Bus Route 86

This story was first published in Telegram Magazine, September 2016 issue. To read the story in the original magazine, along with several other wonderful stories and articles, please buy it here.

Bus Route 86

In the Mumbai that is today, there’s any number of ways to get from Flora Fountain (or Hutatma Chowk as it is officially known) to Mahim. Expressways have been inaugurated; flyovers constructed and even a magnificent white elephant of a Sea-link that promises to make it easy and convenient to get around the city. But in the Bombay that was, back in that summer of ‘95, when I was the Captain of the cricket team of St. Michaels School, the only feasible mode of transport was to take the winding route past Metro talkies, Opera House, Worli and Prabhadevi before finally reaching the last borough of the old city, for beyond Mahim, as anyone will tell you, Bombay ends and the ‘burbs begin.

St. Michaels had never had the funding to provide a school bus to ferry its cricket team to and from matches. So after a crushing win over Sathe Vidya Mandir on a fast-paced pitch at Azad Maidan, played on a blistering hot April morning, we the members of the St. Michaels team, with our coach in tow, were standing at the Fountain bus stop, awaiting the arrival of Bus #86.

Flora Fountain / Hutatma Chowk (present day)

The stock exchange is closed on Saturdays, as are most banks. The thoroughfare, normally bustling, was rather sparse. Both the colonial-era fountain and the more recent sculpture honouring those who had martyred themselves to the cause of separate statehood for Maharashtra glinted in the hard light of the sun, with no crowds milling about to obstruct the view. At the Bus stop itself, posters asking for votes were glued on top of the advertisement for Liril soap. The face of a singularly ugly moustachioed man glared down at us from the shoulders of the lissom model. A lady in a hijab[1] and her son were the only other people at the stop apart from the team. Sathe Vidya Mandir had long since gone home – they, at least, had the funds for a dedicated bus.

“Good win,” said Vivek, who batted at number 3.

“Early rounds are always like this,” I replied. He had only made the team this year, I had been on it a year longer and claimed superior knowledge.

“Is that our bus?” exclaimed the Loomba excitedly. Vishal ‘Loomba’ Udaykar was the team’s wicket-keeper, a position he had earned due to the fact that no one else wanted it.

“It’s an 84,” said Coach, a man in his mid-twenties who played the minor leagues on weekends and waited to be called to play Ranji Trophy for Mumbai. Those of us who had walked half-way down the road, with the aplomb of a batsman who walks half-way down a pitch to tap it with his bat, returned to the footpath.

“You just missed the 86,” said the lady in the hijab with the self-satisfied smile of one who is about to impart unpleasant news. “There won’t be another for twenty minutes.”

A collective groan followed.

“And what bus are you waiting for?” asked Coach.

“86,” she replied.

“Wait, but why didn’t she catch the one she said we…” I began, but Coach shushed me with a movement of his eyes, and before I could wonder any further, a rectangular red bus with the magic number 86 written in the window at the top rolled up to the stop, missing running over the Loomba by a matter of inches.

“Lying bi…,” began Coach, biting off the expletive, as he shepherded us onto it. The conductor and three other commuters were the only others in it, and all the victorious heroes of St. Michaels found comfortable places to sit. As was often my lot, whether due to my being Captain of the side or merely a fault in my stars, I ended up sitting next to Coach. The lady who had assured us there would be no bus forthcoming seated herself a few rows ahead of us.

“She wanted to get us to try and take another mode of transport so that we wouldn’t be occupying all the seats,” muttered Coach. “These people, I tell you…liars, the lot of them.”

Metro Talkes, in the good old days

The bus set off with a lurch, and made its way towards Metro talkies, the revered movie-hall where Hollywood blockbusters had once premiered. It was showing signs of neglect already, the art deco exterior fading, and once-proud ushers hanging around the entrance waiting for patrons who never came.

A few college students climbed on, and then the bus began to move again. It snaked languorously through Princess Street and its multitude of pharmacies, past Chira Bazaar and towards Gaiwadi, an ancient housing complex with two huge cow’s heads made of stone on each side of the entrance archway.

