It was a sultry Saturday afternoon. I woke up to the irksome sound of someone battering the front door. I was shabbily dressed in a pair of old khaki pants and my favourite pink flannel shirt (a man wearing pink – androgynous as it may seem to you – my friend Mo told me that guys who wore pink were “tough guys” and had a reputation for...you know…), so loose that it gave me a scarecrow-like appearance. My fairly-long straight hair was startlingly matted and disorganized. I figured it was because I had gone to sleep wearing my Nirvana bandana that I used to cover up my football field of a forehead. My face was covered in cobwebs, I thought, before I realized it was a shaggy beard. (Not bad, some miracle to grow a beard like that in a day. Maybe it’s a sign – I AM a tough guy!) My Snoop Dogg mug lay in pieces by the window that was ready to shake itself off the hinges. The silly old cat. I stood there for a moment, trying to absorb the disarray that surrounded me when the knock sounded again.
There was a uniformed officer at the door who introduced himself as Inspector V Chandran from Kotturpuram, here to investigate the case of a girl student who fell off the terrace of a nearby multi-storey building. I jokingly told him that the only nearby high rise building was a boy’s hostel where hardly a girl had ventured since the turn of the 19th century. The only other building in the vicinity was the main edifice of the Sahitya Akademi. It was a neat, well-kept single storey building where many a legend ‘walked the earth’ to present or receive awards at glittering ceremonies, in the large compound that also housed my humble abode – a small two-roomed outhouse tucked away in the backyard of the Sahitya Akademi. Chandran looked at me with a weird sneering expression at my remark, simultaneously sizing me up, pink shirt and all.
He said it happened at the neighbouring new college campus to which I just said “Neighbouring new college? There isn’t any new building here (you dummkopf, what are you doing here, beating my door down and waking me up rudely)!” and after an unnecessary altercation, shut the door, eager to catch up on the dream. I nearly crept into bed before I heard myself thinking, “Wait! Where is the driveway?! Why am I surrounded by green? Did M.S.Swaminathan start another ingenious revolution where driveways became unkempt and overgrown overnight?”
I slipped out – literally that is, because of the density of the grime on the floor – and inspected what was once a narrow driveway that ran around the building. The whole building was in shambles. There was not another human in sight. Shocked, I walked out of the compound into what was once a gooey muddy mess of a street. Well, it hadn’t changed that much really, but there were semblances of tar that I hadn’t seen before. There was even a four-storey brick building on the other side. I wondered if they had invented some kind of a make-shift building technique just the day before.
And what a sight that greeted me! A convoy of stretched, silver cars drove past and parked outside a bright black gate. There was a bevy of girls crowding around trying to catch a glimpse of the excitement. Now, that was a pretty sight to my green-weary eyes. It felt like a decade since I last saw a colourful group like that. “Hold on! What are they wearing?” my mind raced, while I could hear my heart pounding (natural reaction you know…remember the pink factor?) One was clad in shorts and some kind of T-shirt that barely had sleeves. Two of them were holding - Blimey! – Cigarettes. I had never seen a woman smoking in up-market Chennai, let alone in Taramani. “Insolent wanna-bes (my new buzz word),” I thought aloud, “maybe some foreign tourists trying to show off for their 15 minutes of fame. What a disgrace! I hope it all changes with the coming of the millennium.”
I walked around carefully avoiding the pseudo-girls and came to a familiar area – the boys hostel – where I had played Gilli and Kabbaddi and roamed like a vagabond through the deer-infested forests beyond. I couldn’t find the familiar faces that usually greeted me with tamarind or raw mango pieces stolen from a nearby farm. Some people were playing cricket albeit in a strange way. I heard someone yell “Paruppu dei, enna da fieldingu – Uthappa maari, Poda!” First, I wondered when ‘Oothappa(m)’ became cricket-lingo. Second, what were they thinking, using language like that! I hoped those girls hadn’t heard. Crazy boys these days, I thought.
I walked on towards the “kutti sevaru” that was my hangout. It was part of my daily routine to sit there and tease many a villager-woman (‘Urvasi, Urvasi’ – what a cult song from this young chap called Rahman. I can’t wait for ‘Bombay’- will be out in a few weeks) who dared to use the sleazy sidewalk. Whoopsie daisies! My adda was gone – vanished into thin air. A lofty fortress of a wall stood in its place. I turned around and walked toward the bus-stop where nary a bus really stopped.
Jumping jiminy! If anyone had told me that very moment that I suffered from somnambulism, I would have blindly believed it. What had been a dimly-lit debacle of a main road with nothing but miles of green dotted with a few buildings, was now an arterial highway. “Where are the tamarind trees? Where is the location they said was to be MGR film city?” I panicked (Of course, the eternal optimist that I am, I had dreamt about a career in the movies, considering the chances of being spotted by some actor or director now that my geographical proximity to them would increase manifold). A few bystanders stared at my beard and outfit. “Yeah, pink checks. Because you don’t have what I do,” I yelled. They scurried off in fright. Cars of all shapes and sizes were zooming past. A sleek white bus with some modish gadget on its windshield with glowing lights also whirred past. “Am I in Shanghai?” (Not that I had been there, but they had showed pictures on our new colour Television set back home).
