#monochromecollective

Her name was Shanti and she looked like she stepped out of a Raja Ravi Varma painting. Fairest than the fairest of them all, her skin glowed with such luminescence - I remember wondering if I would get gilt on my finger if I touched her. Her hair fell in a thick braid that snaked well below her hips.

She had light brown eyes that had a hypnotising quality about them, and she smiled with a dazzle that made everyone want to levitate a little and flap their imaginary wings.

When my family moved to Delhi from an obscure, languid corner in Madras a little less than 30 years ago, I was still a child trapped in an adolescent. I had left behind a tomato plant in the common backyard of our colony, and my biggest worry, even in the awestruck early days in a shiny new city, was whether my other friends in the neighbourhood tended to it with as much affection.

I had painted and planted a big sign board in Tamil that screamed ‘DO NOT TOUCH’ next to the plant before I left - which, in retrospect, didn’t seem like such a great idea.

I also worried about Johny, a playful mongrel I regularly fed saambaar and curd rice to.  I wondered – not without a tinge of envy – whose feet he rested his furry little head on.

I missed my friends as I tried to shake off our squeals that hung frozen in the corners of my mind. But none of this could steal from me the excitement of being in a new city. That was the second biggest move of our lives, with the first one being the shift to Madras from villages and towns near Kanyakumari, where we lived several years ago.

My dad got me into the only school in Delhi which offered Tamil as an optional language, promising the Principal that I would make the school proud someday. I spent much of my time in school by myself as I did not understand a word of English or Hindi and found it surprising that not many kids spoke Tamil.

It was not particularly a matter of pride either for my Principal or my Dad that my report card during that year largely showed single digit percentages against all subjects except Tamil, in which I scored 98%.

I managed to somehow get to 10th standard, when the class sections were shuffled and we had new classmates. That’s when I met Shanti.

Shanti was an introvert and miraculously found comfort in my company. She chose to sit next to me in the class, putting the spotlight on me - and suddenly, I was visible to my classmates.

We spent the next three years becoming the bestest of best friends. She was oblivious to the devastation her looks caused, and would burst into childlike laughter every time I sang paeans to her beauty in my limited vocabulary.

Once, I was so mesmerized by a description of Betty’s lips (not Veronica, but Betty!) by Archie - “ruby red lips like freshly crushed strawberries” -that I made it a point to introduce it every time I reminded Shanti how beautiful she was.

We did everything together, and somewhere along the way I forgot how beautiful she was on the outside. We did each other’s homework, we completed each other’s sentences and thoughts, we laughed at the same things, and we ate from each other’s lunch box.

I loved her puranpoli so much that her mother would send me some every month, which I realised (much later) must have burnt a small hole in their monthly budget.  

My first letter ever was written to Shanti. We wrote each other letters during vacations using code words (essentially girl names) for our respective crushes. It was a lengthy monologue running into several sheets, strategically torn from the centre of my note book.

I wrote to her about how happy I was with the sighting of Shivika in the neighbourhood, helpfully adding a footnote in fine print that I actually meant Shiv but wrote Shivika just in case the letter fell in the wrong hands.

The classmate I was hopelessly in love with fell hopelessly in love with Shanti, leaving both of us to wonder what the word 'aquiline' meant when he sent a love note to her. It read something like: "You have aquiline eyes, you have aquiline nose, you have aquiline lips, you have aquiline face".

She laughed that note off too, much to my secret delight. She told me she would get married to a guy of my choice.

After school ended, we eventually grew apart after staying in touch on and off through letters. A few years later – by which time we had completely lost touch – one day out of the blue, I remembered Shanti and I knew I had to meet her.

I wanted to get her introduced to a friend who I thought would be the perfect match for her! Just like that, after all those years.

I called the friend, told him about Shanti, and set out to find her. I made a few calls and a few days later traced her location to Noida – not very far from where I lived.

I don’t remember being as excited as I was that day when I stood in front of her house, which looked strangely festive... it wasn’t the festival season. The door was ajar and her mother – a mirror image of Shanti – immediately recognised me, jumped up, and hugged me. “Why didn’t you come to the wedding?” she enquired, still holding me.

Shanti got married two days before I got there. I left her place a few minutes later, and never went back.

Shanti taught me kindness. She taught me never to take oneself seriously. That virtues worn lightly served one well. That you always smile, no matter what. That stripped of everything material and outwardly, all human beings were the same. That in friendship, you question nothing and give your everything.

