ISSUE 50

‘Stories? Here, in the city? Where are they? I don’t see them. Even if they do exist, they’re impossible to find – glimpses of colour, bits of rags, that’s what they seem like. Tell me, do you see any? You are with the kids all day, dude. Find me a good story and I will start making a film straightaway tomorrow.’

The moment his good friend, Manav, who worked in cinema said that, Samudra’s being was filled with a new enthusiasm. He set out with his story-seeking lenses freshly glued to his eyes, and, suddenly, as if he was on a collision course, he was surrounded by incidents that opened up before him, one after the other.

As soon as he crossed the Cottonpet main street stories confronted Samudra. It was a crowded one-way street, engulfed by bus and lorry and auto traffic – a street that he crossed every day, negotiating drain works and barricades and excavating JCBs.

Samudra was a teacher in the school with a Christian name that was on the outer curb of the Cottonpet main street. Two years earlier, before setting his first tentative steps onto that road, he had been a teacher at a school in Hebbal. Even after two years of commuting from Hebbal – and he always insisted on taking the bus every day – he refused to consider moving to paying guest accommodation or to rooms in the commercial district of Cottonpet. When colleagues asked him why he didn’t shift closer to the new school, his answers sounded silly, even to himself. Too much air pollution, expensive rooms – they were excuses meant to shut people up but the real reason he persisted in making the daily expedition was to be able to marvel: ‘I come from a village in Bellary and I am taking a stroll through a city like Bangalore! Imagine travelling just two hours in the twenty-four hours of the day and saying, I am in the city!?’ He did not, however, have the courage to expose himself by saying it.

He would leave Hebbal at half past seven in the morning on the bus to Majestic, find a window seat, and gaze with fascination as they passed Cantonment Railway Station, the Indian Express building, Vidhana Soudha and Mysore Bank, and stare at the vehicles on the streets and the people inside them. If he did not get a place to sit, he would read the news on Google. When he got tired of either of these activities, he shifted his attention to watching the college kids from Maharani’s and St. Anne’s, captivated by their passion, their exuberance, their cheekiness.

The bus reached Majestic at eight-thirty. He had to login by eight-forty-five, but rather than dashing over to catch a connecting bus that would take him down the last stretch, he would saunter over to the stop as slowly as possible. Every day, people pack their dreams and carry their hunger and stream together to Majestic. But Samudra’s journey was motivated by the quest for love. It is rarely acknowledged that the draw of the city lies in the mix of love and anonymity that it offers, a mix that gives one the strength to overcome anything.

Samudra believed that to know a path, one must walk it oneself – so one had to assume that the chaos and confusion caused by the roadworks on the Cottonpet main street gave him much joy. Right at the beginning of the market street, an old lady sold jasmine, kanakambara and roses from a basket. A little further on, a restaurant’s middle-aged employee could be heard calling out every day in a mix of English and Hindi, ‘Breakfast ready, Sir … dosa, masala dosa, puri, parotha, chapati,’. Middlemen, here and there shouted, ‘Do you want a room, Sir … Freshup, bathing, single room, double room … come, come, Sir. I’ll arrange low rates.’ And further ahead, hotels; lodgings; tiffin centres; tiny shops selling chai coffee cigarettes; an old man hawking tender coconuts; a twelve-year-old boy in front of the shops for clothes, chappals, and mobile repair hollering ‘Onefifty onefifty … come come’; 24×7 ATMs; banks; police thanes; the wine shop; salons; clinics selling health sprouting everywhere like mushrooms; old buildings; posters that changed once a week; cows on all sides that consumed the tossed garbage along with the plastic; if you lifted your head and looked up, wires emerging from within the amazing electric displays, flying out, radiating in all directions like traces of the mythical vanished Guptagamini river; groups of admiring friends out together for every occasion – Rajyotsava, Ganesh Chaturti, Moharram; plaques and plastic flags marking the memorials or birthdays of heroes; the different languages of the nation spoken by people dressed in different clothes – as he walked along, it was clear that the street, filled with people on the move, was an absolute tangle of stories.

The children who came to study in the school where he worked came mostly from the Marwadi business community. By the eighth standard, many of the children were already engaged to be married. Often, as soon as they finished the tenth, the boys were whisked away to Rajasthan during the holidays, married off, and brought back to take on the running of their family’s shop. They brought goods worth ten rupees from their towns, sold them for a hundred rupees, and in just a few years, were worth a few crores. With clientele like that, school fees were also proportionally high and the salary that Samudra received was marginally higher than most.

