Hyderabad: The story of Lulu

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 6^th 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 15^th 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.