Tales from Sector-9

Going to school was a fresh new battle each day. Enemies varied with the hour. Parents, teachers, bullies, kids you don’t want to be friends with, the one-eyed bathroom cleaner, the poker-faced, short tempered, angry goddess incarnate whom we officially called 'principal mam' and the tailless Doberman from an adjoining neighborhood.

Monsoon in India is like the next politician to rule over you. It comes with a lot of promise and fanfare. It has a dumb fan following. The fan following is mainly due to a temporary relief it promises from the long hot summer along with the incentive it brings for the lazy folk to further laze inside their homes, sipping hot tea and nibbling crispy junk food sprawled up on their sofas. Irrational romanticism pumped into beings already high on tacky sentimentalism and pseudo eroticism by the Hindi film industry could also be a reason.

But in those days for us kids it was just the pleasure of playing in puddles and streams, catching tadpoles in tin cans and falling sick to be able to skip school. As the days progress the incessant rains get on to everyone’s nerves. It turns out to be worse than the earlier summer days. People, irrespective of whether they are the dumb fan lot or not, start dreading and wishing it were all over and yearn for the next change. Days quickly turn dreary, dark and damp with very less time to go or play outside. It was the same in Bhilai.

Come October and the whole atmosphere changed. In the eighties Bhilai winter mornings engulfed you in a dizzying sweet smell from an admixture of jasmines, eucalyptus, parathas, cardamom-ginger tea, petrichor from recently watered gardens and dairy farms far beyond. The Sun kissed you in a warm hug which you never would want to let go. Occasionally soft classical or Hindi film oldies wafted through the air from Panasonic or Sharp radio sets. There was a buzz around with the festive season round the corner promising fun filled vacations for kids.

Beautiful gardens with trimmed hedges, large old trees, colorful flowers, crotons, carpet grass adorned each house. Tree lined and exceptionally planned streets, sectors, symmetric houses and play grounds were a mark of the largest and most successful government run steel plant in the country. Overcrowded and polluted Indian cities were never known there. In India it might have been one of the best places to live for a young boy in 1987. Forever each moment would stand still as if waiting for an eternity to relish itself.

Unfortunately, the human mind has a mysterious ability to complicate state of affairs even in the most pristine of surroundings.

On usual days, that is when the Doberman might have been dozing off or locked inside his bungalow gates, it was almost a pleasure walking to school. The main road which separated sectors 9 & 10 was just a few steps from our house. Peepal, eucalyptus, neem, pine and mango trees lined this leafy path. Transcending this boundary had become a daily ritual. It was like one of those peculiar and sometimes embarrassing morning rituals people gleefully partake, supposedly to channelize their energies and reach where they would want to be one day. Only difference for me was that it was forced and amounted to nothing more than to reach somewhere I rather not so early on most mornings. As in every aspect of life there were also few dangerous shortcuts.

My sister Divya who grudgingly accompanied me on most days was not there that day as I was late. A boy in 5th grade can be a bit annoying for a girl in 7th grade especially if it happens to be your brother.

That was kind of a special day. At least the lunch was. The tiffin box I was to carry was the larger one with a Mickey Mouse sticker, which my mother had saved for special lunch days like these. This was all the result of ‘tiffin box wars’ which me and my sister had been raging with my mother for eons. The usual tactic was to team up when mother used to remind us on adhering to a blanket ban on wasting any food. We would start talking about the aloo parathas, samosas, poori-chole, jalebis, masala dosas and all the other treats some or the other kid might have brought in tiffin. That must have been the only matter where my sister would team up with me. The result was a cycle of battles with culmination points for our victory every month or so. The spoils of war that day included pooris, chole and carrot halwa for both of us. It also meant extra work for mother early in the morning.

