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