Smile of Innocence

     "Vile Parle station aa gaya kya bhaiyya?"

     "Yeh samne kya hai?"


     Ignoring the sarcasm, Avinash slipped a ten rupee note to the autorikshaw driver before stepping out of the three-wheeler, stooping a little to allow his five foot eleven frame to exit the vehicle. He reached in and pulled out his five kilo backpack, smiling inwardly as he noticed the airline baggage sticker which read 'CCU to BOM' in large letters, thinking about the fried sardines his sister in law had packed for him back at his brother's house in Salt Lake, Kolkata.


     Blasted security at the Dum Dum airport, he thought to himself. They had refused to clear his backpack to be carried as cabin baggage because of the 'food item' inside. He had to walk all the way back to the check in counter thanks to the law abiding khaki clad muchchad.


     "Kya farak padta hai yaar? Flight ke andar thode hi na khaane wala hoon", he had tried to reason with the stoic policeman behind the baggage screening counter. But mucchad would have none of it. Well, it was worth a shot trying to save the fifteen minutes of baggage claiming on arrival. Ah forget it.


     He swung the camouflage style backpack over one shoulder and turned away from the autorikshaw to face the mild winter sun. He took a deep breath of the morning Mumbai air, closed his eyes for a moment, felt the bright red of the sunlight diffusing through his eyelids and smiled in the mellow radiance. There was no real need to hurry; he had already called Moorthy the day before informing him he would reach office a little late, since he was taking the morning flight to Mumbai and taking the Shivneri bus to Pune thereafter. Keeping an eye out for the morning traffic, he leisurely crossed the narrow road to the Vile Parle railway station, the smile still etched absently on his bony face.


     The shining sun had reminded him of a smiling face back in Kolkata. That of his three month old nephew, whose sleeping face he had gingerly kissed before leaving the house in time for the early Monday morning flight to Mumbai.


     He still remembered the feeling of profound happiness he had felt when he received the phone call three months earlier from his older brother Subhash, informing him that he had become an uncle. He’d thought he would burst with joy.


     Holding Appu back in Subhash’s house had felt like holding a piece of heaven in his arms. He loved the way the tiny fingers wrapped themselves around his wrist. He loved the little baby noises Appu made when he was entertained or felt happy about something. He loved the way Appu smelled. He loved the amazed look on the baby's face when he swung a little rattle above his head. He could just sit and look at Appu all day and forget all the evils of the world.


     But most of all, he loved making Appu smile. He little cared how ridiculous he must have looked prancing around the cradle, pulling ridiculous faces, making weird noises, sticking his nose out for him to grab; anything to see the little one smile that fully content happy smile that only a baby can show. His favourite stunt was to hold Appu's stuffed 'Tigger' high above the baby's face and bring it down slowly towards him. Appu would reach out with both hands and jiggle his legs, and sometimes laugh out loud in excitement.


     Perhaps it's why everyone is so fond of babies, he reflected. A baby’s is a soul so fresh and innocent, free of disillusionment, one which can make the beholder feel complete. Making such a soul smile does bring about an inner feeling of fulfilment that nothing else can imbibe, he reflected, as he took his place in the queue at the ticket counter.


     Monday morning sluggishness seemed to have affected everyone this morning as the line moved forward ever so slowly. The young man behind the heavily grilled counter, no older than himself, seemed to be new at his work, taking his time to count and return the change to the passengers. After what seemed an eternity, the person in front of him called out "Ek CST return" and shoved a 500 rupee note at the novice. Ugh for crying out loud, he sighed to himself. He looked absently around the booking hall. There was nothing much to see save the few homeless huddled under some dirty covers.


     "Malik, thode chutthe paise de do malik".

     Awakened from his reverie, Avinash recoiled slightly at the sight of the emaciated face, looked away hastily and started to count the number of people in the queue before him. The beggar moved on, a limping with a stout stick in one hand and a grimy bowl in the other.


     A young woman sitting under a closed booking window barely a few feet away caught his eye. Two shirtless children were sitting on the floor beside her as she cuddled a baby on her lap. He gazed absently at the scene, as the woman rolled up a piece of rag, picked up a piece of paper lying around and stuffed it into the a fold of the rolled up rag.


     He watched as she raised this piece of rag and lowered it slowly towards the baby's face, her tired face in a glowing smile. A delighted laugh broke out on the baby's face, in shockingly familiar radiance, as it kicked its little legs and raised its arms towards the rag in excitement. Avinash stared, transfixed; his mind went blank; everything else seemed to fade away. All that seemed to exist was this woman and her child, in their own world.


     He blinked, oblivious of the weight on his back, or the railway station or where he was going. His mind spluttered incoherently, unable to tell him what he was trying to feel.


