WOMAN IN RED

Ever felt this way when your pilot had jumped out with his chute? Here’s what happened to me a week ago.

“Beware the Ides of March”, said the soothsayer to Julius Caesar, as he walked towards the Senate on that fateful day when he was assassinated, ending with, “Et tu, Brute”. Me no Caesar, yet my mother always told me, “Stay away from pretty looking girls, they bring more trouble than you can imagine.””Et tu Momma”, I said, and moved on in life. As luck would have it, all my train, bus and air journeys till date had been uneventful as my co-passengers were  65 years old or more. But then five days after the Ides of March on a Saturday morning I decided to add ‘Spice’ to my life.

I was well in time at the airport for my 7.30 am flight and no sooner had they announced boarding that I made good use of my speedy steps to be among the first to enter the plane and two very pretty Caucasians in red jackets and skirts greeted me with broad smiles. I took another look at my boarding pass to reconfirm I was on the correct flight….indeed I was. Not bad at all. Texted my wife, “on board, all fine”.  You bet, it was better than ‘all fine’ as I quickly asked for water……please don’t get me wrong, I was truly thirsty, but, of course, the close encounter with the Woman in Red was most welcome.

As if this was not exciting enough, came a pretty damsel, in a fitting jeans and a black top, searching for her seat and as luck would have it she came and sat next to me…? I again took out my boarding pass to confirm my seat…mmm…10F…I was at the right place all right. Next, with the newspaper spread in my hands, I pushed my neck back, turned my eyes to my left to get a closer look at my neighbour…..B-e-a-u-t-y is the word that came to mind but spoken exactly the way the hotel front desk person at Ratlaam described Kareena in ‘Jab We Met’. I was truly flying Spice Jet now.

The two air hostesses now started speaking what appeared to be English after a while. They were giving the safety instructions, which I could make out from their hand gestures rather than the spoken words, which, I believe, no one in the plane understood. Normally, I never bother to see or hear the safety procedures but today was different. With my eyes glued, I saw her take out the life jacket, the air mask and show where the emergency exits were...you’re never too old to learn, especially when the teacher is attractive. No wonder my education did not prosper seeing all those Irish Brothers in their white tunics with canes in hand. A mother’s advice to the son was soon lost in translation.

The plane slowly made its way to the runway and while dragging itself to the take off point, I could feel a heavy vibration coming from underneath. Since no one else reacted, I felt it must be quite normal. Having got up very early to catch the flight, I decided to take a nap before they served the in-flight meal. For once the nap was really good and surely I must have been dreaming of life in paradise surrounded by beautiful women living above the clouds. Suddenly I was woken up with some frantic action happening in the plane which, at first, I thought was the food trolley coming to serve. No it wasn’t….the Woman in Red started announcing in her Russian English, “We have an emergency situation. Please fasten your seat belts and remain seated.”

With MH370 and the German Air incidents not long ago, I peeped out of the window and saw, what I presumed was, the hilly terrain of the Aravallis.  The next announcement from the Lady in Red was, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have an emergency situation. The aircraft has a technical problem and we are turning back to Mumbai. Listen to the safety instructions carefully”. She repeated the easy ones first about the exits in the plane and then went on to demonstrate again how to wear the life jacket, how to wear the oxygen mask… “We will be making an emergency landing. When landing, cross your hands over your forehead and put your head down… if we land in water, wear the life jacket and inflate it…”  No sooner had she uttered the words ‘wear it’, that everyone started pulling out the vests from underneath the seats, wearing them and inflating them with a loud pop sound….  “No, no, not now”, cried the poor Damsel in Distress. “Listen to the instructions carefully and please do not inflate the vests now”.

I realized we were still over the mountains and wouldn’t need life jackets. The girl next to me tried peeping out of the window and asked, “How high are we?”To which I replied, “Not too high, but high enough…”to which she smiled, but I could make out she was putting up a brave face. I could see her hands trembling in fear and water soaked eyes.