‘Welcome to Rajiv Gandhi Salai - The I.T.Corridor’, a plaque read. “Dear God, here they go glorifying him already when the wounds are still afresh”. ‘Inaugurated by the Honourable Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Dr. M. Karunanidhi…,’ it rambled on. For want of nothing better to do, I continued reading. “…on the 29th of October 2006.” The hackles on my neck rose as I stood rooted to the spot. My knees softened and began to shake. I almost fainted. I stopped a woman passing by (off the record – not bad, the women on the highways, but I dare not say aloud) and asked her the time. She said “10.30”. Then I asked the date, she stared skeptically for a moment and said “13th July”. “Year?” (I could foresee a slipper coming my way – as was the self-defense mechanism for women ‘then’) “2009”. This time I truly passed out.
There was a uniformed officer at the door who introduced himself as Inspector V Chandran from Kotturpuram, here to investigate the case of a girl student who fell off the terrace of a nearby multi-storey building. I jokingly told him that the only nearby high rise building was a boy’s hostel where hardly a girl had ventured since the turn of the 19th century. The only other building in the vicinity was the main edifice of the Sahitya Akademi. It was a neat, well-kept single storey building where many a legend ‘walked the earth’ to present or receive awards at glittering ceremonies, in the large compound that also housed my humble abode – a small two-roomed outhouse tucked away in the backyard of the Sahitya Akademi. Chandran looked at me with a weird sneering expression at my remark, simultaneously sizing me up, pink shirt and all.
He said it happened at the neighbouring new college campus to which I just said “Neighbouring new college? There isn’t any new building here (you dummkopf, what are you doing here, beating my door down and waking me up rudely)!” and after an unnecessary altercation, shut the door, eager to catch up on the dream. I nearly crept into bed before I heard myself thinking, “Wait! Where is the driveway?! Why am I surrounded by green? Did M.S.Swaminathan start another ingenious revolution where driveways became unkempt and overgrown overnight?”
I slipped out – literally that is, because of the density of the grime on the floor – and inspected what was once a narrow driveway that ran around the building. The whole building was in shambles. There was not another human in sight. Shocked, I walked out of the compound into what was once a gooey muddy mess of a street. Well, it hadn’t changed that much really, but there were semblances of tar that I hadn’t seen before. There was even a four-storey brick building on the other side. I wondered if they had invented some kind of a make-shift building technique just the day before.
And what a sight that greeted me! A convoy of stretched, silver cars drove past and parked outside a bright black gate. There was a bevy of girls crowding around trying to catch a glimpse of the excitement. Now, that was a pretty sight to my green-weary eyes. It felt like a decade since I last saw a colourful group like that. “Hold on! What are they wearing?” my mind raced, while I could hear my heart pounding (natural reaction you know…remember the pink factor?) One was clad in shorts and some kind of T-shirt that barely had sleeves. Two of them were holding - Blimey! – Cigarettes. I had never seen a woman smoking in up-market Chennai, let alone in Taramani. “Insolent wanna-bes (my new buzz word),” I thought aloud, “maybe some foreign tourists trying to show off for their 15 minutes of fame. What a disgrace! I hope it all changes with the coming of the millennium.”
I walked around carefully avoiding the pseudo-girls and came to a familiar area – the boys hostel – where I had played Gilli and Kabbaddi and roamed like a vagabond through the deer-infested forests beyond. I couldn’t find the familiar faces that usually greeted me with tamarind or raw mango pieces stolen from a nearby farm. Some people were playing cricket albeit in a strange way. I heard someone yell “Paruppu dei, enna da fieldingu – Uthappa maari, Poda!” First, I wondered when ‘Oothappa(m)’ became cricket-lingo. Second, what were they thinking, using language like that! I hoped those girls hadn’t heard. Crazy boys these days, I thought.
I walked on towards the “kutti sevaru” that was my hangout. It was part of my daily routine to sit there and tease many a villager-woman (‘Urvasi, Urvasi’ – what a cult song from this young chap called Rahman. I can’t wait for ‘Bombay’- will be out in a few weeks) who dared to use the sleazy sidewalk. Whoopsie daisies! My adda was gone – vanished into thin air. A lofty fortress of a wall stood in its place. I turned around and walked toward the bus-stop where nary a bus really stopped.
Jumping jiminy! If anyone had told me that very moment that I suffered from somnambulism, I would have blindly believed it. What had been a dimly-lit debacle of a main road with nothing but miles of green dotted with a few buildings, was now an arterial highway. “Where are the tamarind trees? Where is the location they said was to be MGR film city?” I panicked (Of course, the eternal optimist that I am, I had dreamt about a career in the movies, considering the chances of being spotted by some actor or director now that my geographical proximity to them would increase manifold). A few bystanders stared at my beard and outfit. “Yeah, pink checks. Because you don’t have what I do,” I yelled. They scurried off in fright. Cars of all shapes and sizes were zooming past. A sleek white bus with some modish gadget on its windshield with glowing lights also whirred past. “Am I in Shanghai?” (Not that I had been there, but they had showed pictures on our new colour Television set back home).
‘Welcome to Rajiv Gandhi Salai - The I.T.Corridor’, a plaque read. “Dear God, here they go glorifying him already when the wounds are still afresh”. ‘Inaugurated by the Honourable Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Dr. M. Karunanidhi…,’ it rambled on. For want of nothing better to do, I continued reading. “…on the 29th of October 2006.” The hackles on my neck rose as I stood rooted to the spot. My knees softened and began to shake. I almost fainted. I stopped a woman passing by (off the record – not bad, the women on the highways, but I dare not say aloud) and asked her the time. She said “10.30”. Then I asked the date, she stared skeptically for a moment and said “13th July”. “Year?” (I could foresee a slipper coming my way – as was the self-defense mechanism for women ‘then’) “2009”. This time I truly passed out.
