I was an infant so that I wouldn’t pick up the bad habit from him. However, he used to glorify his smoking days and used to tell me stories about various cigarette brands, their wonderful packaging etc. and how he used to smoke 40 cigarettes a day.

He would also tell me the names of various fashionable foreign brands that his elder brother’s wife would bring for him from abroad and how his friends would envy him for that. My uncle used to work in Sudan and they used to travel abroad very often. My father was my aunt’s favourite and she would spoil him rotten with such gifts.

I clearly remember that as a child the subject of smoking was an important subject to discuss with my father. Another of my favourite topics to discuss with him used to be his childhood days in the small towns of Bihar.

I remember once telling him in all my excitement: Baba there is this machine that you can use to roll your own cigarettes!! Did you ever use them? Baba said, “oh come on. I could roll three cigarettes on my own in the time it takes for the roller to make one.” I thought this was a very heroic thing to do. And secretly aspired to be able to do it one day when I grew up.

I still remember I used to urge my father to take up smoking again, so that I could collect the glamorous empty packs. And like all young boys, I wanted Baba to be my hero. And all heroes smoked. He never picked up smoking again in his life. I have never actually seen him smoke. And it used to break my heart.

Then there was this maternal uncle I had who reportedly had started smoking from class two – age six or seven. I thought I would start from class eight. I don’t know why, but I thought once you were in class eight you were grown up enough to smoke. So in December 1979, when I was promoted to class eight I bought my first cigarette in Shantiniketan Poush Mela.

To make sure no one familiar would see me, I went towards the back of the fair. And while buying (I think it was a brand called Number 10) I chose a youngish boy to buy it from. The first few years I used to smoke one cigarette a day. Towards the evening. I would walk at least three four kilometres to go to a place where no one would know me and buy from shops where the sellers were much younger than usual. To smoke however, I would go to desolate places. The top of Dhakuria Bridge was a favourite spot.

I clearly remember smoking used to give me a fantastic sexual pleasure. I would get rock hard while puffing. You didn’t really have to think about any particular woman. It would just happen the moment you put the cigarette between the lips. Obviously enough, smoking fulfilled some subconscious need for oral gratification.

I don’t remember when exactly I lost this feeling of pleasure. But it isn’t there any more. In fact smoking forty cigarettes a day perhaps kills your appetite for sex. It can even lead to impotence I guess.

I don’t know if women derive any sexual pleasure from smoking. Perhaps they do. I have never discussed this with any female smoker.

There was another very important factor that contributed to smoking. This Charminar ad of Jackie Shroff (if you are a foreigner – Jackie is a macho male Indian model of yester years and now a celebrity film star in Bollywood. Despite the name, this Jackie is not a woman). Driving an open hood Jeep through lush green tea gardens, wearing dark sunglasses and looking very cool. This ad was most definitely my favourite. It justified smoking as something that cool guys do.

Charminar also had a popular radio ad before this – “Relax. Have a Charminar”. This was probably targeted at slightly older folks. The Jackie ad was more for hooking youngsters to the pleasures of smoking.

I am glad cigarette advertisements have been banned in India now. I am sure less number of young children these days are fascinated by the idea of smoking. There is nothing heroic about being able to smoke 40 cigarettes a day. Or even one.

However, what I hate most about my addiction to tobacco is that it is an addiction and because it is an addiction I can’t control it. Rather nicotine controls me and I don’t like that. Nicotine is more powerful than me. He controls my actions and emotions. I am powerless before him. I don’t like that.

There is no one man or woman or anything tangible that has that kind of power over me. Once upon a time long ago a particular woman had that kind of power over me. Regrettably enough, she never quite used it. You know, the unrequited love crap. Even that I could come out of. It was tough. It took me quite a while to reconcile myself to the realisation that it will never happen and I finally found peace in myself.

But nicotine is something that has a much stronger grip over me. I just can’t come out of it. It’s such a shame.

I am one of those who does everything very consciously. If I do something illegal, immoral or fattening - I would do it very consciously and deliberately. I have always consciously chosen to do whatever I do and that’s why I have complete control over virtually everything. You can never entice me into doing something that I don’t really want to do. Not even illicit sex – which I agree is a very strong attraction for most males and lot of men would walk into a sex trap without realising what they are doing.

Therefore, this battle against nicotine. I am not really too concerned about the health aspects of nicotine or smoking. It kills you. I know. So what? Lots of things can kill me and in any case I will die one day. It makes you impotent. So what? I could live without sex. It harms others. I never smoke in front of non-smokers and therefore I don’t harm others. My car harms others even more and it is perfectly legal to do so.

But I want to give up smoking so that I can tell myself: yes I am really free. Nothing can control me. I am a free man. I can decide what I want to do and what I don’t want to do. That’s the principal motivation for me to give up smoking. I hope some day I will win. The battle is on. It’s a constant battle. You have to be conscious all the time. And keep fighting. It is tiring. It is like using your hand to plug a hole in the dyke. The moment you remove your hand your town will be flooded. And it does get flooded every now and then.

