You have been bundooed. Part I.

The car was zipping down the winding road of the hill when the inspector spots its missing number plate from the bottom of the hill. He sends his crony forward waving his three and a half foot bamboo lathi trying to stop the car. Predictably enough, the car brakes at the last minute and plasters the black road with rubber, to stop inches from the vacillating crony in khaki.

The super dark window of the gleaming white car rolls down with the characteristic whirr of a power window. The crony, still shaken by the smoking rubber on the road, hobbles up to the window and screams, “pagal ho gaya kya re, makade!”

In one quick, bone chilling second, a head turns outwards and upwards to face the crony. The crony realises his knees have now turned to a mass of wobbling jelly under the white hot, intense gaze of the driver. His skin turns a glistening wet. His tongue finds the deepest recesses of his mouth to hide. And is bladder just about to give way, when a hand falls with a thud on his shoulder.

The inspector pulls the crony back and steps forward towards the car. He bends into the window, looks straight into the eyes of the driver. And in a menacingly level, no nonsense tone, says to the driver, “bahar nikal.”

Holding the inspector’s gaze, the driver considers brushing this fly’s ass of an inspector aside for all of 45 seconds. And he decides to step out of the car. He had this desperate urge to pee.

Sensing his victory in the first battle, he says in the same level tone to the driver as he gets out, “license nikal!” The driver pulls his pants up to its right millimetric position at his own sense of leisure. Then he raises a palm up to the inspector and gives him a look powerful enough to make the most villainous run for the cover of their mothers’ pallus. And he walks across the road leaving the open-mouthed, seething inspector frozen in his tracks.

The driver unzips and opens the gates of his dam. Soon, a large puddle forms at his feet. A buffalo’s youngling sets off on a gallop sensing a mud wallow. The driver zips up and starts back to the car with his uncanny swagger that vaguely reminds the inspector of Rajni. He reaches the car, and in one smooth, almost choreographed movement, changes his direction, leans on the car and fishes out a packet of chota gold flake, and sticks one in his mouth. Head slanted low, eyebrows raised, the driver looks at the inspector from the gap between his duplicate Gucci shades and his brow.

The inspector tilts his head, amused by the driver’s antics and asks him, “naam kya hai tera?”

The driver lights his chota gold flake, takes a deep drag and looks up towards the inspector al la Clint Eastwood, and blows his shitty cigarette's smoke straight into his face.

And he says, “James. Sumanth James.”

To be continued.

Sing along!

Me me me!

Hari took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Needs a way of escape from all that oppresses him ..." Click here to read the rest of the results.

What's in a name!

A little before my brother and I were born, Vasanta and Charyulu had this understanding. They would have two kids, girls ideally. The first one would be named by Charyulu and the next one by Vasanta.

To their immense disappointment, I was the first successful sperm.

Now, however disappointed, Charyulu had to find this name for me. The dutiful son that he is, he asked his mom, her sisters, Vasanta’s mom, her dad, their brothers and sisters, and their parents, wherever available, for a suitable name for this 2 and a half kilo packet of nuisance.

For the lack of a more suitable expression, bless their souls, each of them suggested a letter. Charyulu collected all of them and the count came to 26. And he put all of them together into four words so it would not be too hard for them to pronounce it. They had to call me by this monster after all, you see.

And so I have more letters in my name than boxes in an application form. Lines in an app form are found a little wanting too.

But calling someone by a 26 letter name to suggest the use of a potty instead of a saucepan is rather difficult, considering the tsunami of a rage that tends to accompany such instances. So Charyulu chose the shortest part of my 26 letter train for daily use.

And so, the world calls me a 4-letter word.

And he took flight

Fearless was the young ornithologist who went by the name of Arjun. Keen of the eye and sharp of the mind, unquenchable was his thirst for adventure. And insatiable his hunger for knowledge.

Early one morn, at the crack of dawn, the intrepid ornithologist rose from bed and set out to find a treasure of knowledge in the dingy alleyways of Jumeraat Bazaar. Two streets down, he came upon a scrawny and dubious looking peddler, towing a cartful of literature, bound in leather. He scaled walls by night, peddled by morning and called himself Ali. Alas, books, to him, merely balanced a weighing stone on the other side of a balance.

A sparkle set itself ablaze in his eye the instant they fell upon the dirty pile. And Arjun began sifting the sand for the nugget in gold. Grains dropped through the hourglass in torrents. As did perspiration through the pores. Arjun, keen as he was, kept on, regardless of the hour. Regardless of the heckles raised on the peddler. Regardless of the incessantly growing din in the dingy bazaar.

Rise he did, clutching a leather-bound hard enough to inspire white on his knuckles. When he did, triumph wrote an allegory across his forehead. He held the chronicle of a hero, a man who coerced an entire generation to look skywards. A man who taught the world that a bird was an angel in disguise.

Fleet of the foot as he was, he reached his den in no time, and threw himself headlong into the chronicle – an account of the experiences of the hero, in pursuit of the White-tailed Tropicbird from Samoa. One of only three species of the Tropicbird, the bird was magnificence written across the inconceivably blue Samoan skies.

Less of leather and more of adventure the chronicle smelt. And it unravelled the tethers of imagination in the young man. The expectation put a resonating throb of a concoction of young blood and adrenalin in his temples. Tatters were how his resistance and reason lay, and a deep breath did Arjun take. He willed the Samoan spirit into his veins.

Three weeks passed but the passion survived. And down set the young man his foot on Samoan soil. Along snaked the road from Apia to Sa‘Moana, and with it sped the young man they called Arjun.

He set his sails southwards on small vessel and in search of the island of the White-tailed Tropicbird. Across the sky the sun stretched. The salt of the sea met the salt of his perspiration. Soon enough, out of the blue sea grew a speck of green. That spec grew to a mountain. And so did his eagerness to set foot on that land.
Suddenly, the vessel sputtered and choked itself to a fuming death. The maritime beast had a hole in its heart, and away she bled across the ocean for miles behind, leaving her tanks dry. With the island in site, and an oar without, the young man and his vessel bobbed at the mercy of a ruthless ocean.

For this alone he lived, this relentless explorer. He tore a strip of metal off the boat and made an oar of it. Short as it was, he moved slow. But move he did. Alas, he was no match to the massive white waves of the mighty ocean and tumbled into the sea.

The ocean thrashed him with rocks, dragged him along urchins, and doused him in water. But the boy was steadfast. He reached the beach and screamed at the sea, “Is that all my friend?” And his laughter tinkled.

His vessel in shambles, his garb in tatters and his hope on the decline he screamed for help. For three days and three nights he screamed. And his voice found no mate. Dejected, hungry, and utterly out of hopelessness he looked up towards the mountain. And he heard it thunder. Boulders rolled down. The earth trembled. Birds flew from their perches. Even the ocean succumbed into silence. And it rose to the sky from the top of the mountain. A plume of smoke.