Travails with Chachi Read online

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  Copyright © Louise Fernandes Khurshid 2014

  The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by her. They have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews—without prior written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 978-93-81398-56-2

  Printed and bound at

  Rajkamal Electric Press, Sonepat, Haryana (India)

  To my daughter, Ayesha

  Constant Critic, Conscience Keeper, Comforting Companion and Rockstar!

  Taken from us at the prime of her life.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1. The Beginning

  2. The Miskeen Messiah

  3. The Entertainer

  4. Dog Day Afternoon

  5. The Cross They Bear

  6. Mandir Manipulations

  7. Panchvati Perverted

  8. Mango Party Politics

  9. Ram Teri Ganga Maili

  10. ‘Om Jaya Jayalalithaa’

  11. Amma Dekh, Tera Munda Bigda Jaye

  12. Plague on the Sanitary Inspector

  13. Ticketless Travails

  14. Impractical Seshanomics

  15. Jawai Babu Zindabad

  16. When in Doubt, Pout!

  17. A Night of Long Knives

  18. Zamana Badal Gaya

  19. Games Politicians Play

  20. Seeing Red

  21. The Heritage Hungama

  22. The Shape of Things to Come

  23. That’s Not Cricket!

  24. Man Smart, Woman Smarter

  25. Petrol Mein Kuch Milawat Hain!

  26. Ye Haath Mujhe de de, Thakur!

  27. Sifarish ka Kamaal!

  28. Tandoori Nights

  29. Ye Hi Hai Wrong Choice, Babu, Aha!

  30. Friend or Foe?

  31. What a Tamasha!

  32. Land of the Buddha?

  33. The Dark Side of the Sun

  34. Laal Batti Netagiri

  35. One Less Good Man Bound for Glory!

  36. Whose Life is it, Anyway?

  37. In the Spirit of Christmas

  38. Goan Misadventure

  39. And Justice for All

  40. A Different Kind of Maths

  41. Shades of Saffron

  42. The Ways of the Badlands

  Glossary of Terms

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  WITH DUE APOLOGIES TO THE BARD MAY I SAY THAT IN THE midst of the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ – in this case the juggernaut, or roller coaster, of Uttar Pradesh politics – it is almost impossible to get a moment of quiet reflection. Let alone to write. I have, therefore, to primarily acknowledge the persistence of my husband, Salman Khurshid, who nagged me mercilessly into getting Travails With Chachi out of the computer and into the hands of my editor.

  May I also acknowledge the persistence of my editors – first Rukmini Kumar Chawla and now Sanjana Roy Choudhury – who pushed me with relentless zeal to finally hand over the manuscript?

  I would be remiss in not acknowledging my friend, Shobhana Bhartia, and her editorial team, who first introduced Madath Singh Yadav and his DLY taxi, Chachi, to the pages of the Hindustan Times.

  Of course the persons I really need to acknowledge are the good people of the Uttar Pradesh districts of Farrukhabad, Etah, Kannauj, Mainpuri and Etawah. This is an area of UP, which has produced several chief ministers, several vice chancellors, several Union Cabinet ministers, a governor and a president of India! But it is also the area categorized as the ‘badlands’ of UP. While most still cling to their roots, there is an entire badlands biradari, which has migrated to cities as close as Delhi and as far as Surat and Baruch and Mumbai. They are bakers and taxi drivers and zardozi embroiderers and fabric printers and even fruit and vegetable sellers. Common, simple people whose wise wisdom has inspired this collection.

  And lastly, I take this opportunity to acknowledge the abiding influence of my late father, Praxy Fernandes, who urged and inspired me to become a writer; the timeless support of my mother, Joan Fernandes, who helped me go out into the brave new world to take up a course in journalism when India had none to offer; and the timely support of my three sons, Zafar the lawyer, Samar the journalist and Omar the future business manager, who have given me the required moral support in good times and in bad.

