The Smoky World of Aravamuthan

Aravamuthan was not much of a man for the birds and the trees and the great open spaces, but he loved to stand on his balcony early in the morning breathing in the cool air from the Gunadala Hills, hearing the dawn chorus and casting a prayerful look at Indrakeeladri, the divine abode of Goddess Kanaka Durga, silhouetted against the western sky. He had unfailingly done this ever since he moved to Bharathi Nagar ten years ago. He believed that it was restorative. Once this brief indulgence and his nithyanushtanam, worship consisting of a series of rituals, were over, business took over his routine; his work as an assistant manager of a public sector bank rarely allowed him any respite till the evening.

Aravamuthan was on his balcony now. A cool, misty dawn was slowly breaking over the city. But the dawn chorus was in full swing already. The bougainvillea in front of him swayed in a faint breeze, and a sparrow-sized black-and-white bird on one of its branches flapped its tail feathers and flew off, letting out a long trill. Scarcely had Aravamuthan closed his eyes to savour every moment of this heavenly experience when his sensitive nose became conscious of a sharp smell that had never been part of the early morning air of Bharathi Nagar all these ten years. His delicate nose twitched as he sniffed the air, which was becoming thicker with a sharp and bitter smell that invaded his susceptible nasal passages and penetrated his lungs. Sniffing and sneezing, he identified it at once: it was the smell of tobacco smoke, and it came from the neighbouring balcony. He turned in that direction. The reprobate who was desecrating the holy morning air was the old man who had moved into the next-door flat yesterday.

To say that Aravamuthan was allergic to smoke is to make an understatement. He hated not only smoking but also smokers on whom he had called down curses from heaven. He had picked quarrels with smokers on buses and trains; he had made scathing attacks on smokers in his talks at the Town Hall Club; and, in his pseudo-scientific articles published in local newspapers, he had predicted a life expectancy for smokers that was appallingly lower than the life expectancy ever assessed by any researcher.

Aravamuthan leaned forward and stared at the old man, his eyes blazing. Slender and bespectacled with a bearded face that was dominated by a nose that seemed to outmatch Cyrano de Bergerac’s, the old man sat in an old rocking chair with his feet resting on one of the posts of the stainless steel railings and was puffing away at a cigarette with half-closed eyes. He had introduced himself as a retired professor of English when he moved in yesterday.

‘I say, professor,’ Aravamuthan yelled.

The old man leaned back and peered over his glasses. He blinked at Aravamuthan for a moment, but, recognising him, greeted him with a friendly ‘Good morning!’ and a wave of a warm cigarette.

‘I say, professor!’ Aravamuthan’s body convulsed in anger. Shaking himself out of his starting trouble, he growled out, ‘I am allergic to smoke!’

‘Are you, really!’ The old man goggled at him in disbelief. Then he took another remorseless puff at his cigarette and said in a thoughtful tone, ‘Now that I’m here, you will get over it soon.’

Unsettled by this unexpected response, Aravamuthan didn’t know what to do. He simply glared at the old man who, he concluded after a minute’s thoughtful consideration, must be an addict; only addiction to that pernicious weed called tobacco could produce this kind of pig-headedness in a human being. Tackling an addict, he reminded himself, called for tact. Abandoning the subject of his allergy for the time being, Aravamuthan held forth on the dangers of carbon monoxide and pointed out to the goggle-eyed smoker, that, for all he knew, the latter had cancer of the lungs. ‘Don’t you feel sometimes,’ he pointedly asked the smoker who was now taking out another cigarette, ‘that your blood vessels are changing and your arteries are hardening?’

‘No,’ said the old man, lighting the cigarette.

Disarmed and disoriented by this reply, Aravamuthan didn’t know what to do. Having lit the cigarette, the old man inhaled the smoke deeply. Blowing off the smoke, he held up the lighted cigarette before himself and gazed at it for a good minute. Then he began to talk as if in a dream, ‘There is no herb like unto this under the canopy of heaven.’ He paused to take another puff, half-closed his eyes and continued in an incantatory voice, ‘It is a lone man’s companion, a bachelor’s friend, a hungry man’s food, a sad man’s cordial…’

Aravamuthan moved away from the place in disgust. Watching a day-dreaming tobacco addict when he ought to be offering surya namaskar! He winced at the very thought.

But there was no avoiding the old man. He smoked like a chimney, and Aravamuthan recoiled in horror at the sight of clouds and clouds of tobacco fumes escaping daily from his apartment. The residents’ association pleaded helplessness. ‘Of course, we don’t like it, Ara garu,’ the secretary said in the lyrical cadence of his Kakinada Telugu, ‘but there’s little we can do. The durmargudu, such a rogue, smokes in his own house after all. And he hardly ever speaks Telugu.’

