The Eighteenth Parallel (4 page)

I'm aware that as I tell you all this, you may get the impression of the passage of years. In fact, these episodes – the buffalo, Morris, the state of war with Krishnaswamy and his brothers, monkeys-on-the-tree, films like
Tarzan's New York Adventures,
Venkat's and Appa Rao's obscene laughter, the search for a grave in the cemetery, exploring the hills for a place of refuge, Morris' eldest sister's advances – all this took place within a short span of time, certainly not more than a year. When I entered the sixth form, the World War had ended. By then Morris' second sister had also undergone a transformation. The girl was a little dark. And she was large. Her name was Laura. I have for some reason forgotten the eldest sister's name. Try as hard as I might, the name still eludes me. The human mind is still so utterly unreliable. Several years can be rubbed off from your consciousness without the slightest trace, while the tiniest nuances of a random five minutes may be on call instantly as if they were a stretch of eternity. The mind seems to have a special clock and calendar. Or maybe it has neither.

Well, Morris' eldest sister who had been bubbling over with high spirits all through the war years had now fallen into despondency. The British soldier who had been a frequent visitor till now had stopped visiting her. They had all been hoping that he would marry her and take her away to England. Nothing came of it, and now all she could look forward to was an Anglo-Indian life like any other girl in Secunderabad. She stayed home when we went to the cinema. Only Laura would come with us. We – Morris, his brother Terence and I, together with Laura and sometimes the other younger sister – used to go to the Plaza cinema. The ticket money for the cheapest class for the matinee show was just four annas, but British four annas, which was equal to five annas in Hyderabad's 'halli' currency. If tickets were not available at the Plaza, we moved on to the Tivoli and on the rare occasion when we drew a blank there as well, it was Dreamland. Terence always made a nuisance of himself at the cinema, kicking the chair in front of him with his booted feet, and striking a match and lighting up the moment he lowered himself into a seat. Morris could be equally troublesome but every single act of Terence's had the stamp of the savage on it, which Laura found rather attractive. All of them cold-shouldered me when they were with their Anglo-Indian friends, but when the family was alone, I was accorded the status of an insider. I was Laura's favourite. Her elder sister liked me too, though in a different way. She found my presence comforting somehow. She would take out the English magazines the soldier had given her and explain them to me page by page. One day while she was doing this, she suddenly stopped in her tracks, broke down sobbing and threw her arms round me. Moved by all this, I began to cry as well. The noise brought Mr Mannas, her father, there and he pushed us off the sofa. Enter the mother. Three or four pictures on the wall were smashed in the fight that ensued between the mother and the father.

There came a time when all these things changed—'changed' is not the word for it; every bit of it just slipped away from my life. Morris, his eldest sister, the large Laura, Terence, Mannas, Mrs Mannas, all of them. Together with the Muslim boys, my Naidu friends, Janardanan, Appa Rao, the lot. And something else came to pass, something that had seemed most unlikely. I became a close friend of Krishnaswamy and his brothers!

Ranga Ramanujan deserves credit for this.

Well, now I have heard it said that my father suffered a big loss when the Arbuthnot Bank collapsed. For a long time afterwards, he was often accosted by people with a 'What absolute idiocy, putting your money there!' I also saw some people commiserating with him. 'Poor man, he seems to have lost everything.' What my father had lost was eight hundred rupees, roughly the equivalent of fifty gold sovereigns in those days. By a stroke of coincidence it turned out that the Arbuthnot Bank a thousand miles away, had crashed at the same time as my father was returning from the tailor's with two newly sewn alpaca coats. The strange simultaneity condemned the unlucky coats to limbo for years. It was during my cricket days with Santanam that Father retrieved them for use. For several years after that, these two jackets were in constant use, worn on alternate days. They looked a shiny green one minute and turned a dazzling purple the next. Green, purple, green, purple, green here, purple there. A few places became worn threadbare and began to show patches of scarlet. When they were first taken out after ten years of storage, they were a bit moth-eaten, but otherwise there was no cause for any hesitation or embarrassment in wearing them. The reason lay in a propensity which originated with the tailors of Hyderabad who were conservative to the core. The passage of ten or even twenty years could not make them change their age-old styles. Neither did the general populace find it necessary to change their mode of dress. Schoolboys wore open collar shirts. This style of garment was favoured by most adults as well. It was only if you happened to have some cloth of superior quality or of sufficient length that you went in for a closed collar or 'tie-collar' shirt. Though this ensemble of shirt and trousers permitted of little variation, there were still nuances that gave you a clue to the wearer's communal identity. Muslim boys wore their shirts falling over their shorts, pyjamas or trousers. Among the Tamils who had migrated to Hyderabad, all adults wore the same kind of dress. It was as if they had evolved a uniform by consensus. This comprised a full-sleeved shirt tucked into a dhoti, worn with a coat and a cap. The dhoti was worn with a length of the cloth passing between the legs and separating them. Whatever his caste, Mani
Iyer,
Raghava
chari
, Govindaswami
Naidu
or Pinakapani
Mudaliar,
a Tamil migrant never went out without his regulation headgear. Lawyers and professors sported a turban.