  Louise Fernandes Khurshid

  January 2014

  New Delhi

  INTRODUCTION

  LONG BEFORE I ACQUIRED OTHER PERSONALITY DESCRIPTIONS I was, and for many of my late father’s friends and admirers even now, I remain, ‘Praxy’s daughter’! My elder sister, Annabelle, took to an advertising career and our younger brother, Ashok, entered the photography business in earnest. It remained for me to choose between my father’s wielding of the civil servant’s pen to make government files more interesting or indeed to follow the tradition of scribbling newspaper ‘middles’ that he wrote with passion. I chose the latter and, after spending some time preparing to be a journalist at Marquette University in the US, I became part of Aveek Sarkar’s exciting army of scribes.

  It was difficult to retain a frank and fearless tradition of an independent journalist once I married into a political family – and there are incredible stories of those days that must be told another time. I did persevere for a while but gave up not because it was ethically impossible to be an ‘embedded’ source or difficult to retain a public perception of objectivity, rather because the ‘impossible’ happened: I put the pen and reporters’ jacket away, donned khadi apparel and walking shoes, took to the mike in faltering Hindustani, and won for the Congress for the first time in 33 years the Kaimganj Assembly seat in the UP district of Farrukhabad.

  No more Praxy’s daughter but the daughter-in-law of the badlands of UP with a determination to begin changing the world from Farrukhabad. Since then the rollercoaster of periodic elections, including my husband Salman’s, and preoccupations with demands for roads, hand pumps, medical attention, school and college admissions, transfers and intervention for and against police conduct, toilets and gutters and electrification of long forgotten villages – all inevitably prefaced with metaphors of depression, oppression, threats and doomsday prophesies – have been my world. When Salman goes to France I go to Farrukhabad; when he calls on an Excellency I pay obeisance to grassroots democracy. All very far away from the world of journalism.

  But once a journalist, always a journalist. Besides, I had periodically felt the need to communicate to the audience I once thought was central to my life. Thus began my imaginary conversations with Madath Singh Yadav, the taxi driver: it gave me a chance
to bring two worlds together – mine of the present and the other world I began with. Also, for Madath Singh Yadav and his faithful ‘Chachi’, the road travelled and the road ahead.

  I first thought of writing with the pen name, Paul Patwardhan Pasha Singh, to create a sort of Everyman character not identified with any political party or religious denomination or caste clarification or anything that puts one in a predisposed slot. But then the worry that some enthusiastic colleague would raise questions why the wife of a Congress minister was ‘deliberately hiding’ behind such a ludicrous pen name made me decide to take the bull by the horns and write as I am – as Louise Fernandes Khurshid.

  Travails With Chachi has gone through some serious metamorphosis – from an unsuccessful attempt to turn it into a novel to what we have today – a simple journey illustrating the signs and scions of our times.

  How times have changed. And yet haven’t. How mindsets have changed. And yet haven’t. How politicians have changed. And yet haven’t. And how the good people of the badlands of Uttar Pradesh have changed with their migration to the capital city of Dilli. And yet haven’t.

  Travails With Chachi is no philosophical or psychological or economical or sociological treatise. It is a simple set of thoughts that seek to put down simple propositions and suppositions and superstitions and preconceptions of simple people.

  I sincerely hope that this volume will be judged by its own merit and not by the political or otherwise background of the person who has written them!

  LFK

  1

  THE BEGINNING

  MY WORLD WOULD HAVE CHANGED FOREVER THAT DAY had Chachi died.

  Two decades may not a lifetime make but what we had was no mamooli rishta, no simple relationship. It went beyond the usual feet touching on religious occasions or the meaningless ‘duty’ gifts that relatives give each other to go through the formalities. This was no bond of blood. And yet. What can I say beyond the fact that my world would, indeed, have changed forever that day had Chachi died?

  I thought I had no choice but to let her go. With the extreme cynicism of youth my son, Balwaan Singh Yadav, ‘Bablu’, who learns some firangi language called ‘French’ at his fancy school in Delhi, announced that it was passé to ‘get all weepy about a piece of junk’ and that ‘however financially obliged Gandhiji may have been to the Birlas there actually was life after the Ambassador car!’

