THE MEET TO MEET THE MUMBAIKAR
3RD September 2017
Meet to meet Nitin Vaswani
JKM, VMR, VM, NV, Svl, SK, SP, AV
I suggested 1234 as the time for Sriram to pick me up. It has a nice ring to it and for some reason I find it easy to remember. But he wanted to put his own spin into it so he pushed it to 1245. I had to agree, albeit reluctantly, because the gaadi was his and the iraada was his. He provided the tempo and I was a mere traveller.
So there I was, running up the steps and across the pedestrian overbridge to the bus stop shelter near the Big Ganesha some six minutes before the appointed time. I paused briefly in the middle of the bridge to wait for my breath which had fallen four-and-a-half steps behind me to catch up with me. Below me, traffic continued to flow, regardless. As my breath drew level, I caught it by the scruff of its neck and together we vaulted down the steps on the other side to await The Coming of Srirama.
There was a buzzing in my head because of a song circling around in the upper reaches but not settling down. I had thrown a question at the esteemed members of my group and there were some seven of them working on it, not including our Sat Sanghi who at that very moment was probably ensconced in a cab hurrying across town to join us. Bhaijaan was in Bengaluru for a spot of bhajan singing before joining us for bhojan at JPH.
Too many red cars were flitting by on the road but none of them belonged to Sriram. I busied myself looking at the posters and hoardings put up for our general entertainment, but they didn’t hold my attention. They don’t make them like that anymore. I switched attention to my mobile and checked out the posts regarding the song. Hariharan Balakrishnan had pointed out that my initial hum was not right. I took a deep breath and hummed it out again. Hmmm. I was musing on how to improve my humming when there was a ping announcing a comment from good old Anu Venkatesh. She got the song! And it was the right one! No one could have got it righter. She should have been a song righter. Instead, she went and became a painter.
And while I was ruminating on paintings and songs, I spied a red car trying to steal up to me. Could this be the one? I peered at the number plate. Yes. It was Sriram. Not on the number plate but inside The Car, looking as if he had been driving all the way from Dakar! I got in and thanked him for not forgetting to pick me up. He mentioned not and we drove off.
There was no watchman or waterman at the gate of JPH. It had been raining all week. Too much of water. The poor chap must have gone and wet himself. We drove up the drive. Everything was quiet. I wondered why and realised that the windows were wound up tight.
The sun was shining weakly through the trees. The usually energetic bees seemed to have gone down a notch and become unnees, for they were moving around sluggishly with a subdued buzz. Watery nectar, I suppose. We left them to their devices and walked boldly across the car park towards the North West corner.
There was a surprise waiting for us at the North West corner. Some unknown bodies with unfamiliar faces had commandeered the seats. I turned my face 12 degrees to my right (not the Centigrade degree but the compass-wala thing) and there they were! Pulin and Sudhir! And Jintoo too (like Bishop Desmond). Good old chaps. And of course the group was there, waiting and wondering where we were. And there we were, right on cue. Svl-sorr was looking dapper in an English checked shirt, a natty suspender holding up his trousers. VMR was brilliantly attired in Turquoise, her favourite colour of the season. And there, sitting with a smile radiating from his face, was our guest, the Sat Sanghi, the Mumbaikar who braved the rains in his nice waterhouse of a city to venture out and grace us with his September presence. The Satrangi was attired in black and white. He was looking upbeat and chuffed. His hair was puffed up in the old Navketan style. Giani Vaswani himself. Swayam Boo!
I think (the sequence has become a bit hazy now) that the next person to manifest himself was our own Capman. Swayam Boom! It was a keel-less entry. No one keeled over, but the sun was momentarily eclipsed when he trudged in. He stopped at our usual N-W table, and, finding it encroached upon by aliens all foaming at the mouth on account of too much warm beer, glared at them one by one till they subsided into a frothy silence and then walked over to glare at us. But we know him too well so we maintained our noise level. With his cap and his bag slung across, he looked like he had come to deliver some important post. Just crossing, he told me.
