Chronicles of Kancha Bhatta 4 — The Troubled Tiger

If the Dubai Experiment taught us anything about Kancha Bhatta, it is this: the man is constitutionally incapable of a quiet life. He does not seek drama — drama simply recognises him from across a crowded room and makes straight for him, the way stray dogs make for the one person in the street who is not particularly fond of them.

He arrived at my door in early February 2024, boria-bistar in hand, with the air of a man who has thought the matter through and reached a considered conclusion.

“Sir, humko Dubai set nahin hua,” he announced. “Mujhe yahin gheeske kuch na kuch kamaana padega.”

Dubai had not suited him. He needed to earn something here, scraping along as best he could. Fair enough. A reasonable position. The kind of thing a man says when he has run out of alternatives and needs to make the remaining one sound like a preference.

He paused, and then added, with the studied casualness of a footnote: “Meri bibi mujhe ghar se bhaga di.”

His wife had thrown him out of the house in Dhangadi as well.

So the arithmetic was now complete. Dubai had not worked out. Dhangadi had not worked out. Chennai — specifically my door — was therefore not so much a destination as the last option standing: the chair that remains when the music stops. I let him in, because what else does one do with a man who has been evicted from two continents and is standing at your gate with his worldly possessions in a bag?

The Tea Doctor Takes His Rounds

What followed, for several months, was Kancha Bhatta at his absolute finest — and I say this without irony, because the boy, when he is in his element, is a genuinely remarkable creature.

He threw himself into work with the focused energy of a man who has decided that industry is the best available answer to his circumstances. At Dharmarajapuram, the garden was watered with religious punctuality, the house maintained in a state of spotlessness that it has not achieved before or since. At the city home, similar order prevailed. And at the office — where he had installed himself as a kind of unofficial domestic department — he found his true calling.

He began, modestly enough, by taking the 10 o’clock tea orders.

This sounds simple. It was not simple. Kancha approached the 10 o’clock round with the methodical seriousness of a ward doctor doing patient consultations. He went from person to person — Prasanna, Deepa, Mohan, Hari, and the rest of the office — taking individual orders with a small nod of acknowledgment at each preference, as though mentally filing the information for a medical record. Then he disappeared into the pantry and brewed each cup separately, to individual specification.

His repertoire was, by any measure, impressive. Ginger tea, cardamom tea, green tea, lemon tea, amla tea — the full spectrum of what a health-conscious Chennai office might reasonably demand. But Kancha, being Kancha, could not leave well enough alone. He began to experiment. Combinations emerged from the pantry with increasing ambition: ginger-lemon, cardamom-amla, ginger-hibiscus. Some fell flat. Some became quietly famous. The ginger-lemon tea, in particular, developed a devoted following among the health-conscious members of the office, who began referring to Kancha in tones of mild reverence as the Tea Doctor — a man who had, in their estimation, post-graduated in tea studies from Dubai.

It must be recorded, for the sake of historical accuracy, that not every experiment survived contact with its audience. There was the Girnar-cardamom combination, which Kancha presented to me one morning with the confidence of a man unveiling a masterpiece.

“Sir, try this super combo,” he said. “You will become addicted.”

I sipped. I sipped again. I considered the liquid in my cup with the careful attention it deserved.

“Main bilkul bhi mood mein nahin hoon,” I told him, “tere nautanki brews ka aadi banne ke liye. Ja, ek simple adrak chai bana. Phooto.”

I was in no mood to get addicted to his nautanki brews. Go and make a simple ginger chai. And get out.

The Girnar-cardamom combination was quietly retired and never spoken of again.

In between the tea rounds, he entertained the office with his Dubai dispatches. He was a natural storyteller, Kancha — the kind who improves with each retelling, adding details that may or may not have been present in the original event but which make the story considerably more satisfying. The tales of Mridula Rani and the flying plates were received with great appreciation by an audience that had never met her but felt, by the third retelling, that they knew her personally. The story of Aditya’s exotic dogs and their home tutor produced particular delight — especially the subplot in which Aditya’s two boys, watching the trainer put the dogs through their paces, decided to try the same methods themselves, with the result that the dogs promptly turned the exercise around and trained the boys instead. By Kancha’s account, the boys emerged from this experiment considerably less civilised than when they entered it, while the dogs remained entirely unaffected. The office found this deeply satisfying.

For a while, everything was in order. The Tea Doctor was dispensing his prescriptions, the garden was green, the house was spotless, and the Dubai chronicles were keeping the staff entertained through the slower parts of the working day.

Then the evenings began to go wrong.

The Evening Pareshaaniyaan

The trouble with evenings, when you are Kancha Bhatta, is that they are long, and the Dhangadi house loan is real, and your friend lives nearby and has a bottle.

It began unremarkably. On a busy day at the office, I sent Kancha home on his bicycle an hour before I was ready to leave, as was the usual arrangement. He pedalled off. I finished my work and reached home around nine in the evening.

Kancha was not there.

I called him. “Aatha hoon,” he said — I’m coming — and knocked on the door a few minutes later.