     He felt a sharp tap on his left shoulder. He started violently and jerked around. The man behind him pointed at the ticket counter ahead. The novice behind the counter had his arm out, with an amused look on his face.


     "Boss kidhar jaane ka hai? "

     "Uhh.. s-sorry bhaiyya.. Dadar".


     He scooped up his change with the cardboard stub ticket and stepped away from the counter, trying to ignore the chuckles from the others in the queue. Just before leaving the booking hall, he looked back. The baby was trying to reach out to its little doll; it had wrapped its little fingers around its mother's wrist for support.


     A recorded message rang out on the public address system, announcing the imminent arrival the train to Dadar. He deliberated for a moment, turned away slowly and walked thoughtfully onto the platform.

Identity

No, not featuring John Cusack. This is about me.

An observation I have made about myself is that I speak in different accent and style with different people I meet. Perhaps it's because of the environment I grew up in, being in a Bengali family settled in Trivandrum. I was exposed to people who spoke in many different styles. For instance, my father speaks good English, good Bengali and good Hindi. My mother speaks good Bengali and English, and learned all her Malayalam and most of her Hindi after marriage. Most of this rubbed off on me and my elder brother, and naturally I learned to speak like them. I went to a school full of Malayalee students and Malayalee teachers; Malayalam was a compulsory language to learn until the fifth standard, and I had no choice but to learn to speak the language. Not that I wouldn't have anyway, since people spoke it everywhere.

I had Hindi teachers in school who were Malayalees, and would speak Hindi with very strong Malayali accents, English teachers who spoke the language with effortless perfection but couldn't speak Malayalam without a north Indian accent, Malayali science teachers who spoke English with a local accent and so on. Then there were the locals who spoke Malayam with different accents depending on which part of Kerala they were from. The list could go on for ages.

Add to this all, my older brother's and my habit of mimicking real life noises while playing with toys as kids. Screech of tires as a car skids of the parapet, hiss of poisonous snakes, boom of bombs exploding; there's no limit to what a child can imagine when it's at play.

What this all led to was an ability to speak with different people in an accent which was very close to his or hers. For instance, if a mallu asked me what time it was, I'd probably say 'Zevun Thyettie', getting the accent dead right to the last roll of the tongue. If someone in Pune asked me the same question, 'sewan thurrty' automatically comes out. When I speak to my friends from Bangalore or Kerala, my sentences are invariably festooned with words like 'macha' and 'da', which are commonly used among friends of similar ages in those parts. I had spent a week in Delhi last winter while attending a cousin's marriage, and I found myself adding 'ji' at the end of my sentences while speaking with locals.

I really don't know how my accent automatically changes when I converse with people from different places. Perhaps that's how I am; perhaps at some level I begin to speak like people around me because it brings about a subconscious sense of interactive comfort; although none of it is done intentionally.

Most States in India are formed based on the language that majority of the people of that region speak. Perhaps, in this system, my being born in a State, into a family which speaks a different language has negated the necessity of having a 'linguistic identity'. Regardless of the many surprised and inquisitive eyebrows that my family and I have answered to, I take this as a boon, a gift. To be able to understand and relate to at least two regional cultures and languages in a country so culturally rich and diverse; where millions of others like me are not so fortunate to have experienced, or to be able to experience the best of different worlds.

The extraordinary cricketing tales of Purvarth Maddhyanakumar - IV

Throughout childhood, some of the proverbs that were poured over my head (nay, taught!), sometimes to the point of grey-cell-saturation were “Practice makes perfect”, “Rome was not built in a day”, and so on and so forth. Phrases and proverbs, which in a nutshell, were invented to build character. Now unlike the endearing Calvin and his dad, I didn't live in a country where it snowed every winter. Naturally there was never any snow in the courtyard to shovel away and thus 'build character'. Understandably, the proverbs came thick and fast to compensate for the lack of the character-building snow.

But I digress. What I'm driving at is that little Purvarth didn't just wake up one fine Monday and start delivering toe crushers at specifically demarcated trees with a rubber ball. He started off at the tender age of 2 or 3, pretending to be Kapil Dev running purposefully through the living room and hurling an imaginary red cherry at the maidservant struggling with a dirty milk-pot in the kitchen. Later of course, he advanced to higher levels of competence which involved a rubber ball, his elder brother's 'heavy' cricket bat, the initial struggles to catch a moving ball and so on, until he one day began playing with his neighbourhood friends at the 'practice ground', more about which you would have read in an earlier post.