“I hate this bed”, I tell my mother. “Don’t take it personally please, but I really, really hate this bed.” 

The ‘bed’ is a behemoth that occupies my room. It is more at home in this house than I am. It occupies ninety percent of the space that I consider ‘my own’ and I hate it. It is a mocking, humiliating monstrosity of wood whose mission it is to remind me how insignificant I am in the grand scheme of things. It’s a battle between a queen-size platform of planks and I. I am losing.

 “Where will our guests sleep if we remove it?” asks my mother, with a defensive glint in her eyes. Uh-oh…she is prepared to fight. But this my one Sunday off and I am not in the mood to spend the next 12 odd hours locked up in my hole, weeping, alternating between vile anger and remorse.

I don’t dare say this but inside I am thinking – What guests? We haven’t had guests in the longest time, unless you count my mother’s brother. A solitary man whose spirit could, in no way, occupy the enormous plateau that is my bed.

 So, does that mean this room is meant more for a non-existent guest than for a living, breathing, altogether-here Me? Is that what my mother is – a lady in waiting? And is that what I am – already gone?

 The bed was conceived, designed and built entirely by my mother in my absence. I was in Bangalore, I had vacated my room and now it was hers to do what she wanted with it.

One of the first things she did was to take our – my sister’s and my – beds and fuse them into one large unit. I remember the day those beds first arrived in our home more than fifteen years ago. As two stories of bunk bed.

My sister took the berth below, I perched on high. I loved that damn bed. Up until it came, our room was my sister’s domain. She decided pretty much everything that went on in it. Now I had my own special bed. Its altitude allowed me my first taste of privacy. I would mess it up with crumpled sheets and at least three books at any given time (“Who reads three books at one time?” my mother would ask).

Over the years, the bed became inhabited with a walkman, tapes ranging from the Beatles (for over two years), the Doors (about a week give or take) and, ahem, Boyzone (my dirty little secret). There was even a stuffed toy for a bit – Trunky the elephant. That bed was the earliest indication that I was different from my mother. I was a dreamer, I was a slob and I could read three books at one time. 

Anyway, so my sister and I left and my mother was left behind with my father. A distant, generally decent, man with a tendency to be cruel as a defence mechanism. His mantra was – If you have nothing to say, be mean.

My mother took to renovation with a vengeance. Recreate, reshape, redo, reinvent. She took the bunk bed and broke down its upwardly mobile aspirations. She grounded it, made it fall back to earth. She covered it in pretty sheets and made it her own. 

Its massive size and rectangular shape made the room shrink, made three fourths of it inaccessible for the sweeping lady and those who wanted to get to the cupboards. And anyone who entered the room could not leave without stubbing their toes or banging their knees against the legs. It was as if the bed had a lifeforce of its own, a chi imparted to it by my mother. 

But then I came back. I don’t know if I ran away from my other life or if I returned for a singular purpose. Either way, I came back and wished to re-appropriate what I believed was mine.

I remember the first time I saw the bed when I got back from the airport. My mother displayed her handiwork with pride. I pretended to approve but inside I was horrified. Where did my room disappear?

I needed air and light. I needed all four walls and all four corners of my room. I needed the space in the middle to dance. I wanted to open my cupboard without it banging against wood. I wanted space for my books, my laptop, my music and my DVDs.

 “What do you suggest we do with it then?” she asks me. Suddenly I can’t gauge her. The situation is tense and could go either way. I decide to step down. After a beat, so does she. “We could put it in the computer room and shift the single bed in.”

The computer room. That used to be my sister’s before she left for college in America. Now it is the Computer Room. As mine is the one with the mammoth bed. 

I have no ideas. Unless you count the recurring dream I have of taking an axe to it and hacking away repeatedly, manically until there are no pieces left to be salvaged. Until it is dead and truly gone. But I don’t think that idea will go down to well with my audience.

So I keep quiet. Besides I like the bed for itself. I like the bed-ness of it. It is solid and comfortable and just right on days that my lower back is killing me. There’s just too much of it I don’t need. How do I explain this to my mother?

 So we stand on opposing sides of the room with the bed between us. I have just finished telling her I have no solutions but that it doesn’t change how much I hate the bed. She looks at me for a long time to see if I genuinely dislike it or if I’m doing it to punish her.

Sometimes I think she’s looking for signs of my selfishness so that she can have the satisfaction of telling me how much like my father I am. Cruel, insensitive, blind to her misery and unmindful of all that she has given up for me. I wonder what it will take for her to truly understand the depth of love I have for her. 

