‘Bombay Chronicle’

It is the morning of May 06, 06. I woke up feeling weak. That is what you get after getting the viral infection for the umpteenth time. But I don’t think that viral is the only culprit. The other culprit is the doctor who I saw at the St. George’s medical college which happens to be in an alley right in front of my hotel. This wannabe male version of Florence Nightingale is as fresh in my mind as is the taste of the sizzler that I ‘assembled’ at ‘Out of the Blue’. The doctor and the sizzler, together they make up for the wild blend that is forever lacking in my dull mind. I will not forget the way the menu of ‘Out of the Blue’ ensnared me in having a meal out of the blue even when I meant to avoid eating a full meal at all costs. Well I think that the modest creativity of assembling a sizzler was did me in. And as far as the doctor is concerned, I will not forget him for prescribing me the most temporary relief medicines for a six month old chronic viral attack cycle. His prescription consisted of an analgesic, a paracetamol and an anti-allergic, all of which I happened to have in my arsenal already. I wanted to shout right there and then in his office, ‘Please for God sake gives me something extreme, something of industrial strength.’ But then I thought how it would scar all the ultra young age citizens and the old age citizens who had come for a diagnosis and I didn’t do it. Now I am reprimanding myself for not being selfish. I should’ve just gone ahead with it- scarring or no scarring. The result is that I am the one who has ended up scarred now. Now I will never forget how the doctor spent ages with the poor and the needy and neatly sent me packing with an illegible diagnosis in 40 sec. flat. His solidarity with poor also left me wondering if Florence Nightingale shares her family tree with Robin Hood.

Apart from waking up and feeling weak, I also woke up begging for more sleep. I don’t think the only culprits are the viral and the St. Georges doctor. I think the other culprit are the bedbugs in my…well where else…my bed. I have figured that the only way I can get sleep these days are to sleep only when the bedbugs are sleeping and that happens only once it’s daytime. I have no clue how these buggers come to know if it’s day or night. I guess it has to do with biological crap like adaptation, mutation and hereditary intelligence. I couldn’t care less what it’s got to do with. All I know is that I have rashes all over my body and if I can’t sleep during the night, I can’t work at the Express. I have two options

1. I can align my sleep cycle in an alternating pattern with that of the bedbugs, which is not viable since I have to work at the Express during the day.
2. I can go and make a complaint to the hotel admin. But the way my previous complaints have been flushed down the sewer, the very prospect of making a complaint makes me shudder.

But since the second option seemed to be the more viable one, I avoided making the complaint to Attendant-Prince (to know whom better you can read ‘Project: Budget Brainwash’) and chose a softer target i.e. the right-handed right hand man of the left- handed Attendant-Prince. I made their natural orientation clear because it is one of the most preferred pastime of the Attendant-Prince to make it clear to his cronies how he thinks that lefties are generally more clever. I couldn’t agree with him more after having met him. And I wonder if that’s the reason why his left hand man is left-handed. Here we need to take into account that for the Attendant-Prince the left hand man scores over his right hand man because the Attendance-Prince is a lefty. Anyway, one thing I most dislike is conspiracies and a conspiracy which is against right-handers is a conspiracy against me. I will make sure that the attendant-prince will pay for this sometime soon. I still have to figure out how though.

Waking up and feeling weak first thing in the morning is not good. So I was looking to fix the problem. I summoned the right-hand man of Attendant-Prince i.e. I walked over to him while showering respect all the while I approached him, and said, ‘Raat hote hee badan khujlane lagta hai. Mujhe lagta hai mere bistar mein kutch problem hai.’ And he instantly offered to change the bed sheet, which was very kind of him. But I brought to his kind attention that the problem was lying much deeper than that. The problem was not in the superficial bed sheet, but deeper, in the mattress, where the buggers borrowed, so I requested to him, ‘Woh spray karva deejiye naa.’ And he said, ‘Abhi to karaya tha do din pehle’ and I did not say anything because now I was looking up to him as the ‘pesticide spraying demigod’ who would save me from the attack of the bloodsucking buggers in the night-time. So I decided to show him something more impressive. The ultimate weapon of persuasion that I had reserved for the last, ‘Yeh ched dekh rahe hain aap?’, I said pointing to small perforations in my gray shorts like someone was shooting them with an air rifle when they were drying on the clothes’ line. Or can a high tension cable do this to your shorts (Read ‘Drying Clothes can be Injurious to Health)? Anyway, I was saying that I said, ‘Yeh ched dekh rahe hain aap? Kal tak yeh yahaan nahin the.’ And he whispered in a tone filled with dread accompanied with respect, ‘Cockroaches’, and I thought, ‘Now I got your attention huh?’ and he promised as soon as I went out in the evening, he would spray my bed with the pesticides, full strength. ‘I wanted to shout at the top of my voice, ‘Make it industrial strength.’, but I kept quite because now I have realized that it would dilute the gravity of the issue that I had raised. And after I had talked to him, thanks to this episode, I have also realized that I have a bad habit of fucking up the advantage at the last moment by being sarcastic, or trifling. And which is a habit it’s time I let go of.

