LIFE’S LITTLE IRONIES
BY Vengrai Parthasarathy
In the simple annals of Sadanand’s life there was no newness or spark of excitement. To all outward seeming , every day was like yesterday, for this seventy-year old.
A typical day? After tossing in bed till the wee hours of the morning, the world of Sadanand would suddenly come alive to the roar of the motor bike of the bachelor in the ground floor—a signal for him that the day has begun. The inviting aroma of coffee prepares him for the day.
Ablutions over, he peeps out of the window. Six-year old grandson Rakesh stubbornly refusing to get into the rickshaw going to school, was a daily event. The mother using various stratagems and temptations was fun to watch. Usually it would boil down to two. A candy or two or sometimes a spanking or two would put him on his way to school. Sadanand would remember his own school days, and the words of the bard who wrote: “And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like the snail, unwillingly to school”.
The day had not got started yet and so Sadanand climbs down the stairs to lean on the gate and watch the panorama of life passing by. Such a mad rush. Why? He wondered. When do they have the time to stand and stare or smell the roses?
Often as not , some passenger gets off the taxi or auto and arguments regarding fare follow, ending with the hapless passenger coughing up the driver’s demands. Occasionally, if the passenger is a belligerent type, heat is generated, interest picks up, crowds from nowhere gather offering unsolicited mediation efforts. Then the excitement subsides.
The vegetable vendor comes, with baskets on a push cart, and the battle of wits with the bargaining housewife begins for tomatoes and beans and egg plants and ‘extras’ like chillies and mint leaves. Somehow at the end of it all, both feel triumphant.
Lunch time. To Sadanand, in his seventh decade in this planet, the menu appears the same all the 365 days , though the haus frau tries her best to permute and combine and juggle the vegetables and instant pastes and powders as best as she could. The siesta follows usually a disturbed one, due to blistering noise level.
After a cup of invigorating tea, Sadanand pulls up a chair and settles down with morning paper in the balcony, a vantage point to watch the goings on down below. From nowhere a swarm of demonstrators fronted and flanked by cohorts in cycles carrying flags of different political hues and shouting slogans which always end up with ‘Down With..’ somebody or other. They come and they go. These days the itinerant milkmen leading buffaloes are not to be seen. Bottles and satchets have replaced the udders . It was always a wonder for him how the milkman managed the sleight of hand to dilute (enhance?) the milk even as a pair of vigilant eyes were watching him to prevent just that. One of the unsolved mysteries of life.
Sadanand decides to go in and relax in the ’easy chair’, having had his fill of the daily happenings. T.V. is anathema to him but he likes the radio because there is no strain on the eye. He hops from station to station, but it is always Lata or Rafi or Mukesh. A haunting melody from ‘Sangam’ sends the old man dozing.
Then, a friend of yore drops in and Sadanand comes alive. The old, cadaverous-looking friend of his school days settles down for a pow-wow. The two ancients talk.
They talk and talk of the good old days, of the same old friends; of the blood pressure medicines they take and what the doctor said. Their conversation, as always, is laced with laughs and memories of the misty yesterdays. Nicknames of teachers and idiosyncracies of friends and private jokes are dug u from the dusty pigeon-holes of memory. These conversations, invariably, were re-runs whenever the two meet ; every time the same old dough is ground with new enthusiasm and loud , toothless laughter. The whiff of olden days seems to inject new life into the blood of the oldsters, It is as though they are assured that the tomorrow the sun will rise. Forget the dyspepsia. Life is a banquet.