The Silent Love

I could reach airport just in time. This happens very rare these days when you go the airport some fifteen minutes before and spend sometime in the book store, flip through some good books and buy few of them; feel happy by seeing your books on the shelf and sometimes meet one of your old students in the airport with his wife, children, job worries and may be story of new assignments. While teaching at IIMs, I had those options of going early to an airport and spending time in the lounge, now you just have to run and run to come back home, complete office work and go back home, close your eyes, listen to some music and attend guitar classes and spend some stupid arguments on why vegetable prices are going up? Why certain things in life go up and come down but prices always go up?
This time it was different, why this time, every time I go to Kolkata, it is different. I have some love for this town but for all these years I have very few friends there, maybe I can hand count… Jayati, Rajiv, Cecil, Ashok and few more. But Kolkata is my beautiful city, embedded with lots of emotions and nostalgic thoughts, its maidan, early morning ride on the tram; I heard they are going to stop the tram service once the metro is extended and I pray they shouldn’t do that for God’s sake. Life is more interesting in Kolkata, you can walk along the ganges, you can sit down with your soul mate on the side of the river ganga and see the water flowing nearby; you can spend an hour on a queue in front of the kali temple, only to be told by the priest near the entrance of the sanctum that the temple is closed, you can write stories on Brajen Mukherjee road and get scolded by your friend’s father for the number of telephone calls he receives after people read the story in Telegraph autumn collection; you can go to Park hotel disk and spend whole time with Bala and miss your early morning flight to Indore, You can walk into Mirch masala restaurant and enjoy great cuisine there, Kolkata is everywhere in memory, heart, mind, soul……..
But this time it’s not about Kolkata alone, it’s the flight that I took from Kolkata to Chennai in the evening. Most of the time, I jump to a window seat and catch up my sleep, but this time in a hurry, I didn’t ask for a window seat and got an aisle one. The couple was next to me. I hardly take interest on co-passengers in flights and trains these days, so they looked like newly married love birds, may be flying to Chennai and then moving to Ooty or some other hill station. They were newly married; that you can always find out with Bengali girls, they will be loaded with bunch of bangles, red color or some heavy color saree, sindoor full on the head and may be outrageous lipstick colors on the leap and would be squeezing in with their husbands in between and putting you into a spin as the scene many a times looks odd to your eyes.

I didn’t take much interest on them till the food trolley came. The airhostess (rude one this time) asked me what drink will I have (as if they can serve me Tequila or some screw driver), so I wanted a Coke and they obliged. The man started making a sign and without any sound!! The airhostess couldn’t guess what it is, and lo…. Then the lady made some sound…..” da…da”. Ok it sounds Mirinda and when I helped them out with the word Mirinda, they were happy and by looking at my leap he confirmed and they took one Mirinda can.

Its not that they had no money, he pulled out a five hundred rupees note for Mirinda payment but they were sharing it among themselves and sipping from one can. It was great scene to watch for me. Their world was sound proof. They were deaf and dumb. Of course if you are deaf, you are bound to be dumb; but their love was beyond this physical deformities. They were expressing their love, care and responsibility towards each other like any normal couple. When the flight landed, the I guess the lady as bit scared, so she was holding his hand tight, the man looked at me and smiled, it was an assurance he was giving to me that she is well taken care of.
I was waiting near the belts for my luggage when they came with someone who looked like a travel agent to me. They came to say ‘thank you’ what she could utter was ‘u’. I don’t know whether I deserve a thank you from them or not but they were giving it to me and I was so happy to meet this young couple. The agent told me the boy is from a rich Bengali family, studied in some special school in London and the girl is from Bangladesh and they met in London and they are on their honeymoon trip.
I told this thing to Gaurav, Peter and Nitin. One of them joked saying ‘at least there will be no fights and verbal duels between them, they will try to understand each other only through eyes and hand coordination. Though their world is devoid of noise, it is free from so much of bad emotions, fights and verbal volleys that they will be a happier couple in life. It is important to understand that ability of words to express emotions are so limited in life that you can talk a great deal and communicate a lot through silence. Somebody said, if you cant understand my silence, you can never understand my words. Hope some of these women around us understand the value of silence and try to make life peaceful, so also do some men need to learn how to take care of emotions which are so precious that they are like water on the leaf of a lotus.

