Born to be Ordinary; Conduit of Happiness; And the Girl with the Red Pote

1

“Go Like a Pro.”

Strangely I woke up to my own voice sleep talking National Car Rental ad that I had been repeating in jest every time it was on TV.

I gingerly got my phone from the table and checked time.  It was 4:30 am. Unable to sleep again, I played Con te Partiro song on my phone. With the song playing in the backdrop, I drove on a contemplative road of meandering thoughts. It was a time travel to an alternate universe.

I felt a strong urge to write. As always I consulted my consciousness for prompts. I couldn’t muster a single word however. Resigned, I got a paper from the table and scribbled, ‘Go Like a Pro.’

Most of the stories have a narrative. I had a narrative but no story. The narrative needed a plot to legitimize itself to the status of a story. My mind started scanning people, events– imaginary or real–that I encountered, read, heard or somehow felt (perhaps telepathy). Ethereal and previously captured incidents, people, and words which acted as the foundation of my consciousness reacted to form the kernel that resulted in inception of formative ideas. These ideas set off butterfly effects.

I started assigning these actors and events a placeholder lest I forgot them and they disappeared from the annals of my life sequence. Additionally words, the miniscule words, started to form vessels without having any definite structure. They were just not words; they represented an idea. I believe a literary piece should be able to use any idea or word, however complex it is, without any criticism, because I think only textbooks have an obligation to their readers; writers have a selfish agenda to serve themselves just like musicians, sculptors, artists and schizophrenics to be vindicated.  

This is not supposed to be a story or a biography per se– it is just a potpourri of disparate events picked up from the past. The characters are not a figment of my imagination but their cohabitation for sure is. It's a mental construct establishing a cult by picking the characters, I have met in my life, and letting them carry on along the narrative. It may look systematic but the people/events are snapshots picked without any respect to chronology. Figuratively speaking, it's a vicarious experience in living their life without enduring any hardship they faced. It's an attempt of personification of emotions they had in their ordinary life.

Life is not only an inspiration, it is more of desperation. Many people see their dreams washed ashore. They struggle to live an average life. With this theme in my mind I had been thinking of people that I met in my life. Almost all of them exhibited an ordinary life, whatever mighty aspirations they had, and had a resolve to move forward because they acted as a conduit. Needless to say, the readings are my own; interpretations are of my own.

I may sound ego testicle (thanks auto-correct) – I sincerely thought it was due to auto-correct when I wrote on my phone but couldn’t reproduce the mistake again. I meant egotistical. Pardon my non-sequitur.

Just like the school kids from the novel Brave New World take note of everything interesting or uninteresting during  explanation of Bokanovsky's process, I started taking note of anything that I could relate to my theme of ordinary lives. In due process, I got more interested in a biographer’s life than her subject. Nondescript mundane events, that are aplenty, appeared frequently, and magically I felt triviality induced Buddha-esque moment.  The most important realization I had was that a person’s fair shot to prosperity is largely determined by the womb he/she was born to, especially folks from our part of the world.

2

The house was currently owned by an old man who moved from there long ago. The property was in a prime location. Due to legal wrangling among his sons, the ownership hadn’t been established and as such it couldn’t be demolished. For a paltry sum the old man had rented that house.

It was built from clay, brick and wood while the roof was covered by clay tiles. Over the time the tiles fell off or were ruined due to weather and were replaced by a patchwork of colorful metal roofing. Every monsoon you could see people mending the roof. The windows were made from wood–a few of them were missing and were just covered with thick opaque plastic to block light and wind. On the backside there was a pig sty that spread foul smell every time there was wind and frequent squealing of pigs. The house may have survived the 1990 earthquake.

I had been inside that house when I was a kid. The first floor had three distinct rooms. A wooden stair connected the floors. The second floor had three rooms with a loose partition created by walls but had no doors. The floor creaked whenever anyone walked. The attic was a big single room. Long ago they used to show videos in that room. Mostly they showed Hindi, Chinese– well, they were Hollywood movies with Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan etc – and occasionally late night ‘English’ movies which kids were not allowed to watch. There was no running water and sanitary facility in the whole house.

Years later, the first floor was rented to a family that opened a small dingy local alehouse. It attracted a select group of people. An outward extension with a makeshift metal roof provided space for carom board revelers and tea drinkers that liked to bask on the sun. Still there was no restroom in that house; people had to use the public restroom from the wada karyalaya which was across the small road that separated them. The second floor was rented to a migrant family. I think the attic was unoccupied.

The head of the migrant family was a middle-aged man who was always seen wearing a traditional dhaka topi. He worked as a manual laborer. After a hard day’s work he always used to enter the alehouse before climbing up the floor. I had heard him quarrel with his wife more than once. His wife was a simple woman who you could see spinning yarn in a charkha every day outside the small verandah. I was never sure how many kids were in that family but I frequently saw a couple of them, who were about seven or eight, boisterously play in front of the wada karyalaya. They mostly wore the typical government school sky blue shirt and navy blue pant.  One of the kids dropped from the school and was working as a helper in a mini-bus. He was hardly fifteen years old. Their eldest daughter also lived with them.

Roshani, as I later found out her name from Shirish, was of average height and slender build. She was simple and the simplicity was captivating. Her face was round with high cheek-bones and her hair was long jet black straight. Her grace was manifested in her humility more than her stunning beauty. I mostly saw her wearing a green kurta and a red pote around her neck.  The red on green accentuated the pote and it would be the first thing anyone would notice. I had heard from one of the guys in the pool house– no wonder everyone talked about her beauty although she was married– that her husband was working in a gulf country. She worked in a pashmina factory.

I never met her up-close. I usually saw her going in and out of the house carrying an earthen pot; I often wondered where she got the water from. Every time she got out of the house, the people who were playing carom would stop and stare at her. There was another group of young people from the neighborhood and beyond who occupied the porch of the house that was adjacent to the old house. That house had a small cemented porch and stairs to keep the drainage water at bay but had no door facing the street. You could see these kids drinking tea, smoking cigarettes, playing board games the whole day, and in evening drinking chhyang from the bhatti (Alehouse sounds fancy–let’s call it for what it is) and playing guitar. Some of them were kids I grew up with but had stopped talking after I went to a boarding school. Their company wasn’t taken positively by parents who wanted their children to stay away from them. These kids often teased Roshani and sometimes passed lewd comments. She would just look down and walk straight. I wished her husband came back and the couple moved out to a different location.