A Promise to Write - Part 2

 

Ambi left the township in the summer of 1980. The family headed for Madras (as Chennai was then known).

School and home in Madras were a far cry from the comforts of a PSU township. Ambi suffered a culture shock, reminded at every turn of the township’s conveniences and of the small, familiar circle he had moved in. Homesickness soon set in, with his thoughts forever drifting to Sunabeda. He longed to rush back to the township and reclaim Dandi’s company for himself. There was no way Ambi could reach Dandi except through snail mail.

So began the series of letters from Ambi to Dandi, in the inland letter format, priced at 25 paise. The cheaper postcard afforded no privacy, and the yellow cover was comparatively dear at 35 paise. Dandi reciprocated with enthusiasm. After a few months, however, the communication fizzled out, more due to Ambi’s preoccupation with cinema and other modes of entertainment that the city had on offer. For the next nineteen years there was hardly any contact between Ambi and Dandi. Both, in all probability, were preoccupied with career progression and the demands of family life, each swept along in his own current.

In 1999, some years after Raman’s passing in 1995, Ambi set out for the township to get his IAF pension application endorsed by HAL, the re-employer. Having dropped sheet anchor at the Guest House, he resolved to trace Dandi’s whereabouts, and soon landed at the sub-post office in NAC, SBD-1, where he met Dandi’s father. There he learnt that Dandi was in the software development business and had been busy travelling abroad for work. Ambi left his contact details and address with the revered postmaster, to be passed on to Dandi upon his return from a marathon overseas tour.

Back in Chennai, Ambi slipped into his routines, until a week later, when Dandi called up from his office in Hyderabad. It was thence that the relationship was revived. The conversation between them ran thus:

Ambi: “Who is calling?”

Dandi (in a baritone voice): “Abe, Guru, Dandi bol raha hoon.”

Ambi: “Orrey Dandi, Yela unnavoo!”

Dandi: “Sab, maje mein. Tum sunao. Tumko kahaan kahaan dhoondha! Aakhir, tumko ek din apna gaanv aana hi pada… I will come to Chennai next week and meet up with you.”

Ambi sent Dandi all the directions needed for the meeting. About a week later, one evening, Dandi turned up at Ambi’s office on Edward Elliots Road, Mylapore.

The receptionist stepped in and announced, “Sir, a person by the name of Ganga Prasad wants to meet you urgently.”

Ambi: “Who? From where?”

Receptionist (with a comic smile): “He says he’s from Jhumri Talayya.”

Ambi (with a confused smile): “What?”

Dandi forced the cabin door open and stood drooping with folded hands at the threshold.

Dandi: “Namaskaram Ayya!”

Ambi: “Orrey Dandi, kameenay sala!”

Dandi: “Tu bada haraami hai re.”

Ambi: “Hua kya?”

Dandi: “Janam kundali ke bina kisi ko tere se milna mana hai kya? Isiliye bola ki main Jhumri Talayya se aaya hoon!”

And what a meeting that turned out to be, after almost two decades.

Dandi was of medium build, with a confident baritone, thoroughly presentable and carrying himself with an air of authority. It was a stark contrast to the sulking, diffident and hesitant creature Ambi had known ages ago. His gait was distinctive, but with that same stress on the toes. His eyes were prominent enough, it seemed, to spot every business opportunity that came his way. Dandi had, in short, undergone a metamorphosis the likes of which Ambi had never witnessed.

The two left the office together and whiled away the evening at the Malgudi restobar in the Savera Hotel, trying to bridge the bygone past with an incredible present. Ambi apprised Dandi of Raman’s demise in 1995. Dandi acknowledged Raman’s brutal honesty and his no-nonsense approach to people. Dandi was in Chennai for a roadshow to promote his company’s IPO. He had tied up with partners in the USA to promote his business, and mentioned that he had met Rajiv and Anand in the US and was roping them into it.

Dandi returned to Hyderabad in a couple of days. His company hit the markets with a bang, and celebrations galore followed. But his senior partner, who oversaw finance, eclipsed him on all major decisions, much to the ire and resentment of his partners in the US, Rajiv and Anand, who were his classmates. The split became inevitable when Dandi could not muster the strength to counter the finance man, in the face of the discontent thrown up by those partners.