He came in and looked at me with the particular expression of a man who has a grievance and intends to air it before any other business is conducted.

“Sir, kab tak main aapka intezaar karun?” he demanded. He had arrived home two hours before me. I had not come. So he had gone to meet a friend. The logic was presented as self-evident, which in Kancha’s framework of reality, it entirely was.

I told him it was fine, work had held me up, go and make something to eat.

He informed me his stomach was full.

I looked at him more carefully. He was regarding me with the expression of a man contemplating a mildly interesting but ultimately puzzling object. There was a certain looseness to his bearing, a certain careful deliberateness to his words, that I had come to recognise from his late-night Dubai dispatches about Aditya’s household.

“Daru peeke aaye ho?” I asked.

“Haan, sir,” he said, without particular guilt. What was he to do? There had been no timepass. His friend had called. The house loan in Dhangadi had been pressing on his mind. He was pareshaan.

He then listed, in sequence, with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who has had two hours to organise his thoughts and a couple of drinks to loosen them, all of the things currently causing him pareshaaniyaan. The list was not short.

By the time he finished, he was horizontal on his custom bed, still muttering to himself, and I was standing in the kitchen making my own dinner.

This, I regret to report, became the routine.

The Portico Parliament

On a Sunday that had already distinguished itself as one of the worst of the season, I drove back to Dharmarajapuram from Viswanathapuram — all of two hundred and sixty miles — having left in some haste following what I will describe only as an Abirami storm that had erupted that morning, the details of which are not relevant to this Chronicle and which I have no intention of revisiting. I reached home at around six in the evening in the mood that a man is in after eight-plus hours of highway driving on an already spoilt day: the specific mood that requires silence, a hot meal, and the complete absence of additional complications.

In the portico sat Kancha Bhatta, drinking with the relaxed authority of a man who has been at it for some time and has reached a comfortable equilibrium.

I confronted him. I may have mentioned that my day had not been ideal.

He regarded me with the injured dignity of a man whose own pareshaaniyaan are being insufficiently acknowledged.

“App sochte hain sirf aapka samasya hain,” he informed me. He too had problems. Many problems. Problems of considerable weight and complexity. Was he to be expected to sit quietly with his problems while I was apparently the only person in the household permitted to have a difficult day?

I asked him, with what I felt was admirable restraint, whether I was personally the cause of his pareshaaniyaan.

He drew himself up. “Main nikal raha hoon yahaan se,” he announced. His problems could not be solved here. He needed to be released. “Mujhe chod do.”

I considered this for approximately one second.

“Phooto yahaan se,” I told him. “Maine thodi roya ki tum Dubai se waapas aaja.”

I had not wept when he left Dubai. I had not asked him to return from Dhangadi. I was therefore not in a position to be accused of obstructing whatever solutions he felt were available elsewhere.

He picked up his boria-bistar — that faithful bag, present at every significant departure of his adult life — and left for a relative’s place in Purusaiwalkam.

The Purusaiwalkam Dispatches

He did not come back the next day. Or the day after. Or the day after that.

On the third day, his phone stopped being reachable. This is, I have since learnt, a reliable indicator that Kancha has entered a phase of activity that he would prefer not to document in real time.

Five days after his departure, a man appeared at my door. This was Nemraj — Kancha’s relative, a decent and entirely blameless individual who had, through no fault of his own, become the custodian of this particular chapter of Kancha’s story. Beside him, in a condition I will describe diplomatically as substantially reduced from his usual self, stood Kancha Bhatta.

Nemraj told me what had happened, with the patient thoroughness of a man who has spent several days living inside an improbable story and wants to make sure it is accurately transmitted.

After leaving my door with his boria-bistar, Kancha had arrived at Purusaiwalkam and proceeded, over the following two days, to drink with a dedication that left no room for other activities. He had then navigated himself — how exactly remains somewhat unclear even to Kancha himself — to a footpath near Ampa Mall in Aminjikarai. Somewhere around dusk, he had been picked up by a person or persons whose identity and motivations remain unrecorded by history, and deposited near the railway line between Chengalpattu and Potheri. While in whatever condition he was in at that point, some public-spirited individual had relieved him of everything in his pockets.

He had come to his senses the following morning on a stretch of railway-adjacent landscape, some considerable distance from anywhere he recognised, with no money, no phone, and no immediate prospects. With the instinct that never entirely deserts him, he had walked until he found a tea stall, presented himself to the proprietor, and offered to work in exchange for enough money to get back to Chennai.

Kancha Bhatta — Tea Doctor, post-graduate of Dubai, specialist in ginger-lemon and cardamom-amla — had arrived at rock bottom and asked a stranger for a job brewing tea.

The tea stall proprietor had presumably seen harder cases. Kancha worked, earned his fare, called his wife from the stall’s phone to relay his pathetic condition to Nemraj, and waited. Nemraj had arrived, collected him, taken him home, bathed him, dressed him in clean clothes, and was now at my door with the complete report.

I looked at Kancha.