The bus was getting quite full as it left Opera House, where once an actual Opera theatre had existed, or so my father continues to assure me. A hub for a trade in diamonds on one side and auto parts onthe other, it seems impossible to contemplate that it could ever have hosted anything as genteel as an opera. Sometimes, though, when the light is right, usually after a light rainfall, the outlines of the buildings seem to wobble a little and ‘Shankar Mechanic’ dissolves into the stone structure it must once have been where horse-carriages carrying the memsahibs and their husbands to the opera would have been stabled for the duration of the show.

Opera House

They did not wobble now, under the bright light of the afternoon sun, and we rattled on, past the old Babulnath temple, which I have never seen the inside of, and the relatively new Jaslok Hospital, where years later I would come to grieve at the bedside of a dying relative.

Three men got aboard, one clean-shaven and two bearded, dressed in shirts and trousers, carrying cloth bags over their shoulders. The conductor approached them, clicking his ticket-punch.

“Get that thing out of my face,” said the clean-shaven one.

“Where to? Take a ticket,” he said.

“Sena Bhavan,” replied the man. “Three for Sena Bhavan. Oh hey, is that you, Golya?”

He thrust the ticket fare into the conductor’s hand and came over to where we sat, placing a hand on Coach’s back. As Coach’s eyes lit up in recognition, I felt the sense of disorientation that I am sure my readers will understand is quite natural for anyone who finds that the Cricket Coach he has hitherto been terrified of, is called Golya outside of School.

“Pakya, how are you?” asked Coach – or Golcoachya, as I would forever know him after that.

“All good, man. Going to meet the Saheb.”

“Sit down, sit down,” said Golcoachya, gesturing to me to go elsewhere. I hopped into the seat just in front before anyone else could come and occupy it. The bus was just pulling in near Lala Lajpat Rai College, which was then little more than a name to me. I would grow to rather like the place in later years, when it turned out I had a knack for passing exams when LLR was assigned as my exam centre.  Unlike other buses, 86 did not go on to Haji Ali, emerging from the other side of the college and moving on to Nehru Planetarium, the dome-shaped wonder of my – and lakhs of other kids’ – childhood.

“We’re going to win this election, aren’t we?” said Golcoachya. I could see his face reflected in the half-closed glass windowpane, and he seemed to smirk in a self-satisfied manner. He spoke in a colloquial version of Marathi, but I had no difficulty understanding him all the same.

“Should have it tied up. After the dangal[2] from two years back…our people want to teach their lot a lesson,” agreed Pakya.

“Yeah, and the blasts. We need a strong hand to deal with them. And people know who has the danda[3],” Golcoachya laughed.

“They’re gonna be scared when we take power. Damn government has been going soft on them for too long, man. Now our boys take no nonsense. We can screw them in the open once we’re in power.”

Doordarshan

“Doordarshan,” yelled the conductor, as half the travellers made for the exit door in front. The bus slowed to a stop just before the entrance to the offices and studio of the national broadcaster. It was no longer the only channel in the country – cable had made its entry a few years ago – but was still in a position of overwhelming dominance. This was where the driver and conductor changed their shifts as well, and I settled in my seat. These changeovers could take a long time if the pair that was to take over the route was late.

“You’ll come for the speech tomorrow? There’s a rally in Agar bazaar,” said Pakya.

“Saheb?”

“No, not him. It’s too small for HIM.”

“The son?”

“No, the nephew. He’s brilliant. Doesn’t mince words, not him.”

“I’ll be there. No school tomorrow, I can come.”

“How’s work, anyway? Convent school must be paying well.”

“Yeah, money’s all right. Bunch of no-talent kids. Half of them are bloody pav-walas[4]. They say english prayers in the morning, eat meat in their dabbas[5]and try to convert the half that are not.”

“That happens doesn’t it? I knew it!”

“Yeah man, it’s shameful. All these convent schools are joined up, you know. They want to spread their rotten religion in India. They get tons of money from foreign countries and use it to print their conversion material.”