And what about feeling weak? I don’t think it can be solely attributed to viral. I think the lack of parks in Bombay has something to do with it. I am a person with multiple complications when it comes to health and well being. And one of these is my weakening knees and back. I have concluded that it would be suicidal to run on cement surfaces. It would be like trying to drive a beat up beetle over the Rockies, in that event, a lot more than the bumper is likely to come off. And I am not ready to compromise even a bumper anymore. I have lost enough things in life. And so I make sure that I only run on clay or grass. But the lack of parks in this city makes it remarkably difficult. I remembered how I used to hate MICA alumni at the alumni meet referring to their paunch and calling it an occupational hazard. But now I know how that hazard comes into play. Anyway, it’s hard to picture myself ending up with even a slightest of paunch. It’s just not cool. And more importantly it’s just not me. But given the lack of parks in the city, given my growing love for the city, and assuming that I will most probably end up working here, it will have to be some treadmill kept in a gym that will have to do the trick.

When I woke up feeling weak, I had to just stay still for about twenty minutes to gather enough courage to move to the bathroom. But the conversation between my bed-neighbors, the merchant-navy-big-bully and his bed pal kept me engaged, so I decided not to move for another few minutes. The big bully, who supposedly once had a brawl with the captain of his ship and taught him a lesson by getting himself fired from the job (don’t ask how) was once again narrating the stories about life on the big blue. And then when he got stuck on a minor detail, something to do about the coldness of the food served in life on the big blue, he referred to me. Then, his bed pal asked him about me and he mentioned casually, ‘Yeh babu hoga engineering side ka officer, hai na babu?’ And I had been thinking that all these days I had made it crystal clear that I have nothing to do with ships and the closest that I ever came to a ship was when I watched the movie Titanic. Actually my most frequently spoken sentence in here is, ‘Main shipping mein nahin hoon.’ I promptly made it clear to them that I knew nothing about the serving temperature of the food on the big blue and that I had nothing to do with ships.

I woke up feeling weak and suddenly the promise that I had made to Vishal on the evening of May, 05, 06 started to look weak too, like it would snap any moment. The promise had been about going to catch a movie because it is a natural thing to do when you bump into your Career Launchaer, Chandigarh (presently at IIM-L) buddy on Churchgate after you have just flipped though a few pages of ‘Penthouse Girl on Girl’ on one of the pirated book seller’s hangout but have ended up buying ‘The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-time’ which after reading left you wishing that had you been the dog that got pitch forked in very beginning of the novel you wouldn’t have had to go through this sedate, overrated crap. So now it’s almost 4 in the afternoon and I am not too good at remembering movie schedules around here and besides I’ve got a courier to make to mama before I can call him. And the most crucial thing is that I don’t have a cell, so the communication between him and me is like one way traffic. When do I call him? Maybe I’ll make the courier drop at 4:30 and then call him at five so that he can catch the evening show of whatever Bollywood crap is playing.

