When a snake converses with an eagle...

As I walked back from the dining hall, the song "Paramasivan Kazhuthil irunthu" played in my head. I am not a fan of old Tamil songs. I attribute this dislike to T.M.Soundarajan whose voice I dislike; this song and a few others are exceptions. The reason for my liking this song seems to be Kannadasan's lines. Kannadasan is a tremendous poet and his words tend to break through my dislike for TMS. In this mentioned song, I simply love his reference to the snake circled around Siva's neck conversing with Vishnu's vehicle Garuda. I love the line "athil artham ulladu" which means  "there is a meaning in what was said". As is usually the case when translating Indian words, like dharma, artham probably has more to it than the meaning.

I hummed the song in my head as I walked up the ramp to the art block. As I turned onto the veranda outside art room I saw a crowd standing around the jack fruit tree. I approached the 17 year old who is considered an expert in insects and reptiles and asked him the reason for the crowding. He said a few people had seen a snake near the tree. I asked him if it was poisonous. He said he did not know for he had not seen the snake himself. I became a part of the crowd for a few minutes. He looked towards me and said "there is no point waiting here. The snake is too scared to come out. Besides it would have settled down comfortably in some nook and has no reason to come out." I believed the guy for he knew more about reptiles than humans. I walked away. Later that evening, I asked him if he had seen the snake. He said "Yes! Its was a harmless bronzeback."

I don't think I will ever forget this boy. I find his passion for reptiles and insects unique. He and a few of his friends can be seen looking underneath stones and rocks in the campus in search of reptiles. When one sees him running through the campus, one can be sure that a reptile has been spotted in the campus. I hear the phrase "in him, snakes have a knowledgeable teen-aged individual" when I think of him.

Across worlds

I am not sure where I am. Everything around seems familiar and yet I am unable to identify my location. I think I know what is happening but I am not sure. As is usually the case, I have very little control of the events taking place but somehow it seems the events are beyond my control. Just the previous day, my spectacles frame decided to break without any warning. One of the screws decided to disappear without trace and I ended with two pieces of the frame and a missing screw. The situation landed in my life out of nowhere and I looked up at the residence of Gods and poured out my feelings as abuses. But I could find a resolution for the situation quickly. But this is different  for I am unable to resolve anything and somehow my life seems to be in a spiral. Suddenly I am surrounded by darkness and the I hear the sound of the rain outside. I realize that I was dreaming; a dream that I no longer remember but something that was not pleasant and yet not unpleasant. 

I realized at that moment, that during the dream I was awake in another world and as soon as I woke up I came back to the real world. I did not hear the rainfall in my dream. I woke up suddenly and almost instantly I heard it. It was disorienting and shocking.

A teacher's tale

I have come to realise that the teaching community thinks of itself as a large family. For the past two years every time a teacher gets to know that I teach in a school their respective faces brighten and they say with a bright sparkle in their eyes "oh! I am a teacher too". Two years back I did not know what to do with this information and ended up exclaiming with a sheepish expression "Oh! Ah! How interesting!" Now I have a better response for this situation. Depending on the gender and age of the teacher I look at him/her as a brother or sister or uncle or aunt. I let the feeling of the warmth of the new found relationship run through me prior to asking something about them. I usually end up asking them about the school in which and the subjects they teach or taught. At times, the responses contain teaching experiences and anecdotes. This evening I ran into one such experience.

We walked into someone's house and the someone welcomed us by saying loudly (not to be misunderstood with shouting) "I hope you did not visit that house". We were taken aback and did not respond. He changed the statement to a question "did you visit that house?" One of us responded tentatively "we did". He moved his head back a bit, covered his forehead with his palm and said dramatically "why did you go now? Did you not know that there is a death in the family? I mentioned the news to you this morning and yet you did not realise. I only got to know later that you planned to visit this afternoon. I tried calling your mobile a number of times but your phones were not reachable". We could say nothing more than "oh!". He continued ranting "now I don't have a choice but to keep away from him for the next few days". 

Soon, the mood of despair changed and the topics of discussion became agreeable. He started discussing about the dramatic events preceding the aforementioned death "though she was in the hospital she was conscious and interacted with others. As a matter of fact we were chatting with her on Whatsapp when she suddenly stopped responding to our queries. We saw that she was online and yet did not respond to our chat. Five minutes later we got a message on the chat which said that she was no more. She died while chatting with us." We looked at him aghast. He shrugged his shoulder and moved on to other family topics.

