Yet again it’s Hyderabad. The
city of Nizams, hi-tech youngies, beautiful hussain sagar lake, mouthwatering
biryani and hundreds of years old history. Hyderabad comes across to its
population very warmly. People have the vigour and energy of a south Indian and
the soft manners of a Muslim. It’s in no way rude, of course individual
experiences are bound to differ. Being a villager at heart and a small town boy
in upbringing I feel comfortable in this old world, as Hyderabad never gives
you the dead feeling of an Indian metro like Delhi does(again, it’s all about
personal experience). The rush and the hustle and bustle of the old city are so
contrary to the posh and dreamy locations of Banjara Hills and Jubilee hills.
Move to Hi tech city and suddenly the air is charged with a Gurgaon or
Bangalore or Navi Mumbai like smell of churning software in the IT
transnational offices towering the heights of the city.
The recent one was my third trip
to this place. And I tell you, standing contradictory to all the praises that I
have made for this city, I hate this place. It haunts your sinister designs and
outsmarts your satanic desires- All women are clad in dark burqas. Could
anything be more tormenting than desperately wanting to know what is behind
that black veil, especially when you have already had a glance of the milk
white skin around the eyes and the slight show of palms? The Satan in a man and
his sexual desperation finds a resting place nowhere but only when he knows he
is not a satan. I haven’t known it yet, thankfully. I roam the city paying
visits to NGO partners, gobbling up delicious food- feels so human to eat
anything on earth which doesn’t sound like chhole-Bhature or Rajma chawal. The
bill boards displaying and boasting of Hyderabadi haleem and Biryani can be
seen everywhere, must remember it’s the sacred month of Ramadan.
Two years back it was Ramadan and
it was Hyderabad, but it was no celebration, it was no checking out the
bountiful women, it wasn’t about the food either. It was a project assigned to
me by an extended family- my family. The word project, because I had no emotional
connect with the cause; it was a task which was supposed to be done with a
finesse of project implementation, the dedication to ensure result, positive
result. Those days, I had named it Project- Lulu.
My father is the eldest son among
seven children, four sons and three daughters of my grandparents. One of my
uncles in the year 2001 had succumbed to the injuries of the gender and the
society he was born to. His colossally unforgivable original sin was that he
had a love relationship with a woman, who he later realized was not worth marrying.
But fear of defamation of being in an affair with a woman prior to marriage and
later not marrying her and instead being married to some other woman is an
unpardonable crime to a man who has a social repute and belongs to an extremely
well known family in the district. A man is supposed to stand up to being a man
always, whether he wants it or not. A man always has to be the fore bearer of
the family’s reputation, whether he even connects to it or not. So, just in
case he finds all this too much, he makes a narrow escape- through a nasty
suicide, ten days before his marriage. Lalu kaka(uncle) left his body to be
carried by my father and others to a place where his body would be burnt. Ironies
of the gender and social norms are questions of life and death in the Indian
society.
Project Lulu kicked off with a
call from Papa to me on a rainy July evening. Then I stayed in Kundra, a village
of Koraput(Odisha), fifty km from Koraput town. Papa asked me if I could take
his brother, my uncle-Lulu to Hyderabad for a medical checkup. Lulu kaka was
third in line of brothers. A successful LIC agent in the region, well paid and with
a name in town like no other, a regular goer and organizing member of the
district athletic association, a past record of national Youth club membership.
A master of a unique sense of humor and an extremely accomplished event
organizer and manager. Papa had aslo
made him the editor of the periodical which was published by my father’s
efforts as he headed the Zilla Lekhak Parishad (district association of
writers). His acumen at keeping cool in
any situation howsoever is a hard to find phenomenon, which he had mastered by
some past life grace, probably.
Lulu kaka’s debacle of career and
social status happened by the virtue of a tryst with the legal authorities, he
could have been jailed but Papa; as usual an influential man saved him. He went
through phases of financial and personal breakdowns ruining him from inside and
outside. He hit the bottle. Drank to his heart’s content, drank until he was
penniless, and drank until his liver gave up.
