Unruled Notebook

[...Have you ever imagined what life (and death, as you will know in a short while) would be for one strand of a straw?

So, you thought I asked this just as a rhetorical question at the end of Part VIII, to give an essay a feel of a closure (which I never seem to have, according to some of my readers). No, it is just the beginning sentence of this essay. I do intend telling you here, how it is like, to be one strand of a straw. Proceed]

…Strange feeling it should be. You are born already dirty and yellow. Living makes you dull yellow. You are itchy, lean and slanky*; naked, bent and blondie. Most of your life you strive to maintain mutual coexistence piled amongst fellow straw-heads, without adequate legroom. You are nobody, just, another brick in the wall.

Not even that particular Just Another Brick in the Wall popularized by the Pink Floyd but only an ordinary just another brick in the wall, hard to be noticed by anybody. In fact, you as a single straw in a bundle, are more lost than found all your life, much like a needle in the haystack.

All your life, you just wait and wait, to be mashed to partial death and dimensional restructure in the mouth of a thick tongued bovine specimen. And when finally you, as a partially dead straw, think it is all over and you have reached your after life, the bullock chews the cud and you realize it is, after all, a mid death crisis. You finally reach the Nether World of the Bullock Belly, the abode of the dead straw-heads where you realize you are not just your single self but part of a bigger Unified Mash of Nirvana.

Yes, I agree with you readers. Death, as a straw, is much gory than life as one, which anyway is much more sorry. That is why, even as a boy, about to be transformed by the cart-driver’s imagined curse, I preferred the gold bug.

Today, I have grown enough and thankfully, not as a gold bug either. I have also grown ignorant of the innards of the third pocket of the belt around a random cart-driver of Srirangam. I now have reasons why I possibly can never know. For instance, even today, I am still younger to those cart-drivers, so they wouldn’t oblige in revealing their secret.

Perhaps, to know the truth, we should ask the gold bugs of Srirangam. I used to know so many of them as friends…

Proceeding with the narration about the bullock-cart drivers, other than the decorations mentioned in Part IX, these guys are bare bodied, with white hair covering their chest and red bandanas with silver talisman around their arms to ward off evil spirits in solid or gaseous form (you can ask me, why not in liquid form; frame the question in your mind and you will know the answer immediately, if not earlier). There is usually a small beedi (low-tech cigar) in their ear, if not in their mouth. Of course, I don’t find it alight, when stuck inside the ear-head slit.

While traveling, to make the cart run faster (sometimes, to run at all), these guys would coax their bullocks with strange cluck & creech sounds made from the tongue striking the upper palette, resembling the strike of a match. Accompanied were verbal cries like hai, hai, oadura ranga oadu (Go Ranga, Go) with a deft flick from the lash followed by the twists in their tails so that the tails looked more like a sailt.

* Slanky – portmanteau of slouch and lanky (ref. SPOTSOI# Dic. p 1.2 e +12.8)

# SPOTSOI – Sagacious People Of The School Of Irrelevance

[The profundity in the last line of Part VII wasn't intentional. I got distracted and spoke the truth. To dissolve this guilty lump forming at the tip of my typing fingers, I shall hasten back to the 'humorous' bullock-cart story, if not the steam engine one. Proceed]

I agree, I shouldn’t have started with the description of the carts in Part VII, which as usual, got us this far (off). In fact, I realize now that I shouldn’t have done it in Part VI either. I should have started with the bullocks instead.

But then I remember the first time I tried to explain about it to my Romanian friend, I had to start with Sandra Bullock. And from there, it took us quite a while to proceed anywhere else. At least, anywhere close to the above, dull story.

Prudently, here, I shall proceed straight to the bullocks and stick with the story of the steam engines, carefully avoiding any further reference to Sandra.

By the unwritten tradition of Srirangam (some of which being revealed in these essays, in a convoluted time), the name Sri Ranga or shortly, Ranga, is given to, thankfully not the carts, but the bullocks.

These bullocks were certainly skinny, with a particularly innocent and sad face with a white stuff oozing permanently from their otherwise closed mouth. Their skin is usually dirty white in color, with lots of localized movement that senses an imagined touch from an invisible hand. Depending upon the way you look, either the skin or the lots of minute spots on them, look dirty black or dirty white.