Unfortunately that day I again had an episode where my mother got into further trouble. I never liked to have bits of cream in my milk. My mother used to take great care by straining it twice and also mixing ‘Maltova’ chocolate powder very nicely not to leave any of its bits. But some days the winter mornings got inside me and turned me into a sleepy sloth. Then it took me a good 20 minutes to drink the whole glass, with my mother yelling out at me at constant intervals. By then the creamy layer used to settle in again.

As soon as my tongue got the slightest hint of it, as a reflex, the whole of my digestive system would want to jump out of my moth in surge of vomit which in reality wouldn’t have anything other than the milk I just drank. Usually the sloth in me was tame enough to manage holding this sudden digestive misfire. But that day seemed to be a bad day from the start and I vomited the whole glass just when the sloth seemed to have finished the first round of a long relay race called school day. The mopping up took time, not to mention the extra calories my slender mother would have burned suppressing her anger. The result of all this was that I got later than usual for school.

I took one of the shortcuts. It was the shortest. As with shortest of shortcuts it had the most vicious hurdles to cross. Denser undergrowth, a canal to jump over, a lonely stretch behind the haunted bungalow and last but not the least the Doberman’s back alley to cross. I was hoping that the ungrateful brute would be locked up in his court-yard.

Human beings are animals. We evolved out of the great apes in a series of highly unlikely coincidences to have intelligence probably only to protect nature by being in an almost impossible state of existence called intelligent life. But that is the only thing we as humans are not doing in recent times. Great cities have been built over numerous forests we have cut and fauna we have destroyed. Forests which took millions of years of permutations and combinations to evolve complex ecosystems. To make the most of 'one against a gazillion' odds our earth had to endure to sustain life, nature has over billions of years evolved. It evolved from non-living muck to the rich diversity which we see today. Towns like Bhilai are a testimony to the rapid industrialization and non-stop greed us humans have come to characterize over a miniscule fraction of the time life and nature have been around on this earth. What we are achieving is good life for us humans for a few centuries or millennia. After that what would be left of this earth could just be ghost cities and settlements. No plants or animals. Intelligence along with compassion for fellow humans is what made us a great species. The greatest as seen from a human view of success and achievement. A view which is dictated by being human and achieving greatness for humanity. The premise of which itself is a testimony to the uncertainty we know as our universe.

In spite of all this we still care for dogs and cats. At least some of us care for some of them. It’s an irony which exemplifies the vagaries of human psyche.

There are about twelve broad categories of aggressive behavior a pet dog can develop. This is not counting the many more sub-categories and permutations with overlapping behaviors. Each one with a cryptic name and definition only the most astute observer of dogs could have come up with. I don’t really know which one was Dobberman’s but he might have had the most exotically named one. He even could be in the proud possession of more than a few of them. No one knows. He had become part of the local legend in the short history he was around. Sector-9’s streets 9 & 10 were his territory. Gardeners, officers, aunties, kids, house maids, postmen all alike irrespective of their ‘undocumented castes’ dreaded walking on these streets. Some people like us still had to brave around to go about their daily lives on these streets. Walking fast, becoming a statue, running and avoiding eye contact, carrying sticks or small stones were some of the tactics employed by us poor souls. Fortunately in the last two years since Doberman had entered our lives he had not fatally attacked anyone. All we knew was an occasional pin down of some old maid or the abrupt chase of some of us kids who were caught off guard. I had been chased down by him twice before. Few other times the stick or the stones had been useful to scare him away.

Doberman’s pet owner was S.K. Sethi. SKS was a tight lipped and sleek guy with foreign tastes at a time when not many in India knew what those were. He used to jog in the mornings wearing shiny shorts and sneakers no one had ever seen in those parts. At a time when the only cars us people had seen were the Fiats and Ambassadors which the people from bungalows owned, SKS family owned a other worldly Toyota Cressida. People who knew him from the Steel plant used to say he was a smooth talker who got more promotions and opportunities than he deserved with lot of political backing.

SKS had lived for a good part of his youth touring Russian and German steel plants. He had taken a transfer two years back from Rourkela Steel Plant to Bhilai. Though some families in our neighborhood used to keep pets, Doberman may have been such a special case because of his distinguished pet parent. Or was it the other way round is something I wonder to this day.