By this time a few children had started howling as the parents were asked to hold them tight. Everyone started asking the air hostesses as to what the problem was…how serious was the crisis to which the ladies just gave a blank look. We could feel the aircraft go completely slow and then commence its descent. By now there was utter chaos in the craft with the old and the young shouting and venting out their fears. The air hostesses were running up and down the aisle going to one passenger after another and repeatedly asking people not to panic. By now almost all including me had worn their life jackets. In exasperation, the stewardess shouted No life jackets and the people thought she was saying Now lifejackets. Then you could hear many pops going off one after another. A majority of people had started inflating their life jackets. Her accent and intonation were adding to the chaos.

Why don’t they have SOLAS (Safety of Life at Sea) Convention which among other things insists that the crew of an ocean going vessel must know English to understand safety instructions in case of emergencies. Here they should have had a mandatory rule for the captain and the stewardesses to know the local language adequately…maybe someday we will have Safety of Life in Air.

While watching the chaotic scenes and shrieks, some bit of worry came over me as well. I took out my wallet, pulled out the passport size pictures of my wife and daughter and locked my lips tight, smiled and then put them in my shirt pocket from where I took out my business card. Wrote down a mobile number and name and gave it to the girl next to me, “Just in case you need to call someone for me, this is my wife, D’s number. You too give me a number to call in case of an emergency.” She gave me her father’s number…she was a student at Mumbai and hailed from Dehradun.

By now we could see Mumbai from the window and the plane coming down on a sea of blue….sorry it wasn’t the Arabian Sea near Juhu but the blue tarpaulins you see over Dharavi….the plane slowly but steadily taxied down and spontaneously the passengers started clapping and shouting Sat Sri Akaal…Bharat Mata ki Jai….how fear of death reaffirms your faith in God was fine but outburst of nationalistic feeling was a bit too much to digest.

We all had survived a scare of our life and all that mattered was that we, like James Bond, shall Die Another Day. Now I could see the Woman in Red genuinely smiling. It was then that I realized, she too must have been worried, her life too was as precious as mine, she too may have someone waiting at home for her to return to….a young daughter, an old ailing mother, a man she loved….

By now tension gave way to happiness and the phones immediately went into overdrive with everyone narrating the scary story to someone on the other side of the phone.  I quickly took a selfie with the life jacket and sent it to the two most beautiful women in my life…..immediately my phone started ringing-it was my wife. I could hear her sobbing by the time I finished my story. No sooner had this call got over than I got my daughter’s call who had frantically rushed out of the operation theatre…that’s love, that’s life, that’s family.

I was carrying home- cooked fish curry, palak paneer, tomato chutney, meat balls and cup-cakes for my daughter, so I quickly checked with my travel agent for some other flight to Delhi the same day. The agent informed that Vistara was available for 10k but by the time he tried to log in and book the ticket, price had shot up to Rs 35k….scavengers, I tell you!  Anyway, I finally got another flight at a reasonable price in the evening.

PS. I once presented my wife with a scarlet red warm Kashmiri jacket and that’s possibly the only gift she never wore, maybe that’s why we’ve been together for over 26 years now. Women in Red were not for me for sure.

SS

AS I STAND AND WAIT

Recently Kolkata was rocked with protests over a dastardly act on a young doctor working late at night at a government hospital. What the mother of the unfortunate girl would have experienced on that fateful night was the same that I went through every night when my little one was in Delhi....staying awake, praying for her safety as she meandered through the tough life of long working hours while braving the cold, scary wintery nights. Nothing seems to have changed in these eight years when this piece was written. 

I demand Justice. I demand Safety.

As I Stand and Wait

As I wait for the phone to ring

As I wait for the SMS alert

As I wait for the WhatsApp beep

As I wait for the doorbell to ring

Just a “Hi”

Perhaps a “Hello”

Or maybe “I am fine”

Or even a “Reached”

Aches increase

The loneliness stings

All the dreads come back.