The weakness that I felt in the morning was not alone. Not alone in the sense, it was accompanied by a serene, contemplative frame of mind. And because of this contemplation inducing weakness I couldn’t help but remember the chain of events on the night of May 05, 06. How I entered the STD after going to the Thomas Cook office and then saw him- that bastard. I know I am not making much sense. I think, in order to make sense the elevator of Ship, which I have screwed up once before, is the right place to start. Let me make this clear that I don’t have any special liking for this elevator. It’s just an elevator. It does nothing more than what an elevator is supposed to do. It just shuttles people up and down through a dark vertical channel, which if you happen to look into otherwise, would seem pretty spooky. Though I think the elevator is another reason for me to feel weak. This is how. Because of it I do not use the staircase and I am kept from getting even that exercise which I would get in case I used the staircase. No matter how unappealing this elevator might be, there is a special thing about it though I am not sure if it’s face-saving or defacing. The thing about the elevator is that (I am speaking for males here because I don’t know how it would affect the female body) it can make you grab your balls. Yes. Believe your eyes. Look I’ll write it again for your sake in bold. It can make you grab your balls. It can do that because it is the most abrupt elevator I have ever been on. When you press the down button, your balls come all the way up to your throat and choke you, and when you push the up button, your balls touch the floor and rebound. It is nothing like the caring, gentle and thoughtful elevator at the Thomas Cook office, which accelerates slowly and decelerates as slowly. It’s not like this one at Ship, which behaves like a brick hurled at the sky. Good thing that I screwed it. Had they not hired an elevator operator, I would have screwed it over and over again. I can screw it at will because I know how to if I want to. Okay I accept that I had lied when I said I don’t have a particular liking for the elevator, what I really meant is that I hate it from the gut. So where was I? Yes I was saying that it can make you grab your balls. What I meant was that, to ensure the integrity of your balls when traveling in this one of a kind elevator, you tend to secure your balls. And since now I have become habituated to this elevator ritual, I happened to grab my balls even when I was at the Thomas Cook office, purely out of habit, which elevated one of the eye brow of the elevator operator. Seeing the eyebrow go up, I instinctively let go of my balls. Quite contrary to expectations, soon I and my balls were in the 5-star comfort of cloud nine when the Thomas Cook elevator sensitively whisked us from ground floor to fourth floor. On the fourth floor I collected the money which I was supposed to from the Travel Insurance Department, smoothly traveled down the building in the thoughtful elevator, and proceeded towards the STD to call mama to inform her that I had received the money. I made it a point to enter this particular STD because it’s always 'AC on', and because it’s terribly hot and humid, even in the evenings. I entered one of the cabins to make the call to mama. I made the call. When I was making the call to mama and was half way through of what I had planned to say to her, he walked in and instantly I knew it was unmistakably him. No one could look more…well…‘him’. He was with who I thought was his wife, and only yesterday he had told me in the street that he was traveling alone. Despite being a person who lies frequently I can’t stand liars. And this little lie of his was indicating that everything that he had told me was a big lie and it meant that he really was what I had thought of him the night before. Anyways, no words passed between us. I gave him a knowing smile, the kind of smile that says, ‘I got everything figured about you baby. I even know what the tattoo on the ass of the man who gave you the tattoo on your ass says. It says, ‘I own you smartass.’’ So I gave him that kind of a knowing smile. I was able to give him that kind of a smile because truth was on my side or atleast i thought so. He usherered his wife into the STD cabin adjacent to mine and then, I saw the streak of fear on his face and the drop of sweat that ran down his worried face, sliding down his temple and along his cheek. I concluded that he must be terribly worried to see me to sweat like that in my favorite, perfectly cooled STD shop. I said love you to mama and then kept the receiver down. By that time he had walked out of the shop. I stepped out of the shop with the ‘I own you buddy’. smile on my face and then what happened will make sense only when I tell you what had happen on the evening of May 04, 06.

