...because he/she may just be the boy/girl next door!



Prakriti was cooking potatoes when through the window she saw somebody fall. She went to look and in the dark she could make out a man lying prostrate on the ground before what looked like a child, and shouting "Jai Ho! Jai Ho!” It was only when the thing barked and ran away did she realize it was a dog. And only when the man got up and walked did she realize it was the neighbour Devakar. Staggering and still shouting "Jai ho! Jai ho!” he managed to reach the door of his house where he collapsed and was pulled inside. And now she smelled something burning and ran back to jet-black potatoes smoking furiously with the shouts of "Parkirtee! Aaloo! Parkirtee! Aaloo!" coming from one of the rooms. She yelled back - "Can nobody in the whole damned world pronounce my name properly!"


---Ten-tenennn---


Starring:

Gulab Janum,
Kamal Parinda,
Navel Nanda, and
Phool Sikudi

in

Hum Ek Doosre ke Padosi Thay
          ...because he/she may just be the boy/girl next door!


Camera: Vauyar Saila

Screenplay: Kanikarini Khwaba

Background Music: Dhunivar Taana

Art Director: Nazuk Kamarwala

Director: (ahem ahem) Vibhav Singh Chauhan, Draam-e-baaz.


----------

A dulhan had arrived in the neighbourhood and Prakriti had to go for the mu-dikhai as a result of which her brother Jograj was supposed to milk their buffalo today. "Please bhaiya be gentle with it and use my purple dupatta if you need to", she said to him. "Yeah yeah...don't worry" was the reply. When she left, Jograj walked to the buffalo-shed. He stood there for a while, then came back inside the house muttering. Then he ran back to the shed, his head and torso covered with his sister's purple dupatta. Once inside the shed he looked outside, of himself only the face visible, and making sure nobody had seen him, settled down to milk the buffalo. "Damn animal. Wouldn't respond to anyone but her. So here I am. Here's your own Parkirtee, O bhains-mata, in her own purple dupatta. Looking pretty and familiar, am I not? Now please, pour down your five litres for me", he said under his breath, not speaking loud, cautious should the animal see through the guise and refuse to be milked. It is traditional wisdom in the villages of India that an animal who'll allow only a regular to milk it can sometimes be fooled by a simple clothing disguise and Prakriti and Jograj used this method pretty often, causing in Jograj a permanent dread of impending embarrassment.

And it would seem the day for that embarrassment was today, but with intensity more severe than he could have imagined. He had milked about three good litres and could feel at least two more in the buffalo when he heard Devakar clearing his throat behind him. He had an impulse to run away, but froze, and waited. Devakar said after a while, in such a gentle voice Jograj would never have thought him capable of - "Parkirtee?" Jograj didn't reply, now thinking of how to get out of this situation with the least embarrassment. The result was that both of them were still for a while, because Devakar was now lost in his own memories, while the buffalo stood troubled by the two-litres left unmilked in her, after she had resigned the whole of her full-cream for yet another day.

Devakar was remembering that playful day of 15th August when he had seen Prakriti on her terrace, flying a kite. Her silver nose-ring had shone bright on her dark face tilted up towards the sky, looking like an early crescent moon casually hanging about the evening sky. The setting sun's rays had fell on it for a moment and reflected directly into his eyes, reaching his heart through them, and filling it with a longing for her as pungent as the glare. That day, he had realized for the first time that life could be as complete and smooth as a circle, and known at the same time that his life won't be so unless a part of that circle bound, and became inextricably linked to hers, just as her nose-ring was to her nose.

He had decided he would marry her and had already thought as his next thought about how odd it would be for his baaraat to travel only till the next house.

He returned to the present, and said to a sweating Jograj in a voice that had suddenly acquired an almost royal nature while retaining its gentleness - "Parkirtee, I have wanted to tell you something for a long, long time now. I believe the day has come, and I can no longer stay quiet. Even fate is on our side today, that I have found you alone here. And yet, I do not find it an appropriate situation to tell you a truth that has the potential to change both of our lives, not with you in the midst of milking a buffalo. But if you could kindly sneak out of your house tonight, and meet me behind the old temple, I should be, and I have reason to believe, you yourself would be extremely grateful later in life. You can be sure of the purity of my intentions since I have called you to meet me right behind God's house, instead of Thakur Jor Pratap's, the old haveli, which was also one of the possible options."