Night falls

Television sets are switched off

Peace regains

A few more pages to finish

Before I turn in for the night

Do students read ‘Doctor Zhivago’ anymore?

I wonder

Careless thoughts

Fears multiply

The nightmares return.

It’s 2 a.m.

And she is still at work

Has she eaten?

She must be tired

Let me go to sleep

Will someone help me sleep?

It’s 3 in the morning

Will the wait end?

It’s a new day

With tea and newspaper

Same old news

Same old stories

Same old cartoons

Same old routine

Another day of waiting

Endless

Relentless.

The Facebook throws up

Friends in thousands

Same old faces in new profiles

A few updates

Hypocrisy abounds

Heartaches and heartthrobs

Hearts bleed too

For Rohiths and Kanhaiyas

The bashing continues

For Modi and Trump.

For two weeks

Read the columns

Heard the discourses

A new God is in sight

A beacon of hope

Harbinger of Azaadi

They say he has found a new definition

The intolerant talk of tolerance

The tolerant turn to intolerance

So let us wait for the deliverance.

Age shows its ugly side

Have to live with it

The body weakens

Memory fails

Trapped inside a Beautiful Mind

They have to await

Their turn

And so must we.

A walk on concrete

As buildings collide

Roller skates whizzing by

The breeze stops

Waiting

Wondering

To blow or not to blow

Beads of sweat appear

For company I find

Endless shapes

Broken bodies

Twisted legs

Unsteady steps

Foggy minds

Words without voices

Greetings exchanged

I walk on.

The baby

Has left his pram

Walks now and

Prattles on

As the dog rises to greet him

Hope returns

As I walk back home.

DS

FATHER OF THE BRIDE

She was born, “precisely twenty eight years to the day and hour before the birth of Jinnah’s other offspring, Pakistan.”  She was Dina Jinnah, born 15^th August, 1919 in London and was raised as a Muslim. Her relationship with her father became strained when she expressed her desire to marry a Parsi, Neville Wadia. Jinnah told Dina that there were a million Muslim boys and she could choose from any one of them. The daughter was adamant and did not budge from her stance on a husband of her choice. She reminded her father that he too had married a non-Muslim, Rattanbai, who was coincidentally a Parsi. Quaid-e-Azam was left a most disappointed man.

Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins in the book, Freedom at Midnight wrote,”Jinnah had been 41, seemingly a confirmed bachelor, when he fell madly in love with Ruttie, the 17 year old daughter of one of his close friends in Darjeeling. Ruttie had been equally mesmerized by Jinnah. Her furious father had obtained a court order forbidding his ex-friend to see his daughter, but on her eighteenth birthday, with only the sari she was wearing and a pet dog under each arm, a defiant Ruttie stalked out of her millionaire father’s mansion and went off to marry Jinnah.”

On 15^th of August 1947, Jinnah celebrated the day by assuming full powers for his ceremonial office without the comforting presence of his closest relative: 500 miles from Karachi, on the balcony of a flat in South Bombay, a young woman had decorated her balcony with two flags, one for India and one for Pakistan. They symbolized the terrible dilemma Independence Day had posed for her and so many others. Dina, the only child of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had been unable to decide to which country she wished to belong, the land of her birth or the Islamic nation created by her father.

