Lucid Intervals of Parental Custody

 

When this story begins, Ambi was all of ten, a boy of the fifth standard, and precisely the sort of child for whom the word wander-struck seems to have been coined. In those days the family lived at the west end of the township, near the hospital — a respectable enough address, but one that offered painfully little to a boy whose chief ambition in life was to discover what lay just a little further than he was permitted to go.

And he was not permitted to go very far. As a sub-junior of the household, Ambi operated under a strict radius, an invisible tether pegged somewhere close to the front door. There was nothing beyond the hospital, he was given to understand, and most certainly nothing beyond the nursery — and so his adventures were confined to the local repertoire: Kings, Gulli Danda, the mysterious “iron rod” game, and the grave diplomatic business of winning other boys’ marbles off them.

Now and again the iron rod game — in its more ambitious prick-trek incarnation — would carry the boys past the OCC market and out towards the ragged edges of the township, to unknown country far from the dignified precincts of Sector VII headquarters. It took a full week of rain, in the end, to set the great expedition in motion. Cooped up for the better part of a working week, the boys emerged the moment the skies relented with the restlessness of prisoners on parole; and an unscheduled expedition — got up, as always, in the innocent guise of the iron-rod-prick-trek game — steered them towards the north-western corner of the township. And it was there, that afternoon, that Ambi and his friends discovered the railroad to Suku: the line that came stealing out of the factory sidings and meandered down to Suku, a modest station on the Koraput–Vizag stretch of that German engineering marvel.

Within a few months of these mystic discoveries, Ambi’s world underwent a metamorphosis of sorts. The family moved up in the world — quite literally, to Sector III, a posher and more elite locality altogether, where the carefree GZ type-3 way of life was regarded with the sort of distaste reserved for something tracked in on the sole of a shoe. And carefree it had been. Ambi and his fellow adventurers had been, if one is honest about it, only slightly better than vagabonds with lucid intervals of parental custody — a condition advertised plainly in their persons: clothes simple and minimal and expected to last a full twenty-four hours at the very least, no slippers or footwear to boot, hair unkempt, feet muddy, and hands perpetually soiled from the honest labour of handling mud-soaked marbles, earth-pricked iron rods, and rubber balls retrieved from slush.

Amidst PZ quarters in Sector III, this would not do.

Ambi felt, from the very first, like a fish out of water. Mr Dey, the neighbour, took it upon himself to chide the boy for going about without footwear; and Mrs Dey, not to be outdone, rendered unto Ambi’s mother a great deal of free advice upon the merits of the same. The upshot was that Ambi was duly furnished with footwear — not one pair but three: one for pottering about the immediate vicinity of home, one for walking long distances, and one for school. He detested all three with equal fervour, but was compelled, at the very minimum, to wear the shoes to school.

For all that, Ambi looked forward keenly to falling in with the boys of the new neighbourhood. He prepared for the encounter rather as a soldier prepares for a campaign, marshalling his ammunition — marbles small and large, the Gulli and its Danda, a couple of rubber balls, a worn-out cycle tyre with a stick to drive it, an iron hoop for rolling, and sundry other trifles calculated to command the respect of boys of a certain age. The boys of the new neighbourhood, however, looked upon these treasures askance, and wondered — without ever quite putting it into so many words — of what earthly use such things could possibly be.

Ambi was crestfallen. Not one of his hard-won assets could purchase him a single friend in the locality. Some small comfort came from two boys in the immediate vicinity — one a classmate, the other a senior from school — though even they could muster little enthusiasm for Ambi’s heirloom possessions.

But Ambi was not a boy to hold back. If the others would not play, then he resolved to play alone. And so, on most afternoons, he was to be seen careering around the blocks driving his cycle tyre before him with a stick, or walking the double road behind his rolling hoop — barefoot, naturally, upon tar roads gone soft and treacherous in the summer heat. A dozen rounds of the ten blocks of buildings thus accomplished, he would settle upon the grass opposite the house to prise the melted tar from the soles of his feet, succeeding chiefly in transferring a good portion of it to his fingernails. His mother, Chella, having first admonished and then instructed him, would set him to work with a little kerosene — of which there was never any shortage, it being the very fuel that lit the fire on which the household’s meals were cooked.