VGP was soon followed by the irrepressible JKM. She swished in, blowing away everything in her path. The aliens all stood up as one alien but she walked past them without even a first glance. We all too stood up and greeted her but, unlike the aliens, were rewarded by a bright smile which would have nonplussed the sun.
As we were settling down into our seats, VM marched in, looking smart, with a military bearing, like an officer of the Special Forces just out on furlough walking into the regimental mess for his breakfast before taking off for his holiday destination.
And, by general consensus, the meet was ON!
We began with a short discussion on the origin of our species, or, as certain people are wont to say, “kahan se belong karte hain”. I checked my belongings to note what was where and sat back. JKM spoke of Punjabis marrying Bengalis and introducing their offsprings to TamBrahms and so on and so forth and wondered where would they all go if asked to leave? The Punjab? Bengal? Tamil Nadu? State Bank of Brahmaputra? Where indeed! It was all mixed up. I was nodding in agreement while sipping my beer and glanced at Sriram, who was still unsure whether he spoke Telugu with a Tamil accent or whether his second car should be a Hyundai Accent. He was holding his head in his hands. When I say holding his head in his hands, I don’t mean holding it separately, of course. Don’t be silly. Dashed stupid he would have looked, holding his own head in his own arms. And the watermelon juice that he had called for would have dribbled straight down and been completely wasted. What I meant was that he was holding his head while it was still attached to his shoulder by his neck. You know what I mean.
But to get back to JKM’s point, we all agreed that she did have a point. She was, after all, a fauji. Moreover, I remember distinctly as if it had happened just yesterday, she came to our first ever meet with a cauliflower in her hand. Such people can’t go wrong.
VMR, who had been having holiday after holiday after holiday, has once again gone back to being busy. When I asked her to elaborate on her job, she told me that she was right then trying to calculate the percentage increase in nett profit year on year over the last five years, of one of her favourite clients, which she had forgotten to do earlier as she had to step out to pick up a box of dry fruit stick-jaw and could I please not distract her from her calculations? I politely backed off and left her to her number crunching.
I was also trying to break in and tell some stories of my own but firstly the exceptionally toothsome dry fruit square tricks that VMR had drummed up kept me busy. I washed it down with some good old stuff that came out of small green bottles standing on the wall and when one got empty another came in its place and that kept me busy for some time. Then the story telling took a left turn and went round in a clockwise direction which meant mine would the last story to be told. And by the time my turn came, there was VMR distributing the rotis, strictly in alphabetical order, two per head, with two spoons of doll and two of the veggies. So I never got to tell. Never mind.
Svl suddenly announced that he had something to give VGP on behalf of the entire group. Everybody quieted down in anticipation while he dug into his pocket. He came out with a bundle of currency notes which he handed over to VGP and insisted on being photographed doing so. He also made VGP say “Received with thanks from Sri. Svl the sum of (here VGP’s voice became low and inaudible) Pound, Sound, Dollar, Collar, Euro, Iro, Drachma, Drachpa, Dinar, Lunch, Kuna, Tuna, Taka, Naka, Yen, Zen, Won, Lost, Koruna, Varuna, Yuan Renminbi, as the case may be, on this the third day of September Two Thousand No Hundred and Seventeen”, recorded it and mailed a copy to himself. When we all looked at Svl enquiringly, he mentioned that it was VGP’s hafta and because he had international links he hafta be paid in different currencies. Whew, narrow escape for me! I had come prepared with one or two choice things that I wanted to tell him. No one would suspect him of having international links, with his happy smiling face. Hafta hua noorani chehra!
VGP told us that he has taken to crossing posts in a big way nowadays. He sends postcards to all and sundry in all parts of the world and waits for their own postcard responses to be sent back to all and sundry in which he is also included. International currencies, international postcards, this man is going global.