During the early years of struggle for independence, another Parsi was born in Bombay, Feroze Jehangir Ghandy (later changed to Gandhi). In the 1930, Vanar Sena, a wing of Congress Freedom Fighters was formed where Feroze joined the movement and met Kamala Nehru and her daughter Indira. In 1933, Feroze proposed to Indira but she and her mother rejected it.  He grew close to the Nehru family, especially Kamala Nehru, and was beside her till the very end in 1936. In the following years, Indira and Feroze grew close to each other while in England. Indira’s father Jawaharlal Nehru opposed her marriage and even approached Mahatma Gandhi to dissuade the young couple. Mahatma Gandhi, however, did not support Jawahar and also wrote to the other people who were against this marriage in a public statement which included a request, “I invite the writers of abusive letters to shed your wrath and bless the forthcoming marriage.” Feroze and Indira finally got married in March 1942 despite an upset Jawaharlal Nehru.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Parsi Millionaire or Quaid-e-Azzam or Pandit Nehru, fathers will be fathers and it was then that I could truly appreciate Steve Martin’s lines in the final wedding scene in the movie Father of the Bride. “I realized at that moment that I was never going home again and see Annie (his daughter) at the top of the stairs, that I’d never see her again at our breakfast table in her nightgown and socks. I suddenly realized what was happening: Annie was all grownup and leaving us. Something inside began to hurt”.

Dedicated to all fathers of the brides- you're in great company.

SS

EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH

Two gentlemen, separated by nearly a century at birth, come together at the Maha Kumbh of this page where we shall trace some experiments with truth and untruth in their lives. One went on to become the Father of the Nation and the other remains just a Father of a Lovely Daughter.

Episode One:  A young Gandhi, on his return to India, was waiting at a platform for the train to arrive. In those days, if the driver did not see a white man at the station, the driver would just slow down the train expecting the Indian to scramble on to the running train. As Gandhi managed to board the running train, one of his slippers fell off. Gandhi immediately took off his other pair and threw it to a bewildered onlooker. Gandhi remarked later, “Ah, well if someone is to find one of my shoes, hopefully he’ll find the other one too and thus have a fine new pair for himself.”

In the book on leadership, where I found this story, the learned author goes on to say, “What a Man. In this age of scams and greed and never ending wants, it strikes me that we can all take a leaf out of the Mahatma’s book.”

The story shifts to 1982, Ambedkar Stadium, New Delhi where East Bengal was playing Incheon University, South Korea in the DCM Cup Finals. The boy, who never missed any of these matches starting from the Quarter Finals onwards for years, along with his friends, was there to witness the epic match hoping his team in red and gold would win the prestigious cup. It definitely was not his day and the Koreans won the tournament. No sooner had the match got over, than the boy and his friends ran outside for a glimpse of their favourite footballers like Mona da, Bhaskar Ganguly and others. The losers came and quickly climbed onto their waiting bus and drove away without even waving their hands…what a disappointment. The attention then shifted to the Korean team which by now had settled in their luxury coach. The boy, like many others, started screaming for the Tshirts and shoes from the winners. One of the Koreans threw one shoe and the boy fought off a hungry tide of mad soccer fans to grab it…Yes..he had won the shoe. The Korean player now threw down the second pair and the boy made a desperate attempt at snatching the same but failed despite his best attempt.

The person who had the second pair asked the boy to give him the other shoe since it was of no use to him anyway. The boy thought, not having read the memoirs of the Mahatma, that it was true.  “What am I to do with one shoe?”  and he threw his prized ‘Golden Boot’ to the other fellow. This definitely was not a sign of any Gandhian leadership but sheer foolishness. While on his way home he thought, “I too could have asked the other fellow the same question and maybe I would have been taking home a fine pair of football boots with plastic studs.” And so the story goes that the boy was left playing football for another couple of years with ordinary Indian make shoes with leather studs fixed with nails, which would often pierce his foot and cause him pain as much as the story of the missed chance which haunted him for a long time.

Episode 2: While in England, Gandhiji took to the habit of walking to the court and other places in order to save on fares. He would walk up to eight to ten miles a day and he goes on to say that , “It was mainly this habit of long walks that kept me practically free from illness throughout my stay in England and gave me a fairly strong body.” And then who can forget his numerous Walks for Freedom including the Dandi March which was a 24 day and 240 miles long walk from Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi to produce salt without paying tax.  For those who have seen the pictures of Gandhiji walking will vouch for his speed which his followers found it hard to match.