One of the things I am doing these days is not to smoke while doing something else. That is, not to smoke absentmindedly. I want to remain very conscious that I am smoking. Know what I am doing. This helps to control the unconscious urges to reach out for a smoke.

Also I am trying to change the place where I smoke every time. The place where you choose to smoke and the time of the day – these are connected to your addiction.

Let me see where I reach.

Deoghar Memories

I never saw my grandfather. None of my other innumerable cousins, except the first two, did either. He had died way before any of my uncles baring the first one had even married. He died of diabetes that went undetected till he started to turn blind.

To me grandfather meant a black and white photograph on the wall. Him sitting alone on a chair. This I later discovered was enlarged from another group photo where he was sitting with his entire family for a typical family photo. He had a big moustache. Wore a dhoti and a coat. Short cropped hair. He looked very grave and serious with his moustache and a heavy framed round pair of glasses that we used to call the Gandhi frame in childhood. He looked every inch the patriarch of the family.

But I grew up with funny stories about him that showed he was witty and had a brilliant sense of humour. From these stories, told by my father and my uncles, especially Sejoka, I grew up to love him.

After retirement when he settled in Deoghar – way outside the main town - he moved the British district administration to grant him a gun license apparently through the sheer good English of the application and a hilarious logic that he devised to prove how a rifle in his hands would save the administration millions of rupees!! The British District Magistrate issued the license to him without much scrutiny. There is no family tale of him ever having used the gun on anybody though.

In fact I have always harboured the secret ambition of owning a gun license, probably as a result of this story.

Dadu also used to have an obsession for crossword puzzles that used to come out in The Illustrated Weekly then. He dreamt of cracking it one day and getting the first prize, which reportedly ran into thousands of rupees in those days. I am told he never quite got it all correct in his life. It’s quite a shame that none of my uncles imbibed this very English pass time or passed it on to any of us.

The stories of how he would lead his servants on were also hilarious. There was this character called Muni Singh, who wanted to build a house for him. And Dadu gave him a simple puzzle to crack. Muni Singh, all is fine, but how will you put the beam up? Muni Singh yeh beam kaise uthega? Apparently Muni Singh could never crack the puzzle and didn’t quite get to build the dream house for Dadu.

This question is still used in our family jokingly to humour any idiot who comes up with a grand plan on anything without a workable execution strategy. Or we simply call someone a Muni Singh and the rest of the family understands what we mean.

There was this other servant – a cook – who would urge him to have “one more bread” even after he was done with eating his supper. This is a common courtesy in India to request and urge the important man to eat a bit more than he can but beyond a point it can be quite annoying.

Dadu I guess was quite like me. If he said no, he meant it. One particular evening Dadu had had enough of this courtesy. He got annoyed but didn’t show it. When requested for “one more bread”, he quietly nodded. And then he kept on eating until all the bread stock was exhausted and then he got the servant to knead some more flour and make him more breads. I am told the servant learnt a lesson from this and never repeated the courtesy.

Dadu survived one of the worst natural disasters of his time. A serious earthquake that left several hundreds of thousands in his town and surrounding villages dead. Motihari. 1934. Though none in his family died, he had to live with the young boys (of various ages) and his wife in tents for months on end. He even operated his office – the district accountant’s - out of the tent.

Apparently that fateful day one of my uncles got trapped in his friend’s house across a bridge that had collapsed and everyone took him for dead. Dadu was quite unmoved. He was busy protecting the ones that survived and didn’t look perturbed about the one that was presumably gone. I guess when you have nine of them, you can afford to be a bit aloof about one or two.

There is just one story of Dadu ever getting angry with any of his children. It was my father who went on a bicycle with another friend across a dangerous forest – Hazaribagh to Ramgarh – crossing the Chutu Palu Up (I guess a small mountain). The friends they went to didn’t allow them to come back that evening, fearing they would be eaten up by tigers. The next day when the hero arrived home he was tied to a lemon tree and whipped the whole day. I don’t know why Dadu chose a lemon tree for this. I mean I have often wondered about it. Perhaps they didn’t have lampposts in those days in the small towns of Bihar. But I fully endorse what he did.

Having said that, I think my father was also quite a daredevil teenager (though he feels he didn’t think at that time it was a great daredevil thing to do). And I have a lot of respect for him for that. This is on my “to do before I die” list. Drive, yes drive and not cycle, from Hazaribagh to Ramgarh, the Maoists willing. I can’t cycle it up. I am quite certain about that.

I could feel Dadu’s presence most in the house that he built in Deoghar. My father used to take us to Deoghar to spend our puja vacation every year. About a month each year. That was the only place on earth where I could feel completely at home.

There were quite a few items in the house associated with Dadu. Two large easy chairs were the most prominent among these. There were quite a few other minor items as well. A few black wooden homeopathic medicine box of various sizes. A Bengali dictionary. Very thick and leather bound. One of the best dictionaries that Bengal ever produced. There were some old keys, kept in a metal bowl kind of thing. There was one other Calcutta Directory that was quite his favourite. It had lists of owners of all the houses in Calcutta. And his relatives’ names were marked by a fountain pen. If saved it would have been quite an asset in our family. But alas the book, as all his other belongings, just withered away or got lost or were never saved.