In the course of a year, the games that all that ammunition had once promised quietly petered out. Between the need to maintain a certain dignity before the neighbours, and the settled indifference of the local boys to his primitive amusements, Ambi’s assets were, one by one, laid aside. School, until now, he had not troubled to take seriously. It was his mother who reframed the matter for him. “If you want friends around here,” she told him, “you will have to do well in school. That is how the boys will come around to you and treat you seriously.”

It was in the course of one of his exploratory wanderings around the new neighbourhood that Ambi strayed into the man-made forest that lay ahead of his home, down the double roads that ran parallel to the blocks of apartments. Some twenty acres it covered — eucalyptus and neem and a scattering of evergreens — reaching all the way to the Bhanja Mandap Cinema in the west and the DZ quarters to the north. Pressing on beyond the trees to Bhanja Mandap itself, Ambi came upon the central library, standing next to the cinemas.

One evening he tiptoed inside. Ranged behind glass panels stood a great host of books, and from their titles Ambi made out sections on mythology, on history, on novels, and — the discovery that quickened his pulse — a section given over entirely to folk tales. Gathering his courage, he approached the librarian: a stylish, lanky young man, impeccably turned out in bell bottoms, scholarly spectacles perched below a head of well-groomed curls. How, Ambi asked him, might one borrow books from the library?

The librarian regarded him much as one might regard an insect, and delivered himself, in terse Hindi, of the following: “Yahaan bachchon allowed nahin hai. Baahar jo likha hai, padke samaj lo. Ab niklo baahar.” Outside, as it happened, a board announced with perfect finality: Non-members are not allowed. Scared out of his wits, Ambi made for the door and fled home through the evergreen forest.

He sat forlorn at the dinner table that evening — a Friday — awaiting the return of his father, Raman. When Raman came home, Ambi poured out the whole tale of the library and its books and his great desire to get at them. Raman was unmoved. Only adults, he explained, were permitted to enter the library, borrow its books and carry them home; Ambi would do far better to confine his reading to the books prescribed at school. Ambi was disappointed. Long after he had been put to bed, the folk tales section returned to him in the dark, and he lay turning over the single question of how he might yet lay his hands upon those books.

Ambi wanted that access very badly indeed. He turned Chella’s advice over in his mind — how better marks at school would draw more friends in the locality — but Ambi, as it happened, had ideas of his own. Beyond the craving for the folk-tale series, there was a second attraction: a library membership was just the sort of thing a boy might flaunt about the neighbourhood, and stood to make the other boys take him seriously far sooner than any report card would. One way or another, there was no question of Ambi letting the library go.

The next morning he was up early, and presented himself at his father’s bedside to declare a hunger strike. “No food, and no school,” he announced, “until you get me those books.” Now, Raman was an indulgent father where Ambi was concerned; and rather than sit down to negotiate terms with a striking ten-year-old, he soothed the boy, bade him keep to his routines, and promised to find a way.

Raman found a legitimate way out of the challenge thrown to him by Ambi. That very evening he came home with an indemnity letter, neatly typed, undertaking to bear full responsibility for any books his son should borrow. He walked Ambi over to the library, introduced him, paid the nominal fee to enrol him as a member, and submitted the letter. The librarian looked askance at the boy still — plainly unconvinced that so small a person could be trusted to carry off his precious volumes and return them intact — but he relented, all the same. And Ambi, happy beyond measure, made straight for the folk-tale series: every last one of them bound in white, in hard case-bound covers.

Ambi became a fixture at the central library soon enough, borrowing folk-tale books one after another at intervals of a day or two — a pace that did nothing whatever for the librarian’s peace of mind. Folk Tales of Finland, Folk Tales of Poland, Folk Tales of Congo, Folk Tales of Persia, and heaven knows how many more of the series, were carried home and consumed one after another, until the day arrived when Ambi had foraged his way clean through the entire folk-tale run on the classified shelf.

His eye then fell upon the regional histories — books dealing with the very country in which the township stood. He stumbled upon the modern history of erstwhile Chikapara, the hamlet that had been evacuated and razed to the ground to make room for the aero-engine factory. It was a slim thing in coarse print, got up in a hurry — the work, most likely, of some senior hand at the factory, and meant not for any public circulation but for the handful of local history enthusiasts about the township.