The boy when fairly young took to the habit of long and fast walks. The reasons for this habit was simple.  One, the options of conveyance were limited, and even more limited was the currency in his pocket. So the more he walked, the more the coins remained in his pockets to spend on other luxuries of marbles, cricket ball and cream rolls. While walking he developed another strange instinct of trying to overtake the person ahead…and then the next and next till he discovered at least in some activity he could beat a host of people. This habit held the boy in good stead later in life.

In 1998 on his maiden visit to Paris for two days, the boy who by then had turned a man found it very irritable to talk to the French in English and figuring out the metro there. He took to walking in Paris and he walked and walked and walked for 2 days for almost 16 to 18 hours a day. By the time he would retire to his hotel room, his legs would be shaking and he would try relaxing in the bath tub but failed as the stopcock in the tub was not working properly and the hot water would quickly drain away. But one thing was for certain, no place in Paris was left untouched….from climbing the two allowable levels of Tour de Mars, to Arc‘d Triumph, Notre Dame, Louvre, Champs Elysee, museums, cemeteries, bridges….everything , walking through the streets of the historical city. He would have almost covered the entire Dandi route of Mahatma in just two days flat!

It was 6^th December 1992 when the Babri Masjid was demolished. The boy was enjoying a movie at night on the video with his friends at Salt Lake City while his wife and ten month old daughter were at his in-law’s place at Barasat on the outskirts of Kolkata. On the morning of 7^th when he woke up he wanted to see his kid desperately but unfortunately everything in Kolkata was shut…with a couple of incidences of communal violence springing up, curfew had been declared and only fools and goons would dare to venture out in the streets of Kolkata. A Capri by birth and Capri by character, the mountain goat was determined to reach his daughter 18 kilometres away and so began his long walk in a pair of slippers. Stopped at a couple of points by people wanting to cause trouble, the boy slowly but steadily made his way to his daughter who was so overjoyed seeing him that all his pain melted away seeing the kiddo smile and giggle as she jumped into his outstretched arms. The blisters in the feet never mattered at that point when she started playing with him. Love cures.

Finally the year was 2015. Our man, who had by then suffered severe bouts of spondylitis, entered his name in the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon. The doctor had asked him to stay away from running…he told his wife and daughter who was by now a fine lady and a doctor…”I will walk the 21 kms and promise not to run! He walked and walked pretty fast and completed the half marathon in 2 hours and 42 minutes beating many a runner. It is another matter that after this great run, he was laid to bed for nearly 2 months but that did not prevent the Johnny Walker from completing the half marathon yet again the following year…with a slightly slower timing of course.

Episode 3: The boy’s wife and daughter would complain about his snoring. They said it was nothing short of animalistic noises of all hues.  When the daughter was a kid, one night she started crying and when the mother asked her what had happened, the kid said, “Ma Hambaaa”…she called a cow Hambaaa which meant she feared there was a cow in our room. My wife stepped out of the mosquito net and showed her there was no cow and put her back to sleep. Surely my wife must have given the stare of her life to the cow that was snoring away to glory next to her.

Gandhiji in his autobiography narrates a story of how he once ate meat along with a friend of his.  “I had a very bad night afterwards. A horrible nightmare haunted me. Every time I dropped off to sleep, it would seem as though a live goat were bleating inside me and I would jump up in full remorse.”

Our protagonist never had any remorse to all the meat he would have on a daily basis, at times thrice a day. It is quite possible the bleating of the goats, the clucking of the chickens, the chirr of the pigs and the moo of the cows would peep out of his inside to the outside world as he slept soundly, oblivious of the cacophony he made.

Post Script: In the end let me admit, while not staking any claim to the Great Soul’s legacy, my complete admiration for the man and no words can describe him better than those of Albert Einstein who said, “Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.” Truly a Mahatma.

SS