The story of a faceless journalist

 

COLUMN: Tunnel of Time

By Shevlin Sebastian

'What news of T.S.?' a colleague asked me one afternoon sometime ago.

'Yes indeed,' I replied. 'What news of T.S.? Poor guy. Must be feeling discouraged since we haven’t published him for quite a while. More so, after we turned monthly.'

My colleague nodded in silence.

T.S. Venkataraman was one of the most prolific freelance journalists we had come across. At any given time, there were 30-40 articles of his in stock. They were all neatly typed on foolscap white paper, with a short covering letter.

He wrote on all sorts of sports and pastimes that no one else touched: yachting, hot-air ballooning, kite flying, bowling, kho-kho, kabaddi, and carroms. He also wrote on mainstream games like tennis, football, cricket and hockey.

He had an amazing output.

How did he manage to write so much? Where did he get all this information? (Surely he must be connected to the Internet.) How did he get the time? Did he have a typist? These were some of the questions that we asked each other.

We did not know what he looked like. He stayed in Chennai; he lived in one of the flats of the Tamil Nadu Housing Board. M 28 F is the number that immediately came to my mind as I wrote the previous sentence. That was how familiar his address had become to us.

We did not know whether he was young or old, married or unmarried, a journalist or a non-journalist. We did not know what he did for a living. Nothing of his personal life was mentioned in any of his covering letters.

Suddenly, one day, he started sending articles to us. We published a few and that obviously encouraged him. After that, there was this ceaseless flow.

The supply was so great that early this year [1997], when I collected the articles that we could no longer use and sent them back, it had become a medium-sized parcel.

I felt bad that all this work that he had put in had gone to waste. Maybe, if I had returned it earlier, he could have got them published somewhere else.

What made this guilt deeper was his impeccable behaviour. He never once asked about the fate of his articles. He never asked about payment, which was sometimes delayed. He behaved so differently from the usual freelancers; they were always anxious and tense, wondering about the fate of their articles, whether they had been accepted or rejected.

I don’t blame them since I was once a freelancer and behaved in the same way. But T.S. showed admirable self-restraint.

The only sense of sentimentality that he showed was at Christmas, when he would send us a card with that slanting handwriting of his, wishing us a "Merry X’Mas and a Happy New Year".

I was curious about him.

Last year, in October [1996], when it was time for me to go on vacation to Kerala, I wrote him a letter. I told him that I would be stopping over in Chennai for a day.

‘Could we meet?’ I asked.

He replied immediately, stating that he would be "delighted" to meet me. I gave him the address of the cousin with whom I was staying and the date of my arrival. He promised that he would come and meet me.

And so, I set out, in the hope of finally seeing the prolific but elusive T.S.

But fate decreed otherwise.

Till Vijayawada, the Coromandel Express was on time. But in the meantime, a cyclone had hit Andhra Pradesh. The tracks were blown off on the stretch between Vijayawada and Chennai. That distance which the train would have normally covered in six hours, was done in 60 hours, as we took a deviation via rural Karnataka (which matched Kerala in its beauty) and reached Chennai.

I was too drained out.

So many days of the holiday had been lost. I had to run around to get a ticket on the Trivandrum Mail.

My cousin informed me that a Mr T.S. Venkataraman had dropped in.

‘How did he look?’ I asked.

‘He is a very old man, but with lots of energy,’ my cousin replied.

I tried calling him up a few times, but I kept getting the engaged tone. I was running out of time. In the end, I couldn’t meet him.

A few weeks later, when I returned to Calcutta, I wrote him a letter apologising for not being able to meet him. I, of course, had a "natural" excuse: the cyclone. He replied that it was all right. We would meet another time, he assured me.

The other day, we received another letter. As soon as I saw the familiar pink envelope, I told my colleagues excitedly, ‘T.S. has started his flow...’

But that was not to be.

It was a letter from Kamala Venkataraman stating very matter-of-factly that her husband, T.S. Venkataraman, had passed away peacefully on May 2 [1997].

I felt a numbing sense of shock. I realised that I would never be able to see him. That was so sad. I showed the letter to my colleagues. They also looked stunned. For a brief moment, the atmosphere in our office, which is normally so full of laughter and gaiety and one-line jokes, became sombre and silent.

I felt an affection and a sort of inner connection with this stranger. I wondered whether it was more than just coincidence that the date on which he died, May 2, is also my birthday. Who knows, we might finally meet in our next lives. But for now, this is our message to you, T.S.: ‘We miss your output! May your soul rest in peace.’

(Published in Sportsworld Magazine, October, 1997)