Aravamuthan met the old man again and again and explained his problem. But he didn’t seem to listen. The moment the subject of smoking came up, he closed his eyes and went into a rhapsody on ‘sublime tobacco’ which, he assured Aravamuthan, ‘cheers the tar’s labour or the Turkman’s rest.’ He would pause reflectively and then mumble as though talking to himself, ‘From east to west.’ Aravamuthan reasoned with him, begged him, threatened him and abused him. But the old man wouldn’t budge. Nor was there any chance of his moving from the flat. He was an owner-occupier after all, while Aravamuthan was only a tenant.

After spending several sleepless nights thinking over the matter in the midst of tobacco fumes, Aravamuthan decided to move house.

He felt sad at having to leave the place. He had lived there happily for ten years. ‘But it’s a wise decision,’ he consoled himself, though he knew that finding a good house was not going to be easy. When Telangana became a separate State with Hyderabad as its capital, the residuary Andhra Pradesh set about building a world-class capital city at Amaravati, but since this mammoth undertaking was expected to take more than ten years, the government had to make do with Vijayawada, a neighbouring city, as the functional capital, and this had created a housing crisis in Vijayawada. Apartments, in particular, were in great demand, and so Aravamuthan knew that he would have to settle for a three-bedroom portion in a big house.

His manager who lived in Kothapet, which was a busy commercial area close to the railway station, told him that a Vaishya family owned a mansion-like house in his street. ‘They seem to be as traditional as you are, Ara,’ he said, giggling. ‘The namam on your forehead should be enough to impress them. I’m sure they will be happy to let you an entire floor.’

Aravamuthan rushed to Kothapet clutching the address. He knew that Kothapet with its miniscule plant life, sprawling commercial complexes, and 24-hour trading, was a sharp contrast to Bharathi Nagar which had a verdant landscape with a lake at the centre and quiet streets covered with lush green trees. But it was very close to his bank and the children’s school. What was more, the commercial hub appealed to his wife, who hated online shopping; at Kothapet, she would be able to visit stores, examine a variety of brands and then make informed choices.

He showed the address to a shopkeeper. ‘Vangadaru Krishna Kumar garu’s house? Over there.’ He pointed to a dark green building on the opposite side.

Aravamuthan held his breath as he stood in front of the building. His manager hadn’t exaggerated when he described the house as mansion-like. It was a massive, two-storey building with a huge iron gate. A granite nameplate on the gate pillar read Vangadaru Krishna Kumar. Nestled smugly between the paths on both sides that wound from the gate to a capacious portico of a bygone age was a front garden with flowering plants and a giant mango tree. A vast space had been left on the northern side of the building where an old Ambassador car and a Toyota Fortuner stood.

Aravamuthan reluctantly pushed the gate open, but changed his mind at once. Renting a suite of rooms in the house seemed impossible to him. He was about to leave when a tall young man came out of the house and beckoned to him from the verandah. Aravamuthan opened the gate again and moved in gingerly. When he introduced himself and explained the purpose of his visit, the young man became thoughtful. ‘Well,’ he said staring at Aravamuthan with inquiring eyes, ‘we have never let any portion of our house in the past ten years, but the first floor has remained almost unused all these years. Nannagaru uses the first two rooms in the front as his office, but the disuse of the rest of the floor consisting of a living-cum-dining room, three bedrooms, a kitchen and a large balcony is causing some concern. He is actually rethinking his original decision. In fact, we have been looking for a decent tenant.’ He looked Aravamuthan up and down again.

‘Can I meet Krishna Kumar garu?’ Aravamuthan asked him.

‘Dad has gone on a pilgrimage to Varanasi. He left just yesterday. But you can meet Grandma.’

Krishna Kumar’s mother was a tall, fair woman of about seventy. She wore a grey handloom sari and diamond earrings. The tilak on her forehead was a combination of white and vermilion marks: a bow-like white mark between the eyebrows with a vertical vermilion mark running from the centre of the bow to the hairline above. It was a perfect match for the white-and-red Sri Vaishnava mark on Aravamuthan’s forehead.

‘Ara-Amuthan…’ she said musingly. ‘But that’s a Tamil name. Are you a Tamilian?’

Aravamuthan nodded his head.

‘Ara-Amritham,’ she said, parsing the name again and Sanskritising the second element. ‘What a beautiful name! Isn’t it the name of the utsava murthi at the Sarangapani Temple at Kumbakonam?’

