Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Number 21 – Madras Mail


Part One

 
A recent conversation I had with my friend transported me to a time from my previous life, or so it seems to me now as a space from previous life. 
 
My Chennai days. It seems so very long ago!
 
Two decades are not as antediluvian in the scheme of time and that of life generally. But a reflection today, amidst life revolving around two kids below age of 10, a full time career, aging parents, upcoming divorce, dreams some of them shattered and others lived wiser, the two decades ago appears to me as a time from another lifetime.
I was 21 when I arrived in Chennai in June 1998.  Bright, young, naïve starry dreams that solely a 21 year old mind is entitled to patent. I had done well in my exams, interned in Vienna, represented international moot court, engaged to be married and my fiancée was in Dubai.
The world was at my feet!
 
That was the time I was working towards enrollment at Bar and slogging at one of the reputed, underpaid, overworked law firms in south India.  My apprentice involved endlessly going through the library doing research work for the senior lawyers who if given an opportunity would ogle at my breasts or try to tell me how miserable they were with their wives or how rich they were. If I were as evidently unimpressive as I actually was I was subject to a lot of ridicule in my work.  Having bred in a nun convent system, I took to ridicule as fish to water. Ridicule, nominally amusing but really an expression of hostility, was their favourite weapon—the worst possible, short of actual cruelty, in dealing with young people as the nuns had shelled out to us most magnanimously in our developing years. 
 
It was during this period that a colleague introduced me to All India Radio.  I wasn’t keen at first.  It did not appear as exciting as a VJ stint I had done previously for Asianet but had failed miserably due to my non-singing abilities.  But I took it on at her insistence and never looked back for the 18 months I was in Chennai.
 
I started off reading out a part for a Tamil play which required an English accent for 150 rupees per day and quickly moved on to reading four drama parts in a week; an interview and a few other roles too earning 500 rupees per week which was enough to sustain my newly acquired unscrupulous ways ie not sticking to hostel food; movies; telephone calls to Dubai and everything else to the extent that a South Indian girl would imagine herself to do. I must have been relatively good looking as I recall having ardent admirers all over and the surroundings at this place was no particular exception. Whenever I made mistakes, which was very often, my mentor a man in his late 40s always took my side and quickly either covered me or edited my slurs.  During this short span of time I learnt the merit of interpersonal skills over intelligence, became popular and was offered a permanent employment which I felt was like a sword over my rightful career.
 
For and during the ten hours starting at 7 am, the lawyer worked logically, methodically and as I learnt to bill and the nuances on the art of time sheet; research; draft petitions; file; stick stamps; running around to notary public. It struck and quite alarmingly on my 21 year old underdeveloped logical mind that, work outside mathematical logic, does not and need not always completely represent one’s own beliefs or one’s general outlook.  It was a startling revelation at that time! This was my career and I am doing the right thing, I constantly reminded myself during my hours of struggle. When wasn’t the right thing, painful?, I consoled myself during my hours of humiliation at the lawyer’s office.  
 
All the while, impatiently I would wait for the clock to strike 5 pm in order to rush to take a bus to AIR which was around 20 minutes from my work place. The world which had been thin and logical in the preceding hours, suddenly became rich, varied and solid. Before I knew it, it was time for me to head to the hostel where I had to report before 9 pm. I felt time was never enough at AIR. I also felt shameless earning much more than I did at the lawyers office and chagrined that it was effortless.   I felt I was thieving not working.
 
My Chennai days were lively with AIR, my apprentice, Sunday outings with my hostel mates, days of devouring the smuggled beer into the hostel, shopping at fountain plaza, bargaining at mount road..I transitioned.  I missed the naivety I possessed in my cocoon life for the last 21 years with my most inadvertent revelations.  The girls hostel I lived had a roof top overlooking the beach and as though following the general rule that all good things are to be denied to girls who are not married, we were not allowed to be enter the roof top and it was locked at all times.  The conniving girls that we were, we found a way to squeeze in quite dangerously through the racking window and you had to be extremely thin to do that to enter the roof top. The days we smuggled the beer and the beef we went to the roof top after midnight and spent a lovely hour or two often talking about men or trying to solve someone else’s love story.  My earliest realization that sharing food creates special bonding.  If one side of the hostel was the beach the presidency hostel also had a shallow wooded area, which wouldn’t classify to be a forest, from one of its gates. At the roof top both the views were beautiful and it was during one of the beer-beef-boyfriend full moon night I had the first insight into different shades of sex. While I was standing there and musing at the moon, light headed, I saw a bike with three men stop nearby the woods. They alighted and started raping one man after tying him to a tree who neither seemed to resent the entrapment nor the ensuing sodomy.  Transfixed and speechless I stood, as the rest of my mates soon joined to watch the night show. The guys sensed they had an audience and quickly exited. Shocked at my unintended exposure to homosexuality, I was consoled by my more knowledgeable friends that night with more gruesome stories, possibly a figment of their imagination.  However, for me, it was a period of startling revelations.
 
But nothing in the world could prepare me for March 1, 1999.