A man boards the train from Ulhasnagar, has a very obvious Sindhi accent even while he talks Hindi. He is one of the lucky ones among members of ‘train groups’ to have a culturally diverse group of people travelling together to their different places of work. He spouts quite a few Malayalam words, which to the surprise of the Malayalis in the group, sound very much like how a purebred Malayali would talk! It is revealed, now, that this gentleman has been undertaking the annual sabari mala trip without a break for quite some years. The few words that he knows stand testimony to all those devotional trips. What more, he relishes south-indian food and says there’s nothing in the world like the yummy food in Udipis!

Mollywood now has a new actress. The 22year-old is named Roma. She is settled in Chennai and speaks Tamil as fluently as her mother tongue- Sindhi! Roma Asrani. Though I don’t know more about this new budding starlet, I happen to know that she’s as healthy as the other leading ladies of Malayalam cinema.

<----- Roma Asrani

A lady lives in the nearby colony tries so hard to talk in chaste Malayalam, that she actually succeeds, but not before making you feel that she’s not really a Malayali. Truth is, she’s actually a Sindhi lady married to a Keralite, speaks convincing Malayalam, wears deceptively Malayali sarees and dresses, cooks food that taste almost like it came from a Udipi hotel!

All three of the above stories have two things in common. One is obviously the Sindh-Kerala connect. The other thing is that all three of them were told to me by my mother. The uncle in the train is in my dad’s train group. The Sindhi married to a Keralite lives in the same building as my sister’s dance teacher.

We had been watching the box yesterday. A reality talent hunt show was on when my mother pointed out to the celebrity guest and asked me if I know who that was. I replied in the negative. ‘I don’t get to watch much of TV, how do you expect me to know,’ I rued. She replied that the guest was Roma, a Sindhi girl who is now acting in Malayalam films.

I don’t know what she is driving at, but it is definitely sure that she is contemplating yet another such union. It gives me great pleasure that she is giving serious thought to it. Reason to rejoice? Only time will tell.

“Tu repeater hai kya?” he asked me.

“Ehh…repeater nahi…” I replied and told him that this was the first time I was doing the sixth semester. So technically, I’m not a repeater, but non-technically, I am?

No ‘friends’ in class. There are two girls who talk a little more Hindi than the others, precisely why I solve the MidDay Bollywood Crossword with them. That is one part of this class that I certainly enjoy. Some lectures are fun, the others morose. No group to ‘hang out’ with. Hari is a loner. The fun lectures are where Hari opens up sometimes, thinks openly about things he heard at work, learnt in the process…shares with the class. Other times, a general quiet descends. Nothing much to talk. Anyways, there’s no one to talk to. Almost all of whom I knew flew away last April.

Lone canteen visits…the four-seaters are over-flowing with bums, while I manage to find a place to grab my grubs in peace. Dark clouds poke me with the silver wiring in them. The silver wiring of all that I did in the one year that I lost, of things I learnt and the money I earned. Sooner than later, the mildly pleasnt hallucination caused by the wiring sublimes into vapour as the dark cloud fogs the planet again.

Why did this have to happen? Why couldn’t I have passed out with the others? Damned.

I think I know why I feel so down in the Deonar dumps.

K. Complete the following sentence with any fucking ten words of your choice:

Hari is going through this because………………………

One hand up. It’s Hari! Ok, Hari, tell us the answer. You are so smart, only you know the answer.

Ahem…yaya…all that is fine. I am going through all this because I always looked down upon repeaters. Did the ‘always good to everybody’ Hari really look down at people who had lost an academic year and scoff and haughtily think to himself that he’s way smarter than any of them?

*sheepish grin* uh…I guess…yes. There’s my neighbour who is really smart but would always fail when he was in school and I would always think to myself what a dimwit he was. It’s only in the near past that I got over that mean pre-conceived notion. Then there were many of these new faces that could be seen on the first day of every year at school.

“Hey, is that one of the repeaters? May be. Because, if it were a new student…the uniform would look newer than what he’s wearing now,” my mind would talk to itself.