Any one of three incidents that had occurred, one after another, in the school could work as the story he was seeking, he thought. In the first, a youth who had passed out of the school, wanting to make some quick money, kidnapped a boy from the third standard, called up the kid’s parents in the evening, and demanded a ransom of five lakhs. The police, informed of the incident, tracked his mobile, found him and put him in jail. The school’s head greased the palms of all the important newspapers to keep things quiet. That, Samudra thought, could become a story.

Then, there was the episode where a boy from the ninth standard answered roll call for a kid from the neighbouring school for a fee, went to ask for the money he was due and got beaten up till he bled from his nose by the local cheapsters; and the management, getting to know of the incident, gave the boy his certificate to transfer to another school and sent him home – the boy left, and joined the kids who hung out on Magadi Road and took up smoking ganja. He wondered if this failed effort to educate a kid from a butcher’s family might make a good story.

While thinking about which of these two episodes to choose, the third incident struck Samudra, as being the most appropriate, for a variety of reasons.

One of the smarter students in Samudra’s tenth standard class suddenly stopped attending school. It was assumed at first that he was unwell, but on the third day, the rumour that he had run away from home became the topic of gossip during the lunch break – the news hit Samudra like a thunderbolt. A boy who everyone believed could be on the school’s banner that displayed the rank list – if he made the effort – had now, all of a sudden, disappeared. The boy had been told that every student in the school believed he would be on the banner, so all he had to was make just a little more effort, and now, he had simply vanished. Even if there was an investigation, not one person felt there was any guarantee that he would be found and returned.

He had been quiet of late. Had the vortex of high-school love swallowed him up? Was it his home regimen that bothered him? Did the news of his Social Sciences teacher accepting a dowry before getting married bother him? Was it that he, a Marwadi boy who owned a printing press himself, wasn’t excited by the idea of including his name and photograph on a banner?

After school finished, Samudra visited the shop owned by the boy’s family under the pretext of getting a banner made for the school and saw that it featured a variety of options saying things like, ‘Come Back – Be Born Again’, ‘Foreign Travel’, ‘School Annual Day’, ‘First Birthday’. A tremor ran through Samudra. Saying he would return later, he hurried in the direction of Majestic.

That evening, the street revealed itself to him: Five women, dressed to the nines, got out of an Omini van at some hotel. Following closely behind them in a proprietorial way, was a fat man, picking his ears. Lovers, lowlifes, pimps, employees, beggars lay on the footpath. Children wearing masks headed off to evening tuitions. Everyone was out on the street, which was full of excavated pits, barricades and fallen curb stones because of the ongoing roadworks. It was on this very street that he had been walking down for two years, that those three children had spent fifteen years of their childhood. With both the murdering knife and the protecting god for sale on the same street, what chance did the children have?

Would they ever be seen again in their school uniforms?

It was reported in the newspapers that while excavating the road, a brick-lined drain laid in the time of Tippu Sultan had been found. He realised that there were a myriad stories from a myriad streets of the city buried in the earth and was overcome with a feeling of helplessness.

Manav had run away from home three times, just like the kid, hadn’t he? Would he ever be able to bring his story to the screen? Or would the boy’s story end up evoking in Manav the terrors of his own childhood?

For a long time, in high school, Samudra and Manav were banished to the last bench only because they were tall. One did well in school, the other was behind in his work. Samudra used to tease Manav, who lived outside real life, calling him ‘Cine-Manav’. A tall, wheat-skinned, sharp-nosed, sweet boy, now trying, with difficulty, to establish himself as a film director. Samudra recalled how Manav had loved his teacher, Shahid Master; how he never did well in school; his crazy love of cinema; his femininity – all of these things had driven him from home three times. It was distressing to remember.

Feeling as if someone from the past was clinging to him, Samudra ran desperately down the street to its starting point. A few kanakambra flowers still remained in the old lady’s basket. Glancing back, he felt as if he had emerged from the heaving crush and push of a pilgrimage procession. Immediately he took a photo with his mobile and wrote a message to Manav saying, ‘Focus on this photo. It’s filled with faces. Search among them. You may even find your own. Sew the fraying bits of multi-coloured cloth together. Then, perhaps, the entangled, evolving city stories that are resting in hibernation may reveal themselves to you. Face them front on, confront them,’ and having sent the message, he burst forward with thundering footsteps. Some inexpressible fear, an anxiety from within was causing him to shake. Trying to still the waves of tremors, he fixed his earphones to his ears even in the urgency to get home, and became, thus, like everyone else in the rushing crowd. Different tunes were coursing through every single body in that surging flood of humanity. It was only when drawing one’s attention back to the environment in order to cross the street, could the harsh shriek of the of the surroundings be heard.