The next day, home from school for his lunch, Ambi settled himself at the dining table and put it to his father directly. “Did you know,” he asked, “that your factory was built only after the desia people — the aborigines of these parts — had been chased away from here?” Raman, mildly startled, asked how on earth he knew any such thing. Matter-of-fact as you please, Ambi replied that he had read all about it in a book from the library — and produced the very volume to prove it. Raman turned to Chella. “This boy,” he pronounced, “will turn out an investigator yet.”

But it was a book on the “Nandapur- A Forsaken Kingdom” that truly took hold of him, the more so when he learned that Nandapur lay no great distance from the township. He read it from cover to cover, and as he read, the little kingdom assembled itself in his mind, its images and its events conjured up vivid and whole. Now Ambi had always been a boy given to wanderlust, and it was not long before he began to toy with the notion of going over to Nandapur himself, to see what different world might be waiting out there. He was, in short, the very “Naughty Boy” of Keats’s poem.

A couple of months on, a Telugu-speaking family of four came and settled into a portion of an apartment in the block next to Ambi’s — a middle-aged man and his three sons, Prakash, Nagabhushanam and Babu. The father took up work as a security guard at the township factory, and all three boys were duly admitted to the local vernacular high school, while Ambi carried on at the English-medium school that stood close to his home.

To Ambi’s sweet surprise, he found these boys to be every bit as rustic, as touched with the rural, as he himself had been in the old GZ days. He lost no time. He went about recovering his play equipment from wherever it had been abandoned to its fate, and set forth to renew his acquaintance with the “heirloom” assets. Books, for the present, were bundled into the back seat, while Ambi flung himself into Gulli Danda, the iron hoop and ring, the iron rods and all the rest of it with gay abandon. He was, to his great contentment, back in his GZ home days.

One day an elder cousin of Naga’s — Ramayya by name — descended upon the household from Berhampore, bringing with him an old treadle grindstone: a foot-operated affair with a flywheel, used for the sharpening of iron tools. Ramayya’s plan was to stay put for a month or so, earn a little money by his machine, and then return whence he had come.

Ambi took an immediate liking to the man and, quite as much, to his machine. He carried his iron hoop and ring across to have the bends straightened and the edges roughed out, and Ramayya made a clean job of it — the whole thing done, with precision, in a matter of minutes, and done for free. Ambi was thrilled. He hurried home and returned bearing a large knife and, for good measure, the kitchen Aruvamanai — the floor-mounted vegetable cutter — which he plucked clean out of his mother’s hands before dashing off. Chella was left looking distinctly worried, wondering whether the boy had armed himself to go and settle some score with a neighbour. He was back before long with knife and Aruvamanai alike honed to a professional edge, all of it once again for nothing and all of it in minutes — and Chella looked askance at him and asked however all this had come about.

Then, on an early morning, Ambi was rolling along with his iron hoop when Naga hailed him. “Ramayya and I are off to go round the township with the machine,” he said. “Are you coming along?” Ambi begged them to wait, hurried the hoop and ring back home, and ran back to where the two stood waiting. Off they ambled, down the double road beside the school, in the direction of the next town, Semiliguda; and skirting the circle, they turned right towards the L Zone quarters. There Ramayya set up his hawking, crying himself hoarse in the local Odia dialect — “Churi Kachi Tangia saan deba,” “Loha-patara saan kariba ke ochi?” (roughly, “Knives, scissors, axes — shall I grind them?” and “Any iron blades here to be sharpened?”) — and alternating, for the Telugu households, with “Sanai pettali, Kattulu paduna cheyyali?” (“Shall I set the grindstone to your knives and give them an edge?”).

Ambi went about the business with the air of a Sales Supervisor accompanying his firm on its rounds. He helped carry the heavy equipment, fetched the tools out from the households and delivered them back again. It was a Sunday, and most of the breadwinners were at home. One of them, a factory man named Panigrahi, recognised Ambi — though Ambi had no notion of it — as the son of his own RA-department engineer, and asked him, “Are you related to Ramayya?” “Of course!” Ambi announced, with enormous pride.