Didi and I used to play with these books and boxes in those lazy autumn afternoons of the 70s. I am sure those memories are as dear to her as they are to me.

I always thought it was a gorgeous house to have. I don’t know anyone among our friends and relatives and among our friends’ friends and relatives’ relatives who had not gone to the house for a short vacation. Virtually every month someone or the other would come to us to take the keys for the house and a handwritten note from Baba for our caretaker.

The house had some seven eight rooms. A separate kitchen. A caretaker’s room. Several bathrooms – mostly country style though. And a huge garden with fruit trees and a beautiful large well that was always full with water. There was a dilapidated cow shed with concrete cisterns for the cows to eat from. In its hey days the shed would surely have accommodated at least half a dozen cows.

The most attractive part of the house was the roof. It was at three different levels. And the walls of the roof were simply gorgeous – going up and down like a frozen sea wave. We used to light it up with butter lamps during Diwali and it used to look like a brilliant sparkling necklace from a distance against the backdrop of the dark night sky of Deoghar.

We spent countless afternoons in the small and cozy roof towards the front of the house, which was lower than the rest of the roof. You had to jump about three feet from the higher level roof to get into it. There were no stairs. It offered a certain privacy. You could look at the empty road in front of the house. But no one could see you. It had the added attraction of an Eucalyptus tree drooping into it and covering its floor with its dry fallen leaves and filling the air with the sweet lemony aroma of the leaves.

The front of this roof was shaped like a lotus in bloom. There were gaps between the petals (each petal at least two feet high) and we would walk dangerously in and out of them. Somewhere on this lotus was written “Bimal Saraju” the name of the house. Basically the name of my Dadu and Thakuma (who died even before Dadu).

The well was another source of pride for us. It was huge and had a solid cast iron grill covering the top. According to Baba there were several small springs inside the well that ensured year round supply of water. It was the only one of its kind in the neighbourhood and in the height of summer when the other wells in the locality would turn dry several families used to depend on this well for their water supply.

There was no mechanized way to pull water out of the well though. Therefore pulling water out meant you had to throw the bucket attached to a long rope and then pull it up. You had to stand on the circumference wall of the well to ensure that the bucket wasn’t scraping the side wall inside. This made it risky for children like us to pull out water from it and therefore it was Tilua’s task to do the job for us.

Every year Baba used to plan to build two pillars and a cross bar connecting them to hang a pulley in the middle to make the task simpler. But the mason’s estimate would always be way beyond his means and building the pillars always remained an unfulfilled dream for him that was continuously postponed for the next year.

Baba however had to take care of several other expenditure related to maintaining the house. There was the caretaker’s salary to be paid, taxes and general maintenance, which meant painting the house once in a while, repairing the outer doors for termite attacks and painting the millions of windows.

The biggest expenditure however used to be maintaining the huge wall that surrounded the property. It was easily about eight feet high and ran into at least a thousand feet, if not more.

Not only would it need to be cemented where the bricks were giving way, there was another menace. A small piece of farmland behind our property. Its owner used to dig his farm so close to the wall that it would collapse there every year. In fact every year that was the first thing he had to do.

The cowshed in the extreme corner of the property was quite in a dilapidated state. However, Baba never quite bothered to repair it. We were forbidden from going inside as it was full of weeds and being bitten by a snake there was a real possibility. Didi and I used to use the dry cisterns outside for a completely different purpose for which they were built. We used to lay out our fireworks, bought way ahead of Diwali, every afternoon to dry in the sun there.

I do not quite know if it was really necessary to do this but we would still do it every year very scrupulously. We just couldn’t take a chance with things going wrong on D-day and be left with damp fireworks that wouldn’t burst or light up. Diwali was sort of the high point of our stay there. It was not only big it would also herald the end of our stay there. We used to come back to Kolkata one day after Diwali – brother’s day.

On brother’s day, Didi and I would wake up early in the morning and run to the farmland behind our house to take a few strains of greenish paddy corns (the paddy would be ripe in another month), for her to put on my head as my blessings along with a few pieces of freshly pulled out green grass.

Ma would prepare a light watery solution by rubbing a small piece of sandalwood on a piece of wet stone. This would be used by Didi to put a mark on my forehead. And while touching my forehead with the sandalwood solution on her ring finger (Didi standing and me sitting on the floor) she would recite this short poem which basically meant, “I am putting a spot on my brother’s forehead, this brings thorns on the door of Yama (the messenger of death). Yamuna marks his brother Yama and I mark my brother”. This whole process would be repeated thrice.

A butter lamp would be on next to me. And probably Ma would blow the conchshell. After the ritual I would be offered some sweets. And then we would rush for the station in two small horse drawn carriages to catch the morning train that invariably came in the afternoon.

I go to Didi’s house on Brother’s Day almost every year. But somehow that charm of those chilly mornings of Deoghar isn’t quite there. We both silently get nostalgic about those days but hardly talk about it.