I was on the verge of jumping across the canal in a subconscious state of mind. A township built decades ago on the ideals of living at harmony with nature must have needed a lot of water to be transported via canals to be maintained. Unfortunately it would not help revive the fragile eco system that may have existed there for an eternity.

My wandering mind must have been lost in figuring out words for similar pseudo thoughts when I heard a dog’s growl from behind. My jump turned into a frightened tumble and I went rolling into the shallow dried up canal. Luckily, that was a part of the year when owing the good monsoons town maintenance corporation had switched off the water supply via canals. My uniform was now covered with scratchy dust marks from the fall. My palms and knees had some slight but burning bruises.

My heart was pounding a million liters of blood per second. The laughter I heard thereafter was a bitter-sweet one that managed to give me a million changes of emotions in a second. It was my best friend Rishad who was laughing his heart out. He had finally managed to get back on me with this dog impersonation act after other failed attempts.

Best friends can hurt you by shoving you into pits, rolling you up in mud or kicking your bum. In return you can make them step over all the dung that cows from fringe village dairy farms didn’t mind dropping in your elitist island paradise or tickle them when they least suspect during a dreary Hindi period resulting in muffled up groans, laughter and sometimes punishment. W

What never fades away is the pain you feel when such a friend becomes a distant memory, like your favorite lost toy passing thorough hands of people you may never know. What remains is the pleasantly painful reminiscence of such friends you may have made at different stages of your life, hanging on to you as shadowy ghosts. Ghosts who for the rest of your life keep stabbing you fatally on evenings those are dull enough.

Rishad lived on street 35 while I lived on street 38. Our paths to school were the same after crossing the main road. Some days I would meet him on the way. We always came back together. There were other kids who lived in the neighborhood. I would meet or try to avoid some of them while walking to school, but Rishad’s company was the best and I always hoped we would cross paths.

“Are you mad”, I said crawling back. “Drumstick’s going to stick his ruler up my throat today”. Rishad had his trademark all-knowing smirk “I hope he sends you back to change your uniform, then your mom is going to do the same with her rolling pin and you’ll be back begging me for lost classwork. It will also be fun to see what Seema miss will say in front of the class.”

There were many reasons I liked going to school in spite of the grim cast of characters that could be encountered there. Being with friends, playing football, making sand castles, climbing trees without getting caught, learning your favorite subject were some of them. But in class 5 and class 6 for me and my classmates there was another reason and that was Seema miss. She was our class teacher. Seema miss was warm and loving. But at the same time she knew when to take one to task and where to draw the line when it came to discipline. The most difficult of kids were tamer in her class. For the rest of us it was a pleasure to learn what she taught.

In our school the higher class children had given very amusing names for some of our teachers. Many of the nick names did not make sense to us younger lot. But Ostrich was the name for Madam Ghatak our principal. Drumstick was our drumstick lookalike vice-principal. These nick-names made sense to us.

Mishra Sir the Drumstick was a serial innovator. As his job was restricted to finding faults in students and punish them in sadistic ways, all his innovative faculties were drawn into thinking of new ways of punishment. He got a free hand, or maybe a leg, from Ostrich for this. In fact he was Ostrich’s right leg. He was the drumstick like Ostrich leg which liked to kick each of our days to a shocking start with punishments we would be left guessing in our dreams. He used to man the school corridor where we were supposed to queue for assembly each dreaded morning, like prisoners on an identification parade.

Drumstick acted as if he was the victim and the police. His sharp staring goat eyes used to make mincemeat of all the students from head to toe. Unpolished shoes, uncut nails, leaky nose, untidy uniforms, uncut hair were his specialties. Nothing went uncaught. One of his sidekicks Bhattacharya Sir, the Grasshopper, was tasked by him to man the school gates for latecomers when he was busy processing the assembly line.

