Some thoughts as I saw myself in a news video

 

By Shevlin Sebastian

When my sister sent a 6:49 minute video from Nanma 24 Channel, I clicked on it. So imagine my shock, when, at the 2:21 minute mark, I found myself in the video walking in a blue T-shirt, shorts and sneakers.

This was what happened. In the evening, as usual, I had gone to Attipetty Nagar for my evening jog, but found a barrier right at the entrance. So I stopped, parked my two-wheeler and walked through. I noticed a man holding a microphone in his hand.

I also observed large perpendicular cracks in the road, next to the Edappally canal, and assumed some road repair was going on.

But that was not true. The road was in the first stages of collapse. The mud beneath it had shifted, thanks to recent rains, and according to the voice-over in the news video, the road could cave in at any moment.

It was an odd feeling to watch myself from the back. I thought I looked a bit fat around the hips. But, when I sent it to a friend, known for her reassuring remarks, she assured me I looked fine. When I enlarged the image, I realised she was right.

It also raised a question for me: what do people think about me when they see me from the back and the front? What conclusions do they come to?

Recently, an aunt of mine met a few friends of hers who had seen me run. They told her they thought I was from North India.

This is partly true since I have spent many years in Calcutta.

One of them added, “Why does he have to run so much? And so fast?”

What do I think of my running?

I am not running very fast. It takes about 600 metres before I can feel my creaking joints get into some sort of rhythm.

So, what I think of my actions, and what others think of it may be the opposite.

It could be a revelation if you were to ask people: what do you think of me?

I also observe people even as I run, my mouth agape, gasping for breath and sweat dripping down my face: So, is that thirty-something couple married? They talk so much. Do married couples speak so much? Not in my experience. Why do they walk slowly? How can there be any physical benefit if they do not put the heart under strain? You need to walk fast, and pant a little if you want to gain something from this walk.

But after their walk, I am sure they would have felt they had done a good bit of exercise.

Another couple in their seventies: I always hear constant bickering between themselves as I speed past them. Looks like all affection and love have been burnt out.

What about the girl in her late twenties in a T-shirt and track pants? Does she not have any friends? Why does she always come alone? Is she married? Or divorced?

What about the pony-tailed woman, a mother of two sons who ride cycles? She is always speaking to somebody on the phone, through her earphones. So I think, ‘Who is she talking to? A woman? A man? Her mother? A colleague? A lover?’ Sometimes I think, ‘Have never seen her husband at all.’

She could say the same thing about me.

This analysis is happening both ways.

One day, a man stopped me and said, “Are you a doctor?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, a lady walker told me you are a doctor,” he said.

So we spoke. And he was a priest. I would never have guessed that because he was in a collarless T-shirt and denim trousers.

A young nursing student stopped me and said, “What is your name?”

My first name is very unusual in Kerala. So, they play the word over in their minds and nod imperceptibly.

“You run very well,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said.

But do I?

The standard is so low in our state and country. So few do any exercise. So, if someone does a bit, it’s considered great. My cousin from Chicago told me he runs 10 kms a day. So that put me in my place .

Another walker, Rafiq (name changed), a successful entrepreneur, in his early thirties, also put me in my place.

“For a runner, you do have a paunch,” he said.

I looked down at my stomach, not very big, but felt embarrassed by what he said.

I took it as a challenge.

I immediately cut sugar and rice from my diet. Astonishingly, two months later, my stomach is nearly flat, my trousers have become loose, and I had to increase the notches on my belts.

So happy for that put-down by Rafeeq.

I was about to say, “You come with your mother?” when he told me, “I come with my wife. You must have seen her.”

I nod, glad that the question about his mother had been stuck in my throat. Since she was wearing a hijab, I could not guess her age.

So, everybody is evaluating each other as we go about our exercises in the evening, trying to keep healthy.

Interesting, the thoughts that came up, as I saw myself for a few seconds in a news video.

No heart at all

 

By Shevlin Sebastian

Just a day before my mother returned to Kochi, after five months with her daughter and son, following my dad’s passing away, my wife went to her ground-floor flat to do a clean-up.

In the kitchen, she noticed that in the third drawer of a built-in wooden cabinet, five baby rats were scrambling among the plastic bowls and a couple of rolls of cellophane paper. She pushed the drawer shut.

Later, she told me about it. I wondered what to do. Like my wife, I feel queasy when I see rodents.

I took the help of George, a watchman of a nearby building.

He pulled out the drawer, and we took it to the side of the house.