Half a dozen homes in the LZ quarters thus attended to, the three made their way to the central market. There Ramayya bought three packets of mixture from the vendor, who assembled his concoction from the various elements stowed in his rectangular glass box, topping it off with finely cut chillies and onions and a sprinkling of that pungent mustard oil which lent the whole a hot and fiery character all its own. To Ambi, after the labours of the morning, it came as sweet relief, and he consumed his share gleefully the whole way home. And before they parted, Ramayya — who had earned all of seventy-five paise over the morning’s session — handed Ambi a ten-paise coin as his rightful portion of the revenue. Ambi accepted it with gratitude, and marched home victorious.

(To be continued…)

Ambi's Tryst with the Tyrantess

 Terms and Conditions

Ambi was, at the ripe age of four, already a shrewd negotiator. When school was first mooted in 1970, he did not throw a tantrum — he made a demand, delivered with the gravity of a treaty clause: he would go, but only if Aditi, the Tamil girl in the neighbourhood, went too. Without her, the township could keep its school. Aditi, an inconvenient eight months younger, had not yet earned her admission papers. Ambi, wholly unmoved by the academic calendar of the then school Board, simply refused. Negotiations stalled. The matter was tabled for a year, and nobody — least of all Ambi — seemed in the least bit sorry about it. His elder brother Kumaran, meanwhile, had made his own peace with school two full years earlier, and went off each morning entirely unbothered by his younger brother's diplomatic standoff.

That year, in fact, was pure gold. Mornings began with breakfast, then straight across the street to Aditi's for a morning of uninterrupted play, until the factory siren blew at noon to announce lunch — at which sound Chella would come scampering across like a woman late for a fire drill, to haul her son home in time. The three of them would sit down for lunch without Kumaran, already at his desk. The afternoons were worse for her — Ambi flatly refused his nap, so Chella would trot back across a second time, cap in hand, and beg Narayani, Aditi's endlessly fond mother, to absorb the boy for a few hours. Narayani almost always said yes, with a smile that suggested she did not mind the regular intrusions. On the rare day she had somewhere to be, she'd warn Chella in advance, and Chella would then descend on her son with the no-nonsense fury of a woman who had been made to walk across that street once too often. At five, punctual as a temple bell, Ambi returned for coffee — poured into a great "Eversilver Davara", a wedding gift from his Nana, with Chella's initials engraved on its belly, as though even the vessel needed to prove whose house this was. School, meanwhile, could wait. And wait it did.

 Admission, and Betrayal

It waited until 1971, when Aditi finally turned admissible and Ambi, a man of his word even at five, agreed to attend.

The family lived near the west end of the township, barely five hundred metres from a spot the township simply called Nursery, and when the time eventually came, it was the “Hospital” stop — serving every child in the zone — where Ambi would board each morning. A bus made its rounds each morning, scooping children out of the township's various zones and depositing them at the only English-medium school within its boundaries — a school that sat, rather ominously in hindsight, in the shadow of a hill called Bhalu Pahad, the Bear's Hill, a good two kilometres off towards the east end of the township. Ambi and Aditi boarded together each morning at the “hospital” stop, opposite the turnstile, thick as thieves, and the routine held without incident for several months.

Then the school did the unthinkable. It split them into different sections.

Ambi took this the way a shareholder takes a hostile takeover. He marched to his father Raman and reminded him, word for word, of the terms under which he had originally agreed to this whole "school" enterprise. Raman, employing the great fatherly art of the vague promise, assured him it would be sorted "in course of time" — four words that have bought grown men decades of peace from their five-year-olds, and bought Raman about a week.

The Tyrantess of Section B

The universe, having separated the two children, then decided to rub it in. Both KG sections, mercifully, were run by Tamil-speaking teachers — Ambi arrived at school fluent in exactly zero of the languages actually in use there — but the mercy stopped at language. Aditi got Ms Julie, a woman built entirely of patience and warmth. Ambi got Ms Uma, who was not. Ms Uma ran her classroom like a small, furious kingdom, brooking no deviation from her pupils, let alone outright mischief, and had discovered in herself a most particular gift: an unerring instinct for the inner thigh, and the exact quantum of pinch required to make a small boy see stars. Ambi, desperate, appealed to Ms Julie directly: “Miss, enna please unga classla admit pannunga” — could she not simply take him in? Ms Julie laughed, patted him off, and told him it would all work out. It did not.