When I was all of six years old, barely into my first standard, playing cricket on the road in front of the house with all the children in the neighbourhood, both young and old, used to be the high point of the day. We used to assemble on the poorly laid coal-tar turf by 4 pm on weekends and occasionally after school on weekdays, by which time the intensity of the hot tropical sun had subsided to an extent which, our parents were convinced (after much pleading) would not cause untold dehydration on us little souls. This turf of ours saw much cricket played by us for many years, right from the late 1980s until the last of us kids of the neighbourhood moved out of home in the early 2000s.

One particular game of cricket played here taught me a lesson, one that many most people who have played cricket will tell you too: you will have bad days on the field. But you need to have heart even if things don't go your way. It was well into my fourth standard at school, when one day, at the end of a long day at school all the neighbourhood kids had gathered around for a game of cricket. There were children of all ages. RD who was was the eldest of us all was in the 11th standard, Deergharth Madyanakumar (Purvarth's older brother) and SK who were in the 9th, DB who was a year older to me and a handful of other kids. In the company of towering (in age and height) personalities like this, DB and I generally did whatever we were told to do, like "field here!", or "stand there!" or "get ready to bat next!" and so on. And we quite enjoyed it too. 

This was a day when I learned for the first time what it was to be 'sledged' by the opposition, and to be literally (sledge) hammered in the game. I was never a great fielder, even worse when in the primary school. If Purvarth M ever took a catch, it would result in utter disbelief from many, and naturally in much celebration. Somewhat like Venkatesh Prasad winning a match for India by virtue of his batting. RD was at the crease, ominously wielding his massive Jonex cricket bat while Deergharth was bowling. RD, knowing my weakness decided to play all the deliveries to point, where I was fielding. To make matters worse, he kept reminding me how pathetic my fielding was and promised me between overs to hit everything towards me. Amid the guffaws from the others, my ears burned in shame, because well, he had a point. There would be much yelling from the people on my team if a square cut from the batsman passed right by me and zoomed into the coconut grove (which was our boundary). 

My fears were not without reason too, for many such shots from RD zipped straight through me causing several shouts of "Purva! What the hell!!". On the bright side, I got plenty of exercise running repeatedly from point to square boundary and back all the time. Not that I needed it then though, how much extra exercise does a boisterous 6 year old really need? Anyway, after a while my turn had come to bowl. However to my dismay, RD was still batting and it didn't look like he was going to relent anytime soon. 

"Hold on", I thought. "Here's my chance to get him out, and get back at him for all those jibes. Hah. He who laughs last laughs best!" With this renewed confidence, I breezed through my run up, jumped gracefully at the popping crease and let loose at RD batting at the other end. It's a different thing: bowling to fellow fourth graders and bowling to a seasoned high school stud. Despite my hopes and confidence of 'beating' the batsman and all that, my delivery benignly approached RD. 

"THACK!" 

RD hit a straight drive sixer, sending the ball gracefully way over my head and into another neighbour's compound, which formed our straight boundary. I was stunned into disbelief and wonder, and after the next ball which also went for six, absolute helplessness. Deergarth and the rest of my team were beside themselves with perfectly justifiable frustration. But that wasn't going to help at all, as RD kept smashing everything I threw at him. 

Around this time, dad returned home from work, and his arrival coincided with the penultimate delivery of my over. He didn't go into the house immediately, but lingered by the fence, dangling his briefcase nonchalantly with two fingers. This penultimate was slightly better, but only in that RD didn't hit the ball for a six, but he strode out of the crease and creamed the ball right past me for a scorching four! I took a little solace from the fact that he didn't smash it for a six before dad. Relief was short lived though; I was losing all confidence and willingness to bowl at this madman. Nevertheless, I completed the over, and let loose at the batting RD with all my strength. He actually stepped out and swept the ball for a six, again right over my head. Dad responded with applause for the dude who was ruining his son's reputation, saying "Wow! He is just like Sachin Tendulkar!". That was the last straw. Unable to bear it anymore, I legged it from the scene of humiliation and ran into my house, ran bawling past my mum and the dining table, into my bedroom and screamed into my pillow every swear word a nine year old could think of. All directed at RD of course. 

Demoralizing as this game was to my confidence with the ball, it helped me have heart later in my cricketing days in school. I knew what it was to have your best bowling smashed with disdain, and regardless of how many wickets I may have taken in school, there were numerous occasions when my classmates would hit me for fours and sixes. Somewhere deep down, this experience gave me the heart to go back to the bowling mark, and keep bowling at the batsmen with the same effort, if not more. 

And much later, when I reflected about how little experiences teach us things, I realized another very important aspect of the game when I remembered my dad applauding RD. While making that comment, exasperating though it sounded to me at the time, he had introduced the concept of the Spirit of Sportsmanship to me. Someone who outclasses you fair and square deserves your applause, and after all much of the spirit of cricket is based on this aspect. I obviously didn't realize the importance of it then, but I did later, and realized how much healthier it made the experience sports in general.