“Kancha,” I said, “tum ab yahaan rehne ka laayak nahin ho. Ghar waapas chala ja.”

You are no longer fit to stay here. Go back home.

He did not argue. For perhaps the first time in the entire Chronicle of our association, Kancha Bhatta had no counter-position. He said he knew he was guilty. He would go back to the hills, take a break, clear his head, and return a saner man.

I told him he could return on one condition. Not without his wife.

There was also the small matter of the ATM.

It emerged, in the course of Nemraj’s detailed account, that before the Aminjikarai episode, under drunken stupor, Kancha had attempted to draw money from a machine. Kancha does not operate ATMs. This is not a gap in his skill set that he has ever felt the need to address. On this occasion, faced with the machine and its requirements, he had done what seemed to him most sensible: he asked a helpful stranger standing nearby to assist him. The stranger had been happy to oblige. The stranger had assisted Kancha out of the entire month’s earnings — twenty-seven thousand rupees — with an efficiency and thoroughness that suggested considerable prior experience in this kind of assistance.

Twenty-seven thousand rupees, surrendered to a stranger at an ATM, because Kancha Bhatta has never in his life seen a reason to be suspicious of people who offer to help.

Some men learn from their mistakes. Kancha Bhatta simply generates new ones, each more imaginative than the last.

Wapsi

He left for the hills the next day.

The Sharda was waiting, and the cold winds off the mountains, and the house in Dhangadi with its uncleared loan, and his wife — who had, let us remember, already evicted him once and was presumably in no mood for a hero’s welcome.

Some weeks passed in silence. And then the WhatsApp call came — from somewhere up in the hills above Tanakpur, the hills that Kancha has been returning to and departing from his entire adult life, as though the Sharda itself is the fixed point around which everything else in his story revolves.

He called to announce that he had arrived safely.

He announced this in the tone of a man who had departed with my full knowledge, blessing, and approval — a man who had been sent on an errand and was now checking in as requested, mission accomplished.

“Tum gaanv pahuncha ya nahin,” I told him, “mujhe koi fark nahin padta hai. Ab kisne roya ki tum udhar se mujhe phone nahin kiya.”

Whether you have reached your village or not is a matter of complete indifference to me. Who exactly has been sitting here weeping that you hadn’t called from up there?

He laughed, the way Kancha always laughs when he has been caught editing his own history — briefly, without embarrassment, and with the immediate pivot of a man who has the next item of business ready.

He wanted to come back to Chennai. He put this not as a request but as an announcement dressed lightly as a request, in the manner he has perfected over the years.

I reminded him of the condition.

Some more weeks passed.

And then, one fine day, Kancha Bhatta arrived at my door.

He had his boria-bistar. He had his wife. He had his youngest child.

He knocked, and before I could say a word, he drew himself up to his full height and announced, in the voice of a man returning in triumph from a long campaign:

“Tiger Zinda Hai.”

The tiger had been to Dubai and bolted. He had been to Dhangadi and been evicted. He had drunk his way from Purusaiwalkam to a railway line near Chengalpattu. He had begged for work at a tea stall. He had donated a month’s salary to a helpful stranger at an ATM. He had crossed the Sharda and returned.

And here he stood, boria-bistar in one hand, wife and child behind him like the terms of a negotiated settlement, announcing that he was, against all available evidence, still very much alive.

I looked at his wife.

She looked at me with the expression of a woman who has heard the Tiger Zinda Hai announcement before, has her own views on the matter, and is too sensible to share them at the door.

I let them all in.

What else does one do?

Hugh Allen once wrote of a tiger that prowled alone through a shrinking world, fighting battles that nobody else quite understood and surviving them by sheer, stubborn instinct. I thought of that tiger as I closed the door behind Kancha Bhatta, his wife, and his youngest child.

The lonely tiger had come home!

यारों का कारवाँ — A Blog Chronicle

 

There is a particular kind of madness that afflicts those of us who went to school together in a small town, grew up sharing the same ‘Singadas’ and Chai, the same overbearing teachers, and the same adolescent dreams — and then scattered to the four winds, only to be reunited decades later on a WhatsApp group. The madness is this: we actually believe that nothing has changed. That the boy who sat three benches behind us is still that boy. That the girl who topped every examination is still nervously checking her answer sheet. That time, that great leveller and wrinkler of faces, has somehow made a polite exception in our case.

It hasn't, of course. But the beauty of our little caravan — our Yaaron Ka Kaarvan — is that it doesn't matter. Because what we share is not youth. What we share is something older, deeper and considerably more indestructible than youth. We share a story. And every member of this group is a chapter in it.

Allow me, then, to introduce the cast. No names — where would be the fun in that? Besides, they will know who they are. And so, I suspect, will those who know them.

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The Caravan Sets Off ....