A little later, the man's brother walked in and sat on the chair besides mine. As is usually the case, he asked me what I did. On hearing my response, he beamed and said "I too am a teacher".  I looked at him closely and realized that he did look like a teacher. Over time I have realized that in such situations the appropriate question to ask is "what do you teach?" but I was not interested in the "what" question and so I asked "where do you teach?" I had expected him to name one of the Government schools in Kerala and I was readying myself to ask the next question "where would that be?" But his response took me by surprise. "I have taught in many places but I retired as the principal of a school in Brunei". My brain froze. All systems in my body looked at each other in confusion. They did not know what to do next. My heart took the lead and gently nudged my brain back to normalcy. I was trying to digest the name Brunei. When a Malayalee utters Brunei, it can only refer to one place. At many times in my growing up years I had heard Brunei being uttered in my family with utmost respect. I had even met a family who had lived in that place for many years. This person sitting besides me did not seem anything like them. Thus my surprise forced me to utter "In Brunei!" The man responded "For fifteen years". I could not contain my curiosity and asked him to tell me about his teaching journey. 

"I worked for a few years nearby for a few months when I got an opportunity to teach in Kenya. I grabbed it and accepted the offer. I taught in  a few Kenyan schools for nearly six years. At that time, South Africa was moving away from the apartheid policy and many Indians teaching in the African continent considered it as a land of opportunities. So I moved to South Africa when I got an offer and started teaching there. Within a few years I got an opportunity to teach at Brunei. Brunei seemed like a land of milk and honey and I moved to there, quite unnecessarily. I had a good career at Brunei monetarily and professionally. As I mentioned earlier, in the fifteen years I spent at Brunei, I became the principal of the school. But I should not have left South Africa.

At around the time I left, the South African government wanted the teachers from outside the country to leave. They did not want to pay the outsiders and thought that the opportunity should be provided to the locals. The teachers went to the court and filed a case against the government demanding a severance package for the separation. The teachers won the case and the government was asked to provide the appropriate severance package. When the government calculated the package, it turned out to be a significant amount. The government, quite rightly, thought it foolish to pay the existing teachers and to spend money additional budget on the new teachers. So they backed out and let the existing teachers, many of them Indians, continue. 

So my colleagues continued residing in South Africa. They became permanent residents and bought properties in good neighbourhoods; properties that the whites leaving the country were selling. Over time, the value of the properties rose. When they retired they sold these properties for a healthy value and returned to India with a more than healthy bank balance. As they were working in Government schools in South Africa, they receive a good sum as pension every month. In most cases, both husband and wife worked as teachers and together they receive nearly Rs. 80,000 every month, which is more than comfortable to live in Kerala. Also they have the big balance to live in luxury.

It is not like I am terribly unhappy or I had a bad career but the decision to move to Brunei was unnecessary."

Everyday journey challenges

The Flaming Lips are not an easy listen. The music can be cacophonous and the singer loves to sing or can only sing off key. But I find the songs catchy. How can one not love songs with words like "this here giraffe, laughed". There's also a terrifying version of the song "What a wonderful world!". Ardent lovers of the original by Louis Armstrong would definitely hate The Flaming Lips for having sung the song thus. The out of tune singing and feedback drenched music makes it an ideal end-of-the-world song. The past week, I decided to play the entire Flaming Lips discography during my ride to and from work.

The winding roads were not tough to maneuver but the cows residing on the roads made the drive challenging. I had driven over mud roads earlier but not over such maad roads. The cows did not care about the traffic. They lay on the left and right side and the centre of the road chewing their cud. As the vehicles approached them, they looked at the vehicles with disinterest and continued chewing. Many times, I tried to decipher their thoughts but they maintained a blank expression. I am sure the Zen monks can learn a trick or two from them. Usually the cows left just enough space for a car to squeeze through them. But they ensured the vehicle had to swerve to the left or right once they get through the gaps. The bigger vehicles did not have this choice. They stopped and honked but the cows were not affected. The driver honked some more. They slowly pushed up their hind legs and remained in the resulting right angle triangle pose for a few minutes. The driver, by now, was desperate and honked with all his energy. The cows pushed up their front legs and stood looking like a chewing rectangle. By now, the driver was hurling abuses about the cow's parents. The cows' love for their parents usually resulted in their moving away from the path of the vehicle. 