On the other side, there is a one-acre banana plantation.

“Let’s tip them over,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, and did so.

During the day, the mother rat foraged for food and brought it to the babies at night. It probably chose the drawer because it felt it was a safe place. The house had been empty for so long. Outside, in the grassy land, among the teak and coconut trees, there were numerous frogs, snakes, cats, dogs, and an army of centipedes, scorpions and ants. In short, there were too many predators around. I have seen crows pouncing on these baby rats.

George inserted the drawer back into the cabinet. We began searching for the hole.

It was a mystery. There were no spaces under the doors that led to the outside. We checked the windows. They all had wire meshes. But in the work area, beside the kitchen, as George removed a bucket on a cement ledge, there was a circular hole that led to the outside. I assumed it was made to put in the pipe of the washing machine so that the water could run out.

He rolled a piece of thick cloth and pushed it in a few inches. It was now tight and blocked.

“The rat will get the smell of her babies, as soon as she comes near the wall,” said George. “It will not come inside anymore.”

I thanked George, gave him a cash token, and he left.

The next morning, when I came in, I got a shock. The cloth had been pushed aside. I called George. He looked surprised, as he stared at the hole.

“It looks like because of the rains, the mother could not detect the smell of her babies,” he said. “There is also the possibility the crows ate the babies one by one. The mother assumed the babies were in the drawer. She must have made a supreme effort to push the cloth away, to get at her babies. That is the power of the motherly instinct. Since animals live in close touch with nature, they have more intense feelings than us. It is more genuine too.”

Indeed, it would have taken hours to push aside the cloth.

I can imagine the devastation the rat must have felt to see all her babies had vanished. She must have realised she made a horrific blunder by sheltering the babies inside a human habitation.

George stepped outside.

He took a small stone and placed it at the entrance of the hole.

“Because the mother has lost its babies, there is little chance it will come back again,” he said.

He turned out to be right. The stone remains where it is.

And we stone-hearted human beings remain where we are.

We have re-confirmed to the mother rat and her friends we are the most heartless and cruellest beings on the planet. 

An erotic short story set in Kolkata

Thanks to Juggernaut for publishing my short story

https://www.juggernaut.in/books/afternoon-visit

Ordinary people doing extraordinary things

The Calcutta-born and Bangkok-based journalist Ivan Fernandes has written a memorable collection of short stories called ‘Requiem for Calcutta’

Pics: The cover; author Ivan Fernandes

By Shevlin Sebastian

During the years I lived in Calcutta, I would frequently travel through Free School Street on my way to work at the Sportsworld office, near Chittaranjan Avenue. And always, I would go past a huge garbage dump. Expectedly, I took a deep breath moments before, pushed a handkerchief against my nose, and went past.

I always wondered about the group of people who lived in huts right next to the dump. How did they stay next to such filth? Did they get used to the smell? Did it make them sick? It seemed like torture to me.

 

When I began reading ‘Requiem for Calcutta’, a book of short stories by the Calcutta-born and Bangkok-based journalist Ivan Fernandes, I got some of the answers. In a short story titled, ‘The Sex-Crazed Hijra’, Ivan highlights the life of Kiran Mausi, a Bihari eunuch, who stayed next to a rubbish dump in Howrah.

 

Here is his description:

 

‘Here at least 1000 tons of garbage is heaped daily…

 

‘An NGO has reported that 80 per cent of the approximate 10,000 strong squatter community had inhabited the place for at least five generations....

 

‘Without going into details, one can imagine the quality of life here with its inhuman living conditions, unbelievable poverty, crime, vice and exploitation. This dumpsite is also home to a group of hijras, for whom Kiran Mausi is their undisputed reigning monarch. And so, this is where I first met her, in a stiflingly hot and vomit-smelling tin shed.’ 

 

In this memorable collection, Ivan has focused on a wide variety of characters, which is what makes Calcutta such a fascinating place. So, there is Abhra Mazoomder, a fanatic Marxist Bengali, who gets disillusioned as party members gradually lose their idealism and become drunk on power and corruption. The Left Front ruled Bengal for seven consecutive terms, from 1977 to 2011. And they did this by keeping an iron grip on the electorate. So, even if the party workers could not see the way the actual voting took place, they devised ways to figure it out.

 

As Ivan writes: ‘The telephone booth-style cubicles were only half-curtained off from the top, to hide the way a person stamped the ballot. But you could see the person’s legs. The CPI(M), in the long roll of the ballot paper, was listed at the top. If your poll paper was seen touching the floor, you must have voted Communist, because you let the roll drop to mark X, besides the hammer and sickle at the top.