With the Generals who Defended our Frontiers

We begin, naturally, with the man who holds the caravan together. A soldier by profession and a gladiator by temperament, he is the kind of man whose opinion arrives before he does. Fiercely opinionated, aggressively articulate, and possessed of a pen that cuts like a ceremonial sword — he is the group's conscience, its provocateur, and its unlikely glue. He will disagree with this description. Loudly. Which rather proves the point. He has done us proud, after a distinguished career in uniform. He is the group's genuine chronicler, who never misses a date to reckon with, for any of the schemers. Reunions, when they happen, don't really conclude before we get to indulge in the passionate narratives chronicled by the mastermind. 

Then there is his fellow man in uniform — though this one, it must be said, wandered into the army somewhat by accident. He is really an artist, a dreamer, a man more at home with a paintbrush than a parade ground. He disappears for months at a time — one suspects he is somewhere sketching a mountain or composing a haiku — and then reappears with perfect quiz scores and a detailed itinerary for a group trip planned precisely thirteen months in advance. The army made him disciplined. Nature made him poetic. The combination is entirely charming. That said, it was amazing to see his commitment and passion when he got to work with JD/SD students, deep down south, with an enthusiasm that knew no bounds. His epic speech, rendered during the early winter of 2018 at our alma mater. is still afresh in memory

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The Admiral, The Adman, and The Ancient Reptile

No chronicle of this group would be complete without its most beloved figure — a man who spent his finest years navigating the seas as a naval officer, rose to the rank of Commodore, and then, as if that were not enough, went on to command a large and prestigious public sector organisation. What makes him extraordinary is not his career, impressive as it is. It is his heart. He has attended every wedding, every funeral, every moment of crisis that any member of this group has ever faced. He arrives before he is called. He stays longer than he is needed. He is, in the truest sense, the kind of friend that legends are made of.

Our adman, on the other hand, makes legends of the present. If this group has a pulse, he is it. A career in media and advertising has given him an inexhaustible supply of content, positivity, and the curious ability to reply to every message approximately four seconds after it is posted. On days when the group falls silent, one only needs to wait. He will arrive, bearing links, jokes, inspiring thoughts, and general exuberance, like a one-man festival that never quite ends.

And then — ah, then — there is the Crocodile. He earned this affectionate title not through any menace but through a magnificent, unhurried stillness that has descended upon him in his later years. In his prime, he was the class comedian, the most enthusiastic organizer of reunions, a well-travelled businessman who had seen more of the world than most of us had seen of our own cities. The Dundee hunted down all, even the global brigade across the seven seas and consolidated the Caravan. Now he basks. He is content. He moves when he feels like it, which is rarely — unless the right person calls. There is one member of our group who has the mysterious ability to fetch him, rather like a faithful retriever summoning an ancient, dignified crocodile from the riverbank. When he does appear, the group is always the better for it.

No account of this section would be complete without the First Lady — and I use that title with complete sincerity. The wife of a distinguished public sector executive, she presided over our group's gatherings in our shared hometown with the effortless authority of someone born to host. When our caravan descended upon that small town for a reunion, it was she who ensured that no one went unfed, unattended, or un-smiled at. She shepherds a flock — our flock — with warmth, ebullience, and a quiet efficiency that makes it all look entirely natural. Reunions happen because of people like her. The rest of us merely attend.

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The Global Brigade

A considerable portion of our caravan has, over the decades, relocated beyond Indian shores — some to the Near East, some to the Far West, and at least one who appears to be running out of planet.

This gentleman — a high-net-worth software professional turned businessman — has conquered so much of the earth that one genuinely wonders what comes next. He manages hectares farmlands that stretch as far as the eye can see, and yet he is simultaneously to be found on another continent entirely, biking across countries or catching flights. Mars, one imagines, is merely the next item on his itinerary. He may even be dreaming about landing on the Titan on far flung Saturn!

Then there is our man in a Nation, which was once a known for its Imperial certainty, now almost transformed by migration — a software professional who, after years of shuttling between homeland and what was once considered an entirely diurnal empire, applied that most ancient of Bania instincts — impeccable judgment about where to plant one's roots — and settled firmly in the land of his country's former rulers. The historical irony is delicious. He drops in at reunions like a visiting dignitary, sings happily, charming everyone, and then disappears back across the seven seas.

Our Maple leaf chapter is represented by a man of many talents — a gifted mastermind and designer who built beautiful things in India before deciding that the ‘True North’ suited him rather better. He is a cheerful presence at reunions when he makes them, and is distinguished by a hobby so magnificently unusual that one must pause to admire it: he collects matchbox labels. Not stamps. Not coins. Not medals. Matchbox labels. He is, apparently, the only phillumenist most of us will ever know. In a world of collectors, he has found the road less travelled, lit a match, and followed it.

Then there is the other Bania — and here one must tread carefully, because to call him a Bania in the conventional sense would be a grave injustice to the man. Where the community is celebrated for its legendary prudence with money, this gentleman is its most glorious exception. He is generous to a fault, gentlemanly to the core, and possessed of a romantic sensibility that would make poets envious. He built businesses, bought businesses, sold businesses — with the quiet, lethal efficiency of a grandmaster who makes it all look effortless. And then, having thoroughly conquered the commercial world, he retired to a life of magnificent leisure — yachting, kayaking, trekking up mountains, dividing his time between continents with the nonchalance of someone for whom geography is merely a minor inconvenience. He is, by some distance, the most romantic member of our group. 