A Hunger Strike, and Its Consequences

Diplomacy having failed at the teacher level, Ambi escalated straight to the top — his parents — and when even that produced no instant results, he did what any self-respecting five-year-old with a grievance does: he declared a one-day "bhook hartaal". No food, no school, and no negotiating with terrorists — except that Raman negotiated anyway, promising not only to speak to Ms Uma but to have a word with her husband too, her "Veetukkarar," for good measure. Suitably flattered by his own father's willingness to go to the man's house over this, Ambi called off the fast and turned up at the bus stop the next morning full of swagger. Aditi, noticing his absence the day before, asked where he'd got to. "That wicked woman is about to be taught a lesson by my father," Ambi informed her grandly. "If she tries anything again, my dad will ensure she stops coming to school."

Whatever memo Raman had sent, Ms Uma appeared not to have received it — or had received it, read it, and consigned it to the bin. The next day after lunch, she greeted Ambi with a warning, delivered in crisp Tamil: "Nalla thinnuttu panni madthiri alaya thaan nee layakku, pallikku varama ne uruppudave mattey" — roughly, that you are fit only to eat to your fill and wander around like a pig, playing truant, you will come to no good. Ambi, done with diplomacy altogether, shot back that his father knew all about her wickedness and would deal with her personally.

This did not land well. Ms Uma slapped him, then went to work on his thighs with her signature technique until he broke down completely, wet through with fright, and bolted for the gate, howling. The chowkidar, Bahadur, caught him in the corridor before he'd got ten feet away and marched him straight back into the lioness's den. By now thoroughly wrecked, Ambi cried himself hoarse, then cried himself to sleep at his bench — and was, for reasons the family has never been able to satisfactorily explain, simply forgotten there.

Alone at the Gate

He woke on his own, hours later, to a silence that should have alarmed him sooner than it did. The classroom was empty. The corridor was empty. He staggered out to the gate, bag in hand, to discover that the entire school had quietly packed up and gone home without him — bus, teachers, chowkidar, the lot. Only the Maali remained, watering the plants, oblivious to the boy standing at the gate. The sun was dipping toward evening, sometime around half-past-five, and Ambi stood alone at the gate of a deserted school, two kilometres from home, doing the maths a five-year-old does in exactly no time at all: nobody is coming.

Following Rupa and Subhra Home

Salvation, when it arrived, came in the Godsent shape of two senior schoolgirls walking down the road away from the gate toward Bhanja Mandap, the township cinema. Ambi took off after them like his life depended on it — which, as far as he was concerned, it did — falling twice on his knees before he'd closed the gap enough to tuck in behind them, uninvited. Rupa and Subhra, as he'd later learnt their names to be, clocked the small apparition trailing them and exchanged a few lines of Bengali, amused, at his expense — they seemed rather familiar to Ambi, as it happened, since the two families lived only a few blocks apart. They were, it must be said, at exactly the wrong age to be an assurance to Ambi — too young to feel any tenderness for a strange five-year-old, and quite old enough to be out walking home alone themselves on a warm evening. So they did the only sensible thing two pre-teenage girls saddled with an uninvited toddler, ambling behind, can do: they ignored him, and kept walking, hoping he'd peel off somewhere.

He did not peel off. He followed them past the outer road moving away from the cinema, skirted the frog pond, and struck out across the open sports maidan — unfenced, ungoverned, and entirely too large for a boy already sneezing and heating up his way through a cloud of his own making — toward the circular junction off the central market road, where the hospital road met the way to D Zone. The girls walked further down the “Hospital Road”, running parallel to the H Zone Blocks, meekly followed by an anxious Ambi. At the bunker shop opposite the Chaudharys', the girls dropped down a kaccha path toward lower ground. Ambi, eyeing the gradient with the suspicion of a man asked to sign something without reading it, chose the only dignified option available: he sat down and slid the rest of the way on his backside, arriving at the bottom intact but comprehensively redecorated — blue shorts, white shirt, and every inch of skin between, now the same uniform shade of township dust.

By Sector VII the roads had turned friendly again. Rupa and Subhra, spotting their small shadow finally peeling off toward his own lane, allowed themselves a visible sigh of relief and pressed on towards Nursery without so much as a backward glance. Ambi, filthy, spent, and running purely on instinct, staggered the last stretch to the third lane, too weak to walk any further, faltered and collapsed on the road close to the junction of the lane. Watching this from his veranda, Chinnappan, a bachelor who lived below Ambi’s home, frantically ran down the road, picked him up and promptly deposited him upstairs at Raman’s.

