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.