Following my father’s direction,
I enquired about the best gastroenterology places in Hyderabad. Asian Institute
of Gastroenterology turned out to be the perfect bet. I booked an appointment
with the hospital over phone and reached Balangir(my home town). A family of
intimidated and timid lesser humans wanted me to save this man, by some magical
hospital I had figured out in Hyderabad. I left for Hyderabad with Lulu Kaka in
the Nagavali express which ran between Sambalpur(Odisha) and Nanded(Maharashtra).
He was no more the athletic, not at all a man of charm, and nowhere close to
healthy. Alcohol had burned his very existence to ashes much before he could be
cremated. His hands and legs shivered and trembled, his eyes were red like
blood spilling out of them and demeanor of a frightened child, desperately
crying for help.
We reached Hyderabad early in the
morning and left for the hospital for the checkups. His eccentric behavior in
the train had left me puzzled; he acted more like a mental patient than a
damaged liver. The tests of the day at the hospital revealed the gory details
of what alcohol had done to him. He had
passed the phase of Fatty liver and slipped into a condition called Alcoholic
Hepatitis and was highly susceptible to slip to the last stage of Liver Cirrhosis. The day was spent empty stomach not just by him, but also me, found
no time to grab a bite. But still, I was happy I could manage to call up Maa
wishing her happy birthday- it was 6th August. The day ended to be resumed the next day for
more tests.
We retired for the day; my back
gave me the ache of my lifetime. I barely had three hours of sleep. It was 3am
and Lulu kaka was up doing some Puja(ritual), next moment he was looking for a
place to go for a walk, in the next five minutes he discovered there was some
lady in the bathroom and she should be driven out, he wanted paan, he wanted me
to open the gate for his mother who was there to meet him. He spit on the door.
The state he was in, is medically termed
as- withdrawal. A situation when the body is suddenly deprived of the regular
dose of intoxicant. And the body and mind function in noncooperation and the
behavior goes through massive disorientations. My management skills and
patience levels were pushed to the threshold humanly possible. I waited and
managed the whole early hours for sun to dawn and the clock to strike 9, so
that I could take him to Hospital. Not because I wanted him to be cured but
because I was feeling tormented and exhausted doing the whole management of the
crisis for the last 6 hours.
The hospital sent him through a
plethora of tests trying to determine the whole situation he was in. We were sent
to two other hospitals for psychiatric tests and consultations. The tests of
the liver, the stomach and kidneys put up a dismal show. All his organs had
cried their hearts out, begging mercy from the merciless alcohol. The organs
had died an unnatural death, forced to die. The human who contained these
organs was still alive because organs are lesser contributors than blessings
for a man’s survival. Lulu kaka was alive because prayers were still effective
than factory made medicines. This is what the tests revealed. The day ended, that’s
how it has been for billions of years, the sun shares its light and love to the
other part of the planet, without a moments delay, every day. And leaves this
part to retire into darkness and sleep and rest and make love and sin and crime,
all in the name of night.
Had my father or I would have had
the slightest idea that the patient who went as a case of liver disorder would
become a severe psychiatric issue I would have never come alone. But now the
ball was no more in the control court. He would shout and run; I would hold him
and arrest him by sheer muscle power. He would yell at other women in the
hospital assuming he was talking to his wife. He would not move a step until
his wish permitted. To make him cross the rush traffic of the city was a task
that demanded my soul to connect to God and ask for super powers of the angels.
Today I can’t explain how I made him cling to my left arm with the back pack on
my back and his luggage in my other hand and crossed the traffic where there
were no lights for pedestrians to cross the busy roads. I can only say some God
at some corner of the Universe made all that possible. The despair of the day,
the exhaustion, the backache, the desperation to drop down dead in the comfort
of the Volvo bus (tickets were not available in train on that day) that would
take us to Vizag was my only wish left in life, I felt that way. We waited at
the waiting room of the bus stop. The a.c. in the tiny waiting room comforted
me like a lullaby that would lull me to sleep. But I had no luxury to attain
with a patient who was a psychiatric case and could do anything any moment. He
asked me to help him take to a place he could pee. I felt, the world was about to
end and all my sin were coming to mock at me. All humans believe they can
escape their sin, so committing one is easy. But a situation when life is
neither dying nor livable makes one question and ponder if one has committed
sins in the past life or even in this. Taking him to the loo meant crossing the
busy road again, but a project is a project, certain deliverables are
non-negotiable. Back from the loo and
the bus would be there in five minutes time, this meant that I would cross the
road again, this time I sought help from a teen boy who was guarding the
waiting room. We crossed over to the other side, this kid asked me ten rupees
for the services he rendered, I couldn’t have been more amazed, I instantly
gave him.