It would take days to get talking to this new addition. Not because I thought academic failure was contagious or anything, but because such students were usually known for their nefarious activities and I really didn’t want to be known as one of them.

I never thought of myself as conceited as I now seem to be. My memories are shattering me.

I was getting my new college I-card made…when the guy in-charge asked me, “Tu repeater hai kya?”

The question hit me on my face like stray stones hit footboard travelers on local trains. It reminded me of how demeaning…almost derogatory that word was to me, till a few years ago.

All these while, I thought I did no one any harm. It brings tears to me. I thought I was all goody-goody in school. My hands shook if I tried to copy during exams. I never pushed anyone while climbing the stairways to the classroom, never clicked my shoes on the hard stone, never talked in class other than when of utmost necessity.

Isn’t there something on the same lines as sow a mango seed and you get a mango, not an apple?

My current class is good, accommodative and intellectually sparring and they wouldn’t look down at anyone, let alone me. But it is not my class. Yet.

Enough of things that thus weigh me down, compelling me to squander precious time and energy over such senile thoughts. Hope things do change for the better. May the dark cloud be vacuumed out of my head. Hope the industrial visit help me make friends, to help me get out of this semester in peace. Hope the projects and studies and work goes fine. And then there would be nothing to be as sorry about.

No pushing

No shoving

No elbowing

No words spoken

No words intended for me

No hard feelings

No gritting teeth

More time to read

More time to sleep

More time to contemplate

Better audibility of the mobile phone

Stone/ impassive faces replace concerned emotive ones

‘Who you?’ is the highest authoritative policy

Cushioned seats pamper my bum for now…but does it get used to it or gets offended by it is yet to be seen

Such has been my experience following the much-awaited switch to the I Class coach. More observations to follow, am sure! Wink wink.

There is this small gap between our building and the one in front of ours, where we used to hide, while playing ...shit I forgot the name of the game...lol, we called it lapa chhupi (Marathi for luka chhupi) which I had totally forgotten about until my little cousin showed it to me today...and to my surprise, I can still pass through the small passage, albeit tilted...my waist has grown and so has my paunch, so I really have to try not to get stuck between the mossy walls! For a while, I felt I was twelve again!

(Pic: Shyamal Unni. Camera: Nikon Coolpix L5)

Well well…

Two more days and I head back to college to pick up from where I left off, from where I was told to take a break for a year and join back later. Questions arose like infuriated soldiers from hidden bunkers. I hadn’t failed in one subject in 11 years of schooling. The trend began in the tenth and continued throughout, into the HSC and then plagued the two and a half years of mass media that I ventured to study.

My future looked so bleak. It looked like stone walls with graffiti on it, which read, “You’ll never get anything you wish for.” Days spent brooding, sulking. More time was spent at home, surfing the internet. Nearly a thousand job/internship applications sent- some by email, the rest by snail-mail. Meanwhile, I made a new friend. We met through Orkut and then met through a common friend.

(I still don’t get how my time can be bad when all the things happening to me right now are for the best of my interest!)

Luck bent a finger a beckoned me lustfully. A teacher at college, my mentor, got me an internship with The Indian Express. All of a sudden, a nobody, a college dropout was an intern sub editor! It was my first peek of how a real newspaper works and what it needs to be good at what I was learning to do.

2 months later, yet another job followed, but this time, I was supposed to be a full-time sub editor. Afternoon Despatch & Courier. Memories of college wafted in often, rendering me weak, forcing me to wonder if I was treading on a wrong path. My newly-found friend turned love was always there to peel that feeling out of me like you skim out the tender filmy layer off a glass of milk.

Seven months down that lane, ADC, as the paper was sometimes called, decided to down its shutters. Even as this is being typed, the matter as to who actually owns the paper now is awaiting the decision of a court of justice.

A few days later, I was offered a job to write funny-sounding scripts for a comedy show on a newly-born national channel! Wow, isn’t this like a stepping stone to whatever I have always wanted to do?

I took it up. It is fun. But now, college beckons. Hope my stock of luck ain’t over just yet.
A few more years of such booming luck and I would be where I just want to be...

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