Our Detroit pioneer deserves special mention — she was among the very first of our group to make the leap to America, doing so in the late nineteen-eighties when such a move required considerably more courage than it does today. She settled in the Motor City and built a distinguished career in the automotive industry. The girl who always sat in the front row of class went straight to the front row of the American dream.

And then there is the man in the Middle East — quiet, modest, and by all accounts one of the physically fittest people in our entire group, which considering the competition is no small achievement. He was a front bencher in class whose brilliance kept the room thoroughly illuminated, did a stint with a public sector undertaking, and then found his calling in instrumentation - a precise, demanding field that suits his precise, observant temperament perfectly. He is a silent watcher, a man who absorbs everything and reveals little. I have had a particular fondness for him since our school days, and I suspect that those who know him well consider themselves quietly fortunate.

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The Ladies of Quiet Grace

Any honest account of this group must pause, slow its pace, and speak with particular tenderness of certain women whose stories deserve more than they have been given by the world.

There is the one who was academically brilliant beyond measure — the kind of student of whom teachers say, in hushed and admiring tones, that she could have been anything. She chose, instead, to be everything to those who needed her. An entire generation of ageing relatives — parents, aunts, elders — found in her a tireless, selfless anchor. The group has grown quieter for her in recent years. But those who know her understand that her silence contains more wisdom than most people's words.

There is the central banker who carries within her the ghost of an extraordinary career that circumstance gently redirected. Quiet in a crowd, razor-sharp in private conversation, she was once spoken of as a future titan of Indian industry. Life, with its habitual indifference to such predictions, had other plans. She bears this with a grace that is, frankly, humbling.

And then there is the one who refused — magnificently, stubbornly, inspiringly refused — to be confined by the smallness of her surroundings. She nudged her husband out of their semi-rural comfort zone, flew to the Far East, earned advanced degrees and a doctorate in new age studies, and built a thriving healthcare practice from scratch. She did not break through the glass ceiling. She simply walked through the wall.

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The Professionals, The Free Spirits, One Magnificent Baroness and a Vanished Mystery

Our professional brigade is formidable. A missile man — quite literally, a man who helped manufacture BrahMos, one of the world's most feared supersonic cruise missiles — has retired to tend to his elderly mother in his village and to sing Kishore Kumar songs with a voice of surprising beauty. A man of absolute precision in his professional life, he brings that same precision to his friendships and never misses a reunion. And now, in a development that has taken even his oldest friends by surprise, the precision has found a new instrument: he has quietly taken to the guitar. Word from the village is that a Kishore Kumar classic is already being rehearsed with the same no-nonsense discipline he once brought to missile assembly lines — and the group can safely expect a rousing rendition of 'Kya Hua Tera Wada' at the next reunion, guitar in hand, taking our memories back to Bhanja Mandap.

A distinguished IIM alumnus who spent decades at the summit of Indian corporate life has hung up his official shoes and now divides his time between consulting and music — driven always by logic over emotion, and blessed with a tolerance for the group's various eccentricities that borders on the saintly. We haven't seen a more serious but exuberant participant in our Reunions.

And then there is our Textile Baroness — and if the previous portraits were studies in quiet grace, this one is a study in magnificent presence. She began as a business executive, married into an entrepreneurial family of considerable standing in the textile city of the South, and then — with the calm deliberateness of someone who always knew exactly what she was doing — became a formidable entrepreneur in her own right. She today commands a large group of companies that are, among other things, in textiles. The 'among other things' is doing considerable work in that sentence. Three words describe her with complete accuracy: Affluence. Eloquence. Grace. She carries all three simultaneously, effortlessly, and without the slightest suggestion of effort.

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There is one member of this caravan whose presence I very nearly overlooked — an omission that the Adman, true to form, was swift to correct. Some people are simply too significant to miss, and this gentleman is very much one of them.

He is, in the most literal sense, a self-made man. Beginning in middle management at a large textile firm near Pune, he worked his way up with the quiet, determined consistency of someone who never once doubted where he was going — all the way to the Board of the group, and then onward to their Mumbai headquarters, where he now sits as a figure of considerable authority. From the factory floor to the boardroom — that is not a career. That is a conquest.