At many points during this journey, the dogs take objection to my car and chase it while barking. I have been tempted, sometimes, to stop the car and ask them "why?" but was not sure if I would understand their response and hence usually drive away annoyed. Once I saw a lone boy walking along the side of the door swinging his badge above his head. He soon started skipping along the road twirling his badge above his head. I couldn't help but wonder at his joy this early in morning as he walked alone to his school. The road winded towards the red coloured buildings of the law college beyond which lay the forest. By forest, I don't mean the thick wooded evergreen tropical forest kind of forest but the sparsely populated scrub jungle. I have heard that the forest is home for a few animals.  Not the tiger and lion kind of animals but the deer and mongoose kind of animals. Once i had seen seen a mongoose standing on its hind legs in the centre of the road and look into the horizon at the approaching vehicle; the car I was driving. As the car got closer it probably realized that it was a car, which could squash it and ran away. One morning when the music was not blaring out of the stereo and the window panes were down I heard the songs of many birds emanating from the trees. I decided to drive with no music since then but have forgotten about it since. I am sure I will not remember it the next time I drive through that stretch of the road.

The road curves to the right and the forest lands on either side give way to the bund of a big lake on the left and a smaller lake on the right. I remember hearing that the road did not exist eighty years back and the area was a large lake. As in other places, humanity decided to disturb the lake by constructing a road through it. I marveled at the foresight of the set of people eighty years ago who decided to construct this road for my convenience. I did not thank them for I believed it was their destiny to do so. A garbage dump existed on the right; between the bund and road. On most days, foul smell did not emanate from the dump but recently bulldozers started clearing the garbage and the stink from the decomposing waste that lay underneath the fresh waste became unbearable. Actually, nearly unbearable for I did not raise the windows as I passed it; I held my breath for a few seconds instead. The clearing was not done properly and the road by the dump was littered with garbage. I understand the reason for humans not treating garbage with respect but not the way the place with the garbage is treated. I don't think we truly respect anyone or anything.

The road became messy within a few hundred metres. A few months back the potholes lay beyond a speed breaker but now there were a few prior to it too. I changed to the second gear and swerved the steering this way and that to avoid the potholes. It was a futile effort but I indulged in it every time I passed the stretch. No part of the road existed without potholes and at all times at least one of the wheel found itself within a pothole. Many college and school buses plied on this stretch of the road and a few of the driver were impatient oafs. They got their large buses right behind the car and honked vigourously. Sometimes the oafs yanked their large vehicles to the right and overtook me. Usually I ignored them and focused my attention on the potholes. But a few day existed where this behaviour annoyed me enough to mouth words that I should not.

Soon I reached a location that presented the most challenging situation in my life. I am not sure if I will ever resolve this challenge. I wish I had a Parthasarathi who would help me differentiate the right from the wrong of this situation.

Beyond the bad stretch of the road, I had to take a right from a four road junction to reach my destination . Near the middle of the junction stands a tall lamp post. It is not at exactly at the centre of the road but is slightly to the right of the road. The police have placed a barricade from the post to the centre of the road. The reason for the existence of this barricade is not clear. In India, we are supposed to keep to the left of the road. But at the intersection none of the vehicles taking the right keep to the left. Instead they go as the water would flow. I hate doing that. I cross the lamp post and take the right turn keeping the post on my right, that is, on the left side of the road. This confuses everyone at the junction. The person coming from the opposite side thinks that I am going straight as I did not turn prior to the lamp post and so does not slow down. The person coming from the road on the right side taking a right does not expect me to come onto his path and so does not slow down. The person behind me does not expect me to take a right as I have crossed the post without taking a right and so does not slow down. The person coming from my left going straight and the person coming from the opposite side taking left down do not slow down anyway as they want to get ahead of me. All these persons, ignore the fact that the right indicator on my car is blinking. Usually I let everyone pass and then take the right. But I wonder if I should do what others are doing and not do what I think is right. How can I be sure I am right? Parathasaratheeee! Where are you when I need you?