 

‘If you voted for the Congress Party, which was towards the bottom of the roll, your ballot paper was seen not touching the floor as you would raise the roll with one hand to stamp it with the other. Then, of course, you were given a sound thrashing on your way home, irrespective of being male or female, young or old.’ 

 

In another story, Ivan writes about Colleen Rachael Houghtin, who spent her life looking after dogs. The tale focuses on the Anglo-Indian community. Sadly, this community has dwindled because of constant migration and inter-marriage. But who can forget their zest for life, their simplicity and their God-given talents in so many fields, but most notably in music and sports. Many of my close friends in school were Anglo-Indians.

 

Some famous Anglo-Indians, who had their origins in Calcutta, include the the singers Cliff Richards and the late Pam Crain, and the hockey player Leslie Claudius, among many others.

  

Ivan has also written about the Chinese through the life story of — hold your breath — Will Lim Fang Shung Zhangzhao Kan Phin Wun. It’s an unforgettable story with a sad ending. And there is the tale of Raqesh Dalpat Prahladka, a Marwari doctor, who was so inspired by Mother Teresa that he worked for the poor full time. For the Marwari community, which has such prodigious business acumen, to have a member do something like that as his only profession and not make money as the primary occupation, it would have been amazing, to say the least.

In a poignant narrative about Sikh police officer Ekampreet Singh Dindral, who married a Muslim, Ivan’s description of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Calcutta following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards was harrowing:

 

‘This time we saw Inderjit Singh, the elderly Bank of India durwan from across the street, kneeling in the middle of the road, his clothes torn, and without his turban, his long hair all over the place, his face bloodied, an eye as big as a potato, hands folded begging for his life as a mob of about 50 people pulled at his hair, kicked and beat him to an inch of his death shouting, ‘Sala gadhar madarchod bhosri wala’ (arse f…..g treacherous Sikh, born from a rotten c...t)”

 

When asked about the title, ‘Requiem for Calcutta’ Ivan said, “It’s a past that I yearn for. It’s a past that I cherished. It’s a past that cannot be replicated.”

  

The diaspora, which tends to be nostalgic about their homeland, has been enthusiastic about the book. Copies have been sold in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, but also in lesser-known countries like Cyprus and Malta, as well as in France, Spain, and Italy. “It got a mention in ‘The Telegraph’, Calcutta, by a reader who described it as 'a must read book that takes you back in time,’” said Ivan.

 

The writing is so vivid that one got the impression these people are real-life figures. Ivan said he wanted to tell a story not only about a single person but also about the particular culture from where he or she came from. “These are ordinary people doing ordinary things in an extraordinary way,” said Ivan. 

 

The book, however, has a drawback. The publisher missed doing the final proofreading corrections. So, readers will have to overlook a few errors. Ivan promises to make it error-free in the next edition.

 

This is galling for Ivan because he has been a journalist for over two decades. For the past 20 years Ivan has lived in Bangkok, where he is currently the Managing Editor of the online English edition of La Croix, a Paris-based French daily newspaper. It provides content on politics, society, religion, culture, education and ethics.

 

Asked to compare Bangkok and Calcutta, Ivan said, “Both Calcutta and Bangkok are old cities, with Bangkok tracing its roots to the 15th century. Although never colonised by a European power, Bangkok has powerful European cultural influences. Being a tourist hub, Bangkok has a strong cosmopolitan appeal. Tourists come from all over the world.” 

 

Bangkok also has a large Indian-origin population who are Thai citizens but have kept alive their cultural traditions. “So it’s easy to get Indian food or feel like being part of the local population,” he said. “In both cities, the local people are proud of their language and culture.”

 

The biggest dissimilarity is development. “While Calcutta and Bangkok can be similarly chaotic with large crowds, street vendors, neighbourhood markets, monsoon flooding, and traffic jams, it’s the social indicators that make Bangkok superior,” said Ivan. “In Bangkok, there is much more development in city infrastructure, transportation, health services, civic amenities, and cleanliness. It has a greater sense of a positive appeal to human dignity that shields poverty rather than wearing it like a badge of honour as done in Calcutta.”

 

His first book has whetted his appetite. Ivan is now working on a novel that is also set in Calcutta. “I am still grappling with a proper plot structure, characters, the beginning, middle and an end, even though I have already written 50,000 words!” he said, with a winning smile.