Jograj had never been more confused about the state of his mind, as he was now after Devakar left. He told himself he ought to be relieved to not have been discovered, and yet it was good that it was he and not his sister who was present here today. He also ought to be outraged, he thought, for somebody to have made such a proposition to his sister! But he could not have refused the purity argument given by Devakar in the end, which, admittedly Jograj had also once used with Sitara of Noorpur last year. This argument was also an old tradition passed on from one male generation to another and was sincerely believed in, and Jograj couldn't refuse that he did feel a certain bonhomie towards Devakar for having understood it better than had all the girls across generations who ever heard it. And then (for it couldn't be about anything else), marriage to Devakar wouldn't be such a bad thing for his sister, who was already seventeen. What a lucky girl, he thought, just getting out of school, and comes a groom to her home, ready to take her away. He laughed at his initial confusion, and now waited for his sister to return. He was eager to break the happiest news of her life to her.

...


"But they are good people Parkirtee, you'll be very happy in that family", a somewhat surprised Jograj said to his sister when she was appalled at the idea of marrying Devakar.
"They are big carpenters, it is heard that their grandfathers made furniture for English collectors", he pressed on.
"Well that's nothing to be proud of", she replied.
"Well what do you know of class. What does it matter if he prefers a drink in the evening?"
"He is a drunkard. And a bloody dog-worshipper if you don't know."
"A dog-worshipper?"
"Yes I've seen him many times hailing a street-dog at night. Jai-Ho! Jai-Ho!"
"It isn't decent of you to talk like that for your future husband. Talk to me next when you get back your mind."
"Future husband!"
"Yes, he is."
"No! he isn't!"

Jograj didn't say anything more to his sister but narrated the whole incident to their mother when she returned from a distant-cousin visit the next day.

...


"But Ma, I'm still in school."

"Yes, and much good it's doing you, every passing year it's making you less and less suitable a match."

"Ma! You know, our principal is ready to pay my whole fees if I go to college in the city. He says I am more intelligent than even the boys."

"Oh-ho! Smart you are indeed. Smart you are. And you'll stay smart and unmarried. So it's your principal who's been filling your head with all the rubbish in the world."

"But Ma, this is exactly what Papa would've wanted. He would have been very happy if he'd heard I could get a scholarship."

The mother didn't seem softened by the reference to the deceased father, but was certainly quietened for a while. And then -

"Beta, your father is in a different world now. And he wasn't much in this one ever. He always had ideas from I don't know where. Sending you to school was his idea, and see what it has made of you. You don't know, but I've been trying to get a good match for about two years now. And the mention of your being in school in such an obscenely high class always breaks it. I never asked you to leave only because of your father's wishes. But if that means I'm going to have to give up a groom who has come walking right to our door, I'm taking it no more."

"But Ma, I could get somebody educated, like Papa. There are enough well-educated men in this world."

The mother sighed and after the quiet of a few minutes -

"To tell you the truth, your father wasn't much of a husband."

"Ma! For you to be saying this after he's in heaven!"

"What else can I say? At the fields working among the women I had no stories of his manliness to tell them. He never beat anybody, was always gentle everywhere, and he didn't beat even me! And what all I did to invite him! I hadn't even one story to tell them."

"But Ma, he was a different kind of a person. Think of the things he did, the things he gave us."

"What did he give us? What did he give you? A name from I don't know what old language that nobody understands? And if he were alive he would have brought you up to be just as impossible and nobody would have understood anything about you. Already I can't understand your interest in college. Haven't your read enough books already? And to think of you talking about your own marriage! And arguing about it! Aren't you ashamed to even think of it? When I first heard of my marriage I couldn't speak for days I was so embarrassed.

Beta, try to understand, what a girl needs is a husband. And you're getting one in your neighborhood. Think of all the savings! It's not easy for me to arrange everything on my own. A groom in neighborhood is just what your mother needs. Think of it, after college, you still have to marry. Why lose so many years? And who will marry you then? Once a girl crosses twenty, she as good as an old maid. I've lived my life practically without a husband, whether he was dead or alive, and I know how it feels. Is it only your father that's important to you? Doesn't your mother think of your good. I am telling you all this with a woman's experience. Your father wanted to make you a boy. He didn't understand the way a woman has to be. Do you understand?"

"Ma, but not Devakar at least! He's not what I would...and then he's a drunkard!"

"Now it's time you stopped calling him by name. And these little things are there in every man. Where will you find a perfect man? At least the habit is manly. Once you get married to him, you can change him. He's not a stone like your father I can tell you."

"Ma, he goes mad when he's drunk, I've seen him worship a dog!"

