The Detour

It was in the slice of real life as it was in that slice of reel. A young couple in their late twenties and their three-year-old daughter were walking the Chowringhee Road under a sweltering July sun as cars, buses and trams sped past them. They were tired, thirsty and starved on top of being clueless as to which door to knock on next in the bewildering and endless seeming officialdom of Calcutta (now Kolkata), just like the mother and her two young sons in the reel, who hit the streets of Bombay (now Mumbai) after they were thrown out of their small shanty in the workers’ colony.

It didn’t really matter that the two scenes unfolded in different cities, one in Bombay and the other in Calcutta, 11 years apart from each other — the filmy one in 1975 and the real-life one in 1986. Nor did it matter that the people involved in the two scenes came from lower-middle class and working class, respectively. How they felt mattered. And it was the same feeling of isolation and helplessness, as three people, unused to the ways of the world, were forced upon the fatiguing climb of life’s crooked and steep path without a survival kit.

There was another parallel. In the film, the grown-up elder brother, the iconic Vijay, recalled a scene standing by the window of an apartment in a highrise in Bombay. He was precariously poised on the edge of a steep moral precipice, unsure whether to plunge headlong for the gangster’s alluring offer in order to escape a life of poverty and shame. The scene that floated into his vision was the same street scene from some years ago of mother and two young sons walking on a Bombay footpath, buffeted by sun, winds and rain. And the words that came tumbling out of his mouth, as he began his precipitous descent with a firm handshake, became history: “Mujhe apa ka sauda manjur hei, Dabar saab” (Mr Dabar, I accept your business proposition).

The street scene in Calcutta paved the way for a similar detour for Subrat, the young man in the real-life story. If Subrat recalled it some 14 years later, standing by the window of a multi-storied apartment in Hiranandani Complex in Bombay, it was in an effort to pinpoint the moment in his life in which his rise and fall had been concentrated.

And he had to strain to peer back through the mists of years to find that moment.

* * * * *

A scene from long ago from M.K.C. High School in his hometown, Baripada, flashed across Subrat’s mind. It was perhaps the first to show him where he was in the scheme of things.

The bell rang. And that, in turn, set a cheerful bell ringing in students of class eight. The next period was for the craft class, a joyful change of scene. They would make their weekly trip to their oasis within the premises of the school. The craft class was held in an old, dilapidated, and leaky asbestos-roofed building tucked away under the shade of a giant tamarind tree in the backside of the school campus. It was a good 50 meters from the block where their regular class was held.

The craft class was their favourite period. The workshop, though ramshackle, was their choice fantasy place. It offered a welcome break from the dread arithmetic and dull geography, thus becoming an eagerly awaited event for the boys (MKC was an all-boys school then). They also knew that with their promotion next year to class nine this subject would fall by the wayside, only to be resurrected in the dreaded form of the science laboratory some four years down the line.

If the world outside the books existed for them anywhere during their sheltered school years, it was in the craft class. It gave them a chance to attach their affections to things that were written about in books. They marvelled at the tools and instruments like karata, karani, chheni, and randa that they saw being carried by masons and carpenters around every new building site. They enjoyed as much the sight of trees, of birds flitting from one branch to another, and the arboreal creatures atop the tamarind tree. There were two rhesus-monkeys, the red-bottomed ones, dwelling on top of the tamarind tree. They always scanned the boys below with fear and anger because the boys disturbed their peace by their racket.

The craft teacher, Chakradhar Sir, enjoyed himself too. He was concerned with anything but the task at hand, which was explaining how to train the boys in the use of the tools. That day he sat and read absorbedly from a detective novel belonging to the famous Mira series, lying unfurled in his lap. At times he made the reading into a communal affair by reading aloud. He usually selected an intimate passage, featuring Mira and her sidekick-cum-lover Narana.

“And then Narana took Mira gently into his arms and asked her not to think of their next act of robbing Rama to pay Bhima while they had this moment to themselves. Evening was deepening around the two figures as they struggled to become one on the face of the rock, silhouetted ominously against the distant horizon. Here was bliss, Mira thought.”

Chakardhara Sir was the very picture of geniality and warmth as he read this. Suddenly the sound of something dropping on the floor broke his trance. He looked around and caught a boy in the act of picking up the randa from the floor.  The boy broke the spell cast by this highly edifying material. The lilt in his voice was quite gone. It began to crack like a whip. And his eyes seemed to bulge and spew fire.

“Hey, boy! What’s going on there?”

There was a sudden hush. Everyone followed the direction of Sir’s stare.

“You disturbing lout!” Sir roared.

“Siiir! I didn’t do anything, Sir.” Subrat’s voice began to falter from fright.

“What does your father do?”

“Clerk, Sir.” Subrat blurted out the word as though he had been asked, at gunpoint, to part with his most jealously guarded secret.

“Clerk!”

It was not necessary to utter one more word of reproach. Subrat had been decimated. After the class was over, one of his friends, who had a jailer for a father, had repeated the word, with that mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

Subrat knew that the word to pin him down had been found. His life’s mission from then on was to avoid an encounter with the dreaded word, which threatened to annihilate him so completely. But there was no escaping the word. It had the habit of surfacing unexpectedly in the mostly unlikely of places. From now on he had to be ever ready to devise stratagems for diving and detouring to duck the bullet.