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Thursday, November 09, 2017

The Death of A Writer - I

(This is the first part in a series of ... many. It features a writer and his ward - the narrator, a young social science student - getting embroiled in the local politics of a village in coastal Karnataka.)

On the 7th of January 1995, the writer was murdered. Shot. By a bullet fired from nine feet away. The writer had a half-smile on his face. I didn’t see the body, but Ramesha –  the old chemistry lab assistant at our high school, famed for his penchant for hyperbole – did, and said to me: “What a crazy guy the writer was! To see a bullet – death – in the eye and smile? Unique in human history!”

I was sure it wasn’t unique. In fact, I had evidence of the contrary: on the seventeenth day of the Mahabharata war, which both the writer and I considered more fact than fiction, Karna did the same. The scene is gutting: desperately attempting to dislodge his sinking chariot wheel, Karna - unarmed - pleads for a pause in battle. However, goaded by an unforgiving Krishna, Arjuna fires an arrow aimed at Karna’s neck. Notwithstanding the injustice of it all, Karna embraces death with a smile.
Karna smiles because death comes as relief from a tragic life; the writer, on the other hand, must have had a joke strike him as he eyed the bullet.    

*

The writer and I had a conversation about death once. I had gone to see him and as was my wont, took some charmuri along.

As I entered, the old grandfather clock in the living room struck four. I found the writer in his usual position. On the floor, by a window, his back against a pillow propped by a wall; papers, filled with neat cursive ink, strewn across the carpet. A single sheet, a Parker pen and an ink-pot adorned the “writing table” – no more than a two-foot foldable contraption with a wooden surface – by his side. He was very proud of that table for he had built it from scratch. He had just made tea.  

“Ah, charmuri! What timing!” he said, making to get me a cup of tea as well.
“I have a knack, you know – serves me well, especially through the off-side”, I said.
He smiled and asked:
“How is work coming along?”
“Not bad – I may finally be funded to collect data on some of these village santhes

“I was born in a village”, he said and paused dramatically.
“I was born in a village
I will die in a city
What a real pity,
Makes me feel shitty.”

He was pleased with himself.

Such a clever ditty”, I said sarcastically.
“Don’t mock me, young man – these ditties, born out of ennui, composed in a flash, will die with me, unrecorded, unwritten.”
“This shitty one will survive”, I said, “when I write a novel, I will write you in as a character just so you can spout this nonsense.”
When you write your novel … I will be gone by then.”
“Why do you think you will die? Fifty-five is too young to go – you have another twenty years, at the very least!”
“I won’t die of ill-health”, he said, “I will die because my time would have come.”
“Whatever that means.”
“It means nothing. I was just spouting faux-abstruse stuff – “
“—making sure you don’t only come across as a one-note impromptu ditty-writer in my future novel?”
One-note impromptu ditty-writer: you read my mind like it’s the top row of the optometrist’s board.”

Now that was a truly great impromptu line.

We spoke, mostly about cricket, till the crickets, frogs and owls were well into their nightly symphony… The writer was right though. He didn’t die in his village, nor did he succumb to ill-health.

And while you are reading this, he never did.

*

When I first met the writer, he was walking briskly, like a man attempting to keep pace with his thoughts. I was walking briskly too – a man keeping pace with his racing heart. It was a typical October day, the air bit like a swarm of stingless bees. As we crossed each other, the writer looked at me and smiled. Back then, strangers smiled at each other. I smiled back and squinted to look beyond him, at the entrance to the girls’ hostel.

“Are you the young economist?”, he asked. We lived in a small university town, where everyone knew of everyone else.
“No”, I said, unthinkingly.
My subconscious mind had made a heuristic choice to answer in the negative when faced with a question from persons a generation older.
“Liar”, the writer said.     
“Yes, yes”, I quickly corrected myself, “I am the young economist.”
“Well? We must meet then!”
“Sure!”, I said, somewhat too enthusiastically, attempting to compensate for the lack of eye-contact.
“Ice Land hotel? Tea and bonda? Four in the evening, Friday?”
“Huh?”, I said, “Okay, okay.”

*

“You’re early.”, the writer announced, when I turned up at Ice Land at five to four on Friday. His beak-nose peered from above the Udayavani, the local Kannada daily.
“You’re early too.”, I said.

He returned to his newspaper as I drew myself a chair.

“You know what they say about great minds”, I said.
“That they think punctual thoughts?”, he muttered, still staring squarely at the newspaper through his brown-rimmed glasses.
“That they make terrible jokes.”, I said and laughed, to hide my embarrassment. I was somewhat taken aback by my audacity: I didn’t usually wisecrack with people twice my age, especially if I have just met them.  

He smiled and put his newspaper down. A waiter walked up to us.

Yenuntu?”, I asked the waiter. What do you have?


I knew exactly what they had (they serve the same things to this day, twenty-two years later). I leaned back on my chair and shut my eyes: inside, the clang of vessels clashed with the sound of scuffing chappals and wooden chairs; outside, a city-bus engaged in friendly fire with another. 

And sure enough, there it came, the familiar answer to my question: a torrent of sweets, savories, beverages – twenty-one items on the menu, rattled off in a rushed four seconds. 

In that instant, had the writer had asked me, “What is home?”, I’d have answered: 

This is.” 

(Continued: Part 2Part 3)

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