Bhattacharya sir had an uncanny ability to reach far off places in a flash and pester kids. Apart from catching latecomers his specialties included sneaking into hideouts kids had made inside bushes or inside old sheds in the abandoned school yard during free periods and interval. This was to check for any so called disorder and to catch the guilty in hope of providing fodder to the Drumstick and even at times to the Ostrich for their sadistic machinations to be fulfilled and thus earn brownie points from them.

I dusted off my uniform as best as I could and we jumped across the canal to continue the ritual. Still there were ten more minutes before the assembly bell which meant we could walk normally, instead of our usual chattering saunter, and still be well on time.

“My dad says there’s a spate of Typhoid cases coming into the hospital from sector 9. He asked me not to drink even a drop from the school cooler. I hope the haggy old bird and her cronies catch it. It’s been a while since we had some real fun at school” Rishad said. “PWD is suspecting some drain water might have got mixed up with the drinking water supply lines due to damages during the rains”. I shuddered at the thought. “Drain water! Eeww. That means yesterday when Amar forgot his water bottle, he might have drunk part pee part poo. I wonder whose it was.”

I could feel that my subconscious had become extra cautious as we were crossing the gates of the haunted house. A quick glance on one of the dust covered windows and I felt someone or something was watching us. “I think there is someone inside watching us.” I was pointing to the window where I was sure I had seen some movement. We couldn’t see anything and moved along.

It was one on a sector 9 street having a total of eight bungalows of the same size and shape. Four on each side. Only difference was the wild overgrowth in what otherwise would have been sprawling garden manicured as well as the others a few years back when it had occupants. It had quite a few large untended trees, flower beds long overtaken by weeds, a rusted swing on the portico and a rusted old kids bicycle in the garage space. I could imagine the numerous cackling sounds it might have been a resident of in better days. Now it looked like the downtrodden cousin from a gang of overfed and pompous kid relatives, never missing a chance to show who’s got the costlier toys.

An undocumented caste system (UCS) is universally prevalent. Be it gangs, herds, shoals, individuals, sea cucumbers, countries, shoes or black holes all fall into three basic categories – good, bad and the ugly. This categorization is relative depending on who looks, how they look and what they get to see. Great for some can be downright garbage for another. To look good, one needs compatriots who look bad under the most acceptable conditions to oneself and the right set of glasses. The ugly are needed by nobody who feels non-ugly under conditions where they look that way. The haunted bungalow might have been a punching bag full of cow dung for its cousins but for the ghosts, if there were any, it would have been a magnificent palace. For people like us it was just a bad patch forgotten by humanity and also scary due to stories linked to it.

Sukhiya our street’s old gardener, who visited our house once in a week if he remembered to, had once told me a story about the maniac family who lived there many years ago. The man, his wife and their children who lived there abhorred all kinds of life forms other than themselves. At least they did not like them alive. Many pets from nearby bungalows had gone missing in those days. One day some neighborhood kids who were playing on the adjacent grounds went into the compound to get a cricket ball which had crossed over the hedge. As with kids, curiosity overwhelmed the fear of unknown and they started peering inside by prying open a loose window. What they saw must have been very traumatic. It was a zoo of carcasses caged in brine jars. All sorts of animals squirrels, monkeys, snakes. Dogs and cats were the most common. Neighbors called the police and then there were investigations. Few of the pet owners seem to have broken down at the prospect of seeing their pets in such a state. Investigations led the Steel Plant management to fire DGM Mishra and police to press charges of animal cruelty against the family. They left town. The DGM spent a minimal sentence and paid a fat sum to keep the law at bay. They were never heard of later except for in the hushed up gossip women used to have over their green hedges in the evenings.