In general, I am tempted to say their skin is dirty blackish-white and their horns were dirty whitish-black, but I am not Thiruvalar Vairamuthu. Only he is paid to conceive poetical oxymoron of that sort for the Tamil movie songs. More on this in a future essay, if I get to stay alive that long, in cyberspace and fleeing time. For now, it suffice to state I am an ordinary moron, wondering about the oxymoron overtones in phrases like Bengal Government, Intelligent Girl, Indian Cricket etc., for which I receive perhaps a wry lip movement from my readers, (their face look like {;>) sideways, when doing this) and definitely no pay from Zine5 .

Resuming the story, the bullock-cart drivers were mostly bearded men, with drooping white mustache that reach their white beards. For some reason, they were all very old. Perhaps by karma, they were born old, like the late Ashok Kumar of Hindi movies. They wound a smelly white mundasu as headgear and an equally dirty white dhothi as their waistcloth, with an extra-wide, green, buckle-belt over it to support it there. The green buckle-belt had silver colored buckles and three, brown, purses, two of them with black buttoned flaps while the third had a dull white steel zipper.

One of these purses invariably carry lots of coins and some 1 and 2 rupee notes, folded beyond possible differentiation so that, when taken out later, they come either as 12 or 21 rupee notes.

The second carries nose powder (podi mattai) suitable for the noses of both the bullocks and their drivers. This nose powder is sold nowadays as scented gunpowder at the Bullock-boy (Fake Cowboy) shops of Texas. If they are out of stock, you may want to try with the IUPAC under aromatic toluene.

The contents of the third were not revealed to the passengers back then, especially for younger ones like me. Nevertheless, as a boy, I know it had something exotic and dangerous, which at the behest of the cart-driver would turn me into a gold bug or one strand of the straw that the bullocks chewed.

Have you ever imagined what life (and death, as you will know in a short while) would be for one strand of a straw?

[There have been complaints from many reader friends (actually, from only two) that there is no apparent connection between the title and what I have written in the first six parts. Be patient. I am using memory pills (actually, injection) and a lot of Brownian Motion Generators (some call it Hot Liquid Coffee) to bring these things out from Chaos. The medicine was borrowed for this purpose, from Rastapopoulous of "Flight 714", in an alien encounter at Pulau Pulau Bompa, near Philippines. The medicine, as readers of Tintin (by Hergé) would recall, work linearly in personal memory retrieval. In my case, it has started in Srirangam, in a time somewhere before I was born. To add delight to the drivel, the Brownian Motion generators help maintaining the local randomness in Time. Proceed]

If you don’t get what a cart is from the meandering narrative in Part VI, let me know why. For the moment, don’t loose heart, as I am about to suggest you a thrilling alternative (especially for the summer).

Go watch a comeback Vijayakanth movie or any of Ramarajan movies, for that matter.

The climax of such Tamil movies usually involves these carts with their kadayani (what’s the English? axle-stoppers?) promptly removed as a clever ploy, by the villain group, usually headed by the hatchet men, Napolean or Mansoor Ali Kahn.

They are the hatchet men because they normally carry a long hatchet, hidden in their back. This is their identity card, which you get to see before dying, especially if you are one among the extra-characters in the earlier part of the movie. In the climax, these villains pull out these hatchets carefully, without tearing the white shirts they wear, and brandish it in front of the cameraman. The effect of the scene on the audience, as is necessary for a climax, is much the same to that when Jim Carey, as the Mask, pulls an oversize hammer out of his pocket.

Hilarious! The kids (in us) love it!

One caution though, before beginning to watch these movies. Make sure you watch them only in videotape, along with a ‘remote’ with the ‘fast forward’ option. Otherwise you may sleep or puke and reach climax before the movie reaches its. On second thoughts, I would recommend this caution for most of the Tamil movies (and all of the Telugu movies after 1970).

In fact, after getting used to the comfort of the ‘fast forward’, by reflex, I have tried doing this to most of the TV programs that my friends watch. I would in fact be doubly happy, when in the future, people also come with this fast forward option (at least, to the parties that I get to attend).