But what I remember most about him has nothing to do with textiles or boardrooms. In our school days, when the rest of us were preoccupied with cricket scores and Singadas, this young man was quietly introducing his classmates to a different world entirely — the Divine Life Society, the magazine Wisdom, the luminous universe of the Ramakrishna Mission. He carried spiritual literature the way other boys carried comic books. He spoke of Swami Vivekananda the way others spoke of film heroes. And somewhere, without quite realising it, he planted seeds in young minds that have never entirely stopped growing. I will confess something. Whenever I encounter a photograph of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa or Sarada Devi — those serene, timeless faces — my mind travels, without fail, to this classmate of mine. I am not entirely sure whether that is a tribute to him or to them. Perhaps it is both. 🙏

Then there is the RevOps Romeo — a title he has thoroughly earned. He was, in school and college, a young man of considerable charm and romantic inclination, which meant that academics occasionally played second fiddle to matters of the heart. After a period of finding his direction, he flew abroad — first to the Near East, then onward to the United States — and reinvented himself spectacularly as a Revenue Operations professional who now heads a Client Acquisition Team. The poetry of this is not lost on those of us who remember him: the boy who spent his younger years acquiring hearts is now, professionally and triumphantly, in the business of acquiring clients. Some skills, it turns out, are entirely transferable. He recently celebrated his 60th in a traditional manner, (Congratulations!) when he flew down to BLR.

Our ‘once’ melodious pathologist is a woman of quiet, enduring grace. She was among the most studious of our classmates in school, and possessed of a singing voice that made school events considerably more worth attending. Her school journey was interrupted in the late seventies — life has a way of rearranging one's plans — but she persevered, went on to study medicine, and today runs her pathology laboratory with the same quiet dedication she has brought to everything she has ever done. She participates in the group with perfect calibration — never too much, never too little, always exactly right. Universally liked is an overused phrase. In her case, it happens to be entirely accurate.

And then there is the one I think of as the eternal wanderer — a man whose academic journey was, shall we say, non-linear. He began as our senior, became our junior through the philosophical mechanism of trivializing examinations, visited our class for a year, and somehow in the process became one of us permanently. He went on to serve in the military, acquired considerable technical expertise, and has now retired as an aviation MRO professional — maintaining aircraft engines and keeping airports operational. The boy who dismissed his exams as inconsequential, had until recently, in the most literal sense possible, kept aircraft in the sky. There is a life lesson in there somewhere, and it is an extremely encouraging one. We all learnt from him what to do in an exigency- Simply ‘Parget’

Our singing dynamo — and there is no other word for her — has recorded somewhere in the region of three thousand songs on a social media platform. Three thousand. She is ebullient, dynamic, fiercely independent, devoted to social causes, and constitutionally incapable of a dull moment. She is the group's permanent celebration. She seems to alternate between ‘the overseas Doaba, Trumpland and Modiland. Last heard to have tried a forcible entry into Mr Yedukondalavada’s abode! Wonder if she succeeded in bestowing the coveted 'darshan' upon herself.

And then there is the mystery. A Silicon Valley veteran who blazed through the technology industry's most exciting decades, lived a full and eventful life, and then — vanished. Last reported somewhere in the California hills, possibly on a ranch, definitely unreachable. Her WhatsApp ticks stubbornly remain single. Her LinkedIn has not been updated. She has, it appears, retired not merely from work but from visibility itself. We miss her. We also slightly envy her.

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Those We Carry With Us

A caravan, to be honest, must also carry its absences.

Two members of our group are no longer with us. One — the class comedian, a mechanical engineer who reinvented himself in the software world and lived with joyful, generous abandon — was taken by the cruelties of the Covid winter of 2021. The other, a senior government officer on the very cusp of a well-earned retirement, a man who danced with his wife at every reunion with the unself-conscious joy of someone who understood that life's pleasures are not to be postponed — was taken on an ordinary Monday morning in January of this year, during a walk. Just a walk. Fate, when it is cruel, is very cruel indeed.

They are not absent from this caravan. They travel with us still — in the laughter that echoes a little of theirs, in the dances we remember, in the spaces at the reunion table that we set and do not speak of.

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And Finally — The Hillranger

Every caravan needs a few to bring up the rear, keep a quiet count of the stragglers, and write it all down afterwards. That, for better or worse, is me for one.

I am a freelancer in a plethora of trades, revivals being one of them and a writer by compulsion — though I am told I say considerably more on paper than I ever do in person, which my classmates will confirm with some amusement. I am done with serious work and am now on “AMC” mode in the revived entities. I have a village home amidst lush green fields, a trust that tends to a temple and the children of the tehsil, a humble hut up the hills near some prehistoric caves where I collect Jadi-booti, and a blog called Meadows where I deposit my observations.

And we have this group. This magnificent, improbable, irreplaceable group of people who went to school together in a small town, scattered across the globe, and somehow — against all odds, across all distances — kept finding their way back to each other.

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The Caravan Goes On

यारों का कारवाँ चला, कारवाँ चला.

The years have passed. The hair has silvered. The knees have opinions. But the caravan — this extraordinary caravan of soldiers and admirals, admen and crocodiles, missile men and matchbox collectors, RevOps Romeos and melodious pathologists, singing dynamos and vanishing acts, First Ladies and eternal wanderers, quiet heroines and global wanderers — rolls on.

And it will keep rolling. Because that is what caravans do.

Because that is what friends do.

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The views expressed herein are purely personal, warmly intentioned, and offered in the same spirit in which one might nudge an old friend in the ribs at a reunion — affectionately, perhaps a little too firmly, but always with a smile.