There was another story about the haunted house which one of my sister’s friend had told and I would have liked to ponder about if Rishad was not bombarding me with his prattle about some stupid ‘Richie Rich’ story. The cool wind gave me a shiver. A small mound of little pine cones was laying in between other scattered ones and leaves on the path. I kicked it into a burst of cones scarring away a few early birds. Pine trees? They grow in colder places. It’s a wonder how Bhilai had all kinds of trees, many which were not native to the land. Most of them were planted when the place was being setup in the fifties by clearing forests and reclaiming farm lands from the locals. Maybe those were the remnants from Russian cooperation Nehru sought to setup the plant.

Noisy leaves fluttering from the thick foliage, unruly acrid smoke rising from a courtyard, an impatient hungry parakeet calling its mate, an old placid cow grazing and impish boys turning into stone statues. If we were tom & jerry we could have vanished into thin air leaving only our shoes behind for the monster to gnaw. But we were more like Laurel and Hardy. Clumsy as ever. Just 10 meters ahead of us now stood Doberman in all its lethal glory. ‘Drooling’ is one word which would not be enough to describe the massive gooey formation which was gushing down its incisors, black lips and monstrous purple tongue. ‘Blood thirsty’ are two words which would not be enough to describe the red mass of veins coagulating in dirty patches in its eyes. No number of words would be enough to describe the state we were in.

We were getting late and were not exactly on street 9 or street 10. We were in the back lane between streets 8 and 9 which was narrower than the streets. Not much space to escape, not any stick to pick, and not any right sized stone to throw. The thick overgrowth of grass compounded our problems. Even if we tried to run back at least one of us the slower one would be overrun by the monster and pinned down. The consequences were unimaginable to us.

His growl was revolting. Not a soul to be seen. We were late to school. Rishad ditched me quickly and made a run back the way we had come. If he was lucky he could reach the end of the lane and take street 11. That route would be a bit longer but he still may reach just in time if he ran all the way. But no, what he did was to start climbing one of the bungalow’s compound walls. I was not sure if he didn’t want to ditch me or he didn’t want to miss the fun. All of this was happening too fast, me and Doberman were still stuck in our positions, 10 feet apart. He lifted his right paw almost as if daring me to come forward and shake hands, but I knew that it was a step towards its next meal. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Involuntarily I took my bag and wielded it in my right arm raising it like a weapon. But Doberman was smart. It knew that a bag is not a stone. He took the next step, growling.

I took a very slow step back. Running was not an option now. I wouldn’t be able to go more than 10 meters before Doberman leapt and pinned me down. I would have to face him, maybe throw the bag at him to buy time and try to find something else to scare him away. Chances were grim.

Another option was to try to take something out of my bag like my pencil box, water bottle or tiffin box and throw it at him. Though not as much as a good pebble or small stone, the impact achieved would be more as compared to throwing the entire bag. But by the time I would have opened my bag to get one of these and throw, it could be too late. There was also the possibility of missing and then I would have to throw another of those. What if he decides to stay put? Or maybe he could pick up the thrown water bottle and run away? I would then have to drink the non-boiled typhoid water at school, let alone the dressing down I would receive at home.

In a flash I opened one of the straps of my Duckback still keeping it raised. It was one of the original school bags we had in those days. Khaki colored canvas with black borders made of resin. Rectangular in shape with large ugly front pockets and a massive covering flap fasted with belt like straps having holes at equal distances for the pin inside the buckle to latch. It looked like a rotting old window of the haunted bungalow.

First thing I could catch hold of was my tiffin box. Doberman had taken a few more steps and was now at an arm’s length from me. But I was sure the tiffin boxes was heavy enough for inflicting enough shock on him and then take my chances to run back.

But what I did next surprised even myself. I opened the tiffin box in a flash and emptied the nice smelling contents on the grass below towards Doberman. He sniffed those suspiciously and slowly started gobbling up the Pooris, choley and carrort halwa. What I did next surprised me even further. I bent down and started caressing and patting his head.

I had a feeling that he liked all of that. It seemed as if he had slowly started wagging his imaginary tail.

I was almost sure that I could see the small stub moving. Just a little bit.