The bus was a semi sleeper a.c, I
felt this was the end of all sorrows of my life. We would reach vizag early in
the morning; take the next train to Rayagada and one more train from Rayagada
to Balangir, simple! But simple is not
simple when complexity is the order of the day, when the planner has planned
more experiences for you, when the upcoming hours could be the most delicate
and demanding ones of your life, till date. The bus left Hyderabad city and
started off on its way to Vizag. The road en-route Vizag was polished like a
slate and the bus drove fast. For the first few minutes everything was normal,
while I rested my ailing back against the seat.
Lulu kaka suddenly shouted in
the packed bus at the top of his voice,
most co passengers were occupied watching a Telugu movie, still many
could see something weird happening. I was received by a thunderstorm with his
loud yell. All my lethargy and wish to sleep like dead, vaporized in the heat
of what he did. I tried my creative talents to calm him down; I talked about
how he was supposed to listen to me, that he was ill, that we were in a bus
travelling, that he should be sensitive to the fact that there were dozens of
people who were getting affected by his demonic screams, nothing worked.
The
temperature of the drama was about to rise and the patience test was tailor
made for me, I realized. The drama grew intense when he told me that his kids
had been bitten by a dog and so he was kicking the dog away, and in a bid to
drive the imaginary dog away he kicked the woman in the front seat from behind.
The woman was carrying a baby in her lap and her husband seated next to her.
The next few minutes promised that my life was screwed up of all possible
happiness that I had accumulated after ages of penance and austerity in a span
of thousands of years and hundreds of births. The protective husband grew to
full power of his manhood. Nature and society had programmed him to act that way,
uncaring about the fact the context here was different. Here there was no
intent of harm or disrespect. His anger was on the boil. But never does the
universe leave you unguarded when your intentions are aligned with the cosmos’
ways. A young man, perhaps my age or a
little more or less had, had a small interaction with me few minutes prior to this
mishap. I had explained him the critical situation. He jumped into the scene
like an angel and offered to replace the seat with his. He also convinced his
friend to replace the seats with the married couple. Crises are those periods
of ones’ life when the faith is shook from the roots or re-established with a
cementing force that good exists in more ways than one identifies, until
crisis strikes. This Good Samaritan, who barely spoke English and knew nothing
about a language called Hindi, understood my situation like an old buddy, who
knew me in and out, like some saint who had mastered the mundane and
insignificant thing called life.
The next two hours were spent in exhaustive
efforts to control Lulu kaka’s erratic physical behavior. He would kick and I
would hold his legs tight. He would shout and I would press my palm with full
force on his lips to stop him. He would
endlessly, ceaselessly in his loud voice speak all nonsense he could, from
politics to lessons on how to drive a car. From the love for his children to
how bad the society has been to him. Every time the bus would run a little fast
and sway to any side in the turns, he would grab the head rest of the seat in
front, trying to save the bus from falling down and use his full energy to do
so. I would dream, doing this may be he would start panting and feel exhausted
and drop to sleep, nothing happened. With every passing minute he grew more
violent, louder and used his physical prowess to overpower me.
The bus stopped at a place for
dinner. I was hungry. I did not know how to manage to eat. Sure, that happened,
I couldn’t eat. I regretted that I allowed him to get off the bus. The moment
he alighted, his imaginary dogs chased him and he ran, shouting for help. I ran
after him to grab him by neck punch on his face, slap tight and scorn him with
my choicest slangs. I caught him, but did nothing. I knew I couldn’t. He was
today a fallen Satan, but I had seen him in his days of glory. The real Bijan
Mohanty, the manager, the family man, the organizer, the witty guy. Lulu kaka
had this unique identity at home of being sent for errands as many times asked,
he wouldn’t complain. I remember he never grumbled, never angry, an unbelievably
cool one, hard to find breed.
