Read Tandoori Texan Tales Page 11

wanted him. However both of us returned to India.

  Connaught Place was still the center of action. Shop

  windows only displayed stuff made within the country.

  Gone were the flashy imported cars replaced by locally

  made ones; there were only 3 such models, though you had

  plenty of colors to choose from, unlike Model-T. There

  were also those ubiquitous auto-rickshaws and scooters

  alongside buses packed like a can of sardines spewing

  smoke like the Vesuvius. The outskirts of the city extended

  up to about 20 miles from Connaught Place (CP as it was

  affectionately called). Sidewalks did not have that smartly

  clad sauntering anglicized persona of elegance; there were

  those bunches of unwashed, un-scrubbed seekers of Nirvana

  on their way to Nepal, with odor that would send any police

  dog haywire.

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  My one bedroom apartment or flat was about 10 miles from

  CP where my office was located. It was in the southern

  suburb of Green Park. South Delhi had the neighborhoods

  of people with discriminating tastes. Jor Bagh, Defence

  Colony and Chanakyapuri were out of the question; you

  could only live there if you were married to the daughter of

  Indian Ambassador to Brussels (or she would marry you

  only if you were one of those living there). Rest of New

  Delhi was very bourgeois. You could know all about micro

  and macro economic theories of class struggle between

  have’s and have-even-more’s at parties where you could be

  invited only if you belonged to the Inner Circle. Young men

  dressed in Levi’s jeans at the bottom and Indian colored

  Kurta at the top, with beard, smoking Havanas and holding

  a small peg of Chivas Regal on the rocks, would fling all

  the cliches and jargons. When cornered by sheer logic, they

  would immediately take shelter in a line, something like,

  ‘what do you know, I got it all at Harvard or Yale’. Oxford

  and Cambridge were passe. London School of Economics

  still made the grade, just barely. Splitting the infinitive?

  May be, okay. When the music would start playing the

  Beatles or the Beegees, they would make a beeline to their

  equally well informed female counterparts, to try out the

  latest hip steps.

  I bought a 20-year-old Ford Zephyr for four thousand

  Rupees, from somebody who had been transferred out of

  town and was desperate to get rid of it. If I had done some

  background checking and known just how desperate he

  was, I could have brought down the price by half. It got the

  nickname of Old Faithful. Its color was an indescribable

  dirty green. She never let me down even though on some

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  cold winter days she needed some extra persuasion to start

  early in the morning. It would take me a good 35 minutes to

  get to work. Getting into the flow of things, I had a house

  warming party at my apartment while my landlord was

  staying with his expectant daughter on the floor below.

  Instead of just warming the house, I found I had got it to a

  boiling point. We were doing the shrug/frug to the full

  blasting sounds from my stereo of ‘Let’s Forget Domani’.

  Sure enough Domani never came, instead came my landlord

  a minute before midnight. His daughter did not believe in

  induced labor. Would we keep the decibel level down or

  make arrangements to move elsewhere. In exactly a minute

  later he pulled the fuse off our mains. I gave it a serious

  thought and decided to move to a more salubrious

  neighborhood.

  Within walking distance from ‘CP’, I found a one room

  rental with a large terrace; in Manhattan it would be called a

  Penthouse, in simple Delhi lingo it is called Barsati, a room

  where people run for shelter if it starts raining in the middle

  of the night while sleeping on the terrace. My landlady was

  Mrs. Thukral staying on the ground floor. Between her and

  me there was one more floor having a cute friendly family.

  Jan was from Cologne and worked as a journalist at West

  German Embassy, his wife Afsal was from Hyderabad, with

  a Master’s in Social Sciences, taught in a school for the

  handicapped children, they had a little son Kai and a little

  girl Laila. This buffer between my landlady and my stereo

  sound should work out pretty well, I figured. I gave Mrs.

  Thukral all the deposits and advance rents she wanted and

  moved in.

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  Anil found a satisfactory job even though the salary was

  nowhere near what he could have got if he went back to

  America. I was getting settled in my job as well booking

  some nice juicy contracts from the Indian Railways. We

  developed a good size circle of friends of both genders. The

  term Yuppee had not yet been coined, but we were just that.

  After a party at my new apartment, my cousin Suguna told

  me that Ena liked Anil and if he would ask she would

  gladly go out with him. I passed this subtle message

  faithfully. Before you could spell Gunga Din, I got the news

  that they were engaged to be married.