Ever since the split, his business fell on evil days, and it became a roller coaster, plunging every now and then into the depths of despair. Loneliness and a helpless state of mind threw him out of gear in an irreversible manner.

Dandi turned to the bottle for solace, to drown his worries and woes, but the bottle only deepened the abyss, and he slid slowly into depression.

Ambi sympathised with Dandi and beseeched him to part ways with his senior partner in Hyderabad and start afresh, with all the necessary help that Ambi could provide. This stemmed from Ambi’s inference that corporate governance had been given the go-by in Dandi’s organisation. But Dandi had pinned all his hopes on his senior partner, much to Ambi’s vexation.

After many years, matters came to a head, and Dandi forced himself out of the organisation and the business. He then took to freelancing as a PR functionary for quite a few businessmen he knew and had worked with. This did not take him far.

All Ambi could do during these years was to keep abreast of Dandi’s activities, speak to him at periodic intervals, and help him in his efforts to drum up business. Such efforts entailed travelling across the country: to the North East, Chandigarh (with Timmy), Calcutta, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, among many other places. Timmy, sadly, passed away in early January 2026, while on a morning walk.

A time came when Ambi, the young lad, grew mature enough to become Nambi, who could finally tell the wheat from the chaff. Nambi stopped entertaining business ideas from Dandi and confined their discussions to anything but work and business.

Yet it would be wrong to see those years only as a decline. Sometime at the beginning of the millennium, Dandi took upon himself the onerous task of ascertaining the whereabouts of all the “Schemers” and bringing them together in the virtual world.

“Schemers” was the name assigned to the class of 1982: the deemed Xth Std pass-outs from VSV or any other school, whether or not they were together in 1982. The name owes its origin to a string of mischievous adventures resorted to by the group, mostly within the school, undertaken with great enthusiasm and little remorse, much to the annoyance and consternation of the alma mater and the authorities. Among these was an incident, long after Ambi had left the township, in which the masterminds of the group, Dandi being a prime member, detonated a country-made bomb at the school assembly, the device blowing up with fine precision exactly when the National Anthem concluded. Of course, enquiries, investigations, suspensions and penalties followed.

Dandi went about ferreting out the hibernating frogs, pulling back the sulking porcupines, persuading the shy giraffes, beseeching the pachyderms, hunting down all cats, big and small, and then consolidating the denizens of the global jungle into a virtual email group. Messenger services hardly existed then. Most of them were on Sabeer Bhatia’s network, some on Rediffmail, some on the now-defunct Satyam, a couple of sarkari babus on VSNL, and quite a few on Shammi Kapoor’s exuberant network. (BTW, did you know that the shout of ecstasy did not emanate from the vocal cords of Mohammed Rafi or Shammi?)

Nor did Dandi’s contribution to the Schemers end with the email group. He made it a point to participate wholeheartedly in all their get-togethers: Goa (2016), Vizag–Sunabeda (2018), Amritsar–Jalandhar (2019) and Hyderabad (2025). He made it to every one of them with his nuclear family, in spite of his ailments and the strain on his means. He was a permanent fixture at all the gatherings, besides the many mini-reunions that took place in Hyderabad and elsewhere.

The Hyderabad reunion of December 2025 was the last time Nambi saw Dandi. He managed to move around with some effort, but could not climb the few steps at Anand’s farm. Poor Dandi exerted himself to get around the various venues of that reunion without a murmur of protest or hesitation.

Their conversations in those later years were about solutions to Dandi’s erstwhile financial problems, with Nambi providing minor relief here and there, once in a while. Otherwise they dwelt on nostalgic memories of the township, on Dandi’s eulogistic exclamations on the Hillranger’s blogs, or on anything else under the sun.

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Half a century after that dark road to L Zone, the boy who once walked it alone had become the man who knew where every one of us was. He found us, he gathered us, and he turned up at every reunion, with his family, whatever his health allowed. The last part is about the years in which he came out less and less, and about one night in October.