Visiting Chidamabaram

First of all I will not write about the third bitch though my friend has told me the incident about the third bitch so far. I have something good to write. Many good things happen in life but sometimes that goes out of our mundane attention and subsequently we forget about them. It is high time that I write about them and record what impact it has on me and people around me. It makes me feel happy also. It seems I am becoming sensitive to negative happenning more than the positivity of life. I will write about two experiences that recently I had while travelling inside and also out of Tamilnadu.
I have this good friend Sriraman who is very religious and yet an investment banker. I have seen very few ethical people like Sriraman. A hard core Vaishnavite yet a fluent negotiator on the go, very rare combination. Over the few months, after Kannan’s departure from the company, I have found solace with such a great friend. Happiness is a state of mind and one can obtain happiness through incompleteness also. I made a mistake in my earlier conversations when I asked his wife about children. They don’t have kids and yet I never saw Sriraman down at any point of time. He has always come out as a person with high energy and who wants to something good in life. In my trips with him, he took me to may nice and peaceful temples of Tamilndau. I write peaceful because I find solace looking at God and taking up a conversation with him directly. Sometimes, I ask his, “ So, you are testing me, you gonna see me fail on this, lose my mind and get lost as a failure in what I do?” But he has always replied me affirmative and with a smile. Of course God has to always smile, doesn’t he get tired smiling for such a long time? Who knows what makes him to smile towards everyone. I can not do it. If I don’t like people, I make big face and avoid them and if goes beyond a limit, spit it out on the face. I made many enemeies for these reasons. God doesn’t have enemeies and whatever he got in all his lives, they came because God was more successful that them; they were jealous of God and wanted to create problem for him.
Ok, Ok, I am not God, I am a human being who looks at the world in his own eyes/glasses.
I don’t know why I am moving here and there and not writing what I actually intened to. In our last trip, we made a U turn to the original plan and thought we can move across Chidambaram and see the siva-vishnu (Hara-Hari) temple and travel via Cudalore and Puducherry to Chennai. We had the liberty because we were travelling by road. It was a hot summer afternoon when we reached Chidambaram.
No, dat is not the place to which P. Chidambaram belongs to. Rather it is the place where Siva is in nataraja posture. The famous nataraja statue is from this temple. What happenned is not inside but on the gate of the temple that I wish to pen down here. As we parked the car and came out to open, it was almost 40 degree there, so we had to rush to the temple. It was a lazy afternoon and we thought we will have a darshan and quick bite and drive down to Chennai. There were not many tourists and luckily there were not any line. I like south India temples, but the problem is the long que that one has to stand. Sometimes it takes more than an hour to meet God, but it is better than many of our Orissan temples where you have to literally push people to move ahead and I never enjoyed it.
So on the norther gate of the temple, may be it was northern gate, I don’t remember, may be Sriraman will rectify me if I am making a mistake if he happens to read this note; we entered into the temple and I wanted to buy some flowers to offer to God. There was a sixty plus lady selling flowers and tulsi leaf garlands and I purchased offerrings worth 30 rupees and paid her fifty rupees. She had no change and here comes her reply.
“ I will pay you back once you come out of the temple”
There was a long pause from our side as we had some discomfort with the balance pending with her. Of course, there were not many devotees, not much crowd, the place was new to me, I was there for first time and it was a hot afternoon with all the temple rocks sending heat wave.
We are two sophisticated, rural borne, urban grown suave gentleman (are we/ I always thought I am an idiot), we came out of an air conditioned car; I am president of a company, he is an investment banker, we have our houses in metro cities, bank balance in banks; stocks in stock markets, real estate investments, fixed deposits, married to educated women, travelled to far places of the world including USA (what is so crazy about USA?)
And here is a lady in mid sixties or seventies; I don’t know her education background, she was a leporsy patient, speaks a language which I hardly understand and how can she dare to question us that we doubt her integrity and honesty in dealing with a customer and that to infront of a temple, where she must have spent many years of her latter life after being thrown out of home, after being castigated for sufferring from leprosy.
She was surviving in a megre income of few rupees in front of this great temple and who knows how many years she has to repent in front of God for this desease which probably she had got from her husband who travelled to some unknwon place like Chennai or Mumbai; visited prostitutes and got infected with leprosy and finally on return gifted to his wife. Actually I can not ask these questions to the lady’s husbad as from her dressing, I could guess she is a widow. She must have spent long hours near the lamps in some unknwon village in interior tamilnadu teaching her children about life and values; must have got up early in the dawn to cook for them, must have hold the babies close to heart when there were suffering from fever! But where are these children? Where are their attention to the old lady? Probably she should have been comfortable if she would not have got children at all.

And look at us, we had doubt on her ( or on ourselves), we suave, educated, American returned MBAs and PhDs and doubting an elderly woman’s integrity for twenty rupees only. She smiled at us and reaffirmed us that once we make our temple rounds complete, she would definitely pay us back. I looked at Sriraman’s face, he moved away, I was ashamed of myself after a long long time. A drink costs 200 bucks, I have thrown parties to some ungrateful people/women who were rich yet beggars in their mindset, to people who have survived by taking loans from me and shamelessly saying that they wont be able to repay me back!!!!

Here is a lady who is throwing me from citadel of my confidence! Here is a lady through her innocent questioning killing me thousand times for the doubtful emotion that came in my face! Here is a lady whom I am never going to meet in my life and yet teaching me lessons of life and honesty. I had tears in my eyes (not for her, but for being a stupid in life).
God never forives idiots and stupids. We wenet inside the temple and to our surpise Vishnu temple was closed and we could nt have HARA-HARI darshan as we had planned. On our return, she was smiling and gave me back my twenty rupees. I purchased more flowers from her and send the flowers back inside the temple through another passersby devotee and wished God to forgive me for the emotions that I carried about this lady. She taught me great lesson of life. Irrespective of what you achieve in life, what you are, there are so many things that are never taught, never learnt, are never in books and never will be also; but they teach you essense of humanity; they make you to feel how one should be in life and how humbleness can reflect what life has to offer despite all limitations.
May be she was a Goddess there in front of the temple to remind me some of the great lessons of life which nobody taught me.
I have one more experience to share with you in the next posting which I encountered in my recent flight from Kokata to Chennai which I have termed as ‘Silent Love”. But now now, may be few hours, days, months, years latter and may be if I am alive for the next day. Now I see a dream everynight that I am dead……….