I thought about Father Roderick and his threadbare coat, the sparsely-furnished apartments at the back of the school where he lived and the diligence with which he appealed to the parishioners of Mahim to donate money to maintain the school building. I had been invited to tea with him when the team had won the regional Cricket championship earlier that year, and he had told me that we could have new bats now for playing the national championship, as the Trustees had approved the funds. The cheque he wrote when the bats arrived was drawn on his own account, though.

We had won the match today using those new bats. I had made fifty-three of the finest. I wondered where this ‘tons of money’ was coming from, and to whom it was going.

The new driver and conductor hopped on the bus, and it gave another lurch as it started.

“About time too,” grumbled the woman who had boarded with us at Fountain. “How long you fellows take, eh?”

“What’s it to you, woman?” the conductor shot back, clicking his ticket-punch.

“My boy is getting late for tuition classes?”

“Tuition classes? Does he even go to school?”

“He can read and write, which is more than your mother can say for you,” was her response. The conductor made a dismissive gesture and began to troop to the back of the bus.

“Bloody arrogant woman. Look how brave they have become,” I heard Pakya’s voice.

“Pampering, I tell you. Fifty years of pampering. Give them everything because they’re a minority. They’ve become bloated on it,” said Golcoachya.

“That’s how it goes. Anyway, they’ll be put in their place come May. I broke enough bones in the dangal to earn a promotion. Good times are ahead for us, Golya.”

“Hey, I broke more skulls than you!”

Prabhadevi dawned, with the lofty Siddhivinayak Temple’s gold-plated dome looming in the foreground. Pakya and Golcoachya stopped talking to bow their heads reverentially. Then came Agar bazaar, soon to be the site of a rally addressed by Saheb’s nephew, as I had now learned. Sena Bhavan would be next, shortly followed by Mahim.

“How’s your sister?” asked Golcoachya, his voice changed – softer, somehow.

“You keep your eyes off Chinki,” growled Pakya.

“Just asking,” this in a low, apologetic tone.

“Don’t!”

Ranade Road, on any given day

The bus ploughed into the sea of shopping-crazy humanity at Ranade Road, named for a great lawyer and reformer, now famous for saree shops and jewellery. The going was slow now, the wheels moving slower than the old men with walking sticks walking in parallel to us. Behind me, there was awkward silence. It ended when the bus finally emerged around Plaza theatre, still shut down with the burned façade, a victim of the serial bomb blasts two years before.

Plaza Cinema, back then

“I’ll see you tomorrow then,” said Golcoachya.

“Yeah, meet you at the bus stop,” said Pakya. “You’ll like his speech. Tells it like it is, man. Chala, bye!”

As he stepped into the aisle, I felt a tap on my shoulder. Golcoachya gestured to me to come back to the seat next to him, and I did so, having no reason to do otherwise.

“Old friend of mine. Same colony,” he said, patting my shoulder. I shrank from his touch.

Bus #86 took the left turn into Lady Jamshedji Road. It would be ten minutes more to reach Mahim and the sanctuary of the school.

“You all right?” he asked. “Sleepy, huh?”

“Yes, sleepy. Hard match,” I said, agreeing with him, and closed my eyes.

And though I did, I could still see through my shut eyelids. I could see Metro Talkies turned into a multiplex, its charm gone and its screens reduced to showing prancing poppets. I could see Gaiwadi remain much the same, but the cows on its arches were to take on a different shape, bigger, more menacing, and become the weapons with which the Pakya’s and Golcoachya’s of the world attacked their fellow men. I could see Opera House suffer a fire and re-invent itself as a hub for selling computer parts, powering the march of a new, IT-enabled India. I could see the ideals of Nehru, and the spirit of scientific enquiry his Planetarium embodied lost in grandiose claims of ancient knowledge. I could see Doordarshan being mismanaged, sinking into obscurity, deluged by shouting news anchors and wailing soap operas, leaving only a memory of better days.

