And days pass

 

Writing after a long time. I had decided not to write because writing would pain and shame me. My happy days were all done with and all that has followed after this are painful memories that also involve others who gave me pain. But some friends keep urging me, so I try.

There was one room on the top front of Jain hostel which accommodated three inmates unlike the other rooms on the ground floor that had two. This room was often taken by the influential students and the senior ones. I got to take this room once while in my M.Sc with my chosen roommates. This was the room which opened to the terrace on both sides. It was also the room where decisions were taken and porn was watched and liquor was consumed and the occupant was RESPECTED. I was there for six months.

I had all kinds of partners/roommates while at Jain Hostel. Arvind Agarwal who is still a dear friend and about whom I had written in these pages in 2006 was one. It was he who introduced me to Padmini dhoop sticks. Arvind was my junior by four years in MCC. He got into engineering in HKE society Engineering college and was my roommate for six months. Pradeep Oak, a reputed corporate type now and who is the brother in law of the Late Ananth Kumar ji of the BJP was another roommate. The Patil who went on to study a lot of pharmacology was one. Sai Krishna was another. All in all I think I had 10-12 roommates and eventually, though I was a very measly figure, by virtue of my seniority, I became a respected man. Most people called me Professor. In all I stayed there for five years from mid-1882 to mid-1887. I believe I was one person who survived in Jain hostel for the longest time by being timid and non-controversial. I have repeated this peculiar feat several times later, including in my present job and my present family as the longest continuously serving curator in NSC, Delhi (from 1995 to 2015) and as the longest serving partner of my wife from 1996 till date. By being timid, watery and suffering.

I had temporarily forgotten Janaki when I left Wadi for Kerala, but one day, as I was walking towards my home in 1984 holding the hands of my little brother Madhu (he must have been less than five then), a girl called “Madhu” from behind. Looking back, I found it was a beautiful young woman. Women have this trick of blooming into a beautiful flower at a certain age, even if they may have been boyish or stick thin or silly earlier. It was Janaki and she asked, “That’s his name isn’t it? He is so cute” and then she petted my brother, pinched his cheeks and so on and I was smitten all over again. I confided to very few of my friends, because I had what you would call a reputation – of being ascetic and interested only in Relativity and Quantum mechanics. It was sometime in 1985 that Janaki got married. My father received an invitation card from her father. I remember reading the Narayaneeyam of Melpathur Narayana Bhattathiri, an abridged rendition of the Bhagavatha Mahapurana in one day (a huge feat indeed). I cut my finger and wrote her name in my blood and put it inside the Narayaneeyam book asking Lord Guruvayoorappan to somehow make the impossible possible. Remember that I was a very sober person and see how love drives a person mad. I was etching printed circuit boards manually then and I had devised a logo for my boards that had a bold capital J with a queen’s crown on the top. Sai Krishna knew this as did a few others like Jayachandran later, and they used to rib me. I and Sai Krishna used to talk about this while we went on long walks along the Jewargi Road in the evenings. Sai thought me silly.

That was when I watched Sagarasangamam in the Sangeet Theatre of Secunderabad. I knew that being a student and unemployed I could not even hope to marry Janaki. The movie affected me so deeply that I developed a fever. I was bedridden for 20 days. I recovered and continued with my life thereafter, albeit with a reduced zest.  This was to be my first defeat in the matters of the heart, with many more to follow. And follow they did ruthlessly. I propose to write about all my heartbreaks in the coming days, unless curtailed by readers.