  So there I sat, in silent contemplation, while various body parts of my beloved 15-year-old Ambassador taxi, Chachi, were being examined with much the same eye Kareem Chacha from Jama Masjid checks out the pick of the goat litter, fattened for the annual Id-ul Fitr community dawat. Except that the pimpled, potbellied youth who was leering at Chachi’s nearly naked body was no elegant gentleman like Kareem Chacha. This was the younger version of Monty Khurana, the safari-clad father of Bablu’s best friend, Chintu. When you shook hands with him he left enough grease on your palm to fuel a minor forest fire. And even standing ten paces away was a health hazard. All the ‘Intimate’ perfume this man used – and oh so liberally – couldn’t disguise the fact that he had a distinct problem with his sweat glands. They just worked much too over time….

  The sad part is that this was all quite unnecessary. ‘Zamana badal gaya,’ said Dadu, the world has changed, when the topic of pensioning off Chachi first came up, advancing Alzheimer’s adding that additional shake to his gesture of regret. ‘Since when is 15 a “pensionable” age for a car? In my time….’

  ‘That’s the problem with you old timers,’ Bablu had cut in with an uncharacteristic lack of respect for his normally revered grandfather. ‘Dadu, this is the age of the Toyota Carolla and the Nissan X Trail. Even Maruti cars need the Japanese “Suzuki” connection to survive!’

  ‘Tauba, tauba,’ said Bablu ki Ma, knowing that Dadu, whose older brother had taken a bullet between the eyes during the Chinese aggression of 1961, saw red when confronted with anything even slightly slant-eyed. Japanese, Chinese, Korean – same difference where he was concerned! ‘If the Ambassador car was good enough for Mahatma Gandhiji then it’s good enough for me,’ said Dadu with the finality of the patriarch of the family.

  That was it. I was well and truly dog meat where Dadu was concerned. I had committed the cardinal sin – the sin of disloyalty. I had given in to Bablu’s nagging to be ‘with it’ and sacrificed a long and beautiful friendship on the unforgivable altar of commerce. I was definitely not welcome back at the village this Diwali. ‘If you want to behave like a typical Dilli-wallah then stay put in Dilli,’ Dadu muttered. ‘What do you want with the sweet smell of the mango blossoms and the whisper of the wind blowing through the sugarcane fields? A man who can sacrifice his Chachi with such impunity can as well sacrifice his mother and father….’

  And in the echo of the night I thought I heard Bablu ki Ma whisper, ‘Why forget about the wife?’

  You see, even after 20 years I find it difficult to call Delhi my ‘home’. I am a simple sort of fellow with simple sort of tastes and what these family planning-wallahs call the ‘ideal’ family. I pay through my nose to give Bablu a decent sort of education and Bablu ki Ma now insists on being called ‘Sangeeta Bhabhi’ and even has two gas cylinders, a 165 litre Videocon fridge and colour television and Tata Sky Plus in our Lower Income Group DDA flat.

  True, we’ve come a long way from the day when, stepping off the Kalindi Express at New Delhi railway station, the little lady and I, then newly weds, shared that two-room tenement with Pratibha Maasi’s brother-in-law’s family of six. With just a prayer in one pocket and Dadu’s aashirvad in the other, I first arranged potato sales for cold storage owners from Farrukhabad and Etawah. With the initial commissions earned I added chewing tobacco to my list. Then, for two years after Bablu was born, I graduated to commission agent to the largest attar manufacturers of Kannauj.

  Those were the days when being a bicholia, a middle man, was not such a bad thing. And, thanks to the rich variety of commodities and arts and crafts of my home territory in the ‘badlands’ belt of Central UP, my life as a middleman presented some interesting prospects. But then Bablu started getting older and his mother started nagging me about things like education and I too, started to ask myself why I had left the sweet smell of our mango orchards back home for the sick stench of Seelampur’s open sewers.