I saw all this and more. And at the back of it all, I could see my Bombay become Mumbai, a place where decency would die of a cancer, just as my uncle would, where Azad Maidan would see desecration of the symbols of freedom, where two cousins would fight over a poisonous political legacy and drive themselves into oblivion, where Temples would grow ever larger and libraries ever smaller, where bridges between places and hearts would be replaced by flyovers, allowing the privileged to ignore those left below.

But what I could not see was any glimmer of hope. Not for Bombay, and not for Golcoachya’s hopeless love for Pakya’s sister, which would end in a three-inch column buried on Page five of the Time of India, about a fight between two friends, Prakash Joshi and Aditya Golekar, ending in the maiming of the former and the death of the latter.

#

Bus Route 86 is real. Broadly speaking, it does follow the route described above. Also real were the events and implications of the period from December 1992 to March 1993.
Any person interested in perusing more about the riots that ripped apart the fabric of Mumbai in 1992-93 may peruse the text of the Justice Srikrishna report, the outcome of a judicial enquiry committee that was not accepted by the Shiv Sena - BJP government, which was in power then the report was released.

It is available here:
Part 1
Part 2

---

[1] Headscarf covering the hair and neck but leaving the face exposed.

[2]Riot

[3]Cudgel / Stick

[4]Literally, ‘bread-eaters’, a pejorative term for Christians common in Mumbai

[5]Tiffin-boxes

Book Review: Rain, by Sriram Subramanian

Book Review: Rain, by Sriram Subramanian

Publisher: Readomania

Buying link: Amazon

Pages: 190

A friend of mine (himself an engineer) used to narrate a story about his going to visit a distant relative during Ganapati. His teenaged nephew declared a firm intent to pursue his education in the IIT’s and was soon to begin preparing for it. Commending him on his ambition, my friend offered advice on the various fields within engineering with a view to helping his nephew make a more informed decision. That was when the lad informed him that he wanted to be a bestselling author, and apparently going to IIT was now a pre-requisite for that.

It is, of course, a trend now for high-achievers in academics and the corporate world to fancy themselves able to write good fiction. The mushrooming of vanity publishers in India might in fact indicate that this ambition is not the sole confine of the high-achievers either. Let us not forget that my friend’s nephew was not driven by affinity for art so much as the desire to be a ‘bestseller’.

So when the ‘About the Author’ section of Rain begins by saying that Mr Sriram Subramanian is an alumnus of not only the hallowed IIT, but of IIM as well, one can be excused for thinking it will fall into the same category as the work of his peers.

Mercifully, one would be mistaken.

Plot

Rain is told primarily from the point of view of Jai Dubey, an architect settled in Pune and married to Sarika Patwardhan, a research scientist. An encounter with a fortune-teller prompts Jai to make a rash declaration of intent to build a house for his family, and he finds himself increasingly conflicted between his intent to fulfil this ambition and stick to his principles. At the same time, Jai is disturbed by an apparent gap in his memory, a brief moment of his early life which he does not remember, no matter how hard he tries. As Rain takes us through the likely and unlikely turns in Jai’s life, we do find answers, even if they are not answers to the questions we started by asking.

Rain is about the conflict between principle, the competing hierarchy of need and desire, the strands that hold together a relationship. But it is also about the little things that affect our lives, a delayed monsoon, a nail that is an inch longer than it should be, a race against time and flailing against the Gods. And finally, it is about acceptance as well, about understanding limitations and questioning the unproven.

Characters

Mr Subramanian’s able to draw realistic characters, not just the main protagonists, Jai and Sarika, but the latter’s family, comprising her parents Ganesh, the ham-radio enthusiast and Mallika the tough-as-nails Marathi matron and Ashok her loutish brother.

Other characters like Ravi the college friend and Raju the urchin are also drawn from real life, and one can safely say that each individual in Rain is a reflection of a person the reader has known at some point.

Writing

It is difficult to put into words how refreshing it was to read Rain purely from a language perspective. The word usage, the sentence construction, the flow of words, the felicity with which Mr Subramanian brings his story to life is commendable. There are even a few places where the language allows itself to reach even greater heights, a lyrical flight of ideas and words.