This is what happened on the evening of May 04, 06. I woke up feeling weak and called in sick at the Express. But it was not the kind of weakness which brought with it the contemplative streak. It was the ‘restless’ kind which make me conclude that feeling contemplative is independent of feeling weak which beats my previous hypotheses. But anyway, I was feeling weak and so I spent the day sleeping and daydreaming until the evening when the adventurer in me urged me to take a walk and explore the surroundings within a clean radius of a kilometer. I listened to the adventurer in me and got down to fulfilling its urge which by now had become my urge too and it was a combined urge now. And so I jumped into my jeans, hedged the cash in my wallet to a level where it wont hurt in case I got mugged, jumped into the elevator, secured my balls, the operator pressed the button and I landed on ground zero. After having my dinner I was returning to Ship when out of nowhere…no let me reframe…it was actually from behind a parked three ton army truck that he appeared. I saw him. My mind registered the first impression of him and it said, ‘Hunky-dory. Safe.’ He was a harmless looking middle-aged man, wearing a bottle-green kurta, probably silk, with an astoundingly neatly trimmed mustache which looked like a wider than normal black Johnson’s Band-Aid ultra neatly stuck above his upper lip. He was speaking English the way many middle class men speak, with a streak of unfamiliarity with the language in their tone. But I guess…no I know for sure why he chose English despite being uncomfortable with it. It’s because it is one language which is not as harsh as Hindi. To quote an example, it is nearly impossible to ejaculate our frustration by saying ‘Shit!’ in Hindi, at least in public.
This is what he had to say to open the conversation with the stranger that was me, ‘How far is Gateway of India from here?’
Because I happen to be a frequent hiker from VT to Gateway of India, I told him, ‘If you take a bus it would take 5 minutes or if you are feeling adventurous enough you could walk down to the Gateway of India which would take you about 20 minutes but the walk is worth all the sweat.’ And the fact remains that it is indeed one of the most beautiful serenades I have come across. It is almost as beautiful as the The Mall in Jalandhar Cantt, where I used to serenade when I was either extraordinarily pissed or exceptionally happy, generally, or even with someone particular. These two, together are two of the most therapeutic stretches I have had the pleasure of serenading. Anyway, he was not interested in what I was saying. As I would figure out later, he had to stick to the script, his script to be more precise, and I am the kinds who can make a mockery of his kind of a script. So he hurriedly came back to talking about Gateway of India which seemed to be one of the key words of the script on which a lot depends, and said, ‘Don’t mind I am only speaking to you as a friend. I had a bad experience when I first went to Gateway of India.’
‘Don’t tell me you got mugged…’ I interrupted him much to his irritation because I was doing to his script what I would like to do to the elevator in my hotel- screwing it. I got ready to narrate what had happened with me. He made an irritated expression and stopped me with a hand gesture.
He continued, ‘I was very young at that time, and don’t mind me saying this, I am only speaking to you as a friend, I was quite healthy at that time and I had boobs’, he said pointing to his chest. I am sure I lifted an eyebrow when he mentioned boobs because I had not expected this kind of slang language form this seemingly antiquated life form from some small town in India. And I did not try to think what would have happened, if we were talking in Hindi, how would the sentence that he just said would sound.
He didn’t stop there, he went on, ‘And there was this guy at the Gateway of India who started rubbing them and started tickling my nipples’. This was accompanied by a gesture which looked like he was tying to a drive in a screw but he was short of a screw driver so he was using his thumb and the pointer finger instead. ‘And that got me really…EXCITED.’, he said. Boy was he well rehearsed. The psychological implication to be observed here is how he had reacted positively to the pervert’s advances, by getting excited (and not offended, a reaction one might expect from a straight person, or even gay person for that matter), in his Gateway of India instance. Talk about stinking, subtle communication.
Then he asked me, ‘Where are you living?’
I said, ‘Ship Hotel.’ And then he gave a knowing smile which was badly rehearsed and had many flaws in it.
After he had smiled the flawed knowing smile, he said, ‘So when you guys watch blue films in Ship, is it true that guys start feeling each-other up.’ I noticed how he said ‘blue-films’ and not ‘porn’ or ‘porn films’ instead which proves that he was a blast from the past and was quite inactive now compared to his younger days when such (now considered antiquated vocabulary) was in vogue. I did not raise an eyebrow this time. I was so calm that I thought I would freak-out the bastard with it. I was acting on the principal that people get freaked out when they things don’t go according to plan. Acting contrary to expectations is the best thing to do in those times. I merely said without being too offending because I was weaving my web and couldn’t afford to scare him away, ‘Nothing like that happens in Ship, your imagination is too wild.’ And he laughed like a hyena. This is the kind of laugh that suited him perfectly. This was his original laugh. The knowing smile had looked such a sham.
His script looked over and it couldn’t look more bombed so I assumed that it was my turn now. So to freak him out further, I started asking him a flurry of questions, which ranged from where he was from, what he did for a living, whether he was married, where was he living in Mumbai about most of which he lied. I know he lied because when he was going by the script he was looking straight into my eyes but when I introduced my own little impromptu script which involved unexpected questions, he started looking away, his mind trying hard to detach itself from his Gateway of India fantasies and thinking up false, credible seeming information. The biggest lie being that he was staying in Trombay and had come to town for ‘business’. And then I enquired about ‘business’ he said that he was into plastic tank business. I had been sure that his man was a phony for a long time now but now I really wanted to kick his butt at his own game. The only difference was that his communication was scripted. Mine wasn’t, so I had to be very careful of what I spoke. I suddenly had an idea which I thought would trap him. I had noticed how he had looked away when he was mentioning his profession. I presumed that he had lied about it. I thought I would trap him by asking him a closed ended question framed in an open-ended way (to use the terms in a slightly different way, you know what I mean). The framing of the question was tricky. I could ask the question in two ways,

1. ‘So you only trade in plastic tanks or you also make them?’
2. ‘So you only make tanks or sell them too?’