After this exchange, Svl went rather quiet. Was it because he was on Lent? We asked him why and he simply said “give me a chance to speak”! So we all abandoned our stories and fell silent. Svl, who had been at the helm of the nascent IT industry and knew it like the back of his hand, spoke about the virus that is affecting it and how it (the industry, not the virus) is actually going back to the dark ages while trying to bring in people from the dark ages to take it forward into the bright new age. We had to agree. He branched off into shares and share prices and we hung on to every word like Shrikhand, the hung curd. What I did understand was that the lunch expenses would be shared at the table.
While talking of shares, share prices and Shrikhand, we couldn’t ignore the tiger of the akhand share market. NV, a.k.a. the Sat Sanghi, a.a.k.a. the Satrangi. The Tiger takes turns to be the Big Bull and the Big Bear on a fortnightly basis. This week he was the Big Bear on Small Holiday. VMR responded that she herself was modelled on the lines of the constellation SaptaRishi, a.k.a. the Great Bear.
It was VM’s turn to tell us a story and he told us an interesting story of how he runs the TCS. It is a tough job but he is handling it without breaking into much of a sweat. TCS runs like a well oiled cycle. Which brought back fond memories of my schooldays when I used to run TCS on hire. Every day, I would pick up a bicycle on hire during the lunch hour to whizz home and come back in time for a bit of boxing in the classroom. Every cycle had “TCS” painted on its back mudguard – for “Thyagarajan Cycle Service”.
While we were busy talking, Anu Venkatesh seemed to have materialised from nowhere, and no one had a clue. One moment the seat next to mine was empty, vacant, unfilled and unoccupied, then I turned away for a moment and when I turned back, it was full of Anu Venkatesh. Did she waft in with the wind or manifest herself through some osmotic process? Whatever. Not an apparition. She was actually there because she shook my hand and rattled me.
Anu settled herself in and told me that her painting is coming on quite well and she is planning to insure her painting hand as soon as she decides which one it is. She spends all her time with paint and brush and canvas. Her modus paintus operandum uniqum is quite simple actually. She dips her brush into the pot of paint and holds it over the canvas. Art drips from it. Q.E.D. She was once challenged by a retired architect to come up with a work of art in five minutes. She saw a bottle of ketchup lying around, simply dipped her brush into it and let it drip. Voila! It was a work of Arti-Ketchup! The retired architect was flummoxed and decided to retire again. I am trying to scam a painting from her before she becomes unbelievably famous but that is yet to happen.
We were missing a few people, chiefly SM2 and SN, who had promised to make it. SM2 in fact was flying in from somewhere, but at the last minute the pilot refused to land on the JPH lawns on account of the risk of getting sideswiped by the tamarind tree. She was forced to get off at the International Airport along with the rest of the hoi polloi. She went off for lunch with the co-pilot. SN was at home to take care of her little one and her mother who had both reported unwell and had to be nursed. We commiserated with her.
AV had broken off from her well begun but half done painting to run and get halwa and laddu for us, packed neatly in little round boxes. Good stuff. NV had got his better half to make coconut barfis and he had got them packed in neat boxes gift-wrapped to be handed over to us. Added to the dry fruit barfis from VMR, it turned out to be quite a sweet day!
We made the ritual call to the virtual friend who sits in Kolkata and pretends to be a worm. He seemed to be in fine fettle and promised for the twenty-third time that he would soon grace our fair city. This was followed by another call to our Justice Mohtarma, who, it appeared, was hurrying home after her own group meet. She couldn’t speak to all of us on account of inability to converse while flying on a full stomach. But she promised to double the quota of sweets in recompense when she lands up here later this month. This Kolkatan, who can shake the Sequicentenary Building to its foundations, is crazy and a champion storyteller, if ever there was one.
And so it went on, the easy banter between friends with a common interest or two. The post prandial coffee was imbibed. Photos were clicked. Until it was time to leave. Svl left first, followed closely by JKM. Then, one by one, we reluctantly picked ourselves up and headed home.
NB: The happenings narrated above may or may not have happened in the order in which they are described. Some of them may not have happened at all. It is recommended to take a pinch of salt while reading this.
E&OE
© Shiva Kumar – 10 Sep 2017
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