My shorts were always made two inches wider and longer than necessary as I was a 'growing boy'. Even after tightening the buckles to the last possible millimetre, the shorts would be loose at the waist and slip down. To prevent this, I used to roll up the shorts all round the waist, much in the same way that a petticoat or sari is tucked up. This would not show; however, since I wore my shirts falling over my shorts. My tuck-up at the waist also had the incidental advantage of reducing the unwanted length of the shorts. It was on this scene that there now descended two boys whose sole mission in life, for all intents and purposes, was to effect a change in the sartorial habits of the boys of Secunderabad, Raj Kumar and Ranga Ramanujan. Belonging as they did to the new influx into Secunderabad after the end of the war, both these boys had innumerable relatives in the army—a father, a few assorted uncles and brothers.

Raj Kumar wore a new kind of shirt to school which was neither shirt nor coat. The shirt-coat had huge pockets and a stitched-on belt. This garment, Raj Kumar told us, was called a bush coat. Ranga's shirt was open in front and had buttons running up the whole length. While the rest of us had to push our heads through the necks of our shirts, he could put his shirt on like a coat, from the back. This meant that when the process was over, not a hair on his head would be out of place, while we could never get into our shirts without mussing up our hair. Ranga came from a school with a different system of education. Our school authorities must have found themselves in a quandary choosing a class to put him in. After he had sat in a higher class for a few days, he was assigned to our class for a week. He sat bemused throughout the Tamil lesson which went completely over his head. He didn't ever sit a Tamil exam.

One day during Ranga's stint in our class, our English teacher decided to test our grammar. He wrote a long sentence on the blackboard for analysis. Pointing to a part of the sentence he asked, 'What clause is that?' The boys stood up one after the other without answering. Then someone said, 'Noun clause.'

'No, next.'

'Adjectival clause,' ventured another.

'No, next.'

'Adverbial clause,' said the next boy.

These were the only three clauses we'd been taught. The whole class, not just I, was never quite sure which was which. To answer questions on grammar we always depended on our gambling instincts. Now that all these options had been exhausted, we wondered what clause it could be.

The teacher continued to call out 'Next', 'Next', till he came to me.

The teacher now looked like a veritable Shakuni of the Mahabharata, and the class took on the features of the Kaurava assembly. Then I cast the dice.

'Parenthetical clause,' I said.

There was a moment's silence in the class, a deadly silence.

'Next,' called out the teacher. The next boy happened to be Ranga who sat first on the bench behind me. He stood up and said, 'Parenthetical clause.'

At the end of the class the two of us exchanged smiles as befitted two geniuses at English. He wanted to know my name. And I felt the texture of his shirt.

Two days later, Ranga was shifted to the next higher class, to Krishnaswami's section. We didn't speak to each other again until after he finished school and I had also got through my tenth without a hitch, and both of us entered the same college, Nizam College, which was five miles away. Ranga used to come to our barracks to play cricket with Krishnaswami's group, but for all they cared, they may as well have been playing in another country.

