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!