Imagine, the conversation starts something like this

“Hi”,

“Whassup?”

and you press ‘fast forward’ and the person (babe) in front of you goes,

“whatsyoursunsign,oh!,car,monyluvchiolesigh….BLIP” Thud. Silence.

Oh, I am sorry. Did I ‘fast forward’ too much?

A bit morbid, but useful.

Until technology improves to this delectable future, I have to be contended with my alternative, which works fine, at least with the TV. I simply switch it off, before beginning to watch it. My friends have stopped bothering me once they understood the foolproof logic – I am watching the TV.

In fact, with unswerving attention and interest, as what I see in it is my reflection…

[Enough of the "Long before" statements. It keeps me distracted from the main issue. After reading Parts I through V, you now get the general idea of how long back it is, that I mean with those "Long before" statements. I shall now merely narrow it down on the exact years for you. Proceed.]

The time was just a few years before the great flood on the Cauvery, give or take a few years. I am talking about The Flood that brought fertile mud into the bottom two shelves of our small green godrej bureau, which was then located on the ground floor of our rented house, a mile away from Amma-mandapam, the great river’s northern bank, made of Srirangam.

Clutching a Murphy three-band transistor radio (one of them is a rubber band gluing the radio together) and believing the news from it, my parents along with the house owners, sat on the stairs. Three wooden steps above the initial cement steps, which used to be my homework table. In the night, they moved two steps above.

Amidst all of this temporary discomfort in Srirangam, I was enjoying my sleep along with my grandparents, in a comfortable bed in Kodavasal. I later used the aforementioned godrej bureau as the Showcase for the Dolls during that year’s Navarathri Festival. The bottom two shelves housed a park with mustard “trees” grown from the seeds sown in the ever-reliable Cauvery mud.

It was in those times, give or take again a few ‘times’, we had bullock-carts in Srirangam.

These bullock-carts were the prime luxury carriers for the people to travel from any point A to any other point B through lots of other points in between, all of them inside Srirangam.

At this point of time, a formal description of these bullock-carts, in line with the content of this essay, is in order. I describe a bullock cart formally, technically and succinctly as:

A bullock cart is bull locked to a cart through its second ‘l’.

Reflect a moment. If you feel the above description is profound but I am silly, I certainly disagree with you. I think the description is silly. Anyway, instead of the above, substitute in your mind, the mundane description in the following paragraph, if you like it that way. While you are at it, replace the “At this point of time” in the beginning of the earlier paragraph with a “Now” as well. I am fighting to improve my writing, which got spin-doctored by the political euphemisms of the USA.

(Oops! please replace “political euphemisms” in the previous sentence with “clutter”)

A bullock cart is made of a cart, some bullocks with bells around their necks, a man-driver with a lash, and a hurricane light. In addition, it is accompanied usually with lots of dung, hay, straw, jute and their odor.

Let’s now go in parts, briefly.

I assume you all know what a cart is. If not, it is one of those jittery contraption with two wooden wheels supporting a deck with patented straw-cushioned, jute-cloth covered seats, covered by an inverted U roof. The inside of the roof is studded with some dark tree-lizards wondering who in the hell, the upside-down you is.

When resting on the back of a (pair of) bullock(s), these carts are used to teach the elderly village folks, the Lever Rule or the law of balancing of weights. The same rule that I accidentally learnt, along with some other words like fulcrum, pulley, mechanical action etc., after enough education in the Boys Higher Secondary School of Srirangam. This is a school, as you may notice, that stated the obvious, right from its name (to honor their equal rights, we also have a Girls Higher Secondary School of Srirangam).

Proceeding with the cart, when detached from the bullocks, the same cart is used by the children of these elderly village folks, to learn the lever rule (notice the small letters), by playing seesaw on the crossbar in the front. Without having to remember ‘fulcrum’ and ‘mechanical action’.

These children while feeling “happiness”, I noticed, were in general, happier than me.

Following the advice of these children, in my later years, I learnt to solve intuitively the differential equation of the projectile, every time while running to catch the cricket ball that’s fast approaching the ground.