  Udaipur was within my sales territory and I decided to

  make a pleasure cum business visit there. Sohan Singh

  came with a car to meet me at the airport. He had extra gray

  on the eyebrows and moustache alongside more lines of

  wrinkles on the sun baked cheeks. But he had the same

  proud eyes and almost paternal smile. I thought he would

  ask me if I ever got that parallel parking right. Instead he

  said they wanted me to come and lay a corner stone for a

  children’s park in Dore Nagar. Udaipur not only had an

  airport now but an extra railway station, a radio station and

  several industries. You did not have to go elsewhere

  looking for livelihood; you got it all here itself with the

  smoke and squalor as trimmings. Sohan Singh had with him

  his oldest son Devi Singh that worked in Zavar Mining

  Company. I gave them all a good hug. I reminded Devi

  Singh that he still owed me 5 marbles for beating him in a

  game of Gulli-danda. He smiled avoiding eye contact and

  said ‘of course’; meaning how could I argue with my

  master’s son, leave alone beat him in any game. They asked

  me, is it true that in big cities like Delhi they had big radios

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  that showed cinema you could watch sitting in your own

  living room?

  New Delhi had 2 TV channels. One was boring and the

  other more so. The government in its own sanctimonious

  self righteous perception wanted to make TV not a medium

  for entertainment of urban elite but for social change

  especially of the rural masses. But the TV station was

  located in Delhi with a transmission radius of 30 miles

  within which the only mass rural or otherwise was that of

  the deadbeat politicians. Once a week there
would be re-run

  of 15 year old Hindi movie and once a month a re-run of 30

  year old Hollywood movie, just to keep the thinking man on

  the streets of Delhi interested.

  One day I parked by 13 Teen Murti Marg and tried to take a

  peep into the gates. The Sentry told me that a Big Brown

  Big Brass lived there now. Ordinary Brown Big Brasses

  were so many in number that they had to be housed in high

  rise apartment complexes 20 miles away and transported by

  buses! Annaji had retired long since and was living with his

  son in Lucknow. He had chronic intestinal ailment. I asked

  him to come to New Delhi and look up some better doctors.

  After some pulling of political strings, he was admitted to

  the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the foremost

  research institution in the country. He went into a coma.

  Every now and then he would come out of it and talk. That

  man had a memory that would make a super-computer wilt.

  Even in that state he could recall facts like he had it all in a

  compact disk drive between his temples. His CPU could put

  a Pentium processor to utter shame. All the test results

  showed no conclusive results on what ailed him. My mom

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  was in town and I took her to visit him. She was just 1 day

  older to him and they had both been through a lot together.

  She bent and gave him a peck on the forehead. That was

  very touching. As you grow older and see your

  contemporaries leaving one by one, you feel lonely and

  forlorn wondering when will it be your turn. It was all over

  one day, as he started vomiting blood and never came back

  to consciousness. His body was brought to my apartment

  for some religious ceremonies before being taken to the

  cremation grounds.

  New Delhi was the oasis for my business principals

  travelling from Germany to Canton Fair or Hong Kong or

  Tokyo. They would stop over for a jet lag respite. Of course

  it did not hurt to go to Agra and take a picture in front of the

  Taj Mahal, you could put it all on your expense report

  anyway. End of November saw a swarm of these business

  travelers passing by here. Being the local representative of

  their business, I would keep them generally pleased. Even

  though it was not in my job description, doing a good work

  in this area helped a lot to further my career, like perfecting

  one’s golf swing while working for IBM. When my

  company car was not available, I would use my Old

  Faithful. Oberoi Intercontinental was brand-new and the

  only five-star hotel of international standards. They would

  all stay there in rooms on the upper floors overlooking

  green golf course with spick and span carpeted hallways

  whispering elevator music. They would drink Western

  wines, eat Western cuisine, hear Western music and talk

  how Western culture had bettered the lot of the world. They

  would of course have a picture of themselves taken in front

  of the Taj Mahal to show their friends back home that they

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  ‘did India’ in 2 days. One of them once took me aside and

  whispered, “Do you know? Taj Mahal was not built by

  Indians at all. It was built by Italians”. I said, “Yes of

  course, everybody knows that. It was built by the fully

  owned Italian subsidiary of Nippon Construction Co., of

  Osaka, Japan”.

  They all had standard questions for which I had standard

  responses.

  Question: “There are so many starving Indians and so many

  starving cows, why don’t one eat the other and be happy?”

