My Life in Gulbarga Part III

I often used to travel back home to Wadi, which was about 40 kilometers by train from Gulbarga to be at home. But home too was somewhat different. It was no more the home that I left to Moovattupuzha for in April 1980 and for which I pined when I was in Moovattupuzha. I was no more the kid of the house. My brother Srinath was. I was more or less an interloper who was fast becoming a burden, and I remain that till now – in every place I have considered home. It is because of this singular lack of love and attachment that I fail to remember anything about those days vividly.

One thing I remember was a road trip to Mantralayam to worship at the Brindavana of Raghavendra Swami a Madhwa saint of the 17^th Century CE who was widely venerated and worshipped all over Karnataka but Mantralayam, where his Samadhi was located was curiously in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh. The Telugus apparently did not care much for Raghavendra Swami and the situation was much like in the Nankana Sahib in Pakistan. The saint was popularised by Rajanikanth who eventually grew more popular than the Saint himself. I was in B.Sc second year and one thing that comes to mind is that I had not yet begun to shave my beard at that time. I must have looked pretty horrible. I also chewed pan for good measure, making me look like a tramp.

I remember the Tungabhadra river, relatively clean, its banks strewn with rocks, the worship at the temple and I also remember having a pimple that bothered me no end. I was told by many that the pimple was a result of my not shaving. One prayer I had to the saint was that that if the pimple is cured, I would shave regularly thereafter. This is an indication of my proclivity to worry myself thin over inconsequentials right from an early age, and go to the gods over it. It must I think have annoyed the gods thoroughly and later when I really needed them, they showed their backs to me. Eventually I showed my backs to them too.

My reluctance to shave came from the fear to apply a cut throat razor blade to my face. I could not believe that the blade would have the intelligence to discriminate between skin and hair and would selectively cut one and spare the other. There was a hostelite called Prasanna in the Jain Hostel. One night, he caught me and sat me on a chair and shaved me. It must have been around midnight and that therefore was my first shave.

By now I had started enjoying the traditional food of north Karnataka. I did not know much Kannada till then, but I started speaking Kannada in the Gulbarga lingo thereafter, very fluently. I also relished the jawari rotis with eggplant curries and chutneys made of groundnuts with garlic and of black sesame seeds. These were accompanied by a fairly liquid dal, and another cooked item consisting of some pulses that was called Kaalu. New moon days brought Pooran polies, bread stuffed with a sweet mixture. There was in the hostel mess a short thin cook called Gowda who cooked reasonable food and appeared harassed all the time.  He was famous for making irrelevant statements. Ask him why there was more chilly in the dal and he would say the tomatoes were costly. After some questioning in this direction, we tired of it all and ate what he offered us. There was also one Lingappa, who it appears was a major factotum in the hostel and kept tabs on ordinary students and let those students who paid him do what they wanted to. He was corrupt to the core.

I honestly do not remember much about my hostel life because nothing really happened. Except that we who studied till late in the night sometimes crossed the railway line to the other side to have tea well past midnight. The Dadar Madras Express passed through on its way to the Gulbarga station at about that time and we stood by to watch it rush past. It was on one such occasion that we saw a man of indeterminate age and indeterminate provenance sitting by the track and smoking a beedi. We stopped as usual waiting for the Express to pass. As the express turned the curve ahead and we began to see its light, the man looked animated and started puffing fast on his beedi as if he was in a hurry and wanted to finish it soon. He took quick hard puffs. Having finished the beedi, he threw it aside and jumped in front of the train just in time for the engine to run over him. It took about 2 minutes for the whole train to pass and after that, we saw three pieces of the man in the tracks. It was not really gory. There was no post mortem twitching or blood and intestines all around, but just three pieces. The man must have planned well. This is the only suicide I have watched from beginning to end till date. His treatment of the beedi was what left an impression on me however.. Whatever the case may be, we did not really feel like having tea and studying thereafter and so came back to our rooms and slept.