Unruled Notebook

Hello Angel: You are receiving this e-mail message as a personalized automated reminder service provided by the Universal Personal Relationship Manager, an US based, elite and exclusive club of highly paranoid aliens, nice Earthmen and some New Yorkers. Its purpose is to maintain our clients general well being. No, you are not the client, it is the other party who’s money and well fare, we care about.

You are not expected to reply to the email address from which you should be receiving this message, as you are believed to be the busiest person on Earth (although, only second to the Ant that our client has met 20 years before, in his home town in India – the Ant never gave a damn to our clients charm). Further, you possess a peculiar memory that selectively forgets anybody or anything that is not in the immediate vicinity of your eyesight. This seems to be a reasonable conclusion derived out of the past experience by our client, whom you seem to remember visually only whenever chance favors to make both of you meet in unavoidable visual directness.

By this message, we disclose to you that

1) Our client is mentally churned (i.e. feebly pissed) by the selective memory seemingly possessed by you. We say “seemingly” because, with the information available about you, we are still debating about the existence of a memory in you.

2) The myriad side effects your sighting has generated in our client. For instance, our clients heart beat, after this chance encounter with you on the streets, challenges that of the humming bird – a species much forgotten by other species who can forget. Although this in itself is a normal thing to happen for any ordinary person when they encounter Angels, it is highly unnecessary for everybody involved, if our client dies prematurely, of subsequent coronary thrombosis. Our client plans to die of natural causes – old age for instance.

3) Loosing a person’s telephone number amounts to loosing the person, (a thing misplaced IS lost). Normally this happens between life forms that are either purposefully distanced, mutually or one-side misunderstood, or insecure or plain careless. Our client expects you to be either in the first or the last category (although our client doesn’t give a damn anymore) and requests you, to come out of it. Anyway, our clients number is @! $^@!@! $! Store it in a cold dry place, like your memory.

5) For your benefit, we have attached your earlier emails to our client (in an effort to protect our client’s privacy, UPRM is NOT making these emails available to the readers of Babblogue). We request you to read it carefully (it is in simple English) and act accordingly. That is, mind your own business as usual, and mentally make a note to be prepared for the next chance meeting with our client, down the road – literally!

Thanks for your precious time, if you are still with us.

P. S. 1) This message won’t repeat, as UPRM is equally busy. Hope this message is sufficient for you to recognize the gravity of the situation and restore contact, if you chose to, with our client. In passing, it is worth mentioning that our client thinks about you sometimes, before happily settling to write poetry or some such verbal excess. Of course, if you ask about this, our client will suffer from an automated temporary memory loss, provided by UPRM (This is another service provided by UPRM for its clients. Notice however, UPRM should be paid in full BEFORE the service is made available).

P. S. 2) Given your peripheral and mercurial behavior (Angels are unpredictable) you are requested to read this message again. Not the P. S., only the message. Because, you will then be reading the entire message again and again, like the Simple Guy (like our client), with an otherwise blank paper with P. T. O. on both sides.

P. S. 3) The above is the gist of the email reminder from us written when 2002 was still young, to an intelligent but insecure Angel, at the behest of a simple Man, who began an honest relationship with her and soon realized it settled into the game of exchanging Masks. Of course, the Angel was joyous in her ensuing sightings by our client and spewed childish innocence, but soon glided past him, like toxic hydragyrum over a sheet of silica. Our client is paying us now for the use of our Permanent Selective Memory Eraser. It works well. It always does. We have perfected it all through the 80′s and 90′s, from so many trials with inanimate memory resources. And how many times, over the years, you swear at Bill Gates for that? Not as many times as he had done at us perhaps… UPRM.