  My life changed in the early hours of the first day of 1991. Now, I am not a drinking sort of man. On the contrary. It’s just that sometimes a man’s got to behave like a man. Even I, who subject myself to the wife’s home made bel pathar ka sherbet while others bring out the ‘Haathi Brand’, have to put my foot down sometimes. And what better time to make a point than when you enter a New Year?

  It’s amazing what wonders half a bottle of tharra, that powerful local brew, can do for one’s flagging morale. After the wailing of Bablu’s teething troubles and the whining of my dissatisfied wife, the prospect of clinking a soda bottle to desi sharab glass sounded like mujra music to my tired ears. I said to myself – I must think of doing this more often.

  Needless to say, the inspiration for this scheme was my good-for-nothing-else brother-in-law, Mehnath Singh Yadav, who – he himself proudly proclaims – has never done a stroke of work in his life. At the end of each year Mehnath makes the same resolution – to look for a job. I am awarded the dubious privilege of putting him up (and putting up with him) till he scouts around. Within one week he declares he dislikes Delhi. And within nine months my sister, Pushpa, is put to work nursing a new infant. Mehnath has done his work for the year.

  The year 1998 was no different. Except that this time I too, joined Mehnath in drinking in the new year. For a man who came to Delhi so rarely Mehnath certainly sounded like he knew where to go. ‘The thing to do,’ he whispered to me, ‘is to hang around this open air dhaba in Connaught Circus called “Ramble”. In every corner you will see all shapes and sizes of foreign women smoking hand rolled cigarettes that smell much stronger than our Bul Bul brand beedis. The fun
starts around midnight. I tell you, bhai, these white skinned women are really chalu cheez. No pardah-wardah for them. When the clock strikes twelve they start shouting “Happy New Year” and grab anyone around. The trick is to be near enough. If you are lucky the chumma, the kiss, will land right on your ….’

  ‘What nonsense!’ I rushed in, hurriedly cutting him off before the little lady heard. What I really wanted to say was, ‘What excitement!’ When he saw me off at the station Robert Atmaram, my friend from school back at Etawah, had told me to watch out for ‘fallen women’. Was I finally to meet one?

  ‘I swear to you, bhai, this is the place I was told about,’ one very embarrassed Jawai Babu kept muttering as midnight came and went and no dancing girls emerged from the shadows. Embarrassed not so much because he was wrong this time but because all that embroidery on his infamous escapades was fast unraveling.

  I suppose, in the end, there is such a thing as fate, as kismet.

  As we sat on the sidewalk in the inner circle of Connaught Place, opposite Pandit Brothers, with Mehnath at the singing stage of drunkenness, I heard a loud crash. For a moment I thought: ‘Hare Krishna, asmaan toot gaya. This is the end of the world! The sky is falling down!!’ Mehnath stopped singing and started crying. Then howling. Then rolling around on the ground, shouting: ‘Pakistan ne hamla kar diya. Hey Bhagwan, ab hamara number aa gaya!’

  I don’t know who was more embarrassed – I or the Sardar saheb who crawled out of his DLY taxi. As the smell of diesel rose to my nostrils I fought down sudden nausea and tried to pull him away from the crash site. When he started crying: ‘Hai rab, meri Bhabhi’ I even offered to crawl back in and rescue his sister-in-law. Till I realized that ‘Bhabhi’ was what was left of his brand new Ambassador car, now wrapped snugly around the trunk of a sturdy jamun tree….

  Leaving Mehnath laughing at the wind by this time, I tried to comfort the shattered man. Could I help? I asked. He didn’t look sober enough to get home. Could I drive him back somewhere? (After all, they don’t call me Madath Singh Yadav for anything.) But, I tell you, these Dilli-wallahs have no manners. He looked me up and down and swore something terrible in Punjabi – a language I still little understand. ‘That’s all I need – a drunken UP bhaiyya with a fake driving license,’ I heard him mutter. Before he passed out clean.