Fuck the bed, I want to tell her. I want to climb over the mattress and reach her side. I want to hug her and not feel a stiff, untrusting person pat my back perfunctorily. I want her to know that I don’t care about the bed. Or that I care about it more than I do for anything else on the planet. That if she wants, I will happily bang my knee against its legs for as long as I live. That it matters. 

  The room was filled with a strange excitement. At least we kids surely felt so.There was an unmistakable sense that we were being allowed into the world of adults for the first time. That the big secrets are being shared with us; secrets that need maturity to be grasped.

I was 9 years old then, in 1989. Atul bhaiyya, the younger son of our landlord auntie closed the door shut after everyone was in. We liked Atul bhaiyya. He used to tell us impromptu ghost stories during the mandatory power-cuts every night. We would hold each other tight and listen to these stories, and anticipate one kid (most of the times it was Annu) to start crying with fear mid-way. We kids were holding each other tight again as Alok bhaiyya, Atul bhaiyya’s elder brother put the cassette in the waiting tongue of the tape recorder-cum-player. It was a 90-minute long recorded cassette, some local cheap brand, with its contents written in bad handwriting on the outer cover.

 It was a 90-minute long recorded cassette, some local cheap brand, with its contents written in bad handwriting on the outer cover.

 The cassette settled inside the mouth of the player with a ‘satt’ sound. Nana ji, the white-haired, sweet-natured father of auntie went to the window and peeped out of the curtains to check, one last time, just in case. He then signaled Alok bhaiyya to start playing. Annu giggled for no reason. Or may be out of excitement.

The tape was rolling. 

We listened to Sadhvi Ritambhara first. She had a crisp, booming voice, and we had never listened to a voice with so much passion in it. We liked her instantly.

The romantic coolness of a late afternoon room when the sun has been curtailed by heavy curtains, the smell of Russian perfume Nana ji used to wear (he was a doctor in Russia once and our constant source of old copies of Misha Magazine with those exquisite illustrations and fairy tales), and that group of around 15 people from 3 families huddled together listening to a smuggled illegal tape created an instant polaroid in my head.

The elders were nodding emphatically on Sadhvi Ritambhara’s every invocation. Sometimes, they would look at each other and share an emotion, while Nana ji swung between mild grunting, cussing, or the remembrance of a God’s name at some of the lines.

As SIDE A of the cassette got over, mother told us that Sadhvi Ritambhara is from “our own Yamunanagar”. Sadhvi has been giving sermons since she was 6 years old and our hometown Yamunanagar should be credited for discovering her talents. I don’t remember now if I felt superior to other kids after this information was shared, but I think I most probably would have.

 I don’t remember now if I felt superior to other kids after this information was shared, but I think I most probably would have.

 The B SIDE of the cassette was supposed to be even more fun. The first speaker on B SIDE was Ashok Singhal – again, a man with a booming voice and assurance. He called CM Mulayam Singh as 'Mulla Aayam Singh' and we kids burst out laughing. Alok bhaiyya too liked that line and the cassette was rewinded a bit to listen to that portion again.

This time, we were anticipating that line so we said it along with Singhal, and tried to copy the jerk in his delivery when he breaks Mulayam into Mulla and Aayam. That sent Annu into another round of giggles.

 After Singhal ji’s speech, I could piece together some of the issues: There was a temple in Ayodhya, where Lord Ram was born. That temple had been captured by Muslims, and now Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav (there was a funny twist to ‘Yadav’ also in the speech but I can’t recall it now) is not letting us Hindus inside the temple.

Only a couple of weeks before this, we had got a VCR and color TV on hire and had seen that ‘Newstrack’ video bulletin tape (again smuggled) where Mulayam Singh’s police was firing at Ram Sevaks in Ayodhya.

Atul bhaiyya was a part of that crowd of Ram Sevaks, a few months ago. With orange flags in hands and wearing head-bands like Wimbledon players, Ram Sevaks were on a bridge when the police party took them head-on. With nowhere to go, some Ram Sevaks had to jump into the river Sarayu flowing underneath to avoid the bullets. (Ayodhya had a river Sarayu. This, we knew already from the TV serial Ramayana.) The Newstrack screening was also in a similar hushed set-up, but its grimness was offset by the film magazine ‘Leharein’ we saw right after.