  Response: “Because cows are very gentle and refuse to eat

  men and be happy”.

  Question: “What about your caste system? We in

  industrialized, democratic, free, 1st world countries have

  classless society of equal people”.

  Response: “I could say the same thing, but not with such a

  straight face. If you really believe that, buy my Old

  Faithful, she runs on colorless odorless free bovine

  excreta”.

  I was taken aside and told, “That fellow is the son-in-law of

  the Chairman of the Board, ear marked to inherit the

  Industrial Empire one day and you should not have been

  such a smart ass with him”. I said, “I rest my case on

  classless society”.

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  However I must add this person with whom I had that smart

  chat became my very good friend and even now after nearly

  30 years we exchange Holiday Greeting cards.

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  PART 3

  The stewardess gently awakened me. She said we are going

  to be landing in New Delhi International Airport shortly and

  I should buckle my seat belts keeping the seat upright. I was

  shaken from my reverie back to reality. Here I was coming

  to New Delhi from Dallas, Texas after an absence of more

  than a couple of decades.

  Passing through Customs and Immigration was extremely

  smooth. This was the first time I was coming to India on a

  U.S. passport. I had to get a visa to enter the country. My

  emotions were too mixed up to grapple embarrassment. My

  brother had come to meet me at the airport with an air-

  conditioned car. He let me use one room in his flat that he

  had got air-conditioned. He found on his last visit to

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  Washington DC that people in America wanted everything

  air-conditioned.

  I had booked a rental car with Budget. After settling down,

  we got to their office and got the rental car. For $5 extra per

  day, I could also get a chauffeur. Having watched the Delhi

  traffic coming from the airport, I grabbed that deal. The car

  was of course air-conditioned. In India traffic is supposed to

  go on the left side of the read, one more inheritance of

  British individuality. But in reality one drives on either side.

  It is also survival of the fittest philosophy, you go left or

  right or sometimes up and down as well. Lanes are marked

  on the road but that is just a formality.

  Anil now worked for the World Bank in Washington DC.

  He and Ena had a girl Shibani and a boy Akil. Anil gave me

  the whereabouts of another mutual friend Surendra. I gave

  Surendra a call and we decided to meet for coffee at Volga.

  CP looked so different. It had multi-storied skyscrapers all

  over the place. I was told the periphery of New Delhi

  extended beyond 30 miles spilling over neighboring states.

  The stores in CP carried foreign brand names like Reebok,

  Neike, Izod, Pepsi, Coke, Doritos, but all made in India.

  There were a few more brands of cars locally made than

  before. Parking spaces by the street side were at least 2 or 3

  deep. Volga served some good Indian Kingfisher beer. I

  stopped converting prices from rupees to dollars, and just

  gave a handful
of Rupee notes to the waiter and asked him

  to keep the change.

  Mrs. Thukral at 60 Babar Road got a surprise of her life to

  see me. We started ticking off common memories and

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  people. Kai was in Delhi married to an Indian girl. Laila

  was having two kids and living with her English husband in

  New York City. The trees on the street had not been felled

  but half a mile away there were fly over highways and 30

  story commercial buildings. Come 5 O’clock in the

  evening, they all spilled out zillions of working men and

  women trying to get back home. Mrs. Thukral smiled and

  said her apartment is never without well paying tenants.

  Who knows, next time I see her she would have pulled

  down the 3 story house and put up a 30 story apartment

  complex, on top there may be a true Penthouse with a

  skyline for a view, not just a Barsati. We all get

  Americanized sooner or later. Who was I to preach her?

  Progress (?) and jobs have a price to pay. The whole city

  was belching smoke and dust like it was one big incinerator

  gone out of control. Windows of the car were always rolled

  up with A/C in full blast. I was not sure if Delhi had got

  changed or my perspective had changed after living in free

  wide spaces of Texas so long. I guess both are true. I get

  that kind of claustrophobic feeling also when I go to New

  York City, Boston or Chicago. I asked Puri my rental

  chauffeur to take me South Delhi. While there was one

  Ring Road before there were two now. Ring Road is

  equivalent of American Beltway circling the city. South

  Delhi still had the better neighborhoods. It was still not the

  most elite. There were also other very livable residential

  districts. There were several more 5 star hotels like Hyatt,

  Sheraton and what have you. In comparison, Oberoi

  Intercontinental seemed drab and dreary from outside.

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