The Reckoning

The next day brought delirium and a fever fit to alarm the whole street; Dr Mishra prescribed three days of bed rest, and Raman, uncharacteristically indulgent, actually granted them. Ambi's only complaint through the entire ordeal — slap, pinch, abandonment, forced march across a maidan, and a raging fever included — was that Aditi would not be around to keep him company while he recovered.

He went on to endure Ms Uma, thigh and all, right up to the second standard, by which point he had made a private peace with his fate — the way children of that era generally did, back when even the parents were hesitant to haul up or complain against a schoolteacher.

The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram, where the siren has long fallen silent, but old habits of waiting linger on...

The Two-Rupee Tiger

 

The Sound of a Particular Door

Nambi began his college days in 1984, the year he learned to read a house by its noises. He was almost nineteen, commuting fifteen kilometres each way, and living under a roof shared by two people — his mother Chella and his father Raman — who could not agree on how to run it, what to save, what to spend, or, most evenings, whether dinner would survive the night.

He came to know the sequence the way you know a piece of music you have heard too many times. The gate latch. Raman's footsteps, heavier and less certain than they should have been for the hour. The particular silence that fell over the house the moment he called out for food. Chella would already be moving toward the kitchen before he finished asking — she served him without a word, plate after plate, night after night, as though obedience alone might one day be enough to end it.

It never was. Raman, deep enough in drink to have lost his appetite but not his grievances, would sit before a full plate and find that his hands would not cooperate. Rather than say so, he found something else to say. That he had never been given the respect due to a man who had sacrificed as much as he had. That Chella's family had never once treated him with the dignity he deserved. The accusation changed its clothes nightly but never its shape, and it built, course by course, toward the same ending: a plate, airborne, striking the wall with a crack that Nambi could have located blindfolded, rice and sambar sliding down the plaster in a long yellow smear, and his mother on her knees afterward with a rag, weeping quietly, cleaning a floor she had cooked for an hour to fill.

Nambi sat through most of these evenings. He watched his mother go to bed hungry more nights than he could count, and on the evenings he came home late from college, it was worse in its own way — walking in through the front door to find the wreckage already cold, his father already snoring, and his mother alone with the mess, looking up at him from the floor with an expression he never found a word for.

Winter, 1985

He turned it over for a long time before he found the courage to act. Then, one evening in the winter of 1985-86, after the last plate had stopped ringing against the wall and Chella had slipped out of the room, Nambi stood in front of his father and asked him, plainly, what any of it was for.

"Appa," he said, "what is this achieving? Every night, the same drama. You can't even eat what she cooks for you, and by the time it's over there's nothing left but what's on the floor. What do you actually want from her?"

Raman's answer was not an answer. It was old wounded pride finding a new listener. "It is easy for you," he said, "to talk of pain as though it is something you leave behind. You would need to live through what I have lived through to understand what it has cost me." And then, sharper: "You are a boy who has seen nothing of the world. Don't teach your father right from wrong."

For a couple of days, oddly, it worked. Raman came home, skipped dinner outright, and went straight to bed without a word — sparing Nambi only a resentful glance on the way past, as if being denied his evening theatre was itself a fresh injury. The house went quiet. Nambi allowed himself, cautiously, to believe something had shifted.

The Culvert

It hadn't — it had simply changed direction. A few evenings later Nambi came home to find his mother beaten badly enough that the sight of her stopped him in the doorway. When he confronted his father, Raman's defence was that she had answered him back once too often during one of his tantrums, and that this had left him no choice. Nambi gave him a final warning — the kind a boy gives when he has already stopped expecting it to be heard. Raman, furious at being warned by his own son, struck him across the face. And something in Nambi that had been absorbing blows of one kind or another for months finally gave way. He struck back.

What came after was worse than the fight itself. Raman raged and cursed at length, dressed, and walked out of the house without saying where. He returned the next morning around nine, bathed, and left for work within the hour, as if the previous night belonged to someone else's house entirely.