 Singhal ji also talked about Newstrack in his speech, and auntie started crying while listening to that bit. He finished his speech with a call for ‘Jai Shri…’ and we all screamed, in our most enthusiastic voices, together, ‘Ram’.

Ever since I can remember, I was a true believer in love. Pyaar. Ishq. Mohabbat. Ishq wala love. Love wala ishq. Pyaar wala Mohabbat. All of them. And more.

One of my earliest memories of school is sharing a pack of Poppins with a beautiful girl. That, and cursing a girl in a furious mix of bengali and hindi - that even though she is fair, she looks like shit. (In my defense, she had challenged my complexion publicly.)

As I grew up, I went from one school to another, falling in love over and over again. Not that I had any beautiful stories or encounters worth remembering. That I wasn't adventurous, wasn't a bad boy, and was mostly the teacher's favorite - didn't help my cause.

As I grew up, I went from one school to another, falling in love over and over again.

That was the phase when any movie with any reference to bachpan ka pyaar would become an instant favorite. Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja. Muqaddar Ka Sikandar. Having a childhood sweetheart was, somehow, really very important to me.

A significant percentage of summer vacation afternoons during the 90s were spent dreaming up tales of kiddy love (apart from the occasional Mario Bros from the 999999 games cassette).

Durga Puja was spent trying to be less awkward in shiny new clothes while listening to cousins gossip about other families and their kids. The rest of next year was spent trying to find more about 'that girl who looked so beautiful on Navami'. That red shirt became the 'favorite' red shirt for the next 10 years because the 'most beautiful girl on Navami' smiled at me when I was wearing it.

That red shirt became the 'favorite' red shirt for the next 10 years because the 'most beautiful girl on Navami' smiled at me when I was wearing it.

I put the 'hopeless' in 'hopeless romantic'.

I was always one girl away from the perfect childhood love story.

I remember this one girl in class 5th. I had moved to a new school and in the first quarterly exams, toppled her from the first position in class. But she was better and consistent, and I was - well - a waste of my parents' money, to be frank. However, in the words of Ravi Shashtri, 'a keen contest was on the cards'.

It was all very exciting till one fine day our English teacher asked us to write a poem in our Grammar class. I, with all my Secret Seven reading prowess, could barely manage to write four comprehensible lines of disastrous prose. She had written three stanzas. Three beautiful stanzas that rhymed. The whole class applauded - boys more enthusiastically than girls, and I, rather reluctantly. The teacher went ballistic with praise.

I had a new life mission.

Poetry.

I spent a large part of that year writing poems (in retrospect, I should have been reading them). I wrote furiously, I rhymed furiously. Each line was more cringe-worthy than its predecessor. The more I wrote, the more I fell in love with her. Like proper love. 'Write her name in soap foam on my arm while taking a shower' love.

I wrote furiously, I rhymed furiously. Each line was more cringe-worthy than its predecessor.

She left school later that year, and the city too. At the end of the year though, we both had our poems published in the School Magazine. She had two, I had three.

To paraphrase the great Ravi Shashtri again -  In the end, the school magazine was the winner.

Or not.

Towards the end of the 90s, DDLJ had finished five years, love stories were no longer happening in India, and a foreign location was required. I had discovered dialup internet and Sonali Bendre’s videos from Major Saab. Love had taken a back seat, and finishing Tomb Raider was more important.

Towards the end of the 90s, DDLJ had finished five years, love stories were no longer happening in India, and a foreign location was required.

Till one day, when I couldn’t go to school because I was unwell. (Mom had tried to feed me a few extra egg rolls and my bengali stomach called for a bandh). One day turned into six blissful days of food poisoning induced joyous homework-less recovery.

On Sunday, a friend from school hopped over and after a couple of rounds of carrom, secretly handed me a note.

On Sunday, a friend from school hopped over and after a couple of rounds of carrom, secretly handed me a note.

I, like any boy of decent upbringing and good culture, asked him to get lost and leave me alone with my very own personal note.

In that quiet moment with that note, a lot was going through my head.

Was this going to be my first love letter?

Was this it? THE THREE MAGICAL WORDS?

All those years of planning and dreaming and all it took for me to get a love letter was... food poisoning?

Brushing everything aside, very carefully, as to not damage the precious contents and emotions within, I opened the note.

 Positive start. I did as I was told. ­­­­­­

A FLOWER!

This was it.

Flower.

Only one thing could follow flowers.

Three magical words.

I turned the page.

And there were three words there.