I had a hard time trying to convince him that the
dogs had gone and he was safe, that I would keep him safe. He told me that his
mother was in another bus, and we have to wait until that bus arrived. This
time, I caught him by neck and dragged him into the bus, this time it was not
anger, but I knew I didn’t have a chance if I went by moderate means. This enraged
him and he started punching me, beating me. Somehow I managed to seat him on
the seat. But times were going to be tougher. The Telugu picture had ended and
there was silence in the a.c. coach. Every sound he made could be heard loud
and clear in the both ends of the bus. I
was literally preparing a speech for anyone who would complain of this mess and would ask
us to get off the bus. The whole bus would be disturbed by his noisy words and
I would see co passengers grumbling, still I felt like the best humans on earth
traveled with me in the bus that night, no one ever asked me to get off, no
one gave a look which would make me feel looked down upon, no one told me a word.
Lulu kaka, was adamant of getting off the bus, he pushed me, I pushed him back. He
punched me, I punched him back. The whole of the time in the bus, my one leg
arrested his legs, so that he didn’t kick the person in the front seat. My
right hand glued to the window like an iron shaft, so that he had no scope of
standing up and my left hand on his mouth, so that he wouldn’t shout. This lean
man poured his full potential to defeat this enemy who had held him by brute
force.
We reached Vijaywada, it was half the journey, half the distance to
Vizag still remained. For a moment it came to me to get off the bus and take a
taxi to Balangir or stay in a hotel and leave the next morning. But 1.30 in the
night, a sudden risky plan was unrealistic. In this whole time I had prayed to
Gods, cursed them all, cried in my heart and thanked my fellow passengers. I stayed
in that calisthenic position all night.
Not a moment of rest, not a drop of water to soothe my dry throat. Once
I took the risk of fetching the bottle from the bag and gulped a little, also gave
him, I knew he too would be thirsty. But taking a risk second time was not a
viable option; especially the fear of letting him ease gave me goosebumps.
Despite all my efforts, he would manage to kick, shout, and punch me, he tore
my shirt apart. The moments of the night were like years, but wholesome
indulgence in anything has the power to liberate you from the same, I had
become like a log, which felt less pain, was now comfortable in that inhuman position
and felt used to that situation. Hours passed, Vizag was now closer, I had
prepared myself to book a cab and head straight to Balangir.
The bus entered Vizag,
it was the break of dawn, sun had come back to me. He left me when I left
Hyderabad, he was back when I reached Vizag. It felt like, he was with a message
that like life could be rude and terrible, but light never goes out. Have patience for the tunnel to pass and
there is light at the end of the tunnel. The morning light filled me with a
belief that I am more than I have always known. I am not as mundane as people
have known me, I can go farther than I believe. What had happened through the
night was not an achievement by any measure but, what it left me with could be
a forever treasure. I changed my mind; I strictly followed the original plan to
take two more trains to Balangir.
The journey continued with more
dramatic things like boarding an auto, checking into a hotel to freshen up, boarding
the train to Rayagada and the last train to Balangiir from Rayagada. Each of
these offered me magnificent memories for life. In less than twenty four hours
I had mastered the art of patience in real crisis with patience and calmness,
though afraid inside but without the slightest trace of panic. We reached Balangir.
People disbelieved that this was the same man who had left to be treated for
some liver damage. They couldn’t imagine how I could have done all this all
alone. But I knew I wasn’t alone- a constant sense of someone somewhere seeing all
this and walking me through reverberated all through my being, all the while.
Lulu kaka was readmitted in to
the same hospital on 15th Aug, this time we chose to fly, he
had by then recovered of all withdrawal symptoms. And the accompaniment
attendance had increased from just me, to his wife and his aunt. I stayed with
them for a week and came back to be replaced by my father. He was discharged
after fifteen days.
Two months later in October I
was in Balangir for Dussehra. Lulu kaka asked me to take him to the bank, he
wanted to close his account, he had four hundred and seventy rupees. He withdrew
that money and closed the account. He unbelievably gave two hundred rupees to
me; it was like offering half of a person’s total asset to someone else. I
refused but he insisted, I took it.
Forty seven year old Lulu Kaka passed
away in Jan 2014, survived by his mother, his wife, a son, a daughter and other
members of his extended family.
Bijan Mohanty, Rest in Peace.