From a story and plotting perspective, there are places where a straight line has been drawn from a point to another where real life and a higher form of art might have demanded a more sinuous movement. Perhaps for a debut novel and with due consideration to the commercial aspects of writing, this was a choice the author made consciously.

Conclusion

There are a lot of things to like about Rain, even if the book’s blurb flirts with being misleading and the ending is a bit rushed. Certainly, I came away feeling that Mr Subramanian has an ability to express himself that will stand him in good stead as he grows as a storyteller.

I read it in almost a single sitting, and given that this is not a conventional thriller / suspense novel, this speaks volumes for how well the author has knitted the story.

The Many Eklavya's of Guru Chetan Bhagat

The many Eklavya’s of Guru Chetan Bhagat

For those of you not familiar with the Mahabharata, the tale of Eklavya and Guru Drona (which is a small sub-plot in an otherwise massive epic) can be summarised as below:

Guru Drona is the most revered teacher of battle-craft in the land. At his ashram, he trains the Princes of Hastinapura (all one hundred and five of them) alongside his own son, in the various aspects of fighting, though archery is the primary skill of the time. Guru Drona’s favourite pupil is Prince Arjuna.

One day, the Princes are off on a hunting expedition when they come across a tribal lad who is practising archery himself, and appears to be extraordinarily good at it. On being brought before Drona, he claims that he, too, is a student of the Guru. Shocked, Drona asks him to explain himself, and the boy, whose name is Eklavya, explains that since he knows, as a low-caste tribal, he would never have been able to learn from Drona himself, he observed the Guru with his pupils, and building himself a clay idol of Drona, practised until he learned the craft for himself.

Unable to bear the thought of a mere tribal lad surpassing his favoured pupil, Arjuna, Drona demands a payment for his services as a Guru. Eklavya readily agrees, and Drona names his price – Eklavya’s right thumb – the one appendage without which effective archery is impossible. Eklavya complies, and Arjuna’s supremacy with the bow-and-arrow is now unchallenged.

Of course, many variations exist of the story, with varying degrees of blame being apportioned among the characters, but it is not my intention to delve into that at the moment. Rather, it is to establish that it is possible for a person to directly influence another, as a teacher and a student, without having any intention to.

Which brings us to Literature. A successful author often spawns imitators, a fact that is, no doubt, inevitable. No doubt there were those who tried to imitate Shakespeare.

We definitely know that this charlatan wrote a ‘sequel’ to Don Quixote and made good money of publishing it, before Cervantes responded with his own sequel. There must, no doubt, be a lot of Victorian-era authors who tried to imitate Dickens, Hardy, Trollope, Austen and their ilk. That we do not know them today is because their works did not survive the test of time, and no doubt such will be the fate of most authors alive today, present company not excepted.

But what of Chetan Bhagat? He is India’s most popular author, writing in a genre that is best described as Young Adult Romance. His first few books, partially autobiographical and focussing on slices of real-life as well as humour, became cult hits among young Indians who were just awakening to ‘reading in English’, and since then he has written a bunch more, though each one seems to be more sanctimonious and less fun than the last.

Personally, I do not grudge him his success. There are, indeed, some things he does really well, or at least, did in his earlier works. He wrote characters who were realistic and who a reader was interested in, plots that were simple and did not depend on exaggerated twists, and a narrative voice that was humorous and non-judgmental.

Unfortunately, he has spawned a horde of Eklavya’s – young men (and probably some women too), who believe that Chetan Bhagat’s success can be reduced to a ‘formula’ that can be replicated. Look over the ‘Indian fiction’ section at Amazon or a brick-and-mortar bookstore and it is inundated with romance fiction. Titles range from trite to hackneyed to incomprehensible (Durjoy Dutta for instance, uses titles that would leave most of scratching our heads).

For myself, I would normally never read them. I like a good romance novel well enough, (if you think about it, a lot of the works of the master of English prose, Sir P G Wodehouse, are romantic comedies), but being acquainted with the works of the Guru of these hopeful Eklavyas’, I think I know what to avoid. But one does not always get what one wants, and a by-product of having a bit of a reputation among one’s peer group (however well or ill-deserved), for reviewing books well, I do get stuck with copies of books and asked to review them.