Three days passed in a watchful, uneasy quiet. On the fourth, Nambi came home late from college to find his mother sitting outside on the culvert by the road, waiting for him in the dark, crying. He brought her in and turned on his father one more time — what now, this time? Raman told him to shut up and mind his own business. Nambi pressed. Raman told him to get out of the house and manage his own life from now on.

Nambi did not need to be told twice. He asked his mother to come with him. Chella would not leave. But as he walked out the door, she pressed a fifty-rupee note into his hand — everything she had to give a son she would not follow.

Ponneri

He had no destination that night, only a bus to Central station and then a suburban train heading north, chosen for no better reason than that it was leaving. He sat by the window with his thoughts running well ahead of the train — quit college, find work anywhere, become nobody in a town where nobody knew his name. An hour in, the train pulled into a station called Ponneri — the golden lake — a name that snagged on an old family memory, a stop the family used on trips from the Andhra–Odisha border. It was familiar enough, in the smallest way, to make him get off.

It was close to midnight. He bought a bun and a cup of tea for a rupee and ate slowly, standing on the platform, and it was only then that a name surfaced from somewhere further back than the last few days — a distant grand-aunt, his father's paternal aunt, an old lady living alone on Hariharan Bazaar Street. She was family, however thin the thread, and thin threads were what he had left. He walked out of the station and into the bazaar, losing his way more than once in the dark, asking directions from whoever was still about, until he finally stood before what he believed was her door and knocked.

A middle-aged man opened it — a stranger, in a house Nambi had walked to expecting a grand-aunt's welcome. He asked, reasonably enough, who Nambi was and what had brought him there at that hour. Nambi introduced himself and asked for her by name. The man's answer landed harder than anything else that night had managed: she had passed away six months earlier, and the house had since been let out by whichever relative stood closest in line to inherit it. There was nothing more to say to that. Nambi thanked him, turned back the way he'd come, and walked to the station crestfallen, the one thread he'd reached for having given way in his hand.

Back on the platform, he sat on a cement bench, and sleep started pulling at him. He didn't get far into it. Two constables on their rounds blew a whistle, inches from his ear and moved him off the platform, and Nambi — in nothing but a veshti and a shirt — found himself walking the dark road to the highway bus stop instead.

An old man sitting there asked where a boy his age could possibly be going at that hour. Nambi had a lie ready before the question had finished landing — missed the train after stepping out for water, needed a bus to the city. The old man shook his head; no buses from here, better to find an auto to the main terminus, where the Andhra buses came through toward Madras. Nambi thanked him and walked, asking directions from whoever was still awake, counting his coins the whole way — he was not going to be caught penniless in the morning.

Broadway

Two hours later a bus from Nayudupeta finally arrived, close to three in the morning, and set him down at Broadway just as the next morning was breaking over the city. He had tea and a snack at a stall — and then, spotting a bus pulling out toward Tirunelveli, made the sort of decision only a boy with nowhere fixed to be can make. He ran, jumped for the moving rear footboard, nearly lost his grip and his footing both, and was hauled bodily back inside by a conductor who was considerably more annoyed than impressed.

This time he bought a proper ticket — thirty rupees — and settled in for the day with the discipline of someone protecting the little he had left: water at the stops, nothing else, however the food smelled. Somewhere along the way the plan finally took shape in his head. Trivandrum. His uncle Krishnan, Chella's youngest brother, an Engineer at TERLS, and a man Nambi had always been close to.

The Tenner Dilemma

The bus reached Tirunelveli junction around eight that evening. Nambi was weak by then — a single tea and vada at Broadway was not much for a nineteen-year-old to run a whole day on — and as he walked from the junction toward the station, the smell of fresh dosas from a roadside stall stopped him cold. He had ten rupees left and a choice to make: eat, or save it for the fare ahead. Hunger won. He sat down to uttappam and coconut chutney and ate until he was full, and somewhere in the middle of it, without quite meaning to, found himself brooding — thinking of his mother pressing him to eat more at her own table, a hundred evenings that had nothing to do with any of this. He left the stall, with some residual coins left in his pocket,.

