A Scottish Tragedy
I wrote my first short story when I was eleven. It was supposed to be this nonsensical, humorous, Wodehousian piece which had sly references to all my pet peeves interspersed with about two hundred private jokes which, I convinced myself in my feverish adolescent brain, only a select few would understand.
I spent weeks sprawled out on the drawing room floor filling in pages torn out of my father’s diary with my scrawly handwriting, crossing out entire paragraphs in the morning after sleepless nights spent worrying about a particular turn of phrase. When it was finally done, I stapled the sheets together ceremoniously and re-read it about sixteen times, always chucking softly at my terrible cleverness, forever making some small adjustments on the way inspired by the latest Blandings novel I had borrowed from the library.
It was Children’s Day or something and Ruskin Bond was visiting our school. They had decided to present him with a sample of the school’s incipient talent; a book was being made containing pieces contributed by the young writers of seventh grade. I duly turned in my illegible scrawl along with everyone else in the class, privately smug that Radhika Ma’am couldn’t possibly understand the subtlety of my humour sandwiched between treatises on My Summer Vacation and India: Unity in Diversity. Even more privately, I desperately hoped she would like it.
She did. She called me to her desk the next morning and asked me to write the whole thing out again. In better handwriting, please. Preferably typed out in Times New Roman, size 10 – they wanted to maintain uniformity in the collection. I remember being very surprised; standing at the edge of that desk with piles of notebooks blocking my view, incredulity tinged with joy. Ma’am, please don’t make me type the whole thing out and then tell me the story didn’t make it. She assured me that wouldn’t be the case. Make sure you submit the final draft by Friday. She made it sound rather mechanical, as if my story was just one of the many that got selected and it wasn’t really that big a deal. Maybe it wasn’t, really.
That evening, my father turned over the computer to me and gave me some quick tips on handling Word. Soon I had propped up the sheaf of notes on a convenient pile of books, my eyes peeled to the screen, brow knitted in concentration and finger poised in mid air as I searched for the damn letter on the labyrinthine keyboard.
They put my story right at the beginning of the collection. There it was, Number 1 in the table of contents – ‘A Scottish Tragedy’, a name arrived at after hours of brainstorming and one positively dripping with irony and delicate wit. Even if Bond simply rustled through the book, there was a high probability the very first story would still catch his eye. He would read on, ensconced in his favorite rocking chair on his mountainside house in Mussoorie, giggling quietly at the right parts, jowls swaying against his kind face till the gentle twist at the end would crack a smile on his face. And he would saunter in to the living room pick his phone up and call the principal of my school. ‘Who is this kid, this uhm… Keerthi Raghavan? Can I talk to him?’
We filed into the Audio Visual Hall where Bond was being welcomed by the Head Girl. He looked exactly like the photographs on the jackets of his books. Portly, smiling and utterly underdressed in an old T shirt and slacks. I remember noticing he was wearing grey Power sneakers, a strict no-no in my school already given over to the two thousand rupee Nikes and Reeboks. The Principal made some generic speech and proceeded to give him a potted plant in appreciation of his coming here. They had abandoned the traditional bouquet of flowers – the eco-club had campaigned rather fiercely for this. I sat in the third last row of the auditorium, watching intently as the Head of the English Dept handed over the collection, all nicely bound in that red cardboard they bound all the library books in. He wouldn’t flip through it immediately; instead it looked like he was putting it in his bag or something. He couldn’t possibly be expected to start reading it at once, of course. It would be quite rude. Besides, the Head Girl was already calling him to give a speech.
From what I remember, he seemed to talk a lot about ghosts. He told some three stories, all vaguely ghostly, and inevitably to do with chowkidars and unlit bylanes in Mussoorie. It wasn’t very interesting, the speech. To be fair, I wasn’t paying much attention either. All my thoughts were on the book deal I would soon be signing with Harper Collins, the youngest writer on their list, glowing reviews by Ruskin Bond on the back cover of my book.
I spent around three weeks waiting for a phone call of some sort. In six months, the hard disk on my computer had crashed taking with it the sole digital copy of my flight of fancy. I rediscovered the crazy scrawl a full seven years later, in my 2nd year of engineering in a fit of spring cleaning induced by my mother – six yellowing sheets hidden away at the bottom of my drawer. I have them with me even now, neatly filed away in a corner of my cupboard in New York. I take them out every now and then and spend the next half hour smiling to myself.
Sur demande spéciale
It’s been many months since I last posted, and a lot of things have happened in the meantime. I now live in New York, work most of the day for 5 days a week and pass weekends in a kind of stupefied haze of Hindi movies and Saravana Bhavan and innumerable trips to Home Depot till its Monday morning again. And though I make it sound terrible in my typical sort of way, it’s not so bad after all. I walk the fifteen minutes to work most days, and the few times I take the subway, there’s this old jazz band in Grand Central station playing quietly with their heads bowed and eyes closed.
I don’t travel too much anymore, which is a sort of a loss really. My lasting memory of Roorkee will always be the 5 hour bus journeys, staring out of rickety old buses, reading all the crazy signs on the highway announcing the best milk cakes made this side of Muzaffarnagar. Ahmedabad will forever be the squishing of 5 people on the back seat of an autorickshaw and the interminable waits at the airports for flights to Delhi. Cab rides here are disappointingly short, cab drivers monosyllabic, subway windows deathly dark.
M and I did a short trip to Washington DC last month, in the absence of anything worthwhile to do over the long weekend. It was, quite unexpectedly, great fun primarily because we spent much of the day roaming around the city as a part of a guided tour perched on these things. They had a name for every Segway as well, printed discreetly behind the handlebars. Mine was called ‘Buffness’ and I immediately set about living up to the name by contriving to fall off what is supposed to an eminently stable device.
M insists I write about the looks of wonder on the faces of passersby as we whizzed past. I admit there were looks, wondrous perhaps. I saw at least one little boy tugging on his mother’s arm screaming ‘I want one’, and a few old men wanted to know how much these little things cost. M met a wise-assish college sort who suggested she was a part of some exclusive crime-fighting team. All rather rewarding, as you might imagine.
It’s already been a year since I graduated from Ahmedabad. The junior batch had their convocation last week and Facebook was littered with their proud photographs. It doesn’t seem so long back, or perhaps it is New York that is hustling me along. For some reason, time almost stood still in Azad Bhawan, Roorkee. I would read The Hindu from page to page propping up my head on the mess table, nibbling at the terrible breakfast and unbuttered bread and it would still be 9 am. We didn’t get The Hindu in Ahmedabad and the breakfast was miles better but it was still 9 am when I finally folded the newspaper and contemplated the rest of my day.
9 am comes terribly early in New York, I live with the dull discomfort of not having time to read The Hindu over breakfast.
And dammit, I really should write more often.