If your sensibilities have been offended, your dignity bruised, or your carefully constructed public image gently dented — the author is sorry. Mostly. He is also fairly certain you will get over it by the time the next round of chai arrives.

All characters depicted are real people living real and remarkable lives. Any resemblance to fictional characters is entirely the reader's imagination.

© The Hillranger, 2026. All rights reserved.
First published on Meadows — hillranger.blogspot.com

Unauthorised reproduction of this content, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of the author, is prohibited — though the author suspects his classmates will screenshot and forward it anyway, which is, frankly, the highest form of flattery he can imagine.

 

Chronicles of Kancha Bhatta 3 — The Dubai Experiment

 If you have walked the Lockdown Tea Trail with Kancha Bhatta — if you have followed him through fog and forest, through Dhangadi and Dudhwa and Rewa and Nagpur, ginger chai in one hand and his unshakeable faith in the other — you will know that the boy eventually made it home. He landed at my door in Dharmarajapuram, settled into the rhythm of the garden and the kitchen, and for a while, Kancha Bhatta was at peace.

Peace, I have since learnt, does not suit Kancha for very long.

It was sometime during those quiet post-lockdown months that he placed what he later described, with the studied casualness of a man editing his own history, as “just a small phone call” to his boyhood friend Aditya Choudhary in Dubai. The two of them went back further than I had ever fully appreciated — back to a Mumbai of two decades ago, when Kancha was a penniless young migrant roaming the streets looking for any work that would feed him, and stumbled, of all places, into a real estate broker’s office. His first client there was a soft-spoken systems and software student named Aditya. Kancha had no roof over his head in those days, so he did what Kancha does best — he attached himself, quietly and usefully, to a kind man, ran his errands, fetched his tea, and never quite left. It is, if you think about it, a very Ruskin Bond sort of beginning — the washerman’s boy who simply would not be shaken off, and grew, instead, into family. (A handful of nuts)

Aditya never forgot it. By the time of that “small phone call,” he was a long way from his student days — a prosperous Dubai businessman, settled, successful, and evidently still fond enough of his old Mumbai shadow to make him an offer few in Kancha’s position would refuse: come to Dubai. A tourist visa first, Aditya said, and in time, a proper three-year work permit.

That was all the spark Kancha needed. The dream caught in his head like a hill fire in dry season. He worked, he ran from office to office for paperwork, he borrowed a few thousand rupees off me — for “preparations,” he said, though I never did get an itemised account of what those preparations entailed.

Sometime in the last quarter of 2021, as the pandemic finally loosened its grip on the world, Kancha Bhatta touched down in the United Arab Emirates, certain the Gulf was about to make a rich man of him.

The Minister of Tea Gets a New Portfolio

Aditya, it turned out, had recently moved into a grand new house — the kind with marble underfoot and machines for everything, staffed by a small army of help. He also had two things he had developed a considerable fondness for: his two young sons, and a pair of exotic, expensive dogs who came with their own home tutor for “civilised behaviour,” a luxury Kancha found almost impossible to take seriously.

Kancha was drafted into this household on the strength of his good nature rather than any particular qualification. There was a brief, doomed experiment with computers — Aditya, ever the well-meaning employer, thought his old friend ought to learn a keyboard so he could be useful in the office in some small way. Kancha, a man whose entire working life had been built on tea leaves, saplings, and the patient pulling of garden weeds, took one look at the keyboard and decided, with great dignity, that some things were simply not meant to be. Aditya, being generous to a fault, let the matter drop without complaint and absorbed him instead into the household — dog walks at dawn, ferrying the canines to their lessons, attending to their trainer, keeping half an eye on the boys, and reporting anything serious up the chain to Aditya’s wife, Roshni — herself hill-born, and one of the few people in that house who could actually follow half of what Kancha said.

For a while, it was a good life. Kancha settled in, made himself agreeable to everyone, and in particular charmed Aditya’s elderly mother, Mridula Rani, with his easy chatter and his cooking. This, dear reader, was his undoing.

The Reign of Mridula Rani

Mridula Rani had, by her own private reckoning, very little left to manage in that household. The girls who had come from the hills to attend to her did most of the actual work. Her son, in her view, had already squandered enough money on hired help without her interference. But she did have one resource nobody could take from her — time, and an abundance of it — and she resolved, entirely on her own initiative, that this time would be spent supervising Kancha Bhatta.

It began innocently. She enjoyed his company, his light talk, his easy way with the boys. And then, by degrees that Kancha never quite saw coming, “enjoying his company” curdled into “supervising the supervisor.” Every dog walk had her opinion attached to it. Every instruction he gave the gardener was relayed back to her for approval. He found himself escalating matters to Roshni, who would in turn escalate them to Aditya, who would absorb the news over a late-night whisky and do, as far as Kancha could tell, absolutely nothing about it.

It was the cooking that finally broke him.

Mridula Rani had taken a great liking to his poha. One morning, he served it exactly as he always had — fresh, hot off the stove. She decided it was too hot, and a plate of poha sailed across the kitchen and found Kancha’s general direction, by way of grievance redressal.