‘Yes,’ said Aravamuthan, his face flushed with excitement. ‘I was born in that kshetram and named after the Lord of that temple. The more you experience him, the more you want to taste the nectar of that experience – that’s what the name means. The experience was originally that of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, and it is celebrated in the Srimad Bhagavatam, too.’ He spoke with rapture and she listened intently to his elaboration, her head tilted downwards. When he finished, she looked at his face and nodded her head approvingly.

To cut a long story short, Aravamuthan moved in with his family that weekend itself. Before he did so, he inspected the house with all the assiduity of a Sherlock Holmes. He had sniffed the air a number of times and been relieved to find that the place was wholly free from the obnoxious smell he was allergic to. He had examined all the coffee-tables and nightstands in the house and been glad to find them not abasing themselves with ashtrays or packets of cigarettes. He had instructed his children to surreptitiously explore all the dustbins in the house, and they had done so and reported that they hadn’t found even one cigarette butt. To be doubly sure that it was a non-smoker’s house, he had asked the landlord’s son, ‘You don’t smoke, do you?’ Perplexed by the question, the young man had said, ‘I don’t.’

It was Aravamuthan’s first morning in the Kothapet house. He was ambling up and down the terrace along the parapet wall, marvelling at the size of the terrace and stopping occasionally to look at the market street below. Traffic was gradually building on the street, and a tea shop at the street corner was already buzzing with activity. People clustered around a milk booth which had cartons of milk packets stacked up one above the other in neat rows on the pavement. A delivery truck in front of the booth roared to life with a shudder and slowly rolled forward blowing thick black smoke. Aravamuthan turned his face away in disgust and looked westward. Indrakeeladri was visible, majestic in front of him, and the gold-plated vimana gopuram of the Kanaka Durga temple shone in the first rays of dawn. He was watching it with fascination for quite some time when a chorus of high-pitched chirps from the front garden of his house distracted his attention. The lively chatter came from a flock of sparrows flitting between the branches of the mango tree. Aravamuthan stood perfectly still, entranced by the drama in front of him. A gentle breeze blew across his face now producing a tingling sensation all over his body, and Aravamuthan felt that the Kothapet zephyr had a freshness and fragrance which the Bharathi Nagar air had never had. The thought of Bharathi Nagar brought to his mind his month-long agony of fighting tobacco fumes from the neighbouring flat, and his face contorted with pain. He looked in the direction of Indrakeeladri again and thanked the goddess for saving him soon enough from second-hand smoking.

A week passed, and Aravamuthan was enjoying his new house, especially, the terrace which was his regular rendezvous spot in the mornings. One evening, when he came home, his wife told him that their landlord had arrived back from his pilgrimage. An hour later, Krishna Kumar’s son himself came and asked him if he would mind meeting his father.

‘Not at all,’ said Aravamuthan. ‘I have been looking forward to it.’

‘Nanna is in his office – here, just behind your drawing room.’

‘What does your father do for a living?’ Aravamuthan asked, walking behind the young man through a long corridor that connected his balcony to the one in front of the office.

‘By training he is a chartered accountant. So am I.’ He looked back and smiled. ‘But we have stopped practising it because we don’t have the time for it. We are in financing and real estate which are our family businesses. Real estate has become lucrative now, ever since the neighbouring Amaravati became the capital of the new State.’

Where the corridor ended there was an expansive balcony which looked like an extended outdoor hall with a traditional wooden sofa set on one side and a row of cushioned chairs lined up against the opposite wall. In the office, which was located beyond the balcony near a winding staircase, a short, dark, massively-built middle-aged man sat behind a tidy mahogany table with his gaze focused on the computer screen in front of him. His white cotton shirt and gold-rimmed spectacles looked striking against their dark background.

Krishna Kumar stood up folding his hands and welcomed Aravamuthan. He said his mother had spoken to him about Aravamuthan. ‘We’re pleased to have you as a tenant, Amritam garu. I hope you find the house comfortable.’

‘Quite,’ Aravamuthan replied in a tone of infinite gratitude. ‘We’re very happy here. My wife likes this area, and the children love this house.’

The landlord looked pleased. ‘Treat it as your own,’ he said with a reassuring smile. ‘You can stay here as long as you like. I’m sure you’ll never have to regret your stay in our house.’ Aravamuthan was so overwhelmed with gratitude that he was at a loss for words.

Krishna Kumar took out a gold-plated case from his pocket and snapped it open. Inside lay five huge cigars with a gold band adorning each one of them. Holding out the case hospitably before Aravamuthan, he took a cigar for himself.