                              -----------------------------------------------

It has been more than a decade since then. But I still carry this piece of paper around with me wherever I go. I had it with me in Nagpur, in the Boys hostel in Jaipur, in the dingy apartment with green walls in Chennai, and I have it with me here, in Lousiana.

I eventually found out who sent me this note.

We met after school and I narrated this story to her and we laughed. We laughed at how dumb I was and how nice she was and how young and naïve we were. Naïve to believe that there are only three magical words in this world. While there are so many more.

 I was alone. Sitting on a granite slab next to the school gate, tapping my feet on the slab, my gaze fixed on the road outside the school's gate. I scanned the road for as far as I could see, to spot a known face.

None.

It was 11 a.m on a Friday. I remember it because I was aged 11 and was in the 6th standard in the first week of my new school in a new city. My classmates had all gone home. I had failed to notice in the time-table that school closed early for me on Friday. At 11 a.m, instead of 12:30 p.m. So, I sat there waiting. 

My school in Hyderabad, where I lived earlier, was 300 metres from home. This new one, in Bombay, was 7 kilometres away. My father used to drop me and my elder brother at school in the morning on our scooter - a white Kinetic Honda. And my mother would come in the afternoon to take us home. My brother's class that Friday continued till 12:30. We all overlooked the time table at home and mother would only come at 12:30. Brother and I never had been given money while in school, we weren't allowed to wear wrist watches, and mobile phones were not even heard of. While I sat there two things struck me. First was that miserable devil called boredom. I, a hyperactive kid, couldn't sit still for 10 minutes, let alone 90. Second thing that struck was an idea - "What if I ran home now?" 

My father used to drop me and my elder brother at school in the morning, on our scooter - a white Kinetic Honda. 

I used to stand in the front of our white Kinetic Honda, while my brother sat at the back. I didn't mind. I could see the road, feel the wind on my face and let my imagination loose as I watched the road. I was a fan of Street Hawk - a TV show where a biker fought crime while racing his bike at more than 300 kmph. I imagined the Kinetic Honda to be that bike. My father, on the other hand, used to drive extremely slowly. Every vehicle on the road would overtake us and its rider would get to see my grumpy stare. It used to take my dad 20 minutes to get us to school. So when the idea struck me, it was followed by the thought -  "If it takes 20 minutes for dad, it will take me 15 minutes to get home if I run, and I will get home before mom starts." 

I was a fan of Street Hawk - a TV show where a biker fought crime while racing his bike at more than 300 kmph. I imagined the Kinetic Honda to be that bike.

And so I started running. Reached the first corner, turned around and then it began raining. The legendary Bombay monsoon. Once it starts, it pours. I waited outside a shop. But I was wasting time, so I ran anyway. It must have taken me 10 minutes to realise I wasn't as quick as I gave myself credit for. I was nowhere near home.

I stopped at a bus stand and waited there. Peered into every bus that stopped there to see if mom was in any of them. Then I ran again to the next bus stop and peeped again in a few buses. No luck. Must have been 30 minutes before I realised how fruitless this process was, but I had to keep looking for mom, to alert her that I might not be at school if she got there. 

I began memorising the bus numbers. 348, 398, 225, 224, 80 ... I had to remember which one went to our home, which one she would be in. When I look back now, it amazes me how I remembered a route so precisely even though I'd been on it just 4 times before, on our Kinetic Honda. But I did, and I kept running in the rain. A kid, in a school uniform, running in the rain would have been a weird sight in Hyderabad, but nothing is weird in Bombay. No one ever stopped to ask me what I was doing. I still stopped at the bus stops, memorised the name of the stop, the numbers of the buses I spotted. Still no luck with finding mom.

 A kid, in a school uniform, running in the rain, would have been a weird sight in Hyderabad, but nothing is weird in Bombay.

 After a long time had passed - an hour or two or more, I couldn't tell - I realised I was close to home and picked up speed for the final burst of pace. I got home and it was locked. Not knowing what to do, I came out and looked for a shade from the rain. There it was, standing by itself on the side. I looked at it with new admiration. Put my bag in front and sat on my white Kinetic Honda. Dad really drove fast, didn't he?

 After another hour must have passed, mom and brother finally came home and saw me perched on the Kinetic Honda. The door was opened, a shower and lunch was had, followed by an afternoon nap. When we got older, Mom told us how she cried looking for me at school. She and brother searched a lot of streets and asked a lot of questions. Someone suggested I must be at home and she didn't believe it. I had no money and home was 7 kms away. Having exhausted all options, she finally came home.