The bush coat and the full-open shirt. Soon Secunderabad was also full of them. Tailors charged only a little more for these styles. However when worn with pyjamas these garments posed a problem. If you sat down in a chair, the front ends of the shirts parted to reveal the drawstrings of the pyjamas. A solution was soon found in the shape of pyjamas without drawstrings, a kind of trouserish pyjamas. I too had a pair of these made out of MS 55 cloth which was scarce in Secunderabad at the time. I pestered quite a few people to get this fabric for me. When at last I was able to go about wearing these trouserish pyjamas and a full open shirt, I felt like Janab Jinnah. Jinnah, you see, had the reputation of being the first among the world's best-dressed men.

One day as I was entering Lancer Barracks, Ranga accosted me.

'Which is your house?'

'The last one in the first row,' I said.

As we walked together past Morris' house, his older sister called me. 'Chandru!'

I left Ranga where he was and went in. He couldn't have helped watching Morris' sister talk to me, her hand on my shoulder. She wanted me to get her the latest issue of
Picturegoer.
This British film magazine could only be had from AH Wheeler's at the Secunderabad railway station. It cost four British annas, but Wheeler's sold it at a concession for four annas and four pies of our Hyderabad currency. Morris' sister handed me four annas and four pies.

As I took the coins and made to go, Laura came there looking somewhat larger than usual. Ranga couldn't have helped seeing her either from where he was standing. 'What man, where you going man?' began Laura. All the women in Morris' family ended their sentences with a 'man'. The only exception was Morris' eldest sister. I had the answer to Laura's question in my mind in Tamil, but stood silent unable to decide how to say it in English, 'house' or 'home'. Laura had always taken note of these dilemmas which left me tongue-tied, and found them rather amusing. So she shot another of her questions at me, addressing me again as an adult homo sapien. 'What's blocking that mouth of yours,
man?'
She then pinched both my cheeks, then pulled them apart and looked into my mouth. This again was something Ranga couldn't have missed seeing.

We left Morris' house and started for mine. Just then we had another vision thrown in—Pyari Begum standing outside her house which was next to ours. She was ticket-examiner Kasim's second daughter. In my house they called' her fat swine. I had no idea what this animal was. But Pyari Begum looked like a barrel with a sweet face. The final piece of luck, the great attraction, so to speak, was the presence of Nagaratnam in my house. Nagaratnam was my older sister's friend. She was popular among the Tamil families of Secunderabad and took part in the YMCA elocution competitions and danced at school functions. Nagaratnam's tantalising eyes seemed to ask one something. Strangers and acquaintances were fair game alike for her.

And so my stock went up with Ranga. He began to look me up every time he came to play cricket with Krishnaswamy.

For some days Ranga accorded all respect to the strained relations between Krishnaswamy's group and me, and refrained from bringing up the subject. Five or ten minutes was all he could spend at my house before he got bored. Then he would leave for his cricket and I would go looking for Morris, Wahab and the others. But the games I played with them were not the kind which improved with practice, except perhaps tip-cat. Monkeys-on-trees and marbles offered little scope for finesse and didn't sustain my interest for more than a few days.

So when Ranga said one day, 'Why don't you come with me?' I went along. Krishnaswamy and Ranga were the biggest boys in their group apart from the two uncles. These uncles were frequently absent, probably because they felt bored playing with youngsters. The ten or so boys of this group went to a vast open ground half a mile away. They took with them a single pad, a cricket bat, four stumps and an old cricket ball. It was practice cricket every day, with Krishnaswamy and Ranga leading the two sides. I sat under a tree the whole time and Ranga would come and say a few words to me now and again. Krishnaswamy and his brothers kept their aggression towards me in check when they found that Ranga treated me as his equal.

Although the charming Nagaratnam was a frequent visitor to our house and there were some other attractions besides Pyari Begum in the Muslim household next door, and a few things happened which gave people the impression that I was the confidant of all the Anglo-Indian girls in the first line Barracks, it was soon apparent that none of this was likely to benefit Ranga. For there was this business of the Muslim boys who lived on our first line. They had the habit of calling everyone 'sala'. No utterance of theirs began without a prefatory 'Kya be sala?' This word which connoted a liaison with the addressee's sister was not really applicable to Ranga—he had no sisters. Yet he never failed to bristle at the expression.