The Two-Rupee Note

There was no train to Trivandrum until seven the next morning, so he walked to the bus stand to see if anything moved south by night. Nothing did, and the fare — twelve rupees — was more than he had. He hesitated a long while before approaching a well-dressed stranger for help. The man questioned him with the thoroughness of a policeman, and then, under cover of that same concern, let his hands wander somewhere they had no business going. Nambi excused himself, said he'd be back after answering nature's call, and did not go back — he walked straight to the station instead and did not look over his shoulder until he was inside it. For once, luck sided with him: no constables that night to chase a frightened teenager off the platform. Running short of the fare for Trivandrum, he even tried his hand at serving customers in a petty restaurant near the station, but had to leave with just a two-rupee bill with a tiger on its face, doled out to him by the hotelier for serving one customer.

Valliyoor

He spent what was left of the dark on a bench and boarded the seven o'clock passenger train the next morning without a ticket, doing the arithmetic in his head as the small stations went by — caught, perhaps a fortnight in custody, food included, survivable as long as nobody's hands strayed. He thought, with the particular gallows humour of a boy who has stopped expecting things to go his way, of the old crude wisdom about giving in to what cannot be helped, and decided he was ready for whatever came. At Valliyoor two constables stepped into his compartment, and Nambi slipped quietly through to the next carriage before they reached him, breathing out only once he'd found an empty window seat and handed the rest of the day over to luck.

Eraniel & The Rice Women

After Valliyoor, the day eased. A samosa vendor at Nagercoil got what remained of his attention and none of the money he didn't have. At Eraniel he thought, briefly, of getting off and walking all the way to Kollenvilai to see his grandfather — he would very likely have found him some menial contract work through Murugan at the telephone exchange — but decided against troubling an octogenarian living alone for the sake of his own convenience. Besides, Nambi was overcome with guilt for an act of impudence committed a few years back that earned his ire. By Neyyattinkara the compartment had filled with women carrying baskets of red rice on their heads, riding, a fellow passenger observed dryly, as if their own fathers owned the railways. Nobody troubled them either. Nambi, for the first time since Ponneri, let himself relax.

Karamana

At Trivandrum Central he stepped off with no idea how to find Karamana, and asked his way there one stranger at a time until, an hour on, the road turned suddenly familiar — past the Bhagavathi temple on the riverbank, to his uncle's door at TC/50. It was a Sunday, luckily, and Krishnan was home — startled to see his nephew standing there in that state, glad of him all the same, and entirely at a loss for how he'd arrived.

Nambi told him everything, start to end. He bathed, ate a proper meal, and slept the way he hadn't in days. Krishnan promised whatever help he needed, but talked him out of the one thing Nambi had actually come to ask for – a job for subsistence. "Don't worry, boy," he said. "Your father will be looking for you by now. Go back, finish your college, and then find work — but go back and look after your mother. I will help you with whatever you need, always." A week later he sent Nambi home with three thousand rupees and an eighty-rupee ticket to Madras. Nambi owes this sum to his uncle, even today, with interest compounded for about four decades, not less than at least two hundred grand.

Afterward

Nambi had missed a week of college. He came home to find his mother alone. Raman had left the house the very day after his son did, and never came back to it.

He lived out the rest of his years apart from them both, and died in the summer of 1995, of cancer in the oesophagus — unremarked, the way most such endings are, in a house that was, by then, no longer anyone's.

 

Author’s note

I wrote this piece as a small record of the kind of boyhood that rarely makes it into our public stories – a life measured in gate latches, bus stands, and the sound of plates hitting a wall. Nambi’s journey in the winter of 1985–86 is not extraordinary in the way headlines use that word, yet it contains what many families quietly live through: a son negotiating love for his mother, fear of his father, and the need to leave without quite abandoning either. The amounts of money in this story – a fifty-rupee note, a two-rupee bill with a tiger, an eighty-rupee ticket, three thousand rupees in an envelope – are not just details but markers of how precarious movement was for a boy in his teens, and how much calculation sits behind every “simple” decision to run away.

I am also trying to preserve a texture of time: late-night platforms without CCTV, constables who move you on with a whistle, long-distance buses leaving from Broadway, women riding passenger trains with baskets of red rice as if their families owned the rails. These are fragments of a rural and small-town world in the early 1980s that is already fading from memory, even though its quiet violence and quiet generosities still shape the adults we later meet only as colleagues, uncles, or neighbours. If you recognise something of your own family’s history in Nambi’s, I hope this story gives it a language you can carry.

The Hillranger writes from Dharmarajapuram where the evenings are long and the distant memories are longer.

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!