Lesson apparently learnt, Kancha tried again the following week with Kichdi — this time served comfortably warm, not a degree too hot. Unfortunately, Mridula Rani had decided, on this particular morning, that the girls’ gossip was more interesting than her lunch, and sat chatting away to glory while the Kichdi quietly went cold on the table. When she finally turned her attention to it, the verdict was instant and airborne. This plate did not merely sail in Kancha’s direction — it flew clean over his head and shattered against the wall behind him, kichdi and crockery scattering across the floor in a fine, dramatic mess entirely disproportionate to the crime, which, as far as anyone could tell, was the crime of being too patient.

Roshni knew. She always knew. She, probably had her own battles to fight and some scores to settle, but wisely, had no intention to embark on a ‘joint freedom movement’. Instead, she would only ever plead, gently, that there was nothing much she could do. And Aditya — generous, easy-going, perpetually occupied — listened to every late-night complaint over a glass and either said nothing useful or, by Kancha’s account, all but told him to manage the old lady himself for a while longer.

So manage her he did. His days now ran from dawn dog-walks to dusk to a midnight whisky session with Aditya, by the end of which the only sensible thing left to do was sleep and start over. It was here, in those late, weary, well-lubricated nights with his old friend, that Kancha first discovered the particular comfort a bottle can offer a tired man — a discovery that would, two years and one continent later, return with considerably less charm.

The Great Escape

I remember the calls he used to make to me in those days — his voice carrying that particular Himalayan-boy mix of homesickness and bravado, telling me how things stood in Dubai. Each time, I gave him the same sound, sensible, entirely useless advice: stay put, finish the term of the work permit, earn what you can in dirhams, and for heaven’s sake, clear that loan you took to build the house back in Dhangadi. “Jab tak tera work permit khatam nahin hota, tab tak kaam karte raho,” I told him once. “Kam se kam, tera ghar ka karza chhoot jaayegi.” At least the house debt would be cleared.

He listened politely each time, the way one listens to good advice one has already decided to ignore.

There came a day, somewhere near the close of 2023, when Mridula Rani had simply asked too much of him one time too many, and Kancha decided — quietly, and entirely on his own terms — that his Dubai chapter was over. There was no scene, no confrontation, no dramatic exit. He simply announced, to whoever was listening, that he was popping out to the local market for something or other. He walked out of that grand house in his ordinary clothes, carrying nothing that would suggest a man leaving forever, made a quiet call to a friend in the city, secured a ticket to Delhi, and made straight for the airport. From there, one last call — to one of the girls in the house, not to Roshni, not to Aditya — simply to say that he was leaving, for good. Then he switched off his Dubai phone, took his seat, and breathed what I imagine was the deepest sigh of relief of his entire stay in the Emirates.

It would be some days before the household even fully understood that their tea-maker, dog-walker, gardener’s overseer, and old Mridula Rani’s most patient victim was not coming back from the market at all.

Maan Na Maan, Main Tere Mehmaan

The WhatsApp call came to me from his native village, somewhere up in the hills near the Sharda. There was no apology in his voice, no air of a man explaining a hasty exit — only the breezy triumph of someone announcing a mission successfully concluded.

“Tum gaanv pahuncha ya nahin,” I told him, refusing to give him the satisfaction of being missed, “mujhe koi fark nahin padta hai. Ab kisne roya ki tum udhar se mujhe phone nahin kiya.” Whether you’ve reached your village or not makes no difference to me. Who exactly was sitting here in tears that you hadn’t called?

He laughed it off, the way he always does, and then came to the actual point of the call — he wanted to come down to Chennai, to work for me again. There was a certain tone to how he said it, one I had heard from him before — not quite a request, more a gentle, foregone announcement. “Maan na maan, main tere mehmaan.” Believe it or not, I’m your guest. That was when I knew, with complete certainty, that his Dubai adventure was well and truly finished.

He landed at my door in early February 2024, ‘boria-bistar’ in hand, with all the unearned swagger of a conquering hero returning from war.

He knocked at my door and announced in his inimitable style, “Tiger Zinda Hai,”

The tiger, I happen to know, had spent the better part of two years dodging flying plates and drowning his sorrows with an old Mumbai friend. I like to imagine that somewhere on that flight back from Delhi, looking down at clouds instead of dirhams, he made himself a quiet private promise: “No more foreign jaunts for me. From now on, I would settle down with the Hill-ranger, and whenever I fallout with him, I would simply make a temporary escape to Dhangadi until things blow over, all I need to do is to keep shuttling between Chennai and Dhangadi” — a modest, sensible, entirely self-serving life plan, and one considerably easier to keep than a three-year Dubai work permit.

I never did get to remind him of my old prophecy when he left for a dream world— “Pata nahin tum kab tak wahaan tikega” — but I didn’t need to. He had answered it himself, two years, one continent, and several broken plates later. Kancha Bhatta has never let a small detail like the truth get in the way of a good entrance line, and frankly, after everything Dubai had put him through, he had earned the right to walk through my gate believing exactly that.