I try to get out of it, for obvious and very genuine reasons – I usually have a book I am reading, at any given time, and the next 3 are planned as well. Besides that, one writes a little to pay for cutting chai (the pittance I am paid barely pays for that, even), and one writes for no pay at all, a novel that’s going nowhere. But more than anything else, one has a social life, with a family and friends.

Still, I did end up reading two such books recently. One was sent to me by the author himself, a school / college-going teenager who has been aggressively marketing his book in social media as well as, it would appear, physically.

The other was given to me for reviewing by a relative of the author, who is about twice the age of the first author, a Chartered Accountant and a high-ranking working professional.

That both the teen and the working professional were vicarious students of Chetan Bhagat, is immediately obvious.

The teenager’s book can be summed up as a so-called tragedy where the protagonist, a college-going girl, falls in love with an older man she comes across at a traffic signal, bunks classes to spend time with him as he tutors her in whatever she misses, and then randomly gets forced into a marriage by her parents.

The husband turns out to be a nice chap though, and never consummates the marriage; she adopts a daughter and continues to pine for the lost love, and in the end it turns out that he was living close by to ‘keep an eye’ on her all along.  If that doesn’t make you slap your head on your computer keyboard, the fact that he is found by the twenty-year-old daughter in a matter of weeks, when neither the girl not her husband could find him for years, definitely should.

At no stage of the book is there any character development, events are random – characters fall in love because the plot needs them to, parents are evil because they need to be, and ‘forced arranged marriage’ is a deus ex machina to make things go wrong, again, because the plot needs it to. As a reader, I did not care what happened to any of the people in it, dialogue was stilted and elements of Hindi movies were so liberally sprinkled about that I could sense a Nadeem Shravan soundtrack playing in the background.

The CA’s book was better in terms of narration. I could even excuse the flaws in narration and language, as being a result of using a ‘suburban Mumbai dialect’. Not that there is any style, but at least it’s not blatantly bad writing. It’s the plot holes, though, that would make a Bollywood sex comedy seem intelligent.

The hero, also a CA, gets a job in Chennai (cue a chapter of ‘cultural displacement jokes’), meets a strikingly beautiful Punjabi girl in an elevator, uses manipulation and artifice to get to know her better, helps her when she has a completely-random, plot-convenient health issue that is never referred to again, and then wins her over by proposing to her on the night she breaks up with her boyfriend. Attempts at Bhagat – 2 States – esque humour follow, until, again, the ‘arranged marriage’ bogey is raised, followed by a lost phone, confusion caused by Mumbai having two terminals, and then a happy ending that involves plastic surgery and a song written by the protagonist, that was never referred to until twenty pages from the end.

I’m sure there are worse books out there. In fact, I know there are, Amazon’s sample chapters are often enough to establish that. But stuff like this, I often think, would never have seen light of day if not for an unfortunate sense of ‘anyone can write’ brought about by Bhagat. In seeing only the simplicity of his language and his use of young Indian protagonists, writers like these two are missing the wood for the trees.

Not every writer who writes about elves and dwarves and an impending apocalypse is a JRR Tolkein. Not every writer who writes about serial killers and evil clowns is Stephen King. And certainly, the word ‘Magic’, repeated twice in a title, would not make the story ‘magical realism’ as Rushdie and Marquez would have it.

If aspirational, barely-literate Indians need an idol to worship, Chetan Bhagat is as good as any. But if you have aspirations to write, please, for Chetan Bhagat’s sake, if not your own, find your own voice. Write what you want to. And wait until you’re ready to publish it. Even your Guru wrote a few decent books before inflicting absolute crap on the market. Books that had something to redeem them in the eyes of the reader, something that had not been done before.

But if you are going to write the same stories, with the same twists and the same language (in varying degrees of horrible-ness), you might as well pull off an Eklavya. That poor kid got away with cutting off his thumb. To prevent yourself from writing, you’d have to cut off all your fingers.