Amit Chaudhuri: Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence

At least once a week, nationalistic ideals were indulged by reading out “Where the Mind Is Without Fear.” The entire hall, then, in a grave, communal, drowsy chorus, said the words together; from afar, it would have sounded like nothing human, like a host of spirits praying, a murmur that swelled and died and swelled again:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Before the crescendo of the last line, when Gautam woke with a thrill of guilt, and, simultaneously, a surprisingly genuine, perhaps ungrateful, stab of hatred towards Tagore, before that line Gautam let his mind wander, here and there, from the Marine Drive, to Jerry Lee Lewis, to two girls in 7A, Jasmine and Padmini, to his mother’s bye-bye in the morning, to Mr. Patke, the P.E. teacher. On those unusual but inevitable days when Gautam’s mind found that it had recklessly and unwisely expended all its thoughts and had nothing more to think about, it had to return, prodigally, bankruptly, to the poem, where it clung with lowly fingers to whatever was concrete and material in the midst of all that fatherly high thinking and abstraction; thus, odd pictures flashed before its eye, of people walking upright with their heads thrust backward; of a row of ten-foot walls coming up and then being demolished by someone (perhaps Tagore) with a sledgehammer; of bedouins, tents, and mysterious desert landscapes.

When they were out in the corridor again, Gautam said to Khusroo, “You think they take drugs?” Khusroo snorted: “Those chaps? I doubt it, my dear fellow. They’re not even sixteen.” The music followed them out into the corridor and took on an independent, if less coherent, life there. “Jim Morrison was a tripper,” he said warmly. “But no one knows what happened to him.” They walked past the small quad, where NCC cadets marched to “daine baye daine baye,” on Fridays. On the wall at that end, which separated the school from the Gyan Sadhana College of Science and Commerce, founded by B. R. Ambedkar for the “scheduled castes,” a black-and-white cat, poised in profile, had actually paused to turn its face towards the noise in the corridor before it jumped down lightly into the abyss on the other side. Two crows hopping on the even black ground of the quad had been taken aback by the noise that seemed unrelated to the usual belligerence of hockey sticks and rubber balls in the area; unable to locate its source, they darted around together, shooting quick, investigative glances in the wrong direction, not yet ready to fly off. Urchin boys in khaki shorts and shirts with one or two buttons left were standing by the main gate of the school, grinning, but not daring to come in. The music had reached here, softer but still clear, joyous, contrasting with the tiny everyday sounds of the hospital, the college, and the rest of the lane. The two began to go up the stairs, stomping recklessly and making as much noise as they pleased, passing a room next to the vice principal’s office where question papers for a terminal exam were being unhurriedly cyclostyled. As they went past, they saw one of the hamaals, Fernandes, no longer in his khaki uniform but wearing grey trousers and a terylene shirt, sitting on a stool, his hand cupped round a beedi, smoke issuing from his nostrils. There were no teachers around — only the vice principal, Mr. Pascal, lived upstairs in a flat no one had ever seen, with his wife and children, who too were unknown figures. Yet it was said that Mr. Pascal sometimes descended the stairs at six o’clock with a rifle in his hand, strode to the centre of the empty quad where, during the day, they played basketball, and shot at the pigeons decreed to be a nuisance in school.

Fifteen years later — though they did not know it — they would be in different parts of the world, having become quite different people; Khusroo, so popular with girls and so enviably familiar with them, would discover in Texas that he was “gay,” a word that had still not entered their vocabulary, except briefly in the line “A Poet could not but be gay”; Gautam would study chartered accountancy in London and never return home; Anil would become a playwright in English; Freddy Billimoria’s moustache would darken; he would lose his thinness and become regional (Asia) manager of an American corporation; Charmayne would get married and have two children and open an aerobics class; no one would know where Rahul Jagtiani was; the few who remembered him would still be able to recall with some difficulty the bird-like cry of his guitar.

“Apparently he’s gunrunning in the Congo,” said Khusroo of Jim Morrison, who got all his information from his elder brother Darius, a formidably knowledgeable individual whom Gautam had glimpsed only once or twice, a person who possessed a quirky, almost spiritual beauty that was incarnated in the silvery braces he shifted uncomfortably, every few minutes, in his mouth, and the two or three small, inflamed red pimples that were scattered on his cheeks. “With Rimbaud.” “Rambo?” said Gautam, never before having heard a name that sounded like that. “Not Rambo, Rimbaud,” said Khusroo through his nose. Both Khusroo and his best friend, Anil, were Gautam’s guides through the echoing, fantastic-hued chambers of rock music; they talked, Gautam listened; but behind all the words was the distant, intransigent, instructive, bespectacled figure of Darius. It was Darius who had first brought to their small worlds the intractable poetic name of Frank Zappa; it was Darius who had informed them of the subtle but fluid difference between “bop” and “jazz”; it was Darius who set off colourful fusions of images in their heads by declaring that the walrus in “I Am the Walrus” was John Lennon, and that “Sexy Sadie” was the Maharishi: Darius spoke the words; Khusroo and Anil merely repeated. Since then Gautam had entered a pink-green world of innuendoes and monsters, culminating in his purchase of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from Rhythm House, with rows of famous heads, dead ones and living ones, arranged on the cover like a great floral bouquet, a gift, and at the back, at the bottom, near “Printed in Dum Dum, Calcutta,” the words he had almost missed: “A splendid time is guaranteed for all.” They went now into their classroom and slung their satchels on their backs. They had a lot to talk about as they went down the stairs.

It seemed that there was nothing Gautam could do about going to the dance on Saturday. Already he was thinking of the trousers he would wear. Last year his mother had had two pairs of polyester trousers made for him by Woodrow and Bayne, his father’s tailors, but they were too formal. For a long time he had searched for trousers that would fit him tightly around the thighs; he had heard that hippies who had come to India in search of enlightenment sometimes sold their Levi Strausses and Wranglers outside the Stiffles Hotel; they were the real thing, with faded furry patches shining against the inky blue like velvet. But his mother, always one to criticise new ideas and bent on doing everything according to her own, rather limited, understanding, had said the jeans might not be safe because the hippies often had diseases. His mother, ever since he could remember, saw germs, uncleanliness, and infection everywhere, in the most innocent of things, in the rims of glasses, in wet plates, in fingers, especially dark brown ones, and had taken it upon herself to battle her way through a country whose citizens possessed immune systems that were always on their toes. And then someone had told him that a shop in Kemp’s Corner was making blue jeans, the first in India. He had gone there one hopeful morning with his mother, and, after trying out a pair, had said, “Will it fade?” Yes, he had been assured, the colour would run. They were altered again by another tailor to hug his thighs, and now he wore no other trousers at all, and one could see him in them when he went out with his parents for drives, or with Anil for walks down Breach Candy, or to pick his father up from office. It was not that his mother did not throw tantrums about the other two trousers, or try to part Gautam from these, she and Jamuna smuggling them away and both maintaining they were being dry-cleaned at the laundry, until Gautam became suspicious. But now, for the first time, he would wear them to school. Everyone would come wearing clothes he had never seen them in before, in T-shirts, real Levi Strauss jeans, and Charmayne in a backless halter.