[Briefing how I have goofed so far and how I might actually be avoiding it in the present episode within this square brackets, have now become an accepted incapacity of these essays. It at least puts things firmly crooked. I shall oblige in this essay as well, for one last time. In fact, what I have been writing these days, essays I through IX, should all be inside the square brackets. For the following essay, they all should comprise the one big introduction, perhaps a gentle preamble into the past, to a time where Rajaji, MGR and me were residing in our respective, appropriate abodes, minding our correct business. Proceed.]The long black rubber tube at the end of the red steel post would supply greenish white Cauvery water into the engine, when the steam locomotive is resting majestic, in the breezy yet tranquil, old Srirangam railway station, where Time was but a joke.

If you are wondering what steam locomotive, it is the one from which the bullock carts, described in the earlier parts of this story(?), used to bring my grandfather home. If you are wondering which (of my) grandfather, he is the one with a silver betel-leaf box, walking as an inverted J aided by an inverted L of a walking stick, mouth-housing a red tongue that lashes and brown teeth that chews more than food. If you are wondering which home, I agree it could be any one of the three that would remember me. For want of clarity, you may assume it is the one from which I believed that you can always soft-land from an airplane fall onto Thatham street and walk into your home to drink pot-water. G. R. Vishwanath, while trying to take a catch, could easily jump to reach the power cables running twenty meter above the same Thatham street. It is the same house in which I poked my fingers into the red-hot stove to verify the heat-burns-skin-hoax perpetrated by elders. Although I still count ten, if you are not wondering about any of this, I guess it is too late for you. You should have skipped this paragraph.

After filling the engine full, the water post itself would rotate a degree and I, in the pretext of watching the engine, would poise myself underneath the black hose. There is certainly a thrill, for those who have experienced it, in inviting an unexpected water-drop on you. Especially on your close-cropped (like pruned-grass, as another grandfather used to say!) summer head. The dangling hose, oozing moisture over my head, would resemble the trunk of the Big Elephant of the Srirangam Temple (of course, named Sri Ranga), blessing the terrified me, for the five paise it sucked out of my hand.

Taking a short digression on the talk on paise, a big fruit-ice cream stick in those days used to be sold for ten paise. One reason for lurking around the railroad tracks is that the station was near my school. Another is to place a two paise coin on the track and wait for the steam locomotive press to run over it, providing a thin “ten” paise coin! The thrill is not in getting the fruit-ice cream for the “ten” paise. It is in the art of making a perfect “ten” paise coin from those two paise coins inside my pink color Bear piggy-bank, barring the inevitable denomination error.

Returning to the story, born in the seventies, I grew in the eighties witnessing the sudden death of the Big Elephant and the slow death of my steam locomotive. Not many complained for either one. Certainly not to me. So, I didn’t complain either. I didn’t have enough time to spare in those days.

Definitely not enough time in those Srirangam days, when the future was uncertain, the present joyous and there ain’t no past. When I dreamt of waking just below Einstein, slightly to the right of Feynman and a wee bit left of Lennon, mostly above the rest of the bipeds, with a known town surrounding you each day, nevertheless with unknown mysteries…

Did I actually dream all of this while sleeping?

The steam engine locomotive has stopped running in my Srirangam tracks, and as I realize, even as that childhood game I used to play, in the houses of the people who didn’t complain for its slow death. The future is less uncertain if not sure, I have a past and the present is a mere bridge between these two. I have realized, much probably like Dasaratha of Ramayana, directions such as above and below, right and left, are mere human inventions. And I have remained a curious being, interacting now with an unknown World each day, only with known mysteries…

Have I instead slept, while I dreamt?

Somewhere along the road, did Neil Young actually sang, “better to burn out, than to fade away…”?

After enough Srirangam and associated ramblings across a convoluted time-scape, interspersed with kaleidoscopic memory junk, sometimes jocular, many times careless, all served in pretentious verbiage, would you still give a damn about the promised but yet unwritten Steam Engine Locomotives, my boyhood wonder?

Does that question not answer itself?

All right, let me explain,

Long before the days when pagers were given free for the purchase of 1 kg of brinjal from the Day Vegetable Market in North Uttira Street…