When I need to scavenge for stories, I use my time in my village rather than that in the antiseptic towers of Powai. A 100-strong research institute living in their own world provided a better canvas than a MNC with 4000 heads. Maybe, it’s got something to do with my roots where apparently, anyone knows everyone; the surveillance would beat London’s hidden cameras; and with each activity, there is advice, rules, restrictions and more rules and restrictions. But, for most small-town guys and girls in this part of the world, life is like wearing a two-piece yellow polka-dot bikini beneath coarse-cotton black veils. You just had to know where the pools are located. And if the ‘pool rule’ dictated a one-piece suit, you shrug and go topless. Contrary to the common perception, there are fewer rules, fewer gods and fewer reasons to worry in small places.
That’s what my group and I thought till last month – till we heard about her arrival, the arrival of our alpha female.
My group is a motley crew truly representative of my society – what’s that nice word, microcosm, right? There are eight of us. In calendar years, our average age is 40 plus 50-minus-40-or-so. Between us, we have had to attend 10 weddings, provide support for a bachelor and 2 divorces. Collectively, we support 13 kids (including the two adopted, the one with dubious paternity) – all loved and cared cute brats protesting a troubled childhood.
We are definitely not bosom buddies and try to meet only once or twice a year. We have other friends to provide entertainment, card games, sports and beer, picnics and what-not to scratch each other’s back. My group did not have a common religion or ideology (one tried to be a commie but quit the scene when he realized that even the poor are too rich to be fooled; another entertained right-wing thoughts till he got entangled in a ‘mixed’ marriage). Our only claim to a common economic background is a school with a rather strict rule for uniform “Footwear compulsory”.
But, since the days of one-bounce cricket a few decades back, we have never lost touch and we remained as a group. Early on, we formulated the only rule for the group, “Do not even think of making a pass at our sisters.” Even womanizers should have ethics, we reasoned. Our laissez faire philosophy of being womanizers remained just a theory.
There was only one period of restless disloyalty and forgetfulness – that period post puberty when girls distracted us for the first time. Later, most of us admitted that the first love was not true love but just an embarrassment. With advancing years, age along with wisdom and wives brought us back together. It is a sad fact that we cannot stand each other’s wives (and some even their own). The feeling is happily reciprocated by the better-halves. In one instance, my own wife staged a version of coitus-interruptus with the statement, “Why do you hang around with those?” I parried this frontal attack with dead silence and a threat to sleep on the floor or elsewhere, and she accepted both with unsettling equanimity.
Why do I hang around with these?
There is a reason which keeps us together – we grew up together and more importantly, we know what each one did last summer, winter, autumn and spring. Each time we meet, we register in our memory the problems that we face in the present; the niggling worries about the immediate future; and, refresh our memory about past misdeeds that have to remain hidden from lesser mortals, that is, kith and kin. Even the one in the group who resembles Narayana Murthy (mentor-emeritus of Infosys) can be reduced to a mass of giggles, shy protestation or nervous hiccupping.
There is another matter which binds us together, the one matter alone which we have kept hidden from each other – each one’s relationship with her, our alpha female.
Let me tell you that I have talked to lots of men of various generations and nationalities regarding this and I feel that I would not be wrong to state this generalization, especially about men from small places: every man has an alpha female.
For our group, and possibly for quite a few others of my generation in this small part of the world, she is the one.
Is she a queen bee or a black widow? Is she an Amazonian in whose presence we go weak in the knees? Is she a mixture of various ‘-esque’: an unlikely Greta-Garbo-esque Arundhati Roy, a Kafka-esque unknown with the charm of Aung San Suu Kyi, a Juno-esque with the grace and letters of Nadine Gordimer and the intelligent delicate smile of Ingrid Bergman? She is an intellectual, an artist with sublime creativity, a woman with passionate and volatile integrity, eschewing hollow words/people with disgust, flicking aside norms of the hoi-polloi blocking her path. In the age before mobiles, we knew immediately when she ‘appeared at hang-outs’. She dressed with careless common but captivating fashion – bewitching in a cotton sari or groovy in jeans, T-shirt and bra-less. She could be exquisitely dressed in complete Bharathanatyam regalia for a standout performance. We knew about her close-encounters with authority, her many affairs and disposals. We took pride in the fact that she never discarded us.
We never shared what she did with each one of us.
Last month, one of us received a message from her,
“In town on the 20th of June; please arrange with others for a meeting. It’s urgent – old matters I have to settle finally – with the eight of you. Let’s meet at 3 pm.”
So, here we are (from four continents, seven countries), on this Sunday afternoon: most disheveled, some dishabille, all distraught and distant; or in plain words, bloody tense. We know that our family life (our suburban lives with rural roots seeking all paths for upward mobility) is at stake, and probably our career and ambition too.
On his own, each one knew what could happen, what she might want to settle and more importantly, that each one of us would still do anything for her.
And so, here we are in this small place, at 3 pm on the 20th of June, waiting for her.
“My name is Dalton Russell. Pay strict attention to what I say because I choose my words carefully and I never repeat myself. I've told you my name: that's the Who. The Where could most readily be described as a prison cell. But there's a vast difference between being stuck in a tiny cell and being in prison. The What is easy: recently I planned and set in motion events to execute the perfect bank robbery. That's also the When. As for the Why: beyond the obvious financial motivation, it's exceedingly simple... because I can. Which leaves us only with the How; and therein, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub.”
from The Inside Man (director: Spike Lee)
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