I figured that in order to avoid answering more questions about the same, if I asked the first question, he would answer, ‘I only trade in plastic tanks’. He would do that to avoid responsibility of knowing about the know-how of manufacturing plastic tanks.
So I took the second option. And falling in with expectations, he said, ‘No, I only make them.’
I had got him. The logical thing to do was to ask him a whole lot of technical questions about plastic tank manufacturing. For instance, where they get the plastic, what was the formula of the plastic used, who designs the moulds, what was the capacity, where was the factory located. By the time I was through my script, he was sweating profusely and I suspect that his mind was now far removed from Gateway of India type fantasies.
And then after I had asked the questions, I gave him my knowing smile, which was a proper knowing smile and then nervously he said, ‘You asked me so many questions. Like a lawyer, like a lawyer. It wasn’t without a purpose. You asked them just like a lawyer.’ He seemed quite awed by lawyers. I told him. ‘I am studying to be an MBA.’ And I said it in a tone which conveyed, ‘I don’t have to be a lawyer to teach you a lesson bastard.’ This made him even more nervous. And them I guessed that he had no more water left in his body to convert to sweat, so it was time to say good-bye but not before he said almost with awe, ‘What a handsome man!’ Yes that was meant for me. And though it reeked of flattery, I lapped it up because you know how flattery works. Though you know it’s flattery, it does affect you on a subconscious level. But what is important is not that you are being affected by it, what is important is that you should know that you are being affected. He stuck out his hand to shake mine. But it hardly culminated into a successful handshake as his hand was hanging like a damp squid and I did not intend to hold a damp squid on a day on which I had gotten up feeling weak and restless. So I just plain left, and he went his way. I walked away knowing that he knew that I knew what he was and what he had just tried with me.

Now that you know what had happened on the 4th of May, I can tell you what happened on the evening of 5th of May and make sense too. After I stepped out of the STD, though I had the knowing smile on my face, I had planned to leave him and his ghosts alone but his ghosts had vomited much venom in his mind by now, and so he blocked my way and stopped me. I could smell all the alcohol that he had consumed that evening. He grabbed my T- shirt with his damp squid and warned me in his drunken voice, ‘You don’t say a word about me to anyone.’ I wanted to hit him. But I thought again. And I thought about his wife who was still in the STD cabin, his non-existent kid, and then I simply slapped the damp squid away, freeing myself in the process and simply walked off as if we had never met before and he was some random drunkard who had accosted me.

As I was walking to Ship the episode kept playing in my head over and over again and I had this huge urge of sharing the episode with someone so that tomorrow if the bastard harms me in anyway, they would know who to look for- a middle aged man named Ashish, traveling with his wife, and who had stayed in one of the hotels in the area near Ship. I knew that it was his own name because of the way he had said it. And I also knew that he did not have a kid because he had got terribly confused when I had asked him the question about kids. First he had said no and then after considering his age, and his married status, he said yes. And moreover I did not see a kid when I saw him with his wife. Why would caring parents not bring the kids along? I know I am making a lot of assumptions here but that is how irrational I was on that evening. So I thought that I would call Swati. I called her up from one of the get-lost-if-you-don’t-have-a-coin local phones, but then when I heard the engaged tone on her phone, I thought why should Swati have to put up with all the crap that happens to me. I should learn to handle the crap on my own, just like old times, and I also figured that the unexpectedly violent behavior of the bastard had induced me to think unreasonable crap. I finally decided that this particular incident does not need to be told to Swati at 11 in the night-time. With this thought in my head I walked up to Ship, stepped into the elevator, found the operator absent, secured my balls, tinkered with the button, screwed the elevator, took the staircase, went to my bed, and collapsed on it.