"Now I'll not have anything more from you, be glad I've tried to make you understand, girls with proper fathers never get to say a word!"

...


"Parkirtee..."

Prakriti was stopped one afternoon as someone called her name while she was returning from school.

"Parkirtee, you never came to meet me that night, perhaps you weren't convinced by my purity argument, but what you did was right for a girl, and I find myself even more in love with you. I only want to tell you that I have never dreamed of being with any girl but you and I love you from the bottom of my heart. When you become my wife, you'll be the happiest woman in the whole wide world. I'll see you when our families meet tomorrow, and after that when I come to your home with my baaraat to make you forever, forever mine."

Nobody had even spoken anything like that to Prakriti. With everything that everyone had been saying all these days, she had relented a little even in her mind and now hearing such romantic things from Devakar she thought that it might after all be only good for her, something her father, being a man, had not perhaps understood.

...


"Arre beta, have some more laddoo, don't be shy, consider this your own home now", Prakriti's mother said to Devakar in an excessively sweet voice when his family visited them the next afternoon. Prakriti found it absurd to dress up so gaudily when they had already seen her a thousand times; and when she came to know that they had come to her house from the next house in Devakar's city-uncle's car, she had such a nauseating feeling that she wanted to put this all off for another day. But she held herself. Now decked up, she entered the room holding a tray with cups of tea, walking slow with her head down as she had been instructed by her mother, never matching anyone's eye. She just wanted all these ceremonies to be over, and get to the days of marital bliss that everyone had promised lay ahead for her, and which she now had herself started looking forward to.

But one doubt remained in her mind, and she asked her mother to stealthily inquire somebody if there was more to the dog-worship than drunkenness. Now that she had made up her mind to marry Devakar, the only worry she had was if the family was involved with some sort of black-magic. Just as she was saying this to her mother, Devakar's father overheard it. He too had seen Devakar worship a dog many a time when drunk. The black-magic thing, he knew was perhaps the only thing that could break this marriage. For a moment he thought he should just attribute it to Devakar's drunkenness, but finding it inappropriate for the ocassion, he raced his mind around far in space and time and said -

"Arre beta...hahaha! You totally misunderstood it..hohooho...I'll tell you. We are a family of carpenters as you know, and big carpenters, our grandfathers made furniture for English collectors and Zamindars alike. Now have you ever seen a carpenter work? In olden days without machines, it was very difficult to cut and tear a piece of wood. One day as my great-great grandfather was walking around just outside the village, he saw a dog digging the ground. He stood looking and after a while the dog brought out a bone from inside the hole. When it started tearing at the bone, my grandfather was stuck by a great idea. He sat down where he was, mimicking the pose of the dog, and picked up a log of wood that lay nearby and worked on it in the exact way the dog's limbs worked on the bone, and learned that it became very convenient to tear wood this way. This gave us a tremendous competitive advantage and made us the best carpenters in the village. Now of course it's traditional knowledge but since then, Parkirtee beta, we have been worshipping dogs in our family. And a teacher is never small or big. Anyone who teaches you anything is worshippable across generations. What you have seen is Devakar's devotion to tradition."

Prakriti and everyone present in the room felt extreme satisfaction on hearing this account and Devakar, on realizing that this notion had been present in his blood so much that without his knowledge he had been worshipping dogs all along, felt such a joy come over him that he wanted to marry Prakriti right there and then.

...


Prakriti is sitting on her wedding bed waiting for Devakar with an unrest she has never felt before. Although somewhere inside she knows what's best for her now is a long, long sleep, but that would be very inappropriate if anybody ever heard of it, and then perhaps this is the greatest night of her life. Devakar enters, gently closes the door, walks over, sits on the bed and says - "Parkirtee, from today we are each other's forever." And as they draw closer to each other, a shrubbery of red flowers covers them.


THE END

A Bollywood101 (Creative) Studios Production.

I want to write about my four years in college, just gone behind; only, I haven't yet been able to write about my years of schooling. These are difficult experiences to write about for a single person, they form collective memories, the kind you will talk about if a group of friends meets after many years. By myself, it is too overwhelming to write about the whole time. But since time never stops, and some things will fade, I will write down whatever I can.

Four years, eight semesters is a deceptive time scale. When I look back at it, I don't see time neatly divided into days, weeks, semesters or years. It appears instead that I am looking through a distorting lens, which makes time appear to have followed a large number of different scales. Some days appear distant and blurred while some are magically brought near into clear vision, regardless of their chronological order. It makes me feel at times that the whole period has been too short, and at times that it's been too long. Time has passed too slow on the scale of academics, and I have to make an effort to recall my first-year courses and teachers. I know I used to be more serious about them, but I've forgotten why or how. Then there is a time-scale of friendship, on which time has passed fast. I feel I haven't known my friends enough to say goodbye already. I want more time with them, but can't get it. And then there is an opposing desire to move on.

Some inactive days, weeks are totally wiped out, but of some I have retained a video memory. In a brief break during the first MEL120 workshop, we came out and stood in front of the workshop's entrance. From there, the roof of Convo-hall soaring up towards the sky against MS standing huge behind it is a breathtaking sight when you see it for the first time. Later on unfortunately, the knowledge of the machinery operating inside the buildings made it less pleasing to look at. The "relationship" hasn't been without ample hatred and resentment at times. But whether it was good or bad, whether you loved it or hated it, when you spend four years of your life at some place, specially the time when you are 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21, in a way, the place becomes "yours" and it is difficult to ignore it, or to have unmixed feelings for it.

People have been the best part of the experience. After knowing them for a while, it was surprising how similar we are, and again how different each one of us is. Most people outside IIT can't help stereotyping us, but I have found that IITians are at their best and most interesting when they fail those stereotypes than when they are able to successfully follow them. I've also found that it's not IITians who find it difficult to mingle outside, as the common belief is, but it's mostly the outsiders who find it difficult to mingle with us. It's too difficult mostly to talk to an outsider if he knows you're an IITian, since it'll be brought up in every bit of the conversation. Most people will either hail IITians or damn them, they won't treat us as normal. Anyway, it makes us more close-knit. We have our own lingo, our own intra-stereotyping, our own stories, our own set of moral-codes to pass on and our own survival fundas. We therefore have all the elements of a mini-culture, and being a part of that culture turns out to be more important than being a part of the institute. The culture includes some controversial elements too - poltu, inertia, fraud, and on the side of the administration, the primitive attendance superstition, leading to one of the biggest problems called attendance-fight. It has in fact messed things up in the last few days for many of us; it was arbitrary in most cases and that made it worse.

But thankfully, after a long disappointment with teachers, I did find one I'll miss. I took a course by Rukmini Bhaya Nair in the 7th semester, initially, admittedly, due to slot-convenience. But the next semester, I barely read the name of her course before registering for it. Her classes are full of discussion, insights, ideas, and fun. She hardly keeps an attendance record and yet I don't remember missing any of her classes this semester. 100% attendance - unFbelievable. It's surprising how a good teacher by herself makes one a good student. We all probably have our examples of teachers we admire and wish for all teachers to be that kind, of teachers who allow us to stand on their shoulders and see far depending on our own height, as opposed to the ones who stand instead on our shoulders with all their academic bulk and wonder why we can't see what they can see so easily. I once went with a friend to show her a draft of a presentation, feeling a little guilty to take her time for our minor concerns and expecting to take just about fifteen minutes. But she herself gave us one hour, tried to understand all points of our presentation, pulled out books from her shelf and read out related portions, opened her own presentations on her computer and copied related slides for us. Seeing the way she treated our work, by the end I felt that it was important as a "work" we were doing and not just as a course requirement to be met. It was quite a refreshing thing for me to have felt this way for my work, I never felt like this even for my BTP which I was involved with for a whole year. She elegantly negates the notion that good researchers aren't good teachers.

Among places, there's Sip 'n' Byte, Nescafe, Holistic, CSC, Library, places where an attaché inevitably finds himself spending a lot of time. I spent enough time in hostels to get to know about that life and to wish I were a hosteler too, but not quite enough to actually know that life inside out. And I feel a little bad about that. There are many other moments, I don't know what I can write about them, sometimes it was just a shared mood which made us celebrate nothing in particular, sometimes it was a running joke that climaxed, sometimes a treat for something happy that found its way into our lives after all!

Now it appears that all of a sudden I am by myself, and there is a need to think about my own life. There used to be a few minutes daily when I was rushing for the morning class, already late, and the road leading to MS looked good with trees on both sides and occasional flowers, the kind of surrounding you'd love to take a slow walk in. But I always had to rush and it made me think every day about the important question - whether to stop and rest in the lovely, dark and deep woods, or to go the miles for the promises I need to keep. This question and others like this will come up at every stage in life, and I don't know the answers yet but I think they lie embedded somewhere